(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, May 10, 2005)
This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.
This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.
The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”
The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.
How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.
Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .
Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.
After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .
SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .
This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”
Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”
We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .
And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”
Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.
Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”
And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Business Standard column: Character Map
(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', the Business Standard, May 3, 2005)
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Book review: The Red Carpet
(Published in India Today)
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
Book review: Dil-o-Daanish
(Published in The Indian Express)
I tried, but there was no way I could use the English title; The Heart Has Its Reasons conjures up the memoirs of Barbara Cartland and of Wallis Simpson, and for the life of me I can't imagine Krishna Sobti in their company.
The Heart Has Its Reasons
Krishna Sobti
Translated by Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami
Katha
Rs 250, 220 pages
Dil-o-Danish was one of the two books that introduced me to the delights of "reading in place". The novel refused to come alive in an anonymous concrete
apartment block, and remained truculent until it was taken off to Old Delhi.
The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set--Dilli in the 1920s--but shops still sell "muslin-soft" rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.
Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two--real writer and imaginary writer--in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes "bisexually", with access to both genders, sets up an
intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish . Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak--a perk natural to a man of a certain status.
"He himself has two women--one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this—though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you'll never understand."
Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband's life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not
a choice open to her. Mehak's mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation--for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, "People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own
sake." But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not cariacatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.
But the rights he assigns so naturally to himself are not rights he can imagine extending to either Kutumb, when she demands that he acknowledge her pain, or
Mehak, when she exercises her right to property that is hers, and her right to choose her own path. One woman is asked to turn a blind eye; the other is asked
to be invisible. As the inevitable schemings and crosscurrents of the joint family complicate matters, against the backdrop of a robust city in the grip of
change, someone must break the deadlock.
One of the pleasures of Sobti's writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan's dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi. The translators have an uphill task; it's impossible to capture the exact lilt and sway, the pungency and the grace, of the original. They do manage to retain the flow and the rapid back-and-forth of conversation.
This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti's other work, but no less satisfying. Austen's England and Sobti's Dilli have much in common: what
drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen's world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was little more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn't reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama , but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.
I tried, but there was no way I could use the English title; The Heart Has Its Reasons conjures up the memoirs of Barbara Cartland and of Wallis Simpson, and for the life of me I can't imagine Krishna Sobti in their company.
The Heart Has Its Reasons
Krishna Sobti
Translated by Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami
Katha
Rs 250, 220 pages
Dil-o-Danish was one of the two books that introduced me to the delights of "reading in place". The novel refused to come alive in an anonymous concrete
apartment block, and remained truculent until it was taken off to Old Delhi.
The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set--Dilli in the 1920s--but shops still sell "muslin-soft" rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.
Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two--real writer and imaginary writer--in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes "bisexually", with access to both genders, sets up an
intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish . Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak--a perk natural to a man of a certain status.
"He himself has two women--one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this—though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you'll never understand."
Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband's life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not
a choice open to her. Mehak's mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation--for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, "People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own
sake." But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not cariacatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.
But the rights he assigns so naturally to himself are not rights he can imagine extending to either Kutumb, when she demands that he acknowledge her pain, or
Mehak, when she exercises her right to property that is hers, and her right to choose her own path. One woman is asked to turn a blind eye; the other is asked
to be invisible. As the inevitable schemings and crosscurrents of the joint family complicate matters, against the backdrop of a robust city in the grip of
change, someone must break the deadlock.
One of the pleasures of Sobti's writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan's dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi. The translators have an uphill task; it's impossible to capture the exact lilt and sway, the pungency and the grace, of the original. They do manage to retain the flow and the rapid back-and-forth of conversation.
This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti's other work, but no less satisfying. Austen's England and Sobti's Dilli have much in common: what
drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen's world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was little more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn't reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama , but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.
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