The eggs are still there. Caked on to the front of Omana Gangadharan's house, a 70s brick terrace with a neat front lawn, the dried yokes are the only evidence of several ugly things that have recently been hurled at the woman inside. It's not locks or barbed wire that keep Omana Gangadharan trapped inside her home but the words that have fallen through her letterbox and been spat down her telephone.
It began on February 25 this year. Gangadharan answered the phone in her family home in East Ham, east London, to hear a man's voice telling her he was going to rip out her uterus. She was so shocked that she hung up. Earlier that evening, her house had been pelted with stones and bottles. No one inside was hurt but the timing was significant: it was the eve of the launch of Gangadharan's novel, The Final Phase, at the local town hall.
The novel tells the story of the postwar immigration to East Ham of Malayalees (the people of Kerala, south India). It was a departure from the writer's previous work, which had been set in India and serialised in various regional publications, and it was published with the aid of a grant from the Peabody Trust.
A week before the launch, Gangadharan gave a copy to a friend and it began to circulate in East Ham's Malayalee community. "The story relates to the life of every immigrant who has come here," she explains. "I wanted to write about the experience of being invited but not welcomed." Set on the Poet's Estate, home to 10,000 of Newham's Malayalees, the novel fictionalises the arrival of a generation of men who came to Britain in the 50s from India and Singapore. Gangadharan, a 46-year-old mother of two who arrived in East Ham from Kerala 27 years ago, chose Newham, she says, because "it's where I've spent more than half my life".
But the setting turned out to be too close to home: outraged by what they saw as caricatures of individual members of the community, some locals began a campaign to stop the book's launch. Phone calls were made asking speakers Gangadharan had invited to the event not to come and leaflets were circulated telling people to stay away. Protesters picketed the town hall. While Gangadharan was inside, her car was vandalised. So, too, were the cars of her best friend and her daughter. Gangadharan says some of the protesters were chanting that she was a prostitute and telling her 26-year-old daughter she'd slept with other members of the family.
After the launch, the threats escalated. A message on the answerphone informed Gangadharan's husband and son that they would be stoned to death. The family received death threats through the post. One night, three minicabs were sent to her home in succession. After sending them all away, she received an anonymous phone call. "He told me the cabs were intended to take me to Epping Forest where I would be stripped, gang-raped and burnt," she says. "He went into detail about how he intended to remove my clothes."
Even before publication of her book, Gangadharan was well-known within the community, due in part to one of her earlier novels having been made into a Malayalee film. But primarily it was because she got involved, volunteering for an Aids charity and a women's refuge, as ward secretary of the local Labour Party and a translator at the town hall. Then overnight, she became infamous for rubbishing her own community.
"It's clear who she's talking about," says Sreejith Sreedharan, cultural secretary of the Malayalee Association of the UK Trust. "The characters are based on real-life people." The shopkeeper who sells "mouldy vegetables" and his "moustached wife", he says, are based on local people.
He objects, too, to Das, a character who develops a penchant for Soho's sex shows: "The novel gives the impression that the community is illiterate, dependent on the state and has no sexual morals." Sreedharan says he condemns intimidation and violence but he is campaigning for the book to be withdrawn and "an unconditional public apology" to be made to the Malayalee community "for the insult, distress and discomfort" they say she has caused.
Gangadharan is unrepentant. "When there are 10,000 people in the community and 200 characters in my book, what name could I possibly have used that didn't belong to someone?" she asks. "They say: 'That character must be so-and-so because he's got a gold tooth.' I can think of four people in the community with gold teeth."
Most of the threats have been sexually violent or have made insinuations about Gangadharan's sexual conduct. Lurking insidiously within the threats, she says, is a potent objection to a woman telling men's stories. "Until the 70s, immigration to Britain was largely male, so I've written about men's lives - looking for work at Dagenham's Ford factory and, yes, visiting strip joints in Soho. I've written from a male angle and they've said a man helped me. I've never been to Singapore but I spoke to those who have and I visited the Ford factory so that I could describe it. I was not here in postwar Britain, I'm a middle-aged Asian woman sitting at home, so the attitude is: 'How could she write about that?' I'm supposed to remain a housewife, not a person who writes about public life."
On East Ham's High Road, black, Asian and white residents all claim to care little for the controversy. A white newsagent who has owned the shop for over 20 years argues the case for freedom of speech: "Otherwise you'll get restrictions that disregard the intelligence of the reader." A young Malayalee woman adds: "People are saying all sorts of things but until I've read it, I can't have an opinion."
The manager of Newham Bookshop says she received a letter from the Malayalee Association "suggesting I don't stock the book and asking me to speak to them". She is remaining neutral, she says: she sells the novel but chooses to keep it under the counter. "I've sold 15 copies, which is 15 more than I would have sold without the controversy," she adds.
Meanwhile, Newham Library is still assessing whether it will stock copies. "Reading the book from outside the community, we see no reason not to stock it," a council spokeswoman says, "unless it has been legally established that it libels individuals. Saying 'I don't like it' is not a good enough reason for us not to keep it."
Plaistow police have arrested two men for threats to kill Gangadharan, though no one has been charged. She is now too afraid to leave her home. She has stopped her community work and her health has deteriorated, she says, but she insists she will not apologise. "When I write, I have to be free," she says. "I'm living in London and I write for the whole community. I can't be confined to writing about an Indian woman looking after children and going to the temple."
