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Under darkened skies, an event "the likes of which has never been held on Indian shores" finally unfolded: the dazzling International Festival of Indian literature, hosted by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Delhi and Neemrana, 18-26 February 2002.1 Originally slotted for 8 December 2001, the meet was postponed because of the Twin Tower terrorist attacks and subsequent intimations of war. Absent from this gathering of sixty-two Indian authors and literary critics, Salman Rushdie wrote as the "newest of New Yorkers" as official body counts rose to 2,825: "To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it, and now must ensure the wound is not mortal" ("A Nation Challenged" 2002, 234; Rushdie 2002e, 336).
The day after the festival closed, the Godhra carnage-the longest bout of violence in recent South Asian history-became the Indian ground zero. A Muslim mob attacked the bogeys of the Sabarmati Express in Gujarat (chillingly reminiscent of the historic train carnage of 1947 and 1984), claiming fifty-eight lives.2 In the seventy-five-day clash between Hindus and Muslims to follow, the official body count rose to three thousand, though most other sources put it at three times that figure ("A Cannibal Time," 2002, 35). Amitav Ghosh, who had attended the ICCR meeting, wrote with anguish: "The recent carnage in Gujarat is not just a fresh chapter in the sub-continent's annals of horror: it may well prove to be the prologue to horrors yet-undreamt-of" (2002d).
The dismembered bodies of these two cataclysmic events haunt this critical narration, as do the heightened fluctuations of global, national, and local borders that these events commandeered. For the moment, let us focus on the strange porthole in time that was the ICCR festival, an opening of frontiers just before other barriers were so viciously reerected. Aimed at consolidating literary community, the ICCR festival was in many respects a "conciliatory handshake" between "English and Indian languages," after Rushdie's infamous denigration of Indian regional vernacular literatures in the New Yorker. I will return to this remark more substantially later in the book; but suffice to say it became a recurrent trace in all the national coverage of the festival, as it has indeed become in this book. As the ICCR fêted the new Nobel laureate for 2001, V. S. Naipaul, it was not surprising that the meeting bore the banner "At Home in the World"-an allusion to Rabindranath Tagore's novel on early twentieth- century cosmopolitanism and nationalism, Ghare Baire, written in 1915, just after Tagore had received the 1913 Nobel Prize for his translation of the Gitanjali.4
These international signatures, the Booker and Nobel Prizes among them, will be another iterable trace in my cultural analysis, for they clearly underwrite the global and national visibility of South Asian writing in English. So ubiquitous is this writing that it has warranted its own acronym in the national press, as is common practice in the postliberalized technophile vocabularies. Indian writing in English, or IWE (a traditional literary-critical category that hegemonically references all South Asian writing in English), occupied pride of place at the festival with international stalwarts like V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chauduri, and Vikram Seth rubbing shoulders with regional giants like U. R. Anathamurthy and Sunil Gangopadhyay. Many of the regional writers were awardees of the nationally prestigious (but globally unknown) Jnanpith Prize. In fact, as if to drive home the currency of IWE, Naipaul was poised to hand the Jnanpith to the Assamese writer Indira Goswami, compelling some commentators to wonder with apprehension, "What happens when a freshly minted Nobel laureate presides over some acclaimed Indian writers?" (Khosla 2003). Despite the festival organizers' obvious intention to close a historical literary divide, regional writers in the eighteen officially recognized Indian vernaculars remained critical of IWE currencies. Said the illustrious Kannada writer, U. R. Ananthamurthy, who is one of the few regional writers translated into English: "There are any number of top quality regional writers who don't get international recognition only because their language is not the global language of America." And Marathi writer Dilip Chitre quipped: "Why should nimbu pani [Indian lemonade] compete with Coca-Cola? Regional writing doesn't have to consult an English language mirror to know its own face" (Reddy 2002). Cognizant of this divide, Sheela Reddy, covering the story for the Indian Englishlanguage weekly Outlook, chose to tag the IWE writers "Midnight's Orphans," displaced by their postcoloniality and increasingly visible after the publication of Midnight's Children in 1981. Fifty years after the birth of the "midnight's children" of Rushdie's novel, in 1997 a Renaissance in IWE had appeared on the horizon.
