In 2013, Palgrave Macmillan published Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature, a work of literary criticism by Anna Guttman, a scholar of postcolonial and South Asian literature. Unlike the historical and ethnographic studies that make up most of the literature on India’s Jewish communities, Guttman’s book approaches the subject from an entirely different angle: not the lived history of the Bene Israel, Cochin, or Baghdadi Jews, but the way “Jewishness” itself has functioned as a literary trope and metaphor within South Asian literature written in English.
A Literary-Critical Rather Than Historical Approach
Guttman’s project examines how South Asian writers – including some who are themselves Jewish, and many who are not – have deployed images, characters, and symbolic associations connected to Jewishness within their fiction and writing more broadly. Rather than asking what actually happened to India’s small resident Jewish communities, the book asks a different and in some ways more unusual question: what work does the idea of “the Jew” do within South Asian literary and postcolonial discourse, independent of India’s own small Jewish population? This makes the book less a study of Indian Jewry as a historical subject and more a study of how a set of ideas historically associated with Jewishness in Europe and elsewhere have been imported, adapted, and reframed by South Asian writers to explore questions of religious identity, colonialism, and cultural belonging that extend well beyond the Jewish community itself.
As one scholarly review of the book put it, Guttman is “extraordinarily knowledgeable about the range of representations of Jews in South Asian literature,” tracing how images of Jews have been “appropriated or reframed by South Asian writers, including Jewish ones” across a body of English-language fiction that most readers would not immediately think of as engaging with Jewish themes at all.
Jewishness as a Postcolonial Metaphor
Central to Guttman’s argument is the idea that Jewishness, as deployed in South Asian literature, often functions less as a direct representation of any actual Jewish community and more as a flexible metaphor for outsider status, diasporic identity, and the instability of religious and national categories under colonial and postcolonial conditions. A famous example familiar to many readers of South Asian fiction in English, though not necessarily analyzed at length in Guttman’s book specifically, is Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, whose protagonist descends from a prominent Cochin Jewish trading family – a plot choice that uses the real historical presence of Cochin’s Jewish community as a device for exploring themes of hybridity, hidden ancestry, and contested belonging in postcolonial India more broadly, independent of any documentary claim about the Cochin Jewish community itself.
Guttman’s study situates such literary uses of Jewishness within the broader “entangled intellectual contexts within which Jewishness is discussed in South Asian national and postcolonial discourses,” tracing how these representations connect to European and North American debates about Jewish identity even as they are reworked for specifically South Asian literary and political purposes. This comparative framing – reading South Asian literature’s engagement with Jewishness against the backdrop of Western literary and political debates about Jewish identity – is one of the features reviewers have singled out as distinguishing the book’s scholarly contribution.
Why This Book Matters Alongside Historical Studies
Most of the scholarship on Indian Jewry addressed elsewhere in this collection – Nathan Katz’s ethnographic and historical studies, S.S. Koder’s community history of Cochin, Flower Elias and Judith Cooper’s account of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews – treats Indian Jewish communities as their primary subject, documenting real people, synagogues, and historical events. Guttman’s book instead treats “Jewishness” as an idea circulating within South Asian literary culture, a related but analytically distinct subject. Reading these two bodies of work together highlights an important distinction: the small, historically documented Jewish communities of India are not the same thing as the idea of Jewishness that appears in South Asian literature more broadly, even though the two are clearly connected, and even though writers exploring the literary idea sometimes draw directly on the real historical communities – as Rushdie does with Cochin Jewry in The Moor’s Last Sigh – for material.
This distinction matters for readers trying to understand the fuller cultural picture of how Jewishness has been understood and represented in the Indian subcontinent. A reader who has learned the documented history of the Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi communities from academic and community-authored histories gains a different but complementary understanding by also considering how the broader idea of “the Jew” has been used by South Asian writers – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – as a literary and rhetorical device for exploring questions of identity, exile, and belonging that reach well beyond the boundaries of India’s own small Jewish population.
A Niche but Distinctive Contribution
Because Writing Indians and Jews is a work of literary criticism rather than history or ethnography, it occupies a narrower niche within Indo-Judaic studies than the more widely read historical surveys of India’s Jewish communities. Its intended audience is primarily scholars and students of postcolonial literature and South Asian studies rather than general readers interested in Jewish history, and its analytical apparatus draws more on literary theory than on archival research or ethnographic fieldwork. Even so, it fills a gap that the historical literature on Indian Jewry cannot: an account of how the idea of Jewishness has functioned symbolically within South Asian culture, independent of – and sometimes only loosely connected to – the actual lived experience of the region’s own Jewish communities.
The Broader Field of Jewish-South Asian Literary Studies
Guttman’s book belongs to a small but growing subfield of literary scholarship examining how minority religious identities circulate as symbols within postcolonial literature more broadly, a field that has produced parallel studies of how other minority identities – Parsi, Anglo-Indian, Christian – function symbolically within South Asian fiction written in English. Positioning Jewishness alongside these other minority literary tropes allows scholars working in this subfield to ask comparative questions: why does a particular minority identity become available as a literary metaphor for outsider status or hybrid belonging, and what specific historical and cultural associations does it carry that other minority identities do not? For Jewishness specifically, Guttman’s study suggests that the long history of European debates about Jewish assimilation, identity, and belonging gives the trope a particular symbolic density when South Asian writers invoke it, distinct from how they might deploy other minority identities with less extensive prior discursive history attached to them internationally.
This comparative dimension also connects Guttman’s literary analysis back to the real historical communities in an indirect way. Because Jewishness as deployed in South Asian fiction often draws, consciously or not, on the actual historical presence of Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jewish communities in India, even highly metaphorical or symbolic literary uses of Jewishness retain some connection to the documented history that the more conventional historical scholarship on Indian Jewry has established. A reader encountering a Jewish character or theme in a South Asian novel is, whether the author intends it or not, drawing on a cultural memory that ultimately traces back to real communities with real histories – which is part of why Guttman’s literary study and the historical scholarship on Indian Jewry, despite their very different methods and aims, remain useful to read alongside one another.
Reading the Book Today
For students and scholars of South Asian literature, Guttman’s book remains a useful reference point for identifying and analyzing the recurring appearance of Jewish characters, themes, and symbolic associations across a body of English-language fiction that spans multiple generations of South Asian writers, from those working during the late colonial period through contemporary postcolonial authors. For readers of this collection whose primary interest lies in the documented history of India’s own Jewish communities rather than in literary theory, the book is perhaps best approached as a reminder that the story of Jewishness in the Indian subcontinent has unfolded on two related but distinct tracks: the lived history of actual communities such as the Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jews, and the separate, more symbolic life that the idea of Jewishness has taken on within the broader literary imagination of South Asian writers, only some of whom were writing about, or even aware of, the real communities whose history this collection otherwise documents.
Keeping that distinction in mind helps prevent a common category error: treating a novel’s literary use of Jewishness as though it were a documentary claim about India’s actual Jewish communities, when in fact the two, though related, answer very different questions and belong to very different kinds of source material.
Guttman’s scholarship, in the end, offers not a competing account of Indian Jewish history but a companion one – a study of the cultural afterlife that the idea of Jewishness has acquired within South Asian letters, running alongside, and periodically intersecting with, the documented history of the communities that first gave that idea its regional meaning.
It is, ultimately, a book for readers curious not just about what happened to India’s Jews, but about what the idea of the Jew came to represent for the writers who told India’s own postcolonial story.