The BS Column: P Lal and Writers Workshop

(Published in the Business Standard, 9 November 2010)








In the homes of Indian writers of a certain generation, there’ll always be the Writers Workshop shelf, given over to hand-bound books, the cloth borders taken from Orissa saris, the title often hand-calligraphed. You don’t find them in bookstores that often these days, but there was a time when Writers Workshop represented, in effect, the sum total of the aspirations of Indians writing in English.

Professor P Lal, the man behind Writers Workshop, and perhaps the last of the dying breed of “gentleman publishers”, died this weekend at the age of 81 in Calcutta, where he had lived and worked most of his life. In the fifty years since he had started Writers Workshop, Indian publishing had changed beyond recognition. There were now a multitude of publishing houses, literary festivals, book launches—all the infrastructure that was missing when he and a group of friends began Writers Workshop.

“The reason I went into publishing is simple – nobody was around, in 1958, to publish me. So I published myself. Half a dozen others – friends – also found this expedient attractive. So we formed a group, a nice consanguineous côterie. We wrote prefaces to each other’s books, pointing out excellences, and performed similar familial kindnesses in other ways as well. We believed, with Helen Gardner, that criticism should flash the torch, not wield the sceptre,” he wrote of its beginnings.

The “half-a-dozen others” included Sasthibrata Chakravarthi and Anita Desai—but from the start, WW would aim to encourage those who were not destined to become famous, opening its doors to major and minor talent. AK Ramanujan, Vikram Seth, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Agha Shahid Ali, Keki Daruwalla, Mani Nair, the enigmatic Lawrence Bantleman and a score of Indian poets would find their first moorings within the elegant covers so carefully crafted by P Lal’s endeavour—but so would hundreds of other now-forgotten writers.

On a personal note, I might add that one of their youngest members was my sister, who had written a precocious short story at the age of 12, and who for years was made welcome at their meetings. Chai would be ordered—“and a coke for Baby”—and while she never took up writing, she remembers the warmth and acceptance P Lal and his circle handed out to everyone who happened to stray within its borders.

As Indian publishing came of age, the importance and necessity of Writers Workshop began to diminish. The space that P Lal and his friends had created in 1958 was crucial—both in terms of establishing a publishing house for writers, and setting down the importance of Indian writing in English. One of the first controversies that erupted was the attack on Indian poetry in English by Buddhadev Bose, and then by Bose’s son-in-law, Jyotirmaya Datta. The latter wrote an essay, “Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Poets”, that P Lal responded to—with his usual spirited but gentle liveliness—and in many ways, these attacks offered a meeting point for those who were just beginning to write in English, using it as an Indian, not an alien, language.

P Lal was also a writer, poet and academic, but he will perhaps be best remembered for his magisterial translation of the Mahabharata—perhaps the most complete rendering of the epic available. It was typical of him that he would hold a weekly reading, every Sunday, open to all, from 1999 onwards, in honour of the grand oral tradition of the epic. So many of us, writers and readers in Calcutta, attended those sessions, discovering a community and a fellowship long before there was the season of book launches.

The impact of Writers Workshop cannot be measured by its 3,000-odd titles, or by the influence it once wielded as a publishing house. It was, like Clearinghouse in Bombay, a literary movement, fuelled by the agile mind and precise labours of P Lal. In my copies of the books produced by Writers Workshop, there was always this, in calligraphy: “Layout and lettering by P Lal with a Sheaffer calligraphy pen. Embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-boundby Tulamiah Mohiuddin with handloom sari cloth woven and designed in India, to provide visual beauty and the intimate texture of book-feel.”

Few publishers today, however brilliant their lists of authors, have that kind of passion, P Lal’s celebration of “book-feel”, and his insistence that literature was a large, rambling house, its rooms broad enough to accommodate all, however modest or stellar their individual talents.

The BS Column: The sofa-cum-bed conundrum

(This was first published in the Business Standard, 2nd November, 2010)










In the 13 years since Arundhati Roy wrote and won the Booker Prize for God of Small Things, her position in the pantheon of small goddesses has shifted and changed radically.

She and Salman Rushdie were, for a while, part of the India Shining story. Middle-class India chose not to engage with the content of their work—Rushdie’s obsession with restoring a certain view of history, his insistence on the freedom to question faith, Arundhati’s early and constant need to rock the boat, to ask inconvenient questions of the Indian state.

These obsessions, which lay at the core of their work, were edited out for many in India; they were just Booker winners, the equivalent of the Indian beauty queens who walked away with Ms Universe titles and “made us proud” on a global stage.

Rushdie has always been a writer; Midnight’s Children was followed by 14 books, including novels, essays and short stories. Roy, who had once remarked that being called a writer-activist was like being called a sofa-cum-bed, yielded to her more polemical side.

In the decade that followed God of Small Things, she was rumoured to be at work on a second novel, but what she produced was a series of broadsides. They were passionate but often solipsistic pieces, and the argument for her increasing irrelevance as an opinion-maker or analyst has grown in force over the years.

Over the last week, what we’ve seen is a curiously Indian tamasha, where the sense of being caught in a poorly-scripted television drama is inescapable. Arundhati Roy makes a statement about Kashmir that echoes views she has earlier put forward, and views (the state has “never been an integral part of India”) that have been articulated elsewhere, by others.

The BJP, for its own politically motivated reasons, and a TV channel, for the sake of driving up TRP points, jumps on the writer; there is much reference to sedition laws; her home in Chanakya Puri witnesses staged protests by the BJP’s Mahila Morcha wing, where the TV cameras are invited in advance to capture this spontaneous outpouring of public wrath. This isn’t farce—it’s parody.

But there is one point to be made, and it’s the question that often comes up in TV debates—about Rohinton Mistry, about Salman Rushdie, about Taslima Nasreen and about Arundhati Roy. Someone always asks, “Shouldn’t writers be more responsible?” or there’s a suggestion, as was often made during this recent affair, that writers should stick to their writing—no sofa-bed confusion for us.

This is actually a very new idea in modern-day India. The British came up with this argument often, and used it—unsuccessfully--against Bankimchandra, Michael Madhushudan Dutt and other young firebrands, who ignored the suggestion that writers should stick to literature and leave politics out of it. Politics and the political situation of India fuelled their writing, and banned or not, they continued to write about indigo plantations, the cruelty of British rule and the inequities of language. You might add Lokmanya Tilak and Veer Savarkar to the list of those who faced sedition laws, just as an indication of how bad laws make strange bedfellows.

In more recent times, few writers maintained a division between their politically engaged selves and their literary selves. If they had, we would never have seen a Faiz, or a Saadat Hasan Manto, or a Nayantara Sahgal, whose novels chronicled the shifting political landscape of an emerging nation. Perhaps the most towering example of this today is Mahasweta Debi, whose journalism has marched side by side with her stories—it is impossible to extricate the activist from the writer, because they are both the same person, and one couldn’t survive without the other.

Arundhati Roy is not in the same league as Mahasweta Debi. But consider the roots of her engagement, and consider God of Small Things; that early novel was also about caste wars, about women’s financial and legal rights, and about the fragmenting and forgetting of history. Everything she has done since then, from her reportage of the Narmada Dam to her travels with the Maoists and her exploration of Kashmir, is consistent; she may be a very naïve interlocutor of India, and you may disagree with her analyses, as many do, or be tired of her simplifications, as many are, but you cannot doubt the intensity of her engagement.

Writers are, in the end, also citizens. The best writers in every age have also been deeply engaged citizens, and to ask, as we are now doing in India, for writers to stick to their writing is a little like asking investigative journalists to stick to their knitting. What we’re really asking, when we pose the question of a writer’s responsibility, is for writing to be like bonsai-growing, or ikebana: a strictly ornamental occupation that challenges nothing, shakes up nothing. That is not how our writers have worked in the past, and it’s not how they can continue to work in the future.

Criticising the media--Mitali Saran's column

(I've written for Business Standard for over 15 years now, and never in that time been asked to censor my opinions. The only column they couldn't carry was one on the Ambani book, Polyester Prince, because the matter was sub-judice and we couldn't legally comment on it at the time.
It was very distressing, then, to hear that the newspaper wouldn't carry Mitali Saran's column on the India Today plagiarism issue, on the grounds that it was too dated to run. Mitali, who blogs at Stet, has since withdrawn her column from the paper. Here's the link to her blog, the column, and some background.)

From Stet, by Mitali Saran:

The case of the missing attribution*
*This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below:

"Amongst other crimes such as those listed in the Press Council of India report which nobody in the media wants to talk about, is rampant plagiarism. Nobody in the media wants to talk about that either. It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses."

Update November 2, 2010: Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard....

The BS Column: The marketplace of outrage

(I'm running behind on blog updates--my apologies. This was published on 26th October in the Business Standard. This is part of a series of articles and columns I've been writing over the last ten years on censorship and free speech issues--I wish the politics of this country hadn't made that archive necessary.)





“What we have developed today is a marketplace of outrage. And if you And if you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, 'My feelings are more hurt than yours'."~ Monica Ali, author of ‘Brick Lane’.

In recent weeks, we witnessed the Shiv Sena attack on Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, which resulted in the book being burned outside Mumbai University and then withdrawn from the syllabus.

What was instructive weren’t the well-worn, shabby arguments in favour of the ban, arguments that sought to portray one of the great Bombay novels as an “obscene” book that was against dabbawallahs, the Marathi manoos, Indira Gandhi and the Sena, not necessarily in that order. Instead, it was the alacrity with which politicians of different parties brushed aside concerns over free expression in India, and their willingness to support book bans in general, that was fascinating. Perhaps one way to understand the thriving dhanda in today’s marketplace of outrage is to trace the evolution of book bans in the country through some of the most significant ones.

Rama Retold, Aubrey Menen, banned in 1956: Now almost forgotten, Aubrey Menen was at one time something of a standard-bearer for his generation, known for the elegance of his mind and his somewhat baroque work. Rama Retold was a deconstruction of the Ramayana, told with Menen’s trademark refusal to respect pedestals and the icons that stood on them. In the 1950s, this became one of the first books to be banned by the Indian government on the grounds that it might offend religious sensibilities—opening the door to future displays of competitive intolerance.

Nine Hours to Rama, Stanley Wolpert, banned in 1962: Wolpert’s analysis of Gandhi’s assassination had nothing to do with the Ramayana—it was his research into the gaps in the security arrangements surrounding the Mahatma, and the suggestion of conspiracy theories, that attracted the state’s censorship. This set a second, and equally dangerous, precedent, allowing the state to consider banning books that might deliver inconvenient insinuations about any ruling government.

Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, banned in 1988: Rushdie’s Verses is perhaps the most controversial book of our times. India was the first country in the world to ban the Verses, a ban that was propelled by the fear of a strong Islamic reaction against what was seen as blasphemy. Rushdie has often argued for the right—and the necessity—of authors to explore all subjects, including faith, and the right of authors to be, if necessary, blasphemous.

The result of banning Satanic Verses was direct and disastrous—it encouraged political parties and religious groups of all stamps to play the “competitive intolerance” game. Once it had been established that offending religious sensibilities may be cause for a book ban, anyone who wants to shut down inconvenient ideas or lines of inquiry into any faith can demand a ban by insisting that their sensibilities are offended.

Shivaji, by James Laine, banned by the Maharashtra government in 2004: Laine’s work on Shivaji sourced gossip about the Marathi icon’s parentage and origins, fuelling a rampage against the BORI library in Pune by Sambhaji Sena activists. What is most telling about this particular book ban is the way in which Laine’s scholarship and willingness to examine the complex myths around a historical figure have been reduced to gross simplicities.

Laine’s work may have been flawed—some scholars have argued this point—but in the popular imagination, his Shivaji book is the “book that insulted Shivaji”, written by a “foreigner and outsider”. The only way to keep a book on a banned-books list is to do precisely this—rob it of its complexity, and drop it down a memory hole. Few now remember that the real issue at stake was the far more complex issue of how we choose to remember our histories, and who gets to be the custodian of these histories.

Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry, not banned but withdrawn from a university syllabus, 2010: There are two lessons to be drawn from this particular case. One is that book bans have become an almost symbolic ritual—the burning of books, once a powerfully frightening image, now reduced to parody, the conjuring up of protestors just a demonstration of political muscle, not genuine outrage. The other is that in the marketplace of outrage, bribery and force work if you want to orchestrate a book ban, or subvert a university.

In all of this, as one book after another drops into an Orwellian memory hole, what we’re losing is the power to insist that we have a right to read, and to think for ourselves. Each successive ban creates a demand for the manufacturing of more ersatz outrage. What we need is a freemarket of ideas, not the thriving marketplace of outrage that’s set up shop in India today.

PEN India statement on Rohinton Mistry and Such a Long Journey

(My apologies, this should have been posted earlier; I'm travelling at present.)

PEN Statement on Rohinton Mistry Ban

THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE

20 October 2010


Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The PEN All-India Centre strongly condemns the removal of Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Such A Long Journey, from the SYBA syllabus of the University of Mumbai’s Literature course. We also express our great disappointment at the manner in which politicians belonging to the supposedly centrist and liberal parties, including the Indian National Congress, have consented to this ban, demanded by the scion of a right-wing political party, the Shiv Sena.
...


India has lapsed into the worst kind of competitive populism, with political forces seeking to outdo one another in destroying and banning works of literature, art, theatre and cinema, in the name of an aggrieved religious, ethnic or regional sensibility. Not only does this constitute a betrayal of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that ushered India into postcolonial freedom, but it also makes nonsense of our claim to being a 21st-century society, marked by openness, tolerance of diversity, and respect for the creative imagination.

