The bright new breed

AMONG THE THOUGHTS which the Pulitzer Prize award to Ms. Jhumpa Lahiri, an author of Indian origin, for her Interpreter of Maladies,a collection of short stories, throws up is about the steady increase in the number of Indians and those of Indian origin winning distinction for their writing English fiction. This should finally demolish the still widely held belief that an author could claim authenticity for his/her writing only if it is in the mother tongue and not in a ``foreign'' language like English. There is in fact no reason why one should still cling to this notion more than half a century after writers such as R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand won recognition abroad for their fiction and they are still read for their masterly projection of the widely varying Indian scene ranging from the people living in an inviting sleepy hollow like Malgudi in Swamy and Friendsto the struggling proletariat in The Coolie.Since then, the Indian literary scene has been and continues to be enriched by a number of competent writers who have given a sense of India. Among the earlier arrivals here during the Fifties was Kamala Markandeya whose Nectar in a Sieveportrayed the hardships of those living in and resigned to poverty and recalling the lines from Coleridge: ``Work without hope gathers nectar in a sieve and hope without object cannot live''.

If Interpreters of Maladiesfor which Ms. Jhumpa Lahiri has won the Pulitzer Prize features marriages that have been arranged, rushed into, betrayed, invaded and exhausted, it should be because of her sensitive response to the Indian scene which has begun to change from passive fatalism to one of protest and revolt. The Indian tradition of meek acceptance of fate even by an educated woman was portrayed in the Fifties not by an Indian but an Englishman in his Vaidehi.While the Indian wife presented by these writers might have conveyed her reconciliation to the harshness of fate, her gentleness and her capacity for endurance also spelt out much less loudly the message of her being the ``better half'' of man. However, the present flow of media reports of broken marriages and divorces in this country suggest that the woman in India is giving up her submission to male tyranny and acceptance of the bonds of marriage as something sacred and unbreakable.

Ms. Lahiri's prize-winning collection of short stories drawn from the ``extended time'' she had spent in Calcutta should have been inspired by much that was raw as Dominic Lapierre, the other warm-hearted writer, had seen it in his City of Joy.While the crude Western breed of an earlier era such as Catherine Mayo and Beverly Nichols came to India and wrote only unreadable junk such as Mother Indiaand Verdict on India,writers of a later generation, both Indian and from the other half of the world, looked much deeper and responded with empathy to what they saw in a country of contrasts wallowing in poverty in the slums of Calcutta and having reached the electronic frontiers of information technology at the same time. Talented Indian writers have fully responded to the sorrows of India. Even R. K. Narayan whose appeal to his English readers was attributed to his skills for ``understatement'' for which the British have a reputation projected disappointment and sorrow without making it sentimental or morbid as one could seen from his English Teacherand the Painter of Signs.The quality of writing has changed perceptibly since then perhaps because the younger authors felt that they should write far more bluntly. This is reflected partly in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Thingswhich could recall an earlier novel, The Ivory Swing,written by a Canadian lady with the unusual name of Catherine Turner Hospital. Ms. Jhumpa Lahiri belongs to this new breed with the piercing gaze which the Indian reality calls for.

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