:: Farrukh Dhondy

How India lives in English: A critique

Farrukh Dhondy

"Let me tell you the truth

To be kind —

You’re selling mirrors

In the Kingdom of the blind".

From Advice to Young

Writers by Bachchoo

April.25 : The London Book Fair (LFB) is upon the unusually sunny city. I was unaware that there was such a one — one hears of the Frankfurt affair and the financial deals and advances for publication bruited about, but this one comes to my notice as there is a supposed Indian theme to it.

The Indian part of the LBF is inaugurated by the Indian high commissioner, the suave and welcoming Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, who hosts a dinner for the Indian delegation of writers and friends at the High Commission on the night before the exhibition. The Fair is at Earls Court, a few acres of covered space used for every sort of mela and meeting from Ideal Garden displays to Boat Shows and no doubt exhibitions of advances in Artificial Intelligence (bring it on, we are a bit weary of the real thing!).

I go to it as one goes to Southall in London — expecting to be in a British but Indo-saturated environment, with nylon saris on the mannequins, jalebis and second-rate bhangra songs blaring. No such thing. Whatever the Indian media may say, the book fair’s Indian theme is all but absent. There are a few banners and flyers, but it looks like business as usual. The Greenland media would be equally justified in calling the London Book Fair a Greenlandish affair this time round — I caught sight of one reindeer and a human-sized Easter Bunny, in furry white, passed me by — or maybe that was just the effect of the champagne that the Hatchette and Harper Collins booths had so generously afforded us.

On the programme of events, there were a generous number of readings and talks by Indian writers and by people associated with Indian writing. I went to a few — plugs for the authors’ new books etc. The most amusing and enlightening was the appearance by Javed Akhtar reading poems at the Nehru Centre. He was, as always, scintillating in his delivery and funny and, it may be my limitation of Urdu reading, but I find his modern idiom of Urdu easy to understand and as innovative as Wordsworth must have been in the English of his time. (No, I don’t owe him money!)

Some sessions promised to be serious and advertised themes such as "Whither Indian Literature" (NB: not "wither").

After three days of listening to the same pleas for translation, complaints about the neglect of Indian languages or disagreements about the corruption of money entering the game, I came away disappointed.

The presence of publishers with long, if indiscriminate, lists of first-time writers in English indicates that there is a market out there, just as the presence of shopping malls in the smaller cities of India indicates the rise of a purchasing class. The malls will find out what to buy and sell through the operation of the market. I am sure publishers don’t feel the same about their product. Of course, they want to sell millions of copies and make their firms rich, but all of them have other, greater, more philosophical, aesthetic or, in the case of some "ism" or cause, missionary aims.

Such aims ought, at book fairs at least and in seminars, to be subject to what scientists call "peer scrutiny". In other words, there ought to be a critical tradition that reads Indian books with more than a second-hand reviewers’ consciousness. The last thing I mean is the academic, mind-rotting nonsense that goes under the label of post-modern or posturing modem or whatever — the "hybridity", "subaltern" salesmen and women whose sentences purport to be English but are devoid of any discernible meaning and are deployed to mystify the racially guilt-ridden boards of universities who still appoint them to high-salaried lectureships for talking gibberish.

I am perfectly aware that no amount of judicious criticism is going to affect the market. The point of generating a perpetual machine of argument about the purpose of writing a book in India would be to say which sensibility serves which purpose, which prose knows the difference between indulgence and effulgence, which piece does more to afford an insight into Indian reality, which talent is really new, or refreshing and intoxicating and not a rebottling of something that was done in the West.

The real challenge of Indian publishing, which may or may not take any guidance from such a critical enterprise, is right under our noses and remains unseen and unnoticed. It is that a 180 years after Thomas Babington Macaulay’s arguments for educating Indians in English we are finally getting several classes of people in our population who work in English for the global market. The most obvious are our exporters, businessmen, IT workers and call-centre men and women. Millions of Indians, in increasing numbers each year, use English as a transactional language. The language and its ways of thinking get adapted and seep into the lives of these workers even though they may conduct the rest of their existence in Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali etc.

Their English may be primitive or transactional and clumsy, but using it day in and day out and beginning to dream in English at night must mean that these millions are ready for a cultural life in this language. This doesn’t mean that they should be given copies of Jane Austen or Rudyard Kipling straight away (coming to think of it, the latter may not be such a bad idea), but that it is through their curiosity about and induction into reading that English writing in India is destined to grow.

There is enough evidence, let’s say, in the growing sophistication of our English news reporting and in the columns of our magazines that Indians who live abroad also pick up more than transactional language and use it as their cultural, literary language.

I don’t think India has produced its Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Chekhov yet. (The Russian literary progression of the 19th century is a neat example of the growth of a literature as the peasantry began to be literate and the aristocracy and other classes were educated into reading in Russian rather than French!). We have produced some long-winded, navel-gazing writers who boast about their unimportant family arrangements and, just as Bollywood takes plots from Western films we have writers who are imitators of Mills & Boon, James Joyce, Gabriel Marquez and even Anais Nin and Agatha Christie. It is imperative that before imitation becomes the central mode, a critical tradition exposes it and demands something else.