Reading Delhi, Writing Delhi: An Ethnography of Literature

Abstract

This chapter details how the author created a fieldwork-based methodology in order to study contemporary literature in the multilingual Indian context. Drawing on the author’s intellectual biography, the chapter outlines a relationship between literary studies and anthropology in order to show how the analysis of Indian novels in English became a starting point to sketch Delhi’s literary field. By linking these novels, which have become darlings of the global literary stage, to an actual place in India, the idea was to counter issues of representation with field-based research and to ask: Why was India only being represented in English? Here, “fieldwork” becomes an accounting of individual histories and experiences of language, or linguistic subjectivities, as “literature” becomes an anthropological object.