Nilanjana S Roy: The desi writing take-away

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Just after the Hutch Crossword Book Awards were announced last week in Bombay, someone came up to me.

Along with Kai Friese and Urvashi Butalia, I'd been on the panel for the English Fiction category. "Ms Roy," this man asked, "tell me: what kind of job is judging?"

A humbling job, and a rewarding job, one that raises difficult questions. The easiest part is, oddly, the judging itself.

When about forty to fifty books""one-third of the number that Booker judges must go through, but rising steadily each year""are read in bulk, you may experience fatigue or exhilaration, but you will not have a problem identifying the good stuff.

Reading at that intensity brings clarity. Good books shout from the cartons. They announce their quality in the very first three chapters.

Picking the shortlist""Shashi Deshpande's Moving On, Raj Kamal Jha's If You Are Afraid of Heights, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and I Allan Sealy's The Brainfever Bird""required intense discussion and a willingness to respect the perspective of your fellow judges, to re-read books that may not initially have been to one's taste.

But all of us could identify, easily, what we were passionate about. The Hungry Tide was a clear winner, but each of the books on the shortlist was a worthy contender.

But two things became glaringly obvious. The first was that it's getting harder and harder to define the Indianness of a writer, or a book""and the Hutch Crossword, being an award for Indian fiction, in translation as well as in English, needs to remain an Indian prize.

But writers one might claim as Indian were not necessarily eligible: no Anita Desai (The Zigzag Way), no Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake). And books that were set in India and that qualified to me as Indian fiction, such as Gregory Roberts' Shantaram, were not eligible either because the author himself isn't Indian.

This raises an old debate""is Rudyard Kipling's Kim, for example, an Indian novel, is Kipling an Indian writer? Yes. And no. Do we need to go beyond nationality?

Perhaps, but we need awards like the Hutch Crossword because international awards see only one-tenth of the iceberg of Indian writing: many authors who're well-known here or who write brilliantly are invisible abroad""whether they write in English or in other languages.

The second thing I noticed is that the quality of the fiction we had to read varied from the acceptable to the truly abysmal.

There was no lack of ambition""this year was thick with experimentation, in genres from SF and fantasy to the historical novel and the graphic novel, writers felt free to tackle everything from the great life-and-death questions to the Bhopal gas tragedy.

But so much of what I waded through read like a first draft; so many writers had produced books that had tremendous potential, but no more than that.

After the awards, I dropped by Crossword, Lotus and Strand's annual book sale. And I watched readers who approached books with the same level of sophistication, knowledge, and passion that Indians bring to food these days.

"Those books are so cheap, let's buy," a woman said about the Indian fiction in English on display at Strand. "Just because they're cheap you'll buy? But only some are any good," her companion said.

The books written in India in English evoke several reactions: many readers love them like they love ghar ka khana; it's familiar, it can be very good, but some of it is plain old dal roti under a fancy name.

And some is overcooked or underdone, too much masala or too little.

The books coming in from elsewhere, written by Indians or about India? Please, as I said in my previous column, forget the authenticity debate.

It's like chicken tikka masala. Or balti cuisine. Or the spring roll dosa. Or fancy fusion food. No one cares any more whether these represent Authentic Indian Cuisine; the question's whether they're any good.

The books and authors I named last week""Swarup, Shanghvi, Bajwa, Ali""failed for me as books for various reasons. One of the many reasons is that there are authors in the subcontinent who do what they're doing rather better.

Mahasweta Debi writes about the lives of the disenfranchised with more empathy""and more style""than Swarup. If I want lyricism, the Urdu poets do more for me than Shanghvi does.

Bajwa's shop attendant pales in comparison to the people I meet in Premchand's works. I'll read Monica Ali for her take on the immigrant experience, for her incredibly luminous style; but if I want to read a Bangladeshi author, two words: Prafulla Ray.

These are all good authors in their own way, but to me they're so much firang fried chicken; why should I patronise KFC when Chawla's Chick Inn does better chicken pakoras?

But there are authors who aren't chicken tikka masala. Whose works are illuminated by location and distance""think Anita Desai, for whom moving out of India freed her to write about Mexico and India too, think Amitava Kumar, whose criticism gains perspective from the fact that he lives in two countries, think Suketu Mehta, who could never have written his Bombay book until he left Bombay.

Distance works for writers we think of as Indian; Amitav Ghosh travels a lot, lives in New York and Calcutta, and his work is all the better for it.

Ruchir Joshi's ear for Indian English and sense of history may not have been the same if he hadn't also spent time in Europe. Jhumpa Lahiri's sensitivity to the immigrant experience is crucial to her work.

And there are writers for whom distance is irrelevant: Rana Dasgupta, whose Tokyo Cancelled forces us to make connections between people, wherever they might come from; Pico Iyer, the anywhere man whose travel writing leans on his being a global soul.

What I object to is having chicken tikka masala and boil-in-the-bag curries dished up on our table on silver platters, as though they were the best fare available, here or elsewhere.

In the global marketplace of books, India's English readership barely makes a dent; we're a niche market, 2,000-odd readers for the average good book, 10,000 for a bestseller.

We don't count; we can be treated as the dupes we are, people who can be conned into buying mutton dressed up as lamb. That I suspect will change as English grows in India.

Right now, this is where we stand: we have ghar ka khana that needs to get better, we have ersatz microwave curries served up as fine cuisine, and we have some absolutely brilliant literary cooks keeping the broth going.

And we have a growing body of readers who know what they want, who're sampling the best of the global banquet of writing, and who'd like all our writers, here and elsewhere, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the literary world.

They're not going to be conned for very much longer and it's because they are gradually beginning to demand better books that Indian writing, wherever it comes from, will start to improve.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com