Midnight’s other children

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with Midnight’s Children, a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown. Many of the writers who arrived on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (whose wildly successful novel The God of Small Things was first serialized in Granta), Amit Chaudhuri — continued to publish fiction and reportage, and a new wave of novelists, including Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, went on to write prize-winning, best-selling books. Readers of Roy, Desai or Adiga — not to mention the viewers who flocked to “Slumdog Millionaire” — have not been spared portraits of Indian life’s miseries (caste-based discrimination, horrific poverty). But the folkloric and redemptive aspects of the stories, already familiar thanks to Rushdie’s magic realism and the more romantic understandings of Hinduism associated with the Kama Sutra, have merely solidified Westerners’ rosy vision of India. These books and films have also complemented the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island and has written vividly about Indian-Americans. The Indian experience, however foreign, has become part of the American experience.

Full report here NYT