"Yes, sir, I was the one who got away": Postcolonial Emergence and the Question of Global English

In this essay, I use three novels published to wide acclaim in the last two years-Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008), Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)-as case studies for the deterritorialization of the twenty-first-century Indian and Pakistani novel in English. I focus particularly on the phenomenon of minority lives told in a major language, and show how Western literary forms and Standard English are restructured in the postcolonial, English-language, narrative voice.