By Richard Young
That Kiran Desai has won the coveted Booker Prize with her novel The Inheritance of Loss should not perhaps be such a surprise to the bookies who had favoured Sarah Water's The Night Watch. The Booker has become renowned for choosing the little known. More than this however it continues a trend in publishing that has seen Asian writer's work becoming increasingly highly regarded, from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.
Writing in the Guardian today Tom Boyd argues that this is part of a wider post-colonial trend,
"The award has often favoured books that embody in their form & style the creative collision of English language fiction with an explosive post-colonial world…this has become an honour for stories of cultural transition and migration on a globalising planet."
This got me thinking about another artist award, the Mercury Music Prize. Asian/British artists such as Apache Indian, Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Black Star Liner and Susheela Raman have all been nominated in recent years. Their response to 'cultural transition' is to fuse traditional eastern instrumentation with modern western music to create innovative new styles.
The music press wanting to label these new phenomenon termed the music Bhangragga and Asian Underground. The reality is that this is marketing puff rather than reflective of any major musical movement. Worse the very inclusion of these commercially marginal artists has been criticised as an attempt by the Mercury panel to appear cool, rather than reflect the actual listening public's taste.
I wonder if any of this is applicable to the choices made by the Booker Prize judges. Overblown espousals such as "multicultural reverberations of the new millennium" (John Sutherland, today's Independent), are in danger of obscuring rather than enlightening. Does the mainstream media merely believe its own hype? Are they simply giving a new name to something that has been going on for eons in writing, music and art in general – the borrowing, fusing and exchange of different cultures? I'm not sure, but perhaps the bookies are more in tune with the realities after all.
