A couple of days back I finished the latest from Chetan Bhagat - Three Mistakes of My Life and since then I was inclined to write some thing about the Indian Authors who wrote their knowledge, experience and fantasy in English not only for themselves ( these books are big money spinners ) but also for us. Here let me emphasise that the word "us" does not have simple connotation. It reflects those Indians who are now integrated with almost each of the English speaking developed countries of western world. This integration helps the Indian authors in finding global readership which helps in spreading the Indian cultural ethos around the world.
To most of us it seems that this phenomenon of world wide publicity of Indian authors and their work has been started by the likes of Salmaan Rushdie and Vikram Seth and which got further fillip from the Likes of V S Naipaul and Arundhati Roy but the global recognition of Indian literary work has started much earlier and the pioneer of this was Rabindranath Thakur ( Britisher changed his name to Tagore due to difficulty in pronunciation ). His famous work
Gitanjali helped India to earn its first Nobel Prize in literature. To those who do not know -Gitanjali is a collection of 103 English poems translated from Bengali by Tagore. In poetic form it is an anthropomorphic depiction of celestial love which is quite common in Vaishnav literature since 12th century though Gitanjali itself was composed in the earlier part of 20th century. The fact that this work received widespread applause from western countries( an exhilarating preface of Gitanjali was written by W B Yeats) hints that mental and spiritual frequency of 20th century Europe was in resonance with Indian thoughts and believes of 12th century.This indicates that the global influence of Indian literature has its traces at least 800 years back in time if not earlier.
At this point of time it is important to classify the authores in two different categories - those who are Indian born and those who are not. This classification may sound bizarre but there is a very important point that I would like to make about it. Foreign authors who have written about India are not capable of transferring the Indian culture in its totallity to the global audience. For example take the case of Dominique Lapierres' exemplary work - The City of Joy. The award winning book has been based upon the tragic life of a poor farmer who struggles to make his ends meet in the imperial city of Calcutta. Although the book has been really well written but it just gives an account from a white persons' point of view which fails to understand the subtleties of Indian way of life. Similar is the case with the authors like Rudyard Kipling and Lord Mayo. On the other hand Indian writers - by virtue of being Indian - carry with them the essence of Indian culture through out their work.
But this all has started changing since the later part of 20th century. The Integration of Indian society with American and European society due to migration of people and revolution in information technology has affected the Indian culture in the most profound way. It is becoming increasingly difficult to separate Indian and western culture.Now a days the works of Indian authors are either based outside the country or if they are based here then they offer an outsiders look. All the famous work are related to the world wide phenomenon like 9/11, Islamic fanaticism, Globalisation and Economic liberalisation, Human rights and Intellectual property.
In such a scenario being an author who tries to differentiate the Indian culture from western and which caters to this self defined followers of Indian culture is a difficult task but It seems as if Chetan Bhagat takes fun in doing this. He is the only author who's work is directed to the Indian middle class and any person of different nationality will find himself/herself out of touch with it. Unlike the works of famous writers like Naipaul and Seth, readership of Bhagat seldom crosses the Indian boundary but still they are huge success. Even Bollywood finds them attractive. Note that this is different from other works which were imitated in Bollywood in the sense that they were written mostly in the regional languages. It seems that Bhagat has successfully found the nerve of Indian middle class -who are Indian in looks but Western in every other sense - in a classic Indian way. Only time will tell that in which direction will the works of Chetan go after three huge successes but one thing is certain that the Indian readership is going to stay here and for an author who wants to establish himself/herself in it must take a clue or two from Chetan's work.
Labels: Literature
