Step Across This Line (18 page)

“Damme, This Is the Oriental
Scene for You!”

I once gave a reading to university students in Delhi, and when I’d finished a young woman put up her hand. “Mr. Rushdie, I read through your novel
Midnight’s Children,
” she said. “It is a very long book, but never mind, I read it through. The question I want to ask is this: fundamentally, what’s your point?”

Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that the whole effort—from cover to cover—that is the point of the exercise. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“Something like that, perhaps . . .” I got out.

She snorted. “It won’t do.”

“Please,” I begged, “do I have to have just one point?”

“Fundamentally,” she said, with impressive firmness, “yes.”

Contemporary Indian literature remains largely unknown in the United States, in spite of its considerable present-day energy and diversity. The few writers that have made an impression (R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth) are inevitably read in a kind of literary isolation: texts without context. Some writers of Indian descent (V. S. Naipaul, Bharati Mukherjee) reject the ethnic label of “Indian writers,” perhaps in an effort to place themselves in other, better-understood literary contexts. Mukherjee sees herself nowadays as an American writer, while Naipaul would perhaps prefer to be read as an artist from nowhere and everywhere. Indians (and, since the partition of the subcontinent almost fifty years ago, one should also say Pakistanis) have long been migrants, seeking their fortunes in Africa, Australia, Britain, the Caribbean, and America, and this diaspora has produced many writers who lay claim to an excess of roots; writers like the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose verses look toward Srinagar from Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of other catastrophes:

what else besides God disappears at the altar?

O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished. Words are nothing,

just rumors—like roses—to embellish a slaughter.

How, then, to make any simple, summarizing statement—“fundamentally, what’s your point?”—about so multiform a literature, hailing from that huge crowd of a country (close to a billion people at the last count), that vast, metamorphic, continent-sized culture that feels, to Indians and visitors alike, like a non-stop assault on the senses, the emotions, the imagination, and the spirit? Put India in the Atlantic Ocean and it would reach from Europe to America; put India and China together and you’ve got almost half the population of the world.

These days, new Indian writers seem to emerge every few weeks. Their work is as polymorphous as the place, and readers who care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices saying something they want to hear. The approaching fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence is a useful pretext for a survey of half a century of post-liberation writing. For many months now, I have been reading my way through this literature, and my Delhi interrogator may be pleased to hear that the experience has indeed led me to a single—unexpected, and profoundly ironic—conclusion.

This is it: the prose writing—both fiction and non-fiction—created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a more interesting body of work than most of what has been produced in the sixteen “official languages” of India, the so-called vernacular languages, during the same time.

It is a large claim, though it may be an easy one for Western readers to accept; if most of India’s English-language writers are still largely unknown in the West, the problem is far greater in the case of the vernacular literatures. Of India’s non–English language authors, perhaps only the name of the Nobel Prize–winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore would be recognized, and even his work, though still popular in Latin America, is pretty much a closed book elsewhere.

However, it is a claim that runs counter to almost all the received critical wisdom within India itself.
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It is also not a claim that I ever expected to make.

Admittedly, I did my reading only in English, and there has long been a genuine problem of translation in India—not only into English but between the vernacular languages—and it is possible that good writers have been ill served by their translators’ inadequacies. Nowadays, however, such bodies as the Indian Sahitya Akademi and UNESCO, as well as Indian publishers themselves, have been putting substantial resources into the creation of better translations, and the problem, while not eradicated, is certainly much diminished.

I should add that I exclude poetry from my thesis. The rich poetic traditions of India continue to flourish in many languages; the English-language poets, with a few distinguished exceptions—Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes—do not match the quality of their counterparts in prose.

Ironically, the century before Independence contains many vernacular-language writers who would merit a place in any anthology: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (the author of
Pather Panchali,
on which Satyajit Ray based his celebrated Apu Trilogy of films), and Premchand, the prolific (and therefore rather variable) Hindi author of, among many others, the famous novel of rural life
Godaan,
or
The Gift of a Cow.

This is not to say that there aren’t excellent writers to be found outside English. The leading figures include Mahasveta Devi (Bengali), O. V. Vijayan (Malayalam), Nirmal Verma (Hindi), U. R. Ananthamurthy (Kannada), Suresh Joshi (Gujarati), Amrita Pritam (Punjabi), Qurratulain Haider (Urdu), and Ismat Chughtai (Urdu). But these artists are scattered across many languages; it’s the concentration of new talent in English that has created the phenomenon, the “boom.” For my money, the finest Indian writer available in translation—a greater writer than most of the English-language ones—is Saadat Hasan Manto, an immensely popular Urdu writer of low-life fictions, sometimes scorned by conservative critics for his choice of characters and milieus, much as Virginia Woolf snobbishly disparaged the fictional universe of James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
Manto’s masterpiece is perhaps the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” a parable of the Partition of India, in which a lunatic asylum near the new frontier decides that the lunatics, too, must be partitioned: Indian lunatics to India, Pakistani lunatics to the new country of Pakistan. But everything is unclear: the exact location of the frontier, and of the places of origin of the insane persons, too. The lunacies in the asylum become, in this savagely funny story, a perfect metaphor for the greater insanity of history.

