March of the Muse
SHREEKUMAR VARMA
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India is now a haven for creative writing and the world is excitedly watching new and emerging trends.
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Kamala Markandeya wrote about poverty in Nectar in a Sieve, but by then she’d already settled down in the UK. Her final book is about The Nowhere Man, a character caught short in an alien culture, belonging
nowhere. In fact, this subject dominates the works of most immigrant writers.
Anita Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri followed, observing India from both within and outside, even as they expressed a deep sense of alienation. The body of writing that emerges from these “outsiders” makes up the literature of diaspora.
View from outside
Landmarks include the emergence of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. Armed with admirable creative strengths, a remarkable mix of word and thought, they made the world sit up and take notice. Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth also spell magic. Ghosh’s output ranges from his racy, thriller-type The Calcutta Chromosome to the vast and flowing semi-historical novel, The Glass Palace. And Seth is noted for his whimsical verse-novel, The Golden Gate, the massive tome A Suitable Boy and his delicately woven, completely un-Indian tale of music and love, An Equal Music. Both these writers live outside India, and bring a world-view to our part of the world.
Long list
Kiran Nagarkar, Kiran Desai, Namita Gokhale, Rohinton Mistry, Upamanyu Chatterjee. The list stretches on!
Surely, this is the most fertile moment in the history of Indian writing in English, there’s such a tremendous surge of interest and output. In the years to come we’ll probably read even more interesting fiction from Hari Kunzru, Suketu Mehta and Vikram Chandra.
And yet there’s more to post-Independence writing.
For kids
Children’s literature has flowered with Ruskin Bond, Ranjit Lal, Poile Sengupta and a host of others. In fact, it’s a great time for children’s books — you get familiar worlds rather than situations imported from the West.
Poetry
Then there’s poetry from masters, living and dead — Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar, Keki Daruwalla, and the younger ones like Vijay Nambisan, Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Imtiaz Dharker. We could keep adding to the list, losing none of its importance, and we’ll be here tomorrow, still counting. Even though poetry isn’t widely popular, you find local groups of devotees who discuss, debate, write and breathe poetry, keeping alive a movement that will, hopefully, spread through the ranks one day.
We’ve left out plays, “mixed” art forms like graphic novels, and philosophical writing in fiction’s clothing, but I predict these will take wondrous shapes in the coming years.
One language
The best thing about writing in English is that writers from different states, cultures and languages can reach you through a single link language.
On the other hand, it isn’t always easy to convey exclusive ethnic sensibilities in an “alien” language, however intimate we’ve become with it. Sixty years after Independence, we are still experimenting, still digging, still discovering.
From up high in their mystifying ivory towers, writers and story-tellers have finally climbed down.
Six decades have brought writers and readers within touching distance. And new writers have avenues like the Internet, global reach, and more opportunities than ever before.
It is no secret that India, looked upon for long as an excitedly growing economy, is also the new haven for creative writing.
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