Reviews: Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta

(First appeared in the Hindustan Times, January 2005. Thoroughly enjoyed doing this one; it was a no-holds-barred hallelujah. For a more balanced but equally enthusiastic take, read Jai Arjun on Rana and Tokyo Cancelled.)

Tokyo Cancelled

HarperCollins India

Rs 395, 383 pgs

Rana Dasgupta

This is the oldest way to tell a story, and the newest. A tribe, huddled around a campfire, flames dispelling the darkness; a circle of strangers, stranded in the no-man’s-land of an airport after hours, cigarette smoke tracing wreaths around their heads.

From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Boccaccio’s Decameron to Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, this is how stories are created. Pilgrims on a journey, passing the time; a flock of people, fleeing a plague and warding off boredom; passengers, marooned on a modern-day island. The stories they have to tell are more important than the stories of their lives; their presence is just a device, a convenient way of building bridges between tales that could have stood on their own, as isolated short stories. Listen: once upon a time: in a land far away: many years ago, there lived a man who: a long, long time ago, just the other day, this is what happened.

Rana Dasgupta’s stories echo these familiar openings, classic phrases that ease you into the rites of story and urge you to settle down in a comfortable chair. Give in to these urgings. Get as comfortable as you can while you can, for Tokyo Cancelled is one of the most unsettling, discomfitting and utterly brilliant debuts you’ll encounter in 2004. Dasgupta has been compared to Borges and Calvino, tellers of tales that slipped in and out of worlds so fantastic that they were far more real than our own, which is generous—for all his obvious talent, he has a distance to go before he can match them. But he writes as though he had inherited his imagination from Cortazar with a benediction thrown in from the gods of cyberpunk.

A doll fills the empty space in the life of a Japanese salariman; as she becomes more real, she becomes more demanding, until his dreams of a business founder when he shoplifts a dress for his plastic love. In another time, another place, changelings are feared, declared outcaste, shunned for the fact that they will be ageless, relatively changeless by a human society increasingly infiltrated by their kind.

A sailor and a woman meet, arrange an ill-starred rendezvous and are rescued by an unusual, wingless bird. A German man remaps the world; in his new cartography, it is the speed at which change occurs that sends new lines arcing across the planet. None of the characters in his stories are whole; some find ways of change, of transmutation into plants, or luxury stores, some move on. In the middle of this circus of hallucinatory images, one story is told straight up, a plain tale of loss--a motorcycle accident, unlit speed bumps—just to break the flow, just to let the author remind you that some stories can be left unvarnished.

Just the images breeding in the author’s imagination are worth the price of this book: mushroom clouds of memories, a city visited by a mysterious plague of monkeys, a woman whose dreams bring forth saplings, shrubs, trees. But beyond the images, the locations shift and blur until for all their specificity, they don’t matter any more. Buenos Aires, Paris, Delhi, Tokyo; he captures each place while distorting it in a hall of mirrors of the imagination, but these stories go far beyond space and time. The central device, the group of thirteen passengers sharing cigarettes and stories, the only coins of any worth when you must pass an endless night, breaks down fairly early for the simplest of reasons. Each story here bears the author’s unmistakable stamp. Forget the comparison us reviewers can’t help making—yes, he writes a bit like Borges, yes, you can smell Calvino, and yes, that’s a hint of Murakami, perhaps even William Gibson, at the edges. It may be valid; but it’s like a wine-taster’s spiel. The point is that with just one book to his credit, a fabulous collection of short stories pretending to be a novel, Rana Dasgupta has a signature. It’s a brilliant, compelling voice, but it belongs to him, not to 13 fictional characters.

<>Where did these stories come from, then? From the netherworld of an airport in stasis, a place of transit, when the lights have been turned off, the shops shut down. From the loneliness of too much travel and a sense that the world over, people have the same stories to share, the same myths and warnings, the same sense of mystery, of awe, the same need to love, betray, cherish and kill. Once upon a time, there lived a man who moved between many worlds and wrote stories, the oldest stories ever told and the freshest, for the lonely, the homeless, the stranded. Listen to him.

The One About Arthur Miller

(Speaking Volumes; first appeared in Business Standard, February 14 2005)

I'm still feeling kind of temporary about the death of Arthur Miller, to steal one of Willy Loman's best lines from Death of a Salesman. The reaction to Miller's passing at the age of 89 from congestive heart failure varied between "I thought he was dead" and the usual tributes to one of theatre's greatest dramatists.

"I thought he was dead": no respectable obituary writer would admit to that naïve sentiment these days. But overwhelmingly, the articles and assessments of Miller's career chose to hail two of his plays--Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953). Some made passing mention of After the Fall and a few other works--all of them completed before Miller had reached his fifties. When Josh Greenfeld interviewed him for The New York Times back in 1972, he would write even then that Miller, "at the still-youthful age of fifty-six," had been cast "in the unlikely role of a relic".

For a writer who wrote every day, starting at 8:30 am and often going on for eight hours, sometimes writing as Greenfeld noted 2,000 pages of which 140 would end up as a playscript, this must have been hard. Miller wrote three plays in the 1990s, including Broken Glass--woven around Kristallnacht. All of them were reviewed respectfully. None of them made a tenth of the impact of his early work. It's hard to argue that his talents had degenerated over the years--indeed, those who've read his short story in Nadine Gordimer's recent anthology, Telling Tales, might have been surprised by the force and beauty of his writing in his eightieth decade. "I'm pretty convinced he was writing till the day of his death," Harold Pinter told the press yesterday. "He was born with a pen in his hand."

He believed passionately in the power of theatre to transform lives--even in our age, when TV and the Internet provide other forms of entertainment and involvement. "The day will come when theatre again will surmount everything for the simple reason that it is an irreducible simplicity," he told Greenfeld in 1972. "It's a man up there facing other men. Somehow or other this always has to be possible."

It's easy to forget that he started his career with a novel--Focus, which was a partial polemic about anti-Semitism, where the main character was a Gentile who faced racism because he was mistaken for a Jew. His next work was Incident at Vichy, written after he had travelled to Germany and attended the Nazi trials. Unlike Focus, it stands up to re-reading, and highlights a technique that Miller was to use through his playwright's career--the ability to isolate one incident, apparently minor, in the lives of ordinary individuals and use it as a lens to look at a much larger issue.

Most critics would agree that Miller's greatest work was Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman, antihero, everyman, epitomised the tragedy of the little man who gives his life to a system that will inevitably betray him. And much of his work, especially the plays written before he turned fifty, tapped into the eternal struggle between father and sons with an unflinching tenderness that few other writers have matched.

For some of us, though, the great Miller play remains The Crucible, of which he remarked in an essay written in 2000: "The Crucible is my most-produced play. It seems to be one of the few surviving shards of the so-called McCarthy period. And it is part of the play's history that, to people in so many parts of the world, its story seems to be their own. I used to think, half seriously, that you could tell when a dictator was about to take power, or had been overthrown, in a Latin American country, if The Crucible was suddenly being produced in that country."

The resonance of The Crucible goes far beyond the Salem witchcraft trials or even Miller's own experiences. That play was written after Miller had gone through his own trials by fire in the McCarthy era--been hauled up by the notorious HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), had an offer to let him off the hook if his then-wife, Marilyn Monroe, posed for a photograph with a certain committee member, been blacklisted in Hollywood, suffered persecution and questioning.

"Turning to Salem was like looking into a petri dish, an embalmed stasis with its principal moving forces caught in stillness," Miller wrote in retrospect. "One had to wonder what the human imagination fed on that could inspire neighbours and old friends to emerge overnight as furies secretly bent on the torture and destruction of Christians. More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin."

A few days before Miller's death was announced, Salman Rushdie wrote an impassioned article titled: "Defend the right to be offended." Rushdie, along with a band of writers, actors, intellectuals and artists in Britain, has been arguing fiercely against a new law that would ban the "incitement of hatred on religious grounds".

Rushdie writes, "It seems we need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe as well as in the United States….People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It’s no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can’t stand. If you can’t defend their right to say it, then you don’t believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t get up your nose. But free speech does get up people’s noses. Friedrich Nietzsche called Christianity “the one great curse” and “the one immortal blemish on mankind”. Would he now be prosecuted?"

I remember a phrase from childhood, a playground shrug of sorts: "It's a free country, yaar." It was employed as the final closure to arguments, as shorthand for saying that you didn't agree with the other guy, but he was entitled to his point of view. This is the principle that Miller fought for, through his words as a dramatist, through his stint as head of the American chapter of PEN in the 1960s. This is what Rushdie and his colleagues are fighting for now, the right to allow people in the US and India and the UK to continue saying, well, it's a free country. One of those countries isn't free, any more; one has been perpetually beleagured even as it uneasily lays claims to freedom; one is in the process of sacrificing its freedoms.

<> And I'm wondering how many productions of The Crucible we'll see in the next few years.<>

Shameless self-promotion: A Matter of Taste

Very strange when your first book turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with you--all the hard work was done by about 30 other extremely talented writers. I spent two-and-a-half years intermittently editing (read: "driving my editor bats") an anthology of Indian writing on food for Penguin. A Matter of Taste was soft-launched at the start of 2005 and all I can say is that it was so much fun to put together. This is what I said in the introduction:
"Even an anthology has to begin somewhere, and this one eventually found its moorings in memory. Fictional ones, drawn from books we've read, loved and been challenged by; and more personal ones, the kind we all carry, of meals eaten and new tastes, of times of deprivation and moments of sharp, new pleasures."
The Kolkata Telegraph did a piece on the spurt in food writing, which makes me optimistic that there will be more collections of this kind: "The focus is on story-telling. Those who have something to say about food do so with an anecdote, in a travelogue, a historical reference, a literary allusion or a regional context."
Reading the reviews was hugely entertaining--this is where the time that passes between handing manuscript in and seeing it emerge as a book really helps. You have distance, and you know you've done your best, after which it's up to reviewers and readers to make a call. Can't locate too many of them online, but opinions were divided. Tehelka's Sonia Faleiro, the Indian Express review and foodie and restaurateur Ritu Dalmia (in the Hindustan Times) seemed to think it was a Good Idea and loved the range of writing. The pink papers--Business Standard and Economic Times--seemed to think it was more about writing than about food, which is fair enough: it was, unapologetically, meant to be about good writing. Loved those reviews, though, because they came up with very interesting arguments. Anita Nair, writing for India Today, called it a "banquet" but also felt that the pieces were too familiar, like a buffet lunch composed of leftovers and reprised dishes. The Hindu's Rana Siddiqui seemed to have enjoyed reading the collection and liked the fact that it was food writing that focused on the place food has in our lives. Gonna take that woman out to dinner one of these days!
Two distinct responses emerged. The people who loved the anthology pinpointed what made it so much fun to put together--the variety. I loved being able to put Gandhi on meat-eating and Ruchir Joshi's funky version of shrikhand laced with additives and Suketu Mehta on the slaughter of goats and Manjula Padmanabhan on diets and Mahasweta Debi on stark deprivation and Jhumpa Lahiri on fish in an alien land in the same book. The people who didn't like it wanted a different kind of anthology--one that focused sharply and squarely on descriptions of food, on the plate rather than the table, on the history, say, of spices and ingredients. I'm hoping they didn't like A Matter of Taste enough to compile their own anthologies: I wouldn't want to put a collection like that together myself, given my slightly wonky tastes, but I would happily read it.
Just to finish, two recipes that have nothing to do with food:

From Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the masala movie blend:

"It seemed all Rashid had to do was to part his lips in a plump red smile and out would pop some brand-new saga, complete with sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, moustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes."

From I Allan Sealy:

How the Raj is done:
"I wish to shew how the Raj is done. This is the play of children, good adept, rest easy. You must have the following ingredients. (It matters little if one or another be wanting, nor is the order of essence. Introduce them as you please, and as often.) Let the pot boil of its own.
An elephant, a polo club, a snake, a length of rope, a rajah or a pearl of price (some use both), a silver moon, a dropped glove, a railway junction, some pavilions in the distance, a chota peg, a tent peg, a learned brahmin, a cruel king, a chapati (or chaprasi), a measure of justice, gunpowder (q.v.), equal portions of law and order, a greased cartridge, a tamarind seed or else a cavalry regiment, a moist eye, some high intentions, two pax of Britannica, Glucose biscuits, an ounce of valour, something in the middle, a Victoria Cross, a soupcon of suspense (q.v), a bearer, a dhobi (or dhoti), a chee-chee, a dekchi (or deck-chair), a pinch of dust, a trickle of perspiration, a backdrop with temples or mosques (some use both), a church pew, a little fair play, a boar, some tall grass, a tiger, a rain cloud, a second snake or a mongoose, a flutter of the heart, a sharp sword, a bared ankle, walnut juice or burnt cork (some use both), a boy of British blood unsullied, a locket."

