On Mukul Kesavan's The Ugliness of the Indian Male

Like a family impatient with the deadwood left behind by old tenants, the voluble essays of Mukul Kesavan's The Ugliness of the Indian Male and other propositions take up a set of subjects – Indian secularism, nationalism, history, cinema – which typically lend themselves to long-encrusted pieties, and refurbish them with a series of arguments and linkages that really set the brain ticking.

The particular pleasure of Kesavan's prose is that the drama of Indian history is enhanced, in his telling, by the drama of thought. The writing constantly asks questions to itself, wheels and roves in search of adroit juxtapositions or historical parallels, hammers away at key points. A historian by training and one of our sharpest columnists, Kesavan is also distinguished by the breadth of his expertise: he is equally at home on each of the subjects that make up what might be called the holy trinity of Indian public discourse: politics, cricket, and cinema (or more properly Bollywood). If cricket is by and large absent in Ugliness, it is because Kesavan’s appetite for the game is so vast, and his dismay with the game's governing body, the ICC, so total, that all his essays on cricket was siphoned off into a separate collection, Men In White, published in 2006.

The material of Ugliness is arranged much like the way a team traditionally built an innings in one-day cricket. Early on the tempo is more relaxed, the style of the play more various. Kesavan declares his disdain for Indian documentaries, asserts that the Indian male is not only born ugly, but hones that trait through regular practice (on which more later), dissects the various kinds of patriotism found in Hindi cinema. He can be seen attending a political rally in Uttar Pradesh, looking at statues in Madras, enjoying a junket in Australia, bathing in Istanbul. It is only in the last section of the book, "Politics", that his tone rises to a kind of slog-overs crescendo, with a constellation of high-octane arguments about the distinctive colour and character of Indian secularism and nationalism.

Kesavan's argument runs something like this. Indian secularism is not only highly unusual (all the neighbouring states in South Asia privilege one religious community or another), it is also confused, to its disadvantage, with the Western version of that practice. The origins of Indian secularism lie not in the battle to separate the church from the state, as in the west, but in our anti-colonial national movement, and in particular the strategies forged by the Indian National Congress.

Unlike the other provincial political bodies that sprung up in India late in the nineteenth century, the Congress from the very beginning was self-consciously and pluralistically "national", of a mind to represent all the classes, religions and communities of India on the common plank of anti-colonialism. "The uniqueness of Congress's nationalism," writes Kesavan,"is its near-complete freedom from mystical and mystifying notions such as blood, soil, or national essence which are the stock-in-trade of narrower patriotisms”:

The Congress, as its name suggests, saw itself as a cross between a party and a parliament (or at least an assembly of representative Indians). Typically, till 1939, members of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League could be members, even presidents of the Congress. For the Congress, being secular meant making different types of Indians equally welcome; secularism in this context was a way of being comprehensively nationalist. […] The emotional charge of Congress nationalism came from anti-imperialism – not the myth of a suppressed identity waiting to be born.

Even if, in the beginning, the Congress's pluralist definition of nationalism was strategic, designed to bring the largest number on board in a Noah's Ark kind of way, over the sixty years of the independence struggle it became something like a reflex. Thus it was that, despite the horrors of Partition, India did not go down the road of being a Hindu nation. Our secular constitution, in Kesavan's telling, enshrined this liberal and hospitable nationalism in law. Although the Congress itself has been unable to live up to its legacy, the historical triumph of the Congress, writes Kesavan, "is that every party must now lay claim to the virtue of being secular. The meaning of secularism can be contested (truly secular/pseudo-secular), but it is a value, like democracy, that no mainstream party can publicly repudiate.”

Because we don't fully appreciate the ingenuity of the Congress's construction of nationalism, argues Kesavan, we tend to confuse it with the more pedestrian, majoritarian ideas of nationalism that have forged nations around the world. Paradoxically, it is this race-and-religion conception of nationalism, which we bypassed, that is now advocated by a powerful force in Indian politics: the BJP and its allies. Although many secular Indians are horrified when their friends and family members support what they see as the bigotry of the BJP, the fact is that BJP supporters never think of themselves as communal, only as nationalist. And indeed, if we look at the history of the nationalist movements of Europe, it is possible to credit this argument. Hence,

Since the dominant sense of nationalism the world over is derived from the European experience, when a Hindu chauvinist arguing for the primacy of Hindi asks rhetorically, “Doesn’t France have a common language?”, the French example begins to seem a sound nationalist precedent for supporting Hindi. When he asks, “Don’t the English acknowledge that their culture and morality are derived from Christian values?”, this becomes a persuasive reason to support the demand that all Indians acknowledge that they are constituted by Hindutva. The proper secularist response to this is that the nationalism of Gandhi that won us our freedom as a nation state and shaped the pluralism of our constitution has very little in common with this hectoring, homogenizing patriotism. These derivative arguments don’t apply. They’re irrelevant because they aren’t rooted in our experience of the freedom struggle; they don’t emerge from our nationalist practice.

“For secular Indians, the dreadful track record of intolerant nationalisms [the world over] and their failure in containing secession or managing dissent is a gift,” Kesavan argues. "Instead of reflexively denying the BJP's claim to nationalism, secularists should ratify this claim enthusiastically. They should then distinguish it from the nationalism of Gandhi and the freedom struggle, and encourage an undecided public to study the self-destruction that BJP-like chauvinisms wreaked on countries misguided enough to harbour them" – in neighbouring Sri Lanka, for example, where an aggressive Sinhala majority and an embattled Tamil minority have been locked in a murderous conflict for decades. The day Indians accept that those in the majority deserve to have their beliefs and sensibilities deferred to by the rest – the prevailing climate in the rest of South Asia – our marvellous pluralist experiment will have foundered. "Invisibly, we shall have become another country" – that is the ringing close of Kesavan's book.

The density of Kesavan's engagement with these questions, and the sophistication of his responses in general, is perhaps intentionally absent in his irreverent title-essay. "Some years ago I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of Hindi film heroines and the ugliness of Hindi film heroes," he writes. The explanation for this is simple: Indian women are radically better-looking than Indian men. Indian women are, to Kesavan's eye, "delicate and vivid"; Indian men "coarse, dull, and squab-like". Their native ugliness is accentuated by their deficiencies of hygiene (nose-picking, crotch-scratching), hair (moustache-wearing, nose- and ear-hair growing) and other assorted personal and sartorial habits.

It seems to me that Kesavan has set up a slanging match here: responses to these assertions are likely to depend on whether the reader is a man or a woman. As for myself, I can only attest from that Indian women, even if they are more fastidious than men on the body-hair-removal score, are not the angels that Kesavan makes them out to be. Maybe those of his generation were.

In fact, if the ugliness of the Indian male resided only in the list drawn up by Kesavan, Indian women might actually be quite happy to have them, since some of these deficiencies are surface-only and can be reversed with a little grooming, and since Indian women too have grave defects of their own (which for reasons of space I can't go into right now). The real ugliness of the Indian male resides not in his face, but in his mind: in his willing or unquestioning endorsement of patriarchy and chauvinism. But Kesavan's jocular survey of surfaces and appearances, his refusal for a change to probe any deeper, makes for an sly variation in a first-rate collection of essays. The Indian male may be ugly, but in certain instances his writing is remarkably fine.

And here are some essays by Kesavan: "I, The Nation", "Three pivotal moments that shaped early nationalism in India", "How Pluralism Goes Bad", "No Escaping The Nation-State", "The Congress's pluralism became a reflex by the time of Partition", "One-Day Democracy", "Partition became inevitable once the Congress resigned in 1939", and "Memories of 1984".

A long interview with Kesavan from 1998 is here, and Kesavan's excellent cricket blog Men In White is here.

And two old posts on books of essays by Indian writers: "Amartya Sen's large India" and "Krishna Kripalani's faith and frivolity", and a review of Sumantra Bose's excellent book Contested Lands, which is among other things an examination of the temptations and the consequences of majoritarian politics around the world. And here is another old post on a writer greatly, and often annoyingly, stimulated by Indian pluralism, "Shashi Tharoor, banally in love with India", and a post on a somewhat more thoughtful and engaging commentator, "Mark Tully and India".

