(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)
Fiction: It’s a great year for the novel of ideas, with writers from Ian McEwan to Gregory Roberts exploring new territory.
Roberts wisely allowed a long gap to elapse after the runaway success of Shantaram, but his new novel, The Mountain Shadow (Hachette) will still invite comparisons. Mountain of Shadows continues Lin’s story in a far more stylised way; a meeting with eight men will force him back into adventure and intrigue. Will this be as good—or if not, as bulky—as Shantaram? Ian McEwan is on familiar ground with Solar (Random House), where a scientist faces the wrath of the media for analysing the difference between male and female brains.
Dom DeLillo’s critics weren’t impressed with his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, but the advance buzz about Point Omega (Scribner) seems positive. DeLillo has a chance to take a more nuanced look at war and terrorism through the eyes of his protagonist, a secret war advisor. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ promises—and has already delivered—controversy. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Hachette) already has literary groupies genuflecting in advance, and with new collections of short stories by Hanif Kureishi and T C Boyle, the cup of the inkstained wretches of this world runneth over. After a long silence, Thomas Keneally offers a novel—The People’s Train, which features a Russian revolutionary exiled to Australia.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s brand of dark satire is back in Way To Go (Penguin), while fans of “headline fiction” might like Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café (Random House)—a novel of Nepal that starts with the royal murders and continues through the current conflicts. Anita Nair (Lessons in Forgetting, HarperCollins), Namita Devidayal (The Mother, Random House), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (One Amazing Thing, Penguin) and Shobhaa De (Sethji, Penguin) all have new fiction out in 2010.
Keep an eye out for Omair Ahmed’s Jimmy The Terrorist (Penguin), and for these debut writers—Soumya Bhattacharya (If I Could Tell You, Tranquebar) and Tishani Doshi (The Pleasure Seekers, Penguin).And fans of historical fiction have Humayun’s travails, as the duo of writers known as Alex Rutherford offer the second volume in the Empire of the Moghul series—Brothers at War. On the literary front, Jeet Thayil and Dilip Simeon should also be out with riveting first novels, on addiction and revolution respectively.
Indian non-fiction: Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul (Rupa) is a fascinating account of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim—well worth reading. Somnath Chatterjee’s Memoirs of a Parliamentarian (HarperCollins) promises to be more candid than most politicians’ accounts of their lives and times. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin) should be every bit as melodramatic as the title. David Rhodes might top the blood-and-action stakes with his memoir of being kidnapped by the Taliban, A Gift of God: The Story of a Kidnapping (Penguin).
APJ Abdul Kalam’s The Scientific Indian (Penguin) is a reader-friendly guide to issues like water harvesting and space exploration. It’ll probably be as popular, but perhaps not as riveting, as neurologist V Ramachandran’s end-of-2010 release, Adventures in Neuroscience (Random House).
Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation (Rupa) is about the fault lines between the socialist India of the ‘80s and the consumerist India of the ‘90s—it promises to earn out Mehrotra’s record advance. Later in the year, Salil Tripathi’s Silent Spaces (Tranquebar) takes a literary journey across the globe, with writers from Marquez to Rushdie as his guides. And in autumn, Ramachandra Guha examines The Makers of Modern India (Penguin). Jug Suraiya brings the year to a close with his wry brand of humour in his memoir, Times of My Life (Tranquebar).
Business books: Michael Lewis’ The Big Short is probably one of the most anticipated books of 2010—the Liars’ Poker author does a consummate job of unravelling the current global financial crisis. On the subject of fallen magnates, Kingshuk Nag takes a look at The Double Life of Ramalinga Raju (HarperCollins).The Luxe Book (Hachette) by Suman Tarafdar and Taneesha Kulsreshtha offers a little relief, with a look at high-end brands.
Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s Nano-vation (Penguin) is the authorised version of the Tata’s small car story, with an emphasis on the good news rather than the political upheaval in Nandigram. RC Bhargava offers The Maruti Story (HarperCollins), just as we bid farewell to the tiny 800. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alam Srinivas explore The Ambanis and the Battle of India (Penguin) and how gas pipelines became the war zone between the two brothers. SP Hinduja’s What’s Your Problem? (HarperCollins), promises to diverge from the hagiographical approach to business family history, as he mixes family stories with his personal brand of philosophy. There will be a slew of China books on the market, as always, but the most promising is probably veteran business journalist Raghav Behl’s The Red Elephant: The Story of India and China (Penguin).
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The Business Standard 50 Best Books of the Year: 2
(Published in the Business Standard's special year-end issue on books, December 2009)
THE NON-FICTION LIST:
The Idea of Justice: Amartya Sen (Viking/ Penguin)
One of the most widely discussed books of the year seeks to redefine justice as an active goal rather than a passive abstraction, via the Indian concept of “neeti”. The Nobel laureate’s arguments are succinct, thought-provoking—and always entertaining.
The Case for God: Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head)
In a decade where faith has come under attack from the Dawkinites, the former nun makes a plausible and persuasive case for the continued existence of religion, if not the Almighty.
The Hindus: Wendy Doniger (Viking/ Penguin)
The eminent Sanskrit scholar goes back to the Vedas and the few clues from the Indus Valley civilisation among other sources to trace the development of the multiple ideas of Hinduism. Enjoy the splendid digression into the role of dogs, cows and other animals in the scriptures.
Nine Lives: William Dalrymple (Viking/ Penguin)
This thinking person's tour through India's vast array of religions explores nine different ways of finding faith, from Sufis to Tantrics. Dalrymple's relaxed, casually conversational style draws one effortlessly into an examination of faith in all its complications, from religious passion to the faultlines of competing beliefs and the surrender of one's life
in the name of, and with the permission of, God."
Lords of Finance: Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Perhaps the best business and financial book of the year, Liaquat Ahamed offers a riveting study of concentrated power, hubris and the collapse of apparently invulnerable financial systems.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made: Anne C Heller (Doubleday)
The power and influence of Ayn Rand has outlasted her death, despite the frequent literary dismissals of her work. Anne Heller offers a fascinating look at the ways in which Ayn Rand was shaped and in which she shaped the world around her in return.
The Last Empress: Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)
The Dragon Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is an ambiguous figure. This exhaustive and well-written biography explores the workings of the world of the last empress of China in illuminating detail.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life: Carol Slenicka (Scribner)
This stunning work offers deep insight into the life and relationships of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, with special emphasis on Carver’s often controversial relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.
Open: Andre Agassi (Knopf)
Agassi’s confessions of drug use overshadowed the other aspects of his biography. The tennis great unveils the darker side of sport, and of parental ambition in an oddly moving memoir.
Curfewed Night: Basharat Peer (Random House)
This memoir of growing up in Kashmir provides a personal view of its troubled history. Peer’s background as a journalist allows him to blend the personal and the political with consummate ease.
Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Taseer explores the faith of his fathers through the prickly terrain of family history via the faultlines of today, as Islam reveals its multiple faces.
A Place Within: M G Vassanji (Penguin/ Viking)
The Canadian writer’s explorations of India become a quest to understand the roots of his work, as he meets some of his most revered fellow practitioners and thinkers.
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity: Sam Miller (Jonathan Cape)
Miller’s evocation of Delhi’s history, past and present, makes this book the perfect guide. Take it on a long walk around Old and Brashly New Delhi, and you won’t be disappointed.
Dreaming in Hindi: Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin)
This unusual memoir explores what it means to find a new language—and a country—in midlife.
Rethinking Hindu Identity: D N Jha (Equinox)
An outspoken scholar presents his view of the shaping of an often rigid, often troubled view of Hinduism.
Fear and Forgiveness: Harsh Mander (Penguin)
The Gujarat riots and their aftermath, examined by one of the most conscientious voices among India’s citizens.
The Difficulty of Being Good: Gurcharan Das (Viking/ Penguin)
Lessons in contemporary dharma, via the Mahabharata, take us through the squabbles of the Ambanis, lessons from Arjuna on the battlefield, and the importance of living well versus the need to win.
The Ethical Worker: Subroto Bagchi (Penguin)
The management guru explored ways of bringing values into a workplace that might often seem to place ethics below profits, in this final work.
The Satyam Saga: Bhupesh Bhandari and others (BS Books)
A comprehensive look at the rise and fall of India’s IT behemoth. (Disclaimer: This book was compiled by a team of Business Standard journalists; I decided to let it stay on the list despite the potential conflicts of interest because of the number of business gurus who recommended this to me.)
Baulsphere: Mimlu Sen (Random House)
Travels with the faith-intoxicated singers of Bengal, written by an insider to the world of the Bauls.
MS & Radha: Gowri Ramnarayan (Wordcraft)
One of India’s most insightful critics pens a beautiful evocation of a relationship between a musician and a connoisseur of Indian music.
An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R C Dutt (Meenakshi Mukherjee) (Penguin)
A classic biography of an Indian pioneer from the late and respected critic.
THE NON-FICTION LIST:
The Idea of Justice: Amartya Sen (Viking/ Penguin)
One of the most widely discussed books of the year seeks to redefine justice as an active goal rather than a passive abstraction, via the Indian concept of “neeti”. The Nobel laureate’s arguments are succinct, thought-provoking—and always entertaining.
