Agendas, tantrums...

RESPONDING to Girish Karnad's review of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature published in the Literary Review on August 19, AMITAVA KUMAR, well-known critic, writes:

While reading a review of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature in The Hindu on August 19 by the well-known playwright and actor, Girish Karnad, one could not question whether Karnad had read books. What one doubted, instead, was whether Karnad had read the book he was reviewing.

Karnad's attack on the book, and its editor Amit Chaudhuri, was full of bluster. There were some good points raised by the reviewer - fiery, debateable points about the editor's acts of omission and commission, some that I could even agree with - but I was unable to take the review very seriously after I realised that Karnad had written his cantankerous piece merely by looking at the table of contents.

In his review, Karnad wrote that the "extraordinary thing" about the anthology was there was no introduction "explaining why a particular piece was chosen, how the editor relates to the work and, most important of all, how the work chosen fits into the editor's total perception of the state of Indian literature".

Well, the extraordinary thing is that if you turn past the table of contents in Chaudhuri's book, you find that the work of each writer in the anthology is preceded by an editorial note that comments on the author, his or her history and general body of work, and the importance of the selected piece in relation to Indian writing.

If he had read the book he was reviewing, Karnad would have discovered that Chaudhuri's editorial introductions to individual writers are miniature masterpieces of literary criticism. They are thoughtful, polished, and often strikingly original. In a fairer world, all reviewers of Indian literature would benefit from their example. "Criticism is, at its best, an illumination of the work," writes the young American writer William Monahan. "Instead, what we get are agendas, ignorance: the opposite of light".

I cannot claim to know Karnad's agenda. I am reproachful of him not so much because he has been lazy, and what's more, bullying and utterly self-righteous. Rather, my main protest is that Karnad did not read the book he was reviewing and, as a result, squandered the opportunity to engage in serious criticism. This loss is Karnad's, but it is also our's.

GIRISH KARNAD replies:

Any anthology which is properly edited must have an Introduction to the volume in which the editor maps out the terrain he is covering and explains the basic philosophy that has guided his selection . Introductions to individual contributors, however beautifully written, cannot offer a substitute for this feature. It's because Amit Chaudhuri too is aware of this obligation, that, despite his individual introductions, he has a section at the beginning of his anthology titled "Introduction".

The question surely is why then instead of giving us a fresh statement emerging from his experience as the editor of the volume, he recycles two stale articles, one on the Indian novel in English and the other on the Bengali novel. If this is not the result of lazyness, as I charitably assumed, it can mean only one thing: that for Chaudhuri the experience of these two literatures encompasses the total "Indian" experience. In that case, while claiming to protest against condescension towards Indian vernacular literatures, he practises the same condescension towards non-Bengali literatures! The amount of space devoted to English and Bengali in the anthology would further justify such a conclusion, and there is nothing in the individual introductions to prompt one to modify it.

Whether the anthology is lazy, confused or condescending is a point open to discussion. There is however only one word for Amitava Kumar's tantrum: silly.

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