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.

Ms Militancy: Praise, Preface, and so on

PRAISE BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN

“Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporaray Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized.These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and  sting   the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She  uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language  in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.”

MY PREFACE

If you take offence . . .

You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and choose. You are Sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are Adi Sankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscience of this Hindu society.

Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase as these poems show.

I am no atheist—I allow everyone an existence. It is just that I struggle with any story that has stayed the same way for far too long. So, my Mahabharata moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayana is retold in three different ways. I am unconventional, but when I choose to, I can carry tradition. That is why I am Mira, Andal and Akka Mahadevi all at once, spreading myself out like a feast, inviting the gods to enter my womb. I am also Karaikkal Ammaiyar, suspected of infidelity for being ravishingly beautiful. Like each of these women, 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 its 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. I do not write into patriarchy. 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. They take on the sun, they take after me.

I choose my words, coarse as the conned Kannagi’s colourful curses, chaste as her breast that burnt down a capital city. This tongue allows me to resist rape, to rescue my dreams. My language is not man-made, it is beyond the white-hot seminal of your texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra. Tamil woman that I am, I do not spare the ageist, classist, sexist Tholkappiyam either. The criticism that I embark on, like your codification and my cunt, is beyond all culture.

Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. I sew it on everything I wear, I tattoo it into permanence. I strive to be a slut in a world where all sex is sinful. I strive to be a shrew in a society that believes in suffering in silence. I strive to be a sphinx: part-woman, part-lioness, armed with all the lethal riddles.

