Ideas of India

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2010. I'm working on a longer version, and will share that when it's done; each of the people quoted offered far more in the way of insight and experience than I had space for in the span of a newspaper article.)








If you’ve ever ridden the Himsagar Express, you know the pull of the idea of traversing India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. The actual journey is, as most tourists and pilgrims discover, dusty, unromantic and unremarkable. It’s the idea that’s attractive—performing a discovery of India, snaking down the country’s spinal cord, and the magic of that phrase: Kashmir se Kanyakumari tak. As writers, thinkers and travelers have discovered over the centuries, going in search of the idea of India is equally frustrating, and equally compelling.

Pawan Verma, chronicler of the great Indian middle class, is the most recent in a long line of authors to do an “audit” of the idea of India. For him, Becoming Indian is an ongoing project. “The impact of colonialism on a people’s sensibilities does not disappear with political freedom,” he writes. “The Empire continues to exercise its sway at the psychological level. The formerly ruled deny this, and yet their mental servitude is apparent in so many ways.” We are still, he argues, Macaulay’s grandchildren, still enslaved by the elevation of English over other Indian languages, in constant danger of forgetting our own past and culture—which he identifies, unfortunately, as primarily North Indian and Hindi-speaking.

And with that, he joins a grand tradition of arguing over India. The historian Irfan Habib has pointed out that it wasn’t until the late 14th century that the Hindus began calling India “Hindustan”—Ind or Sindh-stan was a chiefly Greek and Persian construct before this time. Much before that, though, Alberuni (973-1078 AD) and other travelers would comfortably refer to the inhabitants as Hindus: “The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.” And many centuries later, Veer Savarkar would take this to an extreme, demanding that India must be a Hindu land, “reserved for the Hindus”. “India is such a huge concept, like Europe,” observes the historian and writer William Dalrymple, “it’s something you encounter only when actually thinking about it.”

A bookshelf devoted to “ideas of India” would have to be large, roomy and argumentative, with space for Vivekananda, Gandhi, Naipaul, Sunil Khilnani, Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha, Tagore, Veer Savarkar and a score of others. Pavan Verma and Naipaul would agree that India is a wounded civilization locked in a willed amnesia over its past of multiple invasions, home now to a million shifting mutinies. They might find some overlapping, though not entirely common, ground with Swami Vivekananda, who argued over a century ago that India had been ruled in turn by Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, and that British rule had reduced us all to shudras in our own country.

For the historian Sunil Khilnani, India inherited a history of thinking in terms of villages and varnam (caste), but overlaying this and shaping our “modern” India is the overarching concept of democracy. And Amartya Sen argues for a more fluid identity, saying that beyond the simplicities of caste and religion, we all inhabit far more complex identities.

How far back does the idea of India go?

One school of thought makes the case that India, as the BJP Manifesto has it, “is perhaps the most ancient and continuing civilisation of the world”. But this harking back to the glories of a past that must be resurrected can lead to extremist movements, and not everyone agrees. The eminent historian Ramachandra Guha says bluntly: “As a political entity, India is a modern construct. The British, accidentally and for their own motives, created an artificial territorial unity; and then Gandhi and the national movement fostered a political unity and shared moral purpose to the people who lived in that territory. The search for ancient or medieval progenitors of the idea of India is unhistorical, and also dangerous, since it tends to end with a narrowly Hindu idea of Indian nationhood.”
Dalrymple might agree that India acquires a political unity in 1947, and that until then, “there is almost no point in Indian history where the whole of India is united—not under the Cholas, or Akbar, or the British”. But he also points to the fact that there has been a continuous, historical notion of India as a geographical entity: “There is at least a concept of India.”

What shapes our personal ideas of India?

Nehru found his history in jail, during the National Movement, through a series of letters to his daughter; and then through the project of writing about the history of the country he was fighting for. Gandhi found his through the age-old Indian tradition of the padayatra, the personal pilgrimage, lathi in hand, around his country.
For today’s authors, the discovery of India is almost always a slow, cumulative progress: there are no shortcuts. Mukul Kesavam, scholar and professor at Jamia Millia University, began thinking about India as an idea when he was writing his pamphlet on secularism in India. “I knew that 'Indian' secularism was meant to be different from the western sort (not a rigorous separation of the public realm from religion, but a state that was equally intimate with all religions etc.) but it hadn't occurred to me that Indian nationalism was singular or original or odd. Not only was secularism in India a species of pluralism, but so was nationalism.”
For the journalist Sadanand Dhume, author of My Friend the Fanatic, his ideas of India were shaped by “lived experience—neighbourhood cricket, Hindi films on Doordarshan”. Naipaul was an early and lasting influence, but as an adult, it was the view from elsewhere in what he calls “two major dislocations” that would be useful. The first shift was conventional, a move from New Delhi to New York: “The Indian goes to the West and sees his country anew from a distance. But equally important, and less usual, was the four years I spent living in Southeast Asia, in Jakarta, and the experience of writing about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia.”
And for Dilip Simeon, chairperson of the Aman Trust and author, it was his time as a student travelling to famine-stricken Bihar, and time spent in “so-called revolutionary activity” that would be key. But there’s an image that stays with him, from the research he did on the history of labour in Jamshedpur and Jharia: “Among my most horrifying and fascinating sensations was the sight of the flames of the Jharia underground fire, emanating from vast fissures in the earth; and the vast swathes of subsidence. It began in 1930, and still rages.”
Dalrymple speaks about growing up in Britain on an early ‘80s diet of Jewel-in-the-Crown infused Raj nostalgia: “I’m the last generation brought up with the Eric Newby/ Rudyard Kipling reading list.” The man who would make his name as an indefatigable traveler had visited very few countries before he made his first visit to India, completely unprepared for the reality he would encounter. “The first culture shock was massive,” he says.

What’s at the core of the idea of India?

“Indian nationalism fetishises both equality and difference,” Kesavan observes. “Diversity and pluralism aren't optional extras with Indian nationalism: they are the whole deal; take those away and the project collapses.”
For Dalrymple, the “sacred map of India” is essential. “I don’t think democracy is “the” idea of India—Hinduism, Bollywood, cricket, these are all important elements in the construction of our identity. You can’t escape the fact that this is a strongly Hindu country, and that the various forms of Hinduism do provide a cohesion. The rightwing may have exploited this idea, but despite the deep hesitations, there’s no question that the network of sacred sites and the sacred map of India is a very important part of most people’s conception of India, predates the modern nation and the birth of democracy. I think you do need to talk to the pilgrim on the way to Vaishno Devi and ask him which is more important—the network of shrines or the ballot box.”
But if you want to understand the idea of India, Ramachandra Guha suggests that you look closely at five of the key figures in pre-Independence India—Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Ambedkar and Rajagopalachari.
“Gandhi and Tagore together fostered an idea of India that did not demonize other nations and cultures, but promoted an open-minded engagement with them. Gandhi and Nehru together fostered an idea of India which was inclusive within its borders, and afforded equal citizenship to all regardless of class or gender, while respecting religious and linguistic pluralism.
Gandhi and Ambedkar, working in parallel and sometimes in opposition, together ensured that in free India there would be special rights for the most historically disadvantaged, namely, the former Untouchables. Gandhi and Rajagopalachari, working together, fostered a skeptical attitude towards the powers of the state and thus opened the way for the protection of individual liberties and the encouragement of individual creativity (whether in entrepreneurship, literature, or the arts).”
Perhaps there’s still a need, 60 years after Independence, to become Indian, as Pavan Verma argues. But the more interesting question, given the choices, is: what kind of Indian would that be?


TEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE IDEA OF INDIA

1) The Mahabharata
2) Alberuni: The Indica
3) Sunil Khilnani: The Idea of India
4) Amartya Sen: The Argumentative Indian
5) Ramachandra Guha: India After Gandhi
6) Gandhi: My Experiments with Truth
7) Naipaul: A Wounded Civilisation, A Million Mutinies Now
8) Veer Savarkar: Hindutva
9) Indian Studies in the History of an Idea: edited by Irfan Habib
10) The Discovery of India: Nehru

Art: Twitterneurons

(For Beam Me Up/ #cloudrumble56. This was part of a performance art exhibition by Abhishek Hazra; the earlier piece, Twitterneurons, is here.)





A few weeks after Abhishek Hazra’s twitter-art/ performance in Delhi, Marina Abramovic performs The Artist is Present at the MOMA. In her decades as a performance artist, Abramovic has used her body as vulnerable space, inviting an audience to attack it, as artwork, as artist’s tools, always pushing the limits. Now she sits, almost motionless, as the audience comes up, one by one, to occupy the chair across from her, and gaze into her face.
As the performance continues, shifting shape and acquiring new rules, making new discoveries, over the days, it’s accompanied by a recording frenzy. There are photo galleries of those who sat across from her, many of them captured in tears, their emotions uncontainable even in this most public of public space. There are recordings. There is reportage. This is the way it happens with the most moving art, the most significant moments of our lives: even as we’re witnessing and experiencing, the drive to capture what’s happening sets up a peculiarly 21st century anxiety.
In a comfortable office, its walls briefly transformed into gallery space by Hazra’s physics-inspired drawings, the artist is surrounded by a ring of laptops. This is to be livetweeted by us, creating a second layer of performance over his performance art. If it works, perhaps it might do what performance art is also, sometimes, supposed to do—break down the fourth wall, make the audience an integral part of the performance. There’s also the technological aspect: #cloudrumble56 might trend on Twitter, and there’s something appealing about using technology to capture or analyse or experience a performance that’s about the history of science.
And there is the irony of trying to use the highly compressed, shorthand language of Twitter—140 characters is your limit—in real time, to tweet about a performance that is, in great measure, also about the breakdown of and the futility of language. At various points of time, Hazra will offer fragments: of thoughts, of excerpts from the speeches of Saha, of explanations of an ionization chamber, stray phrases, references to caste or local identity--“Sahas are not Boddhis”—in his deliberate dismantling of the story and the success story of one of India’s iconic scientists.
* * *
Almost two months after the performance, I’m looking for traces of it on the Net. I have been here before, in the early, evangelical years of the world wide web, when it used to be called the “information superhighway”. Roughly two decades ago, our expectations of the web’s memory were naïve, and awed. Everything was archivable; everything could be preserved. Google Cache made this seem inevitable; spycams and easy uploads and Google Maps made everything seem indelible, accessible, infinitely available.
As we know now, this is not true. By the mid-1990s, you had ghost sites. Abandoned web pages and Usenet group discussions that no one bothered any longer to visit or access floated in cyberspace like shipwrecked hulks, settling in silence to the bottom of the information ocean. Magazines as great and apparently indestructible as Feed disappeared; caches remain, but as the memory of one generation fades, even caches are less and less often visited. Virtual moss grows over them. Those who were hooked to the lives of their avatars in Second Life and other virtual worlds move on when the sites hiccup or shut down, creating new personas and new avatars, sometimes ransacking their old selves, sometimes abandoning them entirely. There is little new about this process; it’s the way we handle our meatspace lives.
#cloudrumble56 is still there on my Twitter feed and still there somewhere in Twitterspace—the counterpoint to the inbuilt ephemerality of Twitter is in the old-world institution of the library. The Library of Congress Archives will save tweets, patiently, as a searchable archive: the babbling mouths of the Internet, preserved for posterity. Until I find my personal cache of #cloudrumble56, what I get are error messages. Hashtag not found. Try a more general search. Try using different words.
On my own Twitter feed, I can find my own tweets. But they’re isolated from the herd, drifting in solipsism, and they make little sense without the comments of the others who shared laptop space with me that day. Finding the cache, where everyone’s tweets are stored, except for the two who accidentally typed “clourdrumble56”, creating an opera box for two, a privileged performance space of their own, leads to a surprising, unexpected surge of happiness. The relief of not being on one’s own any more, the only watcher, the sole witness/ participant.
* * *
If you’ve ever played role-playing games, you’ll know all about the fork in the road, the point where you get multiple choices and can continue as a knight errant or choose to upgrade to seventh-rank ninja warlord, can visit the Baba Yaga’s reinvented techno clubhouse or a Tokyo subway station from the late 1950s.
I could now discuss the content of Abhishek Hazra’s performance, which has to do with the life of a scientist who came from a village near Dhaka, a scholarship boy who made his name with his work on the thermal ionization of elements. I could discuss how his performance makes its bow to the conventions of performance art by starting with the body of the artist—clad in layers and layers of football shirts, sweatshirts, T-shirts, which he will cut up with scissors or mutilate or discard as he removes the layers slowly. Or discuss the many ways in which he subverts our expectations and the notions of what constitutes art by deliberately creating and removing layers of meaning, by fracturing language, with his use of headsets and tinned cheese to puncture the usual technological tropes. It’s in keeping with most of his work, which has demonstrated a fascination with the hidden narratives behind science, and which is underpinned by his fairly formidable knowledge of his subject. But that’s not the point of this essay, and there are better critics of Hazra’s art and work than me to turn to in this respect.

* * *
Tweeting a live performance is exhilarating and distracting at the same time. For those of us in the room, the sense of connection with one another—students, art lovers, the curious—develops before the performance as we chat and reach for chocolate éclairs, set up our laptops on the tables provided, check to see that we have a reasonable view of the artist.
When the performance starts, we retreat from one another, absorbed by our keyboards, looking up or communicating only to share hashtags or to make an occasional, rare observation. This is a polite audience, and no one intervenes with their own performances, no one interrupts the artist. Those of us who have developed the ability to touch-type are at an advantage, but it’s interesting to see how most of us, tweeting in effective isolation, reach immediately for description: he’s taking a sweatshirt off, he has the scissors in his hands, he’s shouting, he’s come up to my chair, he’s handing around a pamphlet, we take bites out of the tray of “cheese”, which doesn’t stand for “cheese” at all, we are watching and worried that we might miss something.
About twenty minutes into the performance, you can see the wear and tear on the Twitter timeline, as people abandon description: perhaps it’s too fatiguing, perhaps we’re beginning to recognize the futility of describing a performance that, like all performance art, you really need to be immersed in. Perhaps it’s also the frustration inherent in trying to livetweet performance art that’s showing through: the greater your fidelity to capturing the performance, the more attention you pay to structuring your tweets, the less you’re actually witnessing or experiencing the performance. If you could plot the graph of Hazra’s performance on a tweet monitor, it’s the seconds of collective silence, the half-minute of nothing, where something has happened in the space of that room, where we’re most deeply engaged—too engaged to tweet.
On some of the Twitter clients I use, #cloudrumble56 is still alive, still accessible. Of the people in the audience that day, some were neophytes to Twitter—entering its gargantuan talk-chamber with no preparation at all. (This encourages solipsism: if you don’t know that you can follow people on Twitter, and no one is following you, you can have conversations with yourself all day if you so choose.) Some have set up separate accounts for this Twitter performance; I haven’t, and as I tweet, I receive puzzled Direct Messages looking for Abhishek Hazra’s Twitter performance—the assumption is that #cloudrumble56 is the art event itself, not the twitter feed about the art event. I share this with the person sitting next to me, and we both admit that we had been expecting Twitter performance art—we hadn’t realized that we were the Twitter performance art.
It comes to me, weeks later, that Twitter is the perfect client for performance art. Every other way of preserving a performance online—videotaping it, or writing about it, as I’m doing now—offers the reassurance of permanence. But as much as writers and photographers will try to capture Abramovic’s performance in New York, as vivid as your descriptions might be of a radical performance piece at Devi in Delhi or in the theatre district in Tokyo, the truth is that what passes between audience and artist, performer and witness, or co-performer, is private.
It seems right that #cloudrumble56 will disperse, as the ions in an ionization chamber will after the experiment, or as we do after the performance. It seems right that its Twitter footprint will fade, shoved down the list of trending topics as each day’s cargo of news and opinion and jokes (and art) piles up. There is no such thing as a perfect cache, whether you’re discussing memory or art. There is no such thing as the perfect capture, or the perfect evocation of an art event; what livetweeting returns you to, inexorably, is the performance itself.
I’m looking at the #cloudrumble56 tweets, at these fragments of testimony, reaction, appreciation, puzzlement, engagement, boredom. The collective tweets, even the ones by the two who had the wrong hashtag, are a touching way of trying to capture what lies beyond language with the blunt tools of language, and you can also see emotion, sudden understanding, crosslinks to other web pages that reference Saha or performance art or science or electrons. Caught in this fragile web is a half-conveyed, imperfectly expressed experience; it’s like walking into a reader’s mind as s/he is reading and drawing up a ringside seat. This is the way one contemporary school of criticism is headed: inside the mind of the reader, or the viewer at a performance, inside the thoughts and experiences of the user. It makes art of all kinds, not just performance art, something that is not passive, not done to you—but something that is created and transformed by you and what perceptions you choose to bring to the table.
There is one last thing left to do. If I do it, there’ll be no repercussions: the promise of the Internet is that there is a backup, somewhere, a cache, however hidden or inaccessible, some institution that, like the Library of Congress, will offer the greatest luxury we could have as humans—the permanence of memory.
So there’s no harm in answering yes to this question:
“Delete cache: Y/N?”
I have my notes and my memories, and I won’t need the #cloudrumble56 cache any more—it’s about as much use as an old cinema ticket. But my finger hesitates, and finally comes down on No. Something in me really wants, like those who take pictures of the Abramovic performance, to believe in the possibility of forever.

The BS Column: Offended in Egypt: The 1,001 Nights

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2010)

This is a story about a 19th-century wanderer and anthropologist, a book that took shape between the 9th and the 11th centuries, and a bunch of 21st century lawyers and clerics who share their beliefs with the most rigid of the 19th century Victorians.

The book we know as the One Thousand and One Nights took shape through accretion, and had many authors over many centuries. Even those who haven’t read the full version of the Kitab Alf Layla wa-Layla, or the Arabian Nights, know many of its stories: the tale of Sinbad the Sailor, the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and many Indians will recognize the animal stories, familiar to us from the Jatakas.

It should be the poster child for “multicultural literature”: it draws from medieval Egyptian history, from Indian-influenced Persian folk tales, from Baghdad’s collected history of storytelling, and a variety of other sources. Even today, to read the One Thousand and One Nights is to hear the voices of a hundred storytellers from across the centuries whisper in your year.

Recently, a group of Egyptian lawyers who rejoice in the name of Lawyers Without Restrictions asked for a ban on the 1,001 Nights under the recently introduced “hesba laws”. The hesba laws have increasingly been misused, and news reports cite hundreds of cases filed under these laws against writers, film-makers and artists for “promoting apostasy”, “contempt for religion” and as in the case of the demand for the ban on 1,001 Nights, publishing obscene material. The irony of the name of the group is inescapable, but one of the features that distinguishes the censorious is that they lack all humour.

It’s not that calls for a ban on the 1,001 Nights are rare or uncommon. School texts and popular retellings of the tales still endorse the bowdlerization that was common among the Victorians, until Richard Burton offered his exhaustive, cheerfully licentious and faithful translation of the Nights. Aside from several countries in the Arab world, the distribution of the Nights was banned in the US for several decades under the infamous Comstock Laws, which made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mails.

But in effect, what Lawyers Without Restrictions have asked for is that one of the world’s greatest and most profoundly influential story-cycles be banned in one of the countries that nurtured and gave birth to these stories. This is, in essence, a repudiation of Egypt’s own history, enacted by a group of people who’re passing through a phase of conservatism and rigid thinking. The similarity between today’s clerics and lawyers, and the repressive, fear-driven morality of the Victorians who condemned the Nights as Oriental turpitude is stark.

In his introduction to what remains the best-known translation of the 1,001 Nights, Richard Burton considers the “turpiloquium” of the manuscript. He defends both the “simple, naïve and child like indecency” that “treats in an unconventionally free and naked manner of subjects and matters which are usually, by common consent, left undescribed”, and the “absolute obscenity, sometimes, but not always, tempered by wit, humour and drollery” of the book.

To this Victorian anthropologist and explorer, translating the 1,001 Nights served two purposes. Burton had done the Haj and criss-crossed Africa by the time he attempted the translation, but saw himself as someone who was “not a success”, and at the same time, “had no cause to be ashamed of his failure”. Reading and translating the Nights during what he called his “official banishment” to Western Africa “proved itself a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency”. A modern psychiatrist might say that he found in the Nights a cure for depression, but that would be only part of the story.


In his introduction, and often in the hundreds of footnotes that form a kind of running conversation with the reader of the Burton translation, he makes his passionate engagement with the “Oriental”, Eastern or Islamic world very apparent. These volumes were, for him, “a cargo of Moslem learning”, and previous translators had done the Nights a great disservice by watering them down. Burton proposed to provide nothing less than “a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original”. This was one means of “dispelling England’s ignorance concerning the Eastern races”, of revealing the full glories and complexity of the “medieval Moslem mind”.


But perhaps the most ironical of Burton’s statements was a passing observation: “What is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.” By asking for a ban on the 1,001 Nights, Egypt’s hardliners could have given no better indication of how far they have departed from their country’s history of inclusiveness, tolerance and openness.

DSC Prize: deadline extended to 5th May

For publishers: got this from the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature team:

"We are extending the deadline for entries for the DSC prize for South
Asian Literature to 5th May, 2010. This is due to several requests coming
from many publishing houses, mostly overseas, whose entries are delayed
due to the grounding of flights after the volcano eruption in Iceland,
The new deadline for submissions: 5 May,2010."

The eligibility rules:

http://dscprize.com.s54927.gridserver.com/eligibility/

Book review: Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta

(Published in the Business Standard, April 28, 2010)

Quarantine

Rahul Mehta

Random House

Rs 399, 252 pages






“The week I start making notes for this essay is the same week my mother is reading for the first time the manuscript for my short story collection, Quarantine...,” Rahul Mehta writes in an essay, Coming Out, just after the publication of this debut collection.



“What I didn’t say then was that I, in fact, don’t want [my parents] to read it. And now that my mother is, I am terrified. I am worried that she will object to the family stories I have stolen and altered and bent to suit my purposes. I am worried that she won’t understand what “fiction” means, and that every time she reads a passage in which a young, gay Indian-American man is having sex (and there is, in fact, a fair amount of sex in the book), that she will think it is me: me having rough sex in an alley, me masturbating in the back of the family car, me having unprotected sex in a loft in New York with a one-night stand.”



More, almost, than the nine stories in Quarantine, this essay marks the pleasures and pitfalls of Rahul Mehta’s writing. This is one of the most surprising collections I’ve read in recent months: honest, spare, moving in the tenderness with which he chronicles the fault-lines and the epiphanies of relationships, but narrow in its scope and ambitions.



The narrator is not Mehta—this is fiction, as he stresses. Though he’s a young, gay Indian-American man himself, that really isn’t him in these stories having sex, or having a nervous breakdown, or facing family conflicts, or holding down an imaginary job. But the narrator’s voice changes little through these nine stories; it’s the link, the connection the reader needs, though it offers no shift in perspective.



In ‘Floating’, a gay couple explores tourist India and returns with artifacts. These are not so much the trinkets and funny stories the narrator despises, but an unsettling encounter, a hint of violence, an anger from the local community that they are not doing their job, not buying the right commodities—sex, fake miniatures—in the right market. In ‘Yours’, Don, Antwon and the narrator circle around each other, trying on power games, trying desire on for size, rejecting the wrong fit. There are bickering gay couples, or the ones who break up over infidelity in ‘Ten Thousand Years’; there are the ones who have slid, without meaning to, from intimacy into near-marital familiarity and can’t find their way back.

Like John Cheever, Mehta is instinctively a kind of Chekov of the suburbs, drawn to the tangled and concealed histories of conventional, apparently bland families—chiefly of the Indian diaspora. Though a few stories are set in India, it’s clear that this is a country seen through a tourist’s eyes, and there’s little questioning or unnecessary tension in that relationship.

One of the most touching stories here, Citizen, is ostensibly about an elderly woman’s struggle to pass her American citizenship test; but the real theme is in the first line: “Everybody told her this is what she should want…” The degrees of disenfranchisement that interests Mehta are personal rather than political. He’s brilliant at excavating the real histories: in the title story, Quarantine, the bitterness and bad blood between the narrator’s mother and his grandfather hides the true bond between them—a mutual helplessness, a shared lack of control over their lives.

It’s rare for Mehta to falter technically, but he does in the ambitious, Carveresque ‘What We Mean’, where the protagonist’s slow breakdown is communicated through his verbal outpourings and a loss of language. It’s brilliantly done; but implausible, because the protagonist retains control over the structure of the story even as he loses control over his mind, always a danger where you’re using a first-person narrator in a situation of this kind.

More often, he’s in perfect control of his material. In ‘Ten Thousand Years’, the travelling couple buy a 1967 Malayalam phrasebook: “…filled with translations for phrases such as: ‘That’s the boy’s job,’ ‘Tell the boy to come in the morning’, ‘There is plenty of work for the boy’.” They are both horrified, but later, during a lover’s quarrel, one of them will use these phrases, as hurtfully as he can, to initiate the break-up.

Quarantine’s greatest flaw is its narrow ambition, and Mehta’s deliberately constrained range—it’s the exact opposite of the “baggy monster” school of writing, and for a certain kind of reader, the limitations won’t be a barrier. It announces Rahul Mehta as an extraordinarily astute, talented young writer, blessed with a quality not often considered literary—he has empathy, and he writes dialogue like a practised eavesdropper. It would be unfair to stereotype Quarantine as just a collection of “gay writings”, any more than John Updike’s short stories are just a collection of writings about hetero relationships, but Mehta’s lack of self-consciousness makes this a wonderful exploration of writings about gay men and different approaches to masculinity, as well as the family in general.

Over the next decade, it’ll be interesting to see whether Mehta manages to expand his range. His craft and his assurance are unquestionable, but while Quarantine is a beautiful, and often moving, read, it stops just short of being memorable. That’s a problem Mehta shares with John Cheever, and it didn’t stop Cheever from building his reputation and his audience over time.

The BS column: Guerrillas in the Mist

(Published in the Business Standard, April 27, 2010)

At the height of the first Naxal movement, reflections of the revolution could be seen in the works of writers from Kerala, Bengal, Andhra and other “affected” states. Some romanced the gun, some romanced the revolutionaries; some were fiercely anguished works that are still read, if only in the college library.

It is unwise to expect the conflicts of the day to draw an immediate response from writers, but the Maoist conflict in India over the last few years has begun to leave its mark on writing in English. You may or may not be among the ranks of Naipaul believers, but give him credit for his sharp instincts.

In 2004, four years before Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti’s non-fiction exploration of Salwa Judum and the Maoists, was published, Naipaul came out with Magic Seeds, in which his protagonist Willie Chandran joins a revolutionary movement in India. Like C P Surendran’s 2006 Iron Harvest, Magic Seeds illustrates the pitfalls of writing about revolution. Ideological debates seldom make for strong plot points, and it requires the cynical eye of a Graham Greene to turn calls to the barricades into good writing. Naipaul flourished his own brand of cynicism: “Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police.” But if Iron Harvest was imbued with an excess of revolutionary fervour and disillusionment, Magic Seeds exuded listlessness.

Perhaps non-fiction will be the more useful form for this insurgency, or conflict. Before Arundhati Roy walked with the comrades, Jason Motlagh did a prescient piece that reflected his unease with the aims and the violence of the present-day Maoists. In 2001, journalist Satnam had travelled to Bastar to meet the comrades; his deeply sympathetic account was published in 2003 in Punjabi. Jangalnama: Travels in A Maoist Guerrilla Zone (Penguin) has just been published in English, and it’s both interesting and dated.

Satnam is blunt about the fact that his sympathies lie with the Maoists, and in many parts, Jangalnama reads like a paean to the simplicity and openness of tribal life — with a nod to the considerable economic hardships. “The laws of Manu have not influenced their lives,” he observes, joining in with the 18-hour marches, the collective song sessions, the basic meals of rice with pumpkin gravy. There is much understanding and sympathy here — in fact, the parallels between Satnam’s journey and Roy’s more recent journey are startling — but no questioning of violence, and little reflection on the lives of the children whose co-option into the movement as young guerrillas is essentially choiceless. Jangalnama is interesting as a historical curiosity, but Satnam’s romanticising becomes a barrier. The great revolutionary novel or account of this decade is yet to be written.

RIP, Alan Sillitoe
“A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality…” Alan Sillitoe, who died this week at the age of 82, wrote in his biography, Life Without Armour. It’s a pity the book is out-of-print, because it remains a remarkably honest account by one of Britain’s Angry Young Men.

Sillitoe’s life was brutal; his father was a vicious drunk, his mother sent him — briefly — to an institution for the mentally challenged because they provided free porridge and daily meals, and he led a working man’s life for years before making his bones as a writer. But this is really a reader’s biography: pages and pages taken up by lists of what he was reading, the early discovery of the Williams and Biggles books, the comforts of the public library. He was a voracious reader, despite his father knocking books out of the young Alan’s hands.

Sillitoe wrote a great deal more than most realise, but the book we all remember is iconic: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It marked a point in British writing when stories about “us” and “them” were being written by “them”, for perhaps the first time in the 20th century. The protagonist discovers his talent for cross-country running while in a Borstal prison, realises both a genuine passion for running and his contempt for the governor who wants him to win a specific race. Instead of mourning Sillitoe, read Long Distance Runner again: “Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas, we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.”

The BS column: The missing Indian canon

(Published in the Business Standard, April 19, 2010)

In the library sales from the crumbling houses of Calcutta, or Delhi, or the hillstation homes, the keen-eyed book buyer would often come across sets of bound classics. These were usually in the printer’s binding—vellum, blue leather and gold—or occasionally bound in red with the owner’s initials stamped on the spine or on the frontispiece.

Over the decades, the contents of these classics changed. Everyman’s Library of classic works was a favourite, as was the Modern Library set; but depending on the owner’s tastes, you might have complete sets of histories, or the World’s Greatest Short Stories, or Masterpieces of World Literature, or a complete set of Greek mythology. You would very rarely find a similar set of Indian classics—individual books, almost always a Mahabharata, a Ramayana and perhaps the great poets or favourite Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali writers.

But complete sets were hard to find, even in the most literate of households, because the concept of a classics shelf for Indian literature didn’t sit comfortably in our imaginations. There were exceptions: Oxford University Press and Penguin India have both produced excellent translations and classics sets, but there has been no authoritative equivalent of the Loeb Classical Library. As of this week, a handsome donation by Infosys’ Narayan Murthy to the Harvard University Press might change that. The project he has in mind would be the Murthy Classical Library of India—with dual-language editions of Indian classics in several languages, from Hindi to Punjabi to Malayalam.

Just a few years ago, the Clay Library project, funded by the philanthropist John Clay, began publishing the beautifully produced Clay Sanskrit Library. It’s one of the very few series I actively regretted not being able to publish—it went to Random House instead of my nascent publishing house—and I remember how beautiful the Clay volumes of Kalidasa and Dandin looked, bound in eggshell blue, the acid-free paper turning smoothly to the touch of your fingers.

Gurcharan Das, as formidable a reader as he is a writer, speaks with affection of the “battle books” (Books Six to Nine of the Mahabharata), in “beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit”. But the Clay project has been disrupted by the illness of John Clay, and there’s some uncertainty about its future. And the Murthy Classical Library, by spreading its net wider than Sanskrit, promises to deliver something we’ve never really had—a comprehensive look at our literary heritage, even if it might take decades to complete.

What do we currently read in the way of our own classics? We don’t have an easy equivalent of “the Classical Canon”—in the sense of a list of classic literary works that would be considered essential reading for any thinking Indian. Most of us imbibe the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, almost by osmosis, whether it’s through the great authoritative translations or through your grandmother’s retellings or via a more popular comic-book or TV serial version. After this, it splinters according to individual preference—there are very few outside the academic world who would read, simultaneously, the Rajatarangini and the Cilappatikaram, Shakuntala and the Buddhist song-cycle of the Charyapada.

Back in my university days, there was an unconscious acceptance of the idea that you could read in translation—we read Chaucer and Homer without questioning the difficult medieval English of one or the translation from Greek of the other. It rarely occurred to even enthusiastic readers to wonder why we couldn’t similarly study the Mahabharata. This isn’t an argument for cultural representation; just a way to underline the fact that we have a large blank shelf in our households where the Indian classics should be. Where this space is filled with classics selected at random, it’s often limited by the language we know best—we’ll read our own region’s greatest authors, but not roam too far abroad. Murthy’s donation is a way of acknowledging that this is a country where we often read, and think, in translation. It’s just not reflected on our bookshelves.

Tailpiece: Years ago, critics in Calcutta dissed Shankar’s writings: he wrote for the masses, and his bestselling books were too populist to be considered serious literature. The Bengali writer makes no claims himself to literary greatness, but I think it’s going to please him tremendously that Chowringhee is on the shortlist for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The other shortlisted fiction includes two books in German, two in French and one in Italian—Chowringhee, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, is the only Asian contender this year.