Indian poetry in Mint Lounge

For a while now Mint Lounge, the Saturday newspaper for whom I work as a book critic, has been publishing, fairly regularly on its books pages, short poems by some of the best Indian poets at work today, written in a range of forms, from free verse to sonnets and ghazals. Sometimes the paper also publishes an excerpt from new collections or translations of classical literature. The idea is to take English poetry out of the exclusive province of literary and little magazines and out of tiny niches inside bookshops, and to show, by putting it out where a mass audience can find it over their morning coffee, that it may be read for aesthetic pleasure, may elicit a response on the level of both language and music, by just about anybody who can bring himself or herself to slow down and follow the beat of a poem.

Here is a selection of them. The links to the poets lead off to other websites on poetry, or the links to their books, and will allow you to form a small beginner's map of Indian poetry today. "The Herons Have Come" by the Sangam poet Orampokiyar, "New Delhi Love Song" by Michael Creighton, "Moult" by Gieve Patel, "Dogwalker" and "Intimations of Unreality from Recollections of Early Cricket" by Mukul Kesavan, "Not Those" by Ashok Vajpeyi in a translation by Sudeep Sen; "Daybreak" by Sridala Swami, "Identification Marks" by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih; "Ghost Sounds" by Aruni Kashyap, "Still" by Rohit Chopra, "Rome: winter" by Karthika Nair, "War Poetry" by Aseem Kaul, "Distant Gods" by Anjum Hasan, and lastly my own "If I Should Let Every Feeling".

And two old posts: "An Indian poetry special in The Literary Review" and "Tigers in the poetry of William Blake and Salabega".

A long interview in Interjunction

This week I have a long interview, in which I discuss Arzee the Dwarf, writers I love, reading, and The Middle Stage, up on the web journal Interjunction here.

Remembering Jose Saramago

The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, passed away last week. I first came across his work as a student in England in 2000, when I bought most of his novels, in beautiful paperback editions published by The Harvill Press (now Harvill Secker, and not quite the same thing), in a garage sale. They seemed to me to express a wholly original sensibility and a fruitful impatience with many fossilised novelistic conventions, and this taught me a great deal. The last Saramago novel I read, and delighted in writing about, was the wondrous Death At Intervals, in which he gave body, life and voice to that spectre that flits in the margins of our consciousness all our lives, death.

Here is an old post on one of Saramago's most charming books, "Jose Saramago's Unknown Island", and here is a link to his lovely meditation on literature delivered when he won the Nobel Prize in 1998, "How Characters Became the Masters and The Author Their Apprentice" ("Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink...").

On Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows

A slightly different version of this piece appeared last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph.

Any history of twentieth-century Russia must open by marking and comparing two groups of citizens within the former Soviet Union. There were, on the one hand, those Russians who adapted their lives successfully to the dogma and paranoia of the perennially looming, all-consuming Soviet state, and on the other, those who fell afoul of it and were made to serve in labour camps, jailed, or killed.

As Vasily Grossman’s scathing and sorrowful novel Everything Flows shows, these two groups were not independent of each other. Often a man might make a move up in his own life by writing a “denunciation” that suspected, and merely by alleging went a long way towards proving, the conspiracy or treason of another.

People thus feared not only the state, but also their own neighbours. In the “people’s state”, the most innocent words were sounded in whispers, and the simplest freedoms disabled. Everything Flows, which was still being revised by Grossman when he died in 1964, is an unforgettable examination of both the perverse machinations and the moral agony of a hollowed-out humanity.

Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist of Everything Flows, Ivan Grigoryevich, leaves society a young man and returns elderly, bowed, and perplexed. His exile, though, has not been one of sleep, but of thirty years in Stalin’s Gulag for a trivial offence. His life has been shredded by the state: his mother is dead, his lover long ago married someone else.

In a striking passage, he goes to Moscow to see his cousin, the prospering scientist Nikolay Andreyevich. Nikolay offers him a confused welcome, while his wife Maria Pavlovna worries that “if Ivan did use their bath, they’d never be able to get the bath properly clean again, neither with acid, nor with lye.” That last qualifying phrase about acid and lye might have been left out by a lesser writer, but it is precisely this that brilliantly brings alive Maria Pavlovna’s pinched hospitality. The detail is cleanly double-sided, managing simultaneously to be both a justification and a condemnation of Maria Pavlovna's conduct. We begin to see how fiction can really be made to work in a layered, mind-expanding way.

Grossman was a bold, unconventional writer, and the form of his book echoes its title, ingeniously employing a variety of narrative lenses as it winds in and out of the corridors of a society feeding upon itself. One chapter unforgettably describes the days of a young mother in a labour camp; another is a meditation on a thousand years of Russian history and the country’s “slave soul”; and a third supplies an intriguing study of Lenin’s personality. This is a genuinely visionary work of art, and a worthy sequel to Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate.

An excerpt from Everything Flows, published in the Russian-English literary journal Cardinal Points, is here. A long interview with Grossman's translator Robert Chandler, whose services to Russian literature are immense (he is also the translator of works by Pushkin, Nikolai Leskov, and Andrey Platonov) is here.

And some other essays on Russian literature: on Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat", "A Kiss in Chekhov", "The sweet voice and harsh words of Osip Mandelstam", "On Hamid Ismailov's The Railway", and on EE Cummings's Russian travelogue Eimi.

And two longer essays on what the work of translation means for literature in general and for Indian literature in particular are, respectively, here and here.

On The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction 2

Curses that last for generations, haunted houses occupied by flickering apparitions both good and evil, the human body invaded by restless spirits, skulls collected from burning ghats, murderous voodoo and protective lemons, patients who use the art of “Persian sorcery” to kill their doctors, voluptuous damsels both chaste and randy, killings by the dozen and a fair amount of rapes – all these perfectly routine, humdrum activities comprise the subject matter of the stories of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction 2. Like its predecessor, which came out to warm reviews in 2008, this book too picks up some of the racy stories from the cheap books and magazines with lurid covers of the world of Tamil pulp fiction, and brings them over to English in a splendidly designed and weighty paperback.

Every story in the world possesses a plot, or what the literary theorist Gary Saul Morson calls “narrativeness”. This is a quality of moving forward or backward in the time-field of the story, and a dramatisation of the contingency of life, whereby we experience the pleasure of story (even when we know, for instance, that it is going to have a happy ending) by contemplating “the excess of possibilities over actualities” set up by the writer. Will the young prince die because of the curse, or will he find some way of beating it? What will happen when this family visits the old dilapidated house on the banks of the river? We want to know, and we read on.

In genre fiction, or pulp fiction, we might say that this quality of narrativeness, understood in a limited but effective way as meaning narrative speed (as encapsulated in the word “pageturner”), is privileged over all the other aspects of storytelling, such as rich and subtle language, close insight into the psychology of individuals, manipulations of point of view, or even a refusal to bring a story to a finished, tied-up close. Because of this, pulp fiction is often the site of one of the guiltier pleasures of reading, that of skipping. The eye often leaps across two or three paragraphs to sneak a peek at what has happened, because we can’t wait to know. When this happens, we might say that the story is a success on its own terms – the writer has drawn us in.

Certainly this feeling of being gripped by narrative pleasure and curiosity is often evoked by the first and longest story chosen by the translator Pritham K Chakravarthy, Indra Soundar Rajan’s “The Palace of Kottaipuram.” This tells the story of conspiracy and intrigue over several generations on a samasthanam, or feudal princely estate, not far from Madurai. Soundar Rajan gives us a charming pair of protagonists: the young and good-hearted regent Visu (cursed, like all the men in his line, to die before the age of thirty) and his smart and sexy girlfriend Archana, whose physical charms are always emphasised (“Archana’s bout of laughter ended with a jiggle of her firm breasts”). Archana and Visu begin to suspect that the curse might not be as fixed in the supernatural realm as it appears, and thereby set the story in motion.

Also prominent on the feudal estate are the Noorukudis, a tribe of bonded labourers who have been bound to, and sometimes preyed upon by, the royal family for centuries. Soundar Rajan loves the conventions of crime fiction, of the good guys enwebbed in dangers of which they have no comprehension (“Far away, on the balcony of the top floor, a pair of eyes was watching them”). But the complex social structure and history set up by him means that the story is always both advancing and expanding.

Overall, though, the new anthology is a disappointment when compared to the first volume. More than one story of the seven chosen is just a meaningless pile-up of blood and gore. Not only are the characters as flimsy as playing cards – something we accept – but often they have very little agency either. The evil spirits that invade their worlds and do gruesome things to them (thereby stimulating or titillating the reader) are finally, and a little too easily, trounced just in the nick of time by other spirits, or by the protection of some powerful goddess or deity. This is just a lazy way of writing, happy to feed off a larger attitude in the culture that believes that there is a divine hand behind everything and that any crisis requires a puja and a mantra to be solved.

One might say these are merely the conventions of the genre and a sign of how it has its ear to the ground, responding to the religiosity of the culture to which these books are addressed. But, no matter the circumstances, it is always disappointing to see stories take the path of least resistance in this fashion. Only Indra Soundar Rajan’s story offers some critique of blind faith and superstition. A tribal woman in his story is suddenly possessed by a vengeful spirit, blurts out a number of prophecies, and collapses, a small streak of blood seeping from her mouth. We are told: "The women in the crowd rushed forward, each taking a spot of the blood and applying it as vibhuti on their foreheads." Later Archana discovers that the "possession" was merely a charade organised by the conspirators in the palace, the better to ensure that they have their way. It is people like those women in the crowd, we realise (as a result of this small observation made at the time of the incident by the narrator) who ensure that these acts of theatre carry the force of supernatural revelation.

The spectrum of human emotions on display in this volume is very small, as if the writers have worn out their sympathies churning out hackwork. Nowhere in this volume is there the tenderness, the realism, or the insight into a troubled heart of a story like Pushpa Thangadorai’s “My Name Is Kamala”, which tells the story of a South Indian prostitute’s attempt to escape from a northern brothel, from Volume 1. Women are seen, whether benignly or in a matter of fact way, as if this were but natural, as sex objects. Again, this may be how pulp fiction generally sees the fairer sex (it seems somehow right to use this cliche), so it is pointless to ask for a more developed understanding of gender issues. What is more interesting, rather, is that for all their apparent coolness and disregard of conventional morality, these stories can't bring themselves to fully embrace the violence and savagery of their material.

In Rajesh Kumar’s “Hello, Good Dead Morning", we see a young woman, Nadia, a blue film and then, aroused, sexually exploiting a visiting technician by threatening to foist a rape charge upon him if he resists. Nadia later is given her comeuppance for this immoral behaviour when she is herself sexually assaulted: suddenly abducted, drugged, and raped on camera. As this scene is pictured, the writer suddenly steps back from the lurid world he has so enthusiastically set up (giving it far more attention that the murder that, when solved, ends the story), and says only that the rapists were “lying on either side of her, toying with her body, strumming it like a rudra veena.” Why this coy, romanticising, falsifying description of something so horrific? Why is Rajesh Kumar so shy of saying, "They fucked her brutally one after the other"?

Now that the novelty value of Tamil pulp fiction in translation has receded, it is harder to see feel so enthusiastic about this second offering of work from his universe. It may be that these stories need a supporting extra-literary narrative – that of the great fame of the authors in Tamil Nadu, the vast number of books they have written, the millions of copies sold, the heat and excitement of this publishing sub-culture – for an English-reading audience to believe in their magic. But surely stories which are intrinsically fluent and gripping should shake off such a crutch once we enter their worlds. This, one finds, is not the case. Despite their sensational subject matter and Chakravarthy’s idiomatic, confident translations, there is just too much narration, dialogue and plotting that is dull, simplistic, and unskilled in Tamil Pulp Fiction 2.

And here is an old post on another Indian work of pulp fiction: Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist.

Vijaydan Detha: between the folktale and the short story

Every reader of literature makes a conceptual distinction between a folktale and a short story. Folktales have protagonists who are often generic, distinguished by their birth (a prince) or their profession (a potter). In the world of the folktale, creatures change form or come back to life from the dead, the characters are buoyed by boons or buffeted by curses, and good usually wins over evil in a way that is narratively satisfying.

The short story is a more modern form, and can be seen both a response and a rebuke to the folktale. It privileges psychology and interiority, believing that the drama of the human mind is just as striking as that of worldly action. It also disdains magic, although it frequently invents fantastical and imaginative premises of its own. Morally, the short story is not committed to upholding virtue or goodness; narratively, it is not committed to always finding a clear resolution. A folktale is something that can be repeated and retooled; a short story, if its essence is to be kept, can only be read, privately or aloud, because it is the linguistic creation of an individual imagnation.

Can a piece of narrative prose then be both a folktale and a short story? To have done so seems to be one of the achievements of the octogenarian Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha. As Detha’s splendid American translator, Christi Merrill (who works on Detha in tandem with the poet, folklorist and translator Kailash Kabir, who has himself translated Detha's works into Hindi), observes in her introduction to Chouboli and Other Stories, Detha’s writing involves both conservation and creation, notation and invention.

For decades, as part of the work his organisation called the Rupayan Sansthan, Detha has been bringing together, as AK Ramanujan did, all the folktales he found told around him, and writing them up in the same language – Rajasthani – rather than the Hindi of which Rajasthani is often considered a poor cousin, thereby preserving and dignifying not just a corpus of oral literature but also the language in which it has been passed down over time. Chouboli asks us to understand it as a double act of translation: first by Detha from oral Rajasthani into the written, and then by Merrill and Kabir from the written Rajasthani into English.

