South Asian Readings of Gabriel García Márquez

Abstract South Asian interest in Gabriel García Márquez and his works has been intense and diverse, and mapping its multiple trajectories offers a historical field of enquiry for assessing the reception of this Latin American writer in the subcontinent. This article uncovers various strands of the conceptual armature at work in the South Asian critical readings of García Márquez and magical realism. These range from approaches that privilege the “Third World” provenance of the genre; to the poststructuralist critique of such Third World nationalism; to the discomfort with an intermediating Euro-American critical apparatus, as also with decolonial readings of García Márquez’s magical realism as a transformative mode charged with a political dimension. The deployment of the “non-mimetic” realist mode in the works of diasporic South Asian writers such as Salman Rushdie or Michael Ondaatje has been noted by critics and is central to positing magical realism as the literary language of postcolonial writers. This article additionally explores the mode’s sturdiness in the works of some of their counterparts in the bhashas, that is, writers of the so-called vernacular languages of the subcontinent. It is in these languages with robust literary traditions such as Bengali, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, and Urdu that García Márquez’s works have been intercepted through translations for the vast majority of readers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, who do not read them in metropolitan languages. The article critically maps these diverse modes of accessing García Márquez in the “lettered cities” of South Asia.