Fifty Years of Indian Writing: Essence

                                        

                           

50 years of Indian writing:

A celebration

R.K.DHAWAN

India has contributed significally to the overall world literature. This contribution of India has been chiefly through the Indian Writing in English, novelists being in the forefront in this respect. A good number of novelists on the contemporary scene have given expression to their creative urge in no other language than English and have brought credit to the English fiction as a distinctive force in the world fiction. To attempt creative expression on a national scale in an alien medium has seldom happened in human history; and it speaks of the prolific quality of the Indian mind to assimilate the newly confronting situations and the complex dilemmas of modern world.

                                                                        II

            In the recent times, a great body of historical fiction has emerged on the literary scene. Many Indian English novelists have turned to the past as much to trace the deepening mood of nationalisms to cherish the memories of the bygone days. A close study of the contemporary novel reveals writer’s preoccupation with our historic past and the unabated interest of the readers in the novels that depict the past and the unabated interest of the readers in the novels that depict the past or that treat some event of import that has had wide repercussions. As a critic, I have always attached a great deal of importance to the impact n a writer of the historical milieu in which he lives and the historical periods of an earlier time with which the author wishes to associate himself by choice. Writers like Kushwant Singh, Manohar Malgonkar, Chaman Nahal, Shashi Tharoor, Salman Rushdie and Amitav Gosh amply illustrate this point of view.

It is quite improper to compare historical novel some with history proper. The novelist concerned with history proper. The novelist concerned with history is beyond the traditional way of assessing events; he has to blend history with his vision and philosophy. The novel deals with history through camouflage. P.V. Narasimha Rao’s maiden novel, The Insider, for example, is a fictionalized biography of an ex-Prime Minister. Anand the protagonist of the novel, is an alter ego of Rao; the major events of his life run parallel to the author’s life history. Also it is an interesting account of the life and times of this country politics. The loss of idealism and honesty from public life in India, portrayed candidly in the novel, makes a terrific indictment of the system. It is a historical novel that throws useful light on the slice of the country’s socio-political life.

An historical novel is nothing but an evaluation of a segment of historical reality as projected by the novelist whose techniques of writing fiction enable him to describe his vision or world vision. In all his writings, Amitav Ghosh’s engagement with history is not the same kind as that of the historian, but this does not in any way lessen its significance as historical fiction. The fictional framework renders history more readable and lively and he is able to involve the reader more than what history does. Ghosh’s fiction reveals that the novelist’s involvement with history is his prime obsession. Indeed, he interjects a new dimension into his encounter with history. His fiction is imbued with both political and historical consciousness. Ghosh is a novelist who virtually bends his novels to the needs of history; they largely derive their purpose and shape from it.

A distinction must be made here between the conscious use of history and its sub-conscious presentation. The setting of most novels is in the context of some historical framework unless the novelist wilfully places his action in an imaginary locale hoping to highlight a special metaphysical or political point of view, e.g. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sometimes, he creates the country, as does Joseph Conrad in Nostromo. It is my contention that whatever be the perfection of craftsmanship in this type of novel, such works are accepted by the public as nothing more than Utopias.

Modern deconstructionists would easily discuss them as exercises in self-deception. Utopias make fine reading; their relevance to the immediate problem is more of an escapist nature suggesting remedies neither available nor practical. The historical novel represents no surface wave of escapism, but a deep, unconscious movement towards national homogeneity. It is in the historical novel only that the actual day-to-day problems of life can be encountered, examined, exposed, challenged and rectified. Entertainment and instruction are, by common consent, most valued virtues of historical fiction. The factual and informational values of history illuminate the subject and increasingly whet the reader’s curiosity. In other words, for a true artist history is a hand-maiden which helps him to achieve several purposes. How deft he is in the art of amalgamating the two must be judged only by the use of history by choice obviously must be held at a superior level than the one who consciously assimilates it.

A pertinent question that arises is the relevance of history in a work of art. As a matter of fact, historical sense and reality enter into the sphere of art imperceptibly; they are important factors in determining the ultimate value of a given piece of art. In a sense every novelist tries to enshrine a period in a book; in other words every novelist is a historical novelist. This historical reality, in terms of time and space, forms an integral part of a work of art and is transmuted in the process of giving it a creative expression; in the process it achieves wider dimensions of universality and at times a state of timelessness. The historical novelist is none but a historian on whom a talent for imaginative fiction has been happily bestowed.

