The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-97 0099268671, 9780099268673

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TH E VIN T A G E BO O K O F IN D I A N WR I T I N G 1947-1997 Salman Rushdie is the author of ten books. His work has been published in thirty languages. Elizabeth West is a freelance editor.

BY

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Fiction Grimus Midnight's Children Shame The Satanic Verses Haroun and the Sea of Stories East, West The Moor's Last Sigh

Non-Fiction The Jaguar Smile:

A Nicaraguan Journey Imaginary Homelands 'The Wizard of Oz'

THE VINTAGE BOOK OF INDIAN WRITING 1947-1997 e d i t e d by

S A L M A N RUS H D I E and E L I ZA B ETH WEST

,,, VINTAGE

Published by Vintage 1997 8 IO 9 Selection copyright© Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West I997 Introduction copyright© Salman Rushdie 1997 For copyright of contributors see pp. 576-8 The right of the editors and the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, I988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in Great Britain by Vintage, 1997 Vintage Random House, 2.o Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2.SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 2.0 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2.06I, Australia Random House New Zealand Limit:::d I8 Poland Road, Glenfield Auckland IO, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2.193, South Africa Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN o 09 97310I o Papers used by Random House UK Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Set in Io1/.II2. Sabon by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

C O NT E N T S

Introduction

IX

jAWAHARLAL NEHRU Tryst with Destiny

1

NAYANTARA SAHGAL With Pride and Prej udice

3

SAADAT HASAN MANTO Toba Tek Singh

24

G.V. DESANI All about H . Hatterr

32

NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI My Birthplace

61

KAMALA MARKANDAYA Hunger

81

MULK RAJ ANAND The Liar

96

R.K. NARAYAN Fellow-Feeling

102

VED MEHTA Activities and O utings

109

ANITA DESAI Games at Twilight

121 v

RUTH PRA WER jHABVALA In the Mountains

130

SATYAJIT RA y Big Bill

148

SALMAN RUSHDIE The Perforated Sheet

163

PADMA PERERA Dr Salaam

1 82

UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE The Assassination of Indira Gandhi

203

RoHINTON MISTRY The Collectors

216

BAPSI SIDHWA Ranna's Story

243

I. ALLAN SEALy The Trotter-Nama

256

SHASHI THAROOR A Raj Quartet

292

SARA SuLERI Meatless Days

302

fIRDAUS KANGA Trying to Grow

326

ANJANA APPACHANA Sharmaj i

356

AMIT CHAUDHURI Sandeep's Visit

379

AMITAV GHOSH Nashawy

409

GITHA HARIHARAN The Remains of the Feast

422

GITA MEHTA The Teacher's Story

430 VI

VIKRAM SETH A Suitable Boy

453

VIKRAM CHANDRA Shakti

469

ARDASHIR VAKIL Unforced Errors

506

MUKUL KESAVAN One and a Half

519

ARUNDHATI ROY Abhilash Talkies

535

KIRAN DESAI Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard

559

Biographical Notes

569

Acknowledgements

576

Vll

INTRO D U C TI O N

I once gave a reading to a gathering 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's Children,' she said. 'It is a very long book, but never mind, I read it through. And the question I want to ask you is this: fundamentally, what's your point?' Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again. 'Oh, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that the whole effort - from cover to cover - that is the point of the exercise. Isn't that what you were going to say?' 'Something like that, perhaps . . .' I got out. She snorted. 'It won't do.' 'Please,' I begged, 'do I have to have j u st one point?' 'Fundamentally,' she said, with impressive firmness, 'yes.'

So here, once again, is a very long book; and though it is not a novel, but an anthology selected from the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country's independence, still one could easily say of the work contained in these pages that the whole collective effort, from cover to cover, is the point of the exercise. Fifty years of work, by four generations of writers, is impossible to summarise, especially when it hails from that huge crowd of a country ( close to a bill.on people at the last count), that vast, metamorphic, contineni:-sized cul­ ture that feels, to Indians and visitors alike, like a non-stop assault on the senses, the emotions, the imagination and the spirit. Put India in the Atlantic Ocean and it would reach from Europe to America; put India and China together and you've IX

got almost half the population of the world. It's high time Indian literature got itself noticed, and it's started happening. New writers seem to emerge every few weeks. Their work is as multiform as the place, and readers who care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices say­ ing something they want to hear. However, my Delhi inter­ rogator may be pleased to hear that this large and various survey turns out to be making, fundamenta lly, j ust one - per­ haps rather surprising - point. This is it: the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 1 6 'official lan­ guages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular languages', during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, 'Indo-Anglian' literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books . It is a large claim, and while it may be easy for Western readers to accept it (after all, few non-English-language Indian writers, other than the Nobel laureate Tagore, have ever made much of an impact on world literature) , it runs counter to � uch of the received critical wisdom within India itself. It is also no:: a claim which, when we set out on the enormous and rewarding task of doing the reading for this book, we ever expected to make. The task we set ourselves was simply to make the best possible selection from what is presently. available in the English language, including, obvi­ ously, work in translation. To our considerable astonishment, only one translated text - S.H. Manto's masterpiece, the short story Toba Tek Singh - made the final cut. Two qualifications should be made at once. First: there has long been a genuine problem of translation in India - not only into English but between the vernacular languages - and it is possible that good writers have been excluded by reason of their translators' inadequacies rather than their own. Nowadays, however, such bodies as the Indian Sahitya Akademi and UNESCO - as well as Indian publishers them­ selves - have been putting their resources into the creation of better translations, and the problem, while not eradicated, is x

