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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Essay |
Balancing Act
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| Anita Desai’s fiction both fulfils and challenges expectations about Indian novels in English |
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Published : 1 September 2011 |
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ULF ANDERSEN / GETTY IMAGES |
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| Indian author Anita Desai poses while in Paris,
France, to promote her book on 18 October 1991.
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HAT WOULD VS NAIPAUL, who recently dismissed fiction written by women as “feminine tosh”, make of the oeuvre of a stalwart like Anita Desai? Many of Desai’s novels, such Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988)—with its male Jewish protagonist—cannot, in fact, be conveniently slotted in any category, whether that of women’s writing, Commonwealth |
Literature (which was the ‘in’ term a few decades ago) or even diasporic Indian English writing. Again, in one of her best novels, In Custody (1984), Desai explored a clearly individualised male character: an Urdu poet belonging to an old and established literary tradition. This obviously contradicts one of the simplistic assumptions behind the idea of ‘feminine tosh’—that women write about other women and ‘female’ matters.
Two of the three long stories, or short novellas, in Desai’s new and excellent collection, The Artist of Disappearance (Random House India, 2011) also feature male protagonists. Neither in her writing—always sculpted and precise—nor in her selection of protagonists and stories do these texts fit any stereotypical definition of ‘women’s writing’.
‘The Museum of Final Journeys’ brings a young sub-divisional officer to a small town—or, rather, a hamlet—on his first posting. The story captures the reader from the first page, with its well-honed and calculated descriptions of place and people, thought and emotion: “The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow.” The sub-divisional officer is soon accosted by the custodian of one of the old mansions in the area, now left with no rightful owner but filled with objects accumulated by the last scion. It is a beautiful story, redolent with loss and the fascination with life, and has an ending that reminded me of that immortal and underrated film, Mrinal Sen’s Khandahar. More I dare not say, for this story—like the other two—is meant to be savoured.
The second story, ‘Translator, Translated’, revolves around a female protagonist, Prema, who teaches English literature at an obscure metropolitan college. Her limited life and confining canvas of ‘required’ teaching have left Prema with “a small, smouldering ember deep inside her soul (so she designed its location, no other would do), where it released an odour of heated rubber, threatening to destroy whatever pleasure or satisfaction she might court”. Recognised and encouraged (absentmindedly) by the one classmate from her alma mater who has made it ‘big’, Prema launches into a career as a translator of an Oriya writer unknown outside the state of Orissa. Desai manages to combine humour and empathy in just the right proportions to communicate the drab and unremarkable heroism of Prema as well as explore some core issues concerning translation (her take on the Bhasha-English divide is fleeting but hilarious), creativity and the essentially human and endless process of ‘becoming’. Prema is the kind of character Naipaul would expect to find in ‘women’s writing’, but she is also the kind of character he cannot create or sustain. Naipaul has remarkable strengths as a writer, no doubt, but in his hands someone like Prema, with ambitions that are at odds with her marginal position, would become a parody. Desai’s Prema remains gloriously herself, mostly because Desai’s narrator does not reduce her—as Naipaul often does to characters in his fiction—to an illustration of the author’s understanding (however profound) of historical and political realities.
| DINODIA PHOTO LIBRARY |
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Early morning landscape of Mussoorie, Mall Road, 1940. |
With the third story—‘The Artist of Disappearance’—Desai returns to a male protagonist. Ravi is the adopted and only son of parents who, busy with their international travels and social lives, let him grow up in relative isolation in their house in a hill station, cared for by an English governess (who has been left adrift by the end of Empire), taught by tutors and attended to by family servants. Ravi is a sensitive, reclusive boy, considered a little ‘retarded’ by his other relatives when he is forced to move in with them (in Bombay) after the death of one of his parents.
As an adult, he returns to the house he grew up in and falls back into the old, reclusive patterns. When the aged governess burns down the house by accident, Ravi continues to live in the one room that survives, tended to by a servant’s family. His life is simple; he feels at home in undemanding nature. In his spare time, he constructs a garden in a secluded spot. When his garden is discovered by a TV crew shooting a film on environmental degradation, Ravi abandons it. He finds a smaller and more private mode to keep his inner self structured and cultivated, away from the prying eyes and loud voices of others.
