A novelist responds: ‘More interesting to map the sensibilities of diasporic (Indian) writers’

If you haven’t read the recent article entitled “Why almost every major Indian writer lives abroad and what it has done to Indian fiction” and you want to know what the overseas residence of these writers has done to Indian fiction, the answer as per the article is the one that people have been giving for the last few decades: It has left behind the authentic and given an overly explained version of India to western readers. There are several ways of responding to such an article, none of which I want to follow. But I do want to sketch a few of them in outline here.

Better questions

First, it can be pointed out that the great prominence of overseas writers could be counteracted, at least in India, by the Indian media giving prominence (and column space) to Indian writers living in India. Indian media appears to have largely signed off on Indian literary work. The website on which the said article appears is affiliated with a major English-language broadsheet that hasn’t reviewed a work of fiction in decades for obscure business-related reasons. Even those media outlets that do devote space to fiction spend large amounts of that space on the books that make it to major international prize lists. We can read about those books in major international media venues; we don’t need our media to flog them. Perhaps the writer could take this issue up in a future article.

Secondly, one could take issue with the fact that the writer can name only two or three Indian English writers living in India, actually only one or two since RK Narayan is dead. He names a number of non-English-language Indian writers who are available in English translation, but seems not to be aware of Jerry Pinto, Jeet Thayil, Anuradha Roy, Anjum Hasan, Janice Pariat, Tanuj Solanki, to name a few, or even the widely read Vikas Swarup and Chetan Bhagat. Maybe the website that published this piece could commission a series of articles on these and other Indian English writers, discussing their themes and concerns.

Thirdly, the writer could also consider a piece critiquing his own interest in what an international audience reads about India. Could we perhaps also consider how an Indian audience perceives India in Indian fiction? Perhaps we could also consider why this question doesn’t get top billing when it comes to deciding what we are writing about.

Also, one could say that the writer’s notion of India suffers from a lack of nuance. How can Jhumpa Lahiri, who grew up and received all her education in the US, be put in the same line as Amitav Ghosh, who spent his formative years in India? Don’t such things give rise to very different sensibilities? It would be an interesting exercise to map the sensibilities of Indian diasporic writers, to construct their literary genealogies in terms of influences in order to determine what their literary output represents. We could then compare this with what they claim it represents and with what “we” think it represents. Then we can do something similar for those authors who live in India and see where that gets us. Okay, that might take more than a quick 700-word column for a website, so I guess I shouldn’t suggest that the writer of the piece in question should pitch that to his editor.

The answers

Okay, now with all that out of the way, let me tell you, in brief, two stories.

In 2005, about to turn 31, I moved to India and took up a job at a public university. A few months later, I got a letter from the Establishment Section (Indian government speak for HR) saying that my Class Ten certificate was missing from my documents and that I should submit it as soon as possible. I looked for the certificate but couldn’t find it. It seemed like a minor matter, so I didn’t think much of it. A couple of months later, I got another letter saying that my salary (such as it was) would be stopped if I didn’t submit the certificate.

Now I began to panic. I went to the minor official who had issued the letter. Tried to convince him it was a minor matter, but he was unmoved. He explained that a prominent person was under suspicion of having fudged his age and so the Class ten certificate couldn’t be overlooked. (That prominent person later became a minister). “But I could easily fudge my age in a Class Ten certificate; the board enters whatever the school sends them.” He was unmoved. “Just get CBSE to reissue it.”

But reissuing it involved many steps, like filing a police report, putting an ad in a newspaper and whatnot. Just back in Delhi after years in the US, I had already fought a bruising battle getting my driving licence renewed. This sounded much, much worse. I didn’t know what to do. I had sleepless nights, my hair began to fall. Meanwhile, one letter after another came from that same minor official, and I began to feel a kind of hatred for him, a kind of loathing for his smug unblinking stupidity.

Eventually, I managed to get the duplicate certificate and that moment passed, but my hatred of that man didn’t quite dissipate; it lingered in the corner of my mind, sometimes coming to the fore, especially if I happened to pass the Establishment Section. Then, one day, a couple of years later, I was driving out of campus when I saw him, the same Establishment officer. He was on a scooter of 1980s vintage. I could see some spinach leaves poking out of a plastic bag that had been stuffed into the scooter’s carrier.

He and I were driving in different directions, so that moment passed very quickly, but I realised in that moment that his jet black hair was coloured and that his fleshy but young-looking face hid the fact that he was not far from retirement. At that time I was in the middle of writing a novel, but, a year later, when that novel was written, the sight of that man on his scooter came back to me, and it brought with it the story of a novel about a corrupt minor government official whose power is transient and who is also vulnerable in his own way, just like the people he exploits. That image and my reading of Shrilal Shukla came together and less than a year later, just a few months before Anna Hazare and his cohort began to demonise people like my protagonist, I had completed a novel called The Householder, which critics said humanised a detestable protagonist.

The second story started a few weeks before The Householder was published, inaugurated by the fact that my father had passed away. Over the next six, eight, 10, 12, I don’t know, maybe 16 months, I clung to the idea that I needed to write a novel to get over my grief without having much of a clue what the novel would be about, except that there would be some brothers in it and the Ramayana would somehow figure in it. Eventually, Tulsidas entered the picture and I realised that I needed to make my way through the Ramcharitmanas if I actually had to write this book.

I downloaded a PDF, and the matter stood there, the file lying unopened on my desktop, the novel waiting for the file to be opened. In the meantime a couple of years had passed since my father’s death and if I didn’t get his mutual funds mutated to my name there was a danger that I would lose the money, such as it was, and so I assembled all the documents I could lay my hands on, promising my wife that I would take her to lunch at her favourite restaurant in Scindia House if she accompanied me to the Barakhamba Road office of the mutual fund provider.

I recall waiting my turn with my heart racing, afraid that I would be exactly one document short and I would have to make this whole journey again, but that was not to be. The person on the other side of the counter kept asking for documents and I kept producing them. In the years since the missing Class Ten certificate, something had been lost and something had been gained. When we left the building, I was flying, I myself couldn’t believe that I had successfully anticipated all the 12 or 13 documents that had been needed. I came back to earth with a thud when I realised that in my anxiety to get to the office, I had parked in a no-parking zone. My car had been towed.

It was lunch time, so we walked through the back lanes to get to Scindia House. Turning a corner, we saw a van parked by the side of the road. Gita Press. On display was the Press’s bestselling book: Ramcharitmanas. Even a man of science can interpret a chance occurrence as a sign, and so I bought it. After lunch, a visit to the impound area to retrieve the car, and a drive back home, I opened the book and began reading it. It took another two years, but that book did get written and published under the title Half the Night is Gone. Some years later, Perumal Murugan wrote a blurb for the Tamil translation of that book in which he called me “a storyteller in the Indian tradition.”

The writer of the article I am responding to asks the reader to pick up a book by one of those Indian writers who live overseas and asks them to “ask what the book might have looked like if the writer had never left.” When I sat down to tell the two stories related above, I was trying to put this statement into some kind of perspective, I guess, make some sort of claim to authenticity, I guess, but having written all that down, I feel less sure of what it is I am trying to say. Perhaps what I want to say is that questions of who lives where, questions of who owns what kind of privilege, questions of what books might have been as opposed to what they actually are, tend to exhaust themselves. Or, at the very least, they tire me and they take me back to Muneer Niazi who said

Kisi ko apne amal ka hisaab kya dete
Sawal sare ghalat the jawaab kya dete

how was I to account for the way that I lived
the questions were all wrong, what answer could I give

This article first appeared on Amitabha Bagchi’s Substack.