(These are random quotes without context from the book published in 2000; Please visit http://richardcrasta.com/impressing_the_whites.htm for more detailed quotes and a table of contents. The book is also available an an e-book from Amazon Kindle.) (Random, and yet, a shrewd Indian reader's observation was this: if an Indian publisher had published this book, it would have been only 2 pages long: the Dedication page, and the Acknowledgments Page. Read on, and you'll see what he meant.)
Thus, when I first made the rounds of Delhi publishing houses asking if my novel-in-progress might interest them, their automatic advice was: Publish it in the West first. Once you impress the Westerners—by being an immaculate ape of their best, safest writers, with Indian spices occasionally blended in for authenticity and local color—Indians will worship you. If you impressed them, you really must be good. Thus it is that even in India, it is the West that makes and breaks reputations, just as African filmmakers must depend on Western companies for distribution, affirmation, and survival.
The message for Indians: A white man can be your savior, but never a brown man.
Half-naked and barefoot villagers in remote parts of India had begun to spend anxious nights worrying about, of all things, their bad breath—because capitalist commercials had effectively penetrated their ancient, spiritual, breath-free minds.
A young Frenchman who had recently visited China and was greatly upset. Why? Because the modern Chinese were not as spiritual as he had been primed by the Western media to expect. In fact, these bloody Chinamen with their 30 million cell phones were as materialistic as . . . as . . . as he was!
If a brown woman dreams of passion, as in Shobha De’s novels or Namita Gokhale’s Paro: Dreams of Passion (published by Chatto & Windus), it’s okay, it’s, whooaaaaaaaaa . . . a wet dream!
Still, I recognize that this conflict and my lonely crusade for literary justice may have not been the best route to health and happiness. Though I am an Indian with no sacred cows whatsoever, I have, from time to time, become attracted to some of the holistic, one-world, non-confrontational Eastern philosophies, in which all conflict (or rape, or murder) is illusory, immaterial, simply a misunderstanding or conceptual error. I would love nothing more than to deny my perception that the Western publishing world operates by double standards as colonialist and destructive to formerly colonial peoples as the behavior of Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria, which Greenpeace accused of murdering a few leading members of the local tribes opposing the company’s profitable operations. In this post-colonial modus operandi, accommodating locals are found, patronized, and propped up, and rebels and “troublemakers” eliminated, sometimes with the help—conscious or unconscious—of the accommodating locals themselves. And I say this post-Roy, yet with a wisdom gleaned from pre-Roy days, and also before I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: The literary hospitality and fairness of the Western world is subordinate to the overwhelming Western agenda that is the neutering of the Third World male.
Rushdie, who derides Pakistan and India for their concept of shame, seems to me to be, like most public school products, also a prisoner of a kind of shame: the fear of ridicule, which appears to be, secretly, one of the most powerful influences on the behavior of many Indians who are psychologically Anglo-Indian.
Could any of these writers stand totally naked before the world, having written a daring and unzipped novel? Not even if they were paid good money to. Shame would intercept the words and choke them before they were out of their speakers’ throats. Salman Rushdie, as an American writer observed, could never write a novel in which the central male character sharing some characteristics with himself can be ridiculed.
Recently published in an expanded edition at:
Impressing the Whites: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VNMBLI
Impressing the Whites (Smashwords): http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52468
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