Chaturvedi Badrinath (1933-2010)

I was saddened to hear of the demise, on the 17th of February, of Chaturvedi Badrinath, a writer and philosopher I admired greatly. Badrinath was the author of several notable books, including The Mahabharata: An Inquiry Into The Human Condition (2006), Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta (2006), Introduction to the Kamasutra (1999), and The Women of the Mahabharata (2008).

Badrinath's literary career began, by today's standards, fairly late in life, when he was in his forties. (He was a member of the Indian Administrative Service from 1957 to 1989, and this consumed his energies in his youth). Unusually, the last decade of his life, with the world of action exchanged for one of reflection, was the most prolific of his literary career. Indeed, it was through his last published book, The Women of the Mahabharata, that I first became acquainted with his work. Merely to read the introduction of this book was to realise that one was in the company of a first-rate reader.

Great literary works, by their very nature, condense thought, pressure language, revel in ambiguities, hum with implication, make meaning through symbols, patterns, leitmotifs and repetition. They replicate life's mystery and complexity through their own patterns of speech, suggestion, and silence.

It follows then that one of the primary tasks of literary criticism is exegesis: the explication, often at a length several times that of the text being scrutinised, of a text's net of meanings and complexity of structure. Sometimes criticism itself becomes pithily epigrammatic, vivid in imagery, rich in the play of ideas. This is the signal quality of Badrinath's work in his two great books on the Mahabharata, books which qualify both as literary criticism and as philosophy. They never make the mistake, as some works of interpretation do, of isolating the work's ostensible message at the expense of the form or context. A short excerpt from one of them is here.

Last summer I happened to be in Pondicherry, and took the opportunity extended by Badrinath's daughter, the novelist and exponent of Bharatnatyam Tulsi Badrinath, to see him at his residence in Auroville, where he had been living in relative solitude for several years. The bungalow was called Badri-La, and inside I found the writer, physically infirm but mentally spry, chortling over a joke with a friend. His spacious living-room was full of fine books on religion and philosophy, many of them of interest to me. We chatted for two or three hours about the writing life, about problems with publishing, about the value of concision and density in writing, and (since he was at work on his autobiography) about the place of the "I" and of self-observation in literature.

Badrinath asked as many questions as he answered, and sucked gleefully on his pipe as he spoke – a pursuit gave him even more pleasure now that the doctor had forbidden it. I noticed too how involved he was with the lives of his staff, and their children. Despite his age and his remote location, he still ran a house very competently. I remember how, when at lunch I asked for some ghee to go with my rice and dal, he was enormously annoyed that the kitchen had run out of ghee the day before, and spoke with some astringency on the necessity of anticipating problems instead of finding oneself embarrassed by them later.

The last honour of Badrinath's distinguished career was the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009 for his literary criticism, which pleased him greatly. Confined to his hospital bed, he sent his daughter on to receive it, but did not live to see her return. The last interview he gave is here.

On hearing of Badrinath's death, I regretted enormously my failure to take up his invitation to return to Badri-La to stay for a few days. But every writer of distinction lives on in his or her books, and Badrinath's magisterial mind and voice suffuse his written work. I look forward to returning to his books – those I have read, and those that I haven't – and to getting to know Chaturvedi Badrinath better.

One of Badrinath's essays, "The Karma Conundrum", is here.

On The Essays of Leonard Michaels

The first thing about The Essays of Leonard Michaels to arrest the reader’s attention is the author’s own photograph on the cover, taken at some point in middle age. The expression is gently quizzical, amused, open, the face aware of the camera but comfortable with itself. Michaels (1933-2003) was an American Jewish writer, principally of short stories, and of the same generation as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, whose small, carefully chiselled work was praised for its candour about sex (this was in the days when such candour was a radical artistic choice in a buttoned-up culture, and not a default setting as it often can be now, as if would be embarrassing to be anything else) and a muscular, even self-consciously masculine style that was nevertheless alive to moods of tenderness, innocence, vulnerability, the anti-masculine.

Writing, in one of these essays, about a love affair that went too fast for him (it goes just as fast inside the essay, described in two pages as an aside to a larger meditation on a professor of English who roused him to his highest nature), Michaels writes, “I had no virginity to lose, but when sex happened with guiltless and astonishing speed, I lost my innocence.” This tension between freedom and violation, meaning and mystery, desire and disappointment is what makes for the energy and insight of this book, one half of which is devoted to literature, art and cinema, the other half to portraits of people, including Michaels himself.

The son of a barber, Michaels was aware of how his own life of education, cultivation, artistic experiment and productive introspection was founded upon the persistent, almost unthinking labour of his father in his barbershop six days a week, year after year. In an essay entitled “My Father” (almost a mandatory requirement, it seems, of a male Western writer, but even if a compulsory assignment then carried off here with panache), he writes that, outside of the two worlds of shop and home, his father was pretty much a fish out of water:

He took few vacations. Once we spent a week in Miami, and he tried to enjoy himself, wading bravely into the ocean, stepping inch by inch into the warm, blue, unpredictable immensity. Then he slipped. In water no higher than his pupik, he came up thrashing, struggling back onto the beach on skinny white legs. ‘I nearly drowned,’ he said, exhilarated. He never went into the water again.

That word "exhilarated", coming where it does, is what brings Papa Michaels alive.

The essay ends with a beautiful night scene where the teenaged Michaels, sleekly dressed and off in search of sexual adventure, runs on the street into his father, coming back home after a long day at work, and is handed a few coins for expenses, as a little child might. The other mentor figure to be found on these pages is a professor of literature, Austin Warren, very famous in his day, whose teaching method was so sparse and precise – all he did was read texts aloud, occasionally stopping to draw attention to a word or ask a pointed question – and yet so vivifying that he held large classes in thrall. Having heard him once, Michaels decided to junk the idea of going to medical school (which would have been the respectable thing to do) and enrolled for graduate study in English instead. Michaels’s eulogy to his teacher reminds us of the enormous power of personal example and passionate rigour, if not to change the world, then at least to decisively impact and permanently enrich a few others.

The high point of this book arrives in Michaels’s discussion of the work of an painter, Max Beckmann, who spent his entire life observing his own face through self-portraits. Beckmann’s work rouses Michaels to a set of inspired jottings on the wonder and mystery of human faces, on how faces are at once both public and private. “A face is the thing we most consciously bear or carry into public view, while it remains invisible to ourselves; and it is also the thing we contemplate endlessly in others, in the tremendous variety and subtlety of theirs moods, desires, and meanings,” he writes. “Whatever we say, our face says it first, or differently, or withholds part of the meaning. It betrays as much as it expresses. It speaks of sadness while laughing, or satisfaction while commiserating.... For no reason we can specify, a face can seem loveable or disagreeable.” The beauty of Michaels’s prose reminds us that although faces and their owners disappear from this world, powerful words are much less easily effaced.

Here are some more of Michaels's essays: "My Yiddish", "The Action of Metaphor", and an excerpt from his spirited and observant reading of Saul Bellow's novel Ravelstein.

And here is an old post on Saul Bellow's Seize The Day, and here are five more on fine Indian essayists: On Mukul Kesavan's The Ugliness of the Indian Male, "Utpal Dutt on theatre and film", "Cricket with Ram Guha", On Chidananda Das Gupta's Seeing Is Believing, and "Krishna Kripalani's faith and frivolity".

Two events tomorrow evening at the Kala Ghoda Festival

I'll be making two appearances at the Kala Ghoda Festival this year, both on the same evening.

This pleases me very much, as it saves me the trouble of polishing my boots twice over and having an extra shirt ironed, and I'm one of those people who loves the sense of having saved precious time through adroit orchestration, no matter that I never establish what that saved time actually does go into. Just the feeling is enough.

Tomorrow, Monday, at 5pm I'm going to be talking to Anjum Hasan, the author of the novels Lunatic In My Head and Neti, Neti, in the David Sassoon Library garden.

And then at 8pm I'm going to be reading from Arzee the Dwarf, alongside Amit Varma and Lata Jagtiani, who'll be reading from their books. This time it will be Anjum asking the questions.

Look forward to seeing you! And now I'll return to my books and to my boots, while also trying to find the time (proleptically gained because of my time saved tomorrow) for a trip in the afternoon to witness the 9th All India Zoroastrian Body Building Championship in Byculla ("Any of the weight class events may be cancelled if we do not receive more than four entries in each class"), and then two hours in front of the television set at night to watch Arsenal v Chelsea. Sundays always turn out to be the busiest day of the week.

In closing, here is an old post: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare", and a review, from 2008, of Lunatic In My Head.

Things I've been reading

Some things I've been reading recently:

An interview with Jonathan Galassi, the publishing head of Farrar Straus Giroux and himself a poet and a translator of Italian poetry, on reading, writing, editing and publishing, and on the history of one of English-language publishing's most influential firms. Among the points on which I agree most emphatically with Galassi is when he talks of the pleasure that ensues when a manuscript is typeset: "I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book." And on the subject what he looks out for most in a novel: "I think the voice is the most important thing—and then the shape."

"After Making Love We Hear Footsteps", a very funny and tender poem by Galway Kinnell about a child ("Fergus") whom—and this is a wonderful phrase—"habit of memory propels to the ground of his making"

"The Last Writes", an essay by DJ Taylor about how there is neither the money or the space in British literary life any more to sustain a career as a full-time book reviewer. I always like pieces about the nuts and bolts of the trade (who pays what sums, how much time it took someone to spin something out, who earned what when), and read this piece with special interest not just because I occasionally write for the British press, but also because I've managed for a few years to make a modest living (actually a very fine living if we understand the word as "existence" and not as "income") from the very profession whose diminishing wages Taylor mourns. Hmm—I wonder how much time I have left on my clock.

"The Perils Of Writing A Life Of Gore Vidal", a very entertaining account of running into trouble with one's biographical subject by Fred Kaplan ("Vidal's pride, one of the leitmotifs of his life, frequently compared to that of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, required that a biography be published while he still lived. If Norman Mailer already had two or three versions of his life published or in process, Vidal argued, why should he not have at least one? My argument that he should follow the example of Mark Twain, who insisted that his biography not be published before his death, met firm resistance.) I have on my desk right now, waiting for a week in which all other things fall silent or go on vacation, two fat new literary biographies of nineteenth-century greats: Michael Slater's biography of Charles Dickens and Joseph Frank's monumental study of Fyodor Dostoevesky, in an abridged version that is still about a thousand pages long.

"These Poems Are The End For Me", a set of poems in Hindi translation in the new issue of the literary magazine Pratilipi by the late Marathi and English writer Dilip Chitre, who passed away recently. Chitre's essay "The Practice of Marathi Poetry" is here.

On the anthology Civil Resistance and Power Politics

In the last half-century, what has united African-American civil rights campaigners in the American South in the 1960s, anti-apartheid demonstrators in South Africa in the eighties, anti-communist agitators in Czechoslovakia in 1989, discontented citizens and student groups at Tiananmen in China in the same year, and striking monks in Burma in 2007 and Tibet in 2008? The answer is civil resistance – a mass program of deliberate, purposive action committed to non-violence, and intended to alter the balance of political power so as to bring about what some commentators have called “a revolution without revolution”.