For some Indian critics, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic. “Indo-Anglian” literature evokes, in these critics, the kind of prejudiced reaction shown by some Indians toward the country’s community of “Anglo-Indians”—that is, Eurasians.

Fifty years ago Jawaharlal Nehru delivered, in English, the great “freedom at midnight” speech that marked the moment of independence:

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

Since that indisputably Anglophone oration, the role of English itself has often been disputed in India. Attempts in India’s continental shelf of languages to coin medical, scientific, technological, and everyday neologisms to replace the commonly used English words sometimes succeeded, but more often comically failed. And when the Marxist government of the state of Bengal announced in the mid-1980s that the supposedly elitist, colonialist teaching of English would be discontinued in government-run primary schools, many on the Left denounced the decision itself as elitist, as it would deprive the masses of the many economic and social advantages of speaking the world’s language; only the affluent private-school elite would henceforth have that privilege. A well-known Calcutta graffito complained, “My son won’t learn English. Your son won’t learn English. But Jyoti Basu [the Chief Minister] will send his son abroad to learn English.” One man’s ghetto of privilege is another’s road to freedom.

Like the Greek god Dionysus, who was dismembered and afterward reassembled—and who, according to the myths, was one of India’s earliest conquerors—Indian writing in English has been called “twice-born” (by the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee) to suggest its double parentage. While I am, I must admit, attracted by the Dionysian resonances of this supposedly double birth, it seems to me to rest on the false premise that English, having arrived from outside India, is and must necessarily remain an alien there. But my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country’s earlier Muslim conquerors, was also an immigrant language, forged out of a blend between the conquerors’ imported tongue and the local languages they encountered. However, it became a naturalized subcontinental language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay.

(In many parts of South India, people will prefer to converse with visiting North Indians in English rather than Hindi, which feels, ironically, more like a colonial language to speakers of Tamil, Kannada, or Malayalam than does English, which has acquired, in the South, an aura of lingua franca cultural neutrality. The new Silicon Valley–style boom in computer technology that is transforming the economies of Bangalore and Madras has made English, in those cities, an even more important language than before.)

Indian English is not “English” English, to be sure, any more than Irish or American or Caribbean English is. And it is a part of the achievement of English-language Indian writers to have found literary voices as distinctively Indian, and also as suitable for any and all of the purposes of art, as those other Englishes forged in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, and the United States.

However, Indian critical assaults on this new literature continue to be made from time to time. Its practitioners are denigrated for being too upper-middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choice of themes and techniques; for being less popular in India than outside India; for possessing inflated reputations on account of the international power of the English language, and of the ability of Western critics and publishers to impose their cultural standards on the East; for living, in many cases, outside India; for being deracinated to the point that their work lacks the spiritual dimension essential for a “true” understanding of the soul of India; for being insufficiently grounded in the ancient literary traditions of India; for being the literary equivalent of MTV culture, of globalizing Coca-Colonization; even, I’m sorry to report, for suffering from a condition that one waspish recent commentator, Pankaj Mishra, calls “Rushdie-itis . . . [a] condition that has claimed Rushdie himself in his later works.”

It is interesting that so few of these criticisms are literary in the pure sense of the word. For the most part they do not deal with language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagination, or talent. Rather, they are about class, power, and belief. There is a whiff of political correctness about them: the ironical proposition that India’s best writing since Independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear. It ought not to be true, and so must not be permitted to be true. (That many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English-speaking elite is a further irony.)

Let us quickly concede what must be conceded. It is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still bedeviled by high illiteracy levels, how could it be otherwise? It does not follow, however—unless one holds to a rigid, class-war view of the world—that writers with the privilege of a good education will automatically write novels that seek only to portray the lives of the bourgeoisie. It is true that there tends to be a bias toward metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction, but there has been, during this half century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as well as urban, sacred as well as profane. This is also, let us remember, a young literature. It is still pushing out the frontiers of the possible.

The point about the power of the English language, and of the Western publishing and critical fraternities, also contains some truth. Perhaps it does seem, to some “home” commentators, that a canon is being foisted on them from outside. The perspective from the West is rather different. Here, what seems to be the case is that Western publishers and critics have been growing gradually more and more excited by the voices emerging from India; in England at least, British writers are often chastised by reviewers for their lack of Indian-style ambition and verve. It feels as if the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around.

And, yes, English is the most powerful medium of communication in the world; should we not then rejoice at these artists’ mastery of it, and at their growing influence? To criticize writers for their success at “breaking out” is no more than parochialism (and parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures). One important dimension of literature is that it is a means of holding a conversation with the world. These writers are ensuring that India or, rather, Indian voices (for they are too good to fall into the trap of writing
nationalistically
) will henceforth be confident, indispensable participants in that literary conversation.

Granted, many of these writers do have homes outside India. Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark were or are wanderers, too. Muriel Spark, accepting the British Literature Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in March 1997, went so far as to say that travel to other countries was essential for all writers. Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer’s home address.