Abstract
Introduction
Indian English drama is a neglected area of academic study; this is partly because there is not enough published material, though many plays have been staged successfully in the last two decades. Routledge India has published Woman Centrestage, a collection of plays by Poile Sengupta. The Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters) has continued to publish modern Indian plays in English. In poetry, Tabish Khair has brought out a new collection. In fiction, Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Not Be Told and Daman Singh’s The Sacred Grove are memorable. Anuja Chauhan’s Battle for Bittora, about an electoral battle in contemporary India, is as entertaining and thought provoking as her first, The Zoya Factor (2008). A large number of novelists made their debut – a wide variety of novels appeared, ranging from one on the life of the seer and poet Sri Aurobindo, to historical fiction, to satirical novels presenting a critique of society, to spy thrillers and science fiction. A number of graphic novels have also been published. Penguin is publishing uniform editions of the works of R.K. Narayan and Amitav Ghosh.
Man of Glass by Tabish Khair is a major new collection of poems. It is in three sections. The first section draws upon Kalidasa’s famous Sanskrit play Shakuntalam. Khair’s Shakuntala is the daughter of a secular Muslim scholar given a classical Hindu name by her parents. She tries to move out of the confines of a small town in India, but the western world does not want her. In the Shakuntala story, the young girl has a secret marriage with King Dushyanta who gives her his signet ring; later, due to a curse, he refuses to recognize her since she has lost the ring. Thwe King realizes his error when a fisherman brings him the ring he found inside a fish. Khair’s poem “Immigration” makes good use of this myth to present the modern day Shakuntala at the visa office:
Shakuntala looks in her papers for the royal signet ring, she rummages through her leather handbag bought in Janpath at the last moment, and just when she thinks all is lost, she finds it: the letter attesting to her identity and grant. She produces it with a surge of pride, but it appears the ring of her achievement is lost: The officer holds it and her passport as if they were cut Out of the belly of a smelly fish.
The second section “Ghalib Speaks in Tongues” has translations of poems by Ghalib the court poet of the last Mughal emperor of India, Bahadur Shah “Zafar” (deposed and exiled by the British in 1858). Khair transliterates the Urdu ghazals and tries to reproduce the fixed rhyme scheme of the original. The third section has poems related to Hans Christian Andersen and his fairy tales. The three sections of the book relating to writers from different centuries, genres and languages are united by a concern with loneliness, dispossession and exile. Though he has been away from India for more than a decade now, the author reproduces the minute details of life in India faithfully.
Dreams That Spell the Light is Shanta Acharya’s fifth volume of poems after Not This, Not That (1994), Numbering Our Days’ Illusions (1995), Looking In, Looking Out (2005) and Shringar (2006). Though she has lived in Britain since 1985, her poetry retains strong links with her home country. Her previous collection Shringar was more about grief and loss than shringar (love). This collection deals with self-realization and not just self-doubt and loneliness:
Having known many homes, many dreams You learn finally to live with the freedom of a spirit, Heart like a prairie field, open—
The poems deal with travel and relocation the world over. In the poem “Italian Prayer”, the speaker asks:
How does one sustain the journey from Konark to St Peters, From Lingaraj to Santa Maria del Fiore, from the temple Of Jagannatha to the Basilica of San Marco?
Hoshang Merchant, known as India’s first openly gay poet and the author of some twenty volumes of poetry, has published Shillong Suite, which contains some fine nature descriptions of the eponymous hill station. Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), the Kashmiri-American poet, was a pioneer who introduced the ghazal form to poetry written in English. The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems has poems from all eight earlier collections, but the title poem “The Veiled Suite” is published for the first time.
The Collected Poems (1970–2010) of I.K. Sharma contain poems from his previous collections – The Shifting Sand-Dunes (1976), The Native Embers (1986), Dharamsala and Other Poems (1993), Camel, Cockroach and Captains (1998) and My Lady, Broom and Other Poems (2004). Sharma’s poems have great variety. He can write serious poems about the Bhakti poet Tulsidas: “He made his heart the city of Ram / And He became the Truth of his life.” He can also write poems with a light touch, such as “Toothache”:
At ominous hour of the night it strikes, It creeps, crawls, is ready for a bite; I pat it, ask it to go a bit slow, It runs like a sprinter in an athletic show.
