Indian Literature in English: An Historical Perspective

Anyone concerned with the history of Indian writing in English, and with its reception in India and abroad, must be sobered by the consideration that this is the first international seminar that has been held on the subject outside India.  If neither the organizers nor the distinguished participants who are here seem to have been aware of the this fact, that simply emphasis how necessary and how useful it is to have an historical perspective on the subject.

Any historical perspective on a literature must help us to see its age, its volume, and its variety; and that is the scope of this paper.  Dr. Chaudhuri’s paper provides a useful starting point for mine.  If it is easy to take umbrage sometimes at his manner, or to disagree with  the  precise way in which he formulates a particular matter, it is generally difficult to take issue with the substance of what he says.  I make bold, however, to challenge two points he made, to the effect that we could write quite well in English by 1850 and that the world of English in India is a limited one and will always remain so.

I make bold to challenge them because in this particular matter of Indian writing in English, of which Mr. Chaudhuri so blithely declared himself ignorant, I have the inestimable advantage of having actually read the stuff!  My special interest is the history of Indian writing in English – and, as I research it, I become more and more aware of how much is simply not known.

There are, for example, five major bibliographies which include Indian English literature within their ambit – including the most useful short bibliography by Ronald Warwick, published by the Commonwealth Institute.  But the most substantial of these bibliographies, edited by Professor Amritjit Singh et al., (Indian Literature in English – A Guide to Information Sources) published in America last year by Gale Research Company, and running to some 630 pages, commences only in 1827, the date of the publication of the first volume of poems by that remarkable Indian, Henry Derozio.  The year (1827) is the generally accepted date or the commencement of the literature, but it is at least a few decades late.  The pamphlets of no less a person than Raja Rammohan Roy began being published some twenty years earlier, in 1816, while the very first pamphlet written in English by an Indian appears to have been published in 1806.  The first book to be published in English by an Indian, appeared before the end of the eighteen century, in 1794.  We don’t have time to discuss the fascinating man who wrote that volume, Sake Deen Mahomed, but he was only one of many Indians who were writing in English before the end of the eighteenth century.  Though they do not seem to have published any volumes of work, they contributed to Calcutta periodicals at a time when Calcutta was second only to London in its importance in the Empire.  Nineteenth century Calcutta was cosmopolitan, and swayed to breezes not only from Britain and the Continent, as Mr. Chaudhuri reminded us, but also to breezes from as far away as Canada and the United States – which are geographically just about as far from India as it is possible to be.  And yet Calcutta started benefiting from English education only in 1817, while the first school which taught English was actually started hundred years earlier, at Cuddalore, near Madras.

The revolution in Indian intellectual life was so complete by the 1830s that the first autobiography had already been published in English – Raja Rammohan Roy’s.  Why it is the genre of autobiography that so demonstrates this mental revolution will be instantly clear to anyone acquainted with Vedantic philosophy, which believes that our consciousness of being individuals, separate from each other and from nature around us, is not only an illusion, but constitutes precisely that illusion which prevents us from ‘relising’ the absolute Brahman.  To be so absorbed in this ignorant and illusionary self as to actually want to recall, and then pass on to others, the wretchedly transitory detail of life in this illusory world ought to come as close as possible to the unforgivable in Advaitic belief.  Anyway, that sin had been committed by an eminent Indian in the 1830s, and is committed by an increasing number of Indians, eminent and not-so-eminent, every year.  The first play in English, Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s The Persecuted was published in 1831, and the first novel in English, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife was published in 1864.  Briefly, then, Indian writing in English goes back some two hundred years, and all the major literary forms had begun being practiced some one hundred and twenty years ago.

By contrast, Australian literature is generally agreed to begin with the stories of Charles Rowcroft in the 1800s, Canadian literature with T. C. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker in 1836, and New Zealand literature with two volumes published separately by Samuel Butler and F.E. Maning in 1863.  White South Afrian literature, again, begins in the 1800s, but black African literature begins very late – unless one includes the work of black British writers such as Equiano and Sancho in the eighteenth century.  Caribbean literature, if one excludes the seemingly solitary exception of Mary Seacole (who should also properly be considered black British), really begins in the inter-war period in the twentieth century.  India was therefore one of the first countries outside Britain and America to adopt English for literary purposes.

One other fact is often forgotten in nationalist zeal by good Indians: that the British did not generally want to see natives educated in English, partly for the racist reasons of keeping us in our place, and partly for more sophisticated cultural and political reasons.  They were afraid that English education would cause too much trouble.  And of course it did.  Eventually it was English education that was responsible for Britain losing its Indian, and in consequence its world, empire.  So Macaulay, the whipping-boy of those Indian who blindly favour the exclusive use of Indian regional languages, was actually quite enlightened.  In allying himself with the progressive Anglicist lobby on the Committee of Public Instruction which he chaired he was, more importantly, allying himself with a large and growing body of Indian opinion that wanted English education and had already started getting it.  His Minute (which introduced state-supported English-language education into India) was the same Minute which conceded the Indian could already (in 1835) use English with an use, fluency, and precision that would do credit to any Member of Macaulay’s own (British) Committee of Public instruction.  We fought to get State-subsidised English education because we could see its advantages; the English hesitated to give it to us because they too could see the advantages that would accrue to us as well as the corresponding disadvantages to themselves.  This Indian demand for State-supported English-language education created the precedent and the successful model for English-language education which was followed in British colonies in other parts of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and thus laid the foundations for the development of English as a world language.

We come, next, to the question of the volume of the literature.  Prose was the first of the literary forms in Indian English literature, and it continues to be the largest and most vigorous form.  Born properly with the reforming zeal of Raja Rammonhan Roy, and aimed at educated people all over the country, the astonishing and irritating flexibility of the language was hammered into an effective weapon of exposition, argument, and exhortation against the British by a long line of eminent patriots such as Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi.  More recent practitioners, such as Mr. Chaudhuri and Ved Mehta, have used it at least as effectively and creatively, if to quite different purposes.

As might be expected, poetry was the most important literary form of the nineteenth century, and through it is not of such central importance now, an ever-increasing number of Indian poets are writing and publishing in English.

Fiction in English presents an opposite sort of line on the graph, which compared to poetry, for it shows a steadily increasing popularity at first, and now an algebraic growth rate, both in the number of works published, and in the print runs of individual titles.

Drama in English is of course the last of the literary forms to flower and there have been only some two hundred plays published in English over a period of 150 years.  But then if drama is to thrive, it is self-evident that it needs greater institutional and public support than any other form of literature.

It is also possible to examine the quantity of Indian literature in English by the historical periods into which it naturally falls.  The first of these is roughly up to 1816, what might be called the ‘Pre-Roy’ period (i.e. before Raja Rammohun Roy).  It is during this period that the use of English by Indians was an individual aberration or indulgence.

The second period begins with Roy and is typified by him: it is marked by a steadily increasing use of the language on the part of the growing nationalist class which was, during this period, entirely English-educated.

The third period begins in the 1930s with the arrival of the three major Indo-Anglian novelists, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao.  This coincides with the final phase of the nationalist movement which for the first time in Indian history awoke the masses of our peoples to their political rights and responsibilities.  During this time, India’s conception of  caste, which had strangled social behaviour for some thousands of years, was revolutionized, and Mahatma Gandhi’s Christianised and individual version of Karma and Bhakti was gradually replaced by the philosophical and practical materialism and individualism typified by the urbanizing and industrializing instincts of Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister.

Having got rid of the English, the paradoxical Indians turned with a remarkable passion to the language of the  people we had just expelled,: our Constitution, adopted in 1951, was written in English, and recognized two official languages, English and Hindi, which the government has made determined efforts to promote.  With this patronage, Hindi has made significant strides, and the number of publications has been growing steadily.  But what is not often realized is that the number of publications in English is also growing, both absolutely and as a proportion of all books published.  Eight thousand of the seventeen thousand titles published in 1981 were in English, and comprised the bulk of our book exports worth £4.5 million.  It is not surprising that India is among the ten largest publishers in the world; what is a little surprising, and very little known, is that India is now the largest publisher of English-language books in the world, after the United States and Britain.

So powerful has Indian English literature become that novelists who have won prizes for their work in Indian regional languages, such as Narendarpal Singh, have started writing in English: an exact reversal of the situation a hundred years ago when M.M. Dutt and Bankim Chander Chatterjee flirted with English before returning faithfully to Bengali.

Indian writers in English have now won every major literary prize: the Nobel Prize was won by Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, the Booker McConnell Prize for 1981 was won by Salman Rushdie.  The Hawthornden Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prie, the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, the Winifred Holtby Award of the Royal Society for Literature, the English-Speaking Union’s Prize for the Best Novel of the Year – all of these have been won by Indian. 

