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Indian novelist before boom time
IT WAS awards time again at the Book Fair — and I was delighted to see my publisher, East West Books (Madras), recognised as the `Best Publisher in English for the Year'. In a troubled 2001, it was a pleasure to see East West bring out several titles that only emphasised that it is the only English language publisher in the South looking consistently at publishing general titles.
It was in the 1970s that I first met K. S. Padmanabhan in Delhi where he was with Affiliated East West Press, which had been associated with Van Nordstrand in the PL 480 programme that made available numerous American academic reprints to Indian collegiates at low prices. A decade later, after he and colleague Kamal Malik, took over AEW, Paddu moved South to head their southern operations and that's when I offered him the manuscript of Madras Discovered. It came out in 1981 as AEW's first general title published in the South, a small book of 160 pages and priced at Rs. 10. Seeing that historical record in print went a much longer way towards getting me even more interested in Madras and its heritage than the rupee a book royalty I received. Today, several editions later, Madras Discovered is Madras Rediscovered, 432 pages in extent and a quarter in format larger. And as I get the next edition ready, it's still with Paddu's East West.
It's around the time Madras Discovered first came out that I caught up with Timeri Murari when he used to bring out the occasional team of British journalists for a cricketing holiday in Madras. Murari, the Booksellers' and Publishers' Association of South India's choice for `Best Author in English for the Year,' scripted in 1999 The Square Circle (Daayra) which won the Grand Prix at the Festival de Valenciennes in France and was screened at several other festivals and in many countries to much acclaim, though it's still to be seen by the public in India. In 2001, he re-wrote it for the stage and directed it at the Haymarket in Leicester.
He should have received the award many years earlier, for Murari's record as an Indian author published abroad is not only an impressive one but also predates all the names that have cropped up in the 1980s and 1990s to the accompaniment of much marketing hype.
Nine fiction titles and two non-fiction ones have followed his first novel, The Marriage, on the Indian immigrants in Britain, published in the U.K. in 1973 when he was just 24. Since then, his books have been published in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Scandinavia and Brazil. Migration, love, mystery and history have been Murari's favourite themes. His bestseller was Taj, translated into nine languages and likely to be made into a film by Sanjay Khan this year. Other novels have been translated into French, German and Dutch. My favourite is The Imperial Agent, which continues the story of Kipling's Kim. A book, which, however, did not get its due, particularly in India, was his last effort, Steps From Paradise, published in 1996. If marketed as a paperback in India, Hodder & Stoughton would have had a winner — but an opportunity was lost. Steps From Paradise appealed to me because it brought a part of the Madras of the 1930s and 1940s to life. Semi-autobiographical, in it were glimpses of that great house where Vasu Naidu (Murari's grandfather) lived off London's Road and the life and undercurrents that swirled in itFrom school at Madras Christian and college at Loyola, Murari went West to study engineering, only to graduate in International Affairs. Another shift and he became a journalist, first in small-town Canada, then with The Guardian in London, before moving into freelance journalism and television in the U.S. By the time he returned to the ancestral home in Madras in 1988, he was an established writer abroad, one who had successfully made the transition from reporter to creative author. It's time he got back to a field he was ahead of the pack in 1970s — writing books and NOT newspaper columns or the occasional feature. Films can wait.
S.MUTHIAH
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