London Book Fair- Focus on Indian Writing

The London Book Fair is hosting a conference on Indian writing. Amit Chaudhuri reviews it here.


In search of India This year's London book fair celebrates the diversity of contemporary Indian writing. How much do the novelists of the new generation have in common, asks Amit Chaudhuri. Writers and publishers recommend old favourites and rising stars
Amit Chaudhuri
The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009
Article history

The theme of the London book fair this year is Indian writing. Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, William Dalrymple and other writers in frequent circulation in this country are going to be joined by writers - K Satchidanandan, Javed Akhtar - distinguished or popular on their own terrain but less known here, for five days of discussions and celebrations. Something like this happened in 2006 to the Frankfurt book fair, when planeloads of Indian novelists and poets descended on the Intercontinental Hotel, waved to each other over breakfast, and then read from their work to courteous audiences in the afternoons and evenings.

The theme then, too, was India; and the "idea of India" acted as a catalyst to a process that might have already begun, but received, at that moment, a recognisable impetus - the confluence, in one place, of literary and intellectual dialogue with what is basically business activity, each bringing magic and movement to the other. The India-themed Paris book fair followed swiftly.

Both these events proved a few things. Firstly, you were reminded of the variety of genres that Indian writers - especially those who write in languages other than English - had practised for much of the 20th century. In the hotel lobbies, the cafés and restaurants in adjoining streets, not to speak of the venues, you kept running into poets, critics, short-story writers, historians, playwrights from the many Indian literatures; and, of course, novelists. The English language had, it would seem, only thrown up novelists in India in the last 30 years; the truth is that there were and are excellent English-language poets, but few, or none, had been invited.

As to the writers from the more troubled regions outside the metropolitan suburbs in which English alone was spoken, you could see, if you scratched the surface of their slightly bureaucratic veneer, that they possessed an eclecticism of taste and literary predilections, a formal curiosity, as well as a true multilingualism, that made them quite akin - paradoxically for brown men wandering about the streets of Frankfurt and Paris - to the breed of writers once called "European". However, no one, I think, asked them about their relationship to Europe, though each of them would have had an answer to the question; this was a reminder of the odd discrepancy between language - and I don't just mean English and French and Hindi - and vantage-point and intention that sometimes characterised interactions between audiences and writers.

The other thing that hit you was the amount of money the Indian government had to spare for culture; it was one of the main sponsors of these events, and had made these migratory, crowded, but characteristically desultory congregations possible. Why now? And just how much thought had gone into the meetings and readings? Perhaps a great deal more could have been done over the decades following independence to give us a greater and more acute sense of our literary history as moderns, especially as more funding seemed to have been available than had been assumed. We in India have no equivalent of the Modern Library, for instance, nor anything like the Penguin Modern European Poets series, let alone properly influential critical and scholarly work on 20th-century literature. Are the book fairs, with their new kind of commingling, sending out a hint - perhaps an unintended one - about the timeliness of such initiatives to their organisers?

Another revealing aspect of Frankfurt and Paris was the evidently unconstricted and even unpredictable way foreign rights were sold by Indian publishers (without, necessarily, British mediation) to European countries: this explained the random mix of celebrities and little-known practitioners, of the "latest thing" in Indian writing in English as well as the older and occasionally infirm writers (members of a deceased avant-garde) in the Indian languages. Some of these people have hardly been translated into English, but are often available in French or German, and there are students writing doctorates on their work. The putative common pool of the Indo-European languages (established at first in the late 18th century by a Welshman, William Jones, and put into circulation in Europe by the Germans Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe and later Max Mueller) probably - who knows? - still stirs faintly in the memory of European academia as it hardly does in the Anglo-Saxon world. Or, possibly, the fact that these countries have less of a direct relationship with India than Britain allows for the frequently hit-or-miss but sometimes surprising nature of the Indian list on the European publishers' catalogues.

What will London bring that Frankfurt and Paris haven't? Certainly, it seems to have taken the cue from the two European cities in at least one regard: it hasn't invited only those writers who are published in this country - that is, Anglophone writers of prose. So, for instance, we will have, besides Vikram Seth, Ramachandra Guha and Patrick French, the Urdu-language theorist Gopi Chand Narang, the Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Ganguly, and the English-language poet and novelist Mamang Dai from the idyllic, remote Arunachal Pradesh. In other words, the book fair should bring some intimation to audiences in London of an explosion in writing that is not 30 but perhaps 200 years old, the consequence of a venerable, many-tongued, and still astonishing lineage in modernism.

