Author: Huang Yiting (Assistant Researcher, Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Not long ago, the 2022 International Booker Prize was awarded to Jitanjali Sri's Tomb of Sand. The work also became the first Hindi translated novel to receive the award.
Since the Indian-American writer Naipaul first won the award in 1971, Indian and Indian-American writers have been repeatedly shortlisted for the length of the award.
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1. Immigration theme
After the end of world war II, a large number of people from former colonial countries immigrated to Britain and began to occupy various important positions in British society. Their arrival has made the phenomenon of "immigration" gradually become the focus of the British academic community. Immigrant scholars from former colonial countries, represented by Said and Homi Baba, have opened up a new field of "post-colonial" research, and have made theoretical analysis of the "immigration" problem in the field of literature and culture. The intention of "postcolonial" research is not to subvert Western Orientalism, but to urge Western scholars to understand more clearly and deeply the westerners' construction of the image of the East. Homi Baba's series of conceptual innovations are more straightforward in pointing out to Western academics that the cultural taste of the "old white man" is no longer the absolute dominance of Western society, and That European cities such as London have transformed immigrants from all over the world into international metropolises with multicultural backgrounds.
At this time, India's English literature, on the one hand, catered to the expectations of british academic circles for the continued influence of imperial culture in the post-colonial era, and on the other hand, injected vitality into British literature and even English literature that seemed to be in a rigid state.
2. Growth and search
From the 1980s to the present, Indian and Indian writers have been nominated 24 times on the Booker Prize list. Their achievements in the creation of English novels not only highlight the search for independent development of Indian English literature, but also illustrate the suppression of the development of Indian English novels by the cultural forces of the former colonial metropolises in the ideological field.
"Sand Tomb" book cover information picture
The ultimate winning Indian novels often highlight the author's exploration of the theme of "growing up" with its semi-autobiographical nature; At the same time, their care for the theme of "growth" echoes the continuous maturity of Indian English novel creation in the past 30 years, and gradually opens up the independent development path of Indian English novels. For example, the debut work of female writer Alandati Roy, the 1997 Booker Prize-winning work "The God of Micro-Things", tells the story of a mother and daughter in Crara State , two generations across the shackles of caste hierarchy, the unremitting pursuit of women's independent control of fate and free love. The famous work of female writer Kieran Desai, the 2006 Booker Prize winner," The Lost Legacy, consists of two cross-narrative stories. They show the british-educated teenage girl Sai and the cook's son Biju wandering and wandering between their desire to live in the West and their return to Indian society, explaining the cultural identity dilemma encountered by Indian youth in their quest for self-struggle. Alavond Adiga's debut novel, the 2008 Booker Prize-winning White Tiger, is a first-person epistolary about how a boy from a poor background, in the process of breaking into society, finally becomes an entrepreneur through deception, betrayal and cleverness. It can be seen that reflecting the changes in Indian society in the "post-colonial" era by writing the growth process of the protagonist is an entry angle that Indian writers are particularly good at, and it is also the most favored type of Indian novel creation in the Western literary world.
Among them, the evaluation of "The God of Micro things" in the Western literary circles best reflects the "growth" characteristics of Indian English novels that are valued in the international literary world. In July of the year Roy won the award, the famous American literary magazine "The New Yorker" published a special issue of Indian English novels and published a theme article called "Declaration of Independence". This article compares the rise of the contemporary Indian English novel to the independence of English-language literature in the United States at that time. However, if we read each article in this special issue, we will find that "growth" represents the advent of independence, and implies that the criteria for judging "growth" and "independence" are not in the hands of Indians - it is still the mainstream Literary Circles in Britain and the United States that have the right to speak. The famous American writer Updike wrote in his book review "Mother Tongue" that in Roy's novel, "the strangeness of language is related to the emotional center", and "this strangeness comes not only from the influence of dialects, but also because the novel chooses a pair of 7-year-old dragon and phoenix twins as the main perspective of the narrative." His comment is intriguing: he agrees that Roy has written about Indian literature and culture in english, but at the same time this linguistic feature inevitably carries with it a "quirk" that is inseparable from the unknowable dialect and the immature characters. It can be seen that Updike, as an American writer, is not satisfied with merely acknowledging the rise of the Indian English novel, and perhaps more importantly for him is to label it with a sense of forerunner superiority. This, to some extent, is also the influence that the English literary community, through the Booker Prize, hopes to exert on the development of English fiction in India. Both Roy's critique of caste hierarchy and Adiga and Desai's depiction of the history of India's struggles against the poor youth have in fact created an image of India that can be called the "other," and this image often seems to show a follower of Britain, the former colonial metropolis. In this way, the British literary community took advantage of the Booker Prize to firmly adopt "colonial novels like India's, re-establish 'Britishness' or construct 'New Britainity'", and these Literary Elites in India also contributed to the maintenance of Britain's cultural advantage consciously or unconsciously.
