A "ST. STEPHEN'S School of Literature"-- What a wonderfully Stephanian idea! When I received the Editor's thoughtful, elegantly-written and not even slightly hubristic essay propounding this thesis, I was both amused and bemused. Amused, because the idea is diverting one to contemplate; bemused, because the assumptions underlying the notion of such a school are problematic enough without the additional burden of being described as its exemplar ("Shashi Tharoor, possibly the most 'Stephanian' of the novelists", to quote the Editor's Introduction.)

Since, unlike my contemporaries Rukun Advani and Suvir Kaul, I did not study English at College and therefore possess neither a theoretical grounding in literature nor a critical vocabulary to articulate my prejudices, I am somewhat handicapped in responding to the Editor's questions. It strikes me, though, that the existence of a "school" should imply something more than the mere fact that a number of writers share the same alma mater (as Kooler Talk might have put it, the "school" must mean more than the College). If there is a "St. Stephen's School of Literature", (and if there is, let us call it SSSL henceforth, in true Stephanian fashion), its members must have similarities in their literary outputs -- similarities of style, theme, content, sensibility, or some combination of these -- that both link them and set them apart from other, non-Stephanian writers. There must also be some continuing affinity amongst the members, some literary bond that reinforces the exclusivity of their mutual club. As I will explain, I am not sure that these two requirements can be found amongst the eligible members of the putative SSSL.

But first, what does the very name "St. Stephen's" stand for to the outsiders whose comments have sparked this debate? Let's face it: to non-Stephanians, "St. Stephen's" in this context conjures up three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering -- elitism, Anglophilia and deracination. We may as well confront this stereotype head on before responding more directly to the Editor's questions.

Whether or not there is an SSSL, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: after all, I spent three years living in and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case, Mission College's elitism was still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to server Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dust plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 70s was an institution whose students sustained as Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, organized Union Debates on such subjects as "In the opinion of this House the opinion of this House does not matter," staged plays and wrote poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned Practical Joke Competition, (in memory of P.G Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the "Winter Festival" of collegiate cultural competition, which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual inter-college cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory)1, maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non cantabrigian "gyps" to serve their meals and make their beds. And, if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (whose typing mistakes were deliberate and deliberately hilarious).

This was the St. Stephen's I knew, and none of us who lived and breathed the Stephanian air saw any alien affectation in it. For one thing, St. Stephen's also embraced the Hindi movies at Kamla Nagar, the trips to Sukhiya's Dhaba, and the chowchow at TibMon ( as the Tibetan Monastery was called); the nocturnal Informal Discussion Group saw articulate discussion of political issues, and the Social Service League actually went out and performed social service; and even for the "pseuds", the height of career aspiration was the IAS, not some firang multinational. The Stephanian could hardly be deracinated and still manage to bloom. It was against Indian targets that the Stephanian set his goals, and by Indian assumptions that he sought to attain them. (Feminists, please do not object to my pronouns: I only knew St. Stephen's before its co-edification.)

At the same time, St. Stephen's was, astonishingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a remarkable extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what version of religious faith you espoused. When I joined college in 1972 from Calcutta, the son a Keralite newspaper executive, I did not have to worry about fitting in: we were all minorities at St. Stephen's, and all part of one eclectic polychrome culture. Five of the preceding ten Union Presidents had been non-Delhiite, non-Hindus (four Muslims and a Christian), and they had all been fairly elected against candidates from the "majority" community. But at St Stephen's, religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were "in residence" or a "dayski" (day scholar), a "science type" or a "Shake Soc type", a sportsman or a univ topper (or best of all, both). Caste and creed were no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian experience.

This blurring of conventional distinction was a crucial element of Stephania. "Sparing" with the more congenial of your comrades in residence -- though it could leave you with a near-fatal faith in coffee, conversation and crosswords as ends in themselves -- was manifestly more important than attending classes. (And in any case, you learned as much from approachable faculty members like David Baker and Mohammed Amin outside the classroom as inside it.2) Being ragged outside the back gate of Miranda House, and having a late coffee in your Block Tutor's room, hearing outrageous (and largely apocryphal) tales about the recent Stephanians who were no longer around to contradict them, seeing your name punned with in KT, were all integral parts of the Stephanian Culture, and of the ways in which this culture was transmitted to each successive batch of Stephanians.

