DSC Prize 2012 Longlist announced

The longlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for 2010 was announced in Delhi today. There are 16 books on the list.

The list has both established as well debut novelists. There are also three translated entries. The five member jury each selected three works, revealed jury member Ira Pande. She said the list includes works from South Asia's cultural diversities as well as books that reflect urban as well as rural landscapes. There are two books on Afghanistan.

The shortlist will be announced on October 24 at the Shakespeare Globe in London, while the $50,000 prize will be given during the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012.

"I am delighted that the DSC Prize is able to provide a global platform to recognize such fine works and present them to a wider audience," Manhad Narula of DSC said.

The longlist:
Omair Ahmad: Jimmy the Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura ( Oxford University Press, India, Translated by Susheela Punitha)
Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books, India, Translated by Manisha Chaudhry)
Siddharth Chowdhury: Day Scholar (Picador/Pan Macmillan, India)
Kishwar Desai: Witness the Night (HarperCollins/HarperCollins-India)
Namita Devidayal: Aftertaste (Random House, India)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: One Amazing Thing (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
Manu Joseph: Serious Men (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, India)
Usha K.R: Monkey-man (Penguin/Penguin India)
Shehan Karunatilaka: Chinaman (Random House, India)
Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins-India)
Jill McGivering: The Last Kestrel (Blue Door/HarperCollins-UK)
Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told (Viking/Penguin India)
Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone (Chatto & Windus/Random House-UK, Translated by Polly McLean)
Kalpish Ratna: The Quarantine Papers (HarperCollins-India)
Samrat Upadhyay: Buddha's Orphan (Rupa Publications, India)

Stories from the underground

An intricate fabric that dazzles in parts but falls apart in the end.

This is a story told across continents and by multiple voices. There is the narrator, a modern-day writer in the dusty town of Phansa in Bihar, making serendipitous discoveries in his grandfather's abandoned library.

There is Amir Ali, a reformed Indian thug, telling his story through the yellowing pages of Notes on a Thug: Character and Circumstances (1840), by Captain William T. Meadows (a takeoff on Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug, first published in 1839, in which the protagonist was called Ameer Ali.)

Different voices
Ah, but Amir Ali is not what he seems — our narrator chances upon some letters written in Farsi by Ali to his Jaanam (beloved), the maid Jenny, in which he declares, “I am not what the Kaptaan wants me to be — I am not Amir Ali, the Thug.' So we have a third voice — that of Ali without his thuggee turban on. And briefly, there is a fourth — the “opium-befuddled” Irishman Paddyji (but more about him later).

Full report here Hindu

Africa through Naipaul's eyes

For my travel books, I travel on a theme. And the theme of The Masque of Africa is African belief. I begin with Uganda, at the centre of the continent, do Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and end at the bottom of the continent, in South Africa. My theme is belief, not political or economic life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming they have to be taken into account. Perhaps an unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of the old Africa by the ways of the outside world. The theme held until I got to the South, when the clash of the two ways of thinking and believing became far too one-sided. The skyscrapers of Johannesburg didn’t rest on sand. The older world of magic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. I had expected that over the great size of Africa the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn’t. The diviners everywhere wanted to “throw the bones” to read the future and the idea of “energy” remained a constant to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts. In South Africa, body parts, mainly of animals but also of men and women, made a mixture of “battle medicine”. To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book.
— V S Naipaul: The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (Picador India, Rs 595)

Naipaul knows Africa well. He has lived and worked in East Africa: “Home Again” in A Way with the World (1994) is based on his time there. In a Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River (1979) are both “about” Africa. Overall, Naipaul’s vision of Africa has been remarkably constant, you might say even rigid: The Masque of Africa merely reiterates his earlier views that Africa is a dreamlike and threatening place that resists understanding, that eats away at reason and the technological products of reason. Joseph Conrad, the man from the fringes of the West has been one of the major influences on Naipaul and many of the images of Naipaul’s Africa have come out of Heart of Darkness. Unlike his three books on India — An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilisation and India: A Million Mutinies Now — which reflect a growing understanding of the complexity of the subcontinent within the framework of history, there is little such generosity with Africa as a whole.

