As you may know, last year I published a book in India on contemporary Indian literature in English. The book was published with Writers Workshop Press and it was about Writers Workshop. Since then, I’ve been reworking the book to appeal more to an American audience. I thought I’d post here a current draft of the introduction to that project, which is as yet untitled. I know it runs a bit long for a blog post, but it might be more meatier fare than the unpalatable scraps I usually provide on this blog.
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I am a reader. I tend to read even my own lived experience as I would read a text. I live with the comfortable detachment of the reader allowing a text to take him deeper and deeper into his interests and researches. It’s even liable to suck me to the other side of the world for long stretches of time.
India, as a chapter of my experience, immediately yielded itself to me as a text: endlessly subtle and complex, yet readable, legible to me by virtue of its utter foreignness. It never failed to disrupt me, to resist my assumptions about reality, even as the best fiction does. While I was there, I never ceased to be a stranger, even as you are a stranger to me, reader.
And so, I found a specific set of books to focus my reading and living for a period while I was in India. I centered myself upon a very small independent publisher based in Kolkata, Writers Workshop. Writers Workshop is a fifty-year-old institution that publishes ‘serious creative writing in English’ with no regard for whether their books will be popular or will be sold. Since Writes Workshop has no distribution and does not sell many books, it’s mostly a good place for Indians who aren’t well known authors to publish books of poetry or first novels—Writers Workshop doesn’t publish famous Indian writers, though it has been known to help a writer or two become famous. The founder and publisher, P. Lal, is also a Sanskrit scholar—he ‘transcreates’ (rather than translates) Sanskrit texts into English, including the voluminous epic, the Mahabharata. This interest of P. Lal ties Writers Workshop—which otherwise publishes contemporary writing—to the traditional philosophies and writs of India.
I used Writers Workshop as a point of entry into the literary culture of contemporary India. I spent my first months in Kolkata reading Writers Workshop books and creating a catalog of them. I then wrote to a collection of Writers Workshop authors around the country, and spent some months traveling around the country to meet them and talk about their work. Writers Workshop gave me access to a set of writers and a collection of concerns that would have been unavailable to me had I remained a tourist, and it also provided a set of boundaries that enabled me to narrow my focus.
The narrow boundaries of this project were useful to me because India is so unimaginably broad in every way. It utterly resists being encompassed in any single narrative, any representational edifice. I am uncomfortable even with the word India; the national entity constituted in 1947 fails to convey the vast dispersal of bodies, histories, consciousness, texts, abnormalities, and aesthetics that sprawl across all dimensions of understanding, even within the limited scope of my engagement in it all. The fragmentation runs endlessly deep; at best, India is merely coexisting with itself. Every Indian oppression is countered by a resistance equally as old. There are nearly as many traditions as there are people, and every tradition carries along with it dedicated critics. Perhaps because of all this, I ceased to be able to excersize control of myself as a discrete individual with an experience that could be corralled into narrative. I lost control of my body, my emotions and my spirituality as I pushed myself to extremes in all these areas.
Before I found Writers Workshop, I found other ways to engage with all these complexities of the textual fabric of India: through study and conversation, seeking the wisdom of teachers and gurus, through myth and idolatry, through music, travel, and sweat. Nonetheless, I remained pleasantly disjointed and displaced; I expanded myself simultaneously in a multiplicity of directions, and my writing about India stubbornly resists totalization and cohesion. Despite my eventual decision to focus solely on Writers Workshop, a gala
The genesis of my interest in Hindusim–an interest that evolved into an interest in India and the multiplicity of religion and culture therein–is inexplicable, unless you are willing to literalize the idea of past life karma expounded by some Hindu thinkers. But it has always been a textual interest. I remember being fascinated by the Bhagavat-Gita in high school. In 2006, I took a semester off from college and spent four months in India: two months living in Varanasi and two months spent traveling alone. I was introduced to an old Brahmin in Varanasi who agreed to tutor me in the mythology of Hinduism. He spent hours recounting stories in breathtaking detail from memory while I scribbled in my notebook. I responded to the symbolic tendencies of Hinduism: everything is a metaphor, and the final referent of that galaxy of signifiers is unknowable and unnamable: there are billions of names for god and none is any more than a word. Why waste ink and wind on it when the symbols themselves are so rich? I know of no other religion that is so content with its own inevitable half-truths.
