Representing 'The Other India' in Transnational Public Spaces

This article explores some of the ways in which the Indian non-fiction writer and journalist, Sonia Faleiro, is positioned as someone with a privileged knowledge about the lives of Indian marginalised subjects, and the ability to translate those experiences for a transnational middle-class audience. In her role as a narrative journalist and an author, she is also tasked with con-structing an ‘authentic’ personality that her readers can relate to, interact with, and in some ways hold to account. In this article, I discuss the way in which Faleiro’s agency in these regards are shaped by and shape the field of Indian middlebrow writing and publishing. This article, with its focus on understanding Faleiro’s transnational literary celebrity and cultural impact, thus critiques the assumptions and politics behind affective citizenship, and middlebrow writing’s purported significance to upholding the cosmopolitan liberal values of plurality, social justice and democra-cy. In essence, following Carolyn Pedwell’s (2014b) critique of liberal narratives of empathy and transnational politics, this article problematises the assumption within certain theories of empathy that a more accurate knowledge of ‘others’ will result in more ethical political action (see for example, Aten’s article (2019) in Psychology Today, “How Empathy Will Save The World”).