Arty goddesses

More often than not, the Indian critic is subject to the same contextual location and the accompanying anxieties of writing in English as a writer. We need to get away from such constricting conceptual categories and become capable of conceiving and engaging with complexity and ambiguity, says VIKRAM CHANDRA in this two-part rejoinder to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's essay published earlier in these columns.

I READ with interest Dr. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's two-part essay recently published in these pages, which referred to an essay I'd written. Dr. Sunder Rajan discovers unequivocal evidence of "anxiety" in my essay. She writes, "All the anecdotes in [Chandra's] article and the terrific name-dropping about the Bombay mafia, policemen, crime journalists, the innumerable place names, the 'inside' stories about literary quarrels, are intended to strenuously 'prove' his 'belonging'." Really? I thought I was just talking about my life, which is actually rather full of anecdotes, Bombay mafia, policemen, innumerable place names, and inside vantage points on literary quarrels. But no, Dr. Sunder Rajan will not allow that. It cannot be. It must not be. She goes on to ask, "And what of that giveaway rhetorical tic of Indo- Anglian writing, the glossing of 'vilayat, abroad'?" Well, since she asked, I feel obliged to point out that "abroad" is actually not a gloss of vilayat, but rather an expansion. The word vilayat is of Arab origin, and originally meant "province," among other things. In colonial and post-colonial India, the word has come to mean specifically England, and perhaps, in a more fuzzy sense, Europe. But if you were speaking of someone who had gone to, say, Thailand, it would be completely erroneous to say, "Chotte Rajan vilayat gayein hain." You would say, "Voh pardes gayein hain." Or - and this titbit is for those who are as pleasured by detail as I am - if you were in Bombay, hanging out with macho underworld types, and were speaking of someone who had gone to Dubai, you might say, "Voh gaon gayein hain."

What is hugely intriguing to me, though, is that although Dr. Sunder Rajan regards glossing by Indo-Anglian writers as a "giveaway rhetorical tic," in her very next paragraph, she herself glosses mashooq as "beloved." Presumably, the same readers who understood (or half-understood) vilayat would know what a mashooq was. So, as far as I can read the lie of this land, the same behaviour can on one hand be a transparent sign of "anxiety," and on the other it can be exactly nothing of the sort. Some glosses are less equal than others. How does the wide- eyed reader tell one kind of gloss from another? I am certain that Dr. Sunder Rajan would argue that it has everything to do with "context." Well, if we examine Dr. Sunder Rajan's context, we find that it is exactly the same context that she has described for Indo-Anglian writers, except more so. That is, she too produces work in this language that she is sure is spoken by less than two per cent of the Indian population. The language in her work is even more specialised and formal than the formal English she says is used, to their detriment, by Indians. The Indian market for this kind of work is even smaller that that for English literary fiction, and in fact the main market for such work is the West, where flourishing departments in post-colonial studies provide classrooms full of readers. To paraphrase her statement about creative artists: academic criticism has an economic dimension; academics sometimes depend on it for a living, and books are bought and sold.

Now, it is also intriguing that throughout her essay, Dr. Sunder Rajan provides only two choices for writers, for critics, and - one assumes - for Indians in general: you are either "India- based" or you are "expatriate." It's a clear-cut choice, and there are no other ways of being. At the very end of this essay, she marches, with a sort of deadly inevitability, towards the solution, the final key to the puzzle: it's all about location, location, location. She presents the reader with what she thinks is the unquestionable truth about the nature of politics and censorship in India, and confidently remarks, "The expatriate writer, despite frequent visits home, is, perhaps understandably, out of touch with this intellectual scene." That is, if someone sees India in a way different from you, it must obviously be because they don't spend enough time close to the verdant soil of the "India-based." Location is crucial. Some writers are "expatriate." The critic is "India-based."

I find this particularly and poignantly hilarious because until recently, Dr. Sunder Rajan and I were colleagues in the English Department at George Washington University, in Washington, DC; she obtained her doctorate at GWU, and has subsequently taught there, in various capacities. We passed each other frequently in the halls, and I suppose I should have asked her on one of those occasions what minimum residency requirement one has to fulfil to be accorded the designation of "India-based," and which committee of "India-based" critics I should submit my form to (in quadruplicate, no doubt). Anyway, Dr. Sunder Rajan has since left us, but we were given to understand that she was on her way to a teaching position at Oxford.

So, given that Dr. Sunder Rajan's language, her product, her intellectual and professional life, her audience, and her means of making a living are all intimately connected with the West, should the reader then conclude that her glossing of mashooq is a "giveaway rhetorical tic" that unequivocally reveals her deeply- rooted and tremulous anxiety? Some reader conceivably could. Further, this reader could argue, the very absence of local colour in Dr. Sunder Rajan's writing, its absolute lack of anecdotes, place names, inside stories, and local colour, its "vague, unmarked terrain," is a certain marker of this anxiety, which produces a text emptied of all specifics. And also that her very idealised vision of the Indian left is of course the product of nostalgia on the part of someone who spends too much time in Washington and in Oxford. And still further, this reader could argue that this essay, and other writing like this, is a product that is paid for in substantial hard-currency payments by the Western academy, which is eager to consume "post-colonialism." So then, of course, the essay itself must be fatally and wholly contaminated by the spirit of the market. Such a reader would have to assume that the geographical distribution of the essay over the globe is what determines the writer's "audience," not her dearly-held conception of who she is writing for. Such a reader would have to believe that any reference to anything Indian in Dr. Sunder Rajan's work was an anxious assertion of "Indianness," and not an interrogation of it. And finally, such a reader would have to assume that any "defects" in Dr. Sunder Rajan's writing weren't just bad writing, but were obviously markers of her deep and inescapable anxiety.

