On a new book of essays on Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Diaspora

It may seem outrageous to allege that a book of interviews with and essays about Salman Rushdie doesn’t have much Rushdie in it, but this is precisely the complaint to be made of Midnight’s Diaspora. This set of responses to Rushdie by a group of political scientists, anthropologists, and literary critics – all career academics except for one, Shashi Tharoor – goes about its business, for most part, in a language far too clotted and abstract to give any enjoyment to the lay reader. But even on its own terms, the scholarship on display in this book barely passes muster because it is either too narrow, tendentious, reductive, or peculiarly self-absorbed.

Midnight’s Diaspora begins with the transcripts of two plodding interviews with Rushdie held at an event in his honour at the University of Michigan in 2003. The subject of the first, conducted by the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, is “The Political Rushdie”; that of the second, pursued by the literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan, is “The Literary Rushdie”. One might ask: why this division of labour? The writer is, after all, one being, both literary and political at the same time. The answer might be that both interviewers are playing to their respective strengths, the better to illuminate the literary and political facets of Rushdie’s oeuvre. But this is to presume that a person with a political background is incapable of a stimulating conversation on a general subject with Rushdie. All that this Rushdie-sharing seems to do is betray the anxiety of academics about certificates of authority and specialization. Despite this allotment of territory, the questions are mostly superficial, revealing a mental universe as cramped as Rushdie’s is capacious. Viswanathan declares in advance that hers “will be the great rambling interview – very much like the great rambling Indian novel” – a peculiarly grandiose remark that inspires more dread than excitement.

Varshney, in turn, asserts that Rushdie’s work is highly political: “He seems to be singularly incapable of telling a story without political sharpness, without political courage.” It follows, then, that we should not “entirely abandon Salman Rushdie to the literary scholars and critics.” There can be no disagreeing with this notion, but the limitations of Varshney’s perspective immediately become apparent when, in the first sentence of his essay about Rushdie’s novel Shame, he calls that book “a political commentary on Pakistan scripted as a novel.” Isn’t it strange that a book that is first and foremost a novel should be called a political commentary that is "scripted" – whatever this ugly word means – as a novel? And shouldn’t we be suspicious when it is a political scientist making this peculiar claim? Might not a historian similarly presume that Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence is a commentary on history written as a novel? Scores of readers – or should we say non-readers – of Rushdie made a similar mistake over 1988-89 when they decided that The Satanic Verses was actually a blasphemous attack on the Prophet scripted as a novel.

The simple truth is that the novel is a flexible prose instrument that encodes through storytelling, at different levels and even there on multiple registers, ideas not just about character and causality but also history, politics, religion, ideology, class and gender relations. To force it into the narrower corridor of one’s preset categories is to un-novelize it. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of his expertise, Varshney’s engagement with Rushdie and Shame lasts for only a page. The rest of his essay is about the problems inherent in the political self-conception of Pakistan. It is a very good essay, and there is much to be learnt from it about Pakistan. But Rushdie himself is almost entirely absent from it.

Indeed, it seemed to me a fault of the entire anthology that there is very little serious textual engagement in it: Rushdie is at times more springboard than subject. And even on his own ground, because he is so sure that Rushdie is at heart a political animal, it does not occur to Varshney to ask the question that Jack Livings does in his excellent Paris Review interview of 2005, “Could you possibly write an apolitical book?”, to which Rushdie gives a very interesting answer. Livings’s interview is part of the series called “The Art of Fiction” and – surprising though this may seem – this is indeed the proper category through which to explore the work of a writer of fiction. Consider, for instance, the illumination of novelistic practice, and how it offers a complex view of a society through its own, specific ways of working, offered by Rushdie in this answer to Livings:

I read less contemporary fiction than I used to and more of the classics. It seems they've hung around for a reason. When I wrote Fury, for instance, I read Balzac, in particular Eugénie Grandet. If you look at the opening of Eugénie Grandet, it uses a technique like a slow cinematic zoom. It starts with a very wide focus—here is this town, these are its buildings, this is its economic situation—and gradually it focuses in on this neighborhood, and inside the neighborhood on this rather grand house, and inside this house a room, and inside this room, a woman sitting on a chair. By the time you find out her name, she's already imprisoned in her class and her social situation and her community and her city. By the time her own story begins to unfold, you realize it's going to smash into all these things. She is like a bird in this cage. I thought, That's good. That's such a clear way of doing it.

Elsewhere in Midnight’s Diaspora, there is a ponderous defence offered by Akeel Bilgrami of Rushdie’s critique of Islam in The Satanic Verses. The paraphrase of Bilgrami’s idea – that we should defend Rushdie not merely on free-speech principles, but on the larger case that the novel is actually the ally of moderate Muslims against fundamentalist conceptions of their religion – is more interesting than its laboured and digressive execution. Thomas Blom Hansen’s subject – the changing picture of Bombay in Rushdie’s novels – seems promising to begin with. But even Hansen’s exploration quickly slides away into the area of his own research, which is violence and Hindu nationalism as embodied by the Shiv Sena, and then further to even more arcane matters. Hansen’s long, obtuse digression about “Alexander Kojeve’s reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic” and how this applies to the Sena seemed to me one of the low points of the book, puzzling on its own terms and therefore twice-removed from the subject of Rushdie.

The suspicion that this book may be no more than a group exercise in self-advertisement under the bright and attention-attracting flag of the Republic of Rushdie is confirmed by Shashi Tharoor’s concluding essay on Rushdie and Indianness. Tharoor is a more stylish writer than the others in this book, but his prose almost always conveys the impression of someone standing in front of a mirror. He allows himself precisely one good, insightful paragraph about Rushdie before he wanders off into a consideration of the main emphasis of Rushdie’s work. What is that emphasis? “[A]s I have written in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium,” declares Tharoor, “the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural.” The suggestion is that Rushdie and Tharoor have been working on parallel lines all their lives, celebrating India’s teeming pluralism and excoriating its chauvinists of all stripes. “My India, like Salman Rushdie’s, has room enough for everyone,” declares Tharoor fatuously. The incredible thing is that readers should be expected to pay good money to discover this congruence.

These “encounters” with Rushdie appear, in sum, about as genuine as those of Mumbai’s cops with gangsters. Although the book concludes with a short afterword by Rushdie himself in which he expresses his gratitude for “the intensive, close, spirited readings offered in this collection”, my guess is that perhaps he is being more polite than truthful, especially from sentences in the same piece like: “As time passes, however, I admit to having more and more difficulty with this whole business of being Explained, rather than merely – happily – read.”If you have Rs.399 to spare, spend it instead on Rushdie’s exuberant early-career collection of essays Imaginary Homelands, which will tell you far more about his work than this puzzling book does.

Some links: an old post, "On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan", a book that, thrillingly if inadvertently, seems to claim for its author the same status that Saleem Sinai does for India in Midnight's Children. And here is an essay by Amitava Kumar that seems to be a stronger assessment, both personal and detached in the appropriate measure, of Rushdie than any in Midnight's Diaspora: "Is Salman Rushdie God?". A set of essays on different aspects of Rushdie's work in a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature can be found here.

A shorter version of this essay appeared today in Mint.

The Frank O'Connor Short Story prize, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay's letter to his second wife, and Kafka

I'm pleased to see that Jahnavi Barua's short-story collection Next Door, about which I'd posted a long essay here in February, has been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

And recently, while reading Sunil Kumar Chattopadhyay's short monograph on Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay (at Rs.15, this must be the cheapest serious book on literature I have ever read), I found the writer quoting a letter from Bibhutibhushan that I thought I'd re-quote here.

Bibhutibhushan was married early, and lost his wife to pneumonia when he was just twenty-four. More than two decades later, when he was forty-six, he married a second time. It was not an arranged marriage; Bibhutibhushan knew the girl, Kalyani, fairly well, and approached her family for their consent. The year is 1940; in a letter to his wife shortly before the wedding, Bibhutibhushan – the author of Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Aranyak, and by now one of the biggest names in Bengali literature – writes, with a beguiling combination of tenderness, yearning, candour, and vulnerability (this is Ashok Dev Choudhuri's translation from the Bengali):

I feel so surprised when I look back on the days of my acquaintance with you. Perhaps I knew you in many past lives – otherwise, why should I feel like it! Kalyani, I knew you for for ages, but this time I meet you rather late. I wish I met you earlier! [...] You want to share your life with me, but I know you could have been married to a much more desirable groom. Since you have chosen me, I must also respect your love for me. I did not really want to be tied down to family life again, but your love is all that is important to me now. I desire that your love and affection should find their full satisfaction. That you'd be happy in your life. You need not respect me like a deity, I want only your love. We humans have so many foibles and weaknesses, we cannot be revered like a god. Of course, love is a different thing. You love someone not in spite of one's defects, but possibly because of them. It is said 'Love is God'. In our hearts there is the altar of God and there is also the sense of friendship, forgiveness, compassion and affection. You may rest assured that I shall always love you. I cannot be hard with you. I have rarely been cruel to anybody. It is my love which will develop your qualities. Kalyani, I knew you are not a Cleopatra or Noor Jahan. But then, how long does physical beauty last? I have seen the beauty of your soul; otherwise, why should I be attracted by you? ... You'd please learn a few songs. In my maternal uncle's place and at other places they'd want to listen to your song. Learn it along with the harmonium. You should know the words of the songs so that you don't depend on others. This is very urgent. Will you remember it?

Which woman would not learn "a few songs" when entreated like this? And I've just finished reading a book that is also a letter, but in its darkness, dread, and pathos its tone is the polar opposite of Bandhopadhyay's: Franz Kafka's letter at the age of thirty-six to his father, Dearest Father. Between them, the letters bring out, I suppose, how family and relationships can stand for both expansion and diminution, freedom and fetters.

And from 2005, "The world of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay".

An excerpt from Arzee the Dwarf in Mint today

A 1500-word excerpt from my novel Arzee the Dwarf appears today in Mint (if you live in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, or Chandigarh, you can buy the paper off your news-stand). The link to it is here, and the cover, designed by Pinaki De, is right before you. The book should be in shops early in June.

Meanwhile, while Arzee is roasting in the Bombay heat, I am having a marvellous time travelling in the north-east, journeying under overcast skies through hill and river country; eating large quantities of fish in mustard, chicken in sesame-seed gravy, duck-egg omelettes, and lychees; and occasionally putting up posts from little cybercafes like this one.

MG Vassanji on the road in India

The novels of MG Vassanji – born in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, to Gujarati immigrants in the middle of the twentieth century, just before the wave of African decolonization, and then from mid-life onwards a resident of Canada – are an embodiment of the winding path of history, of migrations that yield both gains and losses. Vassanji’s work often tracks those communities, or practices, made marginal or invisible by the march of time (as in his majestic novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, set among the Indians trapped between the political binaries of black and white in British-ruled Kenya), or individuals seeking to excavate their history and traditions in order to understand themselves better.

With his previous book, The Assassin’s Song, Vassanji chose an Indian setting for the first time, giving us the story of the keeper of a Sufi shrine in the wake of the Gujarat violence of 2002. Now A Place Within, Vassanji’s memoir of his travels within India over the last two decades, considerably extends and deepens his engagement with the country of his ancestors. One could say that Vassanji has taken the usual questions that inform his novelistic practice, and turned them upon himself to ask: Where do I come from? What meaning does the past of my community hold for me in an increasingly rootless world, and what are my own responsibilities towards that past? This question also has a political valency because historically Vassanji’s people, the Ismaili Khoja community of Gujarat, were practitioners of an “odd, syncretistic faith,” combining elements of Hinduism and Islam. Vassanji’s meditation on questions of identity and Indianness through the linked channels of history, travel, and self makes for a strikingly alert and controlled narrative.

The highlight of A Place Within is a long section on Delhi – really the many Delhis of history founded by a series of dynasties, each one replacing but not quite erasing the other. Some of Vassanji’s legwork will come as a surprise to even those who have lived in that city, like myself, and thought they know it quite well. Vassanji shows how, for the longest time, Delhi was a city moving ever northward, from the Qutb Minar of Qutbuddin Aibak to the Lal Qila and Jama Masjid of Aurangzeb, till after Independence and the inflow of Partition refugees the process was reversed and it has begun to expand southwards again, “towards the oldest Delhis and beyond.”

Whether quoting from the imperial historians Amir Khusrau, Alberuni, and Zia Barni, journeying to distant, unpromising Tughlakabad, or ferreting for Mirza Ghalib’s house in Old Delhi, Vassanji is consistently interesting. Some of his thinking about the role of place in human experience is aimed towards the foreignness of what we easily assume to be familiar. “It is always instructive,” he writes, “to remind oneself of the obvious fact: The boundaries and names of many places are only recent in origin and often hide richer, more complex truths than one might imagine; the past then becomes inconvenient and slippery, far less easy to generalise.” This idea of burrowing beneath the surface of the world’s present face, along with a related desire for the redrawing or rediscovery of the self, might be of thought of as the fundamental impulses of travel writing, and both are present in Vassanji’s work. “I have always felt a sense of wonderful elation while travelling in India,” he writes. “It has helped that I remain, and indeed feel, communally anonymous and ambiguous, identifiable only by that cipher of my very Gujarati last name.” Elsewhere he writes, “It’s only oneself one ever discovers.”

Especially noteworthy is Vassanji’s refusal to shirk the difficult questions of history: the fact that the Indian past is not just one of a fabled tolerance that might serve as a beacon for present-day discontents and that is codified in the idealism of our Constitution, but also of considerable hatred and violence. “No one who reads accounts of the early Muslim historians of India would fail to feel uneasy at the bigotry and the arrogance they reveal among the ruling classes and in the behaviour of the sultans,” he writes. “They remind us, let’s be honest, of Muslim fanatics of today. [...] Surely we must acknowledge this past, which casts a shadow upon our lives even today, when a politican can invoke it to create discord and mayhem in the nation. Surely we must ask if we can turn away from those aspects of it that disturb us while allowing others to move us. We must come to terms with it.” On the subject of the riots following the destruction of the Babri Masjid that broke out in India while he was visiting, he writes, “I could not accept India’s embrace and turn away from the violence. It must in some way be a part of me.”

While Delhi is a city that celebrates its great history, Vassanji finds no such consciousness in Ahmedabad, a city older than present-day Old Delhi, but one that seems “uneasy with time and history.” Vassanji’s search in Gujarat for the shrines and settlements of his ancestors, the Khojas, and for the icons and religious songs (or ginans) taught to him in the small Khoja redoubt of his African childhood, yields a section as moving and as beautiful as any of the great narratives of spiritual seeking in our literature. This even though the author acknowledges that he is “a rationalized being who is acquainted with spiritual longing but cannot yield to it”, cannot cajole and implore and supplicate before God as so many do. “At any dargah, a shrine of this kind,” writes, “and even at a temple before a priest, I cannot but help but allow in me a solemn feeling, some respect and humility, for I stand alongside others in a symbolic place that it some manner reflects human existence and frailty, or smallness and exaltedness, and our striving for understanding.”

Roving beyond the usual roll-call of tourist destinations, Vassanji discovers at many religious sites, even in communally sensitive Gujarat, “a certain laissez faire in matters of the spirit” that seems to be on the retreat. If he resists the labels “Hindu” and “Muslim”, he writes, it is not because they don’t have an element of truth, but rather because they are “too exacting, too excluding”, and they mask the extent to which the past is a foreign country. But how can one avoid these terms when they are such an essential part of our conceptual vocabulary? Vassanji chooses to remain a dissenter, and explains the various implications of his position:

I have already said that I find the labels “Hindu” and “Muslim” discomforting, because they are so exclusive. [...] I refuse to use them this way, perhaps naively and definitely against a tide; but I am not alone. I use the distinction of “Hindu” and “Muslim” only in context, and especially when it has been used by people for themselves or others, as in the Gujarat violence.

So deep is the suspicion when one talks of conflict, that one has to state over and over that to describe the murder of a Muslim here is not to deny, let alone justify, the murder of a Hindu elsewhere, that a fanatic group does not represent an entire people, and there is no entire people, Hindu or Muslim anyway. Attempts to create them, of course, have always been there.

At the same time, Vassanji casts an astringent eye on both the excesses of Hindu chauvinism and the tendency of Indian Muslims – in Vassanji’s view one is that is disabling as much as enabling – to adopt “a primary identity defined by faith, in a unity (the ‘umma’) that transcends political, cultural, and ethnic boundaries.”

Narrated in the distinctive cadences of a novelist in possession of a secure and cogent style, and animated by a love of both language and place and a powerful appetite for the mystery and fugacity of the past, this book about coming home to India cannot but make a richer person of every Indian reader.

Here are some other essays on books on India: Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Harsh Mander's book on the Gujarat violence of 2002 and its aftermath, Fear and Forgiveness; and Ashis Nandy's Talking India. And here are two long interviews with Ramachandra Guha and Christopher Kremmer.

Some things I've been reading: Cheshire, Butalia, Kakar, Dharwadker, and Malik

Some things I've been reading recently:

"How To Read Kiarostami", a long essay by one of my favourite film critics, Godfrey Cheshire, on one of my favourite film-makers, Abbas Kiarostami. Read, for instance, this long interview with Kiarostami by Shahin Parhami ("I envy people who read novels since they have much more freedom to use their imagination than a film audience...Cinema should be able to provide this kind of a freedom both for artist and the audience.") A long interview with Cheshire is here, and here are Parts 1 and 2 of his enormously interesting and influential essay from 1999, "The Death of Film/ The Decay of Cinema". And here is Kiarostami's essay "An Unfinished Cinema", which saw for the first time, strangely enough, on the wall of the lobby of Sheila Cinema in Paharganj in New Delhi in the year 2000, during a screening of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us as part of the Delhi Film Festival.

"New Horizons, New Challenges", a recent survey of the depth and breadth of contemporary Indian publishing by Urvashi Butalia ("Estimates about the number of books published [in India] annually vary, but a figure of 70,000 to 80,000 titles is generally agreed upon. The number of active publishers is usually fixed at between 16,000 to 17,000, and these figures encompass the largest companies — who may do as many as 300-400 titles a year — and the smallest, one person operations — who may produce only two or three titles a year.")

"Five Best Books About India", a short survey by the writer Sudhir Kakar. Kakar names books by Calasso, Newby, Nirad Chaudhuri, Naipaul, and Ramanujan; send in your own list as a comment if you so feel like.

"Fiction at Play: The Truth about Haja Gul Baba Bektashi", an essay by the literary scholar Vinay Dharwadker on Qurratulain Hyder's very unusual short story "The Sermons of Haja Gul Baba Bektashi". The story, Dharwadker argues, "lifts the subcontinent's spiritual and psychic history of the past six centuries out of its linear Western-colonialist time frame and renarrates it in fluid, cyclical time." A large set of essays paying tribute to Hyder, who passed away in 2007, can be found here, and an interview with Hyder by Shoma Chaudhury from 1999 is here.

If you have access to the Sahitya Akademi's bi-monthly journal, Indian Literature, I also recommend that you track down Dharwadker's excellent essay "Translating the Millennium: Indian Literature in the Global Market", from the July-August 2008 issue. Among the ideas defended in it are, "The proper unit of translation is not the word but the phrase" and "Only a poem can translate a poem" (there is more to this notion than there first appears). Here is a paragraph from it:

To a great extent, diction and style can be analysed and translated as surface features of language and textuality. In contrast, 'voice' and 'tone' seem to be encoded inside a text, and hence are aspects of its 'inner form'. Voice and tone are both characteristic of a writer and are vital to the meaning and impact of a specific work: they should be 'heard' clearly when a translation combines the best phrases in the best order to represent its effects. Tagore's English translations of his poetry, fiction and drama fail because they are atonal; his English was not supple enough to capture the nuances of his own voice or the voices of his characters, which are vivid in the original Bengali. Without fine modulations of diction, style, voice, and tone, it is impossible to render a poem, a novel, or a play in one language as an artefact of comparable aesthetic or imaginative value in another medium....It is a major literary achievement in itself when a translator invents an entire style in English that parallels an author's signature style in the original. In all honesty, we have to admit that we still have not done for our major writers what Gregory Rabassa, for example, has accomplished for Garcia Marquez, or Maureen Freely has created for Orhan Pamuk.

Rabassa's recounts his experience of translating Marquez and Julio Cortazar in "Translation and Its Discontents", an excerpt from his book about translation If This Be Treason, here. ("As the first part of Hopscotch and some of the “Expendable Chapters” take place in Paris, quite a bit of French is woven into the narration. This could have been translated, but I left it as it was. Had Julio wanted these spots in English he would have translated them into Spanish in the first place. I also saw no reason to dumb the book down for readers of English and insult them in that way. I also left the Spanish intact sometimes for other reasons. Like any song, tangos are better left in the original or great and sometimes hilarious damage is done.")

Lastly, here is an essay, "Mistaken Identity", on changing attitudes towards issues of individual and group identity by the British writer Kenan Malik,whose work I always read with care ("Historically, anti-racists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and imprisonment of people within their cultural identities.") Malik is also the author of the recent book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy, and some the arguments made in that book – that Rushdie's opponents may have lost the battle, but they have won the larger war against free speech – are presented here in "Shadow of the Fatwa" ("Critics of Rushdie no more spoke for the Muslim community than Rushdie himself did. Both represented different strands of opinion within Muslim communities. Rushdie's critics spoke for some of the most conservative strands. The campaign against The Satanic Verses was not to protect the Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from anti-Muslim bigots, but to protect their own privileged position within those communities from political attack from radical critics, to assert their right to be the true voice of Islam by denying legitimacy to such critics. They succeeded at least in part, because secular liberals embraced them as the authentic voice of the Muslim community.")

That should be at least eight hours of reading!

On Jonathan Bate's biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age

In a brief but dazzling short story about the life of Shakespeare called “Everything and Nothing”, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges portrays Shakespeare as a man without a personality. “There was no one in him,” writes Borges, and this explains why Shakespeare could put himself in the shoes of hundreds of myriad-minded characters, imagine them all from within. Thus the paradox: Shakespeare was not fully a man, and yet “nobody was ever as many men as that man.” At some point, "before or after dying", Shakespeare finds himself before God and makes the demand for a stable, discrete personality, for a “myself”. God’s reply comes: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons – and none.”

In his new biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate attempts to take the measure of how a man of such unpromising circumstances – the son of a small businessman, brought up in an insignificant market-town, educated in an ordinary school – managed to expand his mind, his language, and his imaginative and worldly power to become, as the book’s title asserts, the soul of the age. Or, to adapt Borges, how did a man who should have been nothing end up encompassing everything?

Bate has worked on two previous books that involve Shakespeare: he is the author of The Genius of Shakespeare (1998) , and the co-editor of The RSC Shakespeare (2007), a new edition of the complete works. As would befit such a writer, Soul of the Age is itself founded upon a Shakespearean structure. Bate organises his material around the concept of the “seven ages of man” – infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice (or householder), and then two levels of old age, the latter being “a second childishness” – so vividly described by the character Jacques in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. Making fertile connections between Shakespeare’s plays, what is known of his life, and the beliefs and practices of his times, Bate comes as close to achieving a sense of Shakespeare’s felt presence as any other biographer ever has.

Since he left so few traces of himself, and since so much other evidence has been lost or destroyed, Shakespearean biography has never been a matter of simply collecting and interpreting the sources. Yet there are dozens of other extensive documents left behind by Shakespeare: the plays and poems themselves. Bate quotes approvingly the critic Barbara Everett, who argues, in an essay called "Reade him, therefore" published in the TLS in 2007, that “if [Shakespeare’s] biography is to be found it has to be here, in the plays and poems, but never literally and never provably.” Much of what Bate posits is a result of interpretation, correlation, juxtaposition. But if his method is speculatory, the result is a very rich, educated, and revelatory speculation.

For instance, is it not significant that in Shakespeare’s earlier works, doctors are usually comic figures, but after the marriage of his daughter, Susanna, to a widely respected doctor called John Hall, the doctors in the plays become “dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men”? If this is one direction taken by Bate in his exploration of medicine in the world of Shakespeare’s plays, then in another sally he takes note of the wealth of plants, herbs, and flowers named in the plays, demonstrating Shakespeare’s deep engagement, as someone who grew up in the country and had a "field education", with “the herbal economy of rural England”.

This then leads Bate into a meditation on how, although Shakespeare is always identified with the London stage, he always had one foot in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. He always lived in rented lodgings in London, and many of his plays shuttle, just as he himself did, between the worlds of city and country. When the London theatres were closed for periods of a year or more because of the plague ("Plague," Bate reminds us, "was the single most powerful force shaping [Shakespeare's] life and those of his contemporaries"), Shakespeare returned home. "It is unlikely to be a coincidence," remarks Bate, "that Shakespeare turned to pastoral romance in the plague years around 1607-10: of all of his plays, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are the ones to have the most distinctive air of having been written back home in Stratford." Bate dwells on some of the specific descriptions of flowers or plants in Shakespeare, such the mole on Innogen's breast in Cymbeline, "cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops/ I'th'bottom of a cowslip", and asks, "Is there any other English poet, save John Clare, who has such an eye as this?"

Imagine such an approach being replicated with respect to Shakespearean politics and statecraft, Shakespearean language (such as the relationship between Latin, the "high" language of schooling, and English, which was not the self-confident world language that it is now), Shakespearean cosmology, and Shakespeare’s use of both ancient and recent history, and you have some notion of the wealth of ideas and associations in Bate’s book. Bate's discussion of love in Shakespeare, particularly as it is explored through the sonnets, is one of the best I have ever read, and his brilliant analysis of how King Lear enacts a critique of conventional rationalistic philosophy on the subject of suffering and asserts instead, via Shakespeare's reading of Erasmus and Montaigne, the value of the path of "love and folly" in human affairs kept me thinking for several days.

Nor is Bate an unredeemed bardolater. In fact, in one of the best and most surprising moments of The Genius of Shakespeare, he argues that the profusion, range, linguistic depth, and artistic worth of Shakespeare's work were matched in his own lifetime by a contemporary, born two years before him in 1562: the great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. Lope wrote hundreds of plays and sonnets, and was, like Shakespeare, "wily in his aspectuality". Like Shakespeare, Lope's characteristic form "was a mingle of tragedy and comedy, high and low, the poetic voice accordingly shifting from elegance to coarseness." Perhaps, Bate suggests, it was the politics of empire and of language that played a role in Shakespeare's preeminence:

[Lope] answered to every element of my prescription of a world-genius in literature. But Spain went into decline and Lope was not translated. The whole of Shakespeare has been translated into scores of languages; less than ten per cent of Lope's surviving plays has ever been translated into English.
Twentieth-century physics has made the idea of the co-existence of "alternative universes" easier to comprehend. Picture an alternative world in which Spain triumphed over England. Lope then would have triumphed over Shakespeare and I would be writing a book called The Genius of Vega. What do we learn from our picture? That the apotheosis of Shakespeare was and was not a matter of historical contingency. It was a contingency insofar as it happened to be Shakespeare, not Lope. But it was a necessity because the chosen one had to be a particular kind of genius and could therefore only have been Lope or Shakespeare.

Among the aspects of Shakespeare’s nature that emerge most clearly from Bate’s book is his prudent business sense. Making a survey of the dramatists who were Shakespeare’s competitors – Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, Nashe, Dekker – Bate shows that many of them died young, or in penury. In contrast, Shakespeare not only lived frugally, he was also the first playwright of his time to become a joint-stockholder in a theatre company, thereby ensuring his financial stability through a share of gate receipts, and his indispensability as the company’s in-house dramatist. Even though he never bought a house in London, he acquired and consolidated a massive property back home in Stratford, as if wishing, after his years of physical and mental roving, to retire as a big fish in a small pond. It is these homely details, as much as the evidence of his subject’s genius, that make us warm to Bate’s book, and leave us feeling on such intimate terms with Shakespeare that we too can address him, as God does in Borges’s story, as “my Shakespeare.”

A list prepared by Bate of more than a hundred of the best books on Shakespeare is here. Of these, the two I would most like to read are recent ones with very similar titles but different approaches: AD Nuttall's Shakespeare The Thinker and Phillip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking. And one excellent book Bate doesn't mention, but which I enjoyed enormously, is Allan Bloom's set of resplendent readings of individual plays called Shakespeare on Love and Friendship. Here is an essay by Bate about the authorship controversy associated with Shakespeare: "Scenes from the Birth of a Myth and the Death of a Dramatist", and another recent piece on one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, "The mad worlds of Thomas Middleton", which you should read closely if you are interested in issues of textual scholarship. Among the books mentioned in this essay is "Gordon Williams’s magnificent three-volume compendium of filth, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature", which currently retails on Amazon at just over $500). And Bate offers a short tour of the room in which he works here, as part of the Guardian series on writers' rooms.

And here are two old posts: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare" (which also has links to about a dozen excellent essays on Shakespeare), and "Memories of Borges and the old Twentieth Century bookshop". A review of another recent major literary biography, Patrick French's book on VS Naipaul, is here.

On Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist

At one point in Surender Mohan Pathak’s The 65 Lakh Heist, the pleasure-loving Labh Singh (a.k.a “Matar Paneer”), one of the conspirators involved in the heist, is so happy when the planning is completed and it is time for the revelry to begin that he lets out a cry of “Balle!” This homegrown sound has long been missing from the streets of Indian fiction in English (think of how many "hurrays" and "bravos" one hears instead). It is precisely this taste of the local, together with the adroit fulfilment of genre expectations, that make us say “Balle!” to this classic crime novel by a colossus of Hindi pulp fiction, deftly translated by Sudarshan Purohit, a young software engineer based in Bangalore.

The 65 Lakh Heist was published in 1977 as Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaitii, and it was the fourth book in Pathak’s hugely popular “Vimal” series, selling an estimated three lakh copies. Now, in its English version, it is the second pulp-fiction title offered by Blaft, after their widely acclaimed Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction published last year. Of course, in its new incarnation, the book is no longer “real” pulp – printed on the cheapest paper, sold for a pittance – but a kind of canonised and reified pulp, beautifully produced and, at Rs.195, priced the same as an average paperback. The question to be asked then, perhaps, is the question that must have been asked by the novel's first, most demanding readers: is it still value for money?

I should say it is. I read the book in three hours while waiting for a 3am flight, and it certainly helped those dreaded hours melt away. The tension kicks in from the very first sentence (“Mayaram lit a new cigarette and looked at his watch”), and we are up and running. Mayaram Bawa of Amritsar, an accomplished cracker of safes (for which reason he has earned the moniker “Ustad”) and a chronic jailbird, wants to pull off one last heist before he calls it a day. He intends to enlist the best talent in the business to make sure the operation is a success, and when he spots the wanted criminal Surender Singh Sohal, better known as Vimal, in a gurudwara, he knows that luck is on his side. Vimal has been on the run from the police for long, and unless he helps Mayaram now, his secret will be out.

Pathak, who has also translated some of James Hadley Chase into Hindi, turns out four books a year to this day. His qualities are those of the best pulp-fiction writers: a love of danger and double-crosses, guns and molls, in terms of material, and narrative speed in terms of form. He also writes very good, economical dialogue. His translator serves him well by scrupulously preserving the idiomatic core of the material (such as the line, “They chanted Bolo Ram for him a year ago”, or the phrases “Jaago Mohan Pyaare”, “Papaji”, and “Aaho”) while transferring the rest into a smooth, unshowy English.

Vimal has a particularly intriguing backstory – we learn that he is so bitter because “his wife Surjeet Kaur and her lover had conspired to get him jailed for embezzlement”. If the The 65 Lakh Heist has a failing, it is that character development more or less comes to a stop after the first half, and the rest is all action, concluding with a shootout in a garage. But one could say these are the problems endemic to the pulp-fiction form, in which a character's progress often culminates not in a change of heart or a renewal of perspective but with the sound of a gunshot. On all other counts, there is much to admire in this book, and I put it down looking forward to reading more of the team of Pathak and Purohit in the years to come – or perhaps months.

A slightly different version of this review appeared last weekend in Mint.

"Clouds" in Italian

If you're a writer, it's always a big moment in your life when your work appears in translation for the first time. In part, this is because no writer's sensibility is formed any more (except perhaps writers who work and read in languages with very small catchments) by a monoglot literary culture; much of what we know and love is through translations, and a world without translation would leave every reader and writer alarmingly impoverished. So having one's own work translated feels like an admission ticket into a bigger, more connected, literary universe.

And it's something of a shock, too, looking at all those strange words which are supposed to be yours. Recently a book came for me in the post, and I opened the package quickly, found my name on the contents page, and began to hobble through this paragraph of Italian:

Nuvole

In questa città sembriano tutti stanci, sempre. Sudati, it viso ricoperto di una sottile pellicola di sporcizia. Spesso, nel corridoio di un autobus appiccicoso, ci colpiscono i visi tirati, incattiviti della gente e distogliamo lo sguardo per puntarlo altrove. Siamo così vicini...tanto da vedere i pori sulla pelle della persona accanto, da sentirne l'odore. Ci pestiamo i piedi a vicenda, origliamo conversazioni, sgomitiamo per guadagnare spazio. Siamo praticamente sempre tra i piedi di qualcuno, ciascuno è il motivo di sofferenza dell'altro. "Per favore, preparate it contante," dice un cartello, e un altro "Vietato mettere i piedi sul sedile." None c'è posto nemmeno per tenerli a terra, i piedi.

This is the opening paragraph of my story "Clouds", and it appears in a translation by Gioia Guerzoni in an Italian anthology of new Indian writing called, simply, India, alongside stories and reportage by Altaf Tyrewala, Tishani Doshi, Susan Mridula Koshy, Sarnath Banerjee, Samrat Choudhury, Palash Krishna Mehrotra, Sonia Faleiro, Anindya Roy, Annie Zaidi, and Smriti Nevatia. The English version of the book – I should say the English originals – will appear in India soon in an edition published by Westland Books. "Clouds" is set in Bombay, and is about a man who is losing his grip on life, and who knows it. He spends his days wandering around the city, waiting for something to happen. Here is a bit from the story in (my own) English:

It rained today! I was asleep in the stifling gloom, and never noticed when the breeze picked up outside and the air grew cold. But then the sound of raindrops coming to blows with the earth reached my ears, and I stumbled to the door and threw it open. Rain in March – what a surprise! Everybody else in the building was out in the corridor looking up at the skies, laughing and shouting. Even as dozens on the street were sprinting for cover, the children had already run out and were prancing in the slush outside. A fine spray zipped about and settled on our faces. The trees were greener, the dirty walls of buildings darker and more soulful, and the sky full of low clouds jostling like hasty commuters.

Everything was different. In that luminous grey light, almost available to the touch like fog, I felt like all my circumstances had changed, I felt free of my debts, the penalties I would shortly render. The palm tree at the corner of the compound was swaying, and I too was shivering. It was like being in the presence of something all-embracing, the brahman our ancestors used to speak of, or receiving some great benediction. I washed my face, combed my hair, put on a clean shirt, and went out.

Puddles were everywhere in the holes and slopes of our little city. My porous slippers squelched as I walked, and my feet were soon muddy. The rain had gone and a chastened sun had emerged again, but the air was cool and the sky full of iridescent colours. But the people milling into the bus and pushing for seats had already lost sight of the sky. In the company of such citizens I felt silly admiring from more than the corner of my eye the flaming dome of our little world. There was a hole the size of a coin in the floor of the bus. Through it I could see the grey of the road beneath spinning by very fast. The man next to me got up and left, his jute bag bulging with vegetables. I took my place by the window and watched the world go by.

The rest is in the story, which is in the book, which will be out soon. A set of links to several good essays on different aspects of translation can be found in this old post.

On Harsh Mander's book on Gujarat 2002, Fear and Forgiveness

In 2002 Harsh Mander, a serving IAS officer, was so dismayed not just by the sins of commission of murderous and highly organised Hindu right-wing groups in Gujarat, but also the sins of omission by the government and the bureaucracy in allowing the violence to go unchecked, that he resigned from the civil service and began to work directly with survivors of the Gujarat tragedy. Fear and Forgiveness, his account of the lives of the survivors in the long aftermath of the carnage, is, as the title indicates, a book that is disturbing but also, in small patches, warming. Mander documents the intense suffering and survival strategies of those reduced to “refugees in their own homeland” merely because they belong to the wrong faith. But he also lingers over surprising, unexpected acts of kindness in the midst of barbarism, and over the organised struggle of the survivors to wrest back some measure of dignity and justice.

The reports of several independent citizens’ groups and fact-finding commissions (such as here, and here) have already confirmed, in the greatest detail, the complicity of the Narendra Modi government in the massive loss of lives and property, mainly of Muslims, in what are euphemistically called the “riots” of February and March 2002. The violence broke out following the deaths, on February 27, of 58 Hindus when a train compartment of the Sabarmati Express was set on fire near Godhra station after a dispute between Hindu kar sevaks and some Muslim tea vendors at the station itself. But, as Mander demonstrates, the genocide (which is a more appropriate term for violence so targeted and systematic) has also had the long-term effect, ardently desired by its perpetrators, of imposing on the Muslims of Gujarat a pervasive sense of their second-class citizenship.

Pitted against a state that was hostile to their right to security during the violence then, and that is just as hostile to their right to reparation and justice now, the survivors to this day eke out a precarious existence, funneled into relief colonies, boycotted socially and economically, and often harassed and rounded up by the police without any regard for due process. Mander shows, in the absence of proper state support, that the cause of relief work has been embraced mainly by Muslim organisations, some with their own agendas, thus further entrenching the factionalism of a communalised polity. Reading his book, we understand how, firstly, what began in Gujarat in 2002 is in a way still current, and secondly, how an orgy of state-sponsored violence may radicalise an entire generation of perpetrators and victims both.

Mandar is just as keen to address the implications of the position, still widely aired in middle-class drawing-rooms around the country, that the Muslims of Gujarat “deserved it” or “had it coming”, either for the alleged role of some Muslims in the Godhra train-burning incident, or more generally for the invasion of India and forced conversion of Hindus by Muslim rulers further back in history. It is striking, he points out, that this idea of collective and vicarious responsibility “seems apportioned only to minorities”. Further, if people are to use this logic of group identity to argue that “they” had it coming, then tomorrow upper-caste Hindus might be a similar “they” for Dalits, and all men might be punished for the bondage of women throughout history. All too often this “they” is merely a projection, and a displacement, of the beast within us.

No individual or group deserves to pay this kind of price for the real or imagined wrongs of their co-religionists. Indeed, the scale of the supposedly retributive violence in Gujarat self-evidently shows that the genocide of 2002 was not a “reaction” to any action, as some have claimed and still claim, but a well-orchestrated action in itself. The sooner this truth is accepted, the closer we will be, in Mander’s view, to allowing the beneficial forces of reparation and forgiveness to come into play, and to achieving some kind of reconciliation and closure that allows people to get on with their lives with a measure of normalcy.

One of the best chapters in Fear and Forgiveness is devoted to the work of legal representation done in Gujarat by Nyayagrah, an organisation with which Mander is involved. If the concept of satyagraha, he explains, was about peaceful mass disobedience of clearly unjust laws, then nyayagrah, by contrast, is about a mass campaign to “hold the state accountable to actually enforcing rather than disobeying its own just laws.”

Although a number of high-profile cases concerning the carnage of 2002 have resulted in convictions for the accused, in general the bad faith of the administration, the police, and the lower judiciary has led to hundreds of smaller cases being summarily closed. Nyayagrah attempts to provide legal support and representation, often with the help of trained local volunteers, to any of the victims of the genocide who wish to pursue their grievances in the courts. One of the best passages in the book describes the pressures borne by survivors of genocide not just from those who hate them but also from those who are working in support to them:

Most often, struggles for justice using the law are fought by lawyers and human rights defenders for the victim, in her name and on her behalf. It is reasonably believed that the victim, after all, cannot be expected to understand the complexities of the legal system, and even less the way to negotiate its opaque treatises to secure ultimate legal victory. Therefore, the victims are rarely consulted about important decisions regarding the case, and professional and well-meaning human rights workers sometimes neglect to inform these survivors even about the way the case is progressing. Their existence is recalled only when they have to give evidence in court, for which they have to be suitably “prepared” if the case is to be “won”, or occasionally by alert human rights defenders if they report being threatened so as to plead for witness protection. They are demonized if they turn “hostile” in court or succumb to intimidation or inducement to change their statements. It is ironical that the victim is almost instrumentalised for the “larger” purpose of a greater justice. This is a grave danger when large and high profile cases of major and spectacular massacres, involving significant numbers, are taken up as symbolic “test cases” to uphold the law. The “weak” witness who succumbs to intimidation or inducement, or both, is seen to fail not just his own case, but the entire victim community and indeed the lofty cause of justice itself. I do not believe any victim – even one who prevaricates, surrenders, or submits to inducements or intimidation – should be made to carry burdens of stigma greater than those he or she already bears.

The battle for justice is not so much an end in itself, explains Mander, as it is a means “for the victim to re-establish her or his equal citizenship and rights before the law in a secular democracy.” He recounts how some Hindu volunteers of Nyayagrah are taunted for “siding with the enemy.” But, as this and many other examples of individual courage and compassion described by Mander show, it is only people who cross borders who may show us a way of erasing them.

The defining feature of the Gujarat violence to this day, Mander argues, “is the determined absence of remorse in both the state and many segments of the people.” In the absence of this remorse, it is citizens’ groups, individuals, and the law which must fill the void as best as possible. Mander’s book, at once engaged and morally lucid, is a gentle counsel to not perpetuate the universe of Gujarat 2002-2009 within our own hearts, or wall in our own lives and consciences by such totalising abstractions as “us” and “them”.

An essay by Mander, "Inside Gujarat's Relief Colonies", is here. And some links to other essays: Prashant Jha's long piece of reportage from 2006, "Gujarat As Another Country"; "Understanding Gujarat Violence" by Ashutosh Varshney and "The Gujarat Pogrom of 2002" by Paul Brass, who are both scholars who have written a book each on the subject of Hindu-Muslim violence in modern India; Ashis Nandy's essay from 1991 "Hinduism vs Hindutva: The Inevitability of a Confrontation" ("That death of Hinduism in India will be celebrated by all votaries of Hindutva. For they have always been embarrassed and felt humiliated by Hinduism as it is. Hinduism, I repeat, is a faith and a way of life. Hindutva is an ideology for those whose Hinduism has worn off. Hindutva is built on the tenets of re-formed Hinduism of the nineteenth century"). An extensive bibliography called "Resources Against Communalism and Religious Fundamentalism in India" compiled by Harsh Kapoor lists hundreds of essays and book-length works on the subject, some of which you may want to track down in your local bookstore or library.

[A shorter version of this essay appeared yesterday in Mint)

Some things I've been reading

Some things I've been reading recently:

"Do [Indian] anglophones paddle in the shallows" by Mukul Kesavan, who is in my opinion among the sharpest thinkers and almost certainly the best prose stylist among columnists in the English-language press in India, and whose piece closes with a line worthy of a great short story. My friend the writer Amitava Kumar, who has on occasion left comments of great erudition on The Middle Stage (such as here), and whose book A Foreigner Carrying In The Crook Of His Arm A Tiny Bomb will be out shortly, has a response to Kesavan here. A reverse angle on Kesavan's argument is provided by Aakar Patel's recent essay "Try and say this in Hindi -- bet you can't".

"Adventures in editing: Ted Solotaroff's Commentary Days", a very long and entertaining piece by the late Ted Solotaroff on his years as an editor at Commentary magazine, which is, among other things, about learning the art of editing from other highly skilled exponents ("Well, what she proceeded to do was a revelation. What I had thought was a solid review turned out to have as much fat as a sixteen-ounce blue-plate special. My resentment at being told I was ponderous turned into gratitude once I began to see with her eye and fall into step with her pace. 'Why the double adjectives here? Give me a good precise one.' My overzealous development of a point--example, comment, further example, more comment, final example -- turned into an incisive statement and the best example, and moved on. She showed me how removing a transitional or topic sentence from the head of a paragraph could energize the line of discussion and more involve the reader"). Part 2 of the piece is here: "Further adventures in editing".

And lest we forget that this is an Indian blog, and one that wants to know and to circulate what is happening at home as well as away, here is a beautifully tossed-off little memoir -- one wishes it were longer-- by Rukun Advani called "Academics among writers", about the experience of editing an entire generation of Indian writers -- sociologists, economists, political theorists -- closely linked with academic activity yet also interested in producing polished writing ("When I joined publishing as an editor it was with the expectation that my job would involve reading wonderful new book-manuscripts all day long. At the end of each week I'd tell my boss which the well-written scripts were, and he'd give me the go-ahead to publish those. The bad ones we'd save for a bonfire and watch gleefully as rotten prose met its fate, becoming even more like the dust it already was.")

If you give these essays the time they deserve, you could do worse than spend another hour reading this recent symposium of four good American editors at publishing houses, which offers many insights into the contemporary world of publishing: agents, advances, the rigours of editing, publicity, the corporatization of publishing, the impact of new technologies, why books are published first as hardcovers, and so on.

And here are two marvellous interviews at the ReadySteadyBook website with the poet and translator Michael Hoffmann and the translator Charlotte Mandell. I was particularly struck by Mandell's counterintuitive revelation that she never reads a book all the way through before beginning a translation ("I feel I’ve never really 'read' a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I?"). Mandell also has some interesting things to say about her translation of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones here.

Lastly, I leave you with Adam Kirsch's splendid "In The Word-Hoard", an essay on Dennis O'Driscoll's book-length interview with Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones. And if all this is too literary for you, I can see your point, and so here is a really good essay by Jonathan Wilson on football: "Why is full-back the most important position on the pitch?"

On Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography My Experiments With Truth

A shorter version of this essay appeared in Mint in January as part of a special issue on Gandhi. The long version posted here was published this month in the political journal Democratiya under the title "Still Making Us Work: Gandhi's Autobiography".

Halfway through Part II of his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, we see the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, still only 24, preparing to leave South Africa in 1893 after the successful resolution of the court case that originally took him there.

Gandhi has, by this time, won not just the respect but also the love of the Indian community in South Africa. His unusually stringent and holistic approach towards authority, law, and morals, his keen interest in matters well outside his brief such as racial discrimination, religious division, and sanitation, and his enthusiasm for petitioning and pamphleteering, organising meetings, and travelling has made him many friends and admirers. In Natal his friends, and the merchant community in particular, pester him to stay back and set up a legal practice there. They are willing not only to send private legal work his way, but also organise funds for the 'public work' of reform and improvement that so preoccupies him. Gandhi mulls over their offer, and then refuses the second part of it. He explains: 'My work would be mainly to make you all work. And how could I charge you for that?'

My Experiments with Truth was first published in English translation in 1927, and in its ninth decade it still commands the power, just like its author did in his own person, to make us work should we come within range of it, to make us newly reflective, newly ambitious. It is, as Gandhi himself writes, not 'a real autobiography', but a spartan, goal-directed one, closely focussed only on those incidents and encounters in his life 'which bear upon the practice of truth.' It reflects its author's impatience with inessentials, and his constant search for first principles; it is rich in lessons and maxims, in speculations about root causes and deep connections, and in an infectious moral restlessness and urgency. It can sometimes be vexing and crankish, as in the author's obsession with matters of diet and sexual self-control, or his imputation of a divine will at work in the most mundane matters. But as Gandhi himself writes, 'The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.'

The Autobiography was written or dictated in haste, during the fallow years of the nineteen-twenties, when the energy of the independence struggle had subsided somewhat but the demands on Gandhi's time remained immense. It was published piece by piece from 1925 onwards in Gandhi's Gujarati weekly Navajivan (which explains the book's often arbitrary division into dozens of three- and four-page chapters). Gandhi's faithful associate, Mahadev Desai, translated it almost concurrently into English, supervised by Gandhi himself, but the paradox remains that the autobiography of one of India's greatest writers of English comes to us in an English translation by another hand. The copies found in most Indian homes are the unsophisticated, homely, cheap editions published by Gandhi's own press, The Navajivan Trust, but they are in keeping with the spirit of the author, who honoured substance and economy over show and style.

Not withstanding the fact that most of it is set in England and South Africa, the Autobiography is the most quintessentially Indian of books. Indeed, it might usefully be prescribed as the foundational book for anyone approaching Indian life or literature for the first time. This is in part because of the range of fundamental Indian experiences, across both public and private spheres, with which it engages critically – that of travelling in third-class railway compartments across the length and breadth of India, of agonising over the filth and squalor of public and community spaces, of walking through temples and observing religious festivals, of reflecting on the inequity of power relations in Indian life all the way from marriage (beginning with the author's own marriage) to caste and class. But it also demands to be read because of Gandhi's own creative attitude – the insight offered by his specific strategies and responses – as a negotiator between the forces of tradition and modernity, as a seeker of a common ground where inter-religious dialogue can take place, and as an enthusiast when it comes to the multiplicity of Indian languages and systems. At different points in the book we see Gandhi trying to learn Tamil, the better to deal with indentured labourers from south India in South Africa; speaking in Hindi (or Hindustani) at a Viceregal meeting where the accepted practice was to speak in English; and trying to win over a predominantly Muslim audience in faltering Urdu. Gandhi always goes one step further than one would expect in dealing with the other; when we read him he always seems to be saying to us, 'You can do it too.'

Among the aspects of Gandhi's nature that emerge most clearly from the Autobiography are his considerable talents as propagandist, pressman, and editor. Gandhi's Collected Works run into a hundred volumes, yet relatively few writings were conceived as independent books – they all made their first appearances as pieces in newspapers and periodicals, often those run by Gandhi himself. Although Gandhi began to read newspapers only in his teens, very early in his career he seems to have become conscious of the enormous power of the printed word to disseminate information, to stoke reflection, to offer considered criticism, and to forge durable relationships on a mass scale without the necessity of reader actually meeting author.

But – and this is characteristic of him – he also saw in the written word a means of pinning himself to the highest standards of fairness and justice (which are only other words for what he would have understood as 'truth'). Writing about the journal Indian Opinion, which he ran for over a decade in South Africa, he recalls:

Week after week I poured out my soul in its columns, and expounded the principles and practice of Satyagraha as I understood it. During ten years, that is, until 1914, excepting the intervals of my enforced rest in prison, there was hardly an issue of Indian Opinion without an article from me. I cannot recall a word in those articles set down without thought or deliberation, or a word of conscious exaggeration, or anything merely to please. Indeed the journal became for me a training in self-restraint...The critic found very little to which he could object. In fact the tone of Indian Opinion compelled the critic to put a curb on his own pen.

Here, as at many other points in the book, we see Gandhi advance a sophisticated understanding of the dialectical relationship between one's own actions and those of others, such as when he says, 'My experience has shown that we win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.' And sounded here, too, is the idea of responsible speech and action through self-scrutiny which is one of the root ideas of Gandhian ethics and is explained elsewhere in the book: 'Man is man because he is capable of, and only in so far as he exercises, self-restraint.' Gandhi often asks the impossible of us, but his appeal is in the radical possibilities he opens out before us; he expands our moral arena. We come away from Gandhi with an enhanced view of our relationship to others and to the world.

The word 'God' appears dozens of times in the autobiography, and God clearly has pride of place in Gandhi's worldview. But what kind of God is he? Sometimes Gandhi speaks of God in a way that would strike the secular reader as strangely angular but which is in fact characteristic of the pious, by ceding the very human agency that has so assiduously been forged in hostile circumstances ('Thus God laid the foundations of my life in South Africa and sowed the seed of the fight for national self-respect'). Sometimes the word appears in notes of gratitude towards a mysterious higher authority who seems to be watching over him ('Only vaguely I understood that God had saved me on that occasion' – the occasion being a visit to a prostitute that ends in Gandhi fleeing the scene); sometimes as the end of a human ideal or endeavour ('I worship God as Truth only'; 'I had made the religion of service my own as I felt that God could be realised only through service'); and sometimes as a retreat of language and intelligence before the mystery and ineffability of the divine ('I have no word for characterising my belief in God'). Most notably, this is not a God who belongs to a particular faith; he is a God available to any person who seeks him. How did Gandhi, a practising Hindu, arrive at such a God?

The Autobiography offers a very comprehensive record of the process of the development of Gandhi's views on religion. Gandhi was brought up in a staunchly Hindu household. But because the first years of his adulthood were spent as a student in England (he almost did not go abroad because his family feared that he would lose caste by crossing the seas) and then as a lawyer in South Africa, in these years he kept the company of Christians far more than he did that of Hindus. Indeed he had a sustained encounter with Christianity – attending church service with friends, reading the Gospels, debating the nature of Christ and of salvation, trying to resist attempts to convert him – and with Theosophy before he came to Hinduism in any sustained or coherent way. About his first stint in South Africa, he writes that 'it was Christian influence that had kept me alive in the religious sense.' He first read the Bhagavad Gita, for many the core text of Hinduism, at the behest of two Theosophist friends in England, in an English translation by Edwin Arnold.

This awakening of the religious spirit led Gandhi to explore, through his twenties, the intellectual heritage of Hinduism through correspondence with Indian mentor-figures, and to also read widely on other religions. The reading, he reports, 'fostered in me the habit of putting into practice whatever appealed to me in my studies'; as in other fields, Gandhi is a great improviser in religion. But although Gandhi was soon to be persuaded by what he calls the 'beauties' of his own faith, Hinduism, and came to regard the Gita as 'the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth', there remained in his thought a Christianised view of sin and salvation. At the same time, the roundabout, unorthodox, and graduated route by which he arrived at his Hinduism made his creed both a liberal and critical one in itself, and genuinely open (and not just 'tolerant') towards others. 'In matters of religion beliefs differ,' he writes, 'and each one's is supreme for himself. If all had the same belief about all matters of religion, there would be only one religion in the world.' This would seem to be the starting point of peaceful coexistence in a society that is in part multi-religious and in part non-religious, yet individuals of all persuasions still have difficulty subscribing to this simple and dignified idea, which are both an endorsement of belief and a check on religious coercion.

Characteristically, Gandhi can be found in the Autobiography interpreting the word 'religion' not just as belief in God, adherence to scripture, rituals, and doctrine, but 'in its broadest sense, meaning thereby self-realisation or knowledge of self.' Looking at his own book similarly in the broadest possible perspective, we can situate it within a venerable tradition of the most ambitious human seeking and questioning. Nearly two-and-a-half thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death in Athens for impiety and for corrupting the youth with unsound ideas. The main thrust of Socrate's defence in court – 'The unexamined life is not worth living' – has rung across the centuries as a ideal of human life. My Experiments with Truth, with its insistent questioning and refashioning of both self and world, and its pursuit of 'the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience', might be seen not just as the central book in modern Indian literature, but amongst the most Socratic books in world literature.

And here is an old essay also published in Democratiya: "Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose".

Things I've been reading recently: Lombardo, Nehamas, and Paglia

Some very fine things I've been reading recently (I recommend a cup of a good brew and at least an hour of free time for the proper reception of each of these sections):

An interview with Stanley Lombardo, one of the most recent flagholders of a venerable tradition, that of translating Homer's Odyssey into English ("The word Muse in Greek means ‘mind’ originally...Mind is for me the essence of translation. Odysseus has to attain the minds of many people in his wanderings. That’s what Homer has done, and it’s why his characters are so real — he attains the human mind, he attains many human minds. Translation is mind to mind, not dictionary to dictionary. Homer is a mind that I try to attain."). Chapter One of Lombardo's translation of the Odyssey is here, and if you'd like to hear a recording of him reading from the same section it is here. A friend recently bought me Lombardo's translation from the US (it is published by a small but very good publisher of classics, Hackett), and I've been trying to read it against the widely available Penguin translation by Robert Fagles.

An interview with the classics scholar Alexander Nehamas about Socrates, Nietzsche, Foucault, and also the relationship between book-learning and living in the world ("In modern times philosophy has traditionally been taken to be in the broadest sense a scientific discipline.... But in ancient Greece, as well as in a modest modern tradition, the primary issue is not to find answers to particular philosophical questions like 'What is knowledge?' or 'What is reality?' or 'What is good?' The primary issue is to live a philosophic life. To be a philosopher is to be a certain kind of person, not simply to have views on certain issues. A philosopher who is a certain kind of person is also, of course, a person who has views on philosophical issues. But what matters is not just the answers such a person gives. What matters is the kind of connections you establish between various philosophical issues and the rest of your life. What matters is that a personality emerges who has asked certain kinds of questions and given certain kinds of answers to them, and who, most importantly, has constructed a life around such questions and answers...I am trying to reclaim the defining tradition of Greek philosophy, philosophy as techne tou biou – the art of living. Though 'art' is not a particularly accurate translation of the Greek techne, which is not art in the sense of our 'fine art', but something between art and craft.") I was also intrigued by Nehamas's idea that "the features that characterize oneself and one's life are similar to the features of literary works. The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing – connectedness, grace, elegance." If you enjoy this, you might also want to read "Plato or Schopenhauer", the opening chapter of Nehamas's book The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.

An interview with the iconoclastic classics and poetry scholar Camille Paglia by Michael Sragow (himself the author of a recent biography of the American film director Victor Fleming) on the subject of the films of Alfred Hitchcock ("In writing my study of 'The Birds' for the British Film Institute, I had the opportunity to review all kinds of films from Hitchcock's past that were not available when I was young -- films from the silent era and the 1930s that are now on video. I was just stunned by what I discovered: the blatant continuity of Hitchcock's sensibility, down to tiny little details in the earliest films in matters of decor or geographical setting or the plot. It's clear that what we have in the works of Hitchcock really is, despite the ups and downs of the quality of the films, a giant oeuvre – one huge imaginative projection.") You might also enjoy Paglia's essay "The Mighty River of Classics", and "Rhyme and Reason", the introduction to her 2005 anthology Break, Blow, Burn, a set of readings of 43 of her favourite poems ("My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of 'spirit' and 'inspiration'), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal....Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech"). Paglia describes the selection process for the anthology here.

Some of these pieces were published many years ago, and discovering them brings home how, on the Internet, as in a library, everything remains "current" in such a good way.

On Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s first, overwhelmingly verbose and florid, novel was called The Last Song of Dusk, and when, early on in his new book, we read that “On Tuesday morning a big fat sun careened through thick layers of cloud, revealing a sky the colour of joy”, we know that the writer is still composing gushing odes to mornings and evenings. Indeed, it is hard to think of another Indian writer in English who can match Shanghvi for linguistic excess: his alarmingly bad metaphors, his bewildering mixing of high and low registers, his excessively high pitch even when he believes he is doing understatement. But Shanghvi’s new novel is off-putting not just because we see in it a writer who has settled into his faults, and will now always perpetuate them. What is worse is that he is so indisciplined that he does not even play to his own strengths. His prose is peculiarly self-defeating.

Shanghvi’s native ground is the complex play of feeling between troubled adults. In his work, the chance alliances of love and friendship that his characters forge are seen as a kind of redemption from the intrinsic emptiness and loneliness of life, the troubles of aging and suffering. The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay is a chronicle of the linked lives of four protagonists and the Bombay they know or seek: Karan Seth, a young photographer; Samar Arora, a brilliant pianist who has now lapsed into silence; Zaira, a Bollywood actress; and Rhea Dalal, a middle-aged housewife who was once an outstanding young potter.

Karan, newly arrived from Shimla, is dazzled by Bombay. He believes, like many immigrants to the city, that "from the day I came to Bombay, I felt like I was staring destiny in the eye". His dream – and this is also clearly Shanghvi’s dream, though realised very self-consciously and jarringly – is to create “an epic record of the city” with his camera, an encyclopedia of its moods, characters, and possibilities. Karan’s relationships with the three others all contribute, in their own way and at their own pace, to the deepening of his vision.

Shanghvi can be insightful when working within this field of human striving and desire. When, for instance, Rhea, many years after her marriage has broken up, looks back at the wonder of it and thinks, simply, that “Love is good luck”, the truth of this modest thought surprises us. When Samar dies of AIDS, and Karan says of him that “Even if he couldn’t save what he had loved, loving them had saved him”, we are moved by this.When we see Rhea thinking about "the familiar, consoling details that parented her childhood", we recognise that this odd verb sums up the experience of growing up introverted and withdrawn, and when we are told that Karan's enthusiasm and dedication reminds Rhea "of herself as a young woman, an artist preparing for her conversation with the world", that last phrase seems exactly right as a description of artistic work.

But Shanghvi is so intent on capturing – above, around, and behind his characters – the rumble of the city and the evils of this world that he continually leads his own writing away from good places into black holes. His most dubious move is to turn a crucial event in the book, the death of Zaira, into a hamhanded reprisal of the notorious Jessica Lall murder case, complete with scheming politicians thuggishly working the system, a witness who claims he does not understand Hindi, and cartoonish portraits of a fashion designer and her socialite mother who seek to derive social capital from the tragic affair.

Shanghvi’s account – inspired, he tells us in a somewhat callous prefatory note, “by a range of events discussed extensively in the print media, films and on television” – tells us nothing about the case, or about the excesses of celebrity culture, that we do not already know. Shanghvi's one addition to the facts of the case is to make the murderer, a man called Malik Prasad, the son of a high-profile politician belonging to “the Hindu People’s Party”, a move that allows him to laboriously open fire on the venality of right-wing Hindu politics. Searching further for pilferable scandals, Shanghvi throws in the Salman Khan hit-and-run case. But merely copying reality has never made events in a novel seem real.

Shanghvi’s prose style is totally wild. A collection of his animal metaphors alone (“Her voice was wobbly with emotion, like a hippo on stilettos”; "memories of Rhea took nips at him like packs of hyenas") would be enough to form an instructive masterclass on death by overwriting. As an example of how his narrative continually destroys the mood it has built up, here is a conversation between Malik Prasad and his father – a conversation in which we find out that Malik, in a fit of rage, has shot and killed Zaira:

'How many people were present at the bar?'

'Maybe two hundred or so.' Malik's heart was thudding so hard that he could barely speak.

'Did anyone see you shoot her?'

'Of course, Dad!'

'Don't raise your voice, kutta!'

'How could someone not have seen me?' Blood had shot out from Zaira's temple and stained Malik's shirt.

'Was someone with Zaira when it happened?'

'Yes. Bunty Oberoi. He's her co-star in her new film.'

'Do you know this Bunty chap?'

Malik had met Bunty Oberoi in passing, and he told his father they were acquaintances.

'So Bunty saw you shoot her?'

'He was the one who raised the alarm.'

Bunty Oberoi's scream had been effete and comical, as if he was auditioning for the role of a widow in a Hindi film.

'And then you left the bar?'

'Lucky thought it was the smart thing to do; I just followed him. We ran out. Everyone was looking at me, Dad. Her blood has messed up my clothes. I desperately needed to shower.'

'Is the gun with you?'

'Yes, it is.'

As Malik had rushed out of the bar a few models, svelte and glazed-eyed, had shrieked and pranced out of his way like impalas taking on the plains of the savannah.

Let us leave aside the issue of whether this is good dialogue or not, and think of something even more basic. This is clearly a scene which is supposed to communicate the senselessness and the horror of Zaira's murder. Why then does it have such a puzzling air of bathos?

It is because of the two gratuitous and self-indulgent metaphors wedged into the dialogue by the narrator, one about Bunty Oberoi's scream as if he was "auditioning for the role of a widow in a Hindi film" and the other about frightened spectators running for cover "like impalas taking on the plains of the savannah". These metaphors would be bad, because overly extravagant and stilted, if taken just by themselves; in the context of the scene, they are doubly disastrous. Narratorial preening and showboating ("Her future appeared so blazingly bright, he was tempted to shield his eyes"; "He walked towards her, entering the private cosmology of her unabashed curiosity") make for a stream of jarring moments in Shanghvi's text.

Lastly, it might be worth noting Shanghvi's bizarrely oversexualised imagination, which manifests itself in an excess of hostility towards a chosen few characters. Page after page of his narration is besmirched by pointlessly bitchy and infantile sniping. Minister Prasad, the father of the killer, is not only ideologically despicable but physically gross, as if one kind of corruption inevitably follows the other. He has a habit, we are told, “of scratching his balls so savagely that his pubic lice experienced multiple orgasms.” The judge in the murder case is lured into corruption by the promise of a promotion, and gives his consent: "The words escaped the judge's mouth involuntarily, like a premature ejaculation." A mildly annoying character is dismissed, on the same page on which she enters the narrative, with this sentence: “Glee dripped out of Natasha like precum.” Karan quits photography and goes to work at a school, where the obnoxious principal, Mrs. Pal, has “an ass that looked as if it had been blown up with a cycle pump.” These tasteless smears seem uncannily similar to the casual bigotry of the “Hindu People’s Party” that so agitates Shanghvi, and they might be seen as emblematic of the many excesses and self-deceptions of this severely trying writer.

[A shorter version of this piece appeared last weekend in Mint.]