(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, June 21, 2005)
One way of reading the two great epics of this country is to see the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as piercingly, ferociously honest family autobiographies. With the Ramayana , there are many versions, so many that the true story is impossible to lose permanently: some versions might choose to portray Sita as a pliant, silent wife, but others have unchained her voice, choosing to retain her anger as well as her obedience, castigation of Rama when he asks her to submit to a test of purity. You might privilege one reading or one version above another, but the true story is there for those who wish to look for it.
In both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , little is omitted of the secret sins, sorrows and vices of the many members of the clans, from the weakness of kings to the greed of queens, from the mistake made by a young girl that will separate the sixth Pandava from his brothers to Yudhisthira’s fatal flaw to the complex blend of wisdom, arrogance and acquisitiveness in Ravana’s character. You read the epics for their indelible literary qualities, for the debates over the nature of dharma and wisdom; but you also read them, in part, as the wrenching, true story of families torn apart by complex forces. No character’s virtues are omitted, no vices glossed over.
The epics are still read in a way that few of their literary counterparts can match: Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales aren’t woven into the fabric of contemporary England, the great Norse sagas are still read but they are not part of the common memory in the way of our epics. Given that they are still so much part of our everyday life, our stock of metaphor and wisdom, it’s strange that we don’t follow the honesty of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana when we write in an autobiographical vein.
Business biographies usually gloss over the true histories; the memoirs of politicians and bureaucrats are often a trifle more honest about the working lives of their writers, but usually reticent about the personal life. The autobiographies of well-known Indians in the sphere of the arts have, by contrast, an appearance of frankness: but the candour is usually not complete. The careful reader can see the omissions; the knowledgeable reader can often supply the truth—there are few biographies and memoirs, though, where the reader doesn’t have to read between the lines.
There are strong social and cultural prohibitions on speaking out, on letting the skeletons, the mad cousins and the molesting uncles, out of the closet. Even authors who feel they have earned the freedom to speak openly of their own lives find it difficult, in the Indian context, to tell the true stories of their families. Perhaps this is because we balance a general disregard for the privacy of the individual with an obsessive concern for the privacy of the clan, unlike the tellers of the true and unexpurgated family history of the Pandavas and the Bharatas.
Two recent exercises in biography, one Indian, one Turkish, made me explore the idea of what makes up a memoir more thoroughly. The first, Diddi , was planned by Ira Pande as a memoir of her mother, the well-known writer Shivani. Instead of writing a conventional biography, she blended her translations of her mother’s writings with personal memoir to create a book that is almost more honest than a straightforward memoir might have been.
One of Pande’s biggest problems was created by an apparent abundance of material, in Shivani’s writings about her life, which were compellingly honest but told only a fraction of the truth.
In Ira Pande’s words: “Diddi’s vivid childhood memories are as deeply frustrating as they are compelling. The wall she erected around her life and fears is impenetrable and guards a kingdom where she will grant entry very reluctantly, if at all. In contrast to her evocative pictures of Lohaniji, Henry Pant, Alakh Mai and Rajula is Diddi’s stubborn refusal to confront the dark history of her own family, or indeed her own life. Her sharp eyes saw the shadows, yet she resolutely refused to expose the people she loved the most to ridicule or criticism. I think she sincerely hoped she could transform the nature of her past with the power of selective recall and that if she did not remember the unhappiness and doubts of her past, they would simply disappear. So she blotted out the sun by holding up a thumb…”
Pande’s response was to go back to Shivani’s writings—and to re-read them with the knowledge she now has of the family history, to identify not just characters who were familiar but the connections between a story and the period in which it was written. Because she fills in the context for the reader without pretending to tell the whole truth, we’re free to re-interpret Shivani’s life in a way that would have been denied us if Ira Pande had set down the same story as the absolute and the only truth. It’s an intelligent way of getting around the Indian discomfort with sharing family histories, and a way that’s just as respectful of the reader as it is of the subject.
Shortly after reading Diddi , I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul , which is a memoir of a city, a culture, a history and a childhood. Istanbul is a strange narrative, where Pamuk casts himself alternately as an unreliable narrator and as the perfect guide. But early on, he has a passage that might be read as a warning against expecting any autobiography of a person, a place, an era, to be the true and authentic version.
“...I feel compelled to add ‘or so I’ve been told’. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale that happened to concern some other person… Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.”
Perhaps another generation will rediscover the urgent candour of the narrators of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , who knew that the stories they were telling were too important to be told any other way but truthfully. Or more narrators, caught between loyalty and honesty, faced with the inevitable silences of families and the lack of records, will choose to use Ira Pande’s method of re-reading the old tales for new meanings. Until then, Indian memoirists might want to rework their book titles slightly, to read: “The Authorised Version (Or So I’ve Been Told)”.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Play 'Honky Tonk Women' when it's my turn, ok?
At funerals, inevitably someone will look at the body laid out and whisper, “He looks so peaceful.” Or, “She looks as though she’s sleeping.” But this is not true, even when the dearly departed has died peacefully, of natural causes, in his sleep, whatever euphemism you want to use. Once you’ve seen the body of someone you loved, or liked, or perhaps just knew, laid out on the floor, covered with a white sheet, propped up on a bed of ice in summer, the jaw sometimes tied to hold it in place, the nostrils plugged with cotton wool, you know that it isn’t inhabited any longer. Most corpses look like newly vacant houses. Whoever was in there has moved, address undisclosed.
I find a kind of peace in this idea, along with the regret and the grief and the rest of it.
Placing an obituary in the newspaper is a distasteful experience. First there’s the compression of a person’s life into a few words: “retired” or “beloved teacher” or “obedient son”, none of which capture the really important stuff, that her eyes crinkle up at the edges when she laughs or he could remember every lyric The Sex Pistols wrote, or that he came back from office and told funny stories about the monkeys who throw government into disarray by stealing files from the building. Then there’s the few stilted phrases for grief: “deeply mourned”, “shall be missed”, “life will not be the same”, none of which capture what this really means, the number of times you start dialing a number and stop because the person you want to speak to will not be there at the other end, the devastation of the small, unimportant routines of the day that involved three people and now involve just two, the cupboard space now available after you’ve donated the clothes that you always needed and no longer want. None of this can go into the ad.
Then there’s the reduction of all of it to column inches and money. Rs 2,000 approx for a photograph and a few lines in a paper that doesn’t have all that much circulation in Delhi; so a second ad, hovering between Rs 8,000 (without photo) and Rs 10,000 (with photo) in a better-circulated paper. If you cut out the three lines from her favourite poem, the one her mother wanted you to include, it will fit within the budget, but then something else will have to be trimmed: the wreaths, perhaps. No one will notice the absence of a wreath.
