A tender account of tragic love in Mumbai's dwindling Parsi community has won the DSC Prize—South Asia’s answer to the Man Booker. As Roanna Gonsalves and Claudia Taranto discovered, this relatively new prize has been hailed by the president of PEN International as a champion of regional fiction.

From Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s cheeky opening address to the final rumbling debate about democracy, each day of the 2014 Jaipur Literature Festival brought with it an underlying questioning of global monoculture.

Within the walls of Diggi Palace, turbaned chai wallahs sold tea in pretty little clay pots to literary tourists from across the world and smiling vendors of hand-woven woollen shawls offered welcome relief from Jaipur’s wintry goosefleshed mornings. It was what the Indian government’s tourism ads call ‘Incredible India’; a vision starkly at odds with the bare-headed men selling chai in less exotic plastic cups at the market and the country’s 250 million underemployed people living on less than a dollar a day.

People used to try to move away from localism to 'the international novel'. I never understood what that was really, because all of us come from somewhere, we’re all born somewhere, we all have an experience, and when we write our fiction it comes out of that place. The great novels are all local and if they’re great they become universal because of how local they are. John Raulston Saul, president of PEN International

More than 220,000 people attended this year's festival, flocking from all corners of the globe. The diversity of the crowd was reflected in the prominence given to the issue of translation, specifically the dominance of the English language in publishing. Literary translation is currently a one-way street; half the books available in translation globally have been translated from English, yet only six per cent have been translated into English from other languages.

‘It is really an issue in terms of how much we really do know about the world,’ novelist and translator Linda Jaivin told David Marr on ABC Classic FM. ‘We would much prefer to read a book written by an Australian who has gone to Africa rather than an African novelist who’s been translated into English.’

Writer and president of PEN International John Ralston Saul echoed these sentiments at the festival: ‘Many people are writing in languages that simply don’t have access to publishers, to translation. That is a form of loss of freedom of expression.’ English novelist Jim Crace, also speaking in Jaipur, put it more poetically: ‘You only sing in your own voice. Other languages are going to disappear under the great boulder of English.’

‘People used to try to move away from localism to “the international novel”,’ continued Ralston Saul. ‘I never understood what that was really, because all of us come from somewhere, we’re all born somewhere; we all have an experience, and when we write our fiction it comes out of that place. The great novels are all local and if they’re great they become universal because of how local they are.’

American novelist Jonathan Franzen, though, voiced his concern that a greater emphasis on translation alone would not necessarily help non-English language authors connect with international audiences.

‘One of the consequences of globalism, it seems to me, and I think we see it even in the literary world, is that things become less horizontal and more vertical,’ he said. ‘If you can imagine everything perfectly translated, that we have massive subsidies for translation, that anyone publishing in Romanian in Romania, that is instantly available in all languages everywhere, you are still faced with the finite amount of reading time that an individual reader has … in a funny way you'd think there'd be greater diversity in what is read, but I worry that the trend in a more global literary marketplace is even more towards a kind of star system and a vast sea of people who can't find an audience.’

Two of the books shortlisted for the 2014 DSC Prize, South Asia's equivalent of the Man Booker Prize and one of the highlights of the festival calendar, were translations from Malayalam, the language spoken in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The Book of Destruction by Anand finally brings to an English speaking audience the philosophical, blackly humourous prose of this much lauded cult writer and intellectual. Goat Days by Benyamin has already gone into its 75th edition in Malayalam, a feat unheard of for most English language novels, and has won numerous awards.

However, the ultimate winner of the DSC Prize was a novel written in English. The reserved but popular Cyrus Mistry, younger brother of another acclaimed writer, Rohinton Mistry, took out the award for Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer. Inherently local, the 224-page novel is set amongst the tiny group of men in Mumbai’s Parsi community who prepare dead bodies and leave them outdoors to be ravaged by the weather and devoured by vultures.

The Parsis are Zoroastrians who came to India fleeing the Muslim invasion of their Persian homeland in the 8th century. Under the British rule of India, they enjoyed success in business, education and public life, but in recent years their numbers have dwindled to only 60,000 as many migrate to North America and the UK. Within Parsi society, corpse bearers are treated as untouchables; they are considered polluted and unclean because of their contact with the dead. Parsis believe that all dead matter, including fingernail and hair cuttings, is unclean and should not be touched.

Mistry, who was born in the Parsi community, worked as a researcher for a 1991 Channel 4 documentary about the corpse bearers. The film was never made, but 20 years later their story inspired him to write his award-winning novel. Corpse bearers live in isolation from the very people they serve. Being a corpse bearer, or khandhia, was traditionally a hereditary profession; a son would follow in his father’s footsteps and there was little opportunity for him to break out of this social bind. Being untouchable, he was considered unfit for any other type of occupation. Nowadays, however, it is possible to break out of caste bonds and find other professions.

At its heart, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer is a tender account of tragic love between people living in wretchedness, pointing to contemporary questions of identity and belonging. Each sentence is a joy to read and a testament to the power of language, finely balanced with delicate, pitch-perfect humour. The DSC jury praised the book for the richness of its historical detail, its existential angst and its gentle questioning of the way we look at love, life, and death.

‘[Mistry’s novel is] exquisitely crafted, it’s a tiny book in the sense that it has a very small canvas, but because it has such a tiny canvas it was able to speak to universal themes in ways that some of the books with larger canvases were unable to. I personally believe that he is the great unacknowledged writer of his generation from India,’ said eminent Indian intellectual Arshia Sattar, a member of the jury.

‘It’s very funny in parts and at the heart of it all is a very tender love story. The son of a high priest, the most pure person in the community, falls in love with the daughter of a corpse bearer and is determined to marry her. Of course, if he does that he must leave his father’s house and lose his extremely high caste. He does it for love. It’s about a forbidden love between two young people, a father’s love for his daughter, a daughter’s love for her family and how love can be redemptive.’

Winning the prize, and the US$50,000 that accompanies it, means Mistry can give up his job in advertising to start work on his next novel, as well as finish a play and publish a book of short stories. Ironically, while writing in English may lead to a wider international audience, it has not enabled the author to pursue his craft full time.

‘It’s difficult for anyone to make a living in India as a writer in English,’ he explained. ‘Even though I’ve been writing all my life—I’ve written many stories and recently published two novels—I was still compelled after this second novel to earn my living by doing a job which I was not very happy with. With this prize I’ll be able to quit that job and get back to my writing.’

Jaipur’s festival may be the largest, and arguably most internationally recognised writers’ gathering in India, but the country has a long history of sahitya sammelans, or literary conferences. As Jaipur approaches its 10th anniversary, the Kannada Sahitya Sammelan, held this year in Madikeri, is nearing its 100th. Writers’ festivals across the world today are a continuation of this rich history of celebrating stories and language.

And at Diggi Palace, as the chai wallahs packed up their carts and the shocking pink, lime green and flaming orange canopies were dismantled, the words of Jim Crace confirmed the importance of these traditions in an increasingly globalised world: ‘It is through writing that language becomes vivid and rarefied and valuable. Narrative is strong. Narrative will never die. Whatever the form of publication or dissemination, storytelling is stronger than anything.’

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer is published by Aleph Book Company. Find out more on Books and Arts Daily.