Full report here Business Standard

Inaugural South Asian Literary Festival line-up announced

Bestselling Indian author Chetan Bhagat, Fatima Bhutto and Hardeep Singh Kohli are among the authors set to take part in the inaugural DSC South Asian Literature Festival.

Announced on 22nd September, more than 30 events are confirmed for the festival which will take place across the capital in venues including King's Place, the Free Word Centre, the British Library, British Museum and bookshops from 15-25th October and then at cities around the UK from 26th-31st October.

At the launch, the longlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was also announced, with 16 titles in the running from publishers including Picador India, Faber, Bloomsbury and Constable & Robinson.
Co-directors Jon Slack and Bhavit Mehta of Amphora Arts said of the festival: "The thriving literary and publishing scene in South Asia was the impetus for us bringing a literary festival devoted to South Asian writing to the UK."

Full report here Bookseller

Home turf

Writer Siddharth Chowdhury on his latest book and why he continues to mine the cities, Patna and Delhi, in his works

For any writer to admit that his ambition in life is to “avoid writing a lot” would be blasphemous, but Siddharth Chowdhury, author of the recently-released Day Scholar (Picador, Rs 250) merely shrugs when you point this out to him. “I barely do any research, I work mostly from memory. I visually map the book, think about the characters, and when I write, I usually do that on weekends. Sometimes, after thinking out the characters, I sit down after six months. My books are done over a period of four years. Not writing a lot is quite easily achieved,” says Chowdhury.

His latest book too draws from Chowdhury’s familiar milieu — Delhi University; his Bihari protagonist from Patna is placed in Hakikat Nagar, the writer’s former residence during his salad days. But unlike his debut novel Patna Roughcut, that hailed him as the newest kid on the contemporary literature scene, Day Scholar has earned mixed responses. “There are people who don’t like my book at all and there are those who love it. Patna Roughcut also got good reviews only in the last year,” says the 35-year-old.

Full report here Indian Express

A story long awaited

Days at college are special. They are the in-between years of what you are and what you will be. And for a budding writer at Delhi University, these in-between years were spent observing and imagining situations, environs and characters that is Day Scholar. In protagonist Hriday Thakur’s own words, “I was training myself to observe better, to notice things only a writer would... I was training myself to look at everyone as a potential character…” And in a story that winds up in 160-odd pages, Siddharth Chowdhury’s effort to do just that is quite evident. For Chowdhury, who himself read English Literature at Delhi University, it would have been obvious to write about his days at the university and the slew of colourful and interesting characters, as well as situations that anybody who has spent time at DU, studying or otherwise, could easily relate to.

This is the story of Hriday Thakur, who comes from an upper middle class family in Kadam Kuan, Patna. His ambition to become a writer brings him to DU, where he goes through a roller-coaster ride in his first year of college, learning and unlearning more than he could ever apprehend. But more than the classrooms and the college campuses, the book dwells in the surroundings that form the fringes of DU’s North Campus and an ecosystem in itself. Shakti Nagar, Kamla Nagar, Maurice Nagar, Batra Cinema, Majnu ka Tila and other locations are the many cradles of the story. Then are those interesting, yet ever so familiar characters that one might have bumped into during one’s college days. Zorawar Singh Shokeen, the half jat-half Gujjar owner of Shokeen Niwas, Hriday and his Kadam Kuan friend and accomplice Pranjal’s crib in Delhi. Shokeen is a political broker and a shady property dealer. Then the scrawny Jishnu Sharma, Shokeen’s Man Friday, who arrives in Delhi to prepare for civils like scores of students from Bihar but never goes on to do anything about them. And a host of other stereotypical DU characters that keep the story readable and enjoyable, injecting life and nostalgia into the narrative.

