What I learned from "The Patriarchy"

(Note: This blog doesn't do autobiographical posts as a rule, but perhaps this post could be considered a response to an ongoing conversation, the one started by Saba Dewan on Kafila.)

Reading Saba Dewan's post, on patriarchy and St Stephen's, was a release. For years, I had struggled to make sense of two contradictory things—my years at college were some of the happiest of my life, but the institution that was held up to us as one of the best in India was also built on a flawed and deeply discriminatory set of beliefs.

(It's hard to write about this in part because it always felt like complaining about what was, in essence, a very privileged life--those of us who went to St Stephen's were by definition lucky, in our acquisition of English, in our officially liberal families, in our assumption of a secure place in the hierarchies of power in India.)

St Stephen's in 1989 had many of the elements Saba Dewan describes. The chick charts had gone only slightly underground, but the unofficial college magazines were widely read and almost always singled out “loose” women for harsh, punitive treatment. The editors of Kooler Talk Spice, the unofficial Residence magazine, felt free to comment on women’s figures, attractiveness or perceived sluttiness in terms that were often viciously degrading. Women who protested were marked down as humourless and told that they couldn’t take a joke. This was as much part of the general atmosphere as was the knowledge that you would have to fend off sexual harassment if you took the bus. (NB: My thanks to Amitabh Dubey, who gently pointed out that Kooler Talk, the official college magazine, was not guilty of these crimes.)

When Barkha Dutt ran for college president, one of the more vociferous arguments against having a woman as President was a viciously circular line of reasoning: women weren’t part of the all-male Residence, the college hostel, and so a woman president wouldn’t be able to handle college issues 24/7. The fact that a woman wasn’t able to be on the college premises 24/7 because the college in question had made it impossible for her to stay on the premises was treated as irrelevant.

When several of us, including Barkha, asked Principal Hala why there was no hostel for women, we were told there was no room to build a hostel. Just a few years later, room was found, but the argument was revealing: St Stephens, which had room for some of the finest, most dedicated teachers, room for libraries and tennis courts and a shooting range, room for debate, ideas, engagement of all kinds, had, in the most literal sense, no room for women.

I don’t want to stop with the argument that my college was, in a fundamental and unexamined way, profoundly sexist—Saba has already made that point. Nor do I want to turn this into a rant about a college that in many ways I loved, then and now, even though its present principal seems to want to return to the bad old days by introducing 40 per cent reservation for men, because women are doing so much better than them that the men can’t get their coveted college seats without a little help from Principal Thampu. The fact that no Principal of the college felt the need to intervene when the gender ratios were skewed in the other direction, when the student body had over a 60-70 per cent male composition instead of a 60-70 per cent female composition, is revealing and tells its own story.

But what Stephen's taught me about the way patriarchies work was unexpectedly valuable, and perhaps that might be worth sharing.

Institutions that are deeply, profoundly unfair often do not look the way you expect them to; it may take some time to recognize that you’re living in an unjust system. Logical corollary: an unjust system often co-opts otherwise good, kind, ethical people. Nice people are also part of a functioning patriarchy.



(This is just as true of families as it is of institutions.) Stephen's had some wonderful teachers, inquiring students, and even its architecture—the open windows leading on to the gardens—spoke of open minds and inclusiveness. It was in many ways a fine college, with a tradition of respect for debate and discussion, and this made it harder to either see or believe the extent to which sexism was embedded into the system, to the point of refusing women in my generation an equal right to residence or to political representation in any meaningful way.



For me, in retrospect, this was useful—Stephen's may have been the first environment in which I encountered subtle discrimination that was woven into the system rather than made obvious. Nor was this a function of the times—JNU, in exactly the same era, was far more casually equal, far less insidiously patriarchal.



Patriarchal institutions are not necessarily unequal in other respects--as a friend pointed out, you can have a boy's club that is also staunchly not casteist or classist. But often enough the failure to address deeprooted gender bias can make it easier for an institution, even a highly respected one, to overlook other kinds of prejudice.

It shocks me in retrospect to see what we accepted as normal, part of the Delhi University way of doing things—the easy division of our classmates into the Yadavs and the Rajputs, the ‘harrys’—Biharis, with each group virtually voting in separate blocs. Given that so many members of our college were quite politically aware and capable of passionate engagement with, say, the Israel-Palestine issue or apartheid, the widespread acceptance that this was the way things worked is even more disquieting. (I was equally guilty of not examining this disconnect, being a quiet student, an armchair radical rather than any kind of real revolutionary. Coming from Calcutta, I ascribed this inexplicable set of divisions to the general barbarism of North India rather than looking more closely at what was going on under the surface.)


Looking back, what strikes me about the Stephen's experience are absences—the missing women from the Residence and from key leadership roles, the missing or absent Dalits, the near-complete absence of support or understanding for the few SC or ST students. I don’t think these divisions, of caste and more rarely of class, could have taken such deep root if the gender discrimination had not also existed. This is hardly a radical observation, but it may bear repeating—many kinds of prejudice flourish once you allow one kind of discrimination to take root in any institution.



As a corollary from the previous point—patriarchy in action is every bit as damaging to men as to women, trapping men into a constant and often exhausting struggle for power, and relies on a constant erasure of its own past in order to thrive.


Though our batch had joined Stephen's only five years after Saba Dewan’s batch, their history of protest had been wiped from the collective memory of the college by the time we joined. I often wonder how different all of our experiences of college would have been if the authorities had encouraged discussion, instead of erasing this history of dissent down the years as inconvenient.



There were two interesting lessons from the Stephens’ years—one was that joining an institution that was by definition for the privileged, in terms of language, class, opportunity, was no protection against discrimination. The other was that each generation of women, each generation of students who suffered discrimination because they were darker or came from a lower caste or were called “Chinks” because they came from the North-East, felt that they were the first to fight these battles, and so we all fought our battles from scratch, in small, personal ways. None of us built on a previous history.



There were some unexpected lessons, too. Whether we talked about it or not—mostly not, given that most discussions of ‘College’ centred around the mince at the café, the idyllic October days on the lawns—the experience seems to have changed many of my batch, in quiet ways. So many Stephanians from my generation went on to fight for equality in their own private and professional lives. Perhaps we did learn something after all, and perhaps many of us chose to reject the lessons of discrimination and to keep only the better parts of our education.



The institution may have been riddled with discrimination, and it may to this day carry the legacy of decades of patriarchy; but the institution was also made up of teachers and students. What many of the teachers at Stephen's, from Vijay Tankha and Arjun Mahey to Nandita Narain, tried to pass onto their students went counter to the official history.



They taught us to think for ourselves, and to always speak our truth; in their own, often fierce, battles with the administration, they tried to teach us that it is worth fighting for the right thing, even if no one else around you believes that you’re right.



Perhaps what Dewan has started with her piece on Kafila will lead to a reconstruction not just of Stephens’ history, but of all of our private histories. Once you start filling in the gaps and the silences, it becomes so much easier to see your history for what it really is.



A few months ago, Gloria Steinem said in response to an interview question about the role of feminism today that perhaps the real need for all of us was just to imagine what equality would look like. It’s actually a very challenging, difficult idea; if you don’t live in a world where the genders are equal, it’s hard to imagine equality into existence.



In an ideal world, the places where we grow up—cities, families; the places where we learn—schools, colleges, playgrounds; the places where we work and live would all answer Steinem’s question. This is where Stephen's, for all its other virtues, failed my generation of men and women: it did not allow us to imagine what true equality would feel like. Perhaps, in the twenty years that have passed since my generation was in college, things have changed enough to allow this generation to see and experience what we couldn’t.

Divide-and-rule: the DRM effect

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2012)

A ferry crossing on a quiet Goan river is the perfect time to contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of ebooks for an Indian reader. The advantages rest in my backpack, where the twenty or so books on the week’s reading list reside in my Kindle, part of a growing portable library.

Unless I drop the Kindle into the Calvim River, I could theoretically spend the next three months in Goa and never need to visit a bookshop. For readers like me, or for the average business traveler, the ability to carry around our libraries is a significant advantage.

So far, though, the ebook market in India has been as sleepy as the placid Goan backwaters, except for a relatively tiny number of early users. This is not for a lack of potential readership, or for lack of Internet access—retail giant Flipkart has proved, for instance, that a huge number of readers will buy books online if they are guaranteed safe delivery and enough choice.

Though the difference between the physical book and the book is often raised as a major deterrent, this hasn’t proved to be the case in equally sophisticated markets elsewhere. As the rise of ebook sales in countries from the UK to Canada, South Korea to China, demonstrates, the initial resistance to reading on a device melts away once readers discover the ease and convenience of ebooks.

A few purists lament the loss of beautiful typography and the feel of paper, but you only have to browse the average bookstore to see how few physical books are designed and printed with love. The mass-market paperback is not a thing of beauty; it is as functional as the average ebook, and as unlovely. But with ebook sales rivaling and sometimes exceeding paperback sales in many cases, the ebook versus paper rivalry has had unexpected consequences.

In an effort to underline the uniqueness of the physical book, many publishing houses have begun placing more emphasis on well-designed books—at least for the most prominent literary books on their list. It’s just a matter of a time before publishing houses start exploring the many—and unusual—possibilities of ebook design.

There are already creative sites out there--Booktrack, for instance, does editions of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez novels with sound effects, and some of the indie publishing houses are focusing on creative typography, understanding instinctively that the ebook also opens up possibilities that the plain printed page can’t match.

The market for Kindles and dedicated ebook readers is tiny in India—but the market for tablets such as the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, which double as excellent reading devices, is both sizeable and growing. The problem for the Indian reader is different: buying ebooks is an exercise in frustration, a return to the bad old days of socialism when everything you really wanted was tantalizingly displayed in the window of a shop to which you had no entry.

Most Indian publishers haven’t yet digitized their books—or haven’t digitized a significant percentage of their books, or don’t have an Amazon account—so most of the lost classics, drama, poetry, rare histories and biographies that you might want in ebook form are not available. Indian books in translation—which would make up the bulk of great Indian literature—are only sparsely available in ebook form from online retailers.

The global publishing industry’s insistence on DRM—digital rights management systems, which allow readers to access ebooks only in specific territory—has little impact on readers in the US or the UK. With large ebookstores and an ample selection, most US or UK readers have access to a far wider variety of books than do their counterparts in other territories, creating a kind of unofficial but deep-rooted system of digital inequality.

But for an Indian reader trying to buy ebooks legally, the reminder that you are part of a marketplace that carries over colonial inequalities is sharp. You will pay higher prices—given the dollar or pound exchange rate—in order to read some books. And because of DRM, even if you’re willing to pay higher prices, many ebooks will remain unavailable in India because of territorial copyright agreements.

Many of the arguments against DRM systems for ebooks have focused on the impractical nature of DRM. Because books, being essentially text files, are so much easier to pirate than other kinds of media, DRM is a barrier only for the law-abiding reader. The rest will switch to illegally downloaded books, benefitting neither author nor publisher.

But we rarely discuss the ways in which DRM continues to divide the world of books—and music, and films—into haves and have-nots. If you live in the First World, you are unlikely to realize how much greater your access is to world cinema and world literature, except for those writers who aren’t allowed in past the borders of Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If you live in the grey zone known as Elsewhere, you are unlikely to be allowed to forget how carelessly widespread the restrictions are on what you can read, and how much more you will be charged for the privilege of reading like a First-Worlder.

One might then argue that DRM functions as an unfair barrier. For readers and writers in many countries outside the West, the promise of ebooks was the promise of equal access—our writers could travel elsewhere, theirs could be read across borders. Instead, DRM sets up bristling electronic fences, dividing the world into territories of more and less privileged readers. Until these fences come down, the ebook market in India will remain a shriveled, bonsai version of what it could be.

I’m @twitter.com/nilanjanaroy

The Business Standard column: Lives, Unsanitised

(Published in the Business Standard, April 24, 2012)


Before the digital camera age, the venerable photo studios in most large Indian cities offered a tactful service for the recently bereaved.

Just as honeymooners were offered fake backgrounds—castle, Kashmir lake, eerily white Himalayas, portraits of the dead could be retouched to make the departed’s resemblance to a gargoyle less obvious. Mahatta’s, for instance, added a touch of actual paint to photographs to simulate rouge or lipstick; the paint slowly flaked off, gently ageing the dead as time passed.

One of the reasons why we have very little in the way of interesting contemporary Indian biographies of the famous stems from this need to garland the dead with metaphorical marigolds. The recent persecution of Peter Heehs, who has lived and worked in India for many years, for his biography of Sri Aurobindo, might be seen in this context.

His biography, a work of careful scholarship, is being attacked not because it is inaccurate, but because it interferes with the very Indian demand for a strictly sanitized version of the lives of the famous--as Heehs has said, his critics are “interested in establishing a Sri Aurobindo religion with themselves as popes, priests etc”.

There isn’t much point invoking Heehs’ right to free speech as a biographer—the right to independent, critical inquiry into the life of a public figure clashes with too many deep-rooted Indian beliefs. If you put two favourite North Indian admonishments together, they don’t leave much room for a cultural defence of free speech. Between “zubaan sambhal lo”—hold your tongue—and “aukat me raho”—stay within your bounds, it’s hard to argue that India today has a deep, abiding belief in the value of free speech.

This argument, extended, might also help us understand a fairly recent phenomenon: the persecution of scholars like Heehs, or before him, James Laine, Wendy Doniger and even journalists like Joseph Lelyveld, on the grounds of their foreignness. The crude argument leveled against Doniger and Laine was a racist one that ignored the accuracy of their research into either Hinduism or Shivaji’s life, in favour of the reductive argument that being foreigners, they could not possibly understand the subjects of their study.

When the Passport Office begins to examine the papers of a scholar like Heehs, to see whether he should be allowed to stay in a country where he has lived or worked for years, we’re back with the widespread belief that “outsiders” have no right to write about us. This is paralleled by the fear that “foreign” scholars will not respect the Indian need to enshrine and embalm either the dead, or the dead past.

Perhaps this is why so many arguments that are ostensibly over free speech issues lose their way in the murk, as one side invokes (Indian) culture and the other invokes a (Western) tradition of free speech. The defenders of free speech will always lose this version of the battle as these firangi principles are interrogated by the Indian thought control police.

But an issue that is often obscured is that Heehs and scholars like him are writing in exact accordance with the Indian tradition of biography and autobiography. In 2007, for instance, Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri published Bangal-nama, his memoirs—translated as The World In Our Time by HarperCollins recently. His memories of growing up in Barisal and Calcutta also include a thoughtful critique of Indian nationalism, and the slow erosion by which Muslims and the rural Indians stopped supporting or became invisible in the ranks of the Indian National Congress over time.

The freedom that Raychaudhuri accords himself when discussing national heroes or difficult subjects like bigotry is an old freedom. It can be seen, for instance, in Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s wonderful autobiography, In The Afternoon of Time, which in passing reveals that his sons, Amitabh and Ajitabh, were almost named Inquilab and Azad.

But it also includes a very amusing section on how the furore over his Madhushala poems grew to the point where he needed a certificate from Gandhi: “There’s no wine-glorifying in these verses!” said the Mahatma, rendering Bachchan’s poetry fit for mass consumption again. Nor does Bachchan hold back when it comes to describing his friend and fellow poet Nirala’s struggles with madness; he does this with compassion, but with the understanding that both biography and autobiography require truth, not elision.

The candour that Heehs and others like him claim is a very Indian quality, then. It can be seen in Mulk Raj Anand’s biography and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s letters, in the completely open letters and autobiography of Gandhi, and it might be glimpsed in Sri Aurobindo’s letters, too. “I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues,” Sri Aurobindo writes to his father-in-law. “I fear you must take me as I am with all my imperfections on my head.”

