Angela's ashes - of irony in poverty

While reading the book 'Angela's Ashes' by Frank McCourt, something that i read earlier in the book "A prayer for Owen meany" came back to me - in the book Owen Meany says that what irritated him about the 60's flower power and love politics was the lack of irony and the pervasive self-righteousness. The same can be said of most of Indian literature.

In 'Angela's Ashes', McCourt paints a picture of desperate poverty and of helplessness when dealt a life where the odds are stacked against you right from the start. The foundations of life which we take for granted - a more or less stable family, food, shelter and a sense of a better future is missing from the author's life while growing up in Limerick, Ireland. But he takes us through this bleak childhood with a remarkable sense of irony and black humour, which is almost Dickensian in nature (early Dickens actually, since the late Dickens was much more gloomy and dark).

What this does is that it gives the reader a full measure of how life becomes under these circumstances - when life becomes purely a matter of survival, when our finer senses of compassion and show of propriety is sacrificed on the altar of getting the next piece of bread. A life where death is so common and so constant that death of two brothers and a sister in quick succession in their infancy is treated with sorrow but without any sense of ceremonious tragedy. You get over it quickly becuase life needs to go on. Ceremony and rituals and extended sorrow are for the well-off and privileged - the ones who have the money to pay for the time spent in taking part in activities to mourn.

But its a life not without its humour. Black and grim and maybe even gallow humour but humour nonetheless. It is this humour that suffuses the whole narrative The end result is that the reader comes away deeply touched and fully aware of how the life he is leading right now is not only completely different from the protoganists but also how fortunate that level of difference is. It is this awareness that spurs on a better consiousness of life - especially life at the 'lower dregs'.

It is this kind of narrative that is almost completely missing from the roster of indian literature (exceptions are few, notably Premchand.), a large part of which deals with poverty and life at the margins. Mostly the literature variety oscillates between two extremes. A section, Gandhian in nature, deals with the nobleness of the poverty - the picture of the long suffering indebted farmer who is nevertheless virtuous is a constant feature in many stories. The other extreme is of the extreme wretchedness of poverty and how it turns ordinary men and women into unfeeling animals.

It is this lack of greyness and the lack of seeing the black humour of poverty that makes so many of our so called social literature seem so one-dimensional. It is why even celebrated writers like Mulk Raj Anand's works seem so one-layered now. It sketches the situation but not the individual. Bhism Sahni's 'Tamas' is a fabulous picture of the hypocrisy and the tragedy of communal riots, especially for the poor, but why are we so far away from an 'Indian Catch 22'?

Maybe it is because the people who write such stories have the privilege of being arm-chair activists. The stories that they spin out is a victim of their interpretation and of their opinion of what the people below them in the social chain might be thinking or doing. Both the concept of 'noble savage' and of the 'wretched animal' are an overcompensation on either side of the spectrum. Intellectuals who fashion themselves to be liberals feel self-righteous in foisting their concept of poverty on the people around them, people as removed from poverty that they read about as are the writers who write about them.

And this is also the reason that readers are put off and which is then conveniently portaryed by these intelectual high priests as the tendency of Indian readers to prefer fantasy and light literature. I think its a self-perpetuating cycle. Writers try to sound impressive by writing serious tomes and when people cant associate with the subject, the readers are blamed. Writers like Rushdie who pack in lots of satire in their works were first appreciated in the West before becoming popular in India (the fatwa helping no doubt!!!).

What is needed is an Indian Dickens or even a Frank McCourt - people who have seen the 'other India' with their own eyes and escaped with thier sanity and who can put into words - words which will not be self-righteous but words which would be truthful - even to the black humour and the grim tragedy. It would be a service to the people and perhaps more importantly it would make for good literature.