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.
I’ve already confessed to reading a shameful amount of fiction, (although did you hear Victoria Beckham admit yesterday that she HAS NEVER READ A BOOK IN HER LIFE?!) but that figure about 1000 average sales and 5000 best-seller; is that definitely true? That’s amazing. An editor friend of mine (we have secret editor parties. It’s like the Masons. With better grammar) is writing a novel, I didn’t realise it’s such a tiny number. He may stand a chance.
And yep it definitely is cool being close enough to the newest & hottest authors to bask in their glory, simply due to the fact they live here!
“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 garlicÂ…”
Hey, isn’t this what footnotes are for? Problem solved.
Fiction is dead. The books written now are the equivalent of greek sculptures that were made in alexandria. The greek sculptures valued by museums are the originals not the copies churned out in hellenistic cities. Less that .0001 percent of the fiction written in the twentieth century is read today.
I rather prefer hyperlinks, hint hint…
I’m still fuming from the lack of inclusion of a Pakistani flag on the “independence” post (and the closing of comments on said post), so please excuse me if there’s any leftover vitriol here.
Desi writers in English are going to write different things and on different topics than on Desi diasporic writers (whether Naipaul or Jhumpa Lahiri or Zadie Smith). They all reflect the eccentricities and ethos of their cultures and I think it’s a mistake to conflate their aims and their audiences. Taslima Nasrin (god bless her heart despite Lajja) is rightly focused on a different audience.
If we’re having a conversation about idealized literary merits (which I could deal with), I could see that, but then perhaps we ought to also consider who is more likely to produce an excellent novel in bangla, hindi, tamil, or kashmiri. Perhaps the bias here is towards English (and the people who read English–i.e. our diaspora cultures) rather than the wonders of the diaspora itself.
And I don’t think Lahiri’s shallow diasporic solipcicism (though I love her for Namesake) is head and above mangofied art (which was really more the result of desi authors trying to negotiate a world of internalized, externalized, and commercial orientalism; it’s just a different form of [word deleted out of loyalty]. I won’t defend mangofication because it’s reflective of an itnernal orientalizing and if I hear the word mango in fiction outside of a description of chutney one more time, I’ll puke, but I just want to point out that it’s important to appreciate that people are coming from different places.
One of the most interesting “coming out” plays I’ve heard was at the WFS in Bombay; it was written in Marathi, escaped triteness through self-consciousness, and then transcended it into a metacritique of the author and his role in weaving a preconceived narrative vs. one that would be more upfront. I don’t see something like that coming out of the diaspora anytime soon.
What is shallow about it?
What is solipsistic about it?
Give us some examples.
Oh you catch me on my imprecise hyperbole! I was being unfair, but I do have some perspectives (most of them directed at Interpreter, but some at Namesake also) not all of which involve objecting to her having written my book 🙂
She focuses almost exclusively on one demographic/community (of which I’m a part)–the heteronorm Bangali in the US post 1965 professional class. More important than that question of authorial choice of the world of characters, I think she writes from that perspective constantly even when she’s writing about other characters like the travel guide (which makes them feel shallow and not quite real in my mind) which fall outside of it. And in fact, even the other members of her community. I could be wrong about this because my mother felt that she had described the mother in Namesake to a tee and we have very different life experiences.
She uses words like “Bengali” with no nuance–completely excluding that there are 100 different types of Bangalis in NY alone now (which she should know since she lives here now): Bangladeshi (this is a big one for me that she leaves out almost entirely except as a plot device in one story, i think, and the partition is SO relevant to any questions of a 2nd gen bangali identity–they’re probably the majority in the US among bangalis now), poor people, asylees, working class, the undocumented, blah blah blah. You would think a writer would be interested in the diversity of the ethnic community she’s narrowly confined herself to; write what you know–but try to know more than you do right now.