A hundred years ago, civil resistance as a political force was not much more than a minor curiosity. Although it had theoretical roots in the ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin, in the realm of worldly application Mohandas Gandhi’s work for the rights of Indians in South Africa was about the only feather in its cap. Today, that is no longer so. The idea of civil resistance today has a history, a dignity, an allure, a vocabulary (agitations in the Philippines in the eighties gave rise to the term “people power”; the Czech writer Vaclav Havel produced a famous essay called “The Power of the Powerless”; the peaceful transfer of power in Prague in 1989 threw up the term "velvet revolution"). “Civil resistance” brings to mind strikes, fasts, boycotts, demonstrations, the use of potent symbols and messages, a sense of active community, solidarity, and discipline among discontented people. Civil resistance grasps that there are forces other than brute force (even as it accepts that violence and armed resistance may be justified in certain extreme situations). It is directed at the individual conscience of both the demonstrator and the adversary, and therefore runs deeper than matters of ideology. At the same time, it is nothing without mass support, and constructively channels the power of the crowd as a force for change.

Insofar as one of the reasons for studying history is to avoid repeating its mistakes, civil resistance offers a sharp, self-conscious break with many centuries of bloodshed and suffering over political, social and religious disputes. Thus, even when it fails, or is stamped out by violent reprisals, it is still on one plane a success, for having neutralised through responsible action the instinct to meet blow for blow. Yet, as recent history shows, civil resistance, while not evenly and universally effective, does not need any charitable definitions of success. As Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, the editors of this volume of case studies of modern civil resistance campaigns around the world, argue, the idea of civil resistance has helped redefine revolution since the 1960s. Although violence remains endemic in human affairs, civil resistance “has assisted at the birth of a new genre of revolution, one that involves force but not the violence always associated with that word.”

One of the key emphases of Civil Resistance & Power Politics is that it understands civil resistance not as an ideal of moral action and non-violent “conversion” of the adversary through “truth-force” as Gandhi saw it, but simply as a strategy of practical politics. Moral transformation of the adversary is not essential to successful civil resistance. As the second half of the book’s title indicates, civil resistance is often a response to “power politics” – the negligence, manipulation, and active oppression demonstrated by those in power. But it seeks to counter that with a power politics of its own. Its morality is restricted to non-violence; beyond that it may legitimately be all calculation and pragmatism. We should neither romanticise the idea of civil resistance, nor believe, despite some of the more stirring stories around it, that it infallibly reaches its projected ends.

Indeed, as the scholar Judith M.Brown argues in a clear-eyed review of Gandhi’s civil resistance campaigns, mass action strategised by the most celebrated practitioner of the method, even though it significantly changed the terms of imperial engagement with the colonised, could not really be said to have brought an end to empire, as some hold. Other political and economic circumstances, such as the Second World War and Britain's own faltering interest in the idea of empire, were just as influential in tilting the balance of history in favour of Indian independence.

Gandhi certainly radically enlarged the terms of protest and negotiation available to the disenfranchised, and laid down a frame where any person, even a child, could join the movement as a political actor. Yet even here, Brown shows, his local campaigns directed towards a specific end, such as the farmers’ agitations in Champaran and Bardoli, were much more successful than his pan-Indian campaigns, where it became harder to exercise discipline all the way down the line. Among the lessons we learn from Gandhi’s example is that civil resistance does not usually yield instant results: it shifts the balance of power step by step. We learn also that much depends on the timing of civil protest, and on the adversary’s willingness to engage. During the Quit India campaign of 1942, for instance, the Raj’s attention was directed towards the World War, and Congress leaders engaged in programs of civil resistance were summarily rounded up and thrown into jail. The movement was not a success. So, as the career of even the most successful exponent of civil resistance shows, skilful strategy (and not just moral rigour) can immeasurably help improve the efficacy of civil resistance.

What factors improve the probability of civil resistance campaigns succeeding? The case studies offered here show that, since civil resistance is really a form of political theatre, widespread local and international publicity is certainly a factor. (The rise of the Internet and the availablity of cheap video technology are therefore good omens for civil resistance in the 21st century.) Astute leadership and discipline are very significant, as passions can often get out of hand in mass movements; "the crowd" is often only a step away from turning into "the mob". International support and the pressure of neighbouring powers, including the threat of economic sanctions, can often decisively influence the way domestic power holders perceive their options in dealing with civil resistance. So, as Christina Fink writes in her essay on the demonstrations by the monks in Burma in September 2007, the refusal by India and China, the two biggest powers in the region, to exert any pressure on the Burmese military regime to negotiate with the dissidents made it easier for the generals to crack down on the protests without fear of reprisal.

Most importantly, mass commitment, as Gandhi realised, makes for campaigns that cannot be crushed easily and without loss of face and authority, and provides a kind of safety in numbers. On the subject of the crowd in civil resistance movements, Garton Ash, one of the chroniclers of the people's movements of Eastern Europe that brought down communism in the late eighties, writes in his essay "A Century of Civil Resistance":

Peaceful revolutions, like the violent ones of old, are distinguished by the eruption of very large numbers of people – call them, according to taste, the masses, the people, the crowd, or the citizens – into public spaces, and hence onto history's stage.. They are the exceptional moments when, to adapt Karl Marx, the people make their own history; or at least, they feel they do. [...] There is strength in these numbers, and there is safety. Such mass gatherings break through the barrier of fear which, as Gandhi saw, is the essential bulwark of non-democratic regimes. [...] In the early twenty-first century, we need new studies of the crowd in these new-style revolutions. Their sociology cries out to be understood better, as do their group dynamics. This is, let is be said at once, difficult to do. You cannot interview 500,000 people. Even if you could, memory rewrites history.

I have spent many hours of my life standing in revolutionary crowds, on freezing squares from Warsaw in 1980 to Prague in 1989 to Kiev in 2004, and they remain gloriously mysterious. What is it that sways them one way or another? Who is it that comes up with the chants that erupt, apparently spontaneously, as the crowd speaks back to the speaker as if it were itself one person? Who, as we stood on Wencelas Square in Prague in 1989, had the idea of taking his or her ring out of his or her pocket, holding it up and rattling the keys like a Chinese bell? (Within minutes, some 300,000 people were doing the same, producing a sound that I shall never forget.) Perhaps even the person who really started it does not know.

[...] Freedom of expression – recovered, or fully enjoyed for the first time – is of the essence in such moments. As Alexander Solzenitsyn and Vaclav Havel both argued, the freedom to say what you want, to challenge a regime of organized lying with "one word of truth", is both a symptom and a cause of political change. When people "speak truth to power" they are themselves empowered. They shift the power balance simply by saying words in public.

The merit of this anthology is in the way it takes the reader forward from civil resistance as a beautiful and moving idea to civil resistance as, if you will, prosaic practice. Even as it seeks to reshape history itself, civil resistance has much to learn from its own history, and, as this book demonstrates, much history today to learn from.

Here is a good recent essay by Garton Ash: "Velvet Revolution: The Prospects" ("The prospects for an attempted velvet revolution depend not just on the nature of the state and society it happens in, but also on the place of that state and society in a wider international setting. Painting...with a very broad brush, one might suggest that the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically, and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones—and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies. Thus, attempts have failed in large, independent, self-referential states such as China but also in small, isolated, peripheral ones such as Burma, sandwiched as it is between China and India.")

And here are two old posts: "On the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi" and "On Vaclav Havel's To The Castle And Back".

[A shorter version of this essay appeared last weekend in Mint Lounge]

Malcolm Gladwell and the problem with modern narrative nonfiction

“On the afternoon of October 23, 2006, Jeffrey Skilling sat at a table at the front of a federal courtroom in Houston, Texas.” Not too hard to guess: this is the first sentence of an essay from the New Yorker. It features the familiar hook – a moment of dramatic tension, a set of precise visual details (Skilling is not attending his trial, as some writers might have put it, but sits at a table at the front of a federal courtroom), and the selection of a protagonist who is an entry point into the story – practised and perfected by generations of writers for that magazine, and other American long-form magazines like Esquire and The Atlantic Monthly, at least since the nineteen-sixties, when writers such as Tom Wolfe began to raid the techniques of fiction for their reportage. The current incumbent of the position of star New Yorker writer – a position held in the past by such greats as EB White, AJ Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and the current editor David Remnick – is Malcolm Gladwell, the smooth-talking mind behind the bestsellers The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, all of which offer provocative theses on modern life.

Gladwell’s new book, What The Dog Saw, has no central thesis like the previous ones, but instead brings together the best of his essays, on subjects as various as ovens, hair dye, football quarterbacks, and money markets, published in the New Yorker over the last decade. The general philosophy of these pieces seems to be, on the one hand, that human behaviour and wants are endlessly variable and complex and cannot be reduced to a system, which is why we require writers like Gladwell to explore its oddities, and on the other (and somewhat in contradiction to the first emphasis), that human behaviour is endlessly fascinating and is therefore worth systematising and theorising in all its quirks, particularly if such studies yield counterintuitive or logic-tickling results.

Two favourite Gladwell subjects, popping up repeatedly across these essays, are, one, the variables involved in human choice-making, and two, adroit salesmanship or transactional ability. Gladwell explores human behaviour in the public sphere much more than the private sphere. Some emphasis on commerce or a judgment of economic worth is present in most of his essays, and he uses the phrase “the new economy” a lot. He seems both an adept guide to, and at the same time himself a child of, the highly consumerised, commoditised world in which we now live, showing us how “the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives” as emotions and interpersonal relationships.

All the strengths and novelties of this approach are on view in the best essay in this volume, “True Colors". Like all the other essays in the book, it begins with a protagonist – Shirley Polykoff, a copywriter – who managed to make the newly available use-at-home hair dye dramatically popular among American women in the nineteen-fifties with her hit line for Clairol, “Does she or doesn’t she?” Polykoff’s influence on the minds of middle-class American women was soon rivalled by the slightly more upmarket message projected by the brand Oreal that said “Because I’m worth it.” Gladwell’s key point is that the revolution in hair-dye technology and the representations of hair-dye users in the advertising of the time were not trivial matters. “Between the fifties and the seventies,” he writes, “women entered the workplace, fought for social emancipation, got the Pill, and changed what they did with their hair. To examine the hair-colour campaigns of the period is to see, quite unexpectedly, all these things as bound up together, the profound with the seemingly trivial.”

But at many other points Gladwell’s love of a dramatic story (two essays in the book have as their closing image men breaking into tears, while another ends with an upward spike, with a room full of people cheering for the protagonist) and nonchalant fly-on-the-wall approach towards reporting raise difficult questions that cannot be simply brushed aside. Take for instance the thoroughly charming opening essay of his book, “The Pitchman”, which is about a family of inventors of kitchen gadgets, the Popeils, who sell their own products with such a charming, smooth-talking “pitch” that consumers lap them up. Here is one of Gladwell's portraits.

