When the East is a Career: The Question of Exoticism in Indian Anglophone Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay defends the critical position that there is a strong element of exoticism in Indian Anglophone literature. I do so by offering a rebuttal of two recent articles, written in each case by a prominent writer, defending Indian Anglophone literature against its detractors. Amit Chaudhuri's article, 'The East as a Career,' in the New Left Review, challenges head-on the charges levied against Anglophone literature. Vikram Chandra, in his piece 'The Cult of Authenticity' in the Boston Review similarly decries the critics of Indian Anglophone literature. I choose to discuss Chaudhuri and Chandra's pieces as they are established writers of the genre, their views are aired in prestigious journals and they are therefore in a position to mold critical opinion. I begin with an overview of Chaudhuri and Chandra's position and then proceed to interrogate some of their central assumptions. I contend that the writers choose to misread the political character of the exoticism critique. Contrary to what they suggest, the particular skepticism towards Indian Anglophone literature is not grounded in a nativistic position; instead, it is rooted in the legitimate concerns about the place of English in social reproduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".