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Home , Bengali Americans, Chinmoy Guha, Esther David, Himanshu Rai, Jagadish Gupta, Jyotirmoy Datta

THE HANDBOOK OF REVIEWS

Somdatta Mandal 2015

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Foreword

I have been reviewing books for the last two decades. Some of them have been commissioned for newspapers and meant for the average reader whereas others have been published in national and international journals and aimed at more erudite academic readership. The lengths of the reviews also vary. Some are pretty short whereas others run into the length of an essay. The subject matter of the books reviewed is also wide ranging, beginning from popular fiction to serious academic deliberations. It includes fiction, anthologies, memoirs, biographies, criticism, books on cinema, on Tagore and other miscellaneous topics as well. Compiling all these reviews together in one volume under eight sub-topics has brought out the amazing diversity of the books reviewed. Apart from the sheer number, I have learnt a lot from the different subjects covered and I hope that the reader will find these reviews interesting as well.

Somdatta Mandal Department of English & Other Modern European Languages Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan May 2015

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I: ANTHOLOGIES

Growing Up as a Woman Writer. Edited by Jasbir Jain Telling Tales: Selected Writing 1993-2003 by Amit Chaudhuri Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta edited by Amit Chaudhuri The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Mohammad A. Quayum The Golden Treasury of Writers Workshop Poetry. Ed. Rubana Haq The Best of Quest. Edited by Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala and Arshia Sattar Wither Justice? Stories of Women in Prison by Nandini Oza The Art of the Intellect: Uncollected English Writings of . Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri The Oxford Anthology of (2 Vols). Edited by Kalpana Bardhan Post-Modern Bangla Short Stories 2002. Vol.I. Edited by Samir Roychowdhuri, Murshid AM & Rabiul Karim ‘The Wife and the Beloved’ and other stories: Best of Fifty Years (1936-1986) by Ashapurna Devi. Translated by Sanjukta Das Contemporary Australian Short Stories ed. by Santosh K. Sareen A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories. Edited by Mohammad Quayum Here and Beyond : 12 Stories. Edited by Cyril Wong Travellers’ Tales of Old Japan Compiled by Michael Wise Jora Shanko: The Joined Bridge: Select English Poems by Bengali Poets Edited by Madan G. Gandhi & Kiriti Sengupta

II: CRITICISM

The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives by Jasbir Jain Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema by Nilufer E. Bharucha Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Edited by Paula M.L. Moya & Michael R. Hames Garcia

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After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Sensibility in the Works of Jhumpa Lahiri by Delphine Munos Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by Vivek Bald The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America by Vinay Lal The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath and Rohinton Mistry by Martin Genetsch Writers of the Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities. Edited by Jasbir Jain & Supriya Agarwal Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Edited by Sandhya Rao Mehta Media, Gender, and Popular Culture in India: Tracking Change and Continuity by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Dipankar Sinha & Sudeshna Chakravarti The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk Women, Gender and . Edited by Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen & Judith A. Howard Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography by Geraldine Forbes Women of India: Colonial and Postcolonial Periods. Edited by Bharati Roy Ashapurna Devi and Feminist Consciousness in : A Bio-Critical Reading by Dipannita Datta The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered by Barnita Bagchi Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture by Rosinka Chaudhuri Gender and Cultural Identity in Colonial Orissa by Sachidananda Mohanty Travel Writing in India. Edited by Shobhana Bhattacharji Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power. Edited by Lata Singh Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader. Edited by Nandi Bhatia India and the World: Postcolonialism, Translation and Indian Literature: Essays in Honour of Professor Harish Trivedi. Edited by Ruth Vanita

III: FICTION

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The Gurkha’s Daughter by Prajwal Parajuly A Chughtai Quartet (Translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi) We are Not in Pakistan by Shauna Singh Baldwin Something To Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Season of the Rainbirds by Nadeem Aslam The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji The Tyrant’s Novel by Thomas Keneally The Broker by John Grisham The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville That Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me by Suzanne Kingsbury Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain Lifelines: New Writings from . Edited by Farah Ghuznavi A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan The Three of Us by Abha Dawesar The God of Small Things by Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni So Good in Black by The Lowland: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri Family Life: A Novel by Akhil Sharma The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

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A Mirror Greens in Spring by Selina Sen Kalikatha Via Bypass by Alka Saraogi Pervez: A Novel by Meher Pestonji Sleepwalkers by Joginder Paul Rerun at Rialto by Tom Alter Danny Boy by Jo Ann Goodwin Chinese Mask Indian Eyes: A Mysterious Tale of by Ananda Mohan Kar Of Ghost and Other Perils by Troikolyanath Mukhopadhyay (Translated by Arnab Bhattacharya)

IV: MEMOIRS

Warrior in Pink Sari: The Inside Story of the Gulabi Gang by Sampat Pal Daughters: A Story of Five Generations by Bharati Ray Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: In the Footsteps of Xuangzang by Mishi Saran Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope by Jael Silliman Persepolis I & Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi My Ear At His Heart: Reading My Father by Hanif Kureishi The Tale of My Exile: Twelve years in the Andamans by Barindra Kumar Ghose Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal by Manohar Mouli Biswas

V: BIOGRAPHIES

Sarala Devi: A Monograph by Sachidananda Mohanty The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S.Naipaul by Patrick French The Life of Graham Greene (3 Volumes) by Norman Sherry Martha Gellhorn: A Biography by Caroline Moorhead Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris by Peter Griffin

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VI: TAGORE

Rabindranath Tagore GORA: A Critical Companion. Edited by Nandini Bhattacharya Meeting Mussolini: Tagore’s Tours in Italy, 1925 and 1926 by Kalyan Kundu Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of . Edited by Radha Chakrarvarty Rabindranath Tagore: A Pictorial Biography by Nityapriya Ghosh Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family and Gender in Tagore’s Fiction and Films by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sudeshna Chakravarti and Mary Mathew Tagore: At Home in the World. Edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta and Chinmoy Guha Swades: Rabindranath Tagore’s Patriotic Songs. Translated by Sanjukta Dasgupta On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today by Amit Chaudhuri Tagore and Japan: A Retrospection. Edited by Abhijit Mukherjee, Pratyay Banerjee and Anindya Kundu Religion and Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Discourses, Addresses and Letters in Translation by Amiya P. Sen Rabindranath Tagore: One Hundred Years of Global Reception. Edited by Martin Kampchen and Imre Banga & Editorial Adviser Uma Das Gupta Jorasanko by Aruna Chakravarti

VII: CINEMA

Reading Rituparno by Shoma A. Chatterjee Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema by Satyajit Ray Seeing is Believing: Select Writings on Cinema by Chidananda Dasgupta Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema by Dipankar Mukhopadhyay The Films of Buddhadeb Dasgupta by John Hood The Subject of Cinema and Another Cinema For Another Society by Gaston Roberge

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The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History by Jyotika Virdi Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India by Shoma A. Chatterji

VIII: MISCELLANEOUS

The Renaissance in India by Henry James Cousins India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. Edited by Chandrahas Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar Tramjatra: Imagining Melbourne and Kolkata. Edited by Mick Douglas Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India. Edited by Richard H. Davies

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The Reviews

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I: ANTHOLOGIES

Growing Up as a Woman Writer Edited by Jasbir Jain New : Sahitya Akademi, 2007.Rs. 220.00, 528 pages ------We demand womanist critics in our regional languages, both men and women, to read us, to review us, to represent us in the right light, to give us our due at the turn of the century. -- Nabaneeta Dev Sen

Though women live in the same world in which men live, a common debate that arises out of women’s writing is that it is marginalized, its perspectives are different, as is the use of language and space and the denial of individual feminine self. These issues not only stifle the female creative self, but also create a chasm between them and their male counterparts. Feminist or not, women’s writing is framed by gender-governed social constructs, socialization patterns, histories and myths and needs to confront them and their many pasts. Most women writers wish to belong to the mainstream, rather than be ghettoed and go down in history branded as someone who belongs to the margin. Sahitya Akademi, the central agency that has been promoting Indian regional literatures in a big way for a long time, took the initiative to explore the complexities of gender relations and their impact upon the creative mind by organizing two conferences on women writers. The first one, held in 2001, was entitled “Women Writing in India at the Turn of the Century.” The other, the “All India Women Writers’ Conference” was held in 2005. The book under review is a collection of the proceedings of these two meets and brings to the reader the works of women writers in India across languages, regions, religions, socio-economic structures, caste hierarchies, genres and even generations.

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Apart from the preface and introduction, the volume blends theoretical positions and creative writing under one cover and is divided into five sections. The first section entitled “Women Writing in India” contains two essays by Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Krishna Sobti. Unlike Mahasweta Devi who is dismissive of gender concerns (she is said to write like a man!) and places her writing in a world of higher commitment, Dev Sen in her keynote address foregrounds her feminist perspectives and reflects on socio-cultural concerns. She states that women have dealt with life on their own terms, in their own different ways, but much as they have wanted writing to remain the center of their lives, most of them have not managed to achieve that goal:

Writing is a male territory, has been so right from the beginning, women are latecomers and trespassers. Writing involves the mind. Who does not know that we, women, do not possess a mind. The woman who writes has stepped out of her own area of the senses, and appropriated a male gesture….The woman writer’s appeal therefore is directly to the mind and not to the senses, which is a woman’s allotted territory (4).

She then identifies seven different efforts at silencing the female voice. “No matter how hard I try to place the writer before the woman, it does not work. The woman rushes in and grabs the seat first and the writer comes tumbling after. In life and in work”(6). In her typical tongue-in-cheek attitude she also admits: “Patriarchy has taken notice of us and has produced sensitive womanist men who in their generosity organize seminars like this one” (5). Stressing that “androgyny is the mantra of tomorrow,” Dev Sen concludes her article by stating that being gender-bound by choice is a self-defeating act today and no amount of backlash can put the women writers back into their shells again.

As a writer “who happens to be a woman,” Krishna Sobti takes on the male persona of Hashmat as an effective means of entering the male world. For her Hashmat is not merely another pen name that she has taken, Hashmat is her “spiritual double, a literary sucker who is really provoking in a most natural way”(21). It is interesting that when Sobti used this pen-name for the first time – for her Hasmat writing, her spiritual soul – her handwriting automatically changed and so did her style and posture. “It all set in smoothly because both of us were using their power in different realms and there was no conflict.” She repeatedly questions the anxiousness to invent a new moral value for women writers and wants to shun or “not create two separate categories of writing”(26).

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Section II --which according to this reviewer is the most seminal section of the book --contains eleven personal (and to some extent confessional) reflections by different regional writers and also a couple of writers who write in English. The basic premise of all these women writers is the juxtaposition of the self and the other and also the ability to cross from one to the other. As one goes through the various essays of self-reflection, it is obvious that religion, caste, family structures and marriage can become confining presences in the female world, that educational and professional choices do not easily present themselves as viable ones to women of all backgrounds. One is reminded of Sylvia Plath’s complaint that she had to suppress her creative urge and was forced to do her maternal duties and domestic chores like warming milk for her child. Whereas one writer goes on to say that she decided to remain single, on the other hand we also have writers who acknowledge support coming forth from their fathers, fathers-in-law, husbands and brothers. Sashi Deshpande defines her position as a writer who happens to be a woman. Sarah Aboobacker clearly mentions that her experiences themselves as a Muslim woman have made her a writer. Growing up seeing the difficulties, superstitions, illiteracy and poverty among Muslim women, she decided that she should question such an injustice through her literary work. Having written many articles on communal harmony, she believes that “literature can also be a weapon to strengthen the feeble voice of the backward, exploited and helpless people, to give voice to the voiceless”(35).

For the Telugu writer Abburi Chaya Devi the male-domination at home and outside induced her to grow up as a woman writer. Entering the family of well- known litterateurs was initially advantageous to her but later she realized that women were like bonsai trees, their growth to their natural form and height was stifled in the name of art. It was clear that a woman writer was not supposed to cross the proverbial line of control not only in behaviour, but also in expression, and even in thought. Through her writings she herself has “grown up from a submissive but protesting girl to an understanding and self-assured woman”(42). For Mridula Garg, it was her intense loneliness in the midst of a large family which finally pushed her into the arms of a creative writing. It started as an escape and soon turned into a passion. As a woman, she knows doubly well “how difficult it is to be free in a free nation”(47). For Mallika Amar Sheikh again, composing verses in Marathi is different from Mallika writing in Hindi. Glorifying writing to have a purpose in life she states that her creative work has given her this meaning, given her the feeling of being alive, and this is the most crucial thing for her.

“A wife may breathe without her husband’s permission, but to write and then get it printed? This can never be without his permission. O women who write,

12 all should become recluses – malangs!!” This confession comes from Padma Sachdev who believes that poetry is like a beloved and comes to you only when you are alone. Born into a traditional family where purdah was observed, Jeelani Banu found encouragement from her husband and Ismat Chugtai to continue her creative work. But at the end of a long career she has realized that “society has suffered more because it has not taken the woman along. They have not been given equality”(68). This marginalization of the female voice is also repeated in the writings of all the other writers like Rajee Seth, Pratibha Roy, Indira Goswami, Meena Kakodkar and Neelum Saran Gour.

The third section, “Different Frames,” examines fiction by sixteen writers, some of whom like Esther David, Neelum Saran Gour, Sashi Deshpande, Indira Goswami, and Meena Kakodkar write in English. Among the regional writers we get to read fiction by Chitra Mudgal (Hindi), Himanshi Shelat (Gujarati), Sivashankari (Tamil), Sarah Aboobacker (Kannada), Alka Saraogi (Hindi), Abburi Chaya Devi (Telugu), Surjit Sarna (Punjabi), Volga (Telugu), Vijaya Rajadhyaksha (Marathi), Joya Mitra (Bengali), and Bama (Tamil). The inclusion of samples of creative fiction from some of the writers mentioned in the earlier section actually complement each other and bridge the divide between theory and practice.

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I have now decided to build up a laboratory where I shall discover new mysteries of life fresh concepts and truths – by compounding the hurts and pains, the hopes and despairs and their strikes and counterstrikes. -- Anupama Basumatary

Everyday I look into the mirror. The same narrow eyes. The same brownish hair. The same mouth that never barks. The same teeth that never bite. The same leash. There is nothing loathsome on its face. -- Savithri Rajeevan.

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Section IV, entitled “Songs of the Birds of Fire,” familiarizes us with fourteen creative voices of woman poets. While some write in the regional languages, many of them write in English and they include names like Lakshmi Kannan, J. Bhagyalakshmi, Prabhjot, Savithri Rajeevan, and Sanskritirani Desai. An interesting aspect of the volume is that most of the translations from Telugu, Tamil, Oriya, Assamese, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam were initiated by the writers themselves. Also many of the translators are well known writers in their own right and have extended their creative talents in order to cater to the needs of a multi-lingual society. Also, significantly, some of the translators happen to be men. So, it is interesting to read the translations of the Odiya poetry of Ranjita Nayak done by Jayanta Mohapatra, Anamika’s poetry translated by Ritu Menon, and Padma Sachdev and Sunita Jain’s poetry translated by Anamika.

The last section, the fifth, examines critical issues of aesthetics, representation, narratology, ageing, readership, feminine imagination and the revision of the canon. The sixteen articles comprising this section “Histories, Positions, Redefinitions,” are mind boggling in their range and subject matter. So we get to know about Kashmiri Women Poets, Malayalam Women’s writing in the 20th century, Reflections of Women’s poetry in Telugu, the dialectics of Language, Self and Representation, Feminist Interrogation of Oriya Texts, Subversion of the High Theory of Feminism, and the Question of Readership. What is remarkable about most of these evaluations is their almost total non-application of western theories. This, as the editor succinctly points out, is in itself a healthy and much-needed step if our perceptions of our realities are to have any relevance to our lives.

Ranging from the personal to the political, from the lyrical to the hardcore intellectual voice, the volume conveys the vibrancy of the writing of women in India today. Kudos to Jasbir Jain, the editor of this volume for her Herculean task in getting all types of unprofessional manuscripts redone in proper order, and Sahitya Akademi for such an interesting publication. Jain admits that though the writers in this volume present a whole range of experiences, concerns, emotions, images, struggles and histories, they still do not reflect every shade of meaning in women’s lives. She is aware of non-representation of certain sections and languages, as well as a need to balance the specific feminine concerns with an expansion of feminine interests. But in itself, in its present shape, it opens out the possibilities of coming together across differences, of the need and the willingness to listen to each other, and the possibility of intellectual issues jostling amicably with experiential ones. The book - a distinct successor to the pioneering work done by Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha several years earlier -- is

14 strongly recommended for the casual reader as well as the researcher in women’s studies, Indian literature, contemporary writing, et al.

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Telling Tales: Selected Writings, 1993-2013 Amit Chaudhuri Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) 2013. 308 pp. Rs. 499.00

Spanning a writing career of over twenty years, acclaimed novelist and author of Calcutta: Two Years in the City, Amit Chaudhuri, is also one of the most gifted essayists and critics writing today, whose work has appeared in the pages of many of the most prestigious newspapers and journals in the world, including The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, the Guardian, and the Dublin Review. Collected here for the first time, this volume under review is a selection of Chaudhuri's most enduring short non-fiction that showcases his sense of humour, his idiosyncratic capacity to transform the mundane, his political engagement, and his mastery of words. It also tells us that one can write on anything and everything under the sun if one wishes to and still retain the interest of the readers. “This new book of essays is also an attempt to create an audience for the things that I do,” says Chaudhuri.

When Chaudhuri returned from England, The Telegraph in Calcutta invited him to write a column irregularly for them. So he began to write on anything he wished to – from Derrida to Cheese Toast to Ujjwalas’s ubiquitous ‘chanachur’ -- the humble Indian savoury, to the decline of Bengali food, to revisiting Kalighat, to the habit of people of not parting with small change, to the humorous way he speaks about how “doubles come cheap these days -- although I am not a well-known writer, I too have one who performs an increasingly

15 alarming number of public functions; unlike me, he is constantly travelling cities and continents… The other day he was apparently at a bookshop, meeting people, being photographed and parrying questions; while I was at home, in a gloomy corner, trying to write this article.”

Reading the brief 1500 word long forty articles that comprise the biggest and longest first section of the book that he titles “Telling Tales,” one is reminded of Charles Lamb who had asked his readers to take his essays as an after-dinner conversation, nothing serious or critical and sometimes simply entertaining and soon forgotten. As the author mentions, one of the intentions of putting some of these short pieces together is to hint at the variety of stimuli surrounding him in Calcutta – the invisible milieu of the column – though, oddly, Calcutta is no longer the stimulating place it used to be. The other reason is that “it is possible to write about anything.” So we get to read about playing 'Cowboys and Indians' as a child in India to an outsider's perspective on the British class system to a plane that was hijacked by Pakistani men and taken to Afghanistan at the turn of the millennium. In “Doing Busyness”, Chaudhuri tells a tale about time and the ways in which our status is supposed to be promoted if we never have enough of it – the “principal mode of our epoch isn’t business, but busyness”. He suggests that being less busy provides “special opportunities for receptivity to the world.”

The second section contains some political writing and reportage too. As Chaudhuri mentions in the prefatory note, it is “a tiny selection of disagreements I’ve had with other writers – usually writers I read with much pleasure, but whose wrong side I may have found myself on temporarily, or they on mine.” In the essay “Partition as Exile” he tells us how the Partition had no fixed identity, it meant different things at different times and at times it meant nothing at all. Speaking about the memories of his parents and the members of his extended family he rightly concludes how the story of Partition is not the story of a moment, because it does not stop in 1947, but the story of exile, movement and resettlement, the agonized transition from old to new, and also the search for happiness in one’s ‘own’ country that was also a ‘foreign’ country, India.

The short third section entitled “Listening, Writing, Planning” contains four essays. It is about making music, reflecting on how he began by writing poetry and also how he wanted to be an artist without knowing how to paint or that kind of talent. In “Listening” Chaudhuri tells us how his intolerance of silence was something he became more aware of after moving to England as an undergraduate in 1983 and how he makes his daily journey from writing to music and back. In “Writing Calcutta” one gets an intimate picture of love-hate

16 relationship that the author has with the city – “For me, Calcutta’s ordinariness was its most compelling feature.” He felt it his duty “to remove the city from the Lapierrean ‘joy’ with which it had been made one in the media, out of angelic, Christian, Western, even corporate acts of charity.”

The last section of the book treats us to a selection of literary journalism and critical writing and is about authors. It is Chaudhuri at his most cerebral self. This includes an introduction he wrote for Hesperus Press for a selection of stories by E.M. Forster. “Unlike Kafka” is a review of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguru which was published in the London Review of Books. The third essay is an introduction titled “There Was Always Another” to two novels by Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies and the Chip Chip Gatherers. Here, Chaudhuri reflects on the varying subjectivities of writing families (William and Henry James, the Brontës, the ) and points out that they are usually “quite odd in their intensities”. In trying to make a sense of what siblings make of the same material – parents, home, and country, he correctly observes that the excellent novels by Naipaul were read “lazily” by critics. He also tries to find a reason why it was so difficult for him to jump out of the gigantic shadow of his elder brother, V S Naipaul. The third essay “A Strange Likeness” pays homage to Susan Sontag’s essay “Under the Sign of Saturn” while giving us a new way of looking at a melancholic Walter Benjamin, where he doesn’t seem like a ‘western’ man, but “someone familiar, someone who also could have been a Bengali living at any time between the end of the 19th and the middle of the 20th centuries.”

The attractive red cover of the Indian edition of this book is also its USP but it would be nice if the original dates of publication of each of these essays were mentioned at the end. Though one can in some instances guess the period from stray references, yet twenty years is quite a long time and it would benefit the reader perhaps if he knew when they were originally written and then try and gauge the thought patterns of Chaudhuri accordingly.

