(Published in the Business Standard, April 24, 2012)
Before the digital camera age, the venerable photo studios in most large Indian cities offered a tactful service for the recently bereaved.
Just as honeymooners were offered fake backgrounds—castle, Kashmir lake, eerily white Himalayas, portraits of the dead could be retouched to make the departed’s resemblance to a gargoyle less obvious. Mahatta’s, for instance, added a touch of actual paint to photographs to simulate rouge or lipstick; the paint slowly flaked off, gently ageing the dead as time passed.
One of the reasons why we have very little in the way of interesting contemporary Indian biographies of the famous stems from this need to garland the dead with metaphorical marigolds. The recent persecution of Peter Heehs, who has lived and worked in India for many years, for his biography of Sri Aurobindo, might be seen in this context.
His biography, a work of careful scholarship, is being attacked not because it is inaccurate, but because it interferes with the very Indian demand for a strictly sanitized version of the lives of the famous--as Heehs has said, his critics are “interested in establishing a Sri Aurobindo religion with themselves as popes, priests etc”.
There isn’t much point invoking Heehs’ right to free speech as a biographer—the right to independent, critical inquiry into the life of a public figure clashes with too many deep-rooted Indian beliefs. If you put two favourite North Indian admonishments together, they don’t leave much room for a cultural defence of free speech. Between “zubaan sambhal lo”—hold your tongue—and “aukat me raho”—stay within your bounds, it’s hard to argue that India today has a deep, abiding belief in the value of free speech.
This argument, extended, might also help us understand a fairly recent phenomenon: the persecution of scholars like Heehs, or before him, James Laine, Wendy Doniger and even journalists like Joseph Lelyveld, on the grounds of their foreignness. The crude argument leveled against Doniger and Laine was a racist one that ignored the accuracy of their research into either Hinduism or Shivaji’s life, in favour of the reductive argument that being foreigners, they could not possibly understand the subjects of their study.
When the Passport Office begins to examine the papers of a scholar like Heehs, to see whether he should be allowed to stay in a country where he has lived or worked for years, we’re back with the widespread belief that “outsiders” have no right to write about us. This is paralleled by the fear that “foreign” scholars will not respect the Indian need to enshrine and embalm either the dead, or the dead past.
Perhaps this is why so many arguments that are ostensibly over free speech issues lose their way in the murk, as one side invokes (Indian) culture and the other invokes a (Western) tradition of free speech. The defenders of free speech will always lose this version of the battle as these firangi principles are interrogated by the Indian thought control police.
But an issue that is often obscured is that Heehs and scholars like him are writing in exact accordance with the Indian tradition of biography and autobiography. In 2007, for instance, Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri published Bangal-nama, his memoirs—translated as The World In Our Time by HarperCollins recently. His memories of growing up in Barisal and Calcutta also include a thoughtful critique of Indian nationalism, and the slow erosion by which Muslims and the rural Indians stopped supporting or became invisible in the ranks of the Indian National Congress over time.
The freedom that Raychaudhuri accords himself when discussing national heroes or difficult subjects like bigotry is an old freedom. It can be seen, for instance, in Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s wonderful autobiography, In The Afternoon of Time, which in passing reveals that his sons, Amitabh and Ajitabh, were almost named Inquilab and Azad.
But it also includes a very amusing section on how the furore over his Madhushala poems grew to the point where he needed a certificate from Gandhi: “There’s no wine-glorifying in these verses!” said the Mahatma, rendering Bachchan’s poetry fit for mass consumption again. Nor does Bachchan hold back when it comes to describing his friend and fellow poet Nirala’s struggles with madness; he does this with compassion, but with the understanding that both biography and autobiography require truth, not elision.
The candour that Heehs and others like him claim is a very Indian quality, then. It can be seen in Mulk Raj Anand’s biography and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s letters, in the completely open letters and autobiography of Gandhi, and it might be glimpsed in Sri Aurobindo’s letters, too. “I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues,” Sri Aurobindo writes to his father-in-law. “I fear you must take me as I am with all my imperfections on my head.”
It’s excellent advice, especially to those who seek to embalm his life, garlanding him with dead marigolds.
Showing posts with label Indian writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Lunch with the Business Standard: Amit Chaudhuri
Stepping into Larry’s China at the Ambassador is like stepping a decade back, into another city. Chosen in haste, out of expedience because of its proximity to the IIC, it turns out to be the right setting for Amit Chaudhuri. It could be a respectable Chinese restaurant from either Bombay in the 1990s or Calcutta in the early 2000s, both cities that the writer knows well.
Larry’s has the slightly shabby charm of an old friend who did less well than expected on the stock market. It's mellow, laidback, and Chaudhuri, relaxing into the comfortable chairs, confides that he intends to eat lightly. “Too much rich food,” he says. It’s a Delhi tradition, a way of testing visiting writers by force-feeding them a promiscuous range of Mughlai, Thai and whatever the fashionable cuisine of the day might be.
I suggest steamed rice, some light greens, perhaps a gentle soup. “Is the lobster good?” says Chaudhuri hopefully. He indicates that this is the menu’s fault, its old-school flourishes too tempting to resist.
We order the lobster in hot bean sauce, some greens sautéed in garlic and steamed rice. It is, in essence, a very Bengali summer meal—fish, rice, some barely wilted greens; the only thing we lack is spice, which arrives in the form of a fiery kimchi and a Cantonese bean sprout salad.
As with his books, the author shuttles between countries and cities, faithful to Bombay, where he grew up and where The Immortals, his most recent novel and St Cyril Road, a collection of poems, is set. Calcutta, where he was born and spends much of his adult life, is the background to A Strange And Sublime Address and Freedom Song. He can also claim the university towns of the UK, where he went to college and later taught, his days there colouring an early novel, Afternoon Raag. He compiled an anthology of writings on Calcutta in 2008, and is writing a book about the city, due in 2013.
As the lobster is served, Amit Chaudhuri talks about his disquiet over the systematic demolition of the old houses in South and North Calcutta, the vanishing landscape of a city he’s preserved in careful images in so many of his books. What gets to Chaudhuri, as it does to many Calcutta expatriates, is what he calls the easy middle-class disavowal of its own history.
“Preserving those houses is very low on the list of priorities of people who live in Calcutta,” he says, warming to his argument. “I wouldn’t want to hang on to those houses for some sense of heritage and nostalgia. In Europe, or South America, any culture which is aware not just of its past but of its modernity, any city which is doing creatively interesting things has preserved and used its recent past, like Berlin for instance.”
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s plans to preserve Calcutta’s heritage by painting the city blue might not, you suspect, cut much ice with Chaudhuri. “Calcutta is a relatively recent city, it comes into being out of nowhere, as many of these Indian colonial cities do, and then it accumulates all this history in a hundred years, and that history is not embodied in the monuments—I don’t take visitors to the Victoria Memorial or other monuments, but to the neighbourhoods where people live.”
The names roll off his tongue like beads on a rosary: Bokul Bagan, Khiddipore, Hindustan Park.
Chaudhuri’s resistance to nostalgia, and the way it shellacs the past, is deeply rooted. He’s just finished a short book on Rabindranath Tagore—it is impossible to discuss Calcutta and not Tagore, especially in the year after the writer’s 150th anniversary celebrations—which probably stands as an act of salvage as much as an act of criticism. It’s a rejection of the “sage-like” Tagore, he says.
The greens with burnt garlic are excellent, and with the discernment of the born critic, Chaudhuri zeroes in on the asparagus, marching it into a separate corral on his plate. He grew up in Bombay, distanced from the Bengali language but in a family which had “great secular reverence” for both Bengali and Tagore.
“Bijoya Chaudhuri—that’s my mother--and Shubina Roy, these two singers sang Tagore for me in a way that was distanced, detached, disinterested without an over-emphasis on the individual’s emotions or the emotions of the songs,” he says. The phone rings, on cue; it’s his mother on the line, as though his mention summoned her into existence.
“It is rare,” he continues. “This is what Tagore praises in the Bengali writer Kalidasa, when he contrasts Kalidasa with Shakespeare, accusing Shakespeare of being everything James Mill accuses Oriental writing of—of overwriting, being overblown, melodramatic, exhibitionistic.” This is Chaudhuri at his best, making the connections, joining the dots, helping readers to see a larger and more complex literary history than they might have imagined.
“And then Tagore praises Kalidasa for being oblique, indirect, for holding back—for having all those virtues in temperament, in writerly temperament, which traditionally nowadays we associate with Western writing.”
The problem with present-day criticism, chiefly in India but also perhaps in the West, is that it’s disconnected from any real sense of the past. This is an argument Chaudhuri’s been making for years—most powerfully through the writers he selected for his landmark Picador Anthology of Indian Literature—and he warms to it with the zeal of a man whose lobster has all the spice and depth that he feels the Indian literary landscape lacks.
“It’s as if every book comes out of nowhere—academics will not talk about Kolatkar, Ramanujan, Ezekiel, unless they become liberal causes. We are formed by a literary culture we don’t acknowledge, in English and in other Indian languages,” he says.
“And we will elide the fact that people like Tagore or Qurratulain Hyder may have been responding to Shelley or Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf—a network of reading and cross-fertilisation which have formed us over the last 200 years. There is no genealogy for anything.”
To round out the meal, I ask about the literary world in the UK, which Chaudhuri knows well—he was, for instance, a Booker judge, a task which he performed conscientiously though with his habitual skepticism about literary institutions.
“This meagerness is also now part of British publishing,” he says, turning down dessert with admirable firmness. “In the domain of Thatcherite and Blairite Britain, the changes brought about to BBC 1, BBC 4, the books pages were shrinking, dumbed down. The Booker Prize changed in complexion from a literary to a popular prize, with comedians and chefs judging the prize, Waterstones became more and more of a warehouse. But there are cracks in this smooth surface, and voices from the cracks are still audible.”
