Reporter’s Notebook

India is a dangerous country to be a journalist. According to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly three dozen journalists have been killed in India since 1992 while doing their jobs, placing India among the likes of Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan as the world’s deadliest places for reporters. The noise made on our cable news stations, the shouting matches that pass for ‘robust debate’, mask the fact that our democracy ranks 140th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. ‘Criminal organisations, security forces, demonstrators and armed groups,’ noted Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the index, ‘all pose a threat to Indian journalists. The violence and the resulting self-censorship is encouraged by the lack of effective investigations by local authorities, who are often quick to abandon them, and inaction on the part of the federal authorities.’

Too often, of course, it is in those authorities’ interests to fail to protect journalists, to help discourage accurate, independent reporting. Not that our news media—print or electronic—needs much discouragement to fail to provide accurate, independent reporting. Celebrity gossip and manufactured outrage fatten the wallet and demand little in exchange. So one is admiring of the editors of The Sentinel in Avik Chanda’s debut novel, Anchor—news professionals high-minded enough, as the title suggests, to hold space at the bottom of the front page for a report from the field about state-sanctioned violence against villagers protesting a corporate grab for land and resources.

The Sentinel has sent two reporters—a grizzled veteran and fetching ingenue, in obeisance to cliché—to Bokulpur, an invented village on the fringes of Kolkata, whose desperate and impecunious denizens are making a last stand before massed ranks of police and party hooligans. Violence is a foregone conclusion, as is the weather, dark and stormy in the approved Bulwer-Lytton style. The action in Anchor is set on a single night; instead of chapter titles, we get the hour at which particular actions take place. It wouldn’t be correct to say the novel is told from different points of view; rather, the reader is led on a guided tour of those affected by the unfolding events. The newsroom at The Sentinel; a politician pulling the strings; the police; party thugs; the two journalists, experienced Tapasda and young Sohinee; a sub-editor at The Sentinel, Sohinee’s lover; and the villagers, including their ex-Naxal leader.

Anchor is a post-liberalisation Indian novel, appropriately set in the late 90s. If Chetan Bhagat offers one view of India after the opening up of the economy, an India fuelled by ambition to transcend small towns and small-minded social strictures, an India in which everyone can aspire to the consumerist good life, Avik Chanda shows us the flip side— an India riven by inequality, by governments that side with acquisitive corporations, by the consumerist good life for some provided through the defeat and wholesale destruction of the lives of others.

Chanda’s themes are large but his ambitions comparatively meagre. He uses the conflicts of contemporary India, the darkness, in service of a paint-by-numbers thriller executed with the very broadest of brushstrokes. No character in Anchor is a surprise; everyone behaves as the reader might expect, not as people but as characters in a mediocre thriller. The cynicism here is not of a political party that sees poor rural people as expendable, or of an editor willing to send a young woman with no preparation into what is described in the novel as a ‘war zone’ just to fill a spot on the front page normally reserved for ‘quirky’ human- interest stories, but of a novelist gesturing at seriousness to provide unearned ballast for a resolutely superficial thriller.

We know politicians are cynics, that the police are thugs. The truisms of Anchor might have been more palatable had Chanda been a better writer. In Bengali, Chanda, the son of actor Barun Chanda, is a published poet. In English, he writes prose such as this: ‘A great, ragged arc of lightning draws a jagged graph across the sky, its flash illuminating for an instant a large, dark living room, the grandfather clock, a painting on the wall, the taut, urbane profile of a man who can perhaps pass for an ageing film star, and then next moment, the thunder crashes into the room, drowning out the response’. But it’s not all Chanda’s fault. His editor doesn’t know the difference between ‘cohorts’ and ‘cahoots’. Pity the reader who must bear the brunt.

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