The grandeur and the squalor

The grandeur and the squalor

By K. C. Bhatt

One of the misleading notions one might acquire while growing up on a significant doze of literature in English is that the life has to be often full of grand things to keep one engaged.

Even English people shy away from their literature which depicts the poverty and its ills in their society, like that of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, or the other kind which harangues people to carry out a revolution immediately, like the one created by the likes of George Orwell.

It was a time when people suffered famines mainly because the landlords living in or around the London city shipped away most of the grains produced in English countryside which they owned.

During this time someone like Charles Dickens created a work which did not entirely harp on the glory of the daily life in England but presented it in a way that it was not as heart breaking as the work of Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence.

Then colonialism became a resounding success and the wealth started to reach even to the people on the margins of the margin in England. Now the need of glamour becomes overwhelming in English literature. Things and people were grand and the life never lacked grandeur. The life depicted by Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence appeared belonging to some very distant times.

Either the writers now were influenced to write things to celebrate the new imperial English grandeur or vilified enough to fall silent like Thomas Hardy.

In order to feel that power of being English strange rituals and codes were adopted by the colonials while living in a colony. The writers like George Orwell mocking these consciously acquired eccentricities had short, penurious and restless lives.

Since colonialism has be institutionalized like everything British, to the extent that the subjects would accept it as something preordained, anything that raised questions about the need and effect of colonialism was dealt with severely.

So becoming a champion imperialist became the vogue not only for the native English writers like Rudyard Kipling and so many others who wrote while serving in the colonies, but even for the writers from the colonial subjects like V.S. Naipaul and Nirad Chaudhary.

Having acquired the English sensibilities through the education English has imparted, the need of grandeur was more acute for these native writers from the colonies writing in English. These therefore went on to denounce their kins for everything in their existence — as it fell far short of being English.

Looking from this point of view the life was pointless if it was not aspiring to be as English as it was in the nineteenth century when the British colonial glory was at its peak. Some non British English writers have gone to the extent of assailing the British writers who failed to celebrate the British colonial glory and its superiority over all other nations.

Life has moved on since the colonialism started to retreat after the second world  war — but the way money flies to the former great colonial powers even today, one cannot be sure if colonialism is really over.

This ironical situation is more clearly depicted in literature currently produced by the publishing industry which is owned by only five media houses the world over. In fact they control almost everything that is printed today including the newspapers.

While a breed of non British people writing in English has mushroomed greatly, the content they produce has never given up the pursuit of glamour in life which is so British in essence. The squalor — as appears to a foreign eye — that is so obviously present around one rarely finds a way in the contemporary literature.

As for the Britain itself, the recent popular literature from there is either Mommy porn or occult. Anything closer to life is extremely rare and unwelcome there, it seems.

The writer can be reached at: kcbhatt@gmail.com