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Bollywood film star.
The Great Indian Novel
took on a two-thousand-year-old epic and all of twentieth century Indian history, but it was hardly reasonable to expect each of my novels to be painted on the same vast canvas. One is always looking for new creative metaphors to explore the Indian condition, and cinema was a particularly useful one. In addition, some interesting issues emerged from the subject itself: the social and political relevance of popular cinema in India, for instance, had been dealt with surprisingly little in Indo-Anglian fiction. And the whole process of the manufacture of our modern myths on celluloid was one that I found fascinating as a creative issue in itself: How were these stories told? What do they mean to those who make them and those who see them? How do they relate to their lives?
    One critic wondered why, one book after being hailed as India's first post-modern writer, I had written what some might consider to be a more conventional novel. I don't care about the “post-modern” stuff myself — these labels are for the critics to devise, and I certainly did not see myself through them. But in fact
Show Business
was not all that conventional. I have always believed that, as the very word “novel” suggests, there must be something new or innovative about every novel one sets out to write: otherwise, what would be the point? In the case of
Show Business
it had to domainly with the way the novel unfolds. There are three interlocking narratives in each of the sections of the book, or “takes,” as I called them. The first is the first-person narrative of my protagonist, the Bollywood film star himself, recalling episodes from six different points of his life. The novel begins with him shooting his first film, and ends with him on his deathbed. The second narrative is the story, complete with tongue-in-cheek lyrics, of the formula movie he's acting in at the time, along with other characters from the novel. The third narrative is a series of second-person monologues, addressed to him in the hospital by each of these characters: the “villain,” the hero's father and brother, his mistress, his wife. The story of the novel emerges through the interweaving of these three narratives. I do like my readers to work a little for their pleasure!
    As a writer, I have always believed that the way I tell the story is as important as the story itself. The manner in which the narrative unfolds is as integral to the novel as the story it tells, and as essential, I hope, to the experience of the reader. That said, I don't think novelists should spend too much time rationalizing their whimsies. I basically write as it comes to me. In this novel, the style and structure served to juxtapose different perceptions, which was important to the substance of the story.
    Nor did the novel abandon the political concerns of my literary debut. There is some political satire in
Show Business
— even the title is deliberately ambiguous, and refers to politics and religion, as well as to the hero's personal life, not just his film career. The connection between politics and film in India is one of the themes the novelexplores — within, of course, its fictional parameters. My basic approach in the novel was still that of the satirist: though my novel revolves around one principal character, my concern is not for the man but the mores, and less for the individual than the issues.
    But there was another aspect to what I had done differently — a question, I suppose, of scale affecting substance. In
The Great Indian Novel,
in the process of yoking history to myth, I had to resort, especially in the last third of the book, to characters who were largely walking metaphors. In the new novel I tried instead to portray human beings of much greater complexity — with their fears, lusts, deceits, needs, frustrations. I was writing a book in which nothing is really what it seems. The hero isn't really a hero, because he's vain,