“That is the Problem”: Resisting Discourse in Salman Rushdie’s East, West and Chetan Baghat’s Five Point Someone

This article joins in the current debate about the value of commercial Indian English fiction in the context of post-liberalisation India, the astonishing change that since the early 1990s has transformed India into a superpower (Aiyar 2016), given English a central role in the new socio-economic scenario and led some critics today to support Indian commercial fiction to the point of making it the emblem of a contemporary aesthetics which “requires the death of postcolonial literature – or at least of the narratives of exile, cosmopolitanism, and a critique of nationalism on which postcolonial literature has long relied” (Anjaria 2016: 290). Specifically, I will bring into the conversation Salman Rushdie’s short-story collection East, West (1994) and Chetan Bhagat’s debut novel Five Point Someone (2004), because although considered as paradigmatic antagonists by critics supportive of pop-com Indian English fiction, the diffuse presence of Hamlet in both works opens an intertextual discourse about the perennial combat between political-economic power and literary resistance to it, which, I contend, helps us focus more broadly on Indian culture in connection to the larger picture of neo-imperial times and the stage of culture commodification we live in.