president blink-blink

where are the greeks among you?

2011-12-24T15:15:00.005+05:00

Draw your lots and enter.

It's been a small year in many ways. It's been a year of bylines and second dates, brief meetings with old friends and a slow accumulation of new ones. For the first time this year more people asked me, "When are you writing a book?" than "When are you getting married?," a fact that becomes almost totally irrelevant when you count the number of days I spent at literature festivals versus the number of days I spent at my ancestral home in Kerala.

I have provided no proof of life here in spite of the fact that I am not writing a book. I'm not sure if I don't want to write a book at all, or whether I'm deathly afraid of what it's going to be about. In either case, the complementary truth is that this year I have really enjoyed being a journalist. If I had updated this blog at all, it is too likely that I would have been re-posting something I had written for the paper.

In case anyone is still reading this, let's write it off. I'll add them to the archive at some point. In their place, here is a short round-up of the things that went into the making of 2011.

Books
As with 2010, I read a lot, both on and off the job, although perhaps not as much as last year. Looking through those book blog entries from '10, I find myself missing the excitement of spontaneous and informal criticism. I've reviewed some books in the paper this year, (mostly) plugging in for when I couldn't find a real critic for the books pages. So much of that writing has been a learning process that I completely forgot the joy of keeping a book journal for the fun of it. It will be quite impossible for me to write such a thing AND continue to review in print, so I'm afraid there are no New Year's resolutions to be made there.

My favourite book published this year was probably Aman Sethi's A Free Man (link to my review). Aman did something that needed doing, in as much as any situation really needs a book written about it, and he did it brilliantly. I've thought a lot about long-form journalism and the trade-offs of fact and narrative. Aman's book created an emotional truth with a journalism of fact that was both pyrotechnic and intensely personal; these are two things I usually dislike in newspapers, but am growing to trust in longer stories. My favourite fiction was probably Hanan al-Shaykh's One Thousand and One Nights, a transcreation to adore and cherish.

The book I read this year that had the greatest impact on me was Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon's One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices, which was published in 2005 and thankfully hasn't gone out of print yet, in spite of humanity's general unworthiness. Adarkar produced my other favourite book of 2011, an anthology of multidisciplinary writing about chawls called Galleries of Life: The Chawls of Mumbai. One Hundred Years is a collection of oral histories from the workers, residents, artists and politicians of Bombay's mill district, by two writers who have worked closely with political and social movements in the area for years. It is careful, scrupulous and utterly absorbing. Parts of it are devastating and moving. And almost all of it (apparently closely translated and brilliantly introduced by none other than Rajnarayan Chandavarkar) is in the voice of the people who made it happen.

The worst book I read this year was probably Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. (I reviewed it but honestly can't be bothered). The author I read most was either Susan Elizabeth Phillips, who writes very good contemporary romance novels, usually involving golfers, or Loretta Chase, who writes brilliant Regency romances, which always involve the aristocracy: I offer my close attention to their work in spite of these repellent aspects as evidence of their genius.

Two books I read almost simultaneously were beautiful spins on classic European literature. Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia (2006, I think) is a novel about the woman who marries Aeneas in the final books of the Virgil, and has no speaking lines at all. Le Guin conducts a magnificent feminist rescue, a powerful meta-narrative to the Aeneid, and a mesmerising portrait of Italy before Rome. AS Byatt's The End of the Gods was a short, strange retelling of Norse myth that was in its own quiet way, almost as dazzling as Hanan al-Shaykh's book.

The two books I wanted to read most this year are Dave Zirin's The John Carlos Story and Jonathan Wilson's Brian Clough biography. I guess we'll talk about them next year.

Film
I will remember this year as the one in which I watched almost nothing except for action movies from Hong Kong. I could happily give up every other kind of film for the rest of my life, with the exception of Amar Akbar Anthony. I watched so much Chinese cinema that when I finally started to watch something else (the first season of the HBO series Rome, which I'd always meant to get around to) it took me a little while to adjust to all the white people. One of the things I want to do in 2012 is start to keep a movie log, which will allow me to reflect and marvel on everything I see at more length. This probably means I will have to rewatch all the Donnie Yen films I saw this year which, oh, okay, I won't COMPLAIN.

The worst film I watched this year was Rockstar, which was also in a weird, disturbing way, the most unforgettable.

Music
I listened to a lot of Hindi film music this year. There's a story there that will probably be out sometime early next year. The greatest soundtrack, without peer for me, was indubitably Rockstar, which was opaque on first listen and then resounded with meaning after the film was out. One of the few successes of the film was Imtiaz Ali's use of the music, and everything came together -- the situational nature of each song, the reason Rahman chose Mohit Chauhan to be the voice of the lead character, the background score. I kiss his hands and the hem of his robe. It's not his greatest work but it may be the best-used of any of his music in Hindi cinema in the last eight or nine years.

I went to NH7, briefly. For five beautiful hours it was like being a fish who had been thrown back into the water. I listened to a lot of old Hindi film music, maybe not co-incidentally in the year of the deaths of Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand, and began towards the end to rediscover the recordings of the Buena Vista Social Club. (A lot of this was the effect of reading Alma Guillermoprieto's painful but riveting memoir of her year teaching dance in Havana, Dancing with Cuba. I recommend the book.)

Cricket and football
The 'no time' effect was most impactful here. I shunned cricket after the World Cup for obvious reasons, but football has always been a more demanding interest. I wrote fitfully (VERY fitfully) at The Run of Play, my favourite website in the world. In spite of a busy year for Brian (among other things, his writing for Grantland has been excellent), he's been a great editor, and RoP will be a big reason to stay awake for the Euros.

In spite of this low-density year, some exciting things have happened. I wrote a cover story for the paper about the Mohun Bagan victory of 1911, which was a big deal for me. I participated in this podcast by New Books in Sports, (a big discovery for me -- seriously, look at that gloriousness) where I spoke to academic and broadcaster extraordinaire Bruce Berglund about favourite sports books*, and later discovered that I was followed, on the final tape, by Robert Lipsyte. (Brian: "Just another afternoon in the world.")

One of my RoP posts featured on Quickish's year end list of best sportswriting. And excitingly, Tom Dunmore has just put out a first anthology of pieces from the landmark Pitch Invasion website that he runs, and one of my World Cup blog posts from last year is in it! You can buy it in e- and paper formats, so have a look and think of someone to whom you want to gift a copy or fifteen. The Very Best of Pitch Invasion.

I wrote this a day after the World Cup victory.

* - I picked Beyond a Boundary and King of the World.

City
It's been a difficult year, and a sobering one. People are used to articulating extremes of optimism and pessimism about their cities, but neither have been appropriate to daily life in my hometown, for me. This year has been full of quieter reckonings with past and future. My interest is not in systemic narratives or predictions of the future: maybe that's because there seem to be so few people who can do those well, so there are few examples to follow. It has been a year of learning to wait, to think before asking questions, and -- perhaps this is a failure -- to refrain from answers.

So what have I been doing in Bombay? Commuting and writing, mostly. And how closely linked the two are: as the writer Teju Cole just said at the Goa literature festival, public transportation is the book of the city. Certainly. Over the year, trains, buses and footpaths have explained some things to me, and mystified some others. For the first time, I wrote regularly about life here: about Urdu newspapers and salt pans, safety for women, Mehboob Studios, the Opera House and the NCPA, Pali Hill and Lalbaug. A shoutout here to Abhijit Bhatlekar, my colleague who's taken many of the A+ photographs that have gone with some of the stories, and possibly my favourite city photographer MS Gopal, who runs Mumbai Paused and graciously agreed to take pictures for some of the others.

We had a briefer summer than usual, and a long and torrential monsoon, which I found delightful. I don't mind having given up winter for it. There is something very comforting about rain in Bombay, as long as you don't break a limb trying to evade it.

We also had a bombing on July 13. It's difficult to write about this in a public forum without inviting conversation -- which I don't want -- but I want to write about it because I hate the paralysis of muteness. Thinking about July 13 and days like it has the power to trigger an oppressively personal grief. I understand why people mock us for feeling bad about one day out of the year when we remember what it feels like to be relatively powerless. I understand the acceptance of that mockery as fairer payback than compassion, out of guilt. I understand that there is a way to dissolve mockery, too: to be honest about tragedy, to see more than just one of its dimensions, to be honest about the fact that a public history can be deeply private, and to ask for respect for its private dimensions. I understand that demanding visibility for grief is a symptom of guilt, and that it is good and human to acknowledge public grief when it is someone else's.

But that's not very comforting.

There are stories for these occasions. I wrote one the week after the attack. But to be totally honest, I don't see how journalism has the tools to tell these stories adequately. I don't think the coping mechanisms of fact -- of keeping records, of repeatedly asking 'How do you feel?', of listening patiently for the moment when the thread of a story emerges from a witness' testimony -- are sufficient. There are threads that it is not possible to grasp. And if journalism can't do it, how can literature? How can we impose the authority of a story on something that should not be one?

Days like this are an overloaded fuse. They explode in your eye. Isn't that what the bombers want? Doesn't that mean they win? Have they stopped winning if we stop remembering all the other tragedies that make up this one?

I feel like this is a question that I refuse to answer on every other day of the year, absorbed in the effort of moving away, out of the ambit of this terrible thing. On days like this there is nothing -- not even the sense of shame that there are other people who have to live with their bombing days, every day. Humility is for the Lalbaug day, the Borivali day, the Dadar footbridge day and the Mankhurd day and the 7:57 Churchgate fast day, when everything around you looks like an act of repair -- a patched-up neighbourhood, a patched-up set of limbs, a face or a story with its cracks papered over, when you see bravery and emptiness and think, if everyone else can, then I can too.

Those are the days of the year when you remember that you have work here. Maybe those are the days that I keep trying to roll over the bombing days, like a speed bump in a road that will eventually wear down. They say time heals. I suppose the bombing days are the days when you remember that you cannot outrun it. Not even in the 7.57.

My honest love and respect to those who lost people and property on July 13, and to those for whom every day has been, or will be, a kind of July 13.

Death
Of the raft of legendary old men who have been taken off to Valhalla (along with the few sacred and righteous old women, who were famous before famous women were invented, I guess) I will miss Ustad Sultan Khan the most. I wrote a very short note about him here.

The other person who meant the world to me was Christopher Logue. I will quote from his War Music.

King Agamemnon calls:

'Silent and still for Hector of the soaring war-cry,
The irreplaceable Trojan.'

Then hands removed his shield, his spear,
And all Greece saw his massive frame, historical
In his own time, a giant on the sand. Who said:

'Greek King: I speak for Ilium.
We have not burned you in your ships.
You have not taken Troy. Ten years have passed.

Therefore I say that we declare a truce,
And, having sworn before the depths of Heaven to keep our word,
Here, in God's name, between our multitudes,
I will fight any one of you to death.
And if I die,' (this said within an inch of where he will)
'My corpse belongs to Troy and to Andromache;
My body-bronze to him who takes my life;
And to you all, Helen, your property, who was no prisoner,
with her gold.

And if I live: my victim's plate shall hang
Between the columns of Apollo's porch on our Acropolis,
But you may bear his body to the coast
And crown it with a shaft before you sail
Home in your ships to your beloved land
With nothing more than what you brought to mine.

Pick your best man. Commit yourselves to him.
Be sure that I am big enough to kill him,
And that I cannot wait to see him die.
Then in their turn, faring from world to world across our sea,
Passengers who come after us will remark:
"That shaft was raised for one as brave and strong
As any man who came to fight at Troy,
Saving its Prince, Hector,
Superb on earth until our earth grows cold,
Who slaughtered him." Now who will that Greek be?'

Poetry
Thanks to Logue's death and a novel set during the Trojan War which I reviewed in October, I've tentatively started to re-read classical translations. I say tentatively because, like the books of Penelope Fitzgerald and the films of Wong Kar-wai, it is impossible for me to start a good translation of the Iliad without exposing myself to serious emotional upheaval. I'm currently (very slowly) reading Robert Fagles' translation of the Aeneid, which is a better than any translation of the Aeneid I've read before.

I also finally acquired Agha Shahid Ali's translations of Faiz, The Rebel's Silhouette, and read it from end to end. It as been a hundred years since Faiz was born and ten since Shahid passed away, but they both speak from these pages in living voices. In a different way, so does does Arun Kolatkar in the Collected Poems, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Kolatkar is a surefire cure for sentimentality and a massive igniter of literary doubt. His poetry gets better and better every year.

2012
We've just come out with a 'Slow Down' issue, so in keeping with the spirit I would like to sit down and make this next year a year of projects. I'm thinking: movie blog, or; Indian Blogger Looking At Jet Li Films. I'm thinking a year of re-reads. I already know one big re-read I'm going to effect, and hopefully that will be in the newspapers by and by, but as a personal project, I'm considering a Shakespeare re-read. The compelling reason both for and against this is that there is never a bad time to re-read Shakespeare. I'm thinking of doing more with music: writing more, attending more concerts, and maybe going back to learning. I would also like to write more about sports, and more stories in the MMR beyond the island city.

And justice for all.

And a worldwide theatrical release for The Grandmasters.

I'm on Twitter and Tumblr, same as always, so you know, hey girl. Have a happy new year.

the serrador express* rides again

2011-02-13T10:18:00.015+05:00

Hi friends. I did some reading this week, much to my own surprise. They comprised three Mills and Boon novels, one of which is the first written by an Indian novelist. The other two are set in Russia and a small town in Wyoming, USA respectively.

I know. There is really no polite reason for women like me to read novels we like to mock. Everyone knows romance novels are not written for radical feminazis like myself who want to smash heteronormative ideas of male-female relationships / are not written for secret tools of the patriarchy like myself who will take a Pulitzer-Prize-winning work of history about dead white men** far more seriously than I would a genre romance / are not written for strong, confident women with rich fulfilling inner personal and professional lives like myself / are not written for shallow emotionally unavailable young girls who have no romance in their lives like myself.

But I will advance my non-professional, non-serious opinion nonetheless, because I am not a hater - at least not today morning - and as I intend no malice, I have no problem with being gratuitous.

The Love Asana, by Milan Vohra

Milan Vohra is the first Indian author to write a M&B novel. After I interviewed her, I heard from a couple of people who said that they remembered seeing at least one Indian name on a M&B cover before. Maybe M&B India were undertaking a devilish and disingenuous publicity stunt. But I think what they meant is that Vohra is the first Indian author to write a M&B novel about Indian characters in an Indian city.

...I know, right? Apprehension. Maybe this is how Italians and Greeks feel all the time when they see their countries as the backdrop to trashy English-language romance novels. Or maybe not. Usually, stuff like The Greek Billionaire's Secret Virgin Bride Who Wanted To Be A Nun But Ended Up Singing In A Nightclub And Exploited By Her Wicked Stepbrother For Money But Has Never Given In To Temptation Before Except With A Greek Billionaire ie YOU and The Italian Mafia Boss' Lovechild from His Dead Sister's Innocent Best Friend Who Is Beautiful But Doesn't Know It And Has Very Lofty Morals About Stuff Like Murder But Somehow She Just Melts In Your Arms Even Though You Are In A Dodgy And Offensively Stereotypical Job Because No One Has Touched The Core Of Her Flower-Like Being Except For An Italian Mafia Boss ie YOU is just about interchangeable non-Italian, non-Greek English-speaking girls being swept away by lazy Mediterranean stereotypes, and written by non-Italian, non-Greek English speaking authors. So most Italians and Greeks will probably not read these books and go away and read Homer and Dante instead. Or trashy Italian and Greek romance novels about mysterious English gentlemen with mansions on the Yorkshire moors in which they keep their first wives chained away up in the attic. Wait. What did I just do there?

Anyway. The Love Asana. The Love Asana is set in New Delhi. It is about the ~~Greek~~ Indian billionaire Vivan Parasher, who has returned home having built some sort of design empire in the US. The important thing is that he is hot. He is tall and built like a god (presumably a Greek one. Or an Italian one, like Paolo Maldini.) and has spiky dark hair and another sexy arrow of hair that runs down to the line of the towel he wraps around himself after a bath. And he is eyeball-meltingly successful, like I said, and his design empire company is now coming out with a line of yoga clothing, that they will retail around the world for fun and profit.

Pari Chand is a yoga instructor. SURPRAIZ, LADIES.

Pari's elder brother, Deepak, owns an advertising agency which really badly wants Vivan's company account to revive its failing fortunes. Vivan also wants to give this account to Deepak. Why? Because Vivan once had a sister, Sonia, who had a love affair with Deepak. Who then dumped Sonia. Who then died heartbroken. While Vivan was away building his design empire. So Vivan wants revenge.

I know what you are asking yourselves. If you were a multibillionaire with a dead sister who wanted to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend wouldn't you, like, put a horse's head in his bed or something? Or is that only okay if you are an Italian mafia boss who is capable of touching an innocent girl's flower-like core? Do you think Don Corleone ever did that? At any rate, why would you give this creeper ex your company's lucrative advertising account? Maybe you inhaled something very bad in America and now you have gaps in your cognitive processes?

Duh, no. Naturally, it's a Trojan horse. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Especially Greek billionaires. And especially if you have a young sister upon whom he can extend his revenge by -- marrying her halfway through the book! And then taking her to his luxurious bungalow in Lutyens' Delhi, entering into mutually thrilling carnal knowledge with, falling in love with and having a child with, in that socially desirable order. That burned you, didn't it? I mean, to be on the safe side you better back off Greeks altogether. And Indians. Especially Indian billionaires like Vivan Parasher.

I actually really liked this book, in spite of it causing me to renew my commitment to admiring Gandhian austerity in men. Vohra has a confident, breezy authorial voice and not even the M&B rulebook can totally dampen it. It's a meatier chick lit novel trying to fit into the narrow space afforded it by the M&B format, and you know what? By those standards, it worked. I didn't really care about the dude, but who reads M&Bs for the dudes anyway? I read on wanting to know what was going to happen to Pari.

And I really liked that Vohra paid as much attention to supporting female characters as possible - a stepmother with whom Pari can build a healthy relationship, friends and family who talk and act like interesting, real women - and tried to give Pari herself some real problems other than getting married to an Indian billionaire she doesn't want.

Bottomline: if Vohra wrote another novel, I would read it. The percentage of bad-to-good in fluffy Indian novels is about the same as it is in English publishing everywhere, I think, but Vohra flies upwards, like the sparks in that line in the Bible. She's closer to Anuja Chauhan (who is an author you MUST read if you like fluffy novels and Indian novels and frivolity in general) than to Chetan Bhagat (who is an author you must read only if you plan to subsequently go to America and inhale something very bad there that will leave gaps in your cognitive processes). We need that.

Prince Voronov's Virgin, by Lynn Raye Harris

As I said earlier and tweeted about fifty-three times, I was reading about Walter Benjamin's experience of urban alienation and the collapse of privacy in revolution-era Moscow in Molotov's Magic Lantern, gripped and enchanted by the way the author Rachel Polonsky teased histories out from books and the long-dead men who collected them, of the architecture of Moscow's streets and the cold mazes of the Gulag. Tears sprang to my eyes in the middle of a crowded train, as I read:

Shalamov, who learned in the gulag that a graphite pencile was 'a greater miracle than a diamond,' associated ink with the evil powers of the state. 'What kind of ink is used to sign death sentences? No death sentence has ever been signed simply in pencil.'

It was from this delicate examination of Russian history that I dove straight into Prince Voronov's Virgin, much like you swan-dive into the deep end of a swimming pool. Which is dry.

It was irresistible. There was a mysterious Prince Voronov in it. I am a fiercely republican person, but after you have just read a few elegantly-turned accounts of Stalin's henchmen betraying each other to torture and firing squads you feel a sort of reactionary warmth for aristocracy creeping into your extremities, like one of the later stages of frostbite. So for the sake of perestroika I was quite prepared to like Prince Voronov.

Unglamorous (obviously) American secretary Paige Barnes is wandering alone about the Red Square at night. Suddenly, hooligans appear (obviously). Paige runs from them, and bumps into a mysterious and powerful and handsome man who realises that she needs help. He saves her from the hooligans! He does this by holding her up against a shop window that borders the square and pretending to have sex with her. Paige finds this sexy and terrifying but mostly sexy. So she goes back to his apartment with him - but not to have proper sex that does not involve shop windows. She goes so that the mysterious Alexei can tell her how gorgeous she is and how much she deserves to be loved and so that he can, unbeknowst to her, steal away vital company information from her. Because he hates her American boss. Because her boss is the son of the man who once condemned Alexei's younger sister to death by refusing money for her cancer treatment. Obviously.

No, Alexei does not have a fabric design empire in America.

Anyway stuff happens and blah blah U R TEH PRINCE VORONOV :O :O :O and blah blah palace with beautiful paintings and a troika ride in the winter and GUYS WE SHOULD SAVE MONEY AND GO TO RUSSIA FOR THE 2018 WORLD CUP and then they have amazing beautiful moving passionate sex because Paige deserves to be loved and Alexei is a sleek, virile animal with a sexy arrow of dark hair that disappears into his perfectly tailored trousers and Paige is a virgin who did not know that she was a virgin: obviously the most romantic thing to happen to a girl and a boy.

Then they go to sleep, and there is a problem with the condom and after Alexei has crushed Paige's company to powder (obviously Russian billionaires are much better clued in to this whole revenge thing than Indian ones. Maybe Odysseus was secretly a Russian.) everything is all blah blah sadness blah blah new job blah blah never want to see him again blah blah I have been having jetlag for six weeks now I should really stop throwing up in the mornings and blah blah my sassy black friend makes me get a pregnancy test which is OH NO! BUT I LOVE THIS BABY ANYWAY BECAUSE I'M A GIRL AND THAT'S WHAT GIRLS DO! positive.

So obviously, because preserving the royal line is all-important to Alexei, he marries Paige as soon as he gets wind of goings-on. He spirits her back to his piazza outside Moscow, showering her with jewels and deportment lessons and freezing politeness because he has a lot of feelings. I think all of Leo Tolstoy's novels would have been A MILLION TIMES BETTER if men had had condoms in those days and they managed to impregnate ladies in spite of them.

The notion that billionaires could crush poor single mothers in custody battles or open a Wikipedia page on how royal bloodlines in European history really worked is far too gauche to apply here.

So Paige becomes Princess Voronova! And then runs off with Marat Safin the minute she manages to sell the family diamonds and get some money in a Swiss bank account.

Well, not really. But I suppose Marat Safin is a busy man. So Paige and Alexei fall in love with each other instead, and each of them has a big empty space in their lives that they teach the other to fill, and it's pretty much exactly the opposite of a George Eliot novel, which is how novels by lady novelists should really should be.

Bottomline: You should read it. It has a revenge subplot and a secret baby. If you don't like revenge subplots and secret babies you should read it for Hollywood!Russia. If you don't like Hollywood!Russia then you should read it for Marat Safin. He's not in it but you can mentally Photoshop him into it, like all those Sarah Palin macros in which Putin rears his head.

The Sheriff's Secret Wife, by Christyne Butler

I was very sure this was going to contain the most net WTF-ery of all three, because it is called The Sheriff's Secret Wife, and secret wives are even less George-Eliot-like than secret babies. It starts out in Las Vegas. It has drunken shenanigans. If you took out the sheriff it could be an episode from Friends in its declining years.

But I was wrong. This in spite of the fact that the book's protagonist is called Racy. Racy is from Destiny, Wyoming, not Muvattupuzha, Kerala. She is in Las Vegas for a bartending competition, as she is a bartender, and a very good one. She wins the competition and subsequently quite a lot of poker bets and gets amnesia-inducingly drunk and wakes up the morning after wearing nothing but a wedding ring and a naked virile animal with a sexy arrow of dark hair down his stomach.

But he is not a tall dark stranger. He is Gage Steele, sheriff of Destiny, Wyoming!

Why was he in Las Vegas when he should have been back home being sheriff? IDK. Why did he agree to marry her while drunk? IDK. Why is he such a hot piece of ass? IDK but I am guessing that with a name like 'Gage,' you need some sort of advantage in life.

They get divorced. But there is something wrong with the divorce papers so they aren't really divorced. They have to find a way to be properly divorced, while ensuring that no one in Destiny knows about the fact that they are getting divorced because they were married in the first place.

Now I don't personally know a lot of divorced people but from everything I have heard, if you are looking for smouldering romance and soul-enthralling passion the odds that you will experience it with the same person from whom you are attempting to disentangle yourself through a bureaucratic procedure are very long.

But that's what literature is for. So Racy and Gage set out to find another lawyer. In the meanwhile, Gage has to keep the town safe, because he's the sheriff and that's what he wears cowboy boots and a Stetson for. Racy has to think about her long-term plan to buy over the bar she works, deal with her two elder brothers who have just been released from prison, and a friend's upcoming wedding. They can't bake cakes with rainbow sprinkles just because they have a lot of feelings for each other.

...so you see it's not really ridiculous enough.

It's really not! See, I got the strange feeling that the author actually applied a bit of long-term thought to what would happen to her characters and her location. It's a town full of heterosexual neurotypical attractive white people, which I imagine is very Hollywood!Rural USA, but it's a long way away from setting a novel in a wintry palace in Russia. And Racy has stuff going on in her life. She's not looking for male validation. She's not a pawn in a revenge plot. She's just a sort of heroine who wants to do stuff that lots of ambitious, conservative women want to do, like finish college and own a bar and be respected and respectable. She likes her place of work and she's made serious mistakes in her life - not of the 'I care too much about other people!' variety, but the 'I fucked up and now I have two bad marriages in my past' sort. And most endearingly, she is interested in people besides herself and her virile sexy arrow-of-stomach-hair secret cowboy husband. I don't even know if that can be honestly said of many characters even in non-cowgirl fiction. Because the author just sort of assumes that her female protagonist is in most ways equal to her male protagonist, she doesn't even get to make a big deal out of it. They just fall out and get along and fall out and get along until happily-ever-after comes by, by which time it is actually possible to think of them as two human beings who might have a mutually assured future.

One of the book's problems is that it is obviously written as part of an internal M&B series, so there are several parallel romance sub-plots that are either unresolved or overdetermined. Apart from that also, of course, you're totally right to guess that there is plenty of melodrama and rather a ton of overfamiliar plot points. But let me be frank - these are practically the only reasons I read books.

Bottomline: Worked. But as someone whose only previous cultural exposure to sheriffs is a song called I Shot The Sheriff, I know I have very high credulity when it comes to cowboy romance and cowboy adventure and cowgirl ladies. Maybe this is why I enjoyed it? Or is it because reading three M&B in a day can condition the mind into acceptance very successfully?

* - to know more about the title of this post, see here.

** - simulreading Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance.

my no good very bad jaipur literature festival

2011-01-27T18:05:00.004+05:00

TUESDAY NIGHT. 1900 HRS. JAIPUR AIRPORT

ROSWITHA: * checks in for flight an hour and a half ahead of time*
ROSWITHA: * settles in to wait the long wait of the righteous and the once-bitten twice-shy *

FLASHBACK. THURSDAY NIGHT. 1930 HRS. MUMBAI AIRPORT.

ROSWITHA: I'M A JOURNALIST. YOU HAVE TO LET ME ON THAT FLIGHT.
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: * thinks Roswitha is a gigantic failure, but smiles politely *
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: I'm so sorry, the pilot's already signed off on the sheet for this flight.
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: I'm also sorry that every other Bombay-Jaipur flight until Sunday is booked.
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: I'm also sorry for your face.
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: * doesn't actually say this *

ROSWITHA: I CAN'T MISS THIS STORY.
ROSWITHA: Also, didn't we go to school together?
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: ....
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: Oh dear.
AIRLINE OFFICIAL: Still can't get you on that flight though.
ROSWITHA: I am loving the drama of this reunion, old school friend. Don’t mind if I weep a lot.

FRIDAY MORNING. 0300 HRS. HOME.

ROSWITHA: * shaves several weeks off life in sleepless anxiety *
ROSWITHA: * goes to airport, takes flight to Delhi *
ROSWITHA: * goes to Delhi, undertakes four hour drive to Jaipur *

FRIDAY AFTERNOON. 1300 HRS. JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL.

ROSWITHA: As Samwise says to Shelob in her lair: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
ROSWITHA: EÄRENDIL!

JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL: * CROWDS *

FRIDAY NIGHT 2300 HRS. ON THE BUS TO HOTEL.

ROSWITHA: * is quietly sick *
ROSWITHA: * INTO BACKPACK *
ROSWITHA: STILL WINNING THIS.
ROSWITHA: * weeps *

SATURDAY:

ROSWITHA: * gets ten minutes to talk to Junot Diaz, has same reaction to him as 47239847543975 others at festival *
ROSWITHA: * is saying * Junot, can you talk a little about how you approach writing a short story? How does that differ from how you see a novel?
ROSWITHA: * is thinking * I WANT TO BE WITH U 4EVA JUNOT.

JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL: * CROWDS *

SUNDAY:

ROSWITHA: * eats lunch *
VIKRAM SETH: * comes by to eat lunch at same table *
ROSWITHA: * is thinking * THE VERY PERSON I WANTED TO MARRY WHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD!
ROSWITHA: EÄRENDIL

ROSWITHA: H-hi.
VIKRAM SETH: Oh god no.
VIKRAM SETH: * doesn’t actually say this *
VIKRAM SETH: * smiles * Hi there.

JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL: * CROWDS *

REDACTED: * hushed whisper * I am never writing another book.
ROSWITHA: I know. You’re going to have to come back here if you do.
ROSWITHA: With all the crowds.
REDACTED: I AM NEVER COMING BACK HERE.

JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL: * CROWDS *

MONDAY:

ROSWITHA: * has the same reaction to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as 47239847543975 others at festival *
ROSWITHA: * chanting with the CROWDS * I WANT TO BE WITH U 4EVA CHIMAMANDA.

CROWDS: * JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL *

TUESDAY

ROSWITHA: * is beginning to hear Enya play in the background as Mount Doom approaches *
ROSWITHA: * is about to interview tremendously respected Basharat Peer *
ROSWITHA: * under breath * I WANT TO BE WITH U 4EVA BASHARAT.

BASHARAT PEER: * senses the force from afar - probably *
BASHARAT PEER: * cancels interview *

ROSWITHA: OIC.
ROSWITHA: Well, whatever.
ROSWITHA: I was going to go and hang out with Martin Amis anyway.
ROSWITHA: * does not actually hang out with Martin Amis. *

AND SO, TUESDAY NIGHT. 2100 HRS.

AIRLINE: * announces departure for Mumbai *
ROSWITHA: * approaches boarding gate *
SECURITY GUARD: Your boarding pass please.
ROSWITHA: * has lost boarding pass *
ROSWITHA: ....I've lost my boarding pass.

TUESDAY NIGHT. 2125 HRS.

ROSWITHA: * running towards plane *
ROSWITHA: THE EAGLES ARE COMING
ROSWITHA: WAIT FOR ME
AIRPLANE: * waits *
180 PASSENGERS ALREADY ON BOARD WAITING TO LEAVE: * glare *
ROSWITHA: EAGLES.

WEDNESDAY MORNING. 0015 HRS. HOME.

ROSWITHA: The scar has not troubled me for nineteen years. All is well.
ROSWITHA: Or something.
ROSWITHA: * goes to bed *

Anyway. I got some work done in spite of these several and self-inflicted sorrows. You can read my opening-day report here, my closing-day report here, and several blogs I posted here. More forthcoming presently.

I also met a great many wonderful people, some old friends, some new, some well-met in meatspace and some never before. I say to you that you are beautiful. It may be that only a few days are left ere darkness falls upon our world, and when it comes I hope to face it steadily; but it would ease my heart, if while the Sun yet shines, I could see you still. For you and I have both passed under the wings of the Shadow, and the same hand drew us back.

metro mundanities, random classics

2011-01-13T16:06:00.007+05:00

Versions of these short reviews appeared in Mint Lounge on January 8, 2011.

A brief and irritable note on the following:

The Premier Murder League, Geeta Sundar
With or Without You, Partha Sarathi Basu
Close Call in Kashmir, Bharat Wahkhlu

Penguin’s Metro Reads series is tagged with the line, ‘Every life has a story.’ Truth this may be, but justification it is not. In much the way commercial Hindi cinema serves up fanciful stories about improbable situations by disclaiming it as what ‘the public’ demands, the Metro Reads books dish up a slop of genre conventions – romance, suspense, action – in familiar Indian locations. There the implicit claim of the Metro Reads tagline, that these books are about people whose stories may not be otherwise heard, begins and ends.

And like their Bollywood counterparts, the novels are guilty of a host of narrative sins. In Wakhlu’s military-academic thriller about terror and a secret treasure in Aishmuqam, Kashmir, there are pleasant stretches of potted history in which readers are told – sometimes through clumsy expositionary dialogue – about Kashmir’s dazzling syncretic past and the Mughal intrigues that shaped it significantly. These chunks of information play out in a plot where an academic and a CBI bureaucrat attempt to outwit an unprincipled professor to a possible treasure, while in a related sub-plot, a beautiful young scientist attempts to escape her terrorist kidnappers (and with good reason. An Afghan mercenary who cannot ‘help noticing that she was well proportioned and full of youthful promise’ is hardly salubrious company).

If Close Call in Kashmir transplants Dan Brown to the subcontinent, then Partha Sarathi Basu’s With or Without You travels a much shorter distance, by taking the MBA-hero genre of Indian writing in English to its one true home, Gurgaon. Its cavalier attitude to workplace sexual harassment may be easily ignored by some readers. But how many will delight in page after page devoted to the minutiae of advertising agency politics? Great literature has been created out of plots in which there is seemingly little at stake, but With or Without You is more successful in mapping malls with coffee shops than the inner lives of its characters.

Geeta Sundar’s The Premier Murder League is probably the pulpiest of the three, with a delicious plot involving political murder and cricketing corruption, but even as it delves into different strands of public life – cop protagonists, cricket board shenanigans, middle-class crimes of passion – it ends up being about none of these in particular. Sundar’s book has more shape than the other two, but it is also prone to more bizarre narrative revelations that can throw readers out of the plot. Early on, police visiting the scene of a murder say to one another, ‘Lovely, isn’t it? …It seems unlikely that any crime could have been committed here.’

This sort of banality makes free through the pages of all three novels to such a degree that one is forced to wonder: do Penguin’s editors believe that readers on the Metro are somehow less demanding, or more easily pleased, than their stationary counterparts? This commuter feels bound to point out that even a distracted train traveler can generally tell the difference between easy reading and easy writing. By conflating the first and second, Metro Reads’ small, well-produced volumes come perilously close to being objects of annoyance. Like FM radio in written form, they make you want to change the channel.

Random Classics: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Durgeshnandini and Rabindranath Tagore's Three Women

Random House’s new series of translations opens its account with two beautifully-produced Bangla-to-English works. Translator and series editor for Bengali, Arunava Sinha, presents Anglophone readers with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini (The Chieftain’s Daughter), often remembered as the first novel ever written in an Indian language. Bankim adopted a high Romanticism familiar to readers of Walter Scott in his fervent, epic historical story of love and war in Mughal-administered Bengal. Modern readers may delight in Bankim’s playful elegance as much as the chance to read a cornerstone of modern Indian literature.

Sinha’s confident, unobtrusive translations not only shed light on Bankim but also succeed in one of Indian writing’s most fraught endeavours, translating Rabindranath Tagore. Three Women groups together three famous Tagore novellas, The Broken Nest (Nashtaneer), Two Sisters (Dui Bon) and The Arbour (Malancha). Each is a poignant consideration of women stifled and complicit in their deeply gendered societies, and together they recreate a powerful sense of Tagore’s artistry and his humanism.

art in mumbai

2011-01-08T16:00:00.000+05:00

Unbelievable but true. Below, two brief notes on ongoing shows in Mumbai. Versions of these appeared in Mint Lounge on January 8, 2011.

Ranbir Kaleka's Sweet Unease

Sweet Unease, Ranbir Kaleka’s first solo show in Mumbai, may lead viewers to wonder why it took so long to bring the extraordinary vision of this Patiala-born artist to this city. Bringing together new works with a retrospective of major Kaleka works over the last decade, the show offers a comprehensive look into his fascinating, unsettling trans-media art.

Ranjit Hoskote describes Kaleka’s work as imbued with ‘epic disquiet.’ It is a sense that remains consistent through the themes and concerns of each of his painting/video projection installations. Phantasms rise from tables and walk through eerie, intimate hallways (Fables from the House of Ibaan); history plays out along a railway line through a strange, half-alienating play on a film montage (Not From Here); birth, growth and death become the thematical underpinnings to a montage about a bird (Man With Cockerel). The ethereal effect of Kaleka’s use of media rests on strong structural and emotional patterns in each work; engaging with each installation can effortlessly take up hours at a time, and it’s not hard to imagine the works entrancing casual viewers just as intensely as they do serious critics.

