Is making fact stranger than fiction a literary hindrance in India?

Jhumpa Lahiri lost out to Eleanor Catton for the Man Booker prize this year as the shenanigans in the Victorian-era gold-rush town of Hokatiki in New Zealand clearly proved more compelling than a 20th-century Naxalite tale.

The happenings at Daundiya Khera, however, can be mined to strike Booker gold too. Among the cast of characters in Catton’s The Luminaries are a goldsmith, a gem hunter, a banker, a journalist, a priest, a hotelier and a contractor. There is even more variety in the hordes now milling around the site of a purported hidden cache of gold in an equally obscure village in Uttar Pradesh.

Included are a dead raja-turned-revolutionary, a “visionary” godman, a credulous minister, a local bureaucrat — reportedly the first to “break ground” with a pickaxe as the dream-inspired dig began — an Archeological Survey of India team, media and curious crowds. The anticipated 1,000 tonnes of gold would certainly make a dent in India’s fiscal deficit — if the government gets the hoard that is.

But there’s more likelihood of literary striking gold by divining how a minor raja amassed such wealth and why many perfectly sane people bet on a godman’s “dream” of recovering it. Many (especially leprechauns) believe there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, but so far, no one has acted on such faith.