The official recordings of the sessions by Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi where the writers read out from the Satanic Verses as a gesture of protest are not available on the festival site. Ten other discussions/ readings that stood out for me:
1) Michael Ondaatje, discussing Cat’s Cradle with Amitava Kumar.
2) David Remnick and Samanth Subramanian on Obama, with enthusiastic participation by JLF’s cows.
3) Samit Basu on building imaginary worlds—one of the few talks at the JLF that focused sharply on the craft of writing.
4) Gulzar, Mohammed Hanif, Madan Gopal: poetry from both sides of the border. This gets going after the first 10-15 minutes.
5) Philip Gourevitch on war: “Genocide has an order.”
6) AC Grayling and Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment, free speech and much more.
7) Cheeran, Charu Nivedita, Gogu Shyamala, Satchidanandan and S Anand on the literature of dissent.
The first two minutes, where S Anand reads out a lovely quote from the Satanic Verses, is missing from the tape—it shouldn’t be, because it’s not illegal to read passages from the book, and the JLF shouldn’t be sanitizing writers’ sessions.
Anand read these lines: “What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
8) Ayesha Jalal on Holy Wars and the need to reclaim the meaning of the word ‘jihad’.
9) Two favourite writers in conversation: Teju Cole and Ben Okri.
10) Katherine Boo and Aman Sethi on writing beyond the "beautiful forevers".
Out of my sessions—enjoyed listening to Kiran Nagarkar and Rahul Bhattacharya’s exuberantly “vulgar” readings, the conversation with Lionel Shriver: and my husband’s injunction to the audience after he was pulled in at the last moment to moderate the Richard Dawkins session: "If your questions go over 25 words, I’ll take back the mike."
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Speaking Volumes: Listening To Rushdie
(Published in the Business Standard, January 17, 2012)
In all the claims made for Chetan Bhagat, tireless father of the Indian bestseller, this is one you will never hear: he disturbs the peace. In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just this: he disturbs the peace.
Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 (‘Love. Corruption. Ambition.’) is, like his four previous novels, reassuringly familiar and comfortably accurate in its reflection of contemporary Indian concerns. The obsession with success, the difficulties of modern relationships, small town heroes battling a corrupt system—every one of his blockbuster novels articulates the concerns of the civic-minded Indian with absolute fidelity, and not one offers anything in the nature of a revolutionary or subversive idea.
Chetan Bhagat is the most visible face of the unchallenging new Indian bestseller, comfortable in its certainties, mildly anti-intellectual. Most of the criticism of this school of writing has focused on its lack of grammar and style. This is less obvious in Bhagat’s own writing—pedestrian to a fault, but positively literate when compared to the bestsellers from Shrishti Books.
Srishti’s line of books might be summarized as the revenge of the inarticulate on the literate, and have eloquent titles: ‘Sum Thing of a Mocktale: At JNU Where Kurta Fell In Love With Jeans’, ‘Ouch! That Hearts!’ These books conceal a secret contempt for the reader, assuming that s/he is no longer deserving of even the basic courtesies of grammar and fluency.
From Bhagat to fantasy writer Amish Tripathi to the Srishti authors, none of these writers have built their careers by challenging the accepted wisdom of their times. The argument for welcoming Rushdie to Jaipur is a simple one. His early works, which include Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses, are unsettling and uncomfortable, and we need that discomfort much more in 2012 than we need the safe formulas of the new bestsellers.
The opposition to Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Festival comes from theologians at the Darul Uloom Deoband who have in all probability not read his books, and who would probably be made very uncomfortable if they did. Midnight’s Children tears up the textbook version of Indian Independence; one of the ways to counter, for instance, the hagiography of the Gandhi family, those full-page ads featuring Indira and her progeny is to read Rushdie’s portrait of the Widow and what she did during the Emergency.
But in these times, there are other writers who continue to write against the grain of the official histories—the more official, the less likely to be true. Amitav Ghosh’s Opium War series swings the perspective around to the Indian view, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim stands (as Rushdie’s Shame did some two decades ago) as a reproach to those who would deny the bloody history of Bangladesh.
There are fewer writers who write against the grain of religion. Tahmima Anam is one of them, and The Good Muslim is a mercilessly accurate exploration of two kinds of tyranny—the tyranny of the righteously faithful, and the twinned tyranny of the righteous liberal who stands against the excesses of faith. In many ways, Anam writes against the backdrop of the question Rushdie asked many years ago, when he wrote Satanic Verses.
Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
Doubt.
This brief meditation lies at the heart of the controversy over the Satanic Verses, which has extended into the present and ridiculous debate over whether Rushdie should be “allowed” to attend Jaipur. The real question is why the Deobandis, who rarely come to literary festivals, should want to stop others from listening to Rushdie’s views.
When the Satanic Verses comes up in debate, it is rarely the book that is discussed. As with many other kinds of forgotten history, the version of the Verses we talk about is moth-eaten, fragmentary, the complexity of a novel about migration, magic, angels and devils, the certainties of religion and madness reduced to the simplistic idea that this is a blasphemous book.
In the two decades since the Satanic Verses were banned, it has become increasingly hard to discuss the idea Rushdie puts forward in his work, which is the idea that doubt is necessary and valuable. But in that time, India has also moved closer to accepting, blindly and without much fuss, a worryingly widespread belief. This is the belief that at worst, questioning any faith or religion is in itself a kind of blasphemy—and at best, it’s an esoteric activity that the majority can safely ignore.
In 2007, Rushdie spoke at Jaipur, to a packed audience. He touched upon the silences in the official histories of Kashmir, on meeting some of the men responsible for the Gujarat riots, on growing up among “extremely practicing but incredibly open-minded Muslims” in his family. He spoke about authors and books, writing and reading, and all the other things you hope to hear from writers.
In 2012, I don’t know what he would want to speak about: literature, free speech, fables, memoir writing, perhaps. But I do know that, like so many other readers, I want to hear what he has to say, and it would be a great loss if the manufactured controversy around his visit silenced his voice, yet again.
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
In all the claims made for Chetan Bhagat, tireless father of the Indian bestseller, this is one you will never hear: he disturbs the peace. In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just this: he disturbs the peace.
Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 (‘Love. Corruption. Ambition.’) is, like his four previous novels, reassuringly familiar and comfortably accurate in its reflection of contemporary Indian concerns. The obsession with success, the difficulties of modern relationships, small town heroes battling a corrupt system—every one of his blockbuster novels articulates the concerns of the civic-minded Indian with absolute fidelity, and not one offers anything in the nature of a revolutionary or subversive idea.
Chetan Bhagat is the most visible face of the unchallenging new Indian bestseller, comfortable in its certainties, mildly anti-intellectual. Most of the criticism of this school of writing has focused on its lack of grammar and style. This is less obvious in Bhagat’s own writing—pedestrian to a fault, but positively literate when compared to the bestsellers from Shrishti Books.
Srishti’s line of books might be summarized as the revenge of the inarticulate on the literate, and have eloquent titles: ‘Sum Thing of a Mocktale: At JNU Where Kurta Fell In Love With Jeans’, ‘Ouch! That Hearts!’ These books conceal a secret contempt for the reader, assuming that s/he is no longer deserving of even the basic courtesies of grammar and fluency.
From Bhagat to fantasy writer Amish Tripathi to the Srishti authors, none of these writers have built their careers by challenging the accepted wisdom of their times. The argument for welcoming Rushdie to Jaipur is a simple one. His early works, which include Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses, are unsettling and uncomfortable, and we need that discomfort much more in 2012 than we need the safe formulas of the new bestsellers.
The opposition to Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Festival comes from theologians at the Darul Uloom Deoband who have in all probability not read his books, and who would probably be made very uncomfortable if they did. Midnight’s Children tears up the textbook version of Indian Independence; one of the ways to counter, for instance, the hagiography of the Gandhi family, those full-page ads featuring Indira and her progeny is to read Rushdie’s portrait of the Widow and what she did during the Emergency.
But in these times, there are other writers who continue to write against the grain of the official histories—the more official, the less likely to be true. Amitav Ghosh’s Opium War series swings the perspective around to the Indian view, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim stands (as Rushdie’s Shame did some two decades ago) as a reproach to those who would deny the bloody history of Bangladesh.
There are fewer writers who write against the grain of religion. Tahmima Anam is one of them, and The Good Muslim is a mercilessly accurate exploration of two kinds of tyranny—the tyranny of the righteously faithful, and the twinned tyranny of the righteous liberal who stands against the excesses of faith. In many ways, Anam writes against the backdrop of the question Rushdie asked many years ago, when he wrote Satanic Verses.
Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
Doubt.
This brief meditation lies at the heart of the controversy over the Satanic Verses, which has extended into the present and ridiculous debate over whether Rushdie should be “allowed” to attend Jaipur. The real question is why the Deobandis, who rarely come to literary festivals, should want to stop others from listening to Rushdie’s views.
When the Satanic Verses comes up in debate, it is rarely the book that is discussed. As with many other kinds of forgotten history, the version of the Verses we talk about is moth-eaten, fragmentary, the complexity of a novel about migration, magic, angels and devils, the certainties of religion and madness reduced to the simplistic idea that this is a blasphemous book.
In the two decades since the Satanic Verses were banned, it has become increasingly hard to discuss the idea Rushdie puts forward in his work, which is the idea that doubt is necessary and valuable. But in that time, India has also moved closer to accepting, blindly and without much fuss, a worryingly widespread belief. This is the belief that at worst, questioning any faith or religion is in itself a kind of blasphemy—and at best, it’s an esoteric activity that the majority can safely ignore.
In 2007, Rushdie spoke at Jaipur, to a packed audience. He touched upon the silences in the official histories of Kashmir, on meeting some of the men responsible for the Gujarat riots, on growing up among “extremely practicing but incredibly open-minded Muslims” in his family. He spoke about authors and books, writing and reading, and all the other things you hope to hear from writers.
In 2012, I don’t know what he would want to speak about: literature, free speech, fables, memoir writing, perhaps. But I do know that, like so many other readers, I want to hear what he has to say, and it would be a great loss if the manufactured controversy around his visit silenced his voice, yet again.
Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Speaking Volumes: Dickens and the Oriental Scene
(Carried in the Business Standard, 10 January 2012)
At the Bhowanipore cemetery in Calcutta, visitors can walk down the neat rows of graves with their tidy crosses towards the civilian section, to the plot where Charles Dickens’ son rests in peace.
Lieutenant Walter Landor Dickens was one of the young “griffs” who died early in the service of the East India Company, on New Year’s Eve, 1863. It took another year for the news to reach his father in England, a letter announcing the lieutenant’s death followed by a packet of his unpaid bills.
Two other sons were luckier—Alfred and Edward migrated successfully to Australia. Sydney Dickens died young, at 25, while pursuing a naval career—like Walter, he left his father a legacy of unpaid bills. Francis went from the Bengal Mounted Police to the Canada Mounted Police, and died in Canada in his forties. Dickens’ sons, except for Henry and Charles, were very much the children—and the casualties—of the Empire.
Dickens and Jane Austen, two otherwise entirely dissimilar authors, had this in common: the colonies emerged in their books only as absences, as the shadowy plantations that supply the fortunes of the family in Austen’s Mansfield Park or the convict ships from where Abel Magwitch escapes to meet Pip on the moors in Great Expectations. The places that offered first opportunity and then a gravestone to so many of his sons were by and large, off his fictional map.
Two hundred years after the birth of Charles Dickens, these gaps and omissions seem even more interesting. Peter Carey explored one in his disquieting 1998 novel, Jack Maggs, which told the Australian side of the convict story and featured an unpleasant but sharply drawn portrait of a Dickens-like Victorian writer, called Oates in the novel.
Dickens’s views have been widely documented, from his man-of-the-era defence of the practice of transporting convicts to the colonies—they would have a chance at a second life, away from the horrors of English prisons, in a new country. Peter Carey saw it differently: “The experience was to be cast out and flung to the other end of the Earth, and they really were like abandoned children… [The ships had] people chained and dead in the hold. And nobody wants to think of who was in the hold.”
It would be so easy to assume that Dickens was racist, if you take the silences as significant, or look more closely at his views of the 1857 Mutiny. But Dickens, of all the Victorians, stretched his imagination as far as it could go, forcing his readers to imagine the lives of orphans, or the children who fuelled the engines of Victorian factories, or clerks and scriveners. His imagination and his empathy, like many other men of his time, stopped at the borders of Britain.
In the aftermath of 1857, many British writers in India wrote with eloquence and anguish of what they saw as the precious (if betrayed) trust between the Indians and the British. But the reaction at “home” in England was far more vehement for the first ten years, with the writers and journalists of the day expressing their opinion about the treacherous natives.
Dickens was very much a man of his times, writing to his friend Angela-Burdett Coutts in a now infamous letter in 1857: “And I wish that I were Commander-in-Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in The Strand, London, or in Camden Town) should be to proclaim to them in their language that I considered my holding that appointment by leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.” It’s an interesting letter—it begins by expressing a local frustration with the British gentry having disarmed the peasantry and the army politics of the day, and ends with this bloodthirsty promise.
Always the polemicist, he wrote The Perils of Certain English Prisoners in collaboration with Wilkie Collins in the same year, an allegory of which an English newspaper declared warmly: “He lays the scene of his story, not in India, but in Central America, and in the year 1744, instead of 1857. It is, however, impossible not to see that, though the venue is changed, the parties are substantially the same. The treacherous Sambos, half-negro half-Indian, too much petted and trusted, are the Sepoys; the persons employed about the silver mine are the civil servants; and the soldiers and the women stand in a position analogous to that which they occupied in the Indian revolt.”
Walter Landor Dickens had left for India in 1857, just before the rebellion began. As Claire Tomalin sets down in her biography, Dickens was very much a Victorian father, which is to say his interest in the lives of his children was sporadic, often offhand. But Walter was just 16, and it is not impossible to believe that Dickens, with his vein of sentimentality, would have had the figure of his son and other young cadets and griffins in mind when he wrote to his friend. His bigotry and bloodthirstiness were commonplace, for the times. He had other things on his mind that year, much of which was occupied with the writing and serialization of Little Dorrit.
In 1865, two years after the actual death of Walter Dickens and a year after the family is told about his end, Dickens writes again to his friend Cerjat about 1857. “Of all the many evidences that are visible of our being ill-governed, no one is so remarkable to me as our ignorance of what is going on under our Government. What will future generations think of that enormous Indian Mutiny being ripened without suspicion, until whole regiments arose and killed their officers?”
The tone is almost mild, reasonable, focused on the mistakes of the British government rather than on vengeance. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations have been written and have found their audiences; the unsuccessful Our Mutual Friend is being serialized. The anger so violently expressed in 1857 has dissipated, and for Dickens, as for most of the men of his age, the Mutiny and India and all of the colonies have receded into the far distance.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Speaking Volumes: 2011 and 2012 in books
(Published in the Business Standard, January 2, 2012)
South Asian fiction in 2011 was alive and thriving, despite premature reports of its demise. To be fair, Chetan Bhagat and the authors of bestsellers such as The Saga of Love Via Telephone Tring Tring made it ridiculously easy for even the marginally talented to look like writers of staggering genius.
Debuts of the year: Shehan Karunatilake’s Sri Lankan novel about cricket (Chinaman), Rahul Bhattacharya’s dark romp through Guyana (The Sly Company of People Who Care), Jamil Ahmad’s understated tales of the frontier (The Wandering Falcon) and Mirza Waheed’s searing chronicle of Kashmir’s faultlines (The Collaborator).
Second novels: Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim was a disquieting look at Bangladesh and the righteous rigidities of both the faithful and the liberal, while Mohammed Hanif set a love story in a lunatic asylum to heart-rending effect in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. One of the quieter and lovelier surprises of 2011 was Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, set in Ranikhet, which updated the “plain tales of the hills” genre for our times.
Three of the best: Amitav Ghosh’s very cinematic River of Smoke took his ambitious Ibis trilogy forward into the murk and confusion of the Opium War. He also endeared himself to his readers by sharing journals, photographs and anecdotes on his blog.
Jeet Thayil, once the bad boy of Bombay’s thriving poetry scene, might have a cult classic in Narcopolis, a novel that circumvents the usual Bombay tropes of the underworld and Bollywood. Its characters are all extreme outsiders, from hijras to opium addicts, and this may be the closest India will get to a version of William Burroughs’ Junkie.
The Artist of Disappearance is a delicate reminder by Anita Desai that there are subjects and lives to explore outside of Delhi and Bombay. The three novellas in The Artist of Disappearance are all richly satisfying, but the pick of them might be “Translator Translated”, where a college lecturer discovers the antidote to a life that stretches out before her like “an empty, unlit road” when she begins translating the work of an Oriya writer. “Beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary,” the author Marilynne Robinson said in an interview, and this is Anita Desai’s real gift, to make us stop and look at the ordinary again, whether it’s beautiful or filled with unbearable but commonplace loss.
Page versus screen: The other big shift of the year was the slow, but implacable, movement from the page to the screen. For most people who made the shift from the physical book to Kindles, iPads, Galaxy Tabs and other devices, the initial resistance was stronger than the actual transition.
But India often seemed ill-prepared for this shift, despite the clear and growing appetite for ebooks within the country. Many Indian publishers haven’t put their recent releases, let alone their backlists, into an acceptable ebook format. That’s shortsighted, given how ebook readers seem to be shifting from devices like the Kindle and the Sony e-Reader to reading on their tablets. A report in this paper estimates that India will see sales of 0.7-1 million tablets by end-2012 —that’s a huge base of potential readers, for publishers willing to make an effort.
With Amazon entering the Indian market, the expectation is also that ebook pricing in the country will come down drastically from its present and deeply usurious levels. (This could potentially explode piracy, but since more Indian books are now available for free and illegal download on Torrent than are available legally on Amazon, it’s really up to the publishers to treat this as an opportunity – free publicity – rather than a threat.)
In just the last year, the potential of reading on screens rather than the page showed unexpected possibilities, not just for publishers but for authors. Amazon’s Kindle Singles – short pieces, stories, news articles and poems – were wildly successful, hinting at an appetite for good literary writing that could be read in short bursts. Sites like Longread and Byliner drove an apparent revival of long-form journalism, and long-form journalism itself became the new novel — the thing every young writer aspired to be doing, often with no real understanding of what this alluring and ancient form might actually require.
In 2009, Rick Moody’s attempt to write a Twitter short story ran into technical trouble — his connected tweets, spun out over three days, were retweeted randomly. This created the kind of disconnect you’d get if you physically cut up a Nabokov short story and handed it out to readers in random paragraphs.
But all through 2011, the Nigerian writer Teju Cole pulled off a miracle with his “Small Fates”: 140-character tweets drawn from the newspapers, each poetically, crisply written, telling a self-contained story. For Twitter users inundated with too much white noise, “Small Fates” became an oasis of sorts, a resting place in the middle of Babel.
It seems unlikely that the physical book will die just yet, but the growing and worldwide shift from page to screen may be unexpectedly beneficial. There hasn’t been a really new writing form since the novel, now several centuries old. Perhaps the screens will deliver where hypertext failed.
Speaking Volumes: 2011's best S Asian non-fiction
(Published in the Business Standard, December 27, 2011)
From the biography of a killer disease to a tale of three lovers and one murder, the Opium Wars to the life of a woman who found madness instead of God, this year’s non-fiction by Indians or set in Asia took a wide view of the world. What follows is a highly eclectic selection.
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Deborah Baker, Penguin): The author photo of Maryam Jameelah, writes Baker, was that of “a shapeless black ghost: not even her eyes could be seen behind the dark folds of her veil”. Under the careful scrutiny of Baker, the convert came into sharper focus: Maryam Jameelah was born to a Jewish family, fled her home and faith in search of a truer religion, became a disciple of the fiery Islamic preacher Mawdoodi and stumbled between apparent schizophrenia and a state of temporary belonging.
