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.

A Touch of Strange: The Booker shortlist 2010

(Published in the Business Standard, September 14, 2010)

The Booker shortlist doesn’t always offer the best books of the year—judges are fallible, the competition intense, and it often happens that works left off the list will continue to find readers and faithful acolytes.

A few years ago, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland failed to make the cut, but did brilliantly despite its omission; this year, David Mitchell’s pyrotechnics in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were not sufficient to impress the judges.

But the Booker shortlist is still valuable: the judges may not always pick the perfect books, but they almost always reflect the spirit of the times. The obsession with very English, domestic novels in the 1970s was followed by the rise of the global novel, a period where Ishiguro, Achebe, Rushdie and several others took the prize into far more wide-ranging territory. This year’s shortlist, announced last week, reflects two interesting trends: a growing openness among readers to reading experimental fiction, and the blurring of the line between the novel and other literary forms.

Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are both represented by historical novels—but what they do with the form is another matter all together. Carey has won the Booker twice before, and Parrot and Olivier in America is one of his best works—ferociously intelligent, very funny and as rewarding as it is demanding. It might be called a historical novel, but Carey is one of the world’s most happily experimental writers, and he pushes the story as far as it can go. Loosely modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to America, it follows the adventures of a French aristocrat and his servant in the land of the free. Along with the exuberance, it offers a sharp look at the evolution of democracy.

Andrea Levy’s Small Island was probably one of the most beloved novels of its time; The Long Song is a beautifully textured reworking of slave narratives. Told in the voice of July, the offspring of a Scottish plantation overseer and a slave, it follows the history of slavery in Jamaica. It’s a rich, powerful book, but won’t have the instant appeal of some of her earlier works.

Howard Jacobson is the dark horse of this year’s shortlist, with The Finkler Question, an exploration of what happens to a thoroughly ordinary man after he is exposed to anti-Semitic violence, and begins to question all of the certainties of his life. It has some brilliant sections, including a tour-de-force passage where a Jew sleeps with a Holocaust denier, but may be too insular for most Indian readers.

Tom McCarthy’s C is one of the most unusual novels of recent times—McCarthy’s work as a conceptual artist makes this a distinctly experimental novel, of the kind that has to be read twice for its full impact to be felt. Perhaps one of the most technically dazzling novels on the list, it may not have as much appeal for readers who prefer an old-fashioned story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

But the two strangest books on the list are Emma Donoghue’s The Room and Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room. Both these works have an almost hallucinatory power: they’re the kind of novels that infect your waking world long after you’ve read the final chapter and put the book down.

The Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old child who has grown up knowing only the world of one room, in which his only anchor is his mother. As the story unfolds, we understand that they are held captive by a psychopath; their return to the world outside will be equally unsettling. The Room has the effect of changing one’s perception of the everyday world. It could have been classified as a mystery or crime novel, but that wouldn’t capture its impact, and the lingering touch of strange that Donoghue imparts.

Damon Galgut is one of South Africa’s most talented writers after JM Coetzee, known for his brilliant and unsettling work. In A Strange Room may or may not be a novel at all, but that is almost irrelevant: its power and impact are undeniable. Galgut offers you the travels of Damon Galgut, to Greece, Africa and India, told by at least two and possibly three versions of the author. Galgut, like Coetzee before him, is a master at making the dark and the harrowing material of life absolutely compelling. It’s about travel and displacement, and despite the traveller’s best intentions, things will go horribly wrong—and as the reader, you won’t be able to step away from him in any of his three avatars.

It is impossible to predict which one of these novels will win—Peter Carey may be the frontrunner, but any one of four out of these six could walk away with the Booker gong. This much can be said with certainty—this is one of the strangest, and most rewarding, shortlists of the last ten years.

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/

Speaking Volumes: The Empire's orphan children

(Published in the Business Standard, April 2010)

As a touchingly emotional Rana Dasgupta rose to receive the Commonwealth Award for Best Book on Monday evening, he joined a long list of distinguished winners, from Mordecai Richler and Rohinton Mistry to Peter Carey, Vikram Seth and Andrea Levy.