Kaleka’s work sometimes evokes a joyous sense of the fantastical. As a man with a hammer pounds on the wall opposite which he is projected, to have a white horse manifest before him (Cul-de-sac in Taxila), it’s hard not to feel a spontaneous delight. But it is the multilayered, long-drawn out sophistication of the narratives of each of Kaleka’s installations that complicates them, even more than their conceptualism.

In fusing video art with painting, Kaleka’s work finds its most spectacular idiom. In works like The Kettle, repeated viewings can draw viewers in to a nuanced contemplation of time and its illusory effects. The intimate familiarity of a street scene is always present; it is as though Kaleka opens a window through which stories come pouring through. The centerpiece of this effect is perhaps the marvelous, extended Sweet Unease itself. As its characters provoke orientation and disorientation in their endless, ghost story of a dance, it is impossible not be torn away with an ineffable sense of the world made strange.

Ranbir Kaleka’s Sweet Unease shows at Volte, Mumbai, until February 15.

Sudhir Patwardhan's Family Fictions

Sudhir Patwardhan’s new works, which go on display in his show, Family Fictions, suggest a new direction for this veteran observer of the intersection between the social and the personal. His charcoal sketches and drawings demonstrate a bold, intimate engagement with people. In his paintings, sis gaze remains trained on urban life, as it has in many of his earlier realizations of Mumbai’s public scenes. But this time, it trains itself inward as he paints playful, poignant scenes of life inside apartment houses. Full Circle (acrylic on canvas) arranges old and young members of a family in a tableau of the ages of the man. Yet, the narrative it suggests is warmer and more personal than an abstract engagement with ageing and death. In the tightly composed, shadowed space of the city apartment, the painting creates a moving comment on the environment it invokes.

The theme of enclosure repeats itself through several of the paintings in this show. At the center of many of Patwardhan’s works is a window in an apartment wall, that cuts out of the enclosure of the observer’s room to show other enclosed spaces. Buildings, verandahs, and even streets become bound spaces in these works, poised on the edge of cosy suburban comfort and a quiet claustrophobia. In this, as his other work, Patwardhan affects a compassionate seriousness.

His playfulness illumines the eponymous Family Fiction, a work that interrogates fictionality by assembling a motley cast of characters and settings in its space. Uma Thurman from the film Pulp Fiction co-exists with a middle-aged Indian woman sitting by a bookshelf; a silhouetted gunman draws the eye to the figure of a nude, fleeing the edges of the canvas. The effect is delightful.

Sudhir Patwardhan’s Family Fictions, showing at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, from January 8-January 27.

man of the hours

2011-01-08T15:58:00.000+05:00

The soundtrack of 127 Hours is the best proof yet that Rahman can push the envelope for Hollywood as successfully as he does for Indian cinema.

A version of this review appeared in Mint Lounge on Jan 8, 2011.

British director Danny Boyle’s last film, Slumdog Millionaire, had an A R Rahman score that sounded like Hollywood’s idea of Bollywood, but their latest match-up for 127 Hours eliminates that awkward sense of cultural crossover. 127 Hours is an unconventional Hollywood action picture, about a man trapped alone in a canyon trying to free himself, and its music is unconventional action movie music, too.

Listen, for example, to the overarching theme on the soundtrack’s Liberation triad of songs: quick-burning pieces for guitar, building up to the regimented violence of a strings-and-electronica crescendo. These are typical ingredients for blockbuster music, but in Rahman’s hands the refrain becomes flexible, bouncing from frantic to to contemplative to an uneasy euphoria. Each of the three tracks feed back to each other in earthy loops that suggest the heat and dust of the film’s landscape, a distorted mirror of the Wild West.

Interspersed with these and other Rahman compositions are selections that span an audacious range of genres, from Bill Withers’ classic Lovely Day and a Chopin nocturne to some stunning synthpop (Free Blood’s Never Hear Surf Music Again, Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi) and Sigur Rós’ epic Festival.

They may be distinct from each other, but threaded through with Rahman’s original score, they are an intriguing ensemble. Rahman’s Indian film music integrates complex, sometimes unlikely elements into his infectious brand of cinema pop; for years now, his music has been about getting listeners to re-evaluate the unfamiliar or the ignored – unusual playback voices, once-moribund genres of film music like the bhajan and qawwali, multilingual hip-hop, Chitra’s voice on a bhangra song.

Here, as with some of his Bollywood work, he produces a score bursting with international influences. The results are perhaps at their most artless on tracks like the instrumental R.I.P, and his ethereal, much-discussed duet with Dido, If I Rise, which also uses the voices of Mumbai’s Gleehive Children’s Choir.

But artless is not Rahman’s best mode, and on others, the effect is more layered. The somber orchestral Canyon would fit right in on any Steven Spielberg-John Williams soundtrack, but the crystal clear solo guitar on Touch of the Sun is a minimalist miracle. And who other than Rahman would create something called Acid Darbari, in ambient flute-and-chime tones that recall his gorgeous Rehna Tu (Delhi-6), to play in the background of a story about a hiker trapped in a Utah canyon?

None of this may strike the hammer blow of Trent Reznor’s thunderous rearrangement of Grieg’s In The Hall of the Mountain King for The Social Network, which has probably already power-chorded itself into an Oscar nomination, but 127 Hours holds its own. Its lack of Bollywood exotica may not earn it as many plaudits as Slumdog Millionaire, but it is a much better expression of Rahman’s range than the earlier soundtrack. It may not come as a surprise to Indians who already knew and loved him as a global composer; for others, the effects will be heady.

looking forward to jaipur 2011

2011-01-08T15:53:00.002+05:00

A version of this story appeared in Mint Lounge on Jan 8, 2011

“About fourteen,” is William Dalrymple’s amused census of attendance at the first Jaipur Literature Festival in 2006. Then a small part of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation’s larger cultural programme called the Jaipur Festival, it ran on volunteer enthusiasm and love. “Our first international guest was Hari Kunzru,” Dalrymple, the festival’s co-director, remembered in his opening remarks last year. “We caught hold of him because he was en route to New Zealand to meet his girlfriend at the time.”

The number of people who heard Dalrymple’s address last year was nowhere close to fourteen. Over five days of the Jaipur ‘litfest,’ as it’s fondly abbreviated by fans, about 35,000 people flocked to the small, exquisite environs of the Diggi Palace Hotel. This year, Dalrymple says, attendance seems set to rise further. “The weather forecast predicts it’ll be colder than usual,” he offers. “So it probably won’t be a completely unmanageable number. Maybe about 50,000.”

How did a boutique literary conference, barely five years old, become what is now acknowledged to be the biggest festival of its kind in the Asia-Pacific? And how did it happen in Jaipur, a city whose tourist delights are generally considered more about forts and elephants than intellectual ferment?

Taking a look at the names the festival has drawn in the last five years may be a clue. From Wole Soyinka to Orhan Pamuk (who visits again this year), Steve Coll to Tina Brown, and Vikram Seth to Vikram Chandra, the collective roll-call is practically a who’s who of literary celebrity.

This year, Seth and Pamuk will return, along with some notable first-timers: JM Coetzee, Junot Diaz, Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh. To call them headliners in a festival noted for its egalitarianism – they will have to wait in the same lunch queues as their audience – may be inaccurate. Others making their appearance at the festival for the first time include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Leila Aboulela, Ahdaf Soueif, and Etgar Keret.

And the festival’s offer of equal facetime for Indian regional language (or bhasha) writers is cause for some of the biggest hits at the festival itself. They may not be the primary reason for attendees from New York or Mumbai to fly in, but they are a reason to stay: where else would you see Malayalam novelist K Satchidandan shoot the breeze with Gulzar?

“Jaipur is a cosmopolitan city, so there’s a great local response to other Indian languages, too,” says Namita Gokhale, the festival’s co-director. “Its large Bangla population turned up in full force to the Bengali readings we did two years ago.” Last year, their organized readings in Sindhi were, she affirms, packed to the rafters.

For Ram Pratap Singh, scion of the royal inhabitants of Diggi and the current owner of the estate that includes the Diggi Palace Hotel, it had much to do with public-spiritedness. “We’ve worked over the years, starting with INTAC and Rajiv Gandhi, and have a long association with John and Faith Singh (of the Virasat Foundation). As one of Jaipur’s oldest families, we take an interest in our city.” And so Diggi House (the hotel, with its 70-odd rooms, forms about a quarter of the property), elegant, centrally located, fit for kings and international celebrity writers alike, became the focal point of a tide in the affairs of Jaipur.

“It’s great weather, great food, lots of thinking, reading people – everyone who comes here is on common ground,” explains Ritu Singh, who owns the popular Flow Café on the palace grounds. “Flow’s a bit slow for the rest of the year in comparison,” she laughs. But for those five days in January, her martini shakers start at 9 in the morning and stay until 4am. Singh says friends bus themselves in to help, waiting tables, mixing drinks, mingling with guests.

That informal camaraderie still forms the bulwark of the Jaipur experience. While over 200 people have been working for the last four months to prepare Diggi Palace for the festival, Ram Pratap Singh says that the key to the experience is still how laidback and unobtrusive its infrastructure is. “We’ve had Salman Rushdie here, and managed to allay the government’s fears about security.” Gun-toting guards are not their style.

“There’s nothing sarkari about it,” Dalrymple agrees. “It’s a product of the best sort of amateur love and enthusiasm, rather than greed, or a governmental sense of duty. “We’re fortunate that Namita’s enthisuasms and mine complement each other, and cover a wide range.”

And so the festival does. This year, it expands to cover other parts of the Diggi estate – including the royal stables. (Another change: unlike past years, these will not be occupied by their equine tenants this year. Past attendees will remember the distinct fragrance of horse, wafting through the fest’s baithak area while panelists talk about Soviet history and the art of criticism). On the festival’s various stages, just under 200 writers will discuss their preoccupations, themselves and each other in front of rapt audiences.

Why do they flock here? Bill Cinton famously called the pre-eminent Hay-on-Wye festival ‘A Woodstock of the mind’. By contrast, says Dalrymple, Jaipur is more about the feel of a gigantic Indian wedding. “The music and dance performances in the evenings just add to the feeling. Look, it’s late January. In the rest of the world, that’s miserable,” he laughs. “Jaipur is not a hard sell.”

“Jaipur has been a great way for new, unpublished writers to get a sense of what the public part of the job--speaking, engaging in debates--might entail, as well as for new writers to get a sense of the publishing scene in general,” says critic and writer Nilanjana Roy. Still, the best experiences at literary festivals happen to readers, she says, or writers who like engaging with their vast public.

What about publishers, who, as Roy says, go to Jaipur will full schedules chalked up? “It's a good platform for the writers they already have on their list, and it offers a chance to listen to, read and assess writers, especially those from outside Delhi,” she explains.

”But unlike Frankfurt, this is not a trade fair, where the focus is on signing contracts and making rights deals. It's probably the wrong time and place to try and get them to read your unpublished manuscript.”

Informal translation
Namita Gokhale, co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, on the Indianness of an international festival. Excerpts from a conversation:

How do you balance the festival’s Indian aspects with its international profile?
International response has been gratifying, but it’s a primarily Indian fest for us. Writers appreciate the chance to be a part of a diverse programme, to interact with people from all over the world.

One of the things we do is create a dialogue between Indian English and Indian bhasha languages, where often there’s been a degree of resentment at not being treated the same way.

The earlier tendency was to look for acknowledgment from the UK or US – now here are equal stages on which new voices can find a public as well as presence.

You can see, for example, writing about Dalit literature, which didn’t get a lot of attention before.

How does the festival construct dialogue between Indian writers across languages?
Indians are a bilingual people: speaking in multiple languages is not a problem for us. At the festival, too, you can see we’re still working out our own bilingual challenges.

We recognize that translation is not just a physical act but also subtext; there has to be humility on both sides, there can’t be a dominant bias.

Last year, two days before the festival we did a ‘Translating Bharat’ workshop, which had fabulous outreach. This year, the session ‘Translating Classics’ will be very much a part of this.

Do international publishers respond to writing in regional languages?
French, Spanish, and Italian publishers look for a completely different register from what English-language publishers do. At Jaipur, we form a literary community which manages to make space for all these people, some of whom come every year. You have book lovers, academics, students for whom to encounter these writers is a big deal. It’s a group that feels a sense of involvement and ownership. There’s a vitality to it. This fest isn’t about linen suits.

The fest itself is an act of informal translation – not physical, or textual, but a multilingual act. As someone said to me, “The Jaipur lit fest is like installation art” – very temporary installations that lead to future acts of translation.

A South Asian Pulitzer

The DSC South Asian literature Prize, which will be given out for the first time at the festival, anticipates a watershed in South Asian publishing. The prize will award US$ 50,000 to one winning work of fiction by a writer writing about South Asia and its diasporas. Intriguingly, eligibility rules have no nationality requirement.

Nilanjana Roy, who is part of this year’s jury, says, “It's difficult and challenging to define the South Asian novel, but it's more fun than having to go through author's passports to see if they qualify.”

The Prize, which is open to translations, instantly broadens the range of subcontinental writing that achieves international attention. Its administrators may well see the DSC prize as the subcontinent’s equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award for fiction.

“If the DSC can get two things right--a consistently high standard of judging, and a consistently fair and wide selection of books from South Asia--this has the potential,” Roy says.

This year’s DSC Prize shortlist:

Amit Chaudhuri: The Immortals
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: The Story of a Widow
Tania James: The Atlas of Unknowns
Manju Kapur: The Immigrant
Neel Mukherjee: A Life Apart
HM Naqvi: Home Boy

a year in reading, 2010, part one-ish.

2010-12-31T12:39:00.007+05:00

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite disquisitions of the year. The political biases in this highly biased list should be unsurprising. So also some of the writers, many of whom have been beloved and admired for some time, and many of whom wrote more than one great piece this year. In the case of Tony Judt, for example, I picked a singularly brilliant interview he gave, instead of one of the many spectacular essays he composed for the NYRB and elsewhere, or the NY Magazine piece that profiled him beautifully.

Things missing from this list include, Kasparov excepted, reviews of single books or films (and if you're thinking of that Zadie Smith essay on The Social Network, let me assure you it is on my list of least favourite essays this year). Profiles of people: otherwise it would be all Obama and Berlusconi and Shashi Tharoor.

Also interviews other than Tony Judt's; listicles other than Common Roman Polanski Defenses Refuted (which drifted back to the top of my consciousness in the wake of the corrupted debate over Julian Assange's rape accusation); writing from publications with which I am or have been formally associated (The Run of Play did not, for example, contract my labour in signatures of blood before accepting my blog posts, nor, as an all-round and upfront gratis Portal of Fun, are they dragging their feet on payments - you know who you are, you weasels). A couple of exceptions to this rule are mentioned at the end of this post.

Also great shorter writing, including several Tumblelogs; great rants; great fanfiction involving one or more characters from the DC Comics Universe; great photography, great YouTube videos, and so on.

Also missing is any writing about Mumbai, which deserves its own post.

If this list overrepresents some publications, it is because I enjoyed and was moved by their contents disproportionately. This in spite of not being able to afford a subscription to LRB yet, which is quite an achievement on their part, in every sense.

Recap: Reads of the Year, 2010

Susie Linfield, Living With The Enemy
Guernica
On the living limits of reconciliation as a political ideal.

Rahul Bhattacharya, Cricket, Tennis, the Loss of Immersion
Cricinfo
As the nature of broadcasts change, so does the narrative of a game.

Amanda Hess, Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted
Washington City Paper
How to talk to people who defend Roman Polanski's crime.

Ross McKibbin, Time to Repent
London Review of Books
Britain's new political settlement, and where the fuck Labour went.

Garry Kasparov, The Chess Master and the Computer
New York Review of Books
Can the computer change the way a very human game is played? Not unless it can change the way a very human game is thought.

Daisy Rockwell as Lapata, The Reluctant Feudalist
Chapati Mystery
Can what is said of Sadat Hasan Manto also be said of Daniyal Mueenuddin? A literary investigation.

Dibussi Tande, Undermining African Intellectual and Artistic Rights; Shakira, Zangalewa and the World Cup Anthem
Scribbles from the Den
A brief history of the double standard of artistic property for African artists.

Alma Guillermoprieto, The Murderers of Mexico
New York Review of Books
War as theatre.

Corey Robin, Garbage and Gravitas
The Nation
The life and legacy of Ayn Rand.

Basharat Peer, Tear Gas Over Batamaloo
The National Interest
What is at play, and what at stake, in Kashmir this year.

Brian Phillips, Pelé as a Comedian
The Run of Play
Perhaps David Foster Wallace's notion of the delight we take in sport as religious experience undermines itself.

Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy
Zunguzungu
Why does Assange do what he does?

Amitava Kumar, Birth of a Salesman
Guernica
In the War on Terror, an FBI informant's doppelganger is the terrorist suspect.

Mohammed Hanif, Pakistan flood victims 'have no concept of terrorism'
BBC Online

They belong to that forgotten part of humanity that has quietly tilled the land for centuries, the small farmers, the peasants, the farmhands, generations of people who are born and work and die on the same small piece of land.

And this time there are 20 million of them.

Kristina Božič in conversation with Tony Judt, The Way Things Are and How They Might Be
London Review of Books
Tony Judt, magnificent on social democracy, Europe, America and much else.

Charlie LeDuff, What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
Mother Jones

People my mother's age like to tell me about Detroit's good old days of soda fountains and shopping markets and lazy Saturday night drives. But the fact is Detroit and its suburbs were dying 40 years ago. The whole country knew it, and the whole country laughed. A bunch of lazy, uneducated blue-collar incompetents. The Rust Belt. Forget about it.

Mukul Kesavan, Is Murali the greatest spinner ever?
Cricinfo
What Muttiah Muralitharan has meant to cricket, to Sri Lanka, and to sport.

Rafia Zakaria, Muslim Grrrls
Guernica
A lawyer investigates how Sharia and feminism go hand-in-hand.

Jacqueline Rose, 'J'accuse;' Dreyfus in our times
London Review of Books
Possibly my favourite this year. Justice is an infinite affair.

Some more stuff I liked:

Kamila Shamsie's Pop Idols on a generation of Pakistani pop music in Granta's Pakistan issue;
Umair Muhajir's Reflections on masala cinema and Dabanng at his blog, Qalandar;
Mihir Sharma's Calcutta is the city of second chances after the Park Street fire earlier this year, in The Indian Express;
P Sainath's The Colour of Water on two continuous years of drought in Vidarbha, in India Together;
Nathaniel Popper's A Conscious Pariah on Raul Hillberg and Hannah Arendt, in The Nation;
Nilanjana Roy's Getting Around Your City; A User's Guide for Women, at her blog Akhond of Swat and elsewhere;

and several others.

Finally, to some writers and journalists whom I drop everything to read, every time they write: Samar Halarnkar; Kuzhali Manickavel; Andrew Guest; Alan Jacobs;
Shoma Chaudhury; Chandrahas Choudhury;
Manan Ahmed; Lilia M Schwarcz; Ingrid D Rowland; cheers and thank you all. May your wordcounts ever increase.

Happy new year.

a mature response to the end of the year

2010-12-22T17:13:00.004+05:00

While I gather up my courage for a 'Year in Reading' post, a Q&A meme in which I was tagged months ago by Aisha. All answers calibrated to reflect reading/re-reading between January-December this year.

1. Favourite childhood book?

Anne of Green Gables, by LM Montgomery.

2. What are you reading right now?

Freedarko's The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History and Madhusree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War.

3. Bad book habit?

Refusing to revere books like a good Hindu, the cornerstone of childhood Dussehra observances and longstanding family fights about reading while otherwise occupied (in eating, or lying in bed, or grating coconut, for example; I was on the losing side of all these quarrels). Respecting books as wealth is one thing, but respecting them as wisdom is quite another.

4. Do you have an e-reader?

I will next year, if I can decide between impoverishment via Kindle, or impoverishment via subscriptions to expensive American magazines.

5. Do you prefer to read one book at a time or several at once?

One at a time, although it rarely works out that way.

6. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?

This year, particularly so, thanks to Book Munch. I read much more seriously.

7. Least favorite book you read this year (so far)?

Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hill.

8. Favorite book you’ve read this year?

In non-fiction, probably Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables (my Mint story on the book) and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. Mumbai Fables is an intriguing look at Bombay as a palimpsest of narratives; Demick's book is a reconstruction of social life in the city of Chongjin, North Korea, based on the testimonies of refugees.

My favourite fiction this year was not a new release but Khalid Hasan's gigantic book of Manto translations, Bitter Fruit. A great opportunity to rediscover many things.

9. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?

Never.

10. What is your reading comfort zone?

Middle-class.

11. Can you read on the bus?

No.

12. Favorite place to read?

The train.

13. What is your policy on book lending?

Be generous; have a good memory.

14. Do you ever dog-ear books?

Yes, this is useful practice when reviewing.

15. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?

No; I usually read on the move.

16. Not even with text books?

That's what five-subject notebooks are for.

17. What is your favorite language to read in?

English.

18. What makes you love a book?

Compassion.

19. What will inspire you to recommend a book?

Delight. Ref. introducing Brian to The Count of Monte Cristo.

20. Favorite genre?

Overwrought.

21. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did?)

Not a genre; graphic literature.

22. Favorite biography?

This year, it was Ram Guha's mostly-out-of-print biog of Verrier Elwin, Savaging the Civilised - a very fond and readable, but rigorous look at a key figure in independent India. I believe Guha is putting out a new edition soon, with an introduction that triangulates Elwin's studies with the political-economic crisis in tribal districts in Central India, which is exciting. The old one can still be found in a collection of Guha's early work called The Ramachandra Guha Omnibus, if anyone wants to read it.

23. Have you ever read a self-help book?

No.

24. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?

Weirdly, I'd say Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. The book clearly complicates the romantic notion of risking life and limb to get a story. It also complicates the relationship between narrative and reportage. But at a time when the only major alternative to the embedded journalist seems to be the foreign gonzo/undercover figure, Saviano manages to forward the question of how to write about being victimised, and being complicit, in a war in your own home. I don't think I've read a more high-stakes book this year.

In fiction, as always, Penelope Fitzgerald remains an idol.

25. Favorite reading snack?

Dal-chawal.

26. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.

Not exactly hype; I was disappointed to discover that I just wasn't into Roberto Bolano. I feel like everyone else is reading The Quibbler and I'm stuck with The Daily Prophet.

7. How often do you agree with critics about a book?

Not often with US/UK critics about American/British books, a little more often with desi critics about desi ones.

28. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?

More cavalier as a blogger than as a newspaper reviewer. Same goes for glowers, though.

29. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?

I don't know, I like translations quite a lot. Probably Italian for the newspapers.

30. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?

I don't think I've ever read an intimidating book in my life.

31. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?

Very high degree of trepidation on being confronted with Mark Twain's Autobiography.

32. Favorite Poet?

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, as translated by Agha Shahid Ali.

33. Favorite fictional character?

Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

34. Favorite fictional villain?

I have a very good answer. It is Dmitri Belikov, the nice-guy-turned-bloodthirsty-vampire in Richelle Mead's glorious/atrocious Vampire Academy series. I just know you can change him, Rose!

35. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?

Oh no, I did not have a vacation this year. Usually big fat ones.

36. The longest I’ve gone without reading

I've finished reading maybe four books this month, which is the year's low point.

37. Name a book that you could/would not finish?

I've been stuck on page 3 of Eshkol Nevo's Homesick for maybe six months now, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with this unexceptionable book.

38. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?

Writing.

39. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?

n/a for this year.

40. Most disappointing film adaptation?

also n/a. I didn't even see the new Harry Potter film.

41. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?

Not even going there.

42. How often do you skim a book before reading it?

I skip to the end, but not otherwise.

43. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?

Deadlines.

44. Do you like to keep your books organized?

I also like my football team to win all the time.

45. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?

Do you give a chair away once you've sat in it?

46. Are there any books you’ve been avoiding?

Several.

47. Name a book that made you angry

Oh god, Raffles. Also the early parts of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography which essentially describe what a gigantic creep James Mill was and it's all you can do to stop yourself from flailing through space-time to give poor lamb JS a hug.

48. A book you didn’t expect to like but did?

The Leopard. Marvellous, moving, possibly timeless dead white male literature.

49. A book that you expected to like but didn’t?

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. I mean, seriously? And in a lesser way, Naomi Novik's Tongues of Serpents, the newest in a series I've otherwise really liked.

50. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?

Jane Austen.

the year in marriage proposals

2010-12-20T14:07:00.002+05:00

“Good-bye,” said Eve. “Thank you for being so hospitable and lavish. I’ll try and find some cushions and muslin and stuff to brighten up this place.”

“Your presence does that adequately,” said Psmith, accompanying her to the door. “By the way, returning to the subject we were discussing last night, I forgot to mention, when asking you to marry me, that I can do card-tricks.”

“Really?”

“And also a passable imitation of a cat calling to her young. Has this no weight with you? Think! These things come in very handy in the long winter evenings.”

“But I shan’t be there when you are imitating cats in the long winter evenings.”

“I think you are wrong. As I visualize my little home, I can see you there very clearly, sitting before the fire. Your maid has put you into something loose. The light of the flickering flames reflects itself in your lovely eyes. You are pleasantly tired after an afternoon’s shopping, but not so tired as to be unable to select a card - any card – from the pack which I offer…”

-- from Leave It To Psmith, PG Wodehouse.

gyan prakash: mumbai fables

2010-11-22T09:39:00.002+05:00

I would have loved to write a more detailed review of this book, which I recommend unreservedly. Instead, this is a piece I wrote for Mint Lounge earlier this month on the writing of the book itself. You can read it in newspaper version here.

Publishers often invite Bollywood celebrities to the Mumbai launches of their books, perhaps assuming that people in the city are more likely to come to literary events for movie glamour than out of bookish interest. But Anurag Kashyap was not exactly providing showbiz gloss to the book reception for Gyan Prakash's 'Mumbai Fables,' held late last month in Churchgate's storied old Astoria Hotel: he was there to celebrate a friend and collaborator. Prakash also happens to be the scriptwriter of Kashyap's own mysterious but oddly well-known future project, the film 'Bombay Velvet.' The Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University may seem like an unlikely fount of creativity for Kashyap's famously punk sensibilities. But then his new book, even with its impeccable [meticulousness] and impressive depth of research, is an unlikely book for a historian to write.

Its nine chapters each deal with an element of Mumbai's history through the prism of the texts and myths they have created and sustained. This high literary approach relies on everything from long-buried archival records of land scams and back issues of Bal Thackeray's early mouthpiece, Marmik, to 19th century Parsi detective novels and Hindi comic books. Perhaps it was easier than it seems, given the sheer drama of this multitude of sources, for Prakash to unearth a Bollywood script in the material as a serious academic work.

"To write the history of Mumbai at this level required, in my view, strong story telling without dumbing it all down," Prakash explains in an email conversation. "Indeed, my critique of Bollywood is that they don't take their storytelling seriously. Plots are often full of holes, the characters lack compelling motivations, and the context lacks richness. In my case, strong storytelling in Mumbai Fables and writing Bombay Velvet came naturally since I took both to be serious ventures."

Bombay Velvet, as Kashyap and Prakash said at the book reception, draws from material from 'several chapters in the book.' "I was able to go back and forth," says Prakash, "making the script rich with actual details from Mumbai's history, and turning the book cinematic." It is set in a nightclub: an inspiration drawn from a chapter of history that doesn't make it into Mumbai Fables, but is part of another collaboration: between Prakash and Mumbai journalist and author Naresh Fernandes, who has written extensively on Mumbai's 'Jazz Age' between the 1930s and '60's, when a local jazz culture flourished in Mumbai's nightclubs thanks to talented musicians, many of Goan Catholic origin, and an enthusiastic audience. Many of these musicians doubled up as Bollywood sessions players, or Konkani pop stars. Fernandes' essay about them in the [2002] anthology of Mumbai writing, 'Bombay, Meri Jaan,' caught Prakash's attention, and subsequently inspired him to write, in 2005, 'A Bombay Story.' "Anurag immediately liked its noir quality. I went to Anurag because I had seen his unreleased film "Paanch," and thought that he had the sensibility and the visual imagination to turn this into a film." Along the way, the title changed to Bombay Velvet, and finally, Prakash wrote the first draft of the script in early 2009 while also writing Mumbai Fables."

A double-pronged creative feat of that scope cannot be easy, but it reflects Prakash's own interest in the multiplicity of narratives, and the way they inform the the grand narrative of Mumbai's development as India's city of dreams. 'My goal,’ he writes in an early chapter, ‘is not to strip fact from fiction…I am interested in uncovering the backstories of Mumbai’s history bercause they reveal its experience as a modern city, as a society built up from scratch.’ Along the way, he unearths the counternarrative of that experience, the inseparable other half of Mumbai's self-image: that of a cruel, corrupt city, full of despair and destruction. Perhaps nowhere is this aspect of Mumbai's narrative more starkly realised than in Prakash's chapter on Doga, the Hindi comic-book superhero who protects the city's marginalised and helpless by ruthlessly eliminating criminals. His vigilantism is so angry and bloody that it can make Batman seem like a flower child. But this raw, wish-fulfilling hero who seems to have fought every major city problem over the last two decades is not a Mumbai creation: he was been imagined being by a team at Delhi-based Raj Comics, a large and extremely popular publisher of Hindi-language comics and paperbacks.

"I found it fascinating that the people who came up with the idea were located in Delhi, not Mumbai," Prakash explains. "There are many reasons for it, including the fact that Mumbai doesn't have a strong comic book publisher. But also important is the fact that Doga himself is an outsider in two senses. He is an outsider who comes to Mumbai from the Chambal Valley. But as a masked superhero, he is also an outsider, an estranged, angst-ridden character, outside society and its norms."

Sanjay Gupta, studio head at Raj Comics, explains that they wanted a particular setting for the superhero they created in 1989 - a time when larger-than-life gang wars and balletic violence seemed to be Mumbai's sole preserve. "We have superheroes set in other cities too, and Mumbai was fascinating in this respect. We keep up with newspapers and TV news for fresh news of the city, and while we sell all over India, readers in Mumbai do have a particular attachment to Doga." And it isn't just the young adults who buy out new Doga issues at railway stations the minute they are out. Doga piqued Kashyap's own interest when Prakash introduced him to the comic, and the Doga film, written and directed by Kashyap, is due to go on the floors early next year.

Fernandes, who has himself written about another Raj Comics hero - the Goan musician-turned-zombie Anthony Gonsalves - in connection with Mumbai and Goa's musical history, was the other guest of honour at Prakash's reception. His work is one of Bombay Velvet’s underpinnings: a rare instance of a Hindi film consciously informed by a specific historical narrative. Indeed, conscious evocations of city history are relatively rare in most forms of Mumbai’s popular culture.

"There is no dearth of cultural histories or Mumbai books at all," he says, when I ask him about whether Prakash's book is a rare phenomenon. "We've always produced a lot of material examining and questioning ourselves. But we're not always concerned with the results.” While Mumbai has a long history of citizens thinking it gets worse all the time, he says, “there really has been a rupture of the cultural continuum since the ‘90s: the new economy seems to blow up the old sense of what it means to be a Bombayite.”

In the Mumbai of the imagination that Prakash writes of, contradictions are part of how the Mumbai story continues to tell itself: it holds out both love and indifference, despair and promise. By bringing history to an often stubbornly ahistorical city, Prakash seems to indicate that Mumbai's past is still connected with its future.

anuja chauhan: battle for bittora

2010-11-22T09:37:00.001+05:00

A version of this review appeared in Mint Lounge on November 20, here.

Two of India’s youngest candidates for election to Parliament are fighting it out in their home constituency of Bittora in ‘Pavit Pradesh.’ Zain Altaf Khan has a number of posh degrees and a ticket as token Muslim from rightwing hardliners IJP. Our protagonist, Sarojini Pande, is contesting her seat on behalf of the Pragati Party, the ‘politically correct Noah’s Ark,’ and her grandmother, a corrupt old veteran politician fighting one last poll battle. From her cosy, low-profile urban yuppie lifestyle, Jinni (‘Mohammedan sa name hai,’ her grandmother frostily dismisses the nickname) must overcome opposition schemes, a generation gap the size of Pavit Pradesh with her grandmother, the byzantine inner workings of the Party, and her own attitude to the whole deal, which is two parts skepticism and one part well-intentioned naivété. The gorgeous Zain, of course, happens to be just another hurdle.

With its thinly-veiled grounding in real-life Indian politics, popular culture references that will almost certainly age badly and its flippancy about some of India’s electoral diseases, Anuja Chauhan’s Battle for Bittora really shouldn’t be so amusing. In fact, it is not only funny, but also warm-hearted, well-paced and a little sexy. Literary quirks that would be annoying in less capable hands – a relaxed attitude to Hinglish, an overreliance on italics – become inconsequential quirks in her writing, easier to brush aside than ‘mosquitoes bhinn bhinnaoeing,’ to quote just one of Jinni’s improbable feats of multilingual verbing. What often grates on the ear in you-go-girl novels set in Delhi’s party circuit or Mumbai’s media studios seems perfectly in keeping with the tribulations of a character trying hard to balance her roles as genuine Pavit Pradeshi and hip world citizen at once.

Chauhan is able to strike the urbane, confessional-blogger tone of chick lit effortlessly. Indeed, we make much of Indian publishing trends towards genre-based reading, but Battle for Bittora makes it clear how far ahead of her field she is. Dialogue is effortless in the classic romantic comedy style, sentiment is sharply controlled, and characters with deep, real flaws turn out nonetheless to be likeable, and more importantly, relatable.

The world she creates for Jinni and Zain is key to this experience. The book plays out on a large canvas, but Chauhan paints it deftly. She describes the nitty-gritties of electoral drama in rural India with the aplomb of someone who really has her ear to the ground (Chauhan’s mother-in-law, Margaret Alva, is a senior Congress politician and five-time MP). As Jinni is dragged into vote-bank politics, graft accepting and thoroughly unparliamentary practices, her disgust with the system is matched only by her glee at stepping out of an air-conditioned Mumbai office and finding herself immersed in the most reality-soaked bits of the Real India. If Jinni’s inner monologue is the sort manages to encompass anxieties about the itchiness of a khadi blouse and her constituency’s water supply at once, how can her readers judge her? Self-absorbed, flawed, but ultimately charming: the stuff electoral candidates are made of.

protesting the protesters

2010-10-20T12:45:00.005+05:00

A version of this post appeared on the Mint website today.

I spent this Monday afternoon hanging on the edge of a capacity crowd at the Mumbai Press Club, at a reading of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey organized by the Citizens’ Initiative for Peace. Interspersed with the readings, people stood up to speak variously about the unravelling political fabric of the city and the country, the sanctity of the academic process, the creeping fascism of the majority, the mendaciousness of the Shiv Sena in general and Aditya Thackeray in particular, the declining respect for the rule of law and the dubious qualifications of University Vice-Chancellor Ranjan Welukar – “or whatever his name is,” as one speaker said irritably. Someone quoted Beckett.

The discreet and utterly predictable charm of the bourgeoisie? Someone encroaches on our constitutional right to expression and the only people who turn up to protest are greying Gandhians and earnest college students. Since the capacity of the Press Club terrace is about eighty on a cold day, and it is shaded by the trees on the edge of the Oval Maidan, it’s not hard to feel a little self-righteous, hemmed in and apparently cut off from the currents of the city at large, as though we are forced by virtue of our beliefs to confine ourselves to this shrinking Anglophile circle of light in an ocean of unreason.

This was far from the truth, of course. My fellow audience was made up of fine upstanding public – in the Mumbai sense of the word – many of whom have fought hard to break out of the sort of imposed elitism that various bastions of Indian leadership have been great at leveraging against its critics. How else to describe the predicament of Anand Patwardhan, a filmmaker whose Ayodhya documentary, Ram Ke Naam, has shown exactly once on cable TV in the last 18 years, because it has been banned, or channels too scared to run it? Patwardhan and artistes like him are not alien ideologues who pop into public life expressly to endanger people’s interests. Their mandate, in a broad sense, is to reflect, and comment on, public sentiment. Not exactly the work of the bon-bon eating classes.

Patwardhan was there to read out the statement Rohinton Mistry mailed in from Canada, reproduced extensively across Mumbai papers on Tuesday morning. Mistry harangues Welukar and the University with a very resonant moral seriousness. Paternalistically, he ended with some recommended reading for Aditya Thackeray, Mistry’s fellow-Xavierite and Mumbai University-kar. Even the book-burning fraternity can quote Tagore by heart, but Mistry’s other piece of advice was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, never easily taught in post-colonial academic circles. Did he particularly remember the book’s history, as one recast from sacrosanct classic to questionable, even hurtful object lesson, thanks to Chinua Achebe’s magnificent excoriation? If he did, I salute him for making the recommendation.

