On Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

“In this game of love, women have immense power...much more power than we do,” writes the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano, whose works often depict couples netted by one another, oblivious to the world. “They can really tie us up in knots. We’re animals by comparison.” It is a long stretch from Vettriano’s coolly erotic portraits of beautifully dressed (or undressed) men and women, bright in their own power, to the lawless longing, veiled wooing, insecure dependency, and difficult mingling of unequal partners in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s startling debut story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. But the root feeling is the same. Many of the best moments in Muenuddin’s book involve men who are “wholly masculine” – that is, secure in their place and role in a man’s world, confident that they know what life is – being humbled by a power that disarms their own strength, being surprised by eros or by an emotion that they fear is love. Two of the eight stories in Mueenuddin’s book take their titles from the names of their female protagonists, and at least two more could have.

Mueenuddin’s linked stories – this has now become a convention in short fiction, but in this one instance the material demands it, for the characters are part of an ancient and elaborate hierarchy – wind their way leisurely through the great Lahore house and even bigger country estate of KK Harouni. A pillar of Pakistan’s old feudal order, Harouni rules over a world “as measured and as concentric as that of the Sun King at Versailles”. But Harouni is now aged and enfeebled. Unable to watch over his holdings with the same care of old, he is squeezed of his riches by his extended family of servants, retainers, managers, and workers (many of whom figure as characters in their own right, and are therefore granted a higher status in Mueenuddin’s construct than that of their master, who only cares for them insofar as they contribute to his comfort and standing).

But Mueenuddin’s stories are fascinating not only for what is present in them – the beautifully relaxed, wheeling exposition that recalls the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, the love of the natural world expressed in ripples of memorable language, the dramatisation of the jagged route that human beings take towards understanding themselves and others – but also for what is absent, which is a criticism of the feudal order through which these stories wander. His gaze is curious but uncritical; he sees the world as his characters, who mostly accept the rules of the game, see it; it is as if the world can only be this way. His interest, in fact, is in those individuals who are secretly ambitious in a world where everybody is expected to know their place; his gaze halts upon those who want to rise, and those who can raise.

In the story “Provide, Provide”, Harouni’s elderly and opportunistic estate manager Jaglani, who has long been appropriating his master’s property, takes as his mistress a married woman, Zainab. Zainab gives him whatever he asks for by way of service and bodily pleasure, but stoically, as if performing a duty. When she says she must return to her husband, Jaglani impulsively decides to marry her, although he has a family and children. Shrewdly tracking his thoughts, Mueenuddin tells us that Jaglani feels he is so powerful that “now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice”. Jaglani’s marriage brings him pleasure and pain in equal measure; he finds that “although he had made a career of fearing no one”, he fears his wife, and “yet his love kept increasing.” It is only later, when the deed has been done and its consequences have taken hold both in his home and in his mind, that Jaglani begins to regret his actions. Now he cannot even go back to the estate, which he loves, without being reminded of his folly. Here is a paragraph from Mueenuddin:

Yet Dunyapur has been spoiled for him by the presence of Zainab. He minded very much that he had given his sons a stepmother of that class, a servant woman. He minded that he had insulted his first wife in that way, by marrying again, by marrying a servant, and then by keeping the marriage a secret. His senior wife had never reproached him, but after Jaglani told her she quickly became old. She prayed a great deal, spent much of her time in bed, stopped caring for herself. Her body became rounded like a hoop, not fat but fleshed uniformly all over, a body thrown away, throwing itself away, the old woman sitting all day in bed, dreaming, muttering perhaps when left alone. He reproached himself for taking his eldest son’s daughter and giving her to Zainab, transplanting the little girl onto such different stock. Secretly, and most bitterly, he blamed himself for having been so weak as to love a woman who had never loved him. He made an idol of her, lavished himself upon her sexual body, gave himself to a woman who never gave back, except in the most practical terms. She blotted the cleanliness of his life trajectory, which he had always before believed in. She represented the culmination of his ascendance, the reward of his virtue and striving, and showed him how little it had all been, his life and his ambitions. All of it he had thrown away, his manliness and strength, for a pair of legs that grasped his waist and a pair of eyes that pierced him and that yet had at bottom the deadness of foil.

Among the many satisfactions of this passage is the way in which the pleasure of the thought – a kind of Macbethian regret at an expensive dream gone sour – is both paralleled and improved, the two linking hands as prose writing of a high order almost always does, by the acuity of Mueenuddin’s syntax. It is worth thinking about the impact of phrases which effect small, rueful inversions like “how little it had all been, his life and his ambitions” and then, immediately after, the similar, “All of it he had thrown away, his manliness and strength”. And also the sentence: “Her body became rounded like a hoop, not fat but fleshed uniformly all over, a body thrown away, throwing itself away, the old woman sitting all day in bed, dreaming, muttering perhaps when left alone.”

This observation is an example of a very characteristic and striking register of Mueenuddin’s prose, which is a sentence that seems about to close, to expire, until it suddenly takes a new breath and then runs on strongly again, as if it has seen something new late in the day (here the anticipated close might be “a body thrown away”, and the revival “throwing itself away”, which both changes the tense and, through repetition, better indicates the effect of continuous stress this is having on Jaglani’s mind). Her is another example of this kind of sentence, from the story “Lily”: “It wearied her that this memory came now as she turned and stood, appraising Murad’s clothes, loafers with unfortunate tassels, pressed jeans, white shirt tucked in – resembling somehow an army officer out of uniform, the effect touching to her, sincere, a gentleman calling on a lady.”

“Provide, Provide” works itself through to an exceptional conclusion that features neither of the principal characters, thereby greatly enhancing its beauty and strangeness (a strangeness seen again in “Nawabdin Electrician”, a story about a man shot by a thief, and who lies on the road thinking he is going to die, remembering, of all things, “the smell of frying fish”). In his attention to the minds of Zainab and Jaglani, or that of Husna, the impoverished distant relation who, in the title story, infiltrates the household and then the affections of Harouni himself, Mueenuddin serves up a series of masterful character studies set into the massive edifice of Harouni’s world.

In keeping with the need for economic security or love of luxury revealed by so many of his protagonists, Mueenuddin’s writing has a heavy, beguiling materiality. “The hard blue sky stood enormously tall over Paris,” he writes at one point, throwing us right into the scene with that unusual adjective “tall”, which is a tautology – what else could the sky be other than high, or tall? – and is yet expressive, here, a sense of freedom and possibility being experienced by the narrator. Describing Nawabdin’s prowess with tampering with electrical meters, Mueenuddin offers this bouquet of explanations: “Some thought he used magnets, others said heavy oil or porcelain chips or a substance he found in beehives.” When Husna begins to live with KK Harouni, she hoards a secret stash of goods in “two locked steel trunks, which she filled with everything from raw silk to electric sandwich makers.” A couple make love in a small hotel in the French countryside: “The loose bedsprings made long rusty sounds, like a knife leisurely sharpened on a whetstone.”

In Mueenuddin’s hands the material realm often seems to take off, almost become ethereal: “Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tubewell needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.” It might be said that many of his characters, too, seem to be flapping “small vestigial wings” when they accrue for themselves some precious good. Some works of fiction, by their excellence of craftsmanship, singularity of worldview, and richness and precision of language, announce themselves instantly as classics, and this book of many wonders is one such.

And some other essays on short-story writers: Jhumpa Lahiri, Samrat Upadhyay, Etgar Keret, Houshang Moradi-Kermani, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Parashuram, Jahnavi Barua, Aravind Adiga, Kunal Basu, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Manjushree Thapa, and Nalini Jones.

At the Sun Temple of Modhera

This essay appeared in the January issue of Outlook Traveller, and on the site, where you may prefer reading it, it is improved by the excellent photographs of Kedar Bhat. The photographs here are by my friend Mayur Ankolekar, whose fluent Gujarati also proved very useful on the trip.

Surya, the sun: the source of light, life, time, its daily round the oldest story of our aging planet. At the Surya Mandir at Modhera in Gujarat, a hundred kilometres north-west of Ahmedabad, the sun has for nearly a thousand years risen over, and flooded the arches and friezes of, a monument built as a kind of rest-house, if not home, for it on earth. The Rig Veda, a text drunken with the sun’s gifts and glories, extols the sun’s eye at dawn as the force that “reveals creation”. On a wintry December morning in Modhera the rising sun not only reveals the world – the sleepy village with its jumble of nondescript houses, the fields and a placid lake part-covered by lotus leaves on which long-legged birds stand still in meditation, a tourist bus disgorging a platoon of chattering schoolboys – but also completes it, as it enters with slowly advancing strides the monument expressly constructed with the arc of its journey in mind.

The idol of Surya inside the garbhagriha, or sanctum sanctorum, of the Modhera temple is long gone, plundered by Mahmud of Ghazni on one of his many raids on northern and western India in the eleventh century CE. The temple’s spire, or sikhara, too is broken. But to completely destroy the temple’s heliocentric spirit, Mahmud would have had to have possessed the power to throw the sun itself off its course. Twice every year, on the days of the March and the September equinox, the rays of the rising sun glide over the Suraj Kund (the deep tank that forms the first of the temple’s three distinct but axially aligned features), pass through the arches of the music-hall or Ranga Mandap (pictured above), pierce the entrance to the main chamber or Guda Mandap, and illuminate the sanctum, where the idol once stood. The spectacle has disappeared, but the thought – of the sun bringing its own image to life on a pre-appointed day as if keeping a vow, of the trajectory of a distant star and that of human intelligence and devotion meeting in a kind of architectural handshake, of a sense (even if fabricated) of concord between the earthly and the celestial realms – thrills the mind yet.

On this morning, as the caretaker unlocks the door of the Guda Mandap for the schoolboys and us, the sun – “red as the cheek of an angry ape”, as the eighth-century Sanskrit poet Yogeshvara puts it – is rising south-east of the structure’s welcoming arches, and its rays enter the temple at an angle. We are not the first to enter the temple, although this was our aim; as soon as the door is unlocked three pigeons, as if awaiting this moment from dawn onwards, hasten above our heads into the murky interior. Inside, the sanctum is locked and remains so always, as if hiding the absence at its heart. To one side, another locked crevice, this one leading downwards, is apparently the opening of a tunnel built as an escape route. The caretaker insists that it goes all the way to nearby Patan, the capital of King Bhimdev of the Solanki dynasty (also called the Suryavanshis or sun-worshippers) who built the temple in 1026 CE. Circling the sanctum, we come across the temple’s most permanent residents: rows of small black bats (or kankadiyas, as the schoolboys call them) ghoulishly suspended upside-down from the ceiling, waiting for the day to run its course before they emerge.

I circle the temple from the outside, where the sun is bringing to life cascading bands of ornamental friezes. Under the gaze of the chipped figures carved onto the temple walls, from the repeated one of Surya on his chariot of seven horses to scenes of sexual congress and childbirth, long-legged peacocks sprint across the temple grounds as if escaping after a heist, and squirrels, sparrows, and pigeons nibble shoulder to wing at titbits amidst columns of worked stone that must have once been part of the monument. No rites are now performed at the desolate garbhagriha; the daily round of flowers, incense, and fire is now performed at a small Shiv temple, no bigger than a shed, north of the main structure. The most attractive feature of this little outpost is a stone image of bright-eyed Ganesha at the entrance, with his trunk curling, unusually, to the right. I move on to the ornate pavilion of the Ranga Mandap, smaller but taller than the adjoining temple, its niched facade hosting a profusion of sculpted figures depicting scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mandap can be entered from all four directions through symmetrical arches or toranas, and the east-facing one leads down to what today is the site’s most enticing feature, the great Surya Kund or water-tank.

The tank has two attributes that break up, and fruitfully complicate, what would otherwise be the monotony of steps leading into a pit. One, a number of small shrines, each holding the image of a deity, are built onto the steps on all four sides, giving the tank the air of a self-contained universe. The most striking of these shrines is an enclosure on the east side showing Vishnu reclining on his sesh naga or coiled serpent, surrounded by other forms. And two, the visitor makes the journey down to the water not so much from step to step but from terrace to terrace, which are linked together by steps that cut away to left and right so as to make series of triangles between each terrace.

The visitor takes a slow, zig-zag path into the tank, as if walking through a maze; what might be a simple sequence of parallel lines is turned into a set of complex geometric forms that emanate an autonomous allure and mystery within the larger design. The steps and shrines are reflected and doubled in the water below, thick and green as spinach soup. And as one goes down, following the rising sun as it burrows deeper and deeper into the pit and its stonework, the looming Sabha Mandap itself seems to gain in size and stature; the tank elevates and aggrandizes what is otherwise a hall of modest size. To sit by the porch of a shrine halfway down the tank graven with figures from divinity, watching the water break into little circles below and the shadows of flying pigeons dart across the dome of the Ranga Mandap above, is to enter a realm of marvellous stillness and beatitude, to find oneself at the centre of a framed and concentrated view of the world like that in a painting. At the lowest level, a number of stone slabs jut out above the water, and in better days must have made for a convenient point for drawing up water in pots or studying one’s reflection. Climbing up again to ground level, the visitor feels himself transformed from the one who went in. If our legislators met here rather than in parliament, might they not be a little more conscientious?

One might think of the tank as an appetiser for the other great architectural landmark in the vicinity, the Rani ka Bav or queen’s stepwell at Patan, less than an hour’s drive from Modhera. Stepwells are a common feature of the landscape of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and this one, built within a few decades of the Sun Temple, is among the most marvellous examples of the form.

Like the tank, the stepwell has a staggered descent, but it can only be entered from one side, the east; the other three sides run straight down at right angles to the ground and form the shaft of the well. Descending, I feel as if heaven and earth have exchanged places; I go past level after level of sharp-nosed, full-figured, deities reverentially captured in different poses, faces serene or half-smiling, eyes darting left and right, legs splayed or crossed, arms delicately outstretched or holding up weapons or musical instruments. Every wall, pillar, arch, or nook in the bav ripples with the agitation of faces and limbs suspended forever in stone, and as the day progresses the sun begins at the western face of the well and works its way downwards to light up this rapturous panorama level by level. Just as vividly as the gods have generated the forms and colours of this world, so too have humans in turn envisioned the life of the gods.

