Vikas for Ubud

Always chase your dreams. If you want to be a writer, then don’t get disheartened by the first couple of rejection slips. As I have discovered, it takes just one good agent to help you make your mark in the world. But the important thing is that your product must objectively be good. There are writers, I am sure, who think they have written the next Nobel Prize-winning novel, but maybe the novel is not so good. So get objective advice. Consult your friends, your colleagues, consult those who read books and if they like your book then, I don’t think you should give up, you should keep on trying and I’m sure you will hit the jackpot someday.

Slumdog Millionaire author Vikas Swarup gives encouragment to wannabe-published writers and talks about his work in an interview with Deepika Shetty for Quill magazine. It's up on Eric's blog.

Swarup's new novel is Six Suspects which he describes as an unconventional murder mystery. The author will be appearing at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival next month.

How Reading Shaped Aravind Adiga

How could we function without our only common language? Doing away with English seemed to me tantamount to doing away with India: We were the language's, before the language was ours.

Booker winner Aravind Adiga talks about his relationship with the English language and the literature that shaped him, in today's Independent.*

Adiga has a new collection of short fiction out : Between the Assassinations.

*(I have a subtext here for the wannabes - this is how hungry an author needs to be for words, this is how widely you have to read if you want to suceed. The writing of others has to form you, before you in turn have anything to give. *Steps off soapbox*)

Writing as Ammunition

The prize... was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.

Arundhati Roy talks to Tim Adam's today in The Observer, referring to her Booker win and subsequent shift away from fiction to political polemic. Her new collection of essays : Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy. (Read some of her work here and here.)

A Suitable Sequel

I am so glad I asked Vikram Seth last year at Ubud to write a sequel to A Suitable Boy. I told him that it just wasn't long enough and I wanted more! (And I didn't even resort to any Annie Wilkes like tricks.)

I'm jumping up and down cheering to hear that :

A Suitable Girl will see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A Suitable Boy, who suffered the efforts of her mother attempting to find her a suitable husband during the first book, now a grandmother, searching for the right match for her grandson. To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

Amit - The Publisher's Nightmare

I reacted against this professionalising of the author, in India and in Britain ...

Indian author Amit Chaudhari confesses to being something of a publisher's nightmare to Sophie Harrison in The Guardian. His new novel The Immortals is in nine years.

Particularly interesting in the interview is the comparison between Chaudhuri's

... slender, focused novels ...

and the

... grandeur, whimsicality and pickle factories ...

of Rushdie and his followers, which :

... represents a kind of hallucinatory cliff behind which we cannot see.

I came across Chaudhari's work when he was a guest at our first KL Literary Festival, and was stunned by the meticulous observation and the humanity of his writing which transported me into the same space as his characters.

I have owed him an apology since the festival so post it here.

There really was a balls up with the programming which I was supposed to be in charge of and thought I had sorted out okay. But the nice Mr. Raman decided during the event to shoehorn a couple more readers - folks that he had published - into each slot at the very last minute. It would have been okay ... but both these guys ran over their allotted time and ignored my notes and wild wavings. (I'm studiously avoiding names here because they are guys I really love and they deserved their moment in the sun. Only I wish I had known earlier that they were to be accomodated in the programme.)

Amit's slot (his second appearance in the festival) was scheduled for the very end of the afternoon. I had found a good moderator (or so I thought) for the session - a woman who had studied his work and was a tremendous fan, and she was going to interview him one on one. I told her before the session began the timing she had to work to.

And then the pair of them, up on stage, totally ignored it!

Amit is so interesting, I'd have loved him to speak for hours, and the woman interviewing him certainly knew her stuff and was asking the right questions ... but the ballroom at the Rennaisance was only booked till 6 and there was a wedding dinner taking place that night so the hotel staff needed to move in pretty sharpish to get the place set up so I could give him only 45 minutes. Tops.

The couple on the stage ran over ... by ten minutes ... by 15 minutes ...

I tried to catch their eye.

The hotel staff began to move into the room. I ran over to them and begged for a few more minutes. Not possible.

I started to gesticualte wildly from the back.

The hotel staff began to move tables.

Members of the audience angrily turned round to shush them.

The hotel staff became increasingly and I think deliberately noisier.

The couple on stage were now 25 minutes over time ... having a really cosy chat ...

I picked up the mic and asked the speakers, if they could just wind up the session.

The audience got all angry with me and one woman (a major sponsor) told me to sit down and shut up!

I was by now in tears. I looked around in vain for Raman to help. For anyone who would tell me the right thing to do.

Amit was relectant to end, but said he would close with a reading. He read ... not one of his beautiful descriptive pieces, but a very odd poem about ... shit! Was this a polite and controlled expression of his anger?

And then it was over, and shit was exactly what I felt like! I bawled my eyes out in the Ladies. I had not slept in a couple of days for worrying about everything and all that had to be released before I could face the world again.

But there was the next event to attend ... it was the wonderful production of Riding the Nice Bus over at Zouk, and it went so well that my spirit was completely smoothed again.

And this is why I won't ever be an organiser for a literary festival again, and take my hat off to anybody who does the job. And especially if they manage to remain calm under extremely adverse circumstances!

Regional Commonwealth Prizes Announced

The regional winners of the Commonwealth Prize have been announced, but are not yet up on the official website. (Will append them as soon as.)

Sadly, our Preeta didn't get the Best First Book Prize for the South East Asia and the South Pacific region - that went instead to New Zealand's Mo Zhi Hong (left) for Shanghai Shark :

... the story of young boy's rite of passage as he enters into the bustling, cosmopolitan street life of the contemporary Chinese cities of Dalian and Shanghai, under the tutelage of his uncle, a professional pickpocket.

Mo was born in Singapore, but grew up in Taiwan, China, Canada, the US and New Zealand. he worked as a software developer in New York, and later as an English teacher in north-east China, before returning to New Zealand. He lives in Aukland.

You can hear an interview with him here.

The region's best novel prize went to Australian Christos Tsiolkas who won against some very stiff opposition. His novel The Slap :

... begins with a four-year-old child being slapped at a barbecue in Melbourne's northern suburbs by someone who is not a family member. The uproar that follows is seen from the points of view of eight distinctly drawn characters and puts family loyalty, friendships and social ethics into a fierce crucible.

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Europe and South Asia Heat Best Book Award with Unaccustomed Earth, her collection of stories which has been sweeping all before it, and was praised by the judges for its :

...lyrical, meticulously crafted prose, with the moving and memorable treatment of the diasporic experience coupled with her significant achievement in extending the form of the short story

Mohammed Hanif won in the first book category for his novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes :

... a darkly comic tour de force which takes as its starting point the plane crash which killed Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq. Praised for its "amazingly detailed and plausible portrayal of historical events", as well as its "great political insight and stylistic virtuosity" ...

This is the first time a Pakistani has been a regional winner.

The overall winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize will be announced in mid-May.

Twenty Years of the Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses remains a book about the struggles of migration and the frictions of cultural exchange. It pokes fun at all manner of targets, not least America and Britain. Above all, perhaps, it dramatises the conviction that there is nothing more sacred than the freedom to question what is sacred. Twenty years on, it's a principle that urgently needs to be remembered.

In an excellent piece in the Observer Andrew Anthony describes how the book, first published twenty years ago, ignited a cultural war across the globe - the repercussions of which are still being felt, especially in terms of greatly increased censorship in Britain :

Who would dare to write a book like The Satanic Verses nowadays? And if some brave or reckless author did dare, who would publish it? The signs in both cases are that no such writer or publisher is likely to appear, and for two reasons. The first and most obvious is fear. The Satanic Verses is a rich and complex literary novel, by turns ironic, fantastical and satirical. Despite what is often said, mostly by those who haven't read it, the book does not take direct aim at Islam or its prophet. Those sections that have caused the greatest controversy are contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction - a work of magical realism fiction! - there is no escape from literalist tyranny. Any sentence might turn out to be a death sentence. And few if any of even the boldest and most iconoclastic artists wish to run that risk.

Postscript :

Literary Saloon pointed me in the direction of another article worth reading on the same issue : Twenty Year's On : Internalising the Fatwa by Kenan Malik. Particularly interesting :

The lesson of the Rushdie Affair that has never been learnt is that liberals have made their own monsters. It is the liberal fear of giving offence that has helped create a culture in which people take offence so easily.

Another Postscript :

Screech left this link to Christopher Hitchens Vanity Fair essay on the same theme in the comments. Very well worth a read.

Indian Booker Winners Face Hostility at Home

It qualifies as the ultimate act of subversion. This spectacular feat by writers from a previously colonised nation almost mocking the righteous patronisation the Western literary world would like to heap on writers from the sub-continent. English writers vie for the same prize and that makes the victory sweeter. But back home, as news of yet another Indian writer beating the impossible odds trickles in, the celebration, if any, is muted and tinged with suspicion. Certainly it is nothing when compared to the adulatory headlines every time the Indian Cricket Team beats Australia or England. Even allowing for the much touted cliché that cricket and not literature is the national pastime, it is baffling that these achievers are not accorded a fraction of the accolades that a Bronze Medallist from the Olympics commands. Instead, the hostility they encounter tends to force them into being “Salingeresque” recluses in their own country.

Vijay Nair in The Hindu writes about antagonism towards the Indian Booker prize winners (Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai and Arundhati Roy) from the literary from the literary establishment in their homeland. It's an awful pity that these authors find their efforts met with so much hostility ... and one wonders if the "tall poppy syndrome" doesn't have something to do with it.

Midnight's Children for Big Screen

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, long considered to be unfilmable is to be brought to the big screen, and Deepa Mehta (known for her Elements trilogy) has been signed up to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author himself. Filming will start in 2010.

Calcutta - the New City of Literature?

Calcutta ... produced the first Asian Nobel laureate in Rabindranath Tagore. It was here that Thackeray was born and Dickens's second son buried. The great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib lived here for a while, and the city has produced distinguished authors in English, Hindi, Gujarati, Maithili, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu alongside the Bengali greats. Charles Baudelaire dreamt of a voyage to Calcutta; Mark Twain could not wait to leave the place. It is a city that inspired and enraged Kipling and Macaulay, Ginsberg and Grass.

Academic and author Swapan Chakravorty argues pretty convincingly in the Times that Calcutta (Kolkota) should be the new UNESCO city of literature (an honour currently held by Edinburgh). I've long wondered why the Bengalis seem to have more than their fair share of excellent writers and attributed it somewhat flippantly to the diet rich in fish which is good for the old braincells (which is why Kerelans seems to have a literary advantage too). I'm most probably completely wrong.

(There's more about Calcutta's bid in this piece from the Calcutta Telegraph. Melbourne is also making a bid. ... One day KL, huh?)

Time for Adiga's Tiger

Aravind Adiga has won this year's Man Booker Prize with The White Tiger. Months back, Janet de Neefe who is the director of the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival wrote to tell me that I simply had to read this book. She was so impressed that she invited Adiga to the festival, though sadly for us but happily for him, he flew to London to be there when the announcement was made. Maybe Bali will get him next year?

Although I am only one book into the Booker shortlist this year, I picked the right title to bring away with me on holiday and to write a review of for Starmag. So in that sense I'm happy. As for whether I'm happy with it as the winner ... well I think it will prove a popular choice. It is highly readable (quite zippy actually!), very well written, with relevant and important stuff to say about India's economic miracle, corruption as the only means of survival, the haves and have-nots.

