For the second time, Booker prize eludes an Indian writer

LONDON: The world’s most coveted literary prize — the Man Booker eluded Kolkata born writer Neel Mukherjee — the second time it has happened to an Indian writer in as many years.
Mukherjee’s novel "The Lives of Others" which critics had called “deeply moving, rich and engrossing” lost out to Australian author Richard Flanagan’s "The Narrow Road to the Deep North".
READ ALSO: Australia's Flanagan wins Man Booker prize for fiction
In 2013, Indian author Jhumpa Lahiri’s "The Lowland" lost out to Eleanor Catton’s "Luminaries" — a 832-page murder mystery based on the gold rush in the 19th-century.
Mukherjee — alumni of Don Bosco School in Kolkata and Jadavpur University — was considered the frontrunner to win the prize in 2014.
The jury before the prize was announced, called the book “the most old fashioned” in the shortlist — “the big classical work”.
However AC Grayling, the chairman of the judges announced that Flanagan’s work — a novel based on his father’s experience as a prisoner of war in World War II “bridged East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.”
He further added, “The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war”.
Flanagan, whose father died the day he finished the novel, received the prize at a black-tie dinner at London’s medieval Guildhall late on Tuesday.
He received £50,000 for the award — the first year in the coveted literary prize’s 46-year-history where it has been opened up to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK.
Mukherjee was born in Kolkata and was educated in Oxford and Cambridge. He was expected to prevent a first American triumph. Bookies William Hill had him at odds of 5/2 to win the award.
The novel The Lives of Others is set in 1960s Bengal and revolves around a man’s extremist political activism during troubled times. The work – Mukherjee’s second, has raked in high praise.
Anita Desai called the book “a devastating portrayal of a decadent society and the inevitably violent uprising against it, in the tradition of such politically charged Indian literature as the work of Prem Chand, Manto and Mulk Raj Anand”.
Amitav Ghosh called it “searing, savage and deeply moving: an unforgettably vivid picture of a time of turmoil”.

Australian author Richard Flanagan after winning this year's Man Booker Prize. (Reuters Photo)
Another review said “full of acute, often uncomfortable and angry, observations, The Lives of Others is a picture of a family in all its disunity, and beyond it a city and country, on the brink of disaster”.
Talking about his book, Mukherjee said “I was very conscious that the world of Kolkata would be very unfamiliar to most people. Not even many Indians would understand the Bengaliness of this book. I wanted to give good value to the book, allow readers to enter an entirely new world and hence has been densely rendered”.
Justifying his often made references to food in the book, Mukherjee said “Bengalis are a very food obsessed people and they are proud, rightly of their cuisine. Hence I used food as one of the metaphorical underpinnings of the book because food becomes a marker of who has and who doesn’t”.
Flanagan’s work meanwhile delves deep into wartime - a novel the head of the judging team said as powerful as a kick in the stomach.
It was biographical in a way – the real story of his father’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of the Japanese and a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, built with forced labor at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.
The book refers to his father as prisoner number 335 - who died at the age of 98 – the day his son finished the manuscript.
The judges called it a literary masterpiece. The panel admitted that the decision to award Flanagan didn’t come easy.
Grayling said the result was a majority decision that took several rounds of voting and took the judges three hours. “The best and worst of judging books is when you come across one so hard in the stomach that you can’t pick up the next one for a couple of days, you know you’ve met something extraordinary,” he said. “That’s what happened in the case of this one”.
Flanagan — the Tasmanian-born author is the third Australian to win the coveted prize. He joins an impressive literary canon of former winners including fellow Australians Thomas Kenneally (Schindler’s Ark, 1982) and Peter Carey (Oscar & Lucinda, 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001).
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the sixth novel from Flanagan and centres upon the experiences of surgeon Dorrigo Evans in a Japanese POW camp on the now infamous Thailand-Burma railway. Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North was described by the 2014 judges as ‘a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it’. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse.
Flanagan took 12 years to write it.
Grayling said “This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write”.
After receiving the prize, Flanagan said “In Australia the Man Booker prize is seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up being the chicken. I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate. And I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer being so honored”.
He added “Novels are life, or they are nothing. I hope readers remember 2014’s Man Booker prize not for my book alone, but for the formidable strength of its shortlist of which I am proud to be part. Josh, Karen, Howard, Neel and Ali, I see tonight as not mine, but ours. Thank you”.
“It was the book I had to write in order to keep on writing,” Flanagan said after the prize was announced. “My father trusted me. He never asked me what the story was. He trusted me to write a book that might be true”.
Flanagan, who said he had worked on the script of “Australia,” the 2008 film starring Nicole Kidman said he would use the prize money to “live.” His next novel is nearly finished, and he hopes to publish it next year.
Flanagan was among six authors shortlisted for the prize. Howard Jacobson, a former UK winner, was shortlisted for “J,” a love story set in a mysterious future after an unidentified catastrophe. Fellow Briton Ali Smith who had been shortlisted twice before, was up for “How to Be Both,” which tells the stories of a teenage girl and an Italian renaissance artist. US author Joshua Ferris was nominated for “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour” and Karen Joy another American, for “We are All Completely Beside Ourselves.”
On winning the Man Booker Prize, an author can expect international recognition, not to mention a dramatic increase in book sales.
Sales of Hilary Mantel’s winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have exceeded a million copies in their UK editions. Her novels have subsequently been adapted for stage and screen, with the highly acclaimed theatre productions of both novels arriving on Broadway in April 2015.
Granta, publisher of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 winner, The Luminaries, has sold 300,000 copies of the book in the UK and almost 500,000 worldwide.
Grayling added, “As the Man Booker Prize expands its borders, these six exceptional books take the reader on journeys around the world, between the UK, New York, Thailand, Italy, Calcutta and times past, present and future. We had a lengthy and intensive debate to whittle the list down to these six”.