On reading ‘A Matter of Rats’

I started reading Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats at 3 am on a Sunday morning. The book was in my office bag, and finding myself suddenly awake, I took it out and went to my study.

Reading the book was like plunging into a rat hole of memories. I had grown up as a child in a village in Bihar and like the ancestral village that Kumar describes in this book, my village too had an adjacent basti. We called it the Mus-har basti (the village of rat-eaters) where low caste Hindu families domiciled. I knew some of the members of those families as they worked on our fields as day labourers. Many of them visited our house everyday to meet my father, a school teacher who doubled up as the village head.

Unlike in Patna, rats then were not a menace in our village. Rats, along with stray cats and dogs, lived and roamed around in our courtyards and galis. They stole grains and sometimes we used to hear that rat-eaters (Mus-hars) had hunted through our fields after the harvesting was done.

As a child I was rather afraid of the big, fat moles that scurried around half-blind through the narrow lanes of our village, dipping in and out of drains as they wished. Them, and the stray dogs that sometimes chased people for no rhyme or reason.

It was in Delhi where I had first encountered the menace of rats. As a newly married couple, I used to live in a run-down flat in South Delhi with my wife and we used to sleep on the floor on a mattress. One day my wife telephoned me in the office. A rat had bitten her on the head while she was asleep. She had awoken with a sharp pain and when she touched her scalp, she found blood on it.

Initially, I could not believe that a rat could bite humans, but after seeing my wife’s case, I had to. Because of the rat bite, my poor wife had to take antibiotics for a while. Reading Kumar’s book, that memory came back to me. A Musahar, a rat-eating man in Kumar’s book, tells him that rats could bite through bricks and concrete. In Patna, Kumar tells us, remnants of food on the face of babies attracted rats who bit them, and nurses played music at night to protect their toes from being bitten by rats—they believed music kept the rats away.

I could never figure out what had attracted a rat to attack my wife. Anyway, the result of that unfortunate episode was a short story titled Rats that I wrote while staying in that flat, which took me to Sri Lanka for a literary conference.

At 3.25 am, when I was almost done with the book’s prologue, a quarrel broke out in the neighborhood, disturbing the peace and stillness of the early morning. A couple was having a verbal fight. I looked out of the window. Across the side road that lay between my flat and the multi-storey car park where the squabble was in progress, there stood a very old tree, almost as tall as the car park, which, with its thick foliage, hid the couple from my view. Through the gaps in the branches, all I could see was a man in a blue shirt and a woman in green, both of the Chinese race which I could figure out from their accented English. The man was shouting and verbally abusing his wife and at one point seemed to push her around too. He was saying things like ‘you have destroyed my life’ and ‘I am done with you’. The woman seemed to be scared and even though she fought back, her voice was cracking up. The man was going to his car which had its blinking lights on.

The bickering went on for almost half an hour when I decided to start taking some notes for this review.

It was 4.13am when I went back to the book. It was an exciting read, more so because I had waited for almost two weeks before the book reached me in Singapore from Bangalore.

In the chapter ‘Patliputra’, Kumar narrates the history of Bihar through his memories of the history of the city and the province from his school days, and how he used to draw diagrams of rulers and emperors from the past during his class hours. He ascribes his desire for drawing the emperors of the past (people who existed before photography was invented) to his incipient sexuality.

Then he proceeds to talk about art and craft in Patna. He describes visiting a museum in Patna where Napoleon’s four-poster bed was on display. Kumar expresses his disappointment with R K Jalan’s collection which he says was more geared towards flattering power. One of the collected items in the museum is a dinner plate belonging to Emperor Akbar’s Prime Minister Birbal. Jalan had persuaded a Viceroy and later on Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, to eat from the same plate.

In the chapter ‘Patna in the Hole’, Kumar looks for traces of Patna in English literature. Surveying literature from E M Forster to Vikram Seth, Kumar laments the fact that Patna hasn’t had much of a presence, and declining if at all, in English literature. However, there has been a nuanced portrayal of Patna in many stories by some great Hindi writers. From there, Kumar proceeds to lambast Shiva Naipaul, the young brother of V S Naipaul, who had visited Patna and had nothing good to say about Bihar. In contrast, he finds Ian Jack, the founding editor of Granta, to be sympathetic towards Biharis. He describes Jack as a writer who could discern some humanity and dignity in the much reviled people of Bihar.

In the chapter where Kumar mentions Ian Jack’s writings on Bihar, there is a mention of my hometown Kishanganj. Ian Jack once visited Bihar to find a lawyer who had defended a labourer from the Himalayan foothills. This man had spent thirty years in prison because of being found travelling without a ticket on the Assam Mail. The whole episode had turned out to be a case of bureaucratic mismanagement. In his second visit, Jack not only finds the lawyer but also the labourer, the guy who lost 30 years of his life. After his jail term, the man lived just outside the jail in Kishanganj. I wondered if I had ever seen that man in my town.

In the next few chapters, Kumar deftly narrates some of the success stories from Patna. “This book is about my hometown Patna; but at its forefront are stories about people,” he writes. On its pages we meet artist Subodh Gupa and his mentor Robin Shaw Pushp; we hear about Bindeshwar Pathak, the man behind the Sulabh International movement, and filmmaker Prakash Jha, the man who has made Patna’s first mall. We also get to hear from Irfan, a former communist now working as a TV journalist in Delhi. I had had the chance to meet some of these people, so it was thrilling to read about them from a different perspective.

One of the fascinating stories in the book is that of youth poet Raghav and his now estranged wife Leela, a struggling TV actress. In a Rashomon-like narrative, the author tries to examine the truth in their crumbling relationship. “It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves,” says the thief to the woodcutter in the classic Akira Kurusawa film (Kumar has used that quote in the book to make his point).

Through this book, it would be fair to say, Kumar has only tried to present his perspectives on the city where he grew up. He does not make any other claims. “There is no truth in nonfiction; there is only perspective,” he clarifies his stand in the author’s note.

As far as Patna goes, Kumar’s view of the city is that of hopelessness. “I see in Patna’s decline, in its pretensions to development, in its plain dullness, the stark story of middle age and death,” he says. “It’s all hopeless, really—that is what Patna and I are saying to each other.”

Every time the US-based author returns to Patna, he is reminded of his youth (the time of his life when discovery of sex happened for him), and the present question of ageing and mortality (his Patna-based parents are in the last years of their lives). “To return to Patna is to find the challenging thought of death, like the tip of a knife, pressing against my rib,” he writes.

Kumar’s ode to Patna ends on a melancholy note. Some Westerners might see a crumbling Patna as the Indian version of ancient Rome, but he sees this city in a different light—the city where he grew up and where his ageing parents live. “When I step on Patna’s soil, I only want to see how much older my patents look,” he writes. “I arrive in Patna and a few days later I leave. Each time I leave, I wonder about the circumstances under which I will need to return.”

The book, which starts off with a youthful exuberance, ends up with an old age-like gracefulness—understated, sober, melancholic and wise. As I come to the last page of the book, I understand why Kumar calls the book, A Matter of Rats. It is a tribute to the life and people of Patna, rather than an examination of the past and speculation of the future of the capital of Bihar. It is this quality of the book that makes it an endearing read.

Oh, Bihar

A rising India is the flavour of the century but unfortunately all parts of India are not equally shining. Bihar is one such place—a province that has over 10% of India’s population. More than half of that population lives below the poverty line. The International Herald Tribune recently described it as “a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy”.

I was born in one of the most backward districts of such a state.

Decades ago, British writer Shiva Naipaul, the brother of Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, after his visit to Patna--Bihar’s capital—described the place as “the subcontinent’s heart of darkness”.