Three years is, of course, a small -- and decreasing -- proportion of my life, but my three years as St. Stephen's marked me for all the years to follow. Partly this was because I joined college a few months after my sixteenth birthday, and left it a few months after my nineteenth, so that I was at St. Stephen's at an age when my experience would have had a lasting effect. But equally vital was the institution itself, and its atmosphere and history, its student body and teaching staff, its sense of itself and how that sense was communicated to each individual character in the Stephanian story. Too many Indian colleges are places for lectures, rote-learning, memorizing, regurgitation; St. Stephen's encouraged random reading, individual note-taking, personal tutorials, extracurricular development. Elsewhere you learn to answer the questions, at College to question the answers, some of us went further and questioned the questions.

So yes, Editor, St. Stephen's influenced me fundamentally, gave me my basic faith in all-inclusive, multanimous, free-thinking cultures, helped shape my mind and define my sense of myself in relation to the world, and so, inevitably, influenced what I have done later in life -- as a man, as a United Nations official, and as a writer. Stephania encouraged the development of qualities that would stand writers in good stead. But I had been writing well before I came to St. Stephens -- my first story was published more than five years before I entered College -- and I did not cease to learn when I left St. Stephen's, so I cannot say that (except for the few short stories I wrote in College and about College) either the style or the content of my writing is either primarily or exclusively Stephanian. And, while my Stephanian friendships are important to me, and my association with College is something of which I am inordinately proud, neither relates much to matters literary. Indeed, practically none of the other early-70s Stephanian writers on the Editors bibliographical list did any writing while I knew them at St. Stephen's. 3 To trace retrospective connection in a common "school" would, if I remember my Philosophy Subs classes right, be guilty of the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It might have been different if those who sharpened their own, and each others linguistic rapiers at Kooler Talk, or Spice, had all gone on to churn out comparable novels; but the Bibliography notes nothing by the campus litterateurs of my time, Ramu Damodaran, M. Raghunath, Mooli Oberoi, Siddharth Basu or Amit Jayaram. 4
Those who have seen a distinctively "Stephanian" quality in some writers seem to use the term (largely, I might add, with pejorative intent) to include notions of elitism, privilege, irreverence, flippant wit, cleverness in the use of language, and deracination from the Indian mainstream, wherever that may flow. They do not appear to include the secularism, the pan-Indian outlook, the well-rounded education, the eclectic social interests, the questioning spirit and the meritocratic culture that are equally vital ingredients of the Stephanian ethos. To the extent that all these elements characterize the work of Stephanian writers, one might be able to talk of a Stephanian school of Literature; but the truth is that these qualities, positive as well as negative, are not all found in all the Stephanian novelists, whose works quite naturally manifest as many divergences as similarities. And many of the presumed elements of an SSSL can be spotted in other Indian writers of the same generation who have not come within sniffing distance of St. Stephen's College; Githa Hariharan, Richard Crasta and Sunetra Gupta are just three of the names that come to mind. What is being described as "Stephanian" writing is in fact characteristic of an entire generation of Indian writers in English, who grew up without the shadow of the Englishman judging their prose, who used it unself-consciously in their daily lives in independent India, and who eventually wrote fiction in it as naturally as they would have written their university exams, their letters home, or the notes they slipped to each other in their classrooms.

I would argue, in other words, that whatever the Stephanian writers have in common they also share with non-Stephanian Indian writers in English. (Indeed, it is ironic to see Stephanian writing being criticised for showy prose and brittle wit by non-Stephanian reviewers using language that reveals the same qualities.) And what they do not have in common (the gulf between the concerns and aspirations of any two of the writers in the Editor's bibliography) is sufficiently significant to dilute any thought of an SSSL.

