The Pleasure Principle is Supreme

In an exclusive conversation with GAURAV JAIN, literary provocateur Martin Amis anatomises himself, sexual equality and the art of fiction

For four decades now, Martin Amis, 60, has been an alert reader, a piercing phrasemaker and a feeble storyteller. His major talent has produced a major reputation and a minor oeuvre, of which the critical writings have the best chance of lasting. Of late, he’s slowed down on literary commentary (a recent one on Nabokov’s posthumous novel was a rare delight) for more political themes, with mixed results. His novels, though, remain vexingly arch. The latest, The Pregnant Widow, deals with the sexual revolution of the 1970s — a group of young Britons vacation one summer at an Italian castle, and most of the book anticipates their sexual shenanigans and records languorous conversations. It’s slow going. The studious Keith is there with his prim girlfriend Lily, lusts for the stunning Sheherazade, and instead has sex with the animated Gloria — we’re asked to believe the summer haunts Keith for the rest of his life, more for Gloria’s witchy allure than for any sense of breach. All the while, Keith is distantly anxious about his alcoholic, sex-engorging sister Violet (based on Amis’ sister Sally). The novel occasionally jumps to present-day Keith, morosely divorced and remarried. Amis’ fiction sinks in its familiar bathos, whether in hormonal, sunny Italy or contemporary, bleak England. Sexual revolution was a wearying joyride, says Amis — his emphasis is on the adjective, unfortunately. In an exclusive conversation, Amis spoke on the phone from his London home. He drawled mostly in fully formed paragraphs. Excerpts:

You’ve called the sexual revolution “a necessary trauma” and the 1970s “the joke decade”. Did one need the other?

Yes, it all was of a piece. It involved men giving up substantial amount of their power, and yet they did it without conditions or resistance. Part of the bargain was that women would be more on display and more sexually active — men wanted that. As I say in the book, “the costumes they wore reflected a clownishness.” It did have a carnival atmosphere. [But] you can’t have much nostalgia for flared trousers (laughs). That kind of innocence and light heartedness is gone.

Why does Keith Nearing’s stepdaughter tell him that “the boys have won”?

That’s what she thinks in 2006. The idea that women should be whorish and pornographic — empowerment through pole dancing — it hasn’t gone away but it’s been slightly discredited [since then]. It’s still with us a bit but it was at a preposterous stage in 2006. It’s in retreat now — quite serious feminists were saying it then, they aren’t anymore. That empowerment only applies to the young — there’re no 60-year-old women pole dancing. And it only applies to the pretty ones. So it empowers those who’re already empowered by nature, and doesn’t do a thing for anyone else.

You write that historically the English novel was preoccupied with whether the woman will ‘fall’. So now when all women have ‘fallen’, what can English novelists write about?

All women will fall but there will be many different ways of falling in this new world. Some will survive it, some won’t. The sexual revolution was for both sexes a great multiplication of opportunities and possibilities. So I don’t think the novel is at all diminished by this. On the contrary, when you put all [English novels] together, the preoccupation with the fall of precarious women looks positively morbid.

The Pregnant Widow has barely any plot and keeps circling around discussions of sexual equality, but in the last chapters you suddenly speed up with pithy plot summaries across the decades. What were you trying for?

Well, I’m sure it works, and I think it’s quite original because the genre changes from ‘kitchen sink’ — or ‘country house weekend’ — into the genre I call ‘Life’. This is what I learnt when I was trying to write about life: it is utterly shapeless. I sort of cast off — insofar as I can, being such a habituated novelist — all my colour schemes and all the lapidary stuff and just enter this genre called Life where nothing is expected to add up. I think it’s a good contrast with the rather stylised, suspended Arcadian body of the main story.

John Banville cautioned you about using autobiography in fiction and you say you now agree with him — why?

When you write closely about life in fiction, it reveals an odd characteristic — life is dead. In fiction, the thing comes alive with contrivance, patterning, imagination — not with fidelity to what happened. There’s always contrivance and rearrangement, one’s characters are really Frankenstein’s monsters — composites of several different people. The closer to autobiography it is, the more constrained the writer is. Writing fiction is freedom — that is its defining quality, and you diminish your freedom radically when you start using real people in real situations.

