What does it mean to be human in the persistence of caste, religion and gender categorizations? Inspired by the questions posed in the Presidential theme for MLA 2020, this panel explores the cultural and political dynamics of South Asia in a transglobal economy. Most theorists who engage in issues of subalternity and subjectivities in the South Asian context focus on the caste politics and poetics, and have alerted us to the often intractable negotiations involved in asserting “human” rights in the face of caste and gender categorizations. Amanjeet Javeri in Dalit Poetics, Yaat Nagraj in Flaming Feet, and Toral Gajrawala in Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2013) are seminal works which interrogate these concerns in the realm of literature. This panel takes its theoretical premise from the formulation of human and inhuman dynamics in South Asian culture as articulated by these writers.

The panel is composed of 3 short presentations of no more than 15 minutes each, two by emerging scholars, one by a mid career academic, and a prominent scholar as our respondent. Collectively, the panel investigates the ways in which contemporary socio-economic conditions constitute humanizing or dehumanizing subjectivities. The analyses range from the genre-blending, intertextual pastiche and fragmented narrative of Lawrence Chua’s anti-novel, Gold by the Inch, to Mohsin Hamid and Aravind Adiga’s satiric parodies of ‘self-help” and “get-rich” narratives of the upwardly mobile neo-capitalist Indians in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising India and White Tiger. and finally, to Arundhati Roy’s novel of the pursuit of happiness by the marginalized, transgressive humans “existing on the fault-lines of the nation,” in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Amanda McCourt’s paper, “The Map is not the Territory: Photographic and Historiographic Afterimage,” reads Lawrence Chua’s experimental novel, Gold by the Inch (1998), about the disruptive, epistemic violence of the South Asian diasporic experience, as “depicting the socio-historical violence of human fungibility, which can only be partially rendered in dismembered fragments, incomplete ruins, and residual hauntings.” Arguing that the current political moment requires renewed recognition of Walter Benjamin’s claim

that there is “no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of

barbarism... the new world is also colonial conquest, national development is also foreign

exploitation, and multicultural globalization is also neoliberal extraction,” McCourt posits Gold by the Inch as a subversive narrative of transglobal progress.

Dean Casale’s paper, “How to Become Non-Human in South Asia: The Satiric Capitalist Primers of Moshin Hamid and Aravind Adiga,” continues the discussion of the (im)possibilities of ‘becoming human’ in his analyses of two recent South Asian novels in English, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013). Citing the American paragon of capitalist pragmatism, Benjamin Franklin and his “Way to Wealth” essay as an early example of the ‘self-help’ manuals and ‘rags-to-riches’ narratives that promise the possibility of individual transformation and transcendence, Casale argues that these manuals and narratives “sell” a capitalist ethos of drive, entrepreneurship, self-determination, profit and limitless material happiness. He reads Adiga’s and Hamid’s novels as parodies of these sub-genres which dramatize both the seductive allure of the global capitalist dream for the underclass, along with the exploitative realities of the ‘new’ socio-political-economic order. Using Caroline Levine’s Forms (2016) as a theoretical foundation, he examines the intersections between the textual aspects of these novels – the use of the second-person address, “you”; the narrative tone of ‘in-the-know’ insider’s advice; the unapologetic representations of greed, corruption and violence; the visions of a morally bankrupt world – and the emerging “forms” of global capitalism and secular-liberalism that have overtaken much of contemporary India, to highlight how as caste, tradition, religion and regionalism no longer completely and adequately serve as the bedrock structures and ideological constructs for Indian selfhood in the twenty-first century, Hamid and Adiga powerfully illustrate how corrosively self-deceiving, empty and de-humanizing are the global-liberal-capitalist “forms” that rush to fill the void.

In contrast, Saumya Lal’s paper, “ Precarious Happiness and the Nation in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” offers a more hopeful vision. Basing her argument on Sara Ahmed’s study, The Promise of Happiness, where Ahmed posits happiness as the ultimate goal of human life that can be attained through predetermined courses of action, which nevertheless, excludes the possibility of happiness from marginalized, transgressive human lives, Lal argues that Arundhati Roy’s novel reclaims happiness from this restrictive imaginary by highlighting alternative forms of happiness that emerge in marginalized human lives existing on the fault-lines of the nation. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work, Lal demonstrates that the novel shows simultaneously the precariousness (the inherent vulnerability) and precarity (the political maximization of vulnerability) of the contingent happiness in its protagonists’ lives and exposes the failures of neoliberal narratives of national “development” in contemporary

India by focusing on communities – Hijras, Kashmiris, Dalits – that remain excluded from the

promise of happiness within this discourse. At the same time, the text emphasizes the erratic,

fragile moments of happiness in Anjum’s, Tilo’s, and Musa’s lives that appear despite, and

sometimes in defiance of, their precarity. In addition to using plot events (such as the

“appearance” of the baby Miss Jebeen) that highlight contingency, the novel does so by

employing experimental narrative techniques – such as non-linear, meandering narrative

structure, reconfiguration of narrative space for “major” and “minor” characters and events – that

unsettle “progress” narratives of happiness in the nation, in the process offering alternative

visions of being human.

Together the panelists explore the possibilities and (im)possibilities of what it means to be human in the local and global context of South Asian fiction.