Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Photo: S. R. Raghunathan

WRITING ON THE RIOTS Davidar at the launch of “The Solitude of Emperors”

“I suppose a writer is always concerned with the response to his work in the city closest to his origin,” he said.

The author, who was born in a small town near Kanyakumari and later studied at the Madras University, has been through this before though. “The Solitude of Emperors” is his second book, following the critically acclaimed “The House of Blue Mangoes” in 2002.

This book is centred around the communal riots in Mumbai in the early 1990s, a subject close to Davidar’s heart since he worked there as a journalist for a while.

“The riots affected friends and acquaintances of mine and I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time,” he said. “But it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to address the issue.”

Launching “The Solitude of Emperors” in the Taj Coromandel (Chennai), Nirmala Lakshman, Joint Editor and Director of The Hindu, called the book “deeply disturbing in some ways.” “It takes an unflinching look at communalism with terse, spare prose,” she said.

She spoke of Davidar’s career as a publisher, particularly about his role in establishing Penguin Books in India after completing a course in publishing at Harvard University at the age of 26.

“I’ve known him for more than 15 years, and he took Penguin to great heights in India during that time,” she said.

Davidar, currently president and publisher of Penguin Canada, read a couple of passages from the book at the launch — the first one about his protagonist Vijay preparing to leave his small town in Tamil Nadu for Mumbai, and, the second, an entertaining account of Vijay’s interview in Mumbai with his magazine editor Sorabjee.

In spite of the parallels between the lives of Vijay and Davidar himself (both from small towns in

Tamil Nadu, both worked as journalists in Mumbai), the author said the book was not autobiographical during the question and answer session that followed.

Other questions asked by the audience covered plenty of ground, from what the solution to communal violence in India was, to the author’s literary inspirations and writing style.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

---

---