Building Sites: Suniti Namjoshi's Hypertextual Babel

This essay explores the writing of Indo-English writer Suniti Namjoshi and its relationship with information technology. In her novel Building Babel, Namjoshi starts from the notion that culture, like the tower of Babel, is constructed in and through language. Thus she devises a parallel world in which information, in the shape of stories and myths, is subject to a continuous elaboration that prevents it from assuming any feature of fixity and ‘truth’; an elaboration that finds its natural outcome in the website created by the writer and the publishers. Here, laying down the authority of ‘Writer’, Namjoshi hands in her creation to her readers, who can contribute to the neverending building of Babel.