Odd literary feuds: Greene vs Coward

From Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene:

“Greene suddenly and without warning began to assail one of the original talents of the world of theatre—Noel Coward. There was no obvious reason for seeing Coward as his bête noire. Perhaps for Greene the ever-popular Coward was a suspect talent, though periodically Greene felt an almost insane urge to lash out, working off some of his bile in a review."

Three savage reviews later, Coward responded in verse.

Dear Mr Graham Greene, I yearn
So much to know why you should burn
With such fierce indignation at
The very fact that I exist.
I’ve been unable to resist
Sitting up later than I need
To read in ‘The Spectator’ what
Appears to be no more, no less
Than shocking manners. I confess
Bewilderment. I’ve seldom seen
Another brother-writer press
Such disadvantage with such mean
Intent to hurt. You must have been
For years, in secret, nourishing
A rich, rip-snorting, flourishing
Black hatred for my very guts!
Surely all these envenomed cuts
At my integrity and taste
Must be a waste of your own time?
What is my crime, beyond success?
(But you have been successful too
It can’t be that) I know a few
Politer critics than yourself
Who simply hate my plays
But do they state their sharp dispraise
With such surprising, rising bile?
Oh dear me no, they merely smile.
A patronizing smile perhaps
But then these journalistic chaps
Unlike ourselves, dear Mr Greene,
(Authors I mean) are apt to sneer
At what they fear to be apart
From what they conceive as art.
You have descried (also with keen
Sadistic joy) my little book
About Australia, one look
At which should prove, all faults aside,
That I had tried, dear Mr Greene,
To do a job. You then implied
That I had run away, afraid,
A renegade. I can’t surmise
Why you should view your fellow men
With such unfriendly, jaundiced eyes.
But then, we’re strangers. I can find
No clue, no key to your dark mind.
I’ve read your books as they appear
And I’ve enjoyed them all. (Nearly all.)
I’ve racked my brains in a sincere
But vain endeavour to recall
If, anytime or anywhere,
In Bloomsbury or Belgrave Square,
In Paris or Pekin or Bude,
I have, unwittingly, been rude,
Or inadvertently upset you.
(Did I once meet you and forget you?
Have I ever been your debtor?
Did you once write me a letter
That I never got—or what?)
If I knew, I shouldn’t worry.
All this anguish, all this flurry,
This humiliating scene
That I’m making, Mr Greene,
Is a plea for an explanation
For a just justification
By what strange Gods you feel yourself empowered
To vent this wild expenditure of spleen
Upon yours most sincerely
Noel Coward.


A month later, Greene reviewed Coward’s play Blithe Spirit, calling it “a weary exhibition of bad taste”. So much for the soothing power of verse, though twelve years later, the feud had finally died down, and Greene rented Coward’s house in Jamaica as a holiday home. A curious footnote: Coward acted the part of Hawthorne in the film version of Greene's Our Man In Havana.

How to illustrate your news story on rape

(From the Feb 2012 Times of India story, 'Constable booked for raping minor':



(From the Times of India story on the Kolkata car rape victim)



(From IBN Live news reports; this seems to be a standard IBN visual for rape news stories)



(From IBN Live news reports; FirstPost carried the same screengrab)

The BS column: Dilli's dastangois

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012)

If you were telling a story in the Cameroons, you might start with: “A fable! A fable! Bring it! Bring it!” Most Bengalis know the folktale riff on “Once upon a time”: “Once there was a king, once there was a queen…” Many tales begin with: “Once there was, once there wasn’t”. The older storytelling traditions may invoke a truly ancient past: “In the time when men and animals talked to one another…”

For the last seven years, Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain have begun their dastans with an ode to the cup-bearer, setting aside the minor impediment that their silver cups are often filled with nothing more innocuous than water. The traditional invocation is as much part of their act as are the spotless white kurtas or the ancient story-cycles that they’ve recited from the steps of the Jama Masjid, the monuments of Old Delhi and more prosaically, the IIC auditorium stage.

The dastangos began their performances at an interesting point of time in Delhi’s history: the mushairas and sawal-jawab oral poetry baithaks had died out, replaced by the often grimly ritualistic evening of book readings. Few of the readings that were attended by growing numbers of aspiring writers and curious readers in the 2000s ever migrated out of the comfortably narrow confines of South Delhi. A handful of events were in Hindi or Urdu and the Sahitya Akademi did its best to bring in writers from across India.

But by the end of the decade, the Delhi book reading was like a burra khana for Indian English writers; an evening of chiefly ceremonial significance, as the writer Mukul Kesavan has remarked. Through dastangoi, the two performers brought back a much older tradition of storytelling.

Mahmood Farooqui is a historian with a background in theatre; Danish Husain is an actor and poet. It was in 2005 that Farooqui began to study the cultural history of the dastans, the storytellers who carried a library around in their heads. The first performances he did that year along with Himanshu Tyagi—Danish would join in later—were from the Tilism-e-Hoshruba, a magnificently fraudulent epic.

“Know then that from 1883-1893 in Lucknow, two rival storytellers, Syed Muhammad Hussein Jah and Ahmed Husain Qamar wrote a fantasy in the Urdu language whose equal has not been heard before or since,” writes Musharraf Ali Farooqi, writer and translator of the Hoshruba. The epic was 8,000 pages long, and was “a monstrously elaborate literary hoax”: it passed itself off as one of the great ancient story cycles, perhaps even part of the legendary Adventures of Amir Hamza, but was actually the creation of a small group of storytellers in Lucknow.

They wove an indelible tale, one that was made to be told to a circle of awed listeners, and that was labyrinthine in its twists and turns. “These stories were here before Tolkien, and—if we dare say so—are much better than Tolkien’s work,” boasts an online Urdu bookseller’s Hoshruba page.

Over their seven years of dastangoi, Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui have departed from the old classics—the Hoshruba or the tales of Amir Hamza—in order to experiment with newer works. Recently, they did a Dastaan-e-Sedition to protest the imprisonment of Dr Binayak Sen in Chattisgarh.

To mark Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, the two performers took up his revolutionary novel, Ghare Baire, exploring the separation between the home and the world, and, as they put it: “Vande kya hai, Mataram kya hai”. The two switch easily between the three roles—Sandip, the fiery revolutionary driven by greed, desire and patriotism, Nikhil, the temperate zamindar offering reasoned arguments against the excesses of nationalism, Bimala, Nikhil’s wife, stepping across many boundaries as she is seduced by the outside world and by Sandip’s many persuasions.

The performance, and their translation of Ghare Baire from Bengali into Urdu-studded Hindustani, is successful—as most of their performances have been. Danish Husain said once that the virtue of dastangoi also lay in its portability—the performance/ readings could take place in auditoriums or at a bus stop.

After the show, Mahmood says: “The old stories are the stuff that we live for.” The “modern” stories, based on novels that so closely mirror contemporary concerns, are easier for the performer to feel; but the old story-cycles promise a more ancient connection. It’s what the translator of the Hoshruba, Musharraf Farooqi, means when he says his role is to “beat the kettledrums”.

“What dastangoi is about,” says Mahmood Farooqui, “is a combination of four things—Urdu, theatre, performance, literature. People who do theatre in India often feel the burden of having to do something worthy, relevant, serious. But eventually, it’s about telling a good story. It’s meant to entertain.”

The storytellers of Delhi are done, until the next performance. As the traditional Russian closing has it: “The story is over, I can’t lie any more.”

(Image from the Dastangoi site.)

Baboos and Bande Mataram: India's little magazines

(Baboo Jabberjee, BA, by F. Anstey; from the Project Gutenberg free e-book)

(Published in the Business Standard, February 2012)


Their anniversaries slide by unremarked, except for a handful of scholars and critics who remember the little magazines from a century ago. It’s hard to imagine that era now, when the printing press was as much a symbol of the new technology as the Kindle might be today.

It’s equally hard for all but a few historians and scholars of the calibre of Ramachandra Guha, Aloke Rai, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra or Shahid Amin to imagine the excitement of that time, and the zest of the journals and periodicals that flourished a century ago. Today’s magazine stands offer journals on everything from film stars to motoring to parenting, but a century ago, political commentary, fledgling literature and (admittedly terrible) poetry reigned.

Many took for their model a British original, subverting it in the way of the wily Oriental. 140 years ago, the Indian Charivari joined a long and distinguished list of magazines inspired by the satirical eye of Punch. The Parsi Punch, one of the earliest imitators of the original, was to transmute itself into the Hindi Punch, and Muhammad Sajjad Hussain was to make the Oudh Punch famous as an “Indian vernacular serio-comic paper, the first of its kind ever published in Northern India”.

The Indian Charivari began by reviewing, often favourably, such subjects as the efforts of British painters at the Simla Exhibition, but moved rapidly into political commentary. It was famous for bringing an Indian style to its lampoons, using references to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings and local folk art in its caricatures—including a celebrated one of Lord Curzon, depicted as the goddess Saraswati in a commentary on educational reform.

Mookerjee’s Magazine was founded slightly earlier, in 1861, and was among a score of emerging journals published across the country, from Bengal to Madras, that allowed themselves extraordinary licence. Its stated aim was to cover “Politics, Literature, Sociology and Art”, and within a few years, it had drawn criticism. This was not for its poetry, which was in the best traditions of splendidly awful Indo-Anglian verse (Song of the Indian Conservative, for instance, or an ode to Mohinee, the Hindu Maiden), but for its politics.

In its pages, a defender writes: “That Mookerjee’s Magazine should be deemed notorious, and the quality of its articles depreciated by certain Anglo-Indian writers who see nothing commendable in any independent Native undertaking is not at all surprising. Chime in with their views and write yourself down a humble admirer of Hugrut and his oracles, and you are sure to be petted and fondled as a very respectable Hottentot… “

The contents of Mookerjee’s ranged from the comfortably obscure—a plaintive essay asking Where Shall the Baboo Go, much pedantry about Indian religious texts—to the surprisingly contemporary.

In our current obsession with memoirs from the “insider”, it’s worth remembering that Mookerjee’s Magazine published the drily critical Reminiscences of a Kerani’s Life in serial form, which skewered Baboo and Sahib alike. The Indian fascination with long-form journalism showed up in its pages as well—the current affairs magazines at the turn of the century thought nothing of carrying a roughly 40-page history of famines in India, for instance, as Mookerjee’s Magazine did.

This article, Indian Famines in the Past, was just one of the many instances where Indians spoke out against the erasure of their history—in this case, British India’s perceived indifference to the plight of the famine-stricken. The piece was written just after the famines in the Upper Doab, Orissa and Rajputana, and just before the great famines in Bihar, parts of South India and the Ganjam famine.

By the 1890s, the figure of the intellectual, especially the Bengali baboo, was a familiar enough one to be caricatured—both by fellow Bengalis and by writers like F Anstey, whose Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee B.A. was immortalized in 1897. About 105 years ago, after Mookerjee’s Magazine had quietly folded up its shamiana, another journal would become the most influential Indian English periodical of its time. The Modern Review, started by the journalist and reformer Ramananda Chatterjee, would have among its contributors Rabindranath Tagore, Verrier Elwin, Sister Nivedita and remained determinedly non-partisan all through its existence.

Ramchandra Guha adds an unusual contributor to that list—Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote a splendid rant against himself under the pen-name Chanakya. Chatterjee, like many of the intellectuals of the age, was comfortably bilingual, and edited the Bengali journal Prabasi as well as the Review, which may also have given the Modern Review its inclusiveness and eclecticism.

Most of these journals, and the early pamphlets and periodicals published in Madras, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and other printing hubs around India, are almost forgotten, rarely archived. Some of this indifference to the past may be changing—The Best of Quest, edited by Laeeq Futehally, Arshia Sattar and Achal Prabhala, brought back a sense of the intellectual debates of the 1950s. But few remember Mookerjee’s Magazine or the Oudh Punch, or the biting wit of the Hindi nationalist journals of the previous century. That’s a big gap in our memory of ourselves.

I’m at: twitter.com/nilanjanaroy