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MEMORY’S GOLD: Writings On Calcutta Edited by Amit Chaudhuri Penguin Viking, 2008; 538 pages; Rs. 699.00 ------Though the debate as to whether Job Charnock actually founded the city of Calcutta more than three hundred years ago continues well into the twenty-first century, and that too on what exact date, one thing that actually remains certain is that in spite of the myriad definitions of the city, it still remains as multifarious and as elusive as it was when it was founded. The long catalogue of the metropolis being a ‘dying city’, a ‘ city of palaces’, “city of dreadful night’, ’heroine of a hundred thousand loves,’ a ‘pestilential behemoth’ – Calcutta provokes extreme reactions in almost everyone who has encountered the city. Just a couple of days back, in an year-end article called “(Lazy) journo on leave” a journalist added another feather to the city’s cap by calling it “degeneration-friendly Calcutta, that hopelessly limbs akimbo-in-limbo city where buildings peel their skins and structures grow grime right in front of you even as you try to romanticize decay.” So, it becomes clear that the love-hate relationship towards Calcutta/Kolkata remains unabated till date and the emotions can range from the sacrosanct to the blasphemous.

Put together by Amit Chaudhuri and consisting of more translated pieces from Bengali than those written originally in English, this anthology brings together essays, stories, poems and memoirs of people who have shared an ardent

18 relationship with Calcutta. It is also more interesting because the anthology does not follow a linear chronology but is grouped into seven different sections according to subject or approach. So in Part I, entitled “Arrivals , Discoveries” Kaliprasanna Singha’s Hootum’s narrative describing nouveau Babus of 19th century Kolkata shares space with the narrative of a young 19th century widow as found in Saikat Majumdar’s 2008 debut novel, Silverfish. Chaudhuri begins the anthology with three entries by Henry Meredith Parker who belonged to a time in the 19th century when there was far freer mingling amongst Indian and British liberals in Calcutta than would ever be possible after the Mutiny ( he acknowledge this discovery of this relatively less known poet to his wife’s research). The other and most obvious writer in this section is Rabindranath Tagore who being born in “the Calcutta of yesteryear” gave elegiac reminiscences of his childhood home in his writings. The section ends with ’s letter where he talks about the city’s extraordinary literary acumen when a shopkeeper who read Meghnad Kavya engages the poet on a discussion of blank verse.

The second section on “Exile, Domicile” includes an excerpt from Chaudhuri’s own novel Freedom Song. As a city giving shelter to ‘migrant’ workers from other states, (as does Kishore Babu in Alka Saraogi’s novel KaliKatha: Via Bypass), it also changed the lives of the people who are literally homeless both before and after the Partition. Manas Roy’s narrative “Growing Up Refugee” is juxtaposed with Shaheen Akhtar’s account of the deceptively humdrum yet charged suburban context of a Bangladeshi’s expatriation. The selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri, , Ruchir Joshi, , Sandipan Chattopdhyay, and Shakti Chattopadhyay’s works are commendable as each gives a different interpretation of belonging and not belonging to the city. A significant entry is from ’s novel Malayban which situates him in the complexities of his unhappy marital life and his milieu, without being able to explain, in the end, his disorienting ghostliness, his itinerant sense of the world.

The short section entitled “Flanerie” gives us pictures of the city during , its penchant for ‘adda’, the lure of the Kali temple; but the most significant entry is from Buddhadeb Bose’s Tithidore which records the day of Tagore’s death as one of the transformative moments in the city’s history. Four entries comprise Part IV. Entitled “Manifestoes”, it includes writings of Saratkumar Mukhopadhyay, Samar Sen and Buddhadeb Bose and the eponymous song/poem by Suman Chattopadhyay (Kabir Suman) called “Tomake Chai” translated as “I Want You.” As Chaudhuri aptly points out, poets and songwriters can write manifestoes while using the form self-reflexively, with a degree of irony – declamations that also mediate upon the shape and compulsions of the declamation.

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Since can be simply blind to the city’s faults, it is also necessary to have a non-Bengali or a non-Indian perspective on Kolkata. Keeping this objective approach in mind, Part V has a long list of entries under its title “Visitors.” Beginning with Ramchandra Guha’s “An Anthropologist Among the Marxists” where the writer calls Calcutta “the intellectual centre of world Marxism”, several western writers give their own points of view of the city. These include a writer like Allen Ginsberg, whose 1962 trip is documented in his Indian Journals; two interesting poems by Matthew Sweeney and Tom Paulin; a memoir from V.S. Naipaul’s The Overcrowded Barracoon; a longish excerpt from Gunter Grass’s 1988 diary called Show Your Tongue, where he concludes by stating the position of narrator thus: “He, years ago, had come alone and horrified by the city, had wanted to get away. And once away, had wanted to return. The horrifying city, the terrible goddess within, would not let him go.” We are all aware of how in his earlier visit to the city in 1975, Grass was so appalled when confronting the raw and rough reality of Kolkata that had compared it to a “pile of shit”, the “swarming-stinking metropolis inspired him to “develop a new dialectic from Kolkata’s contradictions.” Later he declared that he could not tear away from the city and would return soon. The reaction of another German writer Ulrike Draesner, is poetic in its starkness of description when she writes “Shacks, crows, heat, incessant honking of car horns – Calcutta.” She further calls the city “a lethargic onslaught”, “a city with no beginning, no end,” “ a city that vanishes, only to reappear when night falls, transformed by yellow light, warm and thick.” Amit Chaudhuri squeezes in a little piece written by himself called “Beyond Translation” where he labels himself as an outsider to the city during his childhood years. Living in Bombay, the trip to his uncle’s home and the contrast between his cousins who read Bengali books whereas he devoured the English ones, smells of sheer nostalgia. Also one is fascinated by reading the exploits of Belal Chaudhury, who formed part of the literary journal krittibas along with Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Kaiser Haq narrates his ten year’s sojourn to Calcutta, his support of the Bangladesh war of liberation and his subsequent return to Dhaka and though Belal has reminiscenced about his colourful life in various articles and essays, Haq rightly points out that it is high time he got it all down between two covers.

The city then shows another facet vis-à-vis employment. In Part VI we read Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s realistic “Canvasser Krishnalal” , dealing with an occupation typical to Calcutta and this offers striking contrast to Utpal Kumar Basu’s surreal take on office culture in the magical city. Jibaanananda Das’s “Beggar” and Moti Nandi’s footballer also accompanies selections from Rajsekhar Basu’s “Shri Shri Siddheshwari Limited” and Sarnath Banerjee’s

20 graphic novel The Barn Owl’s Wonderous Capers. Four longish essays represent the concluding section on “Memory.” Sudhin Dutta’s piece as a part of “The World’s Cities’ series of the British Encounter magazine is a reiteration of the enigmatic nature of Calcutta – “I who was born here at the turn of the century, and have spent most of my years in the city, cannot define its character…Calcutta is an upstart hardly two centuries old.” Sasthi Brata’s reminiscences of College Street and the Coffee House from his groundbreaking autobiography My God Died Young, Jug Suraiya’s equally nostalgic take on Park Street, and Sunetra Gupta’s “Disappearances” bring to the fore various perspectives on the city from the point of view of the exile. So when Sunetra states that “it is not a criticism that our love for the city was rooted neither in its history nor in its geography, for where it existed was in the life of the mind of its inhabitants”, she seems to be echoing the statements made in similar vein by both V.S.Naipaul and Salman Rushdie when they talk about the diasporic sensibility as “India/ of the mind.” Her further statements that the bonds between herself and the city “are so deep that mere distance has no effect upon it” and that Calcutta taught her that “the best state to be poised in is in between two cultures and their productive discourse” redeems the city from its negative publicity no doubt .

The different evocations of the city’s social life in the 19th and 20th centuries, of its churches and cemeteries, clubs and palaces, streets and exotic locales cannot but delight us. No one minds if we have read many of these pieces earlier; within every Calcutta buff lives a sucker for nostalgia. The present anthology is not to be read at one go; one can move backwards and forwards and read the section or the writer one wants to at leisure. Though no one can complain about the subjective choice of the fifty –five pieces that Chaudhuri has selected for this thick volume, at the end of it all, one keeps on wondering why many significant writings are left out. These range from, say, the nightmarish chaos of the city as described by Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise in Days and Nights in Calcutta, Geoffrey Moorhouse’s ponderings on the city with its over-decorated and pseudo-baroque splendours of the Marble Palace, William Dalrymple’s narration about the White Moghuls, Nachiketa’s popular song eulogizing the three hundred years of the city (“Oh Kolkata!”); Radha Raman Mitra and P. Thankappan Nair’s well-researched writings; Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy that popularized the ubiquitous rickshaw as an emblem of the city; Desmond Doig’s Impressions of Calcutta, a book that captures the essence and the spirit of the city as few books have done, and so on. In his introduction to the volume, the editor stated the reason for leaving Mother Teresa out of this collection “because it is an aesthetic of the city, of this city, that [he’s] concerned with tracing”. The above-mentioned writers hopefully could have fallen into the

21 aesthetic category. Maybe Chaudhuri can plan a sequel or a second volume to his recollection of ‘memory.’ Long live Kolkata!

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The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain ( 1880-1932) Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Mohammad A. Quayum Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2013. 198 pages. ------“If a dog is hit by a car, we hear an outcry in the Anglo-Indian media. But there is not a single soul in the whole of this subcontinent to mourn for incarcerated women like us.”

This was Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain or as she was most popularly known as, speaking at “Bengal Women’s Educational Conference” where she also described women as “the lowliest creature in India” and these scathing remarks are no doubt her responses to what she generally saw and witnessed in contemporary society.

The publication of Rokeya’s selected works, “Sultana’s Dream” and “Padmaraag” a few years earlier translated and edited by Barnita Bagchi (Penguin Books) and the recent publication of “Sultana’s Dream” by Tara Books, Chennai speak of the recurring interest in Rokeya. But this volume under review,

22 translated and edited by Mohammad A Quayum, is the most comprehensive as it gives us a taste of all genres of Rokeya’s works that she wrote for over a period of thirty years in both English and Bengali. This includes poetry, polemical essays, fiction, allegorical narratives to social satire, burlesque, letters and journalistic vignettes. Since Rokeya and her work is well known to readers primarily in and Bangladesh, this volume is very useful in disseminating knowledge to a pan-Asian or even a world readership about the fundamental role she played in awakening feminist views in , especially among the of her time.

Rokeya has left behind five books and scores of uncollected essays, stories, poems and uncollected letters. This collection includes Rokeya’s most popular story, Sultana’s Dream (1908), and some essays and letters written originally in English, as well as Quayum’s own translation of several of her fiction and non- fiction works written originally in Bengali. Among them selections from Motichur (A String of Sweet Pearls) Vol I & II, and all the 47 journalistic vignettes included in Abarodhbasini (The Zenana Women) 1931. Most of her writing is in the realist tradition and she depicted the society around her as she saw it, impartially and objectively, without any attempt to glorify or magnify the truth. Rokeya believed in the ethical function of literature; that literature should arouse sympathy for the oppressed and the exploited in society and heighten the consciousness of readers to the reality of the human condition: she wrote for the practical well-being of her society, mainly for the Muslim community of her time, who were in her words, “ship-wrecked” for “earnestly neglecting the feminine portion of the society.” So all her strength lie in writing polemical prose, characterized by clarity, directness, forceful reasoning and a strong intellectual presence of the author- narrator.

From the biographical section of the volume we are made aware of how Rokeya herself had to fight gender discrimination at home with a very strict and orthodox father who did not encourage any formal education for girls. So her achievements as a writer, educationist and social activist did not come easily. Behind her education lay the contributions of her sister Karimunnesa’s benevolent grooming of her younger sister and her elder brother Ibrahim Saber who initiated her into the world of English. Later in her life the support she received from her husband Sakhawat Hossain who was generous, progressive, had a liberal and modern outlook and believed in the significance of women’s education made her one of the stalwarts of education for Muslim girls first in Bhagalpur and then in Calcutta where she moved permanently in 1910. The opening of the Sakahawat Memorial School for Girls in 1911 and the problem she faced in imparting education to Muslim women in Bengali instead of Urdu and Persian is well-known – “… our

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Prophet has made it obligatory to give education to our daughters, why are they still so indifferent to the education of girls?” she asks and concludes her lampoon on religious fanatics by stating, “Those mullahs who give fatwahs against female education are devils in disguise”.

Another path-breaking effort of Rokeya was the founding of the Anjuman-i- Khawateen Islam (Muslim Women’s Association or also known as Calcutta Mohamedan Ladies Association) in 1916. The objectives of the Association was to offer financial assistance to poor widows, rescue and provide shelter to the physically or sexually abused wives, help the poor families to marry off their daughters, and above all, run literacy programmes among the slum women, both Hindu and Muslim. In spite of expressing such grit and tenacity throughout her life, the end of Rokeya’s life was not smooth. She could not bear the constant irrational, unfounded and vitriolic remarks of her critics and as a letter written a few months before her death testifies, she resigned to fate and had this to say: “All my life I have been striving to do something for the freedom of women, and I believe God will help me in this; God is my only hope. He has been testing me by inflicting lot of pain and sorrows, but I am hoping that he will show mercy on me soon.”

What interests us is the fact that in spite of championing for the cause of Muslim women, Rokeya herself has also been a victim of the stringent purdah system all her life. “I have lived in an iron vault” she mentions in an essay. In her ‘Author’s Introduction’ to the Zenana Women, in which Rokeya provides her most outrageous expose of the purdah system as it was practiced by the aristocratic Muslims in India at the time, she tells us -- “Having lived in purdah for a long time, we have grown accustomed to the secluded life. Therefore we, especially I, have nothing to say against it.” She reveals her own experience of purdah in childhood, at least in two episodes of the book, in both of which she explains that she was forced to live in segregation from the age of five, not only from the men but also from women outside her family circle. “The purdah practice can be compared more accurately with the deadly carbonic acid gas. Because it kills without any pain, people get no opportunity to take precautions against it. Likewise, women in purdah are dying bit by bit in silence from this ‘seclusion’ gas without experiencing pain.” Some of the vignettes also make us laugh at the stupidity of the system. For instance when a thief is silently handed over the keys from behind the veil in a lady’s bed chamber so that he can decamp with the jewellery without violating the modesty of the mistress; or when Hindu women were taken to have a bath in the river in a palanquin in an excruciating winter evening and the four bearers went down in the water with the women inside it; or when a burqa clad grandmother refuses to get down from the train in the

24 absence of a palanquin on the platform and is ultimately wrapped in several layers of clothes like a bundle and carried out of the train in that condition by three or four people and put on the horse drawn carriage in that manner.

From reading the different kinds of her selected writing here, the importance of Rokeya Sakahwat Hossain as a writer, an educationist and also as a social activist is reiterated once again. As the first Muslim female voice of the Bengal Renaissance, her position remains undoubtedly on the top. The publisher in Netherlands who has brought out the volume under their ‘Women and Gender’ series focusing on the and the Islamic World and the professor in Malaysia who has edited and translated Rokeya’s works and provided us with a detailed introduction of her life and work need to be congratulated wholeheartedly for this concerted effort.

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The Golden Treasury of Writers Workshop Poetry Edited by Rubana Huq Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 2008. 410pages; Rs.400.00 ------What do A.K. Ramanujan, Agha Shahid Ali, Feroz Ahmed ud Din, Gopal R Honnalere, Keki N. Daruwala, Kshitij Mohan, Meena Alexander, , , , Shama Futehally, Suniti Namjoshi, Uma Parameswaran, and Yamini Krishnamurti have in common? Well, at some point in their lives they all saw their creative and poetic urge in print within the covers of a Writers Workshop book. Indian Writing in English (or Indo- Anglian writing as it was then called) has come a long way from its uncertain beginnings and since the founding of this non-profit and non-political institution in Calcutta way back in 1958. As stated in its motto, it consists of “a group of writers who agree in principle that English has proved its ability, as a language, to play a creative role in Indian literature, through transcreation from India, the Commonwealth and other English-using territories.”

The present book under review is an appropriate tribute to the completion of fifty years of Writers Workshop and with ninety six poets under one cover (some big names now, others faded into oblivion after the first flush of their creative muse) stands as a proof of the role that Writers Workshop played on the “pace

25 and space” of the poets. For several years it was the only platform that most writers of Indo-Anglian literature had. The poetry that was born out of national politics, peasantry and folklore infused with the colonizer’s tongue sounded different and assumed a separate identity and this was the only platform for self- expression. In the brief introduction that Professor Purushottama Lal (more well-known as P.Lal) offers at the beginning of the anthology defining the ‘credo’ of Writers Workshop; we get a brief history of how this enterprise of alternative publishing survived without plush foundations to back it, without advertisement, without large-hearted patrons; how he had to lecture in many western countries and convert the hard-earned remuneration into resources to sustain his dream publication venture.

As mentioned earlier, some of the poets included in this anthology have become world-famous; others have either drifted to more materialistic concerns of life or have never published poetry again. For instance, poets like Feroz Ahmed-ud-din from Bangladesh had published only one book of poems in 1975 and had never been discussed ever again; someone like artist Praseet Sen, who called his poetry ‘visuals’ and has only one volume of poems to his credit before he died in Bombay in his early fifties; writers like Amitava Kumar who forayed into the world of prose writing after his 1996 volume “No Tears for NRI’ and has now joined the bandwagon of diasporic academics in the United States; the famous danseuse Yamini Krishnamurti who wanted to combine her poetry in words which was very occasional with her ‘poetry’ of movement and gesture; or the economist Sekhar Aiyar who works at the IMF in Washington DC and published his only volume of poems in 1998. All these poets share the same space with persons like Tilottama Rajan,(daughter of the famous academic B. Rajan who lived in Canada for several years); Debjani Chatterjee, Suniti Namjoshi, Kamala Das, Jane Bhandari, Gauri Deshpande who voice definite feminist concerns in their works. Again there are female poets like Monika Varma, Ira De, Tapati Mookerji and Lakshmi Kannan of who little is known. One is delighted to read some early Ramanujan (“Anxiety,/ the afternoon’s shame/and tomorrow’s leanness/step out of the walls of wakefulness..”); the nostalgia for his homeland Kashmir in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry (“Destiny is another matter: I /whore myself to the escapes of the times.”); the now famous lines of Kamala Das “I speak three languages, dream in two, write in one”; the bald wit of the gay poet Hoshang Merchant, the diasporic angst in early Meena Alexander; the cynic strain of Daud Haider as translated by Lila Roy, the declaration by Pritish Nandy, “you cannot escape the waters that cradle you”; or selections from Vikram Seth’s “Mappings” who was hailed by Professor Lal to be writing at least a decade ahead of his times.

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This reviewer would do injustice to the editor Rubana Huq if she did not mention the handsomely produced and special layout pattern of this anthology. Dedicated to her three English professors at the and to Professor P. Lal, like all Writers Workshop books it has the ubiquitous handloom sari cover with the golden colour calligraphied title embossed on it; but within the covers all the pages are done in the manner of a collage with photographed material where the old biographies, the poems themselves and also the current positions of the poets are juxtaposed very artistically to give us a feel of the vintage value of this collection. According to the editor, this attempt to do a special layout “would talk of history, to history and engage readers to travel through the picture gallery captured by a five-year old JVC camera presenting images of the original collection that may help all become a virtual partner of the less quoted pages of time.” The endeavour of course comes with its share of technical glitches when for instance, the biography of Jane Bhandari (p.112) gets superimposed beneath the serious-looking sketch of Joe Winter’s face (p.126). Ms. Haq’s personal endeavour to trace out the current location and status of these writers is also commendable.

One of the most interesting aspects of this anthology is the inclusion of the responses of several poets to the questionnaire that Professor P. Lal sent to them. This was related to the charge that the Bengali poet and critic Buddhadev Bose made against Indian writing in English calling it “the inconceivable loss of a mother tongue.” So A.K. Ramanujan is annoyed and states, “As someone professionally concerned with language, such statements do not make much sense to me. It may be because I am not sufficiently literary to understand what men of letters say about language.” admits that he didn’t know poetry in any other language and berates Bose for either “not having done his homework” or for lacking “a vision of history that ignores the results of two of its most significant events: large-scale migration and large-scale colonialism.” From the tongue-in-cheek reply of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra stating that he wrote in English “because that language offered more scope to my emotions…the question is like asking why do you wear a black coat and not a red one,” to Deb Kumar Das’s declaration that “Mr. Bose has missed the point of Indo-Anglian poetry completely; so completely, in fact, that one wonders if he was interested in understanding it,” to Gieve Patel’s statement that “we are not concerned with being appreciated in England or the United States, but in our own country,” to Gopal R. Honnalgere who felt that “the early poets were Indians trying to be Englishmen in Calcutta whereas the modern ones are aware that they are Indian writing in English” to the matter of fact way in which Keki N. Daruwalla asserts “why a foreigner cannot change or re-create a language” to Kamala Das stating, “English being the most familiar, we use it. That is

27 all….Language has no colour prejudice and it does not observe the rigid rules of narrow patriotism. It serves anybody who chooses to serve it”; the readers can clearly evaluate the feeling of the difficult times through which Indian poetry in English had to tread and also the sincere conviction with which these poets went on writing in the genre. So when Saleem Peeradina speaks of not subscribing to the “mother-tongue” myth, stating “My tongue is that in which I can best express myself,” or when Pritish Nandy replies in an angry tone:

Yes, Indian writing in English is the result of Anglomania in the same sense that such writing in Bengali is the result Bengalimania…According to , a London plumber is a native because he hears English in the streets; however much I love English and feel in it I am foredoomed to foreignness because I learnt the language, not picked it up… one feels the sense of unity that prevails among creative minds in a multilingual and multicultural nation as India.

Some of the poets in this anthology get just a page or two for their poetry whereas others are allotted greater space. Though the choice of poets for any collection is always a subjective one, the editor seeks apology for all omissions and makes it clear that she has essentially chosen “poems and not particularly the poets, the music and not the craft, the magic and not the mundane, the spirit and not the flesh.” So, though “no literary history can be expected to cover everything” as A.K. Mehrotra opined in the preface of his 2002 anthology, we feel the insufficiency even though we do get a taste of the kind of Indian poetry in English the ninety six poets have contributed for the last fifty years. So even if one is not a person with a poetic bend of mind, one would surely love to possess this limited copy collector’s item which, apart from the poems themselves, is a historical document of a specific genre among the several unique literary movements in India.

