How to Read in Indian

OUTSIDE THE HEAVY WOODEN GATES that guard the Neemrana Fort-Palace against unwanted day visitors, local villagers and the curious, a dusty, winding path leads back to the highway. In 2003, this path was no more than a narrow lane, so narrow that two vehicles could not pass side-by-side, and to find it blocked by the carcass of a dead pig brought a caravan of writers to an unexpected halt.

The writers had been brought to Neemrana by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and a team of enthusiasts that included Namita Gokhale—now one of the directors of the Jaipur Literature Festival—who felt that India needed a festival of its own. Delhi, in particular, and India, in general, had been no stranger to such events in the past. The grand mushairas of the Mughals were so splendid, so challenging and so famous that Mirza Farhatullah Baig could create an imaginary Last Mushaira of poets from across the country, with imaginary sawaal-jawaabs, in the court of the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

The tradition continued, as Nirad C Chaudhuri recorded in 1937:

“I had a joyous feeling at the prospect of going to the conference at Patna. Such gatherings were a typical cultural recreation of the Bengalis working and settled outside Bengal, the expatriate Bengalis as they were called: the Bengali Diaspora, who never forgot their Zion in Calcutta. Thus in every important city or town in northern India there was a cultural club to keep alive the traditions of Calcutta life. Patna was a big city, the capital of Bihar and Orissa, and it also had a large Bengali population… The sessions of the conference were very well attended, actually in hundreds. In India lectures always attract very large audiences, however abstruse the subjects.”

One of the big questions at any gathering of this sort is a simple but unsettling one: What does this curiosity mean? The audience at Neemrana was missing—the idea was to allow writers to spend time with each other, undisturbed by the voices of the masses. They would return to Delhi and spend another two days discussing versions of the topics they had already discussed, this time with the public in respectful attendance.

The book launches and festivals of 21st-century Delhi were not precisely the kind of “cultural recreation” Chaudhuri had spoken of, which had its roots in the tradition of the adda, the teahouse discussions for which cities like Kolkata and Mumbai had once been famous. Book launches were symbolic displays of an author’s importance, often displays of status and power, in a city ruled by the need for both; they were, geographically, held almost exclusively in South Delhi, and areas like Pitampura, Badarpur, Shahdara and Shalimar Bagh lay well outside the charmed circles of the India Habitat Centre and Aqua at The Park.

As the writer Amit Chaudhuri said, Delhi’s incestuousness had infected literary circles as well; the capital, notoriously an insider’s city, had bred a culture where everyone in publishing knew everyone in the media and everyone on the writer’s circuit. It was the joint-family approach to literature, and while it had an upside—a newcomer could find his or her feet quite quickly, transitioning to insider status in less than a year—it was also, in many ways, damaging, masking a hollowness that showed in the shrinking spaces for book reviews, or for real literary debates as opposed to manufactured controversies and warmed-over gossip.

Publishing in English has flourished in the past 15 years, generating an appetite for what often seem the wrong things—the spurious fame of the 10-second television appearance, the appearance of a world where literary importance is measured by column inches, prizes won and sales figures. By 2003, there were two small but telling signs that a certain kind of literary culture was on the wane: many of the great critics of their time, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Alok Rai among them, had almost stopped writing for the book review pages, and the space for translation, or for the voices of writers who wrote outside the gates of English, had also diminished in the world of the English-language media.

The flame of the mushairas of Lucknow and Allahabad had flickered out, the few that remained pale imitations of the gatherings of the past. Although India had never had an Edinburgh-style festival of its own, the Sahitya Akademi was adept at combining large audiences with very abstruse subjects in the 1990s and well into the 2000s. Parle or Britannia Glucose biscuits would be served with chai, and the appearance of greasy samosas or pakoras would mark the presence of speakers of great significance. In fact, the Sahitya Akademi held its own festival of writing, focusing on regional literature, even as Neemrana 2003 was under way, in a subtle underlining of the tensions between Indian writers in English and the Rest of Indian Literature. (This was often, much to our annoyance, abbreviated as the IWE versus the ‘Bhasha School’, “Bhasha” standing in as inaccurate shorthand for “all Indian regional languages except English”.)

For two days, then, Neemrana played host to the Indian literary pantheon.1

UR Ananthamurthy, MT Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zacharia, Shrilal Shukla, Sukrita P Kumar, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ashokamitran and Bhalchandra Nemade led the contingent of Indian writers who do not write in English.

The writers, separated from their audiences back in Delhi, squabbled, doodled and argued their way through an endless series of panel discussions. A heated argument between VS Naipaul and the German ambassador’s wife had the Nobel laureate threatening to leave; a clash between Naipaul and Nayantara Sahgal fuelled further gossip; Khushwant Singh slammed regional writing for failing to produce biographies and innovative nonfiction; Shrilal Shukla watched sardonically as another version of his novel, Raag Darbari, complete with courtiers and battles of royal intrigue, played itself out.

In an interview elsewhere, Kiran Nagarkar said, “At that Neemrana conference there were about 10 sessions, and all of them essentially became incarnations of the theme of Indianness. All they could think of was this question of being an Indian writer. And it pissed me off no end! For the simple reason that I am not setting out to be an Indian author. But at the same time I cannot for one moment forget that whatever I write comes from an Indian consciousness.”

The debates could swing from amity to bitterness in a second, and then back again; the argument about English versus the Rest of India has roots that go back almost two centuries.

In the late-19th century, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the author of India’s first novel in English (Rajmohan’s Wife), had a political change of heart. The switch he made after learning to write in English—the language that had brought him and many others in Bengal a refreshing sense of a wider world and of that era’s debates over political liberty—when he chose to return to Bengali was a political, not an emotional, choice.

He had worked hard on Rajmohan’s Wife, encountering almost all the problems that Indian writers in English would subsequently face. There was the impossibility of adequately translating cultural nuances and accents into this alien tongue, where “a garden salad” was the closest he could come to describing the Bengali practice of plucking a few gourds and bitter neem leaves off the trees and making them into a light, seasonal dish.

There was the knowledge that an “Indian” novel in English would be treated as a curiosity—well into the 1970s, in fact, when a reviewer in England would describe Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur as a “little savory from the colonial islands”. There was, finally, for Bankimchandra, the lure of patriotism and the mother tongue. He had spent time on indigo plantations, recording the casual and savage oppressions of British rule. He had fallen out of love with a way of looking at the world, as much as he had fallen out of love with English; and the question of whom he was writing for became urgent in his mind. He could not, he felt, write unless he was addressing his people, his countrymen, in their tongue.

He never published again in English after Rajmohan’s Wife, and a few years after that novel came out, Bankimchandra would gently rebuke Romesh Chunder Dutt for wanting to write in a language that neither writer could ever claim, truly, as his own. (Even their names offer evidence of confusion: Bankimchandra’s full name was Bankimchandra Chatterjee, but many Bengalis will use the original version of the surname—Chattopadhyay—repudiating the Anglicisation, and Romesh Chunder Dutt’s second and third names are similarly compromised, Anglicisations of Chandra and Datta.)

A century after Bankimchandra, Mulk Raj Anand (the novelist died in 2004) would make a very Indian complaint against the ur-novel that signalled the beginning of the success story of Indian literature—Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which has sparked more ambition, unfortunately, than discussion of Rushdie’s dark, subversive retelling of contemporary Indian history. Midnight’s Children covers two Partitions—the creation of India and the bloody birth of Bangladesh—but in the popular imagination, it has been reduced to a series of banalities, all of them prefaced by the adjective “Booker-winning”.

Mulk Raj Anand’s complaint against Midnight’s Children is worth rereading; he begins with dismissal, and one can imagine how he would have approached the gathering that took place at Neemrana. He also appears to completely miss the point of Midnight’s Children, and that, too, is part of the history of misreadings and misunderstandings that are woven into the history of Indian writing in English.

