George Saunders

Anna Burns May Have Won the Booker, but Big Publishers Are the Real Victors

The Man Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves. Because of this, a win can be a drain rather than a boost, and costs can outstrip sales if you don’t win.

In the literary world and among those for whom fiction is an interest beyond simply reading books, a great deal of attention will be given to the winner of the 2018 edition of the Man Booker Prize, Milkman, by Anna Burns. The chair of the judges, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, said Burns’s novel, about a young woman being sexually harassed by a menacing older man and set in Northern Ireland, “is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.”

Of course, each year, following the announcement of the longlist in July, the shortlist in September and finally the winner in October, a discussion takes place as to what each announcement might mean. As the Man Booker is the most prestigious, remunerative and talked about literary prize in the UK, this “What does it mean?” can be made to reach into just about every crevice of contemporary culture.

In these accounts, the significance of the prize is restricted to thinking about those novels that reach the long or shortlist or the one that is declared the final winner. But a range of work from various wings of literary studies over the past few years can help us answer the question of what winning means in other, perhaps more challenging, ways. This year has been no exception – discussion of the longlist was dominated by the inclusion of a graphic novel, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, and discussion of the shortlist by the presence or absence of millennial writers. Discussion of Milkman will no doubt be dominated by the history of Northern Ireland, by #MeToo and by the fact that Burns is the first UK-born winner for six years.

It’s a competition

The underlying claim of James F. English’s pioneering 2009 work in the sociology of literature, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, is that both the power of and the problem with prizes consists in the way they equate “the artist with the boxer or discus thrower.” Prizes are competitions.

But while the publicity might go to the winning writers, the real winners are the publishers, who need not just the increased sales and chances of film and TV adaptations that are likely to follow, but also the less tangible boost to their authority and prestige given by a prize. The real winners are also more likely to be not just any publishers, but those that have already been successful. As the novelist Joanna Walsh, among others, has noted, the Man Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves. Because of this, a win can be a drain rather than a boost and costs can outstrip sales if you don’t win.

A competition that maintains a monopoly

It’s not just that the competition is hard for small presses to enter – the big publishers have a near monopoly. In the 50 years that the prize has existed, literary publishing in English has been transformed from being made up of numerous independent companies, often family run, to being almost entirely dominated by the “big five”. These are Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster. And, further, each of these is itself owned by a multinational media conglomerate.

As the sociologist John Thompson noted in his book, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, the economies of scale made possible through mergers and acquisitions have created this almost complete monopoly. But through publishing via supposedly “separate” imprints, the big five have maintained an aura of smallness which is more conducive to the “creativity” on which their profits are ostensibly based.

Over the past 20 years, while 12 different publishers appear to have published the novels which were awarded the Prize, six of these wins were for imprints belonging to Penguin Random House. This monopoly is maintained through the prize’s rules for submissions – the number of novels a publisher can submit is directly tied to the number of longlisted novels they have had over the past few years. An imprint already marked as prestigious is more likely to win again.

It maintains a certain model of publishing

In his article about Amazon and its relation to contemporary literary fiction, US literary scholar Mark McGurl suggests the extent to which reading of material normally scorned by the literary critic can deliver new insights.

And close reading of the Man Booker’s rules of eligibility – while perhaps dry in comparison to reading the winner on the bus or with a reading group – is also revealing. It shows that it is not just a competition for a small number of large publishers, but that the prize is largely about the maintenance of a certain idea of publishing, too.

The rules of eligibility are almost entirely now about the publisher, rather than the novel or novelist – and key to them is the exclusion of anything with a whiff of self-publishing about it. In order to be eligible, a publisher has to prove that they are based in the UK or Ireland, but the only way of proving this is by having the accoutrements of the conventional publisher. Eligible submissions must come from publishers with ISBNs and head offices who use retail outlets for print books and who publish at least two literary novels a year. Rule 1g, through its strange, uncomfortable tautology, betrays something of just what is at stake in this: “Self-published novels are not eligible where the author is the publisher.”

What the various methods of literary studies can suggest, then, is that, contrary to nearly everything written elsewhere about the Man Booker Prize, it arguably doesn’t really matter which novel wins. Whichever wins, I’d suggest that the real winner is an intensely conventional notion of publishing. It’s an idea of publishing where sales and prestige are the most important consequences of winning prizes and where a few very large publishers dominate.

And, to continue that domination, the most novel uses of contemporary technology, which can open up spaces for the most innovative aesthetic forms become illegitimate. If you want to see examples of this kind of work, look to the recently published novel, Gaudy Bauble, by Isabel Waidner (published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe) – a book of experimental writing published in an innovative way. Under the current rules, such novels could never gain the coverage and attention offered by the Booker. And that’s a great pity.

Leigh Wilson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Westminster.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘Milkman’ by Northern Irish Author Anna Burns Picks up the 2018 Man Booker Prize

An unflinching account of an 18-year-old in Northern Ireland in the 1970s against the backdrop of sectarian violence intertwined with dark humour bagged the 2018 Man Booker Prize in London on Tuesday.

New Delhi: Author Anna Burns was named the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman at a lavish awards ceremony in London on Tuesday night, becoming the first author from Northern Ireland to win the most prestigious English-language literary award.

Burns, 56, who was born in Belfast, is the 17th woman to bag the award in its 49-year history and the first woman since 2013. It was her third novel.

Set in an unnamed city, ‘Milkman’ is a coming of age story of a young woman’s affair with a married man set in the political troubles of Northern Ireland. It focuses on a “middle sister” as she navigates her way through rumour, social pressures and politics in a tight-knit community. Burns shows the dangerous and complex impact on a woman coming of age in a city at war.

In a review for the Guardian, Claire Kilroy stressed on Burns’ emphasis of “the oppressiveness of tribalism, of conformism, of religion, of patriarchy, of living with widespread distrust and permanent fear” and lauded the narrator’s voice as “original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”

“None of us has ever read anything like this before. Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chair of the 2018 judging panel.

“It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour. Set in a society divided against itself, ‘Milkman’ explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life,” he said.

Unusually, in the book, the characters have designations rather than names. In an interview for the Man Booker Prize website, she said, “The book didn’t work with names. It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser – or perhaps just a different – book. In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again. Sometimes the book threw them out itself.”

The judges considered 171 submissions for this year’s prize. Burns, who lives in East Sussex in England, saw off competition from two British writers, two American writers and one Canadian writer.

Also Read: Writers Should Maintain a Certain Distance with the World: Anita Desai

In addition to Milkman, the Booker Prize shortlist – two-thirds of which were written by women – included Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, which uses prose to follow a World War II veteran across the US in Hollywood’s postwar glory years, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a work of narrative with an ecological message, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, an steadfast account by a woman of poverty and mass incarceration, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, an unusual story of colonial slavery and the burden of freedom, and Daisy Johnson who’s nomination for Everything Under, her debut novel about a complex mother-daughter relationship, made her the youngest nominee in the Man Booker Prize history.

Books shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Credit: ManBookerPrize/Twitter

Milkman is published by Faber & Faber, making it the fourth consecutive year the prize has been won by an independent publisher.

Burns’ win was announced by Kwame Anthony Appiah at a dinner at London’s Guildhall. She was presented with a trophy by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and a 50,000 pounds cheque by Luke Ellis, Chief Executive of Man Group. The recipient of the Man Booker Prize gets 52,500 pounds ($69,223 or Rs 50.85 lakh). The winning author also receives a designer bound edition of her book and a further 2,500 pounds for being short-listed.

“We are honoured to support the Man Booker Prize for the sixteenth year, as it continues in its fiftieth year to champion literary excellence and the power of the novel on a global scale,” Ellis said.

Appiah, a British-born Ghanaian-American novelist, was joined on the 2018 judging panel by crime writer Val McDermid; cultural critic Leo Robson; feminist writer and critic Jacqueline Rose; and artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.

In 2017, George Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, making him the second American in a row to win the prize after the Man Booker Foundation decided to change the rules in 2014 to include for consideration of the prize, any novel written in English and published in Britain. The Man Booker Prize was previously limited to authors from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth. Northern Irish writer Anna Burns’ win will do well to assuage the fears of those within the literary community who fear the intrusion of an American hegemony in the Man Booker awards.

Also Read: The Story of the Indian Bardo behind George Saunders’ Booker Winning ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

Val McDermid, the best-selling crime writer and one member of the Man Booker judging panel, said, “The kind of people who read literary fiction do not ask authors for passports.”

