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In the evening
of the last century, there was that big debate about the death of the
novel. You saw neo-Victorians wailing over the dead novel from their private
bleak houses in the English countryside. You heard their dire judgements:
the art of story-telling has become a plotless pretence rather a verbal
hoax. Then you saw the venerable Vidia Naipaul joining the funeral procession.
Drop the book and go to the movie hall, for there is nothing on the page
and everything is in the mise en scene, he told you. Even Milan Kundera
got disillusioned. In one of his essays in Testaments Betrayed, he admonished
the society of the novel-Europe-for disowning its own art, and he was
happy to see the abandoned art taking refuge in the tropical magic of
Asia and Latin America. After the End of Ideology and the End of History,
was it then the End of Imagination?
 In
retrospect, it was a non-debate. The novel didn't disappear through the
sewage system of the 20th century art. Rather, in the marketplace of imagination,
the form that continues to evolve and conquer is the novel. If you are
reading W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz or Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of
the Goat or Ian McEwan's Atonement at the moment, can you seriously say
that the novel is in coma? Hari Kunzru doesn't belong to that category;
still, try him. He, with his £1.5 million advance, is a first novelist
whose book is big, bold, boisterous-and Indian. The last adjective matters.
The Indian novel in English is today a mega-narration worthy of big prizes
and big advances. And Kunzru's The Impressionist, just a few weeks old
in the market, marks another eventful moment in Imagining India in English.
And look at what is being played out in that India at the moment.
In Kunzru's novel, the idea of Empire and the action of Identity come
together in a high wattage performance that is deceptively comic. In the
evolutionary saga of Pran Nath, a half caste in a permanent process of
reinventing himself, merge the many mockeries of the Empire, pastiches
and parodies, pathologies and pornographies. Stretching from a Rajasthan
desert to Agra to Fatehpur to Bombay to London to Oxford to a West African
remoteness, The Impressionist is a postmodern picaresque inhabited by
enchanting stereotypes and rare originals. For literary London, another
multicultural spellbinder, and perhaps it needed one after Zadie Smith's
riotous White Teeth. For Penguin, 32-year-old Kunzru, half-Kashmiri, half-English,
like his protagonist, is its investment of the year.
| Books
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 SUDDENLY,
WE ARE EVERYWHERE |
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Hari Kunzru, the Londoner who in The Impressionist explores
the life and trials of an Anglo-Indian boy, has been acclaimed
for his novel's energy and density. Though not on the bestseller's
list, Kunzru has offers for films and television series of
the book. While he defers the decision till he finds "someone
with a vision", Kunzru comments on things that affect
him.
On The Publisher's Weekly remark: "London talents like
Kunzru and Zadie Smith suggest something like the Latin American
boom of the '60s is happening in London."
The comparison with Zadie is flattering. She is a close
friend but our works are very different. She has written about
her life in London, where she grew up. But I stay farther
from my immediate life in my story. However, I have used family
background. The house where Pran grew up in The Impressionist
is my grandfather's house in Agra where my father grew up.
About research for his book: For over six months, I did
only research and also a lot of freelance work to keep going.
Once the book was written, I sent it to six publishers and
four came back with offers.
In spite of a £1.5 million deal for US and UK rights,
he still drives a battered Volvo: Where I live, anything else
will disappear without a trace.
On criticism: ... it has received more positive than negative
response.
On his admiration for British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi:
When I grew up, there was nothing to read about an Asian's
life in Britain. For the first time you get to see real Asians
in Hanif's books. I identified with his Buddha of Suburbia.
Suddenly we are everywhere.
On his next book: It has several central characters and
is set in contemporary London.
-Ishara Bhasi
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Kunzru coincides with another debutant who is another big publisher's
big hope of the year-David Davidar. The House of Blue Mangoes by the CEO
of Penguin India, brought out in UK by Orion, is as big as The Impressionist
but so different in style, though they gaze at the same history. Set in
the lush, leafy South, this sprawling generational saga is populated by
patriarchs and rebels and is powered by violent passions-historical, personal
and social. No verbal fireworks on Davidar's page; it's almost documentary,
vivid and linear.
