A lecture at Yale University

I will be speaking tomorrow afternoon at the Henry Luce Hall at Yale University on the subject "Place and the Making of Literature". Full details are here.

And a recent lecture: "The Classical Novel, On a Fall Morning In Iowa City."

On Jose Saramago's The Elephant's Journey

A slightly different version of this piece appeared last weekend in The National.

In José Saramago's novella The Tale of the Unknown Island, the protagonist – an unnamed everyman figure – asks a king for the gift of a boat so that he may go out "in search of the unknown island". The king is sceptical: after all, isn't it well established that no more unknown islands exist? But the man stands his ground in a remark rich with metaphorical meaning, he insists that there is always another unknown island to be discovered.

Finally the man has his way. The story gives him a love interest: the humble cleaning lady of the palace, who decides that after a lifetime of swabbing the royal floors she would rather be part of a voyage. No other crew member can be found, but this does not seem to be a problem. The story takes its leave of us with an image of the two lovers painting the name of the boat on the prow. "Around midday, with the tide," the narrator finishes, "The Unknown Island finally set out to sea, in search of itself."

Of the dozens of great exponents of the novel in the 20th century, Saramago, who died in June at the age of 87, was one of the few who really made the form his own. In his books the story never arrives to us neatly organised, crafted, and finished, cleansed of narrative detritus. Rather, like the boat in Unknown Island, it is always in search of itself, trying to arrive at an understanding of itself, remarking on its own difficulties as it goes on.

At first this puzzles us. Then, when we see the possibilities inherent in the method, it delights us. The narrator is always the most powerful presence in Saramago's novels, now speeding the action along, now slowing it down, making a luminous observation one moment ("We are, more and more, our own defects and not our qualities"), then succumbing to a page or two of pure pedantry. The narrator's love of irony, sympathy for the marginalised, and undercutting of the grand narratives of history establishes a direct line between him and the author, a lifelong and outspoken communist.

Most distinctive in Saramago's work, though, is the style. His narrators revel in the role of master of ceremonies, insisting on it through the very form of their prose, which swallows up the talk of the characters into long, rolling, idiosyncratic sentences. The typical Saramago sentence can seem almost Jamesian in its love of ripples and qualifications, but it employs no other punctuation than the full-stop and the comma and creates the illusion of something spoken rather than written. In Saramago, it is as if the folktale met modernism.

This narrative method naturally risks falling into self-indulgence and corrosive doubt - the kind of arid self-reflexivity visible, for instance, in the French nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. But Saramago vaults this chasm by virtue of the scale and the thrilling conceits of his stories, which roam widely over Portuguese and European history and are never happier than when juggling metaphysical speculations. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, a proofreader of a historical work changes the entire shape of the Portuguese history by inserting the word "not" at a crucial moment in the text. Blindness imagines an unnamed city struck by a mass epidemic of sightlessness, thereby illustrating just how fragile and hard-won is the civic peace that a portion of humankind now takes for granted. In Death At Intervals, death (a character, named, like most of Saramago's characters, with her initial in lowercase) suddenly abandons her work of taking human beings away from this world. First there is delight at the prospect of immortality, and then consternation as the larger implications of eternal life start to emerge.

Saramago's new novel, published posthumously, is called The Elephant's Journey. (After this we can expect one more book, Cain, as yet untranslated, and perhaps some unfinished or unpublished work.) The Elephant's Journey is translated by Saramago's excellent long-time translator Margaret Jull Costa, and supplies all the familiar pleasures of his voice, seen here filling out a diverting little story about a pachyderm and its mahout who live in one strange land and travel to another.

For two years Solomon the elephant, a gift to King Dom Joao III from one of his colonies in India, has been languishing in Lisbon along with his devoted keeper Subhro. Solomon's arrival, we hear, initially caused a great stir in Lisbon life before he fell, like all fashionable new diversions, from favour with the elite.

It is the middle of the 16th century and Protestantism has recently shaken the foundations of Western Christendom. Dom Joao III wants to send a present to the Duke of Hapsburg, Maximilian, who has embraced the new faith. But the gift cannot have any Catholic associations, and so Dom Joao fixes - taking the irresolute suggestion of his flighty wife - on Solomon. The elephant must now travel on foot, by land and by sea, down rivers and over the Alps, to Vienna. And so we embark on a picaresque tale in the manner of Cervantes, to whose school Saramago certainly belongs, albeit told in slow motion, as if keeping time with the stately pace of its protagonist, who often holds up the travelling party because he wants to take a nap.

Solomon causes a great stir in towns and villages along the route, becoming, like in the old fable about the elephant and the three blind men, many things to many people – indeed, a screen on which human vanities and fears are projected. Some villagers, overhearing bits of a conversation about the elephant-headed Indian god Ganesha, come to believe that Solomon is God. One priest nearly loses his life in trying to exorcise the devil from Solomon's soul. Another tries to enlist the elephant in performing a cunningly man-made miracle, just so that the authority of the Catholic Church may be reaffirmed (many of Saramago's best jokes are those aimed at the self-importance of church and state).

But the book's pleasures are mainly rooted in the narrator's playful spirit and his rejection – repeatedly played for laughs – of most of the rules of conventional novelistic exposition. We hear a voice that is gnomic, dryly witty, rich in proverbs and zany maxims ("The same thing happens with good ideas, and, on occasions, with bad ones, as happens with democritus' atoms or with cherries in a basket, they come along linked one to the other"). It is a voice given to gusts of whimsy and anachronistic observation, fastidiously laying out all the possibilities of a situation with qualifiers ("in the unlikely but not impossible event of", "always assuming that"), and then breaking up this rhythm with sudden pistol shots: "He went plof and vanished. Onomatopoeia can be so very handy." When I came across the simple declarative sentence "The snow began to fall" at the end of one chapter, I was astonished and made a mark in the margin.

Jull Costa's English, too, has an energy and a verve that rings in the ears long after the book has been put down. Her translation, like many other translations of linguistically rich books, also expands the common vocabulary and sonic possibilities of the target language, employing words and rhythms that are beyond the range of most contemporary novelists in English.

"It must be said that history is always selective," says the narrator at one point, "and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where we might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar." This is as close as Saramago comes to articulating a philosophy for his fiction. In The Elephant's Journey, it is the stoical mahout Subhro whose experience - like that of other figures outside the grand narratives of the past, like Raimundo Silva in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, or Baltasar and Blimunda in the novel of that name - allows us to access what the Indian historian Ranajit Guha calls "the small voice of history". Such works should never go plof and vanish.

An interview with Margaret Jull Costa is here.

The Classical Novel, On A Fall Morning In Iowa City

This is the text of a lecture (or a short story) I presented yesterday at the Iowa City Public Library as a response, along with some other IWP writers, to the question of the persistence of the classical realist novel as a template for fiction. Because it was written for the ears of a particular audience, there are some local references and in-jokes here, but nothing that is too obtrusive. Some other lectures I've enjoyed particularly over the last month are those by the New Zealand writer David Hill and the Mauritian writer Farhad Khoyratty (on the topic "Satire's Global Reach"), one by the Icelandic novelist and translator Solvi Sigurdsson on translation, and another by the South Korean poet Kim Sa-In on "Why I Write The Way I Write".

                        The Classical Novel, On A Fall Morning In Iowa City

The IWP writer Chandrahas Choudhury was in a state of great distress as he walked with long strides from the Iowa House Hotel up towards the Old Capitol Building on the morning of Friday, the 9^th of October 2010. He did not see – or if he saw, he did not register – the red and yellow leaves of fall that now rustled beneath his feet, and that only lately had been green leaves above him; nor, mired in his inner discontents, did he respond to the overtures of all the attractive girls winking at him from behind their sunglasses. The only two things in his sights were his destination – the Iowa City Public Library, where he was due to speak in a few minutes – and his dismay.

Because it was private and unspoken, his distress and the reasons for it could be picked up by nothing but fiction, which has a way of looking inside human minds that human beings themselves can never achieve, and this is its value in the world. To keep it short: Choudhury was distressed because he was unprepared. Or rather, he had prepared a lecture, but he had prepared wrongly, and so to the world it would seem that he had been slacking off and had not prepared at all. Only fiction (which excels at sympathy) would understand that he actually had prepared, only he had prepared wrongly.

What was his error? Choudhury had unfortunately long been misconstruing the nature of his invitation to speak at the panel. Instead of applying himself to the subject of the persistence of the classical novel in modern times, he had instead for weeks now, with the habitual carelessness and the susceptibility to exotic suggestion that was at the root of his nature, been writing up his thoughts on the abiding relevance of the classical navel. This was less absurd than it might seem. For thousands of years it has been believed in Indian yogic thought that the navel is the centre of the consciousness, and it is therefore central to any Indian poetics of fiction. Choudhury had imagined that the presiding powers of the IWP, with their usual exquisite delicacy and their characteristic attention to the local contexts of writers from different parts of the world, had been wanting illumination from his proudly Indian self on this hitherto obscure subject of the navel and its relation to fictional realisations of consciousness, but he’d been wrong. It was the novel they wanted to hear about, and he’d only realised this two hours ago.

In a panic, Choudhury had gone to all his friends at the IWP, hoping they might be of some help to him. This was because, on principle, he never wrote more than a thousand words a day, and now, with so much tension in the air, he couldn’t possibly manage more than four hundred words – an introductory paragraph, perhaps, and a swift conclusion. But if his friends (all smart people) would be so good as to contribute to his project a paragraph each off the top of their heads, each one taking the argument of the previous one a step further, then he might have something.

However, his friends, in the usual manner of life, disappointed him deeply. The Israeli writer Touche Gafla offered no help other than playing Kate Bush’s “Babooshka” for Choudhury as a way of unlocking his creative energies; the answer to all the problems presented to Touche lay in some rock song or another. The Mauritian Farhad Khoyratty, a university professor by profession, said that, after a decade of dealing with truant students, he had no sympathy for ludicrous excuses about navels (which, with his characteristic cross-cultural agility, he said were also a kind of orange with their origins in Brazil). The Pakistani writer Husain Naqvi was unable to help, because this was not the slender window of lucid time when he was both not asleep and not at a bar (it strikes the narrator that there are three negatives in this particular sentence, while there are four in the opening sentence of that latest and much-lauded take on the classical realist novel, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and that if only one other “not” could be found from somewhere, this would be a sentence not unworthy of America’s greatest living writer of classical prose). And Choudhury found himself quite unable to approach the Icelander Solvi Sigurdsson, because it had been Solvi’s birthday the day before and he hadn’t given him a present. As for Pola Oloixarac...well, ever since Pola had started attending those belly-dancing classes with the other IWP girls, she wasn’t the same person. If at all there was a subject on which she might now conceivably be of some help, it was that of the (now unwanted) navel.

So there was Choudhury, on his own, walking to the Iowa Public Library without a lecture in the bank, feeling like a character from one of his own stories, typically a person who is in deep trouble, and is feeling the pressure of time on his pulse. Indeed, the same pressures that proved so satisfying in fiction, and gave him the greatest pleasure to construct, proved now, when transferred to real life, to be agonizing beyond belief. He resolved to be kinder to his characters from this point on, but then saw instantly that he was making one of those terrible conceptual fallacies that are always being pointed out by theorists of fiction: that of confusing characters in a novel with real people.

He also saw, though, that if there was any stream of literature – and we’re talking here of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and various avant-garde movements that have still to work out their identities – if there was any stream of literature that allowed for this kind of envisioning of a character as a living, breathing individual, as real and as present as one’s family or girlfriend or cat, then it was the realist novel. It was also the realist novel that, for the first time in the history of literature, dared to imagine, at extraordinary length and in vivid detail, a protagonist who was typical and not exceptional, and yet highly individualized, presented in his or her everydayness. In other words, the distinction of the classical novel form was precisely that it allowed the reader, through the magic of the extended and elaborate illusion that it was able to spin from mere words and narrative sleight of hand and a wealth of sensory detail, to imagine that he or she was watching a life (or even living an alternate one) and not reading a book. The persistence of the form and its many conventions as a perennial template for fiction was connected to the fact that here, finally, was a form that allowed you to forget the very question of form. The sprawl of the classical novel was like a kind of comfortable armchair, or pint of AmberBock beer, that broke down the self-conciousness – the awareness that this was a book – that both writers and readers had previously brought with them, like a second skin, to the experience of literature.

Indeed, it seemed to Choudhury (as he nimbly avoided a US Bank frisbee that sailed out at him from somewhere) that one of the greatest and most durable satisfactions of the classical novel was the way in which it dramatised the passing of time. How the novel loved to play with time! Whole years could be made to pass with a single precise sentence, or the events of a single day could be made to fill up an entire book. Hundreds of things could be done with tense structures, cuts, and flashbacks, and at particularly delicious or fulfilling moments the reader, too, could stop time by closing the book for a few minutes. The realist novel gave both writer and reader the power to control time, which was denied to them by life.

Choudhury was by now consumed by realist-novel-love: it seemed to him that Dickens was walking alongside him, that it was Willa Cather just ahead, withdrawing some cash from the ATM, that Naguib Mahfouz was smoking a cigarette on the patio of the restaurant he was passing, and it was Irene Nemirovsky who gave him a brief nod, from behind her sunglasses, as she passed. It seemed to him – oh, if only he had some paper at hand, to record these zinging thoughts that were now raining upon him like Iowan autumn leaves! – that the most characteristic experience of human consciousness was that of the workings of memory. The realist novel, through the deployment of repetition, echoes, leitmotifs, and contrast, allowed the reader to powerfully experience memory within the field of the literary work, suggesting a connection between an incident on page twenty to another on page two hundred, and thereby stoking, without a pressuring hand, emotions just as strong as those from one’s own life.

In its attention to inwardness, to the patient tracking of the leaps and bends and flows in the thoughts of characters (thought Choudhury, lost in himself at a traffic signal), the realist novel schooled the reader in life. It taught him or her that that which is the most silent may yet be the most dramatic, and created in him or her a yearning for a greater engagement with the back-story of the world – or, if the world proved disappointing and somehow unnovelistic, then once again with novels. And further: although the realist novel strove to be a comprehensive representation of life, in the most capable hands it somehow proved to be an even stronger and more potent presence than the reality from which it mined its details, because, for one, it could eliminate the inessential, which life couldn’t, and two, it could be inflected with the storyteller’s personality and tone, and become not just the world but a way of looking at the world. After reading a good novel, the reader was always looking – for a little while at least, while he or she remained within the force field of the work –to heighten his or her own life to the same level of significance and meaning. The realist novel both bowed to life, and raised its music up a couple of notches.

Choudhury stopped for a moment outside the Public Library, and contemplated turning the other way into Bread Garden Supermarket instead, where he could hide himself amidst all the shelves of soup and the rows of microwave meals, the racks of vegetables and the salad bar (and also perhaps get himself some lunch). He felt the sun warm upon his face, and looked up at a blue sky in which he could see precisely one cloud. He saw that his deeply dire situation was once again something that only the novel could adequately record: a state of contingency, of being alive at a particular moment in time, and feeling a particular set of pressures and sensations. The realist novel was both chronicle and snapshot, coiling its nimble fingers equally ably both around an era and upon a moment.

But what of it? All these thoughts were useless, useless. He saw that if only he had half an hour to sit down and write up the reflections of just the last five minutes (how silverquick was thought!), he would have, even at such short notice, made a success of his lecture. (Choudhury was given too often to thinking a little too well of himself.) But alas, there was no time. He was done for.

Choudhury was innocent of the fact that, all this time (and as you and I know), a story was hanging above him like a small cloud (the first requirement of characters in fiction, of course, is that they never realise they are characters in fiction). And the story was recording his thoughts anyway, in all their rambles and tangles, occasionally editing a word or eliminating a redundancy, because it wanted to be a better story than Choudhury was a thinker.

And Choudhury didn’t know that, in the digital age, the story could take care of itself, and reproduce itself, and circulate itself – it needed no mailman, no agent, no publisher. Even as he walked into the hall where he believed he would soon be undone, the story was writing itself out rapidly on the blank pages of a handout, and when Choudhury glumly picked up the sheets to look at what the others had prepared, he was astonished to find that – astonished to find that – really astonished to find that – despite having done no writing at all, he was a presence in them and not an absence. Really amazed. Blinking in confusion, and eating two kinds of pizza one slice above the other to save time, Choudhury took a few moments to register the amazing good luck of this day and, indeed, of his life.

He had, once again, been saved by a story.

Reading in San Francisco on Thursday

I'm in San Francisco! This Thursday, the 30th of September, I'm going to be reading here at The Book Passage from my anthology India: A Traveler's Literary Companion along with the novelist Vikram Chandra, who has a story in the book. The event details are here.

If you live in the Bay Area, it'd be very good to see you.

On the novels of Irène Némirovsky

This piece appears this weekend in The National.
 

The French novelist Irène Némirovsky died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but, through one of those quirks of fate with which the history of literature is replete, her reputation only began to approach its zenith in 2004. That year saw the publication of Suite Française, an unfinished novel about the experiences of French fugitives during the German occupation of 1940. Némirovsky worked on it while she was on the run herself. It possessed, even in its incompleteness, a Tolstoyan scope and intensity.

For depth of feeling, concision of expression (the novel’s wide-angle opening sentence is only four words: “Hot, thought the Parisians”), and agility of narrative technique, Suite Française was difficult to forget. It immediately inspired an intense curiosity about Némirovsky’s earlier novels, of which there seemed to be a great number. The author was only 39 when she died but she had published roughly a novel every year in a career that lasted 16 years. How did she arrive at her extraordinary powers? What kinds of continuity existed between the earlier works and the later? Did the trademark Némirovskian narrator’s philosophical apprehension of life, which appears fully formed in the late books, come into its own piece by piece, or in one great leap?

New translations of Némirovsky’s books, delivered at the author’s own rate of one a year by her translator Sandra Smith, are slowly allowing readers in English to answer all these questions. Unlike Némirovsky’s contemporary audience we move backwards into her oeuvre, reading books that are smaller in scale and emotional range than her final works (including the majestic All Our Worldly Goods, one of a small shelf of novels in world literature that provide an extended portrait of a happy marriage). Nevertheless, these novels provide their own distinct emphases and satisfactions alongside their weaknesses. Jezebel, written mid-career in 1936, is the latest to emerge.

The very title of the novel appears to condemn its protagonist, the beautiful society lady Gladys Eysenach, whom we meet in a courtroom as she stands trial for the murder of her much younger lover. This opening scene is unusual in Némirovsky for the length of time – about 40 pages – that she holds the same frame. In most of her work she cuts from scene to scene (and often forward in time, too) as rapidly as in a film. But here we feel we are watching a play and we take our cues from the courtroom audience, who have flocked to the galleries in anticipation of a satisfyingly sordid spectacle.

The murder and its motivations are carefully reconstructed, and all the people in Gladys’s life take their turn to speak. Although the accused often flinches, she does not deny her guilt. There are the usual flashes of striking observation. When the judge asks Gladys to take off her hat, her chambermaid, sitting in the audience, moves instinctively to help her mistress before she realises where she is.

Although the trial is for murder, it is also, we see, a prosecution by men of a woman, by bourgeois society of someone who has violated its unwritten codes, and by the crowd of a scapegoat. The trial is about law, but beneath that it is about the complacency of public moralism. Némirovsky’s work, even as it attends to the thoughts of individuals in the manner natural to fiction, also often gives voice to what people think as a mass, usually in a way that exposes their biases. Here, when there suddenly appears on Gladys’s face a sly expression that was “the stock image of a murderer”, the crowd, we are told, “felt even more confident that they had the right to judge her”. When the sentence is passed, the crowd leaves, satisfied. But the narrator wants to tell us more.

The French filmmaker Jacques Becker once said: “In my work I don’t want to prove anything except that life is stronger than everything else.” He might have taken this thought from Némirovsky. In Suite Française, when the teenager Hubert Péricand breaks down in impotent rage because he has not taken up arms against the Germans, the dancer Arlette Corail consoles him: “What can we do? … first and foremost we have to live … to go on …” “First and foremost we have to live” is a thought that echoes throughout Némirovsky. From Ada Sinner in The Dogs and the Wolves to Golder in David Golder, her characters are conscious of all the beautiful things that life has to offer, of the enormous need in their own natures, and of the constant pressure of time upon existence. Life, for them, is stronger than everything else, and they will often transgress to keep the flame burning.

Gladys Eysenach represents this lust for life at its negative extreme. She is animated, but then gradually deformed, by the intensity of her desire to cheat time of its due. A great beauty, she enjoys a glittering youth, marries well, and has several love affairs after her husband passes away in middle age. She revels in her power over men, whose ardour is what gives her life its sweetness, but cannot stand anything that shows up her real age. She tries, for instance, to deny that her teenage daughter Marie-Therese is growing into a woman herself (Némirovsky appears to have drawn this detail from the conduct of her own mother, who dressed her in children’s clothing until she was well into her teens).

When Marie-Therese wants to marry early, Gladys implores her to wait a few years, just so that she may enjoy her own youth a little longer. Later, when her daughter dies in childbirth, Gladys has the baby sent away because it reminds her that she is now a grandmother. We see Gladys thinking, as a 20-year-old: “Leave me alone! I want my pleasure!” Forty years later she is still thinking the same thing. She cannot submit gracefully to the stages of adult life, and so turns herself first into a monster of egotism, later a figure of pathos.

In the novel’s most grotesque scene, we see Gladys camped one night outside the home of her Italian lover, Aldo Monti. Monti has repeatedly beseeched Gladys to marry him but she has always refused, fearing that his regard for her will disappear when he discovers her real age. Monti is out of the house, but he returns at dawn with Jeannine, the wife of one of his friends, a woman less than half Gladys’s age. Gladys is about to confront the couple when something stops her. “Jeannine could cry,” she thinks. “Jeannine wasn’t even 30. Her tears would make Monti feel tenderness towards her. But she, Gladys, couldn’t forget that tears made her make-up run down her cheeks.”

Jezebel is a slight work by Némirovsky’s standards. At times the narration has a perfunctory air, and the author might herself have conceded that the story becomes claustrophobic, hewing too closely to the protagonist’s perspective (this problem is solved in later books by a stronger narratorial voice and beautiful swoops into the lives of minor characters).

Yet the effort invested in the novel’s structure – Némirovsky loves the lash of an uncoiling plot, and the challenges of distracting the reader from perceiving the shape of things before the moment of revelation – yields rich rewards. Also on display is the trademark panache in managing narrative time, within a demanding story that covers over 40 years in the life of the protagonist. Indeed, it is a kind of beautiful paradox about Jezebel that narrative time should be managed so expertly in a story about a woman whose tragic flaw is that she can’t accept its passage at all.

The Middle Stage in Iowa

The Middle Stage greets you, for the first time its five-year-old existence, from America. Last Friday I arrived, after three flights on successively smaller planes, at the University of Iowa, where I'm going to be living and working for ten weeks as part of the university's International Writing Program, one of the world's oldest writing residencies.

Iowa is one of three cities in the world designated a "city of literature" by UNESCO (the others are Melbourne and Edinburgh), and in the week that I've been here I've seen plenty of evidence to support that claim. The city is, of course, home to the highly rated Iowa Writer's Workshop program, which began in 1936, and currently offers degrees in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation, making for a large pool of teachers and students steeped in literature, a number of public and private institutions supporting their activities, and literary events and readings almost all year round.

This week I've been to one of the best independent bookstores I've ever seen, Prairie Lights, and to an excellent secondhand bookshop, the Haunted Bookshop (where I found a copy of Nikos Kazantzakis's marvellous The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel). The IWP office, a lovely grey house with wooden floors and book-lined walls, is a place not to be forgotten, and I've already spent many fulfilling hours in conversation with the other writers on the program, who represent more than 30 countries. Even the hotel gym had copies of the New Yorker in between the racks of weights and the treadmills.

I'm looking forward, in the next three months, not just to time for my own work, but also to reading purely for pleasure again and not always for work (though often the two can be made to coincide). After tomorrow, I won't have any reviews in Mint Lounge till early December, although there will still be essays up from time on time in this space.

Earlier this week I gave a talk on Indian literature and my relationship to some of its traditions at the IWP's International Literature Today class, and I'm looking forward in the coming months not just to a saturated experience of American life and literature, but also to reading and lecturing a little. I'll be reading from Arzee the Dwarf on September 19 at Prairie Lights here in Iowa, reading along with Vikram Chandra from India: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Book Passage in San Francisco on the 30th of September, and giving a talk on "Place and the Making of Literature" at the Department of South Asian studies at Yale University in October.

And, since I don't like any post to be without some reading, here is a poem, an independent-minded sonnet, by the Czech poet Ivan Blatny. I chanced upon it serendipitiously in his book The Drug of Art, which was lying under two other books on a table near me while I was waiting for a meeting, and thought it very fine:

Autumn III
by Ivan Blatny, in a translation by Justin Quinn


All my lovely years, where have they whirled,
those lovely hallways that led to sweet women
the murmurs, ankles, the magic of the world?
Oh why did I stay alone, alone, alone?

The orchard shook and fell like a dead goddess.
The undertakers usher out the bier.
The castle stands, oh nonetheless,
and shreds fly far and near.

The villages drowse in the autumn plains
while actors take off their greasepaint off the train
The curtain rises. The band begins to play.

Nadhera the director paces backstage.
Cervacek sings as in a bygone age,
and stars depart again, the same old way.

Exhibition note for "Flex, Feroze!"

The Parsis of Mumbai are a social people. They have a packed calendar, and can be seen at agiaries and charitable gatherings, weddings and navjotes, at the race-courses and at shareholder AGMs, at Parsi panchayat meetings and elections. Once a year, they turn up in their numbers at Rustom Baug, for the Annual Zoroastrian Power-Lifting and Bodybuilding Championship, open only to Parsi musclemen (and women) from all over the country.

This set of photographs of Parsis by Aparna Jayakumar, taken earlier this year at the ninth edition of the competition, is a celebration both of community (sometimes thought to be in decline) and of the body (clearly in good shape). The pictures record the animation of muscular bodies, but also that of the human face as it watches and sometimes wanders. They catch a Feroze as he flexes those biceps that have been in training all year long for this day, but also perhaps a Jamshed as he suddenly remembers hanging out with Freny on Marine Drive on a winter evening in 1965.

The photographs show an awareness that any public event involves not just an audience watching the actors, but also the actors watching the audience, and taking their cues from them. Casting their net widely about the scene of the event, they construct a narrative that roves back and forth across the line of the stage, creating a palpable sense of intimacy and drama. Parsis young and old, happy and gloomy, flexed and at ease, fill these photographs with their myriad looks and emotions.

Chandrahas Choudhury

On Kalpana Swaminathan's The Monochrome Madonna

Three female presences, not counting the gold-coloured Madonna of the title, light up Kalpana Swaminathan’s new crime novel The Monochrome Madonna. These are the aging detective Lalli, a retired policewoman familiar to Swaminathan’s readers from two previous novels; Lalli’s niece Sita, a woman of literary inclinations with a deliciously tart tongue and an acquired interest in crime; and finally Swaminathan herself (who last week won the Vodafone Crossword Fiction Award 2009 for her book of stories Venus Crossing), a writer with a turn of phrase as stylish as that of anyone else on the contemporary scene. The universe of Indian genre fiction in English expands by the day (often to a chorus of voices inclined to exaggerate the charm of what is on offer). But there are, in truth, few writers in this group as gifted as Swaminathan, whether the criterion of judgement is quality of prose, facility with dialogue and plot, or understanding of the curves and quirks of human nature.

The opening chapter of The Monochrome Madonna, only three pages long, might serve as a case study in how to get a reader onboard a story. There is the dramatic opening line (“I’ve always known I’d be stuck with a corpse  some day, probably in the first week of October”), which introduces us to Sita, from whose point of view the story is told.

Then the subject of corpse-ridden Octobers is illuminated with brief, intriguing descriptions of the trouble that has flared up in the lives of Sita, Lalli and their cohort Savio three Octobers running, as if the reader is already familiar with these cases. In this way, an air of intimacy between narrator and reader is cunningly established, and a kind of storytelling energy generated. There is also a murmur of resistance: we find Sita actually wants to sit down and write in peace, but in Lalli’s absence she has to follow the new case. We enjoy her grumbles, because it makes for a better and funnier story than if she had been ready and waiting. And by the time the chapter ends, we are on site with “the annual corpse”, and now the story must move both forward and, if is to be resolved satisfactorily, backward too. Who did it?

The various personalities and elements attached to the crime include the striking Sitara Shah, an old classmate of Sita’s with the air of a diva; Sitara’s husband Vinay, who adores his wife so much he has photoshopped Raphael’s famous painting of the Madonna and replaced Mary’s face with Sitara’s; a mysterious man discovered lying dead in Sitara’s drawing-room; and various little curiosities, from an empty teacup to a set of fake golden toenails. Lalli only appears on page 50, by which time Sita has done much of the groundwork. We see not Lalli’s serene confidence, but Sita’s doubt-filled diligence (even as she worries away at what is going to happen to her book on the sewers of Bombay, an interest sparked by an earlier case). “Murder felt safer when Lalli and Savio were around,” confides Sita. “Taking on murder meant total responsibility. I was edgy, knowing that I wasn’t good enough.”

Thus, while the unravelling of the crime (or the book’s plot) is left to Lalli; the observation of this from without (or the book’s larger story) is entrusted to Sita, and is this is division of narrative duties that makes for the satisfactions of Swaminathan’s book. Indeed, the story is most interesting when it stays close to Sita’s point of view – a sophisticated, charming voice, moving easily from Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes to the latest trends in nailpolish ("'I'm good. I'm good. No, honestly, I'm good,' she said, doggedly putting that phrase through all three inflections mandatory to American sitcoms circa 2005"). I thought it fell away somewhat when it got too close to other characters, such as the testimonies of Sitara, Vinay and Savio.

Swaminathan knows that even murder mysteries must have their moments of digression. At one point we are treated to a sudden page-long meditation upon roses, followed by another passage on meteors, and realise this is a very independent-minded detective story. Here is Sitara, whose moments of study, reflection, and creation are always being swept away by the troubles of being a character in a murder mystery, shown sitting down and beginning to enter that state of comfort and relaxation that all writers know and look forward to:

Nothing restores me like a blank sheet of paper.... It's Prozac and caffeine, prayer and heresy, buffer and catapult all in one. With a good pencil, the blank page can reduce my unruly demons to chains and loops of black markings, words that march in regular array like ants–deceptively industrious, but each twitchy with a secret agenda. Words are nanochips: a zillion gigabytes of memory can fit in a two-syllabled word. Think of what you can pack into an A4 sheet of Bond!

The plotline of The Monochrome Madonna is perhaps too elaborate, and sometimes it is hard to keep track of all the possibilities and permutations thrown into the mix. But there are many lovely moments in the book, and the writing has a leanness, wit, and easy grace that are in marked contrast to the earnest and windy phrasemaking and imperfect control of register of so much Indian fiction in English. Lalli, Savio and Sita love not just sleuthery but also eating, drinking, and talking, and there is a rich pleasure here not just in the business of death but in the quotidian satisfactions of life. Vile Parle, the unfashionable Mumbai suburb where Lalli resides, should name one of its streets after Swaminathan’s charming detective.

An interview with Swaminathan is here.

On Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills

Human presence in fiction is a complicated thing, and amounts to much more than the sum of the characters who exist within the field of the story. It extends to the narratorial presence as well – that is, the presiding intelligence that observes a novel’s characters, that reflects on the meanings of their actions and “lets them through” to us, or indeed sometimes productively screens them off from us, making them all the more intriguing because they are mysterious. When the narrator seems to pressure the material – to simplify the solution of a dilemma, to insist too strongly on a transition, to use suspiciously convenient accidents and coincidences to drive the story forward – we dim the lamps of our engagement and retain an interest only in the “what” of the story and not in what should be the pleasurable “how” of its progression, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. I had just such a feeling reading Sarita Mandanna’s sprawling first novel Tiger Hills.

Tiger Hills won a substantial amount of pre-publication attention last year when it was reportedly sold to Penguin India for one of the highest sums paid to an Indian writer for a first novel. A period piece covering 50 years from the last quarter of the 19th century onwards, it is set in the verdant, mountainous south Indian district of Coorg (the beauties of whose landscape are extolled at great length) and tells the story of three generations of two families linked by love, marriage, hostility and discord. It might be seen as the story of the beautiful and spirited Devi, with whose birth the story begins, or alternatively as the thwarted love stories of three people.

When still a child, Devi becomes friends with Devanna, a motherless boy. It seems as if their affection might one day turn into love, and indeed this is how things turn out for Devanna. But when the 10-year-old Devi sees the dashing Kambeymada Machaiah, a kinsman of Devanna’s, at a function held to celebrate Machaiah’s slaying of a ferocious tiger, she is entranced, and decides to marry no one but him. She carries this resolve all the way into her adulthood. Even though Machaiah has taken a vow of celibacy for 12 years, Devi manages to wend her way into his affections. Devi and Machaiah begin an ardent love affair, but their accord is shattered by a single act of violence.

Returning drunken and battered from the medical school hostel where he has been assaulted by a senior, Devanna declares his love for Devi and, when she will not have him, forces himself upon her. Machaiah is away – and to cover the shame of the incident Devi is hurriedly married off to Devanna. Devi never forgives Devanna, not even when he attempts to take his own life and becomes an invalid. For all three characters then, life becomes the task of having – this is one of the novel’s few genuinely striking images, taken from the world view of a Christian missionary who mentors Devi – to “bear the weight of the cross”.

There is plenty of story in Tiger Hills. A mere summary of the plot would run to over a dozen pages. But if the book is a period novel by intent, it also has "The Past" stamped over it in a more unintended way. It is not a credit to the book that it should resemble so closely several over-familiar strains of the Indian novel. One may find in it the “Triple-Decker Novel of Family” (in which the sheer scale and duration of the storytelling invites our awe); or the “Novel of Tropical Weather and Burning Passion” (in which the glories of weather, landscape and love are always extensively described, and always without understatement); the “Novel of Predestination” or the “Horoscope Novel” (in which the protagonist is shown to be destined for a storied life from birth itself and is shadowed by portents and omens thereafter); and indeed, the “Novel of Characters Without Character”, in which the problems of the representation of an extra-large cast of characters are usually finessed by acts of omission or simplification, so that even the protagonists wax and wane in complexity.

Nor is the narrator at all a subtle or intelligent interpreter of the action. Consider the novel's reading of Hermann Gumbert, an ambitious German priest who heads the local Mission School, and whose love of botany finds rich matter in the burgeoning plant life of Coorg. Our introduction to Gumbert begins with a pointless act of narratorial fussiness (“Hermann Gumbert had arrived in Coorg over three years earlier. Three years, five months and sixteen days to be exact.”), one of many bits of padding and deadwood in the book. But what is more complicated is the narrator’s gloss when Gumbert, who is very attached to Devanna and does not want him to go very far from Coorg, decides that Devanna is to go not to Oxford but to Bangalore Medical School. Here the narration reaches ahead of itself, and we are told, as the closing line of a chapter: “[I]nnocent of the wheels he had set in motion, of the catastrophic consequences his actions would bring, Gumbert turned out the lamp and finally went to bed.”

But what exactly are these “catastrophic consequences” brought about by Gumbert? In medical school in Bangalore, Devanna is preyed upon by older students, in particular by a vicious Anglo-Indian called Martin Thomas. Thomas beats and tortures Devanna at every opportunity, and on one occasion sodomizes him. But the more that Devanna is preyed upon by Thomas, the more we wonder whether any of this should really have been be traced back to (or in this case, forward from) Gumbert. Not only is this narrative gesture poor storytelling, because it refuses to allow the story to take its own course and tries to draw us on by waving the red flag of approaching catastrophe, it is also poor perception, because it connects the well-meaning Gumbert to the despicable Thomas in an unreasonable way. We reject the narrator’s judgment because it seems to want more to produce a certain kind of story than to be just to the characters.

The three long-legged birds in silhouette on the cover of my British edition embody one of the novel’s more egregious contrivances. Devi is born to a family on the middle rung of Coorg’s feudal ladder. But as her mother’s water breaks while she is working in the fields, a flock of herons arrive from nowhere and circle around her, “executing a final sharp turn to land by her feet”, and then take off again, showering her with water from their wings. Devi’s mother is disturbed by this incident. When the village priest is in turn troubled by the child’s horoscope, she reports the incident with the herons to him.

The priest cannot explain the occurrence (“Who could read the mind of God?”, the narrator somewhat lamely interjects), but clearly the herons want to be part of the story and, unbeknown to the characters, continue to hang over the action all the way through. At key moments in the action the narratorial gaze suddenly slips away, and shows us a picture of herons taking flight somewhere nearby. Sometimes this gesture reaches a point of pure bathos (“High above them, a solitary heron floated on a thermal...”). This is just leaden, unsubtle symbolism, designed to infuse the story with a hooded mystery. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we are schooled by the pressure of repetition to expect something we are not used to. The arc of action rises (metaphorically); herons rise (physically).

The same sense of overdetermination is visible in Mandanna’s language, the predominant gesture of which is a kind of lush suffocation. The novel repeatedly makes heavy weather of weather descriptions, subclauses pointlessly repeating the action of main clauses. “Watery shafts of light spilled from behind dark grey clouds, laminating the town in opalescence.” “The mist draped itself over her, brushing wet, welcoming fingers over her cheeks and arms as it enveloped her in its gauzy cocoon.” Wouldn't the metaphor not be better if it was not so diffused and misty, attaching itself to every possibility – fingers, then a cocoon –  that comes up? Wouldn’t the sentence be much cleaner if it had the self-discipline to stop at “arms”? This sort of writing is frequently hailed as evocative and ambitious, but close examination shows it to be merely lazy.

The same metaphorical sloppiness is seen in a line like “He forced Kate from his memory like water through a sieve, until all that remained was a coarse sediment”. But water through a sieve leaves no sediment at all! The opening lines of my British edition – an epigraph, left out of the Indian edition, that goes “Through all of time, it’s rise and it’s fall;/the heart stays blind, yet sees truest of all.” – immediately strike a false note. What Mandanna really wants is the possessive pronoun “its”; not the contraction of “it is” that she has provided, thereby making a nonsense of the proverb. Its not right to do this.

One might end by examining a pivotal scene in the novel, that of Machaiah’s death, far from the place and the people he loves, in the passes of Afghanistan, where he is sent after enlisting as a soldier. As Machaiah falls, we are told that “Hundreds of miles away, a woman, heartbreakingly lovely, woke up with a start, her heart contracting with nameless dread”. The narrator’s emphasis is worth noting. Even as we are shown the lovelorn Devi being lacerated by a telepathic distress – which, as believers in love, we might just accept – we must for some reason be reminded in the midst of all this, as if with a close-up shot in a big-budget potboiler, that she is “heartbreakingly lovely”. Readers who enjoy this sort of lumbering storytelling may find much to be diverted by in Tiger Hills.

On vacation

The Middle Stage is away this week on summer vacation in London and Cambridge, and is doing no reading. It will be back next week.

Bankimchandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism in the Indian novel

A slightly different version of this essay appeared this weekend in The National.

Hindu nationalism today has a considerable presence in Indian politics: the BJP and smaller state-level organisations; support in sympathetic publications and TV channels; even celebrity endorsement. But one realm that has been persistently indifferent to the allure of Hindu nationalism, whether in its benign or militant incarnations, is the Indian novel, particularly the Indian novel in English.

Hindu nationalism argues that Hinduism is the engine of Indian history, and asserts the equivalence, at the level of culture if not always of religion, of the terms “Indian” and “Hindu”. It believes that Hinduism in India has been for centuries under siege: first from Muslim invaders from the north-west who converted swathes of Indian society to Islam; then the British; and finally the new Indian nation-state. It holds that modern-day Hinduism (which it often views as a cohesive entity) continues to move towards marginalisation because of the encroachment of proselytising religions, the neglect or limitations of the secular Indian state, and the lack of religious consciousness and embarrassment about religious assertion exhibited by Hindus themselves.

Yet the story of India’s past and present narrated by the Hindu right rarely makes it into fiction, except within an ironic frame. The political rise of Hindu nationalism over the last three decades has generated many persuasive ideologues, but the movement does not, in English at any rate, have a house novelist, someone to turn ideas and abstractions into characters and plots.

This is a shame. Firstly, it allows Indian novelists of a certain ideological disposition a free run of the land. The result is often a facile secularism, a kind of reflexive celebration of India’s diversity, that borrows its vocabulary and its tropes from well-worn ideas, and thus has no linguistic or narrative energy to call its own. Tellingly, when Hindu nationalists appear in such novels, they are condemned from first sight by the narrator as zealots, driven by anger, hate, and lust (Arya in Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva, or the cartoonish Minister Prasad in Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay).

Secondly, it would appear that there is a want of serious engagement in the Indian novel in English not just with Hindu nationalism, but with the immense weight of Hinduism itself. Not only is Hindu nationalism artistically unfashionable (except as a convenient source of villainy and conflict), its absence points to a deeper failing that ironically might be seen as lending credence to the Hindu nationalists’ complaint about the falling away of Hinduism from the wellsprings of culture. Barring exceptions such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Hinduism itself is rarely explored or interrogated in an extended way in modern Indian novels in English.

This suggests a narrative orientation in the Indian novel in English that is not just politically centrist or left-of-centre, but which engages with religion more at the level of observation and backdrop than of sympathetic immersion or experience. Hinduism’s massive repository of ideas, fables, images, exemplars, proverbs, aphorisms and narrative structures have left an impression on the Indian novel in English far smaller than the one that it exerts on public and private life in India. One might say that, while Hinduism should be part of the Indian novelist’s wealth, the challenges of realising a mainly Sanskritic worldview persuasively in English are such that it is usually treated as a tax.

This background makes all the more significant the appearance of an English translation of Debi Chaudhurani, a late work by the Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894), India’s first major novelist. One of the earliest recruits of the Indian Civil Service established in the middle of the 19th century by the British, Bankim – so familiar a name in Indian letters, across linguistic traditions, that he is usually referred to by his first name – spent his working life as a deputy magistrate in the colonial administration. But, even though he represented the vanguard of a new class of anglicised Indians (going so far as to write his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, in a sonorous English), Bankim’s ear remained close to the ground.

His novels, particularly those of his late “nationalist” phase, are preoccupied with contemplating the future (and reprising and sometimes reimagining the past) of a predominantly Hindu Bengali society hobbled, from without, by the martial superiority first of Muslim rulers and then the British, and from within, by a stagnation of thought, social structure and gender roles. Debi Chaudhurani (1884), loosely based on the story of a real-life female bandit in 18th-century Bengal, offers the reader a deeply felt vision of “the Hindu way of life” – one that celebrates but also interrogates Hindu tradition. If one were to imagine contemporary Hindu nationalism as its best and most intellectually coherent (something it is mostly not), this might be the kind of reading of Hinduism it would offer.

Like many 19th-century realists (Hardy, Flaubert, Zola), Bankim was fond of female protagonists, the better to portray the constraints and inquities of the patriarchal society that was, as much as the individual, the subject of his enquiry. When we first see his heroine, a young woman called Prafulla, it is as the victim of the neglect of society and “the pinchings of poverty” (this is one of Bankim’s lovely phrases from his one and only English novel).

Although married into a prosperous Brahmin family, Prafulla has been thrown out by her father-in-law Haraballabh (a representative, in Bankim's view, of many of the malignant tendencies of upper-caste Hindu society) because of allegations made against her by members of her village. Even though he loves her, her young husband Brajesvar is powerless to defend her. Although Brajesvar forsakes Prafulla at Haraballabh’s command, we find that the narrator provides only a muted critique of this decision, setting against it Brajesvar’s memory of a verse from the Mahabharata that emphasises duty to the father. This is one of several instances where the reader finds his or her long-settled assumptions about duty and family upended by Bankim, whose vision of an ordered Hindu society leads him to privilege or at least defend the right of parents to filial obedience.

Left on her own, Prafulla is kidnapped by a local goon, and then abandoned in the forest after the venture goes awry. Here she finds herself at the mercy of a bandit called Bhabani Pathak. But Pathak, a Brahmin, also turns out to be a scholar of Hinduism. Impressed with Prafulla’s native intelligence, he sets out to train her for five years in a syllabus that aggregates the great texts of Sanskrit grammar, logic, literature and philosophy. The last text to which Prafulla is exposed is the Bhagavad Gita, “the best of all works”. One might think of this reading list as a nationalist’s reply to the policy of English as a medium of higher education advocated by Macaulay’s Minute in 1834, and imposed by the British in India thereafter.

Even more unusually, Prafulla is shown receiving a physical education. She learns, in tussles with a female adept, to wrestle. The implication is that Brahmins, hitherto the intellectual elite of Hindu society, must learn in a time of crisis to fight. Once Prafulla’s education is complete, she becomes the revered leader and moral compass – hence the honorific “Debi Chaudhurani” – of a band of skilled vigilantes who apply their private vision of justice to a lawless realm. “Each [fighter] had a staff tied to his back – the weapon typical of Bengal,” remarks the narrator. “The Bengali once knew its proper use; it was when he abandoned the staff that he lost his spirit.” Versions of this lament about the pusillanimity of modern Hindu civilisation are widely echoed in contemporary Hindu nationalist tracts.

Yet Prafulla’s major victories in the text are achieved not by force, but by love and ethical action. Elevated by her education, she becomes an exemplar of the ideal of nishkama karma or selfless and detached action, advocated by the Gita, and of the dharma, or vision of order and justice, central to Hindu philosophy. All along she remains steadfastly faithful not just to Brajesvar, but to the well-being of the patriarch who cast her out (even as the reader roots for his downfall). The novel’s final chapter shows her renouncing banditry and returning, under an alias deciphered only by her husband, to her bridal home, to take charge not just of the household but, in due course, of the entire estate.

Breaking down the fence of the European realist novel to make room for his ideological project, Bankim, in his closing chapter, makes his protagonist, elevated by the best that Hinduism has to offer, not just the idealised wife of Hindu tradition but indeed an ideal for all Hindus. Strikingly, he claims Prafulla as an incarnation of the Krishna of the Gita who declares: “To protect the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish right order, I take birth in every age.” These are the closing words of the novel – words that would have, in the unfamiliar context of a novel and as applied to a female protagonist, amazed and roused the book’s original readers, and also words that suggestively replace a Western idea of linear time with a Hindu one of cyclical time. Possibly no other Indian novel is as steeped in the glories of Hinduism, and so self-consciously preoccupied with a vision of the rejuvenation of Hindu society, as Debi Chaudhurani.

Introduction to India: A Traveler's Literary Companion

Here is the introduction to my new book India: A Traveler's Literary Companion, recently published in the USA by Whereabouts Press. The anthology brings together both classic and contemporary Indian writers, and Indian writing in English as well as Indian literature in translation. An Indian edition of this book, which was originally commissioned by Whereabouts for an American audience, should be available later this year. The entire series of literary companions to different countries published by Whereabouts is here.

Much of the pleasure of storytelling comes from all that is left unsaid—from the things for which we readers are given a direction, but not an end. So too, so much of what we feel for the world of a story derives from the flavour of the local—from a turn of phrase, a glimpse of a patch of earth, a memorable detail, that is absolutely specific to the worldview of a particular character or culture.

When, for instance, Chandrakant, the youth leaving his village for the first time in Jayant Kaikini’s story “Dots and Lines,” feels the wind on his face on the train to Bombay, and imagines that the same wind “had just blown the tarpaulin off the night-halting bus on the banks of the Gangavati before reaching this place,” this image makes us see Chandrakant in two places at the same time. Not only does the idea of the wind from home catching up with the train going away from home encapsulate Chandrakant’s longing for what he has left behind, the specificity of the image of “the tarpaulin of the night-halting bus” being ruffled by that wind registers very strongly on our own imaginations. This is one of those flares of detail that make fiction burn brighter than other kinds of prose writing.

Similarly, in Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s “Canvasser Krishnalal,” we are told of Krishnalal, the itinerant seller of medicated oil, that “he would ply like a weaver’s shuttle, from Shiyalda to Barasat, from Barasat to Shiyalda.” This detail not only makes Krishnalal seem like a mechanised object himself, operating upon the world with the same regularity and constancy as that of a season or the trains, it also suggests the man’s jaunty temperament—it might be a metaphor thought of by Krishnalal himself. We understand, from such details, why Eudora Welty thought that while fiction’s reach, its themes, were universal, the power of a story was “all bound up in the local.”

This anthology brings to you a basket of such stories, plucked out of the gardens of India’s many language-literatures: works that are intended to bring you closer to the Indian landscape and the Indian imagination in all its variety, even as you enjoy the universal pleasures of storytelling. About half the stories here were written in English, and the other half are translations, each from a different Indian language.

Indeed, the most striking feature of Indian literature when seen as a whole—a source of its strength and variety, but also of the difficulty in navigating it—is that it is multilingual to a degree not matched by any other national literature in the world. Even if we exclude classical languages and contemporary dialects, we find ourselves before a field divided up among at least two dozen languages. As with any other language, each one of these languages represents not only a particular matrix of sounds and grammatical structures but also a distinct imaginative universe, with its own myths and beliefs, its own social structures, its own view of history and time.

Thus we arrive at the paradox: because of its profusion of languages, most of Indian literature is a foreign country even for Indian readers, who at their best can be no more than trilingual or quadrilingual. I myself speak English, Hindi—which is the closest that India has to a “national” language—and my mother tongue Oriya, and, I am ashamed to admit, can only read and write in the first two, although I can sing you a number of devotional songs in the third.

Unsurprisingly, as English is the language of university education and also the favoured language of the Indian elite, a link language between people whose first languages are different from each other, and also a powerful force in business and advertising, it is Indian writing in English—a realm in which much exciting work is being done— that receives the most attention both at home and around the world. Another factor inhibiting the appreciation of the literature from other Indian languages has been the paucity of good translations into English.

These are the conditions that led Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West to controversially declare, in their 1997 anthology Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997, that “the prose writing . . . created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work that most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India,” and that “‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.”

This is a contention—as I hope this book will demonstrate—that is being disproved rapidly. But the point remains: many of the riches of Indian literature are lying invisible in the shadows, waiting for a translation that will release their rhythms and energies into the world. It is my hope that some of the stories in this volume showcase the best of what is currently available of Indian fiction in English translation, and arouse in you, the reader interested in India, the desire for a more sustained encounter with writers whose work is every bit as good as their better-known counterparts who compose in English.

As with other anthologies in this series, the stories here are arranged on a geographical basis, almost laid out on a map. Each of the five regions in which I have divided the country could potentially have been the subject of an individual book, but here I have limited them to two or three stories each. Where the stories are set in a specific city or town, those have been named; otherwise the general region or state in which the story is set has been provided.

I have tried to make sure that the book gives a sense of the different realities of urban, small-town, and rural India, from the world of upper-class Delhi represented in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Sound of Falling Leaves” to the village people gossiping and squabbling by the pond in Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Asura Pond”. The stories also gesture at the diverse primary allegiances of Indian people, whether it is to the city (Bandhopadhyay’s Krishnalal), the guild (Nazir Mansuri’s fisherman Lakham Patari), caste (Phanishwarnath Renu’s villagers) or the tribe (Mamang Dai’s heroine Nenem).

The works brought together here are both old and new: the earliest was first published in 1902, while the ink is still not dry on the most recent one. Some of the writers here are legendary figures known to, even if not always read by, readers all over India; others represent the new generation, and are slowly making a reputation for themselves. I have made some notes on aspects of their craft and style in the individual introductions to the stories.

Not the least of the pleasures of the stories brought together here is that, while rooted in a particular world, they often hum with the stirrings of distant worlds that have made India such a diverse and fecund civilization. The architect of the Taj Mahal in Kunal Basu’s “The Accountant” looks at an architectural plan “drawn not simply from Hindustan but from Isphafan and Constantinople, Kabul and Samarkand—from the whole world”. In Nazir Mansuri’s “The Whale”, a trader in a port village on the west coast of India ferries “lime, dates, onions, and garlic to Basra, Iran, and Africa” till one day he never returns. Now these stories, too, go out into the world—many of them are being published outside India for the first time—and it is my hope that wherever they go, they will provide the same pleasure that they have given at home.

Chandrahas Choudhury
Mumbai, March 2010