Business Standard: The Library of Everything

SPEAKING VOLUMES, Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi February 8, 2005

Authors, even bestselling ones, are haunted by the idea of mortality: some are doomed to see their books die in their lifetime, and the ones who are read fear secretly that future generations will forget their words. Booklovers are haunted by the idea of undiscovered continents: that somewhere beyond the horizon of their reading lie unforgettable works that they will never encounter. Neither category could fail to be moved by the concept Carlos Ruiz Zafon puts forward in The Shadow of the Wind: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
"This is a place of mystery, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens ...In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new owner's hands. In the shops we buy and sell them but in truth, books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend ... According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive."
Zafon's cemetery is a labyrinthine construction of passageways and bookshelves leading out from a round hall in a huge edifice in Barcelona. It owes much to other imaginary libraries, from Borges' gigantic library that would contain everything ever written onwards.
Perhaps we can imagine it best in this modern age, when the attempt to create a perpetually living library is reflected not in twisting corridors and wall-to-ceiling shelves crammed with musty tomes, but in online archives and websites.
Until recently, most attempts to create a web library relied on the old-world model; file indexes replaced catalogue cards, text or PDF files replaced actual volumes, but the 'shelving system' remained more or less the same. If you looked for Borges on a site like Project Gutenberg or the steadily growing Universal Library, for example, it would lead you to a small selection of books by or about Borges.
There were no complex links between texts; you could not, for instance, be taken directly from a Borges short story you were reading online to a similar work by an Arab writer, or call up all the short stories written in Argentina during the particular year that Borges wrote his tale.
Amazon raised the bar when the online bookshop--now more like a giant online mall that sells everything--introduced its 'Look Inside a Book' feature.
This attempted to replicate the real-world experience of browsing, where you could read the first chapter of or a few excerpts from a book. It had certain advanced features, however, that could only be matched by readers with phenomenally vast and accurate memories.
You could enter a random phrase, say 'giant Sumatran rat' or 'Indian philosophy', and Amazon's search engine would riffle through the pages of its vast catalogue of books until it had come up with a list of references to books that employed these phrases. So if you were looking for stories that featured a giant Sumatran rat as the hero, or a treatise on the eating habits of the giant Sumatran rat, or references in Sumatran mythology to the rat, Amazon's search feature was supposed to make it easier. In practice, this suffered from the usual drawback of online search engines--you got too much information and didn't always get what you were looking for.
Two recent variations on this theme are either promising or ominous, depending on perspective. Google is beta-testing its Print Search feature (www.print.google.com), which marks one of the first mainstream online attempts to collectivise libraries. Google Print puts together a database of books already on microfilm or in e-text versions or in PDF file format at various libraries, and allows you to search that database for keywords and key phrases.
Even in Beta, it's working better than Amazon's search, while generating its share of controversy: many publishing houses and authors are nervous about copyright issues. Google has attempted to address their fears in several ways: the only complete works on database are out-of-copyright works, if you search for a book that is copyrighted at present, you will get only an excerpt or a few pages, and print or save file commands have been disabled on this engine.
Publishing houses are still grumbling about possible piracy issues, but they're looking in the wrong direction. When the debates over music piracy and MP3 file sharing erupted in the wake of Napster, most people assumed that file sharing was an issue that would impact the music and the film-and-video industries, as it has.
The publishing world wasn't worried at that time about the implications of electronic file sharing: most readers preferred physical books to e-books, there were few decent e-readers available, and relatively few people would share e-books online in the same way that they might share their music collections.
But as e-book layouts have improved and scanners have become more widely available, the publishing industry might find that its complacency is terribly misplaced. Shareaza is just one of the many new, improved file-sharing networks that offers users the opportunity to share books as well as audio and video files.
It currently has thousands of books available on the network, with more being added every month'and Shareaza is just one network. This generation is more comfortable reading off screen than the previous one, just as MP3 enthusiasts are prepared to live with a drop in music quality in order to access free music.
This is the face of the new, web library as I see it. It will act both as a force multiplier for readers and as a possible conduit for piracy. It will be a repository for rare books, a source for unusual books, and indeed, a cemetery for forgotten books.
But if it does become all-inclusive--if today's publishers send an e-copy of every book to e-libraries as automatically as they do physical copies to brick-and-mortar libraries, for instance--it could end up being a junkyard rather than a resource. Imagine looking for Midnight's Children and being pointed to childcare guides, treatises on the nature of time or Sheldon's On the Other Side of Midnight instead.
Real libraries, however lovingly they try to preserve books both new and forgotten, are not inclusive beyond a point--the web on the other hand, depends on including everything.
What the new electronic libraries will need, whether its Google or MSN or filesharing networks, are filters. Or you could end up with vast electronic seas of information that no one ever bothers to trawl through.