If two brand new sensibilities in quick succession is a bit too much,
here is the familiar Rohinton Mistry with his third novel, Family Matters
(see review) just published in UK and India. Twice Booker-shortlisted,
he is a topline writer in Faber's fiction list, and this neo-realist born
in Bombay and settled in Canada has a captive fan club. He also happens
to be the only Indian novelist who was featured in Oprah Winfrey's once
influential Books Club. So, India is definitely multiplying on the page,
it is acquiring new styluses to make the artwork more astonishing. There
is always someone to finance the work, there is always someone to buy
it, there is always a critic over there to endorse it, and an award is
never far away even if it is not the Booker.
Is this rising republic in imagination worth the attention? Do the words
stretching from Saleem Sinai's first cry in Midnight's Children to Pran
Nath's last journey in The Impressionist signify an epochal text in literature?
More than two decades ago, Salman Rushdie made it possible. Midnight's
Children was novel as event, an event that totally sabotaged the art and
architecture of, say, R K Narayan's India. The subcontinental variation
of el realismo magical shocked and redeemed, and the sighs and sorrows
of India got a brash new translation by a writer who called himself a
bastard child of history. The writer from elsewhere was reclaiming home,
which existed only in memory. Then you saw the march: Amitav Ghosh, Vikram
Seth, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri,
Manil Suri ... An Indian Spring in words. As the sun set over the Empire,
Macaulay's grandchildren from the colony were providing the literary sundowner.
The Booker Prize, the island's alternative to the literary Nobel, continued
to encourage the market of novel from elsewhere-Okri, Ondaatje, Ishiguro
... and the Booker of Bookers to Rushdie.
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REAPING THE FRUIT: Davidar's
book
has been well received |
Some of the post-Midnight Children parodied the master, quite a few acquired
a style of their own and one writer, Seth, wrote a book that thrilled
the modern day Victorians-they even called A Suitable Boy a Taj Mahal
of a novel and compared the novelist to writers as different as Thackeray
and Tolstoy. Still, the post-Rushdie event was Arundhati Roy-Booker for
the first novel, an international cover girl, and in the eulogy of John
Updike, a Tiger Woodsian performance in fiction.
The God of Small Things was one novel that lived up to the buzz. A work
of raw beauty, fresh and fragrant, too tender, so searing, it marked another
beginning. The age of the romantics-big advances, small novels and the
work of the chief romantic as sensational as a loose page from Lonely
Planet. Apologists argued the spartan narration was neo-Naipaulian; but
it was spartan in ideas too. Suddenly, there is a generation which has
turned its inadequacies into an achievement. They couldn't comprehend
the world, they couldn't play with it in words, so they, the romantics,
did dreamy, miniature compositions, and fantasised that they were variations
of Naipaul and Coetzee. And they had to repudiate the father to declare
their literary adulthood. Hence the new burst of Rushdie-bashing. Rushdie
held the whole world in his palm and danced on, even as the ground beneath
his feet quaked.
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| GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Lahiri is working on her
next novel |
India is a quaking reality whose solitude is more than one hundred years
old, and this reality lies orphaned outside the canvas of the romantics.
That is why the comparisons between the Latin American boom of the seventies
and the eighties, most vibrantly personified by the trio of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, all still functioning
masters, and the rising word power of India are out of place-and out of
history. Trampled dreams and oversized dictators, potentates and patriarchs
in permanent hallucination, the maelstrom of history outside the window-the
inheritance of the Latin American was a horror story, and if there was
magic, it rhymed with macabre. The novelist made sense of history. And
history, in novel, as Kundera says, is the state of being in the world.
Apart from a Rushdie or a Ghosh, the Indian novelist in English, self
exiled or not, writes without the burden of being in the world. The novel
you have is big in size and small in soul.
In the age of McMetaphor, India is still seeking.
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CURRENT
ISSUE MAY 6, 2002
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