We manage to persuade Chaudhuri to have just two pieces more of the lobster. This also allows me to ask him about changes in his fiction over the years. “The early novels were about the sheer pleasure of a certain kind of interruption in life,” he says.
“Then with A New World, I was interested in this new generation, who have a sense of entitlement, who have been brought up to slip into a future patriarchal role, a role of power, and then find themselves at a loose end. Then the theme of power, the market began to interest me. To some extent, The Immortals was about what happens when a traditional person wants to adapt and reinvent themselves for the marketplace.”
Though we’ve said no to dessert, Larry’s China brings out fortune cookies with a flourish—an old-fashioned coda to a very pleasant, old-world meal. Mine is dour: “Everyone has ambitions but you work to make yours happen.” Chaudhuri’s is more dashing. “Getting together with old friends brings new adventures.”
He looks so pleased as we leave the restaurant for the early summer warmth of Delhi’s streets that I decide not to tell him the New Yorker story about Donald Lau, fortune-cookie writer. After years of writing thousands of fortunes (“think in ten-word sentences,” Mr Lau advised newcomers), the inevitable happened. There are only so many times one person can generate gems like “True gold never fears the fire,” and eleven years after he began, Mr Lau retired, suffering from writer’s block.
Chaudhuri, wiser in the ways of channeling his creativity, interspersing his novels with criticism, poetry and anthologies, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.
Larry’s has the slightly shabby charm of an old friend who did less well than expected on the stock market. It's mellow, laidback, and Chaudhuri, relaxing into the comfortable chairs, confides that he intends to eat lightly. “Too much rich food,” he says. It’s a Delhi tradition, a way of testing visiting writers by force-feeding them a promiscuous range of Mughlai, Thai and whatever the fashionable cuisine of the day might be.
I suggest steamed rice, some light greens, perhaps a gentle soup. “Is the lobster good?” says Chaudhuri hopefully. He indicates that this is the menu’s fault, its old-school flourishes too tempting to resist.
We order the lobster in hot bean sauce, some greens sautéed in garlic and steamed rice. It is, in essence, a very Bengali summer meal—fish, rice, some barely wilted greens; the only thing we lack is spice, which arrives in the form of a fiery kimchi and a Cantonese bean sprout salad.
As with his books, the author shuttles between countries and cities, faithful to Bombay, where he grew up and where The Immortals, his most recent novel and St Cyril Road, a collection of poems, is set. Calcutta, where he was born and spends much of his adult life, is the background to A Strange And Sublime Address and Freedom Song. He can also claim the university towns of the UK, where he went to college and later taught, his days there colouring an early novel, Afternoon Raag. He compiled an anthology of writings on Calcutta in 2008, and is writing a book about the city, due in 2013.
As the lobster is served, Amit Chaudhuri talks about his disquiet over the systematic demolition of the old houses in South and North Calcutta, the vanishing landscape of a city he’s preserved in careful images in so many of his books. What gets to Chaudhuri, as it does to many Calcutta expatriates, is what he calls the easy middle-class disavowal of its own history.
“Preserving those houses is very low on the list of priorities of people who live in Calcutta,” he says, warming to his argument. “I wouldn’t want to hang on to those houses for some sense of heritage and nostalgia. In Europe, or South America, any culture which is aware not just of its past but of its modernity, any city which is doing creatively interesting things has preserved and used its recent past, like Berlin for instance.”
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s plans to preserve Calcutta’s heritage by painting the city blue might not, you suspect, cut much ice with Chaudhuri. “Calcutta is a relatively recent city, it comes into being out of nowhere, as many of these Indian colonial cities do, and then it accumulates all this history in a hundred years, and that history is not embodied in the monuments—I don’t take visitors to the Victoria Memorial or other monuments, but to the neighbourhoods where people live.”
The names roll off his tongue like beads on a rosary: Bokul Bagan, Khiddipore, Hindustan Park.
Chaudhuri’s resistance to nostalgia, and the way it shellacs the past, is deeply rooted. He’s just finished a short book on Rabindranath Tagore—it is impossible to discuss Calcutta and not Tagore, especially in the year after the writer’s 150th anniversary celebrations—which probably stands as an act of salvage as much as an act of criticism. It’s a rejection of the “sage-like” Tagore, he says.
The greens with burnt garlic are excellent, and with the discernment of the born critic, Chaudhuri zeroes in on the asparagus, marching it into a separate corral on his plate. He grew up in Bombay, distanced from the Bengali language but in a family which had “great secular reverence” for both Bengali and Tagore.
“Bijoya Chaudhuri—that’s my mother--and Shubina Roy, these two singers sang Tagore for me in a way that was distanced, detached, disinterested without an over-emphasis on the individual’s emotions or the emotions of the songs,” he says. The phone rings, on cue; it’s his mother on the line, as though his mention summoned her into existence.
“It is rare,” he continues. “This is what Tagore praises in the Bengali writer Kalidasa, when he contrasts Kalidasa with Shakespeare, accusing Shakespeare of being everything James Mill accuses Oriental writing of—of overwriting, being overblown, melodramatic, exhibitionistic.” This is Chaudhuri at his best, making the connections, joining the dots, helping readers to see a larger and more complex literary history than they might have imagined.
“And then Tagore praises Kalidasa for being oblique, indirect, for holding back—for having all those virtues in temperament, in writerly temperament, which traditionally nowadays we associate with Western writing.”
The problem with present-day criticism, chiefly in India but also perhaps in the West, is that it’s disconnected from any real sense of the past. This is an argument Chaudhuri’s been making for years—most powerfully through the writers he selected for his landmark Picador Anthology of Indian Literature—and he warms to it with the zeal of a man whose lobster has all the spice and depth that he feels the Indian literary landscape lacks.
“It’s as if every book comes out of nowhere—academics will not talk about Kolatkar, Ramanujan, Ezekiel, unless they become liberal causes. We are formed by a literary culture we don’t acknowledge, in English and in other Indian languages,” he says.
“And we will elide the fact that people like Tagore or Qurratulain Hyder may have been responding to Shelley or Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf—a network of reading and cross-fertilisation which have formed us over the last 200 years. There is no genealogy for anything.”
To round out the meal, I ask about the literary world in the UK, which Chaudhuri knows well—he was, for instance, a Booker judge, a task which he performed conscientiously though with his habitual skepticism about literary institutions.
“This meagerness is also now part of British publishing,” he says, turning down dessert with admirable firmness. “In the domain of Thatcherite and Blairite Britain, the changes brought about to BBC 1, BBC 4, the books pages were shrinking, dumbed down. The Booker Prize changed in complexion from a literary to a popular prize, with comedians and chefs judging the prize, Waterstones became more and more of a warehouse. But there are cracks in this smooth surface, and voices from the cracks are still audible.”
We manage to persuade Chaudhuri to have just two pieces more of the lobster. This also allows me to ask him about changes in his fiction over the years. “The early novels were about the sheer pleasure of a certain kind of interruption in life,” he says.
“Then with A New World, I was interested in this new generation, who have a sense of entitlement, who have been brought up to slip into a future patriarchal role, a role of power, and then find themselves at a loose end. Then the theme of power, the market began to interest me. To some extent, The Immortals was about what happens when a traditional person wants to adapt and reinvent themselves for the marketplace.”
Though we’ve said no to dessert, Larry’s China brings out fortune cookies with a flourish—an old-fashioned coda to a very pleasant, old-world meal. Mine is dour: “Everyone has ambitions but you work to make yours happen.” Chaudhuri’s is more dashing. “Getting together with old friends brings new adventures.”
He looks so pleased as we leave the restaurant for the early summer warmth of Delhi’s streets that I decide not to tell him the New Yorker story about Donald Lau, fortune-cookie writer. After years of writing thousands of fortunes (“think in ten-word sentences,” Mr Lau advised newcomers), the inevitable happened. There are only so many times one person can generate gems like “True gold never fears the fire,” and eleven years after he began, Mr Lau retired, suffering from writer’s block.
Chaudhuri, wiser in the ways of channeling his creativity, interspersing his novels with criticism, poetry and anthologies, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Speaking Volumes: The Great Trotter
(Published in the Business Standard, January 2012. Re-reading The Trotternama after years, it struck me that Allan had anticipated the Tumblr generation-that book was made to be read on a Tumblr in little doses. Someone should start one in his honour.)
In the 1970s, the Cellar in Delhi’s Connaught Place and Trinca’s in Park Street had sizzlers and live music, and for those old enough to remember that age, you might remember a guitarist by the name of Sealy who was often seen at jam sessions.
I Allan Sealy, who was on the list of Padma Shri awardees this year, was fresh out of St Stephens’ College then, part of a generation of writers called, with gentle mockery, the “Babalog School”, by Ira Pande. His contemporaries included Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth and the publisher Rukun Advani. What they had in common was the love of reading (and music) more than the burning urge to be writers.
“Even in your twenties, you know that life is short, you know that you're never going to read everything you want to read,” said Sealy in a 2006 interview. “So you're always sifting. You're trying to get at the very best from the very beginning. If you're actually looking at yourself as a writer, you're looking at all the possible books you could ever write, even if you don't live to write them.”
Fame was not the point; it wasn’t available for Indian writers in English in that era anyway. Politicians, godmen and businessmen traded in the open market of success; writers queued up with other artists at the ration shop, happy to be doled out a few readers, the promise of publication. Permanently inoculated against celebrity, Allan Sealy popped up to survey early Indian literary festivals with an anthropological eye and disappeared as rapidly as he could to his natural habitat—his small home in Dehradun and the garden where he knew the name and personal history of every tree.
The Trotternama, Sealy’s first novel, is a mock epic that replaces the grand historical figures of the old “namahs” with Justin Aloysius, the Great Trotter, officer and inventor who lives on the sprawling grounds of Sans Souci in Naklau. Like one of its predecessors, GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr, The Trotternama is both elusive and immortal—reports of its death are usually proved to be exaggerated, though it’s only a handful of readers in each generation who respond to the slightly manic history of the Great Trotter. Running through its exuberance is a sadder and now almost-buried history—the story of the decline of the Anglo-Indian community, the carefully culled biographies scattered through the book no match for oblivion. “I wish to show you how History is made,” a character says. “Understand first, good adept, that there are no sides to it… Front and back there be, certainly, which the vulgar call past and future… But sides, no.”
The Trotternama, first published in 1988, stands at the crossroads. For the next two decades, Indian publishing (if not all Indian writers in English) would be in the grip of the marketplace, which exerts a kind of dictatorship of success on writing today. The Trotternama was also the last true successor to Hatterr and Midnight’s Children—with a few scattered exceptions, the Indian novel in English took a much more conventional and far less experimental narrative direction in the 1990s.
Sealy wrote against the grain of the marketplace, giving up early on commercial success, looking instead for the freedom to experiment—he moved closer and closer to poetry, for instance, including several of his poems in his last published novel, Red. Landscape is crucial to his books; just as a writer like Annie Proulx sculpts the raw material of a place like Wyoming into her stories and novels, Sealy works best with places like Dehradun, making occasional forays into Delhi (“a good lover,” he says of the city, “but a bad wife”).
From Yukon To Yucatan was an early example of what he could do in other genres—Sealy turned a sharp eye on America, allowing himself to see the US as an exotic, unknown country, in just the way most travel writing outside of Europe and America explains the unfamiliar. His novels overlap without ever returning to the same terrain; The Everest Hotel, set in Dehradun, explored political and personal fault lines, betrayal and friendship; Red came back to a fictionalized Dun, but was an exploration into art and creativity. Nestled in between the two was Brain Fever Bird, an unusual love story that brought a Russian expat together with an Indian artist, in Delhi, a city defined by puppets, theatre and the relentless pulling of strings.
None of these descriptions do the brilliance and the intelligent inventiveness of Sealy’s work justice, nor is the Padma Shri likely to change his life. “Part of me thinks, what's the point of writing if you're only going to write for 12 bright readers,” he had said back in 2006. “But with every book, maybe one per cent you think of the reader, ninety nine you're thinking of yourself, what you want to say."
In the 1970s, the Cellar in Delhi’s Connaught Place and Trinca’s in Park Street had sizzlers and live music, and for those old enough to remember that age, you might remember a guitarist by the name of Sealy who was often seen at jam sessions.
I Allan Sealy, who was on the list of Padma Shri awardees this year, was fresh out of St Stephens’ College then, part of a generation of writers called, with gentle mockery, the “Babalog School”, by Ira Pande. His contemporaries included Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth and the publisher Rukun Advani. What they had in common was the love of reading (and music) more than the burning urge to be writers.
“Even in your twenties, you know that life is short, you know that you're never going to read everything you want to read,” said Sealy in a 2006 interview. “So you're always sifting. You're trying to get at the very best from the very beginning. If you're actually looking at yourself as a writer, you're looking at all the possible books you could ever write, even if you don't live to write them.”
Fame was not the point; it wasn’t available for Indian writers in English in that era anyway. Politicians, godmen and businessmen traded in the open market of success; writers queued up with other artists at the ration shop, happy to be doled out a few readers, the promise of publication. Permanently inoculated against celebrity, Allan Sealy popped up to survey early Indian literary festivals with an anthropological eye and disappeared as rapidly as he could to his natural habitat—his small home in Dehradun and the garden where he knew the name and personal history of every tree.
The Trotternama, Sealy’s first novel, is a mock epic that replaces the grand historical figures of the old “namahs” with Justin Aloysius, the Great Trotter, officer and inventor who lives on the sprawling grounds of Sans Souci in Naklau. Like one of its predecessors, GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr, The Trotternama is both elusive and immortal—reports of its death are usually proved to be exaggerated, though it’s only a handful of readers in each generation who respond to the slightly manic history of the Great Trotter. Running through its exuberance is a sadder and now almost-buried history—the story of the decline of the Anglo-Indian community, the carefully culled biographies scattered through the book no match for oblivion. “I wish to show you how History is made,” a character says. “Understand first, good adept, that there are no sides to it… Front and back there be, certainly, which the vulgar call past and future… But sides, no.”
The Trotternama, first published in 1988, stands at the crossroads. For the next two decades, Indian publishing (if not all Indian writers in English) would be in the grip of the marketplace, which exerts a kind of dictatorship of success on writing today. The Trotternama was also the last true successor to Hatterr and Midnight’s Children—with a few scattered exceptions, the Indian novel in English took a much more conventional and far less experimental narrative direction in the 1990s.
Sealy wrote against the grain of the marketplace, giving up early on commercial success, looking instead for the freedom to experiment—he moved closer and closer to poetry, for instance, including several of his poems in his last published novel, Red. Landscape is crucial to his books; just as a writer like Annie Proulx sculpts the raw material of a place like Wyoming into her stories and novels, Sealy works best with places like Dehradun, making occasional forays into Delhi (“a good lover,” he says of the city, “but a bad wife”).
From Yukon To Yucatan was an early example of what he could do in other genres—Sealy turned a sharp eye on America, allowing himself to see the US as an exotic, unknown country, in just the way most travel writing outside of Europe and America explains the unfamiliar. His novels overlap without ever returning to the same terrain; The Everest Hotel, set in Dehradun, explored political and personal fault lines, betrayal and friendship; Red came back to a fictionalized Dun, but was an exploration into art and creativity. Nestled in between the two was Brain Fever Bird, an unusual love story that brought a Russian expat together with an Indian artist, in Delhi, a city defined by puppets, theatre and the relentless pulling of strings.
None of these descriptions do the brilliance and the intelligent inventiveness of Sealy’s work justice, nor is the Padma Shri likely to change his life. “Part of me thinks, what's the point of writing if you're only going to write for 12 bright readers,” he had said back in 2006. “But with every book, maybe one per cent you think of the reader, ninety nine you're thinking of yourself, what you want to say."
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Speaking Volumes: The twilight of the Brahmins
In Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, there is a wonderful section on the fascination Japonisme held at a certain time in Europe, when Japanese bibelots, netsuke, robes and paintings found their way into Parisian salons: “Anyone would sell you anything. Japan existed as a sort of parallel country of licensed gratification, artistic, commercial and sexual.”
Often, what the collectors of that time picked up from Japan was unremarkable—the dross of everyday life, mass-produced objets d’art mingling with the rare and the exquisite. As de Waal recounts so beautifully, this early hunger was replaced by first a refined connoisseurship, and inevitably, a waning of the interest in Japonisme, a return to the less exotic and the more local.
In the last few weeks, as new books on India by Patrick French and Anand Girdharadass were released, a familiar debate came back to us, reheated and freshly garnished. Pankaj Mishra’s argument with French was over the content of the book—Mishra seemed unable to recognize or reconcile his vision of India, one of cruel economic inequalities and a dominant, often bullying, state, with French’s more upbeat India story.
Reading between the lines, the real anxiety was over French’s portrait, not the quality of his reportage: was this the authentic India, or had he missed the big story? Elsewhere, in a joyously savage piece of provocation, Mihir Sharma flayed India Calling, by Anand Girdharadass, for shallow journalism, and slammed the stereotypes of India that find their way into the “foreign correspondent” book.
But the real debate is one that tore Indian writing in English apart about a decade ago; it’s the question of what makes a book about India the genuine article, and who has the right to “represent” the country. The “authenticity argument” was rapidly buried, with a few stray knives in its back, in the world of Indian fiction—few readers, writers or critics wanted to police books to see how their Indianness rated on a 1-10 scale.
Fewer still are comfortable acknowledging what might be called marketplace realities. In the years when Indian writing was doing well, like a hardworking honour student, in the West, we were happy to measure our importance and success not by the literary impact of a Kiran Desai or a Salman Rushdie but by the sales figures and the prize shortlists. What we are all uncomfortable acknowledging is that the West—shorthand for the complex markets and divergent reading tastes of the UK, the US and a large swathe of Europe—has a sharply truncated view of Indian writing.
Much of the unease expressed by Mishra, and in a different form by Sharma, comes from questioning the need for the Big India book—at some level, we understand that these books are very rarely written by Indian journalists, and that the stories they tell, whether simplified or not, are influential even so. Some of the unease comes from a sense of disenfranchisement; it is telling, for instance, that there seems to be little need for the Big India book in Hindi, or Urdu, or Marathi. Outside of English, we lack either the curiosity or the need to explain India to ourselves.
What the West sees of Indian writing would be ridiculous, if that view wasn’t so influential; as with the age de Waal describes, where all of Japanese culture and history could be interpreted through the shlock, detritus and masterpieces of the art world. Over the last 30 years, some realities have been inescapable; Indian writing in the Western world is defined largely as Indian writing in English, with very few translations making their way abroad.
Writing from the margins—Dalit writing, the resurgence in Indian poetry in English, writing from the North-east—is rarely visible, and when it is visible, it’s exoticised, here and abroad. And by its nature, Indian writing in English has been largely privileged writing—if not quite limited to the sons of St Stephens’, most contemporary writers in this language come from the relatively enfranchised middle class, and their work reflects the limitations of their backgrounds.
In the same week as the French-Mishra rallies, complete with aces and double faults, were playing out at the net, a small piece of data passed almost unremarked. The Census 2001 figures, recently released, revealed that English had effectively become India’s second language, behind Hindi. Many of the new English speakers come from the small towns, or belong to areas of the metros that lie outside the charmed circles of privilege. English belongs to them now as much as it once did, about two-three decades ago, to the old class of writer-Brahmins.
