(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, MAY 17, 2005)
(This week, two new giant-sized bookcases arrived in the house and we finally unpacked the last three cartons of books, taking us back to square one: there are no books in the cartons, ergo, there is no space on the new bookshelves, but in the brief interval between acquiring the shelves in which to stack the books from the cartons, we have...bought more books. Roughly half of the books on my shelves fall into the category of books I don't re-read often, but that I need to have around for reference. Most of this is Indian fiction, and the reason I need the books in person, so to speak, is because most of them are out of print now and are unlikely to ever be reprinted. This might explain why I would be very, very happy if publishers started offering at least the backlist in ebook/ digitised form. Otherwise, me and my husband are doomed: the future involves moving every three years to larger and larger houses, buying more and more bookcases to store all the books I can't bear to donate, dump or discard...)
Most Indians are familiar with “bookless libraries”: they’re the ones you find in officially backward areas of the country where the books on the shelves have fallen to pieces or been stolen and sold to the raddiwallah.
It’s going to take a little time before we catch up with the contemporary definition of a bookless or digital library, the kind that university libraries in the US, Google worldwide, and the EU are separately trying to build. The NYT recently reported that the University of Texas is experimenting with a library which has a “24-hour electronic information commons”. This makes sense; the new generation of students is umbilically attached to the mobile phone and the mouse. Publishers have been putting more books into e-text format, and there’s an increasing demand for libraries to have computer bays and always-on access to the Net.
Google is building its own vast virtual library—it plans to digitize books from Harvard, Stanford, a few other US universities and Oxford University. This online repository will be open to all Google users, subject to the normal restrictions of copyright for now—readers will be able to search restricted portions of a currently copyrighted text and download the entire text, if they choose, of books that are out of the copyright domain.
This seems a worthwhile enough project, but it’s led to a rare show of unity among the nations that make up the European Union, who are worried that knowledge itself might end up US-centric. In the EU view, Google comes across as an evil wannabe master of the universe who plans nothing less than world domination. The EU plans to combat Google’s “cultural domination” with a digitization project that will bring together works from the libraries of six countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Poland.
When the first e-books came out, many commentators wondered what this would mean for plain vanilla publishing and the humble book. Some of us predicted that this would change publishing, but mainstream publishers have been very resistant to e-text initiatives—they fear a Napsterisation of books, where readers would download texts for free rather than buy actual books. This is unlikely; even if e-book readers improve beyond the current clunky ones available, there is something about the physical book that we love and remain loyal to. William Crossman, a futurist and scholar, predicts that the written word as we know it will die out by 2050, but even he suspects that the book will not die out so much as assume new form.
Some assumed that e-books would open up a new market for emerging authors; but if you cut out the services of the editor, you’re left with the world’s largest slushpile. Even if publishing does warm up eventually to e-books, you’re not going to do away with the editor, the agent and the various other middlemen involved in the bookselling business quite that easily. But the real face of the ebook revolution might actually be Google’s digital library and other versions that involve the mass digitization of books. The biggest problem with the Net as a source of information is its built-in unreliability: “I found it on the Net” has become shorthand for lazy research, and few users are willing to explore the online world enough. It’s possible to find good, even great, repositories of information online, but it requires more browsing of the virtual stacks than most readers are comfortable with.
The thing about digitization is that it involves an initial high cost, but relatively low maintenance subsequently. Well-ordered virtual libraries might not replace the real-world model in a country like the US, with its history of excellent and easily accessible public libraries in every city. But the virtual library will change the browsing experience for the next generation of Net users, and it will change the ways in which we spread—and assimilate—knowledge.
India, like many Asian countries, does a terrible job of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, and an even worse job of making this knowledge freely available to most of its citizens. The libraries that work are not open to all; the libraries that are open to all don’t work very well. It would take a combination of tremendous philanthropy and unflinching support from the state to build a network of truly public libraries—and building libraries is only half the job, the other half is maintaining them properly. But given the software expertise in the country, we’re in a position to catch up with the rest of the world now.
