Akash Kapur comments in the NYT Book Review on the recent publication in the U.S. of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. The review is of particular interest because it frames Chatterjee’s novel, first published when we were a lot younger, in terms of a debate on authenticity. Here are the opening lines:

A specter haunts Indian writing — the specter of authenticity. In the pages of magazines and journals, at soirées and (sparsely attended) book parties in New Delhi, literature is being judged by a specious metric of cultural and national loyalty. According to this standard, it is in the work of writers who live in India and write in an Indian language (and thus have trouble finding a Western publisher), and not, to quote one critic, in sell-out “export-quality prose,” that the country’s authentic voice is to be found.

Kapur’s advice is that we give up the ghost of authenticity. This is partly because to go on celebrating English, August as the representation of ‘real’ India would be ahistorical and we’d be forgetting how much the India in that novel has changed; at the same time, interestingly enough, the opposite is also true, and the qualities that make Chatterjee’s novel so wonderful and endearing should persuade us to transcend the narrower debate about authenticity:

Indeed, Chatterjee’s prose is cynical, witty and frequently bawdy; it brilliantly captures a generation and a nation struggling to reorient themselves in the early days of what we now call globalization. “They’re turning modern without warning, these bastards,” a friend of Agastya’s exclaims while struggling to open a cylinder of cooking gas that has a new kind of seal. One character strolls around with a Walkman, and likes to call rupees “bucks” and himself Mandy. “He’s the sort who’d love to get AIDS just because it’s raging in America,” is another character’s withering verdict.

There’s something quaint about such descriptions, reminders of a time when a Walkman was still a totem of modernity and AIDS was an American problem (rather than, say, a rural Indian one). “English, August” is filled with cultural references — Maruti cars, Nirodh condoms, Campa Colas — that are from another era, as are many of India’s insecurities and uncertainties about the West. Today’s India is very different from the nation Chatterjee captures here: more modern, more globalized, more self-confident. Yet “English, August” has worn remarkably well. Agastya’s story is convincing, entertaining, moving — and timeless. It merits an accolade that’s far harder to earn than “authentic.” It’s a classic.

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