In 1974, an anthology of recent Indian writing appeared from England, under the imprint of Penguin Books. Modestly titled, New Writing in India, it was edited by the Indian English poet Adil Jussawalla. New Writing in India continues to be a landmark, showcasing some of the best writers from Indian languages from the 1960s and early ’70s. It is to the credit of the critical sensibility of Adil Jussawalla that most of the writers he had chosen to represent in the volume with short stories, poems or extracts from novels such as N Pichamurti, Dhoomil, OV Vijayan, Bhalchandra Nemade, P Lankesh, Suresh Joshi, Nirmal Verma, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Ravji Patel and Sunil Gangopadhyay went on to become established Indian writers in the subsequent decades.
An anthology with foresight
OV Vijayan was represented by an extract from his novel, Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969) which had attained cult status in Malayalam. It caught the attention of David Davidar who was the commissioning editor of the newly launched Penguin India. In the next two decades, three major novels and a large number of stories by Vijayan appeared in English, in his own translation, from Penguin Books. Along with him, Arun Kolatkar and Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh have emerged as major Indian writers of the 20th century.
In its 50 years of existence, we haven’t had many worthy successors to this path-breaking anthology. Adil Jusswalla had taken pains to locate the best talents in Indian writing, most of whom were not known outside their own languages. In the post-Nehru decades, Indian society was in ferment, buffeted by stormy winds of social change and political revolt. The avant-garde writing that had taken root in most of the major Indian languages, questioned the prevailing norms of reading and writing. The rise of the little magazine movement and innovative experiments in theatre, followed by the emergence of free verse, modernist fiction, and the New Wave cinema constituted the ethos of a counter-culture in the making.
The youth were impatient and turned away from the prescriptive traditions of social realism and romantic idealism. Language took on a new reality, as it constituted the only refuge for a generation of writers who had lost their faith in ideologies. In his lucid introduction to the anthology, which avoided critical jargon of all kinds, Jussawalla wrote: notwithstanding the poverty, hunger and disease in the country, “the Western reader will be surprised that most Indian writers still do not propose any kind of social or political commitment, or advocate action that might effectively transform a system which continues to let poverty and its associate evils persist; they are concerned with style and form”. His selections were dictated by the innate worth of the new writing that had appeared in the decade before. The title echoed the dictum of Ezra Pound, “Make it New” and the newness of expression and thought was what guided the choices of Jussawalla. He also notes that mainstream American and British authors have ceased to interest Indian readers: “the most potent foreign influences on Indian writing today are Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Sartre”.
The Indian reality
Jussawalla flagged some of the misconceptions about Indian writing which made it difficult for Western readers to penetrate its veil of strangeness. The stereotypes about Indian writing that it was otherworldly, metaphysical, full of wisdom and love, were no longer sustainable. Nor was the view that India was all about poverty, overcrowding, and violence. What is notable is that Indian writers have used forms and concepts derived from Western literature, on their own terms, to interpret the complex Indian reality.
It was not easy for the Indian writer to break with the 2,000-year-old written traditions. He cites the example of Ravji Patel who used oral poetry and folk rhythms to speak of experiences which were personal and existential. To subvert tradition, it was necessary to walk the tightrope between the past and present. In most cases, the writers had cast the baggage of tradition behind, to reinvent forms, as in Shrikant Verma or Badal Sircar. From the plain language of Shanmuga Subbiah’s poems in Tamil to Dhoomil’s caustic sarcasm and irony in Hindi, the new Indian writing had very little to do with “Indian” traditions. In an insightful comment which still rings true, Jussawalla wrote: “An analysis of contemporary Indian writing shows several pan-Indian similarities, and it is these which may hold the key to what is Indian about Indian writing (in Indian languages and English) rather than claims of a shared three-thousand-year-old Hindu tradition which some Indian critics tend to make”. He chose to disregard the language-wise ordering of Indian writers, as he felt that the Indian authors themselves would not have liked such an arrangement.
In 1997, Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West edited a volume of Indian writing on the completion of 50 years of Indian independence titled Mirror Work: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997 (Picador) which had hardly any Indian writers from Indian languages except Sadat Hasan Manto and Satyajit Ray. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Kiran Desai, the who’s who of Indian English writing was represented in that anthology. In his introduction, Rushdie made the controversial observation that prose writing produced in English by Indian writers during this phase was “stronger and more important” than what has been produced in the “so-called vernacular languages” of India. One may contrast this with Jussawalla’s comment that “the number of truly original writers in English (in India) is smaller than a hundred years of an English-language based education would lead one to expect”. The Indian English writers included here are Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, LP Bantleman, Kamala Das and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
Jussawalla roped in some of the best translators he could find, such as AK Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vilas Sarang, Anil Dharkar, OV Vijayan, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar, most of whom were bilingual writers. He also collaborated with several contributors crossing the language boundaries. It is the quality of translations that makes this anthology still a pleasure to read. Since the authors are represented by some of their best works, it still serves as an introduction to a very creative phase of modern Indian writing in the post-colonial period.
The three-part division of the volume tried to bring into focus, the political, social and cultural history of the sub-continent. Works dealing with the Partition and the wars with China and Pakistan, writing that reflects the changing social structure of India and the contemporary writings of a more subjective kind, brought out the range of concerns and issues that the complex Indian society had been preoccupied with. He found that images and metaphors of dismemberment and dislocation predominate in these works, mainly because of the legacy of violence beginning with communal and caste conflicts. The contradictions and paradoxes Indian writers had to synthesise in their writings were much more varied and heterogeneous. He admits that given the fact that no Indian can claim to have mastered all the major Indian languages, any view we develop on Indian writing through our limited reading is bound to be fragmentary and limited.
Jussawalla felt that the modernist avant-garde writing in Indian languages reflects “the Indian petty bourgeoisie’s present inability to find a dynamic role for itself in a society which was transforming itself from semi-feudalist to the capitalist”. The defeatist and morbid elements of contemporary Indian writing of the 60s and 70s, do not lead him to take a bleak view of their inner worth. He is emphatic about the vigour and inner vibrancy of much of Indian writing and adds that “there is a determined breaking of shibboleths, a bold experimenting with forms, a sincere desire to expose social evils and a conscious attempt to rework traditional myths and symbols in modern context”. I cannot think of a more sympathetic evaluation of modernist Indian writing from a poet-critic seeped in Western sensibility.
What makes this an exceptional anthology of Indian writing is the refined critical sensibility that is at work in its choice of works, the care with which they were translated and the thoughtful introduction which contextualised these works. It stands out as one of the more creative efforts to embody the richness of the inner worlds of Indian authors.
Among the books which celebrated a hundred years of their existence in 2024 were A Passage to India by EM Forster and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex figure among the books that were published 75 years ago. In Malayalam, a volume of essays was brought out to mark the 50th year of a long poem titled “Bengal” by KG Subramanyan, which heralded a radical avant-garde sensibility. My Story by Kamala Das may have lost its initial shock value, but its critique of patriarchal hegemony in family and society still rings true. I would like to add to this list of creditable works of 1974 this significant anthology of modern Indian literature, New Writing in India edited by Adil Jussawalla.
EV Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has published poetry in English and criticism in Malayalam and English. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2023 for his critical work in Malayalam.