Dasgupta’s Solo, his second book and first novel, is a virtuoso performance, like so many Commonwealth Prize winners. Set in Bulgaria, it explores the painful consequences of the choices made by both nations and individuals. Ulrich is blind, living out his years in a city where all the stories have changed, after “the former villains were cast in bronze and put up in parks”. As his mind wanders through a real and sometimes imaginary past, his life seems like a settling, however unfair, of history’s accounts.

With Peter Carey, JM Coetzee, Thomas Keneally and Chimamanda Adichie on the regional shortlists at one point, it seemed that Solo would be the dark horse of the competition, despite its obvious merits—but the final list of regional winners didn’t include any of the big four, making Dasgupta and Michael Crummey the front-runners for the competition.

For the Commonwealth Awards as they stand today, Dasgupta is the poster boy they need. His work is coldly analytical about globalization and its impact on both the Third and the First World; and he writes well outside the shadow of Empire. But this particular prize is at something of a crossroads in its history.

As with all literary prizes, it’s a big deal for the authors who win. Glenda Guest, who won the Best First Book award for Siddon Rock, pipping Daniyal Muenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was visibly moved: “I have to take a moment to breathe,” she said on stage, confessing that she really hadn’t prepared a speech. Former winner Githa Hariharan giggled about how her cheque for 3,000 pounds was received with immense gratitude in the days when writers took the “broke and struggling” part of the job description seriously.

But the blunt truth is that there’s no real reason to have a Commonwealth Prize, nor is there any commonality between the writers of the Commonwealth. I’m hardly the first person to make this point. Some years ago, Amitav Ghosh made waves when he asked for his book to be withdrawn from consideration: “The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace… I would [betray] my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of ‘the Commonwealth’.” If the award was called the Prize for Members of Former Colonies of the Erstwhile British Empire, which is effectively what it is, few writers would subscribe to its logic.

It’s worth noting that the impact of history may lessen over time. Salman Rushdie condemned the idea of Commonwealth literature in the 1980s, calling it an untenable ghetto; a decade later, he’d relaxed enough to allow his books to be entered for contention. What continues to make the Commonwealth an “anachronism”, as literary columnist Salil Tripathi called it recently, is that it is, unfortunately, anchored to its history. This has an inbuilt absurdity to it: Malaysian and Singaporean writers are eligible for the Prize, but not Vietnamese or Thai writers, excluded only because the flag of Empire was never raised over their soil. It’s similarly bewildering to have India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on the list, but not Nepal, Bhutan or Burma.

It’s with the question of languages that the most vexed issues are raised. The Booker Prize, similarly open only to works written in English, was founded explicitly as a prize intended to encourage reading in Britain. It expanded its frontiers over time, and cunningly included non-Commonwealth member Ireland (presumably because they have too many good writers to exclude).

The Commonwealth Prize had no such agenda when it began, and its inability to include works in different regional languages in English translation is deeply disturbing. The argument, made often, that this would render the Prize administration too complex is somewhat specious. One of the best contemporary literary prizes is the Impac, which treats works in English translation on par with works originally written in English. This still excludes original, untranslated works, but it has the merit of reflecting the way readers actually read—most of us grew up reading a Garcia Marquez or indeed, a Saadat Hasan Manto or Thakkazhi, without “seeing” the translation behind the text.

This shouldn’t take away from Dasgupta’s win, or indeed from the achievements of any of the winners and shortlisted authors in previous years. But the Commonwealth Prize does need to craft an identity for itself. Most literary prizes do that on the basis of a common language—the Cervantes Prize for works in Spanish—or a common historical or national identity, as with the Pulitzer. Sharing a history of imperialism really isn’t enough to create a body of works from the shortlist that would be of interest to most readers.

