If we discussed men the same way that we talk about women…

(Thousands of women come out on the streets to protest via SlutWalks, after a Toronto constable suggests that women could protect themselves better by not dressing like sluts.)


“Of course he’s a rapist, did you see the trousers he was wearing? And that vest? Why would a man wear that kind of clothing if he wasn’t out cruising for a victim?”

“The give away is the brand of jeans. If you see a bunch of guys walking down the road wearing Levis or Diesels, it’s all right, they’re not going to rape you. Other brands—well, I’d be careful. Just saying. You never know what a man wearing another kind of brand is thinking.”

“We always suspected he was a rapist. He’d leave the house every day wearing pajama-kurta—it’s obvious now that he didn’t want to waste time undoing buttons and zips.”

“According to police experts, women should be careful around men in tight jeans. Men in tight jeans are showcasing their sexuality and drawing attention to the power of their libido. Women should also be careful around men in loose jeans. Men in loose jeans have something to conceal, and may either be covering up an excess of sexuality or compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Many experts caution that men who wear pajama-kurta, shalwar-kameez, dhotis or lungis are subliminally indicating intent to rape, because these clothes are less restricting than Western wear.
Men in business suits, say some studies, are considered high risk because they are already accustomed to wielding power and carrying out certain forms of corporate violence. And women should stay far away from men in shorts, boxers and swimming trunks, who are sending out signals that rape would be expedient and easy for them. Police experts on rape suggest that in order to avoid becoming rapists, men should stay at home, not venture out after dark and dress in several layers of clothes—four pairs of jeans, six pairs of shorts—to indicate their willingness to support women’s rights and their intent never to rape.”

But these are things we never do. We never look at male behaviour; it's always the women in the spotlight. We never ask questions about what makes men think they have the right to rape, or to harass; we never look at what a man's wearing when he whistles at, or grabs, or attacks, or assaults, a woman; we never demand that men change their behaviour, their attitudes, their habits; we never shame rapists the way we shame the raped.

Speaking Volumes: The Bin Laden bookshelf

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2011)

“We pray that you do not take these statements out of turn or consider them to step outside the bounds of etiquette.” In 1994, the words of the late Osama bin Laden were measured, almost diffident, as he began to articulate his sense that the Muslim world was under siege.

Just two years later, in 1996, Osama bin Laden had found his voice, as Steve Coll records in Ghost Wars. In August, he issued his declaration of jihad on America, and accompanied this with a poem to the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry: “O William, tomorrow you will be informed/ As to which young man will face your swaggering brother/ A youngster enters the midst of battle smiling, and/ Retreats with his spearhead stained with blood.”

On Monday, news spread of the assassination of bin Laden in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad. Looking back at the two decades the world’s most wanted man shaped and defined, is it possible now to understand the forces that created and shaped him? The profusion of books on bin Laden included several cut-and-paste biographies, collections of quotes and speeches and other detritus. There were interesting asides—among the books Osama was said to have enjoyed were John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, for instance. But these are the books about bin Laden, and the perspectives, that have lasted.

Steve Coll, The Ghost Wars (2004): Ahmed Rashid, no mean expert himself, said of Coll’s magnum opus: “No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events.” It was Coll’s insider knowledge, both of the workings of the US government and of the Af-Pak area, that made The Ghost Wars so good, as he explained the entwined connections between the CIA, Afghan warlords and Pakistani intelligence, and explored what made the region the perfect headquarters for bin Laden.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (2006): Wright began his quest to understand Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in 1948, with the journey made by Sayyid Qutb, the man who inspired Al-Qaeda, “Western in so many ways”. And yet, Qutb hated America, seeing Americans as “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money”. Wright tracks the radicalization of bin Laden and attempts to understand his interpretation and version of Islam—perhaps the most definitive book yet on the rise and philosophy of Al-Qaeda.

