Speaking Tiger Books | Jaya's blog

“Indian Christmas”

Indian Christmas is a truly well produced book by Speaking Tiger Books . It is a hardback with a magnificent range of essays reminiscing on Christmas celebrations. I too have contributed an essay on “Christmas Pakwan”. Memories of my childhood, my inheritance and now making memories for my daughter via massive food hugs. Take a look.

Ideally speaking buy copies of “Indian Christmas”. Gift them generously. This is India that imbibes cultural values from various regions and faiths. Every family celebrates Christmas in its unique style. Yet, there are many overlaps. This is an India that is not going away in a hurry irrespective of current dominant discourses. It is here to stay.

Merry Christmas!

Coincidentally posted on Facebook on 6 Dec, a day that has fearful communal connotations in modern Indian history. 6 Dec 1992, Babri Masjid was demolished by mobs.

Here is my article. It is entitled “Christmas Pakwan”. The printed version includes the Christmas Cake recipe too.

Every Christmas, my paternal grandmother, Dadi, would begin preparing the pakwan. It was a process that took a few weeks of preparation, followed by a few days of intense cooking. The original owners of Dadi’s house were British. It had a kitchen with an inbuilt wood oven but it was outside the house, as in most British houses, so that the cooking could be done outside. The house still exists. Dadi later built a kitchen and a pantry, attached to the dining room. She had a fairly large family. All of us would look forward to the Christmas lunch when the dining table was groaning with food – cold meats, shammi kebabs, chicken curry, pulao with kaju and caramelised onions on top, raita, gajjar ka halwa, zarda, fruits. Dadi was a hospitable lady, so she would also take into account the endless stream of guests who had to be fed. Our house was in the Cantonment area in Meerut, where she had built two prominent schools. So, we had Army personnel, students (past and present), parents, teachers, and many more from the town who would come to greet her and the family on Christmas Day. The visitors came from all walks of life. If they came during the day, they were received in the front lawn. Dadi was an incredible gardener too, so the garden would be ablaze with winter blooms! The guests were served various homecooked delicacies. There was always something for everyone, irrespective of their dietary restrictions, especially if they belonged to another faith. No one left our place unfed. If they came in the evening, they would be received in the drawing room, inevitably around the fireplace which was constantly being stoked by a pile of wooden logs placed next to Dada and Dadi’s chairs. A tray with bowls of sinfully delicious eats was placed conveniently in front of the visitors.

Dadi’s kitchen was buzzing with activity throughout the year. There were maids constantly scurrying about, cutting and chopping, cooking and serving. In the midst of this hustle-bustle, sat Dadi on her wooden chair. She was too large and fat to move around with ease! She would supervise the proceedings and kept a sharp eye on all the food being cooked. She was very particular about how the dishes were prepared. The larder keys were with her and if any ingredient was required, the cupboard would be opened in her presence and the precise amount of masala or oil doled out. Other provisions including the onions, potatoes and sugar were stored in her bedroom or under her bed! No wonder we had situations where a particularly flighty maid chopped up Dadi’s precious gladioli bulbs assuming they were large onions.

Come December, there was a different buzz in the air. Dadi would organise the staff in such a manner that all the stoves were in operation – gas cylinder and the mud angeethis that required handmade coal balls. The pantry would be cleaned thoroughly, sheets laid out on the floor and maids seated, working intently on their assigned chores. There was humming and chattering but the dishes were cooked with precision. At times, it was like an assembly line. If samosas were to be made, then one maid would be rolling the dough, another cutting and filling, and the third, frying both kinds of samosas – keema and meetha. The samosas would then be cooled and placed in the wooden and wire mesh doli and locked. Dadi, herself, would be sitting on a chair with her coal-fuelled mud angeethi besides her. She did not like cooking on the gas stove. On the angeethi would be placed the large dekchis, one by one, and she would cook khope ka keema, gajjar ka halwa, zarda and other dishes.

The festive season would be kickstarted by preparations for the dishes that required a longer lead time like the Christmas cake and the cold meats. The meats were prepared by rubbing the legs of lamb with rock salt and grapefruit and placing them in earthen pots which would then be covered. Later, the meats would be boiled to remove the excess salt and slices of it would be served cold. For the Christmas cake, Dadi would take the assistance of Robert, a worker in my Dada’s karkhana in Meerut, who would advise her on the quantities of fruit, candied peel, nuts, eggs and butter. Once the chopping was over, she would cut strips of brown paper to line the baking dishes. Tiny labels on which she had scribbled her initials – SB (Shakuntala Bhattacharji) would be placed in the batter. Then the local baker would be summoned. He would arrive with a large parat (a large flat brass dish used for kneading dough, but is useful for mixing large quantities of cake batter too!). Into this, the fruits would be upturned, and the many eggs broken into it – after, of course, making sure that the brindled bull terrier Lobo was not stealing the eggs and squirrelling them away in his food bowl. He would carefully lift the nail from the doli’s latch and remove the eggs one by one. He used to sit in the folds of Dadi’s saree and as soon as he saw a chance, he would attack the doli. Bull terriers have powerful jaws that can kill – once they latch onto an animal, their jaws cannot be opened until the other animal is destroyed. And yet Lobo never broke an egg!

My Dadi had got the Christmas cake recipe from Robert. His father, Barkat, used to work as a cook in Lucknow for my maternal great-grandmother, Constance Dass, Principal of Isabella Thoburn College (1939-45). My maternal grandmother, Premilla Mukarji, Constance’s daughter, used to speak of this cake recipe. Nani was a very good cook too, but it was always a laborious process with her. Whereas with Dadi, a warm, generous food hug is what she revelled in, even though it was not the mainstay of her existence. Teaching was. Dadi established schools that still exist. Robert gave my Dadi the recipe, much before my mother, Shobhana Bhattacharji, married into the family. Meanwhile, the recipe had travelled.

I inherited the same recipe from both sides of my family, but like all good recipes, it was open to many interpretations and variations. Dadi had adapted it to suit the morally correct palates and done away with the rum, increased the petha and reduced some of the rich masala. I do not recall Dadi adding spices. Her cake tasted like an ordinary fruit cake that existed in vast quantities but lacked the razzle-dazzle. When I read the recipe written by Constance Dass, the weights and measures were in seers and chhataks. Also, it was richer than I had imagined. The first couple of times I made the recipe I followed her instructions to the letter and the cake rose beautifully, especially when the egg whites were folded into the batter. No baking powder is required. The stiff egg whites do the needful. Slowly, I tweaked the recipe to soak the masala in rum. I prefer to do this in September and bake in December. In fact, I pickle vast quantities of the masala in a glass jar belonging to my great-grandmother, Badi Dadi or Mary Chandulal Mukarji, my mother’s dadi. This is used in the cakes, mince pies and panettone too. Ideally speaking the cakes should have rum dribbled over them too. Badi Dadi was so called because my twin brother and I had to differentiate between the two dadis in our life. Badi Dadi was a tremendous cook herself, she had a fantastic kitchen in Dalhousie, using wood fire and box ovens to churn out magnificent meals with clockwork precision. There was no fussiness in her cooking.

I love the manner in which food histories get passed on from generation to generation through their use and through the stories that are told. Shakuntala Bhattacharji only transmitted recipes orally or she demonstrated a dish. Whereas Constance Dass and Mary Chandulal Mukarji wrote recipes –they are a fine repository of food influences and regional cooking. I still consult them. The recipes also bring out the fact that an Indian Christian family did not observe any food taboos, so we had quite a selection of dishes. All tried and tested too! My mum, masi and I continue the tradition of writing recipes and have amassed quite a collection. It is still my go-to repository rather than the internet.

This Christmas cake recipe is the basis of a good wedding cake too. I made a 25 kg, five-tier cake, with homemade marzipan, royal icing, and orange marmalade for my brother’s wedding. I made everything from scratch, including the blessed marzipan by crushing almonds and kneading the dough till it rolled smoothly. My mother provided some of her to-die-for bittersweet marmalade with its fine slivers of translucent orange peel. Layering the cake, with marmalade, marzipan and royal icing, I decorated it with tiny flowers made with icing sugar as well as lots of fresh flowers. It was so heavy that a special wooden cake stand had to be made. It preserves well for at least six months.

For my own wedding, I did not have the time to make the cake. My fiancé Jacob Rose brought sample pieces of cake to test. I was horrified. They tasted ghastly, nothing but simple cake being passed off as wedding cake! I insisted on meeting the baker, Philip. He came. A family consultation was held. Philip explained the process. I did not approve. So, I gave him my Christmas cake recipe and said, use this. He did and we had a delicious wedding cake. Philip used the recipe to turn around his Christmas cakes and became a huge commercial success. So much so that even we get slices of it at our church fellowship after midnight service. Philip modified it further, to make it a commercially viable option. After his death, his nephew inherited the business, and the tradition continues. The recipe lives.

Today, I am probably one of the few, if not the only one, in my generation and in the extended clan who makes Christmas pakwan. The process begins weeks ahead. With time, I have modified the offerings to incorporate Jacob’s tastes and childhood memories and create new ones for our daughter, Sarah Rose. So now I prepare Christmas cake, mince pies, panettone, pinnis with pumpkin seeds, panjiri, gujiyas, ginger cookies, shammi kebabs, khope ka keema, yakhni pullao, mathri with zeera, cinnamon rolls and more. Everything is homemade, including the desi ghee/clarified butter that I use in the panjiri and gujiyas. It is a juggling feat that calls for my professional publishing commitments, teaching, and cooking to dovetail into each other. How I manage is nothing short of a Christmas miracle!

We are Christians and have been for generations. It means we have recipes from across the country and relatives are to be found everywhere. The pakwan that we serve at home is an amalgamation of these experiences and is a fine testament to the syncretic nature of India. The recipes that we use can be found in Muslim, Hindu and Christian households. Ultimately, it does not matter which faith these foods originate from. It is the joy of cooking, providing hospitality, and watching others revel in the food hug!

23 Jan 2023

“Knotted Grief” by Naveen Kishore

08 02 , 2022 No Comments

unannounced visitor
I dropped by into my dream
careful not to awaken the buried whispers
I lit a candle by their grave
startling the slumbering shadows into a frenzy of activity
bats taking wing flying blindly into one another
this in turn caused the whispers to awaken
look me in the eye
and begin to do what they did best

bear witness

Legendary publisher Naveen Kishore, founder, Seagull Books, has published his debut collection of poetry called Knotted Grief. It has been published by Speaking Tiger Books. He is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Those who are fortunate to communicate with him directly and regularly, have been aware of his talents as a poet for a very long time. His emails are interspered with poetry or at times are only written in verse. The manner in which he responds to situations, events, moments, emotions are well described in his poems but also the way in which he arranges the words on the page. The visual element is as important as the content, ideas and emotions. For years, I have asked Naveen Kishore to get his poems published. I have always found the poems fantastic. It is a gift to be able to compose poems easily focussing upon the reader, so it always seem as if the poems are special. So I was delighted when the publication of Knotted Grief was announced by Speaking Tiger Books.

In Knotted Grief, the collection of poems are categorised according to “Coda”, “Kashmiriyat”, “Street Full of Widows”, “Selected Griefs”, “Tilted Sky”, “Under the Skin” and “Birdcall”. The poems are of varying lengths, from a cluster of words to verses scattered on the page. The sparse arrangement on the page ensures that the reader is absorbed by the few words on the page.

Upon reading the volume, I posed a few questions to Naveen Kishore. Here is the slightly edited version of the Q&A.

How did this collection happen?
The collection happened by accident when my publisher friend Xavier Hennekinne of Gazebo ‘discovered’ that I write poetry by finding some of my poems in online poetry journals. he asked my if I had a book and I said no I have many folders with poems I have been writing for the last ten years! The reason fr not having a manuscript was simple enough. I was so busy writing I couldn’t stop, take stock, and put one together. This was solved by my friend and translator Tess Lewis who offered to select a first draft so that publishers could read it like a book! I went on to share this with Xavier at Gazebo and he in turn shared it with his poetry editor Phil Day, who is himself a poet and a painter. Phil then requested I send hi the four hundred odd poems I had set aside while selecting this collection and immersed himself in these for a few months and came up with Knotted Grief as you read it now!! Gazebo will publish on April 1st. The Speaking Tiger edition happened when I shared the Australian page set version except that Ravi selected more poems because he wanted an additional thirty pages. There is no collaboration between Seagull and Speaking Tiger! I offered my manuscript as any first time author to a publisher I admire. Seagull has nothing to do with it except do what we always do spread the word for friends in publishing!
Did you compose poetry specifically for this volume or did you select from previous compositions?
No. I have been writing on the human condition for many years. Kashmir is one theme but it could easily be Palestine. There is no recent or previous. You write every day. Like music. It is all a continuous riyaz.
Why did you focus upon grief? Is it one of the offshoots of the pandemic?
I didnt. Choose grief. It is usually the other way round. Grief does the choosing, if I may put it like that. You are visited upon by loss of friends close ones in an ever widening or lessening circle of affection. People close to you die. Go away. So you embrace their memory. Similarly at a political, national versus personal level their is grief that springs from what we as people do to each other. Again the ‘human condition’, ‘Kashmir’ ,’Palestine’ Interchangeable grieving. The poems and yes grieving is never without hope.
You have always written fabulous poetry. Why did you choose to publish your poetry now and not earlier?
I cannot as a publisher publish my own books! So one waited for someone to ‘discover’ my poems. Takes time! Besides to me the act of writing is more vital.
How many translations is this poetry being published in? Who are the publishers? Are you supervising the translations or are you letting the poems speak for themselves?
So far Rajkamal Prakashan Samuh very generously offered to do the Hindi; Ravi Dee Cee of DC books is doing the Malayalam; Papyrus is doing the Marathi; Unistar in the Punjabi; Chintan in Bengali; I am reaching out in Tamil, Kannada and Assamese too. Let see. Not really supervising but making myself available for translators should they wish to talk about things. Complete freedom to take liberties as long as the essence of the ‘target’ language is hospitable to what I may be attempting in English. So yes the poems have to touch the translators.
As far as I know, the arrangement of the words on the page are as critically important as the poem itself. How will you manage this quality control in the translated texts especially if you are unfamiliar with the destination language?
I am flexible. It will boil down to the combination of the translator and editor in the language edition to do the best they feel they can to convey render share the original thought in their own languages. This means they have the freedom to lay out the poems the way they wish.
You are a publisher known for publishing extensive translations. Are there any guidelines/sensibilities that you have honed as a publisher over the years that you would ensure are followed in translating your poetry as well?
None. I leave it to the publisher, editor, and translators who become the first sensitive readers in that language. Having said that I may be able to help fine hone the languages I know, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali.
Would you change the collections ever so slightly in every language or will the same edition be made available in all editions?
I think mostly the Indian edition is being followed. I would more or less treat that as the one I would want translated. But open to the variant should it happen organically or for reasons that are yet to come up.

I truly liked Knotted Grief. Perhaps you will too. Buy it. Read it.

8 Feb 2022

“The Tombstone in my Garden” by Temsula Ao

04 02 , 2022 No Comments

This is the story of a lily that refused to bloom one season because she was dislodged from her accustomed position in the garden bed and crammed into an ornate pot so that she could be entered in a forthcoming flower show. For this rare beauty, it was an act of violation of her natural rights because she believed that she belonged on the earth, untrammelled by the confines of a pot, not matter how beautiful or ornate it was. She was sad and angry at first because she could not understand why she had been treated so. Every seasons she gave of her best; her blooms were radiant, long-lasting and even mysterious with her unusual colour-combination. She also missed her companions in the garden bed from whom she had been so forcefully separated. She felt she was condemned to a prison, away from the freedom of the open spaces around her. What she did not know at that time was the fact that ever since her mistress realized how rare a beauty this unusual flower was, she became obsesessed with the idea of winning the first prize in the annual flower show organized by the Ladies Flower Club and has thus callously ordered this exquisite beauty’s dislocation from her natural habitat.

…

…inside the dilapidated shed, Snow-Green stood proud and happy in her pot for the first time in years, with her last=breath efflorescence. There were dewey sparkles like tears on the petals in this ultimate show of splendour as though a misty-eyed little girl, holding her breath in protest, had relented and was at least breathing easy and smiling. In paying this final tribute to a friend and mentor, the resurgent beauty was honouring the sacred pledge she had given him. And a benign peace seemed to emanate from her to envelop all around her.

Award-winning writer, Temsula Ao’s The Tombstone in my Garden: Stories from Nagaland is a collection of five stories ( Speaking Tiger Books). Each very different from the other. Unexpectedly so. Many short stories collections tend to blend into one another in terms of authorial style but in this case it is not so. Ranging from the rise in communal violence in the north eastern parts of India to stories that have a very strong folklore element to them, the stories are astonishingly mesmerising. In all the years that I have known Temsula and have been reading her stories, she never ceases to surprise the reader with her vast repertoire of storytelling skills. Her most extraordinary gift is being able to tell the story in the mode that befits it best rather than adhering to a rigid storytelling structure. So if “The Saga of a Cloth” requires a gentle pace intermingled with narrator’s voice or “Snow-Green” has a very distinctive folk lore and modern setting or “The Platform” that is a mix of reportage and journalistic storytelling or the title story being the interior monologue of a woman, Temsula Ao offers it all to the reader. She does not seem to hesitate in mixing forms to suit the content as long as it has the desired effect upon the reader. In this case, the variety of styles work.

The Tombstone in my Garden is a gorgeous read. Buy it.

4 Feb 2022

“The Brass Notebook” by Devaki Jain

03 02 , 2021 No Comments

In the Feb 2021 of the Seminar Magazine ( #738, ROAD TO JUSTICE: a symposium on thinking through the rule of law), I have reviewed noted feminist economist Devaki Jain’s memoir, The Brass Notebook. Here is the original url. I am also C&P the text below.

***

The Brass Notebook ( Speaking Tiger Books) is renowned feminist economist Devaki Jain’s memoir. Her life has been blessed with rich experiences given the freedom her father allowed her, which was unusual for the time. She had been fortunate that her Tamil Brahmin father did not impose the same restrictions and rituals upon her as he did on her elder sisters when it came to education, marriage, travel among others. Astonishingly she was even permitted by her father to stay alone in London after he had taken her there on an official trip as a companion.

Her trip was eventful; she managed to spend a few days with the then High Commissioner of India, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit. Later, Devaki attended a two-week seminar organized by the Quakers in Saarbrucken, Germany. There she met a Dane who persuaded her to accompany him. His plan was to hitchhike to England after taking a short detour to Copenhagen and then Sweden. Devaki agreed. Later she did an overland trip from England to India with another friend. She does remark in amazed wonder that ‘Looking back, it is surprising how little my father resisted.’ At this time, charmed by the idea of attending Oxford University, even though the admission process was over, she was admitted to Ruskin College, a relatively ‘new’ college that catered mostly to the working class and offered subjects like economics and industrial relations.

Years later when she met the principal H.D. Hughes and asked him why he had let her in, his reply was ‘Pure amusement …at the sight of this evidently upper class Indian girl in her early twenties, asking desperately to be allowed to study alongside men and women in their thirties with more than ten years of hard manual labour behind them. How, he said, could he resist such a social experiment?’

Devaki’s adventurous spirit permitted her to challenge her boundaries constantly. She did this even by marrying out of her caste to the prominent Gandhian, L.C. Jain, a Jain from Rajasthan. It was this very feistiness that enabled her to very early on in her life begin to question inherited traditions of culture and knowledge. For instance, in one of her earliest publications, an essay, ‘The Social Image’, that she wrote for Seminar (‘The Indian Woman’, # 52, December 1963, pp 20-23), she states categorically that the social image of women is mostly a patriarchal construct that is enabled by their veneration of the panchkanyas – Sita, Ahalya, Draupadi, Tara and Mandadori. She argues that this imagery fails to accommodate many women who fall outside ‘this Sita orbit’. This neglect creates both environmental and internal pressures. For example, the woman who stays unmarried and follows a career is considered an aberration. Instead she sought for the celebration of more rebellious women in the ancient Hindu traditions, women who stood up for themselves, and didn’t define themselves in relation to men: Amrapali, a cultured and worldly courtesan; Gargi, an ancient philosopher; Avaiyar, a Tamil poet and scholar, among others.

Later she was fortunate to have her values endorsed while she was enrolled at St. Anne’s College for her PPE course. Her tutors, Iris Murdoch, Peter Ady, Jenifer Hart: three supremely intellectual women, took her seriously as a fellow thinker – a respectful intellectual engagement. ‘I was a woman among other women, and we were bound by ties of intellectual sympathy. I was being valued for my intelligence, hard work and achievement.’ A bond of sisterhood that she learned to value later as an economist and at the helm of Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST).

Devaki Jain is known for recognizing the value of a woman’s labour in real economic terms, whether towards the national economy or in the personal space. It was a slow and methodical process as she accrued experience as an economist, first by writing The Democratic Alternative at Minoo Masani’s invitation. Later as a lecturer in the Economics department, Miranda House, University of Delhi, she taught public finance. She would often walk across to the Delhi School of Economics to converse with eminent economists like Amartya Sen, K.N. Raj, Sukhamoy Chakraborty, and Jagdish Bhagwati to name a few. By 1972, she quit the university and the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) helped her set up a new field-based project on the unrecognized contribution of women to the economy. Later she was commissioned by Sheila Dhar, Director, Publications Division, to edit Indian Women, to coincide with the UN International Year of Women, 1975. Contributors included, among others, Andre Beteille, Veena Das, Ashok Rudra, Romila Thapar, and Qurratulain Hyder. Ester Boserup, working on women in African agriculture, demonstrated the significance of gender roles in social analysis. Ashish Bose, a demographer, presented for the first time the falling sex ratio in India. The ratio declined from 972 females per 1000 males (1901) to 930/1000 (1971), prompting Amartya Sen to coin the phrase ‘India’s missing women’. Women of many different kinds were described in ‘Indian Women’: nuns, teachers, nurses, students, matriarchs. Later the Government of India also set up a committee to report on the status of women in India entitled ‘Towards Equality’.

This project pushed her into exploring her hunch that ‘the official figures on women’s participation in work were seriously underestimating the facts on the ground; I also suspected that what lay behind this underestimation was a deep methodological flaw in the approach to measurement.’ Her proposal to Raj Krishna’s Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) brought together her two interests – growing fascination with women’s role in labour, and her specialization in statistics. Her findings that the measurements were all wrong and much of the time data on women’s economic contribution was not even being collected. She also discovered that the female work participation rates were in fact higher than participation rates for men amongst the landless in India, ‘landless’ being a proxy for extreme poverty. This challenged the long-held belief that the main breadwinner of a household was generally a man.

The string of accomplishments Devaki Jain garnered are endless. For instance, she was one of three women who was invited to participate in Julius Nyere’s twenty-eight member South Commission. It was constituted to give voice to the shared perspective of the South, drawn from the experience of Non-Aligned Movement countries, and not simply imported from northern models that may or may not be suited to the conditions of these societies. She has worked with various national and international agencies committed to a gendered understanding of economics. Her strong friendships with well known feminists like Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker, have only strengthened her perspective on women’s rights. In fact, it is the fundamental principle that she agrees with and so heartily endorses Walker’s view that there is no problem in being called a ‘feminist’ or a ‘womanist’, whatever it takes for women’s liberation to be recognized and for a woman to earn her freedom – that is all that matters.

In keeping with her strong characteristic of recognizing her self-worth and preserving her dignity, she documents the sexual harassment she faced from her maternal uncle and later by a well known Swedish economist at Balliol College, Oxford in 1958. She was interviewed for the job to be his junior research assistant from Asia to work on his magnum opus, a three-volume work on development. She had been interviewed at the home of the then Swedish Ambassador to the UK, Alvar Myrdal. Reflecting upon the incident in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Jain realizes that in 1958 she had no recourse to retribution as there is now for women who work for men and are sexually harassed. Different age, different rules. But why a doyen of feminism like her chooses not to reveal the name of the aggressor, when she doesn’t hide the specific familial relationship with her maternal uncle (who she also doesn’t name) is puzzling. At any rate, it was her choice to make and must be respected.

The title, The Brass Notebook, has been inspired by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook where Devaki Jain uses ‘brass’ as for her it has warm associations with her childhood, but it is also ‘a hardier, homelier metal than gold. It represents not perfection or unity, but an honourable imperfection consistent with my own limits.’ This clearheaded understanding of what it means to be a woman, chart her own career and who values her labour were pathbreaking concepts then and to some extent are even now – nearly six decades later. The Brass Notebook is a snapshot of a life well lived by a pioneering feminist and an excellent role model for subsequent generations.

1 Feb 2021

On Sridhar Balan’s “Off the Shelf”

07 08 , 2020 No Comments

Sridhar Balan is an Indian publishing industry veteran who joined the sector when it was considered a cottage industry despite “big” firms like Oxford University Press, Longman, Macmillan and Tata McGraw Hill having Indian offices. Balan continues to be an active publishing professional who is currently associated with Ratna Sagar. He is always full of interesting anecdotes when you meet him. It is not just the anecdote but the pleasure of watching him narrate the stories with a twinkle in his eye and is forever smiling. He is always so generous in sharing his experiences in publishing. So I am truly delighted that Balan was finally persuaded by Ravi Singh of Speaking Tiger Books to put together a few essays of his time spent in Indian publishing.

The essays span a lifetime in publishing where Balan recounts joining it as a salesperson. He is also a voracious reader with a phenomenal memory and a magnificent ability to tell stories. Mix it all together and voila! — a rich colection of essays that recount significant personalities associated with Indian publishing such as Dean Mahomed (1759 – 1851), a barber’s son from Patna who wrote his first book in 1794 and ultimately settled in Brighton. The essays on other publishers such as Roy Hawkins who is known for settling in India happily wedded to his job as general manager at OUP for more than thirty years. More significantly, Hawkins is credited for having “discovered” many writers such as Verrier Elwin, Salim Ali, Minoo Masani and K.P.S. Menon. Hawkins also published Jim Corbett’s unsolicited manuscript “Man-Eaters of the Kumaon”, first published in 1944. ( It is in print even today with all of Corbett’s other books!) The account of the international publicity organised for this book is a fascinating story. A dream run. A tale worth repeating over and over again including the tiny detail of having two tiger cubs join the book launch party in Manhattan on 4 April 1946. The cubs were encouraged to dip their tiny paws and leave their footprints on the books as a special memento for the guests. A copy was specially inked in this manner for the author too. Corbett had been unable to travel to NYC under military quota as his status was that of a civilian. So he missed his own book launch. Nevertheless the book sold close to 490,000 copies in that year alone. A staggering number by even today’s standards of bookselling! As for the cub footprints on the cover page of the book proved to be such a magnificent book promotion detail that it was then replicated in subsequent editions of the book.

Off The Shelf is full of such wonderful gems of publishing history. For instance, the scholar and academic trained in classics, E.V. Rieu ( 1887 -1972) was selected to head the Indian operations of OUP. He was absorbed in his work but Rieu found time to write verse for children too. Balan recounts a poem that Rieu wrote called ‘Hall and Knight”. It was written by Rieu to record his sympathy for the generations of schoolchildren who had to endure Hall and Knight’s ‘Algebra’, which was the standard textbook in mathematics.

Many of the essays revolve around the time Balan spent at OUP but there are others such as about Dhanesh Jain ( 1939 – 2019) who established Ratna Sagar or legendary bookseller of Lucknow, Ram Advani. ( Whom I too had the pleasure of meeting and who upon hearing I had joined publishing, sent me such a lovely email welcoming me to the industry.)

Balan’s enthusiasm for the book trade shines through Off the Shelf but it is his passion for inculcating the love of reading that needs to be talked about more. He shares one example of his efforts in “Reading in Tirunelveli”. It is an essay worth sharing amongst educators, librarians, book clubs etc for the gentle kindness Balan demonstrates in encouraging children to read. He suggests constructive steps in building libraries and engaging in reading sessions. It is an essay seeped in wisdom.

This is such a lovely book that I could go on and on about it but I shan’t. Just buy it. Read it for yourselves. I could not put it down and read it in one fell swoop.

31 July 2020

Women in Translation, Aug 2019

18 09 , 2019 1 Comment

The Women in Translation (#WiT) month is celebrated annually in August. There was a flurry of activity online with a number of gems being unearthed and discussed. It is a really fascinating time to discover new writers, new translators, new publishers etc. Whilst I enjoyed reading the various articles, interviews, profiles and even book extracts that were made available online, I realised there was a deafening silence from the Indian subcontinent.

There is a thriving literary culture that has existed in the subcontinent for an exceptionally long time in all the regional languages. Of late many of these texts are being made available in English so as to be accessed by a larger readership. Sometimes new translations are commissioned such as Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard although a translation by Neelam Hussain of Simorgh Collective exists too.

Another fascinating aspect of the Indian publishing industry is that as it grows, the market grows, and so does the interest in the craft of writing. For long writers have written and published their works in various literary magazines, “women’s magazines”, newspapers etc. Of course there are now online literary spaces, discussion forums and sometimes even in the print media where writers are interviewed and their craft discussed. But interviewing writers, especially women, is an art unto itself. Women writers inevitably have to find the time to write amongst the rhythm of many other duties and commitments they need to fulfil. This was more so in the past than now when increasingly there are more and more “professional writers”. Even so, reading about the craft of writing by women writers continus to be an exciting world since irrespective of socio-economic class, many writers share the same concerns and have similar pressures. Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, has for years published interviews with women writers. Their latest publication is Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamil Nadu. The Tamil publishing landscape is not an easy one to understand with many interesting threads running through it, all of which were influential upon the seventeen women writers interviewed by the editors — K. Srilata and Swarnlatha Rangarajan. While the interviews themselves are insightful, it is the structural arrangement of each entry that is fascinating for it has the mandatory biography about the author, a sample of her writing, a head note by the editors introducing the writer and why they chose her specifically to be included in the anthology and finally, the interview. Every detail adds just sufficient information creating an image of the writer that the reader definitely wants to know more about.

Ever since World Literature began to open new publishing horizons in the Anglo-American book market as well as the growth of the desi diaspora as a lucrative readership, did the spotlight on translations from regional languages into English become an attractive proposition for many firms. As a result there is a feast of offerings particularly as the multi-national publishers expand their fare. Be that as it may there are some fabulous publishers such as Women Unlimited, Zubaan, Orient Black Swan, Speaking Tiger, Permanent Black ( on occasion), Aleph Book Company, Yoda Press, Westland/Amazon and Oxford University Press that have been publishing translations for a while. It is impossible to list all but here some of the wonderful titles published recently.

The Solitary Sprout: Selected Stories of R. Chudamani ( translated from Tamil by C.T. Indra and T. Sriraman) is a fabulous collection of short stories. In fact, R. Chudamani (1931-2010) has often been considered as an early feminist among Tamil writers. The Solitary Sprout is a wonderful selection of Chudamani’s short stories with “No fury like a mother’s”, “Herself” and “Not a stepfather” standing out as very modern stories. It is hard to believe that these were written many decades ago. The sharp insight and clear ideas that the writer shares can take one’s breath away even now. For instance, “No fury like a mother’s” is about three mothers of young schoolgirls who are furious at how their daughters are ill-treated by their school teacher. The punishment meted out to the young girls by the teacher is to strip the girls publicly. The three mothers team up and pressurise the teacher to resign otherwise they threaten to mete out the same treatment to her as she did to their daughters. “Herself” is about a mother who once her children are married and settled with families of their own, discovers her trueself and becomes a music teacher as well is a voluntary worker at the Primary Health Centre in her village. Much to her visiting daughter’s dismay who had expected a month’s vacation at her parent’s home free from all responsibilities including babysitting her own son. Instead the daughter discovers she has to pitch in with household chores at her parents home and continue to look after her own son. She is deeply disappointed and upset as her memories of her mother was one who was always free and available for the family. It rattles the daughter. More so as her father supports his wife’s actions and sees no wrong. “Not a stepfather” addresses issues like widow remarriage, single parenting, stepfather etc. It is beautifully told from the perspective of the disgruntled mother of the bride who is not amused that her daugther has remarried and expects the new husband also to take care of her young son. It is complicated but within the first visit of the newly married couple to the mother’s house, the son warms up to his new father and gets the blessings of his mother-in-law too. It is a powerful story as it raises so many questions about gendered and social expectations of a woman and a man. The Solitary Sprout is worth reading, sharing and discussing in more forums. These are stories that need to be told more often.

Prolific and powerful writer K. R. Meera has a new collection of three novellas called The Angel’s Beauty Spots. As often is the case with K. R. Meera’s stories, she explores love and its various angles. Sometimes well meaning and powerful love for all intents and purposes can go horribly wrong as in the title novella. K. R. Meera’s stories have this remarkable quality of taking the wind out of the reader’s sails with the horrific and at times inexplicable sequence of events except that some bizarre form of love propelled many of the decisions taken by her characters. Somehow the team of author and translator, K. R. Meera and J. Devika, works well. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact reason but the translation reads smoothly without losing any of the cultural characteristics of sharing a story set in Kerala and written in Malayalam. It just feels perfectly satisfying to read.

The Diary of Manu Gandhi ( 1943 – 44) are the diaries written by Manubehn ( Mridula) Gandhi, who was the youngest daughter of Mahatma Gandhi’s nephew, Jaisukhlal Amritlal Gandhi and Kasumba. These diaries are preserved in the National Archives of India and for the first time are being translated and edited from Gujarati into English by Tridip Suhrud. Manu Gandhi as a young girl had been encouraged by Mahatma Gandhi to maintain a diary. Manu Gandhi was the one walking beside Mahatma Gandhi at Birla House before his would-be assassin, Nathuram Godse, pushed her aside, so as to be able to shoot his target.

Diary-keeping of Gandhi was an essential duty for all those engaged in pursuit of truth and hence obligatory for Ashramites and satyagrahis. He constantly urged the Ashram community and constructive workers to maintain one. ….A daily diary,he believed, was a mode of self-examination and self-purification; he made it an obligatory observance for all those who walked with him on the Salt march.

While The Diary of Manu Gandhi ( 1943 – 44) is of more academic and historical interest to many readers, it is accompanied by a fine commentary by Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud. He offers insights about maintenance of a diary, the translation process, making available critical empirical material such as these diaries which till now many knew of its existence but not many could access. It also documents the growth of a young, under-confident girl to a mature person as evident in the style of her writing, longer sentences, more time spent describing incidents rather than restricting it to scribbles as many of the early entries are. Interestingly, as Tridip Suhrud points out in his introduction, Mahatma Gandhi or Bapu as he was known, would often read and scribble his thoughts in the margins of Manu Gandhi’s diaries. Ideally though it would have been a preferable if in this volume an interview with Tridip Suhrud with a leading gender/oral history expert had been included. It would then give some critical insights in what it means to translate a young girl’s diary many decades later by a highly reputed Gandhian scholar. With due respect even the best academic scholars tend to gloss over certain gender issues that irrespective of how many times they are repeated continue to be important and need to be highilghted. At the same time it would be fascinating to see what emerges from the conversation of a Gandhian expert with a gender expert to see how much Gandhian ways of living influenced the minds and hearts of those in the Ashram or did the basic gendered ways of seeing also get scrubbed away.

Speaking of memoirs, Rosy Thomas’s He, My Beloved CJ about her life with her husband and well-known Malayalam writer and critic, C. J. Thomas. It has been translated by G. Arunima. C.J. Thomas died young. His wife wrote this memoir much later. While it is a very personal account of her courtship, her marriage and the brief time she spent with her husband during which he opposed her desire to seek employment. Apparently in the Malayalam text, Rosy Thomas often refers to her husband as moorachi ( a colloquial term for conservative). Hence within this context it is quite amazing to read an account of a life that does not necessarily romanticise the couple’s love but is able to subvert the prevalent notions of wifehood. It has descriptions of their homes, their families, their circle of friends and at times some of their discussions on art, creativity and politics. At least in the memoir she comes across at times an equal participant despite his conservative mindset on having a wife who earned a living. Be that as it may, the monotone pitch at which the memoir is written or has been translated in —it is difficult to discern the difference — does not make He, My Beloved CJ easy to read. Of course it is a seminal book and will for a long time be referred to by many scholars interested in knowing more about the literary movement in Kerala or about the legend himself, C. J. Thomas — a man who seems to have acquired mythical proportions in Kerala. How many will access it for being a woman’s witnessing of a fascinating moment in history, only time will tell. Meanwhile the translator’s note is worth reading. G. Arunima writes:

…this biography is as much about C J Thomas and their marriage, as it is about Rosy as a writer. The act of remembrance is also about fashioning her own self and subjectivity, both as a ‘loving’ subject, and as a ‘writer’ and raconteur, observing, weighing, annotating and narrating their life as a text. Rosy Thomas grew up in a literary home; her father, M P Paul, was an intrinsic part of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, the Sahitya Pravarthaka Sahakarna Sangham ( Literary Workers’ Cooperative Society) and had also set up the tutorial college that was named after him. Writers, books and a culture of reading were a central part of her life. Even though these reminiscences do not dwell too much on her own literary or political formation, it is evident that CJ’s world wasn’t alien to her. In her later life she was to become a published writer and translator in her own right; such creativity is obvious even in this text where the nuances of a remembered life are testament to her wit and literary flair.

There are many, many more titles that one can discuss such as Sharmila Seyyid’s Ummath: A Novel of Community and Conflict. It is set during the three decades of the Sri Lanka’s civil war. It is told through the lives of three women, Thawakkul, Yoga and Theivanai — one a social activist, the other a Tamil Tiger forced into joining the movement as a child, and the third a disillusioned fighter for the Eelam. The novel has been translated from Tamil by Gita Subramaniam. While it immerses one immediately into the strife torn landscape, it is also puzzling as sometimes the voices of the three main characters seem to acquire the same pitch, making it seem as if the author’s own devastating firsthand experiences of the conflict are making their presence felt throughout the narrative. It is impossible for the English readers to ever solve this puzzle but there is something that comes through in the translation and is not easy to pinpoint. While promoted as fiction, it is easy to see that Ummath with the insights it offers, nature of conversations documented and descriptions of the landscape make this novel a lived experience. This is a challenging story to read but is worth doing so as the conversations about women/gender and conflict are relatively new in public discourse and need to be share more widely.

The final book in this roundup is a translation from Bengali of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s The Children’s Ramayana by first-time translator Tilottama Shome. It is the Ramayana told with its basic story sans the many digressions and minor tales. It is the epic with many of the popular stories retold that many generations of Indians are familiar with. It does not come across as a novice’s attempt at translation. In fact as she says in her translator’s note, “I have tried to retain that delightful quirky tone and the hint of humour told with a straight face that has endeared Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s works to readers for generations” seems to be true. Again it is impossible for English readers to confirm this fact or not but there is something about the zippy pace, ease of reading, a rhythm to the storytelling, making it immensely attractive to read. Perhaps Tilottama Shome being a trained singer ably assisted her in finding the rhythm to this translation. There is something to be said for a trained musical ear and discovering the cadences of a written text making the translation from one language/culture to the next a pleasurable experience!

18 September 2019

Tuesday Reads (Vol 5), 16 July 2019

17 07 , 2019 No Comments

Dear Reader,

Choosing a book or two to write about always throws me into a pother. The three mentioned in today’s post are not to be missed.

Writer and translator Shanta Gokhale’s autobiography One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body is brilliant. Shanta Gokhale is known for her translations from Marathi into English but she is fluently bilingual in English and Marathi. One Foot on the Ground is an account of her childhood, her father’s insistence on sending her to England to complete her school and later University. She returned home to become a teacher and then later joined the PR team of Glaxo. Ultimately she became known for her work as a journalist/columnist, screenwriter, translator and writer. She quit her day job once her children were old enough. Most interestingly, as the subtitle indicates, this is an autobiography that documents the various stages of her life through memorable experiences pertaining to the body. From the first remembered instances of molestation by the cook, dental troubles, babies, cancer, glaucoma etc. Then there are those other quiet assertions of her identity and her self, like filing an affidavit in the court to use her maiden name while still married, allowing her ex-husband to share her apartment till he had found a place for himself ( which was not to be for some years!), revelling in the joy of having her own space, her own bed where she could stretch out and read/work, ultimately recognising that she “needed a room of her own to be the person I was”. The calm tenor and poise with which Shanta Gokhale discusses her life, her body, her responsibilities and her ambitions is delightful. One Foot on the Ground is like reading the testimony of a woman who lives her feminism and do so contentedly. ( Read an extract published in Scroll on 10 July 2019. )

The second book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel is an extraordinary debut novel by award-winning queer Asian-American writer Ocean Vuong. Written in the first person by the narrator, Little Dog, it is a coming-of-age tale in America. It is about the boy, his Vietnam War veteran grandfather, his schizophrenic maternal grandmother and his mother who suffers from PTSD. It is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Ocean Vuong’s life, of migrating to USA as a two-year-old refugee via a brief stay at a refugee camp in the Philippines. The precision of his writing, much as the fineness of description that is associated with poetry, is a remarkable transferance of creative talent into prose. The long beautifully crafted flowing sentences. In fact Ocean Vuong wondered in an interview if it was a comically futile effort. He had to contend with various multiplicities while also being very aware of the American lineage of biographies. Yet the agency as an artist is also very important to him. He adds that he was very inspired by the American idea that one can create a mythology for oneself.

Once at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ‘Nam Vet 4 Life‘, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.

A coming-of-age novel that can be seen to exist firmly within the American tradition of literary biographies but at the same time is that of an Asian-American negotiating his adopted country. By writing this novel, Ocean has put together the best of literary traditions of his country of origin and his adopted country — the written word with the oral tradition and its folksy element. Thereby making it possible to speak of his schizophrenic grandmother and his mother who suffers from PTSD. There is plenty to unpack in this novel. It has many autobiographical elements which Ocean acknowledges in his various interviews but it has been announced as a novel. Ironically this is in the form of a long letter to his mother who is unable to read English. He states “the chance this letter finds you is slim — the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it impossible.” At the same time Ocean Vuong rightly points out that “Conflict driven plot becomes its own protagonist” . Here is a wonderful profile of Ocean Vuong published in the Guardian. ( 9 June 2019).

The final book is another debut novel that has been considered by its publishers “the most coveted debut of 2019, an intoxicating story of art, obsession and possession”. Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory is set in Victorian London, at the time of the Great Exhibition and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Doll Factory is about the heroine Iris who aspires to be an artist while employed with her twin sister painting dolls faces. Iris soon finds herself a part of the PRB. She is hired as a model. It is a fine mix of nineteenth century preoccupation with details and twenty-first century preoccupations of modern storytelling while being very aware of concepts like male gaze. There are moments of pure gorgeousness in the book especially when the author is describing the Great Exhibition.

Elizabeth Macneal is a graduate of the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia where she was the Malcolm Bradbury Scholar, and The Doll Factory has won her the Caledonia Novel Award. It has been sold to 28 territories so far, while TV rights have already been snapped up. Alan Massie puts it well in The Scotsman review:

It’s accomplished; there’s nothing raw about it. Today’s young novelists have all been schooled in the making of a novel and they have usually submitted drafts of it to fellow students as well as teachers, and taken their suggestions and criticisms on board. Their novels are far less clumsy, far less raw, than first novels so often were a couple of generations ago. The Doll Factory is a perfect example.

In the acknowledgements Macneal thanks a long list of people for their help and encouragement. No doubt they have all been useful. Nevertheless, it’s fair to assume that only she is responsible for the novel’s charm. It is indeed charming. But is it about anything that matters? Perhaps we shall have to wait for a second or even a third novel before knowing whether the author’s evident ability can carry her beyond charm so that she deals with matters of significance, writing something which has the reader engaged in both feeling and thought.

The Doll Factory will undoubtedly be seen on longlists and all the noteworthy literary prizes meant for debut authors. Ultimately Elizabeth Macneal may win one of the big literary prizes for a later novel she writes, by which time she will have rid herself of all the creative writing school learnings and learned to be confident of her own voice. She will have learned to trust herself.

For now enjoy this wonderful Twitter thread by Elizabeth Macneal describing how the exquisite book cover was designed:

Somehow it’s been six weeks since The Doll Factory was published (?!!). And in that time, I’ve often been asked about the incredible cover, and whether I designed it. The short answer is it’s all the work of @panmacartdept, but I thought I’d share a bit about how it came about. pic.twitter.com/eCzKstQH8G
— Elizabeth Macneal (@esmacneal) June 13, 2019

One Foot on the Ground, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The Doll Factory are three unmissable books of 2019. They have the incredible quality to stay with the reader long after the books are over and done with.

Enjoy!

JAYA

16 July 2019

An interview with Ekarat

10 06 , 2019 No Comments

Recently Speaking Tiger Books published a collection of short stories called The Book of Love Stories by Ekarat. The book cover is illustrated with two thorny branches. Not exactly an enticing book cover. Yet the stories are a curious collection exploring a range of love. From that of marital love, extra-marital, innocent love shared by little children who are probably imitating adults to young lovers determined to be together cutting across barriers, including the terrifying one of religion. It is a collection that does not grip you from the word go and yet it is difficult to put down. There is something about the detached, seemingly unaffected, style of writing of the narrator which makes it difficult to put the book down.

Ekarat is an alter-ego, a self-created role model, with a million stories to tell. He has walked this Earth for forty bittersweet summers. He has been a travel magazine editor, film marketing executive, communications lecturer and salesman.

After reading the stories, I emailed the author. Here are lightly edited excerpts of an interview with him.

Why did you opt to write short stories and not longer fiction?

Can I tell you the truth? Maybe it was the failure to complete a novel (two actually – in the last seven years) that made me give short stories a go. In 2016, I had just given up midway on what I thought was a very provocative novel. I was disheartened. My friend Palash Krishna Mehrotra read a couple of short stories (one found its way into the book – “Maria”) and he pondered and pronounced that there was something here. That was the inception of the short story collection.

2. How did you get into writing fiction?

Since I can remember, I have been in love with storytelling. I know nothing else. I wrote my first book (unpublished, not sure about the whereabouts of the manuscript anymore) in 2002, just after college. It was an ambitious project – a short story collection that flowed like a novel. My first published novel was The Nothing Man (published by Rupa in 2011) written under my name Ajay Khullar. It was a story of redemption through evil.

3. Did you consciously make every story revolve around love?

Not initially. I wrote the first few stories with the flow of what I had in mind, but when I saw that there was a thread of love running through these stories, I decided to pick up this thread and roll with it.

4. The different explorations of love are fantastic — from the little children in “Love has come to town”, the wife/lover in “Perizaad’s Lover”, to the besotted husband in “Wild Horses (Couldn’t Drag Me Away)” to the stunning “New Kid in Town”. Were these written at different moments in time or in quick succession?

‘Love has come to town’ was among the initial stories, written a few years ago. The others were done in a span of eight-nine months. ‘The Point of Inflection’ was added to the collection last, when the book was already with the publisher.

5. Where do you draw the inspiration for your stories?

Keep my eyes open and my ears close to the beat of my heart. Life provides a lot of material, enough to fill up volumes, if you pay attention. I also draw from my own life. Some of these stories are fictionalised depictions of real life love stories (mine and those that others told me).

6. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a short story?

Honestly, there was no struggle with this collection of short stories. While writing ‘The Book of Love’, I too was in love with a beautiful lady. It made writing these love stories that much easier. It just flowed.

7. Do you think being a travel journalist has made a qualitative difference to your fiction writing?

One hundred percent yes. As a travel journalist you are also telling a story, of a place, of people. You are connecting people to these places. That’s what you also do in fiction, in storytelling.

8. In many ways travel writing and fiction help readers “escape” and experience different landscapes without moving from their chair. Yet, in what way are the rigours of writing distinct for these two forms? Are they demanding in in their own way?

I think to write on travel and to write fiction is a dream job. And I think I’m very fortunate in that regard. I guess you have to have a keen sense of observation for both formats. I’ve had a great time doing travel journalism and I love writing fiction. You, though, invest very heavily when you write fiction (short stories or a novel) and sometimes it can be quite heart breaking – I abandoned two books after spending three years plus on each. It was a terrible feeling.

9. Who are the writers/journalists and poets who have influenced you?

My biggest influence has been the late British writer Graham Greene. I believe a lot of the darkness in my writing comes from the formative years of reading Greene. Also Stephen King – a very effective storyteller who walks the balance of good quality writing and being extremely popular.

10. Why did you publish your stories using a nom de plume?

My reasons for taking a Nom De Plume are very subjective. In my 20s I lived through some dark hours, hours which rolled into years. During these dark hours, I created an alter-ego, a role model, a sort of hero. Over the years I saw some bad days, mostly better. There was no constant in these years, except the idea of Ekarat. I took the name.

10 June 2019

Book Post 28: 18 February – 2 March 2019

03 03 , 2019 No Comments

At the beginning of the week I post some of the books I have received recently. In today’s Book Post 28 included are some of the titles I have received in the past few weeks.

3 March 2019

Of Nayantara Sahgal’s “The Fate of Butterflies” and Toni Morrison’s “Mouth Full of Blood”

22 02 , 2019 No Comments

Nayantara Sahgal (b. 1927) and Toni Morrison (b.1931) have new publications out this past week. Nayantara Sahgal has a novella called The Fate of Butterflies. Toni Morrison’s Mouth Full of Blood is a collection of her non-fiction articles published over the past four decades. Every word chosen in these books is powerful. The two writers have witnessed significant periods of modern history — from the Second World War onwards to experiencing the joy of new democracies and its mantras of self-reliance, new freedoms as those made available with womens’ movements’ and the end of racial segregation, to the presently depressing times of rising ultra-conservative politics, authoritarian rule and sectarian violence. So when Nayantara Sahgal and Toni Morrison as seasoned storytellers pour their wisdom and experience into their writings without mincing words, you listen for the truths they share.

Nayantara Sahgal’s novella The Fate of Butterflies told from the perspective of a political science professor, Prabhakar, is a chilling tale about the all-pervading violence that exists in society. It is an insidious presence that is gradually transforming the rules of social engagement. It is licensing sectarian violence to such a degree that is fast becoming the norm rather than the deviant behaviour it is. The dystopic society Prabhakar finds himself in where people speak of “them” and “they”, mysteriously unnamned groups who are powerful enough to command and strike fear in the hearts of ordinary citizens. The horrors shared in The Fate of Butterflies of mass rapes of women and children, slicing bellies of pregnant women before sexually assaulting them, the homophobic behaviour of some expressed in the horrific violence towards individuals by setting them on fire after trying to castrate them, the quiet disappearance of kebabs and rumali roti from Prabhakar’s favourite dhaba with the excuse that Rafeeq the cook had disappeared making it impossible to offer Mughal cuisine to finding a naked body on the road wearing only a skull cap makes this fiction at times too close to reality. It seems to be a thinly veiled account of many of the witness accounts, oral testimonies and media reports of pogroms and communal violence that have been witnessed in recent years. Linking modern crimes to the historical accounts of Nazi Germany when such horrors unleashed on civil society where first witnessed and documented, Nayantara Sahgal, seems to be reminding the reader of the past being revisited today in the name of “nostalgia” and “harmony” when it is actually a crime against humanity, a human rights violation.

Lopez reminded his friends: no meat unless proven to be mutton, not cow. The Cow Commission went around making sure. He was thinking of becoming a vegetarian himself, he was scared as hell that his fridge might be raided and the mutton turned into beef. Suspects were being dealt with out on the streets, surrounded by camers and cheering beholders. He didn’t fancy that treatment for himself. It was far from reassuring in view of Rafeeq’s disappearance or dismissal. they drank their cloying Limcas, not sure how to find out about Rafeeq. The kaif’s water wasn’t safe and there was no mineral water left. All the bottles of mineral water had been commandeered by ‘them’, the ‘they’ and ‘them’ who came and went, mysteriously unnamed.

Lopez, who taught Modern Europe, said, “This tea party you were at, Prabhu, you said the Slovak was well ahead of the others.’

‘Why wouldn’t he be? They’ve have practice. They had a flourishing Nazi republic during the war, with a Gestapo and Jew-disposal and all the trimmings, and evidently there’s a tremendous nostalgia for those good old days when everybody was kept in line, or in harmony, as they called it.

Togetherness was the watchword. Not that the other speakers weren’t harking back to the glories of the 1930s, but I did get the feeling that some of them were sitting back and waiting to see which way the wind would blow before they risked investing in it. Only fools rush in. Compared with the rest of them the Slovak was the only Boy Scout.’

‘But most people are little people who have to go along with whatever’s happening,’ said Lopez, ‘either because they don’t know any better, or they have no choice and can’t afford to lose their wages or their lives.’

‘Most people,’ repeated Prabhakar, and again with stubborn emphasis, ‘most people everywhere, in Europe or here or anywhere else, only ask to be left in peace to live their lives. It doesn’t seem too much to ask.’

Toni Morrison’s A Mouth Full of Blood is a collection of her essays, speeches and meditations. They are a testament to her varied experiences in American history and literature, politics, women, race, culture, on language and memory. These are structured essays to occasional pieces of writing to moving eulogies as for James Baldwin to her Nobel Prize in Literature speech. It is a wide range of pieces which deserve to be read over and over again but it is the introduction to this volume entitled “Peril” that is exceptionally powerful. It is a commentary on contemporary world politics while focused on the importance of a writer and the significance of making art especially in authoritarian regimes.

In “Peril” Toni Morrison reasons that despots and dictators are no fools and certainly not foolish enough to “perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgements or follow their creative instincts” for if they did, it would be at their own peril. Whereas writers of all kinds — journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppression that works like a coma on the population, “a coma despots call peace”. As she astutely points out that “historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow”. She continues that there are two notable human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. But she woudl like to add a third category — “stillness”. This could be passivity or dumbfoundedness or it can be paralytic fear. But in her opinion it can also be art.

Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, …writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. …The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films — that though is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.

“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture in Literature. Likewise pay heed when these two old and wise women speak. Pay heed.

22 February 2019

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