The ongoing Jaipur Literary Festival has become a brand in its own right. Good for India. It is now even more firmly on the global culture-vulture map.
But the silly fuss over Salman Rushdie has led my depressingly prosaic brain to ask the following questions:
Does he do so in his own right?
Or is it because of the characters she has created?
Or is it because of the genre they have invented?
But before some pedant starts waving his hands about, let me define an author as a brand: “An author can be said to have become a brand when others start to copy him or her.”
And for those who don't quite know what a brand is, here's another definition, not mine, unlike the previous one: A brand conveys implicit information about the product.
In terms of economic theory, when an author becomes a brand, his or her monopoly gives way to imperfect competition where there are many suppliers offering imperfect substitutes for each other.
The “sensitive” will screech in horror but as this happens to all inventors and their products, there is no reason to exclude literary effort. At the end of the day, much as one may think to the contrary, a writer is no more than a designer, the publisher is a producer, the book a product, and the readers are the market.
If the volume of total output in any industry is large, willy-nilly, some brands will emerge. Indeed, the chaatwala in Shahjehan Road in Delhi, the Thalappakattu biryani in Dindigul and Tanishq jewellery are, in terms of the economics of brands, identical.
That is why the output of the publishing industry has grown, brands have emerged, and their substitutes.
Brand ingredient
But what precisely allows an author of fiction to become a brand? His style? Her characters? Or their genre?
Some authors, like Amitav Ghosh who has brought the James Michener genre of novels written around historical facts to India, have created genres that cannot be copied by anyone in India. Such writers do not become brands because in order to be a brand their books should be able to generate substitutes.
Others, like Salman Rushdie can do so, and have been copied for many things. Therefore, they have become brands.
Rushdie, one might say in passing, is the Sony Walkman of this particular sort of literary effort. And like Sony he was unable to repeat his success with Midnight's Children .
Sometimes, however, some authors become brands not because they wrote a terrific book that met one or some or all of my criteria but because some agency such as Booker or Pulitzer conferred an award on them. Jhumpa Lahiri, who writes with haiku-ish perfection, is one such. Aravind Adiga is another even though his writing is all over the place. For writers like them commercial success has followed the award.
Yet others have become brands because of the characters they have created — Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Chief Inspector Morse, George Smiley, Perry Mason, to name a just a few.
Readers may note that there are virtually no good English crime writers in India. I wonder why. Nor are there any Indian political thrillers or family sagas.
Indian writers in English, by and large, are so full of social angst that you start to wonder if they are normal. The path to stardom, it would seem, lies via writing about other peoples' misery rather than your own. Like Arundhati Roy, for example.
That is why Namita Gokhale stands apart. She writes wonderfully about private angst. Indeed, I suspect the success of translations from Indian languages into English is because of this difference.
That said we seem to produce very few fun brands in English.