A Passage to India

Olayinka Oyegbile

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay – Shashi Tharoor

Incredible India – that is the mantra with which the country identifies itself. India is truly incredible. Where do you begin to describe or define its incredulity? Dictionary.com describes incredible as “So extraordinary as to seem impossible.” Is this what India is?

The country has changed a great deal since the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote his novel A Passage to India in 1924 from where I borrowed the title of this piece. Ninety-five years have passed since then, almost a century. Even this writer who first paid a visit to the country about a decade ago has seen that a lot has changed not to talk of almost a century ago. The book is about Forster’s experience during his travels in the then colonial India under the British Empire. It has since been selected as one of the greatest books of the 20th century by TIME magazine. It is a book about racial tension between the English colonisers and the Indians.

My first visit was to Mumbai (formerly Bombay until 1995). It is the capital city of Maharashtra State with a population of 19.98 million, the country’s most populous city after Delhi. On this second trip, my destination is Hyderabad, the capital and largest city of Telangana State and de jure capital of Andhra Pradesh, according to Wikipedia. Hyderabad City has a population of about 6.9 million, with about 9.7 million in Hyderabad Metropolitan Region. Both Mumbai and Hyderabad are cities like Lagos, overcrowded and bursting at their seams with record high pollution from old vehicles, tricycles (what we call Marwa, India is the home of this transportation technology) and motorcycles.

In a way, Nigeria and India have a lot in common. They are both Commonwealth countries owing to the fact of their colonial history. Apart from that, our literatures are also shaped by our experiences and encounters with colonialism. That is why today we have many who identify themselves as Indian-British and Nigerian-British writers.

Therefore a journey to India is like a journey into the heart of the country’s literature and its people. Although many might argue that most of those writers of Indian origin who are known around the world are mostly not resident in the country. But the truth is that most of them still have that blood running in their blood.

India has more writers who have won the Booker Prize than any other nationals in the Commonwealth and have even had more nominations than any other country. The country is home to wonderful writers who have enriched the world literary corpus in a way that is simply incredible, to borrow the country’s mantra. But most of those we know on the world stage are mainly those who live abroad and have the international exposure and endorsements. There is no argument about the origin of award-winning Salman Rushdie whose Midnight’s Children won the Booker in 1981 and also the Man Booker. There is also Arundhati Roy with The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). Now where do you place the bat-like V.S. Naipaul, whose In a Free State (1971) won too. Is he Indian, Trinidad and Tobago or British? Well…

Not to forget the ever engaging Jhumpa Lahiri who has also won Booker nominations, among others. She is a writer whose story writing skill is first class and cannot be ignored. India is also home to Vikram Seth who is best known for his voluminous epic novel The Suitable Boy.  This is a limited view of India and its writers because there are many others who are not known outside India but are big back home. I stumbled on one of such during this trip; he is R. K. Narayan (1906-2001). A quick check of him on online, shows that he was a leading author of early Indian literature in English and was mentored by Graham Greene who introduced him to foreign publishers. He also won several local and international awards and was credited with so much originality that his works are compared to that of William Faulkner and Guy de Maupassant because of his ability to compress a narrative.

However, with all these wonderful writers and a rich literary heritage, it is still a surprise that many citizens are unable to speak English thus making communication sometimes difficult between them and visitors. Even in hotels and convention venues that are hosting international visitors, many find it hard to understand English. It is really Incredible India.