IndiaStar Review of Books   The New Yorker special fiction issue (India focus) June 23 and 30, 1997 published by The New Yorker 20 West 43rd Street, New York   Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia   This special issue of The New Yorker magazine commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. Although its cover announces a "fiction issue," the magazine devotes more pages to contributions in nonfiction than fiction. Moreover, the nonfiction pieces are of higher quality -- with one exception: the problematic framing essay, "Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You," by Salman Rushdie. Some of the best contributions are the essays by Amitav Ghosh, Abraham Verghese, John Updike; a witty, short story by Vikram Chandra; and the poems by Jayanta Mahapatra and A. K. Ramanujan. Amitav Ghosh's "India's Untold War of Independence" is a historical sketch of the Indian National Army (INA), which fought the British Indian Army in Burma in the closing year of World War II. "My father," writes Ghosh, "is one of many Indians who believe that the British would not have left India when they did had they not been faced with the prospect of a large-scale mutiny soon after the end of the war." I concur; however, the title of this essay is not accurate. The story of the INA has been told in, for example, Khushwant Singh's The History of the Sikhs. Ghosh interviewed a number of survivors of the INA, men and women in their eighties. Colonel Gurbakhsh Singh Dhillon, 83, now a farmer in central India, was one of the heroes of the INA. In 1945, an often-repeated slogan voiced throughout the country, "Lal Qile say aai ek awaaz/ Sehgal, Dhillon, Shah Nawaz," urged the release of the three INA officers facing a British court martial in Delhi's Red Fort. My cousins, as part of the boys' brigade of freedom fighters, used to chant this in the streets of Delhi. Ghosh skillfully outlines the history of the INA. Founded in February 1942 by Captain Mohan Singh in collaboration with Sardar Pritam Singh, president of the Indian Independence League, and under the sponsorshop of Major Icheiri Fujiwara of the Japanese Army, the INA, a year-and-a -half later, was placed under the command of Subhas Chandra Bose. By the time, Bose appeared on the scene, Mohan Singh, now a General, had already been imprisoned by the Japanese because of his demand that the Japanese government make "an unconditional commitment to Indian sovereignty." Fujiwara found Bose to be much more pliable than General Mohan Singh -- Bose didn't make any such demand. Had the Japanese succeeded in penetrating Bengal, the scenario would very likely have been horrendous -- just look at the Japanese record in Korea, northern China, and the Philippines. Ghosh's essay sidesteps this issue. One of the intriguing comments Ghosh makes is about Pritam Singh's Indian Independence League's connection with the Ghadar Party, founded in San Francisco by Sikh immigrant-farmers in 1914. Now, that's more of an untold story. Although the poorly equipped INA barely scraped the eastern border of India, Subhas Bose, after his death in a 1945 plane crash, became a legendary national hero, almost worshiped in Bengal. Abraham Verghese's essay "The Cowpath to America" is an engaging personal history of an India-educated physician's experiences in the U.S. as an interne, resident, and professor of medicine. Arriving in the U.S., he is told by an experienced Indian physician, "Look here. We foreign medical graduates are an embarrassment to this society, a problem....We are like the Mexican-migrant-worker problem, or the Colombian-cocaine-export problem ... problems that wouldn't exist if the United States economy didn't depend on us, if there wasn't a great need for the commodity we provide and which they are willing to pay for. They create the problem. But that doesn't mean they have to like us, or treat us fairly." Soon, Verghese finds that most of the Indian and other foreign medical graduates get assigned only to inner-city hospitals, where American graduates are loathe to work: "Ellis Island" hospitals for the third-world immigrant doctors and "Plymouth Rock" hospitals for the Boston-Brahmin doctors. After completing his residency, Verghese succeeds in securing a teaching appointment at Texas Tech University Health Center in El Paso, where the locals, happily, take him for a Hispanic: "For the first time in America, I felt I had disappeared. I no longer stood out. The patients and their families walking the corridors of the county hospital looked like my kin from South India." John Updike contributes two fine essays: A brief, laudatory profile of R.K. Narayan (photographed by Max Vadukul); and a book-review "Mother Tongues: Subduing the Language of the Colonizer." Reviewing Arundhati Roy's "A God of Small Things," Updike rightly observes that it's "a work of highly conscious art, conscious not least of its linguistic ambivalence.... The prose shuttling back and forth among its key images and phrases, rarely lets us forget that we are in the company of an artificer: Roy caresses her novel until it seems not merely well wrought but overwrought.... This is a first novel, and it's a Tiger Woodsian debut." Some of Updike's other observations are not as convincing. For example, he imagines an influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner (and even of Rushdie!) on her writing. I did not see any of this. Later, when I interviewed Arundhati Roy, she didn't either. (Actually, when I asked her about Faulkner's influence, she laughed and said, "To tell you the truth, I have never read any Faulkner.") Vikram Chandra's engrossing short story "Eternal Don," set in contemporary Bombay (not yet updated to Mumbai), features the city's police inspector Sardar Sartaj Singh bulldozing the fortress of Gaitonde Bhai, the not-so-eternal don. The narrative is told wittily and encloses a tale-within-a-tale device -- a device Vikram Chandra has also used in several of his other stories. Salman Rushdie's essay "Damme, This is the Oriental Scene For You" is flawed not only in its condescending title but also in its basic premise that the significant writing in India is only in English. The title is the sort of writing that prompted Professor Nair to famously characterize Rushdie's writing as "clever, but silly." Rushdie disdains India's many highly developed literary languages, dubbing them as merely "parochial." Nowhere in the essay does he mention that only 5 percent of the population of India is English-using bilinguals. This is the figure cited by Braj Kachru, author of The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. Other linguists have cited comparable figures and some as low as 2 percent. One of my colleagues, a Euro-American professor of English, was incredulous when I quoted the 5 percent figure because, after reading Rushdie's essay, she was under the impression that at least 50 percent of India's population is fluent in English. A redeeming feature in Rushdie's essay is his finally acknowledging the influence of G. V. Desani on his writing. In 1982, Feroza Jussawalla, in her book Family Quarrels, had observed: "Salman Rushdie's recent novel 'Midnight's Children' has been widely acclaimed for its experimental style, often considered sui generis -- in a class of its own and generating itself. That it is...another imitative work is overlooked. Uma Parameswaran notes that Rushdie sees himself more in the tradition of writers from the empire that struck back, rather than in the tradition of Anand, Narayan or Rao. Among the Indian writers, is G.V. Desani who is Rushdie's avowed master for he 'showed how English could be bent and kneaded until it spoke in an authentically Indian voice.'"   Feroza Jussawalla's and Uma Parameswaran's early assessments of the extent of Desani's influence on Rushdie were right on the mark. In this essay, Rushdie now grudgingly concedes that he "learned a trick or two from him." I wish Bill Buford, the editor, had sought the framing essay from a literary critic like Harish Trivedi or Meenaskhi Mukherjee instead of Rushdie, whose flawed piece has tarnished this sterling magazine's special issue.