Africa and the New Colonialism

In his brilliantly written essay Capital Gains (Granta), novelist Rana Dasgupta makes us meet MC who is just 28. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. MC tells Rana that "that is just the beginning" and that "he is moving on to much bigger plans". What are these bigger plans? Let me quote from the essay:

‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’

He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.

‘Where?’ I ask.

‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’

MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.

‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’

Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.

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If you read the essay, and you should, you will also find MC later admitting that there are many many super rich young businessmen like him in India.

It's not just MC and rich businessmen like him who are eying Africa. There are many countries who are leasing land in Africa to ensure their food security. A new land grab is on as food is becoming the new oil:

Governments and investment funds are buying up farmland in Africa and Asia to grow food -- a profitable business, with a growing global population and rapidly rising prices. The high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly is leading to a modern colonialism to which many poor countries submit out of necessity.

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But what happens, as Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt ask, in a globalized world when colonies arise once again? We will have to wait and see but it may not be a peaceful reaction.

On "Solo" by Rana Dasgupta

Alok Rai on Rana Dasgupta's latest novel, Solo:

The sense of a lost wholeness haunts modernism. And what is distinctive about postmodernism is a loss of that sense of loss – the loss of a framework against which the experience of loss might even be registered. This comes either in light, celebratory flavours – polymorphous perversities, the unbearable lightness of being. Or, sometimes, in darker, bewildered forms – haunted by a sense of loss, but deprived also of the freedom to mourn – the tragedy that cannot speak its name.

The odd combination of talent and pointlessness that characterises Solo seems like some kind of potlatch – the bizarre custom identified by anthropologists wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. At one level, Solo is an exploration of "failure", and contains the suggestion that it takes a lot of failure to make some signal success. It is an interesting thought, and also a curious advertisement for Dasgupta’s next book.

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I like it when Rai mentions about potlatch: the custom wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. Reminds me of the excesses of the Wall Street, and of modern lifestyle itself. The more you waste, the more you squander, the more successful you are and vice versa. If that is Dasgupta's key theme in this novel then I must say it is extremely insightful and relevant to our times.

Impressions from a reading

I had been looking forward to Rana Dasgupta's reading ever since Deepika had informed me about it. Rana too was kind enough to drop me an email reminding me of the event. There was no way I could have given it a miss, even though I was working on that day.

Why was I interested in Rana Dasgupta?

To be frank, I have not read his debut novel, Tokyo Cancelled except in snatches. Like many other good novels, it lies unread in my list of must-read novels.

Was it the celebrity value then? The star power of a novelist? Maybe not. The star power of a novelist, seeing and listening to a writer about whom one had only read in the media and talked amongst friends, has got diluted over the years. He is among the dozens of young novelists that India produces on a regular basis year after year. He is not a Naipaul or a Rushdie, with many works and numerous awards under his belt. He has so far written only one novel. So why was I interested?

Rana is not a run of the mill author, I believed instinctively (unlike so many other young Indian writers crowding the scene today), that's why. I carried this impression after reading some of his pieces that appeared in newspapers and are available on his blog. Chucking a well-paying marketing job and globe-trotting lifestyle for the dead calm of a writerly life in Delhi is a gutsy decision for anyone to take. Rana had done that, and that impresses me most about him. "To decide to become a writer was an arrogant decision," he said during the one hour plus talk. There it is. I like this kind of stuff, when a writer says these kind of things, because when one talks like that, one knows that here is a man who understands what it means to be a writer, to decide to be a writer which comes with a certain obligation to the calling. That kind of seriousness in a writer is what impresses me most.

It took Naipaul five books to writer whenceupon he became sure of the fact that he had actually become a writer. To believe that you have become a writer, that you are a writer, is a big leap of faith. It is not a hollow pronouncement. It comes with certain givens that you have to respect and live with. That is very important to realise and I believed Rana was that kind of a Writer, a writer with a capital W.

Whatever passages Rana read from his forthcoming novel, tentatively called "Half Life" (a term taken from atomic physics, bears no connection to Naipaul's Half a Life), were mesmerising to say the least. In the reading, a retired, over 100-years-old, nearly blind methusaleh in Bulgaria takes in the view of the city from his window. The tapestry of images and sounds that Rana has woven is marvellous and reminded me of the prose of Borges, Marquez and Coetzee. It was sheer pleasure to hear him read those passages.

