Editor’s Note

WHEN NATIONS BECOME A STORY TO BE TOLD WITH A SENSE of urgency and originality, there will be any number of arbiters out there, setting the narrative norms. As if, even in this age of digital storytelling which claims to super-humanise creativity, the world needs official grammarians to control the national text. Such precautions are getting common, for, increasingly, it’s not confidence but paranoia that characterises those who seek ownership of the story. This—what a relief!—does not reflect popular impulse, which has already made politics an exercise in repudiation: old pieties are being replaced by a subversive spirit, and what matters more is not authority but authenticity. It’s all told with a heavy cultural accent.

It’s this crisis of representation that India, too, faces now. Whether it’s an exaggeration of the present or the over-dramatisation of dissent that turns the India story into a dispute is a matter of perspective. The crisis is partly because of our newfound zealousness in seeing ourselves as the only authentic tellers of our story. For so long, India was someone else’s narrative burden, the one who sought either the exotic from the Orient or the wretchedness of a former colony that had miserably failed to make use of freedom. If it was the cultural whimsies of Hindustan, the wonder that lay beyond China, that animated the pages of travellers from the East, it was the ultimate degradation of freedom that attracted misery-mongers like Katherine Mayo.

Contempt and condescension made the Mayo edition of India—which had its takers—an outright rejection of what was culturally incomprehensible to the storyteller. What came later was different. It was not rejection but the intensity of hurt that set the India of Naipaul and Rushdie apart. An Area of Darkness, a powerful literary introduction of India to the English-speaking world in the Sixties, was a homecoming in which memories could not lessen the pain inflicted by a cruel reality. For Naipaul, it was the beginning of an argument. “The eternity of return” would become a part of his literary journey. The first cry of Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children announced the arrival of not just a brand-new literary sensibility but an India swaying to the passions and pathologies of history. It was such a riotous love letter written by the runaway midnight child. The India of Naipaul and Rushdie was an intimate portrait of what history had denied them—and what memory had kept alive for them.

Then there’s the conscience-keeper, writing wretched India for the progressive readership. This India is a land without justice, the new Republic of Fear where democracy’s illiberal instincts have peaked. The chronicler in search of a cause compatible with his conscience finds in this India nationalists running high on masculine mythology. This is dissent as rejectionism—Mayoism Indianised.

This India gained traction in the marketplace of unfreedom after the 2014 General Election, when the glorified certainties of Nehruvian India unravelled. The dissenting class reduced the greatest cultural shift in the life of India after independence to a few imageries that could have easily been borrowed from any textbook autocracy. They were least interested in arguing with an India emerging out of the taboo-ridden socialist secular state; they were too horrified by the sight of the Hindu nationalist to ask why. They just rejected it. Condemned it. They are still doing so.

An India defying the behavioural code of the past is too big a story to be left to both rejectionists and cheerleaders. The nation has staged a comeback here with the approval of democracy. To read it as misplaced popular impulse is to minimise the will of democracy itself, especially at a time when nationalists in some other places find democracy restrictive. Why, we may ask, the size and sweep of change in India doesn’t get the intellectual representation it deserves? Think of Brexit and the rise of Trump, two events that brought the nation back to the heart of the conversation in this century, and see how they have caused a profusion of political thought in publishing, especially about the limits of liberalism and the ways of identity. The change got the translations it merited.

India remains a story insufficiently told, despite the textual complexities of change. Its chroniclers are either the same old romantics of wretched India or the eager revisionists without the authenticity of scholarship. And for the international reader, India gets its interpreters from either the edit rooms or the more rarefied realms of liberal angst. Even the India story written in English mostly remains accessible only to Indians at home. When we hear the refrain, “we are not writing for the West”, we can’t miss the familiar sound of cultural protectionism there. An India-shaped absence on international bookshelves perhaps tells us about the limits of our storytelling.

When a democracy as big and patient as India plays out its passions, shedding the enforced isms of a righteous past and embracing the cultural attitudes of a nation reclaiming its oldest affinities, its story needs to be told for a wider audience. The enormity of the cultural shift needs to be matched by an intellectual as well as a creative urge—and resourcefulness—to interpret it, lest India remain the biggest story yet to be told fully.

Happy Holidays.

2025 New Year IssuecultureideologyIndian democracyliteraturepoliticsSalman RushdieVS Naipaul