Hall of Fame

Finally, Amitav Ghosh gets into the Man Booker shortlist with his Sea of Poppies.

Amitav Ghosh: Keeps reinventing himself with every new novel.




The Booker Prize is usually served up with a dash of controversy. So far, that has been provided by either deprecation or a touch of ill-concealed glee at the absence from the shortlist of Salman Rushdie’s much-tipped novel, The Enchantress of Florence.
More significant than the petty drama of such exclusions is the inclusion, at long last, of another major writer from the subcontinent, one whose work has, over the last two decades, brought substance and range to Indian English fiction and, indeed, added richly to the literature of the subcontinent as a whole. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first in a trilogy, has been received favourably by the Booker jury for the compelling story told against an epic historical canvas, its deft use of diverse tongues and a memorable cast of characters. By familiar standards of literary accomplishment, the absence from the Booker shortlist of Ghosh’s previous two novels, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide, seems inexplicable. If Rushdie can be said to have revitalised the Indian novel in English with the 1981 publication of the indisputably magnificent Midnight’s Children, Ghosh’s fiction has, over the years, pushed at the boundaries of the genre, probed its unlit corners, and brought it into powerful dialogue with other places, peoples and times. Rather than settle into a predictable house style with a much-used box of tricks to hand, Ghosh has chosen to set new literary challenges for himself, constantly transforming his work over the years.
Ghosh’s career did begin, like that of many of his contemporaries, including Shashi Tharoor and Mukul Kesavan, in the irresistible experimental wake of Midnight’s Children (twice-winner of the Best of the Booker) and the techniques it put into innovative play: magical realism, satire, wordplay, mythology, elaborate allegories, and layers of interconnected stories. His debut novel, the curiously engaging Circle of Reason, draws on these resources but is an uneven achievement, wonderfully witty and insightful in parts, unwieldy and thin in others. But it opened up a rich seam of stories and themes that Ghosh would excavate elegantly in later works. The novel’s most beautiful passages exemplify what would become a Ghosh trademark — an object or process examined in exquisite detail as the writing teases out a myriad embedded stories, much like the weaver’s loom which “has given language more words, more metaphor, more idiom, than all the world’s armies of pen-wielders”. From happenings in the physical world, some improbably prosaic, such as teak-felling, rubber-tapping, opium production, dolphin migration, sari-weaving and even the anopheles mosquito bearing deadly malaria, Ghosh’s writing draws out poetry, insight and wondrous histories.

Violent legacies

Indeed, a storyteller with a passionate predilection for the uncommon and profound is one of the tragic figures at the heart of Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines. A more tightly woven work than its predecessor, this novel experiments with a narrative form that enables the stories of individuals and families to intersect with the larger stories, both familiar and untold, of nation-States, those epic creations of the modern political imagination. Ghosh’s work is often haunted by the violent intimacies that are the legacy of Partition, legacies which set us apart “from the rest of the world… the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror”. Like the novel’s “upside-down house” where a wall divides a family, “shadow lines” parcel up the subcontinent into nations haunted by a sense of their own fragility. When riots and pogroms occur and neighbours become killers, entire cities change shape overnight. As has been all too evident in places from Ahmedabad and Jaffna to Islamabad and Delhi in recent times, subcontinentals live with “a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood”.
In the face of painful separations, the writer is impelled to seek out those histories of belonging, encounter and common ground that have been erased from our awareness in a world which stresses difference. This search culminates in what some regard as Ghosh’s most wonderfully original work, not a novel, but a unique narrative that is at once a travelogue, a fictional reconstruction, an ethnography and a history. With a deftness that belies its complexity, In an Antique Land juxtaposes disparate centuries and transports us between India, Egypt, England and North America as it pieces together the lives of Ben Yiju and Bomma, a Jewish trader and his South Indian slave. Evoking the rich and unarmed medieval trading cultures of the Indian ocean, it questions the pervasive notion that the way things are today is natural and inevitable. History could, in fact, have taken a very different course for there are many instances of peaceful cultural contact and openness in our heterogeneous past. In an essay, “The Greatest Sorrow”, Ghosh offers an insight that we need to recall each time someone pontificates on the impossibility of, say, Hindu-Muslim or Indian-Pakistani co-existence: “there was nothing inevitable, nothing-predestined about what has happened; that far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once, when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary”. Among the many aspects of our history we have forgotten in the wake of the selective rewritings of it by both imperial and communal historians, are powerful traditions of unassuming tolerance and pacifism. It is the interests of divisive forces, whether Islamists or Hindutvawadis, to facilitate our amnesia in this regard.

Epic sweep

After an engaging and typically complex philosophical foray into science fiction in The Calcutta Chromosome, which won him the Arthur C. Clarke Prize, Ghosh returned to a more traditional, though hardly less challenging, form, the historical novel. Almost unique in its attention to proximate regions beyond the immediate subcontinent, Ghosh’s fictional work is enriched by its roots in his own travels, encounters and research. Some that he describes in the travelogue, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma are incorporated in The Glass Palace, a 500-page magnum opus. Both texts visit regions where the displacements of colonialism and war became the mass experience of millions, generating enormous suffering but also the making of new communities. Palace moves with an epic sweep across the late 19th century to the present-day, knitting together the stories of the doomed last King of Burma and his family, their servant, Dolly, an Indian-Burmese orphan named Rajkumar, and Uma, a widow who becomes a famous participant in the Indian freedom struggle. As it illuminates the links between the histories of India, Burma and Malaysia, the novel reminds us that the texture of history is always to be felt in the complex predicaments of individuals and families.
When Palace was nominated for a Commonwealth Prize, Ghosh famously withdrew the book from consideration, citing not only his unwillingness to participate in the Prize’s selective memorialisation of empire, but also, in its privileging of English, “the exclusion of the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives” of formerly colonised nations. He would return to the theme of empire in Poppies, but language, translation and emotional affinities across linguistic divides preoccupy The Hungry Tide, a novel set in the mangrove swamps and river islands of the Ganges delta, a landscape which resists human colonisation and permanence. The constantly shifting terrain of the Sunderbans provides an extended metaphor for the fluid interaction between different languages, faiths and ways of thinking for “the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into each other they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow”.

Recurring theme

One of the running themes in Ghosh’s work is this: despite the relative newness of capitalism and the violence of the imperialism that put it in place, globalisation in the sense of trade, migration and cultural contact is not itself new. Although European colonialism would constitute a great rupture in the histories of Asia and Africa, out of these often tragic upheavals communities were unmade but also made again. Poppies tells the compelling story of how it is that in the ship Ibis, headed to Caribbean sugar plantations, small new worlds are forged, bringing together North Indian women, Bengali zamindars, black men, rural labourers and Chinese seamen.
Great novels in any language help us inhabit the worlds we live in more intelligently and less obliviously, and to understand how we became who we are. Amitav Ghosh’s work, like that of other major subcontinental writers — Tagore, Premchand, Senapati, Chughtai —is imbued by a deep commitment to humane values. In a world so palpably ravaged by greed and intolerance, this literature is surely no luxury but a necessary reclamation of all that in our heterogeneous culture is valuable, possible and, ultimately, utterly indispensable.

" Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall "

Amit Chaudhuri’s collection of previously published articles is an attempt at an alternative story of modernity.



Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, Amit Chaudhuri, Black Kite, 2008, p. 330, Rs. 395.


Amit Chaudhuri’s new book is not new: it is a collection of random essays and reviews he has been publishing over the last 14 years in journals and periodicals. The sub-title is expansive and elucidatory. But the intention towards “clearing a space for a particular kind of discussion” is specific and pointed. Chaudhuri endeavours to get hold of some kind of a perspective on the Indian English writer’s particular placement within India’s modernity vis-À-vis postcolonial theory, and in the process chart his own space, not as a Rushdie clone but as the offspring of manifold traditions that have scarcely been explored. In this context, marginality — which is a major theme in all issues explored in these pages and which constitutes Chaudhuri’s own experience — is singled out as a trope that has been appropriated completely by postcolonial theorists when speaking of identity. In tracing the advent of modernism in India, these essays laudably try to account for marginality and minoritism in a way which is removed from the regurgitations of contemporary postcolonial theorists.
Well, in a certain way, this is a reprieve because as teachers of English, the connections between English writing in India and the experience of displacement, hybridity and hyphenation issuing out of its colonial past has begun to breed monotony and tedium. We have become exasperated with being tied to an absolute grid. So, Chaudhuri’s “clearing a space” for Indian writers like himself would have to involve the removal of the debris of many an orthodox tradition emerging out of India or having been imposed by the British. The national preoccupation with Salman Rushdie in articulating views about language and identity would also have to take a beating here because Chaudhuri refers to a space Rushdie has not been able to encroach upon. And why not? Indian writing both predates Rushdie and exists side by side with it. Unfortunately, postcolonial studies have not given it much consideration.

