The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Most of these journals, and the early pamphlets and periodicals published in Madras, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and other printing hubs around India, are almost forgotten, rarely archived. Some of this indifference to the past may be changing—for instance, The Best of Quest, edited by Laeeq Futehally, Arshia Sattar and Achal Prabhala, brought back a sense of the intellectual debates of the 1950s.

  But few remember Mookerjee’s Magazine or the Oudh Punch, or the biting wit of the Hindi nationalist journals of the previous century. It’s a pity that these were so easily forgotten; to read them is to be reminded that the history of Indian writing in English was not a simple one, any more than the history of pre-Independence India. The textbook versions, the comic book Amar Chitra Katha versions, the cartoon versions of history, and today the RSS’s insistence on its own versions—these depend for their effect on a kind of stark simplicity, a plain black-and-white, heroes-and-villains account.

  Unfortunately, that simplicity erases the past more effectively than any act of censorship, and turns into a set of bald narratives; it is so easy to forget that ‘the past’ was just as complicated and layered as our own times. One strand sets up the evil British versus the courageous Indian nationalists, ignoring the ambiguities, the intermingling and what both sides took (or rejected) from one another’s culture.

  More contemporary misrepresentations by the Hindutva right-wing seek to recast many of those who fought for India’s freedom, including Nehru, by denying their extraordinary, decades-long struggles and erasing the long arguments and discussions over nationalism between Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Jinnah, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Lala Lajpat Rai, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sarojini Naidu and hundreds of others.

  If there’s a gap, a blank, in history, you would notice, just as you would notice a missing photograph in an album. But it’s harder to notice when there is no blank space, just an incomplete version.

  To assume, then, that Indian writing in English began only with Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864—the first attempt to write a truly Indian novel in English—is dangerous. It encourages the amnesia that has been part of the Oriental scene, a smoothening out of the complexities that surrounded the early history of Indian writing in English, where you could begin by writing for a foreign audience and continue with works that were meant to be read by educated, self-aware Indians in search of a revolution. (It also obliterates the fascination that form has always held for Indian writers in English—alongside the novel, and before the novel, Indian authors gravitated to the travelogue, to alternate histories, to essays and broadsides, poems and plays, treatises and novellas.)

  Mother and other tongues

  The arguments between the writers of the nineteenth century over language were fierce and enthusiastically fought. But just as Persian had wound its way into everyday affairs some centuries before, English and the ways of the Anglicised Indian were insidiously contagious. When Bankimchandra published his journal Bongobandhu (Friend of Bengal), he borrowed an odd, hybrid image for the endpapers. They depict Ma Saraswati, the goddess of learning, revered especially in bookish Bengal, towering like a benign mountain across the cardboard covers. She wears, however, not a sari but some sort of gown, curiously like a lawyer’s robe, and from its stiffly pleated folds, the bespectacled faces of young Bengal’s finest intellectuals peer out—Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Raja Rammohan Roy, Bankim himself.

  Dean Mahomet’s Travels are easy to read compared to Rajmohan’s Wife, an attempt by Bankimchandra to make the English language his own. The novel was serialised in 1864 and published as a book only in 1935. Reading it is something of a strain, both on his writer’s nerves and my worn reader’s nerves; the writer who would hold thousands in his palm with the florid drama and hyper-nationalism of Ananda Math and with his fiery journalism found that English washed him out. As the late Meenakshi Mukherjee observed, English turned his flowering village creepers and their abundant gourds into a pallid ‘garden salad’.

  Bankim wrote in translation when he wrote in English, and was sternly scolded by his friends, including Romesh Chunder Dutt, who was Shoshee Chunder’s nephew. They took turns to scold each other; Bankim was the one who’d started first, declaring (accurately): ‘Gobind Chandra and Shoshi Chandra’s [sic] English poems will never live. Madhusudan’s Bengali poetry will live so long as the Bengali language will live.’

  Dutt’s biographer J.N. Gupta records in the Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt:

  Early in his career, therefore, his thoughts turned to his own mother tongue. He has himself described how he naturally came under the influence of the master mind of the great Bankim Chunder Chatterjea [sic]. Bankim Chunder was a close friend of his father, and since his childhood Mr Dutt had the highest respect and affection for him. On his return from England he discussed his plans and ambitions with Bankim Chunder, and the latter suggested that he should contribute in Bengali to the Banga Darsana magazine, then in the noonday of its influence and fame.

  ‘Write in Bengali!’ exclaimed Mr Dutt, ‘but I hardly know the Bengali literary style.’

  ‘Style!’ rejoined Bankim Chunder. ‘Whatever a cultured man like you will write will be style. If you have the gift in you, style will come of itself.’

  This was a memorable episode in the life of Mr Dutt, for from that day he turned to Bengali literature. His inmost ambitions he always laid bare to his brother, and in a letter written in 1877 he says: ‘My own mother tongue must be my line, and before I die I hope to leave what will enrich the language and will continue to please my countrymen after I die.’

  These were rousing words, but reality was a shade more complicated. Romesh Chunder Dutt continued to flip back and forth between English and Bengali. In 1879, he published both Madhabi Kankana and Rajput Jivan Sandhya in Bengali, and in 1885, he came out with his translation of the Rig Veda into Bengali. But in 1895, he published The Literature of Bengal (in English), and in 1896, collected memories and letters,

  Three Years in Europe, 1866–1871. His History of Civilization in Ancient India, Based on Sanskrit Scriptures (1890) carried a brief description of the author that united his two linguistic selves: ‘Romesh Chunder Dutt, of the Bengal Civil Service; and of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law; author of a Bengali translation of the Rig Veda Sanhita and other works.’ He was keenly aware of the ways in which languages could play off each other. In The Literature of Bengal, he writes an account of how Madhu Sudan wrote Tilottoma in Bengali blank verse:

  ‘But the jingling of the Bengali rhyme was ill suited to such attempts, and he remarked to his friend and adviser Jotindra Mohan Tagore, that there was no great future for Bengali poetry until the chains of rhyme were rent asunder. Jotindra Mohan replied that blank verse was scarcely suited to the Bengali language, and that even in the French language blank verse was not a success. But, replied Madhu Sudan, Bengali is the daughter of Sanscrit, and nothing is impossible for the child of such a mother!’

  Bankimchandra took the path that Dutt did not; after the failed flirtation with English, he wrote only in Bengali, in an explosion of creativity. Between 1865 and 1875, for instance, he published Durgeshnandini, Kapalakundala, Mrinalini, Vishabriksha, Indira, Jugalanguriya, essays on society and essays on science—all of this in Bengali. He could not have written with such freedom or such persuasive drama in English. In that language, Bankim’s sentences come out sounding overblown and unnecessarily bombastic; in Bengali, they retain the man’s singular force, he sounds convincing and his voice retains a sense of drama.

  This was to be the way of Indian writers for the next few centuries; for some, English opened a door into a room where they could write with more freedom, because they could think openly, liberated from the silent remonstrances and shibboleths of the mother tongue. For a few, like R.K. Narayan or the poet Arun Kolatkar, English became another native language, if not the mother tongue, then not an alien language either. But Bankimchandra fell into the equally broad category o
f writers for whom English was a shackle, a leaden weight placed on the tongue.

  Beyond English

  In Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, there is a wonderful section on the fascination Japonism held at a certain time in Europe, when Japanese bibelots, netsuke, robes and paintings found their way into Parisian salons: ‘Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.’

  Often, what the collectors of that time picked up from Japan was unremarkable—the dross of everyday life, mass-produced objects d’art mingling with the rare and the exquisite. As de Waal recounts so beautifully, this early hunger was replaced by a refined connoisseurship in the early days, and inevitably, a waning of the interest in Japonism, a return to the less exotic and the more local.