Many of these stories retain a trace of their origins in performance – the presence of an audience is implied in them in a way that written texts, aimed at the single private reader, are not. Merrill begins one story with a chougou, or a nonsensical rhyme intended to put listeners into a mood for storytelling. Some stories also make mention of the hunkara, or "the grunts and hmms of approval that turn a telling into a two-way communication, a community event."

"Just as eyes look more alluring outlined with coal, and a brow looks prettier decorated with a tiki in sindur red, so is a story better told with hunkara," declares the narrator of the cycle of stories called "Chouboli", in which a prince (actually a young woman in disguise) wins a haughty princess's hand with the power of his stories, which he tells in isolation, with only the princess as an audience, but with many objects around him, such as beds and necklaces, offering the hunkaras that send the story bounding forward. Many of the stories begin not with some significant fact about a character or event, but with some remark or claim about the nature of storytelling itself. "Nothing happens to a story if all you do is listen," begins the story "A True Calling". "Nothing happens if all you do is read, or memorize word for word. What matters is if you make the heart of the story a part of your life. This story is one of those."

At the same time, Detha likes filling out the oral stories of his culture – stories about princes and princesses, cunning thieves and shape-shifting tricksters, who in a modern scheme would qualify as "flat" characters – with realistic touches and literary flourishes of his own, making them a reflection on manners, morals, and human nature that is recognisably the work of an individual mind. When the narrator of a story says that "There's nothing in the world more sacred and more wonderful than freedom", that is recognisably an emphasis of the writer.

The other great pleasure of these stories, for the English reader in particular, is the little swirls of local and proverbial detail folded into their situations. When a group of men each renounce a particular food, "someone gave up touri root, another kaddu squash, and a third cucumber"; a jeweller fascinated by a female form fashions "a set of thick mothiyou bracelets for each of her wrists and churau armlets to slide above her elbows." A character is reprimanded for picking on somebody without reason with this proverb: "When the potter isn't getting along with his wife, it's the donkey's ears he pulls."

Merrill prudently does not bother to find (inevitably distorting) English equivalents for words like "leela", leaving us to confront directly the connotations of a line like "The leelas of wealth are certainly most unusual." Ramanujan thought that the folktale was infinitely adaptable, “a travelling metaphor that finds a new meaning with each telling”, and in Detha’s work the folktale sporadically seems to find in itself the energy to find not just a new meaning but a new self.

Certainly, in the best of these stories, "Duvidha" or “The Dilemma” (filmed by Amol Palekar as Paheli in 2005), a human predicament is so convincingly portrayed that we slow down our reading, wanting to savour the complexity of the situation. A pair of newlyweds are seen returning to the man’s village. They stop to rest beneath a tree, where a ghost resides. The ghost is so taken by the girl’s beauty that he falls in love with her. Strangely though, the husband, who should be experiencing something similar for his wife, is so caught up in the mercantile mindset of his community (Detha explicitly says he is a bania) that he can think only of trade and profit. Shortly after, he sets out on a journey of five years because it is an auspicious time for business.

The ghost, still pining, sees the man heading away, engages him in conversation and learns of his story, and decides to take his form and replace him in the household he has left behind. But he is so much in love with the girl that he cannot bring himself to be duplicitous with her: he confesses everything. In turn, the woman, who has always been seen as an object and without desires of her own, cannot bring herself to reject this most extraordinary love from the beyond. The ghost and his beloved live as man and wife in the community for four years, when suddenly the real husband comes home. “All the wealth in the world cannot bring back time past,” writes Detha, and his story appears to side with those people who value time and human relationships over material values.

Although they are frequently diverting, not all the stories in Chouboli work so well. In "The Dilemma", the ghost finds that he is in such a difficult situation that he has to "walk the fine edge between truth and untruth as skillfully as wise Yudhistir himself", but between the folktale and the short story there is not a fine edge but often a yawning gap, and this is not so easily traversed. While these stories are often diverting, sometimes there is only so far a folktale can go, and to a modern sensibility some of the characters can seem too flat. Even so, this is definitely narrative work worth experiencing, especially when complemented by the insights of Merrill’s own introductory essay, on the work of translation and on the possibilities of an Indian English that contains words and concepts from other Indian languages. “Armies march to the beat of drums,/ stories, to the rhythms of ohs and hmms”, goes one sing-song phrase or chougou in the book, and there are certainly many moments worthy of ohs and hmms in Chouboli.

Many of the interpretative and linguistic cruxes of Detha's work are explained by Merrill in her essay "What Is A Translator's True Calling?" And here are two of the stories in the book: "A True Calling" and "Untold Hitlers".

A larger overview of recent Indian literature in translation is here.

Bastar tribals and Indian Maoists in Satnam's Jangalnama

Deep inside the forests of Bastar in southern Chattisgarh live a mass of Indian citizens – tribals – who speak a tongue that bears no resemblance to the major Indian languages; subsist on broken rice, salt, dried fish and roots; have no gods or religion in the sense that has now become normative, and have no comprehension either of many basic axioms of democratic politics and market economics. As soon as we look at them, we begin to misunderstand and patronise them: their minds are almost impossibly foreign, and in popular discourse they are mostly referred to in a pejorative way. They occupy territories rich in mineral and forest resources, and yet are themselves desperately poor.

In and around these tribals, there exists in these jungles a shadowy but substantial force of guerrillas, the Maoists, including both men and women, non-tribals and tribals. The Maoists, or Naxals, seethe at the neglect of the Gonds by the Indian state, believe that the rapacity of capitalism is inimical to the forests and the tribal way of life and advocate "an alternative mode of production", think that Indian democracy is a sham, and are seriously committed to the idea of an armed revolution that will overthrow the Indian state. They have seized control of much of the forest in Chattisgarh, and now run a parallel government of sorts there with the support – sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced – of the tribals.

Finally, alongside these two presences in the jungle, there is a significant absence: that of the Indian state – spoken of internationally as a rising superpower, but present locally only in a severely attentuated and debilitated form, and uninterested in implementing its own legislation on matters like tribal community rights over forest resources, such as the Recognition of Forest Rights Act of 2006. It has none of the attributes of efficiency, accessibility, neutrality and trustworthiness that are minimally to be expected of it, and has over time, by its own dreadful avarice and callousness, lost its moral claim to the allegiance of those in its domain. The fascinating story of these three forces is told in the greatest detail, from a point of view sympathetic to the first two and hostile to the third, by the Punjabi writer Satnam in Jangalnama, his lacerating memoir of a few months in the forest in 2002.

It is the squads of the Maoist militia who control and defend the jungle, and is through them that Satnam gains access to the tribals. Much of the time in Jangalnama, the writer is seen walking, sometimes two or three days at a time, accompanying squads of young Maoists who are always on the move, carrying messages or supplies. Some guerrillas are tribals, some are not; but there is not between them the division and hierarchy that is characteristic of these interactions in other spheres of Indian social, political and economic life. Whatever may be said of the Maoists, they at least see the tribals as human beings, and grant them a dignity that the machinery of government has not. By walking in their wake, Satnam is able to to personally experience the enormous physical hardship and sacrifice of their lives, as also their sense of community and fraternity, and the ardour of both their hate and love.

But it is in the depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet. They love to sing and to dance, but never individually. Theirs is still to a large extent a pre-modern “collective culture” that is, on the one hand, seen by "civilised society" (this phrase almost always appears in ironical quote marks in Jangalnama) as subhuman, and on the other, is now caught up with the very different, highly theorised and ideological, collective culture of the guerillas.

For the tribals, writes Satnam, Delhi does not evoke the same scenes and suggestions that it might for someone in the city. "Dilli is only a word associated with government, and to them, government means greedy contractors, repressive police, displacement and harassment." In one of the most scathing passages in the book, he charges:

The jungle is rich in medicinal plants and herbs, but the medicines made from these never reach the inhabitants of the jungle. ...The inhabitant of the jungle is not part of the market because he does not have money. If the ailing people do not have money, their only cure is death. ... The establishment isn't concerned with human life; it is there to sell contracts – contracts for exploiting jungles, for mining, building roads and hospitals, promoting private education. In fact, it doesn't even shy away from giving out government on contract: whichever faction bids the highest for dishonesty will capture power.

In contrast, the Maoists have at least built some basic infrastructure, set up rudimentary health facilities, offered assistance with farming and irrigation, and defended, even if with a gun, the tribal rights over "jal, jangal aur zameen" (water, the forest, and land). Satnam's portraits of some of the Maoists he meets are very vivid, humanising: Lachakka, a young female guerrilla who ran away from an oppressive marriage; Narang, an elderly revolutionary who wants first of all to improve the material life of tribals by setting up new systems of agriculture and fishery. When he writes of the radicalisation of Basanti, a tribal girl, that "from life experience she has gained a simple and clear understanding of what justice is, how power corrupts it, and the nexus between injustice and power", we recognise this anger because we know ourselves the truth of the world around us.

But as a group, can the Maoists really be trusted in the long run? How can one repose more than a limited, skeptical faith in a formation which self-consciously applies a vocabulary and a jargon of a Chinese communist, making reference, as Rohini Hensman points out in a recent essay, to classes of people and social conditions which often have no real relevance to Indian life? What about the history of successful civil resistance movements worldwide, especially in the twentieth century, running parallel to the bloody battles of communism? Satnam writes that the guerrillas devote some time each day to reading and studying, and that "almost every guerrilla has a pen in his pocket." But much as they may venerate the Lal Salaam and the Little Red Book, one feels that these warriors for a more just world might also do well to have a look at The Black Book of Communism.

In one incident, Satnam describes a massive political rally in the jungle organised by the Maoists:

Dressed in colourful attires, decked with horns of nilgai and peacock feathers on their heads, the people gathered on the grounds to the steady beat of a drum. ...Carrying banners, flags, and placards, the long column began marching peacefully through the jungle to the sound of drums. A guerrilla squad was accompanying them. There was no claos, no clamour. No government officials, no police, no bystanders. Journalists and press reporters, some with cameras, sound system technicians, and a few teachers had come from the town. ...In those jungles of Bastar alone, more anti-American protests must have been raised that in all of India...

An anti-American rally in the heart of the forest! As an example of a growing political awareness among the tribals, a wish to understand the processes at work in the wider world, this would be an impressive and warming spectacle. But, as Satnam tells us at another point, "I found out that most inhabitants of the jungle had only recently heard, for the first time, the names of Bush, Vajpayee, Musharraf and Afghanistan. The war had introduced these names to them as well as put them in the 'league of traitors.'" But what kind of perception of villainy is this? Can it really be respected? The tribals seem to be puppets moved by the doctrinal fervour of the Maoists, repeating the names they are given. When asked at the rally to come forward and utter words of support for a resolution condemning the American invasion of Afghanistan, "many refused to get up from their places, some spoke up from their own seats, others just shook their heads and tried to hide themselves in the darkness." Satnam's report on the tacit alliance between the Maoists and tribals yields some strange and anachronistic scenes, testimony to a new kind of skewed power relations and an ideological zeal gone overboard.

As with any work of passionate advocacy, there are certain things that Jangalnama leaves out. There is always a guerrilla squad accompanying Satnam, so it is likely that he cannot see very much more than what he is shown. Otherwise, he would have some sense that the guerrillas themselves are guilty of more excesses, whether it is violence against dissenting tribals or compromises with contractors and businesses, than his book allows; these charges are not just establishment counter-propaganda. Again, it is not just the guerrillas, but also many individuals and organisationals in Indian civil society, who are agitating for a more just treatment of the tribals. So, no matter what his problems with "civil society", it is an insult to many within it to treat it as one homogenous, lackadaisical, and ideologically slavish group. Rather, it is Satnam who, perhaps for good reasons of his own, appears to have lost faith in the possibilities of democratic protest. At one point he writes that if the anti-Tehri and anti-Narmada Dam protest movements had taken up arms like the Maoists have, these battles would not have been lost in the maze of complicity and corruption comprising the legislature, the executive, and even the judiciary.

Yet, if the first principle of a democracy is that citizens should understand the needs and realities of those who are most different from them, then this is a book that, even though it rejects Indian democracy, genuinely opens up such an extended passage of engagement. "Is there no option except to pick up the gun?" Satnam asks a Maoist. "Had there been one," he answers, "there would have been no need to pick it up." That these are the last words of the book, when the placement of this exchange would have been more logical almost anywhere else, gives Jangalnama a sense not of a resolution but a lingering ambivalence, as if there is more thinking left to be done. There is an sound in Jangalnama that is neither the desperation and puzzlement of the tribal nor the wrath and ideological obstinacy of the guerrilla, but something else: a sad, disillusioned, morally lucid and disquieting anger that any reader would do well to experience, even if finally reject.

