IN his introduction to the recently published The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri insists that "this anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology". But riposte it is. The thoughtful, if often provocative, organisation and presentation of modern Indian writing in this volume comes as a timely rejoinder to prevailing literary orthodoxies, held in place by a pantheon of postcolonial critics, commentators, editors and anthologisers. According to Chaudhuri, the current critical consensus on Indian literature is constrained by a series of lamentable "misreadings".
Such misreadings are visible in, for example, the privileging of Indian-English writing over its vernacular counterparts; the valorisation of the novel form with its new found respectability (akin, Chaudhuri maintains, to dentistry) over other genres, specifically poetry; and, finally, in the unthinking celebration of postmodern pastiche over the quieter, and possibly more profound, pleasures of realism. This position, readers may recall, stands in stark contrast to the one assumed by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West in their controversial, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997.
Where Rushdie and West informed their international audience that English "India novels" constituted a "more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 'official languages' of India", Chaudhuri, irascibly, begs to differ. How, he asks, would the "West" react, if , in the event of some unanticipated bibliographic disaster, all of Britain's modern and ancient cultures disappeared from view, leaving the rest of the world to judge English literature on the basis of a few paltry contemporary novels? What if Julian Barnes, Angela Carter and Martin Amis, alone, were entrusted with the literary labour of bringing England out of an apparent age of obscurity? An absurd prospect, but no more so than the situation where, "Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England and America and whom one might have met at a party, most of whom have published no more than two novels, some of them only one".
Why, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature seems to ask, should Europe alone claim the privilege of representing itself as a whole culture? And, even more important, why should the Indian reader/writer collude in the arbitrary fracturing of her complex and confluent literary inheritance? Once, writing in the wake of the barbarisation and ghettoisation of culture perpetrated by Nazism in Europe, the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, extolled, as politically expedient, a composite view of European literature. Faced with the regional, cultural and religious divisiveness of the time, the critic, he believed, was ethically obliged to show the presence of "Homer in Virgil, Virgil in Dante, Plutarch and Seneca in Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen ... the Odyssey in Joyce; Aeschylus, Petronious, Dante ... Spanish mysticism in T. S. Eliot". Albeit on a lesser scale, the anthology under review is driven by similar convictions.
Refusing to indulge the false (and damaging) linguistic hierarchies so apparent in the Rushdie and West anthology, this volume draws our attention, anew, to the symbiotic development of vernacular and English literatures in modern India. If colonial education led directly to the rise of English in this country, it also provoked a concurrent efflorescence within the vernacular languages. So much so, that "many of the greatest and most interesting writers in the vernacular languages were or are students or teachers of English literature". The immediate benefit of this liberating perspective is that it opens up the very culture of Indian secular modernity to a vertiginous variety of voices and views. If the epochal publication of Midnight's Children conferred on modern Indian history, "the air of a fancy dress party ... full of chatter, music, sex, tomfoolery, free drinks and rock and roll", the diverse writers gathered in this collection complicate that vision. For the crisis of modernity also speaks its name, poignantly and eloquently, in Michael Madhusudan Dutt's self-divided cosmopolitanism, in Nirmal Verma's stark European landscapes, in O. V. Vijayan's mystical atheism, and in the Oriya memoirist Fakir Mohan Senapati's struggle against the hegemony of Bengali.
Aspects of this anthology may well alienate some readers. The editorial headnotes are chatty to a fault, and the selections themselves are fairly idiosyncratic. Bengal is predictably pre- eminent, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu literatures are clumped together under a featureless "The South", and there is something puzzling about the omission of Maharashtra from a volume devoted to the representation of Indian secular modernity. So too, one is not always persuaded by Chaudhuri's protestations about the very literary fashions of which he is, in some ways, a direct beneficiary as a new-Indian-writer-in-English. Nonetheless, the clarity of editorial purpose and the elegance of most translations are exemplary, and invite us to welcome The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature as a major literary event.
(Leela gandhi is Co-Editor of Post-Colonial Studies and teaches English at the School of English, La Trope University, Australia.)
{As on the Online Edition of 'The Hindu', Sunday, August 19, 2001}
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