Speaking Volumes: Bag of Bones

(Published in the Business Standard, December 13, 2011. This is a longer version of the column that was carried in print.)


It was a measure of the relative innocence of Delhi (and India) in 1978 that the murder of two children would hit the city so hard. In the absence of the noise of today’s TV channels or the feeding frenzy of the tabloids, the deaths of Sanjay and Geeta Chopra felt, to middle-class Delhi, like a personal, familial tragedy.

The brother and sister were killed by Kuljeet Singh and Jasjeet Singh, better known by their nicknames, Billa and Ranga. Geeta and Sanjay had asked for a lift back home; three days later, their bodies were found in Buddha Jayanti Park. Their deaths had not been easy or swift, and for months afterwards, the horror of the murders, the deep collective grief over what those children had suffered before they died, became part of the city’s consciousness. Billa and Ranga were sentenced to death, and hanged in 1982.

The murders were unplanned, and yet they were carried out with a degree of deliberation and cruelty that raised questions about Billa and Ranga. It was easier at the time to see the pair as monsters; the idea that a certain kind of person might comfortably turn to killing, given an opportunity, is far harder for most humans to stomach. The hangings, greeted by and large with satisfaction, as a sign that justice had been done, was also a spectacle of medieval justice that raised larger questions over the death penalty. We know little about Billa and Ranga, aside from the fact that they had small-town roots, and that, after the murders, they instinctively sought shelter back home, not trusting to the anonymity of the big city.

There were no Truman Capotes to ask the really messy, unpleasant questions, nor were there the equivalent of writers like Vikram Chandra, to capture the sense of a city in the middle of change. Three decades later, the city is either indifferent to murders, unless they are suitably bloody – dismembered bodies found in gunny sacks – or its media will descend like hordes of flies on the more sensational deaths, as happened with the Aarushi Talwar case.

Bombay has been more fortunate in its chroniclers, from Suketu Mehta to Meenal Baghel, whose understanding of the city comes from the years she spent on the crime beat, and her time as editor of one of its more robustly sensational tabloids. The murder of a young TV executive, Neeraj Grover, in 2008 held the city’s attention for many obvious reasons.

The chief suspects were an aspiring actress, Maria Susairaj, who had ended a relationship with Grover, and her boyfriend Emile Jerome, a young, handsome naval officer. Grover’s body was found hacked into several pieces, a detail that acquired the sheen of legend in the media retelling: “three hundred pieces”, neither more nor less. In July 2011, Maria Susairaj was acquitted by a Mumbai court, who appeared to believe the version of events where Susairaj was cast as a helpless witness rather than an active participant; Emile Jerome received a 10-year sentence.

In Baghel’s hands, what could have been a conventional, if stirringly lurid, tale of predictable crime – passion, jealousy, a cunning cop pitting his wits against two very collected murder suspects – becomes a much more layered tale of darkness. The murder took place in the tiny flat of an apartment building called Dheeraj Solitaire, a name that speaks eloquently of the aspirations and hopes of those halfway up the ladder. Maria’s films – mostly flops – have contemporary, smart, Hinglish titles: Excuse Me and Ok, Sir, Ok.

The Bombay she and Neeraj move in is the world of smart gyms and parties that take them far away from either Mysore or Kanpur, where they grew up. Maria’s universe is a place where you might meet a possible future husband on Orkut while also hedging your bets on shaadi.com, and where, in the big city safely away from the prying curiosity of family, casual relationships that are all about “having mazaa” are filled with possibility and guaranteed free from judgement.

Baghel never lets us forget the violence of the actual murder; the blood from Grover’s body soaked their bedroom, and she has a chilling description of the effect it has in court when the packet that contains his bones is opened up, releasing the “dank” smell of death into the air. This is what hangs over Baghel’s tale of apparently commonplace aspiration: Neeraj Grover shaking off the dust of Kanpur as he works in the office of Ekta Kapur, the woman who runs a TV soap opera empire built on mothers-in-law, virginal heroines and wicked vamps, Maria holding marriage to a naval officer as a card in reserve in case her film actress dreams don’t come through.

The real darkness, in the story Baghel draws for her readers, is not in the crime that happened in the blink of a moment, with the current boyfriend confronting his fiancee’s former lover. It’s not in the carefully planned disposal of Grover’s corpse, where they might have got away with the murder if it hadn’t been for top police officer Rakesh Maria’s experience.

It’s in what happened in the days afterwards, when Emile and Maria went about their daily affairs with apparent normalcy, waiting for the police to forget about the corpse of Maria’s lover and friend, so that the actress and the navy man could go back to the important, absorbing business of their lives together.

Baghel never lets the reader forget that these two, Maria and Emile, are not monsters or psychopaths. Neeraj Grover's story is a very contemporary one: a young man struggling to get out of Kanpur in order to make something of himself, his ambitions and his successful arrival as a minor cog in Ekta Kapur's television serial factory marred only by his obsession with women: "Girlfriends turned up like finds out of an excavation out of Mohenjodaro."

But so is Maria's desperate and reasonably successful attempts to escape from the stifling conservatism of Mysore, her need to reinvent herself as an actress who's crossed the great divide between struggling and recognised. And Emile, the perfect cadet, who shares his small-town background with Maria and Neeraj, has few issues aside from an occasional burst of temper. Through her interviews with other actresses, psychics, police officers, Neeraj's friends in Bombay, Baghel builds up a compelling picture of a much less glamorous city, a place where those from India's small towns work so hard to fit in that they ignore the fissures and fractures of their divided selves.

Baghel offers no easy answers. Instead, she engages our sympathies, with all three protagonists, and then, as a quiet reminder, offers a list of material evidence compiled by the Crime Branch.

"All the clues to Neeraj's killing--the method and also the malevolence--lay in these items:

1. One bone, one foot long, burnt on one side.
2. Remnants of a burnt bag, red in colour.
3. Reddish-coloured half-burnt cloth.
4. Burnt pillow, pillowcase, burnt cloth, and plastic piece, all red."

And so it continues, down to a pair of bloodstained blue jeans with the label Skinny on the inside, one 13-inch chopper with an 8-inch long blade, one parcel containing bones, one yellow-coloured 5-litre plastic can with the words: Saffola Losorb--The Heart of a Family. These 33 things were all that was left of Neeraj Grover.

The Translation Shelf

(This was carried in Forbes Life's winter 2011 issue--a look at some of the most interesting books of the year in translation.)



“We live more of our lives in translation than you might imagine,” said the writer from Chile. His life was an extreme illustration of this. Born in Chile, Ruben had moved to Denmark as a political refugee, and begun to write in Danish as an adult. His books were available in many European languages, though not in English. He hoped some day to be translated into Spanish, so that he would have readers in his home country.

Perhaps the group of writers I met that day were unusual in the linguistic extremes that they represented, but in all probability, you would find the same diversity among a covey of businessmen. One spoke Gujarati but wrote in Tamil; several of the Danes spoke other European languages fluently but used English “in conversation”; one of the Indians spoke and wrote only in English, and I spoke English as a first, Bengali as a second language. As we learned each other’s stories, we also confirmed an old truth: restlessness gives us more tongues. If you had moved two or more countries, you would have two or more languages at hand, and in the words of a Dutch-Danish speaker, you would commute between them.

The UK, like the US, isn’t very comfortable with translations: literature in translation makes up barely 3 % of the US market and about 5 % of the UK market. There are no accurate figures available for India, but I suspect we’re closer to Europe in our reading tastes; 30 % of the books Europeans read are works in translation. In a country where so many are bilingual, we remain perhaps slightly more open to reading in other tongues than the US does.

Purists should start with UR Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura (OUP), translated by Susheela Punita. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara is one of the great Kannada classics, where a small, conservative community of Brahmins is plunged into chaos when an iconoclast dies, and no one can agree on what to do with his corpse. On the subject of translation, Ananthamurthy had pointed out in a key essay that this is an everyday Indian activity: “Many of us use at least three languages, one at home, another on the streets, still another at our office. When you narrate to your old mother what happened in your office, you are translating.” Bharatipura is set in the years just after Independence, and might be called an early NRI novel, as it follows the fortunes of the foreign-returned Jagannatha as he attempts to dismantle caste taboos in his village.

NS Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery (Penguin), translated by Rajesh Rajamohan, won this year’s Crossword award for Fiction in Translation. This is, in some ways, a perfect companion if you’re reading Bharatipura—Litanies is also set in the years just after Independence, and its colourful narrative explores the rise of Communism in Kerala, the lives of the islanders who live off Kochi and the choices before its main protagonist, Edwina Theresa Irene Maria Anne Margarita Jessica.

The third of this loose “Independence” trilogy is a lovely translation of the Hindi writer Yashpal’s Jhoota Sach, one of the most influential modern Indian novels. The thousand-odd pages of This Is Not That Dawn (Penguin, translated by Anand) are an epic elegy for pre-1947 Lahore, probably one of the most startling and moving works of fiction to come out of Partition. This is more than just a chronicle of refugee life; Yashpal captures a world now dead in all its vibrant, complex richness. Readers with little access to Hindi have waited for over four decades for this translation—it was first published in 1958 and in 1960. The title, drawn with some awkwardness from Faiz’s famous poem about Partition, is misleading; the rest of the translation is almost as rich and detailed as the original.

The cult Bengali writer Subimal Misra began penning his uncompromising, bitter stories a decade after Yashpal’s epic, and if the writers of a previous generation had chronicled the betrayal that was Partition, Misra’s function, as he saw it, was to set down the failure of everything else that made up “modern” India. The fifteen stories that are included in The Golden Gandhi Statue From America and Other Stories (HarperCollins, translated by V Ramaswamy) touch upon murder, dismemberment, cholera in Kolkata and unspeakable poverty, all seen through a glass darkly.

But perhaps the best translations of this year, and indeed this decade, come from poetry. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir (NYRB books) and Ranjit Hoskote’s I, Lalla (Penguin) breathe new life into the sturdy old clay of these two great mystic poets. These books return poetry to where it belongs, and promise to make it part of our everyday lives once again.

“I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world,” Haruki Murakami said in a Paris Review interview. That philosophy has helped the Japanese runner, writer and former nightclub owner to build a literary life, one blockbuster novel at a time. The queues for 1Q84 (Knopf, translated by Jay Rubin) in the UK and the US rivaled Pottermania, and the critics seem to think this novel about writing, Japanese communes and the unreliability of memory is as good as Murakami’s best.

Unlike Murakami, translation has eluded the novelist Kyung-Sook Shin, who has a faithful readership in South Korea. Before her moving, complex novel Please Look After Mom (Knopf, translated by Chi-Young Kim) became a bestseller in its English translation, the author had published several books, but only one or two had been translated and read outside Korea. Please Look After Mom is told in a shifting series of voices, all belonging to members of one family, as they look back at the coming-of-age of four friends in 1980s Korea.

At 93 years, Stephane Hessel is an unlikely bestseller author, but the former French Resistance member’s brief call to arms is sweeping the world. Time For Outrage! (Twelve, translated by Damien Searls) is the English translation from the French Indignez-vous, and demands that we abandon our indifference and look for causes, political and personal, that will fire our indignation.

For some reason, murder and intrigue have always translated well, and this year is no exception. Keigo Higashimo’s The Devotion of Suspect X (Alexander O. Smith, Minotaur) is Japanese noir at its engaging best, where Higashimo offers you the identity of the murderer, the victim and the motive in the first few chapters. But the suspense revolves around the deepening relationship between Yasuko, survivor of a violent marriage, murderer of her loutish ex-husband, and her neighbour Ishigami, who helps her cover up the murder, even as investigator Kusanagi attempts to make sense of what looks like the perfect crime.

Santiago Roncagliolo’s Red April (Atlantic Books, translated by Edith Grossman) is the kind of thriller and political novel that makes one realize how much we miss out on by not reading in translation. Felix Saldivar is an oddly vulnerable prosecutor left in charge of a gruesome investigation into mass graves that force him to confront, in bumbling ways, Peru’s bloody history. “Sometimes,” says a key character, “I have difficulty distinguishing between us and the enemy.” After a year of rebellions and civil wars across the world, this is the book to read, a novel that insists on digging up the bones of history, no matter what the cost.

The "free" in free speech

(This is a response to Shashi Tharoor's article, which appeared in the Deccan Herald today. Other links of interest: the India Ink round-up of censorship in the country, and the NYT India blog post that reported Union Telecom minister Kapil Sibal's attempt to ask for "pre-screening" of certain social media sites. All views expressed in this post are strictly personal.)

Shashi Tharoor begins by saying, "The controversy over the government’s alleged desire to censor Facebook, Twitter and other leading lights of the social media has obscured some genuine and urgent questions we need to address about free speech in our society."

Tharoor is a writer I used to respect; his Great Indian Novel is one of the staples in my library, but his years as a diplomat and the UN haven't made him much of a free speech advocate. He's been notably silent on most of the urgent free speech and censorship debates of the last five years, and this video of a debate between him and Christopher Hitchens is fairly representative of his position on free speech--he advocates limitations on free speech, especially in the face of threats of violence. Tharoor has a great deal of credibility as a writer, but it should be noted that his views on censorship are not necessarily shared by most other writers and artists.

The problem arose when the New York Times reported on Monday that our Kapil Sibal, had called in senior social media executives from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and allegedly asked them to “prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online”.

Such a request inevitably sparked off a firestorm of Internet protest against the minister, without waiting to hear his side of the story.

Is there ever a case where a minister's attempt to ask companies to turn censor, screening and shutting down content for offensiveness according to guidelines that are not transparent and not released to the public, would be considered acceptable democratic practice? The minister made no attempt to bring the issue up for public debate, and that is also what's sparked widespread indignation and protest--it's censorship through the back door. The complaint that the minister's side of the story was not heard belies the fact that Sibal didn't want to make his attempts to pre-screen Internet content public!

But — and free speech advocates hate that “but”! — every society recognises some sensible restraints on how free speech is exercised. Those restraints almost always relate to the collectivity; they arise when the freedom of the individual to say what he wants causes more harm to more people in society than restricting his freedom would.

This is the start of a somewhat specious argument, where Mr Tharoor ignores the fact that the Indian Constitution has already placed restrictions on free speech and expression, in Article 19 (2). These restrictions have often been debated, and should be open to debate in any democracy. The apparent reasonableness of the "harm" argument has also, in the Indian context, often been used to remove expressions of political dissent. Behind Mr Sibal's original attempt to ask for pre-censorship, said the first news reports, was the discovery of a page that made offensive comments about Ms Sonia Gandhi.

Since societies vary in their cultural&political traditions, the boundaries vary from place to place. Free speech absolutists tend to say that freedom is a universal right that must not be abridged.

Just an aside: please note the way "free speech advocates" has changed in this paragraph to "free speech absolutists". This also ignores the fact that most advocates of free speech have already considered, and accepted, exceptions to free speech covered under the harm principle.

Just as the commonplace practice of women taking off their bikini tops at St Tropez, Copacabana or Bondi Beach could not be replicated on the beaches of Goa, Dubai or Karachi without risking assault or arrest, so also things might be said in the former set of places that would not pass muster in the latter. It’s no use pretending such differences don’t exist. They do, and they’re the reason why free speech in, say, Sweden isn’t the same as free speech in Singapore.

Women taking off their bikini tops is equivalent to what, exactly? Expressions of dissent with the Congress party, or the kind of trolling one sees on Rediff discussion boards? If Mr Tharoor's making the argument that certain things are "against Indian culture", he might have chosen a less bizarre illustration. As for the comparison between free speech in Sweden and free speech in Singapore, I'm unconvinced that India should choose either the Singapore or China model of monitoring and extreme censorship as a role model for itself.

Even more, any individual with the basic literacy needed to operate a keyboard can express his or her opinion, create information, whether video or text, and communicate it immediately, without the delays necessarily wrought by editorial controls, cross-checking or even the synthesising that occurs in a “mainstream” newsroom.

Yes, but Mr Tharoor's ignoring two major factors in his analysis of social media. One is cognitive distortion. People like him, and other celebrities on Twitter who have large and faithful followers in the lakhs, are also exposed to a far higher than average level of trolling and offensive speech than the average Internet user. Mr Tharoor's view of social media is necessarily biased; just as he would receive more in the way of attention online than most users, he also receives a disproportionate amount of abuse.

The second is the fallacy that would place all Net users at the same level of credibility. One of the reasons why most Net users feel free to ignore a lot of the hate speech and offensiveness that occurs online is because most Net trolls have far less credibility--and reach--than mainstream Net users. It's highly dangerous to see the Internet itself as a published screed; the Net puts into print the average gossip, useless chatter and conversation of everyone on the street. The most useful filter on the Internet remain the Ignore, Block and Report Spam buttons--none of which require government regulation.

And yet this very freedom is its own biggest threat. It means anyone can say literally anything and, inevitably, many do. Lies, distortions and calumny go into cyberspace unchallenged; hatred, pornography and slander are routinely aired. There is no fact-checking, no institutional reputation for reliability to defend.

This has been an inescapable feature of the Internet since the 1990s, so why is it a problem now? And why is the nature of the Internet itself being used as an excuse to press for government regulation of the Internet? The most effective networks (Twitter, Facebook), web encyclopaedias (Wikipaedia) and forums online do not depend on silent censorship or overt censorship to be comfortable spaces for the average user. They rely on a combination of internal moderation--Twitter is ruthless about blocking fake and spam accounts, for instance, personalised screening, where every user sets his or her privacy levels, and the group's own, evolving standards of what is acceptable behaviour. What is acceptable on sites like Grindr, for instance, are highly sexual images; on sites like 4chan, abuse is part of the conversation; but Twitter would very quickly kick off users who attempted to recreate the ambience of those sites.

Mr Tharoor's real problem might be something that we all struggle with--the Internet in its present avatar requires much more from users than the passive consumption of news. It requires all of us to make choices about what we want to pay attention to, and the kind of communities we want to build, and it requires users to be active, responsible participants in their consumption of news and commentary. The state has no business taking over this mediation, or dictating how sanitised everyone's web experience should be.

Mr Sibal’s main concern was not with politics, but with scurrilous material about certain religions that could have incited retaliatory violence. People say or depict things on social media that might be bad enough in their living rooms, but are positively dangerous in a public space.

In that case, the remedy is to report these offensive pages to the social media sites concerned, and perhaps also to demand a public debate on whether this kind of hate speech should or should not be protected as part of free expression. Mr Tharoor continues to make the argument from violence--the argument that x book or y debate could potentially lead to riots or worse. This argument has been used to shut down everything from controversial histories of Shivaji, to films about lesbian love, to provocative art, to books that dare to discuss religion, in the past few decades in India. Colleagues of mine have argued elsewhere that this has led to a situation that encourages people, especially political parties, to create the threat of violence in order to shut down anything, from Rohinton Mistry to Ramanujan, that makes them uncomfortable.

In all of this, Mr Tharoor doesn't ask either himself or his readers a simple question: why does India want to become one of the few countries to demand censorship and "pre-screening" of the Internet? What would the fallout of such censorship be? Would we start by erasing the obviously offensive--morphed pictures of the gods, hurtful, inflammatory speech--and then continue by deleting, say, fierce criticism of the government's actions in Kashmir, or of riots that were not, astonishingly, sparked off by offensive images on the Internet such as the one in Gujarat, or of corruption in public life? Once we set a precedent--pre-screening is acceptable and the state has the right to decide what is and isn't acceptable, where do we stop?

The free speech "absolutists" Mr Tharoor speaks of live with the downside to free speech, which means tolerating and allowing the expression of beliefs that run counter to one's own most dearly held values. We don't do this because we're masochists or martyrs. We do this because the cost of comfort--of never being exposed to a world where you will experience trolling, abuse or hatred--is too high; such a world would also end by excluding dissent or debate.

It takes a longer time to enforce community standards across a social media site than it does to filter out all unpleasantness, but it is possible--and while Mr Sibal and Mr Tharoor might focus on the ugliness of the trolls, many of us have also experienced the other side of social media, as a place where people can tweet their needs in the aftermath of a bomb blast, where a blog can become a line of communication between those stuck in Bombay floods and those worrying about their safety. The Net is a place where, years ago, I met a truly frightening troll online, a man who sent threatening and poisonous messages for years; but it's also the place where I've met some of the loveliest and most generous writers, journalists, thinkers and artists from across the world. It's like real life in its swirls and eddies, in its unedited untidiness, and like real life, it is impossible to edit unless you police all of its boundaries with considerable ruthlessness.

As a man who was once one of India's most provocative writers, Mr Tharoor should understand why we place such a high value on free speech. Even when it means putting up with the relatively tiny percentage of Net users who put their vitriol out there, hoping to be heard, but all too often speaking into silence. It is that silence, the refusal to respond or give them any space, that is far more effective in making the Net a civilised space than any attempt at government or corporate censorship would be.

Also read: From Chandni Chowk to China: Salil Tripathi

India's Authoritarian Lapse: Salil Tripathi

Hate Speech Must Be Blocked: Kapil Sibal defends his stance.

#TheInsecureIndian: Samar Halarnkar

Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor: Gaurav Sabnis

Book review: The End of the Gods, AS Byatt

The End of the Gods: The Myth Of Ragnarok
AS Byatt
Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin India
Rs 399, 177 pages


“Writers don’t make up myths,” Marina Warner observes, “They take them over and recast them.” This, she says, is what Jorge Luis Borges calls the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures. “The more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become.”

In 2005, the independent Scottish publishing house Canongate launched one of the most ambitious ventures of its kind in modern times, inviting authors to retell and reimagine some of the world’s greatest myths over the span of the next few decades. In an age when “ambitious” is a word applied to anything from a new vampire series to a rewarmed Stephen King bestseller, it is useful to be reminded of what the word actually means.

But can the great myths be rewritten to order? Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, which began the series, was a crisp, comforting but not revolutionary reminder of this great collective inheritance. Margaret Atwood’s reworking of the Iliad from Penelope’s perspective was a feat of imaginative brilliance, a feminist corrective; but David Grossman’s gentle spin on the Samson tale was a bland, back-to-basics work, where the novelist’s voice felt muffled under the burden of retelling this ancient tale.

Philip Pullman and Dubravka Ugresic wrote the most iconoclastic books in the series. Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ is the kind of questioning and reworking of Christianity’s core gospels that may no longer be possible, because of the careful fostering of competitive intolerance, in either Islam or Hinduism. (Canongate’s list of myths does not, at this stage, include any drawn from the rich heritage of Hindu mythology, which is just as well given that we still have arguments over whether the Ramayana is to be read as the gospel truth or as one of the great myths.)

Dubravka Ugresic’s chilling reclamation of the Baba Yaga story asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of witches, and the role of the overlooked, persecuted but often powerful old woman who crops up in all of the world’s myths. More than any of the other writers in the Myth series, Ugresic gave herself the freedom to write and reshape myths in the language of myths, and her Baba Yaga book has moved from being just a retelling to becoming a classic in its own right.

If there is any other contemporary author who might perform a similar transfiguration, it is AS Byatt. There may be few tasks harder than reworking the Norse myths; their telling was crystalline, and to tackle the stories that define the word “saga” is something that only the most confident of storytellers would attempt.

Byatt pulls us in to the world where the twilight of the gods will happen via a child, a thin girl born at a time of war, and a book: “A solid volume, bound in green, with an intriguing, rushing image on the cover, of Odin’s Wild Hunt on horseback tearing through a clouded sky amid jagged bolts of lightning…” The child’s mind settles not in the world where there is a war on, or in the gentle legends of Jesus meek and mild—instead, Byatt writes, it “veered away, to where it was alive”.

In Byatt’s understanding of myth, there is this unspoken truth: the myth that you are drawn to, without perhaps knowing why you are drawn towards it, will shape who you become, much more than any other story read and retold. It is possible to settle for cartoon versions of myths, but some, like the thin child in her story, will be drawn back towards the real, complex, darker version.

Uncovering the myths is often unpleasant. The world, in the Norse myths, is shaped from the bones, flesh and hair of a dead giant. “The thin child was disturbed at having to imagine this; there was no scale by which she could measure it.” Maggots and worms become dwarves, trolls and dark-elves; the giant’s eyebrows become a bushy fence that contains Midgard, the Garden of Middle-Earth, in which is placed the home of the Gods, Asgard.

As she meets Odin, and hears yet again the tragic story of Balder the Beautiful, killed by the trickster Loki’s clever machinations, the fettering of Tyr, the thin child steps into the darker corners of mythology. “Wolves run strongly through the forests of the mind,” writes Byatt, “… the loping, padding, tireless runners are both out of sight and inside the head.”

Her retelling spares us nothing; the twilight of the gods is every bit as beautiful and terrible as the original. By the end of the tale, a certain kind of order has been restored, the war is over, and the thin child’s family has found, if not happiness, then a settled and sedate ending. But for her and for the reader, what Byatt has evoked cannot be easily banished into the pages of a book. The task before Byatt was not the retelling of a myth, which is relatively easily done; it was to remind us what it was like to read these myths for the first time, and to live in a world where the myths were not separate from our own lives.

A gate closes in the thin child’s head, and on one side of it is a house, a garden, a home, peacetime. On the other, there is “the bright black world”, containing “the wolf with his hackles and bloody teeth, the snake with her crown of fleshy fronds, smiling Loki with fishnet and flames”.

There is either the world of dailiness and contentment, or the dark black world where the old stories run like wolves at our heels. You can have one or the other, says Byatt. Choose.

Book review: The Possessed, Elif Batuman

(This review was written at high speed, and I wish I'd done more justice to Batuman's book. The Possessed sent me back to the Russian classics after a decade, and what Batuman does is make you read the books as though you're reading them again for the first time. Review published in the Business Standard, October 2011.)

The Possessed
Elif Batuman
Granta Books/ Farrar Straus Giroux
Rs 753

PG Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialized in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. The Russians draw her in little by little, as she succumbs first to Eugene Onegin, and then to Anna Karenina: “Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified and meaningful in terms of plot.”

Batuman really means to be a novelist, but her creative writing career doesn’t survive the reality of workshops: “Why was it
automatically good for a writer to live in a barn,” she asks, “reading short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone other than writing students?”

Russia pulls her in gradually; this student of literature, born to Turkish parents and raised in New Jersey, finds herself drawn to study the Russian novelists in Russia, through a series of complicated detours. (One of them involves judging a shapely leg contest for adolescent boys in a village in Hungary. Batuman has a knack for memorable asides.)

As she warms to her accidental subject, she writes: “I stopped believing that theory had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

In Moscow, she dates bankers, for “the first and last time” in her life; elsewhere, she meets Isaac Babel’s formidable, larger-than-life older daughter Nathalie; in St Petersburg, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stay overnight in the replica of an ice palace modeled on the fully furnished House of Ice commissioned by Ivan the Terrible’s niece, a palace that has “no clear purpose, and therefore many unclear purposes”. She lives briefly in Samarkand, where she learns why it is impossible for women to be saints, how to eat lepyushka, and shares with us her readings of the life of the Emperor Bobur (as the name is spelled in those parts) and the fact, unrelated in Indian histories, that he suffered terribly from gemoroi or haemorrhoids.

Behind the exuberance of the travel writing and the conversational digressions, there is also real scholarship (many of these essays were first published in the New Yorker, the LRB and other magazines). At a Tolstoy conference, Batuman argues, only slightly mischievously, that the writer may have been murdered, but the discussion veers off into a heated argument over whether he had or hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland. Dostoevksy’s poor intellectuals, the ones in his book The Possessed who inspired the book’s title, descend into madness as Batuman asks why the Russians required so much grotesquerie.

Just a few decades ago, The Possessed might have been read differently—Russia has slipped from its position as one of the great powers, and perhaps because of that relative erasure from the world stage, the country is once again new territory for a traveler and writer of Batuman’s stamp. She is free to explore it without having to explain it, and free to explain—always obliquely—why the Russians took such a firm grip on her imagination, why their larger-than-life stories were so much more compelling than the stories she had fled from, where “middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions… and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things”.

By the last chapter, where Batuman explores one of Dostoevsky’s more enigmatic works, a novel called Demons, she has taken us halfway across the world and back. Everything that most critics would edit out of their work is here—the backstories, the failed relationships and minor missteps, the cult-like intensity that might sweep a community of academics—perhaps because Batuman knows, and makes the reader see again, the value of digressions and secret histories.

The question that animates this chapter is not really about literature or books or scholarship: what is worth devoting your life to, asks Batuman? She cannot imagine studying, say, Islamic fundamentalism forever; another person might not be able to imagine being a bread-maker in Samarkand.

“If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” The Possessed, peopled with a cast of eccentrics but free of suicidal moujiks, will convince many readers to at least begin that search.

Silencing Ramanujan

(I had just finished editing the chapter on censorship, part of my collection of essays on reading, when we heard that Delhi University had voted to drop Ramanujan's essay on Many Ramayanas from its history syllabus. One of the saddest parts of writing the censorship chapter is that it's never finished: there is always a new ban, a new act of censorship. This is a rough draft-in-progress of the latest addition, and I hope this will be the last.)



There are many official versions of the Ramayana—the one written by Kalidasa, the one by Kamban, Arshia Sattar’s luminous translation of Valmiki's telling of the great tale, Nina Paley's retelling that brings together several different versions. But there has never been a single, authorized, definitive version of India’s great epic.

Among the many Ramayanas I grew up with, there was the comic book Amar Chitra Katha version that ironed out all ambiguity. Rama was handsome and muscular and good, and he was clearly the hero, Ravana had ten heads and the bug-eyed expression that Amar Chitra Katha illustrators gave to all rakshashas and asuras, and he was clearly the villain. The television epic, with cheesy side-effects and paste jewellery, was surprisingly compelling, as much as any of the complex narratives staged every year at the Sriram Centre, or any of the epic retellings and translations that illuminated a different corner of the myth.

One year in Calcutta, I watched a mildly Communist Ramayana, where Sita waved the Left Front’s hammer-and-sickle flag to signal her deep distress at being kidnapped by Ravana.

Another year, Sudama, who worked in my parents’ house, asked my sister and me whether we would loan him a silk sari, dark glasses and a necklace. He had been selected to play the part of Sita in the local version of the Ramlila. We stared at him; Sudama was a strapping, muscular man who suffered from premature baldness. He didn’t fit any image of Sita we might have had in mind.

“Are you sure you’re playing Sita,” we asked gently. “Not Rama, Lakshman, Hanuman, Ravana?” He was sure; he had read her lines with such feeling, he explained, that the troupe had chosen him on the spot. Also, he had offered to punch in the heads of any dissenters.

We enjoyed Sudama’s Ramayana. He played Sita with a surprising delicacy of feeling, putting on the dark glasses to stare down his wicked abductor, Ravana. Rama was played by a 14-year-old who did splendidly until his voice broke on stage in the middle of the battle scene with Rama and his monkey army pitted against Ravana’s Lankan troops. Rama left, overcome by woe, and his stage brother Lakshmana had to step in, announcing that the departure of Rama had struck fear into the hearts of Ravana’s cohorts, for they knew not what fearsome weapons he would return with. The demons, who knew a good cue when they saw it, surrendered in a great joyous clamour; the Ramayana continued to its ambiguously happy ending.

Most Indians have similar stories—depending on where you grew up and whether you heard the Ramayana or read the Ramayana, your sense of the epic will be complex, and will involve multiple versions.

The late poet AK Ramanujan was a scholar and a connoisseur of the many versions of the Ramayana—he had read many of the translations in the original tongues, and he wrote about the epic with a kind of abstract, pure love. The versions he spoke of were far more elevated than the rough exaggerations of our street Ramayanas, but they all had in common what the Communist troupe and Sudama’s friends shared—an understanding that the Ramayana was public property. The 15th century Bengali poet Krittibas had come out with a version that was faithful in its own fashion; it was as legitimate a version as the oral tradition popular among the Muslims of Kerala, called the Mappila Ramayana. Nabaneeta Dev Sen has a brilliant essay on women's versions of the Ramayana.

It’s unclear how and why some rightwing parties decided to target the late poet and scholar, AK Ramanujan, more specifically his classic essay on ‘Many Ramayanas’. This may have been part of the general climate of intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country’s history and its myths that was part of the Indian landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s. The objections to Ramanujan’s essay appeared to be based on simple and willful misreadings of his writings.

This narrow-focus way of reading texts—scanning them only for “offensive” phrases—would happen a year later with Rohinton Mistry’s subtle tale of Bombay and India in the Indira Gandhi era, Such a Long Journey, where many of those who demanded a ban on the book had not read it, but could quote the few sentences where Mistry’s characters had slammed Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena.

It had happened before, reducing Salman Rushdie’s complex Satanic Verses to a series of deranged blasphemies about the Prophet, obliterating the migrant stories and the humour that also went into the Verses. Selective misreading had caused a bizarre situation where the abridged, distorted versions of books and essays circulated and inspired outrage, while the originals were either placed beyond the reach of readers or left unread. Often, it seemed as though the real battle was between those who read freely and those who instinctively feared the subversive potential in books.

In 2008, members of the student wing of the BJP, the ABVP, reacted violently to the inclusion of this essay in the Delhi University history curriculum, and some of them assaulted the head of the History Department. At that time, the department stood firm, defending their decision to allow students to read Ramanujan’s brilliant explorations of the multiple forms in which the epic had been told across India and other countries.

http://communalism.blogspot.com/2008/03/crying-wolf-ramayana-ramanujan-and-abvp.html

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?236875

So why would the Academic Council decide, three years later, to withdraw Ramanujan’s essay from the syllabus?
http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/du-to-scrap-ramanujan-essay-on-ramayana-that-incensed-right-wingers-104127.html#en

There are easy defences; as was the case with Mumbai University’s craven decision to withdraw Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey from the syllabus, this will in all probability be called a purely internal matter. Despite the apparently furious dissent expressed by nine members of the Academic Council, there is little hope that the decision will be put up for review—changes to the syllabus are made slowly and once made, are usually final.

The damage might seem limited: what prevents a handful of history students from finding Ramanujan’s essay on their own, reading it and discussing it if they so choose? But the real damage is caused by the act of censorship, by the precedent the University sets when it says: this idea is dangerous, or controversial, or too explosive to be discussed. You expect academics and scholars not just to defend free speech, but to defend the work of a man who was probably one of the greatest writers and thinkers in contemporary Indian literature. You also expect them to stand up for the tradition that insists there were always many Ramayanas—that the oversimplified, often chauvinistic version of the epic that the right-wing has often put forward is not, by any means, the only one.

This July, many of us watched in dismay as a screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues was cancelled in New York after a group of Hindutva fundamentalists threatened to picket and protest the film.

Aseem Chabra on Sita Sings The Blues and censorship: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/54/2011080720110807052728135114f274a/Battling-for-free-speech.html

Salil Tripathi on Nina Paley and free speech issues in India: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/24/sita-sings-the-blues-hindu-film-causes-a-stir-in-queens.html

The “offence” Nina Paley’s version of the Ramayana causes is just as specious as the ways in which Rohinton Mistry or Ramanujan have caused offence, but we now have a situation in India where all that is needed to shut down a work of literature is to declare that one’s sentiments have been offended. The real problem lies in the way Ramanujan began his essay:
“How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been?”

It took me some time to understand why this idea might be so threatening, because the way we were taught to deal with books or essays or ideas we didn’t like was the way put forward in the great epics: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are filled with debate, with digressions into discussions of what exactly dharma might be. Most of us are intrigued by the multiple versions of the Ramayana—the feminist version, the rough, bawdy village versions, Nina Paley’s elegant cartoon version, they all have their place.

But if you live in a climate of intolerance, a book that questions the tenets of faith and offers a provocative re-imagining of a religious text might be considered so blasphemous that its author will be persecuted for years (The Satanic Verses). A novel that highlights an inconvenient part of the history of contemporary India, speaking openly of corruption in the Prime Minister’s office and the slow stirrings of narrow-mindedness in a once-great city will be erased from the college syllabus (Such a Long Journey). Ramanujan’s great essay on the tradition of many Ramayanas threatens those who would prefer one version, their version, and so it is removed, and his voice is silenced (Many Ramayanas).

In the “debates” over these books, we no longer debate the ideas they contain. Almost every argument breaks down once the threat of violence is made. The courts have rarely upheld censorship in India, but the other places that should protect free speech—universities, publishing houses, art galleries, bookshops--often crumble in the face of either threats of violence or the staging of actual acts of violence. We are such excellent censors of ourselves, and we rarely talk about the basics of free speech, rarely have a consensus on why freedom of expression is important, or where the tradition of free speech in India comes from.

(Some of the most important free speech battles were won almost accidentally, as demonstrated by Ismat Chughtai’s obscenity trial for her short story, Lihaaf:
http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/28naqviExerpt.pdf )

If you find ideas and stories threatening, if your way of life depends on having just one rigid view of faith, or history, or mythology, then there is no possibility of debate. It is in this perspective that the actions of the Hindutva rightwing parties makes sense: the goal is never to encourage dissent and conversation, but to shut it down. There can only be one point of view, one truth. In that world, making a university back down on what it allows students to learn is a major victory, and it holds out the possibility that one day, it will be only this narrow view of history that will prevail, that we will learn only one kind of history, one Ramayana.

In his essay, Ramanujan does not comment on which telling of the Ramayana is the most accurate, the most authoritative one. Instead, he offers us a bewildering array of Ramayanas: “Hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions.” The Ramayana cannot be owned; it is no one’s property. And this is the idea that the ABVP finds unbearable, so unbearable that it must be silenced.

Here is Ramanujan’s essay—read it, and tell me whether you understand why students shouldn’t be allowed to explore the Ramayana(s) through his ideas.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254

Book review: The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

(Published in the Business Standard, October 5, 2011.)






The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape,
PRICE NOT MENTIONED, 287 pages


“There’s a great line by Ornette Coleman about music,” Michael Ondaatje said in a recent interview. “He says you begin with the territory and what follows is the adventure.”

In his sixth novel, Cat’s Table, Ondaatje knows both his landscapes well. There is the Oronsay, a liner that feels like a castle to the 11-year-old boy who boards the “first and only” ship of his life, bound for England in the 1950s. When most writers use a ship as a setting, it remains just a backdrop, a convenient way to bring a band of characters into close contact with each other in extreme isolation. The sea acts like the white space on the page---anything could happen here, where the normal rules of life on dry land stand suspended.

For a few writers, though, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’ Brian and now Ondaatje, the sea is elemental in the best sense of the term, and a shipboard journey may either bring forth powerful passions in its inhabitants or strip them down to their elemental selves. The nine people Michael will meet at Table 76, the least privileged and the most distant from the Captain’s Table, include two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, and “several interesting adults”. Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael will form a gang whose actions on board the Oronsay range from the exuberantly exploratory to the actively dangerous.
If The Cat’s Table feels like a memoir in parts, this may be because Ondaatje took a similar voyage from Ceylon to England in the 1950s, at the age of 11. “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” the narrator writes in the first chapter, and this imagining belongs both to him and to Ondaatje.

The Oronsay is fascinating, from the engine room “at Hades level” to the gold-painted First Class swimming pool. The passengers include a great philantropist who is suffering from hydrophobia, an accomplished shipboard thief called Baron C and Michael’s beautiful cousin Emily, a first-class passenger. There is a shipboard death, a shackled murderer who inspires a plot among the boys to free him, and there are the secretive, often unsavoury lives of the other passengers who sup at Table 76.

But the real adventure, which will reverberate in the lives of Cassius, Ramadhin and Michael long after they have completed their 21-day voyage, is not so much in the plot as in the magnificent strangeness of coming of age on board ship.
In both children’s fiction and novels that feature child protagonists, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that childhood is as mysterious and as alien a world as any unexplored Amazon forest or distant planet. The best novels step into this world acknowledging that writing from a child’s point of view is essentially an act of the imagination as much as an act of reclamation.
There are very, very few can do it—many novels feature child protagonists who are basically miniaturized adults.

Michael Ondaatje is one of three writers who wrote great books underpinned by a basic truth: children see the world with a kind of merciless clarity, and with few of the calming fictions of adult life. The other two were William Golding and Richard Hughes, and it is interesting that Hughes set his eerie little masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, on board ship. His protagonists, like Ondaatje’s in The Cat’s Table, were children carefully separated from their parents; generations of writers have also recognised that it is only when you allow children to be on their own that you can fully understand them.

It is easy to criticize the slender, tenuous, adventure-filled plot that forms the skeletal structure of The Cat’s Table. But it is also an unrewarding exercise. What makes this one of the most compelling and haunting novels of recent times goes far beyond the question of whether it is well-plotted, or whether its deft, deadly vignettes of characters on the Oronsay, offered up in brief chapters, add up to a satisfying whole. “Over the years,” Michael writes towards the end, “confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.”

Ondaatje offers us three subtly different voices in which to hear this book (it’s hard to escape the sense that The Cat’s Table should be read aloud). There is the voice, filled with a cautious rapture, of Michael the child; there is the assessing voice of the older Michael as he weighs up his regrets against the many tiny illuminated corners of his life; and there is, like a background murmur, the assured voice of Ondaatje himself, the writer in his prime, spinning out one story after another.

It would be a very bloodless reader who could resist the temptation of taking a seat at The Cat’s Table and revisiting childhood as it was, not as we would like to think it should have been. And it would be a very churlish reader who didn’t succumb to the magic of Ondaatje’s summoning up of “all new things in life”, carried by a boat that comes breasting out of the mist.