It’s been a year since Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned hit bookstores around the world but in India the book is still being read without its first chapter. The banned portion is about management guru Arindam Chaudhuri and how he represents India’s neo-rich. But Chaudhuri, who found Deb’s account offensive, filed a case against him in a civil court of Assam, an eventuality the author was least prepared for.
Recalling the episode, Deb says, “I thought I was writing a nuanced exploration of certain social phenomena in today’s India. Mr Chaudhuri thinks otherwise and is well within his rights to do so. If he thought there were factual inaccuracies in the piece, he could have first resorted to the simple, democratic instrument called ‘letter to the editor’, an instrument that is used by countless other individuals and organisations, and one he should support both as a citizen, a publisher and a film producer. Instead, an injunction was issued from Silchar, where none of the parties involved have their primary business and without prior notice to me or my publishers.” This has made it legally impossible to publish the chapter in India even though it is available in every edition around the world. “If we win the case 10 years from now, it will still be a defeat for democracy and free speech,” rues the author.
The irony of the first chapter aside, Deb’s book is a resounding success, one that was shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell Prize this year in the non-fiction category. Though the award went to Toby Harnden’s Dead Men Risen, several critics and reviewers feel that Deb’s work is the “most Orwellian” of the six books on the shortlist, because it lives up to George Orwell’s ambition to “make political writing into an art”. His account of life in new India is candid and closely observed, treading the fine line between reportage and storytelling. The author chooses to call it a “narrative non-fiction”. “Which is to say that the narrative or storytelling part of it is as important to me as the research and reporting non-fiction part of it,” he says.
It all began as a journalistic endeavour when Deb, a resident of New York, was sent to India on an undercover assignment about call centres. “The reporting for this book began in earnest in the summer of 2007, although it was sparked off as a project by some of the pieces I did as early as 2004, which was when I suffered the initial shock of how India had changed,” he recalls.
Deb allowed the stories to take the lead rather than the other way round which explains the sincerity of his prose. His characters are as diverse as it gets. From a farmer and a migrant factory worker in Andhra Pradesh to a software engineer in Bengaluru and a Manipuri waitress in New Delhi — he digs deep into myriad socio-economic backgrounds to expose the dark reality of India shining. “I was surprised by the fact that there was a greater plurality, a sense of collective among characters lower down the class ladder. They were less likely to see themselves as the centre of even their own universe. I was pleased to find this, but I did not plan on it,” he confesses.
The stories are outcomes of interviews that were mostly covert, especially when he was talking to poorer people.