Amitava Kumar on What
is Hot In Indian Writing
Transition, Issue 79, 1998
Paul Theroux once complained that in V S. Naipaul's India:A Million Mutinies Now (1990), "There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians." There are by now nearly one billion of those "yakking Indians" in the world-although Theroux's long, entertaining, damning book about Naipaul is hardly the best place to hear them.
In Sir Vidia's Shadow (I998), Indians utter charming phrases like, "I am not knowing, sir"; I don't recall a single Indian from Theroux's book who didn't speak in funny, babu English.While Naipaul often wrote about intriguing and sophisticated people like Mallika, the Muslim widow of the Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, Theroux seems to think that India is best glimpsed in endless descriptions of urban clamor. In fact, Theroux rarely bothers to talk with the Indians he meets, and his conclusions about them always have to do with caste. He follows this rule with everyone; Naipaul himself is no more exempt than the Brahman beggar by the roadside. In a passage that would shame even the colonial anthropologist of a bygone era, Theroux -undaunted by the nuances of personality, or even culture-perceives an essential Indian identity in his literary hero: "It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to the core-caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about his body being `tainted."
Theroux's cartoonish visions of India stay with him no matter how far he journeys from the subcontinent. In London, his erstwhile mentor seems suddenly pathetic:
Vidia on a London street was less likely a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper, the very dukawallah he despaired of a London newsagent hurryingfrom the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. That place was now a national institution, known throughout Britain as "the Paki shop."
By forcefully recreating the well-known British stereotype of the Indian shopkeeper, Theroux shows his sympathy for Naipaul's troubled encounter with the West. But this seemingly compassionate description conceals an ambiguous insult: in sketching the portrait of an anonymous Indian scuttling along, is Theroux bringing down the writer or the shopkeeper? Or both?
Theroux's brand of casually chauvinistic insight is actually a sign of willful and obstinate ignorance. It's almost enough to make the reader nostalgic for Naipaul's arrogant knowingness: even in his most uncharitable moments, Naipaul has never presumed to speak for anyone else. In one passage from Sir Vidia's Shadow, Naipaul expresses his contempt for the writer who would try to serve as a spokesman. "He is just bringing news," Naipaul says. "That is what he does. Brings news from Nottingham, from working-class people. It's not writing, really. It's news. Don't be that sort of writer, bringing news."
That's not bad advice. Many writers would do well to take it to heart-especially the new generation of Indian writers whose faces are so resolutely turned toward the West. In simply bringing news, these writers produce bad books. Worse still, forgetting the manners taught in the English-language convent schools that they all no doubt attended, these writers reveal their distaste for the poor and weak around whom they cannot help but wrap the eight arms of their narratives.
In the summer of I998, India-and then Pakistan-suddenly exploded on the front pages of the newspapers around the world. The nuclear bomb tests were the culmination of a heady season of self-assertion, a year during which the fiftieth anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence came to life in a flurry of literary acclaim. By December, it was clear that South Asia's literary stable was even more fearsome than its atomic arsenal. Breathless, magazines like the New Republic almost begged for mercy:
Macaulay, who said that "a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India," has been paid back for his ignorant denigration of Indian literature: he has been pelted with masterpieces. His punishment has taken a form which he could not have imagined, the vivid prosperity of an Indian literature, and a Pakistani literature, written in Macaulay's own language.
This sudden attention was certainly not unwelcome. In the ice-cream parlors of New Delhi, a lot of Indians were happy to receive so much notice in the pages of the New Republic, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic. The literary magazine Granta even saw fit to send a reporter to my own little-noticed hometown, Patna. There, an intrepid Brit found Mistah Kurtz in the figure of our chief minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav. Apparently, "Laloo" took Granta's emissary for a walk through his vegetable garden and offered friendly dietary information: "`This is satthu,' he said.`Very good for wind."
Such characters also appeared in the Indian fiction that appeared in the same magazines at around the same time. As these magazines are all published in English, the Western reader could be forgiven for believing that Indians write only in English. In fact, some Indians seem to believe this, too: Salman Rushdie added grist to the anglophone mill with his infamous claim that Indian literature in English far exceeds in quality Indian literature in all other languages. He has admitted that he doesn't know those other languages, and that there have been problems with translation, but none of this troubles him overmuch. Rushdie fervently believes "that India's encounter with the English language continues to give birth to new children," and as proof he offers Kiran Desai's debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (I998). Her book has lots of heat and dust, sweating men, lisping saris, and honking traffic, as well as plenty of yakking Indians. Too many, perhaps: in order to escape them, Sampath-the novel's verbose, daydreaming hero-climbs up a tree and finds himself suddenly transformed into a holy man. Salman Rushdie, meet Deepak Chopra.
Sampath wants to escape the "ugly sea of humanity" and find refuge in a world "where there was not a trace of civilization." He offers mindless platitudes, some of which were culled by the author from Bhargava's Standard Illustrated Dictionary of the Hindi Language: "Dab your mouth with honey and you will get plenty of flies.... Sweep before your own door. ... Many a pickle makes a mickle.... Talk of chalk and hear about cheese." Eccentrics are numerous in the novel, and all events remain odd but harmless. Like the reporter from Granta visiting Patna, Desai offers the reader a comforting assortment of quaint folks: no poets or historians, union leaders, female doctors, teachers, people filled with purpose. Desai's characters lead sheltered lives, far removed from the unsightly world of GATT debates and nuclear bombs. Mainly inoffensive and mildly cretinous, the Indians in her novel pose no threat to anyone, least of all to the West.
Even before she published the novel, Desai (along with her mother, Anita, and, of course, Salman Rushdie) was among the eleven writers tagged as "India's leading novelists" in a group portrait in the New Yorker's I997 Indian Fiction issue. Now that we have the book, we may well ask: Where's the hullabaloo? Indeed, there is nothing in her novel that exceeds the mannered fabulism of R. K. Narayan, a style that charmed readers for decades before Rushdie gave it the poison of history to drink and-overnight!-it grew a tail and claws. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard never quite escapes this monstrous moral economy of the pleasant.
In spite of her Narayan-like fascination with the pastoral, Desai-like Rushdie-seems most interested in socal dysfunction. She zeroes in on Sampath's mother, Kulfi, who is suffocating beneath flowering neuroses and private grief. The novel even offers a couple of remarkable passages on the institution of marriage and the demands it can make on women in India; on the two or three best pages of her novel, Desai mocks both Jane Austen and the Manu Smriti, the antiquated Hindu code of law. At this point, the reader might eagerly anticipate a moving story about the perils of gender in India. But Desai-like Rushdie-lacks any sense of social engagement, and she is quick to pathologize Kulfi's nonconformity. Like Sufiya Zenobia Shakil in Rushdie's Shame (I983), Kulfi is quickly condemned to murderous zeal and madness. It is soon revealed that Kulfi's whole family is plagued by mental illness; the narrative finally tames her by giving her a stove of her own. Don't worry, cook curry. Desai also borrows Rushdie's unease about the people who inhabit the subcontinent: in The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), Rushdie portrayed a rural populace thirsty for blood. In his strange, dreadful India, anyone who lives outside the city's civilizing walls is condemned to a life of barbarity. Indian villagers are portrayed as zealous Hindus who worship the god Ram, even though all the recent riots in India have taken place in urban areas:
In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram. And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don't mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.
This can only be understood as the dismay and ignorance of a distant cosmopolitan. Desai, on the other hand, avoids this problem by evading the issue entirely: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is too serene to touch on riots or anything else more raucous than a tamasha caused by drunken monkeys on a rampage. If Rushdie's fantasies betray his fears, Desai's novel is a bit too sanitized not to raise suspicion.Where have all the people gone?
With the masses missing in action, can language itself-delicate and lyrical, filling a cupboard with spices and fauna -provide safe haven from the rough forces of social upheaval? Desai's language, in any case, is not quite up to the task; her characters seem asphyxiated in their unlikely, pretty, empty India.When he feels cornered at the novel's end, Sampath pukes on his cot. And, then, like the fabled Indian performing his rope trick, he vanishes into thin air. His mother Kulfi keeps on cooking, bent on completing her quest to find a monkey to put in her pot. The one person who remains skeptical of Sampath is identified only as "the atheist." At the novel's conclusion, he meets his end by accidentally falling into Kulfi's simmering vindaloo. The critic, in effect, is shown to be a monkey.
This was the only lesson I could retrieve from Desai's novel: when it comes to deciding the fate of critics, even genteel plots can take a surprisingly chilling, brutal turn.
If Desai's urge to clean up India borders on pathological, she finds her counterpart in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a novelist from Sunnyvale, California, whose preoccupation with the lumpen is as all-consuming as Desai's aversion. I have come to imagine Divakaruni as a high priestess at the South Asian Victim Olympics: she chooses the events,judges the performances, and awards the medals herself. In its brief review of Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices (I997), the New Yorker noted that "Divakaruni's prose is so pungent that it stains the page." Remarks like these help explain why so many Indian writers based in the West have succumbed to the same familiar culinary themes. To his credit, Rushdie's tales of the Indian sub-condiment are as much about colonialism as cooking. Divakaruni sets her sights firmly lower. In her story, Indians are postcolonial chickens coming home to roost-as spicy, well-barbecued tandoori.
The pitfalls of Divakaruni's approach are abundantly illustrated in a passage that comes early on in The Mistress of Spices. A Kashmiri man is explaining how he came to leave his birthplace and settle in America:
One day the fighting started, and tourists stopped coming. Rebels rode down mountain passes with machine guns and eyes like black holes in their faces, yes, into the streets of Srinagar, the name which is meaning auspicious city. I am telling father Abbajan we must leave now but grandfather said "Toba, toba, where will we go, this is the land of our ancestors."
I have yet to meet a Kashmiri who talks like this. "One day"? One day? Even US. News & World Report doesn't reduce history to such easy-to-swallow nonsense. When the reader is meant to accept pithy broken-English translations of Urdu phrases as a substitute for a discussion of extrajudicial Indian Army killings or treacherous, factionalized Kashmiri leaders, it should be obvious that the literary goods in question have been stamped, "For Export Only." What is lost when a people are cheated of the complexity of their lives, cheated of their voices?
Let's return to the novel for our answer. Divakaruni's narrator, Tilo, is an Indian spice-girl living in Oakland, California. From her grocery store, with the help of magical spices, she carries out a divine aid agency for diasporic Indians in need. And there are many of them. At one point our narrator, suffering from a rare bout of self-awareness, seems to worry about the narrow ambitions of her pedagogy of the depressed: "You must not think that only the unhappy visit my store." On the next page, however, those who are without suffering are pushed out of the frame, so that this Mother Teresa of the Bay Area may enjoy her three hundred pages in the narrative sun. "Already they are fading from my mind, already I am turning from them to the others. The ones who I need because they need me."
Tilo's desire to feel needed-which comes to sound an awful lot like a novelist's desire to overcome marginal status in her adopted homeland-is the reason why everyone is so helpless in The Mistress of Spices. A transplanted Indian offers his bitter complaint: "No one told us it would be so hard here in Amreekah, all day scrubbing greasy floors, lying under engines that drip black oil, driving the belching monster trucks that coat our lungs with tar." There is also the cabbie who has been assaulted, the battered woman in a brutal marriage, the young woman who wants to marry a nonIndian, the Punjabi boy who has joined a gang: their real need is for a novelist they can call their own in this strange land. That is the underlying myth of the novel, and, like all myths, it has a grain of truth in it.
Though I cringe at the bathos that permeates Divakaruni's account of a racist attack, and the maudlin tone that she uses to describe even the purchase of a pack of cinnamon sticks, I think her prominence is reason for optimism. Divakaruni's melodramatic stories recall the characters who animated the immigrant fiction of Israel Zangwill and Anzia Yezierska at the turn of the century. We must remind ourselves that The Mistress of Spices is a contribution to a tradition of South Asian writing in America that is still quite young. Divakaruni is unable to render the speech of immigrant Indian laborers in London or Los Angeles, but the next generation will grow up in the ghettoes (or suburbs) of England and America, and they will soon make her attempts redundant. We see it already, in the reach and assuredness of Hanif Kureishi across the Atlantic, in the recent arrival in America of Aasif Mandvi. We should be patient with writers like Divakaruni. The era of ventriloquism will soon come to an end.
In the weeks after the nuclear tests were conducted on the Indian subcontinent, one of India's most prominent writers raised her voice in protest, achieving a rare synergy of nuclear and literary fame. Arundhati Roy-who had just been awarded the Booker Prize for her remarkable debut novel, The God of Small Things (I997)-penned "The End of Imagination," an essay that was published in two leading Indian magazines and later excerpted as a cover article in the Nation. Roy wrote:
We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms we rank No. 138 out of 1 75 countries listed in the UNDP's Human Development Index. More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 6oo million lack even basic sanitation and about zoo million have no safe drinking water
A nuclear bomb isn't going to improve any of this....
If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic.
A writer, it seems, can do this. Declare that she is a nation unto herself! Perhaps even invite others; we're now open to immigration! And what about those who are not so mobile? For whom there are miles of barbed wire? Roy rightly observes that "However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people." But if Roy secedes, if our other writers secede, they leave behind the difficult task of making people understand the difference between buying books and buying guns. It's just as easy to secede as it is to make a bomb.
Roy's loyal readers will no doubt recognize the phrase "mobile republic" In The God of Small Things, she describes the one-boy communist state established by little Estha as he waits by the river for his twin sister, Rahel. "Comrade Estha was there. Under the mangosteen tree. With the red flag planted in the earth beside him. A Mobile Republic. A Twin Revolution with a Puff." In the context of Roy's anti-ultranationalist critique, "a mobile republic" suggests the child's world that is sketched so lovingly in The God of Small Things: a world of the imagination free from patriarchal violence, misogyny, and the savagery of untouchability. Roy's casual identification of political protest with childish innocence raises concerns about the origins and limits of the fantasies that serve Indian writers so well.What would it take to realize such fantasies?
The real task for Indian writers-at home or abroad-is to contemplate these thorny questions of illusion and substance, guns and books, bombs and education. Neither the writer nor the scientist can save the world by herself. Or escape it entirely. That is the plain truth of the nuclear bomb, which makes visible the limits of our fantasies of withdrawal. When it explodes, it will finish you, wherever you reside, however mobile your republic.
Of course, Arundhati Roy is hardly the only Indian who finds solace in fantasy. In Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), Pico Iyer argued that the whole country "suffers from a kind of elephantiasis of the imagination." Like Theroux, Iyer is quick to raise loquacity to a national trait, and he approvingly quotes John Russell's claim that "Indians are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers." In Iyer's opinion, India's yakkers are reflected in the loud, vulgar, masala films of Bollywood-the eight hundred or more "epic concoctions" made in India each year. Iyer writes: "When it came to the production of dreams-or gods-India had the biggest, busiest, noisiest industry in the world."
In short stories collected in Love and Longing in Bombay (1997),Vikram Chandra takes Iyer's insight to heart, inflecting his stories with the garish grandeur of Hindi films. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, makes no pretense of producing radical fiction. And in shedding the middle-class writer's impulse to speak in the voice of the underclass, he produces stories that offer a stark portrait of India's urban elite. The only drawback of this approach is that, swayed by the delusions of the ruling class, Chandra reaches laughably simplistic conclusions about history. He ends one story with the dramatic announcement that it was a marriage between two leading families that determined the flow of transnational capital and the longevity of governments in India.
Perhaps because Chandra narrates these stories from the security of the Indian bourgeoisie, they convey a confidence that is lacking in the fiction that addresses the lives of Indians living outside the national borders. In some of the better stories, like "Kama" and "Artha," one detects a refreshing quality that can only be described as contemporary. In these stories, the reader encounters a female software engineer at work, wellknown Bombay bars, a homosexual relationship, and untranslated snippets of Mehdi Hassan's popularghazals. There is a bold ordinariness to this presentation. The India of these stories is one in which neither tradition nor modernity holds unchallenged sway: its urban centers have been altered decisively by migrations and industry, slums and high finance, crime and films. The eruptions of urban speech in these tales reveal a new India that is at once more crude and more complex than anything the fabulists have been able to conjure.
Like the Hindi films that give his book its dramatic backdrop, Chandra's stories paint a world of urban glitz, heartbreaking romance, and petty intrigue. And, as in some Hindi films, this high-gloss surface is rent by explosions of fundamentalist violence. The stories attest to the citizens of today's India, who find their lives unavoidably mixed: Hindus and Muslims live as lovers, Christians and Hindus help each other as workers. Yet Chandra does not seem interested in pushing these complex relationships any further. Artists like the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan have started to dissect the conspiratorial relationship between Indian masculinity and religious fundamentalism, but Chandra barely hints at a connection. Is it because he feels that ordinary folks-as opposed to card-carrying communists-are incapable of understanding the reality that surrounds them? Amid all the talk of fundamentalist violence, why is Chandra silent about the mohala committees, the civic groups? In any case, wouldn't Chandra know from watching Hindi films that even ordinary people can become heroic?
This last notion, I'm pleased to report, has not gone entirely unnoticed in contemporary Indian literature. His teacher may have been Hollywood rather than Bollywood, but Dinesh D'Souza has nevertheless produced Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (I997)-a tome that proves garishness and grandiosity are not the sole province of Indian film. It is a thick book. There are a lot of non-Indians yakking at length on the dust jacket about the book's worth. Tom Wolfe writes, "This marvelous book will drive the intellectual establishment-the conservative cadre as well as the liberal legionsstraight up the wall. It convincingly demonstrates Ronald Reagan's moral, political and-yes! I'm afraid so!-intellectual superiority to the entire lot of them."
I bought the book, but I have not been able to finish it. I stopped reading many times, but after page forty, I found I could not go on. On that page, where my adventure with the book ended forever, D'Souza cites a poem written by Reagan-every bit as fantastical as contemporary Indian literature, but perilously underspiced-as an illustration of Reagan's "gift for hope."
I wonder what it's all about, and why We suffer so, when little things go wrong? We make our life a struggle When life should be a song.
But what of those writers who, unlike D'Souza and Naipaul and Divakaruni, do not write in English? Would the reviewer from the New Republic, heralding the new Indian "masterpieces," know any more about this other Indian literature than Macaulay knew about the whole Indian literary tradition? What is Salman Rushdie missing out on?
One example of the literature that has escaped the current boom is "Paul Gomra Ka Scooter" [Paul Gomra's scooter], by the Hindi writer Uday Prakash. The eponymous protagonist of Prakash's short story is a Hindi poet who works at a newspaper in New Delhi. Paul Gomra was born Ram Gopal Saksenaa typical Hindu name. But, the narrator informs us, as a result of "technological and social changes, globalization, information and communication revolutions, the end of socialism, and the spread of markets across the entire planet," names like Ram Gopal Saksena had begun to seem "backward, narrow-minded and lower-class." Consequently, our hero took the "pal" out of "Ram Gopal" and made it "Paul"; then, he took up the remaining "Ram Go" and turned it around to read "Gomra."With this nominal change, he joined figures-real and imagined-of cultural and political importance on the current Indian scene. "No doubt this name became one on par with the names of Apache Indian, Louis Banks, Remu Fernandez, Sam Pitroda or T. K. Banji. In fact, T. K. Banji became 'Banji' from Tushar Kanti Banerjee."
After changing his name to Paul Gomra, the former Ram Gopal Saksena does something equally momentous: he buys a scooter. This latter decision is precipitated by the fact that, all around him, people have begun to travel in new cars "with names like Maruti, Cielo, Zen, Sierra, Sumo, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and whatnot." While these people "reached new, impossible destinations," Paul Gomra felt he "was dragging behind time like a worm, a centipede, a turtle, a snail."
As it happens, the new scooter doesn't help matters any: Paul Gomra does not know how to drive it. Its gleaming skeleton begins to rot outside his apartment. Finally, Paul finds a man who is able to drive the scooter to work; he accompanies the man as a rider. In the hours that he must wait each night for this man's work to end so he can catch a ride home, Paul Gomra rediscovers his passion for poetry. One night, he goes to a glamorous literary event in New Delhi. The reader gets only a muddled, secondhand account of the evening's events: we hear that Gomra drunkenly berated the assembled guests for their worship of officialdom; he gave them a lecture on the scooter as a revolutionary tool; he fulminated against Delhi; he said the countryside had not vanished. "Dinosaurs become extinct," Paul seems to have shouted. "The ant survives, you thieves! Delhi will become history, but Gurgaon will remain alive." On the ride back home, Paul Gomra and his friend met with a mysterious accident. Hours later, they are found and admitted to a hospital, but Paul Gomra disappears three days later. We hear of a deranged highway poet who has taken up a pre-Independence slogan: "Quit India!" But already, his memory has begun to vanish; all that's left are twisted remains of Paul Gomra's scooter and the yellowing diary pages locked inside the scooter's trunk. On the last page, dated August I5, I995-the date when India celebrates its independence each yearare the words of Paul Gomra's last poem:
Paul Gomra, the deranged poet of the highway, the specter that now haunts the roots and the routes of the Indian nation, is a kind of travel writer, an elegiac wanderer who mourns lives that have been lost. Paul Gomra's angry voice arises from his impossible identity: he belongs neither to the old world he has left with his new name, nor to the new world that he cannot quite reach on his scooter. You might say Ram Gopal Saksena is the archetypal postcolonial: with wit and some sadness, but with his eyes fully open, he changes his name. He has the courage to step into a new world that has no place for him. Ram Gopal Saksena knows he cannot last, even as Paul Gomra. Prakash's story is a fable about survival amid the forces that have legislated extinction for all. Paul Gomra-like his creator, Uday Prakash, or like Sir Vidia himselfknows very well that he will not be liked any better if he stops yakking.
In the early days of I989, I was a new doctoral student in Minnesota. Although I had already spent three or four months in Minneapolis, it was still an unfamiliar city, snowy and often bitterly cold.
I was living in a small attic apartment-through the sloping roof close above my head, I heard the scurrying of animal feet as I slept-and I would come down at rigidly prescribed hours to cook my meals. My landlady, who allowed me the use of her kitchen, was a recently divorced woman in her fifties. She lived alone, playing the piano and drinking martinis at night, and I was struck by the fact that she never ate the green olives she put in her drink. Before I moved to Minnesota, I had never seen an olive. Now, each morning, there were two or three plump olives lying discarded in the kitchen sink. On Saturdays, a Native American woman would come to clean the house. I cleaned my room myself, and I was permitted to do my laundry in the basement on weekdays.
One evening, I descended from the attic to cook supper after my landlady had eaten, as was my custom: rice and Progresso lentil soup, disguised with a few basic spices to taste a bit like dal.When I sat down at the kitchen table, I saw that the landlady-I had not thought of her until now, but I believe her name was Meg-had left the day's New York Times open for me, with a blue arrow pointing to an article. The headline read: "Street Dramatist in India Slain over Play." The story began: "A leftist who was one of India's most popular street theater directors was beaten to death by thugs last weekend after he refused a politician's demand to stop a drama in support of an opposing candidate, witnesses said."
The slain theater activist's name was Safdar Hashmi. I had watched his plays with great interest in India, before I came to this country; in the two years prior to his death, I had written poems in which I hoped to emulate the didacticism and wit that were the hallmark of Hashmi's plays. I sat looking at the Times' photograph of his corpse. Around him, illuminated by the light of the Delhi morning, stood many progressive intellectuals whose faces I recognized. Since my arrival in the U.S., I do not think I have ever felt as alone as I did that evening, in my landlady's kitchen.
I will not claim that Safdar was a friend of mine, although I had exchanged greetings with him at the bus stop, or at his street performances at Delhi University. He had an easy charm and a handsome face, and his talent was legendary. He was thirteen years older than me, and he was my mentor. Even in Minnesota, in a brief obituary, I caught a glimpse of what had made him so inspiring: "Mr. Hashmi was popular for brief, biting satires that made fun of corrupt politicians, policemen and businessmen, which drew laughter and cheers from large audiences of industrial workers.... His plays ... moved from the propagandist dramas of the early I970s to subtler themes." A month later that year, Khomeini placed the fatwa on Salman Rushdie's head, and I could only think of Safdar being bludgeoned to death on a road in Sahibabad outside Delhi. He was thirty-four years oldeven in my shock, I noticed that the Times reporter had got his age wrongand now he was dead.
Safdar's killing unleashed a wave of grief and rage in India. The funeral procession was a nine-mile-long serpent of artists, workers, students-people from every fragment of a fragmented nation. The play that had been interrupted by his murder was performed on the first anniversary of his death in towns and cities throughout India. Safdar's wife, Moloyashree, was also a member of Jan Natya Manch, Safdar's theater troupe; she told a Hindi newspaper: "I am frequently being asked what I think is the meaning of Safdar's not being any more. It seems to me that my loss is not very different from the loss that is Jan Natya Manch's and the Centre for Indian Trade Unions's. That emptiness is mine too. Apart from that, the private pain that is that of a friend, and of a wife-that is something I do not want to share with everyone.
In I997, Qamar Azad Hashmi published The Fifth Flame, an account of the life of her murdered son. The book is a translation of her memoirs, originally published two years earlier in Hindi as Paanchwa Chiraag. Its epigraph reads: "Four flames eternal burn at the shrine / I've come to set the fifth alight." Hashmi sees signs of hope in the dramatist's career; like Moloyashree, she casts Safdar's death as everyone's loss. Hashmi offers only rudimentary details about Safdar's private world. Instead, the reader encounters the disjunctive world of India after partition, and the extraordinary struggle of a remarkable family committed to both communism and Islam. Later in the book, Safdar's own voice emerges in excerpts from letters he wrote to his mother; Safdar expresses his anxiety about his dying father and ailing sister, and he worries about his constant struggle to find satisfaction in his work.
Hashmi's narrative is more instructive than engaging. The reader will search in vain for Arundhati Roy's stunning architecture of time and prose; for the slick, dramatic dialogue of Vikram Chandra's stories; for Kiran Desai's irresistable monkeys; for the sensuous intertwining of narrative lines that enlivens the writing of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. But nonetheless, the unaffected humanity of Qamar Hashmi's story reminded me of the very ordinary ways in which a sense of decency and a will to struggle are instilled in families throughout India and beyond. The Fifth Flame is a testament to the things that children learn from the thwarted ambitions of their fathers and from the resourcefulness and persistence of their mothers.
Reading the book from the distance of a migrant's self-imposed isolation, I found that The Fifth Flame also made me nostalgic: not for a return to the mythical land of my birth and my people, but for a return to the social and political organizations that help literature transcend fantasy. Safdar Hashmi received his mail at the offices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) at Vithalbhai Patel House; most Indian writers currently discussed in the West have addresses at the creative writing programs of American universities. Safdar thought of theater as something that "brings people closer to fighting organizations." Will the West's favorite Indian writers ever find institutions that can mobilize the South Asian community in America? Will the AFL-CIO come looking for immigrant scribes to write about those who toil as cabdrivers, nannies, garment workers, and noncontract laborers? "Hashmi's triumph," one journalist wrote after his death, "was that he reached the people. Perhaps that is the one sin the political hoodlum will not forgive in an intellectual."
When will Safdar Hashmi come to America?
Last summer, I watched Farhad Asghar perform at the Papp Public Theater with South Asian youth from Elmhurst, Queens. Asghar's skit was about the Number Seven Train in NewYork City, a train that "starts out in Flushing, Queens, a very Asian community, picking up more Asians and other people of color along the way... My trips on the train," Asghar says, "showed . . . me how the city was segregated." In "The Seven Right before Seven," Asghar treats us to a kind of travel narrative that is strikingly different from Paul Theroux's concoctions:
We stand here waiting for a train to take us somewhere where we can make someone else rich, the physical manifestation of the Marxist argument. I see brown, yellow, black and even a little white . . . waiting . for this metaphorical train to take us into the fulfillment of the American dream.... Knowing all too well we'll just be coming back nine, twelve, sixteen hours later, too tired to dream at all.
In words like these, literature that has its history in the Indian subcontinent comes into its own, even when describing something as alien to those distant origins as the New York City subway. Unlike so much Indian writing in the West, "The Seven Right before Seven" asserts its links with the Safdar Hashmis and Paul Gomras of the Indian subcontinent-both murdered on the highway, going somewhere else.
I've been told that in postcolonial writing, as in real estate, location is everything. In both cases, the aphorism holds true, but only insofar as your location determines your neighbors. It's not so much whether you are writing in New Delhi or New York; it's for whom and with whom you are writing that truly matters. One of my favorite parts of Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow was an account of Naipaul talking about himself and his brother, the late Shiva Naipaul:
If we were addressing audiences of people like ourselves, we would have been different writers. I am always aware of writing in a vacuum, almost always for myself, and almost not having an audience. That wonderful relationship that I felt an American writer would always have with his American readers, or a French writer with his French readers-I was always writing for people who were indifferent to my material.
Ah, readers . . to think that a literate critical mass could have saved us from the truth of those words, however disingenuous they may be. To think that an audience of "people like ourselves" could have made Theroux's easy disdain for yakking Indians so much more superfluous! Perhaps only an audience of "ourselves" can relieve us from the shopworn mannerisms-and from the desperate yearning for authenticity-that characterizes so much of what passes for Indian writing in the West.
