India Uncut

Amit Chaudhuri writes in the Telegraph:

At readings by Indian writers in English, two related questions, or some version of them, will invariably be asked by a member of the audience, whatever the setting — bookshop, university seminar or literary festival. The first question is, “Which audience do you write for?”; and the second, “Are you exoticizing India for a Western audience?” I don’t know why people don’t tire of asking these questions; but I notice that all kinds are interested in asking them — among others, the type whose reading consists almost entirely of recent fiction, an odd mixture of The Da Vinci Code, Pico Iyer, and Vikram Seth; people who read almost nothing but magazines, and whose views on, and affective response to, writers derive not so much from books, but almost entirely from what’s circulating about those books and their authors in print; and people in academic disciplines like cultural studies or literature, to whom, especially since the rise of the former, and the latter’s surrender to the former’s protocols, such questions are bread and butter.

Later in the piece, examining the origin of the criticism of the Indian writer in English and the shift in this criticism, Chaudhuri writes:

English, then, is part of the problem; the act of writing in English was, in India, potentially an act of bad faith, and a residue of the old suspicion regarding the motives of those who write in English remains and is still at work among us. But the focus in those earlier attacks on Indian writers in English, such as the famous one led by Buddhadev Bose, was artistic practice, even if that practice entered the discussion negatively, with a metaphysical fatalism; it was apparently impossible for writers to fully and deeply address their subject except in a language that was their “own”. By bringing the audience into the picture, the emphasis and the debate shift from writerly practice to cultural, social, and economic transactions — from the mystery and riddle of the creative act to the dissemination of texts and meanings, by publishers and newspapers, in the academy and in bookshops, from meaning to the production of meaning.

The whole debate about why some Indian writers choose to write in English is such a masturbatory waste of time. You should read a book for what it is, outside the context of whether it is written in the writer's "mother-tongue" or who it is supposedly written for or the level of financial success and hype it has received. If you like it, if it does something for you, good. Otherwise, move on. Writers don't write with taxpayer's money, and no one has the right to question them on what language they write in or who they write for. If you have a problem with someone "exoticizing" India, don't buy the book. Simple.