Poet and essayist Adil Jussawala has won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2014 for English for his book of poems, Trying To Say Goodbye. The book is only his third collection in 50 years of writing, and his first in 36 years. One of the poems:
Highrises
Birds speeding past our balconies
as if they meant to land a message
on them, but missed, always missed,
continue showing off their skills
well in view, as if to tell us
we got the metaphor wrong,
that, though flight and height is what
they taught us groundlings to envy —
whole tribes of us high on firm wings now —
such frozen bird’s-eye views,
such fear between the wing-tips
is not what they meant.
To commemorate the award ,we republish an essay by Jussawalla:
What's this? A two-nation theory for Indian writing?
There’s a strong rumour about, so strong that some of us are beginning to believe it. It was started by Bill Buford, editor of Granta, who is supposed to have said in a New Yorker issue on India that most Indians who write in English don’t live in India. Significantly more than those who live in India, Mr Buford? Well, he might say, there’s that group photograph of them in London to prove it. It appeared in the New Yorker.
Not having seen the photograph, I must guess the number of ‘gone-away’ writers it frames. Ten, at most fifteen? In fifty years of independence, is that the sum total of almost all Indian writers in English?
It takes me back thirty-seven years, to my first year in Oxford when I tried to convince a fellow undergraduate, a white South African, that there was much more to Indian literature than the works of Tagore. He was sceptical. ‘Why don’t you believe me?’ I asked him. ‘Because,’ he replied gravely, ‘if there was much more, we’d have heard about it.’
‘We in South Africa or we in Great Britain?’ I should have asked Jeremy. But I was speechless.
The blindness was staggering, and going by Buford’s supposed remark, the blindness continues. Paradoxically, it’s a blindness linked to vision, or one vision. Believe only what you see is how that particular vision goes. What you don’t see, doesn’t exist. So when I was an undergraduate in England, if someone who wasn’t an Indian had told me that Tagore was the most visible of Indian writers, I’d have agreed. Similarly, if Buford had only said that Indian writers who live outside India, particularly in Britain, the US and Canada, are the most visible writers, we’d have had little to argue with him about.
Can an editor of Buford’s stature seriously expect to judge a nation’s literature almost solely by the writing being done outside that nation? Would he have taken that attitude to the literatures of Africa or Ireland? Both those parts of the world have seen many of their writers go away and live in other parts of the world. Plain common sense should tell us that despite such a situation, a great many poems, plays, novels and short stories are still being written in Africa and Ireland. And if common sense doesn’t tell us that, any good anthology of writing from those parts of the world will.
But, as usual, when it comes to India, common sense gives way to nonsense, insight to ignorance. For some, Indian writers living abroad have become beacons of light, those who live in India, with every few exceptions, will remain unlit and unlightable, each in an area of darkness.
Is there a new two-nation theory in the making—one language, two nations? Preparing for the eventual Partition, should we already start calling the nations Home and Abroad?
Praise is a new phenomenon, as anyone who has followed the West’s critical indifference to Indian writing in English knows. It’s only post-1981, post-Midnight’s Children that the critics—some critics—started sitting up and taking notice.
From ‘Indian’s can’t write in English’ we became ‘the best writers of English prose’. From ‘Indians lack a sense of humour’ we became ‘the people who write the best comic prose in English today’. (I read this or words to that effect in an issue of The Times Literary Supplement two years ago.) The shift of attitude was so sudden, it seemed it happened overnight.
Naturally there’s been a backlash. Some British writers and critics feel we should be put in our place. That is, we should write only about the place we come from. We shouldn’t mess with things British. We don’t know enough about those things or the deep traditions they spring from. Like Chinese take-aways in Birmingham, I suppose. And beautiful laundrettes.
But the backlash will pass, as will the present euphoria. One notable point: even before the dawn of our fiftieth anniversary of independence or our latest stroke of midnight (‘stroke’ having come to mean that we have the symptoms of never having recovered from one), nine collections of Indian writing and of writing on India are out. They come from London and New York—special issues of Granta, Ambit, Acumen, Lines Review, The Financial Times, Times Literary Magazine, London Magazine, New Yorker, and, of course, the notorious anthology edited by Rushdie and Elizabeth West. Given our celebratory year you mightn’t think this unusual, but it is. Publishers and editors of literary journals in Britain and America almost always follow a simple rule. Get interested in the literature of a foreign country only if democracy in that country is under threat or when writers in that country work under conditions of extreme censorship. So the Pasternak affair led to an interest in Russian ‘dissident’ writing, Cuban writing got special treatment soon after Castro’s takeover, the interest in Central and East European writing was at its height when those countries were under Communist rule.
I think this must be the first time in the last fifty years, perhaps in this century, that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have joined hands to mark a foreign country’s celebration of democracy and not its threatened or real extinction. That’s something to think about.
One more thought before the last one. I worked on an anthology of Indian writing for more than five years. It was published by Penguin in 1974 and was called New Writing in India. Unlike Rushdie’s and West’s anthology, it contains a large amount of work by Indian language writers translated into English. Having some knowledge of that field, I found Rushdie’s statement—that the editors found little of worth in Indian-language writing to include in their opus—to be hasty and ill-informed.
And the last thought: soon it’ll be Sri Lanka’s turn to celebrate fifty years of independence. I propose that the year 2000 see at least one anthology of writing from South Asia, not just Sri Lanka, consisting only of work translated into English or originally in English, done by writers who haven’t gone away. If that happens, some people on both sides of the Atlantic might be very surprised.
Excerpted with permission from Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments: Selected Prose by Adil Jussawala, Edited and Introduced by Jerry Pinto, published by Aleph Book Company.
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Highrises
Birds speeding past our balconies
as if they meant to land a message
on them, but missed, always missed,
continue showing off their skills
well in view, as if to tell us
we got the metaphor wrong,
that, though flight and height is what
they taught us groundlings to envy —
whole tribes of us high on firm wings now —
such frozen bird’s-eye views,
such fear between the wing-tips
is not what they meant.
To commemorate the award ,we republish an essay by Jussawalla:
What's this? A two-nation theory for Indian writing?
There’s a strong rumour about, so strong that some of us are beginning to believe it. It was started by Bill Buford, editor of Granta, who is supposed to have said in a New Yorker issue on India that most Indians who write in English don’t live in India. Significantly more than those who live in India, Mr Buford? Well, he might say, there’s that group photograph of them in London to prove it. It appeared in the New Yorker.
Not having seen the photograph, I must guess the number of ‘gone-away’ writers it frames. Ten, at most fifteen? In fifty years of independence, is that the sum total of almost all Indian writers in English?
It takes me back thirty-seven years, to my first year in Oxford when I tried to convince a fellow undergraduate, a white South African, that there was much more to Indian literature than the works of Tagore. He was sceptical. ‘Why don’t you believe me?’ I asked him. ‘Because,’ he replied gravely, ‘if there was much more, we’d have heard about it.’
‘We in South Africa or we in Great Britain?’ I should have asked Jeremy. But I was speechless.
The blindness was staggering, and going by Buford’s supposed remark, the blindness continues. Paradoxically, it’s a blindness linked to vision, or one vision. Believe only what you see is how that particular vision goes. What you don’t see, doesn’t exist. So when I was an undergraduate in England, if someone who wasn’t an Indian had told me that Tagore was the most visible of Indian writers, I’d have agreed. Similarly, if Buford had only said that Indian writers who live outside India, particularly in Britain, the US and Canada, are the most visible writers, we’d have had little to argue with him about.
Can an editor of Buford’s stature seriously expect to judge a nation’s literature almost solely by the writing being done outside that nation? Would he have taken that attitude to the literatures of Africa or Ireland? Both those parts of the world have seen many of their writers go away and live in other parts of the world. Plain common sense should tell us that despite such a situation, a great many poems, plays, novels and short stories are still being written in Africa and Ireland. And if common sense doesn’t tell us that, any good anthology of writing from those parts of the world will.
But, as usual, when it comes to India, common sense gives way to nonsense, insight to ignorance. For some, Indian writers living abroad have become beacons of light, those who live in India, with every few exceptions, will remain unlit and unlightable, each in an area of darkness.
Is there a new two-nation theory in the making—one language, two nations? Preparing for the eventual Partition, should we already start calling the nations Home and Abroad?
Praise is a new phenomenon, as anyone who has followed the West’s critical indifference to Indian writing in English knows. It’s only post-1981, post-Midnight’s Children that the critics—some critics—started sitting up and taking notice.
From ‘Indian’s can’t write in English’ we became ‘the best writers of English prose’. From ‘Indians lack a sense of humour’ we became ‘the people who write the best comic prose in English today’. (I read this or words to that effect in an issue of The Times Literary Supplement two years ago.) The shift of attitude was so sudden, it seemed it happened overnight.
Naturally there’s been a backlash. Some British writers and critics feel we should be put in our place. That is, we should write only about the place we come from. We shouldn’t mess with things British. We don’t know enough about those things or the deep traditions they spring from. Like Chinese take-aways in Birmingham, I suppose. And beautiful laundrettes.
But the backlash will pass, as will the present euphoria. One notable point: even before the dawn of our fiftieth anniversary of independence or our latest stroke of midnight (‘stroke’ having come to mean that we have the symptoms of never having recovered from one), nine collections of Indian writing and of writing on India are out. They come from London and New York—special issues of Granta, Ambit, Acumen, Lines Review, The Financial Times, Times Literary Magazine, London Magazine, New Yorker, and, of course, the notorious anthology edited by Rushdie and Elizabeth West. Given our celebratory year you mightn’t think this unusual, but it is. Publishers and editors of literary journals in Britain and America almost always follow a simple rule. Get interested in the literature of a foreign country only if democracy in that country is under threat or when writers in that country work under conditions of extreme censorship. So the Pasternak affair led to an interest in Russian ‘dissident’ writing, Cuban writing got special treatment soon after Castro’s takeover, the interest in Central and East European writing was at its height when those countries were under Communist rule.
I think this must be the first time in the last fifty years, perhaps in this century, that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have joined hands to mark a foreign country’s celebration of democracy and not its threatened or real extinction. That’s something to think about.
One more thought before the last one. I worked on an anthology of Indian writing for more than five years. It was published by Penguin in 1974 and was called New Writing in India. Unlike Rushdie’s and West’s anthology, it contains a large amount of work by Indian language writers translated into English. Having some knowledge of that field, I found Rushdie’s statement—that the editors found little of worth in Indian-language writing to include in their opus—to be hasty and ill-informed.
And the last thought: soon it’ll be Sri Lanka’s turn to celebrate fifty years of independence. I propose that the year 2000 see at least one anthology of writing from South Asia, not just Sri Lanka, consisting only of work translated into English or originally in English, done by writers who haven’t gone away. If that happens, some people on both sides of the Atlantic might be very surprised.
Excerpted with permission from Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments: Selected Prose by Adil Jussawala, Edited and Introduced by Jerry Pinto, published by Aleph Book Company.
