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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Jeet Thayil, author
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Jeet Thayil, author

His novel 'Narcopolis' got nominated for the Booker prize

Thayil at Humayun’s Tomb, New Delhi. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Thayil at Humayun’s Tomb, New Delhi. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Jeet Thayil, 53, published his first novel, Narcopolis, released his first album STD (as one half of the singer-songwriting duo Sridhar/Thayil), and wrote his first libretto, Babur in London, between last December and this one. For an established poet, anthologist and journalist, this is a remarkable run of debuts. “It’s not a coincidence," Thayil says. “Through my 20s and 30s, I didn’t have the space in my mind, the discipline or the resources, to do it."

In their turn, these things, especially his audacious, haunted Narcopolis, have demanded more of him as a public figure, and as a writer, than ever before. Early reviews of the book in India were discouraging, but it found a niche of enthusiastic readers, and critics in the UK and Europe, as well as prize juries, who were thrilled by its evocation of the opium haze over Mumbai’s red-light district in the 1970s. The novel was nominated for The Man Booker Prize 2012, and is on the shortlist of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013, which will be announced next month. It’s also up for the 2012 Man Asian Literary prize. Thayil won a Sahitya Akademi award for his book of poetry These Errors Are Correct (2008) just last week.

It’s been a year of flying to festivals, book readings and launch parties. Thayil thought he would finish his second novel, which follows one of the characters of Narcopolis (the painter Newton Xavier), by August this year, but balancing his public life with his writing life has been difficult. “Being a successful poet is an exercise in obscurity," he says. “You don’t expect more than that." He was expecting the same sort of reaction to Narcopolis. But praise, when it came, was effusive. Kevin Rushby, writing in The Guardian, called it “A blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and De Quincey." Its Booker citation “admired its perfumed prose".

2012 has also been unusually politically fraught. Thayil was one of four writers who read from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January this year, after which the organizers refused to guarantee his safety, causing him to leave. The opera for which he wrote his first libretto, Babur in London (One for Kukuldash, one for Kichik / One for my liegemen across the Styx / One for the ichkis, one for the baigs / One for the girl with the Hindustani legs), cancelled its six-city India tour fearing violence. “It’s no surprise," he says. “We live in a fractured, divided society and nurture this projected, science-fiction fear, even when there aren’t any threats actually made. But it’s clearly censorship. It affects the way artists think about their work."

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Published: 28 Dec 2012, 05:40 PM IST
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