It’s not hard to see why Such A Long Journey offends people who haven’t read it. Quoted out of context, that stuff about Marathas and bhaiyyas can give anyone a headache. It is the sort of book that should ignite debate, that calls for public polemic about the faultlines of a city that, call it Bombay or Mumbai, has always and tragically accommodated as many variants of disunity as it has of solidarity. It invites comment on why those whose real grievances at real linguistic and cultural divisions are represented via bizarre political theatre, instead of finding voices in lecture halls and newspaper editorials.

It is, in short, an apt cornerstone for questions that crop up endlessly and in different languages outside the Press Club terrace, questions perhaps too broad and too complex to be covered over the debate – such as it is – over one circus of faux-Falangists and their minions. But there are cracks in every wall. I was sitting behind a crowd of the earnest college students I mentioned earlier. Several turned up in spite of ongoing midterms, and I recognised more than one as part of the same group who has been instrumental in drafting and publicising this online petition, a document as sober and serious as Mistry himself might have wrought. They are waiting, they told me, to get through exams before they can reach out to organise their fellow students. They sat politely through the readings and initial speeches, all conducted by people several decades older than them. As the event wore on, they leaned forward, tapped their chins, mumbled, muttered, rolled their eyes, and, once the third or fourth deploration of the ideology of the Sena had occurred, began to mutter amongst themselves.

‘This is not the point,’ I heard more than one of them say. ‘This is really not helping.’ ‘Say something!’ ‘Why isn’t someone saying something?’ ‘Were you going to make the same point?’ ‘Why aren’t you saying something?’

Finally, one girl stood up and marched to the front of the terrace. “If we’re going to go off into discussions of the book’s literary merit or whatever, this is never going to end,” she said. “This is a procedural issue. If we don’t treat it like that, we’ll never get anything done.”

Amazingly, she had the last word. I liked her and her fellow students, who applauded her unequivocally. They know their outrage legitimises nothing. Perhaps they agree with their opponents that the forums of debate afforded them are already skewed. They are not the ones drawing the battle lines in a fake battle. They can only claim their rightful place as part of the public, as much as their sword-carrying classmates. They know they have to get stuff done, the way Patwardhan did for Ram Ke Naam, court by court and channel by channel. I wish them luck. This is not the time to keel over rasping ‘The horror, the horror.’

on leela naidu

2010-10-08T10:30:00.002+05:00

I wrote this for Verve's Annual Best-Dressed Issue, which is this October 2010's issue currently on stands, as a consideration of Leela Naidu's aesthetic influence. Since I read this book earlier this year and failed to review it, I'm also cheating and marking this as a Book Munch entry.

#84 Leela: A Patchwork Life, Leela Naidu and Jerry Pinto

It happens all too rarely, but sometimes, when you are reading a book on your daily commute in a packed Mumbai local, someone will detach themselves from the hive of bodies to ask you about it. The cause will generally be a book that has made you laugh out loud, or weep in public, or the latest Chetan Bhagat. The pleasures of Leela Naidu's biography, Leela: A Patchwork Life, published earlier this year, are more refined; but all the same, it caused more than one lady to lean over, examine the cover, and then ask me how I had procured it, and how much it cost, and did I – visibly from a giddy generation of the post-Sush-and-Ash era – know who Leela Naidu had really been?

Who, indeed? Leela Naidu remained famous in India long after the siege engines of PR machines and the dissolving limits of the news cycle captured celebrity culture. To the post-pageant public, she was always the Miss India (1954) who had made it to a definitive list of the ten most beautiful women in the world, back in an age when the Indian woman came somewhere above elephants and snake charmers, and perhaps ranked a little below bejewelled maharajahs and austere freedom fighters, as exotic representatives of their country to the West at large.

Her appeal to her compatriots was, in all likelihood, touched a little by the same ideas of foreignness, too. She was a biracial woman, as much at home in Europe (her mother was an Irish Indologist, with Franco-Swiss roots) as she was in India. Her career spanned a multitude of roles. From making documentary films for JRD Tata, to dubbing for Chinese martial arts films in Hong Kong and acting as unpaid secretary – her words – to husband Dom Moraes, to being the muse on whom Salvador Dali's Madonna was modelled, to acting in the handful of films that established her legend as one of the loveliest women ever to grace the Indian screen.

For a woman less serenely honest and less elegant, the word 'dilettante' may have come to mind. How else to explain someone who had started out at more or less the same time as Madhubala and Waheeda Rahman, but whose body of work was a mere fraction of theirs: a woman who, according to her biography, was spotted by Raj Kapoor and lined up to be a marquee name for his RK banner – only to turn him down? It may be impossible today to imagine a beautiful woman becoming an icon for seeking less attention, rather than more. But Naidu was only being true to her sense of aesthetics, which found little common ground with commercial cinema.

She was a woman truly at home in the world, and her photographs from the time confirm it. In the simple drapes of her saris, free of make-up travelled through the country with poet-writer Moraes, whether she was taking dictation from Indira Gandhi or protesting on behalf of landless Dalits, she was the consummate face of an enlightened, independent India, still fired by the ideals of independence, impatient with consumerism and wary of social exhibitionism. The same appeal was evident in those films of hers, chosen judiciously across the decades – Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha, Merchant-Ivory's The Householder, and Shyam Benegal's 1985 classic, Trikaal. Years later, Benegal would say that she 'breathed innocence and tranquility' into her performance. It was a succinct description of what she represents in those black-and-white frames of her early life.

But she was equally at home in couture. The 1960s and 70s, the decades of the birth of cool, were portended in the casual grace with which she carried herself in the fashions of Europe and the USA. There were compliments from Ingrid Bergman and salutes from Jean Renoir and David Lean. It wasn't about switching cultural codes: in the girlish frocks and evening gowns of her modelling shots, she was as Indian as she was in saris, and that was the beauty of it. Writing after her death, Vikram Doctor said, 'Naidu was one of a group of beautiful Indian women who, from the Forties to the early Sixties, helped create an idea of a beautiful, elegant and accomplished new nation. This included Rani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur, the other name that people remember from that '10 most beautiful women' list and Nayantara Sahgal .... All these women shared a certain style. While unmistakably Indian and nearly always dressed in saris, there was also a Western air to them as well. They all had Western connections ... and they presented themselves in a mix of Indian and European styles.' The mix, in Naidu's case, was pitch-perfect. She rose beyond the traditional definitions of signature style as a single classic look or a set of influences. Her style was not about fashion; it was about feeling.

The very thought of a woman in rayon saris and flared skirts rising to the top of a list of classical beauties seems idiosyncratic today. We are used to seeing beautiful women who are not only icons of taste, but also of accomplishment. They are women who act in films and walk the ramp; they work as designers and news channel pundits and high-profile entrepreneurs; they head famous families and corporations; they are photographed at parties; they define the labels they wear. If Naidu did any of those things over the last decade, she managed to avoid all attention to it.

We don't think of the starry radiance of Gayatri Devi or Audrey Hepburn when we think of her, nor yet the sun-drenched charm of Madhubala or Sophia Loren. Hers is a cool, chameleonic appeal: gracious, reserved and supremely unruffled. The cover photo of her biography, taken in her youth, is a shot overflowing with joie de vivre – gamine grin, jaunty bob, and all. Her legend had, in later years, taken on the air of melancholy that affects the image of so many people who guard the secrets of their private lives. But her parting shot, as she said, was not going to be 'a narrative of feminine pain.' The narrative, packed with anecdotes and wry asides, lives up to its title: it is assembled like the dazzling patchwork of things and events that made up her life, career and style. It is an alternate iconography of beauty, and it is her legacy to Indian women and their modernity. The films, the labels and the corporations are there for us to define, but our identities can be independent of their existence, too. In Leela Naidu's legend, as in the MacLeish poem, beauty does not need to mean, but be.

on coke studio

2010-10-08T10:23:00.003+05:00

This is the full draft of a story I wrote about Coke Studio for Open Magazine last month; a version of it appeared here. My thanks to many fellow bloggers and Tweeters who helped with it, including Ahmer Naqvi, Ahsan Butt, Manan Ahmed, Omar Bilal Akhtar, and Venkat Ananth, from whose tweets I first learned of the show.

----

In the call-and-response flow of abuse that makes up the majority of comments on that bedrock of the Internet, YouTube, few battles are more depressing and vacuous than the long-running flamewar between Indian and Pakistani users. The shared popular culture and social history of the two countries covers vast quantities of desi-generated content – films, cricket highlights, news shows, Atif Aslam superhits – that find their way, only sometimes legitimately, on to the video sharing site. These videos go on to form the incidental background to the sort of foam-flecked rage, expressed in a multitude of – also shared – languages, that approximates the level of discourse usually achieved at a Shiv Sena block party.

But in this seemingly endless deadlock of trolls, a détente is achieved in the comment threads under the videos of one particular phenomenon. Against the spectacularly-viewed and keenly-discussed music of the Karachi-based TV show Coke Studio, they put down their cudgels, shake hands across the aisle, and find themselves united in love and admiration – and even, on the Indian side, a wistful envy. The most common refrain after variations of 'Wow, I love this' is not the inevitable YouTube corollary of 'Wow, this sucks,' but 'Why can't we do this in India?'

The Coke Studio juggernaut rolled out of the blocks in a Karachi studio in the summer of 2008. Its visionary and executive producer Rohail Hyatt was one of Pakistani pop's early legends, an U-19 Rawalpindi cricketer turned singer turned impresario. "It had been done before," says producer-filmmaker Nofil Naqvi, who worked with Hyatt and his wife Umber, "In a couple of other places, but never on such a large scale." The show, similar in spirit to the British performance series Live from Abbey Road, was a meticulously curated series of live sets featuring combinations of musical acts – sometimes unlikely – reinventing old songs, sampling other genres, melding two or more distinct styles, and putting out an altogether new work. The five episodes of its first season, shot over four days in February 2008, became a hit, featuring collaborations of unprecedented quality, such as the raga-rock fusion of Garaj Baras between Ali Azmat – former frontman of the enormously popular Junoon – and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, who had sung the original in Bollywood for 2007's Paap. Under Hyatt's supervision, the band Strings remodelled the melody of their chiming, high-tension megahit Duur in collaboration with classical vocalist Ustad Hussein Baksh Gullo. Rahat's voice soaring on ambient retakes of hits like Shaman Paiyan and Dildara electrified audiences, and the charming, more lightweight sets by acts like Sajid and Zeeshan or the band Mauj, were glimpses into the generally high standards of Pakistan's pop scene.

And then Season Two rolled around.

"2009 was a dark time for artistes," Naqvi explains. "Safety concerns within the country were rising – it was a very different atmosphere from the one during the last military dictatorship, when security was easier to handle for concert venues and live acts. Business in India had dried up in the aftermath of the November 2008 attacks, which was an even more serious financial hit." Catastrophe was looming. It was in this situation that Coke Studio pulled out all the stops. After the success of Season One, the show secured a deal that allowed them to air simultaneously on every – yes, every – major TV networks and radio channels. This may have seemed like a puzzlingly large-scale gamble on the success of what was, after all, a volatile format: but Hyatt and his backers knew it was going to be special.

"Back during Season One, the only other friend who knew about it was an RJ," remembers blogger and Coke Studio enthusiast Ahmer Naqvi. "But I vividly remember the first episode of the second season. My wife and I were driving and we didn't know what show was on, but when we started listening to it, we were ecstatic." The episode featured some of Coke Studio's biggest hits, including, Naqvi remembers, "eclectic covers by reigning pop kings - Ali Zafar and Atif Aslam. Memorable for the shock value among other things, as no one really could imagine either of them doing such versatile stuff." Aslam is a genuine subcontinental superstar - his songs for Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani in late 2009 were among the year's biggest hits, and had the India embargo for lunch. Like most superstars, his appeal is nonexistent to the bon-bon eating classes on both sides of the border. "That was also why a lot of my friends who were very serious about their music immediately abhorred Coke Studio," Ahmer says. "The presence of a corporate logo, plus teeny-bopper singers, put many purists off."

But the lid had blown off the phenomenon. On the same episode as Zafar and Aslam, the show also featured arguably its flat-out finest production, the reworking of a Bulleh Shah kalam, Aik Alif, by the veteran Sufi musician Saeein Zahoor and the rock band Noori. Cynicism was clearly going to be difficult. High expectations were repeatedly met an surpassed. Aslam covered Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Zafar sang Punjabi folk, a far cry from their fan demographic's usual staples. For many Pakistanis, it was a reaffirmation of a long-held belief: their country made kickass music. "Music is perhaps the only area in the arts where Pakistan produces world-class stuff regularly and which gets local appreciation," Ahmer says. "Coke Studio got the kind of response that authors, filmmakers, and drama serial producers would die for."

It's true that Daniyal Mueenuddin or Mohammed Hanif would be hard-pressed to do with their material what Coke Studio did with theirs. In addition to blanket broadcast coverage, their music and videos were instantly and legally downloadable for free on the Coke Studio website. In a country where returns on recorded music were even less dependable than concert revenues, it was a smart move. Coke Studio became irresistible in cities and along the highways, constantly on replay via mobiles, in vehicle stereos and on the radio. Crucially, it also became available to the diaspora, an influential demographic on social networks and blogs. Word spread. The official Coke Studio fan page on Facebook has just under 300,000 fans, and the official YouTube channel – the videos, of course, proliferate via other IDs too, often with value-added services such as English subtitles, or portfolio shots of the stars interspersed with the broadcast – counts about 8.5 million views. The numbers may not seem like much in comparison to successes in fully digitised media cultures like the USA, or massive markets like India, but they represent a unique force for Pakistani music. And unlike, say, the aggregate Twitter following for a Bollywood star, this population contained a large number of those serious fans not put off by the dubious sponsorship and ice-lolly pop quotients. Writing in the Financial Times shortly after news of this monsoon's floods started to bubble up in worldwide media, the novelist Mohsin Hamid earnestly examined of the possibilities of hope for Pakistan.

'Hope takes many small forms. One of these is Coke Studio, a televised jam session that throws together unexpected musical combinations … It is part of a vast and downloadable music scene ... I have heard its songs as the ringtones of people ranging from bankers and shopkeepers to carpenters.'

Now three seasons down, Coke Studio has dealt with extremes of popularity and backlash. Some of those inveterate downloaders and caller-tune aficionados have excoriated the last season, which aired this July, for a variety of reasons, ranging from esotericism – with more folk and experimental sets than the last two seasons – to a certain feeling of pedestrianism after the unusual achievements of Season 2. Not even the appearances of Sufi legend Abida Parveen has shielded the show from criticism. But the music industry seems content to be philosophical. Omar Bilal Akhtar, vocalist of season 3 rock performers Aunty Disco Project, says, "Obviously with such massive exposure we get some pretty extreme reactions, but we've made more new fans than we could ever have imagined. Being on Coke Studio also lends a degree of credibility to being a musician in Pakistan. Before CS, if you told someone you were in a desi rock band, you got sympathy or condescension. We actually get people calling us back now."

It's not hard to extrapolate a future of eventual doom for such a monolith of cultural capital. How long before artistes who don't get a chance to establish their credentials via the show start to look for alternatives? How long before networks start to feel the tyranny of the show's distribution model? How long before the murmurs of more-of-the-sameness that circulated last month grow into ennui? Akhtar offers an insider's perspective of the benefits that offset these questions. "First, it's definitely raised the bar in terms of quality. We have artistes really pushing themselves to capture the audience's attention. CS has paved the way for experimentation. Popstars can sing with folk musicians, young female rockers can cover classic folk songs, song lengths can be greater than 3.5 mins. Second: it's improved standards for artistes themselves. I have never encountered the kind of professionalism nor seen the kind of equipment that was used in CS anywhere in Pakistan. Having worked with the best, the mainstream artistes in CS can now demand higher standards from the people around them, whether it's media promotion or audio engineering or recording."

Third, and perhaps most significantly in the short term, "there has been a resurgence in ethnic, Pakistani music. It's always been one of Rohail's goals to promote indigenous music. He's introduced my generation to our own country's music in a non-demagogical, refreshing way. It's cool to like folk and qawwali music now."

Akhtar and Aunty Disco Project may enjoy the cult status that all good rock acts aspire to – their Coke Studio song, Sultanat, is outrageously catchy – but as in the rest of the subcontinent, this is at some distance from the mainstream. The real revolution occurred in Hyatt's successfully bringing genuine fusion into the spotlight. It is by no means unheard of or unsuccessful in the subcontinent, particularly in A R Rahman-era Bollywood. But no matter how edgy film music gets, it is always grounded in its context: it is meant to be a background score for a movie and for its stars. By its very nature, fusion in film music is a metaphor for palatability, and the success of Rahman and his colleagues rests unabashedly on that. To imagine the effect of, say, that Strings-Ustad Gullo collaboration, Indians cannot rely on the sound of the movies. They will have to refer to their own live scene and its longtime experimenters like Shubha Mudgal or Ustad Sultan Khan, Indian Ocean and Mrigya. That platform is fortunately vibrant, but also limited in its reach.

By putting fusion front and centre on Pakistani prime-time television, Coke Studio changed the rules of engagement with an older tradition of subcontinental indie. Hyatt and his swanky studio equipment may have rearranged their framework, but the voices of Sindhi fakirs like Fakir Juman Shah, the words of Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah, and restylings of the tradition from vocalists Tina Sani and Arieb Azhar, wafted out of speakers louder and clearer than they ever had before.

And it is this sound that has repeatedly transfixed the YouTube trolls, and sustained a muted but anecdotally significant conversation in India since last year's breakout season. Rabbi Shergill's 2004 version of the Bulleh Shah poem Bulla ki Jaana was a genuine crossover hit, and perhaps one of the few recent instances where pop fusion achieved overwhelming mainstream acceptance, but it came with little context of its history for the vast numbers of the uninitiated, and remained a one-off. By contrast, Coke Studio's music hints at a vast shared context. At last year's TED India conference in Mysore, Pakistani delegates handed out Coke Studio CDs to Indian Fellows. Fans discover and re-discover individual sets through exchanges on Facebook and Twitter, joining in the largely English-language Pakistani chatter to geek out over the music. This networked population is partially deaf to the sound of televised musical contests produced in Mumbai, sceptical of MTV, and critically demanding of the output of Bollywood and urban indie alike. Coke Studio's folk throwback opens up new vistas for these Indian listeners, in much the same way that an array of bands from Junoon to Strings put Indian fans in touch with the astonishing range and accomplishments of the Pak-rock scene over the years.

"The show allows many Pakistanis to present an image of themselves to the rest of the world," Ahmer comments, "One which is simultaneously modern enough to be admitted into the pantheon of international-standard productions, and yet also fiercely embraces local music and tolerant, peace-loving lyrics, so that those nagging questions about identity can be put to bed by both secularists and Islamists, and everyone in between."

It is possible to stumble on a gem of a YouTube video that records Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's rendition of the Kalam-e-bahu and be enraptured by an artefact from a notionally common past. But to hear part of the same text in a glitzy, rocked-out performance of Alif Allah, Chambey di Booti by Arif Lohar and Meesha Shafi (the folkster and ex-model of Hamid's writing) is to clearly relate to that commonality in a language that is still mutually understood. It is not the equivalent of Pakistanis watching Hindi films, or the two countries meeting on the cricket field – it is an awareness that predates both those forms. It may make the question of 'why we don't have this' in India seem urgent, but it also simultaneously makes it banal and self-involved, and a little irrelevant.

anosh irani, dahanu road

2010-10-08T10:13:00.001+05:00

A version of this review first appeared on ibnlive.com, here

#83 Dahanu Road, Anosh Irani

To many residents of Mumbai, Dahanu is an area slightly more of a cypher than parts of Delhi or Chennai. It is a fruit-growing, amenity-inhibited outpost that will someday be swallowed up by the city, an exurb connected to the metropolis at the very last stop on the suburban Western line. Nothing could seem further flung from the diverse, super-urbane neighbourhoods in South and Southwest Mumbai built and occupied by the city's venerated Zoroastrian community. Yet, Dahanu is also a Zoroastrian enclave. As Indo-Canadian author Anosh Irani explains to his readers, it is the settler colony of a more recent diaspora of Persian exiles: the Iranis who fled Arab persecution in the 20th rather than the 10th century, and followed their ancestors to India's west coast. The history of their diaspora is distinct from that of the Parsis of urban Mumbai, and the conflict of those identities flickers in and out of the book in a string of bright, unsteady backstories for the Iranis who populate its pages.

But the Dahanu of Dahanu Road, with its sun-warmed orchards and open sea can also be stifling, a soil that can only sustain one kind of growth. Like the chickoo trees they farm, the Iranis have flourished here. In doing so, they have disenfranchised the Warli tribals who are the land's original inhabitants. The result is a proto-feudal society in which the Warlis provide labour to their prosperous Irani landlords, and receive little pay, less security and no social justice for their troubles. This is the background against which Anosh Irani sets his story, a history in which his clan of fictional Iranis assume the position of chief actors, as well as observers. The protagonist Zairos is a charming young man whose days are spent biking around the farmlands he stands to inherit, shuttling from family home to family home, and spending the day in the company of other charming men who have presumably never worked a collective day in their lives. The Iranis may have their differences with the Parsis, but the author's character sketches evoke the familiar figures of other fictional Zoroastrians - a community that occupies no small part in the canon of cinema and writing about Mumbai - in their dissolute, self-avowedly eccentric personae. Zairos' friends and relations are aware of their detachment from the currents of community life in the big city, and the glowing Parsi record of social and economic achievement. To characters like Zairos' father Aspi, this becomes the cornerstone of a perverse joy in the rough edges of Irani life out in the mofussil. To those like his grandfather Shapur, a first-generation immigrant from Iran, it is a shadow over his primal connection with Dahanu, the first land he is able to possess and call his own. Shapur marries a Parsi woman, Banu, and brings her to live out in the wilds where his chickoo orchards are taking root. Banu dies a young woman, under mysterious circumstances, leaving Shapur with a lifelong grief, and the beginnings of a dynasty.

Zairos, the youngest of that line, is the keeper of the stories an aged Shapur recounts to him on the family verandah. The Iranis' history of oppressing the Warlis may not stretch beyond a few decades, but it carries with it all the heft and consequence of colonial atrocity, sanctioned by law where law exists, and assuming the grim outlines of cowboys-and-Indians narratives where it doesn't. Few of these stories stir Zairos, though, until he sets eyes on Kusum, the daughter of an old labourer and the wife of an abusive husband. Their growing relationship involves a negotiation of boundaries Zairos has never sought to breach before. Through its fulfillment, the novel suggests, change may come to Dahanu.

Irani operates in a register that should be familiar to regular readers of the South Asian saga. Dahanu Road tells a big, messy story about a small place, covering some fresh ground in the process. The novel strikes the reader as a rare experiment in mapping the space between India's urban and rural communities; so also the overlap between communities that are popularly considered to be made up of fundamentally urban or rural people. There is a wide gap between the Irani and Warli stories, and the novel attempts to address this. But in attempting to write a Warli story, the author is on far shakier ground than when he sticks with his Irani protagonists. For an earnest shot at fictionalising a history of Warli oppression, there are few moments in which the writing presents the Warli characters with any sort of directness. For most of them – and especially all the Warli men – there is little existence outside a vicious cycle of poverty, bondage, alcoholism and unemployment. In looking at Irani-Warli relations through, among other things, the lens of gender, the narrative is gendered, too. It falls into several familiar traps. In attempting to portray a society destroyed by outside greed and prejudice, we revisit a scenario excused all too readily in fiction because it is easy to presume that it conforms to reality: the only characters with voices are the ones who serve to further the protagonists' narratives. Even Kusum, the female protagonist, appears to us so largely through Zairos' point of view, that her own inner life - revealed when the authorial voice occasionally switches points of view away from Shapur or Zairos - appears tangential.

No doubt this narrative, and others like it, are important, but they are also incomplete. By staying so close to the perspectives of its oppressors -- the Dahanu equivalent of nice guys though they may be -- Dahanu Road constructs itself explicitly as a narrative of guilt, for familial crimes as well as social ones. A narrative of guilt is also a narrative of redemption, and that is ultimately what Dahanu Road seeks to bestow on its central characters. Unfortunately, redemption is not a literary commodity that is easy to control. We live in days when we are continually reminded that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice. Perhaps the gendering in Dahanu Road is meant to remind us that as in life, justice and redemption are neither available equally to all, nor able to erase the gap between the unequal. Shapur and Zairos are the focal points of the story, but the women, Banu and Kusum, are its axes. They are divided by a deep and poisoned gulf of class and history, but it is remarkable how alike their fates are. At the end of the novel, Zairos climbs the hill of Bahrot, sacred to the history of Indian Zoroastrianism, to make peace with his legacies. His forbidden bond with Kusum - the link to his future - is legitimised as he revisits the past. For Kusum herself, as for the wistful shade of his Parsi grandmother, no such redemption is readily available. There are some lights in which the distance between eras seem very short indeed.

an announcement, a review

2010-10-08T10:07:00.003+05:00

So that joblessness thing did not work out very well. Not only did I NOT have a chance to write a single book update for this blog, I did not have the chance to READ more than a couple of books all the way through last month. But now that I have a new job, I should get my time management completely wrong all over again, and updates should be frequent! Yay! Right?

Anyway. I did write a couple of reviews for the books section of CNN-IBN's website, ibnlive.com last month. Here's one of them.

#82 Tiger Hills, Sarita Mandanna

There are several characteristics of the Indian novel in English that Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills commandeers in all seriousness, perhaps aiming for their reinvention among the hills and plantations of Coorg. If there are readers who have never before read a novel full of lush Indian crops, rained-on Indian villages and sprawling Indian houses inhabited by agonised but fecund Indian families, they should have no trouble knowing them by heart, as it were, within pages of Tiger Hills. Mandanna treats the reader to a reiteration of the Great Indian Novel, many of whose norms are now so familiar that they have passed into the realm of parody. Yet, if she is aware that omens of foreboding, floral analogies for sex, far-sighted grandmothers and illicit affairs with white people are a bit 1990s, she writes in defiance of that awareness.

So the birth of Devi, the tempestuous and beautiful heroine, is heralded by the circling of a flock of herons, who will make their appearance repeatedly through the book at moments of especial doom in her life. Her love affairs are conducted in bowers of laburnum flowers. Devanna – her best friend and eventually the architect of her destiny – is mentored by a kindly German missionary who is secretly a tortured gay man. The bald facts of narrative do not occur in a vacuum: every repetition of a familiar image is an anchor of its overall effect, and Tiger Hills aims for nothing more than unreconstructed nostalgia, and unexamined, heaving-bosom notions of grand passions.

And of what? The book's publicists explicitly drew a connection between Tiger Hills and Gone With The Wind, which is a popular classic because, not in spite of, the sterotypes of place and race that it perpetuates. There are glancing familiarities between the two: both feature strong-willed, unsympathetic heroines, tempestuous love triangles, and multi-generational consequences for the mistakes of a few. But more pervasive yet is the presence of a stifling, objectifying point of view that reduces the landscape and history of a place under the guise of authorial love, an emotional investment that, at least in Tiger Hills, succeeds only in being overwrought and essentialising. Early in the book, the German missionary Gundert, writing on the Coorgs, is quoted:

"They constitute a highland clan, free from the trammels of caste, with the manly bearing and independent spirit natural in those who have been, from time immemorial, true lords of the soil...I have often been approached by them, demonstrating a frank, open curiosity in my antecendents and in a refreshing departure from the obsequiousness so readily found elsewhere, with no hesitation in taking my hand in a grip as firm as any I have experienced."

Tiger Hills upholds this imagined positivism. The Coorgs of the novel are passionate, sexualised beings, with speech full of local colour, destinies predicated on violence and solemn vows, and little inner life that does not relate to any of the above. As sprawling and elaborate as the plots of the novel are, it also mirrors Gone With The Wind in its romanticisation of rape – nowhere near as egregious as the 'Rhett Butler, Animal Lover' moment of Mitchell's novel, but in its elided use as a tool of coincidence, to further the narrative and even, laughably, to elicit post-facto sympathy for the suffering rapist.

Writers – particularly in the Great Indian Novel tradition – are often accused of exoticising India for foreign audiences, but perhaps it's time to look at Mandanna's book not merely as another instance of the 'mango-motifs' narratives which are produced and presumably read in the West, but as a product of a late Indian obsession with self-consciousness. Tiger Hills is just as reminiscent of ironic self-parodies of old Hindi films in nu-age Bollywood, or the indefatigable reproduction of everything from dabbawaalas to autorickshaws in popular art. Its appeal is the appeal of kitsch, in both form and content. Its invocation of, and affection for history go so far, but no further. It may recall Gone With The Wind without the overt racism; but it also does recall Om Shanti Om without the comedy track.

A version of this review first appeared on ibnlive.com, here.

riordan: the percy jackson series, books 1-5

2010-08-28T19:23:00.007+05:00

#77 Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief
#78 Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters
#79 Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse
#80 Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth
#81 Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian
Rick Riordan

Because lay readers like me assume an understanding of the characters of the Homeric epics and the Attic plays, and because we have some measure of their audiences, we also presume to understand the anthropomorphised gods, who directed the morality of these texts and in whose honour they were created and performed, as literary phenomena. The Iliad becomes a living, breathing equivalent (or superior) to the ruins of the Parthenon in that sense. But as with the architecture of the Hellenic age, so much of the cultural plunder carried out with impunity by the British Empire in the last 250 years incorporated these texts into one narrow view of the linearity of Western civilisation, that it is also made available to us largely through that particular context. Although the Empire's relationship with Greek and Latin history is somewhat complicated - for reasons which uber-fantasist of Leithien, JRR Tolkien, knew very well - it was not enough to prevent the appropriation of a crucial chunk of historic culture, not as a philosophical inheritance, already disseminated by the Renaissance (itself famously made possible only through long centuries of Islamic/Judaic salvagepunk in North Africa and West Asia), but in a continuum of dominance. If Christian social justice was a formative element of the Empire's self-justification, then the Hellenic spirit, as understood in the prep rooms of Eton, was its elegant, secular ego.

The Percy Jackson books may render this history arcane through sheer innocuousness, but their fundamental premise threw me off precisely because it is another reiteration of how this appropriation continues to influence the self-image of the Anglo-American West, and the construction of its history as essentially imperial or militarist. The ghosts of ancient Rome have long dogged the USA's footsteps, so maybe it was just a matter of time before someone once again vaporised the oppositions between Rome and Athens and did it. The time came: someone was Rick Riordan. Rick Riordan relocates the Greek pantheon in the only place where they can truly belong in the unipolar world: at the top of the Empire State Building. The gods are the keepers of the flame of Western civilisation - where its centre goes, so they go: from Greece to Rome, to Britain, to the USA. (I won't ask uncomfortable questions about where they went during Byzantium's magnificent stint as the cultural capital of the 'West,' or how they felt about Jerusalem - but I wonder if this means they had a bad case of whiplash during the first few centuries of Modern Europe? France! Venice! Spain! Holland! Austro-Hungary - no, France again! Damnit, Western civilisation, HOLD STILL!) They meddle in the lives of human beings, like always, and this results in the production of a veritable army of demigods, born of part-human, part-godly parentage. The complication is that after World War II, an escalation of a conflict of the children of Hades versus the offspring of the other two elder siblings of the pantheon, Zeus and Poseidon, the Big Three shake on a pact to produce no more mortal offspring, as they are clearly detrimental to Western civilisation, and prophesied to bring further destruction. Alas! As flies are to small boys, so promises to the gods, etc. There are some slip-ups, and demigods occur. Of particular interest to us is Perseus Jackson, the product of a summer fling on a beach vacation between the smart, lovely Sally Jackson and the god of the sea. Percy is not just evidence of that post-war breach of promise, but also the possible subject of that oracular warning of destruction. Who are the others who might fulfil this prophecy? Who will side with Percy in the oncoming celestial war? And just what are the Titans getting up to, stirring in the pits of the world?

A hero Percy becomes, and remains. Riordan is meticulous about building a narrative to scale up, within individual books as well as the series arc, and its pays off in a consistently arresting way. The final battle takes place in a New York City - Percy's hometown and a place of great warmth and attachment for him - frozen in time, spread out over much of the last book. Saving New York, and protecting his family, becomes the focus of Percy's war. It is a war of belonging, and an acknowledgment of the continual sacrifices demanded of the condition of belonging. It is the loneliness of not attaining your rightful place that decays proud individualism into outright villainny, after all. Even the gods are paranoid about it; how can an antagonist, whether he is a disaffected teen demigod, or (to make the most obvious comparison) Voldemort, be any different?

The series is most like trend rajah Harry Potter in the character of Percy himself: in him we see all the early promise of Harry, the socially shunned, 'different' kid (among other things, Percy struggles with dyslexia and ADHD, which we later discover to be symptoms of demigod DNA) who half-inherits, half-earns the mantle of Saviour of A Way Of Life. He too is remarkably suited to heroism because of his personal bravery and loyalty. (Alas, we know those very qualities earn Harry the right to be insufferable somewhere midway through the Potter series and continue in that vein all the way to the end. Percy's development is also unhelpfully self-aggrandising, but I will say it for him and Riordan - he is never a lost cause. His world is uniquely American in its resemblance to 'verses like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: wisecracking, playfully bathetic, individualistic, and even tender, in a very unclassical way.

What is truly interesting is how well this elides, in Riordan's stories, with the violent, un-Romantic, individual -independent mythology of the Greek pantheon. Homer does not survive among us simply because of academic conspiracies, after all; there is something we thrill to, in era after era, about what he has to say about the violatory nature of power, its abiding capacity to self-perpetuate in cycles of randomness and cruelty, and its shameless and joyous corruption. It is a truth we hold to be self-evident, and that no amount of New Testament hegemony can reverse or erase. In a deadpan way, Percy chronicles just how random, violatory, etc. the divine will can be, and how ill-equipped human beings are to behave any differently. Percy and the Olympians are nominally on the same side, fighting for Western civilisation - Olympian civilisation - against the destructive reawakening of the Titans, but Percy is pretty open-eyed about the dubious good in it for the mortal world. The Olympians are forgetful, neglectful parents, after all, and cruel, favouritist, selfish creatures - in fact, in these very qualities are the seeds of their downfall. But their love for their children, when it does manifest, makes them in the human image more successfully than anything else they could possibly do, and as Percy could do much worse than Poseidon, so also the world.

The revolutionary potential of these ideas deserves a moment of consideration. If a battle need not be between Good and Evil - then need it be a battle at all? If a hero's brief is to survive and preserve, rather than destroy and perish, then does he have to be a warrior at all? In its final pages, The Last Olympian provides such a thoughtful and, yes, tender reversal of the heroic trajectory that you see the series' potential for reverse-engineering a great deal of the conventions of the heroic narrative itself. Alas, aside from the last book's dramatic denouement, no imaginative reconfiguring of Homeric regret seems possible. Uncap his sword - otherwise concealed in his pocket as a ballpoint pen - Percy must; rally the forces of demigods at Camp Half-Blood (Hogwarts as summer camp, divided into twelve houses on the basis of parentage) he must; rely on the wits of his Athene-born friend Annabeth, the bloodthirstiness of the Ares camp, the healing abilities and crack shots of the Apollo house, etc etc he must. After all, the pantheon is not a prescriptive body. They cannot teach the human race how to live: they can only oblige us to be heroes, and extract the price continually.

eta. Neglected at first writing to compare it with the small industry of Classics retellings in literature -- pointless because it is not a retelling or engagement with Classical texts, but rather classic YA fantasy narrative, where Greek gods take the place of wizards/vampires/other worldview-altering supernatural beings. But if you are looking to compare it with retakes of Homer or the dramatists in any form, you must brace yourself for a comfortingly hackneyed spin on Greek mythology, one for which a familiarity with the Wikipedia article rather than the primary texts is more than enough. I suppose the whole 'Olympus on Empire State Building' bit is as good an indication as any of what to expect.

stepchild of time indeed

2010-08-19T22:43:00.004+05:00

Sorry, updates have been a bit thin on the ground over the last couple of weeks, haven't they? August has been somewhat cray cray, but I can pretty much guarantee that September will be different: starting when, I will be an unemployed person! Well, mostly. I will be writing here and there to keep the Blackberry bills paid and so on, but this is a Major Life Change. I am so excited about the prospect of being a gigantic hipster that it can only end in tears. Or the baking of cupcakes.

While we wait for that, and I collect my thoughts and energies re. several fantasy novels that have been awaiting review for, oh, months now (cripes), I just thought I'd clue you in to a couple of things I wrote over the last week: over at august blog The Run Of Play, a freewheeling consideration of what Pelé means to football history, called "Stepchild of Time". It involves Tolkien, cricket, and Moti Nandy, among other things: any feedback would be cherished.

I also went to watch a bunch of movies over August - three, which is more than I've seen over the last year combined - but I chose to write a short note about the one I liked least, Aisha. You can read it here, which is where I generally write short notes about things. I know, I should really get a website.

