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Swapan Dasgupta

DAY DREAMS
Authentic Account

A few months before her novel The Gin Drinkers (HarperCollins, 2000) was published, Sagarika Ghose told me of the bizarre expectations the West had from Indian writers. The videshi literary circles, it would seem, expect desi offerings to be one of the three. First, authentic—by which is meant invoking images of the unchanging India, like R.K. Narayan did in English, Premchand in Hindi and Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyaya in Bengali. Secondly, trendy which implies imbibing Salman Rushdie's techniques and offering dollops of incest. Finally, exploring the diaspora experience as people like Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee have done so well.

The implication is that there is little marketing percentage in writing
about the diaspora within—those Indians who live in India but whose
experiences, language and concerns are wonderfully cosmopolitan. The beautiful people that RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan decried earlier this month as the Euro-Hinds. People who are in India but who, as the dust jacket of Sagarika's book put it, are "stranger(s) in your own land". They may be novelties in India, but the West isn't particularly enamoured of those who are equally at ease in South Kensington as they are in Khan Market. There's nothing exotic about them.

Sagarika has proved them conclusively wrong. A novel set in the rarefied world of Delhi and covering three generations of Oxbridge-educated historians, it is by far the most authentic account of the existential dilemmas of Indian PLUs (People Like Us). Separated by education, experience and aesthetics from the rest of the Great Indian Middle Class, the PLUs blend privilege, hedonism with anguish. Once born to rule Jawaharlal Nehru's incredibly inefficient socialist raj, they have been outpaced by the market, by politics and particularly by democracy. The best among them have already fled the country and reinvented themselves in the beautiful enclaves of Manhattan, the Silicon Valley and Hampstead. But a handful has chosen to
stay on. And like the Anglo-Indians who eschewed Australia, they live like endangered species, interacting with the cretinous world but keeping their distance. They maintain a precarious existence on the fringes of academia, journalism and are over-represented in internationally-funded NGOs and distinguish themselves with incessant bouts of self-flagellation. It is this delightful world of the deracinated and guilt-ridden PLUs that Sagarika explores wonderfully.

As a fully-paid up member of this fraternity, I find Sagarika's novel truly authentic. Much more authentic than the contrived Village India, lower middle-class India themes of desi writers. That's because the writer isn't overwhelmed by angst. She acknowledges it but keeps it at an arm's length. Of course, she does a politically correct genuflection at the altar of Dalit consciousness but ensures that the character of Jai Prakash—a crusader-fixer with a taste for white women and Ox-phord, is very cardboard.

It's the most authentic and honest sociological study of minusculity without whose presence India would be a far less exciting place to live in. Those who fled should read it to gauge their life had they returned. Sagarika has written the best diaspora novel set in India.

She has put us back on the map.

(Swapan Dasgupta is Deputy Editor, INDIA TODAY. He has edited Nirad Chaudhuri, The First Hundred Years. Write to Swapan Dasgupta)

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