Major Indian American writers Lahiri, Divakaruni had a book release in 2013.
By Deepak Chitnis
Jhumpa Lahiri (Photo credit : Marco Delogu)
WASHINGTON, DC: Much like it was for Indian Americans in the film and television world, 2013 was also a noteworthy year for desis in the fields of literature and the fine arts.
The following is a list of Indian Americans in the fields of arts and literature who made the biggest splash in 2013, in random order.
Literature
Aziz Ansari – Ansari had an eventful 2013. He released a Netflix-exclusive comedy special entitled “Buried Alive” which was met with rapturous acclaim from critics and audiences, he co-starred in the hit summer comedy This is the End, and he bought a house in Los Feliz earlier this month for $2.7 million.
But Ansari’s biggest accomplishment of 2013 was netting a $3.5 million publishing deal with Penguin Press, the second-highest deal ever offered to a TV star (Ansari is still a co-star on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”). Ansari is said to be working on a book about the modern dating scene; specifically, how the dynamic of singles looking for love has changed in a world of texting and social media. The book will be nonfiction, and Ansari will consult with top academics and conduct his own research to supplement the book.
Ansari’s book is expected to hit shelves in September of 2015.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – Prolific Indian American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni released her eleventh full-length novel in 2013, “Oleander Girl.” The book is about a young Bengali woman named Korobi Roy, who grows up with her grandparents in a dilapidated Kolkata mansion after her parents die when she is very young.
When she comes to the US for her studies and marries Rajat, she’s elated that she may have finally found a love as strong as she’s been told her parents’ was. But the death of Korobi’s grandfather brings to light a family secret that forced Korobi to re-evaluate everything she thought she once knew, and journey across America on an odyssey of self-discovery.
Although not singled out for any major literary awards in 2013, “Oleander Girl” enjoyed a warm critical reception from several pre-eminent publications in India and the US when it was released back in March. The book was applauded for its skilled weaving of Indian and American cultures into a powerful narrative that features a strong, central female character.
Divakaruni is perhaps best known for her 1997 debut novel, “The Mistress of Spices,” which was turned into a film in 2005 starring Aishwarya Rai. The book was named as one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, and received several other industry accolades.
She earned her BA from the University of Calcutta in 1976, then came to the US and earned her master’s degree from Wright State University in Ohio. She then completed her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She currently lives in Houston with her husband and two sons.
Manu Joseph – Journalist and novelist Manu Joseph published his latest novel, “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” in January of 2013. A darkly comedic story with subtle autobiographical undertones, the story is about Ousep Chacko, a journalist and would-be writer who considers himself one of the last “real” men still on Earth. Ousep’s wife, Mariamma, dreams of his demise day after day, no longer able to stand her obnoxious brute of a husband.
Ousep and Mariamma’s world is shaken up when their seventeen year-old daughter Unni falls of a balcony. An apparently happy child, no one knows if her fall was intentional or accidental. Three years later, Ousep receives a clue that leads him a quest to find out the truth, change his ways, and perhaps even fall in love.
The book received rave reviews in both India and the US, and Joseph was shortlisted for the 2013 The Hindu Literary Prize for the novel. Joseph already won the award in 2010, its inaugural year, for his book “Serious Men.”
Rajiv Joseph – Playwright Rajiv Joseph (no relation to Manu Joseph) won the prestigious Steinberg Playwright Award for 2013. The prize, which Joseph shares with fellow playwright Annie Baker, was for his 2013 play entitled “The Lake Effect.”
The play, which had its world premiere earlier this year in Chicago, is about two estranged Indian American siblings who are forced to reunite when their father passes away and a close friend of his begins revealing secrets about the father’s past that forever changes their perception of the man and their familiar relationships.
The Steinberg Playwright Award is given out by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. Now in its sixth year, the award carries with it a monetary prize of $50,000 to each winner. The award itself was given to Joseph and Baker during a ceremony in New York City on November 18th.