When I graduated from college, I applied for a year-long postgraduate fellowship to do a project of my own design abroad. I wanted to form a project around a person or institution that would provide me access to the cultural and academic milieu of India, the thinkers of the society. I found the website for Writers Workshop almost immediately, linked to from Wikipedia, and nearly as quickly I knew that I had found my venue for study in India. I wrote to P. Lal, about the fellowship, not knowing who he was, or what Writers Workshop really was, or if I would get the fellowship. He wrote back almost immediately, unconditionally opening his doors to me. I wrote my fellowship application as vaguely as possible, knowing that I could not truly predict what I was getting myself into in India. To my surprise, I got the fellowship. Four months later, I showed up on the doorstep of the Lal family in southern Kolktata.
I had come to Writers Workshop naively thinking that I could ‘intern’ for Professor Lal as I had interned in American publishing companies. I didn’t understand what Writers Workshop really is: an ethereal thing, a result of cultural confluence and collective investment, a product of the respect that Professor Lal commands as a figurehead. It is less an institution than a conglomeration, and I had to find my own way to engage with it.
The expansiveness and complexity inherent in anything Indian demanded that I move toward a narrow approach. The more specific my proposed engagement, the more chance I had of attaining some depth of understanding. Moreover, I cannot get out of my own skin: I will always approach everything Indian as a foreigner, and my understanding, no matter how deep, will continue to be a foreign understanding. I decided that this was not to be regretted–I may never attain the lifelong knowledge available to someone born and raised in this land that was so foreign to me, but I could approach everything with a wide-eyed openness unavailable to those more local bodies.
Of course, there is a rich history and literature of white men who attempt to capture the extreme diversity of the Asian subcontinent, the delightful differences it bears to everything occidental. It is a particular habit of westerners to try to totalize India in massive tomes, and in many instances I am actually very glad that they did so. I must inhabit a tradition of Orientalists in the sense that I am a Westerner who claims to be able to represent India to my own native society. Although it has been named and condemned, Orientalism is alive and well; some think that simply naming it as a genre was enough to get rid of it. Perhaps it has instead gained a more central place in Western societies: our streets are plastered with appropriations and approximations of Indian culture, from yoga and spirituality to cuisine.
Orientalism–if we are using the word to simply mean the attempt to represent and study Asian cultures in the West–has changed as history has moved forward. My work does not occur within a colonial context where my native country is exerting direct political force over India. Instead, my country (America) is the figurehead for a new movement of global capitalism that India is dreadfully eager to participate in. The fundamental power dynamic remains similar–in India, my skin is still a signifier of wealth and power. But I believe that the need for cultural exchange and understanding is even more pressing now than it was during the days of colonialism: in the new economy, we work closely with India, and India furiously courts Western investment. When our computers in America break, we end up talking to someone in Delhi or Bangalore. American forms and styles are exported to India to be manufactured and mimicked. But where in all this is the human exchange, the cultural exchange? It is easier to send money around the world than to create a broad dialogue between artists and dreamers. I can only contribute in a humble way, but nonetheless, this was my intention in going to India and spending time there, and it is my intention in writing this book.
My life in India was shaped by forces of power and history that were not of my own making, and yet I have my own share in their karmic consequences. 1947, when India and Pakistan became national entities, was not very long ago. Independence was an inspiring triumph of political willpower, but the simultaneous partition was one of the most traumatic episodes in modern history.
The legacy of the British is a daily, physical reality in India. The British comissioned the building of Calcutta, Bombay, indeed, most of modern India. They arranged and designed the trains. They imposed upon the land the idea of India as a nation, and they defined the boundaries that it still roughly occupies. They created the divisions and fragmentations in the land and population that breed hatred even today.