And as this generation begins to tell and write their stories, they may not need to beguile the souks of the West with their Indiennisme. 125 million English speakers, out of whom a much higher percentage has made it their first language in the decade since the Census data was collected, is enough to make its own marketplace. I’m guessing here, but I don’t think this new generation of writers will find much use either for the Big India books or for the debates that drew us in over the last few decades.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The BS column: the Emergency in fiction
Many years after 1975, I had the opportunity to see some of the posters that Indira Gandhi’s Congress used as propaganda for The Emergency. They came from the same school of writing as the Soviet Union’s Mother Russia propaganda, as though Mrs G’s department had taken creative writing classes from Glavlit and the GRU: “The Nation is on the Move! Emergency for a Stronger and More Prosperous Future!” And, ominously: “You Too Have a Role In The Emergency!”
35 years later, some of the Indian fiction written around the Emergency is iconic, some forgotten—and some still unpublished. A new graphic novel, Delhi Calm, attempts to recapture the days of the Turkman Gate riots and deaths, but it’s better journalism than literature. Here are some of the old classics:
Katraa Bi Arzoo, Rahi Masoom Raza: Written in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency, Rahi Masoom Raza’s searing, raw novel has not yet been translated to the best of my knowledge. You can’t leave this off a list of Emergency novels, though: Rahi Masoom Raza wrote this in a kind of white heat of rage, drawing on his experiences of Allahabad during the demolition-and-censorship years. His protagonist, Desh, offers initial resistance. By the end of the book, Desh has been reduced to a man who parrots one phrase over and over again, “Srimati Gandhi zindabad!” and will, like the country he stands for, be crushed under the wheels of a truck.
The Dark Dispatches/ The Night-Shift Reporter, Nirmal Verma: In his elliptical and evocative Raat Ka Reporter, Nirmal Verma never referred directly to the Emergency, choosing instead to depict the paranoia and confusion of the times through an internal journey into the mind of a journalist. This remains brilliant, if not always accessible for most readers.
Rich Like Us, Nayantara Sahgal: Perhaps Sahgal’s best-known novel, this took a wide sweep from the India of the 1930s to the darkness of the 1970s. Sahgal was one of the first writers to make the point that Sanjay Gandhi’s vasectomy programme affected chiefly those from the poorest and lowest castes—racial purity via sterilization. But it was Sahgal’s understanding of the politics of Delhi’s ruling classes, and how that filters into every aspect of our personal lives, that drove this novel.
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie: It is sometimes forgotten that Rushdie has the instincts of the best journalists, investigating Turkman Gate during the Emergency, Trilokpuri in the aftermath of 1984. Midnight’s Children will remain perhaps the iconic novel of Emergency—and independent India—of all time, with its unforgettable portrait of Indira Gandhi as the Widow, her hair white on one side, black on the other. “…The Emergency, too, had white part—public, visible, documented, a matter for historians—and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter of us.” Indira Gandhi took him to court for libel in the case of Gandhi vs Rushdie, and he had to delete a section that speculated on the death of her husband, Feroze Gandhi, from future editions of the book. As Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai notes, “Mother Indira really had it in for me.”
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry: Eschewing Rushdie’s magical realism for a far more plain story-telling style, A Fine Balance was Mistry’s attempt to record the effects of the Emergency on the lives of people like us. As two tailors struggle for survival, they meet Dina and her nephew Maneck, and the unlikely quartet try to find “the fine balance between hope and despair”. With characters like Beggarmaster and a series of dramatic plot flourishes, including the forcible sterilization of the two tailors, A Fine Balance was excessively sentimental, but it remains a respectable documentary of the times.
Bedtime Story, Kiran Nagarkar: Performed a few times but never formally published, Nagarkar’s play Bedtime Story is one of the greater works to come out of that time. He used the Mahabharata as a way to understand the cold justification of violence and the doublespeak of that era, with the Chorus as a Nazi war criminal retelling four episodes from the epic. The censor board demanded an initial 78 cuts, which would have castrated the play with the efficiency of any of Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilization camps; performances were disrupted by right-wing parties for almost two decades. “As with most controversial writing,” said Nagarkar with some bitterness, “it became controversial mostly because nobody had read it.”
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.”
Friday, August 31, 2007
In Conversation with Kiran Desai: Part I
(Published in the IIC Quarterly, June 2007)
Kiran Desai, interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
Kiran Desai’s first brush with fame came in 1997, when Salman Rushdie included the young writer in his controversial anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork. Rushdie described her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, as “lush and intensely imagined”. Kiran, who has lived in Chandigarh, Delhi and New York, spent the next nine years in America earning a living, working on her second novel and occasionally traveling with her mother, eminent writer Anita Desai. Inheritance of Loss moves between the crumbling world of the hill station of Kalimpong at a time of insurgency and the underground world of New York’s immigrant workers. The novel was critically acclaimed and won the Booker Prize in 2006. In this freeflowing conversation in Delhi, Kiran Desai discussed her writing, “enormously fat” books, immigrant New York and language with Ira Pande and Nilanjana S Roy.
Ira Pande: I’m impressed by how you managed to sustain the feeling for this book over such a long period of time—nine years.
Kiran Desai: We writers get competitive about this—how long did it take Mohsin (Hamid) to write his book? Many years… Nadeem Aslam took eleven years.
IP: More, I thought, and he shut himself in a room…
KD: He took eleven years, I took seven. It wasn’t hard to sustain the feeling for the book, not hard at all. It was hard to finish, to put a stop to it, to go the other way from writing in every direction—that was easy, the difficult thing was realizing that to make a book, I had to do the opposite process and start throwing out bits. I cut a lot from the book.
Nilanjana Roy: I heard you threw out about eight chapters?
KD: It wasn’t even eight chapters, it was 1,500 pages, and 800 pages, and 350 pages of it…
IP: People have started to complain about the doorstopper book from India, because everyone’s writing these enormously fat books. Sometimes I feel it would work better if there was more editorial intervention, because as a writer, few could do what you did—chuck out whole bits on your own.
KD: It is hard, because there are so many angles, you can go on forever, turning something around, going into another character, another angle of the whole thing. You have to realize you can’t just go on forever, but there is a trend towards big books all over the world. Look at American books—the new (Thomas) Pynchon, (Dave) Eggers..
NR: In a way it was a pity you didn’t do this, just to correct the gender imbalance.
KD: It is a gender thing! My mother (the writer Anita Desai) was saying this, how young men are encouraged to write really, really big books, and women are often made to cut that down, almost as if it is a gender thing, that women write smaller, slimmer books and men write big, ambitious books. And the men are being accused of—what is the phrase?—hysterical realism. Which is funny, that’s an amusing gender argument, where men are accused of being hysterical and women are being curbed and careful.
I sometimes think it’s just the process of writing. We work on a computer, it’s easy to keep everything, to research, add more and more. I bet if computers weren’t around, a lot of men would write smaller books. Someone said that with Dave Egger it’s really obvious—all those additions and all those footnotes that he can only do because he can play on the computer. But Salman (Rushdie) was saying, I realize we should write shorter books because we get paid the same amount! (Laughs)
IP: Can I ask you about The Inheritance of Loss? Did the title suggest the book, or did the book suggest the title?
KD: The title came right at the end. I’m still not sure it completely fits. A lot of people didn’t like it—I’ve been told it sounds like a self-help manual, someone said, you should just call it The Loss of Inheritance, and that would make much more sense.
I was struggling to come up with something because it’s a book of so many different parts. I thought of all the typical ones: The Judge of Kalimpong—sounds vaguely like colonial literature, The House of Cho Oyu, and then this came up.
NR: It struck me how much loneliness and isolation there is in the book. Biju, the cook’s son in America, Sai, cut off from a normal childhood, the judge alone in England, where you almost feel sorry for him, despite his harshness later… Was that taken from family history?
KD: Not quite that close, but the judge’s story was certainly taken from hearing about the experiences of people going to England. There is often an attempt to cover up what actually happens when you go abroad. For all immigrants, the story that you create at the end is the story you can live with and that you like to tell. It’s not what actually happened. Immigration is like the act of translation, the possibilities of dishonesty are so big, so immense. It’s a place where you can embroider any kind of story, and I think most people do. You also want to go there saying that you haven’t come struggling like other immigrants might have, you’ve come from a position of dignity, it’s also an attempt to create your past, I think, in a different way. You have to make up a story about that as well.
The loneliness is immense. You’re plucked from everything you know, your entire community, you’re telling lies to everybody, immigrants are telling lies to other immigrants. I think people find themselves in really lonely places. When I think of myself, I grew up speaking English and being brought up, in a way, to leave successfully. That’s what my father said, sadly, to one of his friends: “What we did in our generation, we made good immigrants.” He was also brought up to be a good immigrant and he chose not to be one.
NR: You left at 14, when you were studying at a convent in Delhi, are there echoes of that school in the convent you described in your book?
KD: Oh god, it was awful. I got a note from one of the nuns, I almost fell off my chair, I was so scared (laughs) The fear was immediately there. It was so awful, I wonder whether other people’s experiences were so bad.
IP: The fact that all of us did go to these Catholic convents also opened up for us the possibility of looking at another identity for ourselves. I remember leading two completely dissimilar lives. I came from a very traditional, conservative family, puja was part of my day, but I also went and did Angelus and Benediction and all the rest. It made me a better Hindu after I was exposed to Catholicism. I began to understand and respect what we had much more. What was your convent experience like?
KD: I think of dislocation. We went first to Kalimpong, briefly, went back to Loreto, briefly, went to England for a year, and went to the states, and at a really bad time—it was 13 or 14, that age for me. But when I look back at that convent education, I hope they’re not bringing up children in that same way, because every bit of art is stamped out. Wanting to write, or paint, that side of things.
NR: How did you get that back?
KD: It took a long time. I saw reading as an escape from this world. Writing came later, at a much happier and freer time. It was encouraged, it was considered a legitimate activity. I am really lucky for that brief bit of space.
IP: In India you lived in Delhi and in Kalimpong; which cities do you remember best?
KD: I lived in Chandigarh as well, and Bombay for a while, and then Delhi. I lived in Delhi the longest. And now there’s totally new things I love about Delhi, I come back, I go to my father’s house, climb up on to the rooftop. And it’s lovely. The sun sets by the idgah, and we listen to Abida Parveen singing Khusro. Those are the best, those are the good bits of Delhi for me.
IP: And the bad bits?
KD: The bad bits? For me it was the memories of Loreto Convent, now it’s just a completely different relationship with Delhi. I love Bombay, I have very happy memories of Bombay. If you grow up in Bombay, if you spend part of your childhood in Bombay, you get deeply attached to it. It’s true of everybodyI know who’s grown up in that city. And I always envied Bombay writers –they seemed to have that emotional depth of attachment to Bombay that seems to power all their writing forever! And it’s a glamorous city, the whole package, the Mafia and Bollywood, and crime on that glamorous scale. For a long while, Delhi writers felt slightly bad, we only had monuments.
NR: How about New York? So many of you seem to be colonizing New York now.
KD: There’s such a huge number of Indian writers living in New York, and few write about it. Suketu is one of the first to venture into New York, and he really should do it; I think he was 14 when he went there, so he has childhood memories of growing up. Akhil Sharma may be writing about it, New Jersey.. so it is shifting.
NR: Are you uncomfortable with labels such as “diaspora writer”, or “immigrant writer”?
KD: You know, you go down those roads and inevitably end up in a place that’s senseless after a bit. I always hope that I’ll hear some writer talking about these issues in a really clever way so that I can copy what they say, but nobody has. I haven’t heard anyone really manage to undo these knots. You stop talking about literature all together, and you start talking about class and immigration, and end up with a debate that’s about much bigger arguments. You can’t escape labels as a writer…
NR: Inheritance would have been a lot less rich if you hadn’t had that split perspective, the New York immigrant underworld on one hand, the crumbling houses of privilege in Kalimpong on the other…
KD: It’s a completely half-and-half book.
NR: How did you start the process of looking at the immigrant population in New York?
KD: It wasn’t hard to find those stories. Those stories are as easily available as they are here. It’s the same people on both sides of the world; the woman who cleans your house in India, those stories come into your house every single day. It’s the same in New York. The characters are made up of people I know, in bits and pieces—like the Zanzibarian community, I couldn’t have made that up. People who worked in a little bakery near where I used to live; all the stories of the rats are really based on what happened. There’s always a mixture, journalists always ask you how much is fact and how much fiction, but it’s always a mixture.
IP: You’ve spoken a lot about your mother’s presence and her support for you and her general aura, and it is visible. Shashi Deshpande (the writer) said she sometimes felt a sense of déjà vu reading you, that it could be Anita in a younger voice. Quite apart from the mother-daughter relationship that you share, which is obviously very close, were you influenced by her style of writing? Her way of looking at India, because she’s also had several dislocations, and she’s tread almost the same ground, except that it was in another time and in another way.
KD: I was conscious of that, the realization that what we were living through was something that she had lived through and that her parents had lived through. She grew up in an India that was very different from the India of a lot of the people around her, because she had a German mother and her father was a refugee from Bangladesh and had very little family in India as well. So she grew up in a very strange little community, I think, somewhat dislocated, on her own.
So was my father, because his parents left Gujarat ages ago, my grandfather went on this long journey to England, spent the rest of his life in Allahabad and never saw his relatives. There was hardly any communication with them. And that was a whole process, of breaking what we think of as being so deeply Indian, these bonds of community and family and religion.
On my father’s side it was ambition to be part of the ruling class, but it was also part of the idea of a secular India, which was really new. He was breaking all of this and gaining a wider idea of India, he was also losing something very old, that had gone back as far as anyone could remember. It’s a process that happened within India as well as within the community of people who had left, who had always been leaving and returning.
NR: Do your mother and you travel a lot together?
KD: Yes, we did, still do… When we left India, it was just the two of us. I was the youngest child, so I was taken along. We both went through that whole immigrant thing together. She had spent her entire life in India at that point, and all of a sudden, in her late forties, I think, she had to learn how to teach. She was out of the whole cozy world of being a middle-class Indian woman, and suddenly she had to make a living, learn how to drive in different countries, get her pension, all the rest of it, it must have been very difficult.
IP: Was it visible for you then?
KD: No, it’s only now I realize how difficult it must have been. She kept it from me, kept all the worry for me. I certainly must have been influenced by her, her writing…
(contd in next post)
Kiran Desai, interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
Kiran Desai’s first brush with fame came in 1997, when Salman Rushdie included the young writer in his controversial anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork. Rushdie described her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, as “lush and intensely imagined”. Kiran, who has lived in Chandigarh, Delhi and New York, spent the next nine years in America earning a living, working on her second novel and occasionally traveling with her mother, eminent writer Anita Desai. Inheritance of Loss moves between the crumbling world of the hill station of Kalimpong at a time of insurgency and the underground world of New York’s immigrant workers. The novel was critically acclaimed and won the Booker Prize in 2006. In this freeflowing conversation in Delhi, Kiran Desai discussed her writing, “enormously fat” books, immigrant New York and language with Ira Pande and Nilanjana S Roy.
Ira Pande: I’m impressed by how you managed to sustain the feeling for this book over such a long period of time—nine years.
Kiran Desai: We writers get competitive about this—how long did it take Mohsin (Hamid) to write his book? Many years… Nadeem Aslam took eleven years.
IP: More, I thought, and he shut himself in a room…
KD: He took eleven years, I took seven. It wasn’t hard to sustain the feeling for the book, not hard at all. It was hard to finish, to put a stop to it, to go the other way from writing in every direction—that was easy, the difficult thing was realizing that to make a book, I had to do the opposite process and start throwing out bits. I cut a lot from the book.
Nilanjana Roy: I heard you threw out about eight chapters?
KD: It wasn’t even eight chapters, it was 1,500 pages, and 800 pages, and 350 pages of it…
IP: People have started to complain about the doorstopper book from India, because everyone’s writing these enormously fat books. Sometimes I feel it would work better if there was more editorial intervention, because as a writer, few could do what you did—chuck out whole bits on your own.
KD: It is hard, because there are so many angles, you can go on forever, turning something around, going into another character, another angle of the whole thing. You have to realize you can’t just go on forever, but there is a trend towards big books all over the world. Look at American books—the new (Thomas) Pynchon, (Dave) Eggers..
NR: In a way it was a pity you didn’t do this, just to correct the gender imbalance.
KD: It is a gender thing! My mother (the writer Anita Desai) was saying this, how young men are encouraged to write really, really big books, and women are often made to cut that down, almost as if it is a gender thing, that women write smaller, slimmer books and men write big, ambitious books. And the men are being accused of—what is the phrase?—hysterical realism. Which is funny, that’s an amusing gender argument, where men are accused of being hysterical and women are being curbed and careful.
I sometimes think it’s just the process of writing. We work on a computer, it’s easy to keep everything, to research, add more and more. I bet if computers weren’t around, a lot of men would write smaller books. Someone said that with Dave Egger it’s really obvious—all those additions and all those footnotes that he can only do because he can play on the computer. But Salman (Rushdie) was saying, I realize we should write shorter books because we get paid the same amount! (Laughs)
IP: Can I ask you about The Inheritance of Loss? Did the title suggest the book, or did the book suggest the title?
KD: The title came right at the end. I’m still not sure it completely fits. A lot of people didn’t like it—I’ve been told it sounds like a self-help manual, someone said, you should just call it The Loss of Inheritance, and that would make much more sense.
I was struggling to come up with something because it’s a book of so many different parts. I thought of all the typical ones: The Judge of Kalimpong—sounds vaguely like colonial literature, The House of Cho Oyu, and then this came up.
NR: It struck me how much loneliness and isolation there is in the book. Biju, the cook’s son in America, Sai, cut off from a normal childhood, the judge alone in England, where you almost feel sorry for him, despite his harshness later… Was that taken from family history?
KD: Not quite that close, but the judge’s story was certainly taken from hearing about the experiences of people going to England. There is often an attempt to cover up what actually happens when you go abroad. For all immigrants, the story that you create at the end is the story you can live with and that you like to tell. It’s not what actually happened. Immigration is like the act of translation, the possibilities of dishonesty are so big, so immense. It’s a place where you can embroider any kind of story, and I think most people do. You also want to go there saying that you haven’t come struggling like other immigrants might have, you’ve come from a position of dignity, it’s also an attempt to create your past, I think, in a different way. You have to make up a story about that as well.
The loneliness is immense. You’re plucked from everything you know, your entire community, you’re telling lies to everybody, immigrants are telling lies to other immigrants. I think people find themselves in really lonely places. When I think of myself, I grew up speaking English and being brought up, in a way, to leave successfully. That’s what my father said, sadly, to one of his friends: “What we did in our generation, we made good immigrants.” He was also brought up to be a good immigrant and he chose not to be one.
NR: You left at 14, when you were studying at a convent in Delhi, are there echoes of that school in the convent you described in your book?
KD: Oh god, it was awful. I got a note from one of the nuns, I almost fell off my chair, I was so scared (laughs) The fear was immediately there. It was so awful, I wonder whether other people’s experiences were so bad.
IP: The fact that all of us did go to these Catholic convents also opened up for us the possibility of looking at another identity for ourselves. I remember leading two completely dissimilar lives. I came from a very traditional, conservative family, puja was part of my day, but I also went and did Angelus and Benediction and all the rest. It made me a better Hindu after I was exposed to Catholicism. I began to understand and respect what we had much more. What was your convent experience like?
KD: I think of dislocation. We went first to Kalimpong, briefly, went back to Loreto, briefly, went to England for a year, and went to the states, and at a really bad time—it was 13 or 14, that age for me. But when I look back at that convent education, I hope they’re not bringing up children in that same way, because every bit of art is stamped out. Wanting to write, or paint, that side of things.
NR: How did you get that back?
KD: It took a long time. I saw reading as an escape from this world. Writing came later, at a much happier and freer time. It was encouraged, it was considered a legitimate activity. I am really lucky for that brief bit of space.
IP: In India you lived in Delhi and in Kalimpong; which cities do you remember best?
KD: I lived in Chandigarh as well, and Bombay for a while, and then Delhi. I lived in Delhi the longest. And now there’s totally new things I love about Delhi, I come back, I go to my father’s house, climb up on to the rooftop. And it’s lovely. The sun sets by the idgah, and we listen to Abida Parveen singing Khusro. Those are the best, those are the good bits of Delhi for me.
IP: And the bad bits?
KD: The bad bits? For me it was the memories of Loreto Convent, now it’s just a completely different relationship with Delhi. I love Bombay, I have very happy memories of Bombay. If you grow up in Bombay, if you spend part of your childhood in Bombay, you get deeply attached to it. It’s true of everybodyI know who’s grown up in that city. And I always envied Bombay writers –they seemed to have that emotional depth of attachment to Bombay that seems to power all their writing forever! And it’s a glamorous city, the whole package, the Mafia and Bollywood, and crime on that glamorous scale. For a long while, Delhi writers felt slightly bad, we only had monuments.
NR: How about New York? So many of you seem to be colonizing New York now.
KD: There’s such a huge number of Indian writers living in New York, and few write about it. Suketu is one of the first to venture into New York, and he really should do it; I think he was 14 when he went there, so he has childhood memories of growing up. Akhil Sharma may be writing about it, New Jersey.. so it is shifting.
NR: Are you uncomfortable with labels such as “diaspora writer”, or “immigrant writer”?
KD: You know, you go down those roads and inevitably end up in a place that’s senseless after a bit. I always hope that I’ll hear some writer talking about these issues in a really clever way so that I can copy what they say, but nobody has. I haven’t heard anyone really manage to undo these knots. You stop talking about literature all together, and you start talking about class and immigration, and end up with a debate that’s about much bigger arguments. You can’t escape labels as a writer…
NR: Inheritance would have been a lot less rich if you hadn’t had that split perspective, the New York immigrant underworld on one hand, the crumbling houses of privilege in Kalimpong on the other…
KD: It’s a completely half-and-half book.
NR: How did you start the process of looking at the immigrant population in New York?
KD: It wasn’t hard to find those stories. Those stories are as easily available as they are here. It’s the same people on both sides of the world; the woman who cleans your house in India, those stories come into your house every single day. It’s the same in New York. The characters are made up of people I know, in bits and pieces—like the Zanzibarian community, I couldn’t have made that up. People who worked in a little bakery near where I used to live; all the stories of the rats are really based on what happened. There’s always a mixture, journalists always ask you how much is fact and how much fiction, but it’s always a mixture.
IP: You’ve spoken a lot about your mother’s presence and her support for you and her general aura, and it is visible. Shashi Deshpande (the writer) said she sometimes felt a sense of déjà vu reading you, that it could be Anita in a younger voice. Quite apart from the mother-daughter relationship that you share, which is obviously very close, were you influenced by her style of writing? Her way of looking at India, because she’s also had several dislocations, and she’s tread almost the same ground, except that it was in another time and in another way.
KD: I was conscious of that, the realization that what we were living through was something that she had lived through and that her parents had lived through. She grew up in an India that was very different from the India of a lot of the people around her, because she had a German mother and her father was a refugee from Bangladesh and had very little family in India as well. So she grew up in a very strange little community, I think, somewhat dislocated, on her own.
So was my father, because his parents left Gujarat ages ago, my grandfather went on this long journey to England, spent the rest of his life in Allahabad and never saw his relatives. There was hardly any communication with them. And that was a whole process, of breaking what we think of as being so deeply Indian, these bonds of community and family and religion.
On my father’s side it was ambition to be part of the ruling class, but it was also part of the idea of a secular India, which was really new. He was breaking all of this and gaining a wider idea of India, he was also losing something very old, that had gone back as far as anyone could remember. It’s a process that happened within India as well as within the community of people who had left, who had always been leaving and returning.
NR: Do your mother and you travel a lot together?
KD: Yes, we did, still do… When we left India, it was just the two of us. I was the youngest child, so I was taken along. We both went through that whole immigrant thing together. She had spent her entire life in India at that point, and all of a sudden, in her late forties, I think, she had to learn how to teach. She was out of the whole cozy world of being a middle-class Indian woman, and suddenly she had to make a living, learn how to drive in different countries, get her pension, all the rest of it, it must have been very difficult.
IP: Was it visible for you then?
KD: No, it’s only now I realize how difficult it must have been. She kept it from me, kept all the worry for me. I certainly must have been influenced by her, her writing…
(contd in next post)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Bromfield's Bestsellers
(Published in the Business Standard, December 11, 2006)
In the musty depths of Indian home libraries of a certain vintage, you might find the novels of Louis Bromfield nestled among tattered copies of Mrs Beeton and original Kipling editions. Some families had the complete set—Bromfield wrote 34 novels. Most had, at least, his two "India novels"--The Rains Came, reissued recently by Rupa & Co and Night in Bombay.
Now, when few remember Bromfield's name, it's hard to remember just how brightly the sun of his celebrity once shone. His first novel was published in 1924; his third, Early Autumn, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. His American novels were hugely popular, but it was his "exotic"—the adjective was, then, a recommendation—Indian novel, The Rains Came, that became an enduring, much-loved bestseller.
He wrote relentlessly through the 1940s, but suffered in 1944 from Edmund Wilson's scathing dismissal, 'Whatever Became of Louis Bromfield?", which appeared in The New Yorker. Bromfield's literary reputation never recovered, but in that time as in our own, a writer's literary reputation and his literary life were often quite separate things. Edith Wharton was a close friend; Erich Maria Remarque, Gertrude Stein and Picasso were frequent visitors to the Bromfield household in France, and Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall on Bromfield's Malabar Farm in Ohio. Early reviews compared him—prematurely—to Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald.
"One may easily imagine [Bromfield] crying out to his friends, "By Shiva, Kali, or Vishnu, I am going to write a novel about this country!" the New York Times Book Review noted sardonically of The Rains Came. Bromfield had served in World War I as an ambulance driver, and was a passionate farmer whose agricultural achievements are still respected in Ohio. In 1933, he came to India and was, like many foreign writers, overwhelmed by the country. Bombay and Cooch Behar gave him the background he needed for his two Indian bestsellers.
Bromfield just missed being in India at the same time as several better-known Raj writers. E M Forster, who was in Dewas writing A Passage to India between 1921 and 1924 left a few years before Bromfield arrived. Paul Scott would get to know India as an army officer a decade later, in 1943; so would John Masters in the 1940s.
Bromfield fell in love with India, as is evident from the first baroque lines of The Rains Came "It was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-gray house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness."
But he also viewed India with horrified fascination. The Rains Came is a mammoth novel, set in the fictionalised world of Ranchipur, and its melodramatic sweep is hopelessly easy to parody today. Ranchipur suffers floods, an earthquake, a dam collapse, a plague outbreak and a cholera epidemic, and you can sense Bromfield's disappointment that he couldn't shoehorn in more disasters.
Beneath the stereotypes, Bromfield offered insights that were startling for his time. The Maharajah and Maharani are seen as shrewd and capable, if manipulative, leaders, who will politely but ruthlessly edge the British out without quite letting "Mr Gandhi" in.
He was sharp enough to note that most of the gentry—English and Indian—survived the floods, while the Untouchable village, built of flimsier materials, was completely destroyed. The love stories are conventional—a high-born Englishwoman redeems her corrupt life with an act of selfless dedication, the bitter, capable Ransome finds an escape from his alcoholism through acts of selfless dedication, and they are inspired by an Indian doctor who has lived most of his life through acts of selfless, well, dedication.
The Rains Came is still worth reading today—depending on perspective, it's either superior M M Kaye or inferior E M Forster. Night in Bombay is a potboiler, and because of that, almost the more enjoyable. It features protagonists with "mocking blue eyes", the requisite quotient of punkahs and gin slings and was marketed as "a novel of India…and an American woman who was a challenge to all men".
I cannot explain why Bromfield was forgotten, when authors of equal literary enthusiasm and equally dubious quality—J G Farrell, John Masters, Paul Scott, M M Kaye—survived. But I'm grateful to Rupa & Co for finally reprinting the book—without that reminder, I might never have been moved to track down the Lana Turner-Richard Burton smash hit, The Rains of Ranchipur (with Beatrice Kraft as Oriental Dancer), which features the immortal tagline: "Theirs was the great sin that even the rains could not wash away!" They don't make bestsellers like that any more.
In the musty depths of Indian home libraries of a certain vintage, you might find the novels of Louis Bromfield nestled among tattered copies of Mrs Beeton and original Kipling editions. Some families had the complete set—Bromfield wrote 34 novels. Most had, at least, his two "India novels"--The Rains Came, reissued recently by Rupa & Co and Night in Bombay.
Now, when few remember Bromfield's name, it's hard to remember just how brightly the sun of his celebrity once shone. His first novel was published in 1924; his third, Early Autumn, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. His American novels were hugely popular, but it was his "exotic"—the adjective was, then, a recommendation—Indian novel, The Rains Came, that became an enduring, much-loved bestseller.
He wrote relentlessly through the 1940s, but suffered in 1944 from Edmund Wilson's scathing dismissal, 'Whatever Became of Louis Bromfield?", which appeared in The New Yorker. Bromfield's literary reputation never recovered, but in that time as in our own, a writer's literary reputation and his literary life were often quite separate things. Edith Wharton was a close friend; Erich Maria Remarque, Gertrude Stein and Picasso were frequent visitors to the Bromfield household in France, and Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall on Bromfield's Malabar Farm in Ohio. Early reviews compared him—prematurely—to Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald.
"One may easily imagine [Bromfield] crying out to his friends, "By Shiva, Kali, or Vishnu, I am going to write a novel about this country!" the New York Times Book Review noted sardonically of The Rains Came. Bromfield had served in World War I as an ambulance driver, and was a passionate farmer whose agricultural achievements are still respected in Ohio. In 1933, he came to India and was, like many foreign writers, overwhelmed by the country. Bombay and Cooch Behar gave him the background he needed for his two Indian bestsellers.
Bromfield just missed being in India at the same time as several better-known Raj writers. E M Forster, who was in Dewas writing A Passage to India between 1921 and 1924 left a few years before Bromfield arrived. Paul Scott would get to know India as an army officer a decade later, in 1943; so would John Masters in the 1940s.
Bromfield fell in love with India, as is evident from the first baroque lines of The Rains Came "It was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-gray house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness."
But he also viewed India with horrified fascination. The Rains Came is a mammoth novel, set in the fictionalised world of Ranchipur, and its melodramatic sweep is hopelessly easy to parody today. Ranchipur suffers floods, an earthquake, a dam collapse, a plague outbreak and a cholera epidemic, and you can sense Bromfield's disappointment that he couldn't shoehorn in more disasters.
Beneath the stereotypes, Bromfield offered insights that were startling for his time. The Maharajah and Maharani are seen as shrewd and capable, if manipulative, leaders, who will politely but ruthlessly edge the British out without quite letting "Mr Gandhi" in.
He was sharp enough to note that most of the gentry—English and Indian—survived the floods, while the Untouchable village, built of flimsier materials, was completely destroyed. The love stories are conventional—a high-born Englishwoman redeems her corrupt life with an act of selfless dedication, the bitter, capable Ransome finds an escape from his alcoholism through acts of selfless dedication, and they are inspired by an Indian doctor who has lived most of his life through acts of selfless, well, dedication.
The Rains Came is still worth reading today—depending on perspective, it's either superior M M Kaye or inferior E M Forster. Night in Bombay is a potboiler, and because of that, almost the more enjoyable. It features protagonists with "mocking blue eyes", the requisite quotient of punkahs and gin slings and was marketed as "a novel of India…and an American woman who was a challenge to all men".
I cannot explain why Bromfield was forgotten, when authors of equal literary enthusiasm and equally dubious quality—J G Farrell, John Masters, Paul Scott, M M Kaye—survived. But I'm grateful to Rupa & Co for finally reprinting the book—without that reminder, I might never have been moved to track down the Lana Turner-Richard Burton smash hit, The Rains of Ranchipur (with Beatrice Kraft as Oriental Dancer), which features the immortal tagline: "Theirs was the great sin that even the rains could not wash away!" They don't make bestsellers like that any more.
Book review: Ashes to ashes
(Business Standard, November 2006, Fireproof review)
Fireproof
Raj Kamal Jha
Picador India
Rs 495, 388 pages
“I’m a secular (check the page, has this word burnt a hole?) didn’t-cry-over-Godhra stoneheart. So last week, when I went to Ahmedabad, I wanted to bring home, as souvenirs, a charred body. Or a slit uterus.” These were the opening lines of Raj Kamal Jha’s May 2002 article on Gujarat, carried in the Indian Express under the subtitle: “I Went To Gujarat as a Riot Tourist And All I Got Was This…”
In the summer of 2002, this piece was one of the very few that broke through the indifference, the lies and the hysteria that blanketed the riots in Gujarat where, as Jha records in the postscript to his third novel, Fireproof: “Over a thousand men, women and children were killed, more than 70 per cent of them Muslim.”
Jha’s souvenirs from the trip he made that summer were more fireproof than charred body parts: in that early piece, he recorded the pages of books he’d found in “riot-affected” areas, pages from a child’s English workbook, an IIT Delhi research paper, a Class XII workbook. It may have been possible—heaven knows it was—for people to ignore the news reports, the testimonies told by victims who were trapped in the endless and necessary repetition of their stories to a country that seemed to have gone deaf, the fact-finding reports of various commissions. But reading Raj’s report, in which he tempered his savage anger with clinical detail, it was impossible to remain insulated from what had happened.
Fireproof begins with the birth of a baby, so severely deformed that he seems almost mutilated, to “Mr Jay”, “the husband of Patient Number 110742”. With his wife in hospital, Jay struggles to take care of Ithim—his name for the deformed child—in a city on fire, besieged by its own worst nightmares. Jay’s world becomes increasingly hallucinatory: he sees dead bodies falling from the skies, finds a set of apparently random photographs taken of smashed, ravaged homes and streets, and receives a call from someone who calls herself Miss Glass. She promises to help him with Ithim—but first he must make a strange journey, and play reluctant witnesses to three testimonies that arrive via email, each attachment (Tariq.Doc, Shabnam.Doc, Abba.Doc) carrying tales of vivid lives and brutal deaths.
In Dante’s Inferno, as Dante travels to the innermost circles of hell, he flinches at the thought of the journey he’s on, only to be told by his companion, the ghost of Virgil: “Down must we go, to that dark world and blind.” His only job, before he can climb back up and come forth “to look once more upon the stars”, is to be a witness, and no escape is possible from that duty. Novelists often take on that duty, with mixed results, even for the most accomplished. Books like Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege or Shashi Tharoor’s Riot have been only partly successful—they work better as testimonies and as moral compasses than as literature. The weight of virtuous intentions can rapidly become polemical, and bear down ruinously hard on the writer’s own creativity.
Instead of trammeling his imagination, however, the hard facts of Gujarat in 2002 seem to have set Raj Kamal Jha free in Fireproof. He proved in The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights, his first two novels, that he was in possession of a distinctive voice and a powerful imagination, but these were not always allied to a narrative strong enough to carry his undeniable talents forward. The rage that fuelled Jha’s initial reaction to the Gujarat massacres is transformed here into an insistent need to know, to capture in the best fictional form possible the testimonies of the dead, to explore the ruthless, murderous savagery of perfectly ordinary men. In one section, a young girl who watched the torture and slaughter of her parents learns that she will reach a place where there is no fear: “They won’t come back to kill the dead, you can’t burn what has been charred.” Just a few pages afterwards, Jay cleans his deformed son, touching each misshapen part of the child--the “charred skin” that is the baby’s forehead, the “knife-cut” of his lips with a new and hard-won tenderness instead of revulsion.
Fireproof falters at the exact point where the questions begin to pile up—why does Jay have to read Miss Glass’s carefully compiled testimonies, where is his absent wife, why is his baby so starkly deformed, could one feel sympathy for a slaughterer of innocents, where does our own complicity end? Jha takes refuge in a stylized drama of the absurd, where the objects littered around a ransacked, burned shell begin to speak—a dramatic device, perhaps, but also a distancing one. Some readers may guess what Fireproof is all about; some will be disappointed, because the first two parts of the novel are so vastly superior to the climactic section.
Despite this letdown, Fireproof is an extraordinary work, a feat of the imagination that is also testimony to the importance of the act of witnessing. At one point in the book, a character says: ““There is no burden I carry, whatever the dead might say. Because I am alive, I can choose what to remember, I can choose what to forget.” By entwining the imaginary with the brutally real, Jha refutes this particular belief—memory is all we have, he says, and in the face of something like Gujarat, no one has the right to claim amnesia. The dead must be heard.
Fireproof
Raj Kamal Jha
Picador India
Rs 495, 388 pages
“I’m a secular (check the page, has this word burnt a hole?) didn’t-cry-over-Godhra stoneheart. So last week, when I went to Ahmedabad, I wanted to bring home, as souvenirs, a charred body. Or a slit uterus.” These were the opening lines of Raj Kamal Jha’s May 2002 article on Gujarat, carried in the Indian Express under the subtitle: “I Went To Gujarat as a Riot Tourist And All I Got Was This…”
In the summer of 2002, this piece was one of the very few that broke through the indifference, the lies and the hysteria that blanketed the riots in Gujarat where, as Jha records in the postscript to his third novel, Fireproof: “Over a thousand men, women and children were killed, more than 70 per cent of them Muslim.”
Jha’s souvenirs from the trip he made that summer were more fireproof than charred body parts: in that early piece, he recorded the pages of books he’d found in “riot-affected” areas, pages from a child’s English workbook, an IIT Delhi research paper, a Class XII workbook. It may have been possible—heaven knows it was—for people to ignore the news reports, the testimonies told by victims who were trapped in the endless and necessary repetition of their stories to a country that seemed to have gone deaf, the fact-finding reports of various commissions. But reading Raj’s report, in which he tempered his savage anger with clinical detail, it was impossible to remain insulated from what had happened.
Fireproof begins with the birth of a baby, so severely deformed that he seems almost mutilated, to “Mr Jay”, “the husband of Patient Number 110742”. With his wife in hospital, Jay struggles to take care of Ithim—his name for the deformed child—in a city on fire, besieged by its own worst nightmares. Jay’s world becomes increasingly hallucinatory: he sees dead bodies falling from the skies, finds a set of apparently random photographs taken of smashed, ravaged homes and streets, and receives a call from someone who calls herself Miss Glass. She promises to help him with Ithim—but first he must make a strange journey, and play reluctant witnesses to three testimonies that arrive via email, each attachment (Tariq.Doc, Shabnam.Doc, Abba.Doc) carrying tales of vivid lives and brutal deaths.
In Dante’s Inferno, as Dante travels to the innermost circles of hell, he flinches at the thought of the journey he’s on, only to be told by his companion, the ghost of Virgil: “Down must we go, to that dark world and blind.” His only job, before he can climb back up and come forth “to look once more upon the stars”, is to be a witness, and no escape is possible from that duty. Novelists often take on that duty, with mixed results, even for the most accomplished. Books like Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege or Shashi Tharoor’s Riot have been only partly successful—they work better as testimonies and as moral compasses than as literature. The weight of virtuous intentions can rapidly become polemical, and bear down ruinously hard on the writer’s own creativity.
Instead of trammeling his imagination, however, the hard facts of Gujarat in 2002 seem to have set Raj Kamal Jha free in Fireproof. He proved in The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights, his first two novels, that he was in possession of a distinctive voice and a powerful imagination, but these were not always allied to a narrative strong enough to carry his undeniable talents forward. The rage that fuelled Jha’s initial reaction to the Gujarat massacres is transformed here into an insistent need to know, to capture in the best fictional form possible the testimonies of the dead, to explore the ruthless, murderous savagery of perfectly ordinary men. In one section, a young girl who watched the torture and slaughter of her parents learns that she will reach a place where there is no fear: “They won’t come back to kill the dead, you can’t burn what has been charred.” Just a few pages afterwards, Jay cleans his deformed son, touching each misshapen part of the child--the “charred skin” that is the baby’s forehead, the “knife-cut” of his lips with a new and hard-won tenderness instead of revulsion.
Fireproof falters at the exact point where the questions begin to pile up—why does Jay have to read Miss Glass’s carefully compiled testimonies, where is his absent wife, why is his baby so starkly deformed, could one feel sympathy for a slaughterer of innocents, where does our own complicity end? Jha takes refuge in a stylized drama of the absurd, where the objects littered around a ransacked, burned shell begin to speak—a dramatic device, perhaps, but also a distancing one. Some readers may guess what Fireproof is all about; some will be disappointed, because the first two parts of the novel are so vastly superior to the climactic section.
Despite this letdown, Fireproof is an extraordinary work, a feat of the imagination that is also testimony to the importance of the act of witnessing. At one point in the book, a character says: ““There is no burden I carry, whatever the dead might say. Because I am alive, I can choose what to remember, I can choose what to forget.” By entwining the imaginary with the brutally real, Jha refutes this particular belief—memory is all we have, he says, and in the face of something like Gujarat, no one has the right to claim amnesia. The dead must be heard.
Speaking Volumes: An insider's history
(October 23, Business Standard)
At the Kitab festival earlier this year in the capital, William Dalrymple read an excerpt from The Last Mughal, his account of the sunset years of Bahadur Shah Zafar's reign as the events of 1857 tore Delhi apart. He chose a passage that demonstrated the growing and implacable divide between the British and the Indians, in marked contrast to a period just a few decades before, when the two communities had overlapping lives and mixed far more freely.
Outside the auditorium, after he'd finished, an Indian publisher said, bristling slightly, "I wonder how the Scots would feel if one of us went over there and started lecturing them about their own history." The comment struck me with some force, perhaps because like many Indian readers, I've grown accustomed to thinking of Dalrymple as one of "our chaps", despite his Scottish upbringing and heritage. One of this popular historian's early works, City of Djinns, is an exuberant account of Delhi's history that remains a tourist bestseller, but that Delhi's "natives" also enjoyed.
Dalrymple abandons India in classic British fashion for a few months every year when the heat and dust becomes too much for him, but has lived here with his family for years, first in Sunder Nagar and now in a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of the city. He belongs to a venerable tradition of foreigners who have gone native, much as his hookah-smoking counterparts in kurta-pyjama with a begum tucked away in the backyard did in a previous generation.
When I look at the shelves of popular works on Indian history—this means, of necessity, discounting the massive body of strictly academic work that's delved into the history of the country—I can see where that publisher's grouse comes from. I've heard the same complaint, in different versions, repeated over the years about writers like Dalrymple in the field of travel and history, and it's worth addressing.
Much of the most accessible, and occasionally even scholarly, work on the history of the subcontinent has always come from outsiders, starting with Ibn Battuta and Hsieun Tsang and working one's way through James Todd, Max Mueller, Percival Spear and writers of popular travelogues such as Tim Mackintosh-Smith. If you look at Indian history through the centuries, much of it consists of what are effectively political memoirs—the Baburnama, for instance—or commissioned hagiographies—the Padshahnama, or the accounts of the Deccani Sultanate. There are many brilliant historians in contemporary India, but most of them have written for their peers, with a very few—Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Ramachandra Guha among them—addressing a more general audience.
In a more crowded field, The Last Mughal wouldn't stand out as one of Dalrymple's best or most astonishing works, though it is an extremely illuminating read. He seems to struggle in the first part of the book with the vastness of his subject—the life of Bahadur Shah Zafar, puppet Emperor turned puppet leader of the rebels, the 1857 uprising and the subsequent massacres, the religious politics that turned part of the Mutiny into a war of Islam against an encroaching Christianity and the schism created between the British and the Indians as a result. Even for a historian with Dalrymple's gift for deft, concise and always entertaining summary, this is a massive canvas—perhaps too massive.
Though the 1857 Uprising (or, according to taste, Mutiny/ Rebellion/ War of Independence) has been covered fairly comprehensively, Dalrymple's great contribution has been to bring in the Indian perspective by using "the 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers". Towards the middle of the book, when the voices of Ghalib, Delhi's merchants, Zafar's unruly and unwanted army of sepoys, marauding Gujars on the roads outside Delhi, courtesans and poets come in, The Last Mughal comes alive.
I was left with several questions. Why do so few "native" Indians (as opposed to certain Scotsmen we're happy to claim as Dilliwallahs) attempt popular histories or biographies of this kind? The National Archives, the libraries of the Deccan and other archives in India contain many records, like the Mutiny Papers, that are unexplored—are we really this uninterested in our own history, or is this interest beginning, finally, to take off? And most important, I'm thinking about addressing that publisher's grievance by writing a book on Bannockburn. Any interested\nScots publishers are warmly encouraged to get in touch.
At the Kitab festival earlier this year in the capital, William Dalrymple read an excerpt from The Last Mughal, his account of the sunset years of Bahadur Shah Zafar's reign as the events of 1857 tore Delhi apart. He chose a passage that demonstrated the growing and implacable divide between the British and the Indians, in marked contrast to a period just a few decades before, when the two communities had overlapping lives and mixed far more freely.
Outside the auditorium, after he'd finished, an Indian publisher said, bristling slightly, "I wonder how the Scots would feel if one of us went over there and started lecturing them about their own history." The comment struck me with some force, perhaps because like many Indian readers, I've grown accustomed to thinking of Dalrymple as one of "our chaps", despite his Scottish upbringing and heritage. One of this popular historian's early works, City of Djinns, is an exuberant account of Delhi's history that remains a tourist bestseller, but that Delhi's "natives" also enjoyed.
Dalrymple abandons India in classic British fashion for a few months every year when the heat and dust becomes too much for him, but has lived here with his family for years, first in Sunder Nagar and now in a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of the city. He belongs to a venerable tradition of foreigners who have gone native, much as his hookah-smoking counterparts in kurta-pyjama with a begum tucked away in the backyard did in a previous generation.
When I look at the shelves of popular works on Indian history—this means, of necessity, discounting the massive body of strictly academic work that's delved into the history of the country—I can see where that publisher's grouse comes from. I've heard the same complaint, in different versions, repeated over the years about writers like Dalrymple in the field of travel and history, and it's worth addressing.
Much of the most accessible, and occasionally even scholarly, work on the history of the subcontinent has always come from outsiders, starting with Ibn Battuta and Hsieun Tsang and working one's way through James Todd, Max Mueller, Percival Spear and writers of popular travelogues such as Tim Mackintosh-Smith. If you look at Indian history through the centuries, much of it consists of what are effectively political memoirs—the Baburnama, for instance—or commissioned hagiographies—the Padshahnama, or the accounts of the Deccani Sultanate. There are many brilliant historians in contemporary India, but most of them have written for their peers, with a very few—Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Ramachandra Guha among them—addressing a more general audience.
In a more crowded field, The Last Mughal wouldn't stand out as one of Dalrymple's best or most astonishing works, though it is an extremely illuminating read. He seems to struggle in the first part of the book with the vastness of his subject—the life of Bahadur Shah Zafar, puppet Emperor turned puppet leader of the rebels, the 1857 uprising and the subsequent massacres, the religious politics that turned part of the Mutiny into a war of Islam against an encroaching Christianity and the schism created between the British and the Indians as a result. Even for a historian with Dalrymple's gift for deft, concise and always entertaining summary, this is a massive canvas—perhaps too massive.
Though the 1857 Uprising (or, according to taste, Mutiny/ Rebellion/ War of Independence) has been covered fairly comprehensively, Dalrymple's great contribution has been to bring in the Indian perspective by using "the 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers". Towards the middle of the book, when the voices of Ghalib, Delhi's merchants, Zafar's unruly and unwanted army of sepoys, marauding Gujars on the roads outside Delhi, courtesans and poets come in, The Last Mughal comes alive.
I was left with several questions. Why do so few "native" Indians (as opposed to certain Scotsmen we're happy to claim as Dilliwallahs) attempt popular histories or biographies of this kind? The National Archives, the libraries of the Deccan and other archives in India contain many records, like the Mutiny Papers, that are unexplored—are we really this uninterested in our own history, or is this interest beginning, finally, to take off? And most important, I'm thinking about addressing that publisher's grievance by writing a book on Bannockburn. Any interested\nScots publishers are warmly encouraged to get in touch.
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