Published on 23 May 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online, 23 May 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Chicago:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 23, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Amit Chaudhuri is an acclaimed Indian author of novels, short stories, poetry and essays. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), England, held the title of Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in England and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India. Chaudhuri is also an accomplished Hindustani classical vocalist, and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the eclectic strands of raga, blues, and jazz, with a variety of other musical traditions. In 2017 he received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal for his contribution to Indian classical music. Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1962 and grew up in Bombay/ Mumbai, in India. In Bombay, he attended the Elphinstone College and then moved to England for his undergraduate education. He first studied at the University College, London and for his graduate studies went to the Balliol College, Oxford. His doctoral dissertation was on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. He was later Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and received the Harper Wood Studentship for English Literature and Poetry from St. John’s College, Cambridge. He has been a regular contributor of poetry, fiction and reviews to prestigious publications such as The Guardian, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and the Granta magazine. He is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth (2017). Among his other published works are collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as the nonfiction work Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013), a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, called D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (with a preface by Tom Paulin, in 2003), and a unique work that combines elements of memoir and practical and cultural criticism of Indian classical music, Finding the Raga (2021). He has also been the well-appreciated editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), which offers a rich selection of works both originally in English and translated to English. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He has also been a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. His music has been regularly featured on radio and television.
FICTION
Chaudhuri’s longer fictional prose, he himself agrees, is influenced by poetry. He began as a poet, and confesses to only “by accident” stepping into the shoes of a novelist, in an interview with Fernando Galván (1999). Alice Truax, in a review, says about Chaudhuri’s novels, that he is “less interested in one particular story than in all the bits and pieces of ordinary life” (The New York Times ). Chaudhuri believes that, “the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer . . . would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a city, rather than a good story. . . The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist” (A Strange and Sublime Address 48-9). Real Time: Stories and Reminiscences (2002), his collection of short stories, explores fictional meditations on the artistic process, and his characters are often poets, writers and artists. The short stories are marked by a terseness of style and bring out the master miniaturist in him.
Chaudhuri’s first novel A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) has a ten-year-old boy protagonist, Sandeep, at the centre. The novel describes his two visits to Calcutta, to his Chhotomama’s (maternal uncle) house, from Bombay, where he lives with his parents. His next novel, Afternoon Raag (1993) is about a young English Literature student at Oxford, torn between two women and two spaces of home (Bombay/Calcutta) and exile (Oxford). Chaudhuri’s third novel, Freedom Song (1998) concerns two related households in Calcutta in 1993, against a backdrop of social, religious and economic unrest. A New World (2000) is the story of Jayojit Chatterjee, an American-Indian academic with a son and a broken marriage. His fifth novel, The Immortals (2009) is a poignant portrayal of the relationship between Shyamji, a classical music teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student, Nirmalya. Odysseus Abroad (2014), more a mood piece than a novel, follows the course of a single day in the life of Ananda, an undergraduate student in London and his uncle. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (2017) is an account of the narrator (also a novelist) Amit Chaudhuri’s visit to Bombay, the city where he grew up.
James Wood, in his The New Yorker review of Odysseus Abroad, talks about the “measured, subtle, light-footed fiction” of Chaudhuri (2021). According to Wood, one of the pleasures of reading Chaudhuri comes from how little he forces on his readers – “there is no obvious plot, no determined design, no faked ‘conflict’ or other drama” (n.p.). It is, as if, his novels can be placed within the tradition of the lyrical novel, with notable predecessors such as Herman Hesse, Andre Gide and Virginia Woolf. Traditional novels are usually associated with storytelling, and a reader expects characters to be involved in action and dialogue in such a genre. On the other hand, lyrical poetry is plotless and suggests the expression of feelings or themes in musical or pictorial pattern. The lyrical novel is a hybrid form, combining essential features from both these genres. Ralph Freedman, in his study of lyrical novels, talks about how it “transcends the causal and temporal movement of narrative within the framework of fiction” (1). In so doing, it often frustrates a reader habituated to more traditional standards of a novel with a plot and character development. The symbolic patterns, borrowed from the lyric, seem “antithetical to the very method on which narrative is built” (Freedman 1). Unlike conventional novels, where the “experiencing self” is separated from the “world the experiences are about” (Freedman 1), Chaudhuri’s protagonists often abandon their traditional roles, substituting perception for action, and self-portrait for an external reality. His novels, thus, have always had the abstract beauty of a lyric novel, a rare combination of narrative and imagery. The narrator of Afternoon Raag is typical of the genre, his mind reacting to the colours in his teacher’s room, the “furniture browns and wallpaper purples and magnolias and greys, the colours that create, in afternoon light or evening shadow, the abidingness of an English interior” (182). His other novels also celebrate the beautiful ordinariness of everyday life and refuse to be tied down by a plotline and a causal/temporal structure. A Strange and Sublime Address has Sandeep, a boy-narrator with a keen eye for the quotidian who describes what he sees and hears on his visits to Calcutta. Chhotomama takes the children out for a walk in the Calcutta lanes, lined by houses giving out “smells of fish and boiled rice” (48). When the family drives through the city, past the bridge in Dhakuria, past Gol Park, past Gariahat, past Rashbehari Avenue, into Chowringhee, and finally to Park Street, Sandeep equates himself with a bird or a fish. Just as a bird or fish could “float in their chosen element”, Sandeep thought driving was the “only human equivalent of floating, of letting one’s legs rest and setting one’s body adrift” (15). The book is the winner of the 1991 Betty Trask Award. Sandeep, the narrator, is perpetually delighted with what Alice Truax in the NYT calls “the enduring allure of everyday” (n.p.). The encounters of the Bombay boy with Calcutta and the Bengali language are symptomatic of contested issues of identity, exile and home that the novel grapples with. But instead of locating these questions in a magic realist framework of a mythical India as Rushdie had earlier done, Chaudhuri places them within the domestic and the familial spaces. The city of Calcutta and his uncle’s home serve as sites of comfort and refuge for Sandeep, with their healing, therapeutic powers. Whereas in Bombay, “alone in the big apartment on the twenty-third floor, he was like Adam in charge of paradise . . . he was too much in the foreground. He hated being in the foreground” (A Strange and Sublime Address 27), in Calcutta, his experiences are cushioned by an extended middle-class family’s presence, with Chhotomama, Shonamama, Chhordimoni and the elderly couple providing a circle of protection. His father is depicted as a busy executive in corporate Bombay, who “never had the time to go anywhere”, while his uncle had more “ordinary” problems of everyday life (7). And yet, Sandeep “deserts” his more affluent parents “shamelessly” to the comforts of the Grand Hotel in Calcutta and spends the “days and nights at the old house with his cousins” (83). Purvi Shah writes about the novelist’s trait of documenting the tensions between the upper middle class and the lower middle class in a city that is witnessing significant economic changes:
Thus, while Chaudhuri examines South Asian history and post-Independence India, he does so not by charting the Independence Movement or by looking directly at partition but rather by presenting contemporary issues stemming from changes in everyday life as a result of economic liberalization and cultural transformation. (33)
In Afternoon Raag, where the rich psychological life and the romantic dilemmas of an international Bengali student at Oxford are explored, the changing landscapes of both Bombay and Calcutta are again captured by the author. While in the lane the narrator lived in, time was measured by “the conclusions and beginnings of phases of domestic routine”, on the main road, “which was only one among a family of such main roads that had joined hands to create Bombay—not the Bombay people lived in, but the one into which people emerged every day from their houses—there were cake-shops, video ‘parlours’, ‘burger-inns’ (221). Where the oldest cottages used to be, apartment buildings with “matchbox-like flats” came up, and Sindhi Hindus moved into predominantly Christian neighbourhoods. Chaudhuri compares the “floating” migrant labour community who worked at these new construction sites of the city with the Oxford student community, bringing along with them “the quality of a faraway time and place in the area” (Afternoon Raag 242). He gently stresses on the multiculturalism and the hybridity of a post-globalised world. Oxford becomes a representative composite city, and is seen through the eyes of an “outsider” Indian student, but Bombay too. On Cowley Road, in East London, the student-narrator encounters pockets of Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants. In this world of movement and flux, music has a significant role in rooting individuals, in creating a sense of identity, in preserving and transferring cultural memory and in producing a sensuous geography. When the narrator remembers his guru and Sohanlal, in the distant land of Oxford, he claims:
But when a Rajasthani sings Maand, or a Punjabi sings Sindhi Bhairavi, he returns to his homeland, which for him is a certain landscape influenced by seasons, a certain style of dressing and speaking, a web of interrelationships and festive occasions. (Afternoon Raag 258) (emphasis added)
These tensions between home and exile, belonging and non-belonging, come out in Chaudhuri’s fiction in an imagistic, impressionistic Modernist manner. He states though in an interview that he is not interested in “the disintegration of self” common to the modernists, but in the “dispersal of culture from the self into the various sides” (Galván 45). Chaudhuri sees himself as somewhat of an anthropologist, keenly observing the “drift and flow of street life” (Galván 45). In doing so, he presents snapshots of the common rituals and rhythms of daily life in his lean, elegant prose.
And though Chaudhuri is well-known to readers across South Asia, the UK and the United States, reviewers such as Barbara Liss have complained about how difficult it is to relate to his characters who seem to have “drifted into a coma”, and wander through his stories, much like “J. Alfred Prufrocks”. Though “the charms of a plotless book” have little appeal to her, she sees why the exhausting, middle class life in Calcutta may find a representation in the “lethargy” that seems a “permanent condition in Chaudhuri’s fiction”. Liss also points out the absence of detailed female characters in Chaudhuri’s novels, stating that in A New World, “We hear little of Amala, which is too bad because, despite her marital perfidy, she is Chaudhuri’s most likable character” ((Houston (TX) Chronicle). Jenny Offill, too, agrees this to be Chadhuri’s weakness, with Jayojit’s mother so self-effacing, that she is almost rendered invisible. Offill also suggests in her review that Chaudhuri lacks any semblance of drama or narrative tension in his “strangely static” novels. And though notable predecessors such as Proust, Woolf or Beckett have foregrounded the interior lives of their characters above conventional plots, she is disparaging of Chaudhuri’s plotlessness: “Chaudhuri, however, has done something much more peculiar; he has stripped his book of emotion as well as incident, leaving behind nothing but mechanical gestures and surface pleasantries. The result is a carefully written novel strangely devoid of life” (The Washington Post).
In a Guardian interview with Sophie Harrison, Chaudhuri speaks of how he fits into a tradition, “of giving a great deal of importance to space, of looking at time”, a trait which he thinks is not too valued by most of the contemporary middle class readers of India, who are “obsessed with getting things done, with making things happen” and are far from the daydreaming quality of the poetics of space and time one encounters often in him (Harrison, n.p.). Sumana Roy, in her Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Chaudhuri’s novels, tries to understand the reasons why he is not a popular anthologised novelist:
Eng-Lit pedagogy, historically grounded in seriousness, beginning as it did in England by borrowing professors from departments of divinity and law, continues to be in the service of the nation, the race, the marginalized. Chaudhuri’s writing, on the other hand, is grounded in explorations of the sensuous, the emotional, the affective—it refuses to give any of the old professorial subjects center stage or speak about them in a stentorian voice. (“The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri”)
And despite this, he retains in his fictional oeuvre a disbelief in the overtly political, and revels in the mundane, the intimate and the slow:
I believe that the arts, and art, and writing, are basically forms of addiction – you go to them again, and you read it again, re-reading. And you’re not re-reading for what the story tells you, for the plot, or illumination. This is not the addiction of what happens next. (Interview with Harrison, 2009)
NON-FICTION
The tenor of Chaudhuri’s non-fiction is less abstruse than that of his fiction. And while his fiction refuses to be easily categorised, because as Sumana Roy puts it in her Mint essay, “he has refused to be subsumed by the postcolonial machine or be an apologist for the state-of-the-nation novel” (“Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer”), his non-fiction has a more urgent function of literary activism. It constantly engages with the force of the literary, interrogating the roles of both academia and the publishing industry at a particular moment in history. His doctoral dissertation on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry was published as a monograph titled D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, by Clarendon Press in 2003. The work sees Lawrence as an “outsider” figure, removed from other Modernists and Romantic ancestors, and shows how his poetry interrogates even traditional notions of “Englishness”. The book, for its purposes, uses theoretical paradigms from Derrida and Foucault. Terry Eagleton called the work “genuinely groundbreaking and exciting”, and claimed it to be “probably the single best study of Lawrence’s poetry” (“Anti-Humanism”). It is also one of the first times that a post-colonial writer of Chaudhuri’s generation takes up a major canonical writer such as Lawrence, and scrutinises his difference. Chaudhuri’s first major volume of essays Clearing a Space (2008) brought together essays published earlier in LRB and the Times Literary Supplement. In these essays, his major preoccupation is with the state of (Indian) literature in a post-globalised world. He offers his insights about issues ranging from the post-Rushdie novel to the politics of global publishing, from readership to the language of Indian vernacular writing. In the 2001 anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Chaudhuri expresses his worries about the global hype about Rushdie’s writing style, which likely obscures much that is interesting in vernacular and English writing from India. The anthology has writings from Tagore to C.S. Lakshmi, from Urdu to Kannada, and brings to fore a literary activism that marks much of Chaudhuri’s non-fictional canon. In 2014, Chaudhuri began a series of symposiums on “literary activism” to claim a space for the literary that is neglected both by academic conferences and lit-fests. Unlike writers’ retreats which are oasis-like spaces, these symposia are characterised by interaction and dialogue. In a free-market driven world, where the value of literature has radically changed, and which has been affected by the global publishing industry, Chaudhuri and his collaborators seek to discover a robust new critical discourse, outside exhausted paradigms of celebrity authors and book signings. Ashoka University, India has been supporting these annual symposiums since 2018, giving it a fresh visibility. A collection of essays titled Literary Activism, with contributions from the participants of the first symposium was published in 2017, which grappled with these issues. Also, a website www.literaryactivism.com, edited by Chaudhuri came into existence in 2020. A section of this website is titled “Magazine”, in which new writings and art from new authors and practitioners are uploaded, with the express aim of finding fresh voices from unorthodox locations. The Origins of Dislike (2019) is another book that explores similar concerns, where Chaudhuri dismantles figures of the author, the publisher and the reader and bursts some popular myths connected with the writing and reading of literature at the present moment. Chaudhuri discusses how the literary prize such as the Booker has changed from being judged by a panel of well-known novelists to now by politicians and entertainers. The reckoning force that the market is, has come to define what people read and the how and the why of it. His insights into how global capitalism has come to dictate literary tastes and humanistic values are rooted in a Marxist understanding of the publishing market economy. Chaudhuri has also carried forward his activist strain into architectural and urban conservationist campaigns, bringing to attention the need to extend the idea of “heritage” and to preserve the unique urban houses of Calcutta.
Works Cited
Primary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. Three Novels: A Strange and Sublime Address. Heinemann, 1991.
—. Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993.
—. Freedom Song. Picador, 1998.
Secondary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. “Life Sentences.” Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Eagleton, Terry. “Anti-Humanism.” London Review of Books, 5 Feb. 2004, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n03/terry-eagleton/anti-humanism. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Herman Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf. 1963. Princeton UP, 1971.
Galván, Fernando. “On Belonging and Not Belonging: A Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” Wasafiri: Caribbean, Africa, Asian, and Associated Literatures in English, vol. 30, Autumn 1999, pp. 42-50.
Liss, Barbara. “Chaudhuri Excels at Nonadventure.” Houston (TX) Chronicle, 26 Nov. 2000. www.chron.com/life/article/A-New-World-by-Amit-Chaudhuri-2032148.php. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Offill, Jenny. “Life at a Standstill.” The Washington Post, 4 Jan. 2001. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/01/04/life-at-a-standstill/8ea28fa0-3ec3-49fb-9d4c-f9fb56918f33. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Roy, Sumana. “The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2017. www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
—. “Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer.” Mint, 17 Sept. 2016. www.livemint.com/Leisure/pbUc5VKjpS8MglzjF9ADIK/Amit-Chaudhuri-The-writers-writer.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Shah, Purvi. “Amit Chaudhuri.” South Asian Novelists in English: An A to Z Guide. Ed. Jaina C Sanga. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Truax, Alice. “The Allure of the Everyday.” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1999. www.archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/reviews/990328.28truaxt.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Wood, James. “Circling The Subject.” The New Yorker. 27 Apr. 2015. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/circling-the-subject. Accessed 10 Oct. 2021.
Further Readings:
Reviews
Day, John. “Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri Review—Autofiction Examined”. The Guardian, 30 Aug. 2017. www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/friend-of-my-youth-amit-chaudhuri-review. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Eder, Richard. “A Life Like Old Postcards.” The New York Times Book Review. 22 Oct. 2000. www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/reviews/001022.22ederlt.html. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Haas, Felix. “Amit Chaudhuri’s Autofictive Bombay”. World Literature Today, 24 Jul. 2019. www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/amit-chaudhuris-autofictive-bombay-felix-haas. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Interviews
Chaudhuri, Amit. Interview by Anita Sethi. The White Review, March 2013. www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Lakshmi Krishnan. The Oxonian Review, 27 Apr. 2009. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-quiet-rebel/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. “Twenty Questions with Amit Chaudhuri.” Interview. The Times Literary Supplement. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-amit-chaudhuri/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Published on 20 May 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Sundaram, Neeraja. “Atul Gawande (1965-).” Indian Writing In English Online, 20 May 2022, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/atul-gawande-1965-neeraja-sundaram/ .
Chicago:
Sundaram, Neeraja. “Atul Gawande (1965-).” Indian Writing In English Online. May 20, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/atul-gawande-1965-neeraja-sundaram/ .
Atul Gawande poses a stimulating challenge to the biographer. Characterised often by the American media as someone who “wears many hats”, his place in public life is too dynamic to be constrained by labels like “surgeon”, “writer” or “administrator”. Even as he practices surgery at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, he is credited with teaching at Harvard Medical School and inaugurating centres for research and innovation in medicine. His college and medical training in the late eighties and nineties were punctuated by his work in Al Gore’s Senate and the Clinton administration. His work as a writer began almost simultaneously with his surgical practice in the form of bi-weekly posts for the online magazine Slate in 1996. In a Medscape interview, using a characteristically Gawandesque analogy, he finds common ground between producing a column in a periodical and the routine performance of gall-bladder surgery [i]. Both constitute a process of learning before the acquisition of mastery and like any other craft, are made up of conventions and institutions that uphold these. His research and writing, primarily in the field of public health, would influence healthcare policy during Obama’s presidency and earn him a MacArthur grant in 2006. In 2018, he was invited to serve as the CEO of Haven Healthcare, a not-for-profit venture formed through a partnership between American corporate giants Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase – a role he has since stepped down from. In November 2020, he was appointed to the Biden Harris Transition COVID-19 advisory board by the then president-elect Joe Biden. For a student of Indian Writing in English, Gawande’s life and work require a rethinking of what constitutes the work of literary production and the role of the author in our time.
Gawande was born in New York in 1965 to Indian parents who both migrated there to practice medicine. His life story is well-chronicled in the manner of any celebrity. A large volume of his own writing offers vivid detail about his life – his surgical practice, being raised by doctor-parents, his political work and productivity hacks among others. His first three books for instance, Complications (2002), Better (2007) and The Checklist Manifesto (2009), all widely reviewed bestsellers in the American media, build on the minutiae of his medical residency and surgical practice: the challenges of being a doctor in the twenty first century, the very personal struggles of being a parent and negotiating the emotional cost of a high-stress, high-stakes profession. Complications compiled some older pieces written for The New Yorker where Gawande joined as a staff writer in the third year of his surgical residency. Most of the pieces in this book illustrate the autobiographical element that characterises Gawande’s short-form journalism. He offers us an insight into his state of mind as a newly minted doctor on the first day of surgical residency in a chapter titled “Education of a Knife”. Here, Gawande is fumbling, anxious, goofy and unable to make diagnoses or perform simple procedures without consulting senior residents and all the while, several cases are assigned to him. The “real work” that is cut out for him though is to appear to patients “like someone who had not just got his medical diploma the week before. Instead, I was determined to be nonchalant, world-weary, the kind of guy who had seen this sort of thing a hundred times before” (8). This unflattering portrait of Gawande as a novice surgeon allows him to speak of broader and more significant questions about the role of the student-in-training in any medical institution. The conundrum, as Gawande identifies it, is that the physician’s learning curve is a necessary part of medical progress but is at odds with patient safety.
Being Mortal is perhaps the most “revealing” of Gawande’s books, chronicling as it does his experiences with providing care for his ageing parents. This book uses a personal tragedy, the death of Gawande’s father and the struggle to ensure good end-of-life care for him, as the impetus for exploring problems and innovations in elder-care. Much like his own short-form pieces, media portraits of Gawande also follow the style reserved for pop icons and inspirational leaders when narrating details about his daily life. A 2007 New York Times piece titled “Atul Gawande Rocks in the OR” describes his (often self-confessed) love for the operating room by offering readers a glimpse of his surgical performance. “On a recent day”, the article reads, suggesting routine occurrence, “when he took out a gallbladder, two thyroids and what was supposed to be a parathyroid gland but maybe wasn’t, the playlist included David Bowie, Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, Aimee Mann, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, the Decemberists and the Killers” [ii]. Gawande’s team, comprising an anaesthesiologist, the OR nurse and the medical instruments in-charge, the reporter observes, indulged in head-bobbing, toe-tapping and finger-drumming. This fascinating visual insight into Gawande’s workday, replete with a mention of how a copy of Sylvia Plath’s “The Surgeon at 2 AM” sits by his desk, seeks to transform our notions about doctors as much as writers.
Gawande’s writing career lies at the intersection of several interesting cultural phenomena. The first has to do with the public perception of medical practice and the bearing this has, if at all, on literary ambition and success. While the notion of a celebrity-author and a shrewd management of one’s image and the reading public can be traced back to the nineteenth-century in England and America, the doctor-as-polymath or adored public figure is a late twentieth-century phenomena. In his famous 1818 “Cockney-School Attack” against John Keats’ then recently published poetry, the critic John Gibson Lockhart would sardonically advise it was “a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet” [iii]. The review derives great merriment from using medical metaphors to characterise Keats’ lack of poetic talent as an “affliction” and reserves disdain for the idea that a person could be both a surgeon (Keats was a surgeon’s apprentice at the time) and a poet. Another famous instance from later in the nineteenth-century is the public perception of Arthur Conan Doyle, who earned public accolades as a writer rather than as a surgeon. Doyle’s detective stories, historical and political writing would impact the training and practice of English police detectives and earn him a knighthood. Here too, the literary career had little to do with medical training. Chekov too reflects in his letters that the idea of practicing two professions is perceived as unusual, especially those as demanding as literature and medicine. But Chekov writes as a doctor that “literature is my mistress” and that neither profession is harmed by his infidelity. Does Gawande have anything in common with his doctor-writer forebears?
He writes because he is a surgeon, not despite it. Speaking as a resident-in-training in Complications, he confesses to having “a distinctive vantage on medicine” and being “an insider, seeing everything and a part of everything; yet at the same time you see it anew” (xix-xx). The medical practice is Gawande’s occasion to write, and his body of work is a lens to critically appraise the humaneness, efficiency and relevance of medical science and healthcare. Like his literary forebears, Gawande is an innovator with a keen eye on the conventions of form. Speaking of how he became persuaded to start a Twitter account, he says, “All art is defined by constraints” and that working with 140 characters is akin to the constraints posed by the sonnet form to Shakespeare. Gawande’s membership in the writing profession is also cemented by his own vision and practice of the same. He demystifies the writing process by offering insights into his “idea notebooks” and the trial by fire of his early days as a staff writer for the New Yorker. His work for the magazine allowed for the development of a shrewd sensibility about readership, social media and engaging in healthcare debate. Even as we glimpse a great deal of Gawande’s life, the cornerstone of his short-form pieces and books are the stories of others. Some of these are narrated to him first-hand by his patients, others are narrated by colleagues who share the burden of medical firefighting. The heroes in his stories are not always doctors: they come from several unusual locations like the history of science, the medical laboratory and even other industries like finance, hospitality, and aeronautical engineering. Gawande emerges here as a surgeon who understands his profession through and as storytelling. The interpretative frames he applies to the cases featured in his books, the thick detailing of patients’ characters and the close attention to perspective when he presents a colleague’s experiences show us how the doctor’s literary sensibility is no longer an illicit passion occupying a wholly different sphere. Even as a spokesperson for healthcare reform, Gawande asks difficult questions of medical institutions and practitioners, rather than governments. His writing is rooted in and inseparable from medicine all the while demonstrating that the healthcare worker emerges as a new kind of storyteller.
