The Translation Shelf

(This was carried in Forbes Life's winter 2011 issue--a look at some of the most interesting books of the year in translation.)



“We live more of our lives in translation than you might imagine,” said the writer from Chile. His life was an extreme illustration of this. Born in Chile, Ruben had moved to Denmark as a political refugee, and begun to write in Danish as an adult. His books were available in many European languages, though not in English. He hoped some day to be translated into Spanish, so that he would have readers in his home country.

Perhaps the group of writers I met that day were unusual in the linguistic extremes that they represented, but in all probability, you would find the same diversity among a covey of businessmen. One spoke Gujarati but wrote in Tamil; several of the Danes spoke other European languages fluently but used English “in conversation”; one of the Indians spoke and wrote only in English, and I spoke English as a first, Bengali as a second language. As we learned each other’s stories, we also confirmed an old truth: restlessness gives us more tongues. If you had moved two or more countries, you would have two or more languages at hand, and in the words of a Dutch-Danish speaker, you would commute between them.

The UK, like the US, isn’t very comfortable with translations: literature in translation makes up barely 3 % of the US market and about 5 % of the UK market. There are no accurate figures available for India, but I suspect we’re closer to Europe in our reading tastes; 30 % of the books Europeans read are works in translation. In a country where so many are bilingual, we remain perhaps slightly more open to reading in other tongues than the US does.

Purists should start with UR Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura (OUP), translated by Susheela Punita. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara is one of the great Kannada classics, where a small, conservative community of Brahmins is plunged into chaos when an iconoclast dies, and no one can agree on what to do with his corpse. On the subject of translation, Ananthamurthy had pointed out in a key essay that this is an everyday Indian activity: “Many of us use at least three languages, one at home, another on the streets, still another at our office. When you narrate to your old mother what happened in your office, you are translating.” Bharatipura is set in the years just after Independence, and might be called an early NRI novel, as it follows the fortunes of the foreign-returned Jagannatha as he attempts to dismantle caste taboos in his village.

NS Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery (Penguin), translated by Rajesh Rajamohan, won this year’s Crossword award for Fiction in Translation. This is, in some ways, a perfect companion if you’re reading Bharatipura—Litanies is also set in the years just after Independence, and its colourful narrative explores the rise of Communism in Kerala, the lives of the islanders who live off Kochi and the choices before its main protagonist, Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita Jessica.

The third of this loose “Independence” trilogy is a lovely translation of the Hindi writer Yashpal’s Jhoota Sach, one of the most influential modern Indian novels. The thousand-odd pages of This Is Not That Dawn (Penguin, translated by Anand) are an epic elegy for pre-1947 Lahore, probably one of the most startling and moving works of fiction to come out of Partition. This is more than just a chronicle of refugee life; Yashpal captures a world now dead in all its vibrant, complex richness. Readers with little access to Hindi have waited for over four decades for this translation—it was first published in 1958 and in 1960. The title, drawn with some awkwardness from Faiz’s famous poem about Partition, is misleading; the rest of the translation is almost as rich and detailed as the original.

The cult Bengali writer Subimal Misra began penning his uncompromising, bitter stories a decade after Yashpal’s epic, and if the writers of a previous generation had chronicled the betrayal that was Partition, Misra’s function, as he saw it, was to set down the failure of everything else that made up “modern” India. The fifteen stories that are included in The Golden Gandhi Statue From America and Other Stories (HarperCollins, translated by V Ramaswamy) touch upon murder, dismemberment, cholera in Kolkata and unspeakable poverty, all seen through a glass darkly.

But perhaps the best translations of this year, and indeed this decade, come from poetry. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir (NYRB books) and Ranjit Hoskote’s I, Lalla (Penguin) breathe new life into the sturdy old clay of these two great mystic poets. These books return poetry to where it belongs, and promise to make it part of our everyday lives once again.

“I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world,” Haruki Murakami said in a Paris Review interview. That philosophy has helped the Japanese runner, writer and former nightclub owner to build a literary life, one blockbuster novel at a time. The queues for 1Q84 (Knopf, translated by Jay Rubin) in the UK and the US rivaled Pottermania, and the critics seem to think this novel about writing, Japanese communes and the unreliability of memory is as good as Murakami’s best.

Unlike Murakami, translation has eluded the novelist Kyung-Sook Shin, who has a faithful readership in South Korea. Before her moving, complex novel Please Look After Mom (Knopf, translated by Chi-Young Kim) became a bestseller in its English translation, the author had published several books, but only one or two had been translated and read outside Korea. Please Look After Mom is told in a shifting series of voices, all belonging to members of one family, as they look back at the coming-of-age of four friends in 1980s Korea.

At 93 years, Stephane Hessel is an unlikely bestseller author, but the former French Resistance member’s brief call to arms is sweeping the world. Time For Outrage! (Twelve, translated by Damien Searls) is the English translation from the French Indignez-vous, and demands that we abandon our indifference and look for causes, political and personal, that will fire our indignation.

For some reason, murder and intrigue have always translated well, and this year is no exception. Keigo Higashimo’s The Devotion of Suspect X (Alexander O. Smith, Minotaur) is Japanese noir at its engaging best, where Higashimo offers you the identity of the murderer, the victim and the motive in the first few chapters. But the suspense revolves around the deepening relationship between Yasuko, survivor of a violent marriage, murderer of her loutish ex-husband, and her neighbour Ishigami, who helps her cover up the murder, even as investigator Kusanagi attempts to make sense of what looks like the perfect crime.

Santiago Roncagliolo’s Red April (Atlantic Books, translated by Edith Grossman) is the kind of thriller and political novel that makes one realize how much we miss out on by not reading in translation. Felix Saldivar is an oddly vulnerable prosecutor left in charge of a gruesome investigation into mass graves that force him to confront, in bumbling ways, Peru’s bloody history. “Sometimes,” says a key character, “I have difficulty distinguishing between us and the enemy.” After a year of rebellions and civil wars across the world, this is the book to read, a novel that insists on digging up the bones of history, no matter what the cost.

The "free" in free speech

(This is a response to Shashi Tharoor's article, which appeared in the Deccan Herald today. Other links of interest: the India Ink round-up of censorship in the country, and the NYT India blog post that reported Union Telecom minister Kapil Sibal's attempt to ask for "pre-screening" of certain social media sites. All views expressed in this post are strictly personal.)

Shashi Tharoor begins by saying, "The controversy over the government’s alleged desire to censor Facebook, Twitter and other leading lights of the social media has obscured some genuine and urgent questions we need to address about free speech in our society."

Tharoor is a writer I used to respect; his Great Indian Novel is one of the staples in my library, but his years as a diplomat and the UN haven't made him much of a free speech advocate. He's been notably silent on most of the urgent free speech and censorship debates of the last five years, and this video of a debate between him and Christopher Hitchens is fairly representative of his position on free speech--he advocates limitations on free speech, especially in the face of threats of violence. Tharoor has a great deal of credibility as a writer, but it should be noted that his views on censorship are not necessarily shared by most other writers and artists.

The problem arose when the New York Times reported on Monday that our Kapil Sibal, had called in senior social media executives from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and allegedly asked them to “prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online”.

Such a request inevitably sparked off a firestorm of Internet protest against the minister, without waiting to hear his side of the story.

Is there ever a case where a minister's attempt to ask companies to turn censor, screening and shutting down content for offensiveness according to guidelines that are not transparent and not released to the public, would be considered acceptable democratic practice? The minister made no attempt to bring the issue up for public debate, and that is also what's sparked widespread indignation and protest--it's censorship through the back door. The complaint that the minister's side of the story was not heard belies the fact that Sibal didn't want to make his attempts to pre-screen Internet content public!

But — and free speech advocates hate that “but”! — every society recognises some sensible restraints on how free speech is exercised. Those restraints almost always relate to the collectivity; they arise when the freedom of the individual to say what he wants causes more harm to more people in society than restricting his freedom would.

This is the start of a somewhat specious argument, where Mr Tharoor ignores the fact that the Indian Constitution has already placed restrictions on free speech and expression, in Article 19 (2). These restrictions have often been debated, and should be open to debate in any democracy. The apparent reasonableness of the "harm" argument has also, in the Indian context, often been used to remove expressions of political dissent. Behind Mr Sibal's original attempt to ask for pre-censorship, said the first news reports, was the discovery of a page that made offensive comments about Ms Sonia Gandhi.

Since societies vary in their cultural&political traditions, the boundaries vary from place to place. Free speech absolutists tend to say that freedom is a universal right that must not be abridged.

Just an aside: please note the way "free speech advocates" has changed in this paragraph to "free speech absolutists". This also ignores the fact that most advocates of free speech have already considered, and accepted, exceptions to free speech covered under the harm principle.

Just as the commonplace practice of women taking off their bikini tops at St Tropez, Copacabana or Bondi Beach could not be replicated on the beaches of Goa, Dubai or Karachi without risking assault or arrest, so also things might be said in the former set of places that would not pass muster in the latter. It’s no use pretending such differences don’t exist. They do, and they’re the reason why free speech in, say, Sweden isn’t the same as free speech in Singapore.

Women taking off their bikini tops is equivalent to what, exactly? Expressions of dissent with the Congress party, or the kind of trolling one sees on Rediff discussion boards? If Mr Tharoor's making the argument that certain things are "against Indian culture", he might have chosen a less bizarre illustration. As for the comparison between free speech in Sweden and free speech in Singapore, I'm unconvinced that India should choose either the Singapore or China model of monitoring and extreme censorship as a role model for itself.

Even more, any individual with the basic literacy needed to operate a keyboard can express his or her opinion, create information, whether video or text, and communicate it immediately, without the delays necessarily wrought by editorial controls, cross-checking or even the synthesising that occurs in a “mainstream” newsroom.

Yes, but Mr Tharoor's ignoring two major factors in his analysis of social media. One is cognitive distortion. People like him, and other celebrities on Twitter who have large and faithful followers in the lakhs, are also exposed to a far higher than average level of trolling and offensive speech than the average Internet user. Mr Tharoor's view of social media is necessarily biased; just as he would receive more in the way of attention online than most users, he also receives a disproportionate amount of abuse.

The second is the fallacy that would place all Net users at the same level of credibility. One of the reasons why most Net users feel free to ignore a lot of the hate speech and offensiveness that occurs online is because most Net trolls have far less credibility--and reach--than mainstream Net users. It's highly dangerous to see the Internet itself as a published screed; the Net puts into print the average gossip, useless chatter and conversation of everyone on the street. The most useful filter on the Internet remain the Ignore, Block and Report Spam buttons--none of which require government regulation.

And yet this very freedom is its own biggest threat. It means anyone can say literally anything and, inevitably, many do. Lies, distortions and calumny go into cyberspace unchallenged; hatred, pornography and slander are routinely aired. There is no fact-checking, no institutional reputation for reliability to defend.

This has been an inescapable feature of the Internet since the 1990s, so why is it a problem now? And why is the nature of the Internet itself being used as an excuse to press for government regulation of the Internet? The most effective networks (Twitter, Facebook), web encyclopaedias (Wikipaedia) and forums online do not depend on silent censorship or overt censorship to be comfortable spaces for the average user. They rely on a combination of internal moderation--Twitter is ruthless about blocking fake and spam accounts, for instance, personalised screening, where every user sets his or her privacy levels, and the group's own, evolving standards of what is acceptable behaviour. What is acceptable on sites like Grindr, for instance, are highly sexual images; on sites like 4chan, abuse is part of the conversation; but Twitter would very quickly kick off users who attempted to recreate the ambience of those sites.

Mr Tharoor's real problem might be something that we all struggle with--the Internet in its present avatar requires much more from users than the passive consumption of news. It requires all of us to make choices about what we want to pay attention to, and the kind of communities we want to build, and it requires users to be active, responsible participants in their consumption of news and commentary. The state has no business taking over this mediation, or dictating how sanitised everyone's web experience should be.

Mr Sibal’s main concern was not with politics, but with scurrilous material about certain religions that could have incited retaliatory violence. People say or depict things on social media that might be bad enough in their living rooms, but are positively dangerous in a public space.

In that case, the remedy is to report these offensive pages to the social media sites concerned, and perhaps also to demand a public debate on whether this kind of hate speech should or should not be protected as part of free expression. Mr Tharoor continues to make the argument from violence--the argument that x book or y debate could potentially lead to riots or worse. This argument has been used to shut down everything from controversial histories of Shivaji, to films about lesbian love, to provocative art, to books that dare to discuss religion, in the past few decades in India. Colleagues of mine have argued elsewhere that this has led to a situation that encourages people, especially political parties, to create the threat of violence in order to shut down anything, from Rohinton Mistry to Ramanujan, that makes them uncomfortable.

In all of this, Mr Tharoor doesn't ask either himself or his readers a simple question: why does India want to become one of the few countries to demand censorship and "pre-screening" of the Internet? What would the fallout of such censorship be? Would we start by erasing the obviously offensive--morphed pictures of the gods, hurtful, inflammatory speech--and then continue by deleting, say, fierce criticism of the government's actions in Kashmir, or of riots that were not, astonishingly, sparked off by offensive images on the Internet such as the one in Gujarat, or of corruption in public life? Once we set a precedent--pre-screening is acceptable and the state has the right to decide what is and isn't acceptable, where do we stop?

The free speech "absolutists" Mr Tharoor speaks of live with the downside to free speech, which means tolerating and allowing the expression of beliefs that run counter to one's own most dearly held values. We don't do this because we're masochists or martyrs. We do this because the cost of comfort--of never being exposed to a world where you will experience trolling, abuse or hatred--is too high; such a world would also end by excluding dissent or debate.

It takes a longer time to enforce community standards across a social media site than it does to filter out all unpleasantness, but it is possible--and while Mr Sibal and Mr Tharoor might focus on the ugliness of the trolls, many of us have also experienced the other side of social media, as a place where people can tweet their needs in the aftermath of a bomb blast, where a blog can become a line of communication between those stuck in Bombay floods and those worrying about their safety. The Net is a place where, years ago, I met a truly frightening troll online, a man who sent threatening and poisonous messages for years; but it's also the place where I've met some of the loveliest and most generous writers, journalists, thinkers and artists from across the world. It's like real life in its swirls and eddies, in its unedited untidiness, and like real life, it is impossible to edit unless you police all of its boundaries with considerable ruthlessness.

As a man who was once one of India's most provocative writers, Mr Tharoor should understand why we place such a high value on free speech. Even when it means putting up with the relatively tiny percentage of Net users who put their vitriol out there, hoping to be heard, but all too often speaking into silence. It is that silence, the refusal to respond or give them any space, that is far more effective in making the Net a civilised space than any attempt at government or corporate censorship would be.

Also read: From Chandni Chowk to China: Salil Tripathi

India's Authoritarian Lapse: Salil Tripathi

Hate Speech Must Be Blocked: Kapil Sibal defends his stance.

#TheInsecureIndian: Samar Halarnkar

Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor: Gaurav Sabnis

Book review: The End of the Gods, AS Byatt

The End of the Gods: The Myth Of Ragnarok
AS Byatt
Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin India
Rs 399, 177 pages


“Writers don’t make up myths,” Marina Warner observes, “They take them over and recast them.” This, she says, is what Jorge Luis Borges calls the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures. “The more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become.”

In 2005, the independent Scottish publishing house Canongate launched one of the most ambitious ventures of its kind in modern times, inviting authors to retell and reimagine some of the world’s greatest myths over the span of the next few decades. In an age when “ambitious” is a word applied to anything from a new vampire series to a rewarmed Stephen King bestseller, it is useful to be reminded of what the word actually means.

But can the great myths be rewritten to order? Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, which began the series, was a crisp, comforting but not revolutionary reminder of this great collective inheritance. Margaret Atwood’s reworking of the Iliad from Penelope’s perspective was a feat of imaginative brilliance, a feminist corrective; but David Grossman’s gentle spin on the Samson tale was a bland, back-to-basics work, where the novelist’s voice felt muffled under the burden of retelling this ancient tale.

Philip Pullman and Dubravka Ugresic wrote the most iconoclastic books in the series. Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ is the kind of questioning and reworking of Christianity’s core gospels that may no longer be possible, because of the careful fostering of competitive intolerance, in either Islam or Hinduism. (Canongate’s list of myths does not, at this stage, include any drawn from the rich heritage of Hindu mythology, which is just as well given that we still have arguments over whether the Ramayana is to be read as the gospel truth or as one of the great myths.)

Dubravka Ugresic’s chilling reclamation of the Baba Yaga story asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of witches, and the role of the overlooked, persecuted but often powerful old woman who crops up in all of the world’s myths. More than any of the other writers in the Myth series, Ugresic gave herself the freedom to write and reshape myths in the language of myths, and her Baba Yaga book has moved from being just a retelling to becoming a classic in its own right.

If there is any other contemporary author who might perform a similar transfiguration, it is AS Byatt. There may be few tasks harder than reworking the Norse myths; their telling was crystalline, and to tackle the stories that define the word “saga” is something that only the most confident of storytellers would attempt.

Byatt pulls us in to the world where the twilight of the gods will happen via a child, a thin girl born at a time of war, and a book: “A solid volume, bound in green, with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt on horseback tearing through a clouded sky amid jagged bolts of lightning…” The child’s mind settles not in the world where there is a war on, or in the gentle legends of Jesus meek and mild—instead, Byatt writes, it “veered away, to where it was alive”.

In Byatt’s understanding of myth, there is this unspoken truth: the myth that you are drawn to, without perhaps knowing why you are drawn towards it, will shape who you become, much more than any other story read and retold. It is possible to settle for cartoon versions of myths, but some, like the thin child in her story, will be drawn back towards the real, complex, darker version.

