Reading new india
Author: E Dawson Varughese
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs 399
A new literary landscape is being nurtured, particularly in the metropolises. This book explores said literary reconfigurations, more so in the context of post-millennial Indian fiction in English, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
India is a complex country. And ensnared within its myriad intricacies, it is also an evolving and shifting culture. Innumerable sets of ideologies, habits and lifestyles cohabit with unquestioning comfort herein. To condense the point I am trying to make, let me cite an everyday scene I encounter in my metro-train rides to work. I can see two commuters, one reading Amish Tripathi’s The Oath of the Vayuputras and Harper lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sit next to each other profoundly engaged in their respective books that starkly contrast each other, with equal sincerity. The Indian writer cannot be written off. More so, in the contemporary ambience where literature is conjoined with coffeehouses, book cafés, metro reads and the e-book format and so on. A new literary landscape is being nurtured, particularly in the metropolises. In my previous interview with her, author Kamila Shamsie had noted that the English novel from the East has changed enormously over the last 30 years. It is no longer associated with American and British writings alone. Nor is it confined to empires written by the colonisers. E Dawson Varughese’s Reading New India explores said literary reconfigurations, more so in the context of post-millennial Indian fiction in English.
As with Bloomsbury’s thoughtful covers, this book jacket too keeps up with the theme of the text and exhibits Indianness to the core, as the sketch of an Indian woman with plaited hair and a golden dangler earring on her left ear holds a book to read. The preface says, “The once popular motifs of Doordarshan, Thumbs Up, and terylene shirts seem to be rapidly fading into an erstwhile India. In 2010 the rupee was given a new symbol, a blend of the Devanagari script ‘ra’ and the Roman ‘r’ meant a new symbol for a New India, shiny lPG autorickshaws continue to populate the streets of India’s metropolises…Reading New India attempts to capture this moment in its analysis of India’s new fiction in English...”
Varughese’s cultural studies cater to the milieu of new readers. She scrutinises the nuances of the ever changing Indian society and filters them into her condensed cultural and aesthetical assessment. Her book is divided into seven sections that range from Chick lit (light and fun narratives on modern women), Cric lit (literary works revolving around Indian cricket), Graphic novels, Crime writing et al. The strength of the book is its introduction which is detailed and promising. Varughese establishes that she has delved deep into the Indian cultural, literary, historical as well as political consciousness to both scrutinise and explore the emergence of this evolving literary practices. Dating back to the year of Independence, she marks the shift from literary traditions of yore to the formation of the postcolonial canon which is being now replaced by yet another new canon altogether. Very carefully and chronologically, she studies the Indian writings from the time of the Empire (Bankimchandra Chatterjee) to the new wave of English fiction in the 1980s (Salman Rushdie) to the urban scapes (Arvind Adiga), and presents a both enlightening and entertaining commentary on them.
She discusses in detail several books and their plotlines to exemplify the multiple contexts that she has entailed in her themes. Varughese establishes herself as a voracious reader with her incisive critiques and indepth analyses of the books. It reintroduces modern Indian literature, particularly the one being generated by the IT professionals, engineers and the presumably ‘non-reading’ sections.
Many writers have remoulded the idiosyncrasies of an Indian bhasha, reconfiguring it, like in the latest writings of Arvind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Anjum Hasan etc. Varughese’s is a very democratic study of those very nuances .
The genres developed in the new millennium are enamoured with the thrills of 3D effects. Flipkart, Infibeam, Amazon further add up to their visibility and accessibility. All these have been carefully considered by the author in her cultural analysis of the Indian readers.
But then that is about it. It is a cultural study and not a literary one. From the purview of a literary lens, the book shall fail to make a mark, because ‘metro-reads’ are not traditional literature yet. But as an estimation of the psychology of the readers across the decades in India, Varughese is spot on.