is a Florida-based writer.-- c. j. s. wallia)
Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place. The relations of classes had to change before I discovered that it's not the quality of goods and utility that matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there - quoted by Kumar from CLR James' 1993 memoir, Beyond a Boundary. Mobility works as both cause and effect in post-colonial writing. The need to leave one's place of origin and move from the periphery towards the centre, combined with the compulsion to look back and travel; homewards in a bid to understand one's history, is the force that drives much of recent Indian writing in English. The title Kumar has chosen for his book signifies the journey that both he and his fellow writers havemade, the distances they have traversed and the literary signposts they have passed. Like his earlier book, Passport Photos, this one is a multi-genre celebration of the fascinating literary journey that Kumar has undertaken as a reader and critic of Indian fiction. His own fiction and poetry, along with personal accounts, make this an imaginative exercise that explores many of the impulses that have helped create contemporary Indian fiction in English. Kumar emphasises at the very beginning that his pages are to be read merely as "marginal entries in a book written by others." He quotes generously from novels and short stories, newspaper articles, reviews and interviews, and uses photographs to convey a sense of contemporary India and the Indian writer's experience. His canvas is as immense ahis "reading practice" which he claims to have recorded for the purpose of this book. The issues he deals with are, likewise, numerous. One of the first questions he addresses is that of language, of "choosing" to write in English. He says, "In India, the phrase 'Indian writer in English' seems to have been easily adopted as a name. But there is nothing natural in this naming. A well-known critic, Meenakshi Mukherjee, has commented, "If I were to write a novel in Marathi, I would not be called an Indian writer in Marathi, but simply a Marathi novelist, the epithet Marathi referring only to the language....No one would write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness of my Marathi novel." Is there any reason why, when it comes to any Indian fiction in English, there should be an obsession with the issue of its Indianness?" Much of Indian fiction in English is informed by an acute self-consciousness about the use of this particular language for composition, with writers feeling compelled to explain or defend -- through characters such as Amit Chatterjee in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, or Agastya Sen in Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August -- their positions in response to charges that their use of English denies them access to Indian reality. Kumar allows that those who write in English (both in India and elsewhere) "remain several worlds away" from thosewho write in other languages, despite all the movement that is taking place across the globe and between cultures. But that he sanctions the new hybrid idiom's effort to express the new hybrid experience is clear when he discusses that all-important question of audience, celebrating the "desperate grasping for authenticity, which produces... the mistress of spices, the heat and dust, sweating men and women in lisping saris, brought together in arranged marriages, yes, the honking traffic, and the whole hullabaloo in the guava orchard. In short, the sound of yakking Indians." The amalgamation of all these and numerous other literary influences since childhood is reflected in the structure of Kumar's own book, which often seems chaotic as he rushes from genre to genre, book to book, author to author, issue to issue and memory to memory. This is a heady mix, often dizzying, but then so is the hybrid concoction of a billion people and, most importantly, so is movement, especially the kind with which Kumar engages. At a recent reading from his book in Gainesville, Florida, Kumar made a distinction between "cosmopolitan cosmopolitan" writers and "provincial cosmopolitan" ones like himself. His intense awareness of a difference between his own origin in the small, backward town of Patna and a Westernised megapolis like Salman Rushdie's Bombay is significant, not only because he sub-divides the so-called exclusive realm of Indian writing in English into a more exclusive category and a less exclusive one, but also because this book is as much about Kumar's own history as about anything else. Unlike Rushdie, Kumar's journey begins pre-Bombay-London-New York. The opening chapter provides an account of his childhood home and of the rituals in his grandmother's house, "that small town in India's most backward province". The juxtaposition of childhood memories with later experiences of material comfort and choice in a more liberated Western environment is crucial because it is true, but this is the same kind of conceit that has attracted criticism in recent Indian fiction for allegedly trying to exoticise an orientalist view of the homeland. This sort of criticism, of course, places the Indian writer in an unenviable position. In order to convey a real sense of his world, he must resort to local color, but doing so is regarded as suspect for the simple reason that it is already familiar to the Indian reader, and so very unfamiliar to the Western one. Kumar's insistence on the theme of movement, from east to west, implies the issues of exile, displacement and nostalgia, themes that have become synonymous with post-colonial literature as a whole. "What I am always going back to is the moment when I was going away," he says. He attributes his choice of the airport as "the place to mark the beginning" to VS Naipaul and his novel, Miguel Street, but, really, this never seems like the beginning in Kumar's book. It is only the beginning of his journey to the United States, but surely, the beginning of his migration started when he left Patna for Delhi. The "provincial cosmopolitan's" entry into the realm of the "cosmopolitan cosmopolitan" marks the first step of what will prove to be a long journey. It was, after all, in Delhi that the author first bought used copies of Time and Newsweek, to prove that he was now "a citizen of the world". Kumar's concern with the issue of displacement makes him explore the status of a Non-Resident Indian and the purpose of nostalgia. He writes, "As the fiction of so many contemporary Indian writers reveals, our memories as Indians are also memories of movements across different countries and continents. We have built our homes in Britain, in Burma, in South America, in the Caribbean, and in North America. If our past was all these places, can we be nostalgic for only one place? Can we be nostalgic for a place that never was? " His memories of Patna, scattered throughout the book, his self-confessed hunt for his hometown in recent writing, his brilliant poem, 'Against Nostalgia' - which, despite the rejection implied by the title, is an acknowledgment of nostalgia as inevitable and even desirable - are all indicative of the expatriate's perspective. In order to realize his present, he must return to his past constantly. As Kumar has pointed out, most of the successful Indian writers who write in English live abroad, and while this has placed them at the forefront of contemporary world literature and the academy, it also presents them with a problematic choice about how to project their experiences in the light of the significant political questions that their work must, perforce, ask and/or address. Kumar draws attention to the differences between the fiction of Rushdie and Pankaj Mishra's novel, The Romantics, allying himself with the latter, when he says, "If much of cosmopolitan Indian writing, as typified by Rushdie, has valorized the immigrant and the foreign land, then The Romantics is a celebration of the home and its forgotten world. What is remarkable is that this is unlike the nostalgic home of much of expatriate Indian writing. Instead of the bustling, bursting metropolis, we have the carefully drawn pictures of a few, linked lives in the Indian small towns." Of course, the same may be said of Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, or indeed, Chatterjee's English August, where the central characters move from big city to small town, from an elitist location in terms of education and lifestyle to a provincial space, and proceed to articulate the experience of interaction. In these cases, the movement is, once again, a reversal of what Kumar's title suggests, it is a return home, an attempt to understand what has been left behind. In this respect, it seems that Rushdie is outnumbered bythose who are making similar attempts. Kumar himself is one of them, as this book reveals. Bombay-London-New York not only celebrates movement from one location to the other, but also the simultaneity of the locations. If Kumar's fictitious piece, 'Indian Restaurant', depicts some of the pathos of exile, then his remarkable poem 'Pure Chutney', embraces the vigorous fusion of cultures that has, to a large extent, made the acceptance of Indian writing by the West possible. This is a heady journey, more complex and disruptive than the title might suggest, one whose turbulent nature is betrayed by the way in which the book is structured. Its strength is also its weakness, because the volume and scope of issues and themes addressed seem to overwhelm any central argument the author may have had in mind. But, as he launches into his discussion of contemporary India, bringing into focus trends in the films of Bollywood, snatches of economic, social and political currents, and, of course, footnotes on writing about and by Indians around the world, he manages to create a fascinating record, notjust of his "reading practices", but of an old nation and its "new modernity."
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