The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature: The (revised) longlist

(Following a clarification on the rules of eligibility regarding publication dates for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the jury is happy to announce the revised longlist. It was brought to the jury's attention that two novels previously discussed and endorsed were, under the rules, eligible for contention in the final analysis. Here is the final longlist.)

1) Upamanyu Chatterjee: Way To Go (Penguin)

2) Amit Chaudhuri: The Immortals (Picador India)

3) Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf (HarperCollins)

4) Musharraf Ali Farooqui: The Story of a Widow (Picador India)

5) Ru Freeman: A Disobedient Girl (Penguin/ Viking)

6) Anjum Hassan: Neti Neti (IndiaInk/ Roli Books)

7) Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns (Pocket Books)

8) Manju Kapur: The Immigrant (Faber & Faber)

9) HM Naqvi: Home Boy (HarperCollins)

10) Salma: The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)

11) Sankar: The Middleman (Penguin, translated by Arunava Sinha)

12) Ali Sethi: The Wish Maker (Penguin)

13) Jaspreet Singh: Chef (Bloomsbury)

14) Aatish Taseer: The Temple Goers (Picador India)

15) Daniyal Mueenuddin: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Random House)

16) Neel Mukherjee: A Life Apart (Picador India)

(The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is in its first year; we announced the longlist today. This is a rough draft of my introduction to the longlist as chair of the jury.)

It gives me great pleasure to be here today at the invitation of the DSC group, and I’d like to say a special word of thanks to Ms Surina Narula for her unflagging and very gracious support of the prize, and her commitment to literature in a broader sense. I’d also like to thank Manhad Narula: the Prize is his brainchild, and his energy and enthusiasm fuelled the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

The need for a South Asian prize became apparent to many of us some years ago. India had some excellent literary prizes, but given the rich and the overlapping history of the subcontinent, we found ourselves missing the neighbours. There is an instinctive kinship among the countries of South Asia, and for readers, a Kamila Shamsie or a Romesh Gunesekhara would belong automatically on the same shelf as Vikram Seth or Sankar.

There was another problem, familiar to all of those who have administered literary prizes. I think of it as the Passport Control conundrum. Given the alacrity with which South Asians travel, and given that so many of us now lead nomadic lives, spreading ourselves out so that home could be anywhere on one or all of three different continents, it’s hard to identify who qualifies to be a South Asian writer. Too often, prize administrators have ended up in the uncomfortable position of being border guards—effectively checking the passports of authors to see who qualifies and who doesn’t.

The DSC Prize does away with the Passport Control problem in a way that’s highly unusual, but that reflects the realities of our times—it’s the content of the book that matters, not the nationality or place of residence of the writer. (The rules for eligibility are here.) The only criteria for eligibility is that the book should be set in South Asia, should feature South Asian characters, or should in some way concern itself with the history of South Asia. This makes, from the judges’ point of view, for fascinating reading. My colleague, Urvashi Butalia, had asked earlier this year whether we could arrive at a definition of South Asian fiction—I can only say, after reading the books in contention this year, that there is such a thing, and as a reader, you recognize it when you see it.

It was a great pleasure working with my fellow judges this year. We were, literally, reading on three continents. Moni Mohsin is a Pakistani writer and well-known columnist who has been part of that literary world for decades; Amitava Kumar is an eminent critic and writer whose most recent book, Evidence of Suspicion, addresses the euphemisms and lies behind the war on terror; Ian Jack, the legendary former editor of Granta magazine, is also an old India hand; and Lord Matthew Evans is the former chairman of Faber & Faber. We went through several rounds of debate and discussion, and immensely enjoyed the process of longlisting books for the DSC Prize. It was particularly illuminating reading works in translation alongside works written in English; it reflects the way we buy and read books in our everyday lives.

I’d offer just two suggestions for the future success of the Prize: to the Advisory Board, I would strongly suggest that they open it up further, and allow publishers to submit more books. It’s better to have an excess of entries than to run the risk of missing out on a potentially brilliant book, and part of the fun of reading as one of the judges is the discovery of a name or an author you haven’t come across previously. I’d also suggest, if I may, that the prize cover an entire year—for instance, the 2012 Prize would work even better if it were to cover as many books published in 2011 as possible. We offer our apologies to the authors who were not eligible for the DSC Prize because their books were published either too early or too late—any literary prize requires a little time to find its feet, and we hope you will be patient with us over the first two years.

I think the longlist this year reflects some of the best of Asian writing, with three languages—English, Bengali and Tamil—represented, and authors from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the US. In the end, this is what makes any literary prize exciting—the quality and the breadth of reading it covers, and the fiction on this year’s longlist was, for all of us on the jury, truly a discovery.

We will be announcing the shortlist of 5, or perhaps 6, titles on October 25 in London.

