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14 - Postcolonial writing in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2012

Ato Quayson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, if we do not identify your composition a novel, how then do we itemise it? Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.

Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it as a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.

Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, there is no immediate demand for gestures. There is immediate demand for novels. Sir, we are literary agents not free agents.

Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a novel. Sir, itemise it accordingly.

The above exchange, which constitutes one of several frontispieces that frame G. V. Desani’s maverick and freewheeling novel of 1949, offers a provocative opening for this essay. Writing two years after the independence of India, Desani makes his ‘author’ and his initially blustering stance define the very essence of postcolonial necessity. Now is the time of immense social and cultural change, a moment pregnant with opportunity, which demands transformation of the mere fact of the novel into something far more meaningful: the ‘gesture’. And yet this grandiloquence is rapidly brought down to earth by the brute realities of the market, which relentlessly declares its own chain of demand and supply. The author’s quick turnaround, while ridiculous, is touchingly redeemed by the pragmatism that propels it. Moreover, it is an ‘Indian middle-man’ who, in the name of the ordinary ‘rank and file’, imposes on the author these mundane yet unavoidable pressures.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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