Nilanjana S Roy: The library of hollow books

SPEAKING VOLUMES

You can buy anything in Delhi, including a library with no books. Once, wandering through old furniture markets in the city, I met a man whose speciality was creating dummy books""handsome volumes bound in leather, their spines lettered in blue and gold, but containing nothing inside.

They were meant to furnish the rooms of gentlemen who wished to be seen as readers, without going through the trouble of actually reading or buying books.

He was very good at his job. It was only when you attempted to take down a volume that you discovered its hollowness.

Over the last few years, the image of that library, its imposing surface concealing the hollowness within, has haunted me.

The odd thing is that while I see it as a Metaphor (what else?), the books that come to mind when I think of the empty library are not the ones coming out of India.

I spent the last three years, for various reasons, reading the top sixty or the top hundred fiction works of each year""an exercise that could have been depressing.

The general standard is still low; it's still a struggle every year to recommend great fiction that can stand beside the best of Saramago, Pamuk, Murakami, McEwan, Roth and company; some of what gets published is incredibly dreary, incredibly mediocre.

But there is also cause for hope. I see unexpected talent, not yet fully tapped, blossoming in the works of writers like Kalpana Swaminathan and Indrajit Hazra.

There's a growing willingness to be experimental with genres beyond straight fiction""the graphic novel, sf and fantasy, historical novels, children's fiction""as writers from Sarnath Bannerji to Samit Basu to Timeri Murari to Vandana Singh take their first steps.

Much of what comes out is still raw, relatively unfinished; many writers are working in the dark, in the isolation produced by the lack of a thriving literary culture.

But each year, the general level rises. Just a little bit, but enough to keep hacks like me happy with the job.

The problem lies elsewhere, with the books about India and by writers of Indian origin that come to us on an ocean of advance publicity, gilt-edged, flagged for our consideration, endorsed by the Western world, stamped with the approval of publishing houses we should be able to trust, foreign editors whose names are legendary, authors who are living shrines.

For far too long, the debate over the merits of "phoren" versus "desi" books has been hijacked by an obsession with authenticity. Is Monica Ali's Brick Lane the Real Thing, or a simulacra? Are Rupa Bajwa's shop assistants true to life? How much of Bengali culture can an NRI like Jhumpa Lahiri truly understand? Has Naipaul really understood the neo-revolutionaries with whom he explored India's villages? Is Manil Suri's Vishnu authentic, is Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's sense of history authentic, is Samina Ali's Hyderabad authentic, is Vikas Swarup's beggar-turned-quiz contestant authentic?

The only possible answers to these questions are the ones that writers give when pressed: a writer is free to imagine his or her version of reality.

What is the authentic India anyway""the city, the village, the slums, the farmhouses? And what part of the phrase "work of fiction" do you not understand?

This debate, in all its many versions, has allowed writers, readers and reviewers to sidestep the central issue: are these good books, satisfying novels, great works of fiction? On the surface, every single author mentioned above comes to us with impeccable credentials.

Some have won prizes, ranging from the Nobel and the Pulitzer all the way down to the Betty Trask. Many have won critical acclaim, too.

Some even have the ultimate blessing conferred by the sound of cash registers ringing""brilliant sales figures.

And yet, and yet. If you put all of these books together, the Bajwas and the Swarups and the Shanghvis, the Alis Samina and Monica, and Naipaul's recent novels, they force two inescapable conclusions on you.

The first is that none of these writers are untalented. The level of skill differs widely, from Shanghvi's overripe prose to Lahiri's delicately nuanced style, but all of them have at the very least an understanding of the rudiments of writing.

And the second is that we now have a body of writing by authors of Indian origin, about India, that forms a library of hollowed-out books.

Bajwa, Suri and Swarup appropriate the lives of people whom they do not understand; unlike Bibhutibhushan, who lived Apu's life of deprivation in the city and the village, unlike Mulk Raj Anand, who saw at first hand what the humiliations of an untouchable encompassed, they are at a remove from their subjects.

And I do mean subjects. The fact that an appropriation is benign, or well-intentioned, does not make it any less of an appropriation.

Monica Ali does a more sophisticated version of the same thing, using a journalist's techniques and a ham playwright's voice when she employs pidgin English to convey the pathos of a Bangladeshi woman's letters from the village to a luckier relative abroad.

This does not make their novels any less entertaining, in the cases of Bajwa and Swarup, or any less well-written, in the case of Monica Ali and Manil Suri.

But it does set up a constant, low-level interference that prevents an astute reader from engaging with their novels at a deeper level. I would call it white noise, were it not so very clearly brown.

Next week's column will try to extend this argument by taking a closer look at the Hutch Crossword book award, back after a gap of three years.

This year's shortlist for English fiction includes Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide), Shashi Deshpande (Moving On), Raj Kamal Jha (If You Are Afraid of Heights) and I AllanSealy (The Brainfever Bird).

The nominees for best Indian Language Fiction in translation are: Chandrasekhar Rath (Astride the Wheel), Mahasweta Devi (Bait and In The Name of the Mother), Bani Basu (The Birth of the Maitreya), Sharankumar Limbale (The Outcaste) and Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay (Waiting for Rain).

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com