  In early 2011, as new books on India by Patrick French and Anand Giridharadas were released, that familiar debate had come back to us, reheated and freshly garnished. Pankaj Mishra’s argument with French was over the content of the book—Mishra was unable to recognize or reconcile his vision of India, one of cruel economic inequalities and a dominant, often bullying, state, with French’s more upbeat India story.

  Reading between the lines, the real anxiety was over French’s portrait, not the quality of his reportage: was this the authentic India, or had he missed the big story? Elsewhere, in a joyously savage piece of provocation, Mihir Sharma flayed India Calling, by Anand Giridharadas, for shallow journalism, and slammed the stereotypes of India that found their way into the ‘foreign correspondent’ book.

  But the real debate became the one that tore Indian writing in English apart about a decade ago: what makes a book about India the genuine article, and who has the right to ‘represent’ the country? The ‘authenticity argument’ was rapidly buried, with a few stray knives in its back, in the world of Indian fiction—few readers, writers or critics wanted to police books to see how their Indianness rated on a scale of one to ten.

  One of the most memorable battles in that short-lived war was the skirmish between the late Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee and the writer Vikram Chandra. It began when Dr Mukherjee questioned the choice of titles for Chandra’s short stories, in his collection Love and Longing in Bombay. To her, his titles—Artha, Dharma, Kama—were ‘necessary to signal Indianness in the West’.

  Chandra wrote a riposte that was simultaneously thoughtful and very funny: ‘I noticed the constant hum of this rhetoric, this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness, this notion of a real reality that was being distorted by “Third World cosmopolitans”, this fear of an all-devouring and all-distorting West . . . I heard it in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews. And Indians who wrote in English were the one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control . . . The issue was decided not on the basis of the relative merits of the books, but on the perceived Indianness of the authors, and by implication, the degree of their assimilation by the West.’

  Chandra won that particular battle, perhaps because to most of his readers, the titles of his short stories seemed not just acceptable, but given the content, entirely appropriate. These were stories of greed, of lust, of the tyranny and the pleasures of duty. They were very Indian stories, if Indianness was the criteria by which you chose to judge them. (They remain an accurate representation of Bombay, but I would suggest here that they have lasted not because of the India they represent, but because they happen to represent taut, compelling storytelling.)

  But Dr Mukherjee’s suspicion, her distrust of a certain kind of writing, is not so easily dismissed. It remains alive in the parodies that sometimes appear on blogs about Indian writing of the stereotypes on the covers of Indian books in English—insert mangoes, add a sari border, use a suitably Oriental font, bear in mind that pictures of the Himalayas, rivers, sadhus and godmen will always sell a book, even one that has no reference to any of those elements. In a blogpost on the commandments of Indian writing in English, The Buddha Smiled set down the first: ‘Thy Book Must Have a Title That is Strange & Wonderful. Also Very Long.’ His post should be read alongside a beautiful, deadly piece of parody from I. Allan Sealy’s Trotternama:

  How the Raj is done

  I wish to shew how the Raj is done. This is the play of children, good adept, rest easy. You must have the following ingredients. (It matters little if one or another be wanting, nor is the order of essence. Introduce them as you please, and as often.) Let the pot boil of its own.

  An elephant, a polo club, a snake, a length of rope, a rajah or a pearl of price (some use both), a silver moon, a dropped glove, a railway junction, some pavilions in the distance, a chota peg, a tent peg, a learned brahmin, a cruel king, a chapati (or chaprasi), a measure of justice, gunpowder (q.v.), equal portions of law and order, a greased cartridge, a tamarind seed or else a cavalry regiment, a moist eye, some high intentions, two pax of Britannica, Glucose biscuits, an ounce of valour, something in the middle, a Victoria Cross, a soupcon of suspense (q.v), a bearer, a dhobi (or dhoti), a chee-chee, a dekchi (or deck-chair), a pinch of dust, a trickle of perspiration, a backdrop with temples or mosques (some use both), a church pew, a little fair play, a boar, some tall grass, a tiger, a rain cloud, a second snake or a mongoose, a flutter of the heart, a sharp sword, a bared ankle, walnut juice or burnt cork (some use both), a boy of British blood unsullied, a locket.

