The Vodafone-Crossword shortlist, 2009

...is here. My apologies, meant to put this up earlier but had computer and Net problems.

English fiction contenders:

Salman Rushdie's 'The Enchantress of Florence' (Random House)
Amitav Ghosh's 'Sea of Poppies' (Penguin India)
Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Unaccustomed Earth' (Random House)
Neel Mukherjee's 'Past Continuous' (Picador India)
Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Escape' (Picador India)
Anuradha Roy's 'An Atlas of Impossible Longings' (Picador India)
Preeta Samarasan's 'Evening is the Whole Day' (HarperCollins India)

English non-fiction contenders:

Pallavi Aiyer's Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins India)
Basharat Peer's Curfewed Nights (Random House)
Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin)
Edna Fernandes' The Last Jews of Kerala (Penguin)
Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Blackswan)


Indian language fiction in translation contenders:

Jayakantan's Dissonance and Other Stories
translated by K.S. Subramanian (Katha)

Manto's Selected Stories
translated by Aatish Taseer (Random House)

Manohar Shyam Joshi's T’TA Professor”
translated by Ira Pande (Penguin)

M S Sethu's The Wind from the Hills
translated by Prema Jayakumar (Tranquebar)

The BS Column: Will you take offence? One cup or two?

(Published in the Business Standard, June 22nd, 2009; this is the longer, uncut version of the piece that appeared in print)


A few years after the ban on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in India, I happened to be browsing in a London bookshop.

(*Corrected thanks to Rahul Siddharthan--the original line mentioned incorrectly that Khomeini's fatwa was followed by the Indian government ban. This happened the other way around--the Indian government, sadly, was one of the first to ban Satanic Verses.)

Rushdie’s works were laid out prominently and chronologically. Satanic Verses had its place between The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Seeing it there, on open display, not attracting hordes of enraged rioters, was an uncomfortable reminder of its absence from our lives in India.

For years afterwards, when I looked at my collection of Rushdie’s works, it was the gap in the shelves that glared back at me. A missing piece of Rushdie’s writing history, airbrushed out of existence in India. Twenty years have passed since the fatwa. The ban is still in force, and the original impetus of indignation that led to the underground spread of pirated, badly photostatted copies of the book has died down. At least one generation of Indian readers has grown up knowing all about the Satanic Verses controversy without ever reading a single page of the book.

Perhaps the reason why the Satanic Verses controversy stays alive today is because it tapped into issues that were much larger than a single ban, however unjust, on a single book, however controversial or worthwhile. The big fight over the last twenty years in countries across the world goes beyond censorship, and can be summed up in a simple question: does anyone have the right to offend, or to be offended? And if we do, can we live with the gaps that this might create in our lives—not just the missing books, paintings or films, but the missing ideas?

A collaboration between the Index on Censorship and Seagull Books takes up offence and censorship in two recent series. These are collections of essays, about 10,000-15,000 words in length, that take up “questions of rights, liberties, tolerance, silence, censorship and dissent”.

From the Offence series, the two books that will be of most immediate interest to Indian readers are Kamila Shamsie’s Offence: The Muslim Case and Salil Tripathi’s Offence: The Hindu Case. Shamsie examines the figure of the Offended Muslim and offers a measure of clarity. There is the strongly entrenched perception that “Offence is what happens when Muslims encounter the West”—but she points out that there’s a deeper issue here, that “the name of Islam is invoked over a range of perceived offences, most of them entirely without reference to the non-Muslim world”. She suggests that we recast the matter as religious hardliners versus anti-hardliners, by separating those who advocate violence in the name of religion from those who find violence offensive.

It’s useful to read Shamsie alongside Caspar Melville, who writes in Taking Offence: “We have been encouraged….to believe that we have the right to complain whenever we encounter something we don’t like so long as we can couch it in terms of offence.” So it’s not enough to dislike or disagree with the Satanic Verses; you gain legitimacy and power only by being offended. This is a seductive path—for those of any religion, and any set of beliefs. Melville also notes that the stereotypes of the “free” West versus the more hostile and violent Islamic believers allows the West to conceal its own attacks on free speech.

(Before discussing Salil Tripathi’s book, I should disclose that he has signed a travel book with Tranquebar, where I was formerly employed. However, we have not discussed the Offence series.) Salil Tripathi discusses the Indian state’s dismal record of protecting works of literature, art, cinema and scholarship: “The state takes the easier option of banning (any) work rather than promoting a liberal environment in which a more enlightened discussion is possible.” He continues, “Now Hindus want equal opportunity to be offended.” And why shouldn’t any religion, any special-interest group, want the right to be offended, when the rewards are so great? To be offended is to be rescued from invisibility, to be given a voice, however mean-spirited or illogical that voice might be.

What if the ban on Satanic Verses were to be overturned tomorrow? If you go by the way the Indian state has responded in the past, a large majority of readers would once again be held to ransom by a small, but vocal and possibly violent, minority. This is a source of deep frustration to readers like me. We're trapped: the right of (in most cases) a non-reader to be offended effectively trumps my right, as a reader, to fill that gap in my shelves.

There is also the larger issue of whether the state should be effectively supporting the suppression of a book that, however controversial, chooses to examine religion and belief as just another aspect of the human condition, as open to novelistic exploration as wars, or marriage, or the economy. And what, in the end, is truly more offensive? One author's thoughts and views, expressed in the form of a book that you may or may not choose to read? Or the threats of a mob that has no interest in reading the book or debating the ideas it contains, offering no arguments, only book bonfires, riots and violence to those who might want to read it for themselves?

But the Satanic Verses doesn’t exist in India as a novel, a work of the imagination, any more—it’s become a symbol. If you printed copies of the Satanic Verses with only the title and the author’s name, and blank pages inside, they would still be burned.

Cartoonist Martin Rowson sums it up in Giving Offence: “In the Babel of conflicting human opinions, the right to be offended works out, in practice, as just another tactic to win an argument by compelling your opponent to shut up because what they say is offensive.”

The BS column: Welcome to the tilism

(Published in the Business Standard, June 16, 2009)
Here is the single best reason ever proffered for attempting a translation of a long-lost, half-forgotten book:

“What if all the storytellers are also still with us ‘in spirit’? And what if one day this battalion of ghosts feels nostalgic, and enters a bookshop to check the latest edition of Hoshruba but doesn’t find it on the shelves? Who will have the heart to tell them that because of our neglect and disregard of Indo-Islamic literature, the rich language of Hoshruba has become inaccessible….? And this is why the army of readers is gathered here; why I beat the kettledrums.”

For Musharraf Farooqui, translator, author and founder of The Urdu Project, the reproachful ghosts of dastangois and storytellers past never cease whispering into his ear. His translation of the 8,000-odd pages and 21 volumes of the 19th century story cycle known as the Hoshruba is part obsession, part clever publishing gamble. The Urdu Project will also translate more conventional works, but the Hoshruba is its first and most magnificent undertaking.

Farooqui might be fifty years old by the time he finishes telling the tale of the last sorcerers, shape-shifters, and egg-of-oblivion wielding tricksters who riddle the pages of the Hoshruba. He also knows how hard it is to sell a 21-volume Indo-Islamic fantasy saga in the age of George R R Martin, Neil Gaiman, Tolkien films and the Star Trek franchise. But he hopes that the abracadabra of print-on-demand technology will help him and the Hoshruba reach its readers.

With the first sprawling 447-page volume out, the Hoshruba makes an interesting addition to fantasy literature. The story cycle was concocted by Mir Ahmed Ali, passed on to Muhammad Amir Khan, revived by Muhammad Husain Jah and continued by Jah’s arch-rival Ahmed Husain Qamar—a quiverful of authors. To read it is to be drawn back into a world of source magic, the original stuff of today’s fantasy sagas, and to be seduced by its never-ending profusion of sorcerers, battles and red-lipped beauties.

The Hoshruba is likely to add the word “tilism”—a realm of magic and enchantment—to the dictionary, and to beguile many. But reading it is also a disconcerting experience. The modern fantasy reader reads not so much for escapism as to be drawn into an utterly different but believable world—there’s a subtle but powerful distinction between the two aims.

The machinations of the warring kingdoms in George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, for instance, should be required reading for corporate chieftains. (Replace “kings” with “CEOs”, or “dragons” with “highly skilled accountants”, and you have a primer on the art of war that outdoes Sun Tzu.) Neil Gaiman’s Sandman cycle, conversely, delves into the more uncomfortable reaches of psychology.

Reading the Hoshruba is bewildering; sorcerers succeed one another at breakneck pace, eggs of oblivion (which contain powerful drugs that induce unconsciousness) are hurled freely by all comers, and magic citrus fruits take their place beside less homely weapons. It’s hard to follow: which character is real or fake at any given point, which sorcerer has been bumped off and which remains, having merely faked her own death?

The clever Amar Ayyar, a trickster of no mean talents, provides a link; and fans of The Adventures of Amir Hamza (also translated by Farooqui) will be pleased to know that Hamza makes frequent appearances, as does the giant Laqa. But despite the authors’ promise that only those battles that are entertaining will be described, lest the audience be left weary and disinterested, the Hoshruba is a magical, but not easy, read.

Serious gamers will love the Hoshruba—especially those who’ve cut their teeth on longrunning role-playing games (RPG), where the richness of the landscape and the inventiveness of the authors matters more than plot or character. I can see them buying all 21 volumes, but other readers might stop at three, well before the riches of the Hoshruba are exhausted.

Farooqui has one advantage over George R R Martin and co. Being living authors, today’s writers of fantasy attract fans almost faster than they can complete a series. Robert Jordan died before he finished the Wheel of Time series, now being completed by another fantasy writer. Impatient Song of Ice and Fire fans, waiting for volume five from 2005, were recently admonished by Neil Gaiman: “George R R Martin is not your bitch.” Gaiman’s point was that the best any author can do is write to his own internal deadlines—not to the optimistic ones in the heads of his audience.

But Farooqui’s collaborators have finished their story, and his telling of how they wrote it is nothing short of miraculous. “Only an infidel would doubt that it happened in this manner,” he says. I would add that only an infidel would be churlish enough to resist the temptation of entering the tilism, at least once. Think of those poor, disappointed ghosts in the bookshop.

The BS Column: Habib Tanvir

(Published in the Business Standard, June 9, 2009)


The distance from Raipur, where Habib Ahmed Khan was born, to Bhopal, where Habib Tanvir died recently, is little more than 630 km—a narrow compass.

But Habib Tanvir’s life as a playwright and a poet, “Tanvir” being the takhallus he adopted as a young man, was broader in scope. It took him from ancient Greece to contemporary Europe, from Rajasthani folk fables to fierce political drama in Bengal—always, though, via Chattisgarh.

I met the legendary founder of the Naya Theatre when we were both in search of an exit. Delhi’s English-language theatre was inundated with bedroom farces, and that evening’s comedy at the Kamini auditorium was unbearably bad. Sneaking away at interval, I found the front door locked—presumably by a director aware that there was no better way to retain his audience. A rumpled man with black-framed spectacles beckoned me over conspiratorially: “Look! We can escape from the side.”

With the brashness of youth, I told him why I thought Delhi theatre was terrible. He was gentle with my ignorance. “Try your luck further down the road,” he said, mentioning a play festival at Mandi House. He spoke of Alkazi, Girish Karnad, Badal Sarkar and then said, “I’ve done a little play writing myself. There’s one you might like, called Agra Bazaar. My name’s Habib Tanvir.”

We met a few times over the years, and that central modesty never shifted, though he was perfectly aware of his worth. He once said that he had begun his career seeing himself as a writer—as time went by, he felt that his role was to be a translator and a sutradhar. He spent most of his life on the road with the Naya Theatre troupe as actor, director, adaptor, writer, producer, manager, narrator; his engagement was active, right up till his eightieth year. As a small tribute, here’s a look at some of the plays that shaped Tanvir sahib.

Agra Bazaar (1954): As a young man growing up in Raipur and Aligarh, Tanvir developed a sharp ear for the many flavours of Hindi; he had a special fondness for the richness of Chattisgarhi-accented Hindi, and for the language of the bazaar versus the durbar. He was fascinated by the 18th century poet, Nazir Akbarabadi. Akbarabadi was very much a common man’s poet, writing verses to the ordinary man-on-the-street (in the Aadmi Nama), to a hand-fan, to dal, to cucumbers.

Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar takes a vegetable vendor who believes that if he could only get a poet to write in praise of his wares, he would sell more sabzis. Scorned by the great bards of the day, he finally finds Akbarabadi—who remains an offstage presence—and poetry comes down from the courts to the streets. Staged by Tanvir, Agra Bazaar became a brilliant spectacle, gently stressing that literature and poetry are the prerogative of the masses, not just a rarefied few.

Charandas Chor (1975): The story of a thief who keeps his honour at the cost of his life by stealing, but keeping his commitment to refrain from doing four things, is a stage classic. In Tanvir’s version, it showcased the rich roughness of the Chattisgarhi dialect, and brought folk theatre into an urban setting. It developed a second life, adapted as a children’s play.

One of Tanvir’s strengths was to take material written by others and to reshape it for the stage—Charandas Chor was originally based on a Rajasthani folk tale adapted by Vijaydan Detha.

Raj-Rakta (2006): Tagore’s Visarjan is one of his most powerful and most flawed plays, based on a clash between the priest of a kingdom and his king over whether animal sacrifice should be banned. Tanvir’s instinct was to go back to the far stronger novel, Rajarshi (1887) on which Visarjan was based, and meld the play and the novel. Unfortunately, Raj-Rakta works better in text form—it remained awkward on stage in the Naya Theatre production—but Tanvir’s script, if you can get it, remains a classic example of how to write an adaptation.

Ponga Pundit (1930s, staged by Tanvir 1960s onwards): Ponga Pundit is identified so strongly with Naya Theatre and Tanvir that many assume he was the author. It was written, as he often pointed out, by two folk artists, Sukhram and Sitaram, as a takedown of organized religion (and corrupt priests) and works best as improvisational theatre.

After the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid, Tanvir’s performances of the play were often attacked by the Shiv Sena—under the mistaken assumption that he, as a Muslim, was insulting Hinduism. Naya Theatre took the rotten eggs, tomatoes and hecklers in their stride and continued to produce the play. (Read more about this here.)

Perhaps Tanvir sahib’s more esoteric plays—such as the one on the Greek mathematician Hypatia—will fade into obscurity. But his brand of folk theatre has proved surprisingly robust, and though we’ll miss that lean figure with the mobile expressions on stage, his plays will survive his passing.

The BS Column: Kamala Das, Madhavikutty, Suraiya (1934-2009)

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2, 2009)
“Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. “
('An Introduction', Kamala Das)

A name, a role, a religion, a language: all her life, Kamala Das questioned and rejected belonging even as she longed for it. By the time of her death this weekend, 75 and still settling into an identity, Kamala Das stood for certain things in the public imagination: she was the short story writer, the woman who wrote of sexuality with a freedom unthinkable for the times, and then retreated into purdah, an apostate turned convert who rejected Krishna for Islam.

(* A reader, Fr.Vayalil Joseph Joy, writes in to clarify that Kamala Das never rejected Krishna for Islam: "Love for Krishna, I feel, was always a part of her life., though we donot know how or whether she could reconcile this with her new faith.")

Few of this generation’s women writers know her as more than a name—sometimes a caricature—and to some extent, Kamala Das left behind a mixed legacy, too much rubbish thrown in with the good stuff. Those who read in English knew her chiefly as a poet, and she could be a very acute one; but she was also overly prolific, and many of her poems suffer from a lack of revision. She was far more interested in capturing the perfect emotion than the perfect line.

Those who read in Malayalam knew her as a short story writer whose work reflected the frustrations of a generation of women who were just beginning to question marriage and the domestic life, just beginning to embrace their own sexuality and need for freedom. Many knew her only by her autobiography, published as My Story, which was an often intense, often rambling account of her loves, her writing, her need for something larger than the world of tradition and the hearth.

'....No, not for me the beguiling promise of
domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly
letter that begins with the word dearest,
Not for me the hollowness of marital vows and
the loneliness of a double bed, where someone
lies dreaming of another mate, a woman perhaps
lustier than his own....'
('Annamalai Poems', Kamala Das)

Kamala Das grew up in a house where literature and writing was the order of the day—her great-uncle was a writer, her mother, Nalapatt Balamani Amma, was a respected poet, and her father was the managing editor of Matrubhumi. She wrote as a child, but only began to write professionally after marriage and motherhood. Her views were shocking in that time, her frankness about female desire revelatory and unsettling.

'....Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers....'
('The Looking Glass', Kamala Das)

Today, it’s hard to see the impact that lines of these would have had for a previous generation. Writers like Catherine Millet (The Sexual Life of Catherine M) and Charlotte Roche (Wetlands) now examine their sexual history in detailed laundry lists that leave nothing, from haemorrhoids to orgies as meticulously planned as a 19th century tea party, to the imagination. But for women—and men—trapped in a multitude of roles that stressed the centrality of the family, Kamala Das’ passionate evocation of desire, her demand that women be given lives, and rooms, of their own, was revolutionary.

'....Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
Much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put the dead men in....'
('Purdah I', Imtiaz Dharker)

In her sixties, Kamala Das, who had once written with deep feeling about the Radha-Krishna relationship, discovered a need for subjugation, a turning away from the freedom she had so often longed for and fought for.* Her conversion to Islam created yet another identity for her; as Suraiyya, she abjured many of the things that had defined her as a writer. Hindus, especially the liberal fold, were shocked at this late-life change of faith. Nor did it please those who had studied Islam in depth and felt that Kamala Das/ Suraiyya had woefully misunderstood the faith.

Kamala Das had become, she said in an interview, a “puritan in all senses”; but the purdah she embraced so eagerly was deconstructed by another poet, Imtiaz Dharker, in the lines quoted above. Dharker was writing in general terms, but in many ways, she captured what Kamala Das was seeking—a place to hide, a kind of safety after the years of rebellion. In the process, Kamala Das lost the ability to define herself, except in the most fluid terms—she would remain, to the end, a seeker who never quite knew what she was looking for.

(P.S. That's a drawing by Imtiaz Dharker at the top of the post. I like her work a lot, and hope she doesn't mind my using it.)

Book review: Eat My Globe

Eat My Globe
One Man’s Search for the Best Food in the World
Simon Majumdar
Hachette, Rs 295, 278 pages

“I may not be the first person to have eaten rat in China, elk in Finland, barbecue in Texas, crickets in Manila or cod sperm sushi in Kyoto, but there are not too many people out there who can claim to have done so in little over a year.”

As he turned forty, Simon Majumdar dealt with the obligatory midlife crisis with flair. Instead of buying a sports car, shagging a fading starlet or discovering his inner navel in the outer Himalayas, this half-Welsh, half-Indian, wholly insane man chucked up his job and decided to eat his way across the globe.

Majumdar would be the first to admit that he has boldly gone where no one but Anthony Bourdain and a score of globetrotting chefs-turned-TV stars have gone before. But taking the trip vicariously in his company turns out to be an unexpected pleasure. Majumdar represents the best of the breed of the amateur foodie—not the food tourist, wearily moving from one Michelin-starred experience to another, but the genuine food-lover, armed with a curiosity about the world and a desire to taste everything, no matter how unusual.

