PEN India statement on Rohinton Mistry and Such a Long Journey

(My apologies, this should have been posted earlier; I'm travelling at present.)

PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE

20 October 2010


Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...


India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.

There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.


Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE


More links:

The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms

PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html

The BS column: Rohinton and the Rat Pack

(Published in the Business Standard, October 17, 2010. This was written before The Buck Stops Here show on Rohinton Mistry and the withdrawal of his book from the Mumbai university syllabus.)













“That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by –” Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life.





In the city of Mumbai, once upon a time, there lived many storytellers. Some came from the slums, and wrote angry, anguished, beautiful poetry about their lives. Some collected memories of Mumbai with loving care, and set down tales that featured the stories of the real Marathi Manoos, the ones who were Hindu but also Anglo-Indian or had names like Sinai and Pereira.

Some wrote of Firozesha Baag, chronicling the dying world of the Parsis, of ordinary men like Gustad Noble, stumbling from the tribulations of his quiet life into a larger conspiracy involving the corruption of the state, the venality and violence of its political parties. It must be remembered that at this time, Mumbai was also known as Bombay, and Bombay was a city that welcomed kahanis, opening its arms to stories and to story-tellers. Some of the best found an ocean of seas of stories here: a young man who worked in advertising called Salman Rushdie, two men who knew the slums intimately, Kiran Nagarkar and Namdeo Dhasal, a banker called Rohinton Mistry who returned to literature in Toronto, remembering and etching the Bombay he had loved so much.

Salman Rushdie spent years in darkness, at the hands of a villain much like the Khattam-Shud he wrote about in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There were many other Khattam-Shuds in India, men who preferred “chup” to “gup”, and since Rushdie had been unwise enough to write about religion, Islam and the Koran in a book called Satanic Verses, they placed his book under a seal of the blackest silence for 23 years.
Many argued that religion should not be beyond question, and that the point of a novel was that it was made up, and that perhaps those who didn’t want to read Rushdie’s ideas might want to stop buying and burning copies of the book and just tell all their friends not to read it. But a ban hung like a shroud over Satanic Verses, and in a very strange coincidence, few great novels about controversial religious matters have come out of India in the last 23 years. This is, of course, just a coincidence, brought about by the P2C2E described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories—a Process Too Complicated To Explain.

Meanwhile, Mumbai was changing too, and becoming a city of Rats, fearsome creatures with whiskers that sniffed out the merest hint of offence, and great sharp teeth called censorship laws, and the thing about Rats is that they were very good about calling up bands of fellow Rats at need. The Rats felt strongly about the Marathi Manoos, a mythical and apparently endangered species that was threatened in Mumbai by anything that was neither pure Maharashtrian nor a Rat. The Rats felt strongly about anything that was against the spirit of their ancient culture, which is to say anything that criticized Rattery in general and Ratty politics in particular. The Rats felt very, very strongly about books that were freely available, in bookshops or in local universities, that caused offence to Rattishness.

The second thing about Rats is that they are very slow readers. Someone needs to bring a King Rat, or a Crown Prince Rat, a book worthy of burning before he will turn its pages, and the vision of Rats is such that they can only see what offends them. And so, twenty years after Mistry first set down the tale of Gustad Noble, and after it had been not just acclaimed by critics, but loved by non-Rats everywhere, a young Rat read the book. And he was shocked to discover that it offended his sensibilities, by casting aspersions on Rattish behaviour (such as corruption and mob violence and other forms of Rattery), and that it offended particular political parties. It happened to be his political party, but he explained that Political Parties, like Rats, needed to stand together against anything that might be Offensive, such as books that made people question the conduct of Political Parties known for their tendency to rule by thuggery. (Or Thuggeries, since there were three of them, a big Thuggery, a medium Thuggery and a little Thuggerish.)

It caused the Rats the greatest offence of all to discover that Such a Long Journey was being taught in Mumbai University—which, however, had a fellow Rat at its helm. It was the easiest thing in the world to organize a book-burning session followed by a book-banning session, and the niceties observed, the Rats went back to their holes.
They left us with a question, though, as Rohinton Mistry becomes the latest in a long line of authors to experience Rat censure and censorship. If Bombay turns into Rattistan, what will happen to its story-tellers? Will they leave, hustled out of the city by Rat stormtroopers? Will they end up with books written in Rattish, a new language for books that contain only blank pages, and three words: “Don’t cause offence.”

