Narrating The New India: Globalization And Marginality In Post-Millennium Indian Anglophone Novels

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the thematic and aesthetic changes in contemporary Indian Anglophone novels written since 2000 and addressing socio-economic changes that globalization brought to India. The economic liberalization of India in 1991 resulted in a wide array of changes, mainly based on the tenets of neoliberalism, in the socio-economic and political constitution of India. Primarily an economic vision, ‘neoliberalism’ wields immense influence on the social sphere and government policies that aim at developing a free growth of the market, transnational movement of capital and labor, privatization of the public infrastructures, and an emphasis on notions of individual responsibility and self-care. This project analyzes how the recent Indian Anglophone novels represent these changes in contemporary India in terms of the new modes of neoliberal subjectivity and citizenship; the structural changes taking place in India after liberalization; and the ways in which the marginalized groups are perceived and treated in post-liberalized India. In order to reach these objectives, this project focuses on three distinct themes of Indian novels (social upward mobility, remodeling of the Indian cities, and environmental rights) and studies their reflection on fictional characters representing marginalized sections of the Indian society. Methodologically, this project seeks to forge connections between various disciplines and conventional literary studies by reading selected Indian novels through three main critical frameworks--neoliberalism, urban studies and eco criticism—that correspond to the three central issues of contemporary globalization—namely the dynamics of neoliberal ideology, the restructuring of the urban space and the environmental debates of globalization. Through the above objectives, this project contributes to the recent developments in postcolonial studies that move from its predominantly cultural conceptualization of globalization towards an emphasis on the materialist realities of globalization as well. A project like this is especially pertinent today to locate the changing trends in Indian Anglophone novels and the way these novels foreground a critical discourse of globalization that challenges the dominant conceptualization of globalization as an unadulterated emancipatory force, especially in the global South.