(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, July 20, 2005)
It's an old, bad habit: reading books about a country or a place in that setting, but nowhere have the books whispered into my ear as insistently as in Sri Lanka. I'm here as a tourist, but a deeply privileged one: my guides are Michael Ondaatje, Carl Muller, Shyam Selvadurai, Karen Roberts, Jean Arasayanagam and other, newer voices.
In 2005, Sri Lanka seems caught between the need to remember its history, one that sets conflict against a backdrop of heartbreaking beauty, and the need to move beyond it. We tourists are sealed into a hermetic bubble where only monuments, mangosteen sellers and beautiful hotels may gain admittance. The locals are tired of being seen as victims; people discuss massacres and the tsunami, yes, but also the need to build more roads, better schools, the shopping mall boom in Colombo.
As I take to the road, it's the voices of the writers packed neatly into my suitcase who tell me the hidden, forgotten histories of Sri Lanka. In Colombo, the harbour is booming, bustling, even at three am; from the hotel you can hear the ships calling out at sea, the sound of business.
In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, it's in an abandoned passenger liner moored to a side of Colombo harbour that Anil dissects bones. Old and new, the ancient skeletons from the graves of monks, the modern ones bearing injuries that testify to beatings, torture, deliberately broken bones; her job is to put the pieces of history back together. It's fiction, but you would have to be incurious indeed not to look out and wonder whether all the many Anils who reconstructed Sri Lanka in a time of war came back to shore safely.
In Kandy, the peace of the town, a newlywed couple posing for photographs on the shore of a glassy, calm lake, bely another sliver of history. The Kandy Jean Arasanayagam captured in a short story in In the Garden Secretly was a place where soldiers carried T-56 rifles silhouetted against the mass of golden yellow flowers of ahela trees. "Fifteen insurgents had been decapitated, their heads arranged around the ornamental pond at the centre of the university campus….bizarre new additions to the landscaped gardens." No bodies burn on the roads today; in Polonnaruwa, where a child was thrown into a barrel of tar to die, tourists click, snap and move on to the even more ancient Anuradhapura.
Other writers knock at the doors of memory, reminding me—as all tourists should be reminded—that Sri Lanka's history can't be reduced to just a list of casualties. In Galle, a French chef does a fancy version of duck that reminds me of the turkey so lovingly described by Romesh Gunesekara in Reef; in Colombo, thick slices of cake and halwa sandwiched between banana leaves make me hungry for the lavish Burgher cooking Carl Muller wrote of in Jam Fruit Tree. In Nuwara Eliya, the old bungalows of the British that Karen Roberts described in The Flower Boy still dangle their promise of "an England in the hills", the names evocative, a litany of conquest and nostalgia: "St Anne's, Abercrombie, Loolecondera, Windsor, St Coombs, and, of course, Glencairn.."
The sheltered, mannered world of the Cinnamon Gardens described by Shyam Selvadurai exists in uneasy proximity with a new world of fast cars, drugs, underworld murders, fancy shops. But friends tell me that they still have to struggle for pieces of their own history, as Selvadurai did when he battled bureaucracy and poor record-keeping in the archives, building his picture of Cinnamon Gardens from memory and scraps that had been preserved almost by accident. In the custody of monks, the ola manuscripts fare better, the rounded letters of the Sinhala script dictated by the palm leaf's resistance to sharp, angular strokes, described by Ondaatje as "the curve of a lover's spine".
But my sharpest memory of Sri Lanka is not of massacres or malls, but of the scent of cinnamon. Until it hits me full blast, in a room sprayed with cinnamon oil, I never realized the full power of Ondaatje's poem, The Cinnamon Peeler. Speaking of its spicy reek, he wrote: "The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached/ though you might bathe/ under the rain gutters, monsoon." It took a few days after coming home to India to get the scent of cinnamon out of my head; but Ondaatje's poem is harder to dislodge.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Last Word: The cashew girls
(Written for Last Word, The Kolkata Telegraph, July 17, 2005; you can tell I loved doing this particular piece.)
It's a well-known village on the road from Colombo to Kandy, where like bright birds-of-paradise, the cashew girls flutter around passing cars, calling out to buses and scooters from their small tables.
They're mostly young, though I spot a few older women. They dress in shades made more vivid against the sharp green of the landscape: shrieking, happy blues, lipstick reds, sunrise yellows. Framed by their umbrellas and dancing plastic packets of cashews, they look like a flock of chattering macaws.
The driver, and later, a shop owner and a woman up the road selling king coconuts, are a little abashed by questions about the cashew girls. But we've heard the catcalls from passing buses and trucks, seen the flirtations conducted right out here in broad daylight. The photographer, who stopped the car to take pictures, got his wires crossed. The three girls who swooped down on him wanted a little flirting, a little ogling, perhaps a little more than that. He wanted pictures. And roasted cashews. He got back into the car a trifle puzzled.
Some of the cashew girls are known to ply quite a different sort of trade; they catch a lift with a local lorry driver, go up the road and come back with another obliging trucker. The village is moderately notorious, known for the cashew moms as well, the ones who sent their daughters into the same trade they plied many years ago.
