IWE: Dream within a dream?

Does IWE make sense? Why this doubt that questions the very foundation of the whole edifice? Nobody asks such a question of British or American literature, or for that matter even Tamil literature. Then why single out IWE?

One fault line runs through the foundation of IWE, but is absent among other literatures. (Perhaps it exists in other colonial literatures, especially of the sub-continent. I don't know the situation in Africa.)

The fault line's name is authenticity. The starting point of most critics of IWE is its authenticity. Authenticity of a work, as I understand, is its closeness to reality, or its truthfulness in the represenation of a ground reality. Usually, such fidelity is expected only from realistic literary fiction (other genre fiction such as sci-fi, fantasy, romance, mystery, etc. do not make claims about realism). As there is hardly any genre fiction in IWE, the question of IWE's authenticity is legitimate.

There are mainly two lines of questioning:

• How representative are the writers and their subjects?
• How representative is English as the medium of writing?

Writers and subjects:
The major accusation against writers of IWE is that they are elitist. They are said to live in ivory towers cut-off from ground realities, and what is worse, they don't really care about being cut-off. The only reality they know is that which exists in their high circles, but which constitutes at best a minuscule fraction of the populace.

As a result, even when they do write about issues that affect the masses, it is already a second-hand experience to them (filtered through the glasses of the media or elsewhere), and percolates to the reader at third-hand.

Even a renowned writer like Mulk Raj Anand whose novels deal with social issues of caste inequality and untouchability is not writing about what he has gone through or seen, but what he thinks must have been happening in a strata of society isolated from his own.

The (modern) writers don't care, the accusations continue, because they are busy exoticising their subject to appeal to a Western readership (only a large Western readership can translate into large sales).

If not exoticising, if a writer is honest about writing what he can relate to, then he ends up writing about characters whose individual concerns can only belong to an exclusive society. A possible example could be Anita Desai.

An IWE writer writes from the outside trying to look in; seldom does he write from the inside trying to reach out.

English as medium:
The English-speaking fraction of the population is a pretty small number (I will desist from providing statistical sounding figures like 2.45%). English readership consequently, would be a fraction of that pretty small number, and English writers a fraction of that fraction. So if we are talking of the representativeness of IWE in India, it must be clear where we stand. Forget writing, even reading or speaking English in India puts one in an elite club.

A charge of elitism can be argued against, but what is undeniable is that the moment you put an English-speaking character on a page, you are asking the reader for a lot. It is a daunting task to make such a character believable. A writer is faced with limited choices:

1. For the utmost seriousness and authenticity, use characters who are fluent in English. That means, you are bound to give up on any kind of representativeness.
2. Try to be more inclusive of the other strata of society by using characters who are not fluent in English. But you cannot show characters talking in the vernacular in an English novel (not for pages, surely). So you perhaps differentiate by showing the difference in fluency, but using broken English for long usually results in caricature and loses seriousness.
3. Not much choice is left. If you want both representativeness and seriousness, then you will have to rely on narrative description for characterization. More of telling, than showing. That's one reason you will find most IWE writers making abundant use of description, but miserly in using dialogue (unless it is the "non-representative" novel).
   

To be continued...