On Paul Ginsborg's Democracy: Crisis and Renewal

Democracy: the idea comes from ancient Greece (where it was practised as direct democracy), then languished for aeons, resurfaced in the eighteenth century in a new form (that of representative democracy), made steady progress in the nineteenth century, and then caught fire and swept the field in the twentieth. It is now the dominant vision of the political good; even the most undemocratic regimes in the world utter democratic pieties or aspire for the fig leaf of rigged elections to cover their shame. Democracy rarely fulfils its intrinsic potential, but neither is it corrupted as easily as more utopian systems: it is both fragile and tough. It can be mostly procedural – limited to elections – or it can deeply permeate a society’s thought and everyday life. And though it can seem the most natural and practical of arrangements, yet it also requires a faith in human beings that amounts to a kind of idealism.

Indeed, it is idealism that animates Democracy: Crisis and Renewal, a new book by the historian and political theorist Paul Ginsborg, because, when interpreted statistically, democracy is not in crisis but is flourishing like never before. In 1926, Ginsborg writes, only 29 countries in the world had broadly convincing democratic credentials. But by 2000, 120 of the 192 nation-states of the United Nations could be said to be democratic. Communism, the greatest adversary of liberal democracy in the twentieth century, has collapsed except for one or two tenacious redoubts. Even though various kinds of dictatorship still prosper all over the world, not a day passes without democracy taking a small step forward, whether in China or Cuba.

The crisis, then, that Ginsborg detects in many of the world’s established democracies (among which we should include India), comes from within. And to help us make sense of what may be going wrong and how these troubles have been anticipated at different stages in the history of democratic thought, Ginsborg summons the spirits of two of the greatest modern political thinkers, the nineteenth-century contemporaries John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Although neither man stood for democracy as we understand it now (we must remember that a concept seemingly so self-evident as universal suffrage is a fairly recent reality, and that these men lived under a different democratic sky), and there were many differences between them on the subject, both were integrally involved in the project to make all men and women “active subjects in both politics and society”, and in that this is one of the ideals of democracy they were both democratic. Much of what they had to say in their time with respect to democratic ideas remains relevant to present circumstances.

In Ginsborg’s reading, democracy is being undermined today by a complex of interrelated problems. Firstly (and this is a kind of paradox), liberal democracy has its roots in nineteenth-century European liberalism, which held that every adult citizen deserved, on the one hand, greater autonomy and private freedoms, and on the other, a right to vote and participate in representative government. But in many modern nation-states, politics and the political class have now become excessively professionalised; politicians are seen as being of a different breed from normal citizens. At the same time – and this is perhaps more serious – citizens have increasingly retreated into the private sphere, and are often involved in politics only to the extent of bemoaning its quality. Thus democracy has been “hollowed out”; it is not vigorous, but operates on a kind of autopilot. “Where politics does survive,” writes Ginsborg, “it has become media and personality politics, to be viewed rather than experienced”. Democracy is representative, but not participatory, when ideally it should be both.

Secondly, consumer capitalism has profoundly affected the rhythms and emphases of our lives, which are increasingly organised on a work-and-spend axis. The better-off classes are rich in comforts but often perceive themselves to be poor in time; the logic of choice and self-interest, while beneficial in many ways, has also produced what Ginsborg thinks to be “an extraordinary passivity and disinterest in politics”.

This crisis was foreseen by thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, who wrote in 1819 in his essay “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns”: “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily”. The history of modern democracy is one of the (on some occasions mortal) struggle to expand the circle of enfranchisement to include all adult citizens. Therefore, by taking for granted what has been won for us at great cost, we open the door, however slightly, to a time when we may not have it again.

Lastly, in many of the world’s mature democracies, politics and big money have joined hands, and election spending has spiralled to preposterous levels. This not only makes a charade of democracy’s putative egalitarianism, it also makes it vulnerable to the Marxist critique of the state, which charges it with being the preserve of a particular class and of entrenched economic interests. The “classic liberal distinction between the political and economic spheres”, of the kind maintained by Mill, and today by his more determinedly ideological modern-day followers, can ignore serious issues about the relationship of democracy and economics.

Marx, on the other hand, was prescient in his understanding of how political and economic democracy must go hand in hand, and how, in a capitalist system, the worker is profoundly alienated from both the product of his labour and from himself, in ways that damage him or her and also the larger edifice of democracy (Marx’s diagnosis, though, was more acute than his proposed revolutionary solutions).

Ginsborg presents a number of responses to these issues of democratic destabilisation. Some of the best passages in his book are those which summarise Mill’s thoughts on citizenship as nourished in the soil of democratic freedom and openness. Mill imagined citizens as a group of “active and dissenting individuals”, self-disciplined, independent-minded, nurturing a strong sense of the meaning and worth of their individuality. “He loved eccentrics rather than conformists; he wanted everyone to make up their minds on the basis of information and deliberation.” Democracy had to be rooted in healthy disagreement and debate if it was not to wither, because “Mankind speedily becomes unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it” (We see from such sentences that Mill is so enjoyable not just because of the strength of his thought but also the marvellous rhythms of his syntax).

Although there is much talk now of the relationship between civil society and democracy on the one hand and the individual and democracy on the other, Mill also stressed the responsibilities in democracy of that other unit of social organisation, the family. Although the family in history had often stood for a system of authority, incarnating “the virtues of despotism, but also its vices”, the family might also serve as “the real school of the virtues of freedom”. Ginsborg takes up this theme:

Every family is different and each has its own individuality and history. Yet there can be little doubt that under modern consumer capitalism most families, for the reasons I have outlined, are overwhelmingly conformist (in Mill’s sense of the term) and self-absorbed. They are not, by and large, producers of active and dissenting individuals, nor do they contribute anything but a minimum part of their extraordinary energy and creativity to a public democratic sphere. It is as if, by a sleight of hand, they have been separated from politics. How to break through that separation, to release some of those energies so that they could contribute to the reinvention of democracy, is probably the greatest rebus of modern politics.[...] Families, civil society, and the democratic state need to exist in a mutually reinforcing equilibrium.

And here is Ginsborg again on the subject of individuals, time, and democratic participation:

The question of time in a society which is not time-rich but time-poor, and which is dominated by work-and-spend routines, is a very serious one. [But] it is not that individuals have no time, but that they are not accustomed to making time for the public sphere. Mill hits the nail on the head: “So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and everything that is usual appears natural.”

Putting aside a few hours every week for matters of public interest could quite easily come to seem customary, especially if those who now hold political power in democracies thought such an objective worth of encouragement. Under the honeyed routines of consumer capitalism, to pass a great many hours in hypermarkets and shopping centres has now become quite “natural”. A priori there is nothin to prevent time spent in improving democracy from becoming a habitual part of people’s lives. Such a prospect does not offer material rewards, but quite possibly a greater meaning to life – something which is often deeply felt as lacking today.

Ginsborg highlights innovative citizens’ initiatives around the world, such as a township in Brazil that practices a kind of direct democracy, or a proposal by two political theorists in America for a national “Deliberation Day” before elections to foreground the importance of political debate. He points to how, in our internet age, communication and access to information have been greatly improved for those who are prepared to make productive use of technology, and how global civil society is coming together in extraordinary ways in transnational movements of protest or proposal.

Ginsborg’s book closes with a thrilling dialogue in which the ghosts of Mill and Marx are seen carrying on their running debate from “a cloud somewhere over Europe” (Mill is wearing walking shoes, as he has just returned from a long botanical expedition; Marx has “recently been promoted from Purgatory”, and is carrying a book, which he keeps annotating). They begin to talk, to reflect over mistakes they might have made in the light of current realities; Marx agrees that he made a mistake in interpreting the birth of capitalism as its death throes, and agrees that “the rate of profit does not fall”, while Mill admits that he mistook the virtuous consequences of competition, and “over-estimated the self-righting capacities of the market”.

The best point in their discussions is made by the older man. Just as virtue is proved not by theoretical knowledge of the good but by good actions, says Mill, so too democracy, which we understand to be “virtue in its political guise”, can be established only through regular practice at large and small levels. Ginsborg’s book demands that we be not just subjects but also agents of democracy.

And here is a roundtable of essays on and debates around democracy, moving from larger overviews to more specific angles: "Democracy: a short history" and "Whatever happened to democracy?" by John Keane; "Downloading Democracy" by Robert Conquest; "Democracy and its global roots" by Amartya Sen; "Democracy as a way of life" by Sidney Hook; "Democracy for all?" by James Q. Wilson; "Liberal education and mass democracy" by Leo Strauss; "The essence of democracy: not majority rule" by Minoo Masani"; "Democracy's Global Crisis" by Ralph Peters; "Is voter ignorance killing democracy?" by Christopher Shea; "The myth of the rational voter" by Bryan Kaplan; "Aunt Kobra's Islamic Democracy" by Reza Aslan; "Islamist Parties and Democracy" by Husain Haqqani and Hillel Fradkin; "Identity, Immigration, and Democracy" by Francis Fukuyama; "Democracy's Forgotten Dimension" by Vaclav Havel; and "Reinventing democracy" by Jose Saramago.

And here are two essays each on Marx and Mill respectively: "The poet of dialectics" by Francis Wheen (whose biography of Marx is one of the most entertaining books on politics I have ever read) and "Karl Marx, journalist" by Christopher Hitchens; and "John Stuart Mill" by Richard Reeves (who runs the thinktank Demos and has just published a widely praised biography of Mill) and "The Forgotten Philosopher" by Alan Wolfe.

And lastly, an old post that shows that Mill and Gandhi might have had much to talk about: "Ramin Jahanbegloo on Gandhi's concept of freedom".

Obama becomes President

On the successful culmination of Barack Obama's exhilarating campaign to become the forty-fourth President of the United States of America – a campaign that has reinvigorated the public sphere, restored to citizens a sense of their potential as political agents, and resuscitated the idea of politics itself as a force for and a vision of the good and of political office as one of the highest callings of secular life, ideas without which humanity has no future – here is an old post from May 2007 on Obama's The Audacity of Hope, a work that tells us a great deal about the character of the new President.

Here is Obama's long essay from last year: "Renewing American Leadership".

And three other posts on figures from the past century who practiced a visionary and morally ambitious politics: Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Vaclav Havel.

On Ingo Schulze's New Lives

My review of Ingo Schulze's novel New Lives appeared yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor.

Forough Farrokhzad's Fridays

"And when I gained the road where all are free/ I fancied every stranger frowned at me" run a pair of lines in the nineteenth-century poet John Clare's plangent sonnet "I Dreaded Walking Where There Was No Path". To walk where there was no path, to search for that place where all were free, and to invite society's obloquy was also the fate, or perhaps the destiny, of the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967), who began writing verse in her teens, broke with her marriage at twenty-one, took several lovers and with them notoriety, and, like Clare, eventually did time in a mental institution.

The titles of Forough’s early collections of verse: Asir (Captive), Deevar (The Wall), Osyan (Rebellion) all suggest intensely painful confinement – within family, patriarchy, society, religion, conventional morality – and the bliss and blaze of throwing off those shackles. “I have sinned a rapturous sin/ in a warm enflamed embrace,/ sinned in a pair of vindictive arms/ arms violent and ablaze”, begins her early poem “Sin”, and we are led to wonder if that word “vindictive” is a transferred epithet. That is, the arms that embrace the speaker are not vindictive because of any actual malice on the part of the lover but because of the terrible consequences that already seem poised to pounce, even before the moment of rapture is past.

“In the confines of a four-walled time, our only connection to the world outside is a window,” writes Farrokhzad in her memoir In An Eternal Sunset. “A window towards light, towards the sun. A window on the other side of which is beauty and desire. Without a window how could we bear the darkness that presses itself upon us?” Here is one of Forough’s most resonant poems, “Friday”, which seems to describe a world without that window. The translation is by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, and the place of Friday in Forough’s Iran is something like Sunday in ours:

Friday

Quiet Friday
deserted Friday
Friday saddening like old alleys
Friday of lazy ailing thoughts
Friday of noisome sinuous stretches
Friday of no anticipation
Friday of submission.

Empty house
lonesome house
house locked against the onslaught of youth
house of darkness and fantasies of the sun
house of loneliness, augury and indecision
house of curtains, books, cupboards, picture.

Ah, how my life flowed silent and serene
like a deep-running stream
through the heart of such silent, deserted Fridays
through the heart of such empty cheerless houses
ah, how my life flowed silent and serene.

Although the poem more or less explains itself, among the things worth noting in it is that “serene” appears to be a negative value here: it seems to be a cover for stasis, for submission. This is an impoverished silence and serenity, very different from the real thing. Everyone who has felt found their life or home intolerable at some point – whether through the callousness of the complacent, the condescension of the well-meaning, or the cheerlessness and empty routine that often masquerades as stability and peace – will recognize the mood of Farrokhzad’s Fridays. Many of Forough’s poem enact this movement of dread, the horror of insignificance: “Despite all my thrashing,/ I was sinking like silt/ slowly, slowly,/ in stagnant water, crusting/ the walls of its hole.”

And here is the first half of Forough’s long poem, “Window”, which, from the childlike peep of its opening to the ringing sounds of its crescendo, seems to enact a journey into disillusioned adulthood, an entrapment that the speaker beats back with the refrain “One window is enough for me”:

Window

A window for seeing.
A window for hearing.
A window like a well
that plunges to the heart of the earth
and opens to the vast unceasing love in blue.
A window lavishing the tiny hands of loneliness
with the night’s perfume from gentle stars.
A window through which one could invite
the sun for a visit to abandoned geraniums.

One window is enough for me.

I come from the land of dolls, from under
the shade of paper trees in a storybook grove;
from arid seasons of barren friendships and love
in the unpaved alleys of innocence;
from years when the pallid letters of the alphabet
grew up behind desks of tubercular schools;
from the precise moment children could write
“stone” on the board and the startled starlings took wing
from the ancient tree.

I come from among the roots of carnivorous plants,
and my head still swirls with the sound
of a butterfly’s terror – crucified with a pin to a book.

When my trust hung from the feeble rope of justice
and the whole city tore my heart’s lamps to shreds,
when love’s innocent eyes were bound
with the dark kerchief of law, and blood gushed
from my dreams’ unglued temples,
when my life was no longer anything,
nothing at all except the tick tick of a clock on the wall,
I understood that I must, must, must
deliriously love.

One window is enough for me.

The translation is by Sholeh Wolpé, who has recently published a book of Forough’s poems in translation called Sin. The other bits of Forough I quote here are from this book, and one of the virtues of reading the poems in the chronological order of their composition, which is how Wolpé presents them, is that we sense the growth of the poet and the expanding circle of her compass. 

In the four decades after her untimely death in a car crash, Farrokhzad’s voice and words have seeped out into Iranian and world culture to enjoy what the Italian poet Eugenio Montale memorably termed “the second life of art”, or art as remembered and invoked in human dealings long after the first encounter with it as an aesthetic object. And it has been generative of other art too: I first heard of Forough in 2000 through Abbas Kiarostami’s marvellous film The Wind Will Carry Us, which takes its title from a poem by Farrokhzad of which this line is the ecstatic close (this link leads not just to a translation of the poem but also Kiarostami's revelatory essay "An Unfinished Cinema").

An interview with Sholeh Wolpé in which she discusses the process of translating Forough is here ("Something interesting to note is how even in our written material we refer to Forough Farrokhzad as Forough, not Farrokhzad. Even some scholars refer to her by her first name. To this day she evokes a charming intimacy between herself and the reader. Her poems are intimate at many levels and one cannot help but feel a kind of familiarity with her. After reading her work it is difficult to refer to her as Farrokhzad. She becomes one's own Forough.") and her translation of the long lyric poem "I Pity The Garden" here. 

Forough's short film The House Is Black, shot in a leper colony in 1962, can be seen here. And here is the poet Mimi Khalvati's marvellous poem "On A Line From Forough Farrokhzad".

And some old posts on poets: Constantine Cavafy, Jorge Luis Borges, Nazim Hikmet, Attila Jozsef, Antonio Machado, Dunya Mikhail, William Blake, Salabega, Wislawa Szymborska, and Osip Mandelstam.

Happy Diwali

The Middle Stage flings a couple of unreadable books over its right shoulder, holds up a diya, and wishes all its readers a very happy Diwali.

Poetry as Medicine in Ashvaghosha’s Handsome Nanda

This essay appears in the latest issue of the Indian literary magazine Pratilipi.

Few texts in Indian literature are as pointed and yet as paradoxical as Saundarananda (Handsome Nanda), written in the second century CE by the Buddhist monk Ashvaghosha and recently published in the Clay Sanskrit Library series in a translation by Linda Covill. This vivid and beautiful “conversion narrative” is both a story and a sermon; both a paean to sensual pleasure and a bitter denunciation of the deceptions of sense experience; both a work of literature—rich in metaphor, poetic language, and dramatic counterpoint—and yet an attack on literature from within.
The protagonist of the story, Nanda, is a handsome and pleasure-loving prince, a scion of the king of the Shakyas. Handsome Nanda has an equally gorgeous wife, Sundari; he is also a half-brother of the Buddha, “the Realised One”, who is creating a tumult across India with his revelatory perception of the nature of human suffering. Ashvaghosha's other extant work is a life of the Buddha, the Buddhacharita, and here too an entire chapter of his story is devoted to a recapitulation of the life of the Buddha. In one of the hundreds of metaphors with which this precept-heavy text is strewn, we are told that Buddha is the seer who had “passed over the fathomless sea of faults - which is watered by conditioned existence, which has anxious thoughts for fish, and which is disturbed by waves of anger, desire and fear”, and who wants to take us across too.
Sundari and the Buddha represent, respectively, the two poles of extreme sensuality and spiritual ambition that vie for Nanda. This conflict is realised in the story’s most dramatic scene, in which we see Nanda at home sporting with his wife even though his brother has arrived in the town of his birth to teach the dharma. The two lovers are so rapt in each other’s presence that, we are told, “they rubbed off their cosmetics through caressing each other” (like St. Augustine in the Christian tradition, Ashvaghosha seems to have clearly drunk deeply of the well of pleasure before abandoning it for the cave of austerity).
When the Buddha comes home to visit Nanda, he finds all the housemaids enlisted in this carnival of sensual pleasure: “one woman was grinding body-unguents, another was perfuming clothes, one was preparing a bath, and others were weaving fragrant garlands”. He sees the time is not right for him and leaves, but word of his appearance and abrupt departure reaches Nanda and disturbs him, and he seeks his wife’s permission to seek out his brother. Sundari, tantalising as ever, lets him go on the condition that he return before her make-up has dried. As Nanda makes himself presentable and leaves, we are given this matchless description of a man giddy with indecision and then another who has conquered his own self:

Reverence for the Buddha drew him on, love for his wife drew him back again. He hesitated, neither going nor staying, like a king-goose pushing forwards against the waves. However, once she was no longer in his sight, he came briskly out of the palace, only to hang back again, his heart contracting, at the sound of her anklets. Kept back by his passion for love, and drawn forward by his attachment to dharma, he proceeded with difficulty; being turned around like a boat going upstream on a river.
Then setting out with long strides, he thought “The guru can’t possibly not be gone by now!” and “Perhaps I’ll be able to hug my darling girl, whose love is so special, while her visheshaka is still wet.”
Then on the road he saw him of the ten powers, free from pride even in his father’s city, and with all arrogance similarly gone, stopping everywhere and being worshipped like Indra’s banner in a procession.

Indeed, Nanda’s unfulfilled hope that the guru has disappeared from sight might be seen as a foreboding of what lies in store for him, for in fact this is the last time he is to see his wife. The Buddha, when approached, seeks to rescue his brother from slavery to the senses, and after a brief sermon asks his monks to ordain Nanda “so that he may find peace”.
Weeping copiously, writhing in agony, sighing and grieving at the memory of his wife, Nanda enters the realm of monkhood with his glorious locks are shorn from his head and his fine clothes taken away. Ashvaghosha memorably describes his gloom in cosmic terms: “wearing a faded garment of tree-bark and depressed as a newly-captured elephant, Nanda resembled the full moon moving into the dark half of the month, at the end of the night, daubed with the light of the early morning sun”.
That Nanda is a monk only in shell and not in spirit works to the advantage of Ashvaghosha, for the rest of the text is devoted to the depiction of his conversion in slow, shuffling stages. Burning with sensuality and worldliness, the reprobate Nanda is given the most elaborate working-over by the Buddha and his monks. First he is led forward by false inducements and promises that appeal to his pleasure-seeking nature, then gradually his hopes are disappointed and his illusions stripped away, and he is driven on until he learns to see the truth of the dharma for himself. This dramatic situation allows Ashvaghosha to present an elaborate exposition of the Buddhist view of the self and of suffering, of the cycle of rebirth and the route to liberation, of the tyranny of the senses and the necessity of mindfulness. And of course it is not just Nanda who is being persuaded of the duplicitous nature of “conditioned existence”, but also the reader.
Indeed, the distinctive feature of the text is the intensity of its attack on “the six roving senses” and “the glittering show of sense objects” - the very foundation of our experience of the world. “The village of the senses never has enough of sensory experience, just as the ocean, though rivers perpetually fill it, never has enough water,” preaches the Buddha. “As fluidity inheres in water, solidity in earth, motion in wind, and constant heat in fire, so does suffering inhere in the mind and body. [...] Who could sleep without worry in the world of humankind, ablaze with the fires of death, sickness and aging, any more than in a burning house?”
And the emphasis of Buddhism not on an external deity, law, or commandment but on personal agency, practical action, and self-sufficiency is sounded in the Buddha’s revelatory assertion that “the reason for this suffering during one’s active life in the world is not a God, not nature, not time, not the inherent nature of things, not predestination, not accident, but the host of faults such as desire.” The antidote to this suffering is mindfulness: “The mind unguarded by mindfulness can be regarded as defenseless, like a blind man stumbling over rough ground without a guide. [...] Whatever it is that a person continually thinks about, his mind, through habit, will develop a leaning towards it. Therefore, you must give up what is unwholesome and concentrate on the wholesome…”
A spiritual novice to begin with, even a rebel, Nanda gradually becomes an initiate, then an adept, and finally a realised being himself, a self-conqueror. Dramatically, this is the least interesting section of the text, but Ashvaghosha partially compensates for this by showing Nanda rooting out the essential truths of existence, ascending to revelation, through his own journey of striving and discovery: what the Buddha has already said once, Nanda confirms through his own means and in his own language.
Nanda’s story has a curious double conclusion. One is sounded by the Buddha, who marvels at his accomplishments and asks him to go out into the world and carry his “lantern of learning” among the ignorant. The other is voiced by Ashvaghosha himself. Ashvaghosha declares in the last two paragraphs of the text that, knowing the predilections of his audience, he has deliberately made use of a questionable means to achieve a worthy end, and drawn upon the sweetness of literary form and poetic language to make palatable the austerity of his message. “This composition on the subject of liberation is for calming the reader, not for his pleasure,” he announces:

… It is fashioned out of the medicine of poetry with the intention of capturing an audience whose minds are on other things. Thinking how it could be made pleasant, I have handled in it things other than liberation, things introduced due to the character of poetry, as bitter medicine is mixed with honey when it is drunk.
Seeing that the world generally holds the pleasure of sensory experience uppermost and is resistant to liberation, I, holding liberation to be paramount, have described the truth in the guise of poetry. Knowing this, that part which relates to peace should be carefully extracted from it, not the entertaining part; serviceable gold necessarily comes from ore-born dust.

But which kind of reader is the real object of this moralising message? Is it the lay reader with his mind “on other things”, as claimed by Ashvaghosha? Or could it be that this passage is meant to disarm the Buddhist monks and teachers who were Ashvaghosha’s contemporaries and who may have frowned upon his elaborate depictions of sensuality and indeed his apparent love of language, rhetoric, and metaphor as ends in themselves?
The material character of Ashvaghosha’s text suggests an approach towards worldly and sensory experience more ambiguous than its explicit message, and while Ashvaghosha himself acknowledges and rationalises this, there is something expedient about his logic. Poetry, in this marvellous but apparently reluctant poet’s description, is a kind of addiction and corruption, just like sense experience, yet knowledge of the weakness of human nature has prompted him to take recourse to it to convert the masses. But in doing so Ashvaghosha seems to have supplied an escape clause not just for himself but for others. Why should the reader, even if converted to peace by the narrative, not claim the same immunity as Ashvaghosha, and steep himself in poetry with the intention of extracting the worthy part from it?
And isn’t poetry, heightened language, itself an antidote to conditioned existence and to idle sensory dalliance? Is poetry only a glittering wrapper for the truth, and not a form of truth in itself? Might we not be changed or redeemed by poetry as we might by faith or by right action? Poetry may be cited in Saundarananda as only a vehicle for an answer to the problem of suffering, but form and content are not as easily separated as Ashvaghosha seems to suggest, and there is one condition then that his “medicine of poetry” cannot cure and in fact furthers, which is the love of such sweet-tasting medicine.

Two older posts on other Clay Sanskrit Library titles are here: on Kalidasa's Shakuntala, and Dandin's marvellous pan-Indian adventure story, the Dasakumaracharita (and if you are interested in scholarly literature, a bibliography for this title is here).

And a previous long essay in Pratilipi: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare".

In Pratilipi

I'm pleased as always to see the new issue of the bimonthly Indian literary magazine Pratilipi just out. Pratilipi keeps coming out every two months, while I remain stuck in the same place all year long, writing new drafts of old things. Also, the washing machine broke down yesterday, and I had to soak, scrub and rinse two buckets of clothes.

But I digress. Among the many interesting pieces in the new issue are:

"Knowing For Sure Without Knowing For Certain" by the superb documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra (part of a new section devoted to Indian documentaries introduced by the poet Sridala Swami, whose remark "All anthologies are at once histories and auguries" in this recent review of Jeet Thayil's anthology in Tehelka is one of the most satisfying observations on literature I've read in a while)

Some excerpts from Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers in a Hindi translation by Giriraj Kiradoo

A set of translations by Vinay Dharwadker of four great Hindi poets: Kedarnath Singh, Kunwar Narain, Shrikant Verma, and Dhoomil (Dharwadker has also published a book of very fine translations of Kabir called The Weaver's Songs)

An interview with the Tamil Eelam poet Kasi Anandan by Meena Kandasamy, and some poems of Kasi Anandan in English and Hindi translations

"Not Without Remembrance", an essay by Vyomkesh Shukla on the great shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan

Two poems by Keki Daruwalla, one of which is "Gandhi" (you might also want to read Daruwala's old essay "On Writing in English: an Indian poet’s perspective")

and Rabindranath Tagore’s short story "Ekratri" in an English translation by Arunava Sinha (whose translation of Shankar's Chowringhee was recently awarded the Crossword Book Award 2007 for Indian fiction in translation).

Lastly, I'd like to present my own essay "Poetry as Medicine in Ashvaghosha's Handsome Nanda", which I shall post here in a few days.

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.