A Writer's People (22 page)

The education of the new Indian writers—and nowadays some of them have even been to writing schools—also gets in the way. It seems to them they have the most enormous choice when, in imitation of the successful people who have gone before, they settle down to do their own book. They are not bursting with a wish to say anything; nothing is going to force itself out in its own way; they are guided in the main by imitation. Should they be Irish or German and indulge in wordplay? Should they be South American and see magic everywhere? Should they be like the late Raymond Carver and pretend they know nothing about anything? Or should they simply talk it
over with their teacher at the writing school? This is where India begins to get lost. The writing school's India is like the writing school's America or Maoist China or Haiti.

India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it knows best about Indian writers and books are their advances and their prizes. There is little discussion about the substance of a book or its literary quality or the point of view of the writer. Much keeps on being said in the Indian press about Indian writing as an aspect of the larger modern Indian success, but literary criticism is still hardly known as an art. The most important judgements of an Indian book continue to be imported.

As much as for Gandhi, born in 1869, and for Chaudhuri, born in 1897, India's poverty and colonial past, the riddle of the two civilisations, continue to stand in the way of identity and strength and intellectual growth.