“I am envious of writers who are in India”: Kiran Desai, the Man Booker Prize, and Indian Diasporic Writing Somdatta Mandal I: The Man Booker Prize: On the 10th of October 2006, defeating the five other novelists who made it to the short list, Kiran Desai won the UK’s leading literary award, the Man Booker Prize, for her novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Apart from being the youngest woman writer to receive this prize, she is the third writer of Indian origin – after Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy-- to win this prestigious award and also simultaneously catapult Indian writing in English to further worldwide fame as a special genre of writing. It is ironic that a book titled The Inheritance of Loss earned her 50,000 pound sterling and became a sort of redemption for the Desais, whom Salman Rushdie calls the “first dynasty of modern Indian fiction.” Although her mother Anita Desai had been short-listed for the Booker prize thrice -- Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999), with the prize then simply called the Booker and not the Man Booker as it is being called since 2002, she failed to receive the prize. It is further ironical that Inheritance, Kiran Desai’s second novel, was according to the author herself, much harder to write than her debut novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, taking "seven years of my being determinedly isolated." It almost didn't get published in England. "The British said it didn't work,” she admitted, and nearly ten publishing houses rejected it until Hamish Hamilton bought it. The judges described it as “a magnificent novel of human breadth and wisdom.” After thanking her publisher, editor and agent, she added: “I'm Indian and so I’m going to thank my parents.” She told the BBC her win felt “like a family endeavour.” The official dedication of the book is to her mother: “To my mother I owe a debt so profound and so great, that this book feels as much hers as it is does mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness in cold winters in her house... One minute isn't enough to convey it,” she said, after accepting the prize. Though the media reports of the incident did draw our attention, going to the extent of exploring whether the black dress that Desai wore had any special 2 significance or not and how the sari she had chosen to wear for the occasion got left out sitting in a Godrej cupboard in Delhi (India Today, October 30, 2006: 83), is it interesting to note that there was not much report of the exuberance of the common people in London when in October 1997 Arundhati Roy had won the same prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things. The media hype nine years back, with even ordinary Indian shopkeepers in the UK who never read the novel rejoicing with happiness as if India had won a test cricket match – “Jeet gayee, hamaree beti jeet gayee” -- was somehow absent in October 2006. The basic thing for them was that the Cindrella-syndrome had occurred to an Indian woman, and that she had defeated the British in their own game. It was a victory for India and that was the most important thing. This brings us to the question; did anything go wrong this time? Or was it because the winner was not a true desi woman, not “hamaree beti” in the true sense, but one who already lived in the west, was the daughter of mixed parentage, a global character, a member of the Indian diaspora and thus representing people who have been officially designated by our Indian government as ‘Pravasi Bharatiyas’ – people who are offered dual citizenship, and in some sense, dual identities; people who are like the mythical figure of Trishanku, neither here nor there, but suspended in some world in-between. As we are all aware, the labeling of diasporic Indian English writers is a problem indeed. Can we consider a writer Indian by virtue of his/her birth alone? Does the writer remain an Indian writer if he/she writes in the voice of a western persona? Is it the literature that makes a writer Indian or his/her passport? Again, there has been a constant critical refrain about exoticization of the home country and marketing the margins. While some reporters have simply called Kiran Desai “a writer,” Times of India called her an “Indian-origin writer”; Wikipedia termed her as “a citizen of India and a permanent Resident of the U.S,” the Booker Prize committee labeled her as “the Indian-born writer,” The Hindu called her “an Indian writer,” and the reporter of The Telegraph, “the New- York based writer.” To add to that, thematically Desai is far removed from other postcolonial writers like Zadie Smith or Hari Kunzru whose fiction takes a generally optimistic view of what Rushdie has called “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.” 3 Before delving further into the issues of diasporic Indian English writing, I would like to draw your attention to a small tongue-in-cheek article that Kiran Desai wrote in a Guest Column for the 30th Anniversary issue of India Today, much before she had any inkling that she would be nominated for the Man Booker prize. We are told of a writer named Aloo (probably representing the major breed of Indian diasporic writers like herself) who arrives in America and gets embroiled in the debate on whether to continue saying tomAAto, or join the locals in saying tomAEto, or say tomAEto to locals and tomAAto to fellow desis. When he is asked by the Americans as they always do, “Are you planning to stay?” he throws his inconvenient sharam (shame) down the drain and replies, “No…”. “Why not?’ “My subject is there in India…” But the market is here. There are tastes that will never be quenched. For example, like the pashmina shawl, the arranged marriage story will always be in season. After Aloo marries a pale creature and gets his green card, “he can safely begin to proclaim his heritage and feel nostalgic instead of terror while thinking about his motherland. He becomes a martyr forced to leave, which adds complexity to his character and creates the impression that he is not a drab immigrant like the rest, but an exile. Exile is a forlorn, literary feeling and allows him to indulge in moods of elegant grey.” Aloo then starts writing. Magic realism has become a dirty word, so Aloo has replaced an elephant with a dog and has removed a beggar, for it feeds the preconceived ideas of India as a land of beggars. He is boring, but boring is …authentic. In interviews he says that he does not read Indians and instead names Kawabata and Turgenev as his inspirations. “No Indians?” Pressed he mentions the dead or dying, “I admire R.K. Narayan.” “Rushdie?” Oh no. Condemning Rushdie harsher than the Ayatollah Aloo immediately adopts the politically correct position and says Indian writers writing in regional languages are the best. Such as Mahasweta Devi. She does not write for the West. She is pure. Thus Aloo kills two birds with one stone: he does not help a competitor and comes off a patriot. He is just about to relax a little when Arundhati Roy with a love-across-caste-lines book does even better that Aloo did with his arranged marriage book, and goes on record to say that unlike the fancy fake pants that abound (like Aloo), she is the authentic product with an authentic Indian address, and without privilege – a claim that is hotly disputed. You are in the club. 4 I’m not in the club. You ARE. No – you spoke English, ate macaroni and sold yourself to the West just like the rest of us. I am not privileged – I grew up poor and alone, dark and female. (This is a mantra that unlocks many a door. Shout, “Brave Third World woman overcoming all odds,” and you’ll get to leap in the air and earn a million). Never was someone more adamantly invited to take a seat in the club. Never has it been so resisted. Aloo’s wife can’t understand the fight about who owns the Indian subject. Who owns India? The wife thinks everyone does. Aloo thinks all desis do. The desi writers writing in English in India think all desis living in India do. The writers writing in regional languages think they do, not the ones writing in English. On the BBC radio, they ask Aloo, Why are you writing of India while living in the West? Scared, Aloo answers that art has no address, look at James Joyce, Henry James, look at Rohinton Mistry, who has lived abroad and yet can exactly describe the bathroom problems of an ageing Parsi gentleman in Mumbai. Aloo looks at the skeptical eyebrow of the BBC lady. It seemed that she would rather like him to return to India and solve the West’s immigrant problem. As the farce continues, Aloo soon finds a real-life competitor again, this time in the form of an objective critic-turned-writer from the Indian cowbelt, someone who had hopped over the insurmountable barrier of the U.S. Embassy. Aloo runs to catch him, this man who has ruined his life, but he’s a master at slipping away.