ANTHOLOGY OR TOURIST BROCHURE?

Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing Edited by Anjum Hasan & Sampurna Chattarji. Red Hen Press, USA. www.redhen.org

 It is rare for an anthology to be announced with a certain title, and then inexplicably appear with another title. Yet that is exactly what happens to Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji. The original title of the compilation was What is Time. In fact, writers like me were sent a contract by the US-based publisher Red Hen Press for inclusion of my work in the book, which bore the title What is Time. Future Library, however, does not include my work, although I promptly signed the agreement and mailed it to the editors and publishers, even receiving an acknowledgment from Tobi Harper of Red Hen Press. It is possible that there are other writers who have suffered the same fate. In her Introduction, Chattarji regrets having to “let go of prose and poetry by Vijay Seshadri, Manil Suri, Vivek Shanbhag and Anis Shivani.” The reason offered for the exclusion is “lack of permission and budget constraints.”

Future Library not only has two editors, Hasan and Chattarji, but it also has two separate Introductions by each of them.

Hasan’s Introduction is a classic example of name-dropping. The anthologists she names are Adil Jussawalla, Amit Chaudhuri and Jeet Thayil. But what about anthologies edited by R. Parthasarathy, Keki Daruwalla, A. K. Mehrotra, Vilas Sarang, Makarand Paranjape and Sudeep Sen? However, this parasitic reliance on heavy-weight anthologies is an attempt to establish a false continuum between those illustrious works and the present one.

One of the main functions of an anthology is to determine a literary canon. If authors consistently appear in different anthologies, it can be said that they have a definitive place in the literary canon. Unfortunately, editors of recent anthologies rely on subjective preference, with scant understanding of the responsibility they have in canon-formation. Thus, Future Library, when compared to two anthologies that were published at more or less the same time-- Sudeep Sen’s Converse and Nabina Das’s Witness--has a very different list of authors from them, with few overlaps. The selections, here, are at best whimsical. They include relatively unknown writers, but exclude Nissim Ezekiel (the favourite whipping-boy of every anthologist from Mehrotra to Sarang to Thayil), Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth. Hasan and Chattarji can’t even justify these exclusions on the ground that, like Converse, they are only concerned with the work of living authors. For, two late poets, Vijay Nambisan and Eunice de Souza, are both included in Future Library.

 Future Library includes both poetry and prose. It also includes writing translated from Indian languages. However, these languages are chosen at random--it isn’t as if each of India’s thirty or so official languages recognized by the Sahitya Akademi is given due representation.

The governing principle in Future Library is convenience. The anthology merely includes what its two editors could lay their hands on. There is no evidence of rigour in the work.

One of Hasan’s candid admissions is that “American readers...are likely to come to this collection with the expectation of learning from the literature something about its cultural sources.” In other words, they will use the compilation as a rich man’s tourist brochure? But can American readers be blamed? Many pieces in the anthology, especially those written in the regional languages, tend to exoticize and orientalize India, rather than present its modern face.

Like it or not, at least part of the problem with Future Library has to do with its fraught history. The anthology was originally supposed to be edited by Ravi Shankar and Sampoorna Chattarji. But then Shankar was dropped on account of his alleged indictment by the Me Too Movement. Hasan was brought in as a last-minute replacement. Together with Shankar, C. P. Surendran and Sudeep Sen were also eliminated.

Of the selections, it is poems written originally in English that stand out. Gieve Patel’s “Postmortem” abounds in raw power.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Vijay Nambisan’s “On First Looking into Whitman’s Humor” is typical of his irreverent attitude to life. Nambisan was a demolition man par excellence:

A child said to me: What is grass? and I replied,                                                                                              It is a weed, not good for much;                                                                                                 …                                                                                                                    Not that grass! The green grass—do you perhaps                                                                                               Think it to be the uncut hair of graves?                                                                                       So I threw a book at him and went on smoking.

 

Manohar Shetty’s “Taverna” mocks at religion.

                                                                                                                                  Akhil Katyal’s “Dehradun, 1990” cleverly uses dyslexia to, similarly, make its point about the hegemony of our gods.

 However, one would have liked to see a gay poem by this co-editor of The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. Especially as none of India’s distinguished gay poets—Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali, Hoshang Merchant and Suniti Namjoshi—are represented in Future Library.

Among the prose selections, the piece that hogs the limelight is a longish extract from Jeet Thayil’s novel The Book of Chocolate Saints (which I reviewed for Indian Literature, Number 308, November-December 2018). But why is Thayil represented by fiction rather than by poetry, for which he is better known?

All one can say in conclusion is that should Future Library go into a second edition, the editors and publishers should take care to make the book less flawed, so that it serves, not merely as a dignified tourist brochure, but as a genuine attempt to tell readers what Indian writing truly is.

Note on the Reviewer:

R. Raj Rao is the author of six novels, six collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, two collections of plays, and much critical nonfiction, including a biography of Nissim Ezekiel. He has won academic and literary fellowships to the UK, USA, Canada and Germany, and is former head, Department of English, University of Pune. Rao is currently visiting professor at Symbiosis College, Pune.