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Indian Fiction and its Popularity and Significance at Home and Abroad
The ink is well dry on Kiran Desai’s second novel, “The Inheritance of Loss”, but the euphoria it created by winning the Man Booker Prize for the year 2006 continues. She first created ripples in the literary scenario with her debut novel, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard”(1998) which went on to win the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35. With two coveted literary awards to her credit, Desai has joined the new wavelet of young energetic writers who have brought Indian fiction to the global center-stage.
The saga of the unprecedented growth of Indian English Literature began in 1981 with Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”. The book not only went on to win the Booker Prize, (only to be superceded by the 'Booker of Bookers' Prize in 1993), but also made it to the Time Magazine’s list of 100 best novels of all times. His subsequent novels -“Shame”(1985), “The Satanic Verses”1988), “The Ground Beneath her Feet”(1999) and most recently, “Shalimar the Clown”(2005) have made waves in global literary circles. Critics, publishers and writers alike acknowledge the seminal influence of this one book in triggering off the luxurious growth of Indian fiction. Opines Pankaj Mishra, author of the best-selling travel-book “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana” and chief editor of HarperCollins (India), "Midnight’s Children not only inspired many Indians to start writing fiction in English, but also to write in a brave new way."
Rushidie’s clarion call was answered first by Amitav Ghosh whose “The Circle of Reason” (1986) was appreciated by readers worldwide. The same year came Vikram Seth’s “The Golden Gate”, a path-breaking verse-novel that a fellow writer says, "can only appear once in a century”. 1988 proved to be the most productive year for Indian fiction with literary treats such as “Trotternama” by Irving Allan Sealy, “The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh, and “English August: An Indian Story” by Upamanyu Chatterjee. Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey”, which was short-listed for the Booker, stole the show in 1990 and Seth’s widely appreciated novel “A Suitable Boy” arrived two years later.
The boom that ensued brought outstanding literary activity in its wake. Githa Hariharan’s “The Thousand Faces of Night” clinched the Commonwealth's Best First Book Award in 1993. The Mail on Sunday, London, summed it up as “… An important and truly international book…”(Italics mine). The year 1995 saw Vikram Chandra’s “Red Earth And Pouring Rain”, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “Shards Of Memory”, Mukul Kesavan’s “Looking Through Glass”, Githa Hariharan’s “The Ghosts of Vasu Master” and Ashok Banker’s “Byculla Boy”. Even the first months of 1996 produced two major novels, both receiving excellent reviews in India and abroad: Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” and Ghosh’s “The Calcutta Chromosome”. Besides these, there have been a host of promising debuts from Anju Mohan’s “Shangrila” to Jayabroto Chatterjee’s “Last Train to Innocence” to Rukun Advani’s“Beethoven Among the Cows”. Also, writers like Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Manju Kapur, Bapsi Sidhwa and Shobha De and not to forget, veterans like Khushwant Singh and Anita Desai, have made their presence strongly felt in the global literary arena.
1997 was unmistakably the year of Arundhati Roy, "The God of Small Things” and the big Booker. Jhumpa Lahiri ‘s arrival with “Interpreter of Maladies” in 1999 caused a flurry of activity in the publishing world, numerous awards such as the O. Henry Award for the short story "Interpreter of Maladies", The New Yorker’s Best Debut of the Year and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 were lavished upon her. Raj Kamal Jha’s debut novel, “The Blue Bedspread” won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia region) and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel “If You Are Afraid of Heights” was a finalist for the Hutch-Crossword Book Award in 2003.
There is no denying the fact that Indian English fiction has finally gained the recognition it deserves, but market researches and experts don’t present a very heartening picture. The very trend of getting published abroad is a deliberate attempt to ensure attention if not success within the domestic sphere at least. Pankaj Mishra, author of “The Romantics”, winner of the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for first Fiction, throws light on the luke-warm sales figures abroad saying, "The concerns of people in the west are different, their expectations from a novel coming out of India are somewhat fixed. It is not just a matter of quality. Good books dealing with matters we consider vitally important may not seem saleable to publishers there."
Indeed if the words of Jayabroto Chatterjee are anything to go by, the boom in India notwithstanding, Indian writing in English is a mere novelty in the west. There is no doubt that writers like Seth, Mistry, Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor of “The Great Indian Novel" and "Show Business” fame, and Amit Chaudhuri (“A Strange and Sublime Address” and “Afternoon Raag”) get gushing reviews, but these, with the exception of A Suitable Boy, rarely translate into large sales. "The literary supplements have recognized us... but I’m not sure about the average reader," says Mukul Kesavan. Though publishing circles in England expect two or three good novels from India every year, Indian writers have few misconceptions about their popularity in the west.
Besides, there is the “slave-trading colonial mentality” that our writers have to deal with. The very nomenclature “Indian English Writing” smacks of prejudice and bias. Amitav Ghosh delivered an impassioned rejection of the Commonwealth Prize for Literature when he was declared the Eurasia region winner in 2001: "So far as I can determine, “The Glass Palace” is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it is written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain." In the west they still prefer to read about an exoticised version of India. Chatterjee puts it succinctly when he says, "We are curiosities there, our first audience is here”.
But the good news is that Indian writers are exceedingly and deservedly being recognized. The national and international awards heaped upon our authors, the outstanding number of books sold, the extensive marketing done by the media, and the flurry of optimism kindled by the past successes, big and small, suggest that Indian English fiction has come of age, that it has secured a definitive place in world literature. It is important that we re-examine our attitudes with regard to our own writers and their place in the context of an ever evolving multi-cultural world that is becoming increasingly globalised.
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