Little Inkling

In the early 19th century, Russia was for most Europeans a sink of despotism, illiteracy, poverty and superstition. It was to be feared for its military power. But what else did it have? In 1840, Thomas Carlyle wasn’t alone in brusquely dismissing Russia’s claim to be considered a nation. "The Tsar of all the Russias," Carlyle wrote, "he is strong, with so many bayonets, Cossacks, cannons, and does a great feat in keeping such a tract of earth politically together; but he cannot yet speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. The nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia can be."

Carlyle’s disdain, oddly reminiscent of Macaulay’s views on India, had come too late. Russia already had its Dante by 1840: Pushkin, who had made a breakthrough on behalf of Russian literature-an ersatz, heavily Frenchified affair until then-by writing, directly and unimitatively, about the life he saw around himself. In just a few decades, Gogol, Turgenev, Aksakov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov were to give voice to a mass of unnoticed Russian lives. Character by character-noblemen, serf-owners, merchants, soldiers, serfs, peasants, academics, priests-Russia was elaborated in the 19th century and thereby made real to not only foreigners but, more importantly, to Russians, for whom the world they lived in unthinkingly and thought empty suddenly became teeming with events and personalities and nuances and possibilities.

This is the truest function of a national literature: it holds up a mirror in whose unfamiliar reflections a nation slowly learns to recognise itself. The writer, exercising his talent and imagination, discovers new subjects, or deepens old discoveries; and he himself grows in the process. In Chekhov’s late fiction, you find a highly developed sense of the complex world he has been writing about: he has finally come to grips with his subject; and in the last long stories, he describes what is in many ways a makeshift colonial society like ours, adrift after a century of half-hearted modernisation, full of formless or divided individuals at odds with their environment, whose deepest desires, dissatisfactions, frustrations, rages and resentments have their source in some power external to their lives.

It is a steadily accumulating literature that creates a nation’s self-awareness. In our own case, this self-awareness has been conflated with national identity and maintained rather precariously after the independence movement by military or cricket victories, nuclear bombs, beauty queens, fashion designers, software tycoons or the lone Booker or Nobel prize-winner. Much more than poetry, it is prose fiction with its awareness and concern about the individual and society that brings about a larger sense of an interlinked community-something impoverished and fragmented countries like India and Russia particularly lack. It could be said that few people had really noticed the wretched condition of the serfs until Turgenev wrote about them in A Sportsman’s Sketches, which not only established Turgenev’s career but also went on to influence the Tsar’s decision to abolish serfdom.

Our own modern literatures are almost as old as Russia’s. India, like Russia, has always possessed a small group of people who were able to enjoy opportunities of personal growth amidst great poverty and wretchedness. In this century, this Indian elite has gone on to produce the only pan-Indian literature we have, writing in English. Yet, we do not really seek to recognise ourselves in this literature where the significant fact is not an authoritative figure like the Tsar deriving moral leadership from a writer like Turgenev, but Mahatma Gandhi telling Mulk Raj Anand that his Harijans in The Untouchables sounded too much like Bloomsbury intellectuals. It is known primarily for the quality of its fantasy, for which there are now easy formulas, and its linguistic skill and confident tone, the terms of praise themselves suggesting not so much an achievement as a continuing apprenticeship to more accomplished literatures and civilisations.

Far from intuiting larger events or characters, writers struggle to describe them long after they have happened. Press reports of large publishing advances now inspire thousands of Indians to take up writing in an alien language. The manuscripts arrive every day at publishing offices in New Delhi and London. The return addresses often speak of middle-level government jobs in small cities and towns. It isn’t hard to guess at the promptings of these naive attempts at literary stardom, at the bitterness of the authors’ lives and the meanness of their surroundings. But these immediate circumstances aren’t acknowledged up to the point where they could become a richly rewarding subject. The evasiveness, so mysterious, extends to the outside world. The dukandar, the neta, the bijliwallah, the babu, the constable--all the vast and complex cast of characters that animate our daily lives rarely enter the novelist’s domain, except as caricatures.

It almost begins to seem as if this absent sense of a larger society and shared citizenship is a legacy from the time an Indian elite was recruited by the British from amidst the general mass of upper and middle-caste Indians. Exalted above a subject population and cocooned by unprecedented luxury and privilege, most felt little need to imaginatively enter, or even acknowledge, the world around them; they barely acknowledged the ironies and incongruities of their own position, which explains the lack of a complicated individual conscience in this literature. The earliest writers in English did try to find a clarifying vision by attaching themselves to the nationalist movement. But after 1947, and especially in the past two decades, writing in English seems more and more a curiously serene, if limited, deployment of the special advantages provided by a privileged education: fluency in English and an abstract knowledge of the world.

These advantages are even bigger than they seem. A great chasm exists today between the shrinking minority that possesses a language-their own or English-and people who just get by, for whom the self and the world lie inaccessible beyond a bewildering linguistic fog. The evidence lies in the daily English-language newspapers where even the so-called literary pages struggle to break free of commonplace solecisms; the general impression is of a people groping their way from one approximation to another, never quite knowing what they want to say.

The half-truths we have learnt to live with are part of the larger disjunction between our grand-sounding institutions-democracy, elections, Parliament-and the shoddy reality that lies behind them. Much of our public life is mere make-believe: a consensual fraud upon the clueless millions. In these circumstances, it is the writers that you look to for the important truths, the intellectual breakthroughs; you expect them to give the game away. But in a globalised world, the writers belong to themselves alone; and a literature that attempts to figure out the society from which it issues is likely to be accused of being ‘parochial’ and considered inferior to literature that can hold ‘a conversation with the world’, as a recent anthologist of expatriate writing in English put it. In this quest to hold a conversation with the world, literary styles are borrowed from Europe and Latin America and books made out of them; the animating ideas and themes are often picked up from social science departments of American and European universities, the political-seeming ideas which are actually the marginal musings of societies resting at a very high level of material and spiritual satiety and which cannot but have a banal echo in India: sectarianism is bad, multiculturalism is good, nationalism is bad, etc, etc.

Steadily, then, there deepens a chasm between the way we live now and the borrowed ideas we use to look at ourselves. Far from bridging this gap, literature in English widens it further. Left unprotected by a feeble critical tradition, it has now been infected by the values of our lumpen-bourgeois culture, which hustlers and buccaneers dominate.

Writing has become yet another technical skill to be acquired from the West in the private pursuit of social and financial glory. To it attaches the dubious glamour of large advances from English or American publishers; the foreign-exchange hoards of writers are as admired and envied as Harshad Mehta’s millions. The idea of a literary work or corpus adding to our self-knowledge has been swallowed by a shallow colonial pride about Indian writers making it big in the imperial metropolises; and increasingly, you are left with books whose interest lies in not what they contain but the paradox they represent: the paradox of a literature that goes on at great length, swarms with events and characters, ideas and information, possesses a correct political passion and tells us just about everything except who we are.