Indian Writing in English: the Problematics of Definition

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH: THE PROBLEMATICS OF DEFINITION - Somdatta Mandal Let me begin with a subjective statement. Last year, I read a “bestseller” in Indian Writing in English and considered myself poorer by Rs. 295. The ‘bestseller’ in question was Raj Kamal Jha’s debut ‘novel’ The Blue Bedspread. Not taking into heed that most reviewers were united in criticizing it, I found the so called ‘novel’ a collection of short stories at best, individually neither ‘excellent’ nor collectively clearly linked to one another. This made me hold myself back on yet another ‘bestseller’ - The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra whose travelogue about small towns in India entitled Butter Chicken in Ludhiana had made interesting reading. Yet, one could not evade the fact that it was this same Mishra who lost his job as an editor at Harper Collins for trying to push too hard with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. At this year’s book fair in Calcutta, I was in for more surprises after visiting some of the stalls because my so called self-satisfying expertise in keeping myself updated on all recent Indian writing in English was blown to the winds when new titles like Anita Nair’s The Better Man, a debut collection of short stories by A. Muralidharan, The Coconut Cutter, Smell by Radhika Jha ( another first novel) and Banana-Flower Dreams by Bulbul Sharma all stared at my face in such a mind boggling array that my bibliographic list on the topic seemed already outdated. In one of the syllabi revision meetings of an university where I was present, I found that the teachers were having a difficult time framing the syllabus of the paper entitled ‘Indian Writing in English’ which would do away with the canonical stuff and at the same time include literature that had gained sufficient recognition among the academics to be included in the post-graduate curriculum of an university. With the acceptance of ‘Commonwealth literature’, ‘World Literature written in English’ and ‘post-colonial’ literary genres, such a revision was essential. So, whereas Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days or Raja Rao’s Kanthapura were unanimously selected, V.S.Naipaul had to be left out because technically he was not an Indian writer in English. Those who were keen in including Naipaul even suggested that the title of the paper be changed to “Commonwealth Literature” or “Post-Colonial Literature” but that would mean inclusion of Australian, Canadian components too. So it was better to stick to the original nomenclature “Indian Writing in English”. But the problem did not end there. In fact it just began. First and foremost, what would the mode of selection then be like? Before independence, Indian writers were heirs to a culture in which British and Indian elements were interfused and hence sounded a bit false. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi, to whom Mulk Raj Anand sent the draft of his novel Untouchable, said that the language was not the language of the untouchables in India but the voice of the West. (Incidentally, Anand had to revise his manuscript before publication). Of course, this is not to dismiss the vernacular literatures like Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora or The Home and the World or Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta but these were more in the nature of psychological and metaphysical novels ( and social history) rather than authentic voices of India. In spite of the objection to this comment, Rushdie’s charge that the stories were more like parables and somewhat parochial had a sting of truth which reflected in declining sales or confining them to academic courses. By now Rushdie’s Macaulayan judgement on Indian literature in 1997 and 2 his declaration that “the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction- created in that period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen ‘recognized’ languages in India, the so called ‘vernacular languages’” has come under serious criticism. So the question naturally arises - at what point could we say that the Indian literature in the vernaculars and in English became a separate identity, distinguished from the general run-of-the mill novels of the West? First, when the novelist also became a social historian: the key word here is “also”. Second, when Indian writers asserted a plural identity, to define oneself not by birth, ethnicity or geographical location alone, but by the confluence of all these with the “facts of migration, transculturation and multiple identities.” Going by these criteria, where could we begin? Historically speaking, Indian Writing in English is at least a century and a half old, the earliest novel in English having been written in India in 1835 by Kylash Chunder Dutt entitled A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945. Should the first-born be denied acceptance? Well, even if we overlooked this political novel, we could start from the twentieth-century with R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, or The Bachelor of Arts (1937) or Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960) or Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan(1956) or even Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. (1951). Though the magnitude of the writers in question was accepted, nevertheless, doubts crept in. Raja Rao is an expatriate writer living in Texas - his writings are collected in anthologies of Indo-American writing, Asian-American writing, or even diasporic writing - so should he be included? A similar problem arose with our brown sahib in England - how much Indianness did The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse profess? Switching over to more recent times, it was unanimously decided that the big shift in Indian writing in English, post-independence era, came with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children published in 1981 because he established what had remained since then “the most distinctive pattern for the Indian novel, the family chronicle that is also a history of the nation, a distorted autobiography that embodies in an equally distorted form, the political life of India.” Publishers, critics and the writers themselves acknowledge the seminal influence of this one book in triggering off the boom in Indian writing in English. As long as The Satanic Verses was kept out of the purview and in spite of the Rushdiitis prevalent among a lot of academics, he could be unanimously selected. Well if Rushdie was in, what about his children? Can they be left behind? Here I allude to the comment made in the December 16, 1991 edition of The New York Times which dubbed the young crop of Indian English novelists, viz., Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Sashi Tharoor, Farrukh Dhondy, Rohinton Mistry, and Firdaus Kanga as “Rushdie’s Children.” What happened after that was variations played on the basic theme of the grand family saga cast as historical novel: I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotternama (1988), a chronicle of seven generations of the Anglo-Indian Trotter family who were pushed from pillar to post with ‘no place to rest their heads’ was preferred by some over his Everest Hotel. History, in addition to magic realism, has been the major preoccupation of the recent Indian writer in English. There is a view that many of our contemporary novelists writing in English are overburdened with history and in novelist Sashi Deshpande’s opinion, the novels are so full of details from Indian history that they end up sagging under its weight. One 3 novelist whose novels do not suffer from this excess as alleged by Deshpande is Rohinton Mistry. His A Fine Balance attempts to locate the lives of its characters in a historical context, i.e. to suggest that the personal is seen in relation to the general. His Such a Long Journey (1996) follows a similar pattern and explores into areas of human experience which were hitherto only tangentially touched upon. Amitav Ghosh is another novelist who explores the relationships between historical processes and human destiny. In his novel The Shadow Lines, Ghosh successfully interweaves personal history with a nation’s destiny giving us a poignant story of the partition. The next unanimous choice was Vikram Seth’s magnum opus A Suitable Boy(1993) - an “unmatched portrait of India” set in India and about India. But what is confusing is that anthologists of Indo-American writing and Asian-American writing also lay equal claim on him. This confusion of technical nomenclature could well extend to the ‘other Vikram’ - Vikram Chandra whose Red Earth and Pouring Rain went on to win the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (1996). His second, Love and Longing in Bombay won another Commonwealth prize ahead of heavies like Arundhati Roy. Like his namesake, and like Gita Mehta, Amitav Ghosh and others, he too straddles between the two worlds of the U.S. and India. This bring us to the more complicated issue of diasporic writing which is the in-word or talking point in post-colonial cultural and literary discourses. The term ‘Indian diaspora’ is used to refer to the “historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian sub-continental origin in other areas of the world” (Nelson,x).The formation of Indian diaspora is one of the most significant demographic dislocations of modern times and diasporic nature of Indian writing in English once again has three visible sections. In the first category falls a writer like Bharati Mukherjee - one who detests the idea of being called the immigrant writer and considers herself mainstream American. In the second category falls the whole group of writers mentioned earlier who shuttle between different continents.

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