After the Raj: A Personal Tour of Indian Literature in English
BACKGROUND
Strange as it ay seem there is a growing number of Indians who write in English. It is
strange on several counts, but primarily because Indian writing in English became
widespread after Independence. It is typical of the complexities of the Indian mind that
having persuaded the British to leave, they both pioneered the concept of a
Commonwealth open to all races and nations in the old Empire, and adopted English as
the language of their Constitution, their courts and legal systems, education and
administration. Optimistically, they wrote into this Constitution (in English, of course)
that Hindi was to become the sole official language fifteen years after Independence.
Languages rarely keep to timetables. Those fifteen years expired in the mid-sixties, but
English shows little sign of loosening its hold. More magazines, journals, newspapers
and books are published in English than in Hindi, the other official language; and though
the number of publications in Hindi is increasing under Government patronage, the
number of books India produces in English is going up both absolutely and as a
proportion of all books published. India is now the third largest producer in the world of
books in English, and few countries produce as many periodicals in English.
The continued popularity of English is not due only to its being India’s ‘Window on the
World” in the words of the Ministry of Education. Non-Hindi speaking areas comprise
more than half the total geographical area of the county and about half the population.
They do not see why Hindi speaking areas should be given an automatic linguistic
advantage over them in education, administration, and job-opportunities. And since
Hindi areas are the least economically and educationally developed in the country,
automatic preference for such people seems perverse: it will only ensure a low
intellectual and cultural level in the administrative and other national service. However,
the other areas are divided, geographically around the Hindi heartland of the central
plains, and linguistically between some 800 languages (yes, languages – not dialects).
These use different script and fourteen are nationally recognized. That is, if you were
presented with a Rupee banknote, you would find the words “One Rupee” written in
Hindi and English on one face, and in twelve different languages on the other face!
Whatever the “official” fate of English in India, it should be clear that its actual role is
greater and its actual prestige higher now than it was at Independence, and that it is likely
to remain so far at least this generation.
So what has India produced in English?
I do not wish to perpetuate the false notion.
Some people wrongly believe that a few westernized Indians have started writing in
English relatively recently. It is essential to have at least the barest facts if Indian writing
in English is to be understood.
The most startling fact is that Indians were contributing to English-language periodicals
before the end of the eighteenth century. The first Indian pamphlet was published in
1806, and the first volume, Henry Derozio’s Poems, in 1827.
The first Indian
autobiography was published in the 1830s and the first Indian novel in English in 1864.
India was thus one of the first countries outside America and the ‘White Commonwealth’
(Britain, Canada, Australia, etc) to adopt English for literary purposes. In fact, the Indian
demand for the introduction of State-supported English education was what resulted in
the foisting of Western (rather than traditional) education in all erstwhile British colonies
and laid the foundations for the emergence of English as a world language. Of course,
the recent role of America in this cannot be overlooked. But it is not widely realized that
English is now being used for creative literary purposes not only in all the ex-colonies of
the Empire but also by people of Austrian, Brazilian, Dutch, German, Israeli, Italian,
Japanese, Russian and other backgrounds. An increasing number of universities now
offer courses in ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘New’ literatures in English, even in such unlikely
places as Denmark and Spain. And there is an increasing number of academic and
popular journals encouraging study of the field.
Indian writers in English have made a distinguished literary contribution in recent
decades. In recognition of this, a string ofprizes has gone to Indo-English writers: the
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Winifred Holtby Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, the
English-Speaking Union’s Prize for the best novel of the year.
But prizes mean very little: Rabidranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1931 for his Bengali work, though he also wrote in English. Who reads his mistily
aspiring English work now? (His Bengali work is, I hasten to say, of a completely
different quality.) The Indian writer who is almost as well known today as Tagore was I
his day, is R K Narayan. Graham Greene admires him more than any other living
English language novelist.
THE NOVEL
Six o Narayan’s works are currently available here. In The Mahabbarata and Gods,
Demons and Others Narayan adds little except quantity to the vast number of translations
and retellings of these Indian classics.
But Narayan’s Preface to Gods, Demons and
Others is the only lucid introduction to the maxes of Indian mythology that I have read in
English.
Narayan’s reputation rests on his more creative work. His first novel, Swami and
Friends (1933) established his essentially comic mode as well as the fictional town of
Malgudi.