However, even within the subset of that community that she’s really confied herself to, she doesn’t echo any of the kinds of things that we talk about here on SM constantly–parental pressure, race, queerness, religion, alternative ways of living, nationalism, india, etc.–and the things we don’t–childhood sexual abuse, angry yelling in families, how the repression of sexuality plays out (e.g. illicit affairs among calcutta teens), the experience of immigrants, etc. Perhaps her family/subset of the community are extraordinarily well adjusted, but maybe she just doesn’t know it well enough or isn’t willing to present it. I find the gender relations in her books to be shockingly light–where are the one-track uncles and the father imposing his will on the mother and the mother being stuck at home to raise the kids (or worse yet, to work, cook, and raise the kids). I don’t feel that intensity of emotion coming from different expereinces of different characters within the same setting.
She’s occasionally overexplanatory–like exaplaining that when you say goodbye in bangla you say “ashi” which means “I’m coming”–as far as I mremeber, had very little relevance to the story at hand except to indicate that she was down. This makes me feel weird about what her audience is–I feel at times like that that she’s talking to some American White middleaged male publisher rather than to me–as do some of the criticism above about what kind of “community” she presents to the reader.
In her favor, she captures some of the details that you couldn’t possibly have without knowing and which fill my heart with warmth (like the way food is served at the gatherings of what are essentially surrogate families). Namesake in particular was so close to my heart and my mother’s because of how many ways in which it mirrored my own life; but when I think about it, in a lot of ways it only mirrors my life on a surface level, not an emotional level.
But that’s a little different from how I felt about it as a reader (although it’s hard for me to separate)–Again, I didn’t think the characters were all that compelling as people. Gogol’s sister was totally undeveloped; the relationship with his father was so uncomplicated, the mother was sort of a nonentity as far as I remember except perhaps in the begnning and end. Moushumi might have been the most intriguing character.
Perhaps it’s her style I object to; I’ve heard her described admiringly as subtle (Which is something i’m bad at doing or picking up on), but what I like are authors that go into some of the intricacies of their characters a little more overtly. And I like to see the author’s personality a little more–a Zadie Smith’s wry mischief?
I don’t know–I’m, like bongbreaker, extremely poorly read on these books, but this is just how I felt about this book. I say all this with the caveat the the book was written almost a generation ago in desilit terms and so perhaps something she produced now or someone similar to her produced now would look more like what I would like to see and read.
oops. i guess that was a bit long 🙂
Saurav, I completely agree! I am in no way any good study of literature but how in the world did she win the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter?? All of her stories read in the same dry bemused way. Some of the stories were compelling, but that book was like a huge run-on sentence.
I thought Namesake was even worse. It’s a good story but I COMPLETELY AGREE that she can only write from one very narrow perspective. You put it beautifully in your comments. Gogol’s character was the only one that evoked any strong emotion from me, and that’s because through the whole book I wanted to shake him!
The thing about Namesake that really bothered me the most is that it really feels like the reason why she can only write from that one perspective is because she just doesn’t understand the other perspective. Her description of Gogol’s parents, while they may have been accurate, were extremely boiled down and oversimplified. The implication through the entire book is “Gee as 2nd gen. desis our lives are just so COMPLEX; our parents are just so simple they will never understand me.” I was really hoping for some kind of redemption of that (isn’t that what the whole book was supposed to be about??) but it never came…the parents were never presented as being anything more than just shallow parental units. Gogol certainly looked down at them and their goals (that the most important thing was having a nice little house on a clean street on the suburbs with 2 cars in the garage and 2.2 kids in college, etc.) but I felt like Lahiri looked down at that too…I was so hoping for some sort of acknowledgement of the complexity of the lives of NRIs (beyond the near death experience of the father and never being able to tell Gogol the origins of his name) but it never came, although I thought that is what the promise of the book was.
I am not a parent and I’m certainly not the ideal young woman per the standards of our community but I found myself getting offended by her pat assumptions about NRIs. They may have ordinary goals in life but they are certainly not two-dimensional people who don’t understand complex emotions.
(sorry for the sloppiness, I am no writer–just a caveat because some of you always comment so beautifully!)
Saurav
That is a long list of faults with Jhumpa Lahiri – but maybe it shows how much her books mean to you that you care so much – personally I try to focus on what the writer includes rather than what they exclude – the writer can never contain the whole world, sub-sets, exceptions, marginalised and all.