Gawande’s popularity and success as a public figure and writer are also embedded in the unprecedented cultural appetite for the memoir in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Memoirs that curate an experience of managing and treating illness are an important source of information on the quality of healthcare access and delivery. Other American doctors of Indian origin, of whom Abraham Verghese and Siddhartha Mukherjee deserve notable mention, have also achieved literary fame via their journalistic and fictional writing about the medical profession. While all physician-writers boast a unique style, they essentially contribute to a change in the way problems in healthcare and medicine are discussed in the public sphere. There is, in their writings, an insistence on thickening the stories of people who provide and receive healthcare to ensure a more humane medical practice. This agenda is also what drives the field of Narrative Medicine, inaugurated by Rita Charon in the early 2000s to improve medical education and care. Narrative Medicine as a field mirrors the interdisciplinary training of early practitioners who often held degrees in medicine and the Humanities. Physicians and other healthcare workers, Charon believes, could benefit from the interpretative skills taught by literary studies. “Close reading” as a method is now taught to doctors-in-training, nurses and writers at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine programme to instill attentiveness to individual contexts in the face of for-profit and dehumanising medical systems. Each patient, doctor and healthcare worker has stories to tell, as Gawande’s writing amply illustrates, and sharpening their interpretative skills makes for a more humane practice.
What sets Gawande apart from the best-selling science writers of our time? Rather than a focus on innovations in a particular branch of science, Gawande’s characteristic mode is the search for patterns across knowledge domains and systems of every kind. Consider this extract from The Checklist Manifesto where he “sees” a version of the checklist as a solution to many operational problems in industries that are seemingly unrelated to medicine:
I came away from Katrina and the Builders with a kind of theory: under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgement, but judgement aided – and even enhanced — by procedure.
Having hit on this “theory”, I began to recognise checklists in odd corners everywhere – in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. (79)
A theory of writing (or writing about theories encompassing domains outside medicine) takes Gawande out of the sphere of popular science writing and into the literary. Moreover, references to interlinkages between various industries that may share similar problems and solutions broaden the scope of his readership. What is compelling about what Gawande writes are the cornerstones of several popular genres: detective fiction, medical thriller, self-help, and productivity to name a few. Several of his pieces begin with high-octane action – a nervous intern about to make a mistake in the operating-theatre, a critically wounded patient wheeled into the emergency room, a young child helicoptered away from the site of a drowning accident. There is also a unique vantage point as we witness the routine occurrences of situations necessitating medical intervention. Gawande permits us a view of the operating theatre, specialty departments, doctor’s meetings, laboratory, morgue, examination room and medical performance management systems along with other normally inaccessible locations through which we follow the individual case. There is also the sudden and thrilling dive into the body of the patient. Recounting a colleague’s memory of attending to a stab wound he writes,
He drew the electrified metal tip of the cautery pen along the fat underneath the skin, parting it in a line from top to bottom, then through the fibrous white sheath of fascia between the abdominal muscles. He pierced his way into the abdominal cavity itself and suddenly an ocean of blood burst out of the patient. (2)
There is evocative character-building and a preservation of voice in his stories even in the face of provocative debates about the effectiveness of technological innovations, traditions or ethics in medical practice. In The Checklist Manifesto, while presenting the Indian polio-eradication campaign as a test case for diligence and relentlessness in medical care, he weaves the following portrait of the first patient identified in a 2003 outbreak of the disease: “The index case was an eleven-month-old boy with thick black hair his mother liked to comb forward so that the bangs rimmed his round face. His family lives in the Southern Indian state of Karnataka, in a village called Upparahalla, along the Tungabhadra River” (16). He rarely recounts a case, a diagnosis or innovative practice without offering a glimpse into lives, homes and texture of voice. Gawande also enjoys a taste for the unique and the macabre best illustrated by his pieces about rare conditions like necrotising fasciitis in “The Case of the Red Leg” or the role of superstition in medicine in “Full Moon Friday the 13th” or the mysteries of physical sensations like “The Itch”. Gawande’s work also informs the popular image of healthcare workers and whets a public taste for medical tales evidenced by the enduring appeal of American medical-themed television series like Dr Kildare (1961 – 1966), Emergency! (1972 – 1977), and more recently, Doogie Houser MD (1989 – 1993), House MD (2004 – 2012), the long-running Grey’s Anatomy (2005 – present) and Dhadkan (2002), Kuch Toh Log Kahenge (2011 – 2013) and Sanjivani (2002 – 2005) in India.
In 2014, Gawande was honoured with the Thomas Lewis prize for Science Writing. The prize, established by the Rockerfeller University recognises the “Scientist as Poet”. A brief description of the Prize’s vision for awardees sums up the unique position Gawande occupies in any history of writing: “[The prize] honors the rare individual who bridges both worlds [scientists and writers]—whose voice and vision can tell us about science’s aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, providing not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation”[iv].
Further Reading
Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Picador, 2015.
—. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007. Print.
—. Complications: Notes From the Life of a Young Surgeon. New Delhi: Penguin, 2002. Print.
—. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.
Pollock, Donald. “Physician Autobiography: Narrative and the Social History of Medicine.” Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Ed. Cheryl Mattingly and Linda C. Garro. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 108-127. Print.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Print.
Notes
[i] Topol, Eric J and Atul Gawande (2013), “Atul Gawande on the Secrets of a Puzzle-Filled career”, available at https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/815241
[ii] Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/books/03atul.html
[iii] Available at http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=36160
[iv] The Rockefeller University page on the Lewis Thomas prize, available at https://www.rockefeller.edu/lewis-thomas-prize/
Read Atul Gawande on IWE Online
Being Mortal
Published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
Read Atul Gawande on IWE Online
Critical Biography
Published on 13 May 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Lal, Ananda. “Indian Drama in English.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 May 2022, INDIAN DRAMA IN ENGLISH Ananda Lal – Indian Writing In English (uohyd.ac.in) .
Chicago:
Lal, Ananda. “Indian Drama in English.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 13, 2022. INDIAN DRAMA IN ENGLISH Ananda Lal – Indian Writing In English (uohyd.ac.in) .
Despite noteworthy contributions in recent decades, Indian literature in English remains a fledgling discipline with vast regions of terra incognita lying unmapped, as well as frustrating due to the unavailability of primary material – the books themselves. The absence of a culture of methodical library acquisition in India, compared to the repositories and networks in Europe and North America, the randomness of specific collections, and the haphazard manner in which most of them are stocked and catalogued (if at all), frequently result in the abandonment of projects simply because one cannot locate a rare title essential to one’s work, even after time-consuming and exhaustive searches. Ironically, these missing volumes do not date to a remote past, but to periods closer to us such as the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century.
The field suffers so much from these lacunae that it affects the writing of its authentic history. Many of its trailblazing books published in the early nineteenth century do not survive in our libraries. We may know their titles from secondary sources, but we cannot read them because we cannot trace them. Since many of the authors of these sources could not find them either, substantial misinformation about them circulates in print, recycled by later researchers who rely on those sources without investigating them. Dependable literary histories themselves become questionable: one can cite any number of instances where a scholar has claimed a particular book as a milestone, overlooking earlier ones that had certainly existed, though they may have vanished from our ken. The most celebrated and somewhat debated recent example is The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), rediscovered in the 1990s and thereby automatically pushing back the start of Indian writing in English.
Let us narrow our scope to the area covered in this essay: Indian drama in English. For a long time, following K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s authoritative tome, Indian Writing in English (1962, up to its fifth edition, 1985), readers accepted that the first play in English by an Indian was Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Is This Called Civilization? (1871) [1] . As I have proved in a new anthology [2] , that was not the case, but many recent critical works continue to perpetuate this incorrect information, and sometimes even credit Dutt himself as the translator (he wrote the Bengali original, Ekei ki bale sabhyatā). In fact, my quest for this English rendition—one of those books referred to above that seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth—revealed that it was translated by D. N. (Dwarkanath) Banerjee, certainly not by Dutt [3]. If anyone stumbles upon a copy of this translation anywhere, please let me know.
Meanwhile, Kumudini Mehta’s doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Bombay in 1960, which gained notice much later because it remained unpublished, appeared to suggest that one of the fathers of Parsi theatre in Bombay, Cooverji Sorabjee Nazir, had composed and published a verse drama titled “The First Parsi Baronet” in 1866 [4]. Unlike her customary meticulous annotation, she did not provide bibliographical details for this book. I believe she confused it with the biography of Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy by the same name (except for the spelling Parsee instead of “Parsi”) which Nazir indeed authored and published that same year, based partly on a poem by “Munsookh” [5]. It seems improbable that one person would have written an identically titled play and biography, both published in 1866. It is more plausible that Nazir, who did compose drama in English, may even have staged such a biographical play by himself in verse, but did not eventually print it. Only a researcher in Mumbai who can access archival collections and newspaper libraries may confirm or reject this speculation.
Proceeding backwards to the 1840s, we come across two early plays that do survive. One, Kishun Koovur: a tragedy in five acts by Soobrow, Dewan to the Raja of Travancore (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1840), has been digitised online by Google Books, thus allowing scholars to read and write about it [6]. The other, The Spirits of the East: a lyrical drama by “A Bengal Civilian” (Calcutta: Ostell and Lepage, 1844), exemplifies works by British temporary residents exclusively about their life in India, which does not fall within our purview, strictly speaking. For similar reasons but at an even further remove, we cannot admit the eighteenth-century tragedies by Alexander Dow, who spent a long period here in the employ of the East India Company, such as Zingis (1769, on Genghis Khan) and Sethona (1774, on ancient Egypt).
Indian Drama in English, illustrated by Guru G
The recent restoration of Krishna Mohana Banerjea’s The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes, Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society, in Calcutta (1831) to its rightful chronological position marks the true commencement of Indian drama in English. Consequently, this genre too, alongside her sisters, poetry (with Henry Derozio) and fiction (with Kylash Chunder Dutt), debuted before Macaulay’s controversial and demonised Minute, which most detractors blame for the imposition of English on Indians after 1835. Evidently, many Indians chose English for their literary excursions prior to that date. Furthermore, it proves what may come as a matter of disbelief to many, that original Indian drama in English predates drama in any other modern Indian language. However, the lack of easy access to The Persecuted led to merely generalised comments on it in the history books [7]. Nobody could write a thoroughly-considered study of it. By reprinting it in my anthology, I hope to encourage critics to examine it closely, as well as the two other early original plays in English also made available to an English readership for the first time since their first publication. (As I observe there, a few books in Bengali have included the text by Banerjea and fragments of M. M. Dutt’s Rizia: Empress of Inde (written in 1849), but these collections would be unknown to non-Bengali audiences and, besides, they contain far too many typographical mistakes that misconstrue meanings.)
By pure happenstance, the dramatic representation in my anthology originated from British-ruled Calcutta. Of course, it could be argued that Dutt lived, wrote and printed fragments of Rizia in Madras (in 1849-50), but he returned to his hometown Calcutta afterwards and won renown as a Bengali author based there. The writer of the third play, Kaminee: The Virgin Widow (1874), preferred to remain anonymous and may not have been an Indian by birth, but it seems likely that he (she?) resided in Calcutta, since they deal with urban Bengali society, and published it from a respectable Calcutta press. Most significantly from our contemporary perspective, these three plays spanning forty years offer important themes — from religious orthodoxy and persecution of liberal youths (The Persecuted) to the historical tragedy of a Muslim queen victimised by sexism and racism (Rizia) to the social restrictions on teenage widows (Kaminee). I do not claim that they constitute excellent drama, but no literary tradition produced a masterpiece at its beginning, whereas these three do present core issues that concern us today. They were not written for entertainment.
A different point that should be made—and one that might explain a certain amateurishness in their composition—is that none of these plays made it to the stage, as far as we know. English-language theatre did exist in India at the time, but mainly by the British and for the British, while “native” students at the academies and colleges only recited and enacted scenes from Shakespeare supervised as part of their education. Thus, Banerjea and Dutt, both pupils at Hindoo College in Calcutta, not only knew their Shakespeare perfectly but also performed in Shakespearean roles for invited audiences in public spaces: Banerjea as Horatio in 1829 at Government House, Dutt as Gloucester (Henry VI) in 1834 at Town Hall [8]. We can therefore discern the influence of a somewhat dated English in the dialogues of their own contrivance, as they could not test their writing in the theatres.
On the other hand, I should draw readers’ attention to a relatively little-known fact: “as Samachar Darpan in its issue of 17 September 1831 reports, a Committee was formed for establishing a theatre on the model of the English theatre. The plays, it was said, would be presented in English”[9]. The committee consisted of prominent Bengali Hindus, one of whom, Prosunno Coomar (Prasanna Kumar) Tagore, acted on the resolution and established the Hindu Theatre at his garden estate in Narkeldanga, Calcutta. The stage historian Sushil Kumar Mukherjee describes it as “the first theatre founded by a Bengali, housed in the Bengali quarter of the city, for a Bengali audience.” It opened on 28 December 1831, just a month after Banerjea published The Persecuted, but not with an original play. The programme, performed by students of the Hindoo and Sanskrit Colleges as well as others, for a private invited audience of Europeans and Indians, started with Act I of Bhavabhuti’s Sanskrit classic Uttara-Rāma-charita, translated into English by an eminent member of the management of Hindoo College, H. H. Wilson, and ended with Act V of Julius Caesar. On 29 March 1832, Hindu Theatre staged a slight farce with an oriental theme, titled Nothing Superfluous.
Into the 1850s, before turning once and for all to the performance of new drama in their mother tongue, Bengalis cultivated publicly their theatrical aspirations in English. Two amateur initiatives in mainly Bengali-inhabited north Calcutta introduced ticketed shows (not exclusively for invitees) of Shakespeare in English: the Oriental Theatre presented Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV (1853–55) and the Jorasanko Theatre (not the later, more famous one of the same name set up by the Tagores) produced Julius Caesar in 1854. Lest we forget, Dutt was writing Rizia in Madras at this time. Thus, we should not presume that conditions were not conducive for theatre by Indians in English, though they naturally favoured Shakespeare, whereas dissenting scripts on controversial matters by young dramatists may indeed have not interested the ruling elite.
In fact, they did not even interest the Bengali aristocracy, as Dutt learnt unfortunately when he proposed to his Raja patrons that he could present them with Rizia in Bengali for their new theatre. I have recounted in my anthology the pure circumstantial luck behind my discovery of Dutt’s English manuscript—something that Indian researchers rarely encounter, unlike our counterparts in the developed world who can avail of comparatively easier access to authorial scripts and typescripts thanks to the advanced culture there of acquiring and preserving such literary material. Nevertheless, my serendipity emboldens me to suggest that fellow Indian researchers could be just as lucky as I was in locating nineteenth-century writings that we did not even know existed. Or, as in the case of Kaminee, which I traced to the British Library, finding in a foreign archive a copy of an Indian book that has vanished from India.
Proceeding to the first half of the twentieth century, we obviously come across many more plays by Indians in English, but these too have not received the kind of critical commentary routinely and fashionably lavished on our postcolonial drama. Shanta Gokhale named several of these neglected dramatists in her article on the genre in my Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre [10], but we should mention some of them here to serve the purpose of a comprehensive overview [11]. We have expatriates like Niranjan Pal, who wrote The Goddess (1924) and other plays, and started a group in London, The Indian Players, to produce them. While Sri Aurobindo’s closet dramas have attracted attention owing to his venerable stature and poetic accomplishments, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya’s have not.
The Indian characteristic of writing bilingually also deserves separate treatment. The greater proportion of this output arises from self-translation by an author, usually into English, of his own originals composed in his mother tongue. Since the author translated them himself, taking liberties that only he could, they can qualify as original literature according to many theorists. The respectable lineage of this tradition begins with Dutt himself (Sermista, 1859, from Sharmishtha), goes on to the international phenomenon called Tagore, and continues to the works of Girish Karnad. However, we also have the intriguing pre-Independence split-creativity of T. P. Kailasam, who wrote one kind of drama in Kannada (colloquial and contemporary) and a completely different kind in English (mythical and epic).
Tagore’s self-translated plays require special notice. Whereas other translators are credited on the title pages for some of his plays (like The Post Office), he did not acknowledge a few that remain under his own name and therefore these should be regarded technically as his originals even though we know who did the translating, while he himself actually translated several more. His celebrity status after the Nobel Prize led to a spate of theatrical productions worldwide that demand investigation and, if nothing else, disprove Girish Karnad’s pronouncements that Tagore was an inferior dramatist and that Karnad’s plays in English were the first modern Indian plays staged in the US or UK [12]. We must also research early Indian performances of Tagore’s English translations, which unquestionably inspired readers across our own country. I have discovered that the world premieres of two Tagore classics occurred in their English versions (and not in Bengali) in India: Lucknow University’s The Waterfall (Muktadhārā) in 1923, and the Bombay production of Red Oleanders at New High School for Girls in 1928[13]. Primary documentation needs to be unearthed from these cities to reconstruct as much of these historic performances as possible.
We need to pay proper tribute and appreciation to the long-forgotten pioneers of Indian drama in English and their pre-1947 successors, rather than chase the done-and-dusted plays written after Independence that monopolise the critical discourse quite predictably and boringly, as if India has produced only half a dozen worthwhile playwrights in English over two hundred years. True, the number of plays increases exponentially after 1947[14], yet the relatively few scholars of the genre (including those conducting doctoral studies) have followed a safe and well-trodden path, confined mainly to the canonical works by Asif Currimbhoy, Girish Karnad, and Mahesh Dattani, regurgitated ad nauseam. Readers should not misunderstand: I consider them great playwrights, but I am disappointed by the shortage of originality and imagination among critics, despite the availability of other roads less travelled. Next to that trio, the few plays written by Nissim Ezekiel, Dina Mehta, Partap Sharma, Gieve Patel, Gurcharan Das and Manjula Padmanabhan have drawn some appraisal, but since drama has not been the main creative focus of these authors, their poetry or prose has garnered greater attention.
Because there is considerably more knowledge in circulation about the contemporary scenario, I do not think it necessary to explicate it in detail like I have for earlier times. Still, I wish to see definitive monographs on ignored playwrights with a substantial output like Joseph M. Lobo Prabhu, who wrote on social reform, and Leo Brooks Fredericks, who had a penchant for exotic settings. They may have produced quantity rather than quality; nevertheless, their individual trajectories and thematic preoccupations merit study for a deep evaluation of the entire movement. Among the seniors now, Poile Sengupta and Gowri Ramnarayan have proved themselves repeatedly on the stage, but have surprisingly not received analysis commensurate with their achievement. A whole new generation of younger dramatists work and have published in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata – some even facing political trouble like Abhishek Majumdar – without any critical assessment whatsoever. Scholars have also not tapped the genres of radio drama and television drama, many scripts of which were written in English.
A major lacuna in our academic criticism is theatre history and appreciation. The West gives respect to theatre as an art, and many developed countries teach it formally in university departments, adding to its cachet. But its neglect in India rubs off on the negligible secondary literature on it. The large majority of publications on Indian drama deal exclusively with its texts from a literary perspective, although the plays were intended for the stage, and some even had considerable success there. This huge unexplored territory is waiting to be researched, whether going back in time to the importation of the proscenium arch in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, or down to recent theatrical activities.
Every city has its own fascinating history of English-language theatre, which has not been recorded, except by Kumudini Mehta for early Bombay. This statement applies not just to the metropolises, but also to smaller places like Lucknow (as mentioned above) or Shimla, Shillong or far-off Aizawl with its Christmas plays. The nativisation of English on stage throws up many interesting facets, as for example the integration of British and local actors, dating back to the sensational “real unpainted nigger Othello” in 1848 in Calcutta. There are sociological, political, and even legal aspects to be examined, like the ban in Bombay on Currimbhoy’s The Doldrummers (1961) and Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness (1965). Directors who specialised in English theatre by Indians—Ebrahim Alkazi, Alyque Padamsee, Lillete Dubey—and groups like The Madras Players in Chennai, Yatrik in Delhi, and The Red Curtain in Calcutta demand documentation. In the 21st century, mainstream as well as radical productions of originally-written drama continue in the hands of such active groups as Prime Time Theatre (Delhi), Rage and QTP (Mumbai), Padatik (Kolkata), JustUs Repertory (Chennai), and Centre for Film and Drama (Bengaluru).
And in terms of language, the fact that English has now been appropriated by Hindi theatre into a miscegenated “Hinglish”, that seems to have a certain commercial potential for a nationally-growing English-knowing audience willing to pay for an evening’s entertainment, raises linguistic and economic implications worth discussion. Do we possibly have here the seeds of a Parsi theatre-like reincarnation in the live performance industry, more democratic in reach compared to the elite spectators of English previously? Even better, since Indians are naturally bilingual if not multilingual in their day-to-day communication, can we hope that hybridised Englishes may form a medium of our thought-provoking urban theatre in future? For that is the reality of an increasingly globalised world, that would indeed be verisimilitude, and I see experiments in that direction already happening in Kolkata and Mumbai.
Notes:
[1] K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 5th ed. (New Delhi: Sterling, 1985), p. 226. Repeated in such standard books as S. Krishna Bhatta, Indian English Drama (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987), p. 6, and reference works as Amaresh Datta, ed., Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, volume II (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988), p. 1069.
[2] Ananda Lal, ed., Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings (Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019).
[3] “Bengal Library Catalogue of Books”, Appendix (No. II) to The Calcutta Gazette, 20 September 1871, pp. 18-19. The slim play had 42 pages and was published by Light Press, Calcutta.
[4] Kumudini A. Mehta, “English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century”, p. 180.
[5] Preface to Cooverji Sorabjee Nazir, The First Parsee Baronet (Bombay: Union Press, 1866), vi. Munsookh, or Mansukh, was the pen name of Muncherji Cawasji Shapurji, a prolific Parsi Gujarati author.
[6] https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Soobrow_Kishun_Koovur?id=HV5gAAAAcAAJ
[7] For example in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ed., An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 6 and 337.
[8] Ananda Lal and Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist (Calcutta: Papyrus, 2001), pp. 25-26.
[9] Sushil Kumar Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753–1980 (Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 1982), p. 13. The next quotation also comes from this page.
[10] SG, “English theatre”, in Ananda Lal, ed., The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), updated in Ananda Lal, ed. Theatres of India: A Concise Companion (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[11] For a very helpful bibliography of this early period, see the University of Washington South Asian Studies checklist under Drama in https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341864&p=2301845#9577519
[12] A full account of the reception of Tagore’s drama abroad in English, through book reviews and theatre criticism, can be found in the introduction to Ananda Lal, trans. and ed., Rabindranath Tagore: Three Plays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[13] I have described briefly the revolutionary political circumstances of the Bombay production in Ananda Lal, “Rabindranath Tagore: Drama and Performance”, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 119.
[14] See an exhaustive list and individual appraisals in Abhijit Sengupta, In Order of Appearance: A Compendium of Indian Playwrights in English 1947-2010 (Amazon e-book: Kindle edition, 2018).
Works Cited
Anonymous. Kaminee: The Virgin Widow. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.
Aurobindo, Sri. Collected Poems and Plays. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1942.
Banerjea, Krishna Mohana. The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes, Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society, in Calcutta. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.
A Bengal Civilian. The Spirits of the East: a lyrical drama. Calcutta: Ostell and Lepage, 1844.
“Bengal Library Catalogue of Books”, Appendix (No. II) to The Calcutta Gazette, 20 September 1871.
Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath. Five Plays. London: Fowler Wright, 1929.
Currimbhoy, Asif. The Doldrummers. Bombay: Soraya, 1962.
Das, Gurcharan. Three English Plays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Datta, Amaresh, ed. Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, volume II. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988.
“Drama”. University of Washington South Asian Studies Bibliographies. https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341864&p=2301845#9577519
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan. Rizia: Empress of Inde. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.
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Sengupta, Poile. Women Centre Stage. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.
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Sections of this essay appeared in Lal, Ananda. “Introduction.” Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings, Jadavpur University Press, 2019.
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Dance Like A Man
Published on May 6, 2022
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Writing In English Online, 6 May 2022, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/beyond-the-hashtag-exploring-contemporary-indian-poetry-in-english-by-arundhathi-subramaniam/.
Chicago:
Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 6, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/beyond-the-hashtag-exploring-contemporary-indian-poetry-in-english-by-arundhathi-subramaniam/. .
A fellow poet who writes in another Indian language recently asked me what I proposed to write in the preface to an anthology on Anglophone poetry in India. “The usual sales pitch about Indians writing in English?”, he asked dryly.
The question gave me pause. It reminded me of the way in which Indian poets in English are often viewed – as a self-congratulatory bunch of cronies. Ironically, those within the scene are aware of a very different lived-in reality – one of simmering disagreement, a fair share of self-doubt, near-inaudibility (compared to their compatriots working on the novel), and hours of plodding work, punctuated, if they are lucky, by an occasional murmur of appreciation.
Getting past the knee-jerk suspicion isn’t always easy, however. Mention ‘post-Independence Indian poetry in English’ and you usually find you’ve stepped into a minefield of clichés at every word. Take an overview of the minefields and you’re in nothing short of a war zone.
What makes this a particularly dodgy war zone is its state of terminal triviality, at least in public perception. A war zone that offers no fodder to high-decibel media broadcasters, hungry for sound-bites, or to a certain tribe of academics that reads literature for sociology over sensuousness, is considered to be of little consequence. And so, the chances of a cease-fire are dismal, and the barrage of stereotypes persists.
At international literary conferences, Indian poets in English are still asked at least once why they don’t write in their ‘own’ languages – and on occasion, less euphemistically (and in a blithe display of cultural illiteracy), why they don’t write in ‘Indian’. At literary conferences within the country, the same poets are invariably informed at some point ( always in English) that their work is crafty but inauthentic, dexterous but derivative, cosmopolitan but cosmetic. Caught in this crossfire of self-perpetuating clichés, the lot of the Indian poet in English isn’t particularly enviable. That is, it must be added, until she writes her first successful novel. At that point, the glamour of international markets and media attention often confers upon her a certain blessed immunity.
Despite the clunky discourse that continues to hover around it, however, Indian poetry in English endures, even flourishes, seventy years after Independence. Publishers may be few and far between, the royalties meagre, the critical climate thick with indifference or theoretical bluster, and the poets themselves bewildered by disputes over their identity, even their existence. But poetry, in its mysteriously resilient fashion, continues to be written, shared and discussed (if sometimes with more passion than discernment).
To any genuinely interested reader – one who is willing to be surprised, one who reads poetry for reasons of enchantment, insight, the sudden start of recognition – it is evident that this is a scene of considerable vibrancy. It is clear that English is employed here not as a language on loan, but as the rich, spluttering resource of the marrow and the bloodstream. It is just as clear that the formal poise of the best of this verse is not the result of a soulless craft, but of the ongoing struggle to wrest the magical out of the mundane. It is equally clear that in their most interesting work, these poets aren’t trying to be Indian or contemporary or cutting-edge or postcolonial in any trite or self-conscious way. They are merely working their way through perennially challenging terrain – between the wastelands of language, pulverized into truism, and those dark holes of human experience, never quite domesticated by syntax.
*
The above is a series of extracts from an anthology of Indian Poetry in English that I had edited for the Sahitya Akademi six years ago. Since that Introduction, the exuberance in the poetry scene seems greater than ever. It may not be high noon yet, but it may well be 9 a.m. for English poetry in India.
“Contemporary Indian Poetry” illustrated by Guru G
New manuscripts surface every few weeks. At poetry competitions, the submissions of verse are often remarkably self-assured. There is a rising curiosity about performance poetry. The ubiquitous literary festival, although often dominated by an unimaginative panel discussion format, seems to have realised the importance of carving out a niche for poetry primarily because poetry is increasingly recognised as a spoken form, arresting for its temporality, directness, and immediacy (characteristics it shares with the performing arts). The internet and social media are flooded with verse, and spontaneous poetry addas and writers’ groups seem to have mushroomed in big cities and small towns all over India.
It could be argued that there seems at times to be more heat than light, more amateurism than an attention to poetry as an art of verbal rigour. However, festivity is in the air. And it is welcome.
What assails Anglophone poetry is primarily an excess of misguided comment and opinion. There are various brands of nativism and cultural dogmatism that continue to bemoan its one-dimensionality, its lack of rootedness, its architecture of frontage without courtyard, its inauthenticity, its elitism. These allegations may seem to be old hat. And yet, the arguments perpetuate themselves in various ways. Journalistic reviews and academic commentary continue to reflect some of these biases. The danger of such naïve slotting is its impact on poetic practice: the insidious pressure it puts, particularly on emerging practitioners, to fit into pigeonholes and easily definable categories.
Periodically, questions are aired about whether the poetry of the past couple of decades is ‘different’ from the earlier decades. How is it distinct, for instance, from Arun Kolatkar’s imagistic precision in invoking a dusty pilgrimage town or a pageant of Mumbai’s pavement dwellers, Kamala Das’ exploration of female sexuality, Agha Shahid Ali’s soaring poetry of loss and longing for Kashmir, Keki Daruwalla’s hawk’s eye view of history and civilisation, Jayanta Mahapatra’s unflinching gaze at the landscape of Odisha or Adil Jussawalla’s fragmented, temporally fractured verse of the 1970s? These are reductive questions that do scant justice to the breadth and variety of the scene – either of the past or the present. Instead, they give rise to a ‘hashtag’ approach which reduces poetry to a set of easy labels or Unique Selling Points. Implicit in them is an unwillingness to engage with a poet’s oeuvre with any depth or attentiveness.
And so, the scene is often needlessly polarised and demarcated into ‘political’ and ‘experimental’ or ‘language’ poetry, utterly disregarding its complexity and variety. In this attempt to extract rudimentary theory or glib conclusions what is lost is a capacity to respond to the aliveness of verse – the compound of content, style and tonality, and its interplay with a cultural context and historic moment that makes a poem live.
Looking back at the past couple of decades, there is evidence of much ferment and variety. In some of the finest work, there is a curiosity and cultural self-awareness that is neither naively parochial, nor at variance with a cosmopolitan outlook. There is a political alertness that is not at loggerheads with self-reflexivity. There is a formal vigilance that does not spell a commitment to obscurity. There is a capacity for social engagement that does not spell disdain for the craft.
Stylistically, the sonnet is to be found cheek by jowl with the ghazal, the villanelle with the cadence of the Vedic chant. Free verse forms are equally dynamic and fluid, used with no less daring and self-assurance. Tonally, the poetry is more varied than ever before. A common charge has been the predominance of irony in English poetry. Irony certainly continues to remain a presence, but an abundance of other modes and tenors are also to be found.
There is, for instance, the terse, minimalist mode of C.P. Surendran, the economy and astringent wit of Vijay Nambisan, as well as Jeet Thayil’s ability to follow imperatives of mood and melody to arrive at a kind of ‘sound sense’, a versatile soundtrack that is as reflective as it is lyrical. There is the intellectually exploratory, chiseled verse of Ranjit Hoskote as well as Mamang Dai’s elegiac lyricism on the animistic memory that suffuses the forests and rivers of Arunachal Pradesh. There is Manohar Shetty’s deft capacity for biting satirical statement (that is far from monochromatic in its use of irony), as well as Anand Thakore’s lush, full-throated musicality, particularly evident in his book, Mughal Sequence. There is Sudeep Sen’s curiosity about the Sanskrit shloka and the Italian ottava rima as well as Ravi Shankar’s playful need to invoke the Bop and the pada.