Perhaps that description still fits the state of Bihar. It was one of India's most mineral rich states, until a few years ago, when Jharkhand was cleaved out of. After Independence of India, as other states grew, Bihar became nearly stagnant, leading the group of India's laggard states, known as the BIMARU ('Bimaru' meaning 'sickly' in Hindi) states among the economists. The acronym Bimaru stood for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (UP).

But Bihar touched its nadir in the last 20 years or so, becoming synonymous with one of its most colourful politicians, Laloo Prasad Yadav, whose fame, for reasons both good and bad, spreads from Islamabad to Harvard. Laloo Yadav, who is now India's much feted railways minister, and his wife, Rabri Devi, were Bihar's chief ministers. Between the two of them, they ruled Bihar for close to two decades. Rabri had dropped out of school after the fifth standard and had forgotten the Devanagari script in which Hindi, India's office language, is written. She learnt to write her name in office as a chief minister. While Laloo championed the cause of the low caste dalits and the minorities, he strengthened the roots of caste-based politics in the state. Bihar's economic descent and lawlessness became unparalleled in the country.

While Laloo always claimed that the centre, meaning New Delhi, India's capital, always curtailed the budget for Bihar, thus shifting the blame of under-development to the federal powers, he himself got embroiled in what came to be known as the chara ghotala (fodder scam). In the said scam, Laloo allegedly siphoned off millions of rupees meant for cattle feed to his own account. Corruption, lawlessness, economic stagnation became the second name of Bihar. For 20 years, little good news would come out of Bihar.

All this led to many unsavoury developments, including the harm it has done to the identity and dignity of its people. "Bihari" –alluding to those who belong to this state—has become a term of insult in Indian cities, a sobriquet thrown at anyone who looks poor and rustic. In the eyes of Indians outside Bihar, Laloo's shadow seemed to loom large over ordinary Biharis and perhaps they began to see Biharis as carbon copies of a corrupt and venal Laloo. For no fault of their own, this created a sense of shame even in many middle class Biharis.

If you meet anyone from India, they would proudly declare where they came from. Not the ones from Bihar. They might not even acknowledge it, as if it were a big bloat on their CV. Civil servant and novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, of English, August fame, once said rather pitifully in an interview, "I was born in Patna, I can't efface that from my history, it's in my passport."

Poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, and criminalized politics—all these have created a vicious circle trapping the Biharis in a parallax of image and reality that is difficult to disentangle.

Land of 'unwanted' migrant workers

Driven by poverty, hordes of Biharis have migrated to other richer parts of India, especially to the metros such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Today, out of a hundred million migrant workers in India, Biharis form the majority. Twenty-eight per cent of the adult male population of the state now works in projects and enterprises that stretch from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Goa to Arunachal Pradesh, wrote Prem Shankar Jha in Outlook (The Diaspora is Inside).

This high level of migration has sometimes engendered regional identity-based animosities in the host population against the poor migrants.

In February this year, for example, Biharis became victims of parochialism and regionalism in Maharashtra whose capital is Mumbai. They were targeted there, along with other northerners by party members of a regional political group, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) led by Raj Thackeray. Their crime? They were migrants working in Maharashtra, coming from states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. “Maharashtrians aren’t getting jobs or houses. Why shouldn’t we send the migrants back?” is their justification for this indentity-based politics.

This is not an isolated incident. Apart from Maharashtra, Biharis have also born the brunt of political action in places like Assam, Punjab and Haryana, from time to time. Commenting on the recent anti-Bihari developments, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray dubbed the Biharis as the unwanted lots.

Not just politicians but even Bollywood actors have got embroiled in the issue. Some actors like Nana Patekar, Salman Khan and Saijd Khan support the regional party, on the grounds that such mass migration caused problems in Mumbai, even though the general Maharashtrians have long prided themselves on their peaceful coexistence with migrants. A Bollywood actor, Nana Patekar, a Maharashtrian, supporting a signature campaign to protest a police ban on Thackeray’s public speaking, reportedly said: “There may be two opinions about his method, but the issue he raises is important and linked with the rights of Maharashtrians. If that idea is wrong, then isn’t the creation of states on linguistic basis wrong? Why seek domicile certificates? Why can’t non-Kashmiris buy land in Kashmir?” However, actors like Shahrukh Khan and Rahul Bose protested this kind of violence against the people of one's own country. You are free to live and work anywhere in the country is their argument.

Aliens in their own country?

Novelist and Oxford University professor Dr Kunal Basu (Award-winning filmmaker Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife is the title of the film based on Dr Basu’s story that is soon to release globally) was in Mumbai when he saw the dignity of a Bihari violated. Dr Basu, who is researching for his next novel set in Bihar, sent me a poignant note on the incident: “On February 3rd, I was on my way back to my hotel from a book signing event at Crosswords bookshop in Mumbai. As we passed through Dadar, the car slowed and I saw a man being beaten up by a crowd. My immediate reaction was to dash out and come to the aid of the victim. But the driver of my car speeded up, and against my remonstrations refused to stop. The man being beaten up was a Bihari and his assailants were none other than Raj's Marathas.”

What happenend in Mumabi disturbed most Biharis in and outside of India. Jawaid Iqbal, a Chicago-based software engineer and President of Bihar Cultural Association of North America wrote to me: “The recent incident in Mumbai really shocked me. How could politics go to such a cheap level where someone would go against humanity and act with such barbarity? Just take the example of the roadside vendor whose hands were chopped off by the political goons. He had nothing to do with the Thackerys or their political ups and downs. That poor fellow was simply struggling to earn bread for his family.”

As it happens, the poor and the helpless become the first target of violence. Notes Jawaid: “Most of the sufferers are poor and weak people. Did you ever hear that IT professional from Bihar were getting tortured in Mumbai? No. Because they were needed there”.

"It is the harrassment of poor and vulnerable people," said Professor Amitava Kumar, a prominent son of Bihar, a writer and critic teaching English at Vassar College in New York

Crush the stereotype, stop the joke

"No matter what their background, educational qualifications and achievemnets, the term "Bihari" is permanently tagged to all us which unfortunately carries a negative connotation in India today," says my friend Sumit Shaw, a Delhi-based young Bihari filmmaker who has worked with BBC World Service Trust. He makes ad films and now he wants to make a documentary film on Biharis, exploring why they are the butt of jokes, and at the receiving end of violent discrimination in their own country. Like many middle-class well-to-do Biharis, he is irked with the sense of shame tagged with the identity of a Bihari.

The stereotype of a poor, illiterate Bihar, migrating to an Indian cosmopolis like Mumbai, makes Biharis easy targets of political goondaism. Biharis have become vicims of stereotyping--as in the words of Dr Kunal Basu--stereotypes are monsters that are kept alive by ignorance and by the greed of politicians, and the media savours its carcass.

"The reasons for stereotyping are obvious," says Jawaid Iqbal. "Due to media bias and our own inferioty complex. If anything goes wrong in Bihar, it comes out on front pages of newspapers and if someone from Bihar achieves something or contributes to progress it never gets covered or even if it does, it gets buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. But, honestly, we can't blame the media all the time. We are responsible as well. Why do we try to hide our identity as Biharis?"

When the dignity of a Bihari is attacked, it shocks him because he is aware of a proud legacy. At one time Bihar was at the centre stage of India. India’s first kingdom emerged in Bihar. Lord Buddha, who propounded Buddhism, got enlightenment in Bihar, and under Asoka, India’s first great emperor, the new faith of peace spread its light to South-East Asia. Bihar has the honour of developing India’s first place of global learning, Nalanda University, which is now in the process of getting revived with Singapore’s leadership. When India became independent, it was the same state that gave India its first President in Dr Rajendra Prasad. This is the place that has produced worthwhile talent, both in the past and present: Writers such as Kautilya, George Orwell (born under British Raj), Renu, M J Akbar, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitava Kumar, Arvind N Das, Tabish Khair, Siddharth Chowdhury and artists such as Subodh Gupta (India's one of the top earning artists), Shatrughan Sinha, Manoj Bajpayi, Shekhar Suman, Prakash Jha and Manish Tiwary—all had their origins in Bihar. Today, Biharis can be found all over the world, and many of them are doing well. And yet, they find themselves humiliated or beaten up.

How can this stereotype change then? "To regain the pride and respect, we have to use our own resources," says Jawaid. "The main resource is the people. Lets encourage them to be educated. Education and economic empowerement go hand in hand."

But Prof Amitava Kumar has different view on trying to protest at the business of steretyping Biharis: "I disagree with people who fulminate about stereotyping because they are often the successful ones and don't want to be mistaken for an illiterate, uncultured person," he says. "I don't feel any need to participate in that protest. I think it is more honest to take note of, and if you are able, to help alter the really bad situation in Bihar. Asserting Bihari pride is a middle-class act. People with good means wanting a greater share of the cake. It doesn't interest me. Because the Biharis who are getting the stick shoved up their asses by the Shiv Sena goons aren't really crying for pride. They're crying for justice. Under the rule of law what is mine give it to me!"

Agrees Bihar's most well known director and producer in Bollywood, Prakash Jha, but in a different sense, who is quite optimistic about developments in Bihar. He says: "It's (Bihar's image) already changing. Economic activities are happening in Bihar, infrastructure building in on, the new governmnet in Bihar which has come in has done great things. Eventually it will be the economic and instututional activities that will make the difference. Biharis are already studying in colleges and universities outside Bihar. Once the infrastructure is there it will change. It is aready changing, we don't have to do anything."

Dr Kunal Basu also thinks that Biharis deserve respect and dignity like all other Indians, without showing any signs of success. He says, "Bihar and Biharis need no 'showcasing' of success, as with the rest of us, they deserve respect."

Bihar is everybody's problem

Whatever the feelings, the reality on the ground does not look that rosy. While the southern Indian states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have forged ahead with their silicon valleys, industries and foreign investments, Bihar has stagnated, partly along with UP, MP and Rajasthan. The International Herald Tribune (IHT) recently reported that the World Bank lent Bihar government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. And in a joke of surreal proportions, economists are questioning the current Bihar government's tall claims of economic achievements (Economic Survey for 2006-07) of hitting a 16 % Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate, almost double the national average growth rate. How could a state, which had its GDP growth in the negative, suddenly comeback with such fantastically high development figures, they are rightly asking.

But the glass can be seen as half full as well. In a sense, aren't the migrant Biharis contributors to the success of other states, at least partially?

Perhaps Bihar’s time will come too with the right leadership and progress. India took decades to shrug off its image of the land of snake charmers until she unleashed her own army of IIT and IIM professionals and her Tatas and Mittals. And Bihar must come up, as an economically backward Bihar, with about 10 per cent of India’s population, is simply not in the interest of a booming India. India must heed to what some said in a report in The International Herald Tribune: “If you think Bihar is not your problem, it will become your problem.”

The most optimistic is the Oxford don, Dr Basu. "Make no mistakes, Bihar isn't a backward state, it's a frontline state where the battle for India's future and the battle for democracy is being waged," he says. "From Gandhi to Jayprakash Narayan, the wave has always started in Bihar then lapped up on the shores of Delhi. For the last decade it's here that the caste armies have met their match, where large landowners have seen the fear of daylight struck into them, where violence has been met with resistance."

Meanwhile, I am asking my friend Sumit to make that film on Biharis—it might prove to be a little step in clearing the cobwebs of parochialism in the country.

An edited version of this article appears in today's Singapore newspaper, The Weekend Today.

A question of justice

Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt has emerged, for all the wrong reasons, as the poster boy for the Mumbai bomb blasts. Scores of others, the non-Bollywood type perpetrators of the crime, the ones you might have seen in Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday, have got death sentences and life imprisonments.

