On Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

The British empire in India was never so careless and cynical as when it left. The arbitrary redrawing of borders on the Indian subcontinent in 1947 left it broken into two states, necessitating the largest migration of people in history. And one of those countries was itself divided from birth, poised peculiarly - so thinks Rehana Haque, the protagonist of Tahmima Anam's debut novel A Golden Age - "on either side of India like a pair of horns". As territories from north-west and east India became Pakistan, so, in 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh. The absurdity and futility of these dislocations is realised in a remark by Rehana who, when asked about which side she supports in East Pakistan's war of independence, says, "I'm not sure I'm a nationalist".

Rehana is born in Calcutta, sees her sisters married off and sent to Karachi, and is herself married - neither by choice, nor against her wishes - to a businessman, Iqbal, in Dhaka. When Iqbal succumbs suddenly to a heart attack, Rehana is left with two small children to bring up. Her brother-in-law and his wife, who are childless, argue that her children are better off living with them in Karachi. She loses her children for a few years before her circumstances improve, and she is able to bribe a judge to decree that her children be returned. Anam's narration then leaps forward from the nineteen-fifties to 1971, showing us Rehana in middle age and her children, Sohail and Maya, in their teens.

Rehana's children identify with the Bengali language and landscape: Sohail, we are told, loved "the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy, and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land". But Rehana always feels slightly out of place in Dhaka, for more than anything else language is constitutive of human identity, and "She could not give up her love of Urdu, its lyrical lilts, its double meanings, its furrowed beat". Here, and on many other occasions, Anam's writing summons a polished lyricism to give expression to human allegiance and longing. When conflict breaks out between the two halves of Pakistan after the elections of 1970 (in which the party of Mujibur Rahman, from the east, won a majority), Rehana realises that her mother tongue is now "the Urdu of the enemy".

Yet the turbulence in Rehana's world is not all political; some of it is also domestic. Sohail is in love with Silvi, the daughter of their neighbour Mrs. Chowdhury, but Silvi is abruptly betrothed to a lieutenant in the army, and breaks Sohail's heart by complying without protest. At a celebration to mark the engagement, when the bride's mother raises a toast to the couple, Sohail, reconciled to his defeat, pitches in with a toast to the country: "May it emerge from this trial and stand strong". In this one moment we see romantic ardour giving way to revolutionary fervour, and sense that Sohail has joined the resistance not just to fight but also to forget.

Anam's narration bears witness to the brutalities of West Pakistan's assault, the ravages borne and the resistance shown by the nascent state of Bangladesh, and the pathos of lakhs of refugees spilling over the border into India (Rehana herself is shown escaping to Calcutta, becoming a refugee in the very city where she was born). What imperfections her novel has have to do with the occasional contrivances of her plotting and the odd patch of wooden dialogue. But even as it registers the drum-roll of history, her novel does not lose sight of the individual. Anam presents an attentive and satisfying portrait of her protagonist.

Rehana still mourns for her husband and holds imaginary conversations with him, is both exasperated by and proud of Sohail ("she could not blame anyone but herself for making him so fine, so ready to take charge"), and feels guilt that she does not care so deeply for her headstrong daughter. On a visit to Sohail's hideout, Rehana enters a dilapidated building:

Rehana saw a grey pair of men's underwear, next to which was an equally tired brassiere, and beside that a small child's nightie. She felt an old swell of longing for the unit, the family: man, woman, child. This was the formula for happiness, the proper order of things. All other equations suffered in its shadow.

This image of wholeness conveyed by the sight of washing is fitting not just because Rehana remembers her own broken family, but because she is worried that Sohail is living all alone, and that she may lose him in the war - different kinds of uncertainty build upon each other.

And at another juncture Rehana feels that Sohail may have dropped in to visit Silvi, who has taken to a cribbed and joyless view of religion, and visits the girl to ask her, only to hear:

"No, I haven't seen him. I'm in pordah. I don't appear before strangers."
Strangers? What had happened to Silvi? What religion had possessed her? Certainly not the familiar kind. Rehana was not religious herself. She prayed every day, at least once, at Magreb, the most important prayer-time of the day. When Iqbal died, she had used the prayer to give her something to do, something that didn't immediately remind her of the cruel hand she'd just been dealt, and she was unashamed about the solace it had given her. Life had punished her enough; the God she prayed to was not a punishing, not a vengeful, brutal God; He was a God of comfort, a God of consolation. She accepted the relief with entitlement, with confidence, and in turn demanded very little from Him - no absolution, no change of destiny. She knew, from experience, that this could not be achieved.

She knew, from experience, that this could not be achieved - that is a clear-eyed account of how, for Rehana, (and unlike Silvi) the consolations of religion do not draw her away from life, but instead stand alongside and support a more realistic appraisal of life.

Rehana longs for peace and stability but, "sifting her memories" one day amidst the chaos, she realises there never was a then to contrast to the now. "No, there had never been any other time…there was only this time, this life, this fraught and crowded era, to which they were bound without choice, without knowledge, only their passions, their loves, to lead and sustain them." Although the novel describes great suffering, Anam's title paradoxically suggests that, where individuals have lived fully and deeply in awareness of life's fragility, any age is a golden age.

And some links: "Birth Pangs" by Ashis Nandy (We refuse to recognise that the birth certificates of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are written in blood and the memories of that first genocide constitute the dark underside of the cultures of state in South Asia."), "The Forgotten Womb" by Patrick French, "What If We Were Together?" by Amitava Kumar and "What If India Hadn't Been Partitioned?" by Ainslee T. Embree, and "Poems of Partition" by Ramachandra Guha.

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

Guy Sorman's Year of the Rooster

A version of this piece appears today in Mint.

China's sustained economic boom over the last twenty-five years and India's progress since liberalisation have generated a great deal of breathless talk - particularly in the financial press - about caged tigers waking, the balance of power in the world shifting, and the twenty-first century being "the Asian century". Much of this is just hot air. Although China is now the fourth-largest economy in the world, and India not far behind, per capita income is both countries is a fraction of what it is in the developed world.

Further, both countries have followed unusual paths to greater prosperity. India's growth has been kickstarted by its comparative advantages in the IT and service sectors: we have not enjoyed an industrial revolution, and this may hurt us in the long run. China, on the other hand, is the workshop of the world, owing its growth to massive exports of consumer goods and an unusually high domestic savings rate. Its economic miracle is all the more surprising because it has managed and directed by the Communist Party, which controls the apparent paradox of a socialist market economy. Everywhere the question is being asked: can such a rise be sustained?

The French political commentator Guy Sorman has been an Asia-watcher for three decades now, and has written a series of intriguing books, including Barefoot Capitalism (1989) and The Genius of India (2001). His latest book, The Year of the Rooster (Full Circle Global, Rs.495), is an attempt to inspect the Chinese miracle from within, building on a year of travel, study and encounters with people in China in 2005, the Year of the Rooster in the twelve-year animal cycle of the Chinese calendar. We are presented not with an enigmatic, faceless China of facts and figures of the kind bandied so often in the press, but instead a people very much like us, hungry for civil and religious liberty and for responsive government, but in thrall to forces whose power they cannot contest.

Sorman follows, on the one hand, the trail of misery and cruelty left by the Party-State. The story of China, he demonstrates, is "a chronicle of everyday repression". He meets the mother of a youth who was killed during the suppression of the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989, still trying, in 2005, to get information on how and why her son died. He comes across political dissidents who have spent years in prison being tortured, and members of banned religious sects who have done time in labour reeducation centres. Some rebels dream of an armed revolution, others of a thaw ushered in by a figure in the Chinese communist party comparable to Gorbachev or Yeltsin, still others of a Chinese Martin Luther King.

