Luring back the reader

With more and more people buying books, the year saw an upsurge in the reading habit. It was boom time for not just fiction but also non-fiction….

SOME writers are just one-book wonders and, like Emile Bronte, Margaret Mitchell or Arundhati Roy, they bask in the sunshine of the popularity of their first books for most of their lives. They know they don’t have another book in them and don’t make the attempt to write one. But there are other writers who may actually be one-book wonders but never tire of overstretching their jaded creativity.

Indian publishing in 2003 revealed some of these writers. Heralded as the ‘big-finds’ of Indian writing in English some years ago, they were a huge disappointment with their second novels. The hype and hoopla was there all right but the books failed to measure up in terms of literary merit.

Two writers who fell in this category were Raj Kamal Jha and Navtej Sarna who churned out sentimental and nostalgic kitsch full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Sarna’s We Weren’t Lover’s Like That and Jha’s If You Are Afraid of Heights had all the frills but little substance. Because of the positions of both the authors — Sarna is with the Indian Foreign Service and Jha is a senior journalist with a leading national newspaper — their books garnered huge publicity but as far as writing goes, these were just an unabashed whining for the past.

Raj Kamal Jha was particularly disappointing. Critics, who had heaped praise on his first novel A Blue Bedspread, began to question their judgements about Jha as a writer. One critic found his second effort so bizarre, incomplete and disjointed that he went as far as to advise Jha to go back to the basics of writing. But then Jha has his admirers in the West, particularly the literary agents for whom exploring the ‘uncharted zones’ of incest and child abuse are perfect grist for their ‘literary’ mill.

But despite such disappointments, the year saw an upsurge in the reading habit with more and more people buying books. A survey carried out by ORG-MARG revealed that it was boom time for not just fiction but also non-fiction.

Top-sellers

The top-sellers in the fiction category were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoneix, Jeffery Archer’s Sons of Fortune and Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13. In the non-fiction list, the top spot was occupied by Hillary Clinton’s Living History, followed by Ignited Minds by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and in the third place came India in Slow Motion by Mark Tully and Gillian Wright. Then there was Shiv Khera’s bestseller You Can Win and Tarla Dalal’s Swadisht Subzian.

Compared with last year, 2003 was not a year for big titles, either fiction or non-fiction. However, like every year, it did throw up some exciting new Indian writers in English.

Aniruddha Bahal’s Bunker 13 was by far the biggest title from India this year not only in terms of notching big sales and a fat advance but also in terms of literary innovation and craft. Bunker 13 was Bahal’s first book (Bahal does not like to acknowledge A Crack in the Mirror, a college romance he wrote many yeas ago, as his debut.) His new book charted a new path in espionage or literary thriller writing, a genre not usually explored by Indian writers.

Preeti Nair and Uttarra Chauhan were two other first-time novelists who made a valiant attempt with their books, One Thousand Shades of White and A Model House, respectively. Both books went back and forth several generations and were good reads on the whole.

This year it was left to veteran writers I. Allan Sealy and Gita Hariharan to reassert confidence in Indian writing in English. Their books lived up to expectations. Sealy published his fifth book, The Brainfever Bird, which revolved around the themes of love, international intrigue and biological weapons.

Gita Hariharan’s book In Times of Siege describes the life of an Open University professor who is attacked by Hindu zealots for his writings. The other books which registered a beep on the literary graph were Dev and Simran by Eunice de Souza, The Boyfriend by R.Raja Rao and Uncoupling by Cauvery Madhavan.

Expatriate Indian writers proved yet again that they were producing a far more important body of work than the writers writing in English back home. Hari Kunzru’s spectacular first novel Impressionist is just one example. The London Times predicted that, "Kunzru’s name may soon be as famous as his literary forbear Salman Rushdie."

Pico Iyer experimented yet again with Abandon, a romantic novel written in the Arabian tradition. Kunal Basu and Adarshir Vakil, both NRIs, came up trumps with their second novels. 

Basu’s The Miniaturist was set in Akbar’s times and captured the growth and downfall of a court artist.

Adarshir Vakil’s One Day was one novel that did not try to capture the pan-Indian reality — an inveterate obsession with a majority of Indian novelists in India or abroad. One Day was concerned with the small and the trivial. 

The book captured the life of an unhappily married couple in London. India-born-US-resident, Jhumpa Lahiri, published her eagerly awaited novel, Namesake, though it did not get as good a response as her The Interpreter of Maladies.

Non-fiction

Like almost every year, this year, too, it was in non-fiction that writers distinguished themselves. Every year more non-fiction titles are published than fiction. Penguin, by far the largest publishing house in India, publishes over 180 titles every year. More than half of them are non-fiction.

The Iraq war brought out the best in some journalists. Dilip Hero, a UK-based Indian writer and West Asia specialist, published three books, including Iraq — A Report from the Inside and Secret and Lies-Operation Iraqi Freedom and After. But it was former BBC correspondent Satish Jacob’s From Hotel Palestine: Baghdad Pages From A War Diary that gave a blow-by-blow account of the war from the front.

There were a number of biographies and autobiographies, too. Ismail Merchant’s My Passage To India came out in the beginning of the year while Leila Seth, the first female Chief Justice of High Court, published her autobiography On Balance in December. This year saw four well-researched and insightful biographies: Saurav by sports journalist Gulu Ezekiel, Ram Jethamalani by Nalini Gera, Sonia by Rasheed Kidwai and Nehru — the Invention of India, by Shashi Tharoor.

In the political and social sphere there were a number of books by eminent journalists and commentators. M. J. Akbar explored communal tension in India in his Riot After Riot, while Seema Sirohi investigated the evil of dowry in Sita’s Curse. Inder Mahlotra concentrated on the dynastic tradition in the subcontinent in his Dynasties of India and Beyond and Khushwant Singh published his castigating book, The End of India, which sold the best in its category.

This year also saw the publication of Vivek Menon’s Field Guide to Indian Mammals, a comprehensive colour book on all Indian mammals — a fitting answer to Salim Ali’s famous Book of Indian Birds. Numerous coffee table books also made a mark but it was Dinesh Khanna and Pico Iyer’s Living Faith and Roli Books’ mega compilation, The Unforgettable Maharajas: The 150 years of Photographs that took the cake.

And so, as India looks at another year of fiction and non-fiction, experts are predicting a huge upsurge in the book business while Indian authors and bookstores have successfully managed to get some new and some not-so-new readers to pick up a book and ditch the TV. — Newsmen Features

HOME