SPECIAL FEATURE LITERATURE

SPECIAL FEATURE : LITERATURE

Indian Writers

Steamy Leaves

A Petty Penny

Mediocre Crop

An Area of Brightness
Indian writers in English are gaining acceptance in the west
as well as in their home country. But how good are they?

The mystique of oriental experience: (clockwise from above) Shoba De, Githa Hariharan and Ashok Banker

It all began with Midnight’s Children. Publishers, critics and the writers themselves acknowledge the seminal influence of this one book in triggering off the boom in Indian writing in English. Not only did Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece overwhelm literary circles in the west and win the Booker Prize; its impact on Indian literature in English was also decisive.
"Rushdie’s use of language, the way he appropriated Indian themes and settings, offered routes to post-colonial writers everywhere in the world, specially so in India," says Githa Hariharan whose The Thousand Faces of Night won the Commonwealth Prize for the best first novel three years ago. Adds Pankaj Mishra, author of the best-selling travel-book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana and chief editor of HarperCollins (India), "Midnight’s Children not only inspired many Indians to start writing fiction in English, but also to write in a brave new way."
However, it took some years for the effects of Midnight’s Children to make themselves visible in India. It was published in 1981, but it was not until 1985 that the first of the new crop of novels, Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, appeared. The following year came Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, that incredible verse-novel which, a fellow writer says, "can only appear once in a century".
The year 1988 was perhaps the most bountiful, yielding three near masterpieces: The Trotternama by I. Allan Sealy, The Shadow Lines by Ghosh, and English August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee (not to speak of The Satanic Verses by Rushdie). Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, which was short-listed for the Booker, made 1990 memorable and Seth’s A Suitable Boy arrived two years later, accompanied by an aggressive marketing drive never seen before in India. It was followed by several acclaimed works like The Thousand Faces of Night, Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie, Chatterjee’s The Last Burden and Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane.
At least three strikingly original works appeared in 1995: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass, Githa Hariharan’s The Ghosts of Vasu Master and Ashok Banker’s Byculla Boy. Even the first months of 1996 have produced two major novels, both ecstatically reviewed in India and abroad: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome.
Besides them, there have been a host of promising debuts: from Anju Mohan’s Shangrila to Jayabroto Chatterjee’s Last Train to Innocence to Rukun Advani’s Beethoven Among the Cows. "More and more people are writing novels, it is wonderful and healthy," says Kesavan.

Kiran Nagarkar

The boom is also an outcome of the growth of a post-Independence generation which thinks, speaks and writes primarily in English. "It was thought that with the departure of the British, the English language was finished in India," says Ruskin Bond, who has been writing in English for 40 years. "In fact, just the opposite has happened. English has flowered in India to an extent it had never done in British times."
"Earlier, English was the language of public discourse, of higher education," says literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee.

