Indian Writing

Christopher Hitchens is impressed with Rushdie’s English:

At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments.

This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is
more like a musical than a literary one. (I here admit to my own worst plagiarism: invited to write the introduction to Vanity Fair’s “Black & White Issue” some years ago, I took advantage of Salman’s presence in my house to ask him to riff on the two keywords for a bit. He free-associated about everything from photogravure to the Taj Mahal, without a prompt, for about 30 minutes, and my piece was essentially done.) And this is a man whose first language was Urdu!

Amitava Kumar on authenticity and the South Asian political novel:

Quite apart from this whole slew of stay-at-home writers, home being in most cases somewhere outside India, are the ones who, like Adiga, have taken the bus, or at least a hired taxi, to the hinterland. They might have traveled on a boat and risked being eaten by a Royal Bengal tiger. Or they might have walked in the tight, smelly alleys in the slums and, if they are enterprising, met a hired killer or two. This brings a different frisson to the body of Indian writing in English, which, given its roots in the middle class, has often been insular and dull. And these works seem direct responses to the numbing social violence in nearly every stratum of Indian society. But reportage is only an inoculation against the charge of inauthenticity. It hides larger untruths. Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel’s more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam on Adiga:

What of Balram Halwai? What does he sound like? Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning – as they say on cigarette packs – before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these?

Oh, these bureaucrats! Amit Chaudhuri responds to reviews of two of his works:

Ancient wisdom proclaims that it’s better not to respond to reviews. This might need to be considered afresh in a context such as Calcutta and, for that matter, India, where non-response is both endemic and a strategy for survival. How can you encourage debate and a multiplicity of opinion if the terse bureaucratic put-down becomes an acceptable ingredient in life, where you gratefully accept the rap on the knuckles and move on? Argument dries up in the public domain; gossip abounds in the private sphere; opinion itself becomes subsumed under a special language — to do with the demarcation of territories, loyalties — with which all who are attuned to the realm of bureaucracy, and its mode of exercising power, will be familiar.