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The Indian campus novel |
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13th July 2008 |
There is probably a memo floating around the offices of one of the bookstore chains right now suggesting that a sign proclaiming ``Indian Fiction: Campus Novels'' be affixed atop a suitably chosen shelf somewhere near the front of the store. Right on top of this shelf, the memo possibly continues, will be placed twenty-five copies of Five Point Someone, next to which will be displayed ten copies each of Chetan Bhagat's other two books (that aren't set on campuses, but, yaar, he is identified with college fiction.) The remaining few IIT books will be represented by a copy each on the flanks. Below this will be three IIM shelves. At the bottom will be space for books about medical colleges, fashion design institutes, army training institutions, design schools, dentistry polytechnics and radical leftist campuses. Novels set in degree colleges and otherwise unremarkable universities will be displayed here only if they have some interesting angle, like if the narrator is from the North-East or is a lesbian. If this shelf is not entirely filled in the next six to eight months, it can be used to accommodate some of the overflow from the IIM shelves.
Why are all these people writing campus novels, yaar? That's me, not the memo. You can ask the other question: why are people reading these books? Interviewers do, and authors respond fatuously: ``They want to relive their college days''; ``they want to know what college is like before they get there''; ``they want to see if their own college experience is anything like what it used to be.'' Yawn, yaar. It makes much more sense to ask why these books are being written in the first place.
Debut novels (and most of these college novels are debut novels) are often an exercise in locating the writer's self. The setting of the book provides an important clue to where the writer was formed and, more broadly, from where a generation or a class of people are deriving their notion of identity. And the notion of identity I am thinking about here is not a bag of cultural identifiers--that's a red herring at best and plain incorrect at worst. Identity is the set of questions whose answers we will seek all our lives.
The protagonist could be Bibhutibhushan's Apu, unable to choose between the nature-suffused beauty of Nischindipur and the grey urbaneness of Calcutta. Or it could be Jack Kerouac's narrator, unable to do anything with his appetite but express it in broad gasoline-drenched brush strokes. Or it could be Upamanyu Chatterjee's August, unable to comprehend the India outside of the city and bewildered at having to make terms with it. These early works are just some examples of a formative trope that is the making of the writer, that forces--or allows--a person to become a writer. And a sensitive reading of these works can lead you to those important questions, those unresolvable dilemmas that lie at the heart of their writing and, we can conjecture, at the heart of their lives.
But, yaar, what has all this to do with a bunch of chalu page-turners written by people who believe that the best way to capture campus slang is by using the word yaar liberally? Everything. These authors aren't writing about how they grew up in Malviya Nagar or Mulund; they aren't writing about how their village had only one handpump and no swasthya kendra; they aren't writing about how their parents trekked over the border from Pakistan and camped for days at India Gate. They're writing about the places where they were taught how to be citizens of a global economy. They're writing about how they learnt to want the things that citizens of a global economy want.
These people may have come to IIT or IIM from many different places, but they were being groomed to plug themselves into the same three or four, at most five, different professional sockets. To be a banker or a consultant or a civil servant or, for that matter, a professor you need to acquire certain life skills, and you need to unlearn some other things. And that tension between what you once were and what you need to become to survive in urban India circa 2008 is the aloo in the samosa that is the urban Indian campus novel circa 2008.
But I don't think these writers were thinking sociology when they thought of writing their books. I know I wasn't. When I set out to write my own little piece of this puzzle all I was looking for was a compelling story. But I was looking in solitude, far from my eventual audience, far from the notion of an audience. So I chose the story that compelled me. In that pre-Chetan Bhagat era I often wondered why anyone would care about some kids running around moping about what appeared by all accounts to be already successful lives. Finally I wrote the book not because I thought someone else would care. I wrote it because I cared.
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 13th July 2008. |
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