But there's something about them. A freedom in the way they move, an absolute assurance in the way they look men up and down, assessing and rejecting, a happiness in the schoolgirl banter they exchange once they realise we're in the market for, well, cashews. They know their worth; they charge higher for cashews that have been flirted over, they toss their heads and walk away, hips swaying, from a crass trucker who has offended them by quoting a price too low, too soon.
They remind me of the women I saw in Sikkim, the tough mamas and daughters who manned the chhang stalls. Those women would come out and flirt with the drivers of tourist cars and buses in just the same way, with the same firm air of command. Like the cashew girls, their control of the situation was never in question: they were the ones who got to pick and choose, to say no or yes. Some never flirted; some had affairs freely, with a refreshing lack of coyness or shame; some looked up and smiled only at one particular driver.
Back in the metros, Colombo and then Delhi, I look more closely at the women. The ones who strut their sexuality but retreat into the "good girl" persona; the ones who chose to make their own way but confess it still hurts when they're called "easy", or "sluts"; the ones who believe that sexuality is a possession you hand over only to the right man. They're beautiful, but there's a subtle difference in the way they dress, which is to attract attention and appraisal and perhaps approval. The cashew girls, twirling in their bright feathers; they dress to please themselves. The men are just an afterthought.
It's a well-known village on the road from Colombo to Kandy, where like bright birds-of-paradise, the cashew girls flutter around passing cars, calling out to buses and scooters from their small tables.
They're mostly young, though I spot a few older women. They dress in shades made more vivid against the sharp green of the landscape: shrieking, happy blues, lipstick reds, sunrise yellows. Framed by their umbrellas and dancing plastic packets of cashews, they look like a flock of chattering macaws.
The driver, and later, a shop owner and a woman up the road selling king coconuts, are a little abashed by questions about the cashew girls. But we've heard the catcalls from passing buses and trucks, seen the flirtations conducted right out here in broad daylight. The photographer, who stopped the car to take pictures, got his wires crossed. The three girls who swooped down on him wanted a little flirting, a little ogling, perhaps a little more than that. He wanted pictures. And roasted cashews. He got back into the car a trifle puzzled.
Some of the cashew girls are known to ply quite a different sort of trade; they catch a lift with a local lorry driver, go up the road and come back with another obliging trucker. The village is moderately notorious, known for the cashew moms as well, the ones who sent their daughters into the same trade they plied many years ago.
But there's something about them. A freedom in the way they move, an absolute assurance in the way they look men up and down, assessing and rejecting, a happiness in the schoolgirl banter they exchange once they realise we're in the market for, well, cashews. They know their worth; they charge higher for cashews that have been flirted over, they toss their heads and walk away, hips swaying, from a crass trucker who has offended them by quoting a price too low, too soon.
They remind me of the women I saw in Sikkim, the tough mamas and daughters who manned the chhang stalls. Those women would come out and flirt with the drivers of tourist cars and buses in just the same way, with the same firm air of command. Like the cashew girls, their control of the situation was never in question: they were the ones who got to pick and choose, to say no or yes. Some never flirted; some had affairs freely, with a refreshing lack of coyness or shame; some looked up and smiled only at one particular driver.
Back in the metros, Colombo and then Delhi, I look more closely at the women. The ones who strut their sexuality but retreat into the "good girl" persona; the ones who chose to make their own way but confess it still hurts when they're called "easy", or "sluts"; the ones who believe that sexuality is a possession you hand over only to the right man. They're beautiful, but there's a subtle difference in the way they dress, which is to attract attention and appraisal and perhaps approval. The cashew girls, twirling in their bright feathers; they dress to please themselves. The men are just an afterthought.
The Potter review
(And this was the obligatory Instant Potter review. Published in the Business Standard on July 18, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J K Rowling
Bloomsbury
POUNDS 16.99, 607 pages
Not that I want to rain on everybody's Potter parade, but now that we've reached Book Six, Rowling's saga has surpassed The Lord of the Rings , Beowulf and The Mabinogion in length. In Books One to Six, we saw Harry Potter grow from maltreated orphan to apprentice wizard to, finally, the magical world's only hope against the evil Lord Voldemort.
The Potter legend grew; from the baby who was the only living creature in magical history to survive an attack by Voldemort that even his wizard parents, Lily and James, couldn't withstand, Potter went one-on-one with the Dark Lord and lived to tell the tale. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , the Hogwarts School lost a pupil to the machinations of Voldemort; in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , Potter lost his godfather, Sirius Black.
The tone of the books grew darker: while none of the pupils at Hogwarts were actually sniffing potions or taking out half the school with their wands, Potterland was no longer the place where Butterbeer, Pensieves and unruly house elves charmed us all. In the nonmagical, Muggle world that we live in, the Potter saga fuelled a thousand hysterical adjectives and reviews, most of them containing the words "millions of copies sold".
In the sixth book of the series, Potter's world has lost most of its innocence; Hogwarts has been touched by death; even Albus Dumbledore, the emblematic figure of the white wizard set against Voldemort's sulky, pouting darkness, has sustained injuries that defy healing. And Harry now has concerns beyond teenage romance and Quidditch matches and the scheming of schoolmates.
