Book Review: Granta 130 New Indian Writing

Book: Granta 130 New Indian Writing

Author: Edited by Ian Jack Granta

Pages: 288

Price: Rs 599

Here's the bar argument you might have heard before. Or perhaps not.
Aspiring writer A: I don't think Granta will ever publish our stories.
Aspiring writer B: Hmm…
A: Look at Granta 130, special India Issue. It has writers of Indian descent who have been educated by western institutions.Most of them.
B: Hmm… let's have another drink. You sound upset.
A: The only other Indian edition was in 1997.
B: Hmm… I need more ice.
A: And you know what, I bought Granta and read the stories written by Indian writers and I didn't like them. They are OK, but not about real India. I know the real India; you know the real India. We, the students of the Gandhi University, know what's happening here. Granta has missed the point.
B: Hmm… btw, what's this Granta?
A (eyebrows raised): You've not heard of Granta?
B: No. Please tell me na.
A: Let's forget it. Cheers!

From the bar let's go over to my study. I'm not sure if I'm person A or B, but I did buy the book. It's priced at Rs 599—rather costly for me and for that matter for any Indian, particularly students, who are more likely to read.
A month later here's what I have to say: Granta 130 is everything but forgettable. So label me Writer C if you like.
Granta 130 is a good collection, a few writings are better than the others, but because it is about India, I did miss the desi twang.

Breach Candy by Samanth Subramanian, easily one of the best pieces, presents a journalist's investigation into how the Breach Candy club at Mumbai, reserved until 1959 only for the whites, before a two-tier membership allowed Indians to become ordinary members in the mid-sixties—while the Europeans stayed as trust members—is the centre of a legal battle between two groups of its members. While the narrative records only one side of the argument, as those who now steer the club's functioning didn't meet him despite his best efforts, the murky nature of the struggle has a distinct foreground—the club sits atop prime land, which, in a congested island city like Mumbai, is too delicious a fact to be ignored.

Inventive and intense, Upamanyu Chatterjee's Othello Sucks is a cataclysmic tale of an Indian family in Delhi, which is coming to terms with the growing-out of the Shakespearean stranglehold of yesteryears. Even though this is fiction and we know it all too well, it's funny; the starkness to experiment is all too bone-dry, and yet filled with an inner core of unaccustomed marginality that many middle class homes fail to notice.

Pyre by Amitava Kumar is the journey of grief recounted from New York, where the narrator resides, to Patna, where his mother has died, through a narrative that is characteristically unembellished. The narrator's unfamiliarity to the ceremonies mandated by the Hindu tradition turns the economics and emotions of losing a loved one into a touching and candid inquiry.

The train of logic that divides the two communities of Hindus and Muslims in the state of Uttar Pradesh in the engrossing narrative that makes up Love Jihad by Aman Sethi, finds a hard-hitting end, when Ramakant Chauhan, a Hindu activist in Saharanpur, a supporter of the love jihad movement, declares with a flourish that Indira Gandhi was the first victim of love jihad. To the writer's protests that he was a Parsi, says Ramakant, 'Everyone knew Feroze Gandhi Khan was a Muslim. It's all over the internet.' The question remains: Will the ease with which we communicate on WhatsApp and other social media now bind the two communities or move them further apart? This piece has that journalistic argument, and I hope it makes the readers think, discuss probably, and move on.

Hari Kunzru's Drone is set in an Indian future where Seth, the rich man who controls most of the nation, wants nothing but the best: house, wives, even children. Perfection is not unmanageable in his world. In the second part of this piece, a young and well-built labourer called Jai, in order to make ends meet, gets an extra arm attached to find a balance between his basic needs to survive and the quantum of work he has to do in a dusty mine owned by Seth. He ends up contracting a virus, the cost of taming which he can't afford. That the world has been unfair to some and will remain so is the focus here, which clichéd as it may sound, is treated with fairness by use of sharp prose, which may warrant a re-reading if you want to do more than just scrape at the surface.

Shoes by Anjali Joseph remained remote, wriggling along the periphery of my reading consciousness, stagnating, lifting sometimes, but crashing downhill in the end. Stories don't have reasons, and rightly so, but sometimes reasons become stories, which this first person story couldn't demonstrate, though I liked the part when the narrator is having a forced break with two others, drinking local liquor and telling stories about ghosts.

The unfilled gaps of Gandhi's days in London, where he arrived to study law in 1888 onboard SS Clyde, which didn't find elaborate mention in his autobiography, and which, according to Sam Miller in Gandhi the Londoner are important to understand the Mahatma, are part of this rather interesting essay. Sam travels to England in present time and visits places where the Mahatma stayed as a student in London.

Amit Chaudhury's English Summer is set in London where an aspiring Indian poet called Ananda lives on Warren Street, lonely, and with weird notions about a foreign land he has deep prejudices against. Nothing really enchanting or depressing in his life, he is consumed by the ordinariness of his own thoughts. The choice of naming him Ananda, showed, to my mind, a lack of basic care, as I read Ananda as Amanda in the first half of the story, until I had my eureka moment. By then, a lot had slipped through the cracks, and a lack of spark stopped me from going all over it again.

(Kulpreet Yadav is the author of Catching the Departed and founder-editor of Open Road Review literary magazine)