We've been busy...

...and lost track of posting.

Here's the lazy link to my columns and reviews for Business Standard. This pretty much covers the August 2004-mid-Feb 2005 period.

Here are one or two pieces that I kind of like:

The Tom Wolfe Review:

Howling Wolfe, Toothless Story

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi December 16, 2004

There used to be a time when Tom Wolfe was The Man....a rambunctious....swashbuckling....iconoclastic....Young Turk!!....who took on the New Yorker, William Shawn's temple of the gods, for Chrissake....with....irony....and wit. ohmygod HE WAS SO FREAKING GOOD!

He liberated pallid....shrinking.,,,ellipses from the clutches of linguafrankly challenged Romance Writers. He used CAPITALs and broke letters right in the middle of a sentence just so that he could, you know, convey the Truth in its shining glory.

He administered the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, mau-maued the flakcatchers, set a torch to the bonfire of the vanities. Oh yeah. He was the man. In full.

Then four years ago, his writerly instincts told him that college campuses were steaming petridishes hosting subcultures that had been unfairly ignored by the Great American Writer as a species. Now Wolfe, he knows subcultures.

He practically invented the word. So he spent four whole years hanging out with the basketball squad, relearning jargon, meditating on the endless possibilities of the f-word as verb, noun and general conversational comma, diligently attending frat parties.

Of course he dressed for the part. He wore a blazer and casual jeans. There is no length to which the man will not go in pursuit of his calling.

The result, served up as tenderly as a quivering cheerleader to a triumphant football team, is I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel that will change your perspective on college campuses in the land of the free by revealing certain terrifying truths.

Such as: jocks rule, students party, some drugs happen, much promiscuous sex happens, and no one cares about Learning.

It's mindboggling to think that we knew none of this before Tom Wolfe enlightened us; no, we were clearly naive enough to believe that colleges were temples of wisdom, that students would never, ever use bad language, or-gasp!-smoke, or-I need an ellipses, but Wolfe stole the lot when he wrote the book-screw around.

The plot, such as it is, is straight out of Richardson's Pamela, marginally updated for the 20th century. Meet Charlotte Simmons, though you're going to wish you hadn't.

Simmons, freshfaced, beautiful in the manner of a shampoo ad, comes from North Carolina and is a paragon of virtue.

She has never gone all the way, given it up, made the two-backed beast; she appears to have gone through life without noticing her hormones; she is earnest, committed to her studies, and--what more proof could you ask of innocence?--a makeup virgin who knows nothing of the dark world of eyeshadow, blusher and Diesel jeans.

Wolfe may know his college campuses backwards and forwards, but he doesn't seem to know what authors from Agatha Christie to Annie Proulx are aware of-if you really want to know sin, find yourself a small town.

Charlotte's roommate, Beverly, is a social x-ray rescued from a Bonfire of the Vanities outtake. She is here to lower our heroine's morale so that she can whisper her mantra"I am Charlotte Simmons"in tones of increasing desperation, and also to underline another great Wolfeian insight.

Women (barring the lesbians, but who cares about them? Not Wolfe) go to college to land rich husbands; men go to college to land good jobs on the higher end of the business ladder.

But, in an utterly stunning plot twist, the young Charlotte survives the bleak house of ostracism by attracting the attention of three sterling young men.

Jojo Johanssen is the only white player on the all-black basketball team. He must choose between the lure of the courts, SUVs and fat contracts--and Charlotte's purer siren call, which beckons him to explore the life of the mind.

He is so inspired by our heroine, in fact, that he takes an advanced philosophy class; the struggle between Socrates and hoop shots was never so poignant.

Hoyt Thorpe is the reigning campus god, king of the frathouse, so gorgeous that the campus hotties are happy to ignore the fact that he has fewer morals than the average tomcat.

He's the one who tests Charlotte's virtue, and in what is actually one of the better-drawn passages in the book, our heroine proves unequal to the lures of booze and hazel eyes at an out-of-town frat party.

Deflowered by a man unworthy of her, she finds solace in the company of the campus ubergeek, Adam Geller, who has strength, principles, and usefully, the inside dirt on Hoyt.

Among all these tangled threads of passion, one skein will catch your attention: the love affair between Hoyt Thorpe and Hoyt Thorpe is one of the most poignant in history.

The central thesis that Wolfe employs to shore up this sorry edifice of the obvious and the trite is borrowed from a Nobel Prize winner's experiments.

Victor Ransome Starling removed the amygdala from a group of cats, to discover that this sent them into "a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme".

Over time, a normal group of cats, the control group, with their amygdalas intact, began to behave with the same ruttishness as their surgically altered counterparts.

Starling picked up the Nobel for his discovery of what was called "cultural para-stimuli"--normal animal responses could be overwhelmed if the prevailing social or cultural atmosphere was strong enough.

It's quite an insight, and it might have worked better if Wolfe had been less overwhelmed by his research. His characters could have come out of the world of TV soaps and college-dorm flicks: the geek, the beauty, the schemer, the jock, the campus god.

His insights are equally banal: the new racism ensures that blacks and jocks aren't allowed a life out of the sporting arena, geeks are discriminated against, everyone thinks way too much of the urban tribal warfare we know as sports, and hey, did he mention that college kids are very, very horny?

He did, and his efforts have not gone unrewarded: just this week, I Am Charlotte Simmons picked up the annual Bad Sex in writing prize. With lines like 'Slither slither slither went the tongue', the judges said it was the hands-down winner, no questions asked.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe Jonathan Cape, distributed by Rupa & Co Pages: 676; Price: POUNDS 9.75

Then these two recent columns on the ish-tate of Indian writing are personal favourites:

Nilanjana S Roy: The library of hollow books

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi January 25, 2005

You can buy anything in Delhi, including a library with no books. Once, wandering through old furniture markets in the city, I met a man whose speciality was creating dummy books�handsome volumes bound in leather, their spines lettered in blue and gold, but containing nothing inside.

They were meant to furnish the rooms of gentlemen who wished to be seen as readers, without going through the trouble of actually reading or buying books.

He was very good at his job. It was only when you attempted to take down a volume that you discovered its hollowness.

Over the last few years, the image of that library, its imposing surface concealing the hollowness within, has haunted me.

The odd thing is that while I see it as a Metaphor (what else?), the books that come to mind when I think of the empty library are not the ones coming out of India.

I spent the last three years, for various reasons, reading the top sixty or the top hundred fiction works of each year�an exercise that could have been depressing.

The general standard is still low; it�s still a struggle every year to recommend great fiction that can stand beside the best of Saramago, Pamuk, Murakami, McEwan, Roth and company; some of what gets published is incredibly dreary, incredibly mediocre.

But there is also cause for hope. I see unexpected talent, not yet fully tapped, blossoming in the works of writers like Kalpana Swaminathan and Indrajit Hazra.

There�s a growing willingness to be experimental with genres beyond straight fiction�the graphic novel, sf and fantasy, historical novels, children�s fiction�as writers from Sarnath Bannerji to Samit Basu to Timeri Murari to Vandana Singh take their first steps.

Much of what comes out is still raw, relatively unfinished; many writers are working in the dark, in the isolation produced by the lack of a thriving literary culture.

But each year, the general level rises. Just a little bit, but enough to keep hacks like me happy with the job.

The problem lies elsewhere, with the books about India and by writers of Indian origin that come to us on an ocean of advance publicity, gilt-edged, flagged for our consideration, endorsed by the Western world, stamped with the approval of publishing houses we should be able to trust, foreign editors whose names are legendary, authors who are living shrines.

For far too long, the debate over the merits of �phoren� versus �desi� books has been hijacked by an obsession with authenticity. Is Monica Ali�s Brick Lane the Real Thing, or a simulacra? Are Rupa Bajwa�s shop assistants true to life? How much of Bengali culture can an NRI like Jhumpa Lahiri truly understand? Has Naipaul really understood the neo-revolutionaries with whom he explored India�s villages? Is Manil Suri�s Vishnu authentic, is Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi�s sense of history authentic, is Samina Ali�s Hyderabad authentic, is Vikas Swarup�s beggar-turned-quiz contestant authentic?