This narration of the quiet, solitary, vulnerable ‘soul’ (for lack of a better word) in a loud world has been a constant theme in Desai’s fiction. This can be understood in terms of class, for middle-class ennui in the face of the perceived threat and ‘crudeness’ of other classes is a familiar motif of fiction across cultures. But who can deny that this search for peace is also at times an aspect of existence, regardless of class differences?
The three novellas in The Artist of Disappearance are sad and deeply haunting, but not despairing. Disappearance is central to them, and appearances are, in some ways, ‘unreal’: people, hopes, memories and pasts ‘disappear’ and what appears instead seems, at times, in its crass materiality, to lack essence. But even in their implicit elegy for a world of ‘disappearances’, these stories engage with life to a degree of fullness that is rare in fiction these days. Their characters and protagonists range widely across the Indian social scale; they are set across urban and rural spaces. All three stories go beyond hope, or despair. Above all, these are stories that could have been written by an Indian writer in English living in India: ‘diasporic writer’, an easy category, fails to do their author justice. The Artist of Disappearance is singularly shorn of diasporic concerns and discursive elements: the colonial ‘bridge’, on which so much Indian English fiction is predicated, is not missing in the collection but used with Desai’s characteristic subtlety.
This colonial ‘bridge’—by which I mean the tendency in some postcolonial literatures, especially those which assume visibility in the West, to make the history of European colonisation, as theme, criticism or atmospheric nostalgia, central to postcolonial presents—is often a narrative contraption that usurps the space for other possibilities. Writing in a language like English, this appropriation cannot always be avoided—and Desai does not necessarily seek to avoid it. But the ‘bridge’ can be used creatively to suggest other spaces and narratives, which is what—as I’ll go on to highlight—Desai does in her own way.
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ORN IN MUSSOORIE in 1937, the daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother, and awarded a BA from Miranda House, University of Delhi, Desai started off as a writer under two obvious influences: the larger one an attempt by women writers across the world to approach literature on their own terms; and the more specific influence—given her |
background—of the fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a German-born British writer married to an Indian, whose work started to appear in the mid-1950s. Desai’s debut novel, Cry, The Peacock, was published in Britain by Peter Owen in 1963.
There is no doubt that Desai has been an enabling presence in Indian writing in English, not only because she is poised between the generations of Raja Rao and RK Narayan, on the one hand, and Salman Rushdie, on the other, but also because of her creation of a distinctive stylistic space that is different from these definitive presences: as the late and much-missed Meenakshi Mukherjee put it in her book The Twice Born Fiction, “Desai is a rare example of an Indo-Anglian writer who achieves that difficult task of bending the English language to her purpose without either a self-conscious attempt of sounding Indian or seeking the anonymous elegance of public school English.” While it eschews Rao’s serious linguistic experimentation and Rushdie’s magical playfulness, Desai’s language is more linguistically complex and stylised than that of Narayan. This should be obvious enough to any scholar of Indian writing in English. What is less obvious is the significance of Desai’s changes of location: from being an Indian, of German and Bengali parentage, educated in Delhi and later residing in India and then England, Desai has, in recent years, divided her time between the US and Mexico.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Ravi Shankar
25 November 2011
04:46 PM
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The first book i read by Anita Desai was Voices in the City - the protagonist is young, male and angst ridden. No feminine tosh in that.
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Pradeep
2 September 2011
11:32 PM
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Anita Desai is, probably, somebody who still has her heart caged in the mountain town where she has had her share of dreams n life; as of, some part of her still roams astray. That is evident in her characters, their longings, n through them Anita Desai could be heard serenading! Diasporic, NRI , Commonwealth or the latest 'feminst-tosh-propangandist'....whatever, she is an Indian writer to the core who has an international audience and transsexual appeal !
very well done summary of her big pen span in a nutshell!
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