issue 5: monsoon 2010

ADIL JUSSAWALLA

Being There: Aspects of an Indian Crisis

One never knows when the blow may fall, says Graham Greene's sad narrator in The Third Man and of course he is right. Since History is full of nasty surprises, the writer, like everyone else, will do no more than fall flat on his face several times in his life if he's lucky, or get censored or killed if he's not.

A historical date makes its mark suddenly, a hole in a once-clean target, and stays with us till we die. August 15, 1947 is one such date in India. So also is June 25, 1975, when the Emergency was declared.

Suddenness is history's trapdoor, through which we fall—armchair critics along with our armchairs, bombed civilians, those dispossessed of their homelands, those sifting through garbage for food, those dragged out of their homes at midnight, our cups, saucers, pets, everything through that same trapdoor—to certain oblivion—unless there is someone who doesn't flinch from seeing what happened and sets it down.

The resilience of individual writers has helped them survive the worst shocks of history, and there's nothing so bad about the situation in India that will silence its writers permanently. But if Indians who write in English don't normally consider it important to produce novels of social history or write poetry that fully confronts the social and political realities of their time—despite their real admiration for such work from other countries—there must be a reason—perhaps several reasons—and I think it's important to examine them. Some of us, certainly, are going through a crisis which is making us question the validity of our work and our usefulness as agents of social change. Now, more than ever before, we are unsure of ourselves as witnesses. Far from helping to change the course of history, we are finding ourselves its bullied victims. It's as though History had become the Englishman in Victor Anant's novel The Revolving Man, telling the writer, as the Englishman tells the novel's protagonist, "Spin, you Hindu bastard. Spin!" And the bastard goes on spinning.

The expectation the Indian writer has had of himself since Independence has been the expectation of writers in some Commonwealth countries, not all, and some of the phrases I use, like “agent of social change”, may sound absurdly inappropriate to, say, an Australian or Canadian writer. But I believe that no Indian writer can avoid taking a moral stand on the many social evils in his country, especially when, in view of the obvious poverty and distress there, it's a social privilege to be able to write, or travel abroad and pontificate, as I am doing.

So, when I speak of the crisis some Indian writers are going through, I imply that it's as much a moral crisis as an artistic one. It is intimately connected with what we thought we would write shortly after Independence—as also with our reader's expectations of what we should write—and what we find ourselves writing or not writing now. So the writers I have in mind are those who have experienced the two disturbances of jailbreak and re- imprisonment: the exhilaration of being free to write as we chose, of being able to overturn British norms of language and literature (and even decency) and the oppression, forty years later, of finding ourselves strapped, rather like forks choked with spaghetti. Our ends may appear to be dipped in blood—the prescribed blood of others that is meant to baptize the “real” writers of this century—but in fact it's the usual ketchup. We just haven't dared enough.

I could have chosen a less cosy simile, but it seems an appropriate one to apply to those of us who have chosen to stay on in "the soiled and cluttered kitchens of the mind—to lift a phrase from an old poem of mine—with our gaze turned away from the great public events on the sub-continent—events that are affecting at least as many million lives as the last global war did.

Why do Indian novels and verses have so little to say about those events? Why don't we do more than we have? What's the problem?

The problem of Indians who write in English are boring to themselves and to others and I suspect they've activated many unsuccessfully stifled yawns at ACLALS conferences too. But since the problems, like the English language itself, refuse to go away, we return to them again and again. Indian writers have done so obsessively. And it is characteristic of our approach to our problems that we blame the English language for a lot of them. In fact, our attitude to English is one of the major aspects of the crisis I referred to earlier.

So, in a poem, R. Parthasarathy writes of his “tongue in English chains” and of speaking “a tired language” [1]. Meena Alexander, in an essay, speaks of being “exiled by a dead script”[2]. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in another essay, shows the language to be honeycombed with traps, any of which the unwary writer may sink into [3]. Keki Daruwalla sees the language he uses as an exasperating mistress [4]. And English language and literature are subjects of attack in my poem Missing Person, in which the colonizer himself joins in the attack, asking his creature to get back to his (own) language [5].

Getting back to one's language, returning to one's native land, are familiar refrains in colonial and post-colonial writing and every writer haunted by them has had to lay the ghosts in his own way. Speaking for myself, when, in 1970, after many years abroad, I returned to my native land, I had a native language but no literature in it to return to—there are no poets and novelists in the Parsi Gujarati I speak , though it is freely used in adapted versions of foreign plays; it's very much a spoken dialect, full of literary potential, but regrettably unexplored. So I've remained as English-language writer, affected by works in English produced in whatever country the language is spoken and written, and by works translated into English. Oddly enough, I didn't realise how precarious that made my position until three years ago and it was the Hindi novelist Nirmal Verma who helped me see it.