The town has grown and changed with the times, as have Narayan’s
preoccupations. Like most writers, he began with personal, autobiographical concerns:
The Bachelor of Arts(1937) is an Indian romantic talk, The English Teacher portrays the
consolation and return to life of a man whose domestic felicity has been destroyed by
disease and death.
The Dark Room (1938), Mr. Sampath (1949), The Financial Expert (1952) and Waiting
For the Mahatma (1955) move gradually to more public themes and explore the relevance
of Indian traditional wisdom to very different situations and personalities. The Sweet
Vendor (1967) return to more limited subjects but are perhaps the most orthodox fictional
statements of traditional Indian wisdom in contemporary literature.
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Narayan does, however, have more complex and ambivalent novels – notably The Guide
(1958) and The Painter of Signs(1977).
The earlier groups of novels have been
successful with academics and Western readers as offering a way into appreciation of
‘Hindu’ or Sanskrit culture, which is a central facet of Indian life. These last two novels
are more genuine successes for the average person who wants a worthwhile read rather
than an introduction to the mysteries of India.
Narayan is a raconteur rather than a artist; he strikes the successful notes without being
aware of why he succeed. This is quite evident from the marginalia which he has
produced: collections of short stories, a diary of an American tour, a volume of weekly
causeries. And it is one of the more amusing sights to see Narayan invited to American
seminars on creative writing and academic conference where his opinion on fiction are
accepted as authoritative! That he derives his strength from the indigenous folk tradition
of storytelling, which goes back thousands of years, is evident to any one with the least
acquaintance with India. John Updike, in a review in The New Yorker of Narayan’s
atrocious autobiography, My Days, praised Narayan as a ‘Master of English’. Bosh.
Narayan’s English is neither better nor wore than that of any educated Indian. But his
stories have the magic of an era that is, even in India, rapidly passing away. Get hold of
them. They offer a unique reading experience.
A similarly unconscious artist or raconteur is the older writer Mulk Raj Anand whose
work was also first published in the Thirties. Untouchable (1935) and The Coolie (1936)
are the best of his early work, and Private life of an Indian Prince (1953) of his middle
period. Village, Across the Black Waters, and The Sword and the Sickle explore the
adventures of a rebellious Sikh lad, Lalu. They have been highly praised, and as the
second of the books deals with his experiences as a sepoy in World War I, the trilogy
may well appeal to Western readers more than it does to me.
What the projected 3,500 pages of the multi-volume Seven Ages of Man will offer
remains to be seen. Seen Summers (1951), and Morning Face (1968) offer little that is
more sensitive or exciting than Untouchable, Coolie, or The Private Life of an Indian
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Prince. But the seven volumes will, between them, portray an India changing rapidly
from a feudal ad colonized country into an independent and modernisng nation, from the
1920s to Independence.
Anand’s strength is a Dickensian observation and compassion. His flirtation with the
political Left has caused him to be labeled a ‘Maxist Humanist”, bu the ‘Maxist’ half of
the label seems purely honorific. He has brought into the centre of Indian artistic
consciousness a concern for the downtrodden and underprivileged, as well as a sense of
the movement of contemporary Indian history which has not even been attempted by any
other Indian novelist in any language.
In complete contrast to Anand is the work of Raja Rao.
To Anand’s twenty five
published volumes of fiction, literary and art criticism, and Curries and Other Dishes,
Rao has published two short novels, Kanthapura (1938) and The Cat and Shakespeare
(1965) , the long The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and a collection of short stories The
Cow of the Barricades (1947) whih was recently reissued with three additions as The
Policeman and the Rose. The short stories will be accessible to everyone. Kanthapura
recreates a typically south Indian village caught in the struggle for Independence and
helps one to understand the way Mahatma Gandhi touched the lives even of people who
id not ever see him. The grandmother who narrates the story in her own breathless and
rolling fashion is a completely successful but probably unrepeatable experiment. The
Serpent and the Rope, as the title may suggest, is a more dense and opaque philosophical
novel which some critics consider the most outstanding novel written by an Indian in
English. If philosophical novels ar your cup of tea. . .
Narayan, Anand and Rao are often considered the ‘Nig Three’ of Indo-English novelists.
