12 - Amitav Ghosh: The Indian Architect of a Postnational Utopia

Summary

The history of Indian fiction in English goes back a long way in time. Even if we mark 1864 as the starting point of Indian fiction proper (the year of Chattopadhyay's Rajmohan's Wife), it is still, as a genre, almost one hundred and fifty years old. In her ‘The Anxiety of Indianness’, Meenakshi Mukherjee locates the various important milestones in this eventful journey, as well as the variety of challenges faced by its practitioners over the decades. The avowed aim of the first phase of these writers consisted of two definite strands. On the one hand, these writers had to engage themselves in the project of constructing national identity. This construction invariably depended on what Mukherjee describes as ‘an erasure of differences within the border and accentuating the difference with what lies outside.’ To this effect, in all these novels, a homogenized Indian tradition was deliberately constructed and pitted against an equally unified imaginary West. The Indianness in these works of Indian fiction rested upon the binary between the East and the West. At the same time, this construction of Indianness, both in the early phase and in the phase of nationalism, was not without a sense of anxiety, which came with a constant awareness of just how different the ‘alien reader’ (to whom these novels were primarily addressed) was. Mukherjee discusses elaborately in her essay how in the early phase these novels had to indulge in elaborate explanatory asides or semantic or lexical shifts, or how the writers had to be constantly on guard to keep English readers in good humour, the implicit anxiety being to uphold the ordinary Indian soldier's loyalty to the Crown.