Having spent many years of his life in Prague, Verma was very much the cosmopolitan author on an extended return ticket until he went back to India in 1968. In an essay, Returning to One's Country, he speaks of the anguish of being home and not being home, of being “a native stranger who has come back—an alien Indian who is suspect everywhere, most of all to himself”.

When I met him three years ago, he held the Nirala Chair for Literature in Bhopal—a city in India's Hindi-speaking belt—and he offended me a little by saying that I couldn't possibly have any idea about any kind of young Hindi writer who came to him with his work and what his problems were. I replied with some heat that I didn't see why that writer should be any different from young writers in Bombay and why his problems should be so very different either. Verma came back with great vehemence. “They are different because they write and talk only in Hindi”, he said. “They don't know a word of English!”

Since then I've thought a lot about the hypothetical young writer in Bhopal and am appalled by what he must think of me. Not having access to a vast body of international literature— Hindi being poor in translations from other literatures—he can't but resent my privilege. Or he may choose to ignore me, taking the narrow view that the experience of any literature outside Hindi is not worth having. We would have two different views of history and we would not be able to argue which was more falsifying—my “Eng. Lit” view or his. But I hope we'd share at least one thing—an anxiety not to falsify, to witness authentically, to truthsay, because we are aware of what falsified history did in Germany and is doing in Soviet Russia and South Africa. We'd share the hope that the only way to be a responsible writer was to be true to oneself and what one saw; that we were responsible to those who came after us—to bear witness to what the official lie or the censor or Time was always trying to wipe out. If we agreed on that, then we might find our strategies within two languages—whether we were writing poetry or prose—not very different. We might find both our languages—his Hindi, my English—in their currently accepted forms in daily commerce—wholly inadequate to fill out the poetic and fictional worlds of our witnessing. We would then have to chip away at the language, or pummel it, or pare away at its outer shell to get at its kernel and draw out its life-giving essence. We would have to make it new, create new forms with it, make it nourishing.

That this has been the ambition of some novelists writing in England during the last fifteen years, is clear from works like Angus Wilson's As if By Magic, Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers, Rushdie's Midnight’s Children and Naipaul's Guerillas and A Bend in the River— their writers very much historical witnesses.

I'm glad to know that one critic thinks that because of works like these, it's no longer necessary to be defensive about the English novel, as was the fashion in the sixties, and I'm glad that writers from Commonwealth countries other than England are contributing so much to its importance [6]. However, our Commonwealth brothers don't seem to be in any hurry to get easily assimilated nor do some of their critics want them to be. So Rushdie, in order to stress that he hasn't written an “English” novel, will link it to oral storytelling in Indiƒa, and a sympathetic critic will emphasize its dilatory Scheherezadian element [7]. (I haven't read Amitav Ghosh's Circle of Reason, but he has said in an interview that he has based the three parts of his novel on the musical raga [8].

Of other Indian novelists, it's been said that Mulk Raj Anand “has Indianised literary and political models derived from the West, and Westernised traditional values,” [9] that both in Kanthapura and in The Serpent and the Rope, Raja Rao has tried to tell “a breathless, endless tale in the manner of the Mahabharata” [10] and that R.K. Narayan uses the dialectics of maya in The Guru [11].

Yes, we're not too pleased to be fitted into any of Eng.Lit's formal categories, and try hard to reject its formative influence.

In an interview published in 1978, I said that, "if you break away from that structure (of Eng.Lit) completely, if you attempt to completely smash this structure of English culture or Eng.Lit, a very fundamental personal disintegration takes place too. I have not found the alternatives. I can only suggest that by smashing this structure, you go through a process of terrible disintegration. What follows I'm not sure." [12]

Nine years after the interview I'm more certain that while Missing Person is about such disintegration, my own personal disintegration has neither been very fundamental nor terrible. I have not changed. And "Change" was the cry we rallied around at Independence. Change was what we thought would come over us when we overthrew the British norms of language and literature I spoke about earlier. But they have proved tougher than we thought; some of us have become the new colonials, and our expectation of ourselves has been false.

I hope it's clear to you now that this is a crisis of identity. We have so far touched on two causes for it and they have both to do with distrust. I mentioned Nirmal Verma's distrust of himself as an observer when he returned to India, but it's a familiar enough malaise among writers who have never left India as well. And then there is a distrust of the English language and English literature. But what if you begin to distrust your whole being, distrust your modernity and everything that's made you modern? Can you write anything at all then, when it was the very force of modernism that compelled you to write a certain kind of literature in the first place?

