THE GREAT INDIAN BAZAAR: TRENDS AND DIRECTION OF INDIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH Somdatta Mandal

The historical background of Indian Writing in English is unique in the sense that though it is at least a century and a half old, its establishment as a separate literary genre is still debated. The earliest known novel in English entitled A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945 was written by Kylash Chunder Dutt way back in 1835, and the earliest instance of poetry take us back to eighteen twenties – the genres having been of roughly the same age as their counterparts in different Indian languages. In the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially 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. (Anand had to revise his manuscript before publication). When Macaulay’s Minute (1835), aimed at turning Indians into ‘brown Englishmen’ came into force, Indian Writing in English had already started voicing a mixed reaction to the foreign domination. The heyday of Indian Writing in English actually began after independence in 1947 when the Indian empire became the Indian nation with ‘integration’ as an ideal. Switching over to more recent times, it is a common belief that the big shift in Indian writing in English, post-independence era, came with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (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. By now Rushdie’s Macaulayan judgement on Indian literature in 1997 and 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 (what several critics now term as ‘bhasa’ literature) and in Indian literature 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.” “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 a few years ago. Adds Pankaj Mishra, author of Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, “Midnight’s Children not only inspired many Indians to start writing fiction in English, but also to write in a brave new way.”

Going by these criteria, where could we begin? Well, we could go back to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife, 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). But after Midnight’s Children, the first of the new crop of novels appeared with Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason in 1985 and the onrush is till date unlimited. 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 Amitav 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 made 1990 memorable and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy arrived two years later, accompanied by an aggressive marketing drive never seen before in India. This 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 Fatehally’s Tara Lane. 1995 saw at least three strikingly original works in the form of Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass, Githa Hariharan’s The Ghosts of Vasu Master and Ashok Banker’s Byculla Boy. Rohington Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome made 1996 memorable and since then there has been a host of promising debuts, and the list grows alarmingly long year after year. At the Calcutta Book fair last year, I was amazed at the mindboggling diversity of new writers and works that stared at us from several stalls – thus throwing an earlier list of Indian-English writers which I had compiled earlier, completely to the wind. Though quantity of course, does not automatically guarantee quality, it is true that these new novelists are gaining increased recognition and respect in the literary world today.

With the support from big publishing houses which include prestigious firms on both sides of the Atlantic, and Indian chapters of multinational ones like Harper Collins (India) and Penguin (India), as well as several smaller ones, we come across a debut novel by a new author almost every

week, if the reviews that come out regularly in journals, periodicals and dailies are indicators. This boom is also an outcome of the growth of a post-Independence generation that 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 the last forty years. “In fact, just the opposite has happened. English has flowered in India to an extent it had never done in British times.”

Here I must point out to the fact that labeling or defining Indian fiction writers in English has posed several problems. Though the magnitude of several writers in question was accepted, nevertheless, doubts crept in. For example, 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 is he a true writer of Indian writing in English? A similar problem arose with our brown sahib in England - how much Indianness did The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse profess? I am also reminded at the way we appropriated Jhumpa Lahiri as our own Kolkata girl, and the daily newspapers and popular magazines created a lot of hype in her marrying her American boyfriend in the traditional Bengali style. Also, I am reminded of the manner in which newspapers projected the news of V.S. Naipaul winning the Nobel Prize. On the 13th of October, 2001, the day immediately after his award was announced, news in the first pages of The Statesman and The Times of India revealed how our prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee congratulated Naipaul for adding another feather in the Indian cap. Did none of his advisers tell him that this man would never dream of labeling himself as an Indian Writer in English?

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. Sunetra Gupta is a case in point. Born in Calcutta she now lives in Oxford and her novels Memories of Rain 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.” 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. 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 the 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), Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address (1989) and Afternoon Raag Indian writers in English have often been criticized of writing for the Western audience in mind and with an eye towards 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.

PUBLICATION STRATEGIES & MEDIA HYPE

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. This 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. 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. Of course, it is not always fair on the part of the Indian reviewers who brand these writers as some brand of traitor or mercenaries because they have sold their wares so far from home. It is true that a lot of Indian fiction in English gets published in India only after having appeared previously under a foreign imprint. In terms of public idolization and financial rewards, this number has increased over the last decade. 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. R.K. Narayan’s work may today be closely associated with Indian Thought publications of Mysore or Mulk Raj Anand’s with Kutub-Popular of Bombay, but The Bachelor of Arts was first published by Eyre and Spottiswood and Untouchable by Wishart Books, both of London. Both these two outstanding works by Narayan and Anand illustrate another aspect of the Indo-Anglian novelist’s struggles. Referring to those dark days when he failed to get Untouchable accepted for publication, Anand says: I must confess that I felt suicidal, until a young English poet, Oswald Blakeston, took the book to a small publisher called Wishart Books Ltd., and brought the assurance that they would publish it if E.M. Forster would write a preface to protect the book against being called ‘dirty’ because it dealt with dung. Behind the bravado of the concluding part of that statement lurks the uneasy admission that Untouchable was accepted for publication because E.M. Forster wrote a preface for it. And this was

in 1935, two years after Anand’s first novel Coolie, had already been published in India. Again, R. K. Narayan had to wait for the “Green(e)” light before his long and illustrious career could begin.

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. 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. Nilanjana S. Roy calls IndoAnglian literature “a Doon School-St. Stephen’s conspiracy”. It is really interesting to note that many of the young writers like Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, 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. Anita Desai’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 Paris. 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.

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 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 that 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. Technique wise too, Indian Fiction in English has undergone a great shift. From the “sthalapurana” of Raja Rao to the “magic realism” of Rushdie, problems and concerns that are reflected in post-colonial literary theory in general also plagues this genre. Added to this, new voices from the subaltern schools and the theories upheld by the “Nativists” and the ‘bhasha’ theorists have complicated matters further. But what is more interesting is the way the Indian writng in English has been using English itself as a globalized language. Apart from the legitimizing several Indian words in the recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, the fate of the English language has also changed with the time, following its own unique course. The life of the rural poor, small-town life in the region, and the life in the megacities of the subcontinent have all been represented in English literature emanating from India. The alienated consciousness of the writer using the English language is another important factor. But since the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, after expatriation, immigration to the west, the trauma of uprooting, the diasporic consciousness and the loss of “home” and identity have preoccupied many Indian writing In English. In order to do away with the false image of projecting India as a land of snake-charmers and princes and elephants, they have stated inscribing Indian words into the text with a vengeance so to say.

A few examples from this change in the use of language can be mentioned here. We all more or less agree with Rushdie’s definition of how the English language in Indian writing in English has been “Chutneyfied”. But one notices a major shift in the handling and use of words and phrases from

the writers of the early decades of the twentieth century with those of the later and more contemporary ones. Earlier, with the aim of the comprehension of the Western reader in mind, we had Indian words being incorporated within the text, with italics and even a long a glossary at the end of the text. For instance, Sudhin Ghose’s novels even explained words like “sindoor”as vermillion. With Rushdie and even G.V. Desani such glossary was done away with but the texts displayed several stylistic experiments – these were found in the use of Hindi and Urdu words, expressions, expletives etc ( Ö baba”, “Funtoosh”), bilingual echoic formations (“Writing-shiting”) using vernacular idioms (“Who care two pice”), bilingual puns ( “ladies and ladas”). In contemporary writers, the use of vernacular words without references or explanations too has definitely become a new fad.

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’ (a-la Arundhari Roy) 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. 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, Kiran Nagarkar:

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 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 de-colonized 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.

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. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Somdatta Mandal teaches at the Department of English & Modern European Languages, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.