Clips of the latest Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster "Main Hoon Na"
played on giant plasma display screens and loud beats of "It's the
time to disco" - another hit track from another Khan hit "Kal
Ho Na Ho" - reverberated around New Delhi's British Council, venue
for the launch late of Wednesday night.
"It is the new young British Council," smiled Anjoo Mohun,
of the Council's communications division, as guests munched canapés
and sipped cocktails in an environment, which, with the dimming of a couple
of lights, could have easily turned into a dance floor.
"Also Bollywood is a predominant theme in Hari's book, so we wanted
create that feel."
Kunzru, who traces his origin to Kashmir, was one of the biggest publishing
names launched last year with his debut "The Impressionist".
The Impressionist
The Impressionist is a black comedy about race and identity. It goes
from India to England to Paris to Africa following one character, Pran,
who assumes a great deal of different identities and never quite fits
into any of them.
Idea for the book come from:
Part of the idea came from my own experience of being the child of an
Indian father and an English mother. I've grown up in England and feel
pretty English in my upbringing, but there's always been an aspect of
my experience that hasn't quite fitted. I wanted to write something
about a character like that, only I've reversed the polarities in a
way. Pran is the child of an English father and an Indian mother and
I've set the book at a time (the 1920s) - maybe the last time - when
the Empire really mattered. It's at a crisis point in the story of the
British Empire, which of course is kind of why I m here. My father would
never have come to Britain if there wasn't the historical connection
between the two countries.
A fast paced, witty novel that traverses through colonial India, Oxford
England and an imaginary African tribal land, during the last days of
the British Empire. But does it live up to the hype and fanfare that
have preceded it?
An epic and amusing Indian / British adventure that romps through colonial
India, Britain and Africa during the last days of the British Empire.
The story is of Pran Nath, a beautiful pale-skinned Anglo-Indian boy
who, chameleon - like, moves from one world to another, taking on a
completely new identity each time.
Rejected from his Brahmin family for his 'tainted blood', he survives
by becoming Rukshana, a cross-dressing slave in the harem of the promiscuous
and dissolute Raj of Fatehpur. He then escapes to the dirty streets
of Bombay where he becomes 'Pretty Bobby', conveniently adopted by an
eccentric English missionary couple.
Here he learns the skills for his supreme reinvention into an English
gentleman, Jonathan Bridgeman, who travels to England and the stiff
upper lip world of the British boarding school and Oxford University.
His final journey is ironically back to the 'savage' world from which
he has escaped, as a reluctant assistant on an anthropological safari
to Fotseland, a fictional African tribal land.
Huge expectations and hype have accompanied the launch of this novel,
due to the reported £1.25 million advance Kunzru received for
the publishing rights for this, his debut novel. Kunzru is being lauded
as the trendy new face of British publishing and compared to Zadie Smith
(White Teeth). It is the nature of such extreme hype, to make it difficult
for any book to live up to the expectations. Unfortunate really, for
without the hype, this is an impressive book - fast paced, clever and
very witty.
Not so much an Indian novel, as British. It looks with amusing satire
at the decline of The Empire, the rigid social rules and absurdly arrogant
beliefs that created barriers between class and race. Kunzru has created,
in the character Pran, the classic product of two cultures. Rejected
and uncomfortable in both, Pran develops his gift for imitation and
successfully copies all the rules, conventions and costumes that make
up the appearance of culture and becomes something that he is not.
In imitating the 'white superior' culture, Pran begins to believe the
racist dogma, and tries to become the white person by 'expelling' the
black. But the final irony is that in becoming the ultimate Englishman,
the English girl he loves finds him too boring- 'the most English person
she knows'. He realizes that he has become completely hollow and empty
-"nothing of his own is visible."
Because of Pran's constant reinvention, I found that he never became
a fully rounded character for whom you could feel warmth and sympathy.
This ultimately effected my enjoyment of the novel. He was always kept
at a distance, an ever changing caricature.
Characterization aside, I enjoyed the vivid, farcical descriptions
of the absurd extravagance of the decaying Indian Raj, the extreme Britishness
of the colonials in India, and the grey and drizzly England - "the
mystic Occident: land of wool and cabbages, and lecherous round-eyed
girls"
Ultimately The Impressionist is an entertaining and clever read. An
energetic plot, a colourful array of over the top characters and cultures
combined with Kunzru's mocking wit, lift this novel out of the ordinary.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether it lives up to the hype.
Transmission is Hari Kunzru's
second novel and, in a similar vein to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections,
the title is instructive; it's figuratively and literally, the book's
pulsing leitmotif. To transmit is, by definition, to "send across",
and the migration of information and people, the destruction
and the erection of borders in our hi-tech, supposedly global village,
(a world where Indian graduates gain Australian accents working in local
call centres) is what this novel is all about. Although to be clear,
that's an "all about" in much the way that Jonathan Coe's
What A Carve Up! was "all about" the Thatcherite 1980s; narrative
invention, humour and satire form essential components of Kunzru's prodigious
literary arsenal. (No prizes for guessing who Gavin Burger, an incomprehensively
verbose US presidential spokesman who puts in a fleeting comic turn,
could be modelled on.)
Leaving aside the broader forces of globalisation, Kunzru's chief dramatic
agent is a computer virus that meshes together the lives of his main
characters: Arjun Mehta, a sexually-naïve Indian programmer working
in America who unleashes the contagion; Leela Zahir, a Bollywood actress
whose image the bug zooms across the globe and Guy Swift, head of Tomorrow,
a Shoreditch-based consultancy whose ongoing quest to harness the "emotional
magma that wells from the core of planet brand", becomes somewhat
nobbled in the immediate technological fallout. Of his cast, not unsurprisingly
Guy comes closest to caricature (though his scheme to rebrand European
border police as Ministry of Sound-style nightclub bouncers--"Europe:
No Jeans, No Trainers"--sounds alarming believable). But then Guy's
is the incarnate of the worst, Panglossian traits of the West in this
callow information age. His certainty and self-absorbed fecklessness
(which thankfully he does eventually suffer, horribly for) contrasts
jarringly with poor, Mehta, whose American dreams tip, all too swiftly
into nightmare. --Travis Elborough