The most significant writers of this first generation, R. K. Narayan and G. V. Desani, have had opposite careers. Narayan’s books fill a good-sized shelf; Desani is the author of a single work of fiction, All About H. Hatterr, and that singleton volume is already fifty years old. Desani is almost unknown, while R. K. Narayan is, of course, a figure of world stature, for his creation of the imaginary town of Malgudi, so lovingly made that it has become more vividly real to us than most real places. (But Narayan’s realism is leavened by touches of legend; the river Sarayu, on whose shores the town sits, is one of the great rivers of Hindu mythology. It is as if William Faulkner had set his Yoknapatawpha County on the banks of the Styx.)
Narayan shows us, over and over again, the quarrel between traditional, static India, on the one hand, and modernity and progress, on the other; represented, in many of his stories and novels, by a confrontation between a “wimp” and a “bully”—The Painter of Signs and his aggressive beloved with her birth control campaign; The Vendor of Sweets and the emancipated American daughter-in-law with the absurd “novel writing machine”; the mild-mannered printer and the extrovert taxidermist in The Man-Eater of Malgudi. In his gentle, lightly funny art, he goes to the heart of the Indian condition and, beyond it, into the human condition itself.
The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G. V. Desani, has fallen so far from favor that the extraordinary All About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson’s Clarissa or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India’s Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, “fifty-fifty of the species,” the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind the work of many of his successors:
The earth was blotto with the growth of willow, peach, mango-blossom, and flower. Every ugly thing, and smell, was in incognito, as fragrance and freshness. Being prone, this typical spring-time dash and activity, played an exulting phantasmagoria-note on the inner-man. Medically speaking, the happy circumstances vibrated my ductless glands, and fused me into a wibble-wobble Whoa, Jamieson! fillip-and-flair to live, live!
Or, again:
The incidents take place in India. I was exceedingly hard-up of cash: actually, in debts. And, it is amazing, how, out in the Orient, the shortage of cash gets mixed up with romance and females somehow! In this England, they say, if a fellah is broke, females, as matter of course, forsake. Stands to reason. Whereas, out in the East, they attach themselves! Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!
This is “babu-English,” the semi-literate, half-learned English of the bazaars, transmuted by erudition, highbrow monkeying around, and the impish magic of Desani’s unique phrasing and rhythm, into an entirely new kind of literary voice. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy’s more recent, Eurasian comic-epic The Trotter-Nama, an enormous tome full of interpolations, exclamations, resumptions, encomiums, and catastrophes, without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.
Ved Mehta is well known both for his astute commentaries on the Indian scene and for his several distinguished volumes of autobiography. The first of these is the most moving: Vedi, a memoir of a blind boyhood that describes cruelties and kindnesses with equal dispassion and great affect. (More recently, Firdaus Kanga, in his autobiographical fiction Trying to Grow, has also transcended physical affliction with high style and comic brio.)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of the Booker Prize–winning Heat and Dust (afterward made into a Merchant-Ivory movie), is a renowned master of the short-story form. As a writer, she is sometimes under-rated in India because, I think, the voice of the rootless intellectual (so quintessentially her voice) is such an unfamiliar one in that country where people’s self-definitions are so rooted in their regional identities.
That Ruth Jhabvala has a second career as an award-winning screenwriter is well known. But not many people realize that India’s greatest film director, the late Satyajit Ray, was also an accomplished author of short stories. His father edited a famous Bengali children’s magazine, Sandesh, and Ray’s biting little fables are made more potent by their childlike charm.
Anita Desai, one of India’s major living authors, merits comparison with Jane Austen. In novels such as Clear Light of Day—written in a clear, light English full of subtle atmospherics—she displays both her exceptional skill at social portraiture and an unsparing, Austen-like mordancy of insight into human motivations. In Custody, perhaps her best novel to date, finely uses English to depict the decay of another language, Urdu, and the high literary culture that lived in it. Here the poet, the last, boozing, decrepit custodian of the dying tradition, is (in a reversal of Narayan) the “bully”; and the novel’s central character, the poet’s young admirer Deven, is the “wimp.” The dying past, the old world, Desai tells us, can be as much of a burden as the awkward, sometimes wrongheaded present.
Though V. S. Naipaul approaches India as an outsider, his engagement with it has been so intense that no account of its modern literature would be complete without him. His three non-fiction books on India, An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now, are key texts, and not only because of the hackles they have raised. Many Indian critics have taken issue with the harshness of his responses. Some have fair-mindedly conceded that he does attack things worth attacking. “I’m anti-Naipaul when I visit the West,” one leading South Indian novelist told me, “but I’m often pro-Naipaul back home.”
Some of Naipaul’s targets, like—this is from A Wounded Civilization—the intermediate-technology institute that invents “reaping boots” (with blades attached) for Indian peasants to use to harvest grain, merit the full weight of his scorn. At other times he appears merely supercilious. India, his migrant ancestors’ lost paradise, cannot stop disappointing him. By the third volume of the series, however, he seems more cheerful about the country’s condition. He speaks approvingly of the emergence of “a central will, a central intellect, a national idea,” and disarmingly, even movingly, confesses to the atavistic edginess of mood in which he had made his first trip almost thirty years earlier: “The India of my fantasy and heart was something lost and irrecoverable. . . . On that first journey, I was a fearful traveler.”
In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul’s comments on Indian writers elicit in this reader a characteristic mixture of agreement and dissent. When he writes,
The feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian “language” writers. This is possible; what I read of them in translation did not encourage me to read more. Premchand . . . turned out to be a minor fabulist. . . . Other writers quickly fatigued me with their assertions that poverty was sad, that death was sad . . . many of the “modern” short stories were only refurbished folk tales,
then he is expressing, in his emphatic, unafraid way, what I have also felt. (Though I think more highly of Premchand than he.) When he goes on to say,
The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls “the basic human hunger for the unseen.” It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels,
then I can go only some of the way with him. It is true that many learned Indians go in for a sonorously impenetrable form of critico-mysticism. I once heard an Indian writer of some renown, and much interest in India’s ancient wisdoms, expounding his theory of what one might call Motionism. “Consider Water,” he advised us. “Water without Motion is—what? Is a lake. Very well. Now, Water plus Motion is—what? Is a river. You see? The Water is still the same Water. Only Motion has been added. By the same token,” he continued, making a breathtaking intellectu
al leap, “Language is Silence, to which Motion has been added.”
(A fine Indian poet, who was sitting beside me in the great man’s audience, murmured in my ear: “Bowel without Motion is—what? Is constipation! Bowel plus Motion is—what? Is shit!”)
I agree with Naipaul that mysticism is bad for novelists. But in the India I know, for every obfuscating Motionist, there is a debunking Bowelist whispering in one’s ear. For every unworldly seeker for the ancient wisdoms of the East, there is a clear-eyed witness responding to the here and now in precisely that fashion which Naipaul inaccurately calls uniquely Western. And when Naipaul concludes by saying that in the aftermath of the “abortive” Indo-British encounter, India is little more than a very Naipaulian community of mimic men—that the country’s artistic life has stagnated, “the creative urge” has “failed”; that “Shiva has ceased to dance”—then I fear we part company altogether. An Area of Darkness was written as long ago as 1964, a mere seventeen years after Independence, and a little early for an obituary notice. The growing quality of Indian writing in English may yet change his mind.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the flow of that good writing has become a flood. Bapsi Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, but literature has no need of Partitions, particularly as Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India is one of the finest responses to the horror of the division of the subcontinent. Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra is an important attempt by a thoroughly modern Indian to make her reckoning with the Hindu culture from which she emerged. Padma Perera, Anjana Appachana (Listening Now), and Githa Hariharan, less well known than Sidhwa and Mehta, confirm the quality of contemporary writing by Indian women.
A number of different styles of work are evolving: the Stendhalian realism of a writer like Rohinton Mistry, the author of two acclaimed novels, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance, and of a collection of stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag; the equally naturalistic but lighter, more readily charming prose of Vikram Seth (there is, admittedly, a kind of perversity in invoking lightness in the context of a book boasting as much sheer avoirdupois as A Suitable Boy); the elegant social observation of Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August), the more flamboyant manner of Vikram Chandra (Love and Longing in Bombay). Amitav Ghosh’s most impressive achievement to date is the non-fiction study of India and Egypt In an Antique Land. It may be that his greatest strength will turn out to be as an essayist of this sort. Sara Suleri, whose memoir Meatless Days is, like Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, a visitor from across the Pakistani frontier, is a non-fiction writer of immense originality and grace. And Amit Chaudhuri’s languorous, elliptic, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all.
Most encouragingly, yet another talented generation has begun to emerge. The Keralan writer Arundhati Roy has arrived to the accompaniment of a loud fanfare. Her novel, The God of Small Things, is full of ambition and sparkle, and written in a highly wrought and utterly personal style. Equally impressive are the debuts of two other first novelists. Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy and Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard are, in their very unalike ways, highly original books. The Vakil book, a tale of growing up near Juhu Beach, Bombay, is sharp, funny, and fast; the Kiran Desai, a Calvino-esque fable of a misfit boy who climbs a tree and becomes a sort of petty guru, is lush and intensely imagined. Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita: her arrival establishes the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction. But she is very much her own writer, and welcome proof that India’s encounter with the English language, far from proving abortive, continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts.
The map of the world, in the standard Mercator projection, is not kind to India, making it look substantially smaller than, say, Greenland. On the map of world literature, too, India has been undersized for too long. Fifty years after India’s independence, however, that age of obscurity is coming to an end. India’s writers have torn up the old map and are busily drawing their own.
March 1997
India’s Fiftieth Anniversary
[Originally commissioned and published by Time magazine]
There are really only two ways of arriving at your fiftieth birthday. You can (1) do it defiantly—by thumbing your nose at Father Time, throwing the mother of all parties, and announcing your intention of growing old disgracefully; or, (2) you can deal with it grumpily—by pretending it isn’t happening, hiding your head under the pillows, and wishing the day would just go away. On the occasion of my own recently completed half century, my inclinations led me unequivocally down route 1. Now it’s India’s turn; but though the fiftieth anniversary of the end of British rule is being loudly trumpeted around the world, India herself, while not entirely ignoring the event, is reacting with a halfhearted, shoulder-shrugging sourness, a certain category 2 lack of celebratory spirit that has raised many international observers’ eyebrows. You get the feeling the lady wishes she had lied about her age.
Indians have always been less susceptible to anniversary-itis than Westerners. The annual Republic Day (January 26) parades, popular with visitors to India largely on account of the participation of glamorously caparisoned elephants, have been mostly ignored by the locals. Independence Day itself (August 15) is also traditionally a lackluster affair. Ten years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Raj, I was at the Red Fort in Delhi, filming the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s speech to a crushingly indifferent nation. The audience was so unimpressed, in fact, that very large numbers of people simply walked away while Rajiv was still speaking.
The Indian governing elite has long been wary about sanctioning public resources for mere display. It is believed that the public would disapprove of money wasted on, for example, fireworks displays, when it could be used for much-needed irrigation schemes. Against this, one could argue that the Indian public’s estimation of their leaders has fallen so low, because of recent corruption scandals and endemic inter-party bickering, that it’s hard to see how a little fun would make things worse. And there aren’t actually any special proposals for worthy new schemes on the table.
One could, therefore, wish for a touch more subcontinental hoopla as the big five-oh comes around. In India, such plans as have been unveiled range from the conventionally tedious (members of the Indian National Assembly will listen to recordings of speeches by the founders of the nation, Gandhi and Nehru), to the shoestring amateur dramatics of “restaging” the passing of the 1942 Quit India Resolution in Bombay, to the plainly bizarre—viz., the apparently serious proposal that the anniversary be marked by erecting a statue of Gandhiji (clad, no doubt, only in his legendary loincloth) in Antarctica. And in Pakistan—after all, it’s Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary, too—even less is promised; according to the Pakistani High Commission in London, the Nawaz Sharif government has decided to “celebrate humbly.” Pakistani politicians are not noted for their humility, so this is, in its way, something of a first.
Fifty years ago, Mr. Nehru, taking office as India’s first prime minister, described Independence as the moment “. . . when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” The explanation for the nation’s present unwillingness to throw its Nehru topi in the air lies in the subsequent battering administered by history to that newly liberated soul. If, in August 1947, many Indians had idealistic hopes of a great new beginning, then August 1997 is suffused by the sense of an ending. Another age is ending: the first age, one might say, of the history of post-colonial India. It has not been the promised golden age of freedom. The prevailing mood is one of disenchantment. Private citizens and public commentators alike readily provide a long, convincing list of reasons for this disenchantment, starting with the dark side of Independence itself; that is, of course, Partition. The decision to carve a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, out of the body of subcontinental India led to bloody massacres in which over a million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims lost their lives. Partition has poisoned the subsequent history of relations between the two newborn states ever since. Why
on earth would anyone want to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the century’s great tragedies?
Like many secularist Indians, I would argue that Partition was an avoidable mistake, the result not of historical inevitability or the true will of the people but of political antagonisms—between Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah, between the Congress and the Muslim League—which gradually turned Mr. Jinnah, originally a strong opponent of the idea of a separate Muslim state, into its most ardent advocate and eventual founder. (Of course, the divide-and-rule tactics of the British did nothing to help.) My own family, like so many of Muslim origin, was cut in half by Partition. My parents opted to stay in Bombay, and so did my two uncles and their families, but my aunts and their families went to West Pakistan, as it was called until 1971, when East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. We were lucky, escaping the worst of the bloodletting, but our lives were defined and shaped by the frontier separating us. Who would celebrate the descent of the Iron Curtain, the building of the Berlin Wall?
The period after Partition gives rise to a further, familiar litany of woes. The nation’s great social ills have not been cured. Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s famous slogan, Garibi Hatao, “Remove Poverty,” was an empty promise; India’s poor are as poor as ever, and more numerous than ever, thanks in part to her son Sanjay’s hated forcible-sterilization campaign during Mrs. G.’s mid-1970s period of dictatorial “emergency rule,” which set back other efforts at birth control by more than a generation. Illiteracy, child labor, infant mortality, the privations imposed by casteism on those of lower or no caste, all these great questions remain unanswered. (The placing of a garland of shoes, an old Indian insult, around the neck of a statue of the Dalit or Untouchable leader Dr. Ambedkar recently led to days of rioting in Bombay.)