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Jul 15
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“Soliloquy for Kannagi” | R. Parthasarathy

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I stand at the crossroads,

a stranger to this city

in ashes. Not one dome

 

or tower is left

to sing its praises.

With my husband I entered

 

the city through the East Gate:

I now leave

by the West Gate, alone.

 

People follow me:

they touch the hem of my robe,

call me a goddess.

 

But I am only a woman.

Till the wrath

that burns in me is appeased,

 

I will not hold

my husband in my arms.

True, I am victorious:

 

my rage brought the fire

of heaven down

on the king’s head,

 

scorched his city

like straw in the wind.

My life was over

 

even before it began.

I have only my karma to blame

for my wretchedness.

 

With Kovalan gone,

the sword of widowhood

bleeds me to death.

 

I walk on air.

To whom shall I turn now,

where shall I go?

 

Who is there to comfort me

in my grief?

When was it last that Kovalan

 

held me in his arms,

plunged his face

in the pool of my breasts?

 

My skin has not forgotten

the length of his body.

Even now my blood rushes

 

to spend itself

on the farthest rocks of the night

leaving behind a trail of foam.

Parthasarathy, R. “Soliloquy for Kannagi.” Indian Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, July-Aug., 1998, pp. 80-81.
Published with permission from Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi; awaiting permission from R. Parthasarathy.
Read R. Parthasarathy on IWE Online
Critical Biography
Jul 11
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R. Parthasarathy | Graziano Krätli

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Published on 11 July 2022.
Cite this Essay

MLA:

Krätli, Graziano “R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Writing In English Online, 11 July 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-parthasarathy/ .

Chicago:
Krätli, Graziano “R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 11, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-parthasarathy/.

Rajagopal Parthasarathy (b. 1934), better known as R. Parthasarathy, was born in Thirupparaithurai, a village in the Tiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu, and educated at Don Bosco High School and Siddarth College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai), where he subsequently taught at various colleges. In 1962, as a member of Mithibai College’s English Department (headed by Nissim Ezekiel), he was part of a small group of Indian poets who met Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary Snyder during their visit to India, attended a reading of their poetry, read their own in front of them, and mulled over the Beats’ notoriously dismissive reactions (i.e., Orlovsky’s statement, “If we were gangster poets, we’d shoot you,” and Ginsberg’s remarks on Indian writing in English as being “literary and derivative”). In 1963-64 he was a British Council scholar at the University of Leeds, at the time a vibrant poetry scene with John Glover, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, and Jeffrey Wainwright among its main protagonists (Smith and Wainwright would be included in one of Parthasarathy’s first publications, the five-poet, sixteen-page booklet Poetry from Leeds, co-edited with J.J. Healy and published by Writers Workshop in 1968). Nevertheless, the year spent in England was an eye-opener. As it happened to other Indians before (and after) him, the direct experience of English society, English life, even English weather, proved a traumatic corrective to the largely literary and colonial education he had received in India.

Upon his return to India with a postgraduate degree in English Studies, Parthasarathy held more teaching jobs before joining Oxford University Press, for which he worked as literary editor, first in Madras (now Chennai) (1971-82) and then in Delhi (1978-82). During this time, he was also a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (1978-79), and a member of the advisory board for English at the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters (1978-82).

While in Madras, Parthasarathy published the two books that would grant him a place in the canon of Indian poetry in English: the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) and the long poem Rough Passage (1977). In 1982 he joined the English department at the University of Texas at Austin, working as assistant instructor in English (1982-86) while pursuing a doctoral degree. There he found a mentor and a friend in the novelist Raja Rao (1908-2006), one of the authors he had edited at Oxford University Press, who was teaching in the Philosophy department. Parthasarathy then spent his entire academic career, from 1986 until his retirement in 2009, at Skidmore College, a private liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he taught courses on poetry and translation, focusing on Non-Western literatures and the South Asian region, and was director of the program in Asian Studies (1994-98). In 1993 he published a translation of the Tamil epic The Tale of an Anklet: The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, which he had started at the University of Texas and for which he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation (1994) and the first A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation (1996), established by the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies to recognise the work of the late poet, folklorist, and translator. Over the years, his own poetry as well as his translations of classical and contemporary poetry in Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu have appeared in literary periodicals in India and the United States, including the Chicago Review, Indian Literature (Delhi), Poetry (Chicago), Salmagundi, and World Literature Today. More recently he edited and translated a selection of Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit (2017) and contributed translations to The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (2020). As for the publications that have been repeatedly announced as forthcoming (a new collection of poems, a book of essays, and translations of the sixth-century Tamil epic Maṇimēkalai, and of modern Tamil poetry), none of them has appeared at the time of this writing (2022).

Parthasarathy’s relationship with India’s former colonial ruler went through the familiar (and, to some extent, predictable) phases of anglophilia, cultural shock, and disenchantment. What turned his juvenile enthusiasm into critical disillusionment was primarily his direct experience of English life and society during the year he spent in Leeds, as mentioned above. He voiced such a change of heart (and the corresponding change of attitude towards India, from “hypercritical” to receptive and empathetic) in the poems that would form his debut collection, published more than a decade after his return to India and on the eve of another departure and a more permanent residence abroad. Rough Passage is a long poem divided into three parts and thirty seven shorter poems in three-line stanzas. The three parts represent the successive stages of expatriation (“Exile”), estrangement (“Trial”), and repatriation (“Homecoming”), while the triadic arrangement allows for short phrasal units and sharp, staccato statements:

Through holes in a wall, as it were,

lamps burned in the fog.

In a basement flat, conversation, etc.

(“Exile 2”)

 

We live our lives forever taking leave.

Our world, love, moves within

the familiar poles of eye, hand,

 

is eclipsed by the word.

(“Trial 11”)

 

I see him now sitting at his desk.

The door is open. It is evening.

On the lawns the children play.

(“Homecoming 12”)

Chronologically, the book covers ten years of the poet’s life, starting almost programmatically– “As a man approaches thirty he may / take stock of himself.” (“Exile 1”)–and ending on a much more subdued statement: “Later, I watched my forty years / swim effortlessly ashore in a glass of beer.” (“Homecoming 13”). At both ends of this minor existential spectrum, the poet is scrutinising himself–self-consciously and rather affectedly–as he balances the mixed bag of past achievement against the low expectations of an uncommitted future: “Hereafter, I should be content, / I think, to go through life / with the small change of uncertainties.” (“Homecoming 14”). All too often, however, this supposed self-analysis is spoiled by such platitudes as “Experience doesn’t always make for knowledge” (“Exile 1”), “There is something to be said for exile: // you learn roots are deep,” and, a few lines later, “the most assuring thing // about the past is that it happened” (“Exile 2”). Perhaps the most famous and enduring of these “gnomic utterances” (as the scholar Homi Bhabha called them in his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement of February 3, 1978) are the two couplets, placed at the beginning and the end of the book, that are meant to encapsulate the poet’s experience of cultural idolatry and subjugation. Over the years, they have been quoted often enough to become emblematic of the modern anglophone Indian’s divided identity. Parthasarathy used the first one, “He had spent his youth whoring / after English gods” (forming the beginning of the third stanza of “Exile 2”), as the title of a semi-autobiographical account originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1982. “Whoring after English Gods” traces the evolution of Parthasarathy’s attitude towards England and the English language–from his first introduction in high school until his actual encounter with England–which, he would realise, “existed nowhere, except in my mind” (“Whoring after English Gods,” 66). According to this account, it was this realisation that prompted him to write the poem with the “whoring couplet” in early 1964. At the same time, if living in England helped the once obsessive anglophile to get England “out of [his] system once and for all,” it also gave him “a new understanding” of himself and his once deprecated native country, so that, when he finally returned to India, he felt “strangely at home” (”Whoring”, 70). The latter is a more revealing expression than Parthasarathy perhaps realised, as it seems to conflate the titles of two works in which another Indian English poet, Dom Moraes (1938-2004), addressed his own relationship with India: the 1970 television episode Return as a Stranger, and the third volume of his autobiography, Never at Home. Disenchantment with England also meant realising that “English will always remain a foreign language to us,” and consequently, that “I could never function as a poet in English” (67). For someone who had been “exposed … to English ideas and attitudes” (66), had read English literature in college, and even before going to England had seen one of his poems published in the Times Literary Supplement, such a realisation must have been difficult to accept. Nevertheless Parthasarthy, borrowing the old ‘mistress versus wife’ metaphor, was eager to state that “The affair with the English language had been prolonged and tempestuous. It is over now, and I have, as the phrase goes, settled down with Tamil. She is still a shy, obstinate bride; but, like all brides, she will, I am sure, come round. The relationship will then, perhaps, mature into love” (71). The bride’s shy and obstinate behavior refers presumably to the fact that Parthasarthy did not learn Tamil until after his English interlude, as he mentions earlier in the same essay (65). Read in this context, the second signature couplet, “My tongue in English chains, / I return, after a generation, to you” (which opens “Homecoming 1”), describes the poet’s linguistic repatriation, while hinting at the bride’s potential for freeing the poet’s tongue from English chains, or at least loosening them enough to allow him to be “at home in two languages” (71). As Parthasarathy explains in the next paragraph,

Ever since I moved to Madras in 1971, my poems have become, increasingly, a sort of overture made with the aim of starting a dialogue between myself and my Tamil past. Though written in English, they are closer in style and content to Tamil verse…. (72)

However,

The problem of the Tamil poet today is to invent afresh an idiom free from the stylistic and prosodic conventions of a language with a two-thousand-year-old literary history (72).

By calling “My tongue in English chains” a “theoretical statement of this problem” (72), Parthasarathy hints at the possibility that these chains may be inevitable, at least for the time being, and to the extent that his proficiency in English provides him with a more effective tool to voice his “emotional, psychic make-up” (73), whose roots lie deep in Tamil language and culture. This leaves him poetically in a limbo, of which the third part of Rough Passage, “Homecoming,” represents an exploration of sorts. If “Exile”–allegedly written “over four years between 1963 and 1966” (70), that is, during Parthasarathy’s stay in England and immediately after–charts the author’s disenchantment with India and his own unfulfilled self, and “Trial” explores the resulting ennui through the opaque and distorting lens of love (and the metaphoric mesh of ancient and medieval Indian poetry), in “Homecoming” Parthasarathy confronts his own predicament as man and poet. The section begins with “My tongue in English chains” followed by a seemingly programmatic statement:“How long can foreign poets // provide the staple for your lines? / Turn inward. Scrape the bottom of your past. Ransack the cupboard // for skeletons of your Brahmin childhood,” (“Homecoming 2”); proceeds through a taut fabric of familial and cultural landscapes; then ends with a crumbling self-portrait at forty—deflated, disillusioned, and dejected.

