Ms Militancy: Review in the Biblio

Ranjit Hoskote, reviewing Ms Militancy for Biblio writes:

In Meena Kandasamy’ s Ms Militancy, we encounter a series of self-dramatisations, each the result of an acute consciousness of having to address the pressures of perception that attend poets, women, and poets who happen to be women. Sometimes, this self-consciousness summons forth a generic response, cast in the approved form of resistance essayed by numerous women poets who draw on subversive mythic exemplars while affiliating themselves to heterodox woman saint-poets from the Bhakti teaching lineages.

In this spirit, Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take offence…’, which serves this collection as a Preface:

My Maariamma bays for blood.My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings…. Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. (Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)

Fortunately, there is a considerable current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry; even when she rehearses a well established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal shape-shifting. Her poetic personae— actors, commentators, drama queens, rebels—segue through history, cinema, television, myth and the venues of metropolitan culture.

Review of Ms Militancy in SAWNET by Champa Bilwakesh

Meena Kandasamy places gender and sexuality front and center in her collection of poems in the book Ms.Militancy. The title resonates with increasing volume as the work gradually, but surely, gets under the skin of the reader.

A set of poems in the collection draws a theme around the women saints of the Bhakti tradition, Karaikal Ammaiyar, Andal, and Mira. Separated by centuries, language, and geography, these women shared a common will. Evading marriage, they lived their lives outside the margins drawn for women. They roamed the streets, wrote poetry, sang and danced. Their lives and how they ended are not always clear to us but their poetry has become immortal. So erotic is the Nachiyar Thirumozhi that the fifteen year old Andal composed, that it has been suppressed in preference to the more acceptable, although still urgent in its appeal, the Thirupavai. Celebrated for their unwavering pursuit of the male gods, Shiva, Perumal, and Krishna, these women and their lives are still troubling enigmas today that deserve some unpacking.

And Kandasamy unpacks. In ways that are arresting and bold, she explodes the myths that have put the women saints, and thereby all women, in their place. With phrases that provoke she makes these saints merely human, who bleed and suffer and haunt. What drove these women to such sexual frenzy and the compulsion to scream it into their poetry?

Here is Andal sacrilegiously admiring herself in the garland meant for the deity, as retold by Kandasamy:

the guilt glazed love lay on Andal’s breasts.
thick and heavy as him.               

frightened with force
and locked away, she conjured him every night,
her empurumaan, her emperor-man.

recklessness on speed-dial, she became
a rape romantic. He, a bodice ripper.

Here is Karaikal Ammayar who went out naked in the world and walked on her hands all the way to the hills of Kailash. Blessed by Shiva she became a demon-goddess haunting cremation grounds.

i am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin,
with seizures of speech and song, with a single story
between my sobbing pendulous breasts.

And that story in her breast is the betrayal by her husband who, frightened by her “miracles,” abandons her stealthily and makes his life with another woman in another city.

Mira,
Lying on her back—waiting
To be full, filled and fulfilled—
Mira sings a siren-song
To summon Krishna.

The collection, Ms. Militancy, opens with the poem titled “A cunning stunt” played upon by the “man of words” who names her yoni and calls it the

“… seat,
abode, home, nest, lair, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”

It is clear then that to combat this unseemly burden forced upon women, words need to be deployed by poets.

In her preface to the book, Meena Kandasamy finds catharsis in this act of retelling the myths in ways alternate to the traditional narrative Hindus have come to believe as the truth. It is a way to forgive, by “Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you.”

Here is Sita, “Princess-in-exile”:

“Scorned, she sought refuge in spirituality,
and was carried away by a new-age guru
with saffron clothes and caramel words.
Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”

One may wonder why resurrect these women from a dead past when we have other female role models, women so powerful they rock our world, our political destiny, commerce?

There are urgent and important reasons to question and destroy these myths that have grown around the women to silence their scream at the injustice of their condition and who went insane doing so. These myths cloak the horrible conditions that these ancient women endured in a gauzy and palatable saintliness, something to shape our sense of self around these idolized notions of womanhood that finally, and with certainty, cripple us. We still today murder girl babies and we prefer male fetuses; women bear their babies in unspeakable conditions, just like Sita did. India’s infant mortality rate is shameful.

This kind of alternate telling of myths has always been with us, transcending cultures and religions, and geography. In suffering we are all sisters. Every woman may need to make that journey by herself, if not to change the world, then to change her self. Kandasamy is only following on the conventions of marginalized women in rural India everywhere who have for a long time used Sita to voice their own sorrows and condition of powerlessness in poetry. Here is Nabaneeta Deb Sen in her essay in Manushi about the various alternate telling of the Ramayana:

“In the women’s retellings, the Brahminical Rama myth is blasted automatically though, probably, unwittingly. Here, Rama comes through as a harsh, uncaring and weak-willed husband, a far cry from the ideal man. The women do not mind calling him names such as pashanda or papisthi or directly attacking him by saying, “Rama, you’ve lost your mind” (“Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash“). This is possible because the women’s songs are outside the canon. Women’s Sita myth where Sita is a woman, flourishes only on the periphery. The male Sita myth where she is a devi, continues in the mainstream. In the women’s retelling, Sita is no rebel; she is still the yielding, suffering wife, but she speaks of her sufferings, of injustice, of loneliness and sorrow.”(from Lady Sings the Blues: When Women Retell the Ramayana, Manushi Issue 108)

But what is different in Kandasamy’s work is the way it hovers over the sexualization of spirituality in all these stories and episodes. While the other various subversive retelling are often hidden to us because of linguistic borders, this voice in English is confrontational and stark, and yet somehow speaks in all the languages of India.

There are other noteworthy poems in the collection that are political, that speak from a dalit stand and in solidarity with the struggles of the Sri Lankan Tamils. While these also stand out in the awesome beauty of their expression, the rhetoric is predictable in their thrust and lack the energy and spark in a deeply personal way that the feminist ones do. We can certainly look forward to more from Meena Kandasamy and to the way her writing matures.

Review of Ms Militancy in The Hindu Literary Review by Subash Jeyan

Here’s the link to the original piece

In a language darkly . . .

Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society.

A man who saw the poet Meena Kandasamy read out from her latest poetry collection, Ms. Militancy, at the Jaipur Literary Festival this January apparently felt threatened enough to post his reactions on his Facebook wall:

“Watched a so called poetry reading session of a so called dalit-feminist-poet from chennai! The so called poem and the so called reading postures quite resembled that of w***** invitation to clients on roadsides! She addressed herself as a dalit-feminist! All the way i wondered, what did dalitism and feminism had to do in that poem, which literally worshiped group sex practice!!”

Perhaps it is unfair to give such reactionary words more circulation than they deserve but they do give us an entry point to the kind of poems that Meena Kandasamy writes (definitely not pornography) and a counterpoint from ‘real’ life to our notions of ourselves as a ‘progressive’ society. I don’t know what that Facebook person’s idea of poetry really is but if yours is anywhere remotely in alignment with his, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this collection. Or, come to think of it, perhaps you need to read it more than anyone else…

No easy passage

It won’t be an easy passage if your politics are mainstream, let alone conservative. As a woman dalit poet, Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society. Necessarily, what she sees is different from the images we have constructed for ourselves. It was Ambedkar who said that “women are the gateways of the caste system”. Kandasamy is intensely aware of how the female body is used as an instrument of control, by naming it, fixing it and locating it within a discourse whose concerns are very different. Talking about the female self and body in ways not ‘allowed’ by this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming it, of declaring one’s independence from this discourse:

Tongues untied, we swallow suns.
Sure as sluts, we strip random men.
Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.
Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.
And yes, my dears, we are all friends.

There will be no blood on our bridal beds.
We are not the ones you will choose for wives.
We are not the ones you can sentence for life.

(“Backstreet girls”)

And it goes hand it hand with an irreverent taking apart of the contradictions, hypocrisies and pretences she finds around her everywhere in life, literature and the mythologies of the mainstream. But it’s not all mockery, for, she can also write with chilling clarity about the way things still are. Sample this:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child
the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand
the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst
but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule
the doctor sees a medical emergency
the school sees a potential embarrassment
the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for a taste of that touchable water.

In other poems, she writes with a gay abandon that comes from the liberating knowledge that she doesn’t have to play by your rules anymore. Her poems mock the countless edifices of tradition, culture and literature that had been/are complicit in keeping a whole people invisible and worse for centuries. In spite of the delight in wordplay, the startling phrases that catch you unawares and ambush you as you turn a corner (there’s that delightful emperuman, Emperor-man), her poems are mostly simple, direct, effective and often violent. Because it takes violence to rip apart structures that have kept you down, structures that have become invisible, transparent and part of the ‘natural’ order of things to those who don’t have to live with its stifling oppressiveness. Actually, Meena Kandasamy does a favour to people like that gentleman on Facebook by enabling them to see again. For, acceptance could be the first step towards change, for oneself and others.

Possible redemptions

For herself, it is through rebellion that the path to freedom lies, to other more enabling possibilities. As she puts it poignantly in the ‘ foreword’: “I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive….Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself.” The possibility of redemption, then, through the rubble of rebellion, both for her and us. But if her poetry only shocks or offends us, if we can only mourn the past that has been shown up for what it is, the possibility of reconfiguring our world and living spaces and discourses on a more equal and just footing would be lost, yet again…

My review of Naguib Mahfouz’s ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS in Monday’s EdEx

Read the official online version here.

ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS
By Naguib Mahfouz,
Translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies
Doubleday, 1995, pp.229, $22.95

In this stunning retelling of the classic Thousand and One Nights, Naguib Mahfouz succeeds in recasting the novel in an exotic, Arabic form. Set in an unnamed, ancient Islamic city of the medieval times, this book resonates with the politics of the contemporary world. As in the original, these stories are narrated by Shahrzad who fears being put to death by sultan Shahriyar who has sent several hundreds of young virgins to the gallows.

Inhabited by genies who plot mischief and plod their victims to commit murder, the series of inter-connected short-stories revel in magic realism. The cycle of bloodshed begins when Saanan the merchant is tricked by two trouble-making genies, Qumqam and Singam, to kill the corrupt governor of the city. He is put to death and his family is reduced to penury. More misfortunes follow, and the book is filled with mysterious murders which the police cannot solve. The trials of those people accused of these crimes provide the public with material for gossip and unlimited entertainment, but when it comes to light that the innocent have been sentenced to death, it leads to simmering discontent. The subjects are no longer satisfied with the ruler.

In order to solve this problem, the sultan, his minister and the clown put on various garbs and roam the streets at night gathering real information that seldom reaches royal ears. This leads to several riveting episodes which form the basis for about half-a-dozen short-stories.

In the story of Anees-al-Galees, a cunning genie take on the form of an enchantress, mesmerizes the most powerful men of that land (including the sultan) and ultimately humiliates all of them by robbing them of their clothes and making them walk back to their own homes in stark nakedness.

The characterization is contemporary: the women are more strong-willed than the men; a madman acts as the voice of conscience; the bloodthirsty sultan regrets his style of functioning, sets on the path of reform and grows increasingly despondent; religious fundamentalists keep conspiring against the regime.

The alternate endings presented in Arabian Nights and Days vary between the hilarious and the tragic, so we find Shahrazad’s sister Dunyazad eloping with Nur Al-Din, a perfume-seller; sailor Sindbad spouting Sufi wisdom; and Magic-lamp-and-flying-carpet Aladdin, famous for his happily-ever-after story, brutally executed on trumped-up charges.

Mahfouz writes like no other about the world of the living, the dead and the living-dead. First published in 1982 in Arabic, this novel is simultaneously shaped as a call to conscience and as a submissiveness to fate. It easily opens up to many layers of interpretation. It is a novel that’s wise without trying to be clever; and filled with prose where the dialogues are poetic, the descriptions haunting.

//

My review of ‘Rapids of a Great River’ in today’s New Indian Express

Read the official version here.

Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Lakshmi Holmstrom, Subashree Krishnaswamy, K.Srilata
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Pages: 222, Price: Rs.499

There cannot be a better way to begin a book of Tamil poetry than with A.K.Ramanujan’s translations of Sangam poets. In Rapids of a Great River, the journey starts splendidly but on the way downstream, everything begins disintegrating.

The first section consists of selections from Sangam poetry, Silappadikaram, Manimekalai, Tirukkural , Tirumurai, Periya Puranam, Tiruvaymoli, Naachiyar Tirumoli, and Iramavataram. One also finds excerpts from the works of the Siddhar and Tayumanavar, and from Kuttrala Kuravanci and Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai. The translators have conveniently used extant translations for this section and one finds it sufficient. However, I personally prefer Suddhanandha Bharati or G.U.Pope as translators of the Thirukkural, since P.S.Sundaram’s rendering in English is flat and dull, and does not bring out the depth or the poetry of the original couplets.

Although the first section does have a sprinkling of the Usual Suspects, there are some omitted Tamil classics such as the Kalingathubarani which valorized/ glamourized the spectacles of war and heroism and occupies a pre-eminent place in the Tamil canon. Likewise, the religious and cultural diversity of the Tamil tradition is not highlighted by failing to include selections from Veeramamunivar’s Thembavani, a celebrated epic poem on the life of Jesus Christ and Umaru Pulavar’s Seerapuranam, a biography of Prophet Mohammed written through 5000-odd poems.

The second part of the book consists of translations of Tamil poetry beginning with Subramania Bharati. Much as I would like to be blind to the politics of selections, there are certain lapses here too that cannot evade notice. Iconic poet Bharatidasan (1891-1964) whose poetry radically influenced the politics of Tamil Nadu is missing from the anthology. Is this reflective of a prevailing elitist mindset which sidelines poets who sympathize with the ideology of the Dravidian/ Communist/ Dalit movements, preferring to label them political poets, and not poets’ poets? Bharathidasan and Suradha were trend-setters, they took modern poetry to the people, but the manner in which they’ve been ignored is disheartening.

Other glaring omissions include notable poets like Ka.Na.Subramaniam, Abdul Rahman, Abi, Inquilab and the Vaanambadi group (consisting of progressive Tamil scholars like Sirpi, Mu. Mehta, Puviyarasu, Erode Tamilanban). Likewise, although cinema is deeply embedded in Tamil society/ culture, it is regrettable that there’s no mention of Kannadasan, Vairamuthu, Na.Muthukumar, Arivumathi, Thamarai and others who not only hold the lay people in their sway, but have also proved themselves as literary poets. Even as one cheers for the inclusion of about a dozen Eelam Tamil poets in this anthology, the above instances of exclusion raise doubts about the criteria required to make the cut.

Coming to the poems themselves, in many instances, the translators seem to have not understood particular nuances of the original text. As an illustrative example, in Sukirtharani’s poem Pallichenru cholli (sic) vidukiren from her collection Iravu Mirugam (Night Beast), the line Appavin thozhilum aanduvarumaanamum/ solla mudiyamal/ vaathiyaaridum adivaanguven, literally translates into: “Unable to reveal/ Father’s occupation and annual income/ I would get beaten up by the teacher.” Here, a Dalit schoolgirl speaks of her inability to divulge the details of what her father does for a living because it would not only ‘place’ her socially and economically, but also because of the stigma and the humiliation she would face if this information became public. She seeks shelter in silence, and even suffers the corporal punishment meted out to her.

Instead, the translation in the anthology (by K.Srilata and Subashree Krishnaswamy) introduces an undertone of obstinacy (which is neither existent, implied or intended in the original poem) when these lines are transformed into: “When my teacher caned me/ I didn’t reveal/ father’s occupation/ income per annum.” (p.198) The internal helplessness which she faces, her being punished for a powerlessness that seeks protection, is totally absent in such an alternative rendering. As a result, the militancy in the last lines—where this hesitant girl grows up to tell people outright that she is a Paraichi (a Paraiyar woman, an epithet used as a slur by caste-Hindus)—is effectively mellowed. Fidelity to the text may be fast going out of fashion, but a greater sensitivity towards, and perception of, lived Dalit realities would have ensured that such sabotaging of denotation did not take place.

Rapids of a Great River is surely an ambitious project as far as its aspirations are concerned, but at the end of the book, one is left wondering: Where are the rapids? And what really became of the Great River en route to its English avatar?

Review of Yashpal’s Divya in today’s New Indian Express

First published in The New Indian Express. Official weblink is here.

When it was first published in 1945, Yashpal’s novel Divya created a furore because of its unconventional portrayal of women and their quest for independence. Although it is tame enough for our times, the book remains enigmatic as ever since it sets out by envisioning the prostitute as a liberated woman. Set in a time-period when the clash between Buddhism and Brahminism was at its peak, the novel probes the roots of slavery and the plight of women, thus providing insight into the personal and political nature of bondage.

Born in a Brahmin family, the enchanting Divya is the great-granddaughter of the Chief Justice of the Republic of Madra. She falls in love with Prithusen, the son of a former slave, who is also the best swordsman in the kingdom. As in works of fiction (and unlike in almost all of real life), pregnancy follows a single night of love-making, and Divya hides the signs of a new life growing inside her as she awaits the return of Prithusen. He emerges successful in the war, and in warding off the Brahmins who seek to annex the Sagal territory, but spurns Divya on the advice of his father who is keen to get him married to Seero, granddaughter of the President of the Republic, since that would ensure him a better place in the echelons of power.

Her pregnancy, which should have possibly been an occasion for celebration becomes the cause for censure, and Divya leaves the kingdom. Unable to come to terms with that shame, her great-grandfather dies. Sold to a slave trader, she becomes a wet-nurse, and later, flees in order to join the monastic order, but they refuse to allow her since she does not have a father, husband, son or master who can grant her permission. Saved by the generous courtesan Devi Ratnapraba, she’s rescued from slavery of one kind, and inducted into slavery of another.

In her new avatar as the dancer Anshumala, her fame is unparalleled. However, she also realises that merely by becoming the mistress of her own body, a woman cannot become the mistress of her destiny. She returns to Sagal on the invitation of her former guru Devi Mallika, but is once again ostracised by caste society. Rudhradhir, the Brahmin who has now taken over the kingdom asks her to be his wife, arguing that a high-born girl can never be the state’s chief courtesan. Divya turns down his offer. Prithusen, now a Bhikku offers to take her into the monastic order, but she refuses to enter it too, and the novel ends in a conventional manner.

This trajectory of a woman’s life is used to explore the social maladies prevalent in India at that time. As a revolutionary freedom fighter, Yashpal subtly and shrewdly argues for the necessity for transcending caste divisions and empowering women. Even though it is envisaged for personal purposes, this urgent yearning for an egalitarian society by one sensual, spirited woman enables Divya to assume a realness which is neither maudlin or superficial. Such a nuanced construction renders the novel eminently readable.

Interview with Leela Samson and review of her book on Rukmini Devi in today’s New Indian Express

PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTIONARY (Read the official online version here)

Rukmini Devi always stood out: as a child who spoke up against corporal punishment, a large-eyed girl with a long line of admirers, and as somebody who silently def­ied social conventions. Leela Samson’s biography of the dancer and social activist brings out her radical side as well.

Rukmini’s childhood was shaped by her father who disapproved of crudity and lewdness, a Brahmin attracted to Buddhism, a traditionalist who sympathised with women who suffered from Hindu orthodoxy. He pledged his support to social reform and that led to his association with the Theosophical Society.

Samson revisits this period gracefully in Rukmini Devi: A Life, pointing out not just the highlights of the Society, but also telling the reader about the controversies that the fledging movement had to face on foreign soil. The social activism and intervention of the Theosophists — in diverse ways, such as taking up the cause of labour unions and textile workers or providing education to the depressed classes — is brought out diligently. Likewise, she takes pains to tell in parallel the story of J Krishnamurthy — his indoctrination, involvement and later estrangement from the Theosophists.

Her father’s deep connections with the Theosophical Society led to a love affair and, in a move that shocked traditionalists and scandalised liberals, 16-year-old Rukmini married 41-year-old George Sydney Arund­ale, an English aristocrat and vital figure among Theosophists. Severely critici­sed by the newspapers of the day, the storm over such a cross-cultural marriage subsi­ded over time, and Rukmini and Arundale soon went to work for Annie Besant at Adyar.

A European tour shortly thereafter altered their lives irrevocably. At 22, she accompanied her husband to Australia, where he was general secretary of its unit of the Theosophical Society. She travelled with him all over Europe and the United States. Back in India, she was consecrated as Rukmini Devi by Annie Besant.

Her long-term association with Anna Pavlova kindled her interest in dance. In 1932, for the first time, Rukmini watched the Pandanallur sisters perform. She fell in love with it, and she yearned to learn it too.

Refused the tutelage of the dance-doyen Meenakshisundaram Pillai at first, she began learning form from Gowri Ammal, a devadasi who served in the Kapaleshwar temple. Later, convinced of her genuine commitment, Meenakshisundaram came to Chennai to teach Rukmini. She became the first Brahmin woman to learn the Sadir, even as members of her community had signed and circulated a pledge never to witness a Sadir performance and also discourage others from doing so.

Rukmini Devi gave her first public performance in 1935, hardly two years after she had started learning. Two years later, she had established an academy to teach dance with just ‘one tree, one pupil and one tea­cher’, which is Kalakshetra, one of India’s premier dance-schools.

She was a revolutionary woman: in her first performance at the Natarajar temple in Chidambaram she chose to dance Varugalaamo ayya, a composition identifying with Dalit devotee-martyr Nandanar who was killed in his day for seeking entry into the portals of the same temple.

Samson’s devotion to history ensures that Chennai — with its political climate, cultural heritage and zeal for reform — comes across as another character in Rukmini Devi’s life. She tracks the story of how Rukmini Devi single-handedly strengthened Kalakshetra after a fallout with the Theosophical Society. These anecdotes of how she struggled through the litigation, or how she silently managed cancer, bring out her susceptible, human side.

~~~~

INTERVIEW WITH LEELA SAMSON

You outline hardly half-a-dozen insta­nces of having personally interacted with Rukmini Devi. Why did you push yourself into the shadows? Isn’t it unusual for a biography?

It is an obvious answer for anybody who knew Rukmini Devi. With a personality like her, you are in the shadows. She was a powerful individual, a complete person. There was a sizeable age difference between us; besides, she was a guru and I was a shishya, actually quite low in the hierarchy of shishyas. Writing about a guru is not easy, and when the guru is someone like Rukmini Devi, it becomes very difficult. When you write about a life that encompasses so many things, you really don’t have space for anybody else.

Rukmini Devi was a strong and radical woman; so, how difficult was it for you to also write about her vulnerability?

I think one has to face reality. She had her weak moments. All of us are human, nobody is a saint. She was not a good judge of people and often entrusted the wrong person with the job. On the other hand, for the kind of work she was doing, it was all right to have one or many faults, since the work was so much more important than anything else.

You don’t let the controversies between the Theosophical Society and Rukmini Devi turn into a mudslinging match. What helped you in this concise and eloquent choreography of the text?

I don’t think it was a mudslinging match, but there was a lot of bad blood over it. She wasn’t always right. You could even say she was legally wrong. This was her baby, she created it, she put down every stone — how could anybody come and take it away from her? That was the sentiment that guided her.

There was no guidance on what I chose to reveal, I went by instinct. I am not a confrontationist, but I say what has to be said even if it is not palatable. I spent a lot of time with both sides of the story and I feel that she should have been advi­sed correctly through that. After all, artists are vulnerable.

Rukmini Devi is this true renaissance woman, an activist who took up social concerns that lay outside of dance. As her disciple, and as director of Kala­kshetra, what do you think is the role that artists can play in today’s fragmented society?

The problem with being an artist is that you spend so much time correcting form, in becoming that perfect artist who can survive the market and say something with an element of truth. You don’t have time not just for society but also for yourself, for family, for a good marriage. Some people negotiate, but there’s an element of sacrifice. I know many artists who are activists inside. I think an artist can influence hugely. As an artist who has put her career on the backburner and made the institution my priority, I reach out to society. Making connections bet­ween all kinds of artists, bringing the sense of beauty of life into the lives of those who work and live on campus, these are things which ensure that art is taken to a larger spectrum.

You lament the fact that Rukmini Devi’s works haven’t been properly archived; what do you feel about the preservation of history?

We don’t have a sense of history in our country. Any other country would have written copious biographies. One of the things I have taken up very seriously is that we have to get the history of the institute and Rukmini Devi documented. We are about to start a museum — the history of Bharatanayam will run concurrently to her life because that century encompassed the struggle and the renaissance leading to the development of the dance form by Rukmini.

Everyone knows Rukmini Devi remo­ved the erotic in her effort to sanitise Bharatanatyam, but you speak of how she worked against narastuti (the deification of individual patrons). Your biography doesn’t quite sing her praises, right?

If I did that, it would belittle her a little. She was very private. She never praised us if we danced well. It was never her way.

Your experience with writing this book?

I would rather do a kutcheri. There, I at least know what I have to do.

Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Flowers of Violence: Review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck

With her latest book The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, proves that she is much more powerful on the rigorous terrain of the short-story. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as a “writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Adichie leaves an indelible mark through her first foray into short fiction. Seven of the dozen unlinked, stand-alone short stories in this collection are set in a turbulent Nigeria whose crime and corruption she describes with detachment.

Set in the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka, “Cell One”, is a young girl’s tender retelling of the story of her handsome brother Nnamabia’s arrest and subsequent release. Without screaming for attention, it also offers an insight into college cult warfare, police excesses and custodial deaths. In “A Private Experience”, Chika, an Igbo Christian medical student is herded into safety by a poor Hauza Muslim woman even as a violent regional-religious riot is on. Three hours later, both these women — who discover friendship and faith — return to a city full of charred bodies and unsure of the fate of their loved ones.

The mindless violence that haunts Nigeria is a theme that Adichie often revisits. A young asylum seeker in “American Embassy” refuses to hawk the story of her son being shot dead by government agents in order to keep her dignity intact. The most engaging story in this collection, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, is set in the amoral world of children where sibling rivalry leads to the young Nonso’s death.

In “Ghosts”, the despondent survivors of the January 1970 war, torn

between alienation and allegiance, share their memories even as they carry with them the weight of what could have been: Biafra, the nascent nation that

no longer exists. This short-story preceded the publication of her celebrated novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which dealt with genocide and starvation in Biafra even as it explored how the Nigerian nation never allowed its peoples to break away but brutally forced them to stay together in submission.

Unlike the ideological rigidity that characterises states, Adichie portrays the family as a fluctuating unit that is free to fracture. Certain shared facets of her stories don’t evade notice — for instance, all (but one) of the protagonists are young Nigerian women. And, all the men, invariably, inexcusably, cheat. Therefore, when some of the stories delve into the multiple crises of married life in an alien land, there is nothing intriguing or puzzling about what the men will do. Women, on the other hand, hold the answers. They take the decisions that really count.

“Imitation” is the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife who finds her voice when she has lost her space. When Nkem discovers that her husband has installed his young mistress at their Lagos home, she decides to leave the comfort of America in order to secure her marriage. Nkem’s rage, though legitimate, is more a reaction that springs from her own experience as mistress to married men than from harbouring tragic illusions.

“The Arrangers of Marriage” echoes Indian Diaspora writing as it brings out the series of shams that constitute any arranged marriage. Here, Adichie makes inroads in understanding an immigrant’s efforts to merge with the mainstream at the cost of his identity: Ofodile Emeka Udenna names himself Dave Bell, conveniently opts for a visa marriage with an American, and orders his African wife to forget Igbo language and food.

Adichie probes into same-sex love in two stories, “The Shivering” and “On Monday of Last Week”; but the doomed endings are disappointing, and sound almost as if the protagonists were punished for daring to love differently.

By dwelling on lesbian desire and the female body, “On Monday of Last Week” stands a great chance to be a influential story, but our hopes are dashed when we learn that artist Tracy was merely ‘flirting’ when she kept asking Kamara to pose in the nude. “The Shivering”, a story set in the Princeton University, follows the lives of Chinedu and Ukamaka who miss the obvious future by carrying the burden of past loves.

Once out of Nigeria, and in America, people enter into relationships that would never have been possible back home: an upper middle-class girl befriends an impoverished gay driver, a domestic help turns into a rich wife’s confidant and best friend, a waitress finds a college-going boyfriend, and a university-educated woman becomes a babysitter. The Thing Around Your Neck experiments with the second-person narrative to depict how the American dream is rendered meaningless for Anukka when she realises that most of the population in USA adopts either a curious, or a condescending attitude towards her.

Switching between dualities with ease, Adichie repeatedly returns to her preoccupation with cultural encounters. The mischievous and tightly-crafted “Jumping Monkey Hill” explores prejudices, subtle racism and attempts to define the Other that occur over a two-week long writing workshop. A British Africanist has the self-righteous superiority to tell a group of young African writers what constitutes “an African story.” Significantly, this story-within-a-story mentions no workshop participant by name, preferring to refer to them by their nationalities such as Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Senegalese and so on.

She takes off from where she left in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus by using these short stories to explore how Christianity and colonisation succeed in demonising native traditions. In “The Headstrong Historian”, we come across Nigerians who have been conditioned by Christian education to disregard their own culture. Nwamgba’s soul is crushed when her son becomes a priest and treats her contemptuously as a pagan, but she is avenged when her grand-daughter Grace renames herself with Afamefuna (“My Name Will Not Be Lost”) and writes about the lost and undocumented history of the African peoples.

It is evident that Adichie subscribes to the show-don’t-tell school of story-telling, but sometimes she goes a little overboard with the symbolism. But for this slightly irritating flaw, there is no fantastic chutneyfication of language, no bombastic driving-the-reader-to-a-dictionary. Armed with broad strokes and a straightforward style, Adichie subverts on other levels.

Her critique spans continents, her stories flit across timeframes but throughout the book, she maintains the restraint of an oracle, never wasting a single word, never sitting in judgment.

It’s turned out to be something of an Adichie festival because the publisher has taken advantage of the opportunity to make available reprints of two earlier works, Purple Hibiscus and the award-winning  Half of a Yellow Sun. Both are ideal candidates for re-reading and enjoying again the world that she has created with her carefully crafted words.

(Published in the New Sunday Express, i.witness, 12 July 2009)

Review of THE WATCHMAKER by NANAK SINGH

(First published in The New Sunday Express, June 6 2009)

The Watchmaker
Nanak Singh (Translated from the Punjabi original by Navdeep Suri)
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 192
Price: Rs. 250

First published in 1942, Nanak Singh’s Punjabi novel Pavitra Paapi (Saintly Sinner) subsequently won a Sahitya Akademi Award, and was also made into a Hindi film. Translated into English by the author’s grandson Navdeep Suri, The Watchmaker is a timeless classic of doomed and unconsummated love. Rendered in another tongue with enormous sensitivity, this novel retains the earthy metaphors of the Punjabi original.

Set in the cities of Amritsar and Rawalpindi in the 1930s, it traces the story of an ill-fated young man Kedar Nath. When he desperately joins work as a watchmaker under the parsimonious Attar Singh, little does he realize that another family has lost its only breadwinner. Panna Lal, grievously in debt, goes to work one day and learns that he has been sacked from his position as the shop’s accountant and Kedar, armed with the knowledge of repairing watches has been hired as the new replacement. Panna Lal walks away casting the last accusatory glance at Kedar.

When Panna Lal’s children come looking for him, Kedar is plagued by guilt. Afraid of saying the unpalatable truth, he invents the comfortable lie that Attar Singh has sent their father to Bombay on business. He visits their home, and on their advice, takes lodging nearby. Soon, he is exposed to the dire straits of their family: the increasing debts, the young mother Maya looking after four children, the marriage arrangements of the eldest daughter Veena that have been suspended for want of money and so on. Kedar starts shouldering all the responsibilities of running their family and repaying the various debts. In order to account for Panna Lal’s absence and to keep up a lie of such a magnitude, Kedar (writes and) reads a weekly letter (purportedly from Panna Lal) to the family and manages to satisfy them about his whereabouts.

It is not just a story of a young man playing good samaritan by weaving a litany of lies. Quite naturally, Kedar falls in love with the beautiful Veena, and is torn between pursuing his romantic interests and answering his gnawing conscience (which in true Indian fashion reminds him that he is like a brother to her, and that it is a sin to break such trust). The pleasure of watching Veena gives him the necessary emotional sustenance to bear the crushing poverty which he has called upon himself. With nothing but bitter black tea to sustain him, Kedar wrecks his health working hard to settle Panna Lal’s debts. He then convinces Maya to make all arrangements for Veena’s marriage to another man.

Veena sends for Kedar the night before her wedding and confronts him, however, it is too late for the lovers to change their entangled fate. Doomed in love, the young lovers seek their deaths in diverse ways.

Navdeep Suri’s translation preserves a poetic narrative style of an earlier era, a style that doesn’t show and tell, but only hints and implies. The unpretentious novel subtly questions societal norms and deals with the eternally hazy divisions that separate love and duty and sacrifice. In the end, it is also a story of a watchmaker whose Time has gone all wrong. This embattled love-story, replete with a tragic ending, has an universal appeal.

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.

Book Review: Muslim Portraits

Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India
By Mukulika Banerjee (Editor)
Publisher: Yoda Press
Pages: 142 + xxii
Price: Rs.250

By following a policy of alienation and exclusion towards its Muslim population, India has earned a fair share of criticism. The Sachar Committee exposed how Indian Muslims have suffered from prejudice, poverty and political disenfranchisement. The committee’s report showed that Muslims lag behind in literacy, they are under-represented in the armed forces and government jobs. They find it hard to rent a home in cities, they struggle to get a bank loan anywhere. They are systematically criminalised: Muslims form 12 per cent of the Indian population, but make up 40 per cent of the prisoners languishing in its jails. Statistical and sociological studies have sketched this story of marginalisation, but by revealing the faces behind these facts, Muslim Portraits, an anthology of profiles of individual Muslims, comes to possess a legitimacy that is hard to refute or replicate in formal discourse.

In this book, anthropologists who have studied Muslims societies in contemporary India, profile one single individual whom they have befriended during the course of their research. These 11 engrossing life-stories, narrated from places as far-flung as Lucknow and Lakshadweep, let us encounter the diversity of lived experience and force us to step out of the sin of stereotyping.

Manuela Ciotti’s pen-portrait celebrates the friendship (and fictive kinship) of a Muslim barber Islam and his Chamar friend Jannulal in a village near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh as a testimony to the egalitarian spirit of Islam. On the other side of the spectrum, Shail Mayaram’s story of the story-teller Abdul belonging to an untouchable service caste called kamin, brings out the caste discrimination faced by mirasis within the Muslim community.

Brian Didier’s sketch of an alim in Lakshadweep highlights the extent to which Islam has adapted itself in order to stay in tune with age-old native practices. Didier, brought up on “searing television images of ayatollahs”, admits to having deep-seated biases about Islamic clerics that are unseated when he meets Koya. Not only does this alim uphold the island’s matrilineal heritage, but he also refrains from condemning Sufi practices because he considers social harmony the greatest virtue of Islam.

The only profile from Gujarat is about a guide, Mohammed Husain from Bhuj, who survived the earthquake of January 2001. I would much rather have read the story of a survivor of the violent Hindutva carnage in February 2002, when thousands of Muslims were massacred in Gandhi’s home state. The closest this book comes to documenting a conflict situation is through Thomas Blom Hansen’s story of Javeedbhai, a local don in Mumbai whose gang stood up against the police force and warded off Shiv Sena attacks on a Muslim locality in January 1993, shortly after the Babri Masjid demolition.

The portraits of four women challenge popular assumptions. Patricia Jeffery’s portrait (co-written with Roger and Craig Jeffery) of Aisha, the only female teacher at a madrasa in Bijnor, reveals a vivacious young woman who makes excellent and engaging conversation. Aparna Rao chronicles the story of Khatij, one of the unheard voices from the Kashmir valley. Khatij hasn’t even heard of ‘Bharat’, but she is politically aware enough to condemn the torture and atrocities carried out by the armed forces from ‘Dilli and Hindustan’. Sylvia Vatuk’s memoir of Dr Zakira Ghouse, who earned her doctorate at 73, and Soumya Venkatesan’s portrayal of Banu Beevi, a panchayat president, show us strong women who transcend the boundaries of gender, religion and social status because of their ambition to make a mark in this world.

Stereotyping Muslims has ensured that they are shorn of personal histories. Systematic vilification and disinformation campaigns have made them the first subjects of blame in their own country. Aggressive Hindutva and the global war on terror have strengthened Islamophobia and Muslims have been relegated to a nameless, voiceless existence. This book is a commendable attempt to correct that and could go a long way in healing new and old wounds.

Published in The New Sunday Express. Read the official online version here.

Book Review: A Love-Song to the Valley

Curfewed Night
By Basharat Peer
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 246

Stories from conflict zones sound suspiciously similar. In spite of the detachment that a written narrative provides, these stories share suicide-bomber sentiments—they wait for their chance to do collateral damage before returning to silence. It is easy to get lost in the machine-gun sounds of terminology that haunt these war stories—casualties, checkposts, crossfires, collaborators, curfews, detentions, encounters, landmines, torture—but Curfewed Night, the first memoir from Kashmir, India’s infamous conflict zone, evocatively chronicles the struggle for azadi (freedom).

A teenager when insurgency first reared its head in Kashmir in 1989, Peer has the secret ambition to be a militant. He wants lay down his life fighting for Kashmiri independence. Before he can achieve the glamorous status of being a guerrilla, he is bundled away to the Aligarh Muslim University in 1993 to complete his schooling and graduation. Going to Delhi and becoming a writer soon after, he returns home as a reporter and experiences first-hand, the liberatory potential of writing.

Personal and political at once, he breathlessly tells us the life stories of cousins and friends who embraced militancy and the martyrdom that came with it, of the perilous border crossings to get arms-training to become militants, of the hundreds of disappeared young men and their “half-widows”, of psychologically disturbed young people, of graveyards growing monstrously and in absentia funerals, of temples and palaces that were turned into paramilitary camps, of detention and torture cells that were exorcised to make homes for politicians, of the destruction of a Sufi shrine and six hundred years of history in a single day.

Employing a spare prose style and shunning away from any kind of propaganda, Peer acutely traces the alienation and resentment that built up among Kashmiri Muslims because of Indian (mis)rule, militarization and the systematic use of state terror to rig elections and crush insurgency. He adheres to history as he narrates how the UN endorsement for a plebiscite for Kashmiris, to determine which nation they wanted to belong to, was dumped by New Delhi. The memoir gains credibility because of a narrative structure that desperately chases every story and every reference point in Kashmir’s recent history. He meets survivors of the Gawkadal Bridge massacre in Srinagar where more than 50 people died in paramilitary firing while taking out a peaceful march to protest police brutality—a tragedy that irrevocably pushed people towards secessionism and made them reject all symbols of Indian nationalism.

Peer deserves accolades for his sensitive portrayal of the women victimized by war. He writes about meeting Mubeena Ghani, a bride who was raped by an Indian paramilitary group a few hours after her wedding, and her quest for a dignified existence; he visits the village of Kunanposhpora, where the Indian army raped more than 20 women; he chronicles the angst of mothers; he sympathizes with Parveena Ahangar who founded a support group for parents of disappeared persons; and he decries attempts by a puritanical Islamic women’s group to impose the veil on Kashmiri women.

The book courageously and uncompromisingly records the third-degree custodial torture methods employed by the Indian armed forces at Papa-2 and the Indian efforts to breed counter-insurgents. In equal measure, he also notes how Pakistan promoted strife in Kashmir, and how the excesses of the militant groups made thousands of Kashmiri Pandits flee their homeland.

Peer provides an intimate reading experience—he equates dying for freedom with the first kiss on an adolescent’s lips, and the absence of books on the Kashmiri experience with the absence of a lover. Kashmir thus ceases to fit into the traditional categories of a motherland/ fatherland: she is the beloved. Buried within the pages of this memoir is a love-song to his land and its liberation struggle.

(First published in The New Indian Express. Read the online version here.)

TIGER SHINES BRIGHT (Article in TNIE)

Chennai-born Aravind Adiga has won the Booker Prize for The White Tiger, a novel about the India that we are ashamed to admit. Here, people forget to name their children. Here, men with sadness-sculpted shoulders and knotted-rope spines become human beasts of burden. Here, what counts is the size of your belly and the voraciousness of your appetite to demonically devour everyone who comes your way, everyone who crosses your path. Here, the rich and the poor inhabit different galaxies. Here, elections are engineered, and feudalism receives a daily foot-massage from a fraudulent democracy.

Here, people stare at framed photographs of their Pomeranian pups, but servants are ordered not to catch their eye or meet their gaze. This is the unbranded India that is not part of any film festival circuit. It is the raw India that will corrupt our virgin souls and ruin our incubating dreams. This India speaks our mother tongues, though her screaming is never aired on primetime TV.

Adiga’s intense debut novel brilliantly exposes the wretchedly cruel backdrop against which India’s underclass struggles for survival. This work of fiction is centred on seven letters that Balram Halwai, a car driver-turned-entrepreneur, writes to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to explain his success story. Born in a nondescript village near Bodh Gaya, Balram (named after Krishna’s sidekick by his schoolteacher) fights impossible odds to break out of servitude. Son of a rickshaw-puller, he is pulled out of school in spite of the promise he displays, worse he is condemned to work in a teashop. His drive to escape the clutches of fate ensures that he learns driving, and soon he is working for the landlords of Lakshmangarh.

Business deals in their family — as shady as the coal they sold — take Ashok and Pinky Madam to Delhi, and Balram accompanies them in his capacity as a driver. In the corrupt capital city, he learns the trade secrets that run this burgeoning nation. In its bylanes of power, he burns with the desire to break out of the “rooster coop”. He succeeds by murdering his master, moving to Bangalore, taking on a new identity and setting up a start-up. As the narrative sways between grime and glitter, Balram’s logic will bamboozle you and almost convince you that the best thing that happened to Ashok Sharma was getting murdered. For instance, as he murders his boss, Balram says, “Tuberculosis is a worse way to go than this, I assure you.” Adiga’s novel, clever, confident and coarse on purpose, is peppered with a street-slang that will shock the reader in the most unexpected places. He may not be a typical workingclass revolutionary who stands up for his rights, but to his credit, Balram Halwai never gives up the gruelling fight.

If this novel were a fable, it would be the story of how a White Tiger takes on the Buffalo, Stork,Wild Boar and the Raven (the beastly zamindars of Lakshmangarh); and defeats them at their own game. It’s vivid and exotic, and guaranteed to appeal to an occidental eye because of its unflinching honesty.

The capital city becomes a character in the hands of Adiga: its posh international hotels and prostitutes with fake blonde hair; its many slums and statues and indistinguishable streets; its ministers and middlemen lend The White Tiger an immediacy that is lacking in most Indian fiction. The clinical manner in which he has depicted social inequality transforms the novel into an unsettling yet authentic reading experience.

The world has seen enough novels that explore insanity (Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture), dysfunctional families (Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole), the immigrant experience (Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs), historical fiction (Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies). Perhaps, for once, the jury wanted to award a story that was true to life. Perhaps they wanted to push the envelope on what a novel is supposed to do.We have to celebrate Adiga’s recognition on an international platform, because he has revealed the real picture of our country.

The book ends with Balram telling Jiabao that he thinks he is ready to have children: perhaps, more white tigers will populate this place. Is Adiga sending out the message that it is time people watched out for the militant rage of those who have been denied a dignified existence?

You can read the online version of the article here.

the winner will be

As the Man Booker Prize enters its fortieth year in 2008, it retains its position as the most respected literary prize for English language fiction published in the UK and the Commonwealth. Despite its glamorous halo of quality, the prize has attracted attention because of its controversial nature — a wife on the jury fought for the sake of her then husband’s novel, jury members have threatened suicide over the selection of a book, and over the years, they have, like unruly schoolchildren, called each other nasty names and gone so far as to trade charges of cheating.

Because the benefits of the Man Booker prize are many (worldwide audience, translations and film adaptations), the omissions on the shortlist generate as much public discussion as the half-a-dozen selections. Rushdie’s latest novel failed to enchant the jury; other notable omissions this year are Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Mohammed Hanif ’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and Michelle de Krester’s The Lost Dog. The fact that this prize has been bestowed on first-time novelists (Arundhati Roy, Yann Martel, DBC Pierre) means that Aravind Adiga or Steve Toltz stand a big, fat chance to seize the day . Therefore, it not surprising that they happen to be bookies’ favourites.

Spending a month reading the six shortlisted titles means that one can be legitimately entitled to an opinion — in other words, one can piously pick a possible winner.

I love Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.

The text speaks to me in ways that I can never put down into words.

I have never before encountered such a feisty rural heroine in Indian English fiction. Deeti suffers in a wretchedly painful marriage, cultivates opium and supports her daughter single-handedly; falls in love and secretly marries the Dalit who saved her from becoming a sati, decides to become an indentured labourer along with her husband when fleeing from her family. Once aboard the Ibis, she is the women’s counsellor and champion of others’ rights; and in the tremendous, tumultuous final scene she watches, with hope and silent resignation, the love of her life sail away (with other seamen) to save his skin. And during the course of these important events, she fills the world with her song, her laughter.

May be this praise sounds too personal: as though I was reading the novel based on who I am, a woman, a Dalit, an Indian with migrant/slave ancestors somewhere in the roots of her family tree. It is almost time to remember that not one person sitting on the jury shares my background.

However that does not mean that Ghosh’s masterpiece will impress them any less than it moved me. So I might as well say that I made this choice because of purely technical reasons. As, if you please, an objective reviewer.

At the height of his expressive powers, Ghosh is adept at creating not just true-to-life characters but giving each one of them voices and styles and speech patterns of their own: one comes across an English with Indian inflections, a pidgin tongue, and sailors’ registers. The narrative is exceptionally well-handled and the climax is vivid, almost unforeseeable.

Reclaiming history sounds like a scary rightwing project, but by penning a panoramic novel from the perspective of powerless colonised subjects and the manner in which they are swayed by political forces, Ghosh has proved that the purpose of literature is to change the way we look at the world. When you are done with the rereading, this bewitching book will make you long for the second instalment and a screen adaptation.

***

  ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE 

  Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh 
  Publisher: Penguin/Viking 
  Pages: 515, Price: Rs 599 

The first volume of Ghosh’s projected Ibis trilogy, Sea of Poppies is a fascinating historical novel that exceeds expectations novel that exceeds expectations by taking on two of the mightiest projects of colonialism: indentured labor and the opium trade. Ibis, a retired slave ship/blackbirder comes to Calcutta to transport Indians as plantation coolies to Mauritius. With the silken story-telling as potent as the drug itself, colonial history and cultural connections seamlessly merge with the ensemble character cast that consists of sailors and lascar seamen, a disgraced raja, a rajput subedar, a French botanist’s orphaned daughter, and coolies of various castes and women migrants.

Even as the novel reveals masks and mindsets, it also celebrates difference and diversity . The schooner’s second mate Zachary Reid, a black mulatto freedman, and Kalua, a Dalit villager stand out as heroes who silently fight against the stigma of color and caste, and who, at least in their love affairs, transcend them. Britain’s necessity to offset its trade deficit converted the nation into the world’s biggest drug-pusher, and the impact of this exercise looms large over the lives of powerless rural people in the Ganges plains.

To Ghosh’s credit, he portrays colonial subjects as armed with the power to transform their own destinies. The colonizing tongue changes Madhu Kalua to Maddow Clover—yet, creativity gives birth to a pidgin, where English, ravished by Bengali, Bhojpuri and Laskar, turns into a multi-layered lingo whose music adds to this novel’s brilliance. The brutal climax shows the ship in mid sea, fighting a tempest. The real storm is however in the minds of those aboard the Ibis as they watch their dear ones — the convicts and the condemned — move away in search of safer shores.

  FALLEN ANGEL 

  The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry 
  Publisher: Faber and Faber 
  Pages: 300, Price: Rs 799 

Roseanne McNulty, nearing hundred and possibly the oldest person in all of Ireland, has spent more than half a centu ry at the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. As the asylum awaits demolition, psychiatrist Dr Grene has to assess her state of mind. Picking up the threads from his earlier novel The Whereabouts of Eenas McNulty (1998), Sebastian Barry spins this self-reflexive novel.

Though his beautiful, beautiful language can hoodwink you, the plot flaws are too obvious to go unnoticed: Dr Grene does not have any knowledge of Roseanne’s story in spite of being the psychiatrist at the asylum for 30 years and mice have eaten away her official records, and Dr Grene himself has not taken any case notes and she refuses to tell him her story .

Interweaving Roseanne’s secret narrative of her life and Dr Grene’s commonplace notebook, the brooding, dark novel traces the happenings in the past through additional material such as Fr Gaunt’s vile chronicles and hospital records. Roseanne’s fall from grace begins after her father’s death: she marries a Catholic Tom McNulty against the wishes of Fr Gaunt who accuses her of infidelity, labels her a nymphomaniac and ensures her marriage is annulled.

Broken-hearted, she sleeps with Eenas McNulty, gives birth to a son and is admitted into an asylum. It is a poignant story of how misogyny uses the authority of religion and morality to condemn a woman to madness. Despite a disappointing and predictable twist-ending, this novel about poverty and patriotism, memory and identity has a disarming old-world charm that is sure to entice readers.

  SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET 

  The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant 
  Publisher: Virago 
  Pages: 293, Price: Rs 595 

Immigration — with its promise of a new land and language — strips one’s soul and holds out the potential for enormous change. However, Vivien’s Jewish-Hungarian refugee parents refuse to shed their protective layers, preferring to live timidly as mice-people in a red-brick mansion block in Benson Court, London. One day, when uncle Sandor Kovacs makes an appearance, he is violently turned away.

She later hears his name on the news but her curiosity is met with blank stares. Rebelling against this cocooned existence, she falls in love with literature and lipstick and reinvents herself through clothes. She marries to escape her isolation, alas, fate makes her a widow on her honeymoon. Back home, 25-year-old Vivien gets in touch with Uncle Sandor, the notorious slum landlord out on parole after 14 years in prison. Through the hackneyed narrative device of becoming his amanuensis, she learns that this flamboyant face-of-evil, with his weakness for cakes and coloured women, has kind eyes and the key to her family’s history.

When she discovers the past denied to her, Vivien joins the anti-Nazi league and the novel pleats a perfect parallel between anti-semitism in 1940s Europe (her grandparents had been gassed) and anti-Black racism in 1970s England. Grant’s novel details the individual’s struggle for survival through unconventional viewpoints: Eunice, Sandor’s black fiancée views him as a victim and a saviour; Vivien’s boyfriend Claude dies due to his fascination with the Swastika’s shape. Sadly, the clothes-maketh-the-woman motif romps home after ruining the last sentence.

  DANGEROUS DIVIDE 

  The White Tiger  by Aravind Adiga 
  Publisher: HarperCollins 
  Pages: 321, Price: Rs 395 

Even though The White Tiger has an invocation that involves arse-kissing 3,600,004 gods, it turns out to be a smashing debut novel. Selftaught, half-baked Balram-I-am-tomorrow-Halwai writes a series of letters to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao about the Other India that will never be shown to him. Balram’s movement from Darkness (a menial job in his nondescript village) to Light (driver of a Delhi-based businessman) lets him learn the ropes of what works in India. As casteism and feudalism strike a fatal friendship with the police and politicians, we are taken on an unsentimental yet riveting ride.

In an impudent manner, Balram succeeds in justifying why he murdered his boss Ashok Sharma, and how he emerges as a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. No longer a servant, he gets a share in the spoils of India’s economic boom. In trademark Indian fashion — where the lives of poor people have no value — the backlash to his boss’s murder (17 of Balram’s kin are massacred in a bloody reprisal) is mentioned only in passing.

Although every Indian cliché is deconstructed within a controlled narrative structure, Adiga is guilty of over-simplification when he reduces the complex caste system to two binaries: Men With Big Bellies and Men With Small Bellies (by the way, where do we women fit in?). This novel is an incisive satire on our troubled times: as mutiny simmers on the sidelines, one lone man makes a choice and grabs his chance to live like a human being.

White Tiger is a captivating read; you will appreciate Adiga for the engaging manner in which he chronicles oppression and resistance.

  CHARMING RASCALS 

  A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz 
  Publisher: Hamish Hamilton 
  Pages: 711, Price: Rs 1295 

Narrated from prison by Jasper, A Fraction of the Whole is a hysterical realist novel about his megalomaniac dad Martin (“whose body will never be found”) and his legendary uncle Terry Dean, a criminal outlaw and sports fundamentalist who shot down match-fixers and became Australia’s folk hero. Martin’s penchant for attracting catastrophe with his ideas irrevocably shatters his family, and growing up in this shadow, Jasper suffers without school education and a support system. In spite of the broad themes that the narrative brushes past, it is fixated on family (parents, siblings, spouses) and misguided failures (suicides, insanity, serial murders, pyramid schemes). Because this novel is an incredibly funny John-Irving-ish read, there is no danger of being bogged down by the restlessness of its first-person narrators (son and dad sounding so similar). But obsessive energy without direction is pointless and besides, there are literary limits as to how often a reader can be expected to suspend disbelief as the plot spirals out of control.

Misogynists may get away after calling women fickle-minded, yet it takes the talent of Toltz to create a Caroline Potts (who constantly vacillates/oscillates between Martin and Terry) or an Anouk (who transforms herself from a tonsured activist to housekeeper to sexy glamourina to richest widow in Australia within the last hundred pages).

This scandalous, irrational story hyper-imaginatively comes full circle after brief stopovers in Paris and Thailand, and there’s so much under the table and over the top in this fraction of spicy, salted fiction, that the novel’s logical lapses can be forgiven whole-heartedly .

PATIENCE TESTER 

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher 
Publisher: Fourth Estate 
Pages: 738, Price: £17.99

Set in Rayfield Avenue, a Sheffield suburb in the 1970s, Hensher’s historical fiction traces the banal lives of the Glover and Sellers families over two decades. Swaying between domestic drama, industrial strife and political satire, the third-person narrative ensures that all incidents, hysteric or humdrum — Katherine’s infidelity, her public humiliation of son Timothy , a visit to a fishmonger, a court proceeding related to a criminal case, a riot in Orgreave with Arthur Scargill in a cameo — are richly etched. Small events cast long shadows within this sealed community, as the cruelties inflicted in childhood continue to cripple the future.

Apart from the purple passages and the pretentiousness of sincerity which makes one cringe, the novel’s much-hyped engagement with the political is shallow. The miners’ strike of 1984 is told from the point of view of 19-year-old teenage activist Timothy, and thus Hensher saves himself from the task of siding with the Left.

We can commend the author for his adeptness in maintaining suspense — even halfway through the book, we are not told how the characters look. And yet, the epic narrative reads as if someone were reporting, in real-time, CCTV footage of what happens in the Sellers and Glover households. In such a situation, one longs for the pen of a ruthless editor who would have cut down the number of pages and also done away with the trick ending. All the same, it is unfair to call this big book a major letdown because it will lend itself to therapeutic bedtime reading for insomniacs.

(First published in The New Indian Express, Oct 12, 2008)

This is for those of you who prefer the e-paper version…  wait till I give a link, or put up a picture here. : )