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Domnic Fernandes continues (Part II) his reminiscence of
Mapusa of the 1950s
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sidB6
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The exile is over
HindustanTimes.com
Saturday, April 8, 2006|01:14 IST
By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
An essay, in a British newspaper, announced the fate of the Indian novel: it
now lay in the hands of the Indian diaspora writer.
Outside of a few novelists from India who had won major foreign prizes and
scaled international bestseller lists, no one else, the essayist said, had
produced work that could match up to such success.
On the other hand, Americans and Britishers of Indian extraction would save the
Indian novel since their books had won prizes and been reprinted several times.
I reject such reductive analysis. To reduce literary accomplishment to
bestseller lists signals an ungenerous imagination. To measure a book's success
by the awards it garners is to succumb to the inertia of vanity (as James
English suggests so brilliantly in The Economy of Prestige, his tome on
contemporary prize culture). Besides, not all of us are gunning for the Booker
Prize; and as audiences here grow and evolve, the call on a readership outside
India diminishes.
Most crucially, a writer's engagement with solitude is her most momentous
success; what occurs in the process is arbitrary, scintillating, complicated.
But the sheer act of withdrawing from the world if only to engage with it with
detached coherence and deliberate rage is, in itself, a triumph. The new
novelists of our soil, I have a sense, are waiting, watching: time is the womb
of narrative. The last decade has been so monumentally transformative for
India-financially, politically, culturally-that our writers are still recoiling
from the glare of revolution.
How did we go from Buniyaad to Baywatch in the blink of a decade's eyelid? Why
do we get so excited over call centres even as HIV swims unchecked through the
nation's bloodstream? Once we recover from the pathology of such ironies, the
spectacular neurosis of modern India is certain to be illuminated in a novel.
Conversely, as national boundaries blur, as the monster of globalisation leaves
Goa indistinguishable from Brighton, diaspora writers may run out of the
immigrant angst they've successfully funneled so far (often with
heart-quickening panache; often with gut-sickening cliché).
On the home front, the West no longer holds the gloss and promise it once did
(besides, if we wanted to move to a dictator regime we wouldn't have to go as
far as America; Myanmar is right around the corner). If the notion of 'exile'
could be retired in our hyper-jet era, then the Indian novelist must confront
the reality of home and its discontents. And discontent, arguably, is more
inspiring than its opposite. Can I trust the courts in Delhi? Will my brother
and his boyfriend find happiness in Bangalore? I want to quit my husband
because I'm in lust with a younger man. Some very contemporary, universal
questions will find very unique, 'village' answers here - answers certain to
baffle the heart, intrigue the imagination, astonish the mind.
The novel, essentially a Western creation, discovered stamina, restoration and
mischief in India: a plot-driven narrative, with an emphasis on character, was
revived by the multi-lingual theatrics of our storytellers.
In Indian hands, the English language was caressed with sadness (as Arundhati
Roy did in The God of Small Things), smoothened into a level sheet of workman's
metal (as Rohinton Mistry does in his consistently satisfying oeuvre) and
excited by verbal pyrotechnics (as Salman Rushdie achieved in his preliminary
novels). If the Indian story has been told and retold, then it is time to lay
claim on how it is told: or rather, how it was. Maybe that's why the iPod's
capacity to transmit stories fascinates me.
In part, my affection for the iPod is subliminal: a dorky writer chalks up a
few hipster points by cozying up to trimmings of cool. On another level, the
idea that we might listen to stories - as opposed to reading them - is a
triumphant return of the oral narrative. Handed down from tongue to ear, the
story - audibly performed - carries the chorus of history. The Ramayana was an
oral epic; stories out of the Kathasaritasagara were structured for vocal
transmission. Although 'books on tape' are old hat, the iPod - with its
radically accessible podcasting vocabulary - is sure to rearrange the novel's
furniture. Jason Epstein - legendary American publisher, virtual inventor of
the quality paperback - in his memoir Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present
And Future predicted the e-book would change publishing forever. Is it possible
that Epstein's augury - publish-per-demand as the future of publishing - might
tie in perfectly with the novel-on-iPod model?
What, then, is the risk of this transition? The novel, in its conventional
avatar, gave us interiority: the facility to get under the skin of a character
and figure what was going on from the inside (in the converse way, documentary
photography narrative perfected exteriority). Film, with its compulsory
graphic, is unable to convey interiority fully (read Michael Ondaatje's The
English Patient before you watch its adaptation to see what I mean). How will
a technique, flagged off by the infuriating virtuosity of Virginia Woolf and
thrown into relief by modern novelists like Michael Cunningham, endure the
modern nation of the novel:
iPodistan?
One threat of lionising certain writers - and certain books - is that they
limit readership. The establishment of a canon means that select books are
singled out as sacred, valuable, pioneering; in the process, quieter but no
less worthy voices are bypassed. In his essay, The Personal is Political,
Edmund White articulates this concern: "A canon is for people who don't like to
read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in
order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilised." Why, when we speak
of Indian writers, do we automatically factor only a handful of names? And who
are some of our younger writers making noise quietly?
Here, then, I am honoured to tell you about some of my peers: Rupa Bajwa (The
Sari Shop) works with language as subtle as a sigh, impressing upon us tales of
middle India with simple detail and canny insight.
When you read Corridor, Sarnath Banerjee's dizzyingly fun graphic gig, you're
tempted to assume an archetypical Bengali genius is firing up a post-modern
kiln (but you don't say it aloud for fear of catering to the stereotype). Who'd
have thought a Delhi munda was gonna beat good the graphic novel on its head?
It is language that Sonia Failero adores-and language adores her right back.
You might've read her non-fiction in Tehelka but her novel, The Girl,
establishes her as a novelist who may astound us (especially once she allows
that ol' clown-the story-more room on her stage.) After extracting myself out
of this equation, I assure you the novel in India is in wickedly capable hands.
Dusty old relics who claim the novel is dead probably did a lot to kill it; and
folks who believe its fate lies solely in the hands of the diaspora had better
wake up and smell the chai: it's hot, it's cutting and, creampuff, it's on me.
The writer is the author of The Last Song of Dusk. He will be
speaking at the Hindustan Times Kitab Festival in New Delhi today
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1669624,00120001.htm
~(^^)~
Avelino
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