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| Indian story goes global | | | | Well known writer and journalist Arvind Adiga has shot into prominence and has taken the India story to the world. This was more than 25 years after Salman Rushdie and over a decade after celebrated writer, now activist, Arundhati Roy took the Indian story closer to the world. Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning tale of the son of a rickshaw-puller who dreams of escaping poverty and goes to seek his fortune in the big cities draws the world’s attention to a very different side of India. As his publisher pointed out on Wednesday, this award was a kind of recognition that English writing in this country has come of age, acquired greater depth and range, and so should no longer be regarded as exotic. Adiga’s India is necessarily very different from Rushdie’s magical country, the upper middle-class world of Vikram Seth and the exotica which Arundhati Roy had introduced to an international readership. Booker jury chairman Michael Portillo, who described The White Tiger as "in many ways the perfect novel", also noted that it presented the "dark side of India" and that it had prevailed in the face of stiff competition (including from Amitav Ghosh, who was also on this year’s shortlist) because it "shocked and entertained in equal measure". Adiga’s India is the world the well-heeled in our country rarely see and almost never experience: the despair of the underclass left on the wayside by the beneficiaries of the economic boom in an aspiring superpower. And while, of course, it is a work of fiction, the rich-poor divide which White Tiger deals with and the way that this country tackles the "tension between those who have and those who don’t", in Adiga’s own words, is increasingly going to determine the future of India. In many ways, Adiga’s own story reflects the life of many a global Indian of today: born in Chennai, having gone to school in both Mangalore, Karnataka, and Sydney, Australia, and with degrees from Oxford and Columbia University in the United States; he worked as a financial journalist in the West before moving back to live in India. His comparison of the two metropolises of New Delhi and Mumbai on his evening of triumph was interesting: while Mumbai, he said, was the city of the 20th century, Delhi was the city of the 21st century — "more viscerally connected to the hinterland... it was the most important city in the world 300 years ago, and could again become so." Aravind Adiga is the fourth Indian-born person to win the English-speaking world’s most important literary award (Rushdie, Roy and Kiran Desai are the others) and the fifth person of Indian origin (counting Caribbean-born Sir Vidia Naipaul). His award comes at a time when English-language publishing is witnessing a virtual boom in this country: more books are being written, bought and read than ever before, and this at a time when television channels and other media are also proliferating. It is a pity, however, that writing in India’s other languages is yet to witness a similar buoyancy. Back in the Nineties Arundhati Roy’s award prompted a new generation of Indians to take up the pen. A decade later, with more people than ever engaged in reading and writing, an entirely new generation might well be inspired to sit at the computer keyboard to tell their own, unique stories to the wider world. |
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