13 South Asian Writings in English: View from 21st Century

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

Introduction: South Asian literature written in English has enjoyed remarkable visibility in recent times. Many writers from our region writing in English have become famous and successful and have won many awards. You may have read about many of them in the newspapers. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie, Jean Arasanayagam and Romesh Gunesekara are some of the many contemporary South Asian English-language writers you may have heard of.

Today, South Asian Anglophone literature has made its mark internationally and is regularly discussed at various international fora and taught at many universities all across the world. Also, South Asian Anglophone writers have experimented with the English language and developed new idioms and registers of English and introduced new themes and perspectives to the body of literature written in English. South Asian literature written in English is particularly important because it is this literature that is available to and represents South Asia to the rest of the English-speaking world.

What is South Asia?: The label ‘South Asia’ refers to the group of states that make up the Indian subcontinent and some of their immediate neighbours. The member-states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC, are thought to constitute ‘South Asia’. Thus, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan and Madives may be said to make up South Asia. If you look at the map of Asia, you will see that these countries are neighbours and bunched together in the southern part of Asia.

South Asia is a region of amazing diversity. It includes communities that have very diverse practices and belief systems. The region is home to thousands of languages and many religious sects. It is also home to very diverse and rich literary, oral and cultural traditions. Writers in India write in many different languages, as do writers in Pakistan. Even in a smaller country like Sri Lanka, people write in at least three different languages—Tamil, Sinhala and English.

English in South Asia: South Asia has many languages, some of which are very, very old indeed! Tamil, for instance, is a classical language and has been around for a very long time. It is believed by many to be at the very least two thousand years old, though there are many who say it is actually much older than even that! Again, a language like Sanskrit has been in circulation in South Asia for thousands of years and has an immensely rich literary tradition that stretches across centuries.

English, on the other hand, is relatively new in South Asia. The English language was virtually non-existent and unknown in South Asia until only a few centuries ago; so the question of a South Asian English literature, too, did not arise. It was only with colonial contact that the English language really reached us from across the oceans. The same had happened in the case of the Caribbean and of Africa as well. And it was only later that we, in South Asia, started writing literary texts in earnest in the English language. This change from writing in almost solely our own indigenous languages to taking on the challenge of writing in a foreign language like English was also a testimony to the growing importance of English in South Asia.

According to some scholars, the English language served to build bridges in South Asia between people who spoke in different languages and had different beliefs and religious practices. In that way, perhaps the English language played an important role as a lingua franca and allowed people in South Asia to communicate among each other and understand each other better. These scholars believe that English, the language of the colonisers, actually help unite the divided people of the subcontinent and led in the long run to political independence and the emergence of the states we see in South Asia today.

You must also be aware of the curious fact that while the English language came from the colonisers and was adopted by the colonized in South Asia, it became the instrument and medium for hitting back at colonialism. The English language was used to challenge and wage war against imperialism; South Asian English literature often turns out to be the classic example of the empire writing back, challenging the dynamics of colonialism and stripping the notion of ‘the white man’s burden’ of all its pretence.

The British reached India in the early 17th century and were initially engaged in trade with India. But by the mid-18th century, the East India Company had become very  powerful indeed and was virtually in control of large parts of India. English became the language of administration and governance and many Indians realized that learning the English language was a sure way of increasing one’s chances of progress and opening up new opportunities. The work of the Christian missionaries also helped spread the English language in South Asia.

The Charter Act of 1813 made education the responsibility of the colonial state, thus putting the onus of educating Indians on the British rulers. Three years later, the Hindu College was founded by Indians who wanted to propagate the learning of English language and literature. All these contributed to enhancing the importance of the English language in India.

Why do you think the British were so keen to introduce and disseminate the English language in South Asia? If you think they did so solely with an altruistic objective, you will probably be mistaken. The British had their own interests in disseminating their language over the large tracts of South Asia they were ruling. This becomes clear if you look at Sir Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of February 1835. The Minute, which was most important for giving a boost to English-language education in India, and which was symptomatic of the colonial mindset, recommended spreading the English language among Indians with the aim of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”—a class of Indians who would rule the rest of India on behalf of the British. So, you see, the colonial authorities were only interested in spreading the English language because they thought it would help them rule India more effectively!

This history has given the English language a curious position in South Asia. On the one hand, it is viewed as a language of power and status, and one that opens up new vistas of opportunity, and on the other hand, it continues in several cases to be associated with the stigma that stems from its association with the colonial project. Thus, those who write in English from the subcontinent often have to defend their choice to write in English itself. Scholars of the stature of Buddhadeva Bose, P Lal, William Walsh and Abu Syed Ayyub have all been among the more important conversationists who have engaged with this question. The curious contradiction today is that English continues to be the language of a marginal elite in India, and even more so in Pakistan, even as South Asian English literature becomes more and more visible internationally.

