LONDON BOOK FAIR 2009

Who was it who made the rash ill-advised statement that the age of the printed book was well and truly over? Not at all. The printed book persists and prevails. Deep in his grave Gutenberg must be rolling with delight. Books flourish as never before

Reginald Massey

This year’s London Book Fair focussed on India thanks to the British Council, PEN, the Federation of Indian publishers, Foyles, the Nehru Centre, the British Library and several other organisations concerned with literature and the arts. The weather was wonderful, London’s spacious parks bloomed and, most appropriately on Shakespeare’s birthday, books were being sold, authors were being questioned and interviewed while gossip-hungry hacks crammed the various venues gobbling canapés and gulping the free vino. There was, in spite of the tamasha, much interaction between publishers and the reading public. Behind the hurly-burly, literary agents and PR persons worked hard on behalf of the authors they represented. Many a lucrative deal was signed. Who was it who made the rash ill-advised statement that the age of the printed book was well and truly over? Not at all. The printed book persists and prevails. Deep in his grave Gutenberg must be rolling with delight. Books flourish as never before.

Indian High Commissioner Shiv Shankar Mukherjee hosted a dinner party at the High Commission on April 19 for the scores of authors and publishers who had flown in from India. It was a sumptuous affair and the Indian wine quite remarkable. Brevity being the soul of wit, I am happy to report that the speeches were short and to the point. On April 21 the Kensington Roof Garden Hotel was the venue of a reception hosted by the British Council and the London Book Fair. Many British writers and poets were invited and I met up with four old friends, the poet Michael Horovitz, celebrated novelist Maureen Duffy, children’s writer Jamila Gavin and Ranjana Ash who has written on social issues. They are all older now and, I’m sure, wiser.

Indian publishers had over 70 stands at Earls Court. Publishers of academic, art and children’s books, fiction and non-fiction, literary criticism and poetry were represented. Dozens of practitioners who write in languages ranging from Assamese to Urdu attended the week-long heavy schedule. This polyglot assembly was not surprising since India recognizes nearly 30 different languages. I, for example, was asked by the British Council to ‘buddy’ Jiwan Namdung of Darjeeling who writes in Nepalese. I do not know with whom Javed Akhtar from Mumbai or Salma (Rajathi Samsudeen) from Chennai were ‘buddied’. The former, poet and screenwriter, needs no introduction but the latter does. She is the first Muslim woman who has made a reputation as a novelist in the Tamil language. On that count alone her work ought to be widely translated. Thankfully Lakshmi Holmstrom has translated Salma’s bestselling novel under the title The Hour Past Midnight which has been published by Zubaan of New Delhi.

I was disappointed that Ruskin Bond who writes about the India that does not hit the headlines was conspicuous by his absence. Bond who lives in the Himalayan foothills is an iconic figure in India but is virtually unknown abroad even though he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Literary Award way back in 1957 and is now a much loved avuncular Padma Shree of the Indian republic.

Those who write in English had, as always, the edge. Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winning economist, philosopher and former Master of Trinity, spoke to a packed house on ‘India in the Modern World’. There were seminars, interviews and discussions which featured, among others, William Dalrymple, Vikram Seth, Surpiya Chaudhuri, Anita Nair, Girish Karnad, Maya Jaggi, Jiwan Namdung and Urvashi Butalia who founded India’s first women’s publishing house. Literature of identity is particularly cogent in the subcontinental context where societal contradiction generates writing which addresses the multiple challenges head on. Politics is too serious a matter to be left to corrupt politicians. Like the great Urdu poet Faiz, poets have to be politically conscious.

Screenwriters, scriptwriters and song writers have their own problems though many do extremely well in monetary terms. In ‘Literature of the Cinema’ Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Bolwar M. Kunhi and Rachel Dwyer threw considerable light on the subject. Javed Akhtar who belongs to a dynasty of poets going back to the time of Mirza Ghalib has an established literary status and has, at the same time, maintained his reputation as a popular and high earning screenwriter. He posed the question: When the scripts of stage plays (Kalidasa, Shakespeare, et al) qualify as great literature, why aren’t film scripts accorded the same sanctity? He then commented on the oft-heard remark: ‘But the film wasn’t as good as the book’. This was because the reader of a novel creates certain pictures and scenarios in his mind as and when it pleases him. While reading a novel, he simultaneously becomes the director as well as the cameraman for the intensely private theatre of his own mind.  Hence when he sees a film based on the novel that he has read and greatly appreciated, he is disappointed. The film has been made through the efforts and lens of some other director and cameraman. Moreover, the director and cameraman and later, the editor, do not make the film from the original novel because they can’t. A novel, no matter how moving, is not a film script. They make the film from a script written by an unavoidable component called the screenwriter. And, because of that unavoidability factor, people like Javed Akhtar make a living.

‘India Translated’ (with Udaya Narayana Singh, Satish Alekar, Harish Narang, Gopi Chand Narang, Vishwanath Prasad Tewari and William Radice) examined the confusions confronted by an intrepid translator who might, for instance, wish to render into Oriya a novel written in Malayalam. It was noted that there was some confusion even on          postage stamps and currency notes: they have ‘India’ printed in English and ‘Bharat’ in Hindi. Was this cultural or linguistic confusion? Vive la difference!

Vikram Seth (Author of the Day on April 21) and his colleagues looked at the current state of fiction in India, not only fiction written in English but fiction written in other languages as well.  Later, writing in general was debated by Amit Chaudhuri, Mamang Dai, Sutinder Singh Noor, Girish Karnad, Amer Hussein and others.

What are reader-development and retail initiatives all about? What role do academics, critics, journalists and book festivals play? Who are the arbiters of taste? These were questions tackled by writer-publisher Namita Gokhale,  Peter Florence and their fellow panellists.

Conflict, whether sporadic or sustained, seems to present writers with challenging concerns not only in India but the world over. Sudeep Chakrabarti, Shafi Shauq, Soumya Bhattacharya, Tarun Tejpal who edits the investigative magazine Tehelka, Temsula Ao and Glenn Patterson debated the literature of conflict, a genre which is becoming increasingly significant.

Pavan Varma, Nandan Nilekeni, Ramchandra Guha, Suketu Mehta, Michael Wood and Nicholas Spice dwelt on the literature if ideas. Pure and speculative philosophy, industry, sports, cultural travel and memorabilia were covered during their session. ‘Bestsellers and Popular writing’ asked questions such as: What books sell and in what languages? Which authors are Indians reading in vast numbers and why?

Tarun Tejpal’s interview with Claire Fox at the English PEN Literary Café brought home the fact that many a writer’s life is not a happy or safe one. The whole world knows about Rushdie’s tribulations but there are scores of others in the same boat. Tejpal talked about the threats to his life and the constant danger he faced in the capital city of the world’s biggest democracy. Why? Because he unmasks corruption, names the crooks and religious bigots and shames those who sell their souls for pieces of silver.

Though most of the events were held at Earls Court other prestigious venues included Foyles and the Palace of Westminster where Lord Desai’s debut novel Dead on Time was launched. Published by Harper Collins, it is a fast moving political thriller set in the rough and tumble of the highest echelons of British politics. It concerns the doings of one Harry White who occupies 10 Downing Street. Now who might the peer of Saint Clement Danes  have in mind? He makes the emphatic statement: ‘All the characters and events described in this work are fictional.’ We all know that  Meghnad has a devilish sense of humour but he also has an uncanny knack of delivering  knock-out punches.

The day the book was launched a large number of Tamils thronged Parliament Square. They were calling on the British government to do something to stop the killings in Sri Lanka. On the same day Alistair Darling delivered his latest budget speech. The BBC was desperately looking for the economist peer to get his opinion but he couldn’t be traced. Eventually they discovered that he was at his book launch and they broadcast the news on network radio. Not a bad plug for the novel. And gratis too. That must have made Meghnad chuckle with delight. However, Dead on Time is a thrilling read and none other than Ruth Rendell (who often writes her crime novels under the name of Barbara Vine) recommends it. Ruth is Meghnad’s colleague in the upper house. Can they, therefore, be called ‘peer partners in crime’?

Earlier, at Earls Court, the seventeen year old Anirudh Vasdev’s collection Of Ghosts, Wizards and other Fantasies was launched by the acclaimed Urdu writer-critic Gopi Chand Narang who was till recently chairman of the Sahitya Akademi, India’s Academy of Letters. The award winning Pakistan novelist Kamila Shamsie was invited to the Shakespeare Globe Theatre by PEN International. With her were the Norwegian writer-poet Bertrand Besigye who was born in Uganda, Petina Gappah from Zimbabwe and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih who is a member of the Khasi tribe from Meghalaya State, India. ‘International Futures: Free the Word !’ was an informed and measured assessment of the intellectual’s  predicament in many countries and societies. Individual identity and freedom of thought and expression, particularly for women, was Kamila Shamsie’s main concern.

At the Nehru Centre a number of books were launched: Vijai Singh Katiyar’s Indian Saris: Traditions-Perspectives-Design, Amano Samarpan’s Indian Birds in Focus, the Urdu poet Haider Tabatabai’s Ain-e-Maikashi and London ke Bhoot and two collections, Jhooth, Jhooth aur Jhooth and Chandan Paani, by  the Hindi poet Divya Mathur. She, Salma and Kamila Shamsie have much in common. All strength to them. Women, take to the pen! And demolish the domination of men.

Reginald Massey is a writer, author and social critic. His latest book is INDIA: DEFINITIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS (Hansib, London). Last year he was writer in residence at the Wolfsberg think tank in Switzerland