On watching Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal

All of last week I sat inside my room working, and the sun rose and set without my knowing very much about what was going on in the world outside; by the time I finished work it would be dark, and when I did leave home I went most days to a place where bright light never penetrates: the cinema. I saw two excellent German films, Head-On and Good Bye, Lenin, on successive evenings at the NCPA, and having worked up an appetite for pleasures cinematic I then proceeded, first on a damp and slushy evening last weekend and then yesterday on just as damp and slushy an afternoon, to watch Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal twice at the Regal cinema in Colaba.

When I bought my ticket last afternoon I looked closely at it and saw that it said not just 'Regal', as I thought it would, but 'The Regal', and that capitalized 'The' gave the name a ring of grandeur quite proper for a cinema now in its seventy-third year. The Regal first threw open its doors to the public on the night on October 14, 1933, and the first film it ran was the Laurel and Hardy starrer The Devil's Brother. (I advance this detail with some trepidation, dreading a barrage of Regal-centred questions the next time I see him from my blogger friend Yazad Jal, a fount of all sorts of obscure knowledge.)

Anyway, I stood for a while on the front steps of the cinema, watching the rain coming down at a slant against the dark foliage surrounding the gorgeous old dome of the Prince of Wales museum (now named, along with almost everything else run by the government in Bombay, after Chhatrapati Shivaji), with the tall straight lines of the Bombay Stock Exchange looming behind it in an ugly contrast. A poster on the steps advertised a new restaurant, Zaffran, that remained open till four in the morning, offered a discount to patrons carrying the counterfoil of Iqbal, and supplied a road map with directions: "Proceeding from CST to Crawford Market, do not take the JJ Flyover, but proceed towards Crawford Market…" After making an imaginary journey all the way from Regal to Zaffran, taking care to avoid the JJ Flyover after I passed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, I went into the theatre and took my seat. I stood up for the national anthem sung by a male voice in a Marathi accent, with a brightly coloured graphics-generated flag doing a mock-flutter on screen, a definite comedown from the instrumental version of the anthem, which always gives me a thrill, and the picture of a real flag fluttering in a real breeze that used to feature in the cinemas till a few months ago. Then the movie began.

Iqbal, to my mind, is at its best in its first half-hour. That is when everything about it is fresh and its cinematic language is the most original. The deaf-mute Iqbal lives and breathes cricket. He dreams, like any young cricketer, of sharing the stage with the heroes whose pictures adorn the little straw hut that is his little private den, and Shreyas Talpade is so good as Iqbal that we immediately feel intimate with his world. It has been noted almost everywhere that the film is outstandingly cast, but the way Iqbal's world is realised on screen in just as praiseworthy - not only his house with its green-painted walls and the courtyard outside and around that the village, but also the beautifully realised space where so much of the film is set: the little clearing by the river, surrounded by palm trees, that is Iqbal's practice ground, his theater of dreams.

Indeed, the film pays a great deal of attention to trees. The opening sequence, showing Iqbal's mother heavy with child, watching a cricket match beneath a tree with the rest of the village, suddenly provides us with a long shot so full of green trees that we do not know where to focus our gaze. Then suddenly the bottom of the frame explodes to life, and we see the miniscule figures of the villagers leap up at India's victory and begin to dance in jubilation. The camera returns up close to the villagers, shows Iqbal's mother dancing and then suddenly stopping and clutching her stomach, at which point it leaves the scene and cuts away, winding high, high amidst the trees, as if to approximate the passage of time; when we see Iqbal in the next scene, he is a boy of eighteen.

The scene in which Iqbal gives evidence of his cricketing ambition for the first time, leaving his buffaloes and stepping into the palm-tree-fringed clearing to bowl at three sticks, is just as well realised; indeed, we are more likely to carry away memories of Iqbal in this setting than later when he is doing great deeds in whites in the Ranji Trophy or running up to bowl in a blue Indian uniform for the first time. And the trees in Iqbal carry different kinds of meanings. On one occasion when Iqbal goes to the cricket academy where he spies on the young players from behind his buffaloes, he turns away in dejection and sits down with his back to the action, glumly looking at the green fields of his village - where he will soon have to go to work if his father has his way. The only other Hindi film I can remember in which trees mean so much and have such attention lavished upon them is Sudhendu Roy's 1973 classic Saudagar, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Nutan, in which both lead characters rely upon the sap of date-palm trees (from which jaggery is made) for their livelihood.

I found the cricket scenes in Iqbal charming only upto the point where they take place in this unusual private setting, with an unusual cast that gradually extends to include not only Iqbal but also his sister, his coach (played by the ever-brilliant Naseeruddin Shah), and all his buffaloes. The scenes depicting what are we are to understand to be Ranji Trophy cricket are understandably far less convincing, and the climactic gambit with which Iqbal bowls his team to the title was, at least to a former cricket writer's taste, quite absurd. The subplot involving the two coaches who go back a long way is frankly tiresome, and the sudden appearance of bribes on one side and agents toting cheques on another most unsatisfactory. But one forgives these things when one places against them the considerable achievement of bringing to life Iqbal, his world, and his dreams with great imaginative sympathy, and without the emotional manipulation that often accompanies the portrayal on screen of characters with disabilities. Imagine if you will what heavy-duty damage Sanjay Leela Bhansali would have wrought with such a story.

Film is the youngest of all the arts, yet the ubiquity of the moving image in our times is such that we take it completely for granted. Yet it was only a little more than a century ago all this was impossible, and the only things that could be projected onto a screen were still photographs. Watching the first-ever screening of film as we know it, organised by the Lumière brothers on the evening of 28 December, 1895, the magician George Méliès thought he was going to be shown yet another set of stills, when suddenly the world in front of his eyes began to move: "A horse pulling a cart started to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles, then passersby - in short, all the hustle and bustle of a street. We sat with our mouths open, without speaking, filled with amazement."

The first-ever film screening in India took place in 1896 at the Watson's Hotel, just down the road from the site that would one day house the Regal. A list of various milestones in the history of Indian cinema can be found here, and an essay on the same subject here.Good cinema in Bombay continues this week with the screening of several of François Truffaut's films at the Alliance Française, at New Marine Lines very close to Churchgate station.

Roger Manvell’s Film, and thoughts on screen acting

Jai here, dear Reader (as Chandrahas would say), and this is my first post on this site:

Following the comments exchange on this post I’d written on my blog a few days ago, I was trying to recollect where I’d read a certain sentence about Henry Fonda’s walk, which had nested in my subconscious; and from the cobwebbed depths of one of my oldest bookshelves I pulled out Roger Manvell’s Film, a book purloined from a local magazine library in 1991, the year I became seriously interested in international cinema.

Manvell’s book, a series of essays on various aspects of cinema, was published in 1944, when film criticism was still at a confused, underdeveloped stage. (The very simplicity of its title points to the fact that serious books on cinema were rare at the time!) Film is not widely read or widely available today (even Amazon.com has just one blank page on it), which is a pity, for some of Manvell’s observations are remarkably ahead of their time – he was among the few critics of that era who seemed able to look at cinema as an independent medium with its own set of strengths and limitations, rather than judge it with reference to theatre or literature.

There’s much I can say here about this book, but I’d like to focus on one aspect of it – the excellent four-page essay on screen acting (which is where the Henry Fonda reference came from). Here, Manvell says:

“The real artists of cinema acting observe and reproduce the small things…to understand this one must watch for the details of acting technique. You will see them in the eyes and hips of Bette Davis, the face of Jouvet (whose body is nearly always stiff and still) and apparent expressionlessness of Raimu (whose body is part of his eloquence), in the walk of Fonda and the poetic realism of his hesitant voice, the smile of Spencer Tracy, the differing sensuous qualities of face in Garbo and Dietrich (watch the lighting which accentuates this), the commonplace ease of Gabin. You will see these details in the signs of neurotic passion which are the strength of Agnes Moorehead’s performance in The Magnificent Ambersons. You will see them in the curious eccentricities of facial expression and bodily movement with which Michel Simon presents his characters…it is difficult to tell where acting stops and the plastic properties of face and body begin.”

Remember, this was before the advent of the Method actors (led by Montgomery Clift, John Garfield and Marlon Brando) and the new definition of “realism” they brought to screen acting; this was before the notion of an actor allowing his own personality to be subsumed by that of his character became popular. The great actors of that time (and it must be stressed, they were great actors) - people like Tracy, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and of course Fonda (to stick with Hollywood) - weren’t versatile in the way we understand that word today: they didn’t play a wide array of roles, never experimented with accents or even different looks; they could be (and often are) accused of playing the same roles over and over again. But they were versatile in ways we tend to overlook; within the framework of the characters they played, they were adept at a vast range of emotions and could do extraordinary things with their eyes, hands and physical movements. And they were almost always completely believable within their roles.

Here’s another bit from Manvell’s essay, where he talks about Charles Laughton and Leslie Howard, two of Britain’s biggest stars in the 1930s:

“Men of the great acting quality of Laughton and Howard are often accused of being themselves at the expense of their parts...a man is often chosen for his first lead because he has the right face and physique for the part: Laughton passed through a series of parts for all of which his physique and remarkable face were of great plastic value. He has great versatility within his own range – Henry VIII, Rembrandt, Bligh, Ginger Ted, Ruggles, all different and yet the same photogenic Laughton mannerisms in all. Leslie Howard varied still less but audiences loved his quiet, superior, confident, kindly charm.”

It’s interesting how Manvell focuses on individual mannerisms as markers of high-quality acting – since these days an actor’s trademark mannerisms are used more often than not to run him down. In the current Hindi film context, for instance, Shah Rukh Khan is often accused of being Shah Rukh Khan at the expense of his characters in practically every film. Now I’m not going to go out on a limb to defend SRK since I don’t have much of a personal stake where he’s concerned (I happen to think he’s a good actor based on the three-and-a-half movies of his I’ve seen, but that’s about it). But I do baulk when old-timers go on about how Amitabh was a star, not an actor; and how Sanjeev Kumar (vastly overrated in my opinion) was a Serious Actor because he consciously chose to play a variety of roles (a classic case of awarding points for intention over actual execution); and of the many other clichés that perpetuate in the name of acting versatility. It’s annoying the amount of importance many people place on the most superficial definition of “versatility” and on an actor’s ability to completely submerge himself in his part.

There’s another reason why it can be misguided to stress too much on whether an actor is believable in any role – especially when we’re talking about a big star whose popularity was built on the basis of a certain screen image. The reason is us, the audience, and the preconceived notions in our minds. The fact is, some very good actors become stars on the basis of a definite screen persona – and, yes, mannerisms - which an audience connects to immediately; and it’s pointless to blame those actors when they subsequently fail to step out of the constraints we’ve created for them in our own minds. My personal reference point for this is the 1990 film Main Azaad Hoon, a remake of Capra’s Meet John Doe, which was Bachchan’s belated attempt to move out of the mainstream. There was much talk at the time about how admirable this move was, about how he was at last appearing in a “non-starry” role. But the reason the film didn’t work was Bachchan himself: you saw that face up there on the screen, heard that voice and connected it to the Vijays and the Sikandars who had gone before, and (for no lack of effort on his part) it was impossible to see him as anything but The Superstar. John Doe? No way!

Anyway, what started as a revisitation of Roger Manvell’s book has turned into a ramble on acting theories, so I’ll stop here; but expect another long post on this topic soon. And since comments on The Middle Stage are disabled, if (as Sanjeev Kumar-lovers or Shah Rukh-haters) you want to write hate-posts, feel free to do so on my blog.

Life winding down in Cather and Saratchandra

Many readers are familiar with a wrenching experience associated with powerful novels: that of coming towards the close, the last few pages, after which our fortnight- or month-long involvement with a set of characters and an imagined world (no less real for being imagined) will abruptly come to an end. Surely this feeling is more painful than, say, the news of the death of a distant relative or acquaintance. To postpone closure, we try to read more slowly, linger over every sentence, close the book for a while and drift into our own thoughts.

Often novels also enact this mood with respect to their protagonists. Many novels which portray aged characters, or people who have endured some great struggle, attain closure on a kind of diminuendo - a term from music meaning a diminishment of force or loudness, and in the case of novels a flickering and weakening of energies animating the work.

In the third and final section of Willa Cather's great novel The Professor's House (1925) we find the professor of history Godfrey St.Peter, a man in his fifties with a large family, suddenly feeling an immense weariness after having completed a project lasting several months, which is to write down whatever he remembers of the life story of a very dear, and now dead, student of his, Tom Outland. (That story forms the second section of the book, simply titled "Tom Outland's Story", and its effect is quite the opposite: it is of such force as to make the life blood of every reader throb more powerfully.) Alone at home while his family is away on vacation, he begins to behave in a highly unusual way:

All those summer days, while the Professor was sending cheerful accounts of his activities to his family in France, he was really doing very little. […] All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility.

He begins to feel the imminent close of his life as an instinctive conviction, "such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea." A few days later he goes off to sleep in a room with a gas stove and a freak accident fills the room with gas fumes. Awoken by the smell, he feels strangely loath to switch the stove off, and drifts into sleep or unconsciousness again. Finally he is saved by the family's old maidservant.

And towards the end of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Srikanta (published in four parts from 1917 to 1933, eight years to either side of The Professor's House), Srikanta, the weak and sickly protagonist and narrator of the novel, is told by an astrologer that he is shortly about to go through a very bad time, a matter of life and death. His wife Rajlakshmi takes him away from the city to their village, hoping his health will improve. There Srikanta sees out the days in the same dreamy and desultory state as St.Peter:

I passed my days in reading and gazing out of the window at the hard blue sky and dun-coloured fields. Sometimes, I wandered about by the side of the canal or stood for a moment on the rickety bridge. But, more often, I sat at my table and put down on paper the strange and varied events of my life. I knew myself. I had little drive and less ambition. […] It was anough for me to be allowed to live. Sometimes, shamed by the energy and enthusiasm of the others, I would try to rouse myself, to break out of the inertia that had settled on me like a cloud. But, before I knew it, I was back again within its enveloping folds and was my weary, half-conscious, half-dying self again.

And a little later the news arrives that Srikanta's childhood friend, the Muslim poet Gahar, is seriously ill, allowing Saratchandra to extend this meditation on passing away. Even though he is ailing himself, Srikanta immediately sets out for Gahar's village, only to find when he arrives that Gahar has already passed away and been buried. Gahar' was a great lover of nature; now, walking through his courtyard and the rooms of his house, Srikanta remembers the last time he came to visit this house:

It had been spring then and the vines newly in bud. Now, nurtured by the new falling rain, they were laden with clusters of flowers. So many had been swept away by the wind, so many had fallen to the ground. I remembered Gahar's desire to give me some flowers and his frustration at the sight of the wood ants that crawled all over the trunk. I bent down and picked up a handful and felt it was my friend's last gift […] I had eaten and slept here so often in my childhood; I had played within these walls. I had fought and sparred with Gahar and heard stories from his mother. No one was left to share those memories. My roots were being cut away from me…

"My roots were being cut away from me…" - that is very powerful.

