Krishna Dutta raises a contentious point in her review of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide:
"But Ghosh endeavours to make his story accessible to a readership who will not recognise a host of cultural references.
In familiar contexts, this works well, but with the unusual it becomes tricky. When an everyday Indian object such as gamchha - a light piece of chequered material used mainly as a towel - is introduced, Ghosh has to use some 400 words to do justice to the concept before he supplies the Bengali word. This looks contrived. In places he gives a translation in parenthesis, making the text cumbersome...
Strangely, postcolonial Indian writers like Ghosh feel the need to insert the local bhasa (tongue) and cultural anthropology for authenticity, whereas their predecessors - such as Anita Desai and RK Narayan - did not. They were confident enough to transport readers to a different society using brilliantly executed English. Their works are still read fairly widely, whereas Ghosh can expect a limited readership - however interesting his theme may be."
This is the old debate between "authenticity" and "exoticism" rehashed, and I'm not sure I agree with Datta's conclusions. Many of this generation of writers, from Amit Chaudhuri to Ruchir Joshi to Ghosh, employ Indian words and phrases in exactly the same way us postcolonial desis do in our native place, so to speak: we flip between languages, we think in more than one tongue, and perhaps our writing might be allowed to reflect that. I don't know whether Ghosh has over-explained, or whether his riff on the gamchha sticks out as sharply as Dutta says it does; but to seem to argue that Indian English should remove the Indian bits from its speech is to argue for a less colourful language.
If you grew up reading English in India, you stumbled over cultural minefields all the time--try reading Philip Roth on baseball when all you can visualise in the place of America's favourite game is street cricket, try reading books that lean heavily on dialects that come from Yorkshire to Harlem when all you have for comparison is Bong-flavoured Eengleesh versus robust North Indian Angreji. The bottomline? It doesn't matter, so long as the author moves between languages with conviction and without embarrassment. If Dutta's arguing that it needs to be done better, I couldn't agree more; if she's arguing that it shouldn't be done at all, all I have to say is--don't neuter my language. I speak Brahmo English; my friends speak everything from Hinglish to Tam Bram variations, and I like the wide range of options we have, the flavour it adds to plain vanilla English.