In the Realms of Gold
Keats: “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”
The first time I had to judge books formally was when I became a member of the jury for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in 2004. I was thrilled to be adjudicating such a prize, even though I was judge only for the Eurasia region (there are four regions in this competition: Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, Eurasia, South East Asia and the South Pacific; the regional winners are eventually considered for the award later). However, I soon found out that while the idea of being a judge is thrilling, the judging process itself is quite demanding. If my memory serves me right the three of us in the Eurasian jury (Professor Sanjukta Das Gupta of the University of Calcutta, and Maya Jaggi, of the literary page of the British newspaper The Guardian, were my co-judges) had to read 108 books in just about four month's time. I remember that while I had set out to devour all the books initially I soon found comfort in Bacon's worldly-wise observation of ways of managing one's reading in his classic essay, "Of Studies": "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested, that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence, and attention". Adopting Bacon's method, at the end of my reading I could claim that I had tasted about fifty books, swallowed about thirty-five or so of them, and chewed and digested the rest. The books that I read really diligently and with rapt attention were of course the ones I had short-listed. When we met as a jury in Kolkata's Tollygunge Club we brought along the best of these short-listed books. Then in one day of intense negotiation we chose the winners from them: Mark Haddon's brilliant book about an autistic child, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, we agreed merited the Best First Book Prize while Caryl Phillip's sensitively rendered tragic tale of an African man's death in an English village, A Distant Shore, impressed us as the book most deserving of the Best Book of the Year Award. I should add that the process of arriving at these choices was not an easy one. After all, there were at least a few other works in our individual short-lists that had their claims to be made the "best" book in these two categories, though we certainly did not feel the same way about all of them. But it was a great feeling to be present in the delightfully preserved Bengal Club of Kolkata where the winners were announced. And as jurors of our region we felt vindicated in our final choices when some months later our selections were announced overall winners of the Commonwealth Prize in the "Best First Book" and "Best Book of the Year" categories at the Sydney Literary Festival later that year.
I recall now that among the 108 books we were asked to judge for the 2004 Commonwealth Prize for Eurasia, no more than 12 were from South Asia. Even though by 2004 the region had produced Booker prize winners like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, and even though quite a few writers of the region had received the Commonwealth Writers Prize in both categories by then (the Bangladeshi-Australian novelist Adib Khan had won the prize in the "Best First Book" category in 1995 for his novel Seasonal Adjustments), my experience of judging English fiction emanating from the sub-continent that year indicated to me that only a handful of books in English were coming out from our part of the world at this time. Moreover, it was obvious that there was not much quality writing in the language that could attract worldwide attention then.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, at discovering the big change in the volume of South Asian writing when I was invited to become a judge of the 2nd DSC Prize for South Asian Literature earlier this year, for when I opened the package of books sent to me I found I had 52 of them to evaluate! These works are "South Asian" according to the eligibility criteria of the prize since they are either by writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and Afghanistan (although there were no entries from the Maldives and Bhutan this year) or are by diasporic writers who have roots in our part of the world. However, in the DSC Prize even non-South Asian writers who have set their tales in the region are eligible for the award (there were two such submissions this year). Evidently, publishers have discovered by now that there is quite a market for English-language fiction with South Asian content. I found it interesting to note too from the books sent to me that not only were established publishing houses like Penguin and Harper Collins marketing any number of works of fiction set in South Asia, or about South Asians at home or abroad, but that independent Indian publishers like Kali and Rupa had also submitted entries for the competition. Obviously, interest in South Asian writing has been growing exponentially in recent years!
Surely, it is this boom in South Asian Writing and the improvement in the overall quality as well as the increase in quantity that prompted DSC Limited, a massive Indian infrastructure and construction company, to award a hefty prize for the best work in creative writing coming out of the region annually (the prize money is substantial at US $50000!) The brain child of the family that owns DSC, prominent among whom are Manhad and Surian Narula, the prize is announced in the Jaipur Literary Festival that takes place in the Indian city every January, an event also sponsored by the company. I was thus part of an event much larger than the prize itself!
For this book prize I was co-judging submissions along with four other judges: Alaistair Niven from Britain, Marie Brenner from USA, Faiza S. Khan from Pakistan, and Ira Pande from India, who is also the Chair of this year's panel. Our task, we learned, was to arrive at the winner in three phases. Going through the 52 books sent to us in late May, we first had to arrive at a long-list of 15-16 books by the second week of September. Come September 9, then, we emailed our long-lists to Mrs. Pande, who for her part, collated them and came up with a list of 16 books that she sent to us a few days later. We were then asked to reread these books so that we could produce a shortlist of 5-6 books when we were to meet in London in late October.
And so we judges met in an elegant hotel with a Victorian facade and nineteenth century type furnishings owned by the DSC Group in London's South Kensington borough on the 23rd of October to cut down the long list to a short one. Although there were some excellent books in the long-list like the Nepalese novelist Samrat Upadhyay's vivid evocation of a Kathmandu-based love affair, Buddha's Orphans, the Indian writer Siddarth Chowdhury's at times ribald portrait of the artist as a young man in Delhi, Day Scholar, and the Goncourt Prize winning Afghani tale of a woman having to cope with a war that is bleeding humanity in her country, The Patience Stone, that we debated about for a while, it took us three hours or so to arrive at our short list: Chinaman, the ingenious, sprawling, irreverent spin on Sri Lankan cricket by Shehan Karunatilaka, The Story that Must Not Be Told; Kavery Nambisian's thought-provoking tale of contemporary India where sprawling slums bursting with life but reeking of problems lie next to sleekly built housing estates; Monkey-Man, a deft and lively portrait of the tensions generated in people by the pace of life in fast-developing Bangalore (now Bengaluru!) by Usha K. R.; and Tabish Khair's postmodern postcolonial tale set for the most part in Victorian London that has a unique take on thuggery and the heart of darkness occluded by those who espouse reason, The Thing about Thugs, are four of the six books that we singled out. The other two books in our short list are translations (the DSC rules enable such books to be considered for the prize): the major Indian writer U. R. Ananthamurthy's classic novel about an idealist trying to take on the caste system in South India head-on, Bharatipura, and the simply told but delightful portrait of a para in Kashmir's most famous city that is another version of paradise lost, A Street in Srinagar. These books we considered good enough in their English translations to compete with the other four books written originally in that language.
The short-list was announced to the media in a glittering (if not entirely glitch-free) event organized in no less a place than London's resurrected Globe Theatre. It was good to be there to experience the buzz created by the prize. The organizers had done their best to make the event a grand one and throughout the evening the champagne kept flowing and the conversation got more and more animated. I also got my first taste of London's literary life and I think that I even got glimpses of the city's glitterati. But most of all I felt happy knowing that us jurors had done our part well in making such a dazzling event possible.
Because between mid-June to early September I had readon an average200 pages a day in arriving at the long list, I consider my next duty as a judge of the DSC to be an easy one. For all we have to do as judges when we meet in Jaipur on January 22nd is to choose the winner so that it can be declared the next day at the Jaipur Literary Festival. This should be a breeze even though at the moment I can't make up my mind about which of the three books I really, really like in the short-list should be the winner.
Judging books in book awards, I know by now, is not easy not merely for the sheer bulk of the work but also for the difficult choices one has to make again and again. However, the compensations are many: the honorarium one gets is not negligible but the honor of judging is much more gratifying; one gets to own a few dozens books which arrive one day at the outset of the competition as if by windfall; binging in books for a period after having to cut down on them for years because of professional work is entirely satisfying; and interacting with the other judges in pleasing milieus is definitely a bonus. But the greatest satisfaction of being a judge in these book prizes is the opportunity they give us jury members to traverse realms of gold and to encounter at the end at least a few wonderful works that take us, as did Keats when he read Chapman's Homer, into vantage points from where one can view some of the best insights into life and representation of societies past and present created by gifted contemporary writers.
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