There will also be two writers who have aired their disagreements with each other in these pages - the Englishman William Radice, poet, translator of Tagore, and, until recently, poet laureate-aspirant, and the younger Jeet Thayil, poet, critic, editor of an anthology of Indian poetry in English, and defender (odd but instructive that it should need defending even now, in a way that Indian fiction no longer does) of the continued viability of Indian English poetry. Not all of these choices are risky ones; many of these writers (myself included) now spend a fair amount of time in the ghostly, mnemonic world of international book fairs, in their guise as crowded transit lounges for the nation; here we wait, eat, talk to each other, ignore acquaintances, as the difference between airport, venue and hotel gradually diminishes. But does this journey lead somewhere? Will it change the way Indian writing is configured within British publishing?

How does travel shape and qualify writing and nationality (a common enough conundrum), especially when they take on this form - the transcontinental literary event; the book reading in a foreign location? And how do these writers cohere and relate to each other in our minds: what is it, besides the book fair and perhaps the place of birth on their passports or some long-standing enthusiasm, that makes K Satchidanandan and Tarun J Tejpal and Dalrymple all, in some sense, "Indian" writers? One thing we do know is that travel is not only about bringing your particular skills, wares, identity and lineage to a place, but being changed by, and learning from, the act of travelling and facing up to foreignness. In roughly the past 20 years India has changed from being a Nehruvian nation-state - an experiment and ideal in democracy - to a portable mode of existence, as well as a form of self-justification for a curious mixture of free-market opportunism and a slyly conservative provincialism. This means that Indians, as they travel, migrate and resettle, have increasingly begun to deflect the problem - and the rewards - of encountering foreignness, and strangeness, and the notion of "India" has helped them in (has, in fact, been crucial to) this deflection. The so-called Indian diaspora ceased, really, to want either to integrate with, or radically revise, the landscape they moved to in the 1980s and 90s (usually, the United States, succeeding the earlier wave of immigration to Britain); instead, they wished to conform silently and, simultaneously, to continue as themselves. This has led to a unique combination of acceptance and denial.

In 2002, spending some months in America, I found an array of young first-generation Indian settlers in the more well-to-do suburbs of New Jersey and Atlanta, almost entirely, and pretty aggressively, committed to American foreign policy and the Bush dispensation, and yet also clinging to Indian film songs and DVDs and food and marriages, a universe on which contemporary American culture, and Americans themselves, impinged only rarely. This was one of the many recognisable versions of "India" that have sprung up in the last two decades, where "foreignness" does not actually occur in any compelling way. Jhumpa Lahiri has only recently begun to hint - with a delicate abstention from the obvious - at the silence that surrounds this microcosm, in the stories in her bestselling collection Unaccustomed Earth

So much of what the Indian middle class sees as its ideal present and its possible future, including its thoughts on the role of literature, emanates from, or emerges in relation to, these American suburbs. In a survey undertaken last year, it turned out that India lagged behind America alone in its love for that country and for George Bush. ("India" here is a metonym for the middle class, and vice versa.) In the Clinton era, and even more pronouncedly in the Bush era, the US came to be seen as a facilitator of India's own teeming, importunate ambitions, for its true place in the world, and, therefore, as a familial figure, in keeping with the Indian middle class's interpretation of family, as an institution that is primarily a guarantor of self-interest. When India looks at America, it sees a comforting or discomfiting (according to the phase of history it then inhabits) extension of its own welfare - much in the way that a child invents its mother.

This version of the familial also seems to direct the way a large number of Anglophone Indians view what they think of as literature. Their incongruously intimate, emotion-prone and proprietorial relationship with the Booker prize is a case in point. Here, feelings of self-approbation and self-doubt characterise the response to the outcome; and rarely was this inability to escape anxieties to do with prestige clearer than in 2008, when there were two Indians on the shortlist. An uneasy family drama ensued in India, with scorn being poured on one Indian, Aravind Adiga, and felicitations being made prematurely to the other, Amitav Ghosh. When Adiga won, there was patrician outrage; national - or family - pride had been violated. Word had soon got out in the British press that the other serious contender for the prize besides Adiga, as far as the judges were concerned, was Sebastian Barry. This Irish writer, however, hardly penetrated the Indian consciousness, and nor had the others on the list besides the two mentioned; the heterogeneity of Anglophone writing is not something that Indians are any longer prepared to do business with. Similarly, there's a sense, in the context of the new, middle-class Indian, of an end to the notion of travel as disjunction and discovery.

Travel, anyway, shapes the literary festival, the book fair, in paradoxically enclosing ways, and with a degree of unreality. You cover great distances, sometimes, to arrive at the literary festival, but the festival itself is a province, an enclosure. This special provincialism and curious lack of movement becomes more intense when the theme is nationality, or a national literature, as has been the case with the "international" festivals concerning India this century.