There is only one name for a society that bans and burns books, tears down paintings, attacks cinema halls, and disrupts theatre performances under the sign of an aggressive chauvinism. ‘Fascist’ is too gentle a description. The exact name is ‘Nazi’. It is a matter of extreme sorrow that Mumbai in 2010 is exactly what Munich and Berlin were in 1935. It is for civil society in our city to decide whether we want to plunge deeper into the abyss of Nazi-style obscurantism, dictatorial oppression and a savage destructiveness towards every impulse that is open, receptive, creative and compassionate -- or whether we shall resist it.


Ranjit Hoskote
Naresh Fernandes
Jerry Pinto
For The Executive Committee
THE PEN ALL-INDIA CENTRE


More links:

The Shiv Sena explains its position via invective. (Suggesting that Rohinton Mistry is a nobody wanting to be a somebody gives you some idea of that party's levels of ignorance):

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-debate/Shiv-Sena-professes-moral-censorship/articleshow/6790779.cms

PEN Canada backs Mistry, asks Mumbai University to reinstate Such a Long Journey on the syllabus: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/10/21/pen-mistry.html

The BS column: Rohinton and the Rat Pack

(Published in the Business Standard, October 17, 2010. This was written before The Buck Stops Here show on Rohinton Mistry and the withdrawal of his book from the Mumbai university syllabus.)













“That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by –” Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life.





In the city of Mumbai, once upon a time, there lived many storytellers. Some came from the slums, and wrote angry, anguished, beautiful poetry about their lives. Some collected memories of Mumbai with loving care, and set down tales that featured the stories of the real Marathi Manoos, the ones who were Hindu but also Anglo-Indian or had names like Sinai and Pereira.

Some wrote of Firozesha Baag, chronicling the dying world of the Parsis, of ordinary men like Gustad Noble, stumbling from the tribulations of his quiet life into a larger conspiracy involving the corruption of the state, the venality and violence of its political parties. It must be remembered that at this time, Mumbai was also known as Bombay, and Bombay was a city that welcomed kahanis, opening its arms to stories and to story-tellers. Some of the best found an ocean of seas of stories here: a young man who worked in advertising called Salman Rushdie, two men who knew the slums intimately, Kiran Nagarkar and Namdeo Dhasal, a banker called Rohinton Mistry who returned to literature in Toronto, remembering and etching the Bombay he had loved so much.

Salman Rushdie spent years in darkness, at the hands of a villain much like the Khattam-Shud he wrote about in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There were many other Khattam-Shuds in India, men who preferred “chup” to “gup”, and since Rushdie had been unwise enough to write about religion, Islam and the Koran in a book called Satanic Verses, they placed his book under a seal of the blackest silence for 23 years.
Many argued that religion should not be beyond question, and that the point of a novel was that it was made up, and that perhaps those who didn’t want to read Rushdie’s ideas might want to stop buying and burning copies of the book and just tell all their friends not to read it. But a ban hung like a shroud over Satanic Verses, and in a very strange coincidence, few great novels about controversial religious matters have come out of India in the last 23 years. This is, of course, just a coincidence, brought about by the P2C2E described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories—a Process Too Complicated To Explain.

Meanwhile, Mumbai was changing too, and becoming a city of Rats, fearsome creatures with whiskers that sniffed out the merest hint of offence, and great sharp teeth called censorship laws, and the thing about Rats is that they were very good about calling up bands of fellow Rats at need. The Rats felt strongly about the Marathi Manoos, a mythical and apparently endangered species that was threatened in Mumbai by anything that was neither pure Maharashtrian nor a Rat. The Rats felt strongly about anything that was against the spirit of their ancient culture, which is to say anything that criticized Rattery in general and Ratty politics in particular. The Rats felt very, very strongly about books that were freely available, in bookshops or in local universities, that caused offence to Rattishness.

The second thing about Rats is that they are very slow readers. Someone needs to bring a King Rat, or a Crown Prince Rat, a book worthy of burning before he will turn its pages, and the vision of Rats is such that they can only see what offends them. And so, twenty years after Mistry first set down the tale of Gustad Noble, and after it had been not just acclaimed by critics, but loved by non-Rats everywhere, a young Rat read the book. And he was shocked to discover that it offended his sensibilities, by casting aspersions on Rattish behaviour (such as corruption and mob violence and other forms of Rattery), and that it offended particular political parties. It happened to be his political party, but he explained that Political Parties, like Rats, needed to stand together against anything that might be Offensive, such as books that made people question the conduct of Political Parties known for their tendency to rule by thuggery. (Or Thuggeries, since there were three of them, a big Thuggery, a medium Thuggery and a little Thuggerish.)

It caused the Rats the greatest offence of all to discover that Such a Long Journey was being taught in Mumbai University—which, however, had a fellow Rat at its helm. It was the easiest thing in the world to organize a book-burning session followed by a book-banning session, and the niceties observed, the Rats went back to their holes.
They left us with a question, though, as Rohinton Mistry becomes the latest in a long line of authors to experience Rat censure and censorship. If Bombay turns into Rattistan, what will happen to its story-tellers? Will they leave, hustled out of the city by Rat stormtroopers? Will they end up with books written in Rattish, a new language for books that contain only blank pages, and three words: “Don’t cause offence.”

Copy, Paste: The India Today plagiarism case

The India Today plagiarism case makes me think of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika library system, also known as Shaktida.

Shakti Roy was the unacknowledged genius who ran the group's archives for years, long before the Internets made it easy to Google everything under the sun. He had the mind of a superior search engine; if two people, one working on the Society pages and one working on the Stockmarket pages, asked for information on, say, Ratan Tata, they'd get superbly filtered results. And his memory was phenomenal. Any young journalist foolish enough to attempt to "recycle" copy, recycling being the euphemism for plagiarism in those days, would receive a package from Shakti da containing a printout of his story, and the stories he or she had been "inspired" from. No other comment was necessary.

Here's what happened with India Today. Aroon Purie, who writes the note from the Editor-in-Chief, was faced with a split edition; India Today was covering Rajnikanth in the South, Omar Abdullah in the North. His piece on Rajnikanth more or less reproduced the first two paragraphs of this much-discussed Slate article on the film star verbatim:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267820/

"Jackie Chan is the highest-paid actor in Asia, and that makes sense. Besides producing, directing, and starring in his own action movies since 1980, he's earned millions in Hollywood with blockbusters like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid. But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn't make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986. This is Rajinikanth, and he is no mere actor—he is a force of nature. If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth. Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, "SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!"

If you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before, you will on Oct. 1, when his movie Enthiran (The Robot) opens around the world. It's the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It's getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously. Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix) did the action, Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park) did creature designs, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic did the effects, and Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) wrote the music. It's a massive investment, but the producers fully expect to recoup that, because this isn't just some film they're releasing; this is a Rajinikanth film."

Aroon Purie claimed jetlag as an excuse, in an ungracious apology that didn't mention either Slate or Grady Hendrix, the author of the Rajnikanth piece.

The apology is... illuminating. We have a senior editor explaining that he doesn't write his own editorials, and skating lightly over the tiny detail of how those "inputs" found their way into the main copy. We also have a situation where one of the country's best-known magazines apparently doesn't have a copy desk, or at least not a desk that could either recognise the lift (the Slate piece was widely discussed on the Net), or red-flag lines that explain who Rajnikanth is and speak of the "Indian state of Tamil Nadu"--in an edition that goes out to South India.

But most of all, that apology and India Today's reaction lacks grace. Slate got ripped off, without acknowledgement; Grady Hendrix, who wrote those lines, must have been surprised to see them under a different byline. Journalism is often written at high speed, to unrealistic deadlines, and anyone who researches their 600-word pieces will have, at some stage, made use of the files. But plagiarism in India isn't seen as a major crime--as a major embarrassment, yes, but there is little understanding of how the person who's been ripped off might feel. (I remember a journalist from a major newspaper complaining that I'd complained when he stole all but one paragraph of one of my columns. He felt it was unfair that he got yelled at by his editor for "paying tribute". It was only when I explained that I'd prefer to replace the term "paying tribute" with "stole my work" that he backed down.)

Grady Hendrix reacted with amusement: "I’ve just emailed India Today offering my services. Instead of having to do all this tedious cutting and pasting themselves, I suggested that I could just write for them directly. I’ve promised them to charge a reasonable rate, and assured them that I will never steal copy from Mr. Purie and print it under my own name in revenge."

Now that's grace.

And a little more from Mr Hendrix here (scroll down in the comments section):
"I'm the guy who wrote the Slate article, and someone forwarded me a link here to check out the preview of the apology. India Today has refused to respond to emails from myself and Slate, but I'm glad they're going to apologize. It must be very difficult for the staff of India Today that when Mr. Purie gets "jet-lagged" he steals things. I would imagine that whenever they see their boss yawning, or looking sleepy, all of his employees must frantically lock up their laptops and hide their wallets lest he lifts them."