In her anxiety to fill in the missing links and prepare the ground for Book Seven (coming to a store near you in the next three years, never fear), Rowling deliberately avoids some threads that might have deepened the story. The fear and suspicion he incurred in the last two books after a series of unfortunate events appears to have vanished without much trace; he is subjected to no more than the irritations of minor celebrity status. The lives of his parents, Lily and James, which seemed promising ground to mine for complexity and ambiguity, are extraneous to this part of the story.
Instead, as the world around Hogwarts is lashed by Voldemort's forces and the disappearance and deaths of minor characters, Harry and Dumbledore embark on a journey into the psyche of the Lord of Darkness. The mystery surrounding the identity of the Half-Blood Prince (could it be James Potter, or some unknown student?) will be cracked by page 250 by any halfway awake Potter fan, and the slowly unravelling story of Voldemort is disappointing. If you peer deeply into the heart of darkness, what you'll see is the inability to love: we must stumble through an interminable backstory in order to reach this banal pop psychology insight.
Perhaps in this, though, Rowling has her finger on the pulse of an age where evil has lost its grandeur: the face of evil isn't terrifying so much as mean, and perhaps what makes Voldemort scary is only that he's a petty racist with unlimited power at his disposal. We've met those before, but forgive me for being disappointed at the absence of sound and fury. When His Darkness and His Lightness do meet, they should at the very least "exchange a glance/ of great politeness", instead of stooping to clichéd dialogue.
But it's unfair to compare Rowling to the great epic poets, when the closest comparison is between Harry Potter and another innocent hero pitchforked into events beyond his control: Luke Skywalker. Potter is more complex than Skywalker, and certainly in this book, as he struggles with jealousy, anger, hate and sorrow, he grows up, as we have along with him. Voldemort lacks the tragic intensity of Darth Vader, but as yet another character dies, leaving Potter bereft, and as the shadow of darkness looms over Hogwarts, you know you'll line up for more.
This is a long, sometimes awkward, often mawkish Pilgrim's Progress , but it isn't often that a children's series starts with such lighthearted summoning of magic and ends by beckoning us into deepening gloom. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince may read like a prequel instead of a continuation, but it demands that we stick around for the ending—and by now, as Harry grows ever more orphaned, we know that happy endings only exist in fairy tales.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J K Rowling
Bloomsbury
POUNDS 16.99, 607 pages
Not that I want to rain on everybody's Potter parade, but now that we've reached Book Six, Rowling's saga has surpassed The Lord of the Rings , Beowulf and The Mabinogion in length. In Books One to Six, we saw Harry Potter grow from maltreated orphan to apprentice wizard to, finally, the magical world's only hope against the evil Lord Voldemort.
The Potter legend grew; from the baby who was the only living creature in magical history to survive an attack by Voldemort that even his wizard parents, Lily and James, couldn't withstand, Potter went one-on-one with the Dark Lord and lived to tell the tale. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , the Hogwarts School lost a pupil to the machinations of Voldemort; in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , Potter lost his godfather, Sirius Black.
The tone of the books grew darker: while none of the pupils at Hogwarts were actually sniffing potions or taking out half the school with their wands, Potterland was no longer the place where Butterbeer, Pensieves and unruly house elves charmed us all. In the nonmagical, Muggle world that we live in, the Potter saga fuelled a thousand hysterical adjectives and reviews, most of them containing the words "millions of copies sold".
In the sixth book of the series, Potter's world has lost most of its innocence; Hogwarts has been touched by death; even Albus Dumbledore, the emblematic figure of the white wizard set against Voldemort's sulky, pouting darkness, has sustained injuries that defy healing. And Harry now has concerns beyond teenage romance and Quidditch matches and the scheming of schoolmates.
In her anxiety to fill in the missing links and prepare the ground for Book Seven (coming to a store near you in the next three years, never fear), Rowling deliberately avoids some threads that might have deepened the story. The fear and suspicion he incurred in the last two books after a series of unfortunate events appears to have vanished without much trace; he is subjected to no more than the irritations of minor celebrity status. The lives of his parents, Lily and James, which seemed promising ground to mine for complexity and ambiguity, are extraneous to this part of the story.
Instead, as the world around Hogwarts is lashed by Voldemort's forces and the disappearance and deaths of minor characters, Harry and Dumbledore embark on a journey into the psyche of the Lord of Darkness. The mystery surrounding the identity of the Half-Blood Prince (could it be James Potter, or some unknown student?) will be cracked by page 250 by any halfway awake Potter fan, and the slowly unravelling story of Voldemort is disappointing. If you peer deeply into the heart of darkness, what you'll see is the inability to love: we must stumble through an interminable backstory in order to reach this banal pop psychology insight.
Perhaps in this, though, Rowling has her finger on the pulse of an age where evil has lost its grandeur: the face of evil isn't terrifying so much as mean, and perhaps what makes Voldemort scary is only that he's a petty racist with unlimited power at his disposal. We've met those before, but forgive me for being disappointed at the absence of sound and fury. When His Darkness and His Lightness do meet, they should at the very least "exchange a glance/ of great politeness", instead of stooping to clichéd dialogue.
But it's unfair to compare Rowling to the great epic poets, when the closest comparison is between Harry Potter and another innocent hero pitchforked into events beyond his control: Luke Skywalker. Potter is more complex than Skywalker, and certainly in this book, as he struggles with jealousy, anger, hate and sorrow, he grows up, as we have along with him. Voldemort lacks the tragic intensity of Darth Vader, but as yet another character dies, leaving Potter bereft, and as the shadow of darkness looms over Hogwarts, you know you'll line up for more.
