Aravind Adiga: 'How English literature shaped me'

Growing up in a conservative Indian town in the 1980s, Aravind Adiga devoured literature, most of it English, he says in an essay in The Independent. 

"Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. Books were expensive in those days, and few of us could actually buy them. The thing to do was to join a circulating library that would lend them out at a nominal rate (novels, two rupees a fortnight; comics, 50 paise).

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things. Up to the age of 10, you borrowed comics (mainly illustrated versions of the great Indian epics); later came your first novels, a boys' detective series called "The Hardy Boys". Girls read an equivalent series called "Nancy Drew".

When you grew out of the Hardy Boys, you started on the action novelist Alistair MacLean, whose fast-paced novels such as The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare were given glamour by their big-budget Hollywood adaptations. My problems started when Alistair MacLean bored me. The owner of my favorite lending library suggested that I try a "woman's writer" instead: Agatha Christie. She was fascinating for a while, introducing me to the revolutionary idea that a killer could narrate a novel (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) before she bored me too."

Read the full piece here.

Golden age of Indian writing: How a new generation of writers is making waves in South Asia

From The Independent -- 

There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to a Delhi bookshop to browse its section of Indian literature would be a somewhat depressing experience. There would a handful of stellar stand-out names, of course; Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and one or two others. But the collection would be a half-hearted affair, seemingly there more out of duty than joy, and usually it would be hidden away at the back of the shop.

"Now, that has all completely changed," laughs V K Karthika, publisher and chief editor of HarperCollins India. "Now those books are at the front of the shop. What's more, they're actually the books you want to read, rather than the books you read because you feel you should."

For more than a decade, a period bookended by Arundhati Roy's Booker prize success in 1997 with The God of Small Things and Aravind Adiga's similar achievement last year, India has been enjoying an English language literary boom. A newly buoyant middle-class, better travelled, more curious and with more disposable income, has been devouring books like never before. Almost every year now it appears that there is a new trend – pulp fiction one year, chick-lit "sari fiction" the next – as Indian publishers find new ways to tap into the market and reach out to more readers.

But more lately, this growth is spilling out across the hot and angry borders of the sub-continent. New writers from Bangladesh are finding appreciative international audiences, while the frisson surrounding the new literary scene in Pakistan that has produced a handful of exiting new authors, matches the buzz that India first experienced a decade ago.

In India, the growth seems more obviously apparent in the sheer variety of genres that now fill the shelves. There is more fiction, non-fiction and travel writing than ever before; between them, the major publishers now annually produce around 600 new titles each year. But within these broad headings there is huge diversity that would not have been imaginable a few years ago. Today's India is producing crime novels, comic-strip books, and memoirs such as Maximum City, Suketu Mehta's seminal account of Mumbai. There are books set around the campus's of the country's famed technology institutes, and there are books about young Indian women smoking, drinking and falling in love with hapless, inappropriate men.

Read the full article here.

Salman Rushdie: The Fatwa 20 Years Later on Times Talks

People seem to expect Salman Rushdie to write about his experiences after a fatwa was imposed on him in 1989. He explains why he has not yet done it: At the moment it feels like reopening a room that I locked up for very good reason.

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