If you read the editor’s note—or, heck, anything I put in the post! or the issue!—you can see that I have real questions about the categorization of so-called ethnic literature, and that these writers are not held up as “representative,” per se; in fact, that’s one of the issues we raise. That said, I was extremely proud to be able to highlight these folks on the basis of their being very, very good! To set that up in a false dichotomy vs. other writers is unnecessary, unproductive, and frankly, unhelpful to either “set” of writers.

I hope that some of you have taken the time to read Sirisena’s work, which is, after all, the point of this post; she’s an incredibly talented writer and I’m happy to have been able to include her.

http://www.5abi.com/2009-pubs/011-kaldar-roop-dhillon-250509.htm http://www.likhari.org/Likhari%20Pages%202008/5303%20roop%20dhillon%20Suraj_Lekh%20kldhar%2025%20November%202008.htm

Here you go

Neela Noor By Roop Dhillon ( Punjabi) Annexation ( by the same, but translated in English, extracts available on the web, but not sure how good) Loona By Shiv Kumar Batalvi ( Available in English) Pinjar – The Skeleton By Amrita Preetum ( again available in English) Paavitar Paapi by Nanak Singh ( as above) Anything by Amarjit Chandan ( as above, but see below as well) Devdas by SaratChandra Chaterjee ( Bengali) Ponniyin selvan By Kalki ( Tamil) Dhanpat Rai Munshi By Premchand (Hindi) Kavve aur Kala Paani By Nirmal Verma ( Hindi) Jugtu By Sadhu Binning ( Punjabi) Heer By Waris Shah ( available in English)

Amarjit Chandan has won many awards including the one below

http://uddari.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/poet-amarjit-chandan-wins-the-anad-kav-sanman-2009/

I take all point made from 8 to 15 on board…they are all valid.

That said the river can flow the other way. A Diaspora born guy called Roop Dhillon ( Rupinderpal Dhillon) who was raised 100% with English, in a family that left India 5 decades ago taught himself Punjabi and wrote in it for both the Diaspora and Indian audience!

There are many of these translated into English as Well

In my next post I’ll list them for you

Lost in this discussion is the impact that Indian writers in English have had on English as a literary language. Writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have woven strands of subcontinental English, colored by the streets of Mumbai, London, the Kerala backwaters, Shakespeare, Indian Government documents, film dialogue, Doordarshan, etc. Roy’s book is peppered with Malayalam, too. Rushdie is a diaspora writer; Roy is not. The point is that the literary English here is a hybrid, and world literature is richer for it.

I thought “White Tiger” was a strange book, channeling Holden Caufield and Raskolnikov. But why not? It’s just one book. I liked “Between the Assassinations” better because it seemed a little more grounded. Is it more “authentic” because it is set in a fictional village and makes reference to historical events and is not the monologue of curiously literate murderer? Should Adiga write in Tamil or Telugu just because he speaks them?

Culture does influence what language you write in. As does your intended audience. What kind of audience do you reckon someone writing in English is shooting for versus someone writing in Kannada? If you’re Indian and you think in English you are automatically disconnected from the vast majority of Indians. Now that’s fine, as long as you don’t presume to speak for them through your writing. I’m looking at stuff like White Tiger here.

Frankly, I think it’s unfair, even offensive, to accuse this blog — or people of Indian descent who write in English — of having a “colonial lens” or being “the new brown sahibs.” You’re implying that literature in Indian languages is more authentic and more worthwhile than literature in English by people who happen to be of Indian descent. But why should biology decide what language a person writes in? Why must brown writers alone be limited by “ancestry”? I often transplant these chauvinistic arguments — and there are many — to America or the UK to demonstrate just how ridiculous they are. So is Philip Roth a traitor to the Jewish race for not writing in Biblical Hebrew? Perhaps Toni Morrison’s work is just a pale imitation of the much better writing of contemporary Igbo writers? Should the New Yorker remove its colonial lens and shun Alice Munro in favour of contemporary Gaelic writing (yes, the New Yorker is in English, but so what? I’m sure some very good contemporary Gaelic writing has been translated into English). I’m just making these two up, by the way — I don’t even know what Munro’s and Morrison’s “ancestral” languages are — that in itself should tell you something.

I don’t know the family histories of the other writers in this issue of Guernica, but I can tell you that my family hasn’t lived in India for a hundred years, and that I studied Malay, not any Indian language, as my “national language” at school. So this dichotomy you’ve set up — English vs. “Indian languages” — is a false one in much of the diaspora, anyway.

This is such a disheartening discussion thread — thank you, Preston, for trying to hold the fort, but I wish someone who’s actually read the story would say something, instead of the usual tired comments about how attractive the author is and whether she is or isn’t “authentically” South Asian.

I started with Girish Karnad’s plays—Tughlaq, followed by Yayati (both in Kannada). Both of them are fairly acclaimed, and I liked both. Yayati requires some amount of familiarity with the Mahabharata to be fully appreciated. Translations into English are easily available, on Amazon as well—though something is lost in translation to English. Translations to Indian languages are also widely available on online book stores based in India, and these translations are of good quality.

Modern Kannada literature has always had a liberal bent, but some exceptional authors have a different political leaning as well. They are not exactly conservative though, and their style is different too—a more minimalistic literary presentation. My starting point for these authors (due to ease of availability), was SL Bhyrappa—Saakshi, Vamsavriksha, Parva and Daatu are all available in several translations—all four are in Kannada.

What I am doing now is to read through some of the short listed books/winners for Akademi/Jnanapith awards—all books are available in several Indian languages with good translations, though not always in English. Recent awardees which I intend to get my hands on are Rehman Rahi’s Siyah Rud jearen Man (Kashmiri), Indira Goswami’s Chinnamastar Manuhtu (Assamese), and Srinivas Vaidya’s Halla Bantu Halla (Kannada).