Two-thirds of the way down, at the point where the Archaeological Survey of India has barred further progress, one gazes through the aligned openings in a series of pavilions to see Vishnu on his sesh naga on the far wall of the well – as entrancing a darshan as any. The stepwell is surrounded by beautifully tended, rolling grasslands, and as the afternoon sunlight grew strong I lay down on the fragrant grass beneath a neem tree and drifted off into a blessed slumber.

GETTING THERE

Modhera is just over 100 km from Ahmedabad; Patan another 25 km. State transport buses link all three places, and private buses from Ahmedabad to Patan and back are available through the day (Rs.60). The closest railway station to Modhera is Mahesana, which is about 30 km away. A private cab from Mahesana to Modhera, Patan, and back costs about Rs.1000.

WHERE TO STAY

The Sahara Bridge hotel in Mahesana (02762-230823), ten minutes by auto-rickshaw from the station, offers comfortable rooms from Rs 1100-2000. Alternatively, stay at one of the hotels in Patan, of which the best seemed to be Hotel Surya (02766-232544), which has rooms from Rs.700-1200. Modhera itself has very little by way of lodging except for the very basic rooms at the Mata Modheshwari Temple, a few minutes from the Sun Temple (Rs.50-150).

WHAT TO DO

The Mata Modheshwari Temple is worth a visit at Modhera, although its lurid colours and exuberant foliage of plastic flowers veers towards the kitschy. Patan has a number of old temples worth exploring. The town also offers a range of great Gujarati snacking. I spent an entire evening sampling the street food, and in two hours ate my way through fafda (a crisp cracker made from gram flour, eaten dipped into kadhi), samosas with green chillies, jalebis, dabelis, and cholafali (another crispy snack eaten with green chutney and shredded green papaya). Having worked this off with a long walk and a visit to the local cinema to catch a fearsomely high-pitched and melodramatic Gujarati movie, I rounded off the evening with puris and potato curry or shak, and a big paper bag of dried dates and figs for dessert.

And an old travel piece from 2005: "Seven Views of Puri".

Things I've been reading, new books received, Badrinath on the Mahabharata, and Naissance

Some things I've been reading recently: Simon Schama's splendid essay on our need for art, "Unnatural Beauty" ("Art replaces seen reality rather than reproduces it"; "Art is life under new management - the management of picturing's resident conventions: coherence, harmony, tonal balance"), and, less sympathetically, Vijay Nair's recently published piece in the Hindu about India's three recent Booker Prize winners , "And the winner is...".

Nair argues that, given our colonial past, the fact of an Indian writer winning the Booker for a novel in English "qualifies as the ultimate act of subversion" ("English writers vie for the same prize and that makes the victory sweeter"). But back in India these writers encounter only the hostility and resentment of the press and of Indian readers, ostensibly because they portray harsh truths that we would not like to acknowledge.

Given that Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children won the Booker in 1981, inaugurating a new era for novels from the Indian subcontinent (particularly those in English), Nair's view of Indian literary accomplishment as it impacts the Western literary world is, to my mind, nearly three decades out of date. And even as his piece celebrates the subversion of the established Anglophone literary order, which is forced to concede one of its highest prizes to writers from former subject nations, it also ends up perpetuating the very categories that it enjoys seeing subverted, since, if for some reason these novels had not been awarded the Booker Prize, there would have been no reason to celebrate them as amongst our best books. While it is true that literature cannot be divorced from politics, this does not seem like a literary politics that can take one very far, or any closer towards making independent judgements.

I found it entirely characteristic of Nair's argument, then, that he allows for no literary reasons for Indian readers and critics not liking one or the other of these books, only political or personal ones. I thought Shashi Deshpande's rejoinder to Nair in the same newspaper last week, "Debating Spaces", a very clear and cogent response.

Also, I have been attending some very good events at the Kala Ghoda literary festival, and wanted to say that if you are at the festival any day between the 12th and the 14th of February, drop by at Nyela Saeed's exhibition of paintings Naissance, about which I'd posted a short text here in November (the show had to be cancelled then because of the terrorist attacks). The works are on view from 11 am to 6.30 pm at Kitab Mahal building (192, DN Road, 4th Floor, Fort, Mumbai-400001), which is just opposite Central Camera as you go down the road from CST station towards Flora Fountain. Art's deepest urge 'is to trap fugitive vision and passing sensation", writes Schama, and it seems to me that these paintings do just that.

Lastly, some great new books have turned up at my door in the last month from all over the world: Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (here is Badrinath's short essay "The Karma Conundrum", which quotes the sixth-century text the Yoga-vashishtha on the subject of fate, "There is no refuge other than the conquest of the mind") ; the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's classic novel A Mind At Peace (translated by Erdag Göknar, who is also the man behind the brilliant English translation of Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red); the Israeli novelist S.Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh (judgement on Yizhar's prose style is pending, but what a great hairstyle!); the Dalit writer Baby Kamble's autobiography The Prisons We Broke; and the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson's translation of three versions of the same story of vengeance by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, An Oresteia (some of Carson's translations of Sappho are here, with the original Greek text alongside).

I hope to be able to write about most of these in greater detail soon, but for now here is a paragraph from the introduction to Badrinath's book, on the relationship between truth and empathy:

[I]n bringing up the undeniable paradox that the personal can be understood in the light only of the impersonal, the Mahabharata does not ever disperse the individual, the person, into some grand philosophical abstraction. Truth does transcend the mere personal, but it does not for that reason become unfeeling. It is a gross insult to a human being to answer his, or her, dismay, outrage, unhappiness, suffering, by saying: 'but remember that life is transitory, a huge illusion, and so is your unhappiness and pain', or by delivering a discourse on the origins of suffering, or by talking of the wisdom of forgiveness and reconciliation always....Some of the women of the Mahabharata show how, when expressed without feeling, grand truths produce the greatest untruths of all.

I was also intrigued by Badrinath's idea that "Irony is the laughter of truth", and his contention that "In being a most systematic philosophic inquiry into the human condition, the Mahabharata does not see the meaning of a story in the way it ends. The particular end of a story is not the whole of its meaning."

Kingdoms and prisons in Jahnavi Barua's Next Door

For the great American short-story writer Eudora Welty, fiction’s reach, its themes, were universal, but at the same time the power of a story was “all bound up in the local”. Her simple explanation for this was that human feelings, which are the source and also the subject of all fiction, are inextricably bound up with place. Human beings, like trees, have roots in particular places, and often it is fiction that best articulates this particularity.

In Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s Kolkata story “Canvasser Krishnalal”, we are told that “for the last eleven years Krishnalal had been living in room number seventeen, a hole in the wall in the western end of the long, two-storied tin-roofed earthen building that stuck out like an eyesore on 25/2 Ramnarayan Mitra Lane”, and perhaps the most convincing detail in that sentence – the trick that persuades us that Krishnalal actually lives here, and not that Bandhopadhyay has just “set” the story here – is that number “25/2”. Similarly, in the great Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiros’s novel The City and the Mountains, the wealthy and discontented hero of the story, Jacinto, lives amidst a surfeit of worldly riches at No.202 on the Champs Elysees in Paris, and as the story progresses the narrator has only to say the word “202” to encompass the torments that plague Jacinto. Seen through the filter of the human mind, place becomes an extension of the self, and literature, which is text, shows us how place too is a kind of text through which human beings continuously refract their hopes and fears and memories.

Indeed, it is the strength of feeling with respect to place that distinguishes the stories of Jahnavi Barua’s debut collection of stories, Next Door. Barua’s stories are set in Assam – a territory not very commonly represented in Indian fiction in English – and they glow with an affection (demonstrated by both the narrator and the characters) for the region’s forests and fields, for the surging, lifegiving Brahmaputra river that cuts a swathe through the state and rushes on into Bangladesh, and the sun that wheels over the land all day and sinks finally “behind the dark hills of Bhutan”. Further – and this is one way of bringing out the peculiar power dynamics of Indian families – many of Barua’s characters either feel trapped by their houses and live in bitterness and resentment, or else love their homes and their gardens intensely, and can be found in their vicinity all day long.

In one of the best of these stories, “The Patriot”, we are shown a retired government servant, Dhiren Majumdar, and his two houses. One is the old, dilapidated ancestral house in which he grew up, and which he cannot bring himself to knock down (and this abandoned house seems to to move and speak, for we are told that “When the wind blew in from the river, laced with sand and the smell of fish, he house strained at its joints, moaning piteously”). The other house is the smaller and meaner, but habitable, dwelling alongside which was all that Majumdar could afford to build for his family. Every morning, we are told, Majumdar sits down in his compound with a cup of tea, and “examine[s] his kingdom as if he were seeing it for the very first time.”

One evening Majumdar sees a flicker of movement in his old house, and is alarmed. He goes across to investigate, and finds a youth lying in the darkness, badly injured. The boy is an insurgent, and he wants Majumdar to get him medicine and food, and to keep his presence a secret. Majumdar, we have already been told, has a grown-up son who is a successful civil servant, but somehow there is no feeling between them – indeed, Majumdar feels abject before his son, as he used to do before his superiors at work. Now, as Majumdar huffs and puffs under the burden of the arrogant young insurgent’s demands, we feel – although Barua never states this explicitly – that he is being fulfilled as a father for the first time. Barua delicately grafts the bloodshed and violence of the insurgency onto the pathos and neediness of the old man’s life.

And here are the opening paragraphs of Barua’s story “River of Life”:

It said so in the morning papers. Santanu had read it himself, so he knew it was true. Sometimes, when Anu-nobou read out the newspaper to him, he did not believe everything she said. He was certain she was teasing him – flying vehicles that alighted on the moon and circled the stars; sheep that halved themselves to make more sheep, exact copies of themselves; guns fired in America that landed on targets half a world away. She must think he was slow-witted to believe all this.

He knew better than to believe everything he heard. Ma had warned him, before she passed on: before she died, she had impressed on him urgently, all the time, to think for himself. ‘Don’t trust anyone but Dada, Santu,’ she had said. ‘And not even him sometimes.’ She had gone on about the house, until he was sick of it. ‘I have left the house to you, boy,’ she always reminded him, ‘I have signed everything there is to be signed. Do not, in any event, sign any papers. Ever! Do you hear?’

His ownership of the house weighed heavily on Santanu. Every morning he emerged from his flat, dreamless sleep feeling as if an enormous boulder, like the ones he had seen in Umtru, near the waterfall, was strapped on to his back.

As the story progresses we find out that Santanu is indeed “slow-witted”, but Barua’s opening, by holding Santanu’s heaviness and the world’s flight in delicious equipoise, swiftly trips us onto the side of the protagonist, making us doubt the world like he does – a skepticism, we see, that he doggedly, almost heroically, employs not just from his own nature but on his late mother’s orders. Like Dhiren Majumdar, Santanu has a kingdom to think of, but he has been reminded of this so many times that he now repeats it continually to himself; no wonder then that he feels weighed down by a boulder “like the ones he had seen in Umtru”.

Many other stories in Next Door also take the relationship between parents and children as their theme. In “Sour Green Mangoes”, we experience the frustration of a young woman, Madhumita, at the way her aging parents (Barua’s phrase is “her withered, rickety parents”) control every aspect of her life. Barua’s writing works beautifully here to give us a sense of a home as a prison, even as we Madhumita is shown leaving it:

The brooding house is enclosed in a ring of dark mango trees that holds it in a tight embace. In the backyard, a cluster of areca palms stand tall and vigilant, their slim, strong trunks smothered by betel vines that crawl jealously up them, their glossy dark leaves gleaming in the half light. [...] Madhumita wrinkles her nose delicately and then, feeling eyes raking her back, briskly unfurls her umbrella. A sudden spark of anger flares up in her breast; if flickers briefly and, just as quickly, dies down. Every morning, her father and mother stand concealed behind one of the blind windows of the house and follow her progress to the front gate and then out on to the narrow road that runs in front of the house until she reaches the corner, their gaze clinging to her greedily until she is out of sight.

The phrase “blind windows” here, although literally true (the windows look like blank crevices; the house itself is without light), also appears to have a secondary meaning as a transferred epithet, for of course it is Madhumita’s parents who, even as they follow her progress greedily, are “blind”, oblivious to their daughter’s wants and needs. With time Madhumita has learnt to harass her parents as they harass her, yet even this gives her no satisfaction, for she knows that her reverse pettiness is ultimately yet another symptom of her sickness. “She will not let them defeat her now,” writes Barua, “but what was done was done; she has already become what she is today.” This is an observation of great empathy and subtlety.

Some of the stories in Next Door may strike the reader – to use a metaphor in the spirit of Barua’s work – as ripening buds rather than flowers in full bloom. At times the plotting seems slightly rushed, and I felt there were points when the dialogue seemed to hit the wrong notes. Yet there are very many deft and pleasing touches to be found on these pages, and all in all this is an original and striking debut that marks its author as someone in the top tier of contemporary Indian short-story writers.

Another old post about fiction deeply attached to place is here: "Home and away in Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing", and there are some more thoughts on the power dynamics of Indian families in "Mathematics and rebellion in Nikita Lalwani's Gifted". 

Arzee the Dwarf in Tehelka, and on the low stone wall

There is a little piece on my novel Arzee the Dwarf in this week's issue of Tehelka that I would like to share with you. It is here.

And here, as promised, are some passages from the book. This is from Chapter 2, "Looking Forward". After a game of cards with his friends, Arzee is on his way to work:

Arzee passed the grey building which was his home – he could hear the television all the way up from the second floor, because Mother listened to all her soaps loud – and then the empty school, its blue gate being locked by the watchman. Instead of going on straight, he turned now into a passage between two buildings, so narrow it was almost invisible. It was a kind of wasteland where everyone threw rubbish which no one then cleared. A broken toilet seat was lying here, and a red plastic chair with three legs. The ground was covered with a squelchy slop of plastic bags, vegetable peelings, and eggshells. Long grasses had sprouted up near the walls, carrying bits and pieces of garbage within their limbs like diseased flowers. Little frogs the same colour as the muck were hopping from one spot to another with springy leaps, and becoming invisible once again as soon as they landed. Arzee’s shoes sank into the wet earth, and when he looked back to see if anyone had seen him enter, he could only see his footprints following him all the way in.

He arrived now at a low stone wall, on the other side of which thin whispering sounds could be heard. He hitched up his trousers, hoisted himself up onto the wall using the crevices in it as footholds, and arrived at the top. He stood up, and looked down into the silky waters.

Yes, there was a nasty stench here, but also a lovely still and calm. No one bothered to come out here, and all the pleasures of the place were just for him. As if to mark his arrival, a milky sun had come out over his head, and his reflection in the sewer was backlit, as if there was a halo around him. He studied himself closely, and saw what he already knew: that his forehead was high, his hair wavy and thick, his lips full and pink, his black eyes somewhat crabby and disconsolate. He was good-looking, there was no doubt about that. But what of it? Looks weren’t just about shapes and textures, but also about sizes. Even in his reflection there was something irredeemably odd and stunted about him, like a thought that had come out all wrong in the speaking. The acrid whiff of the sewer was so strong that it felt as if his nostrils were burning. But even so, fish or other forms of life – algae, perhaps, or microbes – seemed to inhabit it, making the surface bubble in little spasms. There was a kind of peace to be had in watching the water go by. Arzee thought of that lost one, that past one, whose current had fallen away from his, and how she’d missed this day in his life. She’d gone, but he’d carried on, and learnt to be strong, and now he was all right, only he thought of her sometimes. He spat into the water, as if expelling the thought.

How strange! It seemed to Arzee that somebody was calling out his name: "Arzee!" “AR-zee!” "AR-ZEE!" In fact, what with all the echoes of this bounded retreat, it seemed as if the voice was coming out at him from the inky deeps beneath. Arzee looked around, disoriented. Perhaps it was a trick of his brain: his brain did sometimes play games with him.

But somebody was calling out his name! And Arzee recognised that voice – he'd been trying to avoid the person whose voice it was!

And here is one more passage, about a minor character, Ranade:

If ever there was an instance of someone so in love with this world that even death could not tear him away from the established routine and unfinished business of living, then it was Ranade the stockbroker, who used to live – still lived – on the floor just below Shinde. Two years ago Ranade, a bachelor, had been hit by a stroke and passed away. But not for long, for it seemed he'd passed right back in. Within a week of what was thought to be his final, irreversible departure he was seen back on his first-floor corridor – and not even furtively in the black of night, but nonchalantly, in the clear light of day. His hand was at his lips and he kept drawing and exhaling as if smoking a cigarette, as he often would when taking a break from work when he was alive. One person, not knowing who he was talking to, had even held a conversation with him for ten minutes, and had come away with advice to hold on to Larsen & Toubro and sell India Cements. Ranade's belongings had all been disposed of, but at night Shinde heard the familiar sounds of a tapping at a keyboard from down below, and the scraping of a spoon as Ranade ate his lonely dinner. As the room was clearly haunted, no one was willing to rent it any more. And so Ranade stayed right where he was, and it was as if he'd never gone. Out of curiosity, Shinde had left a pack of cigarettes at Ranade's door one night, and the next morning it was gone! Ghosts weren't as airy and insubstantial as was commonly thought, but clearly had a need for the goods of this world. Perhaps there were many others like Ranade in the city. Once it was established there was one like him, there was no reason why there couldn't be more, all playing the part of life even as they answered the roll-call of the world after. What a curious thing was life – and death too.

That's too much already! The rest you'll see in May.

And an excerpt from my story "Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name", which came out two and a half years ago, is here.

Some things I've been reading

Here are links to some things I've been reading recently. First, three essays on literary biographies that can be usefully read against each other, and which cumulatively give a sense of the rewards and the pitfalls of the form:

Robert Alter on Nili Scharf Gold's biography of Yehuda Amichai ("Gold's study illustrates what a bad idea it is to reduce a great writer to one or two explanatory formulas"); Lewis Jones on two new biographies of Samuel Johnson, which have as their competition one of the earliest and greatest literary biographies ever written, Boswell's Life of Johnson ("Bernard Malamud maintained that all biography is fiction, which may well be true. It is certainly true that no two biographers agree completely, and every biography is stamped with the character of its author); and, most fulfilling of all, Alan Hollinghurst's review of Sheldon Novick's Henry James: The Mature Master (In the end -- by which I really mean soon after the beginning -- you are faced with a problem that can affect literary biography more sharply than other kinds: a writer is writing about a writer. One sensibility is at the mercy of another in a shared medium. No one would want a life of James written in Jamesian. But something sharp-eared, responsive, and self-aware should ideally show itself in the biographer's style and approach").

And here is an essay to do with Indian literature: "The Real Classical Languages Debate" by the scholar and translator Sheldon Pollock, whose lecture two days ago at the Jaipur Literary Festival on the beauty of Sanskrit literature and on the "Sanskrit cosmopolis" of a thousand years ago was among the most rousing talks I have ever heard. I can't wait to read Pollock's book The Language of the Gods: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Pollock is also the General Editor of the marvellous Clay Sanskrit Library series, about which I've written earlier here and here.

Lastly, some links to old essays on literary biographies: Patrick French's book on VS Naipaul, Alberto Manguel on Borges, Giovanni Boccaccio on Dante (this was my first-ever blog post, back when my hair was all black and my weight 65), and Javier Marias on Eliot, Rilke, Lampedusa, and many others.

An interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo

The achievement of Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo has been, over a series of books, to interpret India for Indians, often with the help of other Indians. Jahanbegloo’s works include Talking India, a book-length conversation with scholar Ashis Nandy; The Spirit of India, a study of the thought of 20th century Indian thinkers; and India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India, a set of interviews with Indian politicians, businessmen, artists and sportsmen. In these works, Jahanbegloo presents to Indian readers a set of resources and interpretive frameworks to understand both their history—rich with intellectual ferment and examples of fertile synthesis—and the criss-crossing forces and energies of the present moment. On the occasion of the release of two new books—India Analysed (Oxford University Press), a dialogue with psychoanalyst and historian Sudhir Kakar, and Beyond Violence (Har-Anand), a political manifesto for the 21st century, written in collaboration with Italian ambassador Roberto Toscano— I asked Jahanbegloo some questions about his relationship with India.

You grew up in Iran and were a doctoral student in France. What then are the origins of your intense interest in India?

I think that what I know about India today is the result of 30 years of reading, reflection, conversations with people, and travelling within India. My first links to the thought of India were the books by Gandhi, Tagore, and Radhakrishnan that I found in the library of my parents. Later, for my master’s degree in France, I was working on Carl von Clausewitz and war. Around this time I began to gravitate towards the literature of non-violence, which seemed a very appealing alternative to the Western military tradition. So I actually did my PhD on Gandhi: My thesis was called "Gandhi and the West". Later I also did a book on Tagore in Persian for Unesco. I first came to India 20 years ago and I have been coming back regularly ever since. Sometimes I say to my friends that either I have been an Indian in a previous life or I will be one in my next life.

So many of your books—such as your book with Ashis Nandy, and the new one with Sudhir Kakar—are cast in the form of a dialogue. Could you tell us why you prefer this approach?

The idea of dialogue is central to my world view and the way I work. I think the essence of philosophical work is dual: to engage in dialogue, but also to have the courage to think independently, to think like a dissident. You might call these the two Ds of philosophy. Each of my book-length conversations with Indian scholars has different emphases. With Ashis Nandy it was issues such as religion and secularism; with Kakar I have tried to explore the attitudes of Indian people towards sex, the mystical side of Indian religious life. I have a similar book forthcoming with the intellectual Bhikhu Parekh, where we talk about political philosophy, multiculturalism and diversity in the Indian context.

Even your other new book, Beyond Violence, while not explicitly in a dialogical format, is written in collaboration with the Italian ambassador to India, Roberto Toscano.

The book itself is about how dialogue can be used as a tool to tame the violence in our world today. So it made sense to write it with someone from another religion, another culture, since it is about how we must transcend the idea of an “us” and a “them” and find shared values with others. The idea of shared values is important because, as the first decade of the 21st century is showing us, the world is no longer facing regional issues, but global issues—all our problems are deeply interlinked. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai fall not just into a regional pattern, but a global pattern.

But can humanity really advance “beyond violence”? Isn’t violence a kind of constant throughout human history?

Let me put it this way. If we look at modernity, we can discern two strands to it. One is a narrative of domination and mastery: over nature, over technology, over other human beings. This is a narrative of violence. The other is that of emancipation, of freedom, of individualism. So, although the first principle cannot be eliminated, it can certainly be moderated by the second. The idea of permanent violence does not mean that successful examples of the reverse have not been seen. All the thinkers of non-violence have always emphasized that we cannot just accept the situation that we have—we have to think of ways of transcending it. So I am not a fatalist on the subject of violence.

You take up the idea of the native strengths of Indian culture more specifically in your book The Spirit of India. What is this spirit?

The strength of India is that it is a country of in-betweens. It is a median country. If you look at the 20th century, India was never totally on the side of either traditionalism or modernism. Traditionalists had to learn how to engage with modernists, and modernists in turn were moderated by voices rooted in tradition, as in the relationship between Gandhi and Nehru. The common element in the work of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and several other thinkers is an attempt to acknowledge the richness of Indian traditions while also trying to root out its uglier aspects, its injustices. Even the intellectual journey of someone like Maulana Azad, for example, is the journey of someone who spoke like a fundamentalist in his youth and like a secularist in his later years. He went from a kind of Islamic revivalism to Islamic humanism.

I was struck by your remark in a lecture that Gandhi’s aim was to “democratize democracy”. What do you mean by that? How does Gandhi approach the idea of democracy and where does he leave it?

By that remark I meant that Gandhi wanted to further democratize the Western idea of democracy that he came across in his reading and in his years in the West. Gandhi is not a pluralist, a democrat, in the liberal sense—that is, he does not just emphasize the rights and freedoms of people, but also their duties. So his is what I call an enlarged pluralism, in which freedoms stand side by side with responsibilities. This leads naturally to the idea that change in society cannot occur in a vertical, top-down way, but only in a horizontal way, through individual empowerment and will. And that is a very relevant idea in today’s world: that individuals assert themselves, and not just allow states to act in their names. As Gandhi used to say, "The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."

Finally, you were put in prison, in solitary confinement, without being charged, for over four months by the Iranian government in 2006. What impact did that experience have on you?

Solitary confinement leads to a great increase in self-awareness and self-discipline. You are fighting insanity; you have to learn how to get along with yourself. I had to work very hard to beat back the bitterness that prison creates, the sense of your most basic rights being violated. I had no paper so I would put down my scattered thoughts on biscuit wrappers. Later I published them as a collection of aphorisms called A Mind In Winter.

Is there any one of those aphorisms that you can share?

I can. “The meaning of life is life itself.” In prison you become aware of naked life, stripped of any ideology or dogma. You realize that life cannot be reduced to any system or simple moral framework—it is bigger and stronger than any of these things.

Two old posts on Jahanbegloo are here: "Talking India with Ashis Nandy" and "Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi and his concept of freedom". A review of Spirit of India is here.

And some older interviews with writers: Ramachandra Guha, Samrat Upadhyay, Altaf Tyrewala, Pico Iyer, and Christopher Kremmer.

Coming up

Coming up in the next three weeks on The Middle Stage:

an interview with the Iranian (Canadian? Indian?) philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo,

a review of Jahnavi Barua's debut short story collection Next Door,

a long essay on Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography My Experiments With Truth,

and a little note on and an excerpt from my novel Arzee the Dwarf, which comes out in India in May.

On Irène Némirovsky’s All Our Worldly Goods

Extended depictions of successful marriages are very rare in fiction. This is not just because good marriages themselves are rare, or because marital discord and misunderstanding is itself a favoured subject for fictional inquiry—an opportunity to observe the workings of the self as it rubs up against that other with which it is most intimate; a way to probe the gulf between the private thought and the public word in adult life. In addition to all this, it must be said, it is difficult to bring out the richness of a fulfilling marriage in a way that is also dramatic. There is a reason why folk tales and romantic comedies end at the point of “and they lived happily ever after”—because beyond this point lies more difficult, ambiguous terrain not just for the couple but also for the form.

This is why, when, four chapters into Irène Némirovsky’s novel All Our Worldly Goods, her protagonists, Pierre Hardelot and Agnès Florent, decide to consecrate the unspoken affection they have shared since childhood, and marry in defiance of Pierre’s family, we ask: What now? We feel that Némirovsky has either played her cards too soon, or she is setting these two young people up for a fall.

But remarkably, this is not the case. Némirovsky’s novel begins in a small town in France called St.Etienne at the beginning of the 20th century, and over the next three decades everything around Pierre and Agnes will change shape and colour—crises of livelihood, the death of parents, troubles with children, the horror of two World Wars in which Pierre and then his son are, respectively, mobilized—except for what is shared between them. The tenderness and awe that Pierre feels on his wedding night as he wakes up and contemplates the sleeping figure of his beloved runs like a winding thread across place and time, all the way to the closing scene of the novel, in which, after many months of separation and of fearing the worst, Pierre and Agnes find each other still alive.

Némirovsky’s own life story is no less poignant. She was born in 1903, the daughter of Russian Jews who escaped just after the Russian Revolution and moved to France. In relative youth she wrote a string of successful novels, but she was captured by German troops in World War II and met a gory end at Auschwitz, Poland, in 1942. A notebook snatched up by her daughter as the family fled their house remained unopened for more than 50 years, when it revealed itself to be not a diary but a pair of finished novellas. This work, translated into English as Suite Française in 2006, proved an enormous success, and led to the republication and translation of Némirovsky’s earlier works, including All Our Worldly Goods. Contemporary fiction is all the richer for this belated injection of Némirovsky’s work into its bloodstream.

Némirovsky’s work is distinctive and unforgettable for many reasons. She is interested not only in individuals but also their milieu; All Our Worldly Goods also traces the fortunes of the Hardelot family and the business it owns, and repeatedly cuts away for a page or two at a time into memorable portraits of minor characters ( to my mind the way in which a realist novelist deals with such characters is often a good way of understanding the depth of her engagement with her material).

Further, Némirovsky has the courage, both in this book and in Suite Francaise, to write about the present moment as if it were already historical. She began All Our Worldly Goodsl in 1940, when France was already occupied by German troops, and some the action of the book takes place in the same year—indeed, we are given a fairly comprehensive portrait of what the war is like. The wonder of this would have been apparent to her first readers in French; reading it now, we forget that the war she is describing is the same war that took her life.

Lastly, like all the great realist novelists, Némirovsky alights upon situations we all know and makes them come alive with some marvellous perception. For instance, Guy, Pierre’s son, comes home on leave from the front, and is told by his wife, Rose, that she is pregnant. Guy cannot think of anything to say but “I’m very happy” over and over again, but he does so “without looking at her, feeling oddly shy”, and so much is contained in this paradoxical and yet truthful observation.

This moment parallels one from much earlier in the book, when Pierre comes home from the war (this is World War I) for the first time. Although he has arrived, we see Agnès standing still “in the dark hallway, pressed against the door that was about to open”—she wants to hold on to this moment of delicious anticipation, because every moment after this will be turned towards her husband leaving again. Némirovsky’s writing is full of such delicate and daring surges, beautifully rendered by Sandra Smith’s translation from the French.

The title of Némirovsky’s book (Les Biens de ce monde in French) is worth contemplating. At the most basic level it gestures at the human need for material security and the use, within families and societies, of economic power as social force. Marriages are considered good or bad on grounds of class; Pierre’s grandfather threatens to disinherit him when he decides to marry beneath his station; families are repeatedly shown gathering up their most precious possessions as they flee from war—all these are illustrations of the title.

But “goods” can also be understood in a different way, as—to take a phrase in the novel itself—“all the good things of this world”, both tangible and ineffable. The trust and faith of relationships, the memories of sweetness and darkness we carry, the simple round of actions and exchanges that see us through the day—these too are our worldly goods, and Némirovsky’s novel successfully balances both these planes of existence to open out for us a vision of "the good".

And some links: here is the website of a wonderful exhibition running in New York till March 22, 2009, called "Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Francaise". Among the things worth seeing online are the manuscript of Suite Francaise, with its hand-drawn map of France made by the author (there is a good deal of cross-country movement in the book), the pages crammed from top to bottom with tiny handwriting (Némirovsky must have feared running out of paper), and the lines running on blank paper from left to right and sagging in the middle like clothes lines. Ruth Scurr has an excellent essay called "Irène Némirovsky In The Woods" which discusses, among other things, Némirovsky's love of of Katherine Mansfield and also Chekhov (of whom she wrote a biography). JM Coetzee's essay "Irène Némirovsky: The Dogs and the Wolves" is here, and Paul La Farge's "Behind The Legend" here.

Lastly, as a kind of counterpoint, John Mullan's essay "Ten of the best marital rows in literature".

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

Some things I've been reading

Some things I've been reading recently: the philosopher Roger Scruton on the philosopher Mary Midgley (Scruton's book Beauty is out soon); "Looking For The Great Indian Novel" by Nilanjana Roy (which is really more about the search for great Indian novels across all languages, which laments the lack of good translations of novels in other Indian languages into English, and to which I can append my choice of what for me is both a great Indian novel and a great translation: Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third); Toby Harnden's very amusing lists of top 10 most annoying Americanisms and top 10 most annoying Britishisms (to which I can add a eleventh: "To be honest", which translates as, "You deserve to be told this, but it's killing me to do so"); Arnab Chakladar's long and very interesting interview with the Hindi writer Uday Prakash;"Hanging On Like Death", Anjum Hasan's short story in Tehelka's year-end fiction special (what a pleasant surprise to see such a thing from a weekly newsmagazine); "The Centrality of Literary Study" by Marjorie Perloff, with whom I find myself greatly in agreement ("Why do we study literature anyway? To make the connections between the progress of human lives and their verbal representations. To thicken the plot."); and the ReadySteadyBook Books of the Year 2008 symposium, which lists a lot of great books of which I seem to have read not one.

The Middle Stage's Best Books of 2008 – Non-Fiction

The Middle Stage wishes itself, (why not? good cheer begins at home) and all its readers, a very happy New Year, rich with books, talk, companionship, love, food, exercise, travel, and plenty of sleep. Links at the end of some paragraphs lead to longer pieces on the books cited. A separate survey of the best fiction of 2008 is here. I hope you will excuse the great length of these two essays – they are meant to be read at leisure.

Political dissidents rarely have the doors of power opened for them, and when this does happen, they often find themselves swept away or compromised by the pressures of practical politics, of action rather than reaction. One man – also a man of letters – who has made a success both of dissidence against the might of a totalitarian state and then of political office is the Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who came to power in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989. To The Castle And Back (Portobello in the UK, Alfred A. Knopf in the USA), Havel’s memoir of his fourteen years (1989-2003) in Prague Castle, is among the three or four most satisfying political autobiographies I have ever read. Havel not only describes how political life is a mix of the profound and the banal, of the thrust of policy and the conformity of protocol, but dramatises it by mixing long, thoughtful answers to questions from an interviewer, Karel Hvizdala, with his own notes, memos to Castle staff, and diary entries from his years in office. This makes for a highly appealing structure: here the President can be heard meditating on the relationship of our actions to the world (“We should, after all, do everything seriously, as though the future of the world depended on it, and, as a matter of fact, in some ways it does”); there he is found arriving to the conclusion that “We need a longer hose for watering”, or asking “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?” Havel’s place in history, grand themes, fidelity to language, powers of self-scrutiny, and distinctive organization of his material make for a work that may come to be seen as a classic of political literature. Longer essay here.

The theme of the Australian diplomat Walter Crocker’s book Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (Random House India) might be said to be the one implicit in Havel’s: that is, “the dilemma faced by men of goodwill who acquire power and responsibility is remorseless”. This is why, although Crocker’s work, written only a few months after Nehru’s death in 1964, is highly critical of its subject on a number of counts – in particular economics, foreign policy, and the delegation of power – it takes a realistic and holistic view of Nehru’s contribution to Indian life, and leaves us finally with a sense of admiration for Nehru’s enormous intelligence, ideational power, energy, and discipline. Crocker’s unexpected but prescient conclusion, from the vantage point of 1964, that “Nehru’s rule will leave some mark on India, but not as much as is expected” has proved to be right on the mark. Both anecdotal and analytical, Crocker’s beautifully measured and composed account seemed to me a model of political biography.

Steve Coll’s brilliant and complex The Bin Ladens (Allen Lane) was simultaneously the biography of the world’s most feared terrorist and the story of the great business empire founded by his father. Most of us only know Osama Bin Laden the rootless holy warrior, spewing hatred against the West, America, modernity, and secularization, but his positions have not always been so consistent. He was the son – one of 54 children from several wives – of one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest business scions, Mohammed Bin Laden, and in his youth he worked as a junior executive alongside his brothers and cousins in the family construction firm. Tracing the radicalization of the black sheep of the Bin Laden family against the expanding range and influence of the Bin Laden business group in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, Coll, formerly of The Washington Post and now at The New Yorker, brings together the many strands and leanings of a remarkable family, and can in fact be read as a Tolstoyan exploration of what Coll calls “the universal grammar of families”. The long section devoted to Salem Bin Laden, Osama’s gregarious, westernized, pleasure-loving, high-living eldest brother, transported me totally into the world of this man. A longer essay on the book here, and here is Coll's piece "Young Osama".

Some of the best works of Indian non-fiction in 2008 can be arranged neatly into pairs. All Indians now know that the Naxalite insurgency presents a serious threat to the stability of the Indian state, but beyond this our comprehension of the world and the motivations of the Naxals is shadowy. Indeed, “Naxalite” has become a convenient banner under which tendentious arrests and gross human-rights abuses are conducted; it would seem that any Indian citizen is potentially a Naxal. The journalist Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin Viking) travels through the desperately poor and backward regions of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Nepal to tell us the tragic story of the rebels, the Indian state, and the people caught in between. Chakravarti iconoclastically mixes travelogue, interviews, reportage and analysis, quoting here from a Maoist document, there from a taped exchange between police officers, and ferreting out both state apathy and revolutionary excess with an unflinching and often mordant gaze (longer essay here).

And Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (Random House India) does for Kashmir what Chakravarti does for the Naxal heartland, showing us a land and its people that has suffered both the negligent eye and the bruising fist of the Indian state far more than it has partaken of its privileges and freedoms. Peer’s book is both reportage and memoir: he recalls how the Kashmiri resistance spiralled around him as he himself reached adulthood in the late eighties, and then, having become a reporter for a periodical in New Delhi, he travels through Kashmir in the early years of the new century, sympathetically logging testimonies and bearing witness. There is a heartfelt poetry in Peer’s book to go with the gloomy prose of machine guns, arrests, and curfews, such as in his plangent description of Srinagar as a city of absences. Longer essay here.

The historian Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians (HarperCollins in India, UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press in the USA) was an fascinating account of the history of Indians in America, from the curious and often socially marginal mix of farm labourers, students, and political activists of the early twentieth century to the mass of economically, academically, and politically influential diaspora in America today. Among the best sections of the book is a passage on the Ghadr party, a formation of Indian nationalists and revolutionaries in early twentieth-century America (longer essay here).

Anand Teltumbde’s blistering j’accuse Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Navayana), which takes its title from the poem "Strange Fruit" written by Abel Meeropol in 1939, was a disturbing study of the facts and the larger meanings of the heinous massacre of four members of a Dalit family in Khairlanji village in eastern Maharashtra in 2006. Indeed, Teltumbde's book might also have been called The Other Indians for what it showed us about the persistence of caste prejudice at the level of both state and society. and about the changing dynamics of power within caste groups in Indian today. For Teltumbde, Khairlanji is an atrocity so chilling that it “transcends the context of space and time and interrogates our claim to be humans. It is a mirror that shows us for what we are...It should not be viewed as a mere 'caste issue' to be dealt with by Dalits alone."

The impact of the moving image on India in the last century has been immense, and the magisterial essays of Chidananda Das Gupta’s Seeing Is Believing (Penguin Viking) made for what must be one of the most fulfilling books ever written on Indian cinema. Das Gupta argues that, although film originated in the West and was associated there with the march of science, its transplantation in the early twentieth century to a pre-industrial society heavily invested in faith and in myth instantly made it a very different thing in India. To this day Indian films, under their glitzy surfaces, draw upon the currents and structures of Indian religiosity: “the currents of traditional belief are kept alive beneath a modern exterior”. Whether analysing the phenomenon of Indian movie stars leveraging their fictive personae to become political heavyweights, thinking about the place of the song as “the transcendental element in the language of popular cinema”, or making a distinction between folk culture and pop culture, the range and shrewedness of his Das Gupta’s linkages is enormously satisfying. Longer essay here.

Paul Ginsborg’s Democracy: Crisis and Renewal (Profile) synthesised a huge amount of old and new scholarship to arrive at sophisticated insights into the quality of and possibilities for world democracy today. Ginsborg’s book is all the more attractive because it is set up as a debate between John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, two of the most demanding influential theorisers and critics of democracy. Whether on the subject of how capitalism and consumerism have eroded the public sphere or the role of the family as a school for a thriving democracy, Ginsborg offers us much to think about as we enter our own election year and ponder, in a winter of fear and discontent, how to reform and refine our own democracy. After reading this book I also found much of interest in Ginsborg’s older book The Politics of Everyday Life. Longer essay here.

The Lebanese novelist and historian Amin Maalouf is the author of several excellent books, including On Identity, which I bought very profitably for one pound in a damaged-books store in 2001 and which taught me – and I daresay would have something to offer to most Indians – many useful things about how to think about my relationship to family, society, history, and nation. Maalouf’s new book, Origins (Picador in the UK, Farrar Straus Giroux in the USA), was a very unusual reconstruction, built almost entirely on the leads provided by a trunk of old letters, of the life of his grandfather, an immense, iconoclastic teacher and scholar named Botros, in a small village in Lebanon in the early years of the twentieth century. A strident humanist and universalist in a provincial and sectarian society, Botros wishes for nothing less than the day when “the East [will] catch up with the West and – why not – outstrip it”. Origins is hot with his ringing assertions and demands, with Maalouf’s own voice providing a quieter counterpoint. Among the notes that Maalouf strikes is one that every reader can relate to: that of not taking old people seriously enough, or of reducing them to a bag of burdens and eccentricities. “Elderly persons are a treasure that we squander in cajoleries and blandishments; then we remain forever unsatisfied,” writes Maalouf. “[B]y reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.” A most unusual and charming book.

Leszek Kolakowski’s Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Basic Books in the USA, Allen Lane in the UK), a tour through the riches of the Western philosophical tradition by one of the world’s greatest living philosophers, was a little gem of trenchant thinking and compressed erudition. Kolakowski knows that his material is vast, so he synthesises the thought of each figure he takes up – Socrates, Heraclitus, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Bergson, Nietszche, among others – into a question, and shows how his subject answered that question, anew, in a convincing and yet startling way. Descartes’ aim was “to find the absolute beginning of knowledge, the starting point that is immune to error and doubt”; Aquinas holds, against the might of the Christian tradition, that “the fact that we are corporeal beings is not a minor or contingent matter, the result of chance or a reason for shame; it is part of the definition of our existence; Locke demonstrated what seems obvious to us today, that “liberty, property, political equality, religious toleration and the people as judge of the executive power – all these elements of the social contract are connected”. The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek work philosophos, a lover of wisdom or truth, and Kolakowski shows us the human mind arrowing away towards that goal through the centuries and allows us to participate in the thrill of these endeavours. I always feel especially awake after reading Kolakowski: read, for instance, his piece "What the Past is For".

The historian David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215 (Norton) was a marvellous reconstruction, wide in its historical sweep – acute in its points of rest or focus, and narrated in the splendid lancing sentences of a masterly writer of prose – of the ascent of the newly emergent religion of Islam in Europe in the Middle Ages and its sallies upon Christendom. Lewis shows how the rule over a part of Spain for nearly four centuries by an enlightened Muslim dynasty, the Umayyids, was a kind of golden age of religious tolerance, cosmopolitan values, and science and learning in medieval Europe. He argues that today “much of the Muslim world stands in relationship to Europe and the United States as much of a ramshackle Christian world once stood in relationship to a highly advanced Islamic one”. Lewis shows us how interconnected our civilizational pasts really are, and how we cannot possibly take a us-versus-them, boxed-up approach to history, much less the present. Lewis is also the author of a two-volume biography of WEB Du Bois and another of Martin Luther King.

Lastly, I also found much to enjoy in Chitrita Banerji’s whistlestop tour of Indian cuisine Eating India (Penguin Viking), Alice Albinia’s massively erudite study of the Indus river Empires of the Indus (Hachette India), and the study by Martin Dupuis and Keith Boeckelman of the early years in politics of America’s new President, Barack Obama: The New Face of American Politics (Praeger).