“Why do Asian writers have to be ‘authentic’ to succeed?” asks Sarfraz Manzoor in the Observer. (Thanks, Harpreet.)

The immediate context for Manzoor’s article is the publication of Londonstani by Gautam Malkani. Manzoor writes that “the media hungers for a ‘noble savage’ who will reveal the hidden worlds that shine in the darkness” and “this assumption leads some to conclude, when they discover that Malkani was educated at Cambridge and works for the Financial Times, that he is not sufficiently immersed in British-Asian culture for his book to be truly authentic.”

A part of Manzoor’s criticism is that white writers aren’t expected to be “raw, true, authentic.” This is more the brown or the black writer’s burden. But the more interesting aspect of the argument emerges in the following words:

It is astonishing how many of the writers credited with telling typically Asian stories are in fact atypical - either Oxbridge-educated, mixed race, in mixed-race relationships or all of the above. Whether it is Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi and Hari Kunzru, or Gautam Malkani, Nirpal Dhaliwal and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, these are writers sufficiently of the culture to be able to exploit and extract from their heritage, and for their publishers to claim they are authentic, but also, in a strictly literal sense, exceptional. I have nothing against any of these writers, just the suggestion that theirs is the authentic British-Asian perspective. It is not. It is, in the main, the particular perspective of the alcohol-drinking Muslim, or the mixed-race middle class, or the writer with the Asian name and white partner who is more interested in exploring the life of their Asian fathers than their white mother. All legitimate perspectives, but all particular and personal.

I will confess that as a writer and as a critic I want authenticity. But by that I mean a writing that is not formulaic and sufficiently complex, a writing fully responsive to the amazing mixed-up world from which our stories emerge. Exactly the way in which Manzoor describes above.

A few years ago, this debate had flared in the world of Indian writing in English. Vikram Chandra had engaged in an extended sword-play with the purists, again and again asserting, with new thrusts and feints of metal, that simple-minded divisions of the world, say into Hindi-speaking (authentic) and English-speaking (inauthentic), were often unhelpful:

I was born into a household that on a census form would undoubtedly be tagged as “Mother Tongue: Hindi.” But I called my mother “Mummy” and my father “Daddy.” They spoke to me in Hindi sprinkled with English. Sitting on my mother’s lap, I read newspapers in English. English was everywhere in the world I grew up in, and continues to be an inextricable thread in the texture of every day I live in Bombay and in India. English is spoken on the playgrounds, and we tell folk tales in it, we riddle each other and joke with each other in it, and we make up nonsense verse and nursery rhymes and films in it. Along with many other languages, it is spoken in the slums, on the busses and in the post offices and the police stations and the court rooms. English has been spoken and written in on the Indian subcontinent for a few hundred years now, certainly longer than the official and literary Hindi that is our incompletely national language today. I for one hear registers aplenty ringing away in it, and as it is spoken and written more widely, these registers will expand. A language is a living thing. A patois born in soldiers’ camps not so long ago became Urdu, whose beauty ravishes our hearts. To love Urdu for her low origins and her high refinements, for her generous heart and her reckless love, is not to give up Punjabi. What a mean economy of love and belonging it must be, in which one love is always traded in for another, in which a heart is so small that it can only contain one jannat, one heaven. How fearsome must be this empty land where each new connection must inevitably mean the loss of all roots, all family, each song you may have ever sung in the past. Any ghazal-maker, any Mareez, I think, would flee from such a hellish wasteland. But my region, where Kalidas Gupta Raza continues to sing his passion for Urdu, is different. If Hindi is my mother-tongue, then English has been my father-tongue. I write in English, and I have forgotten nothing, and I have given up nothing.

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