Three years of The Middle Stage

The date of my last post, April 12, is also the third anniversary of the Middle Stage.

How time flies. I was 25 then — I am 28 now; I had a day job then — I don't have one now; I had no burns then — I have sideburns now; I could run only three laps around my neighbourhood park then — I can do ten now; I owned lots of books then — I own lots more books now; I used to live west of the Western line then — I live east of the Harbour line now; I dreamt of being rich and drinking champagne then — I dream of being rich and drinking champagne now.

Regrettably, although the number of people visiting this site refuses to grow, the profusion of books and writers who have come and gone on these pages in the last three years makes it impossible to contemplate the kind of party that I proposed at the end of my first year (also, I am saving up for a vacation abroad, so you would have to bring your own alcohol anyway).

So I thought that all I'd do is thank you, my readers, for taking the time to read my work and often send in illuminating comments. I know it's cheap, but that's me.

I hope you will also read my first novel, which should be out in a while. And I've put together a selection of what I consider to be my best posts from the last two years:

"The Books Interview with Ramachandra Guha"; "Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose"; "Tigers in the poetry of William Blake and Salabega"; "English and Hindi in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games"; "Necessary and unnecessary steps in Constantine Cavafy"; "On David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk"; "The sweet voice and harsh words of Osip Mandelstam"; "On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red"; "Some thoughts on artistic time and real time"; "Words Without Borders, and the stories of Parashuram"; "The Books Interview with Christopher Kremmer"; "On Muhammad Yunus's Banker to the Poor"; "Houshang Moradi-Kermani's "The Vice-Principal" and Literature from the Axis of Evil"; "On Saul Bellow's Seize the Day" and

(yes, I know it's long)

"On Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor"; "Memories of a Borges book, and the old Twentieth Century bookshop"; "On Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi"; "The tumbfalling prose of EE Cummings"; "Shashi Tharoor, banally in love with India"; "On looking through Ted Hughes's Selected Translations"; "On Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul"; "Fakir Mohan Senapati's roundabout fictions"; "On Amitava Kumar's Home Products"; "Talking India With Ashis Nandy"; "Wislawa Szymborska, curious about everything"; "On Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age"; "Travelling with Graham Robb"; "On Vinod George Joseph's Hitchhiker"; "Mark Tully and India"; "On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan"; "The Kitab Literary Festival, and a disquisition on boots"; "On Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners"; "The zany fictions of Etgar Keret"; and my Books of the Year roundups for 2006 and 2007.

And from 2006: "A year of the Middle Stage".

On Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul

Biographies always have to navigate between small and large concerns, between the humdrum detail and the world-changing intervention. But rarely is the gulf between high and low as vast as it is in The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s long-awaited biography of V.S. Naipaul. On the one hand, we make an intimate acquaintance with the oddities, infidelities, and perfidies of an exceptionally egotistic and unreasonable man, a man suffered rather than loved even by those closest to him. On the other, we see that the larger journey of this man (from provincial outpost to metropolitan centre, and thereafter eagerly, restlessly, back and forth across the newly decolonized world) is the story of the 20th century in miniature: the story of mass migration, of failed nation-states, of changing race relations, of multiple personal histories and affiliations.

French’s biography is exemplary on the details of Naipaul’s childhood, and later on his troubled (and troubling) conjugal life. One of the best sections of his book is the early one on Trinidad, tracing the Naipaul family story all the way back to the first arrival of indentured Indian labourers in Port-of-Spain in 1845. As Naipaul has himself said on many occasions, his father Seepersad, the son of an agricultural labourer who taught himself to read and write and became a journalist, spurred his dream of becoming a great writer. But French also shows how Naipaul’s projected sense of himself as a Brahmin, a lover of learning with a native sense of entitlement, fastidious about details of food and clothing, is in a way a disguise, as Seepersad was probably not a Brahmin.

Brought up in a fractious joint family, the details of which he would later use in his fiction, the young Vidia longed to escape from Trinidad and set about studying for the scholarship to England that would allow him to do so. Naipaul later saw his arrival in England in 1950 as being at the vanguard of “that great movement of people that was to take place in the second half of the 20th century”. At Oxford, he was to meet his future wife Pat, who offered support for his ambitions and soothed his insecurities about being a brown-skinned man in a predominantly white country.

After Oxford, Naipaul worked grudgingly at a variety of jobs (as a presenter on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices, as a book reviewer, even as a clerk), married Pat, and produced the brilliant early works of fiction (The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A House For Mr Biswas) that won him acclaim in England as a promising writer from the Caribbean. French is particularly acute in his analysis of how, in his late 20s, realizing that the vogue for Caribbean fiction in England was dying, Naipaul reinvented himself as “a displaced, unaffiliated, un-Caribbean writer” and inserted himself into what the Indian publisher Ravi Dayal called “the mainstream of history”.

Thus began his travels around the world. A commission from the Trinidad government led him to write a short, critical book about the island; he journeyed to India with Pat in 1962 and produced his unsettling and controversial book An Area of Darkness; an offer from a university in Uganda became the launchpad for a series of books on Africa. Naipaul’s life settled into a pattern. He visited several countries, travelled widely with the assistance of local guides, spoke to people, transcribed his notes every evening, came back home and wrote up a book in a burst of focused work. His books, which almost always stoked controversy, tried to unveil the deep structure and crippling malaises of these civilizations through a combination of keen observation and recorded testimonies.

Meanwhile, Naipaul’s relationship with Pat had swiftly degenerated into a scene of relentless egotism and volatility for one, and suffocation and self-abnegation for the other. Sexually unfulfilled, he took to visiting prostitutes. Then, on a trip to Argentina in 1972, he met and instantly fell in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman called Margaret Murray, a mother of three. There began immediately a bruising affair, in both the figurative and the literal sense. Over the next 25 years, Naipaul and Murray loved and lacerated one another without ever coming close to marrying or living together, which was what Murray wanted.

Naipaul could not bring himself to leave his wife, the first reader of his manuscripts, yet, pitilessly, he told her about Margaret and often flew out to meet his lover in different parts of the world, leaving her to deal with her grief. French’s book is as much a biography of Pat as it is of Sir Vidia. He quotes often from her diaries, which are housed in a vast archive of Naipaul’s papers at the University of Tulsa, and closely tracks her attempts to make a life for herself during her husband’s absences. In one of the book's most heartbreaking moments, French shows us Pat living by herself in London, researching, of all things, an anthology of love letters at the invitation of a common friend of her and her husband, the historian Antonia Fraser. French’s narrative ends in 1996, with a moving description of Pat’s death and the scene of a tearful Naipaul and his new wife, Nadira, scattering her ashes in the woods near their country estate.

French beautifully mines and marshals the sources all biographies are made of - entries in diaries and notebooks, letters, recorded interviews, reminiscences of people close to the subject. Sometimes glimpses of a figure - an anecdote, a memory - can tell us more than pages of analysis can. French's narrative is full of such glimpses, which allow us to put together a private picture of Naipaul (French wisely eschews the kind of moralising commentary and retrospective judgments that mar so many biographies).
Moni Malhoutra, an IAS officer who assisted Naipaul with An Area of Darkness, recalls that Naipaul "was very athletic and he used to do a particular movement with his leg, he used to pick it up and bring it up towards his head from the back. It's the kind of posture which you'll see in some sculptures in the Tanjore temples...He loved to do that." Asked to judge a literary competition while serving as a writer-in-residence at a university in Uganda, Naipaul, we are told, "awarded only a third prize". A harried manager of the Taj Hotel in Bombay writes to his demanding guest: "Dear Mr.Naipaul, thank you for filling in the Guest Comments form and bringing to my notice the flaw in the design of the Tea-pots." A journalist requesting an interview with the master is rebuked: "Dear Mr.Bellacasa, Nothing in your questions suggests any knowledge of my work. An interview would be a considerable waste of my time and energy." (That word "considerable" is the funniest part of that sentence).

Naipaul himself gave his consent for the project, and revealed freely of himself to French. “Of all the people I spoke to for this book, he was outwardly the frankest,” writes French of Naipaul. “He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.”

This seems an astute judgment, and French’s biography is certainly candid. But for this very reason, long sections of it make for depressing reading. The darkness of Naipaul’s attachments (if "attachments" is the correct word) is not offset, in French's narrative, by the excitement of the work—and there must have been such an excitement on an almost daily basis, given Naipaul’s ambition, talent, and dedication to his craft.

For instance, since French was given access to all the Naipaul records and papers at the University of Tulsa archive, he had an opportunity to look at the draft versions of Naipaul's books and tell us by what stages they came to acquire their distinction (authors are never more interesting than when revising their work). As Naipaul himself has said, "The value of a literary archive is that it takes us as close as we can get to the innermost self of the writer who produced the work." French does, I think, not fully exploit the potential of the material to which he had access.

In the same way, French does not tell us enough about how Naipaul came to perfect his pellucid, ringing style - the unmistakable sound of his writing voice. Nor is there very much about Naipaul's reading, or the kinds of things he discussed with other writers. Glimpses of Naipaul's attention to the minutiae of composition appear here and there, as in a letter to Random House's Sonny Mehta in which he complains about the work done on his text by a copy editor: "I don't want anyone undoing my semi-colons, with all their different shades of pause; or interfering with my 'ands', with all their different ways of linking."

But the paucity of such material means that French's biography is finally somewhat unbalanced. The World Is What It Is exposes the many skeletons in Naipaul's closet, but it leaves the secrets of his books in the dark. Or to put it another way, French's book is too sexual, and not textual enough.

And two old posts: on Naipaul's book A Writer's People, and on an unusual experiment in literary biography, the Spanish novelist Javier Marias's Written Lives.

Update, April 21: I neglected to mention in my piece that about a third of the Naipaul archive - the notebooks, diaries, and letters of his early career - were inadvertently destroyed by Ely's, the firm which had been storing them. As French writes, "Ely's, instructed to destroy files marked NITRATE (belonging to the Nitrate Corporation of Chile) had taken those marked NAIPAUL as well." This loss would have caused French some difficulty in attending to questions of Naipaul's development as a writer.

A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

The Clay Sanskrit Library in India

I've just received Random House India's 2008 catalogue, and I'm delighted to see that Random House will soon be distributing the new and old releases of the Clay Sanskrit Library series in India. You will soon be able to buy these titles in your local bookstore at Rs.500-800 each.

As I've mentioned in earlier reviews of individual CSL titles, the Library is one of the most significant publishing projects of our age, bringing under one imprint a massive corpus of a millennium-worth of secular literature in Sanskrit, in new translations by some of the foremost scholars of our day.

The beautiful green hardback editions are small enough to fit into a handbag or even a good-sized pocket, and durable enough - in both the physical and the textual sense - to be enjoyed by your grandchildren.

Among the most enjoyable features of the editions are that they are facing-page translations (the original Sanskrit is presented in Roman script on the left-hand page), which makes it possible for the reader to get some sense of the sonic qualities of the original (and even teach himself or herself a bit of Sanskrit). Also, each edition is copiously annotated by the translator; textual cruxes are explained, and connections are made between the text and philosophical and aesthetic theories of the time.

For instance, in one text a character is described as being thirsty for battle, when the usual way of expressing this sentiment in English is "hungry for battle". The translator remarks that perhaps this difference in the metaphorical phrasing of a state of want and eagerness reflects "the desires of a hot and dry climate versus a cold and damp one". I have spent many enjoyable hours just browsing through these notes, one set of which is here.

A full list of Clay Sanskrit Library titles in alphabetical order is here (their Mahabharata will run into 20 volumes and their Ramayana to seven), and their April 2008 releases are here. Also, here is the essay "Seduced by Sanskrit" by Willis Regier ("Why care about Sanskrit literature? It is candid about sex, appreciates the power of money, and confronts the duplicities of war and religion. Its indispensable word is 'dharma' - duty, calling, or moral law.") and Robert Goldman's long introduction to the Ramayana.

And two older posts, on Kalidasa's Shakuntala and Dandin's enthralling pan-Indian adventure story Dasakumaracharita.

Some recent reviews, and thoughts on the interpretation of scripture

Some recent reviews in Mint: on the late Benazir Bhutto's Reconciliation (a vastly dull book, but with one good and very useful chapter ), Ramin Jahanbegloo's The Spirit of India (from which I'd earlier quoted a passage here), and Jose Saramago's sublime Death By Intervals, which with David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk is the best novel I've read so far this year.

Interestingly, Jahanbegloo's book contains an assertion the demonstration of which is worked out in Bhutto's long meditation on the Quran with the help of many progressive voices in the Islamic world. Jahanbegloo's idea is that: "In the long run, there is no such thing as 'good' or 'bad' religions. There are only 'hard readings' and 'soft readings' of religious texts." That is, the work of textual interpretation of scripture is as significant as the (often ambiguous) words of the text itself. Or, as the liberal Iranian theologian Abdolkarim Soroush puts it in this essay, there is a way of understanding religious texts that sees them as "immutable and changeable at the same time".

An an older post on the memoirs of General Pervez Musharraf, a work in which the word "army" is as central as the word "democracy" is in Bhutto's book, and is possibly used more sincerely. The feature common to both books though is that both writers see themselves as absolutely central to the rehabilitation of Pakistan's fortunes. That is to say, both Musharraf and Bhutto saw themselves, and only themselves, as solutions, and therefore were in no small way part of the problem.

I have not read LK Advani's just-released memoir: I wonder if there is a key word in it and if so what that is. Perhaps "Hindu"?

Eugenides, Milton, and love

I've been reading Jeffrey Eugenides's anthology of love stories My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead, and while trying to think about the effects of love stories as compared to love songs - songs are closer to our heart, I think, not only because they are shorter and can be committed to memory but also because, as a lyric form, they take the shape of addresses from one person to another and allow us to insert ourselves into them, while stories, as a narrative form, may move us powerfully but nevertheless leave us feeling like observers - I thought of Milton's vision of his late wife "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint", one of my favourite poems in the English language.

I don't think that in all of English poetry there is a pair of lines more plangent than those at the close of this sonnet ("But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."), and in a very fine essay recently published in the Guardian Review, Claire Tomalin picks out some passages from Milton for close scrutiny, including these lines. She notes how "the softly worded 'O as to embrace me' invites you to expect a gentle follow-up, and instead comes a line of monosyllables like pistol shots. Even Shakespeare's sonnets sometimes slacken at the end, but this one rises to a climax, full of meaning and power."

And in a recent essay in the online edition of Poetry magazine, the poet and translator WS Merwin picks "Methought..." as one of his five favourite love poems alongside poems by Ben Jonson, Jaime Sabines, Stanley Kunitz, and Randall Jarrell. And in an older essay, the former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky chooses Milton's poem among his own favourite love poems.

I also disagree with Eugenides's contention that:

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims - these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

This seems a limiting view, and for this reason I have problems with some of the stories Eugenides has chosen, which don't seem to me to be love stories but stories about complicated relationships or about erotic tension, which are not the same thing. In fact, I can imagine several ways of writing a good love story that would not involve at least one cold heart or give love a bad name. Even warm hearts can have their misunderstandings, as in O Henry's anthology-favourite "The Gift of the Magi". As anyone who has given time and commitment to a relationship knows, mutual possession in love can be as unsettling and as complicated as no possession. In fact the real challenges of love lie in how one deals with possession, not with rejection.

And some old posts on love stories or philosophical works on love: On Anton Chekhov's "The Kiss" (Eugenides has gone for Chekhov's best-known love story "The Lady With The Little Dog"), "On Ilan Stavans's Love and Language", and "Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay's language of love".

And two of my own favourite love poems: "Eyes" by Antonio Machado and "December, 1903" by Constantine Cavafy.

Václav Havel, Kang Zhengguo, and prison literature

Never were more writers incarcerated around the world than in the twentieth century — the century in which totalitarianism reached its apogee and regimes all over the world painstakingly devised, honed and perfected techniques to suppress dissenting thought. Prison literature as a genre really took off in the twentieth century.

Here is Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and later president, on the carefully vetted missives he wrote to his wife (he was only allowed one four-page letter every week, without any scratching out or corrections) while incarcerated for subversive activities by the Communist regime between 1979 and 1983. These were later collected and published as Letters to Olga:

The letters gave me a chance to develop a new way of looking at myself and examining my attitudes to the fundamental things in life. I became more and more wrapped up in them, I depended on them to the point where almost nothing else mattered. All week long I would develop the essays in my head - at work, when exercising before going to bed - and then on Saturday, amid constant interruption, I would write them out in a kind of wild trance. Later I discovered ways of writing out a rough draft, but then the problem became where to hide it, since searches were part of the daily routine. In Bory I hid my rough drafts in a mountain of dirty sheets stained by millions of unborn children, and I would revise them during the noon break, while trying to avoid being seen by informers. Once I'd written out a fair copy, I couldn't change anything or cross anything out, much less copy it again. I'd hand it in, and then there'd be a short, suspenseful wait: would it get through or not? Since I wasn't allowed to keep a copy, I eventually lost track of what I had written, and which letters had been sent - which is why there are so many gaps, repetitions, and flaws in logic. In time I learned to think ahead and arrange my thoughts in thematic cycles, and to weave the motifs in and out of them and thus - in a rather uneven fashion - to build, over time, my own little structure, putting it together something like my plays.... The letters, in fact, are endless spirals in which I've tried to enclose something. Very early on, I realised that comprehensible letters wouldn't go through, which is why the letters are full of long, compound sentences and the complicated way of saying things. Instead of writing 'regime', for instance, I would obviously have to write 'the socially apparent focus of the non-I,' or some such nonsense.

To wriggle past the censorious gaze of a regime that has twisted and perverted language, Havel must encode his thoughts in an obfuscatory idiom that sounds to his captors like something they might say in all seriousness. And yet, at other times, he feels that exasperation that all writers feel at having put down a wrong or an imprecise word, and tries to revise his drafts even though he risks being discovered by informers! There are layers upon layers of irony in this little account.

But the privations of extreme states of confinement can also make something that was previously routine and humdrum suddenly sacred, wonderful, to be lingered over for hours. Here in Kang Zhengguo in his recently published Confessions, his memoir of a life spent in Chinese prisons and labour re-education camps for alleged "thought crimes", on the bliss of food in prison, the psychological sustenance provided by the anticipation of mealtimes, and the invented rituals of eating:

Two inmates [from each cell] had the job of serving breakfast first thing in the morning. [...] If they came back in with the basin saying that today's gruel was thick, or that the ladles had been full, or that they had gotten some doughy clumps, our faces lit up with joy. If they had not done a good job that day, we would sigh with regret.

[...] We were forbidden to doze on our bunks during the day. According to the rules, we were supposed to sit quietly and reflect on our errors, study Mao's works, or read the single copy of People's Daily. However, we did not always obey the rules. By about two o'clock, when the morning's watery gruel had passed right through us and we were famished again, we could smell the aroma of the preparations for that day's dinner. Standing on a pile of quilts, Number Nine craned his neck to look out at the tiny window at the chimney smoke and predict what we would get. He pointed to the three chimneys on the kitchen roof and said that since the second one was belching smoke, dinner would be steamed buns. This verdict was based on long experience, and sure enough, at dinner we each got a brownish wheat bun and a bowl of slightly watery vegetable soup.

Zhengguo writes that during his early days in prison, when he had some reserves of body fat still on him, he had found the food so unappetising ("it reminded me of pig fodder") that he could never finish his share and instead gave some away to one of his cell-mates. But now:

The bitter boiled turnips tasted good to me, and the salty broth, flecked with a few drops of oil, impressed me as a perfect balance of color, fragrance, and flavor. [...]

Some of my cellmates had unusual eating habits. Number Nine seemed to derive spiritual sustenance from keeping one steamed bun in reserve at all times. He always waited till he got a fresh bun before eating the old one he had saved and then hoarded the new one in a special bag that he hung on the wall. I could not imagine why he bothered to do this. He got no more food than the rest of us and always had to eat cold, stale buns. Perhaps the momentary illusion that he had an extra bun was comforting. Number Seven was a very particular diner. After spreading a clean handkerchief in front of himself, he julienned his bun painstakingly with a piece of string, which he called his bun cutter. Then he set the strips of bun out on his handkerchief like a heap of french fries and used a tiny stick to spear each one into his mouth and chew it slowly. After the rest of us had gobbled up all their food, he would still be savoring his sumptuous feast of bun strips.
[...] As the guards said, "If being in jail was a picnic, wouldn't everybody want to come? A little bit of hunger and suffering will teach you who's boss."

And finally, here is a marvellous passage from Havel's essay "Stories and Totalitarianism", which explains how the totalitarian state, with its insistence on a single master narrative, is grimly opposed to the realm of "story" and the freedom and plurality of meanings that realm implies:

Every story begins with an event. This event - understood as the incursion of one logic into the world of another logic, initiates what every story grows out of and draws nourishment from: situations, relationships, conflict. The story has a logic of its own as well, but it is the logic of a dialogue, an encounter, the interaction of different truths, attitudes, ideas, traditions, passions, people, higher powers, social movements, and so on, that is, of many autonomous, separate forces, which had done nothing beforehand to define each other. Every story presupposes a plurality of truths, of logics, of agents of decisions, and of manners of behavior. The logic of a story resembles the logic of games, a logic of tension between what is known and not known, between rules and chance, between the inevitable and the unforeseeable. We never really know what will emerge from the confrontation, what elements may yet enter into it, and how it will end; it is never clear what potential qualities it will arouse in a protagonist and what action he will be led to perform by the action of his antagonist. For this reason alone, mystery is a dimension of every story. What speaks to us through a story is not a particular agent of truth; instead, the story manifests the human world to us as an exhilarating arena where many such agents come into contact with each other.

The fundamental pillar of the present totalitarian system is the existence of one central agent of all truth and all power, an institutionalized "rationale of history," which becomes, quite naturally, the sole agent of all social activity. Public life ceases to be an arena where different, more or less autonomous agents square off, and becomes no more than the manifestation and fulfillment of the truth and the will of this single agent. In a world governed by this principle, there is no room for mystery; ownership of complete truth means that everything is known ahead of time. Where everything is known ahead of time, the story has nothing to grow out of.

Obviously, the totalitarian system is in essence (and in principle) directed against the story.

The translations of Havel are by Paul Wilson and that of Zhengguo by Susan Wilf. A short review of Zhengguo's book I've written is here.

And here are two old posts each citing an example of prison literature: Ganesh Gaitonde's description of days in captivity in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and "Nazim Hikmet in prison".

New posts coming up

I am finally close to the completion of something that's taken up most of the last two years - I hope it's close to finished - and once that's done I'd to work on some essays I've been formulating in my head the last few months but have been unable to write.

Here are the titles of some of the things I hope to put up here in April and May:

"Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare" (Anjum Hasan's debut novel Lunatic In My Head was on my list of books of the year for 2007)

"Schoolteachers and accountants in the fiction of Kunal Basu"

"Books, music, time and death in José Saramago"

and "The unpoetic poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz"

I also hope to have an essay up on David Levering Lewis's fascinating God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, which I've just finished reading.

Also, as Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic ticket goes from strength to strength, my post from last year on his excellent book The Audacity of Hope has suddenly become one of the most-read pages on the Middle Stage. So here you are, all ye American readers, there's no need to go through Google any more.

Finally, here is an old review from Mint last year of Nalini Jones's exceptional debut collection of stories What You Call Winter. The essay begins with the question "Is fiction useful?"

Interjunction

Rohit Chopra, who writes Anti-History/In Another Life, one of the couple of dozen blogs I read carefully, has just launched a new webzine, Interjunction, with his friend and fellow academic Chindu Sreedharan. Here's an extract from their introductory letter to readers:

Interjunction is ...a bridge across media and academia. A platform. At its simplest, it is a multi-blog. At its best, a full-fledged newszine on issues of interest to media professionals and academics.

We also see it as a networking tool, a forum that will put journalists and academicians from across the world in touch. Read more about our objectives here.

And here's the link to the lead piece in the first issue: "Whose Prince? Whose War?".

I've been thinking of what to write for Interjunction, but distressingly I can't think of any media-related topic that I really want to talk about - analysis has always been my weak point - other than the cheque for Rs.1000 I received from Biblio last September for a piece on Orhan Pamuk I'd written for them early in 2004. The other exceptional attribute of this cheque was that it was dated 2004. I feel my thoughts on this matter will turn out to be too trivial, too personal, for the readers of Interjunction. But I'm working on it, Rohit.

If you'd like to contribute to Interjunction, email Rohit at interjunction@gmail.com.

On Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva

Manil Suri’s new novel The Age of Shiva, like his first novel The Death of Vishnu, begins with a scene of a woman offering liquid nourishment to a needy male. There it was the calculating housewife Mrs. Asrani, unwilling to waste her good tea on the dying manservant Vishnu; here it is the protagonist, Meera, breastfeeding her son Ashvin, a scene that Suri dresses up in language that suggests lovemaking.

This is quite appropriate, because The Age of Shiva develops into a story about the hope of redemption invested in passionate and suffocating mother-love – a Lawrentian theme, but also one with roots in Indian mythology (in which Suri is very interested), in the story of the goddess Parvati’s creation of a son to keep her company in the absence of her philandering husband Shiva.

The device of telling his story through the voice of Meera, rather than in the third person, relieves Suri of the burdens of the cloying commentary on the lives of his characters that debilitated The Death of Vishnu. Unfortunately Suri fails to give this kind of narration the proper depth and focus it demands by adding to it a kind of novelistic ticker tape continually breaking news in the life of newly independent India. This creates an excess of suggestion that muddies his story.

A representative example of the confusion generated by this method appears when the teenaged Meera goes with her sister Roopa and Roopa’s boyfriend Dev to a Republic Day rally in Delhi in 1955. Meera hears a stirring speech by Jawaharlal Nehru, and decides to assert her agency by stealing Dev from Roopa, and asks “Hadn’t the prime minister of India, Nehru himself, nudged me in the direction I was planning to take?”. That “nudged me” seems to be an evasion weakly argued by the protagonist yet licensed by the author.

Indeed, the unintentional nudge by Nehru raises a larger question in Suri’s fiction, which is that of the moral responsibility of individuals. All through The Age of Shiva the characters around Meera – beginning with Roopa and her father, and extending to Dev and his family and later to Ashvin– are moral savages: blanketed in egotism, complacent in their hypocrisy, greedily seeking sensual and material pleasures, always on the brink of intemperate speech.

For instance, after Dev and Meera have made love on their wedding night, Dev lies back and begins to think of Roopa (as he might plausibly do). But then he asks aloud: “Don’t you wonder what she’s doing right now?” This is one of numerous occasions when characters behave oddly, as if enlisted in an authorial conspiracy to make a martyr of the lead character: although their moods wax and wane, but there is no productive ambiguity to them. Here is Hema, Dev's fifteen-year-old sister, speaking with Meera for the first time:

"...I suppose we shouldn't expect you to be good either, being a rich man's girl and everything. I've already told my parents. When I get married, it's going to be to the wealthiest man they can find. Marry for comfort, that's what I want, not for love like you. Tell me though, is it true what you two did in the tomb? They were quite outraged, the Muslims, they're saying you defiled the grave. Even the stationmaster, Mr. Ahmed, said it was an insult to one of their Muslim saints.
I kept my gaze focused at my feet, willing my body to be absolutely still. Sweat trickled down my face and neck under the gunghat, but I didn't draw it back or take it off.
"You can tell me, I promise not to repeat it to anyone. Pushpa down the street says you both were naked." Hema giggled. "Were you really? Babuji was called into Mr.Ahmed's office, you know. Given quite a firing."

Everything about this passage is problematic, from the the implausibility of a teenaged girl speaking like this to someone she barely knows ("Marry for comfort, that's what I want, not for love like you"; "Pushpa down the street says you were both naked") to the wooden phrasing and jarring locutions ("Tell me though..."; Babuji was called into Mr.Ahmed's office, you know").

Also, it would seem from passages like this one that Suri wishes to preserve the specificity of certain Hindi works, like gunghat. But he does not show the same confidence in KL Saigal's song "Diya Jalao", preferring to call it "Light The Fire Of Your Heart", which makes it sound like something by the Bee Gees. (Another song, "Jab Dil Hi Toot Gaya", Suri translates bathetically as "When The Heart Only Has Broken"). The heart only?

Meera’s father himself is a veritable deus ex machina, as when he cozens Dev into persuading Meera to abort her first child (he feels she is too young to conceive, when the previous year he had not thought her too young to marry) by offering him a flat in Bombay to allow him to pursue his dream of becoming a playback singer. With this the novel moves to Bombay, where Meera's suffering continues at the hands of her strangely unfeeling and implausible husband.

Meera’s life, then, is undone by men acting brutishly, either singly or in concord. But while her narrative supplies painstaking and often tedious summaries of events and problems in Indian politics – Partition, Hindu-Muslim conflict, the wars with China and Pakistan, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, the rise of Hindu nationalism – it surprisingly never offers any larger meditation on why human nature, or male nature, or Indian nature, is as cruel or unthinking as it is, when this is the main question raised by her troubles, and she has absolute liberty to speak in her story as she perhaps cannot in real life.

The episode of Dev’s death is neatly illustrative of Suri’s ham-handed approach towards his craft. In Chapter 23 we find him sullen because jobless, and hence given to wearing “the darkest shirts he owned, with pants that were charcoal black”. In Chapter 24 we are told of war breaking out with Pakistan; because of the power blackouts the police have advised pedestrians “to wear white shirts” to avoid being run over (not white clothes, note, but white shirts). Ergo, Chapter 25: Dev is run over by a cab in the dark. “What with the dark shirt he was wearing, and no streetlamps or headlights…” a police officer explains. Yes yes, we know.

Suri’s novel – apparently the second in a trilogy – is awash with petty superfluities of this kind, and spoonfeeds its meanings to the reader from start to finish. It is content to clutch at the teats of myth and history, and never attains maturity as a work of fiction.

And an old post on the use of Hindi words in an English novel: "English and Hindi in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games".

[A shorter version of this piece appeared yesterday in the Observer.]

Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi's concept of freedom

From the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo's new book The Spirit of India, this marvellous passage on freedom as understood by Gandhi both in the personal and in the political sense:

To Gandhi, swaraj did not mean simply replacing British rule with Indian rule. [...] Political independence was not an end in itself. Swaraj was above all about individual autonomy, involving self-respect, self-restraint and maturity. Gandhi appealed for individual Indians to free themselves mentally and through character development from internal and external colonization. [...] In other words, Gandhi aimed to revitalize the idea of civilization as dharma (a sense of order, a quality of the soul and duty towards other human beings) through a redefinition of self-government as self-actualization. [...]

What Gandhi criticizes in modern civilization is the process of reduction of self-restraint and self-actualization to self-interest. According to Gandhi, to value human freedom only as the freedom to pursue one's self-interest lacks moral and spiritual depth and creates a life devoid of meaning and truth. [...] Swaraj means essentially 'being open to others', but at the same time it means building a character for oneself by living one's life as a moral project. [...]

We can now understand why freedom for Gandhi was not merely a right, but was a duty. [...] In Gandhi's philosophy civilization is not just a state of self-proclamation of freedom. True freedom is not merely the freedom to do what one desires, but also the ability to ensure that what one chooses is the result of a sense of duty and self-knowledge. For Gandhi, this choice is not exercised as 'freedom from restraints' but as 'freedom through restraints'. There is an ontological difference between the two formulations. In the first formulation, restraint refers to a situation imposed by an 'other' (for example, colonialism). In the second formulation, restraint refers to a self-imposed situation (Gandhian swaraj).

Therefore, freedom is not only freedom from coercion and domination, it is also self-regulation through self-restraint. Hence, self-restraint forms an indispensable part of Gandhi's concept of civilization. [...] True civilization is a state of self-transcendence through self-restraint. It is a process of making and rectifying mistakes. Freedom should provide conditions of growth for an individual. In the eyes of Gandhi, the civilizing process results from an inner reform of the individual. As for outward independence, it is a yardstick to measure the freedom of self within. There can be no outward self-rule without the experience of truth. And there can be no experience of truth without self-realization and moral freedom. True civilization is the reign of moral freedom. [...] For Gandhi the truth is actually the spirit of search for truth. In his own life, he conducted the search as experiments with truth.

And three older posts: "Talking India with Ashis Nandy", in which it is Jahanbegloo that Nandy is talking India with; a review of Rajmohan Gandhi's recent biography of Gandhi, which also addresses the points made here; and a piece on Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners, which takes up some of the thoughts on Gandhi in that book.

A piece by Jahanbegloo, "The Modern Gandhi", is here, and a long conversation between Jahanbegloo and Danny Postel can be found here. A large set of links on Iran's politics, art, and ideas can be found in this post written last year on Christopher de Bellaigue's The Struggle For Iran.

Also, last week's post on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk is now updated with a passage from the book.

On David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk

This piece appeared yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph.

An intriguing aspect of novels that conscript characters from real life, under their real names, into the world of fiction is the degree to which such books must perform a continuous balancing act to justify their existence. They simultaneously invite judgement for their fidelity to the historical record – for the novelist’s painstaking “research” – and for the cunning of their fiction-making, the private corridors they open off public knowledge.

This is the situation of David Leavitt’s novel The Indian Clerk, which explores the relationship between the protagonists of one of the oddest, but greatest, partnerships in the history of mathematics: the Cambridge don GH Hardy and the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. Hardy – fiercely atheist, rationalist, contemptuous of small talk and complacent attitudes, a closet homosexual – brought Ramanujan over to Trinity College in 1914 on the basis of no more than a couple of pleading, eccentric letters full of mathematical hits and misses from the impoverished Indian clerk, and considered his association with him “the one romantic incident in my life”.

Yet Hardy’s relationship with the “Hindoo calculator”, as Ramanujan came to be known in Cambridge circles, was as vexing as it was fulfilling. In Leavitt’s book, as in Robert Kanigel’s widely praised biography of Ramanujan The Man Who Knew Infinity, Hardy is perplexed by Ramanujan’s devotion to the goddess Namagiri (to whom he attributes his flashes of insight) by his childlike and often inscrutable ways, by his unstable mix of highly worldly and unworldly attitudes, and finally by his tragically early death.

Leavitt’s novel begins with a telling scene from 1936. Hardy is about a deliver a lecture at Harvard, but knows that his audience is not as interested in his work as they are in the long-dead Ramanujan. The Indian Clerk has something like the same relationship with readers’ expectations: we want Ramanujan, but get Hardy. At times the narration advances upon the voice of Hardy and at times from above him, steadily enfolding the lives of a host of brilliant supporting characters (some “real”, some Leavitt’s inventions), but it never allows us private access to Ramanujan’s thoughts. Although characters can be just as interesting when information about them is withheld as they are when it is supplied, the reader is likely to chafe at this unequal division, especially since Hardy is such a cold fish.

But this strategy does allow Leavitt to set up one of the most sublime and affecting moves in a novelist’s repertoire, which is a change in a character’s long-settled voice in response to changing circumstances. As the First World War (“the Great War” to Hardy) begins, Cambridge is emptied of its able-bodied men, the mood of crisis invades even the most innocuous act of social intercourse, and life limps along in Trinity College, the cadences of Hardy’s clipped and unemotional sentences open out slowly and make for a more yearning, wondering sound that captivates the ear. Many things in this newly stricken world – including the troubles of his moping Indian friend, longing for home and family – surprise Hardy and move him, and as it shuttles around the lives and worries of its Cambridge set, once close-knit but now widely dispersed, Leavitt’s novel also worries itself into being.

And here is a link to a long interview with Leavitt at The Elegant Variation ("Point of view is my obsession. I love the intimacy of first person, and I also love the scope and latitude of third person").

Unfortunately I don't have the book on me as I'm travelling, else I've have quoted a couple of passages from it. But I thought it work of an enviably high order, and recommend it unhesitatingly.

Update, Feb.28 - And here is a paragraph from the novel, from Part 5, "A Terrible Dreaming". The war has begun; many Cambridge men have been enlisted and have fallen on the battlefields of France. Hardy has chosen not to volunteer, and is reduced to reading "the lists of the Cambridge dead that the Cambridge magazine published", and trying to insert his name "among those of the men from Trinity, all of whom, of course, I had known, at least by sight, and some of whom I had taught". Trinity has been emptied out, although a camp for the wounded has been set up in Nevile's Court. "Hermione" in this passage is the cat beloved of Hardy and his late partner Gaye; Hardy's mother is "half out of her mind" because of old age, not because of the war:

Early that winter I was sitting, one morning, reading in my rooms, with Hermione on my lap, awaiting Ramanujan. I looked up and saw that the first snow was falling. And somehow its innocence, its seeming obliviousness to the condition of the world, moved me and saddened me. For possibly the snow was falling also on the riven farmland of France and Belgium, falling into the trenches in which the soldiers waited for what might be their last sunset. And it was falling on Nevile's Court, to be gazed upon by the injured lying in their camp beds. And it was falling in Cranleigh, where my mother, half out of her mind, watched it through her bedroom window, and my sister through the window of a classroom in which uniformed girls were painting a vase of flowers. Lifting Hermione off my lap, I got up and walked to the window. It was still warm enough outside that the snow didn't stick; it melted instantly when it touched the ground. And there, standing in the court below me, was Ramanujan. The flakes melted on his face and ran down his cheeks. He stood there like that for a full five minutes. And then I realized that this must have been the first time in his life that he had seen snow.

A man watches snow, imagines a fractured world and within it his near and dear ones briefly brought together by the experience of watching the same snow, and then sees another man standing under the snow and realises how different his reading of that snow - and by extension the war - must be. This is a passage aglow with the moral sympathy that is one of the reasons why novelistic narrative, even if it contains little or no factual content, asks at its very best to be taken as a branch of knowledge.

On Chitrita Banerji's Eating India

This piece appeared yesterday in Mint.

It could be said of good food writing that no matter how far afield the writer ventures, he or she always has one foot set at home. That is, food writing is always less interesting when the writer goes out only to look, taste, describe what is out there, and more interesting when the writer brings to the encounter a distinct point of view rooted in his or her family hearth, in a formative tradition that becomes everywhere a standard of comparison and calibration.

A powerful sense of just this kind of dialogue is communicated at every step by Chitrita Banerji’s marvellous survey of Indian cuisine Eating India. Banerji begins with a sumptuous chapter on the culinary traditions of her native Bengal—also the subject of her two previous books Hour of the Goddess and Life and Food in Bengal—and then sets out across the country to taste and think about its enormously variegated food, from the predominantly vegetarian diet of Gujarat to the sharper flavours of the south, the rich synthesis of north Indian cuisines to the enclaves of Parsi and Jewish cooking.

Tracing spheres of influence, establishing patterns of continuity and innovation, and foregrounding subtle variations in cooking methods and the use of ingredients, Banerji connects food to customs, culture, religion, folklore, climate and even architecture. This is important because reading the newspapers these days, and noting the density of detail in the pieces about “eating right” and the contrasting insipidity of restaurant reviews, it is possible to come to the conclusion that eating knowledgeably in our times has come to mean understanding the place of various food groups in a balanced diet, keeping track of calories and portion sizes, and eating no carbs after dark.

There is no question that these are urgent issues in a populace traditionally affected by obesity and heart disease and newly stirred by the idea of the beautiful body as ours, but Banerji’s idea of food appreciation as a series of concentric circles that engage not just the senses but also mind and memory is an incomparably more sophisticated model. Among the implicit points made by her book is the importance of the human encounter to the enjoyment of food, even fast food—she is rarely found eating alone, and there are beautiful passages describing meals at the residences of writer Khushwant Singh and painter Jehangir Sabavala.

While Banerji’s researches are by no means comprehensive—often she stays in a place no more than a day or two, sampling food idiosyncratically with some help from local contacts—her zest is infectious and her eye for points of connection and contrast excellent. Among the things, big and small, I learnt from her book was the influence of the Portuguese not just on Goan cooking but possibly on the Bengali tradition of sweets made with cottage cheese (milk was traditionally never “split” in India); details of the parallel culinary Hindu, Muslim and Christian culinary traditions of Kerala; why meat-eating Hindus until recently looked down on eating chicken; and why Parsis never cook prawns at wedding feasts.

Banerji notes the startling continuity of traditions of Indian temple food (a meal at Amritsar’s Golden Temple or Puri’s Jagannath Temple is limited to the same ingredients and tastes much the same as 500 years ago) as also the incongruity of the sight of workers on a construction site eating chowmein for lunch and the sudden popularity of butter chicken in a country where the preferred cooking medium for centuries has been ghee.

But the element that really binds Eating India into a whole larger than the sum of its parts is the intriguing personality and complicated life story of the author, glimpses of which appear at several points in the text. The voice that speaks throughout with such a distinctive tone—cultivated, empathetic, wise, yet sometimes oddly wistful and vulnerable—reveals itself to be that of a woman now based in a country (America) halfway across the world from where she was brought up, unable to abide by religious belief, and without a secure place in the perception of people after a failed marriage to a Muslim. This paradoxical mélange of rootedness in food and itinerancy in life and in thought gives Eating India a totally unforgettable flavour.

An excerpt from Eating India can be found here. And an older post: On the Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing.

New books received, and old boots polished

Just received: some fabulous new books, including Laurence Senelick's new translation of The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, José Saramago's new novel Death At Intervals, the New Poems of Tadeusz Rosewicz, and Ashvaghosha's Handsome Nanda, the latest in the marvellous series of translations of classics by the Clay Sanskrit Library (see the translator Linda Covill's introduction to the book here).

Can't wait to read and write about these, but before that I have a lot of other pieces to put back, including one on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, which after a stuffy first couple of hundred pages has opened out into a set of chapters of miraculous beauty over which I have tarried for the longest time. I am in general skeptical of novels that feed off the historical record for both large and small details, as Leavitt's does to a considerable extent, and open the corridors of their fictions off the known pathways of the facts (which seems to muddy the facts as much as the fiction) but perhaps I shall have to rethink my objections for this particular case.

Also, it is winter and festival time again in Bombay, and so time once again to bring out those boots, now a year older but still in good condition. I will be part of a panel discussion on Banned Books at 8 pm on Friday the 8th of February at the Kala Ghoda Festival. My friends Amit Varma and Jai Arjun Singh will also be on this panel, as will the playwright Manjula Padmanabhan.

Lastly, my review of Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (with Chitrita Banerji's Eating India one of two new Indian works of non-fiction I've enjoyed greatly), appears in the new issue of Pragati.

And two older posts on Clay Sanskrit Library titles: on Dandin's Dasakumaracharita and Kalidasa's Shakuntala.

Three new novels, and some older ones

I don't usually put up my reviews for Mint up on this site, but by a strange coincidence in the last three weeks I've happened to review three first novels (one dating back to 1954) by women writers (if that means anything at all): Kamala Markandaya's Nectar In A Sieve, Shahbano Bilgrami's Without Dreams, and Anjum Hasan's Lunatic In My Head.

One of these I liked very much, another I enjoyed moderately, and the third not at all, so these pieces can be read as a kind of review-trilogy making a set of linked arguments about fiction, and about how difficult it is to produce a genuinely good work of art or create even one memorable character.

And elsewhere, I'm happy to see that Alaa Al Aswany's marvellous novel The Yacoubian Building, which was one of the three novels on my books of the year for 2007, has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (this link leads to a passionately argued essay by Boyd Tonkin which you should read). I still curse myself sometimes for having garbled the sense of the opening line of an otherwise satisfactory short piece on The Yacoubian Building I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph, which points to one of the advantages of a blog, which is that you can smooth out infelicitous thoughts and phrases. The only other novel I read and wrote about among this list of novels in translation was Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring The World, which I thought a modestly charming work with little or no enduring worth.

And some essays I've been reading recently:

Geoff Dyer's meditation on artistic influence in an essay on Rodin and Rilke ("In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography")

James Wood's meditation on fictional characters "A Life of Their Own", which is perhaps an extract from his new book How Fiction Works. This passage is to my mind a little below Wood's usual standard - he is the greatest, and subtlest, close reader of fiction I have ever read (indeed every review-essay he writes could be called "How Fiction Works") - but necessary reading nonetheless.

the literary critic Geoffrey Hartman's long lecture "A Life of Learning" ("A life of learning has little moral weight unless it communicates the life in learning")

and James Surowiecki's essay on Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in the new issue of Bookforum.

Lastly, I greatly enjoyed - indeed, felt energised by - the dash and brio of James Wolcott's prose in "How Bush Stacks Up", a survey of books about the Bush presidency ("It’s difficult to think of any modern inhabitant of the Oval Office who has contemplated his own mortality aloud more often than Bush, or drawn more consolation from its graveyard perspective").

And some of my other long reviews of recently published Indian novels: Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third, Raj Kamal Jha's Fireproof, Vinod George Joseph's Hitchhiker, and Amitava Kumar's Home Products.

The Books Interview: Ramachandra Guha

The publication of Ramachandra Guha’s thrilling history of India from 1947 to the present day India After Gandhi was one of the highlights of Indian literature in 2007. Guha, whose other books include a biography of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, the awardwinning social history of Indian cricket A Corner of a Foreign Field, the marvellous anecdotal history The States of Indian Cricket, a history of the Indian environmental movement (with Madhav Gadgil) and the book of essays An Anthropologist among the Marxists, kindly agreed to answer a host of questions about India After Gandhi and also about the nature of the historian's craft, favourite books and bookshops, Indian newspapers, and food.

Six decades after independence, democracy is now quite deeply rooted in our psyche and in our language: we are at home with democracy, or at least with the rhetoric of democracy. But as you demonstrate, the decision in 1947 to move straight to a system of adult universal suffrage was "the biggest gamble in history". Could you reprise just why this move was so radical?
In the West, the franchise had been granted in stages; first only men of property were allowed to vote; then men of education were added on to the list. The male working class had to struggle long and hard to be deemed worthy of the privilege. Women had to struggle even longer; in a supposedly “advanced” country like Switzerland, women were not permitted to vote until 1971! This is what makes the Indian experiment so radical. So soon after Independence, a poor and largely illiterate citizenry was allowed to freely choose its own leaders. All Indians above the age of 21, regardless of gender or class or education, were granted the franchise. There was, as I show in India after Gandhi, widespread scepticism about this experiment; many Indians, and most foreigners, thought it would never work. But it did.

Although India After Gandhi is 900 pages long, its scope is so vast that you must have left out at least as much as you left in. Did you find that work on this book was an especially demanding instance of that problem which all narrative historians must grapple with: the selection of detail?
I did leave out quite a lot, though certainly not as much as I left in! I cut 40,000 words from my final draft, these mostly original quotes from primary sources. Even so, the book runs, as you say, to 900 pages. My publishers, my agent, my closest friends, had all warned me that a history book about India would not sell if it were more than 500 pages long. In the end, my American and British editors, together, recommended very few cuts–perhaps 5,000 words to add to the 40,000 I had myself deleted. No reader has (yet) complained about the length; although many readers (beginning with my wife) have complained that the book is too bulky to read in bed.
As I explain in the prologue, historians of India have taken 1947 as a lakshman rekha they cannot cross. My real hope for this book is that it will encourage younger historians to write books of their own on the history of independent India, which is without question the most interesting country in the world. Each of my chapters should be a book. Several of my sections could be developed into books. There are themes I have treated only fleetingly (for example, the history of Indian architecture since 1947) that could be made the subject of whole books. And many of the characters who figure in the pages of India after Gandhi­—for instance, Sheikh Abdullah, AZ Phizo, JB Kripalani, and NT Rama Rao—deserve full-length biographies.

The decades immediately before and after Indian independence also seem to have been a golden age of political leadership. Your chapters on this period are among other things a chronicle of the contributions of our own Founding Fathers - Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar and a host of others. None of these men except Nehru had a family background in politics, yet they were all drawn to politics, and as you show they were all in some way above politics. Is this just a historical curiosity? Must a democratic citizenry be reconciled to not expecting greatness in its statesmen?
A I think that it was, alas, a historical curiosity, or more accurately, coincidence. Rarely in any country’s history have so many men and women of intelligence and integrity taken—at more or less the same time—to the political life. We Indians are insufficiently aware of (and certainly insufficiently grateful to) the country’s Founding Fathers and Mothers. We owe them much more than we realize. Now, intelligence and integrity have mostly left the sphere of politics—although they are visibly present in the realms of social work and social activism, entrepreneurship, and in professions such as medicine and the law.

Your book synthesizes an impressive amount of scholarship. Among the concepts you take up, I was struck by W.H. Morris-Jones's idea of the three idioms of Indian politics: the modern, the traditional, and the saintly. Would you like to elaborate on this idea, and perhaps explain it in terms of a contemporary Indian debate?
I suppose Dr Manmohan Singh represents the modern idiom, and someone like Medha Patkar the saintly idiom. However, most important or successful leaders nowadays practice one or other version of identity politics—and thus would qualify as ‘traditional’ in the terms of Morris-Jones. Caste, region, religion—these continue to shape and define how politicians win elections and how they run their administrations.

Would you like to talk a bit about the works of history that have most influenced your understanding of the art and craft of narrative history? I know that the historian Marc Bloch was an early influence on you...
Apart from Bloch, his great Annales School colleague Lucien Febvre was also an early influence, as was the British social historian EP Thompson. I have also learnt a great deal from Indian writers, particularly the sociologists André Béteille and MN Srinivas—the two scholars who, in my view, have written most insightfully on society and politics in modern India.
A historian must read capaciously, and eclectically. He must read writers Indian and foreign, theorists as well as biographers, sociologists and essayists apart from formally trained historians. But in the end he must use the narrative style that works best with the theme that he has chosen and the material that he has gathered. In this sense, no other historian or book can serve as a model or exemplar. If you compare India after Gandhi with some of my other books, you will see that it is more sociological and argumentative than Savaging the Civilized, my biography of Verrier Elwin (which had to follow a person’s life and emotions closely); yet less sociological than A Corner of a Foreign Field, my social history of cricket, whose organizing categories are race, caste, religion, and nation.

Your research for India After Gandhi must have thrown in your path many texts about Indian history, politics and culture that are now little read. Would you like to talk about some that can still be read for pleasure and profit?
I don’t know about ‘pleasure’, since very few Indian historians write with any sense of style. An exception must however be made for Sarvepalli Gopal, whose lives of Nehru and Radhakrishnan can indeed ‘still be read for pleasure and profit’. Among the other books that I found particularly valuable in terms of the depth of their research, or the spotlight they threw on important issues, were Prafulla Chakravarti’s Marginal Men (a study of Bengali refugees in Calcutta), and Sisir K. Gupta’s meticulous study of the first decade of the Kashmir dispute.

Must a historian read the newspapers closely? What newspapers do you read? And would you like to provide an account of your changing relationship to the newspaper over the course of your life?
A historian must certainly read, and closely, the newspapers of the period or region he is writing about. For both India after Gandhi and A Corner of a Foreign Field I spend many enjoyable hours looking at microfilms of old newspapers and magazines. The riches of India’s periodical press are an under-utilized resource, since many historians still tend to restrict themselves to official records.
The newspapers of the present day are another matter. Growing up, my favourite newspaper was The Statesman, which combined elegant English with a sturdily independent editorial stance. It was destroyed by a megalomaniac named CR Irani. Back in the 1970s, the Times of India was also a real newspaper; now, as we well know, it is a fashion supplement. If the TOI is too frivolous, then The Hindu is perhaps too solemn. Now, in 2008, my favourite Indian newspaper is The Telegraph of Kolkata, and I often also find things of interest in the Hindustan Times. On the whole, though, I feel that the quality of the English-language press in India has declined over the years. There is too little grassroots reporting; too much celebrity journalism. Editors and columnists are too closely allied to particular politicians or political parties.

In 2007 there was a boom in the publication of books on India both at home and in the west. Are there any books amongst these, whether for a scholarly or a lay audience, that have caught your eye?
The two books on India that I most enjoyed in 2007 were both on that most elevated of art forms, Indian classical music. I was very struck by a remark once made by Amitav Ghosh, to the effect that our classical musicians are the only Indians who strive for excellence and achieve it. Their art is richer and more subtle, and calls for far great discipline, than the game of cricket; and it brings the artist in touch with the Divine.
I mention cricket because it is a game we both love to distraction, and both of us write about. But give me M. S. Subbulakshmi over Sachin Tendulkar any day. Sadly, our shastriya sangeet has not really been written about (at least in English) with insight and imagination; there are no musical equivalents of Sujit Mukherjee or Mukul Kesavan. Or not until last year, when Kumar Mukherji published (posthumously) The Lost World of Hindustani Music, a wideranging anecdotal history of many musicians and many gharanas; and Namita Devidayal published The Music Room, her evocative memoir of singers from a single gharana.

Which is your favourite bookshop in the world?
I have many favourite bookshops: John Sandoe in London, the Strand in New York, Clarke’s in Cape Town, and the New and Secondhand Bookshop in Mumbai. But the one I love most is Premier Bookshop, off Church Street in Bangalore. Its owner, T. S. Shanbagh, is a man of much charm combined with a sly humour. His books are arranged in a most eccentric fashion, but he knows where each one is, and knows too which new arrival is likely to interest an old customer. I have written a tribute to Premier in an anthology of writings on Bangalore edited by Aditi De, which Penguin will publish later this year.

Let us say you were hosting a dinner party and had the liberty of inviting half a dozen personages from the entire sweep of Indian history. Who do you think you would want at your table and why? And what then might you talk about?
That is a tough one! To make matters easier, let me restrict myself to the recent past. I guess I must have the four modern Indians I admire above all others—Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru. Then the great (or at least brilliant) Indian whose politics and personality is somewhat at odds with this quartet—namely, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. That will surely get the sparks flying. Finaly, the socialist-turned-social worker Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, not to fill in the gender quota, but because of the range of her experience and the independence of her mind, not to speak of her penchant for puncturing pomposity wherever it was to be found.
The conversation? Perhaps I might begin by asking Gandhi his opinion of his fellow Gujarati, Narendra Modi. Ambedkar might then offer his views on Mayawati, Nehru his views on Rahul Gandhi, Tagore his views on Amartya Sen (whom he named). I think we can trust them to take it from there!

These interviews always end with a question about food. As you have travelled widely around the country, and lived for considerable periods of time in the south, the north, and the east, you must have left your footprints on thousands of eating-houses. What is your favourite memory of a meal?
The older I get, the more I relish Indian vegetarian food. Gujarati cuisine is a favourite, of course, but so is Bengali vegetarian food (I grew up in Dehradun in close proximity to a home in which lived a Bengali widow, for whose delectation—since she had little else to look forward to—this cuisine was first fashioned). But my most memorable meal was had in the Admaru Mutt, adjoining the famous Krishna temple in Udupi. I had been at a conference in the neighbouring town of Manipal, whose presiding deity was the Kannada writer UR Anantha Murty. On the last day of the conference we were taken to the Mutt for lunch by Anantha Murty. The Madhava Brahmins love their food, and this particular meal consisted of forty-two separate items, each listed on a printed card. Udupi is on the crest of the Western Ghats, so to add to the various varieties of cultivated cereals, legumes, and vegetables came a whole array of items picked from the forest—among them wild mango, jackfruit curry, and bamboo shoot pickle.
The meal was made more memorable by the company. We ate sitting cross-legged on the floor. On my left was the Sikh sociologist J PS Uberoi, on my right the Christian anarchist Claude Alvares—both accustomed by culture and upbringing to deprecate vegetarian food as simply ‘ghaas’. Opposite me was the veteran Gandhian Dharampal—not allowed by his upbringing to eat meat, but not allowed either to be exposed to such subtle varieties of taste and essence. As we ate, Anantha Murty walked up and down, explaining the origins and significance of each of those forty-two dishes.
When I was young, I used to say, at the conclusion of every concert by Mallikarjun Mansur that I was privileged to attend: ‘Please, God, allow me to hear this man once more in the flesh before he dies’. Now, from time to time I ask the fellow above that I may be allowed one more meal at the Admaru Mutt before I die.

And some previous books interviews: Altaf Tyrewala, Samrat Upadhyay and Christopher Kremmer.

Bauerlein on the New Critics, and Hughes on Dickens

In an essay flagging the upcoming publication of a new anthology, Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, the literary critic Mark Bauerlein argues that the now unfashionable New Critics - most famously William Empson with his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), but also IA Richards, Cleanth Brooks and RP Blackmur - were "the first humanists to make theory into a recognized disciplinary activity". I've always learnt something from Bauerlein's work - his book Literary Criticism: An Autopsy was of great help during my years as an undergraduate struggling to figure out what to make of the turn of literary studies towards "theory" - and I totally endorse his argument, directed at professors of English on the one hand and at commercial publishers zealously hanging on to copyright on the other, that:

professors owe respect to the past of their own fields. It is up to them to safeguard intellectual history, to keep the pressures of money and fashion at bay. The actions of a commercial press here demonstrate that if professors take their field's past for granted, or if they regard that past as an inferior practice, it will fade and disappear. They should realize that, for all the adversarial postures toward the market and bourgeois values, their "presentism" (or "post-1966ism") combines all too smoothly with the bottom line of the corporations who own their forebears.

Alongside Bauerlein's "What We Owe The New Critics" you might also want to read his essay "Theory's Empre", Andrew Delbanco's classic NYRB essay "The Decline and Fall of Literature", and Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer's acerbic survey from 1995 "Farewell to the MLA". I regret that I have not yet been able to read Delbanco's widely praised biography of Herman Melville.

And in a marvellous essay in the Guardian on Charles Dickens's Christmas stories, Kathryn Hughes writes about how Dickens often used Christmas "as a time to wake up the dozing conscience of the prosperous urban middle classes" and notes of his most famous Christmas story that:

What makes A Christmas Carol so important is that it marks the first time that anyone tried to imagine what a modern, urban Christmas might look like. Here you will find no lingering nostalgia for the Baron's Hall with its extended kith network and 12 days of feudal feasting. Instead, this is a pared-down Christmas, a single day's holiday enjoyed by small nuclear families with no historical or social links to anything beyond themselves. We never hear about Bob Cratchit's mother or sister, and even Scrooge's nephew's house party consists only of close family. When the memory of a joyful Christmas past is held out to Scrooge in the form of Fezziwig's Ball, which he attended as a young man, it is an after-work party held in a merchant's warehouse rather than a scene of feudal feasting. So Dickens demonstrates triumphantly that a meaningful Christmas is possible even in the most contemporary and urban of settings.

What I like best about Dickens is his immense verbal energy and riotous metaphorical imagination - think of Lady Tippins in Our Mutual Friend, with "an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon" - and this facet of his work is taken up in another lovely essay from some years ago by Joseph Bottum, who himself sounds like a character out of Dickens.

And some other things I've been reading over the week gone by: Andrew Sullivan's long essay in the Atlantic Monthly on the Obama campaign, "Goodbye to All That", and Jeremy Waldron's close inspection of the idea of free speech, a big theme in our national conversation and especially on the blogosphere, in his essay "Boutique Faith", arguing among other things that "the costs of hate speech, such as they are, are not spread evenly across the community that is supposed to tolerate them".