Over 100 writers from India and the diaspora come together in an anthology to celebrate India at 75

The organisation that promotes freedom of expression through the confluence of literature and human rights had reached out to authors in India and from the Indian diaspora to write short texts expressing their thoughts on India on the country’s 75th anniversary. More than 100 authors, including this year’s International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree, Gyan Prakash, Nayantara Sahgal, Romila Thapar, Rajmohan Gandhi, Ganesh Devy, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Amit Chaudhuri, Akshaye Mukul, Raghu Karnad and others, came forward to contribute to the project. Besides Rushdie, who, incidentally, is recovering from a recent life-threatening attack on him in western New York, other diasporic writers who are part of the anthology include Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Suketu Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Vijay Seshadri, Sujatha Gidla, Preti Taneja and Karthika Naïr. Young poets and writers such as Akhil Katyal, Aanchal Malhotra, Yashica Dutt, too, are part of the anthology.

Jhumpa Lahiri (Express Archives)

“Authors who were born in British India responded, as did India’s Midnight’s Children and grandchildren. Authors from around the globe sent us their thoughts, as did authors from India’s many languages, communities, faiths and castes. Some voices are optimistic, some prayerful, some anguished and enraged. Some suggest defeat, others venture hope, still others are defiant. The authors hold a spectrum of political views, and may be in disagreement about much else, but they are united in their concern for the state of Indian democracy,” the introduction to the anthology notes.

“…The country I was born in was a country torn asunder, it’s true, but growing up in it, I felt — even very young, very immature — a sense of its difference from other countries. It was a bold experiment, an exercise in democracy and nation-building that was grounded in principles that, politically speaking, were certainly quite new: non-violent co-existence; non-alignment; non-communal; egalitarian; plural in a still semi-feudal society. In hindsight, it strikes me that perhaps that was a “womanist” way of defining oneself and one’s place in the world. Accommodative, not maximalist. What worries me about the hyper-masculinism that now holds sway, is that it conceals a deep insecurity. My country now has such a diminished sense of itself that it is ill at ease with a capacious and confident embracing of difference. Fueled by testosterone it demands compliance with cast-iron definitions of self and other, flexing its muscles against anyone who deplores and decries this puny redefinition of itself. I had thought we would grow old gracefully together, my country and I. Instead I worry that the India I will die in might become the kind of country I may not want to be born in,” writes Delhi-based feminist publisher and writer, Ritu Menon, Delhi-based feminist publisher and writer.

Anita Desai (Express Archives)

Dharwad-based literary critic Ganesh Devy, known for his People’s Linguistic Survey of India, writes, “The mass-psychology of fascism thinks of intimidation of a few as a weapon for keeping the masses tethered to an ideology of hatred. Love is a word scary for it. It is quick to equate it with a jihad, for in hatred does fascism take birth and in hatred does it thrive. Can we allow it to overtake the Indian Constitution and India’s Federalism? All of us have to act, act in unity, act with courage, and safeguard the diversities and the federal structure of our country which is unambiguously defined in the Constitution as ‘a Union of States.’ The freedom of expression is the essence of the ecosystem that keeps courage alive. We have to protect that freedom as a primary freedom of all citizens.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Indian origin, Jhumpa Lahiri, notes how India’s plurality has always served as her introduction to the country her Bengali parents had left behind to make a home first in the UK and then in the US. “Because I was born and raised outside of India, India, in its absence, took on even greater significance in my mind. I grew up with parents who, in missing India, sought out other Indians, and so my notion of an Indian community was always diverse.

Poet Akhil Katyal (Express Archives)

When they invited other Indian families to our home, in the small Rhode Island town where I was raised, I realised that India was an elastic container of individuals who spoke, ate, dressed, and prayed in different ways. These differences did not “enrich” an otherwise homogeneous India; they were India. In that sense, India seemed light years ahead of the United States, which was a melting pot in name but alienating and provincial in practice, at least from my perspective. Visits to Kolkata, a city that, as my mother liked to point out, welcomed all of India’s populations, only confirmed my perception that India’s relationship with The Other was built into its very fabric. The plurilingual aspect of India, in particular, both inspired and consoled me, for it insisted on the need for ongoing communication and translation. The co-existence of more than one language generates curiosity, calls for interpretation, and subverts any notion of absolute power. Unravel certain threads, or snip some strands away, and the conversation is lost; we are left with a frayed society, with imposed silence, with banal and baleful notions of nationhood,” she writes in the anthology.

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