This agent is more cool than James Bond

His motto is: Rob the publisher and enrich the writer.

Hmm...so many writers love him. And for the aspiring writers, he is the god of many big things.

He is the one who got the spunky Arundhati Roy's first book out and created a publishing sensation.

He is David Godwin, the legendary lit agent, the literay Robin Hood, as this Mint article describes him.

But apparently, he started small. When he got Roy in his stable of writers, he says he just had a table and chair in his office and nothing else. He took the next flight out to India to meet her and sign her up (perhaps, worried, had she seen him in his lacklustre office, she might have changed her mind):

After he was fired by Aitken in 1995, Godwin decided to set up an eponymous agency with his wife, Heather, looking after the business side. A friend who was a shipping agent offered him a desk and a phone at his office. “I was in my early 40s. I had no money. No salary. I had to live off what I had sold,” recalls Godwin.

Then everything changed. Godwin’s friend Patrick French (who would go on to write Liberty or Death) dropped by. “Patrick told me that Pankaj Mishra (then working for HarperCollins) had told him about a manuscript he had come across which was ‘the biggest thing since Midnight’s Children’,” says Godwin. It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy.

The manuscript arrived the same day. Later that night, half-way through The God of Small Things, Godwin made a call across the world. He loved the book, he told Roy. He was taking the first flight out to meet her.

A bemused Roy told Godwin to calm down, finish the manuscript and then call her back, if he was still interested.

Two days later, Godwin was flying out to a country he had never before visited—an event that has become so much a part of the folklore surrounding The God of Small Things that it is sometimes referred to simply as the “dash”.

But Godwin is less romantic about that dash and says with a sense of pragmatism: “I only had a desk in London. I thought it would be better for me to see her in India.”

There are two new things here, at least for me. I had read that Pankaj Mishra himself had called up Godwin. Turns out no, not him, it was through Patrick French that Godwin came to know of Roy's manuscript. Also, what is intriguing is that if the book was so good, and it was as time would prove, why didn't Pankaj buy it for Harper Collins for whom he was working at that time (am I right?).

"It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy." Well, I had heard of her. In fact, I had read one of her pieces, in the then Vir Shanghvi edited mag, SUNDAY. She had written protesting against Shekhar Kapur making a film on the life of India's bandit queen. The lady was always a fighter, and courted controversy right from the beginnning. I hope I am not getting the timeline wrong here.

Rushdie on Anita Desai and Urdu

Decades ago, when a fledgling Salman Rushdie was starting out as a writer, one of the hands that guided and encouraged him was of Anita Desai's. Now, the superstar writer pays his debt to her in a foreword to Anita Desai's novel, In Custody:

When I think of Anita Desai I see her most clearly as a figure standing, as an equal, beside Jane Austen, that other great Indian novelist, creator of brave, brilliant women trapped by conservative social mores into becoming mere husband-hunters, women who would be very recognizable to denizens of, for example, the Delhi of Clear Light of Day. And because while she is wholly Indian she is also half-European I think of her in the company of other insider-outsiders such as the white Caribbean novelist Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, or the half-Sikh, half-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Nor should Anita Desai be placed in exclusively female company. As In Custody makes plain, she has cared as much about, and been shaped as deeply by, the great (male) Urdu poets as by any woman’s poems.

Here, Rushdie holds forth on the decline of his mother tongue, Urdu:

In Custody was, therefore, a novel of transformation for its author, a doubly remarkable piece of work, because in this magnificent book Anita Desai chose to write not of solitude but of friendship, of the perils and responsibilities of joining oneself to others rather than holding oneself apart. And at the same time she wrote, for the first time, a very public fiction, shedding the reserve of the earlier books to take on such sensitive themes as the unease of minority communities in modern India, the new imperialism of the Hindi language, and the decay that, now even more than when the book was written, was and is all too tragically evident throughout the fissuring body of Indian society. The courage of the novel is considerable, and so is its prescience. The slow death of my mother-tongue, Urdu, is much further advanced than it was twenty-three years ago, and much that was beautiful in the culture of Old Delhi has slipped away for ever.

Remembering Manto

Sadaat Hasan Manto was Urdu fiction's enfante terrible. There was a time when writers like Manto, Krishan Chandar, R S Bedi, Qurrat ul ain Haider, Ismat Chugtai, Intezar Hussain, among others, made Urdu fiction rocking--they were their generation's Raymond Carvers, Guy de Maupassants, Sartres, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquezes (Though Manto was considered more like D H Lawrence for the choice of his themes).

I grew up reading their stories and novels (some of them had just passed away by that time), and took immmense pride in their work. It took me to a world that was not known to me and made me yearn for that universe, inspiring in me the desire to become an adult and enter that world. Sometimes that world was terrible, mad: Here I am referring to the stories of partition and the pain and savagery that it brought along.

Manto, at his time, was both loved and loathed but his legacy cannot be denied. Even today, his stories are avidly read and they still evoke a sense of wonder at his literary accomplishments.

Here's a piece in Tehelka remembering his life and work:

As an artist, Manto was hugely human, a piece of work in progress. From the early days of his writing career through the years in Bombay to his last days in Lahore, he remained an enigma. He wrote some spectacularly crisp short stories and some eminently forgettable ones. His pen-portraits, nothing less than path-breaking in Urdu literature, stand witness to the sweep of his might as an observer of human nature. Circumstances made Manto what he was as much as he interpreted them. A stern father who trampled on his restless childhood; a school that failed him thrice in the matriculation examination; a social circle that consisted of rebels and spoilt outcasts; well-settled step-brothers who reminded him of his poverty; an establishment that treated him as an embarrassment; a “progressive” peer group paralysed by petty personalities; a socio-legal setup that damaged his self-respect and sent him to the lunatic asylum; a royal addiction that helped him achieve his death wish in the face of consistent rejection — Manto had everything going against him. But, as he said when confronted on his predilection for controversial topics, “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth.”