Fans of writer Durjoy Datta spent all of one day last week lapping up the online denouement of his love affair. As reported in India Today, "He started a series of tweets by saying, 'Hi, I'm online for the next two hours. Because I need to tell you guys something,' and was using #marrymeavanitka. He confessed Avantika inspired almost every woman character he has penned, and tweeted 'I'm in love with a girl. Not surprisingly her name is @avanttika!'"
Avantika was on a flight when Datta sent out his tweets, and, sure enough, when she landed, she was barraged with fan mail asking her to say yes. It all ended well, with Datta putting up a picture of a placard held aloft by his lady love with the words "YES" scrawled inside a heart.
It hardly bears repeating that since the advent of Facebook and Twitter, the business of taking public displays of affection online has gathered speed. It is routine for couples to share pictures of love and intimacy and closely chart the "likes" and "favourites" their endeavours notch. Everything from proposals to the first kiss to more serious milestones such as marriage is now shared with the wider world.
And although most of us only get to see, and be seen by, friends, celebrities have the whole world as their playground. And when the celebrity is a mass writer, there is that added thrill of witnessing a moment that will, in some format or the other, be immortalised in fiction.
There is a certain class of writers that rose in India in the 2000s and benefitted tremendously from a latent, as-yet unexpressed demand for English fiction that is approachable. Chetan Bhagat is the leader of this pack. His books are bought in the hundreds of thousands, as readers from Patna to Patiala devour stories of love and loss delivered in simple, conversational English.
Datta is one of the other major successes of this phenomenon. The author of the wildly successful If It's Not Forever, It's Not Love and Of Course I Love You…Till I Find Someone Better, Datta channels the heartburn of the Facebook generation, as it finds and loses and rediscovers love. Ravinder Singh, author of I Too Had a Love Story, is another example.
Most of these books work because they provide that essential link between pulp and highbrow fiction. The plot moves forward fast enough, yet there is a studied eye on creating characters that connect at more than a superficial level. The language does not sing, which is the whole point, since most readers are not looking for words that soar.
Tuesday's events, however, bring another difference between genre writing and literary fiction to the fore. Bhagat, Datta and others of their ilk write deeply autobiographical tales in which it is easy to connect the dots and figure out, with enough biographical information, the antecedents of the characters and plot lines. The books work not merely for what they say but because the reader knows that the writer actually went through whatever is on the page.
We, therefore, see a hankering among fans to "know" the writer more intimately, similar to what film stars and sportsmen undergo. And if the writer is willing to part with information, as Datta clearly is, the relationship becomes symbiotic.
It can be argued that all fiction is, on some level, autobiographical, but with writers of literary fiction, the presence of motifs, themes and tropes makes this relationship more complex. While this arguably makes literary writing a higher art form, it also, due to its impenetrability, logs lower on the popularity stakes. Besides, the literary writer is a more cantankerous beast, preserving his goods - psychological and biographical - with all the irascible attention of a mother hen looking after her brood.
Some writers bridge even this divide, the latest example being Karl Ove Knausgaard. In his six-part autobiographical series My Struggle, Knausgaard has made navel-gazing an art form all its own. Everything is described, every feeling captured, in a glorious homage to Virginia Woolf's stricture to record every moment on the page as if it were the most defining moment of your life. Knausgaard has achieved the impossible, breaking the ranks of anonymity to become a true-blue celebrity, while also landing a seat at the literary high table.
Lest I get carried away, I must make it clear that Bhagat and Datta are nowhere near Knausgaard in their talents. Yet, in their willingness to put themselves out there, both on the page and online, they reduce the essential scheming of all art, its inescapable wiliness. As he sings to his beloved on Twitter, Datta is only adding another iteration to his live project - art that is both less and more than art.
vjohri19@gmail.com