The Case for God: Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head)
In a decade where faith has come under attack from the Dawkinites, the former nun makes a plausible and persuasive case for the continued existence of religion, if not the Almighty.
The Hindus: Wendy Doniger (Viking/ Penguin)
The eminent Sanskrit scholar goes back to the Vedas and the few clues from the Indus Valley civilisation among other sources to trace the development of the multiple ideas of Hinduism. Enjoy the splendid digression into the role of dogs, cows and other animals in the scriptures.
Nine Lives: William Dalrymple (Viking/ Penguin)
This thinking person's tour through India's vast array of religions explores nine different ways of finding faith, from Sufis to Tantrics. Dalrymple's relaxed, casually conversational style draws one effortlessly into an examination of faith in all its complications, from religious passion to the faultlines of competing beliefs and the surrender of one's life
in the name of, and with the permission of, God."
Lords of Finance: Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Perhaps the best business and financial book of the year, Liaquat Ahamed offers a riveting study of concentrated power, hubris and the collapse of apparently invulnerable financial systems.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made: Anne C Heller (Doubleday)
The power and influence of Ayn Rand has outlasted her death, despite the frequent literary dismissals of her work. Anne Heller offers a fascinating look at the ways in which Ayn Rand was shaped and in which she shaped the world around her in return.
The Last Empress: Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)
The Dragon Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is an ambiguous figure. This exhaustive and well-written biography explores the workings of the world of the last empress of China in illuminating detail.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life: Carol Slenicka (Scribner)
This stunning work offers deep insight into the life and relationships of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, with special emphasis on Carver’s often controversial relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.
Open: Andre Agassi (Knopf)
Agassi’s confessions of drug use overshadowed the other aspects of his biography. The tennis great unveils the darker side of sport, and of parental ambition in an oddly moving memoir.
Curfewed Night: Basharat Peer (Random House)
This memoir of growing up in Kashmir provides a personal view of its troubled history. Peer’s background as a journalist allows him to blend the personal and the political with consummate ease.
Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Taseer explores the faith of his fathers through the prickly terrain of family history via the faultlines of today, as Islam reveals its multiple faces.
A Place Within: M G Vassanji (Penguin/ Viking)
The Canadian writer’s explorations of India become a quest to understand the roots of his work, as he meets some of his most revered fellow practitioners and thinkers.
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity: Sam Miller (Jonathan Cape)
Miller’s evocation of Delhi’s history, past and present, makes this book the perfect guide. Take it on a long walk around Old and Brashly New Delhi, and you won’t be disappointed.
Dreaming in Hindi: Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin)
This unusual memoir explores what it means to find a new language—and a country—in midlife.
Rethinking Hindu Identity: D N Jha (Equinox)
An outspoken scholar presents his view of the shaping of an often rigid, often troubled view of Hinduism.
Fear and Forgiveness: Harsh Mander (Penguin)
The Gujarat riots and their aftermath, examined by one of the most conscientious voices among India’s citizens.
The Difficulty of Being Good: Gurcharan Das (Viking/ Penguin)
Lessons in contemporary dharma, via the Mahabharata, take us through the squabbles of the Ambanis, lessons from Arjuna on the battlefield, and the importance of living well versus the need to win.
The Ethical Worker: Subroto Bagchi (Penguin)
The management guru explored ways of bringing values into a workplace that might often seem to place ethics below profits, in this final work.
The Satyam Saga: Bhupesh Bhandari and others (BS Books)
A comprehensive look at the rise and fall of India’s IT behemoth. (Disclaimer: This book was compiled by a team of Business Standard journalists; I decided to let it stay on the list despite the potential conflicts of interest because of the number of business gurus who recommended this to me.)
Baulsphere: Mimlu Sen (Random House)
Travels with the faith-intoxicated singers of Bengal, written by an insider to the world of the Bauls.
MS & Radha: Gowri Ramnarayan (Wordcraft)
One of India’s most insightful critics pens a beautiful evocation of a relationship between a musician and a connoisseur of Indian music.
An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R C Dutt (Meenakshi Mukherjee) (Penguin)
A classic biography of an Indian pioneer from the late and respected critic.
The Business Standard 50 Best Books of the Year
(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)
THE FICTION LIST:
A Gate at the Stairs: Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Moore’s novel of a woman growing up in the American Midwest is funny and heartbreaking in turn, and deserves all the praise it’s got.
Love and Obstacles: Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead)
One of the best new writers of our times puts Bosnia on the map with these taut, linked stories of immigrant longings, memories and frustrations.
Too Much Happiness: Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
One of Munro’s best collections yet, this is all the evidence you need that the short story is a thriving form, and that Munro is one of the most rewarding writers of our times.
Wolf Hall: Hillary Mantel (4th Estate)
The Booker-winning historical novel examines the political machinations and blood-and-guts of Cromwell’s time, in an age where “man is wolf to man”.
The Museum of Innocence: Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Love and obsession in Istanbul; and Pamuk collects the objects in his story in a real-life museum.
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin (Viking)
An Irish immigrant travels to 1950s America in this novel of the discovery of a country, and the making of heartwrenching but necessary choices. One of Toibin’s masterworks.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Daniyal Muenuddin (Random House)
This gently incisive first collection of short stories set in Pakistan is Tolstoyan in both range and understanding. Definitely a writer to watch.
Home: Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Few writers understand the human heart as well as Robinson. The sequel to Gilead pits faith against despair, shelter against experience, in this wise, resonant novel.
Love and Summer: William Trevor (Viking)
A woman brought up as a foundling, a man about to leave home forever; Trevor makes magic of these simple ingredients.
The City & The City: China Mieville (Del Rey)
Mieville explodes through dark and rich territory in his latest futuristic sojourn.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Javier Marias (Chatto & Windus)
The concluding part of Marias’ trilogy reinvents the Cold War spy novel, blending literary fiction with the conventions of the thriller in a spectacular mix.
The Little Stranger: Sarah Waters (Hachette)
This evocative ghost story set in a Victorian house is a classic tale of deception and quietly climactic horror.
Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
The Japanese master offers stories linked by music and musicians in this delicate and moving collection.
Summertime: J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Coetzee fictionalises Coetzee, in this tale of a South African writer seen through the eyes of the women he’s tried and failed to love.
Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Atwood sticks with SF territory in this clever, apocalyptic follow-up to Oryx and Crake.
The Children's Book: AS Byatt
Children's literature and the perils of growing up, both addressed by Byatt at the top of her form.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
A jaded journalist in Venice, a pilgrim in Varanasi: Dyer romps through this delightful novel with considerable verve.
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese (Random House)
Verghese’s first excursion into fiction is a sweeping, ambitious historical novel.
Solo: Rana Dasgupta (HarperCollins)
Skill and craft fuel this view of Europe from one of its more neglected literary corners.
The Story of a Widow: Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Picador)
Farooqi proves that he’s as good a novelist as a translator with this quiet, satisfying tale of a woman in transit.
The Immortals: Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Music forms the backbone of this intensely literary work, which showcases all of Chaudhuri’s lyrical skills.
The Storyteller’s Tale: Omair Ahmad (Penguin)
Ahmad brings back the fable in this delicate and curiously modern tale, despite its medieval setting.
The Story of My Assassins: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins)
Tejpal’s journalistic skills flesh out this ambitious novel of darkness and violence in present-day India.
(Caveat: Because of my previous association with Tranquebar as an editor, all Tranquebar picks were made on the basis of the recommendations of other reviewers and critics.)
If It Is Sweet: Mridula Koshy (Tranquebar)
The Shakti Bhatt award-winning collection of debut short stories that map the secret worlds hidden in cities as disparate as Delhi and Los Angeles.
Eunuch Park: Palash Krishna Mehrotra (Penguin)
A brilliant first collection of short stories steeped in black humour explores masculinity and the changing face of urban India.
Arzee the Dwarf: Chandrahas Choudhury (HarperCollins)
A new perspective on Bombay, from the point of view of a dwarf obsessed with a crumbling cinema hall.
A Pack of Lies: Urmilla Deshpande (Tranquebar)
A young woman discovers freedom, sensuality and identity as she struggles with a troubled family history.
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories, edited by Ruchir Joshi
India’s first contemporary collection of erotica brings in mofussil lust, Chugtai’s infamous quilt, and a very unusual wedding celebration.
THE BEST OF POPULAR FICTION: THE TOP FIVE
The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown (Doubleday)
Though the kindest word critics had for Dan Brown was “inescapable”, his latest Freemasonry-in-Washington saga hit the bestseller lists.
Two States: The Story of My Marriage: Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
India’s answer to Dan Brown explores the venerable institution of the great Indian marriage—fans love it.
Under the Dome: Stephen King (Scribner)
The horror-meister delivers one of his best thrillers yet in this SF-influenced tale set in a besieged city.
My Friend Sancho: Amit Varma (Hachette)
Varma’s first novel explores a fake encounter in Mumbai, and bridged the divide between popular and literary fiction in India.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Lisbeth Salander must clear her name of false charges in the final volume of the late Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.
