A Scotsman review of Sacred Games ignited a hungama last week across the desi lit blogosphere, which admittedly consists of approximately three overeducated Bengalis with Internet access The offending passage by reviewer Stephen Thompson:

There are certain books that are so similar to one another they almost beg to be grouped together. This is largely true of Indian novels. Look closely at the ones published in the past, say, 25 years, and you’ll see that they’re virtually identical, in theme if not in style and content.

For me, Midnight’s Children is indivisible from A Fine Balance, which in turn cannot be separated from A Suitable Boy. Directly or indirectly, all three books… are concerned with the same thing: the state of Indian society in the wake of independence and partition. [Link]

It’s like how all American films — say, Citizen Kane and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — are concerned with the state of America after the Civil War Thompson’s review inspired murder in bloggers’ hearts:

I’ve noticed that many foreign publications, when they want something written on India or any other third-world country, prefer to have one of their contributors do a half-baked job… [believing] they need to get a writer who knows the audience, even if his grasp of the subject is not so good…

“Sacred Games may well be the first Indian detective novel.” Can’t a man who has clearly knows little of Indian literature stay away from such ludicrously sweeping statements? Poor Byomkesh Bakshi. [India Uncut]

It’s a bit like saying Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen and John Irving have this tendency to set most of their work in… contemporary America, isn’t that odd? And strangely enough, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Nadine Gordimer have all tackled the history and present-day concerns of the African continent–that can’t be a coincidence, right? [Kitabkhana]

Oh, right: Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Deshpande, Raj Kamal Jha, Kiran Desai, Kiran Nagarkar, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Manju Kapur, Amit Chaudhuri, Neelum Saran Gour, Samit Basu, Rupa Bajwa, and all the others are writing the same novel over and over again? [Indian Writing]

Non-desi bloggers jumped in:

… it’s kind of like saying that novels written by African-Americans, Muslims, or hell, any non-white ethnic group can be lumped together and deemed “virtually identical.” Can we say incendiary, boys and girls? [MediaCat]

… the former [Midnight’s Children] contains a protagonist with a highly sensitive nose and the latter [A Fine Balance] does not, the former chronicles Indian history from 1910 to 1976, while the latter takes place during The Emergency between 1975 and 1977. There are infinite differences in language, characters, and plotting. But don’t tell Thompson this. So long as those brown-skinned people are banging out those novels, there isn’t a single distinction in his eyes. [Edward Champion]

Thompson’s criticism would actually be more true of mass-market desi lit.

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