(With inputs from PTI)

The Literary Oligarchy Is Killing Writing

With the staggering rise of wealth inequality and the increasing concentration of ideas and access to an audience in the hands of a few, largely elite writers, it’s the voices on the margins that need to be heard.

With the staggering rise of wealth inequality and the increasing concentration of ideas and access to an audience in the hands of a few, largely elite writers, it’s the voices on the margins that need to be heard.

There is no literary meritocracy. Representative image. Credit: Flavio Ensiki/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Years ago, when I was first trying to make a name for myself as a writer, a prominent Indian novelist and one whom I admired told me I was being a fool to ever think my fiction – influenced by the American and European modernists I grew up reading – would ever be accepted by the mostly white boy club of the terminally hip who ruled New York City publishing – the trustafarian rich kids who defined cool, and by extension, who got published, who got reviewed and who got attention.

He told me to start wearing a turban and pen a gritty but ultimately celebratory novel about Sikhs in California, where I grew up – be the native informant for the bored white US searching for a new ethnicity to discover, consume, go all gaga over and ultimately discard. That way, he said, lay my surest path to even the slimmest foothold in the literary world.

I ignored his advice and told him so. What he described sounded like self-cannibalisation to me. For me, the whole point of writing – great writing at least – was that at its heart it promoted a fundamental freedom of the mind to engage the world in whatever way one chooses. Soon after, the prominent writer made a point of “dropping” me. I suspect he decided my poor judgment proved I was never going to be famous enough for him to waste his energy cultivating while my insufficient sycophancy was in no way going to compensate.

At the time, I had written two novels. One was about an enormously fat satellite television magnate who gets eaten by a huge fish; the second about a wild girl found in the mountains of an imaginary Asian country. While the former suffered from many usual first novel failures, the latter, I believed, and still do, genuinely succeeded.

Within months, I had an agent at a top agency, and months later, a folder full of polite – though often enthusiastic – rejections. Had my name been Robert Smith, and not Ranbir Sidhu, I have little doubt that instead of soft praise for the imaginative depth and striking language of my work, I would have been receiving panegyrics of applause talking up my ability not only for wild invention but the extraordinary range of the lives I inhabited, lives so clearly different from my own. To this day, that novel still sits in a drawer.

It was cool, and still is, for white boys to slum in the shoes of the imaginative other; like famous actors taking on roles with physical or mental disabilities, it almost guaranteed the literary equivalent of an Oscar nomination. They were rewarded for stretching their imaginations, while for someone with a name like mine, such stretching was considered whatever was the polite literary word for uppity. I was expected to stick to the reservation badlands of “write what you know” and spin my tireless rims along the dusty backroads of my own self-ghettoised culture.

Also read: Author-ity, or What Do Writers Really Do?

This was made clear to me early on, long before I moved to New York, and from a very unexpected source. While an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I sent one of my first stories to Bharati Mukherjee, who was teaching there, as part of an application for her creative writing class. She was already a grand dame of contemporary American letters. The story was written strictly in the vernacular of a miner in the north of Thatcher’s England and set during the coal strikes of the mid-1980s. It ran to nine typed pages and consisted of a single, uninterrupted sentence.

It was an odd meeting with Mukherjee. Sitting together in her cramped faculty office, she almost continuously picked up the phone to pronounce “Dah-liing” to someone on the other end. When she did get around to discussing my story, she instantly dismissed it. Why was I writing about miners? Why was I writing about white people? What could I possibly know about these people? At no point did she discuss the story itself. “Write what you know,” she insisted airily, sounding very much like a Hallmark card for distressed writers. I wasn’t allowed entry into her class. I would have to write about “my own people” before she allowed that. Later, I would learn she was famed for mentoring young writers, but every one of those I heard about was always a young, white male. My story went on to win a university prize and was my first published fiction.

To all intents and purposes, I should not exist. The child of Punjabi peasants – my mother a Partition refugee, my father an economic refugee from post-Independence India who left for Kenya, then Britain, where I was born – and someone who grew up in a working class, book-free household who found himself first in the work of Dylan Thomas and Heinrich Böll, and later, in the grand fantasies of writers such as Günter Grass, Alasdair Gray, Jeannette Winterson, Iris Murdoch, Hermann Melville and Georges Perec.

