(Published in the Business Standard, 28 December 2010)
“Section 124-A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizens. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has an affection(sic) for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr Banker [a colleague in non-violence] and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime.”
These words, from Mahatma Gandhi’s closing statement during his trial for sedition in 1922, have been quoted widely in India this year, along with the resurrection of the antiquated laws of Raj India. There were cries of sedition when Arundhati Roy made some remarks on the alienation felt by Kashmiris; this week, the human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to life imprisonment for sedition by a Raipur court in a much-criticised judgement.
By 1909, fears of sedition had turned the British government in India into tireless readers. Sisir Kar’s history of books banned in Bengal under the Raj quotes from a typical circular of the time that urges officers to carefully examine all suspicious material, to “facilitate the immediate detection of seditious books”. As Gandhi was to note, the affection of the subject for the king, or the citizen for the state, could not be commanded—and it was markedly absent in those early years as the national movement gathered steam.
Bankimchandra’s Ananda Math had been in print for 18 years at this time, and as its author, Bankim was struggling between the demands of his job as a government official and the need to express his discontent with the Raj. Between the first and the eighth edition of Ananda Math, the novel that added Vande Mataram to the lexicon of revolution and that would inspire the next generation of revolutionaries, Bankim made continuous changes to the text, often excising or softening sentences that seemed over-critical of the British. In one of the more unusual applications of censorship, there were periods when Ananda Math itself was not banned—but the singing of Vande Mataram was proscribed, and the anthem treated as seditious.
By the time Sharatchandra’s Pather Dabi (1926) was published, featuring, as the Government of Bengal Yearbook commented, “The most powerful act of sedition in almost every page of the book,” disaffection was the spirit of the times. The long history of Pather Dabi, the confiscation of the novel, the exchange between Tagore and Sharatchandra on the impact and validity of criticizing those in power, points to the fact that it was impossible for the Raj to allow questioning of the state without also admitting the disaffection and disillusionment of the writers who questioned it. Tagore disappointed Sharatchandra by praising the tolerance of the British, and by implicitly refusing to endorse the younger author’s insistence that criticism was the only valid response to British rule.
Books like Ananda Math and Pather Dabi were only the most celebrated of their kind; in the attempt to check sedition, journals and books were often confiscated and plays were routinely proscribed or censored. Sisir Kar cites an unwittingly revealing letter from the Police Commissioner, allowing the production of Bankimchandra’s Chandrashekhar to continue if certain objectionable portions were expunged—on pages 10, 19, 20, 33, 36, 40, 41, 43, 51, 54, 55, 80, 120,121, 123, 124, 127, 133, 148 and 151, leaving one to wonder what was left of the play.
All of this, including the trials of the likes of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose for sedition and conspiracy, were part and parcel of the paraphernalia of a state that was an occupying power, and that had to command the affection of the people who came under its rule. In an independent India, the question is whether the state should still feel paranoid enough to continue using a law where, as Gandhi puts it, “mere promotion of disaffection is a crime”.
The writings of Arundhati Roy, for instance, or the work of Dr Binayak Sen, would have placed them in the time of the British Raj among the ranks of the disaffected. Their willingness, and the willingness of other writers and activists, to question the workings of the state are definitely signs of disaffection. But in a healthy democracy, and a healthy state, the affection of its writers and citizens would be earned, not commanded, and criticism would be welcomed, not seen as threatening. We need to ask whether the same laws that were used against Bankimchandra, Sharatchandra, Tilak and Gandhi should be pressed into service in a country that prides itself on its many freedoms.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
A quiet rant on the Assange case, and a response to Kavita Krishnan
I have a lot of respect for Kavita Krishnan and her work in the field of women’s rights in India. Reading the first four paragraphs of her opinion piece in the Huffington Post on rape, I was in complete agreement with her. Krishnan confirmed my understanding of the way rape laws work in this country-—the conviction rate is low, reporting rapes is often a difficult, brutalizing process, and the understanding of consent is limited in the legal system. (Marital rape is not yet an offence, for instance; and a woman’s right to the integrity of her own body is not at all well defined in India, in either legal or cultural terms.)
It is in the final paragraph of Krishnan’s article where we part company. Here’s what she has to say:
The Assange case is complex, and has drawn intense scrutiny across the world. At present, allegations have been made by two Swedish women of sexual assault, sexual molestation and, under the nuanced provisions of Swedish law, an allegation of "less severe" rape; he has not yet been formally charged. The case is nuanced and it would be very wrong to assume his guilt. (I’m attaching some links that might be of interest below.) But this is why I disagree with Krishnan, and think that she has not paid enough attention to the details of the Assange case before offering her opinion on it.
1) She assumes that the allegations brought against Assange by the two Swedish women are part of a US-backed conspiracy; there has been little evidence of this so far. There are legitimate fears that the case will be misused, and legitimate questions about the workings of the legal system and the timing of the case, given Assange’s current situation, but news accounts do not support the idea that the two women are involved in any conspiracy theory. The allegations made by the two Swedish women should be treated as a separate matter, in the absence of any evidence to back the conspiracy theory.
2) It’s a fallacy to assume that because the worst and most violent instances of rape routinely go unchecked across the world—Somalia, South Africa, India and a score of other countries—it is an insult to those women to seek redressal for cases that involve apparently lesser degrees of rape and sexual assault.
The allegations against Assange wouldn’t hold up in any Indian court for a reason: the rape laws in this country are extremely unevolved. A woman’s consent or withdrawal of consent is not taken seriously, and the assumption most courts would make is that if a woman agrees to sleep with a man, she gets what she deserves, even if the man subsequently overrides her wishes or uses force.
The better argument would be not to envy or marvel at Sweden’s laws, but to work for more progressive laws in India. In terms of degree, there is a difference between a Dalit woman brutalized and raped by the men of her village, or a Somalian woman subjected to repeated, violent rape, and a woman who experiences a turning point when the man she’s in bed with uses unacceptable force or coercion. But can we be clear that both of these—first-degree and third-degree rape, so to speak--are unacceptable, instead of drawing false parallels?
3) Krishnan should know better than to assume that Assange’s crime is “sexism”. The allegations made by the two Swedish women concern sexual molestation, sexual assault and "less severe" rape. These are not trivial, if true. And this case is not about an HIV test, sex by surprise, or a broken condom. It’s about consent, the overriding of that consent and the use of force in the process of the overriding of a woman’s consent. The allegations made by these two women deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a big difference between being "insensitive" to a woman’s fear of HIV, and the allegations of molestation and assault laid out in the Guardian report.
I am not an expert on either the law, or on rape victims, though I have written on rape and sexual assault in the course of writing for the gender beat. I’m following this case the way I’ve followed rape trials in India—just as an observer and as a woman who is interested in women’s rights.
But Kavita Krishnan is an expert, and she should know better than to prejudge two women, and to trivialize the allegations they have made against Assange. I understand and share her concerns for the harshness that Indian women face, on a daily basis, and I understand how dealing with the everyday brutality of rape and rape charges in this country can make anyone wonder why the Assange case matters at all.
Here’s the thing. To the two women involved in this case—women who have been vilified, who have had their names and addresses posted on the Internet, who have been blamed and dismissed, even before the case comes to court--it matters. The laws in their part of the world allow them to file a complaint against a man like Assange; the laws in my part of the world would leave an Indian woman in a similar situation with little or no prospect of redressal. I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-centre rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women or women in conflict zones to our attention.
But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing. The right to say 'no' to one's sexual partner, when you're uncomfortable, afraid, in pain, or fear rape, and to have that 'no' heard and accepted, is not a small thing. The right to be heard instead of being dismissed, or belittled, or vilified, is not a small thing. The right to consent should be the right of every woman, and every man; it shouldn’t be a luxury at all.
Here are some links that might be of interest:
1) The full allegations against Assange, from the Guardian:
The two Swedish women say that consensual sex with Assange turned, in separate incidents, into non-consensual sex. One woman alleges that he used force to hold her down, and then deliberately tore his condom when she insisted that he wear one. The other woman alleges that after several instances of consensual sex, where she insisted that Assange wear a condom, she woke up to find him having sex with her, not wearing a condom. He faces charges under Swedish law of sexual molestation and sexual assault. The allegations are yet to be proved, and Assange is yet to be charged.
2) Jessica Valenti on the laws in Sweden and the US on rape, and issues of consent:
3) From Kate Harding, an early piece contesting Naomi Wolf’s assessment of the Assange case:
and a more recent post on the rape myths coming up in the wake of the Assange case:
4) Caroline May on the rift between feminists and progressives on the activist left:
5) Jaclyn Friedman on What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape:
and: Friedman debates Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now:
6) Salil Tripathi: When No Means No
It is in the final paragraph of Krishnan’s article where we part company. Here’s what she has to say:
“Certainly, from the perspective of all those women in India who find the most brutal of rapists going free, protected by the police and the state, and their most serious charges of rape trivialized or even suppressed by force, the idea of a man being hunted down by Interpol on charges which are as complex and ambiguous as those in the Assange case is disturbing. From what I hear, Sweden's rape laws are nothing to quarrel with, and are in fact quite enviable for us in India, where even marital rape is yet to be deemed illegal. But for the US to fire at Assange from the shoulders of the two Swedish women indeed is an insult to the women struggling in vain for justice the world over. It is possible that Assange's casual flings with female fans may not be very democratic; he may be guilty of insensitivity to the concerns and rights of women (for instance their right to be free from HIV). But if sexism is a crime worthy of Interpol's attention, then Interpol should immediately arrest Silvio Berlusconi and Bill Clinton, just for starters!”
The Assange case is complex, and has drawn intense scrutiny across the world. At present, allegations have been made by two Swedish women of sexual assault, sexual molestation and, under the nuanced provisions of Swedish law, an allegation of "less severe" rape; he has not yet been formally charged. The case is nuanced and it would be very wrong to assume his guilt. (I’m attaching some links that might be of interest below.) But this is why I disagree with Krishnan, and think that she has not paid enough attention to the details of the Assange case before offering her opinion on it.
1) She assumes that the allegations brought against Assange by the two Swedish women are part of a US-backed conspiracy; there has been little evidence of this so far. There are legitimate fears that the case will be misused, and legitimate questions about the workings of the legal system and the timing of the case, given Assange’s current situation, but news accounts do not support the idea that the two women are involved in any conspiracy theory. The allegations made by the two Swedish women should be treated as a separate matter, in the absence of any evidence to back the conspiracy theory.
2) It’s a fallacy to assume that because the worst and most violent instances of rape routinely go unchecked across the world—Somalia, South Africa, India and a score of other countries—it is an insult to those women to seek redressal for cases that involve apparently lesser degrees of rape and sexual assault.
