HUTCH CROSSWORD BOOK AWARD 2005

Winner in the category of English Non-Fiction:
Suketu Mehta for 'Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found'

Published by Penguin Books India

Suketu Mehta's acceptance speech at the Award function on 21st March 2006:

"I would just like to say at the outset that this award means more to me than the Kiriyama or the Pulitzer or the Guardian or any of the others that I have been short listed for, because this is from my city, my country and I am humbled and honoured. Thank you Bombay, my Maximum City.

I would like to thank the judges, the organizers of the prize, especially Sriram who has made book-shopping in India a recreation experience. Thanks to him especially as instead of asking someone on a date out to a movie or a disco, you can truly impress her by taking her to a bookstore. I would like to thank my editors, David Davidar and Sunny Mehta.

I am also humbled because of the tremendous quality of the other short listed books. Any one of them was equally deserving of the prize and it is a testament to the most exciting development in publishing in this country today. The emergence of narrative non-fiction is a serious contender to the novel.

I have been asked to say a few words about the craft of non-fiction. I love fiction. I am a fiction writer and I intend to return to it. If the novel is dead I am a necrophiliac.

But these days the dramatic value of the real - planes crashing into tall buildings, a corrupt scientist selling nuclear secrets to the highest bidder, the battle of two religious fundamentalists each bent on world domination, seems to have overwhelmed our capacity to invent new things.

Recent history is a novel playing out on our TV screens. And people are increasingly looking to narrative non-fiction to make some sense of it. If you are a serious writer of non-fiction you have to risk offending people you write about otherwise you are writing public relations pap.

The function of journalism is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If you do your job as a writer you will piss off your family and your friends. You will make powerful enemies - people who can hurt you. It takes a kind of bloody-mindedness these days to write a book that is politically engaged. Writers in India, particularly those in vernacular languages, are not well-protected by the state. Any crack pot politician or religious leader can decide to take offence and command the organs of the state or legions of his thugs to assault the writer.

It takes more courage to write a non-fiction book than a novel because you can always say that you made the novel up.

India is in the process of a vast national debate with itself about globalization, about human rights, about the relationship of men and women, about culture.

This conversation is not being well-served by the platitudes and the certitudes of the half hour TV talk shows. It is not happening within the constricted commercially compromised space of the daily newspaper. This kind of a dialogue can only happen in books and magazines. India needs an appropriate national forum, a magazine or a series of books that can contain the scope and breath of this debate. But all this does not come for free. You have to invest; you have to pay your writer's expenses. It took me seven years to research and write Maximum City and I could not have done it if I did not have international publishers who advanced me money for a book I hadn't yet written. It is much harder to research a non-fiction book. You are not sitting in a nice room with a good view waiting for the muse to sit on your shoulder. When the great documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado is asked about his most important piece of equipment he points to his shoes. Non-fiction involves endless hours of trudging down dirty slums in the hot sun. You have to convince people to talk to you. It is a tremendous externalizing of yourself and like a novelist you have to pay close attention to the craft.

Unlike newspaper journalism, in narrative non-fiction readers have a right to expect pleasure in the text. They expect sentences that dance and leap about the page and satisfy as much as prose in a novel.

While I was writing Maximum City, I kept reading poetry - Rilke, Akhmatova, Faiz, Robert Hass to remind myself that language is important and to protect myself from the debasement of prose that comes from a steady diet of journalism. I read poets to see how word follows word to make world. The single most important thing to remember about non-fiction is to give your characters space to breathe. They are entitled to as much respect as if they were characters in a novel. They must have room to grow in a way that surprise even the author and be as full of virtues and faults as anybody in a Tolstoyian epic. Don't let your characters get crushed by the weight of the author's idea. Underneath the massive foot of history is the human being struggling to get out and this is where the categories of literature blur and vanish. Whether I am writing fiction or non-fiction this is my dharma as a writer, to chronicle the solitary human being's struggle with history - personal and political.

Thank you."

- Suketu Mehta