Pinch of literary spice

Pinch of literary spice

At a gathering of Indian authors in Bangkok, Life spoke to three big names about the robust publishing industry on the subcontinent

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

For the first time in India, local language authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi have become marquee names in terms of sales, eclipsing even mainstream Western writers on the market. Books using local, vernacular language are edgy and have a huge following among young readers.

A very small amount of Hindi literature is recognised on the world stage, despite it being among the top four spoken languages in the world alongside English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. But this year, Indian Amitav Ghosh, who writes in English, made it to the Man Booker International finalist list, even if he did lose out to ultimate winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The word vibrant doesn't do justice to the current state of the literary scene in this richly complex subcontinent of 1.2 billion souls.

Last Monday, India's top authors were featured in the closing event of the Festival of India, at a talk titled "Words On Water", at Chulalongkorn University. This literary event saw the attendance of Namita Gokhale, Vikas Swarup, Shobhaa De, Arshia Sattar, Amrita Tripathi and Shailendra Gulhati. Life talked to three of the writers about festivals, films and feminism.  


 

Connecting literary figures

When Namita Gokhale first organised the International Festival of Indian Literature in 2002, it lead to a lot of "anger and bad words". Yet her attempts to bring Indian writers from around the world and from India, writing in English or Indian languages, into real conversation with each other was far from fruitless.

"It was good because when you speak about your feelings, then you move on," said the founder of South Asia's Jaipur Literature Festival. "As a person who loves literature, I always felt that unless all these languages come together to talk collectively about what is happening in India, that literary moment won't occur."

Nonetheless, the cold war between the English-language writers and regional-language writers on the Indian literary scene still exists. While the media pay attention to English-language writers, Indian-language authors feel neglected.

"Apart from Tagore, the world doesn't know anyone else when there's so many," said the 58-year-old. "Very few people realise that Bengali is the sixth most spoken language in the world, even more than French. It's equally a language of Bangladesh as it is of India. There are 24 national languages in India and all of them have their own footprint. There's really good writing happening but it's getting neglected. That was my motivation for doing these festivals."

Although Gokhale sees herself first as a writer, her desire to make Indian languages more visible has also turned her into a festival director as well as a publisher. Today, the Jaipur Literature Festival, which she founded in 2006, is the most compelling of its kind, boasting the likes of VS Naipaul, Paul Theroux and the Dalai Lama as speakers and pushing the agenda of literary promotion to the people. Its success is a surprise to Gokhale.

"If someone said 15 years ago that in the future Jaipur would be huge and it would create an intense literary scene around it, I would think it was a hallucination," she said.

She believes the opening up of India to the world in the 90s and a growing middle class has led to more readers.

"People are thinking, talking and discussing more," she added. "As the newspapers and media dumb down, and there are these kinds of live discussion with different points of view, people just learn the joys of thinking again. It's a live workout for the mind and it's just like people going to the gym to keep their bodies fit." 

Having released 12 books, the humble Gokhale laughed that the world could probably do without one more book by her, hence her ongoing dedication to the literature festivals.

"I think it's the most valuable thing I'm doing right now," she said. "It's my contribution to the larger scene in Asia. Since I have the ability to connect creative people and it makes so many other people's writing flower, it's a duty I've taken on for myself. I'm just fortunate to be in the middle of something that's happening around the world."


Turning books into movies

The director can be considered the father of a film. But authors who write the book the film is based on can be considered the godfather, according to Vikas Swarup, who wrote the novel Q & A which was turned into the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire

"[When having your novel adapted for film] I think one has to let go. There are writers who are so obsessive of their work that it cannot be translated into any other medium," said Swarup. "That sometimes ends up spoiling the whole thing because a film has a different vocabulary and texture. It has songs, action and drama. A book is much more rich in the sense that it has interior monologue and side plots. A book can go from yrbz to xnp, but a movie is straight a to z. I believe a film can never be the exact mirror of a book, and it should not be also."

When Life last interviewed the diplomat/author in 2012, he was just getting ready to release his latest novel The Accidental Apprentice. Written in his trademark structure of episodic chapters that bring multi-layers, terrains and points in time to the narrative, the story is about Sapna Sinha, an ordinary salesgirl who is bound to become a CEO of a business empire, if she can pass a series of seven tests.

