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percentage of Indians could
read
? The answer was a resounding
yes, however. Perhaps
too
resounding, though. Amid the hullabaloo
of the promotional blitz the novel itself got somewhat lost. On a
slow news week, presumably, a correspondent for
Time
magazine
managed to sell his editor on the concept of an 'Indian Jackie Collins,'
filing copy that soon made Shobha Dé, on the strength of one novel,
an Indian writer known around the world - a rarity - but known for
all the wrong reasons.
The furor surrounding
Socialite Evenings
blinded almost everyone
to the fact that Davidar had published possibly the first truly modern
Indian novel in English and by a woman, a novel that had far more of
Erica Jong about it than it did Jackie Collins. The Indian hack pack
makes Fleet Street's tabloid muckmeisters seem positively scholarly
and altruistic. The scent of blood, not a sense of responsibility, let
alone a literary sensibility, motivated most of India's literati as they
jumped on
Time
's bandwagon, pronouncing Ms Dé's work Indo-
Californian pulp:
Jackie Does Juhu
.
Socialite Evenings
concerns the odyssey of a young Everywoman
through the shallow, brittle world of Bombay's super rich. Ms. Dé's
second novel,
Starry Nights
, tells the cautionary tale of a young girl's
rise to fame and fortune as an actress in Bollywood, the Bombay
film factories that churn out more celluloid than any film industry
on earth. Neither book pulled many punches, but
Starry Nights
rained blows of prose so visceral and raw that it was swiftly branded
pornography. Shobha Dé did not just write about sex, she wrote about
fucking. There were stains on bedsheets, anal lubricants on fingers,
toy boys and sugar daddies. But most of all there was the shattering
of two great Indian myths: Bollywood, which competes with the
paradise of gods on an average Indian's wish list, was portrayed as a
corrupt and seedy Nighttown of desperate prima donnas, ambitious
sluts, and psychopathic billionaires enslaved by perversion and greed;
and men, those little deities pampered from womb to tomb in
traditional Indian society, were given the shocking news that the wives
they had assumed adored them as unconditionally as their mothers
did in fact despised them. This latter act of iconoclastic terrorism
had male egos across the length and breadth of the subcontinent
popping like great waterlogged balloons. For Ms. Dé told them in
