'If there's one thing I've learnt from writing this book, it's that if you want to write a biography, choose someone who's well and truly dead,' says Jessica Hines, the British author of Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me about Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. How did she get insider access to Bollywood? 'Karma, perhaps,' she says with a grin.
Hines is speaking to a packed house at the Kitabfest literary festival in Mumbai, which features writers, journalists and publishers from Britain and India. Guests include Toby Litt, Helen Simpson, Deborah Moggach, Esther Freud, Farrukh Dhondy and Philip Hensher. Indian writers Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Nagarkar and Adil Jussawalla are also there.
Hines intended to write an authorised biography of Bachchan, but was refused permission after the actor read her first manuscript. She then spun the unfinished biography into a tongue-in-cheek saga of her journey through the massive egos of Bollywood. 'Amitabh wanted to attend my brother's wedding in the Cotswolds in a helicopter, along with his entourage of servants,' she says. 'He'd fit in well in the Cotswolds. Not.'
Elsewhere, Litt, fellow British author Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal and Indian writer Shobhaa De are discussing sex in fiction. De, the author of several racy best-sellers, is outspoken about the problems of being a woman writer in India. 'I always get asked, 'Does it have the sex thing in it?' Asian women who write about sex risk being branded as whores. But then a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do.'
Dhaliwal - whose graphic debut novel Tourism came out last year - says: 'If you're not talking about sex, you're not talking about anything. I think men are gagged from talking about sex for fear of being considered misogynistic.'
Not everyone approves. 'Your bad language seems to be a sales technique,' says one member of the audience at a reading of Tourism. 'Do you come from the same town as Jade Goody?' Dhaliwal is not amused. 'This is the way we talk,' he says.
