Alex Tickell

The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy's Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism

When interviewed about her best-selling novel The God of Small Things shortly after winning the Booker Prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy made the point that her work had been conceived as a single defining image, and subsequently written out of sequence: ‘‘I didn’t start with the first chapter or end with the last . . . . I actually started writing with a single image in my head: the sky blue Plymouth [car] with two twins inside it, a Marxist procession surrounding it. . . . [The story] just developed from there’’. And, true to Roy’s non-linear method, this ‘‘single image’’ is divided across the second chapter of the novel, forming the centre-piece of a larger episode which recounts a family outing to Cochin in the southern Indian state of Kerala, during which Roy’s protagonists, middle-class Syrian Christians who run a failing pickle-factory, find their car surrounded by a trade-union demonstration at a rural level-crossing:

An Interview with Manju Kapur

In this interview with Alex Tickell the acclaimed Indian author Manju Kapur talks about her fiction and her growth as a writer. Novels discussed include Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman, Home, The Immigrant and Custody. Kapur reflects on the role of women in the families she depicts, the treatment of history and political change in her works, and the reception of her books in India and internationally. She also recalls her early development as a novelist and comments on her approach to the craft of writing.

Driving Pinky Madam (and Murdering Mr Ashok): Social Justice and Domestic Service in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

In January 2014, an international diplomatic scandal erupted over the arrest and custodial treatment of Devyani Khobragade, India’s deputy Consul-General in New York. United States Marshals had apprehended Khobragade the previous month on a charge of perjury because she had apparently made false declarations on visa documents relating to the employment of her maid, Sangeeta Richard. On the visa form Khobragade had promised that her maid would be paid

Kipling's famine-romance: masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

4500 a month, but she had in fact already signed a private contract agreeing to pay her only

Delhi: New writings on the megacity

573 per month (far less than the minimum New York wage of

‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’: Indian Fiction in English After 1991

7.25 per hour). Tired of enduring the apparently restrictive and exploitative conditions of her employment, Richard left her job and sought help from a US-based victim support group, Safe Horizon.

The 1990s: An increasingly postcolonial decade:

Our present understanding of colonial masculinity is strongly mediated by Kipling’s fictional representation of late 19th‐century India as a space of male self‐determination and imperial service. This article concentrates on one of Kipling’s short stories, published in American and British women’s magazines and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo‐Indian gender relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine‐relief camp is the key to Kipling’s “gender transactions” in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the “biopolitical” logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception.

The postcolonial city and its subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay

The world was changing; an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember Delhi looked like a giant construction site [ ... ] but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. (Sethi 2012, 38)

Midnight's Ancestors

The famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru to the Constituent Assembly at midnight, 14 August 1947, on the eve of India’s Independence, is remarkable not just as the defining statement of India’s postcolonial nationhood but also as a piece of political discourse that has since become sutured into the fabric of Indian-English literary history. Nehru’s salute to the awakening nation, with its epochal rhetoric and its pledge to raise a mansion of free India ‘for all her children’ provided both metaphor and structure for Salman Rushdie’s now canonical novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), and even though Rushdie’s fictional reflection on the moment of independence was an ironic one and involved a metahistorical questioning of the new nation, the speech itself was untouched by this irony. Its literary credentials were reinforced by Rushdie on the 50th anniversary of India’s freedom when it was included as the first (and only non-fiction) text in his controversial Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1997 (1997) co-edited with Elizabeth West. Since then, Nehru’s unique contribution to the development of English literary prose in India has been further recognized (Khilnani 2003, p. 156) and the elision of a ‘messianic’ awakening to national and literary legitimacy has shaped subsequent literary-historical surveys (see, for instance, Mee 1998; Naik and Narayan 2004; Sunder Rajan 2011).

Writing the Nation's Destiny: Indian fiction in English before 1910

The article offers a critical contextualized overview of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the decade of the 1990s, at a time when it was edited at the Universities of Leeds and Hull. It looks at the journal’s relations to the emerging and rapidly changing field of postcolonial literary studies, when JCL shifted from offering fairly predictable close readings of writers still predominantly described as “Commonwealth”, to more prominently theorized accounts of migrant and national narratives.