The second half of “Whoring after English Gods” is an appreciation of the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, culminating in the statement

Ramanujan’s repossession, through his poetry, of the past of his family, and of his sense of himself as a distillation of the past, is to me a signal achievement, and one that was to be of value to other poets who were looking for a kind of poetry to teach them the use of their own voice. I know of poems which, if I had not come across The Striders or Relations, I should perhaps have written differently. (78)

Rough Passage provides a few examples of such poems, most notably “Homecoming 6,” where the alienating experience of facing a mirror in the bath (“Silent, / eyes saccadic, I stare at himself. // Often confront a stranger / in the scratched glass, older perhaps, who resembles my father”) is a direct reference to Ramanujan’s “Self Portrait” in The Striders (1966). Other, unacknowledged (and possibly unconscious) references are to the poetry of Srinivas Rayaprol (1925-1998), notably in a line like “We live our lives forever taking leave” (from “Trial 11”), which paraphrases, in a concise, more “poetic” form, the dispiritedness of Rayaprol’s “the impotent / Excitement / Of our normal lives / Lies in seeking / Them elsewhere” (from “Les Saltimbanques,” in the 1968 collection Bones and Distances), as well as in the somber self-assessment that concludes “Homecoming,” which is remindful of Rayaprol’s pessimistic Weltanschauung in Married Love and Other Poems (1972).

In the absence of a further collection, Parthasarathy’s poetry since Rough Passage is represented by contributions to various literary periodicals and anthologies, both in India and the United States. If they show a natural and predictable evolution of the themes explored in his debut collection–especially the “dialogue between himself and [his] Tamil past,” (“Whoring,” 72)– these poems also reflect the developments that have shaped Parthasarathy’s life and creative work since the late 1980s, particularly his relocation to the United States, where a successful academic career allowed him to bury his “English gods” without actually freeing his tongue from “English chains.” Instead, these chains were repurposed for broader creative ends. “For me, translating a poem is as much a creative act as writing an original poem”: such a statement, made in a 2003 lecture on “The Politics and Poetics of Translation” (175), was both supported and justified by Parthasarathy’s teaching as well as by his scholarly and creative work since the early 1990s, which had focused increasingly on Indian literature in translation and, in the years following his monumental engagement with the Cilappatikāram, had produced English versions of Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu poetry, as well as articles on Tamil literature and the practice of translation.

This creative shift is reflected in Parthasarathy’s own poetry from the early 1990s on, which fed on his parallel work as translator (“Kannaki” and Kannagi” are both poems inspired by the heroine of the Cilappatikāram), or wrestled with its ambiguous condition (“Your country is not a suitcase: / you are not a traveler shuffling, with tongue in cheek, // the loose change of words. / For twenty years you have tried / to pry this book open,” from “The Attar of Tamil”), or meanders into the poet’s—and India’s—“divided house” (“Srirangam,” “At Ghalib’s Tomb,” “Remembered Village”) from a suburban backyard in Upstate New York (“Snow Country,” “Salem Drive”).

At the same time, the emphasis on translation distinguishes Parthasarathy’s two editorial selections of contemporary Indian poetry. Although three decades separate the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) from the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” he guest-edited for Poetry magazine in 2007, the difference between them is not only chronological or typological, but also, more significantly, one of content, which signals a substantial change in the editor’s perspective on his subject.

Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) was one of the first six titles in the New Poetry in India series, which Oxford University Press launched in 1976-77 with Parthasarathy’s editorial input (the other five were individual collections by Keki Daruwalla, Nissim Ezekiel, Shiv K. Kumar, A.K. Ramunajan, and Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage). Over the years, it became one of the most successful and widely read anthologies of its kind. Featuring fifty odd poems by only ten poets (the most exclusive selection to date), it is representative of the canonical status of Indian poetry in English at the time of its publication (except for the glaring absence of Adil Jussawalla; apparently, Ezekiel had recommended to include Jussawalla, but Parthasarathy, for unexplained reasons, decided not to). The introduction is an attempt to account for the “phenomenon of Indian verse in English,” which paradoxically “did not seriously begin to exist till after the withdrawal of the British from India” (3) and apparently is affected by two interdependent problems. One is the “quality of experience” that a poet “would like to express in English,” but from which he or she is alienated by the language itself as both communication tool and symbol/legacy of historical circumstances. The other is the lack of any “special Indian-English idiom”,i.e., compared to “the liveliness and idiosyncrasy of usage one finds in African or West Indian writing” (3), that would enable such a poet to express the quality of Indian experience in a culturally distinct if not unique way. Unlike “two outstanding exceptions in fiction” (7), namely Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948), Indian poets have been mostly unable to “extend the resources of the English language or even to Indianize it” (7).  The few who “have been successful” (but only to some extent) are supposedly featured in the selection.

Less canonical and contemporary than the anthology, the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” features a personal selection of thirteen poems by thirteen poets in “thirteen of the twenty-four languages … recognized by India’s National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi)” (407), namely Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Parthasarathy’s own contribution consists of one English-language poem and five translations or co-translations from the Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu ad Urdu. Linguistically, the 2007 portfolio matches almost entirely Poetry’s 1959 “Indian Issue,” edited by the expatriate Tamil poet M.J.T. Tambimuttu and featuring thirty-eight poems, thirty of which translated from twelve regional languages. In an afterword entitled “Indian Poetry Today” (a puzzling choice, given the scope of its content and the fact that it draws largely from a 1994 article on “Tamil Literature”), Parthasarathy laments the fact that

Bogged down in tradition, Indian poetry has not been successful in reinventing the past. Nor have there been systematic attempts to translate, over a period of time, poetry from other countries that might have offered new directions to poetry in the Indian languages. Even within the country, attempts to translate the great body of poetry in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil into the modern Indian languages have been infrequent. On the other hand, English poetry … has served as a model to be imitated, often with unhappy results. (“Indian Poetry Today”, 407)

With this statement (arguable and partly outdated), and especially with his “position portfolio,” Partharathy seems to indicate translation as a way—perhaps the only possible way—of “reinventing the [Indian] past” by creating a “robust, contemporary English idiom” (407), thus finally breaking the impasse created by historical circumstances and their problematic legacy (i.e., the iconic English chains). In fact, translation has often contributed, and continues to contribute, to linguistic modernisation and poetic renewal around the world. What Parthasarathy does not seem to realise (or prefers to neglect) is that anglophone poetry in post-Independence India has found its voice—or one of its many voices—in and through translation from both Indian and non-Indian languages, but also, most subtly and significantly, from British and American English. This creative process was started by such canonical figures as Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, A.K. Ramanujan and others, and continues with the work of younger poets writing in India as well as in the many charted and uncharted territories of the Indian diaspora.

Today, it is difficult to see how any of these younger Indian poets would consider Parthasarathy an influence, quote his work (as they often do with some of the poets mentioned above), or refer to either of his catchphrases to describe their experience as Indians writing in English. If, after the publication of Rough Passage, “My tongue in English chains” became a familiar line, its popularity and resilience say more about the state of Indian literary criticism at the time than they do about Parthasarathy’s role within the canon of postcolonial Indian poetry. Many of the poems in Rough Passage were originally published in anthologies of “Commonwealth poetry” and “New Poetry from India,” and their relevance and value are defined by the brighter lights of a bygone era.

 

Bibliography

POETRY

Rough Passage. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977.

 

TRANSLATION

The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India – The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

 

 

Edited anthologies

Poetry from Leeds [Ken Smith, D.W. Debby, Jeffrey Wainwright, Sheila Mann, John Comer]. Edited by J.J. Healy and R. Parthasarathy. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968.

Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.

“Indian Poetry Portfolio.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (September 2007): 389-418.

 

Articles

“Meeting Allen Ginsberg.” Writers Workshop Miscellany 11 (1968): 65-66.

“Whoring After English Gods.” In Perspectives: A Collection of Essays by the staff of the SIES College of Arts and Science. Edited by Amritlal B. Shah and S.P. Bhagwat (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1970), 43-60.

“The Chessmaster and His Moves: The Novel as Metaphysics.” World Literature Today 62, no. 4, Raja Rao: 1988 Neustadt Laureate (Autumn,1988): 561-566.

“The Exile as Writer: On Being an Indian Writer in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24, no. 1 (1989): 1-11.

“Tamil Literature.” World Literature Today 68, no. 2, Indian Literatures: In the Fifth Decade of Independence (Spring 1994): 253-259.

“Writing Between the Lines: The Politics and Poetics of Translation.” Indian Literature 51, no. 1 (237) (January February 2007): 168-186. Originally delivered as the 2002-2003 Edwin M. Moseley Lecture at Skidmore College.

“Indian Poetry Today.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (Sep., 2007): 407-418.

Jul 08
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Post-millennial Indian (genre) fiction in English – Part Two | E. Dawson Varughese

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Dawson Varughese, E. “Post-millenial Indian (genre) fiction in English, Part One.” Indian Writing In English Online, 05 June 2022, 08 July 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/post-millennial-indian-genre-fiction-in-english-part-two-e-dawson-varughese/ .

Chicago:
Dawson Varughese, E. “Post-millenial Indian (genre) fiction in English, Part One.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 08, 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/post-millennial-indian-genre-fiction-in-english-part-two-e-dawson-varughese/.

From the Introduction:

[. . . ] E. Dawson Varughese’s approach to post-millennial Indian genre fiction in English is usually one that foregrounds stylistic analysis, focussing on the language-literature interface. She often employs this lens of enquiry in order to explore and examine post-millennial ‘ideas of Indianness’. This fourth text is an excerpt from The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, edited by Violeta Sotirova and published in 2016 by Bloomsbury. Here, E. Dawson Varughese considers ‘style’ in Battle for Bittora (2010) by Anuja Chauhan, focussing on how the language-literature interface expresses ideas of changing India, gendered Indianness and ‘Young India’.

In 2016, Genre Fiction of New India: Post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives was published by Routledge with a simultaneous Indian edition distributed by Manohar. In this book, E. Dawson Varughese explored the rise of mythology-inspired fiction in English from India within the Indian, domestic literary scene, in the new millennium. The book examined how reader reception is key in appreciating how this burgeoning canon is read, received and how (and where) it circulates. This book laid the foundations for the chapter that appears here as text five. Published as ‘Post-millennial “mythology-inspired fiction”: the market, the genre and the (global) reader’ in B. Chattopadhyay, A. Maity and A. Mandhwani (eds), Indian Genre Fiction: pasts and future histories by Chicago University Press in 2018, the chapter presents a distinct approach to this growing body of writing in English. Here, E. Dawson Varughese proposes that the body of post-millennial, mythology-inspired fiction in English to date is characterised by four distinct approaches of telling, which, in turn, find themselves on a spectrum of sorts; at one end lies a sentiment of ‘retelling’ while at the other end lies a sentiment of ‘re-imagining.’ Using examples from a range of mythology-inspired fiction texts in English from India, the chapter aims to elucidate the features of the ‘retelling’ through to the ‘reimagining’ texts.

Finally, the sixth text is an excerpt from her 2018 Palgrave book, Visuality and Identity in post-millennial Indian graphic narratives. This is taken from Chapter 2 in the book, which is entitled ‘Modes of Visuality in India’ and it presents the thesis of ‘(in)auspicious’ seeing in relation to post-millennial Indian graphic narratives. Although a short excerpt, this final text gives an overall introduction to the book, its concerns and overarching argument.

IV. ‘Style in World Englishes Literature: Battle for Bittora (2010) by Anuja Chauhan’

From The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, pp.697-698

[. . .] Amma’s use of Hindi terms here could be taken as examples of ‘cultural marking’ according to Rockwell (2003), as the employment of these terms is not code-switching, which usually presents as ‘the appearance of blocks of speech in two or more languages’ (Kachru and Nelson 2006: 333).

Although in this example ‘blocks of speech’ in this sense are not present, the insertion of the Hindi terms into Amma’s speech can be considered an example of code-switching, given Jenkins ’ (2006) description of the features of Indian English: The Indianisation of English essentially involves on the one hand adaptations of existing features of British English and on the other, the use of transferred mother-tongue items where British English lacks the scope to express a particular concept – or, to put it another way, where British English is ‘deficient ’. (133) What is particularly interesting in the Chauhan extract above (2003: 152), is the use of code-switching to create dichotomy between the secular and the religious. The religious ‘identifier’ terms – ‘Muslim, Hindu, Sikh’ – we might assume, are spoken in Hindi. The transliteration into English of these Hindi terms and the actual spelling (as in the pronunciation) of these terms in English are the same, and so it is difficult to know for sure that Amma speaks these terms in Hindi, but this assumption does however, correspond to the characterization of Amma. Given the context in which the novel is set, we can assume that Amma chooses to speak these particular terms in Hindi (‘achhoot, bhangi, chamaar’) because English is ‘deficient’ (Jenkins 2003: 133). We might also assume that Amma chooses to say ‘Muslim, Hindu, Sikh’ in Hindi so as to accentuate the difference between a ‘true’ India versus an imported idea of India as ‘secular’, a word she pronounces in English. That is not to say that Hindi is ‘deficient’ (Jenkins 2003: 133) in its provision for the term ‘secular ’, as Amma could choose to use the Hindi term laukik (which translates as ‘of the people’). Amma chooses to code switch here not due to ‘deficiency’ but rather to carefully position herself politically, ideologically and ethnically. Amma extends the connotation of ‘dirt’ invoked by her references to lower castes when, in the following sentence, using the metaphor of ‘car parking’, she says that Zaffar had been parking his car in ‘dirty’ garages. Garages are rarely clean places and dirty work takes place in them, and thus Amma’s metaphor works on various levels. The metaphor of ‘parking’ also suggests temporality with the freedom of travel or journey in-between the various garage stops, and this connects to the idea that Zaffar has ‘travelled widely’, evidenced by the presence of ‘ kanji-kanji ’ eyes in the locality. This idea of temporality and journey is underscored by Amma’s use of syntactic reduplication: ‘where-where’ and ‘which-which’. The repetition of ‘where’ as an adverbial place clause and the relative pronoun ‘which’ produces a sense of the haphazard and the random. In turn, this idea connects with the nature of Zaffar’s ‘garage stops ’, that is, how his sexual encounters with various women are equally unplanned and casual in their nature. Amma’s opinion of Zaffar’s nawab family is sustained throughout the novel until her death, which serves as a turning point in the novel as Jinni is pushed to the fore of the Pragati Party, pitted against Zain. As part of his election campaign and appeal to the young people of India, Zain appears on an MTV-style chat show, lounging in a deck chair beside a pool talking to Nauzer Nulwallah, the interviewer, about politics and above all, secularism. Nauzer opens the conversation:

NN: (waving his arms about dramatically): He’s muscular! He’s popular! He’s spectacular! And … he’s secular! [Turning to Zain] Speaking of which, dude, aren’t you in the wrong party? (Chauhan 2010: 141)

Nauzer’s opening lines are appropriated from a popular Bollywood soundtrack ‘Pappu can’t dance’ from the film Jaane tu ya jaane na; here, Nauzer adapts the lyrics to accommodate the phrase ‘ And … secular! ’ This is the selling point of Zain’s revised Indian Janata Party. He states: ‘Today it ’ s [IJP] the only place for someone young and unconnected like me’ (Chauhan 2010: 141). The interviewer presses Zain on his idea of India today:

NN: What upsets you the most about politics today?

ZAK: (simply) I don’t like the way my community is being treated.

NN: Speaking of which, the Christian, the serd and the lady in the burqa went to rent which DVD at the rental store?

ZAK: That is such an old one. The Minority Report . (Chauhan 2010: 143)

Zain ’s identity is manifestly connected to the contemporary and the popular. The take on the Bollywood song in the first extract above positions Zain as a celebrity-like figure and as part of young India. The joke that features in the second extract above also makes reference to contemporary culture and to an India of satellite and film viewing outside of the Bollywood industry, a phenomenon that has exploded since the late 1990s in line with the satellite revolution.

V. Post-Millenial ‘Mythology-Inspired Fiction’ in English
The market, the genre, and the (global) reader

From Indian Genre Fiction: pasts and future histories, pp. 141-158

 

VI. Modes of Visuality in India

From Visuality and Identity in post-millennial Indian graphic narratives, pp. 16-17

[ … ] This book is interested in the kind of seeing that takes place when reading-seeing Indian graphic narratives. If, as Bhatti and Pinney suggest above, seeing in Indian cultures is a mode of knowing, then how might the reader-gazer of the Indian graphic narrative come to engage with visual and textual material that represents the inauspicious? Overall, I am keen to explore the usurping of traditional modes and representations of Indianness (upon which one may gaze in an auspicious manner) for the post-millennial Indian graphic narratives that invite the gaze onto inauspicious, unfavourable and challenging depictions of Indianness. Tension within the production of post-millennial Indian graphic narratives has been alluded to in Chap. 1 of this book. I suggest that a to and fro negotiation of Indian artists/authors with global (western) publishing houses is a hallmark of recently published graphic novels specifically, and HarperCollins India is testament to this. A further tension exists in the reception and the ‘reading’ of Indian graphic narratives since much of this work depicts, narrates and portrays problematic ideas of Indianness. I propose that collectively, Indian graphic narratives since the millennium have embarked upon problematising erstwhile, safe, settled ideas and projections of Indian society, history and identity, namely through Banerjee’s re-visioning of history, Patil’s portrayal of sexuality in Kari, Appupen’s critique of celebrity culture in Legends of Halahala, Studio Kokaachi’s silent graphic narrative rape (HUSH), Ghosh’s ‘Emergency’ in Delhi Calm, the re-telling of the life of B. R. Ambedkar in Bhimayana or Jotiba Phule’s life in A Gardener in the Wasteland (2011), to portrayals of the conflict in Kashmir (Kashmir Pending), Banerjee’s critique of urban, ‘modern’ society (The Harappa Files, All Quiet in Vikaspuri) and representations of gender violence in Zubaan’s edited collection Drawing the Line. All these works engage variously in the narration of problematic, difficult and yet timely issues.

[…]

I suggest that post-millennial Indian graphic narratives story both in content and form the inauspicious. They contravene the established idea of visually depicting Indianness in favourable and celebratory styles achieved artistically through bright colourways, clear, strong lines and intricate often patterned detail. In the deployment of sketch-like images, stark line drawings, muted colours, blurred and indistinct characters, monochrome colourways, multimedia and collage-like approaches to storying, the narrative and characters invoke a visual inauspiciousness. Indeed, through the invocation of the inauspicious, Indian graphic narratives suggest an ominous and portentous future. They point forward in a way that draws on the erstwhile or the current moment and, in doing so, offer a cautionary message both visually and textually.

Sections of this essay have appeared as:
1. Dawson Varughese, E. “Style in World Englishes Literature: Battle for Bittora (2010) by Anuja Chauhan.” The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp.697-698.
2. Dawson Varughese, E. “Post-Millenial ‘Mythology-Inspired Fiction’ in English: The market, the genre, and the (global) reader.” Indian Genre Fiction: pasts and future histories, Chicago University Press, 2018. pp. 141-158.
3. Dawson Varughese, E. “Modes of Visuality in India.” Visuality and Identity in post-millennial Indian graphic narratives, Palgrave, 2018. pp. 16-17
 
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Post-millennial Indian (genre) fiction in English – Part One | E. Dawson Varughese

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Dawson Varughese, E. “Post-millenial Indian (genre) fiction in English, Part One.” Indian Writing In English Online, 05 June 2022, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/post-millennial-indian-genre-fiction-in-english-part-1-i-e-dawson-varughese/.

Chicago:
Dawson Varughese, E. “Post-millenial Indian (genre) fiction in English, Part One.” Indian Writing In English Online. June 05, 2022. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/post-millennial-indian-genre-fiction-in-english-part-1-i-e-dawson-varughese/.

Introduction

Since the turn of the millennium, Indian fiction in English within India has experienced a genuine moment of opportunity in terms of publishing, reading and engaging with authors and their works. The collection of six academic texts by E. Dawson Varughese below – some excerpts, some complete chapters – have all been published in response to these developments and in turn, they examine what she refers to as a ‘perfect storm’ for post-millennial Indian fiction production. We begin with a complete chapter entitled ‘Post-millennial Indian Anglophone writers’ from R. Eaglestone and D. O’Gorman’s (eds) The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Fiction (2019). This chapter details the post-millennial moment and the socio-economic factors that have been at play in the literary markets of Indian fiction in English. It also identifies some key novels and thus offers an overview of a few themes prevalent across post-2000 Indian fiction in English (‘literary’ as well as ‘genre’ fiction); these are collated under three sub-headings: ‘Urban Underbellies’; ‘Female-centred narratives’ and ‘Politics’.


Published in 2013, E. Dawson Varughese’s Reading New India (Bloomsbury) was ground-breaking in its effort to shift the focus away from the long-established ‘literary’ Indian fiction in English, widening the lens to incorporate domestic, Indian genre fiction, thus taking in detective and crime writing to graphic novels and ‘Chick Lit’. This second text is excerpted from Reading New India (2013) and the chapter ‘Chick Lit’; it details some of the early post-2000 Chick Lit novelists such as Advaita Kala. This short excerpt also considers how post-millennial Indian Chick Lit remains in dialogue with ‘women writers’ of earlier eras such as Deshpande and Desai – a longer and more detailed examination of this appears as a chapter in Ulka Anjaria’s (ed) The Cambridge History of the Indian Novel in English (2015) entitled: ‘New India/n Woman’: decision-making and identity in post-millennial Chick Lit’ by E. Dawson Varughese.


The third text introduces the genre term ‘Crick Lit’ that E. Dawson Varughese first employed in Reading New India (2013). This excerpt considers how Indian Crick Lit, produced from within India, echoes some of the changes that the Indian cricket scene has gone through; in short, a post-westernization of the game and of the genre. This excerpt is taken from a chapter in South-Asian Fiction in English: contemporary transformations edited by Alex Tickell and published by Palgrave in 2016.


