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| Film trailer: The Road A man and his son struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with cannibals in this Cormac McCarthy adaptation feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Revenge of the real Suffering from 'novel nausea', Zadie Smith wonders if the essay lives up to its promiseWhy do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don't know where to put them. It's a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word "essay", and what an essay is, exactly, these days. The noun has an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED.For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays") and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: "a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range." Which is it, though, that attracts novelists – the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity?A new book by the American novelist-essayist David Shields (to be published here by Hamish Hamilton early next year) makes the case for irregularity. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call "truthiness" – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an "unbearably artificial world". He recommends instead that artists break "ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work", via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary. And conventional structure be damned. To make the point, Reality Hunger is itself without obvious authorial structure, piecing its arguments together by way of scattered aphorisms and quotation, an engaging form of bricolage. It's a tribute to Shields's skill that we remain unsure whether the entire manifesto is not in effect "built" rather than written, the sum of many broken pieces of the real simply shored up and left to vibrate against each other in significant arrangement. The result is thrilling to read, even if you disagree with much of it, as I do.A deliberate polemic, it sets what one could be forgiven for thinking were two perfectly companionable instincts – the fictional and non-fictional – at war with each other. Shields likes to say such things as "Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn't"; to which I want to say, "Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too". Anyway, there's a pleasure to be had reading and internally fighting with Shields's provocations, especially if you happen to be a novelist who writes essays (or a reader who enjoys both). The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk: "The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe." And: "All the best stories are true." And: "The world exists. Why recreate it?" It's tempting to chalk this up to one author's personal disappointments with the novel as a form (Shields hasn't written a novel since the early 90s), but in expressing his novel-nausea so frankly he hopes to show that he is not alone in having such feelings – and my sense is that he's right.An excited American writing student gave me a proof copy of the book, and during a recent semester spent teaching I met many students equally enthused by Shields's ideas. Of course, it's easy to be cynical about this kind of student enthusiasm. Generally speaking, there are few things more exciting to a certain kind of writing student than the news that the imaginative novel is dead (with all its vulgar, sentimental, "bourgeois" – and hard to think up – plots, characters and dialogue). When your imagination fails you it's a relief to hear that it need no longer be part of a novelist's job description. But if "cui bono?" is a reasonable question to ask of writing students who may fear fiction is beyond them, who benefits when it is the novelists themselves who are grave-dancing?I ask because Reality Hunger comes with "advance praise" from an impressive clutch of imaginative writers – Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Tim Parks, Charles D'Ambrosio and Rick Moody, among others – all apparently eager to commit literary hara-kiri. Most striking is the response of John Coetzee, worth quoting in full: "A manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a 'Make It New' for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) 'a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking'. I, too, like novels that don't look like novels."Coetzee is one of our finest novelists, and one whose nausea with the novel's form grows more evident with each publication. First-person journals, the wholesale importation of the autobiographical, philosophical allegory and the novel disguised as public lecture – he has used all these to circumvent the "well-made novel", that rather low form of literary activity that even as relatively un-neurotic a novelist as EM Forster found himself defining with a sigh: "Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story." But while aesthetic and ethical objections to the "well-made novel" are not difficult to understand, we should be careful not to let old literary pieties be replaced with new ones. This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, "well-made novel" seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for "novels that don't look like novels" is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.But even the most conventional account of our literary "canon" reveals the history of the novel to be simultaneously a history of nonconformity. For as readers we have loved and celebrated not some hazy general idea of the novel but rather the peculiar works of individual imaginations. Even in those familiar lists of "great novels", classics of the genre, and so on, it's hard to find a single "well-made" novel among them, if by well-made we mean something like "evenly shaped, regular, predictable and elegantly designed". Is War and Peace, with its huge tracts of undigested essay, absurd plotting and obscene length, a well-made novel? Is The Trial? And