Imagining India

There are two contradictory opinions about the state of the English-language novel in India at the moment, said author Anjum Hasan. One is that books in English are too focused on contemporary middle-class experience in India, the other extreme is that there’s not enough novels ‘of the interior’. These are opinions, largely though, of writers and critics, whereas for Indian publishers, now is ‘a time of great excitement’. Three or four new publishers have cropped up in the past few years, publishing large amounts of fiction. ‘We’re in the pioneer phase’ said Hasan – publishers are taking risks on young writers, and different kinds of writers.

Chair Stephen McCarty, editor of the Asia Literary Review, wondered if the Booker Prize had had an effect. Hasan said, perhaps when Arundhati Roy won in ’98, but later authors like Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, are oft perceived within India as ‘writing for the West’ and there is some resistance to this. Roy, though, became a figurehead for someone who can make it as a writer in India.

Susan Hawthorne lived in Chennai for four months recently and has read widely in the field of Indian lit. She commented that perhaps India now is like Australia was 10-20 years ago, an explosion of fresh publishers and authors. She said this still sort-of went on, but the ‘excitement’ wasn’t as present. I would argue though, with the growth of online literary communities and the ever-growing ticket sales of writers festivals – this excitement has been somewhat renewed in Australia in the past few years (especially here in Melbourne – our UNESCO City of Literature).

Hawthorne praised Hasan’s novel Lunatic in My Head (Brass Monkey Books) – she found it just ‘so contemporary’. She said ten years ago if she read it she would not have perceived India the way it is portrayed in Hasan’s book. But she spoke of now what she saw – an intersection of the old and the new, the ancient and the contemporary etc. ‘Perhaps it wears its complexity more than some cultures do’.

Hasan spoke about how even the external stereotypes of India can become internalised and can impose on the writing. ‘I don’t see myself as writing about India’, Hasan said. She is writing about contemporary, globalised, connected experience. But a kind of perceived ‘India’ is nonetheless a kind of elephant in the room. Someone like Salman Rushdie, she said, attempts to ‘encapsulate Indian reality for the reader’ but Hasan’s generation is ‘not as concerned’. ‘Global’ influences such as rock music and Shakespeare ‘are just there’. ‘We make them our own’, she said. Writers of Hasan’s generation come from all different backgrounds – they don’t have to have studied English Lit to become a writer (in English) as it may have previously been the case. They have ‘always taken from the [English] tradition what appeals to us’. She said ‘we should stop thinking of the colonial heritage as forever destroying us – it’s a two-way thing.’ Writers in India aren’t particularly interested in the idea of the post-colonial anymore. Hasan is interested in globalisation ‘as a lived experience’ – everything as being ‘so connected’.

Why, though, are we still talking about post-colonialism? Hawthorne had an elegant point: that just as a person remembers and goes over things that have been difficult in the course of their life – the difficult things in a culture’s history will be the ones that linger.

Writers who straddle languages in India are the ‘lifeblood’ of their literary culture, said Hasan. ‘You can’t afford to be monolingual’, as it’s a kind of amnesia. The panel did all express some concern about what is lost with English becoming increasingly dominant, worldwide.

One interesting point Hasan made was that in India they liked ‘positive’ stories about themselves – thus something like Adiga’s The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire (the book and film) caused discomfort locally, as do Arundhati Roy’s outspoken, personal and passionate essays. ‘I don’t think we’re used to that in India,’ she said, ‘we’re used to an impersonal voice’.

During audience q time I asked Hasan if there was much of a lit community among young or emerging writers in India. It surprised me how similar it sounded to our own. She said there’s defintitely an informal community online, and that they hold readings in different cities and that’s one way they meet and learn about each others’ work. But she said it ‘seems quite small’, she worried they’re all just reading each other! It sounds a lot like conversations I’ve had with writerly friends in Melbourne.

I will definitely be adding Hasan’s work to my to-read pile.