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Not at home in English?: India's foreign-returned fictions

The 1990s witnessed a boom in Indian writing in English. Recent postcolonial literary criticism has praised its cosmopolitanism for questioning essentialist notions of national identity. Others are critical of the writing for pandering to a globalized marketplace for literature and failing to assimilate the social realities of India. The issue is complicated by the role of the English language itself, since it has been a tool of colonialism (and continues to be the language of globalization) as well as one of the languages of modern India. Smoothly translating India into English may privilege the language of globalization as a universal master code superior to the specificity of the location it is recording. Some writing reacts to this problem by stressing the circumstances of its own production and bringing English into a dislocating collision with other languages. Yet this response sometimes implied that its own 'fictiveness' places it beyond questions of culture and politics. Narrating the local within the global has had to chart a difficult course between mere assimilation and making a 'fetish of unbelonging'.