Brown skin likely to win Booker, says theatre personality

LONDON: Being brown can win you the Booker Prize, one of Britain's leading Anglo-Indian theatrical translators has told TOI, in a controversial admission that coloured creative artistes increasingly enjoy the advantage of "wearing the ethnic hat".
Classical translator Ranjit Bolt, who has long been the toast of British theatre, said with brutal frankness just eight weeks after Kiran Desai's unexpected Booker Prize win that "the ethnic factor in new novels can help you".
Bolt, whose newest venture, a Dame Judi Dench-starrer musical, is packing in the crowds as the Royal Shakespeare Company's prestigious new offering 'The Merry Wives of Windsor', added: "There is a tradition of brown people writing and writing well and winning awards. Publishers are sheep...and we've got to accept that today, people with a touch of the tar brush are more likely to win the Booker".
Bolt, who has a Malyali mother and an English father, insisted he, himself, had never professionally benefited from the brown dividend for Indian creative artists.
"Being half-Indian has had no relevance to my work, when you're translating classical European theatre, when you're translating (17th-century French playwright) Moliere, being pink or blue or green doesn't make any difference."
Bolt said he grew up in a Britain "where racism was much more acceptable than today ...I did have a bit of a problem, I was not a pale Anglo-Indian...I was a half-caste...neither fish nor fowl".
Bolt is regarded by the cognoscenti of English theatre as one of the Anglophone world's very few translators and writers able to adapt European classics so they achieve a vibrant life of their own.
Bolt's accusation that Brown Britain may actually be using its ethnic origins to gain special favours come at a sensitive time for Brown and Black Britain, which is estimated to be roughly 10 per cent of the UK population.
The British Establishment, from Prime Minister Tony Blair downwards, is increasingly insisting immigrants integrate "fully" into the British way of life. But South Asian immigrants, particularly Indians who have officially been praised as "paragon immigrants", are worried about being singled out for special checks on their level of non-ethnic-specific Britishness.
Bolt recently participated in only his third "ethnic project" ever when his new version of Beaumarchais's 'The Marriage of Figaro' transposed the comic farce to 19th-century India in the dying days of the Mughal Empire. That Mughal version of 'Marriage of Figaro' was staged by Britain's leading Asian theatre group, Tara Arts, founded by East African Indian Jatin Varma.
Though the Mughal Figaro was widely praised by critics for managing to "get a British audience to laugh at a 200-year-old French joke" that was famously described by Napoleon as "the Revolution in action" , Bolt appears wary of taking on more projects that would "stereotype" him.
He admits he was conscious from the time of his very first collaboration with Varma that he was running the risk of relegation to the "ethnic brown box".
He stayed away, he confesses disarmingly, only to add with some asperity that the huge ethnic dividend clocked up by brown people writing in English had passed him by. "I haven't been helped because I don't work in that trendy area...but Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, all of them probably were".