Backpage

BARELY had the hullabaloo over Bill Clinton’s visit to the country died down, when Salman Rushdie hit town. The occasion – the Commonwealth Award ceremony to select the best book for 1999. Though Rushdie got pipped to the award by the reclusive J.M. Coetzee, two-time winner of the prestigious Booker, media attention remained unwaveringly focused on the Indian born writer, helped no doubt by the fact that Coetzee refused to make an appearance.

This was a very different Rushdie. When he first hit the limelight with what critics believe remains his best work, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie came across as somewhat supercilious and cold. Two decades and many more books later, with his life turned upside down by the Iranian fatwa occasioned by the Satanic Verses, the scars of his traumatic experience sit lightly on him. Despite heavy security and mystery governing his movements, his public appearances came across as masterpieces of public relations.

For a country which scored a dubious first in banning Satanic Verses and long denied him a visa, both the government and the media treated Rushdie with unfailing courtesy. The ban on Satanic Verses still remains in force, and fringe political formations continue to highlight his alleged blasphemy against the Prophet and his family. Granting him a visa and providing him security, despite the ritual protests, thus shows both courage and maturity. And this when Rushdie is no admirer of the currently in fashion ideology of Hindutva.

As the reigning pop idol of Indo-Anglican fiction, and as someone who has helped create a mega-buck market for Indian writing in English, Rushdie’s views on the creativity of our English writing remain mired in controversy. Few have forgotten his somewhat derisive comments on the quality of our non-English fiction. The defence that his judgement was based on the quality of translations available to him hardly convince.

For one, he seems less aware of the power dimension governing the relationship between the different Indian languages. True that English is no longer only a colonial legacy, and that all over the country people have both adopted and transformed it to suit their creative purposes, it nevertheless remains the expression of the hegemonic elite. As such, while the Indian and South Asian contribution to the vibrancy and multi-vocality of the language is undeniable, it has simultaneously led to a marginalisation, at least in terms of market recognition, of non-English writing.

But more than language politics, most Indian writing in English seems marked by a narrowness of vision and experience. Despite its phenomenal growth in the last five decades, creatively speaking, English remains the preferred mode of expression of the upwardly mobile middle class Indian. More than the events and processes governing the life chances of the vast majority of our co-citizens, it is middle class interiority and angst and global (read western) literary trends that mark this literature.

It can be and is no one’s case that the world of the middle class Indian lacks legitimacy. Both in numbers and as consumers this strata has come to stay. It is, however, worth considering just how insular this world has become. The opening up to global influences has simultaneously contributed to a weakening of the links with the local. It should come as no surprise that, honourable exceptions aside, the dominant strain of our English writing remains apolitical if not non-political, with little to say about India’s vast under-class. We have nothing comparable to a Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha Gaon, Renu’s Maila Anchal, Srilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari or Bhairappa’s Godhuli – and one is here referring only to books which have been translated into English.

In this era of hegemonic globalisation, with symbols of American culture ruling the roost, this losing out on our roots and concerns should be a matter of worry. Instead of turning xenophobic and aggressively swadeshi with an uncritical pride in all that can be marketed as genuinely Indian, we need to create the spaces and the structures where significant, though non-dominant, voices too get a fair hearing. Just as multicultural and polyglot New York, Rushdie’s favoured imaginary homeland, does not quite represent the American experience, Indo-Anglican fiction, at best, signifies a minor part of our cultural churning.

Now that Rushdie has managed to re-establish physical contact with the land of his birth and childhood, he could do worse than turn his undeniable skills and presence towards exploring the ramifications of this cultural encounter. If some of the excitement that we display towards the NRI authors could be directed at the native marginalised, our experiment with creating a genuinely multicultural society could emerge stronger.

Harsh Sethi