certainly much diminished. And second: while it was impossi­ ble, for reasons of space, to include a representative selection of modern Indian poetry, it was evident to us that the rich poetic traditions of India continued to flourish in many of the sub-continent's languages, whereas the English-language poets, with a few distinguished exceptions ( Arun Kolatkar, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, to name j ust three) , did not match the quality of their counterparts in prose. Those who wish to argue with the conclusion we have drawn may suspect that we did not read enough . But we have read as widely and deeply as we could. Others may feel that, as one of the editors is English and the other a practising English-language writer of Indian origin, we are simply betraying our own cultural and linguistic prej udices, or defending our turf, or - even worse - gracelessly blowing our own trumpet. It is of course true that any anthology worth its salt will reflect the j udgements and tastes of its editors. I can only say that our tastes are pretty catholic and our minds, I hope, have been open . We have made our choices, and stand by them. ( As to the inclusion here of my own work, the decision was taken with some unease; but Midnight's Children is undeni­ a bly a part of the story of these fifty years, and we decided, in the end, that leaving it out would be a weirder decision than putting it in. After its publication, incidentally, I learned that the idea of a long saga-novel about a child born at the exact moment of independence - midnight, August 1 4- 1 5 , 1 947 had occurred to other writers, too. A Goan poet :;bowed me the first chapter of an a bandoned novel in which the 'mid­ night child' was born not in Bombay, but in Goa . And as I travelled round India, I heard of at least two other aborted projects, one in Bengali, the other in Kannada, with pretty similar themes. I j ust had the good fortune to finish my book first. ) The lack of first-rate writing in translation can only be a matter for regret. However, to speak more positively, it is a delight to be able to showcase the quality of a growing col­ lective reuvre whose status has long been argued over, but which has, in the last twenty years or so, begun to merit a

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Xl

place alongside the most flourishing literatures in the world. For some, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a fatal flaw that ren­ ders it forever inauthentic. ' Indo-Anglian' literature evokes, in these critics, the kind of prej udiced reaction shown by some Indians towards the country's community of 'Anglo-Indians' - that is, Eurasians. In the half-century since Jawaharlal Nehru spoke, in English, the great 'freedom at midnight' speech that marked the moment of independence, the role of English itself has often been disputed in India. Attempts in India's continental shelf of languages to coin medical, scientific, technological and everyday neologisms to replace the commonly used English words sometimes succeeded, but more often comi­ cally failed. And when the Marxist government of the state of Bengal announced in the mid- 1 9 80s that the supposedly elitist, colonialist teaching of English would be discontinued in government-run primary schools, many on the left denounced the decision itself as elitist, as it would deprive the masses of the many economic and social advantages of speak­ ing the world's language; only the a ffluent private-school elite would henceforth have that privilege. A well-known Calcutta graffito complained: My son won 't learn English. Your son won 't learn English. But Jyoti Basu [the Chief Minister] will send his son abroad to learn English. One man's ghetto of privilege is another's road to freedom. Like the Greek god D ionysos, who was dismembered and afterwards reassembled - and who, according to the myths, was one of India's earliest conquerors - Indian writing in English has been called 'twice-born' ( by the critic Meenakshi Mukherjee ) to suggest its double parentage. While I am, I must admit, attracted to the Dionysiac resonances of this sup­ posedly double birth, it seems to me to rest on the false premise that English, having arrived from outside India, is and must necessarily remain an alien there. But my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country's earlier Muslim conquerors, became a naturalised sub-continental Xll

language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other Indian lan­ guages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has emphatically come to stay. (In many parts of South India, people will prefer to con­ verse with visiting North Indians in English rather than Hindi, which feels, ironically, more like a colonial language to speak­ ers of Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam than does English, which has acquired, in the South, a n a ura of lingua franca cul­ tural neutrality . The new Silicon Valley-style boom in com­ puter technology that is transforming the economies of Bangalore and Madras has made English, in those cities, an even more important language than before . ) Indian English, sometimes unattractively called 'Hinglish', is not ' English' English, to be sure, any more than Irish or American or Caribbean English is. And it is a part of the achievement of the writers i n this volume to have found liter­ ary voices as distinctively Indian, and also as suitable for any and all of the purposes of art, as those other Englishes forged in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies and the United States. However, Indian critical assaults on this new literature con­ tinue. Its practitioners are denigrated for being too upper­ middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choice of themes and techniques; for being less popular in India than outside India; for possessing inflated reputations on account of the international power of the English language, and of the ability of Western critics and publishers to impose their cultural standards on the East; for living, in many cases, outside India; for being deracinated to the point that their work lacks the spiritual dimension essential for a 'true' u nderstanding of the soul of India; for being insufficiently grounded in the ancient literary traditions of India; for being the literary equivalent of MTV culture, of globalising Coca-Colonisation; even, I'm sorry to report, for suffering from a condition that one sprightly recent commentator, Pankaj Mishra, calls ' Rushdie­ itis . . . [a] condition that has claimed Rushdie himself in his later works' . I t is i nteresting that s o few of these criticisms are literary in Xlll

the pure sense of the word. For the most part they do not deal with language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagi­ nation or talent. Rather, they are about class, power a nd belief. There is a whiff of political correctness about them: the ironical proposition that India's best writing since independ­ ence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear. It ought not to be true, and so must not be permitted to be true. ( That many of the attacks on English-language Indian writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the college-educated, English-speaking elite is a further irony . ) Let u s quickly concede what must b e conceded. I t is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still be