But I am also feeling a little underwhelmed by it. Maybe this is because some of the books I've read recently (including The Brief Wondrous Life of Osar Wao by Junot Dias and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - both of which I need to write about here) blew me away in a way this book just hasn't managed to yet. (And I'm two-thirds of the way through.) It isn't getting under my skin.

At least, though, I do not feel like chucking it into a Balinese swimming pool as almost happened to Anne Enright's book last year! (A novel I hasten to add that I came to greatly appreciate on second reading.)

I also keep comparing it to Indra Sinha's Animal's People which was shortlisted last year and with which I feel it shares certain similarities. Yet I feel that Sinha's book is far the stronger ... I connected with Animal far more than I'm able to connect with Balram.

But I'm happy for Adiga. He's only the fourth debut novelist to have won, and the second youngest ever, and the fifth Indian author. Michael Portillo, chair of the judges, said that for the panel in the end :

... what set this book apart was its originality; for many of us this is entirely new territory - India the dark side. It was in many ways perfect.

Charlotte Higgins writes about the winner on the Guardian website and there is also an extract from the book to whet your appetite. John Sutherland writes an amusing piece about the categories that Booker winners fit into and ask where this book belongs. (He concludes that Adiga is both shooting star and uncommonly readable.) Sam Jordison reviews the novel here.

There's another extract on the Telegraph site, and you might like to read Neal Mukerjee's review here.

I'll append any other relevant links here later.

Kunal's Website

Kunal Basu (whom some of you will remember from his visit to Malaysia in April, see here and here) has just sent me a link to his newly launched website.

Deepika and I can claim that we nagged him into it as we all sat having coffee one afternoon during the Singapore Writers Festival, telling him how badly all authors need them - for promotional purposes but also so that those who write articles on books and authors can find the background information in one convenient place.

Kunal's site really is a corker, I have to admit. I enjoyed browsing through the photo album (as a child above), and reading his opinion pieces on arts and society, management, and traditional crafts.

Hope it isn't too long before we see him back here again.

How Indian Is Indian Writing In English?

The other day Uma raised the issue of why our published-to-critical-acclaim- overseas-Malaysian-authors :

... seemed to be everywhere else. To be anywhere but here.

The same is true of course of Indian authors. (And Pakistani authors, and Bangladeshi authors, and Sri Lankan authors, and Nigerian authors and ... the list goes on.)

Abhinav Maurya writes a very interesting piece about the phenomenon in LittleIndia [found via] :

The next time you walk into a bookstore to browse English books penned by Indian authors, try this little game. Turn to the author biography to see which continent he currently calls home. If you are pondering established names on the literary scene, chances are that nine times out of ten, you will hit upon the phenomenon of the Indian English writer in self-imposed exile.

He ponders the reasons for this, muses on the effects on the writing :

The multiculturalism evident in the works of émigré Indian writers is a result of the alienation they have suffered from both cultures, Indian and western, and their struggle to bridge the gap between the two. It is often because of the distance these writers must contend with between themselves and the milieu of their stories that a certain longing and sentimentality often creeps into their works. Though this element of nostalgia has often been debunked by the critics, it may well be seen as the hallmark of an emerging class of Indian writers.

And in the end recognises :

Whatever the reasons, the exile has done more good than harm to the Indian literary scene, with publishing houses and literary agencies setting up base in India, in recognition of the growing importance of Indian writing in the global scene. The press has been flooded for some years now with stories of major publishing houses like Penguin, HarperCollins and Random House flocking to India in expectation of a literary boom in the country. This in turn has helped many English writers living in India find good publishers and recognition for their work.

Not to mention of course the encouragement for writers inherent in seeing someone from your own part of the world succeed globally.

By the way, I take issue with Maurya saying that Hari Kunzru is an Indian author settled abroad! He was born in Britain and brought up in Britain, but yes has an Indian father! Does everyone need to be pigeon-holed neatly into boxes that identify them as exclusively this and that?

Rushdie Hatrick!

First he won the Booker in 1981.
Then he won, the Booker of Bookers in 1993.
And I've just heard (thanks Eric!) that he's now picked up the Best of Booker.