Ahmed Rashid: Taliban, Descent Into Chaos and Jihad: In November 2010, Rashid wrote a prescient article on the worsening relationship between the US and Pakistan, noting in parantheses that the Pakistan Army had not gone after Al Qaeda in the country since 2006. And in 2006, Rashid had guessed that bin Laden was “probably just a few hours drive away” from Islamabad.

Rashid emerged as an early expert on the Taliban, and then Al-Qaeda as well as the US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan very early on, drawing from his own experience as a (disillusioned) revolutionary who attempted a failed rebellion against Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He has often been criticized by the likes of Tariq Ali for his hawkish stance—Tariq is a strong critic of the US military presence in Afghanistan, and his politics differ sharply from Rashid’s perspective. (It should be noted that Rashid slams the incompetence, incoherence and indifference towards Af-Pak that the US and Europe have demonstrated, in Descent Into Chaos.)

But it is impossible to understand the shifts in contemporary Islam and the global corporate politics that contributed to the rise of the Taliban, or that helped someone like bin Laden spin hatred into terrorism, without reading Rashid. If anyone could have predicted the plot twists in the bin Laden saga, it would have been Rashid; and if anyone understood how the son of a Saudi billionaire came to wage a religious war against the US, it would be Rashid, again.

Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (2011): Scheuer is a former senior CIA operative who followed Osama bin Laden’s life and career for just over two decades, making this one of the most interesting and definitive of the bin Laden biographies. Setting aside Scheuer’s biases, what comes into play is simply the unusual relationship, so to speak, between the spook and his assigned object of obsession.

He makes the case for the late bin Laden being the product of a sophisticated background, an education buttressed by immersion in the Wahhabi culture, which Scheuer marks as aggressive, misogynistic and intolerant in the Saudi Arabia of Osama’s youth.

In his version, Osama bin Laden emerges less as the bogeyman of Western imagination and more as the sophisticated, often urbane and yet unpredictable adversary. This is a surprisingly intimate, if not always convincing, portrait; perhaps no one gets to know a terrorist better than a man whose objective is to bring about his destruction.

Speaking Volumes: Untold stories: India's non-fiction

(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011)

In the first chapter of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Shakespeare, and a personal story about a patient, Carla.

He runs through the conversation he will have with her, and notes ruefully that there is something rehearsed even about his sympathy, given the demands of the months he’s spent working as a cancer fellow: “In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation — vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt.” Two paragraphs down, without ever losing sympathy for the individual struck with cancer, Mukherjee has moved deftly to Solzhenitsyn, to a bigger picture, using, as he writes, “the past to explain the present”.

Reading The Emperor of All Maladies before it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, I was struck, as were many other reviewers, by how polished Mukherjee’s writing was (“The emperors of exploration”, Business Standard, February 1, 2011). Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, had no creative writing or journalistic background — the two traditional catchment areas for non-fiction writers.

But in the middle of his busiest years as a surgeon and a cancer fellow, he had served a kind of apprenticeship — pieces by him had appeared in medical reviews (Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine) and in mainstream publications known for their demanding editorial standards (The New Republic, The New York Times). Mukherjee’s recording eye for detail, matched with a deep empathy for his patients and an ability to do the historical research required, made this not just a prize-winning book, but a classic and lasting work of non-fiction.

In 2010, when Basharat Peer’s memoir of Kashmir, Curfewed Night, was published, one of its most enthusiastic champions was William Dalrymple, who called Peer a “new star of Indian non-fiction”. A few months later, Dalrymple spoke of his excitement at what seemed to be a new trend — the slow shift towards non-fiction replacing our somewhat obsessive focus on Booker-winning novels and other fiction.

Samanth Subramanian, like Sonia Faleiro, is one of the new stars of non-fiction; Following Fish, narrative journalism exploring India’s coastline, remains one of the best food and travel books of recent times. “This is just the beginning,” he says. We both agree that a handful of authors and non-fiction books from the subcontinent isn’t enough to call a movement, yet.

