Indian Ink

'Prose writing...created (in post-independent India) by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 'official languages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular languages' during the same time; and indeed, this new. .. Indo-Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.'

Salman Rushdie, 1997

This is a large claim, but the response of many has been, 'Is it?' V S Naipaul said in 1964 that Indian literature in English didn't exist: 'The only writer who while working within society, is yet able to impose on it a vision... is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. And she is European.' Much has changed since then and it is perhaps to set the record straight that Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West have brought out The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997 (Special Indian Price Rs 340).

 

Primarily, the anthology consists of short stories/ extracts of Indian writing in English with just two translations Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh and Satyajit Ray's Big Bill. All the others are familiar Indian writers in English: the list includes Nayantara Sahgal, G V Desani, Nirad Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry, I Allan Sealy, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan and Arundhati Roy.

This collection begs two questions. First, why is Indian writing in

translation so conspicuous by its absence? Second, why have some Indian writers 'made it' and come back to us via the west?

Naipaul answered the first in An Area of Darkness: '... whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to Indian language writers... 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 assertion that poverty was sad, that death was sad... many of the modern short stories were only refurbished fairy tales...'

Not much has changed in the years since Naipaul made these harsh comments. Indian regional literature (with odd exceptions, especially in Bengali and Malayalam) do not come off in translation the classic case being Tagore. The poetry of the language is often lost and the ideas contained too parochial, confined to a certain time and place. Unlike R K Narayan's 'gentle, slightly funny art', Indian literature does not go to 'the heart of the Indian condition, and beyond it, to the human condition itself.'

Rushdie reiterates: 'Literature has little or nothing to do with the writer's home address'. What Indian regional literature lacks (at least that which is accessible through translations) is 'humanity in all its forms, human consciousness in all its mystery'.

Rushdie does not dismiss Indian regional literature out of hand. He says that 'the century before independence contains many vernacular language writers who would merit a place in any anthology'. His disappointment is with post-independent regional literature as accessed through their English translations.

But what of Indian writing in English? Is it too upper class and lacking diversity? Is this literature so deracinated that it lacks 'the spiritual dimension essential for a true understanding of the soul of India?' Is it just a literary equivalent of 'globalising Coca-Colonisation'?

This collection reflects the confidence of the young generation of Indian writers. Much of this came from Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which set a distinctive pattern for the Indian novel: the family chronicle that is also the nation's history, a distorted autobiography embodying in a distorted form India's political life. Rushdie's piece The Perforated Sheet is a metaphor for the multitudinous nation, 'an imaginary country that could never have existed except by the great effort of a phenomenal collective nation except in a dream we agreed to dream'.

Since all fiction has autobiographical roots, it is not unsurprising that many pieces here have as their theme a journey to the west or being suspended in a limbo between east and west.

Anthologies always invoke a mixed response. But to the extent that it offers a variety, the promise of containing something for every reader they serve their purpose. This one does in one way or another.

V.V.