Nothing — said Professor Stein — it tells us a great deal about Saudi Arabia.
Professor Stein, as you know, the Hanson robot, Sophia was awarded citizenship of Saudi Arabia in 2017. She has more rights than any Saudi woman. What does this tell us about aritifical intelligence?
…
Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?
On the contrary, said Professor Stein, AI need not replicate outmoded gender prejudices. If there is no biological male or female, then –
…
She says, Professor Stein, you are the acceptable face of AI, but in fact the race to create what you call true artificial intelligence is a race run by autistic-spectrum white boys with poor emotional intelligence and frat-dorm social skills. In what way will their brave new world be gender neutral — or anything neutral?
…
Even if, even if the first superintelligence is the worst possible iteration of what you might call the white male autistic default programme, the first upgrade by the intelligence itself will begin to correct such errors. And why? Because we humans will only programme the future once. After that, the intelligence we create will manage itself.
And us.
Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein: A Love Storyis a modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankstein. The story begins at the Villa Diodati (1816) on the shores of Lake Geneva a well-known scene for it is the one in which 19-year-old Mary Shelley conceived of her novel Frankenstein. Two hundred years on Frankisstein is about Ry, short for Mary, Shelley, a transgender medical professional self-described as “hybrid”, meeting Victor Stein, a celebrated professor of artificial intelligence, during a visit to a cryonics facility in the Arizona desert — a setting that exists in reality called Alcor Life Extension Foundation but is never mentioned by name in the novel. there is a professional and a sexual attraction between the two scientists.
The novel makes this overarching connection between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with modern science advancing sufficiently to enable those who wish to, to have a sex change to the application of AI. Frankisstein starts off really very well but after a while fizzles out particularly when The Romantics are clumsily described. Byron and Polidori come away nowhere like the characters one has known them to be and the Shelleys too are an odd couple. The descriptions of Mary Shelley come across as too modern or more as if a twenty-first century interpretation has been imposed upon her character.
Nevertheless artifical intelligence is gaining significance by leaps and bounds every single day. Real life is rapidly morphing into something out of a science fiction story. AI research is helping these initiatives in many, many ways. Some more apparent than others but AI is most certainly here to stay. “The world is at the start of something new,” Winterson writes, “what will happen … has begun.” It is a brave new world but with its many challenges. The crux of Frankisstein is well articulated in the conversation quoted above. It is an unnerving thought when expressed so clearly to have a new world created by a handful of AI scientists propogating their own biases — knowingly or unknowingly, we will never know!
Jeanette Winterson explores her pet themes in Frankisstein of gender, sexuality, and individual freedom. These issues are gaining importance in a technologically driven world. It is rapidly transforming the reality as we know it into something that is increasingly unpredictable as the evergrowing and controlling presence of computers increase in the human world.
Frankisstein is a curious novel that some may find readable and others a tad alarming. But it is a novel meant to be read.
I am a woman, but I am also a Muslim and a person of colour, and these identities cannot be separated. I can’t set aside being a woman of colour when it comes to being a feminist and I can’t set aside being a Muslim woman when it comesto being a feminist.
It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race is a superb collection of essays exploring what it means to be a Muslim woman today. The anthology has been edited by Mariam Khan. The idea was sparked off by British politician David Cameron’s comment in the Daily Telegraph which reported him to consider Muslim women to be traditionally submissive. It sparked off a Twitter storm where #TraditionallySubmissive quickly spread. While watching this annoyance unfold online, Mariam Khan realised she had to do something as she kept reading these perceptions “about” Muslim women. It resulted in this magnificent anthology. In her introduction Mariam Khan says:
It’s Not About the Burqa brings together Muslim women’s voices. It does not represent the experiences of every Muslim woman or claim to cover every single issue faced by Muslim women. It’s not possible to create that book. But this book is a start, a movement: we Muslim woman are reclaiming and rewriting our identity. Here are essays about the hijab* and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about queer identity, about sex, about the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country, and about how Islam and feminism go hand in hand. Every essay in this book is unfinished, because each one is the beginning of a very necessary conversation.
*It’s worth pointing out at this stage that though ‘hijab’ is now more commonly used to describe a scarf that covers the head, in the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ denotes ‘partition’ or ‘curtain’. ‘Hijab’ can also refer to a standard of modesty.
It’s Not About the Burqa is a magnificent book for the stories it shares are no different from any other feminist publication. The preoccupations of the contributors are like that of any other woman — challenges of being a single woman, voicing an honest opinion and facing the consequences of it, single parenting, childcare, sexuality, negotiating life while encountering patriarchal structures on a daily basis, cultural patriarchy and #MeToo. It even recognises the problematic challenges created by “Well-meaning feminists [who] are often the people who perpetuate an exclusionary feminism that centres their experience as universal.” Most importantly the contributors to this book do manage to address the ignorant remark made by David Cameron and one that is unfortunately echoed by many others too. The essayists do it magnificently by sharing their experiences and opinions. The essayists have strong voices that will resonate with many readers, not necessarily only Muslims. As Mona Eltahawy says in her essay upon discovering feminist books in her university library in Jeddah:
Those books were irresistible. And they terrified me. So much so that I would pick them up, read a few pages, put them down in fear and walk away, only to be drawn back again the next day. I was terrified because I knew on a visceral level that those books — that feminism — would unravel something that I needed, something that would change me forever.
It’s Not About the Burqa will do this for many more readers too.
I had been prepared for ugliness because that’s what grows in India, sprouts and flourishes like the hair on a dead person. But the space in which you from adult to child, that leaf-thin whiplash, that I had not expected.