It started in 2002 at Neemrana, a heritage fort outside Delhi converted into a luxury hotel, where the Indian Council for Cultural Relations hosted the first India-themed literary conference, a gathering of well-known writers with the polarising figure of VS Naipaul at the centre. For three days, the writers read from and discussed their work to and with each other; there was access neither to the public nor to the world outside the ancient fortress walls. It was a bit like a Walter de la Mare ghost story, with several sinister and incredible possibilities hanging in the air simultaneously; and the feeling of circularity and repetition was confirmed later, when the conference moved to Delhi and was opened to the public, and India turned out to be almost the only point of reference in the conversations and the questions and answers.

Personally, I think I could find out more about myself by asking Ian Jack (to take a random example; he wasn't present at Neemrana) what he thinks about Hugh MacDiarmid or Muriel Spark, or the Scottish education system in the 60s, or his experiences as a newspaper editor in Thatcher's England, than by interrogating him on India; this is because we're both - as a Bengali and a Scotsman - historical beings invested and implicated in the 20th and unfolding 21st centuries, and will address each other most profoundly, despite our differences, only by addressing our own deepest memories about ourselves. I think the Scotsman understands this, which is why he doesn't constantly ask me what I think about Scotland; but I wonder if the Indian does. To constantly look for yourself even when you encounter the foreign is never to travel; while we know that it's in observing and overhearing others as we journey that we often discover unexpected dimensions of ourselves.

The question, then, is whether, and in what ways, the literary festival or book fair (in Frankfurt or Paris or Delhi or London) can open up to the fact of foreignness and travel.

In Paris, I remember, most of us stayed in our hotel rooms, or idly explored the huge, over-populated venue; on the bus between hotel and venue, I said to the Kannada novelist UR Anantha Murthy (who will be present in London), "Is that the real Eiffel tower?" - for we'd seen it from many angles outside the bus window in the last day and a half, illuminated during the night, deceptively proximate by daylight, a consoling fiction. Anantha Murthy shook his head gravely at its dogged ubiquity, at the very fact that the tower outside the window denoted at once that we were irrefutably in Paris and yet never in it, and said: "To escape the Eiffel tower you have to go inside it," adding, with a smile: "I think it was Barthes who said that." Much the same could be said of identity and nationality; that, for their monumental, visible qualities to evaporate, you have to somehow disappear into them. Anantha Murthy's (for me, utterly surprising) remark made me aware, momentarily, of the contingencies of travel and literature in a way that few of the seminars did: that I knew almost as little, or as much, about his sensibility as I did about Paris.

This admission brings me back to the question: how are Indian writers located within a single space - a hotel lobby; a seminar room; a tradition - actually related to each other? I asked myself this for the first time as I began to put together, at the beginning of the 2000s, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature: what, for example, connected the 19th-century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt to Salman Rushdie, Rushdie to UR Anantha Murthy, and Anantha Murthy to Vikram Seth? The generic word "Indian" by itself provided no key. But the idea of travel did - not just travel within these writers' lives, but form and canon and genre themselves being kinds of travel, of experiencing the foreign. Anantha Murthy had discovered his subject-matter - an existential tale about a Brahmin set in rural Karnataka - while watching Bergman's The Seventh Seal, without subtitles, in Birmingham with his supervisor Malcolm Bradbury; Rushdie had read The Tin Drum in an almost auditory mode (he could hear the resounding drumbeat) and had also been studying Buñuel and Satyajit Ray; Dutt, in the early 1860s, had begun to refine the sonnet in the Bengali language in the melancholy of Versailles; while Seth, more than a 100 years later, had been struck by the ebullience of Pushkin's use of the tetrameter and the sonnet in Eugene Onegin. All this - that is, the movements and paths along which Indian literature had been shaped in the past 200 years - had occurred before fax machines and the internet had come into existence; before the knowledge that accrues with travel had become information, and when travel was still a code for survival and daydreaming, and almost an unspoken faith.

Tagore came to England as an unhappy teenager in 1878, and heard western music properly almost for the first time; more than 40 years later, in what might be read as a gesture of reciprocity, he arranged for the Bauhaus artists' works to be exhibited in Calcutta. In the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came to India, hung out with the avant-garde Calcutta poets (of whom one, Sunil Ganguly, will be attending the London book fair in a more canonical incarnation), went to Bombay and met, among others, the poets Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and Nissim Ezekiel, and returned to America with various manifestos and poems ready for translation. Around this time, and very soon after Robert Lowell published his Imitations, the bilingual Arun Kolatkar (who died five years ago) had begun to compose his extraordinary contemporary versions in English of the Marathi medieval devotional saint-poet Tukaram.

