[Reader-list] The Indian Media - article from Tehelka

[Rana Dasgupta]

This is a recent article I wrote for Tehelka on the media in India.

R



The Indian media

http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=33

A few months ago, a book I wrote was released in the British 
Commonwealth (which of course includes India) and the US. Not having 
published a book before, I didn’t know what to expect of this sudden 
appearance-in-public, nor of my own feelings about it. The book had 
demanded more than three years of intense focus – sitting alone with my 
laptop for weeks and months on end, wandering aimlessly, wondering how 
to write about the world I found myself in, finding breakthroughs in 
newspaper articles or overheard conversations, asking friends to read, 
listening to their dissatisfactions, wandering aimlessly again, 
deleting, re-writing – before I arrived at something broadly satisfying, 
called a necessary halt to the otherwise eternal process of trying to 
perfect it, and submitted it to the publishers. There was some brief 
post-natal depression, but it is surprising how quickly you can forget 
about something you have spent three years on; and by the time the book 
suddenly arrived on other people’s agendas, some eighteen months later, 
it was a fairly hazy memory.

At the same time, it is a satisfying thing to produce a work, and see it 
attain its final form; it is good to celebrate the completion of 
something, even eighteen months after the fact; and of course, more than 
anything, it is fascinating to see how other people will respond to all 
the things that gripped your mind for so long – all the questions of 
politics and the workings of the world, all the situations of human 
intensity, all the innovations you have tried to make in the sphere of 
literature itself. So as the time drew near for the book to come out, a 
moment I had considered as a mere formality, I began to get unexpectedly 
aroused by what might happen.

This book was written in Delhi after I moved here from New York slightly 
more than four years ago. It owed a lot to Delhi’s vibrant intellectual 
climate, and to the experience of confronting all the new things of a 
vast, Protean city I had never lived in before. Delhi therefore seemed 
like the book’s home, and I was particularly intrigued to see how an 
Indian readership would respond to it. Clearly, the first place to look 
for such a response was in the pages of the newspapers.

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 eight hundred words, to do much more 
than simply describe a book, and book reviews in Indian newspapers are 
often much shorter than that. The most extensive space allotted to book 
reviews in a mainstream newspaper is the Asian Age’s Sunday book section 
which is a cut-and-paste job from the New York Times and Spectator – 
with the emphasis on “cut”. In order to fit these articles into their 
new, straitened quarters, the “editors” run the paragraphs together, cut 
out the connecting words and phrases (“of course,” “unfortunately”, 
“however”) and then pluck out whole sentences and paragraphs for good 
measure.

But if you look at precisely how these cuts are made, you realise that 
good book reviewers are confronted not merely with a lack of space in 
Indian newspapers but, more defeatingly, with a highly reductive 
conception of how books should be talked about: one that is baldly 
consumerist and quite inhospitable to the finer aspects of the 
reviewer’s craft. A recent New York Times review of two novels on the 
subject of women and sexuality in the Muslim world said:

"Both books deliver their ostensibly shocking subject matter with 
good-natured pragmatism. Their characters are not much interested in the 
politics of the veil, or in Islam and gender or in anything else that 
might appear on a cultural studies syllabus."

In the version of the same article that appeared in the Asian Age, this 
became:

"Both books deliver their shocking subject matter with good-natured 
pragmatism. Their characters are not much interested in the in Islam and 
gender [sic]."

The cuts change the meaning significantly. “Ostensibly shocking subject 
matter” is very different from “shocking subject matter,” and to reduce 
the former to the latter is to remove a crucial nuance in the reviewer’s 
discussion, even if it makes the book sound more racy. And of course the 
second sentence, which tries to evoke a wider context of thought about 
women in Islam is slashed, in the Asian Age’s impatient hands, into pure 
babble – although possibly, once again, babble that serves to 
de-intellectualise the discussion and make it more immediate and sexy. 
Later in the same New York Times piece, we read:

"Satrapi's previous books, "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2," make up a 
comic-book autobiography of the author's Iranian childhood that 
effortlessly overturns such prejudices. Composed in intense, sparkling 
black and white -- each strip looks like a set of fiercely charming 
little woodcuts -- they transport the reader straight back to the 
craving days of reading "Tintin." Satrapi's drawing genuinely animates 
her writing in a way that makes her, in this translation by Anjali 
Singh, a delight to read.
""Embroideries" is a more modest book than its predecessors, but it is 
just as appealing."

In my Sunday newspaper, this passage appeared thus:

"Satrapi's drawing genuinely animates her writing in a way that makes 
her, a delight to read. "Embroideries" is a modest book, but it is just 
as appealing [sic]."