And some links to other essays: "Social Banditry" by Ramachandra Guha; "Bastar, Maoism and Salwa Judum" by Nandini Sundar; Arundhati Roy's recent "Walking With The Comrades", to my mind a much more cloying and less persuasive piece of embedded journalism than Satnam's, worth studying for such curiosities as the repeated and romanticising use of the word "beautiful" ("We walk through some beautiful villages. Every village has a family of tamarind trees watching over it, like a clutch of huge, benevolent, gods. Sweet, Bastar tamarind. By 11, the sun is high, and walking is less fun. We stop at a village for lunch. Chandu seems to know the people in the house. A beautiful young girl flirts with him.He looks a little shy, maybe because I’m around. Lunch is raw papaya with masoor dal, and red rice. And red chilli powder. We’re going to wait for the sun to lose some of its vehemence before we start walking again. We take a nap in the gazebo. There is a spare beauty about the place."); "Heading For a Bloodbath" by Rohini Hensman; "Targeting Naxalism", a special issue of the magazine Pragati; "Winning By Out-Governing" by Michael Spacek; "The Real Solution For Naxalism" by Abheek Barman; "How Many Deaths Before Too Many Die" and "Death On The Margins" by Shoma Chaudhury.

Update, May 24: And the fresh outbursts of Naxal violence in the last week, in which civilians were targeted for the first time because they happened to be travelling with special police officers or SPOs, some more reactions: "Breaking The Mistrust in Chhatisgarh" by Nandini Sundar, "The Dangers of Playing Footsie with Maoists" and "Bleeding Heart Cynics" by K Subrahmanyam ("In states where the sections of the political class feel that in order to sustain their votebanks and siphon off development funds disturbed conditions are to their advantage, it will be difficult to eliminate Maoism without addressing misgovernance and its offshoot, bureaucratic corruption"), and "No military solutions for Maoism" by Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar.

Things I've Been Reading: Vajpeyi, Reeck and Ahmed, Perur, and Nair

Here are some essays I've been reading recently in the field of Indian literature:

"Crisis In The [Indian] Classics" by the historian Ananya Vajpeyi, which mourns the moribund state not just of Sanskrit scholarship in India, but that of scholarship in all our classical languages ("For...India to forfeit its command over language, lose its voice, forget its traditions, abandon its vast inheritance of thousands of years of learning, reflection, metaphysical and aesthetic achievement, throw away its greatest wealth of knowledge and spirit for want of a few good schools, decent libraries, and spaces for the work of pedagogy to carry on undisturbed, is a shame on all of us.")

Vajpeyi argues that "Without our words, we are nothing", and that we sometimes ignore how we are constituted by language as much as by religion, race or state. Among the initiatives that are working against this tide of neglect and potential oblivion is the Clay Sanskrit Library, which included over fifty volumes of ancient Sanskrit texts in translation before closing down last year.

Vajpeyi's essay ends with a bit of good news: the establishment, through a generous grant from the Murty family, of a Murty Classical Library of India, which will make available, from 2013 onwards, texts in translation not just from Sanskrit but many other Indian classical languages (such as the Sangam literature of ancient Tamil Nadu, some of which is also available in an excellent new anthology of translations by ML Thangappa called Love Stands Alone).

In India, CSL titles can be bought directly off the site of Motilal Banarsidass, the Indian distributor (some titles are here, here and here). Two books I've enjoyed greatly on this list are Dandin's Dasakumaracharita and Ashvaghosha's Saundarananda.

"Manto's Life in Bombay", an essay by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad that gives us one of Urdu literature's brightest lights out and about in the city that funded his brilliant stories ("In 1936 Manto arrived in Bombay; he was twenty-four years old. Nazir Ludhianvi had called him there to work at the Clare Road offices of his weekly, The Painter, and Manto slept in the paper’s offices until he had enough money to rent a room in a squalid tenement nearby — a two-story building with holes in its roof, forty narrow rooms, and only two bathrooms, neither of which had a door"). See also Manto's entertaining essay "Why I Don't Go To The Movies" ("After working in some rinky-dink film companies, I finally found a job at a well-known studio that made accomplished films. I worked there as a writer for four years and in the process slowly laid to rest my interest in watching films. The entire story of this burial is long and drawn-out, but I have only several columns in which to recount a number of anecdotes...")

"Paperback Messiah", a long, detailed and stimulating analysis of Chetan Bhagat's books, his themes, and his readership by Srinath Perur ["Great or not, Bhagat’s signal achievement lies in having unearthed a staggering lode of new readers, people who did not previously find their realities reflected in literature. At least some of them have gone on to read books other than Bhagat’s. His novels, at their best, are entertaining and allow readers glimpses of their lives at a remove. At other times they can send out mixed messages. His columns are far more direct and cogent: topics he has written about include India’s inability to harness talent, a call for a moderate Marathi voice, a letter to Gandhi on his birthday from India’s youth (that ends with “We hope you had a good one up there”) and a call for relinquishing the dynastic hold on Indian politics.]

"Many Vibes of Writers", a piece in The Hindu by Vijay Nair about the different kinds of Indian writers there are, which once again commends Bhagat's books, their direct storytelling, and their lack of pretension, and then moves to a denunciation of another group of writers:

That respect is lacking when it comes to a particular breed of writers who have already styled themselves as literary writers. These are writers whose works come with the coded message 'take me seriously.' And the reason they are saying this and have deluded critics into echoing the same is because these are writers who give the impression of being erudite and scholarly. They are writers because they know their Rushdie and Grass. They can give intelligent interviews and most times what they say in their interviews is more interesting than what the reader has to plod through in their works. While writers like Bhagat and Pal seem to write because they have stories to tell and they enjoy writing, there are writers who seem to write because they have read other critically acclaimed writers and want to write like them.

Among the many problems with this passage is that, even as it masquerades as a call for a better literature, it actually betrays a peculiarly anti-intellectual and anti-literary stance, making no distinction between those who "give the impression of being erudite and scholarly" and those who may really be so. Every phrase contains some peculiar assumption or smear. It is apparently presumptuous for "literary" writers either to take themselves seriously or to want others to take them seriously. But I would imagine even Bhagat would like to be taken seriously; indeed one of Nair's problems with Bhagat's detractors is that they seem to refuse to take him seriously.

In Nair's estimation, Indian writers read the great world novels just so that they can then imitate those models. But how is one to be a writer of any worth without reading the greats? Indeed, since all writers are only writers because of a love of reading, why should they limit one's reading for any reason, or have to apologise for reading the best books they can? It never seems to occur to Nair that writers might read books, and write books, principally for themselves, to satisfy a personal standard of ambition and expectation.

In Nair's view, even if an Indian writer has something intelligent to say about literature ("They can give intelligent interviews...") this is pretentious too, and inevitably a smokescreen for dull and derivative work that ends up "deluding critics". It is worth thinking about the intelligence of any argument that implies that a situation may be improved if only people would take the trouble to be less and not more intelligent.

What is most telling about this essay is that, although it does not hesitate to applaud particular writers who Nair feels have been unjustly traduced (which seems to me a merit of the piece), it offers no specifics about books, writers, or passages it considers fraudulent or grandiose. Why not actually bring up examples of this kind of work so that we may see what he means in the particular and not in the general? What looks like a show of critical bravado is really an act of intellectual cowardice: the writer would rather not make any enemies, and prefers to flap away from behind the large screens of insinuation and flaccid generalisation.