S.J. Popeil was a tinkerer. In the middle of the night, he would wake up and make frantic sketches on a pad he kept on his bedside table. He would disappear into his kitchen for hours and make a huge mess, and come out with a faraway look on his face. He loved standing behind his machinists, peering over their shoulders while they were assembling one of his prototypes.

Here we have the classic portrait of dishevelled, unruly genius down to the last detail, such as that adjective "frantic". Is this true? Possibly. But how does Gladwell know this for a fact? After all, only S.J.Popeil was on the scene during his bursts of late-night inspiration! It makes sense, then, for Gladwell to say that this is how Popeil, or perhaps his wife, said he worked. But no – Gladwell here, and at several other points in the book, prefers to practise what the media critic Jack Shafer has called “mind-meld journalism”, giving the impression that he has uninhibited access to his subject’s mind and life every hour of the day.

The effect, in this piece, is actually that of a writer who has become so mesmerised by his subject that he himself begins to pitch for Popeil. To me this is dishonest, corner-cutting reportage, though it makes for a good story. It bestows upon a chosen human being intriguing backstories and flaming passions, scrubbed free of contradiction, inertia, mystery, or deception (even as the larger argument may insist that people are vastly complex creatures). This approach hankers after the fiction writer's omniscience, but actually turns it into something of a joke by confusing human beings (who are independent, and often inacessible even when in front of us) with characters (who are always constructed, and are mysterious only insofar as the author allows them to be). This trend is now fairly common in non-fiction books of our era; it appears not to be a problem worth thinking about any more. Here, for instance, is a passage from Michael Meyer's recent and otherwise admirable book about the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Year That Changed The World. Meyer tells us how the Wall was breached on the night on 9 November, 1989, and then moves into a flashback:

Earlier that evening, just after 6 p.m., [...] Gunther Schabowski, the portly spokesman for the new East German Politburo, installed just weeks earlier, stopped by the offices of the communist party boss, Egon Krenz, en route to the daily press briefing, a recent innovation designed to demonstrate the regime's new openness.

"Anything to announce?" Schabowski asked, casually.

Krenz shuffled through the papers on his desk, then passed Schabowski a two-page memo. "Take this," he said with a grin. "It will do us a power of good."

The writer's reluctance to use a distancing device such as reported speech even when it is clear that the encounter being described was a private one turns the incident to something that might have come, for example, out of the screenplay of The Lives of Others. The reason he does this is that there is something in the memo that will, unsuspected by Krenz and Schabowski, swiftly bring down the whole regime, so the words "casually" and "with a grin" work to set up a dramatic irony in the story. But this reconstruction, even if based on the testimony of one of the two players involved, loses in reader's trust what it may gain in storytelling power.A similar problem plagued – and for me ruined – Rajiv Chandrasekaran's tale of American bungling in post-Saddam Iraq, Imperial Life In The Emerald City, which "reported" scenes of armed conflict down to what the characters were thinking at the time (“Yee-haw, thought Fish, who was sitting behind Aguero”).

In a platitudinous, self-congratulatory preface to What The Dog Saw ("Along the way, writing has never ceased to be fun, and I hope that buoyant spirit is evident in these pieces"), Gladwell makes a curious point about "good writing":

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, "I don't buy it." Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head – even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

For a writer with so much skill, this seems an amateur's theory. Even so, what interests me most about this passage is not its hazy binaries or tendentious contentions, but why Gladwell has to qualify "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade" with the back-door escape of "Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway" instead of going straight on to "It succeeds or fails on...".

As with Gladwell’s other books, there is no shortage of intriguing hypotheses and surprising insights in What The Dog Saw. But the overall effect of smart-aleckiness and the absence of sustained human encounters swiftly becomes wearisome. One longs to be with a writer interested not just in providing "a glimpse into someone else's head" – this is not as exclusive a community as Gladwell makes it out to be, although it does seem to be top of the to-do list of the modern-day nonfiction writer – but in thinking about the forces and pressures and limits that operate on that all-seeing eye, as much as the heads that it apparently gets into.

And a review of Meyer's The Year That Changed The World is here.

[A shorter version of this essay appeared a few weeks ago in Mint Lounge]

A long interview about the composition of Arzee the Dwarf

Late last year I met a reader and writer in Delhi, Juhi Basoya, who later sent me a list of quite specific questions about the composition of Arzee the Dwarf. One evening I found myself quite free, and sat down to write the fullest and most precise answers I could manage. If I link to the interview here, it's only because I feel it exists on a continuum with all the other thought about writing and composition in fiction and non-fiction that is featured on this site. The only difference may be that here I've applied myself to thinking about my own methods and not someone else's, and can speak in a more personal and probably more confident way. The full exchange is here, and here are a few excerpts:

On the writing process
For Arzee I worked in a very unstructured way, and mostly by instinct, because I’d never done work on such a large scale before. This made it is a very labor-intensive book. Often I didn’t know where the story was going but went ahead all the same just to see what came of it. Once I’d gone all the way to the end (even if it wasn’t a very good end), I kept going back over and over, cutting, changing, and reworking, till slowly the hues and the structure of the story became clear. For future books I hope to work in a more organized manner. But no matter how organized you are, a story always seems to discover its own structure and tone in the actual process of composition. Writing is always full of surprises even for the most methodical and organized writer.

