(Published in the Business Standard on September 12, 2010)
“I think it’s very good to ask yourself who you are and why you’re here and what has made you.” In 1974, when V S Naipaul made that statement to an audience of students, he had been asking himself those questions for over a decade. Twelve years had passed since he had written The Middle Passage, his first collection of travel writings; 16 since he had written his first novels.
The Middle Passage is still an essential Naipaul work. It was a brave book to write at the time, and it set some of the rules by which Naipaul would travel, then and later. Intended as a kind of triumphal tour—the Prime Minister of Trinidad sponsored the trip around the Caribbean and some of the colonies of South America—The Middle Passage became a savage portrait of lost men, living in a “borrowed culture”, unaware of the extent of the losses colonialism had inflicted on them. He set down his own responses—flinching, as when he infamously described the sound of the steel bands of the West Indies as noise, often repelled—as faithfully as he did the lives and responses of those whom his open, merciless gaze fell upon.
“Other travelers, more haunted, carry questions, not answers or explanations, around with them wherever they go, and look to everywhere to give them some understanding, or even movement towards resolution, of the issue that is their lifelong companion (V.S. Naipaul is the archetype of this),” wrote Pico Iyer in a recent essay on different kinds of travelers. This is an accurate portrait, perhaps more accurate than the one we currently have of Naipaul the curmudgeon, or Naipaul the genius: polarizing labels that over-simplify one of the world’s most complex writers.
In his seventies, Naipaul had no need to embark on a journey to Africa. This decade is set aside for the writing of memoirs, for late novels, or collections of essays: it is not, conventionally, an age at which most writers would set themselves the task of another exploration, or undertake the discomfort, physical and mental, of a journey with the intention of understanding the beliefs of a continent. But in the decade before he wrote The Masque of Africa, Naipaul had remained a traveler, choosing to meet revolutionaries in India as part of the research for his most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds. (It was a journey of mutual disillusion.)
The Masque of Africa will not go down in the ranks of Naipaul’s greatest travel writing. “I found the place eluding me,” he writes of his return to Uganda after 42 years, and as he travels through Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the continent remains elusive. His explorations take him to witch doctors, animist shrines, forest initiation ceremonies. His observations on the thoughtless cruelty of some Africans to animals, especially to cats, who may be killed in a variety of ways of ascending brutality, become a running refrain, a sideways comment on the conflicts and bloodshed he doesn’t directly address. He ends by referencing Rian Malan, the author of My Traitor’s Heart—handing us over to a writer whose understanding of Africa is deeper and more nuanced than Naipaul can manage himself.
The Masque of Africa has been judged harshly for its stereotypes (“rubbish is the African way”, he comments of the piles of garbage he sees everywhere in Uganda), and for its limitations—Naipaul, once the most incisive of travel writers, can barely go beyond the surface of things in this book. This is Naipaul as a tourist rather than a travel writer, and it is his honesty about the narrowness of his journey that stands out.
Naipaul struggles with the difficulties of understanding cultures where the history is oral, not written. (In his view, not shared by Wole Soyinka and others, the oral tradition is always inferior to the written, because memory will not last beyond a few generations and may be wiped out entirely in a bloody war, a famine.) It is the practice in this century for journalists and travel writers to edit out the many filters between them and their experiences: the reader rarely sees the fixers, the interpreters, the useful local characters who will offer potted histories of a place.
Naipaul makes it clear that his African visit is mediated: he is too often at the mercy of those who take him around, as in one comic case where he walks too far, and is offered a wheelbarrow (inadequate to the task) for the next leg of his journey. He sets down the omissions and the gaps in each stage of his journey, and it is this honesty that may redeem an otherwise unconvincing, limited travelogue. As an inquiry into belief, The Masque of Africa falls short of Naipaul’s other journeys into faith and belief; but as an explication of the necessary limitations of travel writing as a genre, it is a surprisingly candid work.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
A Touch of Strange: The Booker shortlist 2010
(Published in the Business Standard, September 14, 2010)
The Booker shortlist doesn’t always offer the best books of the year—judges are fallible, the competition intense, and it often happens that works left off the list will continue to find readers and faithful acolytes.
A few years ago, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland failed to make the cut, but did brilliantly despite its omission; this year, David Mitchell’s pyrotechnics in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were not sufficient to impress the judges.
But the Booker shortlist is still valuable: the judges may not always pick the perfect books, but they almost always reflect the spirit of the times. The obsession with very English, domestic novels in the 1970s was followed by the rise of the global novel, a period where Ishiguro, Achebe, Rushdie and several others took the prize into far more wide-ranging territory. This year’s shortlist, announced last week, reflects two interesting trends: a growing openness among readers to reading experimental fiction, and the blurring of the line between the novel and other literary forms.
Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are both represented by historical novels—but what they do with the form is another matter all together. Carey has won the Booker twice before, and Parrot and Olivier in America is one of his best works—ferociously intelligent, very funny and as rewarding as it is demanding. It might be called a historical novel, but Carey is one of the world’s most happily experimental writers, and he pushes the story as far as it can go. Loosely modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to America, it follows the adventures of a French aristocrat and his servant in the land of the free. Along with the exuberance, it offers a sharp look at the evolution of democracy.
Andrea Levy’s Small Island was probably one of the most beloved novels of its time; The Long Song is a beautifully textured reworking of slave narratives. Told in the voice of July, the offspring of a Scottish plantation overseer and a slave, it follows the history of slavery in Jamaica. It’s a rich, powerful book, but won’t have the instant appeal of some of her earlier works.
Howard Jacobson is the dark horse of this year’s shortlist, with The Finkler Question, an exploration of what happens to a thoroughly ordinary man after he is exposed to anti-Semitic violence, and begins to question all of the certainties of his life. It has some brilliant sections, including a tour-de-force passage where a Jew sleeps with a Holocaust denier, but may be too insular for most Indian readers.
Tom McCarthy’s C is one of the most unusual novels of recent times—McCarthy’s work as a conceptual artist makes this a distinctly experimental novel, of the kind that has to be read twice for its full impact to be felt. Perhaps one of the most technically dazzling novels on the list, it may not have as much appeal for readers who prefer an old-fashioned story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
But the two strangest books on the list are Emma Donoghue’s The Room and Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room. Both these works have an almost hallucinatory power: they’re the kind of novels that infect your waking world long after you’ve read the final chapter and put the book down.
The Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old child who has grown up knowing only the world of one room, in which his only anchor is his mother. As the story unfolds, we understand that they are held captive by a psychopath; their return to the world outside will be equally unsettling. The Room has the effect of changing one’s perception of the everyday world. It could have been classified as a mystery or crime novel, but that wouldn’t capture its impact, and the lingering touch of strange that Donoghue imparts.
Damon Galgut is one of South Africa’s most talented writers after JM Coetzee, known for his brilliant and unsettling work. In A Strange Room may or may not be a novel at all, but that is almost irrelevant: its power and impact are undeniable. Galgut offers you the travels of Damon Galgut, to Greece, Africa and India, told by at least two and possibly three versions of the author. Galgut, like Coetzee before him, is a master at making the dark and the harrowing material of life absolutely compelling. It’s about travel and displacement, and despite the traveller’s best intentions, things will go horribly wrong—and as the reader, you won’t be able to step away from him in any of his three avatars.
It is impossible to predict which one of these novels will win—Peter Carey may be the frontrunner, but any one of four out of these six could walk away with the Booker gong. This much can be said with certainty—this is one of the strangest, and most rewarding, shortlists of the last ten years.
The Booker shortlist doesn’t always offer the best books of the year—judges are fallible, the competition intense, and it often happens that works left off the list will continue to find readers and faithful acolytes.
A few years ago, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland failed to make the cut, but did brilliantly despite its omission; this year, David Mitchell’s pyrotechnics in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet were not sufficient to impress the judges.
But the Booker shortlist is still valuable: the judges may not always pick the perfect books, but they almost always reflect the spirit of the times. The obsession with very English, domestic novels in the 1970s was followed by the rise of the global novel, a period where Ishiguro, Achebe, Rushdie and several others took the prize into far more wide-ranging territory. This year’s shortlist, announced last week, reflects two interesting trends: a growing openness among readers to reading experimental fiction, and the blurring of the line between the novel and other literary forms.
Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are both represented by historical novels—but what they do with the form is another matter all together. Carey has won the Booker twice before, and Parrot and Olivier in America is one of his best works—ferociously intelligent, very funny and as rewarding as it is demanding. It might be called a historical novel, but Carey is one of the world’s most happily experimental writers, and he pushes the story as far as it can go. Loosely modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to America, it follows the adventures of a French aristocrat and his servant in the land of the free. Along with the exuberance, it offers a sharp look at the evolution of democracy.
Andrea Levy’s Small Island was probably one of the most beloved novels of its time; The Long Song is a beautifully textured reworking of slave narratives. Told in the voice of July, the offspring of a Scottish plantation overseer and a slave, it follows the history of slavery in Jamaica. It’s a rich, powerful book, but won’t have the instant appeal of some of her earlier works.
Howard Jacobson is the dark horse of this year’s shortlist, with The Finkler Question, an exploration of what happens to a thoroughly ordinary man after he is exposed to anti-Semitic violence, and begins to question all of the certainties of his life. It has some brilliant sections, including a tour-de-force passage where a Jew sleeps with a Holocaust denier, but may be too insular for most Indian readers.
Tom McCarthy’s C is one of the most unusual novels of recent times—McCarthy’s work as a conceptual artist makes this a distinctly experimental novel, of the kind that has to be read twice for its full impact to be felt. Perhaps one of the most technically dazzling novels on the list, it may not have as much appeal for readers who prefer an old-fashioned story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
But the two strangest books on the list are Emma Donoghue’s The Room and Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room. Both these works have an almost hallucinatory power: they’re the kind of novels that infect your waking world long after you’ve read the final chapter and put the book down.
The Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old child who has grown up knowing only the world of one room, in which his only anchor is his mother. As the story unfolds, we understand that they are held captive by a psychopath; their return to the world outside will be equally unsettling. The Room has the effect of changing one’s perception of the everyday world. It could have been classified as a mystery or crime novel, but that wouldn’t capture its impact, and the lingering touch of strange that Donoghue imparts.
Damon Galgut is one of South Africa’s most talented writers after JM Coetzee, known for his brilliant and unsettling work. In A Strange Room may or may not be a novel at all, but that is almost irrelevant: its power and impact are undeniable. Galgut offers you the travels of Damon Galgut, to Greece, Africa and India, told by at least two and possibly three versions of the author. Galgut, like Coetzee before him, is a master at making the dark and the harrowing material of life absolutely compelling. It’s about travel and displacement, and despite the traveller’s best intentions, things will go horribly wrong—and as the reader, you won’t be able to step away from him in any of his three avatars.
It is impossible to predict which one of these novels will win—Peter Carey may be the frontrunner, but any one of four out of these six could walk away with the Booker gong. This much can be said with certainty—this is one of the strangest, and most rewarding, shortlists of the last ten years.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Lunch with the BS: Mahmood Farooqui
(Published in the Business Standard, August 24, 2010)
As the most recent chronicler of the Mutiny of 1857 makes the passage from Jamia Milia University to the Saket Mall, he peers out at the current ghadar on the streets. “This city has never stopped being under construction,” he says, “for centuries.”
The tamasha over the Commonwealth Games, the unpreparedness of Delhi and the prevalent corruption are familiar to Mahmood Farooqui: his Besieged: Voices From Delhi 1857 chronicles a similar, if far more historical, upheaval. Unlike conventional histories of the Mutiny, Farooqui’s compilation collects the voices of Vaziran, one of the city’s more influential courtesans, documents the arrests of lunatics (and the rounding up of Bengalis), records a soldiers’ court arraigning corrupt officials and other fascinating minutiae. It is, in its own way, a subaltern history; which is why Farooqui is perversely delighted to be lunching at Brown Sahib, the Anglo-Indian and Bengali cuisine restaurant in Saket’s MGF mall, writes Nilanjana S Roy.
His new BlackBerry rings every three minutes or so. Within weeks of the launch of Besieged, Farooqui’s wife, Anusha Rizvi, hit the headlines because of her excellent debut as director on the Amir Khan-backed film, Peepli Live. Farooqui, co-director of the film, used to either the quiet life of the historian in the library, or the civilised acclaim that greets his dastangoi performances, is handling Bollywood-ishtyle stardom for the first time, and it’s left him a little dazed. “Anusha appeared on Indian Idol so she’s spotted now, recognised,” he says. “But it has its good side. Our paan-wallah has given us extra credit for this month.”
The Dilli he’s written about and the Delhi he knew as a student are both, says Farooqui, in the past. The boy from Gorakhpur won a place in Doon School, and spent his college years at St Stephens’ studying history, and theatre — not the stylised plays that the English Shakespeare Society staged, but incendiary Indian classics like Mahabhoj. “The generation that passed out of college has a homogenous memory of the time — the advent of TV serials, the intelligentsia, the Nehruvian hangover. But that bhadralok world has moved on to big cars, money. And wine.”
Farooqui has a wonderful speaking style, the passion and clarity of the historian blending with the oratory of the professional dastangoi — the storyteller whose only props are a makeshift stage and a mike, and who can make his voice soar without either, if necessary. He interrupts himself frequently: “Am I going off on a tangent? I’m going off on a tangent, aren’t I? Stop me if I go off on a tangent again.”
Walking into the Saket Mall, surrounded by chic women in Prada and far more middle-class, cheerful young couples, Farooqui continues with his exegesis of Delhi. “So the city — the city has expanded in a mind-boggling way,” he says. “It’s amazing how Delhi continues to become new and how fast and how quickly. Forget the previous centuries. 1911, a new Delhi; 1947, a new Delhi; 1982, Asiad and television, a new Delhi. Mid-90s onwards, there was the new Delhi again — bars to go to, everybody had a car! And now in the last five years, the physical landscape of the city has been transformed. The city’s elite have become more democratised, but everyone is a celebrity — we no longer have film stars, or authors, you’re either a big celebrity or a minor celebrity.”
He is clearly, courtesy Peepli as much as Besieged, somewhere in between. On the escalators, I hear the girls behind me giggle: “Wasn’t he on TV?” Yes, he was, and given that Peepli Live is about the relentless invasion of TV into every aspect of our lives, he finds this both amusing and alarming.
Brown Sahib is a small and quiet oasis in the middle of the mall’s mercantile madness, currently empty. A waiter in a splendidly formal pleated dhoti brings us two aam porar sherbets — green mango sherbet in shot glasses — and we settle to the business of ordering lunch. Throughout the meal, Farooqui will unconsciously do what performers always do — shift his chair to face his lunchtime companion, not his plate.
The Memsahib prawns and the smoked hilsa arrive; the latter, to my dismay, insufficiently deboned and insufficiently caramelised. Brown Sahib, where I’ve had some excellent meals previously, isn’t on form today. The restaurant is decorated in a kind of shorthand Bengal Lite — Bankura horses, Satyajit Ray posters, old-fashioned talcum tins and British-era soap dispensers in the unisex bathroom, a short, potted history of Anglo-Indian Calcutta on the walls.
Farooqui has worked with William Dalrymple, as a researcher on The Last Mughal — the project overlapped with his own work into Shikastah Urdu translations. Most of the documents in Besieged are drawn from the “hundreds of small biographies, with no claimants” that he found in the 1857 archives. He calls the lack of translation or excitement about these and other forgotten records a “third world lack really”.
“I suppose I was writing Besieged for Dilli, but I don’t really know for whom,” says Farooqui, following my line of thought. “We’re living with a loss of our sense of history — it’s a universal moment. Move out of the salons and go to the streets, whether you’re in London, New York, Delhi, and the average person has no sense of history. Why should he? We live in a contemporary present where what happened two years ago is retro, so who are the takers for history?” My “monsoon khichudi” special arrives, with besan pumpkin and aubergine fritters on the side; his mustard hilsa arrives, but without the steamed rice.
“Dalrymple’s way of writing history is very useful — he is not addressing the arguments of the past or the future, he is writing within a period, about that time.” I offer Farooqui my khichudi, since the rice is still missing, and he continues. “My account of 1857 reclaims the Indian version of history, which is based on a simplistic, populist understanding: the Angrez came and looted our country. So I have bypassed the big debate — what did the English really do, how was India created and constructed? Instead we’re having a desi argument about the virtues of desiness and the vices of foreignness.”
Farooqui is warming up nicely, as the rice arrives and allows him to tuck into the hilsa, with another wonderful rant. He insists that he is not a historian (“I have studied history, I am very interested in history, but being a historian is tied to scholarship in a manner I am not — there is a certain idleness of spirit that refuses to go away.”) But his real theme is who Delhi belongs to, and who are the true heirs to the history of 1857. He settles the first question with swiftness: “Delhi belongs to no one — it never has, it doesn’t today, not the Gujjars, not the migrant workers. Perhaps the people who see Delhi as their city are the international artists and writers — it’s become a global choice, whether to live in Delhi or New York.” He contemplates the plastic chutney, made of translucent slices of papaya. “Or both. Ideally.”
How important is it, then, to reclaim history — the Indian view of 1857, for instance? Farooqui’s argument is that our sense of history as a necessity, as “the most integral part of human heritage”, is not more than 200 years old — it’s an Enlightenment concept. As he’s wandered through the city, performing dastangoi in its best-known monuments and forgotten gallis, he has arrived at his own doubts. “I am not sure I can talk about protecting tombs and monuments from, say, squatters, on the grounds that it’s a collective heritage, that we should have respect for history,” he says. “That collective heritage is unequally shared. For 200 years, the elite have tried to force the idea of history on the masses, and the masses have escaped history.”
He breaks off to marvel at the bhappa doi — steamed, baked yogurt — which is hands down the best part of the meal. “This,” he says happily, “is better than any kheer or firni I’ve ever had. Do you know why Indian Muslims can’t handle meat the way the Europeans cook it? Because in India and Asia we cook meat like a vegetable, with plenty of sauces and masalas — we don’t like the smell of the meat to come out.” It’s another classic segue from Farooqui; his mind moves in connected, beautiful tangents, which will make him a historian and writer to watch for the future.
On the way back to Jamia, Farooqui pulls out his BlackBerry sheepishly. “I broke my first BlackBerry,” he confesses and after some prodding, explains it had to do with the media storm around Peepli Live. “All right, all right, I’ll say it into the tape recorder. I broke a BlackBerry in anger at the commercialisation of Indian cinema. I smashed it on the floor, with force.” He thinks about it. “You can’t be seen with a BlackBerry if you’re writing subaltern history.”
The BS column: The Day of the Grasshopper
(Published in the Business Standard, August 24, 2010; revised to include corrections.)
As Siddhartha Sarma claimed the first Crossword award for Best Children’s Book in Bombay this week, a bunch of writers at the Jumpstart festival were asking a key question: should adults read books for children?
Technically, The Grasshopper’s Run is a children’s book—published by Scholastic last year in the emerging category of fiction for young adults. This is a growing segment of readers in India, and an important one: historically, despite the wide variety of literature for children, we haven’t had much literature for teenagers and young adults, across most Indian languages. But as writers from Paro Anand to Samit Basu know, writing for children or young adults effectively consigns the author to invisibility on the book review pages. This means that kids, and teens, will read Sarma’s book—but adults will miss out.
And that would be a shame. Sarma’s real audience, as he says on his blog, is “all you closet Commando readers”—or anyone interested in the almost-forgotten Japanese siege of Kohima in 1944. “The (Second World) war touched India in many places, but the only region invaded on the mainland was the North-east,” Sarma writes. “It was a time of great misery, great courage and remarkable events. But if you expect much fiction about India and the war, forget it. Mostly it is because a couple of years after the war we began a bigger adventure: Independence and the rest of the jing-bang. People weren’t really into what their soldiers did fighting for another country in some far-off place.”
Sarma tells his story through 15-year-old Gojen Rajkhowa, who loses his best friend and watches his village being wiped out by invading Japanese soldiers. It’s a gritty, unsentimental novel, and though Sarma toned down the violence in deference to his intended audience, he’s researched this as thoroughly as anyone could without being a veteran war journalist.
The last book that successfully crossed over, finding an adult as well as a teen audience, in India was probably Samit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies, the first book of the Gameworld Trilogy. But Basu’s book came out at a time when review space was both marginally more generous and more eclectic—to put it bluntly, today’s readers hear about fewer books, in fewer categories, than they did just five years ago.
Very few mainstream magazines or newspapers have room for children’s books, good academic writing, works in translation or poetry any more. So a book like Grasshopper’s Run flies under the radar—even though it works just as well for an adult audience as it does for teenagers, your kids are likelier to find it in their school libraries than you are in bookshops. Why else would adults not read a well-crafted, simply told story about one of the most fascinating conflicts in the history of our country?
Globally, the rise of what’s called crossover fiction has been a trend. At Jumpstart, the conference on writing for children and young adults that was held in Delhi last week, writers Payal Dhar, Paro Anand and Samit Basu discussed the implications of reading (and writing) books that are often mis-classified in the children’s section. Paro Anand, with Weed and No Guns At My Son’s Funeral, has written books that were marked “crossover”, though she pointed out that as the author, she had little thought of categories in mind when she wrote it.
Samit Basu’s Terror on The Titanic (a Morningstar Agency Adventure) continues his interest in fantasy writing—he’s often called a children’s writer because children like his work, but in the UK, he would probably be on the speculative fiction and fantasy shelf. (Disclaimer: Samit is a personal friend, whose work I’ve followed for years.) And Payal Dhar is on the borderline between SF and children’s writing, with her work comfortably straddling both genres.
Curiously, the Indian market is very open to reading crossover fiction from elsewhere—Philip Pullman, Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series and the Harry Potter books all found adult readers here. The reason we’re not reading our own, homegrown crossover fiction is because they’re invisible to adult readers: promoted chiefly in schools, rarely discussed in the mainstream literary media. Perhaps Sarma’s win will change this—Banzai to him if it does.
The Crossword Awards: Kalpana Swaminathan’s Venus Crossing beat out Amit Chaudhuri and Mridula Koshy for the fiction in English prize. The non-fiction prize was jointly awarded to Rajni Bakshi for Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom and Sunanda K Datta-Ray’s Looking East To Look West, leaving Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good out in the cold. The award for fiction in translation went to Sarah Joseph for Othappu (Malayalam), translated by Valson Thampu.
As Siddhartha Sarma claimed the first Crossword award for Best Children’s Book in Bombay this week, a bunch of writers at the Jumpstart festival were asking a key question: should adults read books for children?
Technically, The Grasshopper’s Run is a children’s book—published by Scholastic last year in the emerging category of fiction for young adults. This is a growing segment of readers in India, and an important one: historically, despite the wide variety of literature for children, we haven’t had much literature for teenagers and young adults, across most Indian languages. But as writers from Paro Anand to Samit Basu know, writing for children or young adults effectively consigns the author to invisibility on the book review pages. This means that kids, and teens, will read Sarma’s book—but adults will miss out.
And that would be a shame. Sarma’s real audience, as he says on his blog, is “all you closet Commando readers”—or anyone interested in the almost-forgotten Japanese siege of Kohima in 1944. “The (Second World) war touched India in many places, but the only region invaded on the mainland was the North-east,” Sarma writes. “It was a time of great misery, great courage and remarkable events. But if you expect much fiction about India and the war, forget it. Mostly it is because a couple of years after the war we began a bigger adventure: Independence and the rest of the jing-bang. People weren’t really into what their soldiers did fighting for another country in some far-off place.”
Sarma tells his story through 15-year-old Gojen Rajkhowa, who loses his best friend and watches his village being wiped out by invading Japanese soldiers. It’s a gritty, unsentimental novel, and though Sarma toned down the violence in deference to his intended audience, he’s researched this as thoroughly as anyone could without being a veteran war journalist.
The last book that successfully crossed over, finding an adult as well as a teen audience, in India was probably Samit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies, the first book of the Gameworld Trilogy. But Basu’s book came out at a time when review space was both marginally more generous and more eclectic—to put it bluntly, today’s readers hear about fewer books, in fewer categories, than they did just five years ago.
Very few mainstream magazines or newspapers have room for children’s books, good academic writing, works in translation or poetry any more. So a book like Grasshopper’s Run flies under the radar—even though it works just as well for an adult audience as it does for teenagers, your kids are likelier to find it in their school libraries than you are in bookshops. Why else would adults not read a well-crafted, simply told story about one of the most fascinating conflicts in the history of our country?
Globally, the rise of what’s called crossover fiction has been a trend. At Jumpstart, the conference on writing for children and young adults that was held in Delhi last week, writers Payal Dhar, Paro Anand and Samit Basu discussed the implications of reading (and writing) books that are often mis-classified in the children’s section. Paro Anand, with Weed and No Guns At My Son’s Funeral, has written books that were marked “crossover”, though she pointed out that as the author, she had little thought of categories in mind when she wrote it.
Samit Basu’s Terror on The Titanic (a Morningstar Agency Adventure) continues his interest in fantasy writing—he’s often called a children’s writer because children like his work, but in the UK, he would probably be on the speculative fiction and fantasy shelf. (Disclaimer: Samit is a personal friend, whose work I’ve followed for years.) And Payal Dhar is on the borderline between SF and children’s writing, with her work comfortably straddling both genres.
Curiously, the Indian market is very open to reading crossover fiction from elsewhere—Philip Pullman, Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series and the Harry Potter books all found adult readers here. The reason we’re not reading our own, homegrown crossover fiction is because they’re invisible to adult readers: promoted chiefly in schools, rarely discussed in the mainstream literary media. Perhaps Sarma’s win will change this—Banzai to him if it does.
The Crossword Awards: Kalpana Swaminathan’s Venus Crossing beat out Amit Chaudhuri and Mridula Koshy for the fiction in English prize. The non-fiction prize was jointly awarded to Rajni Bakshi for Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom and Sunanda K Datta-Ray’s Looking East To Look West, leaving Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good out in the cold. The award for fiction in translation went to Sarah Joseph for Othappu (Malayalam), translated by Valson Thampu.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The BS column: The reading life: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru
(Published in the Business Standard, August 17, 2010)
As another August 15 passes by, here’s a thought: what would our country have been like if the leaders of the freedom movement had not been readers?
It’s easier to see them as writers. Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographies, letters and other work have provided gainful occupation for thousands of scholars. Pandit Nehru, incarcerated in jail, bereft of reference books, set pen to paper and produced The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and Letters From A Father To His Daughter. BR Ambedkar’s Who Were The Shudras, Castes in India and the autobiographical Waiting For A Visa still hold the attention of readers.
And it is their progression as writers that historians and thinkers like Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani have written about. But to study the libraries of India’s leaders is to realize how relentlessly, and sometimes restlessly, all of them, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sarojini Naidu, read as a way of understanding the values by which India would be formed.
Gandhi came to English uneasily; the alien tongue made him a virtual prisoner of silence on his shipboard journey to England. In South Africa, as a lawyer who had got over his initial fear of speaking in public, he put together a formidable and eclectic library.
Even a partial list of books on Gandhi’s shelves makes fascinating reading. He read extensively on religion, from Syed Amir Ali on Islam to Moulton on Early Zoroastrianism, and read and re-read the world’s great religious texts. Tolstoy, Thoreau (on the duty of civil disobedience), Max Mueller and Patanjali share companionable space on his shelves.
There is the personal—a book on obstetrics, purchased and read before the birth of his first child, several works on naturopathy, The Vegetarian Messenger, hydrotherapy. In his first year in South Africa, he read “quite eighty books”: most of them on religion. The local histories he read remained influential—an education inspector’s report on Basutoland, for instance, played a key role in Gandhi’s determination to have Indian languages taught in Indian schools.
Nehru was the quintessential privileged reader, with tutors and libraries at home, and later, the libraries of Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge, open to him. His early experiences with the Theosophical Society taught him to read widely—and perhaps skeptically, given his abjuration of organized religion: “an empty form devoid of real content”. Nehru rarely mentioned or quoted the writers he read so voraciously, though one of the books that left a lasting impression on him was Trevelyan’s biography of Garibaldi.
He would, today, be classified as a disciple of Richard Dawkins, the scientist and flagbearer of atheism, and would probably have enjoyed The God Delusion greatly. Long after Nehru had left Trinity and his Tripos in Natural Sciences behind, he continued to read, and enthusiastically recommend, the study of science: “I realized that science was not only a pleasant diversion and abstraction, but was of the very texture of life, without which our modern world would vanish away…”
Ambedkar may have been the most passionate reader of the three. Denied the study of Sanskrit because of his Untouchable status, he had the opportunity to explore his love of books—and the world of empowering ideas they promised—as a young student at Bombay University and then at Columbia. He had mentors in John Dewey and Professor Muller, who lent him books, bought him books and perhaps most crucially, recommended the best of political and socioeconomic thinkers to him. His personal library ran to a vast 50,000 books, representing the range and depth of his interests, from the history of political struggles to Buddhism.
Ambedkar did, according to some scholars, read black protest literature while in America, though he made little direct reference to their works. But here’s an interesting footnote to his history. He wrote to WEB Du Bois, the redoubtable civil rights activist, who took note: “I have on my desk a letter from Dr BR Ambedkar of the Untouchables of India…” Ambedkar made use of his experiences in Slavery Or Untouchability?, arguing that untouchability was far worse as an institution.
But WEB Du Bois had an unusual Indian connection—aside from his friendship with Lala Lajpat Rai, he had penned a romance, Dark Princess, which combined politics and eroticism with admirable economy. In this astonishing work of fiction, Matthew Townes, a doctor discriminated against for his skin colour, meets Princess Kautilya, the beautiful head of an organization of people of colour who plan to overthrow Western imperialism. It ends with the birth of a messiah, “a palpitating bubble of gold”, in tribute to the love between the princess and the idealist.
Whether or not Ambedkar read Dark Princess is, unfortunately, not a matter of historical record. His reactions to a book that included the Ku Klux Klan and a Maharajah of Bwodpur would have been priceless.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
IHT Column: Taking back the streets
My second column for the International Herald Tribune's Female Factor series is up. This one's on women fighting back against street harassment and other kinds of violence against women.
"Something familiar emerges in the stories the women share, regardless of their ages or class backgrounds. All have experienced fear on the streets, fear when traveling alone. Few use the term “eve teasing” when discussing their own experiences; nothing about sexual harassment has ever felt like “teasing” to them.”
It doesn't show in the story (and it probably shouldn't), but writing this piece was a surprisingly personal exercise. I spoke to many women, aside from the women quoted in this story, and every conversation turned into something like an analytical catharsis. Gauri Gill and I spoke about how the quality of one's anger changes; the militant, fierce anger of our twenties has given way to a more practical and dispassionate emotion as we approach forty.
There were debates: has the situation improved over the last 15 years (yes), is it anywhere near ideal (hell, no), how much of a role did class play in street harassment, how much difference could better urban architectural planning make in cutting down violence against women in public spaces. There were confessions and sharings; every one of the women (and many of the men) I spoke to had their own scars, stories of assaults weathered and not reported (one of my personal demons), of terrifying train or bus journeys, of anger at being blamed (for one's "carelessness", for one's "looseness", for one's appearance), of helplessness, especially among the men I spoke to, at not being able to change the ground-level situation. The story couldn't capture the complexity of the debate; as more women enter the workforce, public spaces have had to accommodate their presence, but the underlying causes of the violence against women haven't changed or been addressed.
If you're interested in further reading/ action on this subject, here are some links:
The Blank Noise Project blog: Consistently creative in its approach, the BNP has run successful campaigns, from the We Didn't Ask For It campaign to their more recent Action Hero campaign. Many of the debates mentioned are covered in detail by Jasmeen Patheja and other contributors.
The Gulabi Gang: Run by Sampath Pal Devi, the Gulabi Gang now also runs centres for vocational training for young women, and could use your support.
Jagori: In addition to its Safe Delhi campaign and its mapping of safe/ unsafe spaces in the city, Jagori researches many other areas of feminist concern, from the rights of domestic workers to other forms of violence against women.
And please consider sending in an entry--a photograph, a story--for Transportraits, an exhibition curated by Gauri Gill, on your experience of safety in your city. Contributions from women and men welcome, and details here.
"Something familiar emerges in the stories the women share, regardless of their ages or class backgrounds. All have experienced fear on the streets, fear when traveling alone. Few use the term “eve teasing” when discussing their own experiences; nothing about sexual harassment has ever felt like “teasing” to them.”
It doesn't show in the story (and it probably shouldn't), but writing this piece was a surprisingly personal exercise. I spoke to many women, aside from the women quoted in this story, and every conversation turned into something like an analytical catharsis. Gauri Gill and I spoke about how the quality of one's anger changes; the militant, fierce anger of our twenties has given way to a more practical and dispassionate emotion as we approach forty.
There were debates: has the situation improved over the last 15 years (yes), is it anywhere near ideal (hell, no), how much of a role did class play in street harassment, how much difference could better urban architectural planning make in cutting down violence against women in public spaces. There were confessions and sharings; every one of the women (and many of the men) I spoke to had their own scars, stories of assaults weathered and not reported (one of my personal demons), of terrifying train or bus journeys, of anger at being blamed (for one's "carelessness", for one's "looseness", for one's appearance), of helplessness, especially among the men I spoke to, at not being able to change the ground-level situation. The story couldn't capture the complexity of the debate; as more women enter the workforce, public spaces have had to accommodate their presence, but the underlying causes of the violence against women haven't changed or been addressed.
If you're interested in further reading/ action on this subject, here are some links:
The Blank Noise Project blog: Consistently creative in its approach, the BNP has run successful campaigns, from the We Didn't Ask For It campaign to their more recent Action Hero campaign. Many of the debates mentioned are covered in detail by Jasmeen Patheja and other contributors.
The Gulabi Gang: Run by Sampath Pal Devi, the Gulabi Gang now also runs centres for vocational training for young women, and could use your support.
Jagori: In addition to its Safe Delhi campaign and its mapping of safe/ unsafe spaces in the city, Jagori researches many other areas of feminist concern, from the rights of domestic workers to other forms of violence against women.
And please consider sending in an entry--a photograph, a story--for Transportraits, an exhibition curated by Gauri Gill, on your experience of safety in your city. Contributions from women and men welcome, and details here.
The BS column: Damning the Oriental scene
“Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled,” writes Lev Grossman in an essay on the rise of the trashy hybrid novel. He could have been writing about India, where the rise of imitation pulp fiction—the Third World version of Eric Segal, not even the Third World version of Stephen King—and the growth of worshippers at the broad church of illiterature is an alarming, but persistent, trend. These are four things I’d love to see changing about the Indian literary scene in the next decade.The Booker: It’s so tempting to pin the Indian obsession with the Booker on Arundhati Roy, whose win in 1997 for God of Small Things sparked off the great Indian Booker gold rush. (Blaming Arundhati is now a small cottage industry in its own right, so she may as well take the rap for the Booker. It’s a more interesting crime than hating on the US, sympathizing with the Maoists and never writing a sentence if she can get away with a paragraph.)
But the truth is it’s our fault. If we’re losing interest in the Booker this year because Rushdie didn’t make it to the longlist and there isn’t another Indian/ Asian contender, perhaps we need to ask when we became such insular readers. A century ago, the first Indian writers to claim English as one of their own languages read broadly; their imaginations were fired by their counterparts in Russia, Europe and America. A generation ago, Amitav Ghosh chronicled the practice of using the list of Nobel literature laureates as a kind of reader’s guide—a dreary but worthy way of inviting the world onto one’s bookshelves. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a preoccupation with literary success; it’s an unhealthy self-obsession.
Raise the bar already: One of the reasons why the US and much of Europe consistently produce better literary fiction—more interesting debut novels, more polished short story and essay collections, stellar non-fiction—is that it’s not that easy to get published.
About a decade ago, the hegemony of Penguin India in mainstream publishing gave way to intense competition as four or five publishing houses came up in its wake. This should have led to better work, and better edited books, but what it unleashed instead was a flood of superficial writing that might best be called fake literature, as editors struggled to meet their commissioning quotas.
I’m just as guilty as anyone else in publishing; in my stint at a major publishing house, we played the volumes versus quality game, and as with most other houses, quality sometimes lost. It’s time for publishers to start being gatekeepers again, to step away from the mediocre, the easy successes, the frozen-pizza school of writing—easy to sell, easy to consume, of no nutritional value whatsoever.
Missing: the under-40 “bhasha” generation: (I apologise for using the term bhasha to indicate Indian writers working in languages other than English—it’s terrible but useful shorthand.) Indian writing in English currently suffers from an imbalance—a flurry of literary prizes, the most recent being the Hindu Literary Review prize—without sufficient infrastructure in the way of creative writing courses and writing residencies.
Consider the wealth of Indian languages outside the narrow bandwidth of English—and consider the fact that the two most prominent literary prizes, the Sahitya Akademi awards and the Jnanpith, are reserved for writers in the autumn of their lives. When Ravindra Kelekar received his Jnanpith this week, he spoke of the neglect of Indian-language literature, and of his sense that English crowded out the rest. But in all these decades of complaining about the imbalance, the bhasha literary establishment has done little to encourage young writers, to offer them the early recognition and wider readership that a good first book prize could bring in its wake.
The invisible India: One of the annoying side-effects of living in a world where English is the link language, and where your publishing souks are based in the West, is living with the fact that every now and then, the UK and the US media will discover the obvious.
The success of the Bengali writer Sankar in translation a few years ago offered readers outside India a tiny sliver of what they were missing by reading only Indian writing in English, not Indian writing in translation—akin to reading only Portuguese literature and assuming it stands for all of European literature. It’s been a long time since Adil Jussawalla’s monumental anthology, New Writing in India, or Amit Chaudhuri’s Picador anthology of Indian writing—an updated anthology of Indian writing is overdue.
This year has seen the discovery by the UK media of Dalit writing, and perhaps similar discoveries, even if they seem obvious to those of us who live and work here, will open up the invisible India for the West. If Indian publishers were able to sponsor and aggressively market really good translations, they could change the game.
(Published in the Business Standard, August 2010)
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