“Indian crime writing doesn’t exist as a genre, only as a poor pastiche parody of western tropes and devices”

Saira Kurup, Assistant News editor for Sunday Times Delhi, sent me this questionnaire for an article she was writing on Indian detective fiction. You can read the article in today’s Sunday Times Delhi here. I’m pasting the full interview below:

1. Your books were among the first Indian crime thrillers in English. What do you think of the books being published today in the genre? Do you see any qualitative differences in plots, location and style of writing compared to the time when you wrote your first crime fiction?

Sadly, I think Indian crime fiction – be it mystery, detective, thrillers or any other sub-genre – has yet to find its footing. I personally wrote my three crime thrillers for a lark, playing around with sub-genres in each of the three books. It was more a writing experiment for me than a genuine commitment to the genre of crime fiction. I was more than a little taken aback at the rave reviews I received across the country (over 230 of them, by my count). Because, as a lifelong reader and admirer of great crime and literary fiction, I myself found my own work wanting and lacking. Bluntly put, they were disposable pulps. But what’s being published today in the name of crime fiction in India is itself a crime! It’s as if publishers, editors and authors think that you have to stoop to the lowest common denominator in order to be read and break the bestseller charts. It’s all trash.

2. You have said on your blog that the sales graph of crime and mystery fiction is declining. But were the sales ever good for Indian thrillers? Considering the numbers of new books being released, is there a market for them in India today?

Lol. That blog post was about the declining sales of crime and mystery fiction internationally, not in India. Here we don’t have a market for crime fiction, period, so where’s the question of it declining!

2. The racks are still full of Agatha Christie, PD James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler etc. Do you think readers who have grown up reading these authors would easily accept Indian writing? Would it be easy for them to relate to a thriller set in Meerut or Panipat, etc?

Well, there are authors trying to cater to this kind of ‘Indian’ crime writing – like a new book called The Betelnut Killers by Manisha Lakhe. Horrendous, patronizing, class-snobbery at its worst. Bad writing, pastiche plots and characters that read like parodies of Ram Gopal Varma film characters don’t make these stories ‘Indian’, they just make them awful writing. So yes, it’s probably better to read a good imported classic than a bad contemporary Indian novel.

3. Do you think Indian crime writing has its own identity or is influenced by the classic greats?

Indian crime writing doesn’t exist as a genre, only as a poor pastiche parody of western tropes and devices. Really great crime writing is great literature, great writing, real characters in real situations. Not ex-army commandoes dropping into PoK on secret missions and terrorists running amok. There isn’t a single Indian crime novelist worth mentioning – and yes, I include my previous work in that list. The sole exception would be Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games which far transcends any genre to be a great novel in its own right.

4. There’s little confidence in the fairness of the law and justice institutions in the country. Doesn’t that make a charismatic Indian detective / crime investigator unbelievable?

You said it. In a country where rich and powerful industrialists can perpetrate a gas leak that kills thousands and get away with it, where’s the question of a detective or investigator being able to bring the murderer of even a single Muslim or Dalit to book? It’s a fantasy.

5. Do you think Indian detective fiction has been ignored for a long time because of the focus on writing about Indian exotica, questions of identity, diaspora dilemmas etc, meant largely for the western market?

No. It’s because Indian detective fiction has been trash, while at least those exotica novels do have something going for them, even if it’s only export-quality prose and judiciously chosen metaphors.

6. What should be the qualities of good detective fiction? Which of these qualities are lacking in Indian crime fiction?

I’ve been working on a book titled A BLOOD RED SAREEfor some years now. It follows three women, a lawyer, a social activist and a former journalist as they get entangled in various events that are ultimately connected. There’s no murder, no mystery, no investigation. Just these three women, their lives, their involvement with Maoism, running a women’s gym in Kolkata, battling corruption at the civic level, fighting for the rights of dowry-abuse wives, their personal relationships, their struggles in a male-dominated society at different levels and professions…I don’t know if it’s a crime novel, but it’s my attempt at writing one. Perhaps if it succeeds, it will answer your question simply by existing.