Commentary/Rajeev Srinivasan

A Moveable Feast

Rajeev Srinivasan picks his favourite Indian fiction of the last fifty years

Everybody has had their fill of describing the top ten this and top ten that of the past fifty years; inspired thusly, here is my personal, rather narrow, even partisan view of Indian fiction. After all, as a Malayali living in the US, it has been hard to come across a broad spectrum of Indian writing, even in translation. I am, alas, only bilingual -- I can only read Malayalam and English. Nevertheless, here are my idiosyncratic and whimsical picks, based on what I happened to read.

I have left out many impressive and even outstanding books for varying reasons, and I don't apologise for that fact: after all, this is just my personal favourite list. Notably Raja Rao's Serpent and the Rope, which I found brilliant but obscure, R K Narayan's Malgudi tales which are very nice indeed, but I wish his villagers would stop speaking such chaste English; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children wherein everybody does speak like in real life, although the book is a bit self-conscious, and his Shame even more so; Bharati Mukherjee's work for being soulless if well-crafted; and V S Naipaul's fiction because I prefer his non-fiction, especially The Enigma of Arrival.

I also left out Sethu's inventive Pandavapuram, a magical realist tale of an abandoned wife in rural Kerala conjuring up her `adulterous lover' in the distant, vivid, noxious, industrial town her husband lives in; the `lover' comes to her home, but then, she herself has never been to that distant town; does this man exist, although half the book is from his point of view? And Seemabaddha, later a Satyajit Ray film, a story of corruption in the babu-world of Calcutta. And Bhrashtu, Madampu Kunjukuttan's real life story of an 18th century Namboodiri woman excommunicated for adultery -- she shocked the presiding court by naming a score of society notables whom she had, revenge-bound, seduced; they too were excommunicated.

I was also impelled to look at my personal favourites after hearing of Salman Rushdie's observation -- intended to be provocative, no doubt -- in the Vantage Book of Indian Fiction that all worthwhile Indian fiction has been in English. I must beg to differ. The Malayalam and translated (mostly Bengali) works that I have read are often masterworks in their own right; in fact, many of them are quite superior to the sometimes overhyped Indo-English works that get so much publicity.

The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh, English.

A masterpiece, this in my opinion will outlive all other Indo-Anglian fiction of the last twenty five years. Intensely Indian in spirit, yet international in scope, this wonderfully erudite, yet very touching book is the benchmark for current Indian fiction. A first-person narrative from the point of view of an unnamed, undescribed, but extremely concrete narrator who lives as an observer, watching his colourful family and friends.

In terms of its power and its `truthfulness', it is a close cousin of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning masterpiece, The Remains of the Day. It is a meditation on geography, those `shadow lines' that divide us into nations, and which mean so much and yet so little. It should have won a Booker Prize.

Bakulkatha (Bakul's Story), Ashapurna Devi, Bengali.

The last in a trilogy (of which the others are Prathama Pratishruti and Subarnalatha) which won her the Jnanpith. I read the book in translation in Malayalam and was struck by the power of her female characters. The narrator -- a writer -- inhabits a world at once modern and traditional; her mother and grandmother are the subjects of the other two thirds of the trilogy. There is a shadowy character, Bakul, who seems to have had a tragic love affair with a man who abandons her in the end.

It is a shocking revelation to the reader to learn that Bakul, who is spoken of in the third person, is in fact the narrator as a young girl; and that that entire persona has been bundled off -- killed if you will, allowing the writer to emerge Phoenix-like, strong and self-contained. The writer-narrator's interactions with her headstrong niece, who marries a Caliban-like labourer, to the horror of her bhadralok relatives, are a nice counterpoint to Bakul's docile acceptance of her fate.

Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace), O V Vijayan, Malayalam/English.

Vijayan, without a doubt the most powerful major novelist in India today, burst on the scene with The Legends of Khasak, which single-handedly overturned Malayalam fiction mores -- hitherto genteel and neo-realist -- and ushered in modernity. I personally don't find Khasak all that interesting, but Vijayan's other work, especially his own translations of his short stories (e g After the Hanging and other stories) is outstanding -- in fact his English versions may be a shade better than the originals.