The Convert is one of the most searching biographies of recent times, in the uncomfortable questions it asks about faith and the certainties of both West and East, and in Baker’s final, disconcerting encounters with the real Jameelah, born Margaret Marcus, who lives in Pakistan today.
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Julia Lovell, Picador): Lovell is one of the few historians of the 19th century Opium Wars who has an understanding of the two competing views of the battles between China and Britain. Her lucid, complex account is finely detailed — and for added enjoyment, it should be read alongside Amitav Ghosh’s fictional trilogy, the Ibis saga, set against the same background and period.
The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster): The jubilant acclaim Mukherjee received in India for his monumental biography of cancer belied the fact that there is little Indian about the book itself. Mukherjee’s research into the history of cancer was all developed and conducted in the US.
But this minor quibble shouldn’t detract from his achievement: this is one of the most illuminating and moving books of the year. The quotations from Herodotus and the personal stories from patients give this already impressive biography even more intimacy.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit Banerji/Esther Duflo, Random House): Why would a kilo of dal be enough incentive for families in Udaipur to complete an immunisation programme? How complex are the choices made by really poor families, and how can that decision-making be improved? Duflo and Banerji offer a new way to think about and address poverty. Constantly updated with new research from India, China and elsewhere, their website has grown into a resource that complements but goes beyond the book.
A Free Man (Aman Sethi, Random House): For five years, Aman Sethi followed the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor in Delhi, and attempted successive interviews, often abortive. What began as a promising research project grew into this biography of a labourer, one of the millions of migrants who flock to the capital in search of work. Ashraf, with his philosophical bent and a Chekhovian approach to life, opens up another city for Sethi and his readers, one where you can live a life of azaadi (freedom) and akelapan (loneliness).
The Red Market (Scott Carney, William Morrow): The hair shorn from devotees at the Tirupati temple forms the centre of a brisk trade in wigs; less well known is the red market in human wombs, tissues and remains. His investigation of the vampiric harvesting of blood in parts of India was grimly shocking; the ins and outs of the skeleton business are equally unsettling. But what raises this book above ordinary journalism is Carney’s ability to ask the darker and more uncomfortable moral questions, about the ethics of the surrogacy business as well as more obvious crimes.
Death in Mumbai (Meenal Baghel, Random House): Instead of treating the murder of Neeraj Grover as a sensational crime of passion, Baghel asks a simple question: what would make an aspiring model, Maria Susairaj, and her naval officer boyfriend kill her former lover, hack his corpse into pieces, and look for a cold-blooded cover-up?
It’s the normal, small-town backbeat to the lives and aspirations of Grover and Susairaj that makes the murder doubly chilling, and Baghel quietly draws a picture of a generation growing up in Mumbai, unmoored but easily seduced by the city’s promise of making it big. As with Sonia Faleiro’s 2010 Beautiful Thing, Death in Mumbai is another small indicator that Indian writers are finding their voices outside of the enclaves of fiction.
Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Naresh Fernandes, Roli Books): It was about 15 years ago that Naresh Fernandes began wondering about the backstories to the musicians who lit up Bombay’s jazz age. For years afterwards, friends and acquaintances would receive unexpected presents: MP3s of Lorna’s sinuously honeyed voice singing Goan anthems to love and drunkards, for instance. It seems unfair for Bombay to have two unforgettable city biographies coming out in the same year, but Fernandes’ homage to the city’s jazz age captures Bombay in swing time. The men and women who lit up the city, the era of “music without birth control”, the clubs and the small tragedies — all of these are captured perfectly. Get the book, and the soundtrack.
Speaking Volumes: 2011's best S Asian non-fiction
(Published in the Business Standard, December 27, 2011)
From the biography of a killer disease to a tale of three lovers and one murder, the Opium Wars to the life of a woman who found madness instead of God, this year’s non-fiction by Indians or set in Asia took a wide view of the world. What follows is a highly eclectic selection.
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Deborah Baker, Penguin): The author photo of Maryam Jameelah, writes Baker, was that of “a shapeless black ghost: not even her eyes could be seen behind the dark folds of her veil”. Under the careful scrutiny of Baker, the convert came into sharper focus: Maryam Jameelah was born to a Jewish family, fled her home and faith in search of a truer religion, became a disciple of the fiery Islamic preacher Mawdoodi and stumbled between apparent schizophrenia and a state of temporary belonging.
The Convert is one of the most searching biographies of recent times, in the uncomfortable questions it asks about faith and the certainties of both West and East, and in Baker’s final, disconcerting encounters with the real Jameelah, born Margaret Marcus, who lives in Pakistan today.
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Julia Lovell, Picador): Lovell is one of the few historians of the 19th century Opium Wars who has an understanding of the two competing views of the battles between China and Britain. Her lucid, complex account is finely detailed — and for added enjoyment, it should be read alongside Amitav Ghosh’s fictional trilogy, the Ibis saga, set against the same background and period.
The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster): The jubilant acclaim Mukherjee received in India for his monumental biography of cancer belied the fact that there is little Indian about the book itself. Mukherjee’s research into the history of cancer was all developed and conducted in the US.
