A Blinkered Passage to India

__"Midnight’s Grandchildren" by Pankaj Mishra, in Prospect (Apr. 1997), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3RA.__

Salman Rushdie’s brashly ambitious Midnight’s Children (1981) put the Anglo-Indian novel on the map. His virtuoso venture in magical realism, about the narrator’s growing up in Bombay—and India’s "growing up" after independence in 1947—won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and inspired a rash of imitators, who came and went. More recently, distinctive novelists such as Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, and Robinton Mistry have achieved critical or commercial success. Today, says Mishra, a writer based in New Delhi, Anglo Indian fiction appears on the verge of becoming a literary phenomenon rivaling the Latin American fiction boom of the 1980s.

But Western audiences are getting a narrow view of Indian writing, Mishra says. "What in the West is taken as representative of Indian fiction as a whole is in fact a very small sample of the rich fare available in India itself." India has 16 official languages, and vigorous literary cultures exist in more than half of them. "The names of O. V. Vijayan, U. R. Ananthmurthy, and Paul Zacharia may mean nothing to readers of Indian fiction in the West, but in India they have more readers than Rushdie. And books in Malayalam outsell books in English by as much as 10 times." Vikram Seth enjoyed success with A Suitable Boy (1993), which "skate[s] merrily over the surfaces of its subject," describing "the shallowness of the North Indian provincial elite." Meanwhile, the name of Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, "the great chronicler of North Indian life in Hindi," remains unknown in the West.

The Indian authors writing in English are in a very different situation from that of the Latin American stars of the 1980s. Authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote their fiction in Spanish, originally with a Spanish-speaking readership in mind; only later did they address international audiences. In India, English "remains the language of power and privilege," Mishra notes. But because the audience for books in English is small, their authors "are almost forced to address a global readership." Many of these writers, including Seth, Chandra, and Mistry, choose to live abroad. This "makes for a certain kind of cosmopolitanism," Mishra observes, but "it also leads to a sameness of vision: a slickly exilic version of India, suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice."