Indian Writing in English

A discussion of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in all its aspects, with a view to creating some structure and organization in this body of writing.

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Thursday, December 01, 2005

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most authentic of them all?

Authenticity, we have seen, is the first weapon that comes to hand when one body of writers attacks another. Whether it is regional writers vituperating IWE writers, or native IWE writers criticising the NRI ones, the frontal line of attack is on their authenticity.

It's time to take the bull by the horns. What exactly is this authenticity which results in such a hullabaloo?

Authenticity is about reality; at the same time it is not about realism carried to extremities, describing each and every minute detail as it exists. Reproduction of life exactly as it exists is not art: photography cannot replace painting, nor can a tape recorder replace a singer.

We say a work of fiction is authentic when we feel that what it portrays is likely to have occurred in a certain setting in a certain period. It need not have actually happened as it is described word to word, but there is nothing in the book that precludes the chances of it ever happening. In fiction, the writer tries to portray only the most interesting and eventful things, and characters speak dialogues rich in meaning which bring out their characters and personalities. Certainly, real life will never be that interesting at a stretch.

Authenticity then, lies in the typicality of characters and their lives. How likely is such a fictional character's existence? And if he does, how likely is it that he will talk in such and such a manner, think such and such thoughts and do such and such deeds?

Authenticity is about generalizing and typifying people in a unique way (sounds self-contradictory but therein lies the skill of the writer. Without the uniqueness, we get stereotypes.).

It takes all kinds of people to make the world. A writer can always retort that maybe his character is not all that typical, but what is the guarantee that there is no such person in some corner of the world whose behaviour would be similar to that particular character? Possible, but then that writer gets a low score in authenticity.

If we use the typicality of a work as the measure of its authenticity, then we better know how to measure that typicality. Is it in numbers? If Author A writes about a poet, and Author B writes about a peasant, by dint of sheer numbers Author B always scores over Author A in authenticity (assuming that in India, the number of peasants of the kind as described by Author B will always be much greater than the number of poets of the kind described by Author A).

The question that arises is whether we are caught in a class equation. Are books with intellectual or billionaire protagonists always less authentic than books with the farmer protagonist? Do we give our approval only to socialist fiction that deal with class and society as a whole and not individuals? That is dangerous, and our answer ought to be no.

The core of fiction has to be individualistic. There's nothing unauthentic about having neurotic lonely women protagonists (think Anita Desai) or intellects philosophising in English, Sanskrit and French with equal ease (think Raja Rao) as long as the rest of such character's behaviour falls in line with the personality sketched out for them. The demerit lies in the fact that such a character is atypical; the reader has nothing to judge the character by; everything the author writes about the character has to be accepted by the reader as being typical of that particular character.

For such characters, their problems and concerns are intensely personal. It hardly touches even the fictional world outside the character, leave alone the reader's world.

To be continued...

2 Comments:

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