Omissions

In their obsession with globalisation and diaspora, postcolonial theorists have neglected globalisation in its other, more important, avatar which may be called “internationalism”, a quality which was present in the work of R.K. Narayan (in spite of never travelling beyond Malgudi) and A.K. Ramanujan, both of whom existed before Rushdie arrived with the big bang Booker. Chaudhuri’s book is thus a plea for “the so-called ‘bhasha’ or Indian language writers” who undoubtedly have suffered because they have been eclipsed by the likes of Salman Rushdie who has been the toast of postcolonial critics.
The space that Chaudhuri tries to map is evidently one that should exist outside the binaries — “East, West; high, low; native, foreign; fantasy, reality; elite, democratic” — almost interstitially. The space is also constituted in an absence, for instance, that of the modernist turn in Indian writing, a turn which was never fully (or even partially) conceptualised because of the importation of the “postcolonial” from the Western academy that tempts us to use a terminology of “native/foreign” or “authentic/derived”, leading us to abandon a trajectory that our own narrative of modernity might have pursued. One would have to point out though that the very idea of interstitial space that Chaudhuri is trying to recover has been usurped by long-time postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha whose concept of hybridity is predicated upon just such a notion of space which does not straddle any binary positions.
Chaudhuri dwells predominantly on kindred Bengali writers, sometimes self-consciously using the collective pronoun “ours” as though they were representative of an entire community of Indians. Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Jibanananda Das and Nirad C. Chaudhuri are his models to explore artfully an inherent self-division which may be the only hallmark of their modernity. But in all fairness, the essay “Poles of Recovery” attempts to dispel his Bengali bent as he embraces O.V. Vijayan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, and A.K. Ramanujan to tell his “alternative story of modernity and modernism”. But when Chaudhuri comes to describe his own individual “turn”, he is at his most eloquent. The story of his conversion from a guitar-strumming youth with a proclivity for Western, elite pop to a mature proponent of the genre of Hindustani classical music is described as a process of “assigning new values to reality —to light, to air, to evening, to morning.” Chaudhuri is finally in sync with his Indian environment. Many would see that as a homecoming, as an end to displacement, ironically, within a mould postcolonial critics would call “native” and “authentic”.
Yet the act of writing in English is a sign of inauthenticity of the Indian author evident in the pattern of questions and answers repeatedly surfacing in conferences and literary festivals: “Which audience do you write for?” and “Are you exoticising India for a Western audience?”’ With these concerns, the essay “The East as a Career” starts merrily enough but Chaudhuri does not maintain the vein of humour here and elsewhere. His essays can be ponderous and turgid for those who cannot engage with the density of his argument about “the aesthetics of estrangement, of foreignness, in art” which works best through defamiliarisation of the commonplace, often taken as exotica.

Reclaiming spaces

And what if these questions were posed to Indian writers of another dispensation, Chaudhuri’s real forbears (though not linguistically), who do not write in English? The questions would be hollow, of course. And so would those writers. For the Western audience would regard Indian writers as meaningfully “Indian” only when the representative Indian ethos they produced in their writing was “plural, garrulous, rambling, lacking a fixed centre” (Rushdiesque, in short) as though “delicacy and nuance”, and even reason, were qualities that had never touched it. Evidently, orientalism persists.
Such are the themes, then, that Chaudhuri explores in the many essays in this compilation. I could perhaps best describe them with the adjectives “earnest”, “erudite” and “elegant” but also call them “inconclusive”, “wordy”, “weighty” (as in the phrase “market-intimate onslaught of Indian writing in English” or in the tendency to use parenthetical references repeatedly) and not at all minimalistic. Without doubt, they would be read and enjoyed by a literary mind that is trained and tutored.

The Tradition, that died. Resurrected, now !

Alameddine resurrects the fading oral tradition in a multimedia-like narrative.



The Hakawati, Rabin Alameddine, Picador, 2008, p.513, £5.99.

Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel Hakawati turns out to be an interesting critique on the art and craft of story telling revealing a writer who is very sensitive to the challenges of a novelist. The genre of the fairytale evolved from the human desire to transcend the ordinariness of daily living by tapping the rich repertoire of individual imagination and every country, community and group has created its own distinctive oral tradition of tales to enthral.
A story teller in the Arab/Lebanese tradition is known as “Hakawati” and his stories of people and places usually draw an impressive audience who gather to listen to him over a cup of tea. Taking off from the magical storytelling experience of a Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has matured into a seasoned hakawati himself in this multimedia-like massive narrative of 513 pages. The evolving nature of contemporary multiculturalism has provided a rich turf for Alameddine to resurrect the fading art of the oral tradition.

Stories within stories

Through the protagonist Osama Al Kharrat’s perspective, Alameddine uses the inset technique of story generating story to enable the confluence of history, legend, myth, folklore, family values or cultural vastness. By narrating his childhood experiences of growing up in war-torn Lebanon, Osama captures the politics of a recent past; while memories of his hakawati grandfather serve to manoeuvre the jumps from the present into the peripheral and uncharted worlds that lie beyond rational experience. The episodic narrative thus encompasses the fantastic tales of Fatima (who meets the most evil person) or the folklores involving fairies, elves, imps, ancient cures, prophecies, the crusades, slaves, kings, magic carpets, the underworld, the earthy, the ethereal the lewd. If the different worlds of the past and present, fact and fiction find a legitimate place in the novel, it is because even the most fantastic elements appeal when they carry an authentic human experience.
Consider his candid acknowledgement at the end: “By nature a story teller is a plagiarist — each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip — is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes with a pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping hot tale.” Such an outspoken exposure of the art and craft of storytelling can be the prerogative of a seasoned storyteller with a sharp insight into the psychology of the listener/reader who is told to trust the tale rather than the teller.
All along are interspersed varied perspectives on how a story can get enriched. Uncle Jihad touches the core of the issue when he says, “You see the story of the story of Baybars is in some ways more interesting. Listen. Contrary to what my father and most people believe, the only true event in the whole story, in all its versions is that the man existed. Everything else has been distorted beyond recognition. Al-Malik al Zahir ruken al Din Baybars al Bunduk Dari al Salihi owes his fame to his talent for public relations without which his reign might have been reduced to a mere historical footnote.” He adds that these days few can discern historical accounts from the stories of the hakawatis and looks at Baybars as a marketing hero who “consolidated his power and created a cult of personality by paying, bribing and forcing an army of hakawatis to promulgate tales of his valour and piety.” The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, no king has learned this lesson.
Retelling well known stories requires dramatisation by the expert storytellers. To meet the demands of a first-person narrative, which is to maintain a matter-of-fact tone when being personal, is not an easy task and Alameddine’s Osama slips occasionally into artificiality as in “I felt foreign to myself. I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.” Yet what matters is the emergence of the complex experience of expatriation and displacement that a typical immigrant (not necessarily from Lebanon) faces.

Deep impact

There is natural ease in his portrayal of the enormous hold of childhood experiences over an adult’s life. The novel reaffirms that a well told story resonates in a myriad ways to effect an unseen and sometimes unrecognised transformation in shaping personality. The rich and picturesque spread of human idiosyncrasies lingers in one’s consciousness long after the story line might have been forgotten. Even apparently casual discussions (such as the one on one’s shoe size) carry insightful comments on human nature and truths. A seemingly simple event like the arrival of the dog Tulip carries a recognisable emotional vibe. Such sharp and subtle moments enable the reader to glimpse the eternal that remains hidden in the ephemeral.

Indianising the World

60 Indian Poets is an anthology marked by benevolence and fairness in its inclusion of near-forgotten and emerging poets.




We need more such objectivity and fairness to nurture Indian poetry in English…

Sixty Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, Penguin India, 2008, p.424, Rs. 499.
Jeet Thayil gave lovers of Indian poetry in English the fine anthology Give the Sea Change, and It Shall Change: Fifty Six Indian Poets (1952-2005), in 2005. The book has now been enlarged and reissued by Bloodaxe books (U.K.) as The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) with 73 poets. It has been reissued again by Penguin India as 60 Indian Poets (2008) after deleting 13 poets. The period between Give the Sea Change and It Shall Change (2005), and 60 Indian Poets (2008) also saw the passing away of poets Revathy Gopal, Santan Rodrigues, and Kersey Katrak. Both Bloodaxe and the Indian Penguin imprints of 2008 are dedicated to 13 Indian English poets who passed away between 1993 and 2007. Agha Shahid Ali, Ruth Vanita, Sujatha Bhatt, and Meena Alexander are among the 13 poets axed from the Bloodaxe anthology to make way for the Penguin edition. And, they are all among our finest poets. The Penguin logic of the deletions is therefore baffling.
Jeet’s wife Shakti Bhatt who worked alongside Jeet to make the anthologies happen, passed away too. The passing away of Shakti Thayil is the saddest part of the story of the three world editions of Contemporary Indian English poetry edited by Jeet Thayil.

Spanning the spectrum

Beginning with Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), the 60 poets end with the youngest ones Mukta Sambrani, Tishani Doshi, and Ravi Shankar (b.1975). Poems by Nissim, Jayanta Mahapatra, and Kamala Das are the often anthologised pieces. Daruwalla is on home ground with his usual laden sweeps that both mark and often mar his poetry. A.K. Ramanujan fascinates. Srinivas Rayaprol connects. With Dom Moraes, there is no doubt that his talent resurfaced along with his cancer. “My voice tells me this.... it’ll come to no great harm.... for the cathedral where its lodging is/ was built far off and should the world get worse/ two friends alone will find it: death and verse” (“Another Weather”). G.S. Sarat Chandra, once almost forgotten, still appears fresh. “My rule of possession is simple. Let each man claim the part of stone/ He throws into the river.” (“Possession”) or, “They need you as much/ When you wish they were away.” (“Friends”). R. Parthasarathy went into near oblivion too, after Rough Passage. His poetry can be intensely nostalgic, deeply South Indian, and replete with effects. “Aunt’s house near Kulittalai, for instance / It often gets its feet wet in the river / and coils of rain hiss and slither on the roof” (“Remembered Village”). New poets as Aimee Nezhukumatathil are interesting discoveries. Aimee can be sublimely erotic. “I knew you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles for it..... one drop lasted all day” (“Small Murders”). Bibhu Padhi is a fine poet. His poetry is often heart-drenched, but always philosophically sublime. “During the first sluggish hours of every morning, a hope is quietly born-/ that I might live on to name/ your unborn son, hold his small voice in mine”(“Grandmother’s Soliloquy”). Vijay Nambisan’s poem “Madras Central” with the lines, “Terrifying to think we have such power to alter our states / order comings and goings ; know where we are not wanted / and carry our unwantedness somewhere else,” remains evergreen .
The “Mumbai poets” are all here. Menka Shivdasani’s “No Man’s Land”: “Which side of the border do you need to go/ how far are the red rivers beneath the sky.../ what do they share in that silent snare/ tucked away inside that leather shoe? or “Spring Cleaning”, “When I want to say hello, I’d rather/ walk up to the graveyard/ with a sweet-smelling bunch of flowers, / look sad and pretend / you are still below the earth” are temptations to indulge in. Ranjit Hoskote appears less obscure. Though represented with long poems as “Footage For A Trance” or “Passing a Ruined Mill”, Hoskote is certainly a lot more compelling in his shorter poems. Anand Thakore has melody in his verse. His poem “What I can get away with” has both tenderness and flow. The lines, “Though your arms have a way of making me small / And your eyes are adept at making me forget” bring in a memory of Ernest Downson. There is Vivek Narayan with his “Three Elegies For Silk Smita”: “She’s the slut/ among white hippies on the beach/ behind the campfire/ hot pants”. (sic). C.P. Surendran’s “Family Court” is a sharp sting. Sadly, some of the others remain just fillers. Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s “Genderole” comes with a headache. But she has quality and shine in poems such as “Usage”: “Before I did, you noticed new lines cut me up/ In the rough contours of an unfamiliar map. / Therefore these minefields are dangerous/ Memory may blow us up like enemies/ strangers”. Imtiaz Dharkar fills us with unexpected wine: “My blood turns round with his/ till we break through into the clearing of his heart and stop, amazed,/ struck by light/ the sight of tables laid, glasses he has filled/,making, dreaming, waking,/ to unexpected wine” (“Dreams”). Eunice De Souza’s poetry instantly binds with the reader. Her poem “She And I” unravels a poignant story with a few lines: “Suddenly at seventy-eight/ she tells me his jokes/ his stories, the names of / paintings he loved/ and of some forgotten place/ where blue flowers fell. / I am afraid/ for her, for myself, / but can say nothing.”

Innate splendour

Prageeta Sharma’s “Birthday Poem” jolts us with the bizarre: “I tell my lover of one week, that there are museums drunk with people”. The poetic effects that we came across in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag pours in his poems. Take “Mid day” for example: “Like a film of dust that’s absorbed the seven colours, quietly the dragon fly, the cut grass, ..../ when I wake the lonely road crumbles before my eyes” or “Sunday”: “And no voice to be heard but the newspaper’s as it crackles peremptorily in an old man’s tangled fingers”. Amit tackles his poems with an accomplished sense of closure which is lacking in the poetry of many of our “established poets”. There is innate splendour in “Mamang Dai”: “If I sit very still/ I think I can join the big mountains/ in their speechless ardour” (“No Dreams”). Leela Gandhi is a worthy poet: “I’ll pay what rent I owe in kind, / behave, keep passion confined/ to small hours, / the darkened stair, / and what gets damaged, lover, I’ll repair” (“Noun”).
Poets such as Prabanjan Mishra, Niranjan Mohanty (who passed away recently), Pritish Nandy, Sunita Jain, or fair representations of the Northeast poets have not appeared in any of the three Jeet Thayil anthologies. One wishes that some of them were there too. The omissions, no doubt, are not on purpose. The Jeet Thayil anthology is notable, inter alia, for its benevolence to poets near forgotten as Lawrence Bantleman, or Gopal Honnalgere. And, Jeet Thayil has been enormously fair. We need more of his kind, and more such objectivity and fairness to nurture Indian poetry in English which is now gaining attention of poetry lovers the world over.
The editor deserves his medals.

What is known as "Teening"

Breaking Dawn celebrates the essence of being 16 without dumbing things down.



Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer, Atom,Rs 550.

Serendipity can sometimes set you on a path to eternal grace. At 16, I kept coming across Dostoevsky’s name in every book I read, and vaguely wondered. Then one day, as I went to my best friend’s house so that we could smoke various illegal substances in her room, I bumped into her journalist father’s bookshelf and one fell out and flattened itself on the floor, cover up. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read it, and it changed my life forever.
Switch to 2008 and a more hi-tech age where bookshelves are virtual, aka Shelfari, and there was talk of something called Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, with fansites proliferating as I browsed. What caught my eye was the gorgeous cover, enticing, provocative, in my favourite colours of black and red. So I bought the book, then New Moon, then Eclipse until I reached the last in the series which has just been launched, Breaking Dawn. What is astonishing is how Meyer got the formula right from the very first book, from the suspenseful prologue and cool chapter titles on, and kept the subsequent flowering of the story at its rhythmically intoxicating pace. It’s as though she opened a vein and let the blood flow in its predetermined path, lighting up all that lay in the way. Apt perhaps, because this is a story about vampires.
It’s a teenage vampire love story, to be precise, written by a young woman who is a Mormon with three children. She also listens to Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance when she can tear herself away from her favourite alternative rock band Muse. What was she doing at 16? Discovering that “holding hands was just…wow.”
Who else could have written the Twilight saga? Bella Swan comes to the rainy town of Forks to live with her father, the town sheriff, after her mother remarries. She goes to the new school and is drawn to a group that sits separately and is noticeable not just for their otherness but their cold beauty. She falls in love with one of them, Edward of the Cullen vampire coven. It’s an extraordinary love, and not physical danger, not bloodlust, not non-vampire suitors can dim its reach. But it’s a love that dare not speak its name, at least as far as sexy details are concerned. You would think that children were immaculately conceived if you believed everything you read, but then again, there is a reason why women think cuddling after the act is more important than the act itself. Bella moves through high school, gets involved in life-threatening situations with rebel vampires, bonds ever more deeply with a werewolf clan, continues cooking for her father and keeping him away from the madness of her life, and in the end discovers that she, too, has a secret gift and it’s not just her courage to live life to the fullest.

Simple truths

Meyer can’t write to save her life, but she can tell a story. (When she shifts track, she fails spectacularly; I would advise no one to buy 2008’s The Host.) She taps into the universal consciousness that, despite everything, believes in goodness and justice for all, just like she does. The key to translating that into book gold was simply achieved by Meyer following her mother’s advice “that love is the best part of any story”. It’s no wonder that the Mills & Boon behemoth can outsell poor Dostoevsky any day. But Meyer doesn’t dumb things down for her reader. The story may be simply told, but it’s not simplistic. Vampires and werewolves, lust and love, eternity and what one does with it are woven in with characters who are real and funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always interesting. Breaking Dawn brings the ends together. Bella’s distaste for weddings doesn’t stop the inevitable from happening; we are relieved that an interlude in Eclipse where Meyer stumbled by diluting the love story is dealt with; motherhood is an unexpected yet moving motif; the vampire hordes that threaten so many lives have a final reckoning, and yes, everyone lives happily ever after. Why not?
Meyer has said that she saw Twilight as a movie before she started writing. It makes perfect sense then that the first instalment will be out in theatres this December. What serendipity again that Robert Pattinson who played Cedric in Harry Potter is Edward. Reviewers have been crying themselves hoarse comparing Meyer to Rowling. The actress who plays Bella is perfect casting. Not pretty and vacuous Alexis Bledel as fans wanted, but the much more inaccessible and darker Kristin Stewart.
Meyer has started work on Midnight Sun after Breaking Dawn, but stopped when it was leaked on the Net; for such a compulsive writer, so clearly in love with her characters, my guess is she’ll start again sooner rather than later, this parallel Twilight from Edward’s perspective.
The secret of Meyer’s success is that she might be thirtysomething, she might have truckloads of children, she might dress like a librarian, but in her heart she will always be 16. Aren’t we all?

Understanding Loss

A story of unsettled lives, narrated with warmth, wit and charm.



My Family and Other Saints,Kirin Narayan, HarperCollins, Rs. 295.

Kirin Narayan’s latest book is, rightly speaking, not a me-moir but a we-moir as she says, being a family saga. Bombay is their home, and they make frequent trips to Nasik where her father owns ancestral properties and her formidable grandmother, Ba, rules over her own little kingdom.
The title intentionally recalls Gerald Durrell’s classic, My Family and Other Animals, for, both books feature “eccentric families living at the crossroads of cultures and hosting lots of guests”. Their unsettled lives, with the unexpected always lurking round the corner, are described with wit and charm. But whereas Durrell’s reverses are comical, Narayan’s story is essentially one of tragic change and loss, lightened by her ready sense of humour and a sharp eye for odd characters and events. The immediacy of her style is her greatest asset. Everything seems to have happened only yesterday, and one cannot imagine that little Kirin, constantly having her leg pulled by her adored older brother, is now 50 years old!
The youthful dreams of Maw, her American mother, and Paw, her Gujarati father, have dissolved all too soon under the strain of divergent interests and unfulfilled responsibilities. Ever since Kirin can remember, the tension between them was an insidious presence. Three of the five children who were closest to each other brightened their lives with their dog and numerous cats, and immersed themselves in books, art and music.

Tragic destinies

Rahoul, six years older than Kirin and her guide and mentor, was other-worldly from childhood, fashioning gods from driftwood, shells, bones or discarded tins found on Juhu beach, their home. There was an inner radiance in him, a restless spirit constantly experimenting “with turning limits into frontiers”. The book begins when, at age 15, he drops out of school to search for a guru, leading the way for the rest of the family excepting sceptical Paw, who drowns his frustrations in the glinting amber of alcohol. It ends when Rahoul dies of AIDS-related complications, a pathetic wreck, blind, emaciated and too weak to stand. Maw and Paw are at his bedside. Paw directs that his big toes be tied together. “It keeps the spirit from wandering”, he says. And so these two, bitterly separated for years, come together in shared sorrow for a last gesture of love to their eldest son.
The author’s poetic sensibility imbues this incident with deep emotive significance, and there are others. Kirin remembers a faraway time when she, the baby of the family, was taught how to walk. Rahoul would stand facing her and swing her up by her hands so that her tiny feet rested on his big ones. He would then walk backward propelling her forward, and this becomes a symbol of their separate destinies.
As a child she follows in his footsteps, visiting ashrams and gurus along with her mother, and bowing before Lakshmi, Ganesh, Patane Devi and a host of other deities. But as she excels at her studies and settles down to a successful future in America, he is fated to move in the opposite direction. Taking to drugs and frequenting gay bars, he is lost beyond recall before his 32nd birthday.
But all is not darkness in this story of a dysfunctional family. There is never a dull moment in their lives, for gregarious Maw keeps open house, and, being artistic herself , is visited by musicians, film makers, Americans passing through; while Rahoul brings in hordes of beatniks, hippies, would-be poets and gurus who often stayed over.
Narayan has a gift for drawing character vignettes in a few deft strokes. There are the swamis — Agram Bagram (topsy- turvy) swami who feeds poor children on recipes concocted from the offerings of his devotees, Cupboard Swami, so-called because that was where he slept, and Rahoul’s favourite Swami Prabhavananda, a tiny, rotund figure with a baby face who never stops smiling. Trained as a civil engineer he had a coveted job with a multinational, but gave it up when he was just 26 to search for a guru. Yet he is never stuffy or preachy, playing cards and carom with the children and giggling unashamedly. Sunny-tempered, always encouraging, “It’s goo-oo-ood”, he would say of their youthful endeavours.

The real heroine

The unintended heroine of the book is Maw, the eternal survivor. As her husband, irreversibly alcoholic, sells the extensive family properties in Nasik, then the Juhu bungalow and the neighbouring one inherited from her mother, she is left impoverished and homeless. With only Kirin to look after, she becomes an art teacher in a boarding school where they can be together, and later joins an ashram. Finally she establishes one of her own in the Kangra foothills. As she moves from one disaster to another her indomitable spirit remains undiminished.
When Kirin calls from America to tell her she is writing her family memoir, Maw is thrilled. “It’s goo-oo-ood”, she warbles across continents and oceans, recalling their beloved Swamiji, now gone, like Rahoul, beyond the grave. In reviewing this book one can only echo her words: “It’s goo-oo-ood”, very good indeed.

Literature ... when authored on colloboration : A Case Study

Literary collaborations seem to have their own fascinating stories to tell.
An antagonism between scholars loyal to either of the writers lingers on to this day even though both Conrad and Ford are long dead. Conrad scholars have long written off Ford as a dunce while Ford loyalists frown at the meanness and manipulation of Conrad.



Collaborative ventures: Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins worked together to produce many bestsellers.

The best kept secret in the literary world may very well be the collaborative authorship of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” that played a significant part in the poet winning the Noble Prize for Literature. While Eliot’s vision in writing this masterpiece cannot be denied; what is not as widely known, however, is the part Ezra Pound played in the creation of this modernist poem with over 400 lines. Pound was Eliot’s mentor and the work is dedicated to him. It was to Pound Eliot took the first and the subsequent drafts and he played a significant role in chiselling the work with his editing and suggestions for improvement. Eliot might have been only returning the favour when he wrote the essay “Tradition and Individual Talent,” by including many of the ideas found in Pound’s poetry thus facilitating a greater understanding of his mentor’s works for scholars and academics in the years to come.

Unlikely collaboration

The mentor-protégé relationship also saw the unlikely collaboration of two 19th century Victorian writers with disparate styles collaborating on two plays and a short story. Charles Dickens, one of the most revered figures in English Literature, had an unlikely disciple in Wilkie Collins Collins’s pen made popular a brand of fiction known as “sensation novels,” a genre that led to the birth of the modern day detective novels. Dickens appointed Collins, Editor of the literary journals he brought out and also got his daughter married to the younger brother of his protégé. “The Frozen Deep” and “No Thoroughfare” the two plays written jointly by them have not lingered on in public consciousness unlike the novels they wrote individually, the plays having met with what one would call a “mixed response” in today’s parlance when they were staged initially. However the first staging of “The Frozen Deep,” that Dickens produced led to the breakdown of his marriage. He met Ellen Ternan, an actress who played a part in the play, and left his wife Catherine for her. Dickens and Collins, on the other hand, remained friends for life.
Not all literary collaborations have run the smooth course of the aforementioned partnerships. Certainly financial need on the part of Joseph Conrad prompted him to make the suggestion of partnering on a novel to Ford Madox Ford. A collaboration that produced two novels and a novella. When they met, the 41-year-old Conrad was almost bankrupt even though he had won a certain literary acclaim for the works he had written before Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. The 24-year-old Ford was prolific having already published children’s stories, a collection of poems, a novel of uncertain merit and his grandfather’s biography. It was their common friend Edward Garnett who encouraged them to come together to write a novel that Ford was struggling with. Conrad proposed what he was to later call “the fatal partnership”, which disintegrated after the two had collaborated on some minor works, much inferior to what each produced individually. There may have been no public falling out between the two but it is clear that there was not much love lost between them either during or after their collaboration. An antagonism between scholars loyal to either of the writers lingers on to this day even though both Conrad and Ford are long dead. Conrad scholars have long written off Ford as a dunce while Ford loyalists frown at the meanness and manipulation of Conrad. Sadly the outputs from their collaboration have nothing to commend them either.
Considering W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood met in school, it’s not surprising their lives ran in such parallel tracks joining them in an intimate relationship that spanned companionship, friendship and love. They seemed to have shared political leanings that veered towards the left and gravitated towards spirituality in their later years. They collaborated on three plays written in verse, even though Auden’s chosen medium was poetry and Isherwood achieved fame with his novels. They may have ended up with different partners towards the end of their lives but their affection appears to have remained undiminished considering they continued to dedicate even some of their later works to each other.

Doomed relationship



No writing collaboration came out of the doomed relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath that led to the latter’s suicide over their troubled marriage. Ironically after her death, Hughes inherited Plath’s estate that was to be administered by his sister who did not get along with Plath during her lifetime. The inheritance enabled Hughes to destroy the last journal written by Plath that allegedly contained her disillusionment with him. But Hughes edited a volume of her Collected Poems and got them published many years after her death.
One of the most fascinating literary collaborations seems to have come about quite by accident. On their visit to Australia, D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife in a guesthouse that was partly owned by an aspiring writer Mollie Skinner. An unlikely friendship seems to have developed between the mature Lawrence and the fledgling Skinner leading to the senior writer taking her under his wings and collaborating on a novel written by her on her brother’s immigrant experience and adding valuable psychological inputs to the book. The novel, The Boy in the Bush, is considered by many to be one of the best written by the controversial writer. Lawrence and Skinner collaborated on another novel that sadly never saw the light of the day.
The chequered literary landscape of Australia has seen many literary partnerships especially among women writers. Perhaps the multiple controversies dotting Australian writers and writing made writers like Marjorie Faith Bernard, Flora Eldershaw, Florence James, Dorothea Mackellar, Ruth Bedford go in for collaborative ventures with each other. However, the first Australian writer to make an international impact Rosa Campbell Praed collaborated with the noted male Irish writer Justin McCarthy on three novels after she immigrated to England from the land of immigrants.
One of the greatest literary hoaxes of all times came about because of a collaboration of sorts in the same land. James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two young and disgruntled Australian poets, were jealous of a fellow poet Max Harris who had got funding to bring out a literary magazine Angry Penguins. They got together one afternoon to pick up random words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Collected Works of William Shakespeare and Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary, to string together a series of poems and mailed it to Harris under the fictitious name of Ern Melley. Not content with the make belief name, they also came up with a story of Ern Melley dying and his sister chancing upon the poems in the attic. It was from this fictitious sister of a fictitious dead man that Harris received the poems by post.

Hoaxes

Needless to say, the gullible upstart who had until then posed as a great patron of good poetry fell for the hoax hook line and sinker, coming as it did with the melodramatic story to back it. He immediately circulated the poems to some of his famous literary friends, all of whom agreed that the modernist poems had great potential and Melley could give his illustrious English peers a run for their money. A special edition of Angry Penguins was rushed out towards the end of the Second World War. The newspapers of the time cottoned on to the hoax soon enough not just destroying Harris’s credibility but also blighting the context of Modern Australian Poetry. For a long time, no Australian with literary aspirations ventured into writing free verse.
Another literary hoax perpetuated by a team of collaborators in the 1960s led to a happier ending of sorts. Mike Mcgrade, a columnist with a New York newspaper Newsday was appalled with the quality of mainstream literature being brought out by American publishers. He convinced two dozen of his colleagues to write a chapter each for a raunchy novel suggestively titled Naked Came the Stranger. The book supposedly written by a bored suburban housewife called Penelope Ashe was about the sexual escapades of a lady working in a radio station. Many of the contributors found their portions returned for rewrite as Mcgrade thought them to be too well written. He also got his sister-in-law to pose as the author. The book sold 20,000 advance copies and offers poured in to acquire the film rights of the book. The hoax being discovered had no impact on the sales of the book that continues to be in print.
Instances of Indians collaboratingin literature are rare. However, one of the best-selling novels about India, Freedom at Midnight, came about due to collaboration between two foreign writers: Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins.
In the present day context, the genre of science fiction has seen many collaborative ventures in print. This is one genre where literary partnerships to tell a story appear to thrive. Save for this field, the individualistic and professional approach of most modern fiction writers does not seem to lend itself to collaborative endeavours.

All that was Beautifull

Ali left behind a world of colour and textures that will inspire generations to come.



Ali’s World; Badal and Swapna Mukhopadhyay, Roli Books, New Delhi.

Crises happen in everyone’s life, but it is given to a few to transform them into opportunities for discovery of beauty and meaning. I found Ali’s World to be a unique step in this direction as it will help parents to think positively. Badal and Swapna Mukhopadhyay, Ali’s parents and the authors, have used their positive approach to gather the unique, creative experiences of young Ali.
Ali’s World is a collection of Ali’s drawings, paintings, and sketches, serigraphs that he produced within his short life. The book is a transparent flow of his expressions and creatively communicates what he has experienced. Ali’s integration of line, form, colour and textures builds subtle bridges between one’s inner self and the outer world.

Unique space

Ali’s mother realised that he had evolved a unique artistic space for himself, though she was initially apprehensive. She says, “As a child grows up, he learns automatically to protect himself from undue physical harm. Through the years that Ali was growing up, I would be paralysed with fear for him because he seemed to have no sense of fear that would, ordinarily act as a deterrent to harming himself. Over the years I realised that he was not going to change: that it was me who would have to learn to live with it, and I did…to the best of my ability.”
Ali was not interested in reading books but he was extremely good with his hands. His teachers in Shiv Niketan, aunty Gauba and her team of teachers helped him in exploring his inner space. Ali’s statements: “A dream is a dream and I feel it needs no definition — Neither does a painting. After all, it’s a feeling, an expression — the rest is for you to see” makes it clear that he left us all a space for enquiry.
Ali was basically spontaneous, friendly, outgoing, generous, a young person who truly had a vibrant social presence. He used to invite and share with people who belonged to different walks of life.
When Ali found that he had aesthetic inclinations, he met Gopi Gajwani, a well-known artist. Ali asked him “What if I turn out to be a third-rate artist?” Gajwani shot back, “What if you turn out to be a third rate historian? Think of what you would like to do and let the future take its own course.” Ali then chose the Delhi College of Art.
His non-acceptance of systems helped his creativity acquire a different dimension. An expressionist, he successfully began his journey towards textural rhythm, which created order from disorder. In every painting he had been exploring different kinds of textural and formal variation, with a strong compositional value. His style remains unique. The spontaneous linear variation in his composition is added to through his bold and vibrant colour presence.

Beyond familiarity

Ali’s conscious understanding of thought beyond familiarity strongly deserves appreciation. We see evidence of his unique design and composition in works such as “The Skull”, “Jimie Boy”, “The Puppies”, “Untitled” (from Goa sketch pad), “The Train Derailed” and many other untitled compositions. “ Doctor ”(a portrait) a sculptural entity with textural variation, and, “ Durga in Pather Panchali” gave a unique sense of perspective.
His mother named him “Arpan” an offering to God, but his father named him Ali, after the only person he hero-worshipped in the United States.
The book concludes with a verse from Mohammed Adil: “The painting lies unfinished/A few brush strokes on a half-filled canvas/From he who has crossed the twilight/ More colours on his palette than a rainbow can hold/Coaxed and charmed into … what?/The frozen image of a passing thought?/In searing flames now lies asleep/Pray to the world his soul to keep/‘Ali’, God’s chosen one now lies/As ‘Arpan’, an offering to the skies.” Mohammed Adil, January 28, 1999.

Adults Only !

Antony’s writing style is refreshing precisely because she has absolutely no interest in ‘feel good’ presentations.



Seance on a sunday afternoon; Shinie Antony, Rupa and Co., Rs. 195.

There are 22 short stories in Shinie Antony’s Seance on a Sunday Afternoon, but for some curious reason, poetical or mathematical, they are interesting from No 12 onwards. The first 11 sound like verse elongated to prose, which is not to say that Antony’s poetry is dull or out of tune. Indeed, some of it is exquisite. It is just to point out the oddity of iambic in a short story.
Take No. 3, a story called “Opposites”. It is the outline of a woman’s life; adolescence, boys, college, affairs, men, more men, married men and so on. There is a meter to the writing, a rhythm that keeps you reading but makes you lose the plot.
Yet Shinie Antony is a gifted writer because four stories in this anthology are unforgettable. The first is the story in the title, “Seance on a Sunday Afternoon” about a man who wakes up one Sunday afternoon and contemplates suicide, but postpones it by a week to Sunday next, because, after all, what is one week between life and death. And why does he want to kill himself? The first sentence of the story is explicit: “Rontu (pet name) Mukherjee’s girlfriend had told him what she had been trying to say all of last month by not calling him, by not calling him back, by not being free to meet, by forgetting to meet, by standing him up because of a million other, more pressing engagements — fuck off!”

Auditory quality

There is an auditory quality to Antony’s language and when the reading is rough it expresses the pain and passion of broken hearts, of how cruel people can be to those that they once loved and maybe still love. She wants to tell us that a broken heart is actually a broken heart, not an empty metaphor, but a grievous wound to one’s persona. She wants to tell us that a mind has no delete button to remove memories of love and passion and there is no such thing as ‘getting over it’, that that is an empty metaphor too, because a wound might heal but the scar remains, the gestures remain, the words remain, the smell remains, nothing can ever be erased.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the finest story is “Tapioca Nights”. It is about a woman in Mumbai whose lover has left her for a younger woman and, though the metropolis is huge, she is terrified of bumping into him by accident. She wants to be calm, nonchalant, indifferent when that inevitable meeting takes place because meet they will. And so it does. Some idiot back from the U.S. and not brought up to date on their break-up, books her and her ex on the same night for dinner. She finds out, too late, in the taxi, on the way to the restaurant.
The dinner goes well until the NRI idiot says that he will be back in India for their wedding. After a moments awkward silence the ex comes up with this response: “Marriage is such a redundant institution.” Her well rehearsed equanimity, her poise, her calm, is replaced in a nanosecond by a wild and uncontrollable rage and she lets it all go: “Yeah, better to fuck around”. They had given themselves away, says Antony, “in a time honoured way. With bitterness and brutality”.
Two other stories, “My Second Suicide” and “The Rent”, share the same viciousness towards the insensitivity of middle class morality. She shows us the meanness of spirit of a society that wants to suffocate romance, sexuality, friendship, passion and lust for no good reason. When you kill desire to maintain the status quo, you kill the spirit of life, she seems to say.

Focus on women

In particular Shinie Antony’s stories are populated by women who see themselves as failures. Many of them are older women losing out in love, being reminded of their age, not wanting to have children, going through a miscarriage and generally being thoroughly unhappy.
It is not a feminist angst, a rage against uncaring men, but something more like a distaste for being a woman, for being born the tough and unpleasant half of the human reproductive system.
Antony’s writing style is refreshing precisely because she has absolutely no interest in the ‘feel good’ presentations of a host of Indian writers busy interpreting middle class Indian virtues and vices to an Anglo-American readership across the seven seas. She seems to have enough trouble understanding herself. In a telling line in “My Second Suicide” the woman who attempts suicide says: “It is the spectre of this non-negotiable past that hangs between me and anyone who tries to read me.” Touche.

Sunny Days

Stories of growing up, urbane in style and retrospective in tone.



Crows & Other Stories;Kamalakanta Mohapatra, Translated from Oriya by Leelawati Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre. Rupa & Co., Rs. 295.

With a cover design and a title that echoes Hitchcock’s “Birds”, this book of short stories translated from Oriya looks dressed to kill. And kill it does when perused. Not kill with cruelty or kindness, mind you, but with anticipation and longing, especially of the type associated with forms of childhood and adolescent awakening.
Explorations of self and surroundings by a boy named Sasank form the core of six out of seven stories in the volume. These are many-sided and, though delivered in a wry, playful and irreverent tone, they are always engaged and have an air of authenticity.

Rite of passage

Sasank’s pre-teen and teen years are in focus in five stories, while the title story “Crows” features an adult Sasank with the inevitable adult entanglements in the form of marriage and the eternal tug of war between mother and wife, delicately symbolised by a trapped crow. One story, “The Whore: A Love Story”, is the odd one out in this Sasank series. But it is perhaps not too fanciful to imagine the lover of kink and kitsch, Ghana, as the bohemian other of a Sasank suffocating, as in the title story, in the empty rituals and rigmaroles of civilised intercourse.
This brings me back to the five “rites of passage” stories with their colourful evocations of growing up in the Oriya villages and towns, small and big, in the 1960s. The opening story “The Thief” strikes the keynote to the volume (this happens to be the title story of the volume in the Oriya original) by using the child’s view to probe into the socialisation process that unfolds in schools.
Sasank’s unusual interest in books that are not school texts, admittedly compulsive enough to make him something of a kleptomaniac in respect of story books and fountain pens, earns him the demeaning label of thief from the school headmaster. The story shows the ignorance of educators about child psychology and also explains, by implication, the propensity of such misunderstood children towards delinquency.

Pushing boundaries

For the time being, of course, and, at the time and stage of life Sasank is in such delinquency is pure fun. For the real lessons of life, lessons that are social, ecological, sexual and linguistic are gained through such rough passages, through such playful pushing of boundaries.
In two fine stories, “A Funeral Feast” and “Love Letters” Mahendra, a village boy a couple of years Sasank’s senior, plays Steerforth to Sasank’s David, guiding him through these lessons, but reversing the flow from village to town, thereby handing it to the village.
A passage from the former story, listing these lessons, shows how as well as the writer’s secure grasp of the village scenario in coastal Orissa in the 1960s : “sifting mud for fish and keeping them alive in bottles; digging for earthworms and sliding them over a hook; holding one’s breath, swimming underwater and coming up for air between the legs of the bathing beauties who congregated at Mohanty Pond, wet sarees clinging to their hills and hollows; going out to the middle of the fields for a high noon crap; putting your shorts over your head and whirling like a dervish; tying up the hind legs of Padana’s nanny goat and milking it; …”.
When it comes to language, village’s supremacy over town in these stories is, of course, unquestioned, as Sasank learns to his delight and amazement: “Of the many lessons of the summer, the most interesting was the four-letter word-fest, khadamara, seizing upon any loose monosyllabic response of the opponent and delivering a resounding obscenity to rhyme with it. Sasank was already looking forward to flooring his town friends with this new weapon after the holidays”.
And, of course, it is in the densely webbed space of the village that Sasank learns about the oppressive rituals of caste and wakes up to his own ambiguous sexuality, as in “The Witch” and “Love Letters” in particular.
These stories of growing up, urbane in style and retrospective in tone, are a great read. If one will have any quarrel with these, it is on account of these being cast in the mould of a male bildungsroman which denies agency to the woman (except as a seducer, as in “The Witch”). Full marks to the translators, however, for preserving, through their collaboration, the layered nature of KK’s writing by opting for the right mix of Oriyanising and Englishing.