Congrats Sir Salman on yet another success for Midnight's Children.

(But what won Scott Pack's Alternative Booker? Take a look here.)

Lahiri Leapfrogs List

Jhumpa Lahiri has won this year's Frank o'Connor Short story prize with Unaccustomed Earth. As Lydsay Irvine in the Guardian points out, the book has been something of a publishing sensation, immediately hitting number one spot in the New York Times's fiction charts. Her first collection of short fiction Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer in 2000. (Is any publisher going to spin the tired line about short fiction not selling, after this?)

So no surprises there, really.

The shocker though is that the judges, unanimous in their decision decided to go straight to the announcement, without bothering with a shortlist.

The reason :

With a unanimous winner at this early stage, we decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense. Not only were the jury unanimous in their choice of Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, they were unanimous in their belief that so outstanding was Lahiri’s achievement in this book that no other title was a serious contender.

Nicholas Lezard on the Guardian blog calls it :

... the unpardonable sin of failing to cater for that section of the literary public - and indeed the non-literary public - that likes a flutter.

And I have to agree. The whole point of literary awards is the exposure that they bring to new writing and often hitherto unheard of authors. Cut out the shortlist and you cut out a lot of potential publicity, not to mention a lot of fun for the reader. In other words, perlease bring on the sham!!

But looking on the bright side, Wena can now at least put a sticker on her book saying "nominated for ..." and in that sense stand proudly alongside authors like Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle.

Now to rush out to buy Unaccustomed Earth which just has to be that good!

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

Author on Hunger Strike

Those poisoned in Bhopal continue to sicken and die, without help, without compassion, without justice, because the politicians in Delhi want to do business with their killers. These canaille* refuse to honour the law, blindfold themselves against justice, and, by their inaction, condemn thousands of the citizens they are sworn to protect to fear, pain, suffering and death.

Indra Sinha, the Booker nominated author of Animal's People, adopts the tactics used by the characters in his novel and with nine other campaigners has begun an indefinite hunger strike in support of victims of the Bhopal disaster in 1984, Lindesay Irvine reports in The Guardian this morning :

The hunger strike comes as a "last resort", designed to force government to fulfil promises over rehabilitation schemes in Bhopal and legal action against Dow.

I wrote about this issue in an earlier post, which should provide a bit of context for those of you who don't remember the disaster and don't know about its aftermath.

More about the campaign and how you can help can be found on the Bhopal.net website.

(* = a new word for me too! It means "pack of dogs".)

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 1 : Born in a Library!

My interview with Kunal Basu, author of The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, Racists and The Japanese Wife and Other Stories is in the current issue of Off The Edge where it looks very pretty on the page and appears alongside a piece on the author by Mark Disney. I thank the magazine for giving me permission to use this on my blog, and distributors Pansing for organising the interview. I have split the piece into two parts and the second will be up tomorrow. (This is an earlier draft version and is organised a little differently from the print version.)

Kunal Basu was, it seems, was literally born to the writing life.

His father was a publisher and who met his mother, Shabi, when he published her first book. (She is still producing two books a year at the age of 86.) Basu himself was actually born on the floor of the library of the house in Bengal, surrounded by tall bookshelves. His mother, rushing to finish a manuscript for a publisher, failed to set out for the hospital on time. His aunt cut the chord with a pair of scissors, and his father, in all the excitement forgot to register the birth. “But he kept a meticulous diary,” Basu says “and on 4th May 1956 there’s this one line : Son born. 6.43 a.m..”

He describes his childhood in a house filled with books and lively intellectual discourse, and a constant flow of visiting politicians, authors and painters. He started writing as a teenager and had some stories published in his native Bangla.

He had always thought of himself as a person in the arts, and still seems somewhat surprised that circumstances carried him in a totally different direction. He made, what he now calls, “wrong academic decisions”, studying science and maths before completing his doctorate in marketing with the University of Florida. He became Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University, Canada, before moving to Templeton College, Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Oxford Advanced Management Program.

