Midnight’s other children

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with Midnight’s Children, a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown. Many of the writers who arrived on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (whose wildly successful novel The God of Small Things was first serialized in Granta), Amit Chaudhuri — continued to publish fiction and reportage, and a new wave of novelists, including Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, went on to write prize-winning, best-selling books. Readers of Roy, Desai or Adiga — not to mention the viewers who flocked to “Slumdog Millionaire” — have not been spared portraits of Indian life’s miseries (caste-based discrimination, horrific poverty). But the folkloric and redemptive aspects of the stories, already familiar thanks to Rushdie’s magic realism and the more romantic understandings of Hinduism associated with the Kama Sutra, have merely solidified Westerners’ rosy vision of India. These books and films have also complemented the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island and has written vividly about Indian-Americans. The Indian experience, however foreign, has become part of the American experience.

Full report here NYT

Love of the land

A historical romance set in colonial Coorg wins its NRI author Sarita Mandanna lavish praise but, asks Rrishi Raote, has she acknowledged all her sources?

Sarita Mandanna’s Tiger Hills was born with a silver spoon in its mouth. Not only was it championed by David Davidar, until recently a big wheel at Penguin, it also won the attention of David Godwin, a top literary agent. UK rights were quickly picked up by Kirsty Dunseath of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, who compared Tiger Hills with Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. (Early reviewers said its heroine Devi recalled Gone with the Wind’s immortal Scarlett O’Hara.) And in April 2009 Penguin paid a huge sum to acquire India rights to this debut novel. Trade rumour says the sum was around Rs 35 lakh.

What’s more, Mandanna is a young Manhattanite who works in private equity. She comes from a landed family with thousand-year-old roots in Coorg (now Kodagu). The chief characters in her novel are also privileged, from aristocratic families with coffee estates and paddy acres — all of which boosts the story’s “lushness”.

Full report here Business Standard

The long way home

Conversations and people can convey more about a place than several turgid paragraphs and Seth knows this well.

The other day in the hills I rose, after many years, to the sound of a cock crowing. Compared to the metallic, penetrating cell phone alarm that is the gift of technology to us, the cock-crow was sweet music. And the cloud had rolled up right to the large glass window, swallowing the heart-numbing sight of several half-built houses, gouged hillsides and handsome pines felled while asleep.

For a moment, I was once again the teenager of a lifetime away, treading lightly with the goats from the little village of Ani where the young and vigorous Sutlej rushed under a narrow bridge, to the village of Khanag, hidden high up among the conifers. Leaving the crystal-clear stream with its churning water-mills, we began the climb upwards, lunching against large rocks on parathas and mango pickle, when the cloud rolled down, like some lazy white pillow, from the mountain crest and covered everything in sight with a thin magical haze. It was the same sort of cloud again and holding on to the vision, I began to scour my shelves for travel books once again, books that would talk of unknown roads, open starlit skies, trains whistling in the dark...

Full report here Hindu

Why Jesus didn't turn wine into water

It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years. - Bill Gates

There are some people whose books you don’t want to finish in a hurry because you know, instinctively, that your next read is unlikely to measure up.

Manu Joseph’s Serious Men ranks alongside the others in my list - books by Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie.

His voice is so fresh that he ascribes quotes to Bill Gates the latter has no idea he is believed to have said. Well, in all fairness, it is Ayyan Mani, the protagonist of the novel, father of an acclaimed genius and resident of the BDD chawl in Mumbai who does this.

Inevitably, there have been comparisons to the driver from White Tiger. As the author himself confessed at a reading, he groaned when Aravind Adiga’s claim to fame came out.

“I was well into my book by then,” he says,” and I thought ‘Noooo!’”

But while Yann Martel’s and Adiga’s tigers didn’t impress me much, Manu Joseph’s writing is lyrical even when the thoughts he puts down on paper are coarse. Take the pages in the beginning, when the author gets into Ayyan Mani’s head, to describe the ‘long concrete stretch by the Arabian Sea’, made famous by the climactic scenes of Bollywood movies.

Full report here Sify

The Sino-Indian enigma

This book tracks the course the two neighbours have traversed over the past 60 years

China and India are widely seen as the rising powers set to steer the U.S.-dominated international arena towards Asian ascendancy in this century. Indians, however, concede that China has forged far ahead of India on a whole gamut of indices — economic, social, military, space, science and technology. Comparisons may be odious, but they must spur the trailing competitor on. The two countries were, more or less, on a par when they set out on their different courses six decades ago. India is not aiming to catch up with China as a global heavy-weight, but rather to consolidate itself as a benign regional power with global influence.

A collection of 34 essays, this book tracks the course the two neighbours have traversed over the past 60 years. Apart from reminiscences, it offers scholarly appraisals — historical, sociological, and economic. China's youth and women and Chinese settlers in Kolkata are in focus in separate papers. The essay on university students by Ravni Rai Thakur is revealing for the light it throws on middle-class aspirations to status and freedoms. Chinese nationalism figures prominently, but so do corruption, inequality, urbanisation, and class privilege. Some of the articles grapple with the troubled relationship between the two countries (tellingly conveyed by the books' subtitle, “Neighbours Strangers”) and speculate on their linked future.

Among the contributors are some well-known names like K.P.S. Menon, K. Subrahmanyam, Subramanian Swamy, and Vikram Seth. Menon's Epilogue to his Twilight on China (1972) and Seth's account of desert-baked Turfan, Xinjiang — from his delightful travel book, From Heaven's Lake (1984) — are republished. The rest are special to this issue of India International Centre's Quarterly.

Full report here Hindu

Hinduism and modernity

The contemporary Indian novel might be said to have two strains. The first is the Indian novel in English, and its best-known representatives are household names: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga. The second is the Indian novel in languages other than English, and who the great names are in this space depends very much on the language and geographical location of the reader. The English-speaking reader, relying solely on translations and looking down again from a pan-Indian perspective, might say that currently these are the Bengali novelists Sankar and Mahasweta Devi, the Tamil writer Salma, the Hindi writer Alka Saraogi, the Oriya writer Chandrasekhar Rath, and the Rajasthani folklorist Vijay Dan Detha.

One remarkable aspect of the Indian novel is that both these strains trace their origins in the work of one man, Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894). The first Indian to take a BA under the new English-medium educational system set up by the British, Chatterji thereby came under the influence of the novel, then a prose form unknown in India. Chatterji’s first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1865), written while he was a young deputy magistrate in the newly established Indian civil service, was composed in English.

Full report here Mint

The Empire's orphan children

As a touchingly emotional Rana Dasgupta rose to receive the Commonwealth Award for the Best Book, he joined a long list of distinguished winners, from Mordecai Richler and Rohinton Mistry to Peter Carey, Vikram Seth and Andrea Levy.

Dasgupta’s Solo, his second book and first novel, is a virtuoso performance, like so many Commonwealth Prize winners. Set in Bulgaria, it explores the painful consequences of the choices made by both nations and individuals. Ulrich is blind, living out his years in a city where all the stories have changed, after “the former villains were cast in bronze and put up in parks”. As his mind wanders through a real and sometimes imaginary past, his life seems like a settling, however unfair, of history’s accounts.

With Peter Carey, J M Coetzee, Thomas Keneally and Chimamanda Adichie on the regional shortlists at one point, it seemed that Solo would be the dark horse of the competition, despite its obvious merits — but the final list of regional winners didn’t include any of the big four, making Dasgupta and Michael Crummey the front-runners for the competition.

Full report here Business Standard

Handfull of authors in reconstituted NIC

Very few authors have made it to the reconstituted National Integration Council (NIC), chaired by the Prime Minister.

The writers named to the council include Gulzar, Vikram Seth, Mrinal Pande and Sitakanta Mohapatra.

NIC has 147 members, including Union Ministers, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and all Chief Mininisters. The Council includes leaders of political parties, mediapersons, public figures, business leaders and representatives of women's organisations.


The NIC was set up way back in the early 1960s and held its first meeting in 1962. The decision to set up the council, to review all matters pertaining to national integration and to make recommendations thereon, was taken at the National Integration Conference convened by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in September-October, 1961.

Season of renewal

In Two Lives, his memoir of his great uncle and aunt, Vikram Seth reproduces extracts from the 1893 Jewish Prayer Book of a Berlin synagogue, at the end of which is a brief appendix on fundamentals of Jewish morality.

This says that “Judaism teaches: the Unity of Mankind. It commands us therefore to love our neighbor, to protect our neighbor and his rights, to be aware of his honor, to honor his beliefs, and to assuage his sorrow. Judaism calls upon us through work, through the love of truth, through modesty, through amicability, through moral rectitude, and through obedience to authority, to further the wellbeing of our neighbors, to seek the good of our fatherland, and to bring about the loving fellowship of all mankind.”

Given what would happen in that German fatherland within a half-century, the reference to “obedience to authority” makes painful reading. Assimilated Berlin Jews of this period were patriotic to a fault. A happier phrasing would have been, “through questioning of authority.” Truth and questioning are inseparable, as the terrible price of German obedience showed.

Full report here NYT

What Indians can’t write–and why

There are three kinds of fiction that Indian writers can’t write: good crime thrillers, good romance (adult kind, in which sex is not “lofty breasts” and “stars in the sky”) and fiction for young adults. So that leaves us readers with literary fiction, pulp fiction and of course, the ubiquitous campus novel. By the way, a really cool crime title which Hachette India is publishing is by Lounge columnist, the more Bangalorean-and-less-Swedish writer Zac O’Yeah. His book ‘Scandanavistan’ is a spy thriller set in a futuristic Europe colonized by India!

When  I last visited my favourite bookstore Landmark (finally, Landmark opens this side of town, in Lower Parel), Martin Amis, Susan Sontag and Vikram Seth sat alongside each other in the literary fiction shelves. The new releases section had a dizzying variety of books. There was no separate section for cime, but in popular fiction, there was Swedish fiction, Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre. The only Indian authors here was Kalpish Ratna—they never got to me although their crime stories are soaked in very local Bombay flavours.

There was no category for young adults. In the children’s books section, there was the phenomenally successful ‘Twilight’ series and the usual sci-fi and fantasy titles. What do teenagers and young adults who don’t like sci-fi or fantasy or love stories revolving handsome vampires, read?

Full report here Mint

Dalrymple lauds NRI writing

Each of his books have been bestsellers. Despite that, William Dalrymple doesn’t like people calling him a successful ‘novelist’. He’d rather people call him a ‘non-fiction writer'.

Dalrymple first came to India as a young traveler in 1984 and was fascinated by the sights and sounds of the country. Since then he has made India his home. His latest book Nine Lives, which released late last year, has been another bestseller. Within the first two weeks of its release 35,000 copies were sold in India, the fastest in this country. “For the first time ever I sold faster in India than Britain, which is very nice. If I write about India and Indians don’t recognise that, there’s a problem. It feels wonderful that now I am making a good living as a writer, writing about India. There is a big market for books about India.

However, Dalrymple also feels that there is a dearth of quality travel writing emerging out of India. “Much of the best of Indian writing is happening by NRIs. If I name the top five travel books written by Indian authors, almost all of them reside outside India. Examples being Suketu Mehta, VS Naipul, Amitav Ghosh, Pankaj Mishra and Vikram Seth,” he says.

Full report here DNA

Publishers look to China and India to help them weather recession

In China, inspirational business books such as Who Moved My Cheese and family health titles compete with the latest blockbusters; in India, classics from Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton vie for shelf-space with homegrown authors and the penned advice of billionaire IT entrepreneurs; while in South Africa, the boarding school antics of John 'Spud' Milton have captured readers' imaginations and created a Harry Potter-like craze, says a Guardian feature.

Across the world, the appetite for English language books is booming and publishers struggling under the weight of the recession in their core markets of the US and UK are increasingly turning their sights overseas. Random House, for instance, yesterday announced that the record-breaking first print run of 6.5 million copies of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, will include over half a million for overseas territories including India and South Africa, an unprecedented number for a new fiction title.

Publishers from across the globe have gathered in London this week to discuss how to exploit this growing opportunity. This year's London Book Fair has a distinctly Indian flavour, with heavyweight authors such as Vikram Seth and Amartya Sen among the 48 writers appearing, but delegations from China, Russia, Africa and the Arab world will also be there to meet the estimated 16,000 publishers that have come to showcase their catalogues to the rest of the world.

Read full article here

Publishing industry growing at 30 pc every year

Describing country's publishing industry as vibrant, the Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee said it is growing at an impressive rate of 30 per cent every year, according to a PTI report.

"We come out with about 70,000 titles every year," Mukherjee said at a reception he hosted at India House in the honour of leading writers and publishers on the eve of the three-day London Book Fair, which focuses on India at the Earl's Court.
Prominent among those present on the occassion included economist and author Lord Meghnad Desai, playwright, actor and filmamaker Girish Karnad, Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi and her lyricist husband Javed Akhtar, Information Technology czar and author Nandan Nilekani and author Vikram Seth.

The High Commissioner noted that 30 per cent of titles brought out in India were in English and the rest in Indian languages. "There is tremendous amount of talent in our country," he said.
Over 50 authors and 90 publishing houses from India are participating in the Book Fair.

Mukherjee, while launching a Amit Gupta's latest book Indian by Choice, said "it was a personal pleasure to launch Amit's book as he was my deputy when I was heading the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in New Delhi."

London Book Fair opens amid optimistic buzz

Earl's Court underground station was jam-packed this morning, as much of the UK's – and the world's – publishing industry attempts to make their way into the exhibition centre, clutching or dragging armloads of books, diaries weighed down with back-to-back appointments. It's the start of the yearly rights trading extravaganza which is the London Book Fair, and although the global downturn has affected exhibitor attendance somewhat, the crowds milling around the entrance and pouring into the aisles seem as busy as ever, and the flood of new book deals struck just before and during the fair as overwhelming. A Guardian report.

With India the focus country for the fair this year, a host of big names are scheduled to attend, from Vikram Seth to Amartya Sen, Amit Chaudhuri and Daljit Nagra. Fourteen of India's official languages are represented by the 50-plus authors in attendance, and around 90 Indian publishers will be showcasing their books to an international community – more than 54 countries are represented at the fair – keen to find the next bestseller from the subcontinent.

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In search of India

The theme of the London book fair this year is Indian writing, writes Amit Chaudhuri in the Guardian. Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, William Dalrymple and other writers in frequent circulation in this country are going to be joined by writers - K Satchidanandan, Javed Akhtar - distinguished or popular on their own terrain but less known here, for five days of discussions and celebrations. Something like this happened in 2006 to the Frankfurt book fair, when planeloads of Indian novelists and poets descended on the Intercontinental Hotel, waved to each other over breakfast, and then read from their work to courteous audiences in the afternoons and evenings.

The theme then, too, was India; and the "idea of India" acted as a catalyst to a process that might have already begun, but received, at that moment, a recognisable impetus - the confluence, in one place, of literary and intellectual dialogue with what is basically business activity, each bringing magic and movement to the other. The India-themed Paris book fair followed swiftly.

For full story, clIck here

For a fresh look

For the publishing troubled, the focus on India seems to be an ongoing story. Frankfurt and Paris had the spotlight on India last year, and London follows is following it up with an ambitious line –up of India centric events at London this year.

The London Book Fair, on at the British capital’s Earls Court from April 20-22 this year, is focusing on India as an emerging market and literary hub. This trade fair will look at not only English writing from the south Asian nation but also other vernacular languages, Alistair Burtenshaw, group exhibition director of the event, says during a recent visit to India to promote the fair.

Burtenshaw admits that the global publishing industry is reeling at the moment. But he is confident of the rebound for the sector as well. “Publishing is a very forward looking industry,” he says. “Even in a challenging economic environment, they are going to look ahead. Out industry relies on great writing, and that is not going to stop.”

The London Book Fair, part of Reed Exhibitions, is one of the largest trade fairs in the world for the sector. While leading publishers, distributors, exporters, agents and writers are present, since 2004, each year, the fair has also selected a ‘market focus’ country. A major area where Burtenshaw hopes LBF will see activity is the sale of copyrights, especially for new authors. While Indian literature has already made deep inroads in the western markets, Burtenshaw feels the fair will help the industry look at India through fresh eyes.

The fair sees about 75-100 seminars over three days and usually draws about 25,000 attendees. Last year, there were about 1,800 exhibitors, from 36 countries and 413 companies. This year, publishers, booksellers and industry representatives from 67 countries will be present at the fair. The growth of the LBF in recent years has also meant the fair has a more international flavour, with about half the exhibitors coming from overseas.

About 45 writers, including major names like Vikram Seth, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Nair, Javed Akhtar, Amartya Sen and Ramchandra Guha are among the writers scheduled to attend the fair. Already 78 Indian exhibitors have signed up, far exceeding expectations, says Burtenshaw. About 40 cultural events, including seminars and workshops, are planned. “It will help Indian publishers to sell rights of works by Indian authors to other markets,” he says.

The fair aims to focus on different aspects of Indian publishing. With India already the world’s third-largest producer of English language titles, and a still growing economy compared to negative growth rates in most of the OECD economies, the country offers considerable marketing opportunities.

“This will see writing not only from Indians writing in English, but also from the other languages spoken in the country,” says Burtenshaw. The British Council is putting together the programmes, and Sujata Sen, Director, East India, British Council, points out, there are 32 languages in India with over a million speakers, and there is great scope for translation. She points to Sahitya Akademi’s programme, and hopes more translation rights will be discussed.
And the events will not be limited to LBF alone but will also form part of the Edinburgh, hay, Norwich and Newcastle literature festivals. As part of the build up, the Kolkata Book Fair this had its spotlight on Scottish writers, and BCL organized about 50 events during the festival, points out Sen. “It is all about long term sustainability and engagement, adds Burtenshaw. “The rationale is to create greater business opportunities.

With a going rate of £254 per square metre to rent place at the fair, participation does not come chap. But Capexil is giving financial assistance to participants. LBF has also been helping out potential Indian exhibitors through workshops and seminars, conducting workshops for agents on how they can make a book successful, on participation guidelines, how to set up appointments, which titles to promote, how to present stands, preparing the right publicity material etc. While many of the subsidiaries of international publishing houses have been participating in their global stands, many have also taken stands in the India pavilion, Among the participants from India at the fair are Roli, Rupa, Macmillan India, Mapin, Niyogi, OUP India, Penguin India, Sterling, UBSPD, Zubaan, Wisdom Tree, Ratna Sagar, Research Press, Pearson Education, Palgrave Macmillan, McGraw Hill, IBH, Cambridge University Press India besides a host of printers.

Whether the fair is able to achieve its goals remains to be seen, but what already seems guaranteed is the greater visibility of the India in one of world’s global financial capitals desperately in need of some succour.

India focus at London Book Fair

More than 45 leading Indian writers, translators, critics, academics and industry professionals will be coming to the London Book Fair, to take part in a varied programme of events based on themes of cultural and linguistic diversity, designed to enable better market understanding through contemporary literature between India and the UK. This is the first time such a wide variety of authors has been showcased in this way, and the event will bring together the largest representation of Indian writers ever assembled at a publishing trade show.

Writers including Javed Akhtar, Amit Chaudhuri, Namdeo Dhasal, Ramachandra Guha, Jaishree Misra, Daljit Nagra, Anita Nair, Bhalchandra Nemade, Nandan Nilekani, K Satchidanandan, Shankar, Vikram Seth and Pavan K Varma will take part in a series of ten seminars and readings at the Fair, as well as additional events in London and around the UK. These events will highlight the richness and diversity of contemporary Indian literature, with over 15 Indian languages represented across a total of 40 events.

The British Council is hosting the following seminars:
- Imagining India: the world of fiction
- Home and the world
- Literature of identity
- Literature of conflict
- India writes
- India translated
- Literature of the cinema
- Bestsellers and popular writing
- Literature of ideas
- Battle for the Indian reader

Susie Nicklin, Director Literature, British Council, said: “Many people in the UK feel they know India and her writers, which is not surprising given their justified success in this country; many readers in India feel they are au fait with British contemporary literature. In fact, all of us will benefit hugely from this opportunity — a major part of an ongoing British Council programme – to discover more about each other’s literary cultures and societies.”