BOOKED FOR THE BOOKERBy Anjana Basu
The whole world, we are told, is on fire with the glories of Indian writing. Vintage press recently published Indian Writing in English under the guest editorship of no less than Salman Rushdie. Indian authors have been featured in The New Yorker on the occasion of the nation's fiftieth year of independence. And, of course, the world has sat up and taken notice of Arundhuti Roy's cheekbones while applauding her record-breaking Booker prize.
This would seem to be a fertile, happening period for Indian letters, with the dollars and pounds spilling about everywhere, just waiting to be scooped up by hard-writing authors. But back in India itself, that mythical, much-exploited country currently in the grip of an economic recession, the author who writes in English and who doesn't happen to be an Indian ex-pat or have the right literary connections is a struggling, resentful creature.
Take the Roy case. The moment The God of Small Things hit the headlines, thousands of writers started snowing under her agent, David Godwin, with book projects and piles of bulky manuscripts. The reason for this was that they had read in the newspapers how Godwin had been shown the Roy manuscript by a friend and had rushed in a state of literary fervour to sell it to Flamingo. Quite possibly he did so. But now he resented being buried under all this bumph and didn't have time to deal with all these hysterical Indian intellectuals he had never even heard of. At his prompting, the papers quickly backtracked and announced that Roy was a unique phenomenon and that not every Indian author could hope to make that grade or to aspire to have an agent of David Godwin's exalted status.
For, the one thing every Indian writer in English has come to realize is that he or she needs an agent. You may not need one if you are an Indian writing in English in India for Indians, but who wants to be that? No one reads such an author, unless that author happens to have high scandal value like Shobha De.
Every year at one or another of the book fairs in Calcutta or Delhi, Indian publishers get together and announce that the coming year is going to be a landmark one for the Indian publishing industry. So-and-so has merged with an English publishing house just to encourage new writers; David Davidar talks about how Penguin India is on the lookout for promising reads. Euphoria, as in the David Godwin example, quickly rises and word spreads quickly in the English-writing community, to be followed almost immediately by depression, because nothing really has changed.
As a result of the recession, the price of paper and newsprint has risen. This makes books expensive to produce and to buy. No matter how much Penguin India or HarperCollins want to encourage new writing in English, they cannot afford to publish a book that will not generate instant sales. As a result, most publishers stick to the tried and true. They publish known names, celebrities, or Indian-language authors who have managed to translate their own works into English or make the transition from a native language to English, as Kiran Nagarkar was able to do in The Cuckold.
Or publishers just stick to known quantities. That's why the best-selling author in India for a while was not Vikram Seth of Suitable Boy fame or Chandra, of Red Earth and Pouring Rain, but the scandal-mongering Shobha De. Everyone was already familiar with her catty Hindi-English style from her days as editor of the film magazine Stardust. She's a glamorous ex-model who looks good on the back of a dust jacket. These dubious qualities made her the perfect author for Penguin India to promote, and their gamble paid off. It didn't matter that the literary pundits wasted many columns of newsprint denouncing her. The masses wanted Shobha De. She was even interviewed in the Tatler.
Given the hard economic times, publishers have to make hard decisions about what sort of books they will bring out. Non-fiction devoted to subjects like political history is usually safe. Short story collections are doubtful because agents are wary of handling short stories abroad (in England the genre is thought to be churned out mainly by Indians). So, a short story writer must have some kind of established reputation to get into print. Someone like Ruskin Bond is safe because everyone enjoys his nostalgic tales about life in the mountains of Dehra Dun and because back in pre-history, in the 1960s, he was once shortlisted for the Booker. After Bond, though, the pickings get slim.
Next, publishers must decide which novels to publish. A lot of novels produced by well-known Indian authors have blown up in their publishers' faces. Upamanyu Chatterjee's The Last Burden failed to make a dent even though his English August went on to become a movie and he was lauded as one of the future greats, on the scale of a Vikram Seth, whose A Suitable Boy the British press voted the successor to George Eliot's best work. Ashok Banker, who wrote Byculla Boy, a mawkish story about his own boyhood, publicly blamed Penguin India for mishandling his book and thus depriving him of the success he should have had. Banker did in fact possess all the required ingredients for a hit: He had given up an advertising career in order to write thrillers and went on to produce the script for A Mouthful of Sky, a serial on the lines of the film I Know What You Did Last Summer, currently being aired on the Star TV network.
