Why so cautious? A response to a piece about film literature

[Wrote this for the Daily O]

In this piece published by the Daily O yesterday, literary agent Kanishka Gupta makes hard but pragmatic observations about the Indian publishing industry and about aspiring writers. Some of these observations are general ones, but since the piece is specifically about film books, he mentions that these don’t sell in large numbers; the benchmarks for bestseller status in this category are very low.

That sounds puzzling, given the passion for cinema in this country, but it may have to do with the fact that we don’t have a particularly evolved attitude to good popular cinema, or to good writing about cinema. Many professional film reviewers either endorse movies in the most superficial terms, in cliché-ridden 300-word pieces (“it’s good entertainment if you leave your brains at home”, “four stars for the acting, three stars for direction”), or sit on a pedestal sneering at everything mainstream, making little effort to engage with what they are watching – and then winning brownie points for their “sharp” and “clever” writing. And what is true at the level of reviews holds at the book level too. On the one hand there are academic books meant for a very particular, circumscribed market; on the other, flippant little things that are hurriedly written and published to capitalise on something that’s in the news. (A few years ago a couple of big-name publishers were falling over themselves trying to quickly “produce” a book about AR Rahman when his Oscar nomination for Slumdog Millionnaire was announced; of course, the idea was that the book would be ready for publication by the time the awards were announced!) Accessible yet intelligent writing about cinema is still in short supply – though that has been changing to a degree, with the top publishers now showing a little more discernment in their choice of writers and approaches.

Gupta mentions the big market for tell-all star biographies. That makes intuitive sense – of course a book with Salman Khan’s or Deepika Padukone’s face on the cover, with the promise of juicy, previously unpublished tidbits inside, has greater sale potential than a sombre-looking biography of a less glamorous figure. I would add a caveat, though. My experience, having done two cinema books with big publishers, and also having spoken with other authors of film books, is that marketing is often muddled or indifferent to begin with. Two years after my book about the 1983 comedy Jaane bhi do Yaaro came out, a restored print of the film was released by the National Film Development Corporation. This was after a longish period when this well-loved film had been very difficult to find in stores, so there was naturally lots of publicity and much celebrating. One would think it would be in a publisher’s interests to contact stores such as Crossword and Landmark, and get them to do something as basic as display the DVD and the book together (assuming it was too much trouble to tie up with the NFDC for a DVD-plus-book package).

It didn’t happen, of course. And I confess to my own indolence in not trying hard enough to make it happen (after sending out a couple of emails making the suggestion). I was happy with the feedback I had initially got for the book; I didn’t spent time worrying about sales; everything good that happened – the reviews, the royalty cheques for tiny amounts that still drift in once or twice a year – came as a pleasant, unlooked-for bonus. And it was only with hindsight that I realised that more could have been done: that the marketing people who arranged 4 pm meetings with me at Café Coffee Day (that’s a good time, 4 pm – it lets you leave office early “for an official meeting with an author” and go straight home afterwards) and made impressive sounds about “leveraging social media” and “looking at new avenues such as film festivals” didn’t bother to follow up on most of their claims.

Anyone who has worked in publishing knows that such missteps are part of the grand dance. However, I also had a problem with a couple of Gupta’s points. He is upfront about not knowing much about cinema, but this raises a question that is important to me as someone who does care about films and film writing: how much value can a literary agent dealing with all sorts of books bring to a field that he isn’t personally invested in? Wouldn’t this inevitably result in pandering to a conservative view of what the readership is like, what a “worthy” book might look like, what will sell and what won’t? And we see signs of this near the end of Gupta’s piece, where he says:

“I was reduced to tears when a journalist of S's stature started suggesting names such as Joydeep Mukherjee, Mithun Chakraborty […] And horror of horrors, even Bappi Lahiri!”

I was taken aback by that paragraph, because here is a bit of sneering about people who are presumably too slight or not “important” enough as subject matters for a (good/successful) book. But as the critic Victor Perkins wrote once, “The treatment may or may not have been successful: there is no such thing as an unsuccessful subject.” A great book can be written on any topic, the same way that a terrible book can be written about an "important" personality like Satyajit Ray. The execution is what matters.

For example, the 1960s actor Joydeep (Joy) Mukherjee is the least well-known, certainly the least fashionable, of the three names that Gupta mentions, but I could easily imagine a book about him – by a hardworking writer – that would not just be about Mukherjee in a narrow sense but would also provide a fascinating window on the Hindi film industry of the 1960s, as well as an examination of that elusive thing called stardom: why did this affable leading man never make it to the heights that, say, Manoj Kumar or Jeetendra did? What does that say about our film-going culture of that specific period, about our expectations of star personalities, about us as viewers?

Again, what is so "horror of horrors" about a book on Bappi Lahiri? There are a dozen different ways in which an insightful – or just plain funny – book could be written about this most flamboyant of music directors. But the biggest surprise on that list is Mithun Chakraborty, because here is a hugely interesting subject to begin with: someone who could be convincing in a Mrinal Sen film AND in Disco Dancer (how many other actors could you say that about?), and was seen as a genuine contender for Amitabh Bachchan's throne for a couple of years in the mid-80s, before he took the route that led to Kanti Shah and to a very profitable and shrewd career in C-movies. A book about Mithun, well done, could be a microcosmic study of Indian cinema; it could tell us much about the workings of, and the interplay between, the various grades of cinema in this country.

More alarm bells at the very end of the piece, when Gupta scoffs at the idea of doing a book about a mere “technician” (who, given the little hints in the piece, might well have been someone as notable as Satyajit Ray’s cinematographer). All I can say to this is: it's a pity if film writing in India hasn't reached the stage where a literary agent would feel comfortable midwiving a book of that sort. In other countries with large moviemaking cultures, there are dozens of accessible books on every aspect of the filmmaking process, not just on the most instantly recognizable actors.

Possibly I’m getting idealistic now, and possibly Gupta’s intention was only to discuss what is likely to become a bestseller. But his piece also left me with the nagging sense that an agent, even while ruing the many (undeniable) problems in the publishing industry, can become part of the problem. By falling in too easily with the assumptions of a system that has fixed expectations of writers and the market, and needs books to be clearly classified.