This post by Amitava Kumar reminded me of a debate that happened in several tents at the Jaipur Litfest, and that's been continuing in several virtual tents for the last decade in India. It's second only to the Whither? (Whither the Novel? Whither writing in English in India?) questions in the persistence with which it comes up, and can be summarised as Criticism in India is Dead, Let The Lamentations Begin.
I've always maintained, and continue to maintain, that we're wrong to say that there are no good reviewers left in India; personally, I look forward to reviews by Manjula Padmanabhan (trenchant and always honest), Chandrahas Choudhury, Anita Roy, Jai Arjun Singh and Sanjay Sipahimalani, to name just a few, as well as the old stalwarts. (All of them are friends, which may be seen as yet another pointer to the incestuous circles of Ind.Lit--but it may also be revealing that all of us became friends through our work. The bylines came before the coffees and the lunches.)
But Amit Chaudhuri captured one glaring absence in the Indian scene when he said that we have no Indian-grown magazine that has the authority--or the readability--of a NYRB, a Paris Review or of, say, the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Biblio and The Book Review have been soldiering on for years, and offer excellent reviews; but both operate under severe budgetary constraints, which limits the kind of reviewers they have access to (neither has the budget needed to dispatch books to reviewers outside India, for instance, or can match the kind of payments an NYRB or Granta might make), and the kind of articles they can commission (chiefly book reviews--no original reporting, limited fiction, etc). Civil Lines looked as though it might fill this gap for a while, but the gaps between issues are now chasm-sized; Caravan is promising, but it's just two issues old. The Little Magazine carries respectable book reviews, but where it scores is in offering essays and fiction in translation--it doesn't position itself as a literary magazine so much as a magazine of ideas.
The politics of book reviewing have changed over the last five or six years. We've contended with not just shrinking book review pages, but shrinking space for reviews: as I've often said, a 400-word 'review' is a blurb, and the most generous magazine spaces seldom go beyond 800 words, which is adequate for a book notice--it doesn't really allow for a serious review. The Hindu Literary Review comes out just once a month; Tehelka and The Calcutta Telegraph are unusual in that they often offer classic "editorial" space to book reviewers, but they remain rare examples. Most newspapers and magazines in India ghettoise books; it's rare to find writers (including historians and non-fiction writers) offering opinions or commentary on the editorial and op-ed pages.
Books page editors struggle to balance the political needs of their editors: several of the more respected publications use the books pages as a kind of social gossip section. This is actually quite fascinating. It makes the books pages a great way to track who's in and who's out, as though it were a kind of Sensex of the social world, but it doesn't do much for books pages as literary pages.
Many of the old conventions--a full disclosure on the part of the reviewer of biases, the practice of not assigning a book to a hostile (or an eager-to-please-the-author) reviewer, even the practice of assigning books to experts in the field--are observed only by a tiny handful of reviewers and books page editors. And as many of us know, this *is* an incestuous circle: the worlds of publishing and writing are still very small in English-speaking India. This has its benefits--it's easier for young or emerging writers to find space in the circle, but it turns into a kind of Indian joint family system after a while, where everybody knows why Cousin x has a blood feud on with Maasi y. Many of us have also watched the disappearance of some of our best reviewers off the books pages with some alarm: as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, there's no satisfaction to writing a blurb-sized book review with just a week in hand to consider the book, and you see far fewer reviews by the likes of Mukul Kesavan, Ram Guha, Sunil Khilnani and company than you might have just a few years ago.
Up to this point, what I've offered are the old, familiar lamentations. This often turns into a pointless, circular argument. Reviewers in India often admit that they hold Indian writers to a lower standard--or expect less of their work--than they have for the Junot Diazes and Lorrie Moores of the world. And of course, reviewers blame books page editors; editors often cite the relative pusillanimity of today's reviewers, who won't give a negative review to a Big Name Author, and many editors also say that there are very few reviewers with the right reading credentials. Everyone blames publishers for highlighting and pushing trivial books; publishers blame the media for concentrating on the fluff instead of on works of substance. Faintly, in the distance, a few voices lament that no one pays any attention to poetry, works in translation and children's books, but no one pays any attention to them. And we can continue like this ad infinitum ad nauseum.
