Kitabfest captures Mumbai's imagination
'If there's one thing I've learnt from writing this book, it's that if you want to write a biography, choose someone who's well and truly dead,' says Jessica Hines, the British author of Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me about Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. How did she get insider access to Bollywood? 'Karma, perhaps,' she says with a grin.
Hines is speaking to a packed house at the Kitabfest literary festival in Mumbai, which features writers, journalists and publishers from Britain and India. Guests include Toby Litt, Helen Simpson, Deborah Moggach, Esther Freud, Farrukh Dhondy and Philip Hensher. Indian writers Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Nagarkar and Adil Jussawalla are also there.
Hines intended to write an authorised biography of Bachchan, but was refused permission after the actor read her first manuscript. She then spun the unfinished biography into a tongue-in-cheek saga of her journey through the massive egos of Bollywood. 'Amitabh wanted to attend my brother's wedding in the Cotswolds in a helicopter, along with his entourage of servants,' she says. 'He'd fit in well in the Cotswolds. Not.'
Elsewhere, Litt, fellow British author Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal and Indian writer Shobhaa De are discussing sex in fiction. De, the author of several racy best-sellers, is outspoken about the problems of being a woman writer in India. 'I always get asked, 'Does it have the sex thing in it?' Asian women who write about sex risk being branded as whores. But then a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do.'
Dhaliwal - whose graphic debut novel Tourism came out last year - says: 'If you're not talking about sex, you're not talking about anything. I think men are gagged from talking about sex for fear of being considered misogynistic.'
Not everyone approves. 'Your bad language seems to be a sales technique,' says one member of the audience at a reading of Tourism. 'Do you come from the same town as Jade Goody?' Dhaliwal is not amused. 'This is the way we talk,' he says.
Sometimes, it seems everyone in India is writing a novel. As Alexandra Pringle, editor in chief of Bloomsbury, finds out. She's mobbed by aspiring authors. 'Where does the process of getting published begin, and by God, where does it end?' asks one frustrated author. When Pringle says she discovered rising Indian author Doshi by chance in a bed-and-breakfast at the Hay- on-Wye literary festival, a lone voice asks: 'Where are you having breakfast tomorrow?'
Stereotypes still sell, say some, especially when it comes to Asian writing. During a session on literary criticism, author and critic Hensher says it's still hard to sell a 'German book without Nazis, a French book without baguettes and an Indian book without everyone in dhotis on the beach.'
Ian Jack reminisces about the good old days of publishing, when writers were expected to be reclusive and eccentric. 'When Granta first brought out its list of Twenty Best Young British Novelists in 1983 it was considered very vulgar,' he says. 'These days, what sells is publicity and marketing. It's very difficult to sell a book that hasn't won a prize.'
The eclectic festival is organised by 23-year-old 'cultural impresario' Pablo Ganguli. Calcutta-born Ganguli heads Liberatum, an organisation that aims to connect British authors, journalists and thinkers with the rest of the world. Certainly there's plenty to think about, with debates about terrorism, the veil and Islamaphobia. There's also chaos of the kind Mumbai thrives on. Several top authors drop out, including Germaine Greer, Hanif Kureishi and William Dalrymple. Some panel discussions are hastily put together, others hamstrung by poor moderating.
Still, there's a palpable sense of excitement about Indian writing and the explosion of Indian media. Literary soirees are now the place to see and be seen, judging by the crowds of Mumbai glitterati rubbing shoulders with the literati. Most skip the book readings during the day, but turn up for the cocktail parties at night.
But even that may be no bad thing. 'It's true that many people here haven't read any of the books being discussed,' says Indian writer Tishani Doshi. 'But if it does get them reading, it's got to be a good thing, right?'
