Essays on Indian Writing in English

By Iffat Maqbool

This book is a collection of critical essays on Indian Writing in English- a literary area that has carved a foremost place in global English literatures. Considered as one of the most successful of postcolonial literatures, IWE is today a dynamic and expansive project. The essays on the Indian English novel and poetry cover some important writers like Anita Desai, Kamala Das, Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai, Meena Kandasamy, Agha Shahid Ali etc. The introduction is an attempt to arrive at a definition of the term IWE and place the writers in perspective. The book is hoped to prove useful to students and teachers engaged in this field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Feb 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543700657

Iffat Maqbool

Dr Iffat Maqbool is a Senior Asst Professor at the Department of English, University of Kashmir. She has been teaching courses on Modern English poetry and Indian Writing in English for over fifteen years. Her other areas of interest are postcolonial studies, women’s studies, and contemporary forms of literary representation.

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Copyright © 2019 by Iffat Maqbool.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5437-0066-4

                 eBook           978-1-5437-0065-7

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CONTENTS

The Republic of English: Egalitarian Impulses at Work in Indian Writing in English

The Notion of the Nation in the Indian English Novel: A Study of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Nativizing the Woman Question: A Case for Indian Literary Feminism

The Inheritance of Kiran Desai: A Study of Literary Affiliation between Fire on the Mountain and The Inheritance of Loss

If There Is a Poet, It Is This, It Is This: Agha Shahid Ali - Chronicler of Pain

The Decolonization of Feminist Studies and Postcolonial Feminism: Intersections and Divergences

Agha Shahid Ali and Transnational Poetry: An Overview

Poetry as Dissent: Meena Kandasamy’s Poetry of Protest

Who’s Afraid of Chetan Bhagat? The Millennial Avatar of the Indian English Novel

Where Haider Meets Hamlet: The Indianization of Shakespeare in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Trilogy

Introduction

The essays collected in this book were either presented as seminar papers or published elsewhere. However, some were written primarily for inclusion in this book.

Indian Writing in English is by now a globally acknowledged form of literary expression- possessing a rich history of innovation and experimentation. It is a self -consciously expanding field- and in the recent past- has diversified and redefined its scope and boundaries. The field has come a long way from its beginnings in the nineteenth century as a colonial practice to move on to become one of the most successful of new, alternative literatures to be written in English. India’s tryst with the English language may have a colonial genesis but the sheer variety and development of Indian English Writing discounts any imitative dependence on the standard ‘English’ literary model. From its earlier emphasis on literature written only in English, it has now moved on to include translations of Indian texts-written in various languages- into English. This has broadened the range and scope of this field- wherein English now becomes a mode of rectifying imbalances (since English is tied up with visibility) and resurrecting classics written in other major Indian languages like Urdu, Hindi and Persian. As Priyamvada Gopal states in her introduction to The Indian English Novel Nation, History and Narration:

Fortunately, good translations of ‘bhasha’ or indigenous language literatures are beginning to make their appearance and are beginning to challenge sanctioned ignorance of these literary languages and traditions.

As English now settles as a more or less ‘Indian’ language, the earlier debate of authenticity and representation has also now been rendered redundant. The charge of ‘inauthenticity’ against writers writing in English stemmed from a suspicion of the English writer’s inability to represent ‘Indianness’- an essentialist idea that only indigenous or vernacular writers could espouse and then articulate. Noted writer Vikram Chandra in The Cult of Authenticity, a 2000 Boston Review essay, explains how the anxiety of Indianness when viewed from a singular definition ignores the multiplicity of meanings that the terms authentic and Indian can possess. The essay was written primarily as a backlash to Meenakshi Mukherjee’s criticism of the titles ‘dharma’ and ‘karma’ in his novel Love and Longing in Bombay. Labelling the titles as an exercise in self-conscious Indianization or exoticisation in order signal Indianness to the west, Mukherjee sees the titles as not organically related to the novels. Chandra argues against the privileging of regional literatures over Indian Writing in English on the contention that they represent the ‘real India’. Writing in English, according to Chandra, is not in any sense a case of cultural amnesia as custodians of Indianness would like to believe. The concept of Indianness is myriad, expansive, fluid and hardly monolithic:

Instead, many of them assigned to regional writing a pristine purity of content and purpose, an austere and lofty nobleness of intent, and following from this virtuous abnegation, an ability to connect to a Real India that could not possibly exist in Indo-Anglian writing.