…
I do not need the freedom I imagine I need.
Dancer, poet, writer and literary critic Tishani Doshi’s second novel Small Days and Nights is about thirty-something Grace who is half-Indian, half-Italian. Upon her mother’s death she discovers she has a younger sister Lucia. Lucia has Down’s syndrome which their Italian father insists on referring to as “Mongoloid”. Grace decides to take charge of her life and one of her first decisions is to move her sister home. This despite protests from Lucia’s Teacher at the home. The sisters move to a home their mother had bought many years earlier for a song. Now it is considered to be prime property. Ten acres of land with a detached house by the sea. Grace relies upon a young girl from the village called Mallika to help her manage the house and Lucia and the many stray dogs they seem to have become responsible for. This is a domestic scene that is quietly idyllic. It is a feminist utopia with no men in the household. Although men from the village come to Grace regularly seeking funds and offering unsolicited advice. The sisters also get unwelcome visitors like hostile property brokers.
Small Days and Nights focuses on a tiny slice of domesticity, a world that is usually invisible to most, at least in literature but is all around us. There is something reassuring to know that women’s fiction can make matters of “little” importance such as “caregiving”. Even the frustration that Grace feels for Lucia one day and vents it upon her younger sister by becoming physically violent is understandable to those who are caregivers 24×7. Caregiving is a relentless and an unforgiving responsibility but to those on the outside incidents like this became an occasion to pass judgement. Whereas it is far more complicated than it looks. The outcome is that Lucia is taken away from Grace’s care and back to the home.
While it has the makings of an internationally acclaimed novel there are moments in Small Days and Nights which are bewildering such as the act of Grace taking Lucia out of the home where she was well provided for and Lucia was obviously at ease. Why was it necessary to remove Lucia from her comfortable environs? Or an equally inexplicable act of Grace taking off for long weekends to the nearest city, Chennai, to be with her friends. Wanting time for oneself is a self-preservation act which is necessary for every caregiver but taking time out like this can only be managed if there are reliable people to step in while the primary caregiver is away. Caregiving is a responsibility and not a noble act. It is a constant in one’s life and impossible to take a break from even with support staff to help with the minute-to-minute supervision. And as Grace discovers to her dismay that once she was away Lucia was not being provided for instead she had been abandoned by the maid. Another cause for friction between Teacher, the villagers and Grace.
Small Days and Nights has a way of consuming one with a seemingly insignificant women’s domestic drama but lingers for much longer for the larger issues it raises such as what is the definition of a household, of a family, of relationships, of love etc? The responsibility of caregiving is a thankless task where every caregiver needs their safety valve moment without also having to tackle the judgement passed upon them by outsiders. It forces conversations upon readers about women and their world that would otherwise not under ordinary circumstances be considered as worthwhile.
‘If one lives in a foreign country,’ he said with some pride, and felt as he had felt when they championed the cause of his conchie son, warmed by the experience of tolerance and sanity. ‘My country,’ he repeated. ‘I feel at home in it, more so than I would in my own.’
‘All the more reason not to offend,’ she said bluntly.
…
‘Which country?’ demanded Abdul.
‘Well, England,’ admitted Srinivas.
‘England! What’s the matter with you, man, you can’t think about anything else?’
‘I suppose I could, but why? This is where I live, in England.’
‘It’s your country like?’
‘It’s become.’
‘You think so? You think they’ll let you?;
‘Yes.’
‘Then you better stop,’ said Abdul, ‘because they won’t. the British won’t allow it. First thing that goes wrong it’ll be their country, and you go back, nigger, to yours, back from where you came from.’
Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man is about an ageing Brahmin Sriniwas who emigrated to Britain in the early part of the twentieth century. Later his wife, Vasantha, joined him. His two sons were born and brought up in the country. He was a spice trader. During the second world war, he “lost” his sons. The younger one, Seshu, literally when he died in a bombing attack. The older one, Laxman, found himself a wife and moved to Plymouth where he preferred to be more “integrated” than his own parents had ever been able to achieve. Soon after the war Vasantha succumbed to TB. And then the story continues about how Sriniwas the lonely widower tries to navigate the changing socio-political landscape of this country where he has spent nearly half a century.
I re-read The Nowhere Man in complete disbelief. When I read it at first many years ago, it was a story about an Indian immigrant growing old in UK facing some racism and being shunned by his own son. Published in 1973, set in Nov 1968, a few months after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and a year after the Beatles song “Nowhere Man”. By all accounts that I have dug up on the Internet it was not exactly well received yet the book paved the way for a manuscript like Rushdie’s Midnight Children to be accepted. But reading Nowhere Man now makes it seem so prescient. No wonder it is being republished by Pete Ayrton, formerly of Serpent’s Tail, now at Small Axes in August 2019. Some of the dialogues in it are sharp — much like the racist slurs one hears being shared on social media. Kamala Markandaya did not mince any words when it came to writing about the immigrant experiences in the early 1970s. It is a novel that sweeps through the twentieth century. For us now it will be considered a “classic”, a “historical” novel but at the time of publication it was most certainly a contemporary novel. There is a whiff of the old given the time it was written in too. Writing today is edgier, faster paced, many more details about etched in but this is a cross between the nineteenth century novel and the emerging modern novel. Also upon reading it at in 2019, years after the aggressive promotion of immigrant voices, diversity and inclusivity, our reading sensibilities are little dulled. We no longer seem to expect “English Literature” to be all white but to be inclusive of diverse voices. There is colour. There is Women’s Prize, BAME, Jhalak Prize, Kit de Wal promoting publishing and encouraging new writers etc. And this is a radical change in publishing in the last decade or so, not much earlier than that. So within this context to be re-reading Kamala Markandaya is quite an eye-opener about the immigrant experience. Of course after that there have been many more but this particular book is a great example! Here are two fabulous links about The Nowhere Man: Paris Review( 2018) and London Fictions ( 2013, 2018).