What Embroideries is just as appealing as, readers of the Asian Age 
could not know, for the newspaper determinedly cuts out material that is 
not pure “information” about the single object under consideration. 
Subjective words such as “amusing” or “touching” are axed if too 
numerous, and essayistic flourishes are brutally pruned (resulting often 
in pure absurdity); but most vulnerable of all to the knife are 
reviewers’ attempts to describe a book’s connections to other things – 
previous works by the same author, works by other authors, or indeed 
other things entirely (in the quoted review, for instance, the Asian Age 
chose to strike out a comparison between Satrapi’s graphic novel form 
and cinema). In sum, the universe of the Asian Age book section is a 
harsh and atomistic one in comparison to that of the New York Times: it 
is a place where attempts to make connections and meaning are cut away 
to leave what is, as far as possible, raw product description, lists of 
discrete “features” uncluttered by ideas.

It is predictable that such an ethos would create a besieged mentality 
amongst those Indian journalists who genuinely love and wish to 
celebrate literature. It is not surprising if they choose to speak about 
books as pure aesthetic experience, as a kind of guilty, sensuous refuge 
from a journalism that is so brutally pragmatic and market-driven. If 
they do not often try to speak about a book in the world, it is because 
this is not the editorial conception of their task: they are not asked 
to describe a vision, or a set of ideas that connects to other sets of 
ideas, but simply to describe the experience that can be obtained for Rs 
395.

And even when reviewers approach their task with greater ambitions than 
this, the other pages of the newspaper act with single-minded intent to 
cut books and their ideas back down to size.

In addition to the sparse smattering of reviews of my book came a 
veritable deluge of phone calls from journalists wishing to write what 
they called “profiles”. The interest of this second category of 
journalists was not in “literature” but in “personality”. They wrote for 
columns with stomach-churning titles like “Celebtalk” and they came to 
my house to note down a few snatched words that could then be patched 
together in a collage of more or less incoherent stereotypical 
catch-phrases crowned with a photograph. 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. The pieces that 
finally appeared in the newspapers were so mangled and improvised that 
they frequently bordered on the bizarre. Here are some extracts from an 
interview that appeared in the Kolkata city section of the Times of India:

Every writer has a few characteristic traits in his writing. What is 
your forte?
Yeah. I agree with you. If you go through my novel you will find that it 
is an investigative expose. But I have tried not to write it as a crime 
investigation report. I have tried to delve into the human virtues of 
people from different parts of the world.

Why did you make the international launch of this novel in India?
Though I live in Britain, I have my roots in India. It was just normal 
for me to do the launch at a place where I could share it with my near 
and dear ones.

Your novel deals with different locales and cross cultures. Did it mean 
extensive travelling or browsing the Internet?
Both. Actually I consider myself to be a fundamentalist. [...]

So utterly removed was this from the actual conversation I had had with 
this journalist that I read it with genuine intrigue. I was surprised to 
find myself falling into the journalist’s weary jargon where people do 
not “read” novels but merely “go through” them; I was startled to 
discover that my book was an “investigative expose” (“exposé”?) ; and my 
entire sense of self was thrown into confusion with the news that I 
considered myself to be a “fundamentalist” (where the **** did he get 
that from?).

The second of these answers, on the other hand, is not surprising at 
all, though it is complete fabrication; for such pat talk about “roots” 
is the entirely predictable currency of these kind of pieces. The 
fundamental story these columns are trying to tell is one of the 
dynamic, self-assertive nation as allegorised by the individual Indian 
“celebrity.” The very first thing you have to do in such interviews, 
therefore, is to “confess” that you are Indian, even if you are not – 
otherwise the entire logic of the interview breaks down. “Why do you 
deny you are Indian?” several journalists asked me. “I am not denying 
anything,” I replied. “I’m just not pretending to be what I’m not. I 
hold a British passport, I grew up in England, I speak no Indian 
languages and I did not live in India until I was nearly thirty years 
old. I live here now and my work is greatly influenced by being here; 
but I cannot claim to be an Indian writer.” But such talk poses real 
problems for columns that must be about Indian writing, or Indian 
celebrity. So while a couple of journalists respond melodramatically by 
writing about the “outsider”, while a couple more continue to mutter in 
a dark, Stalinist kind of way that this man “denies” he is Indian, most 
just ignore any complications of this kind and go ahead as they had 
always planned. At the core of the tale of aggressive “success” that 
they are going to write, they plant the tender kernel of national 
belonging. Hence cloying rhymes like “near and dear ones”.

