Altering Time, Altering States: Contemplative Geopolitics in the South Asian Anglophone Novel

Abstract

A high orientalist text, but one that influences many postcolonial writers, Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” imagines a Chinese garden-text that tracks all courses of actual and possible events, making all timelines, both real and virtual, seem equally present and deeply connected. Versions of this enhanced, multi-dimensional temporal awareness appear in the work of several Asian and Asian diaspora writers as they grapple with cataclysmic historical moments, from WWII to contemporary violent outbursts, and consider counter-narratives, ways events might have been otherwise. Using Haruki Murakami’s fiction as a departure point for examining South Asian diaspora fiction writers Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, and Karan Mahajan, this paper explores factors that enable the presentation of enhanced time consciousness as linked to a mindfulness practice or that conversely predispose such apprehensions of deep temporal connectivity to become fleeting epiphanies, ones often tragically tied to global politics and globalizing technologies.