T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: A matter of attitude

A few days ago a friend called up and told me - with the firm authority that women of a certain age acquire - to read books by Alex Rutherford, who, it turned out, is a couple: Michael and Diana Preston. They (or he) have written books on the Great Mughals, from Babur down.

Their next one is on Aurangzeb, due out soon. It seems they also provide notes on which bits of the book are true and which are fiction.

Footnoted fiction, as it were. Talk about advance insurance against the Indian maniacs who are ever ready to take offence and burn or ban books.

She then asked, somewhat angrily, why Brits - both old and new - wrote so much better about India than Indians themselves. Indeed, she said, except for Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Nagarkar and Abraham Eraly, no one else seems to write these Indian history-based books, fiction or otherwise.

The list of Brits writing with India as their subject matter is not very long but it is impressive. Rudyard Kipling, E M Foster, M M Kaye, H R F Keating, who invented Inspector Ghote without ever visiting India and did a damn fine job of it, Tarquin Hall, who writes Indian crime fiction in cafes in Delhi, and, of course, the Great Lisper, William Dalrymple. Even Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who grew up in England but was German by birth produced, excellent India-based fiction.

Think Indian, write English
The Indians who really make the cut are Mr Nagarkar, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. Born and brought up here and writing such good novels.

The others, like Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, even though they do write on Indian themes, are scarcely Indian in the way those who grow up here are. They were born abroad or grew up there for the most part.

For example, Pico Iyer writes very polished prose. But he has neither grown up in India nor writes about things Indian, which is mercy.

Indu Sundaresan, who writes Indian historical fiction, was born and brought up in India. But she now lives in America. I have only browsed briefly through her books, so don't have a well-formed view on them.

Would these persons of Indian origin (PIOs) have written as well in English if they had been educated in India and, from childhood onwards, been taught to think, well, the way normal Indians do? Unlikely.

The nuance, in my view, lies not just in the way you use the words - which can be learnt - but in the way you think about things as well. The underlying attitude makes an enormous difference to the way you write about things, as does the psychological distance that foreigners have.

If you have not grown up with a bunch of, say, Indian cows, you will surely view them differently if no one told you they were holy. And that, if I may say so, was what made Wendy Doniger's book on Hinduism so different. It was, as the Americans say, a different take.

The attitude part is reflected in the way you frame a sentence and tell the story. I can give scores of examples of how the Brits write it and how an Indian born and brought up here would write it. There's a certain fustiness about normal Indian writing that, despite all the right words, can reveal the writer's ingrained attitudes.

Oddly enough, there are dozens of columnists who don't suffer from this problem. They write with great skill and panache. But they are 800-word artists who perhaps shouldn't try writing novels, historical or otherwise.

Indian hang-up
Another problem with Indian writers seems to be, to my mind at least, the need to be sad, grumpy, mal-contended and to impart deeply significant messages. I could be wrong - which I would be very glad to be - but after reading dozens of translations, this is the dominant impression I have.

There's not much fun in reading these books, except to marvel at how well the translators cope with such depressing and angst-ridden books. Indeed very few, like R K Narayan or Khuswant Singh, seem to tell a story for the sake of the story itself. Both had the ability to see the absurdities of India and yet write about them amusingly.

I am sure there are other writers in Indian languages like them. If you know of any, let me know.