“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.
THIS SONG LIKE A STONE IN MY FIST: My (very minor) brush with Maoism
Reading this article in Forbes, and also this one, and this one in Tehelka, among several others of course, I began thinking back to the time when I had a very minor brush with the revolutionary movement and about the epic novel I had begun inspired by that encounter and my subsequent research into the subject.
I first grew fascinated, then interested, and finally obsessed with the Naxalbari movement (now Maoist movement) during a trip to the North East. It was June 1983. I was 19, an under-graduate and an aspiring novelist and journalist with three or four very amateurish attempts at novels under my belt and a more promising but vague idea of an ambitious pan-Indian novel I wanted to write. Inspired by a quote from Tagore, it was titled With Dawn and was to cover the stories of awakenings of a diverse set of young Indians across the country and their rebellion against various things in their individual lives: parents, ritual, tradition, religion, expectations, educational system, etc. It was a revolutionary novel in the radical political sense of the term.
I travelled by train to Kolkata, spent a blissful day wandering the streets and bylanes of the city where I had spent a brief year during my early childhood and which had inspired my mother to name me after one of its most successful sons: ‘Ashok Kumar’ after Ashok Kumar Ganguly. Then I flew to Guwahati, Assam. There a stunned silence met us as we disembarked from the plane. A terrible Naxalbari attack had allegedly left a huge number of people dead and plunged the state into martial law. The incident in question was later called the Nelly Massacre. I remember talking to random Assamese fellow passengers and long intense conversations with a college and hostel mate back in Mumbai, Kalol Guha, and trying to piece together an understanding of the circumstances behind the incident.
From Guwahati, I went on to Dimapur, where a friend’s car was waiting to receive me and drive me up to Kohima, a natural wonder of a town spread across seven verdant hills. I spent almost two wonderful weeks there with another college/hostel-mate, Teli Temjen Toy. After meeting with various local Nagas who were directly or indirectly involved in revolutionary activities, I wrote an impassioned article for the local underground newspaper. It was my first byline as a reporter and journalist. (I had had several publications earlier, but they were mainly fiction, poetry, or general essays – this was my first true reportage.) The article and the newspaper probably wasn’t read by more than a few hundred people but at least one of those people belonged to the local CBI Bureau and I was called in for what I was told was a ‘routine interview’. I had visions of rubber sticks and myself strung upside down from hooks in the ceiling. But as it turned out, it was nothing more than just a probing, direct talk over a cup of tea. But my Naga friend did advise me not to write any more articles while I was staying there. As it turned out, there wasn’t time anyway, although I did write one more long piece and leave it behind to be published after I left. In that one, I wrote about my trip to the road that led to the border with Burma (which meant the border to China, since Burma was under Chinese occupation) and was shown routes and ambush points used by the revolutionaries, as well as a cache of weapons and ammunition. I was also introduced to some fierce women revolutionaries, all of whom seemed to be Baptists with flowing black hair and beautiful singing voices. Almost everyone in Kohima seemed to be able to sing, had beautiful long black hair and played a musical instrument. Catholics were considered a minority and sneered at by the Baptist/Protestant majority, yet another peculiar holdover from the British Raj.
On the plane trip back to Assam and then Kolkata, and the two day long train ride to Mumbai, I began work on the novel. It was titled WITH DAWN, from a line in the Tagore poem. And I knew right then and there it would be the best thing I had ever written.
A year later, my life changed completely. I had left college and was working in advertising to support myself and my ailing mother. My struggle for survival, begun earlier, had claimed my writing ambitions again, and would continue to claim them over the next few decades. But I never forgot that trip to the North East, my research and insights into the Maoist movement, what it meant, why it had begun, what it was likely to lead to over time, and the dangers of ignoring or belittling it. I never completed WITH DAWN. But over time, I used the material and the ideas in that one epic book for at least three other works in progress.
One was titled THIS SONG LIKE A STONE IN MY FIST and was a direct look at the rise of Maoism in India through the stories of two North Eastern girls, one a tribal, the other a high caste girl, and how their childhood friendship blossoms into love, and then that love is torn apart by their falling on opposite sides of the firing line in the growing conflict, and how eventually, they come to hate one another intensely and hate everything the other one stands for. The novel traces the stories of both girls as they grow to womanhood and comes up to present times.
