Critical Resistance to “National Allegory”: An Exploration of New Urban Realism in Select Contemporary Novels of Indian English

Abstract

I want to study the representation of resistance in select contemporary Indian English novels. The “baggy nationalist allegory” that predominated the literary arena in the 1980s and 1990s, sees the abject beings as the passive recipient of society’s injustices and not as a potential threat to the state power. This line of argument implicates a critical fissure in which the mainstream discourses exclude the abjects from the promising resistance discourse. It is also relevant to examine the “infrapolitics” i.e., everyday forms of resistance that go politically unnoticed due to its veiled nature. My paper addresses the need of taking into account the “little narratives” of resistance of those people who are vehemently rejected by mainstream society—the abjects of society. Abjection plays a major role in the complex process of identity formation both at the micro level of individual personhood and at the macro level of society. In this context, it is relevant to examine the New Urban Realism which has emerged in the first decade of the 21st century. This new novelistic form aims to explore more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks and tends to observe the underside of society to examine individuals and groups who resist to normative disciplinary power. This line of argument implies a shift from the original formulation of the concept of ‘abjection’ in Powers of Horror, which is primarily oriented towards the psychoanalytical, to a ‘social’ exploration. My paper will focus on the novels which are produced during the twenty-first century, that is, from the year 2000 till the present time. Chiefly, the theoretical framework for this research would be based on various theorists of transgression and resistance like Foucault, James c. Scott, Michel de Certeau, and others. Theorists like Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler would be referred while examining the process of subjectification and abjection vis-à-vis gender identity and gender role, and for the exploration of the concept of realism in contemporary time, I would resort to Ulka Anjaria, Toral Gajarawala, Amardeep Singh and others.