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Recognising each other

Photos: K. Murali Kumar, Shanker Chakravarty, Ap, AFP, S. Arneja, K. Bhagya Prakash.

Shared ethos: The making of a canon…(Clockwise from top left) Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Amit Chaudhuri and Kiran Desai.

Lists of books tend to depress me. They either contain unreadable bestsellers, most of them written by Dan Brown, or they reflect the inane and often illiterate prejudices of people who need to paste reviews on Amazon. As such the list put out by the literary magazine Wasafiri to celebrate its 25th anniversary was pleasantly surprising: 25 authors were asked to list one book each, published in the past 25 years, which they considered highly influential and significant. Each of the books listed was worth reading, which is more than what can be said of most lists and surveys of books.

At least six Indian English writers were asked, and only two of them nominated an Indian book. Hirsh Sawhney listed the excellent Aag ka Dariya (River of Fire) by Qurratulain Hyder, in a brave and necessary effort to speak up for Indian literatures not written in English, and I listed Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, though I have for many years critiqued both the Western reception of writers like Rushdie and various elements in Rushdie’s brilliant but problematic oeuvre. Like Hirsh, I was tempted to go for a non-English text.

As I wrote in my piece for Wasafiri, in the 1997 anthology of the ‘best’ of Indian writing that he co-edited, Rushdie had briskly dismissed Indian writing in languages other than English. He had not advanced the reasonable argument that it was impossible to know (let alone select between) so many languages, but the less plausible implication that English fiction was simply better. In choosing The Satanic Verses as one of the important books of the last 25 years, I was consciously leaving out books — in the three other languages (Hindi, Urdu and Danish) I have some knowledge of — that could have competed for the honour. But to name them, in an English journal published from the West, appeared less vital to me, for, they would not be familiar to most readers of (even) Wasafiri regardless of how many other readers might swear by them.

Hence, it had to be Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) for me: a baggy monster of a novel, brilliant in some parts, self-absorbed and gimmicky in other parts, a book of “metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes”, as The Times had put it. It is a novel that could only have been written by someone from a Muslim background. It is also a novel that could only have been written by someone immersed in Western ways of seeing Islam.

One can love it or hate it — personally I feel a position in between is the clearest indicator of sanity in today’s world — but one cannot ignore it. Perhaps one could have, if a certain Ayatollah Khomeini had not urged the ‘faithful’ to murder the author, if bans (the first in India) had not been imposed or contemplated, if mobs had not gone on rampage and the author into hiding, if the ‘liberal West’ had not chosen (mostly) to use the conflict to consolidate its own need for a devilish Other, the previous incumbents (Soviets/communists) having recently disappeared with the Berlin Wall. How many novels become History? This one did. How many novels lead to deaths — of supporters and detractors? This one did.

And strangely enough, how many novels remain unfinished in the troubled impact of their texts and paratexts? This one remains thoroughly unfinished. The inability of critics on all sides to relate to The Satanic Verses is inadvertently revealed by all but a couple of texts written about it. This inability points to a future that is yet to emerge from the cloud of unanswered questions surrounding The Satanic Verses: is blasphemy a vehicle of truth; what relation does freedom of speech have to cultural dominance in an unequal world; how can we distinguish between a jealous God and an abstract principle which craves similar sacrifices; are Western nations, with their ‘cultural’ Christianities, really secular; does our capability to denounce pre-Capitalist structures of power rest on a matching blindness to the employment of Capitalist structures of power? There are many other questions, some raised by Rushdie, some against him. We will be lucky if they are answered in the next 25 years.

That is what I argued, overcoming my distaste of aspects of Rushdie’s writings in order to do justice to the socio-historical impact of his book. At the time I listed the book, I was not aware that I would be the only Indian English writer listing a ‘fellow’ Indian English writer. For, Amit Chaudhury listed Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems, Indra Sinha listed Nabokov’s Lolita, Sujata Bhatt listed Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daljit Nagra listed Seamus Heaney’s North, and Sukhdev Sandhu listed Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao. All are brilliant books, and three of them I would rank above The Satanic Verses as literature in my own private list, though I would be unwilling to allot them as much ‘influence’ (with the possible exception of Marquez in a purely literary context). After all, The Satanic Verses continues to throw echoes into our time and space, both for believers and unbelievers, defenders and attackers, moderates and extremists. Every year at least one new — much inferior — The Satanic Verses is spawned by some writer in some corner of the world, and the whole drama re-run in some other corner. Influence, to my mind, cannot be limited to the literary.

But what surprises me is the fact that other Indian English writers find it so difficult to relate to other Indian English texts. I do not believe in Indian English writing as a genre, and yet, surely, cultural and related matters ought to slant a reader towards texts from his or her own cultural and historical complex? This seems to be indicated by the Caribbean writers on Wasafiri’s list, who mostly chose other (excellent) Caribbean texts. But not us Indian writers in English! Is this so because India (and its diaspora) contains so many disparities that Indian English writers cannot see themselves reflected in other Indian writers? But that also applies to my relation to Rushdie’s oeuvre or Hirsh Sawhney’s to Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire: we come from backgrounds which hold little in common with the writers of the texts we finally chose. And yet, Rushdie, with all the quirks and irritants of his oeuvre, and Hyder too, inevitably echo more in my ears than Marquez and Bishop and Nabokov (with all their brilliance) can.

This claim to complex cultural echoes shared within a socio-historical context is by no means confined to Indian or postcolonial writing. After all, it was used just a few days ago to explain the award of the (Swedish) Nobel Prize to yet another European writer. “If you are European, (it is) easier to relate to European literature,” Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told The Associated Press.

Perhaps one can argue that Indian writing in English remains admirably un-clannish. This is good. What is bad is that its lack of self-attention aborts the kind of independent critical discourse without which a sustained writing tradition can not arise. Indian English writing needs to look at itself, if it wants to establish what is still lacking: a solid platform of evaluation that would be connected by bridges to the world, but will not come stamped ‘Made in the West’. At the moment, this is largely lacking — or reduced, when it appears, to some kind of a nationalist simplification. Indian texts in English are not necessarily too varied, but it appears that Indian writers in English find it difficult to recognise each other.

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