When I think of these moments, I'm reminded afresh of the emergence of literature as a network and a form of complex, far-flung exchange, long before the emergence of "information" and present-day modes of travel. It's this mystery that informs the list of "favourite" writers Kolatkar provides for an Indian interviewer in a mood of exasperation and mischievousness, a list in which the dead and the living, like and unlike, mingle disconcertingly: "Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei. Tu Fu, Han Shan ... Mandelshtam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg ... Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais ... Rex Stout, Agatha Christie ... Bhalchandra Nemade ... Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji ... Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker ... Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy."

This is probably as good an intellectual history of Indian literature as any other. Uncontained by either genre or nationality, it happens to contain two figures - the "untouchable" Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal and the Marathi novelist-critic Bhalchandra Nemade - who'll also be making their way this week to London. It remains to be seen if any of the others mentioned will put in an appearance.

'Many have a unique sense of voice - vibrant, down-to-earth, alive'
I recommend Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld (1972-2006). It is raw, disturbing stuff. I don't agree with his politics now (he supports the Hindutva brigade), but his work should be read because it tells of what a brutal society we live in.
Arundhati Roy, novelist

Published in England by the Hogarth Press in 1940 - and championed by Woolf and Forster - Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi was one of the first Indian novels to create a stir among literary circles in England. And not just among literary circles - the printers refused, at first, to publish it because of its critical comments about colonial rule. Set in Old Delhi in 1911 at the time of George V's coronation ceremony, it describes the life of Mir Nihal and his family. They live in a world conscious that its glory days (during the Mughal empire) have long since passed. Ali's style may seem ornate to some readers, but his description of the dying world of Delhi is gloriously atmospheric, and the rhythms of the language pull you in.
Kamila Shamsie, novelist

Qurratulain Hyder, novelist, short story writer and prose stylist of rare accomplishment, is one of Urdu's greatest writers. Literary critic Aamer Hussein has compared her to her contemporaries, Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as "one of the world's major writers: eclectic, iconoclastic and versatile". In her 30s, she wrote her magnum opus, Aag ka Darya - published in English for the first time in 1998 as River of Fire - a great river of a novel, majestic in its sweep, grand in its vision. She maintained that writing can encompass "fact, reportage, imagination, documentary presentation, the epistolary form", even cinematic treatment. All her novels, novellas and short stories are a testament to this belief, as well as to her cosmopolitanism and uncompromising secularism.
Ritu Menon, founder of Women Unlimited, India's oldest feminist press

Daniyal Mueenuddin's outstanding collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is rooted in a rural landscape, like the stories of RK Narayan, but is far blacker than Narayan's work, with the trajectory of each story ending in a shell-burst of loss and tragedy. Mueenuddin looks for inspiration not to the writing of south Asia but to Turgenev and Chekov, and the bleakness of vision of Dostoyevsky or Gogol. His Pakistan is visually beautiful - there are wonderful sketches of the rhythms of the landscape with its clouds and banyan trees and mango orchards, its sugar-cane fields and the sound of "water running through the reeds in the canal" - but it is also brutal and savage. Other Rooms is quite unlike anything recently published in India, and throws the gauntlet down to a new generation of Indian writers. Pakistan as a force in literature seems to be gaining greater momentum every day.
William Dalrymple, writer

Few writers have travelled so far - literally and metaphorically - as a young woman born in 1968 in a village in the Tiruchy district of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Rokkaiah dropped out of school in the 9th grade, and was married off early and against her will to a conservative Muslim family (like her own). She started writing poetry at the age of 13, and, despite strong familial pressure to stop, continued - writing under cover of night, and publishing under a pseudonym, Salma, that would soon be known throughout the state and beyond. Salma has published two collections of poetry, Oru Malaiyum, Innoru Malaiyum ("One Evening, Another Evening") and Pachai Devadhai ("The Green Goddess") - powerful, lyrical and explicit explorations of women's lives trapped in their homes. Along with three other poets, Salma in 2003 faced charges of obscenity (as well as death-threats). A female Muslim writer in India is a rarity; one who writes with such frankness about sex and sexuality is even rarer. On top of this, being an active and respected local politician and social activist makes Salma unique.
Anita Roy, Zubaan Books

