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Home , Allan Sealy, Amitav Ghosh, Memories of Rain, Radhika Jha, Vikram Seth

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 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 ’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Sharma all stared at my face in such a mind boggling array that my bibliographic list on the topic seemed already outdated.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 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 ’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 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 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 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 , or The Bachelor of Arts (1937) or Raja Rao’s (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., , , , , Sashi Tharoor, Farrukh Dhondy, , 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 , 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 (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. Within this group, some write about their immigrant experiences, while others physically living there write on the exoticism of their home country or of characters who go as aliens and try to fit into the western world. is a case in point. Born in Calcutta she now lives in and her novels and A Sin of Colour are set in both Calcutta and Oxford. Living in London, Meera Syal believes that “duality and conflict make you want to express yourself. This is why (her) generation is so outspoken.” Another example is a debut novel which I recently read. The title is Across the Lakes, the author, a young man called Amal Chatterjee. Another Bengalee? Well, Chatterjee was born in , grew up in England, and now divides his time between Amsterdam and Glasgow. What interested me was the fact that the so called ‘lakes’ mentioned in the title are not those found in the English Lake district ( which I thought it was, when I picked up the novel) but our own Dhakuria lakes in South Calcutta. Again, question arises whether we can include the plays of Rana Bose, who now holds an immigrant status in Toronto. Though his origin is in the true sense local, his works are frequently discussed and analysed in Canadian Studies and Commonwealth conferences. But can we still claim him to be ‘Indian’ enough to be included in ‘Indian Writing in English’ courses?

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The most complicated case is the third category of writers whose origin is India but have no connections as such with the country. Bidisha Bandopadhyay ,( who incidentally never writes her surname) is a second-generation Bengalee writer born and brought up in England. Her debut novel Seahorses (1997) is an urban pageant about three young British men and is in no way even remotely connected to India. Another interesting example is that of Jhumpa Lahiri whose Interpreter of Maladies took the literary world by storm. Bill Buford, the literary editor of The New Yorker catapulted her into limelight when he included her in his list of “the twenty best young fiction writers in American today.” Born in London, raised in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and presently living in New York, Jhumpa set some of her stories in Calcutta because of “a necessary combination of distance and intimacy” and in a recent interview said: I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor was a former resident - a valuable position , I think, for a writer…. I learnt to observe things as an outsider and yet I also knew that, as different as Calcutta is from Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way. In the ways I didn’t seem to belong in the US.

But we are equally ready to call her our own, our ‘desi’ girl so to say. Like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee, who make repeated references to the cultural tradition of Calcutta and their cherished moments of nostalgia or moments of bewilderment in encounters with the real Calcutta, Jhumpa also tries to relocate her cultural space and identity mediated by significant cross-cultural influences. Critics were puzzled when Jhumpa, whose home is in the USA and who categorically stated that was not her home, decided to get married in Kolkata in traditional Bengali style. Could it be to renew public interest (to say nothing of the much-maligned Bengali curiosity about other people’s private lives) in a book published nearly two years back and sell a few hundred copies more? According to the writer of course, “It doesn’t really signify anything.” Last month, I saw a full page advertisement of a jewellery store in a local Bangla paper stating that they were fortunate in supplying all the jewellery items for Jhumpa’s marriage. But no more on that. Kiran Desai, whose debut Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard found extraordinary welcome on both sides of the Atlantic shuttles between New York and Cambridge and even goes off to a remote retreat in Mexico along with her mother for literary inspiration. Whether the syllabi can include writers from all these three categories still remain a debatable point but the way all these novelists’ names are used at random by critics to define Indian Writing in English as well makes things complicated indeed., Also, the question remains whether writers living outside India forfeit the right to comment on behalf of an entire nation or not.

One possible solution of grouping or labelling Indian writers in English could be writers who live in India but write about the West or have the Western audience as their target. Right from the inception of this genre, inevitably, Indian novels had to explore the relations between East and West. Nirad C. Chaudhuri started off with a Passage to England (1959) and this was followed by semi-autobiographical pieces like Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason (1986). The relationship between East and West, both used for metaphors for different ways of life, have also been explored in Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August (1988), ’s A Strange and Sublime Address (1989) Afternoon Raag, and A New World. Indian writers in English have often been criticized of writing for the Western audience in mind and with an eye towards 5

bagging a Booker or a Commonwealth writer’s award – along with their astronomical advance amounts they all seem to try out their luck in this Cinderella syndrome. As Bill Buford wryly comments: ….it showed publishers in the West that books by an Indian writer could sell. (In understanding what motivates the makers of literature, as Dr. Johnson knew, it pays to think about pay.)