On the day the winner of Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 is to be announced in London, perhaps it is befitting to remember this extraordinary novelist who would have probably won such an award hands down, if it had existed then!
Cordis Paldano’s debut novel for children The Dwarf, The Girl and the Holy Goat is a must read. Story apart, the pace, the rhythm, the storytelling – everything comes together stupendously. This is a new voice to look out for in the coming years.
Here is an interview conducted via email:
1. What is it about storytelling that fascinates
you?
CP: For me, a good story is one that draws the audience in… It removes them
from the banality of their everyday lives and transports them to another world.
It moves them, outrages them, delights them… and then when the story is over
and behind you, you are a little bit wiser than before.
We may not
always succeed but I think that is what storytellers aim for. Because we have
all been in the audience and we have all had great stories told to us and
because you want the play to go on, at some point you get up and start telling
a story of your own, because you don’t want to break the spell and because you
really think that this is the most valuable thing you can do with your life –
tell a story well.
I think of
storytelling as a vocation, a calling, so I tend not to put it on a pedestal.
But what I really find fascinating about it is how pervasive, ubiquitous and
absolute it is! Honestly, I don’t really know if there is anything is this
world which is not a story! Who you are is a story, your country is a story,
your religion is a story… (This is not to deny the validity or the truths
contained within those stories…on the contrary!)
I love the story
you’d written some time ago of your little girl coping with the death of her
great-grandmother. If I remember correctly, she finally comes to
terms with her absence by concluding that her badi nani has
become a bright star in the sky. The story never fails to move me for a host of
reasons, but it also illustrates two things beautifully. One, that stories are
how we make sense of the world around us and two, when we’re dead and gone,
that is all that will remain of us, we shall have become stories too, to those
left behind.
2. How does your work in theatre inform your
novel writing? What kind of theatre do you specialise in?
CP: I do not do
theatre any more. But for ten years of my life (soon after passing out of
school), theatre is nearly all that I did. I am very much a child of theatre
and so yeah, it does inform my novel writing in a big way. I approach writing
the way a good actor approaches theatre — give centre stage to the characters
and then wait patiently for them to tell their stories through you.
I guess
the kind of theatre we specialised in could be called ‘Physical Theatre’ though
we ourselves never used such jargon. The actors told stories mainly through
their bodies. Make-up, costumes, sets and dialogues were all secondary, the
primary storytelling tool was the actor’s body. So naturally all the actors
received frequent training in Kathakali, Kalaripayattu and Therukoothu. The theatre company that I used to be a part of –
Indianostrum Théâtre, continues to stage plays in Pondicherry under the aegis
of the brilliant Franco-Indian director Koumarane Valavane. When we started
out, Indianostrum was nothing more than a rundown shed near the beach, and now,
it has become an indelible part of the cultural landscape of Pondicherry!
3. Would you venture into adult fiction as well?
CP: Oh yeah, for
sure, in a decade or two… once I’ve written some good children’s books!
4. What drew you to children’s literature?
CP: I
love children and I understand them best. I know dozens of kids who are crazy
about books whereas I hardly ever meet an adult who gets excited about novels.
So as far as I’m concerned, I don’t understand why any author would bother to
write for adults at all!
Jokes
apart, because I grew up speaking many languages (like most Indians do), the
choice to write in English was neither obvious nor easy. Children’s literature
still allows you to get away with a less than adequate grasp of the language.
Of course, the quality of language matters in children’s fiction, but I don’t
think authors necessarily have to master the language. Another reason I write
for children is because the narrative structure of children’s novels closely
resembles the Aristotelian dramatic structure that I am more familiar with.
5. Every storyteller has a soft corner for a
particular kind of story. There is a vast gamut of stories to be told but
what are the few you wish to play with and retell?
CP: I’m not
really sure, I’m still discovering myself as a writer. When I started writing
my first novel, all I originally had were the true stories of three women from
three different countries – one was a child, another a young lady and the third
an old woman – I was inspired by these three women and really wanted to share
their stories with others! So I then went on to weave a larger narrative
encompassing these three stories — the story of a girl seeking to save her
mother and rescue her goat, and this little girl draws strength from these
three stories in her moments of crisis. And by the way, the central characters
of my second and third novels (still in progress) are also strong-willed girls,
so I think maybe that’s a story that I’d like to tell. Stories with strong
female protagonists. Another theme that has emerged consistently in all three
of the novels (much to my surprise) is collective violence. At some pivotal
point in each of the three works, a mob goes berserk and threatens the safety
of the main characters. So ‘collective violence’ also is a theme that I’m
perhaps interested in or I don’t know… maybe that theme is just a reflection of
the times we live in!
6. Does the medium of communication impact the
story being told? Do you make minor changes to your styles of narration
depending on the medium?
CP: Oh yes, each
medium is like a language of its own. So a story told on the stage would be
very different from a story written on paper. Usually, the story grows
organically from the medium and I’ve so far never had to translate a story from
one medium to another. But if I had to, I guess major changes would be required
– you’d have to rethink the story in the new language.
7. Would you ever explore film to tell stories
and I do not necessarily mean a mere recording of your story performances?
CP: What a
delightful idea! I’d love to explore film but before that I’d like to gain some
mastery over the craft of writing that I’ve just ventured into… By all
appearances, it seems like it will take anyone a few lifetimes before they can
achieve some level of mastery in this craft!
