Essays by Meenakshi Mukherjee
Won Sahitya Academy Award in 2003
⭐⭐⭐⭐★)
The Perishable Empire is a collection of essays on a variety of topics but with the common thread of studying Indians' writing in English in different ways. She studies authors like Bankim Chander Chattopadhyay, who wrote a single novel in English before he started writing in Bengala. Then she goes on to discuss several novelists from the twentieth century. The following are some of the arguments she makes along the way:
1. Writers writing in English until a few decades ago felt compelled to give a context and descriptions of Indian traditions - the audience for them was not local, and thus, authors feel compelled to give contexts.
2. Indian writers writing in English used to discuss foreign metaphors to describe India - using names of flowers or things not found in India but that has changed as Indian writers in the language have developed their own English language over time.
3. In recent times, the novelists that have grown to be tremendously popular are those writing on themes considered 'Indian'. You will, for example, be hard-pressed to find a novel in Booker lists that don't deal with quintessential Indian theme (casteism, partition, impact of colonialism, religion, poverty, etc.) and only centers around universal themes like love, sex, families, etc. It would be like if every popular work from Germany was about Nazi Germany.
She quotes Borges saying there are no camels in Quran, and that is what makes it a genuine Arabic text - camels were a part of everyday life to Arabs and nothing to write about. Only a foreigner writing an Arabic book might have forced them into his book. The problem with contemporary Indian novels written in English getting recognized in the west is that they have their metaphorical camels.
4. She argues that every work gaining notice in the west is considered an interpretation of India (you won't consider Atonement by McEwan an interpretation of India, but most Indian novels that have made it to the booker list are read in that way.)
5. The non-English novels also interact with various voices and cultures from India. The Tomb of Sand, written in Hindi, for example, has quotations from writers in several Indian languages, but that kind of intertextuality is missing in Indian novels written in English.
6. Almost novels that have grown popular in the west were written in English. The English translations of novels written in Indian languages have not been considered by the West when trying to understand India. That is not the case with, say, South America, from where it is writers like Marquez who have earned prestige from the translations of their works.
7. West might have preferred English novels over those translated into it because they give an idea of generic India and don't presume on readers' familiarity of local customs (writers anywhere writing with local readers in mind always presume on such knowledge).
8. The publishers have not made enough efforts to translate Indian novels in English and other Indian languages. (That might hopefully change with Tomb of Sand winning International Booker.)
9. In Indian novels written in English, there is also a false dichotomy where everything is divided into either western of Indian (with no mention of the rest of the world) - and Indian novels often elaborate on what sets India apart from the West. She argues that such novels create a generalized idea of India so that they can be easily read by people from different cultures compared to novels in other languages that only wrote about a specific community.
10. She talks about the decline in readership and writings in other Indian languages and points out that it is due to a lack of efforts by publishers to market these books as the market for Indian books is limited, and the number of readers in the languages might be declining. That might also be because the literature in these languages is not received well by literature departments (English Literature departments in Indian universities also don't like works translated from other Indian languages). The lack of interest by critics is another reason.
For me, one of the reasons for the decline in interest in the works in other languages is that they are also not available digitally, even for those that are in the public domain. That said, digital books probably weren't that big a thing in 2003 when this book was published. I wonder what she will have to say about the current Indian literary landscape.
She also discusses several excellent novels and novelists along the way - including Bankim Changer Chattopaday (who wrote almost the first Indian novel). Rabindranath Tagore, Toru Dutta, Sarojini Naidu, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Gosh, etc. Those discussions were quite fascinating.
- A review by Sidharth Vardhan (Martch 27, 2023)
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