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Focuses on Indian writing in English; Rushdie’s introduction includes the
controversial claim that Indian writing in English is simply “stronger
and more important” than the writing in Indian vernaculars.

India is more than its cities.  Clearly, the majority of India lives far from
the urbanized centers where English flourishes, and this is reflected in the
chasm between "Indian English" literature and the vernaculars.  Rushdie feels
the need to address this in his introduction:

	It is true that there tends to be a bias [in Indian English writing]
	towards metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction, but, as this volume
	will demonstrate, there has been, during this half-century, a genuine
	attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as possible, rural as
	well as urban...

But only two stories in Rushdie's Mirrorwork deals with the Indian
heartland. One is Manto's Toba Tek Singh, a work that was translated from
Urdu.  Neither the fact of the translation nor the translator (Khaled Hasan)
is evident to the reader, but is mentioned in the introduction and in the
copyrights.  The other is Nirad Chaudhuri's description of his village in
Bangladesh, which serves to underline the urban life he lived thereafter.

I wonder if Satyajit Ray's "Big Bill" is a translation (perhaps by the author
himself?).

Excerpts: Controversial Introduction by Rushdie

India and world literature

Salman Rushdie

I ONCE gave a reading to a gathering of university students in Delhi and when
I'd finished a young woman put up her hand. "Mr. Rushdie, I read through your
novel, Midnight's Children," she said. "It is a very long book, but never
mind, I read it through. And the question I want to ask you is this:
fundamentally, what's your point?"

Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again. "Oh, I know what you're
going to say. You're going to say that the whole effort - from cover to cover
- that is the point of the exercise. Isn't that what you were going to say?"

	"Something like that, perhaps..." I got out.
	he snorted. "It won't do."
	"Please," I begged, "do I have to have just one point?"
	"Fundamentally," she said, with impressive firmness, "yes."

So here, once again, is a very long book; and though it is not a novel, but
an anthology selected from the best Indian writing of the half-century since
the country's Independence, still one could easily say of the work contained
in the next 600-odd pages that the whole collective effort, from cover to
cover, is the point of the exercise. ...  It's high time Indian literature
got itself noticed, and it's started happening. New writers seem to emerge
every few weeks. Their work is as multiform as the place, and readers who
care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices
saying something they want to hear.

However, this large and various survey turns out to be making, fundamentally,
just one - perhaps rather surprising - point:
    that prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in
    this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a
    stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been
    produced in the 16 "official languages" of India, the so-called
    "vernacular languages", during the same time; and, indeed,
this new, and still burgeoning, "Indo-Anglian" literature represents perhaps
the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.

when we set out on the enormous and rewarding task of doing the reading for
this book, we ever expected to make. The task we set ourselves was simply to
make the best possible selection from what is presently available in the
English language, including, obviously, work in translation. To our
considerable astonishment, only one translated text - S. H. Manto's
masterpiece, the short story "Toba Tek Singh" - made the final cut.

... [Indian English] poets, with a few distinguished exceptions (Arun
Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, to name just three), did not
match the quality of their counterparts in prose.

Those who wish to argue with the conclusion we have drawn may suspect that we
did not read enough. But we have read as widely and deeply as we
could. Others may feel that, as one of the editors is English and the other a
practising English-language writer of Indian origin, we are simply betraying
our own cultural and linguistic prejudices, or defending our turf or - even
worse - gracelessly blowing our own trumpet. It is of course true that any
anthology worth its salt will reflect the judgments and tastes of its
editors. I can only say that our tastes are pretty catholic and our minds, I
hope, have been open. We have made our choices, and stand by them.

The lack of first-rate writing in translation can only be a matter for
regret. However, to speak more positively, it is a delight to be able to
showcase the quality of a growing collective oeuvre whose status has long
been argued over, but which has, in the last 20 years or so, begun to merit a
place alongside the most flourishing literatures in the world.

For some, English-language Indian writing will never be more than a
post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired on India by the
departing British; its continuing use of the old colonial tongue is seen as a
fatal flaw that renders it forever inauthentic. "Indo-Anglian" literature
evokes, in these critics, the kind of prejudiced reaction shown by some
Indians towards the country's community of "Anglo-Indians" - that is,
Eurasians. ...

.. my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country's earlier Muslim
conquerors, became a naturalised sub-continental language long ago; and by
now that has happened to English, too. English has become an Indian
language. Its colonial origins mean that, like Urdu and unlike all other
Indian languages, it has no regional base; but in all other ways, it has
emphatically come to stay.
(In many parts of South India, people will prefer to converse with visiting
North Indians in English rather than Hindi, which feels, ironically, more
like a colonial language to speakers of Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam than does
English, which has acquired, in the South, an aura of lingua franca cultural
neutrality. The new Silicon Valley-style boom in computer technology that is
transforming the economies of Bangalore and Madras has made English, in those
cities, an even more important language than before.) ...

... the ironical proposition that India's best writing since Independence may
have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too
much for some folks to bear. It ought not to be true, and so must not be
permitted to be true. (That many of the attacks on English-language Indian
writing are made in English by writers who are themselves members of the
college-educated, English-speaking elite is a further irony.)

