Mr. Kelvin Philip's Web Log

And, the Nobel Goes To ....

2008-11-29T21:11:00.000-08:00

Writing for Le Clézio is an examination of his relationship to everyday things. Truly a global citizen, his work mirrors the contemporary world of movement across borders, with all its tensions and undercurrents.

Writing the transcultural experience: J.M.G. Le Clézio.

Border crossing is in his blood. In the 18th century, his ancestors had moved from Brittany to Mauritius. He studied in England and then taught in Bangkok, Boston and Mexico City. An Anglo-French parentage embroiled him yet again in the history of mi scegenation that would weave itself into the cosmopolitan texture of his fiction, covering diverse thematic concerns from alienation with crass consumerism to endeavouring to find a home in Mexico, Panama or Mauritius where his true roots lie. He has always aspired to find fulfilment in the rural landscape as opposed to the viciousness of the capitalised crudeness of the so-called notion of progress. Third world collides in his fiction with the Western culture, producing a narrative of migrancy, befitting a contemporary world of movement across borders from Central America to North Africa, from Mexico to Thailand, of “a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation” as described by the Swedish Academy when deciding to award the Nobel prize for literature to the 68-year-old French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

Across boundaries

Le Clézio’s theory of fiction cuts across class and national affiliations and moves towards a narrative that relates to humanity at large, unlike the contemporary fiction written in the U.S. that limits itself to the narrow space of its country of origin, an accusation made by Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, who shot off indiscreetly in support of the advanced literary traditions of Europe that have resulted in innumerable Nobel prizes going to Europeans. This parochial view has irked writers across the Atlantic who have argued in favour of the international complexion of the prize as well as individual merit as the criteria of winning the award without any racial prejudice. It must be kept in mind that creative output and theoretical and critical enthusiasm has always close links with the ongoing cultural growth, an innate critical self-awareness of history and local reality being the source of all efforts towards political, economic and cultural revolution where one country or race cannot claim any dominance.
The Prix Larbaud in 1972 and the Grand Prix Jean Giono in 1997, along with a number of other honours, have lent Le Clézio’s chequered career a distinguished place in the world of French letters for his “new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy”. He has written almost 30 novels, out of which 12 have been translated into English. His first published novel, Le Procès-verbal (1963), was remarkable for its stylistic and bold innovation . Le Déluge (1966), La Guerre (1970), and Les Géants (1973) and L’Extase matérielle (1967) took the world of material progress by the scruff of its neck and elaborated on the idea of confrontation between city and country. As he remarked in an interview, “When I write, I am primarily trying to translate my relationship to the everyday, to events. We live in a troubled era in which we are bombarded by a chaos of ideas and images. The role of literature today is perhaps to echo this chaos.”

Widely admired

Le Clézio is one of the most admired writers living in France today. Though not many have heard of him in the English-speaking world, it is about time that contemporary students of literature begin to get involved in other non-canonical authors like Orhan Pamuk or Naguib Mahfouz, who tend to involve the reader in politics and history outside Europe and who have rightly deserved the Nobel Prize. In recent times, there has been a shift to comparative world literature, but it would be a rewarding experience to introduce authors who remain on the periphery. It is therefore, likely that an international award can succeed in bringing unknown writers from around the world within the canon, thus helping in setting some seismic cross-currents in the area of literary taste. Continuity or obsession with tradition or nativism often borders on a neo-Nazi right-wing stance that often boils down to becoming a cult. Confidence and experimentalism are two qualities that Le Clézio possesses which have enabled him to almost take on the persona of a “loose canon” that refuses to rest with a single idea or one location. He thus moves across space in a multilayered landscape that allows him a three dimensional involvement in wide-ranging matters of human concern. Le Clézio broke new grounds with his Desert (1980), a novel the Swedish Academy emphasised had “magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.” A woman abandons her desert land and moves into the decadent milieu of French urbanity. In his more recent work he has involved himself with the art of film as in Ballaciner (2007) or in children’s fiction as in Lullaby (1980) and Balaabilou (1985). His versatility is obvious in his enthusiasm for working his many novels around the theme of ecology as in Fever (1966), The Flood (1967) and Terra Amata (1969).

Necessary dialogues

Le Clézio’s transcultural experience is so necessary for a healthy dialogue between nations, bringing different cultures together, which make the rich human culture even richer and endorses integration. The bonds of ethnicity and “lost culture” which hold together the peoples of this world are more enduring than the barriers of political prejudice. To counter the self-insulation of cultures from the larger and more varied political realities of our time he sees the need to address issues in the real world. Cultures renew and renovate themselves only if they contain people for whom intellectual freedom matters.

Room for everyone

Continuity blends with change, tradition with modernity. There is room here for all faiths, all languages, all people. And dialogue across cultures becomes a civilising and a humanising agency of valuable social consciousness, thereby enhancing the idea of an international community with wider social concerns and effects. In a cosmopolitan, diasporic set-up, there is the urgency to leap the fences of a narrow nationalism, overcoming any racial antagonism. Today’s world of globalisation is symptomatic of shifting ethnic and cultural contours where expatriate aloofness has to give way to plural cultural affinities and a common vocabulary of a global literary community belonging to many nations. Within this context, Le Clézio’s project does not remain limited to the culture in which he is located, stepping as he does outside his culture to experience and understand other cultures, especially that of the native Americans. A free thinker is indeed an itinerant scholar, not a celebrant of any one cultural identity.
Le Clézio’s work envisages an environment of intellectual fellowship and cultural enrichment for a wider universal community. It is here that all narrow barriers are broken to pursue the vision of a single world. It is the celebration of diversity and transcultural activities such as these that sustain literary art and new spiritual realities. He would readily agree with Orhan Pamuk who says, “The history of the novel is the history of human liberation: by putting ourselves in others’ shoes, by using our imagination to free ourselves from our own identities, we are able to set ourselves free.”

Freedoms of movement

It is clear that Le Clézio works under structural and ideological regulations self imposed with a creativity that is based inherently on compassion, solidarity and the yearning for freedom of movement. He exists in a universal space bound neither by national boundaries nor by ethnic identity and is protean for he does not linger on any one theme or one single narrative technique. He experiences the wonderful lightness of being as well as the inherent tensions between the world that has gone by and the onslaught of the new scourge of global capitalism. Le Clézio will be admired by many in the years to come for his novels and essays and their thematic concerns of “memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict.” Undoubtedly, he has played a fundamental role in an attempt to fashion a contemporary French tradition and revitalise the French novel.

The Story of Bravery

2008-11-29T20:58:00.000-08:00

Sarna captures well the pathos and humiliation of Duleep Singh growing up in a world of betrayals and turmoil.

The Exile, Navtej Sarna, Penguin/Viking, p.251, Rs. 450.

The Exile, by Navtej Sarna, is a very readable, indeed interesting novel on Duleep Singh, the last legitimate Maharaja of Punjab and son of Ranjit Singh, whose life was the stuff of legends. Unlike his warrior father, Duleep grew up amidst uncertainty and fear, both political and personal. He was five years old when he ascended the throne in 1839 on his father’s death.
The Lahore Court of the Child Sikh Maharaja was rife with intrigue. It was his wise mother Jindan Kaur who had managed his succession and along with a few trusted advisors tried gallantly to fight off the British on the one hand and murderous pretenders to the throne on the other. It was, however, a losing battle from the beginning.
Ranjit Singh, through bravery and wile, managed to conquer Punjab and keep it together. He died at 59, worn out by the cares of kingship and rigours of the battle field. His son Duleep, by his youngest queen, also died at 59, but unsung, heartbroken in Paris, struck down by a stroke. He was buried in his estate in the English countryside at Elveden. A deposed king deprived both of his kingdom and faith.

Life of turmoil

Duleep was bundled off to England on Lord Dalhousie’s orders at 16 lest he be used as a rallying point against the British by his mother and her advisors. He was converted to Protestant Christian faith and indulged in by Queen Victoria, whose affection for him may also have been, in part, maternal.
Jindan Kaur, a Sikh lady, did not mount the funeral pyre of her husband, unlike the Hindu Ranis of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to commit sati. Instead she was “rewarded” with imprisonment by the British. Somehow she managed to escape to Nepal, suffering great hardship on the way. She was reunited with her son, then a young adult, in England and was to die there in her forties, careworn and half-blind, sometime later.

Intriguing structure

The structure of the narrative is intriguing. It weaves versions of the story by a dying Duleep Singh in the Parisian autumn of 1893; Mangla, the slave girl and Queen Jindan Kaur’s personal attendant who brought him up as a child; Arur Singh, valet and confidante of Duleep Singh; John Login, superintendent of Duleep Singh after the annexation of Punjab and then his mentor in England; Lady Lena Login, the doctor’s wife and a maternal figure in Duleep’s early years in England; and General Charles Carrol-Tevis, an American soldier of fortune who spied on Duleep Singh in Paris at the behest of the British government.
Duleep Singh’s sense of outrage at being diddled out of his kingdom by the British, despite his decadent ways was real. He went to Paris and then to Moscow in an attempt to find support to make a comeback in the Punjab. He reconverted to Sikhism in Aden, sent messages to Sikh soldiers now serving in the British army, who were by all accounts ready to rally around their deposed Maharaja to drive out the Firangee from Hindustan. But that was not to be.
Charles Carrol-Trevis, Duleep’s confidante in Paris duly conveyed to Her Majesty’s Government in London all of his plans. Every precaution was therefore taken to thwart him. His debauchery was encouraged further and his health began to fail rapidly.
Duleep Singh fathered eight children from two marriages. The first was the Bamba Muller and the second to Ada Douglas Wetherhill. Neither wife had remotely to do with the aristocracy of the day.
The novelist scores on two important points: the first, he captures the climate of intrigue that prevailed after Ranjit Singh’s death, and second, Duleep Singh’s own confusion, humiliation, and pathos growing up in a world of betrayal and continuous political turmoil and his vain but sincere effort to come good. The “Rashomon-like” multiple narrative technique is necessary here, because very little is known about Duleep Singh’s mind, though there is a reasonable amount of information available on his daily life as an adult in England.
Sarna is good on the conspiracies and intrigues that destabilised and destroyed Ranjit Singh’s kingdom within a decade of his death. He deems the eclipse of the Sikhs as a triumph of greed over character. Duleep Singh emerges as a sad, befuddled, good-hearted man robbed by the Fates. Jindan Kaur’s thwarted ambitions for her child and her own life blighted by the tricks of history has genuine pathos. Kudos to Navtej Sarna for telling such a moving story.

An In-Sight into the Foundations

2008-11-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

Tracing the long, dramatic journey of the book in India.

The history of the book in India is a history largely untold.”

So begins An Empire of Books, Ulrike Stark’s fascinating book on early print culture in India. Her focus is the Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow (1858), one of the most successful publishers in 19th century North India, and the largest Indian owned printing press in the subcontinent at that time. I had begun to wonder why — ever since the publication of Print Areas: Book History in India (by Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta) in 2004 — no one had been sufficiently interested to explore book history in India, and was excited and grateful for Ulrike Stark’s interest in Indian book production, and for her fine, intrepid scholarship. It could not have been easy to research and write this book — we all know how difficult it is to find early primary and archival sources. An Empire of Books (Permanent Black) is invaluable to anyone interested in India’s early intellectual and literary history, and is curious, even in the slightest bit, about the history of the book in India.
We know of several books on the history of books in the West, but in South Asia book history is just beginning. Though we easily recognise that print culture contributed to India’s modernity, scholars and journalists have focused more on Indian newspaper and periodical press history than the story of the how the book came to India.
What we need next is something like a national book history — if such a thing is possible at all, since in India there won’t be one history of the book, but many histories — the history of the book in each regional language. In particular, Stark (who teaches at the department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, University of Chicago) looks at how commercial book publishing happened. Her aim is to “shed light on the social, cultural, and material aspects of book production… and to investigate the impact of the commercial book trade on the diffusion of knowledge, and on the processes of intellectual formation, modernization, and cultural renaissance in North India.”

Intriguing aspect

A more intriguing aspect of the book is one that Ulrike Stark herself celebrates — that pioneer publishers such as Naval Kishore were “not just savvy businessmen but men deeply engaged in the intellectual and literary life of their time”. That they did not publish for profit alone. That book printing and publishing in 19th century India was a “venture as much entrepreneurial as intellectual”. They were not just “early industrialists but intellectual path-breakers”; publishing for them was “a vocation, not a business.” Stark names the great icons of early Indian publishing: Fardunji Sorabji Marzban in Bombay, Munshi Harsukh Rai in Lahore, Maulvi Abdul Rahman Khan in Kanpur and Mustafa Khan and Munshi Naval Kishore in Lucknow. They had “a sense of the publisher’s cultural mission in society”. They published to revitalise India’s literary heritage and to contribute to “Indian modernity through the diffusion of education and knowledge.”
These early print houses become vibrant meeting places for intellectuals and writers. It is this “dual nature of the publishing house as modern capitalist enterprise and an important site of scholarly pursuits that the book seeks to explore.” In a very interesting footnote, Stark calls our attention to how “virtually nothing is known about female participation in the early North Indian publishing trade, perhaps the sole exception being that of Mallika, the cultured young Bengali protégé and companion of Bharatendu Harishchandra”, who goes on to set up a small publishing house and bookshop for her.
The full title of Stark’s book is An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Munshi Naval Kishore (1836-95), says Stark, is the book’s central character. In his lifetime he published 5,000 titles, of which 2,000 were in Urdu. “To narrate his life,” she notes, “is to narrate the story of an Indian Hindu who participated in the revival of Hindu traditions while acting as one of the foremost promoters of Islamic learning and preservers of Arabic and Indo Persian literary heritage in the subcontinent…He embodied the synthesis of Indo-Muslim and Hindu learned traditions in an exemplary fashion — most poignantly captured in Khvaja Abbas Ahmad’s succinct characterisation of him as a “Muslim pundit and Hindu maulvi.”

Move to print culture

He published literary works, cheap novels, religious tracts, medical and astrological manuals, song books, legal forms and almanacs. Using the Naval Kishore Press, Stark looks at the transition from oral and manuscript culture to print culture. She is quick to warn the reader that this is not the focus or the concern of the book; neither are readership and reading practices in India.
Early in the book she notes that we often forget that India had had a rich and long tradition of manuscript culture. But manuscripts were becoming hard to come by for many reasons. “The step from the rare and costly manuscripts,” she tells us, “to the mass produced printed book — costing barely one tenth of the manuscript, if not less, and available through a rapidly expanding network of distribution sites and agents — was indeed revolutionary.”
Elsewhere, Stark observes that “the history of public libraries in India remains unwritten”. There were hardly any public libraries that people could use, she informs us. The few early circulating libraries were for Europeans and a few rich, educated Indians. Again, in a fascinating footnote she tells of the first ever full fledged public library in India which was “set up in Calcutta in 1818, when the private holdings of the college library of Fort William was made available to the general public. For the first time a collection of 8341 printed books and almost 3000 manuscripts was made accessible not only to Europeans but to literary men in general in India.” From the introduction of print to India in 1556 to the first book in an Indian language — Doctrina Christam, 1557 — a Tamil translation of a Portuguese catechism to early instances of Indian literature by Indian publishing houses such as the Naval Kishore Press is a long, dramatic journey for the book in India to make, and Ulrike Stark has told this story by immersing herself in the ferment of 19th century India’s intellectual and literary world, and evoking its book-obsessed world with clarity, devotion and absorbing scholarship.

Drugs, Blood, Guns and Women

2008-11-29T20:37:00.000-08:00

In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco.

He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters.

Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember the day his father took him to discover the ice.
Gabriel García Márquez, it is said — though Gerald Martin, as a respectable Anglo-Saxon mythbusting biographer, disputes the version of the story — promptly braked the car and drove back to Mexico City, where he sat down at a typewriter and did not get up until his great novel was finished.
Legends coagulated around One Hundred Years of Solitude even before it was finished, from its celebrated first sentence onwards. People were describing it as a great novel when they had seen only its first 80 pages. It was a famous work long before its publication, as García Márquez gave a reading to a spellbound audience in Mexico City. Once it was published — García Márquez’s wife, Mercedes, had to pawn her hairdryer and liquidiser to pay the postage, standing by her husband as it went off like, Martin says, ‘two survivors of a catastrophe’ — it quickly took over the world. Few people who read it at the time, and very few since, have been immune to its overpowering, torrential imaginative force. Whether its influence on world literature has been benign is a different question; many novelists have been immensely impressed by the apparition of the wrecked galleon in the jungle, overgrown with lush orchids, and tried to reproduce the effect, with limp results. It could only really be done, we might now conclude, by García Márquez.

The luxuriant effect of García Márquez’s novels is achieved with considerable technical restraint and control — The Autumn of the Patriarch consists of exactly one hundred sentences, for instance. It is important to realise that though they hold an exotic appeal for their largely foreign readership, they are not in themselves exotic, but rather examinations of experience we would consider extreme and overblown. Gerald Martin does a very good job in conveying the ways in which a violent Colombian war, the War of a Thousand Days, in which García Márquez’s grandfather fought, and a terrible violent confrontation between banana workers and bosses in Cienaga in the 1920s shaped the novelist’s imagination. It is better still on the searing heat, the extraordinarily extended family, sometimes including ghosts, and the fabulous properties of the novelist’s youth — parrots, macaws, marsupials and even a sloth in a tree in the garden, aunts who observed that they heard a witch fall off the roof in the middle of the night, and constant retelling of dreams. Of course he became a novelist.
After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and, even more, after the award of the Nobel Prize in 1982, García Márquez became a world figure and a hero to the entire continent. The Nobel ceremony has become the stuff of legend; the Colombian radio journalists at the ceremony appeared to be commenting on a football match, and García Márquez had to ask them to put a sock in it. García Márquez’s decision to accept the prize not in the orthodox white tie and tails but in a liquiliqui, a tropical linen suit typical of the Colombian proletariat, shocked many respectable Colombians, some of whom thought he’d turned out in his underwear, but thrilled most of a continent. And after that, he was the world’s friend. When, at his 80th birthday, he called King Juan Carlos ‘tu’ in public, no offence was taken; after all, Charles V had once stooped, in homage, to pick up Titian’s brush.

For most of us, and certainly for posterity, it was the Nobel that was given dignity by García Márquez’s acceptance of it, rather than the other way round. One of the most impressive features of his career is that, nearly uniquely, he wrote and published one of his greatest works after the award. Martin, like some other commentators, seems somewhat unenchanted by Love in the Time of Cholera, and indeed comes close to suggesting that it represents an attempt by the author to broaden his appeal by concentrating on the universal and soft subject of love.
Well, it certainly succeeded in doing so, but few readers fail to respond to the technical mastery, as well as the unparalleled flavour, of this great novel. Personally, I wonder whether lives have been ruined by readers putting too much trust in the admittedly grotesque donnée, of love resumed after decades of interruption. It is the novel of his which is furthest from expressing overt political concerns — something which fascinates commentators on his work, including Gerald Martin, but often baffles and repels the ordinary reader. García Márquez has often teased people by remarking that he thinks The Autumn of the Patriarch is his greatest novel, but I don’t think we want to take him too seriously on questions like that.
Gerald Martin has done a good job here in presenting the myths about the career, as well as debunking many of them. He promises us, in what may be a dig at ungrateful editors, that his 17 years of labour have resulted not only in this long and detailed volume, but a much longer and more detailed one which he hopes to publish in due course. This, I think, is quite good enough for most of us. His account of García Márquez’s pre-Solitude life is particularly good; indeed, after the eruption of worldwide fame, he stops giving us any account of his subject’s earnings, rather disappointingly. The detailed rendering of poverty is constantly interesting, and he should have maintained his investigations — after all, any biography of a living figure is going to be a gross invasion of privacy, so that it seems a little late to start having any scruples in that regard. He can be a little too tactful, particularly on the subject of the famous punch which Mario Vargas Llosa dealt out to García Márquez, ending their friendship permanently. And, like most people nowadays, he doesn’t know what ‘coruscating’ means. But a good, thorough job.
Only sometimes do the bones of a very different biography peep through; a satirical one, in which a novelist who is taken up worldwide for reasons, principally, of radical chic spends years wooing a ridiculous dictator, ponders the dilemma of whether to support a Latin American fascist regime like Galtieri’s, and bewilders a tiny Venezuelan groupuscule with the very public gift of $22,750. Plenty of books less reverential than this about Márquez have been written, and will be written. But you can disagree with his political stance, and still maintain passionately that he deserves the reverence.

A Catalogue of Columns

2008-11-29T03:15:00.000-08:00

The Diary of a Social Butterfly is a collection of columns by Pakistani writer, Moni Mohsin published in a Pakistani newspaper, the Friday Times.

The column, rumouredly very popular, aims to satirise Pakistan’s ladies who lunch, who ooh-la-la.

If this is satire though, it is laboured, contrived and usually in poor taste. Early on, "Butterfly" explains her mode of communication, "Nerves meri shatter ho gayee hain, that is why I am forgetting my English. vaisay tau I am convent-educated." Her nerves remain fragmented obviously, since her English never quite recovers, and by the end of the book, your nerves may need a chemical cuddle themselves.
A column that has spanned many years, Mohsin has Butterfly comment on serious historical events — September 11, 2001, "And as for skyscrappers, taubah baba, what if electricity goes?" "And then nice thing about Gulberg is mummy’s round the corner, Flopsy’s on my backside, Mulloo’s down the road. And because we’re so close to the ground, no plane can fly into us…" — Karachi blasts, January 2004 "Can’t wait for all the parties yaar." —Tsunami, December 2004 "I hear she knows everybody who is everybody, including Coffee Annan, Moody Allen and Paris Sheraton, sorry Hilton." The book ends with her documentation of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. This is not treated facetiously, but honestly, by then, it is too late.
Mohsin also attempts to wring humour out of Butterfly’s relationships with her suffering husband Janoo, his family — the sisters-in-law, The Gruesome Twosome, his mother, The Old Bag (an anecdote featuring Butterfly’s attempts at a soiree and her mother-in-law arriving with a live goat who proceeds to pee on an expensive carpet is so slapstick you’re left looking for the banana peels) and her own family featuring an Aunty called Pussy and a serial-divorcee, Jonkers.
Flailing wildly for moderate clemency, you may say that some columns are alright in monthly doses but perhaps excessive when put together in a book. But even so, the fault lies firstly with the vanity of the author for assuming that such repetitive drivel would be of interest to a reader and certainly some commissioning editor at the publishing house who, in a mad rush to publish the first thing that seemed "Bridget Jones" with a South Asian sprinkle, has allowed this hideous thing to come to print.
Like snorkelling with a plastic straw in a sea of treacle, you will trawl for an insight, an intuitive moment, something that makes you go, "a-ha, so that’s what they’re like". You won’t find it. What you will find is phonetic (mis)spelling as humour, bad grammar as humour, common callousness as humour and most frighteningly, even though this is fiction, an insufferable ignorance of the world at large and at home that makes you dislike the main character intensely.
Mohsin is an intelligent woman, a good author and a woman of the world. I can’t imagine why she’d put her name to this do number ka maal.

A Critical Plot

2008-11-29T03:09:00.000-08:00

The Author takes you through the Holmes Way

How this novel, will be binding ...

The Darkest Evening of the Year; Dean Koontz; Harper; Rs 195.

Amy Redwing runs a shelter for bruised and injured dogs. And she is willing to go to any length to save an animal. Her friend and partner, Brian, has always stood by her and assisted in some of the more bizarre situations, but suddenly he gets a feel ing, that Amy is up against something bigger than just rescuing animals. Brian is convinced that her life is in danger. He is aware that Amy’s refusal to marry him is due to her commitment to the dog rescue charity, but future events leave him perplexed and he begins to wonder if Amy has a past that she is hiding, even from him.
Even as Brian tries to solve this mystery, his life is thrown into disarray, with the arrival of an ex-lover and her bizarre rites. Brian is once again drawn into the vortex of the past, where his daughter is held hostage. While he tries to help Amy come to terms with her issues, he is stuck sorting out his own. But will they survive their demons? Dean Koontz writes yet another thriller with shades of a new and twisted logic.

When the pages are ' filled ', there's nothing, you can read about

2008-11-29T03:02:00.000-08:00

A disappointing novel on love that too easily slips into clichés…

In the Country of Deceit, Shashi Deshpande, Penguin/Viking, 2008, p.259, Rs. 399.

What struck me repeatedly while reading In the Country of Deceit was the enormous likeness Shashi Deshpande has with Jane Austen. Both writers come from a completely different space and time but that little phrase I learnt in colle ge while studying Austen has strangely remained in my memory — “little bit of ivory, two inches wide”. It seems appropriate in describing Deshpande’s world too. For, Deshpande’s novels are about the ordinary lives of women, too ordinary I might add. These are women who live a humdrum existence, mainly jobless, surrounded by children, a world so common that I sometimes think it does not deserve to be written about.
I reach page 41 of Deshpande’s new novel without coming up against anything striking — some development in the plot, an instance of sparkling wit, an amazing stylistic innovation. There is none of it. What is available is a series of desultory letters, with irrelevant detail, in which well-wishing relatives urge the heroine, Devayani, to consider getting married — a very usual, banal, everyday matter. But the heroine is disinterested. I wonder whether I shall stumble upon the secret of Devayani’s gloom, her “sombre” and “unsmiling” exterior? Mind you, she is only 26 but carries the burden of the world upon her shoulders.

Suffering as abstraction

It is her father’s suicide and her mother’s long suffering and eventual death that the author provides as explanation. The heroine’s victim-complex makes it one among a chain of novels Deshpande has written about unhappy women, women who are content to listen and not speak. Our heroine merges into the mould, compounding the unfathomable oppression faced by women into an enormous abstraction. As Naipaul has said, obnoxiously but memorably, “If writers talk about oppression, they don’t do much writing.”
Like Austen again, Deshpande’s novels are inhabited by many characters, all of whom are related to the central character. Uncles, aunts, cousins and friends — Sindhu, Keshav, Savi, Shree, Gundu, Asha, Tara, Kshama, Rani and, of course, Ashok, the married man Devayani eventually falls in love with. She becomes Ashok’s mistress — his “girl” — and begins her long journey of guilt in the “country of deceit”. Ashok is the stock Mills-and-Boon hero, tough but tender, whom Devayani typically resists but soon he becomes her “sun, moon and stars”. He visits her surreptitiously and showers her with love and passionate embraces, but Devayani cannot accept the role of a “whore” or a “floozy”: “I must stop this. We can’t go on. We must stop. I will stop, I won’t go on with this, I must tell Ashok I can’t go on, I will tell him it’s over.” Is this a sample of the anguished utterance of a woman in love with another woman’s husband or an emotional outburst straight out of a Bollywood film? Torment will be torment in both literature and in commercial cinema, I admit, but somehow one expects rendition in literature to belong to another plane.
I fret through the rest of the novel which assumes a recriminatory tone as Devayani’s sister and brother-in-law try to recover the “Devi [they] know”, urging her to choose between a “clandestine affair” and the “respectable” option: “Only if there’s loyalty can you have an honourable marriage. And how can you expect a man who is disloyal to his wife and his marriage to be loyal to you?” Devayani’s relationship with Ashok pulls her out of the warm circle of love given to her in generous doses by her aunts, uncles and siblings which becomes conditional once they discover her transgression. We are then exposed to a bourgeois world of moral and ethical values in which Devayani has to distinguish between “right” and “wrong”. She does break off with Ashok finally but it is not clear whether it is a result of feeling “cheap” or because he does not tell her that he has been posted out of Rajnur.

Unanswered questions

The novel leaves behind a series of unanswered questions: what is the purpose of bringing in the issue of the disputed land which Devayani and her sister, Savi, have inherited but which is claimed by another through forgery? What is Devayani’s friendship with Rani securing for the novelist other than providing the occasion for Devayani’s first meeting with Ashok? Is she a foil to the heroine? How does Ashok’s love affair with Devayani contribute to her growing up? The novel ends with situating Devayani back where she was at the start of the novel. Deshpande has admitted in an interview that writing about love makes one easily “slip into clichéd language [and] clichéd situations”. We couldn’t agree more.
A word about language: Deshpande’s prose, at its most innovative, includes verbs such as “pruning” one’s belongings, and lingers on adjectives like “limpid”, “cute” and “sweet”. The U.S. is referred to as the “States” and women call themselves “nasty bitchy females”. The novel is well-dressed, its jacket graceful but the plot begs for more.

The Other-Side of Feminism

2008-11-29T02:48:00.000-08:00

An accessible, chirpily written introduction to the National Capital Region in the guise of a manhunt. The woman’s search for the perfect man is probably the oldest story there is.

Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India; Anita Jain, Bloomsbury, £12.99.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy women are all alike; every unhappy woman is unhappy in her own way. And that way is triggered usually by the absence of a man, if a couple of recent titles by woman authors are anything to go by.
If every yin needs its yang, every Radha her Krishna, well, then, why should an Anita or an Arshi be denied hers?

Drastic changes

The woman’s search for the perfect man is probably the oldest story there is. With every generation, the field placings have been redrawn and the goalposts shifted but it may not be an exaggeration to say that the most drastic changes in the ‘must-have’ list have occurred over the past couple of decades or so.
If our mothers wanted good providers and respectable families and sympathetic soul-mates, we seek all three — in men who are our intellectual equals, confident enough in their own careers to encourage ours and in a place in life that makes them want what we want. The reason why women are far more demanding now than at any other point in history is best left to the experts but, at the domestic level, the inequities — or, more correctly, the equalities — between men and women make them parallel lines that seem destined to meet only at some unseen point in infinity.
It’s a situation that has bred its own sub-culture, especially in the West – think of films like “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) or the TV series “Sex and the City” (1998-2004) or the Bridget Jones books and the me-toos they spawned — so it was only a matter of time before it was transplanted here. Among the notables, we’ve had Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s You Are Here, a 20-something Arshi’s account of love and life in New Delhi and, in quick succession, Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, an autobiographical account of, well, a 30-something’s pursuit of love and life in New Delhi.
If there’s a crucial difference between the two titles, it’s this: Madhavan addresses the local reader while Jain is far more ambitious. Her target audience is the Westerner intrigued by The India Story (somewhat under shadow at the moment, alas), impressed, perhaps, by images of mega-weddings and glass-and-steel IT hubs, but willing to invest only limited time and energy in the subject. Marrying Anita reads like India 101, an accessible, chirpily written introduction to the National Capital Region in the guise of a manhunt.
So we have plenty of one-line insights, drunken epiphanies and summations of contemporary India issues.
Consider this analysis of sexual harassment: “So-called ‘eve-teasing’ is a common phenomenon in India, perhaps due to the disconnect created by the relative visibility of women in the public sphere — as opposed to in certain parts of the Islamic world — even as gender relations are still largely circumscribed. Men see, but they are not allowed to touch, leading to pent-up frustration.”
Or this one, on financial inequities: “I’m able to install Wi-Fi, allowing me to check e-mail from bed, but my cook, Amma… who prepares fresh sabzi, dal, chapatis and rice everyday, extracts the utterly baffling third-world rate of $18.20 a month. The same amount also buys me exactly two double vodka-sodas in a place like Soho or Capitol. Good thing Amma isn’t much of a drinker.”

Global world-view

The perspective comes from Jain’s global world-view: U.S.-raised and Harvard-educated, she worked as a journalist in places as disparate Singapore and Mexico City. Returning to New York in her early-30s, she discovers all her close friends to be married and the available men to be commitment-phobic. India, where her parents were tied in arranged wedlock, she decides, is where she should look for her partner. So, after some deep rumination on the Western dating system, she takes off for New Delhi.
But Delhi has changed in the 10 years since she was last here, and what Jain finds is a generation in transition: Men more clued into Hendrix than Hariprasad Chaurasia, men who work American hours underwriting mortgages for U.S. companies, men who are openly gay — men, in fact, she would meet in New York. Her repeated run-ins with unsuitable boys make you think there’s something in that truism about certain women being magnets for certain kinds of men.
In the book, however, this makes for a parade of completely indistinguishable male characters. No matter where Jain encounters them — in a café after a matrimonial website exchange, in a restaurant at a friend’s urging, at a party — they all seem to speak in the same voice and possess the same character flaws.
She rejects men for reasons ranging from the Atkins diet (one suitor needs to lose 50lbs) to a reluctance to enter the kitchen.
With the main narrative a flop despite its possibilities — the book ends with Jain still single — all one is left with is Instant India Insights. But, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know all that already.

Queen of Mystery

2008-11-29T02:44:00.000-08:00

“A complete egoist,” Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot, her brilliant, diminutive, impeccably dressed Belgian detective.

“Puffy and spinsterish,” she quipped of Miss Marple, her other famous sleuth. “The old spinster lady living in a village.”

Uttered in the reedy voice of Christie herself, these withering descriptions are contained on a cache of audiotapes, recently discovered in a dusty cardboard box in one of her former houses by her only grandson, Mathew Prichard.
The tapes — 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours — are filled with Christie’s painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.
Christie’s estate is expected to announce its discovery on Monday, the 118th anniversary of her birth, calling the tapes a rare find and a significant addition to the collection of memorabilia related to Christie.
In Britain the appetite for all things Agatha Christie is still fierce. Devoted fans still mark her birthday with a weeklong festival of theater performances, treasure hunts, teas and murder-mystery parties. And while her books have never been considered high literary art, more than 500,000 copies of them are sold in Britain each year. She has been outsold in volume only by Shakespeare and the Bible.
Taking into account such strong interest, Christie’s estate is considering releasing part of the tapes or publishing a new, updated version of her autobiography.
“These are very personal tapes,” said Tamsen Harward, a manager at Chorion, the company that controls Christie’s literary properties. “There are bits and pieces of the autobiography that could be reviewed, in light of listening to the tapes.”
And in a mystery that might have piqued the interest of one of Christie’s fictional sleuths, only the final third of her life story can be heard on the recordings.
“We believe that, being a frugal woman, she reused the tapes,” Ms. Harward said, adding that Christie “clearly” did not feel the recordings had any historical value.
Her modern-day admirers may disagree. The tapes were dictated on a reel-to-reel recorder that was abandoned in the same box with the 27 reels of tape. With an occasional crackle in the background Christie can be heard talking about writing, about her characters and how she conceived them, with her tone varying from casual and meandering to crisp and professional.
“They’re extraordinary,” said Laura Thompson, Christie’s biographer. “Nobody sounds like that anymore. She’s old England. She sounds like an Edwardian, like a gentlewoman, like a lady. It’s as though she’s suspended in an early-20th-century world where the social order is intact, and murder is only conducted in a socially acceptable arena — arsenic in the crumpets, or something.”
In one tape Christie recalls how she conjured the character of Miss Marple, who was originally mentioned in short stories but made her first significant appearance in a novel, “The Murder at the Vicarage.”
“I have now no recollection at all of writing ‘Murder at the Vicarage,’ ” Christie said in the recording. “That is to say, I cannot remember where, when, how I wrote it, why I came to write it. And I don’t even remember why it was that I selected a new character, Miss Marple, to act as a sleuth in the case. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my natural life.”
In another recording she ponders the repeated suggestion that Miss Marple and Poirot, two of her most prominent characters, should be introduced to each other.
“People never stop writing to me nowadays to suggest that Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot should meet,” Christie said. “But why should they meet? I’m sure they would not like meeting at all. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a really sudden and unexpected urge to do so.”
Her grandson, Mr. Prichard, who is also the chairman of Agatha Christie Limited, said he does not intend to make every minute of the tapes public. “One thing we probably won’t do is release in its entirety the discovery we’ve made,” he said. “There are quite extensive parts that are confused and slightly rambling and obviously had to be quite seriously edited for the autobiography.”
After all, it is possible that Christie never intended the tapes to be heard. She left them in a storeroom in one of her former houses, in Devon, outside Torquay, among piles of other memorabilia.
When Mr. Prichard discovered them, he had intended to begin cleaning out his grandmother’s former house. “There was literally almost a house full of archives, paraphernalia, rubbish, everything,” he said.
After discovering the tapes he took them to a friend, who managed, with some difficulty, to operate the recorder and transfer the sound to a digital file.
Among the few other recordings of Christie’s voice are a BBC interview from 1955 and a 1974 recording in which she recalled her experience in a World War I medical dispensary, where she gained a working knowledge of poisons.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on Sept. 15, 1890, to a wealthy American father and British mother. She married twice and kept a low profile, sometimes refusing to allow publishers to put an author photo on her books.
She wrote 66 detective novels (including “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile”), 163 short stories, 19 plays, 4 nonfiction works (including her self-titled autobiography) and 6 romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
She killed off Poirot in her 1975 novel, “Curtain,” a death reported in a front-page obituary for Poirot in The New York Times on Aug. 6, 1975. The next year Christie died at 85.
Ms. Thompson, her biographer, said that throughout Christie’s half-century of writing she remained fiercely protective of her characters.
“She had a very definite sense of their worth,” Ms. Thompson said. “I don’t think she would have cared to hear people talk about those characters in the way that she did.”

Majesty, Romance and Dreams

2008-11-29T02:16:00.000-08:00

A scholarly yet readable overview of the history of Rajput paintings.

Rajput Painting: Romantic Divine and Courtly Art from India; Roda Ahluwalia, Mapin Publishing, Rs.900.

A visual panorama that draws the viewer into bygone worlds, a Rajput painting is more than just a nostalgic overview of an imperial age. It is not a photograph from the past, but rather a flowing narrative that tells a story of its own and incites th e viewer to weave yet another story around it. The prominent themes of Rajput paintings are depictions of religious and literary texts, of war heroes and courtly majesty.
There are two levels to appreciating art: one as the oeuvre of the artist, flaunting its technique and content; the other is to understand art as a manifestation of its socio-political context, a cultural production with layers of interpretation. Roda Ahluwalia examines Rajput painting at both levels, with special emphasis on the latter. The book is an overview of the history of the art form, illustrated with works from the rich collections of the British Museum and the British Library.
It elucidates the formative parameters that characterised a Rajput painting and how the art with the spirit of the Hindu classical tradition accrues Mughal influences to yield a style that is pluralistic in themes, content and technique.

Paradox

Juxtaposing the Hindu idea of an absolute presence made manifest through multiple forms with the Islamic emphasis on the visual medium, both alien ideas to each other, the Rajput art form was to be an interesting paradox of sorts, transposing corporeal forms to visual medium, an amalgam of two belief systems.
The discussion stresses how the Bhakti movement of the cult of Krishna along with the stable reign of an extremely tolerant art patron, Akbar, led to a golden age of Rajput paintings.
Armed with a solid background, Ahluwalia takes the reader (the term ‘reader’ may not be completely appropriate for one is as much a ‘viewer’ of the rich canvases that beautifully complement the vivid descriptions) through a broad picture of the themes that were most commonly adopted — romance, divinity and courtly portraiture.

Unifying factor

This section explores how metaphors and allusions found in classical Hindu literature are transformed into the emotional and symbolic content of the visual medium. The author points out how the experience of the nine rasas or emotional states — love, mirth, sorrow, anger, heroism, fear, disgust, astonishment and tranquillity — is the unifying factor of the visual and performing arts.
The commentary on the close ties of the paintings to music and poetry is supplemented by appropriate paintings and verses and the word to image translation is unfurled by drawing attention to every element in the painting whose meaning is attributed to some part of the parent verse.
The latter part of the book goes on to look at local variations of the art form in the principalities of Rajasthan, Central India and Punjab. The interest of a general reader, however, begins to slacken for it delves into the intricacies of local manifestations in great detail. The differences between the chapters and kingdoms begin to blur and may be reserved for a seasoned art connoisseur or an intense enthusiast.
Irrespective of this, the constant mediation between the poetry of the written word and the beauty of the visual forms make for extremely experiential reading.
The strength of the book lies in the juxtaposition of facts with romance; of ascription with interpretations to ensure that the book remains well-grounded in historical evidence yet liberated enough through personal comment. This simultaneously renders it an objective as well as a subjective account of a school of art through which lives on a world of hues, majesty, romance and dreams.

Be Extra Cautious, in reading this Biography !!!

2008-11-29T02:04:00.000-08:00

Books about literary friendships (James and Wharton, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Melville and Hawthorne) drop into bookstores with numbing regularity. Books about literary revenge are more rare and thus more interesting.

In 1998 Paul Theroux published “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” a memoir about the crumbling of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul, the great Trinidad-born novelist.

Mr. Theroux’s book was a potent, carefully mixed cocktail, served ice cold. It laid bare Mr. Naipaul’s racism, misogyny, vanity, stinginess and (most distressingly) his emotional cruelty to Patricia, his first wife.
Now, 10 years later, comes “The World Is What It Is,” Patrick French’s authorized biography of Mr. Naipaul. It’s a handsome volume, jacketed in silver and black, with a disarming cover photograph of Mr. Naipaul stooping, with a gap-toothed grin, to tie a loose shoelace.
Flip Mr. French’s book over, however, and you confront this Voldemortian clump of words from Mr. Naipaul’s old nemesis, Mr. Theroux: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.” Cue the scary organ music.
Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.
The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.
Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.
Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”
It is to Mr. Naipaul’s credit that this crafty and inquisitive book exists. “He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless,” Mr. French writes, “and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.”
Mr. Naipaul gave Mr. French access to his archives , including journals of his first wife that he’d not yet read. Mr. Naipaul was allowed to examine the completed manuscript but requested no changes.
Mr. French indicates, early on, that he is not playing softball. On his book’s second page we read that Mr. Naipaul “said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a calamity, France was fraudulent, and interviewers were monkeys. If Zadie Smith of ‘White Teeth’ fame — optimistic and presentable — was a white liberal’s dream, V. S. Naipaul was the nightmare. Rather than celebrate multiculturalism, he denounced it as ‘multi-culti,’ made malign jokes about people with darker skin than himself, blamed formerly oppressed nations for their continuing failure.”
“For a successful immigrant writer to take such a position,” Mr. French continues, “was seen as a special kind of treason.”
But Mr. French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view of how Mr. Naipaul, knighted in 1990 and named a Nobel laureate in 2001, made his way in the world, how his greatest books were conceived and composed, how he became what he became: genius, loner, sexual obsessive, ogre, snob, provocateur and profoundly influential and controversial thinker on subjects like colonialism and belief and unbelief.
Born into an Indian family in Trinidad in 1932, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was raised in relative poverty. His hapless father, a sign painter and occasional journalist, was the inspiration for what may be Mr. Naipaul’s signal work of fiction, “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). Mr. Naipaul’s more animated mother, Mr. French suggests, inspired his literary voice: “bright, certain, robust, slightly mocking.”
A scholarship took Mr. Naipaul, at 18, to University College, Oxford, and he has lived in England ever since. When Mr. Naipaul’s first novel, “The Mystic Masseur,” was published in 1957, Mr. French notes, in typically vivid prose: “Like a tiger cub bringing home his first kill, he copied out extracts for his mother from the reviews.”
Mr. Naipaul’s dealings with women make up a good part of “The World Is What It Is.” You will often wish to cover your eyes. After a fumbling sexual encounter that reads like an outtake from Ian Mac Ewan’s “On Chesil Beach,” Mr. Naipaul proposed to Patricia Hale, an aspiring young actress. They would remain married until her death in 1996, but it was often a twisted, withered, tenuous relationship. Mr. Naipaul criticized her remorselessly and regularly visited prostitutes; he also carried on a decades-long affair with a younger woman, Margaret Murray, whom he sometimes violently beat. For her part, Ms. Murray liked to entertain Mr. Naipaul by mailing him life-size drawings “of his erect penis, done in dark brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime green cowboy hat.”
Though Patricia Naipaul frequently came along with her husband when he researched his travel books, she is rarely mentioned in them; she floated behind, a kind of ghost in his life. Later, when she was dying of breast cancer, he was angry she did not perish quickly enough. He wished to marry his current wife, Nadira.
Mr. French writes with wit and feeling about Mr. Naipaul’s books, and about Mr. Naipaul’s sense of his career. He was grimly determined not to be seen as merely a West Indian writer. “Like Ralph Ellison after the publication of ‘Invisible Man,’ he maintained that he was in a category all of his own.”
Mr. Naipaul was capable of racism. And his success sometimes brought it out in others. Evelyn Waugh, in a 1963 letter to Nancy Mitford, noted that Mr. Naipaul had won yet another literary prize: “Oh for a black face,” he wrote.
Mr. French details the off-and-on animosity between Mr. Naipaul and the Caribbean poet and fellow Nobelist Derek Walcott. Would people still praise Mr. Naipaul’s “nasty little sneers” against black people, Mr. Walcott has asked, if those sneers were turned on Jews?
The final sections of Mr. French’s biography grow a bit deflated and sad; the book becomes a list of awards and obligations, and a compendium of Mr. Naipaul’s boorish behavior. (He dressed down Iris Murdoch while both were dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street; he soured an evening at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley estate by disapproving of the food and by sneering at George Lucas: “I don’t know ‘Star Wars,’ I am not interested in films.”)
“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,” Mr. Naipaul has written. “And that myth is in the keeping of others.” Mr. Naipaul was brave to allow this complicated parsing of his own myth into the world. You will finish “The World Is What It Is” wishing to reread Mr. Naipaul’s best books immediately. You will also be glad he is not your friend, neighbor, sibling, landlord or barista.
But what of it? Bad people write good books. And as Mr. Naipaul pointedly says here, “I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me.”

An Embarassing Debate

2008-11-29T01:54:00.000-08:00

Bama enters a highly problematic area of inequality and violence among various Dalit communities.

Vanmam (Vendetta); Bama, Translated by Malini Seshadri, OUP, Rs. 345.

Vanmam documents the hatred and vengeance among the various Dalit communities, an area too touchy to be addressed and too complex to be grasped. It is sad but true that the graded inequality that sustains caste order is replicated among the Dalits as well. The hierarchy among Dalits

in Tamil Nadu has the following structure as a given: Pallar, Parayar and Arundathiyar. The novel has chosen to deal with the top two castes among the Dalits and not the hierarchically positioned Arundathiyar, for example. The idyllic bonding between the two communities built through cultural events, sports and celebration of festivals turns out to be a mere façade to mask the burning jealousies over socio-economic issues. Unfortunately, conversion to Christianity becomes the key variable in causing this divide. The bloody caste clashes begin with a Hindu Pallar murdering a Christian Parayar. The story ends with the murder of an innocent Parayar, that leads to the dawn of realisation among both the parties about how they have been made pawns in the hands of caste Hindus. Finally a resolution sought in electoral politics.

Regional and caste variations

Azhagarasan’s introduction rightfully points out to the lingering doubt that might rise in the reader about the authorial voice being caught up in the complexities of caste equation that she describes. “This is obvious in her (Bama’s) construct of the subjugated, yet reasonable Parayar, and the cruel, insensitive Pallar,” points out the introduction. In the interview appended to the novel, Bama says, “the events I narrated in Vanmam are limited to a particular village. So, you cannot take it as a generalised statement.” But it is difficult not to get into generalised conclusions. More so in translated texts. What one might sense while reading a text in Tamil with all its regional and caste variations of diction, usage and relationship among the speakers get lost in Englsih.
Gail Omvedt, renowned Dalit studies scholar, has said the following in her review of Vanmam: “In almost every region of India there are two main (Dalit) castes, often at odds.”(Indian Express, New Delhi, August 9, 2008). She actually formulates a whole dichotomous structure among Dalits vis-À-vis religion and movement. Vanmam certainly has laid the ground open for such formulation, which is not only detrimental to Dalit struggles but also too simplistic.
Also, for readers familiar with Bama’s Karukku and Sangati, what is missing here is the powerful presence of gender. The women are in fringes, at a loss to have a say in this madness. What is worse is that they are not sure what to say or do. In fact fights over space for women to relieve themselves and sexual abuses are showered on each other by the women of the respective communities. While answering Azhagarasan’s question on foregrounding “caste among women”, Bama pitches “Dalit patriarchy and caste in feminist movements” as polarised arguments. She goes on to elaborate that “Dalit woman is not even considered as a ‘subject’ and caste was never considered to be a subject for discussion” in feminist circles. But right from early 1990s there have been concerted efforts among feminist thinkers and activists to construct the history of Dalit feminism in India. Sharmila Rege’s Writing Caste, Writing Gender and We also Made History: Women in Ambedkerite Movement by Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon (Tr: Wandana Sonalkar) are recent additions in that effort. In Tamil Nadu, one can confidently say that though casteism may not figure in the discourses among the ranks of women’s movements and NGO activism, Dalit women’s plight and their specific burdens have never been absent. It is unfortunate that a writer of Bama’s calibre should close down the options of discussion. Polarising Dalit feminism and critique of Dalit patriarchy does not help to unpack the complex relationship between gender and caste. In the process what escapes unaffected is an all pervasive masculinity in which Dalit males too have their stake.

Unresolved question

The novel has been translated with meticulous care. Malini Seshadri’s debut in translation is indeed commendable. But the unresolved question of capturing the spirit of the language in abuse/humour continues to remain unaddressed. It will remain unresolved till the translators are willing and ready to bend English to accommodate the raw energy of Dalit tongue. An example would be: “kundile rendu veppu vacha” in Tamil has to be “a couple of thumps on his bum’ and not “give him tight in his ass”! One can list many such illustrations of how the English translation softens the diction used by Dalit writers.
The Introduction and Interview with the author help the text to be read in its context. They make an appeal for an alternate mode of reading and aesthetics. Bama’s texts have never worked on the victimhood of Dalits. The agency of Dalits has been powerfully presented in all her writings. Though Vanmam has entered a highly problematic area, we owe it to her for having dared to open up an embarrassing debate in however preliminary a form.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please, welcome ... Mr. Anonymous !!

2008-11-29T01:43:00.000-08:00

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” the book begins.

Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.

Thanatophobia is a fact in his life — he thinks about death daily and sometimes at night is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world . . . awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’ in an endless wail.” He dreams about being buried and “of being chased, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, of finding myself bulletless, held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, informed that there is even less time than I imagined. The usual stuff.” He imagines being trapped in an overturned ferry. Or locked by kidnappers in the trunk of a car that is then driven into a river. He imagines being taken underwater in the jaws of a crocodile.
Beyond the big knock-down stuff, he dreads the diminution of energy, the drying-up of the wellspring, the fading of the light. “I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships.” He has seen his parents through their decline and deaths — “however much you escape your parents in life, they are likely to reclaim you in death” — his father, a teacher of French, felled by strokes, reading the “Mémoires” of Saint-Simon at the end still tyrannized by his wife “always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling” — a few years later, his mother in a green dress, in a wheelchair paralyzed on one side, “admirably unflinching, and dismissive of what she saw as false ¬morale-boosting,” and what he sees there is hardly comforting.
Religious faith is not an option. “I had no faith to lose,” he writes. “I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. . . . I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was.”
The Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie, . . . a tragedy with a happy ending,” and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the sculptures of Donatello — “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Barnes is not comforted by the contemporary religion of therapy, the “secular modern heaven of self-¬fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, . . . the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.”
So Barnes turns toward the strict regime of science and here is little comfort indeed. We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won’t care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.” Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of “self” — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. “The ‘I’ of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.” Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope. (Barnes refers to “American hopefulness” with particular disdain.)

“There is no separation between ‘us’ and the universe.” We are simply matter, stuff. “Individualism — the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists — has led to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience.”

All true so far as it goes, perhaps, but so what? Barnes is a novelist and what gives this book life and keeps the reader happily churning forward is his affection for the people who wander in and out, Grandma Scoltock in her hand-knitted cardigan reading The Daily Worker and cheering on Mao Zedong,while Grandpa watched “Songs of Praise” on television, did woodwork and raised dahlias, and killed chickens with a green metal machine screwed to the doorjam that wrung their necks. The older brother who teaches philosophy, keeps llamas and likes to wear knee breeches, buckle shoes, a brocade waistcoat. We may only be units of genetic obedience, but we do love to look at each ¬other. Barnes tells us he keeps in a drawer his parents’ stuff, all of it, their scrapbooks, ration cards, cricket score cards, Christmas card lists, certificates of Perfect Attendance, a photo album of 1913 entitled “Scenes From Highways & Byways,” old postcards (“We arrived here safely, and, except for the ham sandwiches, we were satisfied with the journey”). The simple-minded reader savors this sweet lozenge of a detail. We don’t deny the inevitability of extinction, but we can’t help being fond of that postcard.
“Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. . . . And there is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. . . . Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.” And so he does. In this meditation on death, he brings to life, in short sure strokes, his parents, Albert and Kathleen.
“She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head towards me. . . . She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than the right, which was just like her — she used to hang a cigarette from the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the opposite side. . . . I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. Was she that cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally so cold? . . . ‘Well done, Ma,’ I told her quietly. She had, indeed, done the dying ‘better’ than my father. He had endured a series of strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily.” In her effects he finds a full bottle of cream sherry and a birthday cake, untouched.
I don’t know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the author’s bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head.

The Non-Existence of Dialogue

2008-11-29T01:04:00.000-08:00

Two narratives of migration and dislocation in the aftermath of the Partition that reinforce the goodness of the ‘common’ man.

Tales of Two Cities, Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani, edited by David Page, Lotus/Roli

The Partition of the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan in 1947 is one of the biggest human tragedies in modern history, its scale rivalling the Holocaust that led to the Second World War. The estimates of the number of deaths owing to the violence and bloodshed that followed the population transfer range around 5,00,000, with low estimates at 2,00,000 and higher numbers placing it as high as 1,000,000. Many more lost their homes and possessions and were forced to build their lives from scratch in a new country. The scars the tragedy left behind continues to fester in the subcontinent and has accounted for two wars between India and Pakistan. Terror attacks on both sides of the border presently can also be linked to the migration that took place over six decades ago. Communal riots that are a shameful blot

on the horizon of modern India owe a lot to the bloody legacy of the Partition. As the cliché goes, our country and its people forget their history only to repeat it time and again. From Godhra to Meerut. From Jamshedpur to Mumbai.

Enabling dialogue

It is in this context that the two long essays by Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani, edited by David Page and brought out in a single compilation by Roli Books as Tales of Two Cities assumes significance. The book is the fourth in a series of cross border talks. Other titles include Diplomatic Divide, Divided by Democracy and Fault Lines of Nationhood.
Nayar writes about the journey he undertook from Sialkot to Delhi as the first migrant in his family. He starts with his reluctance to leave the place of his birth where his father was a respected doctor and goes on to narrate how he was literally tricked into leaving Pakistan as the tension

between the two communities began to escalate. He is not enamoured by the capital of India when he moves in with his aunt. Ironically, his first employer is a Muslim and his first job is with an Urdu newspaper. Nayar captures the subtle irony and paradox of the situation with his lucid prose. The simplicity of his narrative style helps the reader get in touch with the complex times. It is particularly piquant that the homeless finds himself at home with the same community that hastened his migration and who now find themselves in the same situation the author and his family were on the other side of the border. Even more poignant is the journey Nayar makes to Sialkot after many years of Partition only to discover he has been exiled forever and the home he grew up in belongs to someone else.
Asif Noorani is a film journalist of repute and it comes as no surprise that he was born in Bombay in the year the undivided country was extolling the British to Quit India. He and his parents migrate to Pakistan much after the Partition saga has unfolded. He continues to be linked to this country through his mother’s side of the family. Another tie that binds him to India is, of course, Bollywood. As someone who was somewhat protected from the trauma of the initial years following the Partition in the cosmopolitan ethos of Bombay, Noorani is able to retain his sense of humour even while he is sharing dramatic events from his life like being stranded in the city of his birth during the Indo-Pak war of 1965. His encounter with a junior officer of CID, Takle, who manages to retain his humanity even in trying times is particularly heart warming. Noorani also refers to the dilemma of the Indian Muslim when his friends from the film fraternity in Bombay are compelled to disown him in the time of war to prove their patriotism.

Gentle tales

The two long essays flow like gentle tales being told by two wise old men. They may be in the nature of short memoirs capturing a turbulent and traumatic period in their lives but read more like pungent short fiction. Both Noorani and Nayar are products of middle class and in a way their birth seems to have shielded them from the violence and brutality of the event. Neither of them report any casualty

in their family. Both the writers reinforce the goodness of the common man who, irrespective of religious affiliations, continues to be gracious in times of strife engineered by political leaders.
It is only fitting that an Englishman is facilitating this cross border dialogue. The Dickens derived introduction to the two essays by David Page sets the correct tone for what is to follow. Tales of Two Cities may work for even those who usually give non-fiction a miss.

Diaries of the Wild

2008-11-29T00:56:00.000-08:00

An introduction to Indian wildlife that doesn’t offer anything different from what is already available.

The Wild Wonders of India, Biswajit Roy Chowdhury, Niyogi Books, 2008, hardcover, p.151, price not stated.

There have been a plethora of books on Indian wildlife in the last few decades, many of them of admirable quality. So, to make a difference, a new book should have a distinct thrust. It is not clear what the main thrust of the book under review is. I s it a field guide to Indian wildlife or a tourist brochure? This book tries to provide an introduction to Indian wildlife by describing the species, the habitat and in the last section some of the protected areas in the country. But it ends reading like a piece of tourist literature.
Even the short introductory chapter contains howlers such as “The people who lived in the Indus plains were known as Aryans”, “Ashoka ruled in 8th BC” (his reign was 273-232 BC) and Jim Corbett gave up hunting on the advice of F.W. Champion. Information such as these could easily have been verified by referring to any standard book on the subjects.

Plenty of photographs

Photographs dominate this book and there are some beautiful images like the Plain Tiger butterfly on a flower petal and some portraits of rare animals such as the Madras Tree Shrew, the Hoolack gibbon and the Himalayan marmots. The picture of the spectacled macaque is a precious image. This elegant primate is restricted to a small patch of forest near Imphal. The bulk of the photographs is by the author B.R. Chowdhury. He has to his credit some stunning images — the pair of clouded leopard on a tree, for instance. Then there are also the works of other celebrated names in wildlife photography — Ian Lockwood, Vivek Sinha and Kuttappan.
However, a number of animals in captivity have been photographed and included. The Snow leopard, the goral and the Thamin, to cite a few. It is not difficult to get good images of creatures like the Lion-tailed macaque. Some images are of poor quality and they need not have been included. The one of Great Indian Bustard for example. There has to be a balance between the rarity of the image and its quality. Evidently, no photo-editing was done. There are three different pictures of the Clouded leopard. It has to be borne in mind that the arrival of digital photography in recent years has drastically changed the wildlife photography scene.
The layout of photographs does not seem to fall in any pattern and are poorly executed. The picture of the Small-clawed Otter and the Rufus-tailed hare seem to merge and appear as one image.

Carelessly edited

The book has not received adequate editorial attention and this reduces the readability. There are quite a few grammatical errors and syntax problems. For instance, the use of the term Blackbucks. Capitalisation has been used indiscriminately. Distances are given in miles and lengths in feet, instead of in the decimal system. The author has tried to cover as many of the major sanctuaries as possible and this has resulted in repetition. The Silent Valley National Park is disposed off in three sentences. Vedanthangal sanctuary has been covered in twice in the book, in page 121 and in 137. Mundanthurai, a Project Tiger area, is spelt wrongly.

Hall of Fame

2008-10-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

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 "

2008-10-28T03:44:00.000-07:00

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 !

2008-10-28T03:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T03:31:00.000-07:00

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"

2008-10-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T03:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T03:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

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 !

2008-10-28T02:58:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T02:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T02:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T02:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

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 ... ?

2008-10-28T02:21:00.001-07:00

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.

Fabricology

2008-09-28T01:58:00.000-07:00

More on the etymology of fabric names

Last month’s column on words related to fabrics received two kinds of responses. A typical e-mail was from reader Valentina Trivedi who admitted that “words like Poplin and Voile were such an intrinsic part of my mother’s vocabulary that I never thought of them as language imports....” Others wanted to know the etymology of fabric names such as mulmul, khadi, lustalin, tussoor and corduroy, etc.
Etymology of machine-made cloth brought to India by British, French and Portuguese traders is relatively easy to find than the traditional Indian weavings such as mulmul, khadi (khaddar) and tusoor.
Tussoor — tusser in English — is a medium weight wild silk spun and woven with short threads as opposed to cultivated silks (made from the farming of silkworms), which have a smooth continuous filament of silk that is reeled by hand. Perhaps some reader will come to my aid and throw light on the origins of mulmul, khadi and tusser.
Language imports
Although most fabric names are ‘language imports’ into Indian languages, several words about fabrics from India have made into the English vocabulary. Calicut, located on the Malabar Coast, was an important port in trade between India and the Arab world. It was called Qualiqut in Arabic, Collicuthia in Medieval Latin and Qualecut/Calecut in Portuguese. However, the pronunciation of the French form, Calicot, influenced the term ‘calico’ for the textile traded through Calicut.
Cashmere, a highly-prized material woven from the wool obtained from long-haired goats, is an Anglicisation of Kashmir, from Sanskrit Kashypamara meaning “home of Kashyap”, the renowned sage. Madras is a type of bright-coloured muslin cloth first exported from the port now known as Chennai.
‘Chheent’ (Hindi for spraying or sprinkling) spawned Chintz, the name for a smooth, inexpensive cotton cloth that is printed with a flowery pattern and is used for making curtains and furniture covers. Samuel Pepys noted in his diary in 1663: “…Bought my wife a chint that is, a painted Indian calico, for her to line her new study”.
Chintzy for ‘something cheap and low quality’ and ‘somebody not willing to spend money’, was first recorded in 1851 by George Eliot. Kipling recorded in 1891 trousers made from ‘dungari,’ Hindi for a fabric. Dungarees later came to denote work clothes made from a tough material.
Probably more varieties of fabrics made from wool are available in Indian shops than any other material except cotton. The modern spelling came from Old English wull, which in turn was influenced by wol (Dutch), woll (German) and a few other North European languages. In Romance languages, Latin lana (wool) is the root for lana (Italian) and laine (French) as well as for the French surname Lanier, which means “wool-monger”.
In a school that I once attended, we wore suits made from grey flannel. The 1956 movie “The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit” starring Gregory Peck discusses the suit as a sign of respectability and de rigueur for businessmen and executives. For decades, Indian stores have sold this fabric whose name in all likelihood came from Welsh gwalanen (woollen article). Another popular woollen fabric is serge (from Greek serica) meaning “cloth of wool mixed with silk or linen”.
Interesting history
Gabardine, closely woven cotton or wool twill commonly used for school uniforms because it is sturdy and long-lasting, has a more interesting etymological history. The fabric’s name is a direct descendent of French gauvardine, meaning ‘a long, coarse cloak or frock’ worn especially by Jews during the Middle Ages and also ‘a pilgrim’s cloak’. The French term evolved out of Spanish gabardina. Its meaning as an outer garment was gradually lost, and gabardine came to mean by 1904 simply ‘fine worsted cloth’.
Advertisements for suit cloth in India often use the term worsted, after the fabric made from twisted yarn first in 1926 in Worstead, a town in Norfolk, England. Felt, another word commonly heard in India, has its root in the Germanic feltaz meaning ‘something beaten’. The name is no surprise because felt is thick soft material made of wool, hair or fur that has been ‘beaten’ or pressed flat. Felt is also a verb: ‘felt a cap’ means cover with felt. Filter also evolved from filtrum, Middle Latin for felt, which was used to strain impurities from liquid. The first cigarette filter was made in 1908.
Since 1862 shoddy has meant a cheap imitation or something of inferior quality as in ‘shoddy workmanship’. But the word was first used in 1832 to mean ‘wool made of woollen waste, old rags’ and ‘cloth of reused wool”. The disapproving connotation was, no doubt, because of the use of old rags and cheap wool, and influenced the figurative use of the term wool: woolgathering means ‘indulging in wandering fancies and purposeless thinking’, from the lit. meaning ‘gathering fragments of wool torn from sheep by bushes, etc.’ Pull the wool over somebody’s eyes is ‘to deceive someone by not telling the truth’. A black sheep means “a disfavoured or disreputable member of a group”, figurative sense supposedly because a real black sheep had wool that could not be dyed and was thus worthless.

It's Mr.Paul, again !

2008-09-28T01:54:00.000-07:00

Brida suffers in comparison to Coelho’s other books, but works well within its own framework.

Brida, Paulo Coelho, HarperCollins, p.266, Rs 295.

Paulo Coelho’s readers can be classified into two groups, ranging from the casual and the curious to the fans and the fanatics. This dichotomy often results in a confrontation between those who defend the Master and the light of his guidance, a nd those who decry his too-easy flights into fantasy.
Venturing habitually beyond the rational, Coelho’s own life of exploration probably qualifies him to record the processes of spiritual journeys. These emerge in the form of simply narrated fictional accounts, lyrical and inventive, but lit by the freshness of a journal.
The search continues
In his latest book, Brida, Coelho’s search continues. Actually, this isn’t his latest; it’s just that it has taken 18 years for the English translation to emerge. And it isn’t really essential Coelho. Lyricism leaps out of his pages when he describes wild Irish landscapes and plunges into a devastating past along with his heroine, but otherwise it’s a pretty straightforward narrative; the stages of Brida’s search seem almost clinical.
The trouble with Brida is that it’s written by Paulo Coelho. Having become a superstar of mystical fiction, his books are heralded by expectation. He is surrounded by so many auras it is difficult to reach his books without them coming in the way. The redoubtable success of his other books have to be tackled first. And Brida suffers in comparison.
The Alchemist and the rest of the markers on the holy trail have to be disregarded, and the present book taken up on its own merit. We can only judge Brida within Brida’s framework; which, ideally, is the only way to read any book for that matter.
Simple framework
The story is simple. Brida is a young Irish girl who sets out in search of knowledge in the depths of magic and the inexplicable. She meets the Magus first, and is subjected immediately to a rather punishing test in the frightening darkness of a forest where she is left all alone to discard her fears and conquer her doubts. Unknown to her, she strikes a chord in the Magus. He is a much older man travelling in the Tradition of the Sun. Banished for a momentary lapse, the crime of attempting to manipulate his disciple’s path, he lives alone. After Brida leaves him, he waits for her.
But Brida turns to the Tradition of the Moon and the witch Wicca for enlightenment. Wicca appears more responsive to her need. On an outing in the mountains out of Dublin, she tells her: “Stay on the bridge between the visible and the invisible. Everything in the Universe has life, and you must always try to stay in contact with that life. It understands your language. And the world will take on a different meaning for you.”
Wicca’s guidance is slow and steady, and Brida finds herself understanding her past incarnations, her present mission and the imminence of her goal. She realises that her Soulmate, the other half of her cloven soul, the being she’s destined to be with, is also close at hand. Recognising him, she reaches another throbbing threshold. Her boyfriend Lorens would probably have become the third corner of a triangle in an ordinary love story; but here relationships are enduring, vast and riddled with many meanings.
Moment of reckoning
The final scene around a fire in a forest clearing becomes a moment of reckoning for all four characters in the book. Things aren’t always what they seem, and conclusions aren’t as expected, but a higher purpose determines the tide of events and relationships; it knows where it’s taking us.
Brida works well within its framework.
Paulo Coelho is a craftsman whose words pin down feelings and experiences, and yet somehow manage to leave them floating in the air. This mix of clarity and evanescence leaves the reader with the feeling of having read a journal of myth, a record of restlessness and reverie. Its simplicity engages him, while its mysticism allows him his own inner journey.
The characters are drawn with clarity; the Magus and Wicca linger. While the breadth of imagination is vast, the symbols and mythology of Christianity are constantly evoked, reigning in the possibilities. Coelho’s Brida is a modern young woman whose feet, like Mary Poppins, aren’t always on the ground.

Bengal Tiger

2008-09-28T01:48:00.000-07:00

Part of our fascination with Saratchandra is the desire to see what we could have become had we not become ‘impure’ or ‘modern’.

Three Classics: The New Arrangement, Pointing the Path, Bindu’s Son, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, translated by Jadu Saha, Shipra Publications, Rs. 450

Business is good for the Saratchandra industry: “Devdas” and “Parineeta”, film adaptations of Saratchandra’s novellas, were — to use trade parlance — “superhits”; Bengali television serials rip of f his stories without acknowledgement; the titles of most of his stories and novellas have been appropriated by Bengali film-makers; Jadu Saha’s translations of three of Saratchandra’s more popular novellas is one more addition to the growing space of the reclamation of the Bengali writer.
The notion of revival implies loss; the revivalism of Saratchandra is associated with that sense of loss, allied with the sense of recovery of the “authentic”. “Authenticity” and the “real” are words that are often used to uphold Saratchandra’s supremacy over his contemporaries. Tagore is “inauthentic”: he was Brahmo, he allowed himself intellectual transactions with the “West”; his aesthetic and his sensibility are “modern”, a word which the Bengali temper associates with the seepage of influence and a perforated sensibility. Tagore is “made”; Saratchandra is still unmade or, at least, yet-to-be-made. For, much has been made of Saratchandra’s “lack” of education by positing it against Tagore’s acquired learning, as if it were a great virtue that shaped his aesthetic, like Milton’s blindness. “I received no education for want of means,” Saratchandra is quoted as saying. The “no education” is only as half-true as Jonson’s description of Shakespeare’s “little Latin and less Greek”. The Tagore-Saratchandra binary has been the subject of many literary addas in Bengal. Saha’s juxtapositions are familiar to the extent of being tired, beginning from the almost naïve “aristocratic Tagore”-“poor Saratchandra” to the slimy “best writer”-“most popular writer”. Ascribing “mass appeal” and a language of the marketplace to a “poor” man like Saratchandra is, of course, ironical.
Immensely popular
Why was he so popular? Apart from the “stories” and the charm of their settings, Saratchandra appropriated the concept of “identification” for his own narrative ends: identification worked inversely in his case. The men and women who read him are not just like the men and women in his fiction; the men and women who read him become the men and women of his fiction. The question of his readership is an interesting one. The subject and, in many cases, the defining condition of his novellas is poverty. The characters of his stories, thus, could not have been his readers. And herein we find the seed of a modernist debate, one that continues to be used against the Indian-writer-in-search-of-an-audience, as if looking for a reader were an immoral gesture — this disjuncture between the subject of a work and its audience is, in many ways, a post-enlightenment one (Was Defoe writing for Crusoe, for only one possible reader?)
Another important reason for the renewed interest in Saratchandra is allied to the “route to root” culture of our times: Saratchandra was, after all, a diasporic writer, a fact that is often glossed over by his critics. (He was not just a Bengali writer; Bhagalpur and Burma were more important in defining his sensibility than the setting where his stories are placed.) The need to compare one’s footprints before and after the moment of departure and the greater urge to turn loss into gain and myth into history are common impulses of the diasporic citizen. That is perhaps why Saratchandra’s women are as much idealised and exaggerated mixtures of myth and history as Ravi Varma’s flesh-and-blood goddesses.
Part of the contemporary fascination with Saratchandra comes from this half-wish on our part to see ourselves as our forefathers, to mark the alternative route we might have taken had we, almost decidedly, not become the “impure” creatures that we are today. The other part comes from a voyeuristic urge to record or gaze upon a different history of becoming, to check whether we could have been “better” than what we are now. There are other reasons for his abiding popularity: his use of the language of the kitchen; his “realism” and “simplicity” (Saratchandra’s self-analysis); and our conditioned reflex to expect a “happy ending” in a story, for, Saratchandra’s stories are, ultimately, fairy-tales for adults.
Recurring themes
There are recurring themes in his work: sacrifice (it is women who sacrifice; if at all men sacrifice, they carry the burden of the discontent) — in Bindu’s Son, a novella about an aunt’s maternal love, sacrifice is elevated to martyrdom; depiction of social evils without commentary (Saratchandra is storyteller without trying to be a social reformer) — The New Arrangement is the story of an abandoned child bride Usha; the conservative moulds his aesthetic, the provocative only occasionally tinges it — in Pointing the Path, a novella in the rich boy-poor girl mould, it is tradition which prevents Guni from accepting the widow Hem.
Saratchandra does not pose too many difficulties to the translator; Jadu Saha’s translation succeeds in communicating the sense of where the story comes from, in recreating the lost-and-found innocence of Saratchandra’s works. In spite of a few grammatical slips (especially those of prepositions), this book adds to the much-needed body of work that makes interaction and exchange between cultures possible through translation.

Heal, Thy-Self !

2008-09-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

This novel affirms that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions and thoughts is a healing play, a leela.

The Finger Puppet, Anu Jayanth, HarperCollins, 2008, Rs. 295.

Filthy rich and clean broke!” — that’s the situation of a dysfunctional family sitting on a gold mine of stolen antiques and prime real estate in Tiruchirapalli, and are reduced to eating rancid curd rice with mango pickle to disguise the taste. Thanks to a megalomaniac pater familias, who fancies himself to be a rationalist and a “modern”.
Set in the mid 1960s, with a speechless 12-year-old’s thumb as the protagonist, Anu Jayanth’s debut novel is about many things Indian. Put together in the eclectic fashion of a Navaratri Golu, she holds together the whole show with some startling insights into the nature and function of language.
Restoring faith
The book’s much- more-than-whimsical illuminations have proved wrong my distrust of a whole genre of Indian English writing, sparked long ago by Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. My reasoning then went thus: Here I am, drenched and gasping in this torrent of ‘India’ — what can a diaspora writer have to tell me about it, from that abstracting distance? This story of a deceptively phlegmatic maami and her three daughters who subvert feminist stereotypes and intelligently resist patriarchy without detesting their yajamaan, has taken the sting out of my defeat. Now, after all these years, I shall accept that for many outside India, as much if not more than for those who are here, India is not a geographical expression but an area of consciousness which can accommodate and sometimes ingeniously reconcile opposites. Its darkest patches have a way of suddenly lighting up.
Tara has been silenced by the experience of domestic violence. Unwilling to burden her beloved co-sufferers with her own struggle to cope with a seething welter of contradictory messages and feelings, she takes to talking with her own thumb. A common enough childhood daydream, you think. We remember whispering to invisible companions, and not just long ago. But when it’s the coping technique of a victim of abuse, unsettling questions can surface: is this child “disturbed”, or “depressed”? Does she have behavioural problems?
Changing conceptions
Our guesses on what constitute sanity and insanity have been changing, as we strive constantly to align received wisdom and apparent commonsense with what is currently seen as politically correct. Discoveries in neuroscience tempt us to speculate on the role of will and consciousness in human systems ruled by self-propelled neural impulses. The sense of losing ground and authenticity in a world of fragmenting identities has driven us to look anew at old ideas about the mind.
Lest you should think Tara’s is a case of what goes by the name of schizophrenia, or the now-discredited diagnosis of “dissociative identity disorder” or multiple personality, hers is a instance which does not fit into that model of mutually exclusive or antagonistic selves. Tara’s is a personality which grapples with but also celebrates and embraces its own “split”, to use a phrase no longer fashionable in psychiatry. It divides itself not to escape from its daemons, but to have a dialogue with them from two standpoints. To remain integrated — and sane — without erasing the line of division, she plays … and how she plays! Her daemons, once confronted, turn into curiously endearing presences…
Serving a purpose
Like the many swamis and devis in the puja room, each of them a loving concatenation of human aspirations, Tara’s daemons are there for a purpose: to guide her to solutions not available through the usual avenues of logical analysis. Tara and her sisters discover that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions, observations, and thoughts is a healing play, a leela. What saves their flights of fantasy from turning into pathological delusions is the sense of fun that flutters around that house, under the indulgent eye of the “shock absorber” mother steeped in Vedas, ayurveda, ahimsa, and Carnatic music. The father who insists that it is just a figment of his silly womenfolk’s imagination slowly sickens, while his wife heals herself of all her deepest griefs with her customised version of occupational therapy. She assures her children that their crazy father loves them all “in his own way”. Positive reinforcement? Or just self-defense? The family breaks away at one point for sheer survival’s sake but returns to care for him till the end. For, he is one of them, a pitiable fragment who has “lost it”.
As Anu Jayanth weaves together the fabric of life in Tiruchi with the khadi values of Gandhigram, the motif of the finger puppet pops in and out. A strange kind of sutradhar, the finger puppet somehow manages to tassel together the many loose ends in this perceptive tale.

A New Medium

2008-09-28T01:39:00.000-07:00

Despite the possibilities, most poems lack a sense of completeness.

I Witness: Partial Observations; Kapil Sibal; IndiaInk (Roli Books); Rs 295

Kapil Sibal is entirely justified in referring to these pieces as ‘partial observations’. But neither he, nor Shashi Tharoor on the back cover, nor the even more fulsome front inside-flap copy-writer, is justified in calling them poems.
Some of them are incisive, some insightful, some amusing (claims the inside flap makes for the whole book). However, though they display possibilities, not least a good watcher’s eye, they are almost all lacking in completeness.
New form?
The cell phone is not a medium suitable for literary, or even very literate, composition. The reviewer’s duty, then, is to treat this book not as a collection of poems, but as a new form altogether. There is a sure appeal here for those who like their wisdom in byte-sized pieces, and lack the time to think things out for themselves. This audience does not care much for spelling or grammar, or at all for subtlety.
Sibal has, however, an infectious enthusiasm for scientific advances, and it redeems some of the clumsiness inherent in composing a work when you cannot see all of it — or even all of one line — at any time. A certain facility with rhyme is evident. Perhaps it is too facile; as in “Sunday”, where the rhyme pairs are ‘tea-memory’; ‘recklessly-desperately’; ‘glee-knee’; ‘curiously-nonchalantly’; ‘hungrily-peacefully;’ ‘lazily-nostalgically’. Some pieces — “Tsunami”, “Death” and “Mirage” — which rely on this kind of rhyming, yet at least commence to work, because they are ambitious and succinct. “Mirage” begins
How can we/all equal be?/That is the human/tragedy.
Unfortunately, too often observations which begin thus filter through a politician and lawyer’s mind and end like this:
A constitutional/guarantee?/No panacea/for inequality.
The medium that Sibal composes in favours the use of jargon, which does not look so well on the printed page. Besides, the public thoughts of a public man are not the stuff of which poetry is fashioned.
Ring true
The private verses are those which ring true: “In a Clinch”, “Lovers and the Chowkidar”, “As We Approach the Night”, which ends
Promise to/hold my hand,/for in this battle/I lack the strength/to fight.
In fact, these pieces are actually more readable, overall, when they eschew rhyme. There is a comprehension of the pause, the fragility of the moment, of the beauty of transience, as in “Wrath”, which ends
I never have understood/why so many of us/have to die.
Ones that work
One piece that largely works is the amusing “Meeting in London”; another is “Nano”:
Nano tubes/in nano pores./Nano tech/in nano stores./Nano thoughts/of nano brains….
Really, though, too much of this book is out of place between covers. I open it at random and find (“Whither Press”):
TRPs of channels,/soap operas,/get hits for you./News that matters/serious content,/of limited value.
It would be different if I read it as an SMS, I guess. The same is true of the pieces that follow, on the trust vote in the Lok Sabha, “123” and “POTA”. The next, “Man Behind the Mask”, addressed to Vajpayee, has a certain poignancy.
That Sibal composed these pieces on his cell phone has become a focus of breathless interest for the media: Poetry has entered the 21st Century! Excuse me. Poetry has always been at the cutting edge of culture. But if you are using new technology, why use it for an old-fashioned purpose you do not believe in?
In a few years, our elite schools will be filled with students who have never composed anything on paper. Educationists in Europe and the US are gravely considering allowing SMS contractions to pass in test papers.
A new medium
Sibal has told interviewers that he has no time for poetry, no time to write in longhand on paper, to edit, rewrite and revise. Why, then, are his works collected on printed pages? Surely his path-breaking efforts at composition are deserving of a whole new medium? Perhaps the 24-hour news channels would be best. Or a mobile phone services provider could take them up and send them out as text messages at commercial rates, as they do with cricket news and ring tones.
I offer this as a serious suggestion to the next journeyer on this trail.

Folk-Lore

2008-09-28T01:36:00.000-07:00

A painstaking exploration of a society that has an essentially oral cultural history.

Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends; Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Penguin Rs. 195.

The Khasi language is an Austro-Asiatic language, which means that it is closely related to those spoken in South East Asia, particularly to Vietnamese and Khmer. But the literary history of the Khasis has been somewhat obscure since the language had no alphabet until the introduction of the Roman in 1842 by a Welsh missionary called Thomas Jones. That is why the orthography (the style of spelling etc.) of the Khasi language is quite similar to Welsh. Even today, when you hear Khasis speaking English, you can trace a faint Welsh accent.
Which is all quite fascinating and proves that the history of the human species is the history of migration. But since the Khasis migrated from South East Asia to North East India without a written script, a large number of their folk tales and legends became obscure. Add to that, 150-odd years of exposure, through missionaries, to Judeo-Christian tradition and the legends of the Khasis, passed down by oral tradition, were beginning to look rather ragged. That is why the publication of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s book, Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends, is so important.
Geographical background
Dr. Nongkynrih has collected the 20 stories in this volume and told them like folk tales should be — with a wide-eyed sense of wonder at Nature, the ways of men and the infinite laws of the universe. Essentially, the stories are woven around the extraordinary geography of the East and West Khasi Hills districts of present day Meghalaya. Behind the names of many of the hills, waterfalls, rivers and animals there is a story.
For instance, Umiew and Umngot are two rivers that begin at Shyllong Peak and flow down to Bangladesh. As legend goes, they were the twin daughters of U Lei Shyllong (the God of Shillong); one twin was impulsive, the other calm. On one particularly clear day, they could see the plains of Bangladesh and the impulsive twin immediately wanted to go down to see the land below. She suggested that they disguise themselves as rivers. At first, the younger, calmer sister started flowing down gently, taking a long, serpentine, graceful route down to the plains. The older sister, according to her more aggressive nature, plunged down the hills and ravines, tearing her way down until she threw herself to the plains with such great force that she splintered into five branches, now the tributaries of the river. It is a folk tale that eloquently describes the riverine geography of the Khasi Hills and Sylhet district of Bangladesh.
Creation
Just as the Old Testament tells us how God created the universe in six days, the Khasis tells us about how U Blei (God) decided to send seven of the 16 clans living in heaven down to earth and create the Khasi people. The Khasi word for seven is ‘Hynniew’, and the Khasis are known as the ‘Hynniew Trep’ or the seven clans, comprising all the present sub-tribes, which are Khynriam, Pnar, Bhoi, War, Maram, Lyngngam and Diko. In other words, Khasi legends are not just folk tales, but important syntax for social anthropology. They explain, quite beautifully, the traditions and social structure of the society.
Around the Hearth is superbly illustrated by Pankaj Thapa and the cover of the book has a reproduction of a haunting painting by Benedict Hynniewta. To Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, who has explored and painstakingly put together the myths, legends, totems and taboos of a society that has an essentially oral cultural history, we owe a lot. We must say to him in Khasi: Khublai Shibun (thank you very much).

Work that enhances Life

2008-09-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

A work that bows to the greats that have gone before, but stands upright in its own space.

In these days of compromised blurb-writing, comparisons with Rushdie and Roy on the back-cover (from Booker nominee Peter Ho Davies) are enough to alert the antennae of all but the most unsceptical of readers. But Evening Is The Whole Day, Preeta Samarasan’s stunning debut novel, is that rare gem: A work that bows to the greats that have gone before, but stands upright in its own space.
In fact, why stop at Rushdie and Roy? The core of Malaysia-born, U.S.-bred and France-settled Samarasan’s story is eerily similar to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the many-roomed, ghostly mansion where it plays out reminds one of similar rambling adobes in Isabel Allende’s early novels.
The coming-of-age theme, of course, has been examined by any number of authors, ranging from J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) to David Mitchell (Black Swan Green) to Abha Dawesar (Babyji), as has the child’s eye view, frequently in tandem. But few authors, if any, have had such a child as their centrepiece.
The first time we encounter Aasha, she is “only six, (and her) heart cracked and cried out in protest” at her sister Uma’s departure for further studies in the U.S. Vulnerable and vengeful, aching for love yet prickly, imaginative but sequestered by her own inexperience, Aasha is someone you have empathy for, but cannot sympathise with.
As the narrative plays out like a memory, un-chronological and fragmented, we come to see why this juncture in family life — hard, but hardly unprecedented — should be the moment when things finally fall apart and the centre ceases to hold.
Ideal immigrants
To their neighbours at Kingfisher Lane, in the small Malaysian town of Ipoh, though, Aasha’s family is the ideal immigrant Indian unit: “top lawyer” Raju (Appa), homemaker Vasanthi (Amma), and three children, including the Columbia University-bound Uma. They have their share of sorrows, to be sure — Paati, Raju’s mother, has died suddenly, after years of gradual decline — but then, that’s a part of life, isn’t it?
The bigger tragedy for Aasha, though, is the demise of her elder sister as she knew her. From surrogate mother, teacher of songs and co-conspirator in a hundred childish pranks, Uma, 12 years older, has morphed into a sullen creature who prefers her own company, barely opens her mouth at the dining table and asks her little sister to mind her own business. And now, as she leaves for the U.S., Aasha is convinced that it is because she is driving her away. If this is life, Aasha wants no part of it.
Life, and all its parts, is Samarasan’s ambitious ambit in Evening.. (the title comes from a Tamil film song, which Appa translates as ‘Evening is the whole day for those without their lovers’) and, as the layers peel away and we are forced to confront the horrors that nestle inside appearances, the story takes on larger resonances that include society and state.
As masterfully as Samarasan weaves together the multiple layers of her tale, it is when she focuses on the home unit that she comes into her own. In rich, colloquial, comma-scorning prose, she captures Amma’s innate insecurities and sense of injustice, Appa’s weak-kneed idealism and search for succour, Paati’s self-serving love for Uma and the children’s quest for a semblance of balance. Her observation of the tiny, wilful cruelties perpetrated by family member upon family member is spot-on, the atavistic closing of ranks against Chellum, live-in servant and Paati’s care-giver, terrifyingly familiar.
Bleak world view
In fact, it is this grasp of the workings of the Indian family system — some behavioural traits refuse to die on overseas journeys and alien lands — that allows Samarasan to make her own a theme that McEwan explored so convincingly in Atonement. Her world-view, though, seems even bleaker than McEwan’s: For Aasha, there is no redemption, only relief in a single, brilliant smile from her sister as she walks towards the aircraft.
Samarasan is a talent to watch out for: One hopes in the future she casts off the ghosts (of magic realism as well as of authors who have gone before) to further distinguish her own voice.

Un-Biased Author

2008-09-27T20:28:00.001-07:00

A fitting tribute to a poet who was the centre of the Indo-English poetic scene for half a century.

Nissim Ezekiel Remembered: Edited by Havovi Anklesaria. With assistance from Santan Rodrigues; Sahitya Akademi. p.603, Rs 275.

Both Havovi Anklesaria, the editor of Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, and Santan Rodrigues, who assisted her, were students and long-time associates of Nissim. The book, lovingly compiled, is their tribute to their friend and mentor, a poet who stood at the centre of the Indo-English poetic scene for half a century.
As a commemorative volume, the book is unexceptionable. Even the absence of a biographical sketch is a plus, because it encourages you to build your own biography of Nissim, using the information provided in the memoirs, interviews and chronology. You can see a clear picture of the man emerge, and see his work in the context of his life.
Sister’s view
Take, for example, “Remembering Nissim”, an essay by Nissim’s younger sister, Asha Bhende. When she says, ‘I would like to remember Nissim, as my brother who made our mother laugh’; the line surprises you, like a line of verse from Nissim. When she writes, a little later, ‘I still remember the day our mother died’; you begin to hear, in the background, the best loved of Nissim’s poems, “Night of the Scorpion”.
Mrs Bhende recollects how Nissim, in an effort to revive his mother, kept on fanning her after she was dead, saying, “she has only fainted”; and of how he disappeared from the house after the funeral for a week. Nissim rarely spoke about his mother, but this remark, made in an interview, is revealing: ‘But the real source of my literary sensibility was my mother. I always knew it came straight from her to me. She reacted intuitively to my writing. With the rest of the family it was conscious encouragement; with her it was a primal assurance.’
The other personal reminiscences add to the portrait. Gieve Patel recollects how sensitive Nissim was to human suffering. Santan Rodrigues recalls Nissim’s help in launching Kavi India, and how, when they ventured into book publishing later, he bought 100 copies of their first book to help them pay the printer’s bill. Laeeq Fatehally quotes her daughter, Shama, who spoke for all his students when she wrote “we took it as a given, that Nissim’s time was not his own — it belonged to all of us.”
The disintegration of that fine, sensitive mind, after Alzheimer’s struck, is one of the sad stories of our time. But somehow, even after the other faculties degenerated, sensitivity to poetry remained unimpaired. Santan recounts how they visited Nissim at the nursing home he was confined in, on his birthday, and asked him to read a poem. “He took his book of poems that we gave him and read, as if in the days of yore. And as if to mock us asked, ‘Who is Nissim Ezekiel?’”
Who is Nissim Ezekiel? That’s the question this commemorative volume raises. It throws light on the many facets of his genius: the poet who brought in modernity to Indian poetry in English; the man who influenced and promoted a host of young poets; a sensitive and perceptive critic who, through hundreds of reviews and articles, strove to improve the literary atmosphere in India; an art critic who, never intimidated by a painter’s reputation, spoke his mind; a superb prose writer; founder-editor of Quest and Poetry India; editor of Freedom First and The Indian P.E.N.; a playwright and broadcaster; a teacher who taught at several Universities; and above all, a committed individual whose ambition, expressed when he was only 18, was “to do something for India”, and who never backed out of that commitment till the end.
In world literature
Nissim’s position as the pre-eminent Indo-English poet of our time is well established. But what about his place in World Literature? The question never bothered Nissim. He was only concerned with the quality of his poems. When he was actually asked, ‘What about your place in World Literature?’ in an interview, he answered, with some irritation “Perhaps, I don’t make it on the international scene…Most Indian writers don’t. We’re just not good enough.”
Bruce King thinks that Nissim “is a good but minor poet — in comparison to such giants as Yeats, Eliot, or Auden.” He thinks that what possibly hampered Nissim from being a great poet was his “unwillingness to break the mould and make it new”. He was too sympathetic to others, too much a part of his surroundings, and too concerned with the ethical. And these are precisely the qualities we admire Nissim for! King admits that this attitude “contributed to his leadership of Indian poetry and its relationship to India, and it resulted in a surprising number of poems that are likely to last even as critical tastes change.”
Makarand Paranjape’s article, the longest in the “Academia” section, labours to prove that Ezekiel belonged to the Indian poetic tradition represented by Aurobindo. This surprising thesis is based on two reasons: one, Nissim used traditional metres; two, he shows “a most clearly defined spiritual quest in his poetry”.
Paranjape admits, though, that Nissim’s spiritual quest, in comparison with Aurobindo’s, is “modest.” A spiritual quest in poetry, modest or otherwise, is not an exclusive Indian property. And Nissim valued his Indianness, anyway, though he had no use for Aurobindo’s poetry.
His spiritual quest was no doubt prompted by his own inner need. Perhaps the LSD experiment had some role to play. Nissim said, in his interview: “…with the first LSD experience, I gave up atheism — it just collapsed. Religion and its mysteries became more acceptable.” LSD’s use as an entheogen is not unheard of.
Paranjape’s analysis of Nissim’s poetry is accurate: “Overall, Nissim’s work reflects an almost classical concern with order, balance, good sense and wit. Shying away from emotional or verbal excess, he is nevertheless intensely self-critical, honest and funny.”
But doesn’t this description point to the Movement poets rather than to Aurobindo? They all used regular metre, and were Nissim’s contemporaries: Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were born the same year as Nissim; Donald Davie was two years older, John Wain a year younger.
I sometimes think that if Robert Conquest had read Ezekiel’s poems, he might well have included poems like “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, “Case Study”, “Poetry Reading” and “Paradise Flycatcher” in New Lines; and they would have been among the better poems in that fine anthology.
Selections
This brings me to my only quarrel with the book. Why are the poems mentioned above not included in this volume, which is “envisaged as a Reader” and “aims to provide a selection of the finest prose and poetry”? “Background Casually”, the only comprehensive autobiographical poem Nissim wrote, and “Naipaul’s India and Mine”, his best known essay, are omitted too. Preferring “the early and not so familiar ones” to the better poems, simply because the better ones are “much anthologised”, is not quite right in a Reader.
But the delights far outweigh the disappointments. The essays in the “Art and Artists” section, uncollected so far, are a revelation. Sharp and incisive in analysis, blunt in expression, lucid and sparkling in style, they show Nissim at his best as a prose writer. The most incisive among them are perhaps the ones on Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakkar and Laxma Gaud, all published in Z magazine.
Nissim wrote more than 500 book-reviews, most of them in Imprint. The reviews showed his ability to get his teeth into the core of a book, see its virtues and faults and describe them with accuracy. He wrote with such zest that even unfavourable reviews made us hunt up the books, to see if our views coincided with his.
Unfair criticism — or supercilious depiction — of Indian society raised Nissim’s hackles. His criticism was at its most severe then. The anger was due to his passionate involvement with India. He was not quite sure whether he really ‘belonged’, but the desire to ‘connect’ was always there. In an interview in 1977 he said, “I regard myself essentially as an Indian poet writing in English. I have a strong sense of belonging, not only to India, but to this city.”
When specifically asked if his Jewish background did not create a problem, he admitted that it did, but added: “I don’t want to remain negative: I feel I have to connect…”
Poignant message
Connect. That’s Nissim’s message. In 1997, when he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s but had a few lucid days, Nissim wrote an essay, “Poetry in the time of tempests”. I don’t know what impact it made when it was published, but here, in this volume, read against the backdrop of Nissim’s life, it becomes his poignant final message.
Coming out of amnesia, he recollects the past — not the events of his personal life but of the country’s history. The Emergency makes him warn us against “the insidious ways in which those in power try to suppress the inconvenient voices from the margin, the angry voices of the dispossessed and even the quiet voice of poetry.” Then the plea: to look for connections and build them, “so that we may revel in our differences and enjoy our plurality.”

Wish-Full Thinking

2008-09-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

Scholarly and entertaining, Prabhakara’s is an eclectic range.

Many read to get “something practical and utilitarian out of the reading as, for instance, is the case when one reads a railway timetable”. A smaller number read, says M.S. Prabhakara in Words and Ideas, “simply for the joy of reading, for the pleasure the reader gets by re-articulating in the unspoken language of the mind and the heart that unique arrangement of words and ideas of the writer.” Prabhakara himself belongs to the minority who not only read extensively but also an amazingly eclectic range of books.
Immersed in books
The short articles on books put together in this collection — which do not belong to the boring category of “reviews” — show a man who has immersed himself in books for a lifetime, devouring everything that comes his way, from detective fiction to lexicons of the most esoteric kind.
Each essay packs in an outline of the book under consideration, gives a quick overview of the writer’s oeuvre and provides tantalising bits of information that will enthuse a reader to go seeking the book. While they are marked by brevity, the essays also place every book in a larger social context. For example, the essay on K.T. Achiah’s two books on food open an interesting debate on the fallacious link often made between Indian diet and vegetarianism, especially with reference to beef eating.
Another remarkable feature is Prabhakara’s sharp eye for details that may go unnoticed by a casual reader. In “An Old Bird Difficult to Catch” on the biography of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, one of the early communists of India, he picks out a certain Mandyam Prativaadi Bhayankara Tirumalacharya who “flits across” the narrative. Talking about Tirumalacharya, associated with the founding of the Communist Party of India outside the country, he notes that the man had “a uniquely apposite name for a communist revolutionary who after all is constantly engaged in ideological disputations.”
A reader cannot miss Prabhakara’s fascination for words, phrases and the entire histories that lie hidden behind every cluster of letters.
Some of the books Prabhakara refers are either rare or no longer available, which makes this slim volume all the more valuable. The book he writes about in the last essay, for instance, “The Scientific Lady in England”, is about how the gentlewomen of the late 17th and early 18th century were fascinated by telescope and microscope, and through them, drawn to science as a discipline!
Lucidity
Above all, this book is a worthy read for its sheer lucidity. Consider this excerpt from “The Mask Behind the Mask”: “…There is that ‘half a square inch of space within one’s heart’ that is never accessible to anyone, not even to one’s closest companions, not to the lover, not to the husband or the wife. Therein lies security; therein too lies the loneliness of all human beings.”
What Prabhakara says about K.T. Achiah’s style of writing — “scholarship carried lightly and not in the least intimidating, entertainingly written and most comprehensively informative” — could well be said of his own.
If there is a complaint, it is that Prabhakara rarely ever breaks his vow of not “succumbing to the ever present temptation and danger of indulging in anecdotes, that first in the irreversible path to senility that elderly writers should resist”. He breaks it only once to write about the subtle ways in which apartheid works in South African liquor shops, leaving one wishing he had made more such digressions. Let’s hope he writes an entire book of anecdotes next.

Of the people, by the people and for the people

2008-09-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

A perspective from ancient Rome.

Imperium; Robert Harris, Arrow Books, The Random House Group Limited, £3.25

Robert Harris, a former Guardian correspondent, is the master of the historical novel, a much neglected literary genre. Over the years, Harris has brought back to life, for his discerning readership, Hitler, Stalin, and the ruins of Pompeii, introducing through a clever literary sleight of hand many an unexpected twist in each tale. Thus, in Fatherland, Hitler lives on and rules into the 1970s; in Archangel, Stalin is survived by his son, kept in hiding in the forest, for an explosive future introduction to public life. The much acclaimed Pompeii is a brilliant telling of the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the burial of the great city in ashes due to an apathetic and disbelieving populace.

Imperium, another classic historical novel, tells the tale of the master politician “Marcus Cicero” and his rise from relative obscurity to the position of great political influence he eventually occupied in the Roman Empire. Described through the eyes of his faithful slave M Tullius, “Tiro” who it is claimed invented shorthand, Cicero’s life and career in politics also provides brilliant insights into the mind of the politician.

A political path

Political personalities like Cicero and Caesar, not being of noble birth, fascinate us because of the heights they reached, and because they followed a political path, not merely a military one. The Roman Empire described here was the first to establish a political framework. There was a clear hierarchy: councils comprising the aristocracy and tribunals from the grassroots. There was also a political hierarchy of positions that one could aspire to occupy in succession until one achieved the pinnacle, the supreme “Imperium’ of consulship. The “Imperium” was a prize that did not come easily to the common man or “New Men” as they were referred to. Many a political battle had to be fought by Cicero in order to achieve this supreme goal; and hailing as he did from an ordinary family with neither aristocratic leanings; nor significant wealth; nor indeed military might; the only weapon he possessed was his oratorical skill.

How does one conquer Rome with only one’s voice as his asset? Cicero’s training for political life began in the hands of Greek master tutors and is well described here. Molon who trained him to make the public lectures that he became famous for, taught him to memorise his speech by taking an imaginary journey around the speaker’s house. “Place the first point you want to make in the entrance hall, and picture it lying there, the second in the atrium and so on, walking round the house in the way you would naturally tour it, assigning a section of your speech not just to each room, but to every alcove and statue. Make sure each site is well lit, clearly defined and distinctive. Otherwise you will be groping around like a drunk trying to find his bed after a party”.

Cicero’s rise in politics began due to an unusual stroke of luck. Sthenius of Thermae a well known Sicilian businessman, who had been robbed of all his wealth by the Roman Governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, sought his legal counsel. The legal roadblock was that Sicily was a province not seen as being a central part of the Roman Empire and crimes carried out there could not therefore be tried in Rome. Discovering that Verres had prosecuted, convicted and punished by imprisonment or execution, in their absence, many eminent Sicilians who opposed his robbing the province and amassing immense wealth, Cicero did the unexpected. He tabled in the Senate a novel but vague piece of legislation “the prosecution of persons in their absence on capital charges should be prohibited in the provinces” thus forcing a debate on the actions of Gaius Verres as governor of Sicily. When that failed, he took his case to the “lower house”, the Tribunes, winning much public acclaim in the process. His alignment with the commoners in the house of Tribunes, many of whom were supporters of Pompey the Great (then an unaccepted political force) albeit acknowledged military leader of Rome, was a calculated but risky move. He subsequently travelled far and wide within Sicily to personally gather evidence against Verres and garnered considerable public support in the process. His oratory in prosecuting the corrupt governor was masterly: “Here is a human monster of unparalleled greed, impudence and wickedness. If I bring this man to judgement, who can find fault with me for doing this? Tell me, in the name of all that is just and holy, what better service can I do my country at the present time!”

First steps

Thus, with the successful conviction of Verres for crimes committed during his reign as Governor of Sicily, Marcus Cicero took his first steps from relative obscurity to the political centrestage. He made many enemies in the process, not mincing words to condemn Verres and all the aristocrats who defended him. For a great part of his career these very aristocrats who constituted the “Imperium” would see him as an enemy; a “New Man” who dared to challenge their authority and successfully. He did make friends among the tribunals and with Pompey the Great but, as he was to later discover, these friendships were fickle and transient. Cicero’s greatest discovery through this process, however, was the power of public opinion; the opportunities that the garnering of public support would confer on a politician; and the vulnerability of even the established politician and aristocrat to public mood. All these discoveries he would employ in great measure in the glorious political career that was to follow.

Cicero’s career as described here gives us an insight into the mind of the politician. It was said that Marcus Cicero never forgot a name, however small or unimportant the person was and that he would work his supporters during interactions “with a word here, a touch of the elbow there, a favoured glance indicating his recognition of the person even among a throng” — qualities that politicians even today are well advised to develop. Masterful oratory, another of Cicero’s strong attributes, was taken seriously by him. He would stay up all night preparing his speeches: “While the world sleeps, the orator paces around by lamplight, wondering what madness brought him to this occupation in the first place…. usually an hour or two after midnight — there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness and hiding home seem to be the only realistic options. And then, somehow, under the pressure of panic, just as humiliation beckons, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory.”

Fickleness in expectation and allegiance is another much criticised political attribute, and this, Cicero had in ample measure. When his favourite nephew and assistant “Lucius” confronts him on his defence of Fonteius, another politician who has been charged with crimes similar to Verres, he responds with characteristic political rhetoric “who are you or I to determine his guilt? It is a matter for the court to decide, not us. Or would you be a tyrant and deny him an advocate?” Indeed, even though this incident leads to the eventual withdrawal of Lucius from Cicero’s team, the loss of his valuable friendship and his eventual death, Cicero refuses to change his mind. After all, nothing defines political friendships greater than their “impermanence”. And when Tiro his slave and stenographer chances upon Cicero preparing to defend Fonteius, having realised that he was guilty as charged, he observes “He was not merely trying as a second-rate advocate might have done, to devise some clever tactic to outwit the prosecution. He was trying to find something he could believe in. That was the core of his genius, both as an advocate and as a statesman”.

Belief in causes

Indeed, this ability to “believe” in the cause one espouses, however antithetical to one’s political affiliations or past actions is the essence of political life even today. Politicians instinctively understand this, which is why they spout conflicting opinions with the greatest of conviction.

According to Cicero “What convinces is conviction. You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost. No chain of reasoning no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant will win the case if your audience senses that belief is missing”.

Cicero’s career, as detailed in this novel, is a wonderful example of careers in public life, culminating in his acceptance by the very aristocracy that rejected him. The battles and battlefields he chose constitute the stuff of legends and his oratory on these occasions had few parallels for its sheer brilliance. Indeed, the book is an elegant reminder that the mind of the consummate politician worldwide remains in many ways unchanged, through centuries. Although this book is a work of fiction, it draws upon 29 volumes of Cicero’s collected speeches and letters preserved in Loeb’s Classical Library and published by Harvard University Press. His extraordinary ambition, capacity for hard work, ability to see opportunity in adversity, perseverance, social and emotional intelligence, sagacity, oratorical skill and pragmatism, are well brought out here, and remain even today, the favoured attributes of the consummate politician. Most of all, the book reminds us that in the battlefield of public life, “both the pen and tongue are mightier than the sword”.

Peace Be On Him

2008-09-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Prophet is a book of advice or consolation with a touch of pop philosophy that can lend itself to different interpretations.

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran; Since it is now out of copyright different editions are available. This review is based on the illustrated Rupa edition, priced Rs. 60.

Shakespeare, who was “not of an age but for all time”, is the best selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-Tzu, the master of Taoist philosophy, infinitely enigmatic in its meanings and therefore attractive at all times. Third is the Leba nese poet Kahlil Gibran who owes his place in the trinity to just one book, The Prophet, a collection of 26 prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional wise man in a faraway place and time. Since its publication in 1923, The Prophet has sold nine million copies in America alone and many more in the rest of the world. What is the secret of its perennial fascination and above all, does it qualify to be a classic? That is, can it read again and again and will it appear different at every reading as a new book? The Prophet is a book for all seasons. Its words are recited at weddings and funerals; it is quoted in books and articles on training professions in narrow fields of specialisations; and in commercial ads for products of all kinds.

The Prophet is a character called Almustafa who gives advice on all matters like love, work, on joy and sorrow, and so forth. But there is an ambiguity in his counsels, in the manner of astrologers with their horoscopes with statements that are widely applicable. At times, Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. Look at them closely and you notice that he is saying something specific; namely, everything is something else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you are doing, you needn’t worry. All this negation can be quite comforting when you are in trouble, which explains why it has been so widely accepted. They appeal not only by their seeming correction of conventional wisdom but more so by their hypnotic power, their negation of the rational process.

Prima facie, the book sounds religious which it is, in the sense that Gibran was familiar with the basic tenets of Buddhism, the Koran but above all with the Bible, in both its Arabic and King James translations. Many of the paradoxes are taken straight from the Sermon on the Mount but they are made simpler for 20th century readers who long for the comforts of religion but not the organised religion of any church, let alone the instructions of any deity on how to get through the slings and arrows of life. Very simply, The Prophet is comforting for people in doubt or in trouble because its central message is, “You are far, far greater than you know and All is well.”

This mix, with its emphasis on suffering, prophecy and the religion of love was the rock on which Gibran built his message. For instance, when people gathered around him and asked him for his final words of wisdom on the existential problems of life, all he says is that love involves suffering and that “your soul is a battlefield upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite.” And goes on to add: “Your reason and your passion are your rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or be held at a standstill in midseas.”

The right balance

Gibran’s philosophy is against two extravagances: “To exclude reason, to admit only reason.” As he puts it, “for reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.” Therefore, he says, “let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; and let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its daily resurrection, and like a phoenix rise above its own ashes.” To put it in a nutshell, “you should rest in reason and move in passion.”

If you cut through the rhetoric, Gibran’s leading traits are clear — idealism, vagueness, sentimentality. This would be called “inspirational literature” (a genre that is hugely popular now) but it is also a book of advice or consolation with a touch of pop philosophy that can lend itself to different interpretations.

New meanings

This explains why it has always been in print since publication — every common reader can see different things in it and come back to it in times of trouble. Which is what makes it a classic by the conventional meaning of the word.

But there is more to its success than “chicken soup for the soul”, to borrow the title of a current bestseller of inspirational literature. It is short, less than 100 pages, a selling point not to be missed. And since the text is in sections you can dip into it here and there, as most people do with the Bible or religious tomes, which makes the book even shorter to go through.

The Road-Map

2008-09-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

Mahfouz’s classic novel captures the existential choices at the juncture of transition from tradition to modernity.

Cairo Modern, Naguib Mahfouz, translated by William M. Hutchins, The American University in Cairo Press, p.242, $19.95.

Though Egypt has an age-old tradition of oral literary forms, the novel came of age in the modern era with the rise of literacy and the establishment of the printing press. The 19th century saw the rise of the intellectual classes and a period of fre edom from colonial rule. These developments resulted in a literary self confidence along with a nationalist spirit that gave impetus to the renaissance of creative arts with an inherent boldness of not shying from the avant garde and yet giving full importance to tradition. The amalgamation of antiquity and contemporaneity lent a singular dynamism to the literary arts of Egypt.

The people of Egypt stand at the juncture of transition when tradition is being replaced by modernity. Their various existential choices are skilfully woven into the plot of Mahfouz’s 1935 novel Cairo Modern which has been only recently translated from Classical Arabic. Through university students who are about to embark on their future careers, Mahfouz emphasises the varied interests of either following fundamentalist tenets laid by Islam which could present the grand solution to all social and political problems or the principles of August Comte and socialism which have the inherent potential for redeeming mankind. Mahgub Abd al-Da’im, the protagonist, follows the ideology of Nihilism, and is one of four friends who lay out their distinct and contrasting ways of defining their stance on life.

Corruption everywhere

Mahgub is inclined seriously to finally attain his degree, so essential for the upkeep of his family. But on completing his studies, he finds it impossible to get a job in a country where networking is all that matters. A well wisher gives him some practical advice: “Forget your qualifications. Don’t waste money on applying for a job. The question boils down to one thing: Do you have someone who will intercede for you? Are you related to someone in a position of power? Can you become engaged to the daughter of someone in the government? If you say yes, then accept my congratulations in advance. If you say no, then direct your energies elsewhere.”

Faced by abject poverty, Mahgub makes the difficult decision of marrying the mistress of a high official in exchange of a job. Fraudulent existence in a make-believe relationship smacks of the corruption of life in Cairo. Mahfouz, undoubtedly, is morally disturbed by such social conditions, but nothing can be done to save people like Mahgub who daily face the temptation of a wealthy life. Living in the opulent luxury of an apartment with a wife who in fact belongs to another man, he finally realises that “His marriage was a fraud. His life was a fraud. The whole world was a fraud.” The intense relationship that develops between the two overshadows Mahgub’s concern for his family.

His good days in such circumstance are short-lived as his fortune depends on the position of his wife’s lover. Though it is easy to feel sorry for anyone in Mahgub’s situation, one is surprised by his lack of concern for his family. The novel turns out to be a tragic picture of depravity and decadence leading to a deep reflection of a world where education and merit are inconsequential honours. One is left asking these questions in the end: What kind of people are these? Why is it that no meaningful relationships ever develop between these people? Life in modern Cairo becomes symbolic of world-weariness and uncertainty in an empty private world of frustrated energies too fragile to rise to any meaningful intellectual involvement. Nothing could be more mind-numbing.

The novel is a picture of insecure, unhappy people whose mental world rests tremulously on the edge of a neurosis. It is an apotheosis of material well being into an economic craving resulting in the collapse of human values and the gradual corruption of the spiritual hygiene once experienced in get-togethers while in the university.

Faithful portrayal

Though Mahfouz does not succeed in knitting the story of the protagonist with the lives of his three friends from his university days, the novel stands out as a convincing narrative of the archetypal Cairo with all its dreams of a prosperous and just society overwhelmed by contemporary decadence and loss of moral values. His Cairo Trilogy, along with the long delayed publishing of Cairo Modern, indicates his deep seated concern for modern Egypt and the social and political history of his land from “pharaonic Thebes to modern Cairo’s dark alleys” which lingers visibly in the background. Despite its many structural lapses, the novel depicts the conditions of corruption and protest that resulted in the 1952 revolution leading to a fervent spirit of nationalism in Egypt.

Reader discretion is needed

2008-09-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

Unconvincing characters and a writing style that tells more than it shows — The Cambridge Curry Club doesn’t seem to get anything right.

The Cambridge Curry Club, Saumya Balsari, Blackamber Books, price not stated.

It’s the first paragraph that makes you blink — and then wish you could be rendered temporarily blind so you can be excused from further torture. I give you the opening of The Cambridge Curry Club:

The sly October wind tore through Cambridge, boldly lifting the prim skirt of the Junior Bursar as her court shoes, indignant at a male colleague’s promotion, clicked briskly through a college archway to meet the waiting porters and bedmakers.

The court shoes, apparently, have a life of their own.

Not being amongst God’s chosen few, you are not blinded but go on to find that there is no further mention of the bursar or her male colleague, or her shoes. This is an unexpected reticence on the author’s part, as she has no compunction in upending a boiling cauldron of enough characters to fill a phone directory on the reader’s unprotected head. Just when you think there can’t possibly be any more, a new man, another stereotype, the “rangy American”, then proceeds to spout the most unreal clap-trap in the history of brown girl-white dude lust dialogue when he meets Durga, the hip quotient in the Club. He moves in a stream of consciousness from “A smalltown boy who singed his soul…. I was Icarus…Arizona Turk’s Head,” leaving you dazed and confused.

The Cambridge Curry Club focuses on a group of disparate women in a charity shop called IndiaNeed. We are to think of it as “another in The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency territory” and a “new direction in postcolonial literature”. There’s no need to insult the reader’s intelligence. You know the kind of women already, you’ve met them before in “The Jane Austen Book Club”, “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”, “Steel Magnolias”, take your pick. But in this curry of woes that make up lives, there is no nodding your head in empathy, there is only an uncontrollable urge to push the whole lot off a staggeringly perpendicular cliff. Perhaps because the writing is so unsympathetic, so literal, telling not showing. There is no one whom you sit up and notice. Not Mr. Chatterjee, who writes endless letters of complaint over trivialities and watches buxom neighbours reveal their cleavage; not Diana Wellington-Smythe who is as icy as her trysts; not any one of the women at the heart of darkness, IndiaNeed, ranging from hennaed Heera who meets a lost love and loses a closet homosexual husband, to Swarnakumari who will forever remain Indian in England.

Interchangeable

When Balsari introduces someone, she cannot help but give random, seemingly interchangeable details about them. A chance character, Dr. Sridhar, doesn’t escape from being sucked in either, although we do get a rather nice phrase from his wife who tried to commit suicide, failed and recovered “the calm of thin ice”.

There are other redeeming parts. When the elderly father of an English neighbour sees a rangoli as “what appeared to be a ghostly white Nazi swastika shining on the ground”. A war vet, he takes to his bed and can only point a trembling figure at the window when asked for an explanation. At least this is funny, whereas the final fiasco at IndiaNeed with a dead woman as mannequin doesn’t raise a ghost of a smile; one is obviously infected with Balsari’s style at this point. Or with Swarnakumari, who discovers spirituality to cope with her husband’s retirement, “Guru Ma was the equivalent of headphones”.

IndiaSpeak is right on the button, too. Barry says, “…..what do you think, just because you can fool your mother you can do the same with me?” Or the matchmaker’s “I have “n” number of boys lined up”.

Otherwise, there is an engineered serendipity, a facile marriage of words that cloy and annoy. Of Eileen, a maths teacher, who was dismissed after she crossed 60, Balsari writes “A number had been the final betrayal”. When husband Bob confesses he’s gay to Heera, “It was Adam who banished Eve from the Garden of Eden”. Anita who loved erasers and was soon to get busy “erasing a messy divorce”, Vivek who engineered matchboxes was “hardly going to set her alight”, you get the picture.

The author’s intention is clear: “Arre, c’mon….you enjoy this khichdi pot of life bubbling in here, don’t you?” is a line thrown in at IndiaNeed. They may, but we don’t.

You could draw out a character graph of the book but that would be too much work for too little returns.

Durga’s conclusion at the end of the novel is unashamedly cowardly, for instance. She will stay with her boorish husband (although the likelihood of the rangy American taking a role in her life is not entirely discounted). The fact that she thinks passion does not last and “wasn’t marriage about imperfections?” jars. Hell, no. Marriage is love, sublime sex, a meeting of minds and souls, anything less is not worth getting out of bed for. Durga’s pusillanimity is just that. There is nothing new to learn here.

If you are wondering what category this work falls under, I would suggest a new one: Why Bother. As for the readers? There is a boutique an hour from Cambridge whose name says it best: Past Caring.

Un-Solved Mystery

2008-09-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

A book that does not take itself too seriously and gets most things about India right…

The Paradise Trail, Duncan Campbell, Headline Review, p.448, price not stated.

A sticker on the cover proclaimed “If you liked Shantaram you will love this!” I did not much care for Shantaram, but found The Paradise Trail by Duncan Campbell quite enjoyable. Fo r one, the book did not have the mixture of incredulous awe and condescending attitude that most western writers affect while setting their works in India. For another, Campbell seems a bit confused as to whether he should cubby-hole his book in any one particular genre. The narrative keeps on changing from being a study of human relationships to a murder mystery to a tribute to the era of flower children. In the hands of any other writer, this may sound like a perfect recipe for disaster, but somehow Campbell’s ability to meander from one character to another and one style to another becomes the book’s singular strength. Although this is his first novel, Campbell has written other non fiction books and that may explain his disdain for plot points.

Plenty of action

A lot of things happen in the book. It starts with a bunch of Western tourists in Calcutta on a shoe string budget in the early 1970s when India and Pakistan are at war. They stay in one of those seedy, rundown guesthouses situated in narrow lanes that mushroom off Chowringee and spend most of their time in activities like rolling a joint, getting their ears cleaned, composing songs and jingles about Hepatitis and sleeping with each other. They are soon joined by other, more focused, Westerners staying in the opulent Oberoi Grand to cover the war. Their paths cross followed by some more drinking, doping and love making. Overseeing this orgy of indulgence is the Indian landlord of the guest house who is an alumni of the London School of Economics but who spends his time playing cricket with his guests or spying on their possessions when they are not in their rooms. Two of the visitors are bumped off and everyone including the Police believes the murders are the handiwork of a serial killer but no one seems to be unduly perturbed. Even the victims appear to leave the world with beatific smiles on their face. The war of liberation of Bangladesh ends with the Indian victory but that does not seem to matter much in the scheme of things.

There are many books that place their protagonists in a journey that spans many decades but it’s difficult to think of any other that does it with such commendable ease. In a matter of a couple of chapters and a few pages we learn that the several characters have successfully negotiated more than 30 years of their lives. The Hippy has turned into the ultimate success story thanks to his juvenile lyrics, the woman passionately desired by at least three men in her youth is now in a committed relationship with another woman, the snob in a safari suit is an old bitter loser and the Indian landlord has migrated again. As far as the serial killer is concerned, the mystery is left for the reader to unravel. Suffice to say the denouement is quite Bollywood.

Nothing contrived

The Paradise Trail is not for students of serious literature nor would the book enjoy a pride of place in a mystery lover’s shelf. However, the refreshing thing about the book is that it does not take itself very seriously. There is nothing forced or contrived about the characters or the situations. They seamlessly float from one event to another and the reader goes along, a tad amused at the wealth of well researched anecdotes from the era that tumbles out. Like how the polite American audience applauded Ravi Shankar and his musicians when they were tuning their instruments for an inordinately long time because the harsh lights set up at the concert in New York to raise funds for the Bangladeshi refugees had affected them. They mistook the preparation to be a new raga that the master had devised. Another thing that the book has going for it are the pithy dialogues that sparkle with wit and humour. The writer gets most things right about India and that is rare for someone from the West.

The Paradise Trail is the sort of a companion you look forward to in a long flight.

Colonialism : The Dawn

2008-08-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Neither East Nor West looks at the ways in which colonial imperialism continues to function today through new forms of globalisation.

Neither East Nor West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture and Religion, edited by Kerstin W. Shands, Sweden: Sodertorns Hogskola, 2008, p. 186, price not stated.

Edward Said’s Orientalism squarely established that the world inhabited by academics certainly knew of its two-fold division into East and West. Whereas the West was propped up by its innovativeness, advancement, adulthood and scientific temper, its other, by default, acquired connotations of imitativeness, sluggishness, childhood and sorcery. The West led and the East lagged. Unfortunately, this view has endured. Needless to say, the West is the centre to the rest of the world because the belief systems it engendered during the Enlightenment phase created permanent divisions between the West and the rest.

Such a view was built up and aided by an industry of unselfconscious writing and representation, some sympathetic, some vitriolic. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe teaches Friday to call him Master and in one stroke, polarises the world into civilised and primitive. Crusoe’s imaginings of the savagery of the inhabitants of the place he finds himself shipwrecked have continued to date in the cinematic representation of Tom Hanks in “The Castaway” or much earlier in “The Blue Lagoon” and many other films. More seriously, Marx’s infamous papers on British rule in India consider colonialism to be the “unconscious tool of history in bringing about . . . revolution”. Said’s Culture and Imperialism, in fact, gives us a veritable list of novels, opera, and other cultural artefacts which define the pattern of relationships between the Western world and its overseas territories. Connecting Conrad and Jane Austen with this enterprise, Said holds them culpable of depicting native peoples as “marginally visible” and “people without History”.

Cultural negotiations

This kind of geographical diversity provides the matrix for cross-cultural exchange both at the mundane and the sublime levels, which is what Neither East nor West intends to uncover through a series of conference essays on the subject. At a juncture when the world can no longer be encapsulated into Said’s water tight contexts, the contributors explore the ways in which postcolonialism has been “developing and diversifying in several ways”. Postcolonial subversion has taken many forms: either its literary manifestation includes overt resistance through an emphasis on nativism or it charts an ambiguous terrain where the contributions of colonialism cannot be overstated. Postcolonialism has acquired a whole new range of meanings today and moved from its focus on imperial control to neo-colonialism. Colonialism is really an anachronistic term for capital expansion, and so it comes as no surprise that capital expansion in global terms is often conflated with globalisation. Among its many connotations as highlighted by several contributors, one interpretation stands out in the contemporary milieu — that postcolonialism has less significance in connoting “after colonialism” than in emphasising the persistence of it in terms of a continuing imperialism. With the new imperialism of the superpowers, it seems that colonialism has never been done away with. Postcolonial Studies thus becomes an ever bigger discipline than originally envisaged as colonialism had never been a metaphor for oppression in such a gargantuan manner.

Kerstin Shands’ Introduction charts the theoretical trajectory of the marginalised, peppering it with names of dozens of postcolonial commentators from Helen Tiffin, John McLeod and Moore-Gilbert to Aijaz Ahmad, Dirlik, Loomba, Appiah and Graham Huggan. Even the views of Hardt and Negri on the borderlessness of contemporary nations are roped in. In short, the editor sweeps in the many facets of postcolonialism — language, nation, translation, globality — in the effort to make the book comprehensive.

Postcolonial Studies is placed in a particular predicament today: it purports to be a liberatory practice but it is complicit with new hegemonies. Part of the problem arises from the inability of this discipline to step outside its textual parameters. Postcolonial theory, by addressing representation and the relations between centre and periphery, loses its historical-material reality and begins to exist in theory only. The significance of the Third World is thus well-nigh lost in service to “high theory”. Postcolonialism and postcoloniality are themselves not unproblematic terms any longer, as the editor points out, because they originated in the Western academy even as they purport to give a voice to the underprivileged non-Western people. So it is that postcolonial studies, postcolonial intellectuals and postcolonial identity have become global in their conceptualisation. Yet postcolonialism is a necessary intervention in the dominant discourse of European humanism which continues into contemporary globalism.

Diverse perspectives

Within such a terrain, the various articles here present perspectives ranging from the space of the marginalised in both the South African Andre Brink and the Bengali Mahasweta Devi to the 19 century Oriya novel and its counterpart in England; from the significance of the Man Booker Prize and the “disproportionate emphasis on India” to a rather oft-trodden analysis of identity crisis in the figure of Naipaul’s Mohun Biswas; from a caricature of the “Mohammed cartoons” by the Western media and the unexplained hostility towards Muslims to a celebration of Arabo-Islamic literature and culture, especially among women scholars who are sidelined in similar ways as alien and inferior. Though wide-ranging in its formulation, the compilation is limited in its originality and insights.

Lights, Camera, Sivaji

2008-08-06T07:36:00.001-07:00

A fascinating sketch of Sivaji Ganesan’s rise in Tamil films and his varying fortunes later in politics.

Sivaji Ganesan: Profile of an Icon, S. Theodore Baskaran, Wisdom Tree Publication, p.106, price not stated.

In his book, Sivaji Ganesan: Profile of an Icon, Theodore Baskaran takes you on a fascinating journey. A 10-year-old boy smitten by theatre runs away to join a drama company. Young actors were treated like bonded labour and thrashed if they did not remember their lines. Can you imagine walking 60 km, all the way from Palakkad to Pollachi, because he did not have the money even for a bus ticket? Sivaji suffered a life of penury at a young age, refusing to get into any other profession save the one he was obsessed with.

It was when he acted in Annadurai’s “Sivaji Kanda Indhu Rajyam” as Sivaji that he was christened Sivaji Ganesan, a name given by Periyar who was impressed with his performance. The author tells us that he continued his links with stage even after his successful foray into films. He founded his own drama troupe called Sivaji Nataka Manram and staged plays in different cities, sometimes using them as fund raisers for deserving causes. Some of his plays like “Thanga Padakkam” and “Vietnam Veedu” were made into films.

After intensive training in all aspects of theatre, Ganesan moved to films, morphing into a colossus that strode the screen. “Parasakthi” in 1952 broke all records and Ganesan won accolades with his “new wave” acting and body language which defied old conventions. The dialogue was written by Karunanidhi who used it to aim barbs at the Government.

Larger than life

Whenever Sivaji Ganesan acted in a film, his presence became larger than life, dwarfing the director and other actors. Masterpieces, like “Pasa Malar”, “Vietnam Veedu” and “Navarathri” (in which the versatile actor played nine roles), ushered in an era of lengthy rhetoric and the script writer had scope to play with flowery language,

Sivaji Films was born in 1956 and produced successful films like “Puthiya Parvai”, “Vietnam Veedu” and “Pava Mannippu”, and even today the company is managed by his son Ram Kumar. Despite his proximity to the DMK party, Ganesan was slowly sidelined, and MGR was promoted instead. Deeply hurt, he withdrew into a shell, when Director Bhimsingh took him to Tirupathi to provide what turned out to be a welcome diversion. This move sealed Ganesan’s fate and he was considered to have “betrayed the party’s rational ideology”. Kamaraj influenced him to join the Congress party which he did finally in 1961.

Ganesan worked three shifts a day, often living in the studios. He was unmindful of the strain, and this probably caused a deterioration in health. Baskaran talks of Ganesan’s vigorous campaigning for the Congress. He tried his best to bring the Kamaraj and Indira Gandhi factions together, and he did so, finally. He floated a new party and canvassed for the Janata Dal, but was soon to realise that politics was not his cup of tea.

Awards and politics

Ganesan was an honest and plainspoken man who lived by his ideals. The National Award which he rightly deserved eluded him because of his political stance. When the Best Supporting Actor for “Thevar Magan” was offered to him in 1994, he turned down the award He was given the Dada Saheb Phalke award in 1997, but what he valued most was the Best Actor Award in 1960 at Cairo. When the Government of India wished to bestow on Ganesan the Best Actor Award, he turned it down, because he felt it was merely a gesture which came too late and the action was fraught with political overtones. In 1995, the French Government conferred on Ganesan the title Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Letters. The book is a must buy for all Sivaji fans and those who wish to know more of him.

Journey to the End of the World

2008-08-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

Troyanov’s reconstruction of the life of Burton is more an investigation of the curious spirit that was idealised but perhaps never fully accepted by contemporary society.

In 1842, round about the time Alfred Tennyson, still be to be knighted, was publishing “Ulysses” to universal acclaim as the portrait of the ideal man of his age, a man cast pretty much in the mythical mould was stepping off the ship in Bombay. Richard Burton had left behind a chequered career at Oxford, having apparently celebrated his expulsion by driving his horse and carriage over the college’s flowerbeds, and believed that India would help consummate his passion “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.

One-and-a-half centuries later, yet another writer with wanderlust in his soul and multiple languages on his tongue-tip has resurrected the man the world now remembers largely as the translator of the Arabian Nights. Biographical fiction is not the easiest of literary forms, but it’s tough to imagine Iliya Troyanov — born in Bulgaria, refugee in West Germany, Kenya-bred — did not recognise a kindred soul in Burton.

Flair for languages

From that uneventful landing in Bombay, Burton went on to chart an unprecedented career in the East India Company — unprecedented not so much in terms of what he achieved by way of command and decoration, but what he didn’t. An inborn flair for languages, honed by childhood stints in France and Italy, flowered in multilingual India and Burton picked up Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati in quick succession; an attempt to pick up monkeyspeak from a roomful of imprisoned primates, however, came to naught.

The streak of maverick, coupled with his linguistic skills, made Burton a shoo-in for a spy: From Baroda, he was sent to Sindh where, in between the painfully prosaic job of surveying land, he disappeared for days on end in local garb under the alias of Mirza Abdullah to determine the leaks and holes in British intelligence. The trail led to a brothel housing only men and boys, which was apparently frequented by red-coated officers who could not always keep their mouths shut.

Unlike Ulysses, the adventure won Burton no kudos: Instead, it made him a suspect in the eyes of the Company — how could he know the truth of the situation if he had not partaken of the forbidden fruit himself? — and effectively stymied his India career. Not so his pioneering spirit, though: Burton would go on to become one of the first Westerners to do the Haj and explore the interiors of East Africa in an effort to find the source of the Nile, the Victorian equivalent of today’s race to launch the first commercial flight to space.

Troyanov’s intricately constructed, densely imagined reconstruction of the life of Burton is less biography, really, and more an investigation of the curious spirit that was idealised but perhaps never fully accepted by contemporary society. Just as the passing of the ages has morphed Ulysses from the perfect man to the flawed protagonist who abandoned wife and son to feed his own selfish desires, so Burton has come full circle — from questionable “native-lover” to a distillation of the best of the Western intellect: a thirst for knowledge, an openness to the “other” and an ability to view both with equanimity.

Interesting intersection

In view of current world scenarios, the intersection between Islam and the outsider is particularly remarkable. Hailing from a culture which subscribes to “force” as the ultimate way to impose one’s will, Burton spends years perfecting his Muslim persona, even undergoing circumcision. “If I assume somebody else’s identity,” he says at one point, “then I can feel what it’s like to be him.”

It’s not that simple, of course, as his teacher tells him (“Fasting is not the same as starving.”). But the hunger to understand that which has always been on the other side of the divide is genuine, the sympathy is unwavering. Troyanov helps the cause further by being completely matter-of-fact about the drama in Burton’s life; instead of making it read like a thriller, he treats his subject’s life like a philosophical treatise.

Distanced perspective

In each of the three sections of the book, Troyanov uses a double narrative device: An omniscient view of Burton’s own reality, which rarely attempts to explain the mind, and a narrator at a remove, who superimposes his own interpretation on the situation. Perhaps intentionally, the effect is rather distancing. Burton remains an enigma till the end, though the prism through which he is viewed changes. The Collector of Worlds, fluently translated by William Hobson, is one of those books that yields rich pickings over repeated readings.

Meet your Mentor

2008-08-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

Randy Pausch’s last lecture taught many to seize the day and live life to its fullest.

The Last Lecture; Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow, Hodder & Stoughton, £7.99.

The last lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”, by Randy Pausch is intended for his children when, on growing up, they realised how much their father cared for them and loved them. Expanded into a book including ways to realise one’s dreams and living life to the hilt, it would give them a clear picture of their father when they were old enough to respond to such an inspiring lecture. The decision was to not tell the children of the fatal disease their father was suffering from. Let it wait till the end when the little ones would be able to comprehend the meaning of the death of their father. This was the unconditional decision taken by Randy Pausch.

If you were going to die, ‘what wisdom would you try to impart to the world knowing it was your last chance?’ The tradition at Carnegie Mallon is to invite their faculty to give an annual lecture in a series called ‘Journeys’ in which they speak of their views on life and what they feel is most important in their lives. But for Randy Pausch, Professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, it was literally the last as he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and had only a few more months to live. The hypothetical question had turned into a real one for him.

Initial nervousness

He was edgy at first to appear before a learned audience and seemed to lack the confidence to give a lecture based on a real life situation. “There was a definite sense,” Pausch remarked in a recent interview before his death, “when I put that talk together, to use another football expression, you know, I wanted to leave it all on the field. . . . If I thought it was important, it’s in there. I played in football games where you walk off the field and the scoreboard didn’t end up the way you wanted. But you knew that you really did give it all. And the other team was too strong. Yeah, I’m not going to beat the cancer. I tried really hard … but sometimes you’re just not going to beat the thing…I wanted to walk off the stage and say anything I thought was important, I had my hour.” His courage and leadership are obvious in his world view.

Friends from around the world flew in to hear him. And what seemed to be a difficult task, turned into a vibrant and funny discourse on childhood memories and the desire to live life to its fullest while the going is good, a recipe of turning our dreams into reality. And this is what Pausch had to say about his three children: “I just hope that they have passion for things, and I’m sure they will. I’m sure their mother will instil that in them. And whatever they see of me in direct memories and indirect memories, uh, will send that signal. Because if they have passion for things, then I’m happy for whatever they have passion for.”

Many have begun to rediscover their lives and those who had given up hope or their love of a pastime have regained their lost passion after hearing the lecture. What was encouraging was the focus of his lecture on his many dreams and the invincibility of his spirit not to give up in the face of obstacles: “You may not agree with the list but I was there. … Being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia -- I guess you can tell the nerds early. …. I wanted to be one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park.” Having almost failed to make it to Brown University, he persisted against what seemed to be a ‘brick wall’: “The brick walls are there for a reason,” he said during his lecture. “The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.” It was with a similar perseverance that Pausch persisted in pursuing Jai Glasgow until she gave in to his marriage proposal. In the circumstances of the approaching calamity for wife and three children, he endeavoured every day to ensure that his family can bear the approaching loss with all its strength.

Such a positive attitude was conspicuous in his pioneering of the Entertainment Technology Centre and the Alice project (Alice is an innovative 3-D environment that teaches programming to young people through storytelling and interactive game-playing) at his university that began with a collaborative exercise by people from different disciplines coming together to create ‘virtual worlds’ as well as learn to work together honestly and with utmost respect for others’ ideas. It is now one of the most popular pursuits at the CMU with students unhesitatingly abiding in an environment of risk and innovation. Faced by a choice between the predictable or the uncertain, he asserts: “Go for the risk. It’s better to fail spectacularly then to pass along and do something which is mediocre.”

Unique experience

The lecture, which was hurriedly put together, has been rendered into a book where Pausch’s acumen and humour have combined to turn it into a concrete experience to be read by generations: “Putting words on paper, I’ve found, was a better way for me to share all the yearnings I have regarding my wife, children and other loved ones. I knew I couldn’t have gone into those subjects on stage without getting emotional.” Though the book is meant for his three children, millions now have read and heard the deeply moving and uplifting lecture around the world that has not only changed many lives, but has taught many to seize the day and live life to its fullest, especially for those who suffer from pancreatic cancer, medical research on which has made little headway in the past many years. To face the challenge, Pausch advises: ‘We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.’

Riot or Write ?

2008-08-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

The English in these translated stories is supple and responsive to the many registers of Oriya.

The Other Side of Reason: Oriya Stories from the Edge; Himansu K. Mohaptara and Paul St-Pierre, eds. Grassroots, Rs. 195.

Good things, they say, come in small packages. This slim volume containing eight contemporary stories translated from Oriya and an elegant introduction proves how right they are.

Clear principles

Though Himansu Mohapatra (the editor who provides the introduction) denies that the collection is based in either thematic coherence or topicality, it is not a haphazard affair either. There are clear principles of selection at work. Thus ‘readability’, judged by the criteria of aesthetics (fine writing) as well as politics (social criticism), is a paramount consideration. The next is translatability into English, which requires, he stipulates, that the stories be able to ‘cut across cultural divides through the sheer force of their human content.’ And finally all the selections are stories ‘from the edge,’ by which he means they record the experience of the ‘other’, outside the ‘comfort zones of the middle class.’ As a non-Oriya reader who puts herself in the hands of the editor and translators, I found it to reassuring that these are representative texts, stories that emerge from and stand witness to their culture and times.

Two of the stories — “History” and “Fear” — are exclusively about this middle class. Two others — “The Picture Within” and “Window View” — bring in the ‘other’ — a tribal married couple, poor neighbourhood children — to disturb the middle class perspective. The remaining four stories are located emphatically beyond the pale of respectable society. The low life they represent may shock or move the implied middle-class reader, but those effects do not seem to be their primary purpose. Instead they are filled with purpose and meaning, the characters possess interiority and subjectivity, and their worlds exist without reference to any norm except their own. Of these, perhaps Paramita Satapathy’s “Ours by Love” and Giri Dandasena’s “Lefri’s Bonda” are betrayed by their sentimentality, in part because both authors seem to view submission to rape as woman’s sacrifice. Bijoy Pradhan’s “A Case of Unnatural Death” and K.K . Mohapatra’s “The Whore: A Love Story” are as unsentimental as they come: the first a gothic horror not meant for the squeamish, the second filled with bawdy humour and straight satire.

Despite the editor’s warning that the stories are ‘so locked into their respective little islands of space and time as to rule out the presence of a communicating door between them,’ it is tempting to trace motifs across them. I have mentioned the shared meaning of rape in two of the stories. I could not help comparing, either, the male paean to a woman’s breasts that comes at the end of “A Case of Unnatural Death” to the whore’s caustic satire of her male clients who “paw” her breasts “as though they’re mounds of dough or something” in ‘The Whore.’ It is perhaps this inter-textual commentary that makes me unable to accede to Mohaptra’s reading of the passage in the early story as a lyrical rhapsody reaching ‘metaphysical heights.’ Floating in the stream of consciousness of the constable Aniruddha when confronted with a female corpse crawling with worms, the passage seems instead to express the limits of his language, his inability to move beyond the banal moral implied in the contrast between (male) desire for the female body and the horror of decaying flesh, rather than an authorial intervention.

But these are matters for readers to discover and judge for themselves. Perhaps the detailed readings of each of the stories provided in the introduction might be redundant for this reason, though indeed they are full of helpful insights. If I have refrained from remarking on how brilliant the stories themselves are, it is because somehow the comment can come to seem subtly insulting, almost as if one is surprised to find these kinds of excellence in writing in the regional languages. If surprise there is it is not at the stories themselves, however, but at the conditions that must exist for such a dynamic literary culture to flourish. One wishes that the editor could have told us more about the little magazines, the critical community, the readership, the influences, and the institutions that promote contemporary Oriya literature. We are given helpful historical background, but not much by way of contemporary context.

Fine work

A final observation about the translations carried out by various hands but all overseen, apparently, by Paul St- Pierre. They are a pleasure to read, a far cry from the usual trial-and-error attempts of amateur hands that we have got used to in the local translation industry. The English language they work with is supple and responsive to the many registers of Oriya deployed in the stories, just sufficiently estranged from English idiom to convey the fact that they have been translated but not obtrusively so. Altogether it is a neat little book, free of typos and smart in appearance. It appears that Grassroots has already published an impressive number of translations from Oriya. This volume is a distinguished addition to their list.

Defining Reality

2008-08-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

Pamela Manasi’s translation is both aesthetic and subtle.

Sunflowers of the Dark; Krishna Sobti, Translated from Hindi by Pamela Manasi, Katha, Rs.200

Krishna Sobti’s brilliance shines in each of her works. She not only picks themes of searing relevance to society, but also weaves them into compelling tales.

She evokes images in the mind with her descriptions, choice of metaphor and vocabulary. And keeps the reader engaged, at times wondering, at others guessing or hoping, or cringing, but never complacent.

But then that is what one expects from a masterful storyteller.

Sunflowers of the Dark (Surajmukhi Andhere Ke) is the story of Ratti, whose spirit is tortured by demons from her childhood.

Ahead of times

In this story, as in others, the author shows herself ahead of her times, handling themes that her generation preferred to ignore. Only recently has the official machinery of justice been forced to focus on a victim’s trauma and its long drawn aftermath. Even artists, particularly filmmakers, began to talk of the needs and desires of a woman not too long ago.

What stands in the way of Ratti’s fulfilment? Is it her fate, a cruel society, or her parents’ inability to help her heal?

All these perhaps, but most of all, Ratti’s own refusal (the word ‘stubborn’ comes up often in the story) to compromise with anything less than the truth renders her utterly lonely, yet unable to accept companionship.

In a world still largely male-oriented, those who write of a woman’s search for complete fulfilment are in danger of becoming cynics, or aggressive, or just plain clinical. But in Sobti’s Sunflowers…, one finds the unflinching presentation of reality suffused with compassion, and devoid of judgmental hostility.

The success of a creative work is partly the resonances it creates in the mind of one who peruses it. Here, the language is simple, the story simply strung together. It is not a novel with numerous threads coming together at remote points in time, hundreds of pages away from where they took off.

Tortuous journey

Within just a hundred pages, the author acquaints us with Ratti’s tortuous journey, her fighting spirit that refuses to kneel though it weeps, a spirit that does not allow her to dissimulate for the sake of assuaging the ego of her male friends. Yet its reflections are many.

And in this fine translation, Pamela Manasi does a difficult job aesthetically and subtly. By bringing out an English translation of yet another of Krishna Sobti’s works, Katha has performed a service to readers and fans of this doyenne among Hindi authors.

From Pulp to the Core

2008-08-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

Showcasing a literature not found in bookstores or libraries.

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction; Selected and Translated by Pritham K.Chakravarthy and edited by Rakesh Khanna; Blaft Publications Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, Rs. 195

In a move that is arguably fraught with risk and reminiscent of Cultural Studies debates, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction showcases, with a passionate, sentimental fondness, a literature that thrives not in bookstores or libraries but in tea stalls and the backseats of school buses. This book assures readers with a soft corner for Tamil pulp that they don’t need to have their heads examined.

In a breezily written translator’s note, Pritham Chakravarthy traces the evolution of pulp fiction and the history of its readership. She makes a strong case for translating into English a body of texts that have enjoyed, unlike “high” literature, an active readership across caste and class groups. The selection ranges from “soft” romances to detective fiction. From Tamilvanan with his detective character Shankarlal to Pushpa Thangadorai’s narrative on the lives of prostitutes and Ramanichandran’s formulaic take on what makes a good wife, the anthology showcases an impressive range. In her translations, Pritham Chakravarthy has successfully managed to retain the idiom peculiar to pulp.

Variable quality

As for the stories themselves, they vary in quality and readability. Tamilvanan’s “Tokyo Rose” with its James Bond-like Shankarlal and Rajesh Kumar’s tightly crafted “Matchstick Number One” are good reads but some of the other fiction, “My Name is Kamala” by Pushpa Thangadorai and Ramanichandran’s “The Rich Woman” for instance, are disappointingly bland and lacking in sub-text.

Obviously, Tamil pulp like its counterparts from other parts of the world, is mostly written to fit a formula, notwithstanding the occasional attempts at experimentation. One is more or less able to anticipate how everything will eventually end. With this, perhaps, comes the guaranteed pleasure of an easy read. Plots race ahead at top speed, flat characters and inconsistencies (such as the illustration on the cover having nothing to do with the story) abound. Pritham Chakravarthy quotes from the guidelines laid out by Sudhandhira Sangu in a 1933 article titled “The Secret of Commercial Novel Writing”: “The title of the book should carry a woman’s name – and it should be a sexy one …Don’t worry about the story line….The story should begin with a murder… “You can make money only if you are able to titillate.”

Writing pulp fiction requires a certain kind of talent and stamina, a devil may care attitude and a sound understanding of what will sell.

Prolific

Most writers featured here are hugely prolific. Rajesh Kumar has published more than 1,250 novels, Ramanichandran, the romance writer is currently working on her 125th novel and the detective writer Pattukkottai Prabakar writes “non-stop, nearly twelve hours a day, taking only two breaks in the morning and afternoon for a cigarette and a cup of filter coffee”.

Even as I acknowledge the right to life of Tamil pulp, I have a quarrel to pick with its lack of meticulousness. Craft matters even if your readers are “low brow”. Unfortunately, we suffer from a dearth of good popular writing. Readers evolve and so should books.

Nativity

2008-08-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

How important are regional languages in the rapidly transforming global village?

A collection of articles written over the course of a decade, this book reflects on the importance of the mother-tongue and argues for its continuing relevance in a world teeming with global and regional literatures. Insights into the workings of the market, transformations within political parties, the upheavals caused by rapid economic development, and liberalisation are linked to the trials and tribulations of local cultures striving to survive, if not succeed, in an increasingly unequal world.

One of the more arresting themes is the now familiar debate about disparate worlds inhabited by Indians writing in regional languages and in English.

Regional writers, Srinivasaraju reminds us, not only constitute an important segment of the intelligentsia but also have a foothold on the global literary scene. However their presence on the global literary scene is always mediated by western literary trends. This problem is surfacing in other non-English speaking countries such as Korea and Japan. Questions pertaining to the survival of local cultures are further complicated by the kinds of institutional support that is often extended by western powers.

Memorable anecdotes

For Srinivasaraju, the key to systemic continuity resides in the belief in one’s mother tongue and in one’s individuality. The book includes biographical sketches laced with memorable anecdotes. Girish Karnad’s penetrating gaze on the intrigue and ‘somewhat incestuous ways of the world of writers’ sets the tone. Srinivasaraju adds a glowing tribute to Shivarama Karanth, a polymath of uncommon breadth. Appraisals of Rajkumar, the Kannada actor, and P. Lankesh, the writer, highlight their zest for life. In an obituary for Fritz Bennewitz, who came to India with Brecht and chose to identify himself with the Third World, Srinivasaraju recounts how he understood the limitations of a developing economy and was frugal in his productions.

Moving from theatre to reality, as it were, Srinivasaraju writes about Bangalore; of its well-known landmarks, the land-locked water bodies that were ‘celebrated metaphors for serenity’, and discusses the planned township around tanks over 400 years old. He also offers interesting comparisons of Kannada and Hindi language cinema.

Symbiotic relationship

In another essay, Srinivasaraju studies the “symbiotic relationship between Kannada nationalism and the idea of a Hindu state or Hindutva”. He also discusses the antiquity of the Kannada language in relation to Tamil and Sanskrit. He explains how the Kannada identity is derived through the organic relationship that exists between Kodava, Konkani, Byari, Havyak and Kannada.

The mime plays, Phoenix and Four Other Mime Plays by Chi Srinivasaraju, were conceived of, and staged, during the years of the Emergency. As translator of his father’s plays, Sugata Srinivasaraju shows how these mime plays offered a protest and the “unseen and unheard silence” they witnessed itself emerged as a vital protagonist in the plays. These plays, translated in 2002, were particularly worth remembering in the aftermath of violence in Gujarat orchestrated by the BJP government.

Sugata Srinivasaraju leaves us with the thought that no language or country can afford to countenance separatist or egoistic tendencies; terms like parochialism and cosmopolitanism are outdated and have to be grappled with differently.

The Celebration called Life

2008-08-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

Celebration of India, land and people.

Unsung; Anita Pratap and Mahesh Bhatt, Mahesh Bhatt Publishing, Price not mentioned.

Anita Pratap, the award winning journalist, and Mahesh Bhatt, photographer of international repute, teamed up to produce this elegant book focusing attention on 10 people who dedicated themselves to improving different dimensions of lives of people around them.

There are a number of common factors that bind these unknown heroes. They are all from humble origins and are apolitical and all self-motivated. In their lives they act out their own vision quest. And they go through life unhonoured and unsung, like the gems and flowers in Thomas Grey’s poem.

The authors pay their affecting acknowledgment to each one of them; “This book is tribute to the ordinary Indian citizens who have dedicated themselves to improving the lives of people around them. Their inner resources compensate for the lake of financial resources. They operate in the shadows, away from the glare and glitz of fame and fortune, to quietly fulfil their mission.”

Each chapter opens with a short note that contextualises with precision the work of the person written about.

Very readable

Anita Pratap’s stories around each person are very readable and dense. Sample this: “Some people are born with a mission. Others discover it along the way. A few develop it just about when others of their age are ready to retreat into seclusion, to spend their remaining days in contemplation and introspection, doing the little things of life that they were too busy to do earlier. Prof. Hasnath Mansur’s life demonstrates it is never too late to contribute to society.”

This is basically a book of photographs and the text supports the exquisite images. Bhatt captures, in black and white, the innocence of school children and the timeless beauty of the deciduous forest. His shots of the stark Ladakh landscape remind the viewer of works of Ansal Adams and Edward Weston.

Bhatt’s photography avoids gimmickry. The raw, candid images of Muslim women in Bangalore and the school children in Orissa record the spirit of our times. His images inspire and have the power of changing the common thinking of people

Dissonant notes

However, among his outstanding portraits of people, I found the low angle shot of Chinnappa striking a dissonant note. The legends for the photographs have been thoughtfully provided. But it is a misnomer to refer to the Gaur of Indian forests as bison. Gaur is, in fact, a wild ox and not a buffalo like the bison.

A few corporate institutions including Wipro, Infosys and Canara bank have supported this venture and evidently the money has been well utilised.

Book designing receives scant attention from publishers in India. Philip D’Souza has designed this book with such painstaking care that the form complements the content of the book.

Close attention has been paid to every aspect of the book…the lay out of photographs and the choice of fonts. It is a joy to hold this book in your hands and turn the pages.

The book is a celebration of India, people and the land.. It is an inspiring effort and demonstrates what can be achieved by photography.

Another Reformation

2008-08-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

A work that celebrates the life of the multi-faceted Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Vision And Mission; Edited by Shahabuddin Iraqi, Manohar,Rs.750.

Islam is all about ‘Ilm’, knowledge; not just of religion but the science of the times, as Prof Mushirul Hasan points out in the keynote address. In fact, the word ‘Quran’ itself is derived from qara’a which means to read. The Quran then is a collection to be read.

Many centuries before scientists came to terms with it, the Holy Quran had talked of scientific processes of the universe, the dawn of the day, the setting of the sun, even that the earth revolves around the sun. Unfortunately, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Muslims neglected this harmony between faith and reason. For instance, much before Keppler, the Quran stated, “And it is He Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon: All (the heavenly bodies) go along, each in its rounded path.”

Free enquiry

As obscurantism ruled, they slipped into the cesspool of learning by rote rather than enquiry, and everything was interpreted in a manner convenient to a patriarchal society. Until there came Sir Syed who sought to inculcate a spirit of scientific temper and free enquiry across the barriers of gender.

Widely given credit for founding the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College, later to be Aligarh Muslim University, in 1875, Sir Syed was a master of many-layered approach and pluralism of thought. This book here is a compilation of 14 papers presented at an international seminar on the legendary socio-educational reformer, who saw no conflict between science and religion.

If on one side, Sir Syed Ahmad came up with a three-volume commentary on the Old and the New Testament, as pointed out by Gulfishan Khan, and Tafsir al-Quran, a seven-volume Urdu translation of the holy book till Surah 20, he was also largely responsible for pointing out the decline of our heritage monuments in Asarus Sanadid. Incidentally, this volume opens with S.M. Azizuddin Husain’s review of the book that Sir Syed first wrote in 1846, then revised seven years later. More than 150 years later, the same monuments in Delhi continue to be pillaged and plundered with impunity.

If Husain talks of Sir Syed’s contribution to history and Khan to religion, Shafey Kidwai, an academic of no mean scholarly accomplishments, throws light on Sir Syed’s lesser known forays into journalism. And along the way rubbishes some easy stereotypes with his lucid remarks and easy wit. A skilled practitioner of juxtaposition of parallel thoughts, Kidwai comes up with a few eye-openers. In the chapter on Sir Syed’s early journalistic endeavours, he points out that Syed Mohammad Khan, elder brother of Sir Syed, launched a weekly, Sayyidul Akhbar in 1837. It was “erroneously described by Margarita Barns as the first newspaper in Urdu”. Similarly, it is pointed out that the name of the paper had little to do with Sir Syed directly but all to do with his lineage.

It is here that Kidwai deserves more credit. Rather than slip into eulogy, he points out that Sayyidul Akhbar, rather than being a forum of a free discourse, was “regarded as the organ of the Sunnis, as sometimes the writings…were partial and bordered on polemics”.

Another notable and profound chapter comes from Tabir Kalam who points out the width of Sir Syed’s vision by reproducing his welcome address at the Indian Association of Lahore session. However, the book is not an uncritical appreciation. The keynote address gently reminds us that Sir Syed preferred almost everything Western. Nazir Ahmad, no mean institution himself, said rather satirically, “There is no dress in the world superior to the body’s nakedness. That is a dress which has no inside out.”

Minor quibbles

Then there is a blip in Khan’s essay. Khan calls Prophet Mohammed the founder of Islam, which is erroneous, considering Islam makes it an article of faith to believe in all the earlier prophets, starting with the first man on earth, Adam. Mohammed was the last of the prophets of Islam. Similarly, there are avoidable editing errors. Some of the essays could have been better edited, and mistakes of grammar easily removed with more careful scrutiny.

But these are small blemishes in what is otherwise a praiseworthy work. It tells us that there was more to Sir Syed than merely the college he founded. And he deserves greater attention than an annual recalling of his contribution on his birthday every October, as AMU, so religiously does.

The Name is Personal

2008-08-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

Avoid this one like the plague.

Chasing Harry Winston; Lauren Weisberger, Harper, Rs 195

There is no nice way of saying this. The book to borrow words from its own pages, is “deadly boring”, “irritatingly verbose” and a complete no-brainer. The only bright spot is the cover that has a parrot-green high-heeled shoe with a diamond ring. Chasing Harry Winston is a painful enterprise. Lauren Weisberger should have stopped when she became famous thanks to her earlier The Devil Wears Prada. Even there the fame is almost entirely Meryl Streep’s.

Cutting to the chase, this story is about “Three best friends. Two resolutions. One year to pull it off”. So says the synopsis. Emmy, Adriana and Leigh want to change their lives. Emmy vows to find a man on every continent for some no-strings fun, Adriana wants to hook herself a man who will put a five-carat diamond on her finger and Leigh remains undecided about what her resolution is. The men are all either “Impishly cute”, “delectable”,” muscled”, or “casually rumpled” and sometimes “utterly scrumptious”. When it is not men it is a pet parrot. Three whole tedious pages are devoted to the makeover of a pet parrot called Otis.

Obviously, whoever has marketed the book has had to use a lot of tricks. On the cover page, right on top, in big bold letters is “The Devil Wears Prada”. You almost miss the much smaller line that reads, “From the best selling author of”. The name of this book figures on the side, almost like an afterthought. Even the dubious words of praise on the back and the inside pages from journals like Company and Heat, are not for this one , but for …Prada.

A final word. The print is painfully small. You could well go blind before you finish the book; that is if you have not already died of boredom.

Dark Matters

2008-08-06T06:51:00.000-07:00

A quick look at the Capital’s hoary past

Capital Vignettes; R.V. Smith, Rupa, Rs. 295.

Actually, writing about Delhi is no easy task. The city has been written about over and over again: paeans, dirges, historical recounts, sneak peeks into political shenanigans. Most of these accounts are eminently readable, even if some do tend to be superficial piffle. This reader is flummoxed at which category R.V. Smith’s stories of Delhi fall into.

Compilation of facts

A compilation of newspaper articles, Smith’s Delhi is the history-soaked city of old. Basically, it reads more as a compilation of interesting facts than atmosphere-soaked montages. Smith traces the tragic propensity of the Qutab Colonnade, linking it to present times with the killing of Jessica Lal. He tells us of the less-than-posh Patparganj’s battle-torn past, the pastoral origins of Dwarka, how Babur and Akbar were wont to come down to the banks of the Jamuna to sleep in their boats on hot nights. The piece on Old Ink Street and the story titled “Door to a Different High”, which tells of an opium house down an inconspicuous street in, of all places, Karol Bagh, are redeemers of this otherwise indifferent set of Delhi stories.

Editorial slips

Some sentences are awkwardly framed (including the liberal use of the word “negro”) and the odd typo does not help matters. Tony (no last name provided) has supplied some sketches, which unfortunately, add nothing. The reader is left with a nagging feeling that in the hands of a more adept wordsmith, backed by a competent editor, these tales would have truly come alive.

This slim volume doesn’t educate, much. It doesn’t entertain, much, either. Maybe it was just something the author needed to get out of his system?

A Word from the Third-World

2008-08-06T06:40:00.002-07:00

A collection that will age gracefully

Third Word: Post-Socialist Poetry, edited by Lana Derkac and Thachom Poyil Rajeevan, Monsoon Editions, Rs. 200.

Third Word is a collection of “post-socialist” poetry from Albania, Slovenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine and Croatia, edited by Lana Derkac and Thacham Poyil Rajeevan, in an attractive volume by Monsoon Editions. But, as Raje evan warns, don’t expect an “academic chronology of post-socialist poetry”; this is quite an informal collection, which appears to have benefited from not being constricted by a too severe theming or timelining.

In his introduction (not without typos), Rajeevan describes these poems as “straightforward, unambiguous, with moorings in culture and society” and as voicing the political and historical dilemmas that the poets have lived with. Through the volume you can see that, in the rich images and connections the poets make between language, resistance and the forging of tools for a new world in the foundries of the word.

It’s impossible not to be stirred when one poet after another speaks of loss of language and meaning, of memory and home and by the way they teach themselves to use words, grammar, speech, the visual language of dream and nightmare to map a land as yet unformed, to measure and know a land where language must be seeded anew. You can’t but feel the life; the urge of the word, especially potent in the hands of poets determined to renew speech and language.

Almost every other poem in this collection has images of nature, of trees, of moss and wet, of forest, mists and wind and almost all are quick to transmit to the reader in equal portions both a sense of loss as well as of what else there is left in this world.

There are far too many poets and poems to make any kind of sensible analysis within this review, but my favourites were Primoz Cucnik, Iztok Osojnik, Xhevahir Spahiu, Tone Skrjanec, and actually many more! But the poems of Delimir Resicki were very disappointing. Except for one brilliant image: “Europe has a new nightgown”. Third Word, even with the errors that are far too many to leave without mention, is definitely a collection that will age gracefully!