I’ve written earlier about the spate of mass-market novels authored by young students/graduates and published by low-investment houses like Srishti** – mostly simplistic stories about youngsters who learn hard truths about life through friendships and romance, and eventually grow up (or, in some cases, achieve the all-consuming goal of losing their virginity while remaining just as mentally stunted as before). The majority of these novels move at a brisk rate, with lots of conversation but very little description. Rarely if ever are the protagonists genuine introverts or loners, though in some cases they think of themselves as such.
This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.
Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.
Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.
There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.
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** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post
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Did this for Biblio]
Personal experience tells me that if you’ve built up a reputation as a “serious literary critic” – even if it was entirely unsolicited and you’re not comfortable with the label – the best way to lose credibility is to write something faintly complimentary about Chetan Bhagat. This doesn’t mean proclaiming that his books are great, or even good, works of literature. All you need to do is to be less than sneeringly contemptuous. Write a blog post cautiously suggesting that Bhagat is a decent storyteller, that he knows his readership very well and is good at creating a comfort zone for them, and within minutes the angry comments will flow in. Here, from my blog, is one of the more restrained ones:
“This assertion that CB is a good storyteller is a common excuse that reviewers make when they discuss such low-brow crap. But story telling is meant for children, not for adult readers and certainly not for critics whose job should be to help other readers make an enlightened choice and to serve the cause of literature.”
Now of course, critics have a responsibility to literature. Equally important, they have a responsibility to themselves; to express their honest feelings about a work as articulately as possible – preferably backed with knowledge and context – and to understand that these feelings reflect their own distinct backgrounds, experiences and biases and mustn’t be taken as the final word on anything. But as Bhagat himself puts it, “If you’re a critic with a professional interest in what’s happening in the world of literature, you also owe it to yourself to be aware of how different types of writing connects for different people.”
And this is a man who knows a thing or two about connecting with his readers. In a world far removed from highbrow Internet literary discussions, the Chetan Bhagat session at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January this year was a huge, unqualified success that ended with the author being mobbed by autograph-seekers outside the hall. Throughout the session Bhagat showed his talent for bonding with the audience in his earthy, unpretentious style. They hung on to every word, applauded enthusiastically when he said things like “Love comes first. If there’s a book priced at Rs 500 and you can have a meal with your girlfriend for that money instead, that’s what you should do – unless it’s a book about how to get new girlfriends!” They shyly ventured suggestions on how he could improve his books – and no, the suggestions weren’t that the writing should be more literary; instead, they wanted him to remove the “bad language” and the passages about pre-marital sex, which made their middle-class parents uncomfortable.
“Critics think my books are so safe, that they don’t challenge anyone at all,” Bhagat said to me afterwards, “but as you can see, these books often shock the small-town people who are their primary readers. Whether you like it or not, you have to take into account the responses and feelings of even the most inexperienced readers.” What he’s essentially saying is that there are many different levels at which people in this country engage with the English language, many hierarchies of reading and writing; and that most literary critics only seem to care about the topmost rung of sophisticated readers.
Whatever you think of Bhagat’s books, his success provides valuable insight into the needs and aspirations of a large base of readers whose engagement with literature is still at a grassroots level. This is what the Chetan Bhagat phenomenon has been about, ever since his first novel Five Point Someone, strategically priced at just Rs 95, sold lakhs of copies in a market where you don’t need to reach even the 10,000-mark to qualify as a bestseller. The book’s success helped open the floodgates for a new movement in Indian writing in English. An increasing number of writers are now reaching out to the “casual reader” – someone who wouldn’t normally list reading among his hobbies but who might pick up a cheaply priced novel because his friends have been talking about it; someone who prefers conversational prose and easily recognizable stories and settings to the rigours of literary fiction. After all, this type of writing isn’t about opening the reader’s mind to new worlds and ideas, which has traditionally been one of the functions of good literature; it’s about reinforcing everything you already know about the world and your place in it, seeking comfort in the fact that there are others who have experienced the same things you have. (Many of Bhagat’s readers are youngsters who have studied in IIT or worked in a call centre, which are things he’s written about. Many of his other readers are people who aspire towards those experiences.) Other writers have been quick to follow this trend, and their books invite different classifications (“Campus Novel”, “Chick Lit”, “Lad Lit”), but they are really all about giving casual readers something they can relate to. As Abhijit Bhaduri, the author of the “MBA novels” Mediocre but Arrogant and Married but Available puts it, “I chose a business-school setting because I was familiar with it and no other story had an Indian business school as a backdrop. The characters are all archetypal – people every batch can identify with. One simply had to spin a story around it.”
