The Many Biographies of 'New India'

Sailen Routray

Sorghum Field in Mexico (Wikimedia Commons)

The growth of literary modernity in India, in the second half of the nineteenth century, involved a peculiar set of maneuvers of which two were, arguably, the most important. The first of these had to do with the fabrication of a set of narrative devices that invented the individual, through the recreation of the western models of writing biographies and some time later, autobiographies. The second one tried something similar. The norms and conventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century European, especially English, novel writing were adopted with considerable chutzpah by writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjeeand Phakir Mohan Senapati. A considerable part of this adoption dealt with the manufacturing of a certain interiority by creating individual characters.

Thus, fiction, instead of narrating stories, started narrating the lives of characters. The overall social space of narrative, therefore, got framed in a peculiar way. At a meta-level the space of narrative got differentiated into fiction and non-fiction. This was something new in India’s literary history. 

Till the colonial encounter, the ‘truth value’ of narrative was rarely the issue at hand. The debate about whether a story was true or fictional was not central to debates surrounding story-telling. For example, one dominant set of narratives in this period was that of puranas. These stitched songs genealogies, discourses on dharma, and stories embedded in a Chinese box fashion, into a seamless kantha with varying degrees of success.

Puranas were narratives that were neither true nor false. They sidestepped issues surrounding truth the way a mongrel street dog in a narrow Indian gali sidesteps a particularly fearsome tom cat. The restructuring of the literary space in India during nineteenth century under colonialism tried to ‘correct’ precisely this ‘lacunae’. 

‘Truth’ and concerns surrounding it precipitated the Indian literary space into fiction and biography (later autobiographies also became increasingly important). What made novels and biographies the same kind of texts was the focus on ‘characters’, their interiority, and the ways in which the flow of narrative and the ‘flow’ of a person’s life started mimicking each other.

For a large number of Indian languages, during the five decades across the divide between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, modern short stories and novels became the dominant fictional form and biographies and autobiographies became the dominant form of non-fiction. In Indian English, the novel started becoming important for literary practice only after independence in 1947, with the form becoming dominant only with the spectacular success of Saleem Sinai of Bombay. Now the Indian English novel enjoys almost a hegemonic stranglehold over the literary imaginary of India. 

Over the last few years there has been a reaction to such a state of affairs with many writers slowly turning to non-fiction. The most famous example of this is perhaps Arundhati Roy who, after her landmark novel The god of small things, has written only non-fiction. The three books under review here are all works of literary non-fiction, and in some sense exemplify this trend. All the three books are self-consciously about the lives and times of the 'new India', and follow a more or less traditional biographical approach to narrate their stories.

Female Construction Worker in India (Wikimedia Commons)

The beautiful and the damned (henceforth referred to as TBATD) is, at first glance, structured around four sectors of the Indian economy. The first chapter (after the introduction) tells the story of the new sunrise IT-BPO industry. The second chapter tells the story of red sorghum, a crop grown to feed India’s rapidly expanding livestock industry, and raises alarm about the apparent beginning of the end of Indian agriculture as we known it. 

The book's third chapter narrates the story of ‘old’ industrial sectors such as steel, and the ways in which cheap, exploited footloose migrant labour produces the huge profits that support the supposedly high GDP growth rates of the Indian economy, and the hideously decadent lifestyles of India’s plutocracy. The fourth and the last chapter is the story of the exploding Indian hospitality industry, and the minorities, especially the ethnic minorities from the northeastern states, that support it. 

But scratch the narrative surface a little, and biographies of a set of complex and fascinating characters such as the computer engineer Chakravarthy Prasad, alias Chak, the dalit overground Maoist Devaram and his associates, the seed baron Mahipal, the migrant workers Mohan, Dibyajoti, and Pradip, and the Manipuri waiter Esther in the ultra-chic New Delhi restaurant Zest become the pillars and the arches that prop up the lean architecture of TBATD. 

Beautiful thing (henceforth referred to as BT) centers around the bar dancer Leela from the Bombay suburb of Mira Road. BT is the story of a woman who escapes from a family where her father set himself up as her pimp, to become one of the star dancers of the Bombay dance bar 'Night Lovers'. Leela takes the owner of the bar Shetty as her ‘husband’, and fights a losing battle against other younger competitors for his fleeting attentions. 