Let us quickly concede what must be conceded. It is true that most of these
writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still
bedevilled by high illiteracy levels, how could it be otherwise? It does not
follow, however - unless one holds to a rigid, class-war view of the world -
that writers with the privilege of a good education will automatically write
novels that seek only to portray the lives of the bourgeoisie. It is true
that there tends to be a bias towards metropolitan and cosmopolitan fiction,
but, as this volume will demonstrate, there has been, during this
half-century, a genuine attempt to encompass as many Indian realities as
possible, rural as well as urban, sacred as well as profane.  This is also,
let us remember, a young literature. It is still pushing out the frontiers of
the possible.

The point about the power of the English language, and of the Western
publishing and critical fraternities, also contains some truth. Perhaps it
does seem, to some "home" commentators, that a canon is being foisted on them
from outside. ... [In the west] It feels as if the East is imposing itself
on the West, rather than the other way around. And, yes, English is the most
powerful medium of communication in the world; should we not then rejoice at
these artists' mastery of it, and their growing influence? To criticise
writers for their success at "breaking out" is no more than parochialism (and
parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures). One
important dimension of literature is that it is a means of holding a
conversation with the world. These writers are ensuring that India, or
rather, Indian voices (for they are too good to fall into the trap of writing
nationalistically), will henceforth be confident, indispensable participants
in that literary conversation.

Granted, many of these writers do have homes outside India. [... but]
Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address.

IRONICALLY, the century before Independence contains many vernacular language
writers who would merit a place in any anthology: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
Rabindranath Tagore, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Bibhutibhushan
Banerjee (the author of Pather Panchali, on which Satyajit Ray based his
celebrated Apu Trilogy of films), and Premchand, the prolific (and therefore
rather variable) Hindi author of, among many others, the famous novel of
rural life Godaan, or The Gift of a Cow. Those who wish to seek out their
leading present-day successors should try, for example, O. V. Vijayan
(Malayalam), Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (Hindi), Nirmal Verma (Hindi),
U. R. Ananthamurthy (Kannada), Suresh Joshi (Gujarati), Amrita Pritam
(Punjabi), Qurratulain Haider (Urdu) or Ismat Chughtai (Urdu), and make their
own assessments.

... G. V. Desani has fallen so far from favour that the extraordinary All
About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan
Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either
Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India's
Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling,
leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the
English language. His central figure, "fifty-fifty of the species", the
half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind many of the texts
in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without
Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.

In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul's comments on Indian writers elicit in this
reader a characteristic mixture of agreement and dissent. When he writes,

	... the feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done
	for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian "language"
	writers. This is possible; what I read of them in translation did not
	encourage me to read more. Premchand... turned out to be a minor
	fabulist... Other writers quickly fatigued me with their assertions
	that poverty was sad, that death was sad... many of the "modern"
	short stories were only refurbished folk tales...

... An Area of Darkness was written as long ago as 1964, a mere 17 years
after Independence, and a little early for an obituary notice. The growing
quality of Indian writing in English may yet change his mind.

THE map of the world, in the standard Mercator projection, is not kind to
India, making it look substantially smaller than, say, Greenland. On the map
of world literature, too, India has been undersized for too long. This
anthology celebrates the writers who are ensuring that, 50 years after
India's Independence, that age of obscurity is coming to an end.

Contents

 Salman Rushdie :      Introduction
 Jawaharlal Nehru :    Tryst with Destiny
 Nayantara Sahgal :    With Pride and Prejudice
 Saadat Hasan Manto :  Toba Tek Singh
 G. V. Desani :        All about H. Hatterr
	The name is H. Hatterr, and I am continuing. Biologically, I am
	fifty-five of the species.
 Nirad C. Chaudhuri :  My Birthplace
 Kamala Markandaya :   Hunger
 Mulk Raj Anand :      The Liar
 R. K. Narayan :       Fellow-Feeling
 Ved Mehta :           Activities and Outings
 Anita Desai :         Games at Twilight
 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: In the Mountains
 Satyajit Ray :        Big Bill
 Salman Rushdie :      The Perorated Sheet
 Padma Perera :        Dr Salaam
 Upamanyu Chatterjee:  The Assassination of Indira Gandhi
 Rohinton Mistry :     The Collectors
 Bapsi Sidhwa :        Ranna's Story
 I. Allan Sealy :      The Trotter-Nama
 Shashi Tharoor :      A Raj Quartet
 Sara Suleri :         Meatless Days
 Firdaus Kanga :       Trying to Grow
 Anjana Appachana :    Sharmaji
 Amit Chaudhuri :      Sandeep's Visit
 Amitav Ghosh :        Nashawy
 Githa Hariharan :     The Remains of the Feast
 Gita Mehta :          The Teacher's Story
 Vikram Seth :         A Suitable Boy
 Vikram Chandra :      Shakti
 Ardashir Vakil :      Unforced Errors
 Mukul Kesavan :       One and a Half
 Arundhati Roy :       Abhilash Talkies
 Kiran Desai :         Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard