What Was Once New in Indian PUblishing
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2005/06/05/stories/2005060500220400.htm
Opinion
That was once new in Indian writing
How do we distinguish the merely gimmicky from the really new? asks AMITAVA KUMAR
PHOTO: REUTERS
Irreverent tongue: Salman Rushdie.
EXTREMELY Loud and Incredibly Close is a new novel written by a young, under-30 American author with more-than-a-million-dollar advance. The story revolves around the grief of a nine-year-old narrator, a New Yorker, who has lost his father in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The author's name is Jonathan Safran Foer.
This novel has been described as "gimmicky" and "an overstuffed fortune cookie" because, apart from several blank pages and dramatic fonts, it also contains such unconventional devices as flip-book of video-stills arranged in reverse order so that a human being can be seen jumping up toward the top of the smoking twin towers.
The New York Times Book Review described Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as maddening enough to drive the mature reader to the bar for a stiff drink. Such judgments notwithstanding, the book continues to remain on the newspaper's bestseller list.
Impatient with the new?
My own views on that novel are similar, but I am still left with a set of questions: How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha — didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?
To find some answers I want to go back to the beginning. Let us return to the first novels written by writers who inaugurate what we call, inadequately and clumsily, but not wrongly, Indian writing in English. Those literary forebears of ours were trying, in their own way, to do something new. What was it?
I have just finished reading, for the first time, R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends. This was Narayan's first novel. When he had completed it, Narayan would mail it to a publisher in England and then wait for rejection — the whole process usually took about six weeks. In August 1931, Narayan finally handed the manuscript to his friend Purna, who was leaving for Oxford. Purna had been advised by the aspiring novelist "to weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames".
But fate intervened. One day Narayan received a cable from Oxford. It had been sent by Purna. It read: "Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible."
This drama of rejection — and chance acceptance — is important for several reasons. In the 1930s, when publishers and readers in the West were familiar only with fictions of the Raj, Narayan had taken the unusual step of writing about a school-boy in an imaginary South Indian town. Swami and Friends is an exploration of the intimate but ordinary, even humdrum, world of a middle-class childhood. History does make an appearance in these pages — we read of the nationalist movement, for instance — but it does so more like a paper-boat passing in a gutter filled with rainwater. It would have required a great deal of courage on Narayan's part, or at least a mix of naiveté and confidence, to create a world so unfamiliar to those who were going to appraise his manuscript. That, I think, is newness.
Another Indian writer who debuted the same year was Mulk Raj Anand, but unlike Narayan, Anand was engaged in a more active dialogue with the West. Anand wanted to be accepted by the friends he had courted in Bloomsbury; at the same time, he wanted his independence and strove to find it in his art.
At the heart of his novel Untouchable is the drama of a young man's desire not only to escape the oppressive caste system but to also become a sahib. Anand's protagonist, Bakha, wants to wear trousers, breeches, coat, puttees and boots. He smokes cigarettes rather than the hookah. Bakha also wants to be educated: "he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke." It is significant that in the very act of telling us that Bhakha wanted to be a sahib, Anand is able to Indianise the Englishman. The language of the sahib no longer remains English — it is recognisable only as "tish-mish, tish-mish".
Back in the 1980s, this is exactly the feeling that was aroused by Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Twenty years later, it might be argued, we are looking for more than a mixed language. Newness at this stage will come not only from an irreverent tongue, which is now a cliché, but a more accurate engagement with our complex realities, many of which have global dimensions.
The burden of explanation
In Untouchable, Anand's prose always bore the burden of explanation, as if he was trying to act as a guide to the English. On the other hand, by the end of the novel, the Englishman had lost his allure for Bakha. Ten years before the publication of Anand's novel, E.M. Forster had published his remarkable novel A Passage to India. Anand looked up to Forster because "this particular Englishman had leaned on the side of India". Later, Forster was to provide an admiring foreword to Untouchable. Anand must also have opened himself to the novel. And yet, in his own writing he attempted something entirely different; he undertook the task of critiquing caste-oppression in his own society.
Like U.R. Anantha Murthy in Birmingham three decades later, with Bergman's "Seventh Seal" and his teacher Malcolm Bradbury as his inspirations for his searing indictment of Brahmin hypocrisy, Anand used his conversations with writers like Forster and Virginia Woolf to write against untouchablity.
What was true then is also true now. In the case of current Indian writers working in English, what is new is also the result of the conversations ongoing with writers all over the world, older writers like Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Alice Munro, but also younger ones like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and, why not, even Jonathan Safran Foer.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several books, including Husband of a Fanatic published by Penguin India.
Opinion
That was once new in Indian writing
How do we distinguish the merely gimmicky from the really new? asks AMITAVA KUMAR
PHOTO: REUTERS
Irreverent tongue: Salman Rushdie.
EXTREMELY Loud and Incredibly Close is a new novel written by a young, under-30 American author with more-than-a-million-dollar advance. The story revolves around the grief of a nine-year-old narrator, a New Yorker, who has lost his father in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The author's name is Jonathan Safran Foer.
This novel has been described as "gimmicky" and "an overstuffed fortune cookie" because, apart from several blank pages and dramatic fonts, it also contains such unconventional devices as flip-book of video-stills arranged in reverse order so that a human being can be seen jumping up toward the top of the smoking twin towers.
The New York Times Book Review described Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as maddening enough to drive the mature reader to the bar for a stiff drink. Such judgments notwithstanding, the book continues to remain on the newspaper's bestseller list.
Impatient with the new?
My own views on that novel are similar, but I am still left with a set of questions: How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha — didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?
To find some answers I want to go back to the beginning. Let us return to the first novels written by writers who inaugurate what we call, inadequately and clumsily, but not wrongly, Indian writing in English. Those literary forebears of ours were trying, in their own way, to do something new. What was it?
I have just finished reading, for the first time, R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends. This was Narayan's first novel. When he had completed it, Narayan would mail it to a publisher in England and then wait for rejection — the whole process usually took about six weeks. In August 1931, Narayan finally handed the manuscript to his friend Purna, who was leaving for Oxford. Purna had been advised by the aspiring novelist "to weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames".
But fate intervened. One day Narayan received a cable from Oxford. It had been sent by Purna. It read: "Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible."
This drama of rejection — and chance acceptance — is important for several reasons. In the 1930s, when publishers and readers in the West were familiar only with fictions of the Raj, Narayan had taken the unusual step of writing about a school-boy in an imaginary South Indian town. Swami and Friends is an exploration of the intimate but ordinary, even humdrum, world of a middle-class childhood. History does make an appearance in these pages — we read of the nationalist movement, for instance — but it does so more like a paper-boat passing in a gutter filled with rainwater. It would have required a great deal of courage on Narayan's part, or at least a mix of naiveté and confidence, to create a world so unfamiliar to those who were going to appraise his manuscript. That, I think, is newness.
Another Indian writer who debuted the same year was Mulk Raj Anand, but unlike Narayan, Anand was engaged in a more active dialogue with the West. Anand wanted to be accepted by the friends he had courted in Bloomsbury; at the same time, he wanted his independence and strove to find it in his art.
At the heart of his novel Untouchable is the drama of a young man's desire not only to escape the oppressive caste system but to also become a sahib. Anand's protagonist, Bakha, wants to wear trousers, breeches, coat, puttees and boots. He smokes cigarettes rather than the hookah. Bakha also wants to be educated: "he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke." It is significant that in the very act of telling us that Bhakha wanted to be a sahib, Anand is able to Indianise the Englishman. The language of the sahib no longer remains English — it is recognisable only as "tish-mish, tish-mish".
Back in the 1980s, this is exactly the feeling that was aroused by Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Twenty years later, it might be argued, we are looking for more than a mixed language. Newness at this stage will come not only from an irreverent tongue, which is now a cliché, but a more accurate engagement with our complex realities, many of which have global dimensions.
The burden of explanation
In Untouchable, Anand's prose always bore the burden of explanation, as if he was trying to act as a guide to the English. On the other hand, by the end of the novel, the Englishman had lost his allure for Bakha. Ten years before the publication of Anand's novel, E.M. Forster had published his remarkable novel A Passage to India. Anand looked up to Forster because "this particular Englishman had leaned on the side of India". Later, Forster was to provide an admiring foreword to Untouchable. Anand must also have opened himself to the novel. And yet, in his own writing he attempted something entirely different; he undertook the task of critiquing caste-oppression in his own society.
Like U.R. Anantha Murthy in Birmingham three decades later, with Bergman's "Seventh Seal" and his teacher Malcolm Bradbury as his inspirations for his searing indictment of Brahmin hypocrisy, Anand used his conversations with writers like Forster and Virginia Woolf to write against untouchablity.
What was true then is also true now. In the case of current Indian writers working in English, what is new is also the result of the conversations ongoing with writers all over the world, older writers like Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Alice Munro, but also younger ones like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and, why not, even Jonathan Safran Foer.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several books, including Husband of a Fanatic published by Penguin India.
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