Paper short abstract:

The most successful Indian novels in English dealing with post-liberalisation India, A. Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Vikas Svarup's Q&A (2005), both feature subaltern protagonists catapulted themselves into spectacular professional success. What about post-liberalization fiction in Hindi, which has tended to focus on small-town characters and stories of curbed ambitions, joblessness or job frustration, and limited mobility?

Paper long abstract:

The most successful Indian novels in English dealing with post-liberalisation India, A. Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Vikas Svarup's Q&A (2005, aka Slumdog Millionaire), both feature subaltern protagonists who catapult themselves into spectacular success thanks to their ambition and professional success. In almost magical fashion, they not only escape the slavery of low-paid manual labour, they come to impersonate the figure of the successful businessman-entrepreneur. English does not matter much to them since the borders between English and Hindi seem to have become more porous in the post-liberalization informal economy.

What about post-liberalization fiction in Hindi, which has tended to focus on small-town characters and stories of curbed ambitions, joblessness or job frustration, and limited mobility? Even Dalit narratives which encapsulate great mobility (Surajpal Chauhan's repeated assertion that he is now an officer in the office where his father was a sweeper) dwell rather on the limits of such mobility, the unescapable stigmas, rather than on success.

In order to to explore this question, my paper will explore the representation of work and ambition in a range of recent Hindi fictional writing dealing with characters who are part of the new economy such Prabhat Ranjan's stories (Janakipul), Neelakshi Singh's novel Shuddhipatr and Alka Saraogi's Brek ke bad.