A new book: My Country Is Literature

I have a new book out this month: My Country Is Literature — a book of literary essays, some of them first published here on the Middle Stage. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and has over 60 essays on writers and books (including a great many Indian novelists from across the history of the Indian novel) and a long introduction, "The Books of My Twenties, or, How I Became A Literary Critic," that is a memoir of my life in book-reviewing.

Two excerpts from it — one, a passage about the relationship of literary criticism to the essay and of the novel to life, and two, some memories of my father, who taught me to love books and to treasure libraries — are here and here. Here is a paragraph from it:

A book is only one text, but it is many books. It is a different book for each of its readers. My Anna Karenina is not your Anna Karenina; your A House for Mr Biswas is not the one on my shelf. When we think of a favourite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters who touched our hearts, the rhythm and texture of the sentences. We recall our own circumstances when we read it: where we bought it (and for how much), what kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the story began to intermingle with scenes from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation or allowed us to make our peace with some great private discord. This is the second life of the book: its life in our life.

It's a book about all the pleasures and glories of being a reader and trawling the boundless seas of literature. If you know of someone, especially a young person, who loves books, please present them a copy.

Shakti Maira and the Promise of Beauty

"Saundarya drishti – an eye, a sense, an instinct for beauty – is a quality naturally available to every human being.”

The painter and sculptor Shakti Maira reclines in an armchair, and in a patch of morning sunlight, in his family home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Delhi’s Greater Kailash I. “And further, the experience of beauty is such a vital part of the human sense of well-being. Sadly, we have become so acculturated today to the idea that well-being is basically economic. And the idea of beauty has become mainly about looking good, or at the most about visual experience. Today we are constantly taking in-breaths in our lives…and I’m not sure that the experience of beauty is possible without the capacity to take out-breaths.” 

As Maira looks around the room, it is not difficult to see the beauty in him. In profile, his head and broad shoulders radiate the nobility and classical proportions of a Greek bust from antiquity – an effect only accentuated when his serene gaze trains itself back onto you. During our conversation he frequently takes my name, as if to emphasize that, even if he is doing most of the speaking, this is a dialogue. His use of a meditation metaphor reveals the basic ground of his thought; his widely admired art is intensely focussed on ideas of inner harmony and balance. His smile is mischievous, but underneath it there is something enigmatic that reminds one of the face of the Buddha. This is only his temporary residence – his mother, who lives on the ground floor, is 95 and he wants to be near her – but it is lined with beautiful objects, including many made with his own hands, such as his distinctive long human figurines in wood and metal. (“When I think of human beings I see them as feeling, perceiving, imagining creatures, but deeply rooted in the earth. That may be why their bodies look like the trunks of trees.”).

Beauty, clearly, has never been far from Maira’s thoughts. At 70, he has lived many lives – including two decades in corporate life in America before returning to Delhi at the turn of the century – and has won accolades for both his painting and his sculpture, not to mention a book about aesthetic experience and spirituality called Ananda.

His new book, The Promise of Beauty, is notable for being both an emphatic act of assertion and a graceful gesture of self-effacement. Although there are in it dozens of pages of vivid, magisterial writing on the meaning and experience and history of beauty – Maira belongs to that line of protean Indian fine artists who are as comfortable with words as with paint and wood – the bulk of the book is devoted to a set of eighteen long conversations. A cast of eminent scientists and philosophers, poets and painters, dancers and ecologists, architects and politicians are engaged by Maira on the subject of beauty: how and why we experience it, and what it can and should mean to us. 

Most Indian readers will know some of the names in the book – Muzaffar Ali, perhaps, or Vandana Shiva – but the range of the cast and the continuum of science, art, economics and ecology along which the subject is explored will surely be a surprise. If our instinct for beauty is innate, Maira asks, to what extent can it be further trained? Are ideas of beauty cultural constructs, or are some things universally beautiful? Is beauty a static or a dynamic state, a state of balance or of sublime disruption? Are there many dimensions and planes to beauty – sensual, intellectual, spiritual – and how might we climb this ladder of beauty? Is the experience of beauty confined to human beings, or might animals, too, have a sense of aesthetic delight? When we experience something beautiful, what exactly is going on in the brain and what can modern neuroscience tell us about it? What are the aesthetic theories of India and how do they compare to those of the West? Is the world of economics and the active enemy of a beauty-centred existence, or can there be an economics rooted in respect for beauty? Must beauty have any place in policy-making? Why are the modern fine arts so suspicious of beauty? If our experience of beauty is closely tied to the quality of attention we bring to songs, paintings, or people, doesn’t beauty lead out naturally to ideas of responsibility and care? Are beauty, truth and goodness inextricably linked, or can each of these exist without the other?

Maira’s interlocutors are clearly provoked and delighted by these questions, for they throw themselves wholeheartedly into the dance he proposes. The biologist Pushpa Mitta Bhargava wonders if we find some forms in nature especially beautiful because we ourselves are part of the world of such forms (something we often forget in our sense of separateness from the world produced by the alienating sophistication of our consciousness, itself an object of beauty in its own right). The scientist Rupert Sheldrake dwells on the beauty of flowers and fruits from a evolutionary perspective – they are beautiful in order to attract pollinators – and riffs on the idea of beauty as a web of interconnected relationships, an idea echoed by the poet Ruth Padel when she speaks of humans as “membraneous beings” who are constantly navigating between what is inside and outside them. 

These are magnificent, memorable encounters: the more that people say on the subject, the more, it seems, there is left to say. The philosopher Roger Scruton compares the bliss of beauty to the experience of love – “It wells within us but is directed outwards and involves a self-giving of the person who feels it.” The architect Gautam Bhatia ruminates on why modern Indian cities are so ugly when the older facades amidst them are so much more harmonious, and what contours a new imagination of the beautiful Indian city might have. The filmmaker Muzaffar Ali describes the vision of beauty at the core of Sufism (“Beauty, especially in Sufism, is a continuous battle between the visible and the invisible”). It’s like a one-book literary festival on one of the richest and deepest of human themes, with Maira playing the role of a shrewd and sagacious Master of Ceremonies.

The conversation is not all amiable: Maira’s interlocutors resist or elude him, too, which friction generates productive channels of its own. Padel rejects his attempt to give beauty a very transcendent, even salvific, status in human affairs, allowing for nothing more ambitious than “Beauty is a working okayness.” The painter Anjolie Ela Menon finds Maira’s vision of beauty as gladness, well-being and balance somewhat underwhelming, pointing out that at the pinnacle of beauty, “there is ecstasy” – the ecstasy, for instance, of love-making, which has no connection with making the world a better place or the lovers more truthful people. 

The Promise of Beauty is idiosyncratically written: after every two or three chapters, Maira pauses to take stock on the advances that have been made, and to draw together some of the strands of what has been said with his own thinking on beauty. “Beauty is more than a concept,” he writes, “and is best taught through lived experiences of mind and body.” Some of the best moments in the book are when takes us into such experiences of his own. There is the state of alertness, wonder and centeredness that comes with the casting of a bowl in a pottery studio. And the devastating and yet cleansing experience of releasing the ashes of his 26-year-old son into the waters of the Ganga, and then, a year later, of taking up some clay from the banks of the same river, further downstream, to use on a canvas – an experience that leads organically to “a renewed wholeness” as life, time, and art form ever-new patterns and combinations.

“I would say that my life has been and continues to be blessed by beauty,” Maira writes in the book’s concluding pages. But while there is much beauty to be found in the world, “my most profound experiences of beauty have come in meditative quietening, when I have found access to the mind’s inherent spaciousness, its light, peace and well-being.”

Maira’s overall diagnosis, his sense that there is something profoundly out of joint in our world today, is, I think, correct. For all the freedoms and energies and aspirations released by post-liberalization India, there is today in our civilization also a crisis of beauty.  We are harrowed by the chaos and violence and pollution of the city without being able to change anything about it, bemused by our own unending gush of material needs that thrill to the invitations everywhere to indulge them, out of touch with the continuity and consolation of traditional Indian forms, and diminished by our inability to pay close and sustained attention to anything by the white noise of our smartphone lives. 

If we were to pause and “allow our instinct for beauty to become more manifest in our lives,” he believes, we would be able to make a new compact with ourselves and each other. “To live in beauty might be a good working definition of a happy and healthy life at all levels of existence.”

On Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Birth of a Dream Weaver

Have the pleasure and power that a BA in English can confer on a human being ever been described more movingly and inspiringly than in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Birth of a Dream Weaver? The new book by the great Kenyan novelist and playwright, now 78 and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, is the last of a trilogy of memoirs he has published this decade. 

The story of his years at university, it can quite profitably be read on its own as the account of the ripening of a writer’s artistic consciousness. But for the full force of its revelations, ironies, and moral and literary cruxes, one should first take in its predecessors, Dreams In A Time of War (childhood) and In The House of the Interpreter (adolescence).

In those books, we saw the boy Ngugi growing up amongst a vast brood of siblings in the large, raucous rural homestead of his father, a goat-herder – and then suddenly being cast out when his mother, one of four wives, flees to her own father’s home after being beaten by her husband. We are in the nineteen-forties. The world is at war, and Kenya is an impoverished colony of Britain, with a nascent freedom struggle masterminded by an outlawed group called the Land and Freedom Movement, or the Mau Mau. 

The young boy is poor, powerless and often hungry, the captive of a present “born of the power plays of the past”. He takes refuge from history in the consoling power of stories, including those narrated by a blind half-sister, Wabia. Although illiterate and a single parent, Ngugi’s peasant mother has many dreams for her son. When the boy wants to go to school, she makes a pact with him. She will find the money as long as he agrees “to always give his best”. This refrain echoes through the books, setting up the sense of a private ethic – the idea that one is answerable to oneself even more than one is to the world – that overrides worldly standards. 

Having excelled at his studies, Ngugi wins a place at an elite boarding school, Alliance. He wears shoes for the first time and goes forth into the world. The ironies multiply: the arbitrary depredations of colonial rule menace Ngugi’s every dream, but it a school run by Christian missionaries that provides him a physical and intellectual sanctuary from the strife of the larger world. English books give him a sense of the power of literature and the imagination, but English is also the language in which the colonisers assert their power and stereotype the native as a primitive, not much better than a beast. 

Now, in Birth of a Dream Weaver, the steadily expanding frames in the story of both mind and world reach an apotheosis. Innocence is no longer a virtue, or a crutch to hold on to. Ngugi is in his early twenties and has won a scholarship to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, the most famous educational institution in East Africa. The sense of a divided self remains. The railways in Africa were set up for the exploitation of the continent’s natural wealth. Even in taking a train to Kampala, “I was benefiting from a history that had come to negate my history”.

But even so, Ngugi is now in a position to fight for his own side of history. Once a passive watcher of events in the world (“In my mind, political actors had always appeared as fictional characters”), he is now part of the intellectual elite of his generation. All around him, decolonization movements are changing the old world order; he looks up from his book to “the rise of new flags” and throws himself into passionate debates about race, religion, politics, language and literature. 

Ngugi decides he wants to become a novelist, and is persuaded by his peers to become a playwright to dramatize the burning debates of the day. His work as an artist brings a new thrill and tension to the interplay in these books between the worlds, not always antithetical to one another, of “history” and “story”. When a contract for his first novel arrives in the post from a London publisher, Ngugi is over the moon. 

Meanwhile, back in his native Kenya, the independence movement delivers the country back to its people. Ngugi leaves university both a free man – in the sense of having become an thinker who has transcended his limited origins – and the citizen of a free country. Even so, the book ends on an unusually pessimistic note, with dark forebodings of the crises to come: the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi (under whose regime Ngugi would later be thrown into prison) and the sense that colonialism had, even in departing the scene physically, left its tentacles in Africa. The face of the young man slips away, replaced by that of a disappointed 78-year-old.

None of that will distract the reader, though, from the central emphases of these books: their unflinching faith in education and in the power of literature to liberate the imagination and ground the moral sense. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another living writer today – Orhan Pamuk, perhaps – who speaks so inspiringly and convincingly about the values of literature. For some years now, Ngugi has been spoken of as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. The publication of this riveting story of “how the herdsboy, child labourer and high school dreamer…became a weaver of dreams” makes this an ideal year to give Ngugi wa Thiong’o his due.

And some other old posts on the Middle Stage on autobiographies: "The acid thoughts of Sasthi Brata", "On Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography My Experiments With Truth", "On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan", and "On Muhammad Yunus's autobiography Banker to the Poor".

A slightly different version of this essay appeared in the Washington Post.