Salman Rushdie’s new book, Languages Of Truth, is a wonderful collection of essays published between 2003-2020. Once you start reading it, you don’t want to finish reading it. All the essays have been revised for this edition.
There is so much to share from it. Here is an extract from the Arthur Miller Lecture, PEN World Voices Festival 2012.
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I’m here, I guess,, to talk about censorship, but no writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. Writers want to talk about creation, and censorship is anti-creation, negative energy, un-creqtion, the bringing into bring or non-being, or, to use Tom Stoppard’s descriptions death, ‘The absence of presence. Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
… Liberty is the air we breathe, and we live in a part of the world where, imperfect as the supply is, it is nevertheless freely available, ….Imperfectly free, imperfectly breathable, but when it is breathable and free we don’t need to make a song and a dance about it. We take it for granted and get on with our day. And at night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today.
The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If creative artists worry if they will still be free tomorrow, then they will not be free today. If they are afraid of the consequences of their choice of subjects or of their treatments of those subjects, then their choices will not be determined by talent but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free. The air supply is turned off, and we cannot breathe.
And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, then it becomes the subject; the art becomes ‘censored art’, and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks if those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work.
S. J. Bennett’s Windsor Knot( Harper Collins India) is her first mystery novel in this newly launched series. It is also the beloved young adult author’s debut foray into adult literature. In it, she has the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II as an investigator. Rozie Oshodi is the Queen’s assistant private secretary who doubles up as her sidekick investigator. According to the author, “the Queen’s new Assistant Private Secretary. Rozie is a Nigerian Londoner who grew up in a council estate in Notting Hill and went on to serve in Afghanistan as a captain in the British Army. She is quick-witted, brave and somewhat amazed to find the Queen is asking her to do increasingly unusual things.” In fact, the real Queen’s current equerry is Lieutenant Colonel Nana Kofi Twumasi-Ankrah, a Ghanaian-born British army officer. Like Rozie in the book, he’s a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. S.J. Bennett adds:
I’ve always written books with a feminist element to them, and I’m fascinated by the idea of a ‘little old lady’ surrounded by men, someone who is deeply respected, but not always taken seriously. In this series, the Queen (my Queen) has learned that she can trust only certain women to keep her secrets. They are her assistant private secretaries, a role I interviewed for myself after a brief career as a strategy consultant with McKinsey. I’ll never forget walking across the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. I didn’t get that job in the end, and it’s still the one that got away.
The Windsor Knot investigates the mysterious death of a Russian on the premises of Windsor Castle. The novel is set at the time the Queen is 89 and approaching her ninetieth year. She comes across as a sparkling old lady who is very aware of the manner in which she should conduct herself as a British monarch and yet, she seems to exhibit the excitement and enthusiasm of a little school girl in getting to the truth about Maksim Brodsky, the Russian pianist. He had been invited to entertain her guests the previous night at dinner. The manner in which he is found in his room is scandalous and all attempts are made to ensure that the story is underplayed. More so, when they discover a little more about his Russian connections. Yet, those in the know, including the Queen, cannot help but speculate on the circumstances of the death. More so, since Brodsky was known to also run a political blog. So could he have possibly fallen foul of the Russian authorities, especially Putin? ( The eerie parallels of political intrigue to the ongoing story about Roman Protasevich, the Belarus blogger, are purely coincidental. Prostasevich has gone on record saying that the authorities will kill him for managing Telegram channels broadcasting mass protests against the Belarus leader, Alexander Lukashenko. )
Back to the novel. The Queen’s top policemen are investigating the crime. They are Ravi Singh, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; Gavin Humphreys, Director General of MI5 and the most junior of the trio, Detective Chief Inspector David Strong. They are a motley bunch who are perfect team in this mystery story. The author has everything, diversity, true representation of British society, a peep into royalty, the secret conversations, the investigation, and it is pure delight in reading excellent English, nuanced and truly Queen’s English without having to read mangled words and phrases.
I truly love how the author has set her characters in place. I can just see them develop and if she maintains the pace of creating two novels a year, she is on to an excellent formula. I hope she does not run out of ideas and plot settings. First books in a series are always dicey but S. J. Bennett is on to a good thing with this launch. It is the perfect antidote for the gloom and doom that we are surrounded by. This is just the kind of lighthearted banter, mixed with some detective work, that we as readers need to help us look the other way during theese dark pandemic days. Life goes on despite being reminded of our mortality on a daily basis.
It is the perfect blend of Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Very English. Very much aware and happy being in the space it inhabits. And makes the best of the scenario. You don’t need to be a Royalist or an Anglophile to appreciate this kind of storytelling. Just go with it and enjoy it. The author has a very tight control on the language. She will hone her point-of-view skills fairly soon, once the characters begin to assert themselves. The first book is always a testing ground for the roles everyone will play and the author figuring out how to manipulate the scene. Soon everyone will find their niche and it will develop beautifully. I am so sure of it. This first book has sufficient glimpses of a good series in the making.
In fact, the first volume has an extract from the opening pages of the second novel in the series scheduled for publication in November 2021. It is called The Mystery of the Faberge Egg. I cannot wait to read it. Just as the webseries, The Crown, inspired this storyline, these books need to launch a webseries of their own.
On a drive one English spring evening, I found myself thinking about an episode of The Crown. The young Queen Elizabeth II had picked up a painted soldier from a model battlefield and absentmindedly returned him to the wrong place. Her punctilious private secretary corrected the mistake. And I thought to myself that, while it made a nice observation about the private secretary, it was something the Queen – the woman I knew – would never have done. I haven’t met her, but my father has, many times. In the course of a long career in the army, he’s hosted her at the Tower of London, drunk cocktails on the Royal Yacht Britannia and been awarded medals at Buckingham Palace. The woman my father knows is funny, engaged, well-informed and good company. She would have understood that it’s impolite to fiddle with someone else’s model battlefield, and if she’d ever moved a soldier it would have been to put him in the right place, not the wrong one. That got me thinking, here’s a woman with a lifetime of learning, who is often thought of as not very clever. But she’s recognised as a world expert on horse racing, and there are many other fields besides, such as military history, that she knows extremely well. Also, while we’re all looking at her, she’s looking out. She must spot things all the time that others don’t see. What a perfect set-up for a detective. The woman I know could do it brilliantly.
Meanwhile, read The Windsor’s Knot — it is the perfect read.
Steven Bartlett is twenty eight years old. He is a millionaire. When he was eighteen years old, he was living in extreme poverty, scrounging for food and was never sure how the day would pan out. Of course, he had been brought up in relative comfort and his parents were devout Christians, but ever since he chose to drop out of university and forgo his government scholarship, his parents were furious and had distanced themselves from him. One day, he had a 20p coin in his hand. It slipped and fell from his hand and lodged itself in the sofa of the diner he was in. He shoved his hand in to pull out the missing penny and found a one pound coin. He realised that the seats were never cleaned in the cracks, so perhaps if he were in luck, he would find more loose change. Slowly he wound his way through the diner gathering up all the coins he could collect. To his delight he found the princely sum of £13.40. Till date, there is nothing compared to the boundless joy he experienced at discovering this change. Not even the day he received the phone call that his firm, the social media marketing agency, Social Chain, had a market valuation of nearly £200 million.
Happy Sexy Millionaire ( Hachette India) is categorised as a self-help book but it is a fascinating blend of memoir and sharing of business experiences and knowledge. This is a man, like many others before him, who has learned on the job. He had a dream and saw it through. He was focussed and continues to be.
I had no plan. I just had a lot of faith in myself and a lot of faith in the rationale underpinning my decision.
He worked extremely hard at launching a firm. It went bust when he was 21. Then he worked upon Social Chain with his friend, Dominic. It proved to be a resounding success. So much so that one of his dreams of meeting President Barack Obama came true when they were featured on the same panel at an international conference. As a fourteen-year-old, Steven had seen Obama win the US Presidential elections. Barely twelve years later they were on the same stage.
Complicated self-help jargon aside, if you were able to protect your time a little better, become a little more intentional in how you place your chips on the roulette table of your life and develop more clarity on the things that hold long-term, intrinsic value to you, then you probably wouldn’t need to read another self-help personal development book in your life. At the most fundamental level, this isn’t just the most important thing, it’s the only thing. It holds the answer to your mental, emotional and spiritual health, and in my life it’s proved to be the doorway to becoming the happy sexy millionaire I naively aspired to become.
One of his mantras is that time is critical.
Time is both free and priceless. The person you are not is a consequence of how you used your time in the past. The person you’ll become in the future is a consequence of how you use your time in the present. Spend your time wisely, gamble it intrinsically and save it diligently.
He is crystal clear ( one of his favourite phrases) that looking at his “own time habits through a monetary framework” helped him to decide what he should and shouldn’t be doing.
Steven Bartlett highlights portions of his text by enlarging a sentence or a phrase and placing it like an illustration on the facing page of the text. It is an interesting technique but he communicates to be heard clearly. A trait he has honed as a social media strategist but his advice about cyberspace are worth their weight in gold. He emphasizes all that he has learned about social media, the social comparisons, the materialism, the clicks of buttons, the euphoria and the falseness, the gratitude exercises, the neurological impact that gratitude had on dopamine levels, the happiness quotient etc. But he has a warning.
Actively practising gratitude feels so necessary in the modern era because our brains weren’t designed to deal with all this social noise or the algorithms that feed me the prettiest, richest, smartest people on earth every day. Psychologists have often suggested that the slow pace of human evolution and the leap of cultural and technological change have meant that our minds are better adapted to our hunter-gatherer past (where 95 per cent of evolution took place) than to today’s supposedly fast-changing world. In short, digital technology has the capacity to overwhelm our prehistoric brains by exploiting their biases, vulnerabilities and limitations in subconscious, invisible ways. We don’t see it happening, but the astronomical growth of anxiety and other mental health issues in the modern era suggests we’re feeling the consequences.
For him the only worthwhile comparision is “YOU yesterday vs YOU today. If you want to be happy you have to focus on that”.
Happy Sexy Millionaire is an astonishingly gripping tale. It is meant to read in one gulp but remember to keep a pencil handy to underline all the bits and pieces in the text that speak out to you. My copy is dog-eared, top and bottom of the pages, underlined and heavily underlined to highlight text, with commentary scribbled in the margins. This book like many self-help books seems to proselytize but it is not. There is something unique in the manner in which Steven Bartlett writes. It is straight from the heart. He is lucid. He is very sure about what he wishes to share. He shares with a clear conscience and a great deal of faith in one’s abilities. The bibliography he lists at the end of the book is impressive. He probably has honed his skills as a communicator on his very popular podcast, The Diary of a CEO. ( Here is the latest episode where he interviews One Direction band member, Liam Payne. 7 June 2021.)
MariaKonnikova is a journalist who works for the NewYorker. She studied military theory and history combined with psychology in college. Ultimately she did a doctorate in psychology where her focus was on decision making. After a horrifically bad year (2015) when it seems as if her life was plagued by ill luck, she set herself a goal to learn poker. This amazing goal was set by a person who had no clue how many cards were in a deck. And she had a grandmother who was appalled at her granddaughter’s decision to learn a gambler’s game that she called “evil” instead of the more elegant game of chess. This was the same grandmother who had lived through World War II, survived Stalin, Khruschev and Gorbachev too. But Konnikova was determined and chose to seek out as her mentor, the Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of millions of dollars in earnings, Eric Seidel.
The Biggest Bluff ( HarperCollins India) is an enriching story about how Konnikova sets her goals, works hard, and along the way discovers a lot about herself as she masters poker. One of the facts that stands out about the game is that no player can afford to be delusional and have airs. You are what you are and this is how you will play the game. It is true to the personality of the player. As a result, Konnikova gets brilliant insights into human behaviour. She learns many invaluable lessons about negotiations, decision making, what it takes to be a woman and play as an equal while silencing out the #sexist remarks of the other players at the table, being attentive to the extent of blocking out all other distractions and focusing upon the players hands. This is a game dominated by male players. She learns the value of being confident about the skills one possesses rather than looking to others for assurances or even assuming others are better skilled than her. A crucial piece of information about herself that helps build her self-worth. It is also about developing patience and becoming a better strategist. It is not necessary that the best equipped or skilled or even the most aggressive player will win the jackpot, it boils down to strategy. It is preferable to be the dragonfly whose success rate at achieving a kill is 95% as compared to a cheetah ( 58%), lion (25%) and wolf (14%). So it is also about marshaling your facts together and reviewing the probability, being a critical thinker and constantly living in a state of inquiry. It is also about learning from failures and evaluating what comes next objectively. Never let emotions get in the way. She also learned to question the classic model for analysing behaviour: CAPS, or the cognitive-affective personality system. For decades it had been argued that the Big Five version of personality— openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and agreeableness was fundamentally flawed. Konnikova discovers that people aren’t a combination of traits but a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations. She realises that poker is more about psychological and emotional dynamics than physical patterns. And the beauty of this understanding is that it is a dynamic situation that constantly changes depending upon the players involved and from moment to moment. The massive takeaway from this book is that Konnikova realises how many of the learnings she gleaned while preparing for various online and offline games/championships, have lifelong applications. It transformed her in many ways.
And yes, she did win a neat pile of US$300,000.
This book is begging to be made into a web series like the very popular Queens Gambit. It also deserves to be translated into many more languages. Some have referred to it as a feminist telling and others have called it a phenomenal story. It is an astonishing story that confirms that you are never too old to acquire a new skill and get the brain charged up.
There is no denying this is an interesting book but those who know the game will probably benefit more since at times, Konnikova takes deep dives into explaining a table setting and how hands are played. Nevertheless, read it. The strongest point she makes is that the players participate and win purely on the basis of merit and nothing else. She gives the example of talented people being interviewed or losing out on opportunities simply because their attitude/ inquisitive nature etc did not align with the feelings of the powers that be. In that sense, playing poker is a far freer activity as you are judged on the basis of merit. Sobering thought. Much to gain by reading this gem of a book.
In the June 2021 issue of Vogue ( British edition), Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai has been interviewed. It is a good interview as it puts the spotlight on a young twenty-three-year-old who is at the crossroads of her life, figuring out the eternal question — “what next?” Many questions are asked and a lively conversaion ensues until the silly question of relationships is posed by the interviewer. Malala’s response to it has resulted in a significant amount of trolling on social media platforms.
She isn’t sure if she’ll ever marry herself. “I still don’t understand why people have to get married. If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can’t it just be a partnership?” Her mother – like most mothers – disagrees. “My mum is like,” Malala laughs, “‘Don’t you dare say anything like that! You have to get married, marriage is beautiful.’” Meanwhile, Malala’s father occasionally receives emails from prospective suitors in Pakistan. “The boy says that he has many acres of land and many houses and would love to marry me,” she says, amused.
Pakistani author, Bina Shah, wrote a fabulous post on her blog The Feminstani about this interview. Here is an extract:
Well, shit. Pakistani social media alighted upon this quote as if they were kites in the sky who had spotted a particularly tasty scrap of meat. If they were looking for something with which to bludgeon her to death, they found it: in the musings of a young woman who’s still trying to figure things out, things that confound the best and brightest of us, and the stupidest of us. “Should I get married or not, and why does there have to be marriage in the first place” is a question we’ve all asked ourselves, if we’ve got a single ounce of intelligence in our brains. (at 48, I know I ask myself the same question, and up to date neither have I found an appropriate answer nor a suitable candidate. And yet I still hope to get married some day.)
I don’t want to go into the nasty comments, the Z-list actresses who came out with statements against Malala, or the taunts of “un-Islamic” and “Zionist agent” that were showered upon Pakistan’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, one of its few Oxford graduates, and possibly the only girl in Pakistan to have been shot in the head and survived. They called her ugly, and that of course she wants a partnership because she’s too ugly to have a husband (in her interview, Malala said that men propose marriage in e-mails to her father all the time). The usual round of accusations and bizarre conspiracy theories — it’s a drama, she wanted a foreign passport, she was chosen by Jewish overlords to become Prime Minister of Pakistan — came out. In short, we’ve been on this rodeo before.
Also useless is to point out to the Pakistanis howling that Malala’s remarks on marriage are unIslamic that the concept of marriage in Islam, while strong and emphasized as part of Sunnah, has been fairly flexible over the centuries. A valid marriage contract written down on paper is not actually required; just a verbal agreement with witnesses will do (if we want to be very literal about it). In its early years, Islam also allowed sexual relationships with women you are not married to, but are “those whom your right hand posesses” — ie female prisoners of war, and concubines (for men only, not for women who own male slaves). A practice of temporary marriage, i.e mutah, was allowed at one point, which would then be dissolved after an agreed-upon amount of time had elapsed.
Some of these practices were established for reasons of practicality, and some of them have been abused rather than treated as the exceptions or temporary situations meant to give rights to children born out of the traditional marriage scenario. Some of these practices have been abolished, or outlawed in the modern nations where Islam is practiced. Many of these practices continue in secret. The evolution of a written marriage contract is a modern invention made in order to safeguard certain legal rights of the participants, as well as to be able to register marriages in records and databases. But there was once a time when nothing more was required for a binding partnership than two people saying in front of two witnesses that they wanted to be together as spouses.
Marriage is in short not the solid brick house that Pakistanis want to build and entrap two people in forever, regardless of their feelings, their needs, wants and desires. It is exactly what Malala expresses a little clumsily in her interview: a partnership with a door that either partner can open to leave any time she or he wants, with good reason. The Quran is clear that spouses are meant to be a comfort to one another, to have affection for one another, and to guard each others’ privacy and secrets. But it forces no one to marry against their will. If Malala is not ready to marry, and if she is never ready to marry, then she is within her rights not to do so.
In response, I wrote an email to Bina. Here is an extract from it:
It will be interesting to observe how Malala breaks her childhood shackles and really comes into her own. She is 23. So young and yet has achieved so much. For now the Vogue article has highlighted the struggle that a desi girl of her age has to face. The problem in this particular case is that Malala is a role model for girls across faiths and countries. She is a feminist icon. Whether it is the Pakistani male or any other Muslim man or any other man for that matter, they simply cannot handle such a confident young girl like Malala. Offering to marry her because the suitor owns immense property is a sham. The man is eyeing the Nobel Laureate as a trophy to forever house in his home and probably improve his social worth. Most desi men, across our fractured borders, have the same conservative mindset.
If Malala had to truly break shackles and live her life according to her terms, then it is no one’s business to question her sexuality, her choice in partnerships or the kind of arrangements she opts for. Alas, she is caught between two worlds — the public image and the conservative Pakistani Muslim community. She has to straddle these worlds.
The Vogue question about relationships was unfortunate but it holds true for any celebrity. Journalists cannot resist asking women celebrities about their sexual life and their marital status. It is what makes the papers sell. So for me, this interview with Malala, is more than her being representative of a Pakistani Muslim girl, but being an icon/representative of this new generation of girls. They have been exposed to so much more information about being empowered, what it takes to be an empowered girl, facing the violence, making choices and being articulate. This is what defines these young girls. Unfortunately, the desi girls who belong to this generation are also weighed down by other baggage such as the expectations of their families and wider circle of “settling down”.
I remember when my Dadi would go on and on about it, I always felt as if being married was like being evicted from Paradise and like Satan as described by Milton in Paradise Lost, plummeting through a neverending blackness. It is as if achieving married status was the be all and end all of life. Whereas in my reckoning, I was just beginning my life and did not need to be burdened by such questions. It really mucked up many years of my life. When I finally chose, I chose on my own terms, no one else’s. Even so, it was a late marriage by everyone’s reckoning.
You are so right about the backlash Malala has faced for her response. This is the first of many she is going to face. This silly statement of her’s will haunt her for years to come, it will be dissected in polite and not-so-polite circles as how could this seemingly polite, young girl, who (as you point out) covers her head with a dupatta, can have such strong ideas. Well, of course she can. You and I know from firsthand experience that we may dress in our desi clothes but hell, no one can ever mentally shackle us or presume to do so in any other way. It bothers folks. We don’t necessarily strut about wearing the latest Western fashions but we do have some of the most modern ideas of living. I bet you have come across many desi girls who wear the latest hip-hop clothes, but heavens, they spout the most conservative attitudes towards women.
Malala has to negotiate this space on her own but I sincerely hope that she has some good guidance regarding gender. She needs to engage in conversation and figure this out for herself. It was an unfair and loaded question. She should not have been asked it as it seems as if the interviewer was seeing only a young girl of marriageable age. Sad. The kid has won a Nobel Prize, for heaven’s sake. Give her her due. She has survived a bullet wound to the head and has managed to recover sufficiently to attend classes. How many people are fortunate to be able to do that after a head injury?
Perhaps this is what was needed. A furious questioning of these attitudes, the desire to let the younger generation express themselves freely without being burdened by “traditional” customs and this is beyond the borders of Pakistan. It is a universal truth. In many, many ways, times have changed considerably, especially for girls and women. This is a debate that will rage for some time given that a celebrity like Malala Yousafzai has expressed her opinions about it. But for now, this is accompanied by hashtags such as “Shame on Malala” trending on Twitter.
Instead of shaming the young girl, the journalists posing these prying questions about the celebrity’s relationship status should be shamed.
Collegiality and Other Ballads: Feminist Poems by Male and Non-Binary Alliesis a unique experiment. Inviting people who do not identify themselves as of the woman gender but feel strongly on women-related issues offers a searing perspective on how feminism/women’s movements have impacted civil society. There is a collective anger evident in many of the poems at many of the injustices women face regularly. It probably stems from the sensitive understanding, empathy and the recognition on the part of the poets, many of whom belong to marginalised communities of society. Majoritarian discourses are blind or completely oblivious to the daily struggles of these individuals who are mostly left to battle an unequal social system. By bringing together these diverse genders, many of whom still inhabit a niche space in society or focussed LGBTQA+ imprints in mainstream publishing, Shamayita Sen ( editor) and Hawakal publishers have in Collegiality created a well-defined platform that may lend itself to more literary explorations in future.
The Others by Sarah Blau is a really bizarre and very well-written thriller except that Sarah, my daughter, will not let me read it. She knocks it out of my hand!!! It upturns the mushiness about motherhood that seems to have erupted in world literature and created a really sinister story.
Since my child won’t let me read it, here is what the blurb says:
A serial killer is on the loose in Tel Aviv. Each victim is found tier to a chair with a baby doll glued to their hands, the word ‘mother’s carved into their foreheads like a mark of Cain. Stowed away between the wax figurines of the Bible museum where she works, Sheila Heller suspects that she alone knows the connection between the victims. The killings seem to be linked by a pact their group all made at university– to never have children. What Sheila doesn’t know is who is committing these gruesome acts of ritualistic violence, and whether she herself might be the next target.
#PushkinVertigo is the new thriller imprint launched by #PushkinPress. It is an incredible list. The few texts that I have read on this list show it to be very sharply written, there is a crispness with not a word out of place and the action moves very fast. It has that Cold War-spy novel-like detailing in introducing the reader to varied landscapes but it is never overdone. In that it is sufficiently modern in its storytelling. The imprint is a mix of #crimebooks written originally in English and in translation with the focus being on outstanding thrillers. The editors are not averse at publishing debut writers or bestsellers or even reissuing out-of-print titles. It is a fine balance between the old and the new curated by editors who obviously love this genre. Some of the prominent titles on this list include, “#TheHonjinMurders” by #SeishiYokomizo and “Three-Fifths” by #JohnVerger. ( https://pushkinpress.com/all-books/pushkin-vertigo/ )
The Others was a bestseller in Hebrew. It is Sarah Blau’s fourth novel but her first to be translated into English. It has been brilliantly translated into English by Daniella Zamir, who also translated #DovAlfon‘s fabulous A Long Night in Paris.
For those who enjoy reading crime fiction, Pushkin Vertigo is an imprint that they must regularly check out.
Samrat Choudhary’s latest book, The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra ( HarperCollins India) is a travelogue in the North East of India tracking the magnificent river. It is so stunning in its beauty. It looks like an inland sea but its a river. There are points that the opposite bank is not visible. Samrat Choudhary and his friend Akshay Mahajan decide to embark on this exciting epic journey of 2000 kms in East India. The North East of India comprises of seven states. The topography of these states vary from the flat plains of Assam to the hill states of Meghalaya, Nagaland, Arunachal, Tripura and Mizoram. Manipur is a mix of plain and hills. Each state has its distinctive culture. It is truly fascinating travelling in this part of India.
The Brahmaputra is very critical to the settlements in this region and has played a pivotal role for centuries. It is revered and feared. It sustains life. It is also part of the local myths and legends.
The North East of India is defined as a region but it has incredible diversity and character. It is meant to be experienced. Samrat X ‘s writing in The Braided River meanders gently recounting the places he visits, topography, meeting people, sharing their histories — the old and the more recent ones of insurgency, the CAA and NRC agitation etc. It is not easy to tell the story of this vast region in an old-fashioned linear fashion. It has to be the way Samrat tells it. He takes you along on the journey while filling in the blanks in one’s knowledge with local gupshup combined with historical details. At times, he quotes from other sources to contextualise a story or a place. It is not an easy task as trying to tell the socio-politcal-history of this region is akin to walking through a minefield. Samrat seems to pull it off.
Much of his narrative does share details in his inimitable chatty style that I can almost hear him reading it out aloud in my head. It is so clear. His descriptions of the place are vivid. Fortunately modern readers have the Internet to immediately look up references. But for me, reading this book brought back a flood of memories. My father/ Romesh Bhattacharji had been posted by the Central government in Shillong ( the capital of Meghalaya) for nearly five and a half years. As a result, we have travelled extensively in the region. So Samrat’s journey on the Ledo Road/Stillwell Road, meeting the Kachins, Digboi, seeing the Lake of No Return in the far distance, visiting Dibrugarh, the tea estates, the opium cultivation, visiting Wild Grass in Kaziranga, Jorhat, and Tezpur are all very familiar. And if we did not accompany dad, then he ensured that he told us so many stories or shared pictures of his travels while touring the seven states that we became acquainted with them so well. Almost as if we had been there ourselves. Hence many of the places Samrat mention come alive for me as well.
For readers unfamiliar with the region, a better map could have been used instead of the tiny one at present. It plots the main cities Samrat refers to but it is not easy to read. Travelogues like “The Braided River” belong to a rich literary tradition of documenting a region. Words are critical. But in modern tellings such as this, perhaps more maps and line sketches could have been considered as tip-ins in most of the chapters. It would have added to the production cost but it would have been a good investment. The two sets of coloured photographs used at present are fine but the production is of such poor quality that they don’t do justice either to the photographer’s composition or to the region. Pity. Perhaps a standalone website dedicated to this book where extracts of each chapter are illustrated by more photographs could be considered. It has the potential of becoming excellent reference material if curated well.
The Braided River is a book that will standout for years to come as a seminal piece of writing about the history of the North East of India where one common factor is the Brahmaputra. There have been so many twists and turns in the socio-poltical landscape in recent decades that an updated, single volume, reportage from the region was sorely needed. Many travelogues, documentaries and films have been made on the river. It is time Samrat Choudhary wrote a new script.
Bessie Smithby Jackie Kay, Scotland’s National poet is a biography of a legendary blues singer. It is also a fascinating account of the history of blues, jazz, and what is today the popular form, Chicago Blues when the male musicians hijacked the scene with their acoustic guitars. Jackie Kay develops the scene brilliantly by pointing out that the blueswomen sang whatever they wanted to. They were ruthless while talking about men. These women were like a band of travelling musicians. They belonged to troupes. The most famous being Ma Rainey. All the women had “Smith” as a surname to give them some legitimacy as well as anonymity. These women were like a sisterhood that was powerful and knew they were good at what they did — singing. They also had no qualms being open about their sexuality even if they had male partners. They made lots of money and shared it generously. Their songs were the equivalent of modern poetry. They were also the first to adopt new technology like gramophones and made recordings.
Bessie Smith signed a lucrative eight-year contract with Columbia Records between 1923-1931. She recorded 160 songs, twenty a year! On 15 February 1923, the Queen of Blues, recorded ‘Downhearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’. She arrived at the studio ‘tall, fat and scared to death’. It took her many attempts to make the wax recordings. She was probably nervous or stone cold sober. As Jackie Kay speculates, “She possibly mistrusted the whole technological thing, such as it was then. She might have felt that she was being had. But she soon got the hang of it. Humphrey Lyttelton says, ‘The singing that was transmitted to wax was, from the outset, mature, steeped in harsh experience and formidable commanding.'”
The sales of ‘Downhearted Blues’ — three quarters of million copies in six months — far exceeded the sales of any other blues record. The black public were eager to purchase records through mail-order catalogues, record stores in black neighbourhoods or even through the Pullman porters. The blues sold both in the North and in the South and became part of the record companies’ ‘race records’ series. These were issues directed solely to the black purchaser. By the end of 1922 Race records were being distributed in many Northern cities and as far south as Alabama.
In the South the blues sold to black and white people; in the more ‘liberal’ North, they just sold to black people. It was possible to have been white in the North in the 1920s and never have known that blues records even existed. This is because in the North, advertising of so-called ‘Race records’ was restricted to the black press, and the distribution of the records took place only in black areas. Southerners, though, became part of the ‘race market’. White and black people, though segregated, crowded into those tents to hear the blues.
During the Columbia period, Bessie Smith worked alongside some of the best musicians of her day: Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Longshaw, Jack Teagarden, James P. Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, and Joe Smith. But the most exciting combination musically was Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, in those sessions they recorded on 14 January 1925. ‘Reckless Blues’, “Cold in Hand Blues’, ‘Sobbin Hearted Blues’, and ‘You’ve Been A Good Ole Wagon’ were all recorded that day. It has turned out to be the most memorable dates in the history of blues.
Singers at that time were never paid a royalty but paid as usable side. These amounts varied depending on the musician’s popularity but Bessie Smith could earn as much as $250. She was the best paid of all the classic blueswomen. The women singers who came after her like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald were known as Jazzwomen who sang a different kind of music. Five of Bessie Smith’s records were on the market, and her reputation had grown beyond all expectations. But success would not last. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression, a new combo style of blues became fashionable. ‘Urban Blues’ or ‘Chicago Blues’ then dominated the scene from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. The likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf took off; the classic blues singers were replaced by men with acoustic guitars.
In the 1920s she who loved to party, participated in many ‘rent parties’ or parlor socials. This was home entertainment. You could get into any of them from 10 cents to a dollar. The other guests were ordinary, working-class people: tradesmen, housemaid, laundry workers, seamstresses, porter, elevator ‘boys’. But writers and artists and singers loved to go along too. On a Saturday night in Harlem, the music pounder out of the open windows. There was always an upright piano, a guitar, a trumpet and sometimes a snare drum. Rent parties originated in the South, where rents were so high that people had to organise such socials to pay their landlords. You needed no social standing to throw a rent party. All you needed was a piano player and a few dancing girls. Drinks were bathtub gin and whiskey. Food was fried fish, chicken, corn bread etc. Music was played by some of the masters and students of Harlem stride piano. Dancing — the Charleston, the black bottom, the monkey hunch, the mess around, the shimmy, the bo-hog, the camel, the skate and the buzzard — went on till the break of day. You were not regarded as much of a jazz pianist unless, wherever else you appeared, you played the rent-party circuit. You earned your spurs not only by sending the dancers into flights of ecstasy but also by ‘cutting’, or outperforming, rival piano players. Duke Ellington, Bill Basie — not yet Count— a young Fats Waller and Bessie Smith enjoyed these rent parties. One of Bessie’s best-known songs, ‘Gimme a Pigfoot’, written by Leola ‘Coot’ Grant and Wesley Wilson and performed with Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman in 1933 is about rent parties.
Bessie Smith wrote blues for herself to reflect the experience of ordinary working-class people. The blues she sang and the blues she wrote often contained elements of burlesque, music hall and vaudeville which reflected her background as a young girl who had first joined a travelling troupe in 1912. A lot of her blues were raunchy, bawdy, double-entendre-filled, sexy sings, as well as tragic, painful and depressing. Bessie’s blues moved people.
According to Jackie Kay, “Her voice just got to them. Perhaps she reminded them of the past, of losses, of longing. Something in her voice went way back into a deeper past. Her voice seemed to contain history, tragedy, slavery, without self-pity. It had the ability to stretch beyond even the lyrics of her blues into something more complex. Her blues were universal, but also deeply personal. They allowed her to express the whole range of her complex personality– the wild promiscuous drunken side and the depressed, insecure, lonely side.”
Bessie Smith became poorer when the blues that she knew began to die. Columbia Records dropped her on 20 Nov 1931. Jackie Kay uses terms like hedonistic and self-destructive for Bessie Smith which are probably apt descriptors given her alcoholism, temper and impetuous nature. Nothing fazed her. She did exactly as she pleased. Once she confronted the Ku Klux Klan single-handedly. In July 1927, Concord, North Carolina, she was performing in a tent when her musicians discovered that the Ku Klux Klan had removed most of the tent stakes. Her prop boys ran away seeing the white-sheeted men, but Bessie Smith blasted the Ku Klux men:
“I’ll get the whole damn tent out of here if I have to. You just pick up those sheets and run.” The Klansmen, shocked, stand and gawp whilst the Empress shouts obscenities at them until finally they disappear into the darkness. “I ain’t never heard of such shit,” says the Empress, walking over to the prop boys. “And as for you, you ain’t nothing but a bunch of sissies.” Then she goes right back into that same tent for her encore.
Sorted.
Bessie Smith died as a result of the injuries she got in a horrific road accident. She had thousands of mourners at her funeral. Yet her pallbearers were hired. None of the people she had helped over the years came forward. Her ex-husband, Jack Gee, siphoned away her money and despite there being two fund raisers for the specific purpose in 1948 and in the early 1950s he let her remain in an unmarked grave for 33 years. Then in 1970, Columbia Records reissued her five albums. They won two Grammy awards. At this time, it was asked by the public if Bessie Smith could have a headstone now. So, another fund raiser was organised. But it took only two phone calls to get the money. One donor was Bessie Smith’s former cleaning girl, now a rich woman, Juanita Green, who owned two nursing homes and the singer Janis Joplin. Coincidentally, Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose on 4 Oct 1970, the date of Bessie Smith’s funeral.
Bessie Smith is utterly fabulous. It is an excellent example of a biography. Jackie Kay hero worships Bessie Smith but as a professional poet herself recognises the challenges and joys of being an artist. Jackie Kay describes Bessie Smith as a strong woman associated with style, glamour, freedom, strong woman, a real queen, she drank, she cussed, she spent money, she partied, she fought, she was beaten up regularly by her second husband, and was a bisexual. She lived life on her own terms. Money just became another expression of her impulsive, party-loving, binge-drinking generosity. She spent money liberally on her friends and family but was not known to treat her musicians kindly.
There are so many ways in which the author’s and the subject’s professional and personal interests intertwine. Bessie Smith is written brilliantly. At the same time, it is an excellent historical account of blues. Faber Books imprint that focuses on music publishes excellent stuff. No wonder they once had hired Pete Townshend of The Who as Commissioning Editor. This is book is a fine example of this excellent list.
Sonora Jha’s How to Raise a Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto is what it sets out to be — to raise a feminist son ( Penguin Randhom House India). She recounts those essential parts of her life that can be justifiably linked to her being a feminist / feminist awakening. From the incident of bathing on the railway platform in a tiny bathing area constructed for male pilgrims to analysing the violence she witnessed or experienced first-hand at home. The desire to nurture a child with her refreshing outlook on life but always encountering patriarchal structures. Whether it was in her then-husband’s wish to relocate to Singapore for better career prospects without any thought to Sonora’s flourishing career as a journalist in Bangalore. She quit it. Became a full-time mother who loved her son dearly but was surrounded by baby babble 24×7, unlike her husband who worked in an office or later in the evening attended social events whose invitations were not necessarily extended to Sonora. Soon, with her husband’s encouragement she applied for a doctorate programme in the United States, assuming that this would be the first step in their move to the country. Instead, after a horrific car accident that left her incapacitated for months, confined to a wheelchair with a little boy, her husband paid her a visit but declared that he preferred living on in Singapore. Through it all, Sonora redefined her life and understanding of what it takes to bring up a son who would not be like the men in her life — violent men, sexual predators, hostile men, racist men, misogynist men etc. It seemed like minefield as systemic patriarchy reared its ugly head everywhere.
She spells out the hideous ways in which men perpetrate trouble upon women. Whether it is the nonchalant manner in which her ex-husband chose not to move to USA with her, the violence of all the other men she encountered. Much of this is never discussed in decent middle-class houses as if it is an internal matter and no one should be privy to it. What is truly maddening is how much middle-class women suffer because of the socio-economic space they occupy; it is presumed that all is well with them and their lives. Many times, it is not. It is worse than a golden cage. It is precisely why books like this are essential and add to the existing body of women’s literature. It is in the documentation of these tiny details and sharing of experiences that hopefully more and more women will be empowered. Perhaps even men who witness women in their lives being abused are equally emboldened to take action. Who knows? More and more it is imperative that stories need to be shared and not doctored. It is critical to share.
Slowly, her recovery period from the car accident that left her with a crushed ankle and many other injuries, coincided with her discovery that it is not demeaning in any manner for a strong, independent woman like herself to seek assistance from others. Steadily she created a sisterhood, a well spring, a nurturing ring, that enabled her to heal and grow. It was also a web of strength and power that stepped in to look after her son, even if it meant admonishing him without hurting his feelings. These tiny, tiny events added up to make Sonora what she is today — a confident, well-loved, highly respected academic and mother. She never hides the importance of balancing her professional and personal lives.
She brought up her son in this positive environment even though at times it was challenging financially and emotionally. She made mistakes that she is quick to admit such as her bad second marriage with a white, racist man. In her inimitable style of being generous and seeing positive in others, despite being at the receiving end of much brutality, Sonora chose to date and ultimately, marry this man. But his inability to understand or even comprehend the need to be sensitive to others, especially to people of colour, confirmed his outlook as a supremely privileged white man. When he is unable to understand her misery at racist incidents, and she quits the marriage, even though it was not yet a year. This happened close on the heels of her son trying to enter their home and having the police called upon him by the neighbours who could not understand why an Asian boy was trying to enter the home through a window. (He had forgotten the front door keys.) To the police who came and the neighbour, they could only see a burglar and not a resident as this was a white man’s house. The prejudice that exists inherently in society is terrifying. Something that Sonora and her son could perceive but not her white husband. This was another event in her life that made her resolve stronger to have a son who is sensitive and understanding towards others, rather than entitled. The book ends with an adorable account of an exchange between Gibran and his maternal grandmother, Nani. Sonora’s mother is in denial regarding stories about her daughter having been molested while she was growing up in India. Her mother is convinced that Sonora is lying and trots these stories out as attention-seeking tactics. Listening to the heated conversation, Gibran asks his Nani gently to believe Sonora. When his Nani refuses, Gibran points out wisely that she may consider why Sonora never told her mother, perhaps the fact that social structures are give precedence to boys as opposed to girls. A fact that even Gibran has had first-hand experience of as he is “treated like a god”. He reasons with his Nani that perhaps his mother, Sonora, found it hard to share the truth with her own mother for precisely this reason – she would not be believed. He pleads with his Nani to believe Sonora at least once.
She outlines her definition of feminism. It consists of compassion, empathy and kind people. It is labelled as feminism as it focuses upon half of humanity – the female condition, It is also alert to misogyny. Feminism is about love. She advocates strongly that boys are taught this way of loving too. It will grow and take new forms. This is a pertinent point that she raises as it also addresses the challenges women feel about being labelled as a feminist or not, even though everything in their action points to being a feminist.
Sonora has written about a hard subject. The manner in which she has negotiated the personal spaces and extrapolated learnings to share with the world is truly admirable. The pain she went through while writing this book is unimaginable. It is hard to define How to Raise a Feminist Son. No wonder the subtitle of the book is “a memoir and manifesto”. It has a box of instructions/ exercises at the end of every chapter and a list of resources in the appendix.
It will become classic reference material in gender studies and other disciplines. It helps answer many questions as well as encourages readers to introspect. The manual-like element in the book may not appeal to gender specialists but it will prove to be a handy guide to many who are keen to explore these areas but too shy to ask. This book is written with such an assured confidence despite the violence and abuse Sonora has faced from men within her inner circle. There is almost a motivational quality to the book. She includes a lot of PoC narratives and other intersectionalities. It will encourage others to speak up for themselves and focus upon raising the next generation of more empathetic and sensitive boys. This is irrespective of whatever intersectionality they may inhabit. It cuts across cultures and races and formulates a brand of feminism that borrows heavily from the feminist literary canons in India and America. She focuses upon creating her own feminist village, a sisterhood, a collective, that saw her through some tough years. It is interesting that Sonora focuses on this aspect as many strong women are encouraged to be a part of a sisterhood but at the same time fend for themselves. Rarely do women ask help of each other. It is their one weakness. It is not pride but a form of self-sufficiency and self-preservation to prove to society that as single mothers or independent women, they can survive. It is extremely brave of Sonora to document the physical and sexual abuse that she has faced.
I have truly liked this book. Read it. It speaks to everyone.