I don't have solutions to offer, just a few questions.
1) Might it change the situation if publishing houses fill the gap between mainstream media and literary magazines by continuing to publish anthologies of new writing, and to commission anthologies of short stories etc? Several of them are experimenting with new forms: Penguin and Tranquebar have commissioned novella-length work recently, marketing them as Metro Reads and as easy, accessible reading.
For this to work, though, gatekeeping standards need to be much higher than they've been, and I say this as someone who's committed my fair share of sins by letting average work through the gates, both in publishing and in journalism, because of deadline pressures and other exigencies. It would be great to have more ruthless editors; to have anthologies so good that writers would mudwrestle each other just to get their bylines in the Table of Contents.
2) Is part of what we're lamenting part of a wider decline in the quality of our public intellectuals? Ram Guha gave an interesting talk recently about the demise of the bilingual intellectual--in passing, he mentioned that he had trouble naming the next generation of public intellectuals with all-round interests under the age of 40. This might be part of a slow degeneration in the overall quality of debate in the public sphere: I would love to see more dissent and informed response, not just in the field of books and writing, but in a wider sense.
3) And an aside to published writers: when was the last time you had fun writing a review? Do most published writers feel free to criticise a "colleague", and would they spend as much time crafting a truly entertaining, thoughtful review as they would on turning a piece of fiction? (Damn, I miss Dom Moraes: one of the last of the grand old school of reviewers, absolutely fearless, absolutely honest and such an entertainer.)
End of rant, back to the deadlines, and thank you for listening.
Twitter Updates
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Book review: Home Boy
(Published in Mail Today, January 2010)
Home Boy
H M Naqvi
HarperCollins,
Rs 399, 216 pages
“We’d become Jews, Japs, Niggers. We weren’t before. We fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men, AC, Jimbo and me…”
In a recent column, Shalom Auslander described his next novel. “It is a funny book about genocide….I’m a fun guy. I read about the Armenian Genocide, and about the Herrero Massacre, and about the Holodomor, and about King Leopold in the Congo, and about the Tutsis killing Hutus, and about the Hutus killing Tutsis. Somewhere in the middle of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, or maybe it was Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, or This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, or Machete Season,—somewhere in the middle of one of those, it all started to seem…funny. Maybe I was just forcing myself to find it funny. Maybe that was the only response I could bear.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, no form of art seemed adequate. To photograph or film the tragedy was to replay scenes from a bad disaster flick that finally got made (produced by bin Laden, directed by Al Qaeda, playing at theatres all across America). Though literary stalwarts from Don De Lillo to John Updike tried, none of the 9/11 novels came close to capturing what happened. The empty space left by the towers hasn’t been easy to fill.
H M Naqvi’s three protagonists—Metrostanis, “self-invented and self-made and certain we had our fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic”—swagger into that gap the way they get past the velvet ropes that cordon off New York’s hippest bars. All of them have family and a back-story in Pakistan; all three of them, including the narrator Chuck, have slid easily into America. They love the premise of the nation, especially the bit about ‘your bruised and battered’, or as AC puts it, ‘twaday tootay-phootay’, and if living in New York means adjusting to the shift between being a banker one day and a recessionista cabbie the next, they’ll manage.
Post 9/11 is another story. The boulevardiers find themselves arrested—“Just as three Jews are a conspiracy, three Muslims are a sleeper cell”, and slung into the maelstrom of shifting identities, loyalties and beliefs of the new world order.
Naqvi has complete control over his plot, but that’s not what makes Home Boy such a rocking debut. His characters slide easily between the worlds of Columbia Circle and Karachi, doing the shuffle between belonging to New York and the old country at the same time, but that’s not what makes it work either. It’s the combination of sizzling energy and Naqvi’s confident voice that makes Home Boy such a funny, bittersweet ride.
Here’s Chuck on being a Muslim, pre-9/11: “Like most Muslims, I read the Koran once circa age ten and, like some, had combed through it afterward. There were issues in the Holy Book that were indisputable, like eating pork, but the directives concerning liquor could easily be interpreted either way. You should not, for instance, pray when hammered.” His friend AC covers it more succinctly: “I’m a self-respecting Muslim atheist, just like any, ah, nonpracticing Christian, secular Jew, or carnivorous Hindu…” And later, when Chuck, Jimbo and AC are held on suspicion of being terrorists, another viewpoint is offered, this one from the perspective of the believing man of faith who now finds himself on trial for crimes committed in the name of his faith: “You go do jihad some other place else!”
Naqvi has his flaws; in the second section of Home Boy, as Jimbo and AC recede into the background, there’s a little too much in the way of pat explanations of Islam, a few too many conversations that just happen to make the parallels between the racism of an earlier era and the discrimination in practice today. Perhaps it’s necessary for the multicultural novel to come with footnotes and cunningly inserted explanations of what life is really like Back Home, but Home Boy is at its weakest when Naqvi lends his skills to editorializing, even if he’s good at it.
He’s much better at the journalistic aside: “In the movies, people skip town all the time…. You see them sticking their thumbs up curbside or jumping into jalopies and heading out west or across the border, into the sunset…. And though you root for the youthful antiheroes, you know damn well they cannot, will not succeed… They will never make it to the Promised Land.”
And here’s the thing: the real sorrow at the heart of Home Boy is not that 9/11 changed the promised land—it’s the slow discovery by the protagonists of a global truth, that there is no such thing as a promised land, whether it’s the mythical realm called home or the equally fantastical kingdom called abroad.
At his best, Naqvi writes like the young Hanif Kureishi, with a little help from the spirit of Joseph Heller. The last chapter smoothly flips back to the beginning in a superb display of technique and emotion, stirred and shaken in Naqvi’s trademark style. The youngest of the Pakistani writers ranks among the best of his generation writing anywhere today—and Home Boy is going to be one of the most entertaining, exuberant debuts of the year.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Jaipur Literature Festival: finallyfinally
(I promise, this is the last of the updates--my column for the Business Standard, which reprises some of the stuff in the blog posts. For a really thoughtful critique of the festival, see Namita Bhandare's take. It's funny how possessive all of us who've been attending the JLF from year one or two onwards feel about it.)
Every great literary festival in the world leans on its location: Edinburgh has its arts festival, the castles, the cobblestoned streets and the pubs, Hay-on-Wye is the world’s only literary town, paved with bookshops, and Jaipur is a mela. The Jaipur lit fest has the regulation camels-and-elephants, fire dancers, the Kawas brass bands and Darohar recitations, though this year it’s overflowing the bounds of the tiny Diggi Palace.
The crowds this year dwarf the 200-odd souls who used to make the trek to Jaipur back in 2006 and 2007 to catch what was then a tiny fest. This year, the JLF is probably Asia’s largest literary festival, and has 220 speakers and writers, and about 15-20,000 visitors. Courtesy Om Puri, Ketan Mehta and Gulzar, the film frat is here; Bina Ramani and Ritu Kumar head a fleet of fashionistas. The Delhi social swarm descend, and leave, on the weekend, so we have air-kissing all through Saturday and Sunday. But the junta reader is here, too. I meet a contingent of stalwarts from Calcutta, hordes of children from the local schools, corporate friends from Bangalore, and foreign tourists who’ve penciled “Dhzaipore” into their India itineraries.
“The conversations are different this year,” says a writer friend, and I know what she means. With every session packed—the tiniest ones draw about 60, the largest on the front lawns swell to a thousand-plus—there’s little chance to have a quiet chat. Authors are mobbed—though Gulzar and Javed Akhtar draw even more fans than a certain Mr Bhagat—but also left in peace. Roddy Doyle can sit quietly in a corner and read; Anne Enright queues up in the egalitarian lunch line; Alexander McCall Smith is interrupted by autograph-hunters, but allowed to explore the palace in relative peace.
If, as a friend says, “The Jaipur Zoo is now open to gawkers”, there are also many ordinary readers. The Jaipur police chief asks historian Maya Jassonoff a question about empire; three retired gentlemen who’ve travelled here from Lucknow debate Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright’s rightwing politics fiercely; Dalit writer Sivakami draws collegiate admirers as she speaks on what it means to be invisible, and placed in invisible ghettos, in a country and religion you can never claim.
By day three, we’re in overdrive. The writers who missed their flights or were stuck on the road earlier have shown up. In the Durbar Hall, Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks with incendiary honesty about her view of Islam. The front lawns host Wole Soyinka, delivering a poetry reading in his deep, sonorously sensuous voice; on another day, Om Puri reads from Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq. The emperor’s doomed reign shimmers into the background as Basharat Peer, Steve Coll and others discuss a new empire; and Niall Ferguson riffs on “Chimerica”—his view of the dominant influence of China and America. On a day which starts with Vikram Chandra on the anti-thriller, continues to a magnificent reading by Roddy Doyle, followed by Louis de Bernieres and Tina Brown on adjacent stages, a critic of my acquaintance opts out. “Sensory overload,” he says. “All systems blown.”
Gulags, conspiracies and empires (new and old) travel like viral memes between sessions. Anne Applebaum describes the efficiency of Stalin’s gulags; the next day, we hear Isabel Hilton on the new barracks where Tibet’s nomads are being corralled by China. Maya Jassonoff speaks of how the boundaries between occupier and occupied are not as rigid as we had imagined; Tenzin Tsundue speaks of how America (and India) can ignore the injustice and repression perpetuated by a modern-day empire.
And always, it comes back to writing. The Dalit writers ask whether even a tiny corner of “Sahitya” will ever be theirs, as they lay claim to this category called “Dalit literature”. Claire Tomalin conjures up a vision of Jane Austen writing on very little pin-money, precarious independence, no opportunities for travel and calls on her time: “If she could find the discipline to write under those circumstances, we have little excuse.” Doyle makes us look at our lives again as he speaks of walking around cities in Ireland, aware that the history of Easter 1916 and the Second World War is one generation away, always seeing people as living stories.
“Living as research,” he says, capturing the writer’s attitude to life. Vikram Chandra waxes evangelistic about the new criticism, which looks into the reader’s brain. In one of the many performances that mark the end of each day—Amit Chaudhuri, H M Naqvi and other authors taking their turn on stage—there’s an incredible moment when one young writer makes his bow to a dead poet from another generation.
As Ali Sethi sings Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems, you can almost see the baton passing from one generation of story-tellers to another. Jaipur 2010 has the slightly insane feel of a festival that became a great Indian wedding, but it remains true to the original promise: this is a festival that’s as much about katha as it is about tamasha, and it delivers both in equal measure.
Every great literary festival in the world leans on its location: Edinburgh has its arts festival, the castles, the cobblestoned streets and the pubs, Hay-on-Wye is the world’s only literary town, paved with bookshops, and Jaipur is a mela. The Jaipur lit fest has the regulation camels-and-elephants, fire dancers, the Kawas brass bands and Darohar recitations, though this year it’s overflowing the bounds of the tiny Diggi Palace.
The crowds this year dwarf the 200-odd souls who used to make the trek to Jaipur back in 2006 and 2007 to catch what was then a tiny fest. This year, the JLF is probably Asia’s largest literary festival, and has 220 speakers and writers, and about 15-20,000 visitors. Courtesy Om Puri, Ketan Mehta and Gulzar, the film frat is here; Bina Ramani and Ritu Kumar head a fleet of fashionistas. The Delhi social swarm descend, and leave, on the weekend, so we have air-kissing all through Saturday and Sunday. But the junta reader is here, too. I meet a contingent of stalwarts from Calcutta, hordes of children from the local schools, corporate friends from Bangalore, and foreign tourists who’ve penciled “Dhzaipore” into their India itineraries.
“The conversations are different this year,” says a writer friend, and I know what she means. With every session packed—the tiniest ones draw about 60, the largest on the front lawns swell to a thousand-plus—there’s little chance to have a quiet chat. Authors are mobbed—though Gulzar and Javed Akhtar draw even more fans than a certain Mr Bhagat—but also left in peace. Roddy Doyle can sit quietly in a corner and read; Anne Enright queues up in the egalitarian lunch line; Alexander McCall Smith is interrupted by autograph-hunters, but allowed to explore the palace in relative peace.
If, as a friend says, “The Jaipur Zoo is now open to gawkers”, there are also many ordinary readers. The Jaipur police chief asks historian Maya Jassonoff a question about empire; three retired gentlemen who’ve travelled here from Lucknow debate Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright’s rightwing politics fiercely; Dalit writer Sivakami draws collegiate admirers as she speaks on what it means to be invisible, and placed in invisible ghettos, in a country and religion you can never claim.
By day three, we’re in overdrive. The writers who missed their flights or were stuck on the road earlier have shown up. In the Durbar Hall, Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks with incendiary honesty about her view of Islam. The front lawns host Wole Soyinka, delivering a poetry reading in his deep, sonorously sensuous voice; on another day, Om Puri reads from Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq. The emperor’s doomed reign shimmers into the background as Basharat Peer, Steve Coll and others discuss a new empire; and Niall Ferguson riffs on “Chimerica”—his view of the dominant influence of China and America. On a day which starts with Vikram Chandra on the anti-thriller, continues to a magnificent reading by Roddy Doyle, followed by Louis de Bernieres and Tina Brown on adjacent stages, a critic of my acquaintance opts out. “Sensory overload,” he says. “All systems blown.”
Gulags, conspiracies and empires (new and old) travel like viral memes between sessions. Anne Applebaum describes the efficiency of Stalin’s gulags; the next day, we hear Isabel Hilton on the new barracks where Tibet’s nomads are being corralled by China. Maya Jassonoff speaks of how the boundaries between occupier and occupied are not as rigid as we had imagined; Tenzin Tsundue speaks of how America (and India) can ignore the injustice and repression perpetuated by a modern-day empire.
And always, it comes back to writing. The Dalit writers ask whether even a tiny corner of “Sahitya” will ever be theirs, as they lay claim to this category called “Dalit literature”. Claire Tomalin conjures up a vision of Jane Austen writing on very little pin-money, precarious independence, no opportunities for travel and calls on her time: “If she could find the discipline to write under those circumstances, we have little excuse.” Doyle makes us look at our lives again as he speaks of walking around cities in Ireland, aware that the history of Easter 1916 and the Second World War is one generation away, always seeing people as living stories.
“Living as research,” he says, capturing the writer’s attitude to life. Vikram Chandra waxes evangelistic about the new criticism, which looks into the reader’s brain. In one of the many performances that mark the end of each day—Amit Chaudhuri, H M Naqvi and other authors taking their turn on stage—there’s an incredible moment when one young writer makes his bow to a dead poet from another generation.
As Ali Sethi sings Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems, you can almost see the baton passing from one generation of story-tellers to another. Jaipur 2010 has the slightly insane feel of a festival that became a great Indian wedding, but it remains true to the original promise: this is a festival that’s as much about katha as it is about tamasha, and it delivers both in equal measure.
Jaipur Literature Festival: final notes
-The Hanif Kureishi-Amitava Kumar session was a classic example of how matching the right moderator to the right writer can pay off massive dividends. The JLF had a little trouble with this, with Chetan Bhagat asking Anjum Hassan daft, condescending questions about how it felt to move from "the dressing table to the writing table". It was clearly the Teen Deviyan and One Idiot panel.
Amitava, in contrast, had done his homework and knew exactly when to push Kureishi a little and when to step back. But the audience provided the best moments. He was asked: “As a Muslim, do you consider yourself an aberration?”
Hanif’s response, “That’s a great question. Hmmm... am I an aberration? All my life I have fought against authoritarian systems, and any religion is an authoritarian system. I don’t think of myself as a Muslim.”
And then an old gentleman asked the Question of the Festival: “Mr Kureishi, my grandson was circumcised. It was very painful for him. Do you remember your circumcision? Did you feel the pain too?”
"Thank you," said Kureishi. "It’s been a long time since anyone took such an interest in my genitals.”
-My favourite audience reaction to the fest? Provided by a glamorous young fashionista in a Paris kitsch outfit and a truly gorgeous hat, who was seen exiting the Baithak tent at great speed. "Is everything all right, darling?" an equally glamorous editor asks. The fashionista grips editor's shoulder. "Darling!" she says. "They're talking about books in there!"
-Censorship works in strange ways. I'm chatting with a bunch of schoolgirls at the Full Circle bookshop. One of them buys the Tranquebar anthology of erotica, edited by Ruchir Joshi and Sister Jesme's autobiography. As we're talking, she brings out a Stephen King hardback from her rucksack, and slips the cover over Sister Jesme's book. "My parents won't let me read that," she says. I look at the erotica book. "Oh, that's all right," she explains. "The other one is anti-religion, so...."
-Local substitutes have a strange and sublime feel to them, too. By day four, the festival's running out of the Kinley and Bisleri bottles--as an aside, there has to be a better alternative to the plastic glasses, even paper cups would be less wasteful--and raiding local suppliers. "Roy!" booms an authorial voice as I reach for a glass of water. "Are you sure you want to drink that?" I look at the canister: pure, filtered water that rejoices in the brand name of PeeMee.
-"I have an idea for a book..." "Ma'am, is that Ravi Singh? (Penguin's head honcho) I want to show him my first three chapters..." "So I'm writing this really great novel, I have 30,000 words down..." There's a lot of hustling happening on the sidelines (and Ravi Singh, you owe me for steering the demented writer with the 1,200-page poetry saga about a suffering man who owns a cement factory but dreams of being a poet away from you) and as I see the book ideas, partial synopses and excerpts being thrust upon wary editors, I remember a quiet aside from Roddy Doyle: "I have never asked for an advance for a book that I haven't completed." Words to live by.
-Leaving on Republic Day; at the Clarkes Amer hotel, there's an oddly touching flag-hoisting ceremony on the lawns attended by everyone from the managerial and housekeeping staff down to the darwans. It's quite sweet, right up to the moment where we salute the flag--and a local band breaks into a very familiar song. Not Jana Gana Mana, but All Izz Well from 3 Idiots.
Amitava, in contrast, had done his homework and knew exactly when to push Kureishi a little and when to step back. But the audience provided the best moments. He was asked: “As a Muslim, do you consider yourself an aberration?”
Hanif’s response, “That’s a great question. Hmmm... am I an aberration? All my life I have fought against authoritarian systems, and any religion is an authoritarian system. I don’t think of myself as a Muslim.”
And then an old gentleman asked the Question of the Festival: “Mr Kureishi, my grandson was circumcised. It was very painful for him. Do you remember your circumcision? Did you feel the pain too?”
"Thank you," said Kureishi. "It’s been a long time since anyone took such an interest in my genitals.”
-My favourite audience reaction to the fest? Provided by a glamorous young fashionista in a Paris kitsch outfit and a truly gorgeous hat, who was seen exiting the Baithak tent at great speed. "Is everything all right, darling?" an equally glamorous editor asks. The fashionista grips editor's shoulder. "Darling!" she says. "They're talking about books in there!"
-Censorship works in strange ways. I'm chatting with a bunch of schoolgirls at the Full Circle bookshop. One of them buys the Tranquebar anthology of erotica, edited by Ruchir Joshi and Sister Jesme's autobiography. As we're talking, she brings out a Stephen King hardback from her rucksack, and slips the cover over Sister Jesme's book. "My parents won't let me read that," she says. I look at the erotica book. "Oh, that's all right," she explains. "The other one is anti-religion, so...."
-Local substitutes have a strange and sublime feel to them, too. By day four, the festival's running out of the Kinley and Bisleri bottles--as an aside, there has to be a better alternative to the plastic glasses, even paper cups would be less wasteful--and raiding local suppliers. "Roy!" booms an authorial voice as I reach for a glass of water. "Are you sure you want to drink that?" I look at the canister: pure, filtered water that rejoices in the brand name of PeeMee.
-"I have an idea for a book..." "Ma'am, is that Ravi Singh? (Penguin's head honcho) I want to show him my first three chapters..." "So I'm writing this really great novel, I have 30,000 words down..." There's a lot of hustling happening on the sidelines (and Ravi Singh, you owe me for steering the demented writer with the 1,200-page poetry saga about a suffering man who owns a cement factory but dreams of being a poet away from you) and as I see the book ideas, partial synopses and excerpts being thrust upon wary editors, I remember a quiet aside from Roddy Doyle: "I have never asked for an advance for a book that I haven't completed." Words to live by.
-Leaving on Republic Day; at the Clarkes Amer hotel, there's an oddly touching flag-hoisting ceremony on the lawns attended by everyone from the managerial and housekeeping staff down to the darwans. It's quite sweet, right up to the moment where we salute the flag--and a local band breaks into a very familiar song. Not Jana Gana Mana, but All Izz Well from 3 Idiots.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Jaipur Literature Festival: Vikram Chandra
On technique: "If you're a writer or a sportsman, if you've ever practiced a sport, you'll notice that at first you get worse. That's because you're becoming aware of the technique involved, whether it's writing or a sport. Then you practice some more and then you get better. There's a balance between learning technique and finding freedom. You do your daily riyaaz, and you try to reach that flow state, and you eventually do reach it."
On meeting gangsters for Sacred Games: "The bigger guys are eager to meet you. They're like corporate heads: there's a PR line they want to feed you. It's the footsoldiers who are harder to meet. (He mentions one gangster who demanded a meeting near the police station in a Bombay suburb.) "He was a hitman who worked very close by. He felt safe around the police station."
On cognitive poetics, his latest obssession: Literary criticism in the west has looked at content, not at the art of reading. Almost nobody has bothered about what the reader feels, the emotions of the reader as you encounter this text. But when you read a written text, you're making up your own narratives. And cognitive poetics, through specific studies, has shown that when you read a story, there are specific inflexion points--the points of greatest emotional impact in the narrative. It's exciting to me to think that they could be mapped."
Later, Chandra mentions Brian Boyd, and his theories of story--especially the theory that story telling is an adaptive evolutionary behaviour. Here's a link to a review of Boyd's work.
On meeting gangsters for Sacred Games: "The bigger guys are eager to meet you. They're like corporate heads: there's a PR line they want to feed you. It's the footsoldiers who are harder to meet. (He mentions one gangster who demanded a meeting near the police station in a Bombay suburb.) "He was a hitman who worked very close by. He felt safe around the police station."
On cognitive poetics, his latest obssession: Literary criticism in the west has looked at content, not at the art of reading. Almost nobody has bothered about what the reader feels, the emotions of the reader as you encounter this text. But when you read a written text, you're making up your own narratives. And cognitive poetics, through specific studies, has shown that when you read a story, there are specific inflexion points--the points of greatest emotional impact in the narrative. It's exciting to me to think that they could be mapped."
Later, Chandra mentions Brian Boyd, and his theories of story--especially the theory that story telling is an adaptive evolutionary behaviour. Here's a link to a review of Boyd's work.
Jaipur Literature Festival: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Censorship isn’t just something imposed by the state,” says Ali Sethi. “It’s also a mental state.” Free speech isn’t one of the themes for the JLF this year, but like the various memes floating around the festival—gulags, conspiracy theories, the changing nature of freedom, the state versus the individual—it comes up in interesting ways.
Sethi talks about discovering the stories in women’s digests in Pakistan—stories that seem to parallel the stories in women’s magazines here, in their blend of conservatism and outspokenness. Intrigued, he and his friends track down the women who run one of the more popular digests, with sales of 160,000 copies a month. (There’s a moment while we compute this, given the average sales of the Indian or Pakistani writer in English.) They’re met with suspicion: why are they interested in these narratives?
“What we’re doing is not unIslamic,” they’re told. Reassured that Sethi and his friends aren’t there to accuse them, the women open up about the worlds these stories come from.
Two days later, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes an unannounced appearance at the festival. Her arrival has been hinted at, but not revealed for security reasons: she has lived under the shadow of death threats, ever since her book Infidel came out. The media goes nuts; not so the general reader, who has now got used to Jaipur's surprises--as one schoolgirl puts it: "I turned around and bumped into Wole Soyinka! Then I turned the other way and bumped into Alexander McCall Smith!"
Most of us can’t get into the auditorium for her talk; the press of the crowds is too great; so we see her as a remote figure on the giant screens outside the Durbar Hall. She accuses the world’s liberal democracies of appeasing Islam, of being too mired in their own self-doubt and fear of betraying their own traditions to genuinely criticize or examine the more unpleasant aspects of faith and Islam.
The writer I’m standing next to is quiet during her session, but as it ends, he quotes Buruma’s review of Infidel:
“There is no doubt that many Islamic societies, especially in the Middle East, are in deep trouble for many reasons: political, historical, social, economic and religious. Revolutionary Islamism is seen by a growing number of Muslims as the only answer to failed secular dictatorships and corrupt, oil-rich elites, as well as to the economic and military domination of the United States. And European Muslims, often confused and alienated, feel its fatal attraction. Hirsi Ali is quite right that this force must be resisted. Enlightened reform of religious practices that clash with liberal democratic freedoms is necessary. But much though I respect her courage, I’m not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.”
I’m reminded of the debate over Islam in Europe that raged at signandsight, drawing in Pascal Bruckner and others, not so long ago. It’s well worth re-reading.
Sethi talks about discovering the stories in women’s digests in Pakistan—stories that seem to parallel the stories in women’s magazines here, in their blend of conservatism and outspokenness. Intrigued, he and his friends track down the women who run one of the more popular digests, with sales of 160,000 copies a month. (There’s a moment while we compute this, given the average sales of the Indian or Pakistani writer in English.) They’re met with suspicion: why are they interested in these narratives?
“What we’re doing is not unIslamic,” they’re told. Reassured that Sethi and his friends aren’t there to accuse them, the women open up about the worlds these stories come from.
Two days later, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes an unannounced appearance at the festival. Her arrival has been hinted at, but not revealed for security reasons: she has lived under the shadow of death threats, ever since her book Infidel came out. The media goes nuts; not so the general reader, who has now got used to Jaipur's surprises--as one schoolgirl puts it: "I turned around and bumped into Wole Soyinka! Then I turned the other way and bumped into Alexander McCall Smith!"
Most of us can’t get into the auditorium for her talk; the press of the crowds is too great; so we see her as a remote figure on the giant screens outside the Durbar Hall. She accuses the world’s liberal democracies of appeasing Islam, of being too mired in their own self-doubt and fear of betraying their own traditions to genuinely criticize or examine the more unpleasant aspects of faith and Islam.
The writer I’m standing next to is quiet during her session, but as it ends, he quotes Buruma’s review of Infidel:
“There is no doubt that many Islamic societies, especially in the Middle East, are in deep trouble for many reasons: political, historical, social, economic and religious. Revolutionary Islamism is seen by a growing number of Muslims as the only answer to failed secular dictatorships and corrupt, oil-rich elites, as well as to the economic and military domination of the United States. And European Muslims, often confused and alienated, feel its fatal attraction. Hirsi Ali is quite right that this force must be resisted. Enlightened reform of religious practices that clash with liberal democratic freedoms is necessary. But much though I respect her courage, I’m not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.”
I’m reminded of the debate over Islam in Europe that raged at signandsight, drawing in Pascal Bruckner and others, not so long ago. It’s well worth re-reading.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Jaipur Lit Fest, Day 3: in brief
Let's put it this way.
Roddy Doyle, Vikram Chandra, Louis de Bernieres, Hanif Kureishi, plus Sister Jesme, Lawrence Wright and others--all on the same day. On the discussion table: cognition and reading, and what parts of your brain light up when you're deep in a book; Al Qaeda; empire and the new-new orientalism; revamping religion; the perseverance of the Diana myth.
Sensory overload, or to quote a friend: "This fest is on steroids, dude." Expect your Day 3 reports on Day 4, after the H M Naqvi performance rap this evening.
Until then, read him or him.
Roddy Doyle, Vikram Chandra, Louis de Bernieres, Hanif Kureishi, plus Sister Jesme, Lawrence Wright and others--all on the same day. On the discussion table: cognition and reading, and what parts of your brain light up when you're deep in a book; Al Qaeda; empire and the new-new orientalism; revamping religion; the perseverance of the Diana myth.
Sensory overload, or to quote a friend: "This fest is on steroids, dude." Expect your Day 3 reports on Day 4, after the H M Naqvi performance rap this evening.
Until then, read him or him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)