21 - “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit

Summary

This chapter examines post-millennial, Indian “Chick Lit” narratives against older narratives of Indian female experience, both written by female Indian authors in English. I focus on key moments of decision-making from both eras of fiction production, with an overarching interest in demonstrating how the post-millennial Indian Chick Lit novel is a site for the articulation and contestation of modernity in India. Given that the two post-millennial works discussed here have been primarily marketed and distributed within India, resulting in restricted sales outside of India (and/or the wider region of South Asia) at the time of their initial publication, this chapter also considers how India's literary scene makes connections with today's world literature paradigms. In doing so, I hope to challenge the orthodoxy of the “postcolonial Indian novel.” The fact that Chick Lit has seen exponential growth in India post millennium demonstrates that traditional hierarchies of fiction are being somewhat dismantled. Through the rise of popular or “commercial” fiction, the Indian literary scene has changed considerably in the last decade, and Chick Lit has played a fundamental role in this shift in terms of both production and consumption.

This chapter focuses on moments of women's decision-making in what I see as two distinct eras of women's writing in the Indian novel: the more literary, postcolonial phase of the 1980s into the late 1990s, and a new phase of Chick Lit in the last ten or so years. Looking at how decisions are made and followed through on, along with society's responses to those decisions, the chapter considers important changes in women's writing in the last few decades. I suggest that today's post-millennial female protagonists make life-changing decisions with a certain freedom of choice that was less readily available to their earlier counterparts. This point is important given the common perception that decision-making in Chick Lit novels is flippant and frivolous, revolving around which shoes to wear or which outfit to buy. In the Chick Lit discussed here, “serious” moments of decision-making are presented within a larger context in which female characters feel “lost” in the world. As in the earlier texts, decision-making is presented as difficult. Yet despite their difficulty, these texts' post-millennial women emerge as more settled and fulfilled characters by the end of their narratives.