2 - Commodification of Post-Rushdie Indian Novels in English: Kunal Basu and the Politics of Decanonization

Summary

In the last PhD entrance test conducted by our department, almost ninety per cent of the 55 students who appeared before the Research Advisory Committee (the board in our university that conducts the test) to defend their proposals expressed their willingness to do the research on writers other than British. Eighty per cent of this ninety per cent, surprisingly, wanted to work on writers of Indian origin. Seventy percent of this eighty per cent chose fiction writers. Availability of research materials and the number of the PhDs done on these writers – which is still no match to the works done on canonical British writers and which, in a way, lessens the burden of the researcher in terms of the review of the existing research works on the writer of his/her choice – may have determined the choice of these candidates who would work in a rural university of a developing country like ours. But their choice of Indian writers writing fiction in English clearly shows how popular these writers have become in Indian academia. Indian English writers started getting global attention when decanonization, both as a theoretical paradigm and as a literary practice, began to shape the production of literary texts across the world. But at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century, one has to admit, decanonization itself has almost taken the shape of a reverse canonization that invariably involves the politics of exclusion/inclusion.