“The question of Salman Rushdie’s novel does not arise, as far as I am concerned. Rushdie is a clever young man (perhaps too clever by half as the English say). He writes very eloquently in the English language but in Midnight’s Children, he is aping the recent Americans by disembowelling his mother, painting his grandmother as a scheming old witch, his grandfather as a burglar, his father as a mere crook, and he himself as superior to all his colleagues. I suppose he is brighter than the others, but in the kind of way in which the average advertising copywriter is brighter than every other copywriter. India appears to be a spittoon to Salman Rushdie. I suppose it is as it was a vast sewage to Katherine Mayo before the war, or it is the Continent of Circe to that third-grade actor Nirad Chaudhuri, as it is An Area of Darkness to VS Naipaul, as it is Heat and Dust to Ruth [Prawer] Jhabvala.”

That sweeping condemnation is interesting on two counts. It attacks the outsider’s account of India—Naipaul, who travelled extensively in the country, and Rushdie, who grew up here and whose book is steeped in nostalgia for Bombay, are clubbed with Katherine Mayo (whose “drain inspector’s report” is still, inexplicably, on the list of books banned in India), as well as Nirad C Chaudhuri, proud dhoti-wearing imperialist, and Jhabvala, another Indian immigrant and resident.

I found it fascinating that Anand pilloried Rushdie for the crime of disrespect to the family, that he complained—as critics often do of Rushdie and other writers on India—that the writer hadn’t been polite enough, that he shouldn’t have written so openly, or so critically, of family, or community, or country. There is a deep area of discomfort here, in these critiques, in the constant battle over authenticity and viewpoint, which is summarised in the crime of being rude to one’s elders.

Even as the authors sat in the cool conference rooms and shaded alcoves of Neemrana, discussing the burning question of the day—“Who is an Indian Writer?”—tensions grew between the village and the hotel management, not an uncommon situation in today’s India.

The hotel had come up out of the tired, worn-out remains of a derelict fort; Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg had poured love, imagination and cold cash into restoring the place and running it as one of India’s earliest boutique hotels. But the village that shared the hill with the fort had its own set of demands (some unreasonable, for sums of money that were neither owed nor justified; some reasonable, such as the complaint that the lives of the villagers were interrupted by the comings and goings of the hotel guests). Neemrana’s villagers knew the simmering resentment that accompanies being on the wrong side of a pair of gates that will always be locked against you and your kind.

And so, as the writers left, Amitav Ghosh, the still-ruffled Naipaul, Sitanshu  Yashaschandra, Shashi Deshpande, they were brought to a halt, by the tensions and demands of the world outside. The pig had met its untimely end under the wheels of some visitor’s car, probably one of the media caravans that had descended, in Ruchir Joshi’s merciless phrase, “like flies on the dead carcass of the moment”, as Neemrana erupted in the last, fiery but ultimately irrelevant literary dispute of the conference. (Most Indian literary disputes in the closely knit and sometimes airless world of Indian writing in English were of this nature—they generated intense heat and passionate argument, and were of little lasting consequence.)

An argument erupted over who was responsible for the pig-murder, and who—the hotel, the guests, our car—would pay compensation. It continued until someone found a plastic bag, picked up the pig’s carcass and deposited it on the side of the road, an action so baffling in its disregard for ritual pollution that the arguments stopped short and our vehicles were allowed to go on, back to Delhi. The pig lay on the side of the road, a thin line of blood lipsticking its jaw, the only evidence of the accidental violence that had occurred; it looked serene and oddly composed.

ALMOST ALL THE ARGUMENTS that came up at Neemrana had come up before, in the messy and amnesia-ridden history of Indian writing in English. Veterans of Delhi’s book launches—events that had grown from slightly dour lectures at the venerable India International Centre to gossip-fuelled Page 3 dos hosted at five-star hotel poolsides or one of the city’s more enterprising restaurants—knew that at some point during the Q&A, the author du jour would be asked: “Who are you writing for?” The implication was often made even more explicit: “Are you writing for us in India or for foreign readers?”