But to argue this, and to believe it, would require a rigid meanness of intellect and spirit. By "meanness," I mean to suggest that which is narrow, constricted, incapable of conceiving of and engaging with complexity and ambiguity. A reader armed with such a simplistic understanding of "context" would be quite incapable of reading Dr. Sunder Rajan's work in any sort of fruitful way. A reading like this - and perhaps even Dr. Sunder Rajan would argue this - would be stultifying precisely for this simple-minded reader, debilitating instead of revivifying. On encountering such an analysis of "anxiety" in her work, perhaps Dr. Sunder Rajan might wonder - in quite a grown-up fashion, I would assume - whether the anxiety was humming in the contours of her text, or behind the eyes of this beholder who kept insisting, "You're anxious, you're anxious, you're anxious."

And yet, this kind of reading of culture and art has become common in India, both on the right and the left. Dr. Sunder Rajan is quite willing to recognise this on the right, but she absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility that it may exist, in some form, on the left. Because those on the right sometimes break heads in their pursuit of their vision, the left is only to be praised for resisting. But it seems to me that even as it resists the right's dream of blood and soil and belonging, one of the narratives that the Indian left has produced and sustained is this different-but-somehow-similar story, which divides up human beings into "expatriates" and "India-based," which sees evidence of contamination in the use of certain words and images and techniques, which projects on "regional writers" a "naturalness" that is thought to be lost elsewhere. Dr. Sunder Rajan's essay is a fine, healthy example of this species of leftist narrative.

Dr. Sunder Rajan seems to think that I've somehow "inverted" Dr. Meenakshi Mukherjee's argument about the anxiety of Indianness, and asserts that the detection of "anxiety" in Indo-Anglian writing in no way constitutes a search for authenticity. So, in Dr. Sunder Rajan's view, although "demands for patriotism, fundamentalist Hinduism, authenticity, 'roots' in rural India and the like are in plentiful supply in contemporary Indian rhetoric elsewhere," the rhetoric on the left, or this particular instance of it, is obviously and transparently free of any such longing.

As Foucault and others have sharply instructed us, diagnoses of aberrance, of deviance, always carry within themselves a notion of what is "normal," what is desirable. As Dr. Sunder Rajan herself tells us, this diagnosis of "anxiety" is explicitly predicated on the assumption of a "greater self-confidence or 'naturalness' of writers in Indian languages." That is to say, writers who work in languages other than English are somehow effortlessly "natural," somehow astonishingly free of this great and inescapable national turbulence that afflicts the culture that they are a part of. They are un-anxiously themselves, just so, you see. Which writers who write in English of course are not, cannot be.

The very phrase "regional writers" defines these non-English writers as separated from and opposed to the metropole, and implies an inevitable allegiance to the "region," as opposed to the national or indeed the international. The "regional" is opposed to the centre, which is imagined to be elsewhere. Is a computer programmer who lives in Bombay and writes short stories in Tamil a "regional writer," or is she an Indian writer who writes in Tamil and lives in Bombay? Is she more "regional" than the writer who lives next door and writes in English, or less? And what about a Kashmiri chauffeur who lives in Bahrain and writes achingly self-conscious, lush, ornate poetry in Urdu, who reads to audiences composed of Pakistanis, Indians, and Arabs? Is this cunning artificer a "regional writer," or a cosmopolitan one? Is his poetry "natural"? And what about a post-modernist novelist who lives in the great metropolis of Calcutta and writes in Bengali? But the flattening construction of "regional writers" elides such inconvenient complexities, and allows for the discovery of a "naturalness" within the rigorously-policed limits of this generalised and broadly-imagined "region," which - at least to this reader - starts to smell a lot like those rural vistas so beloved of the right, those sarson fields where true, unforced, natural Indianness is rooted. And this construction allows for a comfortable agreement that texts written in English must be "anxious," and suspicious in other ways besides.

As a scholar of the "enshrining of mainstream (western/ white/ male/ bourgeois) literature as the norm," Dr. Sunder Rajan surely knows that consent is sometimes invisibly manufactured by the nicest people, in the nicest academies, and that this kind of consensus can be stifling not only to the practise of art, but to the living of life itself. To quarrel with such a consensus is sometimes necessary, not to mention pleasurable, especially when the consensus is sealed by the ritual exchanging of well-worn platitudes about "one of the world's poorest countries," in an atmosphere positively reeking of "political self-righteousness." The creed that is apotheosised in this ritual holds that only the properly-located and properly-accoutred participants are sensitive to suffering, while everyone else is sneeringly callous.

Dr. Sunder Rajan ends her essay with two possible explanations for why someone might quarrel with the assumptions of this "intellectual scene" on the left, which scene she thinks is just fine, thank you; these reasons themselves are instructively revealing of the complacency and self-satisfaction of this "scene." One possible explanation that she offers is of course that the dissenters are "expatriates," so removed from Real India that they're completely detached from its gritty realities. The other is that writers in general, you know, are crazies who tend towards paranoia and megalomania. She writes, "Or it may be that the self-representation of writers by and for themselves requires a certain aggrandisement of their travails. Saleem Sinai's megalomaniacal conceit as the 'Widow's' chosen rival and persecuted victim in Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a tour de force performance of this kind." She recommends that such fuzzy- minded fantasists should only play with their "fancies" within the space of their fictions, although - small mercies - she does allow that this may, if only within fiction, be "productive." I suppose that writers and artists everywhere should be relieved that a contemporary literary critic, of all people, allows for this tiny possibility that the people whose work she studies may actually tell truths about the world they live in, the crafts they practise, the lives they lead.

(To be concluded)

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