| As India prepares to be the guest of honour at Frankfurt this year, it's interesting to see how much has changed. The gold rush that had agents and editors stampeding into the country in search of the next Rushdie and the new Arundhati Roy, is, thankfully, over, but the interest in Indian writers hasn't waned. |
| We're not where Latin America was several decades ago, when that continent boasted the literary fecundity of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and a score of other brilliant writers. But Indian writers remain popular at the bestseller level""Chitra Banerji Divakaruni, Deepak Chopra""and authors from Jhumpa Lahiri to Amit Chaudhuri have held their own in the literary arena. There is still a disconnect between what foreign publishers want""more non-fiction, more self-help and spirituality tomes, more cookbooks and food books""and between what Indian writers seem to want to write, which is usually non-genre literary fiction. |
| Publishers who've been doing the rounds of Frankfurt, the world's most important publishing trade fair, say that the interest in India has grown over the years. The US, Australia and Canada are huge markets, but they tend to privilege authors who write in English and are not very open to authors in translation. Europe is a different matter; the continent is used to its own Babel of languages, and is fascinated by India's incredibly wide range of languages and dialects. The need for translation is taken for granted: even books written in English by a European author will typically be translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and a handful of other tongues. |
| The National Book Trust has picked 41 authors to represent India. This is a ridiculously small number""at the first Neemrana festival, we struggled to limit the guest list to just under 100 writers, and still felt that we had omitted far too many authors of note. But given the constraints, the NBT has done a reasonably good job. The focus is on authors whose works are, as far as possible, already available in Europe. The list includes Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra, Sudhir Kakkar, Namita Gokhale, Kiran Nagarkar, Rana Dasgupta, Altaf Tyrewala, Alka Saraogi, Jayakantan, Namdeo Dhasal, Vijay Tendulkar, U R Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Sitanshu Yashchandra, Mahasweta Devi and a host of others. Fifteen languages have been represented, and the authors range from first-time novelists to seasoned writers. |
| From the perspective of Western publishers, the Indian publishing industry has a few drawbacks. The local Indian market isn't large enough to support literary agents, and while this doesn't hurt authors here, it does mean that they have to work harder to be visible in the global marketplace. Publishers have increasingly found themselves taking on the literary agent's mantle, not the most satisfactory of solutions. |
| Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that for all its vastness, the bulk of Indian literature remains invisible to the Western reader. A less visible, but acute, problem is that the issues we choose to debate haven't changed. Arun Sankar Chowdhury covered India at Frankfurt in 1986 for Deutsche Welle. He wrote: "25 Indian authors with their very different preoccupations, interests and views: it seemed as if somebody had opened Pandora's box!""They had so many problems at home, with their own art or with the state of Indian literature or of the Indian book trade; they had so many opinions about the future of Indian literature; they had so much to say to the rest of the world""especially the western world""through their books, if only somebody would translate them, and at this symposium, which was a godsend in that sense." |
| Twenty years have passed between Frankfurt 1986 and Frankfurt 2006, but I'll bet that the arguments at the book fair this year will be exactly the same. |
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