those neat Victorian novels we're now expected casually to revile – is it not only from a distance, and in the memory, that they look as neat as they do? Which of them is truly "well made"? Jane Eyre seemed hysterical and lopsided to its earliest readers; we now think of Middlemarch as the ultimate "proper" novel, forgetting how eccentric and strange it looked on publication, with its unwieldy and unfeminine scientific preoccupations and moral structure borrowed from Spinoza. In our classic novels there always remains something odd, unruly, as distinctly weird as Hardy's Little Father Time. Novels that don't look like novels? When it comes to the canon – to steal a line from Lorrie Moore – novels like that are the only novels here. And though it may well be the case that the pale copies of such books to be found in bookshops today are generic and conventional and make the delicate reader nauseous, is the fault really to be found with imagined narrative itself? Will the "lyrical essay", as Shields calls it, be the answer to the novel's problems? Is the very idea of plot, character and setting in the novel to be abandoned, no longer fit for our new purposes, and all ground ceded to the coolly superior, aphoristic essay?In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are "conventional" and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels, and I don't doubt the sincerity of Shields or Coetzee or any writer who responds strongly to Reality Hunger as a manifesto. A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality, and does indeed make you hunger for a kind of writing that seems to speak truth directly. But I also feel, as someone who just finished a book of more or less lyrical essays, that underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest. In "The Modern Essay" Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. "There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay," she writes. "The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion's fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley's comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through! And naturally writers who feel a strong sense of nausea towards their own fiction are even more likely to feel it when reading the fiction of their peers. It's hard to read a novel with any pleasure when you can see all the phoney cogs turning. I'm willing to bet that the great majority of proofs sent to novelists by other novelists barely get read beyond the first two pages. ("The Corrections" writes Shields, in aphorism no 560, "I couldn't read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a 'good' novel or it might be a 'bad' novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.") Tired of the rusty workings of one's own imagination, it's easy to tire of the wearisome vibrancy of other people's, and from there it's a short skip and a jump to giving up on the novel entirely.Except, except. Then something remarkable comes into your hands. Not very often – no more or less often now than in the 1930s, or the 1890s or the 1750s – but every now and then, you read something wonderful. (Despite all the dull talk of the death of literature, the rate of great novels has always been and will always be roughly the same. By my reckoning, about 10 per decade. Although behind them are dozens of very good novels, for which this reader, at least, is grateful.) Every now and then a writer renews your faith. I'm looking around my desk at this moment for books that have had this effect on me in the not-too-distant past: Bathroom and Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Number9Dream by David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel's An Experiment in Love, Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread, The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, the collected short stories of JG Ballard.Some people are not condemned to the generic by their use of plot and setting and character. Some people are in fact freed by precisely these things. Whether what they write is disappointingly "well made" I can't say; certainly there is something a little queer about them all, though that queerness comes not from an excess of the real but from the abundance of their own imaginative gifts. "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion," wrote Francis Bacon in his essay "Of Beauty". Well said. This year Ballard's stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well made, full of the supposedly contemptible components – plot, setting, character – and yet irreducibly strange in proportion. It's a marvel how implacably and consistently weird he managed to be despite appearing to use all the normal tools at the disposal of any English short-story writer. All in all there is something a little shaming in reading Ballard: you have to face the fact that there exist writers with such fresh imaginations they can't write five pages without stumbling on an alternate world.When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it's easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there's no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples. (In Coetzee's oeuvre, of course, we have better examples. The fully imagined artistry of novels such as The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace offer their readers distinct pleasures, not easily dismissed, and not easily found in those impressive but rather anaemic later works, the essayistic and self-referential Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime.) It may be that this idea of the importation of "more reality" is exactly the call to arms a young writer somewhere at her desk needs at this moment, but for this writer at this desk, the argument feels ontologically dubious. When I turned from my own dirty pond to a clear window, I can't say that I felt myself, in essence, being more "truthy" in essay than I am in fiction. Writing is always a