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3. Based on locality
With the maturity of Indian English novel creation, more and more Indian writers have begun to try to get rid of the interference of the mainstream literary circles in Britain and the United States with their creative perspective, use India's local history and culture to locate their central vision, and write different stories. Among them, Amitav Ghosh, who was nominated for the 2008 Booker Awards short list, and The new International Booker Prize winner Sri Sri deserve special attention.
Known for his historical fiction, Goish's literary vision transcends the so-called colonial and post-colonial limits, and his work presents India's relationship with the world in a three-dimensional way in the depth of the grand global history. His most well-known works to Chinese readers are the "Cinquelu Trilogy" – "Poppy Sea", "Smoke River" and "Torrent of Fire" – unfolding in the sino-British opium trade and opium war as the main historical background, reinterpreting this history of suffering that has been unforgettable for all Chinese from the perspective of indians – a third-party perspective that has long been overlooked in the Sino-British opium trade and war. This is to use Indians as observers to describe the world's colonization and trade activities, and its focus is no longer just India and Britain as the dual opposition between colonization and colonization, but by emphasizing India's role as a disgraceful opium growing land in the Sino-British opium trade, allowing India to have organic collusion with other colonized countries, on the one hand, on the one hand, to present the moral hypocrisy under the "free trade" policy of the British colonial empire on a larger scale. It also enables readers to recognize the poisoning of colonial activities on the entire human world from a more macroscopic perspective, and on the other hand, it highlights the image of historical participants with self-driven consciousness of the Indian and Chinese peoples who have suffered from cruel colonial exploitation. The Indian woman Diti on the "Vermilion" who dared to fight for the interests of the shipwrights, the owner of the "Anna Futi" Baram and his Chinese wife, and the young Indian painter Robin who walked the streets in the "Fan Ghost Town" of Guangzhou to find rare flowers, etc., all followed the Opium Trade activities of the British to find their own vitality. Despite their involuntary attachments, they do not lack the courage, wisdom, and kindness to challenge colonial powers, which make up the most impressive flashes of detail in the series. Moreover, in terms of writing style, Gaush rejects magic realism and builds his imagination on informative, detailed historical evidence. To this end, he even attached many footnotes to his novels to help readers understand more deeply the rationality of the words and deeds of the novel characters in real historical situations. Obviously, such a method of writing novels is extremely rare, which makes Gaush's work deeply personal. If most of the Indian and Indian writers who received the Booker Prize before Goish were adept at giving fiction a true writing strategy with personal experience and indirect experience, Gaush's work went beyond the limitations of the writer's individual experience and sought to "reawaken a sense of moral, humanitarian, and, most importantly, historical participation" in the midst of the intricate historical details.
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Ghosh's firm grasp of the Indian-centric perspective is clearly reproduced, or resonated, in Sri's work. Burleigh's fifth novel, The Sand Tomb tells the story of an octogenarian widow who struggles to regain her love of life and travels to Pakistan to brave the enduring trauma of the partition of India and Pakistan as a teenager. As Sri himself summed it up, "This is also the story of an old woman who gradually rises from her spiritual bed in search of a new life", and the old woman named "Ma" remembers the history she witnessed, the description of the suffering caused by the turmoil and tearing of Indian society to the individual, and her perception of the transformation of the current state of life, which constitute the emotional main line of the whole novel. The author limits the narrative of the novel to the observation perspective and thinking scope of an ordinary Indian old woman, which consciously highlights the novel's native Indian perspective. The introduction written on the title page of the novel— "Once you have a woman and a boundary, a story can be told on its own" — shows the writer's hope that through the writing of such Indian vernacular characters, he will break through the existing discourse of history, reinterpret and even resolve historical contradictions.
It is worth mentioning that unlike many Indian writers who have won the Booker Prize or been nominated, but have difficulty in obtaining a more consistent positive evaluation in the field of local public opinion in India, the works of Goish and Sri have been widely praised by India from the official to the folk. Goish is already the recipient of India's highest national award, the Lotus Award, and the historic Pinangert Prize for Literature, and Sri has also won the Academy Award, the Indian Literary Award, and her work has been highly praised by Indian critics. If the Booker Prize's gosh nomination is an attempt by the British cultural community to accept the new trends in the development of Indian literature, then Sri's victory can be seen as their initiative to face this trend.
In 1913, the famous Indian poet Tagore became the first Nobel Prize winner in Asia for his collection of poems Whitanjali, which he first composed in Bengali and translated into English. A century later, another Indian writer won another literary award with worldwide influence for his novels in native Indian languages. This seemingly coincidental century echo may reflect the rise of Indian literature.
Guangming Daily ( 2022-07-07 edition 13)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily