'The Indian Novel Exists'

This must be the mother of all answers (638 pages!) to Salman Rushdie’shackles-rousing assertion six years ago. “I would have written the same anthology,Rushdie or no Rushdie,” Amit Chaudhuri insists, but The Picador Book of ModernIndian Literature proves excerpt after fine excerpt that Indian writing was alive andscribbling, both in English and ‘vernacular’, almost half-a-century before NiradC. Chaudhury was even born, and can teach some tricks to both Rushdie and thepost-Rushdians.

“What I attempted to do was to narrate the historicity of Indian writing. Everynovel is read and judged in a vacuum, as if it had nothing to do with the continuities andpatterns in the past.”

Amit blames the English novel and its hardsell by international publishers for ouracute literary myopia. “The novel in English has become such a big thing, and isbeing aggressively marketed and consumed all over the world. You just don’t have thetranslations from other languages that were there a 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago.Marquez and Kundera must be the last of that trend.” The line, always thin, between amasterpiece and a bestseller is now disappearing, according to him.
“Translations are a problem, yes, because there are not that many people who areexpertly bilingual. And those few are not attracted to translation because it’s justnot worth the labour and time involved,” he says, adding, “but that’sslowly changing with at least two publishing houses devoting themselves entirely totranslated works.”

“The point is, English and the Indian languages are not inimical to eachother—there has been a subtle and continuous interdependence between the two for atleast a 150 years. And ghettoisation of English writing damages both English as well asthe regional languages. Look what’s happening in Bengal—there is no new writerin the Bengali language for years.”

So is there something called an Indian novel? Yes, the creature does exist, he says,although it may not be only a novel, but anything from an essay to a memoir. “Itis,” he pauses thoughtfully, “any writing that comes to grips with the subjectmatter of India.”

The unique thing about modern Indian writing, he concludes, is that it issimultaneously situated in European literary traditions and the local languages andtraditions, both of which are internalised with a dynamic interplay to create the ModernIndian Novel.