Nirad C Chaudhuri is seen as an anachronism now, though in the 1960s VS Naipaul wrote that his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was "the one great book to come out of the Indo-English encounter". Chaudhuri loved to be a controversialist, "to make mischief", as he put it, and he spent the last half of his very long life (1897-1999) upsetting as many people and orthodoxies as he could find the time to meet or examine. Chaudhuri was a genuine polymath. He wrote studies of Hinduism and biographies of Robert Clive and Max Mueller, and most of his work was marked by pugnacious and often wrong-headed judgments. But Autobiography and its sequel Thy Hand, Great Anarch! give a wonderful picture of Indian life in the first half of the last century, as well as of the author's remarkable progress from a Bengali village to a flat in north Oxford. No other Indian author has written so interestingly or frankly about himself, at least in the English language. Take the scene on the bridal bed after Chaudhuri and his new wife have just gone through their wedding rituals and are tentatively trying to get to know each other. As a great Europhile, Chaudhuri wants to know if she's heard any western classical music. She indicates that she hasn't. But has she heard of Beethoven? Yes. Can she perhaps spell his name? "She said slowly: 'B, E, E, T, H, O, V, E, N.' I felt very encouraged. After that we talked about other things aimlessly and dozed off."
Ian Jack, writer and editor

Sadaat Hasan Manto, who worked primarily as a scriptwriter in Bombay before partition, and moved to Pakistan, is the Indian Isaac Babel, a writer of dark, savage beauty, who portrayed the underbelly of Indian life like no other. I believe that the fiction coming out of Pakistan at the moment - by writers such as Mohammed Hanif, Moni Mohsin and Daniyal Mueenuddin - is the most interesting in the subcontinent. These writers are telling stories that we haven't heard before.
Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief, Random House India

Between history and memory lies the other side of Euclid's line in which Bhasha writers spin their magical worlds. Whether it is Vijaydan Detha or Naiyer Masud, Krishna Sobti or Paul Zacharia, they craft bold, alternative worlds. Yes, their writings stand for myriad imaginations across 3,300,000sq km of a linguistically exciting map. And yes, many talk of poverty and deprivation - but this is part of the global human predicament. But Bhasha writers are much more than just this. Many have a unique sense of humour and voice - vibrant, down-to-earth, alive. Dig deep with them to find where truth lies in the bewildering heterogeneity that is India.
Geeta Dharmarajan, founder of the social organisation Katha

Govardhan's Travels, by Anand (translated from Malayalam by Gita Krishnakutty) is a funny, skilful tale about the fate of the "common man". Bitingly satirical, Anand's novel (his real name is P Sachidanandan) is familiar to virtually every reader in the author's home state of Kerala, but unfortunately little known outside. The Bengali writer Mahashveta Devi calls it "the most memorable literary event of my experience".
Urvashi Butalia, director and co-founder of Kali for Women

The novels behind Satyajit Ray's films are great literature - Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's Apu books, the works of Rabindranath Tagore, and others - many available in translation. Ray was an advertising man, tall and senatorial, a fan of Billy Wilder, and he wrote delightful children's books. His best-known are the Feluda series. The books tap into a childhood longing for mystery and detective work, but they appeal to all ages. Collections of his stories for adults remain available. His best-known book, however, is on films: Our Films Their Films
Shruti Debi, editor, Picador India

Published bilingually in English and Hindi, Diddi - My mother's Voice was written by Ira Pande as a tribute to her mother, the Hindi writer Shivani. The author of more than 40 books, many of which were serialised in the literary magazine Dharmayug, Shivani had a fanatical following among her millions of readers. After her death in 2003, her daughter Ira translated a selection of her writings into English, with a commentary on her charismatic mother, and their proud and eccentric Brahmin family. She wrote the same commentary in Hindi, interspersing the original stories with personal insights. Set in the Kumaon hills in the lower Himalayas, her narrative brings fiction and memoir together into a compelling portrait of a changing society.
Namita Gokhale, writer and co-director of the Jaipur literature festival

Poet, short story writer, essayist, novelist, script writer and director, Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) was a prominent figure in the cultural life of Bengal. His outstanding contribution to Bengali literature was the character Ghanshyam Das or Ghana-da. Living in an all-male hostel and rarely stepping out of it, Ghana-da spins tall tales that take us to exotic locations: the Malaysian rainforests, the South Sea Islands, the Arctic and the Antarctic. There is a constant supply of food - several rounds of mutton chops and prawn cutlets - and cigarettes as this ageless raconteur mesmerises his listeners with stories of his bravado. This lovable, legendary character, reminiscent of Baron Münchausen, and as delightful as Hergé's Tintin, is an all-time favourite.
Diya Kar Hazra, editor, Penguin India

• For further information on the British Council's India '09 at the London book fair, go to: londonbookfair.co.uk or britishcouncil.org/india

thanks to 3qd for the link