The BS column: The Saint Sonia Syndrome

(Published in the Business Standard, June 8, 2010)













A few months ago, Norberto Fuentes wrote an autobiography of Fidel Castro, a book that starts and ends in Castro’s voice, where by page 150 the reader has forgotten that this is a fictional creation. Fuentes’ relationship with Fidel was a dark and troubled one; he was once one of Castro’s supporters, then one of Castro’s prisoners, and finally one of Cuba’s exiles.

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, unauthorized and unacknowledged by its subject, reads like the most venomous of letters from a disillusioned lover: Fuentes was close enough to Fidel to know exactly where to put the knife in, whether he’s describing Fidel’s real thoughts on Che Guevara or his fascination with the bloody exactness of the guillotine. In its original Spanish edition, Fuentes’ fictionalized autobiography is pulling readers in, despite its thousand-page bulk—in part because it fills an unusual gap. Castro, unlike most dictators, has never written his memoirs, and inexact, fictionalized and dependent on Fuentes imagination though it is, his Autobiography fills a need among readers to know more than the sanitized, official hagiographies will offer.

In India, a biography of Sonia Gandhi is available. Written by Rasheed Kidwai, it is dutiful, thorough, respectful—not, in fact, a terribly exciting read. It sold well when it came out, in the absence of better material. In the years since Kidwai wrote his biography and since Javier Moro, the writer-nephew of Dominique Lapierre, penned his “fictional biography” of the Indian Congress Party leader, there have been no better biographies of Mrs Gandhi.

The Red Sari, Moro’s slightly breathless account of Sonia Maino’s life before and after she became Mrs Rajiv Gandhi, has been attacked in a tide of rising hysteria by Congress loyalists. Currently, Moro has been threatened with defamation suits if he publishes the book in India; his publishers, Roli Books, are holding firm and Moro is annoyed enough to have threatened his own lawsuit in turn. The question of defamation—if any—is one for the courts to decide; but defamation only applies if you get the facts of a person’s life wrong.

The Congress point of view, summarized by the arguments of spokesperson Dr Abhishek Singhvi, appears to be that since this is not an authorized biography, it shouldn’t be published. There are also allegations of defamatory material—none of these can be judged until The Red Sari is published here. Moro’s prose tends to the purple, but it’s not very likely with his background as a decent researcher and with Roli’s experience that the book contains much libelous matter. With respect, here are three things the Congress might want to consider.

1) If you’re a public figure, you’re fair game for fiction: The ethics of the fictional biography/ autobiography have yet to be established, but as Paul Theroux knew when he wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow about his friendship with VS Naipaul, it’s perfectly kosher to write about someone who’s already in the public eye. Moro allows himself to speculate about Sonia Gandhi’s thoughts and feelings—but by calling his work a fictional biography, he’s covered his bases. The famous have lives that can be researched, are often exhaustively covered, and are of great interest to the ordinary public—as long as the writer isn’t making up stuff, he’s on safe ground. Or more bluntly, the famous make excellent raw material for a book. And free speech covers the right to speculate about the inner lives of the powerful. If Castro and Obama can take it, so can Sonia.

2) Don’t be an unpaid publicist for the other guy: The Congress hysteria over The Red Sari has brought it front-page stories, prime time television slots and added anything from 5,000 to 10,000 potential readers to Moro’s audience. Presumably Roli Books and Moro are less than grateful because of the aggravation they’ve been caused, but the Congress PR machine might want to consider that their campaign has raised far more interest in The Red Sari than any publisher would have been able to achieve unaided.

3) Do it the Obama way: There’s no question of an unauthorized biography of Barack Obama doing anywhere as well as his own accounts of his life have done. Why? Because Obama’s autobiographical writings are searingly honest, detailed and brilliantly written. The sleazy, gossipy biography or the fictionalized biography just can’t compete. If Sonia Gandhi wrote her own memoirs, or authorized a really good biographer to write a no-holds-barred account of her life, there’d be no room for the overblown romanticism of The Red Sari. Given that its only competition is a hagiography, Moro’s book will do brilliantly. What would you rather read, the life of St Sonia, or an exaggerated but human account of Sonia Maino’s journey to become Sonia Gandhi?

Food: Following Fish

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2010, in the food column)










The arguments against fish are many, especially in a north Indian city like Delhi. Fish is bony — often, in fact, the tastier the fish, the bonier it is. Its fragrance is persistent, and for some, too pungent to handle. Meat is relatively easy to understand; the subtleties of buying fish change from coastline to coastline and can take a lifetime to master.

I rarely order fish in Delhi, which is in keeping with my position of mild apostasy on fish — heretical in a Bengali family. While my sister ate her way through fishheads, whole gunmetal pabda and chunks of hilsa, I had to be fed fish by stealth: mashed, in a fiery mustard chutney. It was only as an adult that I realised why I didn’t like fish — the dislike stemmed from a kind of austere, demanding love.

Eating freshly caught and flash-fried bhekti in the Sunderbans on a river boat was a pleasure; I tucked into karimeen with gusto in Palakkad; tackled a tiny, grimly bony but delicious fish curry in Goa; and ate my way through the fish platter at the once-legendary Ananthashram in Bombay, demanding second helpings. It was the freshness that counted; my palate will tolerate mediocre hamburger or frozen prawns, but seems to jib at anything less than absolutely fresh, perfectly cooked fish.

For all fish apostates — or inadvertent gourmands — I have one recommendation: read Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (Penguin, Rs 250). This is not just good travel and food writing — as Samanth travels in search of hilsa in Bengal, toddy shop fish curry in Kerala, trawls through fishing communities and examines the live fish treatment for asthma in Hyderabad, he will revive your curiosity and your appetite.

Having a great fish meal requires a lack of embarrassment on the part of the diner (unless you’re eating the standard sole fillet in butter sauce, or sashimi), and while some clubs, restaurants and five-stars serve good fish, your best meals are likely to be in far more humble places. Canteens in Mumbai, shacks in Goa, toddy shops in Kerala, hole-in-the-wall outlets in Kolkata can and do offer meals that rival anything you’d find in the fine dining line.

Eating at Narayan’s in Mangalore, Samanth falls in love with the restaurant’s trademark masala, “the masala that aggregated in fried lumps on the circulating tray like spicy, red snowdrifts”. The thali is served; he works his way through the seer, sardines and ladyfish, then stands next to the kitchen — “simply sniffing at the frying masala on the tawa, deep-breathing fanatically, trying to fill my lungs with enough aroma to last the day”. Travelling in the Kanyakumari district, he meets food maven Jacob Aruni, who introduces him to fish podi, a dried fish powder used like the gunpowder podis, mixed with rice and ghee.

Aruni’s dried mackerel podi, writes Samanth, “looked like powdery jaggery, speckled white in places with coconut, and it had a deep, spicy aroma, shot through with the strong presence of fish. Tasted raw, it races to the back of your throat and proceeds to set your tonsils on fire… They were mackerel with character, bursting out of their envelope of spice like strong actors out of a crowded script.”

When he’s not learning how to eat hilsa, or searching for the perfect, elusive fish curry of childhood memory, Samanth is a wonderful guide to the changing, threatened lives of today’s fishermen, to boat-building yards and the diverse histories of the Portuguese and the Dutch in India.

Two days after reading Following Fish, I found myself in one of Delhi’s small, local markets, searching for hilsa roe and mackerel. The places where you get great fish, rather than cottony, deep-freeze fillets with all the appeal of wilted lettuce, in this city are few but worth browsing, from Andhra Bhavan to Gunpowder, Ploof to Pan Asian, Dakshin to Ai. But if you don’t find yourself drawn to the fishmarkets and then to the spice merchants, and then back to your kitchen to cook after reading Following Fish, I will undertake to travel to Hyderabad and swallow a live murrel, despite my lack of asthma.

Book review: Ayn Rand and The World She Made

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




Ayn Rand and The World She Made
Anne C Heller
Tranquebar,
Rs 495, 567 pages




Here is my second-favourite Ayn Rand story. Challenged by a journalist to present her philosophy while standing on one foot, the philosopher, novelist and all-round provocateur stuck her foot in the air and stated her creed: “Metaphysics: Objective Reality. Epistemology: Reason. Ethics: Self-interest. Politics: Capitalism.”

The longer version of these principles is also well-known, and forms, to this day, a Canticle of Rand for true believers: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "You can't eat your cake and have it, too." "Man is an end in himself." "Give me liberty or give me death."

My favourite Ayn Rand story, unlike the first, is not in the canon of twice-told Rand tales. Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, to a Russian Jewish family, Alissa/ Alice Rosenbaum chose a new name for herself when she came to New York. She had various explanations for the “Ayn”: it was a Finnish female name, she had made it up. “The real explanation,” writes Anne Heller, “may be more sentimental—and more ethnic—than the creator of a philosophy based on the self-made soul would be likely to admit.”

Perhaps Ayn came from “Ayin”, “an affectionate Jewish diminutive meaning “bright eyes”—her mother called her “Ayinotchka” as a child. The idea that Ayn Rand would step into her new, American life casting off the past while still secretively holding on to a tiny sliver of it is seductive.

It is impossible to explain to Ayn Rand believers why some readers outgrow The Fountainhead and why Atlas Shrugged and Anthem are not taught in universities; it is impossible to explain to Ayn Rand skeptics why millions of readers never outgrow the lure of Rand’s philosophy. GB Shaw at once skewered and (faintly) praised another seductive ideology in his famous aphorism: “A man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. A man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger one.”

But for all that thousands of readers outgrow Ayn Rand by their late twenties, the list of the ones who don’t is illustrious—John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Mayhew and other venerables have all indicated their deep debt to her ideas. The contemporary reception to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is telling: many critics slammed the books for their didactic, “offensively pedestrian” style, and they were right. Many readers bought the books anyway, drawn to Rand’s almost comically force-of-nature heroes and her perversely suffering, noble heroines.

Heller’s objectivity about Objectivism did not go down well with the Ayn Rand Institute; she was denied access to Rand’s unpublished diaries, letters and other documents. She did have access, though, to 40 hours of taped biographical interviews with Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, Russian archives and privately recorded interviews with Rand’s friends. What she produces is an impartial and often acute account of Rand’s extraordinarily forceful life.

Rand’s childhood was marked by the persecution her Jewish family suffered in the Russia of the early 20th century, and by an early determination to make something of her life—in later years, she would reinvent herself as a writer. In the US, she met and married a young, charismatic actor, Frank O’Connor, but her life would always overshadow his. She struggled to make it in Hollywood as a script writer, but it would be her books and her unparalleled ability to command attention and attract a loyal, sometimes terrified, but always fascinated audience that would make her what she became.

It’s hard to explain what constitutes charisma, so much more powerful and inescapable than beauty, intellect or charm, but what Ayn Rand possessed and honed was in the nature of an undeniable, inscrutable inner force. She was a heavy Benzedrine user, and displayed some of the characteristics of the addict, from a restless, relentless mind to paranoia. In later years, she had an affair with Nathaniel Branden, a much younger acolyte who would become a kind of founder of the American self-help movement. It is characteristic of Rand that it was not enough to have the affair—she had to gain the consent of her husband and Branden’s wife, and when Branden fell in love, years later, with another, younger woman, Rand would deal with it by endless rounds of “therapies” with him before a final, irrevocable break.

As the power of the ideas behind The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged grew, what came up around Rand was a cross between a salon and a cult. Over the years, her admiring circle of bright young student minds and heavyweight intellectuals would become a tightly-knit circle of insiders; loyalty and fidelity to Rand (and Branden) was an absolute, excommunication from the circle was final, and in its later stages, signs that the Rand group had become abusive, corrosive, almost Russian in its purges and denunciations, were acute.


None of this explains the continued force of Rand’s ideas, or the continued power of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in particular, to sway the minds and hearts of readers. Heller’s biography will make Rand skeptics and the faithful uncomfortable in equal measure—but like its subject, this book is impossible to ignore. To steal a phrase from the Simon & Garfunkel song, once you’ve been Ayn Randed, the scar is permanent.

The Business Standard column: Copyright, copywrong?

(Published in the Business Standard, June 1, 2010)

The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.
Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will never be stocked in Indian bookshops. Many will come in after six-eight months, or will be prohibitively expensive, or will be stocked in limited copies.

For readers, one way around this is to order online or invest in an e-reader, but that’s still restrictive—you lose out on the serendipity of browsing, the accidental happiness of stumbling across books you didn’t know you wanted. (And as reader Meethil Momayya pointed out in an email, e-books are still subject to territorial agreements.)

From that perspective, the amendments proposed to the Indian Copyright Act might seem like a great idea. The core principle underlying the amendments applies equally to the Internet, digital media, film and broadcasting, and print publishing. Open up the markets, allow books, films and other media to move freely across countries, and give the Indian consumer and reader a much wider choice. So why is Indian publishing unhappy about this, and how is the Indian Copyright Act set to change the way you read?

The publishing perspective: Thomas Abraham, CEO, Hachette India, is blunt: “This will change the face of Indian publishing completely, and disastrously. The worst hit will be the publishers.” His logic, echoed by HarperCollins’ P N Sukumar and Krishan Chopra, is simple. The Act would do away, in effect, with the idea of an Indian “territory”—allowing books to be freely imported, and in the worst case, dumped, in the Indian market. For publishers, the incentive to promote an author or invest in his work in India disappears—if you know that anyone can print and sell copies of the book your publishing house has worked to produce.

Most glaringly, the “open market” is not reciprocal: while US and UK printers could, theoretically, flood the Indian markets with reprints of popular books, copyright agreements in those territories still hold, and Indian publishing cannot do the same. In the long run, this could kill or seriously cripple Indian publishing.

The author’s perspective: While the initial response from authors on the easing of markets is bound to be positive, will they get paid? As happened with the music industry, authors might find that their sales and audiences rise—but they’re not getting royalties on those editions. In a worst-case scenario, if the Act goes through in its present form and the doomsayers are right, the apparent freedoms authors might gain from the easing of copyright restrictions would be offset by the loss of local publishing support. And again, as with the music industry, for authors to gain, they would have to be willing to create book groups, nurture audiences and do much of their spadework. None of this infrastructure exists in India at present.

The reader’s perspective: Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, offers a balanced take. “This is terrible for publishers,” he says. “But readers and retail want more choice and this could offer them more freedom—even at the basic level of being able to buy different editions of the same book.”

The biggest question—unanswered because the Copyright Act is geared far more strongly to the needs of the digital and film worlds, than to the complex and competing needs of print—is how this will work in practice. This could be like the Chinese toy revolution: the insidious replacement of local Indian products with cheaper, more disposable alternatives. Many readers couldn’t care less, so long as they have more and better books to read.

But the other argument is blunt, if protectionist: if you want a thriving Indian publishing industry, flooding the market with cheaper editions of books will kill off the publisher’s incentive to support and nurture authors. This could work if markets were open in the other direction as well—if a reciprocal arrangement allowed Indian publishers to ship their editions of US and UK-produced books into those markets—but there is no way the US and the UK would allow that kind of competition.

Like most Indian readers, I want more choice, and better books; and I don’t want to have to wait months to buy my favourite authors. But however well-intentioned, if the practical implications of the Copyright Act would be to cripple local publishing, that’s bad for readers—and terrible for authors. What works for digital industries and films might have entirely the opposite effect on the publishing world, and it’s not a gamble Indian publishing can afford to lose.

Book review: Way To Go, by Upamanyu Chatterjee

(BOOK REVIEW FOR BIBLIO/ MAY 2010)

Way To Go
Upamanyu Chatterjee,
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
Rs 499, 359 pages
ISBN: 9780670083527














Life is nasty, brutish and at 359 pages, not short, in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s sequel to his 1994 novel, The Last Burden. In the intervening 16 years, India has become more corrupt, more vicious, more consumerist and stayed as grimy as it was in the first book. Chatterjee’s cast of characters have moved on, too, and not necessarily for the good: Jamun’s divorce has yielded a cheerful child and a long-running TV soap opera produced by his ex-wife that reveals their lives together in grim, but TRP-grabbing, detail. His father, Shyamanand, has gone missing for reasons that remain murky until the end of the novel, and his brother Burfi faces his own set of dismal vicissitudes.


It is now understood—after The Last Burden, Weight Loss and Mammaries of the Welfare State—that the relatively gentle humour of English, August was just Chatterjee’s opening shot across the bows. Upamanyu Chatterjee is perhaps the only contemporary Indian writing in English who belongs firmly to the school of Jonathan Swift and Rabelais, but his irreverence encourages quotation from an all together more plebian source, the hashing song Life Presents a Dismal Picture:

“Life presents a dismal picture,
Dark and dreary as the tomb,
Father’s got urethral stricture,
Mother’s got a prolapsed womb.
Uncle James has been deported
For a homosexual crime,
Nell, our maid, has just aborted
For the forty-second time.”

This, in a nutshell, would be the quintessential Upamanyu Chatterjee world; dysfunctional, darkly comic, but adhering to the social conventions of a predictable order. For many readers, Way To Go (like Weight Loss) should come with a statutory warning: this is not for the squeamish. Most of Chatterjee’s reviewers have reacted with a kind of Brahminical horror to his merciless exposition of the more unpleasant facts of life: turds, suicides, corpses, uncongenial sex, shitters on train tracks, bad breath, sweat and the body’s other emanations, autopsies, morgues with “frozen putrid flesh”, “chemical effluent, slag, ordure, garbage, sewerage”, and assorted stenches.

As I read Way To Go in the company of another friend, one of us counted the number of times turds were mentioned in the text, while the other counted the number of suicides, corpses, the suicidal and the homicidal. Both figures were impressive, and it may be worthwhile noting that Chatterjee doesn’t write in order to shock: he writes with a kind of impartial observation, editing out none of the ordure and sewerage of the world.

The first chapter of Way To Go is one of the funniest and darkest in Indian writing. “For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?” Chatterjee begins, and having softened us up with sentiment, gets to what he does best. As Jamun reports the facts of his father’s disappearance to a bored police officer in a depressing police station, the exchange moves into the realms of the surreal.

“Any hobby of Missing Person?”
“He and I played chess on weekends. He watched TV and, being constipated, while waiting in the mornings for the urge to visit the toilet, wrote poems in Bengali.”
The constable incised one word on his page. Jamun guessed it to be ‘TV’.”
Having established that the Missing Person is an eighty-five year-old gentleman, widowed and given to a fixed, stable routine, the constable proceeds:
“Bad Company had Missing Person fallen into before/ever/from time to time?”
“No.”
“Missing Person failed his school/ college exams and therefore left home?”
“No.”
“Was fed up with studies in general?”
“He loved books, the older and mustier the better.’
“If Missing Person stayed in hostel, perhaps its atmosphere was vitiated?”
“Such was not the case in the present instance,” replied Jamun, feeling—on seeing the constable nod his head in slow and steady approbation—that he had at last begun to speak his interrogator’s language.”

These are the skills that made Chatterjee’s English, August such a popular, critical and enduring success: he lays bare the fundamental bizarreness and strictly ritual nature of political, bureaucratic and social systems, and does so with his trademark black humour and impeccable comic timing. Unspoken in this exchange is the understanding that little will be done, and that the nature of the situation will not change—the reporting of the Missing Person is a meaningless, but necessary, ritual.

As the novel proceeds, Chatterjee continues his exploration and excavation of the orifices of Indian society. The relatively circumscribed world that Jamun and Burfi belong to is a world of tedium, despair, violence and spectacular dysfunction. A tenant renders a building unrentable by committing suicide within its premises; the presumption that his ghost will be a co-squatter dissuades most prospective tenants. Lobhesh Monga, the builder who “fucks anything”, stands for the vicious, corrupt, unstoppable energy of the new India Shining. A neighbour plagued by leucoderma will try to find a cure in the blood of a freshly-decapitated chicken. And Jamun’s former life is summed up in the “bilingual banality” of his wife’s TV serial, Cheers Zindagi.

The landscape fits the general tenor of the novel: the rank mangrove swamp near Jamun’s neighbourhood is “Nature’s lush pubic hair”, buildings exhale the sweat of decay and waterlogging into the atmosphere, the morgue (where a stomach-turning but brilliantly observed autopsy scene is set) is located in the wonderfully named Popat Kaka hospital.

And nothing works as it should. The “blue-and-white, electric, dual-chambered, musical, ultraviolet-rayed water filter and purifier” in Shyamanand’s home hasn’t been dusted for four years. Jamun’s sex life has “dwindled to a sort of dry, rotting peanut”, giving him leisure to examine the “wretchedness of his carnal life”. “It was hurried, stinking, dry and gave more dissatisfaction than pleasure to the participants.” Even suicide is compromised, as Jamun wonders whether those who place their necks on the railway tracks recall the products of the morning shitters’ efforts. “Surely, just when it was too late… just before their skulls became blood and mincemeat, they wept and climaxed out of fear and depression at how sinfully they had abused the gift of life.”

Before the novel ends, there will be more deaths and more disappearances, but the real flaw in Way To Go isn’t the darkness of Chatterjee’s vision, or even the relentless scatology embedded in the prose. The most powerful themes in Way To Go are death, old age, and tedium, and in many ways, this is the age-old rant against the dying of the light: why must we grow old, why must all of us become bleached bones, why is the body such a sack of bile, guts and shit?

This is a more or less universal protest against the human condition; it isn’t tragedy that overtakes most of us so much as indignity, and even that will be meted out in small doses of humiliation as our will to live dwindles. In this, Way To Go is consistent with the body of Chatterjee’s work—he is the quintessential novelist of protest, and his black humour masks, in a way, a kind of idealism. Only a writer who believed that life was intended to be more than banality and corruption would be able to dwell with such accuracy on the rot within, or would resent it so deeply.

But Way To Go is overtaken by its own tedium, and the sharpness of the opening chapters gives way to a kind of despairing lassitude. The jokes get duller—the lead character in Cheers Zindagi is called Ashwamedha Ponytail; the prose sinks under the weight of its own despair, as Chatterjee chronicles the rush of builders, like vultures on a corpse, to acquire a house in one scene. He is reduced to banalities: “Words conceal rather than convey meaning…” on the way to genuine insight: “…The written word was coinage, the currency of another economy, of interest mainly for negotiating a literate country.”

The average reader, however literate, will struggle to finish Way To Go; it seems to lose interest in its own concerns and offers up a string of unoriginal observations. Death is all around us; life is corrupting and filled with disappointments; most people live lives of desperation (noisy rather than quiet, since this is India); love and sex have nothing to offer; most relationships are failed ones; God is dead; we are all rotting corpses on our way to the morgue.

Literary failure is sometimes far more interesting than literary success, though, and if you step back from the dank terrain that Way To Go inhabits, what is really of interest about Upamanyu Chatterjee is his refusal to occupy the same sphere that his contemporaries do. His novels are rarely about the grand sweep of Indian history, or the epic mythologizing of the great Indian family, or the confused angst of the diaspora. His focus is, like that other genius poet of dysfunction, John Kennedy O’Toole, on the inescapable failures of our lives, the fact that most of us are unmoored by history and unable to hold on to either the old certainties or the new promises of India Shining.

John Kennedy O’Toole wrote a masterpiece in Confederacy of Dunces. In what is now a kind of quartet of dysfunction, from Mammaries of the Welfare State to Way To Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee hasn’t yet found his masterpiece. And while this is not a novel I would recommend to the reader in search of light entertainment, or to those already on the brink of depression, Chatterjee makes good on one of his guarantees. He will always explore the underbelly of the Indian family and of Indian life, and it will, in his vision, almost always be repellently flaccid, wrinkled and flatulent.

The BS column: The Girls Who Played With Fire

(Published in the Business Standard, May 25, 2010. Spoiler alert: if you haven't read either the Blaise series or the Millennium trilogy, this reveals a lot of backstory.)




Forty two years before Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, became this decade’s princess of crime fiction, Peter O’Donnell created the original Princess.
As Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest) became a posthumous, worldwide success, many of the readers who loved Lisbeth Salander remarked on the similarities between her and Modesty Blaise.

By the time of Peter O’Donnell’s death, earlier this month, at the age of 90, Modesty’s day was over. The Blaise-Garvin books sell as retro, nostalgic fiction, the comic strips are fondly remembered but have been overtaken by today’s action heroes, and mercifully, none of the films made about Ms Blaise have survived. And yet, the connection between the two fictional women remains—stronger than the bond between most “action heroines”, and harder to explain.

Modesty Blaise, when we meet her in the first book in the series, is a poised, successful woman of the world, leader of an international crime ring called The Network, sleekly athletic, an expert at various martial arts and at the move known as “the nailer”, where stripping down to the essentials allows her to surprise her opponents long enough to make deadly use of her kongo. She was, in other words, definitely not from the Barbie school of womanhood.

Lisbeth Salander is a teenager of her times, given to emo-Goth-punk fashion, a formidable mathematician, chess player and computer hacker who replaces Modesty Blaise’s 1960s voluptuousness with the androgynous bisexuality of the 2000s. She uses her photographic memory and her streetfighter’s skills to compensate for her Asperger’s Syndrome, and instead of battling assorted villains and sinister crime mavens, is locked in a permanent battle with the state, and with psychotics whose family histories are as dark as hers.

The most obvious link between these two crime heroines is their childhood history of abuse. Peter O’Donnell wrote often, and movingly, of the young refugee child he met while on duty in the Middle East. The girl was about 11 years old, alone, self-possessed despite her hunger and her rags; he and his troops fed her, and watched as she left. He would never forget her smile, and “the sight of that upright little figure walking like a princess as she moved away from us on those brave skinny legs”. He gave Modesty Blaise that kind of childhood; Blaise would be a refugee from Hungary whose parents had been killed on the long flight from home, would grow up in a camp for displaced persons, and as an adult, would survive more directly physical dangers—torture, incarceration, violence, rape.

Lisbeth Salander’s past was an updated version of Blaise’s survivor’s childhood. Her father is an abusive man who rapes and batters her mother repeatedly; at the age of 12, Lisbeth sets him on fire, and her life will be marked by the declaration of legal incompetence that follows and by battles with the authorities. In the first book, she survives and extracts revenge for an especially vicious rape; by the third, Salander makes her appearance with a bullet lodged in her head—alive, but barely so. Both women had one close friendship with a man—Willie Garvin, Modesty’s partner but not her lover, and Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist who forms an often edgy, wary but loyal alliance with Salander.

Larsson’s longtime partner and English translator, Eva Gabrielsson, has talked about a memory that haunted the author: at the age of 14, he witnessed but was unable to prevent the gang rape of a woman. Other sources have speculated that the inspiration for Salander came closer to home, and Larsson’s work as a journalist who often faced death threats brought him face-to-face with the more unpleasant, brutal aspects of Scandinavian life.

Modesty Blaise and Lisbeth Salander, reaching across the generations, imagined into life by two very different men, are uncomfortable heroines for women readers. They are avengers, not victims; they fight back; and they survive as businesswomen or as players of the system. But they are also subjected, repeatedly, to violence and abuse, and in both sets of books, you shift from being a horrified or sympathetic reader to being an active voyeur.

These are not women superheroines who’re easy to claim; for all their fighting skills, their ease with kongos or keyboards, they don’t inhabit the safe, sanitized world of Wonder Woman. Perhaps that’s why we can’t get enough of them—Modesty is still an icon, in a manner that book or comic book sales don’t explain, and Salander is shaping the imagination of the next generation. I wish Larsson and O’Donnell had had the chance to meet, to discuss their two complex, unforgettable characters—one a queen of crime, the other known simply as the Princess.