For years, I sustained myself on the idea of a literary meritocracy, that good writing, and writers, rise to the top. All I had to do was demonstrate my skill at stepping outside of myself and crafting striking narratives and I would be ushered in, recognised as a fellow writer among writers.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. No one was interested in what the child of Punjabi peasants sees when he steps outside of himself; what they wanted was the Punjabi peasant, or the child, spilled onto the page, to be consumed and assimilated, Borg-like, into their own grand narratives while denying me the agency of inventing my own worlds.

Meritocracies, I learned too late, are the easy myths the rich feed the poor to keep them dreaming that one day they may find a door out – something that’s no less true in the literary world. But just because I was naïve enough to believe in one should not mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about the literary world we have: an oligarchy where the doors to entry are growing narrower and narrower.

Also read: ‘Deep Singh Blue’ Explores the Sense of Unbelonging to a Culture

In India, the stranglehold of the Doon-St Stephens-Oxbridge circuit – South Asia’s Eton and Harrow, and representing less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the populace – continues to dominate who gets easy access to a publishing contract and early success; and while in recent years, many more, and more diverse, voices have found their way to print, those denizens of the old school, with their elite social networks, chummy recollections of punting on the Thames, and back-alley knife fight arts of getting ahead at any cost, continue to define who is promoted, read and taken seriously.

Lucy Diver’s recent Guardian essay highlights how an address in London or New York has become a prerequisite for international success, especially through the Man Booker Prize. My own time in New York made it clear that there were few real friendships in today’s literary hubs, only transactions: ‘What can you do for me?’ is a question silently asked a thousand times at every literary gathering, and answered with all the speed and toxicity of a nightclub lothario sizing up his options for the evening. I wish I could say I’ve not been guilty, but I have; I remember the socially awkward, greenhorn writer in me almost begging more established ones for any crumb that might lead to a path to getting a book published.

There is, of course, much great writing being done in New York and London and the elite addresses of New Delhi and Mumbai. Of the two recent Man Booker prize winners, both American, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was a pure revelation of satire, and well-deserved the prize, and while I haven’t yet read George Saunders’s latest, his books, at least up to the unfortunately self-parodying Tenth of December, were each a small masterpiece.

Also read: The Political Is Personal, or the Enduring Nature of the Memoir

But step outside of yourself, at least if you’re not a white male, and you’ll find the doors to publishing with any major house almost always (politely) slammed in your face. Women writers who attempt any intellectual heft in their writing know they’re banishing themselves to the realm of independent presses – and despite their genuine worth, such presses offer low or no advances, lack the funds to send an author on tour, and usually employ only a single, seriously overworked publicist. Even the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, when, after the early international success of A House for Mr Biswas, penned a novel with only white characters, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, discovered that absolutely no one was interested in his outsider’s view of the British in the 1960s. While the Jonathan Franzens are rewarded for penning zeitgeist-defining tomes, for the rest of us, such ambition, along with our own competing definitions of the zeitgeist, finds us shunted off to the railway sidings of literary and cultural irrelevance.

In a world with diminishing attention spans, ever-decreasing column counts for reviews and a culture that has become celebrity-obsessed, the narrowing vision that establishment authors offer us should be cause for alarm. There is no reason any individual author, whatever their talent, should be recognised and applauded, myself included; but today, perhaps more than ever, with the staggering rise of wealth inequality and the increasing concentration of ideas and access to an audience in the hands of a few, largely elite writers, it’s the voices on the margins we need to hear.

Years after my friendship with the Indian novelist ended, I did write a novel partially centring on the Sikh experience in California, called Deep Singh Blue. When writing it, I chose not to anthropologise or mindlessly celebrate the experience, instead working hard to present that world as closely as I was able – what I called the view from the inside out.

Even after V.K. Karthika, the visionary editor at HarperCollins India, bought it, no major US publisher would touch what was, to my mind, a deeply American novel. The one who finally did was a Los Angeles-based independent, surviving pluckily thousands of miles away from the polite savageries of New York’s literary cocktail circuit. Three cheers for the independents.

Ranbir Sidhu grew up in London and California, and currently lives in Greece. He is the author of Deep Singh Blue.

Despite Its Origins in Grief, Saunders’s Message in ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ Is Refreshingly Hopeful

The Booker Prize jury has done us a favour by drawing attention to a book that tries to forge a unity among opposites in the most surprising ways.

George Saunders, author of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, poses for photographers after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 in London, Britain, October 17, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Mary Turner

I am someone who reads, teaches, and writes about contemporary American fiction for a living. Knowing this, you might expect that fresh, experimental novels would constantly be arriving on my desk, that I would be inundated with literary innovation.

But it is in fact rare to come across a book that does something genuinely new and startling with the form of the novel, a form with a long and distinguished history. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Booker Prize, is that rare kind of book. I had read all of Saunders’s short fiction collections, as well as a great many interviews and essays, before opening his first novel. Yet despite what should have been ideal preparation, I was unprepared for what I found there.

As any student of American history knows, the ostensible subject of Lincoln in the Bardo is the most revered of all US presidents. Abraham Lincoln was an autodidact who rose to fame from an inauspicious backwoods upbringing. He became president at what remains the most fraught moment in American history. He led the north to victory in the Civil War, and abolished slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. He thought like a legal scholar but projected the empathy of a statesman. His speeches are among the greatest ever made by a politician. And he was assassinated as the war drew to a close, ensuring his legacy could not be tarnished by any future descent from the height of his powers.

Lincoln is also one of the most written about men in history, a subject of endless fascination. He has been explored by countless scholars, imagined by myriad writers, embodied by numerous actors on stage and screen. How then to write about Lincoln in a new way, to imagine not only the man himself but all he has come to represent in and for American culture?

Abraham Lincoln. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Tackling Lincoln

Lincoln in the Bardo answers this question in two surprising ways. First, Saunders does not focus his primary attention on Lincoln, but on the spirits who inhabit the cemetery in which his 11-year-old son Willie has been buried. Reading the novel’s opening line – “On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen” – we initially assume that we are hearing the voice of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps coming to us from the mysterious space of the bardo, the realm in Buddhist mythology that lies between death and rebirth.

It soon becomes clear, however, that the facts do not fit with this reading, and nor does the tone. On the third page, we discover that the speaker is one “hans vollman”, in conversation with someone called “roger bevins iii”. These are not famous men, nor are they taken up with famous acts. They are discussing the fatal accident experienced by vollmann when he was hit by a beam while in the first flush of sexual arousal with his virgin bride. Echoing the setting and tone of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language classic Cré na Cille, Lincoln in the Bardo begins like a bawdy black comedy.

George Saunders
Lincoln in the Bardo
Bloombury, 2017

In building a fictional world from this unexpected opening, the second key decision Saunders makes is to refuse to do what writers of historical fiction have always done, which is to conceal the sources of their research and imagine their subject fresh onto the page. Instead, Saunders quotes a wide range of scholarly passages verbatim, attributing the quotations to their author and text.

A democracy of contradictions

The mix of these two registers – the comic and the scholarly – shouldn’t work, but it does. Once the reader has settled into the rhythm of alternating chapters dealing with the chaotic world of the spirits and the more sober (but sometimes equally peculiar) scholarship on Lincoln, Saunders’s project gains clarity, purpose and power. Populated with a multitude of voices, the novel addresses the great faultlines of American democracy – race, gender, wealth, sexuality – while keeping its eye firmly on the common ground its characters share in their inevitable confrontation with life and death.

In a creative writing masterclass with Saunders that I attended earlier this year at the University of Liverpool, the author outlined his vision of literary stories as “active systems of contradiction”. In mixing together what we usually think of as opposites – tragedy and comedy, high rhetoric and bawdy farce, private grief and political action, the individual and the collective – stories can challenge our sense that some things must be kept apart. We come to see that these apparent opposites are in fact different faces of a fundamental unity. This is the unity that underpins our connection to one another in a shared world.

In writing Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders couldn’t have known how directly his themes would speak to an America and a world in which contradictions are becoming increasingly stark and oppositions are being set in stone. The Booker Prize jury has done us a favour by drawing attention to a book that tries to forge a unity among opposites in the most surprising ways.

Despite its origins in grief and mourning, Saunders’s message is a refreshingly hopeful one. We can only hope the message is heard by those whose ears it needs to reach.

