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/

Book review: Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta

(Published in the Business Standard, April 28, 2010)

Quarantine

Rahul Mehta

Random House

Rs 399, 252 pages






“The week I start making notes for this essay is the same week my mother is reading for the first time the manuscript for my short story collection, Quarantine...,” Rahul Mehta writes in an essay, Coming Out, just after the publication of this debut collection.



“What I didn’t say then was that I, in fact, don’t want [my parents] to read it. And now that my mother is, I am terrified. I am worried that she will object to the family stories I have stolen and altered and bent to suit my purposes. I am worried that she won’t understand what “fiction” means, and that every time she reads a passage in which a young, gay Indian-American man is having sex (and there is, in fact, a fair amount of sex in the book), that she will think it is me: me having rough sex in an alley, me masturbating in the back of the family car, me having unprotected sex in a loft in New York with a one-night stand.”



More, almost, than the nine stories in Quarantine, this essay marks the pleasures and pitfalls of Rahul Mehta’s writing. This is one of the most surprising collections I’ve read in recent months: honest, spare, moving in the tenderness with which he chronicles the fault-lines and the epiphanies of relationships, but narrow in its scope and ambitions.



The narrator is not Mehta—this is fiction, as he stresses. Though he’s a young, gay Indian-American man himself, that really isn’t him in these stories having sex, or having a nervous breakdown, or facing family conflicts, or holding down an imaginary job. But the narrator’s voice changes little through these nine stories; it’s the link, the connection the reader needs, though it offers no shift in perspective.



In ‘Floating’, a gay couple explores tourist India and returns with artifacts. These are not so much the trinkets and funny stories the narrator despises, but an unsettling encounter, a hint of violence, an anger from the local community that they are not doing their job, not buying the right commodities—sex, fake miniatures—in the right market. In ‘Yours’, Don, Antwon and the narrator circle around each other, trying on power games, trying desire on for size, rejecting the wrong fit. There are bickering gay couples, or the ones who break up over infidelity in ‘Ten Thousand Years’; there are the ones who have slid, without meaning to, from intimacy into near-marital familiarity and can’t find their way back.

Like John Cheever, Mehta is instinctively a kind of Chekov of the suburbs, drawn to the tangled and concealed histories of conventional, apparently bland families—chiefly of the Indian diaspora. Though a few stories are set in India, it’s clear that this is a country seen through a tourist’s eyes, and there’s little questioning or unnecessary tension in that relationship.

One of the most touching stories here, Citizen, is ostensibly about an elderly woman’s struggle to pass her American citizenship test; but the real theme is in the first line: “Everybody told her this is what she should want…” The degrees of disenfranchisement that interests Mehta are personal rather than political. He’s brilliant at excavating the real histories: in the title story, Quarantine, the bitterness and bad blood between the narrator’s mother and his grandfather hides the true bond between them—a mutual helplessness, a shared lack of control over their lives.

It’s rare for Mehta to falter technically, but he does in the ambitious, Carveresque ‘What We Mean’, where the protagonist’s slow breakdown is communicated through his verbal outpourings and a loss of language. It’s brilliantly done; but implausible, because the protagonist retains control over the structure of the story even as he loses control over his mind, always a danger where you’re using a first-person narrator in a situation of this kind.

More often, he’s in perfect control of his material. In ‘Ten Thousand Years’, the travelling couple buy a 1967 Malayalam phrasebook: “…filled with translations for phrases such as: ‘That’s the boy’s job,’ ‘Tell the boy to come in the morning’, ‘There is plenty of work for the boy’.” They are both horrified, but later, during a lover’s quarrel, one of them will use these phrases, as hurtfully as he can, to initiate the break-up.

Quarantine’s greatest flaw is its narrow ambition, and Mehta’s deliberately constrained range—it’s the exact opposite of the “baggy monster” school of writing, and for a certain kind of reader, the limitations won’t be a barrier. It announces Rahul Mehta as an extraordinarily astute, talented young writer, blessed with a quality not often considered literary—he has empathy, and he writes dialogue like a practised eavesdropper. It would be unfair to stereotype Quarantine as just a collection of “gay writings”, any more than John Updike’s short stories are just a collection of writings about hetero relationships, but Mehta’s lack of self-consciousness makes this a wonderful exploration of writings about gay men and different approaches to masculinity, as well as the family in general.

Over the next decade, it’ll be interesting to see whether Mehta manages to expand his range. His craft and his assurance are unquestionable, but while Quarantine is a beautiful, and often moving, read, it stops just short of being memorable. That’s a problem Mehta shares with John Cheever, and it didn’t stop Cheever from building his reputation and his audience over time.

The BS column: Guerrillas in the Mist

(Published in the Business Standard, April 27, 2010)

At the height of the first Naxal movement, reflections of the revolution could be seen in the works of writers from Kerala, Bengal, Andhra and other “affected” states. Some romanced the gun, some romanced the revolutionaries; some were fiercely anguished works that are still read, if only in the college library.

It is unwise to expect the conflicts of the day to draw an immediate response from writers, but the Maoist conflict in India over the last few years has begun to leave its mark on writing in English. You may or may not be among the ranks of Naipaul believers, but give him credit for his sharp instincts.

In 2004, four years before Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti’s non-fiction exploration of Salwa Judum and the Maoists, was published, Naipaul came out with Magic Seeds, in which his protagonist Willie Chandran joins a revolutionary movement in India. Like C P Surendran’s 2006 Iron Harvest, Magic Seeds illustrates the pitfalls of writing about revolution. Ideological debates seldom make for strong plot points, and it requires the cynical eye of a Graham Greene to turn calls to the barricades into good writing. Naipaul flourished his own brand of cynicism: “Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police.” But if Iron Harvest was imbued with an excess of revolutionary fervour and disillusionment, Magic Seeds exuded listlessness.

Perhaps non-fiction will be the more useful form for this insurgency, or conflict. Before Arundhati Roy walked with the comrades, Jason Motlagh did a prescient piece that reflected his unease with the aims and the violence of the present-day Maoists. In 2001, journalist Satnam had travelled to Bastar to meet the comrades; his deeply sympathetic account was published in 2003 in Punjabi. Jangalnama: Travels in A Maoist Guerrilla Zone (Penguin) has just been published in English, and it’s both interesting and dated.

Satnam is blunt about the fact that his sympathies lie with the Maoists, and in many parts, Jangalnama reads like a paean to the simplicity and openness of tribal life — with a nod to the considerable economic hardships. “The laws of Manu have not influenced their lives,” he observes, joining in with the 18-hour marches, the collective song sessions, the basic meals of rice with pumpkin gravy. There is much understanding and sympathy here — in fact, the parallels between Satnam’s journey and Roy’s more recent journey are startling — but no questioning of violence, and little reflection on the lives of the children whose co-option into the movement as young guerrillas is essentially choiceless. Jangalnama is interesting as a historical curiosity, but Satnam’s romanticising becomes a barrier. The great revolutionary novel or account of this decade is yet to be written.

RIP, Alan Sillitoe
“A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality…” Alan Sillitoe, who died this week at the age of 82, wrote in his biography, Life Without Armour. It’s a pity the book is out-of-print, because it remains a remarkably honest account by one of Britain’s Angry Young Men.

Sillitoe’s life was brutal; his father was a vicious drunk, his mother sent him — briefly — to an institution for the mentally challenged because they provided free porridge and daily meals, and he led a working man’s life for years before making his bones as a writer. But this is really a reader’s biography: pages and pages taken up by lists of what he was reading, the early discovery of the Williams and Biggles books, the comforts of the public library. He was a voracious reader, despite his father knocking books out of the young Alan’s hands.

Sillitoe wrote a great deal more than most realise, but the book we all remember is iconic: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It marked a point in British writing when stories about “us” and “them” were being written by “them”, for perhaps the first time in the 20th century. The protagonist discovers his talent for cross-country running while in a Borstal prison, realises both a genuine passion for running and his contempt for the governor who wants him to win a specific race. Instead of mourning Sillitoe, read Long Distance Runner again: “Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas, we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.”

The BS column: The missing Indian canon

(Published in the Business Standard, April 19, 2010)

In the library sales from the crumbling houses of Calcutta, or Delhi, or the hillstation homes, the keen-eyed book buyer would often come across sets of bound classics. These were usually in the printer’s binding—vellum, blue leather and gold—or occasionally bound in red with the owner’s initials stamped on the spine or on the frontispiece.

Over the decades, the contents of these classics changed. Everyman’s Library of classic works was a favourite, as was the Modern Library set; but depending on the owner’s tastes, you might have complete sets of histories, or the World’s Greatest Short Stories, or Masterpieces of World Literature, or a complete set of Greek mythology. You would very rarely find a similar set of Indian classics—individual books, almost always a Mahabharata, a Ramayana and perhaps the great poets or favourite Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali writers.

