Mystique of Mumbai

In her book City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay, Gillian Tindal evoked an image of a nascent city, a tangle of masonry, bazaar and tram lines forging into the swamp. In books set in more recent times (India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Shantaram, Bombay and Mumbai: The City In Transition), we see a proud metropolis hollowed out by desperation, violent self assertion and crime. For a sense of how ordinary people, rich, poor and middle class, negotiate this turbulent landscape, we have the writings of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Manil Suri and a host of less widely celebrated but much beloved local authors and poets. This treasure trove notwithstanding, one feels, there is still much to be said, much more to be understood about this great and complex city. And it is with pleasant anticipation that one greets Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables.

Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University whose previous books include weighty titles such as Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990) and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). But with Mumbai Fables, a subject he says has preoccupied him for much of the last decade, he seems to have tapped into a less theoretical and more personal register. Explaining his motivation early on in the book, he describes Mumbai, or Bombay, as it then was, as an object of immense fascination and longing for him as a young boy growing up in Patna.

Full report here Indian Express

Armchair travelers will relish 'India'

The 13 stories in India: A Traveler's Literary Companion attempt the impossible: to capture the essence of a subcontinent that feels like 20 countries teeming within the borders of one.

Readers will see familiar names with contributions from Salman Rushdie ("The Prophet's Hair") and Vikram Chandra (an excerpt from "Sacred Games"), but the collection's value lies in the stories from writers unknown in the United States.

Phanishwarnath Renu's humorous "Panchlight" follows a group of Bihari villagers who have purchased a lantern but don't know how to light it. A story by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, whose novels form the basis of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" film trilogy, showcases the ingenuity of a Calcutta man trying to win back a lost job.

Full report here Cleveland.com

A past-present continuum

It’s time for the Delhi tome. Old and young authors turn the spotlight on unknown, valiant and humdrum aspects of the Capital

The scales are tilting in favour of Delhi. The Capital’s advantages over Mumbai are being enumerated in drawing rooms and magazine columns—wider roads, fewer slums, migrant-friendly, the Metro, etc. So Mumbaikars and their friends have taken to pointing out how theirs is a real city, the kind an author falls in love with and writes about. They back it up with weighty evidence—Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts in the last few years.

Maybe the Mumbaikar does feel more passionately for aamchi Mumbai. By contrast, many who have been in Delhi for decades still feel they are passing by and are there only to earn a livelihood. The real Dilliwala, some would argue, left the city after 1947, taking the city’s soul with him. Among them was Ahmed Ali, who moved to Karachi and wrote a celebrated novel, Twilight in Delhi.

Be that as it may, it is a truism that art follows money—and so does literature. There are signs that a generation that grew up in Delhi, or came here to study or work and stayed on, sees the city, with all its contradictions, as its own. It is finding its voice. Vishwajyoti Ghosh recently released Delhi Calm, a graphic work set during the Emergency (1975-77), and Rana Dasgupta is working on his Delhi non-fiction book, a foretaste of which was offered in a brilliant essay in Granta about a year ago.

Full report here Mint

How to write a crime masterpiece

Sacred Games is a labour of love, or perhaps hate; a reaction to the scraps that Chandra’s relatives in Bollywood have got into with the Mumbai underworld

Perhaps the greatest crime novels of the 21st century will be written by Indians. “Great” is certainly an accurate description of the 900-page Sacred Games, a masterpiece of early 21st century literature.

Let’s take a closer look at how Vikram Chandra wrote his manifold narrative, so impeccably woven around two antagonists—a slightly corrupt police inspector and a don with a karmic bend—who, with elegant plot symmetry, mirror one another and are inextricably linked in a web of brutality, but also love.

Sacred Games is a labour of love, or perhaps hate; a reaction to the scraps that Chandra’s relatives in Bollywood have got into with the Mumbai underworld. They were targeted by extortionists and even shot at. As a writer, Chandra, an aficionado of crime fiction, takes pleasure in utilizing the genre’s tropes.

Full report here Mint

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

Prize-winning writers on CWG menu

Literary enthusiasts may get a chance to interact with award-winning authors at a special event during the Commonwealth Games that will host all the previous winners of the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. “We hope to hold a literary event in the cultural programmes associated with the Games and will invite authors who have won Commonwealth Prize,” Commonwealth Foundation director Mike Collins said.

The previous winners of the award include Vikram Chandra, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mohammed Hanif, V S Naipaul, J M Coetzee, Indra Sinha, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. “India is at the heart of the Commonwealth and it is great to have the Games and the literary award come here,” Collins said.

Full report here Indian Express

Between the lines

A chat with Chandrahas Choudhury, whose Arzee the Dwarf has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book

A literary award, to use a cliché, is a boon and a bane. It draws reader's attention to a talent that would otherwise have gone unnoticed or under-appreciated in a literary minefield where sometimes what's between the cover might remain just there, no matter how brilliant. It might, on the other hand, exert pressure on a writer's future literary endeavours. As Chandrahas Choudhury, author of Arzee the Dwarf, says, “As far as the relationship between a writer and an award is concerned, it is important to stop thinking about it.

“All the happiness I had to get from the book I got from writing it,” he says. Arzee the Dwarf, published by HarperCollins, has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book category, along with The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry (Britain), Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Parkes (Britain), An Equal Stillness by Fransesca Kay (Britain), and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Meeuneddin (Pakistan) and Among Thieves by Mez Packer (Britain).

Past awardees include Vikram Chandra for Red Earth Pouring Rain (1996), Zadie Smith for White Teeth (2001), and Mark Haddon for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2004), to name a few.

Full report here Hindu