Every so often, a war of the words breaks out between two literary types. Onlookers, or should I say onliners, gather around to cheer, deride, or simply watch the tamasha with wonder and amusement. Many such exchanges have happened on the pages of Outlook India. A new one has just unfolded in Open Magazine between Hartosh Singh Bal, its political editor (and 3QD columnist), and William Dalrymple, UK author.

The Literary Raj — the opening salvo by Hartosh Singh Bal

The piece you ran is blatantly racist — rejoinder by William Dalrymple

Does Dalrymple know what racism really is? — response by Hartosh Singh Bal

An Inconvenient Truth — a statement on Dalrymple by Pramod Kumar KG

***

What’s my take on this? I often think that we, the globalized Indian elites, haven’t decolonized our minds enough. Sixty years after political independence, we still carry an inferiority complex about our literary culture. Our English language literati, chronically insecure and hungry for external validation, pursue British publishing venues and accolades over Indian ones. Yes, target markets and economics explain many things but there is more—it is as if we accord a higher caste to the British and subconsciously elevate and mimic their literary culture. It is one thing to admire and be inspired by other literary cultures, but our attitude here is one of deference, lacking the self-confidence of equals. Nothing like Bookers and Oscars, or reviews, endorsements, and fat book deals in Britain (also increasingly in the U.S.) to turn our heads. Indian novels that “make it” in the Anglophone West are then taken seriously in India—not vice-versa. Do we ever grant the same cachet to books that win Sahitya Akademi and other awards in India? Or crave translations of our best non-English books?

In his opening salvo, Bal makes many of these points. His bigger focus is inward, on the attitudes of us Indian elites, the language/culture hierarchies we subscribe to, the Anglo/American recognition we crave and which guides our sense of literary merit. We are yet to achieve intellectual independence, and “if Dalrymple appears central to our literary culture, it says something far more damaging about us than about him.” I see in Bal’s critique a bit of Ngugi wa Thiong’o—author of Decolonizing the Mind, a penetrating analysis of the colonization of Kenyan and other African minds.

Dalrymple, among the better UK writers to engage with India, seems to me more a vehicle for Bal’s polemic. The fact that Dalrymple, a resident of India and a director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, didn’t mention any Indian accolades in his profile supported Bal’s point, as did the prompt edits that followed. It’s unfortunate that Dalrymple took things so personally and overreacted. Ok, Bal did provokingly call him “pompous”, but I see nothing racist in Bal’s piece or the cartoon. Dalrymple took the attack on the festival and his role in it as an attack on his work and reputation (some damage to which actually comes from Pramod Kumar).

In Dalrymple’s place, I too would have defended the festival’s diversity, but then acknowledged Bal’s point about the insecurities of the Indian elites and Britain’s long shadow over the Indian literary scene as both valid and nothing new, and perhaps cited warm and fuzzy examples of how things may be changing. As it turns out, a story in DNA claims that Dalrymple now regrets the charge of racism he hurled at Bal. Check out the often interesting comments beneath the articles. What do you think, dear reader? Or is this really a storm in a teacup?