This study focuses upon the handling of contemporary postcolonial texts and cultural production in the global literary marketplace, through a materialist literary analysis of the recent fiction of Indian writer and 2008 MAN Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga. Adiga's texts The White Tiger (2008) and Between the Assassinations (2009) stage the aesthetic, cultural and commercial mediations which take place between texts and their publishers, as well as between the latest Indian novel and its audience. As such, these strategies emphasise broader acts of mediation taking place in the sphere of a global and globalised production and consumption of texts. By offering a reading of these two works, I hope to demonstrate how processes of `looking' and consuming, performing and competing are encoded, metaphorised and satirised in these textual objects, even as these processes are embedded in their handling and treatment by publishers and book-buyers.

In a 2005 article written for the Telegraph India, writer, musician and critic Amit Chaudhuri states that Indian artists have `been `producing' India for a very long time' (Chaudhuri, 2005). Edward Said's critique of the `exoticised' Orient assumes that it `ha[d] been in a state of nature in the last two hundred years, translated into the realm of production and consumption only by Western writers and entrepreneurs' (italics added). Chaudhuri notes that taking this approach risks "exoticiz[ing] exotization itself", defamiliarizing it by making it "impossibly foreign to and distant from, ourselves". This study intends to respond to the question of an `exoticize[d]' production and handling of contemporary postcolonial texts posed by Chaudhuri's comments. In order to draw a sharper focus to such a discussion, these questions will be considered in light of the recent fiction of Indian writer and 2008 MAN Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga. Through the adoption of various literary strategies, Adiga's texts The White Tiger (2008) and Between the Assassinations (2009) self-consciously stage the aesthetic, cultural and commercial mediations which take place between texts and their publishers, between the latest Indian novel and its audience. Embedded in the literary text, each of these strategies act as signposts which direct the attention of the reader to the position of the text within the sphere of a global and globalised production and consumption of textual products. By offering a series of materialist literary readings, I hope to demonstrate how processes of `looking' and consuming, performing and competing are encoded, metaphorised and parodied in these textual objects, even as they inform the handling and treatment of books by publishers and book-buyers.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Aravind Adiga, Cultural Production, Commercial Mediations, Indian Fictional Writing, South-Asian Cultural Commodities, Contemporary Corruption, Social Responsibility, Postcolonial Literatures, Foreign Cultures, Commercial Implications, Postcolonial Production.