On Yashpal's Jhootha Sach (This Is Not That Dawn)

Any reader who has a feeling for the rigours and small miracles of novelistic composition is especially likely to be transported by the awesome narrative freedom and strength of the great long novels of world literature. Having broken through the walls of artistic and formal finitude over hundreds of pages of scene-setting, plot-threading and character tracking, such novels, or novel sequences – IB Singer’s The Family Moskat, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence – seem almost to write themselves, continuously unspooling and ramifying in the same way as life. Indeed, it seems a diminution of life to have to break with their company.

On one level, of course, the great long novels represent nothing more than an especially massy story – a map of human motion and connection on a grand scale. But is that all? Their size would be (and sometimes is) worth very little if we did not also take away from them the extended experience of mind, of an encounter with not just a world but a subtle, disembodied intelligence – the narrator – observing and occasionally annotating its ferment. To observe a story-world for weeks, even months, in concert with a novelistic narrator is to return to the world outside the book to find something strangely absent, or limited, or silent about it. Sometimes when we find ourselves missing the characters of a novel, what we are actually missing is the narrator.

This is the experience we take away from the Indian novelist Yashpal’s massive novel Jhootha Sach (literally The False Truth), first published in Hindi in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, and now translated into English for the first time as This Is Not That Dawn. The novel is over 1,100 pages long, but it is long only in an absolute sense, not relative to the dozens of characters it describes, the ideas it explores, and the narrative time (and indeed geographical space) it traverses.

Following a family from their roots in a gali, or lane, in the great city of Lahore (now in Pakistan) to a new life in the cities of north India over the 1940s and 1950s, Yashpal’s novel takes as its central, world-changing event the partition in 1947 of colonial India into the nation states of India and Pakistan. The bloodbath that resulted from this massive, uncontrolled two-way migration of peoples across the new boundaries of what was formerly undivided Punjab – Hindus streaming east into India from what had now become Pakistan, Muslims west into Pakistan in the fear that they would have no place in a new Indian nation state – took at least a million lives. Partition left a gash on the psyche of the Indian subcontinent that has never quite healed, and that inflames the politics of both countries, as well as Bangladesh, to this day.

The novel’s central characters are two siblings, Jaidev and Tara Puri, who live in a small, tightly knit Hindu community in a lane called Bhola Pandhe’s Gali in the old walled city of Lahore. Among the ways in which Yashpal’s novel links the lives and loves of its middle-class characters to the great churning in the public sphere of Lahore and Delhi in the 1940s is by setting them within the overlapping worlds of journalism, literature and education in Lahore (no other Indian novel is so much in love with the idea of the newspaper, and the newspaper’s power as a voice of reason in the public sphere). Puri is an idealistic young writer and journalist who has already served a prison sentence for the cause of the freedom movement. Tara is a college student excited by the intellectual freedom of the university – one that is not available in the world of the gali, with its family and gender hierarchies – but troubled by her engagement to a man she hardly knows.

In the novel’s opening movement, we see Puri (as he is called by the narrator) vexed by his inability to find a job and the social obstacles in the way of his marrying Kanak, the daughter of a prosperous publisher. Tara, meanwhile, feels that her world will come to an end if she is made to marry Somraj Sahni, her loutish fiance. But these problems pale into insignificance compared to the crisis that suddenly appears like a dark cloud over Lahore, as the British prepare to leave India. The Hindus of Bhola Pandhe Gali fear that Lahore might be ceded, as part of the two-nation theory that has gained currency in undivided India, to the new, primarily Muslim nation state of Pakistan.

“What if there’s a Pakistan or there’s a Hindustan? We’re Lahorites, neighbours of Doongi Gali,” declares one of the family’s optimistic friends. But as the book shows, this cosmopolitan vision of history and community has little chance against the drumroll of nationalism, and the combustible fear of the other lying just beneath the surface of the subcontinent’s social life.

Yet the novel also shows us that, at the time, Partition was not imagined to be a complete sealing-off of two geographically and culturally contiguous territories from each other, as turned out to be the case eventually. People left behind their homes, families, cities and countries imagining that they would soon be back once things had settled. But often they never returned, or returned to find that everything they owned had been taken.

The paradox most strikingly explored by the novel is that the very (allegedly foundational) categories of Hinduism and Islam that were the basis of Partition proved powerless, despite their scriptural emphasis on peace and justice, to stop the cataclysms of violence visited by each side upon the other. People of both sides looted, killed and raped, “all in the name of God”, as one character sorrowfully observes.

Repeatedly in This Is Not That Dawn, characters are shown jettisoning their private moral compasses because they are convinced that blood must be spilled to avenge the spilling of blood. Yashpal’s novel, on a scale equal to the complexity of the matter at hand, shows us how the question of justice is rarely contemplated by human beings in the abstract, or outside the pressures of time or frame of history – and that in a crisis, this tendency can prove to be mortal while continuing to believe itself moral. These conceptions of “comparative justice” are still doing the rounds of the subcontinent to this day, as during the gruesome religious riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002.

If This Is Not That Dawn is nevertheless a deeply pleasurable book, it is because it offers a world so vividly imagined that the quotidian acquires the same significance as the apocalyptic. The novel is steeped in meaningful details that reveal the networks and pressures of space, gender (“the afternoons in the galis belonged to the women ... If a male had to come back to the gali for some reason, he would clear his throat loudly to warn the women”), family and tradition in the small, hermetic world of Bhola Pandhe’s Gali in Lahore, and then out across the fields of city and nation.

As both Puri and Tara are thrust out into the world – Puri when he leaves Lahore in search of a job; Tara when she is abducted by a Muslim man after escaping from Sahni’s house on the night of her wedding – they are forced to bear the violence and derangement of Partition upon their bodies and then, finding themselves still alive, decide what to make of their battered selves. Although it appears for the longest time that Puri, with his idealism, his love of language, his political vision and his diligence, is the book’s hero, we see him gradually sinking, over a thousand pages, under the weight of his own worldly power in the new Indian republic and somewhat insecure masculinity – an unforgettable narrative arc. Revealingly, it is his involvement with the Indian National Congress that gradually leaches the idealism from Puri.

Instead, it is Tara, the apparently helpless, brutalised victim, who slowly gathers strength and makes an independent life for herself in the Indian capital, Delhi, watching out not just for herself but for other women in trouble. The storyline reveals not just Yashpal’s feminism – once she has a modicum of power and agency, Tara repeatedly resists any attempts to return her back to a normative world of female deference and duty – but also his emphasis on the individual’s right to dissent from the collective.

This Is Not That Dawn was written just a few years after the Indian constitution offered a new vision of rights, responsibilities and secular freedom to Indian citizens – a vision of a political order more egalitarian and enabling than any previously held in the history of the subcontinent. It might be thought to be the narrative and novelistic companion to that document, all the more compelling because its worldview is implied – parcelled out into the experiences and reflections of dozens of characters, and across the novelistic timespan of nearly two decades – and not spelt out from above.

