Does Indian literature owe its global success to the Raj?
As close to 50,000 people prepare to celebrate India’s bulging roster of nationally and internationally renowned authors and poets at the seventh annual Jaipur Literary Festival, a public spat between its British organiser and an Indian magazine over allegations of perpetuating “a Raj that still lingers” threatens to ignite a decades-old debate over the role of colonial English in the country’s literary success.
As Delhi-based William Dalrymple and his fellow organiser stress the festival’s intent to showcase works from India’s array of states and dialects to thousands of book lovers, an article in India’s Open magazine this month claimed the festival matters “because of the writers from Britain it attracts”.
India’s literary elite has long wrestled with its complicated post-colonial legacy, sharpened by the huge international success of Indian writers such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Kiran Desai, who have put the former British colony on the literary map, but live, sell more books and win more awards in the UK or the U.S.
In the past five years, two Indians — Desai and Chennai-born Aravind Adiga — have won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. While the prize has been attacked by some for its arguably colonial legacy of rewarding writers in English from the British Commonwealth, Desai and Adiga saw their international profile soar, replicating the global success of former winners Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.
The article, titled “The Literary Raj” argues that the festival reaffirms the inferiority complex among Indian writers who crave international and specifically British recognition, suggesting that through his western-centric festival, Dalrymple has become “the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India”.
“The festival then works not because it is a literary enterprise, but because it ties us to the British literary establishment,” wrote Hartosh Singh Bal, an Indian novelist himself, in the January edition of the magazine.
With the Games to come, 2010 looking rosy for India tourism
Tourism is big business in India and according to new figures released on Wednesday, business is booming.
Despite continued warnings of the threat of militant attacks in the country and sluggish growth in international traveller numbers following the global downturn, India’s tourism numbers bucked a downfall last year to post close to double-digit growth last month, resulting in an almost $1 billion windfall for the industry.
Foreign visitors jumped 9 percent during August compared to last year, with 382,000 entries during the month. A cumulative total since January of 3,467,000 is up 9.7 percent on 2009, according to India’s Ministry for External Affairs.
(Full coverage of the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games)
For India’s hotels, restaurants, tourist sites and shops, higher visitor numbers means higher revenues — in August, revenues touched $992 million, an increase of $70 million from the same period last year.
Perhaps most encouraging for industry players, and the government’s Incredible India tourism campaign, the rise in visitors comes during a year that has seen bomb attacks and civil unrest.
Does anyone have statistics for the number of tourists who visit Delhi more than once? Surely that is a sign of whether or not tourism in the area is going to continue growing.
Who are the Commonwealth Games for?
As India races to get ready for the Commonwealth Games, graffiti questioning their mass appeal has appeared over the last few weeks near some of the venues hosting the October event.
The graffiti in English, a language many middle-class well-to-do Indians are proficient in, questions the Games’ focus.
“Pro-rich anti-poor CWG sucks” says one scrawl. Another is hopeful “the Games are a disaster”. “No to Games” reads one peremptory message.
It is not clear which group or individual is responsible, but the writing on the wall scripts the same theme, along one of the capital’s busiest and posh thoroughfares.
Targeting sports events is not a novelty though New Delhi has not staged a major sports event since the 1982 Asian Games.
As the capital spends around 15 billion rupees to spruce up for the games there are questions on how it tackles what many see as a rush to redress perpetual eyesores from bad driving to beggars at traffic lights.
Is digging up pavements in the Lutyens zone, probably the best looking part of New Delhi, and rebuilding them a good use of resources?
As I’ve argued in detail elsewhere, the games are definitely being used as an excuse to prioritize things favoured by the upper middle classes: transportation other and projects that look good to outsiders.
When have you heard a water project justified in the name of the games? (The Commonwealth Games Village strives to conserve water, but that is for publicity only; if water conservation were a concern, why would it be build on the environmentally sensitive flood plain of the Yamuna?) Tourists and athletes won’t be waiting in line at a public tap or swimming in our rivers, of course, so they are unlikely to notice that nearly half of the sewage in Delhi goes untreated into the Yamuna–and we waste nearly half of the clean water we do get due to crumbling infrastructure.
As for housing for poor people, we are simply trying to remove the poor people! We crack down on beggars, but we allow public contractors to violate minimum wage laws on CWG projects! I could go on, but there’s no need; most people on the street understand this, though they may not write about it in English: the CWG are just an excuse to carry on with unsustainable development for the elite of this otherwise great city!
My initial impression of Bal’s first piece was that Hartosh Singh Bal has a major chip on his shoulder and/or is a publicity-seeker.
My opinion, after his rebuttal, did not change.
As has been pointed pointed out by numerous commenters and Dalrymple himself, the nature of audiences, sessions and speakers at JLF destroys Bal’s claims. Pre-JLF, Indians complained that no-one was taking notice. Now, Bal has found a new grouse.
In terms of approval, I think there is a larger phenomenon at work here. When it comes to politics and diplomacy, successive Indian Governments always sought the approval of the US in the post-Cold War 1990s period. Registering complaints against what they perceived as ‘transgressions’ by Pakistan occurred regularly. This probably happened because the US was seen as the world superpower at the time.
Similarly, Indians have traditionally grown up on a diet of British literature, reading about well-established British literary awards. It is natural to think of Britain as a leading literary power.
Apropos ‘celebrity’ writers getting more attention than ‘great writers [from Europe]‘, doesn’t the celebrity culture pervade all aspects of public life? Who does Bal think would get more media attention during red carpet movie award/music events?
As for any ongoing need for British approval, more and more Indians in the middle-class see the US as their choice for higher education, etc. American television and cultural influences, American slang, trends are all more prevalent in India today. Gone are the days of domination of English public-school and Oxbridge-educated grandees in the Indian political and diplomatic circles. It therefore baffles me how Bal finds this particular kind of cultural cringe to be very strong in India….. And his tone in his first piece is shockingly offensive (as with most such offensive pieces, a result of his ignorance).
To me, Bal’s pieces suggest his refusal/inability to accept Dalrymple as an Indian writer. And refusal to accept that a British-born writer could head a major Indian literary festival without it having imperial-colonial implications.