During the talk, peppered with innocuous yet perceptive questions from some of the students, Rana talked about many things. Why he decided to settle down in Delhi (love, conversations with a set of creatively-inclined friends), why did he name his novel Tokyo Cancelled (he didn't and it could have been NY Cancelled or London Cancelled but he wanted to shift the focus to an Asian setting for his tale of globalisation), how cinematic images inform his sense of setting a scene in his works (he mentioned a little known movie that showed New York's highways and bridges completely empty of people or vehicles, I forgot the name of the film), how he admires the short stories of Roald Dahl (when a kid asked him about his fav children's author) and what he was trying to do in his next novel (Half Life), due out in early 2009.

For a view from the other side of the table, read Deepika Shetty's post on the event. You will enjoy reading it.

Anne Enright, Mohsin Hamid and Rana Dasgupta

So, finally, the verdict is out. To the disappointment of many, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, has won this year's Booker:

Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family that its author called the literary equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.

Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain's most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy.

The prize, which carries a cheque for 50,000 pounds (US$100,000; ?75,000), was awarded during a ceremony last evening at London's medieval Guildhall.

She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville's "The Sea" in 2005.

"The Gathering" is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother's suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family's troubled, tangled history.

Enright said people looking for a cheery read should not pick up her book.

Sharon has done a good job of collecting some interesting viewpoints, adding her own insights on this issue. Worth a read.

I can't offer my opinion on this (how am I feeling?) as I haven't read Enright's novel (but I would want to; her novel's theme appeals to me). But why to spoil her day? Three cheers for Enright!

A note from The Guardian:

Disappointed though he will doubtless be, Ian McEwan can at least take comfort from his incredibly healthy sales. On Chesil Beach is far outselling the other books on the shortlist combined (not to mention the surge of sales for Atonement in the wake of Joe Wright's film). Sales figures of the other books, by contrast, exemplify the tough climate for literary fiction in the marketplace - and Enright's book has so far shifted just 3,253 copies. The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that the McEwan has sold a total of 120,362; Nicola Barker's Darkmans, 11,097; Mister Pip, 5,170; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist 4,425, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People 2,589.

Indians might be disappointed too as Indira Sinha's novel, Animal's People, was also on the shortlist. But I have no idea how many Indians were rooting for her. I read an interesting review of her work in The Time recently.

Coming back to the number of books sold from the Booker shortlist, here's an interesting thought. How can the sale of a book (a novel nominated for this year’s Booker) in UK and USA reflect the culture of those nations? Believe it or not, it is a study in contrast. The NYT did a story on this. Read it here:

WHEN Mohsin Hamid embarked on an 18-city book tour across the United States, he found readers receptive to his latest novel. It is the story of a young Pakistani Princeton graduate who feels empathy with America, but becomes so disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that he packs up and returns home to the city of Lahore.

The response was so strong that Mr. Hamid, 36, with only one previous novel, sold close to 100,000 copies of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", enough to propel the book, a work of more literary tone than popular flavor, onto the New York Times best-seller list last spring.

Now Mr. Hamid is the center of literary attention in Britain, where the novel is on the short list for the Man Booker Prize to be announced Tuesday.

But while his novel has received critical acclaim in Britain, home to nearly two million Muslims, the commercial reception has been cooler. In a country where people are worried about what has become known as "the enemy within", sales of a novel that speaks unnervingly to fear and disquiet about Muslims have yet to reach more than several thousand.

To Mr. Hamid, the contrast is telling of the difference between the United States, and its embrace of newcomers, and Europe, particularly Britain, where immigrants can forever, it seems, be made to feel like outsiders.

Finally, here's a call for a lit event in Singapore. My friend Deepika sends me this news. Please spread it far and wide and do attend if you happen to be in Singapore:

A READING BY RANA DASGUPTA
ON SATURDAY, 3rd NOVEMBER
FROM 3pm-4pm
AT LITTLE BALI, 9, LOCK ROAD, GILLMAN VILLAGE
PH: 6473-6763