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BOOKS
Fragile
Fantasies
Making
half-sense of the Indian imagination in English
By
Vinita Chandra
 |
The
Perishable Empire: Essays On Indian Writing In English
M. Mukherjee
Oxford
Rs 545 |
Meenakshi
Mukherjee's work in the field of Indian writing in English has been well
known by students of literature for at least a decade. It was thus with
great anticipation that one picked up her book The Perishable Empire:
Essays in Indian Writing in English. Mukherjee traces the project
of novel writing in India back to the very beginning, starting from the
1850s, and provides historical, social, and literary reasons for its birth
and growth—establishment of the three universities in Calcutta, Madras
and Bombay, availability of novels from England in India—not just
in English, but in the other Indian languages as well.
Mukherjee
points out that Indian novels in English did not meet with the success
that their regional counterparts in Bangla, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil
and Malayalam did, and asks, "Why did the Indian novel in English
fail to generate that momentum in the early years of the emergence of
the novel in the subcontinent?" A corollary to that would be another
question: Why are we suddenly witnessing a total reversal at the end of
the 20th century when an unmistakable and ebullient proliferation of fiction
in English written by both resident and non-resident Indians has become
a globally recognised and consequently a nationally highlighted phenomenon?
Mukherjee's "serendipitous journey of excavation in the National
Library in Calcutta and the other old libraries in the country" yields
fascinating material which she uses to answer these questions.
The first
section of the book is devoted to novels written in the 19th century,
and the second section to an analysis of contemporary work. Throughout
the book Mukherjee refers to novels in what she calls "bhasha"
writing alongside her examination of novels in English, to translations
of these novels from one bhasha to another, to translations of
novels in English to other Indian languages and vice versa. She also studies
the implications of these translations for the reading public in terms
of region, community, class and specially gender.
One of the
most valuable things about Mukherjee's reading of these texts and authors
is the sensitivity with which she perceives and interprets their different
cadences and tones and the compassion with which she interrogates the
anxieties displayed by them in terms of region, nation, culture, imperialism,
class, language and gender.
There is
no easy valorisation of either English or bhasha literature. She
is hardly ever judgmental—as critics in this field often are—and
the only people she castigates are the critics who ignore the prolific
writing in languages other than English in India when talking about the
talent and success of Indian writers.
Since many
of the essays are reprinted from earlier versions, there's a certain amount
of repetition and overlapping, more visible to the reader who goes through
the text at one sitting. One also hoped that a volume of essays coming
out in 2000 would have commented more on the absolute inundation of writing
by Indian authors in the past five years, specially by women. Notwithstanding,
the book is particularly useful in that while dealing with subject matter
that has been appropriated by the literary criticism circles of post-colonial
discourse and post-modernism headed by the Spivaks and Bhabhas
that are often impossible to comprehend, Mukherjee is singularly jargon
free, her writing cogent and lucid, her arguments inhabiting a comprehensible
position.
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