highly stylised and artificial act, and there is something distinctly American and puritan about expecting it to be otherwise. I call on Woolf again as witness for the defence. "Literal truth-telling," she writes, "is out of place in an essay." Yes, that's it again. The literal truth is something you expect, or hope for, in a news article. But an essay is an act of imagination, even if it is a piece of memoir. It is, or should be, "a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking", but it still takes quite as much art as fiction. Good non-fiction is as designed and artificial as any fairy story. Oddly, this is a thesis Reality Hunger readily agrees with: in its winding way it ends up defining the essay as imaginative at its core, and Shields wants to encourage its imaginative qualities – it seems to be only in the novel that the imagination must be condemned. It's a strange argument, but I guess the conventional form so many imaginative novels take has been enough to give fictional imagination itself a bad name.For myself, I know, now that I've finished them, that I wrote my own essays out of exactly the kind of novel-nausea Shields describes. I was oppressed by a run-of-the-mill version of that narrative scepticism Kafka expresses so well in one line in "Description of a Struggle": "But then? No then." Simply put, my imagination had run dry, and I couldn't seem to bring myself to write the necessary "and then, and then" which sits at the heart of all imagined narratives. When you're in this state – commonly called "writer's block" – the very idea of fiction turns sour. But in a strange circular effect, it has been the experience of writing essays that has renewed my enthusiasm for the things fiction does that nothing else can. Writing essays on Kafka, on Nabokov, on George Eliot, on Zora Neale Hurston, I was newly humbled and excited by the artificial and the fully imagined. The title of the book, Changing My Mind, is meant to refer to the effect great fiction like this always seems to have on me. I once thought, for example, that I didn't want ever to read another lengthy novel about family life – and then I read The Corrections. That book gave something to me I could never get from an aphoristic personal essay about the nature of art (I think that "something" might be "a convincing imitation of multiple consciousnesses", otherwise known as "other people"). And vice versa. I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. As general readers, who thankfully do not have to live within the strict terms of manifestos, we are fortunate not to have to choose once and for all between two forms that offer us quite different, and equally valuable, experiences of writing.The last essay in my book considers the work of David Foster Wallace, a writer as gifted in fiction as in essay. I can't offer a better example of a writer whose novel-nausea was acutely developed, whose philosophical objections to the form were serious and sustained, and yet who had the cojones and the sheer talent to write them anyway. Like all great fiction writers he is hard for other writers to read because his natural ability is so evident it makes you nauseous by turn. But that's fiction for you: it taunts you with the spectre of what you cannot do yourself. Meanwhile, the essay teases you with the possibility of perfection, of a known and comprehensible task that can be contained and polished till it shines. For the reader who cares above all for perfection, there are many sophisticated, beautiful and aphoristic side roads in literature that will lead you safely away from the vulgarity of novels with their plots and characters and settings. Off the top of my head: David Markson's Reader's Block, Peter Handke's The Weight of the World, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces and Kafka's own Blue Octavo Notebooks . . .But after you have raged at the impossible artificiality of storytelling, once you have shouted, with Kafka, "But then? No then", well, maybe you will find yourself returning to the crossroads of "And then, and then", if only to see what's going on down there. Because there is a still a little magic left in that ancient formula, a little of what Werner Herzog, talking recently of the value of fiction, described as "ecstatic truth". And every now and again some very imaginative writer is sure to make that "And then" worth your while.Zadie SmithMargaret DrabbleChinua Achebeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Paul Theroux | Book review Paul Theroux's latest novel falls short of his best work, says Kevin RushbyIn the summer of 1990 I found myself marooned in a Malaysian bungalow while recovering from a bout of dengue fever, a convalescence that gave me the chance to read a short story by Paul Theroux in which a man suffers a debilitating bout of dengue fever in Malaysia. I had an almost unbearable sense of the pages coming to life. I was covered in the dark, haemorrhagic blotches of the illness, feeling as though I had become my own insubstantial shadow. Reality had disintegrated into a vague and unsettling nightmare, an experience that Theroux's account catches perfectly. It was as though he was in the room observing me. The territory of tropical sweatbox interiors and mental disintegration comes easily to the man – he'd have his own eponym were it not that his name defies declension. Therouxian?I had that feeling once again, if not quite so viscerally, while reading his latest novel, A Dead Hand. For a start there are sweltering interiors galore in the Bengali capital, and Theroux digs through them with characteristic force. But it was the moment when he makes an appearance in his own novel that really took me back to that nape-of-neck feeling of being observed.The hero of the story is Jerry Delfont, a washed-up writer who once almost made it in television, but now hides his lack of literary output with lectures. In Calcutta he seems to