But as Subramanian points out, what may be changing – and where Dalrymple is correct – is a sensibility, as our curiosity about our own stories is matched by the willingness to actually go out and tell them. “There’s never been a paucity of academic non-fiction – good or bad – in India,” Subramanian notes. “But general non-fiction, journalistic non-fiction hasn’t had much of an outlet.”

Even among the journalists, someone like Sonia Faleiro, who wrote Beautiful Thing after reporting on the lives of bar dancers for Tehelka, or even Suketu Mehta, whose Bombay biography Maximum City sparked a curiosity about Indian non-fiction seven years ago, narrative non-fiction is something you have to earn. Few Indian publications support essays longer than 1,500-2,000 words; and even fewer would offer that space to issues other than politics.

The Caravan, run by Jonathan Shainin and a crack team of writer-editors, who include author Anjum Hassan and former Random House editor Rajni George, is one of the few magazines that look for and nurture narrative non-fiction, aside from a handful of men’s magazines that occasionally commission lengthy essays. (You could make the argument that magazines like Esquire and Playboy contributed much more than centrefolds to US culture —by commissioning short stories, long interviews and long journalistic essays, they helped several generations of writers to survive and grow.)

It’s tempting to see Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer triumph as confirmation of the Indian success story in non-fiction; but in a way, Mukherjee’s success as a writer is a very American, not Indian, success. What would it take to have a The Emperor of Maladies come out of India? More supportive publishing houses, more magazines with demanding editorial standards, more imagination and willingness to go after the untold stories on the part of writers? I don’t really have the answers, but it’s an interesting question.

Tailpiece: The release of the Ibn-e-Safi thrillers (Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread) could revive nostalgia for the days of “clean” blood-and-guts fiction. Ibn-e-Safi’s son says his father, already a well-known Pakistani writer when he considered writing the Jasoosi Duniya series, rose to the challenge when he was told that the books wouldn’t sell in India without sex and violence. He refused to include women, and his spy stories proved successful all the same.

There may have been precedent, though. Indian tastes ran to Alistair Maclean, whose thrillers were notable for his stern abjuration of romance. Maclean famously said that sex gets in the way of the action, a sentiment he may have borrowed from yet another creator of largely celibate heroes, Desmond Bagley, who said that sex gets in the way of the plot. How James Hadley Chase managed to juggle both will, presumably, remain a mystery.

Speaking Volumes: Greg Mortenson's Bitter Brew

(Published in the Business Standard, April 26, 2011. This was such a sad column to write; Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea set me and several other friends on a journey of exploring how best to make donations of money, books or time to local libraries, and briefly inspired a few very big dreams. The sense of betrayal is very strong, for many of us who were Mortenson fans, and I'm hoping that the Central Asia Institute will get its accounting and focus in order and continue to build and maintain schools.
But even if the Three Cups of Tea story has been tinged with bitterness, I am grateful that reading that book years ago led me (and others) to so many interesting library and literay efforts. It was through Mortenson's book--and through the generosity of a friend who gave me Wood's book--that I discovered Room To Read, and the work it does in India among other countries, for instance.)

If you wanted to change the world, 2006 was a good year in which to find inspiration, in the lives of restless men with a will to make the world better and a yen for mountaineering.

Two of them, Room To Read’s John Wood and the Central Asia Institute’s Greg Mortenson, released books in 2006 that would continue to inspire people around the world for the next five years. One of them is in trouble, his story questioned after an investigation by CBS’ 60 Minutes.

There are many parallels between Wood’s story and Mortenson’s tale. Wood, trekking in the Himalayas, stumbled across a Nepali school and was struck by the absence of books for the children. The Microsoft employee returned with the promised books, building what would become the first of many libraries and schools as part of the Room To Read network. Wood founded Room to Read in 2000, writing about the experience in Leaving Microsoft to Change the World in 2006.

Wood’s focus was on Room To Read’s roughly 1,128 schools and 10,000 libraries, built and maintained across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. His book is a corporate memoir — inspiring, but crisp and blunt about the challenges of running an organisation that wanted to change the way the world’s children read. His teachings are blunt, gleaned from experience; it’s from Wood that you learn how much better the small, open-to-all reading room works in India, for instance, rather than the intimidating, closed space of the government library.

Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea belongs on the inspirational literature shelf. His story was gripping: in 1993, Mortenson wrote, his passion for mountaineering got him into trouble, and he stumbled into the tiny village of Korphu in Pakistan’s Karakoram range. Nursed back to health by the villagers, Mortenson promised himself he would return and build them a school, which he did despite the rugged terrain and despite being briefly held captive by a group of men who appear to be from the Taliban. The Central Asia Institute, founded by Mortenson, has established 145 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But what made the book a bestseller was the drama, and Mortenson’s ability to touch people’s hearts. The title is drawn from an incident where he sits down with the statutory wise man of the village, Haji Ali: “...Haji Ali spoke. ‘If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea….’”

It was this kind of wisdom, as well as the message of hope, and Mortenson’s clearly etched passion for educating girls that made Three Cups of Tea such a bestseller, much-loved in India and elsewhere in the world. As with Wood, Mortenson’s lesson seemed to be that it was possible to change the world – “one school at a time” – though the numbers make you wonder which man was more focused on the actual goal.

It is this aspect of the book, and the Mortenson legend that the CBS television show sought to investigate. The accusations carry weight because they are made by a respected writer — wildlife and mountaineering expert Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air and Into The Wild. Krakauer casts doubt on Mortenson’s story of stumbling into Korphu at death’s door — the reality seems to have been more prosaic, with Mortenson pledging to build a school after a normal trek. He also challenges Mortenson’s account of being held by the Taliban, with one of his “captors” denying the story. Mortenson’s responses have been evasive, and he has no good reason for refusing to appear on the 60 Minutes show.

But the real damage arises from the 60 Minutes investigation of how the money raised by Mortenson’s charity is spent —the implication is that the charity spends almost as much on funding Mortenson’s book tours as it does on actually setting up schools.

The CBS show has spread dismay and sadness around the world; the accusations suggest that Mortenson exaggerated much of the truth — and that his charity is unprofessional. No one questions the real, if limited, value of the work he has done; and if organisations like Room To Read have done more in roughly the same time-span, it is not a crime for a charity to be disorganised. There is, as Krakauer and others have pointed out, a more serious breach of trust — those who believed in Mortenson’s legend and the power of three cups of tea are entitled to ask why there weren’t more schools, and fewer book tours.

The real sadness is in having to separate the wisdom of Three Cups of Tea – listen to the people you’re trying to help, believe that you can make a difference, slow down and take time to understand the way things run – from its accuracy. I thought, like many other readers across the world, that this was a true story, and it is heartbreaking in a way Mortenson may not understand to be told that it is, instead, a very colourful one.

Speaking Volumes: Bans and Banana Republics

(Published in the Business Standard, April 5, 2011. Also read Salil Tripathi in The Daily Beast on India's troubled history of limiting free speech.)




At the height of the uproar over Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Gandhi, one question deserved to be asked: what would we do with a negative, critical biography of a revered national figure? The answer, sadly, is dismal: we would probably ban it.
Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a respectful look at the philosophical growth and evolution of Gandhi’s philosophy. The current controversy centres around two minor sections in the book, and also around the larger question of whether we’re comfortable with honest examinations of national heroes as humans, not gods.

The biography deals briefly with Gandhi’s ambiguous relationship with the architect and bodybuilder Kallenbach; they exchanged letters calling each other “Upper House” and “Lower House” in which Gandhi testified often to the closeness he felt for his friend. Gandhi was open on the subjects of sexuality and relationships, detailing his struggle to maintain celibacy with the same exactness as his other experiments with truth, and his relationship with Kallenbach was one of a series of not easily classifiable relationships.

Lelyveld clarified that he had never directly called Gandhi bisexual or homosexual in his biography; the outrage felt and exploited in states like Gujarat and Maharashtra, which imposed premature bans on the biography, was misplaced. (A question few asked is why we should be outraged at the idea that Gandhi, or any other national figure, might be homosexual—or are we officially a nation of homophobics?)

The second issue remained largely unexplored in the Indian media, but in many ways is a far more uncomfortable matter—was Gandhi a racist? Reading many of the letters he wrote in South Africa reveals his open airing of his prejudices about the “kaffirs”; and Lelyveld raises the right questions here.

In both cases, the Lelyveld biography broke no new ground. The Kallenbach letters are in the National Archives; they are also readily accessible on the Internet as part of a broader collection of Gandhi’s letters from that period, the deep, complex affection between both men very evident. Gandhi’s letters where he speaks of “troublesome, very dirty” ‘kaffir’ convicts are also a matter of public record.

Lelyveld’s reaction to the proposed ban on his biography was the puzzled anger of the outsider unused to India’s bizarre political circus. For any author, a ban on one’s writing is the most unjust of edicts—it’s an erasure of one’s words, a brutal silencing of one’s voice. Lelyveld couldn’t believe that a country that calls itself the world’s largest democracy would countenance a ban of a book on the basis of biased reviews—but he had little way of understanding the history of India’s bans, which have been largely political in nature over the last two decades.

Lelyveld’s book has revealed nothing of Gandhi’s political thoughts or private relationships that was not already in the public domain. He has speculated freely, but not irresponsibly. Nothing Lelyveld has written about Gandhi is any more incendiary than Gandhi’s own letters and autobiographical works—but as many commentators have said, today’s politicians would ban Gandhi’s own words if they could.

What Lelyveld’s case demonstrates the ways in which book bans work in India. They are now largely symbolic; the courts have subsequently overturned almost every ban on a book issued by various state governments. They are almost always demanded by political parties, not by private individuals or the ordinary reader; the book ban is now roughly the same as the one-day fast, a token, banal gesture of protest.

They will also always mis-represent the book, so that Rohinton Mistry’s beautiful exploration of the common man’s Bombay and corruption in India can be called a book that contains swear words, and Lelyveld’s words can be twisted beyond recognition.

The damage done to the cause of free speech as states and politicians vie to be the first to ban a book is immense—but it is also almost secondary, because the politicians who seek book bans, from any party, are not thinking of the complexities of free speech issues.

So what does a book ban, of the kind the Narendra Modi government has sought on the Lelyveld book, mean in today’s India? At its simplest, a ban is just an opportunity for a political party to claim the mantle of protector—protector of a faith, of a community, of a national figure, of Indian culture. It is a no-cost opportunity; the small minority of readers in English is not considered a useful votebank, and banning a book offers immediate access to national television.

There are tiny signs that politicians may have over-used the book ban. The Central government and the Congress have backed away from supporting a ban on the Gandhi biography, and it is very likely that the state bans will be overturned by the judiciary.

So far, though, no politician has had the courage to step up and say what Lelyveld has said: this ban, with its disregard for the basic principles of free speech, is shameful. Nor have our politicians acknowledged another sobering truth: our record on book bans and our lack of support for free speech is more appropriate to a banana republic than a democracy.

Previous columns on book bans:

The marketplace of outrage


Rohinton and the Rat Pack: on the targetting of Such a Long Journey


Why we should lift the ban on the Satanic Verses...


...and the Rushdie effect: censorship after the Verses


James Laine and the banning of Shivaji...






Taslima Nasreen: The Power of Offence


Sedition, censorship and the crime of disaffection--the British legacy of banning books

Blasphemy laws and censorship in Pakistan


And: A Pawn Called Taslima


The Care and Feeding of Book Bans

...the freedom to explore: Imagining Shivaji


Book bans in India, Part One
...and Part Two

Speaking Volumes: The twilight of the Brahmins

In Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, there is a wonderful section on the fascination Japonisme held at a certain time in Europe, when Japanese bibelots, netsuke, robes and paintings found their way into Parisian salons: “Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.”

Often, what the collectors of that time picked up from Japan was unremarkable—the dross of everyday life, mass-produced objets d’art mingling with the rare and the exquisite. As de Waal recounts so beautifully, this early hunger was replaced by first a refined connoisseurship, and inevitably, a waning of the interest in Japonisme, a return to the less exotic and the more local.

In the last few weeks, as new books on India by Patrick French and Anand Girdharadass were released, a familiar debate came back to us, reheated and freshly garnished. Pankaj Mishra’s argument with French was over the content of the book—Mishra seemed unable to recognize or reconcile his vision of India, one of cruel economic inequalities and a dominant, often bullying, state, with French’s more upbeat India story.

Reading between the lines, the real anxiety was over French’s portrait, not the quality of his reportage: was this the authentic India, or had he missed the big story? Elsewhere, in a joyously savage piece of provocation, Mihir Sharma flayed India Calling, by Anand Girdharadass, for shallow journalism, and slammed the stereotypes of India that find their way into the “foreign correspondent” book.

But the real debate is one that tore Indian writing in English apart about a decade ago; it’s the question of what makes a book about India the genuine article, and who has the right to “represent” the country. The “authenticity argument” was rapidly buried, with a few stray knives in its back, in the world of Indian fiction—few readers, writers or critics wanted to police books to see how their Indianness rated on a 1-10 scale.

Fewer still are comfortable acknowledging what might be called marketplace realities. In the years when Indian writing was doing well, like a hardworking honour student, in the West, we were happy to measure our importance and success not by the literary impact of a Kiran Desai or a Salman Rushdie but by the sales figures and the prize shortlists. What we are all uncomfortable acknowledging is that the West—shorthand for the complex markets and divergent reading tastes of the UK, the US and a large swathe of Europe—has a sharply truncated view of Indian writing.

Much of the unease expressed by Mishra, and in a different form by Sharma, comes from questioning the need for the Big India book—at some level, we understand that these books are very rarely written by Indian journalists, and that the stories they tell, whether simplified or not, are influential even so. Some of the unease comes from a sense of disenfranchisement; it is telling, for instance, that there seems to be little need for the Big India book in Hindi, or Urdu, or Marathi. Outside of English, we lack either the curiosity or the need to explain India to ourselves.

What the West sees of Indian writing would be ridiculous, if that view wasn’t so influential; as with the age de Waal describes, where all of Japanese culture and history could be interpreted through the shlock, detritus and masterpieces of the art world. Over the last 30 years, some realities have been inescapable; Indian writing in the Western world is defined largely as Indian writing in English, with very few translations making their way abroad.

Writing from the margins—Dalit writing, the resurgence in Indian poetry in English, writing from the North-east—is rarely visible, and when it is visible, it’s exoticised, here and abroad. And by its nature, Indian writing in English has been largely privileged writing—if not quite limited to the sons of St Stephens’, most contemporary writers in this language come from the relatively enfranchised middle class, and their work reflects the limitations of their backgrounds.

In the same week as the French-Mishra rallies, complete with aces and double faults, were playing out at the net, a small piece of data passed almost unremarked. The Census 2001 figures, recently released, revealed that English had effectively become India’s second language, behind Hindi. Many of the new English speakers come from the small towns, or belong to areas of the metros that lie outside the charmed circles of privilege. English belongs to them now as much as it once did, about two-three decades ago, to the old class of writer-Brahmins.

And as this generation begins to tell and write their stories, they may not need to beguile the souks of the West with their Indiennisme. 125 million English speakers, out of whom a much higher percentage has made it their first language in the decade since the Census data was collected, is enough to make its own marketplace. I’m guessing here, but I don’t think this new generation of writers will find much use either for the Big India books or for the debates that drew us in over the last few decades.

Speaking Volumes: Cricket and Collaborators

(Published in the Business Standard, February 15, 2011; image from www.allvoices.com, AFP.)







Around the time that Shehan Karunatilaka began writing the first notes that became Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, another Sri Lankan writer was defining what drove him back to the desk, one novel after another.

"In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia, in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live,” Romesh Gunesekara said in a 2007 interview. Gunesekara’s work had led him to explore the violence and the civil war in Sri Lanka in direct ways; then to move outwards, with a finely comic novel about cricket, The Match, and then back with a novel about the fragility of the environment, both external and internal, Reef.

In his first novel, Karunatilaka starts with an obsession; cricket, as seen through the eyes of an alcoholic journalist in search of a forgotten legend, Pradeep Mathew. For those who know and love the game—that would exclude all but 15 or so people in the subcontinent—Chinaman is a rare treat, brilliant in its ability to capture the nuances of the game, or to conjure up memories of test matches in an era when players wore whites rather than being mobile corporate billboards. And those with long memories will be able to match apparently fictional characters with their counterparts in real life, with considerable ease.

The difference between Karunatilaka and Gunesekara may be the difference from one generation to another; both writers grew up in a time of war, but for Karunatilaka’s generation, violence and bomb blasts were part of the environment, as they become for second-generation survivors of civil war. When blackouts and package bombs seep into Chinaman, around page 240 or so, they come in as interruptions to the journalist’s attempt to track down the missing cricketer; the announcement of the “worst terrorist attack” since 1995 in Sri Lanka is just a pause in the journalist-narrator’s intense struggle with his alcoholism.

Karunatilaka sets himself free to write about the things that matter to him, as a young novelist making his own way in the world: the perfect delivery, obsession and passion, sleaze, addiction, marriages, and writing itself. He may, as Gunesekara was, be drawn back into his country’s history in time, but Chinaman is, in a way, a declaration of independence.

Growing up in Kashmir, one of Mirza Waheed’s strongest memories was of a time when raids by the army on villages and towns had become increasingly common, routine business. At the JLF, he described the process: the informer would sit inside an army vehicle, and the boys and men of the village would be made to walk past. They had to pretend everything was normal; on one of these occasions, a man was shot by an army officer just before it was Waheed’s turn to walk past. This was also not uncommon, but as Waheed walked by, he realized that the man who had been shot was still twitching, possibly still alive. There was nothing he or the other men could do, except continue walking; the idea, he said, was to pretend that everything was normal.

The Collaborator should really have been a memoir, but that is not necessarily a criticism. Mirza Waheed’s first novel follows the story of a boy who becomes, unwillingly, a collaborator, a counter of corpses who must obey the orders of a cynical Indian army captain. The pages of The Collaborator smoulder with anger and with the narrator’s determination to tell a truth beyond anything that might be conveyed in a newspaper headline, a five-minute television clip.

Waheed’s prose is raw, deliberately unpolished as he captures the cadences of a boy who grew up in the Valley. “I saw my first dead body, before the population of dead bodies I deal with now, in that breezeless dry summer of last year… Farooq returned after three weeks. Tortured, he became a tourist site.”

The Indian army captain is a caricature, but one drawn from life; his drunken, rambling diatribes form a kind of Defence of the Realm speech. Waheed’s aim is to provide not so much a fictional reworking of the past as a thinly fictionalized testimony, the human story of the human rights abuses visited upon Kashmir in the form of a novel. That may limit The Collaborator’s appeal to some, but it does not limit its ambition.

In their starkly different ways, Chinaman and The Collaborator are books that remind us of the new generation of writers who’re coming up behind the Rushdies, Seths and Ghoshes. One book deals headfirst with a history of violence; another chooses to break with the past and write a Sri Lankan epic that rarely mentions the civil war directly. What both writers have in common is confidence and conviction.