  In most discussions of Indian writing in English today, we are still not comfortable, outside of parody, acknowledging what might be called marketplace realities. In the years when Indian writing was doing well, like a hardworking honour student, in the West, we were happy to measure our importance and success not by the literary impact of a Kiran Desai or a Salman Rushdie but by the sales figures and the prize shortlists.

  What we are all uncomfortable acknowledging is that the West—shorthand for the complex markets and divergent reading tastes of the UK, the US and a large swathe of Europe—has a sharply truncated view of Indian writing. Imagine assessing all of European literature by reading only works in Polish, or only works in Italian—that, in the absence of a market for translations of Indian fiction, is the position the West is in when it reads ‘Indian writing’.

  And as long as the market is open only, or chiefly, to Indian writing in English, this blindness cannot be overcome. There is also the question of economic power—with access to larger audiences abroad, publishers outside India can and do dictate who has that access, what kind of stories travel from here to there, what books will be considered future Indian classics. There is an inequality in the system, inevitable, inescapable and often resented.

  Much of the unease expressed by Pankaj Mishra, and in a different form by Mihir Sharma, and earlier, by Allan Sealy and even Prof. Mukherjee, comes from questioning the need for the Big India book—at some level, we understand that these books are very rarely written by Indian journalists, and that the stories they tell, whether simplified or not, are influential even so. Some of the unease comes from a sense of disenfranchisement; it is telling, for instance, that there seems to be little need for the Big India book in Hindi, or Urdu, or Marathi. Outside of English, we lack either the curiosity or the need to explain India to ourselves.

  What the West sees of Indian writing would be ridiculous, if that view wasn’t so influential; as with the age de Waal describes, where all of Japanese culture and history could be interpreted through the shlock, detritus and masterpieces of the art world. Over the last thirty years, some realities have been inescapable; Indian writing in the Western world is defined largely as Indian writing in English, with very few translations making their way abroad.

  Writing from outside the metros and outside the mainstream—Dalit writing, the resurgence in Indian poetry in English, writing from the seven sister-states that make up north-east India—is rarely visible, and when it is visible, it�
�s exoticized, here and abroad. And by its nature, Indian writing in English has been largely privileged writing—if not quite limited to the sons of St. Stephens’, most contemporary writers in this language come from the relatively enfranchised middle class, and their work reflects the limitations of their backgrounds.

  The Census 2001 figures revealed that English had in effect become India’s second language, behind Hindi. Many of the new English speakers come from the small towns, or belong to areas of the metros that lie outside the charmed circles of privilege. English belongs to them now as much as it once did, about two-three decades ago, to the old class of writer-Brahmins.

  And as this generation begins to tell and write their stories, they may not need to beguile the souks of the West with their Indiennisme. About 125 million English speakers, out of whom a much higher percentage has made it their first language in the decade since the Census data was collected, is enough to make its own marketplace. If that happens, this new generation of writers might finally be able to step away from the debates that have come down across a century-and-a-half of Indian writing in English.

  Or perhaps they will find a new set of things to argue about. In the years before the call-centre phenomenon spread across India, adding an American accent to Indian English, the first signs of the hunger for English—a language that might offer a passport to better jobs, more money, more status—showed up in the India of the 1980s and the 1990s in the ads for the very popular Rapidex English-speaking course.

  Their spokesman was the cricketer Kapil Dev, whose contribution to the ad was to speak about its effectiveness, not in a BBC-tinged accent or in the beloved fake-Yank accent, but in heavily accented Indian, Haryanvi English. It was a kind of claiming of the language as our own, the way K.C. Dutt and S.C. Dutt had attempted to claim the right to write for an audience of Indian readers, the way Bankimchandra had struggled in Rajmohan’s Wife to convey the accents and emotional grammar of Bengal in this alien but covetable tongue.