Ana Cristina MENDES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal)

Canon Wars: The Vintage Book of Indian Writing vs. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature
Selecting a title for a book necessarily entails exclusion and elision; to an even greater extent, the same proves true when editors compile anthologies of literary texts. Referring to Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997 (1997), Graham Huggan perceptively inserts “in English” into square brackets and places this phrase at the end of the anthology’s title (Postcolonial Exotic 274). Huggan dramatically draws attention to the heavy ideological baggage that the selection of the title carries: this English-language anthology of post-independence Indian fiction consists almost entirely of texts written in just one of the many languages spoken in the subcontinent, yet still controversially purports to be a gathering of, in Rushdie’s own phrasing, “the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country’s independence.” By deliberately equating “Indian writing” with “Indian writing in English” – and in the process partaking in what might be construed as a reductive, unilingual understanding of post-independence literature –, Rushdie and West’s anthology stands as a conflict-ridden selection from the outset, an aspect compounded by, for instance, the fact that Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul is “regrettably absent from this book” not by editorial decision, but of his own volition.
On the surface, the process of anthologising is a response to a pre-existent body of creative works. There is, however, more to this than meets the eye, as demonstrated by both The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and its successor The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, a rival anthology edited by Amit Chaudhuri in 2001 and including texts originally written in both English and the vernaculars. According to Chaudhuri, The Picador Book is not to be read as an anthology of the “best” modern Indian writing, but as a critique of the taken-for-grantedness of Indian literature. If we extend this critique to Rushdie and West’s selection, The Vintage Book is purportedly informed by a notion of the pre-eminence of Indian prose literature in English when it sets out its goal of including within its covers “the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country’s independence.” This paper focuses on these fault-lines as spaces where, in the past three decades, canon wars have been fought over what constitutes Indian literature. It follows that an interrelated purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which The Vintage Book and The Picador Book are constituent parts of a symbolic economy wherein diverse “agents of legitimation” grant cultural authority and even canonical status to writers and works, regulate the constitution of a literary star system, and facilitate success in a global market.