New Delhi, Nov 14 (PTI) With the DSC literature prizewinner all set to be announced at Dhaka this Saturday, thejudges say they found interesting trends emerging in SouthAsian writing - uprootedness, geographical, spiritualalienation as also the allure of joining extremistorganisations overseas.
The five shortlisted novels are Anjali Joseph's "TheLiving", "The Story of a Brief Marriage" by Anuk Arudpragasam,Aravind Adiga's "Selection Day", Karan Mahajan's "TheAssociation of Small Bombs" and "In the Jungles of the Night"by Stephen Alter.
According to jury chair Ritu Menon, all the five novelsdisplay a remarkable skill in animating current universalpreoccupations in unconventional idioms, and from adistinctively South Asian perspective.
Jury member Valentine Cunningham says his long view offiction by South Asian writers has been affirmed by thisyear's contestants: "there's a great deal of middlingmaterial, fictions that are not much good, to put it bluntly,often rather narrowly focussed (the same domestic, marital,family, political, historical aspects and concerns croppingup again and again)."The best fictionists are the best because they manage towork these familiar furrows with such canniness, aplomb, and(various) imaginative and formal force as to make them riseout of the ordinary, he adds.
"Such rising is the characteristic of our shortlist."Cunningham also argues that it's also the arresting casethat not all but very many, even a majority, of the bestcontemporary South Asian fictionists live and write abroad -in Canada, the US and England, especially in Canada and theUS.
"This has a lot to do with Canadian and US and someBritish universities providing a home for South Asian writers- beginning, in the case of the US and Canada, at the studentlevel. Which is, of course, why the most notable of modernSouth Asian fiction is often about uprootedness, geographicaland spiritual alienation, being liminal between cultures," hetold PTI.
Another judge Senath Walter Perera says politics in theSouth Asian region continues to be a popular theme - oftentreated seriously but sometimes in a manner that is burlesque.
"This year the allure of joining extremist organisationsoverseas for those living comfortable, middle class lives inthe West was an additional concern," he says.
"Issues relating to diasporic living persist in SouthAsian writing emerging from the UK and the US though the focusis now on the children or grandchildren of immigrants," headds.
Although no translation made it to the shortlist, Pererasays the jury read many excellent translations which providedanother dimension to the competition.
"Raj nostalgia remains an irresistible theme in SouthAsian writing in English with carefully researched narrativeson the period. I did not find much innovation in narrativestructure in this year's entries though an epistolary novelbetween women living in two different South Asian countriesdid catch my eye," he says, adding this was his personalresponse. PTI ZMNRJS.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.