Thus it surprised no one that Ayemenem, the sleepy little Kerala town found mention in the “Travel Watch” section of Time magazine within a few months of the publication of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things..

Closely associated with this phenomenon is media hype. Aggressive marketing blitz, huge advances, book launch parties, rave reviews and other frills have no doubt helped Indian writing in English to hit the market. Mukul Kesavan, author of Looking Through Glass, agrees that the hype and media blitzkrieg created by publishers for an Indian writer making it big in the West is rarely witnessed in the case of Indian translations. Here I am also reminded of the media hype that accompanied The God of Small Things. The naïve unsuspecting reader of Roy’s debut novel would not for once suspect how even dust-jacket story outlines were changed in order to cater to the needs of the particular country in which the edition was being published. A comparative study of the Random House cover of Roy’s book published from New York and the India Ink cover published from New establishes my point. When Vikram Seth received more than Rs.3.1 crore in advance for the U.S. British and Indian rights of A Suitable Boy, it trumpeted the arrival of a literary cult - the idolization of writers who gained recognition in the West. In terms of public idolization and financial rewards, this number has increased over the last decade. However hype alone cannot sustain high explosion in the sale of books. The potential or hunger for reading can be tapped only by a book which has a certain amount of integrity to it. India has always encouraged a healthy tradition of writing in English in its post-colonial period, nurtured by the likes of R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Rudyard Kipling, and Kamala Das. However, the last decade has witnessed the emergence and widespread acceptance of a class of writers belonging to the anglicized upper middle class whose success stands in contrast to those peddling to the Western demand for enticing glimpses of Indian life injected with local flavour. This “western cue” which has precipitated the current fascination for Indians writing in English, could at best be termed the spillover of a colonial mindset which makes the language of these “dabblers with India”: as Nirad C. Chaudhuri called them years ago in his Continent of Circe, extremely popular. Thematically their writing reflects very little of the Indian middle class ethos, unlike writing in regional languages which are firmly entrenched in ground realties of Indian social life. “They are misappropriating the English language, creating and marketing imaginary homelands. Moreover, their jargon is tailored to the elite pseudo-culture in India,” endorses a critic. In a book review of M.Prabha’s The Waffle of the Toffs, published last year by Oxford-IBH, Nilanjana S. Roy calls Indo-Anglian literature “a Doon School-St. Stephen’s conspiracy” and states: Prabha has a simple and devastating explanation: Indians writing in English are the wrong people from the right side of the tracks with Doon School and St. Stephens sharing equal blame: “the socio cultural milieu a writer comes 6

from is almost inversely related to his quality of writing. That is the more affluent a writer, the less significant his writing.” She lists the subjects that contemporary writers ignore: no villages, no suppression, no caste conflicts, no searing rage against the system. She entirely ignores the fact that by assimilating and adapting the English language, several Indian authors have subverted whatever colonialist agenda it had to begin with. She does not admit that there might be spheres of experience outside of rural India, and outside of India itself, that could be worthy territory for authors to explore.

Though we might not agree with all the logical explanations offered by the novelist and her reviewer, it is really interesting to note that many of the young writers like Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, I.Allan Sealy , Anurag Mathur, Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan and Makarand Paranjape are all from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Thus it has to be accepted that the Indian Novel in English is at cross roads today and also seems to be a product of distinct culture. The writers are not only English speaking, but for most of them, English is their first language. What we perhaps miss in them is that we might not be able to locate a distinct regional or ethnic identity, for majority of these writers are part of a pan- Indian community.

Another method of classifying or defining Indian writing in English could be on the lines of gender too. Post-Independence India has seen the emergence of a number of women writers in English, many of whom explore man-woman relationships in a closet society like ours. Their settings are usually the everyday world of middle class people with whom the normal Indian reader easily identifies himself. But there is real diversity too. ’s Fire on a Mountain (1977), and Clear Light of Day (1980) see India from a distance. Ruth Prawer Jhabwala weaves her novels such as Heat and Dust (1975) and How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories (1981) within the societal structures of semi-feudal families; Nayantara Sehgal’s A Time to be Happy (1958) sees life from a standpoint of upper ‘constructs’. Shyama Futehally’s Tara Lane is a chronicle of the life of a young Bombay girl who is born in wealth but sees the family fortunes declining over the years; Sashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1988) is a faithful representation of the inner anguish of an educated middle-class Indian woman. Much of the same could be said of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1977) - a sad story, beautifully told and Smell(1999) by Radhika Jha which is a perceptive account of the painful odyssey of a young and innocent Gujarati woman thrown into an alien world of . Unlooped from the binds of tradition, Leela Patel, unlike many young women of the Indian diaspora, can dump memories and identities because they have been brutally snatched from her. She can reinvent herself continuously - a common trope in the post-colonial world view.

After such mind-boggling diversity, I might as well add here that Indian writing in English has suffered for a long time the unjust destiny of being somewhat unimportant among post-colonial literatures. Only in recent times has it found its real place, its ‘locusts- stand -I’ in the consideration of critics at an international level: as a consequence, there has been a considerable, sometimes immodest, interest and re-evaluation of themes and authors so far unnoticed. The blossoming of Indian Writing in English in recent years has certainly 7

proved wrong the apprehensions of quite a few sceptics. Uma Parameswaran, for example, had found the literature’s “future….bleak, offering little but the prospect of extinction.” The literature seemed to her “destined to die young” making her “set A.D.2000 as the dirge date for Indo-English literature.” Also, the misgivings of writer-critics themselves on this score have been proved thoroughly misplaced. Way back in 1983, Anita Desai had bemoaned the dearth of complexity in Indian English literature. “There is so little of it…There simply isn’t enough in the name of variety, value, interest, significance.” I’m sure she would now like to update her interview. One preference of selection could be novels that are rooted in the Indian reality and which help us grapple with the multifarious problems confronting out society. We need not go by ‘bestseller’ novelists who are becoming ‘bestsellers’ even before their novels hit the stands. And there is reason to believe that as we go deeper into the millennium, this trend will only take more firm roots. There seems to be no other way out except letting reasonable time to lapse for the initial hype to subside. If even then, one feels assured that the actual reading public and academics have retained a steady interest in the work of fiction, one can consider buying it or prescribing it in the university curriculum. The noted Kannada writer U.R.Ananthamurthy had once remarked: a lot of new writers who get the kind of attention that Rushdie gives them are writers who write for export. It is a shame that in the whole world only Indian writers in English write for export.

The sweeping nature of Anathamurthy’s remark is disturbing too for his condemnation of an entire genre of writing. In his anxiety to attack Rushdie, he glosses over the fact that Sahitya Academy also awards a prize every year to the best Indian Work in English as it does in the case of all the Indian languages recognized in the Constitution of India. (Belliappa, 29) Way back in 1968, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah had defined Indian writing in English as “primarily part of the literature of India in the same way as the literatures written in various regional languages are or ought to be.”(ix) At this juncture it is also worth recalling the words of the bilingual Marathi writer, : I think the greater number of people writing in English in India today are mediocre writers as would be the case with any language and any country which is why I am puzzled as to why we are in such a hurry to pat our backs. And I clearly see that there is something very wrong in the standards that the foreigners or expatriates are using to judge and assess English Writing in India.

It is true that mediocrity is not the privilege and prerogative of only Indian Writing in English but is very much in evidence in our regional writers as well. It is a rare Vikram Seth who acknowledges with candour and humility that he might not be able to produce a work of fiction that satisfies him in the next six or seven years. Ravi Dayal, admitting to being a small publisher, is not sure whether marketing strategy is of paramount importance when it comes to building the profile of an author. He believes that critical readership in India has come of age and the readers are the best judge of a work. Looking at the present day scenario, one can conclude by stating that Indian writing in English is in a state of good health and flourishing as never before but it still requires an expert’s eye to judiciously segregate the wheat from the chaff. Also, though it is impossible to predict how Indian writing in English will be defined just ten years from now it can be certainly stated that canonical Anglo Saxon literature is 8

already threatened with this onrush and literary flowering of India and the harbingers of 21st century literature will be a new breed of writers from this part of the decolonised world. No wonder Routledge put in an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement to this effect: “God help the English Novel! Send in serious manuscripts on fiction!”

Notes and References

Belliappa, K.C. “Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and the Indian Novel in English.” The Literary Criterion, Vol.XXXII No.4, 1997,pp.20-30.

Buford, Bill. “Declaration of Independence: Why are there suddenly so many Indian Novelists?” The New Yorker (Special Fiction Issue) June 23 & 30,1997. pp.6-7.

------. “Reading ahead”. The New Yorker June 21 & 28, 1999.

Nagarkar, Kiran. Amul India Show. Narr. Sanjana Kapoor. Star Plus, 3 Aug,1997. Quoted in Belliappa,p.30.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. The Swan and the Eagle Shimla: Indian Institute of Advance Study, 1968.

Nelson, Emmanuel, S. ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood P, 1993.p.x.

“Literature: Faces of the Millennium.” India Today. December 13, 1999.

Ram, Atma. Interviews with Indo-English Writers. Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1983.

Roy, Nilanjana S. “Write Society: Indo-Anglian literature as a Doon School-St. Stephens conspiracy. India Today Feb. 7, 2000.

Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West eds. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997. London: Random House, 1997.

