| Bookstorm by Lavina Melwani
These Indian Americans have the write stuff.
So
powerful is the urge to write that even publishers are
turning into writers! The latest big success story is
that of David Davidar, CEO of Penguin India, who turns
author with The House of Blue Mangoes. Davidar, 43,
co-founded the company when he was just 26, becoming
one of the youngest publishers in India or abroad.
At Penguin India, he published some of the best known
names: Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, R.K. Narayan, Khushwant
Singh, Shashi Tharoor, Rohinton Mistry, Shobha De, Sunil
Khilnani, Vikram Chandra, Shashi Deshpande, Kiran Desai,
Romila Thapar and Mark Tully. All those words probably
compelled him to pick up the pen and he wrote his first
novel in bits and pieces over the course of 10 years.
Hardly daring to think of himself as a writer and not
wanting to take advantage of his publishing connections,
he submitted The House of Blue Mangoes under a pseudonym.
It was immediately snapped up and sold in eleven countries.
The House of Blue Mangoes is set in Southern India,
and tells the story of the Dorai family against the
backdrop of the political tumult of the Raj era. When
Davidar begins his book tours across the United States
in April, doubtless many young Indian Americans will
turn out in full force for his priceless words of wisdom
and maybe even anointment by the high priest of publishing.
Amitav Ghosh
Having witnessed the juggernaut of Indian writing, many
aspiring writers are hoping to be the Next Big Thing.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s remarkable Pulitzer prize is still fueling
the dreams of writers as is the super success of Akhil
Sharma’s debut novel–An Obedient Father. After all,
2001 saw Indian writers of the Diaspora in the world
spotlight. From V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for literature
to Rohinton Mistry’s nationwide anointment by the high
priestess of America, Oprah Winfrey, Indian names and
faces were very prominent in the world of words.
“It been a fantastic year,” says Anna M. Ghosh, a literary
agent with Scovil, Chichak, Galen Literary Agency. “There
are a huge number of novels out by Indian writers, who
live in India, the U.S. and other parts of the Diaspora.”
The high point of the year was reached with the Nobel
Prize in Literature being awarded to V.S. Naipaul. The
Swedish Academy called him “a literary circumnavigator,
only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable
voice. Singularly unaffected by literary fashion and
models he has wrought existing genres into a style of
his own, in which the customary distinctions between
fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance.”
Naipaul not only won the Nobel Prize but also published”Half
a Life – his first novel in seven years. His classic
novel The Mystic Masseur was made into a Merchant-Ivory
film this year.
Oprah Winfrey, who has the Midas touch, laid her stamp
of approval on Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 novel, A Final
Balance. She called it “one of the most exquisite and
moving books I’ve ever read. It does what I believe
a book is supposed to do. It transports you and opens
you to new world experiences.” The book had already
won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction, the
Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and
was also a finalist for the Booker Prize. Printed with
Oprah’s magic logo, this reborn book, had an initial
printing of 700,000 copies. Mistry’s new novel, Family
Matters, is due this year.
This was also the year that Amitav Ghosh, who was named
the Eurasia regional winner for the 2001 Commonwealth
Writers Prize for The Glass Palace and a finalist for
the best book category, withdrew his novel and forfeited
the prize. The book, however, received rave reviews,
and also won the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards Grand Prize
of $50,000.
Several writers, who live away from India, published
major books in 2001, from Salman Rushdie’s Fury to Shashi
Tharoor’s Riot: A Love Story. Ved Mehta’s All for Love,
an autobiographical tale of lost loves, was the ninth
in his Continents of Exile series. And yes, Rushdie’s
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is being made into a film.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Unknown Errors of Our
Lives become a best seller in the United States and
India .She was one of the judges for the prestigious
National Book Awards, and her previous novel Sister
of My Heart was made into a popular TV serial in India
by Mani Ratnam. Gurinder Chadha is making the film of
Mistress of Spices, to be produced by the British company
50 Cannons. Now Divakaruni has a new novel out titled
Vine of Desire and it is getting rave reviews.
Manil Suri, a mathematics professor at the University
of Maryland, had a stunning debut with The Death of
Vishnu
Not only the big name writers but also lots of new names
made literary headlines in the past year. Manil Suri,
a mathematics professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore
County, had a stunning debut with The Death of Vishnu.
This novel started out as a short story in a writing
workshop, and has won high praise, making Suri an instant
literary star. The next two books in the trilogy are
The Life of Shiva and The Birth of Brahma. He says,
“So now I have two more titles that have both sprung
up from the original event of Vishnu’s death, and are
waiting to generate stories of their own.”
Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America by Sohrab
Homi Fracis was the winner of the 2001 Iowa Short Fiction
Award. Fracis teaches literature at the University of
North Florida, and is a fiction and poetry editor at
the State Street Review. Fracis credits the Indian books
that have been coming with increasing frequency for
the growing American interest in Indian fiction. Another
new writer is Thrity Umrigar, whose novel Bombay Time
was described by Booklist as “sweet, frightening, poignant,
and chaotic.” Umrigar is a journalist at Ohio’s Akron
Beacon Journal, and has received the prestigious Neiman
Fellowship at Harvard.
“Indian writers have always been significant contributors
to literature in the English language and yet it’s only
in the last couple of years that those contributions
have been fully realized,” says Eamon Dolan, executive
editor at Houghton Mifflin, which published Pulitzer
Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
with such happy results.
“Novice readers might come to the work of Indian writers
because their friends are reading it and it’s all the
rage right now but it seems to me that they stay with
it,” he says. “It has to do with something fundamental
to the cultures these writers are writing about which
appeals to them. Indian culture is just different enough
from American or British culture that it allows us to
see things that are universal and a different lens provides
a fresh perspective.”
Thrity Umrigar’s novel Bombay Time.
There’s an awareness of and comfort with history that
one does not often see in the work of American writers.
He points out that many Indian writers naturally touch
upon the freedom struggle, partition and the caste system,
which make great fodder for drama, thus giving the Indian
story a unique and dramatic angle that is irresistible
to readers of any nationality. He adds, “It’s hard to
say whether a new demand or receptivity to Indian writers
amongst the American publishing houses brought a lot
of great Indian writers out of the woodwork or whether
a new crop of Indian writers elevated our interest in
them.
Thrity Umrigar.
Asked as to why there are so many Indians writing in
English, Umrigar says, “We have a damn good story to
tell. India is rich in stories, bursting at the seams
with epic-scale dramas of personal tragedies and rags-to-riches
stories; of class conflicts and religious turmoil and
domestic clashes.”
Indeed, Indian writers are sprouting up faster than
foliage in the monsoon season. They are bagging book
contracts and advances from major publishing houses,
university presses as well as small literary firms.
Anna Ghosh sees a lot of India-inspired material across
her desk and recently sold two non-fiction books by
Indian writers, both to Houghton Mifflin. One of the
books is by journalist Minal Hajratwala, who is writing
about the Indian Diaspora through the lens of her own
family which lived in four different continents, and
the other is a book about the Andaman Islands, part
anthropology and part memoir, by Madhusree Mukerjee
who is based in Chicago. Both books, says Ghosh, sold”‘for
very healthy amounts.’ Getting published is never easy
but as she points out, “There have just been a number
of extraordinary writers.”
One of those writers is Suketu Mehta, who signed not
one but two books with Knopf recently. A graduate of
the Iowa Writers Workshop, Mehta is a journalist and
fiction writer who lives in New York. His work has won
a gaggle of awards including the Whiting Writers Award,
the O. Henry Prize for his fiction, and a New York Foundation
for the Arts Fellowship in fiction.
Sohrab Homi Fracis.
While one of the books is a novel,”Alphabet, the other
is a non-fiction book on Bombay, to be published in
fall 2002. Says Mehta, “It is essentially the story
of the city of Bombay today, told through the stories
of people who live in the different worlds of the city“—
the film industry, the underworld, the beer bars, the
diamond market — and what links all those stories is
my own story, of returning to the city where I grew
up after 21 years abroad.”
Indeed, many of the young writers are increasingly writing
about their splintered worlds, about the Indian Diaspora
as well as the homeland, and their experiences resonate
with many Americans who are themselves immigrants or
children of immigrants. As Dolan observes, “It is the
theme which runs so powerfully through Jhumpa’s work
— strangers in a strange land—— and you see it certainly
as far back as Naipaul’s work.”
Fracis credits the Indian books that have been coming
with increasing frequency for the growing American interest
in Indian fiction: “What that says is that Americans
are more and more inclined to look beyond their own
boundaries, are more and more conscious of the lives
and cultures and stories of people from the Asian continent,
for instance.”
As the Indian population burgeons in the United States,
more and more young Indian Americans are joining writing
programs in universities and creative writing workshops,
putting pen to paper about the immigrant experience.
While many of these may never achieve publication, a
sizable number will surely be a part of tomorrow’s literary
tradition.
Suketu Mehta says he sees a continuing interest in Indian,
and Indian American, fiction because all the earlier
novels built up an audience hungry for more stories
from that part of the world: ’“We are a story-rich culture,
with the epic myths still alive in our minds, and the
wonder isn’t that so many Indians are getting published
in the West but that it took us so long to do so. This
is not just a flash in the pan.”
..-
End Of Article.....
|
