Literature and Politics

Politics is concerned with power and literature reveals how that power changes people’s lives and stories. This paper takes up Anthony S.Chen’s notion of the relationship between American mainstream society and immigrant Chinese men as a trade-off of power, and applies it adaptively to Sri Lanka and India. In South Asia, political power derives from race, class, wealth, ancestry, and gender, as it always has. A hegemonic bargain was struck between the colonial rulers and those they colonized. The same deal is now enforced by their Singhalese and Indian successors, who wield power because they can, over those who put up with it because they must. But the bargain is inherently unstable: Chinese Americans are aspirational and diligent, and China’s economic power now threatens the United States. In Sri Lanka, the government’s bargain with the people has unravelled because leaders have not kept their side of it. The concrete foundation of modern India’s secular democracy is becoming cancerous because of contending religious forces.

No contemporary fiction of South Asia can credibly insulate itself from these tensions, that affect the lives of millions. The paper finds early traces of them in Leonard Woolf’s novel of colonial Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle; it then traces their workings Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case. They are developed further in pre- and post-independent Sri Lanka in Yasmine Gooneratne’s genteel fiction-as-memoir, The Sweet and Simple Kind, in which past events satirically anticipate what’s happening now. In Inez Baranay’s Neem Dreams, small-scale development projects collide with today’s local Indian politics, and even the well-intentioned agendas of foreigners get trampled in the rush. Aravind Adiga’s TheWhite Tiger is a slumdog who will let nothing stop him becoming a millionaire, certainly not his hegemonic boss. And in all of them, past and present, sex is part of the bargain too.