It’s excellent advice, especially to those who seek to embalm his life, garlanding him with dead marigolds.

Playlist for aspiring authors

Selling your manuscript:
You Gotta Have a Gimmick


The right agent and editor will help you prepare for the rigours of authorhood:
Let Me Entertain You

The media, on the other hand, suggests:
Be A Clown

Shocking readers is also good:
Anything Goes

…and remember, you’re only doing it for your art:
Zip

Success from the author’s perspective…:
When You’re Good To Mama

…and success from the publisher’s point of view:
Where Did We Go Right?

Bonus tracks:

What people think writing is about.

What your family thinks writing is about.

What you think writing is about.

What writing is really about.

Book review: The Man Within My Head

(Published in the Business Standard, April 2012)

BOOK REVIEW: The Heart of The Matter
The Man Within My Head
Pico Iyer
Penguin India,
Rs 499, 242 pages

There is nothing passive about the act of reading. It may seem mysterious that one writer exerts a powerful undertow on your life while another leaves not even a watermark impress, but there is nothing accidental about the choice a writer makes in his literary friendships.

In a hotel room in La Paz, Bolivia, a writer who has come here seeking a break from his desk begins to write, unstoppably. He writes about a boy in boarding school, left alone among a host of boys whose fathers have all just “vanished down the driveway”; his name is Greene.

“Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?” asks Iyer. And with this, he opens up a thoroughly original meditation into literary friendship—into the twinned faith and doubt he shared with Greene, into a world of fathers and sons, innocence and guilt. The Man Within My Head pays tribute, even in its title, to Greene, whose first book was a novel, The Man Within.Pico Iyer’s first book, published in 1984, was The Recovery of Innocence: Literary Glimpses of the American Soul.

These essays, now hard to locate, came out seven years before the death of Graham Greene, who had written in The Quiet American: “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

Neither Greene nor Iyer ever had that kind of innocence themselves, though they saw it and responded to it, sometimes helplessly, in others. In his travel writing, Iyer travels defiantly as a permanent outsider wherever he might be, rather than the all-knowing narrator who infests the travel magazines. “So long as I was loose in the world, unaccompanied, I was never bored or at a loss,” he writes.

Greene, unlike Iyer, was often a terrible traveler; “at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling”, he writes of Freetown, where he found life “pretty grim”. But Greene’s more flamboyant side does not alienate Iyer. He can discuss Greene’s many affairs and his drinking with interest, though he shares neither of these parallel and demanding occupations. Drawn to monasteries himself, Iyer’s broad curiosity would allow him to be amused by Greene’s plans to open a brothel in Bissau as a way of gathering espionage information. (Kim Philby, Greene’s boss, turned this down; it would not have been economically profitable.)

But the affinity—the very real kinship—between Iyer and Greene has deeper roots. “If you try to push him into a compartment,” Iyer writes of Greene, “you’ll always get it wrong.” He could be writing about himself; both writers have a complex relationship with faith, for instance, and neither can be easily straitjacked, either as the Catholic writer or as the monkish novelist. “You can’t read the books in terms of ideologies,” he tells us of Greene. In his own writing, he finds himself walking through Greenesland.

It took ten years for Iyer to write this book, and perhaps more; perhaps this goes back to his childhood, shaped at the kind of British schools that shaped Greene. This might be the closest that Iyer—most open and yet most reticent of writers—gets to writing his autobiography, which he does sidelong. Why is he drawn to Greene? Why not another writer? He knows and doesn’t know the answer to this, and he shares as much as he can with his wife, Hiroko.

“I couldn’t quite convey even to her how difficult it was at times to read The Quiet American: I’d pick up my worn orange copy with the pages beginning to separate from their binding, and I’d see a brash American reaching out for support, or Fowler calling the man he’s more or less condemned to death his “friend” (perhaps his only friend), or see him trying to petition his wife for a divorce and realizing, at the very end, that, as Teresa of Avila had it, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered, and I couldn’t say why it struck me with such force.

