The Overseas Indian and the political economy of the body in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Abstract

In the often highly-charged cultural politics of India, difference is played out in various ways, including in gendered, religious, and social terms. A newer and less obvious difference emerges as India struggles to attract foreign investment to the country, beginning with the cultural and economic campaign to engage Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) – or Overseas Indians, to use the term now growing in popularity – and to kindle their interest in the homeland. The cultural and ideological gap between the Overseas Indian and the local or resident Indian, ostentatiously noted in literary narratives, marks the gap between India’s ambitions to become a global socio-economy, and the reality of its present socio-economic state and its anxieties about globalization. In texts such as Adiga’s The White Tiger and Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, this gap (despite the differences between the texts) ultimately appears to be persistent and insurmountable. The obduracy of the local Indian’s cultural corpus, its resistance to the seemingly more dependent and malleable condition of the Overseas Indian, speaks not only of the persistence of the local against the global in India (contra many discourses of a rampant globalization), but also of anxieties about local problematics (corruption, social injustice, reactionary culture) which are not easily remediable.