Sex and the city: David's departure

Today I stumbled upon Ashok Banker's blog (one of my favorite blogs) and was shocked to read one of his blog entries: Falling Down: A Goliath Named David

I could not believe what I read about David Davidar--that he had been sacked by Penguin Canada over a sexual harassment case. A couple of years back, I had interviewed David when his second novel had come out and had also met him during a lit fest in Singapore. It was difficult to believe that a man of his stature would do what has been alleged against him by one of his former employees. The allegations and the lawsuit are disgraceful and it remains to be seen how David fights the charges “vigorously”.

Here's John Barber's story from The Globe and Mail, Canada:

A former employee of Penguin Canada has launched a $523,000 lawsuit alleging that company CEO David Davidar sexually harassed her repeatedly over the past three years, culminating in outright assault at the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall, and that she was fired after complaining to superiors about Davidar’s “twisted treatment” of her.

Lisa Rundle of Toronto, former director of digital publishing and foreign rights for Penguin Canada, is claiming damages of $423,000 from Penguin for wrongful dismissal and the “harsh, vindictive and malicious fashion” with which it allegedly treated her following her complaints against Mr. Davidar. She is also seeking damages of $100,000 against Mr. Davidar personally.

The allegations were made in a statement of claim filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on June 9, the day after Penguin Group chairman John Makinson and Mr. Davidar jointly announced the latter’s decision to leave one of the top jobs in the international company. They have not been proven in court and Mr. Davidar has not yet filed his defence.

In response, the former executive issued a statement Friday afternoon denying the harassment charges – but acknowledging that neither he nor Mr. Makinson had revealed the full story surrounding his departure earlier this week. “At Penguin’s request, I agreed to publicly state that my departure was voluntary,” he wrote. “The truth is that a former colleague accused me of sexual harassment and Penguin terminated my employment.”

Mr. Davidar said he intends to fight the charges “vigorously,” but declined to make further comments.

Here is the Canadian publishing industry reaction on David's departure.

Scenes from a Lit Fest

Crossings, Singapore's Writers Festival 2007, celebrated literature in its myriad forms with over 50 writers from 16 countries in over 100 programmes between 1-9 December.

For me, the entire festival was an exciting mash-up of scenes from writers' lives, off and onstage. It was an opportunity to see many players in action: moderators, writers, bloggers, festival organisers. There were many international writers setting the scene abuzz. The queues were the longest for the famous Chinese writers such as Jung Chang and Bei Dao. There were enough NRI and Indian names in the marquee to make the whole festival a la Rang De Basanti. David Davidar, Kunal Basu, Madhur Jaffery, and Anita Nair, among others.

December 8, 5 pm
The Singapore Tea Party

As Sharon Bakar and I enter Earshot, the famous cafe in the Arts House by the Singapore River, Sharon spots A. Samad Said, a writer from Malaysia.

"How good to see you Sharon," says Mr Said with a chirp in his voice. His small saintly figure, complete with a flowing white beard, is preched on a chair. In front of him, there is a plate of half-eaten sandwiches. Sharon aka Bibliobibuli, herself a famous Malaysian blogger, is pleased to get the attention from the Malaysian laureate. "Oh, he is the biggest writer in Malaysia," she tells me later.

The laureate talks about his upcoming session. Sharon promises to attend his session the next day and we break for a cup of tea.

Both of us are hungry and a little tired after our session on blogging (World Wide Web of Words--Literary Blogs). Moderated by the spunky and energetic Singapore journalist and blogger Deepika Shetty, Sharon and Ivan Chew (a Singaporean librarian who maintains a books blog) had shared their insights on literary blogging in the session. While for Ivan, blogs were platforms for verbal diarrhea, it was a compulsion (to write) for Sharon. She often had to tell herself to stop posting (and occasionally feed her husband).

So, exhausted there we are with our English breakfast tea. Sharon has ordered a pizza which is yet to arrive. We had met before in Kuala Lumpur (KL) in one of the readings that Sharon had organised. So, we try to reconnect. Sharon talks about the books nominated for this year's Booker Prize. Then the discussion veers off to Tan Twan Eng, Malaysia's latest literary sensation. Tan Twan Eng, the Booker longlisted South Africa and KL-based Malaysian novelist, had shot to fame with his debut, The Gift of Rain. His sessions in the beginning of the festival were good draws, clearly pointing out how popular he had become. When asked how his life had changed after the Booker Prize nomination, he quipped: "It feels the same but things are a lot easier for my publishers and agents. Their phone calls are returned."

Even before we finish our discussion, we are joined by Elmo Jayawardena and his spouse, Dill. Elmo is a Sri Lankan writer but more of him later. We talk about his his book launch that is to follow the same day in the early evening. Elmo is a sharp wit, so he regales us with his jokes and one-liners while sipping on his latte.
Soon, we are joined by Deepika Shetty and Kunal Basu. Kunal had met Elmo in Ubud Writers Festival and I had inroduced myself to him earlier in the day, so he turns to Sharon. "Where are you from?" he asks. "Birmingham," says Sharon, "but I have been living in Malaysia for 20 years now."

Novelist Kunal Basu is an Oxford don--he teaches business and writes fiction (The Miniaturist, The Opium Clerk, The Racists). "How did you end up living this dichotomous life?" I ask him. "I always wanted to write and when we were growing up, there were no Indian role models as full-time writers," he explains. "There were Indian writers but most of them wrote on the side and had a full-time job to support themselves. So, I thought I too had to follow this model but I chose teaching as a career because it gives me control over my time."

Deepika and Sharon start talking about cyber stalkers. Kunal joins in, citing his experience of stalking. A research student, who met him first for a PhD thesis and later wrote an essay on his work, began to stalk him with hundreds of emails every day and would appear wherever Kunal went for his readings or talks. "It became so bad that we had to send her a letter through our agent to put a stop to it," he says.

I congratulate Kunal for couragiously writing in support of Tehelka's latest expose on Gujarat massacres. "I wrote a piece in Tehelka after the Gujarat riots which I think was even better than this," he says. The piece came as a reaction after a journalist asked him why he wrote a 'Muslim novel' (The Miniaturist, based in Akbar's court) despite being a Hindu. "I was angry at this question, which was like an accusation," he says, promising me to send the article.

December 8, A few hours ago
Ideas, Identities and Indian Writing

A little earlier on the same day, David Davidar, head of Penguin Books Canada, and a pioneering publisher of Indian writers in English, now also a novelist, tries to explore the misuse of religion through his novel, The Solitude of Emperors. Mr Davidar’s first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, was published in 2002. It was translated into 16 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense Pick.

His session is titled, A Tale of Two Cities. The other panelist is Kunal Basu. Predictably, there are not many audience questions on communalism, David's theme of the novel. People are more interested in knowing about his publishing experience. David rues the fact that these days editors are editing less and less, resulting in poorly produced texts.

Kunal discusses how many of his stories took birth in his journeys. The idea for The Opium Clerk came to him, he says, while trekking in Bangkok. His guide told him: In the 19th century, Calcutta was the centre of the world's drug business. That sentence triggered in him a curiosity about that period in Calcutta and he began to research for his novel, he says.

Shobha Bhalla, the editor of India Se, asks why are David and Kunal, despite being NRIs, are mentioned as 'from Canada' and 'from UK' respectively in the festival's publicity brochures. Kunal says in reply that "we don't write the brochures." But Kunal does not see any problem in the description as he thinks that he is a global citizen as well as Indian. "When it comes to identity, I am carpetbagger," he says. "If I can get under anyone's skin, I would be happy to do that. And that's why I am not happy with the term Indian Fiction too. It does not exist. Look at the range of our writing. Rushdie is so different from Davidar and so on. So, I don't believe there is anything called Indian fiction."

A shorter version of this report appeared in India Se, Jan 2008.

Writers in cross hair

On Sunday, Crossings, the Singapore Writers' Festival 2007, came to a close. For me, the entire festival was an exciting mash-up (ah, scenes from events are intemixing in my memory) of scenes from writers' lives, off and onstage. It was an opportunity to see many players in action: moderators, writers, bloggers, festival organisers--everyone played cool and I did not see any fretful faces. Or did I miss something?

There were many international writers. The queues were the longest for the famous Chinese writers such as Jung Chang and Bei Dao. There were enough NRI and Indian names in the marquee to make the whole festival a Rang De Basanti. David Davidar, Kunal Basu (photo, above), Madhur Jaffery, Anita Nair, Sharanya Manivannan and Deepika Shetty (as the energetic moderator with a difference). I was also there, connected with two events, but was miraculously not listed anywhere (website, booklets) but I am not blaming anyone. When such big names are around, where do I stand? And frankly, I don't care. I'm happy enough just to be an audience in such events.

First up, on Dec 3, I had the chance to moderate a session with Tan Twan Eng, the Booker longlisted South Africa-based Malaysian novelist, who shot to fame with his debuting work, The Gift of Rain. The session was well-attended. Many had turned up to listen to Twan and get their copies of the novel autographed by the man himself. Contrary to what I had been warned of, Twan wasn't shy at all and he spoke very confidently and eloquently. I would spare you the details as Deepika Shetty has summarised the session in her blog post here.

The other was a session on blogging, again moderated by Deepika. Malaysia's top literary blogger Sharon Bakar and Singapore's Ivan Chew were in the panel. While Sharon I knew as a friend, Ivan was a revelation. I enjoyed the proceedings and discovered that Sharon and I had started blogging at about the same time, Sept 2004! What a coincidence! And Deepika was humble enough to acknowledge how she was inspired by bloggers like Jai Arjun Singh (another friend of mine) and Amit Varma to start her own blogging journey. Both Ivan and Sharon have blogged about this event, so I am skipping the details once again (lazy me!).

I regret not attending the sessions of my friends Sharanya and Chris Mooney Singh who released his poetry book, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company. Sharayna, as it happens, has been making waves in Indian media talking about the Indian discontent in Malaysia.

The Emperor of Narratives

Photo: Courtesy Lucy Cavender

David Davidar is a rare creature. You can count on your fingers the number of top-notch publishers who are also admired novelists in their own right. Mr Davidar, who is credited with the flourishing of Indian writing in English when he was the head of Penguin Books, India, now heads the same company in Canada.

Educated at Madras (now Chennai) and Harvard University, Mr Davidar, in 1985 became one of the founding members of Penguin in India where he edited or published authors like Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta, William Dalrymple, Mohsin Hamid and Ramachandra Guha, among others. Now in Canada, he has been publishing authors like Philip Roth, Khaled Hosseini, John Le Carre, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, and Hisham Matar, among others.

Mr Davidar’s first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, was published in 2002. It was translated into 16 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense Pick. His latest novel, The Solitude of Emperors, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007) has just come out. I managed to catch the busy writer-publisher for an interview sometime ago. Excerpts:


Your latest novel, The Emperor of Solitude, is on communalism in India. What prompted you to write a novel on this subject?

David Davidar: The main cause was, you know, that India, as I say at some point in the novel, is one of the longest running plural societies in the history of civilizations. Every religion, every race, creed, known to man, has lived in India for thousands and thousands of years. Every time fundamentalists, whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, try to disturb the piece, I think people who believe in the amity of nations, communities, all right thinking man, in whatever way they can, should protest and say it is not right or point it out in whatever way they can. So, I thought given the fact that journalists are doing the standard job in India and elsewhere to point out how wrong all this is, I figured out I will take a different approach and try and use the medium of fiction to express my views.

So, in a way, this novel is your protest against communalism?

DD: Ya, I think so. Absolutely!

Do you think communalism is still a major phenomenon in India?

DD: Well, it flares up from time to time. India is a very large country. From time to time, there are sort of riots in some parts of the country, inspired by religion or by caste, whatever the reason. So, I don't think it will ever go away. One has to be vigilant. I think despite the problem of the 1990s and the riots of Gujarat in 2002, the country is quite calm. But there is communal violence everywhere else in the world. Everywhere you look there is some incident or the other. And while the book takes place in India, I hope what I am trying to work through in the course of the narrative is of universal importance.

The protagonist of your novel Vijay comes from small town South India and goes to Bombay to work for a magazine. You also went to Bombay as a young journalist. Did your personal experience help you draw material for this work?

DD: Ya, ya. But it is not autobiographical in any way. I have never worked for a magazine called The Secularist, I have never witnessed a communal riot, but, yes, I was perfectly happy in the small town I was born in. It gave me some ideas, for sure.

Some of the scenes of rioting are so realistically written in your novel. Did you see anything like that personally or was it just research?

DD: Friends of mine lived through those dark days in Bombay. I talked to them. My closest friend who lives in Bombay who I have acknowledged in the back of the book, he and I spent many hours talking about those days, what he had witnesses and so on. So, ya, it is not based on first hand experience but second hand experience.

You wrote your first novel while you were still in India, and your second novel has come out while you are based in Canada. When did you start work on this novel?

DD: About 18 months ago.

That was relatively quick. Your first novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, took you about ten years to write, didn’t it?

DD: For the last one, I actually did the major work in two years. I started it and stopped in between. This one I just wrote it continuously.


You are also a busy publisher. How do you strike a balance between the two roles, as a writer and a publisher?

DD: Well, I work very early in the morning, between 4 to 6 every morning. But I am not sure that I will be able to keep it up.

Any plans to come back to India?

DD: I don't know. At some point in the future, maybe, depending on the opportunities, for sure. Ya, I mean, it is a very exciting part of the world. Definitely. I wouldn’t rule that out.

