From national allegory to cosmopolitanism: Transformations in contemporary Anglo-Indian and Turkish novels

In this study, I explore the transformation of contemporary Turkish and Anglo-Indian novels from national allegories to sites of multiple belongings by way of a comparative analysis. I analyse ten novels by Turkish and Anglo-Indian novelists that were published between 1973 and 2010: Adalet Agaoglu's ‘Lying Down to Die’ (1973), Orhan Pamuk's ‘Snow’ (2004), Salman Rushdie's ‘Midnight's Children’ (1981 ), Arundhati Roy's ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997), Aravind Adiga's ‘The White Tiger’ (2008), Latife Tekin's ‘Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills’ (1996), Elif Shafak's ‘The Thirty Rules of Love’ (2010) and ‘The Saint of Incipient Insanities’ (2004), Kiran Desai's ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ (2006), and Hari Kunzru's ‘Transmission’ (2005). Departing from the relationship between individual and nation, I extend the scopes of the selected works of fiction. As examples of contemporary Anglo-Indian and Turkish novels, the selected novels are actually, I wish to argue, world texts whose thematic reference is not exclusively the nation-state, but a broader entity, that is, the world-system as a whole.