In a justly celebrated paper, the Kannada Novelist U. R. Ananthamurthy deals with precisely these questions [13]. He describes an Indian writers' conference that was disturbed almost literally by a stone. The writers, gathered in a North Indian city, were discussing very much what we are in Singapore: “Why is the Western mode of thought and writing the model for us? Why are we unoriginal in our treatment of form and content in the novel, drama and poetry? While Indian dance and music are uniquely Indian, why does contemporary Indian literature take its bearings from the literature of the West? Are we a nation of mimics, victims of English education, which has conditioned the faculties of our perception so much that we fail to respond freshly to the immediate situation in India?”

A painter who was present then told a story which impressed Ananthamurthy deeply. He said that during his wanderings through villages in the North, he came across a hut in which he saw a stone. It was decorated with red powder and flowers, which meant it was an object of worship. He asked the owner of the hut—a peasant—if the stone could be brought outside the hut since he wanted to photograph it. The stone was brought outside and the photograph taken. The painter then realised that he might have polluted the stone by shifting its position, and apologised to the peasant. The peasant said it didn't matter. He'd just fetch another stone and anoint it with the powder. So, the painter said, any piece of stone on which the peasant put the powder became God for him. The objective and subjective were one in such a person. He belonged to the illiterate Indian mass—seventy per cent of the population. Western education had alienated those at the seminar from him and those like him. If they didn't understand the structure and mode of his thinking, they couldn't become true Indian writers.

The painter's argument shook Ananthamurthy as I said, and though he was later nagged by a doubt that “the authentic Indian peasant... was also an imported cult figure of Western radicals against their materialist civilisation,” his self-doubt, common to “educated Indian writers of (his) generation,” nagged him more. The peasant continued to bother him.

The poor peasant, the trapped young writer in Bhopal, the contracted tribal breaking stones on a city street—they aren't figments of an Indian writer's imagination but indelibly part of his consciousness. Blanking them out can only be momentary. He doesn't have to go far in India to see them or people like them. So Nirmal Verma, on returning to his native land, steps out of the brief embrace of a cinema hall and is appalled at the obscenity he is subjected to—a commercial which shows “smooth-faced healthy children being fed corn- flakes by their smiling mother”—nothing he'd get too worked up about if he were in London—but in India he can't reconcile the children he sees on screen with the children outside it—“wilted faces under merciless sun” [14]. It's the context which makes the commercial obscene; there's a wide gap between the streets and the screen—just as there is a wide gap between me and the peasant, the young writer and the tribal.

Development used to mean bridging the gap, of creating a more modern, more just society and until a few years ago very few of our nation-builders doubted that the way to bring such a society about was by spreading literacy, education and benefits of science throughout the country. The die-hard capitalist and the Naxalite differed in their methods but their goal was the same—to create a modern developed state, totally free of India's crippling anachronisms.

Now the word "development" itself has begun to stink and a few anxious people in the Third World are seriously beginning to question whether some of the old ways were that anachronistic after all.

In India, for example, millions of lives have been marginalised by the construction of dams, hydro-electric projects and the hydro-politics behind them. The marginalisation of the Indian writer—whether writing in the Indian languages or English—is indeed petty when compared to the reach of that marginalisation, which is ferocious and devastating. But when the tribal sees his land gone does he simply take to the bottle and slink away? Yes, he does, but he also sings. He speaks out:

Which company came to my land, to a 'Karkhana?'
It awakened its name in the rivers and the ponds calling itself the D.V.C
It throws earth, dug by a machine, into the river.
It has cut the mountain and made a bridge. The water runs beneath.
Roads are coming; they are giving us electricity, having opened the 'Karkhana'.
All the praja question them. They ask to what this name belongs.
When evening falls they give paper notes as pay. Where will I keep these paper notes?
They melt away in the water.

In every house there is a well which gives water to grow brinjal and cabbage. Every House is bounded by walls which makes it look like a palace.
This Santal tongue of ours has been destroyed in the district. You came and made this Bloody burning ghat, calling yourself the D.V.C*

The song is by an unknown Santhal from West Bengal and it appears in an essay by an Indian scientist who argues, as the blurb of the essay says, “that the crisis of survival—from survival of the poor to the survival of the human race—is not a result of a failure of the modern project of development, of modernisation, of science and technology, but a consequence of their very success.”[15]

In the essay itself he states that “the tragedy of modernisation in the Third World is doubly violent. It has sprung not only from the violence of the West through colonialism and science but also from the modernist impulse of our elites, internationalised without a clue to its doubts or its genealogy”. If this is correct, then it has serious repercussions for the modernist impulse in literature, and is the greatest threat to the modern writer's identity. Such a truth, if it is the truth, can pierce his heart, the heart of language and nail his tongue to his palate permanently. Its scope has room for Ananthamurthy's self-doubt and mine but also puts us in our place. Where did we modern Indian writers think we were going when we so little questioned our modernity?

