Twenty-five years ago, this is what Salman Rushdie could write in an anthology of Indian literature (The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-19971997, untranslated): “’Indo-English’ literature represents perhaps India’s most valuable contribution to the world of books so far. » According to the author of midnight children (Stock, 1983), born in Bombay in 1947 but having left the country since adolescence, “prose writing by Indian authors working in English has proven to represent a larger and stronger body than most of what has been published in the sixteen official languages of India”.
The statement now appears seriously dated. Not only because, since then, an amendment to the Constitution has increased to 22 the number of languages officially listed in the 28 states of the Indian Union. But also because over the past fifteen years we have been witnessing a literary phenomenon that has remained unknown to the general foreign public, which has long been interested in English-speaking Indian literature: the remarkable growth of a written side in the Indian languages of this country with an extraordinarily varied linguistic landscape. Witness the authors invited by the Paris Book Festival (ex-Book Fair, until April 24), which makes India its guest of honour.
This was not yet fully the case in 2007, the previous time India was celebrated with the same event. For a long time, talking about the literature – rightly very famous – from the “largest democracy in the world” consisted in evoking works written in English, in the language of the former colonizer. Even if only a minority of around 2% of the population writes and reads English fluently (i.e. some twenty million out of one billion three hundred million people), this 2% represents a non-negligible part of the intellectual elite of the country, whether it comes from New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta or Madras. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature 1913, has, for decades, been an exception as a writer “regional” internationally recognised.
Regional Indian literatures on par with English
Despite the rich array of books written in Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, Marathi (the language of Bombay and its region, Maharashtra), Tamil (in Tamil Nadu), Malayalam (in Kerala), Kannada (in Karnataka), etc –, the works of writers considered somewhat “peripheral” took time to be translated into English. “We must not forget that all the literatures in Indian languages were not born yesterday and that they have continued to develop for very many years”recalls Geetanjali Shree, who writes in Hindi, author of Return samadhi. beyond the border (Des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2020), selected in the final list of the Booker Prize 2022. “There is today a much greater curiosity for literatures that were previously relatively confidential”, continues the one who will be present at the Paris Book Festival.
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