Indians Writing For A Global Audience

chillibreeze writer —Mishana Khot

They say literature is the most faithful mirror of society, reflecting its zeitgeist, its essence, to perfection. Indian writing has performed exactly this role, with its writers and its characteristics being an echo of all that the country and its people have been through. In the past decade though, Indian writing in English has achieved immense popularity and success. For a writer this may mean more exposure and opportunity and the satisfaction of wider readership, but it also entails understanding new readers and possibly adapting to them. This article briefly explores the recent rise of Indian literature and suggests ways in which it can expand to include foreign readers.

Literature that was written during and immediately after the struggle for freedom is clearly an assertion of the national identity, whether in defiant or muted tones. Across the fiction of this time was pride in all things Indian, and an assertion of a people different from the rest of the world. Some of the common features were rural settings and characters, small canvasses, day-to-day details, and local flavor. This reflected the need to describe the reality of being an Indian in India.

As Indians started moving out of the country and experiencing what it was like to be an Indian out of India, the writing started to describe another reality altogether. Common themes were feelings of being uprooted, culture shock, and the search for self in a foreign culture. For this next generation of writers, who had been away from India for longer, if not from birth, there were feelings of alienation, of not belonging to either culture completely, and of the conflict between the superstition/religion and hard scientific facts.

What writers today should realize is that these issues are no longer valid, or at least, not as valid as they once were. The drama of the Westernized Indian family with clashing values, or the Indian woman/young bride suffering in an immoral, impersonal world are topics that have been explored, described, and detailed ad nauseam. India, as a country and as a community, has been globalized too much to remain within the same scope and topics.

The problem lies in the innate reverse snobbishness about the superiority of Indian culture and spirituality that we all seem to possess. We pride ourselves on our family values, our respect for tradition, our spirituality, the simple high living, etc, and for a while, it worked as the USP of Indian writers. We need to now open our eyes to the new reality, which is that we have moved on from there.

One of the first mistakes: Too many Indian writers write as they are expected to, about topics like spirituality, religion or veiled sexuality. We do not have to pander to a Western impression of India as a country of magic and color, which possesses a pantheon of gods and the Kama Sutra. India is much more than that and should be conveyed as such.

An Indian writer must strike the delicate balance between completely describing what is unique to India without letting it distract the reader from the text. We need to understand that there are many more readers now who do not need explanations, once again thanks to globalization. Rotis no longer need to be decribed as “round flat baked bread”, nor saris as “pieces of filmy cloth draped around the body of an Indian woman.”

Secondly, we should give up the practice of writing with flowery adjectives and the contrived efforts at conveying every detail that we think will appeal to a Western reader. Too much detail and complex sentences make for pretty text, but no substance. An American reader has been exposed to Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, et al, and is more comfortable with less formality and simpler language. Even a colloquial tone is fine, as long as it is not too specific to India, or is adequately contextualized or explained.

All writing is a story of humans interacting under various circumstances and should be written as a human, about humans. The best way an Indian writer can write for an American audience by forgetting that he/she is an Indian, and writing as a human first. Anything else is an attempt at intellectualism, a cover-up for lack of imagination, or a covert pot-shot at the Booker prize.

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Mishana writes for chillibreeze.

Indians Writing For A Global Audience

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