Preserve of the affluent

M. Prabha deserves full marks for having tried to explode the hype that surrounds Indian Writing in English. But there appear to be a few pitfalls in her revealing statements, says SHANTHA BHALLA.

THE first thing that attracts one to the book is its title - The Waffle Of The Toffs - sounds almost musical. On going through it, one realises, however, that the author meant it to be anything but musical.

Written almost in a hectoring tone, she sounds like a crusader - the sworn mission being to burst the bubble of all the hype around present day Indian Writing in English.

The hypothesis that the writer propounds in the course of the book, and goes overboard to prove, is that "the sociological milieu a writer comes from is almost inversely related to his quality of writing. That is, the more affluent a writer, the less significant his writing. And the less affluent a writer, the more significant his writing". This theory is then used as a tool to debunk the body of present day Indian Writing in English and to dub it as sub-standard.

This is how the argument goes: All present day Indian writers writing in English come from affluent, well-connected and influential families, which, as in the hypothesis propounded above, makes all their writing essentially insignificant. All the male novelists who count are the products of places like Doon School, St. Stephen's College, Oxford and Cambridge.

The female novelists are either the wives and daughters of influential bureaucrats or they have all married rich husbands - some of them even marrying foreigners, allowing them to globetrot. All these modern day writers are highly westernised - half of them being expatriate Indians.

Their sybaritic backgrounds ensure that all these writers get glorious reviews not only in the local media but also in the Western press. All the major awards that come in the way are totally manipulated and managed, the PR work of this breed of writers being par excellence and the media, bureaucracy and the upper-class elite of the society operating like a cartel, doggedly watching each other's interests.

There is more in the same vein: The works these authors turn out have been written with a Western audience and the media in mind. The settings are more often than not foreign locales and the protagonists are all high flying jet-setting individuals whose worlds are at total variance with the worlds that lessor mortals like you and me inhabit.

In Circle Of Reason, by Amitav Ghosh, one moves "between Calcutta and Lalpukar and then on to Mahe, Al Ghazira, Algeria and Sahara". In The Shadow Lines, "the story meanders between Calcutta, Delhi, London, Dhaka, Africa and Sri Lanka ...". In The Golden Gate, which has California as its setting, "The poet may be successful at approximating the American idiom" but in the Indian context, such works are utterly insignificant and irrelevant for the Indian masses.

Be that as it may, however, for these authors, driven as they are by the twin agents of "lucre and fame", India becomes significant "as a market for their foreign-manufactured product", which has no acceptability in their chosen countries. India figures in these works only as a saleable commodity because "India is a fashionable topic the market always seems to want". India-baiting is what the foreign publishers look for.

Amid all the euphoria over these writers doing a great job, quite a few of them have crashed out after one book. The author deserves full marks for having the courage to explode the myth of Indian Writing in English. She has done a great deal of research. No statement is made without concrete evidence, some of which are revealing. Like the one about Sir Sobha Singh (Khushwant Singh's father) giving testimony against Bhagat Singh and B. K. Dutt in the bombing case.

However, there appear to be a few pitfalls in an otherwise considerable work. Her theory may do well in the context of the area she has chosen for her study. But trying to explain the entire gamut of literature in this fashion is taking a very simplistic view of a complex subject. At times, the author in her zeal, fails to be objective. The bureaucrats who have taken to writing may be misappropriating both their time at work and their positiotion. But to conclude that bureaucrats (or for that matter anybody doing any other job) should just confine themselves to their cabins and never try to venture out on any kind of creative activity because they hold public office in a poor country, is perhaps taking the argument too far.

The Waffle Of The Toffs, M. Prabha, Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., Rs. 250.

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