Amarendra Kumar’s fifth book of verse Poetry Time Here, Poems: Perspectives includes some poems from his previous books The Real Episode (1981), Sound and Shell (1986), Stage Dilemma (1988) and Song/Anti-Song (1996). Amarendra Kumar also writes short stories, both in Hindi and in English: Passionate Pilgrim (2006) contained both short stories and poems. The poems contain philosophical reflections on life in India. There are a number of striking images, and Amarendra Kumar makes effective use of alliteration.
Many first volumes of poetry have appeared. Prahlad Singh Shekhawat is the Director of an NGO in Jaipur concerned with the education of slum children. His first book of poems Belonging, Being, Becoming contains short poems describing the Indian reality. Two university teachers of English, Esther Syiem and Ivy I. Hansdak, who come from tribal communities, have published their first collections. In Oral Scriptings, Esther Syiem expresses her concern with the preservation of the distinct culture and language of the Khasi tribe. Ivy Imogene Hansdak’s poetry is influenced by the alliterative folk songs of the Santals. The section “Songs of Worship” in The Golden Chord includes poems addressed to God which contain beautiful descriptions, such as the following one depicting a cathedral:
The evening sunlight poured Through the stained-glass windows, Like columns of smoke, bright and luminous; It swirled and danced, like a wraith or spectre, Then calmly lay, without a word on the tiled floor.
Another first collection Rip Not the Sore by A. Naseeb Khan (an English teacher) is notable for its use of rhyme: “Words are pompous,/Words are meek. / Meaning depends / On the way you speak”.
Poile Sengupta’s Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play has an introduction by Shashi Deshpande and contains six plays. Mangalam (1993) is about family politics seen through the perspective of women. The first act is set in a small town in southern India in the 1960s, while the second is set in a present-day metropolis (perhaps Chennai, as far as can be deduced from by the names of the characters). Sengupta employs an interesting dramatic technique: she uses the same actors in both acts, widely separated in terms of time. This indicates that nothing has really changed; the same patriarchal values continue to suppress the aspirations of women. The voice-over provides a kind of choric commentary: “Because a woman has patience, / she is not allowed to speak; / others speak for her, / and she never learns the words”.
The next play Inner Laws (first performed in 1997) is quite different. As a comedy of manners, it takes a light-hearted look at relationships within a joint family, examining, for instance, the traditional hostility between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law who are forced to share a home and a kitchen. Poile Sengupta shows that many women prepare themselves psychologically for this antagonism even before the arranged marriage takes place. Keats Was a Tuber (1997) is set in the staff room of the English Department of a college in a small town in India. The play is about the methodology of teaching English in India and begins with a nameless woman addressing an unseen audience: “English is not my language. It is not the language that my grandparents and parents speak at home… English is now the language of my thoughts, it is the language of my reason, the language I use for loving”. The older teachers in the college refuse to adopt new strategies of teaching; instead they have students learning their notes by heart. When taught that Keats was a tuberculosis patient, the student learns up “Keats was a tuber”. Alipha (2001) tells the intertwined stories of a social activist and a politician in small town India. There are just two characters in this one-act play. Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni is set in a crowded airport. The playwright borrows two characters from Indian mythology, both of whom are considered villains: Ravana’s sister, Shoorpanakha, and Shakuni, the uncle of the Kauravas in the Mahabharata. The playwright presents their point of view, revealing their motivation in a modern adaptation of mythological roles. The technique is experimental, deliberately creating an effect of alienation by having the characters change costume and make-up on stage. Samara’s Song (2007) uses a modified version of the Greek chorus and the Indian Sutradhar to present issues of politics and governance.
The Legacy of Rage by Cyrus Mistry was first performed in 2005, almost 15 years after it was written. The play is about a Christian community living on the west coast of India. Robert the patriarch is engaged in a legal battle with the government which seeks to acquire his land. His son Joeboy is away in the Gulf and the family is sustained by the money he sends home. Robert’s sister, Regina, advises him to settle the issue so that their living conditions can improve. The play is structurally and thematically reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen’s style, specifically his play Ghosts. In the case of Ghosts it is the legacy of syphilis or a diseased society. In Mistry’s play, it is a legacy of anger and rage that is transferred from father to son. Robert’s behaviour towards his wife Daisy, his lover Louvella, his sister Regina and others is paralleled by his son Joeboy’s infidelity to his wife Blendina.
Class of ’84 by Rahul da Cunha is in two acts. Eight boys and girls, who have studied together in college, have now gone their different ways. They come together for the funeral of Jojo, an activist, the only one of them who has not lost his idealism. Basavaraj Naikar’s A Dreamer of Freedom: A Historical Play about 1857 Indian War of Independence tells the story of a less known figure of Indian history – Bhaskara Rao Bhave of Naragund, popularly known as Baba Saheb.
