Volume 62, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Arun Joshi: Avant-Garde, Existentialism and the West / Guest Editors: Pavan Kumar Malreddy and Dieter Riemenschneider

Friedrich Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of values calls for a dismantling of the normative conceptions of selfhood, shattering notions of identity predicated upon moral constructions of good and evil. Nietzsche argues that such constructions stem from a moral topology that prevents the development of a more salient grammar of ‘being.’ Modernist fiction is underpinned by this Nietzschean sensibility, interrogating the linguistic and epistemological barriers to existential freedom. While Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice has been read by many as an exploration of the ‘ethical problem of good and evil,’ this paper will argue that Joshi’s text goes beyond a mere examination of this often simplistic moral binary. Rather, the novel can be seen to be in dialogue with Nietzsche’s proposition that morality has no place in a modern capitalist system. The formation of self as a series of competing dichotomies is no longer tenable in the face of a system that precludes any moral injunction or ballast. Instead, Joshi’s protagonist becomes a derelict, one who only perpetuates, in a Sisyphusian penance, the system’s Nietzschean ressentiment , and its subscription to what Nietzsche terms a slave morality. This paper, then, contends that Joshi’s novel calls for a reconfiguration of the traditional moral matrices of self-definition, highlighting the need for a new moral episteme in the face of a disinterested capitalistic regime.

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain . Both novels present acclaimed novels of formation negotiating masculinity alongside experiences of diaspora and exile. It will be argued that comparing the two novels makes a worthwhile contribution to the genre discussion of the bildungsroman because it illuminates hitherto unexplored narrative connections between Indian literature and German exile literature. While at first sight the celebrated Indo-English novelist Arun Joshi and the German Literature Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann have only little in common, a closer look reveals that the two writers not only shared the experience of living in-between various countries, continents and languages but that both men were deeply concerned with imagining and narrating the agony of loneliness and alienation in an increasingly globalised world. Like Mann’s Hans Castorp, Joshi’s protagonist Sindi Oberoi grows up orphaned and spending his youth abroad. Whilst the two male protagonists have a professional background in engineering, their attempts to engineer their own lives get somewhat out of control when they engage in morbid love affairs. As if this was not enough, and like ‘true’ companions in fate, Hans and Sindi eventually have to come to terms with the deaths of their bosom-friends. Decay and death are thus central motifs in both novels. This is not only reflected in the vibrant representations of numerous places but is vividly displayed in the young protagonists’ detached views of life. Yet despite these similarities, the novels are also marked by differences in the way they construct and narrate masculinity, sexuality and transcultural existentialist identity formation. Hence, the emerging narrative panorama of the genre of the transcultural bildungsroman includes, in addition to a postcolonial and transcultural existentialist version, a homoerotic parody of the genre.

Poststructuralist theory interrogates systems of thought and discursive regimes of knowledge in order to locate the underlying historical assumptions that shape and inform human subjectivity. Nowhere is this epistemological excavation more complex than in representations of the postcolonial self. Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas can be read as a representation of the hybrid self, one produced by transcultural processes of colonisation. Yet, if we read the novel through Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, we find that Joshi’s narrative representation of self is not confined to the postcolonial dialectic of self and other. For Ricoeur, self and other than self reside in a circle of sameness-identity; it is constitutive of selfhood. While critical work on Joshi’s novel has distinguished between the narrator, Romi, and the protagonist as two mutually exclusive entities, the primary focus being the existential experience of Billy, this paper suggests that the narrator himself is intimately implicated in this experience. Indeed, they can be read as two parts of a whole being, a ‘double consciousness’ that inhabits the dialectic self and its other. Ultimately, this reading will attempt to access an understanding of the hierarchy of significations that inform our hermeneutic experience of narrative self-identity.

In this paper, I analyse Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice as an exemplary case of the Indian postmodern novel where story and history continuously overlap. The unfolding of the personal story of its protagonist, Ratan Rathor, should also be read on a symbolical level, wherein the hero’s progression from humble beginnings to a high rank position coincides with India’s achievement of independence. Like Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children , the protagonist of The Apprentice forges a fictional representation of a nation through his individual history which, in turn, could be read as a parody of national history. Last but not least, the paper highlights yet another dimension of comparison between Rathor’s story and that of King Ashoka – an iconic figure of Indian national history.

Arun Joshi’s The City and the River has often been read as an allegorical text, sometimes as an existential one, and in other cases as a philosophical parable. Considering the fact that The City and the River reveals a distinct form, narrative technique, and political predicament in comparison to his earlier novels such as The Foreigner and The Strange Case of Billy Biswas which delve into the grime of everyday life struggles, such diverse, often conflicting reception of Joshi’s text is thoroughly justified. This paper argues that while Joshi’s commitment to the predicament of ‘everyday life struggles’ remains intact, The City and the River marks a latent shift in terms of character constellations and their predisposition to peripheral locations that make the text a precursor to later discussions of hybridity in postcolonial studies. In particular, the identity crises of its characters are inflected in the constant change of the narrative’s locations and their respective political positions.