This is the most auspicious time for Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul to visit India. He can see for himself how the VHP circus is unleashing that great cosmic energy of which he is so proud, resurrecting that magnificent civilisational urge of Brahaminical Hindutva which had been buried in our history books by the pseudo secularist, pan-Islamic conspirators.

Naipaul shouldn’t worry too much about the timing of this epochal event, or how the happy joint family of the Sangh can continue playing this archival orchestra with so many jarring notes; maybe he should wait till March 12 and witness how the grand Ram temple is installed in Ayodhya. In the Hindutva calendar, this would mark the beginning of the great golden period of the Vedic caste society where nobody ate beef and only rivers of milk and honey would flow.

In Mahashweta Devi’s classic Hajaar Chaurashir Ma, on the Naxalbari uprising, the female protagonist comes out of prison after prolonged police torture. As she steps out into the ‘free world’, she is surprised that everything is so normal. All that happened in the last few years — police encounters, ‘shot in the back while escaping’, the fragmented poetry, the anarchy — everything had disappeared. As if nothing had happened. Nothing changes, she thinks, and she seems already exiled.

At this moment, the home, the prison, and the world, becomes one black hole of condemnation. This is the Being and Nothingness of her existential epic. She can never be ‘at home in the world’.

At Home in the World, the international festival of ‘Indian’ literature being celebrated in Delhi and Neemrana this week, resurrects the ‘exile and kingdom’ of this girl who chose to rebel during the early Seventies. All the writers who are ‘coming home’ — at least the Indo-Anglian breed — do they share an iota of her homelessness? Do they feel at home in this world?

There is a famous photograph of Sartre distributing pamphlets on the street seeking the release of Jean Genet from prison. Sartre took up too many causes; he also wrote. Genet was a compulsive thief but he did not agree with the morality of a conformist society based on theft and immorality. Genet was too complex a ‘thief’.

He was intensely involved with the Palestinian cause (read his Prisoner of Love), in the same way every progressive writer of an earlier European epoch identified with the anarchists of the Spanish civil war, or as Camus ‘went back’ to ‘belong’ to colonised Algeria, or even earlier, the passion with which Dostoevski and Pushkin joined the Decembrists in Russia. This is the unfinished story of writers who were not at home in their world.

In the same trajectory of aesthetic rebellion, writers of the Indian People’s Theatre Association brought the longing for the morning inside every home, in books and short stories, in radio and mainstream celluloid. Faiz, Premchand, Kaifi, Saheer, Manto, Chugtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Balraj Sahni, Salil Choudhury, (including Rajendra Yadav, Krishna Sobti, Bishm Sahni, Pankaj Bisht, Basheer, Thakazhi) and a host of others who doggedly celebrated the dream of a new world. This world is unacceptable, they said. This world must change.

They were not propagandists of socialist realism in the Stalinist mould; they were craftpersons who knew how to weave the layers of a fragmented reality that was India and pointed out where it really hurt. Read Premchand’s Sadgati or Phanishwar Nath Renu’s Maila Anchal, to name just two books.

Between Simone De Beavour and Nadine Gordimer, Neruda and Lorca, Indian writers, too, in all the fine languages of the land, were looking for new rainbows — their ghettos or journeys were different from the Indo-Anlgian exotica being dished out these days with insipid regularity.

So let’s talk of failures in these times of mindless success. Forget the etherised reading sessions in 5-star hotels, the cocktail book launch with the Page 3 circus as backdrop, the media hype, cash advances and foreign agents who manipulate this absurd theatre of manufactured consent. Barring four, maybe five, every such book has collapsed. They don’t have shelf, literary or market value.

Instead, majority of these new English writers in India seem utterly rootless, neither coming nor going as Sartre would say. They are cold-blooded in the pursuit of their brave new unipolar world, proudly apolitical, often Right-wing, pathetically urbane and photogenic, anti-vernacular in sensibility, selling cock and bull fiction which no one buys or reads. A recently launched much hyped English book by a young, cocky writer was hailed by a critic (himself a self-styled magic realist and Milan Kunderaist combined) as the arrival of a ‘second Rushdie’. The fat book disappeared faster then a jet engine.

Kafka’s Joseph K keeps coming back even today, so does Camus’ Outsider, Stephen Zwieg’s Chess Player, Mahashweta Devi’s Birsa Munda. They will keep moving to and fro in the timeless circularity of fact and fiction, where, as Borges wrote, immortality is so commonplace. A book is read many times in the minds of men and women, generation after generation, and that is how the book becomes a living object of flesh and blood with the smell of wood between its pages. In the cold-blooded, impersonal enterprise for ‘mission-immortality’ of the new Indo-Anglian breed, this is what is so tragically missing. The book never comes back. Neither as farce, nor as tragedy.

The only book that broke through this banality of simulated success was the one written by Arundhati Roy. She has the courage to join hands with the displaced people of the Narmada valley, stand firm on her position vis-a-vis the Supreme Court, reject Pokhran, and give her Booker money to the NBA. She is successful and talented and her book proves it. It keeps coming back. That is why the urban gentry hates her with such vehemence.

Come to think of it, she is only doing what many of our great regional writers have been doing for years. Like Mahashweta Devi. Or Avtar Singh Pash and Shivarama Karanth. Or all those extraordinary Dalit and women writers who are out there in the open expanse, redesigning the architecture of both the home and the world. Any takers?