Stories of India
If you have ever stopped to ask someone for directions in India and received an answer about the flow of the wind, and the general political tenor of the country, then you know that Indians are natural storytellers
But do not blame this entirely on our predilection for chatter. We have narrative built into our histories, our lives, our religions, and our cultures, which are both oral and written. The earliest literary culture of India can be conclusively traced to the writings in the Vedas, the Tamil Sangam writings, and Pali literature in and around the first millennia BCE. However, these three canons themselves are a collection of oral literature, hymns, and more. The later Vedic Age in India was marked by the epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; these too were written collections of stories that many people knew in the oral form and many regional versions of the great epics followed. I tell you this not just to compile a historical background, but to say that in India every story is told for the first time and that it has been told many times before. It is this beautiful contradictory coexistence that marks India.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana exist in India’s very being, irrespective of region, religion, or culture. Whether or not, one follows Hinduism, everyone has heard of the multiple stories of war, love, familial betrayal, justice, and duty that are contained in these epics. Thus, they become in some sense a kind of literary backbone that has held together the many different traditions of literature. Written in poetic form, in shlokas, derived from the Sanskrit word for grief, shoka, it is traditionally believed that it was the involuntary utterance of the sage Valmiki in sadness that gave rise to poetry. Scholars continue to debate whether these poems are myths, histories, religions, or divine revelations—most of us are content that they are stories that continue to beguile generation after generation.
New forms of writing and language made their way to India in first century CE, as Persian and Arabic amalgamated with the then spoken forms of Hindi and gave rise to Urdu. The medieval period in India flourished in literature. While the regional kingdoms had their own varied literary outputs in different languages (Kannada, Malyalam, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi and more), the area under the Mughal empire had Persian and Arabic alongside the many indigenous linguistic traditions. Royal patronage of the arts played a significant role, and scriptural, philosophical and romantic literature in India, in the medieval period, marked a highpoint in cultural and literary output. All this, of course, was then added to by the colonial encounter. A standardized Hindi and Urdu across North India accelerated literary production in the languages, and novels, poetry and plays written in Hindi and Urdu came on to the national stage in an unanticipated way. Writing both of what had happened, itihasa, and of their contemporary social realities—colonialism, caste, women’s position in society, religion—Hindi and Urdu writers were recognized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the voice of the nation.
Though the Portuguese and the French also held colonies in India, the greatest influence on Indian literature came through the British Raj. The ambitions of the East India Company, and after 1857 the British Crown, were both territorial and cultural; the administrative needs of the colonists had to be met with both British and Indian employees. While the Englishmen were asked to study native languages, Indians were schooled in English. This encounter, while uneven in every degree, gave rise to a renewed interest in the research, scholarship, and preservation of Indian literature while at the same time preparing an entire class of Indians to read, speak, and write in English. Neither the colonists, nor the Indians, could have imagined how prolifically the country would take to the language, or how English, once wielded by the Indians, would never be the same again.
Indian writing in English, from the nineteenth century onwards, reflected a consciousness that was cognizant both of writing in the colonizer’s language and of wresting away from the Raj a cherished marker of its civilization. And yet, in the frenzy of the publishing world in English these days, we sometimes forget that India’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the prize for writing in Bengali. Social reform, nationalism, and a fervent Gandhian ethos dominated the literary world until 1947, when India’s independence and its partition gave way to a new era.
While Indian authors like Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, and others symbolized a sedate, linear narrative style that told India’s stories, the onslaught of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children marked a turn in Indian literatures. While writers before Rushdie, were just as prolific and erudite, they had remained content to write in a form that strove for correctness rather than innovation. I am fashioning a wide ambit here to include the Indian origin, Trinidadian, and later British citizen author V.S. Naipaul who won the Booker in 1971 for In a Free State. Awarded the Booker in 1981, Rushdie heralded a new kind of Indian writing in English that strove for the local, Indianized version of the language. Midnight’s Children told the story of India and of Indians and told it in a language that could be recognized as the spoken English of the country. Of course, the Booker would never be the same again. Arundhati Roy won the award in 1997 for The God of Small Things, followed by Kiran Desai in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, and Aravind Adiga in 2008 for White Tiger. And so, British colonization gave English to India, along with many other countries, but the publishing world of today shows us how language or ideas can never be owned.
It would be amiss to not mention that this attention to Indian writing in English, and its accompanying economics, have come at the cost of the vernacular in India. New, innovative, politically informed, ideologically committed, and greatly imagined writing is available in many Indian languages and yet not much attention is paid to them outside of the few national awards. Recent work in translation has ensured that a wider public has come to read Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Malayali, Malayalam, Tamil and other writers and perhaps that will spur an interest in writing in Indian languages.
Perhaps, then, the next time you ask someone for directions in India, and they give you the history of the road, and then go on to comment on the meaningless of your quest to find salvation, or ask that you give them a lift since they are going the same way, you will hold your surprise in check and remember that our conversations are distillations of the many stories that define us. Literature in India is not just an extension of our reading selves; it symbolizes our deep, abiding interest in the playful, imaginative, and collective enterprise of the storyteller.