Negotiating with the Past

The book illustrates the author’s act of negotiation with the dominant patriarchal order of the time to have her voice heard.



An Unfinished Song; Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal, edited with an Introduction by C. Vijayasree, Oxford University Press, Rs. 395.

As part of its Classic Reissue series, Oxford University Press has come out with a new edition of Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal’s An Unfinished Song with an introduction by C. Vijayasree. The novel was first published in Bengali in 1898 under the title Kahake (To Whom?) and was later translated by the author into English.
As the first Bengali woman novelist, Swarnakumari was an important figure in Bengali literature and a participant in the discourses of social reform and nationalism in 19th century India. Her participation however, was bedevilled by a forced ambivalence.

Critique of social issues

As a woman novelist she had to manoeuvre the dominant patriarchal order of the time to have her voice heard.
An Unfinished Song perfectly illustrates this act of negotiation. In the novel, the outward form of a love story becomes the Trojan Horse through which she smuggles her critique of contemporary social issues into the public domain — whether it be about the Age of Consent controversy, women’s education, the freedom to choose a spouse, the neglect of vernacular languages or the right attitude to the West.
As a novel, An Unfinished Song features the usual ingredients of a romance — love, separation, misunderstanding, coincidences and an unexpected ending.
The simple plot revolves around the love life of the narrator Mrinaline or Moni as she is also known. It begins when as a child she develops a deep attachment for her classmate Chotu. Her affection gets mingled in her memory with the haunting refrains of an unfinished song that she had heard him sing.
Years later, when as a young woman she hears the same song sung by Romanath, her brother-in-law’s friend, she feels strongly drawn to him. However, she decides to break up with him after learning of his aborted affair with an English girl. This break-up, and the fact that she was still unmarried at the age of 19, makes her and her family the object of social censure. Moni is left distraught.
At such a time Dr. Binoy Krishna enters her life as the physician who nurses her back to health. His gentleness, nobility and tenderness win her heart. Yet, just when she thinks she has found the love of her life, her father announces that she is to be married to Chotu.
With her heart intent on Dr. Krishna, this news comes as a new blow to her. The crisis is resolved through a happy contrivance at the end of the plot where Chotu and Dr. Krishna are revealed to be the same person.
On Moni’s sensitive soul, Swarnakumari traces the evolution of human love. It begins with a child’s infantile and possessive attachment to her parents, reaches it peak with the passionate devotion of youth between the lover and the beloved where there is both the desire to sacrifice as well as the need to see love reciprocated and it finally attains maturity when “the heart learns . . . to yearn after the supreme ideal.”

Feminist stand

Her meditations on love are moulded by her feminist stand. She sees love as being intrinsic to feminine nature. “There is always the desire in the female breast to make another happy by self-abnegation, for love is woman’s whole nature, its desires and aspirations her lifeblood.”
While she advocates the complete self surrender of wife to husband, she demands that this devotion be mutual. Her vision of the ideal marriage combines, as Vijayasree observes “the virtues of the Western companionate marriage with the sacredness of the traditional Indian marriage.”
To the present-day reader the world of 19th century elite Bengali society described in the novel — where couples fall hopelessly in love with no more than a few words and glances exchanged — would seem quaint.
Vijayasree’s scholarly yet accessible introduction helps bridge this gap by locating the novel and its author in their proper historical and ideological perspective.

Across the borders

Two different voices and settings make compellingly honest reading.



Kaveri’s Children by Shankar Ram; At the Cusp of Ages by Vaasanthi; Indian Writing, Rs. 100 and Rs. 200.


Thomas Hardy chose to open his novel The Return of the Native with an entire chapter describing the broody landscape of Egdon Heath. Many modern day readers must doubtless feel a sense of relief when they get to the second chapter of that novel for that is when they even begin to meet characters in crisis.
Yet, Hardy and many other writers understood well that a thorough sense of place and a careful detailing of spaces could be one of the most effective ways of revealing character. Think of the people of Malgudi, that fictional universe embedded in our literary imagination.
The stories in Shankar Ram’s collection Kaveri’s Children, edited by William Jackson and published by Indian Writing, are an equally fine example of the literature of place. Place seeps into human behaviour in fluid, subtle ways and Shankar Ram, (the pen name of T.L. Natesan) sees this with great clarity.
Shankar Ram’s stories were first published in book form in 1926 (The Children of the Kaveri) and 1932 (Creatures All) by A.N. Purnah of Madras. Their re-discovery is a story that editor William Jackson, who happened upon them while teaching Asian fiction at Indiana University, tells us. Co-incidentally, the Thanjavur district, which forms the backdrop for Shankar Ram’s tales, was a part of South India that Jackson had come to love thanks to his own explorations of the work of the composer Thyagaraja.

Quirky characters

The 11 stories in Kaveri’s Children are about life in early 20th century rural Tamil Nadu. Set in the Thanjavur district, the Cauvery landscape, they take us back in time, placing before us quirky characters like Achanna whose long-standing feud with Venkatasawamy ends in surprise; Sooriah, the reclusive mad man who heals animals with medicinal plants; and Narayanan, the young boy with his passion for playing the flute.
Understated and laconic, Shankar Ram is essentially a story-teller. No elaborate literary gimmicks, just pure story which often comes to us O’ Henry-like, with twists and turns. Shankar Ram cares about his characters, their peculiar obsessions, their little eccentricities. Sometimes the sharpness of the twists and turns and the obviousness of the surprise endings are a bit tedious. The stories never slacken in pace though and landscape is really an aid to portraying character, not an end in itself.
The fictional voice of contemporary Tamil writer Vaasanthi is quite different from Shankar Ram’s. There is an urgency in the way Vaasanthi views the world. Hers is a voice that is thoroughly modern. In her novel Yugasandhi or At the Cusp of Ages (translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman), character takes centre stage. Unlike Shankar Ram’s characters who are strongly rooted in a rural landscape, Vaasanthi’s characters are largely urban.

Family saga



A crisscrossing narrative of many betrayals, At the Cusp of Ages is a family saga that spans three generation of women: Meenakshi, her daughters-in-law Clara and Shakeela, and her grand-daughter Gayatri. Meenakshi has passively accepted her husband’s infidelity because, for her, “food, clothes and a place to stay were highly essential, honour and self-esteem follow way behind”. Clara, Meenakshi’s Polish daughter-in-law, is twice betrayed — first time her husband who leaves her for another woman and the second time by Meenakshi who abandons her and follows her son instead. Gayatri, Clara’s daughter, is a journalist who attempts to make sense of the chaos that follows her father’s infidelity and her mother’s decision to return to Poland. Viewed through a feminist lens, this is another novel in which the personal is really the political.
Much happens in the novel and there is an interesting mix of perspectives, the pace as quick as that of a Dan Brown novel. The occasional slowing down happens when the writer begins to tell and interpret rather than show. There are entire passages, for instance, where a character reflects on what has come to pass. This has the effect not only of suddenly slowing down the narrative, but also of making the narration somewhat self-conscious.
One instance is Gayatri looking back on the break up of her parents’ marriage: “Could there be anything more senseless than what happened to amma? It must have had its beginning at her parent’s very first meeting. Without either of them being aware of it, this seed must have nurtured itself — as Amma had claimed — in the air-conditioned offices of multinational corporations along the main roads of their city and grown to monstrous proportions, before it confronted them one day. When Appa told Amma — like Kulbhushan Kharbanda had announced to Shabana Azmi in the movie, Arth — “We can’t live together anymore”, there was no unreal theatricality in it, as happened in a movie, only a combination of plain cruelty and ruthless arrogance…” (50).
Vaasanthi’s truth is direct, swift and ruthless. It is also a truth which does not allow for grey areas, for the challenge of the unspoken. But as a piece of writing, At the Cusp of Ages is compellingly honest.

Metro-Politinism : Rise of the Cult

What remains with us at the end is the image of the complex, amoral Delhi which attracts and repels at the same time.
Families at Home, Reeti Gadekar, HarperCollins, p.266, Rs.295.



With the national media having milked the yet unsolved Aarushi Talwar murder case for all it was worth to feed the voyeur in us, there’s no reason why Families at Home shouldn’t do brisk business. Coincidentally, its pl ot takes off from the unnatural death of Saudamini Talwar, the youngest offspring of a wealthy and influential old Delhi family. In fact, had the impending launch of Reeti Gadekar’s debut novel not already been news before the Noida tragedy hit the headlines, the timing of its release might well have led to the inevitable speculation and explained the haste with which this book appears to have been put together. For, editorial lapses recur with distressing frequency and even include a discrepancy in the murder victim’s age (she’s 23 on Page 17 and 27 on Page 22).
As you delve deeper into the novel, the doubts, unfortunately, linger. You wonder, for instance, why it has been described as “a work of humorous crime fiction”. Firstly, it isn’t particularly funny, unless you consider the savage digs that Gadekar’s main protagonist, the determinedly cynical Additional Commissioner of Police Nikhil Juneja, reserves for the world in general and his friends, family and colleagues in particular. Families is, in fact, dark, even melancholy. Secondly, the specific crime that serves as the novel’s reference point is no more than a fragile thread running through the narrative. The investigation Juneja conducts — in between his relentless partying, scheming and deeply pessimistic reflections on life — with an eye to its predetermined outcome is constrained by circumstances and, therefore, half-hearted, the red herrings the author throws our way unconvincing. Even the denouement is too nuanced to leave an impact. Where, you wonder wistfully, is the tautness, the spine-chilling urgency of absorbing crime fiction, the driven protagonists and the withheld breath with which the final, suspense-packed pages are turned?

Redeeming qualities

But in all fairness to its author, Families does have other things to offer: the “bigger story”, as Gadekar herself puts it, which is “about how different people have access to different kinds of justice” and others, including the “deceased”, have none at all. It follows that the novel also deals with the various kinds of crime, of commission and omission, of collusion and complicity that human beings are prone to, whether they happen to be the pillars of society or its dregs and their motivation is greed, malice or survival.
This complex, amoral world is an appropriate canvas for the author’s delineation of an inherently corrupt police force and, particularly of her central character, the bachelor-cop who abhors respectable women and the very concept of marriage and children with a vengeance. Despite his estrangement from his family (“Punjabi, rich, conservative…”), Juneja has no compunctions about enjoying the benefits of the “silent” money transfers into his bank account that his wealthy father arranges for him. Nor does he have any qualms about screwing the very cronies he seems to spend so much time with. And his unrelenting bitterness can be exhausting, with nothing in his past or present to justify its intensity. Gadekar’s painstaking efforts to lend authenticity to her anti-hero are well-intentioned, but our inability to engage with an individual who comes across as a singularly unappealing bastard can be a bit of a problem, particularly when the novel rides on his shoulders.
It is clear that the author meant K. Joseph, Juneja’s subordinate, to serve as a foil, but while this “benign, imbecilic” and uncompromisingly honest cop is endearing, even as he gets on his ACP’s nerves and exasperates his colleagues in equal measure, because unlike their morally ambivalent selves, “he does not adjust”, the contrast he presents to the darker shades in which his superior is painted is way too stark. Gadekar does offer some engaging cameos, though, of Joint Commissioner Gupta, the obsequious Sinha and brutal Sajjan Kumar and the silently ironical Diwan Singh, Juneja’s family retainer and “boss” rolled into one.

Poignant depiction

Where the author truly scores is in her poignant depiction of Delhi in the 1990s. As her characters brood on its moments of beauty and pathos, its killing heat, infernal noise and terrifying aggression that perennially threatens to explode into violence, its potential for minor joys and major heartbreaks and the singular talent of its inhabitants for circumventing rules, subverting justice and corrupting every single good intention known to man, what gradually emerges is a vivid image of a metropolis that we greet with a shock of recognition, carp endlessly about and are irresistibly drawn to, lured by the power of its venal charm.
Yet, as the novel draws to a close, the sense of being let down is overwhelming. It makes you wonder whether this has something to do with unfulfilled expectations. Families was, after all, short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007.

An Obstacle ... ?

An excellent collection that looks at the purdah as an object of mystery, oppression and power.



The veil remains an intriguing and often abused aspect of Eastern culture and politics. It is the single most complex symbol that stands between empowerment and oppression, between the Western woman and her Eastern counterpart.
The veil makes an ambivalent statement: even as it is a sign of women’s enslavement, it is also a custom firmly entrenched in the female psyche. Laj or sharm, intrinsic to the practice, persist because of connotations of “honour” in their observance. Many women go further and choose to veil themselves as a sign of Islamic defiance to the rapid embrace of globalisation and Westernisation, thereby pushing aside Edward Said’s theories of Orientalism to the wilderness. Haleh Afshar has famously written about the way in which the veil gives deliverance from the beauty myth, in a celebration of invisibility.

Socio-political aspects

By far, the most interesting section of The Veil is the one focusing on its socio-political aspects. Here this item of clothing is exposed in all its regressive aspects. The “now-on-now-off” quality of the veil in West Asia has been done to death by the politics of power and subordination controlled by the West. If the imposition of the veil has elicited protest, then the ban on veiling has sent girls in France and Spain to courts demanding the right to go to school with their heads covered. The clarion call for the “liberation” of West Asian women has, in fact, pushed Muslim women in the direction of cover and clothing. It is in this mood that women of Turkey, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia insist that war, poverty, illiteracy, starvation and globalisation are the greatest adversaries of women’s rights, not the veil: “women who veil are by no means mute ghosts. Many are educated, feminist elite, putting the lie to those who wish to equate veiling with complete lack of self-determination”. But the dominant world view about hijab, says Mohja Kahf, is: “poor oppressed Muslim woman, forced to veil. Here come Americans to free her from this tragic victimhood”.
There are chapters concerned with the equation of the veil with devotion. Veiling is part of religions other than Islam such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and even Christianity where surrender to God is thus inculcated. Here goddesses and priestesses are veiled as much as sacred objects and icons: the tabernacle at Mt. Sinai, the Ka’aba which is the holiest shrine at Mecca, statues of the Virgin Mary are supreme instances. The veil becomes a symbol of wisdom and, as shown by Desiree Koslin in her analysis of the veiling of Christian nuns, also a means of distinction between the sacred and the profane.
A third category is the esoteric qualities of the veil. As a positive connotation, no doubt, the veil is seen here through an Orientalist gaze, as possessing an old-world charm, exotic and mystical. Michelle Auerbach finds the veil in the Judaic tradition to be a symbol of religion, not gender, and even as she rebels against an all-women gathering at the synagogue, she comes to terms with the significance of covering the body. Rita Stephan, an Arab Christian, discovers the pleasures of veiling in Syria, which controls the fitna — both beauty and chaos — of women, a kind of mystique lost in the U.S.
Interestingly, whatever the name of this garment, it has a different meaning when men wear it. For men, it becomes the mask of Zorro, that ultimate romantic masculine symbol of the outlaw; it is also a means of hiding identity and protection from authority. But the question remains: why is the veil considered to be oppressive for women but macho when men wear it?
There is also a related question: is the banning of veiling or unveiling a reflection of the way the West perceives Islam and its male practitioners? This tug-of-war raises a deeper philosophical issue of the use of women’s bodies as signs of male triumphalism. The ideology of liberalism or orthodoxy, at any given period of history, is mapped, in the words of Maliha Masood, by “the dialectics of a muslim woman’s head”.

A symbol of power too

But at times, though rarely, the veil can also be a symbol of power. It allows women to beat the masculine gaze and, by default, turn themselves into the ones who inspect.
Jennifer Heath’s excellent collection of essays introduces purdah as a three-dimensional symbol of mystery, power and oppression. As Maliha Masood puts it: “My hijab gave me refuge from prying stares and possibly averted more serious dangers. It adopted me at subway stations and rejected me in trendy cafés. It has kept me warm on cold winter nights, it has wowed, titillated, and amazed, and it has also made me laugh, dance, sulk, and complain. As with most relationships, my hijab and I have had our spats and dramas. These days, we’re in a mellow groove, content to leave each other alone, but always on the lookout for a rousing debate”. The veil, in sum, can be whatever one wants it to be.