Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.

Kantor's article examines the way that two distinct communities—rural villagers and the writers who represent them in fiction—marshal filth as an ethical term in the discussion of the same problem: dysfunction and socioeconomic stagnation in rural South Asia. Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbari, Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and Moshin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia all link soiling substances with larger critiques of rural life. These critiques echo, but do not always neatly overlap with, the discourses of actual rural people. In these novels, filth is characterized by its ability to cling and to spread, such that the only solution seems to be the creation of physical distance between the novel's protagonists and the rural sphere. Ethnographic fieldwork in rural Bihar, however, complicates this view. Villagers express ambivalence about filth: bemoaning the dirtiness of their everyday lives but also deploring others' emotional distancing as filthy. In order to unpack their divergent perspectives, this article brings together several fields of scholarship: social science debates about filth in public space in postcolonial India; literary theories of irony and the sublime; and philosophical writings on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

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This article seeks to explain the recent popularity of South Asian Anglophone literature (beginning in 1981 and peaking between 1998 and 2008) in light of the boom in Latin American literature of the 1960s. It argues that the phenomenon of regional literary “booms” shares features across both eras, and that a unified theory of booms is increasingly important to understanding the way contemporary literature circulates around the globe. Scholarship about both eras has tended to coalesce around three types of boom-driving agents: “creators,” “contexts,” and “curators.” Within that broader agreement, however, scholarship about the South Asian boom has tended to overemphasize the political symbolism of recent South Asian Anglophone literature and its global popularity, while under-emphasizing the political realities that create the conditions under which that literature became popular. This line of criticism has come at the expense of attention to literature’s other dimensions as a cultural object, as well as contextual explanations of popularity involving the role of governments, demographics, and market flows. The more diverse scholarship on the Latin American boom offers a corrective with insights for both the future of South Asian Anglophone literature and the field of World Literature.

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