This history is located on the street, and it dictated my behavior as I navigated the material difficulties of life in India. The country was built on the subdued backs of millions of servants and laborers, and these ubiquitous and underfed souls fill in the gaps left behind by inefficient and ailing infrastructure.
The British didn’t introduce the caste system, but they incorporated it into a system that makes economic hierarchy entrenched in the structure of the land. One cannot do anything, move anywhere, without relying on them, and so everyone does. If I wanted to walk\ down the street with my eyes open, I had to get used to moments of pity and poverty: watching the wirey legs of a bicycle rickshaw straining to overcome potholes, riding high on that rickshaw past hovels and women cooking meager meals on the street. But I never could come to terms of it, or with the fact that I had the financial capacity to rescue any single soul I encountered, but never did. I could never come to terms with their stares, with my feeling that I was trespassing upon their poverty; indeed, that at some level, my presence created their poverty by virtue of the comparison.
This anxiety was one reason for my style of travel in India: I stayed close to the ground when I traveled. I backpacked everywhere, often walking through cities rather than take a rickshaw I could easily afford; I stayed in the simplest guest house, traveled on sleeper class trains which lacked air-conditioning and where I always made friends with the extended family that shared my bunk. But, then again, I avoided riding in the general-class cars, which are packed full of livestock and humanity and the riders spend every moment guarding their few inches of space to sit. The only time I used a coolie was the last time I was in Howrah station, Calcutta, to take the train to Delhi to catch my flight back to America: I came him my smallest pack and my ektara–a single stringed musical instrument–to carry, because I wanted to give him the pleasure of walking past his comrades twanging and swinging and singing and chuckling at this American boy who put so much value on a beggar’s instrument, or, perhaps I only wanted to give myself the pleasure of feeling good about myself.
I traveled the way i did because it made me happy, or for my own self-image: to convince myself that there was some difference between myself and the colonials that preceded me. This attitude was self-serving, because it certainly didn’t help anyone on the streets. By walking through the heat with my backpack rather than taking a rickshaw, I was depriving the driver of thirty rupees that he needed to feed himself and his family. So he would pedal or drive or walk alongside me, relentlessly pleading with me to avail myself of his services. Then, if I got in, he would overcharge me and I’d have to haggle. It wasn’t the money that kept me from indulging in his pleas, it was the palpable dynamic between us: to him, I was an economic resource, but one that could only be mined if he acted obsequious and servile, an attitude that is distasteful to me and that can breed dishonesty. For who, when placed in a subservient position, can resist the impulse to manipulate the master? Not I.
No resolution was reached. Though I began to learn the more natural flows of the city and the country–I learned how to use public transport and shared autos–I cannot claim that I ever felt entirely comfortable on an urban Indian street.
I addressed this problem in ways that felt good to me: by doing all my laundry by hand, by cooking elaborate curries for myself, by squatting in the vegetable market, fingering unfamiliar gourds and practicing my Bengali with the vegetable sellers, by making my own chapatti from scratch, by learning to play Tabla drums, and so on. And, in a related effort, through my studies: through reading Tagore and The Mahabharata and contemporary Indian literature, much of which I write about in this book. This gave me a reason to be living in Indi that transcended the exploitation that I inevitably incurred by doing so.
But in writing about some aspects of this literature I am led again into another face of modern Orientalism. Can I, as a young American student, form an authentic relationship with Indian culture, and can that relationship be conveyed on the page? Many aspects of Indian culture are inseparable from religion, and so discussion of them evokes a collection of spiritual insecurities on both sides of the world: I think that we, as Americans, have had our fill of being lectured on Eastern spirituality by our own counterculture. Perhaps it is one of the dynamics that drives our counterculture away from our mainstream culture; perhaps it started with the Beatles, or when Ginsberg came back from India chanting, or even earlier. It gets worse when we are accosted by evangelical Hari Krishnas trying to sell us Gitas on our own city streets–in my experience, Hinduism is not an evangelical religion. For those of us interested in what has been categorized “Eastern Religion,” it becomes nearly impossible to figure out who has an authentic, authoritative voice. I do not have that voice, especiacially on matters of spirituality–I only have my own voice.