What first appeared as a bringing together of the home and the world, a meeting of imaginations "irrespective of passports," soon brought to the fore a yawning chasm.5 Nowhere was this rift more evident than in the two keynote addresses, one by the fêted Naipaul and the other by the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Asked about the fortunes of South Asian literary production in the vernaculars, Naipaul intimated that these literatures suffered in comparison to Indian writing in English because of their lack of circulation (Khosla 2003). Yet, unlike the regional writers who underscored the postcolony's dependence on international recognition fueled by the current economic muscle of English, Naipaul remained vague about global cultural hegemonies: "They [novels] are an industrial good, which needs publishers, readers, critics and newspapers. A society on the move gives rise to the kind of writing [in English] we see today" (Khosla 2003). On the opposite end, Vajpayee appeared disgruntled at the very procedures of the festival: "It may seem somewhat ironic that the literary heritage of India is celebrated in the medium of English" (Reddy 2002).
This surfacing divide, albeit bewailed by many at the conference, is central to my look at how contemporary global flows and public cultures have substantially altered the constitution of literary value, and indeed of print circulation. Surfing global terrain without attention to the new anxieties over borders can be dangerous, as recent calamities have brought home to us. Hence I propose discrimination in exploring the very category of Indian writers in English, where all writers, regardless of modality of their literary practice or their political and ethical imperatives, are herded together and become indistinguishable from each other. Throughout the ensuing discussion, the reader may notice fluctuations in my deployment of the received literary-critical categories "Indian writing in English" and "South Asian writing in English." While the latter best fits the literary cosmopolitics I describe in this book, I use "Indian writing in English" to reference extant discourse; "Indian," then, attaches to the literarycritical object and not to the geopolitical entity (that the cosmopolitical writers interrogate).
Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, both internationally known public intellectuals and writers with substantial literary production, are avowedly not cut from the same literary cloth as Naipaul. This is eminently clear in the rather guarded response to Naipaul on their part. While respectful of Naipaul's writing, which moves him like "aching wisdom teeth," Amitav Ghosh remains critical of Naipaul's racism and the anti-Islamic pronouncements in Naipaul's nonfiction (in Area of Darkness, 1964, and India: A Million Mutinies Now, 1990). Ghosh decries the increasingly "faded out" worlds of the Caribbean and Africa, so "richly textured" in Naipaul's early fiction, that are now "half-made" in comparison with Europe (2002b). Noting that Naipaul chose to dedicate his Nobel Prize to England, his adopted home, Ghosh remarks that the reactionary turn in Naipaul's work heralded by An Area of Darkness (1964) has "proved immensely popular in the West and he was quickly canonized for his indictment of the 'Third World.' It is a measure of his influence that in the West today, travel writers are taken seriously only to the degree to which they replicate the familiar Naipaulean tone of derision" (2).
As if to mark his difference from some South Asian writers in English, and Rushdie in particular, V. S. Naipaul did not agree to Rushdie's inclusion of his work in an anthology commemorating India's fifty years of independence, Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997, edited by Rushdie and Elizabeth West in 1997. In his introduction to the volume, Rushdie notes that "one of the important voices in the story of modern literature, V. S. Naipaul, is regrettably absent from this book, not by our own choice, but his own" (xvii). Later in the piece, Rushdie "part[s] company altogether" from Naipaul's dim view of the creative potentials in India (expressed in An Area of Darkness) (xviii). Rushdie's and Ghosh's reservations about Naipaul are also mine, as they are those, I suspect, of many South Asian progressive writers and critics. So in this book, I depart from Naipaul, engaging in some critical border drawing to demarcate a different province of the imagination within the exploding sphere of contemporary South Asian writing in English. The closing of some literary borders quixotically enables the opening of disciplinary borders, as I begin to define a distinctive South Asian cosmopolitical discursive formation.