Reading India Now : Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture

he majority of this book was drafted in 2015-2016, during a yearlong research leave spent in mumbai. As the year progressed, the place where i was writing grew to shape the project. i spent the days mostly at our rented apartment, in front of my computer, following a schedule typical of my life at home in Cambridge. At first, that seemed silly; living in mumbai should have inspired me to do lots of new, different things. But this similarity, in fact, gave me the conceptual questions around which this book began to coalesce. The time in mumbai was a time of routine: waking up, making breakfast, taking my kids to school, going to the gym, shopping for food, and then writing for several hours. sometimes the landlord stopped by to collect the rent or discuss repairs, and other times i went back to school for a teacher's conference or performance. The parents' WhatsApp group for my kids' class provided me a running commentary on school-related anxieties as well as practical advice on how to do class projects and where to buy supplies. traffic-light vendors, bookstores, and social media kept me updated on new releases in fiction and other genres. some days i crisscrossed the city in taxis and trains. Other times i waited in interminable lines at the bank or to pay my electricity bill. At night, after the kids were asleep, i watched videos, both news and entertainment, on the internet, along with films and comedy shows. none of this was exceptional or extraordinary. But it was, for the most part, the time in which my writing took place. That year was also marked by a number of important national-level events, some of them disturbing and violent: for instance, the assassination x Preface september-October 2015, pp. 6-22; and ulka Anjaria, "Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga: two Ways to Write english in india," Scroll, August 9, 2015, available at https:// scroll .in/ article/ 747269/ amitav -ghosh -and -aravind -adiga -two -ways -to -write -english -in -india. portions were also published as parts of ulka Anjaria, "The realist impulse and the Future of postcoloniality," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 2 (2016): 278-294, and are republished here by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher. i thank all the friends and colleagues with whom i have discussed my ideas and shared work and who have supported me at different stages of this project, especially Aliyyah Abdur-rahman, In an age of social media and reality television, reading and consumption habits in India now demand homegrown pulp fictions. Ulka Anjaria categorizes post-2000 Indian literature and popular culture as constituting "the contemporary," a movement defined by new and experimental forms—where high- and low-brow meet, and genres break down. Reading India Now studies the implications of this developing trend as both the right-wing resurges and marginalized voices find expression. Anjaria explores the fiction of Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan as well as Aamir Khan's television talk show, Satyamev Jayate, plus the work of documentarian Paromita Vohra, to argue how different kinds of texts are involved in imagining new political futures for an India in transition. Contemporary literature and popular culture in India might seem artless and capitalistic, but it is precisely its openness to the world outside that allows these new works to offer significant insight into the experiences and sensibilities of contemporary India. Contents 8 Preface 10 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction: In Search of an Indian Contemporary 18 Part I. Locations 42 1. The New Provincialism 44 2. Writing the City Now 77 Part II. Publics 104 3. In Pursuit of the Common Man 106 4. Melodrama and the Open Edge of Politics 134 Part III. Representations 168 5. Literature beyond the Pale 170 6. Inside and Out 195 Afterword: Contemporaneity's Futures 228 Notes 232 References 250 Index 278 "This project looks at the idea of the contemporary in 21st-century Indian literature and popular culture, working with a diverse archive that includes literary novels, commercial romances, nonfiction city writing, Hindi popular cinema, a television talk show, and the mixed media texts of a prominent feminist filmmaker"-- Provided by publisher