It wouldn’t take that much effort to build virtual libraries that might either become part of a network like Google’s, or form part of say, a Southern Hemisphere network. But it would require a different approach to books, manuscripts and other forms of knowledge. We tend to neglect books and archives to death, often letting them crumble into dust, or we hoard knowledge jealously and appoint guardians to determine who has access. Building a virtual library would require the kind of vision and willingness to collaborate that goes against the grain for many scholars. It would also require imagination: virtual libraries can be carried anywhere a laptop can go, but beyond that you’d have to be willing to print out texts and carry them into places that have no electricity, no plugpoints, no conception of the Net. In this country at least, the printed word is likely to have a tenacious grip on life.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Business Standard column: SIPs
(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, May 10, 2005)
This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.
This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.
The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”
The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.
How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.
Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .
Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.
After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .
SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .
This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”
Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”
We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .
And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”
Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.
Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”
And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.
This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.
This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.
The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”
The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.
How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.
Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .
Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.
After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .
SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .
This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”
Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”
We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .
And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”
Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.
Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”
And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.
Business Standard column: Character Map
(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', the Business Standard, May 3, 2005)
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Book review: The Red Carpet
(Published in India Today)
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
Book review: Dil-o-Daanish
(Published in The Indian Express)
I tried, but there was no way I could use the English title; The Heart Has Its Reasons conjures up the memoirs of Barbara Cartland and of Wallis Simpson, and for the life of me I can't imagine Krishna Sobti in their company.
The Heart Has Its Reasons
Krishna Sobti
Translated by Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami
Katha
Rs 250, 220 pages
Dil-o-Danish was one of the two books that introduced me to the delights of "reading in place". The novel refused to come alive in an anonymous concrete
apartment block, and remained truculent until it was taken off to Old Delhi.
The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set--Dilli in the 1920s--but shops still sell "muslin-soft" rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.
Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two--real writer and imaginary writer--in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes "bisexually", with access to both genders, sets up an
intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish . Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak--a perk natural to a man of a certain status.
"He himself has two women--one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this—though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you'll never understand."
Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband's life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not
a choice open to her. Mehak's mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation--for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, "People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own
sake." But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not cariacatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.
But the rights he assigns so naturally to himself are not rights he can imagine extending to either Kutumb, when she demands that he acknowledge her pain, or
Mehak, when she exercises her right to property that is hers, and her right to choose her own path. One woman is asked to turn a blind eye; the other is asked
to be invisible. As the inevitable schemings and crosscurrents of the joint family complicate matters, against the backdrop of a robust city in the grip of
change, someone must break the deadlock.
One of the pleasures of Sobti's writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan's dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi. The translators have an uphill task; it's impossible to capture the exact lilt and sway, the pungency and the grace, of the original. They do manage to retain the flow and the rapid back-and-forth of conversation.
This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti's other work, but no less satisfying. Austen's England and Sobti's Dilli have much in common: what
drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen's world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was little more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn't reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama , but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.
I tried, but there was no way I could use the English title; The Heart Has Its Reasons conjures up the memoirs of Barbara Cartland and of Wallis Simpson, and for the life of me I can't imagine Krishna Sobti in their company.
The Heart Has Its Reasons
Krishna Sobti
Translated by Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami
Katha
Rs 250, 220 pages
Dil-o-Danish was one of the two books that introduced me to the delights of "reading in place". The novel refused to come alive in an anonymous concrete
apartment block, and remained truculent until it was taken off to Old Delhi.
The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set--Dilli in the 1920s--but shops still sell "muslin-soft" rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.
Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two--real writer and imaginary writer--in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes "bisexually", with access to both genders, sets up an
intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish . Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak--a perk natural to a man of a certain status.
"He himself has two women--one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this—though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you'll never understand."
Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband's life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not
a choice open to her. Mehak's mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation--for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, "People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own
sake." But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not cariacatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.
But the rights he assigns so naturally to himself are not rights he can imagine extending to either Kutumb, when she demands that he acknowledge her pain, or
Mehak, when she exercises her right to property that is hers, and her right to choose her own path. One woman is asked to turn a blind eye; the other is asked
to be invisible. As the inevitable schemings and crosscurrents of the joint family complicate matters, against the backdrop of a robust city in the grip of
change, someone must break the deadlock.