It would come up again and again; for years, the way in which Naipaul’s works were discussed in India was infected with this viral anxiety. His India books were rarely discussed as part of his general oeuvre of travel writing, where he was equally provocative and just as willing to offer sharp, unvarnished if not always accurate opinions. The few historians and critics who offered more nuanced criticisms of Naipaul’s writing—questioning the accuracy of his account of Indian history, for instance—were drowned out by the many who saw him just as another chronicler of India’s heat and dust and filth.

In the 1990s and the 2000s, discussions on that twinned-in-opposition pair, Naipaul and Rushdie, degenerated under the weight of gossip. Except for a few considered pieces by cultural critics like Amitava Kumar or historians like Ramachandra Guha and William Dalrymple, the shape of what we argued about when we took Naipaul’s view of history versus Rushdie’s perspective on India shimmered and disappeared under an avalanche of stories about spats and divorces, short-lived feuds; they had been turned into performers in a circus act, not writers.

In a sense, we have always been sensitive as a nation to what is written about us; nonfiction about the US, for instance, seldom draws as many reactions, fuelled equally by anxiety and exasperation. The anxiety comes, in the reading of many, from seeing any narrative that interrupts the neatly seductive story of India Shining; the exasperation comes from a smaller band of Indians who are tired of having what they already know and consider familiar explained to them in exhausting and unnecessary detail.

This debate surfaced again this year as Pankaj Mishra attacked Patrick French for missing the real India stories in his “intimate biography of India”. French and Mishra skirmished for a while in the pages of Outlook. The broad thrust of Mishra’s argument was that French had overlooked, or provided superficial accounts of, the darker side of contemporary Indian history—the poverty, the real hungers and tragedies behind the Maoist conflict. French contested Mishra’s reading of his book, and it became clear that the real argument was over divergent views of India: Was this a country progressing despite the burden of history and the indifference of the middle classes, or was this a country still mired in ancient inequities? As the debate overflowed onto other editorial pages, it seemed that there could be no meeting ground. One part of the debate—a small but not unimportant part—concerned that original, anxious question, which I’ll take the liberty of recasting slightly: Who is writing about us? Do they have the right to tell our stories? And are they telling the right ones?

In 1794, Sake Dean Mahomet published what is considered the first work in the corpus of Indian writing in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, A Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of The Honourable The East India Company Written by Himself, In a Series of Letters to a Friend. The enterprising Mahomet may have bent the truth with the claim that his work was “written by himself”; as the scholar and professor Amardeep Singh notes, the first Indian writer in English was also the first to attract accusations of plagiarism, since he had borrowed portions of his account freely from contemporary sources. But Mahomet, whose English was fluent and appropriately florid, given the conventions of the age, was very clear about his audience; the first work in the Indian writing in English library was very definitely written for the West:

“The people of India, in general, are peculiarly favoured by Providence in the possession of all that can cheer the mind and allure the eye, and tho’ the situation of Eden is only traced in the Poet’s creative fancy, the traveller beholds with admiration the face of this delightful country, on which he discovers tracts that resemble those so finely drawn by the animated pencil of Milton. You will here behold the generous soil crowned with various plenty; the garden beautifully diversified with the gayest flowers diffusing their fragrance on the bosom of the air; and the very bowels of the earth enriched with inestimable mines of gold and diamonds…  As I have now given you a sketch of the manners of my country; I shall proceed to give you some account of myself.”

Every sin in the list of charges flung at the heads of Indian writers in English was represented in TheTravels: Dean Mahomet explained words like purdah and chik (“purdoe” and “cheeque”, in his spelling), used Anglicised spellings for place names and people (“Bightaconna” for Baithakkhana, “Bestys” for bheeshti), was guilty of exoticism, devoting three paragraphs to a description of a “Nabob” who enters in grand style, provided a glossary (two, actually) and made sweeping generalisations about the customs of the “Hindoos” and “Mohametans”.

But Mahomet’s position is more interesting than a superficial reading will admit; his travels, plagiarised or not, claimed to be an insider account. Previous travellers to India, from Thomas Roe to Hiuen Tsang, may have become insiders after their years in the country; in India’s vast array of regional languages, the theme of the wanderer and the curious traveller has a centuries-old tradition, especially in religious and spiritual writing.

