In Brooklyn, writers consider ‘New India’

The “New India” is

(a) A place where the pursuit of individual happiness is now possible

(b) A place that wants to be a part of history

(c) A place where the most common job category for women is “maid”

(d) A place that is not that different from the old India

Put your pencils down now. When Indian-origin writers get together to discuss the complexities of the new India, the answer, naturally, is (e) All of the above.

Siddhartha Deb and Bharati Mukherjee, who respectively have nonfiction and fiction books on India out this year, and Amitava Kumar, whose most recent book dealt with the fallout of the War on Terror, gathered on Sunday in Brooklyn to discuss the subcontinent as part of the New York City borough’s literary festival.

Full report here WSJ blogs

Winners and losers in the "New India"

Finely written, carefully reported, and imaginatively conceived, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (Faber and Faber, Inc.) is one of the outstanding nonfiction books of 2011. Deb was born in Shillong, India in 1970, and now lives in Brooklyn. He teaches creative writing at the New School. He responded to questions from Scott Sherman via e-mail.

After publishing two novels, you decided to write a nonfiction book on India. Why?
I’d just come out with a novel that was rather poorly published. I didn’t have a job and depended entirely on freelance income and my book advance, and I was about to be a father. Any novel I wrote would take some years, and although I very much wanted to write a novel, I had this wild idea that it would be easier to sell a nonfiction book on proposal. I thought I’d get an advance, do the book quickly, and get back to the novel, and here I am, some six years later.

I didn’t sell the book on proposal in the U.S., although the proposal was shopped around. I remember one American publisher listening to my pitch and saying, “Yeah, I remember when I went to Delhi for the first time.” And I thought, ‘You know what, this ain’t Alabama.’ After some conversations of this nature, there was an offer too low so I refused to take it. But it did sell on proposal in Britain and in Canada. That helped buy some diapers. The Society of Authors in the U.K. gave me a generous grant to research the book, which went to buying more diapers. Most of the research was done on credit card debt, which funded the tickets between India and New York. I also depended on the hospitality of friends and strangers in India, and my thankfully unprivileged upbringing in India which allowed me to report on the cheap, skimping on things like cars and drivers and resorting to buses and auto rickshaws for the most part.

That’s how it started. But people were also interested in the nonfiction pieces I’d been writing on India, especially this cover story I did on Indian call centers for the Guardian weekend magazine. Most of the nonfiction stuff on India that I was reading was of the boosterish, “India Shining” variety, and I wondered if I could write something that was both critical and “alive,” something like a novel but based on reporting and research.

What languages do you speak, and what languages did you use in the reporting? 
My mother tongue is Bengali. I used mostly Hindi and English, and a bit of Assamese when I ran into some security guards from Assam in a factory in Andhra Pradesh.

Full interview here Brooklyn Rail

Review: The Beautiful and the Damned

review 

The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
Siddhartha Deb
Viking/ Penguin
Rs 499; Pp 224
ISBN : 9780670085965
Hardcover

About the book 

In 2004, after six years in New York, Siddhartha Deb returned to India to look for a job. He discovered that sweeping change had overtaken the country. With the globalization of its economy, the relaxation of trade rules, the growth in technology and the shrinking down of the state, a new India was being born. Deb realized he had found his job: to explore this vast, complex and bewildering nation and try to make sense of what was underway.

The Beautiful and the Damned is the triumphant outcome. It is an original and innovative work that combines personal narrative, travelogue, reportage, penetrating analysis and the stories of many individuals across a vast range of geographical and social circumstances.

Deb talks to the great and good and those in charge, but listens as intently to the worker at the call centre remaking herself from her provincial moorings and the migrant sweatshop worker trying to make his way in the city. By listening to the stories of the people he meets and works alongside Deb shows how people caught in the midstream of these changes actually experience them.

Visiting the metropolises, small towns and villages, as well as both gated suburban communities and camps for displaced peasants, Deb offers a panoramic view of the changes in landscape and urban geography, creating an epic narrative of the people who make up the world’s second most populous nation.

With a novelist’s vision, Siddhartha Deb’s extraordinary book paints a portrait of India through the story of its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.

Reviews:
New India, old angle Business Standard
Relying on preconceived notions, Siddhartha Deb misses the real story.

