IN Southall it felt like a team-mate winning the finals of a literary kabaddi. "Jit gayi ," said Balwant Sagoo who runs a restaurant. He has not read the book, never will, but it matters that an Indian won the Booker. Southall has little time for creativity that crosses barriers. Much of life is about US and Them, and she is one of US (to borrow a use of capital letters).
Sagoo grew up on sitcoms of the likes of Mind Your Language , which defines foreigners by their varying inabilities to deal with English. A Sikh spends his career through this sitcom saying 'Thousand apologies'—he always gets it wrong. Today he might have had a little less to apologise for. The Booker brings competition to creativity. An Indian had beaten them at their game in a paper-and-print equivalent of beating England in a Test match.
These connections look silly but feel real. This love for her prize is more than something quaint among the ethnic. The Indian ghetto survives on the margins of established England. If you can't speak English, you're a clown. If you can, you're a coconut. That prize filled the literary with envy, the merely literate of Southall with a joy untainted by sophistication. Southall felt so much better than Guildhall. "I have read all about this book," says Ranbir Singh, former magistrate and now an importer of fashion accessories. "It is very encouraging sign because this lady has not written in her mother tongue," he says. "Her literary work has been appreciated by people of England, after all there was no Indian on the selection board. English language no doubt belongs to England but others are getting equally good command. She has done a good job and I am quite happy about it."
Ranbir Singh is eager to defend the book even against its Indian critics. "It is bad that in India it is not being taken in right manner," he says. "After all she is only exposing the reality of life with her talent, nothing wrong with that. We all live with these things, and there is nothing wrong in highlighting that point. You can write on so many different topics."
From Southall to the House of Lords, Indians had much the same thing to say. Lord Raj Bagri, chairman of the Metdist group and of the London Metal Exchange, said the prize is "a good example of how Asians are enriching areas which were the private domain of the local people." Lord Bagri said he is "delighted that Indian writers are enriching the English language and that the literary world has recognised it in this manner."
