Let me return to the fiasco called “Jaipur Literary Fest” which
played out in the pink city at a time when not much was happening
elsewhere in the country. It made headlines because of a man called
Salman Rushdie and a novel he wrote twenty five years ago. This must
have pleased Rushdie no end, assuming, of course, he was sober enough,
in a figurative sense, to pay attention to all the ballyhoo created by
his absence in Jaipur. I have a sneaking feeling that all this was
orchestrated by some PR people, and since Rushdie himself is an old
advertising man, he may have lent a hand. On the other hand, Rushdie is
also an honourable man and is unlikely to have stooped so low, but, in
such cases, you cannot really be sure.
The gang behind the Jaipur fest must have gone home as pleased as
punch. They got free publicity, which is like oxygen to such jamborees.
It does not matter that very few Indian writers attended the mela, but
that should not be much of a worry for the organisers. Who cares for
Indian writers anyway? By Indian writers I mean Indians who write in
Indian languages – Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, etc, and not English. To me,
sixty five years after Independence, English is a colonial language,
not an Indian one, for it is used mainly by those who are still obsessed
by the Raj, and whose mindset is colonial. These people write
essentially for non-Indians, particularly those in London, Oxford or
Cambridge, that is, English audiences who still look down on Indians and
are patronising towards them. It is for them that the Rushdies and the
Naipauls and Arundhati Roys write, for if they are accepted by them,
they are automatically accepted by the remnants of the Raj in India.
The real Indian writers write for Indians, just as real Hindi writers
write for Hindi readers, not for Indians living in London or Washington.
I don’t therefore consider Rushdie or Naipaul as Indian writers, though
there may be something of India in their writings. In fact, I do not
think that Rushdie or Naipaul consider themselves as Indians, though we
may do so. They are no different from foreign writers writing about
India for foreign readers, for whom India is an exotic country of
turbaned men and women living on the edge of jungles, first popularised
by Rudyard Kipling and then, in a more sophisticated way by the likes of
EM Forster who, like Kipling, spent some time in India and was perhaps
more sympathetic towards Indians than the full-blooded imperialist
Kipling.
Why has Indian writing become so popular in the West at a time when
most Nobel prizes go to non-Indians? There is a reason for it. The West
has become a dull place and has been done to death. How many times are
you going to read about fish and chips in Bermandsey or roast beef in
Yorkshire? They have been reading about it for years – probably decades
and centuries – and nobody has much appetite for it anymore. The
publishers are looking for exotic stuff-palaces in Rajasthan, curried
rice and chapattis in houseboats on the Dal Lake, and lore-making in
Mahabalipuram. This is the stuff for jaded appetites, for whom the
Western stuff is passé. Publishers want to sell their books and make
money – and probably retire in Spain or Bermuda – and for whom India is
spectacular as well as exotic, even if the writers are a poor lot. So
they are looking for Kunzrus and Rushdies, and will soon start looking
for other fancy names, of which there is no shortage in a land of 1.3
billion souls.
They are fed up with Smiths and Joneses and Pauls and Penelope, and the
rides in Switzerland and Italian Alps, something the Western readers do
every summer. Take them for a change to Mysore and Kanyakumari and they
wouldn’t mind shelling out few more dollars or pounds in their kitty
with a holiday in Kolkata thrown in.
Real Indian writers, those who write in their own language, do not much
care about what foreigners say about their stuff. On the other hand,
the Naipauls and the Rushdies do. After all, they make their pile in
London and Washington and New York, not in Mumbai or Kolkata and Jaipur.
Hence their tremendous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. Naipaul
married an English girl and so did Rushdie (who also married an Indian
girl who promptly dumped him), one way of getting close to Westeners.
They wrote for Western newspapers and magazines, something Indian
writers cannot do, for obvious reasons. The literary careers of “Indian”
writers like Naipaul and Rushdie depend entirely on what Western
critics say about them.
On the other hand, the literary careers of truly Indian writers depend
on their Indian readers, Indian critics and Indian audiences. To me,
they are genuinely Indian writers, while the Naipauls and the Rushdies
are what I call “Raj” writers, carrying huge inferiority complexes in
their swollen heads, and worried more about what the critics in London
say about them than their readers in India. Their readers are
essentially “Raj” Indian – Indians who still live in the Raj, who affect
a false British accent and who prefer fish and chips to nargis kofta
for lunch. These are still thousands, possibly millions, of them in
India, colonial men with colonial tastes, who still live, mentally at
least, in the India of ‘koi hai’ and who still pine for ginger-haired
British colonels in topis and for whom time stopped in 1947.
It is these people, and people like them, who attend Jaipur festivals,
waiting for Rushdie and Naipaul and other faded colonials, ignoring the
real India around them. It is not surprising that most Indian language
newspapers ignored Jaipur, although the English language newspapers,
read mostly by Raj Indians, lapped it up. This is what happens to those
with colonial minds – they cannot distinguish between the real and the
false, and who are unsure about their own identity. It is tragic but
also funny that we should still have such people in our midst after
sixty years of freedom, but what is freedom to people whose minds are
still enslaved by the past?
We should have real Indian literary festivals, consisting of real books
published here in India, and not in some God-forsaken place in England
or America, books by real Indian writers, and not some émigré’s like
Rushdie, and real Indian authors rooted in this soil, writers who write
and speak their own language and not the borrowed lingo of some foreign
land. A society is not really free unless it is culturally free and it
cannot be culturally free until it frees itself from its colonial
hangover. We are still mentally a colony, which is why, after more than
half a century of so-called freedom, we continue to put up with a
foreigner running the country!
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