![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s what I’ve called in the past the “ mango novel”: increasingly familiar mirages of magical-realist wonders and colourful terrors in places at once enticingly and reassuringly distant (think of David Davidar’s novel The House of Blue Mangoes or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, set in a mango pickle factory.) Shantaram raises important questions about what author Vikram Chandra called the “cult of authenticity” in which too often, representations of India are artefacts of heightened or caricatured “Indianness” – designed to appeal to Western audiences. These productions served to excite both fascination and revulsion – as did Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel decades later. Operas and ballets such as Lakmé, La Bayadere, The Pearl Fishers and others portrayed Indian stories and people as exotic curiosities in stereotypical, Orientalist spectacles. The “Indies” have long exerted a powerful pull over the Western imagination. ![]()
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