Modern Mind

find some sort of escape from it. The familiar idioms of English being used in such fabulous settings certainly highlight that the language no longer belongs to anyone.
    R. K. Narayan’s many novels generally take place in his beloved Malgudi, otherwise known as Mysore.
The Sweet Vendor,
published in 1967, is a study of spirituality, though not as, say, a Christian would understand it. 21 For sixty years, Jagan has sold sweets from his store, when suddenly he decides to change his life: he is going to help a stonemason carve a ‘pure image’ of a goddess so that others can find spirituality in her contemplation. But of course he takes his foibles (and his checkbook) with him, with some hilarious consequences. The fact is, Jagan’s change in life is ambitious – too ambitious for his flawed personality: like someone in a Larkin poem, he is not really up to the challenge he has set himself. It is not that easy to retreat from life; for one thing, there is his moody son, more Westernised than he, with an American-Korean wife (actually a mistress), and with whom Jagan is constantly at odds. Narayan is of course poking serious fun at India herself, her spirituality (or spiritual pretensions), her ambition to be a world power when she cannot even feed herself (Jagan produces ‘frivolous’ food), and is both contemptuous and envious of the West.
    Anita Desai’s novels are in general domestic stories, small-scale on the face of it, but in each one the characters are unprepared for the life of an independent India, which as often as not involves some measure of Westernisation. In
The Village by the Sea,
the locals of Thul are worried by the government’s proposal to install a chemical fertiliser plant nearby. 22 Hari, the main character, unlike many other villagers who don’t want change, seeks to adjust to the new state of affairs by escaping to Bombay and becoming a watch repairer, in anticipation of all the watch wearers who will come and live in the village. Others ensure that the village remains a bird sanctuary, but once Hari’s life – his ambitions – had been disturbed, and despite his dismal experiences in Bombay, there is no going back. The new silence isn’t the same as the old one. Desai is saying that change is a question less of events than of attitude, psychology. Deven, the main character of
In Custody,
has great ambition, and when he is invited to become the secretary of the great Urdu poet Nur, he conceives a grand plan to tape-record the poet’s wisdom. 23 In fact, this plan runs into endless difficulties; the poet himself is much less than perfect – he loves pigeons, wrestling, and whores just as much as wisdom – but Deven’s technological incompetence is also afactor, so that the whole project descends into chaos. Desai’s stories are small tragedies, though large enough for the characters who live through them. Is this India as she always was, or as she has been made by colonial occupation? In Desai’s stories no one seems to know.
    Not so in the stories of Salman Rushdie. There is nothing small about either his characters or his plots. His two best-known books,
Midnight’s Children,
1981, and
The Satanic Verses,
1988, are written in an exuberant, overflowing style, the images and metaphors and jokes billowing forth like the mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb. 24 Rushdie’s relationship to his native India, and to the English language, is complex. His stories tell us that there are many Indias, enough of them grim, failing, divided. English at least offers the chance of overcoming the chronic divisions, without which failure cannot be conquered, and only by embarking on a fabulous journey of improbable fantasies can he hope to have what are in fact very direct messages swallowed.
Midnight’s Children
tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on the day India achieved independence in 1947, one of 1,001 other children to be born at the same time. By virtue of this, all of them are given some magical property, and the closer their birth to midnight, when ‘the clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting,’ the stronger their magical power. Saleem has a very large nose, which grants him the ability to see ‘into the hearts and minds of men.’ His chief rival, Shiva, has bloated knees, meaning he has the power of war. The book is written mainly in the form of Saleem’s memoirs, but there is little in the way of traditional characterisation. Instead Rushdie gives us a