Attempts to capture the "real" India almost inevitably result in ill-tempered debates about authenticity. Recent trends would seem to indicate that western readers and filmgoers favour poor Indian exotica over rich Indian exotica: less Jewel in the Crown, more Slumdog Millionaire. Does the real India lie between these two extremes or within them, and if so, who has the right to tell the story? Into this debate steps Nikita Lalwani, author of the Booker-longlisted and Costa-shortlisted Gifted, with her ambitious and filmic second novel, The Village.
The novel is set in an open prison camp in north India called Ashwer, a fictional place based on those that have been operating across the country since the 1960s. To the casual observer it resembles your regular, rustic Indian idyll: the houses are made of corrugated metal, buffalo and goats abound, women in colourful saris fetch water at the pump, and men smoke beedis. There are no prison walls, no locks on the doors but each of the 48 families there includes one person who is a murderer.
Ray Bhullar has come to the village to shoot Doing Time, a BBC documentary about prisons. She's a clumsy, oversensitive and slightly paranoid British-Asian woman who wants her first commission to be a nonjudgmental tale of prison life. Ray is accompanied by an overbearing producer, Serena, and the presenter, Nathan, who we discover is an ex-armed robber.
Ray looks Indian, speaks Hindi and is vegetarian, which endears her to some of the villagers, but she clearly belongs to the other camp because she has grown up in England. As one inmate says: "She lives with whites When you're around it long enough, then colour sticks, doesn't it?" Ray worries about intruding into the lives of others. From the start, her mission to do justice to the people of Ashwer seems destined to fail.
As the novel progresses, Ray, Nathan and Serena manipulate the villagers and their stories for greater emotional effect. We hear about victims of bride-burning, land disputes that end in fratricide and a tortured wife who poisons her husband and buries him under her hut. We see Ray's scruples grow, while her colleagues defer to what they think makes for good TV.
The Village is a masterclass in compression, zooming in from a wide-angle establishing shot to focus on individual lives. Even though the camp has no perimeter, there's an unnerving sense of constant surveillance. There are at least three levels of "seeing": the villagers who observe the BBC crew; the foreigners with their lenses, prying into local lives; and the prison guards spying on both. Everyone is watching everyone else.
The inmates' stories evoke larger questions about justice and privacy, power and powerlessness. Lalwani is also very good at subverting perspective. Gradually, the boundaries in this novel between inside and outside shift. The notion of freedom is turned on its head. And even though the villagers of Ashwer are killers, it's the interlopers Ray, Serena and Nathan whom we judge more harshly, and who seem to be more imprisoned in their lives.
Tishani Doshi's Everything Begins Elsewhere is published by Bloodaxe.