Uncovering the myths is often unpleasant. The world, in the Norse myths, is shaped from the bones, flesh and hair of a dead giant. “The thin child was disturbed at having to imagine this; there was no scale by which she could measure it.” Maggots and worms become dwarves, trolls and dark-elves; the giant’s eyebrows become a bushy fence that contains Midgard, the Garden of Middle-Earth, in which is placed the home of the Gods, Asgard.

As she meets Odin, and hears yet again the tragic story of Balder the Beautiful, killed by the trickster Loki’s clever machinations, the fettering of Tyr, the thin child steps into the darker corners of mythology. “Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind,” writes Byatt, “… the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head.”

Her retelling spares us nothing; the twilight of the gods is every bit as beautiful and terrible as the original. By the end of the tale, a certain kind of order has been restored, the war is over, and the thin child’s family has found, if not happiness, then a settled and sedate ending. But for her and for the reader, what Byatt has evoked cannot be easily banished into the pages of a book. The task before Byatt was not the retelling of a myth, which is relatively easily done; it was to remind us what it was like to read these myths for the first time, and to live in a world where the myths were not separate from our own lives.

A gate closes in the thin child’s head, and on one side of it is a house, a garden, a home, peacetime. On the other, there is “the bright black world”, containing “the wolf with his hackles and bloody teeth, the snake with her crown of fleshy fronds, smiling Loki with fishnet and flames”.

There is either the world of dailiness and contentment, or the dark black world where the old stories run like wolves at our heels. You can have one or the other, says Byatt. Choose.

Book review: The Possessed, Elif Batuman

(This review was written at high speed, and I wish I'd done more justice to Batuman's book. The Possessed sent me back to the Russian classics after a decade, and what Batuman does is make you read the books as though you're reading them again for the first time. Review published in the Business Standard, October 2011.)

The Possessed
Elif Batuman
Granta Books/ Farrar Straus Giroux
Rs 753

PG Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialized in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. The Russians draw her in little by little, as she succumbs first to Eugene Onegin, and then to Anna Karenina: “Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified and meaningful in terms of plot.”

Batuman really means to be a novelist, but her creative writing career doesn’t survive the reality of workshops: “Why was it
automatically good for a writer to live in a barn,” she asks, “reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?”

Russia pulls her in gradually; this student of literature, born to Turkish parents and raised in New Jersey, finds herself drawn to study the Russian novelists in Russia, through a series of complicated detours. (One of them involves judging a shapely leg contest for adolescent boys in a village in Hungary. Batuman has a knack for memorable asides.)

As she warms to her accidental subject, she writes: “I stopped believing that theory had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

In Moscow, she dates bankers, for “the first and last time” in her life; elsewhere, she meets Isaac Babel’s formidable, larger-than-life older daughter Nathalie; in St Petersburg, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stay overnight in the replica of an ice palace modeled on the fully furnished House of Ice commissioned by Ivan the Terrible’s niece, a palace that has “no clear purpose, and therefore many unclear purposes”. She lives briefly in Samarkand, where she learns why it is impossible for women to be saints, how to eat lepyushka, and shares with us her readings of the life of the Emperor Bobur (as the name is spelled in those parts) and the fact, unrelated in Indian histories, that he suffered terribly from gemoroi or haemorrhoids.

Behind the exuberance of the travel writing and the conversational digressions, there is also real scholarship (many of these essays were first published in the New Yorker, the LRB and other magazines). At a Tolstoy conference, Batuman argues, only slightly mischievously, that the writer may have been murdered, but the discussion veers off into a heated argument over whether he had or hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland. Dostoevksy’s poor intellectuals, the ones in his book The Possessed who inspired the book’s title, descend into madness as Batuman asks why the Russians required so much grotesquerie.

Just a few decades ago, The Possessed might have been read differently—Russia has slipped from its position as one of the great powers, and perhaps because of that relative erasure from the world stage, the country is once again new territory for a traveler and writer of Batuman’s stamp. She is free to explore it without having to explain it, and free to explain—always obliquely—why the Russians took such a firm grip on her imagination, why their larger-than-life stories were so much more compelling than the stories she had fled from, where “middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions… and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things”.

By the last chapter, where Batuman explores one of Dostoevsky’s more enigmatic works, a novel called Demons, she has taken us halfway across the world and back. Everything that most critics would edit out of their work is here—the backstories, the failed relationships and minor missteps, the cult-like intensity that might sweep a community of academics—perhaps because Batuman knows, and makes the reader see again, the value of digressions and secret histories.

The question that animates this chapter is not really about literature or books or scholarship: what is worth devoting your life to, asks Batuman? She cannot imagine studying, say, Islamic fundamentalism forever; another person might not be able to imagine being a bread-maker in Samarkand.

“If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” The Possessed, peopled with a cast of eccentrics but free of suicidal moujiks, will convince many readers to at least begin that search.

Silencing Ramanujan

(I had just finished editing the chapter on censorship, part of my collection of essays on reading, when we heard that Delhi University had voted to drop Ramanujan's essay on Many Ramayanas from its history syllabus. One of the saddest parts of writing the censorship chapter is that it's never finished: there is always a new ban, a new act of censorship. This is a rough draft-in-progress of the latest addition, and I hope this will be the last.)



There are many official versions of the Ramayana—the one written by Kalidasa, the one by Kamban, Arshia Sattar’s luminous translation of Valmiki's telling of the great tale, Nina Paley's retelling that brings together several different versions. But there has never been a single, authorized, definitive version of India’s great epic.

Among the many Ramayanas I grew up with, there was the comic book Amar Chitra Katha version that ironed out all ambiguity. Rama was handsome and muscular and good, and he was clearly the hero, Ravana had ten heads and the bug-eyed expression that Amar Chitra Katha illustrators gave to all rakshashas and asuras, and he was clearly the villain. The television epic, with cheesy side-effects and paste jewellery, was surprisingly compelling, as much as any of the complex narratives staged every year at the Sriram Centre, or any of the epic retellings and translations that illuminated a different corner of the myth.

One year in Calcutta, I watched a mildly Communist Ramayana, where Sita waved the Left Front’s hammer-and-sickle flag to signal her deep distress at being kidnapped by Ravana.

Another year, Sudama, who worked in my parents’ house, asked my sister and me whether we would loan him a silk sari, dark glasses and a necklace. He had been selected to play the part of Sita in the local version of the Ramlila. We stared at him; Sudama was a strapping, muscular man who suffered from premature baldness. He didn’t fit any image of Sita we might have had in mind.

“Are you sure you’re playing Sita,” we asked gently. “Not Rama, Lakshman, Hanuman, Ravana?” He was sure; he had read her lines with such feeling, he explained, that the troupe had chosen him on the spot. Also, he had offered to punch in the heads of any dissenters.

We enjoyed Sudama’s Ramayana. He played Sita with a surprising delicacy of feeling, putting on the dark glasses to stare down his wicked abductor, Ravana. Rama was played by a 14-year-old who did splendidly until his voice broke on stage in the middle of the battle scene with Rama and his monkey army pitted against Ravana’s Lankan troops. Rama left, overcome by woe, and his stage brother Lakshmana had to step in, announcing that the departure of Rama had struck fear into the hearts of Ravana’s cohorts, for they knew not what fearsome weapons he would return with. The demons, who knew a good cue when they saw it, surrendered in a great joyous clamour; the Ramayana continued to its ambiguously happy ending.

Most Indians have similar stories—depending on where you grew up and whether you heard the Ramayana or read the Ramayana, your sense of the epic will be complex, and will involve multiple versions.

The late poet AK Ramanujan was a scholar and a connoisseur of the many versions of the Ramayana—he had read many of the translations in the original tongues, and he wrote about the epic with a kind of abstract, pure love. The versions he spoke of were far more elevated than the rough exaggerations of our street Ramayanas, but they all had in common what the Communist troupe and Sudama’s friends shared—an understanding that the Ramayana was public property. The 15th century Bengali poet Krittibas had come out with a version that was faithful in its own fashion; it was as legitimate a version as the oral tradition popular among the Muslims of Kerala, called the Mappila Ramayana. Nabaneeta Dev Sen has a brilliant essay on women's versions of the Ramayana.

It’s unclear how and why some rightwing parties decided to target the late poet and scholar, AK Ramanujan, more specifically his classic essay on ‘Many Ramayanas’. This may have been part of the general climate of intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country’s history and its myths that was part of the Indian landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s. The objections to Ramanujan’s essay appeared to be based on simple and willful misreadings of his writings.

This narrow-focus way of reading texts—scanning them only for “offensive” phrases—would happen a year later with Rohinton Mistry’s subtle tale of Bombay and India in the Indira Gandhi era, Such a Long Journey, where many of those who demanded a ban on the book had not read it, but could quote the few sentences where Mistry’s characters had slammed Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena.

It had happened before, reducing Salman Rushdie’s complex Satanic Verses to a series of deranged blasphemies about the Prophet, obliterating the migrant stories and the humour that also went into the Verses. Selective misreading had caused a bizarre situation where the abridged, distorted versions of books and essays circulated and inspired outrage, while the originals were either placed beyond the reach of readers or left unread. Often, it seemed as though the real battle was between those who read freely and those who instinctively feared the subversive potential in books.

In 2008, members of the student wing of the BJP, the ABVP, reacted violently to the inclusion of this essay in the Delhi University history curriculum, and some of them assaulted the head of the History Department. At that time, the department stood firm, defending their decision to allow students to read Ramanujan’s brilliant explorations of the multiple forms in which the epic had been told across India and other countries.

http://communalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/crying-wolf-ramayana-ramanujan-and-abvp.html

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?236875

So why would the Academic Council decide, three years later, to withdraw Ramanujan’s essay from the syllabus?
http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/du-to-scrap-ramanujan-essay-on-ramayana-that-incensed-right-wingers-104127.html#en

There are easy defences; as was the case with Mumbai University’s craven decision to withdraw Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey from the syllabus, this will in all probability be called a purely internal matter. Despite the apparently furious dissent expressed by nine members of the Academic Council, there is little hope that the decision will be put up for review—changes to the syllabus are made slowly and once made, are usually final.

The damage might seem limited: what prevents a handful of history students from finding Ramanujan’s essay on their own, reading it and discussing it if they so choose? But the real damage is caused by the act of censorship, by the precedent the University sets when it says: this idea is dangerous, or controversial, or too explosive to be discussed. You expect academics and scholars not just to defend free speech, but to defend the work of a man who was probably one of the greatest writers and thinkers in contemporary Indian literature. You also expect them to stand up for the tradition that insists there were always many Ramayanas—that the oversimplified, often chauvinistic version of the epic that the right-wing has often put forward is not, by any means, the only one.

This July, many of us watched in dismay as a screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues was cancelled in New York after a group of Hindutva fundamentalists threatened to picket and protest the film.

Aseem Chabra on Sita Sings The Blues and censorship: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/54/2011080720110807052728135114f274a/Battling-for-free-speech.html

Salil Tripathi on Nina Paley and free speech issues in India: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/24/sita-sings-the-blues-hindu-film-causes-a-stir-in-queens.html

The “offence” Nina Paley’s version of the Ramayana causes is just as specious as the ways in which Rohinton Mistry or Ramanujan have caused offence, but we now have a situation in India where all that is needed to shut down a work of literature is to declare that one’s sentiments have been offended. The real problem lies in the way Ramanujan began his essay:
“How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been?”

It took me some time to understand why this idea might be so threatening, because the way we were taught to deal with books or essays or ideas we didn’t like was the way put forward in the great epics: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are filled with debate, with digressions into discussions of what exactly dharma might be. Most of us are intrigued by the multiple versions of the Ramayana—the feminist version, the rough, bawdy village versions, Nina Paley’s elegant cartoon version, they all have their place.

But if you live in a climate of intolerance, a book that questions the tenets of faith and offers a provocative re-imagining of a religious text might be considered so blasphemous that its author will be persecuted for years (The Satanic Verses). A novel that highlights an inconvenient part of the history of contemporary India, speaking openly of corruption in the Prime Minister’s office and the slow stirrings of narrow-mindedness in a once-great city will be erased from the college syllabus (Such a Long Journey). Ramanujan’s great essay on the tradition of many Ramayanas threatens those who would prefer one version, their version, and so it is removed, and his voice is silenced (Many Ramayanas).

In the “debates” over these books, we no longer debate the ideas they contain. Almost every argument breaks down once the threat of violence is made. The courts have rarely upheld censorship in India, but the other places that should protect free speech—universities, publishing houses, art galleries, bookshops--often crumble in the face of either threats of violence or the staging of actual acts of violence. We are such excellent censors of ourselves, and we rarely talk about the basics of free speech, rarely have a consensus on why freedom of expression is important, or where the tradition of free speech in India comes from.

(Some of the most important free speech battles were won almost accidentally, as demonstrated by Ismat Chughtai’s obscenity trial for her short story, Lihaaf:
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/28naqviExerpt.pdf )

If you find ideas and stories threatening, if your way of life depends on having just one rigid view of faith, or history, or mythology, then there is no possibility of debate. It is in this perspective that the actions of the Hindutva rightwing parties makes sense: the goal is never to encourage dissent and conversation, but to shut it down. There can only be one point of view, one truth. In that world, making a university back down on what it allows students to learn is a major victory, and it holds out the possibility that one day, it will be only this narrow view of history that will prevail, that we will learn only one kind of history, one Ramayana.

In his essay, Ramanujan does not comment on which telling of the Ramayana is the most accurate, the most authoritative one. Instead, he offers us a bewildering array of Ramayanas: “Hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions.” The Ramayana cannot be owned; it is no one’s property. And this is the idea that the ABVP finds unbearable, so unbearable that it must be silenced.

Here is Ramanujan’s essay—read it, and tell me whether you understand why students shouldn’t be allowed to explore the Ramayana(s) through his ideas.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254

Book review: The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

(Published in the Business Standard, October 5, 2011.)






The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape,
PRICE NOT MENTIONED, 287 pages


“There’s a great line by Ornette Coleman about music,” Michael Ondaatje said in a recent interview. “He says you begin with the territory and what follows is the adventure.”

In his sixth novel, Cat’s Table, Ondaatje knows both his landscapes well. There is the Oronsay, a liner that feels like a castle to the 11-year-old boy who boards the “first and only” ship of his life, bound for England in the 1950s. When most writers use a ship as a setting, it remains just a backdrop, a convenient way to bring a band of characters into close contact with each other in extreme isolation. The sea acts like the white space on the page---anything could happen here, where the normal rules of life on dry land stand suspended.

For a few writers, though, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’ Brian and now Ondaatje, the sea is elemental in the best sense of the term, and a shipboard journey may either bring forth powerful passions in its inhabitants or strip them down to their elemental selves. The nine people Michael will meet at Table 76, the least privileged and the most distant from the Captain’s Table, include two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, and “several interesting adults”. Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael will form a gang whose actions on board the Oronsay range from the exuberantly exploratory to the actively dangerous.
If The Cat’s Table feels like a memoir in parts, this may be because Ondaatje took a similar voyage from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, at the age of 11. “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” the narrator writes in the first chapter, and this imagining belongs both to him and to Ondaatje.

The Oronsay is fascinating, from the engine room “at Hades level” to the gold-painted First Class swimming pool. The passengers include a great philantropist who is suffering from hydrophobia, an accomplished shipboard thief called Baron C and Michael’s beautiful cousin Emily, a first-class passenger. There is a shipboard death, a shackled murderer who inspires a plot among the boys to free him, and there are the secretive, often unsavoury lives of the other passengers who sup at Table 76.

But the real adventure, which will reverberate in the lives of Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael long after they have completed their 21-day voyage, is not so much in the plot as in the magnificent strangeness of coming of age on board ship.
In both children’s fiction and novels that feature child protagonists, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that childhood is as mysterious and as alien a world as any unexplored Amazon forest or distant planet. The best novels step into this world acknowledging that writing from a child’s point of view is essentially an act of the imagination as much as an act of reclamation.
There are very, very few can do it—many novels feature child protagonists who are basically miniaturized adults.

Michael Ondaatje is one of three writers who wrote great books underpinned by a basic truth: children see the world with a kind of merciless clarity, and with few of the calming fictions of adult life. The other two were William Golding and Richard Hughes, and it is interesting that Hughes set his eerie little masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, on board ship. His protagonists, like Ondaatje’s in The Cat’s Table, were children carefully separated from their parents; generations of writers have also recognised that it is only when you allow children to be on their own that you can fully understand them.

It is easy to criticize the slender, tenuous, adventure-filled plot that forms the skeletal structure of The Cat’s Table. But it is also an unrewarding exercise. What makes this one of the most compelling and haunting novels of recent times goes far beyond the question of whether it is well-plotted, or whether its deft, deadly vignettes of characters on the Oronsay, offered up in brief chapters, add up to a satisfying whole. “Over the years,” Michael writes towards the end, “confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

Ondaatje offers us three subtly different voices in which to hear this book (it’s hard to escape the sense that The Cat’s Table should be read aloud). There is the voice, filled with a cautious rapture, of Michael the child; there is the assessing voice of the older Michael as he weighs up his regrets against the many tiny illuminated corners of his life; and there is, like a background murmur, the assured voice of Ondaatje himself, the writer in his prime, spinning out one story after another.

It would be a very bloodless reader who could resist the temptation of taking a seat at The Cat’s Table and revisiting childhood as it was, not as we would like to think it should have been. And it would be a very churlish reader who didn’t succumb to the magic of Ondaatje’s summoning up of “all new things in life”, carried by a boat that comes breasting out of the mist.

Banned Books Week, 26 September-1 October 2011

Every year around this time, I dust off two old pieces I'd written on banned and censored books in India, here and here. I read through these lists with a sense of failure: for all of our pride in India's democracy, the rise of Indian writing in English and this country's openness to argument and debate, we still have a deep unease when it comes to protecting free expression.

As a reader, which is what I've been for most of my 20 years in the workforce, whether in journalism or in publishing, I find it terribly saddening and disheartening that we haven't been able to examine previous bans on books. Would the earth really shake if we made copies of Aubrey Menen's gloriously subversive take on the Ramayana, The Ramayana Retold, available? Is there no way we can come back to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, 23 years after it was banned in India, and allow readers to discover the book for themselves? It often seems to me that Satanic Verses marked a turning point in the history of Indian thought: the day we banned this book was the day we lost nuance, and lost shades of meaning.

Every argument about the Verses in the two decades since then has stalled on gross simplifications: this is the book where Rushdie "insulted" Islam, and that is the end of all debate. Denied the right to read the Verses for themselves, Indians are unlikely to discover the layers to the Verses, the migrants' story at its heart, the exploration of insanity, the questioning of faith that Rushdie permitted himself. It followed, from the ban on the Verses, that we set a precedent that dissuaded authors from exploring the big questions about faith, belief and religion. It's easy for a contemporary writer to criticise the India Shining story--but faith has slid silently out of the frame, no longer to be discussed with ease.

Banned Books Week makes me envious. The reverence with which the US still--by and large--regards the right of its citizens to free speech is not encoded into our own DNA. We haven't yet had a political party or an individual politician stand up for free expression rights, even though a culture that bans books freely is also often a culture that will work very hard to shut down other forms of debate and dissent. Few of us would be surprised if school libraries banned books--in fact, in most schools, the librarian is expected to act as a kind of moral guardian, and many "filter" out books that might be seen as too violent or too unsettling for their constituencies.

The courts have consistently worked to protect free speech rights, but as a culture, I think we prefer silence to dissent and we would all too often choose the right not to be offended over the right to have our minds and beliefs challenged. We very rarely connect all the dots and ask what a book ban pronounced (and never re-examined) twenty years ago might have to do with a state that thinks it's all right to deport foreign journalists who are asking inconvenient questions, or another state that thinks it's okay to force Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey out of Bombay bookshops because his writing does not spare the Shiv Sena.

Perhaps we could start Banned Books Week here in India just by talking about, and thinking about, censorship. There's the censorship of the state, but there is also the far more insidious and damaging self-censorship that we often practice, or the intolerance many might face when they express views that differ from the hard certitudes of the moral majority. I hope to spend at least part of Banned Books Week thinking about the ideas and debates that make me uncomfortable, and trying to figure out where, and why, I have been silent in my own life. And if I have time, I'll try to share posts about books that have been banned in India, and what they might still have to offer us as readers. Feel free to share your own thoughts.

Delhi: Emergency numbers

Police numbers/ stations/ helplines:

Police
100

Commissioner of Police 3319661(O) 3319721(O)

Police Headquarters 3352678

Chanakyapuri Police Station 3011100, 3012003

Parliament Street Police Station 3361100, 3542700

Tughlak Road Police Station 3014878, 3012100

Tilak Marg Police Station 3382100

Fire Service 101

Ambulance 102

Accident & Trauma 10999

Hospitals

Emergency numbers for #RML hospital: 23348200 23404446 23743769 23404478
Emergency numbers for AIIMS 26588700;
Emergency numbers for Safdarjung Hospital: +91-011-26101925, +91-011-26161960, +91-011-26194690, +91-011-26165032, +91-011-26168336,

Blood Banks in Delhi (via ClickIndia):
CENTRAL DELHI

Connaught Place
Indian Red Cross Society
Located in Connaught Place, Indian Red Cross Society is a voluntary humanitarian organization which provides relief in times of disasters/emergencies and promotes health & care of the vulnerable people and communities.
http://www.indianredcross.org/

Red Cross Road, Janpath
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)23711551/6441

Karol Bagh
Bajaj Blood Bank
Bajaj Blood Bank is situated in Karol Bagh. It has a collection of all blood components, who wants to take on emergency basis.
Karol Bagh
New Delhi 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 28712849
Blood Bank Organisation
Located just opposite Telephone Exchange, it is an organization which provides blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals.
11/6 B, Shanti Chamber, Oppositte Telephone Exchange, Pusa Road
New Delhi - 110005
Tel:+(91)-(11) 25721870, 25711055, 25730773
Fax:+(91)-(11) 25745208
Sir Ganga Ram Hospital
The Blood Bank at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is housed in a newly renovated larger area. It has been equipped to provide not only good quality blood but also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various haematological diseases and complications in medical cases.
http://www.sgrh.com/

Rajinder Nagar
New Delhi 110060
Tel:+(91)-(11)25735205, 25861463
Fax:+(91)-(11)25861002



EAST DELHI
Mayur Vihar
Dharmashila Cancer Foundation & Research Centre
Situated close to Noida, it is well equipped with ultra modern facilities. It has a list of voluntary donors from whom blood can be collected on urgent basis.
http://www.cancerdch.org/


Vasundhara Enclave
New Delhi - 110 091
Tel:+(91)-(11)-43066666, 43066688, 22617771-75
Tel:+(91)-(11)-22617770, 22619033


NORTH DELHI
Civil Lines
Sant Parmanand Hospital
The hospital's Blood bank is situated in the basement. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells are available round the clock. It has the latest Apheresis system for preparation of Mega units of platelets (Single Donor Platelets).
http://sphdelhi.org

18, Sham Nath Marg, Civil Lines
Delhi -110054
Tel:+(91)-(11)23981260, 23994401
Fax:+(91)-(11) 23974706
Pitampura
Lions Blood Bank
One of the newly opened blood bank in the town, Lions Blood Bank is equipped with all the latest technologies & testing facilities and it is a 100% voluntary blood bank.
AK - 100, Shalimar Bagh,
Delhi -110086
Tel:+(91)-(11)- 47122000, 42258080, 9717897500

SOUTH DELHI
Greater Kailash
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank
G K Medical Centre Blood Bank is situated in Greater Kailash. It operates on a round the clock issue basis.
E49, Greater Kailash II
New Delhi 110048
Lajpat Nagar
CPC Blood Bank
Located in the posh shopping area of Lajpat Nagar, CPC Blood Bank provides the safe healthy tested blood when it needed to the patient admitted in various hospitals. It has the full stock of Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells.

J-36 Lajpat Nagar-II
New Delhi 110024
Tel:+(91)-(11) 26834101
Mehrauli
Batra Hospital & Medical Research Centre
Located near Hamdard Nagar on the Mehrauli Badarpur Road, Batra Hospital provides the blood on a round the clock issue basis. Blood and apheresis component donations are carried out from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (week days).
http://www.batrahospitaldelhi.org

1, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, Mehrauli Badarpur Road
New Delhi - 110 062
Tel:+(91)-(11)-26056148, 26056153, 26057154

Rotary Blood Bank
Located in Mehrauli, it has been established to alleviate the tremendous shortage of healthy, fully tested blood and blood components. Whole blood, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma and packed cells are available any time.
http://www.rotarybloodbank.org/

56-57,Tuglakabad Industrial Area, Mehrauli - Badarpur Road,
New Delhi - 110044
Tel:+(91)-(11)29054066, 29054067, 29962078

Safdarjung
All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)
The Deptt. of Transfusion Medicine at AIIMS is running a full time Blood Bank whcih is open round the clock. It is one of the Regional Blood Transfusion Centre for south Delhi. It collects blood from all the healthy donors who wants to donate blood in the Blood Bank and in the Blood Donation Camps organised in and outside Delhi.
http://www.aiims.edu/

Ansari Nagar
New Delhi - 110029
Tel:+(91)-(11)26588500, 26588700
Fax:+(91)-(11)26589900

South Extension
Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center
Located in Kotla Timber Market, Sunil Blood Bank and Transfusion Center provides the various blood components on emergency basis.
806 Arjun Nagar, Kotla Mubrakpur,
Opp Defence Colony
New Delhi 110003
Tel:+(91)-(11)46507646


WEST DELHI

Janakpuri
Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital
It can be access through Dwarka – Connaught Place Metro line, just 02 km. from Hospital. It provides the various blood components on urgent basis.
Hari Nagar
New Delhi 110064
Tel:+(91)-(11)25494403 Upto, 08, 25125259
Fax:+(91)-(11)25494264

Rohini
Jaipur Golden Hospital
Jaipur Golden Hospital is housed in Sector 3. There is not only good quality blood in fact it has also the blood fractions required for the treatment of various diseases.
2-Institutional Area, Sector-3, Rohini
New Delhi - 110085
Tel:+(91)-(11)27525984-88
Fax:+(91)-(11)27518121

NCR
Noida
Kailash Hospital & Research Centre
The hospital's blood bank is located in Sector 27, Noida. Platelets, Plasma, Packed cells, platelet concentrate, fresh frozen plasma are available. It has been provided with high-tech refrigerators, freezers, and cell separator.
http://www.kailashhospitals.com/

H-33, Sector-27
Noida-201301
Tel:+(91)-(120)2444444, 2440444
Fax:+(91)-(120)2552323

General link to a list of hospitals/ ambulance services, from the Delhi Traffic Police site.

The khichdi conundrum

(From my food writing files, in honour of the weather, this August 2010 piece on khichdi, carried in the Business Standard.)


As the rain clouds settle in and the skies darken, a primitive instinct kicks in: like so many Indians, I must make or eat khichdi, preferably with the accompaniments, but at need, just the plain rice-and-dal dish that has travelled down to us from the time of the Vedas. (Note: There are recipes for rice dishes in the Upanishads, too, but they may have unintended consequences--see below.)

Khichdi is perhaps one of the universal Indian dishes, found in some form or the other across all regions; and yet it’s rarely found in restaurants, and outside of Bengal, khow-swey parties would be more common than khichdi parties. This is not so much household food as langar food, puja pandal food; it hasn’t yet migrated to coffee shop menus. (Given the number of road warriors who look eagerly for home-style food in their fancy hotels, I’m willing to bet it would be a hit if anyone took the plunge and introduced it.)

The closest equivalent to khichdi-on-the-menu is Karnataka’s Bisi Bele Bhath, a complex union of toor dar, rice, tamarind, spices and an assortment of vegetables that may have originated in its present form in the Mysore Palace. Bisi bele bhat enthusiasts will argue hotly over such minutiae as whether one can add green peas (no, say the purists, and I agree), what accompaniments may be served (none or an assortment of vegetable dishes, according to taste) and whether bisi bele bhat tastes even better reheated the next day (no, but it remains edible, unlike leftover sambar-rice).

The Bengali version of khichdi I grew up with had many variations: there was the soupy invalid dish that resembled nothing more than the gruel described in the grimmer work of Charles Dickens’, flavoured austerely with salt, and then there were the infinite variations on the grand “party dish”. Perhaps this is why khichdi doesn’t make it to restaurant menus: anyone can make an average khichdi, but it takes a master to blend the deceptively simple array of spices, lentils (roasted moong dal, the humble masoor), rice and vegetables to the correct pitch.

In that sense, a khichdi is closer to the paella than to the risotto: everything depends, not on the grain of the rice or the release of starch at the right moment, but at the cook’s ability to add in ingredients at just the right stage of cooking. It’s also a dish best made in quantity and served steaming hot; reheating dries out the lentil grains (my theory is that the tamarind sauce in bisi bele bhat makes it slightly more amenable to reheating than the classic khichdi/ khichuri).

Just a few restaurants in Calcutta offer khichdi—these used to be the old “canteen stalwarts”, formica tables, plastic chairs, the haunt of the working class clerk who will settle down in comfort, secure in the knowledge that the smart set will not invade his privacy. Kewpie Kitchen’s offers, in season, grand khichuri-thalis—platters of either hilsa-khichdi, meat curry-khichdi, or the not-to-be-despised niramish or vegetarian version. The accompaniments are classic. The purest of ghee is a must, and will be ladled on to khichuri in quantities that demolish any faint idea that this is a meal for the health-conscious.

Fried vegetables in besan batter—or in the case of aubergines, thinly sliced or cut in fat wedges and fried to an irresistible meatiness—will accompany the khichdi. As with the North Indian obsession with making different kinds of pakoras, delicacy and skill is everything: the highest praise is reserved, as the author Bulbul Sharma noted in her collection of food stories, the Anger of Aubergines, for single leaves of spinach lightly coated in besan batter, introduced briefly to a cauldron of hot oil, and flash-fried, in the same manner as parsley might be fried in the West. Meat and fish accompaniments are permissible, but not really classic.

Which brings me to another pet theory: the first restaurant to set itself up as a langar-specialist, bringing together Amritsar’s gurdwara classics alongside Bengal’s puja-pandal khichdi and labra and Kerala’s temple payasam will make a killing. All we need is the right backer, and a chef who understands the importance of the perfect plate of steaming-hot, delectable, nostalgia-laden khichdi.

The Upanishads on the cooking of rice:

Now, when the monthly sickness comes upon anyone's wife, for three days she should not drink from a metal cup, nor put on fresh clothes. Neither a low-caste man nor a low-caste woman should touch her. At the end of the three nights she should bathe and should have rice threshed.

14. In case one wishes, 'That a white son be born to me! that he be able to repeat a Veda! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice cooked with milk and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].

15. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a tawny son with reddish-brown eyes be born to me! that he be able to recite two Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice cooked with sour milk and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].

16. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a swarthy son with red eyes be born to me! that he be able to repeat three Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with water and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him].


17. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a learned (pandita) daughter be born to me! that she attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with sesame and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [her].

A. Now, in case one wishes, 'That a son, learned, famed, a frequenter of council-assemblies, a speaker of discourse desired to be heard, be born to me! that he be able to repeat all the Vedas! that he attain the full length of life!'--they two should have rice boiled with meat and should eat it prepared with ghee. They two are likely to beget [him], with meat, either veal or beef.

The furore over 2(m) and parallel imports

The problem with the debate over parallel imports is that it has, inevitably, pitted the interests of readers, students and academics against the interests of authors, publishers, and well, readers again. As someone who might write books at some point, and who's worked in the publishing industry, I was very glad to hear that the controversial 2(m) amendment had been dropped. The parallel imports debate is a complex one, and here is a link to old posts on Akhond that cover the entire debate:

Three posts on the parallel imports debate:

Here is a link to a piece in Mint that explains the position from the other side, from the point of view of students and readers:

But much of the debate has ignored the unpleasant realities that drive the publishing industry. The first is that the Indian publishin industry does not operate in isolation; as I and several others have argued, there is no benefit and a great deal of harm in opening up our markets one-way, without being able to access the great souks of the West in an equivalent fashion. The second is that it doesn't make sense to treat academic and trade publishing as the same kind of beast, and assume that laws that are good for one sector will be good for the other. They operate in very different ways, and part of the problem here is that what might work in the textbooks/ academic sector does not work at all for trade publishing and for mainstream fiction/ non-fiction writers.

I'm relieved that 2(m) has been dropped, but I also hope that this will start a longer and more complex debate on parallel imports, and what we can do to bring better books more cheaply to Indian readers--without killing off what is still an emerging English language publishing industry.

The Harud festival: cancelled until further notice

The controversy over Harud, the festival of literature to be held in Kashmir, came to a head today with the organisers pulling out until further notice.

Here's the press release from Teamwork, which also organises the Jaipur Litfest:

HARUD - THE AUTUMN FESTIVAL OF LITERATURE


FROM THE HARUD FESTIVAL SECRETARIAT


New Delhi, 29th August, 2011: It is with great sadness that we announce the postponement of the Harud Literary Festival. Born out of the best intentions to platform work of emerging and established writers in Kashmir, the festival has been hijacked by those who hold extreme views in the name of free speech.



A few people who began the movement to boycott the festival have no qualms in speaking on and about Kashmir across international forums, but have refused to allow other voices, including writers, poets and theatre people from the Valley and across India to enjoy the right to express themselves at the Harud festival.



If those opposing the festival truly believed in free speech, they would have allowed this forum to go ahead and would come and express their dissent at the festival. They could have put to test their claims that the festival would not allow for free speech and expression.



Expression through the arts are at risk across the world and more so in India. Literature is one way to transcend these barriers and provide a platform for inclusive ideas. This unfortunately will be the biggest loss, not just for Srinagar, but for all artists who believe in the right to express themselves.



We wish to reiterate the following:

1. The festival had invited approx 30 authors from Jammu and Kashmir and 20 from other parts of India. The festival had neither invited nor was planning to invite Salman Rushdie.

2. The festival program included sessions on 'The Silenced Voice: Creativity and Dissent', 'Jail Diaries', 'Gulistan: The Forgotten Environment' , 'Lol'ha'rov: Echoes of the Valley' , 'Harud: Songs of the Season' , 'Chronicles of Exile' , apart from other sessions on popular fiction, poetry, theatre etc.

3. We have received some funding support from corporate sources but we have received no funding from any government source..

4. The festival was to be hosted at the Delhi Public School, which earlier this summer hosted a literature festival for children that invited authors to come in from other parts of India.


With many authors voicing their concerns about possible violence during the festival due to the heightened nature of the debate, and a call for protest at the venues, we neither have the desire to be responsible for yet more unrest in the valley nor to propagate mindless violence in the name of free speech. We are therefore left with little alternative but to cancel the festival for now.



We hope that when calmer sense prevails, and we are confidently able to provide a sense of security to our speakers and guests, and writers from Kashmir feel the need for a platform to express themselves, we will reenergize the festival. Till then it is a sad day for us, and a victory for a vocal minority who feel that they alone are the doorkeepers to peoples’ minds and hearts.





Background:

1) Nawaz Gul Kanungo's story on the controversies around Harud

2) An open letter from a group of writers and artists, including Basharat Peer, Mirza Waheed and Sanjay Kak, explaining why they didn't plan to be at Harud.

3) The "Boycott Harud" Facebook page, which reads in the main like a really despicable attack on Salman Rushdie.

Speaking Volumes: The English India wants

(I began writing Speaking Volumes around 1996-97. Tony Joseph, who was then the features editor of the Business Standard, suggested a weekly column on books after it became glaringly obvious to the paper that I was challenged, to put it politely, where number-crunching was concerned.
Since then, the column has run without a break for years, except for a week in 2005 when I was travelling in Sri Lanka and had no access to the Net, and a three-month time out in 2008-2009 because of health problems.
It's been wonderful writing Speaking Volumes, but I'm taking the next six months off to work on a personal project. Thanks for all the mail and all the support over the years, and I hope, when the column comes back, that it will be the better for the break.)


What is your definition of good English? For a certain generation of Indians, Macaulay’s children and grandchildren, “correct” English was defined by clear markers.

The BBC accent and the Oxford accent were prized over an American or a local Indian accent. The Booker Prize was followed with more zeal than the Pulitzer, though Indian interest dropped sharply in years when subcontinental authors didn’t feature on the list. We were supposed to read Nobel-winning literature laureates, Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, and the Latin American authors dominated our imaginations far more strongly than, say, contemporary writing from the US.

And we dreamed about having access to English the way we dreamed about owning real estate. In both cases, the markers for what we wanted would change sharply over time. The yearnings of property owners shifted from the ersatz British country house nestled in a corner of the hills to the defiantly faux-American mansionette in Gurgaon or Ludhiana.

English as a language still stands for many things in the Indian mind—access to more and better jobs, a sign of modernity, a way of announcing one’s aspirations to be a global citizen. But the kind of English we think of as acceptable has changed.

This week, the Vodafone-Crossword book award shortlists were announced. The Crossword is now over a decade old, and has been grappling with the problem of which writers to include in the pantheon of Indian English writing--only Indian citizens or only persons of Indian origin. This year was no exception, as the Prize left out some of the best and most original books of the year, especially in the field of non-fiction—too many good authors were disqualified because they held the wrong passport. This is likely to damage the Crossword in future—no prize can continue to ignore the best literature produced in the year, no matter how pure its motives.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Crossword shortlists was the wide gulf between the literary fiction shortlist, and the popular fiction shortlist. In previous years, the literary and the popular have often overlapped, as when Namita Devidayal’s acclaimed memoir The Music Room won the popular award. This year, the books that featured on the popular award shortlist included works by Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi, Karan Bajaj—there was absolutely no overlap with the literary fiction list, which included novels by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Omair Ahmad and others.

Tripathi, Sanghi, Bajaj and company are part of a larger trend of home-made bestsellers. The Indian Express dubbed some of this writing “aliterature” in a story the paper did on the success of books like Love Via Telephone Tring Tring and similar works. And the Indian English-language publishing industry, after years of hunting for local crime and pulp fiction bestsellers, is more than a little taken aback at the new wave of writers, for whom a racy plot matters much more than either intelligible story-telling or good grammar.

One way to understand the phenomenon of the new bestsellers is to put them through the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed to judge levels of comprehension difficulty, based on factors like word length and sentence length. While not foolproof, the scale provides one way to measure intangibles such as reading ease.
Authors like Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie tend to come in at a Reading Ease of 56 % or lower. If you don’t have a long history as a reader, or you came to English late, in other words, these books might be challenging. Chetan Bhagat and Aravind Adiga weigh in, surprisingly, at similar levels—Bhagat has a reading ease of 86 %, Adiga 76 %.

Unlike more literary authors, Bhagat, Tripathi, Sanghi and other authors use almost no passive sentences in their work, making their books much easier for the reader whose English is a functional, acquired second or third language. The pure pulp bestsellers excoriated by critics, including Love Via Telephone Tring Tring, have an almost uniform reading ease score in the 90th percentile—meaning that they could be read even by those who have very limited English and who experience difficulty with the language.

The Flesch-Kincaid test is only indicative, not definitive. To me, what these scores suggest is the obvious: that we’re producing bestsellers the way the Victorian pulp fiction market once did, to cater to thousands of readers for whom English is a functional, usable but still alien tongue. The Victorian penny dreadfuls were written for readers who had literacy, and who had imagination and a love for storytelling in plenty. What they lacked was a history of reading, and a home-grown canon. In that absence, they turned, as Indian readers are now doing, to pulp fiction as comfort food and junk food, rather than literature. And the gap between them and readers who think of books as literature, rather than a bag of chips, is likely to become even wider over the next decade.

Slutwalking

The really dangerous part of Slutwalk Delhi is dodging media cameras and avoiding the mikes thrust in your face. When it starts, the media-aam junta ratio is 3:1, which leads to the spectacle of a reporter trying to persuade a younger colleague from another magazine to give her soundbytes. "You're marching too, no? Say something as a woman, na?" The younger reporter declines.

By 11 am, the pace has picked up; I'm estimating a conservative 500 or so people--young girls, a healthy and heart-warming number of men, auntyjis and several stalwarts of the gay rights movement in Delhi--have joined in. Depending on when they join in with the Slutwalkers, the media has the numbers at 200--far too low, even if you subtract the organisers and Asmita's street theatre troupe--or at 700, which seems optimistic. I see a young lesbian couple wade through the crowds, swatting TV mikes like flies.

The media is all over Slutwalk, which is turning out to be a plain vanilla, sedate Jantar Mantar protest. Most of the marchers are carrying banners with slogans attacking Delhi's history of violence against women: "Soch badal, kapre nahin", "I have been HARASSED at least once in my life", "Ab toh bol", "Proud to be shameless". One woman, carrying a banner that speaks of child abuse, is stopped several times. "I've lost count of the number of women who say this happened to them too, who were 12 or 14 the first time they experienced harassment and abuse," she says. "It's amazing, sharing our stories."

This is so different from the skimpily-clad marchers dreamed up by the media and by the kind of leering men who've been trolling Slutwalk's FB page. These few hundreds are nowhere near the kind of turnout Toronto had, with thousands of women taking to the streets in anger, but being here feels surprisingly good. The women police officers guarding the march tell me and another young woman: "Do this every year, then maybe the men will start to listen."


The boys marching quietly, banners raised, watching politely as Asmita performs a street play, listening to Slutwalk's young organiser, Umang Sabharwal, speak, are very clear about why they're here. "It's an issue for us," says Deepak, a young college student. "Delhi men have the worst reputations, and many of us are here to say we're not like that, and men shouldn't be like that."

The mothers marching in Slutwalk, two of them side-by-side, are bemused by the media. "They only want to photograph the foreigners and that one woman in small clothes," says one of them. They're here because a) they're sick of being pushed around on buses and the Metro and b), because as Mrs Kumar says, "Why should only the young women march? We can also come out, this issue affects all of us." Were they not put off by the name--Slutwalk, Besharmi Morcha? Mrs Kumar glares at the reporter who asked her this question. "You have time to waste thinking about names. Think about why Delhi is so unsafe for women, no? National capital, and look at the crime rates!"

The young women melting in the heat as we do the ritual march around Jantar Mantar, escorted by bands of police personnel, are clear about why they're here, too. "I'm tired of the TV shows saying think about female foeticide first, think about dowry deaths first," says Rina. "We have to live in this city and move around and you know, our fathers aren't rich men that they have chauffeured cars. Doesn't our safety matter? Look at the rapes, look at the harassment, aren't Indians ashamed of what women have to face in Delhi?"

The men from the Greater Cooch Behar Association, on hunger strike in the cheerfully open-to-all protest bazaar that Jantar Mantar offers, are being steered back to their own tents by a reproachful minder. One of them is arguing that he should be allowed to join in the Slutwalk, but he's being accused of wanting to sneak off to have an illicit ice cream on the side. Unfortunately for his protestations of innocence, his mouth is stained orange from a Kwality's Orange Bar.

I'm thinking of the first Blank Noise protest in Delhi, a walk at night for which less than 20 women showed up, where a police escort was necessary to ensure the safety of that small, tentatively activist band. This is just a start, and the debate over the name and the meaning of Slutwalk almost hijacked the issues behind the walk. But it seems like a good start, to me, and to the people who've gathered here in the July heat. I'm reminded, by the numbers and by the conversations in the crowd, of the early, tentative beginnings of the Gay Rights parade a few years ago. There, too, there had been fears that the movement would be too insular, too self-referential and too niche. Here, the crowds are very different from the media's expectations; this isn't just the usual South Delhi protest veterans crew. "Where are the celebs, yaar?" a TV reporter is demanding. "There are no celebs, only ordinary-shordinary people. How will I get my bytes?"

I get stuck between two streams of marchers. One woman, to my right, is carrying a banner protesting female foeticide. She catches my slightly startled eye and shakes her head: "I didn't make that," she says. "I'm just carrying it for a friend, and no, I don't know what it has to do with Slutwalk."

To my left, though, is a hand-drawn banner that has drawn attention all through the march with a particularly baffling message. "Boys just eat grape and stop Girl Rape," it says.

Despite the intensity of the media scrutiny, the number of police personnel who've thrown a cordon around the marchers because of threats from a Hindutva rightwing group, and the quietness of the march, this is a good way to begin. "I want to come back next year," says Samira. She's 27, and has had enough of Delhi. "It's not about the clothes I'm wearing, it's about the violence we face every day in this city. I'm so sick of it, but I'm here because it's my city, and if I want things to change, then maybe I have to be here and be part of the change instead of just whining." Would she want the name of the march changed? She shrugs. "Call it Slutwalk or anything you like," she says. "So long as we have a regular protest, does it matter?"

Book review: The Groaning Shelf, by Pradeep Sebastian

(Published in Biblio, July 2011.)

The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book love
Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India,
Rs 395, 295 pages
ISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3

In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might grant you a brief, tantalizing darshan, a quick glimpse of what it meant to be in the presence of the strange god called the Internet.

Pradeep Sebastian and Sven Birkerts occupied very different imaginative spaces in that year. Sebastian, the Hindu’s articulate, incisive, gently brilliant literary columnist, wrote about his love for the printed word, with the accent heavily on the “printed”. First editions, secondhand bookshops, the love of the musty, distinctive scent of books—these were what he celebrated in his column, as much as the richness of literary content.

For Birkerts, 1994 was the year when he published The Gutenberg Elegies, which would become a landmark collection of essays marking the advent of ebooks (and the presumed death of print). The Internet had already changed the way Americans read, understood and processed the world, and Birkerts was one of the first to chart—and comprehend—the order of change upon us. We were shifting from a print culture to an electronic culture, he said, much as there had been a shift, centuries before, from an oral literary culture to a written literary culture. However, this shift would take less than fifty years, not centuries, to come about; and this shift would also involve a transition in how we understood the practice of reading and writing. Birkerts was prescient in many of the fears he expressed in The Gutenberg Elegies—language would erode, becoming less complex; readers would have to “incessantly reposition the self within a barrage of onrushing stimuli”; we would experience a waning of the private self as we became more and more enmeshed in electronic webs.

In just 17 years since Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, these are some of the trends in publishing and reading that have changed. E-books have grown in popularity and availability and e-readers from the Sony E-reader to the Kindle and now the iPad have encountered less resistance than many champions of the book accepted. Language erosion has, according to some experts, happened; but this has also been accompanied by the rise of what might be called e-creoles, often complex sub-dialects used on services like Facebook and Twitter, rich in their own ways of combining symbol, smileys and text, expressive and constantly morphing. Traditional bookstores across the world have been under threat, with independent bookstores and large chains alike going under; the cult of the bestseller and the mass-market paperback dominates a great deal of reading. There is a question mark against the concept of territorial copyright; and there are fears that between them, Google and Amazon might own too much of the world’s electronic libraries and bookstores.

That is, of course, a paragraph of over-simplifications, and it is also a demonstration of the limitations of print. In its current form, flat on the printed page you are reading, the previous paragraph conveys only a limited authorial summary of almost two decades of complex, fascinating and challenging arguments. In its electronic avatar, it would have been possible to link the first sentence to the predictions or analyses of Marshall McLuhan, Zizek or Nicholas Negroponte; to link the second sentence to stories from, say Wired or BoingBoing on the rise of e-reading; to link the third sentence to blogs like Language Hat and Language Log, and so on. Deprived of the backbone of the electronic world, of the potentially intense engagement and architecture of the Internet, what you have left in this paragraph is just an unsatisfactory skeleton. (Note: Since this version is online, I've included some links as illustrations.)



• * *



According to the formidable Nicholas Negroponte, the end of the book in its current, physical avatar is closer than we think—he gives it about five years. Observers of the Indian publishing scene believe we have a little longer than that—the physical book will probably never phase out entirely in a country known for its ability to exist in several centuries simultaneously, and even where it does, the process is likely to take ten to 15 years.

It is in this context that Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf, a compilation of writings on the book and on bibliophilia, must be read. This collection of brief, engaging essays—many of them drawn and reshaped from his columns for The Hindu and the Deccan Herald—is at once a nostalgic elegy for the physical book, and a stirring defence of its virtues. Sebastian represents one end of the ebook-versus-printed book debate; he stands for everyone, every reader and writer, who believes that our world would be diminished if we could no longer hold bound volumes in our hands.

The Groaning Shelf is really the distilled essence of one reader’s love affair with books, complete with the inevitable moments of darkness and disillusion. It opens with a description of a condition common to those who live their lives in reading, publishing and writing—a moment of turning away from reading itself, becoming, in Sebastian’s phrase, “a lapsed reader”. For him, this is the moment when he shifts from a deep engagement with the content of books to a deep fascination with the form. “The pleasures of bibliophily for me lie in fully embracing the book as material object: its bibliographical aspects—binding, edition, condition, rarity, and typography matter to me as much as their literary content.”

In the first few sections, Sebastian moves through all the complex and beloved rituals of the true bibliophile. Like Walter Benjamin, he derives pleasure from unpacking his library, aware that in describing the humble and yet intently engaging process of rearranging books on a shelf, he is joining a long line of writers from Benjamin to Geoff Dyer to Anne Fadiman. Alberto Manguel and Coleridge share his search for the perfect bookshelf; Baudrillard and Sontag help him understand the romantic richness that lies behind the process of becoming a book collector, an obsession that goes beyond the merely acquisitive. First editions—the hunt for them, the joy of possessing an untouched, perfectly preserved first edition of a Nabokov or an RK Narayan—lead him to the very Indian neglect of these aspects of book-love. He will, later, meet Bibi Mohamed, an antiquarian book dealer in Manhattan who is one of the very few experts in her field of Indian origin; and he will also write with some feeling of the relative absence of book history in India.

Perhaps the only disappointing section in this collection is ‘Writers’, which offers a series of short profiles of writers from Pico Iyer to Ayn Rand, Pankaj Mishra to JD Salinger. The short essay form, with some pieces just two or three pages long, works very well with Sebastian’s bibliophilia—by moving from the joys of reading in bed to the tale of obsessive collectors, he creates a map of the reading world, and a timeline of the development of the kind of reader of books Anne Fadiman would have classified as courtly rather than carnal. But while these brief profiles are necessarily limited—they must have been written for magazine or newspaper publication—they work only as introductions, and often leave the reader wanting a great deal more.

This is the danger of any collection of essays by a columnist, especially one as sensitive and as thoughtful as Sebastian—the truncated length of the essays whets the reader’s appetite, but leaves it unsatisfied. Even within these, though, there are moments of recognition and pleasurable insight. Writing about Pico Iyer (“Thomas Merton on a frequent-flier pass”), Sebastian instinctively does what any committed reader will do when he comes to Iyer’s novel Abandon. He places it among its natural family: “Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway—the story of CS Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham—and of another little known, astonishing book titled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken…”

All of his instincts are of this order—the instincts of a disciplined, accomplished reader—and this collection is perhaps the first in many decades in India to celebrate books and reading. The Groaning Shelf has the same directness and ease as Sebastian’s columns: it was written by a reader for other readers, and that is its greatest strength. The moments of serendipity compensate for the inevitable disappointment of wanting more than just this collection of essays, however valuable in themselves; there was a deeper book, the personal history of an Indian reader, waiting to be written, and though it is unfair to criticize Sebastian for not having written it, it is tempting to ask him to write it some day.

As a reader, I am on the other side of the divide from Sebastian, wedded more to the content of books than to their form. Many of us “carnal readers”, to use Fadiman’s elegant division, are fascinated by the promise of the ebook revolution, and are happy to jettison the paraphernalia—the groaning shelves—that accompany being a book lover. Sebastian’s essays are a reminder of courtly love, and all that it can bring: the frisson of learning the arcane terminology of the book trade, the joyous serendipity of browsing in secondhand bookshops and finding what you didn’t know you needed.

Perhaps one of the loveliest essays in The Groaning Shelf is about a visit Sebastian makes to “the bookshop that every bibliophile secretly fantasizes about… an entire bookstore full of just books about books.” Behind that deceptively simple phase lies a lifetime of the love and passion that only the true, dedicated reader knows.