(This was written for Time Out Mumbai, about the only magazine I've ever worked for where the editor has mastered the art of screaming with EXTREME POLITENESS whenever I overshoot my deadlines, which is pretty much all the time.)
First Proof
The Penguin Book of New Writing From India: 1
Penguin India, Rs 295,
218+202 pages
Has Indian writing in English ever been formally taken off the Endangered Species List? There are only a handful of R K Narayans, people said just before a guy called Salman Rushdie quit advertising to become a writer. There’s only one Midnight’s Children , I was told just before A Ghosh, V Seth, Sealy and company took centrestage. The new generation has produced no one like A Ghosh and company, we were informed the year before The God of Small Things and the boom in big advances ushered Ruchir Joshi, Pankaj Mishra, Raj Kamal Jha, into the spotlight. Roy’s Booker was a flash in the pan, said doomsayers a few months before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer. There was a brief, and we hope, embarrassed, silence, before a brand-new refrain came up: see, the best writing will come from the diaspora, everything in the homeland is dead.
It doesn’t take a First Proof to tell us that reports of the demise of Indian writing have been greatly exaggerated. As the editors write: “The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise).” They’ve got a mixed bag of allsorts to back up the claim. Of the 17 short stories and 13 essays, travelogues, and assorted pieces of non-fiction here, there’s little that stands up and demands to be called a classic—but even less that doesn’t deserve to be here at all.
First Proof is planned as an annual event, and if it’s meant to showcase the best of new, original and brilliant writing from India, the editors have a tough job ahead. The Little Magazine and a few others of its kind aside, there are few forums where you can publish original short fiction, and fewer still where an editor will push hard enough to coax a brilliant story from the author of a merely adequate one. Civil Lines got past the problem of acquiring sterling writing from writers who’re seldom allowed to break the 300-word or 900-word barrier by delaying publication until the editors felt they had a good enough set; this led to magisterial delays, two-and-a-half years between volumes in one case.
This hits the journalists hardest: Nirmala Subramaniam has a great subject in Prabhakaran as does Saba Naqvi Bhaumik in a more legally acceptable Don, and both of them do a solid reporting job—but they don’t produce great writing. Sankarshan Thakur’s controlled rage leads to something more memorable in his foray into “the heart of Backward country”, as does Mishi Saran’s focused passion on the distant journeys of a long-dead monk. The lack of experience also mars the fiction, where the quality wobbles from the spectacular to the devastatingly mundane.
But First Proof scores in its variety. Some writers here have familiar bylines, but, like Mitali Saran or Anuradha Roy, are making their first foray into fiction; some, like Ranjit Hoskote, are better known in other fields; some are seasoned authors, like Indrajit Hazra or at a more austere level, Andre Beteille. None of them lack confidence. The fiction ranges from the wildly experimental, as with Sarnath and Rana Dasgupta, to Arun John’s quiet, moving tale of a young man setting out in search of the parents who disappeared years before into Africa, to Renuka Narayanan’s florid imagining of Vaak, the deity of speech. The non-fiction takes in the familiar—grandmothers, boarding school odysseys, the world post 9/11—and the unusual—colonial bibis, vamps, Cuba. What comes through is absolute confidence: postmodernism, no problem; journeys to the centre of the human heart, coming up; the markets of Matunga, Fidel sightings in Cuba, Turki in North Bihar—it’s all accessible, none of it beyond imagination.
It’s a bumpy, uneven ride, with more than a few potholes thrown in. But what First Proof says is, buy the ticket, take your chances, come on board—the view’s pretty good from where we sit. This anthology is a brave attempt; and even if it’s a bit of a chalta hai collection, we’ll use the oldest Indian mantra of them all, and simply adjust.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Border song
(This piece was written for The Kolkata Telegraph, which runs a small section on offbeat travel stories every Sunday. I should point out that the idea of frontiers being strange and meaningless constructions is hardly new: read Amitav Ghosh if you want to know just how much a simple pair of compasses and the circles you draw on the map can challenge your sense of national boundaries. And read Kai Friese if you want the grown-up take on borders...hell, just read Ghosh and Friese anyway.)
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
The BS column: Murdering your darlings
(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, May 24, 2005)
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
The BS column: virtual books
(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, MAY 17, 2005)
(This week, two new giant-sized bookcases arrived in the house and we finally unpacked the last three cartons of books, taking us back to square one: there are no books in the cartons, ergo, there is no space on the new bookshelves, but in the brief interval between acquiring the shelves in which to stack the books from the cartons, we have...bought more books. Roughly half of the books on my shelves fall into the category of books I don't re-read often, but that I need to have around for reference. Most of this is Indian fiction, and the reason I need the books in person, so to speak, is because most of them are out of print now and are unlikely to ever be reprinted. This might explain why I would be very, very happy if publishers started offering at least the backlist in ebook/ digitised form. Otherwise, me and my husband are doomed: the future involves moving every three years to larger and larger houses, buying more and more bookcases to store all the books I can't bear to donate, dump or discard...)
Most Indians are familiar with “bookless libraries”: they’re the ones you find in officially backward areas of the country where the books on the shelves have fallen to pieces or been stolen and sold to the raddiwallah.
It’s going to take a little time before we catch up with the contemporary definition of a bookless or digital library, the kind that university libraries in the US, Google worldwide, and the EU are separately trying to build. The NYT recently reported that the University of Texas is experimenting with a library which has a “24-hour electronic information commons”. This makes sense; the new generation of students is umbilically attached to the mobile phone and the mouse. Publishers have been putting more books into e-text format, and there’s an increasing demand for libraries to have computer bays and always-on access to the Net.
Google is building its own vast virtual library—it plans to digitize books from Harvard, Stanford, a few other US universities and Oxford University. This online repository will be open to all Google users, subject to the normal restrictions of copyright for now—readers will be able to search restricted portions of a currently copyrighted text and download the entire text, if they choose, of books that are out of the copyright domain.
This seems a worthwhile enough project, but it’s led to a rare show of unity among the nations that make up the European Union, who are worried that knowledge itself might end up US-centric. In the EU view, Google comes across as an evil wannabe master of the universe who plans nothing less than world domination. The EU plans to combat Google’s “cultural domination” with a digitization project that will bring together works from the libraries of six countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Poland.
When the first e-books came out, many commentators wondered what this would mean for plain vanilla publishing and the humble book. Some of us predicted that this would change publishing, but mainstream publishers have been very resistant to e-text initiatives—they fear a Napsterisation of books, where readers would download texts for free rather than buy actual books. This is unlikely; even if e-book readers improve beyond the current clunky ones available, there is something about the physical book that we love and remain loyal to. William Crossman, a futurist and scholar, predicts that the written word as we know it will die out by 2050, but even he suspects that the book will not die out so much as assume new form.
Some assumed that e-books would open up a new market for emerging authors; but if you cut out the services of the editor, you’re left with the world’s largest slushpile. Even if publishing does warm up eventually to e-books, you’re not going to do away with the editor, the agent and the various other middlemen involved in the bookselling business quite that easily. But the real face of the ebook revolution might actually be Google’s digital library and other versions that involve the mass digitization of books. The biggest problem with the Net as a source of information is its built-in unreliability: “I found it on the Net” has become shorthand for lazy research, and few users are willing to explore the online world enough. It’s possible to find good, even great, repositories of information online, but it requires more browsing of the virtual stacks than most readers are comfortable with.
The thing about digitization is that it involves an initial high cost, but relatively low maintenance subsequently. Well-ordered virtual libraries might not replace the real-world model in a country like the US, with its history of excellent and easily accessible public libraries in every city. But the virtual library will change the browsing experience for the next generation of Net users, and it will change the ways in which we spread—and assimilate—knowledge.
India, like many Asian countries, does a terrible job of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, and an even worse job of making this knowledge freely available to most of its citizens. The libraries that work are not open to all; the libraries that are open to all don’t work very well. It would take a combination of tremendous philanthropy and unflinching support from the state to build a network of truly public libraries—and building libraries is only half the job, the other half is maintaining them properly. But given the software expertise in the country, we’re in a position to catch up with the rest of the world now.
It wouldn’t take that much effort to build virtual libraries that might either become part of a network like Google’s, or form part of say, a Southern Hemisphere network. But it would require a different approach to books, manuscripts and other forms of knowledge. We tend to neglect books and archives to death, often letting them crumble into dust, or we hoard knowledge jealously and appoint guardians to determine who has access. Building a virtual library would require the kind of vision and willingness to collaborate that goes against the grain for many scholars. It would also require imagination: virtual libraries can be carried anywhere a laptop can go, but beyond that you’d have to be willing to print out texts and carry them into places that have no electricity, no plugpoints, no conception of the Net. In this country at least, the printed word is likely to have a tenacious grip on life.
(This week, two new giant-sized bookcases arrived in the house and we finally unpacked the last three cartons of books, taking us back to square one: there are no books in the cartons, ergo, there is no space on the new bookshelves, but in the brief interval between acquiring the shelves in which to stack the books from the cartons, we have...bought more books. Roughly half of the books on my shelves fall into the category of books I don't re-read often, but that I need to have around for reference. Most of this is Indian fiction, and the reason I need the books in person, so to speak, is because most of them are out of print now and are unlikely to ever be reprinted. This might explain why I would be very, very happy if publishers started offering at least the backlist in ebook/ digitised form. Otherwise, me and my husband are doomed: the future involves moving every three years to larger and larger houses, buying more and more bookcases to store all the books I can't bear to donate, dump or discard...)
Most Indians are familiar with “bookless libraries”: they’re the ones you find in officially backward areas of the country where the books on the shelves have fallen to pieces or been stolen and sold to the raddiwallah.
It’s going to take a little time before we catch up with the contemporary definition of a bookless or digital library, the kind that university libraries in the US, Google worldwide, and the EU are separately trying to build. The NYT recently reported that the University of Texas is experimenting with a library which has a “24-hour electronic information commons”. This makes sense; the new generation of students is umbilically attached to the mobile phone and the mouse. Publishers have been putting more books into e-text format, and there’s an increasing demand for libraries to have computer bays and always-on access to the Net.
Google is building its own vast virtual library—it plans to digitize books from Harvard, Stanford, a few other US universities and Oxford University. This online repository will be open to all Google users, subject to the normal restrictions of copyright for now—readers will be able to search restricted portions of a currently copyrighted text and download the entire text, if they choose, of books that are out of the copyright domain.
This seems a worthwhile enough project, but it’s led to a rare show of unity among the nations that make up the European Union, who are worried that knowledge itself might end up US-centric. In the EU view, Google comes across as an evil wannabe master of the universe who plans nothing less than world domination. The EU plans to combat Google’s “cultural domination” with a digitization project that will bring together works from the libraries of six countries—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Poland.
When the first e-books came out, many commentators wondered what this would mean for plain vanilla publishing and the humble book. Some of us predicted that this would change publishing, but mainstream publishers have been very resistant to e-text initiatives—they fear a Napsterisation of books, where readers would download texts for free rather than buy actual books. This is unlikely; even if e-book readers improve beyond the current clunky ones available, there is something about the physical book that we love and remain loyal to. William Crossman, a futurist and scholar, predicts that the written word as we know it will die out by 2050, but even he suspects that the book will not die out so much as assume new form.
Some assumed that e-books would open up a new market for emerging authors; but if you cut out the services of the editor, you’re left with the world’s largest slushpile. Even if publishing does warm up eventually to e-books, you’re not going to do away with the editor, the agent and the various other middlemen involved in the bookselling business quite that easily. But the real face of the ebook revolution might actually be Google’s digital library and other versions that involve the mass digitization of books. The biggest problem with the Net as a source of information is its built-in unreliability: “I found it on the Net” has become shorthand for lazy research, and few users are willing to explore the online world enough. It’s possible to find good, even great, repositories of information online, but it requires more browsing of the virtual stacks than most readers are comfortable with.
The thing about digitization is that it involves an initial high cost, but relatively low maintenance subsequently. Well-ordered virtual libraries might not replace the real-world model in a country like the US, with its history of excellent and easily accessible public libraries in every city. But the virtual library will change the browsing experience for the next generation of Net users, and it will change the ways in which we spread—and assimilate—knowledge.
India, like many Asian countries, does a terrible job of collecting and preserving books and manuscripts, and an even worse job of making this knowledge freely available to most of its citizens. The libraries that work are not open to all; the libraries that are open to all don’t work very well. It would take a combination of tremendous philanthropy and unflinching support from the state to build a network of truly public libraries—and building libraries is only half the job, the other half is maintaining them properly. But given the software expertise in the country, we’re in a position to catch up with the rest of the world now.
It wouldn’t take that much effort to build virtual libraries that might either become part of a network like Google’s, or form part of say, a Southern Hemisphere network. But it would require a different approach to books, manuscripts and other forms of knowledge. We tend to neglect books and archives to death, often letting them crumble into dust, or we hoard knowledge jealously and appoint guardians to determine who has access. Building a virtual library would require the kind of vision and willingness to collaborate that goes against the grain for many scholars. It would also require imagination: virtual libraries can be carried anywhere a laptop can go, but beyond that you’d have to be willing to print out texts and carry them into places that have no electricity, no plugpoints, no conception of the Net. In this country at least, the printed word is likely to have a tenacious grip on life.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Business Standard column: SIPs
(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, May 10, 2005)
This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.
This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.
The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”
The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.
How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.
Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .
Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.
After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .
SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .
This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”
Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”
We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .
And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”
Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.
Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”
And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.
This column was an eye-opener; it's so much easier to read it in a format that allows hyperlinks than in plain vanilla printed-word fashion. For this post, I've let the original version stand for the most part, but added a few hyperlinks where necessary.
This is the closest I’ll ever get to being Thursday Next, the timetravelling literary detective in Jasper Fforde’s novels, who works in Jurisfiction, the “policing agency inside books”. It’s her job to maintain narrative continuity within fiction, which might entail coaxing “the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets” one day and the next “thwarting the Martians' latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge”.
The latest toy on Amazon.com, part of its Search Inside! the book program, might not have you chasing the Jabberwock or traveling through Macondo, but it’s the next best thing. A few months ago, Amazon introduced the concept of Statistically Improbable
Phrases, or SIPs: “To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside… For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.”
The SIPs are buttressed by two or three other nifty tools; the Concordance box identifies the hundred words most commonly used in the book (try it with Ulysses sometime), another tool gives you a number of words-to-dollars spent ratio, another measures the reading ease of the book. But it’s the SIPs you return to, for pure entertainment and for a slightly bizarre look at what happens between the covers of a book.
How does it work? Like a deeply experimental marriage between an old-fashioned card catalogue and a blurb, on one hand, and like a psychobabble-laden peek between the covers, on the other.
Some of it is serendipitious. You smile when “little golden key” pops up as the SIP for Alice in Wonderland and if you clickthrough the phrase, it turns out that “little golden key” is common to both Alice and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of An English Opium-Eater .
Some of it is utterly useless but addictive all the same. James Joyce’s Ulysses yields these SIPs: “ute ute ute, tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom, matrimonial gift, base barreltone, quaker librarian, absentminded beggar, pensive bosom, met him pike
hoses, charming soubrette, editor cried, brown macintosh, retrospective arrangement, learning knight, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song.” Click on matrimonial gift to find an unlikely link between Joyce and Weaving the Threads of Life : The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka by Rene Devisch.
After playing for a bit, I’m not at all surprised when the phrase “white mundu” turns out to be the link between Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and SF writer Roger Zelazny. It’s weird, it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s also nice to see these strange connections pop up between the most disparate of books. Some connections are revealing: “burra babu” is used in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy with some irony, but in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable as a straightforward term of cringing respect. Some SIPs are more popular than others. “Sari pallu” connects almost twenty different works of fiction, most, unsurprisingly, by authors from the subcontinent. “Poor orphan child”, the SIP for Jane Eyre , mirrors “lone lorn creetur”, one of the SIPs for David Copperfield .
SIPs provide a browser’s guide par excellence, if you’re willing to decipher their complicated shorthand. “Porch with the begonias, story about the capon, little gold fishes, insomnia plague, invisible doctors, candy animals, banana company, black bandage, sucking her finger, enchanted region, ermine cape, eating earth.” I read this out over the phone to a friend in Bangalore, who didn’t even hesitate for a second: “One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” she said. On her computer, she clicked on “sucking her finger”, but instead of the salacious porn we half-expected to find, that SIP threw up an unexpected link to Your Self-Confident Baby .
This was identifiable, with some effort: “Big fat mustache, bloated colonel, tighter bomb pattern, eggs for seven cents, intelligence tent, more combat missions, help the bombardier, sei pazzo, seventy missions, zinc pipe, railroad ditch, sixty missions,
illegal tobacco, bomb line, forty missions, colored panties, group chaplain, flak suits, lead bombardier, medical tent, fifty missions, mess officer, combat status, covered cotton, more missions.”
Catch-22 , said my friend. “It’s the ‘more missions’ that’s the giveaway…but why didn’t ‘Nately’s whore’ show up?”
We don’t know, any more than we could figure out why the only SIP for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was “bloofer lady”. Or why Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was enigmatically rendered down to “halva puri” and “gold taps”. “Bougainvillea girls” and “lotus root” pointed tersely to The Mistress of Spices ; “bhadra lok” and “sari edge”, slightly more ominously, indicated Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters .
And only the most intrepid would follow this trail of SIPs, describing one of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s books:
“Continuist version, ethical instantiation, deconstructive embrace, materialist predication, transcendental figuration, socialized capital, pouvoir savoir, ethical singularity, subaltern insurgency, deliberative consciousness, structural unconscious, philosophical justice, subaltern consciousness, gendered subaltern, impossible response, capital logic, persistent critique, secondary narcissism, universal equivalent, communal mode, trace structure.”
Now that list defies further consideration; my personal guess is that it’s the updated,computer version of the old sign that warned when you were about to fall off the edge of the known world, “Here be Dragons”.
Is this feature any use at all? When it throws up something as bald as “three immigration officers” as the SIP for Satanic Verses , or something as frivolous as the fact that Tom Wolfe used “rutrutrutrutrut” in A Man in Full as well as Charlotte Simmons , you have to wonder. But is it fun? Try guessing from the SIPs what these two books are. The first is: “Baby grandaunt, inflatable goose, spoiled puff, unusually dense dorsal tufts, white mundu, mangosteen tree, tender mango, faraway man, gauze doors, blow spit bubbles, banana jam, lucky leaf, yellow bamboo, yellow church, back verandah, pointy shoes, bison head, front verandah.”
And the second is: “Malenky bit, his rookers, old ptitsa, real skorry, starry ptitsa, real bezoomny, old baboochkas, real gromky, little droog, oddy knocky, red red krovvy, old moloko, kashl kashl kashl, real horrorshow smeck, two young ptitsas, type goloss, writer veck, starry veck, grahzny bratchnies, other veshches, old veck, top millicent, horrorshow groodies, milky chai, his Gulliver.” Have fun, and if “bloofer lady” has a meaning deeper than “beautiful vampire who preys on small children”, tell me.
Business Standard column: Character Map
(Published in 'Speaking Volumes', the Business Standard, May 3, 2005)
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Two observations: the first is that while Indian fiction has produced entire armies of indelible women characters--practically all of Tagore's works have at least one great woman in the cast, barring Rajarshi, to name just one author--Indian fiction in English is curiously barren of women. There are tons of memorable women characters; very few who are as iconic as Saleem Sinai or H Hatterr. (No, don't bombard me with lists of the merely memorable: "iconic" is what I'm looking for.)
The second is that while this was a fun imaginary dinner party to plan, playing host at the table would be an absolute nightmare.
One of my teachers told me, years ago: “The great Indian characters in fiction all come from the epics or from languages other than English. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Tagore, Premchand, and the rest. Indian fiction in English has produced no great characters, except for Mr Biswas. And his creator, Naipaul, would deny that he was an Indian writer.”
To some extent, she was right. If I had to be stuck on a desert island with a character from fiction, I might choose Amit Roy or Raghupati from Tagore, or Karna from the Mahabharata, or Banalata Sen, or one of Premchand’s heroines, or the two chessplayers in Shatranj ke Khiladi . (If I wanted peace and quiet, and the island was adequately supplied with food, Kumbhakarna would be a very restful companion.)
But if I had to draw up a list of invitees to a dinner from the ranks of characters in Indian fiction in English, the table would by no means be empty of guests.
Kim would be somewhere near the head of the table, providing we stretched the definition of Indian fiction a trifle. Kipling’s young protagonist, first seen straddling a gun called the Zamzama, might have been the model for future protagonists from the diaspora. He straddled two worlds, owing allegiance to one but immersing himself in the other. This imaginary dinner would be poorer without the Little Friend To All The World.
Saleem “Snotnose” Sinai would have to be there, too, as midnight’s child and history’s witness. He bumbled his way through the first decades of independent India, saw history through perforated sheets and from inside laundry bins, sniffed his way sadly down the paths of Emergency. Salman Rushdie created several memorable characters, but none were as iconic as Saleem. Perhaps he might be accompanied by a younger boy, Haroun from Haroun and the Sea of Stories , one surrounded by the pickles and chutneys of history, the other by Plentimaw Fish and blocked stories and hoopoes.
You would have to place Gustad Noble, from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey , directly opposite Saleem Sinai. Both characters were on similar quests, both were reluctant players in the great game of contemporary Indian history, and Gustad has a pathos, a humour and a quixotic nobility that makes him unforgettable.
Next to Gustad, we might seat Swami, from R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days . He would be fiercely solemn in his mundu and veshti, even if the schoolboy’s feet didn’t quite reach the ground. He might have a great deal to say, despite the difference in background, to Ruskin Bond’s Rusty; one braved the ordeals of cricket and shifting friendships and school in a small but unforgettable village, one was a restless wanderer in the hills, but they have a lot in common.
The presence of H Hatterr from G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr , master of the torrential sentence and endless spools of punning dialogue, would ensure that there was no lull in the conversation. If you seated him next to I Allan Sealy’s Great Trotter, from The Trotternama , there is no telling what might be the outcome—merging the two eccentrics would lead to one of the strangest books ever written.
All of this, naturally, would be observed with care by Lata from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy , who would be the quietest person at the table but perhaps the shrewdest observer. Her silence would undoubtedly be filled by her mother, Mrs Rupa Mehra, with a rambling narrative about her many ailments, the virtues of homemade cards, and the perennial ingratitude of children. But even Mrs Rupa Mehra might be no match for Kiran Nagarkar’s Meerabai from Cuckold , stubborn, fiercely intelligent, and given to unabashed displays of adoration for her elusive Krishna, never mind where she might be and in what company.
The next group would be somewhat motley. Slightly stoned, emerging from a world where statues of Gandhi are rudely propped up by a particularly unfortunately placed stick, attempting to live up to a dignity he doesn’t feel and bored out of his skull—that would be Agastya Sen from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August . His companions would be Bakha, the sweeper from Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable , who would, even in this day and age, be made to feel out of place at the table. Bakha’s burning rage against the machine that refused to recognise his humanity might be hard to match. The only person at the table who might understand Bakha, with a cold and tired cynicism, would be a policeman lounging at the back—as a character in a short story, Vikram Chandra’s Inspector Sartaj could not be extended a full invitation, but his brooding, bitter presence is necessary in this room.
Vying with Hatterr to dominate the conversation would be Nur, the embittered poet with the dark history from Anita Desai’s In Custody ; watching in bemusement a short distance away might be Baumgartner, from Baumgarner’s Bombay . There would just about be room for Rahel and Estha from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , but only for the characters as children; the adult Rahel and Estha wouldn’t quite make the cut. They would have enough in the way of matters to comment on in capital letters, though, if you also made room for the melodramas of Roop and Satya from Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers . Their breastbeating and machinations would hold Amitav Ghosh’s Alu, the compass-wielding protagonist of The Circle of Reason , in fascinated thrall, but then Alu was always a very silent hero.
This would be a strange dinner party, but a rewarding one; imagine the cacophony of views, histories and conversation, imagine Saleem Sinai sniffing out the recesses of Hatterr’s mind, Alu and August lined up together, Gustad Noble in shy conversation with Lata. It’s a small enough band, compared to the gigantic shamiana you would have to erect to host the hordes of great characters who would come pouring out of the books of Indian fiction proper, but it’s not a bad start. And of course some seats at the table would be left empty, for future guests or for those who have been unfairly left out.
Book review: The Red Carpet
(Published in India Today)
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
This is what makes reviewing worthwhile. About forty books cross my desk each month. Some are junk. Some are just about bearable. Some are freakishly pretentious. And some are like Siddhartha Deb's Surface, which I'm reading for the second time in a fortnight, and like The Red Carpet...books that make you put aside your "critical sensibilities" and let you savour being a reader. Hmmm, "critical sensibilities". That always sounded like a vile disease to me: I have terminal cancer, you have critical sensibilities.
The Red Carpet
Lavanya Sankaran
Review, Headline Book Publishing
Rs 295, 215 pages
Show me a collection of linked short stories and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a failed novel, with a tenuous theme holding together characters in the same apartment block or city. The tenth time it’s a collection like Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet , easily one of the most unselfconscious and engaging debuts of the year.
The eight stories of The Red Carpet are set in Bangalore, a city hymned far more often in the pink papers than in contemporary fiction. Sankaran writes about it with unusual fluency and intimacy. She knows every corner and nuance of this world of laidback software millionaires and young affluent couples, Blyton-worshipping schoolgirls and reluctantly marriageable postgraduates, and she writes about it with contagious affection. She could be the poster girl for the emerging generation of writers who’re replacing angst, guilt and confusion with curiosity, confidence and an easy familiarity with the many places they can call home.
Sankaran maps the stories of her characters in the same way we map our lives. Half-forgotten figures emerge fullblown from memory, classmates or colleagues go their different directions and bump into each other years later; some encounters change our lives, some leave our lives untouched. In stories like ‘Two Four Six Eight’ and ‘Mysore Coffee’, where Sankaran explores dark memories—a young girl at the mercy of a scheming ayah, a woman struggling to make sense of her father’s suicide—her deft touch allied to a strong plot creates brilliant fiction. Other stories verge on slightness; ‘Closed Curtains’ and ‘Bombay This’ survive on wry, pithy observations, but they remain muffled, as though someone pressed the Mute button on Sankaran’s prose.
Ramu’s bride-hunting travails are the burden of the first story, ‘Bombay This’; when he pops up as a minor character in ‘Mysore Coffee’, we recognise his cold, ruthless charm immediately. Tara Srinivasan is a passing shadow in one story, a better-drawn cameo in another, and finally gets her own space in ‘Birdie Num-Num’. It can be tricky, bringing this off without forcing the reader to construct elaborate maps in order to figure out who appeared where and why, but for the most part, Sankaran pulls it off.
More than the clash between tradition and modernity, Sankaran is fascinated by the nuances and contrasts, the different degrees of tension that keep the wires humming in a city like Bangalore. Her India, as Swamy in ‘Apple Pie, One by Two’ puts it, is the land of “opportunity and hassle in equal measure”. But Swamy also knows that “the land of dreams” is “always reconfiguring into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”. Priya’s parents, in ‘Alphabet Soup’, looked back at India even as they escaped it; Priya looks to India as she tries to escape the land of “Money and McNuggets”—the backward glance is always slightly blurred.
Who is this book written for? For the mothers who extend a grudging acceptance towards their rebellious daughters, for the daughters who shuttle between tank tops and saris with wry exasperation, the boys who grew up in India listening to Jimi Hendrix and the ones who came back from “phoren” to find untraditional brides. It’s for those whose software dollars built the new, crowded Bangalore and those who drive them around, for the ones who have always lived in the city and the ones who’re trying to make a new life there. It’s for anyone who’s lived at home and understood the world abroad, and all those who’ve lived elsewhere and understood the land they left behind; in short, it’s for the reader. Any reader, anywhere.
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