The allegations against Assange wouldn’t hold up in any Indian court for a reason: the rape laws in this country are extremely unevolved. A woman’s consent or withdrawal of consent is not taken seriously, and the assumption most courts would make is that if a woman agrees to sleep with a man, she gets what she deserves, even if the man subsequently overrides her wishes or uses force.
The better argument would be not to envy or marvel at Sweden’s laws, but to work for more progressive laws in India. In terms of degree, there is a difference between a Dalit woman brutalized and raped by the men of her village, or a Somalian woman subjected to repeated, violent rape, and a woman who experiences a turning point when the man she’s in bed with uses unacceptable force or coercion. But can we be clear that both of these—first-degree and third-degree rape, so to speak--are unacceptable, instead of drawing false parallels?
3) Krishnan should know better than to assume that Assange’s crime is “sexism”. The allegations made by the two Swedish women concern sexual molestation, sexual assault and "less severe" rape. These are not trivial, if true. And this case is not about an HIV test, sex by surprise, or a broken condom. It’s about consent, the overriding of that consent and the use of force in the process of the overriding of a woman’s consent. The allegations made by these two women deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a big difference between being "insensitive" to a woman’s fear of HIV, and the allegations of molestation and assault laid out in the Guardian report.
I am not an expert on either the law, or on rape victims, though I have written on rape and sexual assault in the course of writing for the gender beat. I’m following this case the way I’ve followed rape trials in India—just as an observer and as a woman who is interested in women’s rights.
But Kavita Krishnan is an expert, and she should know better than to prejudge two women, and to trivialize the allegations they have made against Assange. I understand and share her concerns for the harshness that Indian women face, on a daily basis, and I understand how dealing with the everyday brutality of rape and rape charges in this country can make anyone wonder why the Assange case matters at all.
Here’s the thing. To the two women involved in this case—women who have been vilified, who have had their names and addresses posted on the Internet, who have been blamed and dismissed, even before the case comes to court--it matters. The laws in their part of the world allow them to file a complaint against a man like Assange; the laws in my part of the world would leave an Indian woman in a similar situation with little or no prospect of redressal. I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-centre rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women or women in conflict zones to our attention.
But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing. The right to say 'no' to one's sexual partner, when you're uncomfortable, afraid, in pain, or fear rape, and to have that 'no' heard and accepted, is not a small thing. The right to be heard instead of being dismissed, or belittled, or vilified, is not a small thing. The right to consent should be the right of every woman, and every man; it shouldn’t be a luxury at all.
Here are some links that might be of interest:
1) The full allegations against Assange, from the Guardian:
The two Swedish women say that consensual sex with Assange turned, in separate incidents, into non-consensual sex. One woman alleges that he used force to hold her down, and then deliberately tore his condom when she insisted that he wear one. The other woman alleges that after several instances of consensual sex, where she insisted that Assange wear a condom, she woke up to find him having sex with her, not wearing a condom. He faces charges under Swedish law of sexual molestation and sexual assault. The allegations are yet to be proved, and Assange is yet to be charged.
2) Jessica Valenti on the laws in Sweden and the US on rape, and issues of consent:
3) From Kate Harding, an early piece contesting Naomi Wolf’s assessment of the Assange case:
and a more recent post on the rape myths coming up in the wake of the Assange case:
4) Caroline May on the rift between feminists and progressives on the activist left:
5) Jaclyn Friedman on What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape:
and: Friedman debates Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now:
6) Salil Tripathi: When No Means No
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
2010: The year's best non-fiction
From Delhi’s courtesans and merchants at the time of the Mutiny to the search for the perfect hilsa, Indian non-fiction had more variety on offer this year than in the previous five. Here are some of the highlights—an indicative rather than comprehensive list, for reasons of space—of 2010 in general non-fiction.
Business: The second-best thing about All The Devils Are Here (Portfolio/ Penguin, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera) and The Big Short (Allen Lane, Michael Lewis) is that these two business books read like well-written, fast-paced thrillers. The best thing about McLean’s history of the 2008 financial crisis and Short’s dissection of the “tiny handful of investors… for whom the trade became an obsession” is that they are snapshots of a time of greed and hubris. In comparison, Hamish McDonald’s long-anticipated Ambani and Sons (Roli Books) is big on gossip, comprehensive enough, but lacked the punch and the rigorous analysis that a Michael Lewis brings to the table. It reads like a rehash of McDonald’s earlier book, the controversial Polyester Prince.
History: Ramachandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India (Viking/ Penguin) drew crowds and intense debate, over those the historian chose to include in this collection of 19 profiles. Despite its many insights, it fell short of Guha’s best work—a milestone rather than a monumental work in his career. Mahmood Farooqui’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi, 1857 (Viking/ Penguin) was a welcome reminder of the missing oral histories and the untouched records in our libraries. A lasting addition to Mutiny scholarship, it could, however, have done with more commentary and analysis from Farooqui. Madhushree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (Tranquebar) offered both in a trenchant criticism that directly linked Winston Churchill’s biases to the great famine of Bengal. And one of the more entertaining analyses of contemporary India was Santosh Desai’s collection of essays on the middle classes, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India (HarperCollins).
Travel writing: Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish (Penguin), winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize, was one of the discoveries of the year. Marrying a journalist’s eye to a writer’s turn of phrase, Subramanian made his travels up and down the Indian coast come alive, for foodies and travel junkies alike.
Sadanand Dhume’s gripping My Friend The Fanatic: Travels With A Radical Islamist (Tranquebar) is one of the more illuminating and thoughtful examinations of contemporary Islam available, which includes meetings with top Al-Qaeda chiefs and the inventor of an especially risqué dance called drilling. Balance this with Amitava Kumar’s rigorous but personal Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer’s Report on the War on Terror (Picador India), which moves between India and the US and is a brilliant study of how governments have internalized paranoia at the expense of the rights of their citizens.
The arts: Deepanjana Pal’s Life of Raja Ravi Varma (Random House) was one of the few approachable and entertaining artist’s biographies—as opposed to hagiographies—to be written in recent times. Pal’s bland and slightly workmanlike style is offset by her intimate understanding of the period and of art. With Penguin Studio’s monumental tribute to Dayanita Singh, it’s the photographs that do the talking as much as the perceptive essays by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen—definitely a collector’s item, and an essential guide to the work of one of India’s most celebrated photographers. And well worth its Rs 6,000 price tag is the Khoj Book (HarperCollins), with well-curated profiles of 101 Indian artists, from one of India’s most experimental and freewheeling art galleries.
For Charles Correa fans, A Place in the Shade (Penguin India) is a quiet, thoughtful and inspiring collection of the maestro’s essays on architecture—again, essential reading for anyone interested in India’s cities and buildings. And on a lighter note, don’t miss Jai Arjun Singh’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (HarperCollins)—a cult film and books blogger on one of our funniest and most intriguing cult films.
Next week: the year's best biographies and memoirs, fromfrom the lives of bar dancers in Bombay to Mark Twain’s irreverent take on Samuel Clemens and the ultimate assessment of the man in the White House.
Business: The second-best thing about All The Devils Are Here (Portfolio/ Penguin, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera) and The Big Short (Allen Lane, Michael Lewis) is that these two business books read like well-written, fast-paced thrillers. The best thing about McLean’s history of the 2008 financial crisis and Short’s dissection of the “tiny handful of investors… for whom the trade became an obsession” is that they are snapshots of a time of greed and hubris. In comparison, Hamish McDonald’s long-anticipated Ambani and Sons (Roli Books) is big on gossip, comprehensive enough, but lacked the punch and the rigorous analysis that a Michael Lewis brings to the table. It reads like a rehash of McDonald’s earlier book, the controversial Polyester Prince.
History: Ramachandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India (Viking/ Penguin) drew crowds and intense debate, over those the historian chose to include in this collection of 19 profiles. Despite its many insights, it fell short of Guha’s best work—a milestone rather than a monumental work in his career. Mahmood Farooqui’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi, 1857 (Viking/ Penguin) was a welcome reminder of the missing oral histories and the untouched records in our libraries. A lasting addition to Mutiny scholarship, it could, however, have done with more commentary and analysis from Farooqui. Madhushree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (Tranquebar) offered both in a trenchant criticism that directly linked Winston Churchill’s biases to the great famine of Bengal. And one of the more entertaining analyses of contemporary India was Santosh Desai’s collection of essays on the middle classes, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India (HarperCollins).
Travel writing: Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish (Penguin), winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize, was one of the discoveries of the year. Marrying a journalist’s eye to a writer’s turn of phrase, Subramanian made his travels up and down the Indian coast come alive, for foodies and travel junkies alike.
Sadanand Dhume’s gripping My Friend The Fanatic: Travels With A Radical Islamist (Tranquebar) is one of the more illuminating and thoughtful examinations of contemporary Islam available, which includes meetings with top Al-Qaeda chiefs and the inventor of an especially risqué dance called drilling. Balance this with Amitava Kumar’s rigorous but personal Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer’s Report on the War on Terror (Picador India), which moves between India and the US and is a brilliant study of how governments have internalized paranoia at the expense of the rights of their citizens.
The arts: Deepanjana Pal’s Life of Raja Ravi Varma (Random House) was one of the few approachable and entertaining artist’s biographies—as opposed to hagiographies—to be written in recent times. Pal’s bland and slightly workmanlike style is offset by her intimate understanding of the period and of art. With Penguin Studio’s monumental tribute to Dayanita Singh, it’s the photographs that do the talking as much as the perceptive essays by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen—definitely a collector’s item, and an essential guide to the work of one of India’s most celebrated photographers. And well worth its Rs 6,000 price tag is the Khoj Book (HarperCollins), with well-curated profiles of 101 Indian artists, from one of India’s most experimental and freewheeling art galleries.
For Charles Correa fans, A Place in the Shade (Penguin India) is a quiet, thoughtful and inspiring collection of the maestro’s essays on architecture—again, essential reading for anyone interested in India’s cities and buildings. And on a lighter note, don’t miss Jai Arjun Singh’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (HarperCollins)—a cult film and books blogger on one of our funniest and most intriguing cult films.
Next week: the year's best biographies and memoirs, fromfrom the lives of bar dancers in Bombay to Mark Twain’s irreverent take on Samuel Clemens and the ultimate assessment of the man in the White House.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Getting Around Your City: A User's Guide For Women
(I wrote this for Jagori and Gauri Gill’s Transportraits, an exhibition on women and mobility in the city. It’s somewhere between a rant and a cross letter to the editor.
And two brilliant examples of what the exhibition had to offer:
Blank Noise's Step By Step Guide To Unapologetic Walking
Amruta Patil's Navigation, Safe Passage.)
Getting around your city: a user’s guide
1) Weapons: Chili-water in a spray bottle, a shard of glass, a paper cutter, a knife, stiletto heels, pepper spray in the special we’re-sensitive-to-women shade of pink, a razor blade, anything that can be used as a baton, a club, a stick. No whistles; most Indian women are aware that whistles, like cries for help, will attract no attention and will be ignored by passers-by, should you be in actual need of help. Most of the women who carry weapons, with the exception of a few who have trained themselves, some sex workers, and others in dangerous, precarious jobs, do not know how to use them. We carry them anyway; like good-luck charms or pictures of your favourite gods and goddesses, these are talismanic, meant to ward off evil.
2) A spare man: This might be a husband, a boyfriend, a brother, a father, a grandfather, any male child over a certain indefinable age (toddlers and babies do not work), a colleague, your doctor, or a random stranger you’re careful to match your steps with so that other men might think you’re with him. A spare man is more useful than a weapon, if harder to pack into your handbag, because he signals to other men that you are already someone’s property. The downside of carrying a spare man is that you may have to talk to him, or that he may start to believe that you are, indeed, his property, but as a charm to ward off other men, he is invaluable. One spare man, however, is of limited use against groups, gangs and mobs.
3) A watch: This will let you know when you are out at the wrong time. The wrong time is usually any time between dawn and the very late night hours that you are accosted, assailed, abused or attacked by a man or men. If you are out at that time, whether it was for your morning walk or you were coming back from a late business dinner or you were shutting down your pavement stall at five in the evening, it will, whatever the hour of the day, automatically be the wrong time, and you should have known better. (See “Clothes”, below.)
4) Clothes: Anything you are wearing at the time of an actual assault, or that invites comment from men, is not appropriate clothing by definition. If what you are wearing is a tank top, a spaghetti string blouse, a short skirt or jeans, you will make the cultural police in your city very happy, because they can point to the fact that your Western values are responsible for corrupting innocent, helpless men, and instigating them to attack, assault or rape you. If what you are wearing is a sari, a salwar kameez or a loose, all-encompassing sack, then it signifies that you deliberately went out on the streets aware of your potential to attract the wrong kind of male attention, and your clothes are a feeble attempt to cover up your wrong-doing. If you are wearing a burkha and this contributes to your sense of safety on the street, a ban can be organized in short order so that you can experience your fair share of assault and humiliation.
5) Transport: In most cities, the lighting at night has been carefully arranged to ensure that there will be no safe areas, especially around major transit points such as railway stations, metro stations and taxi stands. This is for your convenience. Most auto drivers will not offer safe transport, and many may also try to cheat you. This is so that you do not develop a false sense of security and comfort while negotiating the roads. Most taxis are safe, except for the ones that are not—if your corpse is not found in a drain before the end of your journey, you are in a safe taxi.
Most trains are safe, except for the ones that carry passengers who have no respect for women, which would leave you with the toy train to Darjeeling. The toy train is a very safe train, and you will enjoy Darjeeling greatly. Most buses are meant for the exclusive use of men, and while this will not be explicably stated, you will be made aware of the inconvenience you’re putting male passengers to at all times of your journey, during which they will lean on you, breathe on you, sing to you, fondle your breasts and attempt to molest and/or rape you. All other forms of transport, except for the footpaths, the roads and any stray rivers you may encounter, are absolutely safe for women.
6) Foreign women: All foreign women, including those from the North-Eastern states of India, should be aware of their moral looseness and willingness to be available to all men at all times. If you are a foreign woman and you are not aware of this, the men on the streets of your city of choice will be happy to remind you, several times an hour.
Please enjoy getting around your city. For your safety, we recommend that you travel as a man. If you must travel as a woman, we recommend that you stay indoors at all times. If you insist, after all this, on stepping out of your home, we do apologise for any inconvenience in the form of threats, harassment, rape, assault, violence, humiliation and murder that you almost certainly will encounter.
And two brilliant examples of what the exhibition had to offer:
Blank Noise's Step By Step Guide To Unapologetic Walking
Amruta Patil's Navigation, Safe Passage.)
Getting around your city: a user’s guide
1) Weapons: Chili-water in a spray bottle, a shard of glass, a paper cutter, a knife, stiletto heels, pepper spray in the special we’re-sensitive-to-women shade of pink, a razor blade, anything that can be used as a baton, a club, a stick. No whistles; most Indian women are aware that whistles, like cries for help, will attract no attention and will be ignored by passers-by, should you be in actual need of help. Most of the women who carry weapons, with the exception of a few who have trained themselves, some sex workers, and others in dangerous, precarious jobs, do not know how to use them. We carry them anyway; like good-luck charms or pictures of your favourite gods and goddesses, these are talismanic, meant to ward off evil.
2) A spare man: This might be a husband, a boyfriend, a brother, a father, a grandfather, any male child over a certain indefinable age (toddlers and babies do not work), a colleague, your doctor, or a random stranger you’re careful to match your steps with so that other men might think you’re with him. A spare man is more useful than a weapon, if harder to pack into your handbag, because he signals to other men that you are already someone’s property. The downside of carrying a spare man is that you may have to talk to him, or that he may start to believe that you are, indeed, his property, but as a charm to ward off other men, he is invaluable. One spare man, however, is of limited use against groups, gangs and mobs.
3) A watch: This will let you know when you are out at the wrong time. The wrong time is usually any time between dawn and the very late night hours that you are accosted, assailed, abused or attacked by a man or men. If you are out at that time, whether it was for your morning walk or you were coming back from a late business dinner or you were shutting down your pavement stall at five in the evening, it will, whatever the hour of the day, automatically be the wrong time, and you should have known better. (See “Clothes”, below.)
4) Clothes: Anything you are wearing at the time of an actual assault, or that invites comment from men, is not appropriate clothing by definition. If what you are wearing is a tank top, a spaghetti string blouse, a short skirt or jeans, you will make the cultural police in your city very happy, because they can point to the fact that your Western values are responsible for corrupting innocent, helpless men, and instigating them to attack, assault or rape you. If what you are wearing is a sari, a salwar kameez or a loose, all-encompassing sack, then it signifies that you deliberately went out on the streets aware of your potential to attract the wrong kind of male attention, and your clothes are a feeble attempt to cover up your wrong-doing. If you are wearing a burkha and this contributes to your sense of safety on the street, a ban can be organized in short order so that you can experience your fair share of assault and humiliation.
5) Transport: In most cities, the lighting at night has been carefully arranged to ensure that there will be no safe areas, especially around major transit points such as railway stations, metro stations and taxi stands. This is for your convenience. Most auto drivers will not offer safe transport, and many may also try to cheat you. This is so that you do not develop a false sense of security and comfort while negotiating the roads. Most taxis are safe, except for the ones that are not—if your corpse is not found in a drain before the end of your journey, you are in a safe taxi.
Most trains are safe, except for the ones that carry passengers who have no respect for women, which would leave you with the toy train to Darjeeling. The toy train is a very safe train, and you will enjoy Darjeeling greatly. Most buses are meant for the exclusive use of men, and while this will not be explicably stated, you will be made aware of the inconvenience you’re putting male passengers to at all times of your journey, during which they will lean on you, breathe on you, sing to you, fondle your breasts and attempt to molest and/or rape you. All other forms of transport, except for the footpaths, the roads and any stray rivers you may encounter, are absolutely safe for women.
6) Foreign women: All foreign women, including those from the North-Eastern states of India, should be aware of their moral looseness and willingness to be available to all men at all times. If you are a foreign woman and you are not aware of this, the men on the streets of your city of choice will be happy to remind you, several times an hour.
Please enjoy getting around your city. For your safety, we recommend that you travel as a man. If you must travel as a woman, we recommend that you stay indoors at all times. If you insist, after all this, on stepping out of your home, we do apologise for any inconvenience in the form of threats, harassment, rape, assault, violence, humiliation and murder that you almost certainly will encounter.
Book review: Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2010.)
Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars
Sonia Faleiro
Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton,
Rs 450, 216 pages
In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta’s 2005 blockbuster about Bombay, he writes about his relationship with a bar dancer who grew to confide all of the details of her life to him, from the nature of her clients to her habit of cutting herself when in extreme emotion. “What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?” Mehta wrote, in a particularly revelatory line.
From Truman Capote to John Berendt to Suketu Mehta and Sonia Faleiro, part of the lure of non-fiction is, inevitably, just this: the vast intimate knowledge of another human being that no other form or act can offer. That knowledge, for the best non-fiction writers, is usually pressed into service of something that goes far beyond the ordinary voyeurism of the journalist; at its best, it can be an attempt to understand the rich, confusing business of life itself.
As Maximum City made its explosive impact in 2005, another young writer was finding her voice, and her subject, in the world of Bombay’s dance bars. Sonia Faleiro would spend the next five years immersed in the seedy but subtly empowering atmosphere of the bars in Mira Road, listening to the conversations of dalals and bar girls, clients (chamar chors and Bada Dons), hijras and brothel owners.
“My story is the best you will ever hear. The best, understand? Now come close. Closer! Okay, ready?”
Beautiful Thing sets the pace right from the epigraph, and from its first, searing chapter. Here is Leela, the bar dancer whose life Faleiro faithfully shadowed for years, wearing her client’s boxer shorts as she admires herself in the mirror, young, beautiful, confident, an “alone girl” who demands gifts of money, clothes, jewellery and oddly, vegetables, from the clients who are dazzled by her courtesan’s turn at the bar. “Our often one-sided relationship may be characterized thus: I called Leela. She ‘missed-called’ me,” writes Faleiro, setting the boundaries early on. Her interest in the lives of the bar girls, from Leela to the unbelievably beautiful queen of nakhra, Priya, will always be one-sided, unreciprocated.
Leela, when the story opens, is at the top of her profession, and her profession is at the top of the complex hierarchy that governs sex workers in Bombay. There are destitute prostitutes, the bottom-feeders; brothel girls, a step above; call girls and massage parlour girls; and right at the top, in the glittering tinsel light of the bars, the bar dancers. Leela’s story is not a simple one, and to tell it, Faleiro turns herself into the proverbial camera, the invisible, omniscient writer whose only job is to record what happens.
“When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road…,” Leela tells her. “But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, “Get lost oye!” And they do. And if I want a gift or feel like “non-wedge”, I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. ..I make money and money gives me something my mother never had. Azaadi. Freedom.”
Leela’s story is as harsh and brutal as the story of hundreds of other women in India. Faleiro chronicles their lives through hers; the casual rapes by family members or the police, the limited possibilities of finding respectable, paying work in Bombay’s brutally crowded, busy streets. In 2005, the dance bars offered a kind of halfway house for women who didn’t have to do “galat kaam” unless they were so inclined, and who weren’t subjected to the darker cruelties of being trafficked into the sex trade. Working in the dance bars gave them respectability—many, as in Leela’s case, received an anxious, obsessive love and respect from the families who depended on their earnings. They had, too, a kind of freedom—the freedom to pick and choose their clients, to flirt, to fight over a particularly fancy “Kushtomer”, and the freedom to spend their money as they saw fit.
As with John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing reads like great fiction—from Masti, the stunningly confident hijra, to Priya, the narcissist in love with her own impossible beauty, to Apsara, Leela’s grasping, selfish mother, the cast of characters here are unforgettable. And Faleiro does a brilliant job of blending reportage with the moving, saddening story she has to tell—in a fit of misplaced politicking and morality, the Bombay government closed down the dance bars, condemning most of these women to the indignities, dangers and insecurities of “dhanda”. Her perspective, always respectful to the subjects of her story, allows this to be a story of and about Bombay’s women—a massive, and refreshing, change from the masculine world of the gangs we’ve been offered by previous Bombay chroniclers.
Beautiful Thing is marred slightly by Faleiro’s obsession with accents—by the fourth repetition of “bootiful” and the third of “kushtomer”, the reader might wish that she had exercised less Kiplingesque fidelity. Nor should one expect objectivity; Faleiro makes it quite clear that her sympathies lie with the women in this trade, and her fascination with their independence can cloud her judgment. But these are minor quibbles.
Because the truth is that Beautiful Thing is one of the books we’ve been waiting for in contemporary India—a non-fiction debut of astonishing integrity and sensitivity, where Faleiro tells a story that is beguiling, incredibly funny in parts, and absolutely heart-breaking. This is without question a brilliant, unforgettable book by a writer who is one of the best of her generation. Beautiful Thing is one of the best books of the year; and is one of the most gripping and honest books written about Bombay in a very long while.
The BS Column: Silenced in Burma
(Published in the Business Standard, November 12, 2010)
At the height of Stalin’s rule, Mikhail Bulgakov was learning an aspect of the craft of writing that is rarely taught in creative writing courses today: the art of outwitting the censor. This practice, well-known to all writers who live under dictatorships, could lead to bizarre leaps of creativity.
In his 1925 Heart of a Dog, for instance, Bulgakov created the tale of a scientist who transplants human organs into the body of a dog called Sharik, who then becomes more and more human as the book unfolds. The donor of the organs is a drunk called Chugunkin; this was considered bold nomenclature on Bulgakov’s part, because Chugunkin translates as “iron”, which was seen as a reference to Stalin (“man of steel”).
In a similar vein, consider one of the most famous literary controversies in contemporary China. In 1978, the poet Bei Dao wrote a poem that contained these lines: “Life. The sun rises too.” Chinese officials spent a great deal of time analyzing and dissecting these lines—were they a reference to the “red sun” of Mao Tsetsung? If so, Bei Dao was being deeply critical of Mao; if not, it was just another innocuous poet’s metaphor. The journal founded by Bei Dao, Jintian, was shut down in 1980, when Beijing decided it had had enough of dealing with potentially subversive lyricism.
Just a few months before Dawa Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her 15-year term of house arrest in Myanmar, where the regime has held ‘The Lady’ in effective imprisonment, there was a small, sad but heartening news story in the Burmese press. In July, an unnamed 14-year-old boy was arrested in Rangoon for hawking copies of Suu Kyi’s Freedom From Fear, which is banned in Burma. He was also selling a book by pro-democracy dissident Win Tin, who was imprisoned for 19 years and wrote about his experiences in, “What’s that? Human hell?” which was promptly banned on its release.
The boy’s fate is unknown; but the reports of his arrest pointed to the fact that the military dictatorship in Myanmar has been unable to suppress the appetite in the country for the writings of Suu Kyi, Win Tin and other writers, like Pascal Khoo-Thwe.
Khoo-Thwe and Aung San Suu Kyi have never veiled their writings. Khoo-Thwe’s Land of Green Ghosts is, like so many other works of Burmese literature, not available within Myanmar. His account of the history of Burma was a straightforward narrative, uncensored and open. Suu Kyi’s hard-hitting and mesmerizing Letters From Burma were written for a Japanese newspaper, and has been in print since its 1998 publication in the West. Along with Freedom From Fear, it is one of the most celebrated and revered “missing” books in Myanmar, and despite the efforts of the military junta, samizdat copies continue to circulate.
The history of her father, General Aung San, and his writings, have been more fraught. In the 1990s, references to Aung San began to be edited out of the country’s textbooks: the second weapon of dictatorships and military regimes, after censorship, is erasure. Editing textbooks is a classic way of manipulating history—do it for two generations, and you have succeeded in changing a country’s memory of its own past.
Among the list of guidelines handed down to Burmese printers and publishers in 1975—guidelines that continue to dictate what may and may not be published—is this blanket provision: “Any incorrect ideas or opinions which do not accord with the times.” Put that together with the prohibition on publishing “anything detrimental to the Burmese Socialist Program”, and that leaves very little in the way of “acceptable” writing.
In this climate, censorship becomes a theatre of the absurd. Travelling in Burma, Emma Larkin writes in Secret Histories of the wry joke about George Orwell’s “Burmese books”. Intellectuals and scholars jest that Orwell didn’t write one novel about the country but three—Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984.
Give censors a free hand, and as in Stalin’s time, the absurdities begin to take on a bizarre life of their own. One of the more famous cases of censorship cited concerns an anthology of short stories published in the 1990s. This was a volume of stories put together in tribute to the writer MoMo (Inya), who had died in 1990. On the cover was an image of MoMo’s head, embossed on a gold medallion. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Though none of the stories in the anthology in MoMo’s honour concerned Aung San, the publishers were directed to cover up the image of the medallion. The regime feared that readers would be reminded of Aung San’s Nobel win—and so the book was finally published, with a strip of gold paper pasted over the features of the writer it honoured.
At the height of Stalin’s rule, Mikhail Bulgakov was learning an aspect of the craft of writing that is rarely taught in creative writing courses today: the art of outwitting the censor. This practice, well-known to all writers who live under dictatorships, could lead to bizarre leaps of creativity.
In his 1925 Heart of a Dog, for instance, Bulgakov created the tale of a scientist who transplants human organs into the body of a dog called Sharik, who then becomes more and more human as the book unfolds. The donor of the organs is a drunk called Chugunkin; this was considered bold nomenclature on Bulgakov’s part, because Chugunkin translates as “iron”, which was seen as a reference to Stalin (“man of steel”).
In a similar vein, consider one of the most famous literary controversies in contemporary China. In 1978, the poet Bei Dao wrote a poem that contained these lines: “Life. The sun rises too.” Chinese officials spent a great deal of time analyzing and dissecting these lines—were they a reference to the “red sun” of Mao Tsetsung? If so, Bei Dao was being deeply critical of Mao; if not, it was just another innocuous poet’s metaphor. The journal founded by Bei Dao, Jintian, was shut down in 1980, when Beijing decided it had had enough of dealing with potentially subversive lyricism.
Just a few months before Dawa Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her 15-year term of house arrest in Myanmar, where the regime has held ‘The Lady’ in effective imprisonment, there was a small, sad but heartening news story in the Burmese press. In July, an unnamed 14-year-old boy was arrested in Rangoon for hawking copies of Suu Kyi’s Freedom From Fear, which is banned in Burma. He was also selling a book by pro-democracy dissident Win Tin, who was imprisoned for 19 years and wrote about his experiences in, “What’s that? Human hell?” which was promptly banned on its release.
The boy’s fate is unknown; but the reports of his arrest pointed to the fact that the military dictatorship in Myanmar has been unable to suppress the appetite in the country for the writings of Suu Kyi, Win Tin and other writers, like Pascal Khoo-Thwe.
Khoo-Thwe and Aung San Suu Kyi have never veiled their writings. Khoo-Thwe’s Land of Green Ghosts is, like so many other works of Burmese literature, not available within Myanmar. His account of the history of Burma was a straightforward narrative, uncensored and open. Suu Kyi’s hard-hitting and mesmerizing Letters From Burma were written for a Japanese newspaper, and has been in print since its 1998 publication in the West. Along with Freedom From Fear, it is one of the most celebrated and revered “missing” books in Myanmar, and despite the efforts of the military junta, samizdat copies continue to circulate.
The history of her father, General Aung San, and his writings, have been more fraught. In the 1990s, references to Aung San began to be edited out of the country’s textbooks: the second weapon of dictatorships and military regimes, after censorship, is erasure. Editing textbooks is a classic way of manipulating history—do it for two generations, and you have succeeded in changing a country’s memory of its own past.
Among the list of guidelines handed down to Burmese printers and publishers in 1975—guidelines that continue to dictate what may and may not be published—is this blanket provision: “Any incorrect ideas or opinions which do not accord with the times.” Put that together with the prohibition on publishing “anything detrimental to the Burmese Socialist Program”, and that leaves very little in the way of “acceptable” writing.
In this climate, censorship becomes a theatre of the absurd. Travelling in Burma, Emma Larkin writes in Secret Histories of the wry joke about George Orwell’s “Burmese books”. Intellectuals and scholars jest that Orwell didn’t write one novel about the country but three—Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984.
Give censors a free hand, and as in Stalin’s time, the absurdities begin to take on a bizarre life of their own. One of the more famous cases of censorship cited concerns an anthology of short stories published in the 1990s. This was a volume of stories put together in tribute to the writer MoMo (Inya), who had died in 1990. On the cover was an image of MoMo’s head, embossed on a gold medallion. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Though none of the stories in the anthology in MoMo’s honour concerned Aung San, the publishers were directed to cover up the image of the medallion. The regime feared that readers would be reminded of Aung San’s Nobel win—and so the book was finally published, with a strip of gold paper pasted over the features of the writer it honoured.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
The BS Column: P Lal and Writers Workshop
(Published in the Business Standard, 9 November 2010)
In the homes of Indian writers of a certain generation, there’ll always be the Writers Workshop shelf, given over to hand-bound books, the cloth borders taken from Orissa saris, the title often hand-calligraphed. You don’t find them in bookstores that often these days, but there was a time when Writers Workshop represented, in effect, the sum total of the aspirations of Indians writing in English.
Professor P Lal, the man behind Writers Workshop, and perhaps the last of the dying breed of “gentleman publishers”, died this weekend at the age of 81 in Calcutta, where he had lived and worked most of his life. In the fifty years since he had started Writers Workshop, Indian publishing had changed beyond recognition. There were now a multitude of publishing houses, literary festivals, book launches—all the infrastructure that was missing when he and a group of friends began Writers Workshop.
“The reason I went into publishing is simple – nobody was around, in 1958, to publish me. So I published myself. Half a dozen others – friends – also found this expedient attractive. So we formed a group, a nice consanguineous côterie. We wrote prefaces to each other’s books, pointing out excellences, and performed similar familial kindnesses in other ways as well. We believed, with Helen Gardner, that criticism should flash the torch, not wield the sceptre,” he wrote of its beginnings.
The “half-a-dozen others” included Sasthibrata Chakravarthi and Anita Desai—but from the start, WW would aim to encourage those who were not destined to become famous, opening its doors to major and minor talent. AK Ramanujan, Vikram Seth, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Agha Shahid Ali, Keki Daruwalla, Mani Nair, the enigmatic Lawrence Bantleman and a score of Indian poets would find their first moorings within the elegant covers so carefully crafted by P Lal’s endeavour—but so would hundreds of other now-forgotten writers.
On a personal note, I might add that one of their youngest members was my sister, who had written a precocious short story at the age of 12, and who for years was made welcome at their meetings. Chai would be ordered—“and a coke for Baby”—and while she never took up writing, she remembers the warmth and acceptance P Lal and his circle handed out to everyone who happened to stray within its borders.
As Indian publishing came of age, the importance and necessity of Writers Workshop began to diminish. The space that P Lal and his friends had created in 1958 was crucial—both in terms of establishing a publishing house for writers, and setting down the importance of Indian writing in English. One of the first controversies that erupted was the attack on Indian poetry in English by Buddhadev Bose, and then by Bose’s son-in-law, Jyotirmaya Datta. The latter wrote an essay, “Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Poets”, that P Lal responded to—with his usual spirited but gentle liveliness—and in many ways, these attacks offered a meeting point for those who were just beginning to write in English, using it as an Indian, not an alien, language.
P Lal was also a writer, poet and academic, but he will perhaps be best remembered for his magisterial translation of the Mahabharata—perhaps the most complete rendering of the epic available. It was typical of him that he would hold a weekly reading, every Sunday, open to all, from 1999 onwards, in honour of the grand oral tradition of the epic. So many of us, writers and readers in Calcutta, attended those sessions, discovering a community and a fellowship long before there was the season of book launches.
The impact of Writers Workshop cannot be measured by its 3,000-odd titles, or by the influence it once wielded as a publishing house. It was, like Clearinghouse in Bombay, a literary movement, fuelled by the agile mind and precise labours of P Lal. In my copies of the books produced by Writers Workshop, there was always this, in calligraphy: “Layout and lettering by P Lal with a Sheaffer calligraphy pen. Embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-boundby Tulamiah Mohiuddin with handloom sari cloth woven and designed in India, to provide visual beauty and the intimate texture of book-feel.”
Few publishers today, however brilliant their lists of authors, have that kind of passion, P Lal’s celebration of “book-feel”, and his insistence that literature was a large, rambling house, its rooms broad enough to accommodate all, however modest or stellar their individual talents.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The BS Column: The sofa-cum-bed conundrum
(This was first published in the Business Standard, 2nd November, 2010)
In the 13 years since Arundhati Roy wrote and won the Booker Prize for God of Small Things, her position in the pantheon of small goddesses has shifted and changed radically.
She and Salman Rushdie were, for a while, part of the India Shining story. Middle-class India chose not to engage with the content of their work—Rushdie’s obsession with restoring a certain view of history, his insistence on the freedom to question faith, Arundhati’s early and constant need to rock the boat, to ask inconvenient questions of the Indian state.
These obsessions, which lay at the core of their work, were edited out for many in India; they were just Booker winners, the equivalent of the Indian beauty queens who walked away with Ms Universe titles and “made us proud” on a global stage.
Rushdie has always been a writer; Midnight’s Children was followed by 14 books, including novels, essays and short stories. Roy, who had once remarked that being called a writer-activist was like being called a sofa-cum-bed, yielded to her more polemical side.
In the decade that followed God of Small Things, she was rumoured to be at work on a second novel, but what she produced was a series of broadsides. They were passionate but often solipsistic pieces, and the argument for her increasing irrelevance as an opinion-maker or analyst has grown in force over the years.
Over the last week, what we’ve seen is a curiously Indian tamasha, where the sense of being caught in a poorly-scripted television drama is inescapable. Arundhati Roy makes a statement about Kashmir that echoes views she has earlier put forward, and views (the state has “never been an integral part of India”) that have been articulated elsewhere, by others.
The BJP, for its own politically motivated reasons, and a TV channel, for the sake of driving up TRP points, jumps on the writer; there is much reference to sedition laws; her home in Chanakya Puri witnesses staged protests by the BJP’s Mahila Morcha wing, where the TV cameras are invited in advance to capture this spontaneous outpouring of public wrath. This isn’t farce—it’s parody.
But there is one point to be made, and it’s the question that often comes up in TV debates—about Rohinton Mistry, about Salman Rushdie, about Taslima Nasreen and about Arundhati Roy. Someone always asks, “Shouldn’t writers be more responsible?” or there’s a suggestion, as was often made during this recent affair, that writers should stick to their writing—no sofa-bed confusion for us.
This is actually a very new idea in modern-day India. The British came up with this argument often, and used it—unsuccessfully--against Bankimchandra, Michael Madhushudan Dutt and other young firebrands, who ignored the suggestion that writers should stick to literature and leave politics out of it. Politics and the political situation of India fuelled their writing, and banned or not, they continued to write about indigo plantations, the cruelty of British rule and the inequities of language. You might add Lokmanya Tilak and Veer Savarkar to the list of those who faced sedition laws, just as an indication of how bad laws make strange bedfellows.
In more recent times, few writers maintained a division between their politically engaged selves and their literary selves. If they had, we would never have seen a Faiz, or a Saadat Hasan Manto, or a Nayantara Sahgal, whose novels chronicled the shifting political landscape of an emerging nation. Perhaps the most towering example of this today is Mahasweta Debi, whose journalism has marched side by side with her stories—it is impossible to extricate the activist from the writer, because they are both the same person, and one couldn’t survive without the other.
Arundhati Roy is not in the same league as Mahasweta Debi. But consider the roots of her engagement, and consider God of Small Things; that early novel was also about caste wars, about women’s financial and legal rights, and about the fragmenting and forgetting of history. Everything she has done since then, from her reportage of the Narmada Dam to her travels with the Maoists and her exploration of Kashmir, is consistent; she may be a very naïve interlocutor of India, and you may disagree with her analyses, as many do, or be tired of her simplifications, as many are, but you cannot doubt the intensity of her engagement.
Writers are, in the end, also citizens. The best writers in every age have also been deeply engaged citizens, and to ask, as we are now doing in India, for writers to stick to their writing is a little like asking investigative journalists to stick to their knitting. What we’re really asking, when we pose the question of a writer’s responsibility, is for writing to be like bonsai-growing, or ikebana: a strictly ornamental occupation that challenges nothing, shakes up nothing. That is not how our writers have worked in the past, and it’s not how they can continue to work in the future.
Criticising the media--Mitali Saran's column
(I've written for Business Standard for over 15 years now, and never in that time been asked to censor my opinions. The only column they couldn't carry was one on the Ambani book, Polyester Prince, because the matter was sub-judice and we couldn't legally comment on it at the time.
It was very distressing, then, to hear that the newspaper wouldn't carry Mitali Saran's column on the India Today plagiarism issue, on the grounds that it was too dated to run. Mitali, who blogs at Stet, has since withdrawn her column from the paper. Here's the link to her blog, the column, and some background.)
From Stet, by Mitali Saran:
The case of the missing attribution*
*This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below:
"Amongst other crimes such as those listed in the Press Council of India report which nobody in the media wants to talk about, is rampant plagiarism. Nobody in the media wants to talk about that either. It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses."
Update November 2, 2010: Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard....
It was very distressing, then, to hear that the newspaper wouldn't carry Mitali Saran's column on the India Today plagiarism issue, on the grounds that it was too dated to run. Mitali, who blogs at Stet, has since withdrawn her column from the paper. Here's the link to her blog, the column, and some background.)
From Stet, by Mitali Saran:
The case of the missing attribution*
*This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below:
"Amongst other crimes such as those listed in the Press Council of India report which nobody in the media wants to talk about, is rampant plagiarism. Nobody in the media wants to talk about that either. It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses."
Update November 2, 2010: Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard....
The BS Column: The marketplace of outrage
(I'm running behind on blog updates--my apologies. This was published on 26th October in the Business Standard. This is part of a series of articles and columns I've been writing over the last ten years on censorship and free speech issues--I wish the politics of this country hadn't made that archive necessary.)
“What we have developed today is a marketplace of outrage. And if you And if you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, 'My feelings are more hurt than yours'."~ Monica Ali, author of ‘Brick Lane’.
In recent weeks, we witnessed the Shiv Sena attack on Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, which resulted in the book being burned outside Mumbai University and then withdrawn from the syllabus.
What was instructive weren’t the well-worn, shabby arguments in favour of the ban, arguments that sought to portray one of the great Bombay novels as an “obscene” book that was against dabbawallahs, the Marathi manoos, Indira Gandhi and the Sena, not necessarily in that order. Instead, it was the alacrity with which politicians of different parties brushed aside concerns over free expression in India, and their willingness to support book bans in general, that was fascinating. Perhaps one way to understand the thriving dhanda in today’s marketplace of outrage is to trace the evolution of book bans in the country through some of the most significant ones.
Rama Retold, Aubrey Menen, banned in 1956: Now almost forgotten, Aubrey Menen was at one time something of a standard-bearer for his generation, known for the elegance of his mind and his somewhat baroque work. Rama Retold was a deconstruction of the Ramayana, told with Menen’s trademark refusal to respect pedestals and the icons that stood on them. In the 1950s, this became one of the first books to be banned by the Indian government on the grounds that it might offend religious sensibilities—opening the door to future displays of competitive intolerance.
Nine Hours to Rama, Stanley Wolpert, banned in 1962: Wolpert’s analysis of Gandhi’s assassination had nothing to do with the Ramayana—it was his research into the gaps in the security arrangements surrounding the Mahatma, and the suggestion of conspiracy theories, that attracted the state’s censorship. This set a second, and equally dangerous, precedent, allowing the state to consider banning books that might deliver inconvenient insinuations about any ruling government.
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, banned in 1988: Rushdie’s Verses is perhaps the most controversial book of our times. India was the first country in the world to ban the Verses, a ban that was propelled by the fear of a strong Islamic reaction against what was seen as blasphemy. Rushdie has often argued for the right—and the necessity—of authors to explore all subjects, including faith, and the right of authors to be, if necessary, blasphemous.
The result of banning Satanic Verses was direct and disastrous—it encouraged political parties and religious groups of all stamps to play the “competitive intolerance” game. Once it had been established that offending religious sensibilities may be cause for a book ban, anyone who wants to shut down inconvenient ideas or lines of inquiry into any faith can demand a ban by insisting that their sensibilities are offended.
Shivaji, by James Laine, banned by the Maharashtra government in 2004: Laine’s work on Shivaji sourced gossip about the Marathi icon’s parentage and origins, fuelling a rampage against the BORI library in Pune by Sambhaji Sena activists. What is most telling about this particular book ban is the way in which Laine’s scholarship and willingness to examine the complex myths around a historical figure have been reduced to gross simplicities.
Laine’s work may have been flawed—some scholars have argued this point—but in the popular imagination, his Shivaji book is the “book that insulted Shivaji”, written by a “foreigner and outsider”. The only way to keep a book on a banned-books list is to do precisely this—rob it of its complexity, and drop it down a memory hole. Few now remember that the real issue at stake was the far more complex issue of how we choose to remember our histories, and who gets to be the custodian of these histories.
Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry, not banned but withdrawn from a university syllabus, 2010: There are two lessons to be drawn from this particular case. One is that book bans have become an almost symbolic ritual—the burning of books, once a powerfully frightening image, now reduced to parody, the conjuring up of protestors just a demonstration of political muscle, not genuine outrage. The other is that in the marketplace of outrage, bribery and force work if you want to orchestrate a book ban, or subvert a university.
In all of this, as one book after another drops into an Orwellian memory hole, what we’re losing is the power to insist that we have a right to read, and to think for ourselves. Each successive ban creates a demand for the manufacturing of more ersatz outrage. What we need is a freemarket of ideas, not the thriving marketplace of outrage that’s set up shop in India today.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
PEN India statement on Rohinton Mistry and Such a Long Journey
(My apologies, this should have been posted earlier; I'm travelling at present.)
PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
20 October 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...
India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.
There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.
Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
More links:
The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms
PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html
PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
20 October 2010
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...
India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.
There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.
Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE
More links:
The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms
PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The BS column: Rohinton and the Rat Pack
(Published in the Business Standard, October 17, 2010. This was written before The Buck Stops Here show on Rohinton Mistry and the withdrawal of his book from the Mumbai university syllabus.)
“That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by –” Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life.
In the city of Mumbai, once upon a time, there lived many storytellers. Some came from the slums, and wrote angry, anguished, beautiful poetry about their lives. Some collected memories of Mumbai with loving care, and set down tales that featured the stories of the real Marathi Manoos, the ones who were Hindu but also Anglo-Indian or had names like Sinai and Pereira.
Some wrote of Firozesha Baag, chronicling the dying world of the Parsis, of ordinary men like Gustad Noble, stumbling from the tribulations of his quiet life into a larger conspiracy involving the corruption of the state, the venality and violence of its political parties. It must be remembered that at this time, Mumbai was also known as Bombay, and Bombay was a city that welcomed kahanis, opening its arms to stories and to story-tellers. Some of the best found an ocean of seas of stories here: a young man who worked in advertising called Salman Rushdie, two men who knew the slums intimately, Kiran Nagarkar and Namdeo Dhasal, a banker called Rohinton Mistry who returned to literature in Toronto, remembering and etching the Bombay he had loved so much.
Salman Rushdie spent years in darkness, at the hands of a villain much like the Khattam-Shud he wrote about in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There were many other Khattam-Shuds in India, men who preferred “chup” to “gup”, and since Rushdie had been unwise enough to write about religion, Islam and the Koran in a book called Satanic Verses, they placed his book under a seal of the blackest silence for 23 years.
Many argued that religion should not be beyond question, and that the point of a novel was that it was made up, and that perhaps those who didn’t want to read Rushdie’s ideas might want to stop buying and burning copies of the book and just tell all their friends not to read it. But a ban hung like a shroud over Satanic Verses, and in a very strange coincidence, few great novels about controversial religious matters have come out of India in the last 23 years. This is, of course, just a coincidence, brought about by the P2C2E described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories—a Process Too Complicated To Explain.
Meanwhile, Mumbai was changing too, and becoming a city of Rats, fearsome creatures with whiskers that sniffed out the merest hint of offence, and great sharp teeth called censorship laws, and the thing about Rats is that they were very good about calling up bands of fellow Rats at need. The Rats felt strongly about the Marathi Manoos, a mythical and apparently endangered species that was threatened in Mumbai by anything that was neither pure Maharashtrian nor a Rat. The Rats felt strongly about anything that was against the spirit of their ancient culture, which is to say anything that criticized Rattery in general and Ratty politics in particular. The Rats felt very, very strongly about books that were freely available, in bookshops or in local universities, that caused offence to Rattishness.
The second thing about Rats is that they are very slow readers. Someone needs to bring a King Rat, or a Crown Prince Rat, a book worthy of burning before he will turn its pages, and the vision of Rats is such that they can only see what offends them. And so, twenty years after Mistry first set down the tale of Gustad Noble, and after it had been not just acclaimed by critics, but loved by non-Rats everywhere, a young Rat read the book. And he was shocked to discover that it offended his sensibilities, by casting aspersions on Rattish behaviour (such as corruption and mob violence and other forms of Rattery), and that it offended particular political parties. It happened to be his political party, but he explained that Political Parties, like Rats, needed to stand together against anything that might be Offensive, such as books that made people question the conduct of Political Parties known for their tendency to rule by thuggery. (Or Thuggeries, since there were three of them, a big Thuggery, a medium Thuggery and a little Thuggerish.)
It caused the Rats the greatest offence of all to discover that Such a Long Journey was being taught in Mumbai University—which, however, had a fellow Rat at its helm. It was the easiest thing in the world to organize a book-burning session followed by a book-banning session, and the niceties observed, the Rats went back to their holes.
They left us with a question, though, as Rohinton Mistry becomes the latest in a long line of authors to experience Rat censure and censorship. If Bombay turns into Rattistan, what will happen to its story-tellers? Will they leave, hustled out of the city by Rat stormtroopers? Will they end up with books written in Rattish, a new language for books that contain only blank pages, and three words: “Don’t cause offence.”
Monday, October 18, 2010
Copy, Paste: The India Today plagiarism case
The India Today plagiarism case makes me think of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika library system, also known as Shaktida.
Shakti Roy was the unacknowledged genius who ran the group's archives for years, long before the Internets made it easy to Google everything under the sun. He had the mind of a superior search engine; if two people, one working on the Society pages and one working on the Stockmarket pages, asked for information on, say, Ratan Tata, they'd get superbly filtered results. And his memory was phenomenal. Any young journalist foolish enough to attempt to "recycle" copy, recycling being the euphemism for plagiarism in those days, would receive a package from Shakti da containing a printout of his story, and the stories he or she had been "inspired" from. No other comment was necessary.
Here's what happened with India Today. Aroon Purie, who writes the note from the Editor-in-Chief, was faced with a split edition; India Today was covering Rajnikanth in the South, Omar Abdullah in the North. His piece on Rajnikanth more or less reproduced the first two paragraphs of this much-discussed Slate article on the film star verbatim:
http://www.slate.com/id/2267820/
Aroon Purie claimed jetlag as an excuse, in an ungracious apology that didn't mention either Slate or Grady Hendrix, the author of the Rajnikanth piece.
The apology is... illuminating. We have a senior editor explaining that he doesn't write his own editorials, and skating lightly over the tiny detail of how those "inputs" found their way into the main copy. We also have a situation where one of the country's best-known magazines apparently doesn't have a copy desk, or at least not a desk that could either recognise the lift (the Slate piece was widely discussed on the Net), or red-flag lines that explain who Rajnikanth is and speak of the "Indian state of Tamil Nadu"--in an edition that goes out to South India.
But most of all, that apology and India Today's reaction lacks grace. Slate got ripped off, without acknowledgement; Grady Hendrix, who wrote those lines, must have been surprised to see them under a different byline. Journalism is often written at high speed, to unrealistic deadlines, and anyone who researches their 600-word pieces will have, at some stage, made use of the files. But plagiarism in India isn't seen as a major crime--as a major embarrassment, yes, but there is little understanding of how the person who's been ripped off might feel. (I remember a journalist from a major newspaper complaining that I'd complained when he stole all but one paragraph of one of my columns. He felt it was unfair that he got yelled at by his editor for "paying tribute". It was only when I explained that I'd prefer to replace the term "paying tribute" with "stole my work" that he backed down.)
Grady Hendrix reacted with amusement: "I’ve just emailed India Today offering my services. Instead of having to do all this tedious cutting and pasting themselves, I suggested that I could just write for them directly. I’ve promised them to charge a reasonable rate, and assured them that I will never steal copy from Mr. Purie and print it under my own name in revenge."
Now that's grace.
And a little more from Mr Hendrix here (scroll down in the comments section):
"I'm the guy who wrote the Slate article, and someone forwarded me a link here to check out the preview of the apology. India Today has refused to respond to emails from myself and Slate, but I'm glad they're going to apologize. It must be very difficult for the staff of India Today that when Mr. Purie gets "jet-lagged" he steals things. I would imagine that whenever they see their boss yawning, or looking sleepy, all of his employees must frantically lock up their laptops and hide their wallets lest he lifts them."
Shakti Roy was the unacknowledged genius who ran the group's archives for years, long before the Internets made it easy to Google everything under the sun. He had the mind of a superior search engine; if two people, one working on the Society pages and one working on the Stockmarket pages, asked for information on, say, Ratan Tata, they'd get superbly filtered results. And his memory was phenomenal. Any young journalist foolish enough to attempt to "recycle" copy, recycling being the euphemism for plagiarism in those days, would receive a package from Shakti da containing a printout of his story, and the stories he or she had been "inspired" from. No other comment was necessary.
Here's what happened with India Today. Aroon Purie, who writes the note from the Editor-in-Chief, was faced with a split edition; India Today was covering Rajnikanth in the South, Omar Abdullah in the North. His piece on Rajnikanth more or less reproduced the first two paragraphs of this much-discussed Slate article on the film star verbatim:
http://www.slate.com/id/2267820/
"Jackie Chan is the highest-paid actor in Asia, and that makes sense. Besides producing, directing, and starring in his own action movies since 1980, he's earned millions in Hollywood with blockbusters like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid. But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn't make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986. This is Rajinikanth, and he is no mere actor—he is a force of nature. If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth. Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, "SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!"
If you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before, you will on Oct. 1, when his movie Enthiran (The Robot) opens around the world. It's the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It's getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously. Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix) did the action, Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park) did creature designs, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic did the effects, and Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) wrote the music. It's a massive investment, but the producers fully expect to recoup that, because this isn't just some film they're releasing; this is a Rajinikanth film."
Aroon Purie claimed jetlag as an excuse, in an ungracious apology that didn't mention either Slate or Grady Hendrix, the author of the Rajnikanth piece.
The apology is... illuminating. We have a senior editor explaining that he doesn't write his own editorials, and skating lightly over the tiny detail of how those "inputs" found their way into the main copy. We also have a situation where one of the country's best-known magazines apparently doesn't have a copy desk, or at least not a desk that could either recognise the lift (the Slate piece was widely discussed on the Net), or red-flag lines that explain who Rajnikanth is and speak of the "Indian state of Tamil Nadu"--in an edition that goes out to South India.
But most of all, that apology and India Today's reaction lacks grace. Slate got ripped off, without acknowledgement; Grady Hendrix, who wrote those lines, must have been surprised to see them under a different byline. Journalism is often written at high speed, to unrealistic deadlines, and anyone who researches their 600-word pieces will have, at some stage, made use of the files. But plagiarism in India isn't seen as a major crime--as a major embarrassment, yes, but there is little understanding of how the person who's been ripped off might feel. (I remember a journalist from a major newspaper complaining that I'd complained when he stole all but one paragraph of one of my columns. He felt it was unfair that he got yelled at by his editor for "paying tribute". It was only when I explained that I'd prefer to replace the term "paying tribute" with "stole my work" that he backed down.)
Grady Hendrix reacted with amusement: "I’ve just emailed India Today offering my services. Instead of having to do all this tedious cutting and pasting themselves, I suggested that I could just write for them directly. I’ve promised them to charge a reasonable rate, and assured them that I will never steal copy from Mr. Purie and print it under my own name in revenge."
Now that's grace.
And a little more from Mr Hendrix here (scroll down in the comments section):
"I'm the guy who wrote the Slate article, and someone forwarded me a link here to check out the preview of the apology. India Today has refused to respond to emails from myself and Slate, but I'm glad they're going to apologize. It must be very difficult for the staff of India Today that when Mr. Purie gets "jet-lagged" he steals things. I would imagine that whenever they see their boss yawning, or looking sleepy, all of his employees must frantically lock up their laptops and hide their wallets lest he lifts them."
Friday, October 08, 2010
Bats in our Belfries
(Published in Outlook Traveller, October 2010)
If it hadn’t been for a decade of reading Gerald Durrell, I may never have dated a man who was the companion of the Princess of Patparganj.
The Princess, who was treated like royalty and had better manners than most of the nobility, was a young, comely pink piglet who had been rescued from a possibly fearsome fate in the bylanes of Feroze Shah Kotla. The man in question had gone to the Kotla market to buy razais; he and the Princess crossed paths, and it was love at first sight. Other gently nurtured women may have found his story odd, but I found nothing at all unusual in the fact that he came back sans razai and with the piglet; I, you see, had read my Durrell.
The Durrell books, depending on your taste, are either up there with the greatest of the wildlife and conservation classics in the company of Jane Goodall and Joy Adamson, or nestle comfortably alongside stylists of the ilk of PG Wodehouse. The books were thrust upon me by a wonderful school teacher—“You’ve never read Durrell?” she said, and dumped a shelf-ful of Durrell on me, starting with his fictionalized account of travels with an alcoholic elephant, Rosy is My Relative.
They had the most alluring titles—Catch me a Colobus, Beasts in my Belfry, The Bafut Beagles—and the most seductive illustrations, done by Ralph Thompson, who had a knack for getting both the detail and the humour of the Durrell oeuvre down in a few neat lines. It was one of the absolute joys of a very brief stint in publishing to be part of the Tranquebar team that brought the books back into print in India, with cheerful new illustrations by Gynelle Alves.
Durrell was born in Raj India, though the family moved back to England when he was three-and-a-half, and then to Corfu. “I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids,” writes Durrell, already the young naturalist. It was in Corfu, as he sets down in My Family and Other Animals, that his fascination for both kingdoms—the animal and the human—came to the fore.
Gerald Durrell graduated from keeping snakes in his room to travelling the world, building zoos (A Zoo in My Luggage), collecting rare and on-the-verge-of-extinction species (The Whispering Land, The Drunken Forest) while learning how to change the nature of zoos, from prison to animal-friendly resort (The Overcrowded Ark). But what made his books work was his zest for life, and his ability to collect lugubrious tango-singers, White Horse whisky drinking African chiefs, and mad Greeks alongside the colobuses, lemurs, pangolins, tapirs and chimpanzees that were the stock-in-trade of his profession. The brothers Durrell—Lawrence was the author of the Alexandria Quartet—were natural writers, and there was nothing of the dry scholar in Gerald’s description of animals:
“We had a pair of slender lorises of which we were inordinately proud. These creatures look rather like drug addicts that have seen better days. Clad in light grey fur, they have enormously long and thin limbs and body; strange almost human hands; and large lustrous brown eyes, each surrounded by a circle of dark fur, so that the animals appears as though it is recovering either from some sort of ghastly debauchery or an unsuccessful boxing tournament.”
His writing was not for the sentimental, Disney-influenced animal lover. Durrell was equally strong on describing the proper procedure for pulling out maggots from an animal’s skin, or the problems of building cages strong enough to withstand a young leopard’s temper tantrums.
The Durrell books, as anyone who has read them knows, are insidious in their appeal. Little by little, he expands your world, whether you live in Delhi or Corfu, until it’s peopled—and I use that term with meaning—with the animals who’ve travelled with him, the owl who looks like an indignant vicar, the little flirtatious pig called Juanita, solemn seals who mate with exquisite care and slow delicacy, chimpanzees called Cholmondoley who arrive for tea equipped with their own, large, battered tin tea mug. The younger brother of the teacher who lent me the Durrell books became a conservationist, and she continued, in her profession, to campaign for wildlife rights.
I followed a more muted path, adopting the odd mongoose here, a stray baby hawk there. The Princess of Patparganj grew too large for her habitation and escaped the bacon fate, living out her years on a friend’s no-kill farm. As for the man, it seemed the only way to stop him from rescuing pythons, monkeys and piglets was to turn him to a life of caring for cats and more manageable creatures, and the only way to do that was to marry him. I had a feeling Gerald Durrell would have approved.
The BS column: The Nobel over the century
(Published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2010, three days before the Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa.)
This Thursday, the next Nobel Laureate in Literature will be announced. Salman Rushdie, alas, is way down on Ladbroke’s list of betting odds along with Mahasweta Devi, but some would consider 66/1 a sporting chance — in honour of his new book, Luka and The Fire of Life, I’ve put a small punt on him. Most commentators think this might be the year of the poets, with a small group betting on the African writer Ngugi wa Thiongo. (MA Orthofer at the Complete Review covered the pre-announcement speculation in detail, here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd1; his comprehensive Vargas Llosa links page here: http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#sd8.)
Setting aside the merits of an individual laureate in any given year, though, a century and a bit is a good time to look back at Nobels past. The evolution of the Nobel, from a small European prize fuelled by a dynamite-maker’s fortune to perhaps the world’s most influential literary gong, is a remarkable story.
1900s to the 1930s: The first 30 years of the Nobel was a time of evolution, as the literature prize sought to define itself. The first prize went to Sully Prudhomme, no longer read or remembered, but famous for his poetry at the time. Over the next decade, the Swedish Academy’s fondness for poets, and its occasional partiality towards Europe’s writers, were both strong. Kipling was an early recipient of the Prize, and so, five years after Kipling got his gong, was Tagore. The post-World War I years were somewhat insular, and except for William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann and G B Shaw, few Nobel laureates from that period have stood the test of time.
1930s-1950s: The 1930s saw an earnest attempt by the Swedish Academy to broaden the Prize. Alfred Nobel’s will had stressed that the Nobel in Literature was for the “most outstanding work in an ideal direction”; by the 1930s, the Academy had broadened this to mean “body of work” rather than an individual book, and had decided to interpret “ideal direction” to mean works of universal popularity and interest. That accounts for the laureates of the 1930s — from Galsworthy to Pearl S Buck, Eugene O’Neill to Pirandello, Nobel Prize winners were increasingly recognisable.
The 1940s, disrupted by World War Two, saw the Academy reaching, again, for “ideal work” — but returning, with prizes bestowed on T S Eliot and William Faulkner, to the idea of literary quality and power as the driver behind the Prizes. Andre Osterling, the new secretary of the Academy, was responsible for persuading the Academy to applaud the pioneers of modern literature, from Hesse and Gide onwards. Many of the laureates of the 1940s had been discussed and rejected by a more conservative Academy in previous years. Osterling’s correspondence shows his discomfort with the Academy’s refusal, in the 1930s, to recognise such writers as James Joyce, and his determination not to repeat their mistakes.
1950s-1970s: Over the next two decades, the Prize looked outwards, acquiring a much broader frame of reference. With Churchill, Hemingway, Mauriac, Camus and Pasternak awarded in the same decade, the Nobel was becoming far more international than it had in the first two decades. Pasternak caused the first Nobel scandal, when Russian authorities forced him to decline his Prize — in 1964, Sartre would turn down his Nobel for loftier reasons, and in subsequent years, the Academy has carefully checked to see if authors will say aye or nay.
The 1960s and 1970s were golden years, with Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Kawabata, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer among those awarded. Few women made the cut — Nelly Sachs was the only female Laureate in all these years. And in the 1970s, the infamous Graham Greene rumour began circulating: gossip to the effect that Greene’s amours with the wife of a member of the Academy cost him his gong. True or not, it was a good story.
1980s-2000: Correspondence for these years is not yet available — the Academy releases its working notes with a 50-year time lag — but it is clear that the Prize was more aware of its powers. The Nobel now had the ability to make or break writers, and Garcia Marquez, William Golding and Wole Soyinka balanced then-unknown writers such as Elias Canetti and Claude Simon.
The 1990s was the decade of the poets, with awards going to four stalwarts — Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, making three of them world-famous rather than local heroes. It was also, very much so, the decade of gender equality, as the Nobel recognised Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and Szymborska — three women in one decade. This would be matched in the 2000s, with the Nobel going to Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Mueller and Doris Lessing, but it may be argued that the 1990s had the superior list.
2000-2010: The 2000s have alternated between the obscure — Jelinek, Le Clezio — and the safe anointing of the already famous — V S Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee. The 2000s, going by the list of laureates, reflects the back-and-forth as the Nobel goes to a worthy but obscure European writer, then to a better-known “world literature” figure. Perhaps the greatest challenge the Swedish Academy faces is the challenge of growing out of its Eurocentrism and opening its doors to the whole world of literature.
The BS Column: Naipaul-The Twilight of his Travels
(Published in the Business Standard, September 21, 2010)
I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.
The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour — the prime minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America — The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses — flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled — as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.
“Other travellers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V S Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travellers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarising labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.
In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveller, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)
The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writings. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, that may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart — handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.
The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations — Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.
Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.
Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.
I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.
The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour — the prime minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America — The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses — flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled — as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.
“Other travellers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V S Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travellers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarising labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.
In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveller, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)
The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writings. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, that may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart — handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.
The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations — Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.
Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.
Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature: The (revised) longlist
(Following a clarification on the rules of eligibility regarding publication dates for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the jury is happy to announce the revised longlist. It was brought to the jury's attention that two novels previously discussed and endorsed were, under the rules, eligible for contention in the final analysis. Here is the final longlist.)
1) Upamanyu Chatterjee: Way To Go (Penguin)
2) Amit Chaudhuri: The Immortals (Picador India)
3) Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf (HarperCollins)
4) Musharraf Ali Farooqui: The Story of a Widow (Picador India)
5) Ru Freeman: A Disobedient Girl (Penguin/ Viking)
6) Anjum Hassan: Neti Neti (IndiaInk/ Roli Books)
7) Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns (Pocket Books)
8) Manju Kapur: The Immigrant (Faber & Faber)
9) HM Naqvi: Home Boy (HarperCollins)
10) Salma: The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)
11) Sankar: The Middleman (Penguin, translated by Arunava Sinha)
12) Ali Sethi: The Wish Maker (Penguin)
13) Jaspreet Singh: Chef (Bloomsbury)
14) Aatish Taseer: The Temple Goers (Picador India)
15) Daniyal Mueenuddin: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Random House)
16) Neel Mukherjee: A Life Apart (Picador India)
(The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is in its first year; we announced the longlist today. This is a rough draft of my introduction to the longlist as chair of the jury.)
It gives me great pleasure to be here today at the invitation of the DSC group, and I’d like to say a special word of thanks to Ms Surina Narula for her unflagging and very gracious support of the prize, and her commitment to literature in a broader sense. I’d also like to thank Manhad Narula: the Prize is his brainchild, and his energy and enthusiasm fuelled the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
The need for a South Asian prize became apparent to many of us some years ago. India had some excellent literary prizes, but given the rich and the overlapping history of the subcontinent, we found ourselves missing the neighbours. There is an instinctive kinship among the countries of South Asia, and for readers, a Kamila Shamsie or a Romesh Gunesekhara would belong automatically on the same shelf as Vikram Seth or Sankar.
There was another problem, familiar to all of those who have administered literary prizes. I think of it as the Passport Control conundrum. Given the alacrity with which South Asians travel, and given that so many of us now lead nomadic lives, spreading ourselves out so that home could be anywhere on one or all of three different continents, it’s hard to identify who qualifies to be a South Asian writer. Too often, prize administrators have ended up in the uncomfortable position of being border guards—effectively checking the passports of authors to see who qualifies and who doesn’t.
The DSC Prize does away with the Passport Control problem in a way that’s highly unusual, but that reflects the realities of our times—it’s the content of the book that matters, not the nationality or place of residence of the writer. (The rules for eligibility are here.) The only criteria for eligibility is that the book should be set in South Asia, should feature South Asian characters, or should in some way concern itself with the history of South Asia. This makes, from the judges’ point of view, for fascinating reading. My colleague, Urvashi Butalia, had asked earlier this year whether we could arrive at a definition of South Asian fiction—I can only say, after reading the books in contention this year, that there is such a thing, and as a reader, you recognize it when you see it.
It was a great pleasure working with my fellow judges this year. We were, literally, reading on three continents. Moni Mohsin is a Pakistani writer and well-known columnist who has been part of that literary world for decades; Amitava Kumar is an eminent critic and writer whose most recent book, Evidence of Suspicion, addresses the euphemisms and lies behind the war on terror; Ian Jack, the legendary former editor of Granta magazine, is also an old India hand; and Lord Matthew Evans is the former chairman of Faber & Faber. We went through several rounds of debate and discussion, and immensely enjoyed the process of longlisting books for the DSC Prize. It was particularly illuminating reading works in translation alongside works written in English; it reflects the way we buy and read books in our everyday lives.
I’d offer just two suggestions for the future success of the Prize: to the Advisory Board, I would strongly suggest that they open it up further, and allow publishers to submit more books. It’s better to have an excess of entries than to run the risk of missing out on a potentially brilliant book, and part of the fun of reading as one of the judges is the discovery of a name or an author you haven’t come across previously. I’d also suggest, if I may, that the prize cover an entire year—for instance, the 2012 Prize would work even better if it were to cover as many books published in 2011 as possible. We offer our apologies to the authors who were not eligible for the DSC Prize because their books were published either too early or too late—any literary prize requires a little time to find its feet, and we hope you will be patient with us over the first two years.
I think the longlist this year reflects some of the best of Asian writing, with three languages—English, Bengali and Tamil—represented, and authors from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the US. In the end, this is what makes any literary prize exciting—the quality and the breadth of reading it covers, and the fiction on this year’s longlist was, for all of us on the jury, truly a discovery.
We will be announcing the shortlist of 5, or perhaps 6, titles on October 25 in London.
1) Upamanyu Chatterjee: Way To Go (Penguin)
2) Amit Chaudhuri: The Immortals (Picador India)
3) Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf (HarperCollins)
4) Musharraf Ali Farooqui: The Story of a Widow (Picador India)
5) Ru Freeman: A Disobedient Girl (Penguin/ Viking)
6) Anjum Hassan: Neti Neti (IndiaInk/ Roli Books)
7) Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns (Pocket Books)
8) Manju Kapur: The Immigrant (Faber & Faber)
9) HM Naqvi: Home Boy (HarperCollins)
10) Salma: The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)
11) Sankar: The Middleman (Penguin, translated by Arunava Sinha)
12) Ali Sethi: The Wish Maker (Penguin)
13) Jaspreet Singh: Chef (Bloomsbury)
14) Aatish Taseer: The Temple Goers (Picador India)
15) Daniyal Mueenuddin: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Random House)
16) Neel Mukherjee: A Life Apart (Picador India)
(The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is in its first year; we announced the longlist today. This is a rough draft of my introduction to the longlist as chair of the jury.)
It gives me great pleasure to be here today at the invitation of the DSC group, and I’d like to say a special word of thanks to Ms Surina Narula for her unflagging and very gracious support of the prize, and her commitment to literature in a broader sense. I’d also like to thank Manhad Narula: the Prize is his brainchild, and his energy and enthusiasm fuelled the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
The need for a South Asian prize became apparent to many of us some years ago. India had some excellent literary prizes, but given the rich and the overlapping history of the subcontinent, we found ourselves missing the neighbours. There is an instinctive kinship among the countries of South Asia, and for readers, a Kamila Shamsie or a Romesh Gunesekhara would belong automatically on the same shelf as Vikram Seth or Sankar.
There was another problem, familiar to all of those who have administered literary prizes. I think of it as the Passport Control conundrum. Given the alacrity with which South Asians travel, and given that so many of us now lead nomadic lives, spreading ourselves out so that home could be anywhere on one or all of three different continents, it’s hard to identify who qualifies to be a South Asian writer. Too often, prize administrators have ended up in the uncomfortable position of being border guards—effectively checking the passports of authors to see who qualifies and who doesn’t.
The DSC Prize does away with the Passport Control problem in a way that’s highly unusual, but that reflects the realities of our times—it’s the content of the book that matters, not the nationality or place of residence of the writer. (The rules for eligibility are here.) The only criteria for eligibility is that the book should be set in South Asia, should feature South Asian characters, or should in some way concern itself with the history of South Asia. This makes, from the judges’ point of view, for fascinating reading. My colleague, Urvashi Butalia, had asked earlier this year whether we could arrive at a definition of South Asian fiction—I can only say, after reading the books in contention this year, that there is such a thing, and as a reader, you recognize it when you see it.
It was a great pleasure working with my fellow judges this year. We were, literally, reading on three continents. Moni Mohsin is a Pakistani writer and well-known columnist who has been part of that literary world for decades; Amitava Kumar is an eminent critic and writer whose most recent book, Evidence of Suspicion, addresses the euphemisms and lies behind the war on terror; Ian Jack, the legendary former editor of Granta magazine, is also an old India hand; and Lord Matthew Evans is the former chairman of Faber & Faber. We went through several rounds of debate and discussion, and immensely enjoyed the process of longlisting books for the DSC Prize. It was particularly illuminating reading works in translation alongside works written in English; it reflects the way we buy and read books in our everyday lives.
I’d offer just two suggestions for the future success of the Prize: to the Advisory Board, I would strongly suggest that they open it up further, and allow publishers to submit more books. It’s better to have an excess of entries than to run the risk of missing out on a potentially brilliant book, and part of the fun of reading as one of the judges is the discovery of a name or an author you haven’t come across previously. I’d also suggest, if I may, that the prize cover an entire year—for instance, the 2012 Prize would work even better if it were to cover as many books published in 2011 as possible. We offer our apologies to the authors who were not eligible for the DSC Prize because their books were published either too early or too late—any literary prize requires a little time to find its feet, and we hope you will be patient with us over the first two years.
I think the longlist this year reflects some of the best of Asian writing, with three languages—English, Bengali and Tamil—represented, and authors from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the US. In the end, this is what makes any literary prize exciting—the quality and the breadth of reading it covers, and the fiction on this year’s longlist was, for all of us on the jury, truly a discovery.
We will be announcing the shortlist of 5, or perhaps 6, titles on October 25 in London.
The BS column: Naipaul's twilight travels
(Published in the Business Standard on September 12, 2010)
“I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.
The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour—the Prime Minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America—The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses—flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled—as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.
“Other travelers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V.S. Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travelers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarizing labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.
In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveler, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)
The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writing. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, who may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart—handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.
The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations—Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.
Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.
Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.
“I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.
The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour—the Prime Minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America—The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses—flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled—as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.
“Other travelers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V.S. Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travelers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarizing labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.
In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveler, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)
The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writing. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, who may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart—handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.
The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations—Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.
Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.
Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.
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