On Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker

The most startling feature of Ali Sethi’s debut novel The Wish Maker is that although it is over 400 pages long, its protagonist (who is also for the most part its narrator) is a cipher, registering on our consciousness as not very much more than a pair of eyes. When we meet Zaki Shirazi for the first time, he has just returned to his family home in Lahore (inevitably, for a wedding) after two years as a student in America. What should be the beginning of the book’s action is actually pretty much the end, and Zaki spends his time observing the new Pakistan (“We passed a hoarding on the bridge. It was advertising a new deal for mobile phones...”; “At night I went with Isa and Moosa to see the new places of leisure”) and lapsing into loops of ever-retreating flashbacks.

The Wish Maker swiftly reveals itself, to those with some experience of the genre, as that old chestnut, the three-generation South Asian novel: one tier retailing memories of Partition, the second covering the era of the wars with India and the Bangladeshi independence struggle, and the third, the Pakistan of the present day, both modern ( those"new places of leissure") and medieval when seen through the narrator’s wide-eyed gaze (“She said that such things were common in the villages, where customs were old and went largely untouched by the new ways that developed continually in the cities”). There is plenty of quasi-journalistic observation, a score of aunts, cousins and servants, and a number of songs and weddings, none of which can conceal the instrinsic hollowness of the mind and voice that speaks.

Sometimes such stories can be redeemed by depth of characterization or distinction of language, but strangely enough for someone writing his first book, Sethi shows no desire to contest any of the rules of an old, old game. Although Zaki has been brought up in Pakistan, and has been away for just two years, his eye is always noticing things in touristy ways, such as “old men sitting under trees on the footpath with colourful powders and bottles”, even as his memory is recalling such momentous occurrences as “After the maths period there was the physics period, and after that chemistry, for which we had to go to the chemistry lab in a line led by the teacher...”

Further, the narrator of The Wish Maker seems highly conscious of the need to record—indeed to celebrate—the specifics of Pakistani culture, language and place, while also trying not to turn off a global audience whose apprehension of these things is dim (one of the blurbs on the back cover of his book acclaims it as “a brilliant example of the new global novel”). This leads to a kind of backand-forth covering of bases that often clogs the narration. Sethi is the kind of writer who, when writing about a visit to a neighbourhood, will say that it was “a mohalla, a neighbourhood”, and not one or the other. Sometimes he can write an interesting English: a sentence about how the sun is “like a difficult god, present in the things it made visible” was one of the few bits of the book I enjoyed. But his English is also specked with local colour and subcontinental sounds in the most cliched way, with a carefully italicized “hai” here and a “taubah” there, and (since no narrative is authentic without a sampling of local swear words) one careful mention each of the words “bhenchod” and “maaderchod”.

The same contradictory imperative guides Sethi's attitude towards cultural detail, towards what he thinks should be explained and what only named. Zaki’s cousin, Samar Api, idolizes Amitabh Bachchan, who, Zaki explains, “was said to be the most famous actor in the world”. A police officer sits under “a framed portrait of the Quaid-e-Azam, the founder of the nation” (if an Indian novelist wrote such a line about a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, we would think he or she was being ironic). I have no idea what Sethi’s politics are, but it was surprising to see Benazir Bhutto’s personal and political life described in great detail while, when he approaches the political scene of the late nineties, Sethi devotes a few pages to Nawaz Sharif without ever naming him, only saying that “(Daadi) was pleased when her man won the election”. These are the riddles and puzzles, more than the mysteries of character or situation, that the reader of The Wish Maker ends up pondering.

Here, as a longer example of what seems to me the mechanical nature and aridity of Sethi's narration, is a passage from the book describing a journey made by Zaki's grandfather from India to Pakistan. The passage is told from the point of view of Zaki's mother, Zakia:

[Papu] took trains. They took him from Kanpur to Agra, Agra to Jodhpur, and from Jodhpur into Sindh. The train compartments became crowded. He looked past his window and saw desert turn to desert, and his mind filled with foreboding. He had a little money, and his clothes and his diploma were in his suitcase. He kept the suitcase between his legs. He closed his eyes and tried to think of the city that awaited him, a city he had never seen but had to envision in that moment for its own sake.
'Brother,' said a voice.
It was the old man sitting across from him. He had asked Papu earlier to consider some items, some things he had with him in a cloth bundle.
Papu said he wanted nothing from the man.
'Oh,' said the man, as if hearing it for the first time. 'Oh, I see.'
The train went on shuddering on its tracks. Papu closed his eyes again. And again the man disturbed him, until Papu, unable in that crowded train to change his seat, had to sit with his eyes wide open, his face turned resolutely to the window and his ears unresponsive to the man's increasingly maudlin appeals.
Zakia said, 'Didn't it get any better?'
And Mabi said, 'It didn't.' She knew because she had been with Papu on those trains. She said that in Karachi they had had to sleep in camps...

Oh, so Papu took Mabi along on those trains, did he? But shouldn't we know this from Papu's experience of the train journey, instead of it being tacked on at the end almost as an afterthought? In fact, wouldn't Papu's concern for his wife be central to his memory of those trains, as much as his foreboding about the city they are headed towards?

Unlike in non-fiction, in fiction we are not obliged to accept that something is real, or true, merely because it is asserted as fact, as it is here. Scenes like this demonstrate, by their negative example, that realism in fiction is not a matter of getting the details of history or of culture right, and expecting that one's characters will live and breathe because thrown into this recovered world that is "true". Fiction, too, is a more difficult god than Sethi seems to allow for. Although we are told that Mabi has gone on this journey with Papu, her presence is so anachronistic that for all practical purposes she never leaves home.

And, while on the subject of "increasingly maudlin appeals" that annoy the auditor, here is another passage— one might think of it as the title scene of the novel:

'Samar Api,' I said one night, 'do you think [Mother] doesn't want to get married because of me?
We were lying in wicker beds on the roof. It was August, the last month of the monsoon. All day the rain had been slashing and insistent; trees swayed and fell and lay like logs in the roads, which were swamped. The overhead wires had snapped; there was no electricity in the neighbourhood and the house was dark.
On the roof the night was clear. The clouds had left the moon in light.
'Not at all,' said Samar Api. 'She doesn't do it because she doesn't want to. There's nothing like your first love.' She closed her eyes and released a sigh. It merged with the breeze.
'Samar Api?'
She moaned.
'Make a wish.'
She cupped her hands, brought them to her mouth and whispered the wish, which was chosen without deliberation, without hesitation, then blew it away and watched as it went up into the night.

From sighs that merge with the breeze and wishes that are watched as they go up into the night, it is hard to beat this scene for exertion in making the invisible visible, and for turning yearning into bathos.

Although original and complex fiction in English about Pakistan is being written currently by writers as diverse as Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Aamer Hussein, Mohammed Hanif, Musharraf Ali Farooqui, Azhar Abidi, and Daniyal Mueenuddin, Sethi’s tutelary deity is clearly the Afghan émigré Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini's long and enthusiastic blurb on the back cover ("an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and an illuminating look at one of the world's most turbulent regions") sounds like just the thing Hosseini would want said about his own book The Kite Runner.

Indeed, the very title The Wish Maker seems to reach out towards the large global audience which delighted in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Sethi's writing and plot construction replicate many of Hosseini’s faults, though to my ear his prose has a slightly richer sound than Hosseini’s blundering and bathetic narrations. If this banal and almost willfully unsubtle work is really an example of “the new global novel”, then let us turn to our so-called local writers instead.

And two older essays: on Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

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

On Sankar's novel Jana Aranya (The Middleman)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An archive of my essays on Indian fiction is here.

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

On Alaa Al Aswany's Friendly Fire

Novelists might be usefully divided into idealists, who wish to see a better world even as they strive to faithfully portray the one that is, and realists, who interpret life in a harsher and more pessimistic way as if to say that nothing will ever change. The Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany is without doubt one of the latter. Aswany, who leapt into the consciousness of the Anglophone novelistic universe with the publication of a translation of his novel The Yacoubian Building in 2007, is a poet of the appetites and passions, of a moral universe that is corrupt and doesn’t mind it. Some readers have declared him a heir to Naguib Mahfouz for his panoramic narratorial vision and interest in low-life stories, but the resemblance is really one of structure and not of spirit. Aswany is very much an original.

Friendly Fire, comprising a novella and a bunch of stories, is Aswamy’s latest attempt to copy Egyptian life out into a set of highly charged and coloured fictions. Since both his earlier novels, The Yacoubian Building and Chicago, spun around the lives of a dozen or so characters at the same time, one might argue that Aswany is basically a writer of short stories anyway: his interest is in character sketches that will build up into a portrait of an entire world. As with the earlier books, Friendly Fire too is about the brazen and self-seeking behaviour of those “well versed in the uses of power” and the powerless ones who feel the lash of their whips. Indian readers will find there is much that is familiar in Aswany’s portraits of politicans, heads of university departments, bureaucrats, and doctors, happily feathering their nests and tripping up the lives of others even as they hypocritically mouth prayers and pieties.

The trick in Aswamy’s method, though, is in never criticising overtly, but in only showing us the world as it is. In this way, without moralising, he both revels in ugliness and yet succeeds in making us feel guilty on behalf of those characters who find out, to their shock and despair, that “it is by evil laws that the world is governed.” This is the difference between him and someone like Aravind Adiga in Between The Assassinations, which is also a good book but sometimes reveals the writer’s interpretative pressure upon the material too much.

Aswany is a scourge not just of power and hierarchy, but also of religion. In one story, “The Kitchen Boy”, he shows us an outstanding young doctor, Hisham, reduced to the status of kitchen attendant by his seniors so that he may suffer the same indignities that they did during their induction. Hisham’s troubles are all of man’s fashioning: they are the consequence of the crookedness, callousness, and spite within society. Yet when he confides his troubles to his mother, she suggests that he perform daily a religious ritual that will ease his woes, and Hisham reluctantly agrees. Religion, in Aswany’s reading, is often like putting a blindfold over one’s eyes; it may be a refuge from injustice, but it also allows injustice to continue. Aswany’s narrations often feature quotations from the Quran that are used ironically, such as when a man is trying to smuggle some goods through customs and begins reciting the verse about “covering their eyes so they do not see.”

The other distinctive feature of Aswany’s writing is its frank sensuality, its love of pleasures both free and forbidden. “I drank of beauty until my thirst was quenched,” declares one of his protagonists, while another holds that “joy was a wild beast with vulgar features, an implacable urge lurking within everyone and everything in creation.” Such is the force of our instincts that they often overpower all propriety and reason, as when a man slips out of his father’s funeral ceremony to return to eating a dish of beans he had left behind when the news of the death came in.

And two old essays on Aswany: on The Yacoubian Building and Chicago.

[This essay first appeared in Mint.]

Reading in Kolkata postponed to the 20th

Just a little note to say that because of the proposed Kolkata bandh tomorrow, my reading at Oxford Bookstore, Park Street, has been postponed to 7pm on Monday the 20th of July. I did know that I couldn't get through a week of events in Kolkata without a bandh popping in somewhere! Best to get it out of the way at the beginning and hope there's not another one before I leave.

Also, I'd like to remind you that if you wish to come for my lecture on writing at the British Council Library Kolkata on Friday the 24th, and are not a library member, then please write to me to confirm your participation, and I'll pass this on to the management.

Meanwhile, I just saw myself on Youtube for the first time: some clips of my Delhi reading courtesy Mint. Although my world is primarily verbal and not visual, I have to say I enjoyed this – and why wouldn't I, given how much time I spent wondering which colour shirt to wear?

Arzee the Dwarf: readings and events in Kolkata and Kharagpur

I'm on my way to Kolkata tomorrow, to read from Arzee the Dwarf when I am not eating and drinking at the dozen haunts I already have in mind. Listed below, for the convenience of all the readers of The Middle Stage in Bengal, are the details of the four events I'll be having in Kolkata and Kharagpur over the next two weeks.

At 7pm on Friday, July 17, I'll be reading from Arzee and be in conversation with the singer, writer and and translator Anjum Katyal at Oxford Bookstore, Park Street, Kolkata. The Facebook page for this event is here.

At 5pm on Wednesday, July 22, I'm reading along with the novelist Rimi Chatterjee at Worldview Bookstore, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. I have heard a lot about the range and riches of this bookshop, and I'm going to be there well before time so that I have an hour or two to go through its shelves.

At 5pm on Thursday, July 23, I'm reading from Arzee with the writer Saikat Chakraborty at IIT, Kharagpur.

And at 6.30 pm on Friday, July 24, I'm giving a lecture on literature, and on the things one learns or forgets while writing a novel, at the British Council Kolkata. If you are not a member of the British Council Library, then you'll need to write to me to say that you're coming.

Come to one or all of these readings and talks!

Reading from Arzee the Dwarf in Delhi, and in love with Delhi

I'd like to invite all the readers of The Middle Stage in Delhi to the launch of Arzee the Dwarf this Friday, the 10th of July, at 7pm in Conference Room No. 3, India International Center Annexe, Lodhi Road, New Delhi - 110003.

Although Arzee the Dwarf is set entirely in Bombay and was written entirely in Bombay, Delhi, which is never mentioned in the book, is actually very important to it. I think my English literature degree at Delhi University ten years ago instilled in me the ambition and some of the intellectual resources to make a life in literature. Further, most of my closest friends in the world live in Delhi, so to this day many of the ideas that I dream down west are sounded out and ratified up north.

Like anyone who has been to come to maturation in a particular place, I can never think of Delhi without memories and associations of friendship, love, food, the world opening out, of ideas sparking in the brain. The first two women I fell in love with in some enduring and life-changing way were both from Delhi, and for a long time in my twenties I harboured the unreasonable belief that only Delhi girls had what it took to be good companions, and kept trying to move from Bombay without much success. Over the three years of writing Arzee it was my friends in Delhi who for the most part read and commented on draft versions, and sent me back again and again to my work table (I don't claim therefore that it is perfect now).

Even now, when I go back to Delhi every two or three months on week-long trips, I find myself feeling absolutely relaxed and happy in a way I'm not in Bombay. C-block Kalkaji is for me the place that I love best on earth because of all the memories I have there, and the fresh ones I generate each time I go back to live with my best friends in the world.

So as you can see, I think in a practical way about Bombay, and in a romantic way about Delhi; in a way, behind the green Bombay sky on the cover of Arzee lies hidden Delhi's blue firmament. In my years in Bombay I've been moving house further north each time, and I entertain the fantasy that there will come a day in my life when the Western line will have extended northwards to such an extent that I can speed past Virar and get off instead at Nizamuddin, see all my friends, and be back in time for work the next morning.

So it gives me great pleasure to return to the city where the life that I have today really began, and to read to an audience that includes many of my friends, some fellow writers and tradespeople, and most of my intellectual mentors (who must not, however, be blamed for my many excesses and shortcomings).

The Facebook page for the event is here, so if you have an account please sign up. I will be in conversation with the novelist Omair Ahmad.

And here are two old posts about my years in Delhi: "Memories of a Borges book, and the old Twentieth Century bookshop" and "A Harold Pinter story".

See you soon!

On Mridula Koshy's If It Is Sweet

In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as swiftly and dramatically as in Kafka’s story. Instead, we are made to wait. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.

The initial surprise and disbelief of this is quickly overwhelmed by the radiance of Koshy’s imagining. The monkey, we are told, was bought off the street by the widow (“Maji”) and rescued from a life of captivity, cheap stunts, and hunger. In return, he brings all his skills to bear on improving Maji’s stuttering life. The natural alliance of human and simian lives and needs imagined by Koshy (“His tendency to groom found great satisfaction in her tangled morning hair”) is very endearing. By the time the monkey takes Maji, at the close of the story, back to the old house in Bhutan where he used to live, and we see his tail curl “to lovingly lift the latch of the house gate”, we are totally won over. The companion echoes the tender love and fidelity of that most devoted of companions in our literature, Hanuman.

Indeed, Koshy’s stories are full of large and small acts of caring – of a sense of duty that does not go away even when the object of that duty is no longer present. In one of the best of these stories, “The Good Mother”, we see a woman returning to Delhi from Manchester after the death of her two young sons in a car accident. She carries with her their ashes, to be dispersed in holy waters, but finds herself unable to release them when the occasion arrives. Finally, in a little apartment in Delhi, the claustrophobia of which Koshy evokes with a set of precise details, she brings herself to let the remains go. “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips,” writes Koshy, leaving us to imagine the horror of swallowing a particle of a life birthed by the very body that now ingests it.

Koshy, who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in America for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again, has said that she was “a trade unionist before she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer.” These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers – construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids – living quietly in the interstices of a thriving South Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover.” There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details. The protagonist of “The Good Mother” hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people.” Walking through a construction site, the boy protagonist of "P.O.P" sees a worker "reach the end of his plank-walk to throw the cement with a motion so precise he is convinced again that this work is easy because each of its parts are minute, and only the whole must hurt."

At the same time, these stories cumulatively offer a rich portrait of mothering: of the fulfilment of being a parent, but at the same time its many annoyances and curtailments. Indeed – and this is true to Indian realities – the task of motherhood in Koshy’s work often falls to people other than parents. Several children in these stories are stand-in mothers to their younger siblings, and devise games and consolations to make a bleak reality appear warmer and more exciting. Here is a description of food as seen from the perspective of extreme hunger in "When the Child Was A Child":

That year, Emma remembers, they ate vindaloo pork patted into flour: soft fat thick on stringy meat, and the rind of each piece that started out tough between her teeth crackling to release oil so rich she wanted nothing more than to live in her mouth. There was a dry preparation of beef, fried dark, to which slivers of coconut clung; and chicken in creamy gravy with bones good for crunching open and sucking the marrow from, till the sharp breaks in the crenulations within grated fine the surface of her greedy tongue.

In Koshy's stories, food and family are often conjoined; the same story has a Dickensian scene in which the long-absent father returns...

...from far away where he had been living in a place called a Correctional Facility, which [Emma] knew from the enemies at school was also the place called Jail. He came home that day with boxes of Twinkies and Dingdongs, and a lap into which he pulled the children's mother. The children, exultant and uncomfortable, ringed the tussling parents, and in the mirror Emma observed the great satisfaction of the whole.

Emma remembers it as the year they ate fish every night.

As these passages show, Koshy’s is a prose that does not surrender its shape or meanings easily. Sometimes her narration can seem as willfully dense and tangled as the forest to which Koshy's characters often retreat for a moment of peace or rest. But this is Koshy's method, her quiddity as a storyteller. If there is a criticism to be made of these stories, it is that they can be too one-paced: they sometimes lack that turn of speed, that change of register, that would balance out their heavy beauty, the careful accretion of details like a bird seen on a tree by a child, perched “not on a branch, but actually on a leaf”, or a character who vomits out "chunks of tomato and marvellously intact lengths of noodle." Even so this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place.

[A shorter version of this essay first appeared in Mint]

Reading with Naseer

Few experiences in my life have given me a greater thrill than that of reading with Naseeruddin Shah at the launch of Arzee the Dwarf last week. My own reading skills - reading-aloud skills, I should say - are modest, and therefore I was more than happy to let Naseer take up the gauntlet of interpreting Arzee sonically. Here we are in this photograph reading, leaning in different directions like neighbour trees riven by a stiff wind. And here is some footage (1, 2) of Naseer reading from the book. Besides Naseer, the other protagonists of this video are Arzee and my knobbly knee at bottom left.

I will be back with new essays on books on Wednesday, when I get home from my travels. I am also going to be reading in Delhi (on July 10) and Kolkata (July 17) next month.

Arzee the Dwarf readings: Bombay, Pune, Chennai and Bangalore

I'm very pleased to share with you the news that Arzee the Dwarf is now out. I received my own copy on Saturday, and was delighted with how it looks – and, for all that I was prepared, also a bit surprised by how different a story seems when it happens on a page in a book rather than on a sheet of manuscript.

Some of you have written to say you can't find it in the shops yet: it may take another three or four days to arrive. This Friday (the 19th) I'm going to be reading from it along with the actor Naseeruddin Shah in Bombay at Crossword, Kemp's Corner, so if you live in Bombay, please try and come. But perhaps I am repeating myself here – I may already have accosted you at the big mango bazaar near the Varad Shankar temple in Borivali West, or on the bridge above Marine Lines station, or at the traffic jam that's always there at Pump House in Andheri, and made you accept an invite.

Here the details of all the readings planned for June:

Mumbai: Crossword Bookstore, Friday June 19, 7pm.
Kemp's Corner, Mumbai-400026.
Facebook page here.

Pune: Crossword Bookstore, Saturday June 20, 6.30 pm.
ICC Trade Towers, Senapati Bapat Road, Pune 411016. Tel: 66033050.
Facebook page here.

Chennai: Odyssey Bookstore, Thursday June 25, 6.30 pm.
45-46, 1st Main Road, Gandhi Nagar, Adyar, Chennai-600020. Tel: 044-24402264.
Facebook page here.

Bangalore: Odyssey Bookstore, Friday June 26, 6.30 pm.
757, 100 Feet Road, Indira Nagar, Bangalore-560038. Tel: 080-42115341.
Facebook page here.

I will be reading in Delhi and Kolkata in July.

Also, you will forgive me if much of what is posted here over the next month has to do with my own book, and not all the books by other writers and from across time and across genres that you're used to seeing here. Normal service will resume very soon.

An excerpt from Arzee the Dwarf is here. I hope to see you somewhere in the country over the next month.

Kafka vs Kafka

The correspondence of writers and artists is often a neglected part of their oeuvre, thought to be of interest only to scholars and specialists. But in truth the letters of a writer or thinker can often supply a more lucid illustration of his or her life and work, and the relationship between the two, than most biographies can. Sometimes the letters themselves can approach the depth, complexity, and tension of great art. Dearest Father – the text of a letter written by Franz Kafka to his father Hermann in 1919, a few years before Franz’s death – is one such work.
 
It is already known that Kafka is one of the most complicated, inscrutable, and tortured spirits of world literature. In Dearest Father we find Franz himself attempting to provide a full account of how he came to be so. In Franz’s view, from his childhood onwards it was his father’s arrogance, abrasiveness, and contempt that stymied his progress at every turn. His long letter might be imagined as a set of concentric circles, evoking the particularities of Kafka’s relationship with his father, then the general nature of childhood and parenthood, and finally human nature itself.
One of the letter’s attractions is the way in which the son’s sufferings are not only described in great detail, but actually become manifest through the very style of Kafka’s prose, through the contortions of his sentences. “Dearest Father,” the letter begins, “You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, how to answer, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you...” We learn that Kafka always stutters and fumbles when trying to hold his own against his father, which is why he has chosen to express his thoughts in writing.
Moving from one incident to another, one feeling to another, the 36-year-old son – sickly, self-conscious, indecisive, in stark contrast to his vigorous, self-assured, and authoritarian father – explains how the older man’s behaviour “damaged me on the inside.” Although Hermann rarely ever beat his children, his constant threats of corporal punishment reduced the child Franz to a state of submission and abjectness. Later, the older man sought to fashion the younger after his own image by force, not realising that he was cut from totally different cloth. Whenever Franz took some initiative, his father’s contempt was absolute; when Franz made friends, his father made disparaging comments about them (“He who sleeps with dogs wakes up with fleas”). Finally, and most disastrously of all, when the son sought his independence and escape by deciding to marry, Hermann reduced him to a wreck by implying that he had foolishly succumbed to the wiles of a low woman. The father's actions had the effect of driving the son into a sort of psychological cave. In a memorable metaphor expressing how family, which is what prepares the self for the world, can also come between the self and the world, Kafka writes:

Hence there were for me three worlds, one where I lived, a slave under laws that had been invented solely for me and, moreover, with which I could never fully comply (I did not know why), then another world, infinitely distant from mine, in which you dwelt, busy with ruling, issuing orders and being angry when they were not obeyed, and finally, a third realm where everybody else lived happily, free from orders and obligation. I was forever in disgrace, either I obeyed your orders, which was a disgrace for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, that was also a disgrace, for how dare I presume to defy you, or my reason for failing to obey was that I lacked, for example, your strength, your appetite, your aptitude, although you expected it of me as a matter of course; that was, in fact, the greatest disgrace of all.

“I was no real match for you, you soon disposed of me; all that then remained was escape, bitterness, grief, inner struggle,” writes Kafka. The general tone of Dearest Father is one of a helpless flailing in the face of a remote and unshakable power that recalls the exact existential condition of the protagonists of Kafka’s novels, such as Josef K. in The Castle. Indeed, at one point Kafka confesses: “My writing was about you, all I did there was to lament what I could not lament on your shoulder.” But if we are left convinced about the atrocities half-consciously perpetrated by Hermann, we see no less clearly the extreme fragility and anxiety of Franz, a condition that turns all the colours of the world into grey. The letter becomes all the more tragic and moving for the few moments of happiness that it records:

Fortunately there were some exceptions to this, mostly when you suffered in silence, and your love and goodness joined forces to succeed in moving me, in spite of all the obstacles. This was admittedly rare, but it was wonderful. For instance whenever I saw you exhausted and nodding off in the shop on hot summer afternoons, elbows on the desk, or on Sundays when you came running to us breathless in the fresh summery weather; or once when Mother was seriously ill and I witnessed you shaking with tears, steadying yourself by the bookcase; or the last time I was ill and you came silently to me in Ottla's room, standing in the doorway and merely peering round to see me in bed, acknowledging me with a single considerate gesture of your hand. At times like this I lay back and cried with happiness, and I am crying again now as I write these lines.

In closing, Kafka suggests to his father that although the problems between them are too many and too basic to be eradicated, his attempt to make a record of their relationship for their mutual perusal “might comfort us both a little and make it easier for us to live and to die.” So we naturally want to know how the letter was received by Hermann. But the most striking fact about the letter was that it was never sent. Perhaps the same fear and guilt exhibited by Kafka in the letter prevented him from delivering it to his father. He left the typewritten letter behind in a bundle of manuscripts at the time of his death, asking his friend Max Brod to burn them all. So it is the reader today who has become the letter’s real recipient, and it is upto us to imagine a rapprochement, and a new understanding between father and son that might have been but never was.

An excerpt from Dearest Father can be found here on the website of the publishers, Oneworld Classics, who are devoted exclusively to publishing new editions and translations of classics from European and world literature (two other recent publications of theirs that I'd like to read very much are Dante's Rime and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Last year the novelist Justin Cartwright composed an imaginary reply to his son's letter by Hermann Kafka, which can be found here (Franz himself imagines his father's response in Dearest Father).

And here are some essays on Kafka, including several by contemporary novelists: "F. Kafka, Everyman" by Zadie Smith; "Before The Law" by Louis Begley; "The Human Stain" by John Banville ("The question has been asked: Was Franz Kafka human? He seems to have had doubts himself."); "Double Thought" by Michael Wood; "The Figure in the Castle" by Jonathan Lethem ("Kafka's the greatest writer, by a long shot, whom you can polish off in two or three weeks' reading"); "On The Castle and its translations" by Eric Ormsby; and lastly, "At Home With the Kafkas", an excerpt from Reiner Stach's 2005 biography.

Some things I've been reading: Gilead, Kulkarni, Nemser, Kirsch, Merrill, and Neuhaus

Some things I've been reading recently (Warning: to follow me to all these places will require plenty of spare or work time on your part):

Amihud Gilead's essay "How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have?", which persuasively makes the case that Ernest Hemingway's untitled six-word story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." beats all the competition for the most complex and satisfying short short story ever written.

Two essays about the dismal performance of the BJP in the recent national elections, one by a perceptive outsider, Vir Sanghvi, called "What Is The BJP all about today?", the other a very detailed piece by an insider, Sudheendra Kulkarni, called "Hindu Divided Family".

Two excellent essays on poetry in translation (1, 2): one by Alexander Nemser on Vladimir Nabokov's stilted translations of the major Russian poets Verses and Versions ("Nabokov's versions have the paradoxical consequence of revealing how subjective even a literal translation is. [H]is baffling diction and his commitment to warped syntax produce an effect more of singularity than of accuracy. Literal translation, like any other kind, is asymptotic: it is always approaching the solution but never reaching it. And the gap between the original and the new version can be filled in only subjectively, depending on one's aesthetic sense of what to keep and what to give up. Beyond a certain level of rudimentary meaning, there is no proof in translation, there is only persuasion...")

and the other by Adam Kirsch on David Hinton's Classical Chinese Poetry ("No translator of Chinese verse attempts to follow the original in meter or rhyme, for the simple reason that, if such fidelity is difficult even in translating a kindred language such as French or German, it is utterly impossible when dealing with a language like Chinese. That is why it is so appropriate that Pound, who knew no Chinese, should be the inventor of Chinese poetry in English. When reading English versions of Chinese poems, we are getting as close as the conditions of our knowledge will allow, but no closer--we are reading the phenomenon, while the noumenon, the lyrical thing-in-itself, remains always out of reach.")

"What Is A Translator's True Calling", an essay by Christi Merrill on the stories of the Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha ("At the beginning of his writing career, Detha told me, he unabashedly thought of himself as a folklorist, and made it his life mission to put into print the exceedingly varied and vibrant oral tales he grew up hearing in his native rural Rajasthan. And while he didn't state this directly, he made me understand that he began to feel frustrated with the unspoken mandate to copy down the tales exactly as he heard them. So he began to make changes — as would any storyteller in the oral tradition, I would argue — to bring out the full effect of each story. When I met him in 1988, he had already published fourteen fat volumes of tales written in Rajasthani as part of a series called Batan ri Phulwari (A Garden of Tales), and counted as his influences Russian fabulist and playwright Anton Chekhov (in Hindi translation), Hindi Progressive realist short story writer and novelist Premchand, and the German folklorist brothers Grimm (in English translation)...His work, like mine, was a different kind of translation, more in the spirit of the Hindi word anuvad, which conveys instead a 'telling in turn.' ") Merrill's translation of Detha's "translations" are forthcoming from Katha Books, and she is also the author of the recent study Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession.

Geoffrey O'Brien on Douglas Sirk's 1954 film Magnificent Obsessions, which cites this brilliant observation from Sirk: “The angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.” This is one of hundreds of essays film scholars on the Criterion website; just search for your own favourite movies and then settle down with a nice drink to read what you've collected.

And lastly, "A Curious Encounter with a Philosopher from Nowhere", an account by the Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus of a debate he had with the philosopher Peter Singer. Neuhaus, who passed away in January this year, was the editor of the journal First Things, which I came to during a particularly fruitful period in my reading seven or so years ago. The declared purpose of First Things was "to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society", and from it I, then a student with a typically dismissive view of religious faith, learnt many good things about what religion is and the place that religious belief has in a serious consideration of the world. This essay is part of one of Neuhaus's celebrated monthly columns, "The Public Square", and even if you were not to agree with Neuhaus's worldview, I'd say there is much to think about in his declaration that "I hope always to be religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal, and economically pragmatic."

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!