From the archives: The power of offence

(This is an old piece, written and published in August 2007. Posting it chiefly for my personal records.)


When an author, artist or a film-maker is attacked, the assumption most people make is that the assailants hate the person in question. This is not true.



Most assailants, whether they are bigots, religious fundamentalists, old-world conservatives or merely unemployed, have good reason to love the objects of their wrath. Without an M F Husain to offend their sensibilities, entire cadres of a certain political party would be out of business. Without a Taslima Nasreen, obscure Muslim clerics and little-known political organizations would never get their 15 minutes of fame.



The assault on Taslima Nasreen happened at a book launch in Hyderabad on 8 August, when three MLAs from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) disrupted the event by shouting threats and attempting to physically attack the author. This has been followed by a general baying for Nasreen's blood by Muslim clerics in Calcutta, the revival of a fatwa against her, and the offer of sums ranging from Rs 50,000 (for anyone who can blacken Nasreen's face) to Rs 1,00,000 and "unlimited", but unspecified, rewards for anyone who kills her.



Nasreen, who has been unsuccessfully seeking asylum in India ever since her writings provoked the wrath of religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh, has remained calm. Her tourist visa has just been reissued, allowing her to stay in this country for another six months, and she has announced that she is contemplating a sequel to Lajja, the book that turned her into a permanent exile.



Think of similar incidents of this nature--an assault on a filmmaker (the attack on Deepa Mehta, the recent disruption of a screening of Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace) or the banning of a book (Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses) and look at the manner in which we react in India.



The first reaction is a furious debate over the work itself. After sixty years of Independence, we are not yet comfortable, in our democracy, with the idea that freedom of speech is an absolute freedom, and that artistic freedom is essential. So our reactions, even "liberal" reactions, are nervous, often tentative. There's nothing wrong with Deepa Mehta's film on Hindu widows, but what if it provokes violence, how can we be responsible for that? Of course Salman Rushdie has the right to think freely as a novelist, but his work has after all offended religious sentiments, shouldn't he have been more responsible? Taslima Nasreen is free to suggest that religions oppress women and that the holy book of the faith she was born into is obsolete, but shouldn't she have expected strong reactions?



"Responsibility" is seen as an authorial function: few people see that those who may be offended have an equal responsibility, which is to set out their arguments in a way that at the very least, does not include physical violence.



All of this sends out a very strong message to writers and other creative artists: you are free to write whatever you want, provided you are willing to bear the consequences alone and unprotected by the might of the state.



The way we really feel about writers—our own and those who have come to a free, democratic country in search of shelter—can be seen in what we do not do. The people who make death threats are often powerful. They may be religious or political leaders who wield considerable force and influence. But they are also citizens of this country, and in theory at least, subject to the laws of this land. If you make a death threat in a public forum, you should be arrested. If you attack another citizen who has done you no physical harm, you should be arrested. If you threaten to hold an entire country to ransom by declaring that you will unleash violent mobs if a particular painting is not destroyed, if a particular book is not banned, if a particular author is not silenced, you and your mobs should be arrested as a danger to common citizens.



How often, in these sixty years of this independence that we pride ourselves on, have we seen the real culprits punished? How often, instead, have we effectively licensed and condoned the right of those whose "sentiments have been offended" to extract retribution?



The weakest argument, not from a moral but from a logical standpoint, is that of the religious fundamentalists—of any religion. If you believe as a matter of faith that a certain book is blasphemous, and therefore dangerous for the faithful to read, then you have a simple solution. Tell the faithful that they must not read it. If they are truly faithful, they will obey, and be saved from the perdition you fear for them. If they are not of the faith, or have lapsed in their faith, then to read a blasphemous book will only damn them a little bit further. That is really, as a mindful officer of the faith, none of your business—your only concern is to ensure the obedience of the faithful.



Leave the rest of us, writers and readers, alone.