Disrupting the Ecosystem: Is Bengaluru India’s New Literary Capital?
Photo: CamilleaM1FLERéunion / Wikimedia Commons
Over the decade, a number of literary giants have emerged from Bengaluru—including Vivek Shanbagh, Madhuri Vijay, and more—to garner worldwide critically acclaim. Kamalpreet Singh Gill argues that the trend is a sign of the country’s ‘Silicon Valley’ evolving into the new heartbeat of Indian literature.
Remember that old joke about how if you threw a stone in any direction in Bengaluru—or Bangalore—you’d hit a software engineer hunched over his laptop? In 2020, chances are you might hit a writer working on the next great Indian novel instead.
Has Bengaluru, known as India’s Space City, Electronic City, Science City, or Silicon Valley, also become the country’s new literary capital?
In 2019, Bengaluru based author Madhuri Vijay won the JCB Prize for Literature—billed as India’s richest literary prize—as well as the Tata Literature Live Award in the debut novel category for The Far Field. The novel was also shortlisted for the prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The Far Field was perhaps the most sensational debut that the Indian literary scene had witnessed since Jerry Pinto broke through with Em and the Big Hoom in 2012.
Vijay’s debut novel follows her protagonist Shalini, a young, privileged woman from Bengaluru who travels to Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir to search for a Kashmiri cloth salesman, a man who plays unlikely part of her stormy childhood with her strong-willed, mercurial mother. In Kishtwar, Shalini discovers that she’s walked into a complex web of human conflicts sparked off by the onset of militancy in Kashmir. Caught between the violence of the militants and the state, the people live their lives on a razor’s edge, and Shalini’s sudden arrival causes devastating consequences.
To use a quintessential Bangalorean phrase, this apparent flowering of writers based out of Bengaluru—seeming to sideline India’s established literary nerve centers—may seem almost like a disruption to the literary ecosystem. But this disruption has been built upon a long tradition of Indian writing in English from the region.
Also on the 2019 JCB Prize shortlist was another Bengaluru based writer, Roshan Ali, for his debut novel, Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction. This is the story of a young man from Bengaluru who tries to run away from a house inhabited by a schizophrenic father and a stiflingly doting mother. Ali’s debut is a bildungsroman that follows, in the tradition of Catcher in the Rye, the trajectory of pointless rebellion of privileged youth, and a search for meaning in life. Ali writes with a flair that is almost alarming for a 30-year-old debutant. His masterful playing with language is a delight, deftly traversing a subject matter that is complex and nebulous at the same time.
Both Vijay and Ali, apart from being Bangaloreans, are in their early 30s. Among the jury members who chose the winner for the JCB prize was yet another Bangalorean, novelist and book critic Anjum Hasan.
This sudden thrust of Bengaluru onto India’s literary landscape, once dominated by Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, is not a coincidence, but a trend that has been on the rise for the past decade. In recent years, a host of writers from Bengaluru—writing in both Kannada and English—have been celebrated on the literary awards circuit. One could argue that the wheel was set in motion in 2013, when UR Ananthamurthy—a giant of Kannada literature—was named among the finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, usually given to an author writing in a non-English language.
Then, Vivek Shanbagh, writing in Kannada, dropped the literary equivalent of a bombshell in 2015, in what was to become one of the most celebrated works of fiction to come out of India in the last decade. Ghachar Ghochar—translated into English by Srinath Perur—caught everyone by surprise, partly because of its oddly endearing sounding title, and partly because it’s source of origin was a city hitherto known to most of the world for IT office cubicles. The novel was instantly picked up by the literary establishment of London and New York, where it made it to The New York Times’ and The Guardian’s end-of-the-year best books list. A Great Indian Novel Reaches American Shores was how the NYT breathlessly announced its arrival.
The very next year, Raghu Karnad, published the nonfiction epic The Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. The book would go on to win the Windham-Campbell prize—one of the world’s richest literary awards—and the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Raghu Karnad’s father, Girish Karnad, had been one of the foremost voices in Indian letters in the twentieth century, and a recipient of the Jnanpith, India’s highest literary recognition.
Two years later, in 2018, another Bengaluru based writer, Jayanth Kaikini was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his translated work, No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, seeing off stiff competition from South Asian literary heavyweights such as Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, and Manu Joseph. Having won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award previously, Kaikini was already a literary star in his state, where he also writes lyrics for Kannada cinema. No Presents Please was translated into English by Tejaswini Niranjana, and Kaikini broke through the language barrier to found a much larger audience.
