Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur through Narrative in the Contemporary South Asian Novel

Abstract

The post-Cold War wave of neoliberalism that has swept South Asia has had to be propped up not just by the repressive apparatuses of the region’s states, but through an array of ideological reinforcements as well. The cultural myth of the entrepreneur has served this function as one of the main ideological legitimizations of neoliberal capitalism, attributing meritocracy to cases of individual wealth accumulation and conveying a sense of a society in which government has gotten out of the way and let the most creative and innovative thrive and thereby preempting alternative narratives of capitalist success, such as those emphasizing nepotism, illegal and/or socially harmful business practices, and/or crony-capitalist practices. The rise of the entrepreneur myth has provoked a cultural response in the form of a number of recent novels that employ alternative narratives of business success to debunk the myth of the entrepreneur and thereby challenge the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. This essay argues that The White Tiger highlights the criminalistic side of entrepreneurialness and, while showing how free-market capitalism in India may allow the select few to escape from residual feudal social structures, unmasks the continuing brutalities and deepening inequalities of neoliberal India wallpapered over by triumphalist popular celebrations of the entrepreneur and India’s emergence as a global capitalist powerhouse. Similarly, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia gives lie to certain core entrepreneurial capitalist shibboleths like market inefficiencies, externalization of costs, and the pretense of a stateless capitalist future, while substituting a narrative resolution of deep human onnection for the entrepreneur’s lonely, atomized economic triumph. Finally, The Golden House gives narrative form to the quixotic ill-fatedness of the dream of escaping one’s roots and joining the ranks of a transnational capitalist plutocratic elite through entrepreneurial success while exploring the recent nativist backlash against neoliberal globalization.

• Adiga
• Aravind
• entrepreneur
• Hamid
• Mohsin
• how to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
• neoliberalism
• Rushdie
• Salman
• the Golden House
• the White Tiger

ORCID

Michael K. Walonen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1165-0004

Notes

1 In the words of former Republican Party chief strategist Grover Norquist: “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (Weisenthal 2012).

2 To use Saskia Sassen’s (2001) term for the “command centers” of the global capitalist economy – most importantly, New York City, London, and Tokyo – where its major operational decisions are made and its economic and cultural capital are concentrated.

3 Given how Trimalchio has risen to power and wealth from outside the nobility in Petronius’s Satyricon, there are shades of his upwardly mobile character in both Gatsby and Rushdie’s Nero.

4 In this latter regard, Rene describes the fire consuming the Greenwich Village home thus:

Civilization itself seemed to be burning in the fire, my hopes, the hopes of women, our hopes for our planet, and for peace. I thought of all those thinkers burned at the stake, all those who stood up against the forces and orthodoxies of their time, and I felt myself and my whole disenfranchised kind bound now by strong chains and engulfed by the awful blaze, the West itself on fire, Rome burning, the barbarians not at the gates but within, our own barbarians, nurtured by ourselves, coddled and glorified by ourselves, enabled by ourselves, as much our own as our children, rising like savage children to burn the world that made them, claiming to save it even as they set it ablaze. It was the fire of our doom and it would take half a century or more to rebuild what it destroyed. (Rushdie 2017, 374)