Who's the most authentic of them all? - II

It's perfectly all right to write about people who are not the norm in the society they are placed. One of the thumbrules of good fiction writing is to make interesting things happen to interesting people. Usually, in the effort to make a character interesting, he also becomes unusual (though the real skill of the writer comes out when he makes the usual interesting).

But, but...

With the growing body of IWE writers, one would naturally expect that the subject of writing follows a normal scattered distribution. If some writers are not comfortable using typical characters and settings and rely on the uncommon, then there should be some who should be comfortable. But in actuality, statistics appear to be skewed in favour of the uncommon.
What I mean is that most books by IWE writers are about people who might be interesting as individuals, but do not strike the reader as being typical of a class of people. The character is not representative.

Or at best, he or she may be representative of a niche class. Say, books about bored or repressed housewives: about an individual who can be seen as a symbol for group of people in similar conditions. But there would be few novels dealing with, say, the masses below the poverty line. If at all, the protagonist would be looking at the situation from the outside in. A story seen and told by a person belonging to that strata, facing the problems and concerns that people in that strata face, would be a rarity (I would be glad if someone apprised me of exceptions to this).

Even more so in modern times. Earlier, a Mulk Raj Anand could write a Coolie, or an Untouchable (though there are criticisms that even they weren't truly authentic). These days, hardly anyone even attempts--either due to the lack of a market, or because IWE writers are not capable of writing from such a character's viewpoint.

It is this point which lends maximum credence to M. Prabha's thesis of IWE being the waffle of the toffs. A major reason behind this (as has been discussed before) is that English is not the lingua franca of the country; it is not the language of the masses. This automatically implies their exclusion from IWE, or the absence of authentic IWE writing about the hoi polloi from within.

Another aspect of authenticity to be considered is the bone of contention between the native and the NRI IWE writers. When the NRI tries to be authentic by typifying his Indian setting, he is accused of exoticising. (Vikram Chandra has devoted an essay to this debate.) Writers from both sides need to have a balanced perspective. If a writer describes a cuckoo singing, or the process of making dal, it doesn't necessarily mean he is exoticising. He could honestly be laying out an Indian scene.

At the same time, when Indian keywords like mangoes, curries, tamarind, sarees, and so on populate the titles themselves, the charge of exoticising doesn't sound baseless.
As is the practice, we will not conclude without reaching a conclusion. The question we were grappling with: is Indian Writing in English authentic?

One of our conclusions was authenticity does not depend on numbers. Say, I am an abstruse poet and you are a ragpicker. My problem is not finding the right level of symbolism to portray in my blank verses, and your problem is not finding enough glass bottles in the grabage given the prevalence of plastic these days. I have a problem in my life and so do you. Mine is as real as yours. (Seriousness? Ah, that's another matter. Perhaps the soldier on the Kashmir border has more serious problems than the ragpicker's or the poet's.)

Now if I am the only poet, and there are a ninety-nine other ragpickers, does it make my problem less authentic and the ragpicker's, more? My reality and authenticity is as real and authentic as yours.

Are numbers to be simply ignored, then? Not quite. Consider another analogy. There's a big box. It is divided into two sections, one of them ten times as large as the other. Both the sections are filled with multi-coloured balls. The IWE writer delves into the smaller section and picks out ball after ball, examining and describing each in detail, reching deeper and deeper. The contents of the small section become well known to all.

The big section, ten times bigger, lies untouched and unknown... The IWE writer doesn't reach into it.

The full answer: the IWE writer is authentic in a limited setting.

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...