------Dr. Somdatta Mandal teaches English at Vivekananda College, Madhyamgram and the Post-graduate department of the University of Calcutta. 9

THE GREAT INDIAN BAZAAR : TEXTS AND CONTEXTS OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

My presentation begins with the examination of and objection to the now famous comment by Salman Rushdie when at the threshold of fifty years of Indian Independence in 1997 he stated that “the prose writing---both fiction and non-fiction—created in this 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 of India, the so- called “vernacular languages.” Then, comes the job of trying to identify the writers of Indian Writing in English who are to be included in any university curriculum -- writers canonical enough to transcend the mere ‘bestseller’ lists. With the acceptance of “Commonwealth Literature,” “World Literature Written in English,” “Post-Colonial Literature” as separate literary genres, such a revision was essential.

Historically speaking, Indian writing in English is at least a century and a half old, the earliest novel, entitled a Journey of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945 having been written way back in 1835 by Kylash Chunder Dutt. This was followed by Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864. But we tend to acknowledge the existence of this genre from the twenties and thirties decade of the twentieth century onwards with pioneers like R.K.Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand. It is interesting to note that publishers, critics and the writers themselves acknowledge the seminal influence of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) in the post-independence era in triggering off the boom in Indian writing in English. Not only did this masterpiece overwhelm literary circles in the west and win the , its impact was also decisive in making The New York Times dub 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.” But a mere cataloguing of names is not the real problem. It lies elsewhere and is related to the more complicated issue of diasporic writing—the in-word or talking point in post-colonial cultural and literary discourses.

The formation of the 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 who detests the idea of being called an immigrant writer, or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni whose fiction is replete with the cultural tradition of Calcutta and its cherished moments of nostalgia. The second category includes the whole group of writers who shuttle between different countries and continents – Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Gita Mehta, Kiran and Anita Desai. A question can be raised whether writers living outside India forfeit their right to comment on behalf of an entire nation or not. The most complicated third category includes writers whose origin is or was India but at present have no more direct connections with the country and are permanently settled abroad. Mention may be made of names like Sunetra Gupta, Amal Chatterjee, Rana Bose, Bidisha Bandopadhyay or Jhumpa Lahiri.

One possible solution of grouping or labelling Indian Writers in English could be writers who live in India but write about the West or have the western audience as their 10

target. Again, some of them have been criticized of writing with an eye towards bagging a Booker or a Commonwealth writer’s award. The media hype following Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things or the astronomical sum received by Vikram Seth as an advance for A Suitable Boy trumpeted the arrival of a literary cult, namely, the idolization of writers who gained recognition in the west. In terms of public idolization and financial rewards, this number has increased over the last decade. Again, this period has witnessed the emergence and widespread acceptance of a class of writers belonging to the anglicised upper middle class whose success stands in contrast to those peddling to the western demand for enticing glimpses of Indian life injected with local flavour This “western cue” which has precipitated the current fashion for Indians writing in English, could at best be termed the spill-over of a colonial mindset which makes the language of these “dabblers with India”, as Nirad C. Chaudhuri called them years ago in his The Continent of Circe, extremely popular. Thematically their writing reflects very little of the Indian middle class ethos and makes one critic define it as “a Doon School-St. Stephens conspiracy”.

Another method of defining or classifying Indian writing in English could be on the lines of gender too. Post-independence India has seen the emergence of a number of women writers in English, many of whom explore man-woman relationships in a closet society like ours. Their setting are usually the everyday world of middle class people with whom the average Indian reader can readily identify himself. But there is real diversity too and writings of Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, Nayantara Sehgal, Shyama Futehally, Sashi Deshpande, Namita Gokhale, Radhika Jha, Leela Patel, and others bear ample evidence. This list is further growing at an alarming rate every year.

After such mind-boggling diversity, it can be said that Indian writing in English has suffered for a long time the unjust destiny of being somewhat unimportant among post- colonial literatures. Only in recent times has it found its real place in the consideration of critics at an international level. This blossoming has also proved wrong the apprehension of quite a few sceptics who found its future bleak, “destined to die young”, as Uma Parameshwaran had stated. But again, we need not go by the ‘bestseller’ novelists who are becoming “bestsellers” even before their novels hit the stands. Way back in 1968, Professor C.D.Narasimhaiah had defined Indian writing in English as “primarily part of the literature of India in the same way as the literatures written in various regional languages are or ought to be.” Though it is true that a lot of mediocrity often makes it difficult to segregate the grain from the chaff, it is also true that it is absolutely impossible to predict how Indian writing in English will be defined just ten years from now. Of course it can certainly be stated that canonical Anglo-Saxon literature is already threatened with this onrush and literary flowering of India and the harbingers of twenty-first century literature will be a new breed of writers from this part of the decolonised world. ------

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