Mark Tully and India

This is the last of an informal four-part series on India to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. The other three are "Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose", on Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi, and "The art of oratory, and the great speeches of modern India".

India can be a foreign correspondent's nightmare, very hard to get in its entirety even to those wholly committed to the search. The intense and irreplicable peculiarity of India - the residual presence of outdated modes of behaviour and thought from the days of the Raj, or the widely divergent experience of daily life along lines of caste and particularly gender, to take just two examples of how both the near and distant past continue to work on the present - is of course hard to miss for anybody except those totally habituated to it, but it can nevertheless perplex the intellect seeking to break it down into its constituent elements.

From this perspective, the books of Mark Tully are an especially noteworthy contribution to the literature on modern India. Indeed, because he has now spent the best part of four decades in close engagement with the country, because his travels as the BBC's Chief of Bureau have brought him in contact with all kinds of places and people, and because he is part-insider, part-outsider in a productive way, Tully is probably better tuned into India than most Indians, with their limited access to the great sprawl of their own country and its past.

Tully's latest book and perhaps last book on his adopted country, India's Unending Journey, is a work both off and on the beaten track. This is because, after a series of highly agile, capacious and erudite books about contemporary India, hospitable to all kinds of viewpoints, Tully has in closing written a volume that resembles the traditional "India's message to the world" book customarily written by well-meaning visitors.

In part this is because India's Unending Journey - there is something cliched about the title itself - is the most autobiographical of Tully's books, as also the most polemical. The balance between observed detail and overarching argument is different from that of Tully's previous books, and the writing is more clearly addressed to the western reader. Tully makes a critique of aspects of western life though the lens of India, and thus addresses two constituencies at one go. In some ways he flatters his adopted home at the expense of the civilization in which he grew up. Although Tully knows that India itself, with its manifold problems, has yet to find any kind of balance, the argument he extracts from the experience of "forty years of living in India" is how the West itself is now unbalanced, unquestioningly secular and meanly materialist.

In his youth Tully briefly trained to be a priest in the Church of England, and if anything the autobiographical tone of his new book explains why the question of religion, and the place of religion in an increasingly secular climate on the one hand and a radically shrunken world where previously hostile faiths are forced to co-exist on the other, lies at the heart of his work on India. For in India not only is it taken for granted that you believe in God (as a Goan priest tells Tully), in a way that is no longer so in Europe, but also the other, the stranger, is always in one's field of vision, forcing upon every citizen the imperative of co-existence.

It was in India, writes Tully, that he refined his understanding of religion and came to believe "that a universal God made far more sense rationally than one who limits his activities to Christians", which is the sense of exclusivity, of chosenness, that his upbringing and later his abortive training as a priest taught him and which is shared by dedicated believers of the three great monotheisms. This explains his position on two dominant strands of contemporary Indian thought: he feels equally distant from "a secularism which seems to respect no religion, and a nationalism which carries with it the danger of only respecting one". The view that "any cause that is not secular is illiberal, seems to be illiberal itself," he remarks (not surprisingly some of his critics in India have accused him of being a BJP sympathiser). The religiosity of Indians is clearly congenial to Tully's temperament (while in the west "Mammon is triumphant and God on the retreat"), as is the openness and syncretism of Hinduism, even if it has recently taken on a militant aspect.

For instance, in a beautiful essay called "Altered Altars" in his previous book, India In Slow Motion, Tully sets out with his partner, Gillian Wright, (best known to Indian readers as the translator of Shrilal Shukla's comic novel Raag Darbari), to investigate Goan Christianity four decades after the departure of the proselytising Portuguese. Under the Portuguese, Goa "was the headquarters of the mission to convert the Orient, and was often described as the Rome of the East". But on his visit Tully finds churchgoing tinted with all kinds of borrowings from Hinduism; social life has managed to liberalise doctrine. Where representatives of the Vatican once promoted a spirit of exclusivity, priests are now preoccupied with the necessity of making their church "an Indian church".

Tully attends different services around the state, and reports on the particularities of each one. Among the ways in which worship has taken on an Indian face, he notes, is in the relationship between believers and God. While the Portuguese had wanted to impress the Indians with the awesome majesty of "a God who lived on high", now typically the priest "became one with his parishioners worshipping a personal God, more a friend than a king". Tully confesses he is uncomfortable with these altered altars - "I came from the old tradition...I found it easier to worship God in majesty, rather than God the social worker who battles for the poor, or God the personal pal of the charismatics."

But everywhere in this essay and others in the book - on the history of the Sufi faith, on farmers's problems in Karnataka, on cyber-governance in Hyderabad, on the reinvention of Rama by the BJP - there is evidence of Tully's talent for what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called "thick description". Although the title India In Slow Motion is primarily a reference to the "peculiarly Indian form of bad governance" that has immiserated Indian people and retarded economic growth, it might also be understood as a metaphor for the writer's painstaking methods.

Tully's warming belief in his adopted country, or more precisely the best of what it has to offer, leads him to overestimate India. For instance, in India's Unending Journey he contrasts "our Western habit of seeing issues in black and white" with the Indian belief in balance and reconciliation. "If there is one thing I have learnt from India," he writes, reprising a hoary platitude, "it is to appreciate how little in life is totally black, or indeed, purely white."

This radically exaggerates the gap between western and Indian civilization. "Balance" may be an avowed ideal in India but it is clearly not a reality, and the secular temper of the West that Tully criticises often facilitates a reasoned discussion of issues without the shrillness, misplaced sense of superiority, and contempt for the rule of law that marks the contribution of aggressively religious organisations or people to Indian debates. It is hard to resist the suspicion that it is Tully's impatience with the west that makes him overturn the dominant paradigm. For even if Tully has learnt to appreciate from India how little in life is purely black or white, it can safely be said that there are millions of Indian people who themselves show no sign of having learnt this from their country, and whose faith, whose sense of their history, and attitudes towards their wider society constrict rather than enlarge their lives - which is the emphasis, for example, of VS Naipaul, the titles of whose works on India or Indian characters include the words "area of darkness", "wounded", and "half a life". Reading Tully, conversely, one might feel it is western civilization that has become an area of darkness. I don't think that day has come just yet.

We end, then, with two paradoxes. One is that Tully, by dint of his decades of travel and exceptional learning, has a more sophisticated sense of India and its past than many Indians, who cleave to exclusive and partial views of it. But two: because of its insistence on distilling the meanings of Indian civilization into simple assertions that don't hold up for very long, India's Unending Journey actually waters down a perspective on Indian life that is strongly made, even if never explicitly stated, by Tully's other distinguished books.

And here are two essays by Tully, "My unending journey through India" and "Still in slow motion".

Mathematics and rebellion in Nikita Lalwani's Gifted

I confess that when I first looked at Nikita Lalwani's Gifted I put it down quickly. This was because the first sentence on the back-cover blurb - "Rumi Vasu is ten years, five months, thirteen days, two hours, forty-two minutes and six seconds old" - seemed to me characteristic of a tendency of bad literary fiction the world over: the tendency towards irrelevant detail, which, like a reflection in a shop window, points back towards the narrator instead of establishing something significant about the character. This sentence appeared to me a particularly egregious instance of this, because for all its fastidious attention to specifics of time it becomes inaccurate even within the time taken to read it or think it.

