Books Are Us

HarperCollins has a formidable list of 13 biographies for 2004: from one on Dilip Kumar to another on Hindi filmdom8217;s favourite bad man Pran. A breathless Shah Rukh Khan will compress his filmi 10-years-of-hurry into Twenty Years of a Decade. And MS: A Life in Music will document the life of renowned classical singer MS Subbulakshmi.

Penguin kicked off its Lives series this year with Shashi Tharoor8217;s Nehru: An Invention of India and wants to sustain this series of compact bios by bringing out about three every year8212;Ambedkar and Indira Gandhi are next on the list. Apart from the series, there will be about 10 more biographies8212;not including some that are already in the market: a revisionist take on that eternal prince among cricketers, Ranjitsinhji, and a brutal self-inquiry by India8217;s first woman chief justice, Leila Seth.

8216;8216;We have always brought out biographies but now we will focus on them,8217;8217; says Ravi Singh, executive editor, Penguin India. 8216;8216;They will be written by people who have a perspective to bring to these lives, who can address a larger audience.8217;8217;

Perspective is not something Indian biographers have been exactly famous for. They have generally been content to love and let die. 8216;8216;India has the local tradition of hagiographies rather than biography,8217;8217; says Rukun Advani, co-founder of Permanent Black, the publishing house that will bring out Aurobindo8217;s biography next year. 8216;8216;They are written in praise of a person8217;s life; in between there are some facts.8217;8217;

Nonetheless, the interest in biographies is being welcomed by the literary world. 8216;8216;India has produced an extraordinary range of characters. Readers like biographies. In fact there is a market for non-fiction,8217;8217; says Ramachandra Guha who wrote an exhaustive biography of Verrier Elwin8212;one of the greatest scholars of India8217;s tribal people.

For a country that has produced so many extraordinary lives, narratives have not kept pace. The hurdles in getting access to records have scared many writers away. Indians are not known to be good record keepers and what they have they guard zealously, says Guha. 8216;8216;For instance there is no biography of Sheikh Abdullah. If I were to go to Farooq or Omar Abdullah they won8217;t show me his papers. Look at Sonia Gandhi, she8217;s paranoid about showing anyone Indira Gandhi8217;s papers.8217;8217;

Our lack of a culture of criticism poses more problems. It8217;s the material biographers leave out, more than what they put in, that would probably rebuild a more exact life.

And then, the art of biography is not particularly easy. It requires rigorous research that needs to be presented elegantly. 8216;8216;The basic problem is the credibility of biographies. It requires solid scholarship but scholars are often not interested in creating that kind of narrative. It needs a novelist8217;s technique to pull off a good biography,8217;8217; says Advani.

But the wave of recent interest, however, has fuelled an increase in the number of books on celebrities. Manzar Khan, managing director of the Oxford University Press, India, however, sounds a note of caution. 8216;8216;There is a distinction between well-researched biographies and those which idealise their subjects,8217;8217; he says.

OUP, which published the Life and Times of GD Birla and Judith Brown8217;s biography of Nehru A Political Life this year, has one on Tagore and another on Satyajit Ray slated for 2004. It will also be publishing an omnibus edition on three statesmen: Gokhale, Gandhi and Nehru.

But for every good biography there are 10 others which are nothing but collections of trivia, documenting the getting up and going to bed schedules of their subjects. Anoushka Shankar8217;s smitten tribute to her father, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar8212;Bapi: The Love of My Life8212;was probably written under the assumption that he was the love of our lives too. And another famous father, Gulzar, has provided sentimental fodder to daughter Meghna.

With popular culture becoming more acceptable, the subjects of books are changing too. Says Khan: 8216;8216;Of late, the trend has been to publish many more popular biographies of film, sport and business personalities in comparison to historical and political figures.8217;8217;

While Gandhi and Nehru are still at the top of the Lives Worth Recording heap, other younger heroes are catching up. In a country where cricket is almost a religion and Sachin a god, a number of biographical odes have been published in the past few years to honour Tendulkar. And there are more. Vedam Jaishankar8217;s biography of Rahul Dravid came out last month, and given the turnaround in Adelaide, it couldn8217;t have been more timely. Chess grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand8217;s autobiography will follow next year.

Among other cricket biographies, Mario Rodriguez8217;s Batting for the Empire, a political biography of KS Ranjitsinhji, is perhaps the only one that doesn8217;t conceal the unsavoury edges of its subject. It also brings alive an entire era through its one still life portrait. Lala Amarnath8217;s life as retold by his son Rajender also covers fresh ground.

Be prepared, then, to answer this question sooner rather than later: 8216;8216;Whose life have you been reading lately?8217;8217;