India: Fifty Years after Independence. Eds. Kathleen Firth and Felicity Hand. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001. Pages 168, £ 10.99.

One is not quite sure if the post-independence India in its fifty years (it is fifty four now) has really come of age, as far as its civil and political institutions are concerned. For a commentator like Gita Mehta the experience of the last half century has been a bit like playing snakes and ladders (with snakes apparently many headed). But there is no denying the fact that the arts and literatures in India have indeed blossomed, though we cannot subscribe to the thesis (a la Rushdie) that the most significant writing to emerge from India is that which is done in English. The book under review purports to celebrate this flowering, though the focus is on literature in English, particularly the expatriate brand. There are overviews by Murari Prasad and Mary Conde on feminism and the Indian Women Writing in English. Prasad attempts to delink Indian feminists from the Western feminist tradition maintaining, rather problematically, that the Indian feminists do not really contemplate changing the status quo, thus forgetting that the foundational principle of feminist resistance worldwide is its attack on patriarchy. Elizabeth Russell extends the argument by suggesting that identity is not entirely a matter of choice but of the discourse of power and is often predicated upon the politics of exclusion.

C D Narasimhaiah addresses, very perceptively, the issues of 'Indianness' and 'national literature' in connection with Indian Writing, which ought to leave, by now, its own characteristic imprint. If the Americans lost no time in establishing their national literature, why should Indian writing with its long tradition, be unsure of itself? Language should be no bar if we take cue from Raja Rao or R K Narayan, who successfully use English to convey Indian sensibility. To Narasimhaiah's advocacy of native genius one may perhaps add that a cognitive shift is also called for if one has to avoid the 'essentialism' in Rao's representation of India as a textualized, Brahminical category.

Syd Harrex in his essay underlines the twin traditions of Indian Writing in English, the one that originated from the 'Anglo-Indian' world of Kipling, Thompson and Forster, and the other rooted in India's own historical experience. The diasporic novel is a recent category extending that experience, and offers an inside/outside view, as illustrated by Savita Goel's reading of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. There are, however, limitations of such a view as even Mistry fails to assess the dynamics of oppression in a society ridden with caste and class differences. The expatriate writing itself has undergone changes in as much as it seeks to construct a new identity negotiating different temporal and spatial boundaries. Kathleen Firth and Ranjana Ash investigate complex issues of literary representation, whereas Somdatta Mandal in her essay underlines authority and language, which play crucial roles in cultural articulation. It is something, which was keenly felt by Bankim whose apostasy from the English language, after Rajmohan's Wife, is not unlike Ngugi's.

Globalization has offered a new perspective on national identity, and the section on media and the film highlights it. However, the exigencies of globalization have set up universal standards which dehistoricise national experiences thus thwarting critical evaluation from specific perspectives. No wonder then that Sara Martin Alegre discusses films like A Passage to India, Heat and Dust and City of Joy, which are made by foreigners, and none by Indians. By implication it devalues Indian popular cinema as pure kitsch even though it plays its role in constructing social reality. The interplay between culture, society and mass media cannot be studied objectively with the politics of exclusion, which is what one is left pondering on as one finishes reading this book.

Satish C Aikant
scaikant@rediffmail.com