This is also borne out by the absence of what I have earlier called a continuing affinity, a sort of literary bond of loyalty, amongst the members of any SSSL. St. Stephen's is after all a college, and like all colleges it breeds its share of resentments; the Stephanian writer thus brings a great deal of non-literary baggage to his encounters with Stephanian critics. Of the more than 130 reviews The Great Indian Novel received on four continents, only three were largely negative; two of those -- and I make the point a little ruefully -- were contemporaries of mine at St. Stephen's.
On the other questions raised by the Editor, I can only suggest responses. Why have the post-1970s Stephanians, of both sexes, not produced much fiction or poetry? Perhaps this has to do with the change in the atmosphere of College that reportedly accompanied the switch to co-education, with its new emphasis on academic results pure and simple -- at the expense of, rather than as an accompaniment to, creative endeavors. There was a time when an excellent debater, actor or cricketer would be admitted to St. Stephen's despite poor school-leaving results; since the late 1970s, that has not been possible. Or so I am told: I hope that is not true, for if it is we no longer have a collegiate culture that encourages and sustains creativity.

Whom do I write for? The Editor has already quoted my Foreword to The Five-Dollar Smile. I write for Indians like you -- the Indians who are reading this essay, Indians who have grown up speaking, writing, playing, wooing and quarrelling in English all over India. Contrary to Harish Trivedi's assertion, 5 they do share a "common cultural matrix", one that consists of an urban upbringing and a pan-national outlook on the Indian reality. I do not think this is any less authentically "Indian" than the worldviews of writers in other Indian languages. I write of an India of multiple truths and multiple realities, an India that is greater than the sum of its parts. At the same time I remain conscious of, and connected to, my pre-urban and non-Anglophone antecedents: my intellectual heritage embraces the Mahabharata, ottamthullal and Bollywood as well as Shakespeare, Wodehouse and the Beatles, and as a first-generation urbanite myself, I keep returning to the Kerala villages of my parents, in my life as in my writing. Yet I have grown up in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi; my wife is half-Kashmiri, half-Bengali; and my mother now lives in Coimbatore. This maybe a wider cultural matrix than the good Dr Trivedi imagined, but it draws from a rather broad range of Indian experience. And English is the language that brings those various threads of my India together, the language in which my wife can speak to her mother-in-law, the language that enables a Calcuttan to function in Coimbatore, the language that serves to express the complexity of that multiform Indian experience better than any other language I know.

Postscript: The Editor asks whether I have another novel in progress. Sadly, the answer is no. Since October 1991 I have been responsible for United Nations peace-keeping activities in the former Yugoslavia, an activity that has consumed more of my life than my family would have liked. I used to write on evenings and weekends, and for more than three years now I have had practically no evenings and weekends; still less have I been able to carve out the psychological space one needs if one is to create an alternative fictional universe. It will be sometime, I fear, before I can muster the attendance requirements for admission to the St. Stephen's School of Literature!
(Reprinted from an article in Stephanian (April 1995))

1 One of my few worthwhile innovations as President of the Union was to supply throat lozenges free of charge to the more raucous of our cheerleaders at the cricket final. I am told this is one more Stephanian tradition that, along with our cricket team, has bit the dust&.
2 Including Amin Sahib's memorable and oft-quoted Urdu translation of the words inscribed above the stage in the College Hall -- "Isa ne kaha, main Noor Jehan hoon "-- which came, however, in the course of a Mediaeval History lecture
3 The only exception, apart from myself, being Anurag Mathur, who had stories published in The Illustrated Weekly and JS during his College years.
4 I was on the editorial boards of both publications in my first and second years at College, but ended any further aspirations by being elected President of the Union in my final year (appointing the Editor of Kooler Talk was the President's prerogative). So, I went from being one of KT's principal contributors to becoming its principal target!
5 I am referring here to the lines quoted by the Editor in his Introduction from an article I have not read and hope I am not misrepresenting.

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