The modern mutiny

Aatish Taseer, author of The Temple-goers, walks Raghu Karnad through a city of ambition, horror and flowering trees. Photography by Mikma Lepcha

In his third book, Aatish Taseer’s observant eye scans from the lawn parties of  Sunder Nagar to the cement plains of Dwarka, recording the Delhi of right now. The Temple-goers is a novel about a young writer returning to Delhi, a city of scorching newness, and befriending his gym trainer Aakash, who embodies that newness. As a young Haryanvi man full of ambition, bravado and class confusion, Aakash is an easy figure to spot. Yet the detail and particularity of his character are the real accomplishments of The Temple-goers. “For a character to be ‘credible’ is my highest aim,” Taseer said. “It means he can’t be dismissed, whether you like him or not.”

How did you develop Aakash, and make him so recognisable without becoming a stereotype?
The first little throb of Aakash went through me in a story I wrote about a year before I began The Temple-goers. It resulted in a kinder, more vulnerable likeness who, at the end of the story, is cut down by the system. He sinks from being a trainer at a gym to a security guard.

At the time I was quite happy with the story, but as the months went by, I began to feel that I had underestimated Aakash. I had filled him with my own fears and reservations about the world that was coming into being in Delhi and India, and made him more fragile than he really was. When I sat down to write the novel, Aakash’s frailer twin emerged not some easy prey of the new system, but made by it, and full of resilience and survival instinct. But he is not some sociopath or amoral creature – he is someone very shrewdly aware of being in a society in which his hard work and talent might not be enough.

Full interview here Timeout Delhi 

Challenging the stereotyped woman

Tamil fiction writer C.S. Lakshmi shares with S.S.KAVITHA tips on feminism

The reddish maroon sari, her silky grey hair and the quavering voice lends that unpretentious look to her exuding confidence. When she opens her mouth, she speaks her heart out much like the characters in her fiction. And, that is what sets her apart.

Popular under the pseudonym Ambai, C.S.Lakshmi is a distinguished fiction writer in Tamil. Her works are characterized by a passionate siding with the cause for women and humour. Her profound style is in touch with reality. She is the only Tamil writer to have been included in the recently published Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature edited by Amit Chaudhuri. She is also the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).

Full report here Hindu

REVIEW: The Temple Goers

REVIEW

The Temple Goers
Aatish Taseer
Picador India
Rs 405
Pp 304

Extract from Outlook 
Aatish Taseer’s much-awaited first novel, The Temple-Goers, explores the tensions around religion and class in a rapidly changing India. He evokes, with comic flair, the world of Delhi’s power dinner. Some guests seem familiar enough to set off a guessing game.

Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had—restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels—or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue-and-red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.


He was annoyed even before we sat down. My mother had asked him for eight; he had arrived with his wife and shooting stick some 10 or 15 minutes past eight. Shabby Singh in a black-and-red cotton sari, her large red bindi fiery that night, her politically grey hair in a tight bun, had come by eight-thirty. She brought her husband, a small Sikh gentleman in a yellow kurta. Sanyogita and I were on time as well. But Chamunda was late, very late.

At nine, the writer, unaware that Chamunda was coming, but seeming to anticipate a general tendency on the subcontinent for late, drunken dinners, said, “Udaya, we’ll eat soon, won’t we? We’ll eat soon.

Reviews 
The Independent 
India's seamy underbelly, though hardly news to Indians, is a trendy subject for novels and movies, such as The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. If you have seen Monsoon Wedding, you should have a fair idea of the milieu of The Temple-Goers, a first novel by Aatish Taseer. He was born in New Delhi of an abortive affair between a well-connected Sikh journalist mother and a philandering Pakistani politician, and now lives there and in London, where he has worked as a journalist. Like the film, the novel moves among Delhi's wealthy middle class in all its energy, brashness, pretentiousness, perversion and corruption, supported by a cast of thrusting, upwardly mobile hustlers and servants, all tinged with Bollywood-style romance.