Whilst he says that he does not regret following this academic path, he says that there has been an internal price to pay: “As one gets older it becomes more difficult to do the things one doesn’t like. And my relationship with writing is nothing short of a grand obsession. I don’t want to do anything else anymore. I want to get up in a morning and just write.”

However, he’s grateful for the opportunities the academic life has given him to travel to parts of the world he might not otherwise have visited. His friends, though, always pull his leg about the fact that as soon as he turns up in a place, political turmoil ensues. “I was Iran when the Shah was deposed, China during the Tiananmen crisis and in Indonesia when Suharto was moving on.” Fortunately, nothing untoward happened in Malaysia on this visit.

While many Indian authors writing from the west seem to be fueled by a sense of alienation, that’s not something that comes through in Basu’s work. “We all build fiction around our lives,” he says “and my convenient fiction is that I haven’t left India, I’ve just gone travelling.”

The travels have lasted 30 years or so, but as Basu sees it, it’s been simply a matter of changing habitat rather than changing home, and he finds that rather exciting. “I love to live in different countries, different parts of the world, different houses, and have different sets of friends. Home for me in many respects is my deep seated cultural moorings and they are not necessarily parochial and not necessarily all tied to India. They are things like books that I’ve grown up with, plays that I’ve acted in or seen, favourite films. I feel very much at home around the Thames because Dickens was an early favourite of mine and the dockside and the docklands of London feel like home for me. And so there are these pegs that tie me to my world and those don’t shift very much.”

His commissioning editor once told him that although he is an Indian author, his writing doesn’t smell of curry. “I said I’m not deliberately trying to create distinction for myself, but I think there are all kinds of thing on my palate, not simply the curry.”

Indeed, Basu’s most recent novel Racists (published in 2006) is the very first Victorian novel written by a person of colour. It features an almost completely white cast of characters and explores the subject of racial science. It wasn’t, he says, written out of any kind of personal angst, and the subject matter took him completely by surprise. The novel began with a single image in his head, that of two children, one black, one white, being raised in isolation on a deserted island off the coast of Africa by a mute nurse, and untainted, as it were by “civilization”.

He knew nothing about racial science at first, but as he started to do his research in Oxford’s Bodleian library, he knew he had discovered a world he wanted to inhabit. He confesses that he is intrigued by what he calls “our indecent curiosity” into the notion of what explains difference.

The experiment at the core of Racists, he agrees, is a product of the rivalry between the two scientists, one French and one British, and the battle between their competing ideologies rather than a meaningful piece of scientific research.

“The thing is that in many ways we think of science as being very objective. But when it comes down to it, it is a human endeavour and like all human endeavours it’s permeated by competition, rivalry, bias, love, hate. Everything. So why should this experiment be any different ? And data isn’t neutral. It talks in the voice of the collector and the observer. If you have two observers, then obviously the data is ambivalent and that’s exactly the case with Belavoix and Bates were trying to do.”

It’s a truism frequently tossed in the direction of new writers that you should write about what you know, so it comes as a surprise to learn then that Basu finds it extremely exciting to write about places he hasn’t visited beforehand. If he had, he says, the experience might actually have impeded, rather than enhanced, his historical imagination.

Kucing, Sarawak, features prominently in Basu’s his first novel, The Opium Clerk. Although he only managed to make his first to the city on his way back from Australia last year, and doesn’t regret at all that he hadn’t been there when researching the novel.

“When I read the diaries and the history and started imagining Kucing, I think it was closer in many ways to Kucing of the nineteenth century. One doesn’t necessarily have to travel physically if one travels in imagination,” he says. But, he cautions, “Imagination has to be helped by research by reading the right things, and the right props are necessary.”

He set his second novel, The Miniaturist, in the court of the emperor Akbar in C16th India, but says that it was much too dangerous to travel to Afghanistan and to the Hindu Kush at the time of writing it. However, he says that he experienced the core of the story because he had travelled in the Mogul parts of India, eaten Mogul food, and listened to Sufi music, and read substantially about that period.

Tommorow, find out how the film of The Japanese Wife came to be made, and read about where Kunal gets his ideas for stories from!

(Pic above taken by Kavita of Pansing.)

Knighted and Benighted

I feel I have been damaged as a writer by the way people perceive my work as part of a political event. It is seen as a political entity rather than an artistic one. When Midnight's Children and Shame were published, people responded quite differently to my writing. Then there was a real shift in tone, when they said: ‘Oh that was what he was really trying to do!' That is one of the pleasurable things about this new book: the storyteller is not me. I am still a fiction writer underneath all that mess.

Salman Rushdie gives an exclusive interview to the Times in the wake of the publication of his latest novel The Enchantress of Florence. He talks to Kate Muir about how he got over a shyness for writing about sex; the challenges of writing in a post-September 11, post-Iraq war world; and his move away from what New Yorker critic James Wood has described as his “hysterical realism”.

The novel is out this month.

An Antidote for Over-Ambitious Parents

Malaysian readers are going to find themselves in familiar territory with Nikita Lalwani's Booker longlisted Gifted.

The novel is partly based on the story of teenage prodigy Sufiah Yusof born to a Malaysian mother and Pakistani father who became something of a cause célèbre in this country when she went missing from her Oxford college before giving herself up to the authorities citing parental abuse and describing her home life as “living hell”.

Her father feared she had been abducted. But then an e-mail arrived from his missing daughter. In it, Yusof wrote that her parents had made her life a "living hell." She accused them of "15 years of physical and emotional abuse," including long study sessions in a house kept icy cold supposedly to improve her concentration.

Lalwani’s novel raises the question of how much can you push your kids academically?

Rumika is 10 years old 2 months 13 days 48 minutes and 4 seconds old when the novel opens. When she was just 5, her teacher came to the house to tell her parents that she was a gifted child, and that this gift should be nurtured.

Rumika's father, Mahesh, is a maths professor at Cardiff university, and knows that hard work is the immigrant's path to respect and recognition. He takes the idea of coaching his daughter on board and runs with it, imposing a strict regime on her that borders at times on abuse.

Rumika longs for normalcy, but as she is forced to study ever harder, her relationship with her cold and scornful father deteriorates even further and she also finds her isolation from her friends increasing. As she enters adolescence she has to carve some freedom for herself, but ends up doing things which are risky and stupid - shop lifting, calling emergency services just because she wants to speak to someone, and harming herself. She also, quite comically, becomes addicted to cumin and munches her way through vast quantities of it. The only period of respite is a trip to India with her mother, Shreene.

Lalwani does a very good job of depicting the sense of loneliness and dislocation in the family, and gets right inside her characters and exposes them. No matter how unlikable Mahesh is, we can understand his motivations and fears. Shreene is caught up in traditional notions of propriety and finds it difficult to navigate the compromises that must be made, not only to adapt to British society, but also to be able to understand and reach out to her daughter.

This might make for painful reading but there are also some wonderfully comic moments in the novel, my favourite - Shreene trying out a bikini wax after reading about it in a woman's magazine.

Rumika wins a place to Oxford, one of the youngest students ever allowed to do a degree course and the move gives her some of the freedom she has been waiting for. Lalwani builds up the sequence of events convincingly and Rumi’s actions come as no surprise. In fact we’re cheering for her as she asserts her independence in the final scenes of the book.

This is a novel that young adult readers, particularly those experiencing examination pressure themselves will enjoy very much indeed. It is also an excellent cautionary tale for overly ambitious parents who should be treated to a copy of it by their kids immediately!

(Many thanks to Kinokuniya for sponsoring my copy of the novel!)

Postscript (30/3/08) :

There's a sad footnote to Sufiah's story, which Rocky has put up on his blog. Kak Teh met her in happier times.