Links: The Observer review of Solo
Glenda Guest on winning the Best First Book award for Siddon Rock
Salil Tripathi's column questions the raison d'etre of the Commonwealth Prize
Amitav Ghosh's 2001 letter withdrawing The Glass Palace from consideration for the Prize

The BS Column: The evolving Oriental marketplace

(Published in the Business Standard, October 6, 2009)

This is prize season as the winners of both the Booker and the Nobel are to be announced this week. India has a strong, though not entirely healthy, fascination with both the prizes, slightly dimmed this year because we don’t have a horse in the Booker race.

The two hottest contenders for the Booker, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and J M Coetzee’s Summertime, are doing well in bookshops. There’s mild speculation—against long odds—that Mahasweta Debi or Salman Rushdie might get the Nobel nod. But if you ask the average Indian what s/he’s most interested in this week, the answer would be Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States-The Story of a Marriage, already a bestseller before it has reached the bookshops.

There are some interesting factors at work in the current situation. As a country, we suffer from massive performance anxiety on the literary front, as on most other fronts. Each Booker winner of Indian origin is hailed as an A+ on the report card some invisible committee is keeping on us. A Pulitzer win by Jhumpa Lahiri spikes a brief but fading interest in the US literary prize. The presence of a Rushdie or a Mahasweta Debi in the discussion of possible Nobel laureates is a reassuring reminder that we once won the Nobel, courtesy Tagore.

Any discussion on prize-winning books by authors of Indian origin often follows a completely different and parallel track—we applaud their achievements even as we dissect, or ignore, or argue with their work. We compartmentalise our applause as proud Indians; it’s separate from our reaction as Indian readers. Perhaps that’s why many Indians will buy a book such as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, feel free to dismiss it or call its authenticity into question—and then buy more copies for friends.

What do we really want to read, though? A Chetan Bhagat who says he’s in the entertainment, not the literary, business, is far closer to the pulse of the Indian reader than his more feted literary peers; and writers like Amit Varma now pay attention to the demand from Indian readers that they be entertained, but not condescended to.

Keep the focus on the marketplace for literature—it’s more powerful than we might wish to acknowledge—rather than writers and writing, and what emerges in the Indian context is wonderfully strange. (This will be a paragraph of broad generalisations; bear with me.)

The working models for publishing have been the European and the US marketplaces—large, beleagured but still vibrant, often closed to authors in translation, attempting to market the products of a glut of writers in both continents. It is fiercely competitive, but hobbled by many imperfections.

Africa and Russia are illustrations of how a dying, or troubled, marketplace has a direct negative effect on literary productivity.

There are fewer Achebes, Soyinkas, Solzhenitsyns and Dostoevskys today, because the markets in both territories have been rocky for the last four to five decades.

Japan and China have thriving internal publishing markets, and both have evolved their own blend of genres and a national literature—hampered by censorship, in China’s case, but still alive.

Both export, so to speak, some of their writers, but most of them have a thriving readership in their home territories and aren’t dependent on the export market.

Australia and India are outliers, comparable in terms of size and historical background of their English-language publishing industries.

India has a thriving but deeply insular smorgasbord of regional markets, where cross-translation exists but is not the norm, and where most writers do not produce works for export. (This doesn’t mean that they don’t produce quality writing. It’s just not export-oriented.)

The Indian market in English-language writing has, as in Australia, produced a few contenders for the Great Novel title, and then got back to the delicate process of evolving a national literature.

Many writers, in both countries, have to balance the need to produce work that’s export-oriented, while still remaining true to their need to tell the stories they find compelling. There isn’t always a market abroad for the latter, and it’s telling that Indian writers feel less pressured to produce the great Indian novel these days. There’s a willingness to experiment within genres, or to tell quieter and apparently less “important” stories.

The real question is not why we haven’t produced more Rushdies, but why we haven’t produced more Chetan Bhagats. The answer might lie in the fact that we’re not just a post-colonial market—we are an evolving, under-developed literary market, where the supporting infrastructure (creative writing courses, literary magazines, demanding editorial standards) is only just coming into being.

We don’t control the international literary markets; we haven’t yet evolved a robust domestic market of our own. Until one or the other of these comes to pass, our writers will continue to write for export, or for a very small, patient audience. And we’ll continue to need the ratification of the odd Booker win and the occasional nod from the Nobel.

