On Alaa Al Aswany's Chicago

This essay on one of my favourite contemporary writers appears today in the Scotsman.

“Praise the Lord who created beauty in a hundred ways!” declares an enraptured character in Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago, and a similar attitude might be discerned in the writer’s attitude towards the many protagonists of his sprawling narration, whose particularities and quirks are so elaborately taxonomised as to seem like extracts from state dossiers. Equally fascinated by both sexes, alert to the tinkle of class and race in human commerce, sensitive to the consolations and the deceptions of religion, and interested above all in the question of the human body and its agitations, the narrator of an Aswany story seem to flutter above the world of his creation, hearing, noting, and sometimes whispering.

Aswany’s novel achieves something surprising, which is to turn a great city in the American midwest into a little Egypt. It begins, most unconventionally, with a short history of Chicago city, and then suddenly dives into the lives of a set of Egyptian doctoral students and emigrants resident in the city, some freshly arrived, others naturalised Americans. In Aswany’s previous novel, The Yacoubian Building, an apartment block served as a microcosm of Egyptian society; here, that crucible is Chicago, home to a set who have eagerly left home for better prospects, and yet carry that home in their hearts.

Are Quranic injuctions even more compelling in this strange and godless world, or are they in some way refuted by this carnival of liberty and licentiousness? Can freedom of speech and political allegiance make for a platform from which to question the suffocation of these rights in the motherland? Should one’s goal be the pursuit of excellence in science and learning, or is that, as one character claims, “all success outside one’s homeland is deficient”? Can the coloured and the white man meet on an equal footing, or must they observe an encounter replete with hypocrisies? These are the questions Aswany’s protagonists – a devout woman from a peasant background who continues to wear the veil, an arrogant student fixated on outperforming his colleagues, a political radical who thinks of himself as a poet, a professor who has rejected everything Egyptian and goes to baseball games on weekends “wearing his cap backward”, a Christian Copt hounded out of Egypt – ask themselves and each other.

Indeed, there are at least three levels of conversation in Aswany’s work. The simplest one is that between the characters, who feel a deep need to talk, and are roused and animated by the prospect of conversation in their mother tongue about themselves or the motherland. They debate politics and religion, banter till they find they have fallen in love, quarrel and fall silent, long for or dread the sound of another’s voice. But, on a second level, they also constantly talk to themselves, and Aswany reports these justifications, interpretations, changes of heart, and arcs of argument almost as speech. Here is the male chauvinist Tariq Haseeb vexed by the behaviour of his girlfriend:

He rang her number again and she didn't answer. When he tried one more time, she hung up. So, it was obvious. She was playing the role of the angry paramour. She wanted him to come running after her, humiliating himself. "Impossible!" he muttered [...]. Who did she think she was? He said to himself: This peasant girl wants to humiliate me? What a farce. So, she doesn’t know who Tariq Haseeb is. My dignity is more important than my life. From now on I am going to delete her from my life as if she never existed. Before I met her what did I lack? I was working, eating, sleeping, enjoying life, and living like a king. On the contrary, ever since I've met her I've been anxious and tense.

Those sos are like the hinges of Haseeb's thought, showing us the moment at which a situation begins to bristle with private meanings that seem irrefutable to the person in whose being they take root.

And lastly, there is always in Aswany's work a kind of implied conversation between the narrator and the reader, a way in which we feel as if we are being taken into confidence. A character is described at length and then the narrator stops to ask, as if describing the world of the jellyfish to a room of students, “Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir? There are still two aspects to his life we have not touched upon....” After detailing the grinding work schedule that Tariq Haseeb observes, the narrator asks: “Does that mean Tariq Haseeb does not have any fun? Not true. He also has his little pleasures...” We feel in Chicago as if a host is asking if we are enjoying ourselves at an evening at his house.

Aswany’s storytelling is also marked by its sensuality. From the self-denying student who allows himself an hour of recreation to watch wrestling and pornography to the lapsed poet whose voice and wholeness of self is restored by sex, everywhere we see the animal self lurking beneath the trained, dressed, and tutored body-in-the-world, aching to unsheath itself. If Aswany’s women sometimes seem implausibly beautiful and voluptuous, they at least have more selfhood and agency than Salman Rushdie’s sex goddesses. His warm-blooded, sometimes voyeuristic narration is clearly a man’s work, but it has a kind of Chaucerian love of human tints and foibles that redeems its faults.

Some of the twists and reversals in Chicago, as also its circling focus, make us in agreement with the character who feels “as if he were watching an Egyptian soap opera”. Aswany’s rolling cast of characters and panoramic vision tell us that he wants to investigate the human condition on the grandest scale, and as in soap operas, he wants to make the spectator feel like part of the family. His book resides firmly within the mainstream of Egyptian fiction, but it is also an unusual and striking post-9/11 American novel.

An old post on Aswany's The Yacoubian Building is here, and a recent essay on another excellent novel set in the aftermath of 9/11, Joseph O'Neill's Neverland, here.

On Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project

This piece appears today in the Sunday Telegraph.

Immigrant life often demands a kind of self-refashioning for which one metaphor is rebirth. Aleksandar Hemon’s melancholy new novel about immigrant life, The Lazarus Project, takes up this theme of rebirth on several levels. The narrator, Vladimir Brik, is, like Hemon, a Bosnian now domiciled in America. He has an American wife, and an American self draped over his old Bosnian self. He writes a column about immigrant life for a Chicago newspaper, and wants to write a book.

Brik is roused by the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a teenaged Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who was shot dead by the police chief of Chicago in 1908 and posthumously charged with anarchist plotting. Lazarus fled a pogrom in the Ukraine to remake his life in America, but was cut down. Brik feels as if he is being beckoned by this mysterious figure. He wishes to go sniffing for traces of Averbuch’s life, exhume it, and grant this Lazarus, too, a kind of resurrection. Armed with a writer’s grant, he sets off for the Ukraine with a photographer friend, Rora, in search of Lazarus.

As established by his earlier books, notably The Question of Bruno, Hemon can write sentences of startling beauty, and cut through to the essence of a character with a single arrow: “Like Rora, she was sovereign when silent; her silence was not an absence of words, it was a thing unto itself, shaped by her.”

But the difficulty with The Lazarus Project is that the double-pronged narration, helmed by Brik and opening up intermittently to the more intense and impassioned world of Lazarus, does not allow the story to break free of its moorings in the way novelistic narration can and should. We are intrigued by the poetic yearning and idealism of Lazarus, but he comes to us hemmed in by the prosaic and uninteresting figure of Brik (tellingly, no one in the novel, not even his wife, seems to like or love him very much). The act of sympathetic imagining, which is the only thing Averbuch's story is and can be, is not only overwhelmed by the dullness of Brikian reality, but also diffused by the jostling between narrator and character.

Hemon seems to be deferring here to a modern convention in which the act and labour of storytelling is emphasised, not elided, and multiple narrations proceed in parallel. But his frame narrative waters down the charge of the life of Lazarus for which it is a conduit, so that what we get is a story that seems almost afraid of itself: indeed, a story that indicts itself through the use of the plodding word project.

An extract from The Lazarus Project can be read here. And here is a story by Hemon: "Stairway To Heaven" and an autobiographical essay, "Rationed".

On Orhan Kemal's The Idle Years

Novels are a source of comfort and psychological sustenance to their readers, but they can be so to their writers too. This is especially true for writers working in an autobiographical mode. The novel, here, is like a beam turned in upon oneself, lighting up old shadows and nooks -- or it might be thought of as a mirror in which one's old faces successively appear. The forward march of the narrative in this case also a backward journey into time, and the slow time and fruitful agitation of writing throw up memories long submerged.
These are the speculations occasioned by The Idle Years, a novel first published in two parts in 1949 and 1950 by the great Turkish writer Orhan Kemal (often referred to in the English-speaking world as "the Turkish Dickens"), and now newly and strikingly translated by Cengiz Luhal. Although it is sometimes a mistake to link a writer's books too simply to his autobiography, it would seem that a discussion of The Idle Years would at least begin with such a reading.

The unnamed narrator of the book is the son of a charismatic political agitator who is sent into exile with his family after falling foul of the Turkish regime in the 1920s. Brought up in a large house with all the comforts of life, the protagonist is suddenly pitchforked into a life in which the family is always on the move, money is scarce, and the father's temper thunderous. He is forced to work at menial jobs, and begins to keep the company of a set whom he had previously seen only from afar, and with no consideration of their miseries: workers, vagabonds, and prostitutes. He is constantly hungry, and when granted a good meal through luck, comradeship or charity not only eats ravenously but also remembers every dish and every helping for days. He is often consumed by despair and by shame, but most of all loathes the heavy hand and bellowing voice of his father.

This story broadly follows the contours of Kemal's own youth, and it might be seen as part of that current in literature in which writers mull over the weight placed on their lives, in both good and bad ways, by their fathers: the early novels and later autobiographical meditations of VS Naipaul, for instance, or Franz Kafka's anguished Letter To My Father, or even the essays of Kemal's famous countryman Orhan Pamuk (whose Nobel Prize acceptance speech is called "My Father's Suitcase", and who has written a short, admiring foreword for this book).

Indeed, the first part of The Idle Years is called My Father's House, and its closing movement is one in which the protagonist resolves to leave that house, and returns from Beirut to his homeland to strike out on his own. In one of the novel's best passages, the narrator returns to his hometown, Adana, hot with stories of his itinerant life to tell his childhood friends, only to find that nothing is as it used to be. The place the heart thinks of as home is a pillar to one's self but fragile on its own terms.

Kemal's novel beautifully evokes the world-changing ardour and angst of youth, the consolations of friendship, the aches and burns of love, and the redemption of constant misery and hardship by small acts of kindness or brief interludes of escape. He is considered a great writer of dialogue, and in Luhal's translation the reader can see why. Many of his characters are real talkers, but they talk in a stop-start and naturalistic fashion, leaping from one subject to another, or revealing some particularity of their character through a repeated emphasis. They don't always know what they are saying, though characters in other kinds of novels seem to.

The Idle Years ends with a scene in which the protagonist, still impoverished, marries his beloved wearing a borrowed suit, shoes, and tie. The newlyweds are excited by the beautiful gifts that they have been given, and begin to construct a castle of dreams upon them, only to find out that the groom's grandmother borrowed them all from family and friends to give the wedding a glitter, and that the goods must now all be returned. This episode is symbolic of the whole story, in which hope and yearning are always trying to break free of the chains of reality, and disappointment is quickly forgotten. The last line of Kemal's novel - "So we carried on with our lives, appreciating all that we had" - seems both an observation of a fact and a piece of friendly advice to the reader.
And some other essays on Turkish literature: "Nazim Hikmet in prison" (Hikmet and Kemal were contemporaries, and spent time in prison together, and indeed one register of The Idle Years is distinctly Hikmetian), "Orhan Veli Kanik all of a sudden", and "On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red".

Cricket and redemption in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

Cricket and life are two very different things, but often to lovers of the game they seem the same, or at least to inhabit a continuous plane of existence. The contest of bat and ball seems a smaller version of the great game of life; the variability of pitches, weather and match situation a symptom of the workings of chance in all human affairs; the effort to impose oneself on the rectangle of brown within the circle of green emblematic in some mysterious but compelling way of the human condition in general. "For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and mastery, the variable world?" asks Hans van den Broek, the stoical and embattled protagonist of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, and we see immediately what Hans means. Indeed, Hans is totally adrift in the larger "variable world", and for a brief period cricket is his only means of hanging on at the crease on the pitch of life.
O'Neill's novel, his third, has its home in the scattered cricket fields of New York, one of cricket's earliest centres (as one character in the book points out, the first international cricket match was played between the USA and Canada in Manhattan the mid-nineteenth century). Although Hans is a Dutchman married to an Englishwoman, his work in banking has brought him to New York, where very soon he begins to inhabit "the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself".

But soon Hans's world begins to collapse around him. His wife Rachel feels their marriage is unsatisfactory, and wishes to move back to London with their young son, Jake. Hans is unable to dissuade Rachel and, ever the one to take the blame for a shared crisis, is left with a great burden of rejection and failure. A family man, he is now cut loose from all his moorings. His arc is a classic trope in the American novel, that of the limping and defeated loser struggling with his intransigent nature in an environment of exuberance, optimism, and self-reinvention. Hans shares many similarities, for instance, with Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Saul Bellow's great short novel Seize The Day. Both live in hotels, both are estranged from their wives and torn from their children, and both are, "to anyone who could be bothered to pay attention, noticeably lost" (this is from O'Neill).
Hans used to play some cricket as a boy in Holland, and one day, taking up an invitation after a chance meeting with a Pakistani cab-driver, he goes to a weekend club game at Staten Island, and finds himself the only white man in a motley crowd of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and West Indians. But this sense of being pulled out into a new set far removed from his usual world is a relief to him, and he finds playing cricket again immensely calming. O'Neill evokes this mood in his majestic description of "the sights and sounds and rhythms of a full day's cricket, in which unhurried time is portioned out by the ticking of ball against bat." Cricket in this description is a kind of restorative clock set to a more languorous speed than others, encouraging everybody to slow down and appreciate the big picture and the finer details.
It is at the cricket, too, that Hans meets an older Trinidadian man called Chuck Ramkissoon, a great dreamer and schemer who talks "incessantly, indefatigably, virtuosically", is a master of the grand pronouncement ("Women are responsible for the survival of the world; men are responsible for its glories"), and has a plan for building a cricket stadium in Brooklyn. The stadium, in Chuck's optimistic view, will make New York a centre of world cricket and restore the game to its lapsed prominence in American life. Hans finds succour in this unlikely brotherhood of men come together through a shared love of the great game, and in the companionship and infectious enthusiasm of Chuck and his starred-and-striped motto of "Think fantastic".

Netherland is an exquisite achievement on every level, from the stream of beautifully weighted and sonorous sentences that ripple on page after page to the larger architecture of narrative time and of plot. Here is Hans explaining (and thereby making an apparently simple matter dense) why he cannot slog the ball like the rest of his teammates, because cricket represents a force of continuity within his own fragmented self:

Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations. Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood and college days as if they'd happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavours have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife; my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued. But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got a hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived them in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held. To reinvent myself in order to bat the American way, that baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting, involved more than the trivial abandonment of a hard-won style of hitting a ball. It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years, to my mothered self.

"These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories"—this is very fine and apt. And let us look at this paragraph again and all its pauses and qualifications, the way in which the sentences seem to keep interrupting themselves: "I, however, seem given to" — "But I still think, and I fear will always think..." — "These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone..." — "It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years..."

This is the characteristic cadence O'Neill has forged for his colourless and yet extraordinarily interesting protagonist's narration, and much of the pleasure of Netherland is in catching the delayed gratification of these stretched-out sentences: "Those circumstances were, I should say, unbearable", or, (moving from two pauses to four very even ones which in this case also dramatise the peace of the moment) "Not knowing what to say, I got up and stood next to him, and for a while we surveyed, twenty-two floors down, the roving black brooms of four-dollar umbrellas", or to a mix of short and long pauses: "Perhaps the relevant truth—and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or years has pulled you deep into trouble." The writing in Netherland has its own temporal current, a kind of slow, rapt murmur, and it does not take very long before we are pulled deep into the text by these rhythms.

And an old post, on Saul Bellow's Seize The Day.

New issues of Pratilipi and Almost Island

New issues of two very good Indian literary webzines, Pratilipi and Almost Island, are out now.

What I like about Pratilipi is that it is bilingual, also features translations from foreign languages into Hindi, and has a deep Indian focus, while Almost Island sometimes has its snout pointed in the other direction and often features very unusual writing from around the world in addition to work by Indian writers. Both are beasts interested not only in actual translations but also the theory of translation. They are an odd but complementary pair. I have had an essay published in Pratilipi, and am sure to have one in Almost Island too before I turn 40.

Here are some things to read from them. From Almost Island:

"The Self That Writes", the transcript of a lecture given in Delhi in March at an Almost Island literature conference by the masterly Italian writer Claudio Magris (whose book Danube is full of brilliant things); nine poems by Namdeo Dhasal; "The Night" by the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz; "Pensées" by Sven Birkerts; "Homage To Translation: Benjamin In Japan" by Forrest Gander; and two chapters from Satantango, a novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.

and from Pratilipi:

"Mourning" by Chandra Prakash Deval; "Say Something" by Sridala Swami; three poems in English and in Hindi translation by Anjum Hasan; "Wall Paintings by Meena Women" by Madan Meena; "A Necessary Poem" by Teji Grover; "An Initiation to Sexuality in Almodovar’s Films" by Sameer Raval; and "My Mother's Lover" by Sumana Roy.

On Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing

The first and most unassailable truth of life is change, movement, flux. But the essence of that change is often to be found less in the highly visible, volcanic change of a new job, or a birth or death in the family, a milestone traversed, a timeline of events, a stock market crashing, or a government falling, and more in the galaxies that are always imperceptibly moving and shifting within us, the time that is ceaselessly passing, the body that is growing ripe and strong and then paling, the private and public faces that we sometimes will into being and that sometimes take even us by surprise. The famous Heraclitean epigram “You cannot step into the same river twice” is justly famous not just because of its primary meaning – the river is always flowing, and what was present a moment ago is now gone – but also its secondary suggestion of eternal flux contained in that word “you”. That you that steps into the river is also like the river.

Which art form walks with a lamp through this subterranean field? The novel, particularly the realist novel, a form we might think of as an education in human moods, feelings and compulsions through the shape of a story that we live vicariously. The best realist novels rouse us to a state of heightened awareness and sensitivity, and Anuradha Roy’s first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, the story of three generations of a Bengali family in the first half of the 20th century, seems just such a book. Roy’s novel is as much about a house as it is about a family, and indeed it teaches us that houses, which hold themselves erect longer and witness more than people do and echo with human presence, cannot but be seen as beings in their own right.

Early in the twentieth century, Amulya Babu, a Bengali entrepreneur, builds himself a huge house in the remote hamlet of Songarh, on the edge of a forest and beside the ruins of an old fort, with only a British couple for neighbours. His wife Kananbala detests the place because it is so far from Kolkata, relatives, and civilization. While her husband finds the solitude and expanse of Songarh liberating, Kananbala is oppressed by it, and slowly begins to lose her mind, shocking her family with sudden outbursts of spleen. Amulya and his wife are in search of a bride for their younger son Nirmal, and they find one from a town called Manoharpur, an only child raised in a vast, extravagantly built mansion by the edge of a churning river. The seasons come and go; one generation gives way to another. Suddenly widowed at a young age, Nirmal finds himself responsible not only for his daughter Bakul, but also for an orphan boy, Mukunda, whom Amulya had agreed to provide for.

Roy is especially good on establishing a character’s relation to place: we always think of her characters in relation to a scene precious to them or resented by them. Here is Amulya Babu’s bifurcated world of teeming town and hushed home:

Amulya was the only Indian to have built his home in that area, in the wilderness near the miners’ dwellings and fox-lairs, far away from the bustle of the main market, from the drums of Ram Navami, the speeches and tom-toms of patriots, the nasal calls of the maulvi, the discordant bursts of trumpet music at wedding processions, the sparklers and explosions of Diwali. He heard these noises all day at the factory. As his daily tonga clattered him towards his home each evening, he waited for that miraculous moment when the shouting town would slide behind, replaced by dark trees and an echoing stillness broken only by calls from the forest and birdsong at dusk.

Note that Roy does not say that the tonga “clattered towards his home” but that it “clattered him towards his home”, as if Amulya is himself a vessel of sounds and agitation on his journey towards peace. The noise-silence axis of this passage is thus evoked on every level.

And here is Kananbala’s relation to the same place:

The silence that to Amulya meant repletion locked Kananbala within a bell jar she felt she could not prise open for air. She had disliked it from the start: the large house with echoing, empty rooms, the wild, enormous garden where leaves rustled and unfamiliar berries plopped onto the grass. The want of visitors, the absence of theatre-shows and festivity. Instead, cow-bells tinkling, the occasional clopping of a horse’s hooves, the ghostly throb of tribal drums far away. The croaking of a hundred frogs after rain, the inscrutable sounds from the forest at night. In Calcutta, in her rambling family home crowded with siblings and aunts and uncles, there was always the possibility of a chat, the comforting sounds of nearby laughter, gossip, clanging utensils, squabbling sisters-in-law, the tong-tong of rickshaw bells, the further-away din of the bazaar, the cries of vendors, the afternoon murmurs of a decrepit goldsmith who visited them with boxes of new trinkets and a tiny silver balance to weigh them on.

But this passage also suggests that perhaps Amulya Babu only enjoys his home and his grounds so much because he has a noisy day-world of business, conversation, and engagement that fulfils another side of him; Kananbala, on the other hand, subsists on the memories of the same sounds which Amulya Babu might find so annoying. All the genderedness of space in Indian society is evoked by this description of Kananbala’s exceptional poverty of sounds and relationships, even within the prevailing constrictions of the female domain.

Indeed, the main theme of An Atlas might be the explosive relationship between people and the place they think of as home. Nirmal himself leaves home after the sudden death of his wife, entrusting Bakul and the orphan boy Mukunda to the care of his brother’s family and a widow called Meera. As a employee of the Archaeological Survey of India, entrusted with digging up ruins across the country, Nirmal tries to leave the place of his youth and its scars behind him and make the world his home:

It was a rare feeling, one that usually came to him, if it did, high on a mountain ridge, the immense folds and humps of hills and valleys falling away before him, edges muted in the evening air. At such times, he saw himself as if from the sky, an infinitesmal speck on a gigantic fold of earth, as inseparable a part of the mountains, pink sorrel and trees as were the flying squirrels that scampered up the deodars beside him.

When Nirmal returns home after several years to begin a dig on the site of the old fort, he finds that his daughter will not accept him as a father. And Bakul and Mukunda are inseparable in childhood, but as they reach the threshold of maturity, Nirmal is persuaded to send Mukunda to a boarding school to protect the innocence of his daughter. Mukunda never forgets this abandonment, and resolves never to return to Songarh. After his studies he begins work as an assistant to a building contractor, and this is what occasions his bitter observation, “I know all about houses and homes, I who never had one”.

Roy’s slow-burning prose style proves germinal for a host of beautifully weighted observations. “Beyond the house, in the memory of the day’s light, the ruins of the fort were still discernible to those who knew it was there” – a sentence like that, with absences evoked as presences, encapsulates a whole world of feeling and of mystery. When Mukunda, after a childhood supported by charity, rises to a position of some influence as a contractor and enforcer, he feels a new relationship with the world: “After a lifetime of deferring to other people, now there were those who deferred to me. I saw in their faces my old faces.” And yet, Mukunda knows that there were things not only painful, but also admirable in his past life, and fears that with his rough work he is changing “into someone my old self would have despised”.

One of the triumphs of Roy’s construction is that, after two sections told in the third person by a voice standing above the characters, the novel suddenly switches in the final section to first-person narration through the voice of Mukunda. This is very apt, because of all the characters in the novel, his is the voice most worth hearing from the inside. Mukunda carries within himself a complicated tie of both attachment to and resentment of the old house at Songarh; he loves Nirmal and Bakul for protecting him, and despises them for abandoning him; he has a wife and child of his own, yet longs for another woman. He harbours within him – as we all do to a greater or lesser extent – an atlas of impossible longing, and the contours of that terrain are memorably mapped in Roy’s novel.

And an archive of old Middle Stage essays on Indian fiction is here.

On Vinay Lal's The Other Indians

In the early pages of Patrick French’s recent biography of VS Naipaul, there is a detailed portrait of the first representatives of the modern Indian diaspora in the mid-nineteenth century. These were unwilling travellers: luckless, impoverished indentured labourers, mostly drawn from regions in north India suffering drought or famine, tossed on board ship like chickens in a coop for an arduous journey across the seas on their way to plantations in the West Indies. From these early beginnings, fraught with dread and uncertainty, beset with dangers to both body and self, the Indian diaspora has come a long way to become “an incontestable fact of world culture”, as Vinay Lal puts it in his new history of South Asians in America, The Other Indians.

Notwithstanding several other significant narratives of movement and resettlement, the great Indian narrative of migration of our age, and surely for many decades to come, has been the journey to America. This migration has a kind of double reality: it as much a dream for millions of what Lal calls Resident Non-Indians (a representative example of how the term is used in popular Indian thought is here) as it is a proud fact for actual NRIs. For a long time, before our current period of reverse migration in modest proportions, America was thought to be the natural destination for our best and brightest, the site where they might break free of the sloth and stasis and crab mentality of benighted Indian life and grow wings.
But one of the tricks of the human brain – it the reason we need history – is that it all too easily extrapolates from a present reality that things have always been that way in the past. One of the aims of Lal’s book is to show us the stages of negotiation, attrition, and doubt through which Indian life in America has passed in order to reach its present bullish phase. For instance, although educational attainment among Americans of Indian origin is now famously high (63.9 per cent now have a bachelor’s degree compared to 24.4 per cent in the general population), as recently as 1940 Indians had the lowest educational standards of any ethnic group. Even as India made the transition from colony to independent republic, Asians in America were fighting for the most basic political rights (and often allying with the African-American movement). Lal’s book meticulously charts the progress of Indian life in America from trickle to flood, stammer to swagger.
Indians first began to arrive in America in significant numbers around the close of the nineteenth century. Almost all were male. Some were peasants from the Punjab who had been drawn by reports of American prosperity and who found work as farm labourers, others were students. Perhaps the most interesting of these groups was the one with clear political aims: a set of nationalists and revolutionaries trying to unshackle the British Empire from without by force of both words and militant action. As Lal explains,

By the second decade of the twentieth century, a sufficiently large coterie of cosmopolitan Indian rebels, whose ranks would be swelled and complicated by peasants and workers who had experienced the piercing effects of racial discrimination, felt emboldened enough to initiate a political party to press for Indian independence from British rule. The “Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast” took root in 1913, founded in Oregon, but it is by the name of Ghadr (also Ghadar) that it is commonly known. This “Ghadar Conspiracy” as the British termed it, lasted a mere five years[...] but it is the Ghadr’s party newspaper [which had the words “the enemy of the British Raj” emblazoned on its masthead] which most of all suggests why the romance with the Ghadr movement among Indian progressives endures.
[...] Published at first in Urdu, the predominant language (alongside Hindustani) of north India, and Gurmukhi, the language of Punjabi peasants, Ghadr had within months also commenced publication in Gujarati and Hindi. A contemporary British intelligence report confirmed that some 3,000 copies of the paper at this time were mailed to the Federated Malay States, Siam, and elsewhere in Asia [...]. When one contemplates that nearly 100 years ago an Indian newspaper was being published from the United States in at leadt four languages...one marvels at the ecumenism, grit, ambition, and vision of the movement’s advocates.
One might argue that it was only at a great remove from India that the Ghadrites could entertain...the utopian notion of a mother India that would be freed by militant action. The sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer coined the phrase “Gadar syndrome” to describe the phenomenon of a “militant nationalist movement” created “abroad by expatriates” embodying “the fusion of ethnic anger and nationalist pride”...Useful as are these ideas, they do not entirely capture the globalizing energy of Ghadr, much less the magisterial manner in which the Ghadr movement anticipated the notion of a global Indian diaspora. The Ghadrites, I am tempted to say after Bruce Chatwin, drew their own songlines across the oceans, and everywhere provided assurance to Indians that Indianness was, in some fashion, theirs to claim.

Just before the ascent of the Ghadr party an attractive picture of Indian civilization had already been imprinted on America by the discourses of Swami Vivekananda, whose electrifying address to delegates of the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893 catapulted him into the consciousness of the American public. And as the century rolled on India slowly became synonymous in the American imagination with the thought and work of Gandhi, who acquired a considerable following among the intelligentsia and members of the press. At the same time Indians in America were fighting a long battle over their right to citizenship that would not be resolved until the passing of the National Origins Act in 1965, which set in place systems and quotas for immigration which are still largely in place today.
Lal has many interesting things to say on a wealth of subjects, from the growth of Hinduism in America to the takeover of the motel business by the Patel community, and from contributions by Indians to American literature to the changing dynamics of the relationship between adopted land and motherland. He notes the pervasive anxiety about cultural loss and contamination among Indian Americans, which has spawned an aggressive and rancorous form of Hinduism that is broadly sympathetic to, and often lavishly funds, the activities of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and sees nothing wrong in calling itself Hindu nationalist. It is not surprising, observes Lal,

...that, as India slowly begins to emerge as an Asian power, the Hindu community in the United States, which contributes substantially more to direct foreign investment in India than Hindus elsewhere, should begin to feel emboldened, mindful of its “rights” and prerogatives; nor is it surprising that these Hindus should view themselves in the vanguard of what I would characterize as revolutionary internet Hinduism. The internet is not merely the medium through which debates on Hinduness and Hinduism are being conducted, it is the vehicle, nowhere more so than among Indian Americans, for advancing a new conception of Hinduism as a global faith. If internet Hindutva’s proponents had their way, Hinduism, or more precisely Hindutva, would have something of an ummah, a worldwide community that would also assist in bringing pliant Hindus, both in India and in older Indian diasporas of the nineteenth century, to a awareness of the global strengths of a “modern” Hindu community. [...] Though nationalist Hindus in the United States take recourse to arguments about multiculturalism, they have not at all been hospitable to multiculturalism or even Indian variants of pluralism in India itself.

Indeed, there is material for an entirely different book in Lal’s thought that “Indian culture is perhaps more stable in the US than it is in India”. Himself a resident of America for almost three decades (he teaches History at the University of California), Lal has the advantage of being able to draw upon both scholarship and personal experience in this work, and speaks as both observer and participant. He elegantly summarises and brings into the mainstream a wealth of more specialised literature, such as ethnographies of particular migrant communities (such as the Punjabi-Mexican community in California). Many Indians at home will savour this book about Indians abroad.
Lal's website Manas: India and its Neighbours is here. And some links to essays by Lal: "Reflections on the Indian Diaspora", "Indic Presence in World Culture", "Labour and longing", "Palpable Falsehoods", a letter on the California textbook controversy of 2005, "Bobby Jindal and America", "Gulf Indians and the Hierarchies of NRIs".
And here are some other essays by Lal on aspects of Indian politics and culture other than the diaspora: "Reading Nandigram through ‘The Hindu’", "The future of Indian democracy", "The Tavistock Square Gandhi: 'war on terror' and non-violence", "Muhammad Yunus and the Nobel Prize", "Partitioned Selves, Partitioned Pasts" (an essay on Ashis Nandy), "After Bamiyan", and "The cultural politics of the national flag".
And for more on themes and isues raised by Lal's book: "The Ghadr Rebellion", an essay published in the Illustrated Weekly of India nearly fifty years ago by Khushwant Singh; Amitava Kumar's essay from 2000 "The Indian Is Coming", on the place of the Indian immigrant experience in American literature (Kumar is also one of the hands behind the film Pure Chutney, about the intersection of Trinidadian and Indian culture); Farrukh Dhondy's "The great Indian diaspora is more Indian than great"; Vidya Dehejia's "Arts and the Indian Diaspora"; Seema Sirohi's recent piece in Outlook "The Good War"; and Vijay Prashad's "Dusra Hindustan" and "Letter to a Young American Hindu". A special issue of the Indian magazine Seminar on the Indian diaspora, from which some of these links are taken, is here.
Links to other good essays on the Indian diaspora past and present are welcome.

Essays on Indian fiction

Over the last three years I've written about Indian fiction new, old, and ancient on this site, from Dandin to Jhumpa Lahiri, Fakir Mohan Senapati to Vikram Chandra, and I'm putting all these pieces together in one place here, and will keep updating it with new essays and reviews.

You will find that although there are many general remarks about the nature and the craft of fiction in these essays, my ideas about Indian fiction as a distinct category are usually implied rather than stated. Some of the novels listed here I admired enormously, others I found very poor; some of the novelists are names that rove the world, others are known only at home or are now forgotten; some write in English, others are read in translation from other Indian languages. Wherever possible I have tried to use long quotes to support my judgments, and where some aspect of a writer's work has struck me as being especially significant, beautiful, or innovative, I have tried to burrow away at that instead of writing a more general review. Here is the full list:

English and Hindi in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, on Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, The double darkness of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, On Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist, Seventh century Indian life in Dandin's Dasakumaracharita, On Amitava Kumar's Home Products, Fakir Mohan Senapati's roundabout fictions, Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare, On Kamala Markandaya's Nectar In A Sieve, Schoolmasters and accountants in the fiction of Kunal Basu, Home and Away in Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing, On Altaf Tyrewala's No God In Sight, The world of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, On Mridula Koshy's If It Is Sweet, Kingdoms and Prisons in Jahnavi Barua's Next Door, On Vinod George Joseph's Hitchhiker, On Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, Mathematics and rebellion in Nikita Lalwani's Gifted, Attia Hosain's lost world, On Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldier,Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay's language of love, On Siddharth Chowdhury's Patna Roughcut, On Deepak Chopra's Buddha, The stories of Parashuram, Poetry As Medicine In Ashvaghosha's Handsome Nanda, On Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, On Hamid Dalwai's Fuel, On Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor, Life winding down in Cather and Saratchandra, On Nalini Jones's What You Call Winter, Irrelevant detail in the fiction of Raj Kamal Jha, On Aravind Adiga's Between The Assassinations, and On Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva.

And, since it seems slightly absurd to draw the line of classification upon the line of a nation-state and ignore many civilizational links and continuities, here are some other essays on works of fiction by Nepali, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani writers: On Samrat Upadhyay's The Royal Ghosts, On Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age, On Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, On Manjushree Thapa's Tilled Earth, On Shobasakthi's Gorilla, and lastly, Pervez Musharraf's In The Line of Fire, one of the greatest of modern Asian bildungsromans.

On Chidananda Das Gupta's Seeing Is Believing

"Today, serious cinema is far ahead of serious film criticism.” This remark, taken from an essay written in 1982 by the Indian film critic Chidananda Das Gupta, seems even more true today than it must have been then. Most film reviews in the Indian press offer little more than plot summaries and a few desultory remarks of praise or condemnation. Their original perceptions, if any, are limited to telling the reader which foreign film the movie being discussed has been copied from, and their language is often stilted and ugly. They are published because of the enormous enthusiasm and appetite of Indian viewers for cinema, but they very rarely enhance the experience of a movie for a viewer, which might be thought of as the first prerequisite of good criticism.

It is a pleasant surprise then to read a set of essays on Indian cinema as combative, as vigorous, and as cogent as those in Das Gupta’s Seeing is Believing. In these pieces, published in different books and journals over the last 25 years, we see a powerful analytical mind at work, able to make searching connections between our movies and our society, our literature, our art, our music and our religion. But we also realize that we are reading a critic in whose work conceptual and analytical rigour and the desire to build interpretative structures is not used as a substitute (the distinction is one made by Das Gupta himself) for the play of sensibility: the attention to the unique rhythms and personality of each work of art, and to our aesthetic experience of the work.

Das Gupta’s attractive title refers to the powerful illusion intrinsic to cinema, more than any other art form, that what we are watching is real. He then takes this thought and runs with it, showing how, although film originated in the West, its transplantation to a pre-industrial society heavily invested in faith and myth instantly made it a very different thing in India. Most of the early Indian feature films were mythologicals, which enraptured audiences by bringing the gods and goddesses of Hindu myth from the hinterland of the imagination (where they had always resided) to visible, palpable life. Here is Das Gupta's winning recreation of that experience:

When films began in earnest in India, with Phalke’s Harishchandra in 1913, suddenly the gods and godlike men of mythology came to life. [...] Hitherto the Hindus had seen the trinity and pantheon in their minds and in images of clay, wood and stone; now they saw them walking, flying in space, throwing flaming discuses, setting offenders aflame with a burning look, making the dead come alive, appearing out of, and vanishing into, nowhere.This is how the gods had dwelt in the mind’s recesses, held aloft by a network of myths and legends spawned by the epics and the Puranas. The loves and hates of the gods had been seen as leela, divine play, evoked by the bhakta or devotee in his imagination. These now became reality; here was Raja Harishchandra walking barefoot through the brambles, giving away his son Rohita, his wife Taramati, for the sake of charity; and there, Rama roaming the Dandakaranya forest with Sita. Inside the cinema theatre, the devout took off their shoes, sat with folded hands, and even threw offerings at the screen. [...] As the screen lit up in the vast night in the open air or inside the dark womb of the theatre, before their eyes a primeval dream unfolded in which the gods lived and had their being, emerging from an ancient communal memory secreted within the self.

[...] This was different from seeing [the actors] in the folk theatre. The actors in the folk theatre were too real; too often you knew where they lived, and saw them paint their faces before they entered the arena. In the cinema they were real and shadowy, not gross enough to lose their distance and dignity.

"Too often you knew where they lived, and saw them paint their faces before they entered the arena"— there is a kind of rapture to be felt in lines like these, lines that allow us not just to register but actually to enter the worldview of that early Indian film audience Das Gupta is describing.

Cinema, then, was a product of science but, in this case, science had "reinforced faith and blurred the distinction between myth and fact”. Although the pure mythological film has made a retreat with the passage of time, Das Gupta argues that the basic accord between cinema and religiosity has not changed. Even where the exterior of what is being depicted is modern, beneath the surface, the present is being mythologized constantly and the currents of traditional belief are being kept alive. Again, Das Gupta is very good on the Hindi film song, and on why the songs are so often better than the films themselves. The Hindi film song

is the transcendental element in the language of popular cinema. It expounds philosophies; proposes inductive and dedeuctive syllogisms on the truths of individual life in relation to the social universe; explains hidden meanings; comments, like a chorus, of the worth or consequences of an action, besides providing aural enchantment to the otherwise music-less urban world at its rural grassroots.

[...] The song is like divine speech, filling the firmament, and all vacant space on earth. It flows into the poers of the mind, like balm on wounds inflicted by the daily battles of existence. It represents an experience shared by a vast, varied, divided populace in the cinema theatres, in roadside restaurants for the poor, at fairs, festivals, temple yards, weddings, and all celebrations.[...] Film music blares forth everywhere for everyone, including the unwilling ears of those who are used to high art. This imminence of the film song shared by all lifts it way above the bounds of realism required by particular films and gives it an autonomous, transcendental presence in society.

But Das Gupta does not succumb to the glorification of Bollywood drama, increasingly prevalent in film studies, as the most authentic kind of Indian film. Popular cinema, he argues, must inevitably be populist, because it is made on large budgets and for the delectation of mass audiences. But, for criticism to follow the line of “what is most popular is best” is to truckle to this populism, and that would be a fatal mistake.

Accordingly, a number of Das Gupta’s essays are vibrant appreciations of work, socially engaging, psychologically complex and technically innovative, produced in parallel and regional cinema: not just Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and M.S. Sathyu, but also lesser-known figures such as G. Aravindan and Girish Kasaravalli. Indeed, he shows how there has been, and still is, a strong current of Indian cinema that wishes to challenge societal prejudice and entrenched inequalities, and that promulgates, often without didacticism, a concern for the deprived or the oppressed sections of society whom our expanding middle class would rather turn its eyes from.

One exceptional essay explains how M.G. Ramachandran and N.T. Rama Rao ascended the throne of politics on the back of their on-screen personae in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh: Here again was an example of “seeing is believing” on the part of the audience. Another argues that Indian film studies rely too reflexively on trends in Western criticism, and on Western ideas such as catharsis and alienation, instead of drawing from our own rich native traditions. This is one of the richest and most satisfying books of criticism I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

An essay by Das Gupta on Ray's Pather Panchali is here.

And here are some old posts on books on Bollywood and on movies: On Mihir Bose's Bollywood: A History, on Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor, and Tahmineh Milani's Two Women.

An interview wth Pico Iyer

This interview appears today in Mint.

In the two decades since the publication of his first book Video Night In Kathmandu Pico Iyer has produced a body of work so influential that for most people he is the first name that comes to mind when they think of travel writing. Born in England to parents from India, brought up in California, educated at Oxford and Harvard, and now for many years a resident of Japan, Iyer personifies the vast revolution in the self-image of much of humanity in the last fifty years. Increasingly our cultural allegiances are multiple, the reach and frequency of our journeys wider and longer, our relationship to the word “home” drastically different. To understand the place of the new self within this new globalism many thousands of readers have turned to Iyer. Iyer’s new book The Open Road, a biography of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, appeared this summer. In this interview he talks about the book, about travel writing, about the writers he loves, and about Indians and travel.

Your new book on the Dalai Lama has many insights on religion, politics, globalism, and on the balancing act of upholding tradition while embracing change. Am I correct in my understanding that these are as much the themes of your own work as they are of the Dalai Lama’s life?
One major theme of the book is projection—the way in which we all create the Dalai Lama that we need or want—and I am sure that I am as guilty of that as any other. So inevitably, I see him in relation to certain themes of cross-cultural fascination, of exile and home and globalism, that have always been close to my interests (while trying, I hope, to acknowledge, at many points, that he is infinitely richer and larger than my tiny notions of him). And in approaching a figure on whom so much has been written and said, my only justification for attempting such a project was to bring what I could from my background, and interest in literature, comparative religions and globalism, to see what they might light up in him that more serious and informed scholars of Tibet, of Buddhism, or of monasticism, hadn’t done already. But yes, I can’t pretend that I’m giving the reader anything more than my limited and, no doubt, distorted vision of the man, try though I might to cut through my own projections. My one talisman was that the Dalai Lama himself always speaks for transparency, accuracy and objectivity, so I tried as hard as I could to honour those principles, and spent five years working on the book every day, much longer than I’ve spent on any other of my works.

To make a move from Buddhist “mindfulness” to the travel writer’s art: How important is it for a travel writer to be able to live in the present—to inhabit the moment fully and pick up sensory detail in an intense way? Or would you say this aspect of travel writing is diminishing in importance in the age of Discovery and Travel and Living?
I would say that this aspect of writing is diminishing in the age of information. When I first visited Tibet, in 1985, I felt that few of my friends and neighbours could ever dream of seeing Lhasa, so my job was to absorb as much of its smells and spices and faces and sounds as possible, to bring back to them. By the time I made my third trip there, in 2002, it seemed to me that most people who might read my books could see parts of Tibet I could never visit on some website, or could walk around the Potala Palace on the Discovery Channel. The one thing that writing could do that no new media could touch was to try to catch the inner Tibet, the discussion inside oneself about how much to believe and how much to distrust, the constant dissolve between realism and dream-state that high altitude, culture shock and jet lag bring on.

So, the external aspect of travel, which has always been to me the least interesting part, is best caught these days by a tape recorder, video recorder or digital camera; the psychological, emotional, spiritual and moral conundrums of travel are more and more the writer’s domain. Marcel Proust in Tibet (as I tried to show in my last book, Sun After Dark) would find things that no National Geographic team could match. And Leonard Cohen just sitting in his monastery near Los Angeles can go places far wilder, more exciting and more adventurous than nearly any climber in the Himalayas. The journey through the parallel world of jet lag is just as remarkable and displacing as the errant holiday through Haiti.

How much of travel writing is about place and how much of it is about the person? Must the reader also be able to sense an inward journey taking place alongside the physical one?
No writer can pretend to give you the ‘true’ India, let us say; all she can offer is her version of India, her particular discussion with it, her sometimes inspired and sometimes insipid take on it. Travel, after all, is a conversation, and every traveller only gets as much from his journey as he brings to it. The reason people read Naipaul on India or Africa is that he is trying, with such poignancy and intensity, to sort out the India, the Africa and the Britain in himself; it’s the hauntedness he brings to the places he visits, the questions that shiver inside him, the uncertainties he hopes to resolve there that give his works a power and passion that most travellers can’t match. Likewise, when you read W.G. Sebald, you read him not for his descriptions of Venice or East Anglia, but in spite of them—and because he is always at some level running from his legacy (as one born in Germany in 1944) and running into nothing more than the perplexity of having been born in Germany in 1944.

Jan Morris in Trieste, Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul, Joseph Brodsky on Venice—all the great writers on place are great because of the unsettledness they bring with them, and the intensity of their concerns.

On one’s travels, one encounters not just other cultures but also hundreds of other travellers. Are Indians good travellers? Do you find from your experience that Indian tourists are in any way different from other ones?
Indians are born multiculturalists, and the Indians one sees travelling are used to speaking four or five languages and navigating several cultures every time they walk down the street in Mumbai or Delhi. They are also trained from birth in some of the rigours of travel—in patience and in flexibility, in other words—are as fluent in English as any traveller on earth and tend to bring a particular energy and engagement that you often don’t find in, say, travellers from China. It’s impossible, and folly, to generalize about travellers, but urban Indians are often travellers from birth, and much less thrown off, say, by New York or Hong Kong than the average American or a visitor from Tokyo, say. Among prominent Indian writers, say, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri—and tens of others—all grew up with many, many different places inside them. It’s no surprise that they were in the perfect time, and place (or places) to hymn into being our new, multinational universe.

What is the best travel book you've read recently? And which is your favourite travel book from before the revolution in travel in the 20th century?
A Crime So Monstrous, by the young American writer Benjamin Skinner, tracing the realities of human trafficking from Haiti to India, does what every great book about place should do: opens the eyes, shakes the conscience and lights up those corners of the world that few of us would dare to inspect first-hand. A truly global work, it shows us the realities that underlie many of our casual pleasures, and reminds us of those truths that affect far more people than (those who) travel on holiday around the globe. After reading it, you cannot look at that red-light street in Romania, or that smiling face in Cambodia, in the same way.

As for classic books, all my books have been written, as readers probably know too well, in the shadow and light of Emerson and Thoreau (who enjoy first word and last in my most recent book, and who offer the epigraphs to at least three other of my works). So, it’s no secret, I fear, that my favourite book of travel is Thoreau’s Walden, which takes us around the world, while never moving more than a mile and a half from its author’s home, which reminds us that true travel takes place in the descrying of new ideas and the entertaining of new horizons—and which asks us, unblushingly, “Why go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar?” Insofar as travel is really about transformation—the only reason ever to leave home—Emerson and Thoreau remind us that the truest and deepest journeys can indeed be found while walking around one’s backyard.

Lastly, what three things would you absolutely want to take with you on any journey?
A good book—Greene, Mistry, Lawrence, Roth—some medicines, and a sense of humour.

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".