Amit Chaudhri on why he's actually Proust

Amit Chaudhri writes- 'THE IMPORTANT EUROPEAN NOVELIST makes innovations in the form; the important Indian novelist writes about India. This is a generalization, and not one that I believe. But it represents an unexpressed attitude that governs some of the ways we think of literature today.'

Dos Passos & Faulkner were American novelists. They made formal innovations which Europeans imitated. Later it was Latin American novelists who made innovations which, once again, Europeans imitated. 

What about 'important Indian novelists'? Vikram Seth is one. Two of his novels are not set in India. One is. Rushdie could be regarded as Indian. He is certainly important and arguably innovative. Some of his novels are about India. Some are not. 

Important Bengali novelists write mainly about Bengal or Bengali people. The same is true of important Gujerati or Kannada novelists. Some are innovative. Some are not. The same is true of European novelists. They important German writes mainly about Germany and German people, He may or may not be innovative.

Amit Chaudhri has a different view. He thinks most people have 'an unexpressed attitude' such that anytime a non-European writing a novel for non-Europeans makes a formal innovation, then most people say to themselves 'wow! this guys writes like an European!'.

 If we find formal innovations in a non-European novelist, modulations on form unrelated to, say, identity, difference, or colonial history, we might say, “This novelist has a European air.” We could say the same about the more formally ambitious of the recent American writers, whose innovations are unrelated to Americana: that they are, in some ways, Europeans from, say, Brooklyn. At the moment, though, because of the centrality in the Anglophone world of the USA and of New York, we don’t think of innovations in fiction emerging from these locations as being primarily connected to what it means to be a New Yorker, or an American—we think of them as formal innovations in themselves. The American writer has succeeded the European writer. The rest of us write of where we come from.-

Does anyone read Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Roberto Bolano and think 'these guys aren't writing within their own literary tradition. They are practicing an alien art and their formal innovations don't reflect their own milieu.'?

An American Carnatic Musician- like Higgins Bhagavatar- may make formal innovations which cause us to think of him as more South Indian than American. But this is because there is no native taste for that style of music. Once something becomes popular with the masses, innovative practitioners reflect their milieu even when practising what was once an alien art. Thus Brazilian jiu jitsu is Brazilian. Californian Yoga is Californian. German Rock is German. Japanese Reggae is now Japanese. 

What about Amit's own oeuvre? It truly transcend borders. A turd is a turd across the world.

Amit disagrees.

He hadn't read Proust- tl;dr- but his maternal cousin's Belgian wife said his work was Proustian.

Was she just being polite?

Or was she hinting he should come out of the closet?

WHEN A COUSIN’S BELGIAN WIFE read my first novel, her response wasn’t, as it might have been: “I know these people, literally.” After all, the characters in the novel were people she’d come to know in Calcutta on her visits from America, then Denmark, in the first decades of her marriage. Her relatives through marriage were my relatives on my mother’s side. They were in the small novel. Instead, she said to my cousin, “It reminds me of Proust.”

This passage is quintessentially Bengali. It establishes its intellectual and aesthetic credentials by wholly genealogical means. Amit might be a shite writer but 'maternal cousin's Belgian wife' is good; mobled Queen is good.