Like Narayan and Rao, Sudhi N Ghose is a defender o Indian tradition, but he resorts to
the more palpably Indian medium of fantasy in The Vermillion Boat (1953) and The
Flame of the Forest (1953). He lived in England for many years, publishing a beautifully
sensitive study of childhood, And Gazelles Leaping (1949) and, two years later, Cradle
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of the Clouds – perhaps the most remarkable evocation of landscape in the whole of
Indian literature.
Bhahani Bhattacharya and Manohar Malgonkar are more popular novelists who began
publishing in the Forties and Sixties respectively. Malgonkar is an ex-army man and
draws upon his experiences in Distant Drum, an unusual first novel. The Princes(1963) is
a leisurely evocation of the pre-Independence world of princes and maharajas, (six
hundred of them ruled petty states in the ‘Indian’ portion of India’ – i.e. that which was
ruled by the British). This world, with its corruption and its nobleness is nostalgically
compared with the shoddiness of post-Independence Indian politics and administration.
A lesser novel, Combat of Shadows, may appeal to readers with the right connections as
it is set in a tea estate in Assam.
Malgonkar’s best work is A Bend in the Ganges (1964), perhaps the most ambitious
historical novel to have been produced by an Indo-English writer. The title is taken from
the Indian epic, the Ramayana; “At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to take a look at
the land they were leaving”. This refers to the central characters in the Ramayana who
look back with broken hearts at the land from which they have been exiled; and
apprehensive, no doubt, of the future and of the forests in which they are to live. Te
novel, on the other hand, looks back to an ethos and a way of life that has passed firmly
into history. It is also a look back at the peculiar nature of the struggle for Independence,
which needs to be interpreted afresh to the generation now coming into prominence in
Pakistan, India and Bangla Desh. We can read our history books, but they can give no
insight into the human dynamics of the Independence struggle.
Originally directed
against the British by all Indian communities, the struggle was betrayed by the lust for
power of a few individuals. This both resulted from and was combined with the peculiar
Hindu revivalism of the national movement, to lead to the death of half a million people
in the horrors of partition.
Two other novels on the theme o partitions may be mentioned, though their number is
legion. Khushwant Singh, journalist and scholar of Sikhism, has produced a fictional
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study of Sikh spirituality, I Shall Not Hea the Nightingale (1959). But his Train to
Pakistan (1956) is the better and more faous work, and portrays the shearing apart of the
intricate web of relationships that a held a pre-Independence village together. Chaman
Nahal is a Delhi academic; his Azadi (“Freedeom”, 1976), a fuller and more detailed
study of the impact of partition on the members of one family, won an award from the
Sahitya Academi, the Indian Academy of Letters.
Moreo and more new writers are taking to fiction; newcomers to watch are Shiv K
Kumar (The Bone’s Prayer), Hilda Raj (Trial of Evil), Jyoti Jafa (Nurjahan), and Shouri
Daniels (Salt Doll).
WOMEN NOVELISTS
Kamala Markandaya has now written eight poten novels, of which the most memorable
in Nectar in a Sieve (1954). The Nowhere Man (1973), on an Indian immigrant to this
country, may hold special appeal to readers here. (Other novels on Indian immigrants
include Dilip Hiro’s A Triangular View, (1969), and Jamila and Reginald Massey’s The
Immigrants (1973). Her latest novel, (The Golden Hoeycomb) (1977) is an exploration
of the days and relationships of the Raj which has also been highly praised.
Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, a Polish refugee in England, married an Indian architect and lived
in India for many years. She won the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1979 for her
eight novels and four collections of short stories, but has recently abandoned Indian
themes and taken to New York.
Though I am skeptical of the healing powers of
Brooklyn, her decision to devote more time to film-scrip writing means that her precise
and ironic eye will have vaster scope, though it is in the short story that she has, up to
now, been at he best. All her novels are well known in this country; Heat and Dust won
the 1976 Booker Prize
Anita Desai is the most linguistically gifted of all Indo-English novelists. Games at
Twilight, her first collection of short stories, won the 1977 Winifred Holtby Prize of the
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Royal Society of Literature. She has published five novels, which all show her worth in
different ways: Cry the Peacock, Voices in the City, Bye-Bye Blackbird Where Shall We
Go This Summer and Fire on the Mountain. Desai’s sensitivity to nuances of feeling and
language is unparalleled, though she has not yet shown a mastery of larger fictional form.
Markandaya, Jhabvala and Desai have not been admitted to the ‘Big’ club because of
mere historical accident; their work has become known only since the 1950s. All three
have grown in stature and in sophistication of narrative technique over the years, unlike
the ’Big’ men.
Earlier women writers include Cornelia Sorabji and Krupabai
Satthianadhan, whose work has unfortunately been out of print for some time.
DRAMA
India drama in English also has a venerable history, having been inaugurated in 1830 by
Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s The Persecuted. Banerjea was a giant of a man in his own
time, decorated with the CIE for his educational and authorial work. But his contribution
is now practically unknown, as is the genre of literature he started. A century and half
has produce only about a hundred Indo-English plays.
Drama needs more time, commitment, and institutional and public support than any other
form of literature. It is not surprising that it should be the last genre to flower. But the
large paperback runs of Indo-English novels, the fact the Indo-English literature is now
being translated into other Indian languages, the discriminating interest of the Sahitya
Akademi, all show that the conditions for the birth of a viable tradition of Indo-English
drama are rapidly becoming propitious. The most telling sign appears in the stellar world
of the Indian cinema. India produces and distributes more films for more people at a
greater total investment than nay other country in the world. The films are largely
escapist entertainment, but they are like this only because that is what the large majority
of the people want. That increasing number of films, notably Satyajit Ray’s The Chess
Players, now leave whole scenes in English in the middle of a Hindi movie revels that an
increasing proportion of India’s masses comprehend English. This easy flow from one
language to another in the middle of a serious work would not have functioned in the
past. Today it not only functions, it is accepted as natural.
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The most prolific contemporary playwright is Asif Currimbhoy. Since 1960 he has
published an average of a play a year. Pratap Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness was a
Commonwealth Festival play.
POETRY
Readers who wish to pursue Indian poetry in English can start with R Parthassrathy’s Ten
Twentieth Century Indian Poets; the work of six of these poets has recently been issued,
also by the Indian branch of Oxford University Press.
Nissim Ezekiel is the doyen of indo-English poets. Since the 1960s he has taken to ore
philosophical themes as the result of an experience under the influence of drugs. His
latest volume, Latter-Day Psalms which is due to be published at the end of this year,
reflects a greater mystical awareness. Ezekiel is one of the few Bene-Israel Jews left in
India, his ancestors having fled to India for refuge at the time of the destruction of the
Temple, and now rapidly making their way back to Israel. This makes him a most
unusual Indian poet, though distinctly Jewish themes have, till now, been conspicuous by
their absence.
The other factor which makes Ezekiel fascinating is that he is one of the few Englishlanguage poets in the world who kept writing in traditional metrical form in the heyday of
free verse in the Sixties and Seventies. He also has a series of poems that exploit the
humorous potential of Indian peculiarities in the us of English; this links him with Goan
and other Roman Catholic Indian poets such as Joseph Furtado and Armando Menezes.
The best known of Goan poets, Dom Moraas, has five volumes of incredibly disciplined
poems published in this country; A Beginning (1957) Poem (1960), John Nobody (1965),
The Brass Serpent (196 ), and Poems 1955-1965 (1966), He also has three other volumes
Green in the Grass (1951), the autobiographical My Son’s Father (1969), and Gone Away
(1960), a look back at India – a subject to which he returns with his biography of Mr.
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Gandhi (1980). The award of the Hawthornden Prize for A Beginning has helped to
make him the most well-known and successful of poets from an Indian background.
P. Lal is the founder of the Calcutta-based Writers Workshop which first published
almost all the better Indian writers in English. Lal is also a poet, though he has spent
considerably more energy in ‘transcreating’ the Indian classics in English. In recognition
of his work the Government of India awarded him the title Padma Shri in 1970, and
Western Maryland University (USA) awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of
Literature in 1977.
An accomplished lyricist, he has always been close to India-s
essentially religious ethos. His Collected Poems(1977) have been augrunted by his most
major English work, Calcutta (1977) a formally ‘modern’ work whose artfully disjointed
sections are presided over by Mother Teresa.
Pritish Nandy and Leela Dharmaraj are underrated poets whose work will one day appear
more substantial than it does today, as well that of G S Sharat Chadra whose Once or
Twice (Hippopetamus Press, 1974) and April in Nanjangud (Londo Magazine Editions,
1971) ought to be better known in this country. Other Indian poets whose work is
available in Britain include shiv K Kumar’s Woodpeckers (1979), and my own
Continuations (The Bookshop, university of Stirling, 1979).
PROSE
Fiction is the most popular genre, but the most vigorous genre in Indo-English literature
is prose. Born in the reforming zeal of Raja Rammohan Roz (1772-1833) and aimed at
eduated people all over the country, the astonishing and irritating flexibility of English
was hammered into an effective weapon on exposition, argument, and exhortation against
the British by a long line of eminent patriots such as Brahmabandhab Upadhya and
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of free India. The writers who inherits this
tradition and who uses it most effectively is Nirad C Chaudhuri, a historian and
interpreter of India. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) soon made him so
well known as to be invited to the UK by the British Council; A Passage to England
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(1959) resulted. These two books established Chaudhuri as a man of percipience,
candour and an encyclopaedic mind.
Continent of Circa (1967.
He is best hated in India, however, for The
His coruscating intelligence attempts on the whole at a
judicious balance, but he can be savagely denunciatory or heavily humorous on the way.
He distinguishes between the ‘dark’ aboriginals of India and the ‘fair’ Hindus who he
thinks are one branch of the Indo-European family of peoples:
To put the matter briefly, the Hindu is the European distorted, corrupted, and
made degenerate by the cruel torrid environment and by the hostility, both real
and imagined, of the true sons of the soil.
English readers will probably be more interested in his more recent and splendid
biographies, Clive of India and Scholar Extraordinary: The life of the rt. Hon. Friedrich
Max Mueller. His latest book, Hinduism (1979) designed to delight the average enquirer
and set the Western scholar’s teeth on edge, is the more impressive when one considers
that it is from the pen of an octogenarian, Chaudhuri was awarded an honorary Doctor of
Literature degree for his creative work by the University of Stirling, Scotland, in 1978,
and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Ved Mehta is another deft user of English. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, he is a staff
writer on The New Yorker. Apart from articles and short stories, he has written Walking
the Indian Streets (1960, revised 1971), Portrait of India (19 ), and Mahatma Gandhi and
His Apostles (1976), reports on contemporary historians and philosophers in Fly and The
Fly-Bottle (1963) and The New Theologian (1966); a comic novel, Delinquent Chacha
(1963); and three volumes of autobiography Face to Face (1957), Daddyli (1972), and
Mamaji (1980). While his autobiographical volumes are his most substantial works, they
cannot match the immediate appeal of Deliquet Chacha’s humour.
G V Desani’s All about H Hatterr is equally clever and humorous, but more formally
intricate. Exploiting to good affect the stream of consciousness technique, which is
rarely used by Indo-English writers, Hatterr has a Joycean comprehensiveness and
incoherence. Anthony Burgress, in introducing the 1970 edition of Hatterr, described the
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language of the book as “a sort of creative chaos. . . like the English of Shakespeare,
Joyce and Kipling, gloriously impure.” For those highbrow enough and linguistically
uninhibited enough to enjoy this sort of disconcerting melodrama, Hatter is marvelous
stuff. A mad, mad, mad book. And for who-ever will untangle the method in it, my
kingdom.
Two writers in quieter and more satisfying work have shaped modern Indian thought and
style; Jawaharalal Nehru’s self-disclosure in Letter from a Father to His Daughter (1930),
An Autobiography (1936), and The Discovery of India (1946); and Mahatma Gandhi’s
Biblical transparency and simplicity in My Experiments with Truth.
FINALLY
Indian writers now offer a plenitude of material, from comedy to satire, from fantasy to
works on national issues, from autobiography to fiction, from journalism to works of
lasting merit, from poetry and drama to a chiseled and effective prose.
Indian literature in English has a range and amplitude, a maturity and sophistication that
can be envied by many other literatures in English. Opinion is divided on whether it will
ever produce a really great writer of the stature of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. I remain
hopeful. But while we wait for writers who will fill us all with wild admiration and
wonder, there is plenty that the critic can savour and the reader enjoy
South East Arts Reviews Summer 1980 pp 5-15
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