E. Dawson Varughese’s approach to post-millennial Indian genre fiction in English is usually one that foregrounds stylistic analysis, focussing on the language-literature interface. She often employs this lens of enquiry in order to explore and examine post-millennial ‘ideas of Indianness’. This fourth text is an excerpt from The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, edited by Violeta Sotirova and published in 2016 by Bloomsbury. Here, E. Dawson Varughese considers ‘style’ in Battle for Bittora (2010) by Anuja Chauhan, focussing on how the language-literature interface expresses ideas of changing India, gendered Indianness and ‘Young India’.


In 2016, Genre Fiction of New India: Post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives was published by Routledge with a simultaneous Indian edition distributed by Manohar. In this book, E. Dawson Varughese explored the rise of mythology-inspired fiction in English from India within the Indian, domestic literary scene, in the new millennium. The book examined how reader reception is key in appreciating how this burgeoning canon is read, received and how (and where) it circulates. This book laid the foundations for the chapter that appears here as text five. Published as ‘Post-millennial “mythology-inspired fiction”: the market, the genre and the (global) reader’ in B. Chattopadhyay, A. Maity and A. Mandhwani (eds), Indian Genre Fiction: pasts and future histories by Chicago University Press in 2018, the chapter presents a distinct approach to this growing body of writing in English. Here, E. Dawson Varughese proposes that the body of post-millennial, mythology-inspired fiction in English to date is characterised by four distinct approaches of telling, which, in turn, find themselves on a spectrum of sorts; at one end lies a sentiment of ‘retelling’ while at the other end lies a sentiment of ‘re-imagining.’ Using examples from a range of mythology-inspired fiction texts in English from India, the chapter aims to elucidate the features of the ‘retelling’ through to the ‘reimagining’ texts.


Finally, the sixth text is an excerpt from her 2018 Palgrave book, Visuality and Identity in post-millennial Indian graphic narratives. This is taken from Chapter 2 in the book, which is entitled ‘Modes of Visuality in India’ and it presents the thesis of ‘(in)auspicious’ seeing in relation to post-millennial Indian graphic narratives. Although a short excerpt, this final text gives an overall introduction to the book, its concerns and overarching argument.

I. Post-millennial Indian Anglophone writers

(originally titled “Indian Fiction in English”)

I.1 Introduction

Focussing on Indian literary fiction in English, this chapter considers differences and similarities across the production of this body of work, paying particular attention to the differences between, on the one hand, novels written by authors from diasporic or transnational backgrounds and, on the other, novels by authors who have resided all or most of their life in India. I make this distinction because I suggest, in line with my other work (see Dawson Varughese 2012 , 2013 , 2016 ), that the novels written by those authors who have remained in India are less characterised by the tropes and guises of ‘postcolonial literature’. I suggest that in general, the diasporic or transnational texts that engage with ‘New India’ in various ways, have a tendency to propagate India as ‘the Other’ as they play towards the established mores of the western market (exceptions to this idea exist, of course, such as Half of What I Say (2015) by Anil Menon) and thus result in work that resonates more with a postcolonial framework.


As the discussion of the novels below demonstrates, some diasporic authors (Manil Suri, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee) craft stories that explore the migrant experience (such as migration from India to the US) as well as the movement between two (or more) cultural worlds and the tensions involved in this movement. Aravind Adiga born in 1974, who then returned to India in more recent years, incorporates the vantage point of moving in and out of a changing India that his own personal upbringing has afforded him. Other Indian authors who have lived or worked (or studied) in the West often draw on the two worlds of India and ‘elsewhere’, as demonstrated in the works of Anjali Joseph, Jeet Thayil, Vikram Chandra and Neel Mukherjee as examples. Crucially, I also discuss Indian authors who have spent most or all their life in India, such as Manu Joseph, Usha K.R., Manju Kapur, Anuradha Roy, Deepti Kapoor, Meena Kandasamy, Arundhati Roy and Omair Ahmad as examples. What is particularly interesting about this latter group of authors is how their writing is variously received within India and in the West, which suggests perhaps a generational shift at play in both the production and reception of their works.


Beginning with a discussion of the context in which literary fiction is read and propagated, this chapter is arranged by making reference to four overarching topics that have trended in Indian literary fiction over the past fifteen years: ‘Urban Underbellies’, ‘Female-centred narratives’, ‘Young India’ and ‘Politics’. Within these topics, I examine work by the authors listed above, thus both ‘diasporic/transnational’ and ‘domestic’ authors, demonstrating how all attend to these aspects of post-millennial Indian society, echoing concerns of contemporary living such as city life, the identity/ies and roles of women in New India, the experience of ‘young India’, sexuality and relationships, and the ways in which today’s society might conceive of India’s politics.

I.2 Publishing context

As an echo of these societal shifts, the identity of Indian fiction in English has changed significantly and also relatively rapidly since the millennium. Increased personal spending (especially amongst young Indians), the proliferation of literary festivals in India and greater publishing activity have all contributed to the rise of Indian fiction in English. For example, the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), founded in 2006, has been a key player in alerting the global literary community to India’s place and role in shaping the contemporary world literature canon. By inviting speakers from around the world, in particular Indian writers from the diaspora, the JLF has propagated a post-millennial positivity around New Indian fiction in English and, in turn, raised the profile of domestic Indian writing in English. It has also acted as a catalyst for many of the more recently inaugurated literary festivals held throughout the year in India. In addition to literary festivals, various literary prizes have entered the South Asian literary scene such as the ‘Raymond and Crossword Book Award’ (before 2014 it was the ‘Economist Crossword Book Award’ from 2011 to 2013, the ‘Vodafone Crossword Book Award’ from 2008 to 2010, and the ‘Hutch Crossword Book Award’ from 2004 to 2007). Established in 2010, ‘The Hindu Literary Prize’ recognises Indian works in English and in English translation and an influential literary prize which is currently affiliated to the JLF is the ‘DSC Prize for South Asian Literature’, inaugurated in 2011. Anuk Arudpragasam won this prize in 2017 for his novel The Story of a Brief  Marriage ( 2016 ); Anuradha Roy won in 2016 with her novel Sleeping on Jupiter; and the 2015 winner was Jhumpa Lahiri for her novel The Lowland. Other winners include Cyrus Mistry and Jamil Ahmad of 2013 and 2014 respectively. Although the prize accepts works in translation, the winners to date have all been authors of Indian or South Asian fiction in English, although works in translation have made it to the prize’s shortlist. Given that prizes such as the DSC are open to Indian (South Asian) writing by authors residing outside of South Asia, the growth in production, confidence and the establishment of a new-found identity in Indian writing from within the country has, I suggest filtered through to the diaspora and the wider field of ‘world literature’.


The growth of the publishing scene within India has also played a substantial part in bringing Indian fiction in English to a wider audience. With increased fiscal confidence, the economy of leisure consumerism has boomed over the last 15 years and with this, the purchasing of books for leisure has become ever more commonplace: typically, a ‘popular’ paperback novel of Indian fiction in English will retail at ₹299 (£3–£3.50), and Indian literary fiction in English will retail at ₹499 or ₹799 (£4–£8.50) (exchange rates as of December 2017). Moreover, Indian publishers have become increasingly ‘visible’ as they form part of global publishing houses such as HarperCollins, Hachette or Penguin Random House. Consequently, post millennium, there is a curious, increased to-and-fro of Indian authors (or their agents) negotiating with international, global publishing houses via the New Delhi, Gurgaon or Noida headquarters. Narayanan warns of the potential consequences of such a relationship, saying: ‘if the global visuality of Indian writers is a significant consequence of de/reterritorialized corporations, its most adverse effect is the hegemony of these corporations as the prime global producers of Indian writing’ ( 2012 : 107). Independent presses continue to claim some space for themselves and companies such as Rupa Publications, Juggernaut, JaiCo, Leadstart and Speaking Tiger are examples of this committed activity.

I.3 Urban underbellies

As India’s urban centres have grown in size and structure, so Indian fiction in English has evolved its post-millennial urban narratives. Most notably, authors Aravind Adiga, Vikram Chandra and Jeet Thayil have explored the city in some of its darker avatars.
Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger ( 2008 ) won the Man Booker Prize in 2008, with his portrayal of ‘New India’ garnering a marked interest. The novel is written as an informal letter which charts the life of Balram Halwai. Organised over seven nights of writing, the story explores the lives of India’s poor, the caste system, the underbelly of the city and what it is to survive in today’s India. Adiga’s second novel Last Man in Tower ( 2011 ) also explores city life, money and power as residents of a housing block are offered generous amounts of cash to move out in order for ‘redevelopment’ to take place. Set in Mumbai, the residents of Vishram Society (Tower A) are such an essential part of Adiga’s novel that it begins with a plan of the tower and its residents’ abodes from the ground floor up to the fifth. The tower finds itself in Vakola, in the vicinity of the airport and for most Bombaywallas, Adiga tells us, anything in or around Vakola is ‘slummy’. Vishram Society, however, stands as a respectable, middle-class housing co-operative. Adiga captures the idiosyncrasies of the people, the changing urban centre and the zeitgeist of contemporary Indian culture(s) in all kinds of detail in his novels, be it in the witty ‘NOTICES’ to the housing society, in his characters’ Hinglish or the ongoing social commentary of his (nosey) characters. Through both novels, Adiga captures an India changing at pace and although he has been criticised for attacking certain aspects of Indian society, others suggest that his novels offer introspection into the contemporary Indian psyche, a psyche which is changing dramatically, cutting across the generations, often placing them in tension. As money and corruption lace the narrative of Adiga’s Last Man in Tower ( 2011 ), so too do these interests trace through Adiga’s Selection Day (2016), which was shortlisted for the DSC Prize in 2017. The novel is supposedly inspired by the real-life story of a Mumbai businessman sponsoring teenage cricketers in one of the city’s slums. As a coming-of-age story, Selection Day (2016) privileges the male experience; it explores class, religion and sexuality through its young protagonists, Manjunath, Radha Krishnan and Javed, whilst examining the relationships between father and son(s) in a changing India. Vikram Chandra, meanwhile, was born in New Delhi in 1961, and educated latterly in America. Chandra lives in the United States and at times, in India. Winning the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2008, Sacred Games ( 2007 ) is set in the murky underworld of contemporary Mumbai. The novel takes Inspector Sartaj Singh, who we know previously from Chandra’s ‘Kama’, one of five tales in Love and Longing in Bombay ( 1997 ), and pits him against an infamous Mumbai gangster. The story is epic not simply due to its length but also due to the array of topics it weaves into its storyline: violence, mafia, Partition, Miss India, to name a few. The novel opens unusually, with the death of Gaitonde, the gangster everyone has been chasing and of whom in death Chandra writes: ‘A tooth winked pearl-like, whole and undamaged, from the red raw where Gaitonde’s tight-lipped grimace stopped abruptly’ ( 2007 : 46). Chandra’s style, replete with detail and adjectival musings, resonates with the complexity of Mumbai, its gangsters, police force and its women. The novel chimes with India’s turbulent 1990s and we are frequently reminded of that era, from Dil Se’s ‘Chainya Chainya’ pumping out of loudspeakers on the street to the communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims simmering away in the background. The novel cuts to India’s fascination with the ‘maximum city’ and its gangsters: its bhais, godowns and dadas, all of which have inspired many Bollywood films and nefariously slipped into public culture.