Kavery Nambisan’s sixth novel The Story That Must Not Be Told is set in Chennai. The story alternates between the plush Vaibhav Apartments and the surrounding slum, ironically named Sitara (star). The protagonist, the aged Simon Jesukumar, a resident of Vibhav, aspires to do good to the poor people of the slum community. He contributes items like a water cooler and generally engages in discussions with a school teacher of Sitara who is a butcher by profession. But Jesukumar wants to know the slum better and ventures into the area along with his daughter and her boyfriend who works for a newspaper. Nambisan introduces a variety of individualized characters. Nambisan has portrayed the variety of trades and professions practiced in Sitara and the difficulties of slum life with great attention to detail. The local strongman tells Simon: “Walking through Sitara with trousers hitched and noses covered will not teach you anything. You want the people here to accept kindness on your own terms. […] the beggar who accepts your coin and touches it to his forehead has nothing but hatred for you.” The protagonist ends up with the realization that he cannot do much single-handedly. The low-paid construction labourers, domestic helpers and sewage cleaners from Sitara provide Vaibhav its luxury. Yet the residents unite to get the slum demolished so that their environment is protected. Kavery Nambisan has produced a near masterpiece, and one hopes that her novel receives the critical attention and commercial success it deserves. In spite of its serious theme, it is very readable. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga treated almost the same issues but in a much more sensational manner; because of the Booker Prize, it has become the subject of innumerable academic articles.
Daman Singh’s second novel The Sacred Grove has a thirteen-year-old boy as a narrator, the son of the District Collector in a small town in India. His mother’s pregnancy and the arrival of a new driver, Rafiq, changes the course of his life. Although his father, unlike other bureaucrats, is a man of strict principles and does not permit his son to accept any gifts, the child nevertheless receives special treatment as the son of the highest civil authority of the town. For a history project at school, he goes to investigate a sacred grove on the outskirts of the town. In the course of the novel, we get a clear picture of the plurality of Indian culture. The child feels confused by the various stories associated with the place: for instance, the tribals perceive it as a place of worship where God Bero will rain punishments on those cut trees in the sacred grove; the Muslims think of it as the grave of a Sufi saint, honoured by Hindus and Muslims alike; the Hindutva brigade want to stamp out all religious practices which do not conform to their narrow definition of Hinduism. Young Ashwin slowly becomes conscious of the prejudice that most of the adults, including his mother, harbour against his Muslim driver. Daman Singh’s language is completely in keeping with the sensibility of the narrator, and she presents the boy’s point of view in a very credible manner. The novel is a faithful representation of the reality of contemporary India. When the naïve child is caught up in a Hindu-Muslim riot, Rafiq saves him, but only to be later beaten up in prison. A novel which deals with Hindu-Muslim relations in a more direct manner is Omair Ahmad’s Jimmy the Terrorist. Jamaal is born in Rasoolpur Mohalla, a Muslim neighbourhood in a small Hindu town. The novel reveals the growing alienation of the Muslims and the heavy-handed behaviour of the partisan police.
It has been a good year for children’s writing. Ranjit Lal and Ruskin Bond have published new books. The Sahitya Akademi has instituted an award for children’s literature in all Indian languages, including English. The winner in 2010 was Mini Shrinivasan for Just a Train Ride Away, the story of Santosh, a teenager in Bombay in search of his father. His divorced mother sends him to Calcutta by train for a vacation, and he uses the trip to look for his father. He meets a variety of new people on the train and in Calcutta, returns with a better understanding of his parents’ broken marriage and learns to look at life more realistically. The fast-paced narrative will undoubtedly capture the young reader’s attention.
Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life is a poor sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories as it lacks the imaginative power and the wider allegorical significance of the earlier book. Luka is the younger brother of Haroun. In the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay Rashid, the story-teller, falls into a deep sleep. To save him, Luka has to embark on a quest into the world of magic and steal the Fire of Life. Various magical creatures help and hinder him on his way.
Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose first novel English Augusti (1988) created a sensation, has now written a sequel to his second novel The Last Burden ((1993). The protagonist Jamun’s father Shyamanand is eighty-five-years old and half-paralysed when he suddenly disappears. The new novel, Way to Go, is as slow moving as The Last Burden and adds little to Chatterjee’s literary reputation.
