Postcolonial Servitude

Abstract

Abstract Postcolonial Servitude explores how a new generation of Anglophone, transnational, award-winning writers with origins in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh engages with the complexities of domestic servitude as a problem for the nation and for the novel. Servitude, to be distinguished from slavery, is a distinctive, pervasive, unregulated, and exploitative institution in South Asia, with a long history. South Asian literature has always featured servants, usually as marginal or instrumental. This book focuses on writers who make servants and servitude central, and who craft new narrative forms to achieve their goals. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks, and addressing what it identifies as a blind spot in contemporary postcolonial studies, this is the first to offer a sustained analysis of servitude and servants in postcolonial or South Asian English literature from the early twentieth century to the present, and to examine their political, thematic, and formal significance. Methodologically, using close reading and attention to form to illuminate in new ways both well-known writers (from R. K. Narayan, Attia Hosain, and Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie) and more recent ones (Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Romesh Gunesekera, Aravind Adiga, Thrity Umrigar, Kiran Desai), this book argues that an emergent wave of global fiction has begun to rethink South Asian cultures of servitude. Pulling servants from the background into the foreground, emphasizing their interiorities and stories, these transnational writers attempt to defamiliarize what is familiar, to make the invisible visible, to challenge normalized ways of seeing, being, and writing, and to prompt progressive social change.