Rushdie, Salman; Elizabeth West;
Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997
Henry Holt & Co, 1997, 553 pages
ISBN 0805057099, 9780805057096
topics: | fiction | india | english | anthology
Focuses on Indian writing in English; Rushdie’s introduction includes the controversial claim that Indian writing in English is simply “stronger and more important” than the writing in Indian vernaculars. India is more than its cities. Clearly, the majority of India lives far from the urbanized centers where English flourishes, and this is reflected in the chasm between "Indian English" literature and the vernaculars. Rushdie feels the need to address this in his introduction: It is true that there tends to be a bias [in Indian English writing] towards metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction, but, as this volume will demonstrate, there has been, during this half-century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as well as urban... But only two stories in Rushdie's Mirrorwork deals with the Indian heartland. One is Manto's Toba Tek Singh, a work that was translated from Urdu. Neither the fact of the translation nor the translator (Khaled Hasan) is evident to the reader, but is mentioned in the introduction and in the copyrights. The other is Nirad Chaudhuri's description of his village in Bangladesh, which serves to underline the urban life he lived thereafter. I wonder if Satyajit Ray's "Big Bill" is a translation (perhaps by the author himself?).
Salman Rushdie I ONCE gave a reading to a gathering of university students in Delhi and when I'd finished a young woman put up her hand. "Mr. Rushdie, I read through your novel, Midnight's Children," she said. "It is a very long book, but never mind, I read it through. And the question I want to ask you is this: fundamentally, what's your point?" Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again. "Oh, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that the whole effort - from cover to cover - that is the point of the exercise. Isn't that what you were going to say?" "Something like that, perhaps..." I got out. he snorted. "It won't do." "Please," I begged, "do I have to have just one point?" "Fundamentally," she said, with impressive firmness, "yes." So here, once again, is a very long book; and though it is not a novel, but an anthology selected from the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country's Independence, still one could easily say of the work contained in the next 600-odd pages that the whole collective effort, from cover to cover, is the point of the exercise. ... It's high time Indian literature got itself noticed, and it's started happening. New writers seem to emerge every few weeks. Their work is as multiform as the place, and readers who care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices saying something they want to hear. However, this large and various survey turns out to be making, fundamentally, just one - perhaps rather surprising - point: that prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 "official languages" of India, the so-called "vernacular languages", during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, "Indo-Anglian" literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. when we set out on the enormous and rewarding task of doing the reading for this book, we ever expected to make. The task we set ourselves was simply to make the best possible selection from what is presently available in the English language, including, obviously, work in translation. To our considerable astonishment, only one translated text - S. H. Manto's masterpiece, the short story "Toba Tek Singh" - made the final cut. ... [Indian English] poets, with a few distinguished exceptions (Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, to name just three), did not match the quality of their counterparts in prose. Those who wish to argue with the conclusion we have drawn may suspect that we did not read enough. But we have read as widely and deeply as we could. Others may feel that, as one of the editors is English and the other a practising English-language writer of Indian origin, we are simply betraying our own cultural and linguistic prejudices, or defending our turf or - even worse - gracelessly blowing our own trumpet. It is of course true that any anthology worth its salt will reflect the judgments and tastes of its editors. I can only say that our tastes are pretty catholic and our minds, I hope, have been open. We have made our choices, and stand by them. The lack of first-rate writing in translation can only be a matter for regret. However, to speak more positively, it is a delight to be able to showcase the quality of a growing collective oeuvre whose status has long been argued over, but which has, in the last 20 years or so, begun to merit a place alongside the most flourishing literatures in the world. For some, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic. "Indo-Anglian" literature evokes, in these critics, the kind of prejudiced reaction shown by some Indians towards the country's community of "Anglo-Indians" - that is, Eurasians. ... .. my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country's earlier Muslim conquerors, became a naturalised sub-continental language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay. (In many parts of South India, people will prefer to converse with visiting North Indians in English rather