I’m astonished by the depth of the desi book market in the UK. I was at a store of Britbooks last week. It wasn’t even a real bookstore, it was an airport bookstore, and it was still amazingly well-stocked. If you’ve ever wondered why people call Brits polite, it’s all the time they spend buried in books (while their chavs and yobs whoop it up in da pub).
On the popular fiction shelves I saw a Granta book on India, an odd little compilation of highfalutin’ essays like a Bollysampler CD; several Hanif Kureishi titles; Shalimar the Clown; both of Meera Syal’s novels; Hari Kunzru; William Dalrymple’s White Mughals; Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide; and so on. (In Sevilla, I also saw a tiny book of Ghosh’s tsunami essays.) The chick lit section was chockablock with titles like Bindis and Brides by Nisha Minhas, in which an abusive desi guy tries to rape his estranged wife, and a white guy rescues her. Minhas previously wrote Passion and Poppadoms, Saris and Sins and Chapattis or Chips?, so she’s going for some kind of Nancy Drew mystery effect with alliteration in the titles.
I picked up a copy of Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, a 1998 novella about marital egress and male sexual restlessness, and devoured it on the plane. The book supposedly caused an uproar when it was published; it reminds me of Rushdie’s Fury, a thinly-fictionalized account of leaving your wife and kids by a desi author who had just, well, left his wife and kids. But liberated of the need to be a full-blown novel, it’s a startlingly direct confession of a loveless, sexless marriage told like Portnoy’s Complaint, hands a-wringing and in the same plain yellow cover. It begins the day he decides to leave his wife. Kureishi’s stark emotional intensity comes off better than Fury, which IMO was Rushdie’s weakest after Grimus.
(Side note: According to the NYT, Shalimar the Clown had sold only 26,000 copies in the stores BookScan tracks as of December. Edward Champion points an accusing finger at the less-than-sonorous title: ‘If I were Rushdie’s publisher, I would have urged Rushdie to come up with a title that didn’t involve clowns at all… Shalimar the Clown? Not really a lot of enigma there. You may as well call the book Joe the Barber.’)
NSFW quotes from Intimacy after the jump.
Here’s Kureishi’s mopey take on marriage:
On the way I expounded my cheerful theory that people marry when they’re at their most desperate, that the need for a certificate is a sure sign of an attenuated affection…There is little pleasure in marriage; it involves considerable endurance, like doing a job one hates. You can’t leave and you can’t enjoy it… Nevertheless they were loyal and faithful to one another. Disloyal and unfaithful to themselves. Or do I misunderstand?
In India they don’t seem to put the same emphasis on romantic love. Couples copulate when necessary and get on with their separate lives… They meet at times, but there is no funny business…
His more libidinous position on sex:
She was with another girl and as I looked at them I recalled Casanova’s advice that it’s easier to pick up two women at once than one on her own…All that for a fuck, I muttered. The other men laughed. But I concluded, having just seen how the little minx fondled the house cat as her lover wept, what a fuck it must have been… there are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and child drown in a freezing sea. My kingdom for a come. Women, I’ve noticed, are particularly tenacious in that respect. When they want someone there’s no stopping them.
There’s something plaintive about the man-child so easily belled by his cock and cocked up by his belle:
But if she lets me fuck her here, now, on the floor, I won’t leave. I will put my straight shoulder to the wheel and accept my responsibilities for another year. Anyhow, in the morning I’ll be too tired… I like a happy ending.
He analyzes codependence:
At the expense of feeling weak, I enable her to feel strong. If I were too strong and capable, I wouldn’t need her, and we would have to part…I have never found that the man being in a subordinate position has put women off. In fact, for some people, the more subordinate you are, the more ‘genuine’ they imagine you to be. People are afraid of too much power in others…
The stim-seeking personality:
I’ve needed something to happen every day that showed a kind of progress or accumulation. I can’t bear it when things go slack, when there isn’t sufficient intensity…
He has his Lost in Translation moment:
I have lost my relish for living… Is this all you get? Is this the most there could be?…
And finally, a note of hope:
I think of the people I know… and wonder which of them knows how to live well… The people I can think of who live with talent are the ones who have free lives, conceiving of great schemes and seeing them fulfilled. They are, too, the best company.
Nisha Minhas – seriously awful writer. Every single book is about a desi girl being saved from an arranged marriage by a white man. Or similar cliched trope. Alright, we get it, desi men are the scum of the Earth and white men are Angels of God, but at least write something else around it – make them lesbians or something, eh? Her books pander like a pandering panderer, I havent read a single desi, man or woman, who hasnt wanted to throw them against the wall after finishing them, and all those curry and chapatti and sari references in the titles – give me a break.
Except the NYTimes screwed up yet again-
Edward Champion adds:
<<UPDATE: OGIC notes that the Times may have the figure wrong and that the actual number is closer to 80,000. If this is indeed the case, then this is a serious journalistic mistake that deserves more than a mere “correction,” particularly since the article went out of its way to suggest that Rushdie sales fell dramatically short of publisher expectations, imputing that fiction sales were in a slump. (An image of the specific paragraph, if the Gray Lady corrects it…>>
Manish, this year a couple of big hyped up novels are being published in the UK by major publishing houses, one called Londonstani and the other is called Tourism, both set in the West London Punjabi community.
If you are British-Desi now is the time to get writing. It seems publishers are desperate for novels by second and third generation British-Asians.
I was always a big Rushdie fan until I read Fury. Normally I can’t stop reading his books once I start one, but it’s been a couple of years, and I still can’t bring myself to finish Fury. Ugh. If I feel like having a Rushdie moment I’ll go back to The Ground Beneath Her Feet or Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
Kureishi’s My kingdom for a come.
and
Selena’s Her books pander like a pandering panderer.
Egads. Two fantastic sentences in one thread. Trust me, I’m going to alter and pilfer these.
Teju Cole says it best:
I suddenly feel sorry for all those who, as writers, have to ply their trade from some sleepy American suburb, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I’m sure of it. His material killed him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply didnÂ’t measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who don’t even have a fraction of Updike’s talent, and yet have to hoe the same arid patch for stories. I could cry of boredom just thinking about it.
Though the setting is Britain and not some sleepy American suburb, it sums up my feelings on Kureishi pretty well.
Julian Barnes wrote something similar in Metroland as well, in which the female protagonist believes that people get married not because theyre in love but because they need to believe that they’re lovable enough to live with. Hmm. makes you wonder…. all that stuff our mothers give us about companionship, its not so muhc about the otehr as it is an escape from loneliness for oneself.
Teju Cole
No problem -it’s all yours. Although I think you could cute it up by saying, “She panders like a pandering panda” instead.
Amardeep
I tuned out of Kureishi a while back – and you have an interesting perspective on him there. Although his short story, and screenplay for the movie My Son the Fanatic anticipates, quite subtly and perceptively, The background of the London bombers, right down to the northern England industrial cities they came from. But since then he has not written anything that seems vital to me – enough stories of broken love affairs amongst the white bourgeoisie in Notting Hill already – uggh. And I took a look at The Buddha of Suburbia again about six months ago, having read it when I was a breathless teenager, I realised how flat it seemed to me now – all that fizz and sizzle must have been my teenage hormones rejoicing in Karim’s transgressions. Now, it seems juvenile, boring, and the language is dead.
A brown filmmaker friend says that desi movies in the U.S. and the UK are psychologically revealing. In the U.S., the plots hinge around brown guys who feel/act white, and who need a brown girl to bring them back to their “roots.” In the UK, the movies are about brown people who fall in love with white partners and triumph against the odds and their community. He thinks this is maybe because of each country’s background — in the U.S., brown kids often grow up in majority-white communities and tend to only meet other brown people at college, thereby spurring some cultural re-awakening or what-have-you. In the UK, you could easily grow up in one of many areas that are almost entirely Asian, so having a white partner would be more unusual and a marker of becoming an adult. i.e., being Asian-American means rejecting your brownness until maturing enough to accept and internally integrate it, being British Asian means maturing out of your restrictive community and integrating with the larger culture. Maybe the desi books are similarly predictably different? I have no clue myself (although my personal very unscientific observation is that UK Asians are far more psychologically tormented about their identity than their American cousins, perhaps because they experience more racism and have the whole colonial history) but desi media themes in the West certainly sounds like a fun thesis topic. 😉
midwestern eastender
I take a different view. In my unscientific sampling desis in the UK are much more confident and secure of their identities. Manish’s post reflects that – the range of desi themed books in an airport bookstore shows how integrated desiness is into mainstream British society. I dont think UK desi’s experience more racism than American desi’s – it all varies. We hear horror stories about what happens with dot bashers and Sikh shooters in the USA all the time. And although your friend’s theory is an interesting one, there is plenty of desi American art that suggests that inter-racial coupling is a preoccupation of American desis – I am thinking of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. And there are certain forms of casual stereotyping that occur in mainstream American culture of desis that simply does not happen in Britain anymore.
There are of course variations and different dynamics in all this, with all communities, some are more integrated than others – but whenever I meet an American desi in the UK they are sometimes in awe of the richness, and high profile, of British desi culture.
But your assignation of being ‘psychologically tortured’ over identity made me smile, God Bless You 🙂
I also think the demographics of desi’s in the UK and America are different in general terms – in the UK the desi experience is more urban, in the USA it is more suburban model minority kind of thing. Of course there are variations, there is Jackson Heights which is like the Southall of America, and plenty of posh millionaires in the UK too – but still, British Desi culture has a certain rawness and streetwise fizz than the (sometimes) more restrained American scene.
cheers!
Not that I dont love and am not fascinated by the flowering and manifestations of American desi literature and cinema and art! I am attracted to it all. But I dont think that speculating on the ‘psychological torment’ of respective peoples is very productive, nor does it offer any more insight than ‘Hey, those guys, see how messed up they are?’ and can lead to silly demonstrations of how one is more brain-jellied than the other, whilst failing to appreciate that the manifestors of a culture, the artists and writers and film makers, are often, by their very nature, ‘psychologically tormented’ to begin with! (Such a melodramatic and gothc turn of phrase though, dont you think?)
Ciao!
Sorry, I meant “psychologically tormented” in a lighthearted friendly sense. Heck, I’M psychologically tormented being a white American who lives and works in an almost completely Asian environment in London. (there’s a book in there somewhere, innit?) 😉 I just mean that the people I know here seem to talk and think way more about struggling with who they are as British Asians than the brown Americans I know, and they definitely talk about racism way more. But obviously all of our unscientific samplings depend on who we hang out with. 🙂 There’s absolutely more brown presence in the media here, but I hear my friends talk all the time about how American desis are way ahead in terms of working together in the media (think Badmash and Sepia Mutiny and ethnotechno and everyone promoting each other) and actually completing successful projects (like albums and art festivals) rather than just talking and infighting. Ah, globalized culture…
Definitely! Go for it! It will put a different spin on the whole tradition of American-comes-to-England story (stretching back to Mark Twain’s An American Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)
I am being serious, get writing!
Well, all the bitching from Asian artists and writers yadda yadda yadda – that’s just feisty British Desi’s for you 😉
Although, it is good that there is heat and reaction and opposition within the community amongst its writers and artists – collaboration on projects makes me think of people sitting around a campfire holding hands, singing ‘Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah’, rather than getting out there, hissing and singing and spitting at the world and at each other, which is what all great writers and artists and musicians should do!
The desi music/nighclub scene is large enough to be self sustaining in the UK, but still small enough to be full of back stabbers and all the rest of it – well, you put creative ego’s in close proximity, that is what you get.
It makes it all exciting. It is exciting to be young and desi in London these days. So much energy and culture and material for writers and artists to explore.
great thread y’all.
shout out to midwestern eastender — how you been? and yeah, definitely a book in there.
re: kureishi, i still find buddha of suburbia priceless — maybe it’s just me regressing, but i really do think it’s still fresh, in both meanings of the word. it’s also a wonderful slice-of-life novel about the bad old days when “labour wasn’t working” and was about to be replaced with something worse. the cultural ferment that gave birth to punk, and karim’s part-wannable part-bemused take on it as an inside-outsider still teaches me something when i re-read it.
having said that, i agree with selena that my man pretty much crested a long time ago; the collection of essays that contained “my son the fanatic” — love in a blue time, it was called. (beautiful cover too in the uk paper edition.) interesting that “my son the fanatic” was a very, very short story, maybe 7-8 pages (my copy of said edition having been lent out long ago, and i can’t remember to whom…) yet it contained so much that it could sustain a rather good full-length film adaptation.
whereas “intimacy” is quite the opposite. a full length novel about, really, being in a rut. which gets us back to amardeep and teju’s point. kureishi sort of dug himself into a trench literarily, as well — it seems — as in his personal life; and his attempt to emerge from it, in both art and life, hasn’t led to much. at least in his public output, which has been quite pedestrian; even that essay he had after the london bombings had a recycled feel to it. i do hope for him that his personal life and outlook have improved, and as an early fan i can only wish him the best. it’s like one of those bands you loved that fell off. it happens.
selena, what recent novels do you recommend out of the u.k. scene? desi and… come to think of it… non-desi authors that we might not have heard of over here?
Siddhartha
Hi! To be honest there has not been much in the last couple of years from desi writer in the UK that has really blown me away – however, the two novels coming out this year that I mentioned, Londonstani and Tourism look really interesting, and the first one is getting some major hype! They are both set out in West London/Southall side so it will be interesting to see what they read like.
Away from desi writer one of my favourite recent novels is The Accidental by Ali Smith – this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is really cleverly structured and an engrossing read.
Now that I think of it, Kureishi recently published a memoir of his relationship with his father called My Ear at His Heart which I have heard good things about from a friend so I might read it. It will be interesting to read about his childhood and his father.
Hope that helps.
Ciao!
Is Ali Smith desi?
Manish
No she is gori from Scotland! And she is a very good writer.
Monica Ali’s new novel is going to be published this year – it is set in Portugal and is entirely desi-less!
You can read an extract at this American magazine’s website.
For anyone interested, here is an early review of Londonstani
.
Nice cover art too!
selena — thanks!
re: kureishi, i still find buddha of suburbia priceless — maybe it’s just me regressing, but i really do think it’s still fresh, in both meanings of the word.
I agreee with Siddarth, and probably because of my own “regression”. I admired Jamil’s playful enactments of his own hybridity (long before it became a cliched subject), his whimsical sexual escapades, and his negotiations within the subterranean (subterranean to a “pallid, studied” suburban 2gen like myself, anyway) world of theater. (The scene where he is asked to mimic a parody of a desi immigrant might have something to say to Homi Bhaba, or it might have been a Crash moment.) Here was the 2gen as the beautiful sexual subect, something we hadn’t seen before–and I see a thread (albeit a thin one) running from Jamil to Zadie Smith’s Millat.
I was passing by a pharmacy store at Heathrow, and I heard a song from early 90’s Bollywood flick “Saajan” blaring on their speakers. Hmmm !!! Not a common sight (sound?) in Yankeeland, I say…
Excellent. I expect to have a major role MWEE. Although as I recall…3 (THREE) of us had been commissioned to write books when we met, and you weren’t one. Ner ner ner! (although, Yam and Raj are getting bigger advances than me)
All the brown people I know who know Hanif Kureishi personally (and many who only know him through his writing) think he’s a complete and utter tosser. There’s some premier league hatred for that dude.
Bong Breaker
Although as I recall…3 (THREE) of us had been commissioned to write books when we met
Are you a writer? Are you at liberty to tell us about what you are writing? 🙂
Haha, I’m pretty much the opposite of what you’d call an author Selena. It’s a ‘specialist’ non-fiction book. What do YOU do? You seem to know your stuff and I agree with your take of Kureishi, i.e. nothing that hot for 15 years or so. About Londonistani, is Gautam Malkani Muslim then? Cos he doesn’t sound it but I keep hearing him referred to as the Muslim Irvine Welsh. I read an extract here and quite liked this phrase:
You also said:
W00t! (other people on here say that, I wanted to join in)
Bong Breaker
Hi! Congratulations on your book. Even if it’s non fiction it’s still great! I am just a reader at the moment, love books, like reading, love talking about books and reading. Althoughg I do write short stories, it’s nothing serious! Maybe later I will try to write something longer and try to get it published, but it is so tough to get published these days, so I’ll probably just do it as a hobby unless I get hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration.
Hmmm – I’m not sure if I like that extract from the Londonstani novel.
His name does not sound Muslim to me. Maybe the person who called him the Muslim Irvine Welsh was just confused as some people are about Asians. I can see the Irvine Welsh comparison, written in that vernacular prose, but that style I find just grating. No art or effort in that, just mimicking. Anyway, the extract you posted a link to – it reads like a thread from barficulture or snooplife or some other message board for teenagers! All innit, dutty, gora, innit etc etc etc 😉
Maybe the publishers got excited by the patois and rudeboy talk is something that is seen as ‘the authentic word from the street’. But I’m not so sure.
Ciao!
Thanks Selena. Yeah the extract itself doesn’t make me want to read the book. But then again it slightly more authentic to how London rudes talk than a lot of the stuff I’ve read, which is invariably written by middle class people with no experience of the world they’re trying to portray. Probably the case for Malkani too, but I’m just guessing. It’s a pretty uninspiring chapter.
If I read a ‘South Asian’ book, it is always, always something that is NOT set in London and about young funky Asians. Because I know it will be pretentious, unrealistic twaddle. If I lived elsewhere, perhaps I’d not care about the jarring inaccuracies, but being a British Asian I’m sick of most of the books on the British Asian market. They suck. Like Manish has said before – it’s writing by numbers. Perhaps not hullabaloo in the bungalow, but the British equivalent. I hate the whole A/B/C/BCD identity crisis-new vs. old-West vs. East-arranged marriage-aren’t mixed couples controversial-I’m defying a stereotype, look at me!-finding a middle way between 1st and 2nd gen CRAP. If I want to read about London, I read Dickens.
Bong Breaker
I so agree with you! Every word. It seems that so much is written with just sterotypes – Nisha Minhas being a case in point. I wouldnt mind reading about Southall cool dudes, if it was written well! The Londonstani extract – it is too forced, trying too hard to be ‘street’ and ‘edgy’. I bet you anything that all the reviews will say it is the ‘authentic voice’ of London Asians – said by the same people who mistake the author for a ‘Muslim Irvine Welsh’. Well, Gautam Malkani is an editor at the Financial Times and a graduate from Cambridge, so I dont know how street that is. Maybe he came from the streets. Who knows. Reading that extract gave me a headache though.
Compare that to the prose in The Buddha of Suburbia. To me that seems slightly flat now. But at least it doesnt seem as contrived as this. At the moment the publishing industry is desperate for the new Zadie Smith or Monica Ali – a black or Asian writer who comes from the streets and crosses over into the mainstream giving an ‘insight’ into the lives on the margin. That is the way the publishing industry is now. That is their mentality. That is how Londonstani will be marketed.
Incidently, I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, but some American’s say that her depiction of Bengali-American life doesnt ring true to their own experience.
Anyway, British desi writing needs to be shaken up. On the basis of that chapter, I dont think Londonstani is going to be the novel to do it.
Ciao!
I fell in love with Hanif Kureishi after My Beautiful Laundrette and it was sad to see him steadily deteriorate. Rushdie, however, is another story. I don’t get what people see in him. IMO he owes an apology to all the trees that have been turned to pulp on his account.
Fuerza Dulce- I agree, normally I’d tear through some Rushdie, but I’ll save you some precious time in life: don’t bother finishing Fury, or even giving it another chance. The rest of the book is the same hardly-forgivable crap that you suffered in the first portion. Use it as a drink coaster, while you put your feet up and enjoy Ground Beneath Her Feet again…
Just a guess – might Gautam Malkani be a Sindhi name?
I just started reading an older Rushdie novel, the Satanic Verses so I was wondering if anyone has read it before and if it was worth reading?
I just finished reading Chapatti or chips?….. Hats off to my patience. I didn’t feel like throwing the book against the wall after I read it. In fact I wanted to tear it into itsy bitsy pieces while I was halfway through it. I skipped chapters, skimmed pages and managed to get to the last page. So repetitive, so boring, awful language, jaded plot and a completely confused, dumb protagonist. Is it the story of your life Nisha Minhas – sounds like it !!!! Only you could be the dumb, witless, immoral ‘Naina’. I wish all forces of nature could have come together to keep you on your first word – ‘Rumour’ and we would not have been put through this literary torture!!!! Please stop writing – for the sake of literture and good reading.
any of you ever read Brick Lane by Monica Ali? about a bangladeshi’s experiences in the UK. pretty interesting stuff…
I just read Tall, dark and handsome by Nisha Minhas, it was the most disgusting, offensive book I have ever read. Nisha allowed her racist opinions regarding Islam and Muslims seep through her work. The characters were weak, the story line was unrealistic the language was vulgar. I used to like her books, but I will now be encouraging everyone to boycott all her work. I used to think her previous books were filthy – however, this entire book was about porn!
“Barry”, Islam is an ideology, not a race. And criticizing an ideology and adherents to such an ideology is NOT racism.
In the same manner that criticizing Communism/Communists or Nazism/Nazis is not “racism”.
She is such a digusting writer.I just finished Chapatis or chips?.Who the hell she thinks she is to comment so badly on indian culture. A 100 billion population thrives on the culture and suddenly she thinks of bashing it. It seems it was her life story and if it is it shows how immoral she is.We Indians have much better senses then she thinks and it’s her skewed up, immoral pathetic life that could produce such a story. She really didnot get proper upbringing.