Rashmi Sadana

TWO TALES OF A CITY

Since the early 1980s, novels by Indians in English have become the site of a transnational publishing ‘boom’ made possible by the opening of Anglo-American literary markets to non-white writing. This essay begins by illuminating the disconnect between the postcolonial versus transnational framings of Indian English fiction. It shows how this literature has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a de-territorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding it of its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production. In an effort to ‘re-territorialize’ the history of and the issues at the heart of Indian writing in English, the essay argues that the social and political contours of English in India have come to be about much more than ‘writing back to empire’ or offering a ‘window to the world’ for Indians looking ‘out’ or westerners looking ‘in’. Instead, through a reading of two canonical Indian English texts about the death of Urdu in Delhi, the essay points to the limitations of the postcolonial framework itself. Indian English literature has outgrown the line of critique and politics that casts English as the language of colonization and structures the analysis of Indian English as an oppositional stance and peripheral discourse. This essay dwells instead on the place of English in the multilingual Indian consciousness and the work it does as mediator in Indias linguistic landscape. What is remarkable is not that Indians write in the language of the colonizer, but that they write in an English that has been infused with the social and political consequences of its own indigenization.

Writing in English

R. K. Narayan (1906–2001), the great stalwart of Indian English fiction, wrote over a dozen novels set in the mytho-poetic town of Malgudi; one of them, The Vendor of Sweets (1967), is a prescient parable for Indian writing in English. The novel is about the generation gap between a father and son, one that hinges on the differences of living in a new way as opposed to a more established one. Narayans works are known for their subtle humour, and in this novel, it comes in the form of a story-writing machine that a young man, Mali, brings back to India after having gone to America to study creative writing. Before Mali leaves for America, his father, Jagan, questions why he has to go there to learn the art of fiction in the first place. Jagan complains to a sympathetic cousin: ‘Going there to learn storytelling! He should rather go to a village granny’; and then he asks, ‘Did Valmiki go to America or Germany in order to learn to write his Ramayana ?’ Here, Narayan captures the tension between two sorts of fabrications – modernity and tradition – as he invariably pits the allure of the foreign against seemingly stable home truths. But this easy East–West opposition gets much more interesting and funnier when Mali returns to Malgudi not as a writer, but as a businessman looking for investors to produce and sell an indigenous version of an American storytelling machine.

Reading Delhi, Writing Delhi: An Ethnography of Literature

This chapter details how the author created a fieldwork-based methodology in order to study contemporary literature in the multilingual Indian context. Drawing on the author’s intellectual biography, the chapter outlines a relationship between literary studies and anthropology in order to show how the analysis of Indian novels in English became a starting point to sketch Delhi’s literary field. By linking these novels, which have become darlings of the global literary stage, to an actual place in India, the idea was to counter issues of representation with field-based research and to ask: Why was India only being represented in English? Here, “fieldwork” becomes an accounting of individual histories and experiences of language, or linguistic subjectivities, as “literature” becomes an anthropological object.