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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
How to Read in Indian
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| The long history of a literary argument that refuses to go away |
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UTSIDE THE HEAVY WOODEN GATES that
guard the Neemrana Fort-Palace against
unwanted day visitors, local villagers and
the curious, a dusty, winding path leads
back to the highway. In 2003, this path
was no more than a narrow lane, so narrow
that two vehicles could not pass side-by-side, and to
find it blocked by the carcass
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of a dead pig brought a caravan of writers to an unexpected halt.
The writers had been brought to Neemrana by the Indian
Council for Cultural Relations and a team of enthusiasts
that included Namita Gokhale—now one of the directors of
the Jaipur Literature Festival—who felt that India needed
a festival of its own. Delhi, in particular, and India, in general,
had been no stranger to such events in the past. The
grand mushairas of the Mughals were so splendid, so challenging
and so famous that Mirza Farhatullah Baig could
create an imaginary Last Mushaira of poets from across the
country, with imaginary sawaal-jawaabs, in the court of the
last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar.
The tradition continued, as Nirad C Chaudhuri recorded
in 1937:
“I had a joyous feeling at the prospect of going to the
conference at Patna. Such gatherings were a typical
cultural recreation of the Bengalis working and settled
outside Bengal, the expatriate Bengalis as they were
called: the Bengali Diaspora, who never forgot their
Zion in Calcutta. Thus in every important city or town
in northern India there was a cultural club to keep alive
the traditions of Calcutta life. Patna was a big city, the
capital of Bihar and Orissa, and it also had a large Bengali
population… The sessions of the conference were
very well attended, actually in hundreds. In India lectures
always attract very large audiences, however abstruse
the subjects.”
One of the big questions at any gathering of this sort is a
simple but unsettling one: What does this curiosity mean?
The audience at Neemrana was missing—the idea was to allow
writers to spend time with each other, undisturbed by
the voices of the masses. They would return to Delhi and
spend another two days discussing versions of the topics
they had already discussed, this time with the public in respectful
attendance.
The book launches and festivals of 21st-century Delhi
were not precisely the kind of “cultural recreation” Chaudhuri
had spoken of, which had its roots in the tradition of
the adda, the teahouse discussions for which cities like
Kolkata and Mumbai had once been famous. Book launches
were symbolic displays of an author’s importance, often
displays of status and power, in a city ruled by the need for
both; they were, geographically, held almost exclusively in South Delhi, and areas like Pitampura, Badarpur, Shahdara
and Shalimar Bagh lay well outside the charmed circles of
the India Habitat Centre and Aqua at The Park.
As the writer Amit Chaudhuri said, Delhi’s incestuousness
had infected literary circles as well; the capital, notoriously
an insider’s city, had bred a culture where everyone
in publishing knew everyone in the media and everyone on
the writer’s circuit. It was the joint-family approach to literature,
and while it had an upside—a newcomer could find
his or her feet quite quickly, transitioning to insider status
in less than a year—it was also, in many ways, damaging,
masking a hollowness that showed in the shrinking spaces
for book reviews, or for real literary debates as opposed to
manufactured controversies and warmed-over gossip.
Publishing in English has flourished in the past 15 years,
generating an appetite for what often seem the wrong
things—the spurious fame of the 10-second television appearance,
the appearance of a world where literary importance
is measured by column inches, prizes won and sales
figures. By 2003, there were two small but telling signs that
a certain kind of literary culture was on the wane: many
of the great critics of their time, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
and Alok Rai among them, had almost stopped writing for
the book review pages, and the space for translation, or for
the voices of writers who wrote outside the gates of English,
had also diminished in the world of the English-language
media.
The flame of the mushairas of Lucknow and Allahabad
had flickered out, the few that remained pale imitations of
the gatherings of the past. Although India had never had an
Edinburgh-style festival of its own, the Sahitya Akademi
was adept at combining large audiences with very abstruse
subjects in the 1990s and well into the 2000s. Parle or Britannia
Glucose biscuits would be served with chai, and the
appearance of greasy samosas or pakoras would mark the
presence of speakers of great significance. In fact, the Sahitya
Akademi held its own festival of writing, focusing
on regional literature, even as Neemrana 2003 was under
way, in a subtle underlining of the tensions between Indian writers in English and the Rest of Indian Literature.
