DOCUMENT RESUME ED 434 855 SO 030 850 AUTHOR Altman, Leslie J. TITLE Contemporary World Classics in Literature and Film. Fall, 1998. Fulbright-Hays Summer Seminars Abroad 1998 (India). INSTITUTION United States Educational Foundation in India. SPONS AGENCY Center for International Education (ED), Washington, DC. PUB DATE 1998-00-00 NOTE 21p. PUB TYPE Guides Classroom Teacher (052) -- Reports Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Area Studies; *Authors; Course Descriptions; Cultural Context; *Film Study; Foreign Countries; Global Education; High Schools; *Literature Appreciation; Non Western Civilization; Social Studies; Student Research; *World Literature; Writing Assignments IDENTIFIERS *Contemporary Literature; Film Viewing; Fulbright Hays Seminars Abroad Program; *India; Mukherjee (Bharati); Rushdie (Salman) ABSTRACT This packet includes the syllabus of a trimester-long senior elective course on India, designed to begin with two writers of Indian descent, Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee. The packet contains the daily assignments for the first half of the trimester, which include all of the reading assignments from Rushdie and Mukherjee, as well as the guide for viewing "Salaam Bombay!" an Indian film. It also contains a handout detailing an approach to a Rushdie short story, "Yorick," and two handouts for in-class writing assignments on Rushdie. Additional handouts in the packet are a reprint on the English of India from "The New York Times" magazine, a review of "East West" from "The New Yorker," and an article by Rushdie, also from "The New Yorker." A handout describing a student research project also is included. (BT) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ********************************************************************************
Transcript
DOCUMENT RESUME
ED 434 855 SO 030 850
AUTHOR Altman, Leslie J.TITLE Contemporary World Classics in Literature and Film. Fall,
1998. Fulbright-Hays Summer Seminars Abroad 1998 (India).INSTITUTION United States Educational Foundation in India.SPONS AGENCY Center for International Education (ED), Washington, DC.PUB DATE 1998-00-00NOTE 21p.
PUB TYPE Guides Classroom Teacher (052) -- Reports Descriptive(141)
EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Area Studies; *Authors; Course Descriptions; Cultural
Context; *Film Study; Foreign Countries; Global Education;High Schools; *Literature Appreciation; Non WesternCivilization; Social Studies; Student Research; *WorldLiterature; Writing Assignments
ABSTRACTThis packet includes the syllabus of a trimester-long senior
elective course on India, designed to begin with two writers of Indiandescent, Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee. The packet contains the dailyassignments for the first half of the trimester, which include all of thereading assignments from Rushdie and Mukherjee, as well as the guide forviewing "Salaam Bombay!" an Indian film. It also contains a handout detailingan approach to a Rushdie short story, "Yorick," and two handouts for in-classwriting assignments on Rushdie. Additional handouts in the packet are areprint on the English of India from "The New York Times" magazine, a reviewof "East West" from "The New Yorker," and an article by Rushdie, also from"The New Yorker." A handout describing a student research project also isincluded. (BT)
I have enclosed my first project based on the work I did this summer. Whatis included in the packet is the following:
1. The syllabus of my new trimester-long senior elective, "ContemporaryWorld Classics in Literature and Film." The course was designed to beginwith two writers of Indian descent, Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee.
2. The daily assignments for the first half of the trimester, which include allof the reading assignments from Rushdie and Mukherjee, as well as theviewing of Salaam Bombay!, the film from India that ,the students viewed.
3. A handout detailing a way to approach Rushdie's "Yorick," a story mystudents found difficult;
4. Two handouts for in-class writing assignments on Rushdie.
5. Three additional handouts: one on the English of India from The NewYork Times magazine; one a review of East West, in The New Yorkermagazine and, the final, an article by Rushdie, also from The New Yorker.
6. I have also included a handout describing the students' research project, asseveral students did research projects on India writers.
The unit on India was the most successful of the year. Students appreciatedboth the novel by Mukherjee and the short fiction of Rushdie, and enjoyedstruggling with the difficulty that those works present. Salaam Bombay! wasthe favorite movie of the course; students found it moving and well made. Ihad research projects on many topics, but several explored topics related toIndia. One student wrote on Rushdie's political difficulties; one wrote on thecritical reception of Midnight's Children, a book she read on her own; onewrote about women in India, using a number of contemporary sources; onewrote on Rushdie's allusions in "Yorick," reading some Sterne and someSaxo Granunaticus; another read another novel by Mukherjee and evaluatedit in comparison to Jasmine..
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Without my trip to India, I would have been unable to approach the topicwith as much energy and excitement as I did, fresh from the Fulbrightexperience. That excitement communicated itself to the students, who gavethe course very favorable evaluations.With many thanks for your efforts in making the Fulbright seminar sovaluable to me, personally and professionally.
Sincerely yours,
Leslie J. Altman
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Contemporary World Classics in Literature and FilmFall, 1998
AltmanOffice hours: Bands 2, 4, 7 and 8Office location: AC Lobby
Required texts:Andre Brink, A Dry, White SeasonAthol Fugard, Master Harold. . . and the boysThomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie BlacksmithJamaica Kincaid, Annie JohnBharati Mukherjee, JasmineSalman Rushdie, East, West
Selected handouts
Expectations and course requirements:
-A paper on each group of readings or book that we read, about one everytwo weeks
-An oral presentation on a film clip--A research project due during the second six weeks. A proposal will be
due early in October-Class participation
This course will examine works by a group of "post colonial" writers andfilmmakers from India, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Australia. Inaddition to reading the required texts, students will have an opportunity topursue further their individual interests in papers and projects.
Another goal of the course is to develop criteria for evaluating films. Duringthe first six weeks students will be asked to prepare an oral presentation inwhich they present an analysis of a short film clip. We will watch threecomplete films together: Salaam Bombay! (from India), Sugar Cane Al lley(from Martinique), and A World Apart (from South Africa).
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Schedule
August 31--Introductions, syllabus, texts, assignmentsSeptember 1--East, West: "Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies"Sept. 2--"The Free Radio" (Group work on language)Sept. 3--"The Prophet's Hair"Sept. 4-- "Yorick" (Free writing)
Sept. 7--HolidaySept. 8--"At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers"; in-class writing on "Prophet"and "Slippers"Sept. 9-- "Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain ConsummateTheir Relationship" (Santa Fe, AD 1492)"Sept. 10--Catching up. Presenting film clipsSept. 11--"The Harmony of the Spheres"
Sept. 14--"Checkov and Zulu"Sept. 15--"The Courter" Begin viewing Salaam BombaySept. 16--Short Wednesday: Finish viewing Salaam BombaySept. 17--Jasmine Read Chs. 1-7Sept. 18--Chapters 8-13. Catching up. Presenting film clips.
Sept. 21--Rushdie paper dueSept. 22--Jasmine, chapters 14-19Sept. 23--No class: Short Wednesday, bands 5-8Sept. 24--Jasmine, chapters 20-23Sept. 25--Finish Jasmine
Sept. 28--Begin Annie John:. Catching up. Presenting film clipsSept. 29--"Figures in the Distance" and "The Circling Hand"Sept. 30--Paper on Jasmine, East,West, Salaam BombayOct. 1--"Gwen"Oct. 2--"The Red Girl"
Oct. 5--"Columbus in Chains" Presenting film clips.Oct. 6--"Somewhere, Belgium"Oct. 7--"The Long Rain"Oct. 8--"A Walk to the Jetty"Oct. 9--In-class writing on Annie John. End of six weeks' grading period.
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Alas, poor Yorick! I fear we will run out of time before we can talk about thisstory on Friday, so here's some information that may help you approach it:
Rushdie is quoted as saying that the two most influential novels in Englishare Clarissa, (1747-1748) by Samuel Richardson, and Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) by Laurence Sterne. (The full title of the work is The Life and Opinionsof Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The novel, supposedly an account byTristram of his life from the time of his conception to the present, shows howmuch Sterne was influenced by John Locke's theory of the irrational nature ofthe association of ideas. (Do you see one connection between Sterne andRushdie so far?) In fact, the novel never gets beyond the second or third yearof Tristram's life, it is so full of his "opinions," philosophical digressions oneverything, including the account of the life of Yorick, a humorous parsonwho claims descent from the Yorick of Hamlet. Tristram Shandy is also filledwith typographical eccentricities--dots, dashes, asterisks, one sentencechapters, blank pages, unfinished sentences, and more. (Do you see anotherconnection to Rushdie's story?)
To look closely at just a small piece--try the paragraph on p, 65 that beginswith "Yorick's saga . . ."Do the math: Yorick's saga is the same one that fell into the hands of acertain Tristram 235 years ago: 1994, when East, West was published, less 235equals 1759, the year Tristram Shandy was first published. Pun on "certain."Then pun on "Tristram," a version of Tristan, lover of Iseult in the medievalromances. Then another, "neither triste [sad] nor ram [male goat]. Pun on"Shandy," which in Britain, is also the name of a pub drink that combinesbeer and lemonade, fizzy if not frothy, called a lemonade shandy. Pun onvellum, from the preceding paragraph: for "a velluminous history" read also"voluminous" as Tristram Shandy clearly is). Look up "palatinate." What is"permanganate"? Where does "juice of cursed hebona" come from? (Didyou recognize the phrase?)
Does one have to be an English teacher to enjoy this story?
On Tuesday, you will have a chance to write about "The Prophet's Hair" and"At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers." Think, as you read ". . .RubySlippers," about the relationship between the two and how one represents"East" and one "West." What assumptions operate in the world of "TheProphet's Hair"? What assumptions operate in the world of ". . . RubySlippers"? Will ever the twain meet?Also, over the long weekend, start thinking about a film clip you would liketo show to the group and what you want us to notice about the filmtechnically speaking. Do you need me to provide a glossary of filmterminology? I'll begin working on that this weekend.
In-class writing on East, West"The Prophet's Hair" and "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers"
You may use your books.
Consider the hair of the prophet and the ruby slippers as icons of theirrespective cultures. An "icon" in this case means "a symbol, . . . particularly arepresentation of a sacred personage." What does each icon reveal about theculture which it symbolizes, particularly the values of that culture?
(Please think and plan before you begin writing.)
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In-class writing on East, West
You have now read the first story in the "West" section. What is yourreaction? Specifically, does it feel more familiar than the stories in the "East"section? Is there less you feel you need to come to terms with before you canunderstand the story? Are there "in-jokes" you get? If not, if in fact "Yorick"feels more difficult than, say, "The Prophet's Hair," what does that tell youabout (a) Rushdie and his education, and (b) what Rushdie may be trying tosay, his "point, fundamentally."
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Guide for watching Salaam Bombay!
1. The protagonist, Krishna, is named for one of the avatars of Vishnu. He issometimes seen as a baby, sometimes as a shepherd, sometimes as a lover,sometimes as a warrior, in stories told about his adventures.
Krishna will be called Chaipu, or "tea boy," after his chief occupation inBombay.
2. Ganesh, the brand of tobacco, is the name of the god of beginnings. He isoften invoked at the start of an enterprise to ensure its success. He is the sonof Siva and Parvati. See if you can find the story that explains why Ganeshhas an elephant's head. The festival and parade that leads Krishna to lose his"second mother" is a festival honoring Ganesh.
3. While you are watching, take notes. When we have finished viewing thefilm, we will talk about what makes it successful (or unsuccessful), both interms of its literary, dramatic, and cinematic aspects. Use this sheet to listideas to share in class, as well as questions you have and your comments.
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Research Project GuidelinesContemporary World Classics . . . .
Fall, 1998
Due November 20: a 5-8 page paper answering a research question on asubject relevant to the course
Requirements:1. You must submit a proposal by October 26 outlining your topic and listingyour working bibliography.
2. You may use as many primary sources as you wish; you must use aminimum of 5 sources, of which two must be secondary sources.
3. A summary of your progress will be due at a research conference, to be heldduring the week of November 2.
Some areas to investigate:1. Comparison of one of the works read for class and another work or worksby the same author (e.g., East, West and Midnight's Children (too long,probably) or Jasmine and another work by Mukherjee.)
2. Comparison of one of the films and another film from the same country,by the same director (e.g., Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala or SalaamBombay! and a contemporary Hindi film)
3. Analysis of works by another contemporary world authors not read forclass: e.g., Anita Desai (India), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica) or Derek Walcott(Trinidad), J. M. Coetzee (South Africa), David Malouf (Australia). Read KeriHulme's new book or Patricia Grace (New Zealand). Tell me what you'reinterested in, and I will make suggestions.
4. Contemporary reception of one of the works read for class, here and inother countries
5. Connections between one of the writers and other political, historical,social, or cultural events
6. Social or cultural issues reflected in the works
Documentation:Students are required to follow a system of documenting the sources that theyuse. MLA (textual citations with a full bibliography) is one acceptable format.
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Evaluation:Students will be evaluated on the final project, as well as on completing thefollowing steps:
ProposalWorking bibliographyResearch conference with written summary of progressProper documentation of sourcesPresentation of final paper to the class
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BOOKEND/PiCO Iyer
English in India: Still All the RajTHE assault began, really, as soon as I set footin Bombay a few months before the golden ju-bilee of Indian independence. if Aggrieved,"advised the sign in the airport arrival hall,
"Please Consult Asstt. Commissioner Customs." Atthe counter where I went to change my money, a noticetold me,"PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR DRAW-ERS ARE LOCKED PROPERLY," and after I'd doneso, looking down demurely, I stepped into a wheezingold knock-off of a Morris Oxford to lurch through
/ streets that said "Free Left Turn" on one side and"Passenger Alighting Point" on the other. The crazy
' Indian dialectic was in full swing all around, buses de-mending "SILENCE PLEASE" on their exteriors, a
1 few. truck mudguards responding, "HORN O.K.PLEASE," and my own little car making its own small
' contribution to democracy with a sticker that read:"Blow Your Horn / Pay a Fine."
India is the most talkative country in the world, it of-ten seems, and it comes at you in almost 200 languages,1,652 dialects and a million signs and slogans screamingout of every store and taxicab. Many of them are just fa-miliar enough to be quite strange. We passed Text-oriums as we drove into town, and a Toilet Complex,Stomach Trimmer palaces and Police Beat-Boxes. Wepassed the Clip Joint Beauty Clinic and Note Bene Clean-ers of Distinction. A sign outside one apartment block of-fered: "No Parking for Out Siders. If Found Guilty, AllTyres Will Be Deflated With Extreme Prejudice." An adfor a lecture informed me that "Yogic laughter is multi-dimensionaL" I could only imagine that like most of thecity's notices, it had been fashioned by some proud grad-uate of the course I saw advertised in the localnewspaper. "We make you big boss in English conversa-tion. Hypnotize people by your highly impressive talks.Exclusive courses for exporters, business tycoons."
Malcolm Muggeridge famously remarked that thelast true Englishman would be an Indian, and it's easyto believe that when you hear the "jolly goods" and
it
out of station chappies" ricocheting around the Will-ingdon Club in Bombay, or any of the other oldcanteens and cantonments and Civil List houses thatfill the country's dusty enclaves. Much of the fascina-tion of Indian English lies in the fact that it is as fla-vorful a monument to the Raj as the white-flannel.cricketers along the Oval, the "Whispering Pines" cot-tages around the hills and the mossy, overgrowngravestones commemorating forgotten personageslike Sarah Chandy and the Bombay Color Sergeants.
But a deeper fascination is that modern India hasso thoroughly made the language imposed on it its own,so vigorously adding condiments that it isn't quite Eng-.dish and isn't quite not The history of Indlish or Eng-
,/ lian, or whatever you want to call this hyperactive off-spring of a marriage of inconvenience, begins with the
, merchants and adventurers of the East India Compa-ny, who first came over in the mid -17th century, andwere soon taking back cashmeres and juggernauts andother semi-demi-pukka terms stolen from the IndianEmpire. But it culminated most vividly in the soldiersand teachers and high-minded civil servants of latercenturies, who madecit their business to domesticatethe East, and often got thoroughly domesticated them-selves. We all know that Victoria sent railroads and be-wigged solicitors and Thomas Babington Macaulay toIndia; what we're liable to forget is that by the middleof the lath century, according to one account, India hadsent 26.000 words back into English, many of them asfamiliar as your pajamas or veranda.
The grand old mildewed registry of this commu-nion, of course, is "Hobson-Jobson," "a portly double-columned edifice," as Henry Yule rails it in his preface
Pico Iyer is -the author, most recently, of "TropicalClassical."
of 1886, which began with a series of letters and took itsname, improbably, from an Englished version of "thewallings of the Mohammedans as they beat theirbreasts in the procession of Moharram 'Ya Hasan!Ya Hosain!' " Three centuries of backstairs meetingsseem to hide out in this monumental dictionary of An-glo-Indian speech, and a whole world comes into viewwhen one reads that a "Lady Kenny" is a "black ball-shaped syrupy confection" named after the Lady Can-ning to whom it was first presented, and a "James andMary" is the name of "a famous sandbank in theHooghly River behind Calcutta?? Every inflection ofwhat was once known as Butler English and KitchenEnglish is spelled out with a gravity worthy of the factsof life, and besides reading solemn explications of"pish-posh" and "ticky-tock" and the derivation of"burra-beebee," you can learn that "a four and twen-ty". meant "a criminal" and "ducks" referred to the"gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service.""Home," the venerable archive informs one, "in An-glo-Indian and colonial speech ... means England."
Nowadays, as Selman Rushdie notes, imperialismis reversed not only on the page, and any Englishmanworth his salt any tycoon or pundit or thug, in fact
HENRIK DRESCAEA
knows all about gurus and mantras and yoga. "Theygave us the language," as a character says in HanifKureishi's novel "The Black Album, ". "but it is onlywe who know how to use it." Those who marvel at therutputty masala mixes in Rushdie's novels are apt toexaggerate the magic and underestimate the realism.A walk down any Bombay street is not unlike a journeythrough any chapter of "Midnight's Children."
The shouting vitality of Indian English is mostlyenshrined in the signs and sentences and even senti-ments that bombard you as you bump around a landof Eve-teasers and newspaper wallahs, symptoms of apalimpsest culture that never throws anything awaybut takes' every new influence or import and throws itinto the mix. Sometimes it seems the whole subconti-nent is just a mess of bromides, axioms, apothegmsand rules, all religiously observed in the breach. Eventhe simplest trip down any Indian street becomes a pil-grimage through a gallery of warnings. Some of them
"Do Not Cross Verge" or (on a narrow mountainroad) "Watch for Shooting Stones" make a certainkind of antic sense; but others "Stop for Octroi," forexample I'm still trying to puzzle out
A stranger aspect of this somewhat bossy strain isthat every injunction, however sublime, is undone by ahabitual conversion into singsong. India to this day re-mains a jingler's paradise, and the "Lane Driving IsSane Driving" signs I recall from a decade ago have
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now been joined by tinkly little caveats that trill,"Reckless Drivers Kill and Die / Leaving AU Behind toCry" (or, more laconiCally, "Risk-Taker Is Accident-Maker"). One of the abiding delights of Indian Englishis that much of it reads as If it had been composed by aschoolmaster conspiring with a maiden aunt (calledMrs. Malaprop, perhaps) and drawing, principally, onthe works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. How canone resist a place where the "matrimonial notices" inlocal newspapers offer brides who are "artful, homelyand wheat-colored"? And where a "cousin-in-law" saidhopefully to me at a Matrimonial Felicitation Functionlast year, "The ceremonies should be quite pompous."
Yet in the right hands this curious hybrid's very af-fectations can seem merely aspirations, and it is oftenthe straining toward a grandeur vanished or alwaysout of reach that is so touching here. Tiny, ramshacklehuts present themselves as "Marriage Palaces" andrickety buses that cannot write "Stage Carriage" ontheir sides inscribe "Semi-Deluxe." Even a public toiletI encountered had, with a trademark Indian mix ofstrictness and idealism, "Beautification" written on *1one side and "Coordination" on the other.
It as if words in the subcontinent were still assumedto have a magic they've lost at home, as if calling a place"Reliable" or "Honesty" were the first step towardmaking it so. Not that Indian courtesy is always inno-cent. "Any Exchange Fault or Communications Error,"a sign in a public phone'office advised me, "Is on Cus-tomer's Account. Thanks." Some of the terms you see inIndia have curious meanings (the cafes advertising "fin-gers,"1 learned, were only selling "finger chips," orfrench fries), and some of them just look as if they do.("Video Shooting We Undertake," a tiny photo shop in-formed me.) Some meticulously preserve now fadingcustoms, and some confer a gay Edwardian tilt on eventhe most everyday transactions. ("I'm sorry," I wastold when I called up the editor of a movie magazine,"Miss Sonaya is not in her cabin just now," which mademe imagine her, perhaps not incorrectly, on a cruiseship.) At Elphinstone College, in the redbrick Victorianheart of the University of Bonibay, I was greeted by an"Institute of Distance Education" just down the corri-dor from a "Backward Class CelL" And in the city'smost famous Hindu temple a sign advised, "Devoteesare warned that to sit on the rocks much deep in the seawater away fromthe sea shore is not only encroachmenton government property but is also dangerous to theirlives, including valuable ornaments."
Whether or not my life was a valuable ornament, Icame away feeling that Indian English is not just a sa-vory stepmother tongue to hundreds of millions of In-dians (more Indians, after all, speak English than .
Englishmen do), and not just an invaluable mementoof a centuries-long mishmash, but also a grand and dis-tinctive product of a culture as verbally supple and full 3of energy as any I know. Six years ago, India at lastopened its borders wide to foreign companies, andwhen last I was in Bombay, "cyberprofessional" and"brand name equity" were the terms of the moment, .
bandied about by the young in their MTV-furnishedpubs, as they spoke with studied casualness of "air-dashing." In the newspapers, editorials that still drew,with surprising frequency, upon the example and wis-dom of Bertram Wooster sat next to ads that promiseda "Mega Exhibition Showcase of Ideal Lifestyle."
Yet this stubbornly anachronistic tongue, out ofdate even when it was first imported, suggests thatthere'll always be an England, if only because there'llalways be an India. As I prepared to air-dash awaybeing asked my "good name" one last time, in Delhi'sairport, near signs that said "Be Like Venus:.Unarmed" and an office on the runway labeled "ApronControl" I wondered how far I was really going."Blighty," after all, is the Hindi word for "foreign"
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 27
THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK.Worlds collide in Salman Rusbdie's new collection.
BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
EALISM can break a writer'sheart," says the narrator ofSalman Rushdie's 1983 novel
"Shame." "Fortunately, however, I am. only telling a sort of modem fairy-tale,1 so that's all right; nobody need get up-
set,set, or take anything I say too seriously.No drastic action need be taken, either.What a relief!" Its impossible to readthese lines today without the sense thatgrim literalism has revenged itself upon
. irony. Rushdie, the Pandora of post-i modernism, has forever dispelled any
doubt about the potency of the modemfairy tale.
"East, West" (Pantheon; $21) is acollection of nine such fairy tales; in oneof them, fictional characters have beendetaching themselves from the novels,films, and paintings where they belongand taking their place among the flesh-and-blood. "This permeation of the realworld by the fictional is a symptom ofthe moral decay of our post-millennial
1. culture," the narrator soberly intones.-4 "There can be little doubt that a large
majority of us opposes the free, unre-stricted migration of imaginary beings
!into an already damaged reality." It's ai fable that nimbly reminds us how vast a1crulf exists between Rushdie and the lit-
,
( eralists who seek to destroy him. Theyread fiction as fact; Rushdie urges us to
rconsider the ways in which "fact"whatwe take to be natural and realmay befiction. In a 1985 essay he wrote, "The
1 migrant suspects reality: having expert-enced several ways of being, he under-stands their illusory nature."
The literature of migrancy may bethe literature of border-crossing, butRushdie reminds us that borders crossedaren't merely the kind drawn in dirt. Hisrestless intelligence is forever challeng-ing the lines between East and West,the past and the present, Homo ludensand Homo sapiens, realism and fantasy.(He has admitted that the techno-phantasmagorias of J. G. Ballard strikehim as much more "realistic" than theostensibly ordinary settings conjured byAnita Brookner.) If there are culturaltraditions that belong to the West and
to the East, there is also, he insists, athird tradition, a tradition of displace-ment and exile which belongs to nei-ther. Of course, the big themes ofmigrancycultural heterogeneity, thefragmented and hybrid nature of iden-tityare equally the pet themes of lit-erary postmodernism. And make nomistake: there isn't an artist more self-conscious than Salman Rushdie. (Hiscritical essays bristle with references tosuch postmodernist pashas as MichelFoucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard.)But the literary resources of migrancyare more than theoretical. It hasn't es-caped the British literary establishmentthat a lot of what's most compelling incontemporary fiction has been writtenby people with names like DavidMalouf, Timothy Mo, V. S. Naipaul,Caryl Phillips, and, yes, SalmanRushdiepeople who have, in oneway or another, dwelled at the marginsof the Commonwealth.. "Literature isnot in the business of copyrightingcertain themes for certain groups,"Rushdie has wisely cautioned. Still,we've all had a chance to see whathappens when, as the saying goes, theEmpire writes back
Rushdie's new book is divided intothree sections of three stories eachtheheadings are "East," "West," and "East,West"but such a division seems de-signed to illustrate the instability of di-visions. Inevitably, the "East" stories arealso about the Wesr, the "West" storiesare also about the East; and the "East,West" stories are about both but alsoneither. There are stories about to-ternsDorothy's ruby slippers, theProphet's hair. There are stories thatweirdly refract characters from othersources, including "The 'wizard of Oz"and "Star Trek" And there are storieswhose sheer literary effrontery takes yourbreath awaylike one entitled "Yorick,"a tour de force of pastiche. It's "Ham-let" as retold by Laurence Steme's Par-son Yorick, complete with Sterneandashes and asterisks; but it's also an as-sertion of literary genealogy, invoking asit does Rushdie's great precursor in the
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art of nonlinear and fragmented narrative.What makes the collection work as a
collection is its juxtaposition of contrast-ing voices, from the windy cadences of"Yorick" 's eighteenth-century wit"It'sa true fact that men take an equal plea-sure in annihilating both the groundupon which they stand while they liveand the substance (I mean paper) uponwhich they may remain, immortalized,once this same ground is over theirheads instead of under their feet"tothe snappish tone of the Indian narra-tor of "The Free Radio": "The boy wasan innocent, a real donkey's child, youcan't teach such people." Rushdie's mas-tery of ventriloquism is such that it's fi-nally beside the point to ask (as the oldCharlie McCarthy routine has it) who'sthe dummy.
It's another futile exercise to look fora centering theme in a book so distrust-ful of all centers; but there may be a cen-tering non-theme in the book's repudia-tion of the idea, and ideology, of"home." While fashionable revisionistshave been peddling the story of Chris-topher Columbus as vile proto-imperi-alist, Rushdie's "Christopher Columbusand Queen Isabella of Spain Consum-mate Their Relationship" refigures Co-lumbus as the ultimate migrant, whosevoyage is a means of breaking away fromthe very patronage that makes it pos-sible. A more expeditious way of leav-ing home is to take leave of your senses,as does Eliot, the Welsh guru in "TheHarmony of the Spheres." And in "TheCourter" the narrator's beloved ayah de-velops a mysterious heart ailment thatturns out to be a quite literal form ofhomesickness, and prompts her to re-turn to the Subcontinent. Somethinglike this must have been in the minds ofthe eighteenth-century physiologistswho coined the word "nostalgia" (com-pounded from the Greek nostos, "areturn home," and algos, "pain"). IfRushdie isn't wholly free of nostalgiahimself, his larger aim is to critique nos-talgia, the specious comforts of home
and homelands. Pace Robert Frost,Rushdie sees home as a place where,when you have to go there, you're reallyout of luck.
The seductions of home are mostsquarely the preoccupation of "At theAuction of the Ruby Slippers," a storythat evokes Donald Barthelme in its lu-natic stolidity. "Behind bullet-proofglass, the ruby slippers sparkle. We donot know the limits of their powers. Wesuspect that these limits may not exist."While the slippers repose in their high-security case, the whole world preparesto bid for them: they're an item ofunquantifiable value. "Around theletus sayshrine of the ruby-sequinnedslippers, pools of saliva have been form-ing. There are those of us who lack re-straint, who drool. The jumpsuitedLatino janitor moves amongst us, apail in one hand and a squeegee mopin the other." (At the same time, "dis-approving critiques of the fetishizingof the slippers are offered by religiousfundamentalists." They want to buythe slippers in order to burn them.)But can the slippers do what they aresupposed to?
"Home" has become such a scattered,damaged, various concept in our presenttravails. There is so much to yearn for....How hard can we expect even a pair ofmagic shoes to work? They promised totake us home, but are metaphors of homeli-ness comprehensible to them, are abstrac--tions permissible? Are they literalists, orwill they permit us to redefine the blessedword?
Dorothy's shibboleth gradually assumesanother meaning in this reverie: thereis indeed no place like home, preciselyin the sense that there's no such placeas home. Click your heels togetherthree times and say that, and you'rewell on your way to entering Rushdie'svision of migrancy as the very conditionof cultural modernity. If Rushdie'spersecutors have made the experienceof rootless nomadism all too literalfor him, he's still teaching the restof us why we can't go home again.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDONSalman Rushdie, London, September 26, 1994.
50
LIFE AND LETTERS
DAMME, THIS IS THE ORIENTALSCENE FOR YOU!
Indians are writing some of the most adventurous fiction today. Why isn't it in
Hindi (or Assamese, or Bengali, or one of the fifteen other nationallanguages)?
BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
IONCE gave a reading to a gather-ing 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'sChildren,' " she said. "It is a very longbook, but never mind, I read it through.And the question I want to ask you isthis: Fundamentally, what's your point?"Before I could attemptan answer, she spokeagain: "Oh, I knowwhat you're going tosay. You're going to saythat the whole effort,from cover to coverthat is the point of theexercise. Isn't that whatyou were going to say?"
"Something like that,perhaps," I got out
She snorted. "Itwon't do."
"Please," I begged."Do I have to have justone point?"
"Fundamentally,"she said, with impres-sive firmness, "yes."
Contemporary In-dian literature remains largely unknownin the United States, in spite of its co_ n-siderable present-day energy and di-versity. The few writers who have madean impression (R K. Narayan, VikramSeth) are inevitably read in a kind ofliterary isolation: texts without con-text. Some writers of Indian descent,such.as V S. Naipaul and Bharati Mu-kherjee, reject the ethnic label "Indianwriters," perhaps in an effort to placethemselves in other, better-understoodliterary contexts. Mukherjee sees her-self nowadays -as an American writer,while Naipaul would perhaps prefer tobe read as an artist from nowhere andeverywhere. Indiansand, followingthe partition of the subcontinent almost
fifty years ago, one should also say Paki-stanishave long been migrants, seek-ing their fortunes in Africa, Australia,Britain, the Caribbean, and America,and this diaspora has produced manywriters who lay claim to an excessof roots: writers like the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whoseverses look toward Srinagar from Am-
herst, Massachusetts, by way of othercatastrophes. He writes:
what else besides God disappears atthe altar?
0 Kashmir, Armenia once vanished.Words are nothing,
just rumorslike rosesto embel-lish a slaughter.
Flow, then, is one to make any sim-ple, summarizing statement"Funda-mentally, what's your point?"about somultiform a literature, hailing from thathuge crowd of a country (close to a bil-lion people at the last count), that vast,metamorphic, continent-size culture,which feels, both to Indians and to visi-tors, like a non-stop assault on the senses,the emotions, the imagination, and thespirit? Put the Indian subcontinent in the
Atlantic Ocean and it would reach fromEurope to America; put it together withChina and you've got almost half thepopulation of the world.
These days, new Indian writers seem toemerge every few weeks. Their work is aspolymorphous as the place. The approach-ing fiftieth anniversary of Indian inde-pendence is a useful pretext for a surveyof half a century of postliberation writ-ing. For many months now, I have beenreading my way through this literature,and my Delhi interrogator may bepleased to hear that the experience hasindeed led me to a singleunexpectedand profoundly ironicconclusion.
THIS is it The prose writingbothfiction and nonfictioncreated in
this period by Indian writers working inEnglish is proving to be a stronger and
more important bodyof work than most ofwhat has been pro-duced in the eighteen"recognized" languagesof India, the so-called"vernacular languages,"during the same time;and, indeed, this new,and still burgeoning,"Indo- Anglian" litera-ture represents perhapsthe most valuable con-tribution India has yetmade to the world ofbooks. The true Indianliterature of the firstpostcolonial half cen-tury has been madein the language theBritish left behind.
It is a large claim, though it may bean easy one for non-Indian readers to ac-cept, if most of India's English-languagewriters are still largely unknown in theWest, the problem is far greater in thecase of the vernacular literatures. OfIndia's non-English-language authors,perhaps only the name of the 1913 NobelPrize-winning Bengali writer Rabin-dranath Tagore would be recognized in-ternationally, and even his work, thoughstill popular in Latin America, is nowpretty much a dosed book in the UnitedStates. In any case, it is a claim that runscounter to much of the received critical zwisdom within India itself. It is also not
(.9
a claim that I ever expected to make.Admittedly, I did my reading only in
16 BEST COPY AVAILABLE
52THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 23 & 30,1997
"It's me, TomHuck Finn!"
English, and there has long been a genu-ine problem of translation in Indianotonly into English but between the ver-nacular languagesand it is possible thatgood writers have been ill served by theirtranslators' inadequacies. Nowadays,however, such bodies as the Indian Acad-emy of the Arts (the Sahitya Akademi),UNESCO, and Indian publishers them-selves .have been putting substantial re-sources into the creation of better trans-lations, and the problem, while noteradicated, is certainly much diminished.
Ironically, the century before indepen-dence contains many vernacular- languagewriters who would merit a place in anyanthology- besidei Rabindranath Tagore,there are Bankini Chandra Chatterjee,Dr. Muhammad Iqb4:BihhiitibhushanBanerjee (the iiithOrOf."Pather Pan-chali," on which Satya- jit Ray based hiscelebrated Apu trilogy of films), andPremchand, the prolific (and thereforerather variable) Hindi author of, amongmany other works, the famous novel ofrural life "Godaan; or, The Gift of aCoW." Those who wish to seek out theirleading present-day successors should try,for example, 0. V. Vijayan (Malayalam),Suryakant Tripathi, also known as"Nirala" (Hindi), Nirmal Verma (Hindi),
U. R Ananthamurthy (Kannada), SureshJoshi (Gujarati), Amrita Pritam (Pun-jabi), Qurratulain Hyder (Urdu), and Is-mat Chughtai (Urdu), and make theirown assessments. English versions existof at least some of these writers' works;sometimes, as in the case of Vijayan,translated by the author.
To my own considerable astonish-ment, however, there is only one Indianwriter in translation whom I would placeon a par with the Indo-Anglian. (Actu-ally, he's better than most of them.) Thatis Saadat Hasan Manto, an immenselypopular Urdu writer of low-life fictions,whom conservative critics sometimesscorn for his choice of characters and mi-lieus; much as Virginia Woolf snobbishlydisparaged the fictional universe of JamesJoyce's "Ulysses." Manto's Masterpieceis the short story "Toba Tek Singh," aparable of the partition of India, in whichit is decided that the lunatics, too, mustbe partitionedIndian lunatics to India,Pakistani lunatics to the new country ofPakistan. But for the inmates of an asy-lum in Lahore everything is unclear. theexact site of the frontier, and of. the placesof origin of the insane persons, too. Thelunacies in the asylum become, in thissavagely funny story, a perfect metaphor
17
for the greater insanity ofhistory.
The lack of first-ratewriting in translation canonly be a matter for regret.However, to speak morepositively, it is a delight tobe able to celebrate thequality of a growing col-lective English-languageceuvre, whose status haslong been argued over, butwhich has, in the lasttwenty years or so, begunto merit a place alongsidethe most flourishing litera-tures in the world.
R some Indian critics,English-language In-
dian writing will never bemore than a postcolonialanomalythe bastardchild of Empire, sired onIndia by the departingBritish. Its continuing useof the old colonial tongueis seen as a fatal flaw that
renders it forever inauthentic. Indo-Anglian literature evokes in these criticsthe kind of prejudiced reaction shownby some Indians toward the country'scommunity of Anglo-Indiansthat is,Eurasians.
Fifty years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru de-livered, in English, the great "freedom atmidnight" speech that marked the mo-ment of independence:
At the stroke of the midnight hour,when the world sleeps, India will awake tolife and freedom. A moment comes, whichcomes but rarely in history, when we stepout from the old to the new, when an ageends, and when the soul of a nation, longsuppressed, finds utterance.
Since that indisputably Anglophoneoration, the role of English itself has of-ten been disputed in India. Attempts tocoin 'medical, scientific, technological,and everyday neologisms in India's con-tinental shelf of languages to replace thecommonly used English words havesometimes succeeded but have moreoften comically failed. And when theMaoist government of the state of Ben-gal announced, in the early eighties, thatthe supposedly elitist, colonialist teach-ing of English would be discontinuedin government-run primary schools,many on the left denounced the decision
54 TF-1E NEW YORKER., JUNE 23 & 30, 1997
itself as elitist, because it would de-prive the masses of the many economicand social advantages of speaking theworld's language and only the affluentprivate-school elite would henceforthhave that privilege. A well-known Cal-cutta graffito complained, "My sonwon't learn English. Your son won'tlearn English. But Jyoti Basu"theChief Minister"will send his sonabroad to learn English." One man'sghetto of privilege is another's road tofreedom.
