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.

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In today’s New Indian Express: my interview with Suniti Namjoshi

This is the unchopped longer version. Read the official interview on the paper’s website.

Famed for her subversive writing and outspokenness, poet and fabulist SUNITI NAMJOSHI took to writing prolifically for children a few years ago. During her recent visit to Chennai to launch the latest series of The Aditi Adventures, she spoke to MEENA KANDASAMY about fables and fairy tales, and the intricacies of writing for a young audience.

Q: Your book Feminist Fables is a classic because it retold and revised so many myths. What made you deal with myths?

A: The power of a myth is that it mutates—in the hand of a different poet, it is retold in a different form. Take the myth of Narcissus: for one poet it could be about the romanticism of falling in love with beauty, for another it could be Echo and her fate and her voicelessness. Since myths never mean one thing, all poets understand them and mutate them. Feminist Fables sought to question social assumptions and subvert the male-dominated literary tradition.

Q: Why do you choose to work with fables, given the fact that it is mostly a moralistic medium?

A: Yes, the fables are a didactic form. But more often than they preach something, they actually question something. Secondly, it can be a satirical form—satire doesn’t necessarily reinforce existing values—it can question social issues of a morality which can be damaging. Jonathan Swift was a satirist, but his savage and nasty satire was directed against the establishment. I think my choice of fables has to also do with the Indian tradition of story-telling.

Q:What made you take up writing for children, when the rest of your work is so politically charged? Isn’t writing for children a holy land where there are clear-cut definitions of right and wrong?

A: There are a lot of assumptions about what children’s books should be like. But, it is something that changes from age to age and society to society. There are people who believe that children should be protected. But take a look at the nursery rhymes—say, Ding dong bell, Pussy’s in the well—it is all about drowning a cat, it is so bloodthirsty. Or take a look at fairy-tales Little Red Riding Hood, there is so much of violence. Even the Grimm’s fairy-tales are no exception in that regard.

Q: How unique is the experience of writing for children? Are there any specific limits you set for yourself?

A: I have fallen into writing for children by accident. The first book I wrote was for my niece Aditi. Most of the children’s books at that time were certainly not Indian. Those stories did not make sense for our landscape, our tradition and our experience. My book was set in the countryside, and I put my own childhood into it. The book was not about a Jane or Jim or Lucy, it was about Aditi, it had her name on it.

The difference in my writing arises because I am much gentler when I write for children. My audience comprises of children under ten: not young adults or teenagers. I think writing can arm children with intellectual weapons—I want children to think for themselves and consider and reconsider what is being said. That’s why all the books are filled with speculations and questions which they can ask themselves.

Another difference between writing for children and writing for adults lies in the fact that grown-ups are expected to know several things—such as literary references or allusions—beforehand, but with children that’s not fair to have such an expectation. After all, children have less literary and life experience.

Q: In the Aditi series, the stories for children are set everywhere: in Prague and Hong Kong, in outer space, in cyberspace. How do you view the relationship between travel and writing?

A: Writing springs from experience. I have been to all the places, except of course the moons of Jupiter which figures in one of the stories. When you have been somewhere, there is something about that place which strikes your imagination. What helps with the writing is the right combination of intelligence and imagination.

Q; What’s your take on the standard “and they lived happily ever after” endings? Don’t you think it doesn’t prepare children for real life?

A: Children respond in several ways, and their only influence is not fairy tales where the good prosper and the wicked die. It is hard to say how much these fairy tales actually affect them.  Recently, I was addressing students of a popular school in Chennai, and I was telling them how I had to remove from one of my books an instance of an elephant stealing sugarcane because the publishers objected to it. But one boy in the audience told me, “But it happens in real life. So it can be there in the book.” That’s a major point he was making. In my opinion, children are really rooted in real life.

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 in Muse India — In Conversation with Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Presently, he lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization, was billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales with stories narrated overnight by thirteen passengers held up at an airport. Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo, was released earlier in 2009. It is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man.

Here Meena Kandasamy, a noted poet, engages Dasgupta in conversation on his novels, in Chennai during launch of Solo.

