And he himself, writing in his lucid English prose about his Indian sweet vendors, taxidermists, English teachers, bharatanatyam dancers, and guides, became someone difficult to categorize. The Indian Chekov, early critics called him, because of his nuanced portrayal of ordinary lives. I think of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s arrogant assertion in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” (a document that argues for the adoption of English as the language of instruction in the Indian school system) that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” and I wonder to what shelf he would have relegated Narayan. Or Rushdie. Or any of the Indian novelists writing in English that I was reading and teaching. Notwithstanding Macaulay’s aim to “form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” English-educated Indians (never so docile as hoped for) had always been refused admittance to the British “club.”
For “club” substitute “canon,” and you come to the major cultural and curricular debate of the 1980s and ’90s. By the time I began teaching my course on Indian English fiction, the work of postcolonial critics, challenging exclusive notions of Britishness, was recasting authors not just from India but from all parts of the former British Empire, where the language remained though the colonizers had departed, as just as legitimately part of English literature as, say, John Milton or James Joyce. “Commonwealth Literature does not exist,” Salman Rushdie had asserted as the title of a 1980 essay. His position in the essay is that he does not want to be ghettoized. Writing in English, he not only claims his place as an English author but also contends that English literature written by Indians and other Commonwealth writers is the English literature of the moment. “It’s our turn now,” he radically proclaims. Not to be the Indian Chekhov. Or Indian Dickens. But to contribute works of great originality and gusto. “The Empire Writes Back,” the title of one critical survey, became a rallying cry. And Indian authors were at the forefront of the charge.
I still have my copy of the June 1997 fiction issue of The New Yorker, which was entirely given over the Indian authors. The cover shows two khaki-clad white explorers, a man and a woman, coming upon a temple statue of a portly Ganesh, who sits peering down his elephant trunk at a book held between his hoofs against his round belly. The issue’s table of contents, a mix of generations and of genres, features essays, fiction and poems by Rushdie, Kirin Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chauduri, G.V. Desani, Max Vadukul, Mihir Bose, Vijay Seshadri, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, AK Ramanujan, Chitra Banerjee Divakauni, Jayanta Mahapatra, and Shamin Azad. And this list, of course, merely suggests the depth of field. “These days,” says Rushdie in his essay within the volume, “new Indian writers seem to be emerging every week. Their work is as polymorphous as the place.” He further contends, “Indo-Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first colonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind.”
THAT I have taught a course on Indian English literature nine times over the last sixteen years, which is far more often than I have taught my supposed specialty of Victorian fiction, seems to me really quite remarkable. In addition to offering the course several times at Brooklyn College, I taught it five years in a row at NYU (1996-2001) as part of a Brooklyn College-NYU faculty exchange program. The NYU undergraduate curriculum included courses with a general focus on post-colonialism, but no one else had at that point developed a concentration on India.
Both at Brooklyn College and at NYU my classes invariably had a few Indian or Indian-American students, many from families living in Queens, some of whom knew a lot about Indian culture and some very little, all motivated to know more about the literature. The irony of my being their instructor did not escape me—or perhaps them, but with each successive round of teaching, I felt more flexible and adept in my approaches to the material. I grouped Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day as novels structured by metaphors of breaking and crumbling in their treatment of India’s 1947 Partition and then added Arundhati’s Roy’s The God of Small Things, another book with images of fragmentation, as soon as it appeared in 1997. I taught Vikram Chandra’s sweeping epic Red Earth and Pouring Rain, narrated by the monkey god Hanuman, and Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu, a novel focused on intersecting lives in a Bombay apartment building, among them that of Vishnu, the sweeper who lies dying on the building’s landing while ascending in his dreams of immortality to the realm of his namesake. Seeking to end the course with a work that encompassed the Indian diaspora, I taught in successive years Bharati Mukherji’s Jasmine, in which the heroine, propelled by global violence from her Punjabi village to Florida, New York, and Iowa, plays out the roles of both Kali and Jane Eyre; Anita Desai’s Fasting Feasting, two novellas focused on the constriction of women’s lives, one set in Benares,
