That Long Silence: How the Indian Media Ignores Non-Celebrity Writers
This is yet another of my Rediff.com Book Chaat columns.
It was originally about women writers being ignored in India by the media, but on rereading it, I realized that in fact, it’s really about non-celebrity writers as against celebrity writers.
Either way, the trend continues, stronger than ever.
And it’s worse in some ways: it’s easier for an author to get profiled or interviewed, rather than have one’s book reviewed widely.
The closest you can come to getting an honest appraisal of your book without having to flog it yourself, is having some non-literary celebrity like Rahul Boast (rhymes with cold burnt toast) gush about your book on NDTV while you try not to look self-conscious.
Excuse me. I have to go throw up now.
You go on and read the piece.
And the next time you read an article purporting to be about a particular literary theme which misses out on several crucial books, including your favourites, don’t worry, you’re not any less of a bibliophile than the journalist who wrote that article – they’re just playing the celeb game and ignoring any book that didn’t get the suitable A-level flogging by a celeb in the national media.
Yaaaaaaarghhhh. (Sound of toilet flushing repeatedly.)
BOOK CHAAT
by Ashok Banker
That Long Silence
Is it a coincidence that many gifted authors overlooked by the Indian media happen to be women, asks Ashok Banker
Clubbing writers into groups is something that publishers usually do for reasons best known to them. Labels like literary, mainstream, popular, feminist, Indian, Asian…these colour-tags are only useful to book marketing executives and those readers who need big signposts at every step of their path along the road to literary discovery.
But once in a while, a number of authors, working separately and often without any interaction whatsoever, just happen to share an affinity. Of theme perhaps, or of style, or even of subject. Or as it happens, in this case, of sex.
Indian women novelists. It’s not a term you see bandied about in the media. That’s because the media prefers to report on celebrities and stars, multicrore advances and literary prizes, the personalities of the authors rather than the novels themselves.
One group of publications, the Times Group, allegedly even has a policy never to review books by Indian authors – although interviewing and profiling the authors themselves is quite acceptable.
Frankly, I don’t care a hang about authors or their personalities, their advances and their eccentricities, their family lives and their work habits. What matters is the text itself.
If literature is a ‘great dialogue’ as the late great critic put it, then it’s that great dialogue that interests me, not chitchat with the writer currently enjoying the limelight.
Take Shashi Deshpande, for instance. She’s been quietly penning her novels for years before any of the current crop of writers appeared on the scene.
Since the Eighties, she’s published some of the most seminal and memorable novels in this country. Her novels, while sharing a certain similarity of theme, subject, and at times, structure, are an important record of the experience of Indian womanhood in particular and the changing state of Indian man-woman relationships in the latter half of this century.
Yet, while the press went gaga over one new johnny-come-lately after another, she was virtually bypassed.
At times, I’ve actually witnessed the Indian media covering non-authors like Tara Deshpande and Pooja Bedi Ebrahim while eschewing the ouevre of this gifted novelist.
As I put it to a journalist who had done a large profile of Tara Deshpande last year: “You’re covering the wrong Deshpande.”
But thankfully, the real Deshpande’s books have continued to be published, and her gifts seem to be growing from strength to strength.
If you haven’t read her books yet, then I urge you to pick them up today itself.
From That Long Silence to The Binding Vine, she captures moments and lives with more emotional veracity than any dozen celeb-author-of-the-month.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that she scorched a path that has since been walked on by many graceful feet.
I don’t know for sure if any of the other authors I’m about to mention have actually read Shashi Deshpande’s novels, let alone been influenced by them, but I’m certain that they have assimilated her books by that peculiar form of cultural osmosis that enables great stories to be passed on from generation to generation.
Anjana Appachana’s Listening Now is very different from Deshpande’s small, brightly polished gems.
Yet this large, ambitious, almost unwieldy gunnysack of characters, stories and living colours shares a deep affinity with novels like The Binding Vine. To me personally, Listening Now almost reads like five Deshpande novels woven together in a loose tapestry that combines the individual strands to form a new holistic pattern.
This is probably one of the only novels I’ve read that’s clearly over-written and in need of a ruthless editor, and yet the excess of verbiage actually works as a strength rather than a failing by the time you get through the book. A rare example of ‘more is more’.
Then there’s Shauna Singh Baldwin’s superb debut novel, What The Body Remembers. Baldwin’s territory is much the same as Deshpande’s – the inner and outer lives of women trapped in a masculine cage of social mores and expectations – and yet she explores this territory with language that is far riskier and poetic than Deshpande.
What The Body Remembers is replete with daring metaphors of the kind that would fall into purple prose in the hands of less talented authors. She’s able to use geographical metaphors for anatomical parts with the freshness of someone discovering the language for the first time.
A beautifully structured and fully realized novel that is a major work of fiction in any country – as indeed, one noted reviewer referred to it as an example of ‘the great American novel set in Punjab’!
I came to Chitra Banerjee Divakurni’s work through a story published last year in Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent fiction magazine All-Story. That led me to Sister of my Heart and now I’ve moved on to her earlier novels.
If What The Body Remembers is an epic symphony, then Sister of my Heart is a beautiful sustained jugalbandi. The parallel tales of the two girls blend seamlessly one into the other.
Divakurni’s talent lies in her ability to recount the most heart-rending of moments and emotions without ever lapsing into sentimentalitism.
This latter ability is a weakness of Jaishree Misra whose highly successful debut novel has been selling like hotcakes.
Misra’s prose and plot depend far too much on emotional stringing, like a single note played over and over again to monotonous effect. While the evocation of Kerala and the mindset of a Kerala girl and her outlook has its moments, on the whole the novel seems to have been far more rewarding to write than to read.
The numbers of readers buying copies of the second edition of the book in as many months (or is it the third or fourth edition now?) doesn’t necessarily prove me wrong. Indian writers are fashionable these days.
Sunetra Gupta has never been fashionable, unfortunately. I’ve often sung the praises of this brilliant sculptor of novel-length prose poems.
I’ve said before that she writes the best prose among all Indian English writers, and while her last novel was slightly disappointing, the earlier ones remain as testimony to my adulation: Memories of Rain, Moonlight into Marzipan, and my personal favourite The Glassblower’s Breath are some of the most elegantly carved word-frescoes you’ll have the pleasure of reading.
Perhaps it’s her day job as an acclaimed microbiologist that’s responsible for that sure touch of phrase and minute perfection in language.
Either way, enjoy this writer for her prose and remember her for her characters.
I know there are many more writers out there, women and not women. I’m not claiming to know them all. But even after reading a couple dozen, I’ve come to once sure conclusion.
The hype over Indian English writers may often seem to be out of proportion to their success, internationally. Let’s not forget that three of the most hyped authors of the past two years – Raj Kamal Jha, Pankaj Mishra and Akhil Sharma – turned out to be disappointing reads (except for Sharma) and failed to make it to the ‘sure-shot’ Booker shortlist they were tipped to hit.
On the other hand, authors like Jhumpa Lahiri have been appearing out of thin air (as far as the hype-seeking Indian media) are concerned, selling copies and winning prestigious awards as well as winning local and international acclaim.
Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that many of these genuinely hype-worthy authors happen to be women.
Perhaps there’s no significance in the fact that these far more gifted authors are often overlooked by the media until the Western world discovers and lauds them, while other far less talented celeb-scribes are given the red carpet treatment in print.
Perhaps this only reveals how little the media actually knows about real literature.
And how gullible they are, especially when shrewd manipulators like Kaizad Gustad, Tara Desphande, Pooja Bedi Ebrahim and their ilk beckon their papparazzi cameras and Sony micro-recorders.
After all, let’s not forget the case of Shashi Deshpande and how she was allowed to languish in the media wilderness until finally coming to their notice recently.
Then again, I have this niggling suspicion that if these superb women writers were not women, they just might have got the press they deserve before that Pulitzer or Commonwealth came along and made them hype-worthy.
Hmm, what do you think? Or is it just that they expect all women writers to be as glamorous and PR-friendly as that socialite nightqueen and her hype-savvy ilk?
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 9:25 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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