Longing for Artlessness

Indian writing (in English) seems convulsed by a sudden political urgency. It is quite a carnival of gothic-gossamer tales spun in discordant threads. “Indianness” is acutely dystopic, the discovery of which seems to have given rise to some superbly energetic fiction. We are beset by an acute need for deeper roots and to see it anew in light of an inherent dualism. It is a largely held belief that hyper growth will continue unperturbed on its trajectory. Meanwhile, the spotlight is on local realities. Facing, as we are, a paradoxical epoch of progress in which regressive forces are more firm-footed than ever, the idea of the local is in violent chaos. For the first time in human history, the oppressed has as much political agency and voice as the inflictor. The micro order of things where oppression plays itself out is no longer a hazy landscape cut off by its otherness. We are in the know of things. In this highly charged moral context, how is literature faring?

From this tense fabric, an admirable body of writing has emerged. Current day writers are leaping out of known territory to explore, often with ethnographic zeal, remote corners of human condition. They are breaking bread with caste conflicts, farmer suicides or the imperiled Muslim identity. A Suitable Boy (2005), English, August (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), defining moments of the post Rushdie era, were, to use an archaic expression, of bourgeois sensibility. Later, The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and The White Tiger (2008) sported a subaltern voice, but one propped up by stylistic devices. In those stories, we were still in our comfort zones, thrilled by mysteries of strange connections, gripped by intrusions from the other side into our lives, our identities slippery but not unseated.

The recent body of indignant writing aspires to be different. Their evocation of the local is fiercely political. Such as the spectacularly poetic The Gypsy Goddess (2014) by Meena Kandasamy, an account of the Dalit massacre in Kilvenmani. Written as if an impassioned verse, it throws itself into the outrage. The resounding rhetoric leaves us spellbound and triumphs over everything else. Mingling with the voices of hapless Dalits burning to death is the po-mo rap voice of the author. We come out of its theatre marveling at the turn literature has taken. Kandasamy is beside herself with grief. She flits in and out of the book—a flaming seer-activist mouthing words of terrible reproach. The performance of The Gypsy Goddess is as much about her own personal musings—the impossibility of writing a novel etc.—as it is about the spectacle of atrocity. There is no dearth of poetic splendor in this novel, which mocks at and breaks staid structures of narrative. But the surfeit of brilliance overshadows the grotesque, flesh crawling suffering at the heart of it—the heinous crime it has promised to bring to light and seek retribution for. And therein lies the critical dilemma. When an episode of human outrage becomes material for a book should drum beats and magic alter the mundane pain for us? Or should we find in it a quiet moment that might help us deal with the tragedy?

The Weeded Window by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

The present day author’s quest for the local and ethnographically pure is offset by the need to belong to a homogenized identity of someone writing from the South. I cannot resist invoking here Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878). Egdon Heath in Hardy’s imagined province of Wessex, is dark, dreary and closed to the world outside, yet such is its allure that the reader is drawn effortlessly into its mesmerizing interior. When Clym returns from Paris, we are not saddled with the superiority of his gaze. He is an outsider but not a stereotype of one. Once he enters Egdon Heath, there is nothing outside of it. His return is by itself the stimulus of what plays out, the brilliant unfolding of the plot, an allegory of modernity, aspiration and sexuality.

In her fine book, Sleeping on Jupiter...