Contemporary Indian Writing- part II

Another debut author, Vikas Swarup, a diplomat turned author and presently posted in, as India’s Consul-General to Osaka, Japan, also seems to chart out a similar terrain on the lines of Adiga, but without immunizing himself against the pitfalls of his cosmopolitan narrative. In Q & A, he eschews from celebrating the pluriethnic, rainbow riot of Rushdie’s Mumbai and focuses instead on a Mumbai encumbered by somber shadows of an ulterior reality. An orphan poor boy, Ram Mohammad Thomas becomes a spokesperson of the hitherto silenced minority, the deprived section of the country’s so called economic capital whose towering heights neglect the peripheral squalor of city pavements and slums. Ram describes Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum as “a cancerous lump in the heart of the city. And the city refuses to recognize it….There are a million people…packed in a two-hundred hectare triangle of swampy urban wasteland, where we live like animals and die like insects” (156, 157).
Swarup evokes a morbidly pathetic site of Mumbai as it goes on to revel in its polyphony of inter-cultural ‘riots’. It is a very different Mumbai experience that exposes its underbelly of crime and dons, the organized network of corruption and bribery, where children are abducted, maimed and forced into beggary and rich are not ennobled, as money becomes the means to cover up their hideous personalities, fake smiles and criminal consciousness.
Thus, it seems as if the Indian writers in English do not possess the necessary vocabulary to express the consciousness of local and regional sub-cultures unless turned into elements of exotic appeal.
Based on the format of the TV quiz show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Q & A is a conglomeration of diverse stories linked together by a singular aim of portraying India in all possible colours, including the negative, thereby framing a larger narrative about human life and the rapidly depleting culture of humanity. As Ram goes on to win a billion rupees by answering all questions correctly, based on his life experiences, readers tend to indulge in a fantastic view of life as one’s saviour from the injustices of society and destiny. As Vikas Swarup states in one of his interviews to Hindustan Times, “It is a story of hope and optimism…Anything can happen here in India and we are doing it all with democracy…I wanted to show that not only education but life itself is the greatest teacher”
The narrative of hope is inscribed all over in the life of Ram Mohammad Thomas. His name itself is a testimony to the great ‘optimism disease’ that the underlying secular character of the country cannot and will not be overwhelmed by ethnic and communal strains in its nationalist fabric. Moreover, Ram is also made a victim like Adiga’s Balram. He is accused of cheating in the game show, arrested and beaten hard but this does not deter him from the path of hope. He is acutely aware of the fact that his miseries are the result of the lack of money yet he does not stoop low to co-opt himself within the system that he seeks to challenge. In fact, he comes across as more discerning than Balram. He is aware that if money is a source of power for the poor, it is akin to misery for the rich. “I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born….Is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself. Ram’s narrative does not end up being a tale of class warfare. The inequality between the haves and have-nots is highlighted and the reader is left to formulate his own response. Thus, the novel ends up being a romantic investment in the life and destiny of Ram Mohammad Thomas and falls in line with the dominant genre of postcolonial bourgeoisie Indian English novel that postulate Romanticism and the transformative power of imagination as antidotes to pressing social realities.
Thus, while on the surface, both The White Tiger and Q & A may appear as flash in the pan novels, foregrounding the perspective of independent, lower class protagonists having their own motivations, it remains largely a cosmopolitan take on the subaltern reality, seen through “guilt- tinted as well as gilt-tinted spectacles”. The arrival of both Adiga and Swarup on the Indian English literary scene does not add much to the genre in terms of bringing in variety of ideology and technique , thereby expanding the contours of Indian writing in English today. I here recall Meenakshi Mukherjee’s ideas in ‘The Anxiety of Indianness: Our Novels in English’… “We shall probably see more and more writers ( can I add artists too?) who will (be) propelled by the logic of social dynamics within the country, lured by forces of global marketplace and driven by the mirage of international fame….”