“Globalization into Cyberspace: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and the Indian Transnational Parasite”

Hari Kunzru’s Transmission charts the American migration of Arjun Meta, an Indian computer programmer with a passion for Bollywood cinema. The chaos of our contemporary world, split between real and virtual, computer geeks and neocolonialism, looms large in Arjun’s life. By featuring the virus Leela as a powerful metaphor for interconnectedness, the novel seems to evoke P. K. Nayar’s conceptual framework of the transnational parasite, a performative exchange produced at the interstices of cultural negotiations. The novel, in my view, illuminates a cultural paradigm of contestation and agency in a globalised world where multiple affiliations unsettle hegemonic practices. This essay tries then to shed light on the cyberworld as a productive and transformative semantic space that contaminates ethnic purity and generates change.