Ten years into the life of the new nation, Yashpal sat down to compose an epic story, scrubbed free of nationalist cant, about the passion and tragedy that attended its birth. In doing so, he produced the first great novel about the ideals and implications of a new view of Indianness, a novel whose mingled vision of realism and idealism rings true to this day.

On Diana Eck's India: A Sacred Geography and Akash Kapur's India Becoming

This review appears today in The Washington Post.

It’s most unusual to see geography as primarily a construct of the human imagination, but that is precisely what the scholar of Hinduism Diana Eck attempts in her massive new book, India: A Sacred Geography. Thousands of years before India was a nation-state (1947), a colony of Britain (the 18th century), or a cartographic vision on a map (1782), it was, in Eck’s view, conceived as a geographical unit in the hearts and minds of the faithful, and particularly in the religious imagination of Hinduism.

Pilgrims thought of India as the land of the seven great rivers, as a space marked by the benediction and caprice of the gods who resided in the great northern peaks of the Himalayas, as woven into unity by the great centers of pilgrimage, or dhams, in the north, south, east and west. Seeking the marks and manifestations of the sacred, they fashioned with their footprints a map of a vast subcontinent suffused with the presence of the gods and stories of their appearances in different incarnations.

Eck’s perspective has significant political implications. It arguably refutes the widely held notion that India was merely a confusion of diverse kingdoms, cultures and languages until it was politically integrated by the British Empire. Some scholars hold that the idea of Hinduism, too, is the modern tracing of a circle around a diversity of ancient religious beliefs never self-consciously systematized into a whole. This idea struggles to hold up against the layered evidence supplied by Eck’s book, the synthesis of three decades of work on the myths, rituals, cosmology and everyday life of Hinduism.

But the appeal of the book lies in the fact that its emphasis is not political, but aggregative and connective, making a forest out of a mass of trees. Eck offers an exceptionally rich account of how, throughout India, the cosmic is mapped onto the local in a tradition formed, revised and renewed over the centuries by thousands of discrete phenomena and often anonymous actors.

This map of myth, as it were, radiates a worldview very different from the assumptions of modern cartography. Cartography invests each place on a map with a name and an unassailable specificity. But sacral maps, Eck notes, are marked continuously by “patterns of duplication and condensation,” demonstrating an ability “to see a world in a grain of sand,” in William Blake’s unforgettable formulation. For instance, thousands of rivers and water bodies across the country are said to be linked to or fed by the holiest river of Hinduism, the Ganga. The Ganga is, depending on what lens one brings to it, both somewhere and everywhere.

“As arcane as lingas of light . . . and sacred rivers falling from heaven may seem to those who wish to get on with the real politics of today’s world,” Eck writes, “these very patterns of sanctification continue to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country.”

She devotes entire chapters to regional variations in the worship of the great generative god Shiva, the creator of the universe, or the myth of the Mother Goddess, who is consecrated and remembered in thousands of local incarnations as “the goddesses of earth and village, glade and river, hilltop and mountaintop.” In doing so Eck demonstrates how, just as novels are fully realized only in the minds of their readers, gods are made present in the world by the stories and footsteps of the faithful.

The two main currents of contemporary nonfiction about India might be said to be a broadbrush view animated by strong particulars (such as Patrick French’s recent India: A Portrait) and an attempt to fully realize a fascinating local world (such as two recent books about discrete realms in the megalopolis of Mumbai, Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing). Eck’s book might be said to stand at the sangam, or junction (a site of great religious power in Hinduism), of these currents.

Its ideas reverberate forcefully, too, against other recent works about geography as informed by the human imagination, such as Rebecca Solnit’s book about San Francisco, Infinite City, or Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France. (Robb and Eck also resemble each other in never writing an uninteresting or flat sentence.) All these writers would be fundamentally in agreement with Eck’s assertion that “every story has a place and every place a story.”

Eck’s book is so dense with detail that one might think of its 500 pages as a distillation of a world. In Akash Kapur’s India Becoming,” on the other hand, an idea that might be written up in a few sentences is stretched out, through the conceit of an autobiographical narrative, into an entire book.

In 2003 Kapur returns, after many years in America, to India, the country of his childhood, and finds the sleepy, unmoving world of old dramatically refashioned by new energies — especially the energies of capital — and ambitions. Fascinated by “that sense of newness, of perpetual reinvention and forward momentum that I had felt when I first moved to America,” Kapur beds down in Auroville, a small south Indian town, to take stock of this dramatic historical moment.

He explores the new India through a variety of conversations with, among others, a landlord who sees the old feudal world falling away around him, a young gay man riding the wave of the IT revolution and an activist in Mumbai fighting for the rights of those who have been marginalized or dispossessed by ruthlessness of the new economy. The Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis slowly emerges from his narration, but only as cliche, reverse cliche and all-encompassing cliche.

Dazzled in the beginning by the rumbling of a society of a billion people (“India, I felt, had started to dream”), Kapur soon begins to feel disillusionment with the spectacle of rising crime, pollution and poverty, and a “culture of not caring.” Finally he decides that he has been too hasty in both his elation and his despair, and settles for the comfort of realizing that “the central fact . . . of modern India was change” and the mystification “ineluctably, if at times haltingly, a new world was rising.”

If this were a novel, one might surmise that the writer was deliberately setting the narrator up as a naif. Anyone who reads it as straight-up reportage, though, will probably find the banality and contrivance of this self-indulgent “journey” exasperating. It is not just that Kapur does not take any strong positions (“I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay”). What is worse is that his language groans with superfluity (“It was evening, a time between night and day, and the lights of the city were starting to come on”) and lazy allusion (“India, the author Nirad Chaudhuri reportedly once wrote, is a nation of a million exceptions”).

If Eck’s book reveals the relevance of the local, the unfamiliar and the seemingly obscure to the deep structure of a civilization, Kapur’s proves conversely the great gulf between taking up a relevant subject and writing a relevant book.

Some thoughts on novels, especially Indian novels

Last weekend I gave my talk "Ten Ways In Which Novels Can Change My Life" in Panjim, Goa (and this Friday I'm giving it in Pune, details in the image below). The Navhind Times of Goa generously ran a long interview with me on the subject of novels that I reproduce here.

Life is not a novel. How does a piece of literature factor in the 'unpredictable' human streak?

Life is not a novel, but it is a story, and so is a novel. Both kinds of stories have a lot to give each other. Literature is interested in precisely what is unsystematic and unpredictable about human beings. But the next challenge is to find a way of portraying this unpredictability, persuasively.

There is the good, the bad and the ugly in literature. How would you classify literature into each of these categories and what according to you is the purpose of 'the ugly'?
To my mind there are two kinds of "ugly" in literature. There is that literature which tries to portray or understand or criticise all that is ugly about human nature, human institutions -- for example communal violence, violence in man-woman relations, the urge to think some human beings inferior to others. And of course there is some literature or art which is to my mind ugly in itself -- cynically or manipulatively written, perpetrating stereotypes of its own (for instance the stereotypes of Goans in Hindi movies), or full of other kinds of clichés of thought and language.

The present age has seen the emergence of Chick Lit in India. Is this devaluing literature?
I wouldn't say so. Literature has value not in an a priori kind of way (such as, for instance, money) but only in terms of what it achieves between the time the first sentence of the book begins and the last line ends. In this space, whether it is literary novels, science fiction, or Chick Lit, a work may do something tremendously interesting and original. Some of what we think of now as great novels by women writers were considered Chick Lit when they came out. More important than the genre in which a book is written is the mind of the writer writing it.

What does modern Indian literature reflect of these times in India?
I think modern Indian literature is tremendously interesting and diverse. It reflects a society that is changing very fast, interrogating (or trapped within) old ways of living and interrogating new ones. But it is the responsibility of the reader (and to my mind, also bookshops) to experience the full diversity of Indian literature by seeking (or displaying) literature in translation, books published by small presses, books by writers who are no longer alive to do publicity events for themselves! To make just a short list, I would say that if you were seriously interested in say, just the Indian novel today, you would have to have read at least one work each by Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, UR Ananthamurthy, Aravind Adiga, Kalpana Swaminathan, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Qurratulain Hyder, Yashpal, Salma, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Sankar, and Mahasweta Devi. From a list like this you would be able to piece together a tremendously interesting picture of modern India.

Compare Indian writing qualitatively (including use of language) vis-à-vis the early trio of Indian authors -- Mulk Raj Anand, R K Narayan and Raja Rao.

Narayan was of course a very original prose stylist, as was Raj Rao. I don't like Anand's work so much. Even so, I think contemporary writers are less self-conscious in their use of English today than many of their predecessors, and the best of them produce a more interesting sound that brings the rhythms of Indian life to English. I think older Indian writers tended to write more British "English" English. The work of my generation has a freer sound rooted in multiple influences across world literature.

Your take on regional literature.
As I said earlier (and as I demonstrate with the short list of necessary Indian novels I offered), one cannot think of any map of Indian literature, whether as a writer or as a reader, without thinking about Indian writing in translation. I would not call writing in translation "regional" any more than writing in English is "regional".

Hollywood and European cinema draws heavily from literature. Why do we not see this same trend in India besides the few odd incidences like Chetan Bhagat claiming that 3 Idiots was based on his Five Point Someone.
I think an older tradition of Hindi films did borrow stories heavily from Indian literature. I'm thinking, for instance, of one of my favourite Amitabh Bachchan films, Saudagar (1973), in which he plays the role of a trader of cane sugar. The film was based on a story called "Ras" by the Bengali writer Narendranath Mitra. Or Shyam Benegal's Suraj Ka Satvaan Ghoda, based on a novel by Dharamvir Bharati. As films have become more generic and more calculated, they have drifted away from literature, which is in its very spirit very individual and very specific. I don't know that there are that many serious readers in Hindi cinema any more - someone like Shyam Benegal or Ketan Mehta. But I do know that Mira Nair is currently making The Reluctant Fundamentalist from Mohsin Hamid's novel by the same name. I'd be very interested in seeing that because the book is a very interior one.

What aspect of human nature fascinates you the most and in which piece of literature according to you is this best showcased.
I guess of all human relationships, I'm most interested in man-woman ones. The subject of how one can love (and give oneself away to) someone else over a period of time while also keeping to an independent trajectory -- to be both committed and single, as it were -- is an eternal question for adult human beings. One could make a small survey of the pleasures and problems of romantic attachment, for example, by reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, Yashpal's Jhootha Sach, Irene Nemirovsky's All Our Worldly Goods, and Aamer Hussein's recent novel The Cloud Messenger.

Literary Days at the Norwich Showcase

Some days of one's life one feels grateful for nothing more than the simple pleasure of being alive, and among people tuned not just to the same frequency (principally the wavelength answering to a love of language, jokes, and coffee), but also the same forms -- the old and new ones of literature, literary debate, production, and transmission.

I've been thinking these unoriginal, but nevertheless compelling, thoughts particularly strongly over the last four days as I attend, from morning to night, a set of readings and discussions in England at the Norwich Showcase, an event organised by the British Council. The festival brings together 40 of the best contemporary British writers working in a diversity of forms and languages (across fiction, poetry, drama, performance poetry, nature writing, translation) with a set of representatives from literary organizations, periodicals and festivals from Britain and around the world from Brazil to Uganda to Malaysia to Canada. I'm in Norwich to speak about contemporary Indian literature, and my own work as the Fiction & Poetry editor of The Caravan.

Very often the pleasures of a text are enhanced by the voice of the mind that composed them. Over the last four days I've heard verse by Hannah Lowe, several of them about her father, a professional gambler (a recording of which you can hear here; the texts of some of the poems are here), Tom Warner (here's his very funny and acute poem "Day Thirty-Two", about a survivor of an air crash on a desert island looking at life around him, and here are two others called "Magician" and "Under Natural History"), Kei Miller (who read his excellent "12 Notes For a Light Song of Light"), and Lavinia Greenlaw. If you'd like to listen to Miller and Warner reading one after the other, a podcast of their readings alongside the poet Emily Berry is here.

Yesterday I also enjoyed the writers Robert Macfarlane, whose work I admire greatly, and Adam Foulds talking about new directions in writing about landscape. Macfarlane spoke illuminatingly about the centrality in literature of "the connection of aesthetics to ethics -- the idea that if you learn to see the world differently you'll probably behave differently" and turned the idea into an image by describing it as "a fairly reliable two-stroke engine".

Later, the novelist Adam Thirlwell delivered a razor-sharp talk about the idea of translation not as a substitute for the original but rather a match for it, involving a number of subjective choices made by the individual translator that can never be worked up into a replicable theory or system. Here's is Thirlwell's essay "The Joyful Side of Translation". There was also an astonishing session of performance poetry last night by Luke Wright, who compressed dozens of verbal riffs, jabs, jests and grumbles into a quarter of an hour of pure energy -- a bit like a verbal equivalent of a surging and dipping run downfield by Gareth Bale, the left-winger of the most romantic football team on the planet, Tottenham Hotspur. (Wright cracked everyone up with his line "Some of my best women are friends".)

But there's also been a chance to learn about a host of strategies being employed in our shapeshifting literary world to bring new readers to literature, use new media in the service of literature, and link up the private and the social sides of literature. The marvellously funny and articulate writer Damian Barr is also the salonniere for the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, which hosts an evening, free to all, of readings and bookchat among writers selected by Barr in London every few weeks (the Facebook page for the Salon is here; I'm going to the next event, "Faith and Doubt", on Wednesday the 14th). This isn't your standard meet-the-celebrity event: no books are available for sale, and there are no signings either -- it's all about the written word and the conversation during and after.

The Ugandan writer Doreen Baingana spoke of her work setting up support networks for women writers with her group Femrite, and the writer Jorge Antonio Marques of Brazil (who has, among other things, written a book about the history of tattoos) described his efforts to set up a most unusual literary festival, Flupp, to be held in Rio de Janeiro later this year, to be held on a hilltop in a favela. Samantha Schnee spoke about the work she and her colleagues have done over the last decade publishing over a thousand writers from over a hundred countries in English translation in the marvellous webzine Words Without Borders. Recent issues include a special on the Arab Spring, and an older one focussed on Urdu fiction from India. (An old Middlestage review  from 2007 of a Words Without Borders anthology is here.)

And with that I'm off to shop, during our lunch break, at a little secondhand bookstore opposite the Norwich Cathedral, where all of today's events are being held against the background of the cathedral's steepling spire. My little jaunt there during the morning's coffee break has already yielded two quite rare books, which further intensifies my conviction that there's no university in the world quite as useful as a good secondhand bookshop.

The Caravan's Fiction and Poetry for March

Here are my selections of fiction and poetry for The Caravan's March issue, with little notes on each piece:

The Virgins by Irene Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

ABOUT THE STORY 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 the French novelist Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). Némirovsky’s great theme is the continuous oscillation of human beings between passion and peace. Her protagonists, alive to all the pleasures this world can offer, are memorably marked by what Nemirovsky calls “fire in the blood”.

In this many-sided story, whose ambiguities begin with its very title, a group of women are seen interpreting selfhood, and its relationship to love, marriage and motherhood, through the prisms of their own lives and each other’s. The virgins of the story have much wisdom to offer. In their judgments of the protagonist, there is no hint of jealousy. Even so, might it be that they are trumped finally by “the inimitable prestige of experience”? Might it be that we are most fully human through the intelligence of hindsight, not foresight? The values attached to the word “life” in Nemirovsky—freedom, experience, passion, connection, a particular kind of strength rooted in vulnerability—suddenly surface alongside other competing and persuasive visions of the good life, the whole structure so delicately constructed and balanced it could only be found in the work of a great storyteller.

Némirovsky was Jewish. Her own life was tragically snuffed out in a concentration camp in Auschwitz in 1942, while she was halfway through her masterwork, Suite Française. The manuscript was discovered in a suitcase many decades later and became a worldwide bestseller when first published in 2004. Sandra Smith, the translator of this story, is also the translator of all of Némirovsky’s novels currently available in English.

Four Poems by Salma: "A Midnight Tale", "Perspective", "Evil" and "Home"

ABOUT THE POEMS In the poems of the acclaimed Tamil poet Salma, there appears the same layered and thoughtful attention to the power and pitfalls of female subjectivity that animates this month’s fiction selection. But they are relayed in a voice that is heavier, more burdened, speaking under the weight of the entrenched structures of patriarchy. Repeatedly in these poems, we sense a speaker having to argue with the world before she can be allowed to argue with herself. Yet the modern Indian writer is much more frank than the older European writer about the particulars of the female body—a contrast that shows how much feminism has opened up the language of female self-witnessing, to be sure, but one that also reveals the extent of Salma’s directness and daring. We find that even if the speaker of the poems decides never to leave “the courtyard of my own house”, her unforgettable voice locks us up, too, into that courtyard.

Salma is also the author of one of the great modern Indian novels, The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, 2009, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom).

What Would Dickens Write Today?

This essay appears this weekend on the British Council India website as part of its Dickens Bicentenary special, alongside essays on the same theme by other Indian novelists (Sudeep Chakravarti, Neel Mukherjee, Anjum Hasan, and Anita Nair)

Charles Dickens and the modern industrialized city both came of age around the same time. Dickens’s descriptions of both the beauty and the horror of urban life remain intensely apposite today, and are part of the permanent inheritance of the human race.

“A metropolis,” the German writer Robert Walser wrote early in the twentieth century, “is a giant spider web of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues […], a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself.” This is a very Dickensian description, with its metaphors of webs, oceans and forests, and the suggestion of both knowledge and bewilderment.

The London in which Dickens lived, thrived, and  — especially as a child and a young man — suffered was in his day the greatest and most populous metropolis the world had ever seen. The journalist Henry Mayhew, a contemporary of Dickens, wrote, “In every thousand of the aggregate composing the immense human family, two at least are Londoners.” The many new implications of what it meant to belong to, and take sustenance from, a human family of this enormous size, with its variety, instability, grotesquerie, anonymity, interconnection, anarchy, and forms of community and exchange were explored intimately by Dickens in his novels and his journalism.

But Dickens’s achievement is not just one of empathy, of a surpassing range of perception and powers of connection. It is also one of style. Dickens invented a prose style that was equal, on the page, to the speed of urban life, the explosion of sense perceptions available within it. Just as, within the city, previously inanimate matter was now brought to life by steam and electrical energy, so too in Dickens, characters, scenes and conversations are animated by an extraordinary energy and clarity. The familiar is made unfamiliar; the unfamiliar familiar.

Here is Dickens describing the construction site for a new railway line in Dombey and Son: “There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water and unintelligible as any dream.” Such sentences don’t just describe a new world, but resemble it in their collage of different perspectives.

As the half-finishedness of this landscape suggests, in many ways the modern urban cities closest to Dickens’s London no long belong to Europe, but to Asia and Africa. For better or for worse, cities like Mumbai (where I live) have the same narrative energy. They exist permanently suspended between need and satiation, wakefulness and sleep, impoverished by the city and yet unable to imagine a life outside it, mixing a thousand different tongues and accents into one jumbled-up patois.

Every construction site leaves behind a permanent fund of debris; every line of progress, whether physical or mental, is interrupted by the movement or will of another. For every kind of activity that is organized and regulated, there exists a shadow world where those in need and those who have something to offer find a way of coming together. Now that I don’t live in Mumbai all year round any more, I find that I can return to it just by opening to any page in Dickens’s work. Under the surface differences of names, streets, and manners, it is a similar world.

What I like most about Dickens are the absence of hierarchies in his narrative world, the way in which each character, whether high or low, major or minor, is given a distinct language and accent. A recent study showed that over 16,000 characters appear in Dickens’s work. That is, Dickens invented more people than we meet over the course of a lifetime. Perhaps we love Dickens so much because the world he gives us is bigger than any world we know.

What would Dickens write today? I think he would be greatly fascinated by the Internet: what it does to human selfhood and to relationships, how it is both a means to something and an end in itself. He would be struck, too, by the new forms of capitalism in place today: the financial bubbles of mortgages, derivatives and real estate, the networks of economic connection propelled by globalization and the field of economic desire that trails us wherever we go (he could stay with the titles Great Expectations and Hard Times).

He would delight in making ironic use of the jargon of advertising and PR, and mocking the construction (and indeed constriction) of the human being as primarily a consumer and of the measurement of human progress primarily by economic indicators. And he would love to stand on the elevators of the Tube stations of London, looking at the vast array of human types from all around the world before him and listening to the sounds and stresses of their English and thinking of the images and transcriptions that would make them live again in his work.

Or -- to think about the question in another way -- perhaps Dickens would walk into a bookstore and find that he wouldn’t need to lift a finger. He could pick up one of his books and find that, more than a hundred years after his heyday, he was still in tune with the world.

On Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens

Today, February 7, marks the two hundredth birth anniversary of Charles Dickens. This essay on a new book about Dicken's early years in literature appeared last weekend in The National.

That an increase in information does not always produce an increase in knowledge is one of the lessons of our overdriven age. But on a smaller scale, it might also be seen as one of the essential principles – and, when forgotten or ignored, then criticisms – of the practice of biography.

The fundamental question of biography, or the art of the interpretation of one human being by another, has always been the question of the selection of detail, of the shape of significance. The massive biographies that take a cradle-to-the-grave approach to their subjects, pouring over the distinction of the person every factoid, reminiscence, contextual detail and speculative whisper that can be gleaned from labour in the archives, might be seen as actually dodging this question, content to bask in the reflected light of the subject’s name (Picasso! Steve Jobs! Lady Gaga!).

But a more sensitive and ambitious approach to biography, particularly when applied to over-interpreted subjects, concedes that even a fascinating human being is not evenly interesting, that even in the richest of lives there seem to be periods when every hour is hot with ferment, followed by passages of consolidation, drift, torpor, even regress. If the reason we are attracted to biography is the allure of the drama of human self-fashioning seen from the inside, then these rewards can just as well be gleaned by the choice of a suite of years, and not the whole life.

The excitement of this method – that of the partial, but pointed, biography – is that it is defamiliarising, hovering not above its subject but beside it. In place of the person whom we believe we know, intimately, we are given a figure, answering to the same name, seen confronting a decisive problem in a way that will change both self and world. Through the verb in its title, Becoming Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s study of Charles Dickens in the early years of his career shows us what it wants to give to the celebrations of 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens. It is a Dickens who, throwing himself into the currents of London in the 1830s, could not even be sure of his next move or source of income, much less that his name would still chime in the minds of millions 200 years after his birth.

Indeed, this Dickens was not even sure of the literary appeal of his own name, reaching out to the reading public, after the fashion of the day, through a pseudonym (“Boz”) and reserving his full name for contracts with publishers and letters to the woman he was wooing. Having served, in his teens and early 20s, as a clerk in London’s teeming law courts and a parliamentary reporter for a newspaper, he thought of himself principally as a writer of scenes and sketches, holding on to a chamber in the courts even as he tested the waters of “the most precarious of pursuits” – that of the professional writer.

Douglas-Fairhurst, a scholar of English literature tenured at Oxford, brings to his book two very different kinds of strengths. The first is his knowledge of the literary and social world of 19th-century London, which is his area of academic specialisation. Indeed, with this book, he ties together within his own oeuvre a work about the greatest and most sympathetic novelistic chronicler of the British underclass, Dickens, with the greatest journalistic chronicler of that class, the reporter and editor Henry Mayhew. Mayhew’s massive four-volume work of reportage, London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), came out last year in a new edition abridged by Douglas-Fairhurst and introduced by him as “the greatest Victorian novel never written”.

Dickens and Mayhew were both captivated by the narrative clamour and despair of a London that, over the course of the 19th century, saw a demographic boom that took its population from a million to six million. (Mayhew writes in the opening pages of his fascinating study Criminal Prisons of London that “in every thousand of the aggregate composing the immense human family, two at least are Londoners”.) In so booming, the city itself became interested in measurement, statistical projection and patterns of complex cause and effect, and cultivated an enormous appetite for newspapers and, indeed, novels.

Trawling the periodicals in which Dickens published his early, atmospheric pieces, Douglas-Fairhurst returns him to the literary-social frame within which he worked out his own method and the form – that of the serialised story, gathering momentum or changing direction over the weeks in dialogue with a feedback loop immediately generated by readers – in which he first published his novels. He shows Dickens “transforming himself from sketch writer to novelist, and from reporter to editor” when these were not at all easy or obvious decisions, although they seem so now because they have been ratified by time.

Douglas-Fairhurst’s other talent is for a very attentive and sophisticated kind of close reading – for tracing the contours of Dickens’ imagination and social vision through the analysis of sentences, phrases, even single words. This is invaluable, because if we are to understand through novels how people are marked by life, we need to pay attention to how characters and situations are marked by the text.

Observing the importance of prisons, real and metaphorical, to Dickens’ imagination – in his childhood, his father was briefly sent to prison for defaulting on debts, resulting in the young Charles having to work in a blacking factory while his sister continued to go to school – Douglas-Fairhurst stops upon a sentence in Little Dorrit. The eponymous protagonist speaks of life with her family in a debtors’ prison and of how it has marked them forever, misting up memory of life before the prison and darkening any future that might lie after it: “Whatever we once were (which I hardly know) we ceased to be long ago, and never can be any more.”

Glossing this remarkable sentence, with its exquisitely balanced clauses (two parts of four words each, then two parts of six, and winding through past-, present- and future-tense constructions in a state of tension with one another), Douglas-Fairhurst remarks, “The prison expands to fit the size of the world, and the world contracts to fit the size of the prison”. Indeed, we might say about the work of literary criticism that it shows how a sentence may expand to the size of the world too.

Again, writing about the sprawl, even the excess, of narrative energy and colour in Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst writes: “[T]he centrifugal force of his imagination, which could never resist spawning extra characters and narrative details, is always on the verge of escaping from the centripetal force of his plots.” But this very gracefully expressed idea, which serves in this instance as a compliment to Dickens, might also be applied to Douglas-Fairhurst’s own book, and here it becomes a criticism.

The writing is sometimes self-indulgent – never more so than in the opening pages, when, in setting up the idea of Dickens having many competing paths before him as he was “becoming Dickens”, Douglas-Fairhurst supplies a portrait of an imaginary London in 1855 borrowed from a novel, The Difference Engine, published in 1990 by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. This is a very strained kind of counter-factualism and it lays the ground for many later passages when Dickens disappears completely from view and the writing slackens from being centerless.

Douglas-Fairhurst’s other unreliable tic is his penchant for supplying dialectical explanations for situations or states of mind, which is sometimes extended to the point of self-parody (“only by trying to lose his train of thought could [Dickens] find it, just as only by leaving his home could he enjoy returning to it”). These faults mean that, while frequently insightful, Becoming Dickens falls just short of being essential.

Caravan Fiction and Poetry, February

Here are my selections of fiction and poetry for the February issue of The Caravan:

Gogu Shyamala's story "But Why Shouldn't The Baindla Woman Ask For Her Land?", in a translation from the Telugu by Sashi Kumar, from Shyamala's new book Father May Be An Elephant, and Mother Only A Small Basket, But..., published this month by Navayana,

and four poems by the South Korean poet Kim Sa-in, in translations by Brother Anthony of Taize.

Older selections are here and here.

On Arundhati Roy's Walking With The Comrades

This review appeared last weekend in The Washington Post.

As India grows into its new economic might, it also oppresses and impoverishes its people in ways different from those of old. One might say that where once the sins of the Indian state were mainly those of omission — of being too supine and resource-starved to lift several hundred millions citizens out of a cesspool of poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and caste and gender discrimination — increasingly they are mainly those of commission, of conspiracy and corruption under cover of the motions and catchphrases of democracy. Even so, there remains a basic faith, even pride, among Indians in the warming narrative of “the world’s largest democracy” and its institutions.

For over a decade now, the writer Arundhati Roy has served as India’s most powerful and articulate dissident, tearing that broad consensus to shreds. Through a slew of acerbic and impassioned essays, speeches and books, Roy has attacked both the country’s religious right wing and the barons of big business, and excoriated the Indian state’s political, economic and military policy. At times, Roy’s uncompromising hostility, penchant for tendentious theses and juxtapositions, and appropriation of multiple causes have earned her as much notoriety as respect.

Walking with the Comrades, Roy’s new book, is a riveting account of the face-off in the forests of central India between the Indian state and the Maoists or Naxalites, a shadowy, revolutionary guerrilla force with tens of thousands of cadres. It is a battle over power, land, ideology, mineral riches, rights, ecology — a battle, as Roy sees it,“for the soul of India.”

The thickly wooded states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in central India are home to millions of indigenous tribal peoples. Long neglected by the Indian state because of their inaccessibility and marginality, these areas gradually became the sylvan redoubt of a band of left-wing revolutionaries. These disenchanted and dreaming men and women are contemptuous of “bourgeois democracy” and committed to armed revolution, but have also dedicated themselves to working for and with the tribals to improve their lives. For decades, the Maoists have virtually run a parallel government in these regions.

But in recent years this uneasy equilibrium has been shattered, in part, by India’s booming economy. The tribals live atop lucrative resources: massive deposits of iron ore, bauxite and other minerals meaningless to them but coveted by mining companies. “Commonsense tells us,” Roy quotes India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram as saying in a speech in 2007 at Harvard University, “[that] we should mine these resources quickly and efficiently.” As government and big business draw ever closer in India, the state has become invested in the displacement of tribal peoples — and the flushing out of the Maoists — so that mining companies can blast and burrow in these regions.

Worse, the current government has armed and paid groups of tribals to inform on and smoke out Maoists, setting into motion a gory cycle of killings and reprisals that has claimed hundreds of lives. In this new McCarthyite climate, even to be a Maoist sympathizer in India has become an act of treason.

Roy’s charge is that Operation Green Hunt — the name of the concerted military campaign against the Maoists — is actually a front for the economic pillage of the forests and the destruction of the livelihood and habitat of some of India’s most vulnerable citizens. Deep in the jungle, the old Gandhian methods — or what Roy calls the “pious humbug” — of nonviolence and noncooperation seem absurd. Roy contends that at the Maoist resistance, even if often sinister and inscrutable, has at least halted the disastrous march of big dams and mines where numerous democratic and nonviolent resistance movements have failed.

The book is strongest when Roy describes her days in the forest among the strategists and footsoldiers of the insurrection — a privilege accorded to precious few Indians outside the movement. She walks, eats and sleeps alongside a ragtag bunch of armed youth (“almost everyone’s gun has a story: who it was snatched from, how and by whom”) and weighs their testimonies and arguments. Even so, the book is less reportage than polemic. What is seen and heard, even though vividly narrated, is immediately stitched up with material from newspaper reports and books, or set in counterpoint to claims by politicians, journalists and idealogues, or layered into complex global theses. The book’s primary landscape is not the forest, but the writer’s own mind.

Roy manages over the length of a book — and this is the point of books in any complex debate — to open out a distinctive position that belies easy summary. Although she has been painted as one, she is no simple apologist for the Maoists, whom she sees as possessing “a single-minded, grim, military imagination.” Yet she sees them as “the most militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements” being waged by Indian people for causes across the country. An alternative to the impasse, she suggests, requires “an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as Communism.” The first step to that is to “leave the bauxite in the mountain.” Fruitfully skeptical and contrarian, Walking with the Comrades is a necessary book by one of India’s most distinctive voices.

Samanvay in Delhi

And the festival website with the full programme is here.

On board The Caravan

I have a new job, one that requires me to break one of my own rules and report to office, although only once a month. I'm going to be in charge of the Fiction and Poetry section of The Caravan.

I hope every month to publish new and necessary Indian fiction and poetry in English and in translation, flanked occasionally by writing from other parts of the world.

Here are this month's selections: Feroz Rather's short story set in Kashmir, "The Last Candle", and Rabindra K Swain's poem "The Prime Minister" ("In the Prime Minister is the triumph/ Of the bird who himself does not eat/ But watches the other one take tiny pecks").

As with the selections in my book India: A Traveller's Literary Companion, I've appended a little note to each piece that describes what I think is striking about them.

Falling In Love With The Novel

This essay appeared last week in The Telegraph of London.

In the autumn of 2000, I was a 20-year-old student in Cambridge, at home in the English language but new to England and the English. Producing dutiful but desiccated essays every week on regicide and gender-bending in Shakespeare, struggling meanwhile with the almost complete absence of rice and dal (“lentils”) in the British diet, I suddenly fell violently in love in an unlikely place – Galloway & Porter, a home for cut-price and remaindered books. Thankfully the object of my affections was willing. She was, to squeeze out the last of my metaphor, The Novel.

As with Shakespeare’s blue-blooded lovers, the vision of the novel I fell in love was inseparable from the name of a particular house. This was Christopher MacLehose’s magnificent Harvill Press, then on its last legs, soon to be bought up by Random House and reincarnated as the tamer Harvill Secker.

This encounter with the novels published by Harvill turned my relationship with the novel from one of deference to discovery. From the classroom, I knew of the English canon: Fielding, Sterne, Eliot, Dickens, Forster, Joyce and Woolf. If these novelists bored me a little, it was not because they were uninteresting, but because they were being given to me (I came to them much later, on my own terms).

But the beautiful tall paperbacks from Harvill seemed to me an alternative canon, put together by a mind in tune with the novel’s own roving spirit, its refusal to fit into neat compartments of nation and language. Here was a cavalcade of fantastic names from across European and South American literature: Bulgakov and Andrei Bitov, Lampedusa and Cortazar, Jose Saramago and Jorge Amado, Antonio Tabucchi and Haruki Murakami, with the occasional British firework like Henry Green.

Indeed, in a way that mirrored my own previous heartbreaks, these were novels that seemed to have lost hope in finding lovers, being sold at a pound or two apiece. From the glorious parade of their characters, narrative strategies, and formal play – every chapter on Alessandro Baricco’s Silk was no more than a page, but sometimes a single sentence in Saramago’s novels ran to more than that length – I took away an impression of a single amorphous spirit behind them all, a grand ur-Novel.

Empathetic and critical, veiled and direct, the novel seemed to suggest a complex position from which to inhabit and interpret the world, all the more powerful because not reducible to a single axiom or method. To be educated in novels was to be educated in many of the dilemmas and ambiguities and mysteries of life.

When, a few years later, I returned to India, this alternative education in the novel was to prove more useful than my classroom education in trying to make a map of the Indian novel (and eventually, in writing my own novels). Although the Indian novel has its roots in the English novel – it begins around the 1860s, a result of the colonial encounter – it very soon branched out onto its own paths, melting into the cultural memory and literary traditions of the more than two dozen languages widely spoken across India.

Like the European novel, I saw, the Indian novel was really a kind of continent; to read in it without an emphasis on translation was to confine oneself to only one country. Among my discoveries in translation was the Oriya writer Fakir Mohan Senapati’s limber and anarchic Six Acres and a Third, every bit as powerful today as it was when first published in 1902. Other great books of an Indian pantheon might include UR Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Bharathipura (Kannada), Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight (Tamil), and the Bengali novels of Mahasweta Devi and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

Indeed, the values of the novel – individualism, scepticism, narrative depth, polyphony, empathy, truth-telling – seem to me to be in dialogue with the values of another ambitious project of Indian modernity: democracy. Both these projects invest similar kinds of trust in the individual, and take a similarly complex view of the relationship between liberty and responsibility. Democracy works through ideas and arguments, novels through stories. But the great novels, like democracy, represent a vision of justice.

Further, the novel’s native strengths seem to make it an ideal lens on India’s multiple narratives and long history of intercultural encounters. More than journalism or the cinema – both squeezed by commercial pressures – the novel seems the form most capable of absorbing India’s social and linguistic plurality, of not just describing but inhabiting from within the dozens of ways in which Indians make meaning.

In a culture where religion and society place vast pressure on the individual to believe in received truths, and advertising and the mass media now pour rivers of banality and manipulation into human brains, the novel is a reliable source of complex thought and an invaluable bastion of independence. For those seeking a layered and subtle account of India today, one very good place to find it is in a journey across the grand continent of the Indian novel.

And an older autobiographical essay: "On Not Coming Down From Trinity".

New stories in the Asia Literary Review and Pratilipi

I have two new stories out: one called "Captain", set in a restaurant in Bombay, in the new issue of the Asia Literary Review (a food special), and another called "Madhaba's Bottle of Oil", set in Bhubaneswar, in the new issue of Pratilipi (a fiction special).

Here is a paragraph from "Captain":

     “Europe!” Despite my contempt for Barun, I was impressed. I have never been to Europe myself. It has always been my dream to go to London some day. I want to see up close the people who once ruled us. “How did you get so far?”

     “I got work here, sir.”

     “Well, good for you. What country are you in?”

     “I don’t know, sir. But it’s very cold here.”

      I checked the country code on my phone and ran a Google search on my computer.

      “You’re in Poland,” I told him.

      “Yes…that’s right! I am in Poland.”

      Barun’s voice seemed so close, as if he were leaning right over me here in Prabhadevi, trying to peer into the tip box to see if he could quickly run a raid on it. I could clearly see his shifty eyes, his dark, cunning face, like a marsh always flooded by the waters of secret thoughts. If he had been merely quarrelsome or dishonest with the staff, they might still have tolerated him, because most of them were no saints themselves. But it was food that erected a wall between him and them. After he’s spent all day labouring far from home and family, you can’t deny a working man the needs of his stomach, of food the way he knows it and loves it. Almost to a man, the waiters despised Barun because, between him and Uttam, they made sure the staff lunch and dinner were always Bengali food, made to their own taste, cooked in mustard oil and spiced with panchporan. Phulkopi, aloo potol curry, dimer jhol, aloo chorchori, mung dal, fried eggplant, enough rice to feed seven generations of their ancestors – that was what they made every day. No matter what I or the waiters said to them, the staff food always tasted the same. When they made Chinese food it tasted like Chinese all right, but when they cooked Indian, even their rajma tasted like it was made by a housewife in Sealdah or Medinipur. What a pair.

And an old story, "Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name", is here.

Speaking In Delhi and Trivandrum this week

The literary magazine Pratilipi is a journal whose values I respect and admire. Even to call it bilingual, which it is, is to mischaracterize it, for it contains not just original work in English and Hindi but also translations into English and Hindi from many other languages. No individual mind, publishing house, or journal can come close to comprehending Indian literature across time and across languages, but Pratilipi seems to me very dynamic and ambitious in this regard.

Recently the magazine has diversified into book publishing, and among its new titles is one of the most enjoyable books I've read this year: The Pratilipi Special on the Village. On Wednesday, November 16, the magazine is hosting a joint event for several titles in Delhi at the India Habitat Centre. There will be readings by the poets Mangalesh Dabral, Alok Bhalla and Asad Zaidi, and then Jai Arjun Singh will speak on Pratilipi's list of Swedish novels and I will speak on The Pratilipi Special on The Village.

If you're a student, or just a reader interested in literature outside the mainstream, come along: the Facebook page for the event is here. Would that such events were around when I was a student in Delhi at the end of the nineties; then my education in Indian literature would have taken far less time than it did. In those days there was no transmission of information about events on the Internet; nobody ever invited me to anything; I was confined to English literature classes at Delhi University, and my only outings in culture were viewings of obscure (but beautiful) films in the hushed, prayerful atmosphere of the Iranian Cultural Centre on Ferozeshah Road. This was in its own way not such a regrettable matter, as those films have decisively influenced my aesthetic beliefs, but all I meant to say is that if such an event had taken place in 1999 and I'd known about it I'd have definitely gone for it -- and so should you.

And on the afternoon of Friday, November 18, I'm giving my lecture "Ten Ways In Which Novels Can Change Your Life" at the Hay Festival in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Just in case there are some of you at the talk -- unlikely, but one should never say never -- who also came to the talk by the same title in Delhi in February, don't worry, I'll have changed lots of the novels around, so even if we've grown nine months older -- it's terrible, I know, how time passes, and nothing to show for it but more chapters of a novel thrown out into the trash for lack of rhythm, energy and sense -- the talk won't have. The entire program for the festival is here.

Things I've Been Reading Recently

Some things I've been reading recently in and around Indian literature:

"Shiva's Blue Throat: A Personal Vision of The Artist's Role", a very good essay by the novelist Kiran Nagarkar on the provocative idea of Shiva as a model for the writer ("The quality and truth of an artist depend not merely on the precise observation and nuanced mimesis of the lives of his creatures, but on how far he can, through his artistry, undergo every single emotional crisis, betrayal, thought-process, dilemma, joy and terror that his characters experience. That is the test of Shiva. The life of the character the writer is depicting must be absorbed so fully that it must burn his throat blue, a blue unlike any other and result in a voice which is distinctive and unmistakable. In short, the artist must become Shiva.")

"Should Writers Be Sexier Than You?" an intriguing essay by the novelist (and, last that I heard, a friend of The Middle Stage, although in times such as ours one can never rely on news more than three hours old) Karan Mahajan on the idea of the model as a model for the writer. Mahajan recounts how he posed almost naked, next to a tempting model wearing not much more than him, for Canteen magazine in an effort to overturn the modern writer's reputation for frowsiness. ('Authors present themselves as bright, sincere, humble, hardworking people, like Republican presidential candidates. “It’s all just revision and craft,” one says. “I couldn’t have done it without my mom,” offers another. “My three years of MFA were the best of my life and I would do them again if I could,” says a third.) When you read this piece you'll also find alongside it photographs of some of the bright lights of south Asian writing today, looking like they've just emerged from the pages of Vanity Fair. Also worth noting is that, of all the South Asian writers featured in this piece, everybody is clearly dressed up to achieve a particular look, but only Mr. HM Naqvi appears simply as his everyday self. Would that Tehelka had contacted me, too, to photograph me for this project. But deep in my heart I know the reason why I'd never come close to qualifying for such a project: I'm too cheerful to be sexy.

"Theory and Practice" a debate in The Caravan between the historian Ramachandra Guha and the head of the CPI (M) Prakash Karat about the content of "After The Fall", an essay Guha wrote a few months ago about the decline of the Left in India. It's not often that the head of an Indian political party locks horns intellectually with one of its critics (imagine the likelihood of Sonia Gandhi sitting down at her laptop to compose a response to, say, a critique of the Congress by Arundhati Roy), so you must read this for a sense of the occasion as well as the shape of the skirmish.

"Watch This Man", a magnificently acerbic and thoroughgoing takedown of the ideas of the historian Niall Ferguson by Pankaj Mishra, who anatomizes not just Ferguson's journey through the field of provocative hypotheses about empire and America, but also the shape and course of an entire intellectual milieu. Mishra's essay combines close reading of words and sentences and cultural criticism in magisterial fashion.

"Exploring Rama's Anguish in the Valmiki Ramayana" by the scholar of classic and translator Arshia Sattar, whose very stimulating book on the same subject, Lost Loves, appeared earlier this year ("Because of teaching from [the Ramayana] and reading it over and over again in the past few years, I have developed a new intimacy with the text, one entirely different from the closeness that I had to it when I was translating. To my surprise in this rapprochement, I find my thoughts going more and more to Rama. As a card-carrying feminist, I am shocked that it is he who draws me to him, compels me to try and understand his cruelty towards Sita and what it means for him to be king, perhaps even against his innermost wishes. I find myself more and more involved with Rama and am convinced that the way to a more complete understanding of the Ramayana, especially for contemporary women, has to be through an inclusion rather than a rejection of Rama and his questionable behavior.") Sattar's attention to the dilemmas of well-known figures from the epics in limber and searching prose reminded me of another excellent book in the same small field: Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata.

"Rabindranath Tagore Revived" by Seamus Perry, a very astute look at Tagore's reputation a century after his heyday. Many figures appear in passing in this piece, including WB Yeats, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Bertrand Russell, who delivers the hilarious putdown, not without a degree of truth: "The sort of language that is admired by many Indians unfortunately does not mean anything at all."

On Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke

This essay appeared last weekend in the New York Times as "Fashioning Narrative Pleasures From Narcotic Ones"

No writer in modern India has held a novelistic lamp to the subcontinent’s densely thicketed past as vividly and acutely as Amitav Ghosh. Since the publication of The Circle of Reason in the mid-1980s, Ghosh’s work has been animated by its inventive collages and connections. River of Smoke,  the second volume of his ambitious Ibis trilogy, is the work of a writer with a historical awareness and an appetite for polyphony that are equal to the immense demands of the material he seeks to illuminate.

Like its predecessor, Sea of Poppies, this new novel fashions narrative pleasures from narcotic ones, exploring the fizzing currents of language, politics, trade and culture that swept through the vast opium network operated by the British East India Company in the 19th century. Sea of Poppies was set almost entirely in the cities, harbors and plains of India, the source of the poppies from which the opium was made. River of Smoke takes the action forward to the same opium’s destination, the Chinese trading outpost of Canton.

Although convincing in its reconstruction of early-19th-­century India and revelatory in its linguistic ventriloquism, Sea of Poppies often labored under its own weight. Improbable plot turns too often tied its narrative threads together; its pastiches too frequently lapsed into stretches of creaking comedy. Superficially less dramatic, River of Smoke is much more evenly written and engaging.

It is clear that Ghosh is fascinated by the history of Canton and, within it, of Fanqui-town, a tiny foreign enclave on the edge of a formidable but mysterious civilization that is beginning to resent the corruption of its people by opium. The outpost is populated by traders from around the world (but dominated by the agents of the East India Company) and surrounded by a flotilla of boats that ferry smuggled goods and serve as eating and pleasure houses. Although so small it’s “like a ship at sea,” Fanqui-town is, in one observer’s memorable description, “the last and greatest of all the world’s caravansaries.”

At the center of Ghosh’s story stands a man who owes his life to Canton: Bahram Modi, a Parsee merchant from Bombay. Entirely absent from the first book in the trilogy, Bahram is almost everywhere in the second, and serves as a channel for much of its energy. One of the few independent Indian businessmen in a trade controlled by the East India Company, he is both insider and outsider. A self-made man who has staked his fortunes on one massive shipment of opium, Bahram is paradoxically rich and poor, caught between a group of British merchants who swear by “the elemental force of Free Trade” and a Chinese establishment eager to root out the commerce in opium.

If there is one thing that reveals all the constituent elements of Bahram’s life, it is his language, which is “silted with the sediment of many tongues — Gujarati, Hindustani, English, pidgin, Cantonese.” Probably the most memorable character in all of Ghosh’s fiction, Bahram is captured in every possible mood, from opium-­induced hallucination to boardroom bluster, romantic rapture to Zoroastrian-­inflected philosophical rumination.

Ghosh clearly sets up the events leading to the breakout of the Opium War of 1839 as a mirror to contemporary realities. His British merchants, although fully realized characters, are what today might be called free-trade fundamentalists, adroitly dodging any moral criticism of their position. The force of Ghosh’s ideas and the beauty of his tableaux of Canton are two of the book’s achievements; the semantic ripples of the variety of dialects he folds into the narration are a third. River of Smoke is both a stirring portrayal of the past and, novelistically, a beacon for the future.