A writer of historical fiction then is as much a historian as a novelist. But history does impose limitations on him. He is not free to distort history; factual accuracy has to be strictly adhered to. “Herein lies the additional burden,” writes Chaman Nahal, “that a historical novelist places on the artist. The novelist is obliged to do careful research into the period has to be accurate.” Detail, not only about the layout of a geographical region, but also about the people living in that region, their mode of speech, their dress, their habits, their peculiar traits and countless other characteristics of that particular community. Indeed every care must be taken to verify incidental details, as a sure guard against anachronism. Before it was published, Gone with the Wind was subjected, for a period of eight months, to a rigorous checking of facts; and a systematic verification was made of specific statements contained in the novel. Indeed it is an important reason for the immense popularity of this novel which Margaret Mitchell makes a serious evocation of the American Civil War.

Again it is hazardous to infiltrate too much history into the plot of a novel, or to have too many historical figures among the leading figures among the leading characters. History puts the author at a disadvantage since a great majority of characters who have an independent historical reality can hardly be made amenable to the author’s designs or the exigencies of the plot. The interaction of the two kinds amongst themselves, is the most challenging part of writing a historical novel.          

                                                          III

      As elsewhere, majority of novels in India have been written in response to historical movements or events such as the Gandhian movement, imperial rule, partition of the country, the emergence of the New India. The heroic to throw away the foreign yoke was an epic struggle covering the first half of the twentieth century. The nation was in a ferment; a  massive movement for liberation from the foreign rule was raging in the country. The British, who were exploiting India the utmost, were in no mood to withdraw. The struggle was long and gruelling. 

The freedom struggle caught the imagination of the entire nation, no less the Indian English writers. No significant writer could escape the impact of the mighty movement sweeping the country. The novels written in the Indian languages and English in the thirties and the forties reflect the vitality of people devoted to a cause. This is amply reflected in the novels of the period-Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie, K.A. Abbas’s Inquilab. D.F. Karaka’s We Never Die and C.N. Zutshi’s Motherland.

The novels dealing with the freedom struggle give vivid pictures of the exploitation and the arrogance of the foreign rulers, as also the portrayal of an awakened people struggling for their birthright. The growth of the historical novel coincided with intensification of the struggle for Indian freedom, especially after the First World War. Novels written previously had confined to religious aestheticism-now the focus shifted to contemporary socio-political concern.

Indeed it were the English who brought with them enlightenment of the West and inspired the Indians to imbibe the spirit of nationalism. In the early decades of the century, the English has nearly succeeded in giving the people a unity in law, in public administration, in finance and in education that was hitherto unknown to them and ironically enough all this resulted in generating a sense of national unity which urged them to fight for freedom in later stages.

The intellectuals, be they philosophers, historians or literary artists, have traditionally played significant roles in all national revolutions of the world. Not only do they reach the minds of the people through their writing, they also subject every institution to the society to a specific political philosophy, and through that propagate their point of view.

The Indian English novelists were most responsive to the call of equality, freedom and human rights, for the literary artists have an intrinsic quality and ability to look beyond their time. It is they who hold before the common man a lens, as it were, through which he could see what threatened him socially, culturally, or politically, and which made him aware of the precipice that lay ahead. As it was, a number of novels were written during the period of that portrayed the unjustness of the British rule and the grim fight the people were determined to give to get rid of it. Politics became synonymous with nationalism.

                                               

IV

No doubt, the most important historical event of our age, as is evident from the writings of Indian English novelists, was the partition of the subcontinent. The English in 1947 left the country with bag and baggage, after dividing it into two parts. The religious and political differences between Hindus and Muslims which climaxed with this event led to widespread disturbances, causing destruction of human life on a scale unprecedented in the recent history of the subcontinent. There was let loose a communal fury, which caused a great havoc and misery. In the massacres, which immediately preceded the partition and continued for several months afterwards, at least one million Hindus and Muslims lost their lives. There was large-scale migration of people from one country to the other. In the process, thousands were massacred; women were raped, children were flung on spears and property was looted on a vast scale.

The Indian English novelists, like their counterparts in Indian languages, responded to these happenings with a sense of horror. A number of novels were written on the theme of partition, the destruction it brought and the plight of the refugees. They faithfully record the reign of violence that characterized the period and provide a sad, telling commentary on the breakdown of human values. A strain of despair and disillusionment is predominant in these novels. Some significant novels on the theme of partition are Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, Shiv K. Kumar’s A River With Three Banks and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters.  

                                               

V

            Indian English writers through Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai and Arundhati Roy hold centrestage in the contemporary literary scenario. They have received national and international recognition, fabulous royalties and prestigious awards. Amitav Ghosh is perhaps the finest writer among those who were born out of the Post-Midnight’s Children revolution in English fiction.

