A Mulk Raj Anand Coolie badge, for instance, might be just the thing to accessorise the latest Bina Ramani blouse...or perhaps, an Anita Desai crying peacock, tastefully done in brass.

Writer Shashi Tharoor’s tongue-in-cheek reflection from Bookless in Baghdad, a collection of essays on literary subjects

Did anyone notice that 21 July 1999 marked the centenary of Ernest Hemingway’s birth? It is curious, of course, that a man who was seen as such a literary giant in his time – his suicide in 1961 even made the front page of the Indian papers – should be so completely forgotten three decades later. Today, there seems something embarrassing about his macho prose, the chest-out beer-swilling sentences strutting across the jungle of the page, hunting rifle in hand, each phrase advertising the author’s manhood. In these more enlightened times, Hemingway seems as dated as a Victorian novelist, the exemplar of another era, whose values seem recognisable but inapplicably foreign.

And yet Ernest Hemingway had just become the exemplar of something quite contemporary, a phenomenon very much of the last materialistic years of the 20th century. I have in front of me a press release from a body calling itself Fashion Licensing of America Inc., announcing good news for all those who thought Hemingway was dead and buried (or interred in libraries). ‘His fame lives on,’ the release says, ‘thanks to the Ernest Hemingway Collection, a new body of licensed products embracing furniture, accessories, gifts and textiles’. These feature such Hemingwayesque delights as a ‘Kilimanjaro king bed’ for the modest sum of $3499 (Rs. 1.4 lakh), an amount the grizzly writer, who prided himself on unrolling a mat by a campfire, would never have dreamt of spending on his own sleeping arrangements. If the 96-piece Ernest Hemingway furniture collection (also including lamps, clocks and even a duck decoy for the Hemingway-wannabe hunter) does not appeal, one can always pick up a $600 (Rs 24,000) Mont Blanc Hemingway pen, whose cost at least can be guaranteed to inspire the short sentences for which its eponymous author was famous.

Absurd, of course, that designer accessories should be marketed in the name of a man who was famously unfussy about clothes, drink, appearance or cleanliness. ‘Ernest,’ his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, once said, ‘was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I’ve ever known.’ (She affectionately – and sometimes not so affectionately – called her husband ‘The Pig’). In Cuba he kept a pack of smelly tomcats who were allowed to march all over his furniture (but then he did not possess a $3499 ‘Kilimanjaro king bed’). Though he once informed the world that Gordon’s Gin had kept him alive after a plane crash – ‘this beverage is one of the sovereign antiseptics of our time,’ he wrote cheerfully, ‘[it] can be counted on to fortify, mollify and cauterize practically all internal or external injuries’ – Hemingway was not a likely subject for the attentions of marketing men. The story is told of how a minor whiskey manufacturer invited Hemingway to endorse his product, Lord Calvert whiskey, by appearing in a ‘Men of distinction’ advertising campaign for a fee of $4000. His retort was blunt: ‘I wouldn’t drink the stuff for $4000!’

So why is Ernest Hemingway now being used to sell overpriced king beds and fancy pens? The answer is simple: Hemingway the writer is no more, but Hemingway the image lives on. A larger-than-life literary giant is, in the eyes of product pitchmen, larger-after-life. People who can’t be bothered to appreciate the prose but who wish to be associated with the aura of its creator can now buy into the image. Goodbye Hemingway the novelist, hello Hemingway the brand.

What are the chances that this American trend might also, as so often happens in our globalised world, make its way into our country? Indian writers are lately beginning to receive almost as much attention as their Western counterparts. Even if literary product-licensing is still an unknown art in India, it is surely not too early to consider the possibilities of paying commercial homage to our literary venerables. A Mulk Raj Anand Coolie badge, for instance, might be just the thing to accessorise the latest Bina Ramani blouse. Or perhaps the Cottage Industries Emporium might honour Kamala Markandeya by actually selling nectar in a sieve? Equally up their street could be the Raja Rao Serpent and Rope set, in leather and coir, perhaps, or an Anita Desai crying peacock, tastefully done in brass. The possibilities are limitless: Ganga-jal in a U-shaped urn could be sold as the Manohar Malgonkar Bend in the Ganges, and any amount of post-Kargil mementoes could be recycled as Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadows from Ladakh. More practical shoppers could take home Raj Kamal Jha’s slightly soiled Blue Bedspread. For the better-heeled buyer with a taste for objets d’art, a fragment of rubble and a bulb could constitute an Attia Hosain Sunlight on a Broken Column. And I haven’t even begun to mention the potential of an entire Malgudi Collection honouring R.K. Narayan’s fictional small town (a slightly sagging string charpoy could, for instance, rival the attractions of Hemingway’s ‘Kilimanjaro king bed’).

But something tells me India is not quite ready for all this yet. The director of Kerala Tourism told me how he had made plans for an Arundhati Roy tour of the Vembanad backwaters, to rake dollars off the foreign tourists clamouring for a glimpse of Ayemenem and associated locales in The God of Small Things. The idea was brilliant, but it was promptly vetoed by the state government as unseemly. Writers have their place in literate India, it seems, but only on the bookshelves. Hemingway, now spinning in his grave, would no doubt have approved.

Bookless In Baghdad is published in India by Viking Penguin and in the US by Arcade.