Copy, Paste: The India Today plagiarism case

The India Today plagiarism case makes me think of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika library system, also known as Shaktida.

Shakti Roy was the unacknowledged genius who ran the group's archives for years, long before the Internets made it easy to Google everything under the sun. He had the mind of a superior search engine; if two people, one working on the Society pages and one working on the Stockmarket pages, asked for information on, say, Ratan Tata, they'd get superbly filtered results. And his memory was phenomenal. Any young journalist foolish enough to attempt to "recycle" copy, recycling being the euphemism for plagiarism in those days, would receive a package from Shakti da containing a printout of his story, and the stories he or she had been "inspired" from. No other comment was necessary.

Here's what happened with India Today. Aroon Purie, who writes the note from the Editor-in-Chief, was faced with a split edition; India Today was covering Rajnikanth in the South, Omar Abdullah in the North. His piece on Rajnikanth more or less reproduced the first two paragraphs of this much-discussed Slate article on the film star verbatim:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267820/

"Jackie Chan is the highest-paid actor in Asia, and that makes sense. Besides producing, directing, and starring in his own action movies since 1980, he's earned millions in Hollywood with blockbusters like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid. But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn't make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986. This is Rajinikanth, and he is no mere actor—he is a force of nature. If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth. Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, "SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!"

If you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before, you will on Oct. 1, when his movie Enthiran (The Robot) opens around the world. It's the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It's getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously. Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix) did the action, Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park) did creature designs, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic did the effects, and Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) wrote the music. It's a massive investment, but the producers fully expect to recoup that, because this isn't just some film they're releasing; this is a Rajinikanth film."

Aroon Purie claimed jetlag as an excuse, in an ungracious apology that didn't mention either Slate or Grady Hendrix, the author of the Rajnikanth piece.

The apology is... illuminating. We have a senior editor explaining that he doesn't write his own editorials, and skating lightly over the tiny detail of how those "inputs" found their way into the main copy. We also have a situation where one of the country's best-known magazines apparently doesn't have a copy desk, or at least not a desk that could either recognise the lift (the Slate piece was widely discussed on the Net), or red-flag lines that explain who Rajnikanth is and speak of the "Indian state of Tamil Nadu"--in an edition that goes out to South India.

But most of all, that apology and India Today's reaction lacks grace. Slate got ripped off, without acknowledgement; Grady Hendrix, who wrote those lines, must have been surprised to see them under a different byline. Journalism is often written at high speed, to unrealistic deadlines, and anyone who researches their 600-word pieces will have, at some stage, made use of the files. But plagiarism in India isn't seen as a major crime--as a major embarrassment, yes, but there is little understanding of how the person who's been ripped off might feel. (I remember a journalist from a major newspaper complaining that I'd complained when he stole all but one paragraph of one of my columns. He felt it was unfair that he got yelled at by his editor for "paying tribute". It was only when I explained that I'd prefer to replace the term "paying tribute" with "stole my work" that he backed down.)

Grady Hendrix reacted with amusement: "I’ve just emailed India Today offering my services. Instead of having to do all this tedious cutting and pasting themselves, I suggested that I could just write for them directly. I’ve promised them to charge a reasonable rate, and assured them that I will never steal copy from Mr. Purie and print it under my own name in revenge."

Now that's grace.

And a little more from Mr Hendrix here (scroll down in the comments section):
"I'm the guy who wrote the Slate article, and someone forwarded me a link here to check out the preview of the apology. India Today has refused to respond to emails from myself and Slate, but I'm glad they're going to apologize. It must be very difficult for the staff of India Today that when Mr. Purie gets "jet-lagged" he steals things. I would imagine that whenever they see their boss yawning, or looking sleepy, all of his employees must frantically lock up their laptops and hide their wallets lest he lifts them."

Bats in our Belfries

(Published in Outlook Traveller, October 2010)
If it hadn’t been for a decade of reading Gerald Durrell, I may never have dated a man who was the companion of the Princess of Patparganj.