This is a long, sometimes awkward, often mawkish Pilgrim's Progress , but it isn't often that a children's series starts with such lighthearted summoning of magic and ends by beckoning us into deepening gloom. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince may read like a prequel instead of a continuation, but it demands that we stick around for the ending—and by now, as Harry grows ever more orphaned, we know that happy endings only exist in fairy tales.
Speaking Volumes: The Trouble with Harry
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, on July 15, 2005. This was the obligatory pre-Potter piece.)
Like every other Muggle on the planet, I'll be queuing up tomorrow for the sixth book in the Harry Potter saga. There are good reasons for doing this.
Millions of copies of J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince have been shipped around the world; in the continuing saga of Harry Potter and the Frumious Embargo, the security's been tight enough to prevent leaks. One copy was accidentally sold at a store in Vancouver, but in a nauseating display of Potterian solidarity, the boy who bought it returned the book, saying that he would prefer to read it along with the other fans.
If you need further endorsement, the current Pope believes the Potter books distort "Christianity in the soul"; various parents' groups want the books banned for promoting witchcraft; and minority groups have demanded more positive characters "of colour", given that J K Rowling has already included strong women characters and gay teachers. The Potter books have spawned an entire subculture of fan-fiction on the Net, a hugely profitable film series, and an even more profitable set of merchandising franchises. Not bad for a boy wizard with a geeky haircut, funny glasses and a sinister absence of adolescent pimples.
But standing in line this time feels a bit like buying tickets for Woodstock Two when you were part of the generation that got down in the mud and rain for the real thing. It's hard to look back now and remember the exact quality of the excitement that the first Harry Potter book generated, the astonishment and delight with which we read about a boy wizard discovering Quidditch and battling Voldemort at Hogwarts. J K Rowling returned all but the most hardened, most resistant of readers to the pleasures of childhood reading; it was like being present at the birth of Alice in Wonderland or the Winnie the Pooh books or The Wizard of Oz. Over the years, as Harry Potter has grown up, so have we.
Now the series has two distinct sorts of readers. The first I envy; this is the generation that is just old enough to read the Potter books for the first time. Even if they're doing it with the buzz and the hype, the banners and the plot summaries, there is something magical about being introduced to the Leaky Cauldron and Bertie Bott's disgusting jellybeans and Dumbledore for the very first time.
The second is us: battered by the avalanche of publicity, aware that this is either a brand or a meme we're buying, not a book any more, seeking refuge in irony and parodies even as we shrug our shoulders and add our mite to the Potter industry. "Harry Potter" has become the kind of term to which you append "phenomenon" instinctively. Rowling's saga is up there with The Da Vinci Code and other 21st century bestsellers as one of the great marketing triumphs of the publishing industry. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and this shouldn't detract from Rowling's success, but it is impossible to read Harry Potter now without a mental PowerPoint presentation switching on that lists sales by continent and country, warehousing statistics, publicity plans and everything that it was once considered unnecessary for a reader to know about a book.
And over the last two or three books, the series itself has lost some of its edge. Rowling is, to borrow a term from television, perilously close to jumping the shark, if she hasn't done so already. There is now a formula: a boarding school story, on the same lines as Blyton's school sagas and the Billy Bunter books, a Quidditch match, a dose of magic, then the Fight Between Good and Evil, with Voldemort sneering for all he's worth, and finally an action-packed battle sequence. One of the main characters might die, just for added interest, sparking off slightly gruesome guessing games on a thousand fan sites.
Oh well. Tomorrow, even so, I'll be there, muttering at a hundred kids to get out of my way unless they want an elbow in their sweet little faces, trying to get my fix just like the millions of other Harry junkies around the world. When you're already hooked, you go along for the ride; and who knows, this time around, it might be a good trip after all.
Like every other Muggle on the planet, I'll be queuing up tomorrow for the sixth book in the Harry Potter saga. There are good reasons for doing this.
Millions of copies of J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince have been shipped around the world; in the continuing saga of Harry Potter and the Frumious Embargo, the security's been tight enough to prevent leaks. One copy was accidentally sold at a store in Vancouver, but in a nauseating display of Potterian solidarity, the boy who bought it returned the book, saying that he would prefer to read it along with the other fans.
If you need further endorsement, the current Pope believes the Potter books distort "Christianity in the soul"; various parents' groups want the books banned for promoting witchcraft; and minority groups have demanded more positive characters "of colour", given that J K Rowling has already included strong women characters and gay teachers. The Potter books have spawned an entire subculture of fan-fiction on the Net, a hugely profitable film series, and an even more profitable set of merchandising franchises. Not bad for a boy wizard with a geeky haircut, funny glasses and a sinister absence of adolescent pimples.
But standing in line this time feels a bit like buying tickets for Woodstock Two when you were part of the generation that got down in the mud and rain for the real thing. It's hard to look back now and remember the exact quality of the excitement that the first Harry Potter book generated, the astonishment and delight with which we read about a boy wizard discovering Quidditch and battling Voldemort at Hogwarts. J K Rowling returned all but the most hardened, most resistant of readers to the pleasures of childhood reading; it was like being present at the birth of Alice in Wonderland or the Winnie the Pooh books or The Wizard of Oz. Over the years, as Harry Potter has grown up, so have we.
Now the series has two distinct sorts of readers. The first I envy; this is the generation that is just old enough to read the Potter books for the first time. Even if they're doing it with the buzz and the hype, the banners and the plot summaries, there is something magical about being introduced to the Leaky Cauldron and Bertie Bott's disgusting jellybeans and Dumbledore for the very first time.
The second is us: battered by the avalanche of publicity, aware that this is either a brand or a meme we're buying, not a book any more, seeking refuge in irony and parodies even as we shrug our shoulders and add our mite to the Potter industry. "Harry Potter" has become the kind of term to which you append "phenomenon" instinctively. Rowling's saga is up there with The Da Vinci Code and other 21st century bestsellers as one of the great marketing triumphs of the publishing industry. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and this shouldn't detract from Rowling's success, but it is impossible to read Harry Potter now without a mental PowerPoint presentation switching on that lists sales by continent and country, warehousing statistics, publicity plans and everything that it was once considered unnecessary for a reader to know about a book.
And over the last two or three books, the series itself has lost some of its edge. Rowling is, to borrow a term from television, perilously close to jumping the shark, if she hasn't done so already. There is now a formula: a boarding school story, on the same lines as Blyton's school sagas and the Billy Bunter books, a Quidditch match, a dose of magic, then the Fight Between Good and Evil, with Voldemort sneering for all he's worth, and finally an action-packed battle sequence. One of the main characters might die, just for added interest, sparking off slightly gruesome guessing games on a thousand fan sites.
Oh well. Tomorrow, even so, I'll be there, muttering at a hundred kids to get out of my way unless they want an elbow in their sweet little faces, trying to get my fix just like the millions of other Harry junkies around the world. When you're already hooked, you go along for the ride; and who knows, this time around, it might be a good trip after all.
Random stuff: Kolkata blogs
(This was a blogs-for-beginners story, written in a hurry for The Kolkata Telegraph; published on Saturday, July 9, 2005).
"More than the newspapers, more than the many films shot every year in Calcutta, it’s the blogs that bring me the real news, of a city that is shifting shape in strange and interesting ways, home to expatriates from Cambridge and diehard Mohun Bagan fans, activists and passionate poets, sad old Bongs with a flair for the language and brash new Tolkien-obsessed gamesters. The adda never died; it just moved online."
"More than the newspapers, more than the many films shot every year in Calcutta, it’s the blogs that bring me the real news, of a city that is shifting shape in strange and interesting ways, home to expatriates from Cambridge and diehard Mohun Bagan fans, activists and passionate poets, sad old Bongs with a flair for the language and brash new Tolkien-obsessed gamesters. The adda never died; it just moved online."
Speaking Volumes: Five ideas of India
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, July 5, 2005)
The problem with telling history as though it were a story is that some stories always end up being more influential than others. I can think of four in particular that are told about contemporary India in Rashomon style; all four, in varying degrees, are inaccurate, and all four have caused lasting damage.
The first is the sanitized history of India told by textbooks, sanctified by official approval, and given the blessings of the people in power. In this version, historical figures have as much reality as the smudged images on those pictorial charts we used to cut-and-paste into our schoolbooks, and no more freedom of movement. Netaji is caught for posterity with his arm upraised, calling an army of idealists to action; but that is all his story.
In the official version, it cannot be admitted that Netaji Bose is dead, or that he may have died years ago, just as nothing can be admitted of Gandhi's odder experiments and the cracks in his vision of India lest it tarnish the image of him on the Dandi March. In this version, it is not possible to allow a leader like Advani to express his real views on Jinnah without rebuttal and censorship from the members of his own party, and tremendous discomfort and confusion from members of other political organisations. This is a tin-whistle history, a cartoon history that has no room for nuance or ambiguity, where India's shining past must be appealed to even as its great future is invoked, without regard to the reality of one or the other.
The second is the history of historians, a nuanced, detailed story told with footnotes and references that suffers from being largely inaccessible to the people whose history it is supposed to be. When it comes to explaining India and delving into the country's past, or even exploring the question of when an entity like India actually came into being, the historians have the answers. But these are not easily shared with even students and the reading public, the two relatively privileged sections of society for whom these stories might be accessible. It takes eons for "news" from the world of history to leak into official textbooks, and glacial ages for new developments to become part of the general story Indians tell themselves about their country.
The third is the history that the Hindutva rightwing parties so recently tried to superimpose on the official narrative of modern India, which is a shrunken, simplified, often glaringly inaccurate history of a Hindu country ravaged by Muslim invaders, now seeking to rebuild itself from the ashes and return to the shining glories of a nebulous past. This is a tempting history because it is so accessible, so easily told; its lack of reliance on a basis of fact and its ability to press myths and legends into service as though they were fact makes it a racy, colourful narrative. This history relies on simplifications, where the past becomes a battleground between Us and Them, where the future is always glorious, if we only keep faith in the story and the storytellers. It can be very seductive--once you dispense with the facts, all that's left is a story and a promise—but with stories like this, someone, somewhere down the line, will eventually pay for what has been omitted, fabricated or glossed over.
The fourth is the version that authors like V S Naipaul have been so successful in putting forward before the world and buttressing with apparent scholarship. Naipaul's writings on India have often been so prescient, compelling and incisive that he is much harder to refute than the average ill-informed roadside demagogue. His vision of India is of a wounded civilization, irrevocably, terribly damaged by succeeding waves of invasion, now seeking refuge in a denial of the past.
Last year, William Dalrymple took apart the Vijayanagara moment, a key emotional passage in Naipaul's work where he describes standing amid the ruins of Hampi. Naipaul's views on the fall of Vijayanagar have been widely reported; he saw it as an emblem of the destruction of "Ancient Hindu India", a scar caused by multiple invasions on the psyche of India. Dalrymple's argument was scholarly and carefully deliberated, and he drew attention to the manner in which Naipaul's black-and-white view of the past was itself a distortion of medieval India.
Vijayanagar had a history where Hindu and Muslim culture fused in complex and intertwined ways, but this history, Dalrymple regretted, was not the history Naipaul wanted to see: "This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term)…"
Dalrymple's argument was hysterically received by some of Naipaul's supporters; but it was founded on solid fact, unlike Naipaul's moving, but ultimately inaccurate, epiphany at Hampi. But Dalrymple set out to produce a viable argument, not an alternate history that was neither official and sanitized nor populist and incorrect.
That history has been written by several historians, but few have got to the point as rapidly and as incisively as Professor Amartya Sen in his collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian. Speaking of the initial, devastating wave of invasions, he observes dispassionately: "It would be as silly to deny the barbarities of the invasive history as it would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim presence in India." Later, in the same essay, he analyses the Hindutva movement's attempt to invent a plausible past: "This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India—proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present—and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism." The India that Sen offers to us, instead, is an India founded on a series of argumentative encounters, an India with room for a thousand conversations on the idea of India, with a home-grown democracy that was in place long before the British arrived.
This is a fifth story, told brilliantly and with the true intellectual's genuine blend of an insatiable curiosity—Sen's explorations of the idea of India take him through an examination of Ray, Tagore, gender and calendars, among other things—and an absolute respect for facts, for what really happened as opposed to what we would like to have happened. This is how history should be written, not as a dry narrative about dead kings or a hysterical diatribe pushing a certain agenda, but as an account of ideas and arguments that have been passed from hand to hand for years and that remain relevant even today. It's a strange reflection, but India might have found its most accessible, most intellectually stimulating historian in the person of a Nobel-Prize winning economist.
The problem with telling history as though it were a story is that some stories always end up being more influential than others. I can think of four in particular that are told about contemporary India in Rashomon style; all four, in varying degrees, are inaccurate, and all four have caused lasting damage.
The first is the sanitized history of India told by textbooks, sanctified by official approval, and given the blessings of the people in power. In this version, historical figures have as much reality as the smudged images on those pictorial charts we used to cut-and-paste into our schoolbooks, and no more freedom of movement. Netaji is caught for posterity with his arm upraised, calling an army of idealists to action; but that is all his story.
In the official version, it cannot be admitted that Netaji Bose is dead, or that he may have died years ago, just as nothing can be admitted of Gandhi's odder experiments and the cracks in his vision of India lest it tarnish the image of him on the Dandi March. In this version, it is not possible to allow a leader like Advani to express his real views on Jinnah without rebuttal and censorship from the members of his own party, and tremendous discomfort and confusion from members of other political organisations. This is a tin-whistle history, a cartoon history that has no room for nuance or ambiguity, where India's shining past must be appealed to even as its great future is invoked, without regard to the reality of one or the other.
The second is the history of historians, a nuanced, detailed story told with footnotes and references that suffers from being largely inaccessible to the people whose history it is supposed to be. When it comes to explaining India and delving into the country's past, or even exploring the question of when an entity like India actually came into being, the historians have the answers. But these are not easily shared with even students and the reading public, the two relatively privileged sections of society for whom these stories might be accessible. It takes eons for "news" from the world of history to leak into official textbooks, and glacial ages for new developments to become part of the general story Indians tell themselves about their country.
The third is the history that the Hindutva rightwing parties so recently tried to superimpose on the official narrative of modern India, which is a shrunken, simplified, often glaringly inaccurate history of a Hindu country ravaged by Muslim invaders, now seeking to rebuild itself from the ashes and return to the shining glories of a nebulous past. This is a tempting history because it is so accessible, so easily told; its lack of reliance on a basis of fact and its ability to press myths and legends into service as though they were fact makes it a racy, colourful narrative. This history relies on simplifications, where the past becomes a battleground between Us and Them, where the future is always glorious, if we only keep faith in the story and the storytellers. It can be very seductive--once you dispense with the facts, all that's left is a story and a promise—but with stories like this, someone, somewhere down the line, will eventually pay for what has been omitted, fabricated or glossed over.
The fourth is the version that authors like V S Naipaul have been so successful in putting forward before the world and buttressing with apparent scholarship. Naipaul's writings on India have often been so prescient, compelling and incisive that he is much harder to refute than the average ill-informed roadside demagogue. His vision of India is of a wounded civilization, irrevocably, terribly damaged by succeeding waves of invasion, now seeking refuge in a denial of the past.
