In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Facebook Fictions
  • Amitava Kumar (bio)
Ishq Mein Shahar Hona
Ravish Kumar
Illustrations by Vikram Nayak
Rajkamal Prakashan
www.rajkamalprakashan.com
90 Pages; Print, $1.50

World Literature, or its subcategory “postcolonial literature,” currently popular in the colleges and universities in the West, has been good for people of my ilk. It has allowed us entry into the market for academic jobs. We have joyfully staked our claims to difference, even if our differences remain of a rather narrow sort: we teach books by the same set of authors and parade our readings under the sign of the same few, highly-regarded theorists. I haven’t taken any names so far. I guess my obvious point is that I don’t need to.

A far less provocative way of arriving at my argument would be to stress that one of the advantages of a global approach to the study of literature or culture is that we discover the real complexity of the world. Just around the time that you and I, and maybe our mothers, were getting excited about sharing status updates on Facebook we learned that activists in the Arab Spring had used Facebook pages to foment a revolution. The young men and women in Egypt, for instance, had used social media to remove the dictator Hosni Mubarak who had ruled their country for three decades.

Saul Bellow had once infamously asked where was the “Zulu Tolstoy” or “the Proust of Papua New Guinea.” I cannot presume to speak of the literature in isiZulu or Tok Pisin, but I know a bit about my native tongue, Hindi. There have been writers in this language who have been compared in the past to Tolstoy and Proust but what I want to do here is discuss the emergence of a literary voice in Hindi linked to social media, particularly Facebook. Ravish Kumar, a popular Hindi anchor for a New Delhi-based television channel, has recently published a book whose cover, in addition to the title, bears the following legend: “Laprek Facebook Fiction Shrinkhala.” The first word in that phrase is actually an acronym for “Laghu Prem Katha” or “Short love story.” The last word can be translated as “series.” And the book’s title is “Ishq Mein Shahar Hona,” which, as a counter-intuitive formulation, I would translate as “When in Love, A City Happens.”

First, a word about the book’s author. I first learned of Kumar a few years ago when I started watching a show called Ravish ki Report (or “Ravish’s Report”). His trademark red microphone in hand, Kumar would conduct interviews on the streets of Indian cities and in the homes of ordinary people. His own commentary was always warm, often cutting, effortlessly poetic, alive with several native species of metaphor. I found out that Ravish was from my own hometown, Patna. Later, when writing a book about Patna, I interviewed him. I’ll quote a line from what I wrote about Kumar’s TV show in my book, particularly his language, because it is relevant to what I have to say about Ishq Mein Shahar Hona: “I am bewitched by the beauty of my mother tongue, Hindi, as it is used in Ravish ki Report—uninhibited, sinuous, and richly figurative.”

Ishq Mein Shahar Hona is composed of brief, fragmentary tales in Hindi—a series of Facebook fictions—stories told in the voice of two young lovers. The two lovers search for space and privacy, and also beauty and meaning, and this search maps out the city around them. In other words, love almost as urban architecture or urban planning! For the most part, the stories are set in Delhi and its far-flung suburbs. The writing in these pages is specific and sensual, but, as with much of what Kumar does, the words shade into metaphor. “Are you in love with me or with this city?” “With the city; you are my city.”

Several of the stories quite literally refer to Facebook and status updates, but there are as many that serve as reports on the changes in the cityscape. These are instant passport photos of a new, fast urbanizing India. In...

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