Now, as I see even the international press covering the Maoist movement widely and the revolution reaching a crisis point for India, I find myself wanting more and more to return to the world of THIS SONG LIKE A STONE IN MY FIST and finish the book, finally giving some closure to a story begun almost 30 years ago.
I think perhaps I shall, very soon.
History: A Work In Progress
(Note: This bio, like my life, is still a work-in-progress–AKB)
A Bombay Boy
Ashok Kumar Banker was born on 7th February 1964 in Mumbai. He grew up, lived in and continues to live in Mumbai. He does not possess a passport and has never felt the desire to travel outside India, although he has travelled extensively across India. He lives in the northern suburb of Lokhandwala, Andheri West. His wife is a montessori teacher, his son is in college, his daughter is in school. He works from home and spends almost all his waking hours reading, writing, or with his family. He never socializes and does not accept invitations to any social event, without exceptions. He is of mixed race, religion, and ethnicity, and considers himself simply ‘Indian’. He is 44 years old.
“Only Bad Books Need Promoting…”
The author of 19 published books to date, he has done a total of 5 PR appearances in his entire 20+year career, and does not intend to do any more in future, without exception. He no longer does media interviews, and does not believe in self-promotion or book promotion. (You won’t find a single page of information on this, his official website, about any of his books.) He has not promoted himself or his books since 2005 when he did a single bookstore appearance for the launch of Armies of Hanuman: Book Four of the Ramayana series, and the biggest PR event he has done in his life comprised a total of three bookstore appearances at the launch of Prince of Ayodhya: Book One of the Ramayana series in 2003. Before that, the previous media appearance he did was in 1994 for Byculla Boy.
Ashok subscribes to the adage (his own) that “Only bad books need promoting. Good books have a way of finding their way into good hands–even if it takes a while.” He also rejects the contemporary publishing approach that entails aggressively promoting books to create ‘fastsellers’, preferring instead to let word-of-mouth and reader curiosity work their slow but dependable magic. Interestingly, his book sales are completely unaffected by his PR events–or their absence, and his books sell steadily month after month, with most readers ‘discovering’ him for the first time on their own. The most common reader email he receives even today, after more than half a million copies in print and an estimated 1 million+ readers worldwide is “I had never heard of you or your books until I happened to come across a copy of…”
He points to the immense success of Japanese authors, most of whom do not subscribe to the western capitalistic model of self-promotion, as an example of how genuine reader interest can drive sales far more effectively than short-lived marketing, advertising and PR. He is committed to resisting this trend as an individual and to pursuing a career built on genuine reader affection and support, rather than commercial exploitation and media hype.
This is why, while he eschews media and bookstore appearances and any form of self-promotion without exception, he remains completely accessible to readers. He is perhaps the most responsive author in India, perhaps even the world, replying to every single email from readers, often within minutes or seconds of receiving the email. He has replied to over 15,200 readers since 2003 (and counting). He continues to correspond regularly with several hundred readers even today. A sampling of recent reader feedback and his correspondence can be seen on the Readerswrite page of this website.
Early Years
Ashok grew up speaking only English fluently, and learned Hindi at school. He began reading and writing at a precociously early age, and when he discovered the section on Mythology in a set of encyclopaedias called The Book of Knowledge at age 9, he decided to become a writer. He broke into print at the age of 14 and published several hundred poems, short stories and articles in his teens in a variety of small press magazines, literary journals in India and abroad, and was invited to read his poetry on AIR (All India Radio) and interviewed on DD (Doordarshan, the national broadcaster) as well.
During his teens he worked as a door-to-door market research surveyor to help pay his school fees, and later, his college tuition, while caring for his alcohol-psychotic mother at the same time, events that he would later write about, very obliquely and fictionalized considerably, in the novels Vertigo, Byculla Boy, and the unpublished novels The Pasha of Pedder Road and Beautiful Ugly.
When he was 14, his biological father as well as his step-father, and his mother’s family, all began to distance themselves from Ashok and his extremely unstable mother Sheila, forcing Ashok to care for her financially as well as medically. He wrote his first four novels during this period, as well as several hundred short stories, plays, poems, editorial letters and articles, and even self-published a slim volume of poetry titled Ashes In The Dust of Time which was selected to represent ‘Young India’ at the Paris Book Exhibition in France. Around this same time, his mother, who was in a mutually abusive and alcohol-fuelled violent relationship with her second husband, a small-time Bollywood film actor, suffered a traumatic incident which changed her life and Ashok’s. She would later be forcibly admitted to nursing homes for psychiatric treatments on nine separate occasions, usually by her second husband and/or her mother, and subjected to electroshock therapy. After Ashok was old enough, he refused to have her committed again and took care of her himself.
The Working Writer
He studied a year of college (English Literature and History) at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, before extreme privation and personal circumstances made it impossible for him to afford further education. At the age of 19, he accepted a job offer from HTA (Hindustan Thompson Advertising) as an advertising copywriter, and wrote his first published advertisements on the very first day on the job. Around this time, he and his mother were forced to live separately from the rest of the family at their Khar (W) flat in suburban Mumbai, as neither her family nor her two ex-husbands would support her or Ashok. The copywriting job with HTA paid Rs 800/- of which Ashok received Rs 721/- in hand, to cover his travel, food, clothing, and living expenses, and his mother’s care. His biological father refused to pay any money towards his mother’s care or even for Ashok’s education. Ashok was compelled to take on freelance part-time jobs, at one time working seven jobs simultaneously in order to make ends meet. These years are also portrayed, albeit very obliquely and in fragments and fictionalized, in the above-mentioned novels. However, most of the less palatable details of those years–including the way he and his mother were ostracized by their family, friends, neighbours, etc–have never been written about and perhaps never will be. There are things too terrible for even fiction to sugar-coat, and reality is a hard language to translate. Ashok has consistently refused to write his autobiography, preferring instead to focus his energies on stories that help him deal with and understand ways of dealing with issues that he faced in his life rather than dwelling on them morbidly.
Rising Out of The Rubble
Despite his numerous jobs and the demands of caring for a psychotic mother whom even professional psychiatrists now refused to treat, Ashok continued to write, producing reams of stories, unfinished novels, screenplays for friends, TV serial scripts, etc. Passionately interested in studying Literature and Indian History, his attempts to continue his graduate studies met with failure when the University of Mumbai refused him admission in their Distance Learning (Correspondence) course on the grounds that Literature could not be studied independently. He remains an under-Graduate to this day, but somehow succeeded in educating himself despite the skepticism of the authorities. Ironically, he himself is now the author of 19 books (and counting) and was even invited to deliver guest lectures at the same Department of English Literature at the University of Mumbai. Thus he found himself, a famous author, lecturing about literature to the very English department that had considered him ineligible as a student only a decade or so earlier! He was also awarded a Post-Graduate Diploma by the Xavier Institute of Communication despite being an under-Graduate at the time–he topped the class.
As his mother’s mental and physical health deteriorated further and her family as well as his father and step-father continued to refuse help or financial aid, the pressure on Ashok increased considerably. His mother began suffering violent oubursts, often directed at Ashok himself, or at neighbours, family members, strangers, etc. She was arrested twice, attacked a police inspector on one occasion, and on both occasions, the police discreetly offered to have her locked away for her own good. Ashok refused, and continued to care for her as best as he could until her eventual death in 1990. Meanwhile, he continued to work in Advertising, where he won multiple awards for his work and was considered one of the most talented creative minds of his time, then later as a freelance journalist breaking front-page news stories for Times of India and Outlook, among many other publications, going on to write feature stories, book reviews, essays, toting up a total of 2,000 published bylines. The few short stories he was able to submit internationally also found publication in a variety of science fiction and horror magazines over the years. But his real ambition lay in writing epic novels, a dream which he could not realize due to the need to work multiple jobs and/or assignments in order to support himself, his mother, and later, his wife and first child. He married his school sweetheart in 1987, and their first child Ayush Yoda Banker was born in 1989, their second Yashka Banker in 1993.
