The poco alternative: World Bank lit

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Of all the sad artefacts that litter the transit lounge, airport bookstalls must rank among the saddest. Like the McDonalds clones, airport bookstalls across the world have the same menu on offer.

The main course is always the same top 50 bestsellers in the world. These subdivide into management classics, New Age and diet books, travelogues and read-and-discard fiction, with a light smattering of "literary" fiction and non-fiction drawn from the reservoir of the same 10 bestseller lists.

As an indication that you are in a far country, there will be a shorter but equally homogenous list of the Fifty Books That Introduce You To (Fill In The Blanks) variety.

This is perhaps the most visible outcome of globalisation in the publishing industry, but it's only a starting point. Writer and critic Amitava Kumar initiated a possible debate when he came up with the idea of World Bank literature and used it as a platform to invite essays from a range of critics in his book World Bank Literature.

Bruce Robbins wrote in his afterword, "...His title puts pressure on the established terms postcolonialism and world literature, urging them to come to terms with political-economic realities at the global scale, especially realities that are not reducible to the history and legacy of colonialism in the strict sense."

If you use his concepts instead of the old postcolonial model to look at the world of Indian writing, with a focus on writing in English, this is what you might come up with.

There are authors in India who write in a wide variety of Indian languages, but not in English. The more successful of them command huge audiences, considerable brand name recognition; they know each other, they form various schools of writing.

Some are translated into English; most of these English translations don't cross subcontinental boundaries. In the local marketplace, they have unassailable positions. They dislike being lumped together as "regional" writers for very good reason. Some of them deeply resent being invisible to the wider international world, many shrug their shoulders and get on with their work.

There are authors, some in India, many elsewhere, who write in English and are very visible in the global marketplace. They veer between the headline-making advances (that happens to a few, but a happy few) and making just enough to scrape by.

They resent being asked why they write in English (why not, is the only possible reply); they are wary about being ghettoised (the new Indian writer, the new Asian writer, the new Asian-Western writer, the new Asian-American-gay writer).

What filters back to us in India is what the chiefly white, Western publishing world decides is good Indian writing, which raises its own set of problems. Sometimes it can be like buying

apparently desi handicrafts made elsewhere, retailed to us with a First World stamp of approval.

Thankfully, this set of authors has to deal less and less with the bogy of authenticity. There's not much point pillorying a writer on the grounds that his or her experience of India is inauthentic "" there are as many "real Indias" as there are Indians and it's a waste of time discussing whether the diaspora is less authentic than India, or whether urban India is less real than village India.

How a writer transfers that experience onto a page is a different matter: an inauthentic piece of writing is a work that fails to convince the reader of the reality that the author's trying to convey.

Bad writing might be inauthentic; good writing almost never is. They grew up in Rushdie's shadow; they're worried they're just Multiculture Lite; but they address a global audience.

Authors who write in English in India are often sandwiched in between. They receive much more attention in the English media, especially in the page 3 columns, simply because they're available: but they receive little serious attention, given the state of most magazines' review pages these days.

Their work is discussed; but they're always uneasily aware that someone's making more money in more global territories than they are, and that someone else commands a far bigger audience within India than they do.

Their books sell between 2,000 and 10,000 copies, a small but focused readership. They know better than either category previously described how easy it is to get on the literary map "" and how easy it is to fall off it. But they continue to write, hoping that their books might be export-quality literature, waiting for the ground audience to expand sufficiently for them to catch up with the "regional" writers.

We're not used to seeing literature in these terms; we tend to write about books either in isolation or with blinkers on. Until an idea comes around that forces us to think out of the box. Speaking personally, this meditation was sponsored by Amitava Kumar's far more complex meditation on what happens when you put the words "world" and "bank" in conjunction with the term literature.

The irony is that Kumar is just as subject to the laws of the global marketplace as the literature he's examining with bold new tools. His book came out last year, in 2003, and has been widely discussed in the US.

In India, it's hard to find "" literary criticism Over There is made available Over Here only when it's been officially canonised, preferably by a Western canoniser. It's a pity, because these are the ideas that need to be part of the conversation over here just as much as elsewhere, perhaps even more so.

The Glaswasian?: You've heard Indian-American (and ABCD); Indo-Anglian (and Anglo-Indian); now meet Scottish Pakistani. Suhayl Saadi, whose Psychoraag is due out soon, is being tipped as the new Monica Ali. (Monica Ali, if you recall, was tipped as the new Zadie Smith. Zadie Smith was dubbed the new Rushdie. I don't remember who Rushdie was tipped as, but there must have been somebody.)

Saadi describes himself better than anyone else could: "I celluloid my forehead and hastily scribble: SCOTTISH. But that is inadequate, so I add: English, British, Pakistani, Indian, Afghan, Sadozai, Asian, European, Black(-ish), Minority Ethnic, Male, Non-resident, 21st Century person, 15th Century being, Glaswegian, Middle-class, Writer, Seeker, Lover, Physician, Agha Jaan, Son, English-speaking, Music-loving, Left-leaning "" until I run out of space and time and ink."

nilroy@lycos.com