Like the Greek god Dionysius, whowas dismembered and afterward reas-sembledand who, according to themyths, was one of India's earliest con-querorsIndian writing in English hasbeen called "twice-born" (by the criticMeenakshi Mukherjee) to suggest itsdouble parentage. While I am, I mustadmit, attracted by the Dionysian reso-nances of this supposed double birth,it seems to me to rest on the falsepremise that English, having arrivedfrom outside India, is and must neces-sarily remain an alien there. But my ownmother tongue, Urdu, which was thecamp argot of the country's earlier Mus-lim conquerors, was also an immigrantlanguage, forged from a combination ofthe conquerors' imported Farsi and thelocal languages they encountered. How-ever, it became a naturalized subconti-nental language long ago; and by nowthat has happened to English, too. En-glish has become an Indian language. Itscolonial origins mean that, like Urduand unlike all other Indian languages, ithas no regional base; but in all otherways it has emphatically come to stay.
(In many parts of South India, peoplewill prefer to converse with visitingNorth Indians in English rather than inHindi, which feels, ironically, more likea colonial language_ to speakers of Tamil,Kannada, or Malayalam than does En-glish, which ha's 'acquired in the Southan aura of lingua-franca cultural neutral-ity. The new Silicon Valley-style boomin computer technology which is trans-forming the economies of Bangaloreand Madras has made English in thosecities an even more important languagethan before.)
Indian English, sometimes unattrac-tively called "Hinglish," is not "En-glish" English, to be sure, any more thanIrish or American or Caribbean English
is. And part of the achievement of En-glish-language Indian writers is to havefound literary voices that are as distinc-tively Indian, and also as suitable for anyand all the purposes of art, as those ofother English-language writers in Ire-land, Africa, the West Indies, and theUnited States.
However, Indian critical assaults onthis new literature continue to be madefrom time to time. Its practitioners aredenigrated for being too upper-middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choiceof themes and techniques; for being lesspopular in India than outside India; forpossessing inflated reputations on ac-count of the international power of theEnglish language, and of the ability ofWestern critics and publishers to imposetheir cultural standards on the East; forliving, in many cases, outside India; forbeing deracinated to the point wheretheir work lacks the spiritual dimensionessential for a "true" understanding ofthe soul of India; for being insufficientlygrounded in the ancient literary traditionsof India; for being the literary equivalentof MTV culture, or of globalizing Coca-Colonization; even, I'm sony to report, forsuffering from a condition that onesprightly recent commentator, PankajMishra, calls "Rushdie-itis . . . a condi-tion that has daimed Rushdie himself inhis later works."
It is interesting that so few of thesecriticisms are literary in the pure senseof the word. For the most part, they donot deal with language, voice, psycho-logical or social insight, imagination, ortalent. Rather, they have to do withclass, power, and belief. There is a whiffof political correctness about them: theironic proposition that India's best writ-ing since independence may have beendone in the language of the departedimperialists is simply too much forsome folks to bear. It ought not to betrue, and so must not be permitted tobe true. (That many of the attacks onEnglish-language Indian writing are
18
made in English by Indian writers whoare themselves members of the college-educated, English-speaking elite is afurther irony.)
yjr us quickly concede what must beconceded. It is true that most of
these writers come from the educatedclasses of India; but in a country still be-deviled by high illiteracy levels howcould the situation be otherwise? It doesnot follow, howeverunless one holdsto a rigid, class-war view of the worldthat writers with the privilege of a goodeducation will automatically write nov-els that seek only to portray the lives ofthe bourgeoisie. It is true that theretends to be a bias toward metropolitanand cosmopolitan fiction, but there hasbeen, during this half century, a genuineattempt to encompass as many Indianrealities as possible, rural as well as ur-ban, sacred as well as profane. This isalso, let us remember, a young literature.It is still pushing out the frontiers of thepossible.
The point about the power of theEnglish language, and of the Westernpublishing and critical fraternities, alsocontains some truth. Perhaps it doesseem, to some "home" commentators,that a canon is being foisted on themfrom outside. The perspective from theWest is rather different. Here whatseems to be the case is that Westernpublishers and critics have been growinggradually more and more excited by thevoices emerging from India; in En-gland, at least, British writers are oftenchastised by reviewers for their lackof Indian-style ambition and verve. Itfeels as if the East were imposing itselfon the West, rather than the other wayaround. And, yes, English is the mostpowerful medium of communication inthe world. Should we not, then; rejoiceat these artists' mastery of it, and attheir growing influence? To criticizewriters for their success in "breaking out"is no more than parochialism (and pa-rochialism is perhaps the main vice ofthe vernacular literatures). One impor-tant dimension of literature is that it isa means of holding a conversation withthe world. These writers are insuringthat Indiaor, rather, Indian voices (forthey are too good to fall into the trap ofwriting nationalistically)will hence-forth be confident, indispensable parti-
THE NEW YORKER., JUNE 23 30, 1997
.cipants in that literary conversation.Granted, many of these writers do
have homes outside India. Henry James,James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, ErnestHemingway, Gertrude Stein, MavisGallant, James Baldwin, GrahamGreene, Gabriel Garda Marquez, MarioVargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges,Vladimir Nabokov, and Muriel Sparkwere or are wanderers, too. MurielSpark, accepting in March, 1997, theBritish Literature Prize for a lifetime'sachievement, went as far as to say thattravel to other countries was essential forall writers. Literature has little or noth-ing to do with a writer's home address.
The question of religious faith, both asa subject and as an approach to a subject,is dearly important when we speak of acountry as near to bursting with devotionsas India; but it is surely excessive to useitas does one leading academic, theredoubtable Professor C. D. Narasim-haiahas a touchstone, so that Mulk RajAnand is praised for his "daring" merelybecause, as a leftist writer, he allows acharacter to be moved by deep faith,while Arun Kolatkar's poetry is deni-grated for "throwing away tradition andcreating a vacuum" and thereby "losingrelevance" because in "Jejuri," a cycle ofpoems about a visit to a temple town, heskeptically likens the stone gods in thetemples to the stones on the hillsidesnearby ("and every other stone / is god orhis cousin"). In fact, many of the writersI admire have a profound knowledge ofthe "soul of India"; many have deeplyspiritual concerns, while others are rad-ically secular, but the need to engagewithto make a reckoning withIndia'sreligious self is everywhere to be found.
The cheapening of artistic responsethat the allegations of deracination andWesternization imply is notably absentfrom the Indo-Anglian writers' work. Asto the claims of excessive Rushdie-itis, Ican't deny that on occasion I've felt some-thing of the sort myself. On the whole,however, it seems to be a short-lived vi-rus, and those whom it affects soon shakeit off and find their own, true voices.
(An interesting sidelight. After the1981 publication of my novel "Mid-night's Children," I learned that theidea of a long saga-novel about a childborn at the exact moment of indepen-dencemidnight, August 14-15, 1947had occurred to other writers, too. AGoan poet showed me the first chapter
INVISIBLE BODIES
Turning the corner of the streethe found three newborn puppiesin a gutter with a mother curledaround them.
Turning the corner of the streetshe found a newborn naked baby,male, battered, dead in the manholewith no mother around.
Turning the corner of the streetthe boy stepped on the junkielying in the alley, covered with flies,a dog sniffing his crotch.
Just any day, not only after a riot,even among the gamboge maples of fallstreets are full of bodies,-,invisibleto the girl under the twirling parasol.
A. IC RAMANUJAN(1929-1993)
of an abandoned novel in which the"midnight child" was born not in Bom-bay but in Goa. And as I travelled roundIndia I heard of at least two other abortedprojectsone in Bengali, the other inKannadawith nearly similar themes.)
At any rate, there is not, need not be,and should not be an adversarial relation-ship between English-language Indianliterature and the other literatures of In-dia. In my own caseand I suspect inthe case of every lndo-Anglian writer`knowing and loving the Indian languagesin which I was raised has remained ofvital personal and artistic importance.Hindi-Urdu, the "Hindustani" of NorthIndia, remains an essential aspect of mysense of self as an individual, while as awriter I have been partly formed by thepresence, in my head, of that other mu-sicthe rhythms, patterns, and habits ofthought and metaphor of all my Indiantongues.
Whatever language we Indians writein, we drink from the same well. India,that inexhaustible horn of plenty, nour-ishes us all.
Ti E first Indian novel in English wasa dud. "Rajmohan's Wife" (1864) is
a poor, melodramatic thing. The writer,Bankim, reverted to Bengali and immedi-
1 0
ately achieved great renown. For the nextseventy years or so, there was no English-language fiction of any quality. It was thegeneration of independence"midnight'sparents," one might call themwho werethe true architects of this new tradition.(Jawaharlal Nehru himself was a finewriter, his autobiography and letters areimportant, influential works. And his nieceNayantara Sahgal, whose early memoir,"Prison and Chocolate Cake," containsperhaps the finest evocation of the headytime of independence, went on to become
a major novelist.)In that generation, Mulk Raj Anand
was influenced by both Joyce and Marxbut most of all, perhaps, by the teach-ings of Mahatma Gandhi. He is bestknown for social-realist works like thenovels "Untouchable" (1935) and "Coolie"(1936), studies of the life of the poor,which could be compared to postwar Ital-ian neorealist cinema (De Sica's "The Bi-cycle Thief;" Rossellini's "Rome, OpenCity"). Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanslaitist,wrote of his determination to make anIndian English for himself; but even hismuch praised portrait of village life;"Kanthapura," published in 1938, nowseems dated, its approach at once gran-diloquent and archaic. The centenarianautobiographer Nirad C. Chaudhuri has
been, throughout his long life, an erudite,contrary, and mischievous presence. Hisview, if I may paraphrase and sum-marize it, is that India has no cultureof its own, and that whatever we nowcall Indian culture was brought in fromoutside by the successive waves of con-querors. This view, polemically and bril-liantly expressed, has not endeared himto many of his fellow-Indians. That hehas always swum so strongly against thecurrent has not, however, prevented "TheAutobiography of an Unknown Indian"from being recognized as a masterpiece.
The most significant writers of thisfirst generation, R K Narayan and G. V.Desani, have had opposite careers. Narayan'sbooks fill a good-sized shelf, Desani is theauthor of a single novel, "All AboutH. Hatterr," and that volume is alreadyfifty years old. Desani is almost unknown,while Narayan is, of course, a figure ofworld stature, for his creation of theimaginary town of Malgudi, so lovinglymade that it has become more vividly realto us than most real places. (But Narayan'srealism is leavened by touches of legend;the river Sarayu, for instance, on whoseshores the town sits, is one of the greatrivers of Hindu mythology. It is as ifWil-liam Faulkner had set his YoknapatawphaCounty on the banks of the Styx.)
Narayan shows us, over and overagain, the quarrel between traditional,static India, on the one hand, and mo-dernity and progress, on the other, rep-resented, in many of his stories andnovels, by a confrontation between a"wimp" and a "bully": "The Painter ofSigns" and his aggressive beloved withher birth-control campaign; "The Ven-dor of Sweets" and the emancipatedAmerican daughter-in-law with the ab-surd "novel-writing machine"; and themild-mannered printer and the extroverttaxidermist in 'The Man-Eater of Mal -gudi." In his gentle, lightly funny art hegoes to the heart of the Indian condi-tion and beyond itinto the humancondition itself.
The writer I have placed alongsideNarayan, G. V. Desani, has fallen so farfrom favor that the extraordinary "AllAbout H. Hatterr" is at present out ofprint in India. Milan Kundera once saidthat all modem literature descends fromeither Richardson's "Clarissa" or Sterne's"Tristram Shandy," and, if Narayan isIndia's Richardson, then Desani is hisShandean other. "Hatterr" 's dazzling,
THE NEW YORKER. JUNE 23 (, 30, 1997
punting, leaping prose is the first genu-ine effort to go beyond the Englishnessof the English language. Desani's cen-tral figure"fifty-fifty of the species,"the half-breed as unabashed antiheroleaps and capers behind the work ofmany of his successors. Desani writes:
The earth was blotto with the growth ofwillow, peach, mango-blossom, and flower.Every ugly thing, and smell, was in incog-nito, as fragrance and freshness.
Being prone, this typical spring-time dash andactivity, played an exulting phantasmagoria-note on the inner-man. -Medically speak-ing, the happy circumstances vibrated myductless glands, and fused me into a wibble-wobble Whoa, Jamieson! fillip-and-flair tolive, live!
Or, again:
The incidents take place in India.I was exceedingly hard-up of cash: actu-
ally, in debts.And, it is amazing, how, out in the Ori-
ent, the shortage of cash gets mixed up withromance and females somehow!
In this England, they say, if a fellah is broke,females, as a matter of course, forsake.
Stands to reason.Whereas, out in the East, they attach
themselves!Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!
This is the "babu-English," the semi-literate, half-learned English of the ba-zaars, transmuted by erudition, highbrowmonkeying around, and the impish magicof Desani's unique phrasing and rhythminto an entirely new kind of literary voice.Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's more re-cent, Eurasian comic epic, 'The Trotter-Nama"an enormous tome swirling withdigressions, interpolations, exclamations,resumption, encomiums, and catastro-pheswithout Desani. My own writing,too, learned a trick or two from him.
VED MEHTA is a writer known bothfor his astute commentaries on the
Indian scene and for his several distin-guished volumes of autobiography. Themost moving of these is "Vedi," a memoirof a blind boyhood that describes cruel-ties and kindnesses with equal dispassionand great effect. (More recently, FirdausKanga, in his autobiographical fiction"Trying to Grow," has also transcendedphysical affliction with high style andcomic brio.)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the author ofthe Booker Prize-winning "Heat andDust" (afterward made into a Merchant-Ivory movie), is a master of the short-story form. As a writer, she is sometimesunderrated in India because, I think, the
BEST COPY ka VAILABLE 2 0
SALMAN RUSHDIE
voice of the rootless intellectual (so quin-tessentially her voice) is such an unfamil-iar one in that country, where people'sself-definitions are so rooted in their re-
gionala has a second career asThat
aid jetitis.
an award-winning screenwriter is wellknown. But not many people realize thatIndia's greatest film director, the lateSatyajit Ray, was also an accomplishedauthor of short stories. His father editeda famous Bengali children's magazine,Sandesh, and Ray's biting little fablesare made more potent by their childlike
Anita Desai, one of India's major liv-ing authors, merits comparison withJane Austen. In novels such as "ClearLight of Day"written in a lucid, lightEnglish full of subtle atmosphericsshedisplays both her exceptional skill at so- !
cial portraiture and an unsparing, Jane-like mordancy of insight into humanmotivations. 'In Custody," perhaps herbest novel to date, makes fine use of En-glish to depict the decay of another lan-guage, Urdu, and the high literary cul-ture that lived in it. Here the poet, thelast, boozing, decrepit custodian ofthe dying tradition, is (in a reversal ofNarayan) the "bully," and the novel'scentral character, the poet's young ad-mirer, is the "wimp." The dying past,the old world, Desai tells us, can be asmuch of a burden as the awkward,sometimes wrongheaded present.
