Reading New India

Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English

E. Dawson Varughese

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441105561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading New India is an insightful exploration of contemporary Indian writing in English. Exploring the work of such writers as Aravind Adiga (author of the Man-Booker Prize winning White Tiger), Usha K.R. and Taseer, the book looks at how the 'new' India has been recreated and defined in an English Language literature that is now reaching a global audience. The book describes how Indian fiction has moved beyond notions of 'postcolonial' writing to reflect an increasingly confident and diverse cultures. Reading New India covers such topics as:
- Representation of the city: Mumbai and Bangalore
- Chick Lit to Crick Lit - Call centre dramas and corporate lives
- Crime novels and Bharati narratives
- Graphic novels Including a chronological time-line of major social, cultural and political reforms, biographies of the major authors covered, further reading and a glossary of Hindi terms, this book is an essential guide for students of contemporary world literature and postcolonial writing.

1

Introduction: From postcolonial India to New India

This chapter begins with an overview of the major socio-political reforms since India’s independence from British rule in 1947 and how the notion of ‘Indianness’ has developed in this timeframe, in parallel with these developments. This overview is supported by a chronological timeline (see page 160).

The chapter proceeds to focus on the literary production of this same time period (Section 1.2), presenting:

• key literary figures
• developments and issues in the history of Indian writing in English and, where possible, these will be linked to the developments outlined in Section 1.1
• finally, Section 1.3 focuses on post-millennial Indian writing in English against the backdrop of New India; its post-millennial economical, cultural and societal self

Author biographies support Sections 1.2 and 1.3. and can be found on pages 161–86.

1.1 ‘Indianness’ since independence

India gained independence from British rule in 1947 and the matter of ‘Indianness’ at this juncture in the country’s history was a topic of great debate. Gandhi recognized that Hinduism was part of what it meant to be Indian. However, it was a broad and inclusive sense of Hinduism that shaped his particular idea of India and one consistent with his non-aggressive principles. Despite the presence of militant Hindu nationalists and their desire post-independence for an Indianness to be rooted deeply in Hinduism, it was the European-influenced ideas of what India should become post 1947 that helped to form notions of Indianness that followed. At the point of independence, the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, looked to create an India that was secular. In accordance with a sense of ‘nation’ as a hegemonic entity, Nehru pursued a model that was ‘committed to protecting cultural and religious difference rather than imposing a uniform “Indianess”’ (Khilnani 1999, p. 167). Nehru’s monetary policies followed suit and as India’s first prime minister, he built an economy around state-sponsored investment. Committed to the importance of state identities, Nehru’s idea of Indianness was reflected in his views on India’s languages; English was recognized as the language of state and Hindi as an ‘official’ but not ‘national’ language – other regional languages were also recognized as ‘official’. Of this debate Khilnani writes:

This technique of compromise refused to anchor an Indian identity to a single trait – an option which, had it been chosen, would have suborned regional cultures to majoritarian definitions of a national one. . . . Indianness was defined not as a singular or exhaustive identity, but as one which explicitly recognized at least two other aspects; Indian citizens were also members of linguistic and cultural communities: Oriyas or Tamils, Kashmiri or Marathi. (Khilnani 1999, p. 175)

Following Nehru’s death in 1964, and during the 1970s, Indian politics began moving in very different directions. Regional and caste preoccupations began to invade national politics. Various social groups and movements took precedence over the more hegemonic sense of Nehru’s original view of Indianness. The 1970s saw a rise in the birth of political groups and it became increasingly difficult for Congress to maintain its support and strength across India. By the 1980s, demands for regional autonomy grew – such as the cases in Punjab and Kashmir – each looking for more independence and self-rule. This desire for autonomy ostracized the various peoples seeking regional independence as their demands were interpreted as being ‘anti-national’. It was to Mrs Indira Gandhi that Congress turned to transform the party into one for the masses, a party that once again, it was hoped, would venerate a secular notion of ‘Indianness’. Unlike Nehru, Mrs Gandhi was operating in a different time; there was widespread dissent and deep fissures among peoples of the Indian nation, manifest particularly in their opinions towards central governance. Some of the more controversial decisions influenced by Mrs Gandhi at this time – such as holding political prisoners – have been received variously; indeed, one could suggest that it was the impact of these decisions which led to her death in 1984. In contrast to previous hegemonic strategies of engagement, Mrs Gandhi used associated religious difference in order to garner support and rally voters. The crisis of Congress played out during this period and, in turn, no single political group was able to dominate. General elections in 1991 and again in 1996 produced hung parliaments and coalition governments.

In this political vacuum, the Bharatiya Janata Party was borne out of a Hindu nationalist party – the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. Known as the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s sense of ‘Indianness’ stood in opposition to Nehru’s India; ‘Hinduness’ was at its core and its project was to create: ‘a culturally and ethnically cleaned-up homogenous community with a singular Indian citizenship, defended by a state that had both God and nuclear warheads on its side’ (Khilnani 1999, p. 188). Some thought at the time that this political position would not return India to a Gandhian philosophy of the rural and the village; it did not. Instead, the BJP revisioned a sense of Indianness, claiming that all Indians need not be Hindu to be Indian, but that India be recognized as Hindu. In reality, this political position resulted in little recognition both legally and politically of anything other than Hindu.

Identity politics abound, Ayodhya (see Glossary) found itself at the centre of the Hindu nationalist movement (through the political groups of Sangh Parivar) in 1992, fuelling Hindu–Muslim tensions; a nervousness that reinvoked the days of partition. The Hindu nationalist movement wished to ‘reclaim’ the ancient city of Ayodhya; for the Hindus, this was the birthplace of Ram and for the Muslims it was the holy site of a sixteenth-century place of worship, the Babri Masjid. The Babri Masjid mosque was destroyed in the violence of Ayodhya and tensions around who was a ‘real’ Indian reached an all time high. The ‘Bombay riots’ of December 1992 and January 1993 were fuelled by the Ayodhya violence and many contemporary films make reference to these terrible uprisings, one of the most recent references made in the English-medium film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). One of the early scenes in the film shows Jamal Malik’s mother washing clothes, when she is hit by Hindu rioters, knocking her into the water where she drowns. Jamal and his brother witness her death and run away from the scene to escape the ensuing violence. This memory is evoked some years later when Jamal Malik is asked a question on the game show, Kaun banega Crorepati? Jamal turns to Prem Kumar – the game show host – and says that if it wasn’t for Ram and Allah, then he would still have a mother; a reference to the Bombay riots and the legacy of the religious violence. ‘Difference and Death’, Section 5.2 of this volume, discusses Esther David’s The Man with Enormous Wings (2010) and Taseer’s The Temple-Goers (2010); both texts examine communal violence, difference across and within religions and, in David’s novella in particular, the Hindu–Muslim unrest in the city of Ahmedabad in 2002.

Despite the religious tensions of the 1990s and the ongoing debates of a secular India versus a religious (Hindu) India, the country was making headway economically. The 1990s benefited from increased domestic consumption and these early fiscal developments put India on a path that has resulted in an increasingly important role in global modernity. Das (2002) explains:

The notable thing about India’s rise is not that it is new – it has been among the best performing economies for a quarter century – but its path is unique. Rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy – exporting labour-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West – India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech rather than low-skill manufacturing. (Das 2002, p. 360)

This rise in economic prosperity impacted and shaped the more radical ideas of Hinduism evident in previous years and with this change came a ‘rebranding’ of India’s Hinduism. Khilnani (1999) writes:

For many in India modernity has been adopted through conservative filters of religious piety, moralism and domestic virtue. This has spawned a novel Hinduism, where holographic gods dangle on well-used keychains and cassettes of devotional ragas are played in traffic jams: instances of a religious sentiment freed from its original defining contexts, from the subtle iconography of materials and the punctual divisions of the day into sacred and mundane time. (Khilnani 1999, p. 187)

This change in society is further documented by Swaminathan (2007), writing in recognition of India’s 60 years of independence in 2007 and of the complexities and challenges that New India is experiencing:

The year 2007 marks the birth centenary of Bhagat Singh. In his last letter before he was hanged, Bhagat Singh mentioned that India would not achieve freedom by merely getting rid of the British because their place would be taken by the kale Angrez – the Black English. It is only after the people fight against them and win, will our country be genuinely free. Now, after almost sixty years of “freedom” we not only realize how true his words were, but must also know that those kale Angrez he was referring to, are people like us. (Swaminathan 2007, p. 64)

Swaminathan underscores how India, despite freedom from colonial rule, still suffers at the hands of those in power, and Mondal (2005) reminds us that although India has witnessed leaders who have pioneered secular notions of Indianness since independence, the result has often proved to encode a Hindu majoritarian point of view ‘even in the most secular-seeming and tolerant formulations’ (Mondal 2005, p. 22). At the heart of many of these secular movements was the idea of ‘the composite nation’, of which Mondal writes: ‘In particular, any attempt to articulate an alternative India by appealing to some “pure” or “uncontaminated” secular nationalism is fraught with particular dangers’ (Mondal 2005, p. 22).

As this book will go on to demonstrate, New India faces many challenges and the question of ‘Indianness’ is only one of many, albeit a crucial one. Emanating mainly from increased fiscal certainty – although the global economic meltdown has affected India to some extent – India is now a more confident and adept player in the global economy, and as a consequence of these developments, it is facing new challenges both socially and culturally. The fiction explored in Chapters 2 to 7 talks of and to these changes and considers some of the ways in which New India is being encoded in its contemporary fiction. Ideas of ‘Indianness’, therefore, run throughout the examination of these texts, as India once again jostles and negotiates (twenty-first century) ideas of what it is, and what it should mean, to be Indian.

Section 1.2 presents literary developments and the creation of the canon of Indian writing in English since 1947. Where possible, links with the political and societal reforms of India since 1947, outlined above, will be illuminated in the discussion.

1.2 Literary ‘Indianness’

India has a deeply established and developed literary scene of writing in English in comparison to other countries of erstwhile British colonial rule. Global economic prominence has inspired a fast-changing literary scene. These literary developments are impacting not only the readership of Indian writing in English within India, but also the genre, forms, voices and modes of artistic expression, engaged with representing this emerging economy. These developments are examined in detail across Chapters 2 to 7 of this book.

In order to understand how Indian writing in English has developed over time, this section offers a brief presentation of early Indian writing in English. Although the focus will be on post-independence writing, it is useful to understand how motifs of ‘Indianness’ were developed very early on by writers, Indian themselves, as well as those who knew India well through travel and frequent long-term visits to the country. Consequently, some pre-independence writing is discussed initially, followed by a presentation of the post-independence writers.

Empire and Indian writing in English

The first novel written and published in English by an Indian is Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, in print from 1864 (Talib 2002, p. 82). The canon of this period of early writing in English was produced by both Indians and non-Indians. Boehmer writes of the ‘British high empire of 1870–1918’ (Boehmer 2009, p. xv) and of the colonial writing of that period in which ‘India’ appeared as a subject and a muse in the writings of non-Indians, as well as in literature written by Indians themselves. From Tennyson’s ‘The Defence of Lucknow’ (1880), Kipling’s ‘Christmas in India’ (1888) and Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), to Sarojini Naidu’s ‘Songs of My City’ (1912), this era of writing captured the various experiences of the British Raj, in particular. Notably, the poetry of Toru Dutt and her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) was the first collection of Indian poetry in English to be published by a woman (Boehmer 2009, p. 69).

Kipling’s ‘Christmas in India’ (1888) is infused with sensory experience; the colours of the scene, the smells of the village roads, the sounds of the corn being ground and the parrots calling by the river.

Dim dawn behind the tamarisks – the sky is saffron-yellow –

As the women in the village grind the corn,

And the parrots seek the river-side, each calling to his fellow

That the Day, the starring Eastern Day, is born.

O the White dust on the highway! O the stenches in the byway!

O the clammy fog that hovers over earth!

And at Home they’re making merry ‘neath the white and scarlet berry –

What part have India’s exiles in their mirth? (Boehmer 2009, p. 104)

The poem makes a reference to Christmas at ‘Home’, the capitalized ‘Home’ rooting Kipling and Christmas to a particular tradition and heritage of Christian life.

Within the body of writing in English dis...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: From postcolonial India to New India
• 2 Urban scapes
• 3 Chick lit to crick lit
• 4 Young India
• 5 Crime writing
• 6 Fantasy and epic narrative
• 7 Graphic novels
• Conclusions: New/Old stories in Old/New ways?
• References
• Further reading
• Glossary
• Chronological timeline
• Author biographies
• Index