https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.065
From Coca-Colonization to Cultural Excess: Pico Iyer’s Contested Representation of India in Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East
DR. SNEHA ELCY JACOB
Associate Professor of English & Principal i/c
St. Thomas College, Ranni, Kerala, India
Abstract: Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (1989) presents itself as an investigation of American cultural imperialism and its encounter with Asian societies. Iyer announces his intention to examine the spread of American pop-cultural imperialism, the resistance it encounters, and the ways in which American cultural forms are transformed in Asia. His reflections on cultural hybridity, his rejection of simplistic East-West binaries, his attention to ordinary Asian voices, and his recognition of the limitations of the traveller’s gaze provide traces of a counter-colonial orientation. Yet these gestures remain secondary to his dominant representation of India. His descriptions of Indian cinema, literature, religion, popular culture and everyday life repeatedly rely upon the vocabulary of excess, vulgarity, imitation, chaos and backwardness. Indian cinema is represented as derivative of Hollywood; Indian literature is associated with excessive verbosity; religious practices become spectacles of sensory disorder; and India itself is characterized as simply too much. His repeated comparisons of Indian cultural forms with American and British standards establish the West as an implicit measure of originality, modernity and sophistication. His investigation of “Coca-Colonizing forces” thus produces a significant paradox: while exposing different aspects of American cultural imperialism, Iyer simultaneously reproduces aspects of the colonial gaze through which India is constructed as the cultural Other.
Keywords: Colonial Gaze, Counter-Travel Writing, Cultural Excess, India, Cultural Imperialism
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