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Amit Chaudhuri, “Calcutta” (17 Feb 2013)

Title: Calcutta: Two Years in the city
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publication details: Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2013. Hb. Pp. 308 Rs. 599

It has been a while since I read a book focused on a city. (The last one that I truly enjoyed was Peter Ackroyd’s London, but that was a biography.) Amit Chaudhuri chose to write in “real time” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/02/amit-chaudhuri-new-perspective-calcutta ) witnessing the ups and downs of the city. It is actually a riveting book. Calcutta is a city that can leave you exhausted with its hustle-bustle, filth and yet is unexpected with its richness.

I have just returned from a brief visit to the city. It was after a gap of seventeen years. Much has changed in the city and yet it seems as if it is in limbo. I noticed the disappearance of many old and beautiful buildings and the stark harsh and posh-looking apartments, check-by-jowl with malls set in cramped spaces—many of which were in ridiculous settings. Old buildings that have had their innards gouged out to be replaced with “modern” spaces and embellished with cheap façades so that as you turn the corner you see the older and decrepit building beneath. So Amit Chaudhuri is spot on when he says, “This city-Kolkata-is neither a shadow of Calcutta, nor a reinvention of it, nor even the same city. Nor does it bear anything more than an outward resemblance to its namesake, Kolkata: the city as it’s always been referred to in Bengali. I myself can’t stand calling it any other name but ‘Calcutta’ when speaking in English; just as I’ll always call it ‘Kolkata’ in Bengali conversation. Is this because we – cities and human being – have contradictory lives that flow in and out of each other? To take away one or the other name is to deprive the city of a dimension that’s coterminous with it, that grew and rose and fell with it, whose meaning, deep in your heart, you know exactly. (p.96)”

The author chose to write about the city at the behest of his agent who wanted a non-fiction book on Calcutta. Amit Chaudhuri did not want to imitate Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City but he wanted to do something original. He opted to write about two years of living in the city, a place he had returned to live after having lived most of his life in Bombay, England and in patches in Calcutta. So he says “Why, in 1999, did I move to it? Because I’d been rehearsing that journey for years; as a child, in trips from Bombay in the summer and the winter; and later—in my continual search for certain kind of a city—in my reading. …Even later, when I finally became a published writer, that city would be given back to me by my readers, from their strange identifications and instants of recognition.” And this is exactly the flavor, of wandering, discovering, analyzing–that comes through the text. It is about the city but also the “associations of ‘home’, ‘away’. ‘return’ [that] are quite hopelessly mixed up in my mind” (p.44). His anecdotes are as is—whether it is a description of the people living on the roadsides, or the Italian chefs or even a description of his family, he captures what happens in the space of those two years. No further information is provided to that which has already been given.

Like Raghubir Singh the photographer about whom he has a short piece Amit Chaudhuri too has become a chronicler of a new terrain, albeit through words. Calcutta is a book that will like Raghubir Singh’s Calcutta: The Home and the Street become a landmark book encapsulating a moment in time of a very historically and culturally rich city.

“Don’t buy this book now!”

04 02 , 2013 No Comments

“Structured procrastination.” A delicious phrase coined by John Perry in Don’t But This Book Now! for merely faffing. Without really making you feel guilty he lists a number of reasons why structured procrastination is absolutely acceptable and an activity that should be indulged in as often as possible—It makes one a more productive and better human being. Having said that he explores the reasons for procrastination. One of the main reasons is to be a perfectionist but he puts it so nicely, “You have to get into the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, the costs and benefits of doing a less-than perfect job.” He adds, “The system of breaking tasks down into small increments, and giving yourself a good pat on the back for achieving each of them, has solid credentials.” He offers some splendid advice on how to break the spell browsing incessantly on the internet or watching a mindless programme on the television. (Of the computer he says, “it is also a bane for the procrastinator, because it makes sinking time in utterly worthless pursuits tempting and easy. The big problems are coping with email and surfing the Web.”) The book is an expansion of an earlier essay called “Structured Procrastination” for which John Perry (who’s a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford) won the Ig Nobel Prize at Harvard University. Surprisingly the essays in this slim volume help in boosting one’s confidence. As one of the blurbs on the book cover says that you are tempted to follow the strategies (making lists) discussed to overcome procrastination. It is time well spent in reading Don’t Buy This Book Now!

