Rana Dasgupta slums it in the tiny ghetto we call the books pages. His analysis, in this essay in Tehelka, is measured, and echoes the dissatisfaction that us Babus have heard over the years from reviewers, authors, editors and publishers, which makes me wonder what's going on--we know what's broke in the Indian media, so why can't we fix it?
On the reviews of his book:
"Over time, a small number of reviews appeared. Attentive and well-written, they were at the same time introspective and unambitious. For the most part, they remained at the level of the literary, speaking of the various pleasures and displeasures of the reading experience, and devoting their discussion to issues of literary language and form. They seemed to approach literature as private pleasure rather than as a part of the more general, extra-literary conversations of the world. This was somewhat disappointing since I had conceived this book as a pointed intervention into such conversations.
If you examine the cramped, ghetto-like environs that newspaper editors provide for book reviews, however, all this is not surprising. It is difficult, in a review of less than 800 words, to do much more than simply describe a book, and book reviews in Indian newspapers are often much shorter than that."
I wrote one of the reviews of Tokyo Cancelled, and I have to admit he's bang on in his criticism: we do see literature as a private, even a guilty pleasure. "Covering" books and authors is seen, in the hierarchy of reporting, as a relatively unimportant job; the fight for space is ferocious, constant, and always a losing battle. But it's a little frightening that Rana thought the book received only "a small handful" of reviews; unlike several other novels, Tokyo Cancelled was reviewed everywhere. That is, every publication that has books pages--which seems, clearly, not to be enough.
Rana also met the non-books books journos, a tribe who seems to leave all authors who've been through the interview mill in India more than slightly gobsmacked.
"One sensed among them a panic of speed, the terrible anxiety of having to feed the newspaper’s insatiable hunger for new and different kinds of celebrity; and they were often hilariously unprepared. I had one exchange with a journalist who possessed only two items of information about me — the fact that I had written a book, and my mobile telephone number — and who had to extract from me, during the course of a twenty-minute phone conversation, various other items essential to her article (whose deadline was approaching in the next two hours) — such as the title of the book, the nature of its contents, and my name.
And this is telling:
"But, with a very few exceptions, there is no serious social debate in the mainstream Indian press, and this is not its purpose in speaking to such people. The press already has its Idea — the celebration of the grand pantheon of Indian power and money — and it is not looking for new ones. Artists and intellectuals are called upon not to offer critique or alternative visions but to sidle in compliantly amongst the lowest rungs of this same pantheon and so to boost its size and glory. For anything else, Indian newspapers currently do not even possess the language. This can be seen at its most extreme in Indian press coverage of contemporary art, which never even makes an attempt to talk about the questions raised by this most daring and radical of areas of contemporary creativity; all it can do instead is to quote sale prices and gloat nationalistically, if ignorantly, over the slowly rising value of Indian art on the international markets.
....A true intellectual culture — even just a literate culture — depends on the circulation of these people’s ideas as ideas and not as just more success stories. Virtually the only people whose ideas are expounded seriously and in detail at present are politicians and leading businessmen; and this is a woefully inadequate basis for us to think critically and creatively about the very grave issues that face us.
"
Part of the perks of the Babu's job is that, even if I don't get to write about books, authors and reading in the way I'd like to, I do get the news, the books, the long conversations with writers. When it comes to film, though, I watch what Bollywood's producing in a virtual vacuum; the space for film "news" (gossip, inane celeb drivel, cleavage shots) eats up the space for reviews, essays, information. I went back to the theatres after a long absence around the time that films like Company and Satya emerged on the scene; but I watch contemporary cinema without a road map, with very little conversation around what's really happening. I want to read about the new directors and where they come from and why they're telling the stories they want to tell. I want not just one book by Anupama Chopra on Sholay or one or two works by Gayatri on Mother India and Awara but a whole series on cinema. I want the context, the arguments, the history, the reviews, the analysis--the whole lot. It's the same with contemporary art; we killed off the old, admittedly turgid reviews, but we put nothing in their place except for, as Rana points out, a price list.
Oh well, end of rant. If you have lots of money, already own a thoroughbred and two yachts and don't know what to do with your cash, give it to the Babu and he promises to start up a full-fledged, wildly expensive arts and culture magazine filled with all the writers he wants to read on all the subjects he wants them to write about. (On second thoughts, he might just run away to Barcelona instead, but that's what's called entrepreneurial risk.)
