Toor on Roy & Indo-chic

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

SOAS Literary Review (2) - July 2000
<http://www.soas.ac.uk/soaslit/issue2/TOOR.PDF>

INDO-CHIC: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION IN POST- 
LIBERALIZATION INDIA
Saadia Toor (Cornell University)

'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's  
leading weeklies. 'After burgers, Cielos and cellulars, it's time for  
cultural consumerism' (Outlook, April 9, 1997). If one needed any  
more testimony to India's coming-of-age as a late capitalist society,  
the emergence of a nascent culture industry as reflected by this  
headline and others like it — the cover story is entitled 'The  
Merchandising of Culture' — is an important indicator that India has  
'arrived' on the international economic-political scene; and none the  
worse for wear after its almost half a century of Nehruvian  
'socialism', either. Under the watchful eye of the IMF/World Bank,  
India began to liberalize and 'reintegrate' into the world economy in  
1991–92, but it is only recently that the ideology of global-local  
capitalism has managed to construct the level of hegemony1 that  
allows a globally-oriented capitalist consumer culture to truly  
manifest itself in Indian society.

This cultural consumerism has resulted in a curious phenomenon:  
whereas formerly India was integrated into the global culture2  
industry as a 'producer/exporter' of cultural commodities — or the  
raw material for what became cultural commodities in the West3 — in  
the form of exotica, it is also increasingly their consumer — or at  
least a certain class of emerging capitalist elites is: 'yuppies'  
with disposable incomes unlike any experienced by previous  
generations of largely austere socialist India. This is heralded by a  
change in how India and its inhabitants are now 'imagined' or  
represented on the world stage, but one which includes vestiges of  
past representations refashioned into what I will call the New — one  
is tempted to say ersatz — Orientalism4 and what the New York Times  
has recently referred to as 'the new Indo-chic' (August 30, 1997).

[...]

The New York Times article cited above brings up many of the issues I  
will attempt to address within this paper, including the importance  
of India as an 'emerging market' and the increasing role of the  
diaspora in fashioning 'Indian' identities both at home and abroad.  
Indeed, the proliferation and circulation of these cultural artefacts  
points out that the new 'Imagined India' (Inden 1990)7 is  
'indisputably chic', both at home and abroad. What is happening here?  
How can we explain this metamorphosis which retains vestiges — and  
which plays on important aspects of — the older Orientalist  
representations of India as the exotic Other, particularly since the  
most avid consumers are a certain class of Indians themselves? Part  
of the answer of course lies in the vagaries of the global cultural  
industry and Indo-chic can be seen as only the latest trend in an  
economy of planned obsolescence characteristic of late capitalism.  
Another part of it lies, as I have hinted, at the new role of India  
as a significant emerging market on the global scene — and this, in  
fact, is what the Times article concludes.

The aspect that I find most fascinating is the importance of this New  
Orientalism to the identity formation of the new young urban class in  
India,8 particularly the relationship between class habitus and taste  
as it explains the construction of a new aesthete within and by this  
class (Bourdieu 1984). Note that I am talking about a new class (or,  
it can be argued, class fragment/faction) which does not exactly map  
on to the generic 'middle class' which researchers on modern India  
are so fond of evoking and which is the darling of everyone from  
political scientists explaining the stability of 'Indian democracy'  
to market researchers interested in emerging markets. This class of  
young professionals is very different from the generic Indian middle  
class because it is a new phenomenon (definitely a product of  
liberalization), both demographically young and urban in location,  
self-consciously cosmopolitan in orientation.

[...]

It is interesting to note that unlike previously, when it was the  
space of the exotic Other and cultural commodities which signified  
this space were consumed mainly in the Western hemisphere, India is  
no longer a passive node in this political economy of desire. If  
Orientalism past was a manifestation of the 'Occident's' will to  
power over 'the Orient', the New Orientalism rehearses the same  
relationship but with a crucial difference: today the production- 
circulation-consumption circuit in the case of these cultural  
commodities originates and culminates in India. There is, however, a  
crucial period of mediation by the 'West', where the commodities are  
circulated, and then sanctioned by cultural critics as authentically  
'Indo-chic'. The diaspora features prominently in this process; the  
critics validating this authenticity are usually intellectuals of  
Indian origin. Arjun Appadurai figures prominently in the Times  
piece; Salman Rushdie is another classic example.12 Or else they are  
specialists in 'South Asia' as an academic discipline: Nicholas  
Dirks, head of the South Asia Program at Columbia, is the other  
authority cited by the Times. Without this 'seal of approval', I  
would argue that the fate of these cultural commodities and hence  
their 'biography' (Appadurai 1986) would be remarkably different.  
That is, they would not signify the right blend of exotic modernity  
to Indian consumers, and their consumption would not confer the right  
amount of prestige. However, this process of signification has not  
gone uncontested, as 'Indian-ness' becomes embattled territory and  
the debates heat up over what constitutes an 'authentic' Indian  
identity.