Some families use death in the same way as they use weddings, as an occasion on which you show off your wealth, your status, your ability to spend Rs 50,000 or above on a quarter-page or half-page notice. The dead are good revenue-earners for newspapers. Not quite as good as the To-Let section, not half as good as the Matrimonials, but they pull in more every day than Missing Persons or Miscellaneous, though Massage Parlours do significantly better.
There’s the etiquette, at which we agnostic-atheists are sadly deficient. We take the rice that you’re supposed to sprinkle on the face of the departed in one hand, the right, not both; next time we’ll remember. We discuss the merits of Nigam Bodh versus Lodhi in terms of crematoriums. Nigam Bodh has the Yamuna running alongside, but the hall is gloomy, like a third-rate school auditorium with the stage awkwardly placed so that it’s always difficult bringing the body in on its bier. Lodhi has a neem tree outside, and stone benches on which you can sit and contemplate the sign that says “Moksha Marg” and then, slightly unnervingly: “Doorbhasha” and gives the phone number. I know it’s the number of the crematorium, but it feels like an invitation; make your last call to The Departed here, before he’s progressed all the way along Moksha Marg.
As we leave, someone opens a door in the wall and I see the plots laid out like empty flower beds, containing the ashes of the day, spread out to cool. On some days there are the ashes of several bodies in adjacent plots; today there’s a breeze, and some of the ashes from one plot dance in the air and are carried over to the next. I like that, the idea that in death we might finally live up to the creaky, pious hopes of a hundred stiff school tableaux promoting national integration; I like the idea that the ashes of the dead might get a little mixed up, without regard to gender or caste or class, just as those boring hum sab ek hai songs we sang in school had it.
I find a kind of peace in this idea, along with the regret and the grief and the rest of it.
Placing an obituary in the newspaper is a distasteful experience. First there’s the compression of a person’s life into a few words: “retired” or “beloved teacher” or “obedient son”, none of which capture the really important stuff, that her eyes crinkle up at the edges when she laughs or he could remember every lyric The Sex Pistols wrote, or that he came back from office and told funny stories about the monkeys who throw government into disarray by stealing files from the building. Then there’s the few stilted phrases for grief: “deeply mourned”, “shall be missed”, “life will not be the same”, none of which capture what this really means, the number of times you start dialing a number and stop because the person you want to speak to will not be there at the other end, the devastation of the small, unimportant routines of the day that involved three people and now involve just two, the cupboard space now available after you’ve donated the clothes that you always needed and no longer want. None of this can go into the ad.
Then there’s the reduction of all of it to column inches and money. Rs 2,000 approx for a photograph and a few lines in a paper that doesn’t have all that much circulation in Delhi; so a second ad, hovering between Rs 8,000 (without photo) and Rs 10,000 (with photo) in a better-circulated paper. If you cut out the three lines from her favourite poem, the one her mother wanted you to include, it will fit within the budget, but then something else will have to be trimmed: the wreaths, perhaps. No one will notice the absence of a wreath.
Some families use death in the same way as they use weddings, as an occasion on which you show off your wealth, your status, your ability to spend Rs 50,000 or above on a quarter-page or half-page notice. The dead are good revenue-earners for newspapers. Not quite as good as the To-Let section, not half as good as the Matrimonials, but they pull in more every day than Missing Persons or Miscellaneous, though Massage Parlours do significantly better.
There’s the etiquette, at which we agnostic-atheists are sadly deficient. We take the rice that you’re supposed to sprinkle on the face of the departed in one hand, the right, not both; next time we’ll remember. We discuss the merits of Nigam Bodh versus Lodhi in terms of crematoriums. Nigam Bodh has the Yamuna running alongside, but the hall is gloomy, like a third-rate school auditorium with the stage awkwardly placed so that it’s always difficult bringing the body in on its bier. Lodhi has a neem tree outside, and stone benches on which you can sit and contemplate the sign that says “Moksha Marg” and then, slightly unnervingly: “Doorbhasha” and gives the phone number. I know it’s the number of the crematorium, but it feels like an invitation; make your last call to The Departed here, before he’s progressed all the way along Moksha Marg.
As we leave, someone opens a door in the wall and I see the plots laid out like empty flower beds, containing the ashes of the day, spread out to cool. On some days there are the ashes of several bodies in adjacent plots; today there’s a breeze, and some of the ashes from one plot dance in the air and are carried over to the next. I like that, the idea that in death we might finally live up to the creaky, pious hopes of a hundred stiff school tableaux promoting national integration; I like the idea that the ashes of the dead might get a little mixed up, without regard to gender or caste or class, just as those boring hum sab ek hai songs we sang in school had it.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Book review: Surface
(Published in Outlook, June 2005)
[I admire people who can compress everything they want to say about a book like Surface into 300-odd words and walk away satisfied that they've addressed all the issues neatly and tidily. Me? I get five paragraphs, each worth their weight in gold in these days of shrinking print, and it still isn't enough: there was a lot about Surface that needed to be placed in context, queried, held up for closer scrutiny, etc etc, and no, this review didn't get the whole job done. Something tells me there's a reason why I'd never make it as an ad copywriter...]
Surface
Siddhartha Deb
Picador India
Rs 495, 262 pages
In his first novel, The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb wrote: "History, dragged so far from the metropolitan centres, from the rustic mainlands, will tell you nothing. In the North-East, the way I remember it, history lies defeated…"
The only possible protagonist for a novel set in a region where the past has no meaning is a man for whom the future holds no promise. Amrit, the narrator of Surface, is a journalist who has passed beyond discontentment to indifference. A stray "foreign contact" offers him a faint glimpse of redemption, if he can write "a portrait of the mystery and sorrow of India". It's an improvement on the first assignment he was offered, the story of shit in Calcutta: "a wonderful reduction of the city I lived in to one choice epithet". Now, more nobly, Amrit has to uncover the truth behind the photograph of a woman identified as a porn actress and paraded by an insurgent group in Imphal as a warning against immorality.
His journey is briefly interrupted by the tale, preserved in an old journal, of the suicide of Jim, a British soldier who saw action in Burma. Jim doesn't survive his discovery of the great secret of empire, how it's "wonderfully arranged, all straight lines and precise rules and stiff spines, and how that all becomes a big lie when you move to the edge of the empire and run loose in the jungle with guns and knives".
It's the only truth that Amrit will surface with, as he moves through a dismembered world of betrayals and lies: "…[The] region had been forgotten by the world, and in the absence of connections with what lay beyond, an entire society was trying to recreate itself from selected memories and incomplete knowledge."
