On Upendranath Ashk's Girti Deevarein

In the novel form’s capacious chest of mysteries, one intriguing phenomenon is the attraction of so many novelists who call themselves realists to protagonists who are anything but. (Of course, they can be “realists” in different senses, but equally, sometimes they are not.) Like all paradoxes, this one too points to an important truth.

From Cervantes onwards, naïve protagonists in fiction, their hearts full of great dreams and noble ideals, believing that a more just world can be realised, often rudely schooled in worldly truths by the cynical, provide a point of view on human nature that eventually unsettles the reader just as much as their fictional milieu unsettles them. Of course, they may come across as purely comic if they, like Don Quixote, refuse to learn anything at all. But equally, should they learn to adapt themselves completely to their circumstances, we sense something tragic about their pragmatism, like that of a parrot that has made peace with living in a cage. And so their education has not been in vain, for even as these characters become more worldly-wise, we feel the need to defend or rescue exactly what they are abandoning. It is a good template for a story...I feel it myself as I write this schema out.

Something like this narrative arc – one says “something” because this 500-page novel is nevertheless only a fragment of a massive, seven-volume story, and much remains to be realized in the “future” of the story – appears in Girti Deevarein (Falling Walls) by Upendranath Ashk. Ashk was one of the leading lights of Hindi literature in the twentieth century, and remains, alongside Premchand and Yashpal, one of the realist Hindi novel’s holy trinity. The Girti Deevarein series was his great novelistic project: the story of five years in the life of a highly sensitive young man that he hoped would also become a portrait of the age.

Here is a writer, therefore, who is no hurry at all. (How was he to know that his first readers in English would be reading him decades later in a time when there is time for nothing, and especially not novels?) For three or four hundred pages, all we are given are the torments of the provincial young protagonist, Chetan, in the town of Jalandhar as he flaps, stumbles, falls, and gets up again, buffeted by the storms of family, education, livelihood, poverty, marriage – and his own questing self, which will not allow him to accept easy answers to his questions, even as it cannot reject the dictates of convention.

Brutalized by a belligerent, hard-drinking father who is nevertheless perfectly secure about his place in the world, Chetan knows he can never become the same kind of man. But has no sense of what kind of man to become instead. He needs time to grow into a place of independence, but meanwhile time is a rope steadily twisting tighter knots around him: a wife who does not represent what he wants in a woman, a job in a newspaper that bears no resemblance to what he seeks from work. He is tormented both by his feelings of towards women who cross his path – most notably his own sister-in-law, Neela – and by his inability to do anything about them. Not having a strong sense of self, he repeatedly places his trust in older men who seem to represent some kind of power or virtue. But each one of these engagements leads him only to a further revelation of “the duplicity of the age.”

Above him, another figure seems to proceed much more serenely: the narrator, building up in painstaking (and occasionally pointless) detail the surfaces and structures of lower middle-class life in undivided Punjab in the nineteen-thirties. We are in a universe of galis and mohallas, charpoys and turbans, thundering patriarchs, downcast mothers, the frames of karma and dharma, the Arya Samaj and the Congress party, a glass of milk before bed and one set of new clothes every year. Men prefer the company of men, women only open up to other women, and both sexes sublimate their unactable yearnings in story or song or silence. Late in the book, at a restaurant in Shimla, we learn that Chetan “tasted salad for the first time in his life” – a novel taste in a world where milk reigns over not just meals but metaphors, and the prevalent theory of parenting holds “that the curses of a mother and father are like drops of milk and ghee.”

Daisy Rockwell, Ashk’s greatly involved and touchingly partisan translator (she has also written a critical biography of the writer, and published a collection of his stories called Hats and Doctors), has elsewhere compared Ashk to Proust. The resemblance is certainly worth contemplating. Both writers wrote a seven-volume novel sequence that remained unfinished; the theme of In Search of Lost Time is also the development of a nervous and questing young man into an artist; and both protagonists return obsessively to the fevered climate of their childhoods.

But the fundamental difference between the two writers is that Proust’s story is told in the first person by the protagonist, who by the force and beauty and peculiarity of his obsessions succeeds in converting us to his poetic vision of reality, while Ashk’s narrator shows us Chetan from the outside as the prisoner of his circumstances, and reality in Ashk’s world remains stubbornly prosaic and mean. The workings of memory are central to the narrative method of both writers. But the dozens of flashbacks into Chetan’s childhood in Girti Deevarein reveal not just of a character who seeks refuge from his own present, but also a writer wrestling with his own rather rudimentary technique and generating more mass than meaning.

About a hundred pages from the end, though, the writing suddenly takes wing, and Chetan’s difficulties with the world suddenly begin to be marked by insight rather than incoherence. Glimmering observations begin to appear about the relationship between art and life, self and society, religion and morality. Trying, for instance, to compare the boy Chetan’s genuine love of nature with the adult Chetan’s equally genuine love of art, the narrator observes that “with art, he found what he couldn’t attain in nature: self-expression” and that “Art is really the daughter of nature.”

The story builds up to a devastating denouement. After having meditated for long upon his discontents, Chetan decides that he is at fault for the emotional distance between him and his wife. He resolves to make a genuine effort to scale the wall of gender difference so deeply built into marriage by tradition, and make his wife not his slave but his friend.

Just then, though, comes the news that Neela, his sister-in-law, is about to be married off at a very young age. And Chetan remembers that it was he himself who, having nearly committed a misdemeanour with Neela, had advised her father to have her married off and in so doing, congratulated himself on his own powers of restraint.

Now, attending the wedding, he sees that the girl is being married off to a well-off, well-over-the -hill widower. Yearning for a genuine soulmate himself, he has just ensured that another human being will forever be denied one. Yet again Chetan feels hapless, but there is a difference: he feels hapless for the sake of someone else. And in the same breath he ceases to lie to himself.

The naked truth appeared before him. He was in love with Neela. Despite a year and a half of married life, he loved her….Intelligence, religion, morality, society, marriage – all those walls which in reality had kept his desire hidden from him had fallen in his imagination.

Watching these walls fall so dramatically, one moves from asking more of Ashk to asking for more Ashk.

Conjugal and Fictional Possibility in Perumal Murugan's Kali-Ponna trilogy

One reason why we gravitate to fiction is for the pleasure of entering imaginatively into a highly worked-up moral field that is not our own and often very different from it. In fact, fiction reassures us of the plasticity of our own consciousness: after only a few pages of acquaintance, we are able to bind ourselves with the point of view of one or several characters. Even if they themselves seem trapped or bound down by a situation, a city, or their own natures, in living vicariously through them we experience the space between own imaginative life and theirs as freedom, an enlargement and deepening of our own sense of life and of our awareness of cause and effect. No reflective reader deeply stirred by a novel ever quite relinquishes the trace it leaves behind, and when those novels do not supply a neat closure we often "carry on" the lives of the characters in our own minds beyond the point at which the writer left them. Having once made the story the object of our reading life, we now make it a part of our reading of life itself. It is perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay a writer.

Ten years ago, the writer Perumal Murugan proved himself worthy of just such respect and reverberation – left us tantalized with the sense of a book having ended when the story had in a way only just begun – with his 2010 novel One Part Woman (in Tamil, Maadhurbaagan). Set in a village in western Tamil Nadu some time in the early part of the twentieth century, the book illumined in a torrent of exquisite, empathetic detail the predicament of a peasant couple, Kali and Ponnayi, deeply (and for those around them, often provokingly) in love with one another but unable after twelve years of marriage to conceive a child. 

Although Kali and Ponna are utterly rapt in one another, the norms of the world and the tongues of people around them always remind them of what is missing from their lives. The child-shaped hole in their lives is brought up in nearly every social encounter and finally in their own dealings with each other, although never to the point of breaking the bond between them. If anything, Kali is repeatedly counselled to take a second wife, but refuses to do so. Instead, he grows ever more reclusive, spending all his hours in the barnyard that lies a little distance from his home, tending his fields and his animals. Meanwhile, Ponna, compulsively scratching the wound, turns every subject to the question of children: "The plant that we plant grows; the seed that we sow blooms; is it only me who is the wasted land here?" 

