Paper short abstract:

This paper studies how the concepts of "core" and "periphery" are reconfigured in the narrative and the publication and reception of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), taking into consideration their disparate temporal and social contexts.

Paper long abstract:

My paper would like to consider Ahmed Ali's novel Twilight in Delhi (1940) along with Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) to question whether a stabilized construction of the "core" and "periphery" is at all possible. I will do this by looking at the narrative of the respective novels and associated politics of publication and reception. Ahmed Ali's novel connected the post-war scenario of English modernism with the literature of the subcontinent, insinuating thematic connections between the two literary and temporal traditions. Published from the Hogarth Press, the novel received high praise from the European metropolitan critical establishment and is considered a seminal text in the annals of Pakistani English Fiction. The paper explores the problematic interface between such validation from the colonial centre for a novel which formulates a critical repudiation of the colonialist enterprise.

Adiga's novel similarly gained international prominence after being feted with the 2008 Booker Prize. He questions class based constructs of the feudal economy that permeated the globalized metropolitan economy of Delhi. The novel projects Bangalore as the economic future of a largely agricultural economy. I would like to read the two novels to understand how the concepts of centre and periphery constantly reconfigure themselves in two distinct temporal and social contexts. Leading to an understanding of the way they affect and to some extent construct the paradigm of South Asian literary and cultural texts.