(This was often, much to our annoyance, abbreviated as
the IWE versus the ‘Bhasha School’, “Bhasha” standing in
as inaccurate shorthand for “all Indian regional languages
except English”.)
For two days, then, Neemrana played host to the Indian
literary pantheon.1
The writers, separated from their audiences back in
Delhi, squabbled, doodled and argued their way through
an endless series of panel discussions. A heated argument
between VS Naipaul and the German ambassador’s wife
had the Nobel laureate threatening to leave; a clash between
Naipaul and Nayantara Sahgal fuelled further gossip;
Khushwant Singh slammed regional writing for failing
to produce biographies and innovative nonfiction; Shrilal
Shukla watched sardonically as another version of his
novel, Raag Darbari, complete with courtiers and battles of
royal intrigue, played itself out.
In an interview elsewhere, Kiran Nagarkar said, “At that
Neemrana conference there were about 10 sessions, and all
of them essentially became incarnations of the theme of Indianness.
All they could think of was this question of being
an Indian writer. And it pissed me off no end! For the simple
reason that I am not setting out to be an Indian author. But
at the same time I cannot for one moment forget that whatever
I write comes from an Indian consciousness.”
The debates could swing from amity to bitterness in a
second, and then back again; the argument about English
versus the Rest of India has roots that go back almost two
centuries.
In the late-19th century, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,
the author of India’s first novel in English (Rajmohan’s
Wife), had a political change of heart. The switch he made
after learning to write in English—the language that had
brought him and many others in Bengal a refreshing sense
of a wider world and of that era’s debates over political liberty—when he chose to return to Bengali was a political,
not an emotional, choice.
He had worked hard on Rajmohan’s Wife, encountering
almost all the problems that Indian writers in English
would subsequently face. There was the impossibility of
adequately translating cultural nuances and accents into
this alien tongue, where “a garden salad” was the closest he
could come to describing the Bengali practice of plucking a
few gourds and bitter neem leaves off the trees and making
them into a light, seasonal dish.
There was the knowledge that an “Indian” novel in English
would be treated as a curiosity—well into the 1970s, in fact, when a reviewer in England would describe Naipaul’s The
Mystic Masseur as a “little savory from the colonial islands”.
There was, finally, for Bankimchandra, the lure of patriotism
and the mother tongue. He had spent time on indigo plantations,
recording the casual and savage oppressions of British
rule. He had fallen out of love with a way of looking at the
world, as much as he had fallen out of love with English; and
the question of whom he was writing for became urgent in
his mind. He could not, he felt, write unless he was addressing
his people, his countrymen, in their tongue.
He never published again in English after Rajmohan’s
Wife, and a few years after that novel came out, Bankimchandra
would gently rebuke Romesh Chunder Dutt for
wanting to write in a language that neither writer could
ever claim, truly, as his own. (Even their names offer evidence
of confusion: Bankimchandra’s full name was Bankimchandra
Chatterjee, but many Bengalis will use the
original version of the surname—Chattopadhyay—repudiating
the Anglicisation, and Romesh Chunder Dutt’s second
and third names are similarly compromised, Anglicisations
of Chandra and Datta.)
A century after Bankimchandra, Mulk Raj Anand (the
novelist died in 2004) would make a very Indian complaint
against the ur-novel that signalled the beginning of the
success story of Indian literature—Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children, which has sparked more ambition, unfortunately,
than discussion of Rushdie’s dark, subversive retelling
of contemporary Indian history. Midnight’s Children
covers two Partitions—the creation of India and the bloody
birth of Bangladesh—but in the popular imagination, it has
been reduced to a series of banalities, all of them prefaced
by the adjective “Booker-winning”.
Mulk Raj Anand’s complaint against Midnight’s Children
is worth rereading; he begins with dismissal, and one can
imagine how he would have approached the gathering that
took place at Neemrana. He also appears to completely miss
the point of Midnight’s Children, and that, too, is part of the
history of misreadings and misunderstandings that are woven
into the history of Indian writing in English.
“The question of Salman Rushdie’s novel does not arise,
as far as I am concerned. Rushdie is a clever young man
(perhaps too clever by half as the English say). He writes very eloquently in the English language but in Midnight’s
Children, he is aping the recent Americans by disembowelling
his mother, painting his grandmother as a scheming
old witch, his grandfather as a burglar, his father as a mere
crook, and he himself as superior to all his colleagues. I suppose
he is brighter than the others, but in the kind of way
in which the average advertising copywriter is brighter
than every other copywriter. India appears to be a spittoon
to Salman Rushdie. I suppose it is as it was a vast sewage
to Katherine Mayo before the war, or it is the Continent of
Circe to that third-grade actor Nirad Chaudhuri, as it is An
Area of Darkness to VS Naipaul, as it is Heat and Dust to
Ruth [Prawer] Jhabvala.”
That sweeping condemnation is interesting on two
counts. It attacks the outsider’s account of India—Naipaul, who travelled extensively in the country,
and Rushdie, who grew up here and whose
book is steeped in nostalgia for Bombay,
are clubbed with Katherine Mayo (whose
“drain inspector’s report” is still, inexplicably,
on the list of books banned in
India), as well as Nirad C Chaudhuri,
proud dhoti-wearing imperialist, and
Jhabvala, another Indian immigrant
and resident.
I found it fascinating that Anand
pilloried Rushdie for the crime of
disrespect to the family, that he
complained—as critics often do of
Rushdie and other writers on India—that the writer hadn’t been polite
enough, that he shouldn’t have written
so openly, or so critically, of family,
or community, or country. There is a deep
area of discomfort here, in these critiques,
in the constant battle over authenticity and
viewpoint, which is summarised in the crime
of being rude to one’s elders.
Even as the authors sat in the cool conference rooms
and shaded alcoves of Neemrana, discussing the burning
question of the day—“Who is an Indian Writer?”—tensions
grew between the village and the hotel management, not an
uncommon situation in today’s India.
The hotel had come up out of the tired, worn-out remains
of a derelict fort; Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg had
poured love, imagination and cold cash into restoring the
place and running it as one of India’s earliest boutique hotels.
But the village that shared the hill with the fort had its
own set of demands (some unreasonable, for sums of money
that were neither owed nor justified; some reasonable,
such as the complaint that the lives of the villagers were
interrupted by the comings and goings of the hotel guests).
Neemrana’s villagers knew the simmering resentment that
accompanies being on the wrong side of a pair of gates that
will always be locked against you and your kind.
And so, as the writers left, Amitav Ghosh, the still-ruffled Naipaul, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Shashi Deshpande,
they were brought to a halt, by the tensions and demands of the world outside. The pig had met its untimely end under
the wheels of some visitor’s car, probably one of the media
caravans that had descended, in Ruchir Joshi’s merciless
phrase, “like flies on the dead carcass of the moment”, as
Neemrana erupted in the last, fiery but ultimately irrelevant
literary dispute of the conference. (Most
Indian literary disputes in the closely knit and
sometimes airless world of Indian writing in
English were of this nature—they generated
intense heat and passionate argument, and
were of little lasting consequence.)
An argument erupted over who was
responsible for the pig-murder, and
who—the hotel, the guests, our car—would pay compensation. It continued
until someone found a plastic
bag, picked up the pig’s carcass and
deposited it on the side of the road, an
action so baffling in its disregard for
ritual pollution that the arguments
stopped short and our vehicles were
allowed to go on, back to Delhi. The pig
lay on the side of the road, a thin line of
blood lipsticking its jaw, the only evidence
of the accidental violence that had occurred;
it looked serene and oddly composed.
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LMOST ALL THE ARGUMENTS that came
up at Neemrana had come up before, in
the messy and amnesia-ridden history
of Indian writing in English. Veterans of
Delhi’s book launches—events that had grown from slightly
dour lectures at the venerable India International Centre
to gossip-fuelled Page 3 dos hosted at five-star hotel poolsides
or one
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of the city’s more enterprising restaurants—knew that at some point during the Q&A, the author du jour would be asked: “Who are you writing for?” The implication was often made even more explicit: “Are you writing for us in India or for foreign readers?”
It would come up again and again; for years, the way in
which Naipaul’s works were discussed in India was infected
with this viral anxiety. His India books were rarely
discussed as part of his general oeuvre of travel writing,
where he was equally provocative and just as willing to offer
sharp, unvarnished if not always accurate opinions. The
few historians and critics who offered more nuanced criticisms
of Naipaul’s writing—questioning the accuracy of his
account of Indian history, for instance—were drowned out by the many who saw him just as another chronicler of India’s
heat and dust and filth.
