Even in this moment of Booker victory, something is bothering Satyananda Nirupam. Gitanjali Shree’s Writ Samadhi made its first foray into the world with the Hindi publishing house Rajkamal Prakashan, where he is the Editorial Director. A journey that led to the International Booker Prize for the Tomb of the Sands, Daisy Rockwell’s English translation of the novel by Mr. Nirupam says that in the four years of its publication, Writ Samadhi sold 1,800 copies, which was less than 500 in a year. But within five days of the award, 35,000 copies were off the bookshelf. “To me, it shows that these readers exist, but to wake them up, it takes a big institution, a big award, a big country to celebrate a work. It didn’t happen systematically. Unfortunately, our Not every excellent book published by the U.S. will get an award. And the big prizers don’t always know how to access excellent books,” he said.
Success erases all questions, but Nirupam is right to control his restlessness. Rewards bring in new readers, new resources and forge new relationships. But beyond a grand banter, it is the daily lentils-and-sabzi of an organic literary culture—readers and writers, critics and publishers in honest, critical conversations with each other—that keeps literature alive. It makes room for smaller magazines and passion projects, allows publishers to recognize that unstoppable, original voice, prompts readers to search for books that speak to them, and dials up the hype machine’s exaggeration. Is. Anyone engaged in a work of literature in any language in India—where bookstores struggle to survive, where public libraries are fewer and fewer, where space for reviewing books is shrinking—know Must be how difficult and lonely this task is.
Still, the award is a milestone for Mr. Rockwell. Nearly two decades ago, Salman Rushdie, co-editing an anthology of post-independence Indian writings, claimed that the work of “Indian writers in English” gave India a place on the map of world literature. Regional languages”. “An important dimension of literature is that it is a means of interacting with the world. These writers are making sure that India, or rather, Indian voices … will be confident, indispensable participants in that literary conversation from now on,” wrote Rushdie, looking shamefully as he was at a UN high table. But as it turned out, in the 1947-1997 Vintage Book of Indian Writing, only one text translated into English was cut out – by Saadat Hasan Manto. And, as it also turned out, Rushdie’s flattery about the “brevity” of ‘regional’ literature now follows is as good as ground for dust.
It was not only Mr. Booker who proved his hypothesis wrong. Over the years, the world-winning series of Indian writings in English, influenced by Rushdie, have found themselves hollow. In its place there is a stream of enthusiasm in Indian writings in English about novels written in other Indian languages – a late enthusiasm, given how old the project of translation between Indian languages is. And though they are not the only solution, it is telling that in recent years there have been translations of domestic awards for Indian literary fiction into English, whether in S. Harish’s Mustache, M. Mukundan’s Delhi or Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue. Is like blue In many of these works, the breadth of experience, the music of different languages, the embrace of the strange and sublime, have made the novel ‘Indian Writing in English’ (IWE) very polite and provincial, with a few very good exceptions, in comparison.
Could this have something to do with what is seen as a big-bang moment for IWE? The first Indian English novel (The Wife of Rajmohan) was written in 1864, but Midnight’s Children’s publication in 1981 was seen as the original adventure. The world threw a big party for us, even if individual writers like Amit Choudhary and Rushdie or Arundhati Roy and Anita Desai were invited. That addiction success dictated the narrow terms of evaluation of the IWE. This set the course: You can try another (in the words of Amit Choudhary) “Baggy Monster” that explains India, or write about upper-class migrant life. This created a publishing culture that looked to the gatekeepers of the West, where writers, drawn from a narrowly privileged pool of cosmopolitan life, told their stories. In many ways, translations have helped reach a greater imagination, even though some Indian languages receive less love than others (for example, Hindi and Gujarati more than Malayalam and Bengali) and some texts’ nations. ‘ carry the burden of ‘interpreting’ their cultures.
For longtime readers of IWE, it’s hard not to look at the slides, not to obsess about the “next big thing” or talk of the West’s beloved “literary supernova.” Most of us struggle to identify the IWE works of the past few years that we would love to champion. To a playwright friend, it seemed that it was literature that had not found its footing, and was still caught between “European sophistication and homegrown irreverence”. Too often, writers are caught between a pretty humorous upper-class aesthetic—like the Insta filter that predates the Insta filter—or, conversely, an anthropological curiosity about the Indian underbelly.
Whether this coincided with a rise in the light-fest or a boisterous, non-critical admiration for a fading group of star writers should tell us—even in this festive moment for Indian work— That neither fame nor rewards ultimately create writers.
Amrita Dutta is the National Features Editor at Minto