And, the Nobel Goes To ....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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 !!!

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

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 !!

“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

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

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.