Come, unriddle me. But be warned: I never falter in a fight. And, far worse, I seduce shamelessly.

~~~~~

WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK ONLINE

Scholars Without Borders
It is INR 150, plus shipping.

I will upload a list of bookstores in Indian cities soon, I promise.
; )

Interview in Sampsonia Way

“In this interview, Meena Kandasamy calls herself “an angry young woman,” attacks academic language, and relates how she has faced harassment from people who feel attacked by her writing.” Also, questions about Gandhi, the freedom of expression and two poems from Ms.Militancy

Read my  whole interview with Silvia Duarte here. .

When Meena Kandasamy speaks about the contemporary issues of her native India, she incisively reveals the societal assumptions that assign specific roles to people based on caste or gender. When she turns her attention to the past, she deconstructs the heroes. She uses her poetry like a scalpel to dismantle stereotypes.

In 2009, Kandasamy came to Pittsburgh to read at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s Jazz Poetry Concert. Since then, Sampsonia Way has followed the career of this 26-year-old poet, translator, and creative writer.

Kandasamy’s work articulates the voice of the Dalits, the people at the lowest rung of India’s ancient caste system. Despite the fact that the Indian constitution abolished this system, the Dalits still face widespread discrimination.

Kandasamy recently finished her second book of poetry, Ms. Militancy to be published by Navayana Press in November. In this collection, she retells Hindu and Tamil myths from a feminist and anti-caste perspective.

In this interview she calls herself “an angry young woman,” attacks academic language, and relates how she has faced harassment from people who feel attacked by her writing.

In a recent interview with Sampsonia Way writer Horacio Castellanos Moya said, “if you have some kind of sensibility towards injustice, you know what rage is.” Your poems have huge doses of rage. How do you deal with anger when you are writing?

I am an angry young woman. The world has not seen enough of our kind, while we have had plenty of angry young men. Angry young men working among the people are killed early; angry young men becoming artists spend a lifetime in anonymity; and savvy angry young men turn into politicians and all the revolution inside them simply fizzles out.

However, society will not let angry young women exist, we will be labelled hysterics. As women, we are indoctrinated merely to accept our situation and be grateful for all the things we have. As women, we are told that it is bad behavior to be angry, we are told that we have to change ourselves because we cannot change the system. Those of us who refuse to comply are the shrews whom everyone loves to hate.

In all this social conditioning, we tend to forget that anger is only a reaction to something outside of oneself, a reaction to an oppressive system. I write as an angry young woman, even as it requires all my artistic skill to maintain that rage and to let it reflect in my writings.

Why did you choose poetry as your sword against discrimination?

Poetry is not caught up within larger structures that pressure you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the way that academic language is. Despite being an academic myself, I dread academia’s ultra-intellectualizing. Perhaps academic jargon does contribute a lot to philosophy—to late-night conversations in air-conditioned rooms with plenty of red wine and Swiss cheese. I can fake that routine, trust me, I pull it of like a real pro. Sometimes, I even subject myself to that horror for pure, wicked pleasure. But is it the language to speak of the oppressed? Is it the language in which any victim would speak?

However, you are a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics and English literature and recently completed your dissertation. How do you deal with academic language?

I often die a death within myself when I am asked to theorize my struggle and present it to scholars. In my mind, this image plays: I am an abused naked woman, I am through trauma, and I go around with a begging bowl. I am not pleading. I am not even fighting at this stage. I am out there collecting words, fancy words in a foreign tongue that I must reproduce in order to be heard, in order for my circumstance to be understood. The same thing happens when you are working with human rights organizations, with NGOs, and with lobby groups.

What kind of language should be used?

Whether it is the Dalits in India or the Tamils in Sri Lanka, there is immense discrimination, there is daily violence, there are unbearable tragedies. But to get people to hear, to get the international community to even blink in our direction, we have to learn a jargon-laden language that they will understand. We have to use a pacifist language that does not point and blame, a passive language that forces your eyes to become mere video-capture devices, a pointless language of emotionicide, a carefully-constructed language that pushes you into a paralysis. Consequently, we languish as a society.

So, do you see your poetry as the antithesis of this paralysis?

Yes. Poetry, it is raw. It is real. It is full of jagged edges. My poetry is naked, my poetry is in tears, my poetry screams in anger, my poetry writhes in pain. My poetry smells of blood, my poetry salutes sacrifice. My poetry speaks like my people, my poetry speaks for my people.

In the poem “Nailed” you write, “Men are afraid of any woman who makes poetry and dangerous portents.” How have men and members of the other groups you criticize responded to your work?

There are men who take great interest in writing obscene emails to me, but their lack of imagination makes for rather depressing reading. Others say that I am “terrorizing” the caste-Hindus with my writing. Very often I know that this anger is because of the political, anti-caste stand I adopt.

When I wrote an article attacking the anti-Muslim hatred in the novelist V. S. Naipaul’s writings, someone wrote, “Is Meena Kandasamy your pedophile prophet’s preteen wife?” on an internet forum. I bring on extreme emotions in people. I have been called all kinds of names. There are hate-mongers who write to me saying that they will come to my city and finish off my career.

It sounds like criticism has turned into threats.

Increasingly, the criticism has also become personal and malicious as well. There is a new breed of moral police who attack me for my writings. There was a woman who said that I write about my body as a way to garner male-attention and she blamed men who posted comments on my Facebook status updates. Sometimes, hatred can provide a lot of amusement!

Being a writer has made me blind and totally brazen. My family and friends are afraid for me. I have been stalked to my hotel and received anonymous threats. At times like that, I am a little scared. I later console myself and gain confidence with the fact that any physical attack on me will only draw more attention and garner a larger audience for my protest against caste discrimination and other issues.

In your poem “Mohandas Karamchand” you wrote to Gandhi: “Don’t ever act like a holy saint. / we can see through you, impure you. / Remember, how you dealt with your poor wife. / But, they wrote your books, they made your life.” What happened when you published this poem?

I was both cheered and reprimanded. To talk solely about the harassment I faced is to portray only one side of the story. Dalits welcomed the poem, Communists welcomed the poem, Muslims welcomed the poem and, above all, most women appreciated the poem. They could never come to term with Ghandi’s sexual experiments (which included sleeping next to naked young women to ‘test’ his vows of celibacy), or how hard he was on his wife, Kasturba. Gandhi supported the revival of the varnashrama dharma (the caste system’s insistence of people only working in their traditional occupations), and he used techniques of blackmail to prevent Dalits from attaining political autonomy and the right to govern themselves.

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” influenced me a great deal. When I saw what she had done, I thought, “Well, there’s a figure I would like to take on too.” Even today, it is my most popular (although no longer the most controversial) poem. The best thing about poetry is that it opens up space for discussion, a space for a critical revaluation.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Freedom of speech and expression in India is balanced precariously between the ever-present threat of direct, physical attacks from both security forces and social vigilante groups on the one hand, and the reassurance of protection from higher judicial authorities on the other. But the scales seem tipped in favor of the former.” How would you describe freedom of expression in India?

I am proud of quite a few things about my country. One is its Constitution, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression for instance. But, is there a thriving freedom of expression? Of course not.

Films are regularly and brutally censored for their politics. Women poets are attacked when they write about sexuality by the so-called moral police. Tamil leaders are jailed when they speak of the right to self-determination and human rights for their people. The state labels them as “secessionists” and says they are a threat to national integrity. The state routinely criminalizes Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi [indigenous people of India] leaders because they challenge the oppressive system. Journalists have been taken in for questioning and some end up being killed in ‘fake encounters’ by the state. As Indians, we are not totally shocked because our neighboring countries do much worse.

Look at Sri Lanka for example, it has one of the worst records of assassinating, abducting, incarcerating members of the media or anyone who decides to expose human rights abuses or the genocide of the Tamils. So, as Indians, we perhaps draw comfort from the fact that things are much worse elsewhere even as we fight hard to not to lose freedom of expression.

(Ms.Militancy will be published by Navayana later this year)

 

Mike Daisey and Monologues and some soul-searching

Yesterday, I was at a workshop organized by the US Consulate Chennai where Mike Daisey, the celebrated monologuist was explaining his craft and talking about what stories he chooses to tell, and how he fashions these extemporaneous performances. I adored what I saw of his work on YouTube and other places, and I respect some of the things he has to say about capitalism and employment conditions and so on. (Many of the more interesting things he had to say got deflected of course, given that some of our wannabe types in the audience had styooopid questions for him which took none of us anywhere).

All the time I was listening to him, I was wondering how this kind of theater has parallels with spoken-word and performance poetry. Yes, in the case of slam poetry you are closely following a certain poem, but the use of space and timing and voice and body and agenda and delivery and so on, is really, really similar. What evidently varies is the duration, you certainly cannot be reading poetry for two continuous hours. And you can actually get away with a lot more when it is going to be spontaneous speaking with an outline as opposed to performing a poem.

Which medium do I prefer? Poetry of course. Even though it might not have the weight of theater behind it, even though it is ghettoized in relation to fiction, there’s something about poetry that works not only on the level of thought, but on the level of language too. That vitality and extra layer is something I would think twice about losing. But for all this one-vs-another comparison, I am a fan in equal measure of both StaceyAnn Chin and Mike Daisey. What is crazy that labels tend to drive them so far apart! In that context, one other name comes to mind immediately: Sarah Jones, who does amazing one-woman shows, taking up to eight characters and switches between the world of plays, performances and hip-hop poems with effortless ease.

The Language Wars: On NDTV’s We The People

I participated in last week’s We The People hosted by Barkha Dutt on NDTV, where in the midst of some Hindi-language fanatics (Alok Rai, Ashok Chakradhar), some well-meaning people (Atul Kulkarni, Abhijit Bhattacharya), some confused identities (Sir Mark Tully, Arundhati Nag), I got the opportunity to share about compulsory imposition of Hindi, what it means to lose out on learning one’s mother-tongue, the linguistic roots of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, India’s silence over the genocide of Tamils, and why English is important for Dalits. (Hey, that’s all that I said, but you really have to watch the video to get a fair idea of how things went).

ps: Barkha is so unassuming and spontaneous and friendly. And she puts you at ease in such a brilliant manner, I am sure she can squeeze words out of stone if she just tried. : )

Markers of Marriage (Cross-posted from Ultra Violet)

This is what happens when you are stuck with thesis-writing!
Articles that have been pending for ages write themselves..

RECENTLY, I PARTICIPATED in the launch function of a documentary film Pottu about the hardships and social humiliation faced by widows and deserted women in Tamil Nadu. Produced by the Kalangarai Trust which works among the widows in the southern district of Nagappattinam (particularly in Vedaranyam, Sirkaali and Poompuhaar), the 50-minute documentary attempts to describe the torture that widows are forced to undergo in the name of tradition. The documentary started off with a young girl’s story: the gaudy ceremony surrounding puberty, her early marriage (to prevent the chance of the family name getting “spoiled” if she were to be left “free”), the dowry that her parents are forced to pay, the hard work that she is forced to do in her husband’s home, his alcoholism and domestic violence, his death and finally, her enforced widowhood. Although Pottu seemed to make of every cinematic cliché, some issues highlighted by the documentary deserve to be taken up for debate.

Bangle-breaking ceremonies (where all the symbols of marriage: the red kumkum mark (pottu), the thaali (mangalsutra) are removed) are notoriously common in Tamil Nadu’s southern villages. In fact, these ceremonies are conducted before dawn, when even the gods are supposedly sleeping, because such a merciless sight is capable of disturbing even them.

Not only is a woman forced to undergo emotional agony because of her husband’s absence, but she is also forced to face social humiliation. The things that society puts forward as symbols of femininity and desirability are snatched away overnight. Widows are systematically kept out of social functions (celebration of menarche or marriage), they are stigmatized and heaped with abuse and they are denied all decision making at the family level. They are also denied civil rights–commonly-held beliefs discriminate widows by virtue of their being considered “inauspicious”. Tamil proverbs say that to see a widow early in the morning effectively ruins a day, and so on.

Yesterday, the women who were the driving force behind the documentary Pottu, got together and announced that soon they would be hosting the first international conference of widows, destitute and deserted women. They have two demands: laws to prosecute people who abuse widows in degrading terms and social, economic, legal rehabilitation for the widows.

There are several reasons why such a project has emerged from Tamil Nadu. According to a statistics by the Kalangarai Trust approximately 10% of the households in the state are headed by widows, and that 24% of the widows live alone. Majority of the widows are mothers of the head of the household. Their study also shows that the highest concentration of widows (8.06% of the general population) in Tamil Nadu arises from two categories of widows particular to the southern-coastal districts of the state: Tsunami widows and widows of men who have succumbed to HIV/AIDS. A large number of them work as daily wage labourers.

Tamil widows face a particular problem because of the manner in which their language subjugates them. The English word widow has an equivalent masculine form widower (which might carry fewer negative connotations may be, but at least a word exists). There’s no equivalent masculine form for the word vidhavai (widow) in Tamil. On the other hand, in popular practice, a just-widowed man is humorously referred to as the pudhu maapillai (new bridegroom)–perhaps enshrining the fact that he would soon be married to someone.

Widowhood is also becoming a problem that cuts across cultures. No longer are Hindu widows alone subjected to such torment. Even a religion like Islam, where there’s no bar on widow remarriage, is being influenced by local practices. At the documentary release function, a Muslim woman lamented how her own community was now following these meaningless practices which has historically plagued the Hindu religion.

The efforts of William Benetick and Raja Rammohun Roy put an end to the Sati system in 1829. The Widow Remarriage Act was passed in 1856. Another hundred years later, the Child Marriage Restraint Act came into place. Every reformer and every revolutionary on the Indian soil has voiced about the condition of widows: Phule opened a home for widows and abandoned children, Dr. Ambedkar traced the roots of the sati system in the necessity to maintain/preserve the endogamous caste structure, Periyar argued for widow remarriage. Even a middle-of-the-road traditionalist reformer like Gandhi condemned the practice of widowhood in no uncertain terms. Pandita Ramabai became an icon by speaking out against the heinous nature of imposed widowhood.

Today, as women fight against gender injustice and social indignity, they are forced to confront several challenges: how to oppose cultural facets that alienate widows, how to create alternative cultural symbols that don’t differentiate between women, how to develop a policy framework not only for widows but also for single women in India and especially how to fight against a hypocritical system where the oppressor is not someone from the outside, but one’s own blood, one’s own family? Perhaps this is one area where there is no dearth of Hindi/Tamil films that describe the plight, but there is a paucity of public debate and discussion.

(p.s.: Women members of this organization demanded (rightfully of course) that they should be allowed to wear bangles, wear flowers, and above all, wear the pottu. However, every ‘invited’ speaker pointed out that all women should unite to throw away the markers of marriage and/or femininity such as the bangles/flowers/pottu/thaali and so on? All of us might agree that these are decisions which women should take as individuals, and not just as a category, but then, what’s your take on this?)

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Reproduced from Tehelka.com

MEENA KANDASWAMY has an electric effect on rooms when she reads her poetry. The erotic content quite apart, the juxtaposition of her highly femme persona and the tartness of her observations always charges the atmosphere.

The late Kamala Das wrote the foreword to Touch, the collection of poetry Kandaswamy published at age 23. ‘Love and its politics inform my poetry. Caste atrocities happen most frequently because of intercaste love affairs.” A happy denizen of the Internet, 25-year-old Kandaswamy’s first short story The Suicide’s Inbox was the perverse unfolding of a correspondence between two women.

The daughter of a Tamil professor and a Maths professor at IIT, Meena has been always aware that even PhDs are not invincible armour. She chose to pursue a degree privately. “I knew I would not rest quietly if I had to suffer the usual caste slurs in college. Such a waste of time.”

Kandaswamy pins her dalit identity on the act of rebelling against any kind of oppression. She describes what it is like to live in a state with powerful dalit movements going back to the legendary Nandanar, who died claiming his right to worship Shiva: “Discrimination is sophisticated. Once a day — I’m not exaggerating — once a day someone will ask me whether I am vegetarian to figure out whether I am Brahmin.”

She avidly follows the media’s handling of dalit public figures. ‘People say dalits smell but when dalits stand for elections people say that suchand- such dalit’s perfume was expensive.” She has funny stories about the liberals left as well. “People exoticise our ‘sexual freedom’ as if dalits live in a nudist colony. I once met the editor of a left-leaning national newspaper. He told someone to verify if I was a dalit since I spoke English well.”

Kandaswamy says she wrestles daily with the biases of language in her writing, her PhD thesis and her rapacious translation of Tamil literature. She teaches English in a college. She blogs about local politics but is writing a novel set far from Tamil Nadu. Is this the life she dreamt of? “I dream of too many lives,” she replies.

NISHA SUSAN

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009

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. : )