The Indianness of Indian English Literature

The Indianness of Indian English Literature

Kaushik Viswanath

Almost any essay attempting a broad overview of Indian English Literature[1] seems to find it necessary to comment on, or at least make mention of, the “Indian English Debate”. It is a debate that centres on questions such as “can Indians write in English?’, and more importantly, “should Indians write in English?”. The main critics of the movement of Indian Writing in English are those whom it leaves behind, or sidelines, in its wake: Indian regional language writers. They dismiss most of Indian English Literature as being second-rate, and Indian writers in English as well as their readers as “intellectual pygmies” (Reddy, par. 9). A certain excessive ill-feeling against the IEL is evident in their statements, perhaps since they have come in response to Salman Rushdie notoriously commenting that the best literature in India was being written in English, calling “Indo-Anglian” literature the most valuable contribution India has made to the world of books. Makarand Paranjape is of the opinion that Rushdie’s statement was a reinforcement of what is only a myth and a misconception, but misconception or not, until the statement is withdrawn, the protest will not be silenced.

One would suppose that in over eighteen years of such debate, the issue would have finally been brought to a standstill, an uneasy resolution, or at least have fallen out of relevance. The problem is that it hasn’t – critics and writers continue to fume over the issue of the validity of Indian Writing in English. Usually the attacks against this burgeoning tradition come first, after which supporters of the tradition jump to its defense. The debate is not a baseless one, although the major question is no longer about whether Indians can write in English. Jeet Thayil quotes from a letter Yeats wrote to his friend:

Damn Tagore. We got out three good books, Sturge, Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. Nobody can write music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.

Thayil strikes down Yeats’s argument by pointing out that Yeats never wrote in Gaelic, the language he learnt in childhood (Thayil, xii). But even when one looks at early literary criticism (even by Indians themselves) about Indian Writing in English, the outlook has been fairly sceptical:

“Indian English can hardly acquire the native strength of Amerian or Australian English, for in Indian soil, it has always remained an exotic plant, and Indian Writing in English is a tree that has sprung upon a hospitable soil from a seed that a random breeze brought from afar” (Joshi & Rao, 2).

Indian English Literature has come a long way since then, and has established itself with more confidence than literary critics before the eighties might have expected. The first Booker prize to go to an author of Indian descent was in 1971, to V.S. Naipul for his In a Free State. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala then won the Booker for her Heat and Dust in 1975. However, true optimism and a revolutionary change in the perception of Indian English Literature came only with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker prize in 1981. As Paranjape comments, “It was written with rare verbal verve and employed an astonishing variety of linguistic and narrative traditions. Rushdie himself called it the chutnification of the English language. This novel broke taboos and inhibitions, encouraging Indians to experiment anew with both the form and content of fiction… another thing that Midnight’s Children did was to renew the dying market for IE fiction in Britain and America” (Paranjape, “Post-Independence”, 1053).

Since then, IEL has grown in leaps and bounds, garnering both critical as well as popular acclaim – it has won three more bookers since Midnight’s Children: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in 1997, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in 2006, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger in 2008. Penguin has also stated that India is the fastest growing market for English publishing.

Questions of whether Indians can write in English have therefore been silenced. The questions that still rage unanswered are those regarding the authenticity and validity, or rather the Indianness, of IEL. M. Prabhe, in her book The Waffle of the Toffs, asks not whether IEL is ‘authentic’, but whether Indian English authors are “silencing authentic voices by usurping the cultural space of the nation themselves” (170).

Regional language authors feel that IEL is incapable of successfully capturing the culture and life of India, whereas regional language literature is able to achieve this. Ashokamitran says,

Being rooted eludes writers like Naipaul and Rushdie. Rushdie is extremely clever and he does try to be Indian but not successfully. The land and the community give a lot of support, subtly, to a writer. This distance from the community the IWE have, their sense of not belonging anywhere, their lack of emotive content, makes them prime candidates for a spiritual life, not writers. (Reddy, par. 10)

Paranjape also admits this shortcoming:

Because of a disjuncture between the language and social experience, because the text is written about people and events in a language which is not the language of those people, the natural tendency of an Indian English writer is to move away from society instead of toward it. There is an exception to this alienating clash between the medium and the culture when and if you write only about the people who speak in English in India. But if you did that you would be confined to writing about a very small section of people … the Indian English novel has by and large been a novel of retreat from social engagement, either into personal psychological reality as in Anita Desai or Arun Joshi, or it is formalistic, with verbal experimentation, virtuosity and display of skill in the manner of presentation as in Rushdie and Roy. (Paranjape, “Kiran Nagarkar”, 14)

Indeed, many writers of the IEL tradition have taken this into account and attempted to vernacularise and Indianise their English. What Rushdie calls “chutnification” is an example of this, using code-switching and code-mixing. Nissim Ezekiel took this further in his poems that examined the peculiarities of English usage that was and still remains typically Indian:

(From “The Patriot”)

I am standing for peace and non-violence.

Why world is fighting fighting

Why all people of the world

Are not following Mahatma Gandhi

I am simply not understanding.

Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,

I should say even 200%

I should say even 200% correct,

But modern generation is neglecting –

Too much going for fashion and foreign thing. (Ezekiel 5)

Aravind Adiga, in his Booker-winning debut novel The White Tiger, accounts for, or explains away this “alienating clash between the medium and the culture” in the manner in which his book his presented. The book is essentially a series of letters written by Balram, the protagonist of the book, to the Prime Minister of China. Balram is originally from a rural background and has never completed his schooling – English is certainly not his first language. Still, the necessity of having to write across international boundaries demands that Balram adopt the medium of English, for writing in a regional language would fail to achieve his purpose of communicating with the Chinese Prime Minister.

Others have approached this very differently. Kiran Nagarkar, in Cuckold, tells a story set in 16th century Mewar through the eyes of the Maharaj Kumar, the heir apparent to the throne of Mewar. The tale is narrated entirely in English, and makes an almost anachronistic usage of English idioms. This is, in a way, complimentary to the protagonist himself, who is an anachronism – he is a voice of modernity and progressive thinking in a medieval society entrenched in conservative ideals. Paranjape stresses upon this fact and highlights the anti-realist or almost fantastical element that Nagarkar is able to draw out by his conscious use of a medium that contradicts the culture. (“Kiran Nagarkar”, 15-16)

It is now evident that the debate over IEL is not simply over whether or not Indians can and should write in English, but is entirely a much more complex issue. On one level the entire debate boils down to an issue of labels – asking what constitutes “Indian English Literature” entails asking what constitutes “Indian English”, “Indian Literature”, and most importantly, “Indian”. Meenakshi Mukherjee makes an insightful point in this regard:

If I were to write a novel in Bengali I would not be called an Indian writer in Bengali, but simply a Bengali novelist, the epithet Bengali referring only to the language and not carrying any larger burden of culture, tradition or ethos. No one will write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness of the Bengali novel. But the issue of Indianness comes up with monotonous frequency in any discussion of novels written by Indians in English ... Seeing India as a symbol both in physical and metaphysical terms comes more naturally to the novelist in English than to the other novelists who take their India somewhat for granted and often deal with it piecemeal rather than in its totality. What it means to be an Indian is not a question that troubles the Marathi or the Bengali writer over much. (46-49)

Mukherjee’s statement is almost the final word on the matter. It is an undeniable truth – the very label “regional language writer” robs its bearer of a national identity. What language can claim to be pan-Indian? Indeed, what can be said to be pan-Indian, without question? If there is any language that seeks to represent “India”, it must be English. The issue is no longer about Indian English Literature’s place in India, but about English’s place in India – and enough has been said about this. On this matter, Kiran Nagarkar hits the nail on the head: “I was born on the cusp of independence, there was no point denying my colonial legacy as well as the new India. The only thing to do was to accept it and to make the most or the worst of it” (Chakladar, par. 3)

Like the implicit justification of the usage of English Adiga gives us in its communication across borders, English’s place in India is also implicitly justified in a nation that is essentially riven with boundaries – boundaries of community, caste, class, and most importantly in the context of this debate, boundaries of language. IEL’s use of English to travel outside the boundaries of the nation is well-known. What it needs to be allowed to achieve is to travel across the boundaries within the nation. In the absence of Indian English Literature – Indian literature in a language that is equally foreign to all Indians – there is no Indian literature. As Mukherjee points out, there will be Hindi literature, Bengali literature, Tamil literature, and so on, but an Indian who knows no Tamil will have to rely on translations into a language he knows to be able read his countryman’s and his country’s literature – and translations are not always available, nor are they always good. (Besides, if we are to abandon English altogether, then every regional language literature must be translated into every other regional language – a herculean task.) Within the framework of a nation like India, that is as much concept as it is nation, the existence of Indian English Literature is both necessary and inevitable.

A majority of the time, the problem is that IEL is too self-conscious. Indian English Literature is, in my opinion, too often about India – it is either the focus of the work, or the Indianness of the work is flailing its arms around, trying to make itself as conspicuous as possible. IEL is not without its hang-ups and neither are its readers. A lot of IEL, even the best of it, tends to betray some self-consciousness and a little insecurity about its own Indianness. But this is changing – I believe the total absence of such an insecurity was part of the phenomenal success behind Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone. Indian Literature in English will be propelled forward by Booker winners, but what it also needs is literature that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that is interested more in national readership than international acclaim.

Works Cited

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008.

Chakladar, Arnab. “A Conversation with Kiran Nagarkar.” Another Subcontinent. 21 Aug. 2005. 26 Nov. 2008 < http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/>.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “In Search of Critical Strategies” The Eye of the Beholder, Indian Writing in English. Ed. Maggie Butcher. London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Common Myths and Misconceptions about Indian English Literature”, New Quest 129 (May-June 1998): 134-144.

---. “Kiran Nagarkar and the Tradition of the Indian English Novel.” The Shifting Worlds of Kiran Nagarkar’s Fiction. Ed. Yasmeen Lukmani. New Delhi: Indialog, 2004. 1-24.

---. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History”. Economic and Political Weekly, 2 May 1998. 1049-1056.

Reddy, Sheela. “Midnight’s Orphans.” The Week, 25 Feb 2002.

Rushdie, Salman. “DAMME, THIS IS THE ORIENTAL SCENE FOR YOU!” The New Yorker, 23 June 1997.

Thayil, Jeet. “One Language, Separated by the Sea.” 60 Indian Poets. Ed. Jeet Thayil. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008. xi - xviii.

Joshi, Krishnanand, and Syamala B. Rao. Studies in Indo-Anglian Literature. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1970.

Prabha, M. The Waffle of the Toffs: A Sociocultural Critique of Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 2000.

---

[1] Henceforth referred to as IEL. May be variously referred to through this paper as Indian Writing in English, Indian Literature in English, etc.