Abstract

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 reliedµ (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.