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The Best of Quest Edited by Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala and Arshia Sattar TranquebarPress, Rs 695 ------Letus begin with a little bit of history. In 1954, a new magazine appeared out of Bombay with Nissim Ezekiel at its helm. Named Quest (“a quarterly of inquiry, criticism and ideas”), it flourished for about two decades until an unusual political situation in the country caused it to collapse. From the very beginning Quest was an ideologically free-wheeling enterprise. Launched during the Cold War and unknown to its management or the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom headed by Minoo Masani, some of its financial support came through conduits set up by the CIA. Quest was modeled on Encounter- a magazine edited by Stephen Spender and published in the USA and UK, Quadrant in , Transitionin Africa and even Imprint in India - journals that were also financed by the same secret sources. From the very beginningQuest was to counter every shade of fascism, and to encourage clear, honest and balanced discussion on issues of public concern. Ezekiel further laid down some principles –everything about it must have some relevance to India. It was to be written by Indians, for Indians and needless to say it was a difficult task to achieve because during those days Indians still glamorised anything foreign, ,including writers. But the magazine flourished and any and every idea underthe sun saw expression in its pages.

During the Emergency, Minoo Masani insisted that the publication of Quest be suspended in protest against the censorship laws imposed by Mrs. Gandhi. Professor A.B. Shah, the new Director of Programmes in India of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (that was by then openly financed by a time-bound grant from the Ford Foundation) had exactly the opposite response. As the editor of 29 an anthology of writings that appeared during the first ten years of Quest entitled Ten Years of Quest, he wanted to defycensorship by publishing the magazine without submitting its contents to government censors. Therefore, the personality clash between Masani and Shah and a difference in their political response to dictatorial rule saw the untimely death of the original Quest. When there was a deadlock on the use of the name Quest, Shah opted to launch New Quest. This journal in its new avatar was to be a voice of protest, freedom, democracy, as well as of faithin the use of theintellect as a weapon to preserve its own liberty.

As a freewheeling enterprise, Quest was an intellectual rite of passage: many of the boldface names that light up newspapers, magazines, academic journals and every television screen today, first made their mark with a piece in here. Ezekiel as the editor wanted people to write not for money, but because they had something to say which was worth saying. As the title of the present book under review is an indicator, this anthology contains selected pieces of essays, opinion, poetry, fiction, reminiscences published in the pioneering periodical Quest that accordingto the editors is “the result of a rearrangement of space” and meant little more than a footnote to history. It contains any and everything that would arrest the interest of the Indian intellectual growing up and living during the fifties and sixties decade in post-independent India. Featuring writers famous and obscure, Indian and foreign, Hindu; Muslim; Christian and atheist, the anthology is divided into several sections. The section titled "In Memoriam" finds two of the current editors reminiscing about Nissim Ezekiel. The longest section "Essays and Opinion"has 45 entries and one has to useone's imagination to look for themes that are not included. Writers like RajaniKothari, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Jyotirmoy Datta, P.Lal, Dilip Chitre, , Hamdi Bey, A.G. Noorani, Khuswant Singh, Abu Sayeed Ayyub, Sibnarayan Roy rub shoulders with Subhas Chandra Mehta, A. H. Bilgrami, C.R. Irani, Sudhir Kakar, Murli Das Mehyani, Marie Seton, Claude Alvares.and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman (who writes on the Proclamation of Independence of Bangladesh). Section IV contains poems by 17poets who have become great stalwarts in Indian English poetry - Agha Shahid Ali, Darius Cooper, Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Adil Jussawala, Arun Kolatkar, Jayanta Mohapatra, , Saleem Peeradina, A.K. Ramanujan and others. lt also contains a few entries by Allen Ginsberg –the American Beat poet who came to India in search of nirvana. The fiction section contains stories written originally in English aswell as translations of others written in different bhasha literatures. Some of the writers included are Yashwant Chittal, Neela D'Souza, Keki N. Daruwalla, Kamala Das, , , Klimleshwar, PremendraMitra, and P.S. Sundaram.

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Dilip Chitre, who for many years published a column under the pseudonym “D”, managed to create his own cult-following among the readers of Quest. He used it to write on popular and art-house cinema, painting and artists, populist movements and politics, upcoming gurus and godmen, theatre, music, and the various hued moral police who sought censorship of art. In the postscript section, Chitre provides a lot of inside information about the journey ofQuest under different editors. He laments that few readers of the current age will care to dig through the archived coffins in the expired journal's graveyard to find “D.” “But I know it's me,” he concludes,“- of another time and season - grinning back at my present self, anolder, wiser and infinitely more boring self.”

Apart from the literary pieces, an added attraction of this volume is the inclusion of several advertisements from the original pages of the .journal. Printed in black and white and launched much before the advent of television, they provide a sense of nostalgia in a way that Radio Ceylon or Binaca Geetmala did for the radio listeners during the sixties decade. Thus the visual pleasure provided by advertisements of many products now long passé - Go-go Bata shoes, Tinopal whitener, Lambretta scooters, Binaca talc, Erasmic blades, the ubiquitous Ambassador car from Hindustan Motors for the Indian family, Rajdoot motorcycles, Tik-20 for bugs, Favre-Leuba watches, Rallifans, Modella suitings (where a sari-clad woman ina suitcaresses a lion) - speak a lot about consumer culture in the first few decades of post-independent India. Perhaps the most interestingof the lot is the Air India advertisement in which three sari-clad air- hostesses surround the first class passenger and pamper him like the proverbial maharaja of the company's logo.

As Ramchandra Guha endorses in the dustjacket of the book, the range of themes – from politics to religionand warfare to literature - matches the range of writers, who, despite their variety within, are united by a commitment to liberal values and stylish prose. He requests all ‘literary-minded’ and ‘liberal- minded’Indians to returnto this book and I think, this statement endorsesthe value ofthis anthology in a nutshell. Achal Prabhala concludes the foreword with a question: “Two decades on from the end of the big bad chill, who could-have imagined that oneeffect of imperialism would be the idiosyncrasy and iconoclasm you now hold in your hands?"

In this age of transnational publications this anthology is therefore a really good read for Indians by Indians who wrote back in the language of the Imperial masters after they weregone from the country forever!

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Whither Justice: Stories of Women in Prison Nandini Oza Rupa & Co, 2006, Rs.195.00

We are tired of reading about women who have been marginalized in our patriarchal society, the subaltern who cannot speak, women who have been for generations more sinned against than sinning. Feminists and social workers, NGOs and governmental agencies are constantly making us aware of the plight of these ordinary individuals. So, when this slim volume recounts ten incidents of true lives of women prisoners as fictional stories, at first glance it seems to be reiterating on things discussed to death. But the credit of this young writer lies in the fact that she has managed to live among the prisoners, first as part of her field work for a Master’s degree in Social Work, and subsequently, as an undertrial prisoner after she became a full-time activist in the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Gaining confidence of these prisoners who earlier refused to speak or divulge their life stories, Oza saw the effects of centuries of discrimination and exploitation of women as never before in its starkest form. Their life stories revealed their position as women, the expectations from them, the ruthless manner in which society dealt with them and coerced them into crime. In many cases, these women were paying the price for the crimes of society.

So we hear of Dayali whose records allege that she had trespassed into someone’s private property and had stolen a cheap sari that was hanging on a clothesline, drying. She had spent two years in jail without the charges being proved and even

32 when the case unexpectedly came up for trial, she refused to admit the theft because she had not done it. Again, there is Revali, who, after a lot of coaxing takes the writer into confidence and asks her to write a letter to her husband and send it to an address which is just a platform at Dharampuri Railway Station– the only address they had after being routed out from their village for dam construction. We also hear of Kammu, an illiterate woman who firmly believes that marriage should be limited to having children. Widowed with a young son, she is in jail because she killed her second husband, the Master sahib of the village, when she found out that he was a pedophile and had targeted her only son for it. We also hear of Mukta, who was led into prostitution by the lure of good life and was booked under SITA (Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act), and of Shakuntala, who had plunged into a lake along with her two children but was saved and arrested. Ironically, she sat counting her days in prison secretly harbouring her last wish that once free from captivity, she would go straight to the lake and end her life in its calm waters. Written in a lucid style, it is recommended that you pick up this slim volume and read Nandini Oza’s fictionalized stories of faceless, voiceless and forgotten women, of their dreams shattered beyond recognition as well as of hopes that still linger in them. And think!

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The Art of the Intellect: Uncollected English Writings of Sudhindranath Datta Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008. pp.326; Rs. 650.00 ------

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As a post-modern Bengali poet, essayist, journalist and critic, Sudhindranath Datta (1901-1960) needs no introduction to the Bengali intelligentsia. He was among the poets of the 1930’s, such as Jibanananda Das and Buddhadeva Bose who broke away from the romantic tradition of Rabindranath Tagore, to whom he had written as early as 1928 about his belief that “the chief component of poetry is not lyricism but intellectualism, and it is there that a poet’s individuality is located.” Datta’s work is marked by a distinct urban outlook and ambience as he became a representative poet of the post-Independence generation. Though not a bilingual writer, he also wrote in English for the larger part of his career and these consist mainly of discursive prose. Ten years after his death, a selection of Datta’s original English writings and translations (by himself and others) had appeared under the title The World of Twilight.

As the title clearly states, the present volume under review contains all the recoverable English writings of Datta outside those already gathered in the earlier collection. Sudhindranath and his wife, the noted singer and musicologist Rajeswari Datta, had bequeathed their property to . The Hirendranath Datta Foundation, named after the poet’s philosopher father was set up within the University to look after this legacy. Retrieved by the School of Cultural Texts and Records under the able and painstaking editorial skill of Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, the articles in this volume are of various lengths and mind-boggling variety giving us a new insight into the multi-faceted genius that Sudhindranath was. Some of these articles were never published before; others may have been printed but are virtually untraceable, hence recovered from drafts and typescripts. Some pieces have been recovered from The Marxian Way, other rare journals and from The Statesman archives. Most of them were intended for publication and/or broadcasting over All India Radio. The range of subjects and depth of treatment reflect one of the most erudite and original minds of the time. They also recreate the political, cultural and intellectual milieu of that age of transition and prove how a man cannot be compartmentalized as a poet or a short-story writer.

The eighty articles of this volume are divided under six sections. Twelve essays comprise the ‘Literature’ section where Datta begins “The Necessity of Poetry” by stating that poetry needs no defence as it is after all one of the elder arts. Examining the classical poets he concludes thus: “I must admit that I have failed and failed lamentably to prove the necessity of poetry.” Similar stark statements appear in “The Highbrow” where he states that his intellectual curiosity was extensive and though he did not possess enough industry to become erudite in any subject, he employed the results of his varied reading to inquire why he liked literature. Living in a pluralistic world, he admits that his literary ideal was

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‘priggish’ and he fully deserves to be denigrated as there was a great contradiction between his highbrow theory and lowbrow practice. He even agreed with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much- maligned Ivory Tower. Readers will be delighted to read the draft of an introduction to the proposed Oxford Book of Bengali Verse that was being edited by Rabindranath Tagore with Prashantachandra Mahalanobis and Sudhindranath’s help. For whatever reason, the collection did not see the light of day. The critical comments that his father Hirendranath Datta made and that have been incorporated as footnotes in the article are significant.

In “Whiggism, Radicalism and Treason in Bengal” Datta states that from prehistoric times Bengal stood apart from the rest of the country, absorbing rebels, suffering royalty, thinking that, as nobody came to her without the intent to exploit, she owed none anything except lip service. Calling himself “neither a progressive nor a writer who has ever passed beyond infrequent notoriety” he concludes that without presuming to call himself a Marxist, he realized that the crisis in our culture was of class origin; and therefore he placed his forlorn hope of regeneration in the people who are ‘permanently beyond class and thus eternally outside crisis’. Several other pieces in this section talk about European Literature after the War, about Andre Gide, Goethe, Valery, and T.S. Eliot after he won the Nobel Prize (Budddhadev Bose translated this article into Bengali and published in his journal Kavita). In the concluding article of this section “Whither English Literature? Modern Essay and Iconoclast Biography” Datta feels that being on the wrong side of forty, it behoves him to avoid all confusion between augury and wishful thinking. He is convinced that English prosperity, derived mainly from the accidental occupation of India, was not the ultimate link in a chain of fortuitous circumstances, but the inevitable consequences of expanding capitalism.

Datta’s interest in Indian art, early history and archeology is expressed through some articles he wrote in this area. These include the art of Atul Bose, Jamini Ray, the evolution of Durga, Sartorial Traits of the Hindus and Holi. He praises Jamini Roy for remaining Indian as “nobody before him has ever succeeded in being” and in a witty manner mentions how popularity at long last has not robbed Roy of his simplicity, and “his pictures continue to be priced ridiculously low, as is fitting in a country where most men have not money enough for two square meals a day.”

A major portion of Datta’s writings comprise of reviews. It was in The Statesman that he wrote most of his reviews, mainly of books, beginning in 1939. There were Sundays when he wrote more than one. These were obviously

35 commissioned, but not alien to his interests. These range from Bengali authors like Charu Chandra Dutt, Buddhadeva Bose, and Nanda Lal Bose, and wander off to European shores with Albert Einstein, Sidney Keyes, Guido de Ruggeiro, Franz Kafka, John Lehmann, Philip Talbot, Lasky, Strindberg, Aldous Huxley, Antonina Vallentin, Sigmund Freud and many others. He even wrote some drama reviews of Othello, Pygmalion, Arms and the Man performed by Shakespeareana along with an appreciation of Samghat performed at the Rungmahal.

Taking a look at the titles one can see a similarity with the book review section of Parichay, the magazine he edited for twelve years and which afterwards passed to his Marxist friends. Many English reviews for this newspaper were often rewritten and enlarged in Bengali for his journal. In the two reviews of Rabindra Rachanabali published by Visva-Bharati, Datta praises the poet of Volume I and states: “Tagore is greater than an unbeaten pioneer. Not only did he create the present-day Bengali culture in its entirety, he still remains its sole dispenser and arbiter.” In the later review of Volumes II & III he is not so eulogizing and states that Tagore’s later writings tend to become a trifle too pure, meaning thereby that with the passage of years, the emphasis shifts slowly and imperceptibly ‘from matter to manner’. That he had friends on The Statesman – including at various times, Malcolm Muggeridge and Lindsay Emerson-- might have been a reason behind his association with this English daily, where he served again as an Assistant Editor from 1945 to 1949.

It was actually as his stint as Assistant Editor in The Statesman that made Datta write several editorials or political commentaries on contemporary affairs. The section entitled “Politics and Society” has several such pieces (some anonymous), the titles of which are self-explanatory – “The Rise of the Nation,” “Society and the Ethos”, “Observations on the Russian Situation,” “Gandhi’s Assassination: Chairman’s Remarks”; “Bengal Today: Communism in Bengal”; “The Legacy of the Raj”. Several other articles in this section speak of the writer’s close affinity with M.N. Roy and Marxist principles. In “Draft on Marxism” Datta states his belief that one of the major fallacies of Marxism resides in the very equation of theory and practice; in “Proposal for The Marxian Way” he states: “For the Marxist attitude is dialectical, realistic and based on history; it grows by synthesizing the contradictions inherent in any given situation; and the exclusive Marxist, who would achieve social unity by ignoring the actual pluralism of the contemporary world, would be untrue to his creed and faithless to his discipline.”

In his introduction to the volume, Professor Amiya Dev calls the poet’s art as that of the ‘intellect’ and the range and nature of some of these articles surely

36 vouch for that. He further states that Datta was basically “a Bengali writer who happened to write English on occasion and with facility” and so we enjoy these English writings as a ‘bonus.’ Whatever be the reason, Sudhindranath combined in him the best of the Eastern and Western cultures. Like Tagore he too had abandoned all the old-fashioned ways of conventional Bengali families and eventually became a true citizen of the modern European world.

In the Preface of the book, the editor mentions that the initial support for processing Sudhindranath’s archives was obtained under the ‘Editing as a Skill’ Programme funded by the University Grants Commission under its scheme for ‘Universities with Potential For Excellence’. Apart from kudos to the editor for undertaking such a laborious job, readers will also understand Sudhindranath’s Bengali writing better through some of his observations noted in English. We eagerly wait for the companion volume being processed now that will contain Sudhindranath’s largely unpublished and unknown Bengali short stories.

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The Oxford India Anthology of Bengali Literature (Volumes I & II) Edited by Kalpana Bardhan Oxford University Press, 2010; Rs. 695.00 per volume

“I wanted to offer the less bilingual next generation of Bengalis, and the non- Bengali readers in English within India and outside, selections from Bengali literature that I have loved the most, learned the most from, and truly enjoyed translating.”

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-- the editor, Kalpana Bardhan

This anthology was long overdue. Packed in two volumes, The Oxford India Anthology of Bengali Literature covers 130 years of Bengali writing, from 1861 to 1991, by 100 writers and includes nearly 250 selections from a wide range of genres including poetry, short story, novel, memoir, and essay, among others. Translated by some of the finest scholars in this area, the compendium is put together by Kalpana Bardhan and is thorough and inclusive. Unlike a few one- genre multi-author anthologies and one-author multi-genre collections of translation, this one represents Bengali literature in as many genres, as many forms and with as much historical depth as possible for an idea of the literature developing and changing directions.

Volume I (1861-1941) spans a period of 80 years and includes the writings of some of the most representative figures in Bengali literature. It begins with the so called period of the Bengal Renaissance in literary culture, among other things, and ends with the nationalist struggle stepping up as World War II crept up British India’s eastern flank. Offering a judicious selection of a vast number of writers, the chronological listing of their works enables the readers to develop a sense of evolution of the various genres and sub-genres across the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, while savouring this veritable feast of material. The volume is divided into three sections. The poetry section, representing eleven poets, begins with Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73), includes the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Priyambada Devi, Sukumar Ray, Jibanananda Das, , Buddhadeva Bose, and Bishnu Dey, among others, and ends with Samar Sen (1916-87).

In the short fiction of the past century as a whole, Tagore, the three Bandyopadhyays (Bibhutibhusan, Tarashankar and Manik) and Rajsekhar Basu have been translated plentifully. Apart from including them, we also savour the writings of Parashuram and Jyotirmoyee Devi who have been translated less. This section also includes celebrated practitioners like Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Sharatkumari Chaudhurani, , Abanindranath Thakur, Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, Jagadish Gupta, Sharatchandra Chatterjee, and a few others. What leaves the readers unsatisfied is the fact that due to space constraints only one entry is accorded to each of these writers.

The third section comprising of non-fiction ranges in tone from delightfully light-hearted to gravely serious entries by the leading literary lights of the time like Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay (Sense of National Identity and Western Influence), Shibnath Shastri (account of nineteenth century social reform), Jagadish Chandra

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Bose ( address to the 1911 assembly of the Bangla Sahitya Parishad), Rabindranath Thakur (selections from Jibonsmriti, Japan Jatree, Atmaparichay, Chelebela, Gitacharchaa, Russiar Chithi), Pramatha Chaudhuri (The Story of Bengali Literature), S. Wajed Ali, Rokeya Sakawat Hossain, Indira Devi Chaudhurani (Relationships), and ends with Sudhindranath Datta’s essay, “An Introduction to Rabindranath’s Genius.” It also includes fascinating sketches of 19th century Calcutta by Kaliprasanna Singha, extracts from the autobiography of Debendranath Thakur, the religious reformer, as well as of Rashsundari – an unlettered, painfully shy, overworked housewife who struggled by herself to be able to read, in secret defiance of a taboo of her time – and of Binodini Dasi – the theatre actress.

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Volume II starts with the 1940s – a watershed for Bengal’s social fabric and politics as well as literature. The decade, starting with Rabindranath Tagore’s death in 1941 and the British thrusting India into World War II, ended an era of established literary form and social order in Bengal. The succession of jolts that shook Bengal in this period -- first the breakdown of civic society amidst famine and profiteering, then a surge of hope for social change with peasant struggle and writers and artists supporting progressive causes and opposing fascism, and then that hope crushed and overridden by the riots and the Partition – deeply marked the arts and literature of the 1940s and 1950s. The works of Sudhindranath Datta, Bishnu Dey, Samar Sen, Manik Bandyopadhyay, and others, straddling both decades, and included in both volumes, strike us with the shift of focus and tone over this period. Those who started writing in the 1950s looked at other issues from other angles. Thus the literature of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s reflect the travails of dislocation, the struggles to survive and reintegrate and the casualties and triumphs in the process. So we witness two distinct streams of Bengali literature, each reflecting not only the political- economic-demographic shifts affecting people’s lives, but also writers’ changing perspectives on self and society. All the entries in this volume speak of these two related streams of Bengali literature.

The poetry section of Volume II begins with Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) and ends with Mandakranta Sen (b. 1972), and includes, among the 39 poets, the works of , Sudhindranath Datta, Jasimuddin, Premendra Mitra, Annada Sankar Ray, Ajit Datta, Bishnu Dey, Arun Mitra, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Nirendranath Chakravarti, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Rajlakshmi Devi, Buddhadeva Bose, Latifi Hilali, Shamsur Rahman, Sankha Ghosh, Tarapada Roy, Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyaya, Joy Goswami, Nabaneeta Dev

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Sen, and Ketaki Kushari Dyson. Unlike the poems in the first volume, most of these entries are much more subjective and cerebral.

In order to accommodate maximum number of writers in the ‘Short Fiction’ category, only one entry per author is included. Satinath Bhaduri, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Syed Shamsul Haq, Subodh Ghose, Bani Basu, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Mahasweta Devi, Samaresh Basu, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Dibyendu Palit, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Abul Bashar and Nasreen Jahan are some of the names featuring in the short fiction section. While Mahasweta wrote prolifically of struggles against class-caste-gender-based oppression, Ashapurna Devi’s and Selina Hossain’s stories offer a different tale on the question of izzat, honour, with an inversion of the gender issue from what is taken for granted.

