Or, why the middle class is extreme. In December, the New Yorker magazine published a brief essay by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk’s essay offered a commentary on the writer’s trial–now dismissed–for having uttered statements that were considered anti-national. (Pamuk had told a Swiss newspaper that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey” and that it was taboo to discuss these matters in his country.) What interested me in the essay was the following paragraph:

In recent years, we have witnessed the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries we have also seen the rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. Whatever you call these new élites—the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy—they, like the Westernizing élites in my own country, feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism.

Isn’t it interesting that Pamuk says that we won’t quite grasp what has happened in recent years in countries like India and China unless we see the lives of the new middle class reflected in literature? Why only literature, and not films, particularly given the film-making talent in both countries? Am I to gather from the quote that he is also saying that so far Indians and Chinese haven’t produced writing that adequately portrays the new conditions? I’d mention Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13 as an example of a book that is a result of that emergence that Pamuk is talking about–the book being both an expression as well as a symptom of the acquisitive greed and self-love of the nouveau-riche in India. Perhaps readers of this blog could build a list of the new literature of globalization.