Bookplanet: Indian writers hit paydirt in US

South Asians suddenly popular in U.S. books, culture – by Patrick T. Reardon/Chicago Tribune

HarperCollins reportedly paid a $1 million advance to Vikram Chandra for the U.S. rights to his sprawling, multilayered novel "Sacred Games," expecting high critical praise. But, also, expecting strong sales because of the growing American fascination with books by and about Indians, Indian-Americans and the South Asian subcontinent.

Part of this is because of the increasing visibility of Indians and Pakistanis in the U.S., says Dohra Ahmad, who teaches postcolonial literature at St. John's University in New York.

"We have a generation of South Asian-Americans coming of age, the first mainstream Indian-American actor (Kal Penn), and a new image of South Asia as an important place where neighbors might come from and employment might go," says Ahmad, the editor of "Rotten English," an anthology of vernacular English writing from around the world, to be published in June by Norton.

"What was once exotic now feels more familiar, and suddenly worth attention."

India is becoming a major player on the world stage, as the title of Mira Kamdar's new book, due in bookstores in mid-February, indicates: "Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World" (Scribner).

India, she writes, is "at once an ancient civilization, a modern nation grounded in Enlightenment values and democratic institutions, and a rising twenty-first-century power. With a population of 1.2 billion, India is the world's largest democracy."

South Asian fiction has been on the rise in the West since 1981 when Salman Rushdie, who was born in India and moved to Pakistan as a teen, won the Booker Prize (the United Kingdom's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the U.S.) for his novel "Midnight's Children."

Other Indian-born Booker winners have been "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy (1997) and "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai (2006).

In the United States, Rohinton Mistry, who, like Rushdie and Chandra, was born in Mumbai, found sudden fame when his 1996 novel "A Fine Balance" was selected by Oprah Winfrey in late 2001 for her book club.

Meanwhile, Jhumpa Lahiri, the London-born daughter of Indian parents, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection "Interpreter of Maladies." In 2003, she followed with "The Namesake," a novel about cultural conflicts and confusions between two generations of an Indian-American family.

The work, however, spoke to immigrants from many backgrounds. At appearances to promote the book, "people came up to her from all over to say, `I came from Ecuador' -- or Bosnia, or wherever -- `and it was the same for me,'" says Lori Glazer, a publicist for Houghton Mifflin, the book's publisher.

A movie version of "The Namesake," starring Kal Penn, will hit theaters this spring.