Bats in our Belfries

(Published in Outlook Traveller, October 2010)
If it hadn’t been for a decade of reading Gerald Durrell, I may never have dated a man who was the companion of the Princess of Patparganj.

The Princess, who was treated like royalty and had better manners than most of the nobility, was a young, comely pink piglet who had been rescued from a possibly fearsome fate in the bylanes of Feroze Shah Kotla. The man in question had gone to the Kotla market to buy razais; he and the Princess crossed paths, and it was love at first sight. Other gently nurtured women may have found his story odd, but I found nothing at all unusual in the fact that he came back sans razai and with the piglet; I, you see, had read my Durrell.

The Durrell books, depending on your taste, are either up there with the greatest of the wildlife and conservation classics in the company of Jane Goodall and Joy Adamson, or nestle comfortably alongside stylists of the ilk of PG Wodehouse. The books were thrust upon me by a wonderful school teacher—“You’ve never read Durrell?” she said, and dumped a shelf-ful of Durrell on me, starting with his fictionalized account of travels with an alcoholic elephant, Rosy is My Relative.

They had the most alluring titles—Catch me a Colobus, Beasts in my Belfry, The Bafut Beagles—and the most seductive illustrations, done by Ralph Thompson, who had a knack for getting both the detail and the humour of the Durrell oeuvre down in a few neat lines. It was one of the absolute joys of a very brief stint in publishing to be part of the Tranquebar team that brought the books back into print in India, with cheerful new illustrations by Gynelle Alves.

Durrell was born in Raj India, though the family moved back to England when he was three-and-a-half, and then to Corfu. “I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids,” writes Durrell, already the young naturalist. It was in Corfu, as he sets down in My Family and Other Animals, that his fascination for both kingdoms—the animal and the human—came to the fore.

Gerald Durrell graduated from keeping snakes in his room to travelling the world, building zoos (A Zoo in My Luggage), collecting rare and on-the-verge-of-extinction species (The Whispering Land, The Drunken Forest) while learning how to change the nature of zoos, from prison to animal-friendly resort (The Overcrowded Ark). But what made his books work was his zest for life, and his ability to collect lugubrious tango-singers, White Horse whisky drinking African chiefs, and mad Greeks alongside the colobuses, lemurs, pangolins, tapirs and chimpanzees that were the stock-in-trade of his profession. The brothers Durrell—Lawrence was the author of the Alexandria Quartet—were natural writers, and there was nothing of the dry scholar in Gerald’s description of animals:

“We had a pair of slender lorises of which we were inordinately proud. These creatures look rather like drug addicts that have seen better days. Clad in light grey fur, they have enormously long and thin limbs and body; strange almost human hands; and large lustrous brown eyes, each surrounded by a circle of dark fur, so that the animals appears as though it is recovering either from some sort of ghastly debauchery or an unsuccessful boxing tournament.”

His writing was not for the sentimental, Disney-influenced animal lover. Durrell was equally strong on describing the proper procedure for pulling out maggots from an animal’s skin, or the problems of building cages strong enough to withstand a young leopard’s temper tantrums.

The Durrell books, as anyone who has read them knows, are insidious in their appeal. Little by little, he expands your world, whether you live in Delhi or Corfu, until it’s peopled—and I use that term with meaning—with the animals who’ve travelled with him, the owl who looks like an indignant vicar, the little flirtatious pig called Juanita, solemn seals who mate with exquisite care and slow delicacy, chimpanzees called Cholmondoley who arrive for tea equipped with their own, large, battered tin tea mug. The younger brother of the teacher who lent me the Durrell books became a conservationist, and she continued, in her profession, to campaign for wildlife rights.

I followed a more muted path, adopting the odd mongoose here, a stray baby hawk there. The Princess of Patparganj grew too large for her habitation and escaped the bacon fate, living out her years on a friend’s no-kill farm. As for the man, it seemed the only way to stop him from rescuing pythons, monkeys and piglets was to turn him to a life of caring for cats and more manageable creatures, and the only way to do that was to marry him. I had a feeling Gerald Durrell would have approved.

The BS column: The Nobel over the century

(Published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2010, three days before the Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa.)


This Thursday, the next Nobel Laureate in Literature will be announced. Salman Rushdie, alas, is way down on Ladbroke’s list of betting odds along with Mahasweta Devi, but some would consider 66/1 a sporting chance — in honour of his new book, Luka and The Fire of Life, I’ve put a small punt on him. Most commentators think this might be the year of the poets, with a small group betting on the African writer Ngugi wa Thiongo. (MA Orthofer at the Complete Review covered the pre-announcement speculation in detail, here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd1; his comprehensive Vargas Llosa links page here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd8.)

Setting aside the merits of an individual laureate in any given year, though, a century and a bit is a good time to look back at Nobels past. The evolution of the Nobel, from a small European prize fuelled by a dynamite-maker’s fortune to perhaps the world’s most influential literary gong, is a remarkable story.

1900s to the 1930s: The first 30 years of the Nobel was a time of evolution, as the literature prize sought to define itself. The first prize went to Sully Prudhomme, no longer read or remembered, but famous for his poetry at the time. Over the next decade, the Swedish Academy’s fondness for poets, and its occasional partiality towards Europe’s writers, were both strong. Kipling was an early recipient of the Prize, and so, five years after Kipling got his gong, was Tagore. The post-World War I years were somewhat insular, and except for William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann and G B Shaw, few Nobel laureates from that period have stood the test of time.

1930s-1950s: The 1930s saw an earnest attempt by the Swedish Academy to broaden the Prize. Alfred Nobel’s will had stressed that the Nobel in Literature was for the “most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; by the 1930s, the Academy had broadened this to mean “body of work” rather than an individual book, and had decided to interpret “ideal direction” to mean works of universal popularity and interest. That accounts for the laureates of the 1930s — from Galsworthy to Pearl S Buck, Eugene O’Neill to Pirandello, Nobel Prize winners were increasingly recognisable.

The 1940s, disrupted by World War Two, saw the Academy reaching, again, for “ideal work” — but returning, with prizes bestowed on T S Eliot and William Faulkner, to the idea of literary quality and power as the driver behind the Prizes. Andre Osterling, the new secretary of the Academy, was responsible for persuading the Academy to applaud the pioneers of modern literature, from Hesse and Gide onwards. Many of the laureates of the 1940s had been discussed and rejected by a more conservative Academy in previous years. Osterling’s correspondence shows his discomfort with the Academy’s refusal, in the 1930s, to recognise such writers as James Joyce, and his determination not to repeat their mistakes.

1950s-1970s: Over the next two decades, the Prize looked outwards, acquiring a much broader frame of reference. With Churchill, Hemingway, Mauriac, Camus and Pasternak awarded in the same decade, the Nobel was becoming far more international than it had in the first two decades. Pasternak caused the first Nobel scandal, when Russian authorities forced him to decline his Prize — in 1964, Sartre would turn down his Nobel for loftier reasons, and in subsequent years, the Academy has carefully checked to see if authors will say aye or nay.

The 1960s and 1970s were golden years, with Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Kawabata, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer among those awarded. Few women made the cut — Nelly Sachs was the only female Laureate in all these years. And in the 1970s, the infamous Graham Greene rumour began circulating: gossip to the effect that Greene’s amours with the wife of a member of the Academy cost him his gong. True or not, it was a good story.

1980s-2000: Correspondence for these years is not yet available — the Academy releases its working notes with a 50-year time lag — but it is clear that the Prize was more aware of its powers. The Nobel now had the ability to make or break writers, and Garcia Marquez, William Golding and Wole Soyinka balanced then-unknown writers such as Elias Canetti and Claude Simon.

The 1990s was the decade of the poets, with awards going to four stalwarts — Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, making three of them world-famous rather than local heroes. It was also, very much so, the decade of gender equality, as the Nobel recognised Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and Szymborska — three women in one decade. This would be matched in the 2000s, with the Nobel going to Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Mueller and Doris Lessing, but it may be argued that the 1990s had the superior list.

2000-2010: The 2000s have alternated between the obscure — Jelinek, Le Clezio — and the safe anointing of the already famous — V S Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee. The 2000s, going by the list of laureates, reflects the back-and-forth as the Nobel goes to a worthy but obscure European writer, then to a better-known “world literature” figure. Perhaps the greatest challenge the Swedish Academy faces is the challenge of growing out of its Eurocentrism and opening its doors to the whole world of literature.

The BS Column: Naipaul-The Twilight of his Travels

(Published in the Business Standard, September 21, 2010)

I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.


The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour — the prime minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America — The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses — flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled — as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.

“Other travellers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V S Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travellers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarising labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.

In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveller, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)

The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writings. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, that may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart — handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.

The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations — Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.

Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.

Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.