17 - Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India

Summary

We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.

– Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

This is no longer the fatal time of the planets, it is not yet the lyrical time of the seasons; it is the universal but absolutely divided time of brightness and darkness.

– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (p. 109)

Ever since Saleem Sinai was obliterated – “sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes” in Midnight's Children (533) – the emergence of a dystopian aesthetics for the Indian novel became virtually guaranteed. The contemporary Anglophone novel in India is decidedly dystopian. This is not to suggest that other genres of the novel – the satiric, comedic, romantic, and epic – have disappeared. Nor is it to overlook the harrowingly pessimistic representations of modernity in the social realism of numerous anti-colonial novels of an earlier era, prior to Rushdie. It is simply to mark a peculiar trend: dystopia is the prevalent mode through which present-day novels from India grapple with the symptoms and conditions of “millennial capitalism” (Comaroff and Comaroff, “Millennial” 291).

In millenarian modernity, capitalist culture is increasingly seen as “messianic, salvific, [and] magical[ly] manifest …” (Comaroff and Comaroff, “Millennial” 293). Postcolonial dystopian novels contend with the chimeric, trance-like thrall of capital's latest allures by seizing on a surreal representational force, one we might characterize as “delirious.” In other words, postcolonial dystopian fictions make delirium – radical ruptures of the real and the rational reflected by rendering form itself as delirious – the basis of their critique of the social damages of late capital.

These fictions align with the energetic play of magical realism inaugurated in India by Rushdie but refashion it in important ways. Just as “magical realism may transfigure a historical account via phantasmagorical narrative excess” (Mikics 382), so too do the new novels of dystopia from India assimilate the phantasms of life under globalization, but this time to narrate a circumstance of historical calamity without analogue. While Saleem's dissolution heralds the arrival of India's multitudes, a possibly utopian sublimation, the surreal fissures in postcolonial dystopian fictions fix the present in states of horror. Magical realist fiction, Wendy Faris argues, allows us to “imagine alternative visions of agency and history” that temper volatile and disjunctive histories (136).