On the title
The name was just one of those things that arrived in my head out of nowhere, and seemed exactly right. As far as I can remember the book, was always Arzee the Dwarf, and the title of the work came before everything else and was a spur for all that followed because it focused the point of the book. Many times, when work wasn’t going too well, I would murmur “Arzee the Dwarf” three or four times to myself like a little mantra, and tell myself that, no matter how the novel turned out, I’d at least managed to write a simple, striking, and intriguing title!

On language and metaphor
In my view similes and metaphors are one of the great joys of language. But of course in a novel they must appear in a disciplined way, in a way that enhances the pleasure of the story and of a particular moment in that story. If you think about it, language itself is spontaneously metaphorical. When you say “I’m feeling down” or “feeling blue”, you’re not actually standing lower or turning a different color, but everyone knows what you mean. Metaphors are mind-expanding; they can make a sentence seem like it grasps the whole world. I would say they are one of the many weapons in a writer’s arsenal, and every now and then he finds a moment to shoot.

And some older posts and interviews about Arzee the Dwarf are here.

An essay on Indian fiction in translation

I've just published a long essay, "The Middlemen", bringing together my thoughts on both the general subject of Indian literature in translation and some specific recent works, in particular Salma's The Hour Past Midnight and Sankar's The Middleman.

And here are some older posts on works discussed in this essay: on Sankar's The Middleman, the stories of Parshuram, Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres and a Third, and Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist.

The Middle Stage's Books of 2009: Fiction

A survey of the best non-fiction of 2009 is here.

The Tamil writer Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan) tells the story, and the stories, of a group of women who belong to a Muslim trading and landowning community in a small village in Tamil Nadu. Each one of these characters is vividly brought to life, and the narrator beautifully negotiates multiple visions of love, truth, justice, sorrow, anger, belief and desire: the novel is a magisterial exercise in the working out of point of view. The focus is primarily female, but not exclusively so. We are for time to time catapulted into the lives of patriarchs, husbands, and brothers, and often the predicaments of these men are just as tenderly observed. Lakshmi Holmstrom’s translation often leaves some of the vocabulary of the Salma’s Tamil world intact, thereby making us enter a world as much on its own terms as on ours (readers cannot always demand the rights of consumers). Not the least of the novel’s pleasures is the quality of its thinking about God, who appears sometimes as a source of succour for the miserable and the helpless, sometimes as justice and at other times a perversion of justice, sometimes only as a question or a blank space – and therefore always human, in the sense of always appearing to us filtered through a human imagination. To my mind one of the greatest of Indian novels.

The leisurely and beautifully weighted stories of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Random House in India, Norton in America, Bloomsbury in the UK) take what has become a convention in short fiction – the stories of interlinked characters conceding primacy to each other – and raise it into an examination of the many currents of life emanating from the decaying estate of an aging landowner in feudal Pakistan. This world appears, like Salma’s, grossly patriarchal, but we find to our surprise that most of Mueenuddin’s stories are about women, and these women often exert a power over men that pierces the hearts of the heartless. Mueenuddin is often an astute psychologist, as when he shows us an estate manager throwing all caution to the winds in a love affair because he has so carefully calculated his rise that now, for once, “he deserved to make this mistake.” Some of the prose effects of this book are too vivid for description in a single paragraph. Longer essay here.

Orhan Pamuk’s long-awaited The Museum of Innocence (Knopf is America, Faber & Faber in the UK) proved to be a love story that, not for the first time, found a channel that made readers ask: why didn’t we think of this before, the idea of an actual museum for a relationship? A 30-year-old business scion, Kemal Basmaci, falls in love with his beautiful teenaged cousin Fusun and is vividly transported into the wonders of a private and shared vision, even as he about to make what society would think of as “a good marriage” to an attractive and accomplished woman of his same class and standing. Kemal cannot bring to a halt his drift in either direction, and becomes, to his own anguish, a resident of two camps. 1970s Istanbul and its streets, consumer objects, and mores are beautifully worked without any theoretical debris into this highly pleasurable story, the many fine moments of which invite the same rapture as the real experience of love itself.

Narrative swiftness and weightlessness – pure fictional skills, in a way, in which no sentence seems significant enough to be quoted but the story glows with an easy confidence in itself – were also a feature of works of fiction by two old masters: Nocturnes (Knopf in America, Faber & Faber in the UK), a collection of stories about music, memory, and dreaming by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Middleman (Penguin India), a novel set in the discontented Calcutta of the 1970s by the Bengali novelist Mani Sankar Mukherji, or “Sankar”. Both writers are very adept at dialogue; indeed, since Ishiguro’s stories are all in the first person, they all aspire to the register of talk. Both writers also love plot. Ishiguro likes to move his stories on with little tremors of disbalance or revelation; we are never allowed to settle comfortably into our knowledge. Sankar’s tightly worked story expands just enough around a morally hazy landscape to carry a violent sting in its tail as we witness the protagonist’s journey from innocence to experience. Eudora Welty once observed: “A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.” Sankar is one of those writers who knows the truth of this, and revels in the power of story to make meaning through a narrative arc. Arunava Sinha’s translation was expertly thought out. Longer essays on these two books are here and here.

A novel explicitly about politics and then about all those things that politics, no matter how omnivorous it is, cannot possess or destroy, Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants (Knopf in America, Fourth Estate in the UK) tells the moving story of a family of a young woman sentenced to death for counter-revolutionary activity in a fictional city in China in the year 1979. As with Salma’s novel, a number of characters, most of them on the margins of society, seem to draw the text out behind their trajectories, and the novel’s amplitude and artistic balance often rouse the reader to wonder. Longer essay here.

Aseem Kaul’s Etudes (Tranquebar) was the work of a truly independent sensibility: a book of 75 very short stories notable for their pellucid observation, dazzling metaphors, and jettisoning of the conventions of realist storytelling (which, in default mode, as it is used by so many practitioners, especially in popular fiction, can be absolutely wearying). A longer essay on Etudes is here. This was only one among several distinguished works of short fiction published in India this year, the others being Jahnavi Barua’s Next Door (Penguin, longer essay here), Mridula Koshy’s If It Is Sweet (Tranquebar, longer essay here), and Nighat Gandhi’s Ghalib At Dusk (Tranquebar, longer essay here).

Sudarshan Purohit’s translation of Surender Mohan Pathak’s The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist (Blaft) brought into the house of Indian fiction in English, for the first time, a colossus from the Hindi pulp-fiction scene, and was a worthy successor to the same publisher’s The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (2008). Longer essay here.

For a while now the translator Sandra Smith has been bringing to readers English, almost year by year, the vivid and striking novels of the French writer Irene Nemirovsky, who when at the height of her powers was captured by the Nazis and killed in Auschwitz in 1942. This year's Nemirovsky release was The Dogs and The Wolves (Chatto & Windus in the UK), which follows the stories of three cousins, one rich and the other two poor, across Russia and France and across two decades. Nemirovsky's passionate and questing protagonists, her shrewd eye for human vanities and hypocrisies, simmering plots, and intensely dramatic and economical style always make her sound like no one else you have read. Longer essay here.

A friend of mine, flipping through the copy of Shariar Mandanipour’s Censoring An Iranian Love Story (Knopf in America, Little, Brown in the UK) lying on my table, expressed shock that I had scored out so many passages of this book with a black pen. This was an unintentional compliment to perhaps the most unusual novel of the year, in which the love-story of two characters, Dara and Shirin, in Tehran, is intercut with the narrator’s own battle to defend the integrity of his text against an army of guideline-obsessed cultural censors (who, even when they find a female character sweating and saying “It’s hot”, immediately set about slashing and burning). Art literally fights for its life in this clever and jazzy postmodern tale, even as the author finds his own two creations rebelling against him and the storyline he has thought for them. When, towards the end of the novel, Dara and Shirin meet and are fulfilled, we totally understand, and are moved, when the narrator begins to speak of “my own loneliness”. A salutary deconstruction, and reconstruction, of fiction as it is conventionally understood. Longer essay here.

Good wishes for 2010!

The Middle Stage's Books of 2009: Nonfiction

Here are The Middle Stage's favourite nonfiction books of 2009:

MG Vassanji's A Place Within (Penguin in India, Random House in Canada) was a brilliant meditation on history, religious identity, and Indianness by a novelist turning the questions of his fiction upon his own life and traditions. A member of an old, syncretistic faith, the Ismaili Khojas, Vassanji (who was born in Africa and later migrated to Canada) returns to the Gujarat of his ancestors and to the many Delhis to history to think about where he stands on some of the most vexing issues of our time. “It is always instructive,” writes Vassanji at one point on his travels, “to remind oneself of the obvious fact: The boundaries and names of many places are only recent in origin and often hide richer, more complex truths than one might imagine; the past then becomes inconvenient and slippery, far less easy to generalise.” And in a more personal mode, confessing to an inability to feel the belief of the true believer but also the skepticism of the agnostic: “At any dargah, a shrine of this kind, and even at a temple before a priest, I cannot but help but allow in me a solemn feeling, some respect and humility, for I stand alongside others in a symbolic place that it some manner reflects human existence and frailty, or smallness and exaltedness, and our striving for understanding.” To my mind this is the best Indian travel book of this decade.

Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (Penguin in India and the UK, Harvard University Press in America) was, at one level, a highly technical and specialised work grappling with key questions in the theorisation of justice, most notably the landmark work by John Rawls on the same subject. But Sen's book also offered, to any intelligent lay reader interested in being led out of his comfort zone by a very astute tour guide, page upon page of brilliant thinking on both the plural nature of what we think of as "just" or "fair", while simultaneously insisting that these ideas be rigorously tested in the practical domain of "redressable injustice" instead of only aspiring to a theoretical, almost mathematical, beauty. Sen contests many ideas that have acquired a general currency in the world today, arguing here against rational choice theory and its "remarkably miniaturised view of human rationality", there against "the propensity [of theories] to account for all appearances from as few principles as possible", and holding a candle for "the plurality of reasons that a theory of justice has to accommodate." "Reasoning is central to the understanding of justice even in a world which contains much 'unreason'," Sen writes. "Indeed, it may be particularly important in such a world." The use of that understated and yet somehow reproving phrase "may be", which actually leaves the reader filling in a stronger word, offers a clue about what it is about Sen's style that makes his work so persuasive.

Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs To Differ (Doubleday in America, Penguin in the UK) richly deserved the accolades it won for being one of the best books available on the complexities of modern Iran. One of the very charming features of Majd's book is that we are brought up close not only with Iran, but also with Majd himself: his love of life's little pleasures, his sunny nature and love of jokes and absurdities, and his alertness to very subtle nuances of social conduct. I read his work as a meditation not just on how to live when one goes to in Iran, but on how to live. Also perhaps the best book title of the year.

