ABSTRACT
Focussing on Indian literary fiction in English, this chapter considers differences and similarities across the production of this body of work, paying particular attention to the differences between, on the one hand, novels written by authors from diasporic or transnational backgrounds and, on the other, novels by authors who have resided all or most of their life in India. I make this distinction because I suggest, in line with my other work (see Dawson Varughese 2012, 2013, 2016), that the novels written by those authors who have remained in India are less characterised by the tropes and guises of ‘postcolonial literature’. I suggest that in general, the diasporic or transnational texts that engage with ‘New India’ in various ways, have a tendency to propagate India as ‘the Other’ as they play towards the established mores of the western market (exceptions to this idea exist, of course, such as Half of What I Say (2015) by Anil Menon) and thus result in work that resonates more with a postcolonial framework.