Following the success of Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, it is no surprise that The Accidental Apprentice is also being adapted for the big screen.

"There's both a Bollywood and Hollywood deal. The Bollywood script is being written as we speak. The director Sriram Raghavan is a new age one who doesn't believe in making 'masala' films. His films are made with a lot of integrity and artistic effort. He said he'd like Deepika Padukone and Amitabh Bachchan to play two of the main roles. Let's see if it works," he said.

"As for BBC Worldwide in LA, they're still figuring out what's the best way to do it. The deal was settled just a few months ago so I don't know whether it's best to be a feature film, series, or whatnot. The BBC has a good track record though, it's not Hollywood Hollywood, so my comfort level is quite high."

Although Swarup was recently appointed joint secretary of external publicity and official spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs in India and doesn't have as much time to write as in the past, his experience in both the literary and the film scenes means he holds a unique place in the Indian writing world.

Asked if there's any advice he can give to writers whose books are going through a movie deal, Swarup said: "A book comes out and a couple of years later it goes to the back list, but when the film comes out, it will go back to the bestseller list again, like Life Of Pi. There was worldwide interest in reading it again and the advantage is getting a second life. You engage with a whole new readership, because in the world we live in, many more people watch movies than read books. When they watch a movie based on a book, they get attracted to the book also and your story gets told to many more people than if it was just a book.

"My advice to people considering film options is that it's important to have a level of comfort with the people doing it. As long as you are comfortable, you won't feel conspiracy theories at the back of your mind that they've completely distorted the original message of your book."


 

Getting better with age

Outspoken social commentator. Model. Editor. Socialite. Fearless columnist. Mother. At 67, the ever-popular Shobhaa De is still a crowd-pleaser, even after four decades of writing. Her four columns in different leading publications have a mass following and she is indisputably one of India's liveliest opinion-shapers. De's 18 best-selling books — fiction and essays about women, sex workers, jet-setters, husbands and wives — have also made her the queen of the craft, as well as an authority on popular culture and a sharp observer of society. Both her plot lines and her own demeanour exude glamour, but it is the long-time writer's illustrious career and outlook on life that is the real inspiration. 

"When the literature world outside India discovered me, I supposed they were interested because I talked about an India they were not aware of," said De. "It was about strong women who weren't being oppressed in society and were in charge of their own lives. I only know of such women and am one myself. I can only write about my own realities. They were very intrigued and fascinated because it wasn't what they expected of India and the position of women were very different from my books."

De's books and columns deal with the classic, and troublesome, problems of social hierarchies and the chances for people, especially women, to move up the career and social ladders. This happens everywhere in the Third World, but is particularly acute in the social structure of a vast country such as India.

"I wasn't that conscious that I was making that comment, but it is part of my narrative because I find success stories of people who have done it the hard way and on their own terms triumph. In India, we have our own prime minister who started out selling tea and didn't have the privileges that our previous prime ministers had experienced of education and world leader exposure.

"If you look at Bollywood movie stars such as Shah Rukh Khan, he came to Mumbai with hardly any money in his pocket. I am also unashamedly pro-woman. I've been writing about women for over 30 years and it's very important in a society like ours in India that people like myself communicate these messages when many don't have access to a life of education. If you see yourself as a doormat, chances are you are allowing society to treat you as a doormat."

In 2010, De wrote Shobhaa At Sixty: Secrets Of Getting It Right At Any Age, a memoir about her life that gives an example of how to age gracefully — and how as a writer and as a woman, 60 is not a bad age at all. Again, it's in societies such as India — and Thailand — that puts a stigma on ageing women, when it can actually be seen as a wonderful stage of fulfilment.

"I want to tell woman that 60 is not the end of the road, but the beginning of a whole new journey," she added. "There are societies that are so ageist and make women feel redundant. You've lived, experienced, loved, been loved, cherished, nurtured and been nurtured back. What do you have to fear?

"There's only 20 years or so ahead, so you should make the most of it. The best perspective of all is to smile and make peace with a few lines on your face because it doesn't matter."

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