But this minor quibble shouldn’t detract from his achievement: this is one of the most illuminating and moving books of the year. The quotations from Herodotus and the personal stories from patients give this already impressive biography even more intimacy.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit Banerji/Esther Duflo, Random House): Why would a kilo of dal be enough incentive for families in Udaipur to complete an immunisation programme? How complex are the choices made by really poor families, and how can that decision-making be improved? Duflo and Banerji offer a new way to think about and address poverty. Constantly updated with new research from India, China and elsewhere, their website has grown into a resource that complements but goes beyond the book.
A Free Man (Aman Sethi, Random House): For five years, Aman Sethi followed the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor in Delhi, and attempted successive interviews, often abortive. What began as a promising research project grew into this biography of a labourer, one of the millions of migrants who flock to the capital in search of work. Ashraf, with his philosophical bent and a Chekhovian approach to life, opens up another city for Sethi and his readers, one where you can live a life of azaadi (freedom) and akelapan (loneliness).
The Red Market (Scott Carney, William Morrow): The hair shorn from devotees at the Tirupati temple forms the centre of a brisk trade in wigs; less well known is the red market in human wombs, tissues and remains. His investigation of the vampiric harvesting of blood in parts of India was grimly shocking; the ins and outs of the skeleton business are equally unsettling. But what raises this book above ordinary journalism is Carney’s ability to ask the darker and more uncomfortable moral questions, about the ethics of the surrogacy business as well as more obvious crimes.
Death in Mumbai (Meenal Baghel, Random House): Instead of treating the murder of Neeraj Grover as a sensational crime of passion, Baghel asks a simple question: what would make an aspiring model, Maria Susairaj, and her naval officer boyfriend kill her former lover, hack his corpse into pieces, and look for a cold-blooded cover-up?
It’s the normal, small-town backbeat to the lives and aspirations of Grover and Susairaj that makes the murder doubly chilling, and Baghel quietly draws a picture of a generation growing up in Mumbai, unmoored but easily seduced by the city’s promise of making it big. As with Sonia Faleiro’s 2010 Beautiful Thing, Death in Mumbai is another small indicator that Indian writers are finding their voices outside of the enclaves of fiction.
Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Naresh Fernandes, Roli Books): It was about 15 years ago that Naresh Fernandes began wondering about the backstories to the musicians who lit up Bombay’s jazz age. For years afterwards, friends and acquaintances would receive unexpected presents: MP3s of Lorna’s sinuously honeyed voice singing Goan anthems to love and drunkards, for instance. It seems unfair for Bombay to have two unforgettable city biographies coming out in the same year, but Fernandes’ homage to the city’s jazz age captures Bombay in swing time. The men and women who lit up the city, the era of “music without birth control”, the clubs and the small tragedies — all of these are captured perfectly. Get the book, and the soundtrack.
From the biography of a killer disease to a tale of three lovers and one murder, the Opium Wars to the life of a woman who found madness instead of God, this year’s non-fiction by Indians or set in Asia took a wide view of the world. What follows is a highly eclectic selection.
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Deborah Baker, Penguin): The author photo of Maryam Jameelah, writes Baker, was that of “a shapeless black ghost: not even her eyes could be seen behind the dark folds of her veil”. Under the careful scrutiny of Baker, the convert came into sharper focus: Maryam Jameelah was born to a Jewish family, fled her home and faith in search of a truer religion, became a disciple of the fiery Islamic preacher Mawdoodi and stumbled between apparent schizophrenia and a state of temporary belonging.
The Convert is one of the most searching biographies of recent times, in the uncomfortable questions it asks about faith and the certainties of both West and East, and in Baker’s final, disconcerting encounters with the real Jameelah, born Margaret Marcus, who lives in Pakistan today.
The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Julia Lovell, Picador): Lovell is one of the few historians of the 19th century Opium Wars who has an understanding of the two competing views of the battles between China and Britain. Her lucid, complex account is finely detailed — and for added enjoyment, it should be read alongside Amitav Ghosh’s fictional trilogy, the Ibis saga, set against the same background and period.
The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster): The jubilant acclaim Mukherjee received in India for his monumental biography of cancer belied the fact that there is little Indian about the book itself. Mukherjee’s research into the history of cancer was all developed and conducted in the US.
But this minor quibble shouldn’t detract from his achievement: this is one of the most illuminating and moving books of the year. The quotations from Herodotus and the personal stories from patients give this already impressive biography even more intimacy.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit Banerji/Esther Duflo, Random House): Why would a kilo of dal be enough incentive for families in Udaipur to complete an immunisation programme? How complex are the choices made by really poor families, and how can that decision-making be improved? Duflo and Banerji offer a new way to think about and address poverty. Constantly updated with new research from India, China and elsewhere, their website has grown into a resource that complements but goes beyond the book.
A Free Man (Aman Sethi, Random House): For five years, Aman Sethi followed the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor in Delhi, and attempted successive interviews, often abortive. What began as a promising research project grew into this biography of a labourer, one of the millions of migrants who flock to the capital in search of work. Ashraf, with his philosophical bent and a Chekhovian approach to life, opens up another city for Sethi and his readers, one where you can live a life of azaadi (freedom) and akelapan (loneliness).
