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Business News/ Opinion / A tale of two Bookers
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A tale of two Bookers

Why V.S. Naipaul's 'A Bend In The River' and Neel Mukherjee's 'The Lives Of Others' were denied the Booker prize

Neel MukherjeePremium
Neel Mukherjee

The most memorable novel I have ever read is A Bend In The River, published in 1979. It was nominated for the Man Booker that year, but lost to Offshore, a novel now out of print which I have not read, but whose blurb sounds embarrassingly pretentious. “Offshore is set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…".

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V.S. Naipaul. Photo: Satish Bate/Hindustan Times

The Man Booker judges are hardly infallible. They’re just as vulnerable to emotion and to what is fashionable as the group that hands out the Nobel Peace prize. American diplomat Henry Kissinger and President Barack Obama will be remembered for many things, reducing the world’s standing armies will not be among them.

But there is another aspect, and it is the existence of those judges (six white people) in a monocultural cocoon.

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There is a sameness to these people and you know what I mean. The Booker prize was this year opened up to non-Commonwealth writers (meaning Americans), but remains closed to Commonwealth writers who don’t write in English, even if their work is published in the UK. This says more than anything else about how insulated the thing is kept from the world. And, without question, such insularity affects the award.

One of the 1979 judges, Hilary Spurling, told The Guardian 30 years later about the judging:

“It was a strong field and the bookies’ favourite was VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Its opponents on the panel argued that the book shouldn’t strictly be classified as a novel, and in any case he’d won the prize before. The Naipaul lobby (including me) snapped back that the novel was doomed if it couldn’t expand to include this sort of documentary fiction, and that our job was to pick the year’s best book, regardless of its author.

“The final verdict was as much of a shock to the judges as it was to everybody else. We’d spent the entire afternoon at loggerheads, and in the end compromised by giving the prize to everybody’s second choice, Penelope Fitzgerald’s small, slight, melancholy but beautifully judged and executed Offshore. Her recently published collected letters make it clear that her triumph—and the general incredulity that greeted it—caused her humiliation ever after."

This sounds appalling to me, given how authoritative our media think the Booker jury is.

Naipaul was denied the Booker because the judges either ignored or did not understand his penetration into Africans and Indians in that book. A Bend In The River is not just great writing, it achieves the highest purpose of literature, which is to open up a culture and a world to the reader. The judges did not get that at the time.

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I wonder if this was also the case with Neel Mukherjee’s work. His The Lives Of Others, on Naxalism and the middle class, was, like A Bend In The River, odds-on favourite to win this year’s Booker but didn’t, following a majority (i.e., not unanimous) vote.

I think it is particularly silly to rank writers and musicians. Books are meant to be read and not graded. Anyway, enough whining about the Booker. Let me tell you a bit about the writer. Neel is a friend and one of the most interesting people I know.

He is that rare person who knows the high cultures of both East and West, a trait that I find most attractive. He is like Allama Iqbal and Khaled Ahmed and Nirad Chaudhuri. He is unlike Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, both monolingual writers and, I may add, thinkers.

Neel is the only person I know who is properly immersed in both Western classical and Hindustani music.

At home, he sits at his desk in the London suburb of Clapham Common (where columnist Polly Toynbee, granddaughter of historian Arnold, used to be his neighbour) playing BBC Radio 3. One afternoon in Mumbai, over lunch at Dadar’s Sindhudurg restaurant, Neel picked out what was being hummed at the next table (raga Durga as the delighted Marathi gentleman acknowledged).

He is usually trim and beautiful- looking (an Italian at dinner compared him to Michelangelo’s David) and is conscious of this. There is a framed cartoon in his bathroom of a man who has cut off one of his limbs and is looking down at the weighing scale, bloody cleaver in hand, to see if he is finally lighter.

He is one of the three finest cooks I know. Extraordinarily neat and quick in the kitchen and capable, unsurprisingly, of putting together both European and Indian meals of exceptional quality. Anything he puts together (asparagus wrapped in bacon with mozzarella) is magical.

He is wonderfully bilingual and my wife, who is from Kolkata, says Neel speaks Bengali as well as anyone she knows. His English is first-rate.

He can calibrate his writing and can use different tones for, say, his reviews in The Daily Telegraph and those in The Guardian. Writers will know how difficult that is. He is erudite but holds his learning lightly. Almost anything I am currently reading, whether Jacob Burckhardt or Ernest Renan or anything else, he is likely to have read. This, his many interests and his qualities, is what makes Neel wonderful company. I admire and respect him greatly.

His brother is the famous Udayan Mukherjee, for many years the face of CNBC-TV18, and I join him in toasting the exceptional quality and success of his brother, an extraordinary man, Booker or no.

Also Read | Aakar’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 25 Oct 2014, 12:07 AM IST
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