Indian Writing English: Counterrealism as Alternative Literary History

This essay is at least partially a belated response to a significant, polemical, and neglected monograph entitled Indian Writing in English: Is There Any Worth in It? written by Subha Rao and published in 1976. The monograph is a reworking and elaboration of a paper presented, appropriately, at the University of Mysore, then the centre of Indo-Anglian and postcolonial studies in India. Had this trenchant critique of Indo-Anglian writing been written from the perspective of what has been dubbed the `colonial cringe,' namely, an uncritical defence of a canonical, largely British, tradition, a response would be an unprofitable exercise in that it would seek to resolve on a literary plane what is clearly an expression of cultural bias. Rao's work, admittedly, does not exclude references to British literature — in fact, an instance of comparison, one that is used to judge the only Indo-Anglian text that the author refers to, namely, B. Rajan's The Dark Dancer (1958), is Middlemarch. But the core of the argument is derived from socio-cultural premises that have a specific and local significance for India, and by extension for countries and regions where alternative linguistic traditions have been revived and foregrounded as an auxiliary to decolonization and nationalism. The failure of Indian writing in English, according to this view, is seen to be a consequence of factors more complex than that of a duality based on authenticity versus imitation.