The dark side of Bombay is also the setting for Jeet Thayil’s debut novel Narcopolis ( 2012 ) and the city also appears in his 2017 novel The Book of Chocolate Saints ( 2017 ). Born in Kerala in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Mumbai, Thayil won the DSC Prize for Indian fiction in English South Asian Literature in 2013 for Narcopolis ( 2012 ), which was also shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and then in 2013 for The Hindu Literary Prize. As its title suggests, the novel explores the world of narcotics, specifically opium, mostly in 1970s Old Bombay but also in the city in more recent times. The novel is anchored in Thayil’s own experience of drug addiction and alcoholism. The descriptive prose captures the detail of the opium dens, appealing to the visceral: ‘. . . a smell of molasses and sleep and illness, a woman tending the pipe, using a long needle to cook the opium, her hand moving as if she were knitting . . .’ ( 2012 : 3), and, ‘. . . she felt herself slipping through the mat into the floor. Below was a thick layer of cotton wool and below that were the blue pools of her nightmares’ ( 2012 : 182). Although the novel does not speak directly of the post-millennial years, it does highlight the changes that the city has witnessed and in terms of narcotics, the demise of opium and the rise of heroin. It is Jamal, the son of the opium house owner, who brings the narrative into New India through his relationship with Farheen, his text messages and, most significantly, his cocaine, MDMA and Ecstasy, ‘new drugs for the new Bombay’ ( 2012 : 281). Other urban narratives of New India include those by Manil Suri, who is an American writer of Indian heritage. He was born in Bombay in 1959 and moved to the United States for postgraduate study in mathematics. He has written various personal commentaries on growing up gay in India and about India and the US in this regard. Suri’s trilogy The Death of Vishnu: A Novel ( 2001 ), The Age of Shiva: A Novel ( 2008 ) and The City of Devi: A Novel ( 2013 ) has brought him various successes, with The Death of Vishnu ( 2001 ) winning the PEN/Bingham Fellowship in 2002. Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men ( 2010 ), which won The Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN/Open Book Award, is also set in Mumbai and deals with issues of caste through the narrative of a Dalit who works as an assistant to a clever Brahmin astronomer in a scientific institution.


Joseph returns to Mumbai with his 2017 novel Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous (2017), taking on big questions about political forces and again, religious and societal division. Moving away from Mumbai, Usha K.R.’s novel Monkey-man ( 2010 ) foregrounds the city of Bangalore and is set in January 2000; the city that has morphed from ‘pensioner’s paradise’ to the IT hub of India. The book’s narrative hangs on the sightings of the elusive ‘monkey-man’ although Usha K.R. devotes most of her narrative to the detail of the characters and their lives, linked, as they are, through one ‘being’ – the monkey-man. Anjum Hasan also writes of Bangalore and Deepti Kapoor of New Delhi, with the latter’s novel A Bad Character ( 2014 ) discussed below.

I.4 Female-centred narratives

Post-2000 there has also been a rise in narratives that put women, and women’s experience, at their centre. Born in 1967, Anuradha Roy published her first novel An Atlas of Impossible Longing in 2008, followed by The Folded Earth ( 2011 ) which won the Economist Crossword Prize in 2012. Tabish Khair (2011 ), in his review of The Folded Earth ( 2011 ), writes: ‘This is the kind of novel about India that cultivated people in the West, particularly Britain, love to read. It is set in a refreshingly recognisable – Tolkien-like map embedded – but not overtly familiar part of India’. Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker, her third novel, Sleeping On Jupiter (2015), won the DSC Prize in 2016. It tells the story of Nomi who has grown up in Norway following harrowing childhood years in India, living in an ashram as an orphan and being abused by the temple’s spiritual leader. She returns to India and the location of the ashram later in life and the novel charts both her journey and that of a handful of others as they explore their own lives, memories, sexuality and desires. Roy has been praised for her elegant prose, but Sleeping On Jupiter (2015) has been criticised within India in particular for its portrayal of Indian society as miserable, poverty-ridden and wrought with issues of sexual violence and inequality.


Winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1999, Manju Kapur’s debut novel Difficult Daughters (1998) similarly explores female experiences, in particular the role of women in family life, education, marriage and love. These themes recur in her subsequent works A Married Woman (2003), Home ( 2006 ), The Immigrant ( 2008 ) and Custody ( 2011 ). Kapur, born in 1948 lives and works in New Delhi and although some of her work, Difficult Daughters ( 1998 ), A Married Woman ( 2003 ), Home ( 2006 ) and Custody ( 2011 ), echo this in their own geography, portrayal of bourgeois lifestyle and politics, her later novel The Immigrant ( 2008 ) treads a different geography as it is set in Canada. Kapur’s novels explore a range of eras from Partition ( Difficult Daughters), the 1970s in A Married Woman ( 2003 ), the 1980s in Home ( 2006 ) and the 1990s in Custody ( 2011 ). Home ( 2006 ) captures 1980s New Delhi particularly well, with the story set in a fabric shop, its business threatened by new fashion and fabrics.


The changing times are made more intense as the Lal family home faces grief, loss, jealousy, love and repression within its own walls. Kapur, as with her other novels, explores the female characters carefully and fully, but in Home ( 2006 ) her descriptive hand extends to the portrayal of Karol Bagh in New Delhi and in particular, the Lal’s shop. She writes on the potential renovation of the family’s livelihood: ‘Central air conditioning a must, plaster-of-paris ceiling with frills and moulding, mirrors, a gold and glass chandelier, a tiled toilet (customers stay longer if you allow them to pee), a kitchen to store cold drinks and make tea . . .’ ( 2006 : 163). Kapur has been called the Jane Austen of India for her complex family sagas and gentle storytelling. Although a domestic writer (she resides permanently in India), she is a successful Indian author with regards to her reception in the West, mainly because her narratives are demonstrably of the upper echelons of Indian society and the kind of family saga that readers might enjoy exploring. Diaspora writers have also anchored their narratives in the convoluted lives of ‘the family’ but have equally foregrounded the challenges of the immigrant experience and a shared identity.


Such motifs are found across Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, and, publishing her first book Interpreter of Maladies ( 1999 ) at the turn of the millennium, she went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 with this collection of short stories. Her debut novel The Namesake was published in 2003. Born in London in 1967, Lahiri’s family, from West Bengal, moved from London to the United States when Lahiri was very young. Lahiri considers herself an American writer. Her fiction explores both India and the United States through the identities of those living between the memories of the homeland left behind and the world in which they now find themselves. Her second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth ( 2008 ), was very well received, and her novel The Lowland ( 2013 ) made the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize but went on to win the 2014 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. West Bengal, its cultures and its capital city feature significantly in Lahiri’s work. The Lowland ( 2013 ) evokes the Calcutta of the 1950s and 1960s as it traces the rise of the Naxalite movement alongside the lives of two brothers, while The Namesake (2003 ), from the outset, suggests a gastronomically memoired Calcutta: ‘Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks . . .’ ( 2003 : 1). Lahiri has a Ph.D. in literary studies and has taught Creative Writing in the United States.


A fellow Indian-American writer of West Bengali origin, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in Calcutta in 1956 and lived there until her early twenties, when she moved to the United States to pursue postgraduate study. Like Lahiri in The Lowland ( 2013 ), Divakaruni charts the lives of her characters, separated by miles and by cultures – one in India and one in the United States – in her novels Sister of My Heart ( 1999 ) and its sequel The Vine of Desire ( 2002 ). As with the work of Manju Kapur, Divakaruni’s writing explores the female self and its relation to other females as well as exploring challenging relationships with men and with wider society. Her 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions ( 2008 ) epitomises this interest as Divakaruni embarks on a re-telling of the Indian epic The Mahabharata from the perspective of Panchaali, the wife of the Pandavas (the five brothers).

I. 5 Young India

As I have suggested above, the changing reading public is emblematic of an unfolding, generational shift, and this, too, becomes the concern for much new fiction. Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978 and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge to then graduate from the MA in Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia in 2008. Her first novel, Saraswati Park, was published in 2010 and won the Betty Trask Prize, Desmond Elliott Prize and Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction in India. Another Country ( 2012 ), her second novel, was published in 2012 and charts Leela’s life as a 20-something in Paris, London and Bombay. Saraswati Park ( 2010 ) explores the sexual awakening of Ashish who is living with his aunt and uncle in a suburb of Mumbai, studying to pass his exams. Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of learning, music and art and this almost-bildungsroman is steeped in both the arts – his uncle is obsessed with books and a letter-writer by profession, Ashish is studying literature – and in the lessons of life. Ashish has a lot to learn about life, in particular about love. A tumultuous relationship between the protagonist and his male tutor results in both the destruction and the recreation of Ashish. The trials and tribulations of Ashish’s awakening are met by the moods and colours of the city of Mumbai and Joseph captures the details of the city in surprising ways: ‘A fleet  of cockroach-like taxis in black and yellow livery waited at the junction outside the GPO. When the lights changed they all, honking, took the U-turn. A man on a cycle passed; he carried a tangle of enormous red ledgers, each wrapped in plastic, atop his head. The gold on their spines flashed in the sun’ ( Joseph 2010 : 8). Her third novel The Living ( 2016 ) was shortlisted for the DSC Prize in 2017 and, like her second book, it straddles continents; Claire and her son in Norwich (UK) and Arun and his wife in an unnamed town in Maharashtra (India). Footwear connects the two characters as Claire is a shoe-maker and Arun makes leather slippers.


Deepti Kapoor evokes a very different kind of city, while still exploring ideas of ‘young India’ in her debut novel A Bad Character ( 2014 ) which was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize in 2014. Set in present-day New Delhi, Kapoor has written a fierce depiction of the city and its society, post millennium. The narrator, Idha, moves from Agra to live with her aunt in New Delhi. She is alone. Her mother had died four years previously and her father is in Singapore with little interest in his 21-year-old daughter’s life. A timely novel, given the debate around living as a lone female in New Delhi, A Bad Character ( 2014 ) is dark and hopeless in its portrayal of the young woman’s life. Published by Jonathan Cape, the novel is, however, sincerely ‘domestic’, its narrative peppered with locales, Delhiites and the peculiarities of living in the capital city. It is also a breathless novel and Kapoor’s style communicates this from the outset, echoed in her main characters’ hunger to ‘survive’ life. Idha manages to make it through the New Delhi life she embroils herself in only to write: ‘My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken on the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east’ ( 2014 : 1). Bharati Mukherjee was born in Calcutta in 1940. Having lived in Canada and America for most of her life, she considered herself an American writer, and this positioning of identity is explored in her post-millennial novel Desirable Daughters ( 2002 ) and its sequel The Tree Bride ( 2004 ). Her novel Miss New India ( 2011 ), however, is set firmly in India, in ‘New’ India, and the novel, exploring the usual ideas of life in an Indian city post 2000, acts as a cultural barometer for call centre life in particular. Set in Bangalore, the protagonist Anjali discovers a new existence, a world away from Bihar and the lower-middle-class family she has left behind. Mukherjee observes the move from the known to the unknown well and she writes assuredly on the migrant experience. The novel presents an India that plays to the West’s ideas about ‘New India’ and thus rehearsed dichotomous motifs of poor and rich, rural and urban, illiterate and educated run throughout the narrative.