Last year, William Dalrymple took apart the Vijayanagara moment, a key emotional passage in Naipaul's work where he describes standing amid the ruins of Hampi. Naipaul's views on the fall of Vijayanagar have been widely reported; he saw it as an emblem of the destruction of "Ancient Hindu India", a scar caused by multiple invasions on the psyche of India. Dalrymple's argument was scholarly and carefully deliberated, and he drew attention to the manner in which Naipaul's black-and-white view of the past was itself a distortion of medieval India.
Vijayanagar had a history where Hindu and Muslim culture fused in complex and intertwined ways, but this history, Dalrymple regretted, was not the history Naipaul wanted to see: "This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term)…"
Dalrymple's argument was hysterically received by some of Naipaul's supporters; but it was founded on solid fact, unlike Naipaul's moving, but ultimately inaccurate, epiphany at Hampi. But Dalrymple set out to produce a viable argument, not an alternate history that was neither official and sanitized nor populist and incorrect.
That history has been written by several historians, but few have got to the point as rapidly and as incisively as Professor Amartya Sen in his collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian. Speaking of the initial, devastating wave of invasions, he observes dispassionately: "It would be as silly to deny the barbarities of the invasive history as it would be to see this savagery as the main historical feature of the Muslim presence in India." Later, in the same essay, he analyses the Hindutva movement's attempt to invent a plausible past: "This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India—proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present—and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism." The India that Sen offers to us, instead, is an India founded on a series of argumentative encounters, an India with room for a thousand conversations on the idea of India, with a home-grown democracy that was in place long before the British arrived.
This is a fifth story, told brilliantly and with the true intellectual's genuine blend of an insatiable curiosity—Sen's explorations of the idea of India take him through an examination of Ray, Tagore, gender and calendars, among other things—and an absolute respect for facts, for what really happened as opposed to what we would like to have happened. This is how history should be written, not as a dry narrative about dead kings or a hysterical diatribe pushing a certain agenda, but as an account of ideas and arguments that have been passed from hand to hand for years and that remain relevant even today. It's a strange reflection, but India might have found its most accessible, most intellectually stimulating historian in the person of a Nobel-Prize winning economist.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Business Standard column: Books Do Furnish a City
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, June 28, 2005)
Somewhere on my bookshelves, there's a collection of modern verse that cost me Rs 15, three plates of papri chaat, one back massage and a paper on Jane Austen. It's a thick volume, dense with marginalia in four different sets of handwriting. It started with Eliot and Yeats, which was where the Eng. Lit. syllabus of a decade ago stopped, and took us into what was then new, wildly exciting, uncharted territory with the poetry of Symborska, Brodsky, Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish.
The four of us were regular visitors to the Sunday book bazaar held at Daryaganj: we were too broke to have more than a passing acquaintance with proper bookstores, but too hungry for books, in that pre- Amazon.com, pre-liberalisation era, to withstand the siren call of the pavement booksellers.
When our pockets were to let, we browsed hungrily and wistfully (and became extremely proficient speedreaders as a consequence). When we had the money, we greedily weighed the merits of Faulkner versus Nabokov, Faiz versus Ghalib, an Asimov compendium in tatters versus a single Arthur C Clarke novel in good condition. We met friends doing the rounds; some only in search of calendar art pictures with which to decorate their rooms (now considered high kitsch art, but in our day they were just garish wallpaper), some in search of a Ludlum or Richard Bach, some penniless seekers after the truth according to Pinker or Chomsky. We cultivated professors who might be induced to point us to rare finds and curiosities, most of these culled from the decaying libraries of the Raj. There was usually enough left over for us to end the morning's outing with a visit to Old and Famous Jalebiwala or Parathewala Galli, relics of a pre-Barista age.
The compendium of verse was expensive, and we were ten rupees short. R and J shrugged and suggested that we come back next week. S and I argued that we'd spent the month's allowance anyway; next week we'd be even more broke. Then the bookseller, a dour man who had watched unmoved as we scrabbled for loose change, said gruffly, "Poetry ke liye discount hai."
He took our money; we took the book and hitched a ride back home, because we had spent even the bus fare. It took me three months to buy out my co-owners, but it was a soft deal: we agreed that they could borrow the book back at need. J consulted it for love poetry he could crib and pass off as his own to impressionable girlfriends, R read the three poems by Rilke included in the collection and then saved up for four months until he could afford an entire Rilke compendium, S discovered a love of feminist poetry through Plath and others that eventually impelled her to apply to the US for further studies in feminist writings.
It's hard to convey what the Sunday book bazaar, and the pavement booksellers in Connaught Place meant to us. There were no mass-market chains like Crossword or the Corner Bookstore; the Bookshop and the Bookworm were landmarks in a city that lacked quality bookshops, but were too expensive for us to patronise in those days. Some of us had come from other cities—Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore. We knew the pavement booksellers there, whether "there" was College Street or Flora Fountain. Even today, when many markets in Delhi have at least one bookshop, and Café Coffee Day sells books along with its lattes and frappes, those pavement sellers are often a student's first lessons in paper-and-print love.
