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.