Despite all the difficulties, my time in India and the writing that tries to represent it was worthwhile, if only because I bothered to seek out the knowledge of another culture. Even in the current climate of multiculturalism and diversity, few of us–despite our own diverse backgrounds–go out of our way to engage with a culture that has almost nothing in common with our own. We demand that cultures meet us half way; that they reach out to us and make their strangeness accessible to us. Take, for example, the issue at hand: Indian Literature. Fiction, and, to some extent, nonfiction about India and Indians has found a huge market in America, beginning, perhaps, with the huge success of Salmon Rushdie’s masterpiece, Midnight’s Children. The progression of this genre can be traced through a variety of equally wonderful writers: Anita and Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, and so on. Although these writers are extremely good, none of them live in India. To varying degrees, they are Western or they reach across cultural lines towards a Western audience, and do not have large readerships in India. We appreciate this accessibility–we like books that were written for us. Incidentally, this trend has recently taken a revealing turn: I would submit that the most recent entry into this popular genre is Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger, which was written in Delhi, and yet I believe it to be clearly aimed at non-Indian readers–the structure of the book, an Indian explaining India to an international businessman, is enough to reveal the cultural function of the novel. The fact that this novel was written in Delhi reveals a recent trend in India: a desire to make itself more transparent and accessible to the international community, particularly the international business community.
As Western readers, we tend to enjoy books that are written for us. Although this may seem only natural, I found that it confused or even angered some of the Indian authors that I talked to, who told me that a diverse population and a long history of colonialism (beginning a long time before the British) had taught Indian audiences to appreciate cultural forms that were not created with them in mind–just see how popular American movies, books, and music are in India today.
And yet, there is a thriving English language literary culture in India for Indian audiences. The educated classes–a small percentage of the population–universally speaks English; for many Indians, English is as natural or more natural than their families’ languages. This is a product of both contemporary and historical circumstance–globalization and colonialism. It occurs within an incredibly complex and diverse domestic linguistic landscape. The number of distinct languages in Inida is an oft-quoted and constantly changing statistic: the 1961 census recognized 1,652 separate languages in India. The number has tragically decreased since then due to the pressures of modernity, but as of the census of 2001, there were 29 languages that were spoken by more than a million native speakers, and 122 more that were spoken by more than a hundred thousand native speakers. In this context, Professor Lal has argued that English can have the power that Latin had in Europe after the Roman Empire: it can be the shared language of learning and exchange, and therefore ought to be embraced as an indigenous Indian language in independent India. I’s a radical position to take in a culture that has put so much effort into transcending the legacy of colonialism, but it’s a position that seems to have been vindicated by history.
This, in turn, creates a valuable opening for me, as an American, to understand and engage with the cultures and literatures of India. One of my answers to the question I get asked when I discuss my project, why India?, is that as an English speaker, I have greater opportunity to engage with Indian culture than I would in another culture where English might occupy a more superficial place–English might be enough for the traveler, but in India, it is enough for the traveling scholar.
And yet, all I have to offer is my own experience: more than a broad study of India, it is an account of my own engagement with whatever and whoever I engaged with there. This is the canyon of my own experience, which was prone to chance, avoidance, and self-indulgence. On the page, I attempt to represent the opnions of the people that I met and spoke with, but their opinions may or may not reflect broader cultural views. On occasion, the canyon may become more shallow and broad rather than narrow and deep, and the reader may be able to catch a more expansive glance of the Indian landscape and humanscape. Although we appreciate the expansive and colorful view, we understand that we cannot access the depth behind it. Otherwise, I will focus on the more narrow topic–Indians who write books in English–in the hopes that this literary discussion will provide some deeper insight into the culture. My American education trained me to look in literature for the contradictions, obsessions, and neuroses in the culture, and that is why I chose this mode of engagement for my time in India.