Chaturvedi Badrinath's The Women of the Mahabharata (Orient Longman) was simultaneously a brilliant philosophical inquiry and a work of subtle and polished literary criticism. Badrinath's book focuses on twelve significant women in the Mahabharata and the place of their stances and actions within the larger web of meaning embedded in the epic. "In being a most systematic philosophic inquiry into the human condition," writes Badrinath in one of his moments of flight around the idea of story,"the Mahabharata does not see the meaning of a story in the way it ends. The particular end of a story is not the whole of its meaning." Both epigrammatic ("Irony is the laughter of truth") and expansive (it quotes at great length from the text), this is a book which deserves a world and not just an Indian audience. Badrinath is also the author of The Meaning of the Mahabharata.

Another book which offered a brilliant interpretation of key cruxes in the Mahabharata, as well as other questions raised by the Ramayana and that of many other texts in the library of Hinduism, was Wendy Doniger's magnum opus The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin). Doniger's title gestures at an ambition to write a more comprehensive and inclusive history of Hinduism than the standard narrative allows, concentrating in particular on of women and lower-castes and their modifications of received traditions, as well as the vast internal diversity of Hindu thought itself on any of the big questions. Like Sen, Doniger is happy to accept the plurality of approaches towards the resolution of complicated academic debates; like Majd, she likes a good joke and is not shackled by ideas of scholarly decorum. I was particularly amused by her assertion that Emperor Ashoka's equivocations and hedging on the subject of non-violence "“is the expression of a man who finds himself between a rock edict and a hard place”.

Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age (Penguin in the UK, Random House in America), a biography of Shakespeare by one of the greatest living Shakespeareans, beautifully organised its copious material around Shakespeare's own famous conceit of the Seven Ages of Man. Bate, who is also the author of the excellent book The Genius of Shakespeare, shows us Will the boy, youth, theatreperson, householder, and businessman against the background of a richly realised world of sixteenth-century reading, rhetoric, politics, statecraft, and even botany. Some of Bate's readings of individual plays, particularly of King Lear and its vision of human love and folly, showed how literary criticism is not just a response to literature and a meeting of two minds over one text; it is itself a form of literature, and can tint older works with new colours.

Tzvetan Todorov's Torture and the War on Terror (Seagull Books) was a short, eloquent and trenchant book about the vitiation of both inteliigence and dignity by the use of torture to grill suspects, whether in America's war on terror in particular or war in general. Todorov refutes various arguments made in support of torture, such the widely circulated "ticking bomb scenario", and suggests that the long-term damage of torture that is sanctioned by both states and societies – that is, you and me – are far greater than its apparent payoff. "Institutionalized torture is even worse than individual torture," writes Todorov, "because it subverts the very foundation of the idea of justice and law. If the state itself becomes the torturer, how can we believe in the civil order that it claims to bring or to sanction?"

Harsh Mander's Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre (Penguin India) was a compassionate and morally lucid account of what happens to a society – in this case Gujarat after 2002 – for weeks, months, and years in the wake of a genocide. The defining feature of the Gujarat violence to this day, Mander argues, “is the determined absence of remorse in both the state and many segments of the people.” As much as the trials of those who orchestrated large-scale murder and carnage in Gujarat in 2002 are about punishing the guilty, they are also, argues Mander, a way “for the victim to reestablish her or his equal citizenship and rights before the law in a secular democracy.” Mander describes the work done by himself and his volunteers on behalf of those deprived of their livelihoods, families and dignity in the carnage of 2002, but he always sees them as human beings first and victims second, even if this means that they choose not to fight the long fight in the courts.

Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Penguin in the UK, Pantheon in America) was a beautifully composed meditation on the idea of work as imagined and lived out by 21st-century human beings in a range of situations, from fishing in the deeps of Maldives to the backroom operations of supermarkets. De Botton is less a reporter, more a writer; he is no Barbara Ehrenreich, infiltrating the sites that he wants to investigate. One of the criticisms offered of his book was that he is rarely seen getting his hands dirty, and approaches the work of labour from a certain remove. But it seemed to me better that the writer made this clear, and mined his own mind and intuitions for the significance of what he was seeing, instead of committing himself to a more detached and perhaps quantitative engagement with the situations he was entering. One of the book's many pleasures was the distinctive filamented cadences of de Botton's language.

Many excellent meditations on both life and literature were brought together in The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Farrar Straus Giroux). One of the joys of reading Michaels is his emphasis on how writers are as interesting as the thoughts or ideas for which we know them, and that to understand a writer's ideas we must first and foremost read his sentences, not just seek out his arguments. "Because the sentences from Hegel and Blake also have a form in which their intuitions, and preserved against rational analysis, it is not easy to explain them without letting their pleasure and energy bleed away," he writes at one point. Elsewhere, in a beautiful meditation on the human face, he writes, "A face is the thing we most consciously bear or carry into public view, while it remains invisible to ourselves; and it is also the thing we contemplate endlessly in others, in the tremendous variety and subtlety of their moods, desires, and meanings....A face is revealing and at the same time a disguise....Whatever we say, our face says it first, or differently, or withholds part of the meaning. It betrays as much as its expresses." The cover of this book features, appropriately enough, a striking photograph of Michaels.

Dearest Father (Oneworld Classics), a new translation by Richard and Hannah Stokes of a long letter written well into middle age by Franz Kafka to his dominating father Hermann, but never sent, showed us the contorted emotional world and murky artistic wellsprings of one of the greatest of modern writers as perhaps no biography or work of interpretation could. Kafka casts himself and his father as permanently warring but poorly matched antagonists, and his life as one long series of failures presided over by the older man. "I was no real match for you, you soon disposed of me; all that then remained was escape, bitterness, grief, inner struggle," writes Franz. The sense of human powerlessness which is everywhere in Kafka's fiction is evoked here as a grown man's inability to see himself in any other way than as a despairing and unworthy child.

The fiction and poetry list follows next week.