Inverted Zeal

The book, then, isn't just a 'Sociocultural Critique of Indian Writing in English (iwe)'. iwe is just symptomatic of a larger malaise - an incestuous cultural establishment seething with incompetence. But it seems excessive to accuse almost everybody of note in the media or academia of selling out in an elaborate back-scratching exercise. The only exception appears to be the author herself. It might have been a better idea to chronicle instances of corruption and let the reader come to her own conclusions.

The author derisively dismisses almost all modern Indian writers in English without any self-consciousness about her credentials to judge these writers. Arundhati Roy's success is attributed to her links with the media. Vikram Seth's to the fact that he cultivated literary journalists in California and that his mother was a prominent member of India's judiciary. Rushdie is a hack copywriter who hasn't outgrown advertising. And Amitav Ghosh, she asserts, is incapable of anything more than anthropological hallucinations.

That is why the author - in her incarnation as a teacher - concentrates on the study of Australian poetry. That literature, she says is a working-class effort and devoid of the scandals that plague our writers in their quest for celebrity. Prabha's solution is to call for the privatisation of culture, to stop state patronage which inevitably breeds corruption. But it is not clear if the author will actually be comfortable if that does happen. For, will not the cultural elite have a head start in this model too? The cultural pathology of Indian Writing in English, I'm m afraid, is still waiting to be written.