A Bird's Eye View

There is something common about all contemporary Indian authors in the English language, be it Vikram Seth, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai or Raj Kamal Jha, and that is that they have all spent a substantial amount of time outside India. Some have stayed there for education, some for work and some have made it their home, peeking in on India when they so desire. If you loosen the argument just the little bit, you can even include writers like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry. They’re of course not Indian, like some of us do claim, but are of Indian ancestry nevertheless.

Some pretty big names, aren’t they?

The startling fact is that the above is true for most acclaimed Indian authors. There are very few who have spent their entire lives here and have still been able to come up with writing that is comparable to some of the masterpieces by the names taken above. Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra, to name a couple. But there are too few, and why is that?

Living abroad didn’t necessarily improve their style of writing; I doubt if anyone else could ever produce a novel as powerful as Roy’s The God of Small Things. And also, it wasn’t that the years away from India helped them gain insights into the world inside and outside in ways they had never been aware of before.

Maybe, and I think I might be right here, those years in the West gave them that much-needed privilege, which is something we all wish we had, that is of being able to observe and understand something so personal to oneself from a distance. Maybe, this place is too complex and confusing to fully understand when you are living in it, as one of its countless little parts. Maybe, one needs a bird’s eye view, the chance to lose oneself in the maze completely, and yet not be overwhelmed by wild, uncontrollable emotion, the type which is bound to come when you think about this great country.