Nothing is as it seems; the motives of the rebels, the story of the woman in the photograph, the promising foreign contact, even the shining hope held out by a mysterious effort called the Prosperity Project. There are no easy conclusions in Surface , just the dwindling prospect of redemption. And in the heart of this darkness, Deb finds a new set of horsemen for the apocalypse: dereliction, amnesia, corruption and apathy.
[I admire people who can compress everything they want to say about a book like Surface into 300-odd words and walk away satisfied that they've addressed all the issues neatly and tidily. Me? I get five paragraphs, each worth their weight in gold in these days of shrinking print, and it still isn't enough: there was a lot about Surface that needed to be placed in context, queried, held up for closer scrutiny, etc etc, and no, this review didn't get the whole job done. Something tells me there's a reason why I'd never make it as an ad copywriter...]
Surface
Siddhartha Deb
Picador India
Rs 495, 262 pages
In his first novel, The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb wrote: "History, dragged so far from the metropolitan centres, from the rustic mainlands, will tell you nothing. In the North-East, the way I remember it, history lies defeated…"
The only possible protagonist for a novel set in a region where the past has no meaning is a man for whom the future holds no promise. Amrit, the narrator of Surface, is a journalist who has passed beyond discontentment to indifference. A stray "foreign contact" offers him a faint glimpse of redemption, if he can write "a portrait of the mystery and sorrow of India". It's an improvement on the first assignment he was offered, the story of shit in Calcutta: "a wonderful reduction of the city I lived in to one choice epithet". Now, more nobly, Amrit has to uncover the truth behind the photograph of a woman identified as a porn actress and paraded by an insurgent group in Imphal as a warning against immorality.
His journey is briefly interrupted by the tale, preserved in an old journal, of the suicide of Jim, a British soldier who saw action in Burma. Jim doesn't survive his discovery of the great secret of empire, how it's "wonderfully arranged, all straight lines and precise rules and stiff spines, and how that all becomes a big lie when you move to the edge of the empire and run loose in the jungle with guns and knives".
It's the only truth that Amrit will surface with, as he moves through a dismembered world of betrayals and lies: "…[The] region had been forgotten by the world, and in the absence of connections with what lay beyond, an entire society was trying to recreate itself from selected memories and incomplete knowledge."
Nothing is as it seems; the motives of the rebels, the story of the woman in the photograph, the promising foreign contact, even the shining hope held out by a mysterious effort called the Prosperity Project. There are no easy conclusions in Surface , just the dwindling prospect of redemption. And in the heart of this darkness, Deb finds a new set of horsemen for the apocalypse: dereliction, amnesia, corruption and apathy.
Speaking Volumes: Adaptations
(First published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, June 14, 2005
Most book purists would agree with Charlie Kaufman on the subject of turning a book into a film: "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't."
But as most film lovers know, Charlie Kaufman, who struggles so hard to turn a novel about flowers, heavy with interior monologues, into a film is a character who wasn't even in the original book that was turned into Adaptation. It's this way: Adaptation was meta enough to satisfy the most carping of critics, being a film called Adaptation about turning a (genuine) book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans into a (never made, except in the film about the film of the book) film called The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman was an invention of film, if you like: the tormented screenwriter whose desperate search for a way to turn an internally driven, beautifully written novel into 120 pages of screenplay while avoiding action-packed cinematic clichés leads him to pursue the novelist into an action-packed final sequence. Nicely ironic, and three years after it was made, Adaptation is still something of a cult favourite on the circuit.
Kaufman's grumble--"The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't"—may be voiced by a character of the cinematic world, but it's the book lover's grouse against film adaptations to a tee. What happens when book meets film? And why do we care so much?
Let's start with the assumption that there are two kinds of book purists. The first kind is more puritan than purist, the sort who has "Do not tamper with the text" written on his heart. If you love books, shun the book puritan: his mind is closed to the idea that every reader brings her own interpretation to any great work of fiction, and that sometimes the best readers are the most creative interpreters. Anthony Minghella's English Patient is not Michael Ondaatje's English Patient ; it doesn't follow the book slavishly, but neither does it distort the book. Because Minghella read and understood the book so well, he was free to translate his notion of it onto celluloid.
As the director of the film, he worked roughly on the same lines that Gregory Rabassa does when he's translating the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rabassa doesn't reproduce Garcia Marquez's text in another language; his method is to internalise the novel and then to virtually rewrite the book all over again.
To some extent, this is what directors as different as Kurosawa and, at another level, Vishal Bhardwaj have done with Shakespeare's Macbeth . I've seen some productions—chiefly theatrical, not film--of Macbeth that suffer because they're obsessed with the need to be faithful to the text to the point where they stifle the play. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood works in part because he saw clearly how bringing the Scottish play to medieval Japan might deepen his personal reading of the play. And Bhardwaj's Maqbool is a brilliant reinterpretation because he understood how easily a play about kingship, treachery and hubris could be adapted if it was set in the Mumbai underworld.
Fidelity to the text can only take you so far. There's a reason why recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons played as it would have been on the instruments of the time are curiosities. The "original, authentic" way grates on our modern ears, now that we've grown used to a different reading of the music. Some theatres do performances of Shakespeare, Marlowe and company in the style of the era in which they wrote the plays; again, these are far more satisfying as literary history than as theatre. For works to remain classic, each generation needs to continue interpreting them in different ways.
That disposes of the book puritan: but the purist is a different matter. The book purist is usually open to wide-ranging, even iconoclastic, interpretations of the books that matter to him—and the emphasis here is firmly on books that do matter in themselves, and how well the interpretation works. Gurinder Chaddha, for instance, had a good thing going when she decided to remake Pride and Prejudice and set it in contemporary India, where Austen's interest in the politics of arranged marriages and property settlements is keenly shared by thousands of families. It's another matter that she didn't do it very well, producing a film that was deeply tedious by both Bollywood and Hollywood standards.
On the other hand, Coppola did Mario Puzo a favour with The Godfather trilogy, by lifting a decent, fast-paced, unusual bestseller into the ranks of art with his cinematic interpretation—his frames packed far more punch, frankly, than Puzo's workmanlike prose.
Some books lend themselves more easily to film because they carry relatively little baggage. What if the film versions of The Namesake , based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, and The Mistress of Spices , based on Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee's book, aren't "good" adaptations? I probably wouldn't carp much: neither book means as much to me as The Hours , Michael Cunningham's novel. I watched the film version with enjoyment—and great relief because I loved both The Hours and the book that inspired it, Mrs Dalloway , so a bad adaptation could have wrecked two books for me.
But Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas was soap opera going for baroque with a vengeance, held together by torn shreds of Sharatchandra's plot. Like many fans of the book and at least one of the previous film versions of Devdas , I was incensed at Bhansali's production because the book he claimed to have based his film on had all but vanished under the weight of his lavish sets and his larger-than-life melodrama.
With Sharatchandra's Parineeta, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's adaptation takes sweeping liberties with text and time, filling out one character's story in intricate detail where the text had nothing but silence, and shifting the scene from turn-of-century Bengal to 1960s Bengal. But Sharatchandra's original novel was a relatively slight, mannered work, one of those books that still enjoys a readership without inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that a work like Srikanta or Devdas does. It's a novel where so much is implied in so many absences that it offers a blank canvas to the right director, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra's retelling is refreshing in its own right. The book isn't like that: but it might have been.
Most book purists would agree with Charlie Kaufman on the subject of turning a book into a film: "I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't."
But as most film lovers know, Charlie Kaufman, who struggles so hard to turn a novel about flowers, heavy with interior monologues, into a film is a character who wasn't even in the original book that was turned into Adaptation. It's this way: Adaptation was meta enough to satisfy the most carping of critics, being a film called Adaptation about turning a (genuine) book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans into a (never made, except in the film about the film of the book) film called The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman was an invention of film, if you like: the tormented screenwriter whose desperate search for a way to turn an internally driven, beautifully written novel into 120 pages of screenplay while avoiding action-packed cinematic clichés leads him to pursue the novelist into an action-packed final sequence. Nicely ironic, and three years after it was made, Adaptation is still something of a cult favourite on the circuit.
Kaufman's grumble--"The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just isn't"—may be voiced by a character of the cinematic world, but it's the book lover's grouse against film adaptations to a tee. What happens when book meets film? And why do we care so much?
Let's start with the assumption that there are two kinds of book purists. The first kind is more puritan than purist, the sort who has "Do not tamper with the text" written on his heart. If you love books, shun the book puritan: his mind is closed to the idea that every reader brings her own interpretation to any great work of fiction, and that sometimes the best readers are the most creative interpreters. Anthony Minghella's English Patient is not Michael Ondaatje's English Patient ; it doesn't follow the book slavishly, but neither does it distort the book. Because Minghella read and understood the book so well, he was free to translate his notion of it onto celluloid.
As the director of the film, he worked roughly on the same lines that Gregory Rabassa does when he's translating the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Rabassa doesn't reproduce Garcia Marquez's text in another language; his method is to internalise the novel and then to virtually rewrite the book all over again.
To some extent, this is what directors as different as Kurosawa and, at another level, Vishal Bhardwaj have done with Shakespeare's Macbeth . I've seen some productions—chiefly theatrical, not film--of Macbeth that suffer because they're obsessed with the need to be faithful to the text to the point where they stifle the play. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood works in part because he saw clearly how bringing the Scottish play to medieval Japan might deepen his personal reading of the play. And Bhardwaj's Maqbool is a brilliant reinterpretation because he understood how easily a play about kingship, treachery and hubris could be adapted if it was set in the Mumbai underworld.
Fidelity to the text can only take you so far. There's a reason why recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons played as it would have been on the instruments of the time are curiosities. The "original, authentic" way grates on our modern ears, now that we've grown used to a different reading of the music. Some theatres do performances of Shakespeare, Marlowe and company in the style of the era in which they wrote the plays; again, these are far more satisfying as literary history than as theatre. For works to remain classic, each generation needs to continue interpreting them in different ways.
That disposes of the book puritan: but the purist is a different matter. The book purist is usually open to wide-ranging, even iconoclastic, interpretations of the books that matter to him—and the emphasis here is firmly on books that do matter in themselves, and how well the interpretation works. Gurinder Chaddha, for instance, had a good thing going when she decided to remake Pride and Prejudice and set it in contemporary India, where Austen's interest in the politics of arranged marriages and property settlements is keenly shared by thousands of families. It's another matter that she didn't do it very well, producing a film that was deeply tedious by both Bollywood and Hollywood standards.
On the other hand, Coppola did Mario Puzo a favour with The Godfather trilogy, by lifting a decent, fast-paced, unusual bestseller into the ranks of art with his cinematic interpretation—his frames packed far more punch, frankly, than Puzo's workmanlike prose.
Some books lend themselves more easily to film because they carry relatively little baggage. What if the film versions of The Namesake , based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, and The Mistress of Spices , based on Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee's book, aren't "good" adaptations? I probably wouldn't carp much: neither book means as much to me as The Hours , Michael Cunningham's novel. I watched the film version with enjoyment—and great relief because I loved both The Hours and the book that inspired it, Mrs Dalloway , so a bad adaptation could have wrecked two books for me.
But Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas was soap opera going for baroque with a vengeance, held together by torn shreds of Sharatchandra's plot. Like many fans of the book and at least one of the previous film versions of Devdas , I was incensed at Bhansali's production because the book he claimed to have based his film on had all but vanished under the weight of his lavish sets and his larger-than-life melodrama.
With Sharatchandra's Parineeta, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's adaptation takes sweeping liberties with text and time, filling out one character's story in intricate detail where the text had nothing but silence, and shifting the scene from turn-of-century Bengal to 1960s Bengal. But Sharatchandra's original novel was a relatively slight, mannered work, one of those books that still enjoys a readership without inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that a work like Srikanta or Devdas does. It's a novel where so much is implied in so many absences that it offers a blank canvas to the right director, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra's retelling is refreshing in its own right. The book isn't like that: but it might have been.
The BS column: The writer in his labyrinth
(First published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, June 7, 2005)
It is a naïve confession to make, but until I was in my late teens, it didn't occur to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was judged by mere mortals. Most of the relatives and friends whose homes I visited had libraries that shared a strange eclectism.
Amitav Ghosh, examining his uncle's "odd assortment of books", defined this: "The principles that guided my uncle's taste would have been much clearer to me had I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz-show adept the link between Grazia Deledda, Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokov, Sienkiewicz and Andric will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize for Literature."
Most of the readers I knew had a Nobel shelf, if not a Nobel bookcase. And most accepted without question the impression that the Nobel Prize carried an authority that went beyond human writ. The idea that the Academy in Stockholm might choose the right author for the wrong reasons or vice versa, smacked of the heretical, even when it was finally admitted into my adolescent mind.
The Nobel Prize for Literature still draws the mantle, however tattered, of secrecy around it, and still functions in the manner of the highest court of the land, its opinion final and beyond appeal. The Man Booker International Prize, in contrast, has been set up in an age that demands at least the appearance of transparency, for an audience of readers who believe that no judgement is so final that it cannot be questioned.