I only looked at Gifted again when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but on reading it I have come around to thinking the judges have actually made a fairly astute choice. Regardless of whether it goes on to win a formal honour (it is pointless to think of novels primarily through the lens of prizes and awards) it is a sparky contribution to Indian letters. And it is so not only for its theme - which is that of the Indian family, and within it the characteristic tenor of parent-child relations, which tend to remain stagnant even as the child matures and finally becomes an adult - but also for the quality of its writing, which for large sections of the book is unusually precise and rich.

The protagonist of Gifted, Rumika Vasu or Rumi, is a child prodigy with a highly developed aptitude for mathematics, and her father, a university professor at Cardiff, is determined to make sure that she makes the best of her talent by passing her A-levels well before the appointed age and gaining entry into a place like Oxford. Early on in the book, when Rumi is just a child, she does not see her talent as a curse, only as a gift. The detail on the back cover about her age appears in the novel on page 17 of my Penguin edition, and it takes on a different quality there because it is Rumi herself who is shown computing it, as part of the patter of a host of charming thoughts about numbers:

She looked at her watch again. Now she was 10 years, 2 months, 13 days, 2 hours, 48 minutes and 4 seconds old. She sang the numbers song in her head. It was almost a lullaby, one she had known since she was a child, the tune working like a step graph with a line that rose and rose, then flattened out when it got to sixteen, ending with a comforting monotone. [...] The figures continued in her head...they were wholesome, even numbers, created through doubling alone. 32 and 32 are 64...128...256...512. Five hundred and twelve was a lovely number. Really friendly. It made her think of her dad's big, warm, open hands, the lined palms in which she used to put her face on Sunday mornings when he and her mum were in bed. He used to pretend those hands were crocodile jaws waiting to gobble her up. That had been when he hadn't been so obsessed with mental arithmetic and getting the right answer.

A long passage humming with mathematical thoughts ("Five hundred and twelve was a lovely number. Really friendly" is to my ear a beautiful touch) ends with a slight grumble of complaint about the consequences of that mathematics in Rumi's family life. Even as they establish a present reality, unfolding spontaneously in the protagonist's lively mind, the details foreshadow what is to come.

Immigrant life in Cardiff is depressing; the burden of being the class geek troubling; the small social circle of the Vasis, further restricted by Mahesh to ensure his daughter's discipline, boring. Rumi daydreams often of her family's previous visit to India, where the visits to other branches of the line and the encounters with unknown cousins and savoury eats made for such excitement. She dreams of escaping to India, and knows just enough of history to see how that history can be used to triumphantly legitimise her rebellion:

And then it would be announced in Assembly, how she was leaving them behind - Rafferty, Harris, the lot of them. She'd get her hair cut in advance, with a big fringe that spiked up a bit, and somehow get hold of a ra-ra skirt. When the list was read out at the end for football, table tennis and all that extra-curricular stuff, she'd raise her hand.

She's get up and say, "Yes, I have an announcement. I'm moving to a country where people laugh and have fun and aren't cruel and rude and don't make a joke of you, and where they are more intelligent than people here, especially at maths like me. And I'm never coming back. And also, by the way, my mum and dad say that British people stole all these stones from people in India, the rubies and diamonds in the precious buildings, before they stopped ruling it [...]. So it doesn't make much sense for me to live here, to be honest, because I don't agree with it. I'm going back to where I came from.

She knew that she would have to make sure she was in a place where she could look at Simon Bridgeman and Christopher Palmer during this last bit, to give them a signal so they didn't take it personally. Or maybe she'd warn them in advance, so that the shock of what she was about to reveal, about their own history as British people, didn't upset them too much.

This is really a complex triple-sided point, because while Rumi registers her protest at the British, and amusingly leaves out the two boys in her class who are friendly with her, we can see from above her that what she wants to escape, ironically, is not so much Britain as her own, resolutely Indian, family in Britain.

Not all of Gifted is as good as this. If Lalwani's contention, through the tracking of her protagonist at different stages of her childhood and adolescence, is that Indian parents, even highly educated ones, often don't know how to deal with their children as they grow older, infantilising them and denying matters like their growing awareness of their sexuality, then to my mind her book to some extent duplicates these faults this by managing the protagonist less well she grows older. I was wearied in particular by the repeated descriptions of the teenaged Rumi's obsession with chewing cumin seeds. But there is a great deal of genuinely lively and vibrant writing in this novel, to go with its diagnosis of a major faultline in Indian society.

And old posts about two other works of comic fiction that have something to say about the encounter between imperial and colonised cultures: Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third and Parashuram's "The Scripture Read Backwards".

The art of oratory, and the great speeches of modern India

This is the third of an informal series of pieces to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian independence. The first two are on Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose and on Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi.

Words are the basic currency of human communication, and if in one enduring form words are worked into stories, into literature, then in another more immediate and practical form they take the shape of rhetoric, or speeches expressly designed to make arguments and persuade people. In the decades leading up to Indian independence and just after public speaking took on a special urgency and force, as revealed by the wealth of Indian speeches from this period anthologized in two recent collections, Rakesh Batabyal's The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches and Rudrangshu Mukherjee's Great Speeches of Modern India.

India is an orator's country. Traditionally we were an oral culture, passing on our heritage by word of mouth rather than written records. Even today, after nearly two centuries of modernization and the spread of literacy, India remains a resolutely oral and visual culture, now boosted by the new mass media. From the streetside incandescence of trade union leaders to the honeyed discourses and grim jeremiads of saints and godmen of all stripes, the intense and unflagging verbosity of characters in our movies to the ingenious pitches for magic pens and ginger drops by wandering salesmen on Mumbai locals, everywhere in India the art and practice of oratory is alive and well. We are a people who revel in garrulity and cannot countenance silence.

Neither Batabyal nor Mukherjee rove as widely as they could have, choosing, perhaps because of constraints of space, speeches made mostly in formal settings like parliaments and courtrooms and grouped around significant themes. There is, for instance, not a genuinely funny speech in either book. But both anthologies have their share of thrilling passages, some, like Jawaharlal Nehru's "tryst with destiny" speech, familiar to all Indians, and others dredged out from the back-rooms of history. My selections here are intended to illustrate certain themes and patterns in these books and also some general aspects of the art of oratory.

For instance, the speech made by a man sentenced in a courtroom is a tradition that goes back to Socrates. Its appeal lies in the fact that justice is seen, by both the speaker and at least a part of the audience, to have been denied in the very house of justice. As the British government took to arresting and incarcerating large numbers of Indian protestors in the non-cooperation and independence movements, there naturally arose many occasions for condemned men to take the rule of law to task.

Two such speeches from the 1920s demonstrate the range of approaches used to discomfit the authorities. The more ingenious one was devised, not surprisingly, by Mahatma Gandhi, at his historic trial before Justice Robert Broomfield at Ahmedabad in 1922 after the suspension of the non-cooperation movement because of outbreaks of violence in parts of the country. After the prosecutor had made his case, Gandhi disarmed the judge completely by agreeing that he was guilty but at the same time arguing for the morality of his actions. Gandhi says:

I would like to state that I entirely endorse the learned advocate general's remarks in connection with my humble self. I think he was entirely fair to me in all the statements that he has made, because it is very true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from this court the fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me [...]

It is the most painful duty with me but I have to discharge that duty knowing the responsibility that rests upon me, and I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned advocate general has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay, the Madras and the Chauri Chaura occurrences [...]

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. [...] I know that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it.

I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law in a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the judge, is as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.

The judge could not of course in good conscience believe this, and in sentencing Gandhi he remarked that if that sentence were later to be commuted, "no one will be better pleased than I". Here, as on many other occasions in the years to come, Gandhi's speeches were marked less by strident sloganeering or an appeal to emotions than by what the historian Simon Schama calls one of the elements indispensable to great oratory: "integrity of personal conviction, the sound of what Cicero, after the Greeks, called ethos".

A few months later the Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam struck a more dramatic tone than Gandhi - even a melodramatic tone - in another courtroom of the Raj at his trial on charges of sedition. On the day of his hearing the Kazi, later the national poet of Bangladesh, emphasised the gulf between what he called the king's law and God's law, between justice and Justice. He thundered:

The message of the king is like bubbles; mine - the boundless ocean. I'm a poet, sent by God to speak the unspoken Truth, to give form to the formless creation. The message is the revelation of the Truth, the message of God. That message may be judged seditious in a state-court, but in the court of Justice, that message is not against Justice, not against Truth [...]

I'm the shower of Truth, tears of God. I have not rebelled against a mere king, I have rebelled against injustice.

I know and I have seen - I'm not alone standing convicted in this court today. Standing behind me is the beauteous Truth, God Himself. Throughout ages He stands quietly behind His soldiers of Truth turned political prisoners. Through farcical trials like this when Jesus was crucified, Gandhi was imprisoned, that day too God stood quietly behind them. The judge could not see Him. Between him and God stood the emperor.

I hear that my judge is a poet. I'm delighted! A rebel-poet is to be judged by a judge-poet! But the last boat at the day's end is calling this elderly judge whereas, red-dawn's naba shankha is here to greet my coming. Death is calling him, life is calling me. I can't tell whether our respective setting star and rising star will unite. Nah, I'm talking nonsense again.

It should not be seen as an aspersion on the justice of his cause when I say that the Kazi does here seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, the messianic tone of which sometimes bubbles over into an unintentional comedy. If there is indubitably in the words of the good Kazi, as those of Gandhi, the sound of ethos, there is also mixed in with it the equally distinctive sound of bathos.

Speeches are often meant to rouse or inflame; they are what turn a group of individuals into a mob. A characteristic method of doing so is to draw upon history and myth, the sense of a past or an injury shared by the speaker and his audience. Where the speaker wants to argue for the legitimacy of his actions, the past supplies true or false precedents for his stance and helps him align himself within a tradition.

An example of this is a speech chosen by Mukherjee called "Why I Killed Gandhi", delivered by the assassin Nathuram Godse in a packed courtroom in Simla in May 1949. Godse advanced the injured pride of Indian Hindus as his reason for eliminating Gandhi, and declared his hostility towards what he saw as Gandhi's emasculating creed of nonviolence:

Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokamanya Tilak, Gandhiji's influence in the Congress first increased and then becam supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence which he paraded ostentatiously before the country.

No sensible or enlightened person could object to those slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a mere dream if you imagine that the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day.

In fact, honour, duty and love of one's own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never concede that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and, if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force.

Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness, and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations including the revered Bhishma because the latter was on the side of the aggressor.It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed a total ignorance of the springs of human action.

Note how, in the process of positing Gandhi as opposed to the glorious tradition of Rama, Krishna and Arjuna, Godse subliminally advances the idea that he himself has carried on the tradition of their heroism. There is something tragic about these words - tragic that a man should be shot because of his insistence on the nation's "scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life" and his supposed ignorance of "the springs of human action", but tragic also that a man could kill for these reasons, genuinely believing himself to be in the right. But the springs of Godse's thought, the shape of his logic, have also undeniably run deep in India over the last sixty years, and especially since the early nineties

But if oratory often ends up appealing to chauvinist sentiments, then it can also be a force for broadening boundaries and forging connections. Among twentieth-century Indians who demonstrated and advocated an openness to, and not a distrust of, the wider world the most prominent are Jawaharlal Nehru, Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen. If in many of his speeches Nehru spoke passionately of an independent and inclusive India, then he was also the first to warn that nationalism could be a straitjacket. And Ray, like Nehru, was a citizen of the world as much as he was a citizen of India.

Looking back at Ray's legacy in a speech given in 1995 called "Satyajit Ray and the art of Universalism: Our Culture, Their Culture", Sen remarked:

In Ray's films and in his writings, we find explorations of at least three general themes on cultures and their interrelations: the importance of distinctions between different local cultures and their respective individualities; the necessity of understanding the heterogeneous character of each local culture (even the culture of a common, not to mention a region or a country); and the great need for intercultural communication, attended by a recognition of the barriers that make intercultural communication a hard task.[...]

In emphasizing the need to honor the individuality of each culture, Ray saw no reason for closing the doors to the outside world. [At the same time] Ray appreciated the importance of heterogeneity within local communities. This perception contrasts sharply with the tendency of many communitarians, religious and secular, who are willing to break up the nation into communities and then stop dead there: "thus far and no further." The great filmmaker's eagerness to seek the larger unit — to talk to the whole world — went well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small — the individuality, ultimately, of each person. [...]

While Ray insists on retaining the real cultural features of the society that he portrays, his view of India — even his view of Bengal — recognizes a complex reality, with immense heterogeneity at every level. It is not the picture of a stylized East meeting a stereotypical West, which has been the
stock-in-trade of so many recent writings critical of "Westernization" and "modernity." Ray emphasized that the people who "inhabit" his films are complicated and extremely diverse. Take a single province: Bengal. Or, better still, take the city of Calcutta where I live and work. Accents here vary between one neighbourhood and another. Every educated Bengali peppers his native speech with a sprinkling of English words and phrases. Dress is not standardized. Although women generally prefer the sari, men wear clothes, which reflect the style of the thirteenth century or conform to the directives of the latest Esquire. The contrast between the rich and the poor is proverbial. Teenagers do the twist and drink Coke, while the devout Brahmin takes a dip in the Ganges and chants his mantras to the rising sun. It is important to note that the native culture which Ray stresses is not some pure vision of a tradition-bound society, but the heterogeneous lives and commitments of contemporary India. The recognition of this heterogeneity makes it immediately clear why Ray's focus on local culture cannot be readily seen as an "anti-modern" move. "Our culture" can draw on "their culture" and "their culture" can draw on "our culture".

This is a remarkably cogent and sophisticated series of insights, although, having heard Sen speak on several occasions, I can guess that despite the urgency of its critique of aspects of contemporary Indian thought it would have hardly been made in a lectern-thumping or hectoring fashion. This brings us to a valuable point made by Mukherjee, which is the distinction between great speakers and great speeches. "Great speakers do not always make great speeches," he writes. "The yardstick for judging the latter is whether the words retain their power with the passing of time. There is obviously a shadow between the power of oratory and the power of a text when it is read by subsequent generations."

And in a rare speech delivered in 1982 by the title "The Education of a Filmmaker", Ray himself demonstrated his universalism by speaking among other things of his love for the Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves. What is so wonderful about it? Ray says:

One quality which is sure to be found in a great work of cinema is the revelation of large truths in small details.[…] There is a scene in Bicycle Thieves where father and son go feverishly looking for a man they believe to have connections with the thief. In the process the two lose each other. Finding himself alone in a back street…Bruno is seen to approach a wall while unbuttoning his pants. But before he can do what he wishes to do, Ricci suddenly appears and calls out urgently. 'Bruno whirls around and runs to join his father, his urge unsatisfied.' This one detail brings home the implications of this desperate, daylong search more vividly than anything could have done.

[And] there's a scene towards the end where Ricci suddenly runs into the thief in front of the latter's house, pounces upon him, and demands that he hands back his bike. Hotly denying his guilt, the thief suddenly goes into an epileptic fit. As he sinks to the ground shaking and foaming at the mouth, his mother, who's been watching from an upstairs window, tosses pillows to put under his head. Meanwhile, Bruno has dragged along a policeman, whom Ricci now takes into the house to make a search. We see the miserable pigeonhole of a room where the mother cooks a meagre meal for the family of four. 'Instead of accusing him,' she says, 'why don't you find him a job?' The bike, however, is not found. As Ricci comes out of the house, he finds that the whole neighbourhood has turned against him....

Apart from adding dimension to the story, the film challenges our stock response of instant antipathy to a character who brings misery on the hero by an unsocial act. But so finely is the balance maintained that the incident doesn't lessen the calamity of the hero's loss. It merely makes the film a far richer experience than a conventional treatment would have done.

And finally, which of the two books to buy? Batabyal's is the longer and more comprehensive selection, Mukherjee's the more idiosyncratic and interesting - most of the work I've excerpted is from his anthology. I would be more partial to the Mukherjee were it not for the vexation provided by the text, which is littered with totally careless typos that a single diligent reading could have eliminated. Reading it I was often reminded of the highly flexible grammar and spelling of the competition success magazines I used to peruse in adolescence. So if you don't mind an error-strewn text then go for the Mukherjee; if you find these things annoying, as I do, then read the good bits of the Mukherjee in a bookshop and buy the Batabyal.

And here is a link to a splendid feature run several years ago by the Guardian: the text of, and commentary on, the greatest speeches of the twentieth century.

Me, Mint, me and me

This Saturday I happen to have a full-page piece in Mint on the art and practice of oratory in India, as exemplified by two worthy new collections of modern Indian speeches edited by Rudrangshu Mukerjee and Rakesh Batabyal.

So if you happen to be in Bombay or Delhi, you might want to actually buy the paper, not because of any remarkable quality in the work, but because for the first time Mint has requested a picture of my mug to prop up the piece. As I don't have my photo in the newpapers very often, and as I get excited easily, unsurprisingly I got excited about this, as anyone would in my place. And why shouldn't I, after all I've been through? I quickly sent them a photograph from an angle which, if not exactly flattering, at least didn't further damage the case of what Nature had already treated so unkindly, and when earlier this week I happened to pass by the office on my extensive travels around the city (from restaurant to restaurant, bar to bar, popping by sometimes at the place of a friend to eat and drink for free) I thought I'd pop in there too and have a preview of myself on the page.

Imagine my shock then (at least try) when I found that they'd decided to use not my actual photograph - a representation of me at one remove, as indeed all representation is by definition, but you won't get my precise point without this recourse to tautology - but an artist's reconstruction of my photograph, or Chandrahas Choudhury twice removed from himself, and looking mighty upset about it too.

As you already can tell if you've been paying attention, I was not pleased to see this reconstruction. To be fair, it did bear a striking resemblance to me. But the resemblance was not to the me of today, which I might have accepted, but instead to the probable me of ten years from now - old, haggard, wearied by continuous book reviewing on the one hand and by being ignored by pretty girls everywhere on the other and the carping of critics on the third - or have I scrambled my metaphor? This was transparently unfair: let down, and by my very own paper! I protested and protested, and even offered to re-do the page myself on QuarkExpress, but they said it was already closed, and no, I couldn't meet the artist. I had a black coffee, and left in a mood the same colour.

Anyway, as the wise Macbeth truly did say, what's done is done. This post is too, and I'm off now.

In Pragati

My review of Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi appears today in the August issue of Pragati, alongside pieces by Nitin Pai on India's vacillations over a free-market economy, Atanu Dey first on Indian villages and then on the state of education in India, and Ravikiran Rao on Arun Shourie's analysis of our flawed electoral system.

You can download the entire issue here.

Wislawa Szymborska, curious about everything

We are all wise, of course, but it takes considerable work to give voice to wisdom into a form free of condescension, disarming resistance through wit and perhaps warmth. Do such voices often seek to express themselves in verse? Perhaps not. As a rule poets tend, no doubt for reasons beyond their control, to encourage calumnies such as that perpetrated by the young Mark Twain, who, writing that a fire had destroyed his home, his happiness, his constitution, and his trunk, remarked that the loss of his happiness fazed him very little, "because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that melancholy would abide with me long".

Certainly it could not be said that melancholy is missing from the work of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. The great devastations of war and politics in the twentieth century affected Poland more than most countries; "hatred, in our century./How lithely she takes high hurdles./How easy for her to pounce, to seize" writes Szymborska in one poem. But even so Szymborska remains, even at her advanced age, the most witty, spry and searching of contemporary poets. If there is a strong line of irony running through her poems, it is more warming than brooding. Her work is so accessible as to be almost conversational, yet there is a curiosity and metaphysical intelligence that informs even her simplest lines, and at the same time a happy engagement with the surface textures of ordinary existence and what lies just beneath them, binding day to day and life to life.

Here, for instance, is her delightful poem "Funeral", in a translation by Joanna Maria Trzeciak. It is a poem that has possibly as many speakers as it has lines:

Funeral
"so suddenly, who would've expected it"
"stress and cigarettes, I told him"
"not bad, thank you"
"unwrap these flowers"
"his brother's heart did him in too, must run in the family"
"I wouldn't have recognized you with that beard"
"it's his own fault, he was always getting himself into something"
"that new guy was supposed to speak. I don't see him anywhere"
"Kazek is in Warsaw, Tadek went abroad"
"you were the only one with enough sense to bring an umbrella"
"so what that he was the most talented of them all"
"it's a walk-through room, Baska won't go for it"
"sure he was right, but that still isn't really the reason"
"and a paint job on both doors, guess how much"
"two egg yolks, one tablespoon sugars"
"it was none of his business, why did he mess with it"
"only in blue, and in small sizes"
"five times with no answer"
"all right, I could have done it, but so could you have"
"good thing she had that part-time job"
"I don't know, maybe the relatives"
"the priest is a veritable Belmondo"
"I've never been to this part of the cemetery"
"I dreamed about him last week, something struck me"
"the daughter's not bad-looking"
"it happens to all of us"
"give my best to the widow, I have to make it to"
"it sounded much more solemn in Latin"
"it came and went"
"good-bye Ma'am"
"let's go grab a beer somewhere"
"call me, we'll talk"
"either No. 4 or 12"
"I'm going this way"
"we're not"

The mood of mourning, the freshened awareness of mortality, the words of commiseration expected in a funeral are there, but they are mixed in with trivial scraps of conversation. Even so sombre an occasion returns inevitably to the human mean; life goes on.

In "The Poet and the World", her Nobel Prize lecture of 1996. Szymborska says of the people she admires most:

inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

This sentiment undergirds one of her best poems, titled, with her characteristic reticence, "A Few Words on the Soul". The translation is by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky,
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds.
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when non one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

What is so charming about this poem is the way the soul is imagined as a kind of dandy whimsical companion, always disappearing whenever something dull or routine is going on, and positively unhelpful whenever hard labour must be done. We are clearly elevated by it, yet strangely "it needs us/ for some reason too". The form of the poem and the details it picks on ("mirrors, which keep on working/even when no one is looking" - yes, that would impress the soul) is quite beautiful. We end up thinking that yes, we should be more hospitable to our souls.

Szymborska radiates the same charm and good humour in her exceptionally agile prose, of which she has written a good amount (for decades she wrote a newspaper column called "Nonrequired reading", the pieces from which are collected in a book by the same name). Here, for instance, are some highly entertaining excerpts from her columns for the newspaper Literary Life, in which she gives advice to novice poets. Although she is never condescending, she can be quite firm, and although there are no deliberate jokes here, lots of the answers are really quite funny, not to say insightful:

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: "You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?"

To Marek, of Warsaw: "We have a principle that all poems about spring are automatically disqualified. This topic no longer exists in poetry. It continues to thrive in life itself, of course. But these are two separate matters."

To Mr. Pal-Zet of Skarysko-Kam: "The poems you’ve sent suggest that you’ve failed to perceive a key difference between poetry and prose. For example, the poem entitled ‘Here’ is merely a modest prose description of a room and the furniture it holds. In prose such descriptions perform a specific function: they set the stage for the action to come. In a moment the doors will open, someone will enter, and something will take place. In poetry the description itself must ‘take place.’ Everything becomes significant, meaningful: the choice of images, their placement, the shape they take in words. The description of an ordinary room must become before our eyes the discovery of that room, and the emotion contained by that description must be shared by the readers. Otherwise, prose will stay prose, no matter how hard you work to break your sentences into lines of verse. And what’s worse, nothing happens afterwards."

The whole piece, "How To (and How Not To) Write Poetry", is here.

Here are some other beautiful Szymborska poems: "Consolation", in which she imagines what Charles Darwin must have liked to read ("Darwin./They say he read novels to relax,/But only certain kinds:/nothing that ended unhappily."), "A Cat In An Empty Apartment", and "The Three Oddest Words".

And some other posts on poets: "The sweet voice and harsh words of Osip Mandelstam", "Nazim Hikmet in prison", "The despair of Attila Jozsef", "Constantine Cavafy's City", "Antonio Machado's Eyes", "Dunya Mikhail's war against war", "Chess with Jorge Luis Borges", "Orhan Veli Kanik all of a sudden", and "Tigers in the poetry of William Blake and Salabega".

Unusual book of the month, and some thoughts on matters many

Just received in the post today: a marvellous volume called Polish Writers on Writing, one of a series of books called The Writer's World published by Trinity University Press. It's edited by the poet Adam Zagajewski, and contains fascinating essays by and correspondence between all the luminaries of the great pageant of twentieth-century Polish literature, including Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Zymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Witold Gombrowicz, and the utterly original short-story writer Bruno Schulz.

Schulz is found here arguing, "The life of the word consists in tensing and stretching itself toward a thousand connections, like the cut-up snake in the legend whose pieces search for each other in the dark.[...] Language is man's metaphysical organ.We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol. The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word."

On the arrival of this book I was immediately reminded of the time when, poking about in a second-hand bookshop in Bloomsbury in London last summer, I came across a book of essays called The Mature Laurel: Essays On Modern Polish Poetry.

I immediately realised that this rare volume might up the Seriousness of my book collection by a full percentage point, and so, impressed by essays with titles like "The Poet As Torturer" (wait, since when did APJ Abdul Kalam become a Polish poet?) and "The New Wave: A Non-Objective View", I bought it. Well, now it has the company of a brother book almost as serious, though probably a lot more readable, and all I need to do now is find meself a copy of Milosz's A History of Polish Literature to make me unbeatable on the subject within India. And from there I'll move slowly outwards, north and south, east and west, and have the whole world covered by the time I'm seventy.

And among other things, I've been rereading the essays in Jorge Luis Borges's Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, the memory of which and the loss of which I lamented in a post last year, and a new copy of which was sent to me by a very kind reader. Writing The Middle Stage is fun enough anyway, but such gestures fill my heart with love for all humanity, even Paulo Coelho.

And finally, for some time now I've been organizing all my essays on Indian literature into a sidebar you'll find on your left, and now there's quite a respectable set of them, from older essays on Saadat Hasan Manto, Amartya Sen, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Fakir Mohan Senapati and Dandin to more recent ones on Vikram Chandra, Krishna Kripalani, Raj Kamal Jha, Amitava Kumar and Parashuram.

And lastly, some other occasions when I've happened to have some thoughts: serious thoughts, in "Some thoughts on nearly popping it" and "The Kitab Literary Festival and a disquisition on boots"; and humorous thoughts, in "Some thoughts on artistic time and real time".

On Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi

This essay appears today in the Scotsman, and is the second of an informal four-part series of pieces on the Middle Stage over the month leading up to the sixtieth anniversary of Indian independence. The first of these, featured last week, was "Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose".

The life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is one of the most well-documented and minutely analysed lives of the 20th century. Yet, as the editor of Gandhi's collected works, which run into 100 volumes, remarked, the Gandhi story is inexhaustible, "like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata combined".

This is because Gandhi's abiding concerns - the working out of disputes large or small without descent into hatred or violence, the need for every human being to arrive at self-rule in the individual sense before demanding authority in any other sense, and the belief that worthy ends are nothing without equally worthy means - remain eternally relevant, so that he speaks afresh to every age.

Now, the historian Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma, vividly brings to life in his massive biography the texture of Gandhi's days as he progressed from a timid anglicised student to the fearless loincloth-clad opponent of empire and other licensed injustices, the development of his thought across his engagements with conflict situations in England, South Africa, colonial India, and free India, the attitudes borne towards him by his many friends and foes, and the mood and colour of his age.

Gandhi is well qualified to write this book for more than just reasons of family. Among his other books are biographies of Vallabhbhai Patel and C Rajagopalachari (two of the Mahatma's staunchest allies in the independence movement and brilliant politicians in their own right); a study of Indian Muslims, over whom colonial India broke up into two independent countries; and a wide-ranging study of South Asian history, Revenge and Reconciliation, encompassing the thought of figures such as the Buddha and the emperor Ashoka and the counsel of such texts as the Bhagavad Gita (the Mahatma's favourite book). Gandhi's intimate familiarity with South Asian history and the many sides and perspectives of the Indian freedom movement impart to his study a satisfying density and richness that place it on the highest rung of the vast literature on the Mahatma.

In an excellent early section, Rajmohan Gandhi shows us how the young Gandhi, working as a lawyer defending the rights of the coloured community in South Africa, perfected the incipient methods of passive resistance and satyagraha (literally, "truth-force") through his reading of writers like Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau, and his skirmishes with the South African government. When he moved back to India for good in 1914 his reputation preceded him, and he himself was ready to publicise his unusual weapons before the Indian people and to persuade them to join him in deploying them against Empire.

Among the salutary qualities of Rajmohan Gandhi's work is his liberal and judicious use of quotations from Gandhi's writing, including his autobiography and other books, his weekly columns for the two Indian journals he edited, and his voluminous correspondence (he was an indefatigable letter-writer and lobbyist, once writing some 5,000 letters, all by hand, over a six-week period). The value of this approach is twofold. One, instead of the static, "finished" Gandhi enshrined in history, it presents us with a Gandhi continuously on the move, finding words for his experience as he discovers and refashions himself.

Second, it foregrounds Gandhi's engagement not only with the Raj, with the oppressive caste system and the Hindu-Muslim question, but with the English language itself. As a youth Gandhi's English was poor. As a 19-year-old journeying to England to study law, he dreaded conversation in English with his fellow passengers, recalling that "I had to frame every sentence in my mind before I could bring it out". But by steady labour he improved his English to the extent that, writing in English on the great questions of the day and rebutting the Raj at every step in a clear, forceful idiom, he did as much as any other Indian writer to domesticate the language. As the Indian historian Sunil Khilnani has observed, "English made the empire, but [Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru] showed how it could be used to unmake it - how the language could be a tool of insubordination and, ultimately, freedom."

Gandhi emerges in Rajmohan Gandhi's portrait as both an acute strategist and a doubting, sometimes fallible, man, viewed by some as a saint and others as a crank. Despite his misgivings ("I often err and miscalculate") he was one of history's greatest moral visionaries, the inventor of universally relevant pacifist concepts that aspired towards breaking down adversaries nonviolently. His genius extended beyond immediate conflict resolution; by the practice of never talking down or humiliating his opponents, he was also usually successful in foreclosing future conflicts. As Diana Eck has written, Gandhi "saw clearly that if conflict is cast in terms of winning or losing, of us prevailing over them, then ... the next round of the conflict is only postponed". Rajmohan Gandhi's splendid biography delivers to us both the Gandhi of his time and a Gandhi for our times.

And some essays on Gandhi: a recent one by Pankaj Mishra on Gandhi's Autobiography ('"I must reduce myself to zero," he wrote on the last page of the autobiography, upholding a long Indian tradition in which power and charisma are gained from renunciation rather than worldly success'); "Fighting A Gandhian Fight" by Mark Juergensmeyer; "Southasia’s difficulties with Gandhi’s legacy" by Ashis Nandy; "Gandhi in Jaffna" by Ramachandra Guha; "Gandhi the philosopher" by Akeel Bilgrami, and "What If Gandhi Had Lived On?" by Rajmohan Gandhi.

Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose

"I am not a man of letters," wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in one of his missives from jail to his daughter Indira, but of course he was. All through his life Nehru lost no opportunity to write. His words took the form of drafts and resolutions for the Congress party, essays on the great issues of the day for newspapers and journals, and letters to friends, family, and colleagues in the independence movement. When he became Prime Minister of India, Nehru wrote a long letter addressed jointly to his chief ministers every fortnight, containing his deliberations on domestic and world affairs. It is clear that, despite the burdens of his worldly commitments, words set down on paper were for Nehru a way of making sense of the commotion of life, politics and ideas.

But Nehru was also a man of letters in a more abiding sense, as readers of any of his major works (his autobiography, Glimpses of World History, and The Discovery of India) know, and as The Oxford India Nehru, a selection of his most representative speeches and writings, again proves. That is to say that we can read Nehru not just for his ideas, or for insights into his personality, but also for the way in which expressed himself, for the grace and rhythm of his English. "At its best," wrote the editor Frank Moraes, one of Nehru's best biographers, "Nehru's style shows a vigour and clarity as pleasing and compelling to the ear as to the mind." Indeed, Nehru was among a handful of Indian writers, among which Gandhi and Tagore were also prominent, who found a way to domesticate what for most other Indians born in the nineteenth century was an often puzzling colonial tongue, a language the rules and moves of which could of course be learnt, as did many young people wanting to make a career under the Raj, but could never be used with the same vigour or pliability.

"English made the empire," observes the historian Sunil Khilnani in an essay called "Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English", "but [Gandhi and Nehru] showed how it could be used to unmake it – how the language could be a tool of insubordination and, ultimately, freedom." The two men, neither of them professional writers,

shaped the place and form of English in India in three decisive ways. Gandhi was born in 1869; Nehru died in 1964: their lives encompassed a linguistic century that stretched from the English of legal petitions and imperial proclamations, of diwans, pleaders, and officers of the early Raj, to the official bureaucratese of the Five-Year Plans and the ministries of the independent Indian state. The sheer bulk of their spoken and written words (combined, the published work of Gandhi and Nehru exceed 150 volumes), as well as its historical span, ensured for the English language a countrywide currency. Second, though often ambivalent about the function of English in India, they kept a political commitment to English as a language of public communication. English may have been 'the language of the enemy', yet both wished to accommodate it alongside other Indian languages, recognising it as a vital link not just to the wider world but also between Indians themselves. Finally, the forms in which they wrote - autobiographies, public and private letters, journalistic essays and articles, and works of history - helped to define how these genres came to be understood and used in India, by their contemporaries and those who came after.

Although he sometimes chose a romantic and elevated tone that could grow monotonous, there is never in Nehru's work that tendency towards vagueness and bombast, the use of clichés and archaisms, that to this day disfigures so much Indian prose in English. Indeed, Nehru deserves to be seen, independently of the political man, as one of the best Indian prose writers of the twentieth century.

Uma Iyengar's selection of extracts for The Oxford India Nehru organises Nehru's work by theme rather than by chronology, grouping together Nehru's thoughts on Indian history and culture, on Gandhi, on India before and after independence, on the changing world situation, and so on. The great preoccupations and leanings of Nehru's work quickly emerge: his rationalism, his natural egalitarianism and his commitment to democratic institutions and practice, his impatience with, if not outright contempt for, religion, his espousal, after the fashion of his times, of socialism, his sometimes qualified admiration for and complicated relationship with Gandhi, his keen interest in world politics, and his sense of India as one indivisible composite culture and his desire to overlay upon it "the garb of modernity".

Many of these thoughts are still relevant; in fact, sometimes they seem never more relevant than today. Attacking the demands made by various communal organizations in 1934, Nehru writes that communalism is "another name for social and political reaction", and that "it has often sailed under false colours and taken in many an unwary person". Writing in 1953, Nehru remarks that although nationalism can be a rousing and unifying force, one of the problems with it is "the narrowness of mind that it develops within a country, when a majority thinks itself as the entire nation and in its attempt to absorb the minority actually separates them even more". Objecting to the very name of the Backward Classes Commission, he writes, "It is as if we are first branding them and then, from our superior position, we shall try and uplift them".

In more than four decades of writing to convince, persuade, engage, describe, attack, defend, reminisce, synthesise, and understand, Nehru wrote upon every possible subject on which opinions were divided, from cow slaughter to public health to the national flag and anthem to divorce ("Divorce," he opines with characteristic clarity, "must not be looked upon as something which makes the custom of marriage fragile"). Iyengar even includes a letter to his chief ministers on the subject of brooms, observing that the commonly found short-handled ones make for tiring and backbreaking work and encourage "a certain subservience in mind", and insisting that municipal sweepers be supplied with long-handled brooms.

Here, from The Discovery of India, is a classic example of Nehru's elevated style: a sentence multi-claused, expansive yet syntactically balanced and clear in sense, and proceeding steadily from specifics to generalities, generalities that exemplify his professed humanism and universalism:

The story of the Ganges, from her source to the sea, from old times to new, is the story of India's civilization and culture, of the rise and fall of empires, of great and proud cities, of the adventure of man and the quest of the mind which has so occupied India's thinkers, of the richness and fulfilment of life as well as its denial and renunciation, of ups and downs, of growth and decay, of life and death.

The only phrase that mars these sonorous cadences is "ups and downs", which is a favourite Nehru phrase. In a letter written in 1930 from jail to Gandhi, also in jail following the success of the Dandi march, Nehru exulted that Gandhi had made a new India with his "magic touch", and remarked that "our prosaic existence has developed something of epic greatness in it." His writing about India, too, can often seem like a project to lift up an India of prosaic realities and trying to infuse in it, by harking back to the past and to the universal story of man, an epic greatness.

Nehru becomes a more interesting writer when irked or riled; the expression of annoyance or dissent adds muscle to his writing. Here, for example, is a paragraph from one of a series of letters he exhanged with the Englishman Lord Lothian in 1936 over the future direction of India. In it he attacks Lothian's argument that Indian people should stick to constitutional methods of protest:

You refer also to the 'constitutional road' in India. What exactly is this constitutional road? I can understand constitutional activities where there is a democratic constitution, but where there is no such thing, constitutional methods have no meaning. The word constitutional then simply means legal, and legal simply means in accordance with the wishes of an autocratic executive which can make laws and issue decrees and ordinances regardless of public opinion. What is the constitutional method in Germany or Italy today? [These countries had just come under Fascist rule] What was this method in the India of the nineteenth century or of the early twentieth century or even now? ... The mere fact that it is impossible for the great majority of the people of India to make their will effective shows that they have no constitutional way open to them. They can either submit to something they dislike intensely or adopt other than so-called constitutional methods. Such methods may be wise or unwise, under the particular circumstances, but the question of their being constitutional or not does not arise.

Nehru's key rhetorical tactic is to ally "constitutional" to "democratic", and to insist that one is nothing without the other. Cutting and hacking away sentence by sentence, he leaves his adversary with no ground to stand on.

And in an essay in the Tribune early in 1934, he launches a broadside against organizations motivated by communal considerations:

What are communal organizations? They are not religious, although they confine themselves to religious groups and exploit the name of religion. They are not cultural and have done nothing for culture, although they talk bravely of a past culture. They are not ethical or moral groups, for their teachings are singularly devoid of ethics and morality. They are certainly not economic groupings, for there is no economic link binding their members and they have no shadow of an economic programme. Some of them claim not to be political even. What then are they?

As a matter of fact they function politically and their demands are political, but calling themselves non-political, they avoid the real issues and only succeed in obstructing the path of others.

Nehru had a naturally metaphorical cast of mind. He is often found on these pages comparing history to a great river. Indeed, he thought a lot about history, and felt keenly the pressure of history. In a speech to the Contituent Assembly in 1947, he imagines himself "standing on the sword's edge of the present between the mighty past and the mightier future" - a particularly good metaphor, because it suggests how fraught with uncertainty the present is, possessing the power to cut sharply even as attempts are made to work with it. Elsewhere, he likens the taking of risks to the exhilaration of climbing the mountains, while those who hold back, desiring safety and security, are seen as living in the valley, "with their unhealthy mists and fogs". This metaphor shows among other things Nehru's love of mountains, for most Indians would hardly go along with his negative characterization of valleys.

Although he read widely and well, Nehru was curiously not much given to quoting from the works of other writers, perhaps because he spent so much time on the move or else in prison, with limited access to books in either case. Despite frequent references to the defects and excesses of capitalism and the merits of socialism, for instance, he can only be found quoting Marx once on these pages. Also, Nehru's relationship to his reading was intensely practical, a means of learning something about the world past or present. He liked to read travellers' accounts – Hsuen Tsang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battutah - and surveys of history and society - Marx, Oswald Spengler, Reinold Neibuhr – but we know that he disliked reading novels, saying they left him "mentally slack". Gandhi appears to have been a more adventurous and open-minded reader, fond not only of the Gita and the works of Tolstoy, Ruskin and Plato but also of Walter Scott, Jules Verne and Goethe.

Perhaps it is to these tendencies we may attribute one fault of his writing, which is a fondness for generalities and groupings and a disregard for bracing and often necessary specificities. Consider that, although he travelled widely for decades on end, and was a captivating speaker who drew huge crowds, his references to the Indian peasantry almost always take the form of the generalized description – "the sunken eyes and hopeless looks of the people", "the starving peasant" for whom "hunger gnaws at his stomach". There is no account in his letters or essays of an actual conversation with a peasant whose name is provided or who is seen as more than a downtrodden man or a hungry stomach, and it does not seem to have occurred to him that his work would be all the more forceful by his doing so.

Yet the most stirring sentences of twentieth-century Indian writing in English were composed by Nehru. These are the opening lines of his speech to the constituent assembly on the hour of India's independence. It was a situation made for a man of his talents and predilections. "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom," he begins, before moving onto a majestic seven-part sentence. "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." 

Nehru never wrote a better or more deeply felt line. It was what he had been waiting to say almost all his life.

On Muhammad Yunus's autobiography Banker To The Poor

Not many would dispute the claim that poverty - not AIDS, terrorism, or climate change - is the greatest problem before mankind today. After all, even if we are living in an age of unprecedented prosperity, more than one billion people, or one-sixth of humanity, still live below the poverty line, or on less than $1 a day.

But unlike those other issues, poverty has always been around with humanity, and so we are all to some extent inured to it - it is for most people a fact of life, as natual as the weather. And perhaps even the opening proposition of this essay leads to a misleading conclusion, for it suggests then that it is the responsibility of mankind, or at least the richer sections of mankind, to "solve" the problem of poverty through redistribution, charity, employment schemes, or development aid. And who should know of this propensity better than Indians? We are, after all, home to one third of the world's poor, and our politicians routinely come to power speaking the rhetoric of poverty alleviation. Indira Gandhi's rousing slogan Garibi hatao, which swept her to power in 1971, still resounds through the corridors of government today and informs our policy-making at every level.

The salutary argument of Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammad Yunus, is that to emerge from the shackles of poverty the poor need access not so much to development aid or social welfare or skills training as capital. As Yunus has demonstrated in three decades of work in Bangladesh with his Grameen Bank, the idea that the poor are not credit-worthy because they have neither skills nor collateral is fallacious. The extent to which he has been successful is disputed by skeptics, but the fact that he has ushered in nothing short of an economic and social revolution is indisputable.

His autobiography recounts the steps by which he arrived at his thinking, and the progress of the micro-credit movement from a $27 loan made in 1976 - Grameen's disbursements came to over $600 million in 2005, and programmes replicating the Grameen model are in place now the world over. Yunus's philosophy of "grass-roots capitalism", and the specifics of how it involves both the individual and the community in a comprehensive vision, is one of the most essential advances made in our times on problems of economics that have been debated for hundreds of years, a fact acknowledged by the United Nations when it declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.

Returning to Bangladesh to teach economics in the seventies after completing his Ph.D in America, Yunus noted that the elegant theories of his education that he himself now propagated in the classroom seemed not to be working on the ground. Many of the desperately poor in his village, although capable of productive work, were caught up in the clutches of moneylenders, or else working for miniscule wages because, as Yunus points out, "profit is unashamedly biased towards capital".

These facts have confronted many an economist, but Yunus's achievement, backed by hundreds of committed workers, was to convince the poorest of the poor (many of them illiterate women in a society which treated them like second-class citizens) that they could be independent economic actors by borrowing small amounts of capital, and then to get them to pay back these debts. He shows that he managed this, paradoxically, by making it hard for the poor to borrow from Grameen. Each individual desirous of a loan had to approach the bank after forming a group, the members of which then acted as a peer-support system. Further, the repayment of the loans was not on a yearly but a weekly basis, a continuous rather than a deferred activity.

The poor are often overawed by money (many of the women to which Grameen issued loans had never handled money in their life) so Yunus went down to a scale at which even they could be comfortable. Grameen was also unusual in that it sanctioned loans without collateral, and that it gave no great importance to skills training. In Yunus's view, the poorest of the poor already have skills which they can utilize to break the strangehold of absolute poverty. In a table of activities supported by Grameen loans, amongst the most popular are paddy cultivation and paddy-husking, cow-rearing, weaving and cane-making, the purchase of rickshaws and sewing-machines.

Yunus emerges in these pages as a strong proponent of self-employment, which he sees as being given short thrift in traditional theories of economics. "Obviously self-employment has limits," he writes, "but in many cases it is the only solution to help the fate of those whom our economies refuse to hire and whom taxpayers do not want to carry on their shoulders." Yunus is also a critic of development aid and the welfare state, which inculcate in the individual a sense of dependence or natural entitlement. "Charity, like love, can be a prison," he declares.

The poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate, "but because they cannot retain the return of their labour," argues Yunus. "It is not work which saves the poor, but capital linked to work." By thinking of the poor as not creditworthy because they possess no collateral, banks, in his opinion, practice a kind of "financial apartheid". Micro-credit, in his view, uses the power of cash capital to liberate the potential of human capital. He reminds us that the etymological root of the word credit is "to believe, put trust in". This incisive and clear-headed autobiography should become an enduring part of the essential literature on poverty.

Here is Yunus's Nobel lecture, in which he asserts his belief in capitalism but argues against a now-standard interpretation of it based on the assumption "that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives − to maximize profit". "This interpretation of capitalism," he argues, "insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives." And he has a good essay on globalization here, in which he contends that "we cannot cope with the problem of poverty within the orthodoxy of capitalism preached and practised today". Yunus's observations might be interpreted as proof that sometimes it is capitalism's most perceptive critics who are its best friends.

And here are two essays on a related theme by the economist William Easterly, "Why Doesn't Aid Work?" and "The Ideology of Development", and a good essay by Amartya Sen on Easterly's recent book The White Man's Burden.

And finally, a superb essay - the transcript of a lecture, actually - by James Q.Wilson, a writer I admire greatly: "The Morality of Capitalism".

Muhammad Yunus's new book Creating A World Without Poverty is published in America this week by the excellent imprint PublicAffairs Books.

And some other posts on autobiographies by Pervez Musharraf, Sasthi Brata, and Barack Obama.

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.]

On Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring The World

Many writers of fiction attempt on occasion to set their work a few decades back from the present, sometimes to recall the world of their childhood when their sense experience was sharpest, sometimes to explore on behalf of their readers the question of how we got here now from the place we were then, and sometimes just to relieve themselves from the pressures and risks of interpreting the contemporary world. The near past, then, is a place more familiar than unfamiliar.

But going further back in time that the recent past - into another age altogether, as does Orhan Pamuk in his great novel My Name Is Red, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, or Kiran Nagarkar in his book Cuckold, set in the Rajput kingdom of Mewar around the same time - is a different matter altogether. Personal experience or the testimony of family members no longer counts for anything; a library is more useful than memory. Perhaps this is why works of fiction set in the distant past feature fictional recreations of actual historical personages - Mirabai in Nagarkar's book, Giacomo Casanova in Sandor Marai's Casanova in Bolzano. Such figures serve as a familiar anchor, as it were, in the ghostly world of distant time - they become representative of an entire age. Indeed there is a thrill in seeing them come alive, living in the moment, as they never can in history books or even biographies, which are obliged to see them through a different lens.

Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring The World, one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of this season, summons from relative obscurity two Germans of the early nineteenth century: the great naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose studies of the natural life of Latin America were revolutionary in their time, and the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss, still spoken of today as perhaps the greatest mathematician since antiquity. Describing the efforts of these two men to measure the world - Humboldt on arduous journeys, Gauss from the comfort of his study - at a time when "things weren't yet used to being measured", Kehlman presents a study of the single-mindedness of scientific genius, leavened by the comedy of their family life and dealings with society.

The novel's lightness of tone is crucial, because it gives it two registers, rather than the single one available from a more dedicated historical reconstruction in which the narratorial voice subsumes itself to the characters and their environment. While Kehlman faithfully summons up period details and the specifics of the work of his protagonists (he has a doctorate on the work of Immanuel Kant, so he knows the territory), he does not historicise his language - his characters are shown thinking and speaking not in archaisms but in a contemporary idiom. This is a clever compromise. The novel's language thus is always skittering on the edge of comedy, a comedy that exploits the contrast of the infinite patience of the protagonists with the challenges of measuring the world, and their absolute puzzlement with the behaviour of other, normal human beings with modest intellectual capacities and varied wants.

Gauss, for instance, feels irritation with the fact that a superior spirit such as himself should be housed in such a sickly body, while his son Eugen should be bursting with health when he is only "a common or garden-variety creature". On another occasion the boy Gauss, who can compute equations in a flash, feels incredulity at how slowly people seem to think. "Sometimes he managed to accommodate himself to them, but then it became undendurable again." On his wedding night, as his hands slide over his bride's body, Gauss sees that "a sliver of moon appeared between the curtains, pale and watery, and he was ashamed to realize that in this very moment he suddenly understood how to make approximate corrections in mismeasurements of the trajectories of planets. He wished he could jot it down…." That image of Gauss, his fingers on skin and his eye on the moon, might serve as a précis of the novel's method.

The defining feature of a historical novel is its setting in time, and the question of time is given an added edge in Kehlman's book by the way his protagonists themselves feel the yoke of time on their backs. Gauss, for instance, is acutely conscious of how speedily civilization is progressing scientifically , and thinks it unjust that "you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not". Readers will smile at this thought, for of course reading is one of the ways in which we can escape being held prisoner by time. Even as Kehlman's readers join him in looking backwards, his protagonists are looking forwards, to a day when everything about the world will be known, thanks in part to their researches.

Another of the novel's little ironies is that both Humboldt and Gauss have no time for art, and think it a frivolous pursuit, a distraction from the main business of life. Science is about fidelity to empirical truth, but artists remarkably "held deviation to be a strength". Humboldt is shown in one scene criticising novels in which the author ties his inventions "to the names of real historical personages". That the Humboldt who does so is himself a name tied to a historical personage in a novel is one of the many witty touches in this charming book.

Here is an essay by Kehlmann on the writing of historical fiction: "Out of this World". I am not sure if his remark that "As a German writer, I can only marvel at Latin American novels; unlike their authors, I can't just invent a beautiful woman who flies away while hanging up washing, or creatures that are half-man, half-snake" is meant seriously or as a sly barb.

And here is an old post, on Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.

Coming up in July

I haven't quite worked out what fiction I'll be writing about next month, other than Naguib Mahfouz's just-released Karnak Café.

But there'll be pieces on some splendid new non-fiction, including:

An essay on Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose, on the occasion of the release of The Oxford India Nehru, an anthology of Nehru's best essays and speeches

Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of the Bangladeshi economist and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus

Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

and possibly Rajmohan Gandhi's recent biography of Mahatma Gandhi

In Pragati

My recent piece in Mint on Guy Sorman's account of contemporary China The Year of the Rooster also appears today in the new issue of Pragati, the monthly magazine of The Indian National Interest.