[Reader-list] Hindi fiction writing in Delhi

[Rana Dasgupta]

Perhaps some of you saw this in the Guardian this week...

R


Writer, publisher and tea-seller caters to a readership thirsting for Hindi

Literary and media audiences are increasingly choosing their native 
tongue over English

Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Wednesday November 16, 2005
The Guardian

For two decades, evening commuters have come to sip coppery brown tea at 
Laxman Rao's roadside stall on a busy South Delhi main road, to the 
sound of the blaring horns of passing traffic. But in recent years, 
customers come not for sugary chai but for a taste of Rao's bittersweet 
words.

Rao is the author of 18 novels, plays and political essays in Hindi, 
India's national language which is thought to vie with Spanish to be the 
world's third most-spoken mother tongue. Like most Hindi novelists he 
considers writing stories a calling, one he supports with the 4,000 
rupees (£50) a month he makes from selling tea. "For 20 years I have 
made no money from my books."

But Rao's luck appears to be changing. His novel Ramdas, about a wayward 
village boy who mends his ways only to drown suddenly, earned him 10 
times as much money as he made from selling tea. He has handed over the 
running of his stall to his eldest son while he cycles around Delhi's 
libraries hawking his work. "I am the writer, the publisher, the 
salesman now," says Rao, 51. "There is a change coming even if I am too 
old to enjoy it."

In the last few years English, which bound together a nation of 800 
tongues and dialects and connected India to the outside world, has faced 
a challenge from native languages. As literacy levels rise in India, 
there is a palpable shift to a more subcontinental lingua franca and 
Hindi's reach is lengthening. Although it is spoken by half of India's 1 
billion people, its writing is absent in the literary canon of India, 
which is dominated by exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. "I 
do not read these books. They do not talk about the India I know," says 
Rao. "The stories do not mean anything to me or people like me. India 
lives in villages, small towns, on streets. The authors do not."

Factual information, as well as fiction is increasingly sold in Hindi. 
The biggest-selling newspapers in the country are no longer 
English-language broadsheets but those printed in Hindi. Nearly 70% of 
all news broadcasts are transmitted in Hindi, less than a decade after 
Rupert Murdoch presciently chose the language for his Indian TV network.

Publishing houses now hope to mirror that success. Penguin India, one of 
the country's largest English-language publishers, this year began 
printing novels in Hindi. In six months it has put out 15 such books, of 
which four are original titles. Ravi Singh, publisher of Penguin India, 
says that margins are lower but the market in India is much bigger. 
"It's in hundreds of millions of potential readers and we have watched 
advertising trends slope upwards, so we know people out there are 
getting richer."

Mr Singh says there have always been big-selling "Hindi classics". "Take 
Sara Akash, a novel written in the early 20th century about small-town 
India. It has sold 120,000 copies," he says. "But there has been a more 
recent change which is a confidence about using Hindi, about not being 
embarrassed about using it rather than English. People are hungry for 
Hindi."

The deference to English has long been part of India's cultural make-up. 
The language is perceived to bestow intelligence and sophistication on a 
speaker, but remains the preserve of an elite whose opinions often seem 
far removed from the concerns of ordinary Indians. The language debate 
is ignited periodically in the literary world. In 1997 Rushdie, who was 
born in Mumbai, declared that Indian writing in English was "proving to 
be a stronger and more important body of work" than writing in 
home-grown languages.

"It was typical from someone who does not read and write Hindi," said 
Harish Trivedi, professor of English at Delhi University. What is 
important about Hindi's rise, says Prof Trivedi, is producing stories 
that Indians can identify with. "Are you interested in Indian indentured 
labour in Africa? Then read Pahla Girmitiya by Giriraj Kishore. If you 
want stories of Indian Sikhs in Slough in Enoch Powell's Britain then 
read Mahendra Bhalla ... Novelists who are located in places they write 
about."

Pavan Verma, the director general of the Indian Council for Cultural 
Relations, says he is "condemned by privilege". "People like me are 
really cultural orphans. Linguistically I was brought up in the British 
system, albeit one based here. So I was completely educated in English 
and spoke it while growing up. Although I can read and write Hindi it 
comes as a learnt language." Mr Verma yearns for the day "when Hindi 
literature has the same popularity as Russian works or Latin American 
authors".