Indian Pied Pipers

Another Indian spring is upon us as Midnight8217;s children bask in the literary spotlight on the eve of the new millennium. Indeed, bookstore window displays around the world this April will splash one Indian writer after another: Salman Rushdie with his high-decibel, rocking 8216;n8217; rolling The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vikram Seth with his somewhat more restrained An Equal Music, Raj Kamal Jha with his darkly meditative The Blue Bedspread. And this by no means will end the jostling for centrestage as the subcontinental pack gets set to beguile readers from Jamaica to Japan, and everywhere else in between, with the lushness and novelty of their storytelling. Indeed, Indian writing in English was deemed to have come of age when the New Yorker acknowledged this churning in global literature and sought to frame the who8217;s who of this new genre in a now famous photograph. It is instructive that two years down the line 8212; a lifetime in Indian public life 8212; that picture seems somewhat sepia-tinted,for the cast has multiplied considerably.

Wherein lies the charm of these Pied Pipers of our fast-changing world? The western literary establishment8217;s tendency towards exotica 8212; the flavour of the decade, as it were 8212; is routinely offered as an explanation. Just as it was Eastern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America in the 1980s, goes the oft-repeated argument, so it is India in the the 1990s. Hence the prophecy chimed like a faithful grandfather clock after every acclaimed tome: this is a passing phase. But India8217;s millennium hopefuls needn8217;t despair. As ever, Rushdie provides a clue. As his narrator in The Ground Beneath Her Feet confesses: quot;The only leaps of faith I8217;m capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don8217;t pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth.quot; With cyberia blurring old certainties, the promised benefits of the scientific age delivering a bewildering maze of conundrums, and redrawn trade barriers and dwindling ideologies mishmashing securenational and religious identities, fin de siecle discomfiture is more than palpable. Facts are no longer what they used to be and are more easily found in fiction.

And who better to chronicle this terra infirma 8212; and offer dual citizenship in a more enduring republic 8212; than a tribe which has never really enjoyed the benefits of single identities and the certainties taken for granted in the developed world. Indian writing in English is by definition an eclectic mix of diverse influences and accents, unconstrained by anything as weighing down as a literary tradition; a skillful weaver of words and ideas enjoys the unfettered freedom to invert, to pervert, to subvert the givens and evolve his own grammar. Therein lies the USP, as too a career hazard. A careful scrutiny of the novels that have left an impress makes it amply clear that each has surpassed everything before in some measure, whether it be style, structure or usage. Therein also lies the future of Indian writing in English: as long it keepsevolving and capsuling truths in ever more fanciful flights of imagination, it will endure and continue to transport us to familiar yet unknown worlds.