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July 07, 2005
Indian and Foreignors
Rana Dasgupta, author of the short story collection Tokyo Cancelled, writes on Indian media and how and why it reduces 'all creation' to its 'Indianess'.
Why do you deny you are Indian?” several journalists asked me. “I am not denying anything,” I replied. “I’m just not pretending to be what I’m not. I hold a British passport, I grew up in England, I speak no Indian languages and I did not live in India until I was nearly 30 years old. I live here now and my work is greatly influenced by being here; but I cannot claim to be an Indian writer.” But such talk poses real problems for columns that must be about Indian writing, or Indian celebrity.
Dasgupta also discusses how the interest in authors is not for their books but their value as interesting 'personalities' as well as how a 'cut and paste' book review is written, and is to the detriment of intellectuality.
The interest of this second category of journalists was not in “literature” but in “personality”. They wrote for columns with stomach-churning titles like “Celebtalk” and they came to my house to note down a few snatched words that could then be patched together in a collage of more or less incoherent stereotypical catch-phrases crowned with a photograph. One sensed among them a panic of speed, the terrible anxiety of having to feed the newspaper’s insatiable hunger for new and different kinds of celebrity; and they were often hilariously unprepared.
Posted by Soniah Kamal at July 7, 2005 12:08 PM
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Posted by: Anonymous at July 7, 2005 12:08 PM
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