Foreign Policy Blogs

What Makes One Indian Enough to Write About India?*

What Makes One Indian Enough to Write About India?*Recently there has been some heated discussion on who is ‘morally qualified’ to write about India. Socio-economic changes have made India the apple pie of global literary – fiction and non-fiction – circle. Patrick French’s India: A Portrait and Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking have invited the ire of several intellectuals and books reviewers in India. The patronizing narrative in such books is criticized as reflecting the colonizing mindset and selectively focussed on the aspirations of the urban middle class. According to the critics an outsider’s view is not authentic and only those who are ‘Indian enough’ (measured by some abstract standard) are eligible to communicate an objective view. The controversies have led Will Heaven, Deputy Editor of Telegraph Blogs to suggest that “the colonial hangover afflicts not us but them.”

Mihir S. Sharma critiqued Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling by writing that, “the last refuge of full-throated Orientalism is an Indian-American’s big India book.” In a more balanced review of Patrick French’s India: A Portrait, Pankaj Mishra writes that the “book manages to remain unaware of this country, even as it heralds the New India where adivasis may not have potable water but can drink Sula wine.” The review of books written by ‘foreigners’ took a nasty turn when Hartosh Singh Bal’s article “The Literary Raj” criticized the Jaipur Literature Festival and its organizer, the well-acclaimed Scottish writer William Dalrymple. According to Bal, “what is of interest in this context is not Dalrymple the man, but Dalrymple the phenomenon. How did a White man, young, irreverent and likeable in his first and by far most readable India book, The City of Djinns, become the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India? Dalrymple responded by referring to Bal’s column as ‘racist’ and defended his right to write about “the country I love.” Dalrymple makes an interesting observation when he proposes to reverse the proposition: “If anyone was to suggest that Vikram Seth had no right or qualification to write a novel about England like An Equal Music… If anyone was to suggest that Amit Chaudhuri shouldn’t judge the Booker Prize, or direct Britain’s leading creative writing course, because he was too Bengali, or that Salman Rushdie should not be president of PEN as he was of Kashmiri Muslim origin, it would be regarded as blatantly racist.”

The controversy here involves two aspects: first relates to the identity of the authors, those who have not lived in India for long can’t completely comprehend the enigma called India. Second deals with the narrowness of the subject matter. The critics believe that stories about ‘emerging India’, ‘increased social mobility’, ‘economic opportunities’ reflects the partial Indian reality. The elitist narrative ignores the millions of under-privileged people and internal unrest resulting from social and political discrimination.

Some of these objections are valid. For example, Patrick French’s book is not as exhaustive as the subtitle ‘An intimate biography of 1.2 billion people’ suggests. French has overlooked some very important aspects of India. For instance, as Pankaj Mishra observes that French choose to overlook the big issue of farmer’s suicides and instead writes about “an upwardly mobile adivasi at a Californian-style vineyard owned by Sula Wines.”

But not all foreign writes have focussed on the rising and shinning India. William Dalrymple’s books, The Age of Kali and Nine Lives, expose some very disturbing facts about caste, class, political corruption in India.

The controversy over such genre of books is expected to continue. The foreign writers are criticized for being selective if they focus on India’s prosperity and attacked for being for being missionary in approach if they write about the challenges confronting India. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was criticized by many in India for making a fortune by showcasing India’s ills. Few cared to attack Vikram Swarup, an Indian novelist and diplomat, who penned Q&A, the novel on which Boyle’s movie was based.

The controversy in the literary circles is part of a larger image projection dilemma associated with India. Rather than attacking the identity and approach of foreign authors per se, it would more worthwhile to enrich the debate by emphasizing that India is land of dualities. India is rich and poor, secular and fundamentalist, urban and rural, educated and illiterate, progressive and conservative. While such trends exist simultaneously in many countries, the demographics make India a unique case; a small percentage translates into huge numbers in absolute terms. So it can be perspective rather than bias that determines the content of narrative fiction and non-fiction on India.
* The title of the post is paraphrased from Sadanand Dhume’s quote. Dhume is a columnist at Wall Street Journal and currently writing a book on India’s middle class.
 

Author

Madhavi Bhasin

Blogger, avid reader, observer and passionate about empowerment issues in developing countries.
Work as a researcher at Center for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley and intern at Institute of International Education.
Areas of special interest include civil society, new social media, social and political trends in India.