Children of a Dreadful Midnight, Ruchir Joshi (31 Jan 2013)

31 01 , 2013 No Comments

Original post on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/notes/ruchir-joshi/children-of-a-dreadful-midnight/10151468364809434

Dear Fellow-citizens,
Let’s be clear about this: yesterday, Calcutta finally completed its downfall from the cultural capital of all Asia to a narrow-minded, spirit-crippled, morally corrupt, goonda-governed provincial town. From being the great city where Rabindranath Tagore wrote ‘where the mind is without fear’ our urban concentration has now become the champion backwater place where the heart is squeezed by fear, paranoia and the over-riding greed for power. This hasn’t happened overnight, we have watched the slow-motion collapse of our culture and our sabhyata over the last fifty years, but the final implosion has been rapid, the final dive into crass, shameful mediocrity has been sharp. The last shredding of any remaining intellectual honour has been forced through at triple-speed over the last eighteen months.
Here are the facts of the last blow, the final hacking that felled all of Bengal’s and Calcutta’s pretensions to cultural superiority.
At this time last year, just after the events at the 2012 Jaipur Literary Festival, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had declared she would not let Salman Rushdie enter Calcutta. This was a bizarre statement, completely un-provoked, since Rushdie then had no plans to visit our city. The chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, had made the opposite statement, that Rushdie was welcome in Delhi any time. But Dikshit then had to revoke the statement, clearly under pressure from her high command. Regardless, within a month of Dikshit’s flip-flop, various state elections now over, Rushdie came to Delhi for a conclave, had a normal, undisrupted and undisrupting time and left. The elections were done and dusted and so was the psuedo-issue that had been raked up in Jaipur to win votes, that of Rushdie and the novel he published in 1987, The Satanic Verses. This demonstrated that Delhi is bigger than Calcutta in more than just size, no one chief minister can hold it hostage.
Cut to this year. The film of Rushdie’s earlier novel, Midnight’s Children is being released in India. Rushdie, Deepa Mehta, the director of the film, and Rahul Bose, who’s acted in the movie, are touring India to promote the film. Mehta and Bose have also been invited to the Kolkata Literary Meet writers’ festival to discuss the adaptation of the book into a film. Rushdie’s name isn’t on the list, but on Tuesday it becomes clear that Rushdie was also planning to come to Calcutta to promote the film. As it is, the only officially announced engagement for the writer was a press conference at a hotel in the city. Late on Tuesday night it became clear that our police had intervened and stopped Rushdie from coming to Calcutta. The end result: a huge humiliation for a so-called city that still deludes itself that it is the home of vibrant culture and intellectual vigour and courage.
So much for the facts one can print.
Fellow citizens, I am a story-teller and also an inept, low-level, sudoku puzzle addict. Allow me to bring a different kind of narrative sudoku calculation to this page. Let’s look at the printed ‘numbers’ and embark on a small adventure of conjecture: Who finally delivered the coup de grace to Bengal’s long failing moral body? Who finally chopped through Calcutta’s ethical spine?
Question 1: was Rushdie only coming to promote the film at a press conference?
Now, if I was an organiser of a literary festival, and if I knew Salman Rushdie was going to be in town during my festival, it’s likely I would have been eager to have him make an appearance. Given how he’s done things in the past, it would have surprised no one had the panelists at the Midnight’s Children session at Kol Lit Meet announced in mid-discussion that they had a surprise guest, and had Rushdie been then led on to the stage. Had I been the organiser, I would have grabbed at this idea, but then, that’s only me.
Question 2: Regardless of whether Rushdie was coming to Calcutta to promote his film, make a theatrical entry at Kol-Lit or just have a quick snack at Bhojohari Manna, who actually pulled the plug on his visit?
a) The Kolkata Police? Fearing a law and order problem? Unlikely. As we know, this police force does not even clear snot from its nose without an okay from Writers’Building. It’s unimaginable that they could make a such a huge decision without serious goading from above.
b) If not the police then the state government? Who in the state government? And how? Not to mention why? Well, let’s keep these squares blank for a moment.
c) The Muslim groups? Maybe. But, wait a minute. In Jaipur last year, the protests against Rushdie attending began way before the JLF festival opened. This year, in Calcutta, we heard nothing till yesterday, and the ‘protests’ only took place on Wednesday morning – well after Rushdie had already cancelled his visit – as if to provide retro-substance to the notion that widespread protests were always going to take place.
So let’s lightly pencil in a tentative sequence. Remember what Mamata Banerjee said last year, unasked and unprovoked? So, could it be that an aide woke her up when he saw the announcement of Rushdie’s visit? ‘Didi, you had said you would not let him come to Calcutta. What should we do?’ Could it be that a phone call went from Writers’, or Kalighat, to Lal Bazar Police HQ? Could that phone call have set off other calls from some department of the police, say Special Branch, to the Muslim ‘leaders’ in the city? Perhaps a conversation like: ‘Maulvi-ji! Imam-sahab! Aren’t you planning to protest at Salman Rushdie’s visit to Calcutta?’ ‘Oh? Rushdie is coming? We didn’t know! When? Of course we will protest!’ Could this have then led to police officers landing up at the office of whoever had (unofficially) invited Rushdie? Could, say, three cops, (played in my imaginary movie by, say, Tapas Pal, Rahul Bose and Parambrata Chattopadhyay) have stood behind the person who’d ‘invited’ Rushdie, (person played by Nandita Das), and glowered at her computer screen till she sent off an email ‘disinviting’ the shaitan Rushdie?
But enough of this guessing game.
Yesterday, Mamata Banerjee, either through action or inaction, kept at least one of the promises she had made to Calcutta’s Muslim community. Of all the many promises she had made, this one was perhaps the most poisonous: Rushdie will not be allowed into Calcutta. What this ‘promise’ actually says is ‘I will use a psuedo-issue to stoke the egos of your leaders, in the gamble that we can shove under the carpet the fact that I have done nothing to improve the condition of Muslims here, which remains worse than the conditions of Muslims in Modi’s Gujarat.’ It’s a vile delivery that cuts two ways into the rotting ‘culture’ of Calcutta: it bolsters the osbcurantists and fundamentalists of all colours, not just Islamic, while snatching away yet more space of expression from that soft pocket of society we call artists.
There was a time when (what used to be) Kolkata understood what ‘freedom’ meant, what ‘free speech’ meant, what ‘imagination’ meant, what was meant by ‘art’. The movement for the stopping of sati started here (it offended the core ‘religious sentiments’ of lakhs of Hindus), the movement for a free India, where people of all faiths and belief and non-belief could live, also garnered huge charge from the thinking of Kolkatiaya minds and hearts. Central to each and everything that Calcutta and Kolkata gave to the yet-to-be-born Republic was the tenet ‘where the mind is without fear’, i.e that you can think and say what you want. What this latest assault on our freedom to think, read and see what we want does is plunge us into a darkenss of a kind we in this city have not yet known. Today, we Calcuttans have really become the children of a dreadful midnight.
Ruchir Joshi for 31st January, 2013

On poetry — my thoughts ( 29 Jan 2013)

29 01 , 2013 1 Comment

The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry
Edited by Sudeep Sen
HarperCollins Publishers, India, 2012. Pb. Pp.540. Rs. 599.

Panchali’s Pledge Subramania Bharti
Translated by Usha Rajagopalan
Everyman Classics, Hachette India, 2012. Pb. Pp. 274 Rs. 350

Dom Moraes: Selected Poems
Edited with an introduction by Ranjit Hoskote. Penguin Books India, 2012, Pb. Pp.282. Rs 499.

The River Speaks: The Vaiyai Poems from the Paripatal
Translated by V. N. Muthukumar and Elizabeth Rani Segran
Penguin Classics, Penguin Books India, 2012. Pb. Pp. 176. Rs. 250

These my Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry
Edited by Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo
Penguin Books, India, 2012. Pb. Pp. 450 Rs. 499

In the company of a poet: Gulzar in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir
Rainlight, Rupa Publications, Delhi, 2012. Hb. Pp. 206. Rs 499

2012 was a delicious year for poetry from and being published in India. There were plenty of books to choose from — anthologies, collections, translations and some even for children. The anthology edited by Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo (p.xxi) “comprises almost thirty languages and dialects, all translated into the English except of course those poems written in English. It includes poems, folk songs, and oral narratives that have now been transcribed. We have sought for a collection which tries to represent the breadth and diversity of Indian poetry – we wanted poems that surprised and delighted, poems that illuminated, and inspired further reading—a book for readers, not scholars and academics. We chose poems that worked in translation, those which crossed the boundary of language, which faithfulness to the original combined with adaptation to produced work that existed on its own merit.” It gives a good bird’s-eye view of what was written over the centuries, the various traditions that spawned poems and the transformation to the form over time. While reading it, you get a sense of the variety of poetry, the forms, the reasons why poetry is written and what can actually travel in translation. It is extremely difficult for me to even give a snippet of what is in the anthology since every poem is perfect. It forces you to engage with the content, takes you to a different world and time, and yet encourages you to move on to read the next poem. In no way is it dull to read such a volume.

In fact the editors achieve very well what Gulzar says in the absolutely delicious book In the company of a poet: Gulzar in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir that poetry is about “direct communication” and “What a poem says on the surface is not all that it means. You have to unpick the lines and see the shadows of words. That what makes it poetry, otherwise it would be prose. You usually have to be less ambiguous in prose, which is often an elaboration of thoughts: whereas in poetry, thoughts are usually compressed. A poem has an element of mystery. You have to unravel that mystery. Of course it depends on every poet—how much they reveal, and how much they choose not to.” He adds, “when you understand a poem’s meaning, you can never forget it. You find yourself reciting it at some occasion and it is appreciated. The idea of writing poetry appealed to me because reciting poetry is so pleasurable and the appreciation I got made me happy.”

I wish though that Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo had a longer note about the translation process. Or at least got a few of the translators to speak and then carry a transcript of it as an afterword on their experience at translating poetry. Obviously it takes a while for a satisfactory conclusion to be achieved. An insight into this is given by Sudeep Sen in his Aria introduction on translating poetry “Sculpting language, altering tongues, intoning arias” (p.4), “In almost all instances — whether it be Hebrew, Danish, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Persian, Spanish or Portuguese — I have worked closely with poets of the source languages themselves. They would do literal translations of the original poems in very raw prose. Once I got down the contents in an accurate version, I would then enter the process more proactively and often singularly to sculpt and revise the jagged prose texts to give them a poetic shape in English. After every revision and draft, I would ask the poet to read aloud the poems in their original tongue, so that I got down the rhythm, rhyme, and the cadence correctly — getting them as close to the original as is possible. Once both the poet in the original language and I as a translator were happy with the versions we came up with — which happened through several working sessions over extended periods of time — we would let go of the poems in their new avatar, in a new language.” Maybe knowing this he chose to consciously create a useful anthology of English poetry by Indians (based in the country and from the diaspora). It was fifteen years in the making, but it is time well spent. Unfortunately that is not the case with Usha Rajagoplan’s translations of Subramania Bharti’s Panchali’s Pledge. I cannot read the poems in the source language but I realize that the translations are missing something from the original.

Of the recent set of publications on poetry my favourites are the translations of Lal Ded’s poetry by Ranjit Hoskote (I, Lalla) and his selection of Dom Moraes poems. Even if you have never read poetry or been hesitant about taking a dip in it, start with Ranjit Hoskote’s introductions. His selection, translations and arrangement of the poems introduces you to the poets, their techiniques, form and evolution very well.

And if you have children. Then some of the anthologies that I absolutely enjoy reading out aloud to my daughter are The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes; The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse selected and illustrated by Quentin Blake; The Puffin Book of Modern Children’s Verse edited by Brian Patten, illustrated by Michael Foreman (revised and updated); The Macmillan Treasury of Poetry for Children with a foreword by Charles Causley and A first poetry book selected by Pie Corbett and Gaby Morgan (published by Macmillan). As Charles Causley who used to be a school teacher till one day he discovered the joys of reading poetry to his students says, “A poet, of course, is not obliged to make a poem, whatever its form, entirely accessible at a first reading. A poem, by its nature, may hold certain qualities in reserve. It may not burn itself out, so to speak, in one brilliant flash of light. A poem is a living organism, capable of continuous development and the most subtle of changes. It may contain both a revelation and a mystery. We need to be aware not only of what is said, but of what the poet most carefully has left unsaid.” Pie Corbett says it aptly “Let the poems become shafts of sunlight to brighten up the day.”

The Convert, Deborah Baker

07 01 , 2013 No Comments

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article2420670.ece (first published in the Hindu Literary Review, 3 Sept 2011)

The Convert is about Maryam Jameelah who converted from Judaism to Islam and became a hard-line defender of Islamic values and culture.
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism is about Maryam Jameelah, the well-known conservative and hard-line defender of Islamic values and culture, currently living in Lahore. She has been publishing books, articles, and pamphlets since the 1960s. Some of the recurring issues are “condemning Western efforts to influence the Muslim world or criticising the ill-begotten efforts of the modernising reformers of Islam” (p.84). The Convert is predominantly about the conversion of Margaret Marcus, as she was born, from Judaism to the Jamaat-e-Islami brand of Islamic ideology.

Margaret or “Peggy” Marcus was born in 1934, but did not begin to speak till she was four years old. By this time, her anxious parents, Myra and Herbert, had taken her to various psychiatrists. When she finally began to speak, it was in complete sentences. Very much like the apocryphal, but well-known story about Macaulay, whose first words were, “Madam, the agony is abated.” Her mother described Margaret as hyper-sensitive and of a nervous disposition, but “she was considered an exceptionally gifted young girl. Her paintings were always praised in school and she had a beautiful singing voice” (p.109). At the summer school, where she was happy learning how to dance, she was severely condemned by the director and requested not to return as she had no flair for the art. Likewise with her painting — upon being informed by Mawdudi that painting was not looked upon kindly in Islam, she gave up painting till the late 1990s. Later, she was unable to complete her course at the University of Rochester as she had a nervous breakdown. By the time she began her correspondence with Maulana Abdul Ala Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, she had been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and had had a “fifteen-month long stay at the New York Psychiatric Institute and later the Hudson River State Hospital” (p.125). The other correspondents included “mature Arab Muslim leaders deemed reactionary fanatics by the New York Times”, such as Sayyid Qutb of the Society of Muslim Brotherhood and Shaykh Muhammad Bashir Ibrahim, leader of the insurgency against France and a member of the Islamic clergy (p.140).

Exploring Islam

It was after these stints in mental asylums that she began to explore Islam seriously. In fact, “Mr Parr, the librarian in the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library brought her attention to Muslim Digest where she would publish her first essays on Islam. “After reading Islam at the Crossroads by Muhammad Assad, the Jewish convert whose book The Road to Mecca had made such a deep impression on her, Margaret began to articulate the kernel of her argument against modern America” (p.136). But it was Sheikh Daoud Ahmad Faisal, a pure Moroccan Arab and his West Indian wife, Khadija Faisal, who ran the Islamic Propagation Centre of America, housed in a run-down storefront in Brooklyn Heights “who finally convinced Margaret Marcus to submit to God, to obey His commands as set forth in the Holy Quran, and to sacrifice her life in this world for the life in the hereafter” (p.138). It was “Peggy’s paralysing childhood fear of death had forced her to ponder the most profound questions of existence for hours on end. When she grew older she compared the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for their teachings on the hereafter. Of all these faiths, only Islam provided her the clear assurance that her efforts to live a pious life would be justly rewarded” (p.137-8).

Most of her arguments and tension with her parents were over the formation of Israel, their religious prejudice against the Arabs, the Palestinians and their support for Zionist activities and institutions, though her parents were also to convert later, but to the Unitarian Church. In fact, she began a novel, Ahmad Khalil: The Story of a Palestinian Refugee and His Family, and illustrated it with sketches at the age of 12 but it remains unpublished. Margaret Marcus began to write on Islam and by the time she reached Lahore, “her work began to appear in translation in the Arab daily An Nadwah, out of Mecca; in the Daily Kohistan, a Karachi monthly; in a newspaper out of Kerala…in a few Urdu publications out of Lahore. A collection of essays was released in Istanbul”(p.84).

Margaret Marcus was so taken in with the religion that she converted. Then, at the behest of Maulana Abdul Ala Mawdudi she travelled to Lahore to become a part of his family. Soon the relationship turned sour and she was packed off to Pattoki. But from there too, she was soon transferred to the Pagal Khanna in Lahore. She stayed there till August 1963, when she was released into the custody of Mohammad Yusuf Khan, a Pathan whose family were powerful feudal lords in Jullunder, but post-1947 had fled to Pakistan as refugees. He was “connected with the Jamaat-e-Islami as he was responsible for the publication of the Mawlana’s works and for selling skins of sacrificial goats donated to the party during Ramadan. While the party was banned, Khan oversaw the publication of the Weekly Shahab” (p.157). Later in the month, he married Maryam Jameelah, who became his second wife. They had five children, but it was Yusuf Khan’s first wife who brought up Maryam Jameelah’s children, along with her own brood of ten.

Deborah Baker has based her book on “…the Maryam Jameelah collection on deposit at the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library” and interviews, including with Maryam Jameelah in late 2007. She focuses on the 24 letters written from the 1950s to 1963 and these dominate The Convert. Then the 30 years of Maryam Jameelah’s life documenting her marriage, motherhood and political upheavals are reduced to a few pages. Baker claims that this book is “fundamentally a work of nonfiction”, though she refers to it as ‘a tale’. She says that “unless her words are accompanied by quotation marks and a specific citation, the actual and imaginary letters of Maryam Jameelah do not appear here as she wrote them. … I have also moved an anecdote or thought from one letter to another, or taken an anecdote or thought from an essay and put it into a letter. …I do not make anything up. Some readers might find this simply unorthodox, others may well feel misled. …” Nor did “Maryam …ask to read the manuscript before publication. She trusted, as the reader will have to trust…” (p.225-6). In some instances it is as if writing this book was also for Deborah to understand her own Catholic upbringing, the conversion of her father to Catholicism for love, the family arguments over religion and the answers her siblings found.

Fiction or biography?

If Baker was interested in writing a bio-novel of the kind that David Lodge and Peter Ackroyd have written, then she should have been honest and done so. In that case, it is perfectly acceptable to have a fictional license and insert or embellish parts of the narrative. As David Lodge wrote recently in The Guardian, “…as long as they are compatible with the factual record, and the book is presented and read as a novel, not as history, no harm is done, and something may be gained. Bio-fiction does not pretend to replace biography, but complements it, offering a different kind of interpretation of real lives.” It may have been best if the empirical data had been presented as is, with a good analysis of the subject, rather than intruding into the narrating like a “nosy …biographer” (p.130). Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, co-editor and translator of Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain, says that working on a woman’s memoir is a “fine line between editing a memoir and completely reconstructing her life story —especially around one significant event”.

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, Deborah Baker, Viking, 2011, p. 256, Rs. 450.

Australian author and illustrator Frane Lessac’s visit to Pathways School, NOIDA

18 12 , 2012 No Comments

Last month Australian author and illustrator Frane Lessac was visiting India. While on tour she was in Delhi to participate in the Bookaroo festival. It so happened that I heard of her visit. So along with the help of the Australian High Commission, New Delhi and Dr Shalini Advani, Director, Pathways School, NOIDA we arranged to have Frane Lessac visit the school on 23 Nov 2012 to interact with the form 4 and 5 students.

Frane Lessac used a variety of mediums to conduct a session. It included drawing on paper and using the computer while telling stories. She did it all so convincingly that the imaginary world became a reality for the students.

According to an email I received after the event from Dr Advani “It was quite a magical session. The kids really loved her, as you saw from their pursuing her even as we were walking down the corridors.” According to Aparna Gupta who helped co-ordinate the event on behalf of the Australian High Commission “Frane was very happy with the children at the school and was very impressed that they took time to read her website and books.” Whereas for Frane Lessac “My greatest ambition is to instill pride and self-esteem in children about their unique heritage and their own ability to capture in it pictures and words.”

Some pictures of the interaction:

Rajnikanth, the definitive biography by Naman Ramachandran

12 12 , 2012 No Comments

This is a well written biography of a very impressive man. Rajnikanth may be a movie superstar but he is definitely so for his humility and his hard work. It shines through this biography. It also explains the phenomenon called Rajnikanth. As a friend told me when we were discussing the man, “Frankly none of us know why we are so besotted by him, but we are. It may be a combination of his style, his flair and his ‘goodness’, but he is also very humble, very down to earth, simple and honest, to the extent he returns money to the producers if his films flop.” So for those who love the man, who adore him, who hero worship him or those who simply want to know more about Rajnikanth, read this biography. I have.

It has been published by Penguin Books India. It goes on sale today. Rajnikanth’s birthday. 12.12.12

Mixed Tape, Mantaray and Prabha Mallya

03 12 , 2012 No Comments

Curious experiment with comics. A new bi-monthly experiment with comics of 3-8 pages long. Launched by Mantaray, an independent publishing firm based in Bangalore and started by Pratheek Thomas. It has an exciting bunch of illustrators and storytellers associated with it. http://mantaraycomics.tumblr.com/post/35200734659/mixtape-is-here

One of my favourite illustrators is part of the Mantaray team — Prabha Mallya. I met her first while she was still an undergraduate student at IIT, Kanpur. She met me at the World Book Fair, New Delhi to show me her notebook of drawing scribbles. Today I am so pleased to see her flourish. I love the confidence with which she draws and is willing to experiment. She has done the illustrations for Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, published by Aleph. Some of her illustrations are visible at . More recently she has illustrated Kipling’s Just So Stories . Truly scrumptious. (a href=”https://www.jayabhattacharjirose.com/jaya/files/2012/12/Just-So-Stories.jpg”>

Inking India, Asian Age

02 12 , 2012 No Comments

My article (cover story) on word portraits of India, published in Asian Age, 2 Dec 2012. Here is the link http://www.asianage.com/cover-story/inking-india-946

The recent Girish Karnad-V.S. Naipaul altercation reignited the debate on how authentically can the realities and complexity of India be portrayed through words. Writing on or about India is not unheard of — E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions; Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Jungle Book; Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India; Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram, Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to list a mixed bag of names. To comment upon the accuracy or authenticity of books discussing India is never easy. Yet surprisingly the books that work don’t try to understand India’s complexity — they reveal it. They don’t impose a world view but they have a point of view. Writers who share their personal experience and look out from that, seem to grasp more than those who have readymade explanations or impose viewpoints to simplify complexity. Works that pile detail on detail work very well, such as Shantaram or Kim.

Recently, these word portraits on India have gained momentum, especially in nonfiction. The frequency with which these books are being published is astounding. For instance, Akash Kapur’s India Becoming; Oliver Balch’s India Rising, Patrick French’s India: A Portrait; Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Princes & Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857 edited by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma.For writer Tabish Khair, “It is not a question of portraying India ‘correctly’, as India is too complex and changing a reality to be portrayed in a handful of approved or ‘correct’ ways. But it is a question of engaging honestly with the discourses employed by anyone to portray India: for instance, if someone sees historical India as torn between the two opposed and segregated ‘nations’ of Muslims and Hindus, then he is subscribing to a dubious colonialist 19th century discourse, and I think this should be pointed out.”

Raja Rao, in his preface to Kanthapura, talks about the need to develop a new kind of English to describe the complexities of India. “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own… We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression, therefore, has to be a dialect which will someday prove to be in as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.”
Amandeep Sandhu, whose recently published Roll of Honour is about Punjab, comments that a word portrait on India “demands that the writer rid oneself of one’s own prejudices and learns to stand in the shoes of the villain in the text. That is a tough call and is compounded by not wanting to write for a market or for money or for a constituency. I feel it is necessary to portray ourselves in a way that the readers can focus on us not for our being exotic but for our being human.”
Academic and critic Mohan Rao said in a recent review of Siddharta Mukherjee’s The Emperor of Maladies, “I am curious about why some books get international recognition and awards and others don’t… The Indian elites and middle classes celebrate whatever the West acknowledges. Why the West acknowledges mainly Adigas and Vergheses says something about imperialism and the economics and politics of publishing. It also says something sad about the Indian elites and middle classes who believe these don’t exist.”
Shauna Singh Baldwin’s new novel The Selector of Souls has an Indo-Canadian character. She feels, “How can there be any correct way to ‘portray the realities of India’ or more importantly Indians? If I thought about that, I’d be completely discouraged from writing stories and just stick to pithy comments from the sidelines. Rarely are stories written from a multi-point of view (like a play or a film) or a group point of view. Most stories ask, Why did this happen? and, Why to this person? Fiction usually follows one individual at a time, asking the reader to put him/herself in another point of view.” Janice Pariat, whose anthology Boats On Land focusses on khasis, says it very well, “It’s most important to keep in mind that the nation is our biggest, toughest construct and all writers can do is offer a re-imagination of a small part of it — whether the place is where he or she comes from or chooses to live in.”
The acclaimed writer N.S. Madhavan feels most Malayalam writers of the past were zeitgeisty, in the sense that they flowed with time rather than holding up a mirror to realities of the day. He says, “O.V. Vijayan’s celebrated Legends of Khasak was essentially a 1960s novel that through sheer good writing outlived the decade. Fiction these days has more reality connect; it took more than 40 years of Malayalis’ Gulf experience to produce Benyamin’s novel Goat Days or their tryst with Naxalism in Santhosh Kumar’s Andhakaranazhi (Vortex of Darkness). Surely this ought to have something to do with instant history churned out by individuals in social media.”

Janice Pariat “Boats on Land”

28 11 , 2012 No Comments

An excerpt from an email exchange with Janice Pariat who recently published her debut collection of short stories — Boats on Land (Random House India, Hb), Nov 2012

Boats on Land (cover image), Janice Pariat

JB

: I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed reading the anthology. It has taken me back to the time we spent in Shillong. Much of what you write about is so familiar to me including the silence on the streets during the curfew, playing cricket and the unexpected violence. Your anthology is so focused on the Khasi life, stories, people, the richness of stories and histories that intermingle that at times it is difficult to separate them. (Somewhere I read a review that termed it as a North Eastern collection. I do not agree with it.) I also like the arrangement of stories in the book. Starting from mid-19C to the present day. There is a gentle walk through time. Many reviewers have termed your stories as nuanced but for me, you live and breathe Khasi culture. You are the perfect medium with your wonderful command over the English language to communicate it to the outside world. I am sure your stories have generated many positive reviews but they would resonate well with those who are familiar with Shillong. The casual references to ceremonies, familiar landmarks in the city, the mix of folklore and reality, the growing tensions, the dhakars….I love the way you create the characters many of whom I suspect are really etched after your sharp and astute observation of people and listening to stories. There is a deep sense of calm and confidence ( I do not know how to explain this to you) in your writing. It is as if you are completely at ease writing what you do, this is what you do best and will never be apologetic (nor should you be!) about who you are. I love the way you bring in Khasi words, references to the Kongs, the dishes, without necessarily explaining them to anyone! Thank heavens! High time someone did that. For years I have been hearing about it being critically analysed but rarely spotted it in print. All those questions that you have been asked in interviews about writers who inspired you or you like reading sound trite. You are an original voice. Truly loved what you have written. As for the lesbian question in an interview baffled me considerably. Was it asked on the basis of the kissing scene and the title story? I am really not sure what to make of it. Maybe in DHL’s time yes, but now? No. At least not to my mind. But that is for you to tell me.

Janice: … absolutely thrilled that you loved the stories and thank you for your extended feedback. So glad you connected with them in that intimate, special way. It cheers me up endlessly to know that my work is read and treasured.

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