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Journalism of Courage
A reader of an early draft of Deepa Anappara’s debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Penguin Random House), set in a slum in a smog-shrouded Indian metropolis, came back with a startling question. “Can you show a poor person noticing that their toilet is dirty? If they are using it daily, why would they notice that?” Anappara, who worked as a journalist covering education and child rights in Mumbai and Delhi before she moved to the UK in 2008, knew from her many interviews that sanitation and the state of public toilets was a bitter issue for slum residents. Still, she went back to academic writing on the subject, collated a list of pieces and sent it to her reader. “[I wanted to show that] people are constantly aware of this reality, that they feel ‘that this is not what our life should be’,” she says.
Reading is tangled with privilege and power, it decides the shape of someone else’s story, it can also be wielded to invalidate their experience. This is something Anappara is aware of. Since 2009, she has chiselled away at the craft of fiction in a publishing context which is overwhelmingly white. “I am constantly surprised that the Indian writer’s people have read here are the four people who have won the Booker Prize,” she says over a Skype interview from her home in London. “Even today, it is quite difficult for a writer of colour to be published. You are often asked to explain India in a way a writer from California or New York isn’t,” she says.
For decades now, publishing firms in the UK and the US have shaped the standards of how Indian writing in English is perceived and evaluated, even in India. The results of a publishing culture that has one eye on the prize, often elsewhere, while consuming stories about itself, have been mixed. It has led to great discoveries but also foisted derivative writing, from the endless quest for the “great Indian novel” to the stereotypes of diaspora-literature longing. It has led to homegrown writers without the right publishing pedigree going unheralded. But it has been a while — perhaps since the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, also a despatch from the underbelly of urban, unequal India — since the West has “discovered” a “literary sensation” and a “rising star” for us in the author of the Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line.
The rousing reception to Anappara’s novel in the West — it won the 2019 Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize when it was still a manuscript; it saw a bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018; movie rights have been sold; it has been described by The New York Times as the debut of a “literary supernova” — might make readers of Indian writing in English wonder, too. It is interesting that another new work that arrived with glowing reviews from the West was Mathangi Subramanian’s A People’s History of Heaven, a novel about a group of Feisty Five girls in a Bengaluru slum. In Djinn Patrol, too, Jai and friends (Pari and Faiz) set about “detecting” as children from the slum begin disappearing. If the urban Indian slum is now a motif that snags the publishing gaze, it is, perhaps, because it has become a cultural artefact the Western audience recognises, from its many appearances in films and books — an easy, if predictable, shorthand for the complex economic reality of India that features in newspapers and magazines. “There are moments when I worry that reader response to this book will determine what any writer of colour will face,” Anappara admits. Fiction, though, is richer for the stories that hide frozen within people, those that resist easy exegesis and walk away from headlines.
Nevertheless, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is an assured, moving debut, though not the sensation it is being billed as, despite blurbs from Ian McEwan and Anne Enright. Anappara is an unlikely star. As a quiet child growing up in Palakkad, Kerala, she devoured all kinds of writing, from Viktor Dragunsky’s Adventures of Dennis (1959, translated from the Russian) to the works of MT Vasudevan Nair, Sarah Joseph and Kamala Das. She graduated with a commerce degree and studied journalism at the Asian College of Journalism, then in Bengaluru. Her first job was with The Indian Express, in Mumbai. “One of the first stories I did was about a boy who had run off and was found due to a police show, Missing (aired on Sony and anchored then by Jackie Shroff),” she says. The voices of the many children she met while reporting on ill-equipped government schools and loopholes in the Right to Education Act didn’t make it to her news copies but stayed with her.
The novel remains true to those voices and stubbornly refuses to elucidate India. It is reflected in Anappara’s language, which is studded with coinages and portmanteau that ring true to the Indian ear: “detecting” and “ekdum-mad” and “hi-fi”. It is apparent in the many un-italicised Hindi words and references to pop culture, even to a striking scene from Luck By Chance (2009). “When I read books with words in italics, and an explanation, it is jarring to me as a reader. I think: who are you writing this for? At the level of sentence, technique and craft, it doesn’t work,” says the writer.
Anappara, who admits she “was an idealist when she became a journalist”, approaches the children with empathy, if not love. Jai, not as sharp as the go-getter Pari or as hard-working as Faiz, is an avid watcher of reality shows like Police Patrol and fancies himself as Byomkesh Bakshi, though he wonders why the Bengali detective fights crime in a white dhoti — “dhotis are the worst because they can slip off easily, leaving you in your chaddi in the middle of a bazaar”. “How to write about poverty without romanticising the subject or sentimentalising it? For me, the answer to that difficult and really complex question was to stick to Jai’s point of view, to look at the world as he sees it and follow his interests, which are quite strange,” she says.
It’s reportage that acts as a springboard for Anappara’s fiction, evident in the small details of slum life, from gossip at the public toilet to the simmering violence in classrooms, from the mid-day gruels served to children to the growing march of Hindutva.
The latter owes to her reportage in Gujarat, five-six years after the 2002 riots: “The news reports I wrote from Gujarat showed a great divide between Hindu and Muslim children. Many of the Muslim children had to drop out of school because they had been displaced from their homes. An education centre, run by an NGO, had organised a cricket match between kids to dissipate the tension. But it ended up becoming an India-Pakistan match, and by the end of it, they were trading insults based on religion,” she recalls. In Djinn Patrol, it is this precariousness of childhood, torn between reality and the ghosts of hope, that Anappara shows with great skill.
As she works on a PhD from the University of East Anglia on historical fiction, Anappara is mulling the idea of writing a historical novel on the empire. “It is something I wanted to do especially since I came to England because this country has a completely different idea of history and the British Empire. I remember switching on the BBC and seeing something very warm about Winston Churchill, and I realised, ‘Oh, this guy is a hero’,” she says.
Does she feel the burden of representing India? “I don’t know if it is as much my burden as that of the publishing machinery,” she says. While the UK and English editions have been published without a glossary, Anappara had to give in to the American market. “My publishers said American readers would struggle not knowing what those words are. But, of course, that comes from a power imbalance, where, as an American reader, you have a privilege that the Indian writer does not.”
