There are a few simple reasons why the author Shobhaa De has been referred to as the Indian Jackie Collins - namely, shopping and sex. Take this scene from her latest book, Bollywood Nights, just published in the UK, and featuring the heroine Aasha Rani, a sultry Indian actor:
"The Thai girls asked her flirtatiously whether she wanted to try a 'sandwich massage'. Game to try anything once, Aasha Rani agreed readily. It was an experience so sensuous, so arousing, so complete, that it was weeks before she could forget [it] ... When she returned to Bombay a fortnight later she had with her two VCRs, two CDs, enough makeup to fill three trunks, and had experienced some of the greatest orgasms of her life."
I've arranged to meet De at the Langham hotel in London, and I watch as India's first lady of sauciness swishes down the steps wearing a black and white zebra-print sari, a very large cocktail ring and carrying a quilted gold bag. With her long glossy hair and perfect accessories she looks much more like a leading lady than a 59-year-old mother of six - in fact, she resembles her heroines.
To many in the west, Indian fiction is characterised by large mournful tomes about families and feelings, written by such authors as Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Mistry. To them, De's work will come as a shock. She's been a bestselling writer in India for many years and her books have been known to shift 10,000 copies in three days. They describe a side of the country that western audiences rarely encounter, her central themes being power, greed, lust and sex. In Bollywood Nights, Aasha Rani becomes very successful in a film industry laced with scandal, before falling in love with a sleazy married actor - a relationship that threatens to wreck her reputation.
Is Bollywood really so scandalous? "It can't be airbrushed," De says. "It can't be made antiseptic with a Dettol wash. Bollywood is brutal, showbusiness is brutal, I'm telling it like it is, warts and all. It is the underbelly that in a way defines what Bollywood actually is but rarely wants to acknowledge about itself."
And while her books seem at odds with the family entertainment produced by Bollywood, the industry doesn't spurn De as some sort of renegade. In fact, for many years she's had a very close relationship with it - as well as being the author of bonkbusters, she's the pioneer of modern Indian celebrity journalism.
Born in 1948 in the state of Maharashtra, De is the youngest of four children, and her father was a district judge (she describes her background as "solidly upper middle class"). At 17 she became a model, and by the time she was 23 she had founded her own celebrity magazine, Stardust, a monthly fix of Bollywood gossip, including exclusive interviews, scandalous tittle-tattle and photoshoots of all the latest heartthrobs wearing very few clothes. As editor of one of the first magazines to cover the Indian film industry, De soon became a household name in India, with Stardust also gaining a cult following internationally.
She is married to a Bengali businessman, Dilip De, her second husband, and, between them, they have six children, including four daughters (one of whom is the editor of India's Hello! magazine and is about to launch an Indian edition of Grazia). Her books are steeped in a lifetime's observation of Bollywood. "I had a ringside view of Bollywood and all that it entails," she says. "It was a perspective most other people would not get. It's an insider's view because 11 years of editing a magazine like Stardust does provide you with a lot of rich material."
She denies that Rani, her current heroine, is based on any one actor: "Let's put it this way, there is a pattern to Bollywood and it follows its own sort of logic." Offscreen, as well as on, "nubile young ladies from south India fall for Punjabi hunks from Delhi. So it isn't actually based on any one character - it's a composite of a lot of women I've seen pass through the Bollywood portals."
And what about the hunks? Has she dated any actors herself? She looks shocked and coquettish at the same time. "No, no, no. I'm sorry, but it's just not true. It would be a total lie for me to even suggest something like that." In her youth, she "did get a lot of very attractive movie offers ... but it took me under 10 seconds to say a very resolute no."
De likes to say that she exposes Bollywood, lays bare its secrets. But she often seems intoxicated by the glamour she claims to strip away. "Bollywood spins by its own set of rules and nobody really wants to completely deconstruct it," she admits. "You don't want to disillusion a lot of people out there - for more than 350 million of whom Bollywood remains a hugely seductive dream."
When it comes to British celebrities, she often can't understand why they're celebrated at all. She's met Liz Hurley a few times "socially in Mumbai. It just astonished me that there could be this level of interest in her - after all, she's not Madonna. There is something very peculiarly British in the obsession they have over certain people ... We cannot understand the Kate Moss phenomenon, we cannot understand the Victoria Beckham phenomenon. We don't see the attributes in them that make them so iconic. And we certainly don't see it in Liz Hurley. We see her as a very, very ordinary and not particularly riveting figure."
"India is hot right now," she announces. Her books "were among the first few to reflect a contemporary India, rather than be focused on the cliches surrounding India. They were not books about the depression and repression, and they were not about women who were suffering, they were not about poverty. Instead they're about attitude, so perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist that more than a hundred doctorates have been written about them."
If there's one thing above all others that, in De's mind, is a cliche, it's the idea that Indian society includes religious zealots of any kind. When asked if anyone has ever protested about her sexually explicit writing, she reacts almost as if her country has been insulted. "I just feel that there are too many value judgments made about India based on nothing more than sometimes very prejudiced reporting in the western media ... I think we have done brilliantly. Why not focus on the positives, why not focus on the fact that we are self-sufficient in every area including food? We're way beyond the cliche of the Taj Mahal, land of the snake charmers and the elephant boys, tigers prowling the streets."
Later that evening, I meet De again at the 20th anniversary of Penguin India at the grand La Portes des Indes restaurant in Marble Arch. It feels as if we have been transported back to colonial India with waves of white, upper-class publishing folk staring in wonder at passing fire eaters and men in turbans. As coconuts and cocktails are handed out, I spot De in a white sari being photographed with a snake draped over her shoulders.
· Bollywood Nights is published by Penguin, £6.99
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/