Just as telling are the binaries with which the piece begins to lay out the argument. The idea that "The fiction of ideas is literary fiction and the fiction of emotions is popular fiction. One evokes thoughts [sic] and the other feelings" is so shallow and simplistic that even bringing it up to declare its inadequacy, as Nair does, works only to cripple the discussion from the very outset.

The slack and hackneyed language of Nair's piece is itself a telling comment on what kind of language and literature the writer values. Why, for instance, do writers never just write books, but always for some reason "pen" them? ("I have read the first novel Bhagat penned many years ago...Thanks to the immense popularity the four books he has penned to date have enjoyed...") Nair's remarkably bland and unexceptionable conclusion ("Maybe it is a good thing for a writer to be well read and also have a great story to tell" – does such an idea really require to be let out through a "maybe"?) suggests that, while his piece may certainly evoke thoughts, they are thoughts that others have to improve or complete if they are to be at all defended.

News of two books: Arzee the Dwarf, and India: A Traveler's Literary Companion

Arzee the Dwarf was recently shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award. The prize finally went to the Australian writer Glenda Guest for her novel Siddon Rock.

Arzee will be out in a paperback edition with a new cover later this year. Some reviews of the novel are here: India Today, Outlook, Tehelka, and Interjunction. An excerpt from Chapter 2 of the book is here.

And my second book, an anthology of Indian fiction called India: A Traveler's Literary Companion, is now ready, and will be out in America in June from Whereabouts Press. In a way, the book is an extension of the work of literary appreciation you see here on The Middle Stage, and might be thought of as a short introduction to the diverse pleasures of Indian literature reflective of my own reading and tastes (which is all that any anthologist can bring to his or her book).

Each story in the book is set in a different part of the country, and is absorbed not just with character and narrative but also with the depiction of place and landscape. The stories employ a number of narrative modes: not just realist (itself a very broad school) but also fabulist, folkloric, and historical. The streets of the city, the sea, the village pond, the railways, the ancient monument, even the zoo – these are some of the Indian sites and character-worlds of the stories, each given a strong local incarnation.

The anthology is divided almost evenly between Indian fiction in English and fiction from the other literatures of India, including translations from seven languages alongside works by Indian writers in English. Although by no means exhaustive (it is a short book, and limited to the same size as the other volumes in the series), it features stories from a timespan of over a hundred years in Indian literature, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. The book has a foreword by Anita Desai, and among the writers in it are Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Kunal Basu, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Qurratulain Hyder, Phanishwarnath Renu, Githa Hariharan, Nazir Mansuri and Anjum Hasan.

An interview with Rajmohan Gandhi

The work of Rajmohan Gandhi, one of India’s premier historians, offers one of the most comprehensive and variegated views generated by any writer of the political landscape and major thought currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Gandhi is the author of biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Ghaffar Khan, and C. Rajagopalachari, of a study of the ideas of revenge and forgiveness in South Asian history, and a book on the intellectual world and existential dilemmas of Indian Muslims.

Gandhi’s new book, A Tale of Two Revolts, is set both home and away. It is a comparative study of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (sometimes termed India’s first independence movement) and the American Civil War of the 1860s, in which the southern states attempted to secede from the north over the question of slavery. One of its attractions is that, because of this double perspective, it teems with personalities as widely disparate as Abraham Lincoln and Mangal Pandey, Frederick Douglass and Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Tolstoy and Karl Marx. Gandhi agreed to explore a number of questions over email about the book, about Indian history, and about the art and craft of the historian.

Your new book is a comparative study of two outbursts of revolutionary energy in the nineteenth century. By doing so you are able to appraise the strengths and weaknesses of each movement more critically. Could you briefly throw some light on why the Indian Mutiny of 1857 faltered? And do we, because of nationalist passions, assign to it a position of exaggerated importance in our history?

Let me point out right away that my intent was to portray or recover the past, not to judge it. I wished to paint the protagonists, not to grade them. True, the process of studying in order to depict did produce “conclusions”, but arriving at findings was not my aim.

Before I offer my understanding of why the Revolt of 1857 faltered, let me state that I was intrigued by some of its principal figures, including the Mughal prince Firoz Shah, Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow, Kunwar Singh of Bihar, the Maharashtrian Brahmin Tatya Tope, and Khan Bahadur Khan of Bareilly. And I was struck too by the involvement of so many “ordinary” Indians, a very large number of whom were killed, causing immense unrecorded sorrow, while the British, as I show in the book, offered much more vivid personal accounts of their troubles and bereavements.

As I see it, the rebellion’s failure was inevitable because, firstly, independence was not the consistent aim of its leaders, and, secondly, these leaders were unable to mobilize the bulk of the Indian people, with whom they did not identify themselves. True, in some areas of northern and central India, especially in Avadh, the masses supported the Revolt for a while, but this support did not last long and did not extend to large parts of the country. Though pride was temporarily stirred in many hearts, the Revolt’s failure, within four months of Bahadurshah Zafar’s restoration as Hindustan’s ruler by the rebels, actually seemed to relieve the common Indian in most parts of the country.

The uprising merits an important place in our history. The British were profoundly shaken by it and a great number of Indians lost their lives. But we should also recognize that across the country influential Indians of the time either welcomed the Revolt’s failure or said nothing in its favour. Knowledge of this widespread contemporary disapproval should join our awareness of the Revolt’s significance.

Like many of your other books, this one too has a sprawling compass. Although you appear strongly critical of the way the Mutiny was organised, you nevertheless find many other deep currents of resistance and progress in nineteenth-century India – wars, one might say, not of arms but of ideas. Please tell us a little more about the structure of the book and about the relative weight given to its many protagonists like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Allan Octavian Hume, and Mahatma Phule, some of whom are quite distant from the main action.

These three, and two others I followed, Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, were contemporaries of the Revolt’s leaders. Two of them, Khan and Hume, dealt directly with the Revolt. All five were gifted intellectuals from very different backgrounds. I wanted to discover their reaction to the Revolt. Also, by following their lives, which extended to the end of the 19th century, I wanted to see how the India of 1857 evolved into an India closer to our times. So my retelling of the Revolt and the American Civil War is accompanied by a look at the lives of these five, plus some others.

In their different ways, these five activated India’s social or national or intellectual conscience in the 19th century. Vidyasagar and Phule brought to daylight the harshness with which widows of all castes and all persons belonging to “low” castes and “untouchables” were being treated. Hume, whose fame as a scholar of India’s birds is little known to those aware of him as a founder of the Indian National Congress, toiled successfully to bring an all-India outlook at least to elite groups across the land.

I found that the decades-long battles for equality, compassion, knowledge and an all-India feeling in which some of these individuals (and others of their ilk) were engaged were not less stirring than the Revolt’s struggle against alien rule.

Then I felt I could not ignore Tolstoy or Karl Marx, each of whom followed from distant perches the 1857 Revolt and the American Civil War as well. Writing from London for the New York Tribune, Marx provided almost the only counter to the American media’s uniform depiction of the Indian Revolt as an eruption of oriental barbarism [See here his articles "The British Rule In India" and "The Future Results of British Rule in India"]. As for Tolstoy, despite his aristocratic birth he stood for equality; despite his love of guns and hunting he hated war; despite the imperial thrust of the Russia of his time he honoured Asia and its truths. What a story it would have been had the India of 1857 possessed, either on the British or the Indian side, a person like Tolstoy.

Or one like Abraham Lincoln, who knew to struggle but also to reconcile, whose political compass was always joined by a moral compass, and whose soul (like that of the much younger Tolstoy) wanted to wring meanings deeper than “victory” or “defeat” from great bloodshed.

Finally, there is William Howard Russell, the Irishman who as the correspondent of the Times of London covered both Revolts and provided word portraits of individuals, scenes and battles that are as rich, revealing and riveting as what a movie camera, had one existed at the time, might have captured.

How do you think about the work of the historian? To make the past present, through a rich and complex depiction of it? To pressure the present into accommodating difficult truths and realities it would rather ignore? To function as a counterweight to the simplifications of politics, ideology, and popular culture?

These are useful ways of thinking about a historian’s task. But more often than not, think, it is through accident or good fortune rather than deliberate design that a work of history produces the outcomes you describe. Any historian consciously setting out to portray history for the purposes you mention is likely, I suspect, to produce something forced and unconvincing. But if a writer loves a period or is captured by it and by some of its protagonists, if the writer is aware of his or her biases and tries not to be governed by them, if, rather than resenting layers, paradoxes and comparisons, the writer welcomes them, if the writer is willing to pursue unexpected leads into unmapped spaces, then she or he may produce something of the sort you have in mind.

You have questioned, in your earlier work, the widely held belief "in the essentially pacific nature of the Indian subcontinent". For all that we adopt the rhetoric of non-violence, you wrote ten years ago in your book Revenge and Reconciliation, it is violence that dominates, "not merely violence in self-defence but violence in revenge, or for power, or for a thrill, or in the name of justice." Is violence somehow natural to the human condition, and non-violence in history merely an interlude of great self-discipline and rational reflection?

Violence has always made news. And the impulse towards violence is not foreign to our human nature. Yet violence does not describe the essence or the totality of the human condition. Peace is less sensational, yet after all 1857 in India and the Civil War in America were followed by long decades of relative peace. Whether non-violence is an interruption in history or the norm is perhaps hard – I should say impossible – to say, yet we in India ought to admit that ever since (and possibly even before) the Mahabharata time, revenge has been a powerful pull for many of India’s inhabitants. The notion of “My group is superior and has the right to dominate” has also commanded passionate adherents.

Having said his, I cannot but again recall that after 1857 violence was rejected in India by large masses, and also that following 1915 non-violence was consciously accepted by large masses for over thirty years. On the other hand, the Partition-related 1947 killings, the 1984 Delhi killings, the 1992-93 Mumbai violence, and the 2002 cruelties in Gujarat form part of another – sadder, grimmer and equally true – story.

The present day again tempts many in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia towards the “final” solution of war or killing. The blaze and sound of terrorism make it easy for some to be cast as Ravanas or Kauravas, meriting instant and non-judicial deaths, and the list of those who can be cast as such – who should be “done away with” – seems to expand by the day. The Lincolns, Tolstoys and Gandhis of history are needed afresh.

You are unusual, among historians, for having actually stepped into the cauldron of politics. In 1989 you contested the Lok Sabha elections in Amethi against Rajiv Gandhi. Tell us a little about what you took away from this experience, and what Indian democracy seen up close is like. What are the main faults of Indian democracy today, and its strengths?

My life in politics – the end-1989 Amethi election and a Rajya Sabha spell as a Janata Dal MP – lasted less than three years. I found that politicians were not another breed, they did not descend down a special shaft, they were rather like the rest of us and often possessed an attractive side. Yet I did not find that as an MP I could make a real difference. I think I had too thin a skin to promote myself, which one needs to do to reach a place from where you can perhaps make a solid difference.I also missed an adviser or two who could have helped me maximize my strengths and minimize my weaknesses in order to advance larger, non-personal objectives.

India’s democracy has allowed ministers only limited scope to address real issues: survival in office takes a great amount of energy and time. Then there is the difference between passing a law and getting it implemented. We have been very poor at the latter, which requires enlisting the participation of citizens. Usually our law-makers are out of touch with the realities of getting things done on the ground, though some are pretty good at using money – obtained God knows where – to get results.Sadly, gold and the gun are often seen as more likely to secure change than the enforcement of law.

But much that is helpful also occurs. Our governments are replaced through elections. Although great numbers are left out, many of the weak and the disabled do get assistance. Although danda power and gun-power intimidate many neighbourhoods, elsewhere it is possible to criticize persons in office. Our media are not always wise or calm, they do not always show good taste or judgment, but thank God they are not chained. Pluralism receives lip service at least, and sometimes a good deal more than that.

Three of your books are biographies of Indian politicians who were also writers and intellectuals. Who, to you, are the most interesting examples of this tradition in Indian politics today if any?

My subjects belonged to another age. As for recent times, Narasimha Rao is dead and Atal Behari Vajpayee is no longer active either as a politician or as a poet or intellectual. V.P. Singh also painted and wrote verses but he too is gone. Not that it was always possible to agree with even these three. Right now there must be some fine and sensitive intellects in Indian politics but clearly they are too prudent to write candidly or spontaneously.

Please name two classic books on Indian history and two current ones that the lay reader might read for both pleasure and instruction.

My research and teaching having narrowed my reading, I fear my answers may not help much. But I must pick the ever-new Mahabharata, even if it is not history in a conventional sense, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India. William Dalrymple’s evocation in The Last Mughal of the streets, birds, crafts and trades of the Delhi of 1857 was wonderful, and I think Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi is a splendid read.

A review of Rajmohan Gandhi's Gandhi: The Man, His People and The Empire is here.

And here are some other Middle Stage interviews with writers: Ramachandra Guha, Pico Iyer, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Altaf Tyrewala, Samrat Upadhyay, and Christopher Kremmer.