To use a quintessential Bangalorean phrase, this apparent flowering of writers based out of Bengaluru—seeming to sideline India’s established literary nerve centers—may seem almost like a disruption to the literary ecosystem. But this disruption has been built upon a long tradition of Indian writing in English from the region. As early as the 1940s, English language writers from Karnataka like Raja Rao and Kamla Markandaya had achieved international fame. Raja Rao was the recipient of Padma Vibhushan, Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Both Rao and Markandaya, born in British India, moved to the USA and UK respectively later to continue their literary careers. A.K. Ramanujan, one of India’s best-known folklorists and poet was a Mysorean. These writers in turn represented a mere spilling over into the English-speaking world of a much deeper river of Kannada literature.
Kannada writers have been awarded the Jnanpith Award—India’s foremost literary recognition—a record eight times as of 2020. Only Hindi has more Jnanpith awardees to its name.
Despite these early flourishes, it was always the Mumbai of Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry, the Delhi of Anita Desai and William Dalrymple, and the Kolkata of Tagore and Amitava Ghosh that produced the most celebrated Indian writing in English. These were India’s great cities, its capitals of different kinds: financial, political, intellectual.
Bengaluru was then just a pensioner’s paradise, a place where retired sarkari babus and army officers came to spend their sunset years in pleasant stupor. The struggles and turmoil of human suffering, the churning produced by societies on the cusp of great changes, the blood and sweat of human toil—all raw material for great art—were things that seem to happen in faraway places, where masses of humanity poured in in great numbers every day on rickety buses and grimy trains. From these masses came some of India’s most loved art. In Bangalore, life seemed to be just too easy going for the bother.
Bengaluru, on the other hand, is where every unemployed college graduate who can put together two lines of code now wants to be. It should come as no surprise then that this is the city where the best of our new stories are being born and committed to literature, where those stories are being recognised and feted with the biggest literary awards in the region.
By the end of the twentieth century, however, things were changing fast. Bengaluru was no longer a sleepy town swaying in the shade of coffee plantations, but a city beginning to stand up confidently, attired in concrete and fiberglass. Meanwhile, the old megacities were beginning to groan under the weight of their own splendid, sordid history, unable to produce anything new. Too crowded to move, choked by the burden of their own humanity—and in Delhi’s case, its toxic air—their elites began to move to New York, Toronto, and London. Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, one after the other; those who could leave, left, leaving behind broken shells of past greatness.
It was Bengaluru then—dynamic, young, fast-changing, and fast-expanding—that became the driver of New India’s growth. It was to Bengaluru where the hinterland began to move—expectant CVs and new age tech skills in tow—arriving not in grimy train compartments but on low-cost flights booked two months in advance for the cheapest prices. It was Bengaluru that had now became the city of dreams.
Growing up, we used to hear stories of people running off to Bombay all the time, because Bombay was the city where you went if you wanted to become ‘something’. Those stories are rare now. Perhaps the cost of surviving is too high, and doesn’t justify the expected returns. Bengaluru, on the other hand, is where every unemployed college graduate who can put together two lines of code now wants to be. It should come as no surprise then that this is the city where the best of our new stories are being born and committed to literature, where those stories are being recognised and feted with the biggest literary awards in the region.
There is also the small and impolite matter of money. Literature, like all art, can flourish only when patronised by wealth. Art follows wealth, creative pursuits being located at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. In all the great art capitals of the world, the grime and the grease of industry, the mundane, philistine business of making money preceded the flowering of great art. Renaissance was born in Italian cities because of the wealth generated by the great mercantile families of Venice and Florence. The Medici family patronised Da Vinci, Raphael, and Galileo; it was the Medicis who commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment on the Sistine Chapel. The source of this fabulous Medici wealth was the very mundane, un-art like business of banking and trading wool. Dickens wrote in an industrial England blackened by the soot of newly-arrived capitalism. Ghalib produced sublime poetry in a Delhi drenched in the fabled wealth of the Mughal empire in its twilight, just as opium money of the East India Company was flooding the coffers of Tagore’s Calcutta.
America’s cultural invasion of the world followed the conquest of the world by its corporations. India’s wealth is being generated in Bengaluru today. Knight Frank estimates that Bengaluru will witness the fastest growth in Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) population in the world. Thus, it is in the same city where great literature follows in the wake of those boring lines of code.
Fun Fact: There are 39 UNESCO designated cities of literature in the world, none of them in India. South Asia is represented by just one city, Lahore. If we couldn’t get Tagore’s Calcutta or Ghalib’s Delhi on the list, perhaps now Bengaluru might stand a chance, for the City of Technology to also become the City of Words.
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Kamalpreet Singh Gill is an independent researcher based in Chandigarh with interests in folklore, subaltern histories, and Punjabi, Hindi, and English literature. He takes people out on cycling holidays with Art of Bicycle Trips. He can be reached on Twitter: @KPSinghtweets and on Instagram: @kamalpsingh86.