I.6 Politics

‘Politics’ appears variously through characters, locations and time periods in contemporary Indian literary fiction in English. The place and the politics of West Bengal appear in much of Neel Mukherjee’s writing. Mukherjee was born in 1970 in West Bengal and lives in the UK. He is the author of two post-millennial novels: A Life Apart ( 2010 ) (also known as Past Continuous [2008]), which was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2011, and The Lives of Others ( 2014 ), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker 2014. Both novels are set in Calcutta, although A Life Apart ( 2010 ) moves to England where the protagonist Ritwik embarks on a new life and forms a special bond with Anne Cameron who has, in different ways, lost much in life. The Lives of Others ( 2014 ) is set in West Bengal in the late 1960s. Supratik becomes involved in politics and activism, leaving the Ghosh family for the communist party, a contentious move given that the Ghosh family owns paper mills and is relatively well-to-do, residing in a large house. The novel is full of various Ghosh characters and this aspect of his craft resonates with Manju Kapur’s novels of ‘domestic life’ fiction through the various dramas and challenges that surround the family and its immediate community.


Politics permeates the pages of Anil Menon’s Half of What I Say (2015), which was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize in 2016. Born in 1966, having lived in the United States and India, Menon’s slightly speculative novel has been described as a churn of characters. It is however, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the new governmental security outfit called the Lokshakti, that stands out from the narrative. Brought into existence in order to root out corruption, the Lokshakti has its own way of doing things; prisons, ‘soldiers’ and its own ‘Culture Department’. Inspired perhaps by Indians calling for anti-corruption laws and by supposed cases of ‘sedition’ in the post-millennial years, Half of What I Say (2015) eerily imagines an India of censorship, arrests and shadowy surveillance somewhat in the name of an anti-corruption agenda. Whilst the novel captures something of this post-millennial moment through its range of multifaceted and often complex characters, it pushes the narrative into the fable-esque or the mythical, asking the reader to imagine an India of now at the very edge of the imminently possible. The ‘quiet’ politics of Menon’s novel serves to agitate and unnerve both its reader and the idea of the contemporary, post-millennial Indian moment.


The lives of Dalit agricultural workers in Tamil Nadu are explored in Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel, The Gypsy Goddess ( 2014 ), with Kandasamy taking direction for the narrative from historical events. Christmas Day 1968 saw the massacre of Dalit workers in a village called Kilvenmani following the murder of a popular communist leader. The landowners attempt to force the workers back to the fields, and in their resistance the peasants are assaulted and over 40 people are burnt alive in a hut. Kandasamy is creative in form and style, her language use is witty and sharp: ‘Destination of the dead: Paapaan Sudukaadu, Nagapattinam. A cremation ground named after Brahmins but used for untouchables’ ( 2014 : 188). In Part Three of the novel entitled ‘Battleground’, Kandasamy includes Inspector Rajavel’s tabulation of the facts of the massacre, an (almost) inventory of death, each of the 42 entries including the words ‘charred’ or ‘burnt’ somewhere in their sentences. Meena Kandasamy who was born in 1984 identifies as a ‘poet, fiction writer, translator and activist’ ( 2014 : 283) and is based in Chennai. In her second novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife ( 2017 ), the protagonist is a poet with (outspoken) leftist political views. Set in South India, she marries a college professor who soon reveals his violent behaviour towards her. She tells her father of the abuse that her husband rapes her and beats her but her father asks that she reconsider leaving the marriage given the shame this would bring on her and the family. Kandasamy’s When I Hit You ( 2017 ) is a tale of a modern Indian family, which is based on the author’s personal experience. The story is visceral and its ‘truth’ presents a post-millennial notion of Indianness that many would prefer to have silenced. Shortlisted for the Man Asia Prize 2009, Jimmy The Terrorist ( 2010 ) by Omair Ahmad who was born in 1974 went on to win the Vodaphone Crossword Book Award in 2010. Mughal heritage runs throughout this novel (making connections with Ahmad’s earlier novella The Storyteller’s Tale [ 2008 ]) in both the locale of an old north Indian town as well as in the identity and religious and cultural practices of Jamaal, a.k.a Jimmy, and the wider community. The narrative exposes the lives of the residents of Moazzamabad and whilst the narrator is at pains to show the Mughal inspired architectural, intellectual and cultural jewels of the town (albeit in a diminishing state), the reality of existence in Moazzamabad is far less pleasant. Suffering from anti-Muslim prejudices, a rising right-wing Hindu movement and a life of poverty, Jimmy is brought up in miserable and challenging circumstances. The storyline is multi-layered and the characters are complex, which in turn echoes the socio-cultural landscape of Moazzamabad. Ahmad makes statements on this very complexity at various points in the story: ‘And maybe in all that I am telling you there is nothing to help us make sense of this town, our mohalla, that boy. We understand so little, after all . . .’ ( 2010 : 150). Arundhati Roy, known for her political activism, and made famous by her 1997 Booker Prize win for The God of Small Things, published her long-awaited second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in 2017 with Hamish Hamilton. The novel focuses on some of modern India’s darkest moments including the insurgency in Kashmir and the Gujarat riots of 2002. A raft of many different voices, marginal, politicised and persecuted, Roy’s novel might be thought of as an echo of her own polemic positioning that the intervening years have been testament to; the Narmada dam, her support for an independent Kashmir, the US invasion of Afghanistan, campaigning for Adivasi land rights in Kerala and her criticism of prime minister Modi’s ascension to power, as some examples. The novel made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2017.

I.6 Other developments

In addition to an expanding catalogue of Indian Chick Lit and crime fiction, there has been a proliferation of ‘popular’ mythology-inspired fiction which rides on the back of the success of Amish Tripathi’s ‘Shiva Trilogy’: The Immortals of Meluha ( 2010 ), The Secret of the Nagas ( 2011) and The Oath of the Vayuputras ( 2013 ) (see Dawson Varughese 2016 ). These novels retail at around ₹299 (around £3.00–£3.50) and like Amish’s works, appear in many Indian languages. Since 2015, there has been an increasing interest in Indian speculative fiction which moves beyond the now established ‘mythology-inspired’ fiction, not least because it is typically more ‘literary’ in style. These novels include Vikram Balagopal’s Savage Blue (2016), Tashan Mehta’s The Liar’s Weave (2017), Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), Anil Menon’s Half of What I Say (2015) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s The Island of Lost Girls (2015) – a sequel to the feminist dystopia introduced in her 2008 novel Escape .

Conclusions

This chapter has considered ‘diaspora’, ‘transnational’ Indian authors of Indian literary fiction in English as well as Indian authors who have lived most or all their life in India. I have suggested four topics or themes that have trended across this body of writing since the early 2000s, and thus the chapter has attempted to show how ‘Indian’ authors have engaged with ideas, amongst others, of the immigrant experience, economic liberalisation, the role of and the female experience in ‘New India’, as well as political events of both the post-millennial years and earlier ones in India’s modern history. I have suggested that literary festival activity and a more buoyant domestic publishing scene are responsible for transforming both the identity of Indian fiction in English and the dynamics of its distribution patterns. That is not to say that the world literary space is an equal playfield; as Pascale Casanova reminds us, an unevenness in this publishing domain should be expected:

Autonomy is nonetheless a fundamental aspect of world literary space. The most independent territories of the literary world are able to state their own law, to lay down the specific standards and principles applied by their internal hierarchies, and to evaluate works and pronounce judgments without regard for political and national divisions. ( 2007 : 86)

Indian fiction in English, within India at least, is challenging the orthodoxy Casanova writes of (when we think of ‘the most independent territories of the literary world’ as those in the West),not only through increased literary activity in publishing and by way of literature festivals but also through the content of some recent Indian literary fiction in English. The narratives of Anil Menon’s, Deepti Kapoor’s, Manu Joseph’s, Omair Ahmad’s and Meena Kandasamy’s post-millennial Indian fiction in English in particular, challenge an established (and arguably erstwhile) view of the identity of Indian ‘postcolonial’ literature. These authors’ novels move beyond the tropes of Indian postcolonial narratives that have been identified by humanities scholars in the West in particular (see Dawson Varughese 2012 ); instead, these novels story Indian experience (in all its variety) more through Indian paradigms, philosophies and lived encounters (often of the post-millennial moment).

The discussion of a range of authors here makes clear that some novelists continue to foster the idea of India as ‘Other’ through an exoticised imaginary, playing to certain stereotypes that have been established through earlier canons of Indian writing in English. The current Indian literary scene in English is in flux, however, and it is with an eagerness and fervour that the new writing produced from both within India and outside of India about India continues to shape what will become more steadfastly, the post-millennial canon of Indian literary fiction in English.