First Breakthrough
In 1990, after his mother died–an event which is described exactly as it occurred in Vertigo, he inherited her flat in Bandra, and some debts. He was forced to sell off a room of the flat in order to repay some of the debts, and found himself unwilling to continue working in advertising and journalism full-time thereafter. He stayed home and began work on several new novels, completing his first novel-length work after almost a decade. It was in this period that he wrote the books Ten Dead Admen, The Iron Bra, Murder & Champagne, Vertigo, Byculla Boy, The Pasha of Pedder Road (unpublished), Beautiful Ugly (unpublished), and several other unfinished manuscripts. In 1992, he received an acceptance letter for his novel Vertigo which later became his fourth-published (but first-accepted) novel. He received an advance of Rs 50,000/- for the novel, the highest advance ever received by an Indian author in the country at the time–it would later be topped by the Rs 1 lakh advance received by Vikram Seth for his novel A Suitable Boy. However, this fact was never publicized and in fact, this is the first time it is being mentioned publicly.
Despite having purchased Vertigo first, his publishers wished to launch Ashok’s career with the three crime novels. And so he was published and heralded by the media as “India’s first crime novelist in English” receiving widespread critical acclaim but only moderate sales. All three books were published simultaneously in January 2003. Vertigo was published shortly therafter, in July of the same year, but apart from a few critically admiring reviews, was generally assumed to be a crime novel too, and therefore not given much notice. Only later would it acquire a small but dedicated set of followers who would consider it one of the most intense, moving portayals of working life in urban India. It later earned Ashok inclusions in the prestigious literary anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature as well as The Vintage Anthology of Indian Literature. Today, it is regarded by several critics as being a seminal book in the history of Indian English literature and one of the few books to capture the realities of urban India in such gritty detail.
Desi Writers, English Praise
Fiction publishing in India in the Nineties was divided between the high-profile ‘stars’ whose books were published as literature but who topped bestseller lists, and the so-called ‘bestselling’ authors like Ashok who were roundly ignored by the literati and enjoyed only moderate sales to a limited number of readers who appreciated contemporary Indian writing. The severe western-oriented bias against Indian contemporary writers was exemplified by statements made to Ashok by a well-known publisher: “Indian authors will never be able to write as well as firang authors,” and an influential critic on the boards of several literary award juries: “Of course we’re going to award authors who are published first in the West and who are known and personally respected by us (the jury members).” Authors were often paid a flat lumpsum on publication of as low as Rs 1500/- in exchange for which they signed away world rights to their work in perpetuity. Even those authors who were lucky enough to sign with the more scrupulous publishers were lucky if they received an advance of Rs 10,000/- to Rs 20,000/- for world rights for a book, while their editors wined and dined at five star hotels, publicists spent several times that amount on publicity for the same books, and bookstore chains took as much as 60% of a book’s MRP while the author herself could earn as little as 5% royalty–royalty which rarely, if ever, reached the author’s hands. Much of this inequity has been removed now, but a great deal still remains.
Ashok’s struggles with the inequities of the Indian publishing system found an outlet when he was offered an opportunity to create and write the screenplays for what would later be “India’s first television series in English” for the National Network’s DD Metro Channel. Previously familiar with writing screenplays from his numerous advertising commercials and award-winning documentaries and corporate films, Ashok then spent the next few years writing over 400 produced TV shows. He also resumed writing freelance journalism for his own satisfaction. He turned down offers to write books on various subjects that his publishers felt would be commercial rewarding, or returned advance payments to contracts he did not wish to fulfil, including a contract to write a biography of Sanjay Dutt, a biography of Bal Thackeray, and a non-fiction book on the Kargil War, among several others. He began to face the possibility that perhaps the only way he could earn a living by writing books alone was not by writing books he wished to write, but by taking on such contracts that publishers were offering.
The Television Years
Sadly, as Ashok soon learned, writers were not treated much better in the television and film field. As Ashok experienced first-hand when a producer once told him he had bought the rights to one of his novels: “Ha, bhai, I got the rights to your book just yesterday only. For Rs 250/- from Crossword!” Even producers like Ekta Kapoor admitted publicly in numerous interviews that she was inspired by two works to pursue a career in telling stories through the medium of television: her father’s social dramas (films) of the Sixties, and “Ashok Banker’s Vertigo,” which she claimed was the first novel she had ever read. She credited the book as being her ‘bible’ for how to tell a story about relationships and the basis for her television empire. But even adulation and the cult following that Vertigo and his other work had garnered by that time was insufficient to earn Ashok a respectable living by writing books. What was worse, by this time, no publisher was willing to read a manuscript submitted by him because most automatically assumed it would be a crime novel, even though he hadn’t written a crime novel for several years.
