Playing in the ‘minors’ and the problem with measuring Indian writers by global fame alone

If renown and recognition are indexed only to global, all-conquering varieties, then at the moment, it is difficult for the resident writer to have them. The West has limited space for writing set in India

A recent news article titled ‘Why almost every major Indian writer lives abroad and what it has done to Indian fiction?’ inevitably gathered a bunch of valid reactions from Indian writers who do not live abroad and have only done good things to Indian fiction. Note that the term “Indian fiction” here is limited to Indian fiction in English, as was the case in the original article’s headline and body.

The article’s author, Girish Shukla, lives in India and has a couple of novels to his name. I must say that I hadn’t heard of him before reading the piece. If part of his intent with it was to break out of a wrapping of general anonymity among the literature-waalas, then he might have just had reasonable success. I should not, however, give too much currency to my having heard of him or not. Shukla could just as easily say that this is the first he is hearing of me. This reciprocal feeling will get us nowhere.

The article’s underlying thesis (which one has to gather from between the lines), that at the very top end, global renown is not evenly distributed between diaspora writers and resident writers, or that there is no stratospheric zone of superlative renown among resident writers (Arundhati Roy being an exception), is palatable only because it is axiomatic. If renown and recognition are indexed only to global, all-conquering varieties, then at the moment, it is difficult for the resident writer to have them. There is a simple reason for that: The overwhelming majority of English fiction by writers living in India doesn’t really go to the whole Anglophone market; it is published by Indian publishers for the Indian reader. This failure of export is not due to the bad quality of the goods in question, but due to a demand limit in the importing geographies. The West has limited space for writing set in India.

What is missed, not only in Shukla’s article but in the recurrent discourse around such matters, is the small marvel of the relatively new Indian English ecosystem. Forty years ago, a writer in India had, perhaps, to look West by necessity. Now, a different option exists, a different habitat exists. This habitat is capacious within its boundaries, and is developing, in fits and starts and sprints and slogs, its own markers of value. It cannot as yet endow the resident writer with “majorness”, as the term might be commonly understood, but it does offer a “minorness”.

Take my case. I was born and raised in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. At 17, I followed the uni-path offered to boys of my socio-economic station and academic ardour: An engineering education. Four years later, I followed it up with an MBA. It was after finishing my education and arriving in the first metropolis of my life for work, at 24 years of age, that I realised that I liked reading and writing non-utilitarian stuff. I practiced writing fiction. It took me a few years to be passable, years in which I also worked full-time and dealt with the considerable strains of having a negative financial inheritance. I am 40 years old today and have published four books. I have had a few mentions in “Indian” awards. Yes, it would be fine to think of me as a minor writer who lives in India and writes fiction in English. I have, over the years, found a handful of readers who abidingly come back to my work.

Let me add, after the mini-biography of the previous paragraph, that a few decades back, there was little in India to sustain the kind of minorness I inhabit. This minorness is not a compact with any sort of stasis or lack of ambition; it contains no aversion to larger markets, bigger advances, grants, and fellowships, in India or in the West. But this minorness can — if it was all there was to come — be enough. It is not nothing; it is, in fact, the farthest thing from nothing. One is present at the same table, just that the spot is not brilliantly lit. One eats the same food, drinks the same wine. It all tastes the same.

Shukla, who shouldn’t mind me calling him a minor writer, makes of majorness an ultimate touchstone. In doing so, he belittles me, he belittles himself.

Solanki is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer