Stepping into Larry’s China at the Ambassador is like stepping a decade back, into another city. Chosen in haste, out of expedience because of its proximity to the IIC, it turns out to be the right setting for Amit Chaudhuri. It could be a respectable Chinese restaurant from either Bombay in the 1990s or Calcutta in the early 2000s, both cities that the writer knows well.
Larry’s has the slightly shabby charm of an old friend who did less well than expected on the stock market. It's mellow, laidback, and Chaudhuri, relaxing into the comfortable chairs, confides that he intends to eat lightly. “Too much rich food,” he says. It’s a Delhi tradition, a way of testing visiting writers by force-feeding them a promiscuous range of Mughlai, Thai and whatever the fashionable cuisine of the day might be.
I suggest steamed rice, some light greens, perhaps a gentle soup. “Is the lobster good?” says Chaudhuri hopefully. He indicates that this is the menu’s fault, its old-school flourishes too tempting to resist.
We order the lobster in hot bean sauce, some greens sautéed in garlic and steamed rice. It is, in essence, a very Bengali summer meal—fish, rice, some barely wilted greens; the only thing we lack is spice, which arrives in the form of a fiery kimchi and a Cantonese bean sprout salad.
As with his books, the author shuttles between countries and cities, faithful to Bombay, where he grew up and where The Immortals, his most recent novel and St Cyril Road, a collection of poems, is set. Calcutta, where he was born and spends much of his adult life, is the background to A Strange And Sublime Address and Freedom Song. He can also claim the university towns of the UK, where he went to college and later taught, his days there colouring an early novel, Afternoon Raag. He compiled an anthology of writings on Calcutta in 2008, and is writing a book about the city, due in 2013.
As the lobster is served, Amit Chaudhuri talks about his disquiet over the systematic demolition of the old houses in South and North Calcutta, the vanishing landscape of a city he’s preserved in careful images in so many of his books. What gets to Chaudhuri, as it does to many Calcutta expatriates, is what he calls the easy middle-class disavowal of its own history.
“Preserving those houses is very low on the list of priorities of people who live in Calcutta,” he says, warming to his argument. “I wouldn’t want to hang on to those houses for some sense of heritage and nostalgia. In Europe, or South America, any culture which is aware not just of its past but of its modernity, any city which is doing creatively interesting things has preserved and used its recent past, like Berlin for instance.”
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s plans to preserve Calcutta’s heritage by painting the city blue might not, you suspect, cut much ice with Chaudhuri. “Calcutta is a relatively recent city, it comes into being out of nowhere, as many of these Indian colonial cities do, and then it accumulates all this history in a hundred years, and that history is not embodied in the monuments—I don’t take visitors to the Victoria Memorial or other monuments, but to the neighbourhoods where people live.”
The names roll off his tongue like beads on a rosary: Bokul Bagan, Khiddipore, Hindustan Park.
Chaudhuri’s resistance to nostalgia, and the way it shellacs the past, is deeply rooted. He’s just finished a short book on Rabindranath Tagore—it is impossible to discuss Calcutta and not Tagore, especially in the year after the writer’s 150th anniversary celebrations—which probably stands as an act of salvage as much as an act of criticism. It’s a rejection of the “sage-like” Tagore, he says.
The greens with burnt garlic are excellent, and with the discernment of the born critic, Chaudhuri zeroes in on the asparagus, marching it into a separate corral on his plate. He grew up in Bombay, distanced from the Bengali language but in a family which had “great secular reverence” for both Bengali and Tagore.
“Bijoya Chaudhuri—that’s my mother--and Shubina Roy, these two singers sang Tagore for me in a way that was distanced, detached, disinterested without an over-emphasis on the individual’s emotions or the emotions of the songs,” he says. The phone rings, on cue; it’s his mother on the line, as though his mention summoned her into existence.
“It is rare,” he continues. “This is what Tagore praises in the Bengali writer Kalidasa, when he contrasts Kalidasa with Shakespeare, accusing Shakespeare of being everything James Mill accuses Oriental writing of—of overwriting, being overblown, melodramatic, exhibitionistic.” This is Chaudhuri at his best, making the connections, joining the dots, helping readers to see a larger and more complex literary history than they might have imagined.
“And then Tagore praises Kalidasa for being oblique, indirect, for holding back—for having all those virtues in temperament, in writerly temperament, which traditionally nowadays we associate with Western writing.”
The problem with present-day criticism, chiefly in India but also perhaps in the West, is that it’s disconnected from any real sense of the past. This is an argument Chaudhuri’s been making for years—most powerfully through the writers he selected for his landmark Picador Anthology of Indian Literature—and he warms to it with the zeal of a man whose lobster has all the spice and depth that he feels the Indian literary landscape lacks.
“It’s as if every book comes out of nowhere—academics will not talk about Kolatkar, Ramanujan, Ezekiel, unless they become liberal causes. We are formed by a literary culture we don’t acknowledge, in English and in other Indian languages,” he says.
“And we will elide the fact that people like Tagore or Qurratulain Hyder may have been responding to Shelley or Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf—a network of reading and cross-fertilisation which have formed us over the last 200 years. There is no genealogy for anything.”
To round out the meal, I ask about the literary world in the UK, which Chaudhuri knows well—he was, for instance, a Booker judge, a task which he performed conscientiously though with his habitual skepticism about literary institutions.
“This meagerness is also now part of British publishing,” he says, turning down dessert with admirable firmness. “In the domain of Thatcherite and Blairite Britain, the changes brought about to BBC 1, BBC 4, the books pages were shrinking, dumbed down. The Booker Prize changed in complexion from a literary to a popular prize, with comedians and chefs judging the prize, Waterstones became more and more of a warehouse. But there are cracks in this smooth surface, and voices from the cracks are still audible.”
We manage to persuade Chaudhuri to have just two pieces more of the lobster. This also allows me to ask him about changes in his fiction over the years. “The early novels were about the sheer pleasure of a certain kind of interruption in life,” he says.
“Then with A New World, I was interested in this new generation, who have a sense of entitlement, who have been brought up to slip into a future patriarchal role, a role of power, and then find themselves at a loose end. Then the theme of power, the market began to interest me. To some extent, The Immortals was about what happens when a traditional person wants to adapt and reinvent themselves for the marketplace.”
Though we’ve said no to dessert, Larry’s China brings out fortune cookies with a flourish—an old-fashioned coda to a very pleasant, old-world meal. Mine is dour: “Everyone has ambitions but you work to make yours happen.” Chaudhuri’s is more dashing. “Getting together with old friends brings new adventures.”
He looks so pleased as we leave the restaurant for the early summer warmth of Delhi’s streets that I decide not to tell him the New Yorker story about Donald Lau, fortune-cookie writer. After years of writing thousands of fortunes (“think in ten-word sentences,” Mr Lau advised newcomers), the inevitable happened. There are only so many times one person can generate gems like “True gold never fears the fire,” and eleven years after he began, Mr Lau retired, suffering from writer’s block.
Chaudhuri, wiser in the ways of channeling his creativity, interspersing his novels with criticism, poetry and anthologies, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Books Column: A charpai of her own-Ismat Chughtai
(Published in the Business Standard, April 2012.)
What would you do if you were a young Indian woman reader looking for inspiration in the lives of other writers? Would you look to Jane Austen, trapped in a tiny corner of the English countryside, using her wit to create epics on two inches of ivory? To Annie Proulx, who only began writing once she had hacked her way through journalism, domesticity, the baggage of two marriages?
Saadat Hasan Manto’s tribute to his fellow Urdu writer and old friend Ismat Chughtai, offered a glimpse of a third way. This is Manto’s description of Ismat at work:
“Ismat had this habit of chewing ice. She would hold a piece in her hand and crunch on it noisily. She would be lying down on the charpai supported by her elbow, with her notebook open before her on the pillow. She would hold a fountain pen in one hand and a chunk of ice in the other. The radio would go on blaring, but Ismat’s pen would race along on the paper with a gentle rustle as her teeth smashed the ice to pieces.”
Over time, the “gentle rustle” of the pen on the paper would give way to a steady flow—Ismat would write “not caring about her spelling or the use of diacritical marks”, or anything except the need to capture the quicksilver images in her mind. But what struck me was the space that Ismat occupied—small but absolute, a charpai of her own, in answer to Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman writer must have a room of her own.
The 14 chapters collected in Ismat’s memoirs Kaghazi hai Pairahan span several decades of her life, but were published between 1979 to 1980. In his introduction to this first translation of her memoirs into English, A Life in Words (Penguin Classics), M Asaduddin quotes Chughtai’s note to her editor: “I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time… The sequence might be worked out while editing them.”
This is so different from the way Mulk Raj Anand or Harivansh Rai Bachchan, for instance, wrote their memoirs—Ismat had her charpoy and her ice, but she also had a household, a husband, a baby daughter, visitors, the ring of the doorbell, to answer to.
In these memoirs, she pins down her recollections at speed, writing extensively about her childhood, her memories of Aligarh and her student years, but leaves large, apparently inexplicable omissions.
There is little mention of her marriage, for example, except a brief aside to record her husband’s disapproval when Chughtai faced an obscenity trial over her celebrated short story, Lihaaf. Nor is there—in these memoirs—much of an account of her literary friendship with Manto, though the two writers had overlapping lives. Perhaps this was reticence; or perhaps Chughtai was driven by the necessity of capturing what was distanced or lost—her childhood, old familial relationships—rather than the warp and weft of her everyday life.
But despite the omissions, these fragmentary chapters add up to a powerful narrative. Chughtai, among the most feminist of contemporary writers, belonged to the broad church of feminism whose members were driven by an intolerance of any kind of injustice. Why, she asks after the recitation of a marsiya at the masjid, did the protagonist have to shoot an arrow into a baby’s throat? Why the throat, why not the arm? The violence, the unfairness of it, nags at her; the question will not leave her alone.
Chughtai had no tolerance for inequality in any area of her life. Her family paid lip service to the idea of equality: “But in practice,” Chughtai observes, the acid sharp in her voice, “girls and boys were equal in the same way as Hindus and Muslims were brothers.” Later, she writes: “Purdah had already been imposed upon me, but my tongue was an unsheathed sword.” She claimed all spaces for herself in her writings, reveling in her descriptions of the domestic world even as she fought for the right to be educated, telling her family that she would run away to the mission school and become a Christian if they couldn’t support her ambitions.
And always, she retained the capacity to surprise, as she reminds us on every page of this memoir. “Whenever I entered the library, I would feel intoxicated,” she writes. “For hours together I would turn the pages of books and inhale their odour.” This is the kind of tribute you expect a writer to pay to the idea of books and reading, but Chughtai continues: “Chinese and Russian books used a kind of glue that smelt like stale meat, which was nauseating.”
This is what reading Ismat Chughtai’s memoirs—and her fiction—is like. The starting point is reassuringly familiar, and then comes the unexpected swerve, the push into completely alien territory. Nothing in her world is entirely safe, especially on close examination, which is probably why we still read her.
What would you do if you were a young Indian woman reader looking for inspiration in the lives of other writers? Would you look to Jane Austen, trapped in a tiny corner of the English countryside, using her wit to create epics on two inches of ivory? To Annie Proulx, who only began writing once she had hacked her way through journalism, domesticity, the baggage of two marriages?
Saadat Hasan Manto’s tribute to his fellow Urdu writer and old friend Ismat Chughtai, offered a glimpse of a third way. This is Manto’s description of Ismat at work:
“Ismat had this habit of chewing ice. She would hold a piece in her hand and crunch on it noisily. She would be lying down on the charpai supported by her elbow, with her notebook open before her on the pillow. She would hold a fountain pen in one hand and a chunk of ice in the other. The radio would go on blaring, but Ismat’s pen would race along on the paper with a gentle rustle as her teeth smashed the ice to pieces.”
Over time, the “gentle rustle” of the pen on the paper would give way to a steady flow—Ismat would write “not caring about her spelling or the use of diacritical marks”, or anything except the need to capture the quicksilver images in her mind. But what struck me was the space that Ismat occupied—small but absolute, a charpai of her own, in answer to Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman writer must have a room of her own.
The 14 chapters collected in Ismat’s memoirs Kaghazi hai Pairahan span several decades of her life, but were published between 1979 to 1980. In his introduction to this first translation of her memoirs into English, A Life in Words (Penguin Classics), M Asaduddin quotes Chughtai’s note to her editor: “I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time… The sequence might be worked out while editing them.”
This is so different from the way Mulk Raj Anand or Harivansh Rai Bachchan, for instance, wrote their memoirs—Ismat had her charpoy and her ice, but she also had a household, a husband, a baby daughter, visitors, the ring of the doorbell, to answer to.
In these memoirs, she pins down her recollections at speed, writing extensively about her childhood, her memories of Aligarh and her student years, but leaves large, apparently inexplicable omissions.
There is little mention of her marriage, for example, except a brief aside to record her husband’s disapproval when Chughtai faced an obscenity trial over her celebrated short story, Lihaaf. Nor is there—in these memoirs—much of an account of her literary friendship with Manto, though the two writers had overlapping lives. Perhaps this was reticence; or perhaps Chughtai was driven by the necessity of capturing what was distanced or lost—her childhood, old familial relationships—rather than the warp and weft of her everyday life.
But despite the omissions, these fragmentary chapters add up to a powerful narrative. Chughtai, among the most feminist of contemporary writers, belonged to the broad church of feminism whose members were driven by an intolerance of any kind of injustice. Why, she asks after the recitation of a marsiya at the masjid, did the protagonist have to shoot an arrow into a baby’s throat? Why the throat, why not the arm? The violence, the unfairness of it, nags at her; the question will not leave her alone.
Chughtai had no tolerance for inequality in any area of her life. Her family paid lip service to the idea of equality: “But in practice,” Chughtai observes, the acid sharp in her voice, “girls and boys were equal in the same way as Hindus and Muslims were brothers.” Later, she writes: “Purdah had already been imposed upon me, but my tongue was an unsheathed sword.” She claimed all spaces for herself in her writings, reveling in her descriptions of the domestic world even as she fought for the right to be educated, telling her family that she would run away to the mission school and become a Christian if they couldn’t support her ambitions.
And always, she retained the capacity to surprise, as she reminds us on every page of this memoir. “Whenever I entered the library, I would feel intoxicated,” she writes. “For hours together I would turn the pages of books and inhale their odour.” This is the kind of tribute you expect a writer to pay to the idea of books and reading, but Chughtai continues: “Chinese and Russian books used a kind of glue that smelt like stale meat, which was nauseating.”
This is what reading Ismat Chughtai’s memoirs—and her fiction—is like. The starting point is reassuringly familiar, and then comes the unexpected swerve, the push into completely alien territory. Nothing in her world is entirely safe, especially on close examination, which is probably why we still read her.
The Books Column: "Poems good enough to eat": Adrienne Rich
(Published in the Business Standard, April 2012. Rich was the first poet I read who gave me a blueprint for how to live, allowing me--and so many other women--to imagine what our lives could be, if we were willing to take them out of their steel dabbas and Tupperware containers.)
“Adrienne Cecil Rich,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal. “Little, round and dumpy, all vibrant short black hair, great sparkling black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella; honest, pink, forthright and even opinionated.”
The description was typical of Plath’s cattiness, expressed towards the women poets she feared most and saw as rivals, from Marianne Moore to Rich. But Plath was also perceptive: honest, forthright and opinionated could stand beside any of the epitaphs written this week for Rich, whose poetry and feminism turned the key in the lock for several generations of women, especially in the US.
Rich died at the age of 82; in 2011, she had published Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, her 25th collection of poetry. “I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book," she wrote.
The path she chose was sharply divergent from the one taken by Plath and Anne Sexton—there were no gas ovens for Rich, and there would be no dark call to suicide, despite the personal tragedies she survived. Speaking at Sexton’s funeral, Rich said, “We have enough suicidal women poets, enough suicidal women, enough of self-destructiveness… I think of Anne Sexton as a sister whose work tells us what we have to fight in ourselves and the images patriarchy has held up to us. Her poetry is a guide to the ruins…”
Rich’s poetry was a guide to everything else—patriarchy and feminism, yes, but also love, also the Iliad, also the Vietnam war, also racism, also mermaids and divers. As she wrote in The Blue Ghazals, there were few frontiers between the personal and the political: “The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political.” In her own life, Rich had gone from a conventional heterosexual marriage to a late discovery of her lesbianism; the shift from one to another was as important as the ripening of her radical politics.
Always, she came back to language: “That old, material utensil… found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use.” Her task, and the work of poets, was to “make it into something that means more than it says”. Rich inveighed against the peculiarly 21st century disavowal of poetry, the tendency in the US and elsewhere to treat poets and poetry as marginal figures.
Art could help you save your life, when it was not “mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby’s, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities”. The true purpose of language was regenerative, even transformative, and that is what we lost when we relegated poetry and poets to the back shelves. Editing a poetry anthology, this is what she wanted: “Poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices bursting under the tongue, unmicrowavable poems.”
The power of Rich’s own poetry, from the time of her very first collection, A Change in The World, onwards was that they could be read by those who had followed her own radicalism, or by those who had chosen different paths—housewives in India, for instance. Feminist poetry is sometimes boxed too carefully, the life of the poet creating a kind of shrine around the work that kills off the poems themselves. It is hard to read Rich if all that you know about her is that she was a lesbian poet who fought the patriarchy, to quote one recent oversimplification.
Instead, read her poetry as a partial answer to a comment Gloria Steinem made recently: the task before present-day feminists, said Steinem, was to imagine what true equality would look like. Rich defined her own politics with elemental simplicity: she wanted, she said, “the creation of a society without domination”. By this, she meant domination of any kind—any one gender, class, race over another.
Of all the awards she received, the one that stands out in public memory was the 1973 National Book Award, where she refused to go on stage alone. Instead, Rich went onstage with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, accepting her award in the name of all women. Over twenty years later, she would refuse the National Medal of the Arts, traditionally awarded to recipients at the White House, turning it down because of the cynical politics of the Clinton administration.
Perhaps what most will remember and cherish of Rich’s work are the explicitly political works—Diving Into The Wreck, for instance. But all of her writing was also a reminder to celebrate the human condition. This is what she wrote in Twenty-One Love Poems: “At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever./ At forty-five, I want to know even our limits./ I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, /and somehow, each of us will help the other live,/ and somewhere, each of us must help the other die."
“Adrienne Cecil Rich,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal. “Little, round and dumpy, all vibrant short black hair, great sparkling black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella; honest, pink, forthright and even opinionated.”
The description was typical of Plath’s cattiness, expressed towards the women poets she feared most and saw as rivals, from Marianne Moore to Rich. But Plath was also perceptive: honest, forthright and opinionated could stand beside any of the epitaphs written this week for Rich, whose poetry and feminism turned the key in the lock for several generations of women, especially in the US.
Rich died at the age of 82; in 2011, she had published Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, her 25th collection of poetry. “I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book," she wrote.
The path she chose was sharply divergent from the one taken by Plath and Anne Sexton—there were no gas ovens for Rich, and there would be no dark call to suicide, despite the personal tragedies she survived. Speaking at Sexton’s funeral, Rich said, “We have enough suicidal women poets, enough suicidal women, enough of self-destructiveness… I think of Anne Sexton as a sister whose work tells us what we have to fight in ourselves and the images patriarchy has held up to us. Her poetry is a guide to the ruins…”
Rich’s poetry was a guide to everything else—patriarchy and feminism, yes, but also love, also the Iliad, also the Vietnam war, also racism, also mermaids and divers. As she wrote in The Blue Ghazals, there were few frontiers between the personal and the political: “The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political.” In her own life, Rich had gone from a conventional heterosexual marriage to a late discovery of her lesbianism; the shift from one to another was as important as the ripening of her radical politics.
Always, she came back to language: “That old, material utensil… found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use.” Her task, and the work of poets, was to “make it into something that means more than it says”. Rich inveighed against the peculiarly 21st century disavowal of poetry, the tendency in the US and elsewhere to treat poets and poetry as marginal figures.
Art could help you save your life, when it was not “mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby’s, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities”. The true purpose of language was regenerative, even transformative, and that is what we lost when we relegated poetry and poets to the back shelves. Editing a poetry anthology, this is what she wanted: “Poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices bursting under the tongue, unmicrowavable poems.”
The power of Rich’s own poetry, from the time of her very first collection, A Change in The World, onwards was that they could be read by those who had followed her own radicalism, or by those who had chosen different paths—housewives in India, for instance. Feminist poetry is sometimes boxed too carefully, the life of the poet creating a kind of shrine around the work that kills off the poems themselves. It is hard to read Rich if all that you know about her is that she was a lesbian poet who fought the patriarchy, to quote one recent oversimplification.
Instead, read her poetry as a partial answer to a comment Gloria Steinem made recently: the task before present-day feminists, said Steinem, was to imagine what true equality would look like. Rich defined her own politics with elemental simplicity: she wanted, she said, “the creation of a society without domination”. By this, she meant domination of any kind—any one gender, class, race over another.
Of all the awards she received, the one that stands out in public memory was the 1973 National Book Award, where she refused to go on stage alone. Instead, Rich went onstage with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, accepting her award in the name of all women. Over twenty years later, she would refuse the National Medal of the Arts, traditionally awarded to recipients at the White House, turning it down because of the cynical politics of the Clinton administration.
Perhaps what most will remember and cherish of Rich’s work are the explicitly political works—Diving Into The Wreck, for instance. But all of her writing was also a reminder to celebrate the human condition. This is what she wrote in Twenty-One Love Poems: “At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever./ At forty-five, I want to know even our limits./ I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, /and somehow, each of us will help the other live,/ and somewhere, each of us must help the other die."
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