When all patience and propitiation has been exhausted, one final option, if extreme, presents itself. At the popular annual chariot festival of the half-male, half-female god Ardhanareeswara – in his encompassment of both sexes into one whole, the very emblem of conjugal felicity – in the nearby town of Thiruchengode, there opens up on the final night an abandonment of all norms and the erasure of identities. Then, any man and woman may consort with one another in the dark, and children born of such encounters are held to be bestowed by the god himself. It is suggested to both Kali and Ponna by her own brother Muthu that she journey to the festival all alone to find a man on this night to be impregnated by him. It is very hard for her to contemplate this act of tawdry yet potentially liberatory adultery, but she wonders if she would do it if her husband gave his permission.

The tension between the present and the future, the individual and the couple, between sexual fidelity and the need for children, is thus strung by Murugan to the highest pitch. In the end, as the result of a misunderstanding orchestrated by Muthu for what he believes to a good cause, we see Ponna going to the festival and being seduced by a man believing her husband has discreetly consented to it, and Kali belatedly discovering what he then takes to be the greatest of all betrayals. One Part Woman ended with an image of Kali, drunk and devastated, in the very barnyard where he and his wife had spent so many happy hours, and looking up at the portia tree that he himself had planted many years ago – the most prominent motif in the book: a symbol of pleasure in the natural world, of Kali's own capacity for creation and nurture, of the passing of time, and of the slow ramification of of events. What would happen next? Would he take his own life? We could not say: people need air to live, and characters their creator.

And what was happening to the creator? It is clear Murugan himself was exhilarated by his own story in One Part Woman and unwilling to take leave of his characters. In fact, he had generated such a cloud of possibilities that in the years that followed, he came up with not one but two sequels, now ably translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan as Trial By Silence and A Lonely Harvest. What is thrilling about this follow-up is that the books are not contiguous. Instead they audaciously take they take advantage of the freedom that fiction allows and life does not, and explore two versions of events arising from the same narrative crux: Kali and Ponna sundered by the eruption in their lives of a single night's events and their consequences. Some events are common to both sequels – in both, for instance, Ponna discovers she is pregnant – but the meanings and feelings they generate are very different because of the circumstances in which they transpire, allowing us, in effect, to choose a path on a fork on the road, then come back and take the other one.

In Trial By Silence, we see Kali where we left him, now attempting to kill himself by hanging from a noose on the portia tree. But his mother arrives just in time and saves him. Shortly afterwards Ponna arrives home from her night at the chariot festival and is shocked both by his brush with death and by her discovery that he had never given his consent. She is branded a whore by her husband, who refuses to touch her or converse with her and retreats into a private universe, stewing and suffering silently in his barnyard with his animals and becoming even more estranged when it turns out she is pregnant. Ponna herself cuts off all her ties with her own family for having plotted the destruction of her marriage. In this way an entire web of connections is broken up; the world of the family becomes a set of solitudes.

And the other book? In A Lonely Harvest, we find that Kali succeeds in killing himself; the grotesque details of his grimace at point of death and his cadaver are no less unsettling in light of the knowledge that he continues to live in another book (which experience leads to the insight that the "reality" of fiction is of a different order than that of life). Ponna is left a widow with a small farm, an aged mother-in-law, and (soon) a child in the womb. But she refuses to leave the barnyard where Kali spent all his days and in fact moves house there, seeing his presence in every small detail and especially in the portia tree. 

We are thus made spectators to two kinds of tragedy. In one, we see how lonely and riven two partners in love and domesticity may become while keeping up a kind of perfunctory life in the world together. In the other, the desire to perpetuate life results instead in the snuffing out of a life, and in the desperate efforts, pervaded by regret and yearning, of those left behind to patch together an existence that will never yield the pleasures of the past. These are exquisite formal patterns.

And they are realized in writing of great involvement and fidelity to point of view. Nowhere is Murugan's mastery of his material more evident than in his depiction of space as a reflection of human personality, and in his intricate braiding of the human and natural world. In a seemingly artless, low-key "village prose" that is nevertheless limpid and expressive, he makes us partners in the peasant's endless round of chores, showing how in his imagination the possibilities of trees and soil, birds and beast, water and stone, sun and season, are channeled into mutually supportive combinations. Raising livestock and working his fields in One Part Woman, Kali is a master of creation who is yet mocked by the world for being impotent; then in Trial By Silence, his decision to abandon his crops and cattle and let everything decay around him in his beloved barnyard becomes a metaphor for the blighting of his mind by the plague of cuckoldry; then in A Lonely Harvest, he kills himself in the very same haunt, and the control of the space passes over to the two women of his house, who in taking it over and adapting it to their own needs and capabilities discover its pleasures all over again while finding in it disturbing hints of his presence.

There is much to admire also about the equity of empathy distributed by Murugan between his male and female protagonist – sometimes expressed in very shape of the story, in the form of chapters alternating between their respective viewpoints. And, given his own starting position, his extraordinarily layered and lucent exposition of female subjectivity and agency in the characters of both Ponna and her mother-in-law Seerayi give the lie to what has regrettably become an axiom of modern gender politics and of some strands of feminist literary criticism: that male writers can never write truthful portraits of female characters because they somehow “just don’t understand”. (If the only identities we could depict truthfully were our own, there would no point in writing fiction in the first place.)

If anything, the most powerful emotional effect of the book is the sense that in their long years of mutual adoration and affectionate mockery (of which many lovely scenes fleck all three books) both Kali and Ponna have become, like Ardhanareeswara, half-man and half-woman, able to treat gender and sexual difference as a bridge to the other and not as an island.

Kali was intimately familiar with every inch of Ponna's body. He did not even know his own body that well. There was one little lash on Ponna's eyelids tht was thick and slanting away from the other eyelashes.  He sometimes held it between his lips and tugged at it. She once said to him, 'Let me know if you want to remove it.'But he replied, 'It is my most favourite piece of hair, let me tell you.'
He also liked to play with her tongue by keeping his finger on it. She would pull it in at his touch, and he would ask her to bring it out again. 'If feels soft, like touching a snail,' he said once.'See, now the snail's going into its shell!' she said, and closed her mouth. 
He loved the fine lines on her lips. He once counted them and said, 'Fourteen.'She said, 'You are crazy.' And he agreed. 'Yes, indeed I am.'

And, as an extension of the same experience of reaching out, both parties are able to marshal imagination and memory as an antidote to pain – and even as a substitute for embodied presence. “She pervaded his thoughts,” we read in One Part Woman. “She came to occupy them so much that he could tell her every movement and gesture.” And in a startling scene in A Lonely Harvest, we see Ponna going into the fields after Kali’s death and finding a brinjal patch that had been lovingly planted by him. The effect gradually metamorphoses into the cause; creation back into the creator. “Ponna caressed the bristly stem of the brinjal plant. It felt like she was caressing his arms. She held the stem against her cheek. Definitely his hand….She kept walking through the plants. How many hands did he have!”

Is this one of the essential works of Indian fiction in our century? It absolutely is.

On Yashpal's Jhootha Sach (This Is Not That Dawn)

Any reader who has a feeling for the rigours and small miracles of novelistic composition is especially likely to be transported by the awesome narrative freedom and strength of the great long novels of world literature. Having broken through the walls of artistic and formal finitude over hundreds of pages of scene-setting, plot-threading and character tracking, such novels, or novel sequences – IB Singer’s The Family Moskat, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence – seem almost to write themselves, continuously unspooling and ramifying in the same way as life. Indeed, it seems a diminution of life to have to break with their company.

On one level, of course, the great long novels represent nothing more than an especially massy story – a map of human motion and connection on a grand scale. But is that all? Their size would be (and sometimes is) worth very little if we did not also take away from them the extended experience of mind, of an encounter with not just a world but a subtle, disembodied intelligence – the narrator – observing and occasionally annotating its ferment. To observe a story-world for weeks, even months, in concert with a novelistic narrator is to return to the world outside the book to find something strangely absent, or limited, or silent about it. Sometimes when we find ourselves missing the characters of a novel, what we are actually missing is the narrator.

This is the experience we take away from the Indian novelist Yashpal’s massive novel Jhootha Sach (literally The False Truth), first published in Hindi in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, and now translated into English for the first time as This Is Not That Dawn. The novel is over 1,100 pages long, but it is long only in an absolute sense, not relative to the dozens of characters it describes, the ideas it explores, and the narrative time (and indeed geographical space) it traverses.

Following a family from their roots in a gali, or lane, in the great city of Lahore (now in Pakistan) to a new life in the cities of north India over the 1940s and 1950s, Yashpal’s novel takes as its central, world-changing event the partition in 1947 of colonial India into the nation states of India and Pakistan. The bloodbath that resulted from this massive, uncontrolled two-way migration of peoples across the new boundaries of what was formerly undivided Punjab – Hindus streaming east into India from what had now become Pakistan, Muslims west into Pakistan in the fear that they would have no place in a new Indian nation state – took at least a million lives. Partition left a gash on the psyche of the Indian subcontinent that has never quite healed, and that inflames the politics of both countries, as well as Bangladesh, to this day.

The novel’s central characters are two siblings, Jaidev and Tara Puri, who live in a small, tightly knit Hindu community in a lane called Bhola Pandhe’s Gali in the old walled city of Lahore. Among the ways in which Yashpal’s novel links the lives and loves of its middle-class characters to the great churning in the public sphere of Lahore and Delhi in the 1940s is by setting them within the overlapping worlds of journalism, literature and education in Lahore (no other Indian novel is so much in love with the idea of the newspaper, and the newspaper’s power as a voice of reason in the public sphere). Puri is an idealistic young writer and journalist who has already served a prison sentence for the cause of the freedom movement. Tara is a college student excited by the intellectual freedom of the university – one that is not available in the world of the gali, with its family and gender hierarchies – but troubled by her engagement to a man she hardly knows.

In the novel’s opening movement, we see Puri (as he is called by the narrator) vexed by his inability to find a job and the social obstacles in the way of his marrying Kanak, the daughter of a prosperous publisher. Tara, meanwhile, feels that her world will come to an end if she is made to marry Somraj Sahni, her loutish fiance. But these problems pale into insignificance compared to the crisis that suddenly appears like a dark cloud over Lahore, as the British prepare to leave India. The Hindus of Bhola Pandhe Gali fear that Lahore might be ceded, as part of the two-nation theory that has gained currency in undivided India, to the new, primarily Muslim nation state of Pakistan.

“What if there’s a Pakistan or there’s a Hindustan? We’re Lahorites, neighbours of Doongi Gali,” declares one of the family’s optimistic friends. But as the book shows, this cosmopolitan vision of history and community has little chance against the drumroll of nationalism, and the combustible fear of the other lying just beneath the surface of the subcontinent’s social life.

Yet the novel also shows us that, at the time, Partition was not imagined to be a complete sealing-off of two geographically and culturally contiguous territories from each other, as turned out to be the case eventually. People left behind their homes, families, cities and countries imagining that they would soon be back once things had settled. But often they never returned, or returned to find that everything they owned had been taken.

The paradox most strikingly explored by the novel is that the very (allegedly foundational) categories of Hinduism and Islam that were the basis of Partition proved powerless, despite their scriptural emphasis on peace and justice, to stop the cataclysms of violence visited by each side upon the other. People of both sides looted, killed and raped, “all in the name of God”, as one character sorrowfully observes.

Repeatedly in This Is Not That Dawn, characters are shown jettisoning their private moral compasses because they are convinced that blood must be spilled to avenge the spilling of blood. Yashpal’s novel, on a scale equal to the complexity of the matter at hand, shows us how the question of justice is rarely contemplated by human beings in the abstract, or outside the pressures of time or frame of history – and that in a crisis, this tendency can prove to be mortal while continuing to believe itself moral. These conceptions of “comparative justice” are still doing the rounds of the subcontinent to this day, as during the gruesome religious riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002.

If This Is Not That Dawn is nevertheless a deeply pleasurable book, it is because it offers a world so vividly imagined that the quotidian acquires the same significance as the apocalyptic. The novel is steeped in meaningful details that reveal the networks and pressures of space, gender (“the afternoons in the galis belonged to the women ... If a male had to come back to the gali for some reason, he would clear his throat loudly to warn the women”), family and tradition in the small, hermetic world of Bhola Pandhe’s Gali in Lahore, and then out across the fields of city and nation.

As both Puri and Tara are thrust out into the world – Puri when he leaves Lahore in search of a job; Tara when she is abducted by a Muslim man after escaping from Sahni’s house on the night of her wedding – they are forced to bear the violence and derangement of Partition upon their bodies and then, finding themselves still alive, decide what to make of their battered selves. Although it appears for the longest time that Puri, with his idealism, his love of language, his political vision and his diligence, is the book’s hero, we see him gradually sinking, over a thousand pages, under the weight of his own worldly power in the new Indian republic and somewhat insecure masculinity – an unforgettable narrative arc. Revealingly, it is his involvement with the Indian National Congress that gradually leaches the idealism from Puri.

Instead, it is Tara, the apparently helpless, brutalised victim, who slowly gathers strength and makes an independent life for herself in the Indian capital, Delhi, watching out not just for herself but for other women in trouble. The storyline reveals not just Yashpal’s feminism – once she has a modicum of power and agency, Tara repeatedly resists any attempts to return her back to a normative world of female deference and duty – but also his emphasis on the individual’s right to dissent from the collective.

This Is Not That Dawn was written just a few years after the Indian constitution offered a new vision of rights, responsibilities and secular freedom to Indian citizens – a vision of a political order more egalitarian and enabling than any previously held in the history of the subcontinent. It might be thought to be the narrative and novelistic companion to that document, all the more compelling because its worldview is implied – parcelled out into the experiences and reflections of dozens of characters, and across the novelistic timespan of nearly two decades – and not spelt out from above.

Ten years into the life of the new nation, Yashpal sat down to compose an epic story, scrubbed free of nationalist cant, about the passion and tragedy that attended its birth. In doing so, he produced the first great novel about the ideals and implications of a new view of Indianness, a novel whose mingled vision of realism and idealism rings true to this day.

Indian Literature 2000-2010: a survey

A shorter version of this essay appeared earlier this week as part of a special edition of Mint surveying the last decade in Indian politics, business, society, literature, and culture. I apologise for some lapses and omissions – I'd have liked to say something, for example, about poetry and drama, but I don't think I'm tuned in enough to the scene to have a secure sense of its shape. 

This is also my final piece as Mint Lounge's book critic, bringing to an end four fulfilling years of waking up every Saturday to find one of my reviews in the paper. An archive of about 180 reviews and essays for Lounge is here. These essays, and my two books Arzee the Dwarf and India: A Traveller's Literary Companion, were my own small contribution to Indian literature this decade. I'll continue to appear occasionally on the paper's books pages, but the space where I'm most reliably to be found is here.

The Decade In Literature
 
The book business encompasses three universes that overlap substantially but have distinct identities and histories. These are: publishing (the book as a physical object, the mechanics of book-editing, design and printing, the size of the market, the quality and diversity of the writers and publishing houses within it), bookselling (the bookshop as a site for browsing and buying and as a cultural space, the distribution networks of publishers, book launches and other publicity methods), and, less tangible than the other two but the idea grounding it all: the idea of literature, of a reading culture.  

This is the acknowledged power of the written word, deeply considered by an individual writer and then sifted through multiple quality-control filters and put between two covers, for nuanced thinking that calls on all the riches of language, creates unforgettable verbal patterns, beats on the reader's brain with provocative ideas or narrative methods, world-changing argument or a defence of the status quo, offers spiritual elevation or just thrilling timepass, supplies a mirror on the world or a vision of an alternative world. Across all books is a common idea of the book.

This idea, though, is changing. From a global perspective, not since Gutenberg invented the printing press in the fifteenth century has there been a more momentous decade in the history of the book as the one that just went by. Both book-publishing and bookselling have changed shape enormously from the turn of the millennium onwards. In the West, the decline of print culture and the arrival of the e-reader and the e-book have made it possible to imagine a day, due within our own lifetimes, when the printed book, like the printed newspaper, will be no more than a curiosity. Indeed, a hundred years from now the very word “book” may not mean anything, as we move further into a world of integrated multimedia. 

Simultaneously, the spread of the Internet and the growth and burgeoning power of Amazon have precipitated a crisis for bookshops, which all through the twentieth century were the sites where all the elements of literature came together, and mean something vital to you and me that they might not to our children. Meanwhile, globalization has, arguably, made “literature” a bigger and richer space for most serious readers, making more kinds of books more easily available to more readers, permitting old books to be sold alongside new books, and allowing readers, through the Internet, to have a stronger say in book discussion and, thereby, sales.

India’s book economy is, however, on a different arc, from that of the West and, like the Indian newspaper industry, is still on its way up rather than down. For an observer of Indian literature in English (for the purposes of this essay, I include under “Indian literature in English” both work originally written in English and that translated into English), the last decade was full of bright lights on all three counts of publishing, book-selling, and the density and internal diversity of the idea of literature and the spread of a reading culture.

As – whether we like it or not – the hub of the many literary cultures that make Indian literature the most complex and multilingual national literature in the world, Indian literature in English has a huge responsibility, one that it realised better this decade than in any one previously. 

Just as it has taken Indian democracy the best part of 60 years to activate the social and political energies of a majority of its citizens, including many traditionally disenfranchised groups, similarly, it might be said, it has taken Indian literature in English (which is a few decades older than Indian democracy) a very long time to achieve a density and diversity equal to the social and linguistic energies available to it. We might think of this decade as one in which Indian literature both went forward and expanded outward at the same time, bringing into its embrace many of the literary riches of its past and present that were hitherto restricted to speakers of a particular regional language or specialists. (Take an hour, for instance, to survey all the riches of the Clay Sanskrit Library project, which published about 50 titles over the course of this decade).

The birth of many new publishing houses and imprints in the last decade, the explosion in the number of books published,  the increase in the number of bookshops (particularly the big chains like Crossword, Landmark and Odyssey) and the growth of the online book trade all point to one thing. The book business is growing rapidly. In 2010, the estimated value of the trade book market (covering, that is, books published for the general reader, and not textbooks or technical books) was about 1500 crores . This is three times the size of the book market in 2000.

When Penguin, the market leader in the trade segment (with about 15%), started up its operations in India in 1987, it published seven titles that year. In 2000, it was up to 124 titles a year. This year, it was about 240 – a reliable index of how things have come along in two decades. Further, many more players have a slice of that pie than was the case ten years ago. A number of new English trade and academic publishing houses – Random House India, Permanent Black, Westland Books, Hachette,  Blaft, Navayana, Yoda, Niyogi, Amaryllis, and Srishti – appeared over the last decade to compete with the older guard of Penguin, HarperCollins, Rupa, Orient Blackswan, Oxford University Press, Seagull, Zubaan, Motilal Banarsidass, Picador, Katha, Roli, Mapin, and Stree Samya, claiming a share of the trade even as they helped increase its size with their distinct emphases.

Widening internet penetration has stimulated e-commerce, allowing readers in places without bookshops to buy books, and even those in areas with bookshops to access a much wider range of books, or buy books at substantial discounts. Online bookselling, almost negligible in 2000, now accounts for about Rs.100 crore worth of business annually, divided up between players like Flipkart (where I do most of my shopping), Rediff and Indiaplaza.  

The physical Indian bookshop, though, with some honorable exceptions, continues to be a disappointing place for the serious reader. Stocking an inadequate range of titles and usually manned by staff who have no real interest in or knowledge of books, bookshops in India don’t yet manage to fulfill the publisher Andre Shiffrin’s idea that “The good bookshop doesn’t just have the book you want, it has the book you never knew you wanted.” I find some of the better secondhand bookshops in India, such as Blossom in Bangalore and New & Secondhand Bookshop in Mumbai, far more rewarding than the big chain stores. Recently I spent some very productive hours in Arpita Das's Yodakin in Delhi's Hauz Khas Village, and Sachin Rastogi's Worldview Bookstore at Jadavpur University in Kolkata has an excellent range of academic and university press books at bargain prices.

A great part of the appeal of books, we must remember, is their allure as physical objects: the way they are designed, bound, typeset. This was the decade in which, for the first time in India, books as objects met world standards. When I was a literature student in the year 2000, it was possible to distinguish a book published by an Indian publisher from a foreign one just by taking a look a it. This is no longer the case, and Indian bookshops now take pride in a wealth of books by Indian writers that don’t just read well but look great. If there is something that Indian publishing needs now, it is better editors. To this book-reviewer, too many Indian books are currently let down by their sloppy English: hoary cliches, confusing syntax, superfluities, stilted dialogue, clumsy metaphors, and unselfconsciously purple prose.

Indian literature itself occupies a much larger place in world literary consciousness than it did at the beginning of the decade, with a small raft of big Indian names giving way to a whole schooner of exciting voices. The typical first-time Indian novelist or short-story writer in English today is much less self-conscious in his or her approach to the language than, say, two decades ago, and much more sure of his or her audience. The result is that good new works of fiction appear now not in their ones and twos but at the rate of a couple of dozen a year. In a multicultural and globalizing world, in the age of the Internet and with easy access to a hospitable market, Indian writers are also likely to be from more diverse backgrounds than previously, and to have a far wider range of narrative and aesthetic influences across mediums, from novels to films to music to comic books. 

Unfortunately, writers in English have a much greater chance of being published in markets outside India (something that distorts foreign perceptions of Indian literature). This is slowly changing, but it may take another decade to take full effect. The revolution must begin, however, by more Indian readers consciously seeking out Indian literature in translation (some older essays on what I think are great Indian novels in translation are here: 1, 2, 3, 4).

Indeed, the role and agency of readers, as much as writers, in a literature cannot be overestimated. Any vibrant literature requires a sizeable number of discerning readers who not only follow the work of writers but are in some sense in advance of them, and whose impatience with sterile forms and stories, and skepticism of prevailing power structures, creates an atmosphere of ferment and ambition where distinctive visions and bold new energies can exercise their spirits. Such readers are now everywhere in evidence in India, but their numbers are still too small or them to be gamechangers. Perhaps by the year 2020...

Another pointer to the maturation of Indian literature in English this decade was the emergence of genre fiction of various kinds, from thrillers to chicklit to campus novels to pulp fiction in translation, thereby opening out the market for Indian fiction dramatically and bringing in readers hitherto deterred by or unsympathetic to novels. Most of these books don’t yet meet the standards of the educated reader of literary or genre fiction (and some, as Aadisht Khanna pointed out in a hilarious piece, are so bad they’re good) but they are part of the story of Indian literature this decade as much as an Amitav Ghosh or Aravind Adiga.  

As a sign of India’s growing power within the world of Anglophone fiction, the decade was also marked by the establishment of a number of indigenous prizes for Indian or South Asian works of high literary merit. The Crossword book awards, established in 1998, were joined this decade  by the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Hindu Best Fiction award and the Shakti Bhatt First Book award. While still putting down roots in the Indian book world, these prizes allow us to envisage a day when they, rather than overseas stamps of recognition like the Booker, will be seen as the primary arbiters of Indian literary merit. 

Alongside literary prizes, a thriving literary culture also needs quality literary journals. The two established Indian literary journals in English, The Little Magazine and the Sahitya Akademi-published Indian Literature, were joined this decade by a number of excellent print and online literary journals, including the bilingual Pratilipi (which has recently gone into book-publishing), the eclectic Almost Island, and newer efforts like a webzine dedicated to short fiction, Out of Print. Even a magazine such as Time Out Mumbai, which started out in 2004 and over the course of the decade established itself not just as India's best-written magazine but as a journal integral to the self-conception and historical self-awareness of Mumbai, might be thought of as part of the story of Indian literature this decade, cities and literature always being closely connected. 

Book coverage in mainstream newspapers and magazines, though, is not noticeably better than it was in 2000. For this reason, despite the growth of Indian literature, books do not occupy a noticeably larger space in the minds of educated people than at the turn of the century. This one of the last missing links in the maturation of Indian literature, for without robust literary debate and the reasoned evaluation of books, literature is hamstrung both at the level of its influence in the public sphere and its power to school and widen the tastes of readers.

Currently, Indian literature is more deep and diverse than it has ever been, but no one newspaper or journal – perhaps not even all the periodicals collectively – is able to take full stock of this on its pages, and many outstanding titles (particularly academic publications, books from small presses, and works in translation) come and go without a trace. What Indian literature needs in the next decade is something like a New York Review of Books or a London Review of Books – a New Delhi Review of Books perhaps? – to consolidate the many gains of the decade gone by.

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Bankimchandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism in the Indian novel

A slightly different version of this essay appeared this weekend in The National.

Hindu nationalism today has a considerable presence in Indian politics: the BJP and smaller state-level organisations; support in sympathetic publications and TV channels; even celebrity endorsement. But one realm that has been persistently indifferent to the allure of Hindu nationalism, whether in its benign or militant incarnations, is the Indian novel, particularly the Indian novel in English.

Hindu nationalism argues that Hinduism is the engine of Indian history, and asserts the equivalence, at the level of culture if not always of religion, of the terms “Indian” and “Hindu”. It believes that Hinduism in India has been for centuries under siege: first from Muslim invaders from the north-west who converted swathes of Indian society to Islam; then the British; and finally the new Indian nation-state. It holds that modern-day Hinduism (which it often views as a cohesive entity) continues to move towards marginalisation because of the encroachment of proselytising religions, the neglect or limitations of the secular Indian state, and the lack of religious consciousness and embarrassment about religious assertion exhibited by Hindus themselves.

Yet the story of India’s past and present narrated by the Hindu right rarely makes it into fiction, except within an ironic frame. The political rise of Hindu nationalism over the last three decades has generated many persuasive ideologues, but the movement does not, in English at any rate, have a house novelist, someone to turn ideas and abstractions into characters and plots.

This is a shame. Firstly, it allows Indian novelists of a certain ideological disposition a free run of the land. The result is often a facile secularism, a kind of reflexive celebration of India’s diversity, that borrows its vocabulary and its tropes from well-worn ideas, and thus has no linguistic or narrative energy to call its own. Tellingly, when Hindu nationalists appear in such novels, they are condemned from first sight by the narrator as zealots, driven by anger, hate, and lust (Arya in Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva, or the cartoonish Minister Prasad in Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay).

Secondly, it would appear that there is a want of serious engagement in the Indian novel in English not just with Hindu nationalism, but with the immense weight of Hinduism itself. Not only is Hindu nationalism artistically unfashionable (except as a convenient source of villainy and conflict), its absence points to a deeper failing that ironically might be seen as lending credence to the Hindu nationalists’ complaint about the falling away of Hinduism from the wellsprings of culture. Barring exceptions such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Hinduism itself is rarely explored or interrogated in an extended way in modern Indian novels in English.

This suggests a narrative orientation in the Indian novel in English that is not just politically centrist or left-of-centre, but which engages with religion more at the level of observation and backdrop than of sympathetic immersion or experience. Hinduism’s massive repository of ideas, fables, images, exemplars, proverbs, aphorisms and narrative structures have left an impression on the Indian novel in English far smaller than the one that it exerts on public and private life in India. One might say that, while Hinduism should be part of the Indian novelist’s wealth, the challenges of realising a mainly Sanskritic worldview persuasively in English are such that it is usually treated as a tax.

This background makes all the more significant the appearance of an English translation of Debi Chaudhurani, a late work by the Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894), India’s first major novelist. One of the earliest recruits of the Indian Civil Service established in the middle of the 19th century by the British, Bankim – so familiar a name in Indian letters, across linguistic traditions, that he is usually referred to by his first name – spent his working life as a deputy magistrate in the colonial administration. But, even though he represented the vanguard of a new class of anglicised Indians (going so far as to write his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, in a sonorous English), Bankim’s ear remained close to the ground.

His novels, particularly those of his late “nationalist” phase, are preoccupied with contemplating the future (and reprising and sometimes reimagining the past) of a predominantly Hindu Bengali society hobbled, from without, by the martial superiority first of Muslim rulers and then the British, and from within, by a stagnation of thought, social structure and gender roles. Debi Chaudhurani (1884), loosely based on the story of a real-life female bandit in 18th-century Bengal, offers the reader a deeply felt vision of “the Hindu way of life” – one that celebrates but also interrogates Hindu tradition. If one were to imagine contemporary Hindu nationalism as its best and most intellectually coherent (something it is mostly not), this might be the kind of reading of Hinduism it would offer.

Like many 19th-century realists (Hardy, Flaubert, Zola), Bankim was fond of female protagonists, the better to portray the constraints and inquities of the patriarchal society that was, as much as the individual, the subject of his enquiry. When we first see his heroine, a young woman called Prafulla, it is as the victim of the neglect of society and “the pinchings of poverty” (this is one of Bankim’s lovely phrases from his one and only English novel).

Although married into a prosperous Brahmin family, Prafulla has been thrown out by her father-in-law Haraballabh (a representative, in Bankim's view, of many of the malignant tendencies of upper-caste Hindu society) because of allegations made against her by members of her village. Even though he loves her, her young husband Brajesvar is powerless to defend her. Although Brajesvar forsakes Prafulla at Haraballabh’s command, we find that the narrator provides only a muted critique of this decision, setting against it Brajesvar’s memory of a verse from the Mahabharata that emphasises duty to the father. This is one of several instances where the reader finds his or her long-settled assumptions about duty and family upended by Bankim, whose vision of an ordered Hindu society leads him to privilege or at least defend the right of parents to filial obedience.

Left on her own, Prafulla is kidnapped by a local goon, and then abandoned in the forest after the venture goes awry. Here she finds herself at the mercy of a bandit called Bhabani Pathak. But Pathak, a Brahmin, also turns out to be a scholar of Hinduism. Impressed with Prafulla’s native intelligence, he sets out to train her for five years in a syllabus that aggregates the great texts of Sanskrit grammar, logic, literature and philosophy. The last text to which Prafulla is exposed is the Bhagavad Gita, “the best of all works”. One might think of this reading list as a nationalist’s reply to the policy of English as a medium of higher education advocated by Macaulay’s Minute in 1834, and imposed by the British in India thereafter.

Even more unusually, Prafulla is shown receiving a physical education. She learns, in tussles with a female adept, to wrestle. The implication is that Brahmins, hitherto the intellectual elite of Hindu society, must learn in a time of crisis to fight. Once Prafulla’s education is complete, she becomes the revered leader and moral compass – hence the honorific “Debi Chaudhurani” – of a band of skilled vigilantes who apply their private vision of justice to a lawless realm. “Each [fighter] had a staff tied to his back – the weapon typical of Bengal,” remarks the narrator. “The Bengali once knew its proper use; it was when he abandoned the staff that he lost his spirit.” Versions of this lament about the pusillanimity of modern Hindu civilisation are widely echoed in contemporary Hindu nationalist tracts.

Yet Prafulla’s major victories in the text are achieved not by force, but by love and ethical action. Elevated by her education, she becomes an exemplar of the ideal of nishkama karma or selfless and detached action, advocated by the Gita, and of the dharma, or vision of order and justice, central to Hindu philosophy. All along she remains steadfastly faithful not just to Brajesvar, but to the well-being of the patriarch who cast her out (even as the reader roots for his downfall). The novel’s final chapter shows her renouncing banditry and returning, under an alias deciphered only by her husband, to her bridal home, to take charge not just of the household but, in due course, of the entire estate.

Breaking down the fence of the European realist novel to make room for his ideological project, Bankim, in his closing chapter, makes his protagonist, elevated by the best that Hinduism has to offer, not just the idealised wife of Hindu tradition but indeed an ideal for all Hindus. Strikingly, he claims Prafulla as an incarnation of the Krishna of the Gita who declares: “To protect the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish right order, I take birth in every age.” These are the closing words of the novel – words that would have, in the unfamiliar context of a novel and as applied to a female protagonist, amazed and roused the book’s original readers, and also words that suggestively replace a Western idea of linear time with a Hindu one of cyclical time. Possibly no other Indian novel is as steeped in the glories of Hinduism, and so self-consciously preoccupied with a vision of the rejuvenation of Hindu society, as Debi Chaudhurani.

Introduction to India: A Traveler's Literary Companion

Here is the introduction to my new book India: A Traveler's Literary Companion, recently published in the USA by Whereabouts Press. The anthology brings together both classic and contemporary Indian writers, and Indian writing in English as well as Indian literature in translation. An Indian edition of this book, which was originally commissioned by Whereabouts for an American audience, should be available later this year. The entire series of literary companions to different countries published by Whereabouts is here.

Much of the pleasure of storytelling comes from all that is left unsaid—from the things for which we readers are given a direction, but not an end. So too, so much of what we feel for the world of a story derives from the flavour of the local—from a turn of phrase, a glimpse of a patch of earth, a memorable detail, that is absolutely specific to the worldview of a particular character or culture.

When, for instance, Chandrakant, the youth leaving his village for the first time in Jayant Kaikini’s story “Dots and Lines,” feels the wind on his face on the train to Bombay, and imagines that the same wind “had just blown the tarpaulin off the night-halting bus on the banks of the Gangavati before reaching this place,” this image makes us see Chandrakant in two places at the same time. Not only does the idea of the wind from home catching up with the train going away from home encapsulate Chandrakant’s longing for what he has left behind, the specificity of the image of “the tarpaulin of the night-halting bus” being ruffled by that wind registers very strongly on our own imaginations. This is one of those flares of detail that make fiction burn brighter than other kinds of prose writing.

Similarly, in Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s “Canvasser Krishnalal,” we are told of Krishnalal, the itinerant seller of medicated oil, that “he would ply like a weaver’s shuttle, from Shiyalda to Barasat, from Barasat to Shiyalda.” This detail not only makes Krishnalal seem like a mechanised object himself, operating upon the world with the same regularity and constancy as that of a season or the trains, it also suggests the man’s jaunty temperament—it might be a metaphor thought of by Krishnalal himself. We understand, from such details, why Eudora Welty thought that while fiction’s reach, its themes, were universal, the power of a story was “all bound up in the local.”

This anthology brings to you a basket of such stories, plucked out of the gardens of India’s many language-literatures: works that are intended to bring you closer to the Indian landscape and the Indian imagination in all its variety, even as you enjoy the universal pleasures of storytelling. About half the stories here were written in English, and the other half are translations, each from a different Indian language.

Indeed, the most striking feature of Indian literature when seen as a whole—a source of its strength and variety, but also of the difficulty in navigating it—is that it is multilingual to a degree not matched by any other national literature in the world. Even if we exclude classical languages and contemporary dialects, we find ourselves before a field divided up among at least two dozen languages. As with any other language, each one of these languages represents not only a particular matrix of sounds and grammatical structures but also a distinct imaginative universe, with its own myths and beliefs, its own social structures, its own view of history and time.

Thus we arrive at the paradox: because of its profusion of languages, most of Indian literature is a foreign country even for Indian readers, who at their best can be no more than trilingual or quadrilingual. I myself speak English, Hindi—which is the closest that India has to a “national” language—and my mother tongue Oriya, and, I am ashamed to admit, can only read and write in the first two, although I can sing you a number of devotional songs in the third.

Unsurprisingly, as English is the language of university education and also the favoured language of the Indian elite, a link language between people whose first languages are different from each other, and also a powerful force in business and advertising, it is Indian writing in English—a realm in which much exciting work is being done— that receives the most attention both at home and around the world. Another factor inhibiting the appreciation of the literature from other Indian languages has been the paucity of good translations into English.

These are the conditions that led Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West to controversially declare, in their 1997 anthology Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, that “the prose writing . . . created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work that most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India,” and that “‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.”

This is a contention—as I hope this book will demonstrate—that is being disproved rapidly. But the point remains: many of the riches of Indian literature are lying invisible in the shadows, waiting for a translation that will release their rhythms and energies into the world. It is my hope that some of the stories in this volume showcase the best of what is currently available of Indian fiction in English translation, and arouse in you, the reader interested in India, the desire for a more sustained encounter with writers whose work is every bit as good as their better-known counterparts who compose in English.

As with other anthologies in this series, the stories here are arranged on a geographical basis, almost laid out on a map. Each of the five regions in which I have divided the country could potentially have been the subject of an individual book, but here I have limited them to two or three stories each. Where the stories are set in a specific city or town, those have been named; otherwise the general region or state in which the story is set has been provided.

I have tried to make sure that the book gives a sense of the different realities of urban, small-town, and rural India, from the world of upper-class Delhi represented in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Sound of Falling Leaves” to the village people gossiping and squabbling by the pond in Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Asura Pond”. The stories also gesture at the diverse primary allegiances of Indian people, whether it is to the city (Bandhopadhyay’s Krishnalal), the guild (Nazir Mansuri’s fisherman Lakham Patari), caste (Phanishwarnath Renu’s villagers) or the tribe (Mamang Dai’s heroine Nenem).

The works brought together here are both old and new: the earliest was first published in 1902, while the ink is still not dry on the most recent one. Some of the writers here are legendary figures known to, even if not always read by, readers all over India; others represent the new generation, and are slowly making a reputation for themselves. I have made some notes on aspects of their craft and style in the individual introductions to the stories.

Not the least of the pleasures of the stories brought together here is that, while rooted in a particular world, they often hum with the stirrings of distant worlds that have made India such a diverse and fecund civilization. The architect of the Taj Mahal in Kunal Basu’s “The Accountant” looks at an architectural plan “drawn not simply from Hindustan but from Isphafan and Constantinople, Kabul and Samarkand—from the whole world”. In Nazir Mansuri’s “The Whale”, a trader in a port village on the west coast of India ferries “lime, dates, onions, and garlic to Basra, Iran, and Africa” till one day he never returns. Now these stories, too, go out into the world—many of them are being published outside India for the first time—and it is my hope that wherever they go, they will provide the same pleasure that they have given at home.

Chandrahas Choudhury
Mumbai, March 2010

On The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction 2

Curses that last for generations, haunted houses occupied by flickering apparitions both good and evil, the human body invaded by restless spirits, skulls collected from burning ghats, murderous voodoo and protective lemons, patients who use the art of “Persian sorcery” to kill their doctors, voluptuous damsels both chaste and randy, killings by the dozen and a fair amount of rapes – all these perfectly routine, humdrum activities comprise the subject matter of the stories of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction 2. Like its predecessor, which came out to warm reviews in 2008, this book too picks up some of the racy stories from the cheap books and magazines with lurid covers of the world of Tamil pulp fiction, and brings them over to English in a splendidly designed and weighty paperback.

Every story in the world possesses a plot, or what the literary theorist Gary Saul Morson calls “narrativeness”. This is a quality of moving forward or backward in the time-field of the story, and a dramatisation of the contingency of life, whereby we experience the pleasure of story (even when we know, for instance, that it is going to have a happy ending) by contemplating “the excess of possibilities over actualities” set up by the writer. Will the young prince die because of the curse, or will he find some way of beating it? What will happen when this family visits the old dilapidated house on the banks of the river? We want to know, and we read on.

In genre fiction, or pulp fiction, we might say that this quality of narrativeness, understood in a limited but effective way as meaning narrative speed (as encapsulated in the word “pageturner”), is privileged over all the other aspects of storytelling, such as rich and subtle language, close insight into the psychology of individuals, manipulations of point of view, or even a refusal to bring a story to a finished, tied-up close. Because of this, pulp fiction is often the site of one of the guiltier pleasures of reading, that of skipping. The eye often leaps across two or three paragraphs to sneak a peek at what has happened, because we can’t wait to know. When this happens, we might say that the story is a success on its own terms – the writer has drawn us in.

Certainly this feeling of being gripped by narrative pleasure and curiosity is often evoked by the first and longest story chosen by the translator Pritham K Chakravarthy, Indra Soundar Rajan’s “The Palace of Kottaipuram.” This tells the story of conspiracy and intrigue over several generations on a samasthanam, or feudal princely estate, not far from Madurai. Soundar Rajan gives us a charming pair of protagonists: the young and good-hearted regent Visu (cursed, like all the men in his line, to die before the age of thirty) and his smart and sexy girlfriend Archana, whose physical charms are always emphasised (“Archana’s bout of laughter ended with a jiggle of her firm breasts”). Archana and Visu begin to suspect that the curse might not be as fixed in the supernatural realm as it appears, and thereby set the story in motion.

Also prominent on the feudal estate are the Noorukudis, a tribe of bonded labourers who have been bound to, and sometimes preyed upon by, the royal family for centuries. Soundar Rajan loves the conventions of crime fiction, of the good guys enwebbed in dangers of which they have no comprehension (“Far away, on the balcony of the top floor, a pair of eyes was watching them”). But the complex social structure and history set up by him means that the story is always both advancing and expanding.

Overall, though, the new anthology is a disappointment when compared to the first volume. More than one story of the seven chosen is just a meaningless pile-up of blood and gore. Not only are the characters as flimsy as playing cards – something we accept – but often they have very little agency either. The evil spirits that invade their worlds and do gruesome things to them (thereby stimulating or titillating the reader) are finally, and a little too easily, trounced just in the nick of time by other spirits, or by the protection of some powerful goddess or deity. This is just a lazy way of writing, happy to feed off a larger attitude in the culture that believes that there is a divine hand behind everything and that any crisis requires a puja and a mantra to be solved.

One might say these are merely the conventions of the genre and a sign of how it has its ear to the ground, responding to the religiosity of the culture to which these books are addressed. But, no matter the circumstances, it is always disappointing to see stories take the path of least resistance in this fashion. Only Indra Soundar Rajan’s story offers some critique of blind faith and superstition. A tribal woman in his story is suddenly possessed by a vengeful spirit, blurts out a number of prophecies, and collapses, a small streak of blood seeping from her mouth. We are told: "The women in the crowd rushed forward, each taking a spot of the blood and applying it as vibhuti on their foreheads." Later Archana discovers that the "possession" was merely a charade organised by the conspirators in the palace, the better to ensure that they have their way. It is people like those women in the crowd, we realise (as a result of this small observation made at the time of the incident by the narrator) who ensure that these acts of theatre carry the force of supernatural revelation.

The spectrum of human emotions on display in this volume is very small, as if the writers have worn out their sympathies churning out hackwork. Nowhere in this volume is there the tenderness, the realism, or the insight into a troubled heart of a story like Pushpa Thangadorai’s “My Name Is Kamala”, which tells the story of a South Indian prostitute’s attempt to escape from a northern brothel, from Volume 1. Women are seen, whether benignly or in a matter of fact way, as if this were but natural, as sex objects. Again, this may be how pulp fiction generally sees the fairer sex (it seems somehow right to use this cliche), so it is pointless to ask for a more developed understanding of gender issues. What is more interesting, rather, is that for all their apparent coolness and disregard of conventional morality, these stories can't bring themselves to fully embrace the violence and savagery of their material.

In Rajesh Kumar’s “Hello, Good Dead Morning", we see a young woman, Nadia, a blue film and then, aroused, sexually exploiting a visiting technician by threatening to foist a rape charge upon him if he resists. Nadia later is given her comeuppance for this immoral behaviour when she is herself sexually assaulted: suddenly abducted, drugged, and raped on camera. As this scene is pictured, the writer suddenly steps back from the lurid world he has so enthusiastically set up (giving it far more attention that the murder that, when solved, ends the story), and says only that the rapists were “lying on either side of her, toying with her body, strumming it like a rudra veena.” Why this coy, romanticising, falsifying description of something so horrific? Why is Rajesh Kumar so shy of saying, "They fucked her brutally one after the other"?

Now that the novelty value of Tamil pulp fiction in translation has receded, it is harder to see feel so enthusiastic about this second offering of work from his universe. It may be that these stories need a supporting extra-literary narrative – that of the great fame of the authors in Tamil Nadu, the vast number of books they have written, the millions of copies sold, the heat and excitement of this publishing sub-culture – for an English-reading audience to believe in their magic. But surely stories which are intrinsically fluent and gripping should shake off such a crutch once we enter their worlds. This, one finds, is not the case. Despite their sensational subject matter and Chakravarthy’s idiomatic, confident translations, there is just too much narration, dialogue and plotting that is dull, simplistic, and unskilled in Tamil Pulp Fiction 2.

And here is an old post on another Indian work of pulp fiction: Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist.

Vijaydan Detha: between the folktale and the short story

Every reader of literature makes a conceptual distinction between a folktale and a short story. Folktales have protagonists who are often generic, distinguished by their birth (a prince) or their profession (a potter). In the world of the folktale, creatures change form or come back to life from the dead, the characters are buoyed by boons or buffeted by curses, and good usually wins over evil in a way that is narratively satisfying.

The short story is a more modern form, and can be seen both a response and a rebuke to the folktale. It privileges psychology and interiority, believing that the drama of the human mind is just as striking as that of worldly action. It also disdains magic, although it frequently invents fantastical and imaginative premises of its own. Morally, the short story is not committed to upholding virtue or goodness; narratively, it is not committed to always finding a clear resolution. A folktale is something that can be repeated and retooled; a short story, if its essence is to be kept, can only be read, privately or aloud, because it is the linguistic creation of an individual imagnation.

Can a piece of narrative prose then be both a folktale and a short story? To have done so seems to be one of the achievements of the octogenarian Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha. As Detha’s splendid American translator, Christi Merrill (who works on Detha in tandem with the poet, folklorist and translator Kailash Kabir, who has himself translated Detha's works into Hindi), observes in her introduction to Chouboli and Other Stories, Detha’s writing involves both conservation and creation, notation and invention.

For decades, as part of the work his organisation called the Rupayan Sansthan, Detha has been bringing together, as AK Ramanujan did, all the folktales he found told around him, and writing them up in the same language – Rajasthani – rather than the Hindi of which Rajasthani is often considered a poor cousin, thereby preserving and dignifying not just a corpus of oral literature but also the language in which it has been passed down over time. Chouboli asks us to understand it as a double act of translation: first by Detha from oral Rajasthani into the written, and then by Merrill and Kabir from the written Rajasthani into English.

Many of these stories retain a trace of their origins in performance – the presence of an audience is implied in them in a way that written texts, aimed at the single private reader, are not. Merrill begins one story with a chougou, or a nonsensical rhyme intended to put listeners into a mood for storytelling. Some stories also make mention of the hunkara, or "the grunts and hmms of approval that turn a telling into a two-way communication, a community event."

"Just as eyes look more alluring outlined with coal, and a brow looks prettier decorated with a tiki in sindur red, so is a story better told with hunkara," declares the narrator of the cycle of stories called "Chouboli", in which a prince (actually a young woman in disguise) wins a haughty princess's hand with the power of his stories, which he tells in isolation, with only the princess as an audience, but with many objects around him, such as beds and necklaces, offering the hunkaras that send the story bounding forward. Many of the stories begin not with some significant fact about a character or event, but with some remark or claim about the nature of storytelling itself. "Nothing happens to a story if all you do is listen," begins the story "A True Calling". "Nothing happens if all you do is read, or memorize word for word. What matters is if you make the heart of the story a part of your life. This story is one of those."

At the same time, Detha likes filling out the oral stories of his culture – stories about princes and princesses, cunning thieves and shape-shifting tricksters, who in a modern scheme would qualify as "flat" characters – with realistic touches and literary flourishes of his own, making them a reflection on manners, morals, and human nature that is recognisably the work of an individual mind. When the narrator of a story says that "There's nothing in the world more sacred and more wonderful than freedom", that is recognisably an emphasis of the writer.

The other great pleasure of these stories, for the English reader in particular, is the little swirls of local and proverbial detail folded into their situations. When a group of men each renounce a particular food, "someone gave up touri root, another kaddu squash, and a third cucumber"; a jeweller fascinated by a female form fashions "a set of thick mothiyou bracelets for each of her wrists and churau armlets to slide above her elbows." A character is reprimanded for picking on somebody without reason with this proverb: "When the potter isn't getting along with his wife, it's the donkey's ears he pulls."

Merrill prudently does not bother to find (inevitably distorting) English equivalents for words like "leela", leaving us to confront directly the connotations of a line like "The leelas of wealth are certainly most unusual." Ramanujan thought that the folktale was infinitely adaptable, “a travelling metaphor that finds a new meaning with each telling”, and in Detha’s work the folktale sporadically seems to find in itself the energy to find not just a new meaning but a new self.

Certainly, in the best of these stories, "Duvidha" or “The Dilemma” (filmed by Amol Palekar as Paheli in 2005), a human predicament is so convincingly portrayed that we slow down our reading, wanting to savour the complexity of the situation. A pair of newlyweds are seen returning to the man’s village. They stop to rest beneath a tree, where a ghost resides. The ghost is so taken by the girl’s beauty that he falls in love with her. Strangely though, the husband, who should be experiencing something similar for his wife, is so caught up in the mercantile mindset of his community (Detha explicitly says he is a bania) that he can think only of trade and profit. Shortly after, he sets out on a journey of five years because it is an auspicious time for business.

The ghost, still pining, sees the man heading away, engages him in conversation and learns of his story, and decides to take his form and replace him in the household he has left behind. But he is so much in love with the girl that he cannot bring himself to be duplicitous with her: he confesses everything. In turn, the woman, who has always been seen as an object and without desires of her own, cannot bring herself to reject this most extraordinary love from the beyond. The ghost and his beloved live as man and wife in the community for four years, when suddenly the real husband comes home. “All the wealth in the world cannot bring back time past,” writes Detha, and his story appears to side with those people who value time and human relationships over material values.

Although they are frequently diverting, not all the stories in Chouboli work so well. In "The Dilemma", the ghost finds that he is in such a difficult situation that he has to "walk the fine edge between truth and untruth as skillfully as wise Yudhistir himself", but between the folktale and the short story there is not a fine edge but often a yawning gap, and this is not so easily traversed. While these stories are often diverting, sometimes there is only so far a folktale can go, and to a modern sensibility some of the characters can seem too flat. Even so, this is definitely narrative work worth experiencing, especially when complemented by the insights of Merrill’s own introductory essay, on the work of translation and on the possibilities of an Indian English that contains words and concepts from other Indian languages. “Armies march to the beat of drums,/ stories, to the rhythms of ohs and hmms”, goes one sing-song phrase or chougou in the book, and there are certainly many moments worthy of ohs and hmms in Chouboli.

Many of the interpretative and linguistic cruxes of Detha's work are explained by Merrill in her essay "What Is A Translator's True Calling?" And here are two of the stories in the book: "A True Calling" and "Untold Hitlers".

A larger overview of recent Indian literature in translation is here.

On Sankar's novel Jana Aranya (The Middleman)

Even in a time of recession, most educated young Indians today inhabit a job market miles removed from the India of the decades preceding liberalization. But public memory is always short, and one generation’s shared experience often erases that of the previous one. The array of urban job options available today to the graduate or even the school-pass will probably ensure that in a decade we will have all but forgotten the moment in middle-class Indian life when, to quote a line from Sankar’s novel Jana Aranya “if you had a job you were blessed.”

Sankar’s novel – famously made into a film by the same name by Satyajit Ray on its publication in Bengali in 1973, but only now translated into English by Arunava Sinha under the title The Middleman – beautifully evokes a world of competitive examinations, newspaper classifieds, job interviews, family pressures, and nepotism. At the same time, we see the desperation of those left behind in the race for financial security, the respect of society, and marriage and family through the gateway of employment. In a short, charming afterword to the novel, Sankar reveals how he himself worked as a middleman in his impoverished youth, buying all kinds of goods cheap and then selling for higher. Although his novel describes the particulars of a time and place that may have now disappeared, its sympathetic portrait of human striving and shrewd understanding of the ways of the world make it at once a great novel of both business and family.

The protagonist of The Middleman is Somnath Banerjee, the youngest son of a retired judge. Unlike his two older brothers, who have done well for themselves and made good marriages, Somnath is a struggler, an unexceptional individual seeking a place in a world which has its own peculiar ways of judging merit. Although Somnath is badly off, his family is not in need of his income. His struggle is personal, not familial, and there are many supportive presences at home, including his tender-hearted sister-in-law Kamala (some of the best scenes in the book depict conversations between these two kindred hearts). Some others have it even worse, such as Somnath’s friend Sukumar, who must find a job urgently to support his large family. Sankar expertly depicts the fellowship of these two hopefuls, Somnath and Sukumar, but does not fail to remind us of their differences.

After numerous attempts at finding a job, Somnath realises that time is running out: “If he couldn’t become self-reliant now, he would no longer remain human.” On the advice of an acquaintance, he decides to go into business. The novel now leaves behind the world of the salaried (except for brief glimpses into the life of the luckless Sukumar) and moves across into the adjacent world of entrepreneurship. What is Somnath to buy and sell? How are contacts to be made and how is business to be generated? Can one hold to one’s own values in the world of commerce, or is one to fall in line with the rest? Sankar makes us consider all these questions through the figure of Somnath, and his portraits of small-time traders, speculators, and agents are vivid and memorable. Somnath realises that to succeed in such a world – which is, after all, the only world which has offered him an opportunity to be human, albeit a morally impoverished human – he will have to jettison some of his beliefs and compunctions. Here are the paragraphs in which Somnath first tastes the thrill of an income:

When Somnath brought up the envelopes, Mr Ganguly asked him to leave a few samples and the rates. He promised to get back to Somnath after checking their stocks.

The transaction was completed by five o'clock, and after deducting expenses three crispt ten-rupee notes sat in Somnath's pocket. His first ever income. An experience as breathtaking as first love. Suddenly, Calcutta had shed its drab hues and was glowing before his eyes. Unable to contain his excitement, he took out his wallet and counted the money again.

Back in his office, Somnath looked for Bishubabu, but was told that he was out of town on business. As soon as Adak arrived, Somnath ordered for sweets, eager to celebrate. Adak protested loudly. 'This is why Bengalis get nowhere with business. This is your first capital. You can't afford to waste it. Get it up to ten thousand first. Then I'll be the one demanding the sweets.'

Just as Somnath has two older brothers, so too Jana Aranya could be said to bear a familial resemblance to two novels that preceded it in the world of Bengali fiction. These are Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Ghoonpoka (The Woodworm, 1967); and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1969), both of which were translated into English many years before it was. As their very titles indicate, these novels too are about the corrosion of traditional values and the alienation of the protagonist from society. But although it has had to wait the longest to be translated, Sankar’s novel is a more satisfying experience than the other two because of the excellence of its narrative craft.

Although it is written in a smooth, unornamented prose, the novel’s achievement is deceptive. One would have to draw a diagram of the plot to see how deftly Somnath’s encounters with the different people in his life, his shuttling between home and the world, are laid out. There is a heartbreaking tenderness about some of the family scenes, and then a powerful hunger and ruthlessness about the world of deals and commissions; yet these realms are not a pair of simple contrasts, and at times it appears that it is the family that is unreasonable and the world of commerce a better arbiter of worth.

Although Sankar’s language is naturally something that would not lose much in translation, Sinha’s skill is especially evident when it comes to his magisterial rendering of dialogue, which Sankar prefers to third-person narration as his narrative motor. This is transparently one of the greatest of modern Indian novels, and though it has crossed the borders of its language belatedly, its second innings is sure to be even longer than the first.

Sinha's two other translations of Bengali novels are Sankar's Chowringhee and Buddhadeva Bose's My Kind of Girl. His translation of Rabindranath Tagore's story "One Night" can be found here.

An archive of my essays on Indian fiction is here.

[A version of this review first appeared in Mint.]