‘He’s someone for whom literature never existed. He’s starting on a clean slate.’ This sense of a beginning, of possibility, imparts a sort of effortlessness to Bhagat’s prose.
by Amit Chaudhuri
Literature is an imponderable. What its defining qualities are obscure, and the notion that it has absolute characteristics by which it can be recognised has long receded. Naturally, people who abhor literature’s slipperiness — for instance, the conveners of the Booker Prize; publishers; literary agents — continue to make large claims on its behalf, and behave as if they can spot literature from a mile away. What they make a habit of spotting, of course, is something that looks like literature, or has the air and features of a classic, identifiable as an important work because its bone-structure resembles other important works of the distant or recent past. This habit of, and expertise in, spotting the identifying marks of literature is of course crucial to its successful commercialisation. This is not to say that we can’t recognise the literary when we intermittently confront it: we often do. But it’s an odd species of recognition, because we’re hard put to communicate what its familiar features are — especially as it’s a kind of familiarity that shocks us slightly. It’s a recognition that’s akin to a kind of compulsion or love. This isn’t to say that love — or one’s compulsions — can’t be discussed intelligently.
In India, not many among the educated (especially Anglophone) middle classes — that is, the constituency of readers in the major cities — seem to have any idea of what literature is. This might be a good thing, a covert acknowledgement of the fact that the literary is hard to pin down. But, more often, it seems like an indifference that’s insular rather than energising; in fact, the Anglophone middle class has decided, in the last thirty years, that it does know what literature is, and also decided, almost concomitantly, that it’s not important enough. Literature is significant to this class when it becomes a historical narrative or when it espouses a political theme; that is, when it becomes a form of knowledge that can be taken seriously, or when it can substitute for a social intervention that can be taken seriously. The ‘literary’ characteristics of such ‘serious’ work aren’t just imponderable; they’re to some extent dispensable.
Here, the advent of Chetan Bhagat introduces a provocative modulation. At first, the significance of Bhagat’s rise seemed simple: it confirmed the appearance of an indigenous popular literature in English (augured faintly by Shobhaa De, and augmented now by Amish Tripathi), one that, in its way, challenged the hegemony of the ‘literary’ Indian novelists in English who were published abroad, and who derived much of their magic and potency from this fact. I’ve dipped into One Night at the Call Centre and read two pages, and noticed that Bhagat writes fluently and well. Those two pages possessed an energy that perhaps comes from their author having been given a carte blanche — of being uniquely unshackled from the history of literature. As the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said to me when we were chatting once about Bhagat: ‘He’s someone for whom literature never existed. He’s starting on a clean slate.’ This sense of a beginning, of possibility, imparts a sort of effortlessness to Bhagat’s prose.
But if literature is an imponderable (‘It is an institution, but a strange institution,’ said Derrida to his interlocutor Derek Attridge), how can we know it except negatively: that is, by what it is not? And here Chetan Bhagat’s role turns out to be sui generis. For, despite all his popularity, no one in India wants to own up to the fact that Bhagat’s works are literature. In fact, no one I know even casually admits to being an admirer of the work. So we have the contradiction of a writer who’s read widely, but about whose fiction the best-known fact is that it’s read widely. It’s as if — in distancing itself from Bhagat’s work, in overplaying its putatively non-serious qualities — sections of the Indian reading public are speaking up for a sense of the literary which they themselves didn’t have any awareness of, let alone loyalty to, until Bhagat came along. Bhagat now seems, in India, to be a metonym for whatever is the opposite of literature — but what is literature? If it was always Bhagat’s mission to make the ordinary reader aware of it via subterranean means — negatively, antithetically — he has succeeded marvellously, and with greater reach and force than any so-called ‘literary’ writer has. If his predecessors or offshoots — De, Tripathi — were embarked on a similar enterprise, we didn’t know it, so peripheral was their impact. Yet Bhagat, by inadvertently electing to become the norm of what’s anti-literary, has contributed to creating, in circumscribed, ‘aspirational’ Anglophone India, a constituency for literature — where literature, inasmuch as it isn’t Bhagat, remains an imponderable (as, inevitably, it should).
Amit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, critic, and musician. His latest novel is Odysseus Abroad. Among the prizes he has won are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Prize, and the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to literary studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.