Authenticity and the South Asian political novel - Amitava Kumar

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know. Look at Jhumpa Lahiri, who has assiduously mined the experience of Bengali immigrants of a fixed class. She is one of the better ones, writing about what she knows; lesser writers have been content to churn out what we all know: arranged marriage, dowry, saris, and spices.

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What we have in the narrative sketches about the military men–from a lowly loadmaster who sexually molests a prisoner, to the toadying generals whose suave demeanors barely hide their instincts for torture–is a complex picture of a ruling class in transition. It reminds us of what Eqbal Ahmad wrote of the great shift that had already begun taking place in Pakistan’s military by 1974. According to Ahmad, during the first twenty-five years of its existence, Pakistan was ruled by bourgeois soldiers and bureaucrats of colonial vintage, men who were largely status-quoists, greedy and paternalistic but nevertheless moderate in their beliefs and behavior. In the years that followed, new officers joined the ranks, men of petit bourgeois origin and fascist in outlook. These officers tended to be more religious and, having been trained by the Americans, resembled the Brazilian and Greek juntas. For Ahmad, the political environment in Pakistan appeared “to favor the growth of a right-wing, militarist dictatorship.”

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Almost exactly eight years ago, in this magazine’s pages, the Indian writer Vikram Chandra published an inspired, polemical essay called “The Cult of Authenticity. ” Chandra’s anger was directed against those “cultural commissars,” mostly critics in India, who were suspicious of writers’ use of clichéd Indian motifs. These critics claimed that an easy appeal to saris and samosas, and the employment of a few well-known words like karma and dharma, were the means by which Indian writers in the West signaled their identity and coddled their readers. Chandra bristled at the suggestion that others, by dictatorial fiat, could choose his material for him. Chandra made an argument not only for artistic autonomy but also for the essential hybridity of any writing. His point is that because the culture around us is mixed up and in flux, the literature that draws on that culture will reflect its energy and impurity. It was inevitable, for example, that in his fiction he would employ words in English and other Indian languages. Just as people do on the streets of Mumbai.

Quite explicitly, Chandra also argued against the notion of any real India, an India that is accessible only to a certain kind of writer, one who lives in the hinterland, or receives poor advances, or writes only in an obscure, regional language. Against such a purist aesthetic, Chandra pushed for recognition of the actual, impure world in which we all live and write:

There will always be a prevailing market and a prevailing ideology, and a head of department who fiercely upholds that prevailing ideology, a head of department whose cousin owns the press that publishes the books, whose cousin’s best friend reviews the books for the Sunday paper, whose cousin’s best friend’s cousin gives out the government grants and the fellowships to Paris. All art is born at this crossroads of ambition and integrity, between the fierce callings of fame and the hungers of the belly and the desires of one’s children and the necessities of art and truth. Michelangelo knew this, and [popular nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mizra] Ghalib knew this. There is no writer in India, or in the world, no artist anywhere who is free of this eternal chakravyuha, this whirling circle that is life itself. To have less money does not mean you are more virtuous, to have more money does not mean you are less capable of integrity. Those who believe in the salutary effects of poverty on artists have never been truly hungry, and are suspicious of money from the safety of their own middling comforts. Finally, I suspect, whatever language we write in, we are all equally capable of cowardice and heroism. . . . In case it makes anyone feel any better, let me state for the record my considered opinion that for sheer incestuousness, for self-serving pomposity, for easy black-and-white moralizing, for comfortably sneering armchair wisdom, for lack of generosity, for pious self-interested victim-mongering, for ponderous seriousness and a priggish distrust of pleasure, there is no group on earth that can match the little subcaste that is the Indo-Anglian literary and critical establishment. I say this with full cognizance of my own somewhat contested membership in said establishment.