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

Read the official version here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan

Vasugi (popularly, V.V.Ganeshananthan was in Chennai recently to promote her first novel, Love Marriage. I interviewed her on one of my most maddening days (don’t even ask me to elaborate). And this was the first time I was actually interviewing someone in my age-group (that can be quite unsettling: you have so much of respect for their work, but the desire to be a fan is at war with your desire to be a friend, so you end up being neither), so I am not sure how this interview has actually turned out.

This interview appeared in today’s The New Indian Express, i.witness. (I was unable to find a link on the Indian Express homepage. However do check up the e-paper if you want to be doubly sure of this!) Do read the novel, it’s lovely. The review might be carried here in a few more days. Sometimes, I feel this review should be read alongside the interview, just so that things are in context, and everything makes greater sense. 

The average writer shies away from politics. What made you choose such a political theme like war to tell a family’s story?

People’s personal lives are affected by politics in any country, and at any time. I was aiming for a certain level of realism, and people’s personal lives don’t exist in a vacuum removed from politics or the news. 

Why do so many varieties of marriage populate the book?

I have written about marriage partly as a metaphor for choice. A marriage can involve two people—or a person and an idea, or a person and a community, etc. Here, the range of marriages shows the range of choices. 

I was lured by the fragmented narratives, by chapters that are, sometimes, three sentences long. Why did you choose this literary technique?

No one learns the story of their family in strict chronological order. People learn about their families in fragments, in bits and pieces. The currency of the family story is the anecdote. 

Tamils in Sri Lanka often despair that the roots of the war lie in the cultural genocide that is being carried out against them. Is this one of the reasons why culture is accorded such a place of prominence in Love Marriage?

I never sat down and made a conscious decision about culture’s role in the story . The story is about what is important to the people within it. I was just thinking about them. That said, Yalini is certainly interested in exploring her family’s history and its meaning to her. 

Do you think you would have given your novel a much different ending if you had written it in these turbulent times?

I am sure I would have. I started writing the book before the tsunami, before 9/11. I didn’t put those bits in until much later. Even the militant uncle didn’t figure in the first draft of the novel. But the characters ended up being affected by the world around them, which makes sense. 

As a responsible journalist, who’s once been the Vice President of South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), how do you think the global media views the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis?

I hesitate to identify the global media as some sort of collective, and to make generalisations about it. That said, right now, there is a lot more media coverage on the conflict than earlier, and hopefully that is helpful. Of course, it is also hard to get information in these difficult circumstances. I’d like to see more American news organisations putting resources into covering international news, but unfortunately , in this economy , many media organisations have been forced to cut back. It’s a critical time for this kind of coverage.

SLUMDOG DEBATE : Let’s not be in denial of reality

(My article first appeared in the Sunday Magazine i.witness of The New Indian Express. Read the official online version here.)

“There is no nation of Indians in the real sense of the world, it is yet to be created. In believing we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion.” — Dr. B R Ambedkar

 

Indian literature in English and Bollywood cinema, like cricket, terrorism and general elections, effortlessly ensnare us into integration. Lest we lose ourselves in a lot of other trouble-seeking, trouble-making identities, we reaffirm our Indian label and sit still. Most of us watch movies; the educated elite among us also read books. In that instant, finding nothing better to do, some of us react as Indians. And because it is a national pastime, everyone embraces a posture of victimhood. In this urge to engage in identity politics, a few slip into combat mode and launch diatribes at those who dare to portray the diverse living conditions in this land.  

Last year, The White Tiger, which portrays a Bihari chauffeur who makes it big, was scathingly ridiculed for calling this country’s cow-belt a Land of Darkness. The Booker-winning novel was not only criticised by those singing Brand India’s praises, but also by critics who accused author Arvind Adiga of demonising the Dalit and depicting crime as an emancipatory tool. Even as we contemplated if it was worthwhile to rush to his rescue, Adiga exposed his ignorance of India when he described, in the aftermath of 26/11, that five-star hotels are places “where people of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee”.     

Likewise, the jury is still out on whether Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire showcased the India that we see, or the India that suited the Western gaze. Even though the film — with childhood sweethearts, undying love, betrayal and revenge — was as Bollywood as it could get, it was called poverty porn. Extending the metaphor, its director was labelled a poverty pimp.  

The film’s depiction of slum life (its toil, its toilets), the raw and rough energy of orphaned street children, didn’t earn the appreciation of those who found the viewing experience as cathartic as self-flagellation. They easily glossed over the fact that the film featured a slum-born Dalit Muslim as destiny’s child, it showed the blinding and maiming of child beggars, and it also captured prostitution, religious carnage, custodial torture — a concoction that mainstream Bollywood has certainly shied away from.

White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire are not isolated cases — they are at the receiving end more because they have won recognition in the West. But the armchair sneering had started long ago. Readers had issues with the manner in which India was being typecast (saris, spices, snake-charmers). But when a few authors/filmmakers began to shed this superficiality to expose some home truths, the blame-game increased. They were accused of packaging Indian poverty for foreign consumption. People felt uncomfortable that they lived in an India of disconnect. They wanted subversive art to be shown the door; they wanted escapist or feel-good fare. India’s brief economic boom has merely increased this demand. Chetan Bhagat is conveniently lapped up, but Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Altaf Tyrewala, Indra Sinha and their ilk are lampooned for their courage to be realist, or at least, magic realist, when they describe caste and communal tensions.

Market forces have driven Bollywood to seek shelter in opulence and extravagance for a long time. The industry knows glamour makes a stronger impact than a worthwhile film, so it will continue to churn out the regular five-dances-and-five-stunts masala movie. When art is so absolutely divorced from life, it is hopelessly out of harmony with society. Stupefied by the melodrama, even film critics obsess about plot, pace and perfection, entirely missing out on the politics that a film puts forth. Thankfully, because popular actors in the South are politicians-in-waiting, even mainstream Tamil films carry empty sloganeering. Moreover, the success of films like Paruthiveeran, Veyyil and Subramaniapuram, attest to the fact that we are willing to come to terms with realism, we are willing to accept crushed heroes. Perhaps a Satyajit Ray or a Ritwik Ghatak will emerge only out of regional cinema. Perhaps Slumdog Millionaire will shame and dare Bollywood to be a little more true to life (Whose life? A Dalit woman for a change).   

“Real Indians” lend themselves to the readymade cliché of the three no-evil monkeys popularised by Gandhi. They will obstinately not see the squalor and suffering in India, finding it too graphic and grimy even on celluloid. They will not hear the cries of their countrymen for help, they will not register the angry voices of protestors. They will not speak out against any kind of oppression. They know how to keep their lips sealed, but they are afraid somebody else will let the dirty secret out.  

Sometimes I fail to understand why the fear of being exposed unsettles us. Newspapers and television have bared all, so there’s little space left for literature and cinema to do any great damage. People should be getting furious that such inequalities and injustices continue to exist instead of sulking over the fact that it’s being projected to the West. Accusations and arbitrations of who-and-what-and-where constitutes authentic India cannot change the reality. It makes no sense to live in institutionalised denial and lose one’s integrity. At the end of the day, real India includes even those who militate against the idea of India.

Book Review: Muslim Portraits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Review of Indrajit Hazra’s novel The Bioscope Man

The Bioscope Man
By Indrajit Hazra
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 308, Price: Rs 299

“The absence of parents is the first precondition for freedom,” Milan Kundera wrote in Life is Elsewhere. For Abani Chatterjee, born in the same year as the motion pictures, freedom arrives pretty early and pushes him on the road to fame. A mishap during a train journey turns his father into a hateful, broken man. To escape the tyranny of tending to her always inebriated husband, Abani’s mother Shabitri hoodwinks reality and starts faking a coma. As his father fades away and his self-willed mother enters a vegetative state, Abani starts living life on his own reckless terms.

As a teenager, he continues to urinate from the window and dig his nose in public. When he learns that he has been forced to drop out of school because of his father’s alleged nationalist credentials, he turns as stealthy as a house-cat and keeps slipping out of the Chatterjee household to discover Calcutta on his own. With the help of his enterprising uncle Shombunath Lahiri, he enters the world of moving pictures. And in the process enjoys a quick climb to the pinnacle of glory: boy caught pasting posters one moment, publicly adored poster-boy the next.

He starts as a projectionist’s assistant at the Alochhaya Theatre, graduates into being a prompter, and by a lucky twist of fate ends up playing the title-character of Prahalad Parameshwar. He subsequently essays the roles of Othello, Ram, Parasuram and Shivaji, and his silent movies lead to resounding success. He starts getting recognised in street corners and quaint cafes, and is nothing short of being a star.

Hazra successfully experiments with technique, so we find three interludes interspersing the narrative like the titles of the silent films: the stylised stories of Prahalad, Anandhamath and the Black Hole of Calcutta. These bioscopes starring Abani are instant hits with the masses because of their daring portrayal of intimacy and undercurrents of nationalist chic. Yet, he views freedom fighters as “criminals with ambition” and maintains his nonchalance towards nationalism even as various upheavals rock the subcontinent.

Here, brown men (teeming with Bengali pride) share a love-hate relationship with mems: Abani chooses corrosive satire to attack the shape-shifting Annie Besant, though he initially finds her “American” and desirable; Shombu Mama is infatuated with bioscope diva Faith Cooper; and Abani labours under the weight of his undeclared, one-sided love for his onscreen sweetheart Felicia Miller.

On hearing the news of Felicia being shipped to Australia by her disapproving father, Abani enters a trajectory towards ruin when he mistakenly enters a ladies’ restroom. The man with the “bioscope in his bones” falls from grace and spends a decade playing minor roles.

One day, out of the blue, he gets a call to work in an international production. He meets German director Fritz Lang, the man with the monocle, who is planning to do an “India film” on Sir William Jones, the Orientalist. Following a visit to Kalighat, Abani manages to convince Lang to do a film on Jones’ Sanskrit tutor Ramlochan Sharma instead.

He hopes that this bioscope will push him back into the waters to which he once belonged. What follows is a distinctively sad story about the longing for fame.

Hazra’s third novel is about every elemental idea that makes us melt: love and languages transgressing boundaries; films and the freedom struggle defining our identities. The inventive narration enables one to savour the teasing, tongue-in-cheek novel where no character can really resist fate.

For a work of fiction with the central theme of pretence and deception, The Bioscope Man is not only enchanting, but also remarkably authentic.

Published in the New Indian Express on Sunday

And if you find time, pls. read Hazra’s interview to Ipsit Mohapatra in the same issue here