than Hindi, which feels, ironically, more like a colonial language to speakers of Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam than does English, which has acquired, in the South, an aura of lingua franca cultural neutrality. The new Silicon Valley-style boom in computer technology that is transforming the economies of Bangalore and Madras has made English, in those cities, an even more important language than before.) ... ... the ironical proposition that India's best writing since Independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear. It ought not to be true, and so must not be permitted to be true. (That many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English-speaking elite is a further irony.) Let us quickly concede what must be conceded. It is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still bedevilled by high illiteracy levels, how could it be otherwise? It does not follow, however - unless one holds to a rigid, class-war view of the world - that writers with the privilege of a good education will automatically write novels that seek only to portray the lives of the bourgeoisie. It is true that there tends to be a bias towards metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction, but, as this volume will demonstrate, there has been, during this half-century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as well as urban, sacred as well as profane. This is also, let us remember, a young literature. It is still pushing out the frontiers of the possible. The point about the power of the English language, and of the Western publishing and critical fraternities, also contains some truth. Perhaps it does seem, to some "home" commentators, that a canon is being foisted on them from outside. ... [In the west] It feels as if the East is imposing itself on the West, rather than the other way around. And, yes, English is the most powerful medium of communication in the world; should we not then rejoice at these artists' mastery of it, and their growing influence? To criticise writers for their success at "breaking out" is no more than parochialism (and parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures). One important dimension of literature is that it is a means of holding a conversation with the world. These writers are ensuring that India, or rather, Indian voices (for they are too good to fall into the trap of writing nationalistically), will henceforth be confident, indispensable participants in that literary conversation. Granted, many of these writers do have homes outside India. [... but] Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address. IRONICALLY, the century before Independence contains many vernacular language writers who would merit a place in any anthology: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (the author of Pather Panchali, on which Satyajit Ray based his celebrated Apu Trilogy of films), and Premchand, the prolific (and therefore rather variable) Hindi author of, among many others, the famous novel of rural life Godaan, or The Gift of a Cow. Those who wish to seek out their leading present-day successors should try, for example, O. V. Vijayan (Malayalam), Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (Hindi), Nirmal Verma (Hindi), U. R. Ananthamurthy (Kannada), Suresh Joshi (Gujarati), Amrita Pritam (Punjabi), Qurratulain Haider (Urdu) or Ismat Chughtai (Urdu), and make their own assessments. ... G. V. Desani has fallen so far from favour 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 many of the texts in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him. 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... ... An Area of Darkness was written as long ago as 1964, a mere 17 years after Independence, and a little early for an obituary notice. The growing quality of Indian writing in English may yet change his mind. THE map of the world, in the standard Mercator projection, is not kind to India, making it look substantially smaller than, say, Greenland. On the map of world literature, too, India has been undersized for too long. This anthology celebrates the writers who are ensuring that, 50 years after India's Independence, that age of obscurity is coming to an end.
Salman Rushdie : Introduction Jawaharlal Nehru : Tryst with Destiny Nayantara Sahgal : With Pride and Prejudice Saadat Hasan Manto : Toba Tek Singh G. V. Desani : All about H. Hatterr The name is H. Hatterr, and I am continuing. Biologically, I am fifty-five of the species. Nirad C. Chaudhuri : My Birthplace Kamala Markandaya : Hunger Mulk Raj Anand : The Liar R. K. Narayan : Fellow-Feeling Ved Mehta : Activities and Outings Anita Desai : Games at Twilight Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: In the Mountains Satyajit Ray : Big Bill Salman Rushdie : The Perorated Sheet Padma Perera : Dr Salaam Upamanyu Chatterjee: The Assassination of Indira Gandhi Rohinton Mistry : The Collectors Bapsi Sidhwa : Ranna's Story I. Allan Sealy : The Trotter-Nama Shashi Tharoor : A Raj Quartet Sara Suleri : Meatless Days Firdaus Kanga : Trying to Grow Anjana Appachana : Sharmaji Amit Chaudhuri : Sandeep's Visit Amitav Ghosh : Nashawy Githa Hariharan : The Remains of the Feast Gita Mehta : The Teacher's Story Vikram Seth : A Suitable Boy Vikram Chandra : Shakti Ardashir Vakil : Unforced Errors Mukul Kesavan : One and a Half Arundhati Roy : Abhilash Talkies Kiran Desai : Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard