Don't judge a Booker by a passport

His face launched a thousand petitions, but more memorably, it inspired countless memes. Michael Gove, come to think of it, is quite obviously the Dinanath Batra of Britain. Like Batra, Gove too believes that the matter of a nation's curriculum must be entirely homespun. But as Dinanath toils hard to get all English and Urdu words removed from NCERT's Hindi textbooks, Michael had already engineered his coup d'état in May. Convinced that the British diet was fast getting starved of Austenian and Shakespearean nutrients, Gove, the then secretary of state for education, devised a cunning plan. The Conservative Party leader demanded that three American classics - To Kill a Mocking Bird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible - be dropped from the British GCSE syllabus. Though a new warzone, the classroom was no Iraq. The rules were simple: There could be no allies.

From the din of agitated voices that flared, there emerged a clear voice of reason. American author Toni Morrison had decided to weigh in. "It may be that the academies will catch up with artists who write literature, and it won't have these nationalistic categories and so on. So that you'll [just] have literature," hoped the Nobel laureate. Although Morrison had articulated a sentiment that all of Gove's critics could collectively cheer, the former education secretary's rhetoric is still winning that battle for hearts and minds. The Man Booker prize provides us with ample proof that it isn't just the academies that are afflicted by petty nationalism. In a world where the difference between anonymity and renown is often a £50,000 cheque, it is hard for literature to remain just literature.

Ever since the Booker's inception in 1969, the award was primarily restricted to citizens of the Commonwealth. In September last year, the organisers of the prize announced that they had decided to level the playing field. You just had to write in English to qualify. Not everyone was admittedly happy in this new democracy. A section of the British literati quickly braced itself for a future American onslaught. Broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg drew a touching analogy - "It's rather like a British company being taken over by some worldwide conglomerate." Even Howard Jacobson went on record to say that the tweak in rules was a "wrong decision". The Booker winner may have possibly mellowed by now. He has again made the shortlist with his dystopian novel J and together with Ali Smith (How to be Both) and Neel Mukherjee (The Lives of Others), he is giving some patriotic punch to newspaper headlines in old Blighty - "British authors ward off US contenders".

Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler, the two Americans on this year's shortlist, might justifiably feel like freshmen trapped in a hostile school. Though their respective novels, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, are both quirky enough to satisfy the Booker's all-important criterion of originality, British betting agencies haven't given either title much of a chance. The very business of judging the prospect of books by the odds they've been given reduces literature to competitive sport. But to then view all fiction through the prism of a writer's nationality can skew the contest even more. The willow of a bat doesn't win matches, batsmen do.

Britain isn't alone in claiming for itself intellectual achievements of the individual. After Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North was shortlisted, The Australian said that the Tasmanian writer was leading "the Booker charge for Australia". With an independence referendum looming large, Scottish dailies were eager to readopt the Inverness-born Ali Smith as one of their own. While the Scot-Briton divide could have well been an intimate matter for Smith, Neel Mukherjee proves that national affinities can never be simplistically defined.

Born and raised in Kolkata, Mukherjee is now a British citizen. In an interview two years ago, the writer had said, "I don't much care for living in India. It is a difficult country to live in. I can only return as a tourist." Englishness, however, has not provided any new belonging. He was quick to confess, "I don't feel English at all."

For someone who believes that most "English fiction is a cul-de-sac", it isn't surprising that Mukherjee chose 1960s Bengal as the setting for his second novel, The Lives of Others. In the end, it is one of the book's characters that might have an answer to the Booker conundrum. Sona, a young teenager with extraordinary mathematical talent, is at the bottom of his joint family's food chain. The slightest bit of international recognition, it turns out, is enough to change all that. As news of his scholarship to an Ivy League school begins to disseminate, relatives swap their indifference for concern and a display of vicarious pride comes to mask their natural envy. If Mukherjee wins the Booker, Indian and British approval will undoubtedly not be as disingenuous, but often driven by an invented patriotic zeal, it does run the risk of transforming The Lives of Others into yet another Slumdog Millionaire. It is Sona who makes a final plea for quiet achievement. Reacting to the accolades he has received, he muses, "To rise above oneself. That will do. That is enough." Like Toni Morrison, we can only hope that the world will soon catch up with the mathematician's equanimity.