being produced in India.
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Forster: A foreigner who captured rural India in his work. |
Mueenuddin is not alone in thinking this. A few months ago, I wrote a short article bemoaning the state of recent Fiction Written in India in English (FIE), in which I complained about a lack of ambition and a repetitiveness of theme and setting. It triggered an intense debate, with many endorsing what I had said, but at least a few publishers and bloggers objecting strongly because they felt I was prescribing a norm for the Indian novel. The novel, though, can accommodate anything and everything, and individual novels can hardly be faulted for either subscribing or failing to subscribe to any norm. My complaint had to do with a collective.
In his novel
2666, Roberto Bolaño writes of scholars gathered together for a seminar on German literature in Amsterdam: “…the applause sparked by English literature could be heard in the German literature room as if the two talks or dialogues were one, or as if the Germans were being mocked, when not drowned out, by the English, not to mention by the massive audience attending the English (or Anglo-Indian) discussion…’’ The parenthesis is telling. There is no separating Indian Writing in English (IWE) from English literature; in fact, the term IWE is so diffuse that it is almost without meaning. My criticism was directed at what is being written in India in English – hence the term FIE.
Even those who took umbrage at my article, such as blogger and former publisher Nilanjana S Roy, wrote in to say that “the one thing I do agree with Bal about is the ‘monotony’ of much that is published these days.” I can only think that the suggestion of monotony and the perception of a bath of warm water both indicate a problem that needs some attention.
A NATIONAL FICTION?
IN A RECENT ESSAY in
The Atlantic, Monica Ali made the case that:
If you agree with Monica Ali, as I do, then it is worth asking: what of India? Literature in the Indian languages is a vast enterprise, and books in one language are barely accessible to those who speak another. To understand ourselves through this vast corpus may be as futile an endeavour as the map that Jorge Luis Borges dreamt up, a map that in every detail is a true copy of the real world. FIE should in principle work far better as an atlas; after all, it can potentially represent every part of the country. But it doesn’t and this failure is, I believe, one of the main reasons for the monotony it evokes.
Let me come to this failure through a digression, which is only my way of defining FIE through what it is not. Journalists range from the perpetually peripatetic to those who would rather never leave Delhi because they feel that all that there is to know in this country transpires there. I prefer to know a few places well, returning to them time and again. I have spent several years reporting out of Punjab and Madhya Pradesh, so I can claim some knowledge of these two states.
Over the past three years I have been working on a travelogue set along the Narmada River. My fascination with the river has led me to explore how other writers have written of the terrain. By ‘the terrain’ I don’t just mean the river, the Vindhya Mountains or the palash tree in bloom. I also mean the life and history of the small towns along the river whose course stretches over 1,200 kilometres from Amarkantak in south Madhya Pradesh to Bharuch in Gujarat. As far as non-fiction goes, there are a few recent travelogues in Gujarati, Hindi and English, and there is, of course, no lack of Puranic history. But as soon as I turn to fiction, there is almost nothing since Kalidasa wrote of his beloved Avanti. In
Meghdutta he describes the river Reva, or the Narmada, and the young men comporting with courtesans on the hills near Vidisha. In FIE I know of just one book published in the last decade that touches this terrain – Amita Kanekar’s A Spoke in the Wheel – a historical novel set in Mauryan times. I have to go back a little to find Gita Mehta’s River Sutra and in actual truth the feel of these small towns is best portrayed in
A Passage to India, a novel set in the Indo-Gangetic plain but born out of EM Forster’s experience in Dewas, a town barely 20 kilometres from Indore.
It was only natural to turn from this paucity and wonder if it is peculiar to Madhya Pradesh. But Punjab has been no better served by FIE in the recent past. In the early years of FIE, Mulk Raj Anand and Khushwant Singh wrote extensively of the state, but from the last 10 years I only know of Rupa Bajwa’s
The Sari Shop and Neel Kamal Puri’s
The Patiala Quartet. And even these books have registered a shift from the rural settings explored by the earlier authors. I believe much the same holds true for the rest of the country. FIE has for the most part retreated from the world that lies outside metropolitan India.
This failure stems in part from the transition the country has undergone since 1991. Authors in their early 30s or younger have been predominantly shaped by the post-liberalisation world. For many of them, English is their first language; the world they move in is almost entirely constructed in English. Only a few recent works escape these limitations, such as Siddharth Chowdhury’s
Patna Roughcut, about a university student in Delhi who goes back to Patna to work as a journalist and write, and Omair Ahmad’s
The Storyteller’s Tale, a perfectly-structured fable constructed out of the stories a noblewoman and a poet fleeing a Delhi laid waste tell each other. The overarching tendency, though, has been a retreat to a world defined by English.
It is a retreat to the past. We are a culture where the elite have always spoken a language of their own: Sanskrit to begin with, then Persian and now English. If you apply the paradigm of a national fiction to what has come down to us in the name of Sanskrit literature, you can see the similarities. It is circumscribed in its failure to step outside a gated world; individual authors such as Kalidasa or Bhartrihari are worthy of attention, but as a collective the terms monotony and a bath in warm water are not out place.
In similar fashion, a number of good novels and good authors can exist comfortably in a setting where the multilingualism of the country does not intrude in any real way, but taken as a collective this kind of fiction will become repetitive in tone and character. Authors may well be writing about the world they know best, but the world all of them know best seems increasingly to be the same world. It is as if the same novel is being written over and over again. The writer in Sanskrit was working within an aesthetic framework that resulted in his consciously leaving out much of the world. We have no such aesthetic defining us and yet, through the unconscious act of borrowing an aesthetic, we have ended up similarly circumscribed.