One of the pleasures of Sobti's writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan's dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi. The translators have an uphill task; it's impossible to capture the exact lilt and sway, the pungency and the grace, of the original. They do manage to retain the flow and the rapid back-and-forth of conversation.
This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti's other work, but no less satisfying. Austen's England and Sobti's Dilli have much in common: what
drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen's world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was little more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn't reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama , but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Review: Coronation Talkies
(This was written for the Business Standard, May 2, 2005.)
Coronation Talkies
Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking
488 pages, Rs 475
Remember the days when patriotic Indians, struggling under the yoke of Empire, swore revenge on the Raj? We did our bit. We introduced Britain to chicken tikka masala and bhangra-rap. We took over cricket, and we did our best to unleash Lagaan on an unsuspecting world. Just to rub it in, we gave the West End Bombay Dreams and we rehashed Jane Austen into the worst kind of Bollywood musical.
But there’s a new breed of writers out there, from Barbara Cleverly to Thalassa Ali to Susan Kurosawa, who’re doing their best to ease the brown man’s burden. You want reprisal? Cleverly offers bad detective stories and the romance of the Raj. You want payback? Ali offers lurid tales of dastardly intrigue, and the romance of the Raj. You really, really want vengeance? Susan Kurosawa does to the romance of the Raj what Dr Hannibal Lecter did for the popularity of brain curry recipes. Her only weapons are an imaginary hill station called Chalaili and a touching belief in the dictum that history repeats itself twice, the second time as parody.
Chalaili is a composite made up of hill stations visited by the author. With its reputation for rain and occasional depression among the inhabitants, it’s not hard to guess that it has bits of Cherrapunji and Doolali stirred together, with a dash of Chail chucked in for good measure. This is the setting for a story at once so dreary and so preposterous that you know it will come to a bad end and probably be reincarnated as a Broadway musical. (The British shouldn’t have to suffer alone; the Americans must take their chances like the rest of us.)
Mrs Rajat Banerjee, future proprietor of the eponymous Coronation Talkies, soon to be the movie theatre that is the pride and joy of Chalaili, introduces herself in deathless prose: ‘“All the time I think of food,” she giggled.’ This, you realise just two pages along, is a blessing, because when she doesn’t, she’s given to “startling outbursts”. “As Clark Gable hung the Wall of Jericho curtain in his shared accommodation with the runaway Claudette Colbert, Mrs Banerjee let out a scream so loud that three rows from the back, caught in a still-innocent tangle of unfurling shawls and popping buttons, two visitors to Chalaili, Anita Mehta and Sonny Raman, shot to their feet and hurried in opposite directions.”
The scream is intended to be Mrs Banerjee’s way of paying homage to the beginning of It Happened One Night , and what surprised this reviewer most about it is that the film doesn’t begin that way at all—the Wall of Jericho scene happens quite a bit of the way down. But this is uncharitable-- Coronation Talkies is billed as a comedy, and we must allow the author a free hand with her imagination, even if it does extend to the plot of classic films.
Lydia Rushmore is Mrs Banerjee’s opposite number in this lengthy farce. In contrast to Mrs Banerjee’s opulent charms, Lydia is painted as a flat-chested former spinster hustled into a marriage of convenience. Her husband, a weather researcher with the forest service interrupted his obsession with the climate and its vagaries long enough to have an ill-judged affair with the wife of the visiting British Resident of Kashmir, and was ordered to return from England with a wife of his own or not at all. Lydia’s introduction to India is made fearsome by heat and dust (and beggars), and while her first visit to the local Chalaili club is turned by the other, duly snobbish, memsahibs into the day of the scorpions, her counterpart discovers that sleepy Chalaili isn’t really the jewel in the crown she thought it was when she planned to open Coronation Talkies here.
This is the point at which the novel begins to enter Cold Comfort Farm territory, in the sense that every character turns out to have a past that includes something narsty in the woodshed. Lydia’s descents into gin-fuelled depression and misguided attempt to make a friend of Anil, the sole servant in attendance at Bluebell Cottage, are explained in capital letters: “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I BLOODY WELL AM?”
Never mind. We’ll be told in short but mawkish order as Lydia harks back to the days when her father used to call her the Princess Liddie Diddie while getting plastered at the pub. She seeks temporary solace with Simon Fraser-Gough, but what Simon has lurking in the woodshed is far nastier than anything Lydia might have imagined. Speaking of woodsheds, William has something narsty stashed away in his, too, a complicated tale of dark illicit passions that must never be spoken of. Anil, not to be outdone in terms of domestic drama, contributes his mite’s worth by arriving with his sister, who has been forced into prostitution in the wicked city. She has a heart of gold, but her lungs are made of lesser metal, unfortunately, precipitating another tragedy.
Meanwhile, Mrs Banerjee has progressed from her first dismayed look at the brokedown palace that’s Coronation Talkies (“Talking picture theatre, my jolly bottom,” she explains, in a fair semblance of what passes for wit in this novel). Under her careful management, it has survived a disastrous opening night that provided the author with yet another stab at comedy (comedy survived, but it was a close call), and gone on to better things. But, and this may surprise you, Mrs Banerjee, like everyone else in the novel, has a dark secret of her own. This emerges slowly and painfully through a tangle of comic romps, comic lusts, comic interludes, comic memsahibs and comic newsletters that redefine the critic’s cliché “read this and weep”.
There are some really good bits in Coronation Talkies , like the epigraphs before each chapter and the hand-drawn map of Chalaili and the very handsome book cover. Not enough, though, to prevent the sigh of relief that escaped me when this period piece finally reached the last full stop.
Coronation Talkies
Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking
488 pages, Rs 475
Remember the days when patriotic Indians, struggling under the yoke of Empire, swore revenge on the Raj? We did our bit. We introduced Britain to chicken tikka masala and bhangra-rap. We took over cricket, and we did our best to unleash Lagaan on an unsuspecting world. Just to rub it in, we gave the West End Bombay Dreams and we rehashed Jane Austen into the worst kind of Bollywood musical.
But there’s a new breed of writers out there, from Barbara Cleverly to Thalassa Ali to Susan Kurosawa, who’re doing their best to ease the brown man’s burden. You want reprisal? Cleverly offers bad detective stories and the romance of the Raj. You want payback? Ali offers lurid tales of dastardly intrigue, and the romance of the Raj. You really, really want vengeance? Susan Kurosawa does to the romance of the Raj what Dr Hannibal Lecter did for the popularity of brain curry recipes. Her only weapons are an imaginary hill station called Chalaili and a touching belief in the dictum that history repeats itself twice, the second time as parody.
Chalaili is a composite made up of hill stations visited by the author. With its reputation for rain and occasional depression among the inhabitants, it’s not hard to guess that it has bits of Cherrapunji and Doolali stirred together, with a dash of Chail chucked in for good measure. This is the setting for a story at once so dreary and so preposterous that you know it will come to a bad end and probably be reincarnated as a Broadway musical. (The British shouldn’t have to suffer alone; the Americans must take their chances like the rest of us.)
Mrs Rajat Banerjee, future proprietor of the eponymous Coronation Talkies, soon to be the movie theatre that is the pride and joy of Chalaili, introduces herself in deathless prose: ‘“All the time I think of food,” she giggled.’ This, you realise just two pages along, is a blessing, because when she doesn’t, she’s given to “startling outbursts”. “As Clark Gable hung the Wall of Jericho curtain in his shared accommodation with the runaway Claudette Colbert, Mrs Banerjee let out a scream so loud that three rows from the back, caught in a still-innocent tangle of unfurling shawls and popping buttons, two visitors to Chalaili, Anita Mehta and Sonny Raman, shot to their feet and hurried in opposite directions.”
The scream is intended to be Mrs Banerjee’s way of paying homage to the beginning of It Happened One Night , and what surprised this reviewer most about it is that the film doesn’t begin that way at all—the Wall of Jericho scene happens quite a bit of the way down. But this is uncharitable-- Coronation Talkies is billed as a comedy, and we must allow the author a free hand with her imagination, even if it does extend to the plot of classic films.
Lydia Rushmore is Mrs Banerjee’s opposite number in this lengthy farce. In contrast to Mrs Banerjee’s opulent charms, Lydia is painted as a flat-chested former spinster hustled into a marriage of convenience. Her husband, a weather researcher with the forest service interrupted his obsession with the climate and its vagaries long enough to have an ill-judged affair with the wife of the visiting British Resident of Kashmir, and was ordered to return from England with a wife of his own or not at all. Lydia’s introduction to India is made fearsome by heat and dust (and beggars), and while her first visit to the local Chalaili club is turned by the other, duly snobbish, memsahibs into the day of the scorpions, her counterpart discovers that sleepy Chalaili isn’t really the jewel in the crown she thought it was when she planned to open Coronation Talkies here.
This is the point at which the novel begins to enter Cold Comfort Farm territory, in the sense that every character turns out to have a past that includes something narsty in the woodshed. Lydia’s descents into gin-fuelled depression and misguided attempt to make a friend of Anil, the sole servant in attendance at Bluebell Cottage, are explained in capital letters: “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I BLOODY WELL AM?”
Never mind. We’ll be told in short but mawkish order as Lydia harks back to the days when her father used to call her the Princess Liddie Diddie while getting plastered at the pub. She seeks temporary solace with Simon Fraser-Gough, but what Simon has lurking in the woodshed is far nastier than anything Lydia might have imagined. Speaking of woodsheds, William has something narsty stashed away in his, too, a complicated tale of dark illicit passions that must never be spoken of. Anil, not to be outdone in terms of domestic drama, contributes his mite’s worth by arriving with his sister, who has been forced into prostitution in the wicked city. She has a heart of gold, but her lungs are made of lesser metal, unfortunately, precipitating another tragedy.
Meanwhile, Mrs Banerjee has progressed from her first dismayed look at the brokedown palace that’s Coronation Talkies (“Talking picture theatre, my jolly bottom,” she explains, in a fair semblance of what passes for wit in this novel). Under her careful management, it has survived a disastrous opening night that provided the author with yet another stab at comedy (comedy survived, but it was a close call), and gone on to better things. But, and this may surprise you, Mrs Banerjee, like everyone else in the novel, has a dark secret of her own. This emerges slowly and painfully through a tangle of comic romps, comic lusts, comic interludes, comic memsahibs and comic newsletters that redefine the critic’s cliché “read this and weep”.
There are some really good bits in Coronation Talkies , like the epigraphs before each chapter and the hand-drawn map of Chalaili and the very handsome book cover. Not enough, though, to prevent the sigh of relief that escaped me when this period piece finally reached the last full stop.
The BS column: The Collecting Impulse
(This first appeared in Business Standard, Speaking Volumes for April 26, 2005)
Which reminds me: if anyone knows of good books on collectors/ collections/ collecting in India, please tell me about them? I'm also looking for books about books by Indian bibliophiles (and yes, I've seen Tharoor's latest).
My prejudice against book collectors was formed in haste and repented at leisure. The first person I met who called himself a collector had a small but interesting set of first editions. These, like his other books, were carefully kept but so jealously guarded, with dragon locks and remonstrances, that I was left with two lasting impressions.
The first was that the books most beloved by collectors were ones as pristine as possible, with perfect, unfoxed pages and unmarred spines. The best book, by logical extension, was one that had never been read at all. To my mind, it seemed to set up collectors as the exact opposite of book lovers. To a true booklover, a book was only an oblong, inert object until it had been read; to a true collector, the perfect specimen was something that had remained virginal, untouched by readers, and would be kept in that state forever. The second impression was that all collectors were essentially misers, hoarders of wealth in the form of books that they seldom read but would not allow other people to read.
Over the years, this early prejudice hardened. The salary of a journalist was not the stuff that enables anyone to build up collections of their own. The books that passed through my hands were printed in the modern fashion, on indifferent paper. The ones that were loved were loved for their contents, not for the way they looked; some few, when they passed through the hands of publishers such as Sanjeev Saith and Ravi Dayal, had clearly been cherished as objects in their own right. The majority were just objects to be sold, not objects of desire. The famed bookshops in Simla and the Sunday book bazaar in Delhi yielded curiosities rather than beautiful books.