II. ‘Chick Lit’

Today’s body of writing that we might call ‘chick lit ’is mainly written by women, with a female protagonist who, in various ways, faces challenges, questions and changes in contemporary Indian society, these narratives often include a ‘love’ or ‘romance’ element and are often narrated humourously. However, there are a few exceptions, see: With or Without You (2010) by Partha Sarathi Basu, Love Over Coffee (2010) by Amrit N. Shetty and Chocolate Guitar Momos (2011) by Kenny Deori Basumatary. These male authored narratives, although stories of ‘romance’ (in various guises), have less emphasis on the female protagonist as they are told from the male perspective. Today’s canon of chick lit might be considered alongside female narratives that have been published earlier in the history of writing in English in India. The work of Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shama Futehally, Temsula Ao, Nisha da Cunha, Kamala Markandaya as well as other women writers with recent novels in publication such as Jaishree Misra and Manju Kapur, all have engaged with female narratives. Lau (2006) writes of the emotional and domestic territories which are so often explored in the fiction of these writers, stating: ‘their writings frequently include detailed descriptions of the interior spaces of home, the negotiation of roles and hierarchies, and the emotional lives played out against a background of the bedroom and the kitchen’ (Lau 2006, p. 1098). This sentiment is echoed in Deshpande’s words when she states:

Yes, I did and I do write about women. Most of my writing comes out of my intense and long suppressed feelings about what it is to be a woman in our society, it comes out of the experience of the difficulty of playing the different roles enjoined on me by society, it comes out of the knowledge that I am something more and something different from the sum total of these roles. My writing comes out of my consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman. All this makes my writing very clearly women’s writing. (Bhalla 2006, p. 1)

This position taken by Deshpande is useful in setting a benchmark by which we might consider post-millennial chick lit in English from India. As [Section 3.1] will go on to demonstrate, the narratives of post-millennial chick lit, like Deshpande’s works, also explore ‘what it is to be a woman in our society ’and to further quote Deshpande: ‘the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman’ (Bhalla 2006, p. 1). Anita Desai’s work has also often interrogated ‘what it is to be a woman in our society’, to take Deshpande’s words. Desai’s novel Where Shall We Go This Summer? was first published in 1975 and is an intense story of Sita, who struggles with the monotonous life of her married, middle-class existence. One of the most striking scenes in the novel is when Sita, seven months pregnant, prepares to leave for an island, Manori, which she knew as a young girl. Her husband warns that the journey to the island is too difficult; he considers the monsoon’s raging heat and the boat ride across the monsoon sea at seven months pregnant as out of the question. Sita believes that the island can work miracles and that the madness of the everyday that she has been observing for so long now, can disappear if only she can make it to Manori. Sita is terrified to bring her fifth child into the world and she is at odds with her husband, who she claims, has no idea of her suffering: “But you were always so pleased about the babies, Sita, ”he said, closing his fists, unclosing them, uncertainly. “They always pleased you. ” “ I’m not pleased, I’m frightened, ”she hissed through her teeth. “Frightened.” “Why? Why? ” he spoke gently. “Everything will go well. I thought it grows easier and easier.” “It’s not easier. It’s harder –harder. It’s unbearable,” she wept. (Desai 1982/2001, p. 32) The analysis of the new chick lit fiction contrasts the narratives of Deshpande, Desai and others against the post millennial chick lit narratives of Kala, Chauhan, Jain and Vadya. What remains in these new narratives is certainly questions of being a woman in society and ‘playing the different roles enjoined [. . .] by society’, as Deshpande writes, but what we might speculate as ‘different ’ in the new narratives of post-millennial chick lit is the decision-making processes that the female protagonists face. Chapter 2 has narrated how the lives of women in India today can play out and Sophie Das in Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009) is one such example. The character of Aisha in Kala’s chick lit novel Almost Single (2007) examined here, is another such protagonist, both women characters finding themselves alone in Indian urban centres, with an independent working life, a group of friends and a boyfriend. In these novels, as with other chick lit narratives, it is the decision-making processes around the lives of these female protagonists that create a marked difference from the narratives of Desai or Deshpande. Both Hasan’s ‘Sophie’ and Kala’s ‘Aisha’ face moments in their lives when they stand back and ask what decisions they have taken and why. What is it that these characters want in their lives and how will they achieve it? Perhaps the best example of this is Kala’s ‘Aisha’ when, faced with the man she loves, who is handsome, successful, independent and wealthy, and moreover, who has asked Aisha to marry him, Aisha’s response is not ‘yes’ but rather, a request to spend time together so that they might know each other better. Aisha’s position here foregrounds the independence of decision-making that shapes many of the female characters found in the chick lit narratives of post-millennial fiction.

III. De-centring the Cricket World through IPL Crick Lit Narratives

In 2008, the Twenty20 cricket league was launched through the Indian Premier League (IPL), a professional league for Twenty20 cricket (see Shyam Balasubramanian and Vijay Santhanam, 2011, for a historical account of these developments) and it was this inauguration of the IPL which catapulted cricket into the popular domain. Chris Rumford and Stephen Wagg (2010) write that the IPL has brought about the realization that ‘cricket is now a global sport.’ (2010, p. 3) Notably, the formation of the IPL was chosen over a league of the altogether slower game of Test cricket. Although Test cricket has traditionally anchored international cricket to London, this association is increasingly tenuous given the globalization of the game and the physical relocation of cricket’s headquarters from Lord’s, England to Dubai in 2005 (Dominic Malcolm, 2014, p. 125).


[…]


It is evident that the IPL pushed the organization and the playing of cricket into a different mode, what Rumford (2010) speaks of as ‘postwestern’ (see above quote). The IPL, although influential through its media, celebrity and consumption potential is just as powerful in its (increasing) directives on the game of cricket itself. Rumford (2010) illustrates how the rise of Indian cricket has highlighted the fact that there is no one single global modernity and that we are have been alerted to ‘the emergence of a new East capable of shaping global affairs, previously seen as the preserve of the West’ (2010, p. 274). As I have argued elsewhere (Dawson Varughese 2012, 2013), post-millennial fiction in English from India has been involved in a similar shift, an emergence of new fiction, forging new literary directions, the control of which has previously been ‘the preserve of the West’. In this vein, the emergence of post-millennial Indian fiction in English reinforces Rumford’s argument set out in the quote below as this fiction too is also involved in redesigning the way the market is negotiated and played. Rumford (2010) points out that:

over the past two decades or so cricket has been postwesternized, not only in terms of the administration of the game (the ICC) shifting eastwards and the economic balance of power residing in the subcontinent but importantly in terms of the development of the on-field game and the way it is played. (2010, p. 275)

Crick Lit echoes this sentiment through its particular narratives as well as through the Indian domestic publishing industry and its markets.


[…]


As I have articulated elsewhere (Dawson Varughese, 2013, 2014, 2015c), many Indian novels in English are published ‘for sale in India only’ and the West knows little of what India is writing and reading as it relies on the books that make it to its shores, which are far from representative of the Indian writing in English (IWE) scene as a whole.


[…]


To further draw on Rumford’s sentiment above, Indian fiction in English like cricket is directing the manner in which the game is played and, in turn, de-centering the cricket world in both game and related cultural productions.

Works cited

Adiga, A. (2016) Selection Day , London: Picador.

—— (2011) Last Man in Tower , London: Atlantic Books.

—— (2008) The White Tiger , London: Atlantic Books, New Delhi: HarperCollins India.

Ahmad, O. (2010) Jimmy the Terrorist , New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books India.

—— (2008) The Storyteller’s Tale , New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

Arudpragasam, A. (2016) The Story of a Brief Marriage , New York: Flatiron Books.

Banerjee Divakaruni, C. (2008) The Palace of Illusions, New York: Picador.

—— (2002) The Vine of Desire , London: Abacus.

—— (1999) Sister of My Heart , Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan.

Casanova, P. (2007) The World Republic of Letters (translated by M.B. Debevoise), Cambridge, USA, London, UK: Harvard University Press.

Chandra, V. (2007) Sacred Games , London: Faber and Faber.

—— (1997) Love and Longing in Bombay , London: Faber and Faber.

Dawson Varughese, E. (2016) Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Receptions of ‘Weird’ Narratives, London, New Delhi: Routledge.

—— (2013) Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English , London: Bloomsbury.

—— (2012) Beyond the Postcolonial: World Englishes Literature , Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Joseph, A. (2016) The Living , London: Fourth Estate.

—— (2012) Another Country , London: Fourth Estate.

—— (2010) Saraswati Park , London: Fourth Estate.

Joseph, M. (2010) Serious Men , Noida: HarperCollins India.

Kandasamy, M. (2017) When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife , London: Atlantic Books.

—— (2014) The Gypsy Goddess , London: Atlantic Books.

Kapoor, D. (2014) A Bad Character , London: Jonathan Cape.

Kapur, M. (2011) Custody , London: Faber and Faber.

—— (2008) The Immigrant , New Delhi: Random House.

—— (2006) Home , New Delhi: Random House.

—— (2003) A Married Woman , New Delhi: Roli Books, IndiaInk.

—— (1998) Difficult Daughters , New Delhi: Penguin India.

Khair, T. (2011) ‘The Folded Earth, By Anuradha Roy’, Independent , 18 February.

Lahiri, J. (2013) The Lowland , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Random House.

—— (2008) Unaccustomed Earth , New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

—— (2003) The Namesake , Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

—— (1999) Interpreter of Maladies , Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Menon, A. (2015) Half of What I Say , New Delhi: Bloomsbury India.

Mukherjee, B. (2011) Miss New India , Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

—— (2004) The Tree Bride, New York: Theia.

—— (2002) Desirable Daughters, New York: Hyperion.

Mukherjee, N. (2014) The Lives of Others , London: Chatto and Windus.

—— (2010) A Life Apart , London: Corsair/Constable and Robinson.

Narayanan, P. (2012) What Are You Reading? The World Market and Indian Literary Production, London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge.

Roy, A. (2015) Sleeping On Jupiter , London: MacLehose Press.

Suri, M. (2013) The City of Devi: A Novel , New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

—— (2008) The Age of Shiva , New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

—— (2001) The Death of Vishnu , New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Thayil, J. (2017) The Book of Chocolate Saints , New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.

—— (2012) Narcopolis , London: Faber and Faber.

Tripathi, A. (2013) The Oath of the Vayuputras , Chennai: Westland, Ltd.

—— (2011) The Secret of the Nagas , Chennai: Westland, Ltd.

—— (2010) The Immortals of Meluha , Chennai: Westland, Ltd.

Usha, K. R. (2010) Monkey-Man , New Delhi: Penguin India.

 

Sections of this essay have appeared as:
1. Dawson Varughese, E. “Indian Fiction in English.” The Routledge Companion to 21st century fiction, eds. R. Eaglestone and D. O’Gorman, Routledge, pp. 180-189.
2. Dawson Varughese, E. “Chick Lit.” from ‘Style in World Englishes Literature: Battle for Bittora (2010) by Anuja Chauhan’,  Reading New India, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 697-698.
3. Dawson Varughese, E. “De-centring the Cricket World through IPL Crick Lit Narratives.” South-Asian Fiction in English: contemporary transformations, ed. Alex Tickell, Palgrave, 2016.
 
Sections 4-6 to be continued in Part Two.
Jun 24
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The Ghost of Meaning | G.S. Sharat Chandra

By Poetry No Comments

Between immense bricks

someone’s applause from an upstairs

reminds me of a face

in a grocery store,

the name I wrote

on the back of a receipt

 

The parking meters stick out

their expired tongues

a frosted pick-up purrs

in its iridescent fume

catching up with its other

ghost of meaning

 

In the blink of intersections

I look deep into mirrors,

my breath leaning

on their numbered frames

in search of a door

the rim of a cobbled face

G.S. Sharat Chandra. The Ghost of Meaning, Confluence Press, 1978
Published with permission from Jane Chandra.
Read G.S. Sharat Chandra on IWE Online
Critical Biography
High RoofWill This Forest
Jun 24
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Will This Forest | G.S. Sharat Chandra

By Poetry No Comments

constantly denying

i’m having the animals

inside asking am i

 

proud of this state

over them hungry

and hurt they hide

 

in the dark of

the arteries quietly

dying—

 

what if i stopped

denying with the animals

already gone

 

can i turn to

this forest of

softness to feed me

G.S. Sharat Chandra. Will This Forest. Morgan Press, 1969.
Published with permission from Jane Chandra.
Read G.S. Sharat Chandra on IWE Online
Critical Biography
High RoofThe Ghost of Meaning
Jun 20
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G.S. Sharat Chandra | Graziano Krätli

By Critical Biography No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Krätli, Graziano. “G. S. Sharat Chandra.” Indian Writing In English Online, 20 June 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/g-s-sharat-chandra/ .

