There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside. Literature is self-validating a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been done. As Salman Rushdie pointed out in his seminal essay, Imaginary Homelands, Quality not quantityĭefenders of white privilege aside, many authors and audiences are questioning telling other people’s stories, even as literature allows us to empathetically imagine another person’s experience. What had seemed unimaginably strange and remote suddenly became comprehensible and fascinating the flare of shame I’d felt when I first saw the slums and street beggars dissolved in the understanding that they were free the city was free.

On the bus from the airport, Lin sees only what he wants to see, prefiguring other “ poverty porn” like the execrable Slumdog Millionaire: Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love or Liam Pieper’s recent Sweetness and Light, featuring similarly troubled spiritual tourists, the “natives” exist in the background or through the tour bus windows, India and its people merely a set and props for Lin’s journey to enlightment. The Indians in Shantaram don’t vary much from the stereotypes, constantly needing Lin’s help and “revealing” the true nature of India through their simplicity, generosity and poverty. It’s what I’ve called in the past the “ mango novel”: increasingly familiar mirages of magical-realist wonders and colourful terrors in places at once enticingly and reassuringly distant (think of David Davidar’s novel The House of Blue Mangoes or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, set in a mango pickle factory.) Shantaram raises important questions about what author Vikram Chandra called the “cult of authenticity” in which too often, representations of India are artefacts of heightened or caricatured “Indianness” – designed to appeal to Western audiences. These productions served to excite both fascination and revulsion – as did Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel decades later. Operas and ballets such as Lakmé, La Bayadere, The Pearl Fishers and others portrayed Indian stories and people as exotic curiosities in stereotypical, Orientalist spectacles.

The “Indies” have long exerted a powerful pull over the Western imagination.

Gregory david roberts