Joseph is the son of a French-German mother and Indian father. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, he attended the Oxford, Ohio campus of Miami University for his undergraduate studies, receiving his B.A. in Creative Writing in 1996. He then joined the Peace Corps., spending three years in Senegal, an experience that he credits with having a profound effect on him and preparing him invaluably for his career in writing. In 2004, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In 2010, his play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” made him a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize, arguably the highest literary honor in the world.
Jhumpa Lahiri – Lahiri published her second novel, entitled “The Lowland,” in 2013. The novel tells the story of two very close brothers (both in age and relationship), Subhash and Udayan, in 1960s India. Despite their closeness, they are vastly different in terms of personality and life goals. They split up when Subhash decides to emigrate to America and Udayan stays behind in India. However, an incident in Udayan’s past forces Subhash to come back to India and confront the past of the brother he only thought he knew.
Lahiri’s “The Lowland” garnered largely positive reviews from literary critics, with the general consensus being that it’s easily her most ambitious book yet, and a notable departure from her typically more intimate stories of the past. Nevertheless, the story still deals with themes familiar to Lahiri’s writing, such as Indian-American families, cultural disparity between the east and west, and the clash between tradition and modernity.
“The Lowland” was a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, but lost out to James McBride’s “The Good Lord Bird.” It was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, but lost to McBride’s novel there, as well. But that doesn’t mean Lahiri is a stranger to literary plaudits. Her debut work, a short-story collection entitled “Interpreter of Maladies,” won her the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered by many to be the highest honor in the literary world. Her novel “The Namesake” was also a great critical and commercial success, and was adapted into a successful film in 2007.
M. Night Shyamalan – Writer/Director M. Night Shyamalan had an unusual year – rather than release only a movie, the Academy Award-nominee also released a book he wrote about the broken American education system.
The book, entitled “I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap,” released in November to good reviews. Shyamalan used the book as a way to explore what’s wrong with public education in the US, and try to create a paradigm to fix it.
The director realized that the education system needed a similar paradigm of its own, saying that the important thing is to come up with five things that all have to be done together. “The important thing to remember is that if you don’t do even one of those things, your chances for getting diseases goes all the way back up to the norm,” said Shyamalan at a Washington, DC event to promote the book last month. “The education system has to be looked at the same way.”
Over the summer, Shyamalan released his latest theatrical film, After Earth, starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith. The film, which tells the story of a father and son in the distant future who crash-land on a now-abandoned planet Earth and must fight to survive, was panned by critics, continuing Shyamalan’s critical cold streak. The movie did average business at the box office, grossing just over $243 million worldwide from a production budget of around $130 million.
Manil Suri - Maryland-based mathematician and author Manil Suri won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, a dubious distinction given out annually to an author whose novel contains a badly written passage involving sexual intercourse.
Suri won the award for his third and latest novel, “The City of Devi,” which details the lives of a small group of characters in Mumbai as the city goes into a lock-down in the midst of an imminent nuclear threat. At one point in the novel, some of the characters engage in an orgy, which Suri sets against the backdrop of a nuclear winter. As he writes it:
“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands — only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”
The son of Bollywood music director R.L. Suri, he attended the University of Bombay before coming to Carnegie Mellon University and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983. His 2001 debut novel, “The Death of Vishnu,” was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year, and was short-listed for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2008, he published his second novel, “The Age of Shiva.” He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.
Although unable to attend the ceremony in London himself, Suri accepted the tongue-in-cheek award in good humor.
Art
Christie’s Auction House hosts first-ever sale in India - Auction house Christie’s first-ever art sale in India fetched over 15 million dollars, doubling pre-sale expectations, with an astounding 98 percent sale of the 83 lots up for grabs. The renowned London-based art and jewelry seller held the event at the lavish Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai on December 19, auctioning off both classical and modern art pieces.
The centerpiece of the auction was an oil painting by artist Vasudeo Gaitonde, which fetched an enormous sum of just over 237 million rupees from an anonymous US buyer. That amount is equivalent to $3.8 million. Initial reports expected the most sought-after piece to be a painting by the late Tyeb Mehta, entitled “Mahishasur,” which was expected to land somewhere in the range of 75-95 million rupees. It ended up being sold for just under 198 million rupees, or $3.165 million. The third most lucrative piece, an untitled painting also by Tyeb Mehta, fetched just over 98.5 million rupees, equivalent to roughly $1.58 million.
After observing that the sale of art at auctions in New York and London was seeing a growing Indian presence, Christie’s decided to bring an auction to India and see if sales would be similarly robust.
“Our inaugural sale reinforces Christie’s longstanding commitment to the artistic and cultural heritage of the Subcontinent, a commitment that has been part of our history since 1766 when James Christie offered ‘four fine India pictures painted on glass’ at auction,” said Christie’s, also via their website.
Gurmej Singh sets Guinness World Record for longest painting ever - The Guinness Book of World Records confirmed in November that an over two mile-long painting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by controversial artist Gurmej Singh is the longest ever created by a single individual, securing a spot for him in the next edition of the lauded record book.
The painting has been named “The Transcendental,” and was being displayed along the Grand Rapids River. Singh, who describes himself as a “stunt painter,” says that the painting’s purpose is “to raise awareness about Liberty for Women, well-being of women, and role of women in our society.”
Singh, who goes by the street name “SinGh,” initially submitted his work to ArtPrize, the world-renowned international art competition two separate times, only to be rejected both times. His submission to the 2013 competition was rejected just before the September 18 opening of the ArtPrize exhibition because it violated rules for being too big — it did not fit into the 35-foot space allotted to Singh by the competition — and because Singh had changed the focus of the piece without notifying ArtPrize officials.
Singh, claiming he had verbal permission to display the painting beforehand, set the painting up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it took over sidewalks, bridges, and the sides of buildings. Police were notified within two hours and orders given for the painting to be removed.
However, Singh had already notified the Guinness Book of World Records, who certified that the painting – which had a record-breaking length of 11,302 feet and 2.11 inches – was indeed the longest in the world.
Kennedy Center and Indian Embassy host tribute to Swami Vivekananda - The Embassy of India hosted a cultural event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Swami Vivekananda.
The event – entitled “Arise, Awake! In Celebration of the 150th Birth Anniversary of Swami Vivekananda” – kicked off with a 20-minute speech from India’s Ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao. The Ambassador’s speech was followed by a two-hour cultural program, which featured singers and dancers performing routines that were inspired by and dedicated to the memory of Vivekananda.
The event also featured performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Dakshina Dance Company, and Alicia Graf Mack, a Maryland-based dancer who has performed with celebrities such as Beyonce and Alicia Keys.
Swami Vivekananda was a native of Calcutta, born there on January 12th, 1863, and a well-learned man who studied the works of social, religious, and political philosophers from all around the world. He is considered a key figure in modern India and Hindu society, and is credited with bringing Hinduism, yoga and Vedanta to the world stage. Vivekananda died on July 4th, 1902 while meditating, the official cause of death speculated as being a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
Metropolitan Museum in New York and India’s UMC sign arts agreements - In March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Union Ministry of Culture of the Government of India signed a memorandum of agreement expressing mutual willingness to establish a long-term relationship of cooperation.
The agreement was signed on March 19th in New Delhi by Venu Vasudevan, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Culture, and Thomas P. Campbell, the Metropolitan Museum’s Director and CEO, in the presence of Chandresh Kumari Katoch, Minister of Culture of the Government of India.
The Ministry of Culture and the Metropolitan Museum will cooperate in the areas of conservation, exhibition, academic research, sharing of information and published resources, public education, promotion, publications, museum management, and short- and long-term loans.
The first major initiative to launch under the auspices of this new agreement is the Indian Conservation Fellowship Pilot Program, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and the Stichtung Restauratie Atelier Limburg (SRAL) in the Netherlands. The program is supported by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in Manhattan is one of the world’s largest museums, with collections spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe.