”When Iyer writes his essay about Greene, Sleeping With The Enemy, for Time magazine, his father leaves a message on his answering machine. As the father speaks, he is so moved that he begins to sob. “It was a shocking thing, to hear a man famous for his fluency and authority lose all words.” Some weeks later, Iyer’s father is dead; that “gasping call about Graham Greene” is the last memory the writer has of hearing from him.

The ideal father, he reflects, would be an adopted one, a virtual or a chosen father who could offer answers to the questions left behind, the ones that sons (and all children) never get to ask their parents in the end. Instead, Iyer has Graham Greene, the man with whom he shares his secrets, his sins, his most intimate needs. It is a closer relationship, this claimed kinship between a dead writer and a living one, than any other could be.

Lunch with the Business Standard: Amit Chaudhuri

Stepping into Larry’s China at the Ambassador is like stepping a decade back, into another city. Chosen in haste, out of expedience because of its proximity to the IIC, it turns out to be the right setting for Amit Chaudhuri. It could be a respectable Chinese restaurant from either Bombay in the 1990s or Calcutta in the early 2000s, both cities that the writer knows well.

Larry’s has the slightly shabby charm of an old friend who did less well than expected on the stock market. It's mellow, laidback, and Chaudhuri, relaxing into the comfortable chairs, confides that he intends to eat lightly. “Too much rich food,” he says. It’s a Delhi tradition, a way of testing visiting writers by force-feeding them a promiscuous range of Mughlai, Thai and whatever the fashionable cuisine of the day might be.

I suggest steamed rice, some light greens, perhaps a gentle soup. “Is the lobster good?” says Chaudhuri hopefully. He indicates that this is the menu’s fault, its old-school flourishes too tempting to resist.

We order the lobster in hot bean sauce, some greens sautéed in garlic and steamed rice. It is, in essence, a very Bengali summer meal—fish, rice, some barely wilted greens; the only thing we lack is spice, which arrives in the form of a fiery kimchi and a Cantonese bean sprout salad.

As with his books, the author shuttles between countries and cities, faithful to Bombay, where he grew up and where The Immortals, his most recent novel and St Cyril Road, a collection of poems, is set. Calcutta, where he was born and spends much of his adult life, is the background to A Strange And Sublime Address and Freedom Song. He can also claim the university towns of the UK, where he went to college and later taught, his days there colouring an early novel, Afternoon Raag. He compiled an anthology of writings on Calcutta in 2008, and is writing a book about the city, due in 2013.

As the lobster is served, Amit Chaudhuri talks about his disquiet over the systematic demolition of the old houses in South and North Calcutta, the vanishing landscape of a city he’s preserved in careful images in so many of his books. What gets to Chaudhuri, as it does to many Calcutta expatriates, is what he calls the easy middle-class disavowal of its own history.

“Preserving those houses is very low on the list of priorities of people who live in Calcutta,” he says, warming to his argument. “I wouldn’t want to hang on to those houses for some sense of heritage and nostalgia. In Europe, or South America, any culture which is aware not just of its past but of its modernity, any city which is doing creatively interesting things has preserved and used its recent past, like Berlin for instance.”

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s plans to preserve Calcutta’s heritage by painting the city blue might not, you suspect, cut much ice with Chaudhuri. “Calcutta is a relatively recent city, it comes into being out of nowhere, as many of these Indian colonial cities do, and then it accumulates all this history in a hundred years, and that history is not embodied in the monuments—I don’t take visitors to the Victoria Memorial or other monuments, but to the neighbourhoods where people live.”
The names roll off his tongue like beads on a rosary: Bokul Bagan, Khiddipore, Hindustan Park.

Chaudhuri’s resistance to nostalgia, and the way it shellacs the past, is deeply rooted. He’s just finished a short book on Rabindranath Tagore—it is impossible to discuss Calcutta and not Tagore, especially in the year after the writer’s 150th anniversary celebrations—which probably stands as an act of salvage as much as an act of criticism. It’s a rejection of the “sage-like” Tagore, he says.

The greens with burnt garlic are excellent, and with the discernment of the born critic, Chaudhuri zeroes in on the asparagus, marching it into a separate corral on his plate. He grew up in Bombay, distanced from the Bengali language but in a family which had “great secular reverence” for both Bengali and Tagore.

“Bijoya Chaudhuri—that’s my mother--and Shubina Roy, these two singers sang Tagore for me in a way that was distanced, detached, disinterested without an over-emphasis on the individual’s emotions or the emotions of the songs,” he says. The phone rings, on cue; it’s his mother on the line, as though his mention summoned her into existence.

“It is rare,” he continues. “This is what Tagore praises in the Bengali writer Kalidasa, when he contrasts Kalidasa with Shakespeare, accusing Shakespeare of being everything James Mill accuses Oriental writing of—of overwriting, being overblown, melodramatic, exhibitionistic.” This is Chaudhuri at his best, making the connections, joining the dots, helping readers to see a larger and more complex literary history than they might have imagined.

“And then Tagore praises Kalidasa for being oblique, indirect, for holding back—for having all those virtues in temperament, in writerly temperament, which traditionally nowadays we associate with Western writing.”

The problem with present-day criticism, chiefly in India but also perhaps in the West, is that it’s disconnected from any real sense of the past. This is an argument Chaudhuri’s been making for years—most powerfully through the writers he selected for his landmark Picador Anthology of Indian Literature—and he warms to it with the zeal of a man whose lobster has all the spice and depth that he feels the Indian literary landscape lacks.

“It’s as if every book comes out of nowhere—academics will not talk about Kolatkar, Ramanujan, Ezekiel, unless they become liberal causes. We are formed by a literary culture we don’t acknowledge, in English and in other Indian languages,” he says.

“And we will elide the fact that people like Tagore or Qurratulain Hyder may have been responding to Shelley or Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf—a network of reading and cross-fertilisation which have formed us over the last 200 years. There is no genealogy for anything.”

To round out the meal, I ask about the literary world in the UK, which Chaudhuri knows well—he was, for instance, a Booker judge, a task which he performed conscientiously though with his habitual skepticism about literary institutions.

“This meagerness is also now part of British publishing,” he says, turning down dessert with admirable firmness. “In the domain of Thatcherite and Blairite Britain, the changes brought about to BBC 1, BBC 4, the books pages were shrinking, dumbed down. The Booker Prize changed in complexion from a literary to a popular prize, with comedians and chefs judging the prize, Waterstones became more and more of a warehouse. But there are cracks in this smooth surface, and voices from the cracks are still audible.”

We manage to persuade Chaudhuri to have just two pieces more of the lobster. This also allows me to ask him about changes in his fiction over the years. “The early novels were about the sheer pleasure of a certain kind of interruption in life,” he says.

“Then with A New World, I was interested in this new generation, who have a sense of entitlement, who have been brought up to slip into a future patriarchal role, a role of power, and then find themselves at a loose end. Then the theme of power, the market began to interest me. To some extent, The Immortals was about what happens when a traditional person wants to adapt and reinvent themselves for the marketplace.”

Though we’ve said no to dessert, Larry’s China brings out fortune cookies with a flourish—an old-fashioned coda to a very pleasant, old-world meal. Mine is dour: “Everyone has ambitions but you work to make yours happen.” Chaudhuri’s is more dashing. “Getting together with old friends brings new adventures.”

He looks so pleased as we leave the restaurant for the early summer warmth of Delhi’s streets that I decide not to tell him the New Yorker story about Donald Lau, fortune-cookie writer. After years of writing thousands of fortunes (“think in ten-word sentences,” Mr Lau advised newcomers), the inevitable happened. There are only so many times one person can generate gems like “True gold never fears the fire,” and eleven years after he began, Mr Lau retired, suffering from writer’s block.

Chaudhuri, wiser in the ways of channeling his creativity, interspersing his novels with criticism, poetry and anthologies, is unlikely to suffer the same fate.

The Books Column: A charpai of her own-Ismat Chughtai

(Published in the Business Standard, April 2012.)


What would you do if you were a young Indian woman reader looking for inspiration in the lives of other writers? Would you look to Jane Austen, trapped in a tiny corner of the English countryside, using her wit to create epics on two inches of ivory? To Annie Proulx, who only began writing once she had hacked her way through journalism, domesticity, the baggage of two marriages?
Saadat Hasan Manto’s tribute to his fellow Urdu writer and old friend Ismat Chughtai, offered a glimpse of a third way. This is Manto’s description of Ismat at work:

“Ismat had this habit of chewing ice. She would hold a piece in her hand and crunch on it noisily. She would be lying down on the charpai supported by her elbow, with her notebook open before her on the pillow. She would hold a fountain pen in one hand and a chunk of ice in the other. The radio would go on blaring, but Ismat’s pen would race along on the paper with a gentle rustle as her teeth smashed the ice to pieces.”

Over time, the “gentle rustle” of the pen on the paper would give way to a steady flow—Ismat would write “not caring about her spelling or the use of diacritical marks”, or anything except the need to capture the quicksilver images in her mind. But what struck me was the space that Ismat occupied—small but absolute, a charpai of her own, in answer to Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman writer must have a room of her own.

The 14 chapters collected in Ismat’s memoirs Kaghazi hai Pairahan span several decades of her life, but were published between 1979 to 1980. In his introduction to this first translation of her memoirs into English, A Life in Words (Penguin Classics), M Asaduddin quotes Chughtai’s note to her editor: “I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time… The sequence might be worked out while editing them.”

This is so different from the way Mulk Raj Anand or Harivansh Rai Bachchan, for instance, wrote their memoirs—Ismat had her charpoy and her ice, but she also had a household, a husband, a baby daughter, visitors, the ring of the doorbell, to answer to.
In these memoirs, she pins down her recollections at speed, writing extensively about her childhood, her memories of Aligarh and her student years, but leaves large, apparently inexplicable omissions.

There is little mention of her marriage, for example, except a brief aside to record her husband’s disapproval when Chughtai faced an obscenity trial over her celebrated short story, Lihaaf. Nor is there—in these memoirs—much of an account of her literary friendship with Manto, though the two writers had overlapping lives. Perhaps this was reticence; or perhaps Chughtai was driven by the necessity of capturing what was distanced or lost—her childhood, old familial relationships—rather than the warp and weft of her everyday life.

But despite the omissions, these fragmentary chapters add up to a powerful narrative. Chughtai, among the most feminist of contemporary writers, belonged to the broad church of feminism whose members were driven by an intolerance of any kind of injustice. Why, she asks after the recitation of a marsiya at the masjid, did the protagonist have to shoot an arrow into a baby’s throat? Why the throat, why not the arm? The violence, the unfairness of it, nags at her; the question will not leave her alone.

Chughtai had no tolerance for inequality in any area of her life. Her family paid lip service to the idea of equality: “But in practice,” Chughtai observes, the acid sharp in her voice, “girls and boys were equal in the same way as Hindus and Muslims were brothers.” Later, she writes: “Purdah had already been imposed upon me, but my tongue was an unsheathed sword.” She claimed all spaces for herself in her writings, reveling in her descriptions of the domestic world even as she fought for the right to be educated, telling her family that she would run away to the mission school and become a Christian if they couldn’t support her ambitions.

And always, she retained the capacity to surprise, as she reminds us on every page of this memoir. “Whenever I entered the library, I would feel intoxicated,” she writes. “For hours together I would turn the pages of books and inhale their odour.” This is the kind of tribute you expect a writer to pay to the idea of books and reading, but Chughtai continues: “Chinese and Russian books used a kind of glue that smelt like stale meat, which was nauseating.”

This is what reading Ismat Chughtai’s memoirs—and her fiction—is like. The starting point is reassuringly familiar, and then comes the unexpected swerve, the push into completely alien territory. Nothing in her world is entirely safe, especially on close examination, which is probably why we still read her.