Civil society is weak, for "the ability to associate outside the Party is what the Party fears the most". Thought control is everywhere. Both the press and the judiciary are emasculated, and serve as unofficial extensions of the Party. The regime even subjects the Internet to government control, and the state telephone company has developed software to censor text messages for words like "Tiananmen" and "Tibet". If matters have improved, in is only by comparison to the years of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

Sorman argues that the West, in not taking a harder line with China's government for its predations, has valued "trade over human rights". All of this, he contends, renders comparisons of China's growth with that of India virtually meaningless, for a narrowly quantitative analysis does not reflect "non-economic values which matter like democracy, freedom of religion and respect for life".

And even that 9 per cent growth rate needs close examination. For one, if China is witnessing an unprecented migration of labour from the villages to the cities, much of that migration is forced: China has prospered because of its human rights violations, from using people as "human fodder". Also, China's manufacturing revolution is based on a virtually unlimited supply of cheap labour; the spirit of creativity and innovation traditionally associated with capitalism is foreign to Chinese firms.

"The Party has created a labour market not tempered by law, dissent, or collective bargaining," argues Sorman. "Economists had envisaged such a scenario only on paper. Chinese leaders have shown the lcassical economists were right: the less hampered the labour market, the greater the growth. But economists never had the kind of unlimited power the leaders of China enjoy." When, in addition to a precarious legal system and an absence of property rights, one factors in political uncertainty and a looming energy crisis, it is hard to believe that China will really become the world's new superpower.

As Gurcharan Das, the author of India Unbound, writes in his foreword to Sorman's book, he was himself a believer in "the myth of contemporary China". That belief seems to be shared by a section of India's political class: witness Chief Minister's Vilasrao Deshmukh's ambition, later repeated by Manmohan Singh, of turning Mumbai into "another Shanghai". But Sorman's visit to Shanghai reveals nothing but "a façade of modernity", a soulless centrally-planned city of glitzy appearances but poor sanitation, no freedom of speech, and an insipid cultural life. Most readers of Sorman's sobering book would take Mumbai over Shanghai any day.

Sorman's piece "The Empire of Lies" can be found here, in the most recent issue of City Journal.

Here are some other contributions to the debate on modern China: "New China, New Crisis", an extract from Will Hutton's new book on China The Writing on the Wall; "Does the future really belong to China?", a debate between Hutton and the economist Meghnad Desai in Prospect, and "What's Your China Fantasy?", another debate by James Mann and David Lampton in Foreign Policy; "The Dark Side of China's Rise" by Minxin Pei, "Getting Rich" by Pankaj Mishra; "The Great Leap: Scenes from China's Industrial Revolution" by Bill McKibben; "Unmasking the Man with the Wooden Face", a piece by Willy Wo-lap Lam on the Chinese President Hu Jintao; and "China: a 'great nation'?" by the Chinese journalist Li Datong.

And two fascinating accounts by individuals of their struggles with the paranoid Chinese state: "Arrested in China" by Kang Zhengguo ("The questioner begins from the assumption that you are guilty of many, many crimes and that the police already know the details of all of them. He does not say what the crimes are; it is up to you to show your sincerity and earn forgiveness by confessing") and "Enemy of the State: The Complicated Life of an Idealist", a recent piece in the New Yorker by Jianying Zha.

And lastly, an excellent ten-part series on present-day economic and social life in China for which the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2007.

On Mihir Bose's Bollywood: A History

A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

The word "Bollywood" - till recently there were still some who resented the term, thinking it conveyed a satellite status, but now it seems universally accepted - refers not just to the Hindi film industry in general, but also to a specific site, the city of Bombay, and a specific style of moviemaking different from others, particularly in the use of songs and the mixing - some would say the outright murder - of genres.

It could be argued that before the arrival of the talkies in the late nineteen-twenties, the Hindi film was not a Bollywood film as we know it. This distinction is not considered in Mihir Bose's Bollywood: A History, the jacket copy of which claims it is "the first comprehensive history of this major social and cultural phenomenon". For Bose, Bollywood begins the day cinema arrived in India in the late nineteenth century. He has written a curious book, high on enthusiasm but low on insight, containing plenty of personality sketches - and Bollywood is in some ways all about the cult of personality - but for the most part rehashing old arguments and interpretations in equally careless prose.

As Bose points out, unlike other Western inventions like the motor car or the typewriter, the cinema came early to India, almost as soon as it was birthed. In December 1895, the Lumière brothers showed their first selection of short films to a thunderstruck audience in Paris using the Cinématographe, which was both a camera and a projector. It was a seminal moment in the history of the modern world. As the great film critic and historian David Thomson has written, "Used to the frozen mirror of stills, people began to see for the first time how they walked, smiled and gestured, how they looked from the back, and how other people watched them. Introspection and exhibitionism were thus simultaneously stimulated by the cinématographe."

Only seven months later, the films of the brothers Lumière were being screened at Watson's Hotel in Bombay, and the Times of India carried an advertisement about "the marvel of the century, the wonder of the world". India took to the movies almost at once: viewers were enthralled, short films began to be made imediately by native filmmakers, cinema-houses mushroomed in the major cities, and within a few decades, the Indian film industry was the world's second-largest. How did the new art form capture the Indian imagination so swiftly? Bose does not spend any time over this - in general he shows little interest in the specificity of film as a form - but the explanation surely lies in the power of the medium itself.

As the film theorist Noel Carroll has argued, the movies are an unusually clear and intelligible medium, requiring little or no training on the part of the observer (unlike, for example, reading). It is much easier understanding the conventions of films than of novels or plays: film is a truly mass medium. If film easily superceded prevailing forms of spectacle in India, such as the theatre, it was because it outdid the theatre in the production of mythological stories, which was what Indian audiences liked to watch. The Indian film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir, in her book Bollywood Dreams, notes how cinema technique could enhance the illusion of the mythical, through simple devices like low-angle shots or basic special effects. It was not just the matter but also the medium that excited the wonder of the viewer.

Several parallel film industries, each working in a different Indian language, sprang up, but of these the Hindi film industry emerged the strongest. Early on the Hindi film industry worked along the lines of the Hollywood studio system, in which each actor was employed with a particular studio; later, as star power grew, actors began to freelance and the star system emerged. Many of the early luminaries of Bollywood were foreigners, such as the German director Franz Osten, who made 14 movies between 1935 and 1939, or the spectacular stunt queen Mary Ann Evans, who became famous as "Fearless Nadia".

With the arrival of sound in the nineteen-twenties came not just spoken dialogue but, just as significantly, music. Indian popular narrative traditions had always incorporated music, and the first Indian talkie in 1931, Alam Ara ("All Talking Singing & Dancing"), had seven songs. As films were then all shot in sync sound, the actors needed to be able to sing capably, as did stars like KL Saigal. Later image and sound were broken up, and the tradition of playback singing emerged. Bollywood also attracted some of the best writers of the time, like Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto (whose superb memoir of his days in the Hindi film industry, Stars From Another Sky, Bose quotes frequently).

From this potential treasure trove of material, Bose has produced a severely undercooked book. Although he has written other good books, most notably A History of Indian Cricket, Bollywood, or cinema in general, are clearly a foreign field for him. His general method is to paraphrase a bit of history, augment it with a long quote, (usually from Shyam Benegal, who deserves twenty per cent of the royalties); supply a few plot summaries here, retail a bit of gossip there. His book does not extend or deepen our understanding of Bollywood in any way.

Some of Bose's writing is exceedingly puzzling. Consider this bit, about the culmination of the romance between Dharmendra and Hema Malini: "In 1979, Dharmendra heard that in the film Hum Tere Ashique Hain, based on My Fair Lady, Hema had planted a kiss on Jeetendra's cheeks and also cried in the movie without the help of glycerine. He decided he had to act and, in May 1980, he married her." It seems to me that the writing here accentuates the absurdity of what was already an unusual affair.