The Smithsonian Institute’s Exhibit – “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” - The Smithsonian Institute opened its yoga-themed exhibition on October 26, at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC.
The exhibition – entitled “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” – features numerous pieces of art from India and neighboring regions. These pieces range from books to paintings, sculptures to posters, and even some films. The over 130 pieces of art, which were collected from 25 museums and private collections all over the world, explore the 2,000 year-old heritage of yoga tradition.
A yoga-themed exhibition has long been in the works, and was made possible largely through the efforts of Dr. Debra Diamond, the Associate Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art for the Sackler Gallery. In 2009, she began concentrating her efforts towards making a yoga exhibition a reality, and received overwhelming professional and financial support to undertake the endeavor.
One of the centerpieces of the exhibitions is one of the only known sculptures that exists of a yogi who is identified by name. It hails from the eleventh century; the majority of the pieces being displayed come from the 8th-18th century, while the oldest dates back to the second century and the youngest from the early 1900s.
Other pieces include work created by Sufi and Sikh artists, such as a beautifully intricate painting entitled “Battle at Thaneshwar” that was created under the Mughal Empire’s rule of India. There is also Buddhist art, such as a small bust of the Buddha’s dilapidated face while he was undergoing an extreme fast before reaching enlightenment.
Sotheby’s New York hosts auction of Indian and Southeast Asian work – Sotheby’s New York presented Indian & Southeast Asian Works of Art as part of the Asia Week series of auctions on March 20th.
The approximately 130-lot sale included a stunning array of important thangkas, one of the most important groups of Indian folk bronzes in the world, an excellent selection of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain art, and over 30 exquisite Indian miniature paintings.
“A Rare and Important Thangka Depicting Sachen Kunga Nyingpo” fetched the highest sale. It sold for $725,000, a great deal more than the $300,000-$500,000 it was initially estimated to sell for. “An Exceptional and Highly Important Black Stone Vaishnavite Stele” sold for $581,000, and “A Rare and Important Thangka Depicting Mahasiddha Avadhupita” sold for $485,000.
Sotheby’s also displayed an auction of works consigned by Amrita Jhaveri, entitled The Amaya Collection, on March 19, also to strong results. Both sales were part of the famed auction house’s India Week.
Overall, the auction was able to accrue sales of $22,489, 002 over the course of March 19-20, according to Sotheby’s.
Vijay Iyer wins MacArthur Fellowship grant – Jazz maestro Vijay Iyer was among the 24 recipients of the 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, otherwise known as the “Genius Grant,” which from this year onwards comes with increased prize money of $625,000, distributed over five years.
The MacArthur Fellows Program is an annual endowment made to a number of individuals (between 20 and 40 people typically) who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.” The people selected often have contributed something meaningful to their respective field, but the Fellowship’s endowment – which is $625,000 per individual this year from the previous years’ $500,000 – is considered an investment in allowing them to continue their pursuits even further and contribute even more.
Iyer, a professor of music at Harvard University, is a jazz pianist, composer, writer and producer based in New York City. He is the son of Indian immigrants from Tamil Nadu, and was born in Albany, New York in 1971. A gifted musician from an early age, he began learning the violin at the age of just three years old; he also taught himself how to play the piano.
He graduated from Yale University at the age of 20, with a double-major degree in physics and mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in 1998 – after initially pursuing the degree in the field of physics, he decided to create an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in “Technology and the Arts. His dissertation was titled “Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Music,” which discussed the relationships between cognitive activity and music.
The MacArthur Fellowship endowment is paid in quarterly installments over a span of five years. Previous winners of the MacArthur Fellowship, which started in 1981, include: Harvard professor of economics Raj Chetty (2012), UC-Berkeley professor Maneesh Agrawal (2009), and biologist/physician Vamsi Mootha (2004).
This post first appeared in americanbazaaronline.com