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2009 shortlist

It's not on the website yet, but sources say this is confirmed--fiction-heavy this year:

Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf
Mimlu Sen: Baulsphere
Mridula Koshy: If It Is Sweet
Palash Krishna Mehrotra: Eunuch Park
Parismita Singh: Hotel at the End of the World
Preeta Samarasan: Evening is the Whole Day.


Omissions of interest:
Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night, Neel Mukherjee's Past Continuous, Amit Varma's My Friend Sancho. Unless they've all written first books that we don't know about.

The BS Column: Crossword shortlists 2009

(Published in the Business Standard, 29 June 2009)

In the eleven years since the first Crossword award was instituted, several groups of people have benefited. The awards have been handed out for nine years—it took a three-year break from 2000 to 2004—and the categories have expanded from just English fiction by Indian writers to include non-fiction, Indian language fiction in translation, and a new award for popular writing. Authors, translators and publishers value an Indian prize; reviewers like me welcome the overview of the year’s writing that the Crossword gives you. But does it work for readers?

The Vodafone Crossword shortlists were announced last week and after a decade, it’s easy to see the challenges in the award’s path. The biggest practical problem the Vodafone Crossword faces today is a lack of support from other booksellers; Crossword is a bookstore chain, and many booksellers won’t give prominence to the awards, arguing that it’s free publicity for a rival. The second biggest problem is that while the awards are anticipated, discussed and debated by a small group of readers and industry insiders, it hasn’t been able to draw in the average reader. Looking at the shortlists by category gives you a better sense of the issues involved in running an “Indian” book award.

English fiction shortlist:
Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)

At seven books, this is a larger-than-normal shortlist, making it glaringly obvious that Crossword’s judges this year were underwhelmed by Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger. Picador’s hat-trick is of special interest because its three authors are “home-grown”—ie, first published in India. Opening the list up to authors of Indian origin has allowed the inclusion of Jhumpa Lahiri—her first two books were eligible for US prizes, but not for the Crossword because it was open only to resident Indians/ Indian passport holders at the time.

The debate over who qualifies as an Indian writer will continue—currently, the prize is open to anyone who qualifies under the Person of Indian Origin guidelines. Being more inclusive allows more wide-ranging and high quality fiction—which is better for readers—but also creates concerns over whether this might not become too broad in scope. It’s also interesting to see how many writers on this list live for part or most of the year outside India, reflecting the wider shift in the lives of the urban Indian elite.

English non-fiction shortlist:
Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)

From the average reader’s perspective, the non-fiction shortlist usually delivers the most interesting list of books. It’s also the most demanding to judge—it’s harder to set standards for different kinds of non-fiction writing (travelogues versus biographies, memoirs versus criticism). Sudeep Chakravarti and Basharat Peer would be the favourites this year, but keep an eye on Edna Fernandes’ fascinating history of a vanishing community. The list excludes several popular bestsellers, including business biographies, in favour of more stylish and presumably more lasting writing.

Indian language fiction in translation shortlist:

Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)

Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)

Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)

M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)

The longlist for this year’s award promised some interesting work, but translations remain invisible—it’s hard to find many of the books in the stores. Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of the VC award has been that it’s brought the translator into far more prominence. The best translation of 2008 was probably the Blaft anthology of Tamil pulp fiction, but anthologies are seldom eligible for mainstream literary prizes anywhere in the world. I can’t see an easy way for the VC award, or any award, to get around this.

The big debate for the last decade was whether to include works by dead authors. Sriram, who helped to run the award for several years, got into a bit of a tangle during the shortlist discussion in Delhi, first defending the decision to limit the list to living authors before he realised that the rules had changed this year. The current rules now require the translator to be among the living, and opening it up to past (and often previously untranslated) classics might help attract more readers.

That still leaves the question we started with. The shortlists offer a wide range of interesting and very diverse books— but until readers queue up in the hundreds to buy them, there's a missing piece in this Crossword puzzle.

