National Romances: Singleton Desire and the Discovery of India in Chick Lit Narratives

Abstract

Both the novel’s contribution to the imagining of nations and the role romance plays in this project have been well established. The emergence of chick lit, which tracks the fortunes of a single, young, urban protagonist in post-liberalisation India, offers a lens through which to view the intersection of the neo-liberal economy, nationalism and gender. This study examines two chick lit novels by popular author Anuja Chauhan, showing how they layer romantic union with a fantasy of India that embraces diversity, underpinned by a woman who is able to resolve various dichotomies.

Keywords:

• Chick lit
• Indian writing
• nation
• post-colonialism
• women’s writing

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the annonymous readers of this paper for South Asia for their insightful feedback and the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme that made possible this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (London: Picador, 1996).

2. ‘The Rise of Ladki-Lit’, The Indian Express (7 Oct. 2006) [http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-rise-of-ladkilit/14234/, accessed 4 April 2020].

3. Collins English Dictionary (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 12th ed., 2014).

4. Stephanie Harzewski, ‘Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners’, in Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (eds), Chick Lit: New Women’s Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 29–46 [37].

5. Ibid.

6. While modernity is a contested term, it has been cogently defined for the Indian context in Lloyd I. Rudolf and Susanne Hoeber Rudolf, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967); and Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Viking, 2003). There is a large body of work that argues that modernity forms the basis of tradition, rather than being a development of it and that tradition is not static or unchanging. These include Tejaswini Niranjana et al., ‘Introduction’, in Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993), pp. 1–18; and Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 88–126.

7. Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 249–70.

8. Radhika Parameswaran, ‘Reading Fictions of Romance, Gender and Sexuality: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in Postcolonial India’, in Journal of Communication Studies, Vol. 52, no. 4 (Dec. 2002), pp. 832–51; and Neelam Raaj, ‘Write Up Their Alley: Chick Lit Brigade Grows’, The Times of India (17 July 2008) [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/Write-up-their-alley-chick-lit-brigade-grows/articleshow/3286008.cms, accessed 7 April 2020].

9. Arunima Mazumdar, ‘Why Anuja Chauhan Moved from HarperCollins after Eight Years and Three Bestsellers’, Scroll.in (19 Mar. 2015) [https://scroll.in/article/714606/why-anuja-chauhan-moved-from-harpercollins-after-eight-years-and-three-bestsellers, accessed 7 April 2020].

10. Priya Joshi, ‘Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India’, in Ulka Anjaria (ed.), A History of the Indian Novel in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 310–23 [314].

11. Rupal Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalisation (New York: Routledge, 2006).

12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

13. Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 44–70.

14. Anuja Chauhan, The Zoya Factor (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008).

15. Anuja Chauhan, Battle for Bittora (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010); Anuja Chauhan, Those Pricey Thakur Girls (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2013); Anuja Chauhan, The House that BJ Built (New Delhi: Westland, 2015); and Anuja Chauhan, Baaz (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2017).

16. Chauhan, Battle for Bittora, p. 225.

17. Ibid., p. 11.

18. Ibid., p. 224.

19. Ibid., p. 222.

20. Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 72.

21. Chauhan, Battle for Bittora, p. 11.

22. Ibid., pp. 11–2.

23. Ibid., pp. 343–6.

24. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, in Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986), pp. 65–88; Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, pp. 44–70; and Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, in Social Text, no. 17 (Autumn 1987), pp. 3–25.

25. Jyotsna Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogue: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996); Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Realism and Reality: Indian Women as Protagonists in Four Nineteenth Century Novels’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 19, no. 2 (14 Jan. 1984), pp. 76–85; and Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 233–53.

26. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 74.

27. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogue, p. 153.

28. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 50.

29. Ibid., p. 49.

30. Chauhan, Battle for Bittora, p. 158.

31. Ibid., p. 266.

32. Ibid., pp. 204–5.

33. Ibid., p. 240.

34. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the Enchantment of the State: Indian Thought on the Role of the State in the Narrative of Modernity’, in European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 46, no. 2 (Aug. 2005), pp. 263–96.

35. Nehru, The Discovery of India, p. 518.

36. Kanishka Chowdhury, New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

37. Chauhan, Battle for Bittora, pp. 80–1.

38. Ibid., p. 29.

39. Ibid., p. 80.

40. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

41. Nehru, The Discovery of India, p. 60.

42. Chauhan, Battle for Bittora, p. 422.

43. Chauhan, The Zoya Factor, p. 111.

44. Ibid., p. 339.

45. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Virgin Mother, Beloved Other’, in Rajeswari Sunder Ranjan (ed.), Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 17–56; and Jashodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Maithreyi Krishnaraj (ed.), Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), pp. 158–85.

46. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl, ‘Introduction: Writing Goddesses, Goddesses Writing, and Other Scholarly Concerns’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (eds), Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 11–23.

47. Stanley Kurtz, ‘Our Image: The Feminist Vision of the Hindu Goddess’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (eds), Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 181–6; and Usha Menon and Richard A. Shweder, ‘Power in Its Place: Is the Great Goddess of Hinduism a Feminist?’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen M. Erndl (eds), Is The Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 151–65.

48. Chauhan, The Zoya Factor, p. 132.

49. Ibid., p. 172.

50. Ibid., p. 403.

51. Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India, p. 13.

52. Shoma Munshi, ‘Marvelous Me: The Beauty Industry and the Construction of the “Modern” Indian Woman’, in Soma Munshi (ed.), Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), pp. 78–93.

53. Parul Bhandari, ‘Curated to Be Globally Indian: From Virushka to NickYanka, a Socialist Analyses Bollywood Weddings’, Scroll.in (6 Dec. 2018) [https://scroll.in/article/904652/curated-to-be-globally-indian-from-virushka-to-nickyanka-a-sociologists-view-of-celeb-weddings, accessed 28 Aug. 2020].

54. Charmaine Carvalho, ‘Flight from the Womb: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit’, in Positions: Asia Critique, Vol. 27, no. 4 (2019), pp. 713–37.

55. Chauhan, The Zoya Factor, pp. 440–1.

56. Ibid., p. 442.

57. Ibid., p. 237.

58. Ibid., p. 463.

59. Ulka Anjaria, ‘Introduction’, in The History of the Indian Novel in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–30 [12].

60. Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Epic and the Novel in India’, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Vol. 1: History, Geography and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 596–631.

61. Ashis Nandy, The Tao of Cricket (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

62. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 110.

63. Nalin Mehta, ‘Batting for the Flag: Cricket, Television and Globalisation in India’, in Sport in Society, Vol. 12, nos. 4–5 (May 2009), pp. 579–99.

64. E. Dawson Varughese, Reading New India: Post-Milliennial Indian Fiction in English (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

65. Chauhan, The Zoya Factor, p. 29.

66. Ibid., p. 24.

67. Ibid.

68. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 111.

69. Chauhan, The Zoya Factor, p. 90.

70. Ibid., p. 311.

71. Ibid., p. 461.

72. Ibid., p. 470.

73. Harzewski, ‘Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners’, p. 37; and Carvalho, ‘Flight from the Womb’, p. 732.

74. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogue, p. 161.

75. Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 126.

76. Ibid., p. 127.

77. Ibid.