The only novelist in the history of the world who successfully did that [use autobiography] is Saul Bellow, who of course is a great mentor of mine. Saul Bellow had a visionary eye that could burn through and find the universe in the particular. No one else has been able to, in my view. And I wasn’t trying to be like him, I was trying to do it in a slightly different way. [Once] I divested the book of autobiography, except the figure of my sister, it all came alive and was not difficult to write.

What happened to the autobiographical sections you removed from The Pregnant Widow?

That will be my novel after next, and it will be autobiographical — the technical term is ‘alobiographical’ — which means it’s about other real people I knew: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Ian Hamilton. I will be in it, but it’ll be the kind of static, essayistic novel that’s no longer written. [Bellow’s] Humboldt’s Gift is extraordinary but it’s so unlike a novel. I don’t think it’d sell more than a few thousand copies now. The audience has disappeared. Nonetheless, I’m going to write that kind of novel.

TEHELKA’s 2010 readership survey showed a predominance of the utilitarian reader who mainly seeks information and instruction from books. How can literary writers cope in such a scenario?

(Pauses) The great confrontation with nihilism is over for the novel. That was a response to two World Wars and mass death. It was felt that the novel had to start again in this new world. And what resulted is a literature of pleasurelessness — starting with Beckett. I think it’s a dead end. If it isn’t over then it should be. I think the novel should always be based on pleasure. The pleasure principle is supreme, and all this gloomy solemn stuff is an aberration. All the great writers of the past have given pleasure, and all of them have been funny, too. There’s a reason for that — whatever else life is, however dreadful, it is also very funny. Life by life, it is very funny. And fiction is being perverse as well as boring if it denies that.

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The Sun In My Pants

In the last decade, Ian McEwan’s novels have been depressingly artful. His last two books — Saturday and On Chesil Beach — have been particularly airless. Describing the condition of human happiness, his sensibility became finicky, tricked out, contrived. The books seemed too readable, as if the author had untangled his people in his head, flattened them on paper and then calmly filled them with the smooth helium of his prose.

Solar is happily different. It returns us to McEwan’s conventional pleasures of narrative, of English narrative — a straight tale that hugs the mind of the central character, told with dry humour, forever on a rim of irony. Meet Michael Beard, 55-year-old Nobel-laureate physicist who’s coasted on his eminence for 20 years. He retains the monomania of a rationalist, is against religion and sceptical of climate change. The book opens with his crumbling fifth marriage (he’s a habitual adulterer) and his sett ing up of a new institute for clean energy. We witness Beard’s personal and professional turbulences — divorce, philandering, a girlfriend demanding marriage, unwanted pregnancy, another girlfriend demanding marriage; a colleague’s death, Beard’s emergence as a climate change convert and profiteer, his media scandals, setting up an American site in the grand quest to replicate photosynthesis, and all his ineptness in between. We meet Beard in 2000, then skip to 2005, and finally to 2009 when all his circumstances finally crunch up on him.

This is novel writing as heroic set pieces. The book’s pitch-perfect scenes and cleaned-flute prose provide ready satisfactions for any reader. We visit the British country, the Arctic, the American south, airports, trains, hotel bars, dance shops — each sketched with delectable realism. McEwan is as clinical and unforgiving as ever, always quick to take the shine off a situation — in the Arctic, Beard quickly suffers a man’s ultimate accident in his iced groin (“his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there”). And McEwan is nothing if not accomplished — he’s got the science down pat, is properly restrained in explaining it, and aptly skewers its inhabitants.

McEwan is pitiless, of course, he’s done his homework, of course, and provides us the modern panic of urban existence that grips us all sooner or later. No bungle, fumble, miscue or calamity is omitted.

In the last decade, Ian McEwan’s novels have been depressingly artful. His last two books — Saturday and On Chesil Beach — have been particularly airless. Describing the condition of human happiness, his sensibility became finicky, tricked out, contrived. The books seemed too readable, as if the author had untangled his people in his head, flattened them on paper and then calmly filled them with the smooth helium of his prose.

Solar is happily different. It returns us to McEwan’s conventional pleasures of narrative, of English narrative — a straight tale that hugs the mind of the central character, told with dry humour, forever on a rim of irony. Meet Michael Beard, 55-year-old Nobel-laureate physicist who’s coasted on his eminence for 20 years. He retains the monomania of a rationalist, is against religion and sceptical of climate change. The book opens with his crumbling fifth marriage (he’s a habitual adulterer) and his sett ing up of a new institute for clean energy. We witness Beard’s personal and professional turbulences — divorce, philandering, a girlfriend demanding marriage, unwanted pregnancy, another girlfriend demanding marriage; a colleague’s death, Beard’s emergence as a climate change convert and profiteer, his media scandals, setting up an American site in the grand quest to replicate photosynthesis, and all his ineptness in between. We meet Beard in 2000, then skip to 2005, and finally to 2009 when all his circumstances finally crunch up on him.

This is novel writing as heroic set pieces. The book’s pitch-perfect scenes and cleaned-flute prose provide ready satisfactions for any reader. We visit the British country, the Arctic, the American south, airports, trains, hotel bars, dance shops — each sketched with delectable realism. McEwan is as clinical and unforgiving as ever, always quick to take the shine off a situation — in the Arctic, Beard quickly suffers a man’s ultimate accident in his iced groin (“his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there”). And McEwan is nothing if not accomplished — he’s got the science down pat, is properly restrained in explaining it, and aptly skewers its inhabitants.

McEwan is pitiless, of course, he’s done his homework, of course, and provides us the modern panic of urban existence that grips us all sooner or later. No bungle, fumble, miscue or calamity is omitted.

Beard cheats on his wife and his colleagues, frames someone for murder, neglects his partners and daughter. In a superbly comic midsection, he gets roasted by the media for a politically incorrect utterance. McEwan satirises postmodernism — how ‘relativity’ has sneaked out of science to create havoc in the social sciences. The comedy steadily increases in pitch till we’re almost at Bellovian levels — more than anyone, Beard reminded me of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, without the interiority but tangled in similarly preposterous sexual and professional excitements.

Here’s a hint of what’s new — the exquisite pain of conversations in McEwan’s earlier books has been socialised in Beard — he’s secure in his self-esteem, and brackets difficult conversations with fatty foods. The British man has been Americanised. His bumbling knowingness has turned into a willed, searing innocence. Beard faces all the epiphanies and drama of his life, takes the buzz of potato chips, fellatio and the Arctic cold alike, with a reliable assurance of his good naturedness, his reasonableness.

With this light-hearted masterpiece of cosmopolitan follies, McEwan can be justified again as Britain’s national novelist — curious savant, earnest activist, ironic storyteller, flawless writer-technician — all in all, a lovely pedant.

‘I Become A Diva When I Act’

In an exclusive chat, filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh breaks his silence about his acting debut and his increasingly feminine appearance in public

Raised in Kolkata, Rituparno Ghosh, 46, started out as an adman before transitioning to films. His second film Unishe April won the 1995 National Film Award for best film. Since then, he’s been a fixture on the international festival circuit with 15 more Bengali, Hindi and multilingual features, often using Bollywood stars like Bipasha Basu and Amitabh Bachchan. Now for the first time, Ghosh has acted in a film — in a double role. Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Galpo (Just Another Love Story) has Ghosh playing a gay film director who has a stormy affair with his bisexual, married cinematographer. The plot involves Ghosh’s film crew making a biopic of Chapal Bhaduri, a veteran transgender jatra actor who played women’s roles. The film also presents flashbacks with the whole cast doubling up in an earlier era of Bhaduri’s youth, with Ghosh playing the young Bhaduri. As production designer and creative director, Ghosh also controlled most of the film’s visual aesthetic and editing. He has also just wrapped up playing the role of an adman in a second film called Parapar.

Just Another Love Story was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Ghosh lost 14 kg for the movie and has made several stunning public appearances of late in turbans, chokers, salwar kameezes, lipstick and kohled eyes. In an in-depth conversation with TEHELKA, he breaks his silence for the first time to the Indian media about the film, his acting and his increasingly feminine appearance.

We met in Ghosh’s south Kolkata home. The drawing room had the dusty patina of living with books, old furniture, sculptures and a mild carpet. Among the Amitav Ghosh, Adonis, Gorky and Aeschylus on the shelves were also two copies of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. Despite the deep black circles under his eyes, Ghosh seemed more relaxed than his antsy self on the phone. He swung between joviality and tetchiness as the conversation progressed. Excerpts:

Did your acting debut terrify you?

Yes. I never knew how I’d react to a camera. I thought I’d technically be a horrible actor, since all my close acting friends said: “He’s capable of very subtle and fine acting — but everything will happen outside the camera!” I didn’t know if I’d panic once the camera started rolling since I knew the [film] stock is also going. Seventeen years of directing have taught me the frugality of filmmaking, which isn’t supposed to bother an actor. As an actor there’s also a director inside me, however much I want to bury him.

What made Kaushik Ganguly invite you to act?

Maybe because there were these two characters who perform two different femininities. He thought I’d do it more truthfully and not make it a caricature. But he was scared if I’d be able to play the old-world character [of Chapal Bhaduri’s youth] — shed off my urban qualities and get into the skin of a touring village artist. Eventually he was more impressed by that performance.

Did you find Ganguly’s direction much different from yours?

Frankly, I didn’t concentrate on it very much. I didn’t have the time or the energy. I told Kaushik not to rehearse me — just take me to the location and I’ll react to the ambience, the space and my co-actors — that’s what I understand as acting. So for me there’s no template, it was very fluid. The other thing was adjusting to an unknown unit which I hadn’t cast — they weren’t my decision. Also, I wanted to transfer my discomfort with the wig into a feeling of not belonging to this place — it was August and humid. I found what’s very irritating about acting are the [makeup] touch-ups — in the middle of the shots, they’d come into my space and touch my face because the makeup was melting away. I realised I’d have to deal with these intrusions and yet be a part of the character.

You didn’t do any formal preparation?

No, I realised that acting is a combination of the right amount of tension and relaxation. If you get too relaxed you’ll be casual, if you get too tense you won’t be able to perform. I found the tension of my body. After finishing a scene holding a bottle, I didn’t want to lose that tension so I’d sit still [between shots]. I didn’t take lunch breaks. I requested Kaushik not to break too much but if he had to, I’d sit in my position because for me to come back was difficult.

Your films often have intersecting narratives. Do you feel like you’re living inside a film? Do you perform in real life?

I think I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have acted. As Tarkovsky says, “Acting isn’t in great talent, it’s in the desire to perform.” I have the desire. I don’t hide behind it. I become a diva when I act (laughs), it gives me a chance to play a diva — which I can’t afford to do while directing.

Both your characters seem impeccably dressed. As production designer did you obsess about the movie’s look?

No, the characters demanded it. I knew I was playing an old jatra actor who performs female roles. The only thing is — I never practiced wearing a saree, which I regretted. When I finally wore it, I didn’t know the relationship between a heavy Benarasi saree and the ornaments — how and where to place your hand, with also the threads coming out and a huge wig tied into a bun with flowers. The only scenes I hated doing was with the sarees. I became 30 kg heavier and my natural confidence as an actor was gone.

Did the two femininities in both your roles attract you?
No, it was a challenge. Chapal da speaks in a feminine voice because he’s trained that way [imitates a falsetto]. It’s a peculiar voice. It’s very difficult to portray your emotions in an unnatural voice.

Did you model Chapal da on any of the actresses you’ve worked with?

No, because an actress, and a man playing an actress, have two kinds of sexual confirmations by society. If I’d modelled myself on an actress it would’ve been a normative sexual confidence, which I didn’t want to portray. The man I’m playing is reticent and old and not the diva that he used to be. We had a sequence where he walked in and smiled, and the way he sat with an extra femininity was important. He is not [just] a woman, he’s an extra woman — to prove his performance. I met him on the sets but I didn’t want to become too familiar because I didn’t want to mimic him.

So how was your modern character’s femininity different?

I play him with an extra femininity because he’s more than 10 years younger to me. At that age you want to prove you’re a gay activist. There’s a flamboyance to justify my [character’s] existence and validate my relationship with my boyfriend. Professionally, I’m the senior [but in] the couple he’s the man and I’m the woman, so I have to play myself down.

In the distance between Section 377 and the death of the AMU professor SR Siras, what is our society’s confusion?

Section 377 has created a polarity between homosexuals and heterosexuals. It doesn’t deal with the entire matrix of sexualities in between these two polars — that’s where androgyny lies. I think that has remained pretty grey, nobody is looking into that. This film deals with various sexualities which can’t be classified into two distinct social classifications. I think homosexuality is becoming a stereotype now.

Are you eager to act again?

Maybe, if it’s interesting, but not after the second [film]. I shouldn’t have done two films in a row. Direction is easier.

Is compassion important to get good performances from actors?

Yes, actors need to be pampered [since] they’re insecure. Even Amitabh Bachchan complained that after a shot, I never say: “Wonderful, very good.” I say, “Cut. Next shot.” There isn’t a single kind word from me and he used to wait for it. As an actor now, I know how important it is for the director to tell you if it’s a good shot.

Why are your movies preoccupied with exploitative film directors?

I’ve seen a certain ruthlessness in filmmakers, including myself — the creator’s selfishness. Ruthless towards anything that hinders the film and so his personal gain — I want to make this film because I want to make great art and become famous. Human compassion isn’t allowed.

Why do you want fame?

To be in circulation. Then I’ll have producers coming to me. I don’t think I’m a great filmmaker. But I want to keep the myth of a great filmmaker alive through the fame. I don’t think my films are great films — they’re just competent films.

Have your recent public appearances in feminine attire been due to this film or out of a personal choice?

My appearance is more androgynous than feminine. My public appearance has nothing to do with my films — Kaushik can’t be blamed for what I do in my personal life! [Laughs.] Nobody should be held responsible for that.

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With Or Without You

As the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize kicks off in New Delhi, two winners told me why the award both bores and tempts them

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, 34, was the fashion editor at Nigeria’s NEXT newspaper before moving to the copy desk there. Her debut novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, is themed on the infamous Nigerian ‘419’ email scams and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2010 for Best First Book (Africa). In an email interview, Nwaubani discusses her writing, African literature, the problem with African youth and the significance of the prize. Excerpts:

In the novel, Uncle Boniface entices the narrator to join his 419 schemes by emphasising money over education. Do you see young Nigerians being enticed?

During research, rather than being upset I was almost enthralled by the 419ers’ ingenuity. The talented underprivileged can’t be blamed for taking advantage of opportunities to express what they have bottled up inside them. 419 and other crimes are simply by-products of booming economies where there are few opportunities for the underprivileged.

The book enjoys humour like laughing at Igbo and Edo accents. Why is this still rare in African literature?

Our writers’ serious tone is probably a habit from our predecessors. We seem to think the West won’t take us seriously if we don’t write that way — we’ve made ourselves slaves to the slavemasters who’ve left. My Nigerian publisher once said that of all the manuscripts she receives, half tend to write like Chinua Achebe, while half tend to write like Wole Soyinka. I probably would’ve been the same had I not read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which showed me you can write a dismal story that’s still humorous. I decided to damn the consequences and relax into my own peculiar style.

You’ve said young Africans should be “systematically deprogrammed” — what’s wrong with their thinking?

The white man left Nigeria 50 years ago yet he’s blamed for everything. Just as people who attend support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, we need to own up and take responsibility for problems.

You’ve criticised colonialism but stressed that Africans should act rather than blame others. What about a prize organised around former colonies?

I understand the ‘colonial masters’ did many things they shouldn’t have, but life has to go on. Let’s be honest: today, most African nations are poised to gain more from being part of the Commonwealth than by not. Until we overcome the ‘gimme’ mentality to relate with the West, nobody should complain about being part of the Commonwealth. I don’t know a single African writer who’s succeeded in the global literary scene without a western body’s assistance. Not one. Until we’re willing to support our own people into the limelight, no one has the right to bite the hand that feeds them.

A book gets very little respect in Nigeria if the West hasn’t anointed it. Comments like “It won the Commonwealth Prize” or “It got a great Washington Post review” are enough to make people proclaim you the new literary czar — whether they’ve read you or not. That’s worked for people like me, but it’s retrogressive. I don’t know about India, but how many Africans do you know who’ve instituted major literary prizes in their countries? The few literary prizes we have in Nigeria are riddled with controversy.

Mohammed Hanif, 44, is a special correspondent for the BBC in Karachi. His debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, won last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (all regions). In a frank conversation, Hanif ridicules the idea of the Commonwealth and the prize. Excerpts:

What did winning the Commonwealth prize mean for you personally?

We grew up in Pakistan hearing about the Commonwealth but never knew what it does. Nobody knows. The Commonwealth as an institution is irrelevant — nobody loves or hates it. I’m sure athletes and hockey players care about it, but I don’t think writers go around thinking about this prize. It was a very nice event, though [in New Zealand]. I bought an [electricity] generator and TV with my prize money.

Did it help your book’s visibility?

I’m lousy at tracking these things. Surely it did — there were mentions on the paperback. But I don’t think it influences people to go read the book. When you write a first book, you’re just grateful for a publisher and readers. When you’re nominated for a prize, you secretly start thinking — maybe I can win. If you don’t win people say wasn’t it great to be nominated — no, not really. The Commonwealth prize is just one of many prizes [out there]. It’s a bit obscure, quaint and old-fashioned. When you tell people, they ask — ‘Commonwealth what?’ We joke it looks after the British royal family and their holiday calendar. But we don’t really have any reason to hate it.

How do you feel about the prize being organised around Britain’s former colonies?

The Commonwealth doesn’t publish books, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just some kind of f****d up mammary that people have kept alive for themselves. It isn’t giving people anything. I’ve been reading of the excitement in India about the upcoming Commonwealth Games there — lots of new roads and sports facilities and lots of poor labourers being exploited, which is probably consistent with contractors in the Commonwealth.

Does criticising such prizes imply biting the hand that feeds you, such as Amitav Ghosh’s withdrawal from this prize some years ago protesting that it includes only English language entries and that the Commonwealth is a “memorialisation of empire”?

I didn’t know till I won that my book had been entered [for the prize]. The concept of Commonwealth is irrelevant to my life. It’s a bit of a joke. Next time, I’ll probably do what Ghosh did — I think he did the right thing. He’s a veteran writer and has been around a lot. Next time I’d ask him about it.

Why were you detained by Auckland airport customs when you arrived for the prize ceremony last year?

It wasn’t as much about me as another writer from Nigeria [Uwem Akpan]. Mine was a regular airport inspection and interrogation, but he was held for several hours without even being allowed a bathroom break. Everyone was horrified in Auckland — they’re very sweet people. I mentioned it in my acceptance speech. I said someone should tell immigration officers that brown and black people also write books, and sometimes they also win awards, and there’s nothing frightening about it.

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The Beat Generation

Shot over decades, photographer Raghu Rai’s new book India’s Great Masters contains some powerful images of music and ecstasy. Rai speaks about the very private moments behind his resonant images

S Balachander

An entirely self-taught child prodigy, Balachander went on to become a veena and sitar virtuoso. Says Rai, “I took him to Mahabalipuram to interpret his music. His strokes are the deepest possible sound; they bounce so much, it seemed the rocks were approaching in rhythm and dance. I sat him there and wondered what to do. When you make yourself available, nature makes itself available. When I shot this, it went beyond my planning. Ab sur lag gaya.”

Zakir Husain

Zakir Husain has always brought a rockstar air to the tabla. Rai says, “I once asked him who plays better — he or his abba [tabla maestro Alla Rakha Khan]. He smiled mischievously and said, ‘I.’ This photo was taken in his Bombay bedroom 20 years ago, while the family was watching television. He’s treated like a superhero even in his house.”

Vilayat Khan

Sitar maestro Vilayat Khan was as fond of jewellery onstage as he was of purity of notes. Rai describes him as “a complex, impossible man. I went with him on a visit to his Sufi Pir in Deoband. As soon as he reached, he did this drama of clutching his guru’s feet. There are very few people who don’t perform in life — it’s great for us photographers.”

Mallikarjun Mansur Some of his closest disciples didn’t visit classical vocalist Mallikarjun Mansur as he lay dying of lung cancer at home in Dharwar, Karnataka. Says Rai, “He was very fond of beedis. On his deathbed, he told his son (who smoked cigarettes), ‘Pilao’. He’d ask why the doctors didn’t cure him. When I sensed he wouldn’t survive, I asked if I could leave. I couldn’t bear it. He died the next day.”