Khushwant Singh (b. 1915) has brought out two books. Absolute Khushwant: The Low down on Life, Death and Most Things In-between reveals Khushwant Singh’s views on a wide range of topics. The rare photographs and Singh’s anecdotes about famous and less well known people make the book very interesting. This book of memoirs mirrors the style of his weekly column, With Malice towards All. His new novel, The Sunset Club: Analects of the Year 2009 is a kind of a roman-à-clef. It covers one year – from January 26, 2009 to January 26, 2010 – in the life of three old friends. Pandit Preetam Sharma is a Punjabi Brahman who has retired as a top bureaucrat: “He is in good health, but needs glasses to read, hearing aids to hear and dentures to eat”. Nawab Barkatullah Baig Dehlavi comes from an aristocratic Muslim family. His father has set up a chain of Unani Dawakhanas (a native system of medicine, especially practised by Muslims), and like “all good Muslims from well to do families”, Baig goes to Aligarh Muslim University before he takes over his father’s business. The third member of this “Sunset Club” is Sardar Boota Singh, a stocky Sikh with a paunch, who “dyes his beard and looks younger than his 86 years”. The three friends spend every evening sitting on a bench in Lodi Gardens after their evening walk. Their conversation is a convenient strategy for Khushwant Singh to recount one year in the life of India, presenting all the important political and social events of the time from multiple points of view. The book is notable for its humour as well as for the beautiful descriptions of the changing seasons in Delhi. Boota Singh, the alter ego of the novelist, is quite outspoken in his views; his comments always tend to be bawdy. The dialogue is freely peppered with Hindi words.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s One Amazing Thing is set in the Indian Consulate in an American city. When a massive earthquake strikes the building, the nine occupants of the basement are trapped. Waiting for rescue (or death), the young graduate student Uma suggests that each should tell a personal tale, recalling “one amazing thing” in their lives. As in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, One Amazing Thing contains a wide variety of characters – Uma, a young woman whose parents have returned to India after spending decades working and living in America; Cameron, an African-American Vietnam veteran; Malathi, who runs away from Coimbatore and finds work in the visa office; her boss Mangalam, who has paid a heavy price to come out of his poverty; an older white American couple; a Chinese Indian grandmother and her grand-daughter and a young Muslim man. The reader gets so involved in the tales of loss and love, betrayal and redemption, that the earthquake remains just a convenient frame to bring these stories together.
Many writers have made their debut with a collection of short stories. Divya Dubey’s Turtle Dove: Six Simple Tales contains six long stories. Based in and around Delhi, they reflect the realities of Indian society. The thirty-five-page long “The Science Wizard” is in the first person and reads almost like a series of diary entries tracing the protagonist’s life from 1989, when he was a schoolboy dreaming of becoming a rocket scientist, to 1997, when he is drawn into a circle of young delinquents who indulge in drugs and run over innocent passersby in their flashy cars. Another story, “Arnab”, is about a Bengali couple who desperately pray for a daughter. The bizarre consequence is that they are blessed with a beautiful son who is endowed with “feminine qualities” – he is a graceful dancer, takes interest in embroidery and is a wonderful cook. But the parents do not accept such qualities in a boy and drive him to suicide. Venita Coelho’s The Watcher of the Dead is a collection of 16 ghost stories. Unlike the ghosts in Ruskin Bond’s stories, Coelho’s ghosts ruin the life of whoever sees them. The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love by Parvati Sharma consists of twelve stories, arranged in groups of three, which present various kinds of love – between parent and child, between siblings, affection between friends or passionate love. Novelist and translator Aruna Chakravarti has now also brought out a collection of short stories, Secret Spaces.
More and more publishers have started publishing popular fiction. Penguin India has introduced a new imprint, “Metro Reads”, promoted as “Fun, Feisty, Fast reads for the Reader on the Go”. Pustak Mahal of Delhi, who used to publish only textbooks, have launched the imprint “Cedar Books”. Divya Dubey has launched Gyaana Books, which has published some promising new authors. A large number of first novels have appeared, with some recurrent themes. There are novels about a young man or woman venturing into the corporate world after a degree, such as Karan Bajaj’s Johny Gone Down, Nirupama Subramanian’s Keep the Change, Abhay Nagarajan’s Corporate Atyaachaar and Sidin Vadukut’s Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese. Two novels, Bhavna Chauhan’s Where Girls Dare and Sajita Nair’s She’s a Jolly Good Fellow trace the comic consequences of women going for military training. There are thrillers (all first novels) such as Close Call in Kashmir by Bharat Wakhlu, The Premier Murder League by Gita Sundar and The Scalpel, a medical thriller written by H.S. Rissam, a practising cardiologist. Thrillers dealing with politics, espionage and terrorism have also appeared. Blowback by Mukul Deva, a former Army officer, is part of a trilogy. The protagonists are a Muslim intellectual and his girlfriend, both of whom had suffered at the hands of Kashmiri terrorists. Krishan Partap Singh’s Delhi Durbar is the first volume of a projected trilogy dealing with political events. Kalpana Swaminathan’s The Monochrome Madonna is the third book which has the narrator’s old aunt, Lalli, as the detective.
