WHAT WE’RE WRITING NOW
Arundhati Roy's Booker prize in 1997 led to a windfall of experimentation in form, voice & content in Indian writing in English
Iremember the time the first Penguin India books came out. I stood in Mumbai’s now-defunct Strand Book Stall, reading from Nisha Da Cunha’s beautiful stories, Old Cypress, and then saw Padma Hejmadi’s Birthday Deathday. Those were the days when I did not buy a book unless I had already read it and knew that it would be something I would want to own for the rest of my life, a belief that only a young man can have. But I promised myself, as someone who dreamed of having a book out, as someone who dreamed of being an Indian writer in English, that I would try and buy as many Indian authors as I could.
I already had a stack of strange-looking Jaico paperbacks: Nayantara Sahgal and Kamala Das and Raja Rao but those were second-hand books. Now I would contribute to my biraadari, I would help my qaum, even if they didn’t know I was one of them, by buying their books.
That was 1985. It’s been a long time and much ink has flowed and I have given up even trying to keep in touch. We’re a huge bunch and there’s been three Booker Prizes, Arundhati Roy’s for The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai’s for The Inheritance of Loss and Arvind Adiga’s for The White Tiger. We’re now getting close to what might be called a mature market: we don’t just have literary fiction, the epics and the classics in translation; we have genres: there’s chick lit and crime fiction and romances written by men and thrillers. We have 65 literary festivals across the country; I was told that one just ended in Amritsar. Mumbai has three or maybe five, I don’t know. Universities are organising their own. There are hierarchies now: Jaipur at the top and Kozhikode coming in second with the additional cachet of moral superiority.
This is all wonderful. There are times when it is still possible to make discoveries at a literary festival; and by this, I don’t mean meeting people, although that is important. I mean, hearing of new voices, realising that the flood of books, the democratisation of print can have its downWriters side: you don’t hear the quiet voices among the tumult and the shouting.
What is more troubling is that no one seems to be reading. After all these years of hosting a huge literary festival, there is not a single bookshop worth the name in Jaipur. I watch the people at the festival bookshop: they seem oddly uncertain of how to deal with the choices. Their hands wander over the books, they pick them up and turn them over and around. They rarely do what people who go to bookshops do: they rarely open the book they are holding and begin to read.
WHO IS READING?
There’s a huge amount of publishing going on and this must mean that the books are being sold but to whom? I remember a poet friend of mine looking out at a sparse audience and saying, “Well, at least we have each other.”
So perhaps that’s where the books are going. To other writers, perhaps? You’d think that would be a natural market.
This happened to me in Shillong, where there were two editions of a wonderful literary festival called CALM which ended when its originator, Sambha Lamarr, was taken from us by cancer. A man of mature age came up to me with a sheaf of poems.
“I would like you to read my poems,” he said.
“What poetry do you read?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t have the time to read poetry,” he said airily. “Too busy, you know.”
“Then why should I have the time to read your poems?” I asked. I thought it was a fair question but he got angry and tucked the sheaf behind his back in a protective gesture and marched off. Later, he complained to Ms Lamarr of the bad behaviour of people from the mainland. who don’t read? But who does?
THE MOBILE UNIVERSE
The entire nation seems to have taken a leap right over the book and into the immersive experience of the mobile phone. No science fiction writer ever saw this coming. Everyone who ever talked about convergence assumed it would be the computer as locus; no one thought it would be this handheld device which has now upstaged almost every form of communication and absorbed those left into its clutches.
Every so often, then, I am called up by some young journalist who wants to know whether I would object to my books being read on a phone. I say that I don’t mind how they are read as long as they are read. This seems needy perhaps; or it may just be that they were hoping for a Luddite response and a rhapsody on tree-corpse-flakes, I don’t know. But the thing is they’re not reading on those phones; they’re not even watching cinema. They’re experiencing the delight of crafting a narrative out of the raw material of their own lives.
Let me explain. When I started teaching at the Social Communications Media department of the Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai, a post-graduate integrated communications course, I would ask my students how they liked to spend their downtime. Twenty-five years ago, it was books and movies, neck and neck. Then the movies won but it was a brief victory. Next came television and now it is social media.
At the movies and in a book, the script is written for you and you’re a spectator. You may lose yourself in a book, in a movie, you may say you do, but what you are losing is your sense of belonging to your world. You are imaginatively entering another one.
With social media, the idea is simple: you are the author of your own narrative. You can tell it the way you want: visually or verbally or audio-visually. You can select those parts of your life which you think are attractive to the world. You can film your birthday party or your pratfalls. You are the auteur. Democracy is here. Come on in, the water is freezing.
WE’RE NOW GETTING CLOSE TO WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED A MATURE MARKET: WE DON’T JUST HAVE LITERARY FICTION, THE EPICS AND THE CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION; WE HAVE GENRES.