Kesavan's book is published in India by Black Kite, an imprint of Permanent Black (which publishes some great academic books, often in conjunction with university presses in America) aimed at the lay reader. Among their upcoming titles which might be of interest to you is Amit Chaudhuri's new book of essays: Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, which should be out next month.

On Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes

A shorter version of this piece appeared last weekend in the Sunday Telegraph.

Whenever someone famous dies in mysterious circumstances, conspiracy theories proliferate; meanings rush in to fill the void. The insight of Mohammed Hanif’s funny and anarchic novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes – a properly fictional insight – is that the wild explanations proffered in such instances may not be all false, but, remarkably, may all be true. The reasoning at the root of Hanif’s story is something like this: Conspiracy theories are almost by definition false. Therefore they are all equally untrue. If we hold that even one of them is true, it pretty much amounts to saying that any or all of them are true. And indeed, if we are prepared to consider one of them, might we not consider that all of them somehow are true?

Hanif’s book is about the mendacious Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq – a proponent of Islamicization, an ally of America in the Cold War – who died when his private plane went down in August 1988. In A Case of Exploding Mangoes all kinds of forces – the machinations of generals, the resentment of a junior army officer, the curse of a blind woman, the wrath of a Communist group – are shown with their sights trained on Zia, so that when he dies it is not possible to establish the immediate cause, as it were, in this vast field of possible causes.

The Zia of the novel is a suspicious old man hobbled by age and care, nurturing both delusions of grandeur and paranoia about his safety. He opens to a page of the Quran every day to look for signals from the Almighty, “as if it was not the word of God but his daily horoscope on the back page of the Pakistan Times”. Like many strongmen, General Zia is the ruler of a kingdom but not of a home: he is repeatedly insulted by his own wife, who is disgusted by his lechery.

The irreverent language and set-ups of Hanif’s novel relentlessly puncture the pretensions of power. In one marvellous scene, the First Lady heads for her husband’s office in a fit of rage, but abruptly finds herself shooed into a line of widows waiting for alms from the General. Reaching the top of the line, she declares to her astonished husband that from this day she too is a widow. In another, General Zia, dressed as a commoner, teeters out into his kingdom on a bicycle, and is picked up and humiliated by a constable.

Among the best walk-on parts is that of “a lanky man with a flowing beard” who arrives at a party hosted by the American consulate to celebrate the success of the Afghans against the Soviets, introduces himself as “OBL”, and gets very little attention from the dignitaries present. Even as it entertainingly answers the questions still asked about Zia’s death, then, Hanif’s novel raises the delicious possibility that the rage and rancour of America's most intransigent opponent first erupted when he was not invited into a group photograph.

And two old posts, one on a Pakistani dictator and the other on a lanky man with a flowing beard: "On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan" and "On Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens".

Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare

In a beautiful section midway through Anjum Hasan’s novel Lunatic In My Head (Penguin/Zubaan, 2007) – in my estimation one of the best scenes in the history of the Indian novel – we see the middle-aged college lecturer in English literature Firdaus Ansari, one of Hasan’s three protagonists in the book, going to class in Shillong to teach William Shakespeare’s As You Like It to her students.

Firdaus, we know by this point, is still a spinster, lives with her grandfather, feels herself slightly over the hill, has a much younger Manipuri boyfriend called Ibomcha, is still a virgin and slightly squeamish about sex, and has been struggling for several years to complete her M.Phil on marriage in the novels of Jane Austen. She feels profoundly alienated from her life circumstances: at the beginning of the chapter we find her looking at herself in the mirror and thinking that “There was no connection between her and her image; if she got up and walked away, this woman whose eyes were boring into hers would remain.”

Firdaus is not looking forward to teaching As You Like It to a bunch of uncomprehending and disinterested students. And, even though she has some ancient notes on the play, handed down from teacher to teacher over the years, she trembles before the immense authority of Shakespeare, the demands he makes on those who serve as mediators and interpreters for him. The double-edged words of Jacques the fool, we are told, “could still jangle Firdaus’s nerves”.

We see Firdaus begin to read out a passage from the play to her class “of whispering backbenchers, cautiously gum-chewing middle-benchers, and girls with looks of blank sincerity up front”:

“He that a fool doth very wisely hit, Doth very foolishly, although he smart, Not to seem senseless of the bob: if not, The wise man’s folly is anatomised, Even by the squandering glances of the fool,” she read out [...].
She began to haltingly explain Jacques’ twisted lines. “The idea here, girls, is that Jaques feels that by being a fool, being given the charter, the freedom to be foolish, is liberating. Why is it liberating?...Any ideas?”

No one responds, so:

Firdaus read out impatiently from her fading notes. “Jacques says to Duke Senior that his only suit or requirement is that he be allowed to wear a motley coat, one that will signal to the world that he is a fool. In addition, that is withal, he must have freedom as large as the wind to quote blow on whom I please unquote, that is, direct his foolish wit or witty folly towards whomever he chooses. Those who are most provoked by his folly, Jacques goes on to say, are those who must laugh the hardest. Why is this so...? That’s what I was asking you,” she broke off to say, “...if you have any clue about this, but you obviously don’t. Anyway...why is this so?” She continued reading. “Jacques explains that this should be obvious to people, as obvious to them as the way to the church is. The fact is that the person who hits a fool, which can be taken to mean hit not in a literal sense, but figuratively, that is he who criticises or berates a fool, might appear smart but is actually very foolish. [...] For if he criticises a fool he exposes himself. He exposes himself and his folly is laid bare within brackets anatomised. Even the squandering glances, that is, the casual fun that a fool might poke at a man...”

It is by any standard an incoherent, fumbling explanation: there is much dross amidst scraps of sense. But just as Jacques’s chatter is wise foolishness, so Hasan’s portrayal of her protagonist is one of clarity routed through incoherence. By not punctuating Firdaus’s talk as Firdaus herself directs it (“...quote blow on whom I please unquote”, “...which can be taken to mean hit not in a literal sense, but figuratively”), Hasan gives us a sense of how Firdaus’s students are hearing her lecture, and how puzzling it must seem to them.

And by showing how Firdaus, while feeling frustration at the sluggishness of her students, is herself not willing to walk with Shakespeare without the crutch of her notes, Hasan has the courage and the confidence to present us with a fairly damning indictment of her protagonist, whose reproaches to her students mask the fact that she, too, is – to borrow a phrase from Othello – “perplex’d in the extreme. The most meaningful words in Hasan’s passage are not those that make some sense of what Jacques is saying, but precisely the most superfluous ones: phrases like “In addition, that is withal” and “within brackets anatomised”, which show that Firdaus is actually on the same side of the fence as her students. It is a genuinely novelistic passage, teeming with crisscrossing meanings: as a result of the author’s artful layering, the words point out towards Shakespeare and back towards Firdaus at the same time, and we understand not just the place of the fool in Shakespearean comedy but the feelings of inadequacy felt by Firdaus.

Firdaus knows that her students must grapple with Shakespeare “simply because he was standing in the way, he was unavoidable”. She is quite right: in the castle of English literature, the biggest suite of rooms belongs to Shakespeare. But why? For what reason? Firdaus’s reverence for Shakespeare, and the incongruity of this fairly representative classroom scene narrated by Hasan, help crystallise a peculiarly Indian attitude towards Shakespeare, which is to see him as the gold standard of sophisticated “high” English, as a dealer in proverbs and precepts, and, finally, as some kind of transcendent genius, a god who never put a foot wrong. Shakespeare is standing in the way, and we bow before him: we have not broken free of a colonized relationship with him.

Even when we do not comprehend Shakespeare, or faintly comprehend him, we are sure that he was great: the very fact that we do not understand what he is saying proves it, and just to say his name is to bask in reflected glory. Shakespeare is supposed to be good for us, as green vegetables are. I remember how, in school, my seventh standard textbook had a passage from Hamlet which excerpted Polonius’s immensely tedious words of advice to his departing son Laertes. The councillors of education who chose it presumably thought that it was an edifying passage that would be good for students, and by presenting Polonius’s speech out of context, chose to totally ignore the fact that we are at some point supposed to laugh at Polonius’s longwindedness. The dramatic situation counts for nothing; the highflown words for everything.

This Bardolatry, perversely, has the effect of diminishing our enjoyment and appreciation of Shakespeare, because it defines, a priori, the terms of our engagement with him, instead of giving us the chance to apply our all faculties on Shakespeare’s enormously knotty and complicated language in an open field, as it were. Shakespeare’s language is certainly extraordinary, but what is extraordinary about it is that it is not necessarily “good”, or grammatically correct, or coherent in its syntax: it is a language of both beauty and craziness, of thrilling energy but also grinding stasis.

Indeed, I have on occasion heard some grizzled Indian Shakespeareans declare that they cannot bear to read anything but Shakespeare (there used to be a figure like this in many English departments in India, and their eclipse is in its own way rather sad, because in many cases they have been replaced by figures who, waving the flags of new critical theories, are convinced that Shakespeare’s reputation is a conspiracy of British imperialism, or that he represents not artistic genius but a coalescence and personification of the social and ideological energies of his time) – they cannot bear to read anything but Shakespeare because the language of “modern literature”, with its slang and its cuss words, seems debased by comparision. But actually Shakespeare himself is full of curses, scurrility, ribaldry, and slang, now given a patina of respectability by the passage of four centuries.

Shakespeare (but not the Indian Shakespeare) is as rude as anybody in the canon, for the exigencies of his dramatic and intensely practical art, which thrived or withered according to gate receipts, required that he write for groundlings as much as sophisticates. A line like “Now is he total gules” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, meaning “now he is totally red with blood”) sits uneasily with our view of Shakespeare as representative of high culture: it could belong just as easily to a rap song.

In fact, it is imperative that we read Shakespeare without rose-tinted glasses, and note (alongside his wondrous density and compression of sense; his startling nominalizations and verbalizations, compound words and neologisms; the knotty texture of his thought; the marvellous and supple rhythms of his lines) his often gratuitous wordplay, his shambling and over-long metaphors, his immense sententiousness, and his tendency to say in ten lines what he might have done in two. As Frank Kermode writes in an essay called “Writing About Shakespeare”, “There is a way of treating Shakespeare...as a very good but sometimes not so good poet, as sometimes but not always clearly a writer of genius – as always, indeed, a writer and to be considered as such.”

Just as Firdaus is all the more sympathetic for her weakness, so too the richest Shakespeare, the most intriguing Shakespeare, is one whom we discern as being both grand and grandiloquent, both untouchable and fallible, a wizard with words whose trade also forced him into hackwork, and whom we might imagine sitting in his room after a long day at the playhouse, sometimes short of inspiration, and saying to himself, like Richard II, “I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out”.

At the close of that passage in Lunatic In My Head, we see Firdaus back home after an eventful day. Once again the ghost of Shakespeare insinuates itself into her consciousness, stands in the way:

In bed at night, listening to her grandfather coughing his chronic cough, Firdaus, still in complete possession of her new-found clarity, realised – with the shock one might feel when an old ache suddenly vanishes – that all self-confidence was connected to language. If she could clearly articulate what she felt, if she could find the right words, if she could speak them forcefully into the world, she would be able to make an impress on reality. [...]
She felt calm and drowsy. Her nose hurt less now. At the very border of sleep, Jacques’ lines came back to her: ‘Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world’, and she knew that in some roundabout way he was speaking about the power of language too, about the power of the tongue, its wit and cunning, its ability to make men reveal their deepest selves.

“Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind, and I will through and through cleanse the foul body of the infected world” – these ringing words might be read as Shakespeare’s coded appeal to his audience, and indeed as the imprecation of every writer to his or her imagined reader.

And here are links to some essays on Shakespeare which I have enjoyed most over the years. Some of these provide an perspective, from a point of view roughly corresponding to my own though infinitely more subtle, on the main currents in Shakespeare criticism in the last twenty-five years; others directly address questions of language and performance:

“The Case for Bardolatry” by William Kerrigan – one of the most thrilling essays I’ve read in a decade of reading Shakespeare criticism (“Bloom’s literary constructionism is no less extravagant–and no more subject to proof–than the New Historicists’ social constructionism. It is probably wise not to enter into the ultimately empty arguments supporting these two contrasting claims. They can instead be regarded as antagonistic Weltanschauungs of late-twentieth-century literary intellectuals–a particularly clear instance of the ongoing battle between those inclined to see literature largely in terms of society or politics and those inclined to see society or politics largely in terms of literature”);

“The One and Only” by the great Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton, with whom I had the good fortune of studying (“Most biographies, John Updike has observed, ‘are really just novels with indexes.’ That seems especially true with lives of Shakespeare.”);

“Blueprints for Performance” by the theatre director Richard Eyre (“He chose to write in a form in which narrative and character are revealed in words and actions rather than description, and which uses time, space, gesture, movement, speech, colour, costume, light and music, and aims to be truthful while always being unreal. It thrives on metaphor: a room becomes a world, a group of characters a whole society”);

“A Man For All Ages” by Jonathan Bate, co-editor of the recently released Complete Works based on the First Folio and author of the brilliant book The Genius of Shakespeare (“Shakespeare's enduring appeal cannot, however, be said to rest solely on his linguistic virtuosity, nor on the proposition – favoured by some of today's politically minded critics – that he achieved world domination simply because of the power of the British empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. At one level, he is ‘not of an age, but for all time’. He works with archetypal characters, core plots and perennial conflicts, as he dramatises the competing demands of the living and the dead, the old and the young, men and women, self and society, integrity and role-play, insiders and outsiders. He grasps the structural conflicts shared by all societies: religious against secular vision, country against city, birth against education, strong leadership against the people's voice, the code of honour against the energies of erotic desire”);

“Stages of Thought” by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (“To write philosophically about Shakespeare, or any other great author or artist, one needs not so much philosophical learning, or even philosophical argument, but a genuinely philosophical temperament, puzzled and even humble before life's complexities, and willing to put one's sense of life on the line in the process of reading a text. As Plato rightly said, it is no chance matter that we are discussing, but how one should live. The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character”);

The first chapter from Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode, and an excerpt from Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare (“The commercial development of [Elizabethan] drama was one more sign that the world as regulated by liturgy was being supplanted by a world more concerned with capital and labor – a world in which time itself had a different quality”)

“Whose Bard?” by Thomas Jeffers (“And the Russians? Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky had some wise, and Leo Tolstoy some foolish, things to say about Shakespeare, but the one who did the most for him—translating the plays, prompting their production, and recreating the Elizabethan world—was Boris Pasternak. Gross gives him four entries, including this about the atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet, well caught in Franco Zeffirelli’s film version (1968): ‘Outside the windows ring the daggers of the quarreling clans, the blood of Capulets and Montagues streams in the streets, while in the kitchens, cooks’ knives clatter and scullions squabble over the endless dinners. And under the hubbub of cooking and carnage, as under the thumping beat of a noisy band, the tragedy of hushed feelings is played out in silent, conspiratorial whispers.’”);

“Translating Shakespeare”, an interview with the French poet Yves Bonnefoy (“The stage offered Shakespeare all the possibilities of the spoken word, characters in whose speech the stereotypical thinking of a society, its sexism for instance, would flourish and abound, but in which more lucid intuitions and even remarks of a subversive nature could also be heard, giving the author a chance to deepen his relation to life, to death, and to aspects of existence that are authentically real. And all along, through the fiction that structures the plays, there are situations, events, and figures that can be presented in such a way as to reflect symbolically or emblematically the playwright's thinking about poetry and poetics”);

An excerpt from Playing Shakespeare, an invaluable handbook of advice for actors by the legendary director of Shakespeare plays John Barton ("I may be cynical but I don't believe most people really listen to Shakespeare in the theater unless the actors make them do so. I certainly don't. I know that it's too easy for me to get the general gist and feeling of a speech, but just because I get the gist I often don't listen to the lines in detail. Not unless the actors make me. What I want to explore are the ways in which they can achieve that.");

“The Kingmakers” by the British director and actor Michael Pennington, on the great Shakespearean actors Lawrence Olivier and John Gielgud (“Olivier had a gift for play – for believing that he could become anything he wanted - and an ability to spring any number of physical surprises. In comparison, John Gielgud, who transformed himself brilliantly elsewhere, in Pinter and Chekhov particularly, played Shakespeare as if in unending rapturous tribute, the language harrowing him like fire”);

“The Shakespeared Brain”, a marvellous essay by Philip Davis, author of the recently published and widely praised book Shakespeare Thinking (“In particular I mentioned to him the linguistic phenomenon in Shakespeare which is known as ‘functional shift’ or ‘word class conversion’. It refers to the way that Shakespeare will often use one part of speech – a noun or an adjective, say—to serve as another, often a verb, shifting its grammatical nature with minimal alteration to its shape. Thus in Lear for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in Troilus and Cressida, ‘Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages’ (noun converted to adjective); Othello, ‘To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!’ (noun ‘lip’ to verb; adjective ‘wanton’ to noun). The effect is often electric I think, like a lightning-flash in the mind: for this is an economically compressed form of speech.... Could we make an experiment out of it?”)

“Reviving Ann Hathaway” by Eric Ormsby (“There remains the matter of the notorious ‘second-best bed’ which Shakespeare left to Ann in his will. This bequest seems grudging at best, contemptuous at worst. But as Ms. Greer notes, a bed represented a substantial legacy at the time: A modest bed had the same value as a cow, a sumptuous bed was worth as much as a cottage. Furthermore, Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have been lavish in the other provisions of his will; even his more substantial bequest to his daughter Judith is hedged about with niggling restrictions. ‘The most eloquent Englishman who ever lived,’ as Ms. Greer rightly describes him, seems to have been something of a Scrooge at the end. But to read contempt into his bequest to Ann of the ‘second-best bed’ (the best was reserved for guests) may be unwarranted. It could have been a legacy of affection as well, the coded bequest which only a loving wife would understand, the solid symbol of a lasting bond”);

“The death of Kings”, a symposium of Shakespeare actors, directors and scholars each listig his or her favourite play from the histories (Simon Schama: “ Henry IV, Part II is better called a memory play than a history; it is the most lyrical Shakespeare ever wrote. And it needs the most delicate touch in its direction and acting to draw out the autumnal pathos. The most heartbreakingly vivid scenes come from the mouths of the old as they spirit themselves back beyond the ache of their brittle bones to the lusty lads and lasses they still feel themselves to be. Whatever else ails them, their memories are as bright as gems”);

“100+ of the best books on Shakespeare”, again by Jonathan Bate (with selections like“Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1976) – dazzling study of Renaissance rhetorical formations of the self, which deserves to be, but is not, as well known as the work of Greenblatt and others” and “Peter Hall, Hamlet's Advice to the Players (2003) – prescriptions of the RSC founder and self-confessed ‘iambic fundamentalist’”);

“Can You Stage A War? What Shakespeare Knew” by the theatre critic John Heilpern (“There’s one thing –and one thing alone – that Shakespeare couldn’t do. He couldn’t show wars onstage.... Far from telling us how battle scenes should be staged, Shakespeare takes great care to instruct us not to stage them. The prologue to Henry V is an inspired, ironic apology: ‘O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!’”);

And finally, “Everything and Nothing”, a captivating little fable by Jorge Luis Borges (“The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: ‘I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.’ The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.’”)

On Vaclav Havel's To The Castle and Back

In one of a series of grand revolutions that swept over Europe in 1989, the Czech playwright Václav Havel, then the most prominent dissident in his country and indeed one of the cogent critics of totalitarianism in the world, was swept into Prague Castle on the wings of what came to be called the Velvet Revolution. It was a fairytale conclusion to a lifetime of difficult and often lonely political opposition that had included several years in prison.

But if that moment was romantic, the years that followed, and which are described in Havel's new memoir To The Castle and Back – one short term as president of Czechoslovakia, and the two full terms at the helm of the Czech Republic – were mostly prosaic. The man who previously had followed the path of his conscience and had freely spoken his mind now entered, half-willingly, the world of bureaucracy, diplomacy, suits and neckties, compromise, caution, acronyms, and rhetoric – entered the massive precincts of Prague Castle, one of the oldest and largest seats of a head of state in the world, "almost literally a city within a city" – a site whose architecture seemed designed specifically for murky and furtive conduct. "Just think of those long corridors! They actually seduce one into a kind of life in the corridors of power, invite one to invent and spread rumors, to weave intrigues." To The Castle And Back might be read as an account of idealism in politics as tempered by the push and pull of worldly forces: of the castle of the self in the castle of power.

Havel’s book is actually a tripartite collaboration between himself, his long-time friend and translator Paul Wilson, and the respected Czech journalist Karel Hvizdala. The work is not one continuous narrative, but a selection by Havel of notes, memos to Castle staff, and diary entries between 1993 and 2005, interspersed with long, thoughtful answers to probing questions by Hvizdala.

This makes for a highly appealing structure in which, as in politics, profound and mundane concerns are thrown at each other. Here the President can be heard making a grand point about democracy as “a relationship to the world and to society, a way of thinking” or voicing fears that the Czech Republic "would forever remain in a sphere of dubious quasi-democracies, teeming with populists and nationalists"; there he is found arriving to the conclusion that “We need a longer hose for watering”, or asking “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”, or stating, "I'm sending a percel of shirts for Mrs. Ouskova." Havel’s memos to the staff emphasise the quotidian and practical aspects of politics, and his replies to Hvizdala the larger shape of his thought and the range of his concerns.

Here, by way of illustration, is a question by Hvizdala about the European Union, which was established in 1993 and which the Czech Republic joined in 2004, alongside other formerly Communist states who had existed for several decades behind the Iron Curtain of USSR-led communism:

Hvizdala: The old member states have contributed significantly to the development of the new members who are all less evolved because of long years of communist rule. Do you think that we can ever pay them back? What do you say when you are reminded of this subsidization?

Havel: I think that we have an opportunity to pay them back in a certain way already, and one can even see situations in which we are already doing this. I'm thinking about our political voice. The European Union occasionally still suffers from the old European disease, which is the tendency to make compromises with evil, to close one's eyes to dictatorship, to practice a politics of appeasement or even of accommodation, vis-à-vis totalitarian systems, that is determined by economic interests. Some politicians, those who have not experienced fascism or communism, are incorrigible in this regard. I think that the new members of the European Union, who have a relatively recent experience of totalitarianism, are perhaps duty-bound to take a more principled position – should it occasionally be necessary – and to monitor the European Union in this regard, or educate it. It's in everyone's interest. Accommodating evil has, so far, never forced evil to retreat, or to become more humane; on the contrary, it has always made life easier for it. In the end, when confrontation came, the price that everyone had to pay was infinitely higher than the cost of a firm stance.

Unsurprisingly, one of the main themes of To The Castle and Back is man's struggle with language, and also a writer's love of ordered and precise language – indeed the durability of language in a world of transient things. Caught up in the drudgery of statecraft, he muses, "How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it's here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and prime ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, mostly likely inaccurate."

Among the tasks that Havel is seen taking most seriously is his speechwriting: a recurring issue of these pages is the pressure of composing speeches for all kinds of occasions. “For many years now, my weekends have more or less all been occupied with the writing of speeches," he is found complaining in 1998. "It's awful." Elsewhere, he reveals why the composition of speeches take so much out of him: "I try to write speeches as if they were short poems. They have to have a beginning, a structure, an end, their own melody, energy, and drama. Otherwise it’s impossible.” And at the close of the book we find this beautiful meditation on language:

The beauty of language is that it can never capture precisely what it wants. Language is disconnected, hard, digital as it were, and for that reason, but not only for that reason, it can never completely capture something as connected as reality, experience, or our souls. This opens the door to the magnificent battle for expression and self-expression that has accompanied man down through history. It is a battle without end, and thanks to it, everything that is human is constantly being elucidated, each time somewhat differently. Moreover, it is in this battle that man in fact becomes himself. As an individual, and as a species. He simply tries to capture the world the world and himself more and more exactly through words, images, or actions, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself, nor any part of the world. [...] It's a Sisypean fate. But it can't be helped: man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave, though someone, in the end, will know that truth after all: if not the Lord God, then at least the great memory of Being.

"I think that the moral order stands above the legal, political and economic orders, and that these latter orders should derive from the former, and not be techniques for getting around its imperatives. And I believe that the moral order has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and the eternal." These words late in the book contain the essence of Havel's thought, and if Indian readers find them familiar, it may be because they so closely resemble the thought of Gandhi, who, like Havel, sought to restore the spiritual and ethical dimension in politics, and whose thought, like that of Havel, achieved an extraordinary balance of idealism and realism. Havel, like Gandhi, insists that external change is meaningless without a change within; his observation, in his book Letters To Olga, that

The importance of the no­tion of human responsibility has grown in my meditations. It has begun to appear, with increasing clarity, as that fundamen­tal point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity. . . . It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart

would have been unquivocally endorsed by Gandhi.

Havel’s place in history, grand themes, distinctive organization of his material, fidelity to language, powers of self-scrutiny, and commitment to "living in truth" make for a work that should become a classic of political literature.

And here are links to enough essays by or on Havel to keep you going for a couple of days: "Kicking The Door", an essay published in 1979 ("The strange thing happened then: I became suddenly furious..."); "On The Temptations of Political Power", a speech given in 1991; "A Word About Words" ("thanks to the miracle of speech, we know, probably better than the other animals, that we actually know very little, in other words, we are conscious of the existence of mystery"); "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World"; "A Farewell to Politics"; "Stories and Totalitarianism"; "Politics and Theatre" ("A friend once said that politics is 'the sum of all things concentrated.' It encompasses law, economy, philosophy, and psychology. Inevitably, politics is theatre as well...In a theatre, our consciences are touched but responsibility ends when the curtain drops. The theatre of politics makes permanent demands on us all, as dramatists, actors, and audience") "Civil Society and Its New Enemies" ("Human beings are not only manufacturers, profit makers or consumers. They are also – and this may be their innermost quality – creatures who want to be with others, who yearn for various forms of coexistence and cooperation, who want to influence what happens around them")"Edvard Beneš: Dilemmas of a European Politician"; "Redefining The West"; "The Intellectual and Politics"; "The Spires of Renewal"; "Politics and Conscience"; "What Communism Still Teaches Us", and lastly, perhaps Havel's most famous essay "The Power of the Powerless".

And here is an old interview with Havel conducted by Michael Bongiovanni "in semi-clandestine conditions at Vaclav Havel's home" in June 1989, shortly before the Velvet Revolution ("What we want, here and now, are simple, elementary things. Without reference to any ideological framework, beyond all ideology. We aspire to a share in the basic values of life, those which simple common sense and elementary human dignity demand we should be entitled to."), and another interview from 1993 published in the literary magazine Artful Dodge. Also, here is an essay called "Exit Havel", written by David Remnick on the occasion of Havel's departure from office in 2003. The philosopher Michael Hodges and the political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain usefully discuss Havel as a "performer of political thought" here.

And some old posts on books by or about politicians: Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope; Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose, and the memoirs of General Pervez Musharraf.

On Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens

Since the day nineteen hijackers owing allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the name “Bin Laden” has reverberated around the world as shorthand for a benighted medievalism, an intransigent anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, and a murderous hatred of the West, of secularism, and of “infidels” – the obverse, in short, of civilization as much of the world knows it.

But, as the New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll shows in his new book The Bin Ladens, Osama’s background is far more complex than what he himself portrays it to be. His break in the early nineties from his massive family – for long the biggest business group in Saudi Arabia – and from all that they stood for (persistent modernization, business ties with America, fealty to the corrupt ruling dynasty of Saudi Arabia, a love of material and secular pleasures) occurred very slowly and tentatively. Coll’s book is simultaneously the biography of a terrorist and that of a great business house. Indeed, Osama only makes his first appearance a quarter of the way into The Bin Ladens.

Coll’s story begins in the 1930s with Mohamed Bin Laden, an impoverished but enterprising Yemeni national who came to Jeddah in search of work and set up as a contractor in construction. Mohamed’s trade gradually flourished, and he came close to the court of the Al-Saud, the ruling dynasty of newly formed Saudi Arabia. Mohamed’s links with the court would set his own dynasty firmly in step with that of the Al-Saud for decades to come.

Mohamed was a much-married man – he sired 54 children from several wives, and Osama was one of seven children born in the same year. A construction contract funded with American money in January 1951 – half a century before 9/11 – marks the first appearance of the name “Bin Laden” on an American state document.

Private jets were a luxury enjoyed by many Saudi notables, and Mohamed had his own jet, manned by an American pilot who took him from site to site. Mohamed’s death in a plane crash in 1967 would be the first eerie episode of a long list of links between members of the Bin Laden family and plane crashes. Most of Bin Laden business was divided up, as per Islamic law, between the many children, but the burden of running it till many of the children became majors rested upon Salem, Mohamed’s eldest son and Osama’s eldest brother.

Coll’s extended portrait of Salem, an energetic, garrulous bon vivant who loved to live on the edge, makes for the most pleasurable section of his massive narrative. Salem extended his father’s system of patronage, forging links with many members of the next generation of the Al-Saud. He drank wine and ate pork without inhibition, and inherited his father’s love of flying, buying himself several jets and acquiring considerable proficiency in flying them. He flew frequently to America, where he invested copiously in businesses and real estate, and supported several girlfriends all around the world. As the oil boom of the seventies made the Saudi kingdom flush with money, the Bin Laden family rose higher than ever before. But Salem himself died tragically in a plane crash.

All this while Osama, whose mother had remarried after being divorced by Mohamed, was acquiring an education at an expensive private school in Jeddah. This was where he came into first contact with radical religious rhetoric, through a teacher who owed allegiance to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Osama’s devotion to the word of God and his fastidious observance of rules – he would avert his eyes while speaking to women outside the family – was not seen as unusual by his family in a country where, as Coll remarks, “religion was like gravity” – everpresent – and the influence of the austere Wahhabi school was strong.

After attaining maturity Osama worked with the Bin Laden group as a junior executive, while enjoying a life much higher than his position because of his stake in the family business. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 would be the making of Osama. He moved to Pakistan to work as a fundraiser for the cause of the mujahideen, the Arab militia who had arrived to join the Afghan resistance, and his profile rose within his country and within his own family. In Pakistan, Osama came into contact with several radical preachers (Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri) who taught him the lines of his polemic – Christians and Jews want to take over the world; the West is tempting the Muslim world with lowly material and carnal pleasures; it is the duty of every Muslim to wage jihad against these forces – while exploiting his access to wealth.

It is worth noting that Osama’s current face – that of a rootless, transnational holy warrior, a voice speaking to the world from an abyss, plotting its doom – was only consolidated after his family broke off all ties with him in 1994, followed shortly afterward by the Saudi government’s cancellation of his citizenship. Left without the consolations of family or motherland, Osama was now on his own – Osama first, and Bin Laden second. He lived for a while in Sudan, and then, under pressure from the Sudanese government, moved to Afghanistan in 1996.

In his speeches and essays (his skillful use of new media like satellite television and the Internet is totally at odds with his hatred of modernity) he now railed against the Al-Saud dynasty and its defenders; against practices like usury, which he had formerly endorsed; and most relentlessly against the United States. In exile he became something of a "global news junkie" trawling the internet and magazines for material he could use. In his library in Afghanistan, books about American foreign policy and anti-Semitic screeds lay alongside "traditional Koranic texts, faxed essays from radical Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia, and bits and pieces from Western media reports".

Coll's close analysis of the moods and rhythms of Osama's speeches over the years (collected recently as Messages to the World, a volume edited by Bruce Lawrence and published by Verso) shows how, immediately after September 11, Osama's morale took a dip, as the American invasion of Afghanistan he had anticipated bowled over the Taliban instead of meeting with the resistance that the Soviets once had. Heavy bombing around him led to Osama believing that his death was imminent, and in December of 2001 he composed a mournful will and testament. "[N]ever before had a document attributed to him conveyed such despair and exhaustion", writes Coll.

But the long winter passed, Osama found himself safe, and he returned to a life of incitement and provocation via videos and speeches broadcast over the Internet. His spirits were lifted once again after the Iraq war, which he saw as a chance to mobilise the potential of the entire ummah. in 2008, nearly seven years after he shook the world, he remains at large, a spectre who looms in every discussion of world politics. But Coll’s brilliant book, with its emphasis on “the universal grammar of families”, shows us an Osama Bin Laden more contradictory, more fragile, and more vulnerable than the Osama we know.

"Young Osama", an essay by Coll on Osama's youth, can be found here, and the first chapter of The Bin Ladens is here. A good long interview with Coll in a recent issue of Der Spiegel is here.

And some other pieces of interest: Samuel Huntington in conversation with Nathan Gardels on Bin Laden; "The Hunt for Bin Laden" by Declan Walsh; and "What Were The Causes of 9/11?" by Peter Bergen, who has written a widely praised book called The Osama Bin Laden I Know; "Terrorism's CEO", an interview with Bergen; and, most recently, "The Jihadist Revolt Against Bin Laden", a piece by Bergen and Paul Cruikshank just published in the New Republic.

Lastly, Osama has a very funny walk-on part as "OBL" in Mohammed Hanif's charming new novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, about which I will have a post soon.

A shorter version of this piece appeared recently in Mint.

In Pratilipi

My long essay "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare" appears this month in the second issue of the bilingual (English-Hindi) and bimonthly literary magazine Pratilipi. The essay reads some passages from Hasan's splendid novel Lunatic in my Head (Penguin/Zubaan, 2007) through the prism of Indian attitudes towards Shakespeare. The essay will be on the Middle Stage next week, along with a set of links to great essays on Shakespeare.

Hasan's novel is also among the six Indian novels shortlisted for the Crossword Book Awards 2007. Among the English novels shortlisted for the award, my reviews of Lunatic in my Head and Amitava Kumar's Home Products, which I also liked very much, are here and here. Among the shortlisted non-fiction books, my review of Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Mahatma Gandhi is here, and I have a long interview with Ramachandra Guha, the author of India After Gandhi, here. I noted with some regret that I had not read or written about a single one of the shortlisted novels in translation from other Indian languages.

And here are some selections from the new issue of Pratilipi:

"Exiled From Poetry and Country" by Uday Prakash; "Eating The Breeze" by Samurna Chattarji; "January 4, 1960", five poems in Hindi and in English translations by Udayan Vajpeyi; "No Book To Blow The Mind" by Vivek Narayanan; "Translating Ann Jäderlund on the Ghats of the Narmada" by Teji Grover; "The Missing", three poems in Hindi and in English translations by Mangalesh Dabral; "Death and the Self" by Rustam Singh; "The Role of Dalits in the 1857 Revolt" by Badri Narayan; "Wilderness", a story by Sara Rai, and "Between the Pink", six ghazals in Kannada and in English translation by HS Shiva Prakash.

I will have an essay in each new issue of Pratilipi for at least the next year. Each essay will be devoted to a close reading of a work of Indian fiction.

On Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

A slightly different version of this essay appears today in the Observer.

Fiction is nothing but a narrator’s intelligent attention to the play of human feelings, but in the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri that attention takes a very distinctive, refined form. Her characters, genteel Bengalis now resident in suburban America, are themselves acutely conscious of the management of their emotions, of not behaving in an unseemly manner, of keeping their regrets and resentments to themselves. They not only speak without exclamation marks, but also think without them.

And on another level their creator is similarly reticent, steering well clear (the metaphor seems appropriate because in many of Lahiri’s stories characters are seen talking or thinking as they drive) of pathos or melodrama or anarchic laughter, always choosing a murmur over a shout. Both the writer and the characters, for their own particular reasons, want to put a brake on emotion, and the reader moves into the space they have left open. A sentence from the title story of Lahiri’s first book, Interpreter of Maladies, might exemplify Lahiri’s method. A woman, Mrs.Das, argues with her husband over who is to take their daughter to the rest room on a journey, and loses. All we are told about Mrs. Das's response is that she “did not hold the little girl’s hand as they walked to the rest room.”

The stories in Lahiri’s new book, Unaccustomed Earth, although they wander over familiar material in a familiar manner, are decidedly longer, slower, and better than those of the earlier set: they might be said to represent the perfection of a method that was at last glimpse only simmering.

These are Very Serious stories, stories that take storytelling seriously, and everything in them works together to let us know they are so: the slow, even sluggish, openings, patiently building up a scene and behind it a situation; the precise, serene sentences, accumulating weight and meaning clause by clause; the unvarying gravitas of the narrators, whether third-person or first-person – a mood and meaning that are gestured at even by the statuesque author photograph on the inside cover.

The shadow of death hovers over many of them, but humour or happiness seem remote. On one of the few occasions that a character makes a joke, he finds that “No one laughed”. A peripatetic widower sends a postcard to his daughter and her family that says “Be happy, love Baba” – “as if the attainment of happiness were as simple as that”, the sentence goes on, and although we guess this is Ruma's response, it might just as well be the narrator's.

Even so, the stories succeed on their own terms: many of them are exceptionally fine. In the title story, the widower mentioned above comes to spend a week with his daughter Ruma and her little son Akash. Lahiri’s achievement here is to capture all the registers of the encounter between three generations, and evoke the ghosts that drift alongside. Ruma and her father have never been particularly close, and indeed she suspects that he does not really miss her mother. He is never named, as if to emphasise that he is only a visitor. This is very subtle of Lahiri.

But Ruma’s father and Akash take to each other immediately, and Ruma is “briefly envious of her own son”. Her father takes to working on her garden, as he used to in their old home – his home, and in an insight characteristic of Lahiri, we learn that “when he thought about his garden was when he missed his wife the most”. He is now seeing another woman, but cannot bring himself to reveal this to Ruma: the positions of father and child have been reversed. Both are on unaccustomed earth, and Lahiri beautifully draws their situation out to something like a close.

And in the book’s best story, “Year’s End”, a teenager, Kaushik, is told by his father, also a widower, that he has remarried: that Kaushik now has a stepmother and two stepsisters. Kaushik loved his late mother dearly, so his father is prepared for outrage. But Kaushik, although taken by surprise, reports that “no turbulent emotion passed through me as he spoke”.

When Kaushik arrives home after his exams, he is received by his father, and notes how the decor of the house has been changed by a hand with a different taste in interiors. But the house itself seems eerily silent, “as if Chitra and her daughters were discreetly hidden in one of the many cupboards”. “Where are they?” he asks finally, and in those three words are contained all the uncertainty and pathos of one of the many orphans in Dickens. We hear Kaushik’s plaintive question almost as a cry: in the same instant the boundaries between the author, and the character, and the reader are erased, and Lahiri's fiction has worked its magic.

And links to two old essays on short-story writers, both, like Lahiri, of Asian origin and both now based in America, whose work is in my judgment as good as hers: Nalini Jones and Samrat Upadhyay.

Schoolmasters and accountants in the fiction of Kunal Basu

If there is one story in Kunal Basu’s new book of short stories The Japanese Wife that is revelatory of the author’s general method, it is “The Accountant”. An accountant’s life, we know, is almost by definition ordered, repetitive, prosaic – drudgery through and through. Unsurprisingly, Basu’s story opens with a scene of the protagonist, Mr.Ray, reading a manual of architecture at home after work while his wife Beena, an official in the income-tax department, folds clothes. “She was as indifferent to his reading,” we are told, “as he was to her folding.”

“The Accountant” promises to be a story of Chekhovian domesticity and compromise, of the hollow silences and thwarted yearnings of the petty bourgeoisie. But this illusion lasts only so long. Mr.Ray wakes suddenly in the middle of the night – as he has, we are told, all of the last month. What is happening to him?

Sitting up on the bed he wondered if he should wake Beena up and tell her everything. His gaze slipped through the open window and crossed the boundary wall of their gated colony, into the deserted roads and sleepy shrines. Then on it soared over the national highway, flying straight as a crow through the dustbowl of Northern India. It skirted the Yamuna on the way down the plains and came to rest on a flat bed beaten out of the alluvial soil where the river changed course from south to east. Agra! Mr.Ray felt that he had arrived, yet again, at the very spot he knew only too well. He sensed a familiar rush of excitement as he saw a much younger man who bore him a passing resemblance stride past throngs of labourers assembled on the flattened riverfront, struck with frenzy just as an event was about to unfold. Words rang in his ears…Mimar! Mimar! that followed the young man.

Mimar…the architect. He could understand everything –greetings, complaints, even a sly request for a leave of absence – muttered in a dozen tongues, knowing instantly that he had arrived at the Taj, not one of the world’s wonders as it is called today but the wonder that it was even as it was being built more than three hundred years ago by a team of clever architects. Mr.Ray felt certain that he was the Chota Mimar – the young architect arrived from Persia at the call of Hindustan’s emperor.

Without the least effort of his will Mr.Ray finds himself pitchforked into a seventeenth-century scene: a crowd of courtiers, scholars and traders sulking in the Agra sun, the widower Shah Jahan sitting crestfallen in their midst, and the upstart Lahore architect Ahmad Lahori theatening to take over and ruin the design of the Taj Mahal. Mr.Ray’s illusion is so captivating that we rush in right after him. These repeated visions trouble Mr.Ray deeply, he worries that he has contracted some rare disease of the brain, and he knows that nobody in his circle will believe his story of a past incarnation.

But the reader trusts him completely, and longs for more details of the past life of this magnificent Bengali bhadralok who was once a Persian. Just as Mr.Ray “couldn’t bring himself to deny the thrill, the secret pleasure of dipping into his memory”, the reader cannot keep himself from turning the pages of “The Accountant” (indeed, we might think of memory as a kind of compendious and fantastic book).

Later, on a real visit to the Taj with his family, Mr.Ray sees the spellbinding monument from the vantage point of the Yamuna river, and, remembering this view from three hundred years ago, wishes only that he was “a crane nesting on the dry riverbed, or a water buffalo left to roam on the banks by its owner, feasting his eyes on the Taj all day”. Allah, he exclaims to himself in wonder at one point, and in that one word is contained all the thrill of Basu’s leaping storyline: not only is the exclamation almost involuntary, but so is the particular word by which it is expressed. Allah, is what we might be saying to ourselves, too, as we follow the dizzying time travel of the romantic protagonist.

The distinctive feature of Basu’s fiction is his appetite for grand connections, for worlds set up almost from scratch. His novel The Opium Clerk explored nineteenth-century British colonialism and the drugs trade through the eyes of the clerk Hiran; The Miniaturist is set in the world of the artists of Akbar’s court; and his most recent novel, Racists, describes a race experiment set up by two European scientists in which a black boy and a white girl are brought up on a deserted island. Even in The Japanese Wife, Basu’s adaptable protagonists are found popping up in places far from home, whether it is an American widow who finds comfort in a Delhi family or a vacationing Indian couple caught up in the furore of Tiananmen Square 1989.

Basu’s love of world-roving fictions is never more beautifully deployed than in his title story (which is being made into a film by Aparna Sen) one in which the protagonist actually goes nowhere at all.

Snehamoy Chakrabarti is a lowly teacher in a village school in Bengal, and lives with his aunt, but there is one extraordinary thing about him: he has a Japanese wife. The relationship began as a letter-writing exchange between pen-friends, and it was the girl who suddenly proposed when she found out that Snehamoy was about to get married. For twenty years now husband and wife have been steadfastly sending each other letters and presents, advice and commiseration, across the sea while trying to save money so they can actually meet. Their relationship is founded upon small gifts that bear the burden of a great love, photographs that hint at the shape of a personality, the study of each other’s handwriting in letters:

Like a married man, he had grown used to coming home to her, to her things – the gifts she sent him regularly; he waited for her letters as if he was waiting for her to return from her daily visit to the market. In his personal portrait gallery – one that lay in a weathered file by his bedside – she smiled in a series of gently ageing faces. He greyed with her, advised her on her health. She prompted him to mind his savings and the loans he was eligible for but never took out. During monsoons, she’d remind him to wear socks over his slippers to avoid the bloodsucking leech.With the assured status of a Bou, she scolded him for neglecting his aunt – not taking her to see a doctor for his recurring malaria. He wrote about the bazaar women with gaudy made-up faces, who loitered around at night and gestured lewdly at passers-by. He could hear his wife giggle, teasing him…go to them Snehamoy, I know you would like to! Don’t come back to me, I can live without the... They fought over periods of silence, blaming each other, then blaming the lot of postmen. He could swear he saw her waiting for him one evening by Matla’s shores, as he came pedalling blindly down the muddy road after a rare evening with mohua – the local brew.

Basu’s exquisite tale of conjugal corcord nourished entirely by the power of the imagination invites us to think about the extent to which we imagine even the people we know from up close. The pleasures of this collection by one of the best and brightest voices in Indian fiction are enhanced by HarperCollins’s design and production, making for a book the tactile pleasures of which would surely have delighted Snehamoy Chakrabarti’s Japanese wife.

And an old post on another story of conjugal harmony: "José Saramago's Unknown Island".

Zoey's Song

Although my Uncledom is expanding rapidly and now encompasses perhaps a dozen one- and two-year-olds across India and England, I am the godfather, as far as I know, of only one living being: Zoey, the dog of my friend Sonia Faleiro.

I happened to be around when little Zoetta arrived as a shivering pup in the Faleiro McKnight household in 2006, and we have been fast friends since. Our favourite activity is called Tuggies, and involves holding on to either end of a squeaky toy - sometimes a hedgehog, sometimes a chicken, sometimes a fake kabab like the one pictured above - and tugging away for hours, growling unpleasantly as we strive for complete control of the vastly valuable prize. No guest to the household can leave now without first having played a game of Tuggies in the right spirit.

To thank me for my time, Zoey reads The Middle Stage every week over the shoulder of one or the other of her parents. She recently wrote to me saying that the post she likes the best is this old one on boots, which she is a great fan of, having chewed up some.

Lastly, I am pleased to report that Zoey will soon turn two, and is going to have a dazzling birthday party (to which you might give yourself a chance of getting invited by leaving complimentary remarks on her blog). Also, under my tutelage Zoey has taken to composing verse in rhyming couplets, and you will find her first, promising bit of doggerel — the word loses all its pejorative associations when a real canine is involved — composed with a little help from a friend, here. I wouldn't say it's brilliant, but hey — even Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath had to begin somewhere.

The first lines of the poem are "I think of cats, hung by tail from hooks/ Exactly ready for the attention of cooks". Some of the lines have a Yankee twang, which comes from too many hours spent beside Momma watching American Idol and news of the Democratic primaries on CNN (Zoey is now the head of the Indian chapter of the group "Animals For Obama", in which, keeping up the inclusive spirit of Obama's campaign, many human beings are also registered).

On Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

A shorter version of this piece appeared last weekend in Mint.

When compared to the journalist or the scholar, the fiction writer seems absurdly free. He or she can construct a story in any way he chooses. His characters have freedom to say whatever they like – in fact they are most persuasive when we feel them to be “free” of an authorial hand. All we demand in return is not that the story be true but that it be plausible – that it not give the appearance of being contrived.

But this requirement shows us that the fiction writer’s freedom is actually a difficult freedom. Constructing a plausible story from scratch – a story in which narration, dialogue, and plot construction work together to produce the effect of lived experience – can be harder than reporting or analysing a true story. This is the reason why, when judged by the highest standards, most novels are failures, some are honorable failures, and few are successes.

Fiction writers can misuse their freedom through simple incompetence, or by manipulative plotting, or by a failure to imaginatively realise the inner lives of their characters, or by simplified and schematic thinking that waters down the complexity of the world. Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger seems especially instructive in this regard, because it seems to me to be culpable in all the ways mentioned above.

The White Tiger takes the form of a series of letters addressed by an entrepreneur, Balram Halwai, to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. It is a slick monologue somewhat reminiscent of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but while Hamid’s protagonist Changez addresses the reader, Balram addresses Wen for no plausible reason: why not Ratan Tata or Rahul Bajaj instead?. Over the course of seven nights, Balram tells Wen the story of how he was for long a denizen of “the Darkness” and how, after murdering his employer, he made good.

Some other reviews of Adiga’s novel have praised Balram’s cynical, worldweary voice as a refreshing view-from-below, an antidote to romantic thinking about “the new India”. But they ignore the extent to which The White Tiger itself participates in the perpetuation of simple binaries. “Please understand, Your Excellency,” declares Balram to Wen, “that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness”. The two most conspicuous words in the narrative are “malls” (prosperous, materialistic urban India) and “the Darkness” (benighted, suffering rural India), a realm of rapacious landlords, corrupt politicians, and fatalistic citizens reconciled to living in “the coop”.

Elections in the Darkness are always rigged. “I am India’s most faithful voter, and I have still not seen the inside of a voting booth,” declares Balram. “I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves,” says Balram’s father. Balram’s village, Laxmangarh, has many malnourished children with eyes that shine “like the guilty conscience of the government of India”.

Now it is certainly true that India’s malnourished children are an indictment of government. But would a man like Balram – himself a murderer and a corrupt entrepreneur who knows how to work the system – conceptualise a situation in these terms? Or is this just Adiga speaking to the reader over the head of his character, trying to score some points for being a bleeding heart?

Would a man like Balram, who calls himself a "half-baked man" because he was never allowed to complete his schooling, be able to declare, as Balram does, that "Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia"? We are never quite sure what to make of Balram, because Adiga cannot convincingly inhabit the voice or perspective of a hick from the hinterland. We get not Balram, but Adiga/Balram, and we find the sometimes attractive cynicism of the character ("There are three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever") mixed up with the manipulative cynicism of the novelist, who is not willing to set realistic limits on the character's imagination.

Among the many problems in The White Tiger – the literary problems engendered by the peculiar way in which the book is written, not the problems of all the desperate Indian people in “the Darkness” – is that of dialogue. Now, dialogue is almost always a knotty issue for the Indian novelist writing in English, because it requires a kind of translation of speech that Indian readers, at least, would recognise is not emanating from a speaker of English.

The challenge for the Indian novelist then is to bend or tint his English in such a way that it suggests something of the character’s background, the register and the stresses of his speech, and the limits of his vocabulary in a productive way. That is to say, his challenge, if he is working broadly within the conventions of the realist novel, is the challenge posed by all dialogue, with one additional factor thrown in: the sense that this is an analogue of speech in the character’s native tongue. In this sense his attitude towards dialogue might be helpfully understood as being similar to the attitude of a skilled translator.

But there is no evidence in The White Tiger, with its long stretches of tepid and predictable exchanges between characters, that Adiga has thought seriously about this issue. As with another contemporary Indian novelist, Manil Suri, his lead characters seem peculiarly rootless because they speak in such a way as to elide significant distinctions of class and background: these writers attempt to produce realism in social and political detail without taking the trouble over realism in character.

Adiga’s dialogue has a kind of colonial hangover. Early in the novel, we see Balram at his first day at his ramshackle village school, being asked by the teacher for his name. Balram says that neither his mother nor his father ever gave him a name other than his nickname “Munna” (itself an improbable claim). “Well, it’s up to me then, isn’t it?” says the teacher, sounding suspiciously like he himself went to school in England. Because there is already a Ram in the class, the teacher names the boy “Balram”, and asks, “You know who Balram was, don’t you?” Later Balram’s nephew asks him, “Give me a glass of milk, won’t you, Uncle?” At a booze shop in Delhi, Balram gets to the counter and shouts, “Whisky! The cheapest kind! Immediate service – or someone will get hurt, I swear!” Balram’s fellow drivers shout out to him one evening, “Come join us, maharaja of Buckingham!”

Adiga knows enough about characters living in “the Light” to throw in a few f-words into their speech (“we have this fucked-up system called parliamentary democracy...”; “What a fucking joke!”). But, just like other denizens of the Light whom Balram criticises, Adiga himself is unable to engage with the Darkness, and is himself in the dark about how a character from this domain might think and speak. The anglicisms of his rustics as they rail about “the Light” might be read as complaints about no one more than the author himself, who patronises them in the same way that their employers patronise them.

Adiga’s story actually becomes distasteful in one of the book’s closing scenes. Balram now runs a taxi service in Bangalore under the alias Ashok Sharma. One of his drivers knocks down and kills a youth. Balram/Ashok has contacts with the (inevitably corrupt) police, and gets the case hushed up. As a gesture of charity, he visits the aged parents of the deceased with a compensation of twenty-five thousand rupees. The mother will not take it. But “the old man, the father, was eyeing the envelope”, reports Balram. Eventually they take the money.

This scene is reprehensible not because Balram is so despicable, but because of Adiga’s implication that anybody – even parents whose grief is fresh as a wound – can be bought in India as long as the price is right. The other India that The White Tiger purports to investigate is certainly grotesque, but Adiga, no less than Balram, feasts upon and exaggerates its grotesquerie.

And some posts about recent Indian novels which similarly suffocate their characters: Raj Kamal Jha's Fireproof and Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva, and on two novels which realise Adiga's crudely imagined "Darkness" much more successfully: Amitava Kumar's Home Products and Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut.

On Shobasakthi's Gorilla, and some other recent reviews

What’s in a name? If we reflect on our experience, quite a lot. Names serve as a marker of our individuality, our uniqueness in all of creation. Even so, each one of us has not just one name but a host of names — nicknames, relationship names, work names — all of which define us in some way. Our names become shorthand for stages in our life, or for the emotions people feel for us. When your spouse addresses you by your full name, you know you are in trouble. When grandparents address us by some childhood name, we almost become children again.

The Sri Lankan émigré writer Shobasakthi’s short novel Gorilla asks to be read as the evolving story of a man and his real and imaginary names. It narrates the story of Rocky Raj, a poor and idealistic youth living in the island district of Kunjan Fields at the height of the Tamil insurgency. Rocky Raj’s father is a dreaded local goon, and his ruthless predations have earned him the sobriquet “Gorilla”. Unsurprisingly, the fallout of Gorilla’s notoriety is borne by his family, most of all by Rocky Raj. At school, his classmates and even his teachers begin to call him “Gorilla”.

Wishing to exit his father’s domain, Rocky Raj runs away from home and joins a local chapter of the Movement, or the Tamil insurgency. This action is meant to signify the way violence and bloodshed have pervaded Sri Lankan civil society. Rocky Raj runs away from the mindless violence of his father to a violence which at least seems to be in service of an ideal, that of the Tamil Eelam.

At the training camp where Rocky Raj and other youths like him are indoctrinated, each new recruit is supposed to get a Movement name. Rocky Raj is excited by this. The name he has chosen for himself is “Arafat”, which would cast upon him some of the reflected glory of the great Palestinian revolutionary. But his hopes are dashed when the trainers come walking past the lines of recruits, carelessly dashing off names for the youths to fill in their forms. Rocky Raj is given the name Sanjay, because the boy next to him has got the name Rajiv, after the sons of Indira Gandhi. This outpouring of names on an industrial scale suggests that the Movement sees its recruits as not much more than human fodder, to be sacrificed for the higher cause. "Arafat" and "Mujibur" are Rocky Raj's aspiration; "Gorilla" and "Sanjay" his reality.

Rocky Raj’s idealistic ways soon get him into trouble. He believes that once a rule has been put into place, it holds good for everybody, not realizing that the Movement pretty much works as it likes. When, as the local representative of the Movement, he objects to illegal sand quarrying in Kunjan Fields, a call to his higher-ups leads to him being apprehended, tortured and finally expelled. On the run, Rocky Raj/Sanjay finally ends up fleeing the country and seeking refugee status in France, where he gives himself an invented name — Anthony Thasan (which is also Shobasakthi’s real name) — and an invented past to persuade the authorities to approve his case. The short last section of Gorilla set in France is especially powerful.

As the translator of Gorilla, Anushiya Sivanarayanan, explains, the novel belongs to the genre of “autofiction”, in which the author is not just the narrator but also the main character. Shobasakthi was himself an LTTE child soldier and now lives in France, and his narrative uses the real names of many Movement stalwarts well-known in Tamil oral culture. The raw, sweaty, unpolished quality of his narrative is striking, but the publishers need not have accentuated it by letting numerous copy-editing errors slip through.

And some other recent reviews in Mint: on Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence (very dull, except for the sparkling opening section); Kunal Basu's The Japanese Wife (uneven, but with some remarkably fine stories that you should not miss); Satnam Sanghera's memoir of growing up in Wolverhampton If You Don't Know Me By Now; Sudeep Chakravarti's book about the Naxal movement Red Sun; and Jeffrey Eugenides's anthology of love stories My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, about which I'd previously written in a different key here.

The Middle Stage in Australia

As there is nothing that this blog reveres more than the book — that box of carefully chosen words that speaks in such a distinctive and unforgettable voice when opened, often for centuries, millennia, after the life that birthed those words, the voice behind that voice, has been snuffed out — I am very pleased, and proud, to announce that something that was first published here last year appears today in a book.

My Books Interview with Christopher Kremmer, whose sprawling account of India Inhaling the Mahatma I thought an exceptionally rich work, appears this month as a back-of-the-book extra in the new Australian paperback edition of Inhaling the Mahatma.

The new edition also reproduces in full my review of the book, which was coincidentally the first-ever review I wrote for Mint.