Starting the conversation

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Imagine a young man in his mid-twenties, a cricketer who plays the piano and the tin whistle, studying in the Paris of the late 1920s. A mutual friend introduces him to a writer he admires, a fellow Irishman with failing eyesight. As James Knowlson chronicles in his biography of Samuel Beckett, the friendship between Beckett and Joyce was crucial for the younger man, important for the older author.

Beckett had helped Joyce with the writer's current 'Work in Progress'""Finnegan's Wake. A week after the 25th anniversary of Bloomsday (16 June, the date Joyce made immortal in Ulysses), Joyce wrote: "[T]here were two riotous young Irishmen and one of them Beckett whose essay you will find in the Exag fell deeply under the influence of beer, wine, spirits, liqueurs, fresh air, movement and feminine society..." Over the next few years, Beckett became a writer: first a Joycean writer and then deliberately, keeping the techniques he'd learned from Joyce but moving towards a style of his own, a Beckettian writer.

In A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen writes about the circle of writers who gravitated to Henry James, who had just settled into his new house at Rye in Sussex. "James' friend Edmund Gosse right away began making regular visits""James and Gosse went bicycle riding together""and a number of other writers later settled in the neighbourhood: Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, Stephen Crane and Ford Madox Ford."

How do you weigh the importance of a writer's friendships and a writer's links to his or her community? Try an alternate history of Beckett's life where the writer went back to Dublin after Trinity instead of going to Paris, met Joyce at a distance, and settled down to a quiet life as a teacher.

About six years ago, an Indian writer who had spent some years in England asked: "But how do writers here work?" He was referring to those writing in English, like himself. "Without a community, with such small print runs, with no conversation, how can they be writers at all?" It was a valid question at that time. Bombay had a small and thriving circle of poets, Delhi and Calcutta had its writers, the first signs of talent were beginning to emerge from the larger world outside the metros""but even those who knew each other worked in relative isolation. There were conversations""this is an indefatigably chattering country""but in small, private spheres. There were few hubs where writers could meet, a smattering of 'festivals', a few verandahs or chai dukans where writers had their addas.

I think that's changing. The ebb and flow of migrants coming back to Delhi and Bombay, and Patna, and Calcutta, and a hundred other towns, is stronger; they come back for longer periods. Delhi, so often seen as the capital of crassness, now supports a thriving population of writers; it has, much to its surprise, a cultural scene. And like other Indian cities, it might actually be an incubator for emerging talent.

There are writer's workshops on children's writing, on form and structure, on the graphic novel. There are initiatives like Caferati, which provides space for fledgling writers on the web and encourages offline meetings in places like Pune and Nagpur. There are smaller groups, like the British Council-sponsored Writer's Kitchen that brings together about a dozen writers in Delhi. As Rana Dasgupta says, it's too early to expect pathbreaking work, but he points to the fact that a new kind of conversation is beginning, especially among writers of the younger generation.

Pavan calls on New Year's Day. He's a taxi driver I met on a trip to Ahmedabad; he's writing an autobiographical novel in Gujarati. "Didi, find me a translator," he asks. He thinks his novel might appeal to Indians who read in English as well as Gujarati. The confidence in his voice reminds me of the young woman who introduced herself as a blogger and said: "Some day I'll be better known as a writer and a poet."

On the morning of the 1st, I meet a publisher who mentions some writers we both know, young men and women in their twenties and thirties. Some of them are trying to spark interest in Indian genre fiction of all kinds, from the graphic novel to SF to crime noir. I was struck by how professional they were. So was she. "This generation," she says, "knows what they want. They're professional, very confident, and very good at positioning themselves." I don't know whether there's a Joyce and a Beckett lurking among their ranks yet, but I have little doubt that there soon will be.

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