The BS column: Mapping Asia

The definition of South Asia is not permanently fixed,” publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia observed recently. Neither, by implication, is the definition of what puts the India in the term “Indian writing”, and in different ways, three separate Indian/ Asian prizes are looking for new ways to populate the shelf of South Asian literature.

For the Vodafone Crossword, now over a decade old, the battle over the years has been twofold. How do you identify a writer as Indian? And how do you find the right balance between encouraging new, or local, writers and not penalizing those who have done well in markets outside India? These may seem like esoteric questions, but the results are reflected in the prize shortlists—and that, whether the general reader is aware of the processes involved or not, determines whether a literary prize will stand or fall in the long run.

Historically, prizes that have pushed an ideological or political agenda haven’t done well. The only test of whether a literary prize is working as it should or not isn’t reflected in the number of struggling writers it supports or honours; any prize, from the Pulitzer to the Crossword, will ultimately be judged by whether it consistently yields good reading lists.

The Crossword opened up the prize a few years ago to writers who could be considered Indian—William Dalrymple being the most prominent example—by dint of length of stay in the country, or some evidence of Indian origin. The problem with this sort of criteria, as the Crossword and other literary prizes have discovered, is that it turns the prize administrators into a quasi-customs office, with the job of scrutinizing the passports of writers—and this doesn’t work. This year, Dalrymple wasn’t eligible to be considered in the non-fiction category, since he’s not an Indian citizen. I understand the dilemma the Crossword faces, but the result is that their shortlists risk being slanted in one direction or the other: either too insular or too inclusive.
(A full list of shortlisted Crossword titles is available here.)

The Man Asian Literary Prize is, similarly, moving past the teething troubles of the early years. One of its aims, and a noble one, was to encourage emerging, talented writers who hadn’t been published yet. The outcome of accepting unpublished manuscripts for consideration, though, was that the gap between the announcement of the winners/ shortlisted authors and the availability of their books became a gulf.
The memory of the general reader is short; most of us want to buy books the moment a shortlist is announced. This year, the Man Asian has moved back to accepting only books that are already published—which should give it a more reader-friendly list. The criteria for defining the Asianness of the writer remains the passport and the nationality, which, given the massive geographical spread, could lead to fascinating but very eclectic shortlists in the future.

The recently announced DSC Prize for South Asian literature has a much smaller focus—the restriction to the subcontinent rather than to the entire Asian continent makes it narrower, but also makes it more likely that the shortlists will feature books with common themes and interests. More controversial is the decision to define South Asian literature by content, rather than by nationality—if your book has a South Asian setting or South Asian characters, it qualifies. This will lead to some confusion; Asian authors who write about other times and places will be left out, and you could theoretically have a shortlist that features six Asian books, but not a single Asian writer.

Over time, though, both the DSC and the Man Asian prize could help us come to a better understanding of what Asian fiction is, as a category—if such a beast exists. It’s as complex as trying to define what makes an Indian novel Indian, and perhaps it will be as much fun.

Tailpiece: Sarita Mandanna’s Tiger Hills illustrates a point about the dangers of getting what’s known as the Bastard Child comparison wrong in the blurb. (This refers to the an overworked blurb-writer/ reviewer cliché: “X novel reads like a cross between William Faulkner and William Styron”; “If Bret Easton Ellis and Judith Krantz had offspring, this book would be their firstborn” etc.) Tiger Hills, one of the most-hyped debut novels of this season, drew pre-publication comparisons to Gone With The Wind and The Thorn Birds.

I can say with some confidence that this two-generation family historical saga set in Coorg starring an impossibly beautiful, willful heroine, an impossibly romantic tiger hunter and an impossibly annoying faithful husband with not one but two deep, dark secrets resembles neither Margaret Mitchell’s deathless bestseller nor Colleen McCollough’s equally indestructible forbidden-love pulp epic. It is, however, the child of The Far Pavilions and House of Blue Mangoes, as midwifed by Jodi Picoult, which will doubtless appeal to many readers. Just don’t expect Scarlett and Rhett in the Coorg hills.

(Update: Over at The Complete Review, MA Orthofer quite rightly points out that the "massive geographical spread" of the Man Asian Prize is limited to a relative handful of countries--he counts just 23. Here's his take:

http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#qs9)

DSC Prize: deadline extended to 5th May

For publishers: got this from the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature team:

"We are extending the deadline for entries for the DSC prize for South
Asian Literature to 5th May, 2010. This is due to several requests coming
from many publishing houses, mostly overseas, whose entries are delayed
due to the grounding of flights after the volcano eruption in Iceland,
The new deadline for submissions: 5 May,2010."

The eligibility rules:

http://dscprize.com.s54927.gridserver.com/eligibility/