If Indian literature in English is of such quantity, variety, antiquity and quality, why is it so little known and recognised in the West?  One reason is the self-interest of Western individuals and publishing companies.  After independence, the number of opportunities for Western individuals and corporations multiplied in Africa and the Caribbean.  By contrast, opportunities for Westerners in India disappeared almost overnight.  It is therefore understandable that few Western literary scholars are interested in Indian English literature: there are fewer career opportunities. Indian legislation, combined with India’s own vigorous publishing industry means that the market available in India to Western publishers is negligible.  India publishers themselves have only recently made any substantial attempts to promote their books in Britain.

Whereas the cause of Afro-Caribbean studies was given a powerful fillip by the political and social activism of black Americans which has had repercussions all over the world, there has been no similar factor promoting Indian or South Asian studies abroad.  Unlike the African, the Indian diaspora is rarely perceived as a unity; indeed, it is rarely perceived at all.  One has to remind intelligent and well-read people of the fact that the Indian diaspora is both more massive and more widespread than the African, extending to Fiji, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Middle East, Britain and various Continental countries, Canada, the united States, Trinidad and Guyana, in addition to Nigeria and a number of countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

The Chinese diaspora is perhaps comparable, in both spread and size, but the Indian is more riven by divisions of language, religion, caste and family ties.

There are two other factors within our community that have historically militated against our own interest, and still do so.  I refer to what I call the ‘cut-above syndrome’.  Every Brahmin thinks himself superior to members of every other caste, the Muslim considers himself superior to the idolatrous Hindu, the Bengali thinks that the Punjabi is a philistine, the Punjabi in his turn reviles the cowardly Bengali for eating fish rather than meat, and so on.  There is also what I call the ‘orphan-wish’ of Indian English writers: none of us wishes to acknowledge our literary ancestors, regional, Indian English, British, or whatever; all of us apparently sprang full-grown Minerva-like from Jupiter’s head!   Our attitude is summed up by one of us who, on being asked about other Indian English writers, looked the questioner in the eye and quietly replied, “There are a few … but I am the only one worth reading.”

This sort of attitude is possible only for the extreme egoist (which that writer is not), or for one who is ignorant of the history and the body of the tradition in which he or she is writing.

Indian Fiction in English

The Festival India, which has just begun and which lasts until November, is a good time to acquaint oneself with an unusual body of writing.  Indian fiction has been originally written in English for nearly two hundred years, so it is not surprising that it should have something for every taste, from romance, and detective and war fiction to serious novels,

Possibly the best-known Indian novel is G.V., Desani’s All about H. Hatterr, which has acquired the status of a minor classic.  The only Indian novel to have been continuous in print in the West since its publication in 1948, it is an astonishing linguistic feat.  Anthony Burgess described its langue as ‘a sort of creative chaos . . . like the English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kypling, gloriously impure’.  The oddest scrapes of philosophy and scholarship are juxtaposed with dizzy fights of fancy and poetry to make an exhilarating book, reminiscent of a tickling whoosh of air from a pricked balloon; the balloon, in this case is Indian philosophy and spirituality.

Graham Greene considers R.K. Narayan to be the greatest living English-language novelist.  His achievement is generally thought to lie in the purity of his Indian’s vision, rendered in a form which is deceptively simple – and therefore almost universally accessible.  Narayan began with personal, autobiographical concerns: The Bachelor of Arts is a distinctly Indian love story; The English Teacher shows us a man being comforted by spiritualistic visitations after his domestic bliss is destroyed by his wife’s death.  The relevance of Indian traditional wisdom to different situations and personalities is explored in The Dark Room, Mr. Sampath, The Financial Expert and Waiting for the Mahatma.  However, the most orthodox statement of an Indian traditional (Puranic) viewpoint in fiction are found in The Man-Eater of Malgudi and The Vendor of Sweets.  The last two novels especially have enjoyed a tremendous reputation with Western critics and readers as a way into some of the mysteries of India.  Narayan’s more complex and ambivalent novels, The Guide and The Painter of Signs are equally admired by Indian and Western readers, and are probably his best fictional work.

Mulk Raj Anand made his mark at about the same time as Narayan as the result of introduction by E. M. Forster.  In novels such as Untouchable and Coolie, which are the best of his early work.  Anand strikes the note of compassion for the underprivileged for which his work is known.  Private Life of an Indian Prince is, as might be expected by its theme, his most popular work, and is from his middle period.  The projected multi-volume Seven Ages of Man promises a portrayal of India changing from the 1920s to the 1950s, from a feudal and colonized country to a modernizing and independent one.

Manohar Malgonkar also shows a notable historical sense in portraying the struggle for independence in Bend in the Ganges, though it has relatively poor characterization.  In The Princes, Malgonkar provided amore positive picture of India’s old ruling classes, Malgonkar’s forte is strong traditional plots, and his five novels are always engrossingly readable.

Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope may be the best philosophical novel in English to come from India but, for those not philosophically incline, his first novel, Kanthapura, is the greater achievement, A marvelous, half-whimsical, half-poetic recreation of an incessant stream of language from a grandmother, it tells the story of the impact of Mahatma Gandhi on the woman’s village

Khuhwant Singh’s I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale is a fictional study of Sikh spirituality, while Train of Pakistan shows how partition tore apart the intricate web of relationships that held together a pre-Independence village.  Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (“Freedom’) is a fuller and more detailed study of the effect of partition on the members of one family.

Woman novelists have made a notable contribution.  Ruth Prawar Jhabvala is, of course, well known in Britain; for her eight novels and four collections o short stories she won the Neil M. Gunn International Fellowship in 1979 and, for Heat and Dust, the Booker Prize in 1976.  If one of her novels must be singled out for praise the vote will probably go to Get Ready for Battle, which gently mocks the self-seeking ambitions and intrigues of middle-class urban Indian s who are all ready for battle – with each other and with themselves.  The ironic prefatory quotation from the Bhagavadgita alerts the reader to the philosophic, moral and social problems of India which are portrayed so well here.

Anita Desai showed with her very first novel, Cry the Peacock that she is clearly the most linguistically gifted of all Indian English novelists.  The novels that followed, Voice in the City, Bye-Bye Blackbird and Where Shall We Go This Summer? Confirmed this reputation but showed her struggling for fictional form.  Fire on the Mountain, which won the Indian National Academy of Letter Award in 1978 as well as the Royal Society of Literature’s Winfried Holtby Award for the bet regional novel for that year, Clear Light of Say, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980, and Games of Twilight, her impressive first collection of short stories, constitute her mature work.

Fredy Olbrich, in spite of her unusual name, is an Indian woman; her hero, the amiable Chief Inspector Desouza, belongs, like Keating’s Inspector Ghote, to the Bombay CID.  His nine children and his harridan of a mother-in-law add their charm to three precise and luminous novels, Desouza Pays the Price, Sweet and Deadly and Desouza in Stardust.

The first of the Indian Women novelists to establish a name, Kamala Markandaya, has now written eight potent novels, of which the most memorable is Netar in a Sieve.  The Nowhere Man, about an Indian immigrant to Britain, may hold a special appeal for readers here.  Other novels on Indian immigrants include Dilip Hiro’s A Triangular View, Jamila and Reginald Massey’s The Immigrants,  and Timeri Murari’s The Marriage.

If Indian fiction in English is so good and has been published for nearly two centuries, how is it that it is so little knows?  Unlike Africa and the West Indies, India has had its own flourishing publishing industry for as long as Indians have written in English. These books find peculiar distribution difficulties in the West for three reasons.  Firstly few Indian publishers advertise in the British press, owing to Government restrictions on the spending of scare foreign exchange. Secondly, the books are not formally published in Britain and are therefore generally not noticed here.  Thirdly, although some Indian publishers have assigned sole distributorships, there is only one Indian publisher (to my knowledge) who keeps to the terms of the agreement, refusing to supply books to the British market through any other distributor.  The agreements, moreover, do not seem to provide for review copies or, indeed, even for the copies which must be deposited in accordance with British copyright law. 

Afraid that they will be asked to deposit such copies at their own cost, distributors do not even make use of Whitaker’s free listings service in the Bookseller.

However, a steady increasing demand for Indian books since the 1960s has ensured the growth of Indian bookshops in Britain, and titles produced by Indian publishers – unless, like OUP India, they are subsidiaries o British publishers – are best obtained from these bookshops.  Penguin are the principal British paperback publishers with an Indian interest, and Indian titles in hardbacks have also appeared from most of the major British publishing houses.

The most comprehensive single survey of the literature as a whole is K. R. S. Iyengar’s Indian Writing in English; an impressive critical discussion of the themes and techniques of the Indian English novel is The Twice-Born Fiction; Uma Parameshwaran’s A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists and R. S. Singh’s Indian Novel in English have useful essays on individual writers; and several full-length studies have appeared.  The most easily obtainable bibliography is Ronald J. Warwick’s Indian Literature in English: A Checklist.  Strangely, there are few anthologies of Indian English short stories; Meenakshi Mukherjee’s  Let’s go Home and Other Stories is perhaps the best volume with which to begin an acquaintance with this fascinating and growing body of fiction.