English Literature from Undivided India: V K Gokak wrote of the need to mark out two distinct groups within Indian English literature—Anglo-Indian writing and Indo-Anglian writing. The first refers to writings by English writers on India; this is not something we shall deal with here. We shall concentrate on introducing English-language writing by Indians in undivided India here.

Do you know who was the first Indian to write in English? C V Boriah was one of the earliest writers in this tradition, and his Account of the Jains (1809) was thought by many to have been the extant piece of Indian writing in English. But it is now widely accepted that the first book by an Indian in the English language was The Travels of Dean Mahomed, A Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India, while in the Service of the Honorable East India Company, published in 1793.

Dean Mahomed was an Indian who had joined up with the army of the East India Company, and served under British Captain Godfrey Baker. After many years of service, Dean Mahomed followed Captain Godfrey Baker, whom he had worked under and who had become his friend by now, when the latter went back to Ireland.

Dean Mahomed’s work was in many ways characteristic of early South Asian English literature. Most early Indian English writing belonged to the realm of non-fiction.

Biographies, political tracts and essays dominated. It was only later that Indian English fiction, which is perhaps the most popular of the genres of South Asian English literature today, began to make a mark.

It was not as if early Indian English literature was totally divorced from the Indian realities. Even though the language was foreign, the realities that worked their way into the literary works were local and immediate. Thus, Sisir Kumar Das has opined: “When one looks at the body of English writings produced by the Indians before 1835, one realizes it was neither exotic nor rootless, but intimately connected with the contemporary Indian experience…the Indian English writings, then, in their initial stage were so intimately related with the contemporary Indian aspiration and were so much a part of the Indian semiology that they could justifiably be claimed as yet another component of the Indian literature…”

The most important figure for the development of the novel as a genre in India was perhaps Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. Chattopadhyay, who wrote a series of extremely popular and influential novels in Bangla, started by trying to write a novel in English. In 1864, he published Rajmohan’s Wife, which is often considered one of the early Indian English novels. Another important landmark for the development of Indian English fiction was the publication of Lal Behari Dey’s Govinda Samanta in 1874. Yet, the novel really begins to make an appearance in Indian English literature, only in the 1920s, according to Meenakshi Mukherjee.

It was the 1930s that saw the spotlight being focused powerfully on the Indian English novel. This is the decade when the great triad of Indian English fiction of that generation comes to the forefront. This triad consists of Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), R K Narayan (1909-2000) and Raja Rao (1908-2006). In their hands, Indian English fiction attained newer heights— they managed to capture the quintessential Indian reality in all its different aspects in their writings using the English language; at the same time, they managed to Indianise the English language as they tried to create a body of Indian English literature. More often than not, their writings were about the common man; this lent an immediacy and relevance to their works. Social evils, social reform, the struggle for independence, Gandhian philosophy—all these made their mark felt in Indian English literature.

Raja Rao’s 1938 novel, Kanthapura, for instance, highlights Gandhian philosophy and the effects of the creed of non-violence even as it focuses on the common folk of a small village in southern India. This novel also evidences an attempt to work out a fusion between western literary idiom and indigenous Indian literary tradition in terms of structure, form and style. Again, the tensions between the Brahmins of the village and members of the other castes is something Rao explores with finesse.

We find similar linguistic experiments in the works of Mulk Raj Anand, who, too, tries to bring into the English language the indigenous vocabulary and expressions from Punjabi, for instance. His 1935 novel, Untouchable, focuses on a single day in the life of a member of the so-called ‘untouchable’ community and again works in Gandhi, this time his views on untouchability.

R K Narayan, too, by creating the legendary town of Malgudi, focuses on small-town India and all its social prejudices and problems, and highlights the little quirks of Indian society. Social reform is again an important theme in his works though not perhaps in the more overt way in which it figures in the works of the two previously mentioned writers.

The post-Independence period: Both India and Pakistan gained political independence and shook off the fetters of British colonialism in 1947. Sri Lanka also became independent shortly thereafter in 1948. Bangladesh emerged as an independent state in 1971 after East Pakistan took on the might of West Pakistan, which had been exercising military, linguistic political, economic domination over the former. What about the role of the English language in the post-independence period in these countries?