We all have our personal monuments to false arrogance. Mine lay in a claim that could either be made by a purist booklover or by an absolute philistine: the claim that what mattered was just the text, not the book. I made this claim before I had read Robertson Davies on the subject: “It is splendidly austere to say that Shakespeare is just as much Shakespeare in a paperback edition as he is in the beautiful Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 or the First Folio of 1623, but not all of us are such literary Calvinists. We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.”
Oh, the force of that gentle rebuke. It travelled well across the gulf of years and genius that separates someone like me from someone like Davies, and I fled into the arms of that old standby, 84 Charing Cross Road . But I landed on the page for October 15, 1950, where Helene Hanff wrote: “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home…”
I found myself sneaking over to the shelves that contain one of the very few treasures in a bibliophile but defiantly anti-collection home, where all the books are well-thumbed and dog-eared and marked by the passage of time and our love of them. Among the cheerful spines of paperbacks are the austere leatherbound spines of ‘The Library Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment’. Not a collectors’ edition, but as I turned the pages, I recognised that there was quite a different thrill to reading Burton in an edition “illustrated by a series of seventy-one original illustrations reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Albert Letchford” than there was to reading him in the plain vanilla Modern Library edition.
It was at this point, when I was caught between a Calvinist’s love for books as just the text and a far more carnal love for books as objects to be devoured with the eye and the imagination as much as the mind, that Ruchir Joshi, a writer friend, called and asked if I’d like to meet Glenn Horowitz.
Glenn is something of a legend in New York circles, a book collector who assures acquaintances that he’s in the game as a businessman, but whose obvious love for books is inescapable—and contagious. His firm has dealt with and represented the collections and papers of writers as diverse as Amiri Baraka and Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson and Nadine Gordimer, Alfred Dreyfus and Peter Carey. Many years ago, he acquired the correspondence between R K Narayan and Graham Greene, bringing to the acquisition the same knowledge and desire that he employed when acquiring Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate notes. He was among the first in his family to go to college—Bennington, where he was taught by Bernard Malamud and where, for a while, he intended to write nothing less than the great American novel. It was the deliberate extinguishing of one desire, the urge to be a writer, that kindled another kind of passion for books.
Seeing India through Glenn’s eyes was illuminating. He hadn’t met too many collectors, or perhaps he had met only the kind I had encountered—men whom he dismissed as hoarders. Horowitz, like a handful of other book dealers and collectors across the world, is more a “literary diplomat”, a broker of literary history, than a miser or a hoarder. In the brief time he was in Delhi, he raided bookshops in the way Genghis Khan might have sacked a minor kingdom or two—not an epic foray, just an exploratory excursion that served to keep his hand in.
When we met, I bombarded him with questions about collecting: how did it work, how would he make the distinction between India’s better-known English-language authors versus the sometimes more redoubtable regional language authors, where did literary archives end up, what did the ordinary reader have to gain by this strange pursuit?
His response arrived in a large cardboard box, which we opened and ravaged to discover book catalogues. Here was the Beat Generation, here was Jack Kerouac’s disillusion and frustration and creativity all muddled together. Here were Nabokov’s butterflies; here was the history of James Joyce’s Ulysses and its obscenity trials. F Scott Fitzgerald’s signature, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s collections of books, the drawings of the Beat writers… Little pieces of literary history detonated on my desktop until finally, I thought I began to understand the impulses of collectors, who must be entrepreneur and librarian, businessman and literary historian, diplomat and cutthroat bargainer all in one.
Which reminds me: if anyone knows of good books on collectors/ collections/ collecting in India, please tell me about them? I'm also looking for books about books by Indian bibliophiles (and yes, I've seen Tharoor's latest).
My prejudice against book collectors was formed in haste and repented at leisure. The first person I met who called himself a collector had a small but interesting set of first editions. These, like his other books, were carefully kept but so jealously guarded, with dragon locks and remonstrances, that I was left with two lasting impressions.
The first was that the books most beloved by collectors were ones as pristine as possible, with perfect, unfoxed pages and unmarred spines. The best book, by logical extension, was one that had never been read at all. To my mind, it seemed to set up collectors as the exact opposite of book lovers. To a true booklover, a book was only an oblong, inert object until it had been read; to a true collector, the perfect specimen was something that had remained virginal, untouched by readers, and would be kept in that state forever. The second impression was that all collectors were essentially misers, hoarders of wealth in the form of books that they seldom read but would not allow other people to read.