The Red Market (Scott Carney, William Morrow): The hair shorn from devotees at the Tirupati temple forms the centre of a brisk trade in wigs; less well known is the red market in human wombs, tissues and remains. His investigation of the vampiric harvesting of blood in parts of India was grimly shocking; the ins and outs of the skeleton business are equally unsettling. But what raises this book above ordinary journalism is Carney’s ability to ask the darker and more uncomfortable moral questions, about the ethics of the surrogacy business as well as more obvious crimes.
Death in Mumbai (Meenal Baghel, Random House): Instead of treating the murder of Neeraj Grover as a sensational crime of passion, Baghel asks a simple question: what would make an aspiring model, Maria Susairaj, and her naval officer boyfriend kill her former lover, hack his corpse into pieces, and look for a cold-blooded cover-up?
It’s the normal, small-town backbeat to the lives and aspirations of Grover and Susairaj that makes the murder doubly chilling, and Baghel quietly draws a picture of a generation growing up in Mumbai, unmoored but easily seduced by the city’s promise of making it big. As with Sonia Faleiro’s 2010 Beautiful Thing, Death in Mumbai is another small indicator that Indian writers are finding their voices outside of the enclaves of fiction.
Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Naresh Fernandes, Roli Books): It was about 15 years ago that Naresh Fernandes began wondering about the backstories to the musicians who lit up Bombay’s jazz age. For years afterwards, friends and acquaintances would receive unexpected presents: MP3s of Lorna’s sinuously honeyed voice singing Goan anthems to love and drunkards, for instance. It seems unfair for Bombay to have two unforgettable city biographies coming out in the same year, but Fernandes’ homage to the city’s jazz age captures Bombay in swing time. The men and women who lit up the city, the era of “music without birth control”, the clubs and the small tragedies — all of these are captured perfectly. Get the book, and the soundtrack.
Speaking Volumes: So long, and thanks for all the fish
(Published in the Business Standard, December 20, 2011.)
Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children’s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.
George Whitman, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company: “The rumour spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children,” wrote Jeremy Mercer of George Whitman’s bookstore.
Whitman had soup, dubious pancakes and books on offer for all who came; and Shakespeare & Company may be the only bookstore in the world to have its own, official song. “If you ever come to Paris/ On a cold and rainy night/ And find the Shakespeare store/ It can be a welcome sight…”
Indira Goswami: Better known to the young writers and countless friends who found shelter, companionship and a link to “home” in Assam as Mamoni Raisom, Indira Goswami’s novels and other writings defined Ahomiya literature for at least three decades.
In her Unfinished Autobiography, she wrote that all the places she loved were riverine places, from the Ahiron in Madhya Pradesh and the Chandrabhaga in Kashmir to the Thames in London, as though the Brahmaputra had marked her fiction indelibly. “Without my pen, I would die,” she said many years later.
Christopher Hitchens: It was typical of Hitchens, perhaps the true literary heir to Kingsley Amis and Hunter S Thompson, that the Twitter account he started about a year before his death from cancer ran under the flag of @hitchbitch. Hitchens was unabashedly outspoken, the last of the grand old hacks, stubbornly defending his support of the Iraq war, ferocious in his attacks on organised religion and what he saw as the iniquities of faith.
His literary journalism was of a piece with the man — laddish, opinionated, sharp. There would be no RIPs for Hitch; he had already written his epitaphs, in utterly unsentimental examinations of the indignities of late-stage cancer. Of his obituarists, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were among the best, paying homage, as Rushdie put it, to a “great voice” and a “great heart”.
Srilal Shukla: Of all the satire and fiction Srilal Shukla wrote, the one that would last was Raag Darbari, written in the late 1960s, still as trenchant and biting today, over four decades later. His protagonist, Vaidyaji, was the philosophical manipulator who knew exactly how to make a corrupt system work for him. Shukla’s Shivpalganj was an amalgam of the many places he had known and worked in as a government servant.
There was a classic moment at the Neemrana literary festival, where a TV anchor asked Shukla to step out of the frame so that they could get footage of Naipaul. The cameraman was horrified. “Don’t you know who this is?” he told the anchor, who recognised neither Shukla nor the mention of Raag Darbari. Giving up, the cameraman said in exasperation, “This is Naipaul’s baap!” But Shuklaji had already left, amused rather than offended.
H R F Keating: In 1999, the creator of Inspector Ghote published an odd, now forgotten book: Jack, the Lady-Killer. This crime novel in verse was inspired by Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, though Keating confessed he couldn’t match Seth’s rhymes. (The title was taken from The Golden Gate: “The old folks settle down with books:/ He with Tom Jones, she with a thriller/ Entitled Jack the Lady-Killer.”)
This was not the first time Keating had turned to India for inspiration. Inspector Ghote was born in the early 1960s, out of a romantic fascination with a country Keating had read about but never visited. Ghote’s name was borrowed from a George Bernard Shaw diatribe about the illogic of the English language, where you could spell “fish” as “ghoti” — using “gh” as in tough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in mention. But the real allure of Inspector Ghote, for Keating, was that the anarchy of the Bombay CID allowed him to get away from the more stifling conventions of the English detective novel.
Ghote was a good man in a corrupt world, intent on following “the proper procedure” through a delightfully varied list of cases. By the early 2000s (Bribery, Corruption Also and Breaking and Entering), Ghote had become an anachronism, and references to Keating were almost always prefaced with the word “old-fashioned”; but he is still remembered with affection.
Diana Wynne Jones: The year was a hard one for fantasy-lovers, who lost Anne McCaffrey and Russell Hoban as well as Jones. Jones’ fantasies, from the Chrestomanci series to Howl’s Moving Castle, were guaranteed free of mawkishness and predictability. She wrote for the child she had been herself; frighteningly bright, alive and alert to the world, already aware that magic might have its dark side and fairies might have their own twisted agenda. “Writing for adults you have to keep reminding them of what is going on,” she had said. “The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.”
Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children’s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.
George Whitman, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company: “The rumour spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children,” wrote Jeremy Mercer of George Whitman’s bookstore.
Whitman had soup, dubious pancakes and books on offer for all who came; and Shakespeare & Company may be the only bookstore in the world to have its own, official song. “If you ever come to Paris/ On a cold and rainy night/ And find the Shakespeare store/ It can be a welcome sight…”
Indira Goswami: Better known to the young writers and countless friends who found shelter, companionship and a link to “home” in Assam as Mamoni Raisom, Indira Goswami’s novels and other writings defined Ahomiya literature for at least three decades.
In her Unfinished Autobiography, she wrote that all the places she loved were riverine places, from the Ahiron in Madhya Pradesh and the Chandrabhaga in Kashmir to the Thames in London, as though the Brahmaputra had marked her fiction indelibly. “Without my pen, I would die,” she said many years later.
Christopher Hitchens: It was typical of Hitchens, perhaps the true literary heir to Kingsley Amis and Hunter S Thompson, that the Twitter account he started about a year before his death from cancer ran under the flag of @hitchbitch. Hitchens was unabashedly outspoken, the last of the grand old hacks, stubbornly defending his support of the Iraq war, ferocious in his attacks on organised religion and what he saw as the iniquities of faith.
His literary journalism was of a piece with the man — laddish, opinionated, sharp. There would be no RIPs for Hitch; he had already written his epitaphs, in utterly unsentimental examinations of the indignities of late-stage cancer. Of his obituarists, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were among the best, paying homage, as Rushdie put it, to a “great voice” and a “great heart”.
Srilal Shukla: Of all the satire and fiction Srilal Shukla wrote, the one that would last was Raag Darbari, written in the late 1960s, still as trenchant and biting today, over four decades later. His protagonist, Vaidyaji, was the philosophical manipulator who knew exactly how to make a corrupt system work for him. Shukla’s Shivpalganj was an amalgam of the many places he had known and worked in as a government servant.
There was a classic moment at the Neemrana literary festival, where a TV anchor asked Shukla to step out of the frame so that they could get footage of Naipaul. The cameraman was horrified. “Don’t you know who this is?” he told the anchor, who recognised neither Shukla nor the mention of Raag Darbari. Giving up, the cameraman said in exasperation, “This is Naipaul’s baap!” But Shuklaji had already left, amused rather than offended.
H R F Keating: In 1999, the creator of Inspector Ghote published an odd, now forgotten book: Jack, the Lady-Killer. This crime novel in verse was inspired by Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, though Keating confessed he couldn’t match Seth’s rhymes. (The title was taken from The Golden Gate: “The old folks settle down with books:/ He with Tom Jones, she with a thriller/ Entitled Jack the Lady-Killer.”)
This was not the first time Keating had turned to India for inspiration. Inspector Ghote was born in the early 1960s, out of a romantic fascination with a country Keating had read about but never visited. Ghote’s name was borrowed from a George Bernard Shaw diatribe about the illogic of the English language, where you could spell “fish” as “ghoti” — using “gh” as in tough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in mention. But the real allure of Inspector Ghote, for Keating, was that the anarchy of the Bombay CID allowed him to get away from the more stifling conventions of the English detective novel.
Ghote was a good man in a corrupt world, intent on following “the proper procedure” through a delightfully varied list of cases. By the early 2000s (Bribery, Corruption Also and Breaking and Entering), Ghote had become an anachronism, and references to Keating were almost always prefaced with the word “old-fashioned”; but he is still remembered with affection.
Diana Wynne Jones: The year was a hard one for fantasy-lovers, who lost Anne McCaffrey and Russell Hoban as well as Jones. Jones’ fantasies, from the Chrestomanci series to Howl’s Moving Castle, were guaranteed free of mawkishness and predictability. She wrote for the child she had been herself; frighteningly bright, alive and alert to the world, already aware that magic might have its dark side and fairies might have their own twisted agenda. “Writing for adults you have to keep reminding them of what is going on,” she had said. “The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.”
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