13 - Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction

Summary

“I try to locate myself outside issues,” writes the novelist and scientist Sunetra Gupta, “but not outside politics.” This intriguing claim to locate oneself within a domain of the political that lies outside the narrower purview of “issues” raises several questions. What kind of politics are we talking about here, if it is to be understood as distinct from issues? Is it the identification of the political as personal and vice versa, championed by the thinkers of second wave feminism? Or is it the Foucauldian understanding of politics as diffuse rather than centralized? Is it the radical suspicion of sensational events that defined Fernand Braudel's celebration of history “with slow and perceptible rhythms” (Braudel 20)? Or is it simply a withdrawal from the front pages of the newspaper to its innards, to the harder-to-classify human interest stories?

The twentieth century has made it clear that postcolonial novels written in European languages are among the most deeply burdened with the sharp weight of issues. Such novels face at least a double pressure: the metropolitan expectation to provide historical and anthropological knowledge about cultures they “represent” on one hand and, on the other, the ethico-political anxiety that impels such novelists to foreground the most pressing public issues that dominate the national consciousness from which they emerge. Not infrequently, the Anglophone postcolonial novel feels like newsbytes from war-torn lands; too often it glares with the headlines of newspapers, be it the scale and ambition of post-liberation progress, the high points of anticolonial struggle, or the brutal spectacle of trauma.

If, within the history of India, the real and symbolic moment of the birth of the modern nation is the stroke of midnight 1947, the most resplendent moment of triumph of the issue-driven vision of politics for the English novel is also that of its headline-grabbing reincarnation thirty-four years later: the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981. The midnight of 1947 was the proverbial moment of the event that led to the birth of the postcolonial nation – the very genesis of post-coloniality, as it were.