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Journalism of Courage
Life is short; the years pass by quickly. And there are too many books. Each December, I do this little exercise of selecting the ones I might like to re-read from the pile I’ve read during the year. I’m a fiction writer myself, and so, despite all year-end resolutions, the majority of the books I end up reading (and re-reading) are fiction.
In my assessment, the last 12 to 18 months have been especially good for Indian fiction in English. One is speaking, of course, of the quality of the works published and not their commercial performance. The small readership subset that enjoys intelligent fiction remains biased toward Booker Prize announcements and other foreign markers of quality, and Indian titles, even by relatively well-known names, struggle for discovery and discussion. But good books tend to find their way.
Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri and Anees Salim’s The Bellboy are the two coming-of-age novels I’ve marked for a re-read. One is set in an all-too-real Mumbai, the other on a little island that looks like a bra on maps. Pinto’s novel is an extraordinary Mumbai novel, but a reader who’s never been to the city can love it as much. It gives us one of the best male friendships I’ve seen in literature, a friendship made real by Yuri’s, and his mate Muzammil’s, successes and failures in maintaining a bond across a class divide masquerading as implacable grudges and misunderstandings. In Salim’s novel, the enormous labour undertaken to create a “complete” world is hidden masterfully. A unique slant of observation is given to Latif, our neurodivergent protagonist. The narration has a melancholy yet light air all through, which leaves us unprepared (by design) for when a real, ugly world comes crashing in and tragedies accumulate. “Heartbreaking” doesn’t sound adequate to describe the novel’s conclusion.
The Trump years brought “post-truth” and “alternate facts” not only to American polity but a reckoning with these in American fiction. An equivalent treatment of the early Modi years in Indian fiction was becoming due. In Devika Rege’s Quarterlife, which I called “a landmark novel” in this paper earlier this year, we see the most direct fictional approach to the creation of the times we live in. The novel, set mostly in Mumbai in 2014, traces the psychologies of a bunch of youngsters as they negotiate fresh conflicts between the personal and the political. The novel uses an external event — an unfolding riot in the city of Mumbai — to arrive at its denouement in full kaleidoscopic mode, a choice that may have divided critical opinion but has confirmed Rege’s as one of the bravest debuts in recent years, structurally and thematically.
Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angel, set in Delhi around the turn of the previous decade, marks itself as a political novel in markedly different ways. Its middle-class Muslim protagonist, Alif, is a school history teacher. He’s angelic, too, in the sense that he can mentally float above his social-real station and the attendant antagonisms brewing around him. Unlike Quarterlife, History’s Angel is a novel not of “Event” but of incidents. By “event” with a capital E, I mean that nub of significance or signification that novels that mine history or aim to be called political feel obliged to provide — where, say, a matter of life or death finds eerie direction, or where crumbling circumstance and awful agency play out the direst consequences for the protagonist, or where antagonisms between characters find the fullest voice, or, more generally, where a bunch of pages are designed to land as the loudest thuds. An incident, in comparison, is a milder occurrence, like, say, a Muslim school teacher being suspended from his job after a minor incident with a Hindu pupil. As is clear, said mildness is not a compromise on depth of meaning. Both Quarterlife and History’s Angel work with different, equally real, models of realism. I look forward to reading them again, perhaps simultaneously.
The land’s richest literary prize, The JCB Prize for Literature, was awarded to Firebird by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Janani Kannan. This made it the fifth time out of six that the prize has gone to a translated work. It goes to show the richness of Indian literature, and it is only fair that English literature in India accepts itself as one of many. One wishes, however, for a similar flow in the other direction, wherein more English works get translated into other languages.
Like the years before, 2023 failed to come up with many new platforms for upcoming writers. The Deodar Prize, with a stated mandate of ‘Uncovering New Literary Voices in India,’ was a happy exception and saw a very healthy response. The winning stories by Srividya Tadepalli, Samruddhi Ghodgaonkar, and Ratul Ghosh can be read online at The Bombay Literary Magazine and Hammock Mag. For translated fiction, The Mozhi Prize continued its good work.
Tanuj Solanki’s last novel is Manjhi’s Mayhem (2022)