The style, on the other hand, owes more than a little to VS Naipaul's non-fiction, with its combination of precise observation, analytical self-confidence and pitilessness. Not only is Taseer personally acquainted with Naipaul, who has praised him as "a young writer to watch" for his first book, the memoir, Stranger to History. Naipaul is also a lightly disguised character in the novel: a famous writer visiting Delhi from London referred to by the narrator in the Naipaulian grand manner as "the writer", complete with emphatic repetitions, shooting stick and adoring wife.

Four Indians nominated for Commonwealth Writers' Prize

Noted authors Keki N. Daruwalla and Amit Chaudhuri are among the four Indians nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2010. Besides Daruwalla's For Pepper and Christ and Chaudhuri's The Immortals, authors Rana Dasgupta and Chandrahas Chowdhury have also been nominated for their books Solo and Arzee the Dwarf, respectively.

While Solo and Arzee The Dwarf  have been published by HarperCollins-India, For Pepper and Christ has been published by Penguin-Books India and The Immortals has been published by Picador-India.

For Pepper and Christ is a historic tale of sailors voyaging during the time of Vasco Da Gama that weaves itself around the legend of Prestor John and spice trade. The Immortals is the story of two families in Mumbai of the 'eighties bound by music.

Other nominees for best book in Europe and South Asia include The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Britian), Heartland by Anthony Catwright (Britain) In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Pakistan) and Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussain (Pakistan), a communique issued by HarperCollins said on Friday.

Full report here Little About

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The regional winners shortlisted are:
Africa
The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best Book are:

Trespass by Dawn Garisch (South Africa)
The Double Crown by Marié Heese (South Africa)
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)
Eyo by Abidemi Sanusi (Nigeria)
Tsamma Season by Rosemund Handler (South Africa)
Refuge by Andrew Brown (South Africa)
Kings of the Water by Mark Behr (South Africa)

The shortlisted writers for Africa's Best First Book are:
I Do Not Come to You by Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (Nigeria
The Shape of Him by Gill Schierhout (South Africa)
The Shadow of a Smile by Kachi Ozumba (Nigeria)
Come Sunday by Isla Morley (South Africa)
Sleepers Wake by Alistair Morgan (South Africa)
Jelly Dog Days by Erica Emdon (South Africa)
Harmattan Rain by Aysha Harunna Attah (Ghana)

Caribbean and Canada
The shortlisted writers or the Caribbean and Canada Best Book are:
The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels (Canada)
February by Lisa Moore (Canada)
Euphoria by Connie Gault (Canada)
Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky (Canada)
Galore by Michael Crummey (Canada)
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon (Canada)

The shortlisted writers for the Caribbean and Canada Best First Book are:
Under this Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell (Canada)
Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir (Canada)
The Island Quintet: Five Stories by Raymond Ramchartiar (Trinidad)
Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic (Canada)
The Briss by Michael Tregebov (Canada)
Amphibian by Carla Gunn (Canada)

South Asia and Europe
The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best Book are:
Solo by Rana Dasgupta (Britain)
For Pepper and Christ: A Novel by Keki Daruwalla (India)
The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Britain)
Heartland by Anthony Catwright (Britain)
Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein (Pakistan)
The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri (India)

The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best First Book are:
The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry (Britain)
Arzee the Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury (India)
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Pakistan)
Among Thieves by Mez Packer (Britain)
An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Britain)
Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Parkes (Britain)

South East Asia and Pacific
The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best Book are:
Summertime by J.M Coetzee (Australia)
A Good Land by Nada Awar Jarrar (Australia)
The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt (Samoa)
Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
The People's Train by Thomas Keneally (Australia)
Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey (Australia)

The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best First Book are:
The Ice Age by Kirsten Reed (Australia)
After the fire, a still small voice by Evie Wyld (Australia)
Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho (Australia)
Document Z by Andrew Croome (Australia)
Come Inside by Glenys Osborne (Australia)
Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Australia)