What kind of individual will symbolise this nation in its era of markets 
and world takeover, its era of buying French pharmaceutical firms and 
judging Cannes and building global IT centres and sleeping with Liz 
Hurley? Certainly not the dreamy, thinking type. Not the kind of person 
who sits alone in a room for years on end wrestling with an entirely 
cerebral, poetic project. My conversations with the writers of 
“profiles” therefore had little to do with the book I had written, which 
was the ostensible reason they had any interest in me in the first 
place. They asked questions, instead, about what means I had employed to 
secure a publishing contract, and what it was like, now, to revel in 
publicity. The fact that I had spent three years forging a four 
hundred-page communication with the world was not relevant; now I had to 
tell the real story, which was the one of my own ambition, calculation 
and endeavour. The book was just my “product”, my means to an end. Its 
existence in the market proved that I had the necessary balls to seize a 
little bit of the media universe for myself, and now was my chance to 
explain how I had acquired such balls, and how wonderful it felt to 
possess them. As far as these columnists were concerned, it seemed, the 
persona of the “thinking individual” is just a front for something else. 
Deep down, people are interested only in acquisition, in getting more of 
everything, and every kind of accomplishment can therefore be boiled 
down to another article about how another lucky person “made it”. So, 
while newspapers and radio stations in the UK and US were wanting to 
have interviews about what a literature of globalization would look 
like, or how one can write successfully about ethics in a seemingly 
post-moral world, Indian columnists wanted me to spill the beans about 
my staggering personal ambition, the enormous pay-offs I had received, 
and all the glorious rewards of fame and success. (If my irony is not 
apparent, I should state clearly that none of this is actually true to 
my experience.)

Since serious artists and intellectuals make their name, generally, as a 
result of the cogency of their vision of the issues of politics, 
philosophy and aesthetics that face a given society – one would expect, 
on the face of it, that the purpose of seeking interviews with such 
people for a newspaper would be to inject those ideas in an interesting 
and provocative way into social debate. 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.

Any trip to Eastern Europe or Latin America will demonstrate that this 
whole situation is monotonously widespread in the world, especially in 
places where the recent euphoria of global markets has made the 
rightness of wealth banally self-evident, and where the ubiquity of 
poverty lends it all an additional erotic thrill. But the problem is 
that India is truly growing into a global superpower – while the 
delusional excesses of page 3 can make you believe that this is merely a 
country of the superrich, there is actually something behind the 
circus’s maniacal energy – and the press will have to abandon these 
infantile obsessions, so unnerving in a giant, if the rise of this 
country’s influence is to be accompanied by any significant reflection 
as to what it means.

First of all this implies that newspapers should try to think of people 
as thinking, not merely acquisitive, individuals. Of course writers and 
artists and academics, like anyone else, wish to earn money for their 
work; of course they possess all the same frailties of ego and ambition 
as everyone else – but their work cannot be reduced simply to this. 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. 
Everyone else is an unthinking, crass, acquisitive machine: every last 
architect, theatre director, jewellery maker or political activist 
answers the same ten trite questions in much-edited five-word sentences, 
appears under the same soul-destroying rubric of “celebrity,” and spouts 
the same joy at India’s rising and the new possibilities for 
self-aggrandizement that it offers. (While it is wearying that every 
individual comes across as the kind of greedy, opportunity-optimising 
economist’s freak that is the newspapers’ dominant conception of the 
human being, it is truly terrifying to think of such a creature 
magnified several hundred million times and turned into an oil-guzzling, 
market-craving, globe-striding nation-monster, utterly uninterested in 
fine sentiment or ethical detail.)

Secondly, the Indian press might try to take seriously its own stories 
of global coming-of-age, and to abandon its childish parochialism. While 
India’s nascent imperialism is having real effects on daily life all 
over the world, and not necessarily welcome or positive ones, the 
“outside” is still spoken about in the press with a weird mixture of 
guilt, envy and superiority that seems to turn the national boundaries 
into a wall too high for the imagination or the intellect to scale. The 
outside is exotic and sexy and full of shopping; the outside doesn’t 
take enough notice of India; the outside is nice but not Indian enough; 
the outside is getting filled up with rich Indians! – the poverty and 
relentless egocentrism of such perspectives on the world is just not 
adequate for an honest consideration of this country’s place in it at 
the present time. We need discussions about the world that do not have 
to make room for an orgasm or a brain haemorrhage every time a foreign 
place name is mentioned. Rather than trying to establish the Indian 
credentials of everyone who speaks in the press, no matter how forced 
they might seem, journalists need to be able to write about ideas for 
their own inherent interest, wherever they happen to originate. This 
inability to properly consider the foreigner as foreigner – not as a 
melodramatic fact, but just in the sense that a person can come from 
somewhere else and still be just a normal person – is an extremely 
disquieting phenomenon when projected into the future. Just take 
seriously the present-future-fantasy of today’s Bollywood films – which 
have moved on a lot from the films of the 70s, with their quaint, 
hesitant foreign forays – in which the whole of the world has been 
colonised by wealthy, attractive “NRIs” and everyone else belongs to an 
admiring, imitative slave class...