"It is only for a section of those born in the 1950s and after that English is a first language, sometimes their only language. They display a careless intimacy with English, which enables them to play with it."
"There is a post-colonial feeling among us of being people in our own right," notes Shama Futehally, "a new confidence that our experience of life is no less important than that of, say, Enid Blyton’s characters, which has prompted this growth."
"It is not only in fiction that there has been a boom," points out Ravi Dayal, one of the three major publishers of Indian fiction in English. "Some of the best academic work in India is being done in English, too. The growth of fiction is related to the intellectual and cultural revival that is taking place at some of our better universities. Many of our better writers like Ghosh or Kesavan are academics, as are some of our great regional writers like U.R. Ananta Murthy. They all belong to the same rich intellectual tradition."
It is also the mid-eighties which saw the rise of publishers of English fiction in India. The earlier writers in English, R.K. Narayan downwards, were all published primarily abroad, with only some of their novels being sporadically reprinted in India. Of course, even now all the works of the better known Indian writers in English are also published abroad. "The desirable route still seems to be to get published abroad first, and then in India," says Githa Hariharan. "That guarantees attention within India at least." As she notes, a taste for novels set ‘elsewhere’ has grown in the west.
But most writers agree with Pankaj Mishra who says, "The concerns of people in the west are different, their expectations from a novel coming out of India are somewhat fixed. It is not just a matter of quality. Good books dealing with matters we consider vitally important may not seem salable to publishers there."
Indeed, despite the boom in India, the new Indian writing in English has made no great impact in the west. There is no doubt that writers like Seth, Mistry, Ghosh, Chatterjee, Shashi Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel and Show Business) and Amit Chaudhuri (A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag) get gushing reviews, but these--except in the case of A Suitable Boy--rarely translate into large sales. "The literary supplements have recognised us... but I’m not sure about the average reader," says Kesavan.
Though Ravi Dayal says publishing circles in England expect two or three good novels from India every year, Indian writers have few misconceptions about their popularity in the west. "We are curiosities there, our first audience is here," says Chatterjee. It is the new Indian publishers who have made a world of difference by offering outlets for books which may not conform to western tastes.
The first of the new publishing houses to set up shop was Penguin India, a joint venture between Penguin Books and the Ananda Bazar Patrika, in 1986, followed almost immediately by Ravi Dayal Publisher. HarperCollins (India) came five years later, the result of a tie-up between HarperCollins and Rupa Publishing House.
Says David Davidar, chief editor of Penguin India: "Books published by Penguin had been selling in India for over 50 years, and selling well, too. It was Peter Mayer, chairman of Penguin Books, who deduced from this that there must be a large readership for general books in English, both fiction and non-fiction, in India and decided to set up a company here. The company would both publish for the home market and serve as an outpost to find writers for the international market. In Ananda Bazar’s Aveek Sarkar, he found the perfect partner. Both were, in a sense, visionaries." Ravi Dayal and Pankaj Mishra are more prosaic while referring to the origins of their companies. "I had been working obsessively at Oxford University Press for 26 years, the last 12 as general manager, and felt I had been there long enough," says Ravi Dayal, whose publishing imprint is virtually a hallmark of quality. "I quit, and did nothing for a year. Then I felt I should get back to work.... I knew some of the authors, and the manuscripts kept coming in." Dayal works all alone, though his distribution is handled by Orient Longman.
"There was some major problem due to which the import of foreign books into India virtually stopped for a while in 1991," says Pankaj Mishra. "So HarperCollins decided to set up a company here which would reprint some of its books for the Indian market, and publish some original manuscripts."
How much do the new Indian novelists in English have in common? "Whether we like it or not, the class composition of this entire group is uniform, which is not the case with writers in other Indian languages," says Meenakshi Mukherjee. "You have to come from a certain section of Indian society for English to be your first language. You have to be a product of the right kind of school or college."
As Dayal notes, "Theirs is a very urban sensibility--mature, witty, confident--which speaks to a current audience." Not surprising, since all of them belong to Mumbai or Delhi, except a few like Neelam Saran Gaur from Allahabad, Shashi Deshpande or M.C. Gabriel from Bangalore and Zai Whittaker from Madras.
The first significant writers--Ghosh, Chatterjee, Sealy and Tharoor--all came out of St Stephen’s College, Delhi. Kesavan, too, is a Stephenian and Seth hails from Delhi. Mistry, Firdaus Kanga, Futehally, Shobha De, Banker, Nagarkar and Manjula Padmanabhan have been Mumbai’s children, besides Rushdie. And quite a few of them live abroad: Seth, Tharoor, Mistry, Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Kanga, Gita Mehta, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta, Meena Alexander, Vikram Chandra....
Some of the harshest criticism of the quality of Indo-English writing comes from the authors themselves. "With the exception of R.K. Narayan, whom I admire very much, I feel the earlier generation lacked the tools to chisel out a novel about Indian reality, though they had the raw material," opines Banker. "After Rushdie, the present writers have the tools, but there’s a severe shortage of raw materials!"
"Some people have made adverse comments about the earlier writers, but I think they were talking nonsense," says Pankaj Mishra. "Narayan, Ruth Pravar Jhabvala, G.V. Desani... they are very talented people. I don’t think any of our new writers, for instance, has shown the kind of insight into Indian society that Jhabvala does, specially in her early books." He also holds that the post-Rushdie writers have not brought about any innovation in form, or found new ways to tackle Indian reality effectively, other than what Rushdie had already provided them with.
Indeed some think that too many writers are copying Rushdie blindly. "Magical realism appears to be regarded by some people as a sure-fire formula for critical success," feels Futehally. "They don’t place enough care on the basics: plot, theme, characters. I think this is largely due to the fact that ours is a very young literature, and lacks a tradition. If there were a tradition, every new writer would have absorbed it first, and would thus begin with a certain maturity."
Nagarkar is particularly disturbed by the tendency of some authors to exoticise India, ignoring the social churning. "I find much of what I read in English very disturbing," he says. "Why is the writing so thin? What happened to robustness? To intellectual rigour?" "What worries me," says Mishra, "is that the notion of the writer as a critic of society seems to have disappeared. None of the new writers seems to be particularly worked up about the situation prevailing in our country. They have made no attempt to distance themselves from middle class values. Regional language writers have done much more in this respect."
As Banker says, "The literary equivalent of even a Bombay or a Bandit Queen has not been written. Major events in recent Indian history are ignored. All other Indian literatures are tackling these things, but not English." The insularity is a reflection of the novelists’ own limited experience, says literary critic Vrinda Nabar. "Some of them don’t even have bilingual rootedness. They don’t write about certain subjects because they don’t know enough!"
Indo-English writing has its staunch defenders, who feel there is no need for writers to be over-concerned about day-to-day national developments. "A novel cannot be a summary of the last five years’ issues of THE WEEK," says Kesavan. All the same, as Ravi Dayal points out, a number of the new novels have taken up matters of consequence: The Shadow Lines, Looking Through Glass, A Suitable Boy and many others. Mistry’s A Fine Balance explores the Emergency.
"It is absurd to project Indo-English writing as a brash newcomer set to outshine all the other literatures in our country," says Githa Hariharan with good reason. "It is a very young literature, which is progressing step by step. There is no need for us to do right away all that literature can do!"
Indo-English writers also have problems peculiar to them, the foremost being that of rendering experience in a language in which it does not occur. "We have to find the right idiom for it," says Kesavan.
"It is not surprising that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant mode of expression of Indians writing in English before the mid-80s," notes Vrinda Nabar. "Poetry is direct communication between writer and reader whereas the novel requires the creation of a world, plot, characters. There is the obvious problem of vernacular speech and how to convey it plausibly in English. Unless he can hit upon a fortuitous way out, the Indian novelist in English is forced to exclude large areas of Indian experience."
There is also the question of what sort of audience the writer is addressing and how much should be explained. While a few claim that to imagine an audience while writing a book affects authenticity, others maintain that they write for English-speaking Indians. "If non-Indians read us too, it is a bonus," says Futehally. "But I would love to be translated into other Indian languages first."
"The problem is not only that of explaining India to foreigners," says Kesavan. "Even if we don’t want to make any concessions for foreigners, refuse to put in a glossary of Indian words at the end, there is still the problem of explaining a part of India about which one is writing to people in other parts of India. If I use an expression like seedha palla saree without explaining, will people in all parts of India understand?"
More down-to-earth difficulties include the lack of agents and publicists. "In India the writer does not have the kind of support structure he or she takes for granted abroad," notes Shobha De. "In the absence of literary agents you have to flog your own work, which is really not a writer’s job.... Here the publicity one gets depends on one’s own drawing power alone. Most publishers don’t have a marketing division to speak of. Many good books get ignored in the bargain."
Then there is the abiding hostility to the very notion of Indians writing in English. "It obviously has its roots in the national movement for Independence, and the fact that the British ruled here as a colonial power," says Dayal. "For years the official attitude to English was to try and suppress it. The Sahitya Akademi, for example, did not have any award for writing in English till the late sixties."
The perennial question asked is: why can’t these people write in their mother tongues, instead of English? "Vikram Seth had an excellent answer to this," recalls Futehally. "He was addressing a gathering at the Sahitya Akademi, and being fluent in Hindi, he often broke into Hindi during his speech. So at the end he was asked why he didn’t write in Hindi. Seth replied, in fluent Hindi, that there were many in the audience who spoke excellent English--why didn’t they do their creative writing in English?" Even the average reader of English novels seems to have some prejudice against Indians writing in it, says Banker.
One writer who exemplifies the Indian dilemma over writing fiction in English is Nagarkar, who produced the classic Saat Sakkam Trechalis in Marathi in 1975, at the age of 26. "I have always been bilingual. I attended an English medium school and I loved English," he says, "but I could not at first bring myself to write fiction in it. I felt, if I did, I would be letting my mother tongue down."
It was only after his mother tongue let him down that Nagarkar turned to writing in English. "My Marathi novel got a lot of praise but it is out of print," he notes. "It earned me royalties of precisely Rs 121 in the first year, and Rs 74 in the second year." The next setback came with his Marathi play 'Bedtime Story', an adaptation from the Mahabharata. "People felt it was blasphemous and wouldn’t allow it to be staged," he recalls. He then began writing Ravan and Eddie in Marathi, but gave it up after 60 pages.
"I became so despondent at the attitude of my Marathi audience that in 1978 I gave up writing altogether," he reveals. "I went back to Ravan and Eddie again only in 1991, and rewrote it, this time in English. I went through a crisis of conscience, wondering if I was doing the right thing, but I persevered, because I love English, too!"
The hostility to Indo-English writing is far less now, says Meenakshi Mukherjee. "One indication is the attitude of the Bengali literary magazines. Earlier the Bengali literary establishment was fairly contemptuous of those who wrote in English. But now, Desh, the foremost Bengali literary magazine, claims that Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Bharati Mukherjee and Upamanyu Chatterjee are ‘Bengali’ writers!" Adds Davidar: "I keep getting requests from Indian language publishers for translation rights of English novels by Indians. Publishers in Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Oriya and Telugu have been in touch with me. This puts paid to the argument that Indian novelists in English are a breed apart, not relevant and so on. It shows their growing acceptance."
The sales are small, the income meagre; the media evinces some interest, but not the average reader. Yet the novels continue to pour forth--good, bad and indifferent--kindling optimism about the future of this fledgling literature.
--DEBASHISH MUKERJI

Reader' Responses