Over the years, this early prejudice hardened. The salary of a journalist was not the stuff that enables anyone to build up collections of their own. The books that passed through my hands were printed in the modern fashion, on indifferent paper. The ones that were loved were loved for their contents, not for the way they looked; some few, when they passed through the hands of publishers such as Sanjeev Saith and Ravi Dayal, had clearly been cherished as objects in their own right. The majority were just objects to be sold, not objects of desire. The famed bookshops in Simla and the Sunday book bazaar in Delhi yielded curiosities rather than beautiful books.
We all have our personal monuments to false arrogance. Mine lay in a claim that could either be made by a purist booklover or by an absolute philistine: the claim that what mattered was just the text, not the book. I made this claim before I had read Robertson Davies on the subject: “It is splendidly austere to say that Shakespeare is just as much Shakespeare in a paperback edition as he is in the beautiful Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 or the First Folio of 1623, but not all of us are such literary Calvinists. We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.”
Oh, the force of that gentle rebuke. It travelled well across the gulf of years and genius that separates someone like me from someone like Davies, and I fled into the arms of that old standby, 84 Charing Cross Road . But I landed on the page for October 15, 1950, where Helene Hanff wrote: “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home…”
I found myself sneaking over to the shelves that contain one of the very few treasures in a bibliophile but defiantly anti-collection home, where all the books are well-thumbed and dog-eared and marked by the passage of time and our love of them. Among the cheerful spines of paperbacks are the austere leatherbound spines of ‘The Library Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment’. Not a collectors’ edition, but as I turned the pages, I recognised that there was quite a different thrill to reading Burton in an edition “illustrated by a series of seventy-one original illustrations reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Albert Letchford” than there was to reading him in the plain vanilla Modern Library edition.
It was at this point, when I was caught between a Calvinist’s love for books as just the text and a far more carnal love for books as objects to be devoured with the eye and the imagination as much as the mind, that Ruchir Joshi, a writer friend, called and asked if I’d like to meet Glenn Horowitz.
Glenn is something of a legend in New York circles, a book collector who assures acquaintances that he’s in the game as a businessman, but whose obvious love for books is inescapable—and contagious. His firm has dealt with and represented the collections and papers of writers as diverse as Amiri Baraka and Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson and Nadine Gordimer, Alfred Dreyfus and Peter Carey. Many years ago, he acquired the correspondence between R K Narayan and Graham Greene, bringing to the acquisition the same knowledge and desire that he employed when acquiring Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate notes. He was among the first in his family to go to college—Bennington, where he was taught by Bernard Malamud and where, for a while, he intended to write nothing less than the great American novel. It was the deliberate extinguishing of one desire, the urge to be a writer, that kindled another kind of passion for books.
Seeing India through Glenn’s eyes was illuminating. He hadn’t met too many collectors, or perhaps he had met only the kind I had encountered—men whom he dismissed as hoarders. Horowitz, like a handful of other book dealers and collectors across the world, is more a “literary diplomat”, a broker of literary history, than a miser or a hoarder. In the brief time he was in Delhi, he raided bookshops in the way Genghis Khan might have sacked a minor kingdom or two—not an epic foray, just an exploratory excursion that served to keep his hand in.
When we met, I bombarded him with questions about collecting: how did it work, how would he make the distinction between India’s better-known English-language authors versus the sometimes more redoubtable regional language authors, where did literary archives end up, what did the ordinary reader have to gain by this strange pursuit?
His response arrived in a large cardboard box, which we opened and ravaged to discover book catalogues. Here was the Beat Generation, here was Jack Kerouac’s disillusion and frustration and creativity all muddled together. Here were Nabokov’s butterflies; here was the history of James Joyce’s Ulysses and its obscenity trials. F Scott Fitzgerald’s signature, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s collections of books, the drawings of the Beat writers… Little pieces of literary history detonated on my desktop until finally, I thought I began to understand the impulses of collectors, who must be entrepreneur and librarian, businessman and literary historian, diplomat and cutthroat bargainer all in one.
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