I noticed the constant hum of this rhetoric, this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness, this notion of a real reality that was being distorted by Third World cosmopolitans, this fear of an all-devouring and all-distorting West. I heard it in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews.

The attempt to locate Indianness in regional writing is inevitably problematic, since—in a nation battling numerous secessionist movements—regional specificity is inevitably in conflict with generalized national traits. But regional writing is always connected to the soil, to Real India. And when it’s opposed to Indo-Anglian writing, the term regional writing implies that writing in English is not regional, that it’s pan-Indian or, worse, cosmopolitan, belonging to nowhere and everywhere.

Another well-known row is of course the oppositional stance taken by Salman Rushdie and Amit Chaudhari regarding the definition of Indian English literature. In The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, Rushdie’s remarks that Indian English literature is ‘proving to be a stronger and more important body of work’ than writing in Indian languages, justifiably caused controversy and debate. First, its exclusions and omissions of some central texts by pioneering Indian writers like Raja Rao, Ghosh and A K Ramanujan and secondly its erasure of a remarkable Indian literary tradition written in Indian languages that could have found inclusion through translation. The anthology has rightly been critiqued for its lack of a comprehensive approach to Indian English writing. It has also been remarked that the absence of writers not yet ‘discovered’ by western publishers’ narrows the project’s range.

Amit Chaudhuri’s anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature provided a new framework within which to contextualize Indian English Writing- a framework that allows non-English literary output from India in indigenous Indian languages to be part of the broader category -Indian Literature. It was hailed as a more comprehensive and illuminating work-in its aim to represent some important writers from India’s literary history who did not write in English, in fact predate Indian English Writing. This according to Alok Rai is ‘the really valuable thing that Chaudhuri accomplishes…to enable us to frame the question of what an Indian literature-not an object but a horizon- might look like.’

In terms of genre, it is the Indian English novel which can be counted as the most prolific as well as the most successful genre in this field. Gopal remarks:

Few postcolonial literary genres have been either as prominent or as contentious as the Indian novel in English. Even as several anglophone writers from decolonizing regions have achieved a global readership in recent years and even canonical status in some cases (Walcott, Naipaul, Soyinka, among others), novelists from the Indian subcontinent have dominated the international scene in unprecedented numbers.

The earliest manifestation of the Indian English novel is the nation-centrism of the foundational figures of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan. Each used English in ingenious ways to nativize the Indian novelist’s concerns, and played a major role in ‘narrating the nation’ during the 1930s and 40’s. Gopal observes:

…the narration of nation gave the Anglophone novel in India its earliest and most persistent thematic preoccupation, indeed its raison d’etre, as it attempted to carve out a legitimate space for itself. The conditions of its emergence-out of the colonial encounter, addressing itself to empire rather than a specific region or community –meant that the anglophone novel in the subcontinent returned repeatedly to a self-reflexive question: ‘What is India (n)? This was to become a question with chronological, metaphysical, religious, personal, political, aesthetic, historical and geographical dimensions and in the most significant works of fiction, India emerges not just as theme or imaginative object, however, but also as a point of debate, reflection, and contestation.

It is this plurality of preoccupations that defines the Indian English novel in its more contemporary forms. The easy identification of early Indian English novels with majoritarian culture has gradually moved on to a more nuanced interrogation of the ‘Idea of India’ as a self-sufficient, benign category. The self-reflexive category ‘Indianness’ finds heterogeneous expression in ‘alternative Indias’ –not merely nationalistic or eulogistic but critical in their exposition of the limitations of the nation state- the spilt of the nation-state, the disillusionments of the Partition, gender, sexuality, caste, minority issues, linguistic politics etc. The manner in which the idea of India has been appropriated by writers especially novelists is an indicator that one of the most perplexing questions in contemporary India is Who is an Indian? The novelistic perspective now includes oppositional critiques of Indianness. Reading contemporary novel writing