Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (23 page)

The case was cogently argued in a thoughtful and elegant essay. Scholars like Ranga Rao, himself a novelist, and Harish Trivedi had called the rise to prominence of these Stephanian writers “the single most significant development of Indian writing in English of the 1980s.” Trivedi described them, in a paraphrase of Macaulay, as “Stephanians in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Others had
been more cutting, but equally validated the label: Alok Rai, for instance, wrote of “the recent outbreak of bright, clever Indian writing in English…. ‘St. Stephen's’ is code for writing which is reminiscent of privileged, bustling quads and redolent of jockstraps and cynical, brilliant undergraduates hyped up by their gonads and their wit.” Aditya Bhattacharjea concluded from these and other literary references that “a new phenomenon bearing the name of the College has indeed been identified on the Indian literary scene.”

The notion of a St. Stephen's School of Literature was itself, of course, a wonderfully Stephanian idea, and as an Old Boy I was both amused and bemused. Amused, because the idea was, for any Stephanian writer, a diverting one to contemplate; bemused, because the assumptions underlying the notion of such a school were problematic enough without the additional burden of being described as its exemplar (“Shashi Tharoor, possibly the most ‘Stephanian’ of the novelists,” Bhattacharjea wrote in his essay.)

Since I did not study English at college and therefore possess neither a theoretical grounding in literature nor a critical vocabulary to articulate my prejudices, my reactions to this thesis are not as scholarly as its proponents’. It strikes me, though, that the existence of a school should imply something more than the mere fact that a number of writers share the same alma mater (as the college's notorious student paper
Kooler Talk
might have put it, the “school” must mean more than the college). If there is a St. Stephen's School of Literature (and if there is, let us call it SSSL henceforth, in homage to the Stephanian addiction to acronyms), its
members must have similarities in their literary outputs — similarities of style, theme, content, sensibility, or some combination of these — that both link them and set them apart from other, non-Stephanian writers. There must also be some continuing affinity among the members, some literary bond that reinforces the exclusivity of their mutual club. As I will explain, I am not sure that these two requirements can be found among the eligible members of the putative SSSL.

But first, what does the very name St. Stephen's stand for to the outsiders whose comments have sparked this debate? To non-Stephanians, St. Stephen's in this context largely conjures up three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering — elitism, Anglophilia, and deracination. Before one can discuss a Stephanian school, one is obliged to confront this stereotype head-on.

Whether or not there is an SSSL, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: after all, I spent three years living in and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case “Mission College” elitism had a self-fulfilling quality about it that made it the best guarantee of its own perpetuation. St. Stephen's attracts such a high caliber of student that it is virtually assured of excellent examination results irrespective of the competence of the faculty. Further, its alumni either originate in, or graduate to, such a privileged and influential stratum of society that they constitute a network in government, in business, in the media, on which every Stephanian can seek to draw.

But this is still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dust-plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, organized union debates on such statements as “In the opinion of this House the opinion of this House does not matter,” staged plays and wrote poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned Practical Joke Competition (in memory of P. G. Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the “Winter Festival” of collegiate cultural competition, which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual intercollege cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabridgian “gyps” to serve their meals and make their beds. And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of
Kooler Talk
and the cyclostyled
Spice
(the underground rag put out by the Wodehouse Society, whose typing mistakes were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious).

This was the St. Stephen's I knew, and none of us who lived and breathed the Stephanian air saw any alien
affectation in it. For one thing, St. Stephen's also embraced the Hindi movies at nearby suburbs and trips to the aluminum-shed “dhaba” at the corner of the campus, where individual cigarettes were sold to impecunious students; the nocturnal Informal Discussion Group saw articulate discussion of political issues, and the Social Service League actually went out and performed social service; and even for the “pseuds,” the height of career aspiration was the Indian Administrative Service, not a multinational corporation. The Stephanian could hardly be deracinated and still manage to bloom. It was against Indian targets that the Stephanian set his goals, and by Indian assumptions that he sought to attain them. (A self-protective disclaimer to feminists about my pronouns: I studied at St. Stephen's before its co-edification in 1975.)

At the same time St. Stephen's was, astonishingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a remarkable extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what version of religious faith you espoused. When I joined the college in 1972 from Calcutta, the son of a southern newspaper executive, I did not have to worry about fitting in: we were all minorities at St. Stephen's, and all part of one eclectic polychrome culture. Five of the preceding ten union presidents had been non-Delhiite non-Hindus (four Muslims and a Christian), and they had all been fairly elected against candidates from the “majority” community. But at St. Stephen's religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were “in residence” or a “dayski” (day-scholar), a “science type” or a “DramSoc type,” a sportsman or a univ “topper” (or
best of all, both). Caste and creed were no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian experience.

This blurring of conventional distinctions was a crucial element of Stephania. “Sparing” (a Stephanianism derived from “spare time”) with the more congenial of your comrades in residence — though it could leave you with a near-fatal faith in coffee, conversation, and crosswords as ends in themselves — was manifestly more important than attending classes. (And in any case, you learned as much from approachable faculty members outside the classroom as inside it.) Being hazed (“ragged,” in our argot) outside the back gate of the women's college Miranda House, having a late coffee in your block tutor's room, hearing outrageous (and largely apocryphal) tales about recent Stephanians who were no longer around to contradict them, seeing your name punned with in
Kooler Talk,
were all integral parts of the Stephanian culture, and of the ways in which this culture was transmitted to each successive batch of Stephanians.