Adam Kelly is a lecturer in American Literature, University of York.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

The Story of the Indian Bardo behind George Saunders’ Booker Winning ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

Saunders’ experimental novel winning the prize opens up many new possibilities. Now, Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting concepts from the vast philosophical traditions of the East.

Saunders’ experimental novel winning the prize opens up many new possibilities. Now, Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting concepts from the vast philosophical traditions of the East.

An ethnic Tibetan woman walks behind prayer wheels at the Larung Wuming Buddhist Institute. Credit: Reuters

‘Buddhist-inspired ghost story set during the American Civil War’. This is how Anthony Cummins described George Saunders’ Man Booker Prize Winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo – ‘the hotly anticipated and then rapturously received first novel from an American heavyweight who made his name over two decades with his comic, dystopian short stories.’

Saunders – who said the novel had been in his heart for 20 years and that he had previously tried writing it ‘a couple of times and it didn’t work’ – was the bookies favourite. The judges praised the ‘utterly original’ work and said it was ‘deeply moving’.

BBC’s arts correspondent Rebecca Jones commented:

‘This is initially a rather off-putting book – it’s got a rather strange title and when you read the first few pages, you don’t really know what’s going on.’

The ‘strange title’ is because of the word ‘bardo’. What is bardo, where did it come from and how did it enter our consciousness?

The Bardo Thodol

The Bardo Thodol is a classic work of Tibetan Buddhism. In Tibet it is known as ‘The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between’. The ‘in the between’, the intermediate state – after what we commonly understand as ‘death’ – is called the bardo.

In Sanskrit bardo is antarabhava – transitional state, in-between state and luminal state of the consciousness of the karmic souls after leaving a human body and before taking another form or getting liberated.

The Bardo Thodol is from a larger corpus of teachings which fall under Nyingma literature – the Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones – revealed by Karma Lingpa. I say revealed, because the Tibetans believe that the text was originally composed by Padma Sambhava and was revealed by Karma Lingpa (1326 –1386).

Padma Sambhava – whose status in Tibetan Buddhism is only next to Sakyamuni Buddha – is known to have left many ‘hidden treasures’/wisdom texts which are meant to be discovered and revealed by chosen people – the ‘tertons’ – when the time is right. The ‘hidden-treasures’ tradition is known as ‘Terma’ – a key concept in Vajrayana and Tibetan Buddhism. There is a corpus of Tibetan texts which come under Terma teachings and they have been translated in multiple languages.

Going by the Tibetan tradition, one has to credit Padma Sambhava (‘Lotus-Born’) – also known as Guru Rinpoche – for introducing the word bardo into the vocabulary of humanity via Karma Lingpa.

Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Credit: Google ebook

Padma Sambhava – the founder of Vajrayana: an enigmatic school of the esoteric Tantric Buddhism – was the 8th century saint who came to be venerated as the ‘second Buddha’ – especially across Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and the Himalayan states of India.

So, bardo is a word coined by a Buddhist, that has entered the world via Tibet.

There are two kinds of history – real history and mythological history. The combination of both have led the scholars to locate the birth place of Padma Sambhava – the kingdom of Oddiyana – to swat valley (now in Pakistan) or the present Indian state of Odisha.

It is more probable that Padma Sambhava came from Eastern India, because Vajrayana Buddhism grew in Vanga – present day Bengal. The famous Buddhist masters Asita Dipankara, Tilopa and Naropa – associated with Nalanda University – came from Vanga: the ancient name of Bengal.

For over 700 years, till the early 20th century, the Bardo Thodol remained in Tibet.

Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) was an American anthropologist and writer who pioneered the study of Tibetan Buddhism.

Evans-Wentz accidentally encountered Bardo Thodol in Tibet and was the first person to translate the text into English. He published the translation in 1927 – Bardo Thodol came to be known as The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

The cult status of The Tibetan Book of The Dead grew in the 1960s when Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert co-authored a book called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

The Tibetan Book of The Dead has never been out of print ever since.

Now in 2017, the Man Booker Prize to Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo has brought the word bardo into greater focus.

I am yet to read Saunders’ novel that adapts the bardo to form his historical narrative based upon an intimate issue: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s child.

