In 1997 , Salman Rushdie celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence from British rule by coeditingThe Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997with Elizabeth West. In the introduction to the anthology, Rushdie claimed that the most interesting literature of post-Independence India was in English.¹ “The prose writing—both fiction and non-fiction—created in this period [the fifty years after Independence] by Indian writers working in English,” he wrote, “is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen ‘recognized’ languages of India, the so-called ‘vernacular...

Postcolonial theory is peculiar. In startling ways it is not postcolonial at all. Consider, for example, caste and how little postcolonial theory has to say about it. On the one hand, caste has been the object of intense scholarly scrutiny for centuries. At least from the time of the British entry into India as a colonizing power, it has been steadily made into the very identity of India—its essential nature. Yet inThe Weapon of the OtherKancha Iliah records his sense that “caste was not a category of socio-historical analysis” in contemporary scholarship (2010 , x). Certainly, in...

What’s in a word? If the word ispariah, more than one would think.

Googlepariahand the hits will show how the word has become a coveted name for, among other things, a movie about lesbians of color, a marching percussion theater group, and a video game.¹ In its most common usage,pariahmeans, theOEDinforms us, “a member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcast.”² The word’s associations of outsider status are so common that some usages are no doubt meant to be subversive through an immoderate underscoring...

Postcolonialism, I have argued, whether understood as theory, historical condition, or literary canon, cannot be homogenized. While actually existing postcolonialism can be plotted along and between at least two axes of analysis (the transnational and the vernacular), scholarship within the North American academy has shown a strong predilection to standardize it along the first rather than the second. How can “the (post) colonial condition” be properly figured without an acknowledgment of the existence of both the vernacular and the transnational axes of orientation and, indeed, points in between? The temptation to fix and reify—to nail down one perspective on...

In pursuit of the vernacular, I have been led to two ancillary concerns—translation and comparatism. These two topics have found iteration in my argument in multiple ways. Noting how the vernacular directed attention to the question of translation, I took up that topic in the previous chapter. I conclude by turning to comparatism and comparison, a term clearly summoned forth by the notion of comparatism. Though my focus on comparatism is narrower in scope, there are resonances between my argument about translation and my observations on comparatism and comparison in this chapter. I partly rely on these resonances to...