The film historian Iqbal Masud, we are told, "sees the forties as a prelude to the golden fifties, whose nakedness of themes remained unequalled until the eighties". Naked themes? Bose's punctuation, particularly his deployment of commas, could make a reader weep: "But while [Yusuf] was in jail Gandhi, observed a fast, and Yusuf, refused to eat his prison breakfast."

Not only is Bose's writing pedestrian, his book is glazed over with an unseemly self-regard. He constantly makes references to his own life and experiences when they have not the least relevance to the subject. Consider his prologue, a tedious 30-page account of how, in the early nineties, he travelled from London to Bombay to write a piece on Bollywood commissioned by a British newspaper. Accompanying him was an attractive photographer called Pamela Singh, better known as the infamous Pamela Bordes. When word got around of the photographer's real identity, all of Bombay's high society wanted to meet her, and took to soliciting Bose's help in doing so. Even the newspaper editor who'd commissioned the piece decided he wanted a story on Pamela instead.

"Having been incognito as a writer for twenty years, I had suddenly discovered fame as an agent for a photographer who wanted to remain incognito," sniffs Bose. "Pritish Nandy, editor of the Sunday Observer, who had in the past taken great pleasure in knocking my books in print and describing me as a worthless writer, now rang me repeatedly to get to Pamela." All this tells us nothing about Bollywood, but a great deal about Bose. At another point Bose introduces Shobhaa De, the former editor of the film magazine Stardust: "Born in 1948, she had a degree in psychology from St.Xavier's College, where I went to as well..." If this sort of chitchat is all we're getting up to, I might as well reveal that I went to St.Xavier's College too for a bit.

Although published by a major Indian press, this book is shockingly copy-edited. The cover is beautiful and the layout stylish, but when it comes to the actual text, misspellings and grammatical errors are abundant - what kind of priorities does this reflect? In one of the book's many incoherent passages, the director Rakesh Roshan is quoted as saying, "In the old days you controlled the release in order to wet the appetite (sic)". Bollywood: A History does indeed wet the appetite.

Here's an old post about one of the best books on Bollywood ever written: The film writing of Saadat Hasan Manto.

And a piece on one of the best Bollywood films of this decade: Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor.

Words Without Borders, and the stories of Parashuram

At least since the invention of the printing press, the history of literature has also been the history of translation. Within fifty years of the birth of print technology in the fifteenth century, the number of books in Europe shot up from a few thousand handwritten manuscripts and their copies to over nine million. As soon as it became possible, for the first time in history, for every household to possess a copy of a book it valued, such as the Bible, it was not just book production but also translation that became widespread, enriching both life and letters immeasurably by casting literature into new languages and making them accessible to new audiences.

Even today, what we think of as the greatest works of world literature are works we generally know only in translation. The most popular version of the Bible, the King James Bible, is an enduring and majestic sixteenth-century translation of the original Hebrew and Greek. Cervantes's Don Quixote, widely considered the greatest novel ever written, is read today by many more readers in English and other translations than in the original Spanish. The same is true for Flaubert, Chekhov, or even last year's Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. It is a paradox of literature that as a writer's reputation grows, the proportion of his readers who read his words exactly as he wrote them dwindles.

If the world today is a smaller place, then, than it used to be, then we owe that as much to translation as to travel by aeroplanes or the arrival of the Internet. Indeed, in our own vibrantly multilingual country, the glories of our literature would sometimes not find an audience even a few hundred kilometres from their place of origin were it not for the benediction of translations, and our literature as a whole would be the poorer for it. As the literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote, translations achieve something like a cross-fertilisation of cultures, allowing the best of what has been thought and said to reverberate widely.

Yet English, with its imperial past, is now the dominant world language, and as with all asymmetries of power, there ensues a neglect of small or marginal presences. As the translator Michael Hofmann has remarked, the size and spread of the English language offers readers "a delusive self-suffciency". A study by the online magazine of literature in translation Words Without Borders shows that 50 per cent of all books published in translation worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 per cent into English. A sample of the riches English readers are missing out on because of the reluctance of English-language publishers to invest in the (admittedly expensive and time-consuming) process of translation is now provided by the anthology Words Without Borders, which brings together 28 works of literature never before published in English and selected by some the most prominent names in world literature, from Naguib Mahfouz and Gunter Grass to José Saramago and Ha Jin.

The Indian representative in this contingent is the Bengali writer Parashuram (1880-1960), whose story "The Scripture Read Backwards", chosen by Amit Chaudhuri, is one of the strongest pieces in the collection. Parashuram had a talent for a comedy that penetrated to the very heart of cultures and their relations with each other.

"The Scripture Read Backwards" envisages, through a series of comic vignettes, a world in which it is not England which has colonised Bengal, but Bengal which has colonised England. British schoolboys sitting in pathshalas study how Bengali suzerainty has brought peace and order to a fractious Europe; newspapers feature advertisements for powders to darken "the unfortunate natural pallor" of the skins of Englishwomen; a British governess is ticked off by her Indian mistress for saying thank you, please and sorry all the time ("It's a very rude habit"); and a nascent British Home Rule movement tries valiantly to counteract the propaganda of the Bengali empire.

The fun of the story is that British subjects are not just forced into submitting to the ways of empire; some of them really want to be like the Bengalis in matters of conduct or fashion - indeed there is no stopping them. "What's that? Feeling cold?" says one character to another. "Whatever made you wear a dhoti and kurta again? You'll die of pneumonia trying to ape the Bengalis." In this way Parashuram sublimated Indian resentment at the Raj into healing laughter. Would that "The Scripture Read Backwards" had been translated earlier, and read forwards to a Curzon or a Mountbatten.

Many of the other pieces are just as entertaining. The Chinese writer Ma Jian, author of The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue (he had the good fortune also of marrying his translator, Flora Drew, and the couple talk about their marriage here), treats us to "Where Are You Running To?", an entertaining story about a woman chasing her truant son through the streets of the city, remembering on the way all the hardships of her life. The Nigerian writer Akinwumi Isola presents a tale of marital strife in "The Uses of English", a translated story that is also about translation, and the Mexican writer Juan Villoro a hardbitten story about the life of a boxer, "Lightweight Champ". This sparkling collection is the most powerful manifesto possible for a world of words without borders.

More of Parashuram can be found in an excellent edition of his Selected Stories, published just last year by Penguin. The translations are by the prominent critic and translator Sukanta Chaudhuri and the physicist Palash Baran Pal, and they render Parashuram's prose into a fine light-footed English, bounding along on gusts of whimsy. Here are the first two paragraphs of the story "The League of Tender Spirits":

The weather office at Alipur has reported that the hole in the atmosphere above Sagar Island has filled up for good, so there will be no more rain. An advance guard of three autumnal green insects has been captured on Chowringhee Road. The murky sky is being rent apart to reveal the underlying blue. The sunlight has taken on the hue of bell metal. The mistress of the house is airing quilts and blankets out of doors without fear of the weather. One has to snuggle up a little close in bed in the early morning. Skinny little baby cauliflowers are selling at four to a rupee. The price of gourd is rising, of potatoes falling. The autumn is manifesting itself on land and water, air and ether, body and mind. The kings of yore used to set out on expeditions of conquest at this time of year.

The court was in vacation; my house was empty of clients. The whistle of the Dhapa Mail sounded from Circular Road. I observed with wonderment that my elder son had laid aside his geometry textbook and was perusing a railway timetable. My younger son was possessed by a railway demon: he was churning his elbows like pistons, pursing his lips like a shrew and crying 'Choo--choo--choo!' My heart grew restless.

The sentences, flatly declarative and roving from subject to subject, seem forged almost independently of each other, yet the effect they create cumulatively is exceptionally fine. Parashuram, too, was "possessed by a railway demon" - the wonder and excitement of train travel figure prominently in many of his stories. "The king of all forms of transport is the railway train," declares one of his characters, "and the king of all railways the East Indian Railway".

Two stories by Parashuram can also be found in Amit Chaudhuri's excellent, if somewhat too Bengali-centric, anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature.

And here are some essays on translation: by Howard Goldblatt ('Sometimes, of course, a translation can enhance a work in ways the author never imagined. Gabriel García Marquez has said he prefers Gregory Rabassa's English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Spanish original, to which Rabassa replied, "That is probably less of a compliment to my translation than it is to the English language." James Thurber tipped his hat another way: When told by a French reader that his stories read even better in French, he replied, "Yes, I tend to lose something in the original."'); "A Rose By Any Other Name" by Umberto Eco, "On Translation and Garcia Marquez" by Edith Grossman, "How To Read A Translation" by Lawrence Venuti, "The Process of Translation" by William Weaver, "On Translation" by James Atlas, "Translating Saramago" by Margaret Jull Costa, and "Animadversions on Translation" by Michael Hofmann. And Douglas Hofstadter compares two translations of Pushkin's novel-in-verse Evgeny Onegin in this essay, "What's Gained In Translation".

Other Middle Stage essays on early-twentieth-century Indian writers: on Fakir Mohan Senapati, whose novel Six Acres and a Third also contains a witty critique of British rule like that of Parashuram, and Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay.

And old posts on two other anthologies: Literature from the "Axis of Evil" and The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing.

[The first part of this essay appears today in Mint as a review of Words Without Borders.]

On Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid’s taut and accomplished second novel, takes the form of a single long monologue that we are asked to imagine as a dialogue - a form which reverses the power relationship that is the subject of the book.

Changez, a resident of the Pakistani city of Lahore, encounters by chance or purpose an American tourist on the streets of his city, and presses his hospitality upon him. They get to talking—we never actually hear the interlocutor, only Changez’s reactions to him—and Changez loses no time in revealing that he has actually lived in America. He is, we learn, a graduate of Princeton, worked subsequently for a prominent American firm, and even had a love affair with an American girl. Then how is he now here? Changez’s story—which seems to gush from him like blood from a wound—traces the self’s shifting sense of itself against the rumblings of a rudely shaken world.

Changez is the scion of a prominent Lahore family. A bright student, he wins a scholarship to Princeton, where many of his American peers come from the same class of their society as he does of his. But it is a different society. The bright allure of meritocratic America seems to Changez in direct contrast to the tired air of his home country, its attention focused on military skirmishes with neighbouring India. On graduating, he takes up a lucrative offer from Underwood and Samson, a leading valuation firm. The guiding principle of his firm is “Focus on the fundamentals”.

At 22, Changez becomes part of a global elite, flying business-class and hopping from country to country. He loves the buzz of New York. “I was, in four-and-a-half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker,” he exults. Returning to Pakistan to visit his family, he is depressed by the shabbiness of the house in which he grew up, but realizes that “I had changed; I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner”. It is a persuasive portrait of how life in a new country reshapes one’s old attitudes and certainties.

In New York, Changez also falls in love with Erica, a girl from a wealthy American family. As their attachment develops, he learns that Erica has a past: Her long-time boyfriend, Chris, passed away recently. Changez feels that it is only a matter of time before Erica leaves behind her memories and embraces the present, but disturbingly she seems instead to regress, and he feels powerless to help her.

Changez, then, has multiple allegiances to America. Yet, while on assignment in the Philippines, when he sees on TV the spectacle of the World Trade Center being mowed down by terrorists, he finds himself perplexed by the fact that his immediate reaction is one of satisfaction. “[A]t that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack,” he analyses, “…no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.”

Those italicised emphases—of which there are many in The Reluctant Fundamentalist—are Hamid’s way of signalling tremors in his otherwise understated writing; they are suggestive also of the cadences of Changez’s analytical mind at work, seeking precise nuances and distinctions so as to avoid falsifications of his experience.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Changez finds that something in the air has changed: almost overnight, he has been pushed out to the margins of a world in which he felt so much at home. If the complaint of the unnamed black protagonist in Ralph Ellison's landmark novel Invisible Man (1952) is that his skin colour has made him invisible ("Look at me!" he shouts), then Changez's predicament is that he is too visible - because of his ethnicity, he is viewed with suspicion as he never was before. He is alarmed also by the martial stance of his adopted country, intent upon a reprisal that will lead to the deaths of many more innocents. He finds America in the grip of “a dangerous nostalgia” not dissimilar to that of Erica, pining for her departed companion.

But Changez’s doubts and fears are not solely directed outward. He begins to see himself, too, as complicit with a world order he finds morally repugnant. After all, “finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised his power”. He feels he cannot abide any more within his insulated world. Instructed to focus on the fundamentals, he sees now that those fundamentals were akin to a pair of blinders. He becomes—in a clever subversion of the expectations raised by the novel’s title and its alienated Pakistani protagonist—a reluctant fundamentalist.

Hamid's narration recalls not just the Dostoevskian universe of humiliation, resentment, and self-loathing, but even Dostoevsky's pairs or doubles: attempting to get Erica to warm to him in bed, Changez invites her to imagine he is Chris, his dead rival.

And just like Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, who rather than believe in an unjust order decides to “return my ticket”, Changez, too, forsakes his gilded life in America and returns to Pakistan to teach. During the course of his narration, he asserts repeatedly that he means his unidentified American companion no harm. But the reader has heard in his voice the dark undertow of what Orhan Pamuk has called “the anger of the damned”, and is not so sure.

Some links: Mohsin Hamid writes about the gestation of his book here, in an essay called "My Reluctant Fundamentalist".

And he writes here about applying for British citizenship: "It...occurs to me that I have something to lose. I am a Pakistani and proud of it. Inevitably, I wonder if I am not somehow being disloyal to the country in which I was born and which I have always loved. I have the nagging guilt that I imagine accompanies thoughts of divorce. But then I remind myself that I am allowed dual citizenship. My situation is not analogous to that of a husband who is leaving his wife for another woman. No, I tell myself, I am more like a father who is about to have a second child. Of course I am nervous about neglecting my first-born. But surely I can find within me the affection and commitment to be true to both."

And here are two pieces on Pakistan by Hamid for Time magazine: "The Usual Ally", written just after 9/11 ("I remember, as a boy in Lahore, the moment I learned Pakistan had become, once again, America's ally" - the pauses in that sentence sound just like Changez's voice) and "Divided We Fall", written last year, in which he writes sagely of "the inability of our society to channel dissent into debate". He articulates his doubts over Pervez Musharraf's continuing hold on power in a recent piece in the New York Times, "Pakistan's Silent Majority Is Not To Be Feared".

And an old post: "On The Memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan".

On Etgar Keret's Missing Kissinger

A version of this piece on Etgar Keret's new book of stories Missing Kissinger appeared recently in the Scotland on Sunday.

On the inside back-cover of his new book Missing Kissinger, Etgar Keret appears with a black gag around his mouth, staring into the camera with one eye. And if that's what a writer gets up to with just his author photograph, imagine what the stories are like.

Keret is one of literature's freest, zaniest spirits - just as his photograph is not what we expect of the Writer, or the Israeli writer, so his stories stick their tongue out at conventional notions of the literary. They are no more than four or five pages long, their sentences are very short, their language that of casual conversation, and their tone laconic ("Soon as…", a typical Keret sentence begins, or "Truth is…"). The characters, mostly everyday joes puzzled by life, work within a limited vocabulary: "I was going through a shitty time", they might say, or "I love him too, I really do, but that's a biggie".

Indeed, Keret's stories are all tricks of voice, of people taking grave matters lightly and impossible things seriously, in a way that we both see their point and relish the confusion. In the Keretian universe anything can happen; his stories have the strangest premises.

"Suddenly, I could do it," begins the story "Freeze". "I'd say 'Freeze' and everyone would freeze, just like that, in the middle of the street." In "Cramps", the unnamed narrator dreams that he, or she, is a forty-year-old woman, who then falls asleep and dreams she is a twenty-seven-year-old man. Two boys dig for dinosaur eggs in their backyard and find one, and another commandeers an army of ants. In an essay on "quickness" in literature, Italo Calvino noted how in some works "the speed at which events follow one another conveys a feeling of the ineluctable". That remark might serve as a summary of Keret's method.

The stories abound with splendid gags. In "Venus Lite", all the gods come down to earth to work, and Venus arrives in the narrator's office, to work the photocopier. The narrator is going through a hard time and needs something to believe in. He falls in love with beautiful Venus right away, but can't work up the courage to tell her. "In the end, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and left it on the desk for her. The next morning, the note was waiting for me, along with fifty photocopies."

The same anti-climactic tone characterises "Magician School", one of three stories about magicians in Missing Kissinger. The narrator, a young magician, is telling us about the recent graduation ceremony at Magicians High School:

At the ceremony, all the graduates got to demonstrate something from their theses. Amicam Schneidman, who was undoubtedly the great Israeli hope in the field of classical magic, showed how he turned staplers into animals. Mahmud al-Mi'ari shrank himself into miniature size and talked to things that didn't exist. I killed a cow. After the ceremony, I was thinking about something else as I was pulling out the parking lot and boom! After it died, it turned back into a stapler.

In the story "Drops", one of Keret's many unreasonable and perplexing women learns that someone has invented a medicine against feeling alone, and decides to leave her boyfriend before he cheats on her. The medicine comes in two forms, drops and spray. The narrator's girlfriend chooses drops. "Just because she doesn't want to feel alone, there's no reason to harm the ozone layer."

Just as Keret's stories are anti-literary, so too they are anti-romantic. Illusions are always being punctured, and the unambitious protagonists are always being left by their girlfriends for firemen, law students or photographers. Life is tough, and even when the going is great - as in "Freeze", when the narrator can take the most beautiful women home after getting them to freeze - the fun is ruined by the realization that "None of them wants me because of what I really am". These are fine, potent drops of storytelling.

Here is a previous post on Keret: "The zany fictions of Etgar Keret".

And other posts on short-story writers: Nikolai Gogol, Samrat Upadhyay, Houshang Moradi-Kermani, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay..

On Amitava Kumar's Home Products

A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

In a scene late in Amitava Kumar's novel Home Products, the protagonist Binod is returning home with his family from Bombay's Prithvi Theatre after watching a Hindi adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie. "Binod felt the tragedy they had witnessed on stage had also made their own small sufferings pleasant and lyrical," writes Kumar. His novel might be thought of as exploring the question of how art, which is a representation of life, also impacts life, triggering memories, provoking connections, and being assimilated till it virtually becomes a home product.

Binod himself wanted to be a writer - we learn at different stages that he likes reading Orwell, Chekhov, Manto, Bhalchandra Nemade - but he now works in Bombay as a film journalist. When he writes an editorial about the murder by a politician of a small-town female poet in his home state Bihar, a film director asks him if he would like to write a script around the story. Binod travels to Patna to understand the story better, but finds the dead woman's family stubborn and unhelpful.

His cousin, the cool, ambitious, amoral Rabinder, is in jail, not for the first time. On hearing Binod's story, Rabinder suggests there is no need for Binod to track reality so doggedly. If he really does want a model for "a woman's lonely ambitions" in a small town, then his own mother - Binod's aunt - whom everyone calls Bua, is good enough. Bua herself, after losing the support of her husband early in her married life, got herself an education, took up welfare work, and is now a minister in Lalu Yadav's cabinet. Rabinder's question "Shouldn't you be writing Bua's story instead?" resonates in Binod's mind - another instance in the novel of a story from the wider world merging with something close to home. Binod thinks later of "how stories begin in one place and end in another place that is often altogether unexpected".

Kumar's narrative, shuttling continuously between present and past, is faithful to Binod's realisation, adding layer upon layer in a very even, composed style. In the linking up of personal ambition, crime, politics and Bollywood, his book is slightly reminiscent of Vikram Chandra's magnum opus Sacred Games.

Like Chandra, Kumar really knows how to write a rich, satisfying scene. The first two sections of his book - "The Car with the Red Light" and "Ulan Bator at Night" - string together episodes of startling power. Among these is the boy Binod's memory of the night after Bua's wedding. A male relative is expected to accompany a bride to her new home, and so Binod makes the long journey by car with Bua and her husband Lalji. Tired out, he falls asleep early and wakes up to hear voices in the dark:

Bua was talking to someone in a very low voice. When he heard Lalji's voice, he knew he should be sleeping. It was wrong to be awake. But sleep didn't come to him and he was afraid to move or change sides.
Lalji spoke to Bua in a loud whisper. "I looked at your matriculation marksheet. No one scores so high in History and Geography. You got more than I did in both Hindi and English.
Bua was saying,"Let me go."
Lalji shifted his weight and when he spoke again his voice seemed to come from a closer place. Bua was lying between Binod and Lalji's voice that sounded as if he was laughing. "But tell me your secret. How can anyone be so brilliant?"
The low laughter in his throat made Binod think of marbles being scrubbed in the palm of his hand in the schoolyard.
There was silence. Binod had shut his eyes. The bed creaked again, and once more Bua said "Let me go." Her bangles jingled in the dark. Perhaps she was sleeping closer to him than to Lalji. Binod knew that she was wearing thin gold and new red and green ones.
He heard Lalji saying "Okay, okay" in a reasonable voice. There was a pause and he spoke again. "People like me know that the capital of Nepal is Kathmandu or that the capital of Burma is Rangoon. But please tell me - what is the capital of Mongolia?"
He laughed but a note of pleading had come into his voice.
Bua rose to the bait. She said quietly,"Ulan Bator."
"Ulan Bator," Lalji said with great relish and laughed.
Binod was glad that Bua knew the answer because he certainly didn't. He heard Lalji murmur happily in the dark "Ulan Bator…Ulan Bator" but it seemed that he had begun to run in bed. He was trying to catch his breath. Bua said,"You are breaking my bangles". But Lalji didn't say anything in response. He continued to run in the dark. And then it seemed that Bua was running too. They were panting with the effort and then Binod felt that they were tiring and he shared their tiredness and sometime later when the voices had stopped in the dark he began to dream of leopards in the forest and small birds with painted breasts.

"but it seemed that he had begun to run in bed" - that is a striking example of what the Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky called "defamiliarization", or the use of some rhetorical or linguistic device to make the familiar newly strange. In novels this effect is often achieved through the accurate depiction of the experience of characters who, like Binod, cannot quite understand what is going on. We understand more about what they are seeing than they themselves do, but paradoxically it is we who are indebted to them, for their way of seeing makes alive for us something that had become all too familiar - it removes things, to use Shklovsky's words, "from the sphere of automatized perception".

When we hear lovemaking being described as people running in bed, we feel the intensity of it far more than if the experience had been correctly named. As Shklovsky understood it, defamiliarisation in art, and indeed art itself, exists "in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony".

As evinced by that line about Lalji's laughter resembling marbles being rubbed together, Kumar's eye for the telling detail is very sharp. Early in the novel, when Binod visits Patna, Bua comes to see him, accompanied by another minister, Parshuram. Bua has never remarried, but midway through the conversation, "Parshuram reached over to where Bua sat, took the corner of her sari in his right hand and began to rub it on the lens of his spectacles." This is enough to suggest their relationship, and also their indifference to gossip. In the same way Rabinder, we know, has indulged in several acts of violence, but feels no regret or remorse. And even in a sentence like "Rabinder had finished his meal quickly and was sucking on the lime pickle on his plate" we are invited to see a trace of the sinister beneath the everyday.

If Home Products does not quite redeem the promise of its first half, it is because Kumar's narration, having carefully opened out a world, continues to expand outwards, and as a result becomes somewhat unfocused. Kumar has written three nonfiction books previously, including the splendid Husband of a Fanatic, and even in this book he constantly has an eye on the news, which we are perhaps meant to understand as an expression of Binod's curiosity as a journalist.

In one stretch of the book, we are told in quick succession of Virender Sehwag batting against South Africa, the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the tsunami in south India. But novels are always more interesting when exploring the local than gathering up the global - in a novel, a man rubbing his spectacles on a woman's sari may be of greater import than the news of bombs falling on Iraq. "Give me the home product every time," Mark Twain is quoted as saying in the epigraph to this novel, and that might have been his criticism of Home Products as well.

Amitava Kumar had a good essay called "How To Write A Novel" on his years of work on Home Products here. Here are some of his other essays and reviews: "A Shrine At The Border", "The Enigma of Return" (on Suketu Mehta's Maximum City), "A Civilizing Mission" (on the Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmed), and "Passages to India". And on the subject of Partition: "What If We Were Together?"

Victor Shklovsky's seminal essay "Art as Device" is here, and here is an old post on another instance of defamiliarisation in fiction, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane.

On Vinod George Joseph's Hitchhiker

Of all the structures of life that go towards making us unfree, none is more heartbreaking than that of caste, which did and still does reduce one human being to a nullity in the eyes of another merely because of the accident of his or her birth.

Caste issues in the realm of human action rarely figure as prominently in the Indian novel in English as they do in Vinod George Joseph's debut novel Hitchhiker, a thoroughgoing exploration of the way of life of what the French sociologist Louis Dumont called homo hierarchus. An old-fashioned realist novel conceived on a grand scale - there are more than thirty characters in it with significant roles - it provides, through the splendid portrait of its protagonist, Ebenezer, and his milieu, a panoramic and throughly engrossing depiction of a semi-urbanized world where caste hierarchies, religious conversion, and affirmative action bring both hope and havoc into the lives of people.

Ebenezer is the teenaged son of Peterraj, the watchman of the Global Evangelical School in the small town of Aaroor in south India. Ebenezer has a complex, fractured identity. His father, a low-caste labourer, came into contact with missionaries and was persuaded to convert to Christianity in return for a secure livelihood. So Ebenezer is putatively a Christian: in the novel's opening chapter we see him attending Sunday Mass at the school, and singing the song "Walking With Jesus".

Yet he has not really left his low-caste status behind: in his native village the high-caste Edayars treat him and his family as the low-caste Verumars of old. Ebenezer himself is not too comfortable being a Christian, yet he receives funding for his education from a donor overseas because he is one, and cannot afford to reject the consequences of his father's decision. His dream though is to become an engineer, get a good job, and escape the tangled web of religious and caste allegiances altogether by moving to a big city.

Joseph's standout achievement in Hitchhiker is his depiction of the relationship between Ebenezer's material reality and his interior life. Ebenezer feels his family's privation keenly: what others take for granted are for him luxuries. In one of the novel's best scenes, he visits his grandparents and cousins in his village, and a chicken is specially prepared in honour of the family gathering. The chicken is so precious, and there is so little of it to go around, that "it was understood that there would be no second helpings, though everyone could have an unlimited amount of rice and maybe a couple of spoons of gravy".

The meal, we are told, "got over very soon" - not because it is any shorter in real terms than other meals, we realise, but because the people are eating unusually well. Ebenezer and his father share one pair of shoes between them; Ebenezer is waiting for the day "when someone would gift them another pair of shoes so that both he and his father could wear shoes to Church". In Joseph's reading, there is nothing particularly virtuous or noble about poverty. Rather, man is humanised by the fulfilment of his basic material needs. When Ebenezer dreams of being so successful that his children "will have their own TV sets in their rooms", we know exactly where he is coming from.

Even what little material security Ebenezer's family has is as a result of Peterraj's conversion to Christianity; were Peterraj still a labourer in the fields, reflects Ebenezer, he himself might today "be toiling away at a construction site or at a tannery" instead of being at school and nurturing dreams of a better future. Indeed, the thought that "the world was going to be a better place" is a kind of motif in the novel; it is the sentiment that unites the disparate wants of the many characters amongst whose thoughts Joseph roves.

But even Peterraj's conversion cannot insulate his family from the workings of the old caste order. While in his native village, Ebenezer and his family are caught up in a violent clash between the Edayars and the Verumars; Ebenezer's mother and sister lose their lives. Recovering in hospital, Ebenezer is consumed with loathing for the world and for himself. "He hated everyone. He hated the Edayars. He hated himself for being a Verumar and an untouchable. He hated the GE Church for not being able to take away his untouchable status."

Hitchhiker is also unusual in being keenly interested in the realities of the Indian educational system, of which it provides a critique by nothing more than reporting accurately its facts. Indian readers will find that it refreshes their memory of what it is like to go to school and college in India, and the kind of peculiar tensions and calculations involved.

Joseph notes, on the one hand, the almost obsessive competitiveness of school students. Of the two best students in Ebenezer's class he writes, "The competition between Chithra and Aravind was legendary" - an exaggeration which nevertheless expresses the truth of Indian school wars. Ebenezer is in his all-important schooleaving year, and everyone in his class goes to private tuitions not just for the school exams but also the entrance exams to various institutes.

So on the one hand there is the sense of a stampede towards a prized goal, but on the other hand we see unmistakably the shallowness and the sterility of what is taught and how it is absorbed. Knowledge is understood only as memorising and problem-solving, and there is only one method of studying. "Like all his classmates," we are told, "Ebenezer never studied from his textbooks, but depended solely on guidebooks, which covered the syllabus in an exam-friendly way".

Government schools are in a wretched condition and rife with corruption; private educational institutions often demand huge donations from both prospective students and teachers. Students are shown assessing each other's chances of success not just in terms of their capabilities, but also by considering whether they are from the general category, backward castes, or scheduled castes.

In one revelatory piece of dialogue Ebenezer, who has given up his Scheduled Caste status because he is a Christian, says bitterly of a friend eligible for a reserved quota seat: "He is a Verumar just like me. But he is an SC and I am not." In another instance Satish, the son of a district collector who is an SC, is shown feeling guilty because he is not a part of the creamy layer "preventing the really needy SCs from benefiting from reservations"; he fears also that all through his life "he would be accused of having achieved success of account of being an SC". In this way Joseph conveys a sense of the very real doubts, fears and resentments attached to reservations - his book is as good an intervention on our current debate on reservations in education as any.

Small-town and rural Indian life as portrayed in Hitchhiker appears teeming with sects and schisms, with little or no dialogue or exchange. People always have a group identity which, though it sometimes provides them with strength, often limits their free expression as individuals. To survive in this world a number of characters are seen compromising their allegiances for the sake of relationships or material advancement - they are, in the author's potent though not necessarily pejorative metaphor, hitchhikers, and the protagonist is one such person.

Working for a dotcom company in Bombay, Ebenezer falls in love with a high-caste girl he knew from Aaroor. In Aaroor there would be a scandal if they were seen together, but in the city nobody cares - it is possible for them to dream of a future together in Bombay. Yet her family will not allow her to marry someone who is not only low-caste but, even worse, a Christian, and they persuade her to return to Aaroor and reconsider her decision. Afraid that he will lose the person he loves because of his faith, Ebenezer decides to participate in a reconversion ceremony and become a Hindu again. But his efforts are in vain. Finally he is trumped by the very world he wished always to escape.

Although narrated in unadorned, functional prose that can sometimes seem clumsy and artless, Hitchhiker portrays convincingly the life situations and dilemmas of men and women, high-castes and low-castes, city and village dwellers. Whatever Joseph's deficiencies as a writer, his novelistic instincts are very good. Immensely creditworthy are the care with which he has presented the points of view proper to different characters with minimal narratorial intervention, and the skill with which he has controlled a very complex plotline shifting from place to place and character to character. This absorbing story of a man's struggle to make his way up in and break free of a world of caste prejudice deserves the widest possible readership.

And some links to further reading on the issue of reservations in higher education in India: "Classy cast of mind" by Ramachandra Guha, "The A to Z of OBC" by Yogendra Yadav, "Re-caste the problem", an Indian Express editorial on the subject (the tendency of Indian newspapers to always find some kind of bad pun for the titles of the pieces they publish is evident even from this small sample size), "Indian Reservations" by Atanu Dey, and, more generally, "Merit and Justice" by Amartya Sen. And on a similar problem of unequal access to higher education in America, Andrew Delbanco's "Scandals of Higher Education" in the latest New York Review of Books.

And on the state of Indian education and Indian schools: "The Unknown Education Revolution in India" by Naveen Mandava, "A tale of two numbers", a recent piece by Gurcharan Das on the government's provisions for education in the 2007 budget, and "A Class Apart" by Ramachandra Guha ("That education in India is in such a shocking state is made more depressing by the fact that among this country’s founders were Gandhi and Tagore, both of whom thought deeply of how to make learning meaningful as well as enjoyable"). And on a slightly different tack, "What Is Liberal Education?", the text of a lecture given in 1959 by Leo Strauss.

On Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel

A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

In 2003, Dutch voters voted in as a Member of Parliament a woman of Somalian origin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The remarkable thing about this was that it had been only a decade since Hirsi Ali had been a young refugee seeking asylum in Holland - a complete outsider.

At that point she had never held a job in her life, and knew nothing about European history or of the Dutch language. A Muslim girl brought up in the conservative milieu of Somalia and Saudi Arabia, she was unused to, even shocked by, the values of the West. But in this new world she "saw for the first time that human relations could be different". Her new life gave her a vantage from which to examine the ways of the old, as also a sense of the sovereignty of the individual she had never known before.

The wonder and empowerment of this intellectual journey, more than her physical or the political one, animate the pages of Infidel, Hirsi Ali's plainspeaking and revelatory autobiography. Infidel is about nothing less than a kind of rebirth of the self. In the world Hirsi Ali came from, "because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult", but in the West she was able to become "a person, an individual". Her autobiography - the story of the self's journey through time, contemplating the meanings of what it has gone through, and believing in the value of such a quest - is itself the most powerful symbol of that break.

Ali was born in Somalia, and spent her childhood living in a number of either failed or repressive states while her father, a prominent Somalian opposition leader, cobbled together a resistance against the country's corrupt dictator. The values she grew up with were, on the one hand, those of the clan, and on the other those of Islam. While still a child she had to undergo the female genital mutilation commonly found in, though by no means exclusive to, the Islamic world.

Women had little or no independence: before marriage they were the property of their fathers, and after that of their husbands. In public life there was very little respect for the rule of law, government was hopelessly ineffective and mired in corruption, and the warring clans made a travesty of the idea of a civil society. It is Hirsi Ali's argument in Infidel that all these things were related.

Infidel takes unusual positions on many issues, from religious fundamentalism and feminism to multiculturalism and immigrant assimilation. As someone who has seen and lived through both sides of the story on all these questions, Hirsi Ali's views are arguably more important than those who might approach them in a more theoretical way.

Central to her argument is her wideranging critique of Islam, a religion of which she was once a faithful adherent. Not only that, she also differs from those who would make a careful distinction between mainstream Islam and militant or fundamentalist Islam. Her problem is with what is taught by the Quran itself, and the message of absolute submission it preaches.

Hirsi Ali regards the Quran less as a transcendent text that communicates the word of God than as "a historical record, written by humans". Its mindset is too is that of a certain time and place, that "of the Arab desert in the seventh century". Further, there is no distinction in Islam between the religious and the secular sphere: the Quran legislates on every aspect of life. Women suffer particularly badly, for they are subjugated in the name of the Quran. Their sexuality is seen as provocative and in need of being controlled, and their men are granted absolute rights over them. Many of the Quran's verses propagate ideas incompatible with modern notions of freedom, equality and individual rights, yet debate on these matters is forbidden because "worship of God means total obedience".

In Europe, though, Hirsi Ali finds that nothing is too sacred to be debated. Registering for a degree in political science instead of one of the standard vocational courses preferred by refugees, Hirsi Ali finds her old worldview buffetted by the shock of unfamiliar and startlingly powerful ideas:

Sometimes it seemed as if almost every page I read challenged me as a Muslim. Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
People had contested the whole basis of the idea of God's power on earth, and they had done it with reasoning that was beautiful and compelling. Freud said we had power over ourselves. Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale. Spinoza said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature. Emil Durkheim said human beings fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security.
In every way, to read these books of Western history was sinning. Even the history of how modern states formed confronted me with contradictions of my belief in Allah. The European separation of God's word from the state was itself haram. The Quran says there can be no government without God; the Quran is Allah's book of laws for the conduct of worldly affairs.
Almost everything was secular here. Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly…. This man-made system of government was so much more stable, peaceful, prosperous, and happy than the supposedly God-devised systems I had been taught to respect.

In the past, contends Hirsi Ali, the Christian world too was equally close-minded and suffocating, but the revolution ushered in by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment - Kant, Spinoza, Voltaire, Mill, Locke - brought about a separation between the church and the state, and a new respect for reason and the individual's right to choose his or her own way of life. "The Enlightenment," writes Hirsi Ali, "cut European culture from its roots in old fixed ideas of magic, kingship, social hierarchy, and the domination of priests, and regrafted it onto a great strong trunk that supported the equality of each individual, and his right to free opinions and self-rule - so long as he did not threaten civic peace and the freedom of others."

In her opinion Islam, too, needs a similar Age of Reformation. She is critical of the way in which Western governments and intellectuals have become nervous about this right to freedom of speech, of free debate and criticism, out of respect for the pieties of multiculturalism and a fear of being called racist. She herself defied those pieties by collaborating with the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on a short film sharply critical of the treatment of women in Islam. She writes:

When I approached Theo to help me make Submission, I had three messages to get across. First, men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah: it is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at Him. Second, the rigid interpretation of the Quran in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women. Through globalization, more and more people who hold these ideas have traveled to Europe with the women they own and brutalize, and it is no longer possible for Europeans and other Westerners to pretend that severe violations of human rights occur only far away. The third message is the film's final phrase: "I may no longer submit." It is possible to free oneself - to adapt one's faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.

It is a controversial message, liable to further incite the very people it is aimed at. Van Gogh was stabbed to death in 2005 by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin, and Hirsi Ali herself now lives in the United States after facing death threats. But like many of the thinkers she admires, her unorthodox ideas have set off a far-reaching debate. (Time magazine named her one of its "100 Most Influential People of 2005".) This exemplary autobiography provides an unforgettable lens on the most vexing problems of our age.

A crackling discussion of the questions raised by Hirsi Ali's book can be found on the European website Signandsight here, with pieces by Pascal Bruckner, Ian Buruma, Timothy Garton Ash, Necla Kelek, Paul Cliteur and Ulrike Ackermann among others. Another piece, by Christopher Hitchens, is here.

And here is a piece by Hirsi Ali: "The Right to Offend". And in the same vein, a piece by Salman Rushdie, "Defend the Right To Be Offended". And here is a very good essay by Gertrude Himmelfarb: "Three Paths To Modernity: The British, American, and French Enlightenments".

And it seems to me that Infidel might be read very fruitfully in comparison with - even the single-word titles of the books seem to point at each other - Minaret, the novel by Leila Aboulela published two years ago. Aboulela also tells the story of an immigrant Muslim woman arriving in the West in mid-life, but her book charts, just as persuasively, a journey in the direction opposite to that taken by Hirsi Ali. Her protagonist Najwa, floundering in the anomie of the highly secularized world of the West, eventually seeks refuge in the order and certitude of religion, and finds comfort in the sense of being "safe with God". "We never get lost because we can see the minaret of the mosque and head home towards it," goes one sentence of Aboulela's novel.

And two old posts on films with a powerful feminist message: Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor, and Tahmineh Milani's Two Women.

Speakin' on Saturday

Turns out I'm speaking once again this Saturday. Since, alongside other high points in a short but indisputably eventful life, I have now attended three literary festivals, and been on one panel, I now qualify as a veteran, and so I've been invited to speak this Saturday, the 10th of March, at a PEN event on "What do literary festivals achieve?"

On being invited most courteously, I thought a bit about whether I had anything of interest to say, but then I saw my boots lying in one corner under the dresser, and realised suddenly that I had in fact a great many things to say, and the allotted eight minutes might not be enough.

So come along if you can, 6.30 pm, Prithvi House (1st floor), opposite Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu, Bombay. Also speaking will be the novelist Rohit Manchanda, the playwright Ramu Ramanathan, and the journalist Manjula Sen. If nothing else will tempt you, I can reveal that the supply of biscuits is expected to be immense - and I can't possibly finish them all by myself.

The best Indian cricket writing

This weekend's issue of Mint is a cricket special, and I have in it a long piece on the best Indian books about cricket. The main essay is about three writers who followed the game in a non-professional way, and it's accompanied by a box with three more recommendations.

Cricket books, like clouds, can be broadly divided into three classes.

The first is the lot written by cricketers themselves, putting down cherry and willow and taking up the pen, or more likely, the dictaphone. These tend mostly to be autobiographies. Their literary merit is often minimal—rare is the cricketer who, like Navjot Sidhu, prefers a book to a beer, and look what he’s done to the language—but at their best, they successfully evoke the hothouse atmosphere and complex dynamics of a team sport played over five days as only those with personal experience can.

Think of Steve Waugh’s massive, but very readable autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone, published last year, or Mike Brearley’s Phoenix from the Ashes, the England captain’s riveting account of the great Ashes series of 1981. Sunil Gavaskar’s Sunny Days—which he wrote himself, painstakingly, in longhand—still remains perhaps the best Indian example of this kind of cricket book. Kapil Dev, on the other hand, is a ghostwriter’s dream, having produced, at judicious intervals and with different publishers, three autobiographies (Cricket My Style, By God's Decree, Straight From The Heart). A new one may be in the shops even as you read this.

The second set is that written by professional cricket writers. These are the widest in range—histories, biographies, tour books—and also the greatest in number: in England, cricket publishing is a small industry. But again, the number of truly good books by Indian cricket writers is depressingly few. The first one I can remember reading is Harsha Bhogle’s biography of Mohammad Azharuddin, now a fallen hero, but a magician in his prime. A recent book which went straight to the top of the class is Pundits From Pakistan, Rahul Bhattacharya’s fizzing account of India’s landmark tour of Pakistan in 2004.

The third set, often distinct in style, tone and emphasis from the second, is that written by men of letters who also happen to love cricket and have kept an eye upon it all their working lives. The West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James’ classic, Beyond The Boundary (1963), mixing politics, history and sociology with cricket, is universally reckoned one of the best cricket books ever written. P.G. Wodehouse wrote some superbly funny cricket (and golf) stories, and Alan Ross, long-time editor of London magazine, wrote a fine biography of Ranji. In this one area, Indian cricket writing, too, has been well-served. Three books stand out.

The poet Dom Moraes (1938-2006) was also a writer of thrilling prose and during his lifetime, he wrote books on subjects as disparate as Indira Gandhi, Madhya Pradesh and, memorably, Sunil Gavaskar. Merely a few words from the preface of Sunil Gavaskar (Macmillan, 1987)—in which Moraes summons up a picture of Gavaskar’s “rolling walk, the floppy white hat, the elephant hair bracelet and the golden necklet” and recalls his drive off the front foot, “body in balance, the long blade drilling the ball to left and right of cover or straight in course as a moonrocket to the boundary”—are evidence enough that Moraes could do for cricketing prose what Gavaskar did for batsmanship.

Moraes walks along the lanes of Chikalwadi in Dadar, where Gavaskar played in his boyhood, and speaks not only to his subject, but also his family and friends. The result is a rounded portrait of not just Gavaskar the cricketer, a master technician who could also explode in attack, but also Gavaskar the man, “a curious mixture of tolerance and touchiness”.

“No cricket one has watched or read about can ultimately be as memorable as the cricket one has played oneself, no matter at what level.” This is the assertion—which anyone who has ever played competitive cricket of any kind knows to be true—made by Sujit Mukherjee (1930-2003) in his Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer (Ravi Dayal, 1996).

Mukherjee, a professor of English and later a publisher, played intermittently for Bihar in the Ranji Trophy during the 1950s. In his luminous account, told in graceful and understated prose, Patna becomes the unlikely centre of the cricketing universe, and the joys and travails of the school, college and club cricket scene—travelling long distances in third-class train compartments, sharing out precious Gunn & Moore cricket bats—take on a warming significance. Reading it, I was taken back to the 28 not out I once made in Class 7 during a run-chase on a hot afternoon to win the match for my side—but we’ll leave that for another day.

And most enjoyable of all, standing tall in the Playing XI of the best cricket books ever written, is historian Ramachandra Guha’s States of Indian Cricket (Permanent Black, 2005). This brings together in updated form two books Guha wrote in the early 1990s: Wickets in the East, which makes up imaginary all-time elevens of the great Indian state sides, retailing superb anecdotes passed down over the decades, and Spin and Other Turns, a set of dazzling essays about the cricketers—Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Kapil Dev, Bishan Bedi—responsible for Indian cricket’s coming-of-age in the 1970s.

Like the Australian Gideon Haigh, Guha is, in many ways, the ideal cricket writer. In these books, there is an enthusiast’s penchant for reminiscence, generating some dramatic opening lines (“In 1966 I made what turned out to be an incredibly shrewd decision for an eight-year-old”); a historian’s feel for provocative generalization (“Cricket chauvinism runs across two axes, those of nation and generation”); a scholar’s love of ordered argument leavened by trivia (the home of the Maharashtra stalwart D.B. Deodhar “lay on a lane named after himself—surely a unique honour for a cricketer”; the young Bishan Bedi possessed at one time “a collection of 10,000 marbles, won from all the other little boys in Amritsar”); and a great cricket writer’s eye for points of style and technique, as in the masterly discussion of the art of Bedi and Gavaskar. Guha has produced another great cricket book, the magisterial A Corner of a Foreign Field, but States of Indian Cricket is arguably the more entertaining work.

And three other noteworthy Indian cricket books:

Pundits From Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador, 2005)
That Bhattacharya is the best cricket writer of his generation was confirmed by this, a heady and delightful account of India’s tour of Pakistan in 2004. The reader will find here finely detailed accounts of the games—Virender Sehwag’s triple-hundred at Multan has never been better described—braided in with plenty of colloquial talk with old-time stars and moments of skittering comedy. Not to be missed.

Azhar by Harsha Bhogle (Penguin/Viking, 1994)
“There can be few things more beautiful in life than Mohammad Azharuddin in flight,” wrote Azhar’s fellow Hyderabadi, Harsha Bhogle, at the beginning of this book, written some years before the subject’s fall from grace for match-fixing. No trace of that ignominious story can be found here, but Azhar’s quicksilver feet and wizard touch—no one has ever made a simple dab for a single look so attractive—are memorialized in this excellent biography.

Swami and Friends by R.K. Narayan (Hamish Hamilton, 1935)
R.K. Narayan’s first novel remains as fresh as ever. It tells of the capers of a group of schoolboys from sleepy Malgudi (this fictional town was to become his standard setting), seeking to emulate the great MCC with a cricket club of their own. Swami and Friends expresses excitement about cricket tinged with a slight contemporary unease with colonial pastimes—the doubting Swami, we are told, was “familiar with Hobbs, Bradman and Duleep”, but he had “not thought of cricket as something that he himself had to play.”