The Girl Who Ate Books Page 5

  In twenty-first century Delhi, book launches and festivals like the one at Neemrana were not precisely the kind of ‘cultural recreation’ Nirad C. Chaudhuri spoke 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 hotel.

  As the writer Amit Chaudhuri said, Delhi’s incestuousness had infected literary circles as well; the capital, notoriously an insiders’ city, had bred a culture where everyone in publishing knew everyone in the media and everyone on the writers’ 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. Often, instead of substantial literary debates, we made do with manufactured controversies and warmed-over gossip.

  Publishing in English had flourished in the last fifteen years, generating an appetite for what often seemed the wrong things—the spurious fame of the ten-second TV appearance, the appearance of a world where literary importance was 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, the poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the scholar Alok Rai, the editor and author Mrinal Pande, and the poet and critic Rukmini Bhaya Nair among them, had almost stopped writing for book review pages. The space for translations and 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 were pale imitations of the gatherings of the past. In the 1990s and 2000s, though India had never had an Edinburgh-style festival of its own, the Sahitya Akademi was adept at combining large audiences with very abstruse subjects.

  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, while Neemrana 2003 was under way, in a subtle underlining of the tensions between the Indian writers in English and the Rest of Indian Literature. (This was often, much to everyone’s annoyance, abbreviated as the IWE versus the Bhasha School, Bhasha being inaccurate shorthand for ‘all Indian regional languages except for English’.)

  For two days, then, Neemrana played host to the Indian literary pantheon. 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 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 non-fiction; Srilal Shukla watched sardonically as another version of Raag Darbari, his classic satire of intrigues and power plays in post-Independence India, played itself out.

  In an interview elsewhere, Kiran Nagarkar said: ‘At that Neemrana conference there were about ten 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 between English versus the Rest of India has roots that go back almost two centuries.

  ‘Who is an Indian writer?’

  In the late nineteenth century, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, author of India’s first novel in English (Rajmohan’s Wife), had a political change of heart. He had enthusiastically learned to write in English, the language that had brought him and many others in Bengal a refreshing sense of a wider world and of Europe’s debates over civil liberties. The switch he made to Bengali when he chose to return to Bengali was first a political, and then progressively an emotional, choice.

  He had struggled with Rajmohan’s Wife, encountering almost all the problems that Indian writers in English would subsequently face. Novels in English by non-white authors were treated as charming curiosities well into the 1970s, in fact, where a reviewer in England would call V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur a ‘little savory from the colonial islands’. For Bankim, the strongest reasons to remain a Bengali writer intertwined patriotism and a love of 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 who 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, Bankim would gently rebuke the economic historian R.C. Dutt for wanting to write in a language that neither writer could ever claim, truly, as their 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—Chattopadhyaya—repudiating the Anglicization, and R.C. Dutt’s second and third names are similarly compromised, Anglicizations 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 anguished and subversive retelling of contemporary Indian history. Midnight’s Children covers two Partitions—the creation of India and the bloody birth of Bangladesh—but in 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 re-reading; his letter, written in 1982, 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 V.S. Naipaul, as it is ‘Heat and Dust’ to Ruth 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 Mumbai, are clubbed with Katherine Mayo (whose ‘drain inspector’s report’ is still, inexplicably, on the l
ist of books banned in India), with Nirad C. Chaudhuri, proud dhoti-wearing imperialist, and Ruth Jhabvala, another writer often seen as an outsider despite her years of residence in Delhi.

  I found it fascinating that Mulk Raj 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 they 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 that is summarized in the crime of being rude to one’s elders.

  As the authors sat in the cool conference rooms and shaded alcoves of Neemrana, discussing the burning questions of the day—‘Who Is An Indian Writer?’—tensions had been growing 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 hotelier and restorer Aman Nath and his partner, the late Francis Wacziarg had poured love, imagination and cold cash into revamping 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. A pig had met its untimely end under the wheels of some visitor’s car, probably one of the media caravans who 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 the sometimes airless world of Indian writing in English were of this nature—they generated intense heat, passionate argument and were of ephemeral 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.

  Writing for the West: Dean’s Descendants

  Almost 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 a five-star hotel poolside, or one of the city’s flashier 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 had been 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—asking whether his view of Indian history was even accurate, 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 of 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 such as Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple, the shape of what we argued about when we take 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, Indians had always been sensitive as a nation to what was written about them; non-fiction about the US, for instance, seldom drew as many reactions, fuelled equally by anxiety and exasperation. The anxiety came, in the reading of many, from seeing any narrative that interrupted the neatly seductive story of India Shining. And the exasperation came from a smaller band of Indians who were tired of having what they already knew and considered familiar explained to them in exhausting and unnecessary detail.

  This debate would resurface in 2011, 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 here. 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?

  It is clear from the very first work in the corpus of Indian writing in English — Dean Mahomet’s Travels — that a certain kind of writer wrote explicitly 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 is represented in the Travels: Dean Mahomet explains words like purdah and chik (‘purdoe’ and ‘cheeque’, in his spelling), uses Anglicized spellings for names of places and people (Bightaconna for Baithakkhana, Bestys for bheeshti), is guilty of exoticism, devoting three paragraphs to a description of a Nabob who enters in grand style, provides a glossary (two, actually) and makes sweeping generalizations about the customs of the Hindoos and Mohametans.

  But Dean Mahomet’s travels, despite frequent accusations that he had borrowed large chunks from other writers’ tales, have one merit: they claim to be an insider’s 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.

  In the 1790s, what Dean Mahomet managed to sell in the grand bazaar of English writing was not just his exoticism; it was also his position as an insider, as an Indian who knew the country in a way that the Angrez may not. He was pro
bably the first Indian writer to act, unselfconsciously, as travel guide.

  Before 1857: A Million Mutinies

  The next two major accounts by Indian writers in English were significantly different from Mahomet’s travelogue. In 1835, K.C. Dutt wrote A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of The Year 1945, a slim, early attempt at a speculative novel set over a hundred years in the future. In 1845, just a little under two decades before Bankimchandra published Rajmohan’s Wife, S.C. 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 Kolkata Literary Gazette; established in the 1780s, this periodical also had the distinction of publishing writers like the poet and playwright Michael Madhusudan Dutt, another pioneer who struggled to find a balance between the seductions of English and the more solid, comforting attractions of his mother tongue, Bengali.

  Indeed, between Dean Mahomet and Bankimchandra, there lay an ocean of Dutts. The most famous was Toru, the poet whose verses drew abundant admirers, especially the one about Sita, forlorn after her abduction by Ravana, languishing in the gardens of Lanka. It paved the way for many of Sarojini Naidu’s effusions. Toru’s promise was precocious, and she died very young, at an age youthful enough to embalm her legend forever.

  Though much of her poetry seems agonizingly laboured to a modern eye, she was strikingly modern by the standards of her day—far less prolix than, say, Aurobindo, and at least as sensitive in some of her lines as Derozio. But she was just one member of a family that, in many ways, embodied the new breed of Anglicized Bengalis (and other Indians) who were reading the works of Empire—at first with unstinting admiration, and shortly with a far more critical eye.