Making chutney merry in Indo-Anglia

Weren’t the mandarins who presided over English literature and its glittering prizes likely to favour novels written in cool, precise prose located in the English countryside over big, baggy, bursting-at-the-seams books that faithfully reproduced the graffiti that defaced Bombay’s walls and talked about ‘‘writing-shiting’’, ‘‘A-I tip top marriages’’ and local events and gossip.

What precisely did this signify? That the insular world of English literature was opening up? That Indian novels that didn’t spend pages and pages to explain our everyday reality were finding acceptance? The evidence seemed to suggest so but a certain section of Bombay couldn’t get their heads around this ‘‘bizarre’’ new development.

I worked for a magazine at the time and was invited to one of the needless parties held in honour of the great man.

As Rushdie drifted through the crowd he was accosted by a young woman who worked for The Times of India. ‘‘Mr Rushdie,’’ she said, ‘‘I bought your novel ages ago, but haven’t finished it.’’

Rushdie was only half listening but her next sentence commanded his full attention. ‘‘It’s written in such a strange way with all those Indian words and all, I couldn’t get past page 23.’’

Twenty years later, the incident is still clear in my memory, so struck was I by what I’d witnessed. Remember, this was a young Indian woman in Bombay who was complaining to an author who lived and was being feted in England that his novel wasn’t written in the ‘‘right sort’’ of English.

What Rushdie had done was nothing short of momentous. He had defied every convention there was, invented a new language to describe the unique reality of India and in so doing redrawn the contours of the English language itself.

Most importantly, perhaps, it marked the beginning of a new outpouring of novels that were confidently Indian in manner and style and did not seem to have been self- consciously tailored to meet the demands of an overseas audience. Midnight’s Children was the first of three defining moments in the short history of Indian writing in English.

The second moment occurred in 1992. I was by then a publisher working out of Delhi and had published a very gifted poet called Vikram Seth for a few years. Vikram had written several books, including a novel in verse called The Golden Gate.

As his publisher I knew he was working on a book, a novel, but I had seen nothing of it until one day he invited me to his house. He led me to a room cluttered with cardboard cartons, and said, ‘‘Well, here it is. You can read as much of it as you want, but you can’t take it away with you.’’

I couldn’t believe my eyes. There seemed to be over a dozen cartons in which the manuscript reposed. I didn’t know it then, but what I was looking at was one of the longest single volume novels ever written in the English language.

When A Suitable Boy was eventually published in 1993, it came to 1,349 pages, and was immediately hailed as one of the great novels of our time.

In his typical way Vikram had written a book that was against the existing fashion of clever novels written in experimental prose or self-consciously modish, gloomy or flippant.

A Suitable Boy most resembled the great 19th century triple-decker, social realist novels and was squarely set in modern India. Like Rushide’s book, this was again a novel that did not compromise.

The lives of the Mehras, Kapoors, Khans and Chatterjees were not aimed at any particular audience but were instead left to play themselves out at a measured pace and recorded in elegant, pellucid prose.

That A Suitable Boy attracted one of the highest advances ever paid to a contemporary novelist, and more important was one of the biggest selling literary novels in India, England, Australia and many other parts of the world, was testament both to the brilliance of Vikram’s masterpiece and also the distance the new Indian writing had travelled.

The third defining moment was in 1997. The God of Small Things burst onto the literary scene from nowhere. Its author, Arundhati Roy, had trained as an architect, written film scripts, been a fitness instructor, actress and production designer. But nobody had the slightest inkling of her great gifts until her amazing novel set in Kerala stormed its way onto bestseller lists.

It also won the Booker Prize…It was published in 40 countries and sold over six million copies in its first few years.

Once again, like Rushdie and Seth, Roy had written a book that was so original, innovative and astonishing in its use of language and material that it made other contemporary writers look stale and repetitive. And once again, her style, origins and material were clearly and unmistakably Indian…

Why did the fresh new writing that Rushdie’s great novel ushered in take so long to arrive? For a start, the new novelists were the first generation to come of age in free india.

They carried no colonial baggage, they used English as a first language … and they had been released by the shock of Rushdie’s experiment into tackling whatever subject or style they chose in their fiction.

There were stories littered outside the windows of every one of these writers that no one had the confidence to tell before in the English language because Indian writers had upto then been straitjacketed in their choice of subject by audiences in the West …

It’s too soon to speak of an Indian canon. But who knows, a few decades from now there might well be such an impressive body of work produced by the ‘‘now’’ novelists that such a notion will not appear too far-fetched.

A few months before he died, I paid a visit to the Grand Old Man of Indian letters, the novelist R.K. Narayan, at his home in Madras.

As we usually did, we discussed the latest crop of Indian writers, and as was his wont, Narayan said he was astonished at the rapidity with which new novelists and storytellers in English were cropping up.

‘‘And to think that about 20 years ago, I told your chairman that the publishing company (Penguin India) he intended to establish in India would wind up in a few years because there weren’t enough writers around worth publishing.’’ He shook his head in wonderment. Nothing needed to be said.

The author is CEO and publisher, Penguin India, and publisher-designate, Penguin Canada