Butter Chicken In Ludhiana Analysis

This ennui felt by the individual in the face of modernity was crucial to the expression of modernism. To say that modernism is an articulation of the spirit of modernity – a way to match the experience of modernity in literary expression – is a limited claim. Modernism was more a reaction to the conditions of modernity, a way to deal with it. The early European modernism had a tendency to resist the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world by expressing it in new dynamic forms and hoping that this literary expression would be a ‘retreat or refuge from modernity – shelter from its destruction’ (Matz 9). Whether it was Eliot or Lawrance, Joyce or Woolf, Kafka or even Hemmingway, the authentic expression of modernity was always laced with

In 1995, Pankaj Mishra published his book Butter Chicken In Ludhiana – an account of his travels across small town India in 1993-94. The premise of the book itself signifies a major shift in Indian society – the emergence of small town India. These small towns were not the metropolitan power centres, nor were they representative of the idyllic Gandhian imagination of ‘real India’ in villages. They were a crucial middle-ground formed as a result of industrial modernity in India which challenged the many pre-suppositions about the Indian nation. With the emergency (1975-77), coupled with the statism and corruption of Licence Raj, the idealism of the concept of nation based on Nehruvian socialism shattered (Radhakrishnan 2). Notions of secularism and such grand-standing slogans like ‘unity in diversity’ could not be taken for granted with the growing communalism – its high point being the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1993. And the Dalit movement raised several uncomfortable questions and ‘pushed the bristly issue of contemporary casteism on to the public fora across the country’ (Poduval 8). The rise of separatist terrorism in Kashmir in the 90s is only one example of threats to the ‘integrity’ of India nation which by now were more vigorous and overt. In a way each element of the modern definition of Indian nation - ‘Sovereign, Socialist, Secular,

With the old ideals in a state of redundancy, the modern India of late 80s and early 90s came up with newer promises. The promise of technology and modernization, the Mandal commission’s promise of reservations for the underprivileged castes, the promise of a free market liberalism, and the promise of reinstating the unified identity of India, albeit in Hindu majoritarian