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He Will Not Eat You

Why is india the hardest market to crack for modern Indian cuisine? I spent several days with master chef Vineet Bhatia inside his new Mumbai kitchen and got some startling answers

Vineet Bhatia is the world’s only Indian chef to have two Michelin stars, and the only British chef after Gordon Ramsay to have one outside his home country. That still doesn’t make him a man-eater. The 42-year-old is alarmingly mild-lipped, keeping up a breezy flair both during and after service hours. He has the face of Puck the sprite.

Of course, all that might be moot since we don’t know what to do with him anyway. We’re in a curious moment when the idea of celebrity chefs has arrived in India but hasn’t dented our consciousness enough – yet – to demand major attention. In the West, chefs like Anothony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White have acquired the classic macho-but-sensitive profile, often through the terrific food writing in pop culture. But change is peeling in India faster than we perhaps realise. Amateur food blogs are gaining ground; one major television channel is considering launching an Indian version of the BBC’s MasterChef show this summer; and while the old guard like chef Hemant Oberoi and critic Vir Sanghvi are still mechanically esteemed (and an old guard is always useful for an impending revolution), clear young faces are also simmering – people like Manu Chandra, the 29-year-old chef of Bengaluru’s Olive Beach and Varun Tuli, the 27-year-old Delhi restaurateur. So when an expat prodigal like Vineet Bhatia – acclaimed everywhere else for his deep artistry of what’s possible with Indian rations – decides to quietly return to launch a restaurant in India, it might be worth a closer look. Worth spending several days with the master chef inside his new Indian kitchen as he dashed into the biggest opening of his life.

As part of The Oberoi’s post-renovation Mumbai opening after the 26/11 terror attacks, Bhatia had arrived in Nariman Point to launch a new restaurant – his 11th – called Ziya to replace the hotel’s iconic Kandahar. Bhatia pioneered modern Indian cuisine in London, elevating the balti menu of greasy curry houses to French-styled, pre-plated fine dining (pre-plated implies each menu item is one person’s complete meal already served and decorated on a plate before it leaves the kitchen, with balanced tastes, nutrients and colours). Bhatia grew up in Mumbai and actually began his career at the same Oberoi in the early 1990s – he ran Kandahar for about a year before leaving for London. After failing with a New Delhi restaurant in 2001, he had a few months ago begun a small tentative kitchen called Azok, a lounge diner in Mumbai’s Juhu, but still hadn’t gone the whole hog. Now he’d finally returned to the mother ship for a proper second shot at India, the world’s hardest market to crack for modern Indian food.

Pre-plated, ‘nouvelle’ Indian food has never really taken off in India but Bhatia is optimistic, pointing out how pre-plating is similar to Indian restaurants’ thalis. There are some agreeable indicators of such concept restaurants taking hold, at least in New Delhi: apart from their ‘classic’ Indian fare, Varq at the Taj and Monsoon at Le Meridien offer pre-plated modern Indian cuisine. Indian Accent at the Manor hotel, which opened about a year ago, is one of the few yet that matches Ziya’s ambition in being only pre-plated.

So what is the fuss about? Bhatia’s menu includes things like coconut soup with lime leaves, chilli and lemon grass; grilled ginger-chilli lobsters served with broccoli khichdi; foie gras coins with raisins and cashews; wasabi and roasted almond ice cream; paan-chocolate chutney. The flavours are kept carefully light to keep them distinct and not overwhelm each other.

And has this food’s time truly come in India? There is intense disagreement in the fraternity, tinged with business and culinary interests and, of course, the heat of fat egos. While many in the business claim that Varq and Indian Accent are not doing well, the restaurant’s chef Manish Mehrotra contradicts this and says they plan to open another in London soon. He says this cuisine is now “required” in India for a clientele that’s travelling and sampling it everywhere else. Bombay Elektrik Project co-founder and restaurant consultant Sudeep Nair says the food certainly works but people like Bhatia are walking a very fine line, since people either love it or hate it. “Yes, there’s always a market for snob value,” he says. “More than food connoisseurs, you’ll get people who want to be seen there.” Mehrotra predicts that most new Indian cuisine restaurants, especially in the better Indian hotels, will now serve nouvelle Indian food: “There will be these and the Moti Mahals and nothing much in between,” he says. But others like Olive Beach’s chef Manu Chandra remain sceptical about Ziya, saying that “Indian diners don’t necessarily want to be wowed. They might be well travelled and loaded but they want a familiar, comfort zone. I’ve learnt it the hard way!”