In the 1990s and the 2000s, discussions on that twinned-in-opposition pair, Naipaul and Rushdie, degenerated under
the weight of gossip. Except for a few considered pieces
by cultural critics like Amitava Kumar or historians like
Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple, the shape of
what we argued about when we took Naipaul’s view of history
versus Rushdie’s perspective on India shimmered and
disappeared under an avalanche of stories about spats and
divorces, short-lived feuds; they had been turned into performers
in a circus act, not writers.
In a sense, we have always been sensitive as a nation to
what is written about us; nonfiction about the US, for instance,
seldom draws as many reactions, fuelled equally by
anxiety and exasperation. The anxiety comes, in the reading
of many, from seeing any narrative that interrupts the
neatly seductive story of India Shining; the exasperation
comes from a smaller band of Indians who are tired of having
what they already know and consider familiar explained
to them in exhausting and unnecessary detail.
This debate surfaced again this year as Pankaj Mishra attacked
Patrick French for missing the real India stories in
his “intimate biography of India”. French and Mishra skirmished
for a while in the pages of Outlook. The broad thrust
of Mishra’s argument was that French had overlooked, or
provided superficial accounts of, the darker side of contemporary
Indian history—the poverty, the real hungers
and tragedies behind the Maoist conflict. French contested
Mishra’s reading of his book, and it became clear that the
real argument was over divergent views of India: Was this
a country progressing despite the burden of history and the
indifference of the middle classes, or was this a country
still mired in ancient inequities? As the debate overflowed
onto other editorial pages, it seemed that there could be no
meeting ground. One part of the debate—a small but not unimportant
part—concerned that original, anxious question,
which I’ll take the liberty of recasting slightly: Who is writing
about us? Do they have the right to tell our stories? And
are they telling the right ones?
In 1794, Sake Dean Mahomet published what is considered
the first work in the corpus of Indian writing in
English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, A Native of Patna
in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, While in the Service
of The Honourable The East India Company Written by
Himself, In a Series of Letters to a Friend. The enterprising
Mahomet may have bent the truth with the claim that his work was “written by himself”; as the scholar and professor
Amardeep Singh notes, the first Indian writer in English
was also the first to attract accusations of plagiarism,
since he had borrowed portions of his account freely from
contemporary sources. But Mahomet, whose English was
fluent and appropriately florid, given the conventions of the
age, was very clear about his audience; the first work in the
Indian writing in English library was very definitely written
for the West:
“The people of India, in general, are peculiarly favoured
by Providence in the possession of all that can cheer the
mind and allure the eye, and tho’ the situation of Eden is
only traced in the Poet’s creative fancy, the traveller beholds
with admiration the face of this delightful country,
on which he discovers tracts that resemble those
so finely drawn by the animated pencil of Milton. You
will here behold the generous soil crowned with various
plenty; the garden beautifully diversified with the
gayest flowers diffusing their fragrance on the bosom of
the air; and the very bowels of the earth enriched with
inestimable mines of gold and diamonds… As I have
now given you a sketch of the manners of my country; I
shall proceed to give you some account of myself.”
Every sin in the list of charges flung at the heads of Indian
writers in English was represented in The Travels: Dean
Mahomet explained words like purdah and chik (“purdoe”
and “cheeque”, in his spelling), used Anglicised spellings
for place names and people (“Bightaconna” for Baithakkhana,
“Bestys” for bheeshti), was guilty of exoticism, devoting
three paragraphs to a description of a “Nabob” who enters
in grand style, provided a glossary (two, actually) and made
sweeping generalisations about the customs of the “Hindoos”
and “Mohametans”.
But Mahomet’s position is more interesting than a superficial
reading will admit; his travels, plagiarised or not,
claimed to be an insider account. Previous travellers to India,
from Thomas Roe to Hiuen Tsang, may have become
insiders after their years in the country; in India’s vast array
of regional languages, the theme of the wanderer and
the curious traveller has a centuries-old tradition, especially
in religious and spiritual writing.
It is not the audience Mahomet addressed—his readers,
in his mind, were clearly English, not Indian—so much as
the assumptions that he made by writing The Travels that
interests me. That was the 1790s, the book was intended to
be read by the English, and Mahomet, a man of some enterprise,
had access to the English language and assumed that
he would have an audience for a book on India. What he
had to sell in the grand bazaar of English writing was not
just his exoticism; it was also his position as an insider, a
man who was Indian and who knew India in a way that the
Angrez might not. He was, in effect, the first Indian writer
to act as a travel guide, and he took up his duties with a
complete absence of self-consciousness.
