William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:
It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…
As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…
In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…
When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”
It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:
Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience - they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…
… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…
Dalrymple declaims the quietness of the English writing scene in India, as defined by Western publishers. But it’s pinch-hearted and tautological to exclude the vast body of work in India’s native languages. We haven’t cast aside Márquez or Murakami for not writing in English, we’ve found them cultured translators:
If it was the literary merit of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, that made the greatest impression on readers and critics in the west, it is fair to say that it was the size of her advance- more than $1 million in total - that made the most impression in Delhi…. the letters of the greatest of all Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, are full of endless worries as to whether he could pay his bills or afford to drink his beloved firangi wine…
Roy’s book was immediately recognised as a major literary achievement… There quickly followed a major publishing feeding-frenzy: international literary agents and publishers descended on India from London and New York, signing up a whole tranche of authors, many of whom received major advances for outlines of novels they had barely begun…. barely a month went by without the news of some fledgling scribbler being discovered lurking as a sub-editor on the Indian Express or pushing papers in the Ministry of External Affairs… the sheer number of Indian civil servants who appear to be working on novels might be one reason why the Indian bureaucracy still churns so slowly…
That same year Pico Iyer wrote a widely quoted Time Magazine cover story, “The Empire Writes Back”… “The English language is being revolutionised from within. Hot spices are entering English, and tropical birds and sorcerers; readers who are increasingly familiar with sushi and samosas are now learning to live with molue buses and manuku hedges…”
In India itself, there is no new internationally acclaimed masterpiece, no new Roy…
Finally, Dalrymple takes a stand on the perennial ‘more authentic than thou’ arguments. This Indophilic Scot lives in both Delhi and London. But I have some tongue-in-cheek sympathy for the nativists: unlike in Glasgow, the high-speed subcontinental melodrama means if you blink, you’ll miss it.
It is true that in India there has been some sniping about the haute bourgeoisie origins of this literary diaspora, and some questioning as to what a bunch of Indian public schoolboys living in London and New York really know about the less romantic side of the daily struggle for life in India… “If you read other Indian writers most of them are very urban… They all went from the Doon School… to St Stephen’s… and then on to Cambridge…” There is, however, a strong suspicion of double standards inherent in this repeated charge of diaspora inauthenticity. Western writers can go off and live in self-imposed exile abroad without being called deracinated or out of touch with their countries of origin.
