Essential anthology

Book review of The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose

About halfway through the book under review artist F N Souza describes discovering a book of old English essays in a dilapidated house in rural Goa: “The book was an outdated edition of English essays by authors as ancient as itself.” The same description cannot be applied to the current volume, but it is not too far from the mark either. An anthology is judged as much for what it leaves out as what it includes, and when Arvind Mehrotra — one of India’s leading English poets and anthologists — edits a volume, expectations are pretty high. So are the chances of disappointment.

This book performs an essential task of creating a chronology of essays in English written by Indians, starting with HLV Derozio and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the early to mid-19th century to Tagore and Nehru. It includes work by well-known Indian writers of the 20th century, such as R K Narayan, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Ruskin Bond, Anita Desai, Adil Jussawalla, and Dom Moraes. Other usual suspects in the book are Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Ramachandra Guha, Sunil Khilnani, Amit Chaudhuri, and Pankaj Mishra. Some unusual suspects are the artists Amrita Sher-Gil and Souza. Knowledge about Souza’s literary production has gained more currency since an award-winning documentary, An Old Dog’s Diary, released in 2015.

 Other uncommon inclusions are “To Remember Is to Live Again” by Bengali poet and novelist Buddhadeva Bose and “My Aunt Gracie” by Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder. While Bose’s essay is part of his collection, An Acre of Green Grass, recently brought out in a wonderful edition by Kolkata-based scholar Rosinka Chaudhuri, the decision to include Hyder’s essay required some scholarly editorial work by Dr Mehrotra. “Hyder’s ‘Aunt Gracie’ appears in a book of her Urdu stories published by the Sahitya Akademi, The Sound of Falling Leaves(1994),” writes Dr Mehrotra in the Introduction. “The book is a translation, her own, of Pathjhar ki Awaaz.” Hyder says the English version of her book includes autobiographical essays, including “Aunt Gracie”. “She does not specify the language she wrote the four pieces in,” writes Dr Mehrotra, “but since ‘Aunt Gracie’ does not appear in Pathjhar ki Awaaz… I felt it safe to assume that she wrote it in English.”

Writing in English was not an easy choice for Dr Mehrotra’s generation, as he mentions in a recent interview. “Historically speaking, the Constitution of 1950 gave Hindi the ‘official language’ status and said that English ‘shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union’ for a period of 15 years, until 1965,” he told the Open. “But as 1965 approached, which is also when I started writing, the language wars had started. …Writing in English seemed like a dead end. …I and my friends in Allahabad did not know if there would be any writers after us. And we were only 17 or 18 years old. This is not a worry for a young writer in English living in India today.” In this context, the book does emerge in a new light as a history of Indian literature that might — as Dr Mehrotra asserts — seem quite alien to a young reader or writer now.

The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose

Author: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Ed.)

Publisher:  Black Kite and Ashoka University

Pages: 443

Price: Rs 699

Deciding on what an essay is proves to be a little more difficult for Dr Mehrotra. He describes it, in turn, as a still photograph, capturing a moment; a painting; maybe poetry; even a penknife. “The essay, like a penknife, can be put to many uses; like a newspaper aeroplane, it can fly and crash and fly again; as a literary genre, it is unfussy,” writes Dr Mehrotra. “An essay gathers no dust.” Perhaps this trust in an internal value of some essays allows Dr Mehrotra to justify the exclusion of a writer such as Arundhati Roy, arguably India’s best non-fiction writer now. “Political essays, however truthful, well-written and convincing, such as Arundhati Roy’s, have not been included here,” he writes. “Political writing is urgent, but it is soon replaced by something as urgent the next day, often the next hour, even the next minute if we follow it on Twitter.”

 Such an assertion opens a Pandora’s box of questions: Is Dr Mehrotra then claiming that some of the other essays in the book, such as “The Colonisation of India” by an anonymous 19th century youth, “The Nation” by Tagore or “The Tribal Folk” by Nehru are apolitical? Or, does he mean to assert that a cultural moment has more longevity than a political moment? In that case, one might successfully argue that Ms Roy’s essay on the depiction of rape in Bandit Queen (1994) would have more resonance with a contemporary reader than “The Street Music of Calcutta” by Shoshee Chunder Dutt. 

Dr Mehrotra’s statement also betrays an insufficient understanding of social media, where nothing ever gets replaced or erased.

Perhaps such an attitude allows Dr Mehrotra to miss a cultural moment by not including more feminists or Dalit writers in his anthology. One is compelled to ask why an Urvashi Butalia or a Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd are conspicuously absent. Of course, such a question could be asked of any anthology, and ultimately it is the anthologist’s call whom to include and whom to keep out. The book that Souza discovered in Goa prompted him to explore horticulture; Dr Mehrotra’s volume can be considered a success if it manages to turn more readers towards Indian non-fiction writing, which seems to be having a moment in the sun.

The writer’s recent publication is a novel, Ritual