Past & Present
The hazards of prediction
BY RAMACHANDRA GUHA
The British author John Wain once believed that Indian English was incapable of producing true literature.
HISTORIANS make it their business to write about the past. Occasionally, they also seek to comment about the present. What they rigorously eschew, however, is to look into the future, to predict what might happen in years to come on the basis of what has happened in years past.
By not carrying a crystal ball with them, historians escape being held to account for predictions that have gone awry. What is even better, they can then poke fun at other kinds of writers — economists, journalists, prophets — whose own speculations have been falsified by events. In this column I have exercised that privilege often — by holding up to scrutiny (and, it must be admitted, ridicule) those writers — usually Western — who have claimed that India would become a military dictatorship, or that it would break up into a dozen fragments, or that it would be hit by mass starvation, fates that this not-always-happy land has escaped — as yet.
The prediction I shall scrutinise in this column, however, was not made about such portentous matters as politics or economics. It was offered by John Wain, a British man of letters — poet, essayist, novelist and anthologist — once widely published but now, I think, almost wholly forgotten. In the year 1961, Wain visited India at the invitation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He published an account of his trip in the monthly magazine Encounter (also once widely read but now defunct).
Familiar trope
Wain's essay started with a new twist to an old trope — the poverty of India and the hunger of Indians. "The most fortunate inhabitants of India", began his first sentence, "are the birds": birds who circled overhead, ever alert to evidence of new food on the ground below, whether snails or snakes or the dead flesh of dead cows and humans. "I never saw a sick bird in India", claimed Wain, "although I saw sick cows, dogs, monkeys, children, men and women. The birds are all sleek and successful-looking... "
Wain was not unimpressed by classical Indian art and architecture. Attending a Bharatanatyam recital by Kamala Laxman, he allowed that, in its own way, it was as interesting and refined as Western ballet. And of the Taj Mahal he wrote that it was "perfect, timeless, the greatest architectural poem ever achieved". London's St. Paul's Cathedral, built around the same time, seemed "clumsy and earthbound" in comparison.
Wain then moved on to his own area of interest and expertise, literature. In Bombay he spent an evening with a bunch of Marathi writers, one of whom complained about the size of his audience. Although 30 million people spoke his language, said this writer, "the literate population is so small that the greatest Marathi bestseller wouldn't sell more than more than 500 copies". Another writer expressed the desire to publish in English where the market was (in theory) so much bigger, taking in large parts of the world. "I know what my own choice would be", remarked Wain, namely, "to write in Marathi and let the big sales and wide publicity take care of themselves. Especially since Indian English, being a lingua franca, lacks the finesse of nuance that makes literature possible" (the emphasis is as in the original).
At the time Wain wrote these words, there were not many Indian writers who wrote in English and were known in the West. There was R.K. Narayan, of course, but with regard to him perhaps Wain believed that the word "nuance", emphasised by him, provided an escape route. It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the "subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression or sound". And R.K. Narayan wrote straightforward stories in an unadorned prose, to describe which "charming" and "readable" were — perhaps Wain thought — more suitable adjectives than "subtle" or "nuanced".
Watershed event
For at least 20 years John Wain's prediction held good. Then, in 1981, came Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which demonstrated that whatever else one might say about Indian English as a lingua franca, it assuredly made literature possible. Although Rushdie's own work steadily degenerated, that one great book encouraged Indian writers to become more ambitious, both in the language they used and, perhaps more importantly, in the themes they tackled. Once, the Indian novel in English had been not much more than a disguised form of autobiography. Now, where some writers continued to write principally on the basis of their own experiences, others — pre-eminently Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth — set their stories in worlds and epochs far removed from their own.
Traces of a tension
To be fair to John Wain, there does remain a tension in our literary world, between writing in an authentically Indian language and writing in a desi derivative of the Queen's tongue. It is possible to argue that those who write in Marathi or Tamil touch aspects of Indian life — and hence of the human experience — somewhat out of reach of the novelist in English. However, no one can claim anymore that Indian writing in English lacks "nuance", or that it does not qualify as "literature".
ramguha@vsnl.com
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