Writing the Margins (in English): Notes from Some South-Asian Cities

Abstract

This chapter examines some contemporary works of fiction that have emerged from South Asia in recent years and which, more particularly, centre the experience of their protagonists in the cities they call their homes. Owing to this fact alone, these novels are able not only to address some of the most significant social, economic and political changes that continue to convulse the region, but also to challenge and extend Anglo-American meanings of the urban, as well as to invoke newer forms of narrative that map, linguistically and stylistically, the experience of a fractured, incommensurable ‘citiness’. The cities in question—Amritsar, Bhopal and Karachi—are all, regardless of their size, to a greater or lesser extent, cities in crisis, owing mainly to the staggering disparity in the ownership of resources—money, land, water, education and opportunity—exacerbated by the rapid, headlong and uneven urbanization of much of the global South in the last few decades. Rupa Bajwa’s Amritsar may at first glance have the placid feel of a small town, but it seethes and pulsates with the powerless rage and frustration of its angst-ridden protagonist (The Sari Shop, 2004). Indra Sinha’s Khaufpur (‘Terror Town’, a thinly veiled reference to Bhopal in the aftermath of the 1984 gas tragedy) is a ruined city with a devastated populace that, like its eponymous hero Animal, learns to hope and trust once again despite the corruption and callousness it encounters repeatedly at every step (Animal’s People, 2007). The casually, gratuitously, almost absurdly violent Karachi that Mohammed Hanif’s Alice belongs to (Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, 2011) could be straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film, except that it refers to a very real, very contemporary city that is struggling with sectarian violence, extremist groups and organized crime mafias that work more often than not in cahoots with a woefully inadequate police force. Mohsin Hamid’s unnamed city in ‘rising Asia’ in which the (also nameless) protagonist lives out his rags to riches story has an abstract, mythic quality to it that, however, refuses to become a fairy tale by its insistence on laying bare the unsavoury, extra-legal dealings that mark ambitious (or indeed any) undertakings in the global South (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 2013). All of these novels write into being the fractured, pullulating South-Asian city from the standpoints of characters who constitute its vast underclass and will be the focus of this chapter, raising the issues of writing and representation that this chapter is particularly interested in exploring. Precariously positioned as all these protagonists are at the outer reaches of the contentious urban terrains they inhabit, disadvantaged and disempowered by virtue of their class, caste and sometimes both, they also occupy the margins of English-language fiction in South Asia, in that they have generally not been seen to constitute worthy literary subjects. They form a direct line of descent from Mulk Raj Anand’s eponymous Bakha in his 1935 novel Untouchable, who has tended to be replaced in the intervening decades by the genteel middle-class or upper-class protagonists of Anita Desai or Salman Rushdie. In different ways, they all assert a relationship with the English language, the language that not only ‘describes’ them but is also the language of the moment, one they are keen to claim and master. Bajwa’s timid sari shop assistant perhaps desires it most fiercely, tied up as it is with the new life he longs to make for himself someplace outside the narrow lanes of the city that will go on, in the course of the novel, to swallow him up entirely.