Gautam Basu Thakur, associate professor of English, was an invited plenary speaker at the conference “Contemporary Issues in South Asian Literature & Culture Studies” organized by the Department of Languages, Manipal University, Jaipur, India.
Basu Thakur’s plenary, titled “re-Orientalizing Global India: The liberal ethics of representing India’s urban poor,” examined how contemporary western representations of India acknowledge the globally emergent status of India as a lucrative consumer country and a new economic superpower, but then brings this “new” image of India into circulation alongside the “old” colonial image of India as impoverished and marred by political and bureaucratic corruption. Basu Thakur terms this the “slumdog millionaire” phenomenon.