What Makes One Indian Enough to Write About India?*
Recently there has been some heated discussion on who is ‘morally qualified’ to write about India. Socio-economic changes have made India the apple pie of global literary – fiction and non-fiction – circle. Patrick French’s India: A Portrait and Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking have invited the ire of several intellectuals and books reviewers in India. The patronizing narrative in such books is criticized as reflecting the colonizing mindset and selectively focussed on the aspirations of the urban middle class. According to the critics an outsider’s view is not authentic and only those who are ‘Indian enough’ (measured by some abstract standard) are eligible to communicate an objective view. The controversies have led Will Heaven, Deputy Editor of Telegraph Blogs to suggest that “the colonial hangover afflicts not us but them.”
* The title of the post is paraphrased from Sadanand Dhume’s quote. Dhume is a columnist at Wall Street Journal and currently writing a book on India’s middle class.
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