It is not the audience Mahomet addressed—his readers, in his mind, were clearly English, not Indian—so much as the assumptions that he made by writing TheTravels that interests me. That was the 1790s, the book was intended to be read by the English, and Mahomet, a man of some enterprise, had access to the English language and assumed that he would have an audience for a book on India. What he had to sell in the grand bazaar of English writing was not just his exoticism; it was also his position as an insider, a man who was Indian and who knew India in a way that the Angrez might not. He was, in effect, the first Indian writer to act as a travel guide, and he took up his duties with a complete absence of self-consciousness.

The next two major accounts by Indian writers in English were significantly different from Mahomet’s travelogue. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt wrote A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945, a slim, early attempt at a novel; in 1845, just a little under two decades before Bankimchandra published Rajmohan’s Wife, Shoshee Chunder Dutt wrote a similarly slim but ambitious work of fiction, The Republic of Orissa: Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century. Both works were published in the Calcutta Literary Gazette; established in the 1780s, this periodical also had the distinction of publishing writers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a poet-dramatist who struggled to find a balance between the seductions of English and the more solid, comforting attractions of his mother tongue, Bengali.

The two Dutts established an early affinity with speculative fiction in Indian writing in English—an affinity that is, unfortunately, seldom acknowledged. Both works are too slender to be classified formally as novels, but are fascinating for two reasons—their timing and form. Twenty-two years before the Revolt of 1857, KC Dutt imagined a revolt against the British, to take place in 1945—but in his rendering, the revolt would be orchestrated by Indians who had been educated in English.

And this is fascinating: Dutt’s imaginary mutiny, the rebellion of the educated Indian with access to English, was written in the same year as Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, with its infamous comment: “We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue.” Ten years after KC Dutt’s fantasies of language-enabled rebellion, we have SC Dutt’s fantasy, set in the 20th century, of a future India where the British have been defeated and an independent democratic republic established in the state of Orissa—this fantasy of political independence following on the heels of the earlier Dutt’s dream of linguistic independence, both anticipating the events of 1857.

To assume, then, that Indian writing in English began with Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864—the first attempt to write a truly Indian novel in translation, so to speak—is dangerous. It encourages the amnesia that has been part of the Oriental  scene, if you like, a smoothening out of the complexities that surrounded the early history of Indian writing in English, where you could begin by writing for a foreign audience and continue with works that were meant to be read by educated, self-aware Indians in search of a revolution. (It also obliterates the fascination that form has always held for Indian writers in English—alongside the novel, and before the novel, Indian authors gravitated to the travelogue, to alternate histories, to essays and broadsides, poems and plays, treatises and novellas.)

With KC Dutt, SC Dutt and Bankimchandra (who would later reject English, renewing his allegiance, political and linguistic, to the mother tongue), there was also an assumption that they were writing for both kinds of reader: the one at home and the one abroad. This balancing act would become commonplace for Indian writers in English, as it has for this generation of Latin American writers in English, or African writers in English.

IN THE POTTER Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, there is a wonderful section on the fascination Japonisme exerted at a certain time over Europe, when Japanese bibelots, netsuke, robes and paintings found their way into Parisian salons: “Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.”

Often, what the collectors of that time picked up from Japan was unremarkable—the dross of everyday life, mass-produced objets d’art mingling with the rare and the exquisite. As de Waal recounts so beautifully, this early hunger was replaced by, first, a refined connoisseurship, and then, inevitably, a waning of the interest in Japonisme, a return to the less exotic and the more local.

In early 2011, as new books on India by Patrick French and Anand Giridharadas were released, that familiar debate returned, reheated and freshly garnished. Pankaj Mishra’s argument with French was over the content of the book—Mishra was unable to recognise French’s India or reconcile his own vision of India, one of cruel economic inequalities and a dominant, often bullying state, with French’s more upbeat India story.

Reading between the lines, Mishra’s real anxiety was over French’s portraiture, not the quality of his reportage. Was this the authentic India or had he missed the big story? Elsewhere, in a joyously savage piece of provocation, Mihir Sharma flayed Giridharadas’ India Calling for shallow journalism, and slammed the stereotypes of India that find their way into the “foreign correspondent” book.

