"Masala Crime Fiction: Translating the West in Mumbai"

As the threshold connecting the Subcontinent to the world, Mumbai has always been where ‘India met what-was-not-India’. Syncretism and partaking in different cultures have been Bombay’s hallmark from the very beginning. From the ‘freedom of religion and of movement’ granted by the East India company, Bombay drew the energy to flourish as a free port, open to trade and continuous human transit. Considered at the same time ‘an outpost of the West’ and ‘the most Indian of Indian cities’ it has been compared to Chicago in the 1920s and New York post 9/11. Mumbai is not only the capital of the industry of images but is itself a very source of fiction: an aestheticized metropolitan scene inspiring stories and lifestyles. This paper analyzes various instances of the trancultural process by which Mumbai sets itself as a space in which East and West undergo a special and particularly intensified form of continuous bilateral transaction. To support the idea of the city as the gateway where India meets non-India and translates the West for the subcontinent, literary examples are drawn from the field of the contemporary anglophone novel in particular from Sacred Games by V. Chandra.