On an anthology of BR Ambedkar's speeches, Thus Spoke Ambedkar

One of the most suggestive paradoxes of India’s transformation from colony to democratic republic was that one of the founding fathers of Indian democracy – the architect of its constitution, and an authority on the science of government – was also one of its greatest skeptics. For most of his life Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956) was engaged, even as the Indian National Congress tried to orchestrate the movement that would yield to all Indians freedom from foreign rule, in a struggle merely to secure for the untouchables of India a guarantee of “some of the most elementary rights to which human beings are entitled.”

It is in these two avatars – constitutional expert, and as a personification of Dalit self-assertion – that Ambedkar is remembered today. And as a new edition of some of his best speeches, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, shows, his real achievement was not just in articulating the bitterness and sorrow of people who laboured under racial discrimination, but in formulating a solution for the problem that was not impassioned and emotive but strategic and constitutional, using the tools of democracy and the fledgling subjects of democracy to fulfil the promise of democracy. The oppression of Dalits (or “the Depressed Classes”, as they were called for much of his watch) by higher-caste Hindus was not so much a social problem, Ambedkar thought, as it was a political problem, to be resolved by careful political organisation and political representation.

Mahatma Gandhi, Ambedkar’s compatriot and frequent antagonist on issues concerning the Dalits and Hindu society, ambitiously held, on the subject of British dominion, that mere independence from foreign rule was merely a beginning, and that real swaraj would only ensure when each person realised his or her potential, and on the subject of caste oppression, that Dalits were inescapably a part of Hindu society, and that the caste order was not in itself perverse, but rather decadent. Ambedkar, meanwhile, was making the more modest but nevertheless invaluable point that political democracy was a farce when not accompanied by social and economic democracy, and hence that independent India would offer "a life of contradictions" on a much more elemental level than that imagined by Gandhi. The caste order and caste consciousness had to be eradicated, not reformed.

Yet, as much as he thought that Dalits had many grievances that found no ear in either the corridors of power or society at large, this highly qualified lawyer and thoughtful democrat was a staunch advocate of “the diffusion of constitutional morality” through Indian society as the solution for pervasive Indian ills. As these speeches show, Ambedkar hoped fervently that Indian democracy would provide the space and the legal means for Dalits to grow in self-respect and equality, and yet was frequently disenchanted by what was actually granted.

The speeches collected in Thus Spoke Ambedkar, Vol. 1 by one of his students and followers, Bhagwan Das (author of the memoir In Pursuit of Ambedkar), cover a span of about twenty-five years in his career from 1930 onwards. They give us a sense not of the avuncular Ambedkar we know (or think we know), but of a more fiery and often inconsistent Ambedkar on the move, trying to work out the best position not just on the issue of caste struggle but also labour, capitalism, foreign rule, domestic political formations, and constitutional architecture. The sites and occasions where they were delivered are very diverse, from a meeting of the railwaymen belonging to the Depressed Classes (“I am glad,” says Ambedkar, “that we have met today more as workers than as untouchables”) to the chambers of Parliament. Their emphases, inevitably, are not consistent: Ambedkar veered towards Marxism in his youth and made many skeptical pronouncements about the efficacy of parliamentary democracy, but gradually reversed these leanings as he grew older and finally came to be the very face of constitutional democracy.

Many of the thoughts expressed here carry an uncanny relevance today, such as Ambedkar's criticism of the motivations underlying the basic gesture of electoral politics, the vote. “The majority in India is a communal majority and not a political majority,” observes Ambedkar. “In India the majority is born; it is not made. A political majority is not a fixed or a permanent majority. It is a majority which is always made, unmade, and remade. A communal majority is a permanent majority fixed in its attitude.” And if the majority organises itself in this unshakable way in a democracy, Ambedkar concludes, the minority has no option but to itself organise itself on similar lines, which is what explains his repeated emphasis on separate representation for Dalits.

Of course, as Ambedkar himself understood, this was at best only a partial solution to the problem. The challenge of how to integrate into the mainstream by asserting, as a first step, one’s separateness continues to vex the politics of reservation today. As Sunil Khilnani argues in a recent piece, "From Representative Democracy", that considers the addition of political reservations for women to an electoral system that already includes reservations for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes: "...[C]onceding the principle of quotas and reservations in the electoral process, in whatever form, serves ultimately to entrench identities, and fragments efforts to build a community of individual citizens. While the principle serves expedient purposes, long-term it undermines both unity and individuality."

Khjlnani wonders if "we too are becoming a little intellectually lazy about our version of democracy", but that is not a criticism that can be made of Ambedkar, who was always conscious of how dissent and grievance had to be fired by discipline ("The urge for self-realisation in the downtrodden classes," he says in a speech made to the Constituent Assembly in 1949, "must not be allowed to devolve into a class struggle or class war.") In the absence of a major biography, one looks forward to the publication of the three remaining volumes of speeches in this series, as also the re-issue of Ambedkar’s works The Annihilation of Caste and Pakistan or Partition of India by the same publisher, Navayana, for a fuller sense of the vision of this most constructive of Indian skeptics. A catalogue of Navayana's books on caste issues is here.

Thus Spoke Ambedkar, while a reissue of the first of four volumes of Ambedkar's speeches compiled by Bhagwan Das, is freshly and cogently annotated by the publisher, S. Anand, who is sometimes even more acerbic than Ambedkar is, particularly on the subject of Gandhi. Anand has an essay, "From Equalisation To Annihilation – And Beyond", in a special issue of Himal Southasian this month on the theme of "The Future of Caste".

And two old posts: "The art of oratory, and the great speeches of modern India", on two anthologies of Indian oratory; and "On Vinod George Joseph's Hitchhiker", a powerful fictional exploration of a youth floating through both rural and urban life always tagged by his caste.

At the BJP National Convention, and The Caravan

My apologies for not being able to put anything up on The Middle Stage for a few weeks now. I've been kept occupied by a long piece of reportage about my experiences at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national convention in Indore in February. The essay is called "Under The BJP's Big Tent", and it appears this month in the new issue of The Caravan, a monthly magazine of long-form narrative journalism focussed on Indian and South Asian politics, culture, and books.

And here is a selection of essays from the four issues of The Caravan since its relaunch in January this year: "One Hundred and Twenty Five Years of the Congress Party" by Ramachandra Guha; "A Missile In The Living Room" by Amitava Kumar; "The Road Back From Ayodhya" by Basharat Peer; "Bangladesh's Quest For Closure" by Salil Tripathi; "Searching For The Mahatma In Modi's Gujarat" by Mira Kamdar; "A Song Unto Itself", an essay on the Indian national anthem by Ananya Vajpeyi; "Book History in India" by Pradeep Sebastian (see also his essay on the new Tamil cinema); "The Sympathetic Ironist", an essay by the poet Anjum Hasan on the poetry of Eunice D'Souza; and "India and Enid Blyton" by Amy Rosenberg.

The magazine also publishes a long book excerpt every month, as also a photo-essay and fiction and poetry. An archive of articles from all four issues of 2010 is here.