But the real debate was the one that tore Indian writing in English apart about a decade ago: the issue of what makes a book about India the genuine article, and of who has the right to ‘represent’ the country. The ‘authenticity’ argument was rapidly buried, with a few stray knives in its back, in the world of Indian fiction—few readers, writers or critics wanted to police books to see how their Indianness rated on a scale of one to 10.

One of the most memorable battles in that shortlived war was the skirmish between the late professor Meenakshi Mukherjee and the writer Vikram Chandra. It began when Mukherjee questioned the choice of titles for Chandra’s short stories in his collection Love and Longing in Bombay. To her, his titles—‘Artha’, ‘Dharma’, ‘Kama’—were “necessary to signal Indianness in the West”.

Chandra wrote a riposte that was simultaneously thoughtful and very funny: “I noticed the constant hum of this rhetoric, this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness, this notion of a real reality that was being distorted by ‘Third World cosmopolitans’, this fear of an all-devouring and all-distorting West… I heard it in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews. And Indians who wrote in English were one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control… The issue was decided not on the basis of the relative merits of the books, but on the perceived Indianness of the authors, and by implication, the degree of their assimilation by the West.”

Chandra won that particular battle, perhaps because to most of his readers, the titles of his short stories seemed not just acceptable but, given their content, entirely appropriate. These were stories of greed, of lust, of the tyranny and the pleasures of duty; they were very Indian stories, if Indianness was the criteria by which you chose to judge them. (They remain an accurate representation of Bombay, but I would suggest here that they have lasted not because of the India they represent but because they happen to represent taut, compelling storytelling.)

But Mukherjee’s suspicion, her distrust of a certain kind of writing, is not so easily dismissed. It remains alive in the parodies that sometimes appear in blogs about Indian writing of the stereotypes on the covers of Indian books in English—insert mangoes, add a sari border, use a suitably Oriental-looking font, and bear in mind that pictures of the Himalayas, rivers, sadhus and godmen will always sell a book, even one that has no reference to the Himalayas, rivers, sadhus and godmen in it. The latest satirical advice is in ‘The 10 (okay, 13) Commandments of Writing Indian Fiction in English’, on a blog called The Buddha Smiled, the first commandment of which is: “Thy Book Must Have a Title That is Strange & Wonderful. Also Very Long.” It should be read alongside a beautiful, deadly piece of parody from I Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama:

How the Raj is done: I wish to shew how the Raj is done. This is the play of children, good adept, rest easy. You must have the following ingredients. (It matters little if one or another be wanting, nor is the order of essence. Introduce them as you please, and as often.) Let the pot boil of its own. An elephant, a polo club, a snake, a length of rope, a rajah or a pearl of price (some use both), a silver moon, a dropped glove, a railway junction, some pavilions in the distance, a chota peg, a tent peg, a learned brahmin, a cruel king, a chapati (or chaprasi), a measure of justice, gunpowder (q.v.), equal portions of law and order, a greased cartridge, a tamarind seed or else a cavalry regiment, a moist eye, some high intentions, two pax of Britannica, Glucose biscuits, an ounce of valour, something in the middle, a Victoria Cross, a soupçon of suspense (q.v.), a bearer, a dhobi (or dhoti), a chee-chee, a dekchi (or deck-chair), a pinch of dust, a trickle of perspiration, a backdrop with temples or mosques (some use both), a church pew, a little fair play, a boar, some tall grass, a tiger, a rain cloud, a second snake or a mongoose, a flutter of the heart, a sharp sword, a bared ankle, walnut juice or burnt cork (some use both), a boy of British blood unsullied, a locket.

In most discussions of Indian writing in English today, we are still not comfortable—outside of parody—acknowledging what might be called ‘marketplace realities’. In the years when Indian writing was doing well in the West, like a hardworking honours student, we were happy to measure our importance and success not by the literary impact of a Kiran Desai or a Salman Rushdie but by the sales figures and the prize shortlists.

