My latest column for the Hindustan Times is on the literature of small towns.
Politicians offer propaganda in a loud voice. Ditto for pundits. I love the small voice of literature. As Joan Didion said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The writing about small towns or about provincial life is appealing because it too brings the gift of small particularities. RK Narayan built his entire career around it. However, a cultivation of quaintness in his fiction kept me at a distance. Then the kaleidoscope turned and, at least for me, the picture changed with Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, a wildly comic account of a metropolitan Indian, a young bureaucrat, in a mofussil town. And the language! The staidness of colonial English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by an irreverent writer for whom there were no sacred cows.
A few years passed and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy landed with a suitable thud, a grand achievement and not only for its portrait of life in the provinces. Set in a town in Uttar Pradesh, it spoke in a voice that possessed all the nearness and transparency of a novel written in Hindustani. In its pages, English no longer sounded as a sociolect designed to set the elite apart from the unwashed masses.