For publishers: got this from the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature team:
"We are extending the deadline for entries for the DSC prize for South
Asian Literature to 5th May, 2010. This is due to several requests coming
from many publishing houses, mostly overseas, whose entries are delayed
due to the grounding of flights after the volcano eruption in Iceland,
The new deadline for submissions: 5 May,2010."
The eligibility rules:
http://dscprize.com.s54927.gridserver.com/eligibility/
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Book review: Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta
(Published in the Business Standard, April 28, 2010)
Quarantine
Rahul Mehta
Random House
Rs 399, 252 pages
“The week I start making notes for this essay is the same week my mother is reading for the first time the manuscript for my short story collection, Quarantine...,” Rahul Mehta writes in an essay, Coming Out, just after the publication of this debut collection.
“What I didn’t say then was that I, in fact, don’t want [my parents] to read it. And now that my mother is, I am terrified. I am worried that she will object to the family stories I have stolen and altered and bent to suit my purposes. I am worried that she won’t understand what “fiction” means, and that every time she reads a passage in which a young, gay Indian-American man is having sex (and there is, in fact, a fair amount of sex in the book), that she will think it is me: me having rough sex in an alley, me masturbating in the back of the family car, me having unprotected sex in a loft in New York with a one-night stand.”
More, almost, than the nine stories in Quarantine, this essay marks the pleasures and pitfalls of Rahul Mehta’s writing. This is one of the most surprising collections I’ve read in recent months: honest, spare, moving in the tenderness with which he chronicles the fault-lines and the epiphanies of relationships, but narrow in its scope and ambitions.
The narrator is not Mehta—this is fiction, as he stresses. Though he’s a young, gay Indian-American man himself, that really isn’t him in these stories having sex, or having a nervous breakdown, or facing family conflicts, or holding down an imaginary job. But the narrator’s voice changes little through these nine stories; it’s the link, the connection the reader needs, though it offers no shift in perspective.
In ‘Floating’, a gay couple explores tourist India and returns with artifacts. These are not so much the trinkets and funny stories the narrator despises, but an unsettling encounter, a hint of violence, an anger from the local community that they are not doing their job, not buying the right commodities—sex, fake miniatures—in the right market. In ‘Yours’, Don, Antwon and the narrator circle around each other, trying on power games, trying desire on for size, rejecting the wrong fit. There are bickering gay couples, or the ones who break up over infidelity in ‘Ten Thousand Years’; there are the ones who have slid, without meaning to, from intimacy into near-marital familiarity and can’t find their way back.
Like John Cheever, Mehta is instinctively a kind of Chekov of the suburbs, drawn to the tangled and concealed histories of conventional, apparently bland families—chiefly of the Indian diaspora. Though a few stories are set in India, it’s clear that this is a country seen through a tourist’s eyes, and there’s little questioning or unnecessary tension in that relationship.
One of the most touching stories here, Citizen, is ostensibly about an elderly woman’s struggle to pass her American citizenship test; but the real theme is in the first line: “Everybody told her this is what she should want…” The degrees of disenfranchisement that interests Mehta are personal rather than political. He’s brilliant at excavating the real histories: in the title story, Quarantine, the bitterness and bad blood between the narrator’s mother and his grandfather hides the true bond between them—a mutual helplessness, a shared lack of control over their lives.
It’s rare for Mehta to falter technically, but he does in the ambitious, Carveresque ‘What We Mean’, where the protagonist’s slow breakdown is communicated through his verbal outpourings and a loss of language. It’s brilliantly done; but implausible, because the protagonist retains control over the structure of the story even as he loses control over his mind, always a danger where you’re using a first-person narrator in a situation of this kind.
More often, he’s in perfect control of his material. In ‘Ten Thousand Years’, the travelling couple buy a 1967 Malayalam phrasebook: “…filled with translations for phrases such as: ‘That’s the boy’s job,’ ‘Tell the boy to come in the morning’, ‘There is plenty of work for the boy’.” They are both horrified, but later, during a lover’s quarrel, one of them will use these phrases, as hurtfully as he can, to initiate the break-up.
Quarantine’s greatest flaw is its narrow ambition, and Mehta’s deliberately constrained range—it’s the exact opposite of the “baggy monster” school of writing, and for a certain kind of reader, the limitations won’t be a barrier. It announces Rahul Mehta as an extraordinarily astute, talented young writer, blessed with a quality not often considered literary—he has empathy, and he writes dialogue like a practised eavesdropper. It would be unfair to stereotype Quarantine as just a collection of “gay writings”, any more than John Updike’s short stories are just a collection of writings about hetero relationships, but Mehta’s lack of self-consciousness makes this a wonderful exploration of writings about gay men and different approaches to masculinity, as well as the family in general.
Over the next decade, it’ll be interesting to see whether Mehta manages to expand his range. His craft and his assurance are unquestionable, but while Quarantine is a beautiful, and often moving, read, it stops just short of being memorable. That’s a problem Mehta shares with John Cheever, and it didn’t stop Cheever from building his reputation and his audience over time.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
The BS column: Guerrillas in the Mist
(Published in the Business Standard, April 27, 2010)
At the height of the first Naxal movement, reflections of the revolution could be seen in the works of writers from Kerala, Bengal, Andhra and other “affected” states. Some romanced the gun, some romanced the revolutionaries; some were fiercely anguished works that are still read, if only in the college library.
It is unwise to expect the conflicts of the day to draw an immediate response from writers, but the Maoist conflict in India over the last few years has begun to leave its mark on writing in English. You may or may not be among the ranks of Naipaul believers, but give him credit for his sharp instincts.
In 2004, four years before Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti’s non-fiction exploration of Salwa Judum and the Maoists, was published, Naipaul came out with Magic Seeds, in which his protagonist Willie Chandran joins a revolutionary movement in India. Like C P Surendran’s 2006 Iron Harvest, Magic Seeds illustrates the pitfalls of writing about revolution. Ideological debates seldom make for strong plot points, and it requires the cynical eye of a Graham Greene to turn calls to the barricades into good writing. Naipaul flourished his own brand of cynicism: “Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police.” But if Iron Harvest was imbued with an excess of revolutionary fervour and disillusionment, Magic Seeds exuded listlessness.
Perhaps non-fiction will be the more useful form for this insurgency, or conflict. Before Arundhati Roy walked with the comrades, Jason Motlagh did a prescient piece that reflected his unease with the aims and the violence of the present-day Maoists. In 2001, journalist Satnam had travelled to Bastar to meet the comrades; his deeply sympathetic account was published in 2003 in Punjabi. Jangalnama: Travels in A Maoist Guerrilla Zone (Penguin) has just been published in English, and it’s both interesting and dated.
Satnam is blunt about the fact that his sympathies lie with the Maoists, and in many parts, Jangalnama reads like a paean to the simplicity and openness of tribal life — with a nod to the considerable economic hardships. “The laws of Manu have not influenced their lives,” he observes, joining in with the 18-hour marches, the collective song sessions, the basic meals of rice with pumpkin gravy. There is much understanding and sympathy here — in fact, the parallels between Satnam’s journey and Roy’s more recent journey are startling — but no questioning of violence, and little reflection on the lives of the children whose co-option into the movement as young guerrillas is essentially choiceless. Jangalnama is interesting as a historical curiosity, but Satnam’s romanticising becomes a barrier. The great revolutionary novel or account of this decade is yet to be written.
RIP, Alan Sillitoe
“A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality…” Alan Sillitoe, who died this week at the age of 82, wrote in his biography, Life Without Armour. It’s a pity the book is out-of-print, because it remains a remarkably honest account by one of Britain’s Angry Young Men.
Sillitoe’s life was brutal; his father was a vicious drunk, his mother sent him — briefly — to an institution for the mentally challenged because they provided free porridge and daily meals, and he led a working man’s life for years before making his bones as a writer. But this is really a reader’s biography: pages and pages taken up by lists of what he was reading, the early discovery of the Williams and Biggles books, the comforts of the public library. He was a voracious reader, despite his father knocking books out of the young Alan’s hands.
Sillitoe wrote a great deal more than most realise, but the book we all remember is iconic: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It marked a point in British writing when stories about “us” and “them” were being written by “them”, for perhaps the first time in the 20th century. The protagonist discovers his talent for cross-country running while in a Borstal prison, realises both a genuine passion for running and his contempt for the governor who wants him to win a specific race. Instead of mourning Sillitoe, read Long Distance Runner again: “Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas, we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.”
At the height of the first Naxal movement, reflections of the revolution could be seen in the works of writers from Kerala, Bengal, Andhra and other “affected” states. Some romanced the gun, some romanced the revolutionaries; some were fiercely anguished works that are still read, if only in the college library.
It is unwise to expect the conflicts of the day to draw an immediate response from writers, but the Maoist conflict in India over the last few years has begun to leave its mark on writing in English. You may or may not be among the ranks of Naipaul believers, but give him credit for his sharp instincts.
In 2004, four years before Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti’s non-fiction exploration of Salwa Judum and the Maoists, was published, Naipaul came out with Magic Seeds, in which his protagonist Willie Chandran joins a revolutionary movement in India. Like C P Surendran’s 2006 Iron Harvest, Magic Seeds illustrates the pitfalls of writing about revolution. Ideological debates seldom make for strong plot points, and it requires the cynical eye of a Graham Greene to turn calls to the barricades into good writing. Naipaul flourished his own brand of cynicism: “Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police.” But if Iron Harvest was imbued with an excess of revolutionary fervour and disillusionment, Magic Seeds exuded listlessness.
Perhaps non-fiction will be the more useful form for this insurgency, or conflict. Before Arundhati Roy walked with the comrades, Jason Motlagh did a prescient piece that reflected his unease with the aims and the violence of the present-day Maoists. In 2001, journalist Satnam had travelled to Bastar to meet the comrades; his deeply sympathetic account was published in 2003 in Punjabi. Jangalnama: Travels in A Maoist Guerrilla Zone (Penguin) has just been published in English, and it’s both interesting and dated.
Satnam is blunt about the fact that his sympathies lie with the Maoists, and in many parts, Jangalnama reads like a paean to the simplicity and openness of tribal life — with a nod to the considerable economic hardships. “The laws of Manu have not influenced their lives,” he observes, joining in with the 18-hour marches, the collective song sessions, the basic meals of rice with pumpkin gravy. There is much understanding and sympathy here — in fact, the parallels between Satnam’s journey and Roy’s more recent journey are startling — but no questioning of violence, and little reflection on the lives of the children whose co-option into the movement as young guerrillas is essentially choiceless. Jangalnama is interesting as a historical curiosity, but Satnam’s romanticising becomes a barrier. The great revolutionary novel or account of this decade is yet to be written.
RIP, Alan Sillitoe
“A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality…” Alan Sillitoe, who died this week at the age of 82, wrote in his biography, Life Without Armour. It’s a pity the book is out-of-print, because it remains a remarkably honest account by one of Britain’s Angry Young Men.
Sillitoe’s life was brutal; his father was a vicious drunk, his mother sent him — briefly — to an institution for the mentally challenged because they provided free porridge and daily meals, and he led a working man’s life for years before making his bones as a writer. But this is really a reader’s biography: pages and pages taken up by lists of what he was reading, the early discovery of the Williams and Biggles books, the comforts of the public library. He was a voracious reader, despite his father knocking books out of the young Alan’s hands.
Sillitoe wrote a great deal more than most realise, but the book we all remember is iconic: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It marked a point in British writing when stories about “us” and “them” were being written by “them”, for perhaps the first time in the 20th century. The protagonist discovers his talent for cross-country running while in a Borstal prison, realises both a genuine passion for running and his contempt for the governor who wants him to win a specific race. Instead of mourning Sillitoe, read Long Distance Runner again: “Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas, we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.”
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