Indian commercial fiction SAHITYA AKADEMI

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Saturday, 14 May 2011 05:35

Published in the SAHITYA AKADEMI'S MAGAZINE section titled: WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE ATTIC? (March 2011) I’m presently compulsorily closeted away in my attic, up to my ears in the third of a three-book series. This was a deal done a couple of years ago between my very excited literary agent and an aggressively commercial imprint of a UK publisher, and the deadline I was given was one year per book. Foolishly, I tossed my head at the many time-management issues that were glaring at me from my immediate future, not caring to consider that I might have a life to live outside of book writing. But this is not the only reason for which I have subsequently questioned, many time over and too late, the haste with which I was flung into the weird and wonderful world of popular fiction. Not that I had a choice, really, seeing how I simply could not stop writing and given how few literary fiction editors were breaking down my door in London, where I then lived. My very first agent – the much respected David Godwin – had warned me many years ago, when he had just taken on my debut novel, ‘Ancient Promises’, that it faced the danger of ‘falling between two stools’. I was too nervous and too overwhelmed at the time to ask him what exactly these two stools were. But I now understand that he was referring to literary and commercial fiction, highly polarized genres, certainly in Britain and the US, in terms of imprints and commissioning editors. But, David, being David, cheerfully submitted the book to a varied tranche of commissioning editors and sat back, waiting for them to decide which of these two stools the book should sit on. In three days, we had our answer, when Louise Moore, then chief commissioning editor for commercial fiction at Penguin UK called up to express her interest in my manuscript. The resounding silence from editors at literary imprints such as Picador and Weidenfeld & Nicholson was pretty telling too, and thus my writing future was decided. For a while, I continued to resist the ‘commercial’ tag in my writing, without even knowing I was resisting, continuing to want to write like all other Indian writers writing in English whom I admired. But it was like swimming in treacle, my output remaining stubbornly simply not literary enough. The task of keeping me firmly tethered to the golden rule of commercial/popular fiction - ‘story not style’ - fell on my increasingly hoarse agent and hence the unmasked glee with which she fell upon the rather juicy three-book book deal from Harper Collins.    Of course, one may ask why writers should be straitjacketed in such ignominious fashion at all. Certainly when you consider that most readers tend not to read out of boxes but pick up whatever they can lay their hands on, whatever their local library has on the returns shelf, or whatever friends will lend them, usually ending up with strange eclectic piles on their bedside tables. However, in publishing’s increasingly competitive and high-pressured business environment, this kind of branding is due to that very necessary aspect of modern-day publishing: marketing and distribution. Far be it for me to deride the hard work put in by the marketing, PR and sales teams at my publishers for, without their efforts, my books would languish gathering dust in warehouses, rather than being sent out into the shops and, eventually, onto readers’ bookshelves. If tags and labels make their task of wooing dubious distributors any easier, then I’m all for them.   I now know that all publishing house worth their salt should be maintaining lists that heathily mix literature with popular fiction. Not merely because it is their job to cater to varied tastes, rather than be arbiters of taste, but also because, a publisher who understands his business knows that he needs the revenues of popular fiction and paperbacks to help prop up his more expensively produced literary fiction titles.   This cultural shift will take time because, for far too long, India’s publishing environment has been stymied by the most terrible literary snobbishness. Is it therefore any surprise that lovers of genres such as crime fiction and chick-lit continue to turn to British and American writers like Ian Rankin and John Grisham and Helen Fielding? What a shame, though, that, from among the millions of people who use the English language so imaginatively and who come from such ancient and varied traditions of story-telling, India has not been able to produce a home-grown Agatha Christie as yet.

Last Updated on Thursday, 07 December 2017 11:26