One feels that, although their behaviour is received with perplexity within their respective worlds, St.Peter and Srikanta would have been able to understand one another perfectly. As readers, we may find Cather deepens the meaning of Saratchandra and vice versa (as I once remarked while proposing the complementarity of a poem by Cavafy and a song by Gulzar).

And to return to where I started out, one might also venture that we feel distress at the state of characters like Srikanta and St.Peter so deeply because, subliminally, we tangle this sense of human life ebbing away with the extinguishing of another kind of light: that of the novel itself, and the break with a world in which we have invested a great deal of our lives and in fact partly helped create with our imaginations.

A previous post on Cather can be found here. And here is a marvellous essay on The Professor's House by Donald Lyons. Some remarks on Saratchandra's life, milieu and works can be found in this essay by Ranjit Gupta. I would welcome more links to essays on Saratchandra.

A kiss in Chekhov

One of the best depictions in literature of the heart's yearning, and of the ability of the needy imagination to fill out a little sliver of reality with a hundred details and through it derive a kind of hope and strength, can be found in Anton Chekhov's story 'The Kiss'.

In the story an army battalion on their way to camp halts for the night at a village called Myestetchki, and the officers are invited to a get-together at the house of a local man, Lieutenant-General von Rabbek. Von Rabbek has many people from his extended family also visiting him, including several charming young ladies, and soon the evening is flowing smoothly, music is playing, and many members of the company are dancing in the drawing-room. Among the officers is a very shy and unassuming man - "in spectacles, with sloping shoulders, and whiskers like a lynx's" - called Ryabovitch. Ryabovitch, who envies his comrades for their skill with women (though not grudging them their enjoyment), is ill at ease and has nothing to do, hovers on the edge of proceedings, and wanders from place to place getting bored. While walking through the house he takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a dark room adjoining the main room where the music is playing. And suddenly he hears the rustling of a dress in the darkness, and then a woman - who has probably arranged a secret rendezvous there with someone else - greets him breathlessly, throws her arms around him and gives him a kiss. She immediately realises her mistake, shrieks, and flies out of the room, but it is difficult to say who is more surprised - we are told that Ryabovitch, too, "almost shrieked". Bemused and very embarrassed, he returns to the drawing-room feeling as if all eyes are on him, but soon he realises that this not the case. Now:

Something strange was happening to him….His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops […]; all over, from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger….He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud….

All evening he keeps scanning the different women present, wondering which of them it was who kisses him, but none of them are completely to his liking, and (notice how Ryabovitch already associates this woman who now lives in his imagination with a kind of perfection) from them all he forms a composite image "of the girl who had kissed him, the image that he wanted her to have, but could not find at the table…."

The next day the company has to leave, but Ryabovitch's thoughts are still consumed by the kiss, and he cannot resist all the beautiful fancies it throws up:

…he tried to persuade himself that the incident of the kiss could only be interesting as a mysterious little adventure, that it was in reality trivial, and to think of it seriously, to say the least of it, was stupid; but now he bade farewell to logic and gave himself up to dreams. […] In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned on her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children….

Months pass like this, and Ryabovitch cannot forget the woman from Myestetchki, who lives with him in everything he does - among of the interesting details Chekhov advances is that when he visits a brothel with his fellow officers, he feels guilty afterwards and inwardly begs forgiveness from the woman who kissed him. Three months have passed since the evening at the von Rabbeks when it is time for he soldiers to return from camp, and Ryabovitch becomes very excited at the thought of spending another evening in Myestetchki, for von Rabbek is sure to invite the officers again when he hears they have arrived, and he, Ryabovitch, will have a chance to meet the woman who held him once so fleetingly.

When Ryabovitch arrives, he waits many hours for an invitation from von Rabbek, but to his great disappointment none arrives. Finally, mad with impatience, Ryabovitch himself heads for the big house, walks around the periphery of the estate, and sees how everything here is going on as normal, without the slightest inkling of what he is feeling. After all these months it become clear to him how insignificant an incident was the accidental kiss in the dark room, and how his thoughts and yearnings have no relation whatsoever to reality. At this point, close to the ending of the story, we see him standing by a river he had admired when he had last visited in May:

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. In May it had flowed into the great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapour, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovitch's eyes again….What for? Why?

Chekhov was a master at this kind of grafting of an internal mood upon an external scene, and this is one of the most beautiful paragraphs in his work, though it is forceful as well, and those two questions at the end have a sharp sting to them.

Several translations of Chekhov into English have appeared in the last decade, but the first ones, made by a remarkable Englishwoman called Constance Garnett in the early years of the twentieth century, remain among the best. In this essay, the writer Henry Shukman considers the relative merits of the older translations of Garnett and some newer ones by Rosamund Bartlett. The writer Janet Malcolm wrote an excellent book a couple of years ago called Reading Chekhov, an extract from which can be found here. And in this essay, which I also cited once before in a post on Monica Ali, the novelist William Boyd presents us with a Chekhov lexicon.

And finally, does not the Ryabovitch of Chekhov's story seem almost a blood brother of Akaky Akakievich in Nikolai Gogol's story "The Overcoat", for just as Ryabovitch dreams about the unknown woman who kissed him and imagines her as his wife, Akaky Akakievich, too, feels when he thinks about his soon-to-be-bought overcoat that it is "as if he were not alone but some pleasant life's companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him".

Visions of truth in Naguib Mahfouz

The word 'truth' has a meaning and a resonance for each one of us: we apply it whether we are thinking about the events of our own lives, or about history, or about a particular belief system, or even when we argue that something is untrue. Crucially, we make use of it not just with respect to facts - say, "I met A at X place on Y date" - but also with respect to interpretations of facts - for example, "B did this to C and this proves such-and-such thing about B's nature". Every interpretation, of course, can have a rival interpretation, and there has never been a time in history when the idea of the truth has not been a contentious one. In fact, we could go further and argue that societies in which the 'truth' is generally agreed upon or imposed from above and hence not open to question - for example, societies where adherence to a particular set of political or religious ideas is compulsory - are narrower, more complacent, and overall much poorer places to live in than societies in which there is a tradition of robust debate about the truth, even if that debate itself is sometimes divided along clear ideological lines that may often lead us to despair of ever finding the truth.

In our day and age the search for the truth is commonly associated with rational inquiry and empirical reasoning, but it was not always so. For the greater part of recorded history, the pursuit of truth has been connected in some way to religion and faith. Those in search of the truth held that the highest truths were those revealed in the scriptures, and immersed themselves in the study of religious texts, in pilgrimages, and in religious striving. One of the best portrayals in literature of the respective appeals of these two different conceptions of the truth - which we may term the truth of reason and the truth of religion or faith - can be found in the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's luminous novel Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh in ancient Egypt who, upon acceding to the throne, overthrew Egypt's traditional polytheism and decreed the worship of a single god, the sun god Aten. Akhenaten, then, might be said to have disallowed the coexistence of many visions of the truth prevalent in his kingdom, insisting instead that everybody follow the one truth that he had seen in a religious vision and which he considers it his duty to propagate. There is great resistance among the people to his edicts, and finally even Akhenaten's generals rebel and place him under house arrest, where he wastes away and dies. After his demise Egypt returns to its old polytheism, and Akhenaten is fixed in public memory and in history as 'the heretic king', who took his kingdom and his people to the brink of destruction.

But Akhenaten is not the novel's only protagonist. The second is a figure entirely of Mahfouz's invention: a young man called Meriamun who grows up during the years of religious strife precipitated by Akhenaten's rule. On a trip down the Nile with his father, himself a prominent personality with 'a passion for knowledge and for recording the truth', Meriamun sees the remains of the deserted capital city of Akhenaten, and he is filled with curiosity about the life of a man whom everybody now remembers as 'the heretic king'. Was Akhenaten just a madman given to hallucinations, as many believe, or was there something authentic about his religious vision and his teachings? Even though it is not long since his demise, have people forgotten everything about him except for the fact that he was an alleged heretic? The only way of knowing, Merimun decides, is by systematic investigation, by taking the testimony of every single person still alive who was close to Akhenaten, and then putting together the evidence gleaned from all these accounts. If this is done, he explains to his father: "Then I could see the many facets of truth before it perishes like this city."

'Truth' is a word of the most vital importance to both Meriamun and Akhenaten, but the most important contrast offered by the novel between their respective conceptions is this: Meriamun is a seeker of truth; Akhenaten, a self-confessed dweller in truth. One might suppose that the novel privileges the first kind of truth over the second, more personal kind, but in fact its difficult beauty lies in its refusal to set up such a hierarchy and tell us which side is 'right'. Meriamun's quest often yields up puzzles or competing claims that, instead of illuminating the life of Akhenaten, render it even more murky and enigmatic. And while several people denounce Akhenaten as a fraud, some of the dead pharaoh's followers convincingly describe the ecstasy and bliss to be found in the surrender to the divine that, if at all we admit of the authority of religion, we know as being one of the authentic experiences of faith.

Meriamun's search shows us what a rocky and difficult road is the pursuit of the truth through patient scrutiny and inquiry, which allows us to understand why people often - to allude to a recent post on India Uncut - prefer simple interpretations of reality to complex ones. One of the wonders of Mahfouz's book is its final sentence, which shows how, even when one is committed to the path of rational truth-seeking, it is still difficult to resist the seductive temptations of religious truth, with its reassuring confidence and certainty.

The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who made an appearance on The Middle Stage in a previous post about food, has also written a book about truth called Truth: A History. Here, in the transcript of a radio interview, he discusses four techniques of truth seeking which he believes have been used in different combinations throughout history. In this recent piece, Salman Rushdie discusses how the concepts of 'facts' and 'truth' have become embattled in our age of 'bitter disputes about reality'. And here, in his Nobel prize lecture, Mahfouz himself argues that 'Truth and Justice will remain for as long as mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience'.

Casanova and the good life

Relatively few words in the English language have their origins in some personage from history. One such is casanova, a word now used to describe a smooth-talking pursuer of women or a philanderer, which derives directly from the name of the eighteenth-century Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, one of the most legendary lovers of all time.

But while Casanova's name has entered our general vocabulary for good, this fact has also worked to the disadvantage of his memory, because it obscures his many wider achievements. As Tim Parks writes in his introduction to Casanova's book The Duel, Casanova was also 'an adventurer, man-about-many-towns, indefatigable name-dropper, crack shot, amateur theologian, skilled diplomat …and (what makes us aware of all these qualities) a fine writer.' This was a man who, during his lifetime, served in the army, worked undercover as a spy, was jailed after falling foul of the authorities, escaped jail and fled Italy, and for many years lived an itinerant life travelling all over Europe writing plays, translating other authors, and playing the violin. And of course there were the ladies.

The Duel, which has been recently published in a new translation by the Hesperus Press, provides ample evidence of just what a good writer Casanova was. The book is about a famous duel that Casanova was once forced to fight with a Polish count, but we need not concentrate on the particulars of that matter here. Casanova was in his fifties when he wrote the book, and his colourful and peripatetic life had endowed him with a rich stock of opinions on human nature.

For instance, Casanova says he believes a man is truly wise when, "happy with what he knows, and always willing to learn from those who have more experience than he, he will allow everyone to believe what he wants to, and he will not try to force the truth on those who are recalcitrant. […] Men are by nature such that they cannot bring themselves to learn anything from those who wish to force instruction on them." And we hear the dashing adventurer speaking in these lines: "'I cannot' is heard too often on the lips of mortals: it is very seldom on the lips of a man who really wishes to do something."

It would be foolish to speculate whether, if Casanova had lived in the twenty-first century instead of the eighteenth, he would have been a blogger. But, given what we know of his nature, it is certainly possible to surmise what his feelings would have been had he attended yesterday's Mumbai blogger meet (even if he would had to be content with coffee instead of wine):

Excellent food, good wine, and the good company of friends who are well chosen and above all well-disposed, compose a nourishment which raises a healthy man to the highest degree of perfection of which he is capable.[…] There is no man or woman who, after a choice meal, is not more attractive, more eloquent, more animated, more courteous, more judicious and more self-possessed, full of fine thoughts and unusual ideas which are capable of providing honourable and legitimate pleasures to this wretched human race, which, left to itself, is an inexhaustible fount of unhappiness, boredom, and troublesome disagreements.

And more provocatively he continues:

And so, just as bodily health comes from good food, there is no doubt that spiritual peace derives from it also, since that [spiritual peace] cannot have any other impulse than those it receives from physical impressions.

Would you agree with that, dear reader - that good food brings not just bodily but also spiritual peace?

After Casanova's death in 1798, just as his name passed into the English language and kept his memory alive for future generations, so he began to take birth again and again as a character in fiction - for instance in the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai's terrific novel Casanova in Bolzano, published in English translation only last year. I wrote an essay on Marai's Casanova for the San Francisco Chronicle, and it can be found here.

Amartya Sen's large India

In his new book The Argumentative Indian, a set of magisterial essays on the subject of India's diverse and many-sided past and the manner in which our understanding of that past influences the present that we now inhabit, Amartya Sen gives the sense of having distilled a lifetime's thought on the subject of India.

Amongst the best of Sen's essays is one called 'India: Large and Small', in which he engages with the claims made by the Hindutva movement - based on certain historical and cultural features of India's past and the overwhelming majority of Hindus among Indian citizens currently - that Hinduism is preeminent amongst the religions of India and is therefore central to any conception of 'Indianness'. Obeying the first rule of good debate, which is to engage with the viewpoint of the other party instead of dismissing it outright, Sen first tries to represent the positions of the Hindutva movement as fairly as possible. He does contrast the tolerance towards other religions and internal heterodoxy that has been a historical feature of Hinduism with the many untenable claims and the warlike approach of the present-day Hindutva lobby, but then note how skilfully he declines to validate - as a more earnest scholar might - the former at the expense of the latter:

It is not, however, particularly worthwhile to enter into a debate over whether the liberal, tolerant and receptive traditions within Hinduism may in any sense, be taken to be more authentic than the narrower and more combative interpretations that have been forcefully championed by present-day Hindu politics. It is sufficient to note here that there is a well-established capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism, which contrasts sharply with the narrow and bellicose versions that are currently on political offer, led particularly by parts of the Hindutva movement.

Sen then moves on to scrutinise the foundational axioms of Hindutva ideology one by one, offering alternate arguments of his own. Here he is on the viewpoint that India should be thought of as a pre-eminently Hindu country because the Hindu tradition is pre-eminent in India's past:

Certainly, the ancientness of the Hindu tradition cannot be disputed. However, other religions, too, have had a long history in India, which has been, for a very long time indeed, a multi-religious country, making room for many different faiths and beliefs. Aside from the obvious and prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a millennium (Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century), India was not a 'Hindu country' even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. Indeed, Chinese scholars regularly described India as 'the Buddhist kingdom'.
…And to this has to be added the early presence of Christians, Jews and Parsees from the first millennium CE, and the late - but vigorous - emergence of Sikhism in India as a universalist conviction that drew on both the Hindu and Islamic traditions but developed a new religious understanding. The high ground of history is certainly not comfortable for a Hindu sectarian outlook, which is one reason why there has been such a flurry of attempts by political fanatics to rewrite India's history.

After many such specific and patiently elaborated rejoinders to different aspects of Hindutva thought, Sen concludes:

Rabindranath Tagore thought that the 'idea of India' itself militates 'against the intense conciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others'. Through their attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism. In the confrontation between a large and a small idea, the broader understanding can certainly win. But the battle for the broad idea of India cannot be won unless those fighting for the larger conception know what they are fighting for. The reach of Indian traditions, including heterodoxy and the celebration of plurality and scepticism, requires a comprehensive cognition.

Many of the other essays in Sen's book attempt to provide this 'comprehensive cognition' of Indian traditions that will equip us adequately should we wish to defend the idea of a large India against the small. Here are two of them: 'Tagore and his India' and 'India Through Its Calendars' ("...the nature, form and usage of calendars in a particular society can teach us a great deal about its politics, culture and religion as well as its science and mathematics). And here is an essay by Sen on the issue of the writing and rewriting of history: 'History and the Enterprise of Knowledge'.

But even if parts of the book are available here and there on the web, there's nothing like reading these beautiful essays in bed late into the night over several nights, as I did. And since Indian bloggers, as I remarked in another post recently, are almost by definition argumentative Indians, it makes sense to read this book as an exemplary demonstration of the ideal on which we all have our sights.

Mirza Abu Taleb goes to England

In Attia Hosain's book Sunlight on a Broken Column, about which I wrote a post earlier, there is a reference to "the sweet tongue of the true Lucknavi - delicate, flexible, rich in imagery, pointed with wit, polished with courtesy." The durability of the tradition Hosain was referring to is apparent from the Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb, an account given by an eighteenth-century Lucknavi nobleman of his visit - very rare in those days for an Indian - to England.

Abu Taleb was an unwilling adventurer: he left India in a pall of gloom and not on a sea of expectation. For some years he had been running back and forth between Lucknow and Calcutta in search of patronage, at which point he received an offer from a Scottish friend to journey with him to Europe. He writes:

After having considered his proposal for some time, I reflected that, as the journey was long and replete with danger, some accident might cause my death, by which I should be delivered from the anxieties of this world, and the ingratitude of mankind. I therefore accepted his friendly offer, and resolved to undertake the journey.

But as his ship set sail and his homeland fell back Abu Taleb's spirits soon rose, and he threw himself into the task of observing everything that was strange and significant about his journey. In fact, when he reached the Nicobar Islands, where the ship halted briefly and gave those on deck a chance to see the lives of the natives, Abu Taleb was so captivated that he began to think the thoughts that all of us think when we go on a pleasant vacation:

I was so captivated by the mildness of the climate, the beauty of the plains and rivulets, and with the kind of life and freedom which the men enjoyed, that I had nearly resolved to take up my abode among them.

When Abu Taleb finally reached England after several months at sea, he was very well-received there (curiously he does not make any report of having to face racism) and soon became known in social circles as 'the Persian prince'. While giving himself over to revelry and romance - he confesses somewhat coyly at one point that 'Cupid had planted one of his arrows in my bosom', and presents some atrocious verse in praise of English women ('Adorable creatures! Whose flowing tresses,/whether of flaxen or jetty hue,/Or auburn gay, delight my soul,/ and ravish all my senses') - Abu Taleb also made a close study of English government and society. He arrived in England in 1800, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and the implications of the extensive mechanisation of production did not escape him. He remarks:

In England, labour is much facilitated by the aid of mechanism; and by its assistance the price of commodities is much reduced: for if, in their great manufactories, they made use of horses, bullocks, or men, as in other countries, the prices of their goods would be enormous…. [T]he great wheels of [iron founderies] are worked by steam, in a very surprising manner. In these they cast cannon, beat out anchors and do all other large work, which could not be effected by manual labour, the sledge itself being more that any man could lift.

And he is similarly perceptive of the subject of print technology, one of the pillars of modernity:

Of the inventions of Europe, the utility of which may not appear at first sight to an Asiatic, the art of printing is the most admirable. By its aid, thousands of copies, of any scientific or religious book, may be circulated among the people in a very short time; and by it, the works of celebrated authors are handed down to posterity, free from the errors and imperfections of a manuscript. To this art the English are indebted to the humble but useful publication of newspapers, without which life would be irksome to them. These are read by all ranks of people, from the prince to the beggar.

Abu Taleb was not always complementary about England - he devotes an entire chapter to criticisms of the English way of life, and he wrote an essay pursuing the unusual line of argument that European women actually enjoyed less liberty than did Asian women. The book ends when Abu Taleb arrives on the west coast of India in 1803 after four and a half years away from home, and, being 'very anxious to see my family' (of whom there has been no mention since the first chapter), returns to home and hearth in Calcutta.

Abu Taleb's Travels is available in a new edition from Oxford University Press. This page features a forthcoming edition of another book by an Indian nobleman who travelled to England in the first half of the nineteenth century: the Autobiography of Lutfullah - A Mohamedan Gentleman and his Transactions with his Fellow-creatures. Here, courtesy Arun Simha, is a brief history of early Indian newspapers, which began to proliferate a few decades after Abu Taleb brought back reports of them, and the look of some of the mastheads of these newspapers (the Asiatic Mirror, the Oriental Star, and so on) can be seen here.

Robert Farrar Capon and food

One of the many benefits of being unemployed, dear reader, is the chance to savour lunch instead of wolfing down one's midday meal at one's desk. I don't care much for breakfast, but after the morning's work there's nothing like a good lunch, freshly cooked and then slowly eaten at the table. On some days I like frying some garlic bread in a little butter with some slowly browned sausages to go with it, or else a little pasta with cheese on top, or eggs fried till the sides are thin and crispy but the yolk still gooey, or else a piece of chicken with some fruit afterwards. On other days I head out to a restaurant for a more hearty lunch, usually either Noor Mohammadi for flavoursome nalli nihari, dal gosht, or bheja fry with tandoori rotis the size of a wall clock, or to Café Baghdadi in Colaba. If you'd like to join me for good food and conversation at an eating-house one day, you're most welcome.

One of my favourite books on food - not just a cookbook but a treatise on the place of food in our lives - is The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, now in a new edition as part of the Modern Library Food series. It is a charming and eccentric book, with a high conception of the beauty and relevance of matters gastronomical (food and cooking "sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity"), full of savoury asides (at the very beginning of the book there is a ten-page section on the beauty of chopping an onion, and towards an end there is an ode to the powers of baking soda) and pungent comments ("Nothing appalls me more than to hear people refer to the drinking of wine as if it were a forbidden and fascinating way of sneaking alcohol into one's system."). Although a priest, Capon sees nothing sinful or worldly about the love of good food; rather, he might be said to be in agreement of the nineteen-century philosopher of food Brillat-Savarin, who argued that "Gourmandism shows implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator who, when he ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encouragement of savour, and the reward of pleasure…gourmandism is the common bond that unites the nations of the world.”

Here is Capon on place of the three meals of an ordinary working day:

Breakfast is an unmerciful meal. Unless you live in a house full of larks, you know perfectly well that few people are fit company at that hour. Accordingly, a completely routine meal, unvaryin from day to day, is a blessing to everyone. [E]xcept for men who have already worked hard for hours, an ordinary weekday breakfast is no time for a feast. Almost as clearly as breakfast, lunch is a meal in via, on the run. To sit down as if the world were our oyster at 12.30 is to face the second half of our daily obedience pretending that the agony of the world is over already.…I have long been convinced that man needs sleep more than food in the middle of the day.It is only at night, in gremio familiae, […] that we can properly rejoice and eat like men.

Capon's very name brings up the idea of food: 'capon' is another word for chicken or, specifically, a castrated rooster, which was considered a delicacy in Elizabethan England ("The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit", goes a line in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors).

And a contemporary historian of food, and defender of good eating against all those who would downgrade its importance, is the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who has written a book called Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. In this essay, Fernandez-Armesto makes a case not just for gourmandism, as Brillat-Savarin did, but for gluttony, arguing that gluttony is a gift of evolution. And in this essay, Fernandez-Armesto contends that "[t]he obesity pandemic has coincided with the decline of the meal."

Gogol's overcoat

The protagonist of "The Overcoat," one of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's best stories, is Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a clerk in a government department in St.Petersburg, very mild-mannered and self-effacing, never known to raise his voice, and always passed over when it comes to promotions - a nonentity in the social order who does not even have the consolation of the love and respect of people at home, being a bachelor. Akaky Akakievich's only pleasure lies in his work, and he is so absorbed by it that he pays little regard to his personal appearance, to conversation with his colleagues, or to the routine tasks of daily life. He always comes to work wearing a tattered old overcoat ("its collar diminished more and more each year, for it went to mend other parts") that is a source of great amusement to his colleagues.

There comes a time when Akaky Akakievich's coat finally gives up the ghost and just cannot be mended any more. When he hears from his tailor the price of a new overcoat, nearly half his month's salary, he grows nearly faint with worry, and wonders how he will save up the money for a new coat to protect him from the violent St.Petersburg winter. But then gradually he formulates a plan to skimp a little here, forgo something there, and in this manner, through all sorts of pains and sacrifices, to save up enough for the overcoat over the duration of a few months. All this has a salutary effect on Akaky Akakievich's nature. Gogol captures beautifully the significance that gradually gathers around this one material object in the impoverished life of a man not otherwise given to material desires, writing that Akaky Akakievich

was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From then on it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life's companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him - and this companion was none other than that same overcoat with its cotton-wool quilting, with its sturdy lining that knew no wear….In the course of each month, he stopped at least once to see [the tailor] Petrovich, to talk about the overcoat, where it was best to buy broadcloth, and of what color, and at what price, and he would return home somewhat preoccupied yet always pleased…

I shall not reveal any further details of the plot, except for this bit: when Akaky Akakievich finally gets his beautiful new overcoat and wears it proudly to work, his colleagues are so pleased for him that they decide to throw a party for him that night at the residence of one of the clerks in office. Walking that night to the venue of the party, Akaky Akakievich passes through a posh part of town and looks at the shops:

It was several years since he had gone out in the evening. He stopped curiously before a lighted shop window to look at a picture that portrayed some beautiful woman taking off her shoe and thus baring her whole leg, not a bad leg at all…

This passage is thought to mark one of the early appearances of advertising in literature. Writing about it in her biography of Charles Dickens, the novelist Jane Smiley remarks that it can be seen as the moment 'when literature enters the modern world', a world in which

[t]he tissue of relationships and obligations that mark traditional society give way to the casual meetings and commercial connections that mark modern society. [Akaky Akakievich] is struck by the picture of the woman's leg slipping into the stocking. He moves on, but he has just had a thoroughly modern moment - sex and graphics have combined to turn him into a potential customer.

And here is an essay by the novelist AS Byatt on a recent translation of Gogol's great novel Dead Souls.

Jahiz the bibliomaniac

Cyclone Book Tag, which recently hit the Indian blogosphere, seems to have demonstrated irrefutably that there is a marked relation between blogging - the passion for demonstrating to the world that one is capable of independent thought - and bibliomania, the passion for possessing and collecting books. (I think this passion to possess is what distinguishes a bibliomaniac from a bibliophile, who is merely a lover a books and may or may not be a collector.) As modern bibliomaniacs we must take note of an ancient one, the ninth-century Arab writer Jahiz, whose most famous work, the Kitab al-Hayawan ('Book of Animals') has some marvellous passages on the place of books in life.

Jahiz (776-868/69) was born and lived most of his life in the great cultural centre of Basra (in present-day Iraq and currently wracked by clashes between American troops and Iraqi insurgents), at a time when the Islamic world occupied a similar place among world civilizations that the West does today. A prolific writer on every kind of topic - here is the table of contents of one of his books, listing essays like 'This Life & the Life to Come' and 'Why Speech is Superior to Silence' - Jahiz writes of books in the Kitab al-Hayawan:

I know of no companion more prompt to hand, more rewarding, more helpful or less burdensome, and no tree that lives longer, bears more abundantly or yields more delicious fruit that is handier, easier to pick or more perfectly ripened at all times of the year, than a book.
…For all its smallness and lightness, a book is the medium through which men receive the Scriptures, and also government accounts. Silent when silence is called for, it is eloquent when asked to speak. It is a bedside companion that does not interrupt when you are busy but welcomes you when you have a mind to it, and does not demand forced politeness or compel you to avoid its company. It is a visitor whose visits may be rare, or frequent, or so continual that it follows you like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
…A book, if you consider, is something that prolongs your pleasure, sharpens your mind, loosens your tongue, lends agility to your fingers and emphasis to your words, gladdens your mind, fills your heart and enables you to win the respect of the lowly and the friendship of the mighty.…Form any kind of attachment with it, and you will be able to do without everything else; you will not be driven into bad company by boredom or loneliness.

Some readers may find this enchanting but a little too ornate, and they would not be wrong in this. As Robert Irwin says in his book Nights and Horses and the Desert (from which I quote the above passage), Jahiz was a master at the ancient art of rhetoric - the art of using language so as to persuade and influence others. Many of his works appear to be rhetorical demonstrations rather than the expressions of deeply felt convictions - if necessary, one feels, he might have been able to argue that books exercised a debilitating effect on human beings and were agents of corruption.

But Jahiz was so much in love with books - the story goes that he used to pay the owners of bookshops to be locked into their premises at night so that he could read in peace - that we may safely assume that in this case he was really speaking from his heart, even if his style is that of a rhetorician. In fact (to end this tale of bibliomania on an appropriate if somewhat morbid note) Jahiz not only lived by books but died by them as well: it is reported that he was killed at a ripe old age when a stack of books fell upon him.

Unemployed at last!

"Unemployed at last!" So goes the first line of Tom Collins's Such Is Life, a classic of Australian literature, and that, my dear readers, exactly describes my condition right now. May was my last month at work for the magazine Wisden Asia Cricket, and from this month I'm going to a free man, and earn my living from writing.

I have a lot of things lined up in terms of work and writing, but I'd also like in my new life to greatly expand my range of experience - to meet new people, travel to new places, and learn a new skill or two. I expect that time, which is such a problem when one has a day job, will not be a constraint any more. In fact the new problem may be that of learning how to use all my time properly.

Conversation, the very motor of life, occupies a position of importance in my new scheme of things. So if you, dear reader, have any good stories to tell or anything that would interest me, please email me. for instance, I'd like very much to find out how a tea garden is run, or how it's like living on board a ship, or how the restaurant business works. I'm already looking forward to the next Mumbai blogger's meet.

And of course there'll be plenty more time for reading now, so I'll attempt to put up a post about a book or a writer every two to three days.

Unemployed at last!.

Book-tagged

I was book-tagged by my co-blogger Amit a few days ago, and here, dear reader, is a list of books for you. On my way I've also made a few variations to the template:

Total number of books I possess:

Probably between three and four thousand. As I was surveying my collection this morning in order to make an estimate of its size, I suddenly figured that some days, instead of going out to a bookshop to browse, I could just stay at home and leaf through my own collection, which includes - as it always should - hundreds of books that I haven't read and may not read for several years. I then proceeded to browse through my cupboards and came across several very interesting books that I'd forgotten all about.

Last book I bought

The Pursuit of Pleasure by the anthropologist Lionel Tiger (yes, what a name).

Last book I read

Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian, a book fizzing with ideas.

Five books I would not lend to a friend

Some of the books I prize most will already be familiar to you if you're been reading my posts over the last two months, so I shall disregard all of those and pick new ones.

The Odyssey by Homer
My Years with Apu by Satyajit Ray
Shakespeare on Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal


A book I want to possess

The Sarvadarsanasamgraha (Collection of All Philosophies) by the fourteenth-century author Madhava Acharya. This book is cited by Sen in The Argumentative Indian.

A book I couldn't finish

Ian McEwan's Atonement.

And these are the people I choose to book-tag:

My colleague Rahul Bhatia at Cricinfo
Bem
The Transparent Ironist

Chess with Jorge Luis Borges

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote prolifically across the realms of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and literary criticism (and some of his work, such as the piece on Shakespeare cited below, is so complex and teasing that it is not easy to tell which genre it belongs to). Borges can sometimes be difficult and puzzling - he read vastly across the literature of different cultures, and his work is full of allusions and references to these works - but he also has a great gift for compressed, powerful expression, evoking an entire world of thought or feeling in a few beguiling lines of verse or a two-page short story (perhaps this is why he never felt the need to write a novel).

Consider the gorgeous adjectives with which he breathes life into chess pieces in this, the second part of his poem "Chess", and then the way in which the thought of the poem begins to slowly uncoil after the scene has been set by the relatively conventional opening stanza:

CHESS (II)

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
Straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn -
Over the checkered black and white terrain
They seek out and begin their armed campaign.

They do not know it is the player’s hand
That dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
Controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(The words are Omar’s) on another ground
Where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the players, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

It might be interesting to compare the idea of God in the last lines of this poem with that found in the passage from the Rig Veda I quoted in my previous post. The hymn from the Rig Veda speaks of the almighty, but instead of ascribing absolute omniscience to him it ends with the phrase 'only he knows - or perhaps he does not know'. Borges, moving from a different direction, suggests that both chess pieces and men are not aware that a higher power is controlling them, and leads step by step to the searching question 'what god beyond God'? And to this question one could legitimately give the answer: 'Only he knows - or perhaps he does not know'.

Chess makes a fleeting appearance once again in this beautiful Borges poem, "The Just", which moves, like a butterfly taking wing from flower to flower (or like God musing one morning about those things about human beings that please him the most), over those affairs of men that Borges considers most broad-spirited, large-hearted, true to the spirit in which life must be lived (and hence 'just').

THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of
Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(translated by Alastair Reid)

Borges's life contained a great tragedy: passionately fond of reading like most writers, he found in middle age that a congenital eye defect that ran in his father's side of the family was beginning to take his toll on his eyesight, and by his fifties he was almost completely blind. In 1955, the year he was appointed to the directorship of the National Library of Argentina, he noted God's splendid irony "in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness." But he kept his twinkling wit going well into old age. In this interview from 1971 with the New York Times writer Israel Shenker, Borges begins to talk about death and finishes with the observation: "Sometimes I think, 'Why on earth should I die, since I have never done it? Why should I start a new habit at my age?'"

More poems by Borges can be found here and here. His marvellous three-paragraph story about the life of Shakespeare, "Everything and Nothing", (the story begins "There was no one in him...") can be found here. And in this piece, also featuring Borges's poem among other things, the writer Steven Poole asks what is it that draws so many artists to chess.

The Rig Veda's deep questions

Which man or woman has not felt at some point in life, perhaps when contemplating the night sky full of stars or thinking about loved ones now dead, something of the the wonder and the puzzlement expressed in this passage, some three and a half thousand years old, from the Rig Veda:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of the universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it has formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know.

What is most fascinating about this passage (often referred to as 'the creation hymn') is the extent to which it takes its skepticism. First there is the thought, found in many ancient texts, that although mankind cannot fathom the mystery of creation, 'the one who looks down on it' surely must. But how can we know this? A settled picture of 'the highest heaven' rapidly dissolves, to be replaced by one of a creator himself in doubt - struggling like man to grasp the meaning of existence: 'Who really knows? Whence is this creation?'

This version of the creation hymn is from a translation of the Rig Veda by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, who writes in her introduction of how the hymns are meant 'to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind'. A selection of hymns from the Rig Veda can be found here.

Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

People who have travelled comparatively little but read quite a lot (and there is an essay waiting to be written on why, for some, readerly journeys are preferable to real ones) often derive their conception of the world's great cities from novels. Their image of London is from Dickens, they think of Naguib Mahfouz whenever they hear the mention of Cairo, and Chicago for them is the same Chicago that can be found in Saul Bellow's novels. In much the same way, when I think of Istanbul I picture it as it appears in the novels of Orhan Pamuk, one of the leading novelists of our time.

Pamuk's novel My Name is Red, a luminous tale about a group of sixteenth-century Ottoman miniaturists and calligraphers whose conception of art is a religious one and who feel disturbed and threatened by the emerging Western school of portraiture, is a modern classic, containing hundreds of sentences so beautiful and evocative as to move, in Bellow's phrase to describe the effect of great books, 'wonder in the soul'. Also, each chapter of the novel is entrusted to a different narrator, so that the book itself becomes, like a fine Ottoman carpet, a weave of many perspectives, each adding to the effect of the other. Early in the novel a murder takes place, but we do not know who the murderer is. However, the culprit appears every once in a while to narrate a chapter from his point of view, all the while refusing to divulge his identity. In this passage below - note that it is only one long, winding sentence - the murderer follows Black, an artist who is competing with him for a woman's affections, around the city one night:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leather works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn't following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

What is wonderful about this sentence is the way it gives us a sense not only of an external world - that of various Istanbul scenes at night - but also at the same time through an internal world, that of the murderer. We note his fevered and extravagant imagination, which senses hidden presences in the most deserted places; we feel his intense vexation at his realisation (which the sentence delivers up in its final clause) that he is merely mimicking his antagonist, tailing the man he wishes to dominate and defeat. In a way, this sentence is a story all by itself.

Pamuk's most recent book is a work of non-fiction called Istanbul, in which he makes the case that the city of his birth is the most melancholy (the word for this in Turkish is 'hüzün') of all: "For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world." An excerpt from Istanbul can be found here. The first chapter of My Name is Red is available here, and an interview with Pamuk on the subject of the novel here.

And speaking of journeys that involve staying at home instead of travelling, here's Alain de Botton's introduction to Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth-century classic Journey Around My Bedroom, recently reissued by the Hesperus Press.

The Clay Sanskrit Library

Every culture has a story of how poetry came into being. In this month's New Criterion, Eric Ormsby writes of a one such story of origins found in the Ramayana:

Valmíki, a sage, is wandering in the forest when he sees “an inseparable pair of sweet-voiced krauñcha birds wandering about.” Just then a Nishada hunter, “filled with malice and intent on mischief,” fatally wounds the male of the pair. While the stricken bird writhes on the forest floor, his mate utters “a piteous cry” and the sage is filled with compassion. As he listens to the grieving bird, the sage says, “Since, Nishada, you killed one of this pair of krauñchas, distracted atthe height of passion, you shall not live for very long.” As he meditates on his own words, Valmíki realizes their true nature: “Fixed in metrical quarters, each with a like number of syllables, and fit for the accompaniment of stringed and percussion instruments, the utterance that I produced in this access of shoka, grief, shall be called shloka, poetry, and nothing else.” Thus was the Ramáyana, and indeed, poetry itself, created.

The occasion of Ormsby's long essay on Sanskrit literature is an ambitious new publishing venture, the Clay Sanskrit Library, which plans to bring out about a hundred English translations of Sanskrit classics over the next five years. Among the first batch of titles, released in February 2005, are three of the first four books of the Ramayana, Kalidasa's Shakuntala, and Much Ado About Religion, a satirical play by the ninth-century author Jayanta Bhatta.

I'd better get talking with some of my bookseller contacts about when these titles will be available in India.

The role of human nature in public policy

Don Herzog writes in the blog, Left2Right:

Today's quiz has just one question. All you have to do is fill in the blank and explain what "unnatural" means. Notice that your account of "unnatural" has to justify the crucial closing clause, "and therefore wrong." I'm happy to make it an open-book quiz, because you'll all fail anyway. Ready? Here goes.

_____________ is unnatural and therefore wrong.

I hasten to note that I am not any kind of skeptic about moral or political argument. My conviction that there is no sound way to fill in the blank here is a targeted skepticism. We have to get along without any appeals to what's natural or unnatural, I think, because those appeals are strictly speaking nonsensical.

That is right, of course. To derive an ought from an is, a moral prescription from a natural description, you’d be committing the naturalistic fallacy, and you’d end up with a non sequitur. So no matter how you fill in that blank, the sentence simply wouldn’t make sense. Herzog points to “gay marriage” and “anal sex” and “abortion” as examples of terms that are filled into that blank and presented as arguments by conservatives.

However, Herzog builds a straw man later in the post when he says:

Worse yet, with confusions piled on confusions, is trying to make just-so stories about evolutionary biology ground moral arguments. We're free to reject the morality of rape or promiscuity even if we think it would pay off in gene pool frequencies.

No evolutionary psychologist that I know of has tried to ground moral arguments in human nature, and Steven Pinker, in fact, constantly warns against drawing such conclusions. And of course we’re “free to reject the morality of rape or promiscuity”; whoever said otherwise?

While human nature should certainly not be the basis of morality, should it play a part in public policy? I believe it should. Instead of Herzog’s test statement, consider the following sentence:

_____________ is unnatural and therefore impractical.

Can the blank here be filled in for the sentence to make sense? I think so. One example: “communal sharing of property”.

Any political system that requires us to behave in a manner contrary to human nature is likely to fail. For example, EO Wilson once said of communism: “great idea, wrong species”. He thought it would have worked for ants, who are wired differently.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is the perfect system for humans because it mirrors the manner of our evolution perfectly. John Maynard Keynes once said of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species that it was “simply Ricardian economics couched in scientific language”, while Karl Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels that it was “remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his own English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian struggle for existence.” Stephen Jay Gould described natural selection as “essentially Adam Smith's economics read into nature.” (These three quotes are from Matt Ridley's fine book, The Origins of Virtue.)

Thus, if public policy is to work, it must take into account human nature and recognise our limits. But that should not become an excuse for justifying immoral acts, such as, to use Herzog's example, rape. As Herzog writes, morality must be determined independent of human nature. Only then should we think of what is practical.

[Link via email from Sanjeev.]

The art of Joseph Mitchell

Yesterday, over at India Uncut, Amit and I made some remarks about a report in the Telegraph of Kolkata, and I made a brief reference to how journalism can sometimes aspire to the qualities of literature. In my opinion an example of such journalism is the work of the late New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), whose essays on the life of New York city, now collected in several books, shimmer with intelligence, grace, curiosity, and a close observation and a flair for detail that could be said to be novelistic.

Mitchell came to New York at the age of 21 in 1929, spent a few years working as a reporter for a number of newspapers, and then joined the New Yorker, itself one of the city’s great institutions, towards the end of the next decade. He wrote scores of pieces about the city for the magazine, but it is only late in his life that his best work has been republished in book form, and his posthumous reputation has been deservedly on the rise.

Mitchell took many years to perfect his style, but what resulted from his labours was something authentic and mightily impressive. Consider the perfect opening sentence of one of his most unusual essays, 'The Rats on the Waterfront' (1944), and the details that then trip off one by one:

In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.

And a little later:

As a rule, New York rats are nocturnal. They rove in the streets in many neighbourhoods, but only after the sun has set. They steal along as quietly as spooks in the shadows close to the building line, or in the gutters, peering this way and that, sniffing, quivering, conscious every moment of all that is
going on around them. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encounted most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one. When he does, it is a disquieting experience. […] Veteran exterminators say that even they are unable to be calm around rats. "I've been in this business thirty-one years and I must have seen fifty thousand rats, but I've never got accustomed to the look of them," one elderly exterminator said recently. "Every time I see one my heart sinks and my belly flutters." In alcoholic wards the rat is the animal that most frequently appears in the visual hallucinations of patients with delirium tremens. In these wards, in fact, the D.T.'s are often referred to as "seeing the rat."

This is work that leaves the mind teeming with possibilities. Could a long contemplative essay on these lines, full of details that require journalistic legwork but also speaking in a rich personal voice rather than the generic tone of most reportage, be done on the subject of the stray dogs of Mumbai city? Could one be done on the ice-cream sellers who stand all day in the sun, ubiquitous and unnoticed, on every nook and corner of our cities - what the volume of the trade is, what kinds of flavours are most popular, how demand goes up and down across seasons, and so on. Could one be done on the auto-rickshaw drivers of Delhi and their attitudes towards meters, containing the opinions, whether candid or defensive, of drivers themselves, of government sources, law enforcement agencies, and men who tweak meters for a living?

Here are some samples of Mitchell's work: chapter one of his book My Ears Are Bent, in which he describes his early years as a beat reporter, and some excerpts from two essays about skyscraper-building and the oyster trade.

And in this essay Russell Baker offers an assessment of Mitchell's achievement, arguing - and here again we see a reference to the porous boundaries of journalism and literature - that "through the middle third of the twentieth century he had created a tapestry of New York lives comparable to Charles Dickens's astonishing assortment of Victorian Londoners. To be sure, Dickens's most memorable people were fictional while Mitchell's had all actually lived and breathed, but just as Dickens's fictional Londoners seem more real than life, Mitchell's real New Yorkers seem born to live in novels."

Two Indian journalists whose essays I like very much are the late Behram Contractor ("Busybee"), whose pieces on Bombay's restaurants are classics of food writing and are full of his distinctive presence, and Sankarshan Thakur, who writes splendid essays on politics and politicians for the weekly Tehelka.