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ShareIn late February I decided to participate in a culture festival called Kitab in Mumbai. It wasn't a vanity book-fest. There were lively sessions on the state of journalism, on censorship and the radical media, and on the translation of fictional works for the screen. There were writers such as Deborah Moggach, Esther Freud and Geoffrey Dyer reading and speaking.
A couple of newspapers were unfair to Kitab. One journalist, who had probably never heard of Deborah, Geoffrey or Esther implied (in a publication called, I think, The Weekly Azaan) that the festival was a failure because there were no 'A-listers'. The organiser, Pablo Ganguli, replied saying that he was concerned with cultural debate and not with vulgar alphabetical lists. Being one of the writers invited, I should perhaps take not being on the Azaan's 'A' list as a slight to my long and happy career. In fact, I couldn't care less.
I have suggested to Pablo that at the next fest which he plans, several sessions should be surrendered to discuss the lack of critical thought and literary appraisal in India. It is a debilitating lack in the culture. The country has not, to date, developed a language of appreciation of books. To talk of 'A' and 'B' lists is a shameful and craven imitation of the pop-chart mentality, based perhaps on a money-lender's view of literature -- the size of the advance some idiot editor in the West has paid out. In a session on the debasement of journalism, Darryl D'Monte, ex-editor of The Indian Express, valiantly pointed out that in a country where farmers are committing suicide in droves by the day because of debt, the nation's newspapers devote six pages of copy to the wedding of two actors, replete with photographs and reports of the amount of money spent on the extravagance. I don't think that Darryl intended that every newspaper be full of the despair of the farmers -- I think events have proved that the Indian reader is in the main indifferent to such tragedy and would rather have cricket, dubious celebrity and circuses.
The concern for books is, for me, almost more important. A society defines its present and past and the possibilities of life within its confines and conventions, through its literature. I believe that English, though still very much a minority language, remains a commanding one and that its transition from a vehicle of babudom to a language in which fiction and biography are written, is organic and necessary. And yet we have evolved no way of evaluating what is written.
We use the simple money-scale. That Jeffrey Archer sells more copies than, say, VS Naipaul is a sad fact of the way the world is, but no one with a sliver of critical sense could say he was a better writer. People who don't read are most prone to the listings-virus. Reviews in Indian journals extol books because they imitate others. Derivative styles and the ability to mimic James Joyce or Gunter Grass is seen as something to appreciate rather than evidence that the writer cannot engage with the material that India presents and evolve an appropriate literary vehicle for it. The Bollywood star system transfers to writing and makes fools of us all.
And then there are prizes. Writers are given prizes by American institutions for their own reasons. 'Novelists' of Indian origin in America inevitably write about the misery and imprisonment of possessing Green Cards. They eat, drink, earn, vote, live off the fat of the land, and never think of returning to India, but their literary work is a bitter complaint aboutdispossession in a foreign land. Americans appreciate this glimpse into a new and fraudulent immigrant misery and reward it.
An Indian reader of the same book will not pause to think that he or she would rather not live in a hole in Jaganathpur, or wherever, but would prefer to be the tragic cultural isolate eating Ben and Jerry's in Jersey.Years ago I wrote a book called Poona Company. My aunts in Pune read it and issued their honest but inadequate critical opinion: "the boy has a good command of the English language." I don't think our A-listing 'critics' have gone much further than Shehra and Amy masi.
The author is a script-writer based in London.
