A domestic English market lets Indian writers claim national embodiment while staying globally linked

Evidence

One of the consequences of a large home market is that many of the more prominent Indian writers of Englishin sharp contrast ro the Caribbean ones, for examplechoose to live inside India, which undoubtedly helps to consolidate their claim to represent - indeed to embody - the Indian national experience, for their readerships here as well as abroad, while the shared medium of English serves to strengthen that tie, and the metropolitan perceptions of that tie, between the writers based inside India and those who have migrated to the metropolitan countries. Anita Desai and Bharati Mukherjee thus become two faces of the same currency, so to speak, in the global category of Third World Literature. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s question about collective vs individual availability of identity performance — here the material condition (home market) enables a collectivity to perform ‘national experience’ without exile. — connects to: Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 512

Broader Connections

• Indian literature’s unity is an effect of geography and the nation-state #corroborates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 512