You as a publisher were instrumental in the flourishing of the Indian writing in English (IWE) while you were the head of Penguin Books, India. After you left the scene, many success stories have emerged. How do you see the future of IWE in the coming years?

DD: Oh, I think it will continue to flourish because I think it is only getting started, you know. I mean the people I worked with were the first generation of great writers after Indian Independence and onwards from there. I mean they were all born around the 50 and 60s and 70s. Now people born in the 80s, 90s, and even in the new century, who knows in which direction they will take the novel. Creative writing in general has an exciting future.

The Solitude of Emperors

Indian writing in English (IWE), however celebrated at home and abroad, rather than catching our eyes for the seriousness of theme and material often grabs our attention for its "tinsel glitter of celebrity."

Indian writing in the vernaculars, on the other hand, still gets loved, hated, discussed and fought over for dealing with an "aesthetics inseparable from questions of justice and equality."

Such an engagement, a legacy of India's Progressive Writers' Association, is at the heart of David Davidar's second novel, The Emperor of Solitude.

Like some of the socially conscious IWE novels of recent years, such as Sashi Tharoor's Riot, A Novel and Tabish Khair's Filming: A Love Story, The Emperor of Solitude takes us on a journey of India torn apart by the forces of communalism.

David Davidar has said that this novel is his protest against communalism, which in a way underpins the idea that the role of a writer as a partisan is still important and that writers should expose the ills of the society, just like journalists do, but with their own tools and in their own fashion.

The story is told through the eyes of Vijay, a South Indian small-town young man, who comes to Bombay in the early 1990s to work with a dedicated secularist, Rustom Sorabjee, the editor of a magazine, The Indian Secularist.

A young man with not great ambitions, Vijay's experience of meeting Sorabjee transforms him, making him conscious of the damage of communalism (mixing of religion and politics) in an otherwise great land of civilization where great leaders like Asoka, Akbar and Gandhi showed us how to reach out to people of all religions and races and how to live a life of peace and communal harmony.

Vijay witnesses the post-Babri Masjid Bombay riots and gets filled with horror. In the central part of the narrative, Sorabjee sends Vijay to Meham, a small tea town in the Nilgris to recover. There he meets Noah, a colourful character, a poet turned mad by the absolute demands of our world, and they become friends. By far, Noah's is the most interesting character in the entire novel. But even in Meham, communalism raises its ugly head. A Christian shrine, The Tower of God, becomes the object of political wrangling between the Christian community and a group of politically motivated Hindu right wingers. Tragedy follows which leaves Vijay further traumatised.

Running parallel to this story is a book within the novel, a book on India's ethos of secularism by Sorabjee. David has shared some great ideas on religion and life through the device of a book within a book.

Both through the main narrative and the book-within-the-book device, David's message of communal harmony comes through very clearly. It is just the kind of writing that one would locate at the heart of social change.

The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, S$32.95

Filming: A Love Story

It seems that Indian novelists (in this case all NRIs) are turning their attention to the issue of communalism in India, among other themes.

Sujit Saraf deals with it in his admired work of fiction, The Peacock Throne. So, does David Davidar in his recent novel, The Solitude of Emperors (this one is mainly focused on communalism). Now, Tabish Khair's Filming is said to be on this theme too, though the story is situated in pre-Bollywood Bombay.

Here's Navtej Sarna's take on Filming: A Love Story.

Tabish Khair’s Filming draws a unique connection between photography and barbed wire: both inventions, intended to freeze movement, were perfected in the year 1880. In many ways, the rest of the novel is the story—romantic, tragic, bloody—of how these two inventions played out in India. The story of how still images began to flicker on white screens in dusty villages and then started to move, then to talk and sing—first in black and white, then in scintillating, money-churning, record-breaking colour. And of how barbed wire was stretched across the subcontinent, to separate and to secure, and how its sharp points killed unsuspecting souls or left deep wounds in those who got past, their identities in shreds—wounds that continued to ache decades later, at the memory of a song, or a childhood caper, or a youthful love.

And here's an interview with Khair where he discusses issues of hybridism and exile. Here's an interesting quote from him on writers:

Actually, I feel that the attention Indian writers get occasionally is greatly over-rated in India. Even in terms of prizes and advances, Indian writers corner only a very small fraction of the global market. Rushdie and Naipaul are not really 'Indian' in any case, and even they are not among the global bestsellers like Rowlings and Dan Brown: the pomp and spectacle they invite is due to the literary quality of their work. So I am not too worried. Finally, as a writer, you have to decide for yourself whether you want to sip cocktails in five-star bashes, or slog away in the loneliness of your study.