I WAS RECENTLY ON THE JURY for a literary award and made my way, with growing panic, through a few dozen new works of fiction in English. A hundred-odd books from any culture at any time will inevitably reveal something of the soul of that culture. The essence of this particular swathe of literature was that it was resolutely not literary. With some exceptions—which were the best books on the list—the impulses behind writing and reading lay elsewhere.
I don’t mean that the writing was poor. At the level of pacing and plot, a good deal was in fact impressive. Knowing English well and being skilled in these aspects of the craft seem to go hand-in-hand; over the decades, so much Western pulp fiction has been circulated here that Indian writers have now imbibed the form completely. The imprint of, say, Dan Brown on these books was obvious. There is much mystical fiction—“ancient enigma” or “hidden treasure” are the usual preoccupations—that draws on Indian mythology and blends it with incongruous tropes. Notions of secrecy and heresy, for instance, part of the Christian past, are combined with more local lore in Raghu Srinivasan’s Avatari, MN Krish’s The Steradian Trail, Sudipto Das’s Ekkos Clan or Christopher C Doyle’s The Mahabharata Secret, to name just four recent books.
To call these writers un-literary is therefore not to imply that they aren’t reading other writers. Many, in fact, demonstrate an extreme sensitivity to what sells: they seem to be thinking of a genre novel as a replicable product, rather than the outcome of individual imagination. But there is a difference between writing a novel patterned on the best-seller of the moment, and writing one in dialogue with other books and authors. It is in this difference that what I’m calling the “literary” subsists. There were plenty of imitations on my list, but no echoes. The great majority of these novels exist in the vacuum of an eternal present, where the marketable is endlessly duplicated but not necessarily worked on, extended, or questioned.
It is clear that the norms for what constitutes “imaginative” literature—fantasy, thrillers, speculative fiction—and indeed, what constitutes imaginativeness, have been set by Western writers in this mode. In response, we don’t seem to be asking: can we find a way to represent our own experience through these established genres, instead of just substituting their subject matter with ours or, often, creating mash-ups of the two? And what makes textbook history and cartoon mythology so unconstrainedly ours, anyway?
Repurposing the Indian past for novels—apparently with contemporary resonance but often just as expressions of nostalgia—is one dominant kind of English fiction. Another variety, equally revealing in its newness, is aspirational stories about middle-class lives, which too can appear in different genres—from romance to crime. These are novels in which the fundamental paradigm is securely in place; in the representative words of Subhashini Dinesh in My Iron Wings: “I had to earn, and earn well, to live with dignity … I wanted to do something for my family, for my parents who had supported this large family, sacrificing every little pleasure”. Characters are required to pass the posts of various day-to-day challenges in order to achieve success within this framework.
Such writers mostly draw from life, but since life itself can only be interestingly reimagined in writing through the insights we get from literature, this lack of feeling for a literary tradition means that they are forced to fish in the shallows. Chetan Bhagat is usually considered the instigator of such literature, but his books are as much symptom as cause. The larger phenomenon is that of India’s English-speaking middle classes struggling to form a reliable self-image, unable to find a vantage from which to view themselves, and ending up confusing their lifestyles with their lives.
As a result, such fiction is often about just that—lifestyle. Supposedly liberal attitudes; stock differences between parents and children; ho-hum stories of career advancement and office life; an obsession with money-making; the challenges of finding the right mate and relationship woes; what people eat and how they dress; gadgets, toys, homes, furniture, cars, vacations—all this is overwhelmingly the stuff of this literature, even as apparently moral dilemmas occupy the characters and move the story along. (It takes a highly aware writer to make revealing fiction out of consumerism. Jonathan Franzen, for instance, goes beyond the naming of things in his novels to create a distinctive idiom out of the elaborate and oppressive material paraphernalia of middle-class life.)
Interestingly, writing novels has itself become part of the lifestyle being written about. More than half the authors I read were debutants, or had published one previous novel. Many had engineering, management or finance degrees, and past or present careers in the private sector. Clearly, writing represents an escape from the straitjacket of corporate life. Yet many new writers end up turning for ideas to the very life they’re trying to resist.
Others, as I’ve mentioned, seek refuge in an imaginary past. Along with mythological thrillers, the historical novel is also starting to exercise a growing fascination. Just as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have become mere sources of narrative for many of today’s writers, to be recast in superficially contemporary ways, Indian history is increasingly, and unquestioningly, taking the form of a story—epic, saga, tour de force. The historical archive ends up as mere raw material for the novelist and history is flattened when imagined as entertainment. Ashoka, a Mughal emperor, a British officer fighting Tipu Sultan—could all end up occupying the same plane in such books, marked by the exterior trappings and the interior hollowness generally required of a character in a page-turner.
Perhaps language is a factor in these disappointments. This is the country’s first generation using English so widely to write about itself, and there is unmistakeably a sense of discovery, of flexing a new limb, as it were, to see what it can do. But these are cautious and conservative movements. It seems that we are unprepared to stick our necks out—not in order to produce globally acceptable fiction, but work that adheres and gives shape to our own lives. This might explain the absence of a literary sensibility. To the mostly young people producing this literature, writing, in the first instance, is synonymous with storytelling. To have a story to tell is to be a potential writer, rather than to have a relationship with existing work.
If all this signals a crisis—of identity, if not literature—few seem to have taken note. We harp on the distinctions between commercial and literary fiction without wondering if the very terms in which we’ve grown used to thinking about literature could be misleading. Much of the fiction I’m talking about is usually dismissed by so-called literary writers (such as myself!) on grounds of mediocrity and triteness. Yet several writers I read were in fact highly skilled at the mechanics of fiction-writing. From the opposite side, the literary work tends to be considered serious, taken to mean sombre and dull rather than intelligent, a view which disregards the fact that wit is at the heart of the work of the most acute novelists, from RK Narayan to Arundhati Roy.
If popular fiction is limited by its preoccupation with storytelling, literary fiction is susceptible to a false idea of the literary, where literature itself, usually Western, acquires totemic significance rather than being basis for reflection. This was noticeable in otherwise engaging novels such as Supriya Dravid’s A Cool, Dark Place, where a riveting, alcoholic Tamil charmer named Don is compared at various points to Gatsby, Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, a Tolkien character, and finally Madame Bovary. So also in Shashi Deshpande’s Shadow Play, where the characters are often reciting solemnly to each other the old English poetry they learnt in school. In many kinds of writing, imaginativeness is equated with exoticism, whether this means avoiding writing about the ordinary, or insistently, if not feverishly, making things up. (An extreme example is Nilanjana Sanyal’s The Silent Holocaust, which combines the Darfur genocide, ancient Mayans, and a plan to wipe the weak off the earth being hatched in the Nevada desert, based on the theories of Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler.)
Imagination as a form of precision, the new articulation of established truths, the sidewise look at the old, familiar thing—this was what I missed most. What saved the situation for me was, of course, the writing that went against the grain: novels about the Indian abroad that did away with hackneyed diaspora angst or anxieties about conquering the West (Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad and Amitava Bagchi’s This Place); novels about Muslims that disregarded the grim woes of the minority (Anees Salim’s The Blind Lady’s Descendants and Vanity Bagh); novels about community life that bypassed ethnography and folksiness (Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey and Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories). Most significantly, these were works alive to the irony—if not tragedy—of middle-class aspirations, and they approached failure with curiosity and tenderness.
Perhaps, in the end, the shortage of truly good novels is instructive. Writing fiction is a minority activity, and certainly in our culture and in our time, there is something quietly subversive, joyfully marginal about the best being produced. The occasional spotlight of literary awards notwithstanding, these books have to be sought out and grappled with.