Reading’s love affair with Indian writing

Ross Bradshaw takes a walk through the history of Indian writing in the United Kingdom.

In the past, every household with a decent book collection would probably have had at least one of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, EM Forster’s Passage to India and Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Later there would be Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust which won the Booker Prize in 1975 (JG Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker in 1973, but I can’t remember seeing it around much then and it is now, I suspect, not much read). And any hippy worth their salt would have had Love, Siri and Ebba, a famously stoned travelogue!

Many people assumed Jhabvala was Indian but she was a German Jew married to an Indian. Indian writers themselves were less read. RK Narayan and Mulik Rak Anand were available but attracted a more specialist audience. The Bengali poet Rabindrath Tagore (who’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913) was long dead, though not without followers. VS Naipaul, the Caribbean writer of Indian descent also won the Nobel Prize, though he has been criticised for his patronising view of the developing world.

Perhaps the first Indian writers to have a big impact on the British reader were Anita Desai and, above all, Salman Rushdie when his Midnight’s Children won the Booker in 1981. His main character was born at the moment India becomes independent, setting the book immediately in that most important time of Indian history, independence, closely followed by partition. Many people also bought Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy but were daunted by its length (I’m guilty as charged).
Coming more up to date, Arundhati Roy won the Booker with God of Small Things. Roy has used her fame to campaign in India against inappropriate development. Other Indian writers to win the Booker include Kiran Desai and, a couple of years ago, Aravid Adiga. I’ve read Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, which I found more moving in retrospect than at the time, but not yet read Adiga’s The White Tiger, which also shows some of the seamier side of Indian society.

The sales of these books indicate that literary readers are keen on books on India written by Indians, but some of the major books promoted by the Richard and Judy Book Club indicate that the general reader is equally keen on books from the Indian sub-continent. Every book club has discussed The Kite Runner, with most readers going on to Khaled Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’d imagine most have read The Bookseller of Kabul too!

Asian writing in Britain has been slower to take off. In the 1970s there were massive audiences for talks by Amrit Wilson on Finding a Voice and new writers like the lesbian Sunita Namjoshi also attracted large numbers to her readings. Surprisingly this was not sustained until Monica Ali had the break through novel, Brick Lane, which had the confidence to portray her Bangladeshi community with “warts and all” rather than as some Bangladeshi community leaders liked it to appear. Around the same time Daljit Nagra started winning prizes for his first full collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! He came up through the small press scene, indeed several of the poems in that collection had been published by Five Leaves in the Dutch/English anthology By Heart/Uit Het Hoofd.

On a more popular level, the actor Meera Syal seemed to be everywhere for a while, including the best-seller charts for her variable novels, and now the Glasgow Sikh comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli is everywhere, including in the book charts for his Indian Takeaway. More serious is the Pakistani-born journalist and novelist Kamila Shansi, author of Burnt Shadows. Big publishers are now prepared to get behind British Asian writers, though sometimes they get it wrong. Gautam Malkani was given a huge advance for Londonstani, a book about streetwise youth. This time they got it wrong on sales and the book bombed.

Locally we have Bali Rai, writing about our multi-cultural UK; Debjani Chatterjee active in the National Association for Writers in Education; the sometime Nottingham novelist Shanti Sekaran; Mahendra Solanki (quiet at the moment but his Shadows of My Making is well remembered) and BK Mahal, though she too is currently quiet. More would be welcome.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop - http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com