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The Village

Told through the eyes of a British-Asian documentary-maker, this novel is a satire on media intrusion, and explores how current observational television programmes masquerade as modern-day anthropology. Drawing on established narratives of western 'visitors' in rural villages in India and Africa (including novels and non-fiction by Conrad, Naipaul and Coetzee), the book subverts canonical postcolonial representations of the Western gaze by having a woman of Indian origin who has grown up in the UK as the protagonist and focaliser of the story. Through a simultaneous exploration of media ethics and the shifting, chameleon cultural identity of this central character, the novel explores questions of 'truth' and 'reality' as subjective elements of storytelling - whether for television, or the novel itself. The location of the book is modeled on a real-life 'prison-village' which solely exists for inmates who have been convicted of murder in Rajasthan, North India, and includes original interviews with female inmates, obtained by working closely with Penal Reform International. In this way the novel has contributed to extending the debate around rehabilitation of women prisoners at a global level, by drawing attention to the gender politics inherent in the crimes common to this group of life prisoners. The novel explores the binary division between observer and observed by using the stylistic device of viewing the community and place through the lens of a camera. This occurs literally, and also metaphorically, by identifying the gaze of the central protagonist and her imagination, with that of a camera lens. This blurring of reality and imagined reality continues through the use of script, voiceover and stage descriptions in the novel, sampling cinematic conventions to explore the hidden manipulation that is necessary to the 'art' of creating compelling television, particularly that which is presented as reportage, or authentic reality.