8. How do you work on the voices of the
characters? Do they play out as you write them out or do you see them first as dramatized
versions before writing them?
CP: Hmm…character
voices… I don’t think I’m particularly good at it and it’s an area that I’d
like to work on but I don’t really know how, because yes, I see the characters
and the story as a dramatized version before writing them. Plot, setting,
characters and their voices, all come in a large ‘take it or leave it’ bundle
and I don’t know yet how to delicately unwrap the bundle, perform a surgical
strike and then seal it up again. Maybe I’ll learn or better still – I won’t
have to learn, it’ll all get better on its own as time goes on!
9. The pace and timing of your debut novel for
children The Dwarf, The Girl and the Holy Goat is superb. Did
you test parts of it on younger readers before publishing?
CP: Thank you! Your words mean a lot to me… No, it wasn’t tested on younger
readers before publishing.
10. What next?
CP: I’m very familiar with the Mahabharata but not so much the story of Ram. And so I decided to go through Valmiki’s Ramayana and as I was reading it, I got the idea for my second novel – the story of a little girl who absolutely wants to play the role of Ram in her school’s Ram Leela. Her story is interspersed with tales from the Ramayana, of the adventures of Hanuman and others.
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018 was awarded to Jayant Kaikini along with his translator Tejaswini Niranjana for their book No Presents Please. The winner was announced by the DSC Prize jury chair Rudrangshu Mukherjee at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet on 25th Jan, 2019, where eminent writer Ruskin Bond presented the trophy to the winning author and translator. Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada author and dramatist who has won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi prize four times. He has also written regular newspaper columns, screenplays, dialogues and lyrics for Kannada films. Tejaswini Niranjana is a cultural theorist, translator and author. She is currently professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, Tejaswini Niranjana is a Sahitya Akademi prize-winning translator.
In the citation, jury
Chair Rudrangshu Mukherjee, said, “The jury decided to award the DSC Prize for
South Asian Literature 2018 to No
Presents Please by Jayant Kaikini which has been translated by Tejaswini
Niranjana and published by Harper Perennial. The jury was deeply impressed by
the quiet voice of the author through which he presented vignettes of life in
Mumbai and made the city the protagonist of a coherent narrative. The Mumbai that
came across through the pen of Kaikini was the city of ordinary people who
inhabit the bustling metropolis. It is a view from the margins and all the more
poignant because of it. This is the first time that this award is being given
to a translated work and the jury would like to recognize the outstanding
contribution of Tejaswini Niranjana, the translator.”
The six
shortlisted authors and books in contention for the DSC Prize this year were Jayant Kaikini: No Presents Please (Translated by
Tejaswini Niranjana, Harper Perennial, HarperCollins India), Kamila Shamsie: Home
Fire (Riverhead Books, USA and Bloomsbury, UK), Manu Joseph: Miss
Laila Armed And Dangerous (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins, India), Mohsin
Hamid: Exit West (Riverhead Books, USA and Hamish Hamilton, Penguin
Random House, India), Neel Mukherjee: AState Of Freedom (Chatto
& Windus, Vintage, UK and Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, India) and
Sujit Saraf: Harilal & Sons (Speaking Tiger, India)
No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani cafes to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness. In this book, cracks in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal meets the everyday.
Jayant Kaikini, author of the DSC Prize-winning book No Presents Please, reading from the book in Kannada at the Award Ceremony, Kolkata, January 2019
Here are excerpts from an interview with Jayant
Kaikini conducted via email.
JBR: There is a loveliness of
everyday life in your stories which convey the variety of people who live in Mumbai
and yet you manage to capture the quietness of each person. How do you manage
this so beautifully? Do you revise your stories often?
JK: I am deeply absorbed by the human world. May be there is a
collective calm deep within, which binds us all and at the same time liberates
us too. I don’t revise or chisel my stories. I write with a pen. I don’t type.
JBR: Are you a people
watcher? How do you build characters especially of the
women?
JK: We all are extensions of each other, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. We
make sense only in the context of each other. Every individual is special.
There is no deliberate attempt to build any character. I create an open space
for them to evolve and grow on their own.
JBR: How do you develop plot in a
short story? How do you manage to keep the tension in a storyline?
JK: It’s not an essay or a feature writing or a film script. Yashwant Chittal,
eminent Kannada writer (whose novel Shikari
is available in English translation now), used to say ‘I don’t write what I
know. I write to know’. I belong to that school. You must get lost to find something new.
JBR: Why Mumbai? It is a massive
melting pot of languages, cultures and dialects. I am guessing that the stories
in Kannada probably preserved some of these inflections but English does not
allow it. How do you come to terms with the flattening of the diction in
English?
JK: Because Mumbai is Mumbai. The most liberating urban space where you
feel free with a stranger. This city of plurality speaks in a ‘singular ‘
language of its own, like … “tereko, mereko”. I love it. Even the tone is
distinctly homogeneous. So it is difficult to get it exactly in Kannada too. In a way each story by itself is a new
language of images and expression.
JBR: Is the English translation
exactly like the Kannada text or were there modifications made to the
text?
JK: It’s exactly as the Kannada text, minimum deviation or modification.
Maybe because Tejaswini Niranjana too is a ‘Mumbai chauvinist’ like me and a
poet. Translation is always safe in the
hands of a poet. Since a poet is deeply tuned to ‘unsaid’ of the text.
JBR: Oral storytelling is a way
of life in India. In your case too although you speak Konkani, you opted to
write in Kannada and now are translated in to English. Do you think being
multi-lingual and familiar with diverse ways of telling stories informs the
literary structure of your printed short story? If so, how?
JK: Multilingual sensibility is a precious virtue of our country. More so in a big city. In Mumbai I speak in
my mother tongue Konkani at home, in Hindi with fellow commuters in the local
train, in English with colleagues at the workplace and in English with my
senior colleagues and come back home and wrote in Kannada. Dagdu parab,
Antariksha Kothari, Mogri, Mayee, Toofan, and Madhuvanti are not Kannada speakers
but they come into my stories and talk in Kannada. Isn’t it heartening? As Tejaswini points out, these stories break
the stereo type of perceiving individuals only with their linguistic identity.
As I said earlier, story itself is a new language.
JBR: Does the form of a short story
define your search for a subject?
JK: I don’t search
for subjects or stories. It is the other way. They are in search of me. Each
story has its own body and soul. The shape of fish is hydro-dynamically
designed for swimming. The shape of a bird is aerodynamically designed for
flying. In the same way form and structure of a story is designed by its soul.
JBR: Do you think there are
differences in the short story form of Kannada, Konkani and English?
JK: Differences have to be there. Ongoing life is ‘ unstructured’ and ‘non-literary’.
Through the window of a story we try to make sense out of it. So each window
has to be different in its viewpoint and aperture.
JBR: What is the principle of
selection of these stories as some date from the 1980s and some are as recent
as a few years ago? And yet the English translation are not arranged
chronologically. Why?
JK: Though a bunch of stories, this book collectively works as a larger
single fiction. Tejaswini and me impulsively picked 16 stories from my 5 anthologies,
based on their variety and resonance. Order in which they are compiled, too was
done jointly and impulsively.
JBR: What was the literature you were
familiar with as a child and in your early days as a writer?
JK: The reader and writer within me was born in 1970’s when Kannada
modernist movement was at its best. My father Gourish Kaikini was a writer, scholar,
thinker, journalist and staunch radical humanist. So there was an overdose of
literature at home and as a child I was not amused then. I started reading and
writing when I went away from home to another small town for my college
education. If I look back, I think it was to combat homesickness and culture
shock of switching over to English medium from Kannada medium in education. Reading,
writing, extracurricular activities nurtured my self-esteem in an unfriendly
new environment.
JBR: Who are the writers you admire
and who have influenced your writing?
JK: Yashwant Chittal, Shantinath Desai, A K Ramanujan, U. R.
Ananthamurthy, P. Lankesh, Shivram Karanth, Kuvempu, Bendre, Thirumalesh . . .
and many more have groomed and enriched my sensibilities and love for life and
literature.
JBR: What has it been like winning
the DSC Prize?
JK: It was unexpected but it is a good news for Kannada, short story form and the talent of translation. Any award is like a pat on the back of marathon runner from a cheering onlooker. You have to accept it with a smile and keep running. Pat is not the goal.
Graphic
novelist Sarnath Bannerjee’s Doab Dil is
an extraordinary piece of writing or “faction” as he would like to call it. It
is based on a few years of intense reading with a panel, sometimes a double
panel, dedicated to a writer – fiction, non-fiction, or even a lyricist. It is
an “extraordinary” book for every time you flip through it there is something
more to discover. The selection of the writers with the brown drawings is like
entering an accessible portal for a walk through a history of reading. A
reading that is a combination of the canonised writers along with the lesser
known. It is like browsing through the bookshelves at a library where the
familiar writers are placed with the lesser known names. Sarnath Bannerjee is
known for his graphic novels Corridor,
The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, The
Harappa Files, and All Quiet in Vikaspuri.
Yet Doab
Dil is a pivotal piece of work as it marks a transition from his early
works to something new and exciting to come. It is to be found as he mentions,
in the “spaces between the text and images form the central backbone of the
book”.
Here is
an extract from Sarnath Bannerjee’s introduction to the book:
…I was commissioned ninety murals for the new Deutsche
Bank building at Canary Wharf, London. The curators, Alastair Hicks and Mary
Findley, gave me an open brief, which is always a scary thing. After struggling
through many meetings at Winchester House, we finally came up with the idea of
making the whole building read like a book. Two years of intense reading
suddenly came into sharp focus. This was my chance to archive my readings, to
put my thoughts into drawings and, in doing so, preserve the books in my mind.
Doab Dil
brings together drawings and text like two converging rivers. The fertile tract
of land lying between two confluent rivers is called a doab (Persian do ab, two rivers).
It is a rich, draught-free, populous tract where civilizations are born. These
spaces between the text and images form the central backbone of the book. I
have used bits of text that I have assimilated from my reading and mixed them
with my own writing and interpreted them through drawings.
It is not surprising that authors find it easier to talk about reading than writing. Doab Dil is written in that spirit – a book by one reader to another.
******
Here is a lightly edited interview with Sarnath Bannerjee via e-mail.
JBR: Why and how was Doab Dil conceptualised? How long did it take to be made?
SB: Doab Dil is a book about reading than writing. A kind of deep and slow reading that produces wayward thoughts. Often reading provides a springboard for ideas, places and characters. It opens up one’s imagination beyond the merely personal.
There are some themes that Doab Dil explores. Gardens as places of enquiry as well as places where class and taste are played out. Dark Arcadias. Utopia and Suburbia. Originally the book was called “Common Utopias”. Sections of the book also look at work, enlightenment, history and end with a few popular songs that echo the theme of the book.
It took a couple of years to write and draw and many
years of reading.
JBR: You refer to the Olympic Games project in the introduction but I am unable to see how the two are connected except for the book concept?