The Princess, who was treated like royalty and had better manners than most of the nobility, was a young, comely pink piglet who had been rescued from a possibly fearsome fate in the bylanes of Feroze Shah Kotla. The man in question had gone to the Kotla market to buy razais; he and the Princess crossed paths, and it was love at first sight. Other gently nurtured women may have found his story odd, but I found nothing at all unusual in the fact that he came back sans razai and with the piglet; I, you see, had read my Durrell.

The Durrell books, depending on your taste, are either up there with the greatest of the wildlife and conservation classics in the company of Jane Goodall and Joy Adamson, or nestle comfortably alongside stylists of the ilk of PG Wodehouse. The books were thrust upon me by a wonderful school teacher—“You’ve never read Durrell?” she said, and dumped a shelf-ful of Durrell on me, starting with his fictionalized account of travels with an alcoholic elephant, Rosy is My Relative.

They had the most alluring titles—Catch me a Colobus, Beasts in my Belfry, The Bafut Beagles—and the most seductive illustrations, done by Ralph Thompson, who had a knack for getting both the detail and the humour of the Durrell oeuvre down in a few neat lines. It was one of the absolute joys of a very brief stint in publishing to be part of the Tranquebar team that brought the books back into print in India, with cheerful new illustrations by Gynelle Alves.

Durrell was born in Raj India, though the family moved back to England when he was three-and-a-half, and then to Corfu. “I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids,” writes Durrell, already the young naturalist. It was in Corfu, as he sets down in My Family and Other Animals, that his fascination for both kingdoms—the animal and the human—came to the fore.

Gerald Durrell graduated from keeping snakes in his room to travelling the world, building zoos (A Zoo in My Luggage), collecting rare and on-the-verge-of-extinction species (The Whispering Land, The Drunken Forest) while learning how to change the nature of zoos, from prison to animal-friendly resort (The Overcrowded Ark). But what made his books work was his zest for life, and his ability to collect lugubrious tango-singers, White Horse whisky drinking African chiefs, and mad Greeks alongside the colobuses, lemurs, pangolins, tapirs and chimpanzees that were the stock-in-trade of his profession. The brothers Durrell—Lawrence was the author of the Alexandria Quartet—were natural writers, and there was nothing of the dry scholar in Gerald’s description of animals:

“We had a pair of slender lorises of which we were inordinately proud. These creatures look rather like drug addicts that have seen better days. Clad in light grey fur, they have enormously long and thin limbs and body; strange almost human hands; and large lustrous brown eyes, each surrounded by a circle of dark fur, so that the animals appears as though it is recovering either from some sort of ghastly debauchery or an unsuccessful boxing tournament.”

His writing was not for the sentimental, Disney-influenced animal lover. Durrell was equally strong on describing the proper procedure for pulling out maggots from an animal’s skin, or the problems of building cages strong enough to withstand a young leopard’s temper tantrums.

The Durrell books, as anyone who has read them knows, are insidious in their appeal. Little by little, he expands your world, whether you live in Delhi or Corfu, until it’s peopled—and I use that term with meaning—with the animals who’ve travelled with him, the owl who looks like an indignant vicar, the little flirtatious pig called Juanita, solemn seals who mate with exquisite care and slow delicacy, chimpanzees called Cholmondoley who arrive for tea equipped with their own, large, battered tin tea mug. The younger brother of the teacher who lent me the Durrell books became a conservationist, and she continued, in her profession, to campaign for wildlife rights.

I followed a more muted path, adopting the odd mongoose here, a stray baby hawk there. The Princess of Patparganj grew too large for her habitation and escaped the bacon fate, living out her years on a friend’s no-kill farm. As for the man, it seemed the only way to stop him from rescuing pythons, monkeys and piglets was to turn him to a life of caring for cats and more manageable creatures, and the only way to do that was to marry him. I had a feeling Gerald Durrell would have approved.

The BS column: The Nobel over the century

(Published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2010, three days before the Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa.)


This Thursday, the next Nobel Laureate in Literature will be announced. Salman Rushdie, alas, is way down on Ladbroke’s list of betting odds along with Mahasweta Devi, but some would consider 66/1 a sporting chance — in honour of his new book, Luka and The Fire of Life, I’ve put a small punt on him. Most commentators think this might be the year of the poets, with a small group betting on the African writer Ngugi wa Thiongo. (MA Orthofer at the Complete Review covered the pre-announcement speculation in detail, here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd1; his comprehensive Vargas Llosa links page here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd8.)