be fairly well known, enough so to attract a mysterious letter: a certain Mrs Unger, a long-standing admirer of his work, and occasional resident of the city, would like his help in a matter of some delicacy. Jerry affects to be busy, but truth to tell, he's devoid of ideas and looking for diversions. Mrs Unger will do. Although American, she wears a bewitching sari and exudes a weird sexual power. She's the sort of character, you might say, that a bored writer with time on his hands in Calcutta might wish to slide around the bedroom door and seize him by the kundalinis. And so she does. Then we are away: a corpse comes into it, some gory sacrifice and goddess worship, followed by gritty trips to Assam and Mirzapur.This is a thriller of sorts, but unlike some of Theroux's previous fiction, there is little in the way of dystopian grandeur or grimly comic depths. High points do come, but rarely: one is that prickly moment when Jerry, having discovered in Mrs Unger "a character", finds another writer nosing around, a "smirking, intrusive, ungenerous and insincere man" who dispenses versions of himself before disappearing "into a thicket of half truths he hoped was art". In other words, Paul Theroux. It's an unexpected touch and gives Theroux ample opportunity to skewer himself, Jerry and, by implication, plenty of other writers at the same time. "He was intense," writes Jerry after their meeting, "And never at rest, forever uninvolved . . . I knew he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong." Ouch!Theroux has not shied away from danger and controversy in his writing, and I have always liked that. His characters constantly reveal themselves as flawed creatures, attractively repellent, tortured by misgivings and vaguely understood desires that simmer and seep rather than explode. Such grumbling dyspepsia can be satisfyingly cathartic, and amusing on the page. Mrs Unger, in her own way, is almost classic Theroux, a quiet American for the 21st century, sliding easily into either mysticism or capitalism. But Jerry, in his mid-life emptiness and creative desiccation, never becomes convincing, and with a plot that creaks louder than a Bengali flophouse door, the story falls apart in a graceless and disagreeable jumble.The supporting cast don't help out, either. "Top hole, thank you," replies one Indian character to an inquiry after his health, going on in the same breath to describe someone as "a blighter and a mountebank". Indian English does have a happy sprinkling of archaisms, but these don't ring true. And though the scene-setting is wonderfully evocative, it all feels a bit rushed, repetitious and lazy. When Jerry captures an intruder in his hotel room his interrogation of the man is impossibly short; when Mrs Unger delivers her big revelation, it never gets followed up and we are left wondering what it has to do with the bigger story.Perhaps one day Theroux will delight us again with his deliciously sour view of the human comedy, but this book is not it. For the time being I'll head back to The Consul's File to relive the feverish delights of dengue.Kevin Rushby's books include Paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules the World.FictionKevin Rushbyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Have you seen a Kindle in the wild? You have probably seen a succession of puffs from Amazon about how the Kindle is its "best-selling item" - but without any numbers to back up its claims. The company's secrecy isn't surprising, but it's problematic for several reasons - not least because people are now starting to make major bets on the future of their businesses based on those claims.That thought process is what led me to write a piece about that secrecy, and how Amazon's refusal to talk about sales figures could cause a number of problems.In addition to the people quoted in the article, I just spoke by email with James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester who keeps track of the electronic book market, to get his view.Amazon doesn't reveal sales figures because it's the market leader, he says."It's hard to argue that Amazon hasn't been successful in its business, so correspondingly it's hard to pinpoint any way in which Amazon's secrecy has hurt it," he said. "They know that to lead requires marshalling all your resources to beat everybody else even to obvious strategies. To do that, you often have to keep your lips sealed."The big question - how many Kindles are being sold right now - remains slightly elusive. But according to Forrester's analysis, the market will keep growing during 2010 in a way that suggests it will have an "iPod moment" (between 2003 and 2004, iPod sales rose by nearly 500%)."We estimate that by the end of 2010 there will be 4 million ereaders in the US, with more than half of them Kindles, probably close to 2.5m or so."He admits that even those numbers make the Kindle a long way from being mainstream, however."Even at 2.5m possible Kindles in the market, that's less than 1 for every 100 people in the US - so while there's a lot of room to grow, it means that very few of the people around you at any given moment are likely to be Kindle owners. Plus, given that people do most of their reading at home – only 5% of the population travels regularly for business, an obvious Kindle target customer – it's unlikely that we'll see Kindles reach the public visibility that iPods and their white headphones had back in 2003."And there's the extra difficulty in divining what Amazon means when it says the Kindle is the biggest selling item on its site: it feels that the hype is a bit off base because, while I've seen people reading chart-topping books on the bus and train, I have yet to see a Kindle in the wild.Paul Biba from Teleread.org told me that he's seen them being used. "Yes, not "lots' but more than I expected," he said. |I have seen them at airports and at shopping malls. At the malls they seem