For Delhi residents, few collections of short fiction have been as eagerly awaited as this one. Hirsh Sawhney, ex-Dilliwala and currently of Brooklyn, asked writers as diverse as I Allan Sealy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Ruchir Joshi and the Hindi author Uday Prakash to contribute to this volume of twisted tales (it was originally published in the US by Akashic Books earlier this year). The quality of the stories vary: Sealy’s is brilliant, as you’d expect, though some of the others are not. But they all adhere to the central premise of the book, which is to present an “alternative map of the city”, as Sawhney puts it in his introduction. Sawhney told Avtar Singh in an email interview that he also hopes that the book will make readers take a second look at “urban icons and images we’ve filed away and take for granted”.
You’ve focused on noir: is Delhi ready for more genre fiction?
I think Delhi is definitely ready for more genre fiction. When the residents of any place devour genre fiction – be it crime fiction, sci-fi or romance novels – it could mean that a large, middle-class population is spending their free time reading. Delhi, like many of India’s cities, obviously has this growing middle-class. This group of people just needs to start buying books. The onus is now on Indian publishers to produce, market and distribute books that more than a handful of people in a city of 20 million would want to buy.
What attracts me to noir in particular – and what distinguishes noir as a sub-genre of crime fiction – is its existential edge. Yes, noir is sensual and gritty, and it can be gory. But it has to be sophisticated. It has to be packed with social realism. It scrutinises a society’s myths and an individual’s intentions.
Is a collection such as this part of a literary agenda that seeks to counter the cheerleading that is happening in Delhi particularly, and in India in general, with regard to urban development?
Good noir, whether it’s set in Los Angeles, Marseilles or Delhi, will tend to explode the myths that define a city. So yes, most of the stories in this collection scrutinise Delhi’s recent development and definitely try to present a more nuanced portrait of it.
But if this anthology were to have an agenda, hopefully it would be a much more broadminded one. Noir is not just about scrutinising some dogmas. It’s a murky, complex form that scrutinises all dogma. Taken together, these stories hopefully transcend the confines of ideology.
While some authors in this collection seem to be made for the genre (Sidharth Chowdhury, for example), others weren’t as obvious, for instance I Allan Sealy…
I was looking for excellent writers who I believed possessed a certain “eyes wide open” sensibility – people whose prose demonstrated that they were willing to unflinchingly depict their own lives or the realities they were observing.
Siddharth certainly fits this bill, as you point out. The same goes for Allan Sealy. Also, I was struck by his book The Brainfever Bird, which was essentially a literary thriller, some of which was set in Delhi.
Would more stories in translation have presented a perhaps different view of the city?
I definitely don’t know enough about what’s going on in the bhasha languages today to provide a worthy answer to that question. Most of the Urdu, Hindi or Bengali works I’ve read in translation have been written by writers who are no longer alive. Premchand, Manto, Hyder, Tagore…I’d consider Manto, who wrote in Urdu, the father of Indian noir, and I know several of the book’s contributors have been deeply influenced by him.
Delhi Noir, HarperCollins, Rs 399.
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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