The book you are about to read does not have a first chapter: you will find that the text jumps from the end of the introduction to the second chapter,” declares Siddhartha Deb in the author’s note of this book. It’s a pity, because those who read the first chapter, which was also published in the February 2011 issue of Caravan magazine, would agree that it is the most engaging of the five chapters that portray life in the “new” India. Because of an injunction order for defamation obtained by its subject, this chapter (“The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India”) on self-styled management guru Arindam Chaudhuri was pulled out of the book. The surviving four essays, unfortunately, are more a reflection of an armchair leftist’s world view than a real assessment of the India we live in today.

Deb takes you through the rural heartland and bustling cities where he encounters the protagonists of his emerging-India story. They are engineers, farmers, call centre employees, migrant labourers, communists, a right-wing extremist and a waitress in New Delhi. Chance encounters with mobile phone thieves, middle-class aspirers and policemen on encounter squads complete the picture. Through these characters, Deb seeks to give us a glimpse of a country afflicted by class struggle and a highly “tiered” society with “gated communities” for the elite and no room for the poor. The narrative touches on deprivation and surplus, SEZs and farmers’ suicides, alienation and the “high consumption” side of globalisation.

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Full review here Hindustan Times

There’s a tremendous hole in The Beautiful And The Damned: Life in the New India, by Siddhartha Deb. One whole chapter is missing. So after the author’s note and the introduction, we turn straight to chapter 2 on page 72. According to the publisher’s note, chapter 1, ‘The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India’ “has been removed in accordance with an injunction order passed by the Civil Court, Silchar in a suit for defamation”. The suit was filed by one Kishorendu Gupta and the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM).

Fair enough. There is a case, and if Deb and his Indian publishers choose to argue it, the case will come up in court at some point in this country’s future. Meanwhile, as Deb says tiredly over the phone from New York, “It’s interesting that in a book that looks at the real stories behind the ‘new’ India, it’s the single chapter about the rich and powerful that had to be pulled.”

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The Leak Sprung In The Engine Room Outlook

A nuanced probe under new India’s upper stories unearths the usual deprivation and a foundation crumbling away

The Beautiful and the Damned sounds good as a title but is misleading. One of the great merits of Siddhartha Deb’s portraits is their nuance. They are portraits of those he met while travelling across India, investigating the changes he found when he returned after six years in New York. He doesn’t write in black and white. He realises that in almost all cases various shades of grey are the nearest we can get to a true portrayal of anyone’s life.

This is not of course to say that Deb glosses over the insecurity, the danger, the poor pay, the backbreaking work of those oppressed by the changed India he found. But he portrays them as fellow human beings, not objects of pity. At the same time he doesn’t portray, for example, those who employ migrant workers as utterly heartless exploiters. There is even a lightness of touch to his description of a labour contractor.

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India's good, bad and ugly Gulf News

Modernisation is a violent process. Settled forms of existence are uprooted, ancient beliefs are abandoned and familiar hardships give way to unknown dangers. But risks also bring opportunities. India's post-independence settlement was paternalistic socialism — the state discouraged vulgar capitalism and the people remained untouched by material ambitions — that is, they stayed poor. Few got rich except gangsters and politicians.

In the past 20 years, though, there has been an explosion of free-market capitalism. Foreign companies such as Coca-Cola, once banned, are now welcomed. The growth of call centres, computer technology and car manufacturing has seen the country become the world's third-largest economy. The "million mutinies" V.S. Naipaul saw stirring in his 1990 book about India are now a billion and counting. In The Beautiful and the Damned, Siddhartha Deb has taken up Naipaul's mantle.

India’s modern mutinies

Asian powerhouse or failing state? Four reports provide an assessment from the margins of an economic boom

It has often been said of the Indian government that in trying to do too much, it has done too little. Socialist planning in the decades that followed the country’s independence in 1947 created state-owned steel mills, hotels and airlines. It also brought economic isolation and stultifying regulation. Meanwhile, New Delhi had neglected more basic needs such as primary education, public hygiene and women’s health.

Fast-forward and everything would seem to have changed. The growth rate has risen sharply over the past two decades to about 8 per cent and a vast Indian middle class has enticed billions of dollars in foreign investment from western multinationals seeking new consumers. Yet the unfinished economic reforms begun in 1991 have a poor report card in areas where the government must take the lead. The majority of the population still lacks access to a toilet, the average time children spend in school is about four years, and about half of those under the age of five are severely malnourished – a record worse than that of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

India is the land of paradox. And one of its central contradictions is that this most dynamic of economies also has many characteristics of a failing state.