Though V. S. Naipaul approachesIndia as an outsider, his engagementwith it has been so intense that no ac-count of its modem literature would becomplete without him. His threenonfiction books on India"An Area ofDarkness," "India: A Wounded Civili-zation," and "India: A Million MutiniesNow"are key texts, and not only be-cause of the hackles they have raised.Many Indian critics have taken issuewith the harshness of his responses.Some have fair-mindedly conceded thathe does attack things worth attack-ing. "I'm anti-Naipaul when I visit theWest," one leading South Indian nov-elist told me, "but I'm often pro-Naipaulback home."
Some of Naipaurs targets, like (this isfrom "A Wounded Civilization") theintermediate- technology institute thatinvents "reaping shoes" (with blades at-tached) for Indian peasants to use inharvesting grain, merit the full weight of
his scorn. At other times, he appearsmerely supercilious. India, his migrantancestors' lost paradise, apparently can-not stop disappointing him. By thethird volume of the series, however,which was written in 1990, he seemsmore cheerful about the country's condi-tion. He speaks approvingly of theemergence of "a central will, a central in-tellect, a national idea," anddisarmingly, even movingly,confesses to the atavistic edgi-ness of mood in which hemade his first trip almost thirtyyears earlier: "The India of myfantasy and heart was some-thing lost and irrecoverable. . . . On thatfirst journey, I was a fearful traveller."
In "An Area of Darkness," Naipaul'scomments on Indian writers elicit fromthis reader a characteristic mixture ofagreement and dissent. He writes:
The feeling is widespread that, whateverEnglish might have done for Tolstoy, it cannever do justice to the Indian "language"writers. This is possible; what little I readof them in translation did not encourageme to read more. Premchand ... turnedout to be a minor fabulist.... Other writ-ers quickly fatigued me with their asser-tions that poverty was sad, that death wassad ... and many of the "modern" shortstories were only refurbished folk tales.
Here he is expressing, in his emphatic,unafraid way, what I have also felt(though I think more highly of Prem-chand than he). He also says:
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 23 & 30,1997
(A fine Indian poet, who was sittingbeside me in the great man's audience,murmured in my ear, "Bowel withoutMotion iswhat? Is constipation! Bowelplus Motion iswhat? Is shit!")
So I agree with Naipaul that mysti-cism is bad for novelists. But, in the In-dia I know, for every obfuscating Mo-tionist there is a debunking Bowelist
whispering in one's ear, for ev-ery unworldly seeker for theancient wisdoms of the Eastthere is a clear-eyed witness re-sponding to the here and nowin precisely that fashion whichNaipaul inaccurately calls
uniquely Western. And when Naipaulconcludes by saying that in the aftermathof the "abortive" Indo-British encounterIndia is little more than a (very Naipaul-ian) community of mimic menthat thecountry's artistic life has stagnated, that"the creative urge" has "failed," that"Shiva has ceased to dance"then I fearhe and I part company altogether. "AnArea of Darkness" was written as longago as 1964, a mere seventeen years afterindependence and a little early for anobituary notice. The growing quality ofIndian writing in English may yet changehis mind.
The novel is of the West. It is part ofthat Western concern with the condition ofmen, a response to the here and now. InIndia thoughtful men have preferred torum their backs on the here and now andto satisfy what President Radhakrishnancalls "the basic human hunter for the un-seen." It is not a good qualification for thewriting or reading of novels.
And here I can accompany him onlysome of the way. It is true that manylearned Indians go in for a sonorously im-penetrable form of critico-mysticism. Ionce heard an Indian writer of some re-nown, who was much interested in In-dia's ancient wisdoms, expounding histheory of what one might call Motion-ism. "Consider Water," he advised us."Water without Motion iswhat? Is alake. Very well. Now, Water plus Motioniswhat? Is a river. You see? The Wateris still the same Water. Only Motion hasbeen added. By the same token," he con-tinued, making a breathtaking intellectualleap, "Language is Silence, to which Mo-tion has been added."
N the nineteen-eighties and nineties,the flow of that good writing has be-
come a flood. Bapsi Sidhwa is technicallyPakistani, but literature has no need ofpartitions, particularly since Sidhwa'snovel "Cracking India" is one of the finestresponses made to the horror of the divi-sion of the subcontinent. Gita Mehta's"A River Sutra" is an important attemptby a thoroughly modem Indian to makeher reckoning with the Hindu culturefrom which she emerged. Padma Perera,Anjana Appachana (whose major newnovel, "Listening Now," will be publishednext January), and Githa Hariharan, lesswell known than .Sidhwa and Mehta,confirm the quality of contemporary writ-ing by Indian women.
A number of different styles of workare evolving-. the Stendhalian realism ofa writer like Rohinton Mistry, the authorof two acclaimed novels, "Such a LongJourney" and "A Fine Balance," and of acollection of stories, "Tales from FirozshaBaag"; the equally naturalistic but lighter,more readily charming prose of VikramSeth (there is, admittedly, a kind of per-versity in invoking lightness in the con-
SALMAN RUSHDIE
text of a book boasting as much sheer av-oirdupois as "A Suitable Boy," whichruns to a thousand three hundred andforty-nine pages); the elegant social ob-
servation of Upamanyu Chatterjee ("En-glish August"); and the more flamboyant
manner of Vikram Chandra ("Love andLonging in Bombay"). Amitav Ghosh's
most impressive achievement to date isthe nonfiction study of India and Egypt"In an Antique Land." It may be that hisgreatest strength will turn out to be as an
essayist of this sort. Sara Suleri, whosememoir "Meatless Days" is, like BapsiSidhwa's "Cracking India," a visitor from
across the Pakistani frontier, is a nonfic-
tion writer of immense originality andgrace. And Amit Chaudhuri's languor-ous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impres-sively impossible to place in any category
at all.Most encouragingly, yet another tal-
ented generation has begun to emerge.The Bengali-Keralan writer ArundhatiRoy has arrived to the accompanimentof a loud fanfare. Her novel, "The Godof Small Things," is full of ambition andsparkle, and is written in a highly wroughtand utterly personal style. Equally im-pressive are the debuts of two other firstnovelists. Ardashir Vakil's "Beach Boy"and Kiran Desai's "Strange Happeningsin the Guava Orchard" are, in very un-alike ways, highly original books. TheVakil book, a tale of growing up nearJuhu Beach, Bombay, is sharp, funny,and fast; the KiranDesai, a Calvinoesquefable of a misfit boy who climbs a treeand becomes a sort of petty guru, is lushand intensely imagined. Kiran Desai is
the daughter of Anita: her arrival estab-lishes the first dynasty of modern In-dian fiction. But she is very much herown writer, the newest of all thesevoices, and welcome proof that India'sencounter with the English language,far from proving abortive, continues togive birth to new children, endowed with
lavish gifts.
HE map of the world in the stan-dard Mercator projection is not
kind to India, making it look substan-tially smaller than, say, Greenland. Onthe map of world literature, too, Indiahas been undersized for too long. Fiftyyears after India's independence, how-ever, that age of obscurity is coming to anend. India's writers have torn up the oldmap and are busily drawing their own.
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