As a result of the Banker failure, publishers are warier than ever about bringing out novels by no-name authors. Their mantras are: cut back on production runs, publish only what has the right stuff to sell or will sell on the strength of the author's name alone; if we must publish a novel, let's get the rights for something that has already been successfully published abroad. IndiaInk, the house which originally printed The God of Small Things in India, has announced that it will only take on one new author a year. Alan Sealy's East of Everest, shortlisted for this year's Booker, is the second of their efforts. The third is whispered to be a first novel by Ruchir Joshi, who shares some of Arundhuti Roy's connections.
'Ian Jack is in town', runs the whisper through Delhi, and everyone goes haring mad for an interview because of the shortage of local publishers. Pinning Ian Jack down could be a short cut to getting into print. After all, everyone has heard of Granta. And Ian Jack actually has Calcutta connections: he was once married to a Bengali and he has haunted the city for a long time. So, despite the divorce, he obviously still has a soft spot for Calcutta. A Calcutta-based friend sees this chance to get ahead in the race and sends his essay on Satyajit Ray to Granta. Many promises are proffered, but Granta is already loaded with Arundhuti Roy material, so the Cal literati and with them the rest of India go muttering off into corners.
Another reason for the getting-published-abroad fever is the fact that only about thirty percent of the Indian population read English. There was a time not so long ago when no one read an Indian who wrote in English because, following Independence, it was seen as an infra dig or pretentious. One poetry publisher was famous in the 1970's for publishing Indo-Anglian poetry, but the unkind said the poetry sold only because of the sari bindings: women matched their drawing room upholstery to the books and bought up whole shelffuls. Back then, the only indigenous English writers one heard of were Nayantara Sahgal and Khushwant Singh who wrote about partition and the problems of adjusting to a post-Independence India. Both are still writing, both are still known names, but neither are news any more. Khushwant Singh hosts a TV chat show and flaunts his reputation as a dirty old man because he learnt a long time ago that sex sells. RK Narayan, with his tales of Malgudi, is in a league by himself, beyond praise or blame, and has a select host of followers in England who hope that he will one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was a friend of Graham Green and belongs to the days when Indian writing in English wasn't a rage. This rage is actually very recent. As recent as Salman Rushdie. And it started abroad, not in India.
Meanwhile, the older Indian presses like Jaico go on churning out reprints of Indian myths or sensational novels that are sure sells. You pick up one of these books and the shiny board cover splits in your hands while the cheap bold print leaps off the already-yellowing pages. Of course, those who write about sex and sodomy claim that, while they may not be Shobha De, they can still turn a pretty rupee by writing this kind of rubbish because the cheap novels sell fairly well without straining the grey cells.
Everyone else goes on jostling to develop 'connections'. Consider the case of novelist Anita Desai's daughter, Kiran Desai. The mother promoted Kiran's novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard in New York City, with some help from her agent and the press, supported by Rushdie's own plaudits about the novel in The New Yorker where he announced his revelation that every budding novelist should be seventeen, attractive and have a famous mother.
Indian writers also try to beat the odds by writing the way foreigners think Indians are supposed to write. Magical realism, started by Rushdie and continued by Vikram Chandra, is a popular style for this reason. The rest of them are turning out stories about large extended families, peppering the prose with slangy Hindi phrases in an attempt to produce something akin to the way Indians actually speak English, a kind of writing that no foreigner would be able to understand without heavy editing. The protagonist is usually a thinly veiled portrait of the author (Arundhuti Roy's success has encouraged this sort of narcissism). The narrative technique is linear, evolutionary and episodic, probably because these writers are forcing themselves to write to suit what they think the publishers want.
A few publishing houses are even asking would-be authors to pay for getting into print, knowing that there are always people desperate enough to do this. Some foreign publishers of this genre--Minerva Press is one such--have set up offices in Delhi, hoping to tempt such writers. After all, they say, even Byron self-published. Writer's Workshop, a small press in Calcutta which used to champion good budding authors, is now charging to publish their work, even though in the past all they offered by way of compensation were writer's copies.
A recent book fair held on the British Council grounds, was an admitted failure but was typical. The devaluation of the rupee has put most books out of the reach of most readers. They have to save up just to buy one or two important books from the main book fairs held each year in major Indian cities, and the books they buy there will be foreign novels and best sellers rather than the local Indian product. As a result, the would-be Indian novelist in English still has a long way to go and that long way begins with getting hold of an agent, or, failing that, a godfather like Salman Rushdie.
(Anjana Basu does advertising work in Calcutta. Formerly, she taught English Literature in Calcutta University. A volume of her short stories was published by Orient Longman, India. Her poems have been featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. Her work has also been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, The Amethyst Review, The Blue Moon Review, Kimera and Recursive Angel.)