When I started doing book reviews on this blog, I made two promises to myself:
1) I would only write positive reviews. This isn’t because I love every book I read–far from it–but because I am averse to publicly lambasting other people’s writing. I decided that, if I don’t like something I’ve read, I simply won’t write about it. So it would be better to think of these posts as “recommendations” rather than reviews.
2) I wouldn’t write about well known books. Who needs another review of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or the latest Jodi Picoult? I’d rather let people know about books they might not have heard of but that will knock their socks off. At one time, I considered calling these posts “Books that Should be Bestsellers but Aren’t,” but I abandoned the idea because it sounded too negative.
In this post and some of the ones to follow, I’m sticking with my first promise, but not with my second. I’m going to suggest some excellent reads by Indian authors writing in English–despite the fact that each of them is internationally renowned. I’m going to be writing about them because I’m in India exploring the English language here, but also because I’ve noticed that many of my Western friends, despite being voracious readers, neglect Indian writers.
In the last thirty years, the so-called Indian Middle Class (approximately 20% of the population) has been growing in size and influence. They include speakers of many Indian languages–Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and others–but virtually all of them also speak fluent English. As a result, English-language literature written in India by Indians and for Indian readers has thrived. Indian English writing has come into its own as a distinct, unique, and influential body of literature.
Take Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first novel English, August: An Indian Story. This remarkably fresh, funny, and biting work–labeled “India’s first slacker novel”–tells the story of twenty-four-year old Agastya Sen, an upper middle class college graduate who takes a job in the vast web of Indian government bureaucracy. He finds himself posted in the tiny town of Madna, stuck in a mind-numbing job, that forces him to deal with pompous officials, desperate local people whose customs he doesn’t understand, and the many inconveniences of rural Indian life–heat, contaminated water, mosquitoes. Agastya drifts through these experiences with the bored indifference of alienated youth, daydreaming through his work and spending his free time smoking dope and masturbating.
Chatterjee writes expertly about government work in India–he’s spent a lifetime in the Indian Civil Service–but, more importantly, he sheds a harsh light on the vast chasm that separates educated, well-to-do Indian urbanites from the much larger class of Indians living in rural poverty. Even the languages of these large conflicting groups is different. One character calls Agastya “an English type”–an Indian who speaks English better than any Indian language. Another complains that the local people “don’t even speak decent Hindi.” Agastya himself struggles with the English spoken by the people around him–different from the urban dialect he’s used to. And he can’t speak the local tongue at all.
“An average [presumably middle-class] Indian growing up in an Indian megalopolis like Bombay or Bangalore will tell you he feels more at home in New York or London than a place like Madna,” writes one Indian reader of English, August. It is that disjunction between urban and rural, middle- and lower-class that Chatterjee captures best.
Upamanyu Chatterjee has been compared to everyone from Kafka and Camus to J. D. Salinger and Milan Kundera. When English, August was first published in India in 1988, it was an instant best seller: one reader has called it “Probably the best ever contemporary novel from the Indian subcontinent.” Yet, it wasn’t published in the U.S. for over twenty years, and many American readers have yet to take notice. If you have never experienced contemporary Indian literature and want to take the plunge, English, August: An Indian Story is an excellent place to start.