Anyway, see you in a week or so. Maybe before! I am, of course, embroiled in Twitter over here, so if you want some of that fishhook/open eye stuff, get in.

gentleman's sextet

2010-08-04T22:14:00.007+05:00

Some men's writing I read over the last couple of months, notes on.

#71 The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman

One-line summary: The newspaper industry is failing, even in Rome.

A highly polished string of stories about various individuals working for an eccentric American newspaper based out of Rome. Well-told, without much range in emotional tenor and structure. So studiously twentieth-century in its tone that the title seems unbearably twee in retrospect; maybe The Hacks would have worked better.

#72 Patna Roughcut, Siddharth Chowdhury

One-line summary: A chip on the shoulder made manifest in pen and ink.

A small, evocative novel about growing up smart in Patna. Characters universally recognised in the personal histories of most urban Indians of a certain generation come to life in tender, elegiac portraits, and a self-conscious, sometimes sardonic voice does not mask the furious affection for, and alienation from the home city, experienced most keenly when you have returned to it.

#73 Freedom for Sale, John Kampfner

One-line summary: Less provocative than it says on the tin.

Kampfner travels to eight countries to analyse the failure of the democratic experiment, particularly with regards to the trade-off between free speech, capitalism and governance. His central argument - all over the world, ostensibly democratic or democratising nations are colluding in the destruction of their own public freedoms for the sake of private freedoms - is a sound one; especially resonant in the context of debates wherein the fur flew thick and furious in India after the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai (a situation to which Kampfner devotes a chapter). However, his reportage leaves much to be desired, rather obvious to me in the case of countries like the UAE, or China, which also come under his scrutiny for reasons not fully explained.

#74 Following Fish, Samanth Subramanian

One-line summary: Fish are better than you.

A charming collection of essays about Subramanian's delightful travels down and up the length of the Indian coastline, from Kolkata to Mumbai, reporting on the cultures and cuisines of the pescatarian communities that are some of India's oldest as well as its most dynamic. An easy wit and an enthusiasm for Indian seafood make most essays in this collection shine, although one often gets the sense that the author tries to leave his narratives as unclouded as possible by not delving too deep into the politics of class and environmentalism that his stories circle around again and again.

#75 A Country Doctor's Notebook, Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Michael Glenny

One-line summary: Fictionalised Bulgakov recounts stories of his medical residency in a rural Russian hamlet; remains sexy while doing so.

Mikhail, Mikhail, Mikhail. If you wrote Anna Karenina I would not have put it off to read until after I am retired. This is classic comfort reading of a certain sort: mordant, organised around self-doubt and an almost elemental dread of nature, shot through with early 20th century European manpain and enlightement (manlightenment?), but the muted Bulgakovness is ever a joy. Be mine, Mikhail Bulgakov. Be mine.

#76 Amulet, Roberto Bolano, trans. Chris Andrews

One-line summary: The mother of Mexican poetry recounts the pain and madness of a magical-realist Mexico City.

I don't like magical realism and this slim book did not change my views. To be fair, I have read no Bolano before this, and picked it for the basest of reasons - I wanted to carry an extra book on a flight and this was slimmer than The Savage Detectives and 2666. I realised in retrospect that the central character of this book is connected to 2666, and perhaps I would have approached it with more humility had I known as much. As it is, I'm willing to praise Bolano's poetic vision and his fantastic ability to write set pieces, while feeling totally unmoved by the book on the whole.

trapido, fitzgerald, oksanen

2010-08-04T16:59:00.004+05:00

Backlog-clearing restarted with a vengeance, but none of these reviews, curtailed as they are, obliged me by confining themselves to a line each.

#68 Sex and Stravinsky, Barbara Trapido

One-line summary: Star-crossed couples, lonely daughters, the long arm of art.

Curiously half-hearted: even the title seems like a gimmicky ploy to capture airport readers who know not of the wonders of La Trapido. The bright-eyed, velvet-suckerpunch fatalism of her other books plays out astonishingly like bitterness here, which is not a bad thing in itself, but combines poorly with Trapido's uncharacteristic failure to pull off her usual narrative coup, infusing modern-day fairy stories with the grandeur and terror of classic grand narratives. There's so much possibility here, as the story criss-crosses hemispheres and continents; Trapido's return to South Africa is accompanied as ever by her delightful ability to paint real, lovable characters with quick, sharp strokes, and her musical ear for dialogue and voice. But her deprecatory sense of humour serves the big tragedies (bigger than the usual Trapido tragedies, even) of this book only partially; the glimmering of her wit and intelligence inconsistent, if lovely and fulfilling in their flashes. An interesting, thorny sort of specimen for Trapido enthusiasts, perhaps, but not, I think, a book for first-time readers.

(More on Trapido in Book Munch here.)

#69 The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald

One-line summary: Florence Green opens a bookstore in a slumbering English hamlet.

I was going to say, 'even the classic Fitzgerald wit is unable to mask the what a great tragic novel this is,' but the classic Fitzgerald wit is never meant to mask tragedy, only to co-exist with it, as a Donne-esque rein to its pride. Perhaps The Bookshop is meant to caution humour in its turn: life goes on, sure, but so does grief, and so, perhaps, does shame. Everything about this book is small: a small town, a small idea, small people. (Quite literally, two of its most vibrant characters are also children). In that smallness is the big, seemingly implacable tragedy of Fitzgerald's story. The quiet, almost comforting elegance of her voice masks a fierceness and impatience with the language of ruefulness. But there is no cleansing of the poisoned gulf of human habit in this story, only the acknowledgment that a hero, even an unlikely one, cannot always win; a hero cannot even always be a hero.

(My review of Fitzgerald's delightful Human Voices earlier on Book Munch, here.)

#70 Purge, Sofi Oksanen, trans. Lola Rogers

One-line summary: The tragedies of the nation-state played out in the lives and on the bodies of its women, across generations.

Terrifying and very good if you have access to a cup of tea and a chaise-longue after. Not sunny, not redemptive, not concerned in the least with sunniness or redemption, but resolutely free of all the self-aggrandising trappings of tragedy (I seem to be giving tragedy a hard time in this post) as well. Secrets are bound up in the lives of people here: from the days of Estonia in World War II, to its Communist generations, to the unlikely and unpremeditated return of a Russian citizen who is Not What She Seems, silence is a historical imperative. How this is bound up with the secrets that accompany birth and survival is a story told through the complicated history of Aliide, of the violently damaged Zara who lands up at her doorstep one day, and the occasional glimpse of written records from another time. Readers who find Stieg Larsson's pamphleteering use of graphic sexual violence against women questionable will find Oksanen's forthright use of the same tactic both less grotesque and less bearable. Oksanen also uses gender hatred as a means to talk about the betrayals of the state's responsibilities, but her narrative is a revisitation of a country's history, not a musing over its future as Larsson's books are; it can accuse, but it cannot pass sentence.

Next backlog update will be a special one for Teh Menz: Tom Rachman, Siddharth Chowdhury, John Kampfner, Samanth Subramanian, and Roberto Bolano.

on a r rahman

2010-08-02T11:08:00.005+05:00

This short essay grew out of a brief to think about A R Rahman and his music as a catalyst in India's changing relationship with the world. A version of it appears in Verve's August 2010 issue, which is on stands now.

The Alchemist

The search for the emblematic global Indian should be long over. It should have ended the moment we heard the words ‘Mere paas maa hai’ from the stage of the Kodak Theatre on a spring evening in 2009. ‘I may have nothing -- but I have a mother.’ That was our man, speaking our language, quoting a line we have long accepted and parodied as one of our definitive homilies, from Bollywood’s mouth to India’s heart. Could anything be more us?

There are two major reasons why the verdict on that search – a verdict that says, ‘This is the One True Indian, the face of the nation to all the world’s intents and purposes’ – hasn’t been signed, sealed and delivered yet. One reason is the global inconvenience of constricting the idea of India to the stereotype of a single achievement on a single stage. The other, more compelling one, is our candidate himself. From the very outset of his career, A R Rahman –elusive, publicly shy, even somewhat aloof – has resisted every notion of his ever delivering a definitive product, whether it is of his music, or of himself. Lazy media pegs of the emblematic devout Muslim are circumvented offhand: orthodox expectations haven’t hampered the creation some of the last decade’s most memorable bhajans (as an unauthorised biography carelessly suggests it had) – or working with those paragons of impropriety, the Pussycat Dolls and Akon. Rubber-stamping Rahman is no longer an option. But not for him the chameleonic reinventions of other pop icons; not, either, the cosmetic applications of ‘versatility’ that we use for other artistes who play with genres and disciplines.

The truth is that Rahman can never stand outside that ongoing story of the Indian transformation long enough for us to stop and pin him down to any single moment of change, any simple notion of a presiding icon. You have to have a pedestal on which to put an icon, and this one has always been a work in progress. "He can only ever raise the bar for us," says composer Amit Trivedi (Dev D., Aisha) of his effect on film music. "His music brought in a technological revolution. It changed the way he we listen to Hindi film music, the way we respond to it, maybe even the way we buy it, forever."

This is widely, if not always openly acknowledged in an industry where, as Trivedi says, "everyone wants to get the Rahman sound." Like the rest of India, Trivedi first heard the maestro on Roja (1992), then Thiruda Thiruda (Mani Ratnam’s almost-simultaneous Tamil release, dubbed in Hindi as Chor Chor), and Kaadhalan/Humse Hai Muqabla (1994). "The way the tracks were laid down, the arrangements – they were totally new. And the music totally engrossed and engaged you. It made you think: yeh asli cheez hai. This is real; real like nothing else."

Mr Synthesiser, known and even briefly derided for his extensive use of what laymen called ‘computer music,’ was to have this effect on all of India. This was one transformation for which the time was right. Rahman’s music, instead of falling through the crack of that age-old tension in the film music industry between ‘melody’ and ‘technology,’ bridged the gap with all the ease of someone producing, well, a jingle.

Film critic Baradwaj Rangan, who has also written extensively on Rahman’s music, believes that the composer’s sound is the confluence of his genius with the vision of those who have mounted an appropriate stage for his talents. “If another composer had a project comparable to Lagaan or Rang De Basanti to work with, then we’d have a proper basis for comparison,” he says. But there isn’t. Trivedi, a composer whose smash-hit debut album Dev D. was forged in creative partnership with another Bollywood visionary, Anurag Kashyap, also emphasises that collaboration “plays a major role, if you share a certain vibe with the director. Creative freedom always shows.”

But if Rahman has an unprecedented share in the creative vision of his directors, it is because he has repaid their confidence in his genius many times over. It becomes difficult to tell whether the multiplex mentality of the 2000s – the unified, complex, subtle narrative – came before the Rahman era of music, or whether the music influences the way we respond to these new modes of filmmaking. Can Rahman’s sound be pinned down to the requirements and advantages of the multiplex era of film music? Veteran writer on Hindi cinema, Nasreen Munni Kabir, who is currently working on Rahman’s official biography, finds this a fallacy. “All this is very well. But if the music doesn’t deliver, nothing else would matter. I don’t believe his recent music is less accessible to the Indian moviegoer. Simpler tunes may have their place, but they come and go. Think of SD Burman, Roshan, Naushad. Sophistication and layering in music is what lasts.”

“If you read the script, for example, of Delhi-6,” says filmmaker Vijayeta Kumar, who doubles up as Rahman’s stylist, “what’s on the page might make you hear something very traditional, very typical of old Delhi.” Let the record show that the soundtrack Rahman produced was anything but typical. Trivedi thinks it’s one of the best albums he has ever done, and a fitting answer to the ‘multiplex’ accusation; Rangan hears echoes of ‘Sting-meets-Steely-Dan’ in it; Kumar hears house and funk. And all this of the album that caused Rekha Bhardwaj, the vocalist on its biggest hit Genda Phool, to once remark, ‘Rahman is one of those composers who is bringing the traditional sound of India, the folk sound, back into the mainstream.’ Whew.

It’s alright if listeners have lost track after all these years, of the wellspring of the Rahman sound. There’s a sense, more so in recent times than ever, that it’s okay to give up, to be led by the hand into the musical discoveries every subsequent Rahman score leads us to make. It started out in his early work as the buzz of an almost physical energy. When he reinvented the earthy sound of folk (in songs like Rukmini Rukmini in Roja) or created insta-pop hits (the delightful Chikku Bukku Raile from Gentleman, dubbed in Hindi as Chika Pika Rika – a distant early echo of the locomotive rhythms of Dil Se’s Chaiyya Chaiyya) it was inadequately but conveniently explained as the ‘dance’ sound, keyed in to the new, lo-fi vibe of the 1990s, which fed into the thumping basslines and atmospheric funk of our digital present. Rahman didn’t just bring the CD into that piping, treble-ish tape-recorder world of ours – he brought the iPod, too.

In many ways, rethinking music has always been the film industry’s job, both in the South and in Bollywood. Our popular music has always been mongrel, assimilating both the grand classical traditions of the subcontinent, and alien, inaccessible genres from other parts of the world, to transmute them into a unique Indian film vocabulary. But Rahman’s was no one-way tracking of the present into the future. As his career progressed, his enormously complex talent annexed and revamped not just one sound, but whole traditions of popular music. At first, his use of non-standard playback voices took us aback, but eventually taught us to appreciate the pleasures of hearing songs in the voices – to take just a random sample – of old ladies, children, singers without classical educations, and folk artistes otherwise relegated to the margins of the typical Bollywood number to provide regional colour. The film song, in Rahman’s hands, was still a creation of magic, beaming across celestial frequencies in the voices of angels. It’s just that the angels now warbled in different keys.

It’s instructive to remember Rahman’s unlikely predecessor in the innovation stakes in Hindi cinema. For decades, RD Burman’s effortless, cheeky genius made him a sort of Petrucchio to Bollywood’s Katherina, simultaneously harassing and liberating, eventually wholly irresistible. His vocal stylings and experimentation, his free-handed borrowing of rock ’n’ roll and cabaret, his ability to pull off the purest raga-based melody as well as the aching grooviness of the Western dance number, made him the last man to stamp Bollywood so indelibly. The Rahman oeuvre can be described in similar terms, but the breadth and depth of his work have already saved him from any notional assumption of an ‘inheritance,’ whether from Burman or anyone else. Who in the days of carelessly racist ‘tribal noises’ endlessly reproduced in Bollywood’s nightclub and kidnapping scenarios would have dreamed of the world of ‘jungle’ rhythms, African percussion and folk choruses Rahman incorporated into his work? Who, indeed, might have imagined that a day would arrive when Bollywood’s signature orchestral arrangements would allow room for the light-filled, almost Baroque waltz scores in Lagaan and Guru?

Rangan says that the true departure from the past is one of atmosphere. “The old songs had great singers like Lata Mangeshkar carrying you through the melody with the force of their voice. In Rahman’s work, the stridency of an instrument, or the force of a great vocal, will come through filtered, in a way that makes it very pleasing to hear. That ambient sound – whether you want to call it the ‘multiplex’ sound or not – is consistent through his work.”

Take that cherished old staple of Hindi cinema, the fusty, reliable, instantly stereotypical movie qawwali. Before Rahman, the definitive image of the Bollywood qawwali was Rishi Kapoor in a parrot-green silk churidar, surrounded by clapping musicians and flying scarves. Today, the ‘Sufi’ sound, as it is broadly defined, is very much Bollywood’s go-to flavour, embraced and celebrated in everything from the thumping popular hits of Himesh Reshammiya and Pritam, to the brighter, more resonant sounds of Salim-Sulaiman. But it is in the work of Rahman that this most powerful of subcontinental musical modes has attained true postmodernity. Spurred by the cross-border resurgence of popular Sufi music in the 90s, influenced by his own spiritual inquiry, Rahman has produced some of the most astonishing pieces of Hindi film music of the last decade in this form. Thanks to him, the film qawwali does not signify any one narrow cultural context: it sounds, not in the key of earthly celebration, but in that of contemplation and discovery.

And perhaps this is the best way to understand how Rahman is India’s resident alchemist. He is a man whose work functions as a two-way conversation between this country and the rest of the world because the brass tacks of musical transformation – of technology, genre, even tradition – are simply the bases for his artistic experiments. Rahman’s music doesn’t simply offer us change: it offers us transcendence. “People in the West, right since 2002’s Bombay Dreams musical, hear fabulous melodies and spiritual energy in his music. That’s why they like it,” says Kabir. “My favourite of all of Rahman’s modes is his soulful one,” Trivedi concurs. “It’s when he comes closest, quite literally, to divine inspiration.”

For a country who thinks its time has arrived, India is sometimes accused of being too invested in its cultural successes abroad - cricket records, Nobel Prizes, Oscars for films set in our slums. Rahman is one of the very few whose crossover has been so successful that he rises above those dubious spurts of patriotic adrenalin. When his work is performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, or British Prime Minister David Cameron signs up to felicitate him with an Asian Award for his musical achievements, we now shrug – it’s no longer out of the ordinary. The legendary Milos Forman film about Mozart’s life was called after the maestro’s second name, ‘Amadeus,’ Latin for ‘beloved of God.’ It’s a moniker that Indians would thrill to, in a country where music, both in its high classical forms as well as its rustic, earthy registers is so extensively dedicated to praising deities across forms and religions. It is incredible, but true, that Rahman, the product of these decades of change, was never really the architect of a schism between the old and the new – he turned out to be the evangelist of an ultimate union, the evangelist of a new, sublime dialect. Perhaps it’s time to give the ‘Mozart of Madras’ a more fitting name, and start calling him India’s Amadeus.

teen girllit special: abdel-fattah, tamaki

2010-07-21T18:54:00.002+05:00

#66 Does My Head Look Big In This?, Randa Abdel-Fattah

I probably pounced a little too eagerly on this book because the Internet is always telling me how good it is. It is in principle an excellent story, about a teenage Aussie-Palestinian girl who chooses to wear the hijab to her high school one day, and deals with the consequences of this choice. Along the way, friends are made and lost, issues of race and religion are confronted and resolved, and the protagonist's liberal, loving family are presented at the centre of a broad spectrum of minority Muslim culture, one that ranges from the conservative response to alienation to the frantically assimilationist.

The really interesting stories in this novel exist at those ends of the spectrum in my opinion, but their screen time is considerably diminished as the amazing adventures of our heroine, Amal, take up the bulk of the story and the whole of the point of view. There's a nice edge of the LOLarious Asian diaspora comedy that some TV shows in Britain do so well, but in spite of their setup and Amal's adolescent Facebookese snark, it hardly ever bites. Amal herself is so full of sweetness and light and generally gung-ho, the complexities of being a Muslim woman in the West take on the general cast of a slightly tedious romantic comedy (although without the kissing, since Amal is not paying - cough - mere lip-service to Islamic values of modesty).

Reading it in light of the astounding jackassery currently on display in the Western world with regards to the burqa as a political and politicised garment, it seems like a story more necessary than ever. Perhaps its aggressive cleaving to the middle path and its eagerness to identify Amal as just another teenager - clothes! make-up! boys! grades! - are aimed at presenting the hijab and its wearers just like 'everyone else.' Is that what a woman of colour in the West really is? Just like you, without 'you' being, in any way, just like her? Maybe. As someone who lives in an environment where the othering of the hijab/burqa (or the ghoonghat/headscarf) are often accompanied by their normalising through a kind of invisibility - one that intersects with class and religion as much as with gender - this narrative is a little too alien, both in its sorrows and comforts, to be wholly absorbing. Abdel-Fattah's determinedly cheery blandness does not help.

#67 Skim, Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Possibly the best book I've reviewed here all year so far. A stunning graphic novel about Skim - Kimberley Keiko Cameron, Asian-Canadian, fat, talented, in love with an impossible lover - and her coming of age. Describing the printed word with words gives you some purchase; describing a graphic novel as good as this one seems about as impossible as trying to suggest to someone exactly why a great film is great. The sketch-style, grayscale art works beautifully in gathering together the quietness and wonder of Skim's inner life: the text is a superb, spare, mostly interior monologue. Skim herself is a lovely window into a dreaded old enemy: the changing self that is always finding the world too small to hold it. It is a world where we eventually learn that humour and compassion can transform yearning, rather than bury or kill it; a world where we learn what it means to belong, and if we are lucky, to love belonging. Rich and strange, and even more salvaging of the moral and intellectual integrity of the teenage girl as that other great work of visual art, Mean Girls.

mitchell: the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet

2010-07-20T19:30:00.008+05:00

#65 The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

I like David Mitchell. I had a crush on him earlier this decade, when I read number9dream and Ghostwritten in quick succession, and thought we were going to be together forever. I'm afraid Cloud Atlas ended that feeling for me. Others who had never read him before retconned the whole trajectory of his talent to present Cloud Atlas as some sort of postmodern coup, a turning point in the Mitchell bildung. True, it was an unprecedentedly broad showcase for his talent for writing up crack pastiche in a style that was - and continues to be - so richly layered and aphoristic. As ever, you could almost imagine the face in his adorable author photo smiling delightedly as he went TYPE TYPE TYPE at his window.

In spite of this cheering image, I thought it was relatively frivolous and joyless. So yes, he flexed his talent, without actually displaying any commensurate growth or depth in his ideas. This is not an absolute evil. Plenty of writers have charmed us by writing what is essentially the same book - in spirit, if not in the letter (unless you are Jeffrey Archer, in which case you just change the names and throw them across the Atlantic) - over and over again. And Mitchell is such an inventive writer that that it's difficult to imagine him ever running out of stories. His is a great pulp imagination, attuned to all kinds of breathtaking derring-do across genres, whether he's writing an Age of Sail story, or a Yakuza thriller, or fingernail-shattering SF dystopia. In his stories, there's always a man with a gun ready to walk into the room, per the Raymond Chandler prescription. The longer Cloud Atlas grew, though, the more it muzzled the reader's instinct to devour it, the more it hopefully invited us to seek the pleasure of a sustained intellectual proposition. In my opinion, it wasn't worth it. I didn't think there was more to the analyses than you would write on an undergraduate literature exam; I was mildly jealous that in the real world, critics were apparently paid for writing exam answers.

I came, therefore, to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in an attitude of some disenchantment. But, in the manner of the ex-girlfriend with a sense of humour*, I was also hoping to be proved wrong.

I was not proved wrong. As I am trying to separate my feelings about the critical halo around him from the book itself, let me first say what I liked about the book. It is beautifully written. I think I'm ready to go back on my contention that in the literary dance-off between Mitchell and that other popular, well-liked pulp-transmogrifier Michael Chabon, Chabon would win for stylistic virtuosity: actually, in so many passages of this book, Mitchell writes with a creative felicity that is almost peerless. He is leaping about barefoot while Chabon is tap-dancing in soft shoes. He has written before about Japan with respect, affection and familiarity, as well as wonder: his awesome capacity to fold sensory experience into a story - as he did with contemporary Tokyo in number9dream - is well-matched by his ability to do the same with secondary, academic experience. He writes with a cool, glinting eye on the decaying effect of racial and intellectual arrogance on a human being through pages and pages of stories of bookkeeping, power-jockeying at dinner tables, and diplomatic blind-alleying. It is as fine an account of the stutifying corruption and petty evil of European colonial clarkdom as I suppose anyone has produced.

Is it worth reading for this alone? Maybe. I'll see if I can think of more positives as I go along, but that's about it for now, really. His transmogrifying capabilities have not taken him any closer to the aesthetic or moral concerns of postmodernism; his pastiche is less and less reminiscent of other authors, and more of Hollywood. He has been compared, in the innocent past, to Ridley Scott and Sergio Leone (here is that fly-by little interview, c. 2000 - and spoiler warnings for number9dream). Alas, as Ridley Scott is emblematic of imaginative stasis, so also Jacob de Zoet makes frequent and shocking descents into hackery.

-- spoilers begin here -- (highlight to read)

+ A scarred Oriental lady. Even Bollywood stopped doing that in the 1970s. Heh.
+ Daring samurai rescues in mountainous forests? Noble samurai deaths? Wise old crones? Thanks, these are narrative tropes non-Japanese people are totally unfamiliar with.
+ 'All your base are belong to us' syntax for the Dutch-speaking Japanese? And Jacob is somehow charmingly fluent once he learns to speak their language? White men must be magic. Gosh, I hope one pines for me when the Orient inevitably enslaves me in its impenetrable religio-sexual psychotic way.
+ Which is to say: Shinto sex slavery? SHINTO SEX SLAVERY? WHAT?

It's not (just) about the time or the place or the race. It's about the story. I get it. It's about this dystopian body-horror paradigm that you're transplanting into this sub-plot. There's a lot of complex stuff going on beneath the surface. The situation delineates a loved, and lovable female character who is possibly one of the finest literary heroines we are likely to find in highbrow English fiction this year. But there is a limit to literary apologism. It's not 'like Japanese anime,' as pronounced by James Wood. It's just cheap and foolish exoticisation, and it reads like it. What were you thinking, David Mitchell? What?

-- spoilers mostly end here --

It's the same dispiriting pattern of two of every three set pieces turning out to be gorgeously embellished hollow vessels. To Mitchell's dubious credit, this is just as true of some of the Dutch points of view as the Japanese. The emotional climax of the book is accompanied by the chanting of the 23rd psalm from the Bible. Have you seen a more creatively impoverished trick in the book? I'm not sure I have. I'm not sure the Mitchell of a decade ago would have been capable of writing something so tearfully boring (an assessment which has nothing to do with the Psalm, a piece of poetic genius that does not deserve to be tarred with this accusation).

Then, in his sudden hurry to wind the book up in a sixteenth of the space he has taken to set it out, he descends into Mr Nice Guy bathos, trying in vain to produce an epilogue that suffuses the whole history with melancholy, and succeeding only in inducing an eyeroll. In this Mitchell is reminiscent of some of the failures of young geniuses (hi, Zadie Smith) to grapple successfully with the big structural asks of the postmodern epic. Nonetheless, Zadie Smith is someone who has already made a significant contribution to our understanding of just what such an epic might constitute. I'm afraid Mitchell has a lot of ground to cover after this book if future critics are going to ask the same questions of him.

And for the ordinary lover of pulp, admirer of style, hankerer after narrative, once-Mitchell-fan -- no dice. Maybe very few dice. Maybe one die and a half. This is so surprisingly pedestrian, it hurts. The ghosts of Scott and Leone are vanished. I can almost see Tobey Maguire in the Edward Zwick adaptation. I'm almost ready to read Chabon's Wonder Boys to make up for awarding the dance-off elsewhere.

* - exactly like I am in real life.

harvey, mead: modern vampire romance novels

2010-07-14T18:33:00.005+05:00

#63 My Love Lies Bleeding, Alyxandra Harvey
#64 Vampire Academy, Richelle Mead

It is one of my life's ambitions to write a romance novel, because I can never find one that I like. Perhaps one of the reasons is that romance is so inexorably bound up in the origins of the novel itself, that modern genre conventions interact far more fluidly with romance than they do, for example, with a murder mystery. Margaret Atwood writes science fiction but disavows the genre; mayhem occurs. But Jeanette Winterson or Kiran Nagarkar can write great love stories without the question of genre ever really coming up. 'Mr Ondaatje, do you acknowledge the influence of Nora Roberts on the story you chose to tell in The English Patient?'

Personally, there are many things I do not want about the genre romances I read off and on. Most of all, it's the heroes and their attendant frou frou. This vitiates the 'paranormal' romance for me almost instantly. Vampires? I am bored to tears. Dracula languishes yet in the dry part of my shoe closet. Aristocrat vampires? Instant conflict with bourgeois attachment to social democracy. Immortal, ever-youthful vampires? I can't be tolerant of every kink in the world. Unusually and artistically pale vampires? I hope I am never swayed in personal judgment by the colour of someone's skin, but hey guy, take a Fefol now and then. Vampires with - and this is a particular feature of the modern paranormal romance - extremely large families full of interesting siblings, parent figures and faithful retainers? What are they, the Jolie-Pitts? Get this hyperfertility out of my face!

Anyway. As a great avoider of the disagreeable, the reason I know even so much about the modern vampire romance novel is not that I gobbled Twilight down when it came out (I read half of the first book; then I went out to gather me rosebuds while I may, grateful that the prospect of certain immortality was never to face me). It is that I read not one but TWO modern vampire romance novels yesterday! And, um, the day before. I was bored; they were around. Imperialism has been committed for less compelling reasons.

So now I will tell you about them in brief.

In My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey, 16-year-old Lucy, the product of a goofy hippie home where her parents are always going to peacenik demonstrations and meditation camps at ashrams, is best friends with Solange, the youngest and only female product of the Drake clan of vampires. Solange has seven extremely hot older brothers, the youngest of whom, Nicholas, is Lucy's quippiest, most bothersome, most evocative of confusing sexual attraction frenemy ever. Solange is under attack from the royal court of vampire queen Lady Natasha; the Drakes have come under fire from anti-vamp vigilante assassins for no fault of their own. Somebody's gonna get hurt real bad, right? RIGHT. People fight; people make out; the bad guys are eventually vanquished. Solange finds a cute boyfriend. I am done telling you this story, because details are for nerds, but I actually enjoyed it! Surprise! Harvey has a knack for writing overblown angst and ridiculous made-up details about royal courts and vampire genealogy while giving it all an amicable sidelong look; she writes without sardonism but with a goofy, hi-octane style that clearly indicates OMG SHENANIGANS! Which, if you are a doubter in adolescent teenmance and vampires, is a state of mind you can go along with. It's not a cliche-free, klutz-neutral style, but as I was prepared to coast along on the froth, it was enjoyable. It was even oddly -- adorable. Sometimes.

In Vampire Academy, the author Richelle Mead also tells a story about two girls, one vampire (royal) and one half-vampire, her best friend (preponderance of best friendship MAJOR feature in vampire romance novels), and the social lives of vampire teenagers in the cloistered, festering atmosphere of -- VAMPIRE ACADEMY. (It has a name, it's just nicer to call it that). This is a srsbzness teen drama, where vampire history and customs are taken as seriously as what to wear to high school dances. I admit it: I yawned. I admit it even more: now that I'm done with the first book, I want to read the others. This is like all the times my roommates made me watch Grey's Anatomy marathons. You could clearly understand all the disagreeable discourse going on within and around and during it, but the addiction of narrative - however clumsy, however strained, however predictable - propelled you through it nonetheless. Mead goes for efficiency in style and a breakneck speed of plot that fills you in on relevant histories as you go along in medium-sized infodumps. Her dialogue, aiming for wit, always at least makes it to snark. The worldbuilding ... is not more or less committed to logic than Harry Potter.

Both novels make earnest attempts at creating Strong Female Characters. The intention appears largely blameless. Unlike Twilight, the female protagonists of both books strive at all times to kick ass, take names, and be excellent to each other, without nasty boy stuff overwhelming the importance of their own bonds. Vampire Academy works in a particularly strong sex-positive message (although it is too inconsistent to be fully successful). Having said that, this overarching commitment to the Strong Female Character is not convincingly benign. In the struggle to be Strong and I suspect some manner of textual role models, it feels too much like watching a literary version of fancy dress. This, of course, is exactly the problem your average bad genre romance has with the male characters. This is not to say that the heroines of those novels are well-written because they are supposed to be Girls Next Door (they're not), but it's a cruel indicator of how literary stereotypes can just as easily trap a female character to the straitjacket of gender expectations - be desirable, be socially aggressive, be fertile, be able to kick your attackers in the nuts ten times out of ten - when the magic wand of wish-fulfillment is trained back on ourselves. That's the damned-if-you-do/don't condition of sexism. The answer is not to prescribe against writing or reading a certain type of character: perhaps it's just to recognise the extraordinary agility one needs to write fiction in which people - male or female - can be something more than participants in a narrative masquerade.

possible radio silence

2010-06-11T14:35:00.007+05:00

That is not the title of a hipster novel I just read! I have many books to blog about, including The Gospel According To Coco Chanel and other artefacts of faultless highbrow taste, but I am blogging the World Cup over at IBN Live and at Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils, my footie blog. I'm also taking driving lessons, trying to keep my job, and generally staving off the decay of the flesh. So the volume here may be turned down over the next few weeks. In the meanwhile, I will be re-reading some Wodehouse and the Odyssey.

If anyone has other suggestions for frivolous commute reading I welcome them.

MY GROWING REVIEW LIST OH SHIT

Split
The Demon's Lexicon
Leela: A Patchwork Life
Following Fish
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Skim
Sex and Stravinsky
The Gospel According to CoCo Chanel
The Imperfectionists
Of Love and Politics
Behind the Curtain
Summerland
A R Rahman: The Musical Storm
Does My Head Look Big In This?

lesley downer: madame sadayakko

2010-06-02T00:04:00.007+05:00

When I started Book Munch, I told myself that I would strive, anyhow, to read at least fifty books between January and December. I'm now reviewing book #62 at the beginning of June. I'm thankful things turned out this way, in a year when so much of my time has really not been my own. I also think I should learn to assess basic aspects of time and ambition correctly.

-----------------

#62 Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Conquered the West, Lesley Downer

I knew what I was getting into when I opened this book. I did read Memoirs of a Geisha in my irresponsible youth. I am somewhat familiar with the creepy Japanophilia of some aspects of the West's relationship with the country, and its history that stretches well back into the cultural obsessions of *~edgy~* fin-de-siecle France. [I hope Kate Beaton makes a comic about it soon.] Still, I dug it out of the bargain bin of Magna Bookstore for fifty rupees, and it contains such stunning photographs of Sadayakko that they alone would have made it a worthy purchase.

But the story, even told in a strange confluence of meticulous reportage and whimsical flights of fancy about its subjects, surpasses all bounds. Here is a woman who was adopted by a geisha house as a young girl, and rose to become the star of her generation as one of the most celebrated women in Japan. At the height of her career she counted the Prime Minister of Japan as a patron. But that was in between finding the love of her life -- a penniless student from whom she was parted, as he allowed himself to be adopted into one of Japan's foremost industrialist families, to marry their daughter -- and marrying Otojiro Kawakami, the adventuring actor-rebel who went about calling himself 'the Liberty Kid' as he lambasted the Meiji-era establishment in his political satires, and set himself to revolutionising kabuki theatre.

Yakko herself became an actor at the age of twenty-eight, going along with Otojiro's theatre company on an unprecedented and rather cocky tour of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and then stepping up on stage to help rescue them from certain doom among the fickle audiences and unscrupulous agents of San Francisco and Chicago. Her effect, and the effect of Otojiro's customised kabuki, was absolutely electrifying. It shocked Japanese observers with its convenient cannibalisation of the art's ancient traditions as much as it delighted Western audiences, and the effect is still easily imagined today. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry couted Yakko and Otojiro as their 'comrades in art,' and Sarah Bernhardt paid them the compliment of finding them 'abominable' when she saw them in Paris, where Yakko was counted as having fired the audience's imagination in a way that almost surpassed the previous Expo's great attraction, the brand-new Eiffel Tower. The Czar hosted them at dinner; Prince George was infatuated with Yakko; Picasso painted her in a couple of his earliest sketches ['of moderate value,' according to a Picasso expert today.] The two did not return to Japan empty-handed of art, either: their productions of Shakespeare and other classical Western theatre were tailor-made in their turn by Otojiro, to suit Japanese audiences. At their heart, shocking and delighting Japanese audiences very much interested in the ways of the West, was Yakko, who became the first woman to act on the Japanese stage after centuries of a sumptuary law. She alone lit the torch for a whole generation of Japanese actresses who found their calling in drama.

I have tried not to summarise any of the books I've blogged so far extensively, but believe me when I say that the paragraphs above just about cover the bare bones of the story. Downer, to her credit, does a good job assembling various aspects of this extraordinary life, the conditions that influenced it, and the influence it had in its turn on the world and Japan of its time. She rightly assesses the disgusting Orientalism informing the West's rapturous love affair with Sadayakko [Puccini went to hear her sing while he was writing Madama Butterfly]. She even puts together a well-meaning defence of Yakko and Otojiro's rather opportunistic overturning of stage traditions - both their own and foreign ones - to put bums in seats. After all, Downer says, they did it because they would have starved otherwise, for one. And for another, the West would discover post-modernism and freedom from the text so many decades later -- in their adapting classical theatre to their own ends, Yakko and Otojiro were also ahead of their time.

Nice try, say I. But in spite of their crimes against art, there is something irresistible about Yakko and her villain of a husband, a vibrant sense of adventure and independence -- once, in a period of utter frustration with creditors knocking ceaselessly at their door, they got into a boat and sailed around the coasts of Japan for three months -- and that makes it extremely hard not to sympathise with them. Even Otojiro, with his inglorious record of spousal infidelity and disrespect, comes off as a bit of a lovable pirate [and surely there is a biography that would be worth reading as well].

Although she makes no bones about Yakko's troubles, her social status as woman and geisha, and the fallout of her flouting convention upon convention, Downer strives to paint a picture of a woman who would be iconic and inspirational to any woman in the last century. Often this narrative is so compelling that it is almost easy to forget that it belongs to the robust tradition of the white scholar remaking a subject of colour to suit their own ends. Downer combs through extensive records of Yakko's own youth, but has very little, for example, to say of her reputation in contemporary Japan. This is troubling - surely a personage so important would matter greatly to generations of Japanese actors, artists and feminists? We do touch upon the destruction of piles of records and, indeed, a whole way of life in the wake of World War II, which makes the absence of material or memory fairly understandable. But it is a serious gap in the text, and would have made for a much fairer and balanced account had it been addressed. It is otherwise far too easy to read Yakko's story as co-opted to serve the Downer worldview, and no matter how well-intentioned that end, it is only an end.

More annoying yet is Downer's inexplicable descent into fantasy at the end of pretty much every documentable incident in Yakko's personal life. "They may have found an hour alone in some quiet room in the teahouse." "She must have been deeply grieved." "She was probably --" "As a Japanese woman she could only --" Dude. If I want speculation, I'll read the fanfiction. It's a pity to keep hijacking your own research by appending fluff to practically every page of history, and it's moderately insulting to both reader and subject. And Downer's editors clearly let her keep in her auto-text macros from her drafts, which cannot but stand out as they string themselves across page after page: the number of times she refers to Yakko's deferentail relationship to Otojiro as her status as 'the little woman,' or the reminder after every reference to her physical beauty about 'one flat eye and one round,' [hi, did you think no one knows what the epicanthic fold is?] runs easily into the dozens.

These are serious faults. I have only myself to blame for falling all over them, in the, yes, I-knew-what-I-was-getting-into way. Nonetheless, it's a book I'm glad I read, even for what I understand can only be the bare bones of a life in itself -- it is a tremendous story, and one that deserves to be known much better, and treated much, much more in depth.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Split
The Demon's Lexicon
Leela: A Patchwork Life
The Audacity of Hope

sobel, chughtai

2010-06-01T23:24:00.002+05:00

#60 Longitude, Dava Sobel

Sobel recounts the story of how Britain won the race to solve the problem of how to calculate longitude at sea for popular rather than scholarly reading, and so produces this high-spirited, fun book that makes not only Britain's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science, but also its history, wonderfully accessible. The solution to this problem unlocked the seas for Britain, and was an important step towards the era of British dominion over the waves. How one self-taught clockmaker spent his life to creating the perfect longitudinal clock [or chronometer] becomes a look at a whole web of political skullduggery - Royal Society v/s Longitude Board [oh yeah, for real]! Lunar tables v/s precision watch movement! And the most epic battle of them all, Flamsteed v/s Halley! - egoism, and pure sterling nerdiness. The amazing thing about the clock, of course, is that it was only one of the routes pursued in the race to win the 20K-pound bounty offered by Britain to the person who stabilised longitude calculation to the greatest degree. John Harrison, the man to whom the chronometer owes its existence, was a supremely unlikely contender in this battle: a carpenter's apprentice from Yorkshire with no connections and no influence whatsoever in those days when both science and sailing was governed by committee, and in this case the same committee. Yet, by the end of his life, he had defeated all his naysayers, competitors, jealous rivals and the best, brightest and bitterest of his doubters in the rarefied intellectual circles who felt themselves entitled to the prize, by the simple expedient of having created a perfect piece of technology.

A lovely story, and if anyone reading this does decide to pick it up too, I hope you have already read, or will read, Lisa Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits as well. Sobel's easy style, and her ability to strike the right notes while contextualising personality, morality and horological geekery in the tumult of the age go well with Jardine's portrait of an age where the intellectual pursuits of art and science were inextricably wedded, rather than separated. Plus, Flamsteed and Halley really demand more attention.

#61 A Very Strange Man, Ismat Chughtai, translated by Tahira Naqvi

Many years after this book was written, Javed Akhtar wrote an elegy for his father-in-law and fellow poet, Kaifi Azmi, which was also called Ajeeb Aadmi - a very strange man. It is an elegant, generous piece, befitting the personality for whom it was composed. The novel from which it borrows its name, written by Azmi's own colleague in the Progressive Writers' Movement, could not be more different. Chughtai was not only a central figure in the development of Urdu literature in newly independent India, but also [like Azmi, and Manto, Abbas, Sultanpuri -- right down to Akhtar himself] vastly influential throughout the subcontinent through her involvement in Hindi cinema. The biting sardonism of A Very Strange Man suggests a total lack of illusion about its ability to corrupt individuals and relationships, and induce a sort of moral paralysis. This is a cultural suspicion that any Indian familiar with our early decades of urban freedom will recognise - the zara hat ke, zara bach ke, yeh hai Bambai meri jaan spirit. Actually it's a cultural suspicion that any Indian who watched Luck By Chance two years ago will probably recognise too.

Chughtai tells the messy and hugely uncomfortable story at the centre of her novel with a sort of exasperated tenderness for her characters -- and I don't wonder, since the story is one that is instantly recognisable as picked straight out of the real-life tragedy of Guru Dutt and Geeta Dutt: he the brilliant and self-absorbed director and actor, she the angel-voiced playback singer; his obsession with someone else, her slow descent into alcoholism, and his eventual suicide. Chughtai changes the names of her principal characters, but retains a setting in which Ashok Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Lata Mangeshkar and other Bollywood legends form a living, speaking background to the drama spiralling out of control. The tenderness is not forgiveness, though. It is a painfully sharp novel, and the sharpness certainly comes at the expense of that marked, particularly poignant characteristic of so much great Progressive writing, which is a broad, fair-minded human compassion. But Chughtai's impatience with the lapses of human integrity, too, are characteristic -- and the Chughtai piquancy shines, and sometimes burns, through every line of this melancholy book.

khashoggi, eggers

2010-05-31T15:07:00.005+05:00

Having looked at the calendar and discovered ALARMED that there are only 11 days to the World Cup, which means eleven days until the sleep of reason [and the sleep on the train commute, which is where I do most reading currently], I have decided to clear backlog as comprehensively as possible. Presenting two whole reviews in this post.

#58 Mirage, Soheir Khashoggi [re-read]

I read this book many many years ago in high school, in the halcyon days before everyone began to care about the veil as a political issue, female genital mutilation and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, when all anyone cared to know about the Middle East was that it was full of fabulously rich but cruel sheikhs and fabulously beautiful but terribly oppressed women. Mirage is an excellent thriller about a woman on the run from the evil prince she has married, full of edge-of-the-seat stuff about whether the life she has built for herself in America under an assumed identity is going to collapse or not. As titillatory glamourised adventures riffing off real world problems go, it's pretty good, really!

Treading the high/low barrier, it aims to be a serious novel about the status of women in the Middle East, and it tackles an astonishingly broad range of issues in a complicated plot, ranging from the denial of formal education and extreme discrimination between sons and daughters, all the way up to forced marriage, domestic abuse and that awful staple of made-for-the-West narratives, death by stoning for adultery -- and chases the threads through to explore violence against women in America. The author has little time for cultural relativism: through her protagonist, she makes it clear that anyone who is not outraged by this is deluding themselves. But all of this seems a terribly casual approach to the detached reader. Soap-operatising the experience of one woman and applying it as the political framework for a wholesale rejection of a certain history and values -- I'm clearly no one to say that this is not justifiable, but can it truly be seen as definitive? Because, um, this book is also weirdly autobiographical. The main supporting character, for example, is a mind-blastingly wealthy arms dealer who got his start under Aristotle Onassis.

*looks at you*

*looks at author's last name*

*looks at you*

I know Slate and Feministing and other American websites love to talk about how soap operas in countries with poor human rights records empower women. I have no personal experience with female foeticide and child marriage, two subjects Indian soap operas linger over ultra-lovingly, and perhaps I am no one to judge whether these disgusting productions have been more or less helpful to women who do have to confront these issues than the tireless but not very sexy work of generations of women's rights advocates and workers. But I do judge these calcifying, fit-to-pattern narratives, anyway. I judge fiction in a way I would not judge biography [and I'm not sure if Hirsi Ali's books, for example, fall into this category -- stating upfront that I've never read them, but I've heard her speak about them and read her magazine writing, and in spite of her calling her books memoirs, they are also clearly doubling up as prescriptive scholarship, in which case they are outrageous, no matter what Tunku Varadarajan thinks]. The autobiographical strain in Khashoggi's novel apparently does extend beyond the Operation Diamond Racket brother, and I sympathise with the sincerity with which this book carries its message against violence, which I think salvages the book to a great extent. It just chose a wrong-headed medium in my opinion. And I wonder how Khashoggi herself feels about it in the wake of the deluge of concern trolling about veils, FGM and Ayaan Hirsi Ali that have succeeded this novel into the next decade.

#59 What Is The What, Dave Eggers

So carrying that thought forward -- is intent a necessary criterion by which to judge a novel? If yes, I suppose I'm glad to have put down money for What Is The What, whose proceeds go towards an education facility in Marial Bai, the Sudanese village from where the book's central figure, Valentino Achak Deng, originally hails. Deng is one of Sudan's Lost Boys, a child who saw his village ravaged by civil war and walked through the desolate war zone of South Sudan to get to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, and thence to a new life in America.

Whether benefits should be predicated on the pleasures of a good book or not is a difficult matter. This is our culture now, the giving of benefit dinners and the purchase of DARFUR tee-shirts; who might even have heard of Marial Bai in this imperfect world, had Deng and Eggers not found each other and this much-discussed and extremely popular book come out of it? But I will say that if I could give the book back to be sold a second time, I would, because this is really not the book about Sudan I wanted to read. I don't mean to say it's a bad book -- it's not. It is an agonising, saddening novel, that nonetheless manages to imbue its characters with tremendous dignity, and it narrates a situation that defies the imagination in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone that does not pretend to reportage any more than it makes obvious attempts to provoke or titillate. But it is not Valentino Achak Deng's story. It's Dave Eggers' story, for which Deng has provided material. I spent a long time trying to figure out what was real about this book - since it helpfully advertises itself as a novel - and what was not. What is a 'fictionalised memoir'? Was Deng even real? Was this money really going to a real school in a real village? And if it wasn't, just what did Eggers think he was doing?

Clearly Deng is real, and I apologise to him for doubting it. But I can scarcely be more aghast at how completely someone would appropriate his identity to write this book. Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you want to stick to the standards of truth -- and the separation of the authorial voice from the voice of the subject -- expected in a straightforward work of non-fiction? If you were dedicated to Deng's educational project, why wouldn't you take the questionable but easily less fraught path of an 'as told to' story? Of course, Eggers may well have gone in the other direction and written a completely fictionalised work based on a bunch of imagined or composite characters, with names changed and situatons suitably cast to exercise the sympathy of the novel-reading class. But then he may have had to answer questions about how he succeeded in writing a novel about a human rights crisis without actually having spent time there. [And had he travelled through Southern Sudan, surely, he may have had to answer questions about why he chose to write a fairy story instead of reporting hard straight facts in a newspaper. I know. But if these questions are never asked, then who determines the standards of truth to which we hold the written word?] If the book is supposed to be a testimony, how can it have the name of a person who did not live through the events of the testimony on it? Surely that completely obscures its primary purpose?

Set against a civil war, a literary quibble over a single African's identity may not seem like much. But to a reader like me, who has so far only known what it's like through the eyes and voices of others, it reads like a tremendous betrayal, even with the consent of the person whose story it is -- it casts a shadow over the whole book. I was so, so glad to stop reading it when the end came.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Longitude
A Very Strange Man
Madame Sadayakko
Inverting The Pyramid
Split
The Demon's Lexicon

paretsky, sayers

2010-05-30T14:06:00.005+05:00

#56 Fire Sale, Sara Paretsky
#57 Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers

In spite of having read both books at a fair interval from each other, they struck me with an important thing they had in common apart from the obvious -- crime novels, female protagonists, female writers -- which unites them in my eyes.

In Fire Sale, VI Warshawski returns to the neighbourhood where she grew up, a grim, eroding part of Chicago's beleaguered South Side. What starts out as a temporary assignment to coach her old high school's basketball team becomes a dangerous entanglement with the neighbourhood's only significant generator of employment, the department store conglomerate By-Smart [that is exactly what you're thinking it is in real life] and the shady family of Christian fundamentalists who own the company. Warshawski is very aware of the privilege she has earned, having been one of the few kids who has succeeded in getting away. Her involvement in the fallout of By-Smart's crimes is both debilitating and thankless, but it is also a matter of conscience - not an obligation, but a moral stake in the fortunes of her childhood home.

Warshawski is the dogged, upstanding, quick-tongued, tirelessly proactive detective that washed-up shamuses who defined and been defined by urban American literature only wish they could be. She really is a hero -- not because she has the privilege of being always in the right, but because she takes that stake of hers, that responsibility to her world, very seriously. It is intensely personal in Fire Sale, but also, from the only other Warshawski novel I've read so far, inclusive of the wider community of which she consciously retains a membership. If the detective is the principal literary figure to embody the values of the enlightenment, it is also true that she or he is a chief figure in the twentieth century's creative engagement with identity. But Warshawski is never content to take up the Charon role that other detectives can sometimes smugly assume, bridgeing the unbridgeable and speaking the unspeakable. She has the Marlovian sense of duty and Marlovian notions of honour, but I think her sense of humour stretches a little further than Marlowe's, and her pragmatism strikes a note very different from the Golden Age's disappointed romanticism. Reading this very Bush-era novel in the years of Obama [that other South Sider-come-lately whose engagement with his adoptive Chicago are such a crucial element of his books], I find it striking how Warshawski also acts as a bridge between two corresponding eras of hope, cynicism and activism.

This sprawling, somewhat rambunctious, knock-down-drag-out story is very different from the classic Gaudy Night, the first Sayers novel I have had the dubious pleasure to read. It is a classic from-chaos-to-order mystery starring the stately, clever Harriet Vane and the somewhat fey genius-level Renaissance man Peter Wimsey. I might have been very struck by Wimsey had I not earlier read Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles [written considerably later than Sayers' books, I note] before this. The Lymond Chronicles feature a fey, genius-level Renaissance man, who actually dates from the Renaissance, in their starring role. I hate Francis Crawford with a passion -- somehow these gorgeous blond imperialists just don't do it for me -- and I credit Dunnett's great talent for creating a lovable supporting cast and her scholarly/swashbuckling style for keeping the books readable. Similarly, Gaudy Night is fantastically readable for its own style, and for the character of Harriet, but is too airless, and too classist, to be otherwise tolerable. In Sayers' book people are always saying what they ought to say. Ideas are always explored fully in dialogue in a way that you would only expect from a novel set in a serious-minded ladies' college in Oxford, and there are perpetual glimpses of a living world that, alas, reverts to type the minute conversations are over. There's something very satisfying about Gaudy Night as a romance, where two characters dancing around each other say things like:

"...However. should you characterise me as a heart or a brain?"

"Nobody," said Harriet, "could deny your brain."

"Who déniges of it? And you may deny my heart, but I'm damned if you shall deny its existence."

which I love, and would have put in a romance novel had I thought of it [and if I were writing a romance novel]. As a mystery, though, it starts out brightly articulated within Harriet Vane's own mind, and then unravels as she loses its threads, delivers them into the hands of Wimsey, and resigns herself to the role of courageous sidekick as the dreary, distasteful revelation comes about.

Yet there is one important tack to Gaudy Night that Sayers manages skilfully, if repressively. This crime, and this mystery are also primarily a way for Harriet to redefine her relationship to a a place central to her own identity - Oxford. The resolution of the crime is a way for Harriet to return control of itself to the social hierarchy of those dreaming spires. Across an intellectual and geo-political gulf so wide that they may seem almost to be working across different genres, both Vane and Warshawski are returning home; not just to bridge the unbridgeable, or speak the unspeakable, but to repay the unrepayable. In the ironclad conservatism of her Oxford, Vane is nonetheless part of a pioneering generation of women for whom their duty to their education is paramount. Warshawski recognises both the futility and the discomfort of having to be grateful for one's roots. But both of them end up shouldering that a burden traditionally appropriated by men - of a love for city and community that transcends the personal, and that both Sayers and Paretsky successfully manage to root very deeply in the personal. As someone who keenly feels that love -- that sense of the unrepayable debt -- to the city I live in, this is even more meaningful than the wittiest of romances.

trapido, ozick

2010-05-26T00:53:00.003+05:00

#54 Temples of Delight, Barbara Trapido [re-read]

Trapido's give-and-take with the world of classical drama extends to a playful, brainy, subversive [when is Trapido not subversive?] engagement with opera -- here it is The Magic Flute that becomes the basis for the story of Temples of Delight, as well as a thread that runs through the novel itself. Her shy, somewhat remote and masochistic heroine - Trapido's protagonists are heroines - must pass through a cave of horrors in search of her lost and very true love -- her childhood best friend, the clever and evidently disingenuous Jem McCrail. Alice loses her before a school year is out, and when she finds her again, does so in bizarre and tragic circumstances. Trapido explicitly connects the improbable conventions of opera with the dream-logic of unconsciousness. The jealous and repressed ex-best friend can turn up in a moment of absolute triumph that -- well, that actually reminds you of that bit in Amadeus where Mozart's mother-in-law is raging at him about his irresponsibility and is transmuted in the blinking of an eye to the Queen of the Night shrieking Der Holle Rache. The gifts are invariably poisoned. Love is outright bizarre - as are lovers. In comedy, of course, one can cut across lines of status and identity in a way that would be unthinkable in the rule-bound world. Trapido talks to us, not only through Alice, but also through Mozart [with whom one doesn't need to be familiar to find this a superb read - I'm hardly so, for starters] to persuade us of something many English students have grown accustomed to believing after having read too much Shakespeare: the destructive power of the emotions is balanced out well by the human heart's capacity for survival; forsaking one means forsaking the other; embracing both is the best way forward.

I love this book, though not as much as Brother of the more Famous Jack. Trapido is never quite safe, never quite celebratory, always ready to pull you back from the brink because there's something even more questionable behind you. There is even something quite cynical about Temples of Delight, towards the end - but in a Trapido book it is always evident that philosophy is a mechanism, and all mechanisms are interesting and even useful, in pursuit of survival.

#55 Heir To The Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick

I began this book eagerly because Ozick is often mentioned among the greats of modern Jewish-American literature alongside Grace Paley. I don't know anything about modern American literature, but I think Grace Paley is great, and following on that affection, I assumed that no one mentioned in the same breath as Grace Paley can be anything but awesome.

Now since Ozick is a major novelist I cannot decide whether she is awesome or not on the basis of one book, particularly since it left me cold. She is obviously a magistra - Heir to the Glimmering World is as much the work of a thinker as a writer. It is the story of rootless young Rose Meadows, who ends up as nursemaid and secretary in the newly-established house of a refugee family, intellectuals who have fled to the edge of New York in the 1930s ~~to form a family singing troupe, led enthusiastically by their governess-turned-stepmother~~ from Nazi Berlin. Their benefactor is a half-crazed, immensely wealthy Christopher Robin figure [explicitly based on the son of A A Milne] himself a floater on the tides of the world. Ozick retreats behind a detached voice to let her protagonist assemble - begin to assemble - the tragedy of their alienation: a dreary, disturbing, but never simple state of affairs.

Ozick, too, is concerned with survivors, and her protagonist - again a slight, blonde lost girl - is a resilient one, as are most of her acquaintances in the novel. But resilience in itself has no value - it would be stupid to say so under the circumstances. Often a story begins when we try to assemble something out of wreckage, with the assumption - spoken far too often for its own good - that we are still fighting, or that there is some victory still to be won, or that not to react resourcefully would be to 'let them win'. It's just as true that 'they' have already won. Ozick does not reach for the comfort of salvaging, even though the novel closes on the promise of marriage and birth, and the beginnings of Rose's own coming-of-age. The novel itself evokes a purgatorial stage - where the Mitwissers, Rose, and James A'Bair are all grappling with the loss of the past and coming up empty-handed time and time again.

Yet, it does not work. Rose and the Mitwissers are complex organisms, but there is too much echo to James, who is unfortunately far too important to the novel to be dismissed. He is also an exile, as is clear in the text, but he is a flat character where the others live - fretfully and resentfully, but live. Elsa Mitwisser's scholarship, lost forever to her, is vivid to the reader, but Rudolf's work on the philosophy of the Kara'ite Jews - supposedly more central to the novel and to Rose - does not live in the same way, in spite of Ozick's treatment of it. Ozick is also wonderful at calling up the dream-logic of unpredictable relationships, of strange connections and even stranger, and grotesque, dissolutions, but the disengagement of the authorial voice becomes static in these circumstances.

And it takes me aback that someone so obviously scholarly as Ozick, who can let philosophical theory adrift in her book in such subtle and shapely ways, who can formulate learned and genuinely absorbing, complex conversations on the connections between the Bhagavad Gita and obscure branches of Judaism, can be so remiss in her research as to leave in an Indian character called Gopal Tandoori. Tandoori is what one calls the product of a particular roasting process in the kitchen. I don't deny that there may be Indians living in the US who are calling themselves 'Tandoori' right now - in fact, I'm sure I'll find people calling themselves that in Bombay right now if I look hard enough - but this is contextually wildly inappropriate. It's like how most of us don't name our children Taj Mahal. Ozick may have a reliable explanation, but it certainly wasn't evident in the book, and it puzzled me enough to throw me out of the novel almost completely, once it appeared.

Not a good experience, all in all. Time to go back to Paley.

penelope fitzgerald: human voices

2010-05-25T21:45:00.002+05:00

#53 Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald [re-read]

I returned to this slim novella early in April after I had run through some tiresome reading, and I did so because if you held a gun to my head and asked me to identify my favourite novelist Fitzgerald might possibly be her. Sorry Jane Austen, Helen de Witt, even - gulp - George Eliot. I have read all these novelists far more often and extensively than Fitzgerald, even thought more about them, and for what it's worth, know more about them [I love your blog, Helen]. But I love Fitzgerald with a love that is actually painful: I almost can't bring myself to open a book by her because I know just how delightful it will be. There are other novelists whose mastery over their work is complete. They can bowl you over with their braininess and learning. They can provoke you to thoughtful and sustaining laughter. They can even, admittedly, tell you stuff about life that's quite close to the real thing. But somehow, Fitzgerald manages to harness all these literary qualities to the narrative in a way that they nourish the story from beneath the surface, inviting you to dig in deep without offering map, neon sign or even, really, a tourists' guide that warns you of the pleasures ahead. Fitzgerald's novels offer the closest approximation of a sensation that poetry openly provokes and short stories are perhaps best structured to give: delight. Although I don't suppose she ever achieves it in a way that rises above the limitations of the form, Fitzgerald does come close to offering a novel that does not mean, but is.

That she does it in the hidebound and quite unfashionable mid-twentieth century staple of the tragicomic love story, in the registers and structures generally favoured by the English girl-novelist, is even more moving. I don't think anyone who reads Fitzgerald will come away with the idea that they are reading anyone but a highly intelligent and even deeply scholarly person, but her pleasures are never the pleasures of, say, Iris Murdoch. Her sympathy for vulnerability is immense. But when you read Virginia Woolf you enter into the torture of the vulnerable soul and emerge wracked and enlightened; when you read Fitzgerald you are aware that it is not at all separate from the life, not only of your body, but of the world around you. It's not about enlightenment. It's about illumination.

The amazing thing is that all of this is true even of a minor, slim and relatively less accomplished novella like Human Voices, a story about the BBC during World War II. Men and women of all shapes and sizes are trying to keep it together. That's really about it. The novel is only about war in the sense that the truly mundane things in life persist in spite of it. Somehow things come to their expected conclusion more often than not: if someone has to inconveniently give birth, they will, and if someone hs to fall inconveniently in love, and then even more inconveniently have it reciprocated, they will. Fitzgerald never contrives to make this seem extraordinary or dramatic. Through a delicately hilarious exposition, through the matter of fact authorial voice [one that in this novel veers identifiably, if never uncomfortably close to the stiff upper lip] Fitzgerald allows these things to take their own course. Of course, she seems to say, it's not extraordinary. It's not dramatic. But it's not sordid either - and it isn't purely comic simply because it happens to purely ordinary people. One of Murdoch's famous dictums, that art is tragic but life can only ever be comic, seems always to find an indirect contradiction in Fitzgerald's writing. She values the comic so highly that arguments about whether tragedy > comedy et cetera become irrelevant. But tragedy itself is never allowed to wither on the vine. When it does occur, it is heartbreaking - and it provokes not the aching individualist self-awareness of canonised tragedy, but the humility, solidarity - and maybe even the wisdom - of human grief.

lampedusa and lucy maude

2010-05-16T22:49:00.002+05:00

I have so much backlog I can totally NOT read anything new until I clear this up. * hides What Is The What under the table *

#44 The Leopard, Giovanni Tomasi di Lampedusa, trans Archibald Colquhoun

A small, spellbinding book that recreates the best things about the style of the pre-modernists, sweeping and subtly ravishing, but built on the painful ironies that distinguish the bent of mind of the great European modernists. Everything about it is exquisite: exquisitely drawn out of real history, exquisitely thought out, exquisitely written -- and of course exquisitely ironic. In a great piece of luck, this Vintage edition I read also reconstructs the story behind the writing of Il Gattopardo in some detail, through the notes and meta published by Lampedusa's nephew and literary executor, Gioiacchino Lanza. It is the story of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, caught up in the tide of socio-political change after Garibaldi's landing in Sicily, which is also the story of Lampedusa's own great-grandfather, Giulio Fabrizio. But it does not operate solely within the parameters of the fictionalised memoir, which is a thoroughly postmodern categorisation at any rate. Nor is it a historical novel in the trade sense. In spite of an epic scope - and it is astonishing how Lampedusa can achieve the grand vista through a few careful strokes - it clearly meant to articulate the narrowing of a life in a world made new, larger and more aware.

It is a novel about constraints, and about the fetters of the mind that history imposes on its subjects. Even as the prince attempts to cling to a way of life that is swiftly coming to an end, he is keenly aware that he does so out of expediency, and perhaps out of regret for the opportunities of a new world in which he can only always be out of place. While the novel can build this awareness in sweeps of love - for Sicily, its land and even some of its people, its sentimentality surfaces more often in a melancholy bitterness - perhaps a basic ingredient of most ironic novels in some degree. "We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth."

It may be too easy to dismiss this novel, for all its astonishing literary qualities, as just that - a sentimental, hidebound book that reaps all the benefits of having been written in the twentieth century, but relinquishes its attendant burdens. But I'm not so sure. I would reach back further, beyond the novel of Woolf and the novel of Eliot, to the novel of Austen, to explain its concerns and its effects. It is the work of someone deeply interested in in civilisation and deeply aware of its hypocrisies. If somewhat less determinedly sunny in its ending than an Austen novel, it answers to the same sense of righteousness; indeed, of an ironic righteousness. And then, there's the temptation of the studied detachment of its narrative voice, which makes one mark it out for a reflection on the life of Lampedusa himself -- a diminished nobleman, and a 'literary dilettante,' as the introduction calls him, who only ever completed one novel in his life and did not live to see it published. Perhaps a Visconti film in itself.

#45-52 The Anne books, LM Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Anne's House of Dreams
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside
Anne of Windy Willows
Anne of Ingleside

[re-read]

I have loved these books with all the passion of my honest, simple, once-pious and possibly fey heart, but I really regret fishing them out of the boxes this time. Montgomery is a wonderful comic writer, and it's still great to open a book and find yourself able to laugh at the tribulations of someone falling through the roof of the duckhouse while they're trying to snoop around looking for a willow-ware platter. And Montgomery's eternal and constant love for Prince Edward Island in all its glories wears well. I'm sorry to say that Anne herself does not. Having re-read the Emily trilogy about a year ago I am able to report that those books escape that particular trap, although they may well fall into others. The worst thing about the Anne series is that it loses its integrity as it steams on, rolling on to predictable ends to little stories and then beyond. It flickers back into life in Rilla, briefly, but as a book about the Great War, this particular one becomes deeply saddening for other, unintended reasons.

Wearying. The jokes are what keep it going.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Human Voices
Heir to the Glimmering World
Temples of Delight
Fire Sale
Inverting the Pyramid
Longitude
A Very Stange Man
Split

nandy: striker, stopper

2010-05-06T19:03:00.005+05:00

#43 Striker, Stopper: Two Novellas, Moti Nandy, translated by Arunava Sinha

There is a section in A Season in Verona where Tim Parks imagines how the average footballer's career seems to be encircled practically from the outset by a tightening noose. In the opening paragraphs of his chapter 'Lecce' [noting this so that those of you who own a copy don't have to turn pages for hours trying to find it, the way I totally did not of course] he notes:

... By seventeen or eighteen they are playing in Serie C, or sitting on the bench in Serie B. Solemn men in heavy coats gamble on their future. They are bought and sold ... shunted up and down the length of the bel paese, Treviso, Taranto, Palermo, Turin. They know no one outside the world of football now. They hardly know what to say to a person who is not a player or a manager or a journalist. Or at least a fan. Is there anybody who is not a football fan? ...

The translator's dedication of these irresistible stories reads 'to East Bengal Club,' which satisfactorily answers the last question here. Parks came to mind as I read these novellas, written in 1970s Calcutta by Moti Nandy, veteran Bengali sports journalist - and novelist, and rendered into English beautifully and sympathetically by Arunava Sinha. One of them is about a young striker's future; the other hangs on an aging defender's past. And at what price? Football in the world of these novellas is not merely weighed in the balance against the civil opportunities of a regular life, like education and stability and honest relationships. No, what price the luxury of doing something you are born for, when families are starving - something Parks' young 21st century Italians have no notion of - and motherless children neglected for training? Nandy's stories evidently milked the problems of working-class Calcutta for all their worth, in narratives full of the drive and relish of great pulp. But those narratives also reflect a very Dickensian sense of righteousness and compassion for human dignity, and it resonates across the generations, across languages and cities.

But the sense comes by-and-by. Our heroes' stories are also full of screeching violins. The teenaged striker Prasoon refuses to buckle down to his little club Shobhabajar's demands, and so finds himself working a petrol pump on a night shift at one point, while he trains on his own in the hope of making it to a bigger club. And what should come rattling along the road one night but an Ambassador holding his teammates who have already sold out to the club's demands, now on their way to the India juniors training camp? Bring on the fricking orchestra, right? What about Kamal Guha's non-existent relationship with his teenage son, with the roots of its trouble in the fact that Kamal never made it back from a game on time to be with his dying wife? [And why not? The club held the telegram back because they needed him on the day. Oh yeah.]

The beauty of Nandy's writing is that it integrates these rather shopworn operatic conventions into a finely-wrought picture of the challenges of the sport: of how truly wearying and alienating the obsession can be, and how manipulative and traitorous the practice of it. Nandy's heroes actually do fight crime, in the form of Calcutta's abject football bureaucracy. Both novellas operate neatly within the real structure of the city's football: most of the action is set around two imaginary clubs, struggling relegation candidates Shobhabajar, and the mighty Juger Jatri, who are capable of running neck and neck with Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. Prasoon must lift himself from the scrabbling mediocrity of Shobhabajar to Jatri [a club where - drumroll - his father once played, and from which he was unfairly ejected after being accused of throwing a match]. Kamal Guha, who has descended from the heights of success with Jatri to a part-timer's role in Shobhabajar, must find a way to keep the club and himself afloat.

It is a corrupt world. The little clubs will fight to keep their best players from leaving, scrap and trade favours among themselves to stay up. The big ones will intimidate and bully the smaller ones for reasons of their own. Perhaps inescapably, the journeys of both young man and old mirror each other. If Prasoon, with all his ambition and integrity, must learn to be selfish - so selfish that he must eat even when his family cannot - then Guha's quest is that of a man who already knows that all things come to pass, and must sacrifice to achieve them anyway.

As someone says in Parks' book, 'How can you pay for something you hate so much?' But we know football can be grim - there's a living history that tells us so. We read it between the lines in stories of inflated salaries and dream moves. We may even experience it, in a minuscule way, when we participate in that grand ideal of suffering for the game from the stands. Melancholy and football joined hands, after all, around the first time someone decided to pass instead of dribble. Perhaps that is how the conventions of the happy ending in both novellas achieve a note of transcendence. Football still has the power to transform bitterness into joy - and it is extraordinary how steadfast that matter of belief can be. Perhaps the more mired it is in the sordid, the greater its evocation of romance, of a higher logic that can render all accounts balanced and all stories completed. It is a belief that can illuminate not just its honest and proud adherents, but the game itself. The joy of Nandy's stories is not the joy of winning a match - it is the deeper, steadier feeling that comes of looking at the league table at the end of the season, and finding your team where you want them to be.

* - I chose these pictures in spite of the fact there's a moment in one of the stories where a manager flies into a rage because a player suggests they play with a sweeper. 'You want me to play catenaccio!' he squawks. I thought it was sublime.

[...and mumbai] mehta: alice in bhuleshwar

2010-04-30T00:11:00.008+05:00

#42 Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood, Kaiwan Mehta

I won't, and you will see why, but I could hug this book for a number of reasons. Its passion for its subject, the old 'native' neighbourhood of Bhuleshwar in South Bombay, practically runs off the page. Its ideas are subtle. Its presentation of modern-day challenges is clear-eyed but not prescriptive or hectoring. Its research is astounding: from the backstories of individual wadis [compounds, or colonies, or co-ops, as we might understand them], to the popular art and literature in a multitude of languages that originated from Bhuleshwar, it packs in so many little facets, so many illuminating histories of the neighbourhood, that anyone interested in Bombay could perhaps only wish for a series of similar books about other neighbourhoods in the city: ones with longer or shorter histories, with different immigrant cultures, and with different histories of labour and land relations - yet so clearly bound by some of the same glue that has stuck Bhuleshwar together.

Bhuleshwar is an amorphous area - it represents the small but stunningly diverse edge of what was once Bombay's white neighbourhood, the old commercial and government district at the southernmost tip of the island, running off left on the north-west to include the residential districts of Malabar Hill and Napean Sea Road. Across and beyond these lay the native town of the labourers, the tradesmen, and the shopkeepers, starting uncertainly from the green fringe of what is today called Azad Maidan, and hemmed in between Marine Lines and Charni Road stations [a distance that is covered in three minutes by a train on the Western line]. In Mehta's walk through this area, he employs a variety of different disciplines to try and uncover its logic - a difficult and limiting term, he warns us at the very outset. Can it be explained by its architecture? Its economics? Its history? Its art? The oral testimonies of its residents? He says,

At this point I would wish to discuss the 'experience' of a city...This is not for documentation or descriptive purposes, but to understand the structure of experiences, the forms in which this experience is structures, the articulations of this experience, for it is the images of this experience - the one we experience and the one we imagine and fantasise about - that is the structure of urbanity and city-ness essentially.

And sadly, this is how the book becomes unreadable, except as an intelligent but somewhat unintelligble jumble. Mehta clearly has ideas and stories coming out of his ears, and he has hypotheses and flights of fancy to lighten up virtually every single page of this little book. But it is about as coherent as a map of Bandra West, which as everyone knows is a rabbit warren masquerading as a neighbourhood. This is obviously what Mehta wants to indicate, as evident in his title: that even the a-ha! moment of identification we experience, whether as tourists or as inhabitants, is solipsistic. But in this case, 'show not tell' is a mistaken strategy. I come away with no lasting impressions of the book, except perhaps that an editor with a gimlet eye and a red pen might have done something truly wonderful with this material. Perhaps I need to tackle it again, with a highlighter and a bunch of post-its this time, just to see what is in it. Damn it, Bombay, THIS IS LIKE LIVED CRITICISM OR SOMETHING.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Human Voices
Heir to the Glimmering World
Chasing the Sun: Stories from Africa
Fire Sale
The Leopard

[great cities, ii] al aswany: the yacoubian building

2010-04-30T00:09:00.003+05:00

#41 The Yacoubian Building, Alaa al Aswany, trans. Humphrey Davies

This is an unobtrusive and beautiful translation of a strange, sad, sometimes lovely novel. The Yacoubian building, the translator's note tells us, does in fact exist in Cairo, but the real one is very different from the block where al Aswany's characters flourish, mingle and decay. Each character is his or her own little Cairo in this novel: exiled from the past, detached from other, crueller parts of Egypt, or cut off from a future, they all linger in the uncertain present of a city that is almost too old to have a history. Former aristocrats, who remember the colonial city, a cosmopolitan and high-bred haven for the upper classes, struggle bitterly with the new realities of Cairo, while new immigrants to the city find themselves alienated without money or education, huddled on the terraces of the building, above the apartments of those they serve. It is incredibly hard to be poor in this Cairo, and even harder to be a poor woman. No matter how harshly the line is drawn between man and woman, or gay and straight, the ultimate and insurmountable hurdle is class. Sustaining that hurdle [in an ur-text that echoes a clear and present strain in Indian popular culture] is the omnipresent corruption: in government systems, of religion, and of course, in relationships.

But The Yacoubian Building is not grim, even if it is harsh. It builds itself on small, almost light-hearted human dramas, in which the lives of the building's residents - ranging across classes and cultures - criss-cross with each other. Some of the stories end on a note of unexpected sweetness, but the frustrations of the novel surface in the way not enough do. The narrative voice is ironic and cool, but it folds a strong sense of justice in between the lines. None of the stories set out to make amends for inujstice, or serve anyone their just desserts, either: we are led to sympathise with each character, we are not promised, nor do we receive, sympathetic ends to all their stories. Nor is al Aswany ready to build barricades against any single kind or class of person, except perhaps for the evident dissatisfaction, universal among the characters, for Egypt's dictatorial government and its inability to serve any of its citizens well.

[great cities, i] stangalino, jakubowski: rome noir

2010-04-29T23:50:00.011+05:00

#40 Rome Noir, edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski, translated by Anne Milano Appel, Ann Goldstein and Kathrine Jason

Against all available evidence I always feel like I could be at home in Italy, in most places except two. One is Venice, which I readily admit is a failure of imagination: of course it is no mere maze of romantic canals. Venice's history is long and complex enough to turn the screws on any irresponsible tourist, and I suppose going there simply to ride in a gondola is about as enlightened as touristing to Varanasi to find ~inner peace~. My other blind spot is Rome; I don't know why. It is indisputably one of the world's own cities. It has everything you could hope for, PLUS two great football clubs*. And yet I never imagined Rome and myself as having anything to do with each other, until I read this collection, part of Akashic Books' series of noir anthologies.

Many of these stories foreswear the stylisation of noir, while engaging with its consciousness of the absurd. Their protagonists are universally driven by some sort of obsession, all of them bending reality in varying degrees of consciousness; all trying to make Rome, or Romans, fit around them. So marked is the emphasis on the inner life, so much do many of the narrators here live in their own heads, that it may often seem like their location is incidental to the narrative. This is one aspect of the collection that I am not convinced I like. Noir as people like me understand it is heavily reliant on the particulars of urbanity [rather than just the particulars of locality]. To me noir is also a very visual medium: Los Angeles and New York, and of course Bombay, have a noir aesthetic that I can understand because I have absorbed these cues through film, even before literature. Many of Rome Noir's stories are unconcerned by the visual element, or call it up in heavily ironic and self-reflexive ways [as in the story where a historian must interpret the gruesome hallucinations of tourists taken sick around the Colosseum]. But I guess urban noir is about representing the alienation of the self in a colossal and complex system, and not really about explaining it. Part of the tension urbanity creates is in how this inevitable alienation rubs up against our inevitable intimacies with others. A city is simply a network of relations in one sense, after all; what sets us adrift within these landscapes?

The more I read these stories, the more I began to appreciate the resistance of many stories to rely on cultural cliches. But I do wish there had been a stronger organisation against the psychological cliches, of which there are many. Doomed lovers, weak fathers, crazy cops. Yada yada, you know? And many stories touch upon a physical alienation, of the immigrant communities of Roma, Chinese, Africans and South Asians. Yet, the stories that engage with this are about the attitudes of other Italians to these new settlers: not a single narrator or protagonist, as far as I made out, actually comes from these populations. Few stories revolve around the young or the old; and for one of the foundational locations of Western politics, not one of these Roman stories is overtly concerned with politics. A diversity of thought and voice would have strengthened this collection immeasurably.

Clever, nuanced and often polished, none of the translations are really memorable, except for those of my two favourite stories. There is a lovely suppleness to the last one in the collection, Nicola Lagioia's 1988, translated by Ann Goldstein. This is a memoir of teenage crime, a polished, atmospheric gem of a story, totally absorbing and almost flawless. The seams are invisible here. And inevitably, they are all too plainly on display in the opening story, my other favourite, Nicoletta Vallorani's Pasolini's Shadow. The filmmaker's legend appears twice in two different stories in this book, and Vallorani's story almost places his shade as a watcher over the other characters. In a surreal, poetic narrative, we hear of the last night of Pasolini's life in his own voice. And Pasolini the artist, the foreigner to Rome, is the one protagonist in this book purely concerned with the city as a symbol. It is a highly stylised, dramatic, heartbreaking piece of writing, and its best achievement is to take the familiar elements of mythology - of Rome, of Romans, even of Pasolini's tragic death - and render it into something eerie and yes, alien. At that moment the whole edifice is completely horrifying and completely familiar. The Romans, as Pasolini reminds us, were builders of roads. In his voice, the reiteration of this bromide opens all roads up to Rome -- and Rome up to everyone.

* - alright you can make your Cisco Roma joke now.

eta Aha, Aishwarya has written about the Delhi number, Delhi Noir, here.

wharton, wharton and ashraf

2010-04-26T00:15:00.005+05:00

#37 The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Books are generally a tissue of lies. Old age and hard use inure your finer feelings to their manipulative effects, especially if you are reading them on the 9.10 Churchgate fast local. So it is an unpleasant surprise to come across a book that can not only pierce through the calluses of a lifetime's experience of Books That Lie, but do it so thoroughly that it can ruin your whole week. This is exactly what The House of Mirth achieves. For an unpleasant and untrue book, its effect on the tear glands is remarkable. It is almost as though the reader has a secret self-indulgent, self-pitying streak buried deep, hidden away alongside the beauty and brilliancy underappreciated by a dishonest world.

What am I describing here? What did I just read that so affected me? A novel about a rich woman incurring gambling debts that she is eventually unable to pay? Trying and failing to catch a wealthy husband? Falling into social and financial ruin thanks to a villainous and unfeeling world that consists of about thirty people who seem to lie about giving parties all day? A doomed romance? Oh girl. Are you kidding me? A heroine who is 'bred for ornamentation only'? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I mean maybe its just me, but if George Eliot went before me in telling the stories of rich women [and men] whose education and philosophies can completely betray them, sometimes even to the point of death, I would have some shame before I sat down to write The House of Mirth, you know?

I'm not trying to pull some version of the BOOTSTRAPS! argument on this book and on Lily Bart. Of course, women's lives are circumscribed in ways that not even the most liberated, or even the recklessly brave, are able to always escape. Of course anyone who fell into ruin in the way Lily does in the course of the book could not always pick herself up and dust herself off and become an adventuring pirate with numerous devoted and buff gentleman callers crowding the deck of the barge. And of course - to acknowledge the soul of the book - I do not mean that a person in a book, any more than one in life, is to be despised for being unable to exchange ideas for expediency. But surely such characters are not to be pitied, either. And Lily is not a principled ideologue*. She's really not very much of anything, as Wharton is keen to emphasise. Not much of anything, that is, except a victim of her circumstances. I leave it to you to guess how much I love books in which heroines have nothing left to do in the last five pages but die protracted deaths for no fault of their own.

Of course a big and perhaps quite well-highlighted flaw in the Wharton worldview is its insufferable snobbishness. Perhaps no reader of novels can justifiably escape being a snob of some sort, but Wharton's is not the Ideal Snobbery. It's more - well, more a tissue of snobbery. While symptomatic in books like the one I describe below, which is set in a world where poor people don't exist, the tissue is present and pulsing in The House of Mirth, which must perforce describe the scenery flying past as Lily tumbles down the socio-economic ladder. Equally unforgivable to me, in spite of Wharton's partially-redeeming use of the character later in the book, is her 'that little Jew' treatment of Simon Rosedale.

And yet, WTF. There's just something so compelling in this elegant trainwreck, in this tissue, indeed, of trainwreckery, that by the time you've caught the 8.52 Borivali fast and are nearing home you have to shut the book on the last few pages, when Lily, betrayed and bereft by those she once considered friends, is fucking up sewing sequins on a hat in a millinery factory, because you can't cross the overbridge with streaming eyes. There is something so thrillingly sad about Lily's downfall, because she both does and does not deserve it, and because Wharton is so mercilessly able to sacrifice her in order to criticise the falsehoods of the alien, ancient world Lily - and once, Wharton - depended on, you find yourself compelled by the strange notion that whether or not this tragedy deserves your pity, it is completely justified in evoking your terror.

But what a cheat, nonetheless. What the hell, woman, EVERYONE ELSE IN THE FACTORY IS MAKING HATS FOR A LIVING. Why are you so bad at it that only an OD in a strange bedroom can close your story with proper eclat?

#38 The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [re-read]

As I have hated The House of Mirth on first read [and will return to it time after time to examine more closely what it is about it that is so readable nonetheless], so I have loved The Age of Innocence, which I first read as an impressionable young person who liked anything with Daniel Day-Lewis in its movie version. A foolish, sentimental, manipulative, gorgeously-written book - just like The House of Mirth, actually - it had, when I first read it, something miserably sweet about it; the idea that two people doomed never to be together could find a way to be principled and even happy, in spite of doom etc., for the sake of the world around them. You know, men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

But again this book shocked me in a way it did not a decade ago.

WTF is up with May Welland?

How is this doomed etc. romance, set up between two people of grace and sensibility, so thoroughly wrecked by someone characterised so poorly by Wharton that she can only be described as a POD PERSON?

May Welland is bland. May Welland is stupid. May Welland is narrow-minded. May Welland is a mean bitch. Is there anything she does not do to oblige Newland Archer - her eventual husband and one half of the doomed etc romance, the other being May's cousin, the married and melancholy Ellen Olenska - to despise her? Could a book with such a sharp eye for how a family or a society can repress individuals be MORE clueless when it comes to the treatment of one of its own central characters? At the end of the book Daniel Day-Lewis was a forgotten fancy; Michelle Pfeiffer was a gorgeous dream. I was rooting to SET MAY FREE. Send her a cruise to Monte Carlo! Bring on the rakish gamblers! The inheritance! The underground archery club! Run, Winona, run!

Someday I will write that story.

Until then, I just hope no one is still teaching Edith Wharton in classes on feminism.

#39 The Beast (Numberdar ka Neela), Syed Muhammad Ashraf, trans. Musharraf Ali Farooqi

What a satire. This is a fantastic novella about a village in which the rapacious Thakur Udal Singh takes advantage of a rare blue bull to evoke fright and doubt among the people of his village, and how his plans - and Neela the bull - eventually slip out of his control. The narrative voice is almost dispassionate, but it frames a very righteous anger burning its way through the book, about how power accrues with the powerful, and how religion, poverty and corruption can serve a very narrow but instiable greed. It is also a great story about the madness of the exploiter meeting the madness of the exploited. This is not a story concerned with justice, except in its reliable absence.

The translation was curiously jaw-droppingly good at some points, and frustratingly clumsy in some details, but on the whole, I thought it was an excellent, even-handed job: it borrowed some of the authenticity of a setting so alien to English. Good stuff, and it is one of the few books from this quarter of Book Munch that I can wholly recommend.

* - Man, I hate those.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Alice in Bhuleshwar
The Yacoubian Building
Human Voices
Roman Noir
Heir to the Glimmering World
Chasing the Sun: Stories from Africa

the april shit-list

2010-04-20T18:44:00.012+05:00

The first few books I read this month were largely disheartening, and I can't bring myself to write much about any of them [apart from Danielle Steele, obviously] so I'm making post-its, rather than notes, about them.

#32 Songs of Blood and Sword, Fatima Bhutto

English-language popular history is something with which the subcontinent could always do, particularly stuff not explicitly written to please MBAs and religious fundies, so I looked forward to this book since the minute I heard about it. Again, it seems false advertising got the better of me, since it is not so much a history as a hagiography of the author's grandfather, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto [not exactly the world's nicest prime minister] and her father Murtaza. A book like this has every right to exist, and even to be conditionally applauded for daring to frame an exceptional harangue against Pakistani president and the author's uncle-by-marriage, Asif Ali Zardari -- even if that harangue carries unpleasant overtones of classist entitlement. There it ends. It is rather obviously a very personal piece of writing, because of which I will be amazed if people without a deeply personal interest in the fortunes of the Bhutto family [as opposed to Karachi, or Sindh, or Pakistan, or indeed the subcontinent] have found anything to like very strongly about it.

#33 Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

Some melancholy writer-type befriends a salt-of-the-earth jack-of-all-trades, moves with him to Crete, gets him to work the mines on his land while he sits about and contemplates existence, and learns valuable lessons about life, love and the world from this working-class hero. Tiresome, dated, classist, sexist Rabelais-fail that even manages to make modern Greece [MODERN GREECE!] boring. No saving grace whatsoever. I'm about to read The Last Temptation soon and it had better make up for this hideously boring nonsense times ten.

#34 Raffles, E. W. Hornung

Here is George Orwell's essay on Raffles. This is the classic book of stories about an ace cricketer and burglar, on whom many of the beloved British dandy-adventurers of the 1900s are based, including James Bond and the Scarlet Pimpernel. The book is dedicated to the author's brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, and I read somewhere that Raffles, to the late Victorian reading public, formed a sort of elegant doppelganger to that eminent thief-catcher Sherlock Holmes. It even has worshipful bromance in the form of Raffles' sidekick, Bunny. How you can make such exciting material and context so bloody rubbish is a question that plagued me through the first story. I assumed it would get better. Then on the first page of the second story I came across a shockingly anti-Semitic caricature as well as the casual use of the word 'Kaffir' within paragraphs of each other! So not only did it not get better, IT GOT WORSE! Never ever EVER read this book even if someone pays you to do it. It will rot you.

#35 Loving, Danielle Steele

Okay, I lied about this being a shit-list. This is actually a brilliant instance of its genre and has probably set cosmic standards of excellence that leaves all other books of its ilk crouching in the shadow of its magnificence. It has surpassed anything I have ever read by Danielle Steele, including the one where the farm girl has an illegitimate baby with the Congressman, or the one with clones, or the one with the Japanese-American girl who has to go to an internment camp during World War II. It has handsome rakish love interests. It has a beautiful and fragile young girl for a heroine, who has gorgeous clothes and an interesting past, instead of a personality. It has this heroine marry her way out of financial trouble, like, FOUR TIMES. It has exceptionally cruel villains. It has everything! Why would you not love it?

And I have to say this for Danielle Steele, she is really not afraid to let things get downright messy, emotionally and otherwise, in her books. If it's something another writer would feel awkward or shy about putting in her book, Danielle Steele will write it out in letters of flame on the page and having writ, move on airily to the next Bergdorf Goodman shopping spree. It's really great. If you're reading a section and thinking gosh, now this old guy has the hots for his dead friend's daughter whose guardian he purportedly is, that's really sort of improper, then on the next page Steele will have her heroine think, 'It was almost like incest...but!' [exclamation mark mine]. If she wants a medical crisis in the middle of the book she puts in an evil obstetrician who ties the heroine down to the bed in the middle of labour. If you think at some point of time in the book that a divorce would be the wrongest thing to happen to the heroine - she's divorced within three pages. If you think, 'OMG, girl, do not sleep with that sleazebag,' she has slept with the sleazebag before you can say 'sex.' No matter what you may think of this book or yourself after you have closed it [and put it in the drawer that contains your school slam books and old threatening letters from banks], while it is going on it is for the win. For the bloody win. It even has a green card marriage.

#36 Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers & The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe

Okay, guys, I love reading snark about clueless American hipsters as much as the next person, and I know that Tom Wolfe is capable of being a bewitching writer [something all the other writers - apart from Danielle Motherfucking Steele - on this post could learn]. But this is a sad, corrosive pair of essays. Radical Chic starts off as an absolutely acidic indictment of upper-class, white New York society's private reasons for fundraising for the Black Panthers, but can't really sustain this critique, and ends up rambling on about poor Lenny Bernstein and his other upper-class white New Yorker friends in a way that has absolutely no purpose but to make the reader feel better about themselves. And the second essay, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers about minority groups in San Francisco scamming white authorities by playing on social guilt, is just unreadable. Wolfe is good at mimicking the voices of his peers, but not those different from him.

The Painted Word is his comment on New York's pretentious art world in the Seventies. I'm generally a fan of the deflation of artistic ideals, since I can never be 19 again, and Wolfe is good at tracing how ideas themselves are captives of the market. But his is the style of the rhetorician, and the rhetorician, particularly the rhetorician who is also a satirist, cannot be a historian. I laughed through it, but in the end I wasn't sure why I did, since I don't know anything about Jackson Pollock, anyway.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
The Age of Innocence
The House of Mirth
Alice in Bhuleshwar
The Beast
The Yacoubian Building
Human Voices

a poem for the hungry and the psocialist

2010-04-19T18:31:00.001+05:00

THE GREAT TABLECLOTH

Translated by Alastair Reid - Wuthering (1988) Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda

When they were called to the table,
the tyrants came rushing
with their temporary ladies,
it was fine to watch the women pass
like wasps with big bosoms
followed by those pale
and unfortunate public tigers.

The peasant in the field ate
his poor quota of bread,
he was alone, it was late,
he was surrounded by wheat,
but he had no more bread;
he ate it with grim teeth,
looking at it with hard eyes.

In the blue hour of eating,
the infinite hour of the roast,
the poet abandons his lyre,
takes up his knife and fork, puts his glass on the table,
and the fishermen attend
the little sea of the soup bowl.
Burning potatoes protest
among the tongues of oil.

The lamb is gold on its coals
and the onion undresses.
It is sad to eat in dinner clothes,
like eating in a coffin,
but eating in convents
is like eating underground.
Eating alone is a disappointment,
but not eating matters more,
is hollow and green, has thorns
like a child of fish-hooks
trailing from the heart,
clawing at your insides.

Hunger feels like pincers,
like the bite of crabs,
it burns and has no fire.
Hunger is a cold fire.
Let us sit down to eat
with all those who haven't eaten;
let us spread great tablecloths,
put salt in the lakes of the world,
set up planetary bakeries,
tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon itself
from which we can all eat.

For now I ask no more
than the justice of eating.

nagarkar: ravan and eddie

2010-04-17T00:37:00.006+05:00

I found myself thinking about this in tandem with a novel I have not re-read in very long. I blame Fury. I always will, possibly for everything wrong with the world.

#31 Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar [re-read]

I first read Midnight's Children when I was about 16, and it changed my life, expectedly. Not only its English but also its images were so intensely familiar, in a way that no other book I had read in school was, that it made literature, for the first time, possible. It was possible to borrow its nostalgia and its complexes. It was a book too good to make a reader feel self-important, but it made one matter.

I read Ravan and Eddie a couple of years after that. Since that time, I have re-read Midnight's Children once, and Ravan and Eddie about eight times at least. It is one of the least nostalgic*, least familiarity-breeding novels I have ever read. When I read it for the first time I also thought it was one of the funniest books ever written. But I think it is one of those novels that get less funny as you get closer to its truth. On successive readings I have always found myself horrified, disturbed and sad in turns at the way it narrates the casual ugliness of sex, the pervasiveness of violence, the marriage of worshipfulness and nauseating hatred in men's attitudes to women, and above all, the relentless worry that distinguishes its milieu. Nagarkar's way of telling the story is to make it as grim as he possibly can, and put a lot of jokes in to really turn the screws. You laugh as you might in life - you also find a compassion that you tend to in life.

Since Midnight's Children is about twinning, and since I've already started this post by pairing Rushdie's book with this one, and since you've already read the title of this novel, it will come as a complete shock to you that this book is about two boys whose fates are linked. Ravan lives on the Marathi Hindu floor of the Central Works Department chawl in Mazgaon; Eddie on the Catholic floor. They are both traitors to their identities in different ways; they also hate each other passionately, and never stop. It is stupidly obvious that they have more things in common than either of them realise. Nagarkar does not take it upon himself to milk this for tragedy or redemption: he just lets the praxis sit there and grow, relishing its trivialities. It is possible to see how the tumult of class, caste and gender relations in the bustling throng of the CWD chawl might be characterised as fragile and temporal: its emotional energies are as hand-to-mouth as existence itself can be in the CWD chawl. Nagarkar sees through their little self-preserving hypocrisies and their circularity. Life in a Nagarkar book is always brutal, but at least his characters are guaranteed not to be patronised. It is possible, in the Nagarkar worldview, to earn happiness, even in its fragile and temporal glory, and value it in spite of the frustratingly low returns on investment, as though it is the only important thing in the world. Conversely, grief interests Nagarkar but melancholy bores him; who has the time, the novel seems to say? Ultimately these are the things that propel the novel, even after the stencilling starts to show on Ravan, Eddie, their formidable mothers, their absent fathers and their distant and flawed gurus.

Nagarkar's language is one of my favourite things about this novel and his writing in general. Without inaccuracy or incoherence, he writes an English as far from its received register as can be. It is perfectly intelligible and largely unmixed with other languages [unlike Rushdie's chutneyfication] and yet it reads exactly as an unposh Indian accent sounds: part-colonial, part-native, with a syntax that echoes a local language without quite eschewing the structure of British English, rounded, but stiff. He is less impressive when you are reading with a clear head and able to see what a mess the novel is structurally. Is it meant to be episodic? Am I supposed to let it wash over me, or keep track as it goes back and forth in time? Is it supposed to be read in chunks? It is an annoying display of seams in an otherwise convincing display of sprezzatura. Perhaps more control over these things would have made it a better book. But of course, I still think it is a very good book.

At 16, just as you can enter Rushdie's rarefied, cosmopolitan upper-class Mumbai circa 1950 with no trouble at all, you can also borrow the CWD chawl, with its compressed, anxious and self-segregating layers of the working class. On successive readings it is possible to retain some self-awareness even as you lose yourself in the terror and the chaos of these respective worlds. Rushdie's work has not just gained the pedestal of the definitive Bombay novel in English; it brought the pedestal, nailed it to the ground, and stood up on it, all while being a novel that actually traversed a pretty large stretch of the subcontinent. Yet for me, Ravan and Eddie has been the city novel since the minute I read it. Why is that? Do I believe that CWD chawl Mazgaon is a Mumbai more 'real' than Warden Road? I do not. But Ravan and Eddie is a more realistic novel, to use the term in its narrowest sense, than Midnight's Children; it represents its subject more literally** than Midnight's Children does. It is first and foremost a story about its chosen slice of Mumbai while Midnight's Children, of course, is first and foremost about the imagination it sprang from. This time, I read it in two-hour long commutes between home and work in a crowded local, with the sound of women fighting, talking, praying and working all around me, echoing through the book and mingling perfectly with its undercurrents. Of course it is about those boring things that you worry about all the time as an adult in Mumbai: about how little space you have, how little time you have, how little control you have, and how, no matter what you are doing, you will never escape being someone's neighbour.

* - I mean that. In spite of the fact that it is a wildly immersive experience and glories in exploring the different country that was newly independent India, where Goa was still a Portuguese colony and Cuticura Talcum Powder a luxury talc, the writing is only ever indulgent in service of something else, and hardly ever of itself.

** - that must be the first time in years I've used that word correctly.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Songs of Blood and Sword
Zorba the Greek
The Age of Innocence
Raffles
Alice in Bhuleshwar
The Beast
The Yacoubian Building
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Human Voices
Loving

jasanoff: edge of empire

2010-04-10T23:53:00.002+05:00

#30 Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750 - 1850, Maya Jasanoff

A history of art collectors in the earliest days of the British Empire, in India and Egypt: how could a book like this rise above its context of plunder and appropriation? Jasanoff is also concerned with this. At the end of her preface, she says:

In no way do I wish to make an advertisement or an apology for empire, past, present or future. But empires are a fact of world history. The important question for this book is not whether they are "good" or "bad," but what they do, whom they affect, and how.'

It may not be immediately clear how someone who wishes to liberate a study of empire from an ethical context can also be so categorical in stating that she is not going to be an apologist. In fact, I'm not sure how the book actually succeeds at what it does. But it is a success. How does she do it?

Her book is a tightrope act. The stories of the marginal men she collects in this book - scholars, dilettants, bounty-hunters and artful dodgers - are propelled by orientalism: both in the Saidian formulation of this basic facet of empire-building, as well as her own understanding of how orientalism develops in an imperial culture. Her goal is to focus on the accumulation and loss of power through cultural artefacts for individuals. Because the book travels on foot, so to speak, a lot of the tensions of race and conquest unspool into something less domineering than the edifice of Empire at the institutional level. Her subjects are fascinating men driven to the cosmopolitan mess of late-1700s India, a battlefield of interests that in many ways absorbs the tensions of that other great battlefield of the time: Europe. In the stories of men like Claude Martin (well-known to Indians thanks to his La Martiniere schools, which are still around and - I think, judging by their regular appearance on the Bournvita Quiz Contests - flourishing) and Antoine Polier, both Frenchmen in Lucknow under the reign of the dissipate Asaf-ud-Daula, Jasanoff is also telling the history of empire as a history of land and wealth collected as spoils in a global war between England and France. It is a history of pettiness, bureaucratic tangles, and the desperation of mercenary tricksters trying to fashion themselves through the works of beauty they acquired.

And they are fantastic stories without exception. Jasanoff goes from men like Robert Clive, Empire's Number One man and a frantic social climber, to women like his daughter-in-law Henrietta, travelling through Srirangapatnam in the wake of Tipu Sultan's death, describing wide-eyed the changes taking place in the landscape around her, and acquiring plants, animals and - of course - art, along her route to and from Madras. The men collecting in Egypt are even less savoury, but no less interesting, from the pathetic Henry Salt, to the Savoyard strongman Belzoni, both of whose names are still carved as graffiti into the wall of the Ramesseum at Thebes. The scale of the presumptuousness of the Egyptian collectors is offset by the enormity of its situation as a theatre of war: between the Mameluke governors and the restless Arab population, the Ottomans overseeing the country and their shifting alliances, the British and - most memorably of all - Napoleon. At the time of invasion Napoleon circulated the Arabic 'Proclamation to All Egyptians', and Jasanoff quotes it in a section called 'Abdallah Bonaparte'.

You have been told that I have come to this land only with the intention of eradicating your religion. But that is a clear lie; do not believe it. tell the slanderers that I have come to you only to rescue your rights from the hands of the oppressors. I, more than any Mamluk, worship God, glory be to Him, and respect His Prophet and the great Quran ... O you shaykhs, judges, imams, jurbajjiya and leading men of the country, tell your nation that the French are also sincere Muslims. A confirmation of this is that they entered Rome and there destroyed the throne of the Pope, who had always urged Christians to combat Islam. Then they marched on Malta, whence they expelled the knights, who claimed that God, exalted is He, sought of them that they fight the Muslims. Moreover, the French continued to be sincere friends of His Excellency the Ottoman Sultan and the enemies of his enemies ... All Egyptians must be grateful to God ... for the termination of the dynasty of the Mamluks, saying loudly, "May God perpetuate the paying of honour to the Ottoman Sultan, may God perpetuate the paying of honour to the French army, may God curse the Mamluks, and may He ameliorate the condition of the Egyptian nation."

You try that on for size, Nicolas Sarkozy. [And the whole letter is on the Internets, here.]

My favourite bit, of course, is the chapter on Srirangapatnam, with its thrilling account of Tipu Sultan's friendships with France on the cusp of Revolution. From the Bourbons he received an array of Sevres porcelain, and from Napoleon, letters of support against the hated British. A Jacobin Club of Seringapatam was actually in existence back in the day. This is what they did on Republic Day in 1797, in Tipu's capital, in the middle of eighty-two gun salutes and so on:

"Behold my acknowledgement of the Standard of your country," said Tipu when the guns fell silent, "which is dear to me, and to which I am allied, it shall always be supported in my Country, as it has been in that of the Republic, my Sister!"

The club members then planted a liberty tree (a Maypole-like post that was the centrepiece of many revolutionary festivals) and listened to an impassioned sermon from their president, Ripaud, on the sublimity of republican values, the "barbarity and atrocity' of the perfidious English, and the treachery of counterrevolutionary rebels. "Citizens!" he intoned in fervent climax. "Do you Swear, Hatred to all Kings except Tippoo Sultaun the Victorious, the Ally of the French Republic. War against all Tyrants and love towards your country, and that of Citizen Tippoo." "Yes!" the chorus of voices, European and Indian both, swelled enthusiastically back: "We swear to live free or die!"

In retelling the story of Tipu and Srirangapatnam, its fabled hordes of jewels and how they - and Tipu - were used to construct the legitimacy of Empire to the British public, Jasanoff writes one of the most insightful and complex explanations of this history.

And this is really her trump card. She is a superb writer. Her voice comes through without quite the elegant authoritativeness of Linda Colley, but does capture some of its stateliness and poise (and it turns out that Colley happens to be one of her teachers). The book cannot help being episodic as it builds its rather limited thesis - of individual collecting reflecting on the collection of an empire - but that does not stop this from being absorbing. Shock and absurdity are dealt with coolly; the bombast of Empire continually punctured; the study of individuals inclined towards the dignity of human aspiration, on all sides of the divide.

Perhaps this is where Jasanoff's attempt at chronicling the transactions of empire rather than critiquing it hollows out. Empire as a conflict of race is not a unidimensional behemoth, especially at the time she writes about. But what about empire as an act of economic exploitation? Jasanoff takes the classic liberal view of capitalism as something valuable when individuals practice it to improve themselves. The men Jasanoff focusses on collected their fortunes, and their identities, only sometimes on behalf of the Empire. Often, they collected in spite of it. But the nature of the beast is that breaking the bonds of class is not always an act of empowerment. Indeed, it may end up enslaving others to a degree that the acts of those who are already free (or freer), need not.

Coming soon on Book Munch:
Songs of Blood and Sword
Zorba the Greek
Ravan and Eddie
The Age of Innocence
Raffles
Alice in Bhuleshwar
The Beast
The Yacoubian Building
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Human Voices

So many of these are so frustrating, I'm putting this out to make myself writes notes on all of these.

march memoir madness: kaifi, obama, crisp, seth, mill

2010-03-28T22:01:00.005+05:00

I plus parental/grandparental units spent most of this month scrambling to shift house, so book blogging became a secondary concern. Presenting an ungainly post of fly-by thoughts on all the memoir reading I've done this March [and I have no idea how, it just happened]. I hope to write more on at least a couple of these again, so maybe next time I will also be able to offer quotes, after my books have emerged like Venus from the bottom of the cardboard boxes.

#25 Kaifi and I, Shaukat Kaifi, trans. Nasreen Rehman

Imagine being married to a brilliant poet who is also handsome, also famous, also a poor and dedicated Communist who lives on a commune in Andheri, where he has one room to share with you. He makes almost no money writing his amazing poetry and spends most of his time on work for the Party, among labourers [his sympathies perfectly expressed in the immortal 'Makaan' - Sab utho, main bhi uthoon, tum bhi utho, tum bhi utho. Everyone awake: I will rise, so must you, and so must you] and in slums. You, a beauty and a wit who has spurned the elegant cosiness of your traditional upbringing in Hyderabad, have to tear up saris to make curtains, yearn quietly for doilies, and put up, not only with the city that Bombay was in the 1950s, but with being poor in the Bombay of the 1950s. You have plenty of backbone, and you have a husband who wrote the words, Uth meri jaan, mere saath hi chalna hain tujhe - arise, my love, you must walk with me today. Annoyingly paternalistic to read today? Yes, at least for me. But beautiful, nonetheless. Shaukat Kaifi, wife of Kaifi Azmi [and mother of cinema's leading lights Shabana and Baba Azmi] writes that when she heard those famous lines she was convinced that they had to be for her: that she and none other would have the right to walk beside Kaifi. She was correct. Their whirlwind courtship and romance [I have three words for you: letters. in. blood.] led to a marriage of over fifty years, and a lifelong engagement with politics, literature, and for Shaukat, acting in the theatre and the cinema, both of which had a flourishing relationship with the Progressive movement's Urdu writers that continued well into the '60s and beyond. Her touching love story with Kaifi Azmi is at the centre of this memoir, but it is also a very personal, often surprising record of some of the most radical currents of newly independent India; in Urdu writing, in Islam - particularly among Muslim women - and in the theatre of Bombay. The translation is a just and apparently scrupulous effort, although the translations of the poetry do seem to sacrifice rhythm for faithfulness. All in all, a pressing reminder to self that the resolution to learn to read Urdu must no longer be put off.

#26 Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

I am so weary of admiring Barack Obama's BRAAAIIIINS I have no way to express it. His story is of course an eminently tellable one in broad strokes: parents! Hawaii! Indonesia! Chicago! Kenya! but it is what he does at the micro-level that is astounding. It would have been easy to write the emotional equivalent of an adventure story, I think, and for a writer of his gifts that might have been a deeply impressive read, for all we know. But this memoir is shaped by the hands of Obama the rationalist, with his matter-of-fact eloquence and his immense capacity for analysis. As much as an act of self-creation, this book is also an act of self-dissection, as it were, and the two seemingly opposed acts are bound up in each other. I can see why complaints of glibness have carried right over into critique of his presidential persona. It is rather obviously an elided, highly selective piece of writing, but that goes to serve the grand narrative of ideas that this book is about. It seems to me to be perfectly honest to that trajectory: highlighting, primarily, his experience of race and space, and then that of constructing masculinity.

The last section of the book, where he travels to Kenya to meet his father's family, is easily the most visceral of all the episodes he describes. Intensity of thought here yields some ground to intensity of feeling, and yes, alright, I cried like a nut at the obvious points. But I think my favourite section of this book is his work as a community organiser in Chicago. I think the book's significant triumph is its chronicle of the frustrations, the continually changing priorities, and the constant inspiration derived from the people, rather than the ideas that you work for. The nature of professional activism probably differs from place to place, but I think everyone interested in communities, particularly urban communities, ought to read this. It is an emotional but unsentimental description of what life on the margins can be like, and what it means to accept its truths in order to reverse them. Kaifi Azmi once told his daughter: You must accept that change may not come in your lifetime, but continue to work for it nonetheless. Obama's work subordinates this broader truth to the struggle for an achievable, quantifiable change, even if it is diminished and imperfect. A lesson well-learned on the whole, I suppose.

#27 The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp

I found this gloriously funny and often exquisite book very hard to read. Crisp's humour is Wildean in its arch frivolity and piquancy. It is perfectly possible for victims of gay-bashing to be flippant about it, and I suppose it is possible to laugh at the flippancy; I could not. Crisp's life, almost coeval with the twentieth century [he was born in 1908] was by no means easy. Born into bourgeois Englishness, never willing [or per his memoir, able] to repress his sexuality, the repercussions were constant. Crisp was pulled out of taxis and beaten, shunned by employers, rejected by the War Office for being a pervert, and subjected to countless other acts of violence and humiliation, large and small. Crisp lays the drollery on thick, and every other line is a witticism that sends himself or someone else up. But the book is not simply about mocking pain, nor is it satirical [as a friend once tells Crisp, there's never anything satirical in his work, because there's no anger]. It is a very sharp look at the inner life as well as the material condition of a certain section of London and English society over the early years of the 1900s. It is also about how both the self and a group can create and sustain an identity in the face of violent hatred. Crisp the writer would no doubt disavow the romance and sentimentality of such an idea, writing as he does from a perpetual standpoint of disengagement from the broader currents, but that hardly makes his book apolitical.

#28 Two Lives, Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth is quite demonstrably a brilliant writer. His language is musical, his subjects are fascinating, his sentiments are meet and his compassion for his characters something of a byword. I think The Golden Gate is a fantastic book and From Heaven Lake a simply lovely one. I didn't like An Equal Music, but while I have never read past the first 20 pages of A Suitable Boy [the commuter's hands are perpetually tied to the small book] I hope to do so whenever I am next unemployed, or succumb to the Kindle, or something. But since he has hopped from genre to genre with such overall success it might suggest that he would do to biography, a noble but hardly transcendental art, what spring does to the cherry trees.

He doesn't quite. Two Lives is not the work of Seth the lyricist extraordinaire but that of Seth the Ph.D candidate, and while all the tremendous good taste of language and sentiment shine through, it is a biography that goes, perhaps in keeping with the lives of his subjects, in stops and starts. It is the story of his great-uncle Shanti Behari Seth and Shanti's German wife, Henny Caro. Their long, cosy married life in England succeeded a long friendship, begun when Shanti, an Indian student of dentistry, became the Caros' lodger in 1930s Berlin. Shanti was then still a British subject, and unable to practice dentistry, moreover, under the Aryan laws of Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of war, he joined the British Army in Sudan as an officer, and had an extremely eventful career that ended with his losing his right arm on the battlefield of Monte Cassino, Italy, in 1943. The Caros - mother Ella, and daughters Lola and Helga [or Henny] - were Jewish. Henny fled Berlin just before the war began, finding shelter with friends in England. By the end of the war, she had lost most of her friends in Germany, but her family suffered the worst fate. Ella, she was to discover, died in Theresienstadt, and Lola in Buchenwald.

The story of the Caros, told largely through letters and Seth's recounting of his research into the matter, is exceptionally humanising of the unthinkable tragedy. The Caros' gentile friends also went through the crucible, and not all of them passed the test. Their letters tell a bleak story for the ones who stood up for what was right. But it is leavened, as Henny herself seems to assure herself and them, by the human decencies of friendship and loyalty - decencies that are anything but common. Henny's most steadfast friend, of course, turns out to be Shanti himself. A man who made several very long journeys to come to his unexceptionable dental practice in middle-class London, with a circle of friends who came over for dinners and bridge parties, who claimed never to have known racism in his life, and who made such a dependable husband and friend for Henny, Shanti's inner life is somewhat obscured by the absence of any copious or introspective correspondence, although it is much better documented on the whole than Henny's: distraught after her death in the late '80s, he destroyed most of her photographs and papers, and never touched her post-War correspondence. Perhaps it was also less easily recorded. Seth does a marvellous job piecing together a framework for the criss-crossing of their lives during the tumultous war decades, after which their marriage, which comes at a leisurely pace in 1951, in the absence of any tempestuous romance, is a bit anti-climactic. How Seth himself comes to know these members of his family, and how he relates to them over the years, becomes a lovely, complex thread in the narrative: the Caro-Seths never have children, and various surrogates come into their lives in complicated, not always benign ways. But after Henny's death from cancer, Shanti's own life and the threads of the book devolve into a minor cacophony: emotional turbulence clashes with the frustrations of old age, and with the distasteful if always interesting matter of wills and legacies. Here Seth's desire to take the story to its end somewhere well after Shanti's death dulls its impact considerably. I am no censor of private stories, but I do wonder why Seth felt a more circumspect end to the book might have sacrificed its honesty.

#29 Autobiography, John Stuart Mill [re-read]

Oh, John Stuart Mill. Every time I read this book I can barely think through the first two chapters except to be appalled at the superdickery of James Mill, Famous Victorian Philosopher and crazycakes economist, and little JS' father. He put JS to studying Greek at age 2 and mathematics at age 3. Yes, readers of the scintillating The Last Samurai will know how well this can be accomplished in fiction. But Mill was no Sybilla to JS' Ludo. He was an asshole with a temper who ensured that baby J, when he was finally allowed to interact with the outside world, was 'at least a quarter century ahead' of his peers, a brilliant analytical thinker and polymath who had accomplished more by the age of 20 than most academics ever do, but at what price tender modern pinkos like me can only shudder to imagine. Little Mill is extremely gracious to him, though, because amazingly he turns out to be a very nice guy - and another Famous Victorian Philosopher who is not only much less of a dick than other FVPs, but also very relevant to liberal thinkers today. He turns out to have a terrifically involved intellectual life, great friendships with other FVPs [to say nothing of people like Thomas Carlyle] and a love story with Harriet Taylor that is just waiting for Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly to find the right Hollywood script. [What? They acted as the Darwins! The Mill-Taylors were even cooler!] I am by no means familiar with all or even most of Mill's work, so all that detailed stuff in between about the Reviews and his work on Logic is barely of academic interest to me: but he is endlessly articulate on the subject of the life of the mind and the liberty of the individual - of every individual, including slaves in Jamaica and women everywhere, not just privileged white men - and since his mind was such a gigantic one the Autobiography is nothing short of a marvel.

daniyal mueenuddin: in other rooms, other wonders

2010-03-20T15:58:00.001+05:00

#24 In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin

I began this book with extremely high expectations, given all the reviews and prizes, and ended it with all of them met because this really is an unusually good book. The writing does justice to its form - the short story - as well as to its own scope. You come away after it feeling like it has satisfied some vital enquiry into the human character, and into writing itself. It's the sort of feeling you get when you read the great psychological writers of the nineteenth century, like James or Chekhov; writers who have shaped the way you read interiority as well as the material condition.

The book is a set of eight short stories, revolving around the life and estate of Pakistani landowner K K Harouni. Harouni himself appears only as a supporting character: the stories are about his servants, retainers, family members, and his circle of friends among the upper classes of Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. The classes are connected intimately but never fluidly: their resources to grapple with the crises of life - births, deaths, scandal - may vary but at the core they retain a similar sort of corruption and clarity. These layers unspool with gentleness and a certain amount of tender impassivity in the lives of several astonishingly well-realised characters.

But impassivity is also brutal, and the beautiful trick in many of these stories is the way Mueenuddin draws them to a close. In Nawabdin Electrician, we examine the life and milieu of the title character over a hypnotically well-controlled and evocative narrative, until we are led in the last four pages to see what happens to Nawabdin when an armed thief attempts to rob him of his motorcycle. It is a stunning conclusion. The next story, Saleema, is almost one of my favourites, with its complicated love story between the maid Saleema and KK Harouni's valet, the old man Rafik, until something happens at the end to make your blood curdle - something so inevitable, but so little foreshadowed in the narrative, that its occurrence is astounding. The last story, A Spoiled Man, also makes use of the same device, of bringing the story around to an end that seems inevitable but never drives or bullies the story.

To find a style so free of mannerism, of cleverness and of sentimentality is a wonder. My favourite story is Provide, Provide, about Harouni's corrupt estate manager Jaglani, and his relationship with the seemingly helpless Zainab, who turns up as his maidservant, but whom he eventually marries in secret. Marriage and sex are the prime movers of the relationships between men and women in this book, but Mueenuddin is successful - again - at describing manipulation and disingenuity without becoming manipulative himself. His female characters are as human and vivid as the male. They are not the bearers of illusion: agency, mobility, freedom, these things are even more limited for them then they are to their lovers and husbands. Even ones who exist outside the landscape, like an American girlfriend, eventually succumb or are lost in some way. Here the grand impassivity of Mueenuddin's narration touches on something dreadfully uneasy without comment. There are no easy lives in this book, no simple gifts of redemption. The women suffer for this the most - again, as they do in the great European novels of the late nineteenth century - and their deaths, or the facts of their survival, are always subordinate to thir weaknesses of thought and action. Mueenuddin has an enormous capacity to describe their ambitions and desperations, and his female characters are in many ways much more sympathetic than the men. Perhaps this is necessarily because within these stories, they are always more isolated. In such a stiflingly patriarchal world, the old maxim about individualism as the preserve of the male and community being a female creation is turned on its head. What country, what network of power, what circle of friends could Zainab or Husna [the young mistress of K K Harouni] possibly belong to? What is destiny in the face of fate?

I've touched on the stories that deal with the less-privileged characters of the world of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders because I liked them the most: while the achievements of stories like Lily, about the courtship and marriage of two lonely young people from the swish set, are varied and impressive [although the one set in Paris, with the American girlfriend, is the only story with sections of writing that are almost, almost pedestrian], I found them less moving. In fact, I wonder if part of the power of this book is because its stories are set in a country and society relatively unexplored in English-language fiction. What are the odds that I would have shut the book or flung it against a wall if Lily was set in England or the US, or India? High. In Other Rooms... would go on a bonfire of the vanities, alright. But a book's worth as the proverbial mirror to society can only rank alongside a judgment of its own integrity, and In Other Rooms... is tremendously truthful to itself. It is superb.

meme: if you see this post a poem in your blog

2010-03-17T11:53:00.003+05:00

I vaccillated between Kaifi Azmi's Makaan and this, but this has an Agha Shahid Ali translation.

Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang
Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Maine samjha tha ke tu hai to darakhshaan hai hayyaat
Tera gham hai to sham-e-dahar ka jhagra kya hai
Teri soorat se hai aalam mein baharon ko sabaat
Teri aankhon ke siwa dunya mein rakha kya hai

To jo mil jaye to taqdeer nigoon ho jaye
Yun na tha maine faqat chaha tha yun ho jaye
Aur bhi dukh hain zamane mein mohabbat ke siwa
Rahatein aur bhi hain wasl ki raahat ke siwa

Angeenat sadiyon ke taariq bahimanaa talism
Resham-o-atlas-o-kamKhwaab mein bunwaye hue
Jaa-ba-jaa biktey hue koochaa-o-bazaar mein jism
Khaak mein litharey hue, khoon mein nehlaaye hue

Jism nikaley hue amraaz ke tannuuron se
Peep behti hui jaltey hue naasuuron se
Laut jaati hai udhar ko bhi nazar kya ki jiye
Ab bhi dilkash hai tera husn mager kya ki jiye

Aur bhi dukh hain mohabbat ke dukh ke siwa
Rahatein aur bhi hain wasl ki raahat ke siwa

Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang.

Mujhse pehli si mohabbat / Don't Ask Me For That Love Again
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
translated by Agha Shahid Ali

That which then was ours, my love,
don’t ask me for that love again.
The world then was gold, burnished with light –
and only because of you. That’s what I had believed.
How could one weep for sorrows other than yours?
How could one have any sorrow but the one you gave?
So what were these protests, these rumors of injustice?
A glimpse of your face was evidence of springtime.
The sky, wherever I looked, was nothing but your eyes.
If You’d fall into my arms, Fate would be helpless.

All this I’d thought, all this I’d believed.
But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love.
The rich had cast their spell on history:
dark centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks.
Bitter threads began to unravel before me
as I went into alleys and in open markets
saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.
I saw them sold and bought, again and again.
This too deserves attention. I can’t help but look back
when I return from those alleys – what should one do?
And you still are so ravishing – what should I do?
There are other sorrows in this world,
comforts other than love.
Don’t ask me, my love, for that love again.

china mieville: the city and the city

2010-03-11T17:24:00.004+05:00

Teal deer warning.

#23 The City and the City, China Miéville

Now this is how you defeat [many] expectations. What a thrillingly confounding read this was. After a point of time I just threw up my hands and said to the book, okay then, bring it. It brought it.

Orhan Pamuk once said [I paraphrase] that a novel is an essentially liberal tool because its point is to tell us about people who are not like us. Now arguably, you could say that since a novel’s further point, by and large, is to tell you that people who are not like you are in fact in their own way just like you, the novel is a tool of The Man, soothing the ineffable fears of the chaise-longue-occupying, page-turning class.

The City and the City junks these oppositions quite markedly. I’m afraid soothing is in abeyance here. At every level we are dealing with an alienation from and a resistance to the familiar – a classic diagnosis of the malaise of the city. And the city. Beszel and Ul Qoma are two alter-cities [if I have that correct] that occupy the same set of spaces. They are divided by a bizarre, alarming and shadowy border, one that requires the people of each city to divide themselves from each other totally. They ‘unsee’ each other’s surroundings and each other, even if they are on the same street or the same apartment block. To violate this cardinal rule is to invoke the fearsome powers of Breach, the omnipotent security force responsible for keeping borders intact. The protocol for citizens is as elaborate as a Google algorithm […one of the elaborate ones, anyway]; the rules for tourists and businesspeople are almost worse. When a murdered corpse turns up in Beszel, the journey to find the criminal takes the Besz policeman Tyador Borlú on a dangerous journey in which he has to negotiate the geography and the politics of both cities.

The Beszel and Ul Qoma borders are not exactly inimical as understood in our world. They are not the borders across which bombs are lobbed and walls are built [to be broken] and star-crossed love stories conducted. The culture of resistance exists, but in an apparently desultory way. The separation here is seemingly absolute and on equal terms – there is no easy analogy to be drawn to the relationship between, citizens and a slave class, or the occupiers and the occupied, or the trauma of what ought never to have been divided. In a city like Bombay it may seem impossible to really 'unsee' anything at any time, but this is a fallacy. In fact, the invisibility we are constantly enforcing in over-pressured cities is that of our relationships with each other. We unsee the other variables in our equations of power. Beszel and Ul Qoma are caught up in the same arithmetic, but in ways that the narrative leaves ambiguous. It leaves a lot ambiguous.

Since my interest in the book was first sparked by its relationship with Raymond Chandler, I have to address its debt to Chandler. This is marked in the novel’s atmospherics, its protagonist’s, uhm, project of distancing, its intense awareness of place [and how it plays with that conceit to astounding effect]. In spirit, it is less obvious. Philip Marlowe’s coolness is a slightly fey charade: he is a ferociously sentimental character, a dogged romantic and a bit of an ideologue. He is much more rooted in his city and his place in it, though, than Borlú, who is a cop.

And Marlowe’s Los Angeles is a warm, almost tropical city. Reading a Marlowe book is still a wholly sensual experience of the living organism, bright lights, bars, cars and all. There’s something much more austere going on in Beszel and Ul Qoma – the atmosphere, particularly once the plot hurtles into thriller-mode where gun battles and life-savings are rife, is a bit more Cold War Le Carré than anything, I thought? And I find it particularly striking that both of them are city-states, and the laws that bind them and drive the plot of the novel forward are not the porous and symbiotic rules of cities, but the more absolute laws of nations.

Is there something reactionary to the constant movement of The City and the City against the grain? I would not say so. It’s not a dogmatic book in the way intensely self-aware writing can sometimes be, nor is it simply a funhouse mirror held up to its own influences. It is subverting. I am still unconvinced on some aspects of that subversion, though. For example, on the first page of the book we see a naked dead woman who is thought to be a prostitute. Later we discover that the naked dead woman is not a prostitute. Point taken. But she is still a naked dead woman. Sadly there are very few ways you can neutralise this image in art, let alone subvert it. Similarly, my discomfort over the cultural signifiers of Ul Qoma was sustained throughout the novel. Textually it starts off as and remains the Other – where is all the badass Qussim Dhatt fanfic, anyway? Its markers are, to borrow a word from the Wall Street Journal, ‘Islamist.’ Broadly, of course, totally broadly. Now, a writer is always free to alienate the markers of an ‘othered’ culture and incorporate it in their work, even in service of commenting on or criticising the othering. But with the noblest of intentions and legerdemain to burn, it is still, in this case, appropriation. Or am I wrong to think so?

I haven’t yet seen the new Chandan Arora film Striker, but one of its reviewers quoted a line of dialogue from it: Us waqt humko yeh maloom nahin tha, ki Bombay ko jitna dekho, roz thoda aur dikhta hai. We did not then know that no matter how long you look at Bombay, every day you see a little more of it.

I found this rather profound in the context of a film about the ‘93 riots. For a city where collective memory has no public value, it is a warning and a verdict. It acknowledges the smallness of our lives in a big city, the ease of assuming the role of the ignored, and of ignorance: it indicates how actors in a conflict can be complicit in a fire that we did not start. To me The City and the City is a great take on that; a complex and skilfully navigated elaboration of our capacity to see, and see more, and see less. I think I’ll read it again in a year’s time and see if it ends differently.

And now I am a bit in need of a ‘the soothing will see you now’ book. I have this one on colonial plunder in 18th century India lined up next. That should bring it sufficiently.

sidin vadukut: dork

2010-03-08T13:03:00.006+05:00

#22 Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin 'Einstein' Verghese, Sidin Vadukut

I liked this novel in spite of myself. However badly that speaks of my character, I think it at least rescues my taste in some measure. What won me over to Dork is that it's not a novel about a bumbling young chap who discovers himself [that category of novels is called, in my mind, 'Wank.'] Through the story, the young chap remains an unreconstituted bumbler, and that's putting it kindly. Robin Verghese is a hopeful young egoist with a diary, a job at Mumbai's Dufresne Partners, and reality-defying naivete. We follow his diary, Mole-style, as he swashbuckles his way through one promotion cycle at his frankly lamex0rz firm, makes long-running attempts to get the girl, and takes the odd opportunity to save the day.

Robin is not an idiot savant. He's just an idiot. And the great thing about Dork is that it isn't really just lampooning the little guy, of course - it's the whole culture. Robin's world is so painfully familiar to anyone who's been a corporate minion that it should come with warning labels for reproductions of soulless Taj parties and desperate usage of PowerPoint. But there's nothing bitter or angry about this book. Its prime provocations are goofy, not satirical. Robin is a type of character very familiar to Indian readers - the product of an elite school, dealing not just with the vagaries of the world outside, but also with the chaos within. He's also a LOLarious send-up that type.

I enjoyed it. And I'm going to take the rare opportunity to infuse this post with some hard-hitting journalism. I had the privilege of speaking to the author just before the Mumbai launch of this book. Below I reproduce the short Q&A that appeared [version thereof] in the March issue of Verve Magazine.

How do you make consulting interesting?
By not writing too much about it. It’s easy to poke fun at the stereotypes, and it serves as a rich backdrop, but the book is about its characters. The diary format helps; you can pick and choose details, skip over days of the boring stuff, and still stay true to the format. I didn't have to write a magnum opus.

But parts of this book were so reminiscent of Tolstoy.
Don't make me kill myself.

Sorry. Who is Dork’s ideal reader?
There was a focus of sorts when I was talking about it to my publishers. I thought it would speak best to young readers, between 25 and 35, MBAs fresh out of school. But my major concern was really to do justice to my own mental image of Robin Verghese. I’ve been amazed at how different people have taken different things from the story, though – for many people, it’s worked as a great slice-of-life in a metro, for others it’s about a lifestyle.

How easy is it to sustain humour (a mainstay of your kvlt blog, Domain Maximus) at novel-length?
It’s very difficult. There are several transitions that you have to make carefully: sustaining a line of humour for that span, and writing fiction itself, is a challenge. But the genre of humour, of the jokes, is carried forward from Domain Maximus to the book - the general sense is the same. I did take a lot of shortcuts to help myself. The diary format, for example, bridges a gap with the blog format.

What sort of writing inspires you?
My own favourites are writers like William Dalrymple, Bill Bryson, Martin Cruz Smith and so on. Dork in particular had a number of inspirations. I worked with the sensibility of The Office TV series, which really opens up everything in the office space to be laughed at. Sue Townsend is another. And Craig Brown, Molly Evans, and the brilliant office culture columnist Lucy Kellaway.

What can we look forward to in the further adventures of Robin Verghese?
Robin will not reform. He will remain a dork, and the comedy of errors will continue. The repercussions so far have been small – I want him to arrive at a point where he’s able to create international diplomatic incidents.

DISCLAIMER ~SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE CONSULTANTS~ DISCLAIMER

surendra mohan pathak and barbara trapido

2010-03-06T01:09:00.005+05:00

#20 Daylight Robbery, Surendra Mohan Pathak, trans. from Hindi by Sudarshan Purohit

These new Blaft translations of the ultra-mega-super-hit Surendra Mohan Pathak crime novels put me in a bit of a bind. Did I want them because they have lurid pulp covers, fabulously illustrated by ~~Ramesh Ram of Shelle Studios~~ [by Mustajab Ahmed Siddiqui (Shelle Studios) - I thank Blaft for the correction]? Is it their appeal the appeal of kitsch? Was I genuinely interested in vintage Hindi crime fiction, or was I just being an annoying hipster? I will have a lifetime to ponder these things since I am already in possession of both The 65 Lakh Heist, and Daylight Robbery. I will also buy the next one when it comes out, because it turns out that hipster or no, I am genuinely interested in vintage Hindi crime fiction.

My formative years were the very early '90s, when '80s cinema entered its heyday. I want to know if there was a Raymond Chandler flying off the shelves of the Higginbothamses and the Wheeler and Cos. of the dusty railway bookstalls of The Real India at the same time that Sunny Deol and Feroze Khan [and Vinod Khanna, and other men with a propensity to leave their shirts unbuttoned to the navel as they stalked about ravines with rifles on their shoulders] were entertaining us stationary toffs in the cinema halls. Vimal, the hero of Daylight Robbery, could have been played on screen by any of these guys -- maybe not Vinod Khanna, who was perhaps always a little too urbane, or Feroze Khan, who just couldnt act, bless him. But definitely Sunny Deol [we will discuss the relative merits of Sunny Deol's acting v/s Feroze Khan's acting in a later post dedicated to the mullet in Bollywood]. Vimal of the thousand names and disguises is a tragic action anti-hero. He could never be played by Amitabh Bachchan, who would fail as a man so seemingly unable to control the larger narrative of his life. Vimal lives in a world surrounded by evil. He is repeatedly roped into committing armed robbery, extortion, GBH and even murder by crooks who have his number and are putting the screws on him to make use of his extraordinary talents. Worse: beautiful and desperate women are throwing themselves at him. Tainted money is hoarding itself in the trunk of his stolen car. Vimal, who only entered a life of crime because his faithless wife tricked him into jail on trumped-up criminal charges in the first place, just wants a break, damnit! Time for an NHRC intervention!

So no, this isn't exactly Khachaturian-endorsing, society-in-chaos wiseass territory. This is Aluminium-Age, dying-gasps-of-the-planned-economy-era Bollywood territory. It is melancholic, but only in the sense that it deals coolly with the inner turmoil of Vimal, or the grasping, unhappy [and very sexy] Shailaja. There's an odd fatalism about Vimal and his attempts to escape the grip of a criminal life, an escape that you sense he never quite expects to achieve. Like a bird on the wire, as Leonard Cohen would say.

The pulp aspects of the book are almost one hundred percent goodness. For all that the portrayal of the beautiful/desperate woman was ultimately a turnoff for me, there was plenty to admire. Pathak has a brisk but very visual style, and a gift for atmosphere. Characters are drawn with cutting efficiency, and they play well with and off each other. An early sequence when the main players in the heist sit around a card table to induce a man to co-operate with their scheme is probably the most delicious part of the whole book - you watch with bated breath as a textbook confidence trick that is executed unhurriedly and mercilessly. That's real call-up-the-author stuff.

And it is a dashing, action-walla book; the thrills and chills set-pieces are pulled off exquisitely. Pathak recreates familiar action scenes with an intense, snappy vigour. Reading them is like watching a toe-curling sequence out of a Manmohan Desai film [and I really have no higher compliment to bestow on any art, as anyone who knows how I feel about Amar Akbar Anthony can confirm]. Oh, yeah. Getaway cars! Jumping on trains! Robbing a salary van in broad daylight! I love the translation here - it never falters or grows awkward, and the English that it produces is perfectly readable anywhere in the Anglophone world, while remaining distinctly desi. Perhaps best of all for me, it makes me want to read Pathak in the original. I will. I'll stop off at the Wheeler and Co. next to the ticket counter at Churchgate next week and ask for one.

#21 Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido [re-read]

I've flogged this book so often that I have nothing new to add. To recap: I am always seduced by Trapido's gentle, self-mocking tone. She sends up a female poseur and a particularly female manner of disavowal even as she enters fully and joyfully into the spirit of posing and disavowing through her central character, the clever and timid Katherine Browne. In one of Trapido's later books, an undergraduate student writes a paper on Shakespeare's comedies in which she says, 'The Tragedies are Tragedies and the Comedies are Tragedies. The Comedies are a better sort of tragedy because they make us laugh and because the characters stay alive. Survival is admirable.' This is the spirit in which Katherine's character begins her story [in a charming, half-flippant, half-arrogant voice] and takes it forward. She does this among other things, by playing with a very old chestnut: the love triangle. It is also an odd bildungsroman; it meanders with Katherine as she picks her way through philosophy, love affairs, families and life at home and abroad, but it is intimately concerned with the fulfillment she finds with other people - ultimately with the lovable, irritating brother of the more famous Jack. Trapido writes heady, anti-naturalistic dialogue and a completely literary prose, but she does it lightly and sweetly. It sends everything up in a way that could make you almost miss the sadness. It's a comedy, alright.

paul smith on shakespeare

2010-03-04T19:15:00.003+05:00

Paul Smith, director of the British Council and Cultural Counsellor to the British Embassy in Cairo, was in Mumbai earlier this year to deliver the 12th annual Vasant J Sheth Memorial Lecture, an annual event to honour the memory of Vasant J. Sheth, founder of The Great Eastern Shipping Company. Smith's lecture was called Full Fathom Five: Shakespeare’s Old Seas and New Worlds. I asked him three questions via email about his subject.

For many readers, Shakespeare's most emphatic engagement with the ocean and the brave new worlds that lay across it comes in The Tempest. Could you tell us about a couple of other instances in his oeuvre - perhaps lesser-read - that we might hear about in your lecture?

You’re right to pick out The Tempest, resolutely a culmination of his life’s dramatic offering, and the play in which transition by sea is key to what the drama explores. And, yes, The Tempest is the Shakespeare play which is most conscious of the ‘newfoundlands’ across the oceans which beckoned a different future from the Mediterranean past. To the European, the Mediterranean was a sea encircled by human cultures and habitations. But the Atlantic beckoned of ‘a world elsewhere’, in accordance with the burgeoning human spirit. Other ‘last plays of Shakespeare – particularly Pericles and The Winter’s Tale – share The Tempest’s use of the sea as the locus of exploration and self-discovery and, indeed, of birth, death and redemption.

I shall also talk about the plays in which new life has to begin at the shoreline, particularly following the metaphorical calamity of shipwreck in, for example Twelfth Night or The Comedy of Errors. And we’ll touch on plays where war is fought across the waters –Antony and Cleopatra, say, or Troilus and Cressida - and where commerce, including the commerce of human relations - is determined by the sea’s implacability, most notably The Merchant of Venice.

Would you say Shakespeare's engagement with Europe's changing worldview affected the audiences of his own time - other writers or thinkers, perhaps?

Shakespeare’s period of writing coincided with Britain’s earliest mercantile adventurism – the disgraces of early colonialism were to peak in later decades. But there is a clear psychological and metaphysical sense of expansionism and unbounded limit as the Renaissance human spirit recognises its capacity to conceive and control greater territories of the mind and spirit as well as terra firma. Terra incognita begins to beckon and seduce where it was, to the Medieval mind, frighteningly out of bounds. The great dramatist of excessively expansionist vision and ambition is Shakespeare’s exact contemporary Marlowe –stretching the bounds of knowledge in Dr Faustus, of ‘infinite riches’ in The Jew of Malta and of land and imperial power in Tamburlaine. But, in every play of Shakespeare, the dominant pulse is the realisation that each drama is creating its own uniquely real new world.

Britain's maritime history is also, in one sense, its colonial history. How much of a sense of the momentuousness of what was to come do we get from Shakespeare?

It was all yet to come, but Shakespeare’s psychology clearly premeditated it. He is compelled by the means by which people exert control over each other – be it an Iago over Othello, his daughters over Lear, Shylock over Anthony and then Portia over Shylock. And his geographical vistas are wide. Shakespeare was a country boy from the centre of an island nation and we have no evidence whatsoever that he even saw the sea let alone crossed it. But the majority of his plays are set in distant lands and, in some plays – Anthony and Cleopatra for example – the boundaries of his play find synonymity with the boundaries of the known world. ‘All the world’ – the beckoning expanding world of renaissance Europe - really does become ‘a stage’ in the Shakespeare canon.

[A version of this appeared in Verve Magazine's January issue.]

on the jaipur literature festival 2010

2010-03-02T13:44:00.008+05:00

[I wrote this for the March issue of Verve Magazine, which is out now on stands. Please assure yourself of a copy, Mum. A direct consequence of this piece is that I have eschewed the first-person plural forever.]

Paper Trails

‘What’s that?’ we are asked when we inform a native of Jaipur of our primary reason to touch down in this storied city. ‘A literacy festival?’ We perish the thought. What does reading and writing have to do with education? At any rate, we have come to the Jaipur Literature Festival not in search of enlightenment, but satisfaction. We want drama. We want action. And we want it to come straight out of a book.

To the traditionalist, using a phrase like ‘The Greatest Literary Show On Earth’ to promote a literature festival may seem a little bit like saying ‘The Biggest Birthday Party On The Planet’ to describe Christmas. It infuses an appallingly cheerful vigour into something that ought to be the rarefied, quasi-spiritual experience of communing with great minds and ideas. Alas for the traditionalist, there is truth in advertising. The Jaipur Literature Festival is unapologetically, vividly, a show. Rumour has it that this was not always the case. Festival co-director William Dalrymple reminds us in his opening address of their major coup in 2006, when ‘we invited our first international guest, Hari Kunzru, who was passing through India on his way to visit his girlfriend in New Zealand.’ The festival organisers have always emphasised its unique charm as a space where readers can, free of cost and compunction, rub shoulders with the great and good of the writerly world. It becomes a sort of Disneyland for readers, inviting the literary tourists and the thrill-seekers who might hope to sit next to Salman Rushdie at a Kiran Desai reading, or steal the last gulab jamun ahead of Vikram Seth in the lunch line.

In fact, the appeal lies in its genteelly Woodstockian mood. It’s in the existence of a place where writers are treated like rock stars. ‘Vikram Chandra breathed on me!’ ‘Alexander McCall Smith autographed my book!’ ‘Hanif Kureishi was rude to me!’ Whether or not you think writers merit this sort of treatment, or whether the truly serious Ideal Reader is also capable of being a crazy fan, is not actually relevant in the context of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Those who have been here since its modest beginnings at a reading in Jaipur University may find it losing its quiet, homespun vibe (as indeed, more than one plaintive veteran was heard to say).

Its true triumph this year was its ability to remain fresh and free of stuffiness. This cannot be an easy task when your schedule is bursting at the seams with Nobel Laureates, Harvard professors, newspaper editors and celebrity polemicists – and that’s saving the presence of the novelists. This is part of the genius of the festival. The one-hour sessions, the glorious January weather, the informal but tightly-organised discussion areas; all of these are calculated to take one so far into the realm of ideas and no further. We have no statistical data on how many casual attendees ran away from the Diggi Palace, tempted by the Chance Pe Dance and Veer movie posters splashed across the entrance to the venue, but we were glued to our seats practically the whole time.

The festival’s opening, like the crystal ball of a mediocre fortune-teller, was lost in a haze of mist. The skies were clear and the nagaras were sounding in sunny Jaipur, but the festival’s major locus was Delhi, from where festival catalogues were being printed, audiences were being transported, and practically every speaker, Indian or international, was being offloaded – and which had been choked up by fog. Coming from Mumbai, where winter is something that happens to other people, we had travelled through the effects of the inclement North Indian winter and were already reeling from nights huddled under razaais and layers of woollen clothing when the news came that several of the speakers scheduled for Day One, including keynote speaker Girish Karnad, were at various stages in the process of arrival: some in a terminal at a Delhi airport, some in airplanes seeking a landing at a Delhi airport in vain, others stuck on the Delhi-Jaipur road, memorably described by Tunku Varadarajan as ‘your own personal Gulag’ in conversation with Anne Applebaum about her book, Gulag: A History. The festival, chugging along on time and re-organising sessions with a zest and creativity, turned up unexpected treats: the very first session on the front lawns was a hastily patched-up but delightful conversation between novelists Chandrahas Choudhury and Vikram Chandra, on the subject of Chandra’s opus Sacred Games. We like that Chandra’s self-consciously literary concerns have never come in the way of his central concern with the meat-and-potatoes of a good novel: his work has generally been a thoroughly satisfying confluence of idea and sentiment. As a speaker, he strives for the same effect, achieving clarity and perspective with a humourous, gently professorial air. Choudhury’s focus on the novel’s literary qualities just about balanced out the audience’s curiosity about the juicy bits of Chandra’s gangland research. We grew conscious of being in a local minority when Chandra illustrated one of his answers with a hypothetical love story ‘between Rakesh and Maria,’ and we were the only ones laughing in the audience (For those who don’t follow the adventures of the Mumbai police in their dailies, the city’s commissioner of police is named Rakesh Maria).

The fiction writers did not hold sway on the first day, though: that honour went to the poets and lyricists who held court in the eyeball-witheringly yellow and very pretty confines of the Durbar Hall, overflowing this year with schoolgirls in blazers and the flower of Indian publishing alike. An afternoon of Pavan Varma and Gulzar in conversation was followed closely by Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar waxing eloquent on the subject of the poet Kaifi Azmi and Shabana’s mother Shaukat Kaifi’s memoirs. On an audience perfectly capable of slipping back and forth between spoken English, Hindi and Urdu with aplomb, the effects were electrifying. It was a note that struck with abiding sweetness through the festival again and again. It threaded through the multiple panels at which Gulzar and Akhtar made their presence felt, either on stage or among the audience. It came most fully into its own at one of the standout evening performances of the week, a brilliant and moving tribute to the great Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the third day, anchored by the poet’s eloquent daughter, Salima Hashmi, and burnished by Akhtar’s warm, hilarious anecdote of making friends with his hero on one of the great man’s tours of Mumbai. To recount it in print would rob it of its sparkle – let us tell you only that there was ticketless travel, reckless alcoholic courage, and a deep conversation about the Urdu script involved.

Gulzar and Akhtar’s presence and thumping popular successes at the festival seemed to broaden its scope, but not merely in the poets’ capacity as Hindi cinema’s stalwarts (Rahul Bose represented the more glamorous fringes of the Bollywood-literary partnership fully enough). Their enduring influence on the way a Hindi-language nation thinks, speaks and perhaps dreams, represents live literature in a way that the purer, narrower channels of book publishing do not. This idea extended to many of the Indian-language panels on what is known, in festival parlance, as bhasha literature. With poetry, drama, protest writing, short stories, non-fiction and novels all finding representation in one way or the other on these polyglot, multidisciplinary panels, both the writing and its meta sprang to life.

The abundance contrasted with the more intensive English forums, where you could pick a broad scheme and follow its thread from panel to panel, sometimes through all five days of the festival. For those interested in political journalism alone, the festival offered practically a highlight reel through its five days: from the political biographer Kai Bird, to old Cairo hand Max Rodenbeck, to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and most recently in the news for his stellar narrative reportage from Gaza in The New Yorker – you could catch an unprecedented mingling of the star rosters of Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books and global newspapers of record, often on the same panel. The polemical thinker Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s unpublicised talk on doctrinaire Islam’s incompatibility with the modern world left audiences offended and thoughtful. Her own dogmas aside, we think there is a lesson for the liberal establishment in the fact that Hirsi Ali had to fly down in secret, stay at her hotel under an assumed name and had almost no English-language daily report her views without heavy censoring.

Neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson horrified us by turning out to be an incredibly charming and engaging speaker; we applaud the festival organisers for having the sense of humour to fly in an academic whose most famous work is an emphatic argument in favour of the positive aspects of the British Empire. (Ferguson’s talks at the festival largely confined themselves to some of the less explosive areas of his expertise, such as economics, which justly few people who come to attend a Literary Show would pretend to know anything about, and his home country Scotland, whose tradition of satirical humour rivals that of its near neighbour Ireland.) Perhaps the only other speaker to make an equal impression on the straight women present was young Ali Sethi, whose sprawling debut novel The Wish Maker, written in the finest subcontinental tradition of tragicomic, navel-gazing sprawl, did not prepare us for his eloquence, erudition, and one of the finest ghazal-singing voices (he presented a moving recital of some of Faiz’ most famous poems at the evening performance) we have heard of late.

Travel writing also received its fair share of the spotlight, with the presence of the sublimely funny Geoff Dyer, followed around everywhere by fans and journalists like the slacker-lit god he is. Dyer’s is an awesome intellect, but one that chooses an ironic simplicity over seriousness and complication when he is called into conversation. ‘I’m not very good at plot,’ he offered, as a reason for his books’ sublime preoccupation with place on a panel called ‘Visible Cities.’ ‘The only plot that occurs to me is boy-meets-girl.’ The enduring popularity of the theme was indicated by the overflowing numbers at the Baithak tent who came to chat with Lonely Planet’s Tony Wheeler. Who knew that India’s first psychedelic disco, The Fertilised Egg, was run in the basement of the Ram Bagh Palace in the happy haze of the late 1960s? Wheeler, who could very well have encountered it in his initial backpacking trips across the subcontinent, did not, but the information came from another quarter, as it did repeatedly through other sessions: it was offered by super-mod William Dalrymple, who kept conversations up throughout the fest with personalities ranging from Wheeler to the Tibetan poet, Tenzin Tsundue, to Steve Coll, to Alexander McCall Smith. Dalrymple’s assumption of the position of co-conversationalist, rather than mere questioner or moderator, was largely a boon to the audience. With the confidence of a television anchor (which he has been) and the focused curiosity of the historian (which he continues to be), he succeeded in drawing out his panellists as well as the audience, to foster some of the festival’s most delightful sessions. If there were festival-goers who might have preferred to hear other authors speak wholly uninterrupted by Dalrymple’s own wealth of anecdotes and opinions, we didn’t hear the murmurs.

Alas, murmurs abounded in other sessions where moderators were less successful in charming their listeners or their distinguished interviewees. Time and again we spoke with delegates and guests who felt that speakers’ potential was often inversely proportionate to their moderators’ ability to draw them out. Often this seemed to be a matter of circumstance, rather than capability: the witty, polished Rachel Holmes appeared to be operating in a vacuum as she attempted to carry the conversation on literary adaptation with three of the most accomplished and eagerly-awaited speakers at the festival: the novelists Hanif Kureishi and Roddy Doyle and director Stephen Frears. Doyle, who in his previous sessions established himself as perhaps the nicest writer alive – a kindly, ultra-hip high-school teacher to Chandra’s genial professor – recounted to us the story of Zanjeer, which he had watched on the flight over, and remarked on how miserable the story might have been had it come out of Ireland. Kureishi’s final session, a one-on-one with the writer Amitava Kumar, whose acquaintance with both the author and his works was extensive enough to warrant just the right mix of comfort and provocation, proved to be delightful – at least for those of us who were sitting far enough away to enjoy Kureishi’s magnificent grumpiness. At a festival where good humour and earnestness infected speakers from session to session (and quite rightly), Kureishi’s laconic, sarcastic public face put even the extraordinarily reverent audience on the back foot. We at Verve celebrate the corrosiveness of bad temper in small doses: to be fair, our and Kureishi’s darkest doubts about his appearance in a Literary Show were realised when an elderly gent in the audience stood up to ask him, in all seriousness, if he had been circumcised. ‘No one’s been this interested in my genitals in a long time,’ said Kureishi after a pause during which his cast-iron frown almost – for a second – wavered into a smile. ‘What a country.’

But the Great Moderator Question is ultimately a circumstantial one, and has no serious implications for the festival’s future. A more pernicious tendency on the schedule this year was the urge, like an anxious tourist, to over-pack: the full-to-bursting, shifting rosters of speakers for high-visibility sessions. A potential cracker of a debate on the Internet and books, filmed for TV and moderated by Barkha Dutt, was packed with big names, from Gulzar to Tina Brown, and ended up achieving nothing. In spite of the brilliance of individual speakers like Zubaan Books publisher Urvashi Butalia and moderator Shoma Chaudhury, a panel on publishing in the next decade paddled in the shallows and gave up before it could ever tread water. These are exciting, complex issues; at a festival where even potentially inflammatory texts were discussed with poise and aplomb, they deserved better.

We hope to see future editions of the festival cave in less to the over-packing urge: if there’s one thing Jaipur no longer needs, after all, it is gimmicks to capture an audience. Practically the whole world seems to be watching, certainly the whole country. If many of them were looking just for a peek into the swinging Tina Brown dinner do (‘Darling, Delhi was empty on the evening of Tina’s party,’ reports a friend) – well, who doesn’t love a good soirée after all that emotional wrangling about Naxalism over tea? On a more serious note, if there is a part of Jaipur’s own population that isn’t quite sure what all the fuss about a ‘literacy festival’ is, there is also a substantial and growing number for whom the festival has transformed the city calendar. As during a gripping Test match, the weekend and evening sessions were packed with the local gentry. This is excellent. In spite of its milling with exceptionally diverse audiences, in some of whose hands guidebooks vie with the new Andrew O’Hagan, the festival actively resists becoming a tourist attraction in a city filled with tourist attractions. For Jaipur’s increasingly ‘glocal’ identity, one that seeks to be as fulfilling for its citizens as it is for visitors, there could hardly be a brighter indicator. For readers and writers and, yes, drama-seekers in the field of Indian publishing, the future looked as rosy as the Old City.

cape to victory

2010-03-01T13:31:00.001+05:00

Written after a whirlwind pro-trip to South Africa. This appears in Verve Magazine's March 2010 issue.

Cape Town has its meditative aspects. You can walk through its fabulous botanical gardens virtually undisturbed by the sound of human voices. You can hike up Signal Hill talking quietly of J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. You can spend hours savouring your kingklip à la mode as you linger over a bottle or six of superb South African wine. It makes it almost difficult to imagine that over the summer, it's going to feel like the fist of a crazy god will smash figuratively through this rarefied air and unleash the dogs of what Orwell called 'war minus the shooting.' It's the football World Cup, and it's going to get Cape Town's hair down and hips swinging – something, once you get past the Coetzee and the Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir 2001, that it is in fact exceedingly good at doing.

We cricket fans are a step ahead of the rest of the world in some respects. We already know what it feels like to follow the last heart-stopping minutes of a game as the moon rises over Johannesburg. We've cried as our side crumbles against the backdrop of the timeless cloudbank over Table Mountain. We've kept our fingers crossed as the silvery, changeable light of a South African winter plays over the faces of our boys in the middle.

Apply that, if you will, to a different sport, and something an order of magnitude larger. Standing at the edge of the town square in Cape Town on a bright, bracing winter's morning with your back to the Castle of Good Hope, it's easy to look across the stately cobbled expanse in front of you and imagine what it will be like in June and July 2010. The heritage lampposts will be requisitioned as support beams; the facades of establishments great and good that hem the square in on three sides will be all but hidden by rows of projector panels. The quiet hum of business district traffic will be an unheard buzz under the songs and shouts and tears imploding through it with the force of a million small hurricanes. It will accommodate an impossible number of human beings, certainly more than the cantonments of occupying forces ever dreamt it would, when it served as a drilling square for the Dutch and then the British armies. South Africa will be playing host to the World Cup in those chilly winter months (even the biggest summer tournament on the planet can't escape the vagaries of the hemispheric calendar reversal). What dreams may come, what drama unfold, no one knows, except this: that it will be big and emotional and diverse. Football always is.

And so, you learn, is South Africa. Touch down in Cape Town and you find yourself overwhelmed at every step. If it isn’t the shimmering crescent of Table Bay with its pure shoreline and clear waters, it’s the sight of Table Mountain, that jagged, ancient behemoth of a rock around which this elegant city orients itself. Walk down to the picturesque V&A Waterfront from your elegant hotel – the exquisite Table Bay hotel still has a plaque over its sea-facing entrance that announces reserved right of entry to those inappropriately dressed – and find a crowd of tony malls and cafés perched on the edge of a decidedly commercial waterfront. Music and colour call to you from every corner. And everywhere there are layers of history written into earth and stone. Such beauty is not for the faint of heart. Like Paolo Rossi's hat-trick against Brazil in 1980, you can't quite believe your eyes. Like the art of a classic Number Ten, the more you know about it, the more it awes and moves you.

Cape Town is one of the major venues for the World Cup – the shimmering new Green Park Stadium will be a semi-final venue, second only to Jo'burg, which hosts the final – but edges out other cities in the country with sheer charm. The greenery and Indian-influenced vibrancy of Durban, the pumped-up metropolitan whirl of Jo'burg, the small and quiet stateliness of Port Elizabeth notwithstanding, you inevitably circle back to Cape Town as the epitome of the urban experience in southern Africa, perhaps because South Africa's modern history really did begin here.

The thread of familiarity that runs through most of the world’s colonial cities is evident in the graceful European architecture of the city’s business and political districts. The city centre itself occupies the sliver of reclaimed land between the mountain and Table Bay – the fort, you discover, was built on what was originally the coastline. Cape Town's colonial history began in 1652, as a trading outpost of the Dutch East India Company. With maritime trade came Dutch settlers and Huguenots fleeing persecution in Catholic France, indentured labour from Madagascar and Javanese slaves from the Dutch colonies in Indonesia who originated the Cape Malay and Cape Coloured cultures that grew out of here. Indian slaves and settlers, soon to be part of the mix of peoples who now give the Rainbow Nation its moniker, stirred in their own contributions into the melting pot that Cape Town now represents. It stands, today as always, as South Africa's First City of culture and a sort of hyper-microcosm of the whirlwind of historic and cultural change that have gone into the making of modern South Africa.

It's evident in everything Capetonians do. Walk into any artefact or design store and you will be confronted not just with masks and fake assegai, the usual samples of the 'African souvenir' but with a truly funky DIY aesthetic that celebrates the continent's spirit of innovation. Whether it's working radios made out of wire and Coke cans, or accessories that do something unique with traditional African motifs, originality is everywhere – and it's of the first order of cool. One ubiquitous style motif, you’ll notice, is the face of US President Obama, present in painting, decals, prints and sketches on every design must-have. (“But we want a scarf with Nelson Mandela on it!” we exclaim, shallow as puddles. “Also a bag, a t-shirt and possibly a set of kerchiefs?” We’re told gently that our hero’s face is no longer free to copy, since he is retired, while Obama’s public office makes his image fair game for playful reproduction. We love it.) Step out of any of the exciting stores around Green Market Street into the bylanes of street bazaars where you can haggle for anything from elephant hair bracelets to exquisite malachite jewellery. It applies to food, too. The working-class Cape Malay cooking that was once called 'South Africa's home food,' with its experimental mix of Eastern spices on Western bases, is now haute cuisine the world over, and where better to sample koeksisters (a sort of pastrified gulab jamun) and Cape Malay biriyani than the bright Bo-Kaap district, the traditional heart of Cape Malay culture?

As in India, diversity is as much a political issue as a cultural one. South Africa achieves it in spades, which is one of the reason it delights travellers looking to experience an authentic, living history. From the silent reminders of the empty roads above District Six, to the statue of Cecil Rhodes outside Groote Schuur - Rhodes' grand residence that now serves as a pied-à-terre for South Africa's head of state - it's worthwhile to stop and think about the legacy of pain and resistance – one that came full circle from Gandhi to Mandela in the late twentieth century. Cape Town, always vital to military and mercantile empires, was once the pivot of the world, as important psychologically as it is strategically. While the British and the Boers fought each other all those years ago, their colonisation wreaked havoc on the African nations whose land they came to occupy, and the Castle of Good Hope today flies six flags on its battlements, as a reminder of each of the forces who governed South Africa through its history, including the current flag of the Republic.

It is a flag you will see flying high and proud through the country as the world tunes in this summer (or winter). Its colours are blazoned across the décor of Johannesburg's airport, touched up a couple of years ago in Cup-anticipation. Across the country, you will see it on cars, newspapers, touristy knick-knacks, and jerseys. At its best, sport makes nationalism fun, and South Africans, by and large, make truly excellent sports fans. Their ability to churn out consistently talented and lovable sportspersons (we give you two words: Jonty. Rhodes.) is matched by their endless enthusiasm for games people play. It will be hard not to share it even if you can't typically tell a football from a golf ball. And if you really aren't an enthusiast, coming to South Africa might help you reconsider. The epic sexiness of those baggy green rugby jerseys – we make no mention of the torsos filling them – must be seen to be believed.

The World Cup is a chance for travellers and football fans alike to see South Africa at large, and Cape Town in particular, at its finest. Ever since the world football federation (FIFA) drew the Rainbow Nation’s bid to host the big daddy of all sporting events – sorry, International Olympic Committee, we can but report the truth – the world has been anxious to get a look in at the newest face of a very old country. The roads will be wider, the spirits higher. World Cups always throw up the defining images of their era, and the new decade will truly begin at South Africa’s tournament this winter (or summer). Hearts will stop, tears will fall, and fingers will be crossed as never before. In Cape Town’s main square on those magical evenings, the grander emotions will be on full display against the very grandest of backdrops. Feel it. It will be South Africa at its most infectious.

BOX:
VERVE'S TOP FIVE
A few of our favourite Capetonian things

Shine Shine: Tracy Rushmere's airy studio in Bo Kaap houses the products of her hip, contemporary take of African commemorative cloths. Out of her definitive aesthetic come bags, cushion covers, t-shirts and more. If you buy one thing in Cape Town, we suggest it comes from Shine Shine. (shineshine.co.za)
African Image: A collection of authentic African art and artefacts from all over Africa. Find anything from Zulu beadwork, Ashanti cloths and Baule figures, as well as edgy, urban street-craft and postmodern design. (african-image.co.za)
Monkeybiz: A non-profit that co-ordinates the production of exquisite traditional beadwork from some of South Africa's most underprivileged women, Monkeybiz sells unique, one-off products made of beads: dolls, magnets, animal figurines and more. (monkeybiz.co.za)
Afro Tea: The Afro brand is almost hypnotically cool, and their antioxidant loose-leaf teas in fabulous blends drive us crazy. If we weren't addicted to their Cape Town blend, we'd still recommend anything by Afro for the amazingly pretty packaging. Afro also do coffee. Puzzlingly, the only Afro Café we can find is in Salzburg, Austria. (afrocoffee.com)
Chocolats Marionnettes: Handmade artisan chocolate in uniquely African flavours. Dark Karoo Mint and Limpopo Lime. Milk Cape Malay Spice. Dark Red Hot Chilli. Pink Peppercorn. White Egoli Flake. Reeling yet? Eat it, believe it. (chocolatsmarionnettes.co.za)

pop, six, squish, uhuh.

2010-03-01T12:34:00.004+05:00

#19 Imperium, Robert Harris

Nice. An slick, legal-thriller-paced novel about the early career of Cicero, told through the eyes of his secretary, Tiro [whose invention of Latin shorthand not only stands him in good stead historically, but also forms an important plot point]. Republican realpolitik is the true hero of this book. There isn't a page without a a speech, a conspiracy, horse-trading, the threat of a political emergency - totally OhNoTheyDidnt! (Ancient Rome). The pages seethe with the characters and circumstances of those obscure fellows: Julius Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Catilina and others. The drippy thing is that Harris does more justice to the sketches of these supporting characters than he does to his top man Cicero. I'm afraid the writing stands at such a distance from insight or speculation about the character of Cicero that at times it seems pointless to read bits of his thrilling speeches in a novel when we could very well have taken a hit off that pipe by -- reading a book of his thrilling speeches. We end up knowing everything about his Wikipedia article and nothing about his LiveJournal, so to speak.

The saving grace is that Wikipedia articles involving Cicero are generally highly entertaining, since the man could talk a bit. Even so, fair warning: even Wikipedia historians will find the infodump in the first 50 pages tiring ["Of the six hundred men who then constituted the senate, only eight could be elected praetor - to preside over the courts - and only two of these could go on to achieve the supreme imperium of the consulship." Groan. Even Ridley Scott didn't do that]. So I don't know how primary text fans [of whom I am not one] will stand it. But let this not deter you -- it is still an engaging read, because it picks up steam quite admirably. Harris is a veritable artist of the gripping political intrigue. I'm thoroughly impressed with his skill at sustaining reader interest in events and outcomes that were spoilered for us two thousand years ago. In spite of its lack of psychological depth the book actually does a fabulous job sustaining an internal rhythm, with excitement building around Cicero's cases, his elections, and the changes in his own political positions. Most writers would despair of bringing it all together to fit so well. A-grade light reading, all in all. I will definitely be reading the recently-released Conspirata if I get a chance and a free day.

roberto saviano: gomorrah

2010-02-27T16:11:00.006+05:00

#18 Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano, trans. Virginia Jewiss

I read stellar reviews of Gomorrah in the papers over and over again for two years, so I jumped at the chance to read it when it popped up. It took me almost three weeks to finish this 300-page book. I stopped every two chapters to go read another book. Why was it so hard? Whatever Gomorrah is, it's not news. Power stinks. Alternate power structures shadow everything that seems to represent truth and reality. Naples and Campania are run by crooks. Like everywhere else in the world, right? Maybe Saviano's reviewers in Anglo-American newspapers are so shocked by this book because they are not hardwired to think like that?

But as you read this hypnotic, reckless book, you realise that it is not a conspiratorial thesis. It's voice is neither that of paranoia nor of a persecution complex. It is highly specific to its time and place. Gangs mean different things to different societies. In many developed countries they are divorced from the mainstream public consciousness by time [gangs = fedora-wearing tax-evading Depression-era thugs] or race and class [gangs = pimping Soviet mobsters, gangs = black and brown drug pushers working in inner cities]. In Naples and Campania, no such divide exists. There is no parallel economy in Saviano's writing, no underbelly, no layer of society protected from the effects of the Camorra. The line between an illusion of normalcy and reality is non-existent. Crime is judged by our intangible notions of ethics, but in the freest-of-free markets where the Camorra operates, there is perfect elasticity - there are no ethics, only actions. Quite unlike the rigid hierarchy of the Cosa Nostra or other mythologised southern Italian criminal systems, the Camorra's existence hinges purely on its self-sustaining economic cycles. Murder [even murder committed to make a statement, and Saviano's chapter on the Secondigliano War is full of shocking examples] is an economic move; bosses going into prison is only a way for the economy to cleanse itself of old blood and let the new entrepreneurs rise to the top. The cycles continue.

Each chapter in Gomorrah deals with a specific aspect of the economic landscape here: from the collaboration with the Chinese mafia flooding Western Europe's markets with goods, to the couture sweatshops, to the role of women in the system, to Camorra control over drugs, construction and waste disposal. The style is high-gonzo - unflinching, incredibly visual and rich with analogy [but winningly delinked from the authorial personality. I hate that self-aggrandising shit nine times out of ten]. Throughout the text, literary artifice becomes the revealer - power can only be spoken of in terms of what it can be compared to.

The book's moving force is sheer, futile rage. It provokes both pity and terror, but the effects are anti-cathartic. Aristotle doesn't live here. Neither is this the Napoli of Maradona, a simple case of one poor, neglected part of a rich country generating its own mythos, its own power. That sort of creative order doesn't exist in the Campania of this book. Priests who protest against the Camorra are gunned down in their churches; women testifying in a murder case find themselves alienated and rejected by society; teenage girls who have nothing to do with the gangs die simply because they were in the way of a bullet, without the question of justice ever entering the picture. All of these would ordinarily be some sort of markers in the opposition between right and wrong, but in Gomorrah they are only illustrative of how irrelevant they are to the mechanisms of the power structure. Early on in the book Saviano describes going to the funeral of a 15 year old Camorrista [yes, that's fifteen years old], and reports the priest as saying, "Over here, the only thing you learn is how to die."

What sort of indictment is this against a society? Would it stand up in court? Would it even stand up as journalistic truth? Gomorrah was sold as fiction in its first printing in Italy, but marked as non-fiction to sell abroad. It evokes my biggest fear about about the Internet-driven inclination to narrative journalism and its many charms: how much of it is telling you a figurative truth? How much data is it replacing or representing anecdotally? It is easy to remember what a report may be leaving out [The Economist never seems to realise this], but much more difficult to assess what a story is not telling you. The stories of Gomorrah are chaotic, bereft of solutions, wholly caught up in the operations of the System. That is the book's explicit point. But in many reactions I have read that there is a whole system in place in Campania through which ordinary people fight the Camorra with ordinary weapons - cops, courts, civic administration. Some people say that Saviano's story has been receiving disproportionate attention [Napoli's police chief even recommended against increasing his security - Saviano has been living with armed escorts, in exile, ever since the book became a huge success]. Would a Proper Journalist write this book? But what Proper Journalist could have written this book? And in Saviano's favour, he never claims that Gomorrah is anything more than a personal testimonial, nor does he shirk his responsibility as a witness.

...The proofs are not concealed in some flash drive buried underground. I don't have compromising videos hidden in a garage in some inaccessible mountain village. Nor do I possess copies of secret service documents. The proofs are irrefutable because they are partial, recorded with my eyes, recounted with words, and tempered with emotions that have echoed off wood and iron. I see, hear, look, talk and in this way I testify, an ugly word that can still be useful when it whispers "It's not true," in the ear of those who listen to the rhyming lullabies of power. The truth is partial; after all, if it could be reduced to an objective formula, it would be chemistry. I know and I can prove it. And so I tell.

That's a very strange place for a story to occupy. But it does its job. It is a book that demands that its readers be aware of its context. It is not bystander journalism, not goal-oriented investigation and not social history. It can neither implicate, nor absolve you as a reader. There are no pay-offs. It would never have made a Rolling Stone cover story or a Hollywood movie. And in spite of its rootedness, it is the sort of book that could be written in many other cities. If you can remember that, and if you can stand that, then you should absolutely read it.

[And trigger warnings for extraordinary violence. I have a fairly strong stomach for on-page bloodshed, but this gave me nightmares.]

mohammed hanif: a case of exploding mangoes

2010-02-24T11:24:00.006+05:00

#17 A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif

What broke my heart about this book? Was it the plot, that starts out in awesome break-neck, whip-lash, split-screen fashion and then starts to freeze up in the odd uncomfortable position near the end? Was it the occasional burst of my least favourite type of writing in this world, magical realism, spurting now and then across a page of perfectly adequate piece of prose? Was it the niggling inconsistency in tying up loose ends?

Hell no. All that I can handle. But I can't handle how one day, I am in the middle of a nice life with a nice job and an issue of Tehelka to read on the train, when suddenly I start to care about Under Officer Ali Shigri and his Oedipal obsession with his dead father and the military dictator who may have had Daddy killed. When I say 'suddenly,' I mean somewhere halfway down the first page. Books. They can really kill you sometimes.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes runs along two parallel tracks. In the last days of his life, General Zia-ul-Haq, who wants to be remembered as a good Muslim and a great ruler, is suffering from increasing paranoia. His readings of the Quran are warning him of terrible tragedy ahead. In this great country of Pakistan that he has rescued from a bunch of whiskey-swilling cravat-wearing sybarites through his military coup, people are conspiring to murder him. Somewhere. Possibly everywhere. In the other corner, we have a sturm und drang show from Ali Shigri at the Air Force academy. Ali is young, intense and perpetually bitter. His scramble down the rabbit hole begins when he reaches out to wake up his roommate and best friend Obaid one morning and finds that 'Baby O' isn't there.

General Zia is trying frantically to shape his political legacy into the Cold-War-ending, Nobel Peace Prize-winning piece of history he knows it is. Ali is trying to survive the battle with a military establishment punishing him for a crime that he hasn't committed - and which Obaid has disappeared trying to protect him from. So what is Ali doing in the TV footage of General Zia's final moments, captured on camera just before Zia ascends the plane that will blow up in mid-air four minutes off the ground, killing him and everyone on board? This is what the elaborate plot of Mangoes is about.

Hanif pulls out all the stops as a storyteller. In this compact 350-page novel he constructs a full-masala plot, throws in a dozen sideshows (not all of which tie back in to the main narrative one hundred percent neatly), remakes real-life characters in an angry, ugly comedy, and creates a handful of complex, layered original characters who somehow manage to hit all the piteously familiar sweet spots of fiction (a dude with a dead father, come on) and make them all work excellently. Some of it ~~teeters on the edge of~~ is outright melodrama - there's an extended sequence in prison that is caught somewhere between Dumas and Bollywood - and it is absolutely absorbing if you like that kind of thing. I do. I laughed and I cried through the book. The women on the train thought I was mad because I kept putting my face into it and guffawing. Or shutting it and going 'Oh, Obaid.'

Hanif's style is less miniatures in ivory than hammer-on-nail, which I like; it keeps the book rumbling on in a dry, busy voice. It's not self-consciously literary (the magical realism is easily forgivable) and manages to evoke the perfectly accurate but ineffably awkward rhythms of subcontinental English very well indeed. The Zia sections are great satire; Hanif's Zia is a more raw, rough-cut version of the dictators in Louis de Bernieres' novels. But I like Ali best. Zia's character may loom large over the novel, but Ali's arc, smaller in scope (he's not ruling Pakistan, after all), is inscribed much wider.

Ali is a boy trying desperately hard to be funny - and he succeeds. He brings with him a half-deadpan, half-slapstick approach to the awfulness of military life, a deep, delicate friendship with Obaid, and the memories of Colonel Shigri hanging from the ceiling fan by his own bedsheet. All these preoccupations are potentially deeply annoying, but Ali is not one of life's bullshitters. Ali lives -- and I can't tell you whether that's a spoiler, or a character review. It was this, my friends, which broke my heart.

arundhati roy: listening to grasshoppers

2010-02-20T09:58:00.001+05:00

#16 Listening to Grasshoppers: Fieldnotes on Democracy, Arundhati Roy

This book is a collection of Roy's essays and sketches, written at various crisis points in India's public life over the last decade. (Regular readers of Outlook Magazine will be familiar with most of its contents.) Roy's style blends some testimony with some reportage, but her primary literary position is that of a polemicist, not a journalist. The title of the book is taken from its longest and I think its most philosophically representative piece, a talk Roy delivered in Istanbul in January 2008, on the first anniversary of the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. In this, she traces the world's history of linking genocide with progress in a freewheeling lecture that touches on the historic - race genocide in North America, Nazi camps in Europe - and elides it with the contemporary, specifically with India, and particularly in relation to the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. This will probably make a lot of people unhappy, starting with political moderates in India and going all the way up to those students of the Holocaust who view it as a unique and ahistorical event. But Roy has a way of upsetting even liberals who are ranged on her side of the field. Her writing is a notable departure from the way liberals in India communicate with each other, at least in between magazine covers. We hate the thought that someone might be talking down to us without first establishing their appropriate authority to do so. Roy's style regularly stands out in the corpus of resistance writing as an exclamation mark on a page where the other punctuations are commas.

Since this does not invalidate her opinions, sadly for the legion of anti-Roy trolls on the Internet and prime-time TV news, let me try and stick to my mandate, which is to describe my experience of the book. As I said, I think the titular essay is central to the collection in more ways than one, and pulls together almost all the ideas contained by the more time-bound 'feral howls' [Roy's words] that Roy produced for magazines on several devastating occasions: the carnage in Gujarat, the dubious investigative and judicial processes that surrounded the state's prosecution of Mohammed Afzal for the Parliament attacks in 2001, and the Mumbai attacks in 2008. While the decision not to 'update' any of this writing leads to a substantial overlap between pieces - readers who've never come across Roy before may find themselves very thoroughly acquainted with her talking points before the third essay is out - I think it will stand as a good record of Roy's decade in opinion writing, successful in its shocking immediacy and the consistency of her commitment to the egg and not the wall. In some cases, the atmosphere in which her criticisms were delivered was far less comfortable than it may seem to us now, and she has written, argued, harangued and - yes - shrieked at volumes that not many people with quite such carrying voices did.

However, I don't enjoy the self-conscious juvenility and the handwaving that marks her style. Catastrophes occur in 'our wonderful democracy'; an observation about the Hindutva characterisation of Muslims as 'outsiders' contrasts it with the government's signing of development aid contracts with Britain, 'a government that colonized us for centuries.' This is bad rhetoric and logic. The Afzal piece is completely successful in transmitting Roy's concern for and horror at the way the Delhi Police and courts handled the trial of the main suspects in the Parliament bombing, but framed as it is in the language of conspiracy theory and secondary-source reportage, it's also confusing about what form it aims to be judged by. There is a satirical sketch written on the even of Bush Jr's visit to India that imagines a speech he might make, written in 'voice,' peppered with "Innia"s and "jus' kiddin'"s. Her refusal to take a solutional approach anywhere in her essays (apart from Azad Kashmir) severely limits her and our capacity to expand on her criticism. All of this throws regularly me out of her narrative.

(I freely admit that this probably means that my inner self is a morally comatose real-estate developer with a side-business in arms-dealing waiting to break out.)

So I guess you could say that in spite of my profound agreement with the spirit of this book, I am not its ideal reader. Since Roy is not India's only vocal critic of the state, even if some newspapers abroad seem to think so, and since I read Outlook regularly, why did I read this book? Frankly, because of Penguin's deliberate attempt to mislead readers about its subject - in fact, this ought to be an object lesson to editors and publicists on how not to characterise a political anthology. Listening to Grasshoppers is produced to look like a meditation on democracy. The back cover text reads:

Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race?

Underneath the blurbiness, this is a very good question. Is there a political system with the potential to be more just and less prone to breakdown than democracy? There is almost nothing in this book that even approaches this practically, much less philosophically. Roy's main arguments are about the abuse of state machinery in India, and about the failures of nationalism. But the faults of the state are distinct from the faults of democracy - which is why Roy herself repeatedly uses the word 'fascism' to describe institutionalised oppression. If there's anything evident in her essays, it's that the ideal has not failed its people and its institutions: it's the other way around.

maria misra: vishnu's crowded temple

2010-02-19T13:57:00.007+05:00

#15 Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India After The Great Rebellion, Maria Misra

[Caveat before I start: I'm a very casual reader of history.]

The faux-exoticist title is justified on the first page: Misra opens the book with a short account of the Guruvayur temple in Kerala (incidentally, my family's hands-down bestest and most favourite ever place of worship bar none) and the struggle over making it open to lower-caste Hindus in the years before and after 1947. The one-step-forward, two-steps-back process of this achievement, Misra suggests, is illustrative of the entire process of India constructing its modernity (which Misra has to make clear for her largely non-Indian audience). The stated goal of this book is to trace India's self-construction of its modernity through the years after the Mutiny. This project is divided into three interlinked parts - the heyday of late 19th-century colonialism, the Congress-led change in India's image leading up to 1947, and the country's successes and failures in negotiating modernity, both in relation to its past and to the global present, in the years after independence.

So I kind of forgot all about this underlying thesis because Misra also does, for long stretches of the book: she just likes to tell the stories, and she's good at that. She goes full throttle through her first two excellent chapters on British imperialists and their creepy racist obsession with royalty and the caste system, and their interference in these structures to rigidify and oppress an originally more fluid society. I'm always amazed that the government didn't cram all this into our history books in school - Misra retells a lot of stuff Indian kids learn at a young age, but she gives them a life and depth that the state-board texts don't really provide. Of course, this is nothing compared to what they will hide from you about the beginnings of the nationalist movements. The Maharashtra Board will tell you that the public celebrations of Ganpati were started by Tilak in the interests of Indian nationalism and self-image. But it can't admit that to do this, at least in Bombay, he crushed the public celebrations of a festival that already had a long tradition of multi-faith celebration and subversive native pride: Muharram.

Misra puts all this together in a layered, dense narrative. She avoids cultural history for the most part, unless it ties in directly with her exploration of the political process. This is probably a good thing - two of the weakest bits in the book are her (short) digressions on British-era cricket and Sholay. Mercifully, she plays to what I thought was her main strength in the middle chapters: political biography. There is Gandhi, whom Misra plainly finds a little distasteful, but whose work and philosophies she assesses scrupulously. There is Nehru, whom Misra obviously thinks is the bee's knees*, but whose failures she reports without flinching. The only jarring note in her superb chapter on the Nehru years (called 'The Last Viceroy') is her concluding paragraph, in which she writes that Nehru, although he is now popularly seen as a tragic hero with a fatal flaw - excessive idealism - he was really a fighter; just one who was betrayed by the system he hoped would support him. This is a pretty self-defeating argument - and let's not forget how many people (Rajagopalachari and Ambedkar, among others) legitimately felt let down by him. My grandfather and I were talking about him the other day, and he said what I have heard from many people who lived through the early years of Independence - that Nehru was a great man, and his one fault was that he refused to be a dictator. Misra's saving grace from that puzzling final contention of hers is that she obviously disagrees.

The third person, of course, is Indira Gandhi. Here Misra gives up some of the authority that characterises her analyses of Gandhi and Nehru and prefers a more dispassionate, declarative tone. Her view of the Emergency is by and large that of the commentator who said that it was a failure of a dictatorship, that its opponents failed to overthrow (Contentious, I know). On the other hand, her criticism of Operation Blue Star and Sanjay Gandhi is scathing, and her assessment of Rajiv is unsentimental and brusque. Then she spends about half a page on the '84 riots. It escapes me why Misra, throughout the later portions of the book, chooses to spend so little time on what has been one of the defining conditions of urban India and its own grappling with modernity: institutionalised political violence in the form of riots. She sees them as part of the pathologies of the State, effects of its cultural process. But they are also the causes in some important ways.

LALALA OMG TALKING A LOT. Quickly, two other things about the book I liked: 1) her potted history of the facts, opinions, benefits and fallouts of liberalisation, and 2) her frequent running comparisons of how South India has developed political and social modernity differently from the North - in fact, I wish there had been more of this in the book. I also have two major quibbles. The first is objective: my edition of the book (a yellow-coloured paperback that I can't find an online link to right now) is riddled with elementary editorial errors. No one should let stuff like 'Champaram' for Champaran or 'Lakshmi' for 'Lakshman' pass by, and I hope other editions are better proofed.

My second major quibble is a bit of Hollywood criticism*. It is her general indifference to challenging the popular status quo (I'm less sure about the academic one). Why not talk about subaltern voices? Why not tackle how the lives of women or children have changed through the years? Why not examine the changing dynamic and rhetoric surrounding the relationship of urban and rural India? I understand that it may not be in the scope of Misra's project to challenge a mainstream consensus: we may at least generally agree that independent India's expectations of modernity have been shaped by the objects of her focus on this book. She aims for balance as well as decisiveness, accessibility as well as depth. I will stick my neck out on her behalf, and say that she writes as fairly as the somewhat self-selecting inclinations of her thesis allow her to do. This book definitely isn't a people's history; but I think it can justifiably argue that it tells a nation's history.

* - You're never liberal enough for everyone.

guha on verrier elwin

2010-02-12T14:01:00.004+05:00

Wrote in detail, so only one book in this post.

#14 Savaging the Civilised, Ramachandra Guha

I have wanted to read this book for ages in spite of the fact that I knew almost nothing about Verrier Elwin until I finally cracked it open. I was dimly aware that he had loomed large over the early years of the Anthropological Survey of India and the government's tribal policies, and that he was some sort of English eccentric who'd decided to take off and live in the jungles of the Central Provinces with the adivasis, when the rest of his compatriots on the subcontinent were oppressing us brown people and falling in love with Jawaharlal Nehru.

This much is true. Verrier Elwin was one of those chaps who went native quite thoroughly - much like white men have been known to do throughout the modern history of European empire. But he was not an explorer, or an adventurer, or even an artist like Paul Gauguin [someone Elwin once deplored as the primary reason for the Western world's phony fascination with 'the primitive' and 'the elemental']. He was a lapsed missionary turned Gandhian freedom fighter, turned social worker, turned hedonist, intellectual and anthropologist; someone who dedicated his life to documenting and chronicling the culture of several Indian tribes, promoting their welfare throughout a nation that seemed to have alternately no clear idea, or several bad ones, about how best to integrate the First Peoples of the subcontinent into the new, independent India.

...skeevy, right? An Oxonian priest travels down to the Raj to bring the love of Christ into the hearts of heathen natives and suddenly chucks it up for wine, women and song in a tribal ghetto. Spontaneous blech from post-colonialists ensues. But Guha writes a supple and beautifully readable biography that recasts the appearance of Elwin's orientalism in subtler lights. It becomes a scrupulous history of some of the cultural transactions that underscored the end [as they did the very beginning] of the British Raj. Elwin's love for India is the love of an enthusiast. He is also, in Guha's biography, a man given over to transforming the evils of Empire - and the majoritarianism of the nationalist project - into something that would benefit the people with whom he made his home, and whom he was committed to serving.

It is a story of multiple transformations, and Guha controls that narrative extremely well. He builds an especially vivid background for the early chapters of Elwin's life in India, when Elwin rebelled against the English religio-imperialist mandate [in itself a fascinating and nuanced thing, since Christian missionaries and their supporters back home were by no means all on board with the un-Christian exploitation that was the Raj's raison d'etre]. He became first a disciple and a foot soldier of Gandhi, and then a private sceptic of Gandhi's own hyper-religious agenda. Already ensconced among the Gond people in present-day Chattisgarh, his missionary hut became a secular centre for education and healthcare, and his own interests turned to the lives and culture of the Gonds and their neighbours, the Baigas, about whom he wrote several books, and among whom he married. His work took him further afield over the years: through Orissa and then, to his great delight, to the North-East Frontier Agency [present-day Arunachal Pradesh].

As a public intellectual with tremendous clout both in England and in India, he advocated fiercely at first for protecting tribal culture, arguing that there was no 'civilisation' that could truly offer tribal people a social order that would even integrate, if not outright destroy, their own ways of life with those of the urbanising world. This earned him many enemies among sociologists who disapproved both of his methods and of his perceived commitment to hobbling the notion of a united, unilaterally forward-focused India; but it also won him friends in high places. It is amazing today to read of the philanthropic endowments for Elwin's cause from men like JRD Tata, who consolidated the corporation that is currently, among others, closing in fast on the resources of tribal land in central India. Elwin's views were moderated over the years, partly because of the necessity of staying on the right side of the Indian government, but his studies influenced the upper-est echelons of New Delhi - Nehru looked on him as a friend and an advisor, and his work with government agencies and the Anthropological Survey of India, Guha demonstrates, set benchmarks for the administration and understanding of tribal areas.

This book is not an unproblematic read. It is one thing to disengage from orthodoxy for its knee-jerk characterisation of Elwin as a white man playing at being Indian. It's quite another to ignore the question of how Elwin's trailblazing work and his wide circle of influence was even possible; Guha is certainly aware of the forces at work there, but touches on the symptoms without ever acknowledging the system. In other words, Guha scuppers tender pinko expectations as always. [The things we put up with.] But he doesn't let his fondness for Elwin get in the way of thorough - although never sensationalist - reportage, and his ability to balance out the story of an individual life with glimpses at the complex larger history makes this book a very valuable record of a certain period in twentieth-century India.

Savaging the Civilized came out in 1997. I would very much like to see a present-day assessment of Elwin's policy-related work, and the ways in which it may have impacted tribal life and administration over the decades. Guha writes that Elwin [who spent years near Amarkantak, the source of the Narmada] would definitely have been on the activist side of the national divide over the Narmada dam. Would he have solutions to offer to Chattisgarh now? A lot of Elwin's early predictions about the impact of the state running roughshod over its first peoples seem to broadly prefigure the current situation in central and eastern India. It doesn't take an unreconstituted Gandhian to condemn violence - a disgruntled one could still do that. What are the odds that an anthropologist, even if he was an inspired lunatic like Elwin, might have known how to address it? These may seem like unfair questions to ask, but historians do so all the time. This is a book that invites engagement with the present in many ways. In some ways, it ought also to provoke people to read it in spite of that.