Three years is, of course, a small — and decreasing — proportion of my life, but my three years at St. Stephen's marked me for all the years to follow. Partly this was because I joined the college a few months after my sixteenth birthday and left it a few months after my nineteenth, so that I was at St. Stephen's at an age when any experience would have had a lasting effect. But equally vital was the institution itself, its atmosphere and history, its student body and teaching staff, its sense of itself and how that sense was communicated to each individual character in the Stephanian story. Too many Indian colleges are places
for lectures, rote learning, memorizing, regurgitation; St. Stephen's encouraged random reading, individual note-taking, personal tutorials, extracurricular development. Elsewhere you learned to answer the questions; at college, you learned to question the answers. Some of us went further, and questioned the questions.

So, to return to the possible existence of a St. Stephen's school of Indo-Anglian writing: I have to admit that St. Stephen's influenced me fundamentally, gave me my basic faith in all-inclusive, multanimous, free-thinking cultures, helped shape my mind and define my sense of myself in relation to the world, and so, inevitably, influenced what I have done later in life — as a man, as a United Nations official, and as a writer. Stephania encouraged the development of qualities that would stand writers in good stead. But I had been writing well before I came to St. Stephen's — my first story was published more than five years before I entered college — and I did not cease to learn when I left St. Stephen's, so I cannot say that (except for the few short stories I wrote in college and about college) either the style or the content of my writing is primarily or exclusively Stephan-ian. And while my Stephanian friendships are important to me, and my association with the college is something of which I am inordinately proud, neither relates much to matters literary. Indeed, practically none of the other early-1970s Stephanian writers who have since distinguished themselves did any writing while I knew them at St. Stephen's. (I remember Amitav Ghosh as a diligent reporter for All-India Radio's “Roving Microphone,” and Allan Sealy's prowess with the guitar was the stuff of legend, but
only Anurag Mathur, apart from myself, published fiction while he was at St. Stephen's.) To trace retrospective connections in a common “school” would, if I remember my subsidiary classes in philosophy right, be guilty of the logical fallacy of
post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
It might have been different if those who sharpened their own, and each other's, linguistic rapiers at
Kooler Talk
or
Spice
had all gone on to churn out comparable novels; but the campus journalists of my time have all firmly resisted the temptation to produce literary fiction.

Those who have seen a distinctively “Stephanian” quality in some Indo-Anglian writers seem to use the term (largely, I might add, with pejorative intent) to include notions of elitism, privilege, irreverence, flippant wit, cleverness in the use of language, and deracination from the Indian mainstream, wherever that may flow. They do not appear to include the secularism, the pan-Indian outlook, the well-rounded education, the eclectic social interests, the questioning spirit, and the meritocratic culture that are equally vital ingredients of the Stephanian ethos. To the extent that all these elements characterize the work of Stephan-ian writers, one might be able to talk of a Stephanian school of literature; but the truth is that these qualities, positive as well as negative, are not all found in all the Stephanian novelists, whose works quite naturally manifest as many divergences as similarities. And many of the presumed elements of an SSSL can be spotted in other Indian writers of the same generation who have not come within sniffing distance of St. Stephen's College; Vikram Chandra, Richard Crasta, and Sunetra Gupta are just three of the names that
come to mind. What is being described as “Stephanian” writing is in fact characteristic of an entire generation of Indian writers in English, who grew up without the shadow of the Englishman judging their prose, who used it unself-consciously in their daily lives in independent India, and who eventually wrote fiction in it as naturally as they would have written their university exams, their letters home, or the notes they slipped to each other in their classrooms.

I would argue, in other words, that whatever the Stephanian writers have in common, they also share with non-Stephanian Indian writers in English (indeed, it is ironic to see Stephanian writing being criticized for showy prose and brittle wit by non-Stephanian reviewers using language that reveals the same qualities.) And what they do not have in common (the gulf between the concerns and aspirations of any two of the writers to whom St. Stephen's can lay claim) is sufficiently significant to dilute any thought of an SSSL.

This is also borne out by the absence of what I have earlier called a continuing affinity, a sort of literary bond of loyalty, amongst the members of any SSSL. St. Stephen's is after all a college, and like all colleges it breeds its share of resentments; the Stephanian writer thus brings a great deal of nonliterary baggage to his encounters with Stephanian critics. Of the more than a hundred and forty reviews
The Great Indian Novel
received on five continents, only three were largely negative; two of those — and I make the point a little ruefully — were by contemporaries of mine at St. Stephen's.

So there may not be a St. Stephen's School of Literature, but what its supposed adherents have been writing deserves a place in the national literary canon. I have often
argued that criticisms of Indian writing in English are often based on a notion of authenticity that is highly contestable. The pun-dropping Stephanian is as Indian as the Punjabi peasant of the Pune professor; and if what he writes is not sufficiently rooted in the earth of the Gangetic plains to pass muster with the self-appointed guardians of Indianness, it has its place within a realm of experience that is still uniquely Indian. The frame of reference of the Stephanian novelist may not be that of R. K. Narayan, but then Narayan's was not exactly that of, say, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai — and India is large enough to embrace all three as her own.