The Multilingual Anglophone: World Literature and Post-Millennial Literature in Postcolonial India

This essay proposes a comparative approach for engaging with Anglophone world literature by focusing on post-millennial literatures of India. The reason for focusing on India is threefold. First, India is a multilingual space where translations and comparativisms are central to conceptualizing any literature. Second, Anglo-American postcolonial theory has been heavily based on Anglophone literature about or from India, and it has largely ignored the literatures of other Indian languages, creating a gap between praxis and theory within the literatures of India. Finally, the concept of the "Anglophone" and the "world" in the Indian context is multidimensional, informed by class as well as caste, where centre-periphery, local-global, universal-particular, diaspora-native, individual-collective frameworks become reductive. The two novels that follow in this essay indicate that the paradigm for analysing Anglophone world literature has to be comparative, translational, provincial, multilingual, and worldly.