Unlike the Nobel, where a few names leak from the shortlist every year without the actual list ever being announced, the shortlist of 15 authors is up on the Man Booker website. We know the names of this year's judges-Professor John Carey, Alberto Manguel and Azar Nafisi. Unlike the confusing terms of Alfred Noble's will, with its controversial directive that the Nobel Prize be awarded to "ideal" literature, the Man Booker is clear: "Worth £60,000 to the winner, the Man Booker International prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language."
We know the judges' struggles, too, the absurd impossibility of picking just 15 writers from a shortlist of 200, and then just one to be declared first among equals. Carey likened the process of judging to Plato's noble and necessary lie, Manguel drew parallels with the absurd prizegiving in Alice in Wonderland, and Nafisi was keenly aware of the absentees, from Achebe to Ishiguro to Rushdie. She writes: "We had to be thankful that, unlike some political leaders, we as literary judges were neither God, nor even his representatives, but fallible mortals, ready to question and be questioned..."
Unencumbered by the magisterial seal of authority, it's easier to get past the petty questions: instead of asking why the judges didn't award Garcia Marquez, or Kenzabura Oe or Muriel Spark, we're free to look at this year's winner, Ismail Kadare, and his place in the pantheon.
Kadare grew up during the Second World War in Albania, and saw his country survive several invasions, make a break with Soviet Russia and come under Hoxha's repressive regime. Kadare discovered an anchor in literature; one of the anecdotes most often told about him is how he was so taken by Macbeth at the age of 11 that he copied the whole play out by hand. In the Greek dramatists, he found a theme that he would explore on and off in his work, the tribulations of "a dissident writer facing a totalitarian state".
He made his compromises; in an interview with The Paris Review, he recalled: "From 1967 to 1970 I was under the direct surveillance of the dictator himself. Remember that, to the great misfortune of the intellectuals, Hoxha regarded himself as an author and a poet, and therefore a "friend" of writers. ..In such a situation I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter...." Hoxha never persecuted Kadare directly, but four of his books were banned by decree; other books were "half-banned", meaning that they could not be discussed in newspapers or magazines. "It was as though they had never been written," Kadare says.
When Hoxha's regime fell, Kadare and his family emigrated to Paris, where he now lives. His books have often been hard to find, and readers in English see his works through the lens of a "double translation": the English is translated from the French translation of his works, a process that has sometimes muffled his voice. The General of the Dead Army, a first novel written after he had already earned a formidable reputation as a poet, was a dark, moving tale of a general sent to Albania to discover and repatriate the remains of soldiers who died in WWII: "I have an entire army of dead men under my command." I read the novel years ago, but its protagonist stayed with me, his futile quest a metaphor for those who seek to dig up the bones of history when their own history has been ripped from them.
The Palace of Dreams, a slightly later work, offered one of the most powerful visions of how far tyranny might go: it's an allegory of a world where dreams are collected from the furthest corners of Empire, as though the true tyrant has a need to own even our most unconscious thoughts.
Kadare has suffered a fate common to many writers in translation, the fate of being simultaneously known and unknown; his name has travelled much further than his books. He is often referred to as Albania's best-known writer, but the Man Booker International might make us see him as a writer for the world.
It's like the journey he makes in one of his poems, Longing for Albania, which begins with a description of a very specific homesickness and ends with these lines, applicable to exiles everywhere:
"How far and how beloved you are, my country .
The airport will tremble with the droning,
The mists will hang in suspense over the chasms.
Surely those who invented the jet engine
Must have been far from their country once."
It is a naïve confession to make, but until I was in my late teens, it didn't occur to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was judged by mere mortals. Most of the relatives and friends whose homes I visited had libraries that shared a strange eclectism.
Amitav Ghosh, examining his uncle's "odd assortment of books", defined this: "The principles that guided my uncle's taste would have been much clearer to me had I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz-show adept the link between Grazia Deledda, Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokov, Sienkiewicz and Andric will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize for Literature."
Most of the readers I knew had a Nobel shelf, if not a Nobel bookcase. And most accepted without question the impression that the Nobel Prize carried an authority that went beyond human writ. The idea that the Academy in Stockholm might choose the right author for the wrong reasons or vice versa, smacked of the heretical, even when it was finally admitted into my adolescent mind.
The Nobel Prize for Literature still draws the mantle, however tattered, of secrecy around it, and still functions in the manner of the highest court of the land, its opinion final and beyond appeal. The Man Booker International Prize, in contrast, has been set up in an age that demands at least the appearance of transparency, for an audience of readers who believe that no judgement is so final that it cannot be questioned.
Unlike the Nobel, where a few names leak from the shortlist every year without the actual list ever being announced, the shortlist of 15 authors is up on the Man Booker website. We know the names of this year's judges-Professor John Carey, Alberto Manguel and Azar Nafisi. Unlike the confusing terms of Alfred Noble's will, with its controversial directive that the Nobel Prize be awarded to "ideal" literature, the Man Booker is clear: "Worth £60,000 to the winner, the Man Booker International prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language."
We know the judges' struggles, too, the absurd impossibility of picking just 15 writers from a shortlist of 200, and then just one to be declared first among equals. Carey likened the process of judging to Plato's noble and necessary lie, Manguel drew parallels with the absurd prizegiving in Alice in Wonderland, and Nafisi was keenly aware of the absentees, from Achebe to Ishiguro to Rushdie. She writes: "We had to be thankful that, unlike some political leaders, we as literary judges were neither God, nor even his representatives, but fallible mortals, ready to question and be questioned..."
Unencumbered by the magisterial seal of authority, it's easier to get past the petty questions: instead of asking why the judges didn't award Garcia Marquez, or Kenzabura Oe or Muriel Spark, we're free to look at this year's winner, Ismail Kadare, and his place in the pantheon.
Kadare grew up during the Second World War in Albania, and saw his country survive several invasions, make a break with Soviet Russia and come under Hoxha's repressive regime. Kadare discovered an anchor in literature; one of the anecdotes most often told about him is how he was so taken by Macbeth at the age of 11 that he copied the whole play out by hand. In the Greek dramatists, he found a theme that he would explore on and off in his work, the tribulations of "a dissident writer facing a totalitarian state".
He made his compromises; in an interview with The Paris Review, he recalled: "From 1967 to 1970 I was under the direct surveillance of the dictator himself. Remember that, to the great misfortune of the intellectuals, Hoxha regarded himself as an author and a poet, and therefore a "friend" of writers. ..In such a situation I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter...." Hoxha never persecuted Kadare directly, but four of his books were banned by decree; other books were "half-banned", meaning that they could not be discussed in newspapers or magazines. "It was as though they had never been written," Kadare says.
When Hoxha's regime fell, Kadare and his family emigrated to Paris, where he now lives. His books have often been hard to find, and readers in English see his works through the lens of a "double translation": the English is translated from the French translation of his works, a process that has sometimes muffled his voice. The General of the Dead Army, a first novel written after he had already earned a formidable reputation as a poet, was a dark, moving tale of a general sent to Albania to discover and repatriate the remains of soldiers who died in WWII: "I have an entire army of dead men under my command." I read the novel years ago, but its protagonist stayed with me, his futile quest a metaphor for those who seek to dig up the bones of history when their own history has been ripped from them.
The Palace of Dreams, a slightly later work, offered one of the most powerful visions of how far tyranny might go: it's an allegory of a world where dreams are collected from the furthest corners of Empire, as though the true tyrant has a need to own even our most unconscious thoughts.
Kadare has suffered a fate common to many writers in translation, the fate of being simultaneously known and unknown; his name has travelled much further than his books. He is often referred to as Albania's best-known writer, but the Man Booker International might make us see him as a writer for the world.
It's like the journey he makes in one of his poems, Longing for Albania, which begins with a description of a very specific homesickness and ends with these lines, applicable to exiles everywhere:
"How far and how beloved you are, my country .
The airport will tremble with the droning,
The mists will hang in suspense over the chasms.
Surely those who invented the jet engine
Must have been far from their country once."
Monday, May 30, 2005
The Business Standard column: the Orange prize
(First published in the Business Standard, May 30, 2005)
When the Orange Prize for women’s fiction was announced in January 1996, it seemed like a retrograde step to many observers. This was the enlightened 21st century, not the dark ages: some condemned the prize for excluding men, and writer A S Byatt declared that she couldn’t support a prize that “ghettoized” women.
Ten years on, I think Kate Mosse, the founder of the Orange Prize, saw something that none of us had—precisely because we assume that we live in an age of equality. Mosse’s frustration had to do with the 1991 all-male Booker shortlist; she and others in the publishing world felt that women writers had to work that much harder to be visible, and that even the most talented women writers were judged differently from men.
MobyLives, a leading literary blog, would agree: over the years, MobyLives has tracked the New York Times coverage of male and female authors and sees a tremendous gender gap. If you’re looking at literary prizes, the Nobel for literature has a dismal reward: in its 105-year-old history, only ten women have won the prize. The Booker has honoured 12 women in 33 years, but its shortlists are still tilted towards male authors.
This week, Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins published the results of a survey they conducted across a sample of 100 academics, critics and writers. They found that while support for the Orange Prize was almost unanimous, there was an astonishing gender gap in terms of reading habits. “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men. Consequently, fiction by women remains ‘special interest’, while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style,” write Jardine and Watkins.
The bias doesn’t seem to be deliberate, but it’s there. In the late ‘90s, the editors of Random House’s Modern Library series put together a list of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys were the only women to feature on the list; Woolf was the only one in the top 50. In 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled its own list of novels to counter the Modern Library list—the aim was to correct several biases, not just the gender bias, but it was a revealing exercise. Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein joined the company of women, and added a sense of the range and variety of women’s writing.
If you look at the second list of names, you might begin to gain an insight into how easy it is to overlook women’s writing, and how strange that omission seems once it’s pointed out. There are still names missing from the Radcliffe list: Margaret Drabble and Nadine Gordimer, for instance, but it goes some way to restoring the balance.
Ten years gives you enough time to assess the worth of a prize, and with the Orange, there’s no question that it’s become one of the most respected literary awards in the business. This is partly because the Orange has stuck to its agenda, which is to showcase the best writing available in any given year. Aside from the fact that the prize is open only to women’s writers, there is no other agenda, no particular kind of women’s writing that the juries are encouraged to promote. Borderline chicklit hasn’t been excluded; neither has the huge, sweeping, historical saga. The themes authors have tackled range from vaudeville to hostage situations, from race equations in postwar England to Nigeria in the throes of a coup, from the travails of a lesbian pickpocket to drama on the Titanic. And the Orange seems to feel no need to bend over backwards in order to accommodate newer writers at the expense of more established names: from Margaret Atwood, E Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison and the late Carol Shields to newer writers like Trezza Azzopardi, Oonya Kempadoo or Kamila Shamsie, they’re all there.
The worth of the Orange lies in the fact that it restores the balance. Once in a while, an author like Shirley Hazzard will get a fair shake from the mainstream awards. More often, you’re dealing with writers like Ann Patchett or Andrea Levy who get some media attention, but who gain from the Orange’s endorsement of their worth. The Orange’s record with regard to authors from the subcontinent has been good: it’s flagged authors from Anita Desai to Kamila Shamsie to Shauna Singh Baldwin to Monica Ali.
It’s often argued that the Orange has no business discriminating against male writers; this year, as the tenth anniversary of the prize came up, a few commentators argued that the original biases that had prompted the setting up of the prize were diminishing, and that there was no need for a women’s-only medal any more. But Jardine’s research makes it clear that there is a difference: that even among the ranks of people who might appear to be beyond prejudice, the ways in which we read are inherently polarized. I’m fascinated by the question Jardine raises but doesn’t answer: if men and women read differently, where exactly does the difference lie? But that’s a subject that demands a column to itself.
It’s hard to look at mainstream book reviews and argue with conviction that women writers are given the same space as male writers: just because some women are on an equal footing doesn’t mean that the gender as a whole has progressed. There might come a time when the Orange Prize is no longer necessary; when the Nobel committee automatically considers women authors alongside men without the need for recourse to affirmative action, when the mainstream media’s book review sections have a fifty-fifty split between women writers and male writers as a matter of course, not of deliberate policy, when men become as comfortable with reading women authors as women are reading male authors.
There might be a time when the Orange shortlist is redundant, because most of the authors on it are also featured on the Whitbread and the Booker shortlists; but that time hasn’t yet arrived. Until it does, the Orange is needed, as a reminder of how easy it is to overlook fine, talented authors just because they have the wrong chromosome.
When the Orange Prize for women’s fiction was announced in January 1996, it seemed like a retrograde step to many observers. This was the enlightened 21st century, not the dark ages: some condemned the prize for excluding men, and writer A S Byatt declared that she couldn’t support a prize that “ghettoized” women.
Ten years on, I think Kate Mosse, the founder of the Orange Prize, saw something that none of us had—precisely because we assume that we live in an age of equality. Mosse’s frustration had to do with the 1991 all-male Booker shortlist; she and others in the publishing world felt that women writers had to work that much harder to be visible, and that even the most talented women writers were judged differently from men.
MobyLives, a leading literary blog, would agree: over the years, MobyLives has tracked the New York Times coverage of male and female authors and sees a tremendous gender gap. If you’re looking at literary prizes, the Nobel for literature has a dismal reward: in its 105-year-old history, only ten women have won the prize. The Booker has honoured 12 women in 33 years, but its shortlists are still tilted towards male authors.
This week, Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins published the results of a survey they conducted across a sample of 100 academics, critics and writers. They found that while support for the Orange Prize was almost unanimous, there was an astonishing gender gap in terms of reading habits. “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men. Consequently, fiction by women remains ‘special interest’, while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style,” write Jardine and Watkins.
The bias doesn’t seem to be deliberate, but it’s there. In the late ‘90s, the editors of Random House’s Modern Library series put together a list of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys were the only women to feature on the list; Woolf was the only one in the top 50. In 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled its own list of novels to counter the Modern Library list—the aim was to correct several biases, not just the gender bias, but it was a revealing exercise. Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein joined the company of women, and added a sense of the range and variety of women’s writing.
If you look at the second list of names, you might begin to gain an insight into how easy it is to overlook women’s writing, and how strange that omission seems once it’s pointed out. There are still names missing from the Radcliffe list: Margaret Drabble and Nadine Gordimer, for instance, but it goes some way to restoring the balance.
Ten years gives you enough time to assess the worth of a prize, and with the Orange, there’s no question that it’s become one of the most respected literary awards in the business. This is partly because the Orange has stuck to its agenda, which is to showcase the best writing available in any given year. Aside from the fact that the prize is open only to women’s writers, there is no other agenda, no particular kind of women’s writing that the juries are encouraged to promote. Borderline chicklit hasn’t been excluded; neither has the huge, sweeping, historical saga. The themes authors have tackled range from vaudeville to hostage situations, from race equations in postwar England to Nigeria in the throes of a coup, from the travails of a lesbian pickpocket to drama on the Titanic. And the Orange seems to feel no need to bend over backwards in order to accommodate newer writers at the expense of more established names: from Margaret Atwood, E Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison and the late Carol Shields to newer writers like Trezza Azzopardi, Oonya Kempadoo or Kamila Shamsie, they’re all there.
The worth of the Orange lies in the fact that it restores the balance. Once in a while, an author like Shirley Hazzard will get a fair shake from the mainstream awards. More often, you’re dealing with writers like Ann Patchett or Andrea Levy who get some media attention, but who gain from the Orange’s endorsement of their worth. The Orange’s record with regard to authors from the subcontinent has been good: it’s flagged authors from Anita Desai to Kamila Shamsie to Shauna Singh Baldwin to Monica Ali.
It’s often argued that the Orange has no business discriminating against male writers; this year, as the tenth anniversary of the prize came up, a few commentators argued that the original biases that had prompted the setting up of the prize were diminishing, and that there was no need for a women’s-only medal any more. But Jardine’s research makes it clear that there is a difference: that even among the ranks of people who might appear to be beyond prejudice, the ways in which we read are inherently polarized. I’m fascinated by the question Jardine raises but doesn’t answer: if men and women read differently, where exactly does the difference lie? But that’s a subject that demands a column to itself.
It’s hard to look at mainstream book reviews and argue with conviction that women writers are given the same space as male writers: just because some women are on an equal footing doesn’t mean that the gender as a whole has progressed. There might come a time when the Orange Prize is no longer necessary; when the Nobel committee automatically considers women authors alongside men without the need for recourse to affirmative action, when the mainstream media’s book review sections have a fifty-fifty split between women writers and male writers as a matter of course, not of deliberate policy, when men become as comfortable with reading women authors as women are reading male authors.
There might be a time when the Orange shortlist is redundant, because most of the authors on it are also featured on the Whitbread and the Booker shortlists; but that time hasn’t yet arrived. Until it does, the Orange is needed, as a reminder of how easy it is to overlook fine, talented authors just because they have the wrong chromosome.
Blood on the dance floor
(Published in The Indian Express, May 27, 2005. This was in response to a suggestion from the paper that an author and a reviewer might separately want to express their views on the business of book reviewing in India. The Marginalien cast an impartial eye on reviewing and authorial responses from the perspective of a seasoned writer; I did my bit as a reviewer.
Here's Manjula Padmanabhan's piece:
"It’s a familiar phenomenon: a new book bursts upon the market like a horde of triumphant Goths on a raiding party and a month later its author is heard ranting about the pathetic standards of literary criticism in the country. The most recent example is a first novel, which was received with cautious rather than effusive praise. In an interview some weeks after the launch, the author referred to Indian reviewers as ‘‘out-of-work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers.’’
As disgruntled creative spirits go, however, he was fairly restrained. Artists whose exhibitions have received negative reviews tend to be more physical. For instance, my sister Geeta Doctor, who reviews both art and literature, was once almost strangled by a muralist because she dared to ask him how many screws he’d used in one of his creations. Another one tried to force her to buy one of his paintings in penance for her mildly negative review. By contrast, authors generally restrict themselves to verbal responses in the form of the occasional death-threat by mail, anonymous phone calls and acid rejoinders in the letters columns of journals that have published unfavourable notices."
And here's mine:
“He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto, ‘Everyman, I will be thy guide’; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; ‘They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,’ he thought, weighing one in his hand…” –From ‘A New World’, by Amit Chaudhuri.
Amit Chaudhuri’s protagonist, Jayojit, could be every Indian author’s nightmare reviewer. Never mind that these days “books by Indian writers” can look as bulky as a wrestler on steroids; the fear of being weighed and found wanting is common to all authors, regardless of language or location. If it’s a little stronger in Indian writers who’re building their own kind of literature in English, that’s only to be expected.
There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase in my house that is given over to works of fiction by Indian writers. In that bookcase, I see a reflection of the publishing landscape over the last decade. Some of those books acquired classic status slowly, some were acclaimed at birth; some were pronounced dead-on-arrival, some, like G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr, are indestructible even if they spend long years in hibernation until a new generation clamours to be introduced to the book all over again. But the vast majority of the books that have found, and lost, house-room were received with lukewarm appreciation and read by less than a thousand people in the country. It’s a hard lesson. If you’ve poured two, or three, or ten years of your life into writing a book, you don’t want to be reminded that this might be your fate.
One of the arguments we often hear from authors, usually when they’re pleading to be treated with more respect, accorded a few more superlatives, offered a shade more understanding, is that Indian writing in English is a young, growing body of literature. It needs encouragement, and nurturing, and other things that reviewers in India don’t provide. The classic reaction when an author feels that he hasn’t received his due is to lash out, sharply, at the one section of his audience that can be held accountable. There’s not much point to criticizing publishers or alienating readers; reviewers, though, can always be faulted for not realizing that what lies before them is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
The view from the reviewer’s chair looks a little different. All the reviewers and critics I spoke to for this article nailed two things that make reviewing Indian books a very strange business. The first is, as critic and editor Anita Roy put it, that everyone knows everyone else’s “co-ordinates”. Most literary circles are incestuous; but even by that standard, the Indian literary world is composed of people who share incredibly complicated, tangled histories.
This should change, once you reach a critical mass of really good writers, and it can’t change too fast for anyone of us. Knowing the co-ordinates does nothing for readers or writers except to make everyone paranoid. The writer who has the “right” co-ordinates fears that this might make him or her a target for universal envy, the writer who doesn’t complains about being left out in the cold; and it’s a rare reviewer who doesn’t resent having to navigate the deep, politically messy waters of this sort of knowledge.
The second aspect of reviewing Indian books, as a writer who shuttles between the US and India puts it, is that you cannot help but set the bar lower. If you review books regularly, you’re likely to fall into the trap of being kind, which is the worst sort of insult you could offer any writer—and any reader. Very few of the forty-odd books that come in for review each month are distressingly, painfully bad; very few rise above the mediocre. To be a reviewer in India is to know firsthand the triumph of hope over experience—but when a truly, unequivocally great book does come your way, the joy it brings in its wake is all the reward any reader could ask for.
How good does Indian writing have to be? In the last few months, we saw really brilliant work from writers as disparate as Haruki Murakami, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Andrea Levy, to name a scant handful. In the increasingly eclectic world of Indian reviewing, these books are also up for review; if you’re a reviewer who reads in another Indian language aside from English, as many of us do, you’re looking at another 10-15 potentially great books to be read every month.
There isn’t space any more for kindness. There isn’t the room to make allowances for the Indian writer working in English. And from what I’ve seen of young Indian writers at home and elsewhere, there’ll be no need for grace marks in another few years. Until then, though, if you’re an author in search of adulation and you don’t get it, follow the advice that V S Naipaul famously offered a fellow writer: take it on the chin and move on.
Here's Manjula Padmanabhan's piece:
"It’s a familiar phenomenon: a new book bursts upon the market like a horde of triumphant Goths on a raiding party and a month later its author is heard ranting about the pathetic standards of literary criticism in the country. The most recent example is a first novel, which was received with cautious rather than effusive praise. In an interview some weeks after the launch, the author referred to Indian reviewers as ‘‘out-of-work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers.’’
As disgruntled creative spirits go, however, he was fairly restrained. Artists whose exhibitions have received negative reviews tend to be more physical. For instance, my sister Geeta Doctor, who reviews both art and literature, was once almost strangled by a muralist because she dared to ask him how many screws he’d used in one of his creations. Another one tried to force her to buy one of his paintings in penance for her mildly negative review. By contrast, authors generally restrict themselves to verbal responses in the form of the occasional death-threat by mail, anonymous phone calls and acid rejoinders in the letters columns of journals that have published unfavourable notices."
And here's mine:
“He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto, ‘Everyman, I will be thy guide’; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; ‘They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,’ he thought, weighing one in his hand…” –From ‘A New World’, by Amit Chaudhuri.
Amit Chaudhuri’s protagonist, Jayojit, could be every Indian author’s nightmare reviewer. Never mind that these days “books by Indian writers” can look as bulky as a wrestler on steroids; the fear of being weighed and found wanting is common to all authors, regardless of language or location. If it’s a little stronger in Indian writers who’re building their own kind of literature in English, that’s only to be expected.
There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase in my house that is given over to works of fiction by Indian writers. In that bookcase, I see a reflection of the publishing landscape over the last decade. Some of those books acquired classic status slowly, some were acclaimed at birth; some were pronounced dead-on-arrival, some, like G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr, are indestructible even if they spend long years in hibernation until a new generation clamours to be introduced to the book all over again. But the vast majority of the books that have found, and lost, house-room were received with lukewarm appreciation and read by less than a thousand people in the country. It’s a hard lesson. If you’ve poured two, or three, or ten years of your life into writing a book, you don’t want to be reminded that this might be your fate.
One of the arguments we often hear from authors, usually when they’re pleading to be treated with more respect, accorded a few more superlatives, offered a shade more understanding, is that Indian writing in English is a young, growing body of literature. It needs encouragement, and nurturing, and other things that reviewers in India don’t provide. The classic reaction when an author feels that he hasn’t received his due is to lash out, sharply, at the one section of his audience that can be held accountable. There’s not much point to criticizing publishers or alienating readers; reviewers, though, can always be faulted for not realizing that what lies before them is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
The view from the reviewer’s chair looks a little different. All the reviewers and critics I spoke to for this article nailed two things that make reviewing Indian books a very strange business. The first is, as critic and editor Anita Roy put it, that everyone knows everyone else’s “co-ordinates”. Most literary circles are incestuous; but even by that standard, the Indian literary world is composed of people who share incredibly complicated, tangled histories.
This should change, once you reach a critical mass of really good writers, and it can’t change too fast for anyone of us. Knowing the co-ordinates does nothing for readers or writers except to make everyone paranoid. The writer who has the “right” co-ordinates fears that this might make him or her a target for universal envy, the writer who doesn’t complains about being left out in the cold; and it’s a rare reviewer who doesn’t resent having to navigate the deep, politically messy waters of this sort of knowledge.
The second aspect of reviewing Indian books, as a writer who shuttles between the US and India puts it, is that you cannot help but set the bar lower. If you review books regularly, you’re likely to fall into the trap of being kind, which is the worst sort of insult you could offer any writer—and any reader. Very few of the forty-odd books that come in for review each month are distressingly, painfully bad; very few rise above the mediocre. To be a reviewer in India is to know firsthand the triumph of hope over experience—but when a truly, unequivocally great book does come your way, the joy it brings in its wake is all the reward any reader could ask for.
How good does Indian writing have to be? In the last few months, we saw really brilliant work from writers as disparate as Haruki Murakami, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Andrea Levy, to name a scant handful. In the increasingly eclectic world of Indian reviewing, these books are also up for review; if you’re a reviewer who reads in another Indian language aside from English, as many of us do, you’re looking at another 10-15 potentially great books to be read every month.
There isn’t space any more for kindness. There isn’t the room to make allowances for the Indian writer working in English. And from what I’ve seen of young Indian writers at home and elsewhere, there’ll be no need for grace marks in another few years. Until then, though, if you’re an author in search of adulation and you don’t get it, follow the advice that V S Naipaul famously offered a fellow writer: take it on the chin and move on.
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