Chicago:
Krätli, Graziano. “G. S. Sharat Chandra.” Indian Writing In English Online. June 20, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/g-s-sharat-chandra/.

G.S. Sharat Chandra (1935‒2000) was—in his own words—“born to prosperity” in the small village of Nanjangud [Nanjanagudu], in the southern state of Karnataka (Vasudeva and Bahri 9). His father was a criminal lawyer, and this affected his studies and career prospects. After attending law schools in Pune and Bengaluru, he reluctantly entered the legal profession, worked as probation officer in a detention home and trade union representative for tea and coffee plantations, while reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, Frost, Pound and other modernists, and “secretly planning to leave the country and pursue a literary life” (Vasudeva and Bahri 9). The pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps was strong, but the pull of poetry was stronger, although it would take a New World to gain the upper hand. In 1963 Chandra left India for the United States, officially to pursue advanced degrees in English and law, but secretly hoping for a literary career. There, he first pursued an M.S. in English from the State University of New York at Oswego, then moved to the Osgoode Hall Law School, in Toronto, where he earned an L.L.M. (with a specialisation in labour law) in 1966. Unable to secure a job as a corporate lawyer, after one year of teaching in a law school in Canada, Chandra applied and was admitted to the newly-established International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, eventually transferring to the Program in Creative Writing (commonly known as Iowa Writers’ Workshop), from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in poetry in 1968. Soon after, he joined the faculty at Iowa Wesleyan College (now Iowa Wesleyan University), where he launched the little magazine Kamadhenu; then moved to Washington State University in 1972, and eventually to the University of Missouri‒Kansas City, where he was a Professor of English until his premature death in 2000.

Chandra started writing while a student in India, publishing his first poems in a college magazine and local newspapers, but the content of his first volume of verse, published in Calcutta while he was living in Iowa, already reflects his equal distance from both his native and his adoptive country, while laying the foundations of that “Third Country” that he will build slowly, book after book and poem after poem, over the next three decades. With regard to his first and second country, Chandra’s concern as a poet is not to distance himself from either, but rather to gauge, define, negotiate, and appreciate the underlying distance, and in so doing to understand what this means for his multiple interdependent selves—as a creative writer and academic, son and father, husband and lover, Indian and American, alien and naturalised citizen.

In the case of India, this view from afar focuses on petty politicians and bureaucrats, poverty, superstition and corruption, an entire social system, and forms of belief that are antiquated yet deeply rooted and even effective in their own way. Its bitter realism is often sharpened by sarcasm, but of the type that reveals the ambiguous, dispassionate feelings of the expatriate rather than the immediate, first-hand concerns and frustrations of the resident. However, inside this “nation where death / Is a blessing to the dead and the living”—as he writes in “Matrudesh” (from Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems), one of his earliest and harshest “Indian poems”— family relations and familial affections represent a more private country, one that is much harder to keep at an emotional or intellectual distance. In such cases, remembrance and dream, irony or satire are better suited to overcome the sense of loss that separation—or distance in space or time—always inevitably evoke.

Irony, satire, and sarcasm dominate the poems that trace the expatriate’s or the immigrant’s progress in America (an experience he further explored in his short story collection Sari of the Gods). A men’s room in a filling station evokes a post-scarcity paradise, while a resort in Bermuda offers an illustrative catalog of racial inequality, in which whiteness in its different shades (pink beaches and skin, green waves and golf links) is counterpointed by the monochromatic presence of colored staff:“BLACK SHOESHINE BOY! / Black coach driver / Black pub waiter / Black doorman” (“The Visit”, Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems, 7) . Through his relocations from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and back to the Midwest, Chandra navigated and responded to the dispersive enigma of the American Province, a geographically diverse yet culturally and intellectually uniform landscape, as different from India as from New York or Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. This landscape and its typical locales and characters (bars, gas stations, motels, highways, summer camps, waitresses, young pacifists, partygoers, innocents abroad) represents a ground bass running throughout his poetry, with the occasional recurrence or repetition of emblematic figures or situations stressing the overwhelming identity and banality of the overall picture. An example of this approach is the short poem “At the Bar” (in Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems), which is reprinted (partially) in Aliens (1986) with the title “At a Bar in Tucson”, and then again in Family of Mirrors (1993) as “At an Iowa City Bar”—the location changes from one collection to the other, but the drunk who “hasn’t been as far east as detroit” yet “sits talking about zen / in his cool and detached style” remains the same, and his perdurance reveals a quasi-mythological tenacity of character.

More original and fascinating, perhaps, are the poems in which the anxiety of foreignness and assimilation, and the dilemmas of exile, expatriation and immigration, are expressed in elliptical and imaginative ways, as in two short poems that form a sort of diptych in Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems. In “hand”, a sheet of paper questions the intentions of the author who is about to insert “her” in the typewriter roller:

 

as I put my entire life under

you to be rolled spaced shifted

can i trust you with clear intent

 

are you certain that your inky fingers

will not grapple with me tear me apart?

 

can i be sure while you mark me

all over my white body

that you do not pause to get mad

 

and crush me into a ball?

 

Hints of violence, dominance and submission through mechanical or manual actions suggest a process of acculturation and subjection that operates, regularly and systematically, on a larger, indeed a collective, scale. In the more cheerful, optimistic, and almost cartoonish “2 Questions” (reprinted as “Questions” in April in Nanjagud), the once innocent and vulnerable sheet of paper has been turned into a typed page, “her” virginal white body not grappled by inky fingers but permanently marked by the blackness of inked type. A land has become a country—no longer an open space but a coveted destination—and a stage has been set for the action to take place (in the first half of the poem) and (in the second) for the two interrelated questions to be posed.

If words

Could get up

And walk away

From the page,

Would they

In their blackness

Find a shape?

And you, my dear page,

In your emptiness,

Would you sing?

 

In this case, issues of racial and cultural identity (represented by “blackness” and “shape”, respectively)–immigration, representation, and prosperity–are subtly yet eloquently intertwined. In fact, we could superimpose this poem on the previously quoted “The Visit” (in Bharata Natyam Dancer), and compare the “blackness” of the typed words with the black staff at the Bermuda resort (or with immigrants, aliens or persons of colour in general), and imagine how their disaffection and departure (if they “could get up and walk away”) would result in a significant loss, both quantitative (“in your emptiness”) and qualitative (“would you sing?”), for the impagination of the country.

With Offsprings of Servagna (1975), Chandra approached classical Kannada poetry as a source of inspiration rather than a matter of translation, literal or otherwise. Possibly inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Śiva, published only two years before, it provides a vivid selection of vacanas (“sayings”), or “poems under the influence” of the 16th-century poet and philosopher Sarvajña, without the scholarly apparatus (and authority) of Ramanujan’s text, or the linguistically and culturally innovative approach showed by Arun Kolatkar, in his rendition of Marathi devotional poetry, or Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in his versions of Prākrit love poetry and especially in his Songs of Kabir.

Eventually, Chandra’s American life rewarded him with a tenured professorship, a loving family, a house in the suburbs, and a solid reputation as an award-winning internationally published poet. But that is just one side of the picture. On the other, darkening over time, his poetry reflects the various and progressive stages of disillusionment, discontent, estrangement and eventually alienation. From the mid-1970s onward, the word “alien” appears repeatedly—often in combination with concerns about death and dying—in the text and titles of individual poems (“For All Aliens”, “If You Die Alien”, “Aliens”, “An Alien’s Day in Kansas”), as well as in the title of a chapbook consisting almost entirely of “American poems”. The only exception is “The Return of Gandhi”, a cameo portrait of the poet as a lapsed vegetarian who, after a Texan meal of roasted goat kid, “cooked beyond / all animal identity”, has a dream in which “Gandhi crouched inside my stomach / putting the goat back together”. “The Return of Gandhi” returns in the next collection, Immigrants of Loss (1993), where it concludes a brief, middle section of Indian poems. Here, a comparison between “Pavement Sleepers, Calcutta” and previous “poverty poems” such as “Beggar” (from Heirloom, 1982) and especially “Matrudesh” (from Chandra’s first collection), will show how the poet has toned down his approach, turning his accusatory finger to more atmospheric views. Yet India pops up, literally and unexpectedly, early on in the collection (outside the boundary of its dedicated section), in the form of a baby elephant sorting out rejection letters in the poet’s wastepaper basket.

If Chandra’s poetry (but also his correspondence with fellow poets in India) reveals an increasing sense of estrangement and alienation as an expatriate and an “alien”, these feelings further extended to his achievement as a poet, especially one whose popularity and success relied to a significant degree on his belonging to, and identification with, a specific genre or group. The South Asian label, indeed, provided a certain amount of recognition and currency, but in the long run it also nursed the frustrating realisation that an anglophone Indian poet in America is not exactly the same as—or not quite on the same level of—an American poet.

 

Acknowledgements:

I thank Jane Chandra and her Family for additional information and clarifications about G.S. Sharat Chandra’s biography, as well as for granting permission to quote from his work.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry

Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968 & 1975.

Will This Forest. Milwaukee: Morgan Press, 1969.

April in Nanjagud. London: London Magazine Editions, 1971.

Reasons for Staying. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1971.

Once or Twice. Sutton, Surrey: Hippopotamus Press, 1974.

Offsprings of Servagna. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1975.

The Ghost of Meaning. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1978.

Heirloom. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Aliens. Safford, Arizona: Gila Review 6, Fall 1986.

Immigrants of Loss. Frome, Somerset: Hippopotamus Press, 1993.

Family of Mirrors. Kansas City, Missouri: BkMk Press, 1993.

Fiction

Sari of the Gods: Stories. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1998.

 

References

Lawrence, Keith. “G.S. Sharat Chandra”.  Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 59-69.

Sturr, Robert D. “G.S. Sharat Chandra.”  Asian American Short Story Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 39-44.

Vasudeva, Mary, and Deepika Bahri. “’Swallowing for Twenty Years / the American Mind and Body’: An Interview with G.S. Sharat Chandra.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (Fall 1997), pp.9–17.

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They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country’ | Imtiaz Dharker

By Poetry No Comments

When I can’t comprehend
why they’re burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can’t bear to look
at god’s own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they’ll catch on at once
they’ll pin it down
they’ll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they’ll cluck their tongues
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I’m black
or hear I’m gay
they won’t be surprised,
they’ll purse their lips
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they’ll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
‘She doesn’t know any better,’
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren’t able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.

But from where we are
it doesn’t look like a country,
it’s more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That’s where I live.
And I’ll be happy to say,
‘I never learned your customs.
I don’t remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.’

Imtiaz Dharker. “They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country.'” I Speak for the Devil, Bloodaxe Books, 2001.
Published with permission from Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com.

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