As a student at IIM Ahmedabad, Chetan Bhagat founded a magazine, Tomato Ketchup. Even at IIM-A, not the most literary of places, Tomato... was reportedly considered lowbrow and died a premature death. Bhagat’s subsequent literary forays have seen more popular success but continue to be considered lowbrow.
But Bhagat need not fret. The novel genre itself was considered lowbrow and commercial during its early days. As Daniel Defoe, often considered the first novelist, said, “Writing itself has become a very considerable branch of the English commerce. The booksellers are the master manufacturers, or employers. The several authors, copiers, sub-writers and other operators with Pen and Ink are the workmen employed by the said manufacturer.” Ian Watt, author of the classic The Rise of the Novel, says Defoe’s style was considered to be ‘easy, copious and unpremeditated’ in contrast to the ‘verbal grace, complication of structure...’ of the prevalent literary culture.
Watt argues that while the early novels may not have been masterfully crafted, they were revolutionary in their movement away from Classical Idealism towards a greater empathy for individual imperfection. They also understood the needs of the rapidly rising, newly literate, industrial revolution-created bourgeoisie. These two seminal course changes, in structure and audience, by the early novelists laid much of the foundation for the development of modern literature.
Indian writing in English, from Bankim Chandra to Arundhati Roy, has not had the same middle-class trajectory of the West and has been accused of being elite. While it has successfully answered W.B. Yeats’s admonishment that “no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue”, it has not quite successfully countered U.R. Ananthamurthy’s allegation of “writing for export”.
Indian English writing in the late 19th century does seem like a quaint replica of the Victorian novel. Sham Lal, former editor of The Times of India, refers to a British writer calling Indian writing in English “Matthew Arnold in a sari” with an Indian professor hurrying to correct him with a more appropriate “Shakuntala in skirts”.
The second phase of Indian English novels try and move away from, as Gandhi advised Mulk Raj Anand, “meretricious literariness”. The novels of key writers, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao have common themes around a search for an ‘authentic’ India. But with the exception of G.V. Desani’s brilliant All about H. Hatterr, these books tend to romanticise and the quest for the authentic, couched in the idiom of modernism, at times ends up sounding contrived.
The last, post-Rushdie phase has been referred to as the coming of age of Indian English literature. Yet, while some of the new authors do write masterfully, they still fall prey to the problems of their predecessors. They continue to write for a western or elite Indian audience, they still struggle with their quest for an ‘authentic’ India and they still give an Indian lick of paint to the current western ‘ism’ in vogue.
Like Defoe, IIT-IIM-I banker Bhagat is a tradesman and, like Defoe, he is likely to be blissfully unaware of the literary conventions of the day. He is also unlikely to care. His recent Two States reportedly sold 10 lakh copies in 10 weeks, a 100 times more than what was considered a hit Indian English novel in the pre-Bhagat era.
Early 21st century India is astonishingly similar to mid-18th century England, with the ‘millennium bug’ being India’s ‘spinning jenny’. The IT revolution has created lakhs of English-speaking, under-25-year-olds living in tier-2 towns like Kanpur or Coimbatore. They have a subculture of their own with the key words being IIT, IIM, IT, multiplex, malls, SMS etc. Openly consumerist but not violently so in a Clockwork Orange sort of way; more permissible in matters of sex yet shying away from promiscuity; western in many ways yet conscious of a constructed Indian identity. Bhagat appeals to this group—he does not ignore them, he does not caricature them and he does not ‘anthropologise’ them. He writes, like Defoe, simply and insightfully, about himself and—embodying the ideal so many of them aspire to—captures their imagination.
Pioneers are not usually master craftsmen. Bhagat is certainly not. He displays an ignorance of the world beyond his own experience; his characters, real though they are, never really rise above themselves; and the simplicity of his language is probably more inability than profundity. But as the early 19th century English essayist Hestor Chapone said of Samuel Richardson: “It is only from the ignorant that we can now have anything original; every master copies from those that are of established authority....” Chetan Bhagat may not be a master, but he is certainly an original.
(IIM-A alumnus Sitapati is marketing manager at a leading MNC.)