The British left South Asia, but the English language continued to hold an important and influential position in South Asia. Many writers espoused the English language for their creative endeavours in South Asia in the post-independence period. The turning point is generally taken to be 1981, when Salman Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, was awarded the Booker Prize. This award, given to a South Asian English-language writer, immediately catapulted South Asian Anglophone writing to much greater international visibility than it had ever enjoyed. It opened up opportunities for writers from South Asia who wished to write in the English language. Also, Rushdie’s experiments with the English language, which has been called ‘chutnification’, opened up an array of possibilities for the contemporary English-language writers from South Asia, many of whom would continue to experiment with indigenous registers of language as well as with the magic realist mode of narrative used by Rushdie and his propensity to bring together history and fiction and problematize the boundaries between the two. Many, of course, have pointed out that what Rushdie was doing was not really something new; many decades ago, the same thing had been tried out by the brilliant writer, G V Desani, in his novel, All about H Hatterr. The novel was published all the way back in 1948, more than 30 years before Midnight’s Children saw the light of day.

The most important early attempt in the post-independence era at writing a history of Indian English literature was K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s Indian Writing in English–it was published in its first edition in 1962. M K Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature was another landmark volume; it was published by the Sahitya Akademi in 1982. In the Pakistani context, Alamgir Hashmi fulfilled a similar role; his Pakistani Literature: The Contemporary English Writers (1978) is said to have popularized the label, ‘Pakistani Literature in English’. Tariq Rahman’s A History of Pakistani Literature in English (1991) was another important attempt in this direction. Another important figure is Muneeza Shamsie, who edited several anthologies of Pakistani English literature starting with Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English (1997). She is also author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani English Literature, a recent book on the development of Pakistani English literature that discusses both writers born in independent Pakistan as well as older writers who became ‘Pakistani writers’ with the partition of 1947, such as Suhrawardy and Ahmed Ali. A similar role has been played by D C R A Goonetilleke, who has edited several anthologies of Sri Lankan English literature and written extensively on English writing from Sri Lanka in many international journals.

From among the South Asian countries, it is Indian English literature that has benefited most from the 1981 Rushdie Booker and from the attention it brought on South Asian English- language writing. Indian English literature is in the spotlight internationally, and many Indian English writers have achieved celebrity status. But Pakistani English literature, too, has been steadily making its mark over the last few decades and there is today a large body of impressive writings in English that have come out of Pakistan. There is a group of relatively young writers from Pakistan who write in English, many of whom have already gained international recognition, and this is promising for the future.

You may have heard of Bapsi Sidhwa, the Pakistani-origin writer, who wrote novels such as Ice Candy Man; you may also have watched the film, 1947: Earth, which was made out of Sidhwa’s novel. She is indeed one of the most familiar names from the group of Pakistani diasporic writers who write in English. Sara Suleri Goodyear is another important diasporic writer-scholar now based in the USA; her most influential book is Meatless Days.

Among the younger fiction writers from the ouvre of Pakistani English Literature, you will encounter Kamila Shamsie, Aamer Hussein, Mohsin Hamid, Talat Abbasi, Uzma Aslam Khan and Daniyal Mueenuddin. Mueenuddin is best known for his short story collection titled In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. Uzma Aslam Khan shot to fame with her first novel, The Story of Noble Rot (2001), and has written three more novels after that. Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West. He is also an essayist of note and has authored a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. Aamer Hussein is author of a number of short story collections, of which the best known is perhaps Cactus Town: Selected Stories (2003).

Kamila Shamsie is one of the most exciting of the younger Pakistani English-language writers. Her most recent novels are Burnt Shadows (2009) and A God in Every Stone (2014). and Her first novel, In the City by the Sea, was published in 1988, and deployed a child protagonist, Hasan. Among other things, the novel effectively works on themes of military dictatorship and censorship in Pakistan, impediments to democracy in Pakistan, colonial hangover, and the stark class divide in independent Pakistan. These are all themes that come back in Kamila Shamsie’s later novels in different ways. The Aliya-Khaleel relationship and the Mariam apa-Masood episode in Salt and Saffron (2000) that transgress the unwritten class divides in Pakistan underscores the vast divide between the haves and the have-nots in postcolonial Pakistan. The history of the Dard-e-Dil family also puts Partition under the spotlight and seems to underscore the shared history that ties the Indian subcontinent together, something that Partition can neither defy nor deny.

Shamsie’s third novel, Kartography (2002), is perhaps where she comes into her own, playing around with language and bringing to the fore one of the episodes of Pakistani history over which there has been a curious, if understandable, reticence in Pakistani literature. Kartography brings to the fore the history of oppression by West Pakistan over East Pakistan, which finally led to the partition of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971. Political violence, religious sentiments, displacement—these are all themes that recur in Kartography.

In many ways, Kamila Shamsie’s works show us the true context of South Asian English literature. English remains a language that unites but also divides in South Asia. The elite nature and lifestyles of Zia and his friends in Kartography highlights this divisive potential. The English-speaking elite is often seen to be divorced from local realities in South Asian literature in English. Also important here is the question of who English-language writers from South Asia write for. Since it is only a small percentage of readers in South Asia who read literature in English, many writers perhaps write with an international readership in mind. Does this influence the way they portray their homelands? This is a question you may like to think about when you read South Asian literature in English.

What about Bangladeshi Anglophone literature, you must be asking. Do people write in English in Bangladesh the way they have been doing in India and Pakistan? Some would go back to pre-Partition times and claim writers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Nirad C Chaudhuri within the corpus of Bangladeshi English Literature on the ground that they were all born in what constitutes today’s Bangladesh. But the independent state of Bangladesh was created on the basis of language—Bangla was the national language of this country and so writers were passionate about writing in Bangla. Still, there are writers from Bangladesh who write in English and who have contributed to the body of South Asian English literature.

Niaz Zaman is one of the most prominent names in the arena of Bangladeshi English- language writing. She is author of The Dance and Other Stories (1996), a collection of short stories in English. She also wrote a novel called The Crooked Neem Tree (1982). Razia Khan Amin was one of the important poets from the first generation of Bangladeshi English- language writers in the post-1971 era. She is remembered for her two anthologies of poetry called Argus Under Anaesthesia (1976) and Cruel April (1977). Farida Majid is another poet- translator who edited several volumes of poetry in English from Bangladesh.

One of the most important names in the field of Bangladeshi English-language fiction is Adib Khan. Adib Khan is a diasporic writer from Bangladesh settled in Australia. Seasonal Adjustments (1994), Solitude of Illusions (1996), The Storyteller (2000), Homecoming (2005), and Spiral Road (2007) are his important works. Khan deals with themes of identity, migration, and dislocation—themes that are common to many diasporic writers from South Asia who write in English.

Another writer you may have read about recently is Monica Ali. Ali was born in Bangladesh and migrated to the UK. Although she moved to the UK as a child, she is also claimed by some within the folds of Bangladeshi English Literature. Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and focuses on the Bangladeshi community in London.

Sri Lanka has a most vibrant English-language literary scenario. After the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British arrived in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). They defeated the Dutch in 1796 and brought all of Sri Lanka under their control around 1815. English has remained an important language in Sri Lanka since then; it is one of the three major languages, the other two being Sinhala and Tamil. However, the stark divide between the haves and the have-nots that we see in postcolonial Pakistan is also present in Sri Lanka, and the English language has, here too, been associated with an elite Westernised strand of society cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka—this is a theme that has been explored in, among others, Cinnamon Gardens, Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel, which focuses on Sri Lanka of the 1920s.

Lucian de Zilva, S J K Crowther, H E Weerasooriya and of course Patrick Fernando are among the important early Sri Lankan English writers, but it is only in the 1980s that Sri Lankan English writing comes to prominence. Punyakante Wijenaike and James Goonewardene were important for this trajectory and they were pioneers in the field of Sri Lankan English literature. Rajiva Wijesinha also identifies Ediriweea Sarachchandra, writer, dramatist, academic, and Yasmine Gooneratne, academic-writer, as having played important roles in popularizing Sri Lankan English literature. Gooneratne started New Ceylon Writing as a platform for Sri Lankan literature before she emigrated to Australia and wrote A Change of Skies, her 1991 novel.

Many of the Sri Lankan English-language writers are part of the diaspora. Rienze Crusz, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai and Romesh Gunesekara are part of this group. Much of their writings go back to Sri Lanka and reflect on the social and political history of Sri Lanka. The 1980s were a tempestuous decade in the history of Sri Lanka. The ethnic rivalry between the majority Sinahalas and the minority Tamils came to a head and fuelled militancy and violence. This militancy and state-sponsored violence found their way into much of the Sri Lankan English literature of the period. Shyam Selvadurai’s debut novel, Funny Boy (1994), for instance, details the growing up years of Arjie Chelvaratnam, a young boy, and his attempts to negotiate simultaneously his burgeoning consciousness of his sexuality and his growing understanding of his identity as a mixed Tamil-Sinhala child living in a country split apart by violence between the Tamil and the Sinhala communities.

Among the writers who are based in Sri Lanka, Jean Arasanayagam and Carl Muller, both Burghers, have written fiction and poetry in English and are among the best-known Sri Lankan English-language writers.

Conclusion: The Anglophone literary tradition in South Asia is well established by now. South Asia has produced a number of literary works in the English language that are remarkable for their treatment of contemporary South Asian realities, their experiments with the English language and their treatment of themes of history, identity, displacement and social and political divisions.

While the Indian English literary tradition seems to have been most visible, Pakistani English literature and Sri Lankan English literature, too, have commanded increasing visibility in recent years and have thrown up many powerful writers.

Reference

• http://www.maps-world.net/southern-asia.htm
• http://www.alearningfamily.com/main/south-asia-political-map/
• http://www.shyamselvadurai.com/img/Selvadurai-01-Kevin-Kelly.jpg