(Published in the Business Standard, December 2009)
Paul Samuelson had a Nobel Prize in economics to his credit, a large and faithful following who venerated him for his resurrection of Keynesian economic theory, the ear of several US Presidents and a tradition of fruitful, running battles with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. But when he died this Sunday, at the age of 94, the legacy he left behind him was to be found in college classrooms across the world.
The fascinating thing about Economics, his bestselling textbook, is not that it was so comprehensive and influential when it first came out in 1948. Samuelson was very much a product of the Great Depression in the US, and credited his development to being in the right place at the right time—ie, Harvard of the early 1930s, where he learned his trade under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen and others.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Samuelson spoke of that era: “Just when I had completed my advanced training, World War II came, followed by fifty years of exploding college economics enrollments. My generation had a strong wind at its back. My famous teachers had become full professors only after 40. Wunderkinds in my generation could become anointed before age 30. Outside the Ivory Tower, economists were sought out by governments, corporations, Wall Street traders, and textbook publishers.”
The other great truth of his life was the importance of getting paid for work that he would happily have done for free. When McGraw Hill approached Samuelson to write a basic textbook on economics, he took on the task with trademark seriousness. When the classic 1948 textbook celebrated its 50th anniversary—Samuelson’s Economics, in its updated edition, is now just over 60 years old—he set down his intention as a young, upcoming academic in the 1940s:
“My great predecessors—John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Frank Taussig and Irving Fisher—were writing for their times. I was writing for the last half of the 20th century—an epoch that surpassed even my youthful optimism.”
Over the decades, Samuelson’s brand of economics has been revised, attacked and reassessed. But his textbook, augmented by William Nordhaus’ corrections and updates, has endured, in a field where shifts in theory can be violent, merciless and leave innumerable “books of the decade” on the remainder pile.
Stanley Fisher, who read the textbook as a student in Zimbabwe, got its enduring appeal better than most: “To read Economics is to have a glimpse of the extraordinary mind that created it: undogmatic, generous to predecessors and contemporaries, encyclopaedic, of course brilliant, and, most remarkably, sceptical, not inclined to take itself too seriously.” Literary classics often survive a century, but if Samuelson’s Economics does, it will be among the few textbooks aside from Gray’s Anatomy to achieve that distinction.
* * *
In memoriam: This week also marked the passing of the poet, translator and critic Dilip Chitre, who died at the age of 71 in Pune, of cancer. For many of us, Dilip Chitre often represented three poets in one. There was his own, iconoclastic work—a massive corpus where the Ekun Kavita (collected poems) runs to three thick volumes.
Chitre’s comfortable bilingualism and his famous intolerance for shibboleths guaranteed that he would not be lionised by the Marathi critics of his day, though it was a different story when it came to his work in English.
For readers outside Marathi, Chitre opened up and made new the work of two distinctly different voices—Sant Tukaram, the 17th century Marathi poet-saint known for his sinewy, uncompromising mysticism, and Namdeo Dhasal, once seen as the firebrand of contemporary Dalit literature. Chitre was drawn to the power and strength in both these writers. He was influenced by another great poet, Arun Kolatkar, when it came to translating Tukaram: he approached the poems “like a dance”, paying attention to the rhythm and the back-and-forth of the structure, where each poem begins with the words “Says Tuka”.
His Dhasal translations are towering, and are deliberately unlyrical: Gaandu Bagicha, for instance, is translated with no euphemisms for Dhasal’s out-to-shock language of the streets and the slums, and the Golpitha poems retain Dhasal’s searing images. (Dhasal grew up in Golpitha, and his memories of his father’s butcher’s shop form some of the most powerful images in that early series of work.)
Chitre was unimpressed by the rabid demands of those who wanted cultural censorship on the grounds that specific books or works of art offend religious sentiments. In a classic email to India Uncut, he laid down the true meaning of the word secular: “In India, it is often misinterpreted as ‘equally sensitive to all religions’ and not ‘equally neutral to all religions’… Whether God or democracy is our priority as citizens of this nation cannot be left to God to decide. He is not a registered voter in India.” Many of us hope that even after his death, Chitre will have the final word on this subject.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Friday, January 08, 2010
Apologies and a nibble: English vegetables, desi steak
(Haven't had time to update the blog for a while--my apologies. Here's a place-holder--an essay on food, written in 2003, that I thought I'd lost. Enjoy.)
Galangal and lemon grass were piled up in hillocks. The mushrooms were fresh and came in four varieties-white, dried dhingri, dried shitaake and dried, slightly dubious porcini. "Maydum," said my old faithful vegetable seller, "aur bhi fresh-fresh aaye hain." I came back with the usual urban load of fancy ghaas-phoos: borkoli, snaw piss, red peepers, aspagragrass -- and with a phrase reverberating in my head. English vegetables.
As opposed to desi veggies. My father-in-law had used it first, in appreciation of a dish of babycorn and red peppers tossed with hing, jeera and fried onions: "Aamar," he had said in Bangla, on the only visit he ever made to our house, before the cancer made travel difficult, "English vegetables khub bhalo laagey."
It was a winter evening and as I mechanically sorted, made mental menus and stashed my load of exotica away, I found myself counting the absences. The day before Diwali is when Bengali households celebrate by lighting fourteen lamps and cooking a mixture of fourteen kinds of saag. This year I'd made up the quota with the usual greens -- palak, methi, lal saag; and some less usual ones -- bok choy, watercress. (My conscience cavilled that watercress was not saag. I rejoined that I didn't have all day to shop, and that watercress was peppery, green and leafy -- ergo, close enough to saag not to make a difference.)
I slowed when I hauled out a bunch of carrots: orange, like the ones in the 'phoren' picture books for children, and tasteless, unlike the deep red, hairy, indigenous varieties that were increasingly hard to locate. Mulberries and phalsa had been equally hard to find in the summer gone by. In the fancy markets, English vegetables were easier to get than ever before; the old, desi roots-and-tubers stuff harder to come by, barring a few limited staples.
***
Ten years ago, at the Calcutta Club, I'd eavesdropped on a conversation happening two tables away. "These Phrench Phries," complained a man in a Bong-Yank accent, "they are bherry limp. Not like the ashol jinish, the real thing, at all." "It is the potatoes, Alok da," said his companion gravely. "Until India learns to grow potatoes like the Idaho variety, we cannot sample the authentic Phrench Phry." One chewed on a relatively inoffensive steak, whose authenticity had not been called into question, while the other contemplated, with solemn displeasure, the unworthy impostor on the plate. Together they managed to convey the impression that what to my untutored palate was a perfectly reasonable alu-bhaja would never make the passing grade as even third-rank Phrench Phries.
That was before the Hindutva brigade discovered that the two ingredients you need for the perfect Phrench Phry were: a) the humble potato raised to the standard set by the Idaho variety and b) distinctly unsacred but tasty beef tallow as the frying fat. Or the Phrying Phat. Either way, it was only a short while before, for McDonalds and company, the Phat was well and truly in the Phire.
***
That evening, as I chopped red peppers, cucumber and tomatoes for a last summer gazpacho before winter set in and drove me to the comfort of hot soups and plain dal-bhaat, the German laser knives someone had gifted me felt wrong in the hand, their weight suddenly awkward. Setting them aside, I came up with a chopper set on a wooden board that a friend had brought down from New York. It made swift work of the Spanish onions and the peppers, and I remembered the pride with which he'd told me that this was the very "offset serrated blade" praised by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential.
I'd reached the tomatoes and the last of the twilight was shading into smog when the sleekly post-modern lines of my New York-imported offset serrated blade blurred into another, more familiar image. Take away the jargon, and my chopping equipment stood revealed as a boti -- the raised blade set on a rough piece of board that's ubiquitous in Bengal and most of India. The boti retails at the equivalent of $2 or less; my offset serrated Bourdain-approved blade sells for $130 in some California stores.
The kitchen stood revealed as a cross-cultural minefield. The antique Italian peppermill, a gift handed down by my mother-in-law, used by her mother in the days when the possession of such an item conveyed an aura of world citizenship on the user, is employed in our house to grind saunf and roasted jeera. The silver salad set and the silver toast rack we received as wedding presents are forlorn white elephants: there is no butler to polish them, I prefer wooden salad sets anyway, and we are a toast-averse household. Jars of dried Italian herbs sit side-by-side with various masalas, bought whole once a month, roasted at home and freshly ground. The dried Provence and other herbs taste like...crumbly green flakes. Just as we inveigh against "curry powder", there being no such beast in the Indian culinary lexicon, I imagine a brigade of forlorn Italians raising their voices to the heavens in protest against the use of tasteless flakes instead of the fresh herbs from the garden the original recipes demand.
I know that this discomfort is inherited, a family legacy. As with bloodlines and songlines, if you follow the tangled skein of foodlines far back enough, you may discover truths about yourself. Uncomfortable truths; but truths, all the same.
***
In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Indian was self-explanatory: in Didima's house, it featured the best of Bengali cuisine, with a detour down the cosmopolitan byways of a Brahmo household. In my mother's Delhi house, the delicate spicing of classic Bengali cuisine collided with the in-your-face punch of North Indian cuisine. It was one of those marriages that worked, against all reason.
In both households, however, the English meals followed the same pattern. Vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives, more occasionally lightly steamed with lemon butter; glorious jeera-spiked versions of white sauce alternated ominously with "bakes" distinguished by listless curls of Amul cheese. Cabbage was served up in thick, tasteless wedges that resembled steamed cotton wool, but sometimes it received the fusion blessing of coconut and mustard seeds with a dash of malt vinegar, all added Anglo-Indian style to the crisply shredded and only barely blanched vegetable. But the crowning sleight-of-hand came with the Roast: mutton roasted on coal fires, served with tasty but gluey "gravy". It was years before I realised that this wasn't even mutton dressed up as lamb: it was mutton dressed up as lamb pretending to be the forbidden meat, beef.
The sacred cow occupied a slightly ambiguous position in our household. It was perfectly all right to go out to five-star restaurants and order a steak, since it was understood that hotel steak was godless, procured from an atheist cow. This polite fiction was maintained even in the face of the knowledge that most (atheist?) steak-providing cows in Delhi were actually (agnostic?) buffaloes.
In Calcutta, conversely, beef was acceptable except if you had especially religious-minded Hindu relatives coming over for dinner, and even then occasionally passed off in extremis as innocuous mutton. If the record states that we were responsible for corrupting good Hindu souls, so be it; but add that they thoroughly enjoyed what they were eating, so long as they were allowed to do so in ignorance. The sturdy Brahmo steaks Didima cooked were seasoned with crushed pepper, fried onions, grapes, and of course, a delicious guilt.
But families change, and so did mine, eschewing red meat apparently for reasons to do with cholesterol. Once I organised an impromptu family lunch -- several decades after our five-star steaks and our Calcutta beefsteaks. The potato salad and curried mushrooms went down well, but the plate of steak -- cooked medium-rare, so that its pink juices oozed balefully out -- lay accusingly on the table while everyone politely ate the takeaway tandoori chicken we'd ordered as a backup. It was a small thing, but it pointed at a rift, indicated that at least in matters of what we were or weren't willing to put into our bodies, my family and I had gone in different directions.
***
Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path, not moderate but iconoclastic. It was provided by my Thakurma, who travelled from household to household along with her husband until she and Thakurda established a kind of metronomic movement between my father's house and his younger brother's house. There were two other brothers, but one lived in inaccessible Air Force cantonments, dots on the map of India. The other had married a practising Wiccan who convinced him that he was actually the bastard of a royal family, fostered out in my Thakurma's household. Ignoring the evidence presented by the family nose, the very distinctive protuberance that was replicated faithfully on the physiognomy of all the brothers, he elected in the interests of marital peace to disown his natural family.
Having Thakurma and Thakurda to stay was no penance: one was the source of magical stories, the other of practical wisdom. Besides, Thakurma's culinary contributions were of the subversive kind. She cooked everything forbidden by the dentist and took absolutely no notice of family preferences, convinced -- correctly -- that her skill in the kitchen would overcome all resistance.
We had an early skirmish over fish, which, in repudiation of my Bengali roots, I refused to eat. A galvanised iron tub of catfish was a permanent presence in the kitchen; I named each whiskered creature and was told that the ones missing every night had gone on a trip, and never connected the maacher jhol on my plate with the straying travellers. Aside from catfish, though, I flatly refused to eat anything else from river or sea.
Wiser than my mother, who was on the losing end of a running feud with a ten-year-old's stubbornness, my Thakurma retreated from the battlefield. When my suspicions had been lulled, she greeted me with nimkis and an addictive mashed, pickled thing that I instantly loved. It was smooth; spiced to perfection with mustard oil; had a taste that brought the sea into my mouth; I thought she'd wrought magic with the humble potato. When she confessed that I'd been eating non-catfish fish for eight days without protest, I flew into an absolute rage. It's only now that I can acknowledge her triumph: not only did she make me eat what I hated, she made me love it. In the war between my prejudices and my tastebuds, she won.
As the years went by, the two households were tossed around. My Kaka went abroad; we spent six years shifting from house to house in Delhi while my father was posted in Calcutta. In that period of collective rootlessness, my grandparents shared our refugee status. Sometimes with us, sometimes not, depending on the size of the house my resourceful mother, lumbered with three rambunctious children, could find.
All the places we stayed in then had a common feature: the pre-shrunk kitchen. Instead of the large, roomy spaces we'd grown up with, we had to accommodate ourselves to closets with a stove bunged in. Thakurma's repertoire of sweets, which ranged from malpoa to payesh, from sandesh to labango latika, from layered patishaptas with their filling of coconut and raisins to narkeler nadu, shrank in tandem.
Perhaps we noticed, perhaps we didn't. My sister and I had discovered liqueur chocolates, one of the many dazzling items that we knew of only as articles brought back from the amorphous land called Abroad. My mother walked in to find her daughters replete with chocolate, but with no signs of a liqueur hangover. "There was smelly water inside," my sister explained. "We threw it away and ate the rest." The kitchen sink reeked of assorted liqueurs for days, until our cook poured quantities of yeast down the drain. The sink continued stinking, but now in a familiar as opposed to exotic way.
I do remember, despite the lure of biscuits from Paris (they tasted disappointingly like Britannia biscuits) and then-exotic Toblerone, that Thakurma kept up the tradition in exile with a token offering. Sometimes it was alu-bhaja for tea, flaunting their swadeshi flavour in stubborn denial of conquering alien tastes—Thakurma never ate a McDonald’s French Fry in her life, and wouldn’t have felt that she’d missed out on much. More usually, she'd pull out a battered Dalda tin which contained moas -- the lightest of confections, puffed rice held together with melted jaggery. When they returned to live with us, the tin smartened up, courtesy the birth of my brother, Dalda giving way to shiny blue Lactogen.
But the habit remained; though she made patishaptas and channar-payesh once in a while, it was Thakurma's moas that flavoured those years of our childhood. They provided a rare thread of continuity in those years of evictions and constantly changing schoolbus routes, of exoduses where my mother lead the way like a new Moses, appealing to our sense of adventure as we moved yet again, me lying in a malarial haze at the back of the lumbering black Ambassador, my baby brother stolidly holding the TV aerial out of one car window like a conquering flag and my sister perched on a pile of rugs and cushions in the front passenger seat.
***
"Would you like to see our ovens?" asked the chef of a snazzy new Italian restaurant, just opening in Delhi. "They're wood-fired." I heard the pride in his voice and followed gladly into the inner reaches of the kitchen. Men and women in chef's whites, tocques clapped smartly on their heads, shaped loaves, prepared duck's breasts for roasting, checked a brace of guinea hens. The ovens were huge, industrial sized. The doors were deliberately unpainted, in a designer way meant to indicate rustic charm. They were large, and as they clanged open, twin odours of meat, from one, and bread, from the other, were released in fragrant clouds.
A beaming assistant yanked freshly baked foccaccia out of the oven and deftly assembled accompaniments of virgin olive oil, pesto and sundried tomatoes. Another platter contained zucchini, cherry tomatoes and other English vegetables in a raspberry-vinegar reduction. "For you," he said. "To taste." The bread smelled divine. And I knew that if I so much as tried to take a bite, I would vomit.
Three years ago, I had accompanied my father to the electric crematorium on Ring Road, braving the raised eyebrows of well-meaning North Indian friends who felt that women had no place in that temple to death. But the woman we were about to cremate was the first feminist I'd ever met in my life; it was because of her that my mother had become a lawyer, well into middle age, instead of remaining a housewife. It was because I'd seen her writing short stories that I was trying to earn a living with hack journalism instead of marrying some rich guy and doing ikebana arrangements around the house. The least I could do was show up to say goodbye.
The electric crematorium, with its bare stage for relatives to say a few words, do a few last rites, reminded me of the many knocked-together arenas where exiled Bengalis would gather during the Pujas to put on bad, histrionic, nostalgic plays. My grandmother's body looked very light; those who raised her bier didn't have to strain.
She had died in the sterile, impersonal space of a hospital ward, instead of in her own bed at home. She and her husband had remained eternal refugees, first from Bangladesh and then from Orissa; the small patch of land she had tried to buy and claim as her own outside Delhi was mired in an interminable legal tangle. The only space they'd had was the space they'd carved out inside our lives, and that was huge, unpartitioned, beyond all boundaries.
I joined the avalanche of mourners who'd shown up for Thakurma's funeral, realising for the first time how many lives she'd touched. From my father's colleagues, who had often sat down to chat with 'Mataji', to the vegetable seller, to my friends, to her own friends -- they were all here, in tacit tribute to a life fuller than we'd thought possible.
The furnace at the electric crematorium is built like a Dutch oven. After the final rites have been performed, the eldest son steps forward and breaks the skull of his parent with a stick. Some say this frees the spirit; a dourly realistic friend told me briskly that this prevents the skull from exploding in the intense heat of the flames. "One doesn't want," she said, "bits of one's brains going off any old where."
My Thakurma lay on the platform in front of the oven. There was a final muttered prayer, a clang, the platform slid first forward and then with surprising speed, backward as the door to the furnace opened. She went in head first, her eyes closed, and before the door swung shut again I saw her head and then her torso haloed by flames.
On the plate held out by the assistant chef, I imagined I could smell wood ashes, burning flesh, crisped bones. His smile was beginning to slip a little; the staff was beginning to look a trifle questioning. In place of the focaccia, I thought I could see my Thakurma's fair, wrinkled, only slightly mottled flesh, beginning to sear. The door of the restaurant’s brand-new, state-of-the-art wood-fired oven clanged again, as someone pulled out the duck breast au jus.
I took a deep breath and inhaled scents from the past: the talcum-and-damp-newsprint smell of old age, incense, the harsingar flowers Thakurma used for her daily puja, the faint aroma from the John Exshaw brandy she drank in ladylike quantities, that last whiff of burning hair and flesh.
"Thank you," I said, tearing a chunk off the Italian bread. I dipped it in olive oil and ate, not knowing quite what I was devouring -- flesh, flour, a memory, the present. Whatever it was, it stayed down.
Galangal and lemon grass were piled up in hillocks. The mushrooms were fresh and came in four varieties-white, dried dhingri, dried shitaake and dried, slightly dubious porcini. "Maydum," said my old faithful vegetable seller, "aur bhi fresh-fresh aaye hain." I came back with the usual urban load of fancy ghaas-phoos: borkoli, snaw piss, red peepers, aspagragrass -- and with a phrase reverberating in my head. English vegetables.
As opposed to desi veggies. My father-in-law had used it first, in appreciation of a dish of babycorn and red peppers tossed with hing, jeera and fried onions: "Aamar," he had said in Bangla, on the only visit he ever made to our house, before the cancer made travel difficult, "English vegetables khub bhalo laagey."
It was a winter evening and as I mechanically sorted, made mental menus and stashed my load of exotica away, I found myself counting the absences. The day before Diwali is when Bengali households celebrate by lighting fourteen lamps and cooking a mixture of fourteen kinds of saag. This year I'd made up the quota with the usual greens -- palak, methi, lal saag; and some less usual ones -- bok choy, watercress. (My conscience cavilled that watercress was not saag. I rejoined that I didn't have all day to shop, and that watercress was peppery, green and leafy -- ergo, close enough to saag not to make a difference.)
I slowed when I hauled out a bunch of carrots: orange, like the ones in the 'phoren' picture books for children, and tasteless, unlike the deep red, hairy, indigenous varieties that were increasingly hard to locate. Mulberries and phalsa had been equally hard to find in the summer gone by. In the fancy markets, English vegetables were easier to get than ever before; the old, desi roots-and-tubers stuff harder to come by, barring a few limited staples.
***
Ten years ago, at the Calcutta Club, I'd eavesdropped on a conversation happening two tables away. "These Phrench Phries," complained a man in a Bong-Yank accent, "they are bherry limp. Not like the ashol jinish, the real thing, at all." "It is the potatoes, Alok da," said his companion gravely. "Until India learns to grow potatoes like the Idaho variety, we cannot sample the authentic Phrench Phry." One chewed on a relatively inoffensive steak, whose authenticity had not been called into question, while the other contemplated, with solemn displeasure, the unworthy impostor on the plate. Together they managed to convey the impression that what to my untutored palate was a perfectly reasonable alu-bhaja would never make the passing grade as even third-rank Phrench Phries.
That was before the Hindutva brigade discovered that the two ingredients you need for the perfect Phrench Phry were: a) the humble potato raised to the standard set by the Idaho variety and b) distinctly unsacred but tasty beef tallow as the frying fat. Or the Phrying Phat. Either way, it was only a short while before, for McDonalds and company, the Phat was well and truly in the Phire.
***
That evening, as I chopped red peppers, cucumber and tomatoes for a last summer gazpacho before winter set in and drove me to the comfort of hot soups and plain dal-bhaat, the German laser knives someone had gifted me felt wrong in the hand, their weight suddenly awkward. Setting them aside, I came up with a chopper set on a wooden board that a friend had brought down from New York. It made swift work of the Spanish onions and the peppers, and I remembered the pride with which he'd told me that this was the very "offset serrated blade" praised by Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential.
I'd reached the tomatoes and the last of the twilight was shading into smog when the sleekly post-modern lines of my New York-imported offset serrated blade blurred into another, more familiar image. Take away the jargon, and my chopping equipment stood revealed as a boti -- the raised blade set on a rough piece of board that's ubiquitous in Bengal and most of India. The boti retails at the equivalent of $2 or less; my offset serrated Bourdain-approved blade sells for $130 in some California stores.
The kitchen stood revealed as a cross-cultural minefield. The antique Italian peppermill, a gift handed down by my mother-in-law, used by her mother in the days when the possession of such an item conveyed an aura of world citizenship on the user, is employed in our house to grind saunf and roasted jeera. The silver salad set and the silver toast rack we received as wedding presents are forlorn white elephants: there is no butler to polish them, I prefer wooden salad sets anyway, and we are a toast-averse household. Jars of dried Italian herbs sit side-by-side with various masalas, bought whole once a month, roasted at home and freshly ground. The dried Provence and other herbs taste like...crumbly green flakes. Just as we inveigh against "curry powder", there being no such beast in the Indian culinary lexicon, I imagine a brigade of forlorn Italians raising their voices to the heavens in protest against the use of tasteless flakes instead of the fresh herbs from the garden the original recipes demand.
I know that this discomfort is inherited, a family legacy. As with bloodlines and songlines, if you follow the tangled skein of foodlines far back enough, you may discover truths about yourself. Uncomfortable truths; but truths, all the same.
***
In my mother's house and my grandmother's house, meals came in two varieties: Indian and English. Indian was self-explanatory: in Didima's house, it featured the best of Bengali cuisine, with a detour down the cosmopolitan byways of a Brahmo household. In my mother's Delhi house, the delicate spicing of classic Bengali cuisine collided with the in-your-face punch of North Indian cuisine. It was one of those marriages that worked, against all reason.
In both households, however, the English meals followed the same pattern. Vegetables were boiled to within an inch of their lives, more occasionally lightly steamed with lemon butter; glorious jeera-spiked versions of white sauce alternated ominously with "bakes" distinguished by listless curls of Amul cheese. Cabbage was served up in thick, tasteless wedges that resembled steamed cotton wool, but sometimes it received the fusion blessing of coconut and mustard seeds with a dash of malt vinegar, all added Anglo-Indian style to the crisply shredded and only barely blanched vegetable. But the crowning sleight-of-hand came with the Roast: mutton roasted on coal fires, served with tasty but gluey "gravy". It was years before I realised that this wasn't even mutton dressed up as lamb: it was mutton dressed up as lamb pretending to be the forbidden meat, beef.
The sacred cow occupied a slightly ambiguous position in our household. It was perfectly all right to go out to five-star restaurants and order a steak, since it was understood that hotel steak was godless, procured from an atheist cow. This polite fiction was maintained even in the face of the knowledge that most (atheist?) steak-providing cows in Delhi were actually (agnostic?) buffaloes.
In Calcutta, conversely, beef was acceptable except if you had especially religious-minded Hindu relatives coming over for dinner, and even then occasionally passed off in extremis as innocuous mutton. If the record states that we were responsible for corrupting good Hindu souls, so be it; but add that they thoroughly enjoyed what they were eating, so long as they were allowed to do so in ignorance. The sturdy Brahmo steaks Didima cooked were seasoned with crushed pepper, fried onions, grapes, and of course, a delicious guilt.
But families change, and so did mine, eschewing red meat apparently for reasons to do with cholesterol. Once I organised an impromptu family lunch -- several decades after our five-star steaks and our Calcutta beefsteaks. The potato salad and curried mushrooms went down well, but the plate of steak -- cooked medium-rare, so that its pink juices oozed balefully out -- lay accusingly on the table while everyone politely ate the takeaway tandoori chicken we'd ordered as a backup. It was a small thing, but it pointed at a rift, indicated that at least in matters of what we were or weren't willing to put into our bodies, my family and I had gone in different directions.
***
Between these two extremes, the Indian lunches and the English dinners, lay a third path, not moderate but iconoclastic. It was provided by my Thakurma, who travelled from household to household along with her husband until she and Thakurda established a kind of metronomic movement between my father's house and his younger brother's house. There were two other brothers, but one lived in inaccessible Air Force cantonments, dots on the map of India. The other had married a practising Wiccan who convinced him that he was actually the bastard of a royal family, fostered out in my Thakurma's household. Ignoring the evidence presented by the family nose, the very distinctive protuberance that was replicated faithfully on the physiognomy of all the brothers, he elected in the interests of marital peace to disown his natural family.
Having Thakurma and Thakurda to stay was no penance: one was the source of magical stories, the other of practical wisdom. Besides, Thakurma's culinary contributions were of the subversive kind. She cooked everything forbidden by the dentist and took absolutely no notice of family preferences, convinced -- correctly -- that her skill in the kitchen would overcome all resistance.
We had an early skirmish over fish, which, in repudiation of my Bengali roots, I refused to eat. A galvanised iron tub of catfish was a permanent presence in the kitchen; I named each whiskered creature and was told that the ones missing every night had gone on a trip, and never connected the maacher jhol on my plate with the straying travellers. Aside from catfish, though, I flatly refused to eat anything else from river or sea.
Wiser than my mother, who was on the losing end of a running feud with a ten-year-old's stubbornness, my Thakurma retreated from the battlefield. When my suspicions had been lulled, she greeted me with nimkis and an addictive mashed, pickled thing that I instantly loved. It was smooth; spiced to perfection with mustard oil; had a taste that brought the sea into my mouth; I thought she'd wrought magic with the humble potato. When she confessed that I'd been eating non-catfish fish for eight days without protest, I flew into an absolute rage. It's only now that I can acknowledge her triumph: not only did she make me eat what I hated, she made me love it. In the war between my prejudices and my tastebuds, she won.
As the years went by, the two households were tossed around. My Kaka went abroad; we spent six years shifting from house to house in Delhi while my father was posted in Calcutta. In that period of collective rootlessness, my grandparents shared our refugee status. Sometimes with us, sometimes not, depending on the size of the house my resourceful mother, lumbered with three rambunctious children, could find.
All the places we stayed in then had a common feature: the pre-shrunk kitchen. Instead of the large, roomy spaces we'd grown up with, we had to accommodate ourselves to closets with a stove bunged in. Thakurma's repertoire of sweets, which ranged from malpoa to payesh, from sandesh to labango latika, from layered patishaptas with their filling of coconut and raisins to narkeler nadu, shrank in tandem.
Perhaps we noticed, perhaps we didn't. My sister and I had discovered liqueur chocolates, one of the many dazzling items that we knew of only as articles brought back from the amorphous land called Abroad. My mother walked in to find her daughters replete with chocolate, but with no signs of a liqueur hangover. "There was smelly water inside," my sister explained. "We threw it away and ate the rest." The kitchen sink reeked of assorted liqueurs for days, until our cook poured quantities of yeast down the drain. The sink continued stinking, but now in a familiar as opposed to exotic way.
I do remember, despite the lure of biscuits from Paris (they tasted disappointingly like Britannia biscuits) and then-exotic Toblerone, that Thakurma kept up the tradition in exile with a token offering. Sometimes it was alu-bhaja for tea, flaunting their swadeshi flavour in stubborn denial of conquering alien tastes—Thakurma never ate a McDonald’s French Fry in her life, and wouldn’t have felt that she’d missed out on much. More usually, she'd pull out a battered Dalda tin which contained moas -- the lightest of confections, puffed rice held together with melted jaggery. When they returned to live with us, the tin smartened up, courtesy the birth of my brother, Dalda giving way to shiny blue Lactogen.
But the habit remained; though she made patishaptas and channar-payesh once in a while, it was Thakurma's moas that flavoured those years of our childhood. They provided a rare thread of continuity in those years of evictions and constantly changing schoolbus routes, of exoduses where my mother lead the way like a new Moses, appealing to our sense of adventure as we moved yet again, me lying in a malarial haze at the back of the lumbering black Ambassador, my baby brother stolidly holding the TV aerial out of one car window like a conquering flag and my sister perched on a pile of rugs and cushions in the front passenger seat.
***
"Would you like to see our ovens?" asked the chef of a snazzy new Italian restaurant, just opening in Delhi. "They're wood-fired." I heard the pride in his voice and followed gladly into the inner reaches of the kitchen. Men and women in chef's whites, tocques clapped smartly on their heads, shaped loaves, prepared duck's breasts for roasting, checked a brace of guinea hens. The ovens were huge, industrial sized. The doors were deliberately unpainted, in a designer way meant to indicate rustic charm. They were large, and as they clanged open, twin odours of meat, from one, and bread, from the other, were released in fragrant clouds.
A beaming assistant yanked freshly baked foccaccia out of the oven and deftly assembled accompaniments of virgin olive oil, pesto and sundried tomatoes. Another platter contained zucchini, cherry tomatoes and other English vegetables in a raspberry-vinegar reduction. "For you," he said. "To taste." The bread smelled divine. And I knew that if I so much as tried to take a bite, I would vomit.
Three years ago, I had accompanied my father to the electric crematorium on Ring Road, braving the raised eyebrows of well-meaning North Indian friends who felt that women had no place in that temple to death. But the woman we were about to cremate was the first feminist I'd ever met in my life; it was because of her that my mother had become a lawyer, well into middle age, instead of remaining a housewife. It was because I'd seen her writing short stories that I was trying to earn a living with hack journalism instead of marrying some rich guy and doing ikebana arrangements around the house. The least I could do was show up to say goodbye.
The electric crematorium, with its bare stage for relatives to say a few words, do a few last rites, reminded me of the many knocked-together arenas where exiled Bengalis would gather during the Pujas to put on bad, histrionic, nostalgic plays. My grandmother's body looked very light; those who raised her bier didn't have to strain.
She had died in the sterile, impersonal space of a hospital ward, instead of in her own bed at home. She and her husband had remained eternal refugees, first from Bangladesh and then from Orissa; the small patch of land she had tried to buy and claim as her own outside Delhi was mired in an interminable legal tangle. The only space they'd had was the space they'd carved out inside our lives, and that was huge, unpartitioned, beyond all boundaries.
I joined the avalanche of mourners who'd shown up for Thakurma's funeral, realising for the first time how many lives she'd touched. From my father's colleagues, who had often sat down to chat with 'Mataji', to the vegetable seller, to my friends, to her own friends -- they were all here, in tacit tribute to a life fuller than we'd thought possible.
The furnace at the electric crematorium is built like a Dutch oven. After the final rites have been performed, the eldest son steps forward and breaks the skull of his parent with a stick. Some say this frees the spirit; a dourly realistic friend told me briskly that this prevents the skull from exploding in the intense heat of the flames. "One doesn't want," she said, "bits of one's brains going off any old where."
My Thakurma lay on the platform in front of the oven. There was a final muttered prayer, a clang, the platform slid first forward and then with surprising speed, backward as the door to the furnace opened. She went in head first, her eyes closed, and before the door swung shut again I saw her head and then her torso haloed by flames.
On the plate held out by the assistant chef, I imagined I could smell wood ashes, burning flesh, crisped bones. His smile was beginning to slip a little; the staff was beginning to look a trifle questioning. In place of the focaccia, I thought I could see my Thakurma's fair, wrinkled, only slightly mottled flesh, beginning to sear. The door of the restaurant’s brand-new, state-of-the-art wood-fired oven clanged again, as someone pulled out the duck breast au jus.
I took a deep breath and inhaled scents from the past: the talcum-and-damp-newsprint smell of old age, incense, the harsingar flowers Thakurma used for her daily puja, the faint aroma from the John Exshaw brandy she drank in ladylike quantities, that last whiff of burning hair and flesh.
"Thank you," I said, tearing a chunk off the Italian bread. I dipped it in olive oil and ate, not knowing quite what I was devouring -- flesh, flour, a memory, the present. Whatever it was, it stayed down.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
2010: The Year Ahead in Books
(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)
Fiction: It’s a great year for the novel of ideas, with writers from Ian McEwan to Gregory Roberts exploring new territory.
Roberts wisely allowed a long gap to elapse after the runaway success of Shantaram, but his new novel, The Mountain Shadow (Hachette) will still invite comparisons. Mountain of Shadows continues Lin’s story in a far more stylised way; a meeting with eight men will force him back into adventure and intrigue. Will this be as good—or if not, as bulky—as Shantaram? Ian McEwan is on familiar ground with Solar (Random House), where a scientist faces the wrath of the media for analysing the difference between male and female brains.
Dom DeLillo’s critics weren’t impressed with his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, but the advance buzz about Point Omega (Scribner) seems positive. DeLillo has a chance to take a more nuanced look at war and terrorism through the eyes of his protagonist, a secret war advisor. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ promises—and has already delivered—controversy. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Hachette) already has literary groupies genuflecting in advance, and with new collections of short stories by Hanif Kureishi and T C Boyle, the cup of the inkstained wretches of this world runneth over. After a long silence, Thomas Keneally offers a novel—The People’s Train, which features a Russian revolutionary exiled to Australia.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s brand of dark satire is back in Way To Go (Penguin), while fans of “headline fiction” might like Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café (Random House)—a novel of Nepal that starts with the royal murders and continues through the current conflicts. Anita Nair (Lessons in Forgetting, HarperCollins), Namita Devidayal (The Mother, Random House), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (One Amazing Thing, Penguin) and Shobhaa De (Sethji, Penguin) all have new fiction out in 2010.
Keep an eye out for Omair Ahmed’s Jimmy The Terrorist (Penguin), and for these debut writers—Soumya Bhattacharya (If I Could Tell You, Tranquebar) and Tishani Doshi (The Pleasure Seekers, Penguin).And fans of historical fiction have Humayun’s travails, as the duo of writers known as Alex Rutherford offer the second volume in the Empire of the Moghul series—Brothers at War. On the literary front, Jeet Thayil and Dilip Simeon should also be out with riveting first novels, on addiction and revolution respectively.
Indian non-fiction: Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul (Rupa) is a fascinating account of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim—well worth reading. Somnath Chatterjee’s Memoirs of a Parliamentarian (HarperCollins) promises to be more candid than most politicians’ accounts of their lives and times. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin) should be every bit as melodramatic as the title. David Rhodes might top the blood-and-action stakes with his memoir of being kidnapped by the Taliban, A Gift of God: The Story of a Kidnapping (Penguin).
APJ Abdul Kalam’s The Scientific Indian (Penguin) is a reader-friendly guide to issues like water harvesting and space exploration. It’ll probably be as popular, but perhaps not as riveting, as neurologist V Ramachandran’s end-of-2010 release, Adventures in Neuroscience (Random House).
Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation (Rupa) is about the fault lines between the socialist India of the ‘80s and the consumerist India of the ‘90s—it promises to earn out Mehrotra’s record advance. Later in the year, Salil Tripathi’s Silent Spaces (Tranquebar) takes a literary journey across the globe, with writers from Marquez to Rushdie as his guides. And in autumn, Ramachandra Guha examines The Makers of Modern India (Penguin). Jug Suraiya brings the year to a close with his wry brand of humour in his memoir, Times of My Life (Tranquebar).
Business books: Michael Lewis’ The Big Short is probably one of the most anticipated books of 2010—the Liars’ Poker author does a consummate job of unravelling the current global financial crisis. On the subject of fallen magnates, Kingshuk Nag takes a look at The Double Life of Ramalinga Raju (HarperCollins).The Luxe Book (Hachette) by Suman Tarafdar and Taneesha Kulsreshtha offers a little relief, with a look at high-end brands.
Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s Nano-vation (Penguin) is the authorised version of the Tata’s small car story, with an emphasis on the good news rather than the political upheaval in Nandigram. RC Bhargava offers The Maruti Story (HarperCollins), just as we bid farewell to the tiny 800. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alam Srinivas explore The Ambanis and the Battle of India (Penguin) and how gas pipelines became the war zone between the two brothers. SP Hinduja’s What’s Your Problem? (HarperCollins), promises to diverge from the hagiographical approach to business family history, as he mixes family stories with his personal brand of philosophy. There will be a slew of China books on the market, as always, but the most promising is probably veteran business journalist Raghav Behl’s The Red Elephant: The Story of India and China (Penguin).
Fiction: It’s a great year for the novel of ideas, with writers from Ian McEwan to Gregory Roberts exploring new territory.
Roberts wisely allowed a long gap to elapse after the runaway success of Shantaram, but his new novel, The Mountain Shadow (Hachette) will still invite comparisons. Mountain of Shadows continues Lin’s story in a far more stylised way; a meeting with eight men will force him back into adventure and intrigue. Will this be as good—or if not, as bulky—as Shantaram? Ian McEwan is on familiar ground with Solar (Random House), where a scientist faces the wrath of the media for analysing the difference between male and female brains.
Dom DeLillo’s critics weren’t impressed with his 9/11 novel, Falling Man, but the advance buzz about Point Omega (Scribner) seems positive. DeLillo has a chance to take a more nuanced look at war and terrorism through the eyes of his protagonist, a secret war advisor. Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ promises—and has already delivered—controversy. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Hachette) already has literary groupies genuflecting in advance, and with new collections of short stories by Hanif Kureishi and T C Boyle, the cup of the inkstained wretches of this world runneth over. After a long silence, Thomas Keneally offers a novel—The People’s Train, which features a Russian revolutionary exiled to Australia.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s brand of dark satire is back in Way To Go (Penguin), while fans of “headline fiction” might like Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café (Random House)—a novel of Nepal that starts with the royal murders and continues through the current conflicts. Anita Nair (Lessons in Forgetting, HarperCollins), Namita Devidayal (The Mother, Random House), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (One Amazing Thing, Penguin) and Shobhaa De (Sethji, Penguin) all have new fiction out in 2010.
Keep an eye out for Omair Ahmed’s Jimmy The Terrorist (Penguin), and for these debut writers—Soumya Bhattacharya (If I Could Tell You, Tranquebar) and Tishani Doshi (The Pleasure Seekers, Penguin).And fans of historical fiction have Humayun’s travails, as the duo of writers known as Alex Rutherford offer the second volume in the Empire of the Moghul series—Brothers at War. On the literary front, Jeet Thayil and Dilip Simeon should also be out with riveting first novels, on addiction and revolution respectively.
Indian non-fiction: Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul (Rupa) is a fascinating account of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim—well worth reading. Somnath Chatterjee’s Memoirs of a Parliamentarian (HarperCollins) promises to be more candid than most politicians’ accounts of their lives and times. Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin) should be every bit as melodramatic as the title. David Rhodes might top the blood-and-action stakes with his memoir of being kidnapped by the Taliban, A Gift of God: The Story of a Kidnapping (Penguin).
APJ Abdul Kalam’s The Scientific Indian (Penguin) is a reader-friendly guide to issues like water harvesting and space exploration. It’ll probably be as popular, but perhaps not as riveting, as neurologist V Ramachandran’s end-of-2010 release, Adventures in Neuroscience (Random House).
Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation (Rupa) is about the fault lines between the socialist India of the ‘80s and the consumerist India of the ‘90s—it promises to earn out Mehrotra’s record advance. Later in the year, Salil Tripathi’s Silent Spaces (Tranquebar) takes a literary journey across the globe, with writers from Marquez to Rushdie as his guides. And in autumn, Ramachandra Guha examines The Makers of Modern India (Penguin). Jug Suraiya brings the year to a close with his wry brand of humour in his memoir, Times of My Life (Tranquebar).
Business books: Michael Lewis’ The Big Short is probably one of the most anticipated books of 2010—the Liars’ Poker author does a consummate job of unravelling the current global financial crisis. On the subject of fallen magnates, Kingshuk Nag takes a look at The Double Life of Ramalinga Raju (HarperCollins).The Luxe Book (Hachette) by Suman Tarafdar and Taneesha Kulsreshtha offers a little relief, with a look at high-end brands.
Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s Nano-vation (Penguin) is the authorised version of the Tata’s small car story, with an emphasis on the good news rather than the political upheaval in Nandigram. RC Bhargava offers The Maruti Story (HarperCollins), just as we bid farewell to the tiny 800. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alam Srinivas explore The Ambanis and the Battle of India (Penguin) and how gas pipelines became the war zone between the two brothers. SP Hinduja’s What’s Your Problem? (HarperCollins), promises to diverge from the hagiographical approach to business family history, as he mixes family stories with his personal brand of philosophy. There will be a slew of China books on the market, as always, but the most promising is probably veteran business journalist Raghav Behl’s The Red Elephant: The Story of India and China (Penguin).
The Business Standard 50 Best Books of the Year: 2
(Published in the Business Standard's special year-end issue on books, December 2009)
THE NON-FICTION LIST:
The Idea of Justice: Amartya Sen (Viking/ Penguin)
One of the most widely discussed books of the year seeks to redefine justice as an active goal rather than a passive abstraction, via the Indian concept of “neeti”. The Nobel laureate’s arguments are succinct, thought-provoking—and always entertaining.
The Case for God: Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head)
In a decade where faith has come under attack from the Dawkinites, the former nun makes a plausible and persuasive case for the continued existence of religion, if not the Almighty.
The Hindus: Wendy Doniger (Viking/ Penguin)
The eminent Sanskrit scholar goes back to the Vedas and the few clues from the Indus Valley civilisation among other sources to trace the development of the multiple ideas of Hinduism. Enjoy the splendid digression into the role of dogs, cows and other animals in the scriptures.
Nine Lives: William Dalrymple (Viking/ Penguin)
This thinking person's tour through India's vast array of religions explores nine different ways of finding faith, from Sufis to Tantrics. Dalrymple's relaxed, casually conversational style draws one effortlessly into an examination of faith in all its complications, from religious passion to the faultlines of competing beliefs and the surrender of one's life
in the name of, and with the permission of, God."
Lords of Finance: Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Perhaps the best business and financial book of the year, Liaquat Ahamed offers a riveting study of concentrated power, hubris and the collapse of apparently invulnerable financial systems.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made: Anne C Heller (Doubleday)
The power and influence of Ayn Rand has outlasted her death, despite the frequent literary dismissals of her work. Anne Heller offers a fascinating look at the ways in which Ayn Rand was shaped and in which she shaped the world around her in return.
The Last Empress: Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)
The Dragon Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is an ambiguous figure. This exhaustive and well-written biography explores the workings of the world of the last empress of China in illuminating detail.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life: Carol Slenicka (Scribner)
This stunning work offers deep insight into the life and relationships of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, with special emphasis on Carver’s often controversial relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.
Open: Andre Agassi (Knopf)
Agassi’s confessions of drug use overshadowed the other aspects of his biography. The tennis great unveils the darker side of sport, and of parental ambition in an oddly moving memoir.
Curfewed Night: Basharat Peer (Random House)
This memoir of growing up in Kashmir provides a personal view of its troubled history. Peer’s background as a journalist allows him to blend the personal and the political with consummate ease.
Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Taseer explores the faith of his fathers through the prickly terrain of family history via the faultlines of today, as Islam reveals its multiple faces.
A Place Within: M G Vassanji (Penguin/ Viking)
The Canadian writer’s explorations of India become a quest to understand the roots of his work, as he meets some of his most revered fellow practitioners and thinkers.
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity: Sam Miller (Jonathan Cape)
Miller’s evocation of Delhi’s history, past and present, makes this book the perfect guide. Take it on a long walk around Old and Brashly New Delhi, and you won’t be disappointed.
Dreaming in Hindi: Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin)
This unusual memoir explores what it means to find a new language—and a country—in midlife.
Rethinking Hindu Identity: D N Jha (Equinox)
An outspoken scholar presents his view of the shaping of an often rigid, often troubled view of Hinduism.
Fear and Forgiveness: Harsh Mander (Penguin)
The Gujarat riots and their aftermath, examined by one of the most conscientious voices among India’s citizens.
The Difficulty of Being Good: Gurcharan Das (Viking/ Penguin)
Lessons in contemporary dharma, via the Mahabharata, take us through the squabbles of the Ambanis, lessons from Arjuna on the battlefield, and the importance of living well versus the need to win.
The Ethical Worker: Subroto Bagchi (Penguin)
The management guru explored ways of bringing values into a workplace that might often seem to place ethics below profits, in this final work.
The Satyam Saga: Bhupesh Bhandari and others (BS Books)
A comprehensive look at the rise and fall of India’s IT behemoth. (Disclaimer: This book was compiled by a team of Business Standard journalists; I decided to let it stay on the list despite the potential conflicts of interest because of the number of business gurus who recommended this to me.)
Baulsphere: Mimlu Sen (Random House)
Travels with the faith-intoxicated singers of Bengal, written by an insider to the world of the Bauls.
MS & Radha: Gowri Ramnarayan (Wordcraft)
One of India’s most insightful critics pens a beautiful evocation of a relationship between a musician and a connoisseur of Indian music.
An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R C Dutt (Meenakshi Mukherjee) (Penguin)
A classic biography of an Indian pioneer from the late and respected critic.
THE NON-FICTION LIST:
The Idea of Justice: Amartya Sen (Viking/ Penguin)
One of the most widely discussed books of the year seeks to redefine justice as an active goal rather than a passive abstraction, via the Indian concept of “neeti”. The Nobel laureate’s arguments are succinct, thought-provoking—and always entertaining.
The Case for God: Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head)
In a decade where faith has come under attack from the Dawkinites, the former nun makes a plausible and persuasive case for the continued existence of religion, if not the Almighty.
The Hindus: Wendy Doniger (Viking/ Penguin)
The eminent Sanskrit scholar goes back to the Vedas and the few clues from the Indus Valley civilisation among other sources to trace the development of the multiple ideas of Hinduism. Enjoy the splendid digression into the role of dogs, cows and other animals in the scriptures.
Nine Lives: William Dalrymple (Viking/ Penguin)
This thinking person's tour through India's vast array of religions explores nine different ways of finding faith, from Sufis to Tantrics. Dalrymple's relaxed, casually conversational style draws one effortlessly into an examination of faith in all its complications, from religious passion to the faultlines of competing beliefs and the surrender of one's life
in the name of, and with the permission of, God."
Lords of Finance: Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press)
Perhaps the best business and financial book of the year, Liaquat Ahamed offers a riveting study of concentrated power, hubris and the collapse of apparently invulnerable financial systems.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made: Anne C Heller (Doubleday)
The power and influence of Ayn Rand has outlasted her death, despite the frequent literary dismissals of her work. Anne Heller offers a fascinating look at the ways in which Ayn Rand was shaped and in which she shaped the world around her in return.
The Last Empress: Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)
The Dragon Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is an ambiguous figure. This exhaustive and well-written biography explores the workings of the world of the last empress of China in illuminating detail.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life: Carol Slenicka (Scribner)
This stunning work offers deep insight into the life and relationships of one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, with special emphasis on Carver’s often controversial relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish.
Open: Andre Agassi (Knopf)
Agassi’s confessions of drug use overshadowed the other aspects of his biography. The tennis great unveils the darker side of sport, and of parental ambition in an oddly moving memoir.
Curfewed Night: Basharat Peer (Random House)
This memoir of growing up in Kashmir provides a personal view of its troubled history. Peer’s background as a journalist allows him to blend the personal and the political with consummate ease.
Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer (Random House)
Taseer explores the faith of his fathers through the prickly terrain of family history via the faultlines of today, as Islam reveals its multiple faces.
A Place Within: M G Vassanji (Penguin/ Viking)
The Canadian writer’s explorations of India become a quest to understand the roots of his work, as he meets some of his most revered fellow practitioners and thinkers.
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity: Sam Miller (Jonathan Cape)
Miller’s evocation of Delhi’s history, past and present, makes this book the perfect guide. Take it on a long walk around Old and Brashly New Delhi, and you won’t be disappointed.
Dreaming in Hindi: Katherine Russell Rich (Houghton Mifflin)
This unusual memoir explores what it means to find a new language—and a country—in midlife.
Rethinking Hindu Identity: D N Jha (Equinox)
An outspoken scholar presents his view of the shaping of an often rigid, often troubled view of Hinduism.
Fear and Forgiveness: Harsh Mander (Penguin)
The Gujarat riots and their aftermath, examined by one of the most conscientious voices among India’s citizens.
The Difficulty of Being Good: Gurcharan Das (Viking/ Penguin)
Lessons in contemporary dharma, via the Mahabharata, take us through the squabbles of the Ambanis, lessons from Arjuna on the battlefield, and the importance of living well versus the need to win.
The Ethical Worker: Subroto Bagchi (Penguin)
The management guru explored ways of bringing values into a workplace that might often seem to place ethics below profits, in this final work.
The Satyam Saga: Bhupesh Bhandari and others (BS Books)
A comprehensive look at the rise and fall of India’s IT behemoth. (Disclaimer: This book was compiled by a team of Business Standard journalists; I decided to let it stay on the list despite the potential conflicts of interest because of the number of business gurus who recommended this to me.)
Baulsphere: Mimlu Sen (Random House)
Travels with the faith-intoxicated singers of Bengal, written by an insider to the world of the Bauls.
MS & Radha: Gowri Ramnarayan (Wordcraft)
One of India’s most insightful critics pens a beautiful evocation of a relationship between a musician and a connoisseur of Indian music.
An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R C Dutt (Meenakshi Mukherjee) (Penguin)
A classic biography of an Indian pioneer from the late and respected critic.
The Business Standard 50 Best Books of the Year
(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)
THE FICTION LIST:
A Gate at the Stairs: Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Moore’s novel of a woman growing up in the American Midwest is funny and heartbreaking in turn, and deserves all the praise it’s got.
Love and Obstacles: Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead)
One of the best new writers of our times puts Bosnia on the map with these taut, linked stories of immigrant longings, memories and frustrations.
Too Much Happiness: Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
One of Munro’s best collections yet, this is all the evidence you need that the short story is a thriving form, and that Munro is one of the most rewarding writers of our times.
Wolf Hall: Hillary Mantel (4th Estate)
The Booker-winning historical novel examines the political machinations and blood-and-guts of Cromwell’s time, in an age where “man is wolf to man”.
The Museum of Innocence: Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Love and obsession in Istanbul; and Pamuk collects the objects in his story in a real-life museum.
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin (Viking)
An Irish immigrant travels to 1950s America in this novel of the discovery of a country, and the making of heartwrenching but necessary choices. One of Toibin’s masterworks.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Daniyal Muenuddin (Random House)
This gently incisive first collection of short stories set in Pakistan is Tolstoyan in both range and understanding. Definitely a writer to watch.
Home: Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Few writers understand the human heart as well as Robinson. The sequel to Gilead pits faith against despair, shelter against experience, in this wise, resonant novel.
Love and Summer: William Trevor (Viking)
A woman brought up as a foundling, a man about to leave home forever; Trevor makes magic of these simple ingredients.
The City & The City: China Mieville (Del Rey)
Mieville explodes through dark and rich territory in his latest futuristic sojourn.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Javier Marias (Chatto & Windus)
The concluding part of Marias’ trilogy reinvents the Cold War spy novel, blending literary fiction with the conventions of the thriller in a spectacular mix.
The Little Stranger: Sarah Waters (Hachette)
This evocative ghost story set in a Victorian house is a classic tale of deception and quietly climactic horror.
Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
The Japanese master offers stories linked by music and musicians in this delicate and moving collection.
Summertime: J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Coetzee fictionalises Coetzee, in this tale of a South African writer seen through the eyes of the women he’s tried and failed to love.
Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Atwood sticks with SF territory in this clever, apocalyptic follow-up to Oryx and Crake.
The Children's Book: AS Byatt
Children's literature and the perils of growing up, both addressed by Byatt at the top of her form.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
A jaded journalist in Venice, a pilgrim in Varanasi: Dyer romps through this delightful novel with considerable verve.
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese (Random House)
Verghese’s first excursion into fiction is a sweeping, ambitious historical novel.
Solo: Rana Dasgupta (HarperCollins)
Skill and craft fuel this view of Europe from one of its more neglected literary corners.
The Story of a Widow: Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Picador)
Farooqi proves that he’s as good a novelist as a translator with this quiet, satisfying tale of a woman in transit.
The Immortals: Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Music forms the backbone of this intensely literary work, which showcases all of Chaudhuri’s lyrical skills.
The Storyteller’s Tale: Omair Ahmad (Penguin)
Ahmad brings back the fable in this delicate and curiously modern tale, despite its medieval setting.
The Story of My Assassins: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins)
Tejpal’s journalistic skills flesh out this ambitious novel of darkness and violence in present-day India.
(Caveat: Because of my previous association with Tranquebar as an editor, all Tranquebar picks were made on the basis of the recommendations of other reviewers and critics.)
If It Is Sweet: Mridula Koshy (Tranquebar)
The Shakti Bhatt award-winning collection of debut short stories that map the secret worlds hidden in cities as disparate as Delhi and Los Angeles.
Eunuch Park: Palash Krishna Mehrotra (Penguin)
A brilliant first collection of short stories steeped in black humour explores masculinity and the changing face of urban India.
Arzee the Dwarf: Chandrahas Choudhury (HarperCollins)
A new perspective on Bombay, from the point of view of a dwarf obsessed with a crumbling cinema hall.
A Pack of Lies: Urmilla Deshpande (Tranquebar)
A young woman discovers freedom, sensuality and identity as she struggles with a troubled family history.
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories, edited by Ruchir Joshi
India’s first contemporary collection of erotica brings in mofussil lust, Chugtai’s infamous quilt, and a very unusual wedding celebration.
THE BEST OF POPULAR FICTION: THE TOP FIVE
The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown (Doubleday)
Though the kindest word critics had for Dan Brown was “inescapable”, his latest Freemasonry-in-Washington saga hit the bestseller lists.
Two States: The Story of My Marriage: Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
India’s answer to Dan Brown explores the venerable institution of the great Indian marriage—fans love it.
Under the Dome: Stephen King (Scribner)
The horror-meister delivers one of his best thrillers yet in this SF-influenced tale set in a besieged city.
My Friend Sancho: Amit Varma (Hachette)
Varma’s first novel explores a fake encounter in Mumbai, and bridged the divide between popular and literary fiction in India.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Lisbeth Salander must clear her name of false charges in the final volume of the late Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.
THE FICTION LIST:
A Gate at the Stairs: Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Moore’s novel of a woman growing up in the American Midwest is funny and heartbreaking in turn, and deserves all the praise it’s got.
Love and Obstacles: Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead)
One of the best new writers of our times puts Bosnia on the map with these taut, linked stories of immigrant longings, memories and frustrations.
Too Much Happiness: Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
One of Munro’s best collections yet, this is all the evidence you need that the short story is a thriving form, and that Munro is one of the most rewarding writers of our times.
Wolf Hall: Hillary Mantel (4th Estate)
The Booker-winning historical novel examines the political machinations and blood-and-guts of Cromwell’s time, in an age where “man is wolf to man”.
The Museum of Innocence: Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Love and obsession in Istanbul; and Pamuk collects the objects in his story in a real-life museum.
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin (Viking)
An Irish immigrant travels to 1950s America in this novel of the discovery of a country, and the making of heartwrenching but necessary choices. One of Toibin’s masterworks.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Daniyal Muenuddin (Random House)
This gently incisive first collection of short stories set in Pakistan is Tolstoyan in both range and understanding. Definitely a writer to watch.
Home: Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Few writers understand the human heart as well as Robinson. The sequel to Gilead pits faith against despair, shelter against experience, in this wise, resonant novel.
Love and Summer: William Trevor (Viking)
A woman brought up as a foundling, a man about to leave home forever; Trevor makes magic of these simple ingredients.
The City & The City: China Mieville (Del Rey)
Mieville explodes through dark and rich territory in his latest futuristic sojourn.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Javier Marias (Chatto & Windus)
The concluding part of Marias’ trilogy reinvents the Cold War spy novel, blending literary fiction with the conventions of the thriller in a spectacular mix.
The Little Stranger: Sarah Waters (Hachette)
This evocative ghost story set in a Victorian house is a classic tale of deception and quietly climactic horror.
Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
The Japanese master offers stories linked by music and musicians in this delicate and moving collection.
Summertime: J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Coetzee fictionalises Coetzee, in this tale of a South African writer seen through the eyes of the women he’s tried and failed to love.
Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Atwood sticks with SF territory in this clever, apocalyptic follow-up to Oryx and Crake.
The Children's Book: AS Byatt
Children's literature and the perils of growing up, both addressed by Byatt at the top of her form.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
A jaded journalist in Venice, a pilgrim in Varanasi: Dyer romps through this delightful novel with considerable verve.
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese (Random House)
Verghese’s first excursion into fiction is a sweeping, ambitious historical novel.
Solo: Rana Dasgupta (HarperCollins)
Skill and craft fuel this view of Europe from one of its more neglected literary corners.
The Story of a Widow: Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Picador)
Farooqi proves that he’s as good a novelist as a translator with this quiet, satisfying tale of a woman in transit.
The Immortals: Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Music forms the backbone of this intensely literary work, which showcases all of Chaudhuri’s lyrical skills.
The Storyteller’s Tale: Omair Ahmad (Penguin)
Ahmad brings back the fable in this delicate and curiously modern tale, despite its medieval setting.
The Story of My Assassins: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins)
Tejpal’s journalistic skills flesh out this ambitious novel of darkness and violence in present-day India.
(Caveat: Because of my previous association with Tranquebar as an editor, all Tranquebar picks were made on the basis of the recommendations of other reviewers and critics.)
If It Is Sweet: Mridula Koshy (Tranquebar)
The Shakti Bhatt award-winning collection of debut short stories that map the secret worlds hidden in cities as disparate as Delhi and Los Angeles.
Eunuch Park: Palash Krishna Mehrotra (Penguin)
A brilliant first collection of short stories steeped in black humour explores masculinity and the changing face of urban India.
Arzee the Dwarf: Chandrahas Choudhury (HarperCollins)
A new perspective on Bombay, from the point of view of a dwarf obsessed with a crumbling cinema hall.
A Pack of Lies: Urmilla Deshpande (Tranquebar)
A young woman discovers freedom, sensuality and identity as she struggles with a troubled family history.
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories, edited by Ruchir Joshi
India’s first contemporary collection of erotica brings in mofussil lust, Chugtai’s infamous quilt, and a very unusual wedding celebration.
THE BEST OF POPULAR FICTION: THE TOP FIVE
The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown (Doubleday)
Though the kindest word critics had for Dan Brown was “inescapable”, his latest Freemasonry-in-Washington saga hit the bestseller lists.
Two States: The Story of My Marriage: Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
India’s answer to Dan Brown explores the venerable institution of the great Indian marriage—fans love it.
Under the Dome: Stephen King (Scribner)
The horror-meister delivers one of his best thrillers yet in this SF-influenced tale set in a besieged city.
My Friend Sancho: Amit Varma (Hachette)
Varma’s first novel explores a fake encounter in Mumbai, and bridged the divide between popular and literary fiction in India.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Lisbeth Salander must clear her name of false charges in the final volume of the late Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.
Books in 2009: What authors were reading
(From the Business Standard special year-end issue on books, published in December 2009)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
The BS Column: From Dune to Cyberabad
(Published in the Business Standard, December 8, 2009)If a future historian were to examine the ways of humanity via a library of science fiction, these would be the scholar’s conclusions. Most rocket scientists and space explorers are white and male. UFOs, ETs, alien life-forms and spaceships prefer to visit the United States of America and large parts of Europe, with the occasional foray into Japan and very rarely, deserted patches of the globe.
Astronauts and spaceship crews are chiefly drawn from the West, though an occasional Indian (usually a doctor) or Chinese member (usually a mathematically gifted technician) might find a place on board alongside the token blacks. Africans, Brazilians (and other Latin Americans), and Indonesians or Malaysians rarely explore space, though Russians often do, and even Australians might. (Canadians and New Zealanders are conspicuous by their absence.) Robots, androids and humanoids are either based on Caucasian or more infrequently Japanese models, but evil aliens may reflect certain racial stereotypes of the time.
Around 2006, SF author Ian McDonald began exploring landscapes outside the Western world as possible terrain for speculative fiction. His River of Gods offered a Balkanised India, while Brasyl travelled to both the Brazil of the future and a Brazil of the past. He’s just out with Cyberabad Days, and his vision of India of 2047 is both riveting and eerily plausible.
McDonald has travelled extensively in India over a period of years, but sees himself as a tourist rather than an old India hand. This allows him to make the occasional gora mistake, as when he refers to “fields of dhal” when “fields of masoor” might have been more accurate, but these errors are minor. What makes Cyberabad Days work as a short story collection is not just that he writes brilliant SF; it’s that he creates an incredibly recognisable view of a future India.
In the hands of a seasoned SF master, India/ Cyberabad emerges as a fractured state, torn by increasingly vicious water wars. Marriage bureaus augment the shaadi.com routine with the assistance of aeais (artificial intelligences); hijras transform into “nutes”, taking on the slick mantle of future technology; steel monkey-robots can be found on the pink walls of Jaipur; Ardhanarishva Clinics assist in gender-transformation surgery; and the rivers, down to the Ganges, are “starved and frail” across the land.
One of McDonald’s aims, as stated in his interviews, is to shift the focus of SF to the developing world—a shift that, as he says, should have happened internally, with Colombian or Bangladeshi writers, for instance, joining the phalanx of Indian SF writers. To some extent, that process is happening. Samit Basu’s Gameworld series is an unselfconscious fantasy saga set in a very Indian world, with explicitly desi references. Manjula Padmanabhan’s more recent Escape explores a dystopian world where women are exterminated as a matter of course. Padmanabhan didn’t name her country of the future, but as she says, references to food, clothes and geographical terrain make it clear that her dystopia is a very Indian one. It’s influenced by the present-day phenomenon of a skewed gender ratio caused by the killing of female foetuses and infants by Indian families who want sons, not daughters.
Authors like Anil Menon, Anshumani Ruddra and Basu also have an understanding of the workings of the international market—explicitly Indian SF and fantasy is less saleable than more conventional works set in a recognisably Western world. Anil Menon bluntly counselled Indian authors to look to a local rather than a global audience, though writers like Ashok Banker have had some success with wider audiences—Banker’s updated fantasy reworking of the Ramayana found many readers outside India. It’s not an easy market for writers in India—or Brazil—to penetrate, though, and perhaps McDonald’s success with Cyberabad Days, Brasyl and River of Gods will open those firmly shut doors a crack wider. There will need to be several McDonalds (or Orson Scott Cards) before editors and publishers abroad begin accepting SF set in the developing world.
What we need is for the wheel to come full circle. From the 1850s onwards, India saw a curious phenomenon—a healthy appetite for local science fiction, especially in Bengal and Maharashtra. Early Bengali SF writers wrote about explorations to Venus, automated homes and suitably respectful household robots. One of the great pioneers, Premendra Mitra, allowed his imagination to aoar in the other direction—outwards from India to the wider world.
In his classic Piprer Puran (Saga of the Aunts), Mitra writes of the invasion of “monstrous Ants” who bring the cities of Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador down. Their story, told in the early 20th century, is narrated by a multicultural cast: Asesh Roy, Senor Sabatini, Sukhomoy Sarkar and Don Perito. By setting his SF in Brazil and India, Ian McDonald is returning a very old compliment.
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