            It was in the year 1993 that the Indian English novel came to be associated with big ‘monies’. It started with Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy which was a happy marriage of ‘money and imagination’. Seth became India’s first millionaire novelist. He was paid of Rs. 2.5 crores as advance royalty for the novel by the British publishers, Orion. His novel was the high watermark of the Indian literary scene of the early nineties. The novel was short-listed for the Booker Committee Chairman felt that the novel needed editing. Nonetheless, the novel registered a tremendous sale and fired the imagination of many aspiring fiction writers in the country.

            The publication of Arundhti Roy’s The God of Small Things is the latest and most valuable addition to the corpus of Indian writing. It is pre-eminently a novel by a woman. Having received the Booker’s award for the Best Novel of the Year, it is the most talked-about novel in the world today. Indeed, it has taken the publishing world by storm. The book has shot the newspaper headlines the worldover, and the media is almost hysterical in highlighting the commercial success of the author. No writer has been paid such a fabulous amount for publishing rights of his/her first novel.

            Arundhati Roy is an excellent storyteller, and the novel seems to us a literary sport. We may not hesitate to call it a contemporary classic. It is a modern novel in its theme and the treatment of the theme, a postmodern novel in its knotting and knitting of narrative threads, manipulation of expressive literary forms and creative ‘play’ with words, a feminist novel in the pity and terror that it in evokes for the condition of women in the particular cultural milieu, a political novel in its criticism of the hypocrisy of the communist party, an autobiographical novel is eminently amenable to multiple approaches and interpretations.

                                                       VI

There are several reasons for the popularity of recent books published by Indian writers in India and abroad. Of the several qualities a book needs to have, is its capacity to capture the imagination of the reader. In other words, the most pertinent question is whether a book is ‘readable’. The fiction of R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Anita Desai has caught the attention of the audience for one or the other reason. Maybe an easy entry into the comic world, a deep concern with social problems, or face to face with the dilemmas of the woman’s world. At the turn of the century, however, a new trend seems to be emerging. Marketing strategies are now as important as the contents of a book or its author. Modern technology, especially the media and the internet, has played a significant role in promoting new books. This has been quite advantageous to the third-world writers, for their books reach the world over in no time. It is no longer uncommon to see a book on the day of its release selling at different places in different countries. Books are now being treated as revenue-generating products that need, apart from other ingredients, an author who has promotion potential and a publisher with wide marketing network. This development has helped an Indian writer in English much more than a regional Indian writer. Works of new writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Gita Mehta, Rohinton Mistry and Arundati Roy have been published by international book companies. Quality production, effective cost structure, and easy mobility have given a boost to the sales: books are treated as products of a corpus culture, to be bought and sold with frenzied efforts. For example, The Idea of India, a diasporic book by India-born Oxford Professor Sunil Khilani, has been listed by The Guardian among the best ten world books published in 1998.

Recently Sudhir Kakar, eminent psychologist and sexologist, has published his debut novel, The Ascetic of Desire. The time is the fourth century AD, the golden age of Indian history. The locale: an ashram in the woods a little outside Varanasi. Every morning Vatsyayana, the author of Kamasutra, recounts stories from his childhood and youth to a young pupil who plans to write the great sage’s biography. Little is known of Vatsyayana’s life, so the young scholar pieces these tales together along with relevant slokas of erotic wisdom from the Kamasutra, which he has learnt by heart.

The story that unfolds is fascinating. Vatsyayana’s mother Avantika and her sister Chandrika are famous courtesans in a brothel at Kausambi. From them and their various lovers, Vatsyayana gains his first indelible impressions of sexual artifice. Later, Vatsyayana finds himself in an imbroglio of sexual passion and jealously involving his wife Malavika, the queen sister, and her lover, a poet in king Udayana’s court. Surprisingly, however, it turns out that Vatsyayana, the author of the world’s best-known treatise on erotic techniques, is a sexual novice himself.

Increasingly, the pupil, who is embarking hesitantly on sexual exploits himself, finds to his consternation that his own life has begun to reflect and parallel the ascetic’s narrative in many ways. Eventually, as the novel reaches its denouement, the two stories converge and collide, with disastrous results. Teacher and pupil part ways and the biography remains unwritten, except for what is captured in the pupil’s journal which is The Ascetic of Desire.  