Setting aside the merits of an individual laureate in any given year, though, a century and a bit is a good time to look back at Nobels past. The evolution of the Nobel, from a small European prize fuelled by a dynamite-maker’s fortune to perhaps the world’s most influential literary gong, is a remarkable story.

1900s to the 1930s: The first 30 years of the Nobel was a time of evolution, as the literature prize sought to define itself. The first prize went to Sully Prudhomme, no longer read or remembered, but famous for his poetry at the time. Over the next decade, the Swedish Academy’s fondness for poets, and its occasional partiality towards Europe’s writers, were both strong. Kipling was an early recipient of the Prize, and so, five years after Kipling got his gong, was Tagore. The post-World War I years were somewhat insular, and except for William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann and G B Shaw, few Nobel laureates from that period have stood the test of time.

1930s-1950s: The 1930s saw an earnest attempt by the Swedish Academy to broaden the Prize. Alfred Nobel’s will had stressed that the Nobel in Literature was for the “most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; by the 1930s, the Academy had broadened this to mean “body of work” rather than an individual book, and had decided to interpret “ideal direction” to mean works of universal popularity and interest. That accounts for the laureates of the 1930s — from Galsworthy to Pearl S Buck, Eugene O’Neill to Pirandello, Nobel Prize winners were increasingly recognisable.

The 1940s, disrupted by World War Two, saw the Academy reaching, again, for “ideal work” — but returning, with prizes bestowed on T S Eliot and William Faulkner, to the idea of literary quality and power as the driver behind the Prizes. Andre Osterling, the new secretary of the Academy, was responsible for persuading the Academy to applaud the pioneers of modern literature, from Hesse and Gide onwards. Many of the laureates of the 1940s had been discussed and rejected by a more conservative Academy in previous years. Osterling’s correspondence shows his discomfort with the Academy’s refusal, in the 1930s, to recognise such writers as James Joyce, and his determination not to repeat their mistakes.

1950s-1970s: Over the next two decades, the Prize looked outwards, acquiring a much broader frame of reference. With Churchill, Hemingway, Mauriac, Camus and Pasternak awarded in the same decade, the Nobel was becoming far more international than it had in the first two decades. Pasternak caused the first Nobel scandal, when Russian authorities forced him to decline his Prize — in 1964, Sartre would turn down his Nobel for loftier reasons, and in subsequent years, the Academy has carefully checked to see if authors will say aye or nay.

The 1960s and 1970s were golden years, with Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Kawabata, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer among those awarded. Few women made the cut — Nelly Sachs was the only female Laureate in all these years. And in the 1970s, the infamous Graham Greene rumour began circulating: gossip to the effect that Greene’s amours with the wife of a member of the Academy cost him his gong. True or not, it was a good story.

1980s-2000: Correspondence for these years is not yet available — the Academy releases its working notes with a 50-year time lag — but it is clear that the Prize was more aware of its powers. The Nobel now had the ability to make or break writers, and Garcia Marquez, William Golding and Wole Soyinka balanced then-unknown writers such as Elias Canetti and Claude Simon.

The 1990s was the decade of the poets, with awards going to four stalwarts — Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, making three of them world-famous rather than local heroes. It was also, very much so, the decade of gender equality, as the Nobel recognised Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and Szymborska — three women in one decade. This would be matched in the 2000s, with the Nobel going to Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Mueller and Doris Lessing, but it may be argued that the 1990s had the superior list.

2000-2010: The 2000s have alternated between the obscure — Jelinek, Le Clezio — and the safe anointing of the already famous — V S Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee. The 2000s, going by the list of laureates, reflects the back-and-forth as the Nobel goes to a worthy but obscure European writer, then to a better-known “world literature” figure. Perhaps the greatest challenge the Swedish Academy faces is the challenge of growing out of its Eurocentrism and opening its doors to the whole world of literature.

The BS Column: Naipaul-The Twilight of his Travels

(Published in the Business Standard, September 21, 2010)

I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.


The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour — the prime minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America — The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses — flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled — as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.

“Other travellers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V S Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travellers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarising labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.

In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveller, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)

The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writings. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, that may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart — handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.

The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations — Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.

Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.

Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.

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.