Between the lines

(Published in the Business Standard, January 16, 2007)

Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel as well as every other literary honour he was ever offered. He believed that by accepting a literary award, a writer became part of the establishment, and in his view, a writer could only work if he was outside the system. The poet Les Murray, on the other hand, justified accepting a literary award on the grounds that he was only going up on stage to collect his wages.

V S Naipaul once said that the Booker was "destroying literature" by looking for good, commercial books that died very quickly, while France's Prix Goncourt rewarded "antiquated" books. Amitav Ghosh believes that the origins of literary awards are important, even crucial. Some years ago, he withdrew The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Book Prize on the very valid grounds that he disagreed strongly with "that particular memorialisation of Empire that passes under the rubric of 'the Commonwealth'".

The shortlists for the Hutch Crossword Book Award, given out to the best works by authors of Indian origin in the categories of fiction in English, non-fiction and fiction in translation from other Indian languages into English, will be announced this evening. Launched in 1998, the prize weathered a gap between 2001 and 2003 when no awards were given out, returning in 2004. It has a small but significant impact on book sales, but to most authors, it's the recognition (and the cheques!) that count. Indian authors who work outside the enclosed world of English letters often respond to the award emotionally. (I remember the distinguished writer who bounced up and down in excitement in the car on the way to a TV interview after he won.)

Last year, Krishna Sobti spoke of how this award meant recognition from a community of readers--English-speaking Indians--who often ignored writers from "other" languages. Some Indian writers in English, the ones who already have serious reputations and readerships elsewhere, respond nostalgically: the Crossword may not be the biggest or the most important award in their shining rows of medals, but it's the one from "home".

But what does the award mean to the Indian reader? This year's fiction longlist is pretty representative of what the reader has to choose from in the course of a year. There is, sadly, a great deal of middling fiction--the longlist is compiled as a collection of all eligible titles, barring children's books, that might qualify as literary fiction, rather than as a selective list. The 20-odd decent contenders on this year's list of 49 rise fairly quickly to the top.

Of them, some have made an impact in the international markets--Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Some authors are better known in Indian literary circles--Kiran Nagarkar, Manju Kapoor, I Allan Sealy, Kunal Basu. Some are relatively new writers--Altaf Tyrewala, Siddharth Choudhury--while some are relatively experimental writers--Kalpana Swaminathan with her murder mysteries, Samit Basu's fantasy series, Srividya Natarajan's offbeat humour. There are three writers from the North-East on the list--Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai and Dhruba Hazarika. While they shouldn't be stereotyped by region, it is good to see new voices in fiction emerging from a part of the country that has been so muffled over the years."

The non-fiction list looks impressive, with 61 titles, but many of these have leaked in from the self-help and spirituality section. Yoga for High Blood Pressure, the Kama Sutra and An Ethical Guide to Hacking Mobile Phones may be very useful books, but they would not qualify as great literary non-fiction. The rest of the list is cheerfully eclectic. There are biographies and memoirs, notably Vikram Seth's Two Lives, Yashodhara Dalmia's life of Amrita Sher-gil, Shrabani Basu's Spy Princess and Timeri Murari's heartwrenching memoir of loving and losing an adopted child, My Temporary Son. There are interesting books on film, from Madhu Jain's history of The Kapoors to Jerry Pinto's Helen. And there are huge omissions, which I hope Crossword has corrected on the actual list, such as the omission of the autobiography of Baby Haldar.

Despite these minor caveats, both the non-fiction and fiction lists work reasonably well as reader's guides to what's been published in the mainstream. The translation list was a brief one last year, because publishers hadn't submitted titles for consideration, and is restricted to nine titles and six languages this year. I found this baffling until Crossword pointed out that they reserve awards for authors who are still alive. "The problem is not that we're not doing translations," a cynical publisher told me. "The problem is that we prefer to translate the dead guys." So in this polyglot country of a hundred different dialects, the reader limited to English and perhaps one more tongue, are stuck with either a very short list of living writers—or a reasonably long list of very dead ones.