5
GUEST EDITOR'S LETTER
Shashi Tharoor
Following the success of Litro’s special issue in 2016 featuring recent writing in English by the Indian diaspora, it is a pleasure to bring readers an edition focusing on contemporary Indian writing in what is often called “vernacular” languages, ably translated into English. The challenge of making Indian writing accessible to an international readership is not an easy one. Writers in Indian languages inevitably make cultural assumptions that are not easily comprehensible to readers in other languages; they also use words and allusions that, when translated, can come across as stilted. This may explain why their quality is not always apparent. In his preface to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 19471997 (1997), which he edited with Elizabeth West, Salman Rushdie made the now-notorious comment that "prose writing—both fiction and non-fiction—created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a more interesting body of work than most of what has been produced in the sixteen ‘official languages’ of India, and the so-called ‘vernacular’ languages, during the same time: and indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, 'Indo-Anglian' literature represents the most valuable contribution India
has yet made to the world of books". Rushdie's comment raised a great many hackles at the time, and the controversy has not entirely abated two decades later. In a sharp riposte, Amit Chaudhuri, editing The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), asked a blunt question: "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?" But Chaudhuri’s own selection, skewed as it was in favour of his native Bengali, hinted at some of the challenges of making a representative selection of writing from the wide variety of Indian languages in which modern literature is written. Not only are India’s languages mutually incomprehensible, they also vary significantly in literary culture and in the quality of translations available. This edition of Litro sidesteps this particular problem by making no claim to being representative. It cannot possibly represent the entire range of what is available in Indian literature in Indian languages today. Instead, in the stories here, by some of the most interesting and original talents writing in Indian languages, it offers a taste of the ex-