“What we’re seeing,” says Neelesh Misra, whose Once Upon a Timezone was about a call-centre employee’s long-distance relationship with a US-based journalist, “is the end of pretension for the publishing industry.” But there’s a pretension of a different sort on view now, accompanied by inverse snobbery: the eagerness to take potshots at “serious writers”, the self-serving assumption that any writer who uses descriptive prose and trades in complex ideas must be a “pseudo-intellectual” catering to the demands of the West. “I can’t understand why anyone would write an 800-page novel or spend six years working on one book,” Tushar Raheja, author of Anything for You, Ma’am: An IITian’s Love Story, wondered aloud to me once. “My life has been so eventful that I can easily write 50 books based on my experiences.” It might bear mentioning that Raheja was all of 22 years old at the time and that his book (the second paragraph of which began with the sentence “So ya, returning to the point”) supplied little evidence of an “eventful life” other than what its title suggests.
Amidst all this bluster, it’s refreshing to talk to Bhagat, who doesn’t have any delusions about what he’s trying to do: “I’m not pushing myself in a literary direction, I’m pushing for reach.” But he does think a great deal about the issues surrounding his writing – about the effect he has on both highbrow critics and inexperienced readers. And though he is known for being unassuming and happy go lucky, he admits to sometimes getting defensive when the criticism becomes too personal. “When you condemn me, you judge my reader,” he says. “Many people don’t understand that my books are read by government-school kids who know they have to learn English if they want to get anywhere in life. My books often provide them with an entry point into that daunting world. They would be scared if they picked up a more literary work and saw intricate sentences in the first paragraph.”
This last remark makes it seem like “mass-market publishing” is only about writing books that are simple, fast-paced reads, but the truth is a little more complicated. There is an army of mass-market writers who use big words and convoluted sentences to impress, in the style of the MBA aspirant who memorizes word-lists for an entrance exam without understanding context, or the thesis writer who uses the thesaurus indiscriminately. The work of these authors gets published – with practically no editing or even copy-editing – by low-investment publishing houses such as Srishti, and some of it makes Bhagat’s novels seem like masterpieces of restraint and subtlety. “No other book will give you as many big words for only a hundred rupees” went a description of Tuhin Sinha's That Thing Called LOVE: An Unusual Romance... and the Mumbai Rain (many of these novels have intriguing sub-heads that will remind you of such Hindi movie titles as Baaz: A Bird in Danger). But ambitiously florid though Sinha’s novel is, its claim is put in the shade by other recent publications like Novoneel Chakraborty's A Thing Beyond Forever, which informs us that its central character has “been taken through a cavalcade of exclusive events”, that she has received “copasetic answers” and that “the brush of her rapturous wishes made a surreal painting of utopia on the canvass of her heart, spraying a déjà senti feeling on her” (sic). Or Pankaj Pandey’s The Saga of LOVE Via Telephone...Tring Tring, which includes gems like “I gradually started spreading my tentacles in love”, “Then, started my saturnine days” and “What will Pankaj do in this perplexed and imbroglio situation?” (sic)
Presumably, the above books are targeted at smart-alecky urban youngsters – the “anyways” generation who are willing to see a book as a fashionable pop commodity and for whom talking the cool talk is more important than an understanding of basic grammar. But then, that’s how large the spectrum of mass-market readership in India is: it includes these city brats as well as the small-town readers who diffidently ask Chetan Bhagat to tone down the gaalis in his books. It includes readers who will never pick up anything other than a Bhagat novel but it also includes at least a few people who will use his books as a stepping stone to more varied reading. Either way, it’s a market that will determine the future of Indian publishing and the literary critic would do well to try and understand it, even if he can’t bring himself to approve of it.
Posted below is a feature I did for the latest issue of Man’s World magazine. It was meant to be about books that are commonly classified as “lad lit”, but a related story that I find much more interesting (and which I’ve incorporated here) is the number of writers who are targeting the mass market – reaching out to the kind of reader who might pick up a cheaply priced novel because of the easily relatable characters and settings in it. The attitudes of some of these writers are very revealing. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery, for instance: the assumption that “literary” must necessarily be synonymous with “pretentious”, and that the best reason (the only reason?) to write a book is to sell thousands of copies and become famous quickly. I couldn’t help thinking about my recent interviews with Vikram Chandra and Raj Kamal Jha: Chandra saying he would be pleased if his book found just one reader with the “same heart”, Jha saying he felt lucky if 4-5 people appreciated something he had written. The mass-market writers would probably snort at these statements.
Working on this story was another reminder that many of us who read/review for a living and move in lit-circles tend to lose sight of the possible directions IWE (Indian writing in English) might take in the next few years. I think there’s scope for more indepth features about the increasing democratisation of Indian publishing.
Here’s the story.
‘We can’t do very literary stuff’
“What we’re seeing,” says Neelesh Misra, “is the end of pretension for the publishing industry.” The journalist-cum-author is talking about a new movement in Indian writing in English: the growing number of writers who are reaching out to the “casual reader” – that is, someone who prefers easily recognizable stories and settings, and conversational prose, to the rigours of literary fiction. Misra’s own first novel, Once Upon a Timezone, is a case in point. Despite a low-profile launch, it had sold over 8,000 copies as of early December, a very impressive figure for the fiction market in India.
“People who didn’t read earlier are picking up books now,” says Misra, “and they want themes and characters they can relate to.” Many urban Indian youngsters should be able to relate to his fast-paced story about Neel Pandey, who dreams of going to the US but ends up working in a Delhi call centre and forming a long-distance relationship with an American journalist.
Misra is in his 30s, well-ensconced in his job as a senior editor with the Hindustan Times, and proclaims that he’s “primarily a journalist who also happens to write books” – but his views are shared by a much younger man who hasn’t even embarked on a career yet. Tushar Rahaja, 22, recently graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the author of Anything for You, Ma’am – An IITian’s Love Story, says he and his friends can’t connect with a lot of contemporary fiction. “I know many people who don’t read simply because they find it very boring,” he says. When Raheja wrote his debut novel, he relied on his visual sense and a flair for recording casual conversations: “I knew I couldn’t do very literary stuff.”
This movement away from “literary stuff” is catching on. Traditionally, one of literature’s strong points was supposed to be that it could make you uncomfortable – by opening windows into new worlds, challenging the reader to (at least briefly) understand characters who live and think differently. Much of the new writing on the Indian literary horizon performs the opposite function: it’s about reinforcing what you already know of the world; seeking comfort in the fact that there are others who have experienced the same things you have (even if it’s something as basic as having an argument with a girlfriend at the Barista in Green Park market - you know, the one that's just around the corner from Evergreen?). And as it happens, much of this writing is currently in the form of stories about the lives of confused young men.
Dude lit: a facile classification
Many new books deal with the coming-of-age experiences of a male protagonist – the ups and downs in studies, friendships, romance and career. In recent months, apart from Once Upon a Timezone… and Anything for You, Ma’am, there’s been Abhijit Bhaduri’s Mediocre but Arrogant, about a youngster named Abbey who lives and learns in a Jamshedpur management institute in the early 1980s (don’t miss that the book title spells “MBA”) and Tuhin Sinha’s That Thing Called Love (TTCL), centred on the ad-sales manager of a matrimony website and his quest for true love.
This commonality has led these books to be classified as “lad lit” or “dude lit”, the Boy’s Own Club riposte to Chick Lit. But the authors themselves resist being slotted. “These are terms propounded by the media,” says Sinha, pointing out that his novel deals with the lives of a motley group of characters, not just one male protagonist. “In a broad sense, I suppose it can be called lad lit. But personally, while writing it, I was least concerned about what category it would fit into.” Besides, he says, the feedback he gets through his website and on email comes from both male and female readers.
Chetan Bhagat, whose bestselling Five Point Someone and One Night @ the Call Center have been vanguards for the genre, is more aggressive. “Chick lit refers to literature that is read primarily by women. But ‘lad-lit’ is read by men and women both, what is so laddish about it?” he asks. “Some journalists like to slot items into snappy sub-categories, and so do the marketing divisions of publishing companies – that’s how this compartmentalisation happens.”
Abhijit Bhaduri says Mediocre but Arrogant wasn’t written to fit a genre but flowed naturally out of his own experiences as a business-school student. “I wanted to write about the experience of growing up in India in the 1980s and I chose a business-school setting because I was familiar with it.” Similar sentiments are voiced by Sudeep Chakravarti, whose Tin Fish captured the ethos of Mayo School in the mid-1970s, a milieu the author had experienced firsthand. For all the recent media hype, “lad lit” is simply a jazzed-up term for the good old-fashioned Bildungsroman, which is the sort of book a first-time novelist – still struggling to find a comfort zone in fiction – often writes.
Reading is cool. So is writing. But 'serious’ equals ‘pseudo’
So while it’s interesting that stories are being told from the young male perspective, the more notable thing about these books is that they constitute a new approach to writing and publishing – one that’s opposed to the idea that reading has to be a solitary habit, confined to a select few. Through pricing strategies and through the accessibility of their writing, these authors are targeting a mass readership and they make no bones about it.
A couple of years ago, Rupa & Co’s gambit of pricing Bhagat’s Five Point Someone at Rs 95 famously paid off: in a market where a mere 5,000 sales are enough to classify a novel as a “bestseller”, Five Point Someone sold lakhs of copies. Youngsters who would otherwise never have listed “reading” among their hobbies were buying the book – not just from regular bookstores but even at railway stations and traffic crossings. This is a strategy that other publishers have picked up on. Srishti Publishers has marked Raheja and Sinha’s novels at Rs 100 (in fact they are marked down even further at some bookstores), while Once Upon a TimeZone (HarperCollins India) and Mediocre but Arrogant (Indialog Publications) are both priced at Rs 195 – which is still quite low given their higher production quality and better editing.
“I told my publishers I didn’t want my novel priced at more than Rs 100,” Raheja tells me. Reason? He can’t imagine why someone might want to spend Rs 500 or more on a book “when he can go out with his girlfriend a couple of times and enjoy himself with the same money”. The obvious jokes aside (people who read have time for girlfriends?), this indicates a thought process that’s very different from that of purveyors of literary fiction. It’s the thought process of someone who’s willing to see a book as a pop commodity, something that provides instant gratification the way a quick meal at McDonald’s would – rather than as a pathway to intellectual stimulation.
But then “intellectual” is a bad word in these circles anyway – it’s synonymous with “pretentious”, and invariably preceded by “pseudo”. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery on view: the eagerness to take potshots at “serious writers”, the simplistic and self-serving assumption that any writer who uses big words, long sentences and descriptive prose must necessarily be insincere or catering to the demands of the West. The writers who target a mass-readership can’t understand why anyone would be “self-important” enough to write an 800-page tome, or to spend six years working on one book. “My life has been so eventful that I’m sure I can already write 50 books based on my experiences,” says Raheja confidently.
Abhijit Bhaduri and Neelesh Misra are relatively measured in their attitude to literary distinctions. “I want to avoid talking down to readers or getting into fancy descriptions,” says Misra, “but I do think of my work as middlebrow at least. If I write something, it should meet a certain quality requirement.” Bhaduri, who counts Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy among his favourites, says, “The casual, conversational style of writing appeals to a large mass of people, but literary fiction has its own place.”
Convergence
Significantly, many of these writers have a strong online presence, with personal websites and blogs that help in promoting their books. “My Ryze page helped spread awareness about TTCL,” says Tuhin Sinha, “When you don’t have a professional PR agency working for you, the Net is the best option.” This medium also helps the writers to bypass the critic (another bad word!) and interact directly with that more important beast – the reader. For as Raheja puts it, “Critics use words that are out of the public domain. They are distanced from what they write about – they don’t know how much effort one puts into writing a book or making a film.”
Another interesting thing about this new lot of novels is that many of them are practically ready to be transferred to the big screen. (As a boy tells his girlfriend in Anything for You, Ma’am, “When God is giving us such a good chance to live a movie, why should we despair? Right now it is a perfect script for a masala movie.”) This isn’t surprising, for on the whole these writers have closer ties with Bollywood films than with literature. Sinha, for instance, is a Mumbai-based scriptwriter whose work includes serials like Pyar Ki Kashti Mein. “The scriptwriting experience has helped,” he says. “I’ve been told my book is very visual.”
Similarly, Neelesh Misra has written songs for Hindi movies – notably “Jaadu hai nasha hai” from Jism and “Maine dil se kaha…” from Rog – as well as a couple of scripts. His book ends with a very movie-like coda about what eventually happens to the various characters (sample: “Meenal Sharma and Sonia Shah are now India’s first legally married lesbian couple”). And Raheja’s ultimate aim is to make a film and oversee most aspects of the production. “I hate collaboration in art. Ideally I would like to do everything myself.” He draws an imaginary marquee in the air with his hands: “It should say Written by, Directed by and Music by Tushar Raheja.” Chances are that film versions of most of these books will be underway soon – which in turn should open the market even further.
But as Bhaduri says, “Today it’s lad-lit, tomorrow we’ll have teen lit or even kid lit. Eventually it’s all about giving the reader something to identify with.” Purists and critics will continue to be sceptical about this new writing, but for good or for bad it seems to be working. The coming months should see the playing out of the conflict between mass-market writing and literary fiction, especially if the larger publishers start accepting more manuscripts with an eye on what appeals to the untrained reader.
(BOX WITH STORY)
Tempting as it is to put all these books in the same bracket, they do vary in quality. Once Upon a Timezone… and Mediocre but Arrogant are a cut above the others. The former is a good airport read, but it also makes interesting observations about the changing nature of relationships and communication in today’s world – especially in the way the protagonist and his US-based girlfriend become close long-distance despite lying to each other about important things. Bhaduri’s novel (soon to be followed by “MBA” sequels, starting with Married but Available) is well-plotted and benefits from the illustrations, done by the author himself, which are like the doodles you’d see in any college student’s notebook.
On a lower rung in terms of writing quality and production values are Anything for You, Ma’am and That Thing Called Love, both of which are earnest first-time efforts but cringingly awkward in places. When a young couple spends time getting to know each other over coffee in That Thing Called Love, the author notes, “They soon realised that their coffee had been over for sometime. They’d been instead sipping the magic of their interactions.” It’s the sort of amateurishly constructed sentence that one is immediately tempted to condescend on – but then, who is to say there isn’t a market for such writing? This manner of basic, school-level playing around with words is exactly what might appeal to a lovelorn young man who has never read a novel before and casually picks one up at a roadside stall for “timepass”.
However, even the most indulgent reader would have to squirm at a sex scene late in the book, when a boy “pulls off a girl’s bra to discover that her lofty boobs did indeed meet the idea he had of them”. (“Lofty” boobs? Really? Where was the editor? But I forget – assembly-line books don’t waste much time on the editorial process.)
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.
