What elephants! What tigers!

William Radice writes a well-meaning review of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets:
"Their poems start to rub up against each other, more interestingly and movingly in this anthology than in any other I have seen."

Radice is an old India hand, but the rest of the review is illuminating because of his annoying assumptions about how Indian poets should write. "...For the reader of the anthology, the exuberance of India is precisely what is missing. Where are the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds? Where are the family relationships that the Indo-Anglian novelists have explored so lovingly?"

I was taken aback at that archaism--I haven't heard anyone in India describe Indian writers by the term "Indo-Anglian" since the dark ages--and irritated at Radice's appeal for Indian poets to abandon iambics in favour of the "tabla-beat of India". It's telling that he quotes Raine, who discovered India at the age of 74: "The place of every arrival, the term of every spiritual quest."

Jeet Thayil, the editor of the anthology--full disclosure, on the McCrum scale quoted below, Jeet's probably a 7--has responded:
"Radice's orientalism would be quaint enough to be endearing - if it weren't so annoying. He tells the reader (breathlessly, I imagine) that my anthology lacks "the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds" of India, not to forget "family relationships", "children" and groups of enthusiastic "Indian university students". What a happy picture must be playing in Radice's overheated 19th-century imagination! What elephants! What tigers! What heat and dust and palanquins!" Check out the lively discussion in the Comments section.

Why am I blogging this? Not just because it's a "fight" or a controversy. Not just because Jeet is a friend. But because this exchange feeds into a very contemporary debate, where many of us are beginning to question what the West wants to read about India and how it wants Indian authors to respond.

Amitava Kumar: http://bostonreview.net/BR33.6/kumar.php

David Baddiel: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5205157.ece

The McCrum scale

In Robert McCrum's column on the best of the year's fiction, he tackles the logrolling issue by offering full disclosure on the degree of his relationship with each author on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being "don't know at all", 9 being "very close" and 10, which no author gets, being presumably "she and I are still playing footsie in bed".

I'm all in favour of full disclosure. But the McCrum Scale For Critics sends shivers down my spine. It has great potential: there's the possibility of discreet name-dropping, for example (so Paul Auster rates a 9 with McCrum and Peter Carey an 8? Zoe Heller has some catching up to do...).

What if you get it wrong, though? That pleasant evening with El Nobelista you remember so well might show up as a 6 on your scale, but El Nobelista might write back with a puzzled: "And you are...?" Or worse, if you get it wrong on the opposite end of the scale, and Struggling Young Turk realises, too late, that the "close friendship" he's been boasting of rates a dismal 2.5 in your book. And then there's the need for revisions: you could chart entire cultural and personal histories just by perusing the rise-and-fall on the critic's full disclosure posts.

"Yes, back in the days when they agreed on the importance of transgressive writing, he was a 9; but then she did that take-down of what she called the "ersatz narratology" in his Great Novel and he slid down to a 1.5, after which they found themselves on the same side of the Derridean fence, and jogged along at a 5.6, but then they slept together and he went back to 8, but he was so miffed that this didn't rate a 9, they broke up and now he's a permanent 3."

And then you might have Fledgling Critic-Cynical Doyen disagreements on what exactly each number on the scale stands for:

Author gets a 0:
Fledgling critic: "I'm proud to stand outside the corrupt circus of the literary establishment and offer an independent opinion untainted by personal contact with authors that might taint my perfectly independent, furiously honest review!"
Cynical Doyen: "The author's dead, or we'd be doing lunch at his chateau."

Author gets a 5:
Fledgling critic: "He raised an eyebrow at me at so-and-so's book launch, and said, oh hello there."
Cynical Doyen: "He's slapped my face with his glove thrice after bad reviews, but we've been out for drinks seven times after the good ones so I guess it evens out."

Author gets a 9:
Fledgling critic: "I interviewed him once and he wrote me the sweetest thank-you email afterwards."
Cynical Doyen: "Some people call him Snuffles and bring him fluffy blankets with ducks on them to warm up his cold toes, but I never did that. The blanket with my initials on them and 'CD Lurves You, Yes I Do' hand-knitted across the bottom row? My rivals must have planted it."

I'm having way too much fun with this so I'd better stop now. Oh, and McCrum's picks are pretty good.

Speaking Volumes: 2008's best fiction

(I know: best-of-the-year lists are the ultimate cliche, the lazy columnist's easy standby, and I've been doing them since 2002, so I should know. The truth is I like doing them for entirely selfish reasons: they give me an excuse to potter around my bookshelves, page back in my reading diary and reconnect with books I liked but that might otherwise sink to the back of what I fondly like to think of as my mind. {Visualise the room at the back of the house where all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else has been piling up since the 1980s--you know, the one where Miss Havisham has her own rocking chair and yes, that would be my brain.}
This is the published and necessarily truncated column: I'll be adding to the list over the course of this week. Many thanks to Vikram Johri, my colleague and fellow reviewer, who gently pointed out that I'd absent-mindedly portmanteaued Haruki Marukami's name together, creating a brand-new author called 'Harukami'.)

If you needed any proof that the novel has become more international than ever, and that it is still as much of a carrier of “news” as it was in the 18th century, 2008 provided ample evidence.

The year was bookended by two masterpieces. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, was technically a late 2007 release, but reached India only in early 2008. The Dominican-American writer exploded onto the literary scene in the 1990s and survived writer’s block for ten years before coming out with this Pulitzer-Prize winner. Oscar Wao is an overweight Dominican Star Trek fan, pursued by the lurking ghosts of “fuku” and the fear that he will never lose his virginity. Diaz is hilarious and savage by turns, and this definitely qualified for heartbreaking work of staggering genius status.

Roberto Bolano’s 2666 came out a full six years after the author’s death, and consolidates the posthumous fame that came to him after the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 in English. Its central theme is the unsolved murders of over 300 women in Santa Teresa, and he brings together a group of literary critics, a mentally unstable professor and a mysterious writer in classic Bolano style. Don’t be deterred by the 1,100-odd pages—it’s worth your time.

Though Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie and Pat Barker had works of varying degrees of excellence out this year, some of the real surprises came from less well-known names. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland polarized opinions: critics thought this post-9/11 novel with its evocation of the hidden world of cricket in New York was brilliant, while the Booker judges disagreed. I’d say O’Neill’s perfectly tempered prose and the immigrant world he conjures up are irresistible. Less satisfying was Sebastian Barry’s beautifully written The Secret Scripture. This novel about an old woman incarcerated in a mental asylum in Ireland had promise, but lets you down in the final stretch. For more demanding but infinitely better reads, try The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich or Rawi Hage’s explosive, bitter Cockroach.

The first part of Amitav Ghosh’s trilogy, A Sea of Poppies, was a fast-paced read that made up for occasionally one-dimensional characters by offering an unusual take on the Opium Wars and maritime India. Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence was often mired in complexity, but the breadth of his ideas made many of his fans look at concepts of East and West differently, even as the novel made some of us nostalgic for his non-fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth was an almost pitch-perfect, moving collection of short stories; she has an unusual gift of compassion that makes up for the sometimes narrow focus of her work.

Nadeem Aslam’s intricate The Wasted Vigil approaches Afghanistan from a distinctly fresh viewpoint—worth reading despite his predilection for dense thickets of prose. Mohammed Hanif’s black comedy, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, took on General Zia’s assassination with verve and devastating wit—definitely a keeper. And from another age, The Adventures of Amir Hamza in a fresh translation reminded us that black farce and outrageous sexual innuendo were not invented in our century, but much earlier.

P D James offered a classic murder mystery in The Private Patient, which also hinted that her poet-detective, Adam Dalgliesh, might be on the way to retirement. Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a sharp-edged thriller that took on financial skullduggery and sexual abuse in Sweden, was one of the surprises of the year—sadly, Larsson died before he could witness the success of his book. Stephen King’s Duma Key is the second book from the master of horror in recent times to signal his return to form, after a string of duds.

But if you’re looking for the unusual, try one of these. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a work of alternate history that introduces us to the “frozen Chosen”, two million Jews rescued from the death camps and relocated to Alaska. Closer to home, Manjula Padmanabhan explored an alternate reality, a world without women, in the provocative Escape.

For those who prefer light reading, Mark Crick’s parodies of great writers in Kafka’s Soup and Sartre’s Sink were brilliant and deadly. He mimics the voices of the greats, from Steinbeck to Dostoevsky, Goethe to Murakami, with incredible wit. The first of his collections gathers together recipes that the greats might have written about; the second collects D-I-Y mishaps. Brilliant work, and far more satisfying than the overhyped but ultimately weak The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

Speaking Volumes: Reading in a time of terror

In the days just after the Mumbai attacks, reading is the last thing on my mind. Like most of the people I know, I’m reading not books but blogs, Twitter feeds, the newspapers.

In the course of time, we read the lists of the dead, dreading the moment when our eyes will snag on a familiar name, when a single line of type will bring grief surging into our lives.

Terror and war force a pause, a kind of mourning from even the most dedicated readers and writers. In the aftermath of an attack anywhere in the world, at any moment in history—Hiroshima, Bali, Madrid, Beirut, New York, Mumbai—we seem to veer briefly away from fiction. After 9/11, bookstores reported that sales of non-fiction on military affairs and terrorism soared, as though by reading about the enemy one could draw a circle of protection around oneself, one’s family.

Terror strikes too close for us to want to see our lives reflected in the mirrors held up by Dom DeLillo, Amos Oz, Claire Messud, Denis Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan and a score of others. We always go back to fiction, in the end, but after that necessary pause, that breathing space.

Many of my friends turned to ancient sources of comfort: the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, especially Ecclesiastes. The best-known lines from Ecclesiastes are from Chapter 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal …”

But further along, you come across these lines: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.” It is a naïve thought, but it was at that moment it struck me: someone as human as me and you wrote the Bible. It may have been King Solomon, but he was no distant, magisterial author—like us, he had borne hapless witness to suffering and struggled to make sense of it.

Over this week, I have found my way back to fiction through poetry. I re-read W H Auden’s bitter ‘September 1, 1939,’ which was read so often in the US after 9/11. “Who can release them now,/ Who can reach the dead,/ Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden asks in an especially bitter verse, written for an earlier war. And then he flows into one of the most moving passages in poetry: “All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded lie…./ We must love one another or die.”

Auden led me to two poets closer to home. I had read Jeet Thayil’s ‘At Kabul Zoo, The Lion’ many years ago, in a different context. In this poem, Thayil imagines the devastation wreaked on the Kabul zoo (“So this is fear: tracers flaring/ above the pens, the fat thud/ of bullets…”), told from the point of view of one of its oldest inhabitants, Marjan the lion (“blind in one eye, / my jaw in shreds, my mane / singed to a useless crop, / I’m still here…”). Another place, another time: but his images hit home, almost painfully.

Then I went back to the late Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. Kolatkar was never a sentimental writer, and in this collection what he captured about Bombay wasn’t the city’s famed, and overstretched “spirit of resilience”. His Bombay was inhabited by the Boomtown Lepers’ Band, by pi-dogs and drug-pushers, by the drunk who rails against this “shit city… one big high-rise shit; waiting for God/ To pull the flush”.

What do you look for when you read at a time like this? Not comfort, not just a mirror image of shared sorrows. Perhaps what you look for most is some kind of meaning, an unromanticised reminder of how things really were, an antidote to easy empathy, knee-jerk sentimentality.

Many will find their bearings in more concrete books: analyses of terror, treatises on the politics of South Asia. Some will find solace in older accounts of wars and battles, in the Iliad, in Herodotus, in Michael Herr. Perhaps my tastes—poetry and the ancient religious texts—will not be shared by all. But I have learned this week that if reading does not provide answers or salvation, it does provide a path back to some sort of acceptance.

(Published in the Business Standard, December 5, 2008)

Speaking Volumes: Kill all the (wo)men

(This was supposed to be a gentle ode to the joys of reading books in connected series, rather than in isolation, but I got caught up with Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape and its predecessors. As sometimes happens, I discovered later that I'd drawn on information I'd first researched for a column written many years ago, but I think I put a different spin on it. As I get older, my memory shreds into tinier and tinier bits.)

Many readers often wish there was an accurate system of “book pairings”, in the same way gourmet chefs suggest wine pairings, just to enhance reading pleasure. We do our best, with collected editions dedicated to a particular author or genre, or with Amazon-style attempts to suggest books that might go together, but there just isn't enough out there.

Here’s a classic instance of how it might work. If you're interested in Vietnam, start with The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s blackly funny dissection of US intelligence efforts in that country, then move on to Michael Herr’s tour of duty reportage in Dispatches (1977), and close with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007). All three books are Nam classics in their own right, but read together, they have an indelible, cumulative impact.

Or, to take another genre, start with Mary Shelley's horror classic Frankenstein (1818), where a scientist’s dream of creating life has monstrous results, move on to Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin, where an ordinary New York apartment building conceals Satan’s child, and close with Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998), about a secret that menaces generations of children.

As Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape came out last week, I found myself hoping that readers wouldn’t read this intriguing work of dystopian science fiction in isolation. I can’t comment on the literary merits of Escape for reasons of conflict of interest, having read a very early draft, but as one of the few works of modern Indian science fiction, it’s an important debut.

A brief plot summary: Escape is set in a world devoid of women, dubbed the “Vermin Tribe” by the generals who run the land. There is, however, a single woman left— a young girl called Meiji, who has been raised in isolation by her three uncles, and as she emerges into adulthood, must escape in order to survive. It’s a complex tale, where, as with much of 21st century science fiction, the development and growth of the characters is just as important as the futuristic setting.

To read Escape in a vacuum, however, would be to do both the book and yourself a disservice. It should be book-ended by a utopia and a dystopia— both written by Asian women. In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein published Sultana’s Dream, set in the relative utopia of ‘Ladyland’. Women rule this world, but view men with maternal affection, seeing them as helpless creatures at the mercy of their own appetites, who must be placed in purdah for their own protection. Rokeya Hossein was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and her gentle utopia is filled with touches of whimsy— the work day in Ladyland is only two hours long, for instance, because the men used to waste the remaining hours in smoking hookahs. Rokeya Begum continued her exploration of utopia and its challenges in a second novella, Padmarag.

Almost nine decades later, the feminist scholar and imaginative writer Suniti Namjoshi published Mothers of Mayadip in 1989. This fable was set in a far darker world than Ladyland, and Namjoshi set down a flatly didactic novel: what if a feminist utopia depended on killing off all men? How utopian would it remain, set on a foundation of fear and deliberate cruelty? What would happen if any one of the women decided to save even a single baby boy? Namjoshi’s world was the exact opposite of the world Padmanabhan evokes in Escape, but they share a common basis: in each, one gender's sense of identity is based on its fear of the other.

Mothers of Mayadip is much shorter and much less ambitious in scope than Escape; Namjoshi’s interest lay in writing a fable, not a full-length novel. Like Padmanabhan, Namjoshi offered no easy conclusions: a world minus men was not guaranteed to be fair, equal or free of fear, and would inevitably face its own troubles. Escape is far more interested in the question of what form a world inhabited by just one gender would take; Manjula Padmanabhan’s predecessors were more interested in the idea of a feminist utopia/ dystopia as a thought experiment.

Reading the three together— if you can find Padmarag and Mothers of Mayadip in secondhand bookshops— is well worth it, and not just as an academic exercise. It’s interesting to see how the same questions are raised by three members of very different generations of women, and how the answers become increasingly complicated over time.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 25, 2008)

The Food Club: Changing palates

(Some time ago, the Business Standard asked me to do an offbeat food column. It's still finding its feet, but it's a lot of fun to write.)

Mention “eating healthy” to most normal people and they automatically think “deprivation”. The idea of dieting in any form, whether you’re a diabetic, a heart patient or a model, is linked with the idea of doing without: it’s easier to visualise the dark chocolate ice cream that you can’t eat than it is to visualise a healthy heart.

Never having dieted in my life, I was curious about how I would react to a month-long, ayurvedic and naturopathic diet. It’s astonishing how happy your so-called friends are to share their unpleasant diet experiences. The one who’d done the dismal cabbage diet (cabbage soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner) for ten days said, “Watch out for food dreams… I dreamt of wedding food and banquets and royal Mughlai cooking every single day, it makes you wake up crying.”

A recent heart patient spoke wistfully of his yearning for steak: “All I want is a very large slab of very red meat,” he said. “Kobe beef. Pork chops in apple sauce. Badam pasanda.” I said politely, “So, what’s for dinner tonight?” There was a long, pained silence. “Steamed vegetables and soya-flour chapattis.”

So I entered my ayurvedic retreat prepared for the worst. The day before I left, I treated myself to a steak in mushroom sauce with lightly steamed asparagus on the side, following that up with a double chocolate mousse. I figured I needed some good food memories to get me through the next month.

What is a healthy diet, exactly? I spent some time at a naturopathy centre and some time at an ayurveda centre, and came back with two contrasting opinions. Naturopathy and ayurveda both agree on an avoidance of “poisons”— both steer clear of meat as far as possible, eschew coffee, tea, alcohol, white sugar, refined flour and excess salt.

But naturopathy believes that most foods (read vegetables) are best eaten as close to their natural state as possible — juices and salads will predominate over curries and cooked dishes. Ayurveda believes that lightly cooked, bland foods are best for the system. In addition, ayurveda prescribes three different kinds of diets depending on your “dosha”.

The naturopathy diet was, for me, the more austere of the two. I dreamt of foie gras for three straight nights in a row, and began to miss desserts and sugary drinks about three days into the diet. Feeling deprived on a full stomach — the naturopathy meals were filling and the portions large — was an odd, disorienting experience. I knew after a week that however healthy this regimen of juices and salads might be, it wasn’t something I wanted to follow in my daily life.

Perhaps the ayurveda diet was better geared to my system, but I actually thrived on it. Meals were simple but excellent: fruit and either steamed idlis or moong-dal dosas for breakfast, a choice of three perfectly cooked vegetables with dalia khichdi for lunch, an occasional dessert, and more organic, locally-sourced vegetables for dinner. It sounds bland, but the variety in the vegetable dishes was extraordinary, and one never felt either hungry or too full.

I went out once to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and after nearly three weeks of healthy and tasty eating, it was a bizarre experience. Everything tasted too intense — too strongly flavoured, too salty, too spicy, too oily. I ate two bites of the beef curry I’d been craving, and stopped: it wasn’t what my palate wanted, though it was superbly cooked.

A month down the line, eating “normally” still feels wrong and food at parties seems too heavy.

I like some things about getting back to a normal diet — mostly the little treats and surprises, the lemony explosion of a perfect Tom Yam, the smoky silkiness of braised eel, the homely, memory-laden taste of a simple meat-and-potato curry.

But the change in my diet has changed the nature of my cravings: I dream of fresh fruit and of beetroot thoran, I find myself wanting green tea and fresh-caught, lightly steamed fish with just a bit of ginger and lime. Eating healthy, it turns out, isn’t always incompatible with eating well.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 2008)

Speaking Volumes: A legend at lunch

Getting older has its privileges, if very few of them. One is the pleasure of meeting an author who has shaped your world view over the course of decades.

Back in the 1990s, Nadine Gordimer had an unexpected effect on the narrow world of Delhi University’s students. She was often cited, her works were passed from hand to hand and discussed in fierce tones, and her politics informed our lives as we dissected apartheid and looked at India’s own unspoken policies of discrimination anew.

Many of us could quote portions of her Nobel speech by heart. She had won the Prize for literature in 1991, and I still remember the electrifying shiver that ran down my spine when I heard the first line: “In the beginning was the Word,” she started her speech, borrowing from the Bible and making those ancient words her very own.

She spoke powerfully of what it was to grow up in the South Africa of the apartheid years: “Only many years later was I to realize that if I had been a child in that category — black — I might not have become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible for me was not open to any black child.” Gordimer’s books were often banned, though unlike her contemporaries—Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Jaki Seroke among others—she was not sent to jail.

At a private lunch hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi to celebrate her first visit to India in 14 years, Gordimer is relaxed and open. The lecture she gave in Calcutta was something of a triumph, the event attended by over 700 people; a quiet reading in Delhi will attract over 150 squeezed into a small hall. Her apparent fragility is misleading; at 85, she has the energy and curiosity of a much younger woman. She’s looking forward, she confides, to a trip to Mexico later this year to attend the birthday celebrations of her friend, the writer Carlos Fuentes, and expects to spend her own birthday on a plane.

It gives her great pleasure to know that censorship no longer exists in South Africa; she comments wryly on the excellent taste of the government’s censors. Of her more than 14 novels, the South African government had seen fit to censor four—The Late Bourgeois World, The Conversationist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. It’s something of a tribute to her powers as a writer that the last three of these haven’t dated and still remain relevant today.

Over lunch, the discussion ranges across a number of subjects. Gordimer has a sharp, alert birdlike presence; she’s an intent listener, picking up the unspoken nuances in our questions. She finds parallels between South Africa and India, and speaks of how the younger writers in South Africa mine the question of race relations and discrimination from an entirely different perspective. “We were three separate nations for so many years,” she says, “white, black and coloured; we are still getting used to being one country.” Her years of struggle are touched upon lightly; she insists that despite the many bans on her books, she never suffered as much as others did.

Like many writers who have lived through times of suffering and repression, Nadine Gordimer remains intensely attuned to injustice. There is passion in her voice when she speaks of how Salman Rushdie’s proposed visit to South Africa had to be aborted—Rushdie is a personal friend of hers, and over the years, Gordimer has spoken up against the fatwa that kept him in hiding after the Satanic Verses controversy. She had, she says, very much wanted him to come to South Africa, but the visit was cancelled after the Muslim community erupted in protests and made death threats against the writer. Her voice is laced with indignation as she speaks of this, after all these years.

Is she still writing? At 85, many authors would have settled back and rested on their laurels, but Gordimer cannot imagine a life that didn’t involve writing—her most recent collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, came out in 2007. She rarely discusses current work, but confirms that she has something in the pipeline.

I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to tell her what this casual meeting means to me. For my generation of readers, Nadine Gordimer opened up a much larger world than any of us could have imagined, and I like to think that she also stirred our consciences. There are authors whom you love, and there are authors who change your life. And sometimes, the same person can be both things to you, as Nadine Gordimer has been for so many of us.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 18, 2008)