Nilanjana S Roy: The great Indian (stockmarket) novel

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Could you send me a list of books in fiction [sic] to read about the present-day scenario in politics and stock market regarding the Indian nation?"

This came in from Manoj Jain of Rourkela. In the six years that I've been writing this column for the Business Standard, this isn't the first time I've heard this from readers, but perhaps Manoj defined what he wanted more clearly than most.

What Manoj wanted was not a condensed newspaper version of history duly fictionalised; he was looking for novels that made sense of our lives. My instinctive reaction when asked to prescribe books as though they were headache pills is to decline.

There are only a limited variety of human ailments that can be cured by the application of a novel, after all. It is possible to prescribe Bridget Jones' Diary (by Helen Fielding) to unmarried and secretly anxious thirtysomethings; those leaving for Amreeka have been buying Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans for the last decade-and-a-half; and Agastya Sen's travails in English, August are just the ticket for a fledgling IAS probationer, but that's about it.

Literature isn't good at being useful. It may be highly moral, or deeply challenging, or downright subversive; it may be creative, stimulating and original; but it tends to be of little or no practical use.

Even when it is, it isn't. Richard Adam's Watership Down and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath impart quantities of information, but you do not read the former only in order to be enlightened on rabbit habits, nor do you read the latter solely for information on fruit-farming in California.

But what Manoj explained was simple. He wants to see some reflection of the world around him in the books he turns to for entertainment and a release from boredom.

Sitting in Rourkela, he is uncomfortable with the idea that the closest insights into the themes that he is most interested in come from a 19th century novelist (Dickens, on industry) and a shlockmeister (Hadley Chase, on local politicians).

What he's looking for in terms of a "political novel" is closer to Robert Penn Warner's monumental, fast-paced take on corruption, All The King's Men, though I suspect he'll settle for Carl Hiaasen-style dark humour. What he's looking for in a "stock market novel" would have the levels of deep political involvement you might find in Arundhati Roy's nonfiction essays or Mahasweta Debi's short stories.

Writers who set out to capture the electoral process usually end up with nothing more than an extended editorial; writers who attempt to "do" the stockmarket often, judging by the number of unpublished and unpublishable manuscripts I've seen over the last few years, end up doing a bad version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.

I'm not a fan of deliberately polemical novels; when Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege came out last year, I agreed with her impassioned defence of "our" kind of secular India against the depredations of the "fundoos" (fundamentalists). But I also noticed that the sections where the novel scores serious debating points are also the sections where the literary quality falters.

The book that comes closest to capturing the lunacy of an Indian election was written in Trinidad. V S Naipaul was a young man when he penned The Suffrage of Elvira, an early novel that used humour to cover a deep disillusionment with the democratic system in action. It remains deeply funny; everything from the vote-capturing to the superstitions of the candidates will be instantly recognisable.

With the exception of Nayantara Sahgal, who chronicled the political upheavals of a nascent and rapidly jaded New India through a series of novels set in the period just before Independence all the way through to the 1960s, few Indian writers in English have been able to capture the true flavour of Indian politics.

Courtesy Upamanyu, we have the IAS novel "" life as a probationer and life in government, if you add Mammaries of the Welfare State to English, August.

Rohinton Mistry's works, which place the little man, the common man, if you like, in the middle of events of national importance, are often recommended to foreigners as required reading on India. In India, they're read for the human interest "" for his wonderful characters and their tragicomic predicaments "" rather than for the political content of what he has to say.

Midnight's Children is the only iconic novel of recent times that managed not just to capture newly Independent India and the Emergency, but to define them for a new generation of writers.

The great stockmarket novel is still waiting to be written. We have produced no financial thrillers, no really supreme fictional studies of the new bourgeoisie.

There are fleeting glimpses here and there; in A New World, Amit Chaudhuri attempted to capture the changing economic as well as cultural face of India, but the portrait is sketched very, very lightly.

Vikram Seth, however, captured a slice of the new versus the old economy when he set the boxwallahs beside the upstart, energetic new breed of entrepreneurs in A Suitable Boy.

It's interesting how many Indian writers are more acute when it comes to capturing their own tribe: self-reflexive references to Indian writing abound, from Vikram Seth's insouciant send-up of solemn poetry readings in A Suitable Boy to Ardashir Vakil's dig at the need to be part of the multicultural world, more mainstream than the mainstream itself, in One Day.

Even so, there are no unsung Bonfire of the Vanities here, no darkly funny novels that feature the Great Indian Scam Trick in detail.

There are debates, if you're looking in the right direction: God of Small Things is about inequitable inheritance laws and a heritage crumbling in the face of pollution and indifference just as much as it is about the love laws.

Early reviews indicate that Hari Kunzru's Transmission features the new whitecollar coolies "" bodyshopped software engineers "" as well a computer virus gone amok.

Just as I'd hesitate to prescribe the ideal reading list on, say, India and liberalisation, I'd hesitate to prescribe to authors what they should and shouldn't choose as subjects worthy of a novel.

But Manoj's question boils down to this: why don't more contemporary novels reflect our lives? And when they do, why don't they do it better? Not being a novelist myself, I have no answer to that one. But if you're writing the greatest Indian stockmarket novel of all time, get in touch.

nilroy@lycos.com