THE FICTION LIST:
A Gate at the Stairs: Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Moore’s novel of a woman growing up in the American Midwest is funny and heartbreaking in turn, and deserves all the praise it’s got.
Love and Obstacles: Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead)
One of the best new writers of our times puts Bosnia on the map with these taut, linked stories of immigrant longings, memories and frustrations.
Too Much Happiness: Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
One of Munro’s best collections yet, this is all the evidence you need that the short story is a thriving form, and that Munro is one of the most rewarding writers of our times.
Wolf Hall: Hillary Mantel (4th Estate)
The Booker-winning historical novel examines the political machinations and blood-and-guts of Cromwell’s time, in an age where “man is wolf to man”.
The Museum of Innocence: Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Love and obsession in Istanbul; and Pamuk collects the objects in his story in a real-life museum.
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin (Viking)
An Irish immigrant travels to 1950s America in this novel of the discovery of a country, and the making of heartwrenching but necessary choices. One of Toibin’s masterworks.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Daniyal Muenuddin (Random House)
This gently incisive first collection of short stories set in Pakistan is Tolstoyan in both range and understanding. Definitely a writer to watch.
Home: Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Few writers understand the human heart as well as Robinson. The sequel to Gilead pits faith against despair, shelter against experience, in this wise, resonant novel.
Love and Summer: William Trevor (Viking)
A woman brought up as a foundling, a man about to leave home forever; Trevor makes magic of these simple ingredients.
The City & The City: China Mieville (Del Rey)
Mieville explodes through dark and rich territory in his latest futuristic sojourn.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Javier Marias (Chatto & Windus)
The concluding part of Marias’ trilogy reinvents the Cold War spy novel, blending literary fiction with the conventions of the thriller in a spectacular mix.
The Little Stranger: Sarah Waters (Hachette)
This evocative ghost story set in a Victorian house is a classic tale of deception and quietly climactic horror.
Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
The Japanese master offers stories linked by music and musicians in this delicate and moving collection.
Summertime: J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Coetzee fictionalises Coetzee, in this tale of a South African writer seen through the eyes of the women he’s tried and failed to love.
Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Atwood sticks with SF territory in this clever, apocalyptic follow-up to Oryx and Crake.
The Children's Book: AS Byatt
Children's literature and the perils of growing up, both addressed by Byatt at the top of her form.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
A jaded journalist in Venice, a pilgrim in Varanasi: Dyer romps through this delightful novel with considerable verve.
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese (Random House)
Verghese’s first excursion into fiction is a sweeping, ambitious historical novel.
Solo: Rana Dasgupta (HarperCollins)
Skill and craft fuel this view of Europe from one of its more neglected literary corners.
The Story of a Widow: Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Picador)
Farooqi proves that he’s as good a novelist as a translator with this quiet, satisfying tale of a woman in transit.
The Immortals: Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Music forms the backbone of this intensely literary work, which showcases all of Chaudhuri’s lyrical skills.
The Storyteller’s Tale: Omair Ahmad (Penguin)
Ahmad brings back the fable in this delicate and curiously modern tale, despite its medieval setting.
The Story of My Assassins: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins)
Tejpal’s journalistic skills flesh out this ambitious novel of darkness and violence in present-day India.
(Caveat: Because of my previous association with Tranquebar as an editor, all Tranquebar picks were made on the basis of the recommendations of other reviewers and critics.)
If It Is Sweet: Mridula Koshy (Tranquebar)
The Shakti Bhatt award-winning collection of debut short stories that map the secret worlds hidden in cities as disparate as Delhi and Los Angeles.
Eunuch Park: Palash Krishna Mehrotra (Penguin)
A brilliant first collection of short stories steeped in black humour explores masculinity and the changing face of urban India.
Arzee the Dwarf: Chandrahas Choudhury (HarperCollins)
A new perspective on Bombay, from the point of view of a dwarf obsessed with a crumbling cinema hall.
A Pack of Lies: Urmilla Deshpande (Tranquebar)
A young woman discovers freedom, sensuality and identity as she struggles with a troubled family history.
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories, edited by Ruchir Joshi
India’s first contemporary collection of erotica brings in mofussil lust, Chugtai’s infamous quilt, and a very unusual wedding celebration.
THE BEST OF POPULAR FICTION: THE TOP FIVE
The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown (Doubleday)
Though the kindest word critics had for Dan Brown was “inescapable”, his latest Freemasonry-in-Washington saga hit the bestseller lists.
Two States: The Story of My Marriage: Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
India’s answer to Dan Brown explores the venerable institution of the great Indian marriage—fans love it.
Under the Dome: Stephen King (Scribner)
The horror-meister delivers one of his best thrillers yet in this SF-influenced tale set in a besieged city.
My Friend Sancho: Amit Varma (Hachette)
Varma’s first novel explores a fake encounter in Mumbai, and bridged the divide between popular and literary fiction in India.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Lisbeth Salander must clear her name of false charges in the final volume of the late Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.
Books in 2009: What authors were reading
(From the Business Standard special year-end issue on books, published in December 2009)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
The BS Column: From Dune to Cyberabad
(Published in the Business Standard, December 8, 2009)If a future historian were to examine the ways of humanity via a library of science fiction, these would be the scholar’s conclusions. Most rocket scientists and space explorers are white and male. UFOs, ETs, alien life-forms and spaceships prefer to visit the United States of America and large parts of Europe, with the occasional foray into Japan and very rarely, deserted patches of the globe.
Astronauts and spaceship crews are chiefly drawn from the West, though an occasional Indian (usually a doctor) or Chinese member (usually a mathematically gifted technician) might find a place on board alongside the token blacks. Africans, Brazilians (and other Latin Americans), and Indonesians or Malaysians rarely explore space, though Russians often do, and even Australians might. (Canadians and New Zealanders are conspicuous by their absence.) Robots, androids and humanoids are either based on Caucasian or more infrequently Japanese models, but evil aliens may reflect certain racial stereotypes of the time.
Around 2006, SF author Ian McDonald began exploring landscapes outside the Western world as possible terrain for speculative fiction. His River of Gods offered a Balkanised India, while Brasyl travelled to both the Brazil of the future and a Brazil of the past. He’s just out with Cyberabad Days, and his vision of India of 2047 is both riveting and eerily plausible.
McDonald has travelled extensively in India over a period of years, but sees himself as a tourist rather than an old India hand. This allows him to make the occasional gora mistake, as when he refers to “fields of dhal” when “fields of masoor” might have been more accurate, but these errors are minor. What makes Cyberabad Days work as a short story collection is not just that he writes brilliant SF; it’s that he creates an incredibly recognisable view of a future India.
In the hands of a seasoned SF master, India/ Cyberabad emerges as a fractured state, torn by increasingly vicious water wars. Marriage bureaus augment the shaadi.com routine with the assistance of aeais (artificial intelligences); hijras transform into “nutes”, taking on the slick mantle of future technology; steel monkey-robots can be found on the pink walls of Jaipur; Ardhanarishva Clinics assist in gender-transformation surgery; and the rivers, down to the Ganges, are “starved and frail” across the land.
One of McDonald’s aims, as stated in his interviews, is to shift the focus of SF to the developing world—a shift that, as he says, should have happened internally, with Colombian or Bangladeshi writers, for instance, joining the phalanx of Indian SF writers. To some extent, that process is happening. Samit Basu’s Gameworld series is an unselfconscious fantasy saga set in a very Indian world, with explicitly desi references. Manjula Padmanabhan’s more recent Escape explores a dystopian world where women are exterminated as a matter of course. Padmanabhan didn’t name her country of the future, but as she says, references to food, clothes and geographical terrain make it clear that her dystopia is a very Indian one. It’s influenced by the present-day phenomenon of a skewed gender ratio caused by the killing of female foetuses and infants by Indian families who want sons, not daughters.
Authors like Anil Menon, Anshumani Ruddra and Basu also have an understanding of the workings of the international market—explicitly Indian SF and fantasy is less saleable than more conventional works set in a recognisably Western world. Anil Menon bluntly counselled Indian authors to look to a local rather than a global audience, though writers like Ashok Banker have had some success with wider audiences—Banker’s updated fantasy reworking of the Ramayana found many readers outside India. It’s not an easy market for writers in India—or Brazil—to penetrate, though, and perhaps McDonald’s success with Cyberabad Days, Brasyl and River of Gods will open those firmly shut doors a crack wider. There will need to be several McDonalds (or Orson Scott Cards) before editors and publishers abroad begin accepting SF set in the developing world.
What we need is for the wheel to come full circle. From the 1850s onwards, India saw a curious phenomenon—a healthy appetite for local science fiction, especially in Bengal and Maharashtra. Early Bengali SF writers wrote about explorations to Venus, automated homes and suitably respectful household robots. One of the great pioneers, Premendra Mitra, allowed his imagination to aoar in the other direction—outwards from India to the wider world.
In his classic Piprer Puran (Saga of the Aunts), Mitra writes of the invasion of “monstrous Ants” who bring the cities of Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador down. Their story, told in the early 20th century, is narrated by a multicultural cast: Asesh Roy, Senor Sabatini, Sukhomoy Sarkar and Don Perito. By setting his SF in Brazil and India, Ian McDonald is returning a very old compliment.
The BS Column: Faiz Ahmed Faiz: the poet in prison
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2009)
The thousands who still recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry honoured his 25th death anniversary earlier this month in various ways—through mushairas, book releases and some, Faiz-style, raised a glass of single malt to his memory.
Faiz, born some four decades before Independence, has been claimed by three countries: he was born and brought up in pre-Independence India, made the decision to remain in Pakistan, where he graced the coffee houses of Lahore for many years, and is honoured by many Bangladeshis for his impassioned poetry opposing the massacres that accompanied the bloody birth of that country.
As far as I know, there have been no celebrations of Faiz in Sargodha jail and Lyallpur jail, where he was held in solitary confinement for four years, from March 1951 onwards. Faiz was arrested as part of the Rawalpindi conspiracy, under the antiquated Bengal Regulations of 1818 that deal with crimes of sedition against the state. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a friend of Major General Akbar Khan, who led a failed coup against Liaqat Ali Khan’s government in Pakistan, but the level of his involvement in the coup was relatively low. He was one of the last of the 15 accused to be released from jail, in 1955.
As Ted Genoways has written elsewhere, Faiz’s prison experiences were perhaps the most formative in a life already shaped by history. He spent a considerable portion of the prison years in solitary confinement—an unusual experience for the man who was at the centre of gatherings of poets, writers, intellectuals and political thinkers. His wife, Alys, and he exchanged letters through these years—Faiz wrote over 140 letters to her in this time. These are collected in Dear Heart, and are well worth reading.
In 'A Prison Evening', Faiz wrote:
“This thought keeps consoling me
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed…”
The prison years, he said later, gave him quiet time to write. He produced two of his greatest works, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan nama, in this period, adapting his techniques to the exigencies of prison life. Deprived of paper and pen in solitary, Faiz composed four-line verses called q’itas instead; they were easy to memorise.
Poets seem to be imprisoned far more often than other kinds of writers, and perhaps a nation’s record on human rights might also be judged by the number of poets it holds in its cells. In the months before Faiz’s anniversary, Vietnam finally pardoned and honoured four poets who had been persecuted for their writings against the earlier regime. Two had died by the time the pardon was issued. Samina Malik, the Lyrical Terrorist, was held in Britain for her provocative but not terribly good verse extolling beheadings and terrorism. She was released on appeal in 2008.
Burma holds many of its poets in cells. Especially celebrated is the poet Saw Wai, who wrote the apparently innocuous ‘February the Fourteenth’. Only close examination revealed that the first words of each line spell out: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Perhaps the best understanding of what life in jail means comes from Abbas Khidr, the Iraqi poet tortured by Saddam’s regime: “You leave the prison behind, but you carry it within you, in your mind.”
For Faiz, the prison years were different. He had imagined he would be held for a few weeks, perhaps a month; but he said later that his four years in jail taught him patience and brought him peace. “I sometimes fear that I might turn into a saint when I get out of jail,” he quipped. His political views remained unchanged by his time behind bars. He had been a communist, was fearlessly outspoken—one of his poems, ‘Poem to a Political Leader’, criticised Gandhi, and he made his sorrow at Partition clear in these famous, often-quoted lines:
“Ye daagh daagh ujaalaa,
ye shab-gaziida sahar,
Vo intizaar thaa jis-kaa, ye vo sahar to nahiin..
(This stained light,
this half-bitten dawn
Is not the dawn we had long awaited).”
Prison foreshadowed his years of exile in Beirut, an exile from Lahore and Pakistan that would be followed in turn by dislocation when he had to leave Beirut again. The late poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote with understanding of the imprint these years left on Faiz:
"Twenty days before your death you finally
wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack
of Beirut you had no address... I
had gone from poem to poem, and found
you once, terribly alone, speaking
to yourself…”
Perhaps, as the tributes pour in to Faiz this year, and we recite his verses at mushairas or just among gatherings of friends, it is Agha’s words in ‘Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ that capture the poet’s legacy best:
“I listened:
and you became, like memory,
necessary.”
The thousands who still recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry honoured his 25th death anniversary earlier this month in various ways—through mushairas, book releases and some, Faiz-style, raised a glass of single malt to his memory.
Faiz, born some four decades before Independence, has been claimed by three countries: he was born and brought up in pre-Independence India, made the decision to remain in Pakistan, where he graced the coffee houses of Lahore for many years, and is honoured by many Bangladeshis for his impassioned poetry opposing the massacres that accompanied the bloody birth of that country.
As far as I know, there have been no celebrations of Faiz in Sargodha jail and Lyallpur jail, where he was held in solitary confinement for four years, from March 1951 onwards. Faiz was arrested as part of the Rawalpindi conspiracy, under the antiquated Bengal Regulations of 1818 that deal with crimes of sedition against the state. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a friend of Major General Akbar Khan, who led a failed coup against Liaqat Ali Khan’s government in Pakistan, but the level of his involvement in the coup was relatively low. He was one of the last of the 15 accused to be released from jail, in 1955.
As Ted Genoways has written elsewhere, Faiz’s prison experiences were perhaps the most formative in a life already shaped by history. He spent a considerable portion of the prison years in solitary confinement—an unusual experience for the man who was at the centre of gatherings of poets, writers, intellectuals and political thinkers. His wife, Alys, and he exchanged letters through these years—Faiz wrote over 140 letters to her in this time. These are collected in Dear Heart, and are well worth reading.
In 'A Prison Evening', Faiz wrote:
“This thought keeps consoling me
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed…”
The prison years, he said later, gave him quiet time to write. He produced two of his greatest works, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan nama, in this period, adapting his techniques to the exigencies of prison life. Deprived of paper and pen in solitary, Faiz composed four-line verses called q’itas instead; they were easy to memorise.
Poets seem to be imprisoned far more often than other kinds of writers, and perhaps a nation’s record on human rights might also be judged by the number of poets it holds in its cells. In the months before Faiz’s anniversary, Vietnam finally pardoned and honoured four poets who had been persecuted for their writings against the earlier regime. Two had died by the time the pardon was issued. Samina Malik, the Lyrical Terrorist, was held in Britain for her provocative but not terribly good verse extolling beheadings and terrorism. She was released on appeal in 2008.
Burma holds many of its poets in cells. Especially celebrated is the poet Saw Wai, who wrote the apparently innocuous ‘February the Fourteenth’. Only close examination revealed that the first words of each line spell out: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Perhaps the best understanding of what life in jail means comes from Abbas Khidr, the Iraqi poet tortured by Saddam’s regime: “You leave the prison behind, but you carry it within you, in your mind.”
For Faiz, the prison years were different. He had imagined he would be held for a few weeks, perhaps a month; but he said later that his four years in jail taught him patience and brought him peace. “I sometimes fear that I might turn into a saint when I get out of jail,” he quipped. His political views remained unchanged by his time behind bars. He had been a communist, was fearlessly outspoken—one of his poems, ‘Poem to a Political Leader’, criticised Gandhi, and he made his sorrow at Partition clear in these famous, often-quoted lines:
“Ye daagh daagh ujaalaa,
ye shab-gaziida sahar,
Vo intizaar thaa jis-kaa, ye vo sahar to nahiin..
(This stained light,
this half-bitten dawn
Is not the dawn we had long awaited).”
Prison foreshadowed his years of exile in Beirut, an exile from Lahore and Pakistan that would be followed in turn by dislocation when he had to leave Beirut again. The late poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote with understanding of the imprint these years left on Faiz:
"Twenty days before your death you finally
wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack
of Beirut you had no address... I
had gone from poem to poem, and found
you once, terribly alone, speaking
to yourself…”
Perhaps, as the tributes pour in to Faiz this year, and we recite his verses at mushairas or just among gatherings of friends, it is Agha’s words in ‘Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ that capture the poet’s legacy best:
“I listened:
and you became, like memory,
necessary.”
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The BS Column: Darwin's Savage Reviewers
(Published in the Business Standard, November 24, 2009)
On this day, one hundred and fifty years ago, the publishing house of John Murray brought out a condensed and abridged treatise on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in a first printing of 1,250 copies.
The author, Charles Darwin, was delighted when John Murray ordered a second printing of 3,000 copies in the wake of public demand, and when the first printing in the United States of America ran to 2,500 copies. He considered this tremendously successful for a scientific work on the then obscure field that would become known as evolutionary biology. Over the next 150 years, Origin of Species would become one of the most widely read, reprinted and discussed works in the history of science.
Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection have had a massive influence on almost every aspect of contemporary thought. Companies and governments alike often abuse the principle of survival of the fittest. The emphasis on the evolution from man from other species has led animal rights thinkers to the argument that we will, eventually, have to cede non-human species more respect and rights than we are currently willing to offer. And Darwin’s exploration of mating practices in the animal kingdom as part of sexual selection influences a slew of dating games and tactics. It’s incredibly difficult, if you’re a thinking person in the 21st century, to try and imagine a world where we didn’t take the principles of evolution for granted.
Except in one field, where the opposition to Darwin’s The Origin of Species has always been fierce—religion. In the wake of the publication of Origin, the Church found itself split. The Bishop of Oxford came out fiercely against Darwin’s theory of evolution, as did the Church of England faction in general; but liberal Christians were able to support Darwin’s ideas.
Darwin followed these debates with great emotion, complaining bitterly against one reviewer: “But the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base.” A few lines later, he was more composed, thanking his friend J D Hooker for his support: “You have cockered me up to that extent, that I now feel I can face a score of savage Reviewers.”
And he has them still, a century and a half after The Origin of Species came out. In that time, there has been little scientific refutation of Darwin’s theories. But opposition to evolution comes from three unlikely, ill-assorted groups. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness is a valiant opponent of Darwinism, if the least influential of his critics today. ISCKON’s The Darwin Delusion draws from Intelligent Design rather than classic creationism to make its arguments. Author Lalithanatha Dasa says, “Darwinism is, more than anything else, the singular cause of atheism in our time.”
Creationism in its current US avatar is a well-funded and influential movement. Schools of creationist thought vary widely, but the basic text is the Book of Genesis, and in the creationist view, the timeline of human evolution is drawn from the Bible. (This seems to lead, as far as the newly established Creationist Museum demonstrates, to an obssession with dinosaurs and the belief that they were still walking the earth long after the fossil record would indicate possible, but that’s another story.)
Where US creationism has been most successful is in the challenging of the teaching of evolution in schools, and in its demand that creationism be taught alongside—preferably as an equally established scientific theory, despite the complete lack of scientific proof, but at any rate as a valid belief system. The debate over mixing science with religion is an ongoing, fierce, take-no-prisoners one, and it has had far-reaching effects on the equally ferocious free speech and censorship debate.
Though they have little else in common, the Genesis-inspired creationists and the burgeoning school of Islamic creationists are united in their hatred of Darwin. In bookstores in Turkey (and New Delhi’s Nizamuddin), you can find entire shelves devoted to theories of Islamic creationist belief. Harun Yahya/ Adnan Okhtar, the man who has written the 800-page standard text on Islamic creationism, is a fascinating figure. Condensed, Yahya’s views are that the world may well have been created billions of years ago, but that the creatures in it exist in the same form that they were originally created, by God. (There is a rather magnificent comparison between Darwinists and the wicked Pharaohs of Egypt, a must-read on Yahya’s website.)
If the first 150 years of the theory of evolution saw a battle between the Church and Darwinists, accompanied by growing acceptance of Darwin’s ideas among the scientific establishment, the next 50 years is likely to see a broader battle, between religious dogma and science, censorship and free speech. The power of Darwin’s theories can be seen, to a great extent, in the ferocity of the resistance currently being offered to them. Reason and scientific proof may yet win the day, but this is in some senses a very medieval, 21st century war.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Book review: The Museum of Innocence
(Published in Mail Today, November 2009)The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber
POUINDS 12.99, 536 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23699-2
“What I am trying to explain,” Orhan Pamuk wrote in Istanbul (2005), “is the huzun (melancholy) of an entire city, of Istanbul.”
Pamuk, the most celebrated of Turkey’s writers, has had to carve out an unusual path in his decades of writing. Unlike his contemporaries in Turkey, he gives himself the freedom to see his country with a clear, unsparing eye. Unlike writers from the West, he must explain the culture his writing is steeped in. Instead of explaining Istanbul or Turkey, though, he reinvents and reimagines this world for an audience that could just as well be sitting in Istanbul’s cafes as Europe’s salons, or India’s metropolises.
The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s first novel after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, is ostensibly about love and obsession. It’s also an evocation of huzun, a meditation on the attractions and uses of melancholy.
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” There is a precision to this moment, as there is to the rest of Kemal’s story—it happens “on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three”, as he enters his lover from behind, and nothing in his life will ever be the same again. Kemal is rich, successful, on the brink of the perfect marriage to Sibel, a girl from a similarly privileged Istanbullu family, and what will change his life is the oldest story in the world—his love for Fusun, a shopgirl, and a distant relative from an impoverished branch of Kemal’s family.
If this sounds like the storyline of a Turkish—or an Indian—melodrama, Pamuk sets up the echo deliberately. The Museum of Innocence is a straightforward tale of desire and obsession; an unusual form for the master of the baroque plot to choose, almost a reversion to the early 21st century Marquezian or Nabokovian explorations of the topography of love. Fusun and Kemal occupy the no-man’s-land between the conventional demands of Istanbul society, and its yearning for the beguiling but dangerous freedom of the individual promised by the West.
The definition of love Pamuk offers in The Museum of Innocence is “deep attention” blended with “deep compassion”; Kemal’s obsession with Fusun is a function of the painful, acutely focused attention he finds himself compelled to offer--as with lovers down the ages, for no good reason. Rendered impotent with his fiancee, he retreats, Sibel by his side, from the round of parties and opulent amusements that govern their “insular, intimate” circle, but the relationship ends; Fusun marries someone else; and Kemal spends eight years at the edges of her life, a guest at her family’s very middle-class dining table, a possible source of funds for the film she wants to make and star in, a casual but committed drunk.
Released from the glittering but airless world of crumbling privilege he was born into, Kemal discovers the vivid and corrupt world of Turkey’s film-makers, who aspire to make art films, sometimes make melodramas, and must usually survive by making or dubbing soft porn films. By the 400th page, the reader knows that this tale will have a conventional, dramatic twist; and Pamuk delivers as expected.
It’s a conventional storyline, but what lifts The Museum of Innocence into the realm of the classic is Pamuk’s understanding of the frailty of love, and the fierce effort needed to maintain it.
Rising up alongside the figure of the lovers is the ghost of Istanbul, a city struggling to be remembered, known, familiar, mired in its own melancholy, reaching for change even as it holds on to the sexual and social shibboleths of the past. And Kemal’s closest kin are not other lovers, but the obsessive collectors of Istanbul, whose homes fill up with the accumulated memorabilia of a city just as he allows the many rooms of his life to be filled with shrines to a love often consummated but never possessed. The last chapter is turned over to the figure of Orhan Pamuk, allowing the writer to make a cameo appearance in his work.
The Istanbul he evokes is familiar to readers of his previous work, and The Museum of Innocence is as much a tribute to its lost, forgotten icons as it is to the power of first love. Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem; a floral batiste handkerchief folded carefully by Fusun; a modified Nisantasi map of Istanbul; tombala sets and salt-shakers, New Year’s lottery tickets, china dogs, 4,213 of Fusun’s cigarette butts, bottles of Altun Damla cologne, everything that might be found in the locked glass cabinets of a well-off Istanbullu’s home.
The Museum of Innocence is not Pamuk’s most ambitious work, but it is his most evocative. And Pamuk retains his ability to surprise, even within the bounds of convention. Three-fourths through his lushly told but straightforward narrative, Pamuk reaches Chapter 69, where every sentence, for four pages, begins with the word ‘Sometimes’. The young Pamuk would have felt the need to exhibit his literary exuberance throughout the book; the older Pamuk allows himself this one flourish, and then lets us meditate again on why there are no museums to the human heart, except for the one that he has built in these pages.
(For a much more detailed review and overview of Pamuk's work, read Pico Iyer's long essay, Secret Love in the Lost City. And visit Pamuk's real-life Museum of Innocence--it's beautiful.)
The BS Column: The Man Who Would Map the Mind
(Published on November 15, 2009, in the Business Standard)Only the steady tide of readers overflowing into the aisles of the Gulmohar Hall indicated that this was not just another book discussion at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s lecture drew students, fellow neurologists and inquiring readers in such numbers that we could easily have filled the nearby Stein Auditorium.
The neurologist and author was here to deliver the inaugural Charles Darwin lecture, though his speech was not marked by the high excitement that attended a similar event in 1860 at a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. That debate, on Darwin’s recently published Origin of the Species, saw an epic clash between Bishop Wilberforce and T H Huxley. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote: “The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke.”
Wilberforce is said to have asked Huxley if he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother—the actual words are in doubt. Huxley’s famous response was that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected to any man who used his gifts to obscure the truth.
No ladies fainted during Professor Ramachandran’s speech in Delhi, or during his earlier presentation at the TED India conference, though there was much applause and laughter. The author of Phantoms in the Brain, The Emerging Mind and The Man with the Phantom Twin is as accomplished a speaker as he is a writer, with a simultaneous gift for humour and clarity. Ramachandran has loyal followers (and readers) around the world in part because he passes the Stephen Jay Gould test.
The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I have fiercely maintained one personal rule in all my so-called "popular" writing. I believe-as Galileo did when he wrote his two greatest works as dialogues in Italian rather than didactic treatises in Latin, as Thomas Henry Huxley did when he composed his masterful prose free from jargon, as Darwin did when he published all his books for general audiences that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested lay people. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people."
Ramachandran shares Gould’s passion for clarity, and his belief that even the more complex reaches of science are not beyond the grasp of the average intelligent lay person. He led us rapidly through his explorations of the philosophy behind the workings of the brain, but what was of particular interest was his discussion of mirror neurons.
In 2000, Edge carried a paper by Ramachandran that has proved to be one of the most influential works of its kind: ‘Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution.’ He dubs mirror neurons “Dalai Lama neurons”, or “empathy neurons”—these are cells that fire both when a person acts, or observes an action performed by someone else. Ramachandran’s research led him to a succinct and breathtaking hypothesis: “The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others.” Going a step further, he suggests that there might be rational and neurological, rather than religious, grounds for ethics.
From his 2000 and 2006 research, Ramachandran’s inquiring mind has already moved further. He ran out of time and couldn’t go on to discuss his next obsession: the possibility of “multiple minds” in a single brain, the idea that your sense of your self might be even more subjective than you realize. If we are “nothing but a pack of neurons”, and if the brain produces our individual versions of reality, why not explore this possibility further? Would you be willing to upload your “self” into cyberspace, would you be willing to be a brain in a (presumably well-maintained) vat, if that allowed you to “be a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity”?
As Ramachandran shifted gears, citing the Upanishads and Advaita philosophies of the self and consciousness with as much ease as he referred to the latest research on autism, I was not alone in my sense of awe. Ramachandran and his colleagues have a long way to go before they can prove their hypotheses, but if they succeed, they will change the way we think about individuality, consciousness and the self forever.
The last time we had such a shift in human thought was in November 1859, when the publisher John Murray brought out the first 1,250 copies of On the Origin of Species and Natural Selection. I’m guessing that within the next two decades, those of us who were present in that small auditorium in Delhi will look back at Ramachandran’s talk on consciousness with a sense of having been present at the making of history. Few readers could ask for more from a literary evening.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The BS Column: Civil Lines, Redux
(Published in the Business Standard, November 10, 2009)
“Civil Lines hopes to appear irregularly, twice a year for a start.” Among the many promises this magazine of “fine unpublished writing connected with India” made and kept, the first part of their opening manifesto was religiously adhered to. It is only now that the best of Civil Lines has been collected in Written For Ever (Penguin India), some 16 years after the magazine’s birth.
The first issue of Civil Lines came out in 1994; between that date and 2001, the magazine took on a mythical aura, assisted by the fact that Civil Lines sightings and basilisk sightings occurred at roughly the same frequency. The cover photographs by Sanjeev Saith became as iconic as the contents between the covers.
It’s easy for any literary magazine to make an impact with its first issue, and in this case, the first issue was an absolute gem. Edited by the late, formidable Dharma Kumar, the late and equally redoubtable publisher Ravi Dayal, Mukul Kesavan, Ivan Hutnik and Rukun Advani, it included work by I Allan Sealy, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Radha Kumar, Ramachandra Guha, Bill Aitken and Khushwant Singh. Alongside this embarrassment of riches came a prescient warning: “The length and content of future numbers are as uncertain as the periodicity; we’ll play it by ear.”
Civil Lines is notorious for its elusiveness--five issues between 1994 and 2001, followed by an eight-year-long silence. (There will, however, be a Civil Lines 6: the contract was signed while I was still at the publishing house Tranquebar.)
Readers have consoled themselves with the reflection that Civil Lines shares its somewhat erratic tendencies with some of our finest Indian writers and thinkers, who seem unnaturally disinclined towards actual publication. But for those of us who have—and incessantly talk about, much to the annoyance of those who don’t—the complete collection of those five slender volumes, Civil Lines evokes a rare admiration.
It’s not just the roster of names who were published by Civil Lines, or the fact that many of them became names (or became much bigger names) post-publication: the editors, with their collective knowledge of the Indian intellectual circuit, had a knack for spotting emerging talent just before it became established talent.
Some, like Manjula Padmanabhan, Raj Kamal Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Suketu Mehta and Allan Sealy, were evolving into the writers they are today. Some, like Radha Kumar, Bill Aitken, Sonia Jabbar and Tenzing Sonam, are well-known for their work in other fields, and add the label of “professional writer” to a host of other achievements. Some, like Dilip Simeon, first gave notice of brilliant work to come in the pages of Civil Lines—Simeon’s novel, expected out soon, grew out of the incredibly incisive and funny ‘OK TATA: Mobiloil Change and World Revolution’.
To establish a literary magazine where the first issue is a collector’s item is commonplace; to establish a literary magazine where every issue is a collector’s item is extraordinary. Civil Lines found its identity from the first issue onwards. In comparison, even the New Yorker shuffled uneasily in its first decade between being a vehicle for humorous writing and an arena for news of interest to a metropolitan audience. (The New Yorker, however, came out with admirable, even monotonous, regularity.)
Civil Lines was shifty about its stated manifesto: issue one commits itself only to “fine unpublished writing”. Civil Lines 2 admitted: “’First-rate writing’ is a good intention, not a usable manifesto,” and then stubbornly refused to set down a manifesto of any kind. Civil Lines 3 helpfully pointed out thematic links: trucks seemed promising, relatives were in abundance, and the editors continued bravely, “Then there are animals.”
Civil Lines 4 eschewed a manifesto in favour of a poem, the delectable ‘Tonguing Mother’: “When words float free of local reference/ writing happens in a fog/ of deference.” And Civil Lines 5 drew our attention to the fact that it advertises itself as ‘New Writing From India’: “This,” said the editors with what one couldn’t help feeling was perverse glee, “is misleading.”
In many ways, Civil Lines mirrors the successes and failures of the wider world of Indian writing in English. Here, in its five volumes, is the brilliance, self-referential wit and passionate engagement of some of the best of our writers. The magazine’s appearances may have been erratic, but the editors, with Kai Friese joining their ranks, displayed a virtue unusual in Indian literary circles—quality control.
And it’s significant that the silence from Civil Lines is mirrored by a decade of uncertainty in Indian writing in English—more writers have been writing to the marketplace, rather than for themselves, in the last decade than ever before. It is perhaps too much to expect that Civil Lines 6 will herald a return to the glory years when the magazine was an annual affair, but I would be content to see the magazine reach Civil Lines 10 before—well, let’s say 2030 to be on the safe side.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Ved Mehta: The time traveller's life
(Published in the Business Standard, November 7, 2009. Images taken from www.vedmehta.com)Indian writing has little space for the family album. The few portraits of parents, siblings or partners that emerge are like the photographs that hang in our homes: officially posed, formally garlanded. Ved Mehta’s Continents of Exile series is one of our few, monumental exceptions, a long-playing biography on the screens of our imaginations.
He’s in Delhi for the re-release of the eleven books that make up the series, written over decades, starting with Daddyji and continuing through Mummyji and Mamaji into the personal terrain of All For Love and Red Letters.
Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down, not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. This has its pitfalls, as Ben Yagoda noted in About Town, a history of the New Yorker: “Ved Mehta’s endless biographies of the various members of his family almost seemed to dare the reader to say, “This is boring!” and flip ahead to the next article.”
Mehta, one of the great raconteurs in person, knows this; he also knows that Continents of Exile cannot be ignored. “When my three-part essay on Mamaji came out, other New Yorker writers asked why Mr Shawn would run this, at a time when people were dying in Vietnam,” he says. Shawn had his own reasons for shaping and encouraging Mehta’s personal and painful brand of honesty.
*******
“I hate the word ‘memoir’,” says Ved Mehta, after I’ve used it for the fifth time. “I prefer biography, or autobiography.” We’re discussing the Indian reluctance to write in the autobiographical vein. My theory is that there are too many unspoken taboos on writing about the personal, the familial. Ved’s hands flicker in disagreement, like an unconscious turning of a page to a different chapter.
“Indians aren’t reticent,” he says. “Maybe we still have a Victorian morality that won’t let us speak our minds. But there’s a freedom in the West you don’t have here. Writers there are not afraid of not making a living. They have the freedom to write about sex. The freedom not to appear dignified, noble, likeable. What would Henry Miller have written if he’d wanted to be liked by his middle-class relatives?”
I think of my impatience as an adolescent reading Mehta’s “endless biographies”, wading through these meandering accounts of parents, relatives, lovers, friends, editors, partners. It was years later before I realised how deeply embedded Mehta’s portraits had become in my mind, as though his family had become mine, as though I knew Kiltykins and Daddyji as well as he did. It took years to see how tight, how taut — Mehta’s adjectives, not mine — the narrative was; how much had been skillfully omitted, how accurate the details were.Mehta would give the credit to Shawn: “He was a genius, and he also had enormous taste, sympathy and humanity. These sound like abstractions, but they are not.” The preferred adjectives to describe good writing today are “necessary” and “honest”; but as Mehta expands on Shawn’s virtues, they seem like the Holy Trinity of truly timeless writing, including Mehta’s own work. Taste, sympathy; humanity.
*******
How reliable is memory anyway? Here are three Ved Mehta stories. The Neemrana festival gathered together some of India’s greatest writers— V S Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Khushwant Singh and Ved Mehta among others — and then, for inexplicable reasons, sequestered them in a fort-palace far away from their readers.
The insistent literariness of the Neemrana festival was enlivened by a massive disagreement between the wife of the German ambassador and Naipaul. The author and the ambassador’s wife threatened, from opposite corners of the fort, to leave if the other stayed on; the combined diplomacy of Pico Iyer, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Nadira Naipaul finally persuaded a still-furious Naipaul to come down to dinner.
Ved Mehta walks in late. For once, his normally acute senses fail to compensate for his blindness, and he sees only Vikram Seth and Dom Moraes, not Naipaul. “Dom,” says Ved in his clear, carrying voice, “you’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.”
“No, no,” says Mehta, though he’s smiling. “That didn’t happen.” He has, he explains, often had to deny stories about himself.
The late Dom Moraes and he once made the same trip, and wrote separate accounts. Dom had a wonderful story about Ved Mehta as the guest of a maharana, drawn to the lifelike figure of a stuffed tiger. “May I pet it?” he asks, and the maharana gives his permission, while Dom signals frantically — but ineffectively, since Mehta can’t see him-from the other end of the room. Ved, petting the stuffed animal, is remarking on the realistic feel of its fur when the tiger gets up, yawns and walks away.
“Dom,” says Mehta with some feeling, “treated me as Quixote treated Sancho Panza. I never rode horses. The maharana never introduced naked ladies into my bedroom. And the stuffed tiger story isn’t true.” I have a clear memory of Dom telling the story in his rich timbre, and Mehta and I both agree that some stories, however false, should be true.
The third story concerns Mehta’s blindness, which he has often written about, commenting that it is for the blind to imagine the world of the sighted — the sighted rarely feel compelled to do the opposite. One of Mehta’s readers, noting the many references in his writing to “seeing” and “scrutiny” or specific colours, particular details, is convinced that Ved Mehta is not really blind. At a book launch, the reader decides to prove his theory.
Ved Mehta is speaking to a group of friends. The reader sneaks up and joins the group; then makes a rapid hand gesture in front of Ved’s face. The writer continues with his tale. The reader tries a more obvious gesture; the writer is unmoved. The reader, still convinced that Mehta’s faking, starts waving his hands in front of the writer’s face, jumping up and down. The writer remains impassive. Defeated, the reader leaves, and tells a friend who’s witnessed the incident that he was wrong, that Ved Mehta is, indeed, blind.
“That wasn’t Ved Mehta,” says the friend. “That was V S Naipaul.”
This story is true.
*******
The conversation has roamed from the short attention span of the modern-day reader to the relative merits of Joyce versus D H Lawrence to a dispute over whether it was alcohol or buggery that fuelled the productivity of Truman Capote. (“Buggery,” says Mehta, and that settles the matter.)
There is one final matter to be addressed. “I never started out wanting to write a million words about my life,” says Ved Mehta, and we both contemplate what it would have been like, in 1972, to look ahead at a vista of writing biography all the way up to 2003. I cannot imagine it, any more than he could, as a young writer. “Writing is in itself a way of growing up; the more difficult the challenges you take on, the more you change.”
Continents of Exile is balanced by the other books — travelogues, political accounts, short stories — but perhaps Ved Mehta knows that his biographies will define him. There is an end to a novel, even a trilogy; but an autobiography can only end with an obituary, which we will hope is long delayed. However inadvertently he began the project of writing his life, the million-plus words it’s taken to cover his history, Ved Mehta has hit upon the only possible answer to writer’s block. Writing your life as you live it is the perfect way to ensure that you will never run out of material.
(Also read: Jai Arjun's excellent profile of Ved Mehta, carried in Tehelka.)
Food column: Sliced baboon for breakfast?
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(Published in the Business Standard,
November 7, 2009)
The UK restaurant critic A A Gill is as well known for his acerbic outrageousness as for his (formidable) knowledge of food, but even he couldn’t have predicted the storm he would create with what will go down in history as the “baboon confession”. In his Sunday Times review of The Luxe, Gill served up an unforgettable opening line: “I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch.”
Outrage followed, with readers flaying Gill for his vivid description of how he blew the creature’s lungs out, and for his confession that he did it to “get a sense of what it would be like to kill someone, a stranger”. Unusually for Gill, though, he may have committed a minor error. He writes: “There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard.”
Some months before Gill blew his baboon away, though, a group of South African farmers were lobbying for permission to open the world’s first licensed baboon abattoir. Animal rights groups have successfully blocked the plans for the abattoir — baboons are uncomfortably close to humans in terms of their facial expressions, and most of us have a visceral discomfort when it comes to killing any of the ape family. The understanding that apes, monkeys and baboons can feel pain and fear is inescapable, given their closeness as a species to humanity itself.
The farmers had specific plans for marketing baboon meat —tinned according to old bush recipes, and in the form of salami. Given that Friar Labat records an 18th century recipe made with donkey meat, wild boar meat and the meat of the domestic pig blended together, baboon salami isn’t that much of a stretch.
In the same week of Gill’s baboon confession, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer touched off an ongoing debate with his book, Eating Animals. Foer doesn’t mention baboons, specifically, but he does ask an age-old question: why do we draw the line at eating dogs? Given that Gill spends much of his life as a food critic eating dead animals, is it really that reprehensible that he would then go out and shoot one? Would his baboon-killing have been more justifiable if he had subsequently cooked and eaten the primate?
Foer’s book shows much of the zeal of the newly-converted vegetarian, but he does offer new ways of looking at the increasingly vexed question of whether we can morally justify eating meat. (Full disclosure: I’m a lapsed vegetarian, who lost the taste-versus-ethics argument some years ago.) Foer has a cunning addition to the usual arsenal of reasons to go vegetarian: his research into factory-farmed meat, which accounts for most of the meat eaten in the US, demonstrates a strong and convincing link between bad holding and slaughter practices and the spread of numerous human diseases. To summarise his arguments: eating meat can’t be justified morally, and if the ethics of eating meat doesn’t bother you, consider the fact that it might make you sick.
Foer addresses cultural discomfort brilliantly: few cultures can afford to take a long, hard look at what’s on their plate, and why, whether that’s organic vegetables or pesticide-laden fruits, meat or tofu substitutes. The difference between the tables of the rich and the poor, between abundance and scarcity, the many food taboos balanced against the sensual pleasures of the palate, the cruelty of killing versus the widespread acceptability of animal slaughter — to look closely at your plate is an act of moral courage that is beyond most of us.
I think that’s also what’s missing from Eating Animals: the understanding that for most of us leading already-rushed lives, making increasingly complex decisions about everything from water conservation to child-rearing, we would prefer not to examine what goes into our bodies too closely. Between Gill’s gunslinger act and Foer’s compassionate but persistent inquiry, they might force us to look again at why we eat meat — and to accept that there’s a deep inconsistency between deploring the killing of a baboon while we order another portion of butter chicken or fish fry.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The BS Column: Asterix at 50
(Published in the Business Standard, 3 November, 2009)
The year is 50 BC, and all Gaul is occupied. All, except for one indomitable village, and by Toutatis, its inmates have maintained their grip on our hearts and minds even though we’re awash in a sea of neo-Disney comic book characters.
Fifty years after the team of Uderzo and Goscinny created their version of the Odd Couple—Asterix the Gaul and his large friend Obelix the menhir-delivery man, with Dogmatix tagging along—the appeal of that little Gaulish village is a curious one. The Western comic book world is overrun with spin-offs from the TV and film worlds, and the most successful series seem to depend, like the mind-numbingly tedious adventures of Scooby-Doo, on the endless repetition of a familiar theme. For groups as diverse as Pixar, Disney, Marvel and DC, comics are an efficient merchandise-delivery system; and Uderzo, who survived Goscinny, appears to be phlegmatic at the idea that the Asterix franchise will go the same way.
For almost five decades, though, as all comic book territory was steadily occupied, the Asterix series offered a tiny pocket of resistance, a dollop of magic potion in the weak broth of mediocrity that threatened to drown comic books worldwide. From the very first issue of Asterix the Gaul, which appeared in Pilote magazine, Uderzo & Goscinny had intended Asterix to stand bravely against the “I came, I saw, I conquered” wave of sameness that rolled out across the world of comic books. The first Asterix introduced some of the characters who would become staples—Getafix, the druid, whose name had to be changed to Magimix in the US because (quelle horreur!) there might otherwise be the suspicion that Uderzo and Goscinny were in favour of drug use. (What, exactly, went into that cauldron of magic potion anyway?)
As Unhygienix the fishmonger and his wife Bacteria, Geriatrix the ancient warrior, Vitalstatistix, the village chief who feared nothing except for the falling of the sky on his head and his wife Impedimenta, and Cacofonix, the village bard with the dulcet voice of a cat in heat, made themselves part of our lives, they carried a little bit of the cultural resistance of France with them.
The thumping of Romans, from Magnumopus to Tremensdelirius and Infirmofpurpus, that accompanied Obelix’s joyous forays into the wider world, the celebration of wild boar against le hamburger, the gentle fun had at the expense of the amusing tribe of Englishmen—these were all part of an attempt to pretend that there might, just, be intelligent life outside the Disney universe. Where else could one find an entire comics book series in the 21st century that ignores the existence of America? Except in Asterix and the Great Crossing, where the Gaulish reaction to North America is to attempt to leave it as soon as possible.