Last month, Bombay's pavement booksellers were turfed out of the Flora Fountain area by an administration that sees no difference between them and illegal encroachers on public space. They have since been relocated, but not in Flora Fountain itself. This week, Delhi's Sunday book bazaar came under threat and there's still confusion over what will happen to the bazaar—the system of issuing tokens to regular booksellers isn't working and the new space they have been allocated may not be adequate. It seems, at the time of writing, that they will be allowed to stay. In both Delhi and Bombay, the argument for throwing out the booksellers has been the one about "public space". The Sunday book bazaar was under threat of closure because a "beautification drive" was in progress.
And I'm thinking, what better use of public space could you have than to use it as a vast and mobile library? Neither Bombay nor Delhi has decent public libraries; Bombay, for all its size, sprawl and energy, doesn't have the number of bookshops it needs to encourage a reading public.
A visit to a bookshop is a deliberate, planned affair; a stroll down sidewalks covered with books is serendipity at work. A book bazaar is for readers who might be too intimidated or too broke or too busy to step into a bookshop: it doesn't just belong in public space, it is in the best sense of the term, the public's very own space. We shouldn't be reduced to defending pavement booksellers; we should be demanding more areas, in this mall-ridden city, where you can buy jalebis and hankies alongside ideas and excitement.
Somewhere on my bookshelves, there's a collection of modern verse that cost me Rs 15, three plates of papri chaat, one back massage and a paper on Jane Austen. It's a thick volume, dense with marginalia in four different sets of handwriting. It started with Eliot and Yeats, which was where the Eng. Lit. syllabus of a decade ago stopped, and took us into what was then new, wildly exciting, uncharted territory with the poetry of Symborska, Brodsky, Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish.
The four of us were regular visitors to the Sunday book bazaar held at Daryaganj: we were too broke to have more than a passing acquaintance with proper bookstores, but too hungry for books, in that pre- Amazon.com, pre-liberalisation era, to withstand the siren call of the pavement booksellers.
When our pockets were to let, we browsed hungrily and wistfully (and became extremely proficient speedreaders as a consequence). When we had the money, we greedily weighed the merits of Faulkner versus Nabokov, Faiz versus Ghalib, an Asimov compendium in tatters versus a single Arthur C Clarke novel in good condition. We met friends doing the rounds; some only in search of calendar art pictures with which to decorate their rooms (now considered high kitsch art, but in our day they were just garish wallpaper), some in search of a Ludlum or Richard Bach, some penniless seekers after the truth according to Pinker or Chomsky. We cultivated professors who might be induced to point us to rare finds and curiosities, most of these culled from the decaying libraries of the Raj. There was usually enough left over for us to end the morning's outing with a visit to Old and Famous Jalebiwala or Parathewala Galli, relics of a pre-Barista age.
The compendium of verse was expensive, and we were ten rupees short. R and J shrugged and suggested that we come back next week. S and I argued that we'd spent the month's allowance anyway; next week we'd be even more broke. Then the bookseller, a dour man who had watched unmoved as we scrabbled for loose change, said gruffly, "Poetry ke liye discount hai."
He took our money; we took the book and hitched a ride back home, because we had spent even the bus fare. It took me three months to buy out my co-owners, but it was a soft deal: we agreed that they could borrow the book back at need. J consulted it for love poetry he could crib and pass off as his own to impressionable girlfriends, R read the three poems by Rilke included in the collection and then saved up for four months until he could afford an entire Rilke compendium, S discovered a love of feminist poetry through Plath and others that eventually impelled her to apply to the US for further studies in feminist writings.
It's hard to convey what the Sunday book bazaar, and the pavement booksellers in Connaught Place meant to us. There were no mass-market chains like Crossword or the Corner Bookstore; the Bookshop and the Bookworm were landmarks in a city that lacked quality bookshops, but were too expensive for us to patronise in those days. Some of us had come from other cities—Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore. We knew the pavement booksellers there, whether "there" was College Street or Flora Fountain. Even today, when many markets in Delhi have at least one bookshop, and Café Coffee Day sells books along with its lattes and frappes, those pavement sellers are often a student's first lessons in paper-and-print love.
Last month, Bombay's pavement booksellers were turfed out of the Flora Fountain area by an administration that sees no difference between them and illegal encroachers on public space. They have since been relocated, but not in Flora Fountain itself. This week, Delhi's Sunday book bazaar came under threat and there's still confusion over what will happen to the bazaar—the system of issuing tokens to regular booksellers isn't working and the new space they have been allocated may not be adequate. It seems, at the time of writing, that they will be allowed to stay. In both Delhi and Bombay, the argument for throwing out the booksellers has been the one about "public space". The Sunday book bazaar was under threat of closure because a "beautification drive" was in progress.
And I'm thinking, what better use of public space could you have than to use it as a vast and mobile library? Neither Bombay nor Delhi has decent public libraries; Bombay, for all its size, sprawl and energy, doesn't have the number of bookshops it needs to encourage a reading public.
A visit to a bookshop is a deliberate, planned affair; a stroll down sidewalks covered with books is serendipity at work. A book bazaar is for readers who might be too intimidated or too broke or too busy to step into a bookshop: it doesn't just belong in public space, it is in the best sense of the term, the public's very own space. We shouldn't be reduced to defending pavement booksellers; we should be demanding more areas, in this mall-ridden city, where you can buy jalebis and hankies alongside ideas and excitement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