If you notice, though, all such restaurants have opened in five-star properties – for the good reason of having captive, hungry guests, self-selective external clients, and no rent. Restaurateur Zorawar Kalra, son of chef Jiggs Kalra, says that their Punjab Grille restaurants can also make this food but there’s no local demand for it. Mehrotra admits that half his guests are expats, which is surely a bad sign. But everyone is unanimous about one impression – Indians don’t like to be shown how to remake their own food. What chance does Bhatia have?

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Delhi Belly, Dude

Aatish Taseer must make up his mind. Is he going to allow his good manners to kill his ambition?

In the Ghost Writer, Philip Roth describes the writer Abravanel in an undisguised portrait of Saul Bellow: “[During his lecture], we might have charged the stage to eat him up alive if he had been any more sly and enchanting and wise. Poor marvellous Abravanel”. In The Temple-Goers, Aatish Taseer describes the writer Vijaipaul in an undisguised portrait of VS Naipaul: “It had been very affecting to hear him speak, very affecting to watch his distant observations coincide with smaller, more particular observations of my own.” The difference in literary paternity — Roth uses it for performance while the latter uses it for self-esteem — seems emblematic of all that’s wrong with Taseer’s about-to-behailed, turgid first novel.

“Note-perfect prose.” “Silver wit.” “One of the most accomplished talents of our times.” Taseer’s book jacket has lots to deliver. And he invites comparisons with Roth when he bestows his firstperson narrator the name “Aatish Taseer” and his own history and circumstances.

Expat writer returns to Delhi and moves in with girlfriend, Sanyogita. The novel begins by presenting his agent’s letter saying she was “mightily impressed” with his writing. Thence it is about how “Aatish” joins a gym, gets an Urdu teacher, Zafar, becomes close to a gym trainer, Aakash, and how this estranges him from Sanyogita. Eventually, the expected happens in this untenuous triangle. This is Taseer’s big ‘break-up novel’.

The cartoon plot is belied with ponderous descriptions of the grubby “new” Delhi as “Aatish” discovers the old city and suburban badlands, areas previously invisible to him. Taseer obsesses with plantlife descriptions in a way only a first novel has stamina for. His addiction to chewing the scenery is marketed as incisions into a changing India.

Some of the cartoonishness is because Taseer either writes with or for a firang sensibility — as when noticing how children learn to say “jai” without being taught it, or when Aakash’s father stands next to his ancestor’s statue: “Then an unexpected sorrow, like that of the red rose against the black background in his flat, passed over his face”. If you saw such reaching in journalism, you’d giggle.

When the agent eventually dismisses his novel, “Aatish” says, “I hadn’t found a way to write about my situation. I had the disarray of my situation to show me why.” This silly creed, where the writing will neaten the life, might explain the book’s Disneyland aura. Add to this the rheumy idea of giving one’s own name and life to your character without it adding any immediacy; clumsy punning such as calling a state “Jhaatkebaal”; deploying stale tropes like the Aarushi murder; basing some characters upon celebs like Vasundhara Raje for frisson — all done without originality, Taseer lands you in artistic dudgeon.

Why has no one told Taseer that literary gamesmanship and good manners are a disastrous mix? He writes with joyless ennui, in a voice that wants to catalogue tidily but has no amplitude — we get no humour, irony, anger or even scattiness. Characters sit in an observational hive but their internal lives never flare up. Crucially, all the hints about Aakash’s hidden menace go nowhere.

“Aatish” explains his glazed submission to Aakash: “My belief that Aakash could rescue me from being an outsider in India had led me into a kind of self-effacement.” Poor “Aatish” has a rough time of it all around. There is one grace note in his novel — it’s dedicated to no one.

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