decadent-trans-girl:

kuanios:

“Unfortunately for South Asian writing, what the publishing industry has decided is best for Western readers is pandering, cliché-heavy, lunch-buffet fiction that’s easy to digest and doesn’t contain too many weird, foreign ingredients.

On Jeet Thayil’s acclaimed novel, Narcopolis, about Mumbai’s seedy underground world of violence and drug addiction, and the winner of the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian literature (awarded for literature published in English about the subcontinent and the diaspora), Thayil told an interviewer, “I try to avoid any mention of mangoes, of spices and monsoons. The problem with those books about India […] I find it very difficult to recognize the country I know.”

“Those books” Thayil refers to are South Asian diaspora novels about the Indian subcontinent. Mangoes, spices, and monsoons. I’ll add saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western culture. The frustration Thayil expresses has been echoed by other South Asian writers and readers who don’t identify with the stories and struggles presented in many of the South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forward — the era ushered forth by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed. They see nothing of the real India, or the real Pakistan, or the real Bangladesh, or the real diaspora communities reflected in these novels, which are designed for a primarily white reading public. What they do see are stereotypes — a colonialist “jewel in the crown” version of the subcontinent that includes tall servants named Raj and palm fronds, mosquito nets and teatime and exiles longing to return to their super romantic homeland. In much contemporary literature, South Asians are exotic little creatures fluttering about in glass jars for the bemusement of monocle-clutching Western observers.”

Jabeen Akhtar 

Apparently the rest of this article sucks, but this excerpt really is good

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   I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again. Diaspora literature isn’t reflective of the countries. These writers are...

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    This reminds me of the South Asian student club at university…

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