The preoccupations are no less varied. There is Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s need to implicate cultural studies and literary theory in poetry as well as Meena Alexander’s need to speak of the Pamba river and the ash trees of New York in the course of a single poem. There is Vivek Narayanan’s impulse to explore the verbal succulence of the 12th century Tamil Ramayana of Kamban as well as Anjum Hasan’s atmospheric, unhurried evocation of Shillong captured at a moment in personal history. There is Karthika Nair’s powerful engagement with the women of the Mahabharata as well as Sampurna Chattarji’s need to understand how an extraterrestrial protagonist might perceive the contemporary world.
*
It would be unfortunate to ignore the many shades of political comment in Anglophone poetry. To dismiss it as politically pasteurised, as some have done, is quite simply to not read it. There are, on the one hand, the overt voices of protest against caste violence associated with poets such as Meena Kandasamy, or more recently, Chandramohan Sathyanathan. There are several unequivocal and strong poems here that demand a hearing.
At the same time, there is nothing anaemic or apolitical about the voice of Hidimbi in Karthika Nair’s retelling of the Mahabharata, in which the voice of the tribal woman articulates issues of marginalisation and powerlessness in an adroit blend of conviction and craft. Or in E.V. Ramakrishnan’s “Falling Figures”, about the chilling newspaper image of the “mob with petrol bombs” moving deeper “into the eyes of a man/ frozen in fear, his hands folded”. Or in Imtiaz Dharker’s anthem to all those who are proud to owe allegiance to alternative modes of citizenship, proud to proclaim they “must be from another country”. Or in Mona Zote’s poem about Ernestina, a woman sitting on the hills of modern-day Aizawl, contemplating the sinister political and spiritual wasteland about her. Or in Tabish Khair’s “Immigrant”, in which a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale becomes a device to articulate a resonant question about cultural and political identity. These are random examples. There are many layers of political comment and pungent social critique that are simply waiting to be unravelled by vigilant readers.
Myth remains important, but not narrowly revivalist. Vijay Seshadri’s compelling poem on the close of the Mahabharata, “The Long Meadow”, raises searching questions about dharma, love, and human bewilderment in a world where “only the complicated, ambiguous victories are worth having.” My own work (including recent poems on archetypal figures such as Shakuntala, Kartikeya and Avvaiyar) is often fuelled by an impulse to blur the sensual and the spiritual, the secular and sacred, and yet remain alert to dogmatism on both sides of the divide.
Interestingly, several Anglophone poets have been involved with serious translation projects, working closely with various regional literatures. The ways in which such an ongoing transaction makes for mutual dialogue and synergy are obvious. This should lay to rest the unexamined charges of cultural insularity and exclusivism that are frequently laid at the door of this poetry.
There have been translations by bilingual poet Robin Ngangom of contemporary Manipuri poetry, Desmond Kharmawphlang and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih of Khasi poetry and folklore, Sudeep Sen and Sampurna Chattarji of modern Bengali poetry, Mustansir Dalvi of Marathi and Urdu poetry, E.V. Ramakrishnan of contemporary Malayalam poetry, to cite just a few examples.
Additionally, the engagement with varied strands of a traditional literary inheritance is clearly deep and committed, laying to rest the equally unsubstantiated charge of ahistoricity. A.K. Ramanujan’s translations of the Kannada vachana poets and Tamil Shaiva poets as well as Dilip Chitre’s renditions of Tukaram have been followed by several significant translation projects in recent times.
Mani Rao’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, K. Srilata’s translations of medieval Tamil poetry, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translations of Prakrit love poetry reveal a fascination with a spectrum of literary traditions: from the sacred to the secular.
Indeed, it is quite remarkable how many contemporary Anglophone poets have been motivated to create spirited, modern-day versions (often colloquial, vigorous and slangy) of the rich counter-cultural legacy of Bhakti poetry. These include independent volumes of translation by Vinay Dharwadker and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra of Kabir, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Ravi Shankar’s work on Andal, Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Lal Ded, Jerry Pinto’s of the Marathi women Bhakti poets, Gieve Patel’s project on Akho, Anju Makhija’s work on Shah Abdul Latif, Vijay Nambisan’s volume on Narayana Bhattatiri and Puntanam Namboodiri, among others.
In an anthology of Bhakti poetry that I edited in 2016, I had the opportunity to commission translations, and found several poets willing to engage in an immersive process of exploration, often finding unexpected moments of literary kinship in the process. These ranged from Keki Daruwalla’s translations of Narsinh Mehta and Anand Thakore’s of Surdas to Mustansir Dalvi’s versions of Rahim, Prabhanjan Mishra’s of Salabega, and my own of Abhirami Bhattar.
*
The above is a general reflection on a poetic climate, rather than a comprehensive catalogue of Anglophone Indian poets of the past twenty-five years. There have been several anthologies in recent times that have offered varied ways of mapping the scene: based on chronology, region, gender and theme. There is clearly room for more.
A recent anthology of poets below forty (edited by Nabina Das and Semeen Ali) brought to light a host of younger names, including Akhil Katyal, Jennifer Robertson, Rohan Chhetri, Goirick Brahmachari, to name just a few. Recent years have seen the publication of volumes of poetry from senior poets, such as Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel, as well as the late Eunice de Souza, Kersy Katrak and Srinivas Rayaprol.
Looking back at my own formative years, it is time, I believe, for an anthology that compiles the work of that vibrant cluster of poets associated with Mumbai’s Poetry Circle, with which I was associated in the 1990s (along with Ranjit Hoskote, Jerry Pinto, Masud Taj, Menka Shivdasani, R. Raj Rao, T.R. Joy, Gayatri Majumdar, Anju Makhija, and Marilyn Noronha, among others).
In recent years, I have revisited work by poets who have emerged as strong and distinctive voices in the past decade, such as Sridala Swamy, Tishani Doshi, Sharanya Manivannan, Kala Krishnan Ramesh and Mustansir Dalvi, as well as encountered interesting new voices, such as Sohini Basak, Sumana Roy, Urvashi Bahuguna, Rochelle Potkar, Arjun Rajendran, Ellen Kombiyil, Subhashini Kaligotla, Anupama Raju, Arun Sagar, Sabitha Satchi, Shobhana Kumar, Rohinton Daruwalla and Michael Creighton – all of which point to a scene of continued vibrancy.
There is also the advent of a popular global genre – Instapoetry – that suggests that poetry is morphing into avatars that would have seemed unthinkable less than a decade ago. While the literary merits of such work are the subject of heated debate, it is clear that Instapoetry has touched a chord. The readership for the work seems to be a sizeable millennial segment, hungry for an accessible articulation of emotional issues ranging from cultural identity to personal trauma.
*
One hopes that the exuberance in the contemporary poetry scene will also produce in time a generation of responsive and fine-tuned readers and listeners. For the most interesting poems compel the attentive reader to evolve a language of response that is strenuous and subtle.
Such a critical climate at times seems difficult to envision. The great technological efflorescence that has democratised articulation often seems to foster a culture of pat opinion and definitive conclusion, rather than one of nuanced dialogue and receptivity. The art of listening seems more beleaguered than ever before. And yet, one continues to hope that the clamour will make room with time for subtler and more considered responses. Above all, one looks forward to a more focused examination of the work of individual poets rather than the ‘clump’ approach that so often makes sweeping assertions about context and irons out specificity.
To return to the case of the poet who asked me the question about the ‘sales pitch’, let me say, no, I am not ecstatic about the state of Indian poetry in English. (But then I am not ecstatic about poetry; only, at times, about poems.) What I do know is that Indian poetry in English is alive. And like all things alive, it engages, it annoys, it provokes, it excites. On several occasions, it has given me the jolt of wonder for which I turn to poetry in the first place.
To allow oneself to be engaged, however, one also needs to work at being a certain kind of reader one who is rigorous but generous, exacting yet not mean-spirited, inclined to listen rather than impatient to legislate. Such readers, I believe, do invariably find much here to revisit and much to look forward to.
Sections of this essay are excerpted from Another Country: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, published by the Sahitya Akademi, 2011, edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam
This is an updated version of the essay that appeared in Indian Literature : “Introduction: Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 1 (297), 2017, pp. 33–39.
Published with permission from the Sahitya Akademi and Arundhathi Subramaniam.
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