Abstract
Although the lives of the poor are striking examples of pervasive precarity in our age, a certain precarity of spirit—an existential encounter with one’s purpose in life—arguably defines the lives of contemporaries living in the heart of South Asia’s chockablock metropolises, apparently successful individual strivers who have been drawn away from many traditional values in the pursuit of capitalistic acquisition. Focusing on Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai as portrayed in recent novels, this chapter seeks to define the hollowness that pursues young South Asians who have closely identified with the glitter of possessions to the exclusion of contemplation and sincerity. Beneath a comparative breezy narration in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji, Diksha Basu’s The Windfall, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, readers are asked to discern the fragility of the human spirit in some of the most promising younger members of society.
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Notes
- 1.
Real control, so the story goes, remains in the hands of the same few families. “Three trading communities (the Marwaris, Gujaratis and Parsis) play a disproportionate role in the control and ownership of Indian publicly-traded firms. However, their role is skewed towards smaller, younger, and lower market share firms, and there is significant turnover in the identity of the largest firm over time. The results are similar for family control and ownership. Overall, the results do not support the entrenchment perspective, and instead supports the view that these social groups are the primary vehicle for raising funds among smaller, younger, and low market-share firms. However, neither do the results support the view that Indian firms are rapidly embracing a managerial model with diffuse shareholdings” (Mani, 1).
- 2.
Although his setting is unnamed, in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia it is likely Pakistan, and thus technically outside the geographical boundaries of this chapter. But he certainly is in tune with the writers under discussion here. His narrator offers an increasingly cynical (some might say, very honest) set of Dale Carnegie-like guidelines for “making it” in contemporary South Asian society: move to the city, get an education, don’t fall in love, avoid idealists (especially those who congregate around universities), learn from a master, work for yourself, be prepared to use violence, befriend a bureaucrat, “patronize the artists of war,” “dance with debt,” focus on the fundamentals, have an exit strategy. Some of these are, perhaps, less prescriptive and more descriptive of the course taken by his narrator, the course of whose life undercuts the value of the advice he has offered the reader. He is, in fact, a fine example of an unreliable narrator, one who begins with an apparent wisdom far in advance of his years, but ends pitiable and alone. His narrator asks the question that lies at the heart of this chapter: “Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?” (Hamid, 77).
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Hawley, J.C. (2022). The Precarity of the Urban Spirit: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji, Diksha Basu’s The Windfall, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar. In: Dwivedi, O.P. (eds) Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_6
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