Of a publisher-writer, and his first novel

It is not often that one hears of publisher-writer these days. David Davidar, India’s topmost publisher, belongs to this category. For a long time now, he has been writing columns and book reviews, and now comes up with his debut novel THE HOUSE OF BLUE MANGOES.

Davidar’s BOOK TALK column in The Hindu daily, for over a decade, has enlightened the book lovers across the country, and provided invaluable tips about the emerging authors on the horizon, and their works. Davidar is more than a voracious reader, and his reading list is not confined to any particular genre or speciality or continent. And he is just as ease with and knowledgeable about any writer from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Carl Hiassen to Pico Ayer. Personally, while I have always wondered how he manages to read so many books despite his hectic schedule, I have respect and admiration for Davidar’s book reading skill and analytical mind. And I have always suspected him to be a real writer in disguise.

So when I heard he was coming out with his first novel, I was not surprised. I was curious and eager to read it, but I had my doubts as well. For, creative writing is never as easy as writing a column or suchlike thing.

First novels are usually musings supported heavily by a writer’s genuine feelings and unique experiences of his own world. Davidar’s is not exactly this kind: he does not write solely from his direct experience. Of course, he writes about a region and people whom he intensely knows. And he researches a great deal for his subject. The result is a history of Dorai family, spanning three generations and about fifty turbulent years of pre-Independence India.

The first chapter begins with a rape scene, and it almost puts me off. Could not he start it out any other way, I think depressingly. Or is it just because it is the easiest way to hook a reader? The scene is however not erotic or sizzling, and actually leads one to the crucial issue of hatred and strife between different castes and sub-castes, so rampant in India (South India, in this case). As you read on, you get absorbed in ways of two patriarchs of two different casts fighting each other to prove their strength in a rather savage way. The region, the people, the times come across so vividly and effortlessly, with a fast forward movement. Davidar uses Indian words with such astonishing elan, and he never really cares whether his foreign readers will get them right.

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