But complete sets were hard to find, even in the most literate of households, because the concept of a classics shelf for Indian literature didn’t sit comfortably in our imaginations. There were exceptions: Oxford University Press and Penguin India have both produced excellent translations and classics sets, but there has been no authoritative equivalent of the Loeb Classical Library. As of this week, a handsome donation by Infosys’ Narayan Murthy to the Harvard University Press might change that. The project he has in mind would be the Murthy Classical Library of India—with dual-language editions of Indian classics in several languages, from Hindi to Punjabi to Malayalam.

Just a few years ago, the Clay Library project, funded by the philanthropist John Clay, began publishing the beautifully produced Clay Sanskrit Library. It’s one of the very few series I actively regretted not being able to publish—it went to Random House instead of my nascent publishing house—and I remember how beautiful the Clay volumes of Kalidasa and Dandin looked, bound in eggshell blue, the acid-free paper turning smoothly to the touch of your fingers.

Gurcharan Das, as formidable a reader as he is a writer, speaks with affection of the “battle books” (Books Six to Nine of the Mahabharata), in “beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit”. But the Clay project has been disrupted by the illness of John Clay, and there’s some uncertainty about its future. And the Murthy Classical Library, by spreading its net wider than Sanskrit, promises to deliver something we’ve never really had—a comprehensive look at our literary heritage, even if it might take decades to complete.

What do we currently read in the way of our own classics? We don’t have an easy equivalent of “the Classical Canon”—in the sense of a list of classic literary works that would be considered essential reading for any thinking Indian. Most of us imbibe the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, almost by osmosis, whether it’s through the great authoritative translations or through your grandmother’s retellings or via a more popular comic-book or TV serial version. After this, it splinters according to individual preference—there are very few outside the academic world who would read, simultaneously, the Rajatarangini and the Cilappatikaram, Shakuntala and the Buddhist song-cycle of the Charyapada.

Back in my university days, there was an unconscious acceptance of the idea that you could read in translation—we read Chaucer and Homer without questioning the difficult medieval English of one or the translation from Greek of the other. It rarely occurred to even enthusiastic readers to wonder why we couldn’t similarly study the Mahabharata. This isn’t an argument for cultural representation; just a way to underline the fact that we have a large blank shelf in our households where the Indian classics should be. Where this space is filled with classics selected at random, it’s often limited by the language we know best—we’ll read our own region’s greatest authors, but not roam too far abroad. Murthy’s donation is a way of acknowledging that this is a country where we often read, and think, in translation. It’s just not reflected on our bookshelves.

Tailpiece: Years ago, critics in Calcutta dissed Shankar’s writings: he wrote for the masses, and his bestselling books were too populist to be considered serious literature. The Bengali writer makes no claims himself to literary greatness, but I think it’s going to please him tremendously that Chowringhee is on the shortlist for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The other shortlisted fiction includes two books in German, two in French and one in Italian—Chowringhee, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, is the only Asian contender this year.

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

Book review: Brothers at War (Empire of the Moghul, Book II)

(Published in the Business Standard, March 2010. I met and liked Michael and Diana Preston, co-authors of the Empire of the Moghul series, but as is apparent, I wasn't sold on the second volume. The Prestons have been travelling to India for over 30 years, and know their Mughals--but Humayun didn't come to life for me. Not that this is going to dent their impressive Indian sales, and both of them seem so enthusiastic about the Jahangir book, where Mehr-un-Nissa takes over the story, and the Akbar book, that I'm willing to stay with the series a while longer.
Loved Michael's story about travelling to Iran just after the Rushdie fatwa with a copy of the Baburnama. Just before he reached, he realised it had a foreword by Salman Rushdie, so he ripped out those pages; then searched the book frantically for more Rushdie mentions, and finally made Teheran airport with a bowdlerised Baburnama, title pages, foreword, back cover missing. After all that effort, Iran Customs showed no interest in the book.)


Empire of the Moghul: Brothers at War

Alex Rutherford,

Hachette, Rs 495, 436 pages

Edo Steinberg is an unsung, unpublished genius whose claim to fame rests on this contribution to the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest:

“Our tale takes place one century before the reign of Alboin, the Lombard king who would one day conquer most of Italy and who would end up being murdered by his own wife (quite rightfully, I'd say, since Alboin made a drinking cup out of her daddy's skull and forced her to drink from it), when our little Sonnebert was seven years old.”

Steinberg was one of the 2008 winners in the Historical Fiction category, and this entry sums up the pitfalls of trying to write in the epic vein. It’s tempting to adopt a sonorous style to fit the period, to introduce too much information too fast, and to try to sneak in a winsome minor character, usually of dubious value.

Contrast this with the quiet opening paragraph of Brothers at War, by Alex Rutherford: “The wind was chill. If Humayun closed his eyes he could almost imagine himself back among the pastures and mountains of the Kabul of his boyhood, rather than here on the battlements of Agra. But the short winter was ending. In a few weeks the plains of Hindustan would burn with heat and dust.”

In just two books, part of the grandly ambitious Empire of the Moghul series, the husband-and-wife team that make up the pseudonymous “Alex Rutherford” have made their mark on historical fiction in India. Diana and Michael Preston are both civil servants and enthusiastic travelers, and what drives Empire of the Moghul is their passion for the bloody lives and times of the emperors, from Babur to Aurangzeb. The first book, Raiders from the North, drew heavily from Babur’s writings to create a portrait of a young, ambitious king, exiled several times over in his fierce quest for a kingdom of his own; Brothers at War takes us into the far more internal struggles of Humayun.

In their account, Humayun emerges as a man of the senses, beguiled and betrayed by his appetites, embracing opium as passionately as he embraces the women of his harem. His virtues are also his weaknesses: the compassion and forgiveness he shows his warring brothers as they plot against him will drive him into exile for years. As with the first book in the series, it’s the Prestons’ attention to detail and their intimate knowledge of the workings of the Mughal empire that makes this a satisfying, meaty read. They’re great on the battle sequences, and when they offer details such as the astrological carpet Humayun has woven when his opium-fuddled mind wants the court to be governed by the planets, they bring the period alive.

But the really great historical novels, like really great literary novels, make their mark by creating unforgettable characters. Hillary Mantel did this in Wolf Hall by bringing Thomas Cromwell—the weaver’s brat who rose to become the king’s counselor—to life against the bloody, brutal background of Tudor England. George RR Martin, with a cast of fictional characters in an imaginary landscape in the Song of Ice and Fire, pulls off an awesome feat when he makes you believe in a country where the last of the dragons still terrorise the skies and direwolves roam an increasingly bitter winter landscape. He does this by making his protagonists—the young boy-king, Rob, the diabolically shrewd and kind dwarf Tyrion Lannister—as real as though they inhabited the pages of a history textbook.

The Prestons do their best, lacing Humayun’s struggle to reach, and hold, the throne of Hindustan with internal monologues: “An even deeper melancholy took hold of Humayun—not only grief at Maham’s death but a sense that many of the certainties of his youth were crumbling. All his life he’d been a pampered prince, brought up to expect great things as of right, confident of his place in the world. Never before had he felt so insignificant, so vulnerable to the buffeting of others’ actions.”

This tiny section encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of the Rutherford/ Preston approach. They manage, successfully, to avoid the kind of bombast and clichés that infest what might be called the school of the hysterical novel. But if these first two books are any indication, Empire of the Moghul will remain a satisfactory, page-turning read, never reaching the heights of the really great historical novels. As with Babur, Humayun in these pages emerges as slightly more interesting than he does from the history textbooks—but they remain flat characters.

One way around this for writers like Philippa Gregory has been to focus the action on minor characters, letting us see emperors and empire through the eyes of a footsoldier, or a skeptical vizier, or a lady of the harem. The trick, with this series, is to treat a historical character the way you would treat an imagined character, to reimagine the emperors of India. For all the virtues of this series, perhaps the Prestons will remain better historians than novelists.

Speaking Volumes: The desi roman-a-clef

(Published in the Business Standard, April 5, 2010. Any great Indian roman-a-clefs in languages other than Bengali or English?

“I read Glenarvon too, by Caro Lamb…/ Goddamn!” In 1816, when the Lady Caroline Lamb published her infamous roman à clef, Glenarvon, Lord Byron’s response summed up his dismay at discovering the history of their tempestuous romance preserved for posterity. Glenarvon, now barely read, went into multiple editions at the time; Caro Lamb was ostracized and condemned; Byron continued his devastating career despite the scandal.

The reviews were stern and moralistic (the British Critic lamented the sorry influence of the excesses of the wicked, depraved Continent—oh, those Italians!—upon staid, upright English society), and the sales were spectacular: in other words, Glenarvon surpassed the hopes that any publisher of a roman a clef may permit himself to harbour.

Good fiction and good gossip have a lot in common—so does bad fiction. James Wood once dismissed John Updike’s suburban-America stories as so much “gossip in gilt”. The pleasure of the roman à clef lies in the drawing-room thrill of the guessing game, as has happened with Hindutva, Sex and Adventure (Roli Books), by ‘John MacLithon’.

Hindutva, Sex and Adventure is a silly season book. At 166 pages, it fictionalizes the life, amours and journalistic biases of one of India’s best known adopted foreign journalists, Mark Tully, badly disguised as “Andrew Lyut”. It’s slight, but has enough insider dope to do well at the Foreign Correspondents Club, and bets on the author’s identity have been placed in the very best Delhi salons. (The smart money’s on Francois Gautier, despite his denials—Gautier hints that Tully himself wrote the novel, and Bernard Imhasly is the third favourite in the Identify MacLithon stakes.) How does it stack up against roman a clefs of the past?

Bengal Nights, Mircea Eliade: This lyrical, and I use the word with prejudice, lush and overblown 1933 novel romanticizes the relationship between Alain (Eliade himself) and Maitreyee Debi, poet, protégée of Tagore, and daughter of a renowned Bengal philosopher. Though Eliade refers in passing to the social world of 1930s Calcutta, most of his focus is on the ineffable, mystical aspects of his affair, where Maitreyi Debi stands in for the mysterious East. Decades later, she responded in kind with the equally sonorous It Does Not Die (Na Hanyate), making this a rare instance where the novel does duty as syrupy love letter.

Beethoven Among The Cows, Rukun Advani: Though this isn’t a classic roman a clef, this early novel by a highly respected publisher included an unforgettable portrait of the scholar Gayatri Spivak. “Professor [Lavatri] Alltheorie’s Collected Marxist Phonecalls had outsold Gone With The Wind… Her Collected Feminist Faxes was in press. Her opponents defined her subject-position with a law—Lavatri’s Law: Incredible Articulation + Incredible Incomprehension = Incredible Salary.”

The Insider, PV Narasimha Rao: This 1998 novel by a former Indian PM is now justly forgotten; Rao’s political revelations were overshadowed by his fondness for his upright, morally anguished protagonist, Anand. It was widely assumed that his characters were based on the politicians of the day-- Sanjeeva Reddy, Brahmananda Reddy, Lakshmikantamma and V.B. Raju, among others. At 767 pages, it suffered from the defects of a great deal of Indian political writing—the gossip wasn’t good enough to justify the prolixity.

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth: Seth’s magnum opus included a vast array of cleverly executed sketches of post-Independence politicians—GB Pant, CB Gupta and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed appeared under various pseudonyms. The novel had ambitions beyond the scope of the conventional roman a clef, and lived up to them, but he was devastatingly accurate—especially in the Calcutta sections. The lady intellectual who speaks of Duality and Oneness, the father-and-son lawyer pair known as the Bony Bespectacled Banerjis and the gorgeous, unfaithful boxwallah’s wife were among the many characters based on real persons, which may explain why A Suitable Boy continues to sell like sandesh in Bengal.

With the exception of Seth’s fiction, most Indian roman a clefs have followed the Glenarvon route. Mrinal Pande’s My Own Witness touched on the early years of TV stardom in India, with Prannoy Roy and Pritish Nandy easily identifiable in her cast of characters. It made a brief stir in 2001, just as Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-Goers (with characters loosely based on V S Naipaul, Vasundhara Raje Scindia and Mala Singh is receiving some critical attention today. Back in 1816, C Lemon wrote to Lady Frampton of Glenarvon that there was “no connection between any two ideas in the book”, and expressed further disapproval. Having done so, she provided a key to the characters—so and so was Lady Oxford, such and such Lady Holland—that made it clear she had read her way avidly through the novel, despite her criticism.

Hindutva, Adventures and Sex, like Kanika Gahlaut’s 2002 expose of Eminence Greases and fashion victims in Delhi, Among The Chatterati, is unlikely to last more than a season; a better roman a clef may last a decade; but they’re not meant to last. The roman a clef promises entertainment for the moment, insider gossip and perhaps a little in the way of snapshot wisdom. It’s as serious, and as frivolous, as the changing fashions of the day.