Well, as another poet said, “I learn by going where I have to go”, and I have to come to Singapore fully knowing that I've travelled this far, not on the wings of a modernist impulse-- though without that impulse I wouldn't have gone this far--but on those of a modern aircraft. Nor, despite my doubts about development, have I come here to argue that I'd have preferred to travel by bullock cart because I suddenly prefer the good old ways. I don't. But the scientist's words help me see that I'm part of an elite—an international elite with many Third World writers in it—that has too easily taken its modernizing role for granted. Caught up in the convention of a conference to make ourselves heard, we may or may not listen to one another. But we're fairly certain who won't listen to us back home. Who are we writing for there?

Edwin Thumboo has said in an interview that the historical perspective is important to Singaporeans because, owing to the rapid modernization of the city, they are in danger of losing their historical hinterland [16]. That is also true of those who live in Bombay as I do. But it's possible that the historical perspective may not come in the form in which Thumboo and I expect it. It may not come in the shape of a grand novel or poetic epic. It may come—as it already has—in a series of speak-outs—like the song of the Santhal and, in English, the poems of Dilip Chitre, Keki Daruwalla, Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Gieve Patel, which deal with historical events like the Bangladesh War, the Emergency or the Bhopal disaster, or with local and family history.

Speaking out, saying it, is how India's bhakti poets set about their work, trying to change social consciousness, singing to the lower castes that God was in their hearts and not in Brahminic temples. Now, when it’s essential to get back our sense of the sacredness of things—of land, river, tree, even the peasant's stone—it may be that these poets will help us, showing us that a linear view of history and development—even literary development—was not modern at all but against life itself and contained the seeds of its own destruction.

I implied in my opening remarks that the word “witness” is not very satisfactory when applied to writers. But there's one in which it applies perfectly—and that is, of “being there”.

It was Whitman's position in an open society, as it is also the position of those writers who live in oppressive regimes, in states of special fear or on the margins of history.

That sense of “being there”, in works of fiction and poetry, is never finally dependent on where the writer is physically situated. The Sunderbans of Midnight's Children are no less real for the writer's never having visited them. (I consider the chapter on them to be one of the richest in the book.) That sense is finally dependent on the quality of the writer's imagination and the strength of his talent.

“Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups,” says Rushdie. “And as for risk: the real risks of any artist are taken in the work, in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.” [17]

In his Nobel lecture, Milosz speaks of the poet's double role. “He is the one who flies above the earth and looks at it from above, but at the same time sees it in every detail”. The near and the far. And though he says “distance is sometimes impossible”, and soaring above earth's good and evil seems “a moral treason”, yet, in a precarious balance of opposites, a certain equilibrium can be achieved thanks to a distance introduced by the flow of time. “To see and to describe”, may also mean to reconstruct an imagination. A distance achieved with thanks to the mystery of time must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfil their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.

There are a score of sub-Rushdies in the making of India, I was told by a young writer ** just before I left Bombay. There may well be half a dozen sub-Miloszs too. If their solutions to the problems of distance and authenticity are as inspiring, it may be a hopeful sign. But it will take a lot of time and, considering what needs to be done in India, I am perilously close to agreeing with Milosz that “all art proves to be nothing compared to action”; I too readily accept his anguish.

At the same time as Milosz says those words as someone “who wrote a certain a number of poems out of the contradictions engendered by an earth polluted by the crime of the genocide”, he also confesses, as a pained historical witness, that he “would have preferred to have been able to resolve the contradiction while leaving the poems unwritten”.

NOTES

This paper was first read at the 7th ACLALS conference in Singapore in June 1986 and was published by The Bombay Review 1989/1 issue.

Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940 and went to school there. He left it in 1957 to study Architecture in London but dropped out. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and worked in London, primarily as an English language teacher, after graduating. He has lived mainly in Bombay with his wife Veronik after returning to the city in 1970. Books of poems: Land's End,1962, revised edition 2020.; Missing Person, 1976. Trying to Say Goodbye, 2011, The Right Kind of Dog, 2013, Gulestan (chapbook) 2017, Shorelines, 2019, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Winder, 2021. Books of Prose: Maps for a Mortal Moon, 2014, The Magic Hand of Chance, 2021. A book of poems, fiction, and nin-fiction: I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky, 2015.Anthologies: New Writing in India (1974), Statements (co-edited with Eunice de Souza), 1976. Honours: Sahitya Akademi Award (for Trying to Say Goodbye), Tata Literature Live Poet Laureate for 2021.