Nilanjana S Roy: Crossed swords and Crosswords

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In the endless discussion over the politics of literary awards""is it Nigeria's turn or Albania's to win a Nobel, was such-and-such judge guilty of literary infidelity when he abandoned x or y author""a simple fact gets lost in the wash of gossip. Judges for an award are unnatural readers.

The average person reads a dismal six to 10 books a year; even the average committed reader seldom gets beyond two to three books a month. Judges develop the reflexes of the academic or the professional editor, scanning rather than reading. A book doesn't have to grab you by the first page, but if it hasn't got you by the first three chapters, it's unlikely to beguile you later on. A truly bad book will announce itself early on; a truly good book might, in contrast, take time to open up and reveal its secrets.

To be a Booker or a Pulitzer or an IMPAC judge requires a fast, opinionated reader, unlike the normal reader who might take months to arrive at a properly considered opinion of the book before him. It's a skill, but a peculiarly limited one in its usefulness.

The Hutch Crossword awards for fiction, non-fiction and translation aren't reading marathons yet""instead of the 100-140 books a judge might have to scan on the average fiction list, a judge on the English fiction panel typically faces a far less demanding set of 30-40 books. This year's Hutch Crossword non-fiction prize demanded more stamina, with 59 books on the longlist.

The final shortlist was announced yesterday: Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Ira Pande's Diddi, Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits in Pakistan, Mishi Saran's Chasing the Monk's Shadow, Navanjyot Lahiri's Finding Forgotten Cities and One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices by Meera Menon and Neera Adarkar. It covered quite a range: a biography of a city's underground life, a memoir of a writer and a mother, an exuberant travelogue mixing cricket with Pakistan notes, a travelogue in the company of a long-dead monk, a look at the Indus Valley civilisation and a sociological work.

The big surprise was the omission of Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indians, one of 2005's most discussed and debated books. It's a glaring and inexplicable absence. Many might disagree with Prof Sen's conclusions, but very few would have doubted that his entertaining meditation on India and the Indian mind was one of the key works of non-fiction to come out last year.

It was a relief to find Arundhati Roy's The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire missing from the shortlist""Roy's collection of essays seemed mediocre, her conclusions obvious rather than startling. The Crossword judges may have been wiser than they realised, given Roy's reaction to another recent award. Awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize, Roy refused the prize on the grounds that the Akademi is an Indian government institution and that she and the Indian government don't get along too well. The Akademi, which was under the impression that it retained a certain literary and cultural independence, refuses to rescind the award""so you have an author who won't step up to bat, and an academy that will make its award disregarding authorial protests!

The Crossword shortlist for fiction includes Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw, Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled, Siddhartha Deb's Surface, Cyrus Mistry's The Radiance of Ashes, V S Naipaul's Magic Seeds and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown.

Both the fiction judges, who went through almost 40 books, and the non-fiction judges, with their longlist of 59, must have envied the judges of the Hutch Crossword translation prize. It should worry us all that the longlist for works in translation was down from about 20 books last year to a mere 10 this year. Picking the six on the translation shortlist must have been relatively easy, since it was a question of winnowing out just four books. Works by Bama, Mahasweta Debi, Krishna Sobti, Manzoor Ahtesham, Gurdial Singh and the late V K Madhavan Kutty are on this year's list.

One of the reasons suggested for the drop in translations is that more work in translation from other Indian languages into English is being done on dead authors than living ones. Another publisher suggests that Crossword needs to cast its net wider, given that most translations of contemporary writers are undertaken by very small presses. But in a year of surprising, often exhilarating, writing, this is a depressing statistic: it's very saddening, for a country that speaks, argues and swears in so many different tongues to have just ten works on the translation longlist of a mainstream literary prize.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com