JLF: writers, voices of

Martin Amis on writing about sex:
“It’s impossible to write autobiographically about sex. What voice can you use: ‘Bravo, I took her again in the morning?’”

and on writing:

“To accuse a novelist of egotism is like accusing a boxer of violence.”
“But writing is not a collaborative art. A writer comes most alive when they are alone.”
“If life is a foot, fiction is a shoe.”

Junot Diaz in an earlier interview on writing for applause:
“And I spent ten years writing Oscar Wao, and I definitely didn’t spend the ten years being like, “I’m amazing! This has taken ten years, because this much genius requires a decade!” [laughter] I spent the whole time, you know, fucked up, unhappy, really miserable and convinced that I’d ruined the whole thing, and all the stuff you get when you spend a really long time lost in the desert. I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.”

And at the JLF on applause:
“Most books look for applause, a reinforcement of current day ideas. Books are a work of art. They should look to add something, not seek applause. Otherwise it is the society asking us to do the monkey dance so that they can clap. And sadly most seem to be dancing.”

Richard Ford on reading:
"I just read. I don't work with such distinctions of culture. When I read an Indian novel in English, I think I am reading a novel. I don't think that I have to put on my Indian hat, because this is going to be a book by Indians about Indians. When I read, I try to make sense of the work in terms of a system of values that I understand. The idea is to be comfortable with things that I don't understand.”

Nam Le on being marginalized:
"One thing I like about the literary world, there are enough hurt feelings to go around. I imagine that even as we speak, there is a white, male, middle-aged writer sitting in Brooklyn complaining about being sidelined by foreign exotica."

Orhan Pamuk on “Turkish love”:
"When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can''t love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity. When non-Western authors express this humanity through their work their humanity is reduced to their nation''s humanity.”

Lunch with the Business Standard: Miguel Syjuco

(Published in the Business Standard, January 2011)






Among the spotless white mundus and crisp cotton saris of visitors to the Hay-on-Thiru festival held earlier in the year, one writer fitted in, keeping his cool despite the Kerala heat. Miguel Syjuco, the young winner of the Man Asian Prize for Literary Fiction 2008, had spent much of 2009 and 2010 in a quietly triumphal tour of literary festivals; he is now something of a veteran, his polish and assurance on stage belying his 34 years.

He fits seamlessly into the Hay-on-Thiru programme; along with Mexico’s Jorge Volpi and India’s Charu Nivedita, Syjuco brings with him stories less often told. He won the Man Asian prize for his dazzling first novel Ilustrado, and he opens up about it as we share an excellent lunch of kappa-fish curry, mutton fry and appams, in the open-air tents pitched at the Kanakakunnu Palace.

“It was a Cinderella story for me,” says Syjuco, digging in with some happiness into the three delicate vegetable thorans—home-style Kerala food at its best. But he’s quick to add that it wasn’t the overnight success story reported in the media. It was in 2001 that Syjuco joined a creative writing programme; by 2006, he had the rough draft of Ilustrado; in 2007, he submitted it for the relatively new Man Asian Prize, then open to unpublished manuscripts. It didn’t make the shortlist. It didn’t even make the longlist.

“I had spent years trying to find publishers and literary agents. I was getting rejected all the time,” he says. “I kept meeting failure and disappointment, and I didn’t give up. I told myself I’d give myself ten years, and if in ten years I didn’t make it, then I’d quit.” Syjuco had three years left of his allotted decade when he finally made his mark.

When he didn’t make the Man Asian’s 2007 cut, he revised Ilustrado, and resubmitted it in 2008. “For its first three years, they really had this goal of wanting to find unpublished talent. Authors would rush to finish their novels, because now they had a bridge between them and publishers in the West.” Ilustrado was shortlisted: “Winning the Prize got the book on the desks of agents and publishers,” he says.

After his years of being an observer of the literary scene, Syjuco is now an insider; his reading at Thiru, for instance, drew writers like Sebastian Faulks. “I don’t really care about prizes,” he says, “the biggest motivation for writers is that prizes have taken the place of book reviews.” The shrinking space for book review pages, and the proliferation of amateur reviews online has meant, he explains, that even good critical reviews are “drowned out by the plenitude of noises”. In that scenario, prizes like the Man Asian or the DSC South Asian prize, or other regional literary prizes offer a stamp of approval, and access to readers and publishers in the West.
We take second helpings of the kappa and fish curry—the sole swims in a thin but perfectly spiced red gravy, the kappa is freshly pounded. At the next table, Simon Schama, Peter Florence and William Dalrymple hold court, with rising literary stars Basharat Peer and Manu Joseph just a table away.

Syjuco has moved on to the craft of writing. Illustrado spans contemporary and past Filipino history through the stories of two writers, one young and filled with passionate conviction, the other, Crispin Salvador, dead in mysterious circumstances. The illustrados of the title are the “learned” or enlightened ones—the privileged intelligentsia of the Philippines, but in Syjuco’s retelling of history, the illustrados have also betrayed their country, by their lack of engagement.

“You learn craft through trial and error, by writing; but a good creative writing programme will teach you how to read,” he says, moving his chair back from the strong winter sun. “You write the books you want to read—I think many writers write because they want to get published, or write for approval, and that is limiting.” For Syjuco, becoming a writer also brought him to grips with his country’s history, and with the weight of the colonial past.

“I didn’t want Illustrado to be an explanation of Filipino history,” he says. “I wasn’t out to explain, or to represent. The book is an indictment of the ruling elite of a generation—they did not make the difficult choices, and the personal histories I focus on is part of that larger history.”

We skip the rich desserts; I don’t have the palate for kheer, and the humidity, despite the cool breezes and the occasional drift of rain, has taken away Syjuco’s appetite. It’s time to shift inside, to the author’s green room, which is a grand, formal room speckled with chandeliers. Local celebrities—Shashi Tharoor, NS Madhavan, Mamooty—eddy in and out of the room, each with a small retinue of fans, as if this were a medieval court rather than a literary festival.

The similarities between the Filipino, or the Indian, or the Mexican writer are striking in some ways, despite the very different local culture; we have a history of colonialism in common, we have the experiences of corruption and insurgencies in common. “The anger—the anti-intellectual backlash—you see in the US or the Philippines or perhaps India comes from the sense of betrayal,” says Syjuco. “But I also wanted to take a compassionate look at the frustration that the privileged classes feel—we were born into wealth, privilege, influence, but the system is so complex and so rigged, that there’s no place for us.”

It delights him that readers in the Philippines have responded to the novel, though most of the reviews have focused on the success of Illustrado, rather than its content. Even the experimental form, which places Syjuco alongside playful post-modernists like Roberto Bolano, Junot Diaz and David Mitchell, hasn’t deterred readers, though it’s a departure from the traditional Filipino novel.

“The problem is that a lot of people do feel the perfect Filipino novel is about the rich versus the poor, socially relevant, the struggling classes—the story takes a backseat to the message—and we also like to exoticise things, we do write for the West.,” he says. I ask if that’s becoming an increasingly difficult choice for writers like him: does one have to write for the reader elsewhere rather than the reader at home, or is there room for both?

Syjuco pauses, to allow the film star Mammooty’s more enthusiastic followers to pass: “I was writing for everybody—I don’t think we should have to choose, I think a book can be both, it can work for readers at home, and readers elsewhere. Just work harder, don’t be in such a hurry to get published.”

His next book, a novel he began writing in the rejection-slip years, is written in the voice of a Filipino woman who has been mistress to a very powerful man. Through the stories she narrates of her lovers, Syjuco says, he wants to convey a view of a society in change. “It’s an examination of power, of corruption. Fiction is a very powerful way of understanding your society and history.” A political way, I suggest. “I do believe that writing should be political. Another family saga? Really, we need that? Another failed marriage and meditation on what it means—we need that?“

Syjuco, always polite in his personal style, is warming up now to a rant. “This might be provocative, but because the publishing world is centred on Western reading, it doesn’t have the same issues we have. If Philip Roth—whom I admire greatly—if he lived in Africa or the Phillippines, he would have to write differently. Writers who have witnessed the disparity, the poverty and the corruption of the world they live in—they can’t revisit the same family stories, the same quotidian lives.”

Nor does this, he says, have to be poverty porn. And this Filipino writer demonstrates his claim to be a citizen of the world by quoting the great non-fiction writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. “Kapuscinski spoke in a Paris Review interview of how he’d been all over the world, lived through coup d’etats and revolutions, poverty and famine. And he said, everywhere I go, I see journalists and soldiers and aid workers, but I don’t see poets, or fiction writers, even sociologists. Where are they? They should be there.”

That is what Miguel Syjuco, writer, illustrado, is trying to do, away from the literary festivals and the podium: to listen, and to tell it straight. As he leaves, a dapper figure in the Thiruvanthapuram sunlight, I’ll make a prediction you can’t always make about debut novelists, however good their debuts: Syjuco will have a long career ahead of him, as provocateur and teller of tales.

Speaking Volumes: Tampering with Twain

(Published in the Business Standard, January 10, 2011)


“Well, if I ever struck anything like it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.” (From Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain)




It’s impossible for those outside the US to understand just how loaded the “n-word” is, and how much weight it carries. It may be the one word in the English language that has become truly unsayable; what was an uncomfortable pejorative at the turn of the 19th century is now the last (and perhaps the only) truly taboo word in the American lexicon.

For teachers and parents, the use of the n-word in one particular American classic has caused intense debate and anguish: Mark Twain used the word 219 times in Huckleberry Finn, each casual, offhand instance a reminder of how deep prejudice ran in the Old South.

So when Dr Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar, released a new edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he knew he would cause controversy with his decision to bowdlerize Twain’s works. “Far more controversial than this reuniting of Twain’s boy books will be the editor’s decision to eliminate two racial slurs that have increasingly formed a barrier to these works for teachers, students, and general readers,” he writes in his Introduction to the NewSouth edition. The other excised word is “Injun”; in Gribben’s edition, the n-word is replaced by the word “slave”, and “Injun” by “Indian”.

Gribben’s reasons are solidly practical, and are similar to the reasons why Charles Lamb, several centuries previous, cleaned up Shakespeare’s plays and rendered them into sanitized prose so that they would reach a wider audience. And Gribben explains, “The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups. There is no equivalent slur in the English language. As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact.” His aim, by editing Twain, is to return the books to school syllabi and to readers who might be made so uncomfortable seeing taboo words in print that they would rather not read these two classic American novels at all.

The problem is not with Gribben’s reasoning, but with the general principle—and with the precedent he might set. In the subcontinent, we are perhaps more aware of the dangers of sanitizing the past than readers in America might be. By excising the n-word and softening the “Injun” word, Gribben is making the classics more accessible—but at a significant cost. In order to ensure the comfort of a set of readers, he is in danger of eroding the historical past; of creating a cozy set of books where the full impact of racism as it operated in Twain’s times is lost.

Back in the day, when Amar Chitra Katha released its series of the Indian classics in comic book form, it set up an interesting contradiction. The comic books allowed far more readers to access Indian history, literature and mythology; but Amar Chitra Katha freely bowdlerized their versions, and added in their own biases. The skin colour of characters was a glaring, tell-tale sign: rakshasas and demons were dark, gods and goddesses fair, reinforcing one of the uglier Indian prejudices.

With abridged editions, some readers are led back to the originals at a later stage. I remember my shock, after reading the sanitized, children’s version of Gulliver’s Travels, at discovering the full breadth and scatological vitriol of Jonathan Swift’s satire. The abridged version of the Travels and the original were so far apart, as with Lamb’s version of Shakespeare’s tales, that they might have been written by two completely different authors. The original was always accessible; but how many readers will bother to access the original?

Here’s what Gribben, and his defenders, are missing in the course of the Twain debate. Discomfort, even acute discomfort, is not a reaction that readers should be protected against; literature that makes you flinch, or that might even seem repellent, is almost always literature that makes you re-examine your own entrenched prejudices. And as many supporters of the unexpurgated Twain editions have pointed out, the abridged version can rapidly replace the original, leaving only the most academic of scholars with a faint trace memory of the power of the original to offend.

And here’s a final argument against sanitizing Twain. It took about three decades in the US, and almost seven in the UK, for the n-word to acquire its present status as the ultimate unspeakable epithet. All of us, including Gribben, are very much the prisoners of the prejudices of our time. There’s a difference between speaking out against the use of an offensive word or term, and in releasing an edition that changes the writer’s intent. Gribben is cleaning up Twain in deference to the sensibilities of readers of this decade; but in another five decades, those sensibilities may have changed. Make your protest as an editor and reader in the appendices and forewords; but don’t tamper with the text.

Speaking Volumes: The Jaipur Litfest Primer

(Published in the Business Standard, January 3, 2010)

Perhaps the only way to understand the Jaipur Literature Festival is to think of a traditional mehfil crossed with a darbar. Over six years, the JLF has grown from a sleepy, intimate local festival held on the lawns of the eccentric Diggi Palace to Asia’s largest literary festival, packed with authors and celebrities (the two sometimes, but not always, overlap) from around the world.
Here’s a quick look at what to expect between the 21st and the 25th, and at some of the questions that the JLF raises:
1) The Visitors: Jaipur insists it doesn’t have stars, but every year brings a raft of celebrity writers from India and elsewhere—Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Wole Soyinka, UR Anathamurthy and Simon Schama have shown up at the Diggi Palace in past years. JM Coetzee, the South African writer and Nobel laureate, is expected; so are Orhan Pamuk and perhaps Martin Amis.

I’m looking forward to Richard Ford, Jim Crace, Jung Chang and Ahdaf Soueif; also Patrick French, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, the latter notorious for his adrenaline-spiked readings, are also expected. Among the younger writers, keep an eye out for the brilliant Junot Diaz, for Nam Le, author of The Boat, and for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

2) The Home Team: Along with Vikram Seth and Kiran Desai, expect to meet some of Asia’s most interesting writers. Bant Singh, the Dalit singer, is an iconic figure of resistance in Punjab; the agricultural labourer is now an activist celebrated for his poetry of protest, and has survived a vicious attack on him in 2006 after he sought justice for the rape of his daughter. His session should carry on the JLF tradition of encouraging voices of protest, from Bama to Om Prakash Valmiki, in earlier years.

Among the list of Indian writers in English, keep an eye out for Rana Dasgupta, whose Solo was one of the most rewarding novels of 2009, graphic novelist and artist Sarnath Banerjee and “cancer biographer” Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of Maladies. A focus on Kashmiri writers and Urdu writing looks promising, and make space on the programme for activists like Aruna Roy and water maven Anupam Misra.

3) The Sideshows: In line with Margaret Drabble’s complaints that Hay-on-Wye had become less intimate and more crowded with celebrities, the JLF is very different from its first, quietly literary avatar. Old hands complain, with some justice, that the music performances every evening and “star” writers of the Chetan Bhagat variety have turned Jaipur into a tamasha. As one of my friends from the fashion world discovered to her delight last year, it’s possible to be at the Jaipur Literature Festival and have a grand old time without attending a single session on writing or reading.

This year packs in a ton of stuff: a small showcase on children’s writings, the announcement of the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, performances by some of Asia’s best musicians and performance poets. As with Hay, and increasingly, Edinburgh, it’s up to the individual festival-goer to craft his or her programme. Go for just the music and to hang out with the Beautiful People at the bar behind the speaker’s venues, and Jaipur will be just another extended party; choose your sessions carefully and this could be the feast of ideas it was originally meant to be.

4) The Celeb Factor: Is the JLF all about the celebrity writers, as more than one media columnist has suggested? The problem with this perception is that it doesn’t match the experience on the ground. A recent piece talks about how the importance of the festival lies in the big names that it draws from the world of Western publishing, and to some extent, that’s true—people will queue up this year to listen to Coetzee, as they had in previous years to hear John Berendt on Venice and Savannah or Anne Applebaum’s impassioned discussion of gulags. But what the criticism omits is that the breathless focus on just the McEwans and the Rushdies is entirely a media creation.

For those who’ve been to several years of the festival, some of the best sessions have had massive audience support, but little press: the debate between Dilip Simeon and Nandini Sundar last year on the Maoist insurgency, for instance, or Anupam Misra’s spellbinding talk on the drying up of Indian rivers, or Sheen Kaaf Nizam’s standing-room-only poetry reading.

That’s another thing the media doesn’t report. There was the year the slam poets rocked Jaipur, with Jason doing his beatbox thing while poet Jeet Thayil unleashed his blues side, the year Gulzar and Javed Akhtar held an overflowing audience captive, the year that Tenzin Tsundue read his protest poems on Tibet. If there’s any group of writers the Jaipur Literature Festival belongs to, it’s not the celebrities—it’s always been the poets, in the end.

(The festival schedule is up here.)

The BS column: The crime of disaffection

(Published in the Business Standard, 28 December 2010)

“Section 124-A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizens. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has an affection(sic) for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr Banker [a colleague in non-violence] and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime.”

These words, from Mahatma Gandhi’s closing statement during his trial for sedition in 1922, have been quoted widely in India this year, along with the resurrection of the antiquated laws of Raj India. There were cries of sedition when Arundhati Roy made some remarks on the alienation felt by Kashmiris; this week, the human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to life imprisonment for sedition by a Raipur court in a much-criticised judgement.

By 1909, fears of sedition had turned the British government in India into tireless readers. Sisir Kar’s history of books banned in Bengal under the Raj quotes from a typical circular of the time that urges officers to carefully examine all suspicious material, to “facilitate the immediate detection of seditious books”. As Gandhi was to note, the affection of the subject for the king, or the citizen for the state, could not be commanded—and it was markedly absent in those early years as the national movement gathered steam.

Bankimchandra’s Ananda Math had been in print for 18 years at this time, and as its author, Bankim was struggling between the demands of his job as a government official and the need to express his discontent with the Raj. Between the first and the eighth edition of Ananda Math, the novel that added Vande Mataram to the lexicon of revolution and that would inspire the next generation of revolutionaries, Bankim made continuous changes to the text, often excising or softening sentences that seemed over-critical of the British. In one of the more unusual applications of censorship, there were periods when Ananda Math itself was not banned—but the singing of Vande Mataram was proscribed, and the anthem treated as seditious.

By the time Sharatchandra’s Pather Dabi (1926) was published, featuring, as the Government of Bengal Yearbook commented, “The most powerful act of sedition in almost every page of the book,” disaffection was the spirit of the times. The long history of Pather Dabi, the confiscation of the novel, the exchange between Tagore and Sharatchandra on the impact and validity of criticizing those in power, points to the fact that it was impossible for the Raj to allow questioning of the state without also admitting the disaffection and disillusionment of the writers who questioned it. Tagore disappointed Sharatchandra by praising the tolerance of the British, and by implicitly refusing to endorse the younger author’s insistence that criticism was the only valid response to British rule.

Books like Ananda Math and Pather Dabi were only the most celebrated of their kind; in the attempt to check sedition, journals and books were often confiscated and plays were routinely proscribed or censored. Sisir Kar cites an unwittingly revealing letter from the Police Commissioner, allowing the production of Bankimchandra’s Chandrashekhar to continue if certain objectionable portions were expunged—on pages 10, 19, 20, 33, 36, 40, 41, 43, 51, 54, 55, 80, 120,121, 123, 124, 127, 133, 148 and 151, leaving one to wonder what was left of the play.

All of this, including the trials of the likes of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose for sedition and conspiracy, were part and parcel of the paraphernalia of a state that was an occupying power, and that had to command the affection of the people who came under its rule. In an independent India, the question is whether the state should still feel paranoid enough to continue using a law where, as Gandhi puts it, “mere promotion of disaffection is a crime”.

The writings of Arundhati Roy, for instance, or the work of Dr Binayak Sen, would have placed them in the time of the British Raj among the ranks of the disaffected. Their willingness, and the willingness of other writers and activists, to question the workings of the state are definitely signs of disaffection. But in a healthy democracy, and a healthy state, the affection of its writers and citizens would be earned, not commanded, and criticism would be welcomed, not seen as threatening. We need to ask whether the same laws that were used against Bankimchandra, Sharatchandra, Tilak and Gandhi should be pressed into service in a country that prides itself on its many freedoms.

A quiet rant on the Assange case, and a response to Kavita Krishnan

I have a lot of respect for Kavita Krishnan and her work in the field of women’s rights in India. Reading the first four paragraphs of her opinion piece in the Huffington Post on rape, I was in complete agreement with her. Krishnan confirmed my understanding of the way rape laws work in this country-—the conviction rate is low, reporting rapes is often a difficult, brutalizing process, and the understanding of consent is limited in the legal system. (Marital rape is not yet an offence, for instance; and a woman’s right to the integrity of her own body is not at all well defined in India, in either legal or cultural terms.)

It is in the final paragraph of Krishnan’s article where we part company. Here’s what she has to say:

“Certainly, from the perspective of all those women in India who find the most brutal of rapists going free, protected by the police and the state, and their most serious charges of rape trivialized or even suppressed by force, the idea of a man being hunted down by Interpol on charges which are as complex and ambiguous as those in the Assange case is disturbing. From what I hear, Sweden's rape laws are nothing to quarrel with, and are in fact quite enviable for us in India, where even marital rape is yet to be deemed illegal. But for the US to fire at Assange from the shoulders of the two Swedish women indeed is an insult to the women struggling in vain for justice the world over. It is possible that Assange's casual flings with female fans may not be very democratic; he may be guilty of insensitivity to the concerns and rights of women (for instance their right to be free from HIV). But if sexism is a crime worthy of Interpol's attention, then Interpol should immediately arrest Silvio Berlusconi and Bill Clinton, just for starters!”

The Assange case is complex, and has drawn intense scrutiny across the world. At present, allegations have been made by two Swedish women of sexual assault, sexual molestation and, under the nuanced provisions of Swedish law, an allegation of "less severe" rape; he has not yet been formally charged. The case is nuanced and it would be very wrong to assume his guilt. (I’m attaching some links that might be of interest below.) But this is why I disagree with Krishnan, and think that she has not paid enough attention to the details of the Assange case before offering her opinion on it.

1) She assumes that the allegations brought against Assange by the two Swedish women are part of a US-backed conspiracy; there has been little evidence of this so far. There are legitimate fears that the case will be misused, and legitimate questions about the workings of the legal system and the timing of the case, given Assange’s current situation, but news accounts do not support the idea that the two women are involved in any conspiracy theory. The allegations made by the two Swedish women should be treated as a separate matter, in the absence of any evidence to back the conspiracy theory.


2) It’s a fallacy to assume that because the worst and most violent instances of rape routinely go unchecked across the world—Somalia, South Africa, India and a score of other countries—it is an insult to those women to seek redressal for cases that involve apparently lesser degrees of rape and sexual assault.

The allegations against Assange wouldn’t hold up in any Indian court for a reason: the rape laws in this country are extremely unevolved. A woman’s consent or withdrawal of consent is not taken seriously, and the assumption most courts would make is that if a woman agrees to sleep with a man, she gets what she deserves, even if the man subsequently overrides her wishes or uses force.

The better argument would be not to envy or marvel at Sweden’s laws, but to work for more progressive laws in India. In terms of degree, there is a difference between a Dalit woman brutalized and raped by the men of her village, or a Somalian woman subjected to repeated, violent rape, and a woman who experiences a turning point when the man she’s in bed with uses unacceptable force or coercion. But can we be clear that both of these—first-degree and third-degree rape, so to speak--are unacceptable, instead of drawing false parallels?

3) Krishnan should know better than to assume that Assange’s crime is “sexism”. The allegations made by the two Swedish women concern sexual molestation, sexual assault and "less severe" rape. These are not trivial, if true. And this case is not about an HIV test, sex by surprise, or a broken condom. It’s about consent, the overriding of that consent and the use of force in the process of the overriding of a woman’s consent. The allegations made by these two women deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a big difference between being "insensitive" to a woman’s fear of HIV, and the allegations of molestation and assault laid out in the Guardian report.

I am not an expert on either the law, or on rape victims, though I have written on rape and sexual assault in the course of writing for the gender beat. I’m following this case the way I’ve followed rape trials in India—just as an observer and as a woman who is interested in women’s rights.

But Kavita Krishnan is an expert, and she should know better than to prejudge two women, and to trivialize the allegations they have made against Assange. I understand and share her concerns for the harshness that Indian women face, on a daily basis, and I understand how dealing with the everyday brutality of rape and rape charges in this country can make anyone wonder why the Assange case matters at all.

Here’s the thing. To the two women involved in this case—women who have been vilified, who have had their names and addresses posted on the Internet, who have been blamed and dismissed, even before the case comes to court--it matters. The laws in their part of the world allow them to file a complaint against a man like Assange; the laws in my part of the world would leave an Indian woman in a similar situation with little or no prospect of redressal. I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-centre rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women or women in conflict zones to our attention.

But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing. The right to say 'no' to one's sexual partner, when you're uncomfortable, afraid, in pain, or fear rape, and to have that 'no' heard and accepted, is not a small thing. The right to be heard instead of being dismissed, or belittled, or vilified, is not a small thing. The right to consent should be the right of every woman, and every man; it shouldn’t be a luxury at all.

Here are some links that might be of interest:
1) The full allegations against Assange, from the Guardian:
The two Swedish women say that consensual sex with Assange turned, in separate incidents, into non-consensual sex. One woman alleges that he used force to hold her down, and then deliberately tore his condom when she insisted that he wear one. The other woman alleges that after several instances of consensual sex, where she insisted that Assange wear a condom, she woke up to find him having sex with her, not wearing a condom. He faces charges under Swedish law of sexual molestation and sexual assault. The allegations are yet to be proved, and Assange is yet to be charged.

2) Jessica Valenti on the laws in Sweden and the US on rape, and issues of consent:

3) From Kate Harding, an early piece contesting Naomi Wolf’s assessment of the Assange case:

and a more recent post on the rape myths coming up in the wake of the Assange case:


4) Caroline May on the rift between feminists and progressives on the activist left:

5) Jaclyn Friedman on What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape:

and: Friedman debates Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now:

6) Salil Tripathi: When No Means No

2010: The year's best non-fiction

From Delhi’s courtesans and merchants at the time of the Mutiny to the search for the perfect hilsa, Indian non-fiction had more variety on offer this year than in the previous five. Here are some of the highlights—an indicative rather than comprehensive list, for reasons of space—of 2010 in general non-fiction.


Business: The second-best thing about All The Devils Are Here (Portfolio/ Penguin, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera) and The Big Short (Allen Lane, Michael Lewis) is that these two business books read like well-written, fast-paced thrillers. The best thing about McLean’s history of the 2008 financial crisis and Short’s dissection of the “tiny handful of investors… for whom the trade became an obsession” is that they are snapshots of a time of greed and hubris. In comparison, Hamish McDonald’s long-anticipated Ambani and Sons (Roli Books) is big on gossip, comprehensive enough, but lacked the punch and the rigorous analysis that a Michael Lewis brings to the table. It reads like a rehash of McDonald’s earlier book, the controversial Polyester Prince.

History: Ramachandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India (Viking/ Penguin) drew crowds and intense debate, over those the historian chose to include in this collection of 19 profiles. Despite its many insights, it fell short of Guha’s best work—a milestone rather than a monumental work in his career. Mahmood Farooqui’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi, 1857 (Viking/ Penguin) was a welcome reminder of the missing oral histories and the untouched records in our libraries. A lasting addition to Mutiny scholarship, it could, however, have done with more commentary and analysis from Farooqui. Madhushree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (Tranquebar) offered both in a trenchant criticism that directly linked Winston Churchill’s biases to the great famine of Bengal. And one of the more entertaining analyses of contemporary India was Santosh Desai’s collection of essays on the middle classes, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India (HarperCollins).

Travel writing: Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish (Penguin), winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize, was one of the discoveries of the year. Marrying a journalist’s eye to a writer’s turn of phrase, Subramanian made his travels up and down the Indian coast come alive, for foodies and travel junkies alike.
Sadanand Dhume’s gripping My Friend The Fanatic: Travels With A Radical Islamist (Tranquebar) is one of the more illuminating and thoughtful examinations of contemporary Islam available, which includes meetings with top Al-Qaeda chiefs and the inventor of an especially risqué dance called drilling. Balance this with Amitava Kumar’s rigorous but personal Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer’s Report on the War on Terror (Picador India), which moves between India and the US and is a brilliant study of how governments have internalized paranoia at the expense of the rights of their citizens.

The arts: Deepanjana Pal’s Life of Raja Ravi Varma (Random House) was one of the few approachable and entertaining artist’s biographies—as opposed to hagiographies—to be written in recent times. Pal’s bland and slightly workmanlike style is offset by her intimate understanding of the period and of art. With Penguin Studio’s monumental tribute to Dayanita Singh, it’s the photographs that do the talking as much as the perceptive essays by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen—definitely a collector’s item, and an essential guide to the work of one of India’s most celebrated photographers. And well worth its Rs 6,000 price tag is the Khoj Book (HarperCollins), with well-curated profiles of 101 Indian artists, from one of India’s most experimental and freewheeling art galleries.

For Charles Correa fans, A Place in the Shade (Penguin India) is a quiet, thoughtful and inspiring collection of the maestro’s essays on architecture—again, essential reading for anyone interested in India’s cities and buildings. And on a lighter note, don’t miss Jai Arjun Singh’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (HarperCollins)—a cult film and books blogger on one of our funniest and most intriguing cult films.

Next week: the year's best biographies and memoirs, fromfrom the lives of bar dancers in Bombay to Mark Twain’s irreverent take on Samuel Clemens and the ultimate assessment of the man in the White House.