SB: The end product for both the projects have been large murals, they were drawn with expanse and detail in mind. The drawings themselves are self-contained and often tell parallel stories. This is the formal connection between the two works.
Some of the characters that appear in Doab Dil seem to be distant cousins of
the characters that appear in my Olympic project. In both these, I have tried
to practice the discipline of the unsaid. I have used minimal
text but tried to expand the scope of the theme. In successful cases, the
frugal text has brought out details and complexity of a larger tonal
universe.
JBR: What made you switch to non-fiction reading?
SB: It wasn’t a conscious choice and i haven’t switched to non-fiction. Every now and then I stumble upon a good non-fiction book, I start reading it reluctantly and slowly get drawn into it. It just is not my first preference. Information and facts don’t interest me so much. Neither does opinions. But i have a great appetite for imagination. Imagination is proper therapy to get through life. If i need to know about something, like a city or a political event, i look for fiction around the theme.
Ever since I started working on my History Biennale
project six years back. I have been reading a lot of books on rhetoric and
history. That’s how it started. Also, many of my academic friends are
converting their thesis into books, that gives me a steady stream of books to
read.
JBR: Which was the first nonfiction book you read that got you hooked and spurred on this reading spree?
SB: The Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich, Cheese and Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, Mumbai Fables by Prof Gyan Prakash etc.
JBR: In Doab Dil what came first — the text or the illustrations?
SB: At first came reading, then pictures then the writing.
JBR: “Doab Dil” are two Hindustani words but the text is in English. Would you like to see this book translated into Urdu or Hindi?
SB: I would very much like to, I don’t like the fact that my books are only in English. I would most love to write in Bengali. I have a good sense of the language, but I am not yet confident about writing in Bengali although I believe an app exists that will help me in this task.
JBR: These read like meditative pieces on literature irrespective of form. You glean tit-bits from modern classics to contemporary pop across nations and cultures but they all work together beautifully. How did you make your selections?
SB: I think I have my mother’s instinct. Or so I think. I have work intuitively. I don’t think I am very clever about structure and nor do I have a head for analysis. I am mostly driven by a kind of reportage.
The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady by Deepa Agarwal and Tehmina Aziz Ayub is a good account of a fascinating woman. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life mirrors the history of the subcontinent. Namita Gokhale, writer and co-director, Jaipur Literature Festival, wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. The following extracts from the introduction have been published with permission of the publisher, Penguin Random House India.
****
Reflecting on how and what to write
while introducing this important biography, I wonder once again if it is one or
two books I have before me. This collaborative account, co-authored by Deepa
Agarwal and Tahmina Ayub, mirrors the fissures and fault lines that divided
Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life into two astonishingly symmetrical halves.
A well-researched portrayal of an intrepid and passionate woman, it presents
her personal narrative and political convictions, and mirrors the history of
the subcontinent, in a timeline truncated by the uncompromising contours
of the Radcliffe Line.
Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in
India on 8 July 1947. The eminent barrister was given all of five weeks to
divide up a nation, a culture, a people. His brief was to ‘demarcate the
boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the
contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’. A handful of men—five
persons in each ‘boundary commission’ for Bengal in the east and Punjab in the
west—worked day and night on a hurried and ignominious exit from an
increasingly precarious and unstable empire. Equal representation given to
politicians from the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, each
hostile and intractable in their positions, only added to the tensions.
In New Delhi, at 8 Hardinge Road, a
sprightly forty-three year-old woman, all of five feet tall, was hastily
putting together some personal belongings. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was
preparing to depart in a government aeroplane for Karachi airport, where her
husband Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was soon to be sworn in as the first prime
minister of Pakistan.
The future first lady was leaving her
magnificent double storeyed home, set in three acres of garden, for an unknown
and uncertain life in a newly formed nation. This elegant colonial bungalow
(now 8 Tilak Marg) had been her home since her marriage. Both her sons, Ashraf
and Akber, had been born here. 8 Hardinge Road had become the focal hub for the
activities of the Muslim League. Her husband had been appointed finance
minister of the interim government, and indeed the papers for the interim
budget presented on 2 February 1946 had been taken directly from his home to
Parliament House.
Not so far away, at 10 Aurangzeb
Road, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had also made preparations to depart Delhi, and
India. However, he had been more pragmatic than the idealistic and high-minded
Liaquat Ali and had sold his house to the industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia for
Rs 3 lakh. Liaquat and his wife Ra’ana, on other hand, had decided to gift
their home to Pakistan—it was to become the residence of the new nation’s
future high commissioner. ‘Gul-i-Ra’ana’, the bungalow that her adoring husband
had named after her, would henceforth be known as ‘Pakistan House’. Their vast
and eclectic library was also gifted to the new nation in which they had
invested their hopes and lives.
What were the thoughts and emotions
that jostled in her mind and heart as she observed all that she had struggled
for come to fruition, even as the looming shadow of Partition prepared to bathe
the two nations in a fierce spasm of blood and sacrifice?
Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, born
Irene Ruth Margaret Pant on 13 February 1905, to an apostate Brahmin lineage,
was a practising Christian until 1933. After her marriage, she converted to
Islam and was renamed Gul-i-Ra’ana. This fiercely independent lady, who carried
her myriad identities within a core self of unchanging conviction, departed
this world on 13 June 1990, by which time she was known, recognized and
honoured as ‘Madar-e-Pakistan’ or ‘Mother of Pakistan’.
The first half of her life was
spent in undivided India, where she transited two religious identities, and
repudiated a third, albeit through her grandfather. With almost mathematical
precision, her eighty-six years were divided into forty-three years plus some months
in each of her two lives. She was an intimate witness to history—the two
nations, the bifurcation of East and West Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh,
the course of the Cold War, the rise of Gorbachev, and the increasingly
unequivocal hold of the army in Pakistan. From Jinnah, through Zulfikar Bhutto
and to General Zia-ul-Haq, she spoke her mind and held her own.
Before her marriage, she was a
professor of economics in Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha College. Her
doctoral thesis had been on women in agriculture in rural Uttar Pradesh. Begum
Ra’ana was an important, even crucial, catalyst to Jinnah’s return to politics
and the unfolding of the ‘two-nation theory’. In the summer of 1933, she and
her husband met Jinnah in his home in Hampstead and appealed to him to return
to India. Unafraid to champion difficult causes, she was radical in her
attempts to bring about gender equity within the Islamic State of Pakistan and
unflinching in her defence of her friend Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he was facing
the gallows. And at all times, she was charming and gracious as an accomplished
diplomat and stateswoman.
Where then did she get her steely
resolve and infinite reserve of strength? How did she negotiate the transitions
and transformations of history with such seeming ease? I have always been
fascinated by this formidable woman, and her ability to stand tall in an
overwhelmingly patriarchal society even after losing her husband, with no grown
male—or indeed female—relatives to support her in the newly birthed nation of
Pakistan.
…
Begum Ra’ana was born Irene Pant.
We share maiden surnames, and a common ancestry. I was born Namita Pant, and a
faded family tree documents these connections, with a branch of it
cryptically cut off. With his conversion to Christianity, her grandfather
Taradutt Pant had placed himself outside the pale of caste and kinship. Yet
whenever I encountered the half-told stories of Begum Ra’ana, I could sense the
mountain grit in her, the legendary strength that comes so naturally to Kumaoni
women. There was also a strong family resemblance—to my sister, to several of
my aunts. I wanted to know more about her, to understand her as a determined
woman, a thinking, feeling human, a creature of her times and circumstances.
First To The Topis a picture book by David Hill and illustrated by Phoebe Morris about the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. It is a simply told tale of an extraordinary achievement by a New Zealander mountaineer and a Nepali sherpa. The 1953 British Mount Everest expedition was the ninth mountaineering expedition to attempt the first ascent of Mount Everest, and the first confirmed to have succeeded when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit on Friday, 29 May 1953. Led by Colonel John Hunt, it was organised and financed by the Joint Himalayan Committee. News of the expedition’s success reached London in time to be released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, 2 June.
While it is a legendary story for it was the first time humans had scaled the highest mountain peak on earth at 8,848 m (29,029 ft), it is also a tale that is inspirational and highlights the grit and determination of Edmund Hillary. He was accompanied in his ascent by his sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. Later the two of them became firm friends too. Despite what the book title highlights, the picture book does not stop the story with the successful attempt. Instead David Hill shares the extraordinary work Edmund Hillary did in Nepal by establishing schools and helping the locals in many other ways. Later Edmund Hillary was appointed the New Zealand High Commissioner to India too.
By Jamling Tenzing Norgay – http://www.tenzing-norgay-trekking.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11252058
Today, 29 May, is the 66th anniversary of the ascent of Mt. Everest. 20 July 2019 will also be the birth centenary of Sir Edmund Hillary. Sadly it is also the week when world media is agog with stories of overcrowding at the summit of Everest. There have been many unnecessary deaths too. A trek that should normally take only a few hours is now taking twice as long due to the excessive number of people wanting to climb the mountain.
Nevertheless the story of the first ascent of Everest will continue to be legendary for it is the first time that man overcame all odds to climb a formidable peak such as Mt. Everest. It was at a time when mountaineering equipment by today’s standards would be considered rudimentary. It was not necessarily wind and water proof light clothing. The rucksacks the mountaineers carried would have been heavy and coupled with low oxygen supplies at such a height, the climb would have been dangerously challenging.
First To The Top is an inspirational tale that little children may as well hear. It has been told well by David Hill. The illustrations by Phoebe Morris are bright and colourful. The double-page spreads with the text in varying fonts laid out across the pages allows for an interactive experiences while introducing tiddlers to letters and word formations. No wonder it won a clutch of awards: Winner of the 2016 Non-fiction HELL Children’s Choice Awards, 2016 Story lines Notable Picture Book Awards and 2015 New Zealand Listener Top 50 Children’s Book Awards.
First To The Top is a good addition to a personal or a school library. Get it.
The East Was Readis an anthology of essays on the impacts of socialist culture in various parts of the Third World. Wang Chaohua and Pankaj Mishra recall with fondness the meaning of these books for their very different lives in China and in India respectively. Deepa Bhasthi goes on an emotional journey into the library of her grandfather, a communist intellectual. Rossen Djagalov writes a short history of Progress Publishers. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o talks about how he wrote Petals Of Blood in Yalta on the sidelines of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1973. Sumayya Kassamali writes about Faiz in Beirut, giving us a sense of the cultural worlds that drew in both the Soviet Union and the Third World Project. Across the Third World, people grew up reading inexpensive beautifully-produced books from the Soviet Union — children’s books, classics of world literature, books on science and mathematics, works of Marxist theory. One such prominent publisher responsible for producing beautiful books, many in translation, was Progress Publishers. The following extracts from the essay have been reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
****
(p. 78)
As an heir to the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia’s literature-centrism, the Soviet state, down to its very bureaucracy, believed in literature’s capacity to change society and made an enormous investment in literacy campaigns and the wide accessibility of literature through publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, and public readings. As a testimony to that belief, by the time the USSR ceased to exist, its Writers’ Union had approximately 10,000 members, that is, 10,000 professional writers who could live off their literary work—a number probably never matched in history, before or after. It was not only a matter of financing: through street names and monuments, school curricula and press reports about writers, the state helped to institutionalize the idea of the intelligentsia as the spokesperson of the people. It also helped to cement the idea that literature is an authoritative source of values. And yet from the second half of the 1920s onward, Stalinism also did much to compromise that ideal by increasingly using literature instrumentally, censoring it to better reflect its talking points, and otherwise controlling it.
…
(p. 81 – 83)
Progress’s origins could be found in the utopian visions of the
immediate post-Revolutionary period. In the realm of literature, one of the main
generators of these was Maxim Gorky, who proposed a World Literature publishing
house that would translate all foreign literatures into Russian, Russian literature
into all the major languages of the world, and finally, all of the above in to the
languages of the Soviet Union. An economically devastated and politically isolated
Civil War era Russia, however, was not a place where such visions could be realized.
A World Literature publishing house did appear between 1919 and 1924, focused only
on one part of Gorky’s vision: the translation of world classics into Russian. While
it offered much-needed employment to Petersburg writers as translators and editors,
paper shortages, organizational difficulties, and lack of funding ultimately meant
that most of their translations remained unpublished.[1]
With time, however, the resources at the disposal of the Soviet
state grew and elements of these early visions began to be realized even if compromised
to one degree or another by the growing Stalinist stratification. Founded in 1931,
a Moscow-based literary magazine with issues in several languages, Literature of the World Revolution (renamed
in the beginning of the Popular Front period to International
Literature) may have been the most visible structure
of Soviet literary internationalism. Yet more significant, especially as far as
non-Soviet readers were concerned, was the establishment that same year in Moscow
of the Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), Progress’s predecessor,
which translated books into foreign languages.[2]By
that time, there were already several other foreign-language newspapers in the city:
the Polish Tribuna Radzecka, the French Journal de Moscou, the English Moscow News as well as The Communist International, which was publishing issues in German, English, French, Spanish,
and Chinese. Besides, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCE)
was already translating and printing the works of Lenin and other political literature
in different languages.[3]
ITIR drew its translators and editors from both polyglot Soviet citizens with foreign experience and political refugees, often with Comintern connections. Indeed, its staff reflected the composition of Moscow’s foreign community and its shifts: from the influx of Spanish refugees in the late 1930s to their retirement or departures for Mexico, Cuba, or Spain in the 1960s and ’70s, from the return of the Moscow-based East European exiles to their countries in themid-1940s to the increasing numbers of non-Western subjects in post-Stalin-era Moscow such as the main translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature in Hindi—Madan Lal Madhu (1925–2014).
…
(p. 83 – 84)
In the history of publishing, there has probably never been a press so linguistically ambitious. In its first year (1931), it published in 10 West European (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese), seven East European (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian), and five Asian languages(Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Persian, and Turkish). And while the first post-Second World War decade saw the emergence of an Afro-Arab (Arabic, Amhara, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili) and Indian (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu) sections, it was in the post-Stalin era that non-Western languages came to dominate the overall publishing plans. Over the course of the1960s alone, the number of ‘Eastern’ languages doubled, from15 to 28. By 1980, the Indian section was producing more titles than the English one, which had led the publishing house since its foundation. (Throughout this period, books in the colonial languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—were also being sent to Africa, Asia, and Latin America by ITIR’s distributor, Mezhkniga.) By the time it came to an end in 1991, Progress was a behemoth publishing yearly close to 2,000 new titles with a print run approaching 30 million copies.[4]
…
(p. 85-86)
It was publishing in foreign languages, however, that accounted
for the vast majority of Progress’s output. Many around the world fondly remember
Progress’s cheap, high quality editions of otherwise unavailable Marxist literature.
In addition to the classics of Marxism and Leninism, the other three areas Progress
published in were politics, textbooks & illustrated materials, and fiction.
Fiction emerged as a distinct field of the publishing house only gradually, as the
classics of Marxism-Leninism and contemporary political studies had initially been
the main focus of ITIR’s work. Over the course of the 1930s, however, some of the
publishing house’s more distinguished translators such as Alice Oran, George Rui,
Maximilian Schick, Hilda Angarova, Jose Vento, Angel Errais, Margaret Amrome, Ivy
Litvinova (Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov’s wife) began to translate the
classics of Russian and early Soviet literature into foreign languages. Slowly,
over the post-war era, the literature section became the largest of Progress’s four
thematic sections, reaching in 1981 a volume of 404 titles. The following year,
1982, it evolved into an independent publishing house, Raduga (Rainbow). By that
point, the editorial choices for texts to be translated could easily veer away from
the safe classics to include more debatable contemporary Soviet literature such
as Valentin Rasputin and Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novels. There has never been another
publishing house worldwide that could compete with its ability to popularize Russian
and Soviet literature abroad, or more generally, any publishing attempt of such
scale to create a direct translation link between two non-Western literatures, bypassing
the monopolies of London, Paris and New York. And yet, together with all other Soviet
projects for world literature, this one has been largely forgotten, except maybe
for the occasional volume in public libraries and private collections.
[1]Maria Khotimsky, ‘World Literature, Soviet Style: A
Forgotten Episode in the History of the Idea’, Ab Imperio, vol. 2013,
no. 3, 2013, pp. 119–154.
[3]For more on Moscow’s cosmopolitanism
of the 1930s, see Katerina Clark, Moscow,
the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet
Culture, 1931-1941,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