The Indian fondness for Asterix remained a mystery to me for years, until Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge revealed in an interview that they had chosen to weave a certain kind of public school English into their translations of Asterix from French to English. This generation of English-speaking Indians prefers a more robust, home-grown flavour to the language, but a previous generation had different and distinct preferences—we liked our English birthed by the BBC, consecrated by Kipling and baptized with a sprinkling of P G Wodehouse and Frank Richards. The richness of the puns in Asterix—especially with the names of characters, from Tragicomix—the dashing, handsome, ever-so-slightly ridiculous husband of Panacea; the Latin-English quips and the catchphrases (“These Romans are crazy”) draws from this tradition, and it’s a dying one.
Over the years, Asterix has had its share of controversy. Uderzo & Goscinny were gleeful in their perpetuation of racist stereotypes—the English had bad teeth and liked their food boiled with mint sauce, the Spanish are hot-blooded and tempestuous, the Germans are humourless and martial. As the series wore on, the exuberance of some of the best comics gave way to a more formulaic approach, especially after the death of Goscinny.
Like Tintin, Asterix came close to being claimed by gay rights groups as one of their own: his closest friendship is with Obelix, he’s a lifelong bachelor. But their relationship is closer to the literary friendship between Holmes and Watson, manly, even misogynistic, but not quite gay enough, then to the more ambiguous Haddock-Tintin friendship. Asterix does fall in love, and Obelix has a crush on Mrs Geriatrix, making them a less obviously gay couple.
But it is impossible to be too critical, or too cynical, of the exuberant and nostalgic world of the Gauls, where Romans tiptoe through the forests, a druid ladles out magic potion to the villagers, Dogmatix cries when a tree is uprooted, Mrs Geriatrix undulates so expressively, and a thin Gaul and a fat Gaul go tramping off in search of adventure. The sky would have to fall on my head before I stopped reading these books, however old-fashioned they may become as the decades pass.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Food: Table for one
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2009)
“In the same way that you should get massages and take naps or meditate, you should, everyone should, make a point to eat out by yourself from time to time,” wrote Amanda Hesser in her wonderful Cooking for Mr Latte. “You should be kind enough to yourself to lavish your appetite with good food without the interruptions of company.”
And yet, most of the frequent flyers, conference junkies and global nomads I know would rather don mime makeup for a day than eat alone. One friend admits that a long-anticipated trip to Italy was ruined by her disinclination for the solitary table: she ordered room service, only daring once to eat a slice of pizza on the street, eschewing the baroque delights of the Roman table through shyness.
Another frequent traveller, otherwise a man-of-the-world, suffers mild anxiety attacks every time he has to eat alone; another will buy sandwiches and eat them in his room rather than go through what he sees as the admission of social failure involved in asking for a table for one. One friend has solved the problem at considerable cost to his liver; he finds it less threatening to nibble on bar snacks than to eat in a restaurant when on his own, but since he feels obliged to order drinks alongside, he says this is not always the best solution.
I feel for them; I, too, used to be a reluctant solitary eater. Travelling around India, often on my own, there seemed to be too much risk involved in seeking out the table for one, especially in North India where a woman on her own is automatically assumed to be in need of the attentions of (usually) hirsute, burping, half-drunk men. And eating out in fancy restaurants can be ordeal, starting with the maître d’s thinly veiled pity as he escorts the lone diner to a table, tucked behind a pillar, viewless, where s/he is destined to be bumped into by harried waiters and ignored by the busboys. If you’re at all self-conscious, it is hard to overcome the sense that the rest of the restaurant’s patrons are wondering why you have no friends—and it is often hard for a lone diner to get anything like good service.
The essence of the single diner experience, though, is a kind of enjoyment that you can’t have when you’re with a group. Lose the crutches: the book, carried along, the iPod in the ears. The problem with these accessories is that while they allow you to block out the world, they also detract from the meal—it’s fine to comfort yourself with Ruth Reichl at a Gurgaon food court or a McAnywhere, but at a truly excellent restaurant, it would be like draping tussore curtains over a Kandinsky.
For many of us, it can take just one experimental trip to change your habits. I began to love eating out on separate trips to Malaysia and in Edinburgh—I was free to choose my preferred cuisine, to eat deep-fried Mars bars or order three helpings of tom yam soup without embarrassment, and to ask idiot questions: “What is that exotic, rare herb you’re sprinkling over the laksa?” “That would be mint, ma’am.”
Buy Patrick McFarlin and Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone, or read MFK Fisher on the private joys of solitary eating. Madison has recipes for those who cook alone—they range from the elaborate to the simplicity of tomatoes-and-cheese on toast, but the bottomline is simple: treat yourself the way you would treat a guest. Fisher speaks of the “peace and nostalgia” of eating on your own; Hesser sees a kind of liberation in the ability to pay full attention not just to your meal, but to your palate and your appetites.
A few small details can go a long way towards the creation of a great, solitary meal. At restaurants, be polite, but insist on a good table—point out one by the window or in a comfortable space where you can see the other diners—and book ahead if necessary. If your waiter isn’t harried, and s/he shouldn’t be at a good restaurant, give him or her a sense of your tastes and ask for recommendations.
Eat well; eat with pleasure; pay attention to your plate and your senses; eat without worrying about butter on your chin or whether it’s polite to take a second helping. For those of us who spend much time in the company of other foodies and friends, eating alone can be a blessed reminder of the pleasures of your own company, and of the secret, childish joy of satisfying your own appetites.
Book review: Summertime by J M Coetzee
(Published in the Business Standard, October 2009)Summertime: Scenes From Provincial Life
J M Coetzee
Harvill/ Secker
Rs 799, 266 pages
That this is a book by J M Coetzee about a dead and not entirely successful writer called John Coetzee will surprise no one who knows the work of the real Coetzee. Perhaps the only defence left to a writer as highly regarded and relentlessly pursued as the (real, not fictional) J M Coetzee, and as insistently reticent, is to offer himself up in sacrificial fiction.
The work for which J M Coetzee is best known comes from his early and middle period: The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace. In these and other works, Coetzee revealed himself as a chronicler of history—including but not limited to the history of South Africa—who was willing to deal in history’s ambiguities as well as its certainties. Each of these novels was an exploration of the human history of pain, broken by moments of compassion but rarely optimistic of redemption.
Some years ago, Coetzee, pursued by fame, began to create a different kind of fiction. His Nobel speech, built around the character and voice of a modern-day Crusoe, remains one of the strangest acceptance speeches ever in the history of the prize, written in the dispassionate third-person. He turned a fictionalized lecture on 'The Lives of the Animals' into a book about a fictional writer called Elizabeth Costello, and wrote two fictionalized memoirs: Boyhood and Youth.
Summertime is a companion volume to these two, the last in a trilogy of strange and unsettling works, where the novelist becomes his own subject. There is a biographer of John Coetzee, unnamed and largely unidentified except through the medium of his questions, and his silences. He seeks to understand the life of the fictional Coetzee through the writer’s encounters with women, and what we are offered is a series of interviews and reflections on relationships that run the gamut from affair to misunderstood encounter to close friendship.
“He was not what most people would call attractive. He was scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory.”
This is the voice of the married woman who has an affair, ambiguous and not entirely satisfactory, with John Coetzee; she sees him as a loner living with his father, both stumbling with ineptitude around the empty spaces of their lives. She is startled to hear that Coetzee has written a book; it is not a usual accomplishment in her circles. Her marriage breaks up, and to her, it’s the story of her life, her independence, that is central, with the writer an appendix, not the main chapters.
The women offer different perspectives, all remarking on the writer Coetzee’s essential strangeness, his talent and need for distance. A cousin, Margot, remembers his brilliance but also his remoteness from family: “John sitting on the stoep of that dreary little house making up poems!” A Brazilian woman who meets him as a teacher is unimpressed, by his teaching and by his letters to her: “That is what I ask: how can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”
It would be a mistake to read too much into Summertime’s presentation of John Coetzee, poet, writer, possibly a failed man and perhaps even a mediocre practitioner of his work. But in these critiques—and the women in John Coetzee’s life are his reviewers, more than his biographers—the writer emerges as dry, reserved. The central question, as one woman asks, is whether a writer who cannot connect as a human being can truly write something that demands intimacy—the novel being perhaps the most intimate of all ways to examine the human life.
Summertime is an uneasy read, intensely rewarding but also deeply disturbing. Coetzee offers, through the fictional Coetzee, a more intimate look at his own life and passage through the world than a standard biography might reveal. But this intimacy is fictional, about an alter ego to whom intimacy is alien and uncomfortable, and it is hard to draw a line between Coetzee the writer, and his creation, Coetzee the writer.
It’s when he appears to be most open, in his fictionalized biographies, that Coetzee is also trying to tell us to trust nothing. Memoirs and biographies are compelling, but the truth of a life is elusive; and by opening up his own life in fictional form, he keeps it firmly hidden from any would-be seeker after that truth.
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