Contemporary Indian Writing - part I

Shashi Tharoor in his essay ‘Rushdie’s ‘Overartist’: Indianness from Midnight to the Millennium’ talks about Salman Rushdie’s heritage to the Indian English fiction, derived from a “polyglot tumult of multiethnic and postcolonial India” (122) where “people of every imaginable color (sic), creed, caste, cuisine, consonant and conviction can live, strive and triumph together in one gloriously mongrel nation…” (135). With writers like Rushdie and Tharoor whose post-modernist musings are imbued with a “chutneyfied” vision of India, no wonder the ‘desi sadak’ and gullies of the ‘other’ India lose their visibility and rendered devoid of a significant presence within the contours of the Big Indian English novel. However, a sense of variety has begun to illuminate the said genre with new writers like Aravind Adiga and Vikas Swarup, who have shown their willingness to incorporate the subaltern perspective in their debut novels, The White Tiger (2008) and Q & A (2005) respectively. Both Balram and Ram Mohammad Thomas hail from rural hinterland and slums of the ‘other’ India but come across as bold, clever, independent and agents of their own destiny as they narrate their lived reality from their own perspective and conceptualize their relationship with upper class masters. Here one is tempted to map the credibility of the authors’ rendition of lower class consciousness. Admittedly, it is not easy for these urban writers to evade the charge of elitism altogether, of being out of touch with grass root realities and incapable of writing convincingly about the subalterns of the ‘idea’ called India.
Following is a kind of a review of both the novels to see how far these India writers in English have been able to do justice to their representation of India. A kind of a survey becomes important because Indian English has deftly usurped the position of Indian Literatures and distorted their efforts to present the real India by delving into a constructed representation of India, aimed at exoticising it and selling it in the western market. It’s a similar kind of experience when one visits the elite art galleries in elite circles of Delhi and sees a variety of aesthetically distorted and intellectually distanced canvases in the name of High Art and I so wish to call it the Indian English Art born out of the sole desire to sell India abroad.
At a time when India is trying to mobilize world opinion for getting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council and every next leadership summit speculating over India’s credentials to be the new visage of world power; both Adiga’s and Swarup’s protagonists tend to deflate these claims by their grim confessions about the ‘real’ India existing somewhere on the deprived peripheries of Delhi, Mumbai and rural interiors of the country. Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger takes upon himself to puncture the India shining rhetoric and highlight the brutal injustices of society in a series of one-sided conversations with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
The White Tiger is rigorously inclined towards stripping the veneer off the amoral materialism that lies at the heart of society. India is the largest democracy in the world but weak enough to survive the distortions of the system where politicians are bribed, horse-trading finds its way into the corridors of Parliament, elections are rigged and corrupt politicians keep coming back to power. The poor residing in the darkness never get to cast their votes. They struggle to live as much as they yearn to die and escape the curse of poverty. Therefore, in the subversive act of murdering his master, Balram hides his derisive laughter at any pretension of justice or civility.
The novel documents Balram’s journey from the darkness of village into the light of entrepreneurial success, capturing psychopathic stirrings of his “half-baked” mind that refutes the traditional caste/class structure by exposing its incongruities. He affirms how the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor has reduced Life to a condition of eternal class warfare:
I won’t be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course, the rich have won the war for ten thousand years.
Being poor amounts to having no human value and relegates one to a status even worse than animals. “Men with big bellies” are out there to exploit and destroy “men with small bellies.”

However, what strikes as a jarring note here is the way Adiga uses the language of self-subalternisation and renders this portrait of social unrest devoid of meaning. Liberty, for Balram, amounts to switching sides in the Manichean world of two Indias and placing himself in the position of his former master. He will commit more crimes, pay bribes, and perhaps murder again if need be. Thus, the narrative ends up being a guilt-tinted, middle class, liberal take on the distortions of the system that leaves no alternative for its victims except one, that is, to wriggle their way through the system by colluding with the system.
Thus, Aravind Adiga’s novelistic agenda is not radically different from those of other postcolonial bourgeois migrant writers who wish to speak from the margins, yet end up assimilating into the coterie of the mainstream cosmopolitan elite. Literature of the periphery looses its thrust when an elite, middle class and Oxford returned Adiga attempts to communicate it, divorced as he is from the lived reality of the ethnic or caste ‘other’. Thus, the novel ends up being a surface documentation of the lives and experiences of poor and does not come across as a credible narrative of resistance against the oppressive power structure.




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Bharti Arora (The latest Fragmented Few)