The only possible answers to these questions are the ones that writers give when pressed: a writer is free to imagine his or her version of reality.

What is the authentic India anyway�the city, the village, the slums, the farmhouses? And what part of the phrase �work of fiction� do you not understand?

This debate, in all its many versions, has allowed writers, readers and reviewers to sidestep the central issue: are these good books, satisfying novels, great works of fiction? On the surface, every single author mentioned above comes to us with impeccable credentials.

Some have won prizes, ranging from the Nobel and the Pulitzer all the way down to the Betty Trask. Many have won critical acclaim, too.

Some even have the ultimate blessing conferred by the sound of cash registers ringing�brilliant sales figures.

And yet, and yet. If you put all of these books together, the Bajwas and the Swarups and the Shanghvis, the Alis Samina and Monica, and Naipaul�s recent novels, they force two inescapable conclusions on you.

The first is that none of these writers are untalented. The level of skill differs widely, from Shanghvi�s overripe prose to Lahiri�s delicately nuanced style, but all of them have at the very least an understanding of the rudiments of writing.

And the second is that we now have a body of writing by authors of Indian origin, about India, that forms a library of hollowed-out books.

Bajwa, Suri and Swarup appropriate the lives of people whom they do not understand; unlike Bibhutibhushan, who lived Apu�s life of deprivation in the city and the village, unlike Mulk Raj Anand, who saw at first hand what the humiliations of an untouchable encompassed, they are at a remove from their subjects.

And I do mean subjects. The fact that an appropriation is benign, or well-intentioned, does not make it any less of an appropriation.

Monica Ali does a more sophisticated version of the same thing, using a journalist�s techniques and a ham playwright�s voice when she employs pidgin English to convey the pathos of a Bangladeshi woman�s letters from the village to a luckier relative abroad.

This does not make their novels any less entertaining, in the cases of Bajwa and Swarup, or any less well-written, in the case of Monica Ali and Manil Suri.

But it does set up a constant, low-level interference that prevents an astute reader from engaging with their novels at a deeper level. I would call it white noise, were it not so very clearly brown.

Next week�s column will try to extend this argument by taking a closer look at the Hutch Crossword book award, back after a gap of three years.

This year�s shortlist for English fiction includes Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide), Shashi Deshpande (Moving On), Raj Kamal Jha (If You Are Afraid of Heights) and I AllanSealy (The Brainfever Bird).

The nominees for best Indian Language Fiction in translation are: Chandrasekhar Rath (Astride the Wheel), Mahasweta Devi (Bait and In The Name of the Mother), Bani Basu (The Birth of the Maitreya), Sharankumar Limbale (The Outcaste) and Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay (Waiting for Rain).

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi February 01, 2005

Just after the Hutch Crossword Book Awards were announced last week in Bombay, someone came up to me.

Along with Kai Friese and Urvashi Butalia, I�d been on the panel for the English Fiction category. �Ms Roy,� this man asked, �tell me: what kind of job is judging?�

A humbling job, and a rewarding job, one that raises difficult questions. The easiest part is, oddly, the judging itself.

When about forty to fifty books�one-third of the number that Booker judges must go through, but rising steadily each year�are read in bulk, you may experience fatigue or exhilaration, but you will not have a problem identifying the good stuff.

Reading at that intensity brings clarity. Good books shout from the cartons. They announce their quality in the very first three chapters.

Picking the shortlist�Shashi Deshpande�s Moving On, Raj Kamal Jha�s If You Are Afraid of Heights, Amitav Ghosh�s The Hungry Tide and I Allan Sealy�s The Brainfever Bird�required intense discussion and a willingness to respect the perspective of your fellow judges, to re-read books that may not initially have been to one�s taste.

But all of us could identify, easily, what we were passionate about. The Hungry Tide was a clear winner, but each of the books on the shortlist was a worthy contender.

But two things became glaringly obvious. The first was that it�s getting harder and harder to define the Indianness of a writer, or a book�and the Hutch Crossword, being an award for Indian fiction, in translation as well as in English, needs to remain an Indian prize.

But writers one might claim as Indian were not necessarily eligible: no Anita Desai (The Zigzag Way), no Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake). And books that were set in India and that qualified to me as Indian fiction, such as Gregory Roberts� Shantaram, were not eligible either because the author himself isn�t Indian.