to be used by men who seem to be waiting while their wives are shopping."But have you?Amazon.comGadgetsEbooksBobbie Johnsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Channel 4's view of India is a cliche Kevin McCloud slumming it in Mumbai, Gordon Ramsay reducing a vast culture to a samosa. Welcome to Channel 4's Indian Winter seasonIf what follows smacks a little of gloating, I apologise – there should really be a lot, heaped teaspoons of the stuff. You see, I'm off to India next week on holiday. Most of it will be spent in the city of Kolkata (or Calcutta, as it used to be known), which is supposedly having its own cold snap – but still the weather forecasts come with pictures of a big yellow sun, rather than symbols of empty gritting lorries.Kolkata in winter has more going for it than temperatures of 27C, though. In a few days' time, the city's boi mela begins. Book festival, that means in Bengali, and it's a more fitting term than fair. Book fairs are for London and Frankfurt – trade events at which contracts are auctioned off and retailers decide on future three-for-two offers. But Kolkata's boi mela is the world's biggest book fair: two million people came last time, and that was an off-year.It's also one of the most important events in the city's cultural life. When the fair was cancelled in 2008, Kolkata's mayor and chief minister still staged an "inauguration evening", where they speechified about the importance of books. And when it's up and running, the boi mela makes that point all too clearly: Penguin and HarperCollins exhibit alongside sellers of Marxist literature, and tiny girls in glasses lecture bewildered mothers on PG Wodehouse. "No, no, no!" I once overheard. "This is Blandings. I want Jeeves."It was the pocket-sized Wodehouse fanatic I thought of when Channel 4 started publicising its Indian Winter season, which begins tonight. Perhaps you've seen the posters, featuring some familiar British TV presenters cavorting with a tiger, an elephant and a snake. Despite 30 years of visiting north and south India, the most time I've ever spent with an elephant remains on a school outing to London zoo – but I can forgive visual shorthand in a poster. The real shame is that the programmes aren't much better.Of the seven strands that make up the season, four are about slums and poverty. Nearly all focus on Mumbai. This is the "brutal reality" of modern India, apparently; and it doesn't include pre-teen bookworms. Of course, no one can deny the prevalence of poverty in what, for all the superpower talk, remains a poor country. But what Channel 4 has done is boil a subcontinent of one billion people down to a giant slum. Why?One answer would be that, as Channel 4 staff acknowledge, there were no Indian or Indian-origin commissioners across the entire season. But more seriously, the programmes smack of an abject lack of engagement with the subject. The executives despatch Kevin McCloud to live in a slum for a fortnight, and he does as good a job as any. "There's only one word to describe this place – and it's intense," he says. "People are living in really horrible conditions, producing amazing things and at the same time they seem to be happy." Cheers for that, Kevin.Ask Julian Bellamy, Channel 4's head of programmes, what happened to the rest of India and he points you to Gordon Ramsay's cooking series. Ah yes, a vast culture reduced to a samosa. As for why the scheduled films are all standard Bollywood schlock, he says he wanted material to fit in with the TV premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. Fine, but why not show the innovative Hindi films that director Danny Boyle acknowledges influenced him? Black Friday featured a 12-minute police chase through a slum that Boyle mimicked for one of Slumdog's standout sequences. But that might have detracted from the overriding message that runs through the rest of the season, of India as a subordinate culture.The same patronising attitude runs through the Victoria and Albert Museum's blockbuster winter exhibition, Maharaja. A collection of the finery owned by India's royals, it's full of priceless jewels. I say priceless, but each of the Cartier necklaces and Fabergé eggs on display helps explain why the princely states remain among some of the least developed regions of India today – because weak-chinned and soft-headed princes in Udaipur and Jaipur invested in foreign luxuries for themselves rather than roads for their subjects. Yet there is little mention in the exhibition of the human cost, just case upon glittery case.When I visited, the guide warned we were short of time: "Go to the last room – it's full of the most marvellous bling!" And lo, the punters were cannonballed into a room with a vintage Rolls-Royce. Bellamy talks of a "huge, extraordinary, vibrant" country. Reviews of the exhibition describe a "sumptuous" display. This isn't a country they're talking about; it's a holiday destination.Indians are also guilty of stereotyping their own country. A few years ago, the chief executive of a big retailer was describing at length his difficulties in breaking into Kolkata. "The thing with you Bengalis is that the women wear saris, but they argue over Marx!" And there was a sigh, as if to ask: "Why won't you be one thing or another?"Yet it is precisely when other people aren't one thing or another that they have most to teach you. To visit the Kolkata book fair is to be reminded that a literary culture can be more than a festival circuit, and that intellectual debate need not be an elite affair. In Bengal soon after local-boy economist Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize in 1998, I passed a petrol station defaced by a blob of spray paint that read: "Calcutta is proud of its son Amartya Sen." That's Kolkata for you: even the graffiti artists have postgraduate degrees.IndiaTelevisionThe news on TVIndiaAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |