Literary India: Festival of Festivals

The more insular residents of the West probably imagine that half the Indian population is illiterate, while the remaining hundreds of millions spend their time gyrating in slums to the anodyne tunes of Bollywood musicals. When it comes to functional illiteracy, however, there is quite a lot we in the West have to offer.

I still recall my fruitless attempt to find one of the world’s most celebrated novelists in a large bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the original home of the modern book festival. ‘Do you sell modern first editions?’ I enquired. ‘What are you looking for?’ came the curt reply. ‘Evelyn Waugh.’ To assist his rather basic RAM in processing this information, I noticed that he carefully wrote down on his notepad ‘Evil and War’, which to judge from his demeanour, was a perfectly normal request in his shop at least.

In India, this would never happen – instead it would be ‘Sir, will you be needing the Penguin paperback edition or the somewhat more expensive but sturdy Everyman’s Library series?’ Or to take another incident – when was the last time a beggar accosted you on the M4 from Heathrow and tried to flog you a Booker prize-winning book for half price?

Well, the Indian equivalent happened to me just the other day as I flew into the functioning anarchy otherwise known as Delhi International Airport. No sooner had I settled into a hopeless traffic jam, partially created by the chaotic digging of the new Metro, when I was offered a vacuum-packed hardback of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger for less than £3. Later I was admonished by literary friends for buying a bootleg item and also told I was lucky the pages inside actually had ink on them.

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