Friday, January 21, 2011

The view from here

After the Bal-Dalrymple stand-off, with a brief digression via anonymous solutions to the problem of IWE, here's Mridula Koshy's essay from earlier this month:
Too many Indian writers are immured in the broad brushstroke approach to Indian-ness. A generation and more have expended energy on a sort of anthropological writing, handling as curiosities what would otherwise be mundane – bindis, bangles and arranged marriage. Deciding how much of an India unfamiliar to the west may enter a work if it is to find success abroad is a constantly negotiated question for the Indian writer in English. Like Hosseini, some of these writers are immigrants to the US, while others live for extended periods of time in the west. The migrant writer is in this case like other migrant workers, someone forced by the economics of a global marketplace to travel where the work is. But the writer is unlike any other worker in that his work is determined by its accountability to audience. If there is any substance to the notion of authenticity, it rests here in the question of accountability. Nadine Gordimer said of African writing, ‘One must look at the world from Africa, to be an African writer, not look upon Africa from the world.’ 

Read the whole thing. 

I always want to know how people define authentic and how they know it when they see it. Koshy's definition is certainly an interesting one; for another approach to the question of accountability see Rahul's post today on music, the arts, and funding. 

More on this as and when. 

18 comments:

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Thanks for the link. And what's "the view from here", i.e. your own view?

JP said...

I'm not able to understand any of this. Am I an Indian? Do I have to write as an Indian? To be really authentic do I have to write always from the perspective of a left-handed, myopic, limping, south Indian atheist Tamilian Brahmin Anglophone bass-playing Indian? Or is that an inherently inauthentic identity to have? Did Kafka write as a Czech, a Jew, a German or an Austrian? Who the fuck is anyone anyway?

JP said...

Rahul's post is really interesting and for what it's worth, as a musician I am in complete agreement with that part of his post which deals primarily with the musical currents of the last 100 years.

Space Bar said...

Rahul: Unfortunately, I don't have a coherent view on the matter and tend to shift my opinion with dizzying frequency. That doesn't, of course, mean that I shouldn't attempt to articulate my position, but I suspect the trouble I have doing it at all is symptomatic of the whole IWE problem: which is, I don't feel well-read enough to say anything meaningful.

So I tend to take often contradictory positions in dialogue with people, sometimes just to be contrarian, sometimes to see where taking a particular line will get me.

Perhaps I will post about this instead of putting it in a comment (hence the optimistic 'more on this'!).

Space Bar said...

JP: Well, yes, you are. I think - in the actual, political eschewing of nation states and boundaries - identities *are* important. National identities may be only one kind of self-identification (there being linguistic, gender, political, artistic and many, many more that make up any person) - and often not the most important one - and it may not be necessary to wear it like a badge in one's writing, but don't you think a writer has to engage with it?

I think it's disingenuous to say that our generation of IWE writers are no longer troubled by these questions because, somehow, we have arrived at some unique comfort zone in our sense of self that we no longer have to think about what we write about, why and how.

We can write about any damned thing we please, but we don't; surely it's symptomatic of something that the range of our writing is woefully narrow and timid?

(Please note, I'm not saying all IWE has to signal its dubious Indianness with reviled signposts much-discussed elsewhere.)

Rahul Siddharthan said...

JP - thanks.

I don't have much of an opinion on the national identity thing -- haven't really thought about it. Vikram Seth became famous with The Golden Gate, and also wrote An Equal Music, neither of which had anything to do with India. HRF Keating became famous writing India-based books before ever setting foot here. But I guess these people are the exceptions. To most of us, our national and other identities would define how we write and it would be hard to shake that off, even harder to assume a new identity and make it realistic. It's not that we "have" to do write as Indians. But it's very hard to be convincing otherwise. But I won't try very hard to defend the above.

JP said...

I think it's a failure of the imagination to think that you have let your various identities define what you write. Sometimes, great literature is created by people who deny some part of their identity, like Thomas Mann, so secretive about his sexuality or Mary Ann Evans, writing as a bloke. I do understand that there is a point about how much you need to explain Indian words or cultural specificities if writing for an international audience. Isn't it easiest to simply write the way that seems natural and then let your editor tell you if her audience needs more explication? There, sorted. Can the IWEs now start writing something of worth please.

As for not thinking about what one writes about - that seems like a rather peculiar and counter-productive way to write, but one can see its results in bookstores everywhere.

As for writing whatever the hell one pleases, why else would you? Write, I mean.

Space Bar said...

JP: Identities define you whether you want to acknowledge them or not. Writers may deny some part of themselves in their writing, but what they hide also defines them, if only in their ostentatious avoidance of that part of themselves.

As for not thinking about...well. That didn't turn out the way I wanted to say it.

I meant, it's not as if IWE has reached a zone where writers do not have to think about language, or how to write - just as an example - different people and the way they speak, and how to get it right.

Since there's no lingual homogeneity, but since the Indian Writer in English in nearly always of a homogenous educational/class background, these questions have to be asked time and again.

It's a failure of IWE that there isn't nearly enough formal or conceptual challenges writers set themselves.

Cheshire Cat said...

I dream of an India that is a police state, where the term "Indian writing in English" is banned from public discourse.

Such a lot of blather we'll be spared...

Space Bar said...

cat: :D indeed. (i suspect you're in the (good?) company of a lot of IWE writers themselves.)

km said...

Who's standing up for Omani Writing in Latvian (OWL)? Who? Who?

Please tell me why you think it is disingenuous "...to say that our generation of IWE writers are no longer troubled by these questions".

JP said...

>>I meant, it's not as if IWE has reached a zone where writers do not have to think about language, or how to write - just as an example - different people and the way they speak, and how to get it right.

Aren't those things every writer should think about anyway? If you're alluding to the fact there are not yet any set standards on how to use language as an Indian writing in English about a multi-lingual society, or how to depict different social classes and regional types, isn't that a challenge rather than a problem? Besides, I think there are precedents for all of this.

>>Identities define you whether you want to acknowledge them or not.

Sure. But what of it? Come to whatever terms with your identity and write. You can even write yourself into understanding some aspect of your identity, that can be a good book. Or is this like that moment when my acidhead acquaintances tried to describe what LSD did for them beyond the hallucinations and I heard them out and then thought 'huh...but that's just introspection. Doesn't everyone do that anyway?'
In short, I think the whole identity question is one that generates heat but not light. If a writer is any good, her work will be interesting and worthwhile whether or not she has acknowledged her national identity (which seems to be the only form of identity this debate cares about; how 19th century). If she is possessed of actual genius, her work will reflect it even if she has not accepted that identity, or has actively rejected it, or had it actively rejected by the currents of history, like Joseph Roth, the perfectly superfluous man in a Europe on the verge of extinction.

>>the Indian Writer in English in nearly always of a homogenous educational/class background

I think that it is possible to overestimate that homogeneity. Look at the differences between our own experiences of growing up in Hyderabad during roughly the same period of time.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

About Dalrymple and JLF, see this letter in the current issue of Open.

Space Bar said...

km: Because I think in the very safeness of the subject matters IWE writes about, is the anxiety about being an IWE. I think this is a good time to revisit Meenakshi Mukherjee and Vikram Chandra.

JP: All fair points. I feel I'm taking a more hardened position on this matter than, in fact, I have. So let me back-track a bit.

You're right that all writers have to ask themselves these question, no matter where they are. I agree with you that they, in fact, do - whether they're Philip Roth, Junot Diaz, Amitav Ghosh or Anne Enright - some with more success than others.

I'm suggesting that IWE is currently striking a pose of comfort, playing ostrich, avoiding challenges.

I disagree with you that genius will out. That, if anything, is a 19th century way of looking at the world. It's more likely that many good writers will be ignored in favour of the more market-friendly mediocrities we're seeing in bookstores.

On the other hand, look at these two not-quite-manifestoes. (go to page 3)

I know which one holds more promise, is more exciting; I know which one makes me groan and say, 'not again!'

So, you see, I'm divided pretty neatly with wanting to take both sides (or every side) of this IWE thing. I want to be free of it all and be a part of - surely mythical? - the subset Writer, writing solely out of an urgent need to.

I also want to question the romantic conception that such a thing is possible, untethered from all signposts and locations - a perfectly abstracted Writer Writing at the urging of her Genius.

Tied in with this is the question: who is the IWE writing for. But I won't go there now.

Rahul: Yes, I saw. Oh, btw, Tehelka is live-streaming JLF. It's very interesting. Diaz seems to have stolen the show yesterday.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Thanks for the tip, but I'm minimising my online time (posting this from my phone in fact). Wanted to make a not-entirely-OT comment on IWE. I am reading Siddhartha Gigoo's 'The Garden of Solitude' and intend to blog about it when I am done. I bought it mainly because I knew Gigoo's wife at school. Not sure what the country's literati will think of it -- somehow I expect many of the usual suspects to turn up their elegant noses. But I find it not only a good read, but a much-needed perspective on Kashmir from a Pandit viewpoint. And, to bring this comment back on topic, I think nobody could accuse it of inauthenticity. Highly recommended (modulo the fact that I haven't quite finished it).

km said...

Because I think in the very safeness of the subject matters IWE writes about, is the anxiety about being an IWE.

You are a writer so maybe you can tell me - do *you* feel this anxiety? Are you conscious about writing in English?

Space Bar said...

rahul: i sympathise! i'm minimising my online time too. post about it sometime, though.

km: never mind about me! listen to coetzee:

http://twitter.com/supriyan/status/29510857150963712

http://twitter.com/supriyan/status/29511002626195457

(Not that this directly answers your qs about anxiety...but.)

(via tweets from Supriya, whose posts from JLF must be read.

JP said...

>>I disagree with you that genius will out. That, if anything, is a 19th century way of looking at the world. It's more likely that many good writers will be ignored in favour of the more market-friendly mediocrities we're seeing in bookstores.

Actually, given time, it will. Not all if it of course; 'many a rose' and all that. Still. Go look at the bestseller lists from 1900. No really, do.

I suppose I am insulated from all this as a genre writer; there is no established market or audience in India for weird fiction and I seem myself as writing for the few fellow oddities I know - maybe half a dozen all told amongst all the dozens of people I know.