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THE Empire Writes Back. That’s what the world said when a host of Indian authors writing in English burst upon the global literary scene more than a decade ago. Now the Indian literary empire is conquering new territories: after years of being mostly restricted to the Anglophone market, Indian writers are being snapped up in the European market from France and Germany to Spain and the Netherlands. "Indian writers have a growing presence in different language markets. Few countries offer the kind of material that India has to offer. We have a fractured past, a difficult present which seeps into our writing," said Tarun Tejpal, author and editor of weekly paper Tehelka. "It’s also a reflection of the increasing economic power of India. Culture rides on the coat-tails of economic efflorescence," he said. To be sure, the biggest success in the international market is still Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning The God of Small Things, which was published in 1997 and translated into more than 25 languages from French to Finnish. But far from the Arundhati Roys, Salman Rushdies and Vikram Seths is a growing crop of lesser known writers increasingly being book-marked in the foreign language market. Tejpal’s The Alchemy of Desire sold 14,000 copies in the French market within a month of its release this year and is now going into a third reprint. There are many more, and they’re not all peddling Indian exotica or the diaspora experience. Indian authors experimenting with new genres are also selling in the European market. The Simoqin Prophecies, a science fiction book by 25-year-old Samit Basu, has been translated into Swedish and German. Another sword-and-sorcery saga inspired by the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, has sold French and Bulgarian rights. The Gin Drinkers, journalist Sagarika Ghose’s peep into Delhi’s cocktail circuit and how the Oxbridge-educated generation deals with social deprivation, is available in Dutch, and Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled has been translated into French. "At the Frankfurt book fair this year, a lot of foreign publishers, especially Italian, expressed interest in Indian rights," Nandita Aggarwal, an editor at Harper Collins India, said. "As the world gets smaller, more and more people are getting interested in Indian writers". India first made a mark on the global literary map with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981. The next big landmark was Roy’s The God of Small Things, which sent some of the biggest literary agents to Indian in search of the next Roy. After that, there was a flood of writers from Delhi-based journalist Raj Kamal Jha to film-maker Ruchir Joshi who sold the rights for their books for up to 1,60,000 pounds sterling. As India fetes its two biggest literary stars, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, for their latest releases, British writer William Dalrymple created a stir with an article saying future Anglophone Indian bestsellers were likely to come from the West. "Since 1997 there has been no new galaxy of stars emerging to match the stature of those of the 1980s and ’90s. Many of the Indian novelists who were signed up with such excitement 10 years ago failed to repay even a fraction of their advances," he wrote. "In India itself, there is no new internationally acclaimed masterpiece, no new Roy."Indian writers bristled at Dalrymple’s criticism, and reports of Indian authors still drawing million dollar advances kept pouring in. — Reuters |
