On keeping a journal

From William Boyd's Bamboo (2005), a collection of his critical writing, this lovely riff on Keeping a Journal:

For the journal - relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story - does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backwards, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed.
The impenetrable judgments of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband - and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it's written as the future unspools into the present.

Dan Baum and the fine art of tweeting

Like many New Yorker readers, I've been a Dan Baum fan for many reasons, his brilliant New Orleans series among them. So I was sorry to hear that his contract hadn't been extended last year--and more than amused when he began tweeting the story of his firing from the New Yorker recently.

Dan's Twitter feed is here; his New Yorker tweets are collected on his website, here:

People often ask why I left the New Yorker. After all, I had a staff writer job. Isn’t that the best job in journalism? Yes.


Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I’ll tell that story here, in 140


Character chunks.

But the real eye-opener for me was this collection of pitches, done by Dan and his wife and collaborator, Margaret Knox.

These are some pitches for stories that were accepted.

And these are some pitches for stories that were rejected.

I wish I'd known about these during my brief stint in publishing--just to show writers how much work might go into a good manuscript synopsis/ proposal. It's a rich archive, and Dan's generosity in sharing these is remarkable.

The BS column: The Translator's Tale

How do you get the world to read in Indian? I’m quoting a young Italian editor who said this when she discovered the wealth of Indian literature outside the narrow confines of writing in English recently.

It’s a great question. Ever since Indian writing in English took off in the West with R K Narayan, Raja Rao and Kamala Das, most of the world has read Indian writers chiefly in this language, to the exclusion of others. The equivalent would be a bit like narrowing the great canon of European literature down to works originally written in English—no Goethe, no Calvino, no Mallarme or Maupassant. This is ridiculous: as Pritham K Chakravarthy, translator of Blaft’s anthologies of Tamil pulp fiction and folk tales, says, we all grew up with translation. “How else would we know Marquez or Sartre?”

Part of the problem has to do with the demands of publishing as a market place—Indian writers in regional languages were seen as less glamorous, less marketable. The recent London Book Fair saw a slight but significant shift when writers like U R Ananthamurthy—one of the few Indian writers recognized in the West—and Sankar were given an attentive, and eager, ear. A few literary journalists commented on the frustration of knowing a country only through one of its many languages.

Perhaps we’re seeing a new openness to reading Indian writers in translation. For years, translators such as the venerable and fluent Gita Krishankutty have done their work in relative silence. In an interview after winning the Crossword award for translation, Krishankutty, who has translated writers from K Satchidanandan to V K Madhavan Kutty, spoke with sadness of the invisibility of her work—discovering that the books she’d worked on were not available in bookstores.

One of the biggest complaints against Indian translation used to be that it wasn’t of high quality—Krishankutty’s skills and sensitivity to the rhythm and music of the writing were an exception, not the norm. Translators like Arunava Sinha (Chowringhee, My Kind of Girl) are changing this. “I was attracted to translation because some stories talked to me,” says Sinha. “I wanted to share them with others.”

To illustrate how complex the translator’s task can be, he speaks of three different books. “Chowringhee, by Sankar, is a cascading text, piling on phrases, sentences, metaphors and references in masses of words with high emotional content,” says Sinha. Translating it into English, an “essentially more reserved language”, required a balance between “restraint and exhibitionism”.

My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose, was very different. “This is prose written by a poet with a very light but sure touch. The cadences and tone of the original prose needed to be captured as much with the ear as with the eye.” With a third novel, set several centuries in the past, Sinha says, “There is the larger issue of preserving the historical distance that the original creates without making the translation completely unreadable to a contemporary audience.”

The isolation that translators in India work in seems incredible, given the number of languages we have, and the great need for good translation. But despite the efforts of Katha, Siyahi and other literary groups to bring translators together, most of them work in a kind of absolute solitude. “I don’t know any translators from other languages, except Tamil,” says Pritham. She stresses the need to work with a good editor, which made a big difference in her view to the quality of both of Blaft’s anthologies.

Sinha agrees, saying, “I’m afraid there’s no real community of or exchanges between translators. And publishers do not work as closely with translators as they do with authors.” But there are signs of change—more cynically, if the US and European markets start to look with greater interest at Indian writing in translation, there will be better opportunities for translators and a demand for higher quality translations.

A possible way forward is shown by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, translator of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, and an acclaimed author (The Story of a Widow) in his own right. Farooqi had once commented with dismay on the average reader’s resistance to works in other languages: “Storytellers always traveled and spread their stories; now you need a visa.” He’s not waiting for his paperwork, so to speak. Instead, he’s kicked off the ambitious Urdu Project, which plans to focus on classical and contemporary Urdu literature.

Its first publication demonstrates the size of its ambitions—a translation of the 24-volume epic Hoshruba. Perhaps this is the way forward for translators—to effectively turn publisher and build their own list of the quirkiest, most unmissable books you and I have never read.

Book review: The Best Travel Writing 2009

(For Outlook Traveller, May 2009)

The Best Travel Writing 2009:
True Stories From Around the World
Edited by James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger and Sean O’Reilly
Travellers’ Tales, distributed by Westland
Rs 790, 351 pages





In Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the main character has a highly covetable visiting card: “Holly Golightly: Travelling”. Today’s passport officers would call in security if anyone was so unwise to state “Traveller” as their profession, though: it’s not a respectable job in the same way as “journalist” or “writer”.



As Pico Iyer observes in the closing piece in The Best Travel Writing 2009, travelling is something you do as a summer job, a detour between other kinds of work: “Now, doing the same thing twenty-five years later, I see that the jobs we stumble into often teach us more than all the ideal gigs we so patiently stalk. And getting lost or going on a detour is how we find the places we’d otherwise miss.”



Travel writing in 2009 is especially difficult, compared to what it would have been just a century ago. There are no places on the map marked “Here be Dragons”; Google Earth, Wikipaedia and streaming video give all of us the illusion of having charted every last place on earth. Adventure tourists have replaced fearless explorers. And the greatest fear of modern travellers is not the probability of disease or death—it’s the fear that they will turn out to be tourists, not travellers, after all.



The editors have selected their pieces wisely, given the times. Some writers embrace the tourist’s eye-view, but with a skewed perspective. Chris Epting tracks the motel and hotel rooms where music legends died, sleeping in the same room where Janis Joplin spent her last night, wondering whether Gram Parsons still haunts the Joshua Tree Inn. Cecilia Worth attends an unusual music performance inside an empty oil drum in Antarctica, Gabriel O’Malley battles his own sense of distaste as he visits the Stalin Museum in Georgia.



Patricia Dreyfus captures the experience of seeing a tiger in Chitwan National Park; Jill Paris goes boldly in search of the perfect dirndl. Marc-Edouard Leon attends the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Brighton, where the Beard Liberation Front pleads for an end to discrimination against the hairy, and where anxious contestants may use a snood—a whisker hammock—to protect the shape of their locks when they sleep.



The lure of reading 14th or 18th century travel writing often lay in the traveller’s description of the perils of the profession, and this is no different—though the dragons have changed, become more metaphorical. Read Jeff Greenwald, accompanying his mother to India, Susan Van Allen, wryly watching as Italian men become the pursued instead of the pursuers, or Rolf Potts, negotiating Cambodia via the wrong phrasebook. Even the casual traveller must deal with the shock of a new culture, confused signals and flawed assumptions, or the inescapable reality of being the foreigner.



In ‘The Bamenda Syndrome’, one of the most haunting pieces in this book, David Torrey Peters describes his sense of spiraling downwards into an alternate mental space in Cameroon. He witnesses a medicine man pulling worms out of a friend’s teeth, or does he? “Rather than admit to myself that I had arrived unprepared for certain experiences, I narrated my own explanations to myself,” he writes. “But much like a lie built upon a lie, I found myself unable to revise stories to fit events without admitting that I knew nothing, and so my stories … grew more and more fantastic.”



Some pieces are small gems. In ‘I Hold High My Beautiful, Luminous Quran’, David Grant explores the ins and outs of ‘dating’ in Ghana, where the norms of the Islamic culture forbid actual contact: “If you’re a DJ up in this country, this is how you get around social stricture when you run out of the music with the pious lyrics. You create a hot mix that has no lyrics at all.”



As with all collections, this one has its flaws. The insistence of some of the writers on finding an epiphany in even the most banal travelling experience is puzzling until you note the high number of MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) candidates and teachers among the contributors. And while the pieces criss-cross the globe, the contributors are chiefly Europeans and Americans, as though there were no African or Asian travel writers to be found, barring the ubiquitous Mr Iyer.



But I would still add The Best Travel Writing 2009 to my backpack. Like the best companions, it has much to offer in any given situation, a smattering of practical advice, eminent portability, considerable humour—and it travels well.

The BS column: How not to write about evil

(Published in the Business Standard, May 5, 2009)

Over half a century of Indian writing in English has produced several contenders for the title of the defintive Partition novel; but other conflicts have been more elusive. Partition has been recorded in many Indian languages—from Manto’s classic, brutal short stories to Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to Chaman Nahal’s Azaadi, literature has kept pace with history.



Every few years, someone attempts to write the great Kashmiri novel, but even Salman Rushdie (with Shalimar the Clown) missed the mark. The intensity and tragedy of Kashmir has been served better by non-fiction writers than by fiction writers. A handful of novelists have tried to make sense of the Bhopal gas tragedy, of 1984 and of the Gujarat riots, but I would argue that Indra Sinha (Animal’s People), Shonali Bose (Amu) and Raj Kamal Jha (Fireproof) have been adequate witnesses, but fall short in literary terms.



In their defence, it has never been easy to write about tragedy—or to write about evil, as two recently published works demonstrate. The first, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, is a 900-plus page brick of a novel that was highly acclaimed in France before becoming a worldwide bestseller. It is also one of the most repellent books I have read in recent years—not because of its subject, but because of Littell’s perspective.



The protagonist of The Kindly Ones is Maximilien Aue, a former SS officer in the Second World War, complicit in a number of crimes, now living in retirement and working in a lace-making factory. Littell takes his title from the euphemism for the Furies, forces of merciless but exact vengeance in Roman mythology, and he takes his inspiration for Maximilien Aue’s life history from the troubled, bloody history of the legendary House of Atreus. Novelist and reviewer Laila Lalami called The Kindly Ones “a pornographic catalogue of horrors”, and most reviewers have been left disturbed, if not repulsed, by Littell’s mindlessly graphic musings.

(Speaking personally, I can't remember ever being so repelled by a novel. Not shocked; most of Littell's catalogue of horrors is familiar to any reader of Roman mythology or pulp horror fiction. But to read this book was to swing between boredom and deep, almost physical, distaste.)

Relentlessly repetitious, the novel presents Aue’s lust for his sister in terms that do violence to the memory of the Holocaust; he has sexual fantasises that cast her in the role of a prisoner in the camps, for instance. In her review for The New Republic, Ruth Franklin caught it best when she commented: “But The Kindly Ones is not an important novel, because it fails absolutely to add anything of significance to our understanding of its subject, which is nothing less than the most perplexing question of modernity. How could human beings undertake….an unprecedented systematic program of mass extermination against other human beings? “ It is, however, one of the most widely discussed novels of this year, chiefly for its more sensational aspects and because of the huge advance the author received.


J M Coetzee has, far more elegantly and incisively than Littell, examined the question of how one writes about evil in several of his books. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character comes to the conclusion that you can’t write about evil, or bear witness beyond a certain point, without inflicting damage on yourself as a human being. And besides, she asks, how reliable is memory anyway? She writes: “"Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, …. exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear….?"

A much shorter, much drier document manages to bear witness in its own way. In its scant 43 pages, and in the detached language of the objective witness, the Red Cross Report on Torture effectively presents evidence that indicts the US government for its treatment of suspects and prisoners at Guantanamo. From political websites to the venerable New York Review of Books, the Red Cross Report has opened up a debate on the nature of bureaucratic evil and legalised crime.


Littell offers one way to examine violence that is perhaps valid, but that is deeply repugnant: approach it through the lens of voyeurism, exaggerate the nature of evil to the point where it becomes ridiculous in its offensiveness. The Red Cross report offers a more traditional way: be a witness, write perhaps without the scorching words Coetzee (and Costello) demand, but with absolute honesty. The novelist who seeks to capture the nature of an undertaking such as a holocaust, a riot or a pogrom, must find a way between these two paths. Several Indian film-makers and photographers have found a way of telling their truth, but for the Indian writer, capturing the nature of the beast remains elusive.

41 Indian Writers in Translation

Amit Chaudhuri on Indian writing, from The Guardian:

"As to the writers from the more troubled regions outside the metropolitan suburbs in which English alone was spoken, you could see, if you scratched the surface of their slightly bureaucratic veneer, that they possessed an eclecticism of taste and literary predilections, a formal curiosity, as well as a true multilingualism, that made them quite akin - paradoxically for brown men wandering about the streets of Frankfurt and Paris - to the breed of writers once called "European". However, no one, I think, asked them about their relationship to Europe, though each of them would have had an answer to the question; this was a reminder of the odd discrepancy between language - and I don't just mean English and French and Hindi - and vantage-point and intention that sometimes characterised interactions between audiences and writers."

The recommendations at the end of the article inspired me to put down a list of 40 books I've enjoyed by Indian writers, 41 Indian writers whose books I've enjoyed in translation. Standard disclaimers:

1) This is not intended to be a definitive or even indicative list--it's just my list of writers whose works I personally enjoyed.
2) Yes, there's a built-in bias towards Bengali writers, since Bengali's my mother tongue.
3) Many writers have been left out. This is because:
i) they're not available in English translation, and this is a list of Indian books translated into English. I know, most unfair.
ii) I've never heard of them and I should've, in which case I'd be happy to add their names to the list
iii) I have heard of them and I hate their work, in which case I'll maintain a discreet silence

41 Indian Writers in Translation

Ambai: In A Forest, A Deer
Short stories drawing on mythology, feminism and the lives of ordinary women

Ashapoorna Devi: The First Promise (Pratham Pratisruti)
One of the few novels by the prolific and highly regarded author available in translation, this follows the evolution of Satyabati, a child bride who grows up to demand much more of her new life in a changing but still hidebound Calcutta.

Bama: Karukku
Bama’s account of growing up untouchable, a dalit in modern India.

Bhisham Sahni: Tamas
The iconic novel about Partition; Sahni drew from his memories of working in the refugee camps to write the story of Nathu, the sweeper who sparks a riot with the inadvertent killing of a pig, Jarnail and many others.

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay: Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road), Aparajito
These classic, much-loved novels formed the basis for Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy as Bibhutibhushan followed his protagonist from the little village of Nischindipur to the demands and temptations of the city.

Fakir Mohan Senapati: Six Acres and a Third
Senapati’s wickedly funny tale of colonial India

Girish Karnad: Collected Plays
From one of India’s most intelligent and engaged writers, plays that sweep through history and myth to address today’s audience.

Gopinath Mohanty: Paraja
This 1930s novel explores the slow decline of a tribal stripped of his lands by the state, turning first to the forest that he knows so well and then to alcoholism.

Harivansh Rai Bachchan: In the Afternoon of Time
The great poet’s honest, moving recollections of his life, from the hardships of growing up in the provinces to the success of Madhushala, and the superstardom of his son, the actor Amitabh. The English translation was a very successful abridgement of the four-volume original.

Jibananda Das: Selected Poems and Collected Short Stories
Jibananda’s layered, often revolutionary poems spawned a host of terrifyingly bad imitations, but few had the accuracy of his vision. His short stories are less well-known, but for a generation of Bengalis, he offered an escape from the gentle tyranny of Tagore.



Kamleshwar: Partitions
Searing, anguished and questioning, one of the finest explorations of the scars of Partition in Indian literature

Kiran Nagarkar: Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three)(my thanks to Salil Tripathi for the reminder)
Nagarkar's first novel was about Kushank Pundare, an unpublished writer living in a chawl. The Marathi literary world was not amused by Pundare's sublime blend of nihilism and broad humour, but Nagarkar's readers continue to be entertained.

Krishna Sobti: Mitro Marjani, Ei Ladki (translated as To Hell With You, Mitro and Listen, Girl)
Sobti’s richly comic, sometimes dark explorations of sexuality and the need for freedom.

M Mukundan: On the Banks of the Mayyazhi
Father Alphonse, Dasan the freedom fighter, Chitralekha the dancer and the villagers of Mahe come together in this unforgettable classic.

Mahasweta Devi: Titu Mir, Rudali, Breast Stories, Mother of 1084
It’s hard to pick just a few from Mahasweta Devi’s corpus of writing, but try not to miss her wrenching, engaging perspective on history

Mahesh Elkunchwar: Holi, Yuganta, Pratibimb, Party
I haven’t been able to find a “collected plays”, but some of his scripts are available in translation. One of India’s most popular and most questioning playwrights.

M T Vasudevan Nair: Naalukettu
Literally “the house around the courtyard”, Naalukettu draws on MT Vasudevan Nair’s own memories to recreate the atmosphere of a village in South India, and the struggles of a young boy to find his way through a maze of tradition.

Nabaneeta Deb Sen: Defying Winter (in Five Novellas by Women), A Nabaneeta Reader
OUP’s Nabaneeta Reader, if you can find it, is the best introduction to the wide range of this writer’s work, which roams from children’s fiction to travelogue to literary criticism and mainstream fiction. Defying Winter is a wry and warm novella set in an old-age home.

Naiyer Masud: The Essence of Camphor
Translated from Urdu, these stories retain something of the perfume of that language—delicate, precise and melancholy, especially the title story and ‘Sheesha Ghat’.

Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld
Many disagree with Dhasal’s politics, while retaining the right to admire his fierce, bitterly angry poetry. Dilip Chitre does a beautiful translation of this Dalit poet’s work.

Nirmal Verma: Selected Stories; The Last Wilderness (translated by Pratik Kanjilal)
The pioneer of the “Nayi Kahani” movement, Verma wrote with depth and passion, and a quiet sensibility matched by few. In 'The Last Wilderness', Pratik Kanjilal's sensitive translation captures Verma's story, set in the hills, narrated by the secretary-companion to Mehra Sahib, a retired civil servant. Verma uses the landscape to convey a sense of menace and possibility; one of his finest novels.



O V Vijayan: Legends of Khasak
Vijayan made Khasak as much of a “real” place as Marquez’s Macondo, and it has something of the same richness.

Premchand: Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players)
His other novels and short stories may carry more literary weight, but Shatranj remains a personal favourite, for its evocation of a friendship tested in the sunset hours of a dying empire.

Premendra Mitra: Mosquito and other stories
“Ghanada” is one of those great literary characters known only to the Bengalis; this collection brings out some of the wit and bizarre fluidity of Mitra’s imagination.

Qurratulain Hyder: Aag Ki Dariya (River of Fire)
This monumental novel takes on two-and-a-half millennia of Indian history, linked by four characters who wander through the ages, bearing witness to the shifting times. Hyder’s magnum opus.

Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories (try to get the OUP edition, translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri and others), The Home and the World, Chokher Bali
It’s hard to choose only a few from Tagore’s overflowing bookshelf, but his short stories are perhaps the best introduction to his work. Many of his novels, including Ghare-Baire (The Home, the World), and Nashto Neer (The Broken Nest, filmed as Charulata) inspired Ray’s films.

Rahi Masoom Reza: A Village Divided
Reza’s account of the feuds between rival families in Gangauli is pointed, sharp and very, very funny.

Saadat Hasan Manto: the collected short stories
Manto framed Partition and the riots with brutal humour—in his stories, inmates of a lunatic asylum must make sense of the new borders, a man finds he has no taste for cold meat, a child sees jelly in a pool of blood.

Sankar: Chowringhee
In this skilful translation, Sankar’s immensely popular novel about the inside stories of a grand hotel in Calcutta comes alive.

Sharatchandra: Debdas, Srikanta, Pather Dabi
One of Bengal’s most popular novelists, Sharatchandra’s characters remain alive in the public imagination—though many readers have forgotten his reputation for sarcasm and his trenchant criticism of the social norms of his times.

Shivram Karanth: Ten Faces of a Crazy Mind
“I do not desire to be killed by others’ pens. I shall take my own life.” Karanth was one of the greats of Kannada literature, and his autobiography is as unorthodox as was his life.


Shrilal Shukla: Raag Darbari
This classic satire of small-town India takes a close look at the rotting body politic without needing to hold its nose.

Sunil Gangopadhyay: Sei Samay (Those Days), Pratham Alo (First Light)
Historical fiction that treads a fine line between gossip and accurate chronicle of the life and times of Bengal’s finest—two of the prolific Gangopadhyay’s better-known works.

Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai: Chemmeen
One of the late Thakazhi’s most popular works, this set star-crossed lovers down in a fishing community in rural Kerala.

U R Ananthamurthy: Samskara
The funeral of a Brahmin who had turned his back on the community is at the centre of Samskara, U R Anathamurthy’s challenging and, for its times, revolutionary novel.



Vaidehi: Gulabi Talkies
Short stories translated from Kannada; Vaidehi’s trademark style is best captured in the title story, where a town deals with the loss of its midwife, Lillibai, when she decides instead to run the only-for-women cinema, Gulabi Talkies.

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer: My Granddad Had An Elephant, Walls
Basheer—freedom fighter, wanderer, writer—had a knack for capturing the absurd, the comic and the tragic in a few bare paragraphs. My Granddad Had An Elephant is a collection of short stories verging on memoir; Walls follows two prisoners who may not, eventually, want to leave for “the larger jail outside”.

V K Madhavan Kutty: The Village Before Time
One of my favourite books—a brief excerpt: “When water collected in the ditch on the left of the path, we always gathered to watch the little fast-moving insects called ezhuthachan chaathis that looked as if they were writing on the water. They wrote amazing stories in languages that looked sometimes like Malayalam and sometimes like Tamil.”

Vijaydan Detha: A Straw Epic and other stories
The Rajasthani folk tales that Vijaydan Detha used as the foundation for his stories don’t translate well, but this collection offers a hint of the flavour of the original. Especially in ‘Duvidha’, the classic story of a triangle between a bride, her husband and the ghost that assumes the form of the husband for a brief while.

Vilas Sarang: The Women in the Cages (short stories)
Many of the stories here were originally written in Marathi and then rewritten in English by the bilingual Sarang. His Bombay is a surreal city, where Ganesha’s idol might run away from his own procession, where a man might get into trouble for warming his hands on a cold day at a funeral pyre.

Vijay Tendulkar: Ghashiram Kotwal, Sakharam Binders or The Collected Plays if you can get it
Tendulkar’s fearless and ferocious plays are staples of any self-respecting Indian theatre group—few playwrights have used contemporary events and stinging satire quite as well.

Useful resources:


Seagull Books: Seagull has a brilliant catalogue of works in translation
Vedams Books: Online bookstore with some hard-to-find classics
Women Unlimited and Zubaan: The emphasis is on women's writing, but both stock some translations
Katha specialises in translations, but their web page isn't terribly browser-friendly
The Little Magazine: Carries stories and screenplays in translation--browse each issue separately.

Also read: Boyd Tonkin on "India's hidden treasures":

"...the vast bulk of Indian culture, and Indian life, never happens in English.
Not that the UK publishing industry usually wants to know. When the thin, elite crust of native English speakers in India throws up world-beating author after world-beating author, why bother to investigate the literary riches that may lurk among the nation's 22 other official languages, from Assamese to Urdu? Yet those treasures sparkle. An Indian novelist once, only half-jokingly, said to me that he had begun to write in English because the competition in Bengali was just too stiff."

The BS Column: Zombies versus Churails

(Published in the Business Standard, April 27, 2009)


Pride and Prejudice with Zombies is like Gone with the Wind with vampires—an idea so simple in its brilliance and so obvious that you wonder why no one’s thought of it before.

There isn’t—yet—an enterprising author who’s added fangs to Rhett Butler (and copyright forbids it), but Seth Grahame-Smith has been cleaning up with his P&P For Zombies. By the simple expedient of adding rival armies of the living dead to Jane Austen’s original broth of badinage, romance and family woes, Grahame-Smith neatly revs up Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett’s courtship.

Could you have an equally successful version with churails and djinns? Perhaps, but Grahame-Smith’s success is also because of the public fascination with zombies, vampires and werewolves. Werewolves come from the Old Norse vargulf, and were feared as actual threats several centuries ago. Zombies originated in Haiti, but the idea of revenants—the walking dead—was very much part of Old English folklore. Vampires, especially the Transylvanian kind, reached the peak of their popularity in the 18th century.

True zombies, vampires and werewolves have not been feared for at least two centuries. But their place in the popular imagination has maintained by horror movies and novels as well as several generations of gamers. Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series elevated the classic vampire love story to interspecies romance, with a werewolf vying for the hand of the beautiful Bella.

It’s almost unsettling to read a classic, by-the-book ghost story today, given that ghosts have been shunted firmly into the dark vaults of the horror genre or series like the Goosebumps books for children. Sarah Waters was probably well aware of this when she wrote The Little Stranger, one of the first haunted house novels in mainstream fiction in a long, long while. Today’s intelligent reading public will believe in aliens, the power of positive thinking, or creationism far more readily than they will believe in a book that features a ghost as the lead character. Ghosts, unlike vampires and assorted ghouls, are not in fashion any more.

Waters sidesteps this problem by giving her ghost a suitably anachronistic setting—an old English country house, crumbling for want of funds. At first meeting, the Ayers have far more need of a bookkeeper than an exorcist, but by degrees, Waters draws the reader into the idea that real evil might exist and leave its mark behind. Reading The Little Stranger is eerily like reading an unpublished, forgotten Wilkie Collins. Perhaps this is the only way a straightforward ghost story would work any more, as opposed to a vampire-zombie tale—as a throwback, a deliberate nod to a previous era.

The Indian churail (or pisach or djinni) faces similar problems as the Scandinavian myling or the Er Gui of China: they don’t translate well outside of their culture. (For the curious, a myling is the spirit of a murdered child; an Er Gui is the ghost of a person who died of starvation or hunger.) Among our authors, Ruskin Bond tells ghost stories with a ghoulish relish that one only finds in gentle, genial writers who live in peaceful retirement in the hills.

But few have carried on the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote some of the most chilling ghost stories of all time—Khudita Pashan (The Hungry Stones) being perhaps the best of them. It’s not for lack of talent—for instance, Tarun Tejpal and Ravi Shankar Etteth have both played around with the ghost story. Ravi Shankar wrote at least one classic, featuring a busload of highly unusual passengers in war-ravaged Kashmir.

In 1914, a Mr S Mukerji compiled a set of Indian ghost stories, and noted: “I have heard all sorts of ghost stories from my nurse and my father's coachman, Abdullah… as well as from my friends who are Judges and Magistrates and other responsible servants of Government,and in two cases from Judges of Indian High Courts. A story told by a nurse or a coachman should certainly not be reproduced in this book.” He included the judges’ stories, which were thunderously boring, but perhaps something of the belief that ghost stories are for the masses, not for the purveyors of high literature, has rubbed off on to our authors.

That, given India’s rich heritage of dakinis, betaals, nishibhoots and other things that go bump in the night, is a sad mistake. Perhaps more Indian writers might be persuaded to go the way of Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a few ghost stories himself, and who observed: “You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.” Until then, it’s zombies all the way down.