Books

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO BOOKS Murder in Mumbai New Releases Never at Home Authorspeak

The very first chapter of this book asserts the "essential civility of English governance", "the non-hierarchical nature of the English language in early colonial discourse" and that "the terms of legitimacy of the new de facto sarkar were negotiated, not imposed". Continues Bruce Carlisle Robertson, the author of this chapter: "Rammohan Roy not only cracked the foreigner's code but used it to set the limits of British governance in India." To suggest that the somewhat fluid power relations before the establishment of British paramountcy might be indicative of the entire Indo-British encounter mediated through the English language is not only questionable but pernicious. This and the editor's Introduction, with its three opening and very colonial epigraphs, suggest a certain discursive genealogy that is ultimately subservient not only to the power of the language but also of its metropolitan origins. To that extent, in its very attempt to minimise or discredit the contentious history of cultural struggle in India, this ambitious project misses its very special postcolonial opportunity of producing a new account of Indian Literature in English.

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Ed by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Permanent Black Price: Rs 1,495 Pages: 406

But what is Indian Literature in English? This book offers no clear answer. "Jim Corbett (1875-1955) is among India's best-known 'Indo-Anglian' authors after Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster," begins Mahesh Rangarajan in his essay "Five Nature Writers". Rangarajan (or the editor) should have known that these writers were traditionally known not as Indo-Anglian but rather as Anglo-Indian. It was to obviate the imprecision if not (racial) prejudice of this term that its inversion, "Indo-Anglian", was coined as early as 1883 to describe "Specimen Compositions of Native Students". Mehrotra himself approvingly quoted Adil Jussawalla's "Kill that nonsense term" in a previous anthology. However, like a stubborn ghost, not just the term, but the entire gamut of identity-issues surrounding it has come back to haunt this book.

In fact, what one might otherwise overlook as a slight lapse or inadvertent error actually underscores a major conceptual faultline. Its utter inability to offer any convincing or consistent way to define, delimit or theorise this literature is the undoing of the book. There are several interesting inclusions, no doubt, such as Behramji Malabari and Govardhanram Tripathi-though the latter's major creative works are all in Gujarati-not to speak of Cornelia Sorabji, Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson. While all these writers are named in chapters and have a good deal of space devoted to them, major writers like Mulk Raj Anand or Raja Rao, whose staggering output, range and reputation span more than seven decades of literary creativity, are relegated to meagre sub-portions of chapters.

MISSING THE POINT: Identity issues haunt the book

Many modern Indian English poet-anthologists, of which Mehrotra is arguably the chief example, practised a special kind of literary untouchability. Characterised by the extreme anxiety to retain their "purity", they tried their best to avoid the "polluting" touch of the mass of "bad" writers. Mehrotra's dismissive and categorical exclusions are notorious: "Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt, Aurobindo Ghose and Sarojini Naidu were ... not those with whom you could today do business" or "Aurobindo Ghose, who spent the last years of his life composing a worthless epic of 24,000 lines".

Convincing neither as "Indian" nor as "history", the book is certainly "illustrated"-so brilliantly, in fact, that that alone would make it worth possessing.