Historical novels are also quite popular as debut publications. Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha is set in the Indus Valley Civilization in 1900 BCE Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant deals with the manipulative capabilities of Gangasagar Mishra, a school teacher who becomes a kingmaker in contemporary India, uniting the country in the face of external and internal threats. He is presented in parallel to Chanakya, the wily Brahmin of the 4th century BCE who defeated the forces of Alexander the Great and installed Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire.
Tabish Khair, poet, novelist and literary critic, has published his fourth novel, The Thing about Thugs, which can also be seen as a historical novel presenting minor events and revealing the darker side of Victorian England. Amir Ali travels from his small village in Bihar and is shown telling Captain Meadows his life story as a thug, but the reader wonders how much is fact and how much fiction in Amir Ali’s account. Intertwining with this narrative strand is the story of a group of Englishmen who are engaged in a scientific study of skulls. The study brings in the story of the criminal supplier who does not hesitate to kill people whose heads have an interesting shape. There are echoes of nineteenth-century literature ranging from the works of Charles Dickens to Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug. The well known psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s third novel, The Crimson Throne, is set in the times of the ageing Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. The novel covers the violent fight for succession between his sons, the scholarly Dara Shikoh and the austere Aurangzeb. A. K. Srikumar’s historical novel, The Begum’s Secret, is a very readable reconstruction of the richly diverse culture of Awadh. It begins in 1784, when the province is beset by famine; Srikumar describes the machinations of the British and the birth of “Dum Pukht” (a new style of cooking) with equal felicity.
Software expert Arunabha Sengupta’s third novel, The Bestseller, is set in present-day Amsterdam. It is a story about a talented young author Sandeep Gupta. He changes places with his partial look-alike and old school friend Pritam Mitra, a renowned IT consultant so that Pritam can go on a trip with his girlfriend. When forced to deliver a presentation about the role of the consultant, Sandeep adapts the philosophy of the Gita. The Gita advises detachment from the fruits of action and advises us to remain indifferent to the ups and downs of life. Sandeep’s original presentation wins him the top position in the company, but this is something he does not want because his primary aim is to devote more time to writing.
Sarita Mandanna’s debut novel Tiger Hills was first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Penguin India is said to have paid a huge sum (around Rs 35 lakhs) to acquire India rights to this bestseller. The novel captures the scenic beauty of Coorg (Kodagu), a hilly district of Mysore, famous for its tea and coffee plantations. The small ethnic minority, the Coorgis, first entered Indian English fiction in Kavery Nambisan’s novel, The Scent of Pepperxe “Scent of Pepper, The” (1996). She presented the distinctive culture and religion of the people of Coorg in this novel which spanned three generations. Tiger Hills has the same setting and time period, and the similarity between Nambisan’s and Mandanna’s descriptions of “Paria-kali” (a special dance with canes) has led to charges of plagiarism. But the resemblance ends there – Mandanna has a story of passion and violence and her descriptions of Coorg are based on Reverend G. Richter’s Gazetteer of Coorg: Natural Features of the Country and the Social and Political Condition of Its Inhabitants (1870). Devi is born to a landowning family in 1878 and grows up a rare beauty. Her childhood companion Devanna falls in love with her; but Devi is in love with Machaiah, famous for having single-handedly killed a tiger. The tragic love triangle blights the lives of succeeding generations.
P. Lal, poet, critic, translator and publisher, died on 3 November, 2010, aged 81. He was a pioneer in publishing Indian English literature. Many prominent authors were first published by Writers Workshop in the 1960s and 1970s – Keki N. Daruwala, Kamala Das, Ruskin Bond, Shiv K. Kumar, Vikram Seth and Suniti Namjoshi to name a few. Writers Workshop continues to encourage new authors. Lal made a major contribution to translation, coining the word “transcreation” for his creative translations. He will also be remembered for attempting a shloka-by-shloka translation of the entire Mahabharata.