A leftist in his early days, he has become a transcendentalist. Gurusagaram is a refreshingly spiritual work, of a man in search of himself, and looking for a guru to guide him. It won Vijayan the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award.

Collected Stories, Saadat Hassan Manto, Urdu/English.

As the chronicler of Partition, Manto has no equal. His stories are deeply moving. In particular Toba Tek Singh has become the symbol for the futility of Partition: a man, released from prison, searches for his old, eponymous village; but is has vanished -- it is in the no-man's land between India and Pakistan. He dies there, shot at by soldiers on both sides. So also the story of the Jewish woman, who sacrifices herself to save her (I think Sikh) lover from a communal mob.

Mayyazhi Puzhayude Theerangalil (On the banks of the River Mahe), M Mukundan, Malayalam.

Mukundan's wry and beautifully characterised novels are full of existential sorrow, and often set in the peculiar social structure of Mahe, the tiny (former) French enclave on the Malabar Coast. Mukundan is a standard-bearer of a trend in Malayalam towards technical complexity, also exemplified by Anand in his Kafkaesque Death Certificate and The Crowd and they capture perfectly a time and place: 70's Kerala, a beautiful land, but one without opportunity.

My only complaint about Mukundan is that he is cruel to the best characters in his novels: for example, the freedom-fighter anti-hero Dasan of Mayyazhi, whose angst and anomie destroy both him and the woman who loves him. In God's mischiefs, the decent Franco-Indian magician Alphonse as well as all the other positive characters suffer horribly and die wretchedly. Sigh!

Ini Jnan Urangatte (... And now I must sleep), P K Balakrishnan, Malayalam.

A strange and wonderful work, this is the retelling of portions of the Mahabharata from the points of view of its two most wronged characters: Draupadi and Karna; yet Balakrishnan is able to show they are the true centres of the epic -- the woman and the putative low-caste man. Both exploited, both put upon by the powers that be; yet the epic revolves around them.

Truly, Karna is the hero of the Mahabharata, a man with his human failings, yet one who always strives, one who remembers his roots, and one who is honourable. Particularly well done are Karna's conversation with Kunti when she reveals that he is her son; and Draupadi's interior monologue, without the feminist rhetorical excess that seems to afflict other such attempts. Another Sahitya Akademi winner.

Baumgartner's Bombay, Anita Desai, English.

This is the only one of Desai's books that I have read, and the luminous prose prompts me to seek out and read more of her work. The Jewish Baumgartner ends up in India during World War II and never sees good reason to go back. He lives his life out in Bombay, as the quintessential outsider, a white man not wholly accepted by the sahib-log whites of India; nor accepted as anything other than strange by Indians.

Oru Desathinte Katha (The Story of My Land), S K Pottekkat, Malayalam.

Although known as an excellent travel writer, Pottekkat won the Jnanpith for this exceptional autobiographical novel about growing up in Malabar. With his traveller's eye for detail, Pottekkat brings to life his escapades with his teenage gang, the `supper-circuit-sangham'. The tragic story of the beautiful but paralysed Narayani remains fresh in my memory, although I read the book twenty years ago.

I compare the poignancy of this book to Marcel Pagnol's radiant childhood novel, The days were too short, which was the basis for two brilliant and touching films, My Mother's Castle and My Father's Glory.

Balyakalasakhi (Childhood Friend), Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, Malayalam.

Basheer bestrode the Malayalam literary scene like a colossus; the rebel, the outsider, who could weave magic with economy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature; but he alienated the Indian literary establishment. His memoirs, also of a Malabar childhood, are touching.

But then, Basheer had the gift of making anything he wrote worthwhile -- eg Mathilukal about his prison sojourn, sensitively made into a film by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Bhargavi Nilayam, a ghost story made into one of the best loved of old Malayalam films.

Golden Gate, Vikram Seth, English.

Entirely bereft of any particular Indian-ness, this paean to my beloved Northern California, especially a time and place that I knew -- the 80's world of yuppies in the Silicon Valley, snooty city folk from Marin County -- was a technical tour de force, written in verse, and its characters none the worse for it. It is a shame that Seth then went on to write that `ready-for-soap-opera' tome, A Suitable Boy. Ah, well, he got paid enough for it, and that must count for something.

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