This raises an old debate�is Rudyard Kipling�s Kim, for example, an Indian novel, is Kipling an Indian writer? Yes. And no. Do we need to go beyond nationality?

Perhaps, but we need awards like the Hutch Crossword because international awards see only one-tenth of the iceberg of Indian writing: many authors who�re well-known here or who write brilliantly are invisible abroad�whether they write in English or in other languages.

The second thing I noticed is that the quality of the fiction we had to read varied from the acceptable to the truly abysmal.

There was no lack of ambition�this year was thick with experimentation, in genres from SF and fantasy to the historical novel and the graphic novel, writers felt free to tackle everything from the great life-and-death questions to the Bhopal gas tragedy.

But so much of what I waded through read like a first draft; so many writers had produced books that had tremendous potential, but no more than that.

After the awards, I dropped by Crossword, Lotus and Strand�s annual book sale. And I watched readers who approached books with the same level of sophistication, knowledge, and passion that Indians bring to food these days.

�Those books are so cheap, let�s buy,� a woman said about the Indian fiction in English on display at Strand. �Just because they�re cheap you�ll buy? But only some are any good,� her companion said.

The books written in India in English evoke several reactions: many readers love them like they love ghar ka khana; it�s familiar, it can be very good, but some of it is plain old dal roti under a fancy name.

And some is overcooked or underdone, too much masala or too little.

The books coming in from elsewhere, written by Indians or about India? Please, as I said in my previous column, forget the authenticity debate.

It�s like chicken tikka masala. Or balti cuisine. Or the spring roll dosa. Or fancy fusion food. No one cares any more whether these represent Authentic Indian Cuisine; the question�s whether they�re any good.

The books and authors I named last week�Swarup, Shanghvi, Bajwa, Ali�failed for me as books for various reasons. One of the many reasons is that there are authors in the subcontinent who do what they�re doing rather better.

Mahasweta Debi writes about the lives of the disenfranchised with more empathy�and more style�than Swarup. If I want lyricism, the Urdu poets do more for me than Shanghvi does.

Bajwa�s shop attendant pales in comparison to the people I meet in Premchand�s works. I�ll read Monica Ali for her take on the immigrant experience, for her incredibly luminous style; but if I want to read a Bangladeshi author, two words: Prafulla Ray.

These are all good authors in their own way, but to me they�re so much firang fried chicken; why should I patronise KFC when Chawla�s Chick Inn does better chicken pakoras?

But there are authors who aren�t chicken tikka masala. Whose works are illuminated by location and distance�think Anita Desai, for whom moving out of India freed her to write about Mexico and India too, think Amitava Kumar, whose criticism gains perspective from the fact that he lives in two countries, think Suketu Mehta, who could never have written his Bombay book until he left Bombay.

Distance works for writers we think of as Indian; Amitav Ghosh travels a lot, lives in New York and Calcutta, and his work is all the better for it.

Ruchir Joshi�s ear for Indian English and sense of history may not have been the same if he hadn�t also spent time in Europe. Jhumpa Lahiri�s sensitivity to the immigrant experience is crucial to her work.

And there are writers for whom distance is irrelevant: Rana Dasgupta, whose Tokyo Cancelled forces us to make connections between people, wherever they might come from; Pico Iyer, the anywhere man whose travel writing leans on his being a global soul.

What I object to is having chicken tikka masala and boil-in-the-bag curries dished up on our table on silver platters, as though they were the best fare available, here or elsewhere.

In the global marketplace of books, India�s English readership barely makes a dent; we�re a niche market, 2,000-odd readers for the average good book, 10,000 for a bestseller.

We don�t count; we can be treated as the dupes we are, people who can be conned into buying mutton dressed up as lamb. That I suspect will change as English grows in India.

Right now, this is where we stand: we have ghar ka khana that needs to get better, we have ersatz microwave curries served up as fine cuisine, and we have some absolutely brilliant literary cooks keeping the broth going.

And we have a growing body of readers who know what they want, who�re sampling the best of the global banquet of writing, and who�d like all our writers, here and elsewhere, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the literary world.

They�re not going to be conned for very much longer and it�s because they are gradually beginning to demand better books that Indian writing, wherever it comes from, will start to improve.