Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

In her essay in Thinking with an Accent (2023) Pooja Rangan asks, “when does becoming accented become disabling?” to problematize contemporary literary and sociological discourses that interpret accents as “lacking or excessive.”1 Her coeditor of that volume, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, writes in Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone of “accented reading”—a method of interpretation that “stages and assesses the relationship between the burden of representation experienced by ethnic, postcolonial, and non-Western writers of Anglophone literature, on the one hand, and the overdetermining interpellation experienced by the ethnic, postcolonial, and non-Western critics and scholars who study them, on the other hand” (1). I am curious about Rangan’s use of “disability” and Srinivasan’s theorizing of “burden” as these ideas capture the dynamic relationship between speaker/scholar/teacher and listener/reader/student in the US academy. For Srinivasan, what happens in the Anglophone texts by Bharati Mukherjee, Chetan Bhagat, Amit Chaudhuri, and Jhumpa Lahiri matters less than these writers’ reception in the United States. She therefore states, “An accented reading is a reading of a relation to a text and an account of a journey with a text . . . ” (29).It is important to attend to the historical period Srinivasan examines in Overdetermined. In the first chapter, she studies Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Jasmine (1989), and Miss New India (2011) and in the seventh chapter, she considers Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003), In Other Words (2016), Whereabouts (2021), and Roman Stories (2023). Between the late 1980s and mid-2020s, significant change shaped India and the United States, the two national cultures that occupy a central place in Overdetermined. India emerged from the dark shadows of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in the 1980s, witnessed the economic liberalization of the 1990s, and transformed into a neoliberal Hindu nationalist state in the 2010s and 2020s. Concomitantly, the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror (2001–21) propelled large-scale migrations and displacements from Asia and the Middle East to the United States, which in turn engendered ambivalent racialized and gendered categories and complex cultural texts.Overdetermined acknowledges that the status of Indians in the United Sates also underwent change during this period. As Srinivasan points out, whereas Mukherjee’s immigrant characters reside in the United States and sound “foreign, “nonnative,” and “nonstandard,” Lahiri’s characters are immigrants, emigrants, tourists, and locals who speak in “a global English accent” (53, 213). If accented reading entails “reading with the knowledge that . . . one may not be a text’s intended addressee,” who identifies Mukherjee as a multiethnic or not-a-postcolonial writer, who perceives Lahiri as a global or “post-postcolonial” writer, and what intersections between these two sets of readers and critics exist matters (28, 206). In this context Srinivasan’s chapters on Chetan Bhagat, New India’s right-leaning best-selling writer, and Amit Chaudhuri, a globally celebrated yet understudied writer-professor who currently teaches creative writing at Ashoka University, one of India’s elite private universities, are fascinating companion pieces. That both find it necessary to distance themselves from the term “postcolonial” leads Srinivasan to ask, who really benefits from pronouncing the extermination of the never-dying postcolonialism? What does their reception as authors—Bhagat’s much-asserted accessibility and authenticity, Chaudhuri’s pursuit of beauty and innovation—suggest about the task of complicating the term “global,” about the task of representing and problematizing history as postcolonialist scholars?Srinivasan’s meditations on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said take these questions to the academic scene, addressing the dangers of the global commodification of academic talks, accents, and celebrities, the divide between the critic and the amateur, the disappearance of the postcolonial and the concomitant rise of the Anglophone. In her reflection on Spivak, Srinivasan draws a parallel between twenty-first-century call center agents and postcolonial theorists to argue that the latter are expected to speak “in a voice that is particular and global, Indian and intelligible, native and neutral at the same time” (78). What, she wonders, is the connection between being Indian and thinking like a postcolonialist? Perhaps the ascendency of Spivak, Bhabha, and other postcolonial Indian scholars in the 1980s and 1990s was not an accident given the then recent histories of the 1947 and 1971 partitions and neoliberal US academia’s desire for lesser-known stories and histories? Recalling Bhabha’s concept of the nation thirty-one years on from The Location of Culture—“unstable and competing temporalities including the colonial, postcolonial, native, and modern”—Srinivasan refuses to ignore the blurring of boundaries between empires, colonies, and postcolonies and the looming fear of hybridity, whether sociocultural, racial, artistic, or disciplinary, in the United States (123).In so doing, Srinivasan brings into focus two kinds of failures concerning the postcolonial—the first, intrinsic to the postcolonial concepts of subalternity, decolonial optimism, and cultural hybridity, and the second, posed from the camp that wants to move past the problem of ambivalence in order to treat literature as postcritical, therapeutic content to be consumed with bare minimum critical engagement. How can a scholar be attuned to the slipperiness of these failures and reflect on the implication of their own identity in them? Of Said, Srinivasan asserts that his “status as a nonnativist, antiessentialist, anti-identitarian humanist intellectual was ironically secured by his identity as a Palestinian exile” (169). If Said was indeed what Ella Shohat called him, “the bulletproof intellectual” with a singular commitment to the Palestinian cause, why would he be invested in delving into the connection between imperialism and the novel form and theorizing orientalism, a broad and abstract concept? For Srinivasan, Said the politically committed public intellectual was distinct from Said the academic. Her view that Said believed in “thinking like an exile” suggests that he was a quintessential disidentifying postcolonialist for whom exilic thinking was a way of combining free thinking and critical rigor. Yet because Overdetermined leaves Said’s privilege unmarked it cannot unpack the academic labor of “semipublic intellectual writing” when it becomes a new task “required” of graduate students and professors already overworked by conferences, peer-reviewed publications, teaching, mentoring, and service (176). If academic journals function to gatekeep, how open and democratic are outlets like the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and The Drift? How can semipublic intellectual writing respond to scholasticide, a reality which students of the global south encounter far more than their global north counterparts?Overdetermined ends with an afterword in which Srinivasan lays bare the challenges of teaching South Asian literature and culture to South Asian American students in the United States. I started reading Overdetermined in July 2025, a month before I started my first job as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Anglophone Literature. Not only did Overdetermined make me reflect on why South Asia and not India (my country of birth) matters to me as a scholar, it also compelled me to grapple with the hard task of teaching non-Western literature to a largely white classroom. Srinivasan rightly notes, “We cannot allow the non-West to be represented as a safe site of comparative study elsewhere, while the minoritized and marginalized in the United States are denied their own literatures and histories” (219). That said, in the past four months, I have learned one thing: I will be able to teach minoritarian literature alongside canonical literature to University of South Dakota students not despite being a postcolonialist but because I am a postcolonialist.