Meena - All over Solo, we have people trying to preserve the remnants of their culture. How important do you think is the preservation of culture? What about the dangers of such a project—a monolithic Hindutva that seeks to impose itself, or fundamentalist Islam that refuses to respect native traditions?

Rana – In a way, the book deals not so much with the idea of culture, as just the idea of preserving it. There is a difference between the attempts of an individual, to sort of, find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people. The character in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category. He’s being forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project. I think the idea of culture is a very difficult one. For instance, it is assumed that we all know what our culture is. Most of us have constructed our culture—it’s fairly complex, it is not necessarily shared with people who live in the same place as us. So, I don’t see culture as a sort of organic and obvious thing. For my character, it is just an aspect of the self. It is how people tell their stories themselves. I was looking at how politics and times completely rips that language apart and deprives individuals of the ability to link various bits of their lives together.

Meena - Tokyo Cancelled was ultramodern, consisting of stories swapped in an international airport. Why do you have to take us to the 19th century in Solo? Is it to tell us that it was a better world?

Rana – Tokyo Cancelled had no historical depth of any sort and was very much in the contemporary moment. We didn’t know the stories of the parents or grandparents of any of the characters. They were just simple situations which didn’t have a past to them. After that I felt that I had to write about history. And I feel that the times we are living in, make sense only through history. I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character. I think there is some romance in the book about the time in which Ulrich is born. This romance for the 19th century is quite strong in me, for certain kind of incredible creativity in the European bourgeois culture of that time. So, one thing I wanted to do was to write a history against the Anglo-American version of 20th century. The 20th century is shown as the American century, with great progress and meaning and fulfillment, and I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain. I think we are also used to the idea that the 21st century is a place of great doom and pessimism, but I wanted to find some kind of hope in the present moment. So, the second part of my book, also quite crazy and violent shows characters who are full of immense creativity. My main character ends his contemplation of the future with some kind of hope.

Meena - This is a successful book about a man who has met much failure. Was this a conscious decision?

Rana – I wrote about failure partly because I am surrounded by success stories all the time. I was bored by it. People are kind of obsessed with success in this country. It is never the reality for lots of people. The main pages in a newspaper are only about endless success, but tucked away in the small columns are news of people committing suicide. Writing about failure was also because I wanted to set myself a writing challenge—if you strip away success and events and achievement from a life, when you basically have to narrate one hundred years of duration, it makes you engage with the role of life itself, of what it means to just exist. I found that an interesting project for writing a novel.

Meena - Why did Ulrich have to be so unlucky even in love?

Rana – I think Ulrich survives a hundred years because he never really becomes entangled with anything. As the experience in the middle period of his life shows, your attachments are going to kill you, your attachments to political movements, your attachments to people. Ulrich basically survives because he is incompetent at making attachments. He doesn’t quite believe in himself to make the things work. After he turns blind, this character finds a new lease of life.

Meena – Daydreams are the only redeeming feature of this doomed man’s life. What do you think of old age? And isn’t daydreaming no country for old men?

Rana – To me, Ulrich is some kind of novelist. So, on one level, this novel is an examination of the relationship between what a novelist imagines and writes, and what their life is, and how elements of life become mutated into fiction. The daydreams here are fictions that are too coherent and directed to be daydreams. I think that old age is undervalued. I think it is difficult to grow old with all your faculties intact. Both my books have been interested with what wisdom means in the contemporary world, and wisdom is something that is associated with old age.

Meena – There are echoes of India in the Bulgaria that you have described. Your novel could have been about India instead. Or is it because you would have been criticized if you had penned a honest novel about India?

Rana – There is particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India to ridiculously claim that there is no poverty or violence in the country. Poverty and violence are absolutely legitimate subjects to write about. I still haven’t found a way of writing about this country. It’s a very, very complex place and it’s been written about very much. I would like to write about this country, and if I do, it will probably be non-fiction because I find that the reality of this country is itself complete. One doesn’t have to make it up. The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is kind of enough. Also, the last two countries I have lived in have been India and the US. And in a way, I am bored of big countries and their arrogance and their assumption that they are so unique. Both America and India have this very intensely and both are very self-absorbed. So, I wanted to write about a small country that I didn’t know much about.

Meena - There’s so much of reference to gypsies—they seem to be the only truly happy people in the Ulrich’s world.

Rana – Gypsies are interesting because they are the ones who cannot really be categorized. Even the Communists tried to lock the gypsies down and make them factory workers. They always remained somehow outside the social system and when the system crumbles one suddenly realizes that they are running all kinds of businesses and also producing the kind of music that became the anti-state sentiment. So, I suppose that they are fascinating in one respect, they are figures that are not pinned down and one cannot really define who they are: are they criminals, are they heroes. Both my books have figures who cross borders, who are never categorized, who refuse to allow an identity to be given to them from outside. There’s also a long history of romanticizing gypsies which is quite unfair. They have also had a terrible time in Europe—they are mentioned in connection with the Holocaust, they were also gassed along with the Jews.

(Reproduced from Muse India)

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)

In Conversation With Rana Dasgupta

(First published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express on 26 April 2009. And I, as usual, was too caught up with too many things.. so I could not put it up.)

With an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo is about people who had to live through painful and pointless political projects, says Meena Kandasamy. This place is chaotic,” Rana Dasgupta complains even before we settle down to talk about his latest novel, Solo. At Chennai’s Landmark bookstore, where his publishers have spared him for half an hour, little children run around us, and some staff are sweeping the bookstore. His observation is sharp, but cloaked in that soft voice, it could be mistaken for a compliment.

This iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach pervades his writing. That is why, even though preservation of culture is an overarching theme in Solo, its dangers are accorded greater importance. “There is a difference between the attempts of an individual to find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people,” he says. “The protagonist in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category, and he’s forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project.”

Speaking of “corrective history”, Dasgupta says the times we are living in make sense only through history. “I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character, the 100-year-old Ulrich.”

In that sense, Solo is essentially an alternative history of what is called the Anglo-American century. “The 20th century is shown as the American century, but I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain.” Is that why the protagonist Ulrich takes shelter in daydreams, the only redeeming feature of his life? “No, to me Ulrich is like a novelist. On one level, Solo is an examination of how elements of life become mutated into fiction.”

I wonder why Solo was not set in India, given that Dasgupta has told a universal story. “Are you worried that a honest novel about India would face too much criticism?” I ask He pins down the emergence of such criticism to a “particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India that ridiculously claims that there is no poverty or violence in the country.”

That leads to the inevitable question, whether he will write a novel set in India. Dasgupta says he is keen to do so, but it will be non-fiction since the reality of this country is complete in itself. “The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is enough.”

He points out that he wrote about Bulgaria in Solo because he was bored with big countries that were full of arrogance and self-importance.

Likewise, he wrote about a doomed man’s life because he was bored by the success stories that surrounded him.

Now I understand why he writes about people outside the social system, such as the gypsies. He says he finds them fascinating since they refuse to allow an “identity” to be given to them from outside.

“I am like that,” he admits, “I refuse to be categorised.”

Review of Solo (Rana Dasgupta)

Publisher: HarperCollins India
Price: Rs.395
Pages: 357

In his critically acclaimed second novel that is dominating best-seller lists, Rana Dasgupta tells the story of a 100-year-old man who does not want the end of his life to be a mindless, meaningless falling-off.  Inspired and shaken by a newspaper report about the traumatic death of parrots who had preserved the lost tongue of a population that was wiped away, Ulrich decides to share his story, or at least the sections that he can still recollect. 

The conventional first movement of the novel, Life, set in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, starts in 1901 and gives the story of Ulrich, his parents, his passions, his friends, his professional and personal relationships and how he loses everything. His engineer father dies of humiliation, but not before he cripples the musical aspirations of his young son. The family’s failing fortunes snatch away the remotest possibility of Ulrich completing his education from the University of Berlin. His best-friend Boris is arrested on charges of sedition and executed for his communist beliefs. Ulrich marries Boris’ sister Magdalena and they give birth to a son, she however deserts him because he is unable to provide her with a suitable standard of living. His intellectual mother, Elizavita, is sent to a concentration camp. Post-retirement, he loses his eyesight trying to open a bottle of sulphuric acid in his shabby home laboratory.  

Though Ulrich isn’t the agent of much action—he’s a bookkeeper, who later works in a chemical factory—he is caught up in the big changes that are happening around him. The history of conflict-ridden Bulgaria besieged by war and communism, the social upheaval and uprisings, are presented in parallel through an ordinary person’s point of view. The novel traces the fall of the Ottoman empire, the Communists’ successful resistance of Fascist forces in 1944, and 45 years later, the fall of Communism. Such turbulent and tumultuous changes ruin Bulgaria—misguided Communists erase much of its heritage and the state-enforced prohibition of music drives it underground. Dasgupta also chronicles the environmental consequences of transforming Bulgaria into the chemical factory of Europe. This age of atrocity is followed by another, that of gangster-style capitalism, and as always, people invested with authority demonstrate the destructive side of their power. 

The panoramic, provocative first Movement, Life (with chapters named after chemical elements) is followed by the magic-realist second, Daydreams (that has chapters named after sea-creatures). Liberated from the constraints of history and geography in the astonishing and vibrant second half of the novel, Ulrich re-imagines the relics from his past and escapes his mundane existence through his daydreams where he is absolutely, incredibly free. 

Personalities like Kakha Sabedaze, who are only mentioned in passing in the first half of the book, are offered a much larger landscape to operate upon. This typical gangster-entrepreneur is glamorized by his arm-candy Khatuna, a pulp-fiction heroine who has the dare and drive to chase her dreams making adept use of any number of people in the process.  

Boris in his modern-day avatar, grows up in an abandoned town with only his grandmother for company, is discovered by a producer named Plastic, enraptures audiences around the world, signs deals with Universal, makes endless music and leads a jet-setting life as a global celebrity. Daydreams afford Ulrich the uncharacteristic boldness to dream up his lost son as Irakli, a perceptive poet and the muse of Boris. 

Ulrich, who has nothing to give away but failure, finds solace in the fact that all success stories—and here, he cites Albert Einstein who abandoned wife Mileva, his daughter and his schizophrenic son —are surrounded by failures. 

Surprisingly, the challenge of ambiguity between the surreal and the real engrosses the reader’s attention and one takes on the task of identifying the ingenious parallels between the 20th and 21st century versions: the burning violin, parrots who pull out their own feathers in trauma, people who take pride in their royal lineage, asphyxiation from carbon dioxide poisoning, the death of pets, the unrestrained Gypsy music, an Australia-shaped stain and so many more.  The novel’s eclectic mix of music and misery is fatally addictive. Solo , one of the most-energetic magic-realist novels that we have seen in recent times, should be definitely read not just for the brilliant story-telling, but also for the universal truths that it reflects and reiterates.

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. : )

Book Review: The Immigrant

The Immigrant
By Manju Kapur
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 336

SEX sells. Sexual dysfunction, as a plot device, tries hard and in the process makes use of an anaesthetic, a timer and couple-therapy. Apart from this single, sinful exception, Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant fails to offer any fresh insight through its tortured portrayal of an NRI marriage.

Nina Batra, an English lecturer at Miranda House, Delhi, immigrates to Canada after her arranged marriage to Ananda, a dentist in Halifax. But for a disappointing Professor-Student, May-December dalliance that is concealed from her mother, Nina represents the quintessential middle-class spinster in every possible aspect. The novel begins on her thirtieth birthday and with a grim realisation of her diminishing prospects. As banal as her surroundings, she joins her widowed mother in passively waiting for a marriage proposal. Daughter of a dead diplomat, and single-handedly supporting herself and her mother, it is to Kapur’s credit that Nina is made to maintain an air of dignity: this ensures that the penny-pinching isn’t reduced to a peepshow.

Set in the Emergency era, the novel is a laboured attempt to recreate India of the 1970s: forced sterilisations, money laundering, sloganeering, curfew and arrests. Or, in other words, an India that everyone wants to abandon. This is the India — where criticism can prove to be costly — about which Nina writes to Ananda. Halfway through the book and several letters later, Ananda flies in to India to finalise his marriage. It is from this point onwards that the novel loses focus and begins meandering. What adds to the tension of a different sort is the manner in which tense oscillates between paragraphs, sometimes, even mid-sentence.

A delayed consummation sets the stage for the disintegration of their marriage. Nina struggles as her husband moves from denial to acknowledgement and action. The discontented protagonist dabbles with feminism and co-counselling, but her arguments reach the heights of academic pretension. She finds Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex too western, and she takes pains to point out that woman is not a universal category. As a relatively new immigrant, she is also weighed down by the necessity to blend in by eating meat and wearing western clothes. Pushed into the servility of staying at home and denied a life outside of marriage, she has to console herself that planning the weekly menu together secures the future in a way in which sex never can. Meanwhile, to cover-up/cure his inadequacy Ananda secretly undertakes sex-therapy.

After successfully ‘proving’ himself with a surrogate, Ananda becomes the insensitive, straying husband, and after a string of one-night stands, takes on a young, white mistress. As Ananda-Amanda (Andy-Mandy, if you will), kick up a storm, Nina too gives into her spirit of adventure, signing up for a library science course, and getting herself an admirer. Though both spouses enter into extramarital affairs, it is unfair and unfortunate that it is the woman who ends up ‘punished’ (read raped by her rakish lover). Though the delayed climax, replete with the discovery of a blonde hair on the bed, is highly predictable, there is an element of anxiety in the narrative that makes it easy for the reader to feel for the protagonists.

The Indian middle class family is a safe, familiar territory and Manju tells this cliché-ridden story with tenderness and empathy never reducing any character to a caricature. Themed on distance and its effect on identity, The Immigrant is an interesting read if one wants to know the long way today’s global Indian has come. Despite its weaknesses, this book of fiction is bound to work precisely because it telegraphs the message that in the process of self-reinvention, Anywhere can be home

First published in the Sunday mag of The New Indian Express. You can read the online version here.

Book, booker, booked

“The future was a casino, everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.” Salman Rushdie (Fury)

Every time an Indian has won the Booker, it has triggered off a boom in the publication of Indian English fiction. This book boom, this opportunity-knocking-repeatedly-on-many-doors, this “democratization” (if it could be called that) of the publishing industry has ensured that the idea of “everyone has a book in him/her” has been stretched to its logical extreme: everyone has a book out now. Everyone? Well, not exactly, but almost. Because, there is no denying the fact that a book’s selection is driven by the author’s profile. (Consider your novel-in-progress booked if you belong to one or more of the following categories: IIM/IIT graduate, NRI with an MFA, or young and sexy female blogger). Nobody can berate publishers for keeping one eye on the market, and the other on the manuscript. Neither can we blame the writers whose works reflect the hungry haste of our Internet generation, whose novels resemble patchy compilations of blog-posts, and who inspire in an average reader, the urge to pen such a novel herself. 

Welcome to the World of Live and Let Live. Now that we are finished meeting the survivors, let’s know its victims. What’s happened to them? Ms. Dedication drops dead. Ms.Quality becomes a dejected kite-maker (and it has been observed that a lot of her kites follow a certain fast-paced, gripping formula). Ms. Writing Calibre, widowed, with her varicose veins and heart condition, tries to fly these kites on humid afternoons. 

The rest of us are, as always, misled by the marketing. 

The tragedy doesn’t end with Chetan Bhagat’s appalling and irksome novels becoming record-breaking best-sellers. The Indian Imagination is laid to rest as other wannabe authors decide to mass produce campus novels. In most cases, these are the literary equivalents of a frame-by-frame remake of the author’s autobiography. May be, when they are tired of replicating the university fiction model, new writers would migrate to call-center novels. Or, they might try their luck with chick lit (and in the process, remember to reinforce several references to monsoon and mangoes). 

Since the story doesn’t sizzle, what about style? 

Shouldn’t innovative use of language be an equally important consideration? Or has it become inconsequential? Friends tell me that the GRE test paper for English Literature contains random passages whose author has to be correctly identified. Where content cannot be clearly demarcated, students rely on style to zero in on the author. Could this be possible with India writing in English? Isn’t it an oft-repeated complain that with the exception of Rushdie and Roy, the new generation of Indian writers, even those who manage to bring in regional nuances, read like each other? 

One has to also probe as to why Indian English novels prefer to stick to safe territory? This is not a question of authenticity/credibility: most of these novels are authentic in the tiny (rarely well-researched) worlds which they inhabit. Of course, these novels are accessible only to a small, heterogeneous minority that has no clue about the grassroots reality in India. But, why this hesitancy to try something daring at least in the make-believe universe? In this deeply distrustful, fragmented society where every individual act is capable of subversion and has its own shock-value, why do we have trouble in locating the live-wire in our literature? When Arundhati Roy captured the poetry of Ammu’s brownness against Velutha’s blackness, we learnt about love’s limitless potential to challenge the Love Laws. We shuddered for the lovers, we wept at the various manifestations of violence. But such realistic portrayals are few too less to provide comfort. The complacency is evident from the absence of anxiety to engage with any cause/issue of oppressed people in contemporary Indian English fiction. Remarkable exceptions to this elitist formula from among the new crop of writers are Altaf Tyrewala (No God in Sight) and more recently, Aravind Adiga (White Tiger).

As Indian English fiction shamefacedly enters the big league of pop culture, what we presently seem to lack is the literary equivalent of a talent hunt like Super Singer. Otherwise, hype-wise we are already there. In this backdrop, it is understandable why new novelists are more concerned about readership than content. Naturally, their body of writing ends up more factual than literary. Nepotism and his dignified cousin Networking, have created a scene where anything goes, and everything gets into print. Glitzy book-launches and massive promos cover up these fault lines. Authors turn celebrities and critics conveniently metamorphose into cheerleaders. The bandwagon rolls on. 

Nobody can contest the claim that new Indian fiction in English is clever and confident, but when can we lay hands on a literature that will touch and transform lives? In their much-publicized love affair with the English language, the new generation of Indian writers seem to have gained intimacy, but have unforgivably lost ground. 

This article originally appeared in The New Sunday Express. Read the online version here.

Call for applications: TFA AWARDS 2009

TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS (TFA) invites entries for its fourth annual TOTO awards for Indian creative writers in English. Two cash awards of Rs. 25,000 each will be given in January, 2009.

BUT: Entries are only invited from young people — over the age of 18, and who have not celebrated their 30th birthday before 1 January 2009.

ALSO: The spirit of the Toto Awards is to identify promise and encourage young talent. Therefore, do not submit an entry if you are already an established writer.

TFA is looking for entries in three genres –– short plays, short stories and poetry.
The submissions should not exceed 7,500 words. You can submit any combination of your writing in the above genres, as long as the entire submission is within the stipulated word limit.

Entries should reach TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS (TFA) by 4 October 2008 at the latest. There will be no extension of the submission date.

TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS (TFA)
H 301 Adarsh Gardens, 8th Block, 47th Cross, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560 082
Phone: 080-26990549

Entries should be sent in soft e-mail copy to totofundsthearts@yahoo.com as well in hard copy form to the above address. Please address queries to the same e-mail ID.

THE FINE PRINT:
Entries must be accompanied by a signed statement confirming the applicant’s date of birth, whether the applicant’s work has been published in print (give details), and also affirming that the submitted work is original. Please ensure that the hard copy does not carry your name on it. Submitted entries will be given code numbers to protect applicants’ identities from the jury during the judging process.

Submitted material will not be returned.

The decision of the TFA jury is final and cannot be contested in any forum.

Please note: We reserve the right to use your submitted writings (if necessary) to publicise the awards either on our website or in any in-house materials such as a newsletter. Otherwise, the copyright rests with the writer and your submission will be put to no other use without your express permission.

(TOTO FUNDS THE ARTS (TFA) is a not-for-profit public trust set up in memory of Angirus ‘Toto’ Vellani, who was intensely passionate about music, literature and films.)