But some have chosen to look deeper into the issue, beyond the gloss and the mayhem:

Professor Amitava Kumar asks on his blog:

The verdicts have finally been delivered in the Bombay blasts case. Most of the guilty are in jail. But the bombings had been in response to the earlier riots, in which three times more people were killed. Why have those who were guilty of inciting violence and murder during the riots gone unpunished?

Vir Sanghvi writes on the Mumbai blast verdict in HT:

No Muslim family who lost everything in those riots received anything like justice, let alone compensation. The murderers, unrepentant to the end, were elected to high office and the policemen who facilitated the massacres were promoted. Official inquiries into the riots (such as the Srikrishna Report) were ignored. And then, after the blasts, TADA was used indiscriminately against honest and blameless Muslims.

So let’s not waste our time worrying about Indian Muslims and Al-Qaeda. Let’s stick to our own riots and our own terrorist reprisals. The Bombay blasts case shows that the bombers have been (fairly) punished. But the rioters still run free, and the victims of those massacres have found no justice.

Rather than be concerned about a few inept doctors and a couple of failed car bombs in a faraway country, let’s think about our own blasts and our own system of justice. And let’s pause to consider whether the next time a bomb goes off in Bombay we should blame Osama bin Laden or whether we should consider our own failure to provide justice to those whose families, homes and lives were destroyed in the Bombay riots.

A dangerous pursuit called book reviewing

Book reviewing can be a dangerous pursuit. Why? Because sometimes writers can be such pricky ingratiates (writers are expected to be humble souls but exceptions are allowed).

If you don't believe me, ask Professor Amitava Kumar. And Lionel Shriver. But more on that later.

Writers should be thankful to book reviewers for the mere hard work that they put in, whatever the outcome: The poor sods (at least the honest ones) have to trawl through the entire book, fiction or non-fiction, interesting or boring, and come out with an opinion. It's another matter that their opinion might be influenced by the persistent reminders from the commissiong editor or the hurry to catch the next flight to wherever.

Remember, even erudite sounding book reviewers are human beings but when a book review has to be written, they are put to an exacting test.

How?

Ok, let us look at novelist Lionel Shriver's experience:

I am an idiot. Given that publishing honest and thus sometimes unfavourable assessments of the work of colleagues is violently at odds with a writer's self-interest, it's surprising that literary editors can cajole any author into reviewing. But then, plenty of writers like me don't know what's good for them, and some writers plain need the money.

Why is writing criticism self-destructive? Because reviews are deeply personal. The average book represents years of hard work. Most novelists will have invested heart and soul into their text, imbuing characters with a measure of themselves. Although a necessary conceit, the line between the writer and his book is a smudge. The experience of having your book rubbished is of having your character rubbished - for all the world to read. The adversaries you bring into being by writing negative appraisals are like diamonds: forever.


Obviously, the same writers you pillory may end up getting a crack at you. Literary editors are busy people. However dedicated to integrity in theory, they don't have time to verify who might bear whom a grudge.

Now, a practical example: Recently, when Prof Amitava Kumar reviewed (in fact, ripped apart) a Bollyood history non-fiction work (Bollywood—a History) by Mihir Bose, it made the author see an unfounded personal vendetta in the whole exercise. Instead of not taking it to his heart, he's let it all out. I guess Prof Kumar was just expressing his opinion (was the bad morning coffee the culprit behind the negative slant of the review?) but the scorned author has now shot back with his own defence (so what, you'd scream: these days even bad publicity is good publicity, no?):

