English, 'Chutneyfied'

IN the old days, before English became a naturalised post-colonial Indian language, the pioneers of the Indian English novel wrote the Queen's English. They felt, as poet Kamala Das puts it, responsible towards the language. "We didn't take English lightly. We felt we had to beat the British at their own game. We read Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, we were romantics."

"But Arundhati uses English as a plaything. She can spit at correct English. She is Cinderella and fame is her prince. We are trying to sell India to the West and she has succeeded," Das exclaims, adding that she likes Roy very much.

So does former prime minister and about-to-be published author P.V. Narasimha Rao. Rao has described the book as having a Sanskritic, even Puranic quality. "As a reader I liked the book very much," says Rao and "have conveyed my congratulations to her. It is very well-written." Rao's own novel is due for publication very soon. "Please don't ask me to be specific about the date but all I can tell you is that it is in the pipeline." Rao says he is not a literary critic and cannot explore the pluses and minuses of The God of Small Things. "I thought it was very good is all I can say."

 With the coming of The God Of Small Things, the Indo-Anglian novel is playful, it plays tricks, it reads the way we speak and overthrows the idea that Indian authors must only write about profound Indian truths, or that authors must be of vast learning to tackle complex national dilemmas. Salman Rushdie and Mukul Kesavan used history as raw material for magic realism, Upamanyu Chatterjee essayed the identity crisis of English, August and Amit Chaudhuri gave Bengal a strange and sublime address. But The God Of Small Things, says an Indian critic, "is playful, not profound, it's not a learned book, yet a terrific book of memory." Now the tongue that Rushdie unleashed is not only legitimate and perhaps soon a part of college curricula, but also shorn of the gravitas of "nationhood". Translated into 27 languages, Roy's nationality appears irrelevant.

"When we wrote," says author Anita Desai, "we tended to write based on the literature we read, not on the way people spoke. I congratulate Arundhati Roy. The new writers have made this language legitimate." Yet Desai says that today, English writing has become show business, driven by a powerful publishing industry.

"There are certain fashionable publishing trends, like India, or ethnic writing in America. Publishers are more powerful now than they used to be. The publisher decides what the market wants. In our time writing was a quieter, more private thing," says Desai.

Indeed when, in the forties, G.V. Desani wrote All About H Haterr, in pidgin English about a pidgin-speaking hero in a rumbustious society, it was hardly noticed. When Penguin re-issued it in the 1970s, Anthony Burgess hailed it as a masterpiece and wondered why this brilliant book had been buried for so long. Decades after, Desani is a Buddhist monk in Texas but his first experiment with Indian English rules his native land. Rushdie may have invented "chutneyfication", but it is quite possible that he was influenced by Desani, says publisher Ravi Dayal.

"I want to congratulate Arundhati," says celebrated writer Amitav Ghosh. "This is the best thing that could have happened in the 50th year." Ghosh says he doesn't believe in "chutneyfication", however. "My first book was chutney-fied, but now I believe in writing more simply. I like a certain simplicity about writing. But the world of letters is very wide and there is space for everyone." Ghosh says since he is fluent in a number of languages, he is in danger of becoming too chutneyfied so people may not even understand him! But is this chutneyfied language a product designed for international shopping malls or is it fed from the roots, a 'true' expression of Indian thought and feeling? Nayantara Sehgal describes Roy's book as an extremely moving story but buried under a great deal of extraneous packaging. "There was too much artifice, all those capital letters and repetition. Often I could not understand whether we were in the past or the present." Sehgal says that it is a pity that the themes of the Indian novel are now those dictated by the West, such themes as Exile, Identity, Re-inventing The Self are very fashionable, as are immigrant writers who write on ethnic subjects. "English writing in India is an artificial scene, influenced very much by what sells abroad. Literature has acquired a sort of arrogance."

And what of that hoary controversy, English writing versus Indian languages? As English becomes more and more of an Indian tongue, a ready seller abroad, a winner of prizes and as "authentic" as Malayalam, what of the vernaculars? "English writers have a certain aura," says Urdu author Qurratulain Hyder,"because it has a bigger readership abroad. There is a problem of translation. I am an Urdu writer. If I want to be read abroad I have to get a very good translator!" Hyder says she hasn't read Roy's book but doesn't like "Indian-English". "I think it degrades literature, I don't like it. It is journalistic, not literary."

 O.V. Vijayan says he is disgusted with the label "regional writer". "There is an innocence about Roy's book, a lack of parading. But I have chosen to write in Malayalam and not in English, although it would have been more profitable to." Vijayan says he is participating in civilisation by writing in Malayalam and doesn't think you can do this by writing in the language of another people. "Indo-Anglian writing is the East India Company in reverse. And is culturally untenable".

From the early R.K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, moving through the 'good conventional' English of Desai and Sehgal in the '50s and '60s, the first translations of A.K. Ramanujan and the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel—one of the first Indian poets to be included in international anthologies—to the first "Indian" plays in English in the '70s like Girish Karnad's Tughlaq, and finally to Rushdie's descendants in the '80s, this is, says Dayal, the time of the novel. So much academic thought, economics, poetry, even architecture takes place in English. "It would be strange if this gifted community did not also produce good novelists," says Dayal.