The BS column: Personal Histories

(Published in the Business Standard,
April 13, 2009)

Ben Okri referred once to the older generation—in any time, of any place—as “libraries on fire”. In modern India, the stories these “libraries” contained often went up in metaphorical smoke: of all the things we were forbidden to write about, the family was the most taboo.

For many (though not all) writers, the first and most natural route into writing is the exploration of their own histories. Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Vikram Seth are classic examples of those who were drawn into exploring the silences around the official histories, the absences in family photographs. The late Flannery O’Connor had an astute understanding of why the code of silence and repression was so tempting to any writer worth her salt. “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation,” she said in one of her interviews. “In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

Two new writers, Sadia Shepard and Aatish Taseer, have little in common beyond this: a curiosity about their roots, and the means to indulge that curiosity. The titles of their books are revealing: Shepard’s exploration of her roots in the Bene Israel community of India is called The Girl from Foreign, and Taseer’s journey through the map of modern-day Islam is called Stranger to History.


Taseer’s story is well-known by now. He was brought up in Delhi by his mother, the journalist Tavleen Singh, and knew little about his father: “My earliest sense of being Muslim was bound to my earliest perception of my father’s absence.” The first letter his father ever wrote to him was in response to an article Taseer had written on Islamic extremism in Britain; the father excoriated the son, accusing him of lacking even “superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos”.

To Taseer, the most interesting part of the letter was that his father, “a professed disbeliever in Islam’s founding tenets”, still retained the right to be offended as a Muslim. “Caught between feeling provoked and needing to act, I thought of making an Islamic journey…. The first part of the trip would be an old Islamic journey, almost a pilgrimage, from its once greatest city to its holiest. The trip away, through Iran and Pakistan, was a journey home, to my father’s country…. and, finally, to his doorstep.”

Shepard grew up in a white clapboard house in Chestnut Hill, just outside Boston, with a need to fill in the outlines of the stories her grandmother told her. Shepard’s father was a WASP, her mother a Pakistani Muslim—but her Nana, she discovered at 13, had gone from being Rachel to being Rahat, from being Jewish in India to living in Pakistan as a Muslim. As she returns to India to explore her grandmother’s legacy, her Nana’s hidden story and to find her own “native place”, Shepard must deal with her own unusual position. She belongs to three faiths—Islam, Judaism and Christianity—or to none. “I feel a welling up of resentment at the idea of choosing one faith, one affiliation, over the others… [Not belonging] also allows me to keep asking questions, to hear what is really said behind closed doors.”

Shepard’s journey is deeply personal, a delving into family history and a discovery of a community struggling to live within the bounds of an increasingly polemical India. Taseer’s journey through Islam is a more deliberate exploration, part travelogue, part self-discovery. Towards the end of his travels, Taseer, who may claim both Sikhism and Islam or neither, writes of the possibility of embracing the three-tier history of India whole, of how he prefers inheriting garbled histories to violent purities: “The world is richer in its hybrids.”

There is such a small, scattered set of books on the shelf of Indian memoirs and personal journeys. In recent times, a few writers have successfully attempted to mine personal history—Amitava Kumar (Husband of a Fanatic), Ira Pande (Diddi) and Timeri Murari (My Temporary Son) among them. The memoir requires a blend of technical skill, journalistic observation and personal honesty to really work, and also perhaps freedom from the fear of being judged. I don’t know what drove Taseer or Shepard to use the labels “foreign” and “stranger”, but perhaps what they were claiming was the privileges of the outsider, who may roam freely through the hidden rooms of family history without breaking too many unspoken rules.

As I read these two different but equally compelling narratives, a friend calls, a young writer who grew up in Calcutta and moved to the US several years ago. Amin is working on a family history, and the journey has taken him to old, crumbling homes, to Dhaka, to Dubai. He speaks of what he has discovered here, and what is left to discover. And then he says, “I don’t know if I could have written this if I’d stayed here. Distance gives you freedom.” Freedom to question, freedom to write without fear of what people will say, freedom to explore. Perhaps this generation of writers, insiders or strangers as they may be, will give themselves that freedom, one that was denied to the previous generation.

Torn condoms and cabinets of wonders

I know a dozen people who hate Karan Mahajan, for good reason: he's bright, articulate, very funny and Family Planning, his first book, looks like a rare example of a decent Delhi novel. (Attempts to write the Great Bombay Novel outnumber attempts to write even the Really Not Half Bad Delhi Novel ten-to-one.) All this, and he's not yet 26. But jettison the jealousy and read this small piece in Granta--it's a great reason to start liking the man. I'm catching up with my reading, just started the book and will blog about it once I'm through.

In October 2004, The Matthias K. Rath Museum of Destruction and Resurrection (MKRMDR) opened on the campus of Stanford University. I was its co-founder, co-curator and co-inhabitant. The museum was run out of a dorm room. It was dedicated modestly to the reanimation of ‘wonder’ in the universe. Despite spatial restrictions and three grossly unmade beds, the MKRMDR boasted sixty wondrous exhibits, including a ‘Celestial Chart Employed by Ancient Navigators in Micronesia’, ‘The Quilt Worn By Governor Dukakis in Berkeley College in the Year 1988, when He Squandered Forever the Democratic Nomination’ and ‘A Shaman’s Rug In Arrested Flight’. The MKRMDR achieved, in its short life-span, a spectacular level of success – which is to say it peaked briefly above the status of a collegiate prank, became a famous venue for boozy parties, and was dismantled as soon as I graduated.

Reviews compiled at The Complete Review, over here:

Karan Mahajan interviews Suketu Mehta at The Believer:

Excerpts from Family Planning here:

The BS column: A Book of Verse, and Thou

(Published in the Business Standard, 6th April 2009)


What connects an 11th century Persian mathematician, a 19th century English eccentric, poets such as Rupert Brooke and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and a 21st century Iranian translator and book-lover?

The book the world knows as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. The version of the Rubaiyat best known today is the translation by Edward FitzGerald, published in 1859 and rescued from the bargain-bins about a year later by Rosseti and the other pre-Raphaelite poets. The praise of Rossetti and Swinburne had the effect of raising the price from a penny to twopence, which Carlyle in particular saw as proof of the venality of booksellers.

FitzGerald complained that Khayyam’s work, neglected by his own country, had “been but scantily transmitted abroad”. The few manuscripts in existence had been, “mutilated beyond the average Casualties of Oriental Transcription”. The one at the Bodleian contained a mere 158 rubaiyat, or quatrains; the one FitzGerald had been sent by a friend who knew of his passion for obscure books, Oriental literature and botany, contained 516 poems. FitzGerald cut out “all kinds of Repetition and Corruption” that infested Khayyam’s work, and produced in his roughly hundred-quatrain version the Rubaiyat that we know today.

The vogue for the Rubaiyat in Europe was extraordinary. Rupert Brooke proclaimed that he was proud to have an exquisitely illustrated version in his personal library; Swinburne and Rossetti pressed the book on their literary friends; Omar Khayyam Clubs sprang up for the purpose of reading from the verses over elaborate dinners; and a relatively rare edition, embellished with a finely etched skull on the back cover, caused headlines when it went down with the Titanic.

At least three generations of Anglophone Indians shared the European enthusiasm for the Rubaiyat. Though Khayyam’s popularity has since waned, there was a time when every schoolchild could recite the better-known verses: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,/ Moves on, nor all your Piety nor your Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line…”

The quatrains of the Rubaiyat that most disturbed Khayyam’s contemporaries were the verses that extolled “a Loaf of Bread, a glass of wine and Thou”, where, as subsequent verses made clear, the emphasis was on the wine. Islamic strictures against drinking made Khayyam’s frequent—and joyous—references to the tavern and the cup-bearer distinctly out of place. Khayyam would have enjoyed the company of the late Harivansh Rai Bachchan, whose Madhushala had many eminent critics squirming as the poet explained the grand design of life through the metaphors of the tavern, the glass, the wine and the incurable thirst of the drinker.

Khayyam’s real quarrel was with the stringent tenets of faith. He taunted his critics, questioning the doctrines of sin and hell, arguing that it would always be the unbelievers who knew the scriptures best. At its best, his Rubaiyat is a celebration of the uncertainty and richness of life, with the poet urging his listeners to enjoy the few moments they have. If we are all “helpless pieces on the Chequer-Board of Life”, Khayyam argues, we may as well accept that we have little say in the shaping of our lives, and instead draw on life’s richness as deeply as we can.

Khayyam spent his early years in Afghanistan, where his poems today would be considered near-blasphemous. His reputation as a mathematician and algebraist of renown eclipsed his reputation as a poet in Iran; it was only in 1988 that the Rubaiyat was translated by a fellow Persian, so to speak. Karim Emami’s translation is called The Wine of Nishapour—a reference to Khayyam’s hometown—and is far more faithful to the original, though less exuberant, than FitzGerald’s wildly freewheeling version.

Today, the Rubaiyat is a relic, a reminder, an embarrassment. Khayyam’s exuberance and unabashedly flowery phrases lack irony and bitterness, making him unsuited for the 21st century. His acceptance in the West has its roots in an age when “exotic” was not a damning epithet, when all things Oriental were eagerly embraced because they allowed such wonderful opportunities for fancy dress. And in India, the vogue for Khayyam is a reminder of a time when we bought our opinions and our poets wholesale from the West.

But it would be a shame if we celebrated only the more innocuous Khayyam. The poet of Nishapour is a reminder of the tradition of independent thinking in Islam, of the space that a Persian poet was once allotted to criticize his faith. In a world where the Iran war and the Afghanistan conflict are still alive, we could do worse than look again at the words of the iconoclastic poet who lived his childhood in one country and became a man in the other.

Links: The Rubaiyat online--different translations

The Rubaiyat exhibition: The Harry Ransom Center (excellent images)

Elihu Vedder's drawings for The Rubaiyat: The Smithsonian

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)