That might be, even in this jaded age, very odd indeed. Majumdar’s “I ate it so you don’t have to” list includes rotten shark meat in Iceland and deep-fried banana in Ireland, in addition to the stir-fried rat and braised dog previously mentioned. What makes this book work, though, are his opinions—freely offered and stubbornly defended, as in his description of pizza (even the best available in Chicago and Rome) as “snot on toast”.

The list of things the “Great Majumdar” loved eating as he made his way across 90 countries on a budget slimmer than a bulimic model’s waist is vast and endearing. Instead of an endless list of fabulous gourmet meals that few of us would be able to afford, he proffers comforting classics: roti canai in Malaysia, Mrs King’s pork pie from Melton Mowbray in England, pho in Vietnam, breakfast ribs in Kansas. In India, he visits Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Goa, and instead of rating restaurants, offers a more nuanced overview of the local specialties.

Eat My Globe may lack the inimitable style of MFK Fisher’s writings, or the unique experiences at the heart of Bill Buford’s Heat, but Majumdar’s energy and enthusiasm are contagious. He romps across the world not just for himself, but for all those of us who harbour a similar desire to eat our way across the globe and who will probably stop at twenty or less countries. We don’t have to, because the Great Majumdar made the journey for us.

(For Outlook Traveller, June 2009)

If It Is Sweet--a personal note

Reading Mridula Koshy's stories for the first time, almost a year-and-a-half ago, fresh into the publishing job I left this January, I had two distinct thoughts. The first was that these were the Delhi stories I'd been looking for; the second was that if all I managed to do was publish another three books like this, I'd have justified my time in publishing.

If you live in Bombay and write, the city looms behind your work, inevitably and naturally. But Delhi seems to elude writers, especially those who work in English--the great Delhi novels I can think of were written by Krishna Sobti and Ahmed Ali, with a few exceptions. (I Allan Sealy and Karan Mahajan have both used Delhi as an interesting backdrop, but the author who's probably captured Delhi best was Vandana Singh, in an SF short story.) Most writers see Delhi through the lens of history--it's a wonderful place to set a certain kind of tourist historical novel--or through the lens of a camera--the picture postcard view.

Mridula's stories in the collection that became If It Is Sweet (Tranquebar) captured the many levels at which Delhi works, her curiosity and her open-mindedness as a writer allowing her to examine the lives of people too invisible, too ordinary to be considered worth writing about. Perhaps it's her background--she used to be a trade union organiser--that makes her such an acute observer, perhaps it's the many places that she travelled between as a young child that gave her an ability to imagine the lives of strangers in richness and detail.

A large girl who is simultaneously lover and liar, a teenager fruitlessly hawking discount coupons for covetable, unaffordable jeans, the koodawallah's intricate romance, a carpenter uncovering his Delhi world through the mysteries of plaster of Paris, a child of the footpath making an unexpected connection at the traffic lights, mothers, tourists, drifters--all of them captured in Mridula's compassionate but unflinching vision. The Good Mother, for instance, isn't about Delhi--it's about tragedy and the harsh, inescapable fact that life will continue to go on even after the worst you can imagine has happened. But here's a tiny aside that reveals a slice of Delhi, the architecture echoing the lives of the people:

She had not noticed from the outside, but the houses are built with no space between them, just the superfluity of two sets of walls in a tight kiss, so that they are suctioned, one to the other. But neither do the two balconies, nor do the houses themselves, bear any relationship of symmetry or accord any thought to each other.

This is what Rana Dasgupta had to say about the book:

In brooding, otherworldly prose, Mridula Koshy tells us the stories other writers overlook, or do not wish to tell: the household thoughts that must always remain silent, the disavowed dramas of the city, the heartbreaking proximity of opposite emotions.

There'll be other books from Mridula Koshy; she's here for the long haul, and I look forward to reading them. But I'll always have a soft spot for this collection of short stories, so intense, so rewarding, so revealing of the inner life of this city I've known all my life, loved and hated, and never seen captured quite like this before.