Yes, her books do mean a lot to me on a personal level, but it’s not because of the writing as much as the sense of shared community affiliation (she is, after all, the first person that i could see myself relating to who wrote her book, the person I got excited about hearing that she was coming to our pujas, the person, in short, that’s a legitimate 2nd gen celeb). I’m not saying there’s nothing of value in what she does–just that it’s a knock to the head when you realize that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
I would hope that the writer would try to make nods toward understanding community and individual diversity, at least make a demonstration of self-awareness by avoiding usages like “Bengali” without specifying what she means. You can’t cover everything, but you can be aware and exressive of your limitations. She is, imo, presenting a very limited and unself-conscious perspective of what that life is like even within the self-defined bounds of what she’s trying to do. And the characters still lack depth.
I wish I could articulate it better, but I lack the language for it.
I really enjoy Dalrymple (William, not that awful Theodore), and his description seems about right.
But I think we can distingish between Diaspora authors writing about the watan and those that talk about the diaspora. For example, South Asian Canadians Rohinton Mistry and Shyam Selvadurai write about India and Sri Lanka from southern Ontario.
Selvadurai says
Like a lot of immigrant writers I find that a homeward pull inhabits my creative mind, that it is the capturing of the world I left behind that haunts my imagination. Yet, without the isolation from that world, without the act of migration, I wonder if FUNNY BOY would have ever been written.”
Rabindranath Maharaj has also said that he could not have written his books in Trinidad, for the seemingly trite reason that he would have been interrupted by relatives too often. (Maybe he was joking — I’m bad with humour.) Does emigration and the resultant isolation spur good writing?
On the other side are emigrant writers that write about the diaspora. Lahiri, Sidhwa, etc. They are writing about what they live, not what they used to live.
Of course, you can be on both categories at once. Isaac Beshivis Singer made that journey a century ago. Mistry may make it yet.
Saurav wrote:
I’m still fuming from the lack of inclusion of a Pakistani flag on the “independence” post (and the closing of comments on said post)
Yeah — I was away for the week-end — what happened there? No reason you can’t mix your Dunya ke sab se achha, ye Hind-o-stan hamara with a little Dil, Dil, Pakistan. And for those of us not happy with either -stan, don’t to add a little of Faiz’ Subhe-aazadi, August 1947 — chale chalo ki voh manzil abhi nahin aaii
Interesting blog entry manish, its music to my ears too, If I finish my first novel in english by the end of 2005 , gives me hope that I have a chance to win a booker or atleast be in that long list in 2006 😉 Definetely Rushdie, Naipaul, seth, Roy, jhumpa paved way and made it easy for some of us trying to enter the western publishing houses as indian writers..
Dalrymple’s a bit too optimistic, I think. Some fiction from the Indian diaspora is terrific, but a lot of it is rubbish that only gets published on the strength of its exoticism. I, for one, am sick of clumsily-executed magic realism and tales of oppressed Indian housewives.
As for Jhumpa Lahiri, I don’t understand the criticism that her work is too narrow: Jane Austen had a narrow focus too, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t a writer of note. As for her supposed avoidance of social issues – frankly, I’m glad that she doesn’t inject her work with the sort of turgid yet shallow sociological musings that other South Asian writers have such a penchant for (Chitra Divakaruni, anyone?).
It is a very interesting read and speaks a lot about “India”. The article states that Indian writers do not have the edge to make it on the world scene, the second-generation writers from the diaspora are going to give the world so called “Indian Literature”.
Somwhere deep down, I feel a twinge of disgust, I guess Western Publishers want tales of exotic India, India in the figments of imagination, India from the intellectual perspective of Amartya Sen and Salman Rushdie. These diasporic writers are fantastic their literary sword shines from an Oxford and Cambridge education or from being muddled in a suburb in the West. Writers from India are dull and bad story tellers.
Arundhati Roy was a freak debutante, it feels like India has seized to find expression in the imagination of Indians in the homeland. Look at the the movies, movie-goers world wide will only be looking at movies made by Diasopric directors.
We need a Satyajit Ray and another Arundhati Roy. We need to look at India without imagination, without nostalgia, without western lenses.We ALSO need stories of India told by one of us.