The third disjuncture is of course about cultural self-confidence. For all the bluster about the arrival of the postcolonial generation, we still could be said to privilege external modes of validation over our own (consider the ridiculous obsession over winning Oscars, for example). Of course it is the content of the standards that should count, not their provenance. But it is mildly disturbing that despite all the rhetoric of India having arrived, the lack of external validation in some important spheres is still seen as some kind of deficit. This is then compounded by sheer ignorance about the cultural possibilities and ground that we stand on. For instance, one distinction often mapped onto literature is the construction of the vernacular as the parochial and rooted, the English as the cosmopolitan and universal. This identification is bizarre, but widespread. But intellectually nothing could be farther from the truth. As Kunwar Narain himself once wrote, there is a sense in which Hindi writers have had to write with an even deeper sense of self-consciousness about three traditions: what he called Hindu, Indo-Islamic, and Western. In that sense, vernacular literature has carved out its freedom through a wider appropriation.

Finally, one cannot help wondering whether what is at stake at this juncture is not simply the contingent location of Hindi in emerging elite consciousness, but a conception of literature itself. Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger is a good read, with some powerful passages. But you cannot shake off the feeling that it is simply today’s macabre headlines selectively strung together for effect. Amitav Ghosh’s erudite Sea of Poppies again reads like what should have been yesterday’s headlines strung together, a history rather than a novel. These are perfect examples of what many critics feared might happen to literature under the guise of realism: the distinction between art and journalism, art and history would get eroded. Nothing wrong in stringing headlines (Dostoyevsky did that as well, but did incomparably more as well). But you cannot help but wonder whether the confusion between art and reportage is now so deep that we neglect the other possibilities of literature.

... contd.