CULTURE
Talented, but self-indulgent
S. RAMACHANDER
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What would have been riveting in a Sunday magazine travel piece becomes a strain in an extra-long novel.
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The Peacock Throne: An Epic Tale of Modern India, Sujit Saraf, Sceptre, £ 11.99.
IT takes courage to write a book like this. That must be the first comment on this first novel by an Indian resident in California, who has quite unabashedly set himself up in obvious comparison to the cult novelists from the sub-continent, such as Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy — the first one evokes a comparison for the scale and size of the effort and the second for the evocative and descriptive writing. Clearly one of the new generation of global Indians, Saraf is both an IIT graduate and a PhD from the University of California, resident of the green card land that the generation dreamt of for decades.
In this book, he begins with a rich and colourful tapestry of scenes from Old Delhi and elsewhere in India's capital, leading the reader into the world of small traders, street people, activists, and petty politicians and the ubiquitous brokers and hangers on, whom this ultimate city of power attracts like a magnet.
Ear for language
Starting with the day of the assassination of the Prime Minister, and its reverberations in ordinary lives, some on the margin of society, the book deals sensitively with many high and low points of recent Indian history. Obviously the author has an ear for language of the common person, male and female. His dialogue, although not originally meant to be spoken in the language in which he writes, manages to sound lively and authentic, so much so that one is scarcely conscious of it. Here is a trick that few Indian writers of dialogue in English manage to do so well, barring exceptions such as Girish Karnad. This is no mean achievement. Yet the book is as hard to review, as it must have been to write for just one reason — its inordinate, meandering length that leaves the reader exhausted with a surfeit of sameness. The re-creation of the sounds and sights — from the hand pump on the street corner to the roadside vendors and mobile barbershop to the prostitutes gazing down through the iron grills of an upstairs window, red lips parted to let out a stream of paan juice — is indeed excellent, but alas palls after a while. What would have been riveting in a Sunday magazine travel piece becomes a strain in an extra-long novel.
Too long
In the end one is left with the feeling that the word `epic' in the subtitle is more descriptive of the scale rather than the content. In places it even manages to sound like a parody of the genre, with the present tense liberally used to bring the action to life, somewhat reminiscent of John Le Carre, but without his elliptical brevity and powerful irony. The characters do sound real and very credible, despite the artificiality of local dialect being represented in a foreign language.
That is one clear positive of the book, as is the fluency. Yet, it remains, all in all, a tiresome book, too long by about 300 pages at the very least. One hopes the author will learn to be less self-indulgent in future, because he certainly is a new talent.
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