The news of yesterday's series of armed attacks in Mumbai is impossible to assess as long as its only sources are the Western bourgeois media. Who did it? Why? What will be the effects, short- and long-term? Mumbai is a great city in the world's second most populous country, a city and a country of massive resources, a gigantic working class, and profound poverty and human suffering, the latter ever increasing as global capital extends its tentacles ever deeper. There are no doubt class causes of these bloody events, and there will be no doubt class effects. I'm waiting to read analysis from the several huge Indian communist parties. That will be much more illuminating than hours and hours spent watching CNN.
Last spring I read Vikram Chandra's marvelous novel Sacred Games, which is as much a literary portrait of the city of Mumbai as it is a detective/gangster/political thriller. I've read a number of other fine novels by Indian authors in recent years, including Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, The Impressionist and Transmission by Hari Kunzru, and The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri. Recent Booker Prize winner The White Tiger by Aravand Adiga is on my to-read list. However, as important as the current wave of English-language books by Indian authors is, and as insightfully as some of them, especially Desai's, Kunzru's and Chandra's, examine questions of class, colonialism and neocolonialism, it would be naive to read these novels as the most reliable representations of the current state of the class struggle in India. This raises the perpetual, and perpetually vexing, question of who will tell the stories of subjugated nations. When it's nearly impossible for the poorest, the most oppressed, to get access to education, let alone to publication, let alone translation, will their voices always be silenced? Or, at best, interpreted by sympathizers from the more privileged middle classes? I don't know how far I have the right to delve into this issue as a white writer/reader in the leading imperialist country but I do think it's right to remain conscious of how limited is the access of readers in this country, even red readers, to the authentic voices of the workers of the world.
