'When Inez Baranay’s seventh book, Neem Dreams, was released in September 2003, it met with wide critical acclaim in India, yet was barely noticed in Australia. Baranay had been publishing in Australia for almost 20 years, but this novel was published in India, indicating a shift in her publishing career. While Neem Dreams continues Baranay’s interest in issues of Third-World development and with Western tourism, travel and trade, I propose in this chapter that it also engages with Australian literary criticism, especially in postcolonial debates. Neem Dreams was released almost a decade after Baranay’s nonfiction text, Rascal Rain (1994), which met with fierce criticism. That decade was one in which Baranay addressed that criticism, contemporary theory and the academy. I argue, therefore, that Neem Dreams signals Baranay’s uneasy relationship with Australian writing, publishing and identity, as well as her changed attitude to the academy and contemporary theory. While the back cover blurb of Neem Dreams alerts us to the neem tree ‘acting as a kind of crucible for India’, I want to argue that, in many ways, postcolonial theory is the crucible for this book. In this chapter then, I offer a reading of Baranay’s literary career from 1994 to 2004 through its encounters with the academy, with Rascal Rain and Neem Dreams operating as bookends. Her substantial and productive career means that shifts in institutional and political discourses become evident in tracing the ways in which Baranay’s texts and career are read (and written). I am interested in the kinds of questions a career such as hers raises about the imbrication of theory and fiction and the circulation of authority among writers, critics and the academy.' (Introduction)
