Cyrus Mistry wins DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

After the record cold of Friday, the sun shone on the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Acclaimed playwright and journalist Cyrus Mistry won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014, with its $50,000 cash prize, for The Chronicle of the Corpse Bearer . While announcing the prize, the head of the jury, literary critic Antara Dev Sen said the book won because it forced us to re-look justice and love in a story of the Parsi community of corpse bearers in Mumbai.

Gloria Steinem handed over the prize. The book tells of Phiroze Elchidana, the son of a priest at the fire temple, and married into a family of Parsi corpse bearers (the khandhias). The book forces one to ask, “What is love?” Sacrifice? A corpse?”, “What is clean, what is unclean?”, “How does one hold onto faith in the reality of death?”

Mistry won from 65 nominations and a shortlist of six books. The shortlist included Anand’s Book of Destruction (translated from Malayalam by Chetana Sachidanandan), Benyamin’s Goat Days (translated from Malayalam by Joseph Koyippalli), Mohsin Hamid’s Howto Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia , Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden and Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors .

The fourth DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was judged by a jury who read close to a hundred books. Sen, translator and writer Arshia Sattar, OUP’s MD in Pakistan Ameena Saiyid, journalist and editor Rosie Boycott British and bookseller and book trader Paul Yamazaki comprised the jury.

A couple of big absences like Katherine Boo, Rana Dasgupta, Yan Lianke and Rupert Everett might have dampened the spirits of a few ardent fans, but there was plenty other entertainment for all.

Jhumpa Lahiri was a clear crowd favourite. Her two sessions, ‘The Global Novel’ and ‘The Interpreter of Stories’ were the two best-attended.

While a couple of bodyguards escorted her from place to place, her length of fans coiled around the front lawns awaiting her autograph. In the ‘Global Novel’, Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Jim Crace, Maaza Mengiste, Xiaolu Guo, discussed the unique 21st century phenomenon where we live everywhere and live nowhere.

However, they also expressed a preference for the more humane term “universal” to the more commercial term “global”.

Crace said global writers are those who are read the world over, like R.K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe and Garcia Marquez. Franzen cautioned against the homogenisation of culture and said the worst mistake an author can make is to force himself to be universal, while often it is by describing the personal and particular that one reaches the largest audience.

In her session with Rupleena Bose, Lahiri spoke in detail about the act of creation and the absence of place and belonging. She said that while the basic ingredients for The Lowlands were the two brothers, Tollygunj, that time period; Gauri (the wife, young widow and professor) was the engine of the book.

As an individual, Gauri made difficult choices, but Lahiri said: “As a writer you have to have sympathy for unsympathetic characters. Gauri is a very complex character, she is not entirely unsympathetic.”

While Lahiri is cautious about using the word “memoir”, her next work is a “linguistic autobiography” about what language means to her.