What we are all uncomfortable acknowledging is that the West—shorthand for the complex markets and divergent reading tastes of the UK, the US and a large swath of Europe—has a sharply truncated view of Indian writing. Imagine assessing all of European literature by reading only works in Polish, or only works in Italian—that, in the absence of a market for translations of Indian fiction, is the position the West is in when it reads “Indian writing”. And as long as the market is open only, or chiefly, to Indian writing in English, this blindness cannot be overcome. There is also the question of economic power: with access to larger audiences abroad, publishers outside India can and do dictate who has that access, what kind of stories travel from here to there, what books will be considered future Indian classics. There is an inequality in the system, inevitable, inescapable and often resented.

Much of the unease expressed by Mishra, and in a different form by Sharma, and earlier by Sealy and even Mukherjee, comes from questioning the need for the Big India book—at some level, we understand that these books are very rarely written by Indian journalists, and that, even so, the stories they tell, whether simplified or not, are influential. Some of the unease comes from a sense of disenfranchisement: it is telling, for instance, that there seems to be little need for the Big India book in Hindi or Urdu or Marathi. Other than in English, we lack either the curiosity or the need to explain India to ourselves.

What the West sees of Indian writing would be ridiculous, if that view wasn’t so influential—as with the age de Waal describes, where all of Japanese culture and history could be interpreted through the schlock, detritus and ‘masterpieces’ of the art world. Over the past 30 years, some realities have become inescapable; Indian writing in the Western world is defined largely as Indian writing in English, with very few translations making their way abroad.

Writing from the margins—Dalit writing, the resurgence in Indian poetry in English, writing from the Northeast—is rarely visible; when it is visible, it is exoticised, both here and abroad. And by its nature, Indian writing in English has been largely privileged writing—if not quite the sons of St Stephens College, most contemporary writers in this language come from the relatively enfranchised middle class, and their work reflects the limitations of their backgrounds.

The Census 2001 figures, released late last year, revealed that English had, effectively, become India’s second language, behind Hindi. Many of the new English speakers come from the small towns or belong to metropolitan areas that lie outside the charmed circles of privilege. English belongs to them now, as much as it once did about two to three decades ago, to the old class of writer-Brahmins.

And as this generation begins to tell and write its stories, it may not need to beguile the souks of the West with its Indiennisme. There are 125 million English speakers, of whom a much higher percentage has made it their first language in the decade since the Census data was collected, a number large enough to make its own marketplace. If that happens, this new generation of writers might finally be able to step away from the debates that have come down across a century-and-a-half of Indian writing in English.

Or perhaps they will find a new set of things to argue about. In the years before the call centre phenomenon spread across India, adding an American accent to Indian English, the first signs of the hunger for English—a language that might offer a passport to better jobs, more money, more status—showed up in the India of the 1980s and the 1990s in the ads for the very popular Rapidex English Speaking Course.

Their spokesman was the cricketer Kapil Dev, whose contribution to the ad was to speak about its effectiveness, not in a BBC-tinged accent or in the beloved fake-Yank accent, but in heavily accented Haryanvi English. It was a kind of claiming of the language as our own, the way KC Dutt and SC Dutt had attempted to claim the right to write for an audience of Indian readers, the way Bankimchandra had struggled in Rajmohan’s Wife to convey the accents and emotional grammar of Bengal in this alien but covetable tongue.

From that period of Indian history, I retained for many years a small memento, picked up in my travels across the Hindi heartland. A flyer from the Prince School and Education Bureau, distributed at a bus stand, it offered the familiar ‘English Tutions’ (“tuition” is often misspelled, and the Indian version sounds more euphonious to my biased ears), and this beguiling promise: “IN THREE WEEKS, LEARN HOW TO READ IN GREMAN. HOW TO READ IN ENGLISH. HOW TO READ IN INDIAN.”

I like the enterprise behind that promise. I think, in many ways, we are all still trying to learn how to read in Indian, even if we don’t always have the right glossaries.

(From the forthcoming collection of essays on reading, How To Read In Indian, to be published by HarperCollins India.)