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Passages From India
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19189 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
2,148 Words |
| Author
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Clark Blaise
Clark Blaise is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer,
and directs the University of lowa's International Writing
Program. Two of his books, Days and Nights in Calcutta and The
Sorrow and the Terror (both written with Bharati Mukherjee)
reflect twenty years' experience with Indian life. |
To the writing of certain kinds of novels--garish, clashing, eccentric, fantastical, hoarse-voiced--an Indian background confers significant advantages. The imagination of Hindu India, after all, is keyed to one of the great literary achievements in human history, the Mahabharata, an epic so vast, so rich, so intricate, that it could spin off the Iliad, the Old and New Testaments, plus the Koran, as little more than solar flares.
For most of the twentieth century, colonial influences and the independence struggle delayed and distracted India's novelists from exploiting this unique resource. Almost in gratitude for a guilty, repressed Englishman's setting his novel in a fictional Chandrapore, or for a neurasthenic American's use of Upanishadic commands at the close of The Waste Land, sophisticated, English-educated Indians' literary tastes were set. Many sought validation in the same high, dry, ironic Forsterian/Eliotic convention; it would have seemed disrespectful not to. And for those more politically committed to the freedom fight, there was a more dedicated clinging to the surface events of history, and a programmatic rejection of English models and mandarin style. Following their Russian masters, they felt that the time for style and literariness would come after the successful struggle. Until then, subjectivity was an indulgence.
Such are the dilemmas of colonial, or even of post-colonial literatures. To imitate, or to deface. To gather overseas attention, or forge the domestic alliance. It is, as Mrs. Gandhi used to announce periodically to cover any domestic shortfall, "a global phenomenon." In other words, it takes a generation or two for foreign models to fade in their luster, for authentic traditions to be rediscovered, for the unification of high and low culture, of colonial and native language, to assert themselves. This happened in Canada, Africa, the Caribbean and Australia, and certainly it has erupted in India. Indian literature in English is now enjoying a homegrown harvest, and Shashi Tharoor's novel, though far from perfect, is interesting even in its flaws. It is, as Dr. Johnson once said of Thomas Gray, "boring in a new way."
The successful fusion of style and substance occurred with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), a novel that wedded the demotic exuberance of Indian popular culture--its movies, street life and politics--with the native origins of magic realism in the shape-changing, comic grotesquerie of the ancient epics. I well remember the day I began reading that book, for a New York Times review: call, they said, if I felt the book merited more than the 900 words they had
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