The shadow of inept and iniquitous government looms large in each of the four books under review. A recurrent theme of Mark Tully’s India: The Road Ahead, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Broken Republic and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing is that for all the progress of recent decades, the country’s growth has been far more corrupt, unequal and disruptive than it needed to be.

Full report here Financial Times

Q&A with Siddhartha Deb

New York-based novelist Siddhartha Deb's book of narrative nonfiction, The Beautiful And the Damned: Life In The New India hit bookstores in India earlier this month. I quite enjoyed interviewing him over email, and this Q&A first appeared in print in the DNA Books page on Aug 28, 2011, though in a heavily abridged form for want of space. Posting here the complete interview.

What was the transition like, from fiction to nonfiction? Do you think of yourself primarily as novelist who also writes nonfiction or as a nonfiction writer who also writes fiction? Which form gives you a bigger kick?
The transition to nonfiction was difficult for practical reasons. I had to fund long stretches of reporting, and that was difficult at the beginning. I also had to spend a lot of time away from my very young son, and I didn't enjoy that at all. But writing nonfiction is easier in the sense that the boundaries are more clearly defined, and so it's harder to go wrong. If you're reasonably methodical, you can produce something that is, at the very least, acceptable. With fiction, there are no clear boundaries, at least for me, which means there are many more ways to go wrong but also a shot at transcendence, at magic, at creating life out of even nonsense, all of which I rather like. Since I'm desperate to return to fiction, let's take this book as a novelist's foray into nonfiction.

Full interview here DNA

Lop-sided growth is beginning to threaten even the middle class

Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful And the Damned: Life In The New India hit bookstores in India earlier this month. In an email interview with G Sampath, he talks his new book, about the challenges of narrative nonfiction, and the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement.

What was the transition like, from fiction to nonfiction? Do you think of yourself primarily as novelist who also writes nonfiction or as a nonfiction writer who also writes fiction? Which form gives you a bigger kick?
The transition to nonfiction was difficult for practical reasons. I had to fund long stretches of reporting, and that was difficult at the beginning. I also had to spend a lot of time away from my very young son, and I didn't enjoy that at all. But writing nonfiction is easier in the sense that the boundaries are more clearly defined, and so it's harder to go wrong. If you're reasonably methodical, you can produce something that is, at the very least, acceptable. With fiction, there are no clear boundaries, at least for me, which means there are many more ways to go wrong but also a shot at transcendence, at magic, at creating life out of even nonsense, all of which I rather like. Since I'm desperate to return to fiction, let's take this book as a novelist's foray into nonfiction.

You no longer live in India. How does this geographical translocation affect you as a writer? Apart from other things, especially in terms of choice of subject matter? Do you find America a better place to write from?
My first two novels were set in the north-east of India, which was not the most career affirming move to make while trying to survive as a writer in New York. So, in that sense, I've never been writing for a western audience, and my choice of subjects has been determined on what interests me rather than what sells. And if I possess something of the outsider's eye in writing about India because I've been living in New York, I should add that the outsider's sensibility was honed earlier by the experience of having grown up in the north-east, and of being pretty hard up for a good many years in India. As far as New York being a better place to write from, that's not a guaranteed thing. But the city did push me harder, especially in the beginning. It taught me a degree of professionalism, gave me relatively easy access to an enormous wealth of books and other material, and handed me a surplus of hard-earned confidence.

Full interview here DNA

‘Why I took on Arindam Chaudhuri’

Siddhartha Deb’s latest book, The Beautiful and the Damned, paints a picture of present-day India through the stories of five individuals who span the country’s social, economic and geographical gamut.

The book’s first chapter, focusing on the rise of businessman Arindam Chaudhuri, was excerpted in The Caravan, a Delhi-based monthly magazine. Mr. Chaudhuri is the director of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, a popular privately-run network of management schools.

The article gained more attention when the IIPM filed a lawsuit against Mr. Deb, his publishers Penguin India, The Caravan and Google India for “grave harassment and injury.” (You can read more about Mr. Deb’s publishing saga in this New Yorker article.)

The Indian edition of the book, published by Penguin India, was released without the first chapter. Mr. Deb said the lawsuit alleges that he and other defendants are working for IIPM’s competitors. This is what The Caravan had to say about the case. Mr. Chaudhuri and an IIPM official did not respond to requests for comment.

Full report here WSJ blogs