[...]

The interplay between global/local forces both in the sense of  
economics, and in terms of a politics of identity is strongly  
evidenced by the hype surrounding Arundhati Roy. In fact, it  
exemplifies the ways in which the New Orientalism is articulated and  
used within the global cultural industry, and most importantly, how  
Indians themselves are turning the Orientalist gaze back upon  
themselves.

Since Roy was signed on by Random House, It has been virtually  
impossible to escape the hard-sell for her first novel, The God of  
Small Things, freely hailed as the best Indian novel — and possibly  
even the best English novel ever written — by the press in India and  
abroad. The award of the 1997 Booker Prize just added some more  
sparkle to the Arundhati sensation. Marketing for the book has been  
dominated by glossy photographs of a very photogenic Roy, wispy  
tendrils of hair framing eyes that stare dreamily out. One publicity  
poster for the book has a four-foot image of Roy's face, beneath  
which is the caption 'Set to be the publishing sensation of the  
year', leaving much ambiguity as to whether the referent is Roy or  
her book, which is not mentioned even by name. The strategy is  
clearly one which plays into the Indian beauty myth, recently  
bolstered by the simultaneous success of two Indian women on the  
international beauty scene as Ms World and Ms Universe, 1996,  
followed by another title in
1997.16

Moreover, Roy crosses over into the world of academic chic as well,  
being the postcolonial 'subaltern' subject par excellence — brown and  
female — exemplifying postcolonial resistance by writing back in the  
language of the colonizer himself. It is in this avatar of the  
vanquishing heroine that she is hailed in India as well; and given  
the fact that this year was the 50th anniversary of Indian  
independence, it was considered highly appropriate that a 'daughter  
of India' should put India on the map of contemporary English  
literature.

Roy's photographs and her lifestyle also made good copy in the Indian  
press, as did the 'story' behind how the book happened to command  
only the biggest advance for a first novel in the history of  
publishing. India Today published its first interview with Roy right  
after the release of her book, and included excerpts from it. From  
the title — 'Flowering of a Rebel: The woman who never obeyed the  
rules, scoffed at convention and was chased by controversy, now finds  
herself on the edge of literary stardom' (ITI, March 15, 1997: 72) to  
the tone in which the article itself is written (in the genre of a  
thriller, complete with details of how she got to the edge of this  
stardom) — one can see the construction of a star personality:

It is better if we first get this out of the way, that she is truly  
beautiful. How beautiful? Here's a story. The brother of her friend  
met his friend who said publishers were paying all this money to an  
unknown girl for a first book not because she is bright (mind as  
sharp as a gutting knife) but because she is beautiful. That  
beautiful (ibid.).

The article continues in this tone of hushed awe and mystery to talk  
about just how much of a storm of a book it was — which is all about  
who called whom to set up the publishing deal. Frontline's London  
correspondent summed up the 'story-line' thus: 'A feisty, independent  
woman receives a mind-boggling amount of money for a first novel and  
is catapulted into instant stardom' (August 8, 1997). Frontline, a  
weekly which, unlike India Today, for example, is not self- 
consciously a part of the 'yuppie press' in India and takes itself  
very seriously as a rule, mentions that '[m]ost of the profiles [of  
Roy in the British press] portray Roy as an outcast who had lived in  
slums all her life, until emerging to produce a perfect first  
novel' (ibid. 102). Of course, it is also important in this rags-to- 
riches tale of stardom for her to have been 'a rebel who once lived  
in a squatter's colony', and who had women weightlifters for friends.  
We are told that she is happier in the company of such select friends  
'than sipping wine demurely over cocktail chatter', that she is  
'unconventional (drinks, swears, wears what she wants)' (ITI March  
15, 1997: 73); in fact, she is everything that the new generation of  
young urbanites would want to be.

