Imprisoned In White

It was always, to be fair, an impossible brief—particularly within the inevitable constraints of space and language, its not easily breached imprisonment within the ghetto of English. And today's India, teetering on the cusp of who-knows-what, is perhaps, in literary as much as in extra-literary contexts, quite as recalcitrant as it must seem tempting. The exclamation mark of the title—India!—I surmise, derives more from a despairing gasp rather than from that characteristic gesture of our times, the clenched fist punching the empty air, in triumph.

Readers should be warned, I suppose, that most of the big names are here, doing their familiar numbers. Nirad Chaudhury weighs in with a finely poised meditation on how he came to be so wonderful. Naipaul is represented by a musty exhumation of some pages from the diaries that became A Wounded Civilisation many, many years ago. Anita Desai and R.K. Narayan and Ved Mehta are here—still trying to get to Simla, being cute, and being tirelessly reminiscent, respectively. If only Granta could have persuaded these worthy writers to drop their old bags of tricks, and risk their arms (and necks, I suppose), it really might have added up to quite a party. But there is an already existent constituency for the Indians that these people have doled out for years, and Granta's India! will take its place alongside those hoary artefacts. This isn't quite topdrawer, but much of it feels distinctly top shelf—taken down, dusted and readied for the occasion.

Which is not to say that there aren't very fine things in the issue. The quiet can-dour of Sanjeev Saith's portraits of varied veterans of 1947 and the unsparing naivete of Dayanita Singh's portraits of the material and non-material appurtenances of bourgeois homes both rest, no doubt, on high technical skill. Viramma's story, Pariah, as told through Josiane and Jean-Luc Racine, makes compelling reading. And what of Ms Arundhati Roy, represented here by a just-in-time extract from

The God of Small Things? Not to put too fine a point on it, even in this truncated form, her prose restores to that much abused word, "creative", its original original force. The real disappointment, I suppose, is in the reportage—which is strange, because classy reportage was Granta's forte. It's true that everyone can't be Fenton saving his ass in Saigon, or Chatwin exploring the ends of the earth—but Dalrymple on Laloo scratching his (Laloo's) balls, or James Buchan annotating the loss of the lost paradise of Kashmir—well, I suppose it could seem fresh somewhere, provided you freeze it and fly it out fast.

It is perhaps worth asking what the problem is with this sort of thing. One can't legitimately complain that there is an audience somewhere for local colour in the form of Laloo and his antics—the Indian bourgeoisie too assuages its recurrent sense of panic by sneering at the contemptible Laloo and Mulayam: the Great Unwashed, becoming ever greater. Fishlock visits Gujarat After Gandhi, and notices this and that. Buchan's revelation that Kashmiri terrorists, often armed and always abetted by the Pakistani state and its patrons, are having to contend with the formidable violence of the Indian State, with enough "collateral damage" to satisfy even the American military and its rhetoricians—this too must be news somewhere. But it is still the case that nothing really ever happens to these confident white travellers, nothing that challenges them, or subverts their prejudices in any significant way. Nothing ever happens and, one is tempted to say, can ever happen that will require them to drop their zoological perspective. The troublesome heterogeneity of their two audiences is certainly part of the problem with Granta's India!

One of their audiences—and by far the more influential audience—both needs and wants stereotypes. So it purrs contentedly when the characters seem drawn from Central Casting. Thus the BSF man "supervising" with pistol in hand the last Kashmir election in the Valley, calls out to the reluctant voters thus: "Come to the Motherland polling booth. There is nothing to fear. The Motherland will protect you. Now come on, move along. Move!" I know that some literary heightening is perfectly in order, but surely that's stretching it? Underlying all this there is the deeper problem of the representation of Indian realities in English. It has to do with the way in which questions of power, of colonial guilt and colonial knowledge, are ineluctably implicated—and must therefore be negotiated—whenever anyone uses English in India. When it is the English themselves using English in India, as the poor devils must, the situation gets doubly complicated.

It could hardly be an accident that the freshest things here are by Indians working out of India. A politically correct friend of mine is prodding me to notice that many of the better things also happen to be by women! One cannot help remarking, finally, the inspired vulgarity of the cover design. And that Vikram Seth too is among the big names assembled under this garish marquee. He's contributed a minimalist sonnet—13 words, 14 syllables in all. At least it has the virtue of brevity.