Before Dylan, Tagore: on the erasure of Indian literature | Overland literary journal

A few months ago, my neighbour asked me, ‘Do you have beds in India?' Last week, a white friend asked me, albeit jokingly and drunk, ‘Did you have some spicy curry for dinner before you came?' Do these two examples, among many, reveal a symptomatic Western perception of India as defined by its extremities - poverty, spicy food, idolatry of cricket heroes? Is cultural India merely a frenzied collection of colours and Bollywood melodrama? Does there remain a colonial hangover demarcating India as an exotic populace of the enchanting and far-away East? Is this why in October 2016, a Bengali writer as significant to literature as Joyce, Eliot or Proust, was forgotten by the New York Times and the Guardian, when they described Bob Dylan as the ‘first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature'?