The next two major accounts by Indian writers in English
were significantly different from Mahomet’s travelogue. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt wrote A Journal of Forty-Eight
Hours of the Year 1945, a slim, early attempt at a novel; in
1845, just a little under two decades before Bankimchandra
published Rajmohan’s Wife, Shoshee Chunder Dutt wrote a
similarly slim but ambitious work of fiction, The Republic of
Orissa: Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century. Both
works were published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette; established
in the 1780s, this periodical also had the distinction
of publishing writers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt,
a poet-dramatist who struggled to find a balance between
the seductions of English and the more solid, comforting
attractions of his mother tongue, Bengali.
The two Dutts established an early affinity with speculative
fiction in Indian writing in English—an affinity that
is, unfortunately, seldom acknowledged. Both works are too
slender to be classified formally as novels, but are fascinating
for two reasons—their timing and form. Twenty-two
years before the Revolt of 1857, KC Dutt imagined a revolt
against the British, to take place in 1945—but in
his rendering, the revolt would be orchestrated by
Indians who had been educated in English.
And this is fascinating: Dutt’s imaginary
mutiny, the rebellion of the educated Indian
with access to English, was written
in the same year as Macaulay’s Minute
on Indian Education, with its infamous
comment: “We have to educate
a people who cannot at present be
educated by means of their mothertongue.”
Ten years after KC Dutt’s
fantasies of language-enabled rebellion,
we have SC Dutt’s fantasy, set
in the 20th century, of a future India
where the British have been defeated
and an independent democratic republic
established in the state of Orissa—this fantasy of political independence
following on the heels of the earlier Dutt’s
dream of linguistic independence, both anticipating
the events of 1857.
To assume, then, that Indian writing in English
began with Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864—the first attempt
to write a truly Indian novel in translation, so to speak—is dangerous. It encourages the amnesia that has been part
of the Oriental scene, if you like, a smoothening out of the
complexities that surrounded the early history of Indian
writing in English, where you could begin by writing for a
foreign audience and continue with works that were meant
to be read by educated, self-aware Indians in search of a
revolution. (It also obliterates the fascination that form has
always held for Indian writers in English—alongside the
novel, and before the novel, Indian authors gravitated to
the travelogue, to alternate histories, to essays and broadsides,
poems and plays, treatises and novellas.)
With KC Dutt, SC Dutt and Bankimchandra (who would
later reject English, renewing his allegiance, political and
linguistic, to the mother tongue), there was also an assumption
that they were writing for both kinds of reader: the one at home and the one abroad. This balancing act would become
commonplace for Indian writers in English, as it has
for this generation of Latin American writers in English, or
African writers in English.
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The roll call included Vikram Seth, VS Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Ved Mehta, Amit Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh, Dom Moraes, Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra, I Allan Sealy, Farrukh Dhondy, Pico Iyer, Nayantara Sehgal, Shashi Deshpande, Kiran Nagarkar, Keki N Daruwalla, Githa Hariharan,
Ruchir Joshi, Imtiaz Dharker, Mukul Kesavan, Amitava Kumar and Anita Rau Badami.
UR Ananthamurthy, MT Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zacharia, Shrilal Shukla, Sukrita P Kumar, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ashokamitran and Bhalchandra
Nemade led the contingent of Indian writers who do not write in English. |
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Saptarshi
29 January 2012
09:20 AM
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Agree with Rohan. And good article, except for the last quarter, which is startling in its blithe, casual classism. The patronizing disclosure deftly snuck in, that the Indian version spelled as 'tution' is euphonious to the author's ears, is silly and also, pretty telling. Nilanjana, small chance you're reading the comments section, but it's about as offensive as calling the Jamaican patois a "cute accent".
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Rohan
24 April 2011
07:23 AM
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Just two words come to mind regarding how to read in Indian (which is what your essay seems to have boiled down to): Chetan Bhagat.
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Ashok Kumar
5 April 2011
10:33 AM
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This is great!
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Sucharita
1 April 2011
04:58 PM
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Brilliant piece. A joy to read, apart from giving valuable insights.
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