But in 30 years as a writer I’ve never come across such a malicious review. Why Kumar decided to have a rant about the book I do not know. I’ve never met him and have done him no personal harm. He says: "History should have a point, no?" History with a point is called propaganda. And people who write such histories are known as pamphleteers. Kumar also says that Hindi films don’t lend themselves easily to generalisation. But as Satyajit Ray said: "The ingredients of the average Hindi film are well known; colour (Eastman preferred); songs (six or seven) in voices one knows and trusts, dance—solo and ensemble—the more frenzied the better; bad girl, good girl, bad guy, good guy, romance (but no kisses); tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama; characters who exist in a social vacuum; dwellings which do not exist outside the studio floor; exotic locations... See any three Hindi films, and two will have the ingredients listed above." Whose view would you accept? Kumar further alleges: "You’d be hard pressed to find a single coherent or cogent argument about Hindi cinema in Bose’s book." The book has 19 chapters and almost every one discusses various themes.

Like it? More of it is here.

While we won't meddle (and both the writer and reviewer are entitled to their opinions), there's a lesson to be learnt here. Good coffee or bad coffee, and notwithstanding the editor's reminders, we shouldn't shy away from expressing our opinion. What do you think?

Two books and a writer

I'm really looking forward to read two books which are still in the making (apart from Professor Amitava Kumar's Home Products of course; its copy is yet to come from India for me).

One is Patrick French's biography of V S Naipaul. Patrick had been researching it for a long time and now I hear that it will soon be making its way to the press. Two things are interesting about this project. First, Patrick is a provocative (and scholarly) writer--so I expect some interesting research on Naipaul in this book. Second, and not any less important, Naipaul himself has written so much on himself and his life--so what new thing is going to come out of Patrick's research and observations, and how will Naipaul react to it? After all, Naipaul was also analysed by his former friend, Paul Theroux, in his book on their friendship and its unceremonious end--definitely not leaving a good taste for Naipaul.

Second is the novel by former Time magazine journalist Arvind Adiga. Outlook reported that his manuscript, The White Tiger, was doing the rounds at London Fair and was creating a lot of buzz. I have enjoyed Arvind's writings on books and writers and I am sure his work will be an engaging read.

Meanwhile, looks like London-based novelist Mohsin Hamid, while promoting his second novel A Reluctant Fundamentalist, is becoming an expert in framing sharp (and short) answers. In a Q&A with Outlook, he said this when asked if Rushdie was an influence:

Rushdie opened the doors of commercial and literary recognition for South Asian writers. But not an aesthetic or political space.

Hmm...another tiff in the making with the Shah of Blah?

Conversations

I came across this interesting bunch of interviews in one of my favourite Indian journals, Tehelka.

The interviews separately feature two writers, Amitava Kumar and Kiran Desai, and one lit agent, I'd say the most famous for Indian writers at least, David Godwin.

I'm just pulling some quotes here from their interviews, and if the quotes pique your interest please go and read the full texts.

Immigration is not a pretty thing: Kiran Desai

There was this realisation that what my generation was going through in America was the same as what my grandparents had gone through in the UK decades earlier. Nothing had changed. Both sides like to see it as different — the US doesn’t like thinking of itself as a colonial power and Indian immigrants try and emphasise how welcome they are, but there is a lot of hypocrisy in that pretence. Immigration is not a pretty thing. It’s often very cruel. It’s just self-preservation to ignore racism in these countries.

The Arundhati Roy effect: David Godwin


I never begrudge any writer money or platform. But a much more interesting consequence of Arundhati’s success has been its impact on writing in England. Take Monica Ali. Or even writers from Africa and the Caribbean. It may sound far-fetched, but we are hearing a wider range of voices. The publishing industry has become more open minded as a consequence of Arundhati.



Bihari writers, anyone?: Amitava Kumar

I like Siddharth’s writing because it is daringly original. And Tabish is the better kind of scholar-writer that India somehow seems very good at producing.

But I doubt they would identify with the Biharis who run the kind of website you’re referring to. I certainly don’t.

I don’t write to furnish a better image of a place or a person. Writing for me is a way of finding out what is hidden from the world. All declarations of superiority are also symptoms of real inferiority. I know what is inferior in myself. I want to be honest about it.