A story of sub-continental incentives

When writing about writing, one should try not to sound like an economist. Economics is, after all, a dry and emotionless subject, and one cannot price art, etc., etc. But, nevertheless, the laws of economics cannot be denied, and one of the most potent is this: Incentives determine output. Even though it is not possible to evaluate the “output” by any real quantitative metric, even the haziest possible notion of aesthetic quality that is the only form of judgement we can use, incentives still determine output. 

In other words, the quality of writing determines on the incentives of the writer — and, naturally, of the publisher. 

One way of seeing that this is true is to consider the difference between Indian and Pakistani literature. It has become widely accepted as a fact in the past decade, indeed as something of a cliché, that Pakistani novels are just “better” than Indian ones. They are more real, or more dramatic, or more raw, or better crafted, or deeper — the underlying aesthetic values that determine this belief may differ, but the conclusion is always the same. Indian novels are now insipid, Pakistani novels are not. Many, including the writers Amit Chaudhuri and Palash Krishna Mehrotra, made this argument in print a decade ago, and it is hard to find anyone who disputes it. 

As it happens, I disagree with this diagnosis; I think we read these books essentially as a method to understand a society that is particularly opaque and frustrating to outsiders. As India has opened itself up and “normalised” itself, Pakistan remains difficult to understand — and therefore prone to exoticisation by readers. And understanding Pakistan is, of course, important; not just to Indians, who have to live next door to an unquiet neighbour, but also to the rest of the world years after 9/11 put Af-Pak on their mental map. Many years ago, in a review of Jamil Ahmed’s The Wandering Falcon, I argued the difference in what was being explained also mattered: “Unlike novels that ‘explain’ India – overwhelmingly soft, mushy things, optimistic or empathetic – novels ‘explaining’ Pakistan are about violence, repression, public affairs. And are thus hard, taut, exciting.” 

That analysis was written before The White Tiger, before cow vigilantes and before the new macho Indian self-image, so perhaps it will in the future no longer be true. But, nevertheless, something else will be true for the foreseeable future, something else that plays crucially into the incentives of writers and publishers: The small size of the Pakistani market for writing in English. Perhaps because the Pakistani elite is so much smaller a proportion of the Pakistani population than the Indian elite is; or perhaps because a larger proportion of the Indian middle class has to learn English to get about in our polyglot country, as opposed to uniformly Urdu-speaking Pakistan; for whatever reason, even the tiny Indian market for writing in English dwarfs its equivalent in Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan has no real publishers of English books — just Oxford University Press of any size, and OUP is of course has an academic focus. 

What does this mean for Indian vs Pakistani novelists? In short, Pakistani novelists write for the outside world, and Indian novelists are usually forced to think about the Indian market. Once, decades ago, it was readers in Manhattan and Mayfair that the greatest generation of Indian writers set out to woo — the Rushdies of the world wrote like Indians, but for a global audience. That was the point at which Indian writing ruled the world, the time of ‘Empire Writes Back’ magazine stories, of Bookers and bouquets. If the laurels now go to Pakistan – to Mohsin Hamid, or Bilal Tanweer, or Mohammed Hanif, or Musharraf Ali Farooqi, or Daniyal Mueenuddin – then it is because they are the ones now writing effortlessly as Pakistanis but for the world. And for the global citizens that these writers are, it is perhaps easier to do this than it is for the novelists of the new India. They have a simple incentive structure, and they meet it with grace.

For an Indian writing today, on the other hand, you have to walk an uneasy tightrope: not so rooted that it confuses the outsider, not so disconnected that it alienates the local. Of course, the big money and the real plaudits are still abroad; but the home market now has a size, pull and accessibility that few writers can afford to ignore. The conflicting incentives here thus have an effect on the output: It falls, too often, between two stools when it comes to artistic judgment. 

Might this, too, change in the future? Well, consider an interesting fact: More and more Pakistanis are writing for Indian publishers. In bookshops in Pakistan, you see Indian imprints everywhere; Indian publishers choose Pakistani authors to add to their lists and to promote for an Indian audience. Slowly, but surely, the incentive structure is changing again. I wonder what it will do to the output of the Pakistani novel industry — currently, everyone says, on top of its game.