The prize to an experimental novel that taps into a ‘foreign’ cultural idea – of the bardo – opens up many new possibilities. Indian Anglophone authors might finally think of adapting ideas and concepts from the vast philosophical and spiritual traditions of the East, to frame their works in the future, and won’t wait for the Western Anglophone authors to show the way.

Till now, the overwhelming majority of the Anglophone Indian literary authors have avoided taking inspiration from the corpus of philosophical and spiritual literature of India. Primarily, the focus has been in the socio-political sphere, memoirs, immigration and history.

George Saunders, author of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, poses for photographers after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 in London, Britain, October 17, 2017. Credit: Reuters

Jorge Luis Borges delved into Indian philosophical texts – especially Buddhism – and wove various ideas into his works. Carlos Fuentes based his magnum opus Terra Nostra on reincarnation. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha told the story of the spiritual journey of a person during the time of Sakyamuni Buddha. Franz Kafka was influenced by Eastern spirituality – especially Taoism. T.S. Eliot employed allusions from Buddhism and Upanishads in The Wasteland. There are many such examples from Henry David Thoreau to W.H. Auden. But I cannot name a single well known Indian Anglophone author who has adapted ideas and concepts from Indian philosophy.

To paraphrase Amartya Sen, who once said that the tendency of the Anglophone Indians to ignore the philosophical works of India, is a ‘mistake’.

There is a political dimension to this as well. In the general absence of the liberal and the progressive intellectuals and authors delving into our tradition – in religion, science, philosophy and mysticism – the right wing is trying to fill the vacuum and making a hash of it.

To give an example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remark about Ganesha and plastic surgery is well known. I don’t know of anyone from the liberal and progressive circles who hasn’t made jokes out of that remark. But there was no one to point out that Sushruta Samhita is an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery that is a pioneering work of human civilisation. It includes chapters describing surgical training, instruments and procedures.

Sushruta is already acknowledged as the ‘father of plastic surgery’ and the contribution of India to that field can be rightfully highlighted.

Ideally, ignorance – stemming from fantastical exaggeration and also neglect – needs to be avoided.

We also cannot allow the right wing – that portrays itself as the defender of all things Hindu/Indian – to muddle truths with exaggerations, falsities and distortions to serve their political agenda.

There is an urgent need for the liberal and the progressives of the Indian Anglosphere to engage with our ‘knowledge heritage’ in the time of right wing theocratic nationalism.

I have two copies of the Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead – the one translated by Evans-Wentz and a latter translation by Robert Thurman, that includes a foreword by Dalai Lama.

For those who are intrigued and interested, I can recommend the two translations, for a deeper understanding of the bardo.

Devdan Chaudhuri is the author of Anatomy of Life. He is one of the contributing editors of The Punch Magazine. He lives in Kolkata.

George Saunders Wins 2017 Man Booker Prize for ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is a fictional account of US President Abraham Lincoln burying his young son.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a fictional account of US President Abraham Lincoln burying his young son.

George Saunders, author of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, poses for photographers after winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 in London, Britain, October 17, 2017. Credit: Reuters

London: American author George Saunders has won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, a high-profile literary award, for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a fictional account of US President Abraham Lincoln burying his young son.

In his acceptance speech, Saunders, 58, noted that “we live in a strange time,” adding he saw the key question of the era being whether society responded to events with “exclusion and negative projection and violence,” or “with love”.

Saunders was the second consecutive American writer to win the prize, after the rules were changed in 2014 to allow authors of any book written in English and published in the UK to compete.

His novel, set in 1862, a year into the American Civil war, is a blend of historical accounts and imaginative fiction, which sees Lincoln’s son Willie, who died in the White House at age 11, in “Bardo” – a Tibetan form of purgatory.

The judging panel, led by author and member of Britain’s House of Lords Lola Young, praised the “deeply moving” book, saying it was “utterly original”.

Saunders was presented with his award by the Duchess of Cambridge, the wife of Britain’s Prince William.

Last year, American Paul Beatty became the first American to win the award, for his novel The Sellout, a biting satire on race relations in the US.

Other previous winners have included this year’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch and Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.

The award was previously open only to writers from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe or countries in the British Commonwealth. The winner receives a 50,000 pound ($65,000) cash prize.

(Reuters)