Good non-fiction, finally

Why aren't more professors and academics writing more readable books on history, politics, diplomacy, economic or current affairs? That's because Indian academia suffers an acute deficiency of original research in the humanities

India's status as Asia's largest English-speaking country has assured educated Indians with authorial ambitions of a ready readership. But it's been a skewed market so far. The fiction side of the business has enough quality names that provoke instant recall. It's quality, popular non-fiction that has suffered an imbalance.

The best books in this genre are autobiographies and memoirs. By definition, even the best written of them remain subjective accounts of times and events. But objectively researched and well-written non-fiction by Indian writers has been hard to come by.

Biographies? Mostly skin-crawling hagiographies, with exceptions such as Daman Singh's marvellous portrait of her father Manmohan Singh. History? Economics? Rarely dispassionate or mature, or often so arcane and academic in character and turgid in prose as to be unreadable. Business? Ha ha ha. Quickies by journalists and self-published stuff don't count.

Ditto for politics, which is why memoirs remain the best sources here. A polymath like Ramachandra Guha - whose works on the environment, cricket, politics and, most recently, Gandhi, combine rigorous research with a light touch - is so rare as to accord him celebrity status.

Then there's the production values of publishing houses. They have vastly improved now, but barring the large university publishers with relatively deep pockets and Rukun Advani's stable, the non-fiction specialists managed to kill the occasional potential best-seller with poor proofing or a textbook-like appearance that would deter any but the most interested reader. Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 is one outstanding book that suffers a serious packaging deficiency. Despite the adage, people do judge books by their covers.

In case you're thinking Indians are inherently incapable of the intellectual heft that popular non-fiction demands, consider some Indian-origin authors: Simon Singh, one of the finest science writers around; Dilip Sarkar, a former policeman who is the go-to guy for research on the Battle of Britain; Srabani Basu, with highly readable and varied histories on curry, a famous Indian-origin spy in World War II, Queen Victoria's Urdu teacher, and the Indian soldiers of World War II. None of them live in India and one only one - Basu - has an Indian employer.

Part of the problem for the listless non-fiction scene is the small domestic market. It can sustain few Guhas or Arundhuti Roys who make a living mostly from writing, the latter having turned her considerable talents in fiction to polemical non-fiction.

That leaves academics, the main engine for popular non-fiction writing in the West. So why aren't more professors and academics writing more readable books on history, politics, diplomacy, economic or current affairs? That's because Indian academia suffers two degenerative diseases. The first is an acute deficiency of original research in the humanities. Over the years, for a variety of reasons, colleges have become functional degree-dispensing teaching shops rather than sanctuaries of research.

Poor funding partly accounts for this parlous state, since academics need more than their salaries to take time out to research and write. A general negativity towards the humanities in favour of the sciences is the other part of the explanation. So private endowments, which powers academic research in western universities, tend to be weighted in favour of the latter. Witness the number of grateful IIT alumni who fund their institutes; you don't see that happening much in subjects like history, literature, economics and so on (the irony is that India doesn't produce much path-breaking scientific research either). And second, the generally poor state of our public archives makes the researcher's work a Herculean struggle.

The good news is that the drought in quality non-fiction is ending. The last few years alone have seen seriously good stuff by Indian authors hit the book-stands. Here's a partial - and entirely subjective - list: Yasmin Khan (India at War), Nisid Hajari (Midnight's Furies), Raghu Karnad (Farthest Field), Jairam Ramesh (To the Brink and Back: India's 1991 Story and Old History, New Geography), Mihir Sharma (Restart), Srinath Raghavan (India's War), Sugato Bose (His Majesty's Opponent), Arjun Subramaniam (India's Wars), Vinay Sitapati (Half-Lion), and others that conflict of interest prevents me from mentioning.

This has nothing to do with epiphanies in our academic system; it is a function of globalisation so that Indian arms of multinational publishers can publish the work of some sterling Indian writers either as reprints or by offering respectable advances. The even more encouraging point here is that not all of these authors are rooted in foreign universities or media houses. Subramaniam, for example, is a serving air force officer, Sharma was working in the Indian media when he wrote his book and Jairam Ramesh needs no introduction.

At a time when the public discourse is being constrained by a violent political agenda, the flowering of the Indian non-fiction business should be celebrated. Intellectually, India is the richer for it.