Claudia Kramatschek, a german literary critic, writing for a German audience about the English language fiction segment of the Indian book industry, says
These are thrilling times for all things literary, and the excitement is tangible to anyone spending time in India these days and speaking with writers, publishers and literary critics about recent developments and tendencies in book publishing. For India's breakneck transformation of recent years has made itself felt in the world of publishing as well, if only indirectly....
Here in Germany, "Indian literature" is still perceived through a distorting lens. Today, just as earlier, German reception is conditioned by the works of English-language authors, many of whom live abroad. On the Indian book market, all of these writers enjoy advantages about which their colleagues writing in regional languages can only dream. This is all the more absurd once we realize that popular authors writing in Hindi or Bengali have for their part attained sales figures and readerships that seem almost inconceivably large to their English-language colleagues. In terms of reader numbers, English-language Indian literature plays an extremely limited role on the Indian book market.
...
But a younger generation of authors now appears to have emerged in the English-language literary sector whose common development manifests a kind of caesura. All are between 25 and 35 years of age – a fact while in and of itself represents a minor revolution in a country where the aura of the senior writer has always shaped the literary canon. All came of age in an India where access to the wider world was available via mouseclick, and all feel at home within the most divergent cultures – and they play with this intercultural network in their literary work as well. At the same time, nonetheless, they are rooted in India to an astonishing degree, and they write about this sense of connection in new and innovative – and at times surprising - ways. A marked turn toward localism is observable, meaning toward the microcosmos of one's own lived world, to the history of the individual towns where these authors lead their lives. In literary terms, this return is associated with an opening toward genre literature and toward what might be referred to as the small form.
Some of the writers mentioned include
Altaf Tyrewala, whose debut novel "No God in Sight" has also recently appeared in German. Just 170 pages in length, the slender novel is a slap in the face to the tradition of the "Great Indian Novel", the favoured form of Anglo-Indian literature....
With "Corridor", Sarnath Banerjee, who was born in Calcutta in 1972 and lives in Delhi, for example, has not only published India's first graphic novel. In it, he combines the motif of city life with a loving search for traces among the local aromas and social milieus which he perceives as doomed to perish in the wake of India's globalisation and homogenisation.
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Chetan Bhagat, born in Delhi in 1974, has captured the voice of an entire generation in his "one night @ the call center". His novel which sold 100,000 copies in a single month, and this in a country where the best-seller threshold is 5,000 - is set in the world of the call centre, where ever growing legions of well-educated urban Indians waste their talent and knowledge.
In stylistic terms, Bhagat’s novel is conspicuous for its use of colloquial English, the true lingua franca of the urban middle classes, and for its renunciation of the type of elaborate diction associated with the works of many Anglo-Indian authors.
It may well be that novels such as "one night @ the call center" are less concerned with literariness as such and far more with the possibilities of identification.
...
Samit Basu, (his blog) born in 1979 and currently a resident of Delhi, has certainly performed a service by providing Indian literature with its first fantasy novel, "The Simoqin Prophecies". Here, we find an arresting and innovative melange of myths new and old, Indian fables and Western pop culture, the Mahabharata and James Bond.
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This spirit of freedom, which allows the local to mingle with the global, is exuded in particular by Rana Dasgupta's (website) first novel "Tokyo Cancelled", which quickly made it to the top 10 list of Indian bestsellers. All traces of an Indian setting have been virtually eliminated - although the now 35-year-old author emphasizes the importance for his writing of Delhi, his home since 2001. Nonetheless, his novel mirrors in an exemplary fashion a contemporary world in which life - whether in London, Paris or Lagos - is subjugated to the conditions of the global marketplace.
Kramatschek concludes by saying
When it comes to English-language literature from India, the approaching years are indeed likely to show evidence of a fresh wind....
Literary online magazines and blogs are flourishing – and in regional languages as well, incidentally.
Literature, with its numerous and at times contradictory facets, finally, mirrors the situation of the country as a whole, which seems to be developing in a perpetual contradiction to itself. Given this situation, we can only wait expectantly to see which new and unexpected pathways will be opening up within the landscape of Indian literature.
Hi, I was just googling when I ran into this post.
India is just in the discovery phase of these genres, but things here are more difficult than in the West. There are no funds available, nor are the publishers willing. Then there's undue praise when it's not worth it, as for graphic novels.
If you are interested, here's the link to a detailed review, a little caustic perhaps, of the indian graphic novel scenario.
http://buroangla.blogspot.com/2007/05/plight-of-indian-graphic-novel.html
Posted by: buro angla | July 01, 2007 at 12:20 AM