Step Across This Line (19 page)

The question of religious faith, both as a subject and as an approach to a subject, is clearly important when we speak of a country as bursting with devotions as India; but it is surely excessive to use it, as does one leading academic, the redoubtable Professor C. D. Narasimhaiah, as a touchstone, so that Mulk Raj Anand is praised for his “daring” merely because, as a leftist writer, he allows a character to be moved by deep faith, while Arun Kolatkar’s poetry is denigrated for “throwing away tradition and creating a vacuum,” and so “losing relevance,” because in
Jejuri,
a cycle of poems about a visit to a temple town, he skeptically likens the stone gods in the temples to the stones on the hillsides nearby (“and every other stone / is god or his cousin”). In fact, many of the writers I admire have profound knowledge of the “soul of India”; many have deeply spiritual concerns, while others are radically secular, but the need to engage with, to make a reckoning with, India’s religious self is everywhere to be found.

The cheapening of artistic response implied by the allegations of deracination and Westernization is notably absent from these writers’ work. As to the claims of excessive Rushdie-itis, I can’t deny that I used on occasion to feel something of the sort myself. However, it was a short-lived virus. Those whom it affected soon shook it off and found their own true voices. And these days more or less everyone seems immune to the disease.

At any rate, there is not, need not be, should not be, an adversarial relationship between English-language literature and the other literatures of India. In my own case, and I suspect in the case of every Indian writer in English, knowing and loving the Indian languages in which I was raised has remained of vital personal and artistic importance. As an individual, I know that Hindi-Urdu, the “Hindustani” of North India, remains an essential aspect of my sense of self; as a writer, I have been partly formed by the presence, in my head, of that other music, the rhythms, patterns, and habits of thought and metaphor of my Indian tongues.

Whatever language we write in, we drink from the same well. India, that inexhaustible horn of plenty, nourishes us all.

The first Indian novel in English was a dud.
Rajmohan’s Wife
(1864) is a poor melodramatic thing. The writer, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, reverted to Bengali and immediately achieved great renown. For seventy years or so there was no English-language fiction of any quality. It was the generation of Independence, “midnight’s parents,” one might call them, who were the true architects of this new tradition. (Jawaharlal Nehru himself was a fine writer; his autobiography and letters are important, influential works. And his niece, Nayantara Sahgal, whose early memoir
Prison and Chocolate Cake
contains perhaps the finest evocation of the heady time of Independence, went on to become a major novelist.)

In that generation, Mulk Raj Anand was influenced by both Joyce and Marx but most of all, perhaps, by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. He is best known for social-realist works like the novel
Coolie,
a study of working-class life reminiscent of post-war Italian neo-realist cinema (De Sica’s
Bicycle Thief,
Rossellini’s
Open City
). Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanskritist, wrote determinedly of the need to make an Indian English for himself, but even his much-praised portrait of village life,
Kanthapura,
now seems dated, its approach at once grandiloquent and archaic. The centenarian autobiographer Nirad C. Chaudhuri has been, throughout his long life, an erudite, contrary, and mischievous presence. His view, if I may paraphrase and summarize it, is that India has no culture of its own, and that whatever we now call Indian culture was brought in from outside by the successive waves of conquerors. This view, polemically and brilliantly expressed, has not endeared him to many of his fellow-Indians. That he has always swum so strongly against the current has not, however, prevented
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
from being recognized as the masterpiece it is.

The most significant writers of this first generation, R. K. Narayan and G. V. Desani, have had opposite careers. Narayan’s books fill a good-sized shelf; Desani is the author of a single work of fiction,
All About H. Hatterr,
and that singleton volume is already fifty years old. Desani is almost unknown, while R. K. Narayan is, of course, a figure of world stature, for his creation of the imaginary town of Malgudi, so lovingly made that it has become more vividly real to us than most real places. (But Narayan’s realism is leavened by touches of legend; the river Sarayu, on whose shores the town sits, is one of the great rivers of Hindu mythology. It is as if William Faulkner had set his Yoknapatawpha County on the banks of the Styx.)

Narayan shows us, over and over again, the quarrel between traditional, static India, on the one hand, and modernity and progress, on the other; represented, in many of his stories and novels, by a confrontation between a “wimp” and a “bully”—The Painter of Signs and his aggressive beloved with her birth control campaign; The Vendor of Sweets and the emancipated American daughter-in-law with the absurd “novel writing machine”; the mild-mannered printer and the extrovert taxidermist in
The Man-Eater of Malgudi.
In his gentle, lightly funny art, he goes to the heart of the Indian condition and, beyond it, into the human condition itself.

The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G. V. Desani, has fallen so far from favor that the extraordinary
All About H. Hatterr
is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson’s
Clarissa
or Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy,
and if Narayan is India’s Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other.
Hatterr
’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, “fifty-fifty of the species,” the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind the work of many of his successors:

The earth was blotto with the growth of willow, peach, mango-blossom, and flower. Every ugly thing, and smell, was in incognito, as fragrance and freshness. Being prone, this typical spring-time dash and activity, played an exulting phantasmagoria-note on the inner-man. Medically speaking, the happy circumstances vibrated my ductless glands, and fused me into a wibble-wobble
Whoa, Jamieson!
fillip-and-flair to
live, live!

Or, again:

The incidents take place in India. I was exceedingly hard-up of cash: actually, in debts. And, it is amazing, how, out in the Orient, the shortage of cash gets mixed up with romance and females somehow! In this England, they say, if a fellah is broke, females, as matter of course, forsake. Stands to reason. Whereas, out in the East, they attach themselves! Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!

This is “babu-English,” the semi-literate, half-learned English of the bazaars, transmuted by erudition, highbrow monkeying around, and the impish magic of Desani’s unique phrasing and rhythm, into an entirely new kind of literary voice. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy’s more recent, Eurasian comic-epic
The Trotter-Nama,
an enormous tome full of interpolations, exclamations, resumptions, encomiums, and catastrophes, without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.

Ved Mehta is well known both for his astute commentaries on the Indian scene and for his several distinguished volumes of autobiography. The first of these is the most moving:
Vedi,
a memoir of a blind boyhood that describes cruelties and kindnesses with equal dispassion and great affect. (More recently, Firdaus Kanga, in his autobiographical fiction
Trying to Grow,
has also transcended physical affliction with high style and comic brio.)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of the Booker Prize–winning
Heat and Dust
(afterward made into a Merchant-Ivory movie), is a renowned master of the short-story form. As a writer, she is sometimes under-rated in India because, I think, the voice of the rootless intellectual (so quintessentially her voice) is such an unfamiliar one in that country where people’s self-definitions are so rooted in their regional identities.

That Ruth Jhabvala has a second career as an award-winning screenwriter is well known. But not many people realize that India’s greatest film director, the late Satyajit Ray, was also an accomplished author of short stories. His father edited a famous Bengali children’s magazine,
Sandesh,
and Ray’s biting little fables are made more potent by their childlike charm.

Anita Desai, one of India’s major living authors, merits comparison with Jane Austen. In novels such as
Clear Light of Day
—written in a clear, light English full of subtle atmospherics—she displays both her exceptional skill at social portraiture and an unsparing, Austen-like mordancy of insight into human motivations.
In Custody,
perhaps her best novel to date, finely uses English to depict the decay of another language, Urdu, and the high literary culture that lived in it. Here the poet, the last, boozing, decrepit custodian of the dying tradition, is (in a reversal of Narayan) the “bully”; and the novel’s central character, the poet’s young admirer Deven, is the “wimp.” The dying past, the old world, Desai tells us, can be as much of a burden as the awkward, sometimes wrongheaded present.

Though V. S. Naipaul approaches India as an outsider, his engagement with it has been so intense that no account of its modern literature would be complete without him. His three non-fiction books on India,
An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization,
and
India: A Million Mutinies Now,
are key texts, and not only because of the hackles they have raised. Many Indian critics have taken issue with the harshness of his responses. Some have fair-mindedly conceded that he does attack things worth attacking. “I’m anti-Naipaul when I visit the West,” one leading South Indian novelist told me, “but I’m often pro-Naipaul back home.”

Some of Naipaul’s targets, like—this is from
A Wounded Civilization
—the intermediate-technology institute that invents “reaping boots” (with blades attached) for Indian peasants to use to harvest grain, merit the full weight of his scorn. At other times he appears merely supercilious. India, his migrant ancestors’ lost paradise, cannot stop disappointing him. By the third volume of the series, however, he seems more cheerful about the country’s condition. He speaks approvingly of the emergence of “a central will, a central intellect, a national idea,” and disarmingly, even movingly, confesses to the atavistic edginess of mood in which he had made his first trip almost thirty years earlier: “The India of my fantasy and heart was something lost and irrecoverable. . . . On that first journey, I was a fearful traveler.”

In
An Area of Darkness,
Naipaul’s comments on Indian writers elicit in this reader a characteristic mixture of agreement and dissent. When he writes,

The feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian “language” writers. This is possible; 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 assertions that poverty was sad, that death was sad . . . many of the “modern” short stories were only refurbished folk tales,

then he is expressing, in his emphatic, unafraid way, what I have also felt. (Though I think more highly of Premchand than he.) When he goes on to say,

The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls “the basic human hunger for the unseen.” It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels,

then I can go only some of the way with him. It is true that many learned Indians go in for a sonorously impenetrable form of critico-mysticism. I once heard an Indian writer of some renown, and much interest in India’s ancient wisdoms, expounding his theory of what one might call Motionism. “Consider Water,” he advised us. “Water without Motion is—what? Is a lake. Very well. Now, Water plus Motion is—what? Is a river. You see? The Water is still the same Water. Only Motion has been added. By the same token,” he continued, making a breathtaking intellectual leap, “Language is Silence, to which Motion has been added.”

(A fine Indian poet, who was sitting beside me in the great man’s audience, murmured in my ear: “Bowel without Motion is—what? Is constipation! Bowel plus Motion is—what? Is shit!”)

I agree with Naipaul that mysticism is bad for novelists. But in the India I know, for every obfuscating Motionist, there is a debunking Bowelist whispering in one’s ear. For every unworldly seeker for the ancient wisdoms of the East, there is a clear-eyed witness responding to the here and now in precisely that fashion which Naipaul inaccurately calls uniquely Western. And when Naipaul concludes by saying that in the aftermath of the “abortive” Indo-British encounter, India is little more than a very Naipaulian community of mimic men—that the country’s artistic life has stagnated, “the creative urge” has “failed”; that “Shiva has ceased to dance”—then I fear we part company altogether.
An Area of Darkness
was written as long ago as 1964, a mere seventeen years after Independence, and a little early for an obituary notice. The growing quality of Indian writing in English may yet change his mind.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the flow of that good writing has become a flood. Bapsi Sidhwa is technically Pakistani, but literature has no need of Partitions, particularly as Sidhwa’s novel
Cracking India
is one of the finest responses to the horror of the division of the subcontinent. Gita Mehta’s
A River Sutra
is an important attempt by a thoroughly modern Indian to make her reckoning with the Hindu culture from which she emerged. Padma Perera, Anjana Appachana (
Listening Now
), and Githa Hariharan, less well known than Sidhwa and Mehta, confirm the quality of contemporary writing by Indian women.