With meticulous attention to historical detail, Sudhir Kakar’s superb novel brings to life the reign of Samudragupta with all its pomp and grandeur. With characteristic insight, Kakar plumbs the psychological depths of a plethora of characters who are at various stages of discovering their sexual identities. What emerges through incidence and super imposition is a powerful narrative of lust and sensuality imbued with an old- world charm and a surprising sense of irony. A fitting fictional counterpart of Kamasutra, The Ascetic of Desire is a major literary event of the year.

                                                          VII

Many of the regional writers too have been quite visible through translations. The translation phenomenon has become prominent, thanks to the efforts made by the Sahitya Akademi, Katha and other organizations. It has brought into cosmopolitan reckoning some of the brilliant writers in the regional languages. Indeed one of the most popular novels of recent times is U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Sanskara, written originally in Kannada. The English translation by eminent poet A.K. Ramanujan may be construed as contribution both to traditional Indian literature as also to Indian English literature. The novel won the author many prestigious awards including the Sahitya Akademi and the Jnanpith Awards.

Several of the regional writers have captured the imagination of the English-speaking world. Translation of the plays by Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar  and Mohan Rakesh, novels by Premchand, R.N. Tagore, Sarat Chandra, Mahasweta Devi, Quratulain Hyder, short stories by Saddat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander have become immensely popular. Some years ago, Pakistani Urdu writer Intezar Husain was given the first Rupa Award of Rs. 50,000. The English translation of his short stories entitled Leaves became a favourite of the Literary world.

                                                          VIII

The contemporary Indian poetry finds its source both from source both from self and society. Poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Keki Daruwalla have received international recognition. Recently Eunice de Souza has published a valuable book Nine Indian women Poets (OUP). It introduces us to major contemporary women poets. The nine poets featured in this book represented two generations of Indian women poets of the post-1947 period.

Following Kamala Das almost every poet attempts to explore the self against a background of personal relationships. In Kamala Das’s ‘An Introduction’, the distinctiveness of possessing a language and the transmuting character of speech is submerged, perhaps even obliterated, by the experience of love.

Charmayne D’ Souza writes about ‘vivid inner experience rather than of localized spaces’. Her poems are imaginative, her themes are varied and she gives the impression besides, and this again is rare, of greatly enjoying her writing. Her first collection A Spelling Guide to Woman was published in 1991 and one looks forward to reading more of this urbane and talented poet.

Another poet whose talent shines through clearly is Sujata Bhatt. Bhatt’s is a highly personal poetry; she has a fine sense of the rhythms of language and is one of those poets who can fashion a poem out of almost anything.

                                                           IX

An appraisal of Indian drama shows that while drama in various Indian languages has shown a marked development, it has not done so in Indian English. In this literature, drama is a plant of poor growth. The first and foremost reason is the want of a living theatre. It is a well known fact that the real success of a play can be tested only on stage. A playwright needs a living theatre to put his work on acid test, evaluate its total effect on the audience and thereby get a chance to improve upon his performance. This handicap has not allowed him to pursue playwriting in a systematic and comprehensive way.

Very recently Indian English drama has shot into prominence Younger writers like Mahesh Dattani and Manjula Padmanabhan have infused new life into this branch of writing. The thirty-eight-years-old Bangalore-based Dattani has published forceful plays like Where There is a Will, Final Solutions and Tara. Padmanabhan’s Onassis award-winning Harvest has achieved world wide acclaim. Incidently, both mean, ugly, unhappy things of life; Padmanabhan projects a dehumanized, terrifying world in which mothers sell their sons for “the price of rice”. Her play Harvest is about an impoverished family living in a single room in chawl of Bombay. Population explosion has rendered the city dwellers into helpless, poor, dehumanized lot struggling for their survival. In this scenario, driven by hunger and unemployment, twenty-year-old Om Prakash decides to become an organ donor and mortgages his body to a white First-World buyer. Padmanabhan projects in her play a more serious, grim and unpalatable world than Dattani. But her play is rather intellectual and not suited for stage, unlike the plays of Dattani which have been quite successful on the stage and have captured the imagination of the middle-class audience.

English plays are occasionally staged, especially in big cities like Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. Visits of foreign troupes are arranged from time to time by the British Council and the American Centre. In Delhi, Yatrik group has actively staged several plays. Barry John, the renowned director, has made a significant contribution to the Delhi theatre. It is a matter of great satisfaction that some of the Indian English plays like Gurcharan Das’s Mira, Pratap Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness and Asif Currimbhoy’s The Dumb Dancer have been staged in the West.

It is mainly then Indian drama in Indian languages and the drama in English translation which has registered a remarkable growth in the recent decades. During the last few year, several plays originally written in the regional languages have been translated into English. Today, a sizeable number of such plays exist, and it is possible for the scholars to assess and evaluate Indian drama in its totality. Many academics have felt the need for English translations of literature in the Indian languages. English translations of classics in the Indian languages should form an important component of Indian English literature and if these are taught to our students, it will engage their attention fully and meaningfully. The translations have forged a link between the east and the west, north and south, and contributed to the growing richness of contemporary creative consciousness. Thus regional drama in India is slowly paving way for a “national theatre” into which all streams of theatrical art seems to converge. The major language theatres active during the sixties, seventies and eighties that rejuvenated and consolidated are those of Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Kannada. A study of Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad clearly shows that they are the symbols of the new resurgence in their own areas and have made bold innovations, fruitful experiments and given new directions which go in the history of Indian drama as a significant mark of achievement.

                                        Novel Form in Ocean of Stories

                                                 MULK RAJ ANAND

Our forefathers were, for centuries, tellers of tales. So the earliest surviving fictions are stories of human foibles, proverbs with morals to teach folk way of good against evil. Tales were told and retold, but not written down. Creative imagination of bards, after Aryan penetration, elaborated two recitals in the Vedic and Post-Vedic eras, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The themes of these epics are power struggles. In the Ramayana, the fabulous story of upperlands monarch, Rama in exile fights against Rakshasa Raja who abducts his Rani Sita.  The Mahabharata has as its central theme the struggle against powerful Duryodhana for inheritance of share of kingdom, denied to younger Pandu cousins by the elder. There are several fictions assimilated in the Mahabharata like the love tale of Nala and Damayanti, of Savitri rescuing her spouse Satyavan from Yama. In fact it has been said, that what is not in the Mahabharata is insignificant.

In the later centuries, tales from the Mahabharata were adapted as plays, like Shakunthala by bard Kalidasa of fourth century A.D. in fact commentators of early medieval history laid down a dictum that all new fictions must be written about characters in the Mahabharata.

Apart from epics, which were recited in feudal courts, among the folk remained current fables and tales of words and deeds of Buddha. These short stories told in villages reached at a moral at the end of each tale. They remained popular lessons for preaching good against evil down the ages.

Brihut Katha stories were told by townfolk, also moral lessons

                                                 Contributors

MULK RAJ ANAND is a pioneer of Indian English fiction. He is a prolific writer and has recently published the novel entitled Nine Moods of Bharata. 

SUMAN BALA teaches at University of Delhi. She has published a book on Joseph Conrad, and several papers on Indian fiction.

INDIRA BHATT formerly at C.U. Shah Science College, Ahmedabad, is actively engaged in guiding research on Indian fiction.

SUBASH CHANDRA teaches at University of Delhi. His publications include a book on Thomas Hardy, and several articles on Indian fiction.

BIJAY KUMAR DAS teaches at Ravenshaw college, Cuttack. He has a number of books and articles to his credit.

R.K. DHAWAN teaches at University of Delhi. He has published several books and articles on Commonwealth literature.

V.T. GIRDHARI teaches at People’s College, Nanded. He has recently published the book entitled The Novels of Joseph Conrad.

NIBIR K. GHOSH teaches at Agra College, Agra. He has recently published the book, Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel.

S. INDIRA teaches at Dr. L.B. College, Visakhapatnam. Her areas of research include Indian writing and Canadian literature.

PRAFULLA K. JAGADEB teaches at Christ’s college, Cuttack. His areas\ of interest  include Indian English poetry.

P.S. KASTURE teaches at Akola in Maharashtra. A senior academic, she has several publications to her credit.

S.T. KAPADIA is a Professor Education and Retired Director, School of Phy.,Edu. and Phi., Gujarat University.

ALASTAIR NIVEN is Director of literature, British Council, London. His publications include D.H.lawrence, The writer and his works and The Yoke of Pity: The Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand.

R. RADHIGA PRIYARDHARSHINI teaches at Vellalar College for Women, Erode.

T.J. PURANI teaches English at Smt. S.C.U. Arts College for girls, Ahmedabad.

K. SUNEETHA RANI teaches at University of Hyderabad. She is engaged in research on Australian aboriginal writing.

SRILATA RAVI teaches at the Department of European studies at National University of Singapore.

ALKA SAXENA teaches at D.A.V. College, Kanpur. She is a creative writer and a perceptive critic.

A.R. SHUKLA is a senior academic from Gujrat University, Ahmedabad. His areas of interest include Indian English Writing and Canadian Literature.

KANNAMAL SRINIVASAN teaches at Vellalar College for Women, Erode. Besides Indian writing, she is interested in American literature.