After she won the Booker prize, India Today featured Roy on its cover  
with the title 'Princess of Prose: by winning the Booker Prize,  
Arundhati Roy gives Indian writing in English global acceptance'. The  
cover story was more revealing: 'Arundhati Roy brings recognition to,  
and opens up a global market for, Indian writing in English' (ITI,  
October 27, 1997). And in fact, that is what it is all about: the  
marketing of postcolonial fiction in the West (within the academy as  
well as the general readership) as the new publishing 'trend', as  
representative of an 'authentic' third world experience, and hence  
more 'vibrant', more 'lush', more 'multicultural' than the 'more  
prosaic, although undoubtedly worthy, novels the other authors  
[shortlisted for the Booker] had produced' (Frontline, November 14,  
1997). In India, while the Booker Prize was seen as a way for India  
to wag its thumb at the 'West', Indian writing in English was itself  
the subject of much controversy, sparked off in no small way by  
writer/literary critic Salman Rushdie's declaration that work by  
Indian writers in English was 'the most valuable contribution India  
has made to the world of books' (Rushdie 1997a: 60), exemplified by  
the fact that the anthology of Indian writing co-edited by Rushdie  
(1997b), includes only one writer whose original work was in an  
Indian language. In his introduction to this anthology, Rushdie  
asserts that 'the prose writing — both fiction and non-fiction —  
created in this period by Indian writers writing in English is  
proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of  
what has been produced in the 16 "official languages" of India; the  
so-called "vernacular languages," during the same time' (ibid.). To  
an older generation of Indians, this was a preposterous claim which  
completely elided the depth and range of Indian writing.

I argue that this claim is part of a reconstitution of 'hegemony', in  
the Gramscian sense, by a new elite and its organic intellectuals  
like Rushdie which is urban, cosmopolitan, and more integrated into  
the international capitalist system than any previous generation of  
Indians.

[...]

Roy talks about her encounters with Rushdie on television programmes  
in the US where they appeared together as part of the publicity for  
her book. Rushdie is said to have complained that 'The trouble with  
Arundhati is that she insists that India is an ordinary place', to  
which she responds, 'Well, I ask, "Why the hell not? It's my ordinary  
life [...] I don't want brownie points because I'm from India."'  
Rushdie is 'disappointed by her refusal to describe India as  
exotic.'18 But the novel itself, and its attendant publicity, belies  
this refusal. The literary editor of a New York weekly claims that  
'The book has proved that Americans could be persuaded in millions to  
buy and read books by exotic novelists other than Garcia Marquez and  
Amy Tan' (ITI October 27, 1997: 20). GOST [The God of Small Things]  
continues to be on the New York Times bestseller list, even beyond  
the expectations of 'industry insiders' (ibid.).

The structure and content of the novel itself are interesting to  
deconstruct, because of how well they exemplify the qualities Adorno  
isolated as characteristic of the culture industry, in particular the  
'predominance of the effect' (Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit. 125):  
the almost obsessive use of stylistic features like randomly  
capitalized words — what one critic has called the prose's 'tweeness'  
— the self-conscious coining of catchy 'turns of phrase' — what  
Adorno would dismiss as 'well-planned originality' — the cleverly  
disguised but ubiquitous stereotype. The intertextuality  
disparagingly referred to by Adorno as characteristic of the culture  
industry is reflected in the way the narrative uses filmic devices  
(Roy is also a screenwriter). The writing zooms in and out of  
scenarios, and the descriptions of the scenes are also heavily filmic  
in quality. This presents a slightly different issue from the one  
criticized by Adorno, where novels are 'shaped with an eye to the  
film'; here, the novel incorporates the camera's eye.

Also, in terms of content, the book makes use of the metonymic slide  
between India and a certain forbidden sexuality, which has its  
precedents in such canonical English novels as E.M. Forster's A  
Passage to India (1924), and 'Raj' bestsellers such as M.M. Kaye's  
The Far Pavilions (1978).

[...]

In GOST, the forbidden occurs at two levels: one is in the form of an  
inter-caste affair, the other is the incestuous love of the twin  
protagonists. The displacement in this case is geographic/cultural:  
GOST is set in Kerala, a state whose multi-layered cultural heritage  
— a result of centuries of interaction with Arab and Chinese  
tradesman, Jews, Syrian Christians, Dutch and British colonizers —  
its tropical climate, and its as-yet-unspoilt natural beauty, is  
'Other' even for most Indians. As a testimony to its potential as a  
marketable commodity within India, it should be noted that, over the  
past couple of years, it has featured on tourism shows made by and  
for Indians,19 broadcast over satellite television, and it has been  
the chosen locale for an Indian remake of Laura Esquivel's Like Water  
for Chocolate, telecast as a serial over the India-based but Rupert  
Murdoch owned satellite television network Star TV.

It is also worth pointing out, even if just as an aside, that one of  
the pivotal moments in the plot of GOST revolves around a Communist  
demonstration, and that the Communist Party is derided at various  
points throughout the novel.20 Aijaz Ahmad notes in an otherwise  
favourable review of the book that this is only possible given the  
hegemony of neo-liberalism in India at this historical juncture  
(Frontline, August 8, 1997: 103–4). This hegemony is so extensive  
that political parties at both ends of the spectrum often find  
themselves in consensus and grappling with similar economic agendas  
when in power.21

Even if one admits that Roy may not be using these metaphors as a  
conscious attempt to play the market, the question of authorial  
intent becomes moot when there is a field of meaning already  
constructed for Indian cultural artefacts in the global cultural  
economy. The 'disjunctures' in this global cultural economy  
(Appadurai 1990) are evident in the fact that this field of meaning,  
which encodes Indian artefacts as exotic and hence desirable, is not  
limited to 'the West' anymore. Indians (both within and outside of  
India) are increasingly the ones turning the Orientalist gaze back  
upon India, almost as if looking at themselves through 'Western  
Eyes', leading to a cultural cannibalism of sorts.

[...]

It is also instructive to examine the social biography (Appadurai  
1986) of GOST in the period since its 'conception'/production. As  
Appadurai puts it: 'For [the illumination of the concrete, historical  
circulation of things] we have to follow the things themselves, for  
their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses and their  
trajectories' (ibid.). Thus humans encode things with value and  
meaning, but it is only in their circulation and consumption that it  
is possible to see the 'politics of value' at play. Although at some  
level GOST and Roy — signifiers of Indo-chic — circulate as signs  
independent of social and historical context in the system of signs  
(as per Baudrillard's analysis) that is the culture industry, at  
another level, their decoding by various people is very politically  
and historically contextual.

On the one hand, GOST is one among many commodities over which  
'tournaments of value' are contested in the urban Indian milieu. It  
has also become part of a debate on the status of English in India  
sparked off in no small part by Rushdie's statements on its behalf,  
where it is either the language of necessity in an increasingly  
global economy and a polyglot country, the marker of status (a  
hangover from its colonial history), or India's way of asserting its  
presence in the new world order. The response to Roy's winning of the  
Booker Prize, as presented in Indian magazines and weeklies, revolves  
around the postcolonial moment of success — like beating the English  
at cricket. 'The Empire writes back', as that seminal book on  
postcolonial theory declares. In fact, leading Indian weeklies (in  
English) declared Roy's success nothing short of a victory for India.  
All this has fed a certain nationalist pride, even though Rushdie  
tries hard to disclaim it when asked what constitutes 'Indian'  
literature: 'one must separate Indian in the literary sense from  
Indian in the nationalistic sense because a literature that becomes  
subservient to nationalism gains all kinds of problems as a  
result' (Rushdie 1997a, op. cit.). Shades of the Lukács-Brecht debate  
over art and politics (Bloch 1977)? Perhaps. But what does Rushdie  
mean by this statement, and later, when he talks of a 'particular  
kind of Indian experience' (ibid.)? It is the experience of urban,  
middle and upper-middle class India, united by its cosmopolitanism  
and its familiarity with English.

It may seem paradoxical at best or contradictory at worst to assert  
that both a cultivated cosmopolitanism and a self-exoticism define  
the new urban elite in India today. In fact, the two are  
dialectically related in the sense that the cosmopolitan identity  
requires both the status markers associated with the 'West' (e.g.,  
fluency in English, to the extent that the latter can be seen as a  
luxury good), and the East (e.g., expensive 'ethnic' jewelry or  
clothes) because both provide important cultural capital. Also, the  
reappropriation of the identity of the exotic Indian is only possible  
because such encoding existed within Orientalist discourse to begin  
with. Thus 'ethnic' Indian artefacts are valuable for the Indian  
elite precisely because of the signification they embody in the  
'Western' imaginaire. I would suggest that this not be read as a  
totalizing assertion about the new 'Indian' aesthete, one which gives  
all agency only to the 'West'. In fact, I am claiming that the nodes  
in this signification are complex and play off each other in  
significant ways: thus NRIs [nonresident Indians] seem increasingly  
to be the mediators of authentic India for the 'West' — as  
intellectuals, film-makers, and even simply by virtue of being an  
increasingly visible presence in the cultural landscape of their host  
countries — as well as active participants in the creation of a new  
aesthete, one which holds an appeal for an increasingly cosmopolitan  
young urban professional class in India. I believe this is an  
interesting case study of the construction of taste such as that  
elucidated by Bourdieu (op. cit.), although it is one which is much  
more dynamic because it is still under construction.

[...]

However, what do we do when the 'concrete, identifiable' artist  
herself becomes a commodity, such as Roy has become? It is impossible  
to abstract the sale of GOST from the publicity posters of Roy; it is  
Roy that carries the 'aura' (Benjamin 1968) in this case, not so much  
her artistic production. In fact, one could argue that the cultural  
commodity being produced, circulated and 'consumed' is also not GOST  
but Roy as the authentic postcolonial female subject, embodying the  
(post)modern pastiche that makes Indo-chic simultaneously 'new' and  
'Orientalist'.