Finally, around the year 2000, he found himself facing a life crisis. He was fiercely unhappy with the work he was doing, disillusioned with the raw treatment meted out to writers in the film and television industries, the corruption and politicization of the media, and the oddity of a book publishing trade in India wherein everybody was achieving financial success and growth except for the authors of the books themselves. At this point, he also faced a crisis of faith. Never having been a religious person, and having grown up with a variety of religious exposures, being of conflicting ideoligical and ethnic influences himself, Ashok began to explore his own inner belief systems and his roots as a writer. After much self-searching, he found himself fascinated by his early childhood obsession with mythology once more. This led him over the next several months to re-reading and researching ancient Indian epics, puranas, history, etc.
A chance meeting with a visiting British author en route to Varanasi encouraged him to begin writing a complex narrative that would encompass all of Indian myth, legend and history in one massive inter-connected series of tales. But even the longest story cycle in the world must have a beginning, and so, he later focussed on a starting point and decided that the ‘adi kavya’ was surely the place to begin. Thus began his writing experiment that later took shape as the Ramayana series, an attempt to retell the ancient purana of Valmiki in a contemporary voice, as one contemporary Indian speaking to others in his own natural idiom.
The first person he sent the manuscript of the first book, tentatively titled “Prince of Dharma” allegedly dumped the pages into a wastebin, unread. That was his own editor at Penguin Books India. No other editor in India would even agree to read the manuscript. The publishing industry being what it was then, and remains even today, most editors didn’t even have to read a manuscript in order to reject it. It was enough to say that they “don’t publish your kind of books”. The assumption, presumably, was that Ashok was trying to submit a crime novel.
An Epic, not Epic Fantasy
Around this time, the same British novelist he had met and helped while in India offered to introduce him to her agent. He wrote to the agent in question, who said that she only handled science fiction and fantasy books. When Ashok showed her his manuscript, she expressed optimism in selling it to US publishers, provided it could be sold as ‘fantasy’, since there was no publishing ‘slot’ for mythology or epics. (Ashok has always maintained that his Ramayana was a retelling of an epic, and should therefore be classified simply as ‘Epic’.) Her approach to the work would later prove to be highly prejudicial and biased, and Ashok was soon compelled to part ways with her. But she was instrumental in getting his work read by and secured a publishing contract with a US fantasy publisher–against Ashok’s explicit wishes, as Ashok actually wished to wait for another publisher to respond with a possible offer. Using a power of attorney, the agent then signed Ashok to contracts whose specific contents he had no knowledge of until months later, a practise that is considered universally acceptable for ‘foreign’ writers in the US and UK publishing industry. As the international rights sub-agent told Ashok in one memorable conversation, “This advance (xx amount) must be quite a sum in your currency.” The obvious implication was that as long as the author was getting paid well, what did it matter how the books were marketed and sold.
Sweet Success
Later, when the packaging of Prince of Ayodhya as a ‘fantasy’ novel backfired in every country where it was marketed as such, Ashok was proven right. Today, his Ramayana series is primarily bought and read by readers who understand that it is a retelling of the ancient Sanskrit epic and read it for that reason, not as just another fat fantasy series. Ashok parted ways with the agent as well as the US publisher of the first book soon after publication of Prince of Ayodhya. Even today, the series has never been published fully in the USA and only limited number of copies of the UK edition are available in select stores there, yet the number of people actually reading the books has continued to swell rather than fade. And in India, the series found its own historic niche as the first ‘series’ to be published in the country to such widespread acclaim and sales. In fact, the books continue to find new readers at a faster rate today than when they were first published in 2003. At a conservative estimate, over one million people (mainly Indians) have read one or more of the books, most of them discovering the series in the past two years alone. Ashok has received film offers from seven different major international production houses and studios, offering US $ amounts in eight figures for the film and media rights to the series. They are currently optioned and a major feature film adaptation is in development.
(To be Expanded and Continued)
SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis will be out next month (October). Written in a pacier style than my Ramayana Series, this short impactful book details the rise to power of the monstrous Kamsa and his brutal campaign to thwart the birth of the prophesied 8th Child. 