It happened several years ago. A week of writers--Pinter, Doyle, Irvine Welsh; musicians and Qi Gong enthusiasts doing their thing on the streets; an afternoon spent with no one but the seagulls; the Irish doctor who showed me around the Canongate and told stories about his favourite writers the way other people tell stories about their favourite aunts; apple-and-cheese lunches; jazz one blustery night near Arthur's Seat; and then it was time to leave Edinburgh.
The Norwegian mime troupe who'd offered me a ride in the van hadn't bargained for the double bass player who was dating the driver; I said, no problem, I'd make my own way back to London. The flights and trains were too expensive, so I booked a bus ticket, and everything, naturally, went wrong.
The wheels on my suitcase locked, so it had to be dragged and carried down the street. It was a grey, mizzling morning; "here, luv, 'av an apple on me, you're too early for breakfuss", the lady at the desk had said kindly when I was leaving the hotel. But the apple and my spare cash had disappeared through a hole in the lining of my coat by the time I wrestled the suitcase into the bus. It was packed; two hours into the journey, I woke to find the guy in the seat next to me breathing his halitosis--stale beer, fried fish--into my face; when we stopped at a gas station, the loos had been pre-puked in by the previous busload getting out of Edinburgh. Five hours later, I'm starving. No, really. I blew my cash in Edinburgh on music tickets and books; it's only genteel starvation, but I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast two days previous. And the people behind me are eating hamburgers with way too many onion rings. And my coat is too thin, I'm freezing, and the window doesn't close all the way...Halitosis opens his eyes, mumbles something, turns the other way and releases an awesome Stealth Fart, the kind that makes your eyes water for the next half hour. I open the window. Now it doesn't close at all, any more, and everyone's glaring at me--but at least I can't smell Fart n' Onion. Only, as we roll into London, smog, car exhaust and Big City Dirt.
London was an indulgence, I knew that right from the start, but it's only at this point that I'm wondering if I made a big, big mistake. Broke, cold, wet, miserable, hungry, sleepy--I should have just got on the flight back home with the rest of the small group from India.
That's when I see Leaflet Boy. He's young, probably in his early twenties, a thin, brown figure wearing too-large spectacles that he has to keep pushing up his nose. He's standing at a corner watching the slow progress of traffic and offering leaflets with a grave, courtly gesture to Londoners who clearly couldn't give a damn about him or his leaflets. I don't know how long he's been standing there, handing out leaflets no one wants, but his eyes are watery in the wind and his cheeks are blue with cold.
I know it's rude to stare, but he's such a small, brave, pathetic figure. I'm about to look away politely when he catches my eye and waves.
The bus has stopped in traffic. I'm at the window; I'm sure he's waving to someone else, so I look around instinctively.
He's smiling now. He waves again.
At me? I'm confused.
He points a finger in my direction and sketches a wide bow. Yes, you.
Tentatively, I wave back.
He puts a hand on his heart and sketches an even lower bow.
Hello! he mimes.
I smile, uncertainly.
He draws a huge smiley face with a flourish in the air.
Cold! he mimes, shivering exaggeratedly.
This I can do. I mime "cold" back with absolutely no trouble. I'm guessing this is just a brown-face meets brown-face encounter.
He does a complicated mime. If you smile--ok, got that--and jump up and down--hmmm, not in a bus--and wave to random passers-by--they look startled, but some smile back at this skinny, exuberant kid--then you feel--he mimes overcoat, comfort--ah, warmer.
I start laughing. By now, other people in the bus are beginning to grin at the kid, wave to him. And people on the street aren't edging past him; they're stopping, briefly, turning around to smile at the loony Indian kid.
The bus starts up again. Leaflet boy looks sad, but only for a second. He crumples one of the leaflets deftly, working fast, shaping it into a rough paper rose. Puts it between his teeth, puts his hand on his heart, gets down on his knees and starts singing.
"Musafir hoon yaaron..." It's a cracked, adolescent voice, getting fainter and fainter until it's lost in traffic.
Soon I can't see him. In the bus, people go back to sleep, rustle their papers, look for mints, stretch, get back to their individual cocoons of silence.
I never saw Leaflet Boy again, and we probably wouldn't recognise each other if we met on the street. But over the next few years, I travel a lot, and each journey brings its own adventures: lonely roads, unsafe trains, fleabag hotels, muggings, magic, great meals, strange pilgrims, the works. But I've never travelled that broke again, or felt that lost and alone in a strange country.
And I'm sure that no matter where I go and how many friends show up at the airport to receive me, I'll never be welcomed as warmly, as gloriously, to a city as Leaflet Boy welcomed me to London. Bless the boy, wherever he is.
Friday, December 02, 2005
The BS column: The Ambedkar Letters
A young person of enterprise could make a fortune in today's India by modelling herself on The Hon Galahad Threepwood and setting up as an Unpublisher. For a modest consideration, such an enterprise would refrain from publishing salacious memoirs, period histories guaranteed to rattle many skeletons in many cupboards, and letters that would hurt the sentiments of such-and-such a special interest group. I can guarantee that Unpublishers Inc would made a tidy profit.
The question of what we don't want to see in the public domain, and why, is always fascinating. Take the recent controversy over the publication of letters written by Frances Fitzgerald to Dr B R Ambedkar.
Frances Fitzgerald was a typist in the House of Commons who met the young Ambedkar in 1920 when he shifted to the boarding house she and her mother ran. The exact nature of the relationship between her and Ambedkar is unclear, but it would hardly have been unusual for a young man trying to survive in the England of that day and age to form a friendship with his boarding house keeper. There was genuine affection on both sides: he referred to her as 'F' and dedicated one of his books to her: "To 'F.', In Thy Presence is the Fullness of Joy". None of this is unknown to Dr Ambedkar's biographers.
In 1923, when Ambedkar returned to India, Fitzgerald began writing to him; they stayed in touch until 1943, when her plans to come to India were disrupted—she was denied a visa because of "the political situation". Fitzgerald's letters were in the custody of Ambedkar's personal librarian, the late S S Rege. The letters were handed over by Rege to Arun Kamble, professor of Marathi and Dalit activist; Kamble also has notes from Dr Ambedkar's second wife, Savita, permitting him to use the letters as he saw fit.
Kamble brought the letters to Roli Books a few months ago. Now there's a considerable tangle over the letters that is playing out through newspaper columns and special reports, each adding to the confusion.
Are the letters authentic? Roli is satisfied on this point, as is Kamble. It may be desirable to verify the provenance of the letters further, but few people seriously doubt that these letters were written by Frances Fitzgerald.
From here, it gets murkier. Dr Ambedkar's grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, wants the publication of the letters stopped, disputing Kamble's right to own them. Ambedkar biographer Gail Omvedt was asked to be a formal collaborator, and told Outlook that Roli was not willing to work with her to establish the authenticity of the letters. Roli, conversely, says that Omvedt never showed up for a meeting arranged between her and Kamble in Pune, and that they broke off the collaboration after other points of difference arose. There may be another factor here: Omvedt is a well-respected scholar with a strong academic background, while Roli is a general-interest publishing house. Their ways of handling a collection of letters like this would diverge considerably.
One section of Ambedkar scholars wants the letters to be suppressed because they might show the Dalit leader in an "unfavourable light". I have no sympathy with this argument; Ambedkar acknowledged the relationship, and it is not for us to censor after his death what he did not censor while alive.
But what about Frances Fitzgerald's story—who was she, what drew her to Ambedkar and India, what happened to her between 1943 and 1945, when she died? Kamble's detractors say no serious research has been done by him on these questions. He and Roli would agree, however; as the publishing house pointed out, the contract had only just been signed when the first rumbles of dissent arose. Kamble is supposed to go to England to find out more about Frances Fitzgerald, and Roli has expressed hopes that they will find the Ambedkar half of the correspondence.
The doubts and fears being expressed about Roli's handling of the affair are understandable; with a figure like Ambedkar, in a country like ours, the instinctive response is to try and protect his legacy.
Perhaps the Frances Fitzgerald letters will be no more than a footnote in Ambedkar's life; perhaps they will be a source of information for feminist scholars or scholars interested in that social period. If Roli does a good job of the book, this could only add to our knowledge of the period; if they make a mess of it, the text of the letters will still be there in the public domain for other scholars to reclaim. Either way, I don't see how suppressing the publication of the letters helps anyone, least of all the interested reader.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 29, 2005)
The question of what we don't want to see in the public domain, and why, is always fascinating. Take the recent controversy over the publication of letters written by Frances Fitzgerald to Dr B R Ambedkar.
Frances Fitzgerald was a typist in the House of Commons who met the young Ambedkar in 1920 when he shifted to the boarding house she and her mother ran. The exact nature of the relationship between her and Ambedkar is unclear, but it would hardly have been unusual for a young man trying to survive in the England of that day and age to form a friendship with his boarding house keeper. There was genuine affection on both sides: he referred to her as 'F' and dedicated one of his books to her: "To 'F.', In Thy Presence is the Fullness of Joy". None of this is unknown to Dr Ambedkar's biographers.
In 1923, when Ambedkar returned to India, Fitzgerald began writing to him; they stayed in touch until 1943, when her plans to come to India were disrupted—she was denied a visa because of "the political situation". Fitzgerald's letters were in the custody of Ambedkar's personal librarian, the late S S Rege. The letters were handed over by Rege to Arun Kamble, professor of Marathi and Dalit activist; Kamble also has notes from Dr Ambedkar's second wife, Savita, permitting him to use the letters as he saw fit.
Kamble brought the letters to Roli Books a few months ago. Now there's a considerable tangle over the letters that is playing out through newspaper columns and special reports, each adding to the confusion.
Are the letters authentic? Roli is satisfied on this point, as is Kamble. It may be desirable to verify the provenance of the letters further, but few people seriously doubt that these letters were written by Frances Fitzgerald.
From here, it gets murkier. Dr Ambedkar's grandson, Prakash Ambedkar, wants the publication of the letters stopped, disputing Kamble's right to own them. Ambedkar biographer Gail Omvedt was asked to be a formal collaborator, and told Outlook that Roli was not willing to work with her to establish the authenticity of the letters. Roli, conversely, says that Omvedt never showed up for a meeting arranged between her and Kamble in Pune, and that they broke off the collaboration after other points of difference arose. There may be another factor here: Omvedt is a well-respected scholar with a strong academic background, while Roli is a general-interest publishing house. Their ways of handling a collection of letters like this would diverge considerably.
One section of Ambedkar scholars wants the letters to be suppressed because they might show the Dalit leader in an "unfavourable light". I have no sympathy with this argument; Ambedkar acknowledged the relationship, and it is not for us to censor after his death what he did not censor while alive.
But what about Frances Fitzgerald's story—who was she, what drew her to Ambedkar and India, what happened to her between 1943 and 1945, when she died? Kamble's detractors say no serious research has been done by him on these questions. He and Roli would agree, however; as the publishing house pointed out, the contract had only just been signed when the first rumbles of dissent arose. Kamble is supposed to go to England to find out more about Frances Fitzgerald, and Roli has expressed hopes that they will find the Ambedkar half of the correspondence.
The doubts and fears being expressed about Roli's handling of the affair are understandable; with a figure like Ambedkar, in a country like ours, the instinctive response is to try and protect his legacy.
Perhaps the Frances Fitzgerald letters will be no more than a footnote in Ambedkar's life; perhaps they will be a source of information for feminist scholars or scholars interested in that social period. If Roli does a good job of the book, this could only add to our knowledge of the period; if they make a mess of it, the text of the letters will still be there in the public domain for other scholars to reclaim. Either way, I don't see how suppressing the publication of the letters helps anyone, least of all the interested reader.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, November 29, 2005)
Book Review: My Ear at his Heart
My Ear At His Heart: Reading My Father
Hanif Kureishi
Faber and Faber
POUNDS 3.99, 242 pages
In 1989, Hanif Kureishi gave a talk in Calcutta. We were good little schoolgirls, utterly unprepared by a diet of Sharatchandra, Wordsworth and Steinbeck for his funky iconoclasm. Some of us had seen My Beautiful Laundrette ; most of us had been banned by parental edict from seeing Sammy and Rosie , presumably because it had "Get Laid" in the title.
Kureishi was genial, like a temporarily vegetarian wolf consorting with a bunch of lambs. He got us to discuss class and race rage, when most of us had experienced neither, and he looked amused when the boldest of our number asked him whether being gay was "wrong". "It's two people in love, yeah?" he said, and moved on, unaware that he had just undone about 17 years worth of carefully instilled prurience and prejudice.
Months after Kureishi had departed, his rebel's charisma still lingered. We argued about his films; in 1990, we argued about his Buddha of Suburbia ; in 1995, past the portals of college, we were arguing about his Black Album ; in 1998, settled into jobs or relationships, feeling suitably adult, we argued about My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy .
I didn't want to see Kureishi turn 50. If he were to age gracefully into distinguished authorhood, what hope was there for us, with our ironed and laundered lives concealing the urge to grow old disgracefully?
But that's the thing about iconoclasm: it lasts. My Ear At His Heart is a conventional family memoir in the same way that Howl was a pretty poem. It starts with an aborted book, the one Kureishi intended to write about "the way one uses or reads literature", about writers who had been important to him, and of course, about the 1960s and 1970s. The focus would be on one of his father's favourite writers, Chekhov, "and the numerous voices his work can sustain".
Instead, a "shabby old green folder" surfaces after eleven years, containing a novel called An Indian Adolescence . The author is Shannoo Kureishi, Hanif's father; this, along with another unpublished work, The Redundant Man , and other unpublished plays and writings, is a reminder that Hanif was not the only writer in the family, even if he did become the most successful one.
Both his father's books are heavily autobiographical, and through them, Kureishi approaches an intimacy with his father that parallels and also sometimes outdoes the relationship they shared when Shannoo Kureishi was alive. Other books emerge; Shannoo's brother, Omar, had written two books of autobiography, published and well-received in Pakistan. A family story is beginning to come together; like all family stories, this one offers both great knowledge and great danger.
Shannoo came to London after Partition, part of the flood of migrants in that generation. His official life was drab—he was a minor civil servant in the Pakistani embassy whose energies went into reading, and cricket, both obssessions shared to some degree with Hanif; his writing was not secret so much as unregarded. His books reveal a bitter and lasting competitiveness with Omar. His brother was more successful, though Shannoo was the better cricketer, but their early explorations into love were scarred by rivalry.
Some of this rivalry colours Hanif and Shannoo's relationship. Hanif Kureishi recalls his father blaming him for the failure of The Redundant Man to get published, striving for a different kind of brotherhood: "He put us on the same level: writers—almost brothers—together, with neither of us more talented than the other." When Kureishi put on an early play, his father showed up, but hated the production. "…Dad was in rage: for a start, he was giving me contemptuous V-signs from his seat."
Shannoo Kureishi found a kind of life in the suburbs; his son rebelled against the blandness and conformity that his father sought. In his teenage years, discovering sex n'drugs n'rock n'roll—and revolution—Hanif Kureishi learned, too, that "love and sex, taking you out of your family, led you into the strange field of other families".
There is humour here, too, and pride in his father's ambition, even a posthumous gentleness on the part of the son. But as Shannoo's story reveals a Pakistan that Hanif never knew, either through religion or language, and opens up the struggles of the early migrant, it fuels Hanif Kureishi's own journey through his life as he nears fifty.
This is a brilliant, corrosive memoir, whose power lies as much in the questions it raises as in the ones it answers. It's about writing and families, fathers and sons, the weight of our histories and how to carry that weight.
Kureishi starts by reading family history; by the end of the book, he's trying to read all of history. "To what extent do the dead determine the lives of the living? How do you keep them vital within you? And how do you keep them out of your way in order to live within a different age, as a different person?" He closes the manuscript; he walks out, into the chaos outside the order of the room. That, says Kureishi, is the only place to head for: the unknown.
(For The Indian Express, carried November 2005)
Hanif Kureishi
Faber and Faber
POUNDS 3.99, 242 pages
In 1989, Hanif Kureishi gave a talk in Calcutta. We were good little schoolgirls, utterly unprepared by a diet of Sharatchandra, Wordsworth and Steinbeck for his funky iconoclasm. Some of us had seen My Beautiful Laundrette ; most of us had been banned by parental edict from seeing Sammy and Rosie , presumably because it had "Get Laid" in the title.
Kureishi was genial, like a temporarily vegetarian wolf consorting with a bunch of lambs. He got us to discuss class and race rage, when most of us had experienced neither, and he looked amused when the boldest of our number asked him whether being gay was "wrong". "It's two people in love, yeah?" he said, and moved on, unaware that he had just undone about 17 years worth of carefully instilled prurience and prejudice.
Months after Kureishi had departed, his rebel's charisma still lingered. We argued about his films; in 1990, we argued about his Buddha of Suburbia ; in 1995, past the portals of college, we were arguing about his Black Album ; in 1998, settled into jobs or relationships, feeling suitably adult, we argued about My Son the Fanatic and Intimacy .
I didn't want to see Kureishi turn 50. If he were to age gracefully into distinguished authorhood, what hope was there for us, with our ironed and laundered lives concealing the urge to grow old disgracefully?
But that's the thing about iconoclasm: it lasts. My Ear At His Heart is a conventional family memoir in the same way that Howl was a pretty poem. It starts with an aborted book, the one Kureishi intended to write about "the way one uses or reads literature", about writers who had been important to him, and of course, about the 1960s and 1970s. The focus would be on one of his father's favourite writers, Chekhov, "and the numerous voices his work can sustain".
Instead, a "shabby old green folder" surfaces after eleven years, containing a novel called An Indian Adolescence . The author is Shannoo Kureishi, Hanif's father; this, along with another unpublished work, The Redundant Man , and other unpublished plays and writings, is a reminder that Hanif was not the only writer in the family, even if he did become the most successful one.
Both his father's books are heavily autobiographical, and through them, Kureishi approaches an intimacy with his father that parallels and also sometimes outdoes the relationship they shared when Shannoo Kureishi was alive. Other books emerge; Shannoo's brother, Omar, had written two books of autobiography, published and well-received in Pakistan. A family story is beginning to come together; like all family stories, this one offers both great knowledge and great danger.
Shannoo came to London after Partition, part of the flood of migrants in that generation. His official life was drab—he was a minor civil servant in the Pakistani embassy whose energies went into reading, and cricket, both obssessions shared to some degree with Hanif; his writing was not secret so much as unregarded. His books reveal a bitter and lasting competitiveness with Omar. His brother was more successful, though Shannoo was the better cricketer, but their early explorations into love were scarred by rivalry.
Some of this rivalry colours Hanif and Shannoo's relationship. Hanif Kureishi recalls his father blaming him for the failure of The Redundant Man to get published, striving for a different kind of brotherhood: "He put us on the same level: writers—almost brothers—together, with neither of us more talented than the other." When Kureishi put on an early play, his father showed up, but hated the production. "…Dad was in rage: for a start, he was giving me contemptuous V-signs from his seat."
Shannoo Kureishi found a kind of life in the suburbs; his son rebelled against the blandness and conformity that his father sought. In his teenage years, discovering sex n'drugs n'rock n'roll—and revolution—Hanif Kureishi learned, too, that "love and sex, taking you out of your family, led you into the strange field of other families".
There is humour here, too, and pride in his father's ambition, even a posthumous gentleness on the part of the son. But as Shannoo's story reveals a Pakistan that Hanif never knew, either through religion or language, and opens up the struggles of the early migrant, it fuels Hanif Kureishi's own journey through his life as he nears fifty.
This is a brilliant, corrosive memoir, whose power lies as much in the questions it raises as in the ones it answers. It's about writing and families, fathers and sons, the weight of our histories and how to carry that weight.
Kureishi starts by reading family history; by the end of the book, he's trying to read all of history. "To what extent do the dead determine the lives of the living? How do you keep them vital within you? And how do you keep them out of your way in order to live within a different age, as a different person?" He closes the manuscript; he walks out, into the chaos outside the order of the room. That, says Kureishi, is the only place to head for: the unknown.
(For The Indian Express, carried November 2005)
The BS Column: Dial B For Bestseller
The author of a successful campus novel gets the plot of his second bestseller off a beautiful woman, whom he meets in a conveniently empty train compartment. The story she tells him is about six friends who work at a call-centre, and a night in their lives that changes everything. The resolution is provided by God via a key phone call. This, slightly summarised, is the synopsis of Chetan Bhagat's second runaway bestseller, One Night at The Call Centre.
I emailed the uncut synopsis from Bhagat's website to a publishing insider I know. He was told nothing about the author's first book, the bestselling Five Point Someone, or about Bhagat's considerable brand equity.
The publishing veteran responded with deep scepticism: "The characters are fine, call centres are a decent, in-the-news setting. But the writer meeting a beautiful muse—give me a break. And God on the phone? That would get tossed from any Creative Writing 101 class. Tell him to rewrite and stick with the voices, or he doesn't have a prayer."
One Night at the Call Centre sold 70,000 copies in the first week of its launch, and still heads bestseller lists. There are two ways to read the moral of this story: one is to say that the critics, including my publisher pal, know nothing, and the other is to look at the story that Indian bestsellers have to tell.
It's almost too easy to set up an opposition between literary writing and Bhagat's attempts. The 31-year-old IIT and IIM graduate does it himself, stressing ad nauseum that he's the champion of the common man, out to write popular books for the "non-reader", not "boring", literary novels.
From the critic's perspective, his two novels read like promising first drafts, untouched by any editor's hand. I'll believe it's God calling at the end of ON@CC, because no one else but the Supreme Deity could have got through so easily to a call centre helpline. More than Five Point Someone, ON@CC is messy: the humour is clunky, the plotting shaky and more happens in 24 hours than is plausible. The critics who see a lack of lasting literary merit in Bhagat's works are perfectly correct.
But there's good reason for readers to love Bhagat's work. His books retail at the right price point for "timepass", the characters are immediately identifiable and the writing is fast-paced, smooth and undemanding. He writes for a generation that sees very few reflections of its aims, heartbreaks and language in contemporary literature.
Go back to a few of the milestones in IWE history, and you'll see another pattern. Rushdie's Midnight's Children lives in the minds of the larger reading public not because of its literary qualities, but because Rushdie scored a significant success on the global stage. Arundhati Roy's Booker win consolidated writing as a respectable, potentially middle-class occupation—though given Roy's iconoclasm, I'm pretty sure she wasn't looking to be a role-model for the bourgeoisie! Pankaj Mishra has a telling anecdote in Butter Chicken from Ludhiana where his admission that he is a writer is evaluated—and judged to be respectable--not by the content of what he writes, but by the potential advances and royalties he might receive.
The great home-grown Indian bestsellers have all spoken to a section of the Indian reading public that's used to being left out of the literary discussion. Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans, one of the longest-running bestsellers in the local Indian market, spoke for those homesick in the Land of Hope and Supermarkets in a way that more sophisticated travelogues could not. Shobha De's novels are incorrectly seen as "socialite" accounts. They're actually written for an audience who stands at the window of the socialite world, tempted and fascinated by what they see, but resigned to the fact that they're on the outside. And for all the surface glitz, De's novels champion classic values: conventional marriages, happy families.
What Chetan Bhagat did, in both his novels, is to address the great Indian middle class with tremendous ease. I'd argue that Sudeep Chakravarti did it better in Tin Fish, a work of fiction set in the boys' boarding school world of a few decades ago, or that Jaideep Varma captured the grind and heartbreak of an office more realistically in Local, to name just two contemporary writers who seem to be both adequately literary and adequately popular.
But Bhagat's more simplistic formula has been rather better marketed. He gets away with sloppy work because of the lack of competition in the popular fiction market. If you're looking to raise the standards there, you need more writers like Bhagat, not fewer. Oh, and better editors. Please.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, on November 22, 2005)
I emailed the uncut synopsis from Bhagat's website to a publishing insider I know. He was told nothing about the author's first book, the bestselling Five Point Someone, or about Bhagat's considerable brand equity.
The publishing veteran responded with deep scepticism: "The characters are fine, call centres are a decent, in-the-news setting. But the writer meeting a beautiful muse—give me a break. And God on the phone? That would get tossed from any Creative Writing 101 class. Tell him to rewrite and stick with the voices, or he doesn't have a prayer."
One Night at the Call Centre sold 70,000 copies in the first week of its launch, and still heads bestseller lists. There are two ways to read the moral of this story: one is to say that the critics, including my publisher pal, know nothing, and the other is to look at the story that Indian bestsellers have to tell.
It's almost too easy to set up an opposition between literary writing and Bhagat's attempts. The 31-year-old IIT and IIM graduate does it himself, stressing ad nauseum that he's the champion of the common man, out to write popular books for the "non-reader", not "boring", literary novels.
From the critic's perspective, his two novels read like promising first drafts, untouched by any editor's hand. I'll believe it's God calling at the end of ON@CC, because no one else but the Supreme Deity could have got through so easily to a call centre helpline. More than Five Point Someone, ON@CC is messy: the humour is clunky, the plotting shaky and more happens in 24 hours than is plausible. The critics who see a lack of lasting literary merit in Bhagat's works are perfectly correct.
But there's good reason for readers to love Bhagat's work. His books retail at the right price point for "timepass", the characters are immediately identifiable and the writing is fast-paced, smooth and undemanding. He writes for a generation that sees very few reflections of its aims, heartbreaks and language in contemporary literature.
Go back to a few of the milestones in IWE history, and you'll see another pattern. Rushdie's Midnight's Children lives in the minds of the larger reading public not because of its literary qualities, but because Rushdie scored a significant success on the global stage. Arundhati Roy's Booker win consolidated writing as a respectable, potentially middle-class occupation—though given Roy's iconoclasm, I'm pretty sure she wasn't looking to be a role-model for the bourgeoisie! Pankaj Mishra has a telling anecdote in Butter Chicken from Ludhiana where his admission that he is a writer is evaluated—and judged to be respectable--not by the content of what he writes, but by the potential advances and royalties he might receive.
The great home-grown Indian bestsellers have all spoken to a section of the Indian reading public that's used to being left out of the literary discussion. Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans, one of the longest-running bestsellers in the local Indian market, spoke for those homesick in the Land of Hope and Supermarkets in a way that more sophisticated travelogues could not. Shobha De's novels are incorrectly seen as "socialite" accounts. They're actually written for an audience who stands at the window of the socialite world, tempted and fascinated by what they see, but resigned to the fact that they're on the outside. And for all the surface glitz, De's novels champion classic values: conventional marriages, happy families.
What Chetan Bhagat did, in both his novels, is to address the great Indian middle class with tremendous ease. I'd argue that Sudeep Chakravarti did it better in Tin Fish, a work of fiction set in the boys' boarding school world of a few decades ago, or that Jaideep Varma captured the grind and heartbreak of an office more realistically in Local, to name just two contemporary writers who seem to be both adequately literary and adequately popular.
But Bhagat's more simplistic formula has been rather better marketed. He gets away with sloppy work because of the lack of competition in the popular fiction market. If you're looking to raise the standards there, you need more writers like Bhagat, not fewer. Oh, and better editors. Please.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, on November 22, 2005)
Last Word: Tearing the Veil
The banner around Miss Afghanistan's waist is a reminder of her country, and also an insignia of exile. When Vida Samadzai entered the world's most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) beauty contest, she was breaking several taboos. Samadzai had left her country in 1996 to study in the US. She became the first Afghan woman in three decades to walk the ramp in that fashion, and then she wore a red bikini for the Miss Earth contest.
The reaction from her home country was immediate, and lasting; if she returns to Afghanistan, she will face criticism and even legal prosecution.
Samadzai makes traditional feminists uncomfortable. Very few feminist thinkers would find it easy to endorse beauty contests, with their emphasis on looks as the most important aspect of a woman, the often negative impact they have on young women in terms of body image, and the sheer mindlessness of most pageants.
But Samadzai made me wonder whether the problem with contemporary feminism was that the rules had become too rigid. For women from several war-torn or otherwise beleaguered countries, from Bosnia to the Lebanon to Afghanistan, taking part in beauty contests has become a symbol of empowerment. I find it baffling, as a woman, that we need to be empowered through teeth whiteners, cosmetic surgery, diets that would call Amnesty down on your head if you administered them to prison inmates, and all the rest of it—but that's just me.
For Samadzai and the many women in Afghanistan who have followed her career, entering that beauty contest was a way of reclaiming their rights to do as they pleased with their bodies. The Taliban enforced the burkha; Samadzai tore through the veil. In that sense, her achievement is as important as the achievements of, say, Afghanistan's first women chess players.
Take another case, that of Samira Haddad, who recently won the right not to wear the hijab in a case in the Netherlands. Haddad applied to the Islamic College of Amsterdam. She was told that, as a Muslim woman, she had to wear the headscarf or risk being rejected. Her win has widely been interpreted by the Western media as a blow against the hijab in the debate over whether the scarf is a symbol of oppression or empowerment.
But Haddad is invoking a different tradition—she comes from Tunisia, where women do not wear headscarfs in public. She wants Muslim religious groups to endorse the right of women to choose what they can and cannot wear. Like women who have fought for exactly the opposite—the right to wear the headscarf in countries where the hijab is seen as a disturbing reminder of religious differences—Haddad is fighting for herself. She is not anti- or pro-hijab—she merely wants the right to wear what she's comfortable with.
These are just two, fairly superficial examples, but they made me think. Women have been told what to do by men, by religious leaders, by social custom, and yes, even by feminist ideologues. Perhaps what we really want is just the right to make our own decisions—regardless of whether they seem to be anti-feminist when they're not, or whether they seem to be feminist when they're actually deeply personal.
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
The reaction from her home country was immediate, and lasting; if she returns to Afghanistan, she will face criticism and even legal prosecution.
Samadzai makes traditional feminists uncomfortable. Very few feminist thinkers would find it easy to endorse beauty contests, with their emphasis on looks as the most important aspect of a woman, the often negative impact they have on young women in terms of body image, and the sheer mindlessness of most pageants.
But Samadzai made me wonder whether the problem with contemporary feminism was that the rules had become too rigid. For women from several war-torn or otherwise beleaguered countries, from Bosnia to the Lebanon to Afghanistan, taking part in beauty contests has become a symbol of empowerment. I find it baffling, as a woman, that we need to be empowered through teeth whiteners, cosmetic surgery, diets that would call Amnesty down on your head if you administered them to prison inmates, and all the rest of it—but that's just me.
For Samadzai and the many women in Afghanistan who have followed her career, entering that beauty contest was a way of reclaiming their rights to do as they pleased with their bodies. The Taliban enforced the burkha; Samadzai tore through the veil. In that sense, her achievement is as important as the achievements of, say, Afghanistan's first women chess players.
Take another case, that of Samira Haddad, who recently won the right not to wear the hijab in a case in the Netherlands. Haddad applied to the Islamic College of Amsterdam. She was told that, as a Muslim woman, she had to wear the headscarf or risk being rejected. Her win has widely been interpreted by the Western media as a blow against the hijab in the debate over whether the scarf is a symbol of oppression or empowerment.
But Haddad is invoking a different tradition—she comes from Tunisia, where women do not wear headscarfs in public. She wants Muslim religious groups to endorse the right of women to choose what they can and cannot wear. Like women who have fought for exactly the opposite—the right to wear the headscarf in countries where the hijab is seen as a disturbing reminder of religious differences—Haddad is fighting for herself. She is not anti- or pro-hijab—she merely wants the right to wear what she's comfortable with.
These are just two, fairly superficial examples, but they made me think. Women have been told what to do by men, by religious leaders, by social custom, and yes, even by feminist ideologues. Perhaps what we really want is just the right to make our own decisions—regardless of whether they seem to be anti-feminist when they're not, or whether they seem to be feminist when they're actually deeply personal.
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, November 2005)
Monday, November 28, 2005
Reasons to hate really good writers
Some day, I'm going to get on a train at Nizamuddin Station, perhaps the one that wakes us up at three am because it has such a quiet, mournful hoot, and take it to the end of the line, and find another train, and take that to wherever it's going, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, well, Paul Theroux did that already. Great Railway Bazaar.
Fine, no problem. So I'll take a look at where colours come from--ochre, Indian yellow, gamboge (what a name, eh?), lead white, which killed off so many fashionable women, cochineal...
Victoria Finlay. Colour: A Natural History of the Palette.
Cities, then. How about exploring an Indian city through the stories of people who live on the fringes? Delhi through its eccentrics, its lunatics, its obsessives...
Yawn. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City. It's Bombay, but you don't want to do the me-too book.
Or it might be fun to see what Kubla Khan's Xanadu was all about, or if we're talking long, continent-hopping journeys now, who could be a better guide than Ibn Battuta?
William Dalrymple, In Xanadu, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels With a Tangerine.
How about climbing Everest? Or doing the inside story on the Deep South, or Venice? Or no, wait, how about I just get in the car and drive? Across the subcontinent, as far and wide as the roads will take me, screw the deadlines (guilty voice in head saying, but who'll feed the cats can be ignored), just follow the highways and the little bumpy potholed roads and see what happens?
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air; John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, City of Falling Angels; Way too many post-Kerouac writers been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Dammit. Going to have to give up reading, aren't I?
Yeah, well, Paul Theroux did that already. Great Railway Bazaar.
Fine, no problem. So I'll take a look at where colours come from--ochre, Indian yellow, gamboge (what a name, eh?), lead white, which killed off so many fashionable women, cochineal...
Victoria Finlay. Colour: A Natural History of the Palette.
Cities, then. How about exploring an Indian city through the stories of people who live on the fringes? Delhi through its eccentrics, its lunatics, its obsessives...
Yawn. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City. It's Bombay, but you don't want to do the me-too book.
Or it might be fun to see what Kubla Khan's Xanadu was all about, or if we're talking long, continent-hopping journeys now, who could be a better guide than Ibn Battuta?
William Dalrymple, In Xanadu, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels With a Tangerine.
How about climbing Everest? Or doing the inside story on the Deep South, or Venice? Or no, wait, how about I just get in the car and drive? Across the subcontinent, as far and wide as the roads will take me, screw the deadlines (guilty voice in head saying, but who'll feed the cats can be ignored), just follow the highways and the little bumpy potholed roads and see what happens?
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air; John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, City of Falling Angels; Way too many post-Kerouac writers been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Dammit. Going to have to give up reading, aren't I?
The BS Column: Ode to Willy D
When William Dalrymple wrote an article recently in which he argued that Indian writing in English had sputtered out in the home country, I found myself wishing he would just read a little more often.
Dalrymple's arguments have been made over the years within India. There are no contemporary writers of the stature of Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh and Mistry; there have been no great literary successes after Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things . (We're not counting Allan Sealy, Ruchir Joshi and company—only commercial successes count in this arithmetic.) The best writing now comes from the diaspora—Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru—and the great 'Indian' successes, such as Pankaj Mishra or Suketu Mehta or Siddhartha Deb, or even Amitav Ghosh, increasingly live abroad for at least part of the year. The best future writing, he predicted, would continue to emerge from the diaspora; inside India, the boom had gone bust.
Dalrymple made some valid points. I agree that some of the best writing will come from the Indian diaspora in the future, as it should—it would be cause for deep concern if crossing the black water robbed Indians of their talent. But the reason why Indian writers need to be in New York or London is simple: that's where the market is, and until local publishing booms, as it might, it's going to be necessary to go to the market. And Dalrymple's argument that Indian writers travel widely or live elsewhere demonstrates a sad lack of historical perspective. From Tagore to Mulk Raj Anand to Nirmal Verma, there are as many great Indian writers who've explored the world outside India as the ones who stayed rooted in one place. Some, like Saratchandra, were just as curious about Burma, for instance, as they were about Bilayat.
But still, I needed a sign. Could Dalrymple be right, or was his piece merely premature provocation?
Just a few weeks later, we heard about Vikram Chandra's big-bucks deal for a thousand-page novel set in Bombay, featuring Inspector Sartaj. I'd claim Chandra as an Indian success, even though he is, using the Dalrymple yardstick, exposed to Foreign Influences, having taught on American college campuses—and enjoyed the experience. Tch.
More omens would be propitious, I thought, so I looked for another sign. And found three.
Kalpana Swaminathan first gave notice that she was a writer to watch when she came out with Ambrosia for Afters , an ambitious but uneven novel. Some of us knew her writings already, as half of the Kalpish Ratna combine, a byline she shares with Ishrat Syed. Then she wrote Bougainvillea House , a darkly atmospheric novel set in Goa. Clarice Aranxa, her protagonist, is a woman of the old school, in the last stages of motor neuron disease, watching as sudden death visits some of the key people in her life. It's a brilliant study of obsession and betrayal, an utterly absorbing tale. And Swaminathan wrote it without the cushion of a large advance or the comfort of a thriving community of writers around her.
Then there's Nilita Vachani, the documentary film-maker who's out with HomeSpun . She takes some of the biggest myths we've spun around the freedom struggle, around war and around love stories, and refashions them from the inside out. This debut novel has a few flaws, but her portrait of a man whose idealism sorely tests his wife and her look at how a reluctant fighter pilot really died are not easily forgotten. Nor could I leave Sharmistha Mohanty off this list of new writers to watch: New Life has a predictable plot, with a heroine who discovers strength in unexpected places in love, writing and death, but Mohanty has an astonishing, utterly distinctive handwriting.
Three months, three writers to watch—and they're just the pick of what's been a quiet growth of talent from India, at a time when Indian writing in English is just beginning to stretch its wings.
The proper answer to Dalrymple's arguments, which I believe he made in good faith, isn't going to come from rebuttals written by people like me; they're going to come from the books. And I believe that these three writers are part of a quiet but sure gathering of talent in India that is making the counter-argument, slowly but steadily.
I'll stay on hand, anyway. Someone needs to watch the great Indian melting pot of literary talent as it comes to the boil—and when it's ready, add Dalrymple's article to the mix, so that he can eat his words in comfort.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, November 15, 2005. And that was a truly brief list of writers to watch: for reasons of space, or because I'd mentioned them in previous columns, I didn't mention Timeri Murari (old writer, new book), Jaideep Verma (Local hero), Siddharth Chowdhury (Patna Roughcut), Cyrus Mistry (The Radiance of Ashes), Shankar Vedantam (The Ghosts of Kashmir), Sudeep Sen...oops, that's Sudeep Chakravarti, sorry (Tin Fish)... hang on, Mistry might be "diaspora talent", but who cares, read him any way.)
Dalrymple's arguments have been made over the years within India. There are no contemporary writers of the stature of Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh and Mistry; there have been no great literary successes after Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things . (We're not counting Allan Sealy, Ruchir Joshi and company—only commercial successes count in this arithmetic.) The best writing now comes from the diaspora—Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru—and the great 'Indian' successes, such as Pankaj Mishra or Suketu Mehta or Siddhartha Deb, or even Amitav Ghosh, increasingly live abroad for at least part of the year. The best future writing, he predicted, would continue to emerge from the diaspora; inside India, the boom had gone bust.
Dalrymple made some valid points. I agree that some of the best writing will come from the Indian diaspora in the future, as it should—it would be cause for deep concern if crossing the black water robbed Indians of their talent. But the reason why Indian writers need to be in New York or London is simple: that's where the market is, and until local publishing booms, as it might, it's going to be necessary to go to the market. And Dalrymple's argument that Indian writers travel widely or live elsewhere demonstrates a sad lack of historical perspective. From Tagore to Mulk Raj Anand to Nirmal Verma, there are as many great Indian writers who've explored the world outside India as the ones who stayed rooted in one place. Some, like Saratchandra, were just as curious about Burma, for instance, as they were about Bilayat.
But still, I needed a sign. Could Dalrymple be right, or was his piece merely premature provocation?
Just a few weeks later, we heard about Vikram Chandra's big-bucks deal for a thousand-page novel set in Bombay, featuring Inspector Sartaj. I'd claim Chandra as an Indian success, even though he is, using the Dalrymple yardstick, exposed to Foreign Influences, having taught on American college campuses—and enjoyed the experience. Tch.
More omens would be propitious, I thought, so I looked for another sign. And found three.
Kalpana Swaminathan first gave notice that she was a writer to watch when she came out with Ambrosia for Afters , an ambitious but uneven novel. Some of us knew her writings already, as half of the Kalpish Ratna combine, a byline she shares with Ishrat Syed. Then she wrote Bougainvillea House , a darkly atmospheric novel set in Goa. Clarice Aranxa, her protagonist, is a woman of the old school, in the last stages of motor neuron disease, watching as sudden death visits some of the key people in her life. It's a brilliant study of obsession and betrayal, an utterly absorbing tale. And Swaminathan wrote it without the cushion of a large advance or the comfort of a thriving community of writers around her.
Then there's Nilita Vachani, the documentary film-maker who's out with HomeSpun . She takes some of the biggest myths we've spun around the freedom struggle, around war and around love stories, and refashions them from the inside out. This debut novel has a few flaws, but her portrait of a man whose idealism sorely tests his wife and her look at how a reluctant fighter pilot really died are not easily forgotten. Nor could I leave Sharmistha Mohanty off this list of new writers to watch: New Life has a predictable plot, with a heroine who discovers strength in unexpected places in love, writing and death, but Mohanty has an astonishing, utterly distinctive handwriting.
Three months, three writers to watch—and they're just the pick of what's been a quiet growth of talent from India, at a time when Indian writing in English is just beginning to stretch its wings.
The proper answer to Dalrymple's arguments, which I believe he made in good faith, isn't going to come from rebuttals written by people like me; they're going to come from the books. And I believe that these three writers are part of a quiet but sure gathering of talent in India that is making the counter-argument, slowly but steadily.
I'll stay on hand, anyway. Someone needs to watch the great Indian melting pot of literary talent as it comes to the boil—and when it's ready, add Dalrymple's article to the mix, so that he can eat his words in comfort.
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, November 15, 2005. And that was a truly brief list of writers to watch: for reasons of space, or because I'd mentioned them in previous columns, I didn't mention Timeri Murari (old writer, new book), Jaideep Verma (Local hero), Siddharth Chowdhury (Patna Roughcut), Cyrus Mistry (The Radiance of Ashes), Shankar Vedantam (The Ghosts of Kashmir), Sudeep Sen...oops, that's Sudeep Chakravarti, sorry (Tin Fish)... hang on, Mistry might be "diaspora talent", but who cares, read him any way.)
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