A little after midway into the narrative, the story of Leela becomes the story of the dance bar industry in Bombay, when a politician from the party in power takes on the industry, and successfully shuts it down with grave consequences for the dancers. The book details the struggles of Leela, and the ways in which she tries to fashion a sense of self despite the stock tropes that society has created for ‘those women’.

A free man has Mohammed Ashraf, a safediwala originally from Bihar, but now resident in Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi, as its protagonist. Sethi slowly stitches together the story of this man (along with those of his friends) whose life is a work in the model of the stereotype of tribal art; painted with broad strokes and with solid, primary colours, and executed with a winning disregard for coherence of composition. 

A Street in Delhi (Wikimedia Commons)

Ashraf is the kind of footloose labour whose life Deb does not detail out for us. He is a divorcee whose marriage and its dissolution still has the capacity to haunt him. He is prone to binge drinking and calling acquaintances such as Sethi in the wee hours of the morning; whose self-description is “mast maula, dil chowda, seena sandook, lowda bandook! A dancing adventurer, with my heart for a treasure chest and my penis for a gun (p. 70).” 

He and his friends are caught up in the neo-colonial remaking of the city of Delhi, where the poor are being increasingly pushed out of sight and out of the ‘mind of the city’ and their livelihoods and homes are being destroyed with impunity.

All the three books under discussion here try to provide us accounts primarily from the margins; these margins might be economic, geographical, ethnic, social or religious. But is the new India only about the margins? But this charge can perhaps be made with greater felicity against TBATD as compared to the other two books. BT and AFM are not overtly and self-consciously about the new India. They are structured around very clearly identified individual protagonists.

But TBATD is purportedly about ‘the new India’. Two questions remain to be answered if one wants to produce this kind of global narrative about India. First, one needs to give accounts of the quotidian lives, aspirations and motivations of the middle classes who are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the processes that are radically reshaping ‘the new India’? Pankaj Mishra’s precocious Butter chicken in Ludhiana captures early stirrings of this process. 

Second, if one chooses to tell the story of ‘the new India’ through an appliqué work of biographies then can one tell such a story without the story of such ‘anachronisms’ like 'Dalit Indian  Chamber of Commerce and Industry', or the increasingly vocal and visible queer subcultures in all large Indian cities? The unleashing of predatory capitalism has not merely created footloose labour, it has also created the footloose queer. But TBATD fails to capture this sense of new possibilities that have been brought into being by the demons released by contemporary socio-economic processes in India.

But there are many ways in which TBATD scores over the other two books under review. BT and AFM both use desi words and expressions liberally, sometimes with a jarring effect. Sethi is more effective, because unlike Faliero his usage of Hindi words and Indianisms are both less frequent and more useful. If one uses certain words for conveying a sense of place and milieu, then such usage has to be pitch-perfect. Otherwise, it falls flat. For example, the Hindi expression 'chhammak chhallo' - 'cha' with aspiration - is wrongly spelt as 'chamak' in BT. But, to be fair, both these books are otherwise well written, empathetic towards the protagonists, and help access lives that the reading public of Indian English is unfamiliar with.

My quibble with all the three books is much larger. These three books of literary non-fiction (and other books of non-fiction about contemporary India), are, in some sense, attempts at conveying ‘the facts’. These have a representational notion of the relationship between reality and texts. 

An engagement with contemporary texts (both fictional and non-fictional) about India reveals that this notion and the related differentiation of the narrative space into fiction and non-fiction, and the resultant narrative tropes and registers are increasingly less able to capture the hybridity and fecundity that India’s social milieu now offers. This assertion calls for a longer discussion elsewhere. But if English language fiction seems unable to help us grasp our contemporaneity in a nuanced fashion, then does shifting back into The New Yorker style long-form journalism the only way to make sense of the present? 

The present conjuncture in India requires not literary non-fiction (or conventional fiction for that matter), but hybrid narrative forms as exemplified by the puranas. Is the time ripe now for subverting the conventions of narrative differentiation of literary modernity, and cannibalise the story-telling forms of our pre-colonial past to access and make sense of our ever-present futures?

Note: A version of this review essay was first published in 2012 in the news magazine Hard News, Volume 9, Issue 4. 

Books Under Review

Deb, Siddhartha. 2011. The beautiful and the damned: life in the new India. New Delhi: Penguin Viking.

Faleiro, Sonia. 2010. Beautiful thing: inside the secret world of Bombay’s dance bars. New Delhi: Penguin Hamish Hamilton.

Sethi, Aman. 2011. A free man. Noida and London: Random House India.