Non-fiction from the 1940s onwards is represented in the third section in various forms of social critique: Wahdud on the Muslims of Bengal; Nirmal Bose on the structure of Hindu society; Partha Chatterjee on concepts of ‘modernity’; and Gautam Bhadra on Bengal’s syncretist folk singer-philosophers. Of literary criticism we find Sudhindranath Datta on ‘Utterance and Realization’; Ashok Rudra on Rabindranath’s songs; Aby Sayeed Ayub on ethics and aesthetics in literature; Sibnarayan Ray on the problematics of Bengali identity; and Manoranjan Byapari on the paucity of Bengal’s dalit literature. Of the study of classics we get Buddhadeva Bose on Yudhistira; Nrishinghaprasad Bhaduri on Veda Vyasa who composed the Mahabharata. Under memoirs we have Samar Sen’s on the 1930s and 1940s, Mujtaba Ali’s about the Sanskrit pundit of his school at the turn of the century, Asok Mitra’s of visiting Havana and the United States during the Cuban missile crisis, and Taslima Nasrin’s on the death of her ex-husband Rudro.

The distinctive literary stream of , East Pakistan, and Bangladesh takes its multifaceted place in this volume: with selections from Bengali Muslim writers before 1952 (the birth of the language movement) – Waliullah’s stories, Abdul Wadud’s essays, and Jasim Uddin and Shamshur Rahaman’s poetry – and from those after, writers of the 1970s on. This volume also has the distinct voice of West Bengali Muslim fiction writers like Abul Bashar, Mustafa Siraj, and essayists like Abu Sayeed Ayyub. The earlier volume had its share of Bengali Muslim writers like Nazrul Islam, S. Wajed Ali, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Mujtaba Ali, but they were primarily considered part of the Bengali mainstream and claimed equally by Hindus and Muslims.

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The little thumbnail portraits of each writer included at the back of each volume add freshness to this mammoth anthology. The eulogies at the back cover by eminent scholars speak of its excellence too. While Sudipta Kaviraj calls it “the first of its kind”, Amartya Sen finds it “a nostalgic trip through exciting but familiar territory” and opines that “the collection will serve a different purpose for those unfamiliar with the literature presented here.” According to Ashis Nandy, “this is by far the most serious and comprehensive introduction to Bengali literature attempted till now.” The only comment that this reviewer can add is that the editor’s choice, subjective though it is, is really commendable. She has not only successfully amassed so much of material, but her meticulous layout pattern is organized in such a manner that nothing seems out of place. Though Kalpana Bardhan has been translating Bengali literature for the last two decades, her earlier background in socio-economic studies provides particular sensitivity to aspects of literature as social commentary. This herculean task is definitely a labour of love. Also her selection of translators is commendable. There are several entries where not finding a good translated piece, she has done it herself.

We are aware that the postcolonial flood of translation of bhasa texts into English came from a variety of factors, including the active support of national literary academies. A stronger boost also came from the proliferation of academic fields, especially English language departments of a new nation insisting on inclusion of English translation of vernacular literature. There is also the growing interest of general readers of literature in other social cultures as reflected in vernacular language writings originally meant for regional readers and writers. The anthology will appeal to anybody who enjoys good writing as well as students and scholars of comparative literature, translation studies, and Indian literature in translation. Apart from a pan-Indian readership, I feel that it would be very useful for even young Bengali readers who comprise of a generation that generally feels more comfortable reading things in English. Those who feel either intimidated or uninterested to pick up Abanindranath Thakur’s Khirer Putul or Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutum Pyachar Noksha can easily read up the excerpts from “Caramel Doll” and “The Observant Owl” without cribbing like serious scholars of translation studies that the flavour of the original has been lost in the process.

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Postmodern Bangla Short Stories 2002 (Volume I) Edited by Samir Roychowdhury, Murshid A.M. & Rabiul Karim Kolkata: Haowa 49 Publishers, 2002

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------At the outset, the editors of this volume should be given due credit for undergoing a Herculean task of selecting a few representative stories out of six hundred Bengali little magazines and their two thousand plus fiction writers. The dust-jacket cover of this translated anthology of Bengali short stories claims that it is “the first of its kind since the arrival and departure of the Empire” as well as a “post-generic and post-west event at the beginning of the new millennium”(whatever that means). A laudable effort no doubt in the sense that the volume comprises of fifty-three entries – translated stories that reveal the departure from obligatory axioms and canons of modern Bangla short stories with which a layman reader is usually conversant. But unless one is an avid reader of Bengali little magazines, one would not have heard the names of any of these short story writers that come out of the different districts of West Bengal, Bangaldesh, , and the of .

The volume is dedicated to the memory of the seven architects of twentieth century Bangla fiction, namely – Adwaita Malla Varman, Somen Chanda, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Asim Roy, Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Amiya Bhusan Majumdar and Shyamal Gangopadhyay ( no longer ‘living’) – an essentially outstanding subaltern group of writers who according to the editors ventured in “rescuing Bangla literature from the refugee-centric quagmire world of agony aunts”. Out of the fifty-three stories in this volume, only seven are by Bangladeshi writers.

Before one gets to read the actual translated stories, ( some of them strikingly original in theme, tone and style), one has to wade through 89 pages of a lengthy preamble comprising of Moloy Roy Chowdhury’s 64 page long overview called “The Arrival of the Departure”; a five page long “Deliberation from Bangaldesh” by Rabiul Karim (which has too many typos and grammatical errors); and a nine page long item entitled “Periplus” – a disjointed, unnecessary piece full of too many jargons -- written by the other two editors, namely Samir Roy Chowdhury and Murshid A.M. With a lot of postcolonial and postmodern theories strewn in at random, what mars this commendable volume of course is its faulty English, and a convoluted style of writing that makes us question – “Who is the target reader of this book?”

Moloy Roychowdhury argues that if there could be Queen’s English, , Caribbean English and Indian English, there is also a Bangla English which has been resorted to by the translators so that the ethos and the ethnos of Bangla culture are retained to the extent possible. But how would an ordinary reader react to sentences like these:

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Short story is the imago of a mourner. Hence, for its function, it has nothing to do with communication of facts and ideas. It should, only and only, burn down the spinal chord of an individual a life, with an emotive valency that ran through the blood of Christ on Calvary. Short story, so far, have been five-finger exercises in the logtable of love tricks, a camouflage of alphabetical hypocrisy, a logical description of facts seen with the eyes of a dead reptile. Oldies of the blankety-blank school as well as the Recruits, who went to conquer this Venus, finished with crooked genitals, and returned to suck the public hemlock of Press-geishas.

There are several other instances that mar the sincere effort of the editors and translators. How can a writer, Shankar be ‘a potboiler’? The plight of the marginalized woman’s voice could have been described in simpler terms. One also fails to understand why the term “Hindu” is capitalized throughout the book and written in the lower case for the “muslims”. It is true that this anthology brings into focus the neglected Bangla literature outside Bengal but at the same time, one wishes that before the next volume is published the editors would spare some more time in proof-reading. For instance, the opening of the first story by Aditee Falguni reads like this: “I came back my own place.” …The headlight of lady’s front lighted endlessly. Too much story’s everywhere, I came back only for those.” Also, a list of the titles of the stories along with the names of the participant authors at the beginning of the book (done alphabetically, of course) would make things more convenient for anyone who plans to read this 432 page volume.

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‘The Wife and the Beloved’ and Other Stories: Best of Fifty Years (1936- 1986) by Ashapurna Devi Translated by Sanjukta Das Supernova Publishers, 2013, Rs.299.00; 319 pages ------This anthology has been long overdue. Whereas Ashapurna Devi has become a household name for the Bengali speaking readers, a dearth of suitable translations has still not made her that familiar to the pan-Indian reader as it should have been desirable. Though her Jnanpith Award-winning novel Pratham Pratishruti along with its sequels Subarnalata and Bakul Katha has been translated into English and several other Bhasha literatures, and have been taught in academic courses in Women’s Studies in several universities across the country,

Before reviewing the stories that have been included in this particular volume, it would be worthwhile to go through a brief biographical sketch of Ashapurna Devi (1909-1994) that would help the reader in assessing the significance of her literary oeuvre. Born in Calcutta, she received her education at home and was married off when she was only fifteen and then became a mother at seventeen. Her first story “Pashapashi” was published when she was only thirteen. She continued her writing in the midst of her domestic household duties and has to her credit 176 novels, 30 collections of short stories and about 50 books for children. Since the 1940s she was extremely well received by the reading public and her works have been translated into several languages. Interestingly speculation was rife among the contemporary readers and critics whether her name was the pseudonym of a male writer.

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To select only twenty-five short stories (written between 1936 and 1986) out of her entire literary oeuvre spanning so many decades is no mean task. Though the choice is subjective, the translator Sanjukta Das has taken great pains to give us the infinite variety of her work.

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Contemporary Australian Short Stories Edited with an Introduction by Santosh K. Sareen New Delhi: Affiliated East West Press, 2001. ------

Reviewing a book for academics as well as the casual reader becomes a difficult task especially when in the foreword, the noted Australian academic Bruce Bennett states that the anthology is “aimed at students and a wider readership in India.” This sleek volume edited by Professor Santosh K Sareen of Jawaharlal Nehru University manages to bond these two categories pretty well and initiates the reader into Australian literature, which like its counterpart in India, has a long history of storytelling.

An absorbing, varied and lively introduction to contemporary Australian literature and culture, the continent comes alive in all its multiplicity through the 17 shortstories selected for this volume. The editor's choice encompasses 16 authors (half of whom are women), and range from white, black, immigrant and aboriginal groups and their individual positioning in Australian society. The inclusion of the writings of three aboriginal Australians, namely Joe Nangan, Paddy Roe and Herb Wharton, is significant.

The narrative structure of these short stories is also as varied as possible - ranging from the traditionalto the experimental, and including oral storytelling techniques. The editor states in his introduction that hehas chosen the stories “carefully,after rigorous discussion and debatewith a cross-section of scholars” so that maximum variety in narrativetechniques, diction and themes canbe accommodated. Thus the main objective of selection has been storiesthat are in some way or other distinctivelyAustralian.

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Among the interesting elements of this anthology, mentionmust be made of the several stories presented through child narrators – for example, GlendaAdams' “Lies,” Beverley Farmer's “Among Pigeons,” David Malouf’s “Bad Blood,” and Elizabeth Jolley's “A Gentleman's Agreement.” Some again, like Elizabeth Harrower's “The Beautiful Climate,” speak of the authoritarian male patriarch of the household and how he is unable to overcome the nostalgia for the old mother country. Peter Cowan's “The Tractor” questions the ethics of the march of civilisation. The woman protagonist of this story is caught in a strange dichotomy of whether she shouldhelp her husband in finding out the man who secretively destroys theirtractor, or warn the bush people -who are keen to let the world remainas it is - of their impending danger.The myth that the aborigines are thehunters and aggressors is thusreversed and they are treated as thehunted and the oppressed.

Judah Waten's “Mother” represents an immigrant mother's complex experience as envisaged by her male child and captures the tensions thatgo with migration in seemingly newhavens. Several other stories also focus upon the breaking down of familial relationships. Ninette Dutton presents a subtle treatmentof love outside marriage in “The Black Stone” where a woman's sexualencounter with a stranger, an aborigine, revitalises her to nurse andhelp restore her sick husband. In Paddy Roe's “Worawora Woman,” the protagonist is a strong man who has to decapitate a “worawora” woman in order to return to normality and his wives.

In Judith Wright's “The Weeping Fig,” Mr Condon's obsession with hisancestral heritage leads him to visitthe homestead of his ancestors. Thelandscape and detailed natural description in some of the storiesform an inseparable part ofAustralian literature and will surelybring to mind the living, vibrantquality of the Australian landscapethat DH Lawrence described inKangaroo. While Lawrence spoke of “the terror of the bush” in one place, in another he grew lyrical about thearmfuls of bloom, gold plumage ofmany branches of different wattlesand white heather, the scarlet bellswith the deep red-blue blobs whichcreated for him “a corner of paradise.”

Different hues of this paradise are captured in these stories including Alan Marshall's ''Trees Can Speak" that describes the narrator's encounter with a man who uses nonverbal signs to communicate. The “Australianness” of the English language used in the stories also interests the reader. Theuse of ‘bush’in a special Australian sense refers to the vast interiors, the outback, displacingsuch words as ‘forest’ and ‘woods’; the mention of new wordslike ‘bushranger,’‘billabong,’ ‘swag,’ ‘stockman,’- all add to the ethnic flavour of some of the stories.

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Expressions such as “aaall the time,” “he kill eeeverything” try to recapture the sound of the rolling tongueof the continent's lingo.

A strongly recommended volume to savour what academic jargon terms as “other Englishes,” this anthology makes the two continents of India and Australia meet on the edge of hospitable shores and shows us the similarity of themes in Commonwealth literature. Moreover, the universality of someof the themes dealt with in the storiesjustifies the strong resentmentthat certain Australian criticsexpressed at the arrogant accusationby The Times Literary Supplementof the philistine life led by supposedly “steak-fed, sports fixated”Australians.

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A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories Edited & Introduced by Mohammad A Quayum Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2010. 328 pp ------In an article in The Times of London published in July 3, 1982 entitled “The empire writes back with a vengeance,” Salman Rushdie had stated that “[the English]language needs to be decolonized, to be made in other images, of those of us who use it from positions outside Anglo-Saxon cultures are to be more than artistic “Uncle Toms.” And it is this endeavor that gives the new literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and India much of their present vitality and excitement”(7). That was almost three decades ago. In the meantime, with

47 globalization and transculturalism in the postcolonial era, Queen’s English has long lost its hegemony and Englishes of various flavours have captured the world market, both in commerce as well as in literary studies. This anthology of short stories is a commendable collection of voices from different Asian countries and the kaleidoscopic nature of the contributors justify the title as a virtual ‘rainbow.’ Moreover, it helps the reader to understand that Asians have moved away from creating what was known as ‘Oriental’ fiction.

The twenty-five stories in this collection come from East, West, South and , representing as many as ten countries: Bangladesh, India, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates and they dwell upon ordinary and extraordinary issues of life including joy, sorrow, love, loss, and loneliness in their culturally rooted circumstances. Since several of the writers reside outside their homeland, the diasporic angst, nostalgia and memory play significant roles in their stories as well. Getting an insight into different cultures under the homogeneous umbrella term ‘Asian,’ we get stories with both positive and negative values. While some talk about the ‘quest for happiness, harmony and justice’ that is desirable for the human soul, others ‘delve into the horrors of war, violence, death, greed, selfishness, betrayal’ and all things that are of negative value. One also notices some common themes across countries like the relationships between genders, sexes, generations, races, religions and classes, the evils of patriarchy, intricacies of the husband-wife relationship, the aspirations of Asians to migrate to the west for better living conditions, the idea of a ‘home,’etc. Again we have others that focus on specific socio-cultural issues like the difficult life in a Malaysian rubber plantation, the lives of ordinary people enmeshed in the Vietnam War, or the lament of a cultural ennui engulfing contemporary Singaporean life where traditional family values are being forgotten.

Some of the contributors are freelancers writing occasionally, whereas others are more seasoned literary artists. Apart from multifarious themes, what draws our interest is the use of innovative and experimental devices in the stories. Most of them begin in media res and offer open endings and show that the writers, both new and old, have taken great pains to experiment with the form. For example, we find the use of flashback in K.S. Maniam’s “Guardian Knot” and “Monideepa Sahu’s “Flowers and Paper Boats”; a first person voice of a dead man narrating his family history from within his picture frame on the wall in “Maya Niwas,”; a rarely used second person voice in “Baby’s Breath”; the diary format in “Breakfast with the Fugitives”; multiple voices and interior monologue in “Broken”; symbolism in “Patchwork”; and elements of magic, mystery and supernaturalism in “Broken” and “Alone and Palely Loitering.” As the editor

48 rightly reiterates, these stories “demonstrate that Asian imagination has responded to the short story form in varied ways, and that writers are willing to take the risk and experiment with the form to create new styles.”(23)

In his detailed introduction to the volume, Professor Mohammad Quayum has located the genesis of contemporary Asian stories written in English by giving us a socio-historical account of the Western form of the short story genre and the introduction of English in this part of the world. He has also made it clear that the proliferation of the English language was not equal in all Asian countries and as a result writers from the Indian sub-continent account for almost half the stories in this collection. Though each story is unique in its own way, one cannot but mention the powerful stories that have been written by writers residing in Bangladesh or are of Bangladeshi origin. Unlike India, which perhaps has the longest history of writers writing in English, this seems unique for a young nation that has struggled both politically and socially to keep Bengali as the official language. In “Seduction” Razia Sultana Khan tells us about a middle class joint family where the young daughter-in-law of the house is enticed and enamoured by a ‘chaiwalla,’ a tea vendor on the street, who seems to offer her release from her claustrophobic existence within the house. Another remarkable story is “Waiting” where Farah Ghuznavi writes about the aims and aspirations of the haves and have-nots in contemporary Dhaka, especially during the time of Eid. Perhaps the most significant contribution from this group comes from Fayeza Hasanat, a diasporic Bangldeshi settled in the US, who narrates how relationships change within an extended family in order to facilitate that elusive ‘green card’ required for settling and working in the US. How the lure of the lucre makes and breaks lives of people who want to immigrate to the west also comes out very poignantly in Vijay Lakshmi’s story “The Wait.”

The two entries from Pakistan are totally different in theme, content and style. Whereas Fawzia Afzal-Khan in “Dreamscapes: Ma Vie En Rouge” focuses on the problem of an intellectually ambitious contemporary woman who is torn between the modern ideas of feminism, lesbianism and gay rights on the one hand and her innate feminine desires on the other, Qaisra Shahraz’s “The Zemindar’s Wife” gives the reader a beautiful picture of feudal lifestyle and class consciousness that is embedded in the psyche of many of the country’s inhabitants. Another compelling piece comes from Suad Khatab Ali of the United Arab Emirates and the story “The Subjugated Ones” traces the pangs of suffocation that the female protagonist suffers both physically and psychologically when she has to wear the abaya in her job as the only female police detective in the country.

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Though the selection of the twenty-five stories is a subjective choice of the editor (and he admitted that he had a hard time selecting them from the one hundred and forty entries submitted) the reviewer has certain reservations about the inclusion of two stories. As stated in the introduction, the editor had invited entries from “writers of Asian background regardless of their current domicile.” Under this circumstance the story “Seiji” by the American writer George Polley, though set in rural Japan, sticks out like a sore thumb. Again, including a story by Sasenarine Persaud, a Guyanese writer of Indian origin currently residing in the US, creates more problem because this would mean that we can include most Caribbean writers, (including V.S. Naipaul) or writers whose ancestors migrated from India two generations ago to work as ‘girmits’ in the erstwhile British colonial plantations in Fiji, Mauritius and other places. Thus the unique ‘Asianness’ of the volume is somewhat diluted. Though it is a very difficult proposition to label a writer as per his/her literary output, physical locale or passport, sticking to strict geographical jurisdictions is probably the safest bet. In fact, every reader of A Rainbow Feast will expect the editor to do a second volume and give us more multifarious voices from Asia.

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HERE AND BEYOND: 12 STORIES Edited by Cyril Wong Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014. 258 pages.

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------With globalization and transculturalism in the postcolonial era, it is a fact widely known that Queen’s English has long lost its hegemony and Englishes of various flavours have captured the world market, both in commerce as well as in literary studies. This anthology is a commendable collection of twelve unique Singaporean short stories written between 1958 and 2012 that are representative of this small nation state. As Singapore is a relatively young country, the goals of its citizens have been shaped by geographical, economic and political factors. The Singaporean imagination is accustomed to negotiating between the historical past and the modern day present; to not just dreaming beyond the local, but also beyond the borders of realism or practical demands. As the title of the collection suggests, the stories here portray negotiations between the ‘here and beyond’ within the context of an ever-changing society with constantly shifting and conflicting demands. The authors included are S. Rajaratnam, Yeo Wei Wei, Goh Sin Tub, Simon Tay, Stephanie Ye, Alfian Sa’at, Suchen Christine Lim, Wena Poon, O Thiam Chin, Claire Tham, Philip Jeyaretnam and Felix Cheong, and they hail from different ethnic backgrounds – Indian, Chinese, Malayan. The ethnic diversity of the writers and the variety of subject matter of their stories also help the reader to understand that Asians have moved away from creating what was known as a generalized ‘Oriental’ fiction.

Getting an insight into different cultures under the homogeneous umbrella term ‘Singaporean,’ we get stories with both positive and negative values. They chart the emotional ups and downs of protagonists who strive to find meaning against the backdrop of negotiations between the local and the global, between the past and an ever-changing urbanized present, between reality and fantasy, between the present and the hereafter, extending beyond into the realm of the supernatural. While some talk about the quest for happiness, harmony and justice that is desirable for the human soul, others delve into death, greed, selfishness, betrayal and all things that are of negative value. One also notices some common themes like the relationships between genders, sexes, generations, races, religions and classes, the evils of patriarchy, intricacies of the husband-wife relationship, the aspirations of Singaporeans to migrate to the west for better living conditions, the idea of a ‘home,’etc.

The opening story “The Tiger” by S. Rajaratnam is a strange story about motherhood as perceived by an actually pregnant woman and her chance sight of a pregnant tiger in the village. While the villagers hound the animal out, the author shows us how Fatima’s fear of the tiger turns to sympathy and compassion for the animal. The contrast between the ineffable serenity of the natural world and the self-absorbed agitation of human society becomes the

51 backdrop for a subtler and more poignant parallel between the two mothers. Yeo Wei Wei’s “Here Comes the Sun” casts a different light between people and the natural world as wrought through the perspective of its psychologically troubled protagonist , Mdm Goh Lai Peng who lives in an abandoned rubber plantation and develops a relationship with a speaking mynah. Goh Sin Tub’s short narrative “The Shoes of my Sensei” reflects on the more universal bond of friendship between student and teacher, as well as the private sacrifices enacted in courageously preserving that bond regardless of what others might think or what consequences might result.

Displacement is by no means specific to those who have moved elsewhere – it lives within troubled souls who must chart their own paths to peace of a kind, developing maps for journeys even as they are travelling them. Three stories tell us about Singaporeans in other parts of the western world. The protagonist Emma in Stephanie Ye’s “City in C Minor” has a keen interest in classical music while her father struggles financially to support her passion. When Emma fulfils her dream to move abroad for her studies, an ambivalence sets in and a disconnect open up between past desires and present realities. Distance from her home country grants the protagonist a new perspective that she might not have gained if she had not left in the first place. In Alfian Sa’at’s “Visitors” the protagonist has left Singapore to be educated in New York but instead of focusing on the perceived advantage of studying abroad, Hidayah grouses about the difficulty of explaining her ethnicity to others. But it is by meeting her parents at last that she is able to gain a new-found confidence in her own identity and she comes into her own after having grappled with notions of home and selfhood in a foreign land.

The third interesting story of what it means to exist meaningfully in a new country is found in Wena Poon’s “The Shooting Ranch” where two groups of relatives from Singapore who have adapted to a foreign country in the US with dramatically different results are portrayed. The Chinese narrator and her mixed- race daughter, two cosmopolitan urbanites presently based in New York travel to meet their less polished Singaporean relatives; the latter reside on a farm with an attached shooting ranch in Nevada. Over time, the narrator and her daughter progress to sympathising strongly with their female relatives upon learning about their psychological and physical abuse at the hands of the sole male character. The narrator’s compunction at not being able to help is soon overtaken by helplessness and resignation.

A very pessimistic but extremely moving story is “Gloria” by Suchen Christine Lim where a Filipino domestic worker is overwhelmed by the disparity between

52 the luxurious materialism of Singapore and the poverty of life in her homeland, and the class barriers between her Singaporean employer and herself. Eventually she makes a mistake of shop-lifting that threatens her livelihood and her freedom. The absence of productive communication and the failure of an empathic connection between Gloria and her employers suggest that meaningful relationships become tragically impossible across barriers of class and nationality.

Again we have a story that focuses on specific socio-cultural issues and focus on the lament of a cultural ennui engulfing contemporary Singaporean life where traditional family values are being forgotten. “My Cousin Tim” by Simon Tay is set against the backdrop of a funeral where the protagonist recounts his days growing up with his cousin. Despite not having undergone a Western education Ek Teng has a smoother path in his studies and career while the risk-taking Tim drops out of school and squanders his father’s money in attempting to become educated in London.

A very optimistic story is O Thiam Chin’s “Grasshoppers” where the narrator remembers being raised single-handedly by his mother, a popiah seller, and having learnt a life lesson about moving forward in the face of adversity through the grasshoppers he played with. In Clare Tham’s “The Judge” the central protagonist is a judge with an estranged relationship with his son, a fact that manifests during a family meal when the latter brings up a case in which the judge has to decide whether to mete out the death penalty or not. Guilt also informs Philip Jeyaretnam’s “Campfire” where the narrator reluctantly confides in his campmates during National Service about his girlfriend, her positive impact on his life, and about her sudden passing. The last story in this collection is “True Singapore Ghost Story” by Felix Cheong where the narrator is a businessman who begins to ‘die’ from the moment global markets crash. Using economic success as the central barometer for a meaningful life, the narrative centres on an individual whose life becomes nothing beyond the materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle that he craves.

Thus rediscovering the self and the value of relationships form the focus of these tales, which range from the realistic to the surreal, with the occasional epiphany about one’s morality and the meaning of existence within the bustling city. In other words what we get from this volume is a new global Singaporean identity that is reflected in such stories. The sheer diversity of the tales showcased here meant that a single overarching theme is impossible to identify. The glossary of words that have ethnic flavour of Singaporean English and are unknown to foreign or young readers, the explanatory notes at the end, and the study questions that are designed to generate discussion in reading and teaching groups

53 are clear indications that the editor Cyril Wong and the publisher Ethos Books want this anthology to be part of the school/college curricula. The declaration that the book has been published in collaboration with the Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore endorses the belief. But even if not read as a prescribed text, one can vouch that the anthology is a valuable addition to the fast growing canon of Asian Englishes and will be cherished by anyone who loves to read short stories.

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Travellers’ Tales of Old Japan Compiled by Michael Wise Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2008; 262 pages ------Japan had been secluded from the rest of the world for so long that myths about her fuelled the imagination of people. Some of those myths were dispelled by actual visits by outsiders but simultaneously others got constructed once people started reading the narratives of such visits. As a kind of prelude to this collection of travel anecdotes, the complier quotes from St. Francis Xavier’s impressions of Japan as early as 1549:

I really think that among barbarous nations there can be none that has more natural goodness than the Japanese. They are of a kindly disposition, not at all given to cheating, wonderfully desirous of

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honour and rank…most of them can read … they have not more than one wife…they are wonderfully inclined to all that is good and honest, and have an extreme eagerness to learn. (14)

This praise for a ‘barbarous nation’ and its people by a religious person way back in the mid sixteenth century can be read as a kind of stereotypical imperialist construct that continued unabated even up to the late twentieth century resulting in the study of Orientalism as a specific critical genre initiated by Edward Said and other postcolonial critics.

In this anthology, seventy four early travellers from ten countries, mainly and America, describe at first hand their many experiences of Old Japan from 1853 to 1923. They range from diplomats, tourists, sailors who stopped by as part of maritime expeditions and the whaling industry, members of the royalty, missionaries and others. In the preface the compiler explains why he selects this seventy year time span – a period he considers “the adolescent years of modern Japan” that fell between “two seismic events”(5) -- namely the arrival of Commodore Perry with his squadron in 1853 demanding that Japan should relinquish its seclusion, and the great earthquake in 1923 that destroyed and Yokohama. To the foreigner, Japan was obviously a puzzle – a strange land where bizarre behaviour went hand in hand with courtesy and charm. Many western traders condemned the Japanese as unreliable, and many western travellers patronized their hosts as unsophisticated. Others, more clear-sighted, saw early on the potential and future success of the Japanese people. For example, a 1907 trip through China, the Philippines and Japan “exactly doubled” (203) the American F. Dumont Smith’s knowledge of the world. George Johnson, another American visitor, writes in details about a subject usually not mentioned when travellers put pen to paper – namely the benjo or the toilet.

While some visitors loved Japan, others found it simply unendurable. A British Minister in the 1870s was reported to have described Japan as “a country in which all women dress from the waist downwards, and all the men from the waist upwards”; while an American statesman put the matter more bluntly, calling Japan “ a country of nudity, lewdity and cruelty”(5). Some of the exotic experiences of the travellers in Japan include descriptions like visiting a public bath-house, staying with a Japanese family, eating a live fish, flirting with geisha girls, consulting a village doctor, an American travel writer Eliza Scidmore climbing Mount Fujiyama in a storm in 1891, dining with the Emperor, seeing the slums of Tokyo, meeting with hostile samurai and even witnessing hara-kiri. Some anecdotes are of more serious nature whereas a few are humorous and lighthearted as well. For instance, in the very last entry Sir Valentine Chirol

55 narrates how he got relief from severe toothache. Travelling in the countryside he had to visit a young Japanese dentist on an emergency basis who tried very hard to pull out “the honourable tooth” but failed. On his third attempt “the whole house rocked for a moment” and this time the doctor was successful. Having displayed him the trophy, he made a profound bow, rubbed his hand over his knees, drew in a long breath and said, “I reckon the honourable earthquake did help.” (246)

In her famous book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt uses two specific phrases -- ‘contact zone’ and ‘autoethnographic expression’ -- that have become seminal in the discussion or analysis of any travel narrative. Pratt uses the term ‘contact zone’ to refer to “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”(6). The manner in which several western narrators in this book under review reiterate their interaction with the Japanese people sometimes by coercion, inequality and conflict seems to prove Pratt’s point that the divide between the two different races of people can never be eradicated. For example, The Marquis De Beauvoir, a young man of twenty one went to Japan in 1862 as a simple tourist and wrote back home:

A few weeks ago, accordingly, after my first ride, I told you in my first enthusiasm that you must come here to find the most courteous people in the world; and now I am obliged to allow that it would be difficult to find oneself in the middle of a more hostile mob! (50)

The second point that Pratt makes about “autoethnographic expression” referring to instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms does not find much representation in these narratives as all of them focus on the outsider’s point of view. A very common trope that recurs in most travel narratives is the use of binaries – the Self and the Other, us and them, east and west, civilized and uncivilized. Whereas some of these visitors to Japan emphasize on their sense of wonder, there are also others who find the local customs and traditions inscrutable. For example, Laurence Oliphant, Private Secretary to Lord Elgin reaches Yedo (earlier name of Tokyo) to find, “to his astonishment, chairs, tables, and beds, in a city where all such articles had been previously unknown”(26) but he could not contain himself when he finds “a pair of sparkling eyes visible at two little peepholes expressly constructed” by the people of the adjoining house

56 separated only by a paper screen. One can understand his surprise when he realizes that “it was evident that a toilet, as performed by an English gentleman, was a spectacle which afforded intense amusement to the young ladies of the family next door” (27).

As a wealthy man, American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was not easily impressed by lavish display; the gorgeous tombs of the tycoons failed to move him. But almost everything else he encountered during his two weeks in Japan in 1884 filled him with enthusiasm and he wrote: “No country I have visited till now has proved as strange as I had imagined it …All is so far beyond what I had pictured it that I am constantly regretting so few of my friends will probably ever visit Japan to see and enjoy for themselves.”(89) A self-confessed tramp, Harry L. Foster came from Brooklyn, New York to collect experiences for a travel book and he too tells us how “among old travelers, the Japanese has the worst reputation of all the Orientals for his untrustworthiness …” but in the next sentence adds, “even when the Japanese swindles you, he always does it so nicely and politely that you simply have to come back to be swindled again.”(236) Lafcadio Hearn of Greek-Irish parentage married the daughter of a Samurai family and took Japanese nationality but remains puzzled by Japanese behaviour. He tells us how his cook who wore “a smiling, healthy, rather pleasing face” would always brood when left alone -- “he never showed his real face to me; he wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette” (165) and this is why he loved the people very much, more and more he knew them. One interesting entry comes from Raja Jagjit Singh of Kapurthala, Punjab in Northern India. To him the countries of the Far East were as strange and wonderful as to any European. Being royalty he was well received in Japan, and was able to combine the pursuits of an ordinary tourist with formal engagements at Court.

Though travel has been primarily a masculine enterprise, women were not excluded. They also travelled , migrated, moved, often for the same reasons as men – their husbands or fathers or sons. Their writing, obviously different from men, were seen as narratives of their journeys and representation of their personal experiences resulting also in the female gaze. Mary Fraser, wife of the British Minister, lived for three years in Tokyo and kept up a lively correspondence with home, emphasizing that “…the ideals of the race have not changed, and I hope they never will”(158). One finds interesting details in the extracts from a journal written by Dr. Marie Stopes, primarily known for her work on birth control, when she went on an eighteen-month visit to Japan to further her interest in coal mines and associated fossils. In another narrative, Ethel Howard, previous governess to the Kaiser’s sons in Germany tells us about her experiences of working in Tokyo as governess to the children of an

57 aristocratic Daimyo family from southern Japan and how the Russo-Japanese war impinged even on their privileged lives.

Apart from customs, several entries focus on food as a strong cultural marker. Sometimes the travellers have also become the object of a reverse gaze. Charles Careleton Coffin of the Boston Journal arrived in Nagasaki in 1869 when Japan was in a state of civil war. While walking along the streets he comes to a public bath house where he sees “men, women, and children have laid aside their clothing, and are bathing together with as much freedom as a flock of ducks!!”(52) But soon he is perplexed by the manner in which the Japanese “hold themselves in high esteem and look upon foreigners as belonging to an inferior race”(52). He writes that soon he found a crowd following them to indulge their curiosity:

The women are greatly amused when they discover the hoop-skirts worn by the ladies of our party. They test the springs, gaze at the mysterious framework in wonder, and then give way to boisterous merriment. To them it is undoubtedly the most ridiculous arrangement in the world.(53)

After going through the multifarious experiences narrated in this anthology it becomes clear that travel extends the inward direction of autobiography to consider the journey outward. But whatever be the journey’s motive, it changes both the country visited and the self that travels. An added attraction of this book is the pen and ink sketches that accompany many of the entries Though some of the sketches of Japanese men and women bear close resemblance to dark African natives thus enhancing the exotic element of Japan to the western readers, others help the less perceptive reader visualize the uniqueness of the country being described. With its well documented glossary, and a historical time-chart included as appendix at the end, this book will appeal to serious and casual readers alike.

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JORA SANKO: The Joined Bridge Select English Poems by Bengali Poets Edited by Madan G. Gandhi & Kiriti Sengupta Gurgaon: The Poetry Society of India, 2013. Rs. 230.00 ------Over the years a new subgenre in Indian Poetry in English has emerged and the present volume under review specially points out in that direction. This is dividing the creative impulses of poets under their regional identities and even though, as in this case, the poets live in all parts of the country and some even outside it, they are classified as being Bengalis and the most significant criteria is that they write not in their mother tongue but in English. This anthology comprises of poetry written by twenty-one contemporary Bengali poets ranging from people from all walks of life -- freelancers, academics, doctors, professional writers, some already quite well-known while others not so commonly discussed in academic disciplines. As is their multifarious styles of composition, the selection criteria are not well defined. The poets are neither classified alphabetically, nor chronologically according to their date of birth. The reviewer could not find any logic or a pattern in the selection process.

The poems of Aju Mukhopadhyay from Pondicherry are long and speak of issues like Mother India or how ‘man lives and lives/dying to himself many times/ until one day to realize/ that grass like earth…is superior to man naturally.” The poems of Asit Maitra, an FRCS doctor in England, bear his professional mind- set when he prescribes his “[My] Recipe for Creativity”, “A Pair of Scissors” or juxtaposes Newcastle upon Tyne with Kolkata in the poem “Walking the Streets.” If one takes the first person poetic persona to be that of the poet’s own, then the short poems by Bishnupada Ray speak of disturbing issues plaguing 59 contemporary life. Three out of the nine poems by Sudeep Sen speak of places like , Delhi, Dhaka, whereas the one “Bideshini, Banalata” or the one “Shiuli” reek of Bengali ambience to the core in theme and content. The lyrical quality of each of his poems speaks of a mature poet who has carved a niche for himself already in the world of contemporary poetry. Debashish Lahiri loves to use a convoluted style usually seeped in classical myths and his long poem “Dodging December by the Apocalyptic Route” is no exception. In her short poems Debjani Chatterjee, who lives in England, does not express any specific Bengaliness in selecting the themes of her poetry. She pays tribute to Mahmud Darwish, Kanagawa Tanka and in a poem called “Halfie” she expresses the divided self of a diasporic persona and says:

As global survivors, we are all halfies navigating paths between birth and death. Halfies endure the worst of both worlds - and enjoy the best.

Gopal Lahiri who resides in Mumbai expresses the angst of life in different facets in all his poems whereas Jaydeep Sarangi does the same through poems like “Baby Growing in a Poet” [“Death has different meanings for us at different stages of life/So is poetry.”] The poems of Ranadeb Dasgupta [“know not who you are/ need not what you tell --/ I accept destined way/ love is a despot …well.”] and Rudra Kingshuk [“This age is a rhino age, thick-skinned and low- headed/ Only a fire can bring an end to it”] are wonderful to read not only for their lyrical quality and evocative imagery but also for their brevity of style. Sanjukta Dasgupta loves to dwell on women’s issues and so her poems like “Chandalika”, “Chitrangada” are steeped in Tagore’s ethos whereas in the one entitled “Pride and Politics” she speaks of ‘Khap pride’ and ‘Gay Pride’ and ends the very powerful poem with the following lines:

Someone sighs and mourns At the cold blooded execution Of human rights.

Sharmila Roy has already carved a niche for herself as an established Indian English poet and of the four poems included in this anthology the one titled “Chew” speaks of age-old emotions through contemporary imagery:

The long sleek pack of Alpenlibe toffee chocolates, I hold it between my fingers. The thumb injecting a lot of my warmth making it more sweet and 60

delightful. I give it to him before I leave station, I leave a little bit of me in all of those brown rounds wrapped in cellophane.

The poems of Sonnet Mondal, Sujan Bhattacharyya, Sutapa Chaudhuri, Ananya S. Guha, Bina Sarkar Ellias, Rupendra Guha Majumdar, Nabina Das, Siddhartha Bose, and Kiriti Sengupta [“Gold is precious and so is the time/we spent together’] all express different styles and emotions in their poetic endeavour. The seeped Bengaliness in the psyche of the Mumbai-based Bina Sarkar Ellias’s poems “Santiniketan I”

in Santiniketan the red road rolls out, astonished like Kali’s tongue.

Is juxtaposed with “Santiniketan 2”, where “the red earth/of Santiniketan, mourning the death of its renaissance,” and it is interesting how Delhi-based academic Rupendra Guha Majumdar evokes also the same landscape in his poem entitled “Landscape With a Peepul Tree” where he mentions “ a Ramkinkar landscape in Santhal oils/ and local ingredients on a stretched canvas…” proving the age-old saying “Home is where the heart is.”

The title of the anthology is borrowed from Rabindranath’s ancestral house in North Calcutta called Jorasanko, which literally means the joined bridge. The editors probably selected the title thinking that these poems serve as a connecting link between the Bengali origin of the poets and their creativity that is expressed in English.

All said and done it has to be mentioned in the end that in spite of such honest efforts on the part of the editors, the anthology needed much more careful proof reading. In the foreword for example, Toru Dutt is spelt wrong, as is the wrong year of Arundhati Roy’s winning of the Booker prize. Also in the list of contents the poet Sutapa Chaudhuri has a different spelling from the entry inside. But what really mars the beauty of the book is the very long bio-notes of each poet that come at the beginning of their individual entries. Some of them are a page long and seem redundant. A short standard one paragraph length bio-note for all poets would have been better. All these do not of course belittle the excellent quality of some of the poems included and we hope such anthologies are published again and again. That the motto of the editors is to give Bengali poets a better visibility throughout the world is commendable.

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II: CRITICISM

The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives Jasbir Jain Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2015. Rs. 850.00; ISBN 978-81-316-0711-4, 268 pages ------The word ‘diaspora’ forever seems to be expanding in its meaning and application and has also transcended geographical and cultural spaces of the nation-state. Though scholars have been engaging themselves in diaspora studies for quite some time now, it has gone through several phases over the last few decades. Beginning from the subtle analysis of reading post-postcolonial texts as moving from expatriate writing to that of diaspora and transnational studies, it also moved from the politics of exile to hyphenated identities and ‘translated’ men. In trying to capture this long journey of diaspora studies, Jasbir Jain gives us eighteen illuminating essays (five of which had been published earlier) that raises many questions which cannot be answered by any generalisations on account of the multiple differences that crowd subcontinental diasporic writing. Beginning with the seminal question in the introduction as to ‘how many diasporas?’ she makes it clear that the Indian one has acquired a multiplicity of approaches and each one works differently. Thus the difference between the indentured labourers, the voluntary migrants who went in search of trade or prosperity elsewhere, and the IT professionals who are now scattered around the world due to the effect of globalization is so marked that they have to be forcibly brought under the large umbrella of subcontinental diasporic studies.

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The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives is a work of gathering multiple dispersions of the emigrants from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. In the essays in this collection, the homeland/homelands is/are placed at the centre and around it are assembled the various acts and modes of remembering the past across time and distance, moving from the immediate past to the distanced past and work with the various issues that the writers raise. The title ‘Writing Home’ carries the meaning of representing as well as relating, hence memory and narrative are two factors that shape them. Memory is central to all kinds of writing but to the writing of the diaspora, it is much more central. Memory can be problematized in highly philosophical terms; it is never self-contained or isolated; it has a personal perception as the same event may be seen differently by different people and also by the same person in different contexts and times; it is likely to be embedded in a continuum of other events, people or environments; and most important of all, it inevitably gets intermixed with imagination. So, in the very first essay Jain discusses narratives of four writers that bring together memories of the homeland with all their complexity of history, politics and exile and are predominantly narratives of ‘mourning’. The texts analysed in this context are Sara Suleri’s two memoirs, Boys Will Be Boys and Meatless Days, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters and Sorayya Khan’s Noor. These narratives, falling in different genres and spread over a writing period of nearly two decades (1989 to 2007) choose to work with memories of the past that refuse to be buried, memories that have a living presence and a foot in the future. Jain makes it clear that the diaspora ‘writes’ home to fulfil its many psychological, emotional and historical needs; it also feels free to comment on the political or religious happenings that push the nation into orthodoxies, fundamentalism and closed spaces. It also writes home to be visible in the host culture and to establish a two-way connectivity and constantly chisel at a past which it claims. And then they also write for the future.

In an essay called “The Burden of Culture’ Jain discusses the trajectories of critics like Neil Bissoondath, Himani Banerjee, Arun Prabha Mukherjee and Uma Parameswaran along with the works of writers who are twice dislocated like Ramabai Espinet and M.G. Vassanji and contrast them with writers like Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh who instead of remaining confined to the homeland or east-west encounter, explore their difference amongst other pluralities. The next essay in the anthology also analyses the use of space in the writings of Ashis Gupta and Michael Ondaatje. Moving away from the diasporic writers who write only in English, Jain also explores the diasporic writing in Punjabi by analysing the works of writers like Harpreet Singh Sekha and Harbhajan Hans. Since their writing is in the mother tongue, they seek also to

64 reach a different category of readership, which perhaps occupies a different space, reality and history. The author comes to the conclusion that “the idea of the word ‘homeland’ is fascinating for it is the umbilical cord that cannot be shed.”(62)

We are all aware that exile, émigré, refugee, expatriate – all these categories which signify different kinds of people are now clubbed under the general term diaspora and have erased all the nuances of difference. While the pre-independence Indian writer abroad worked through nostalgia, memory and a possible dependence on Indian philosophy, creating a mythical past from them or alternatively a return to India and a re-defining of the self within the trope of patriotism, the writer of the post-independence period works through other constructions which can be broadly categorised as exotica, history, fantasy, collision, and the use of a third space. The essay “The New Parochialism” discusses such issues in details and concludes with the following observation:

All reflections of the homeland cannot be considered equally valid or invalid. Very often literary evaluations may be different from cultural and political ones, but this trend towards narrowing of spaces and the myopic vision needs to be watched with care.(86)

While some essays discuss the works of V.S. Naipaul, David Dabydeen, Neil Bissoondath, and other writers of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, and those settled in Fiji, Mauritius, and Malaysia, who are all in a way children of the ‘Jahaji-Bhai’, one interesting essay entitled “A Bit of India: Under African Skies” discusses four writers – Ronnie Govender, Farida Karodia, M.G. Vassanji and Abraham Verghese who whether settled in parts of Africa or having moved away to any of the western countries, all are seriously engaged with the past. Each of these four writers relates differently to the land of origin and almost all of them admit the possibility of more homes than one. Thus ‘where does one belong?’ is a query which needs to work with ‘how does one belong?’ This difference of approach towards their homeland also comes out clearly in the essay which discusses the fiction of Tahmina Anam and Monica Ali.

The other interesting areas included in this volume are the different responses of the mid-air tragedy with the crash of The Emperor Kanishka through Bharati Mukherjee’s non-fictional work The Sorrow and the Terror and Anita Rau Badami’s fictional version in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?; the response of different writers like Shyam Selvadurai, Romesh Gunesekera and Naomi Munaweera on the civil war in Sri Lanka; the muhajirs who hold an outsider status and though an immigrant, does not belong to the place, as depicted in the fiction of Intizar

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Husain. In the essay called “The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders” Jain also focuses on how increasingly writers from Pakistan are writing about the porous borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The border is both a haven of refuge and a place of violence and has come to play a significant role in politics and the writing about the war zone as can be seen in the writings of Kamila Shamsie, Raza Konrad Asraf, Fatima Bhutto, Nadeem Aslam and others.

The penultimate essay in this volume needs special mention. For more than two decades the cultural scene has been bristling with talk of crossover films, directed, at times also produced, and almost always written by Indians living abroad. These films form a broad category in themselves as they are engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their culture of origin. In “Cultural Interpretations/Representations in Film of the Indian Diaspora: Nostalgia, Memory or Spoofing?” Jain classifies diaspora films into three main categories, namely, i) the in-between films where a constant negotiation tales place between home and the outside, ii) the conflictual situation is a bizarre mix, full of stereotypes and caricatures and in general a fun atmosphere is created, and iii) diasporic films located wholly in India. All these films generate multiple interpretations of culture – one of the director, the other of the story writer, others still of non-culture readers/viewers, of cultural readers located abroad and of cultural readers/viewers back home, especially if they are familiar with both the novel and the film.

This work, thus, explores the many ways the diaspora remembers and reflects upon the lost homeland and its own relationship with an ancestral past, its history, culture, and the current political conflicts. Amongst the questions it asks is ‘how does the diaspora relate to us at home and what is our relationship to them as representatives of our present?’ The last is problematic in itself for our present is not theirs and distance cannot equate the two. The transformations that new locations have brought about as they have travelled through time and interacted with the politics of their new homelands wherever they be Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean Islands, UK, US and Canada, as well as the countries created out of India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, have altered their affiliations and perspectives. The above issues together seek for new insights into the problematic of the diasporas’ lost homes. Also several different narrative styles and modes are evident, varying from the katha, the Tuti-Maina stories, the Thousand and One Nights to modern and postmodern modes. Apart from the continuity of ideas and texts, the dominant concerns of poetics, aesthetics, memory and representation, form an underlying strand of continuity in these essays.

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This volume is probably the first to deal with subcontinental diasporic writing in such a significant way. It serves as an ample testimony of the author’s erudition and expertise on the subject. But because writing changes, realities shift and perceptions differ, Jain is herself aware that no single volume can hope to cover the immensity of the philosophical and ontological issues. She therefore optimistically concludes with the remark: “And may they continue to do so, else a static world would be dead and boring.”(9) Hence we can expect another such interesting volume in the near future.

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Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema Nilufer E. Bharucha Bhuj-Kachchh, Gujarat: Centre for Advanced Studies in India, 2014. Price: Rs. 695.00; 204pp; ISBN: 978-938-2847-17-5 ------Over the last couple of decades the interest in Indian diasporic studies has gained great impetus and new books and anthologies on the subject are being published on a regular basis so much so that sometimes it is becoming difficult to separate the grain from the chaff. The present book under review contains twelve essays and one interview on various aspects of Indian diasporic literature and films. Written from the mid-1990s onwards when academic interest in diaspora studies first began to manifest itself in publications and courses on the subject, several of the essays have already been published in journals and anthologies while others have been specially written for this book.

The introductory essay entitled “From the Jahaji to the Jetsetter: Old, New and Transnational Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema” the author informs us

67 that the Indian diaspora in time spans a period from the 1830s to the present and in space covers over a hundred countries. There are over 25 million Indians in diaspora today and it is the largest diaspora after the Chinese one. Included in this diaspora are the indentured labourers who were taken to other British and French colonies as well as the professional and academic diasporas which also began in the colonial period and continue to this day. Again there are the transnational Indians who also like the global Indians live across borders and exhibit diasporic traits that span a wider spectrum than that offered by the global Indians. According to the author, very often academics and researchers tend to collapse them all into one catch-all category – the Indian diasporic. This then becomes as hegemonic and misleading as the term ‘postcolonial’ and therefore it is important to find the right definitions and categories for the diaspora and also essential to historically contextualize them.

In the next article we are told how translation is usually an act laden with intricate power politics. It involves not just languages but also cultures, civilizations and peoples. Discussing issues like the Eurocentric notion of colonization as a ‘catastrophe’ that led to ‘progress’ would be unacceptable to even most Western scholars today. Borrowing the idea of ‘a translated man’ from Salman Rushdie’s Shame, she points out how the othering of competing civilizations in national or imperial spaces is also not necessarily determined by colonial displacement or immigration and resultant minority status. However, minorities – cultural, linguistic or religious – within national spaces too bring into play the politics of exclusion and inclusion. Mentioning the works of writers like Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry, I. , Amitav Ghosh, Sashi Deshpande, and Hanif Kureishi we are warned how Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the ‘clash of civilizations’ is really a dangerous one here as it bleeds into the essentialist models of nationalism professed by some states in the past and in the present both in the Europe and in the East.

In “Global and Diaspora Consciousness in Indian Cinema: Imaging and Re- Imaging India” we are informed that global Indian cinema is not an invention of the 1990s but actually began in the 1930s when there were several global collaborations between UFA Berlin, a British Company and , the founder of that led the director Frantz Osten make several globally successful films full of dance, duels and spectacle and of course love. In recent times the liberalization of the Indian economy and the growth of global consciousness in India itself which makes such Hindi films a viable proposition in India has also fuelled the growth of Hindi films on the diaspora. We are also made aware that it would be erroneous to think that Bollywood films on the

68 diaspora are posing challenges to patriarchy; in fact if anything they are reinforcing patriarchy.

The other essays are more focussed on particular aspects and writers of the diaspora, namely South Asian Novelists in Canada, the Parsi Diaspora, Bapsi Sidhwa’s fiction, Re-evaluating Cornelia Sorabji’s visit to the West, two essays on Rohinton Mistry ( one on his long journey from ethnicity to transnationalism and the other on his subversion of master narratives and challenging the metanarratives of history) and two on Salman Rushdie, one focusing on his early fiction and the other his resistance to fundamentalism in his post-Fatwa fiction. The last article discusses in detail two novels, namely Atima Srivastava’s Transmission and Manorama Mathai’s Mulligatawny Soup where the authors are described as ‘translated women’. Their discourse locates women as aliens in an alien landscape, trying to construct a sense of identity, home and belonging.

The volume concludes with an interview that Bharucha conducted with Attia Hosain in her London home way back in 1997 but never saw the light of day during her lifetime. In that conversation we are told why she wrote so little (“I lacked confidence in myself”), that she was not a Pakistani and “never wanted to be one”. Claiming her Indian-ness in spite of being a Muslim and living in Britain, her candid declaration that she was not an ‘ethnic minority’ but a human being and should be treated as such should inspire scholars to assess her in a new light.

Given their chronological setting these essays document the history of diaspora studies both theoretical and practical. This jargon-free collection, which has put together the scholarship on diaspora of one of its earliest scholars, should be of value to students, researchers and academics of Indian diasporic literature and cinema around the world.

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Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism Edited by Paula M.L. Moya and Michael R. Hames Garcia Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd, 2001, 354 pages. ------Identity is today a growth industry in the academy, across the humanities and social sciences, influencing even law, communication, and cultural studies. The constitutive power of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other forms of identity has, finally, suddenly, been recognized as a relevant aspect of almost all projects of inquiry. The present anthology is a serious attempt to reevaluate, and even to 'reclaim', the issue of identity from the disrepute into which it has fallen.The post-positivist realist theory of identity, as it has been formulated, elaborated, and tested in this anthology, emerged from a collective of scholars working together in and around Cornell University (with Satya P. Mohanty leading the group) during the 1990s. The scholars who initially came together did so partly in response to the excesses of the widespread skepticism and constructivism in literary theory and cultural studies and partly because they were interested in formulating a complex and rigorous theory of identity that could be put to work in the service of progressive politics. The editors of this anthology support such action because they feel that "identities" are "evaluatable theoretical claims that have epistemic consequences."

Although theoretical in orientation, the ten essays in this collection deal with specific social groups - Chicanas/os, African-, gay men and lesbians, , and others - and also with concrete social issues directly related to race, ethnicity, sexuality, epistemology, and political resistance. Satya P. Mohanty's nuanced reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved shows how post-positivist

70 objectivity, theory-mediated experience, and a causal theory of reference are relevant to something as personal and everyday as cultural identity. He argues that we can adjudicate the validity and usefulness of different identities by viewing them as theoretical claims that attempt to account for casual features of the social world. In the process, he demonstrates that a good theory of identity does more than simply celebrate or dismiss the various uses of identity - rather, it enables cultural critics to explain where and why identities are problematic and where and why they are empowering.

In his essay, "Is There Something You Need to Tell Me? Coming Out and the Ambiguity of Experience," William S. Wilkerson demonstrates this by presenting some phenomenological considerations about the experiences of coming out as lesbian or gay. In trying to understand the challenges made to theorization of identity by "multiplicity," Hames-Garcia feels that when their messages are taken seriously, cultural productions by 'people of color' can offer trans-cultural insights into ethical questions of human value, community, and solidarity. Drawing on Mohanty's work to extract the basic claims of a post-positivist realist theory of identity, Paula Moya tries to effectively "test" it within the realms of Chicana/o studies by articulating a realist account of Chicana identity that theorizes the connections among social location, experience, and cultural identity. Through an analysis of Cherrie Moraga's "theory in the flesh" she tries to see its effectiveness upon women of color. Again, by using as examples the project entailed in ThisBridge Called My Back and the feminist consciousness- raising group described by the philosopher Naomi Scheman, Brent R. Henze shows that it is, in fact, individual agency that provides the most epistemically and politically effective grounds for the collective agency of anidentity group. His essay concludes with a programmatic analysis of the role "outsiders" can play in liberation struggles.

By offering a realist reading of Joy Kogawa's novels Obasan and ltsuka to explore the affective and collective dimension of objective knowledge, Minh T. Nguyen feels that much recent criticism of Asian American literature has tacitly accepted certain postmodernist premises (including a radically skeptical stance towards the nature of experience) that have resulted in crucial misreadings of many Asian American texts, particularly those of Kogawa. She further argues that the personal experiences and racialized perspectives of people of color should be seen as significant social and political theories - and that, as theories, they provide fallible nonnative accounts of social reality and values.

As the lucid title of her essay reveals, "Racial Authenticity and White Separatism: The Future of Racial Program Housing on College Campuses," deals with Amie

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A. Macdonald's belief that racial identities can be sources of both objective knowledge and mystification. She argues that we can better understand the role ethnic community houses play when we remember that such houses can foster the preservation of alternative communities of meaning. In the course of her argument, Macdonald makes two crucial points: (a) that the existence of a plurality of perspectives secures the continued diversity of interpretations of the social world and (b) that as long as social subordination is a central feature of the American society, the intellectualanalyses of people who are marginalized and oppressed are crucialto anaccurate account of social power and the possibility of political transformation. On the basis of these two contentions, she defends voluntary self-segregation of people of color as the best social condition in a white-dominated society for creating alternative and affirmative cultures.

The volume's final essay, "Who's Afraid of Identity Politics?" makes a philosophical clarification and defense of the new realist account of identity developed by the other essays in the anthology. By tracing what "went wrong," Linda Martin Alcoff clarifies what is metaphysically and epistemologically in dispute between theorists who have been associated with postmodernism and those who call themselves realists. She discusses approaches to the self developed by Hegel, Freud, Sartre, and Foucault, and helps us to understand how the critique of identity in contemporary literary and cultural criticism can be traced to a desire to deflect the power of the other over the self.

The editors profess in their introduction that this volume presents "an alternative theory of identity" that solve some of the key problems of current theories of identity. As mentioned in the 'acknowledgments' section, the six different seminars and conferences from 1998 onwards that had discussed several of the issues presented in this anthology also prove that the question of identity politics is an ongoing contemporary issue still to be debated in future academic meets. Reclaiming Identity is therefore strongly recommended for all those seriously interested in understanding the basic tenets and theories of multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, epistemology, and cultural studies.

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After Melancholia: A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri Delphine Munos Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013. 237 pp. ------In 1999, a young writer of Indian decent in the United States came into limelight by winning the famed Pulitzer Prize, an award given to an American writer for publishing the best work of fiction that same year, and with that Jhumpa Lahiri and her Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond entered the reader’s domain in a big way. She was acclaimed not only for her powerful literary style but also for bringing to our notice the plight of Asians in America, or to be more precise, a specific sub-genre within that class, namely Bengalis in America and Kolkata who suffer from the traditional problems of cross-cultural identity crisis, acculturation problems and all the related issues discussed ad nausem in studies of the diaspora sensibility. Apart from the two novels she has penned till date, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowlands (2013), which have also dealt in details about the plight of Bengali Americans in various manifestations, we have tasted the unusual power of her observations in the other anthology of short stories Unaccustomed Earth (2008).

Unaccustomed Earth is divided in two sections. Part One contains five stories, three of which were earlier published in different issues of The New Yorker. Part Two contains three interrelated stories about two characters Hema and Kaushik. The three interrelated stories, “Once in a Lifetime,” “Year’s End” and “Getting Ashore” are also a unique experiment of first person narration. According to the author herself, as stated in the dust-jacket of the US edition, this triptych is “a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate – we follow the

73 lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.” [Incidentally, like the characters of her stories, Jhumpa Lahiri, after spending her time in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York, is living for quite some time now with her husband and two children in Rome.]

Such an introduction of Lahiri becomes necessary for this reviewer before discussing the particular book under review because it is an in-depth study of these three interrelated “Hema and Kaushik” stories from a totally new perspective. Delphine Munos, the author of the book is at present a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Literatures at the University of Leige in Belgium, and the book is the outcome of her doctoral research. Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of “hybridity talk” and matters of culture in discussions of texts by minority writers, the author reads the work of Jhumpa Lahiri against the grain, by shifting the ground of analysis from the cultural to the literary. She wants her work to be different from those of critics who work from the narrower theoretical boundaries of transnationalism, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory and Asian- American studies. With the help of psychoanalytic theories ranging from Sigmund Freud through Andre Green and Nicholas Abraham to Jean Laplanche, and even Julia Kristeva, she re-evaluates the complexity of Lahiri’s craft and offers major insights into the author’s representation of second-generation diaspora subjectivity. She feels that Freud’s father-centred Oedipus masterplot gives way to more mother(s)-centred theoretical frameworks. She feels that the triptych of short stories discussed is exemplary texts in which Lahiri redefines notions of belonging and arrival regarding the Bengali-American second generation, not in terms of cultural assimilation – which would hardly make sense for characters born in the United States in the first place – but in terms of a re- symbolisation of the gaps in the parents’ migrant narratives. It is her contention that, “by reversing the order of priorities and focusing primarily on the literary (with the help of psychoanalytic theories), a quite different picture of Lahiri’s cultural agenda will eventually emerge – one that challenges most of the usual assumptions concerning ‘the easy consumability of her fiction,’ and her perceived investment in claiming mainstream America through ‘model-minority’ narratives of compliant assimilation”(xx). In the introductory chapter of the book, the author tries to explain the reason of her choice of subject and also takes recourse to discuss different issues of diaspora theory by mentioning critics like Makarand Paranjape, and especially Vijay Mishra. She imports some of Mishra’s insights into her considerations of the Bengali-American second generation diasporic imaginary as portrayed by

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Lahiri. She argues that “while much critical attention has been paid to the class- streamed form of migration inherent in the ‘new’ Indian diaspora, the fact that the voluntary migration applies only to the male body of this affluent diaspora… has been virtually ignored” (xxvi). She feels that the involuntary journey of the wives who follow them after their marriages are arranged, the way in which “such a lopsided parental severing from India might have an impact on the second generation’s own sense of arrival in the land of their birth remains, thus far, a neglected issue” (xxvii). Referring to Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” she suggests that one of the key aspects of Freud is that the melancholic is only able to deny the all-too-blatant reality of loss by becoming the lost object or ideal – by incorporating it into him/herself. But other critics have gone further.

Munos’s in-depth reading of the trilogy is concerned with exploring how “Hema and Kaushik” signifies on the absent presences haunting trans-generational relationships within the US diasporic family of Bengali descent. Relationships are no longer discussed in the usual binaries, and with time, the diasporic sensibility gradually becomes darker, deeper and more complicated. Bringing to the forefront such “negative” categories as the gap, the absent, the unsaid, the melancholically absented mother, After Melancholia reveals that the second- generation “Mother Diaspora” is no less haunting than her first-generation counterpart, “Mother India.” In the chapter entitled “Diaspora’s Hereafters” Munos analyses how in the collection of stories in Unaccustomed Earth, the notion of the parents’ homeland and the trope of the return are not inevitably and exclusively tied up with a nostalgic, backward-looking stance but can also be associated with the advent of new beginnings for a second generation. The “Hema and Kaushik” stories focus on the ways in which the death of Kaushik’s mother at an early age bears on the destinies of the two eponymous protagonists. This death opens avenues for thinking of the emergence of a new generational sense of the future in terms of a dialectical relation between mourning and melancholia.

In the next chapter “Revenant Melancholy” Munos delves into deeper analyses of Kaushik’s exile of self, the resurfacing of his mother’s photographs etc. leads him to extreme reactions. Issues of surrogate mother figure are also discussed in details especially found in the story “Year’s End.” The title of the next chapter “Dead Mothers and Hauntings” clearly explains how Munos delves deeper and deeper into psychological analysis of each of the character’s actions and it sometimes feels as if she is reading too much into some observations and actions that Lahiri has casually incorporated in the stories. This is how Munos concludes her discussion of the chapter:

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What I am suggesting is that Kaushik’s symbolic putting to death of the historical mother, his encounter with an unacceptable form of eroticism through his stepmother, and his melancholic embrace of nothingness in Maine all too perfectly echo Hema’s secret predicament. Snow as blank mourning, the uncovering of Emma Simond’s tomb as a promise of bringing Hema back to life: seen through the perspective of Green’s dead mother, it thus becomes all the more apparent that Parul’s breast cancer and Kaushik’s story of wild grief furnish a ‘plot,’ in more ways than one, to externalize and perhaps mourn the ‘great unspeakable’ in Hema’s life. (94)

In the last chapter titled “The Future of Diaspora” Munos tries to justify her analysis of the stories through other theoretical positions as well. She tries to remind the reader of “the ways in which ‘Year’s End’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ use the threads of ‘afterwards-ness’ to weave the motif of the dead mother into the ever-displaced motif of the sexual mother (or into the mother as a figure of unapproachable alterity)” (104). What interests her most is that “the interweaving of both motifs can be seen to work in conformity with Laplanche’s refiguration of the second moment of the primal situation as one of deferred encounter with the ‘sexual’ message of the mother: i.e. with her unconscious or irreducible otherness” (104). Later in the chapter she tries to find metaphors embedded in the incident of Parul’s lost luggage and believes that “the non-arrival of the mother’s luggage in the USA indicates that the untenable nature of her own fantasies might just as well never come home, both literally and figuratively speaking, in other people, either, not even after a generational lag” (114). She compares Kaushik’s invisible attachment to his mother’s back-and-forth migration between India and the USA with Gogol being tied up in his father’s derailment in The Namesake without his knowledge. She does more than link melancholia with a regression to “the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience, with the melancholic subject returning to a ‘before-the-break’ spot of time in relation to early childhood” (197). After discussing several other perspectives, the author concludes in the following manner:

Lahiri never lets us forget that melancholia is also a raging signifying machine disturbing the smooth running of ‘reality’ by pushing meaning to the outmost confines of the Symbolic, towards its frontier line with the Real – a machine that is sensitive to “the call of the melancholy voice from behind the screen” and eventually one that reshuffles the rules of grammar by marking the empty space of the Thing, “the person who speaks to us.” (205)

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The book leads us therefore to label Jhumpa Lahiri not only as an Asian- American minority writer, an ethnic writer, or a melancholic assimilationist. As the detailed discussion of the “Hema and Kaushik” stories by Munos rightly exemplifies, it is time we should rethink Lahiri’s transnationalism and do away with all earlier labels slapped upon her and just start calling her “an universal writer.” The kind of analysis offered by Munos actually can also inspire us to re- evaluate her novel The Namesake once again. Also, After Melancholia is recommended to all Lahiri researchers for the sole reason that it gives us a new perspective of looking at the writer’s work, not from the traditional Indian point of view (especially because she has been appropriated by several Indian scholars to be an Indian writer in English, and by Bengalis of Kolkata in particular as “amader meye,” literally meaning “our girl,” because both Bengaliness and Kolkata feature so recurrently in her writing), nor from the multicultural Asian-American point of view, which scholars settled in the United States believe to include her in their own bandwagon only. Coming from an European scholar settled midway between these two far-reaching continents, somewhere between Bengal and Boston (to quote Lahiri’s own definition) Delpnine Munos gives us a third perspective, new untainted and unbiased, with a logic entirely her own. Whether all scholars and especially Jhumpa Lahiri herself will accept her analysis of course remains a debatable point.

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Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America Vivek Bald Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,2013. 294 pages

At the outset when we are told that certain itinerant Bengali Muslim peasant- traders like Panch Courie Mondul, Abdul Barrick, Abdul Aziz, Alef Ally, Solomon Mondul, Moksad Ali, Jainal Abdeen, Aynuddin Mondul, and others who hailed from a cluster of villages in the Hooghly district of West Bengal which included Babnan, Sinhet, Alipur, Chandanpur, Mandra, Bandipur, Bora, Dadpur, and Gopinathpur dealt with selling a particular type of embroidery called chikan manufactured in these villages by their womenfolk, it doesn’t strike us as an extraordinary piece of information. But when we are informed that this small group of peddlers, known as chikondars, were adventurous enough to travel around the world and since the final years of the nineteenth century, arrived at New York’s Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal, we are certainly surprized. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South, especially to New Orleans. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen, known in common parlance as ‘lascars’ began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labour and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is a highly detailed account of the lives of these two groups of South Asian immigrants who arrived in the United States between the 1890s and 1940s. In piecing together

78 the stories of this early immigrant group, Bald, a documentarian who teaches writing and digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, draws on census records, marriage licenses, ships’ logs, personal memoirs, newspaper clippings, and interviews with the migrants’ spouses and descendants. We are aware of the Sikh farmers who went and settled in California in the first few decades of the twentieth century and due to stringent immigration laws, many of them married local Mexican and Chicano women creating a generation of mixed multi-racial offspring, but this book tells us a history of Bengali migration that has been largely unknown.

South Asian immigration boomed in the United States after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire. The first group consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s and as mentioned earlier, they sold embroidered silks and cottons and other ‘exotic’ wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey and these men became a fixture at American leisure spots on the eastern coast. Many also travelled to cities like New Orleans, in the then- segregated South. Some of them made trips further down to the Caribbean islands and the Canal Zone of Panama and Central America. Most of these chikondars did not stay permanently the U.S., remaining instead “sojourning itinerant peddlers.” Interestingly, Bald makes clear that these men’s transnational lives were made possible by women –both those back home in the villages of Bengal and by African-American women who welcomed members of this trading network. Though global in scope, these vast networks became firmly embedded in American neighbourhoods of colour, such as Tremé in New Orleans. Of the men who did choose to settle in the U.S. permanently, many married local African American women and raised families – dwelling in the margins of the U.S. immigration regime and challenging the rigid racial classifications of the Jim Crow South. Though many of them were deported, what helped them survive the draconian immigrant laws at the time was the excellent and well-organized network through family and kinship ties that they had formed. Bald tells us that these hundreds of Bengali Muslim peddlers who moved through the US between 1885 and 1935 have remained lost to South Asian American history because they did not integrate and settle, did not “become American.”

The second wave of Bengali Muslim migrants came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, lascars, from regions like Sylhet, Noakhali, and Chittagong and in many ways they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians. South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917

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Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name. Harsh conditions and abuse aboard British vessels made cities like Baltimore and New York all the more attractive, leading hundreds of seamen to jump ship. They melted into the urban landscapes, aided by networks of support that included “kin, fellow workers, and local residents”. Many went on to find work in factories in places like Detroit and Chester, PA, or to become entrepreneurs, responsible for some of the first Indian restaurants in New York. Being mostly illiterate they worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway labourers and even hot dog vendors in the streets of Manhattan. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets, worked hard and did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice. By the 1930s, a number of Indian Muslim ex-seamen had also married into Harlem’s communities of colour and lived there with their Puerto Rican, African American, or West Indian wives. Unlike other immigrants of the time, these erstwhile lascars didn’t settle in their own enclaves. By doing so, they also became a part of Black and Puerto Rican, and West Indian heritage in America, rebuilding their lives along with these communities who were marginalized and deprived of full membership in the US.

The lives and trajectories of the men Bald discusses have long remained unaccounted for in both popular and scholarly sources on South Asian immigration to the U.S. Prior to 1965, South Asian migrants in America were met with suspicion and unease and their presence eventually criminalized. The 1917 Immigration Act designated East Indians as “undesirable aliens” to be turned away at the border. In a similar vein, in the 1923 case ‘U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind’ , the Supreme Court ruled that even those East Indians already resident in the U.S. were racially ineligible for citizenship, because they were not “white.” Due to the climate of hostility and xenophobia, undoubtedly compounded by state-sponsored exclusion, many erroneously assume that South Asian immigration to the U.S. came to a halt during this period. In fact, Bald’s work reveals that throughout these years there was a small but continuous flow of migrants from the subcontinent, many of them working class Bengali Muslims from the regions that today comprise Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.

The sheer volume of information Bengali Harlem presents is striking, and the rich history explored in its pages fascinating. At a time when we talk about American multiculturalism we tend to forget the history of neighbourhoods like Harlem which was not only a space created by the great northern migration of the Blacks from the South but also by immigrants of colour from other parts of the world

80 who had experienced life under colonial rule. Such neighbourhoods were intermixed and “multicultural” before the word was widely used – a mélange of cultures, religions and languages. Importantly, these spaces were the only ones that offered South Asian Muslim migrants the possibility to build a life in a largely hostile U.S. especially at a time when their home villages were still chafing under British colonial rule.

Apart from the history of the Bengali chikondars and lascars, Vald also includes a chapter on the life of Dada Aimer Haider Khan, a Kashmiri Communist and anti-colonial agitator, who fled the British Raj by jumping ship in New York in 1918 and experienced an “awakening” among politically engaged African Americans in Black Bottom, Detroit. Unlike others who were mostly non- literate, Amir Khan wrote his memoir Chain to Lose sitting in a British jail between 1939 and 1942 and it happens to be the only existing first-hand account of the life and movements of an Indian maritime worker in the United States before the 1930s.

In his author’s note Vivek Bald explains that he had named his project “Bengali Harlem” early on in its development when it focused primarily on a set of interconnected families of Bengali ex-seamen who had settled and intermarried in Harlem. At that time the title was literal but over several years of research the name has become metaphorical, standing for a particular set of encounters and possibilities tied to South Asian life making and place making in the US neighbourhoods of colour. Thus, while Bengali Harlem offers an exquisite glimpse into the past, it holds significance that moves beyond the historical. The recovered histories of some of these early Bengali men and their families are not merely the personal narratives of an early immigrant group. Providing political solidarities and spirit of internationalism within American neighbourhoods of colour, their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America. Back to table of contents

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The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America Vinay Lal New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008, 159 pages. ------For a community that commands the highest per capita income of any racial or ethnic group, as well as the highest rate of college graduates, have not so far played a significant role in American politics, though signs of Indian involvement in community affairs, as well as local and state politics, are growing. Newspaper reports of Indians in the US also focus on the visibility and financial stability of the group among the other Asian American groups.

Known by various nomenclatures, the term “Asian Indian” was introduced in the US Census of 1980 to set apart someone so designated from “American Indian” but has not gained universal acceptance among Indian Americans themselves. So there have been ‘Hindoos’ (to characterize all people coming from what was then British India), South Asians, , desis, (a term that operates on many different and disjunctive registers); and ‘Bharatiyas’ or people who derive their origin from ‘Bharat’, the official name for India that appears on the country’s postage stamps, coins and official documents. Whatever they might be called, the Indian diaspora today, more so than ever before, is an incontestable fact of world culture.

Vinay Lal, Professor of History at UCLA, has done considerable work on the Indian diaspora and has narrated how the journey of the Indians to the United States throughout the twentieth century has not been a cakewalk. He feels that the time has certainly come to attempt a modest, critical history of Indian Americans “in their fullness of their political, cultural, social, religious, and economic lives.” Putting on record a very different interpretation of the history and culture of the Indian Americans in thirteen short chapters, he leaves it to the

82 reader to reach his/her own conclusions. The first chapter begins with the “Passage to India” where apart from the Transcendentalist ideas, the circulation of the Orient in America began with ice trade through which British colonialism succeeded in giving India some visibility in the US. Lal then moves on to the first significant wave of Indian immigration that coincided with America’s expansion as an imperial power – with people like Customjee Rustomjee who arrived in the 1850s, to Pandita Ramabai and Anandibai Joshi who visited in the latter part of the 19th century as well as the Sikh farmers and laborers who settled primarily in and around the west coast.

It is interesting to know that though for the first few years the migrants were predominantly Sikhs, the US Immigration Commission of 1911 held that any native of India was, for immigration purposes, to be viewed as a “Hindu.” We are told of different anecdotal evidence that unequivocally suggest creeping discrimination (for example, when Bhagat Singh Thind was not entitled to naturalization) and subjugation to the dominant white society when in 1920 the “Oriental Question” had come to assume a pivotal importance in public discourse. Surendra Mohan Bose’s involvement in the ‘Hindustan Association of the United States’, the formation of the “Society for the Advancement of India” and the “Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast” (known more popularly by the name of Ghadar movement) tells us the history of the early students and rebels. We are also told about the illegal Indian immigration into the US from Mexico, the history of the 1930s to the Luce-Cellar (Immigration) Act of 1946, or Public Law 483 signed into law by President Truman which conferred on Indians the right to naturalization but also set an annual quota of one hundred immigrants from India.

With the increase in the flow of Indians after the passage of the new legislation in 1965, it has increased from a community numbering a few thousands to the figure of 1.71 million in the 2000 census and has now reached over two million. This growth and visibility can also be marked through other developments and especially to the emergence of a diasporic community that is still victim of racism, discrimination and the ‘glass ceiling’. Significantly, the religious life of the Indian communities is on the rise and Lal points to the ‘Hinduization of American landscapes’ and the emergence of ‘Temple ’ taken on by the faith in its new setting. He informs us how the conception of the political among some Indian communities has shifted and is fundamentally informed by identity politics, multiculturalism, and a concern about the geopolitics of culture. So we have the ‘coming out’ stories of Indian gays and lesbians through different associations, as well as middle class Indian families who, though not paying dowries for their daughter’s marriage, run up into “arangetram debts’ to the tune

83 of 30,000 dollars when giving the first public recital for Bharatnatyam (which had to take on the onerous burden of providing a spiritual and cultural anchor for young women) in order to maintain the sanskriti of an ancient civilization.

We are told of the space and mobility provided by the ‘curry-infested Patel motels’; the growing affluence of Indian Americans that has certainly emboldened them and made them willing to exercise their influence in all spheres of life; the politics behind diasporic philanthropy; of the general affluence of the community permitting it to indulge its interests in fashion, entertainment, holidaying, and ‘lifestyle choices’. In the concluding chapter, aptly entitled “The Diaspora at Home: Returnees, Retirees and Resident Non-Indians”, Lal highlights the new trend of reverse flow and brain drain from the US and concludes with the idea that ‘the Indian diaspora in America has spawned in India its own history.’ This slim but very informative volume will be of immense interest to all kinds of readers who wish to know more about the more than a century old history of Indians moving over to the United States under different agenda.

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The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry Martin Genetsch Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2007, $25.95, 242 pp.

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The present situation of South Asian diasporic writing coalesces with postcolonial writing from other nations across the world. Since the 1970s, expatriation, immigrant communities in the west, and the diasporic consciousness have infiltrated into their works. The negotiations between cultures and identity formation have given rise to exoticness in their settings, and problematic terms like hybridity, syncreticism, and mimicry are often used to describe these writings. Arguing that globalization is no longer a term defining only international cash flow but also includes the flow and exchange of cultures, this book examines the works of three major Canadian writers of South Asian origin and born in three different parts of the world –M.G.Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. To demonstrate the complex, textured identities of his authors of choice, Martin Genetsch, a German scholar, shows that these and other writers not only negotiate their Canadian identities but also explore themselves in the cultures, histories, and geographical locations they come from. According to him the work of all the three writers is typical of immigrant fiction but at the same time a comprehensive analysis of their works becomes only possible once they are treated as Canadian writers, enriching our understanding of the plurality of Canadian identities. He argues that if a canonization of the works of immigrant writers is unproblematic with respect to ‘here’, it would be a non-sequitur to exclude from the canon their writings set ‘there.’ This is because for each writer the works set ‘there’ is understood that ‘here’ and ‘there’ are really variations of the same theme. Thus he attempts to exemplify the complexity and interrelatedness of the concepts of ‘there’ and ‘here’ in a paradigmatic fashion as established by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood and developed by Frank Birbalsingh, David Dabydeen, and others.

Presenting a theoretical background of his study, the first chapter of the book analyzes difference and identity in multicultural and postcolonial discourse including a brief survey of multiculturalism in Canada. The writer attempts to find out if the paradigm of difference underlying multicultural models of society is experienced as a prerequisite for a dignified existence in the diaspora, or whether it is an assumption that prevents the immigrant from opting for other models of integration, such as for example, assimilation or acculturation. Especially interesting in this context is the role that other categories of difference play. Genetsch then poses a series of questions he wants to address in the book. Is home as well as host culture experienced differently by the protagonists in Vassanji’s, Bissoondath’s and Mistry’s fictions once other categories of difference, such as age, social class etc, are introduced? Do second generation immigrant experience Canadian multiculturalism as a liberation from a colonialism which they themselves have not had to suffer under? How do

85 members of former colonial elites such as Mistry’s Parsis or Vassanji’s Shamshis experience the racism of lower-class ghettoes?

The following three chapters deal with each of the three writers under purview and attempts to answer these queries. As a writer who has undergone double migration, from India to East Africa and then Canada, M.G. Vassanji in his fiction presents integration as a two-way process. As we see in No New Land, on the one hand, he demands that Canada challenges the racism that runs through its society. On the other hand, the immigrant is called upon to make an effort at identifying with the country of his adoption. His The Book of Secrets underscores a claim for hybridity, too, albeit on a narratologically more sophisticated, self- conscious manner. While difference becomes manifest on an epistemological as well as an ontological level, Vassanji eventually writes in favour of a bridging of differences in the context of an intercultural hermeneutics.

In contrast to Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath’s works present an argument which holds that the community and the group, both of which are crucial to some forms of postcolonialism as well as multiculturalism, are impediments to the individual trying to find his/her position in a new land. Genetsch argues that as a writer of Caribbean origin, Bissoondath is mainly interested in a specifically personal kind of identity and sets some of his narratives in a Caribbean ‘there’ only to level a polemic diatribe against place and tradition. For him these are essential categories which are not negligible but harmful for individual identity constructions, postcolonial or otherwise.

Unlike these two writers, Rohinton Mistry is a writer for whom India, and especially Bombay is important as subject matter and he draws on it in every piece of his fiction. Also Mistry’s understanding of identity can be located in- between these two writers because through his texts runs the more or less explicit belief in a humanism that overrides the particularities of cultural difference. While it may seem a paradox that both a relativist as well as an universalist frame of reference can actually coexist, the apparent contradiction can be reconciled once Mistry’s obsession with the sociological problem of making meaning is given the critical attention it deserves. Genetsch believes that apart from cultural exchange, in all his novels Mistry writes in favour of an exchange between human beings that focuses not only on cultural difference but also draws on transcultural sameness.

After analyzing the work of these three novelists in detail, Genetsch’s hypothesis is that operating within the vocabulary of postcolonialism, the question at the centre of interest is the relevance of difference and to what extent the three

86 authors subscribe to it. He believes that M.G. Vassanji emulates cultural difference but eventually transforms it, while Bissoondath configures cultural difference in terms of group difference against which he posits the difference of the single individual begging to differ. Rohinton Mistry, finally, reflects a certain awareness of cultural difference but offers vistas beyond postcoloniality by taking recourse to cultural exchange and also to humanist positions. All three of them provide insight into the lives of other Canadians (rather than Other Canadians).

In trying to rope in the different kinds of fiction that the three writers have written (and which might be otherwise difficult to compare), Genetsch borrows the sociologist approach and states that difference is no intrinsic quality or an objective factor in a social relationship but the definition of such a relationship. Thus the decision to regard someone as different is always a positioning or an interpretation (“Zuschreibung”) and eventually argues that the search for a personal/cultural identity enacted in immigrant fiction opens up perspectives for reconfiguring Canadian national/multicultural identity. The detailed analysis of individual texts makes this book a handy compendium for scholars working in the area of multiculturalism and diaspora.

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Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities Edited by Jasbir Jain & Supriya Agarwal Kingston & Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.288 pages ------Stuart Hall in his famous essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional model views identity “in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one

87 true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. . . . This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . in the re-telling of the past. (Colonial Discourse and Post-ColonialTheory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 392-401).

In light of Hall’s viewpoint that an “act of imaginative rediscovery”(393) which involves “imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas”(393-4), the present anthology is a chronological collection of twenty articles on Caribbean writers beginning from a personal reminiscence of growing up in a sugar plantation by Cyril Dabydeen and ending with an interview with Ramabai Espinet. In the detailed introduction the editors state: “The origins of the Caribbean writers, despite the limited size of the whole group of the islands, are mixed and varied as those in a country the size of India”(4). They also remind us that the multicultural identity of the Caribbean people who were descendants of erstwhile black slaves and Indian indentured workers spread in different islands, resulted in different local histories and politics to intervene and shape their writings in ways one does not immediately realize.(2) With two notable omissions of Derek Walcott and Neil Bissoondath,----the essays take up several representative authors of the Caribbean, either by addressing their work or through contributions by the writers themselves. These range from David Dabydeen, Eric Braithwaite, Caryl Phillips, Jean Rhys, the three Naipauls (the father Seepersad and his two sons Vidiya and Shiva), George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Paule Marshall, Harrichand Itwaru, Lakshmi Persaud, Jamaica Kincaid and Austin Clarke. Most of these writers live outside their Caribbean origins; some have gone back for a certain period of time, while others have their Caribbean roots ingrained in their psyche to such an extent, that it always features prominently in their writings.

This wide variety of multicultural representation of Caribbean writing in one volume is also interesting because whether white, black or brown, according to the editors, many of these writers reside in the diaspora outside their homeland but express “a collective memory of lost homelands, of broken families and of utopian dreams more often than not destined to remain unfulfilled” (4). It clearly shows how “Caribbean writing in its landscape, plantation backgrounds, use of folklore, Creole speech, slave histories and the memory of transmitted cultures, its political world that attracts interference, and its presence in different parts of

88 the world has become a travelling culture being lived through in multiple ways” (5).

The people of the old Indian diaspora are linked to the production of one commodity – sugar. For Cyril and David Dabydeen and Samuel Selvon, sugar functions as both commodity and metaphor. In a very informative and autobiographical piece entitled “Shaping the Environment: Sugar Plantation or Life After” that is also full of lyrical embellishments, Cyril Dabydeen tells us how the sugar plantation was all for them in Guyana’s coastline; plantation life and its ambience as well as memories of cane-harvesting came the author Cyril Dabydeen as the only resonances as she conjured up “cane-ash like tarantulas floating in the air, then slowly coming down on [us] standing on the balcony of [our] house in the village”(11). Whom does ‘her’ refer to?? not clear…In a more pedagogical note David Dabydeen, himself a Caribbean diasporic academic in Britain, tells us about the problems of “Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain”(26-43). Dismissing the jargon that critics use today derived entirely from the West, he believes with Lakshmi Persaud that if they have to deconstruct West Indian fiction then writers should attempt to use a vocabulary and concepts derived from Indian aesthetics that are native and alive and present, because they are still being used in every day and ritualistic life by a substantial proportion by the Indo-Caribbean peoples. As exile and homecoming are part and parcel of any diasporic individual, for Dabydeen the story of banishment, exile and displacement and perilous new encounters among strange tribes, and “the story of a fall from grace into a prison-house of misery as expressed in The Ramayana serves as an allegory of the experience of indentureship”(40).

The essays on the three Naipauls trace a family’s experimentation with form, narrative and theme. Whereas Vishnupriya Sengupta in “The Politics of Historical Reconstruction: A Study of V.S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado and A Way in the World” concludes that Naipaul’s “focus on histories of the past centuries in the face of a bitter present complicates the relationship of the New World to the Old, and in the process swaps the Center with the margin” (114), Madhuri Chatterjee, as a counterpoint, works with the image of a house and the need to anchor in Shiva Naipaul’s The Chip Chip Gatherers. A valuable addition to the Naipaul discourse is Cyril Dabydeen’s essay “Negotiating V.S. Naipaul” where one can trace a dialogue between two different generations from the Caribbean. She states how she “dwelled on Naipaul’s attitude to the committed literary life and the sense of forged identity with the spirit being bent on seeking out new, if not old, ways of deciphering and decoding meaning or significance in a world riddled with conflicts in the search for belonging and permanence”(119).

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A diaspora exists precisely because it remembers the ‘homeland.’ Though he shares the same Indian origin and a Trinidadian childhood as his contemporary V.S. Naipaul, it is obvious that colonialism comes in for an altogether different treatment in several of Sam Selvon’s novels. In “Conflict and Resolution: Selvon’s The Plains of Caroni”(152-163) Supriya Agarwal points out that Selvon does not dismiss the Caribbean as a place without a history. Instead, he is deeply involved with the problems of economic development and nation construction. She shows how Selvon’s own life course of early education followed by a trip to England follows an almost similar pattern as adopted by the protagonist of The Plains of Caroni but Romesh, unlike several Naipaulian heroes, “does not treat his sojourn in England as a permanent severance from his country. Instead, he feels that his homeland needs to be nurtured with love and knowledge” (152). Discussing his second novel, An Island Is a World, Charu Mathur shows how “each of the characters in the novel relate to a reality where they are caught in a bewildering web of relations in a semi-plural multi-racial world and are a part of the process of creolisation which goes beyond a despairing sense of violation or loss” (174).The Indo-Trinidadian realizes that he is neither a rootless being devoid of identity, nor a lost son of India but a man shaped by the island now. The island is his world and this is the new reality he accepts and relates to.

Two articles, namely “Negotiating Interstitial Spaces: Itwaru’s Shanti and The Unreturning” by Mini Nanda and “Cultural Transformation in Diaspora: Arnold Harrichand Itwaru’s Shanti” by Indira Babbellapati emphasize on the subversive strategies that rise out of the interstitial habitation and also the different cultural components that go into the shaping of the Indian identity. Like his protagonist Deo in The Unreturning, a sequel to Shanti (1992), Itwaru migrates to multicultural Canada with a heavy baggage of bicultural affinities. The hyphens that characterize Itwaru’s identity, Indo-Guyanese-Canadian, signify what Vijay Mishra in his 1996 essay “New Lamps for Old: Diasporas, Migrancy, Border” calls the “vibrant social and cultural spaces occupied by the diaspora in nation states” (in Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Eds. Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee, IIAS, Shimla, 1996: 16) Like many other diasporic writers, Itwaru feels like participating in several cultural groups or traditions without being fully at home in any. So in his novels he delves into the cultural components of the disapora –the manner of speech, the food they eat, religion they practice, inter-racial and gender inequalities they conform in day-to-day life, family and familial relationships, marriages they celebrate etc -- factors which set a people apart from other peoples but also help these Indians retain their oneness within the diaspora.

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The Trinidad born and Canada-based writer and poet Ramabai Espinet is another case of ‘double diaspora.’ In an interview given to Elaine Savory, she reminds us that what is lived is often far more complex than what is theorized, and so of the crucial purpose of fiction and story-telling which is well grounded in history and culture but represents the infinite cultural interactions and negotiations which characterize specifically Creole experience in the Caribbean and the lives of the people who migrate everywhere. The Indo-Caribbean diaspora according to Espinet has evolved in the Caribbean ‘over a period of 166 years’ and there are the ‘ever-present choices of assimilation or accommodation and the complex negotiations necessary to survive.’ For her, the diaspora is ‘both local and global’ and one cannot afford to be complacent. Place does not matter to her because she knows that ‘things change constantly.’ But ‘there is too a very real sense of belonging’ and wherever she is, she recognizes that belongingness instantly. An added attraction of the volume is its Appendix that includes three articles on indentureship by M.K. Gandhi. The first brief one entitled “Indenture or Salvery?” originally appeared in Gujarati in Samalochak in December 1915. “Indenture Labour” deals with the issue seriously and was originally published in The Leader on 25th February, 1916. Gandhi had carefully read the resolution issued at Simla by the government of India on the 1st instant, embodying the report of the Inter-Departmental Conference held in London in May 1917 and his responses on the same was published in The Indian Review, September 1917 entitled “Indian Colonial Emigration.” Commenting on the plight of the girmits, Gandhi’s view expressed way back in 1916-17 that indenture is indeed a state of semi-slavery and really demoralizing is worth referring to in the postcolonial perspective even today. According to him, indenture has persisted because “its bitterness like that of a sugared pill has been clearly though unconsciously concealed.”

The editors as well as the individual contributors are to be congratulated for this worth-possessing anthology, which is a reprint from Jamaica and Miami of the original text published from New Delhi [Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2008]. Dedicated to Frank Birbalsingh, it reconfirms how the different Caribbean writers are still evaluated as marginal figures by the Western academy and we need many more anthologies like this to bring them into limelight.

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Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora Edited by Sandhya Rao Mehta Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 200 pages ------Studying literature of the Indian Diaspora is an ‘in thing’ in academia at the moment and every other day new books and critical studies are being published on the same. As the list of authors grows so does critical works on their writing. The present volume under review comprises of eleven articles (here mentioned as chapters) penned by scholars from different parts of the world that attempt to bring together diverse ways of examining gender in Indian diasporic fiction. While gendered spaces within the diaspora have become central to the study of migration in transnational and globalised contexts, its literary manifestations, voicing various concerns, approaches and attitudes to the representation of this complex experience, are equally varied in treatment and range. Apart from the Introduction by Sandhya Rao Mehta, the editor, the volume brings together a variety of approaches with which to negotiate identities and create new selves in women of the Indian diaspora who are also linked to the perceived feminine task of collecting, remembering and documenting memory and images of the past.

Part I called “Reading Gender” comprises of three articles which offer in-depth studies of four individual novels. In his protean novel Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie tries to give us a socio-cultural history of the growing up of its protagonist Saleem Sinai and the simultaneous development of the nation state of India after its emergence as a new country in 1947. Focusing on two particular issues from the plethora of ideas that Rushdie deals with in the novel, in “Gender and the Indian Emergency: Representation of Women in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” Gemma Scott examines how Rushdie’s gendered representation of the political Emergency and the imposer of it particularly by

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The Widow (referring to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) is actually an alternative reading of history that is largely a result of the author’s self-avowed cultural displacement and is in fact a vital contribution to resistance. She insists that we should not “dismiss the characterization of The Widow and the treatment of Gandhi in the novel as authorial misogyny, or as a result of a paranoid narrator.”(31) Also, we have to keep in mind that as opposed to the negative image of The Widow, Rushdie presents women characters like Padma elsewhere in the novel that are more explicitly positive.

In the next article Sanchari Sur explores a fictional account of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India and its resonance among Sikhs in Canada in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? She argues that a woman’s differential responses to trauma have to be understood in the context of her gendered upbringing and socio-historical circumstances that are temporal and contingent. Through the character of Bibi-ji, this article shows the ways in which trauma crosses religious and national borders, and opens up possibilities for envisioning changing national and religious allegiances in the background of violence. Badami also complicates the notion of national belonging for women by moving her female protagonists from India to Canada. Bibi-ji’s character demonstrates that it is possible to be both a Sikh and a Canadian.

The third article “Purdah and Zenana: Re-visioning Conventions” by Tulika Bahuguna begins by looking at how the Muslim covering called the purdah has been traditionally, sociologically and anthropologically defined to unearth the negative connotations that come embedded within its definition and description. Trying to explain the formulaic binaries that define purdah as being “oppressive, restrictive and controlled as opposed to its presumably liberated, independent and self-dependent counterpart,” (52) the scholar examines various social and political institutions such as family, haveli, educational institutions and necessities of purdah since the time before the partition, and the cross-currents between tradition and modernity through two novels, namely Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Nazir Ahmed’s The Bride’s Mirror. According to Bahuguna, given Hosain’s diasporic standpoint, she is able to arrive at conventional systems of society with the experience of the outsider. In contrast Ahmad’s contextualizing of such Islamic conventions read into a wider way that tradition could be examined by being part of society itself.

The second part of the anthology entitled “Writing Gender” is the longest and contains five articles. While earlier studies attempted an essentialised study of gendered diaspora based on communities of shared experiences, subsequent works focused on the divergent ways in which travel and migration affected

93 different communities in specific ways. An important question which arises in this context is whether diaspora provides agency to women who emerge from a nationalistic narrative into a transnational experience or whether women find themselves further marginalized in the new society owing to factors of race and ethnicity beyond the challenges of gender. The main thrust area of this section is to bring together multifarious ways in which women occupying marginal spaces within the diaspora transform, define and reflect themselves through the tropes of labour, cooking and clothing. Monbinder Kaur’s essay “Blurring Borders/Blurring Bodies: Diaspora and Womanhood” explores the way in which hybridity allows for the female body to process the multiplicity of diasporic experience through a fragmented experience which allows for hybridity. Beginning with emerging issues in the diaspora and examining how they have been represented in different anthologies available in the market she shows us how with the passage of time, issues among the diaspora saw many changes as these groups began to assert themselves socially and culturally. Analysing the works of four diasporic writers, namely Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Kiran Desai and Bapsi Sidhwa, she attempts to examine the shifting identities of women and the burdens created by these shifting roles of diaspora and how these writers are primarily concerned with the relationship between image, identity, culture, power, politics and representation.

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is a significant text as far as it delves in the process of attaining selfhood by the Bangladeshi diasporic protagonist of the novel. The next two essays use this text for comparative studies. In “Diasporic Mobility and Identity in Flux in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Man and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” the author argues that gendered mobility in both the novels comes at the expense of political participation, solidarity and action. While Naipaul’s text is marked by a pervasive sense of paralysis, Ali’s novel indicates that mobility – whether social, financial, or physical – is readily available to the hardworking South Asian immigrant. South Asian women migrating to the West sometimes carry with them – or are expected to carry with them – traditional gender ideologies where family and procreativity are valued over the individual self. In the other article entitled “Gendered Diasporic Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”, the scholar Elizabeth Jackson chose these two novels, both published in 2003, because the similarities and differences between the authors and their diasporic settings enable an interesting comparative analysis. In the two novels under discussion, the female protagonists, both from traditional South Asian families, struggle to reconstruct their identities in two different diasporic locations. Both encounter strong cultural pressures arising from their position as dependent women in the diaspora, and despite their

94 internal conflicts and ambivalences, it is ultimately their individual choices which shape their identities and destinies.

Food and clothing have now become interesting facets in studying the diaspora. Several scholars have argued that food habits and food imagery act as identity markers for the women characters and shape their distinctiveness with special nuances that highlight their ethno-regional affiliations. “Food thus rises above its mundane function as a nutrient and becomes ‘cultural sustenance’ in diasporic situations.”(120) It also enables the diaspora to draw on the coded language of culture and myth expressed through food to satiate its diverse cravings. In “Kitchen Politics and the Search for an Identity: The Mango Season” Shashikala Muthumal Assella shows how the Indian American novelist Amulya Malladi explores a new South Asianness and a new South Indian identity in her book The Mango Season (2003). Through abundant use of food imagery and culinary nostalgia, the scholar argues that Malladi uses food not only as a means of asserting a unique South Asianness, but also as a means of exploring women’s space within the diaspora and India.

Like food, in much of the fiction of the Indian diaspora gender plays a significant role as being the site from where the dialogue between costume and cultural identity is primarily and most intensely conducted and contested. In the next article entitled “Clothing, Gender, and Diaspora” Priyanka Sacheti discusses the novels and several short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to bring out the tensions of cultural belonging and acceptance through recurring images of clothing, “particularly in the way that the sari is imagined and creatively used to indicate changing relationships with self and society.” (135) She also rightfully assesses the difference between the first generation and the second generation of Indian women in America vis-à-vis the kind of attachment they profess for traditional clothes, especially the sari, and concludes her argument by stating that irrespective of generation, the sari ultimately becomes a manifestation of how the diasporic women perceive themselves in the arena of immigrant, gender and identity politics -- and its influence in dictating the trajectories of their lives.

Part III of this anthology entitled “Performing Gender” comprises of three interesting articles. As the title of the first article suggests, “The Masculinisation of the Native Gentleman: A Close Reading of Neel Haldar in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies” it explores the effects of diasporic displacement on Neel Haldar’s gender identity and argues that his very source of entrapment ironically empowers and masculinizes him. Employing Judith Butler’s theory of ‘Gender as Performance’ which states that gender should not be taken for granted, nor

95 should be policed, and Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ‘Uncanny’, Uma Jayaraman reiterates how Haldar’s “ very loss of identity paradoxically empowers him in his displaces state. The empowerment even in extreme instances of privation is made possible only because of his ability to passively resist oppression through a newfound fearlessness – of scatological pollution, of losing caste or face, of material loss of his possessions, wife and son.”(160)

An important development within studies of feminism and sexuality has been the inclusion of queer studies within the diaspora. Modern Indian art genres are beginning to address the subject of LGBT relationships more directly than traditional literary sources. The last two articles focus on queer issues. In “Sexual Realisation in a Historical, Social and Cultural Context: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji” Harshi Syal Gill discusses not only the sexual awareness and realization of the protagonist Anamika but also places her within the context of a deeply ingrained cultural heritage, where she intrinsically recognizes that her sexual transgression does not conform to accepted social norms. Also she has to discard and escape from the cocoon of these norms to find acceptance of her deviation. Interestingly, Dawesar neither condones nor condemns Anamika’s sexuality, but recognises that diaspora is essential for ultimate self-discovery in the imagined freer world of the West.

As cultural texts, Indian films that deal with queerness among the diaspora have been extremely successful. Based on her reading of the films of Karan Johar, especially those that are set among the diaspora community in America like Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho, Margaret Redlich underlines the argument that the Indian diaspora is far advanced in comparison with the Indian population in terms of accepting and understanding of queer issues. Unlike serious art films or what is termed ‘parallel cinema’ in India, what is unique about the Johar films is that by setting the films in the diaspora community, the issue of queerness is treated as a topic for humour while still positioning it within the narrative which legitimizes it by making it a central concern of the plot. According to the author, apart from making the whole context acceptable and believable, both the films present the possibility of joy, hope and acceptance for an Indian gay man. Redlich also rightly points out that most queer films set in India on the other hand have very bleak endings where the society is still unable to accept it as part of reality. Citing Johar’s film Bombay Talkies as an example of a film with a gay storyline which is set in India and which deals with the same queer issues, she tells us how the reception at home is totally different and the film shows “only the possibility of a violent confrontation with society, represented by parents, followed by a life of loneliness, pain and lies, while the spirit of India looks on and sings songs of mourning for them.”(193)

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The contributors to this anthology are a mixed group of senior academics, emerging scholars as well as those outside academia and therefore the standard of all the articles are not consistent. As Adrian Roscoe mentions in the foreword to the volume, issues of identity, mobility, communal violence, masculinisation, kitchen politics, sexual realization, and even clothing, all come under penetrating and revealing scrutiny. While some articles delve with these issues in general by mentioning several texts and performance pieces, there are a few which offer in depth study of one particular text. Of course allowing for new interpretations of established texts as well as introducing lesser known writers is the added advantage of this book. All said and done, apart from a few typos marring the good production (for example, page 161where there are problems with upper and lower case of many words, and page 167 where Kamasutra is wrongly spelt), the editor should be congratulated for contextualizing the issue of gendered spaces in the diaspora in a fresh light and bringing together a very lucid and readable anthology.

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Media, Gender, and Popular Culture in India: Tracking Change and Continuity Edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta, Dipankar Sinha and Sudeshna Chakravarti Sage Publications, 2012. 232 pages, Rs.595.00 ------

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Culturally speaking, post-independence India saw the nation being divided into two opposite camps – on the one hand we had the celebration of traditional stereotypes, on the other we saw them being challenged in different socio- cultural contexts. In India at present there are people of different regions who maintain with passionate fidelity their regional culture, recognize multiple religious affiliations, and support the need to negotiate the home and the world as well as the global in the local. All this has been possible with the help of one entity and that is media. It is the media that is enabling connectivity within the multicultural, multi-linguistic nation of ours and also promoting improved sense of understanding between people. Media thus assumes the role of prime encoder-cum-disseminator of popular culture through its act of mediation, and by producing a notion of space between the individual subject and reality. Interestingly, the Indian media transmits popular culture selectively, retaining deep-rooted patriarchal and capitalistic norms of the market economy, and their embedded presence in contemporary society and culture.

The present volume under review attempts to critique media representations of popular culture and gender in India since the 1950s and track the changes that have taken place in Indian society. The authors give us incisive analyses of these transformations, represented through the candid lens of the camera in films, television, advertisements, and magazines, all of which focus on gender and familial representations and patriarchal norms in Indian society. Focusing on these different aspects, they analyse media flows and effects through semiotic readings and content analysis. Semiotics largely involves intensive readings of single texts through qualitative assessment attuned to the humanities discipline in textual analyses. Here studying the case of the Bengali women’s magazine Sananda serves as a good example. Again, content analyses involve reading a large body of sample texts in order to identify quantitative data attuned to the social science discipline. A whole lot of films, commercial, popular, avant-garde and those with strong messages are discussed in this context. This dual approach makes the study more holistic as it addresses both signification and occurrence.

In the chapter that discusses the Indian media in transition, the writers point out that the Indian state has “a deep heritage” of patriarchy, which time and again has surfaced in some cases rather crudely and in some rather subtly. Thus while induced by the change brought forth by the twin force of globalization and liberalization post 1991, the traces of continuity also tend to make their presence felt. So in the postcolonial era both the deeply patriarchal Indian society and the utterly patriarchal Indian state continue to privilege men at the cost of the ‘second sex.’ This trend was visible not only in state sponsored programmes

98 broadcast and telecast by All India Radio and Doordarshan, but also in private television channels that made their entry after 1991.

In the chapter on ‘Filming Change, Securing Tradition: A Hobson’s Choice or a Dynamic Duality’, we are shown how as there are many Indias in India, so Indian commercial cinema is a heterogeneous mass of speaking positions and lifestyle representations which have been produced and directed with spectacular success. The beginning of the new millennium was marked by a flourishing of the IT sector and the establishment of various MNCs. Bollywood thus got a new fan base with the growth of this privileged section of the Indian society with a sound financial base and a niche audience was thus being moulded. Film makers were quick to recognize the potential of this sector and responded with a series of buddy movies which were focused on protagonists who were in their early twenties. In the guise of the cosmopolitan youth living luxurious carefree lives these hybrid heroes were specifically crafted for the upper middle class youth. These developments in the corporate world rubbed off on the Indian women as well. Increased career opportunities and consequent economic independence redefined the notion of women liberation. Radical changes in gender perfomativity of the new age Indian woman were palpable in the female counterparts of these dude heroes. The Bollywood heroine altered her image to be equally hip and trendy to compete with the dude heroes, thus transforming into a self-declared ‘chhamak challo’ (a girl who is flashy in appearance; can also be used in a derogatory sense) demanding an increased screen space in contemporary Hindi cinema. The booming of foreign television channels like MTV and STAR which tried to cultivate and exploit an international youth culture complemented the makeover of the Bollywood hero and heroine. The lives of the characters in this genre of movies revolve around having fun, trying out new fashions and openly indulging in all kinds of pleasurable activities. They are the brand ambassadors of the consumerist culture and are proud to be so. But however much these films or mega serials like Rajni and Udaan try to reinvent themselves with the changing times and usher in the representations of the ‘new era’ Indian women, at the end of the day, as the authors cogently argue, continuity strikes back and the woman once again becomes the victim of patriarchal domination under the garb of maintaining ‘Bharatiya Sanskriti.’

In the other chapters the writers mention cricket, the formations of images through television, the powerful role of advertising in the print media which also encodes seduction. They point out how advertising can inspire the imagination and creativity of authors and authorial responses and also point to social accommodation of marketable commodities. The impact and identity of little magazines on popular consciousness is another area of investigation. Talking

99 about media responsibility of course brings in the dicey issue of mixing the ‘popular’ with public interest. It is true that media often seeks to skirt such responsibility and aggressively indulge in promoting ‘popular culture’ in all its triviality on the ‘market demands it’ logic. However, we are told that there is hardly any clue as to how the media identifies such market because the methodology always remains guarded. Yet there are instances when the media can also synergize sense of responsibility, sensibility and profit motive in promoting popular culture in its highest forms. The book is very interesting to read and at the same time quite thought provoking too. One strongly recommends this book for anyone who is interested in tracking the role of change and continuity in the Indian media. Without involving themselves in mere theoretical propositions, the authors have succeeded in dissolving the boundaries between mass/low culture, elite/high culture and local/national/global affiliations.

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The Naïve and the Sentimentalist Novelist Orhan Pamuk Penguin (Hamish Hamilton), 2010; 200 pages, Rs. 450.00 ------“I wanted my lectures to be an essay or meditation on the art of the novel, rather than a trip down memory lane or a discussion of my personal development.” – Orhan Pamuk

As a writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2006, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and

100 interlacing of cultures,” Orhan Pamuk needs no introduction. Dedicated to Kiran Desai, the present volume of non-fiction is a collection of the 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered by Pamuk at Harvard at the invitation of Homi Bhabha. The common subject for the six lectures is the novel, or the art of the novel, and as he clearly states in the epilogue, Pamuk’s main goal has been “to explore the effects that novels have on their readers, how novelists work, and how novels are written.” The writer hopes that the reader will keep in mind that this book was written from the point of view of a self-taught writer who came of age in 1970s Turkey, a culture with a fairly weak tradition of writing novels and reading books, and who decided to become a novelist by reading the books in his father’s library and whatever else he could find, essentially fumbling around in the dark. Steering clearly away from theory, (a subject he teaches at ), the book has a simpler motive –“the best way to study the novel and to read the great novels and aspire to write something like them.”

In the first essay entitled “What Our Minds Do When We Read Novels,” it becomes clear that Pamuk borrowed the title of his book from Friedrich Schiller’s essay, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” Drawing on Schiller’s famous distinction between ‘naïve’ poets – who write spontaneously, serenely, unselfconsciously – and ‘sentimental’ poets – those who are reflective, emotional, questioning, and alive to the artifice of the written word – he also explains Schiller’s use of the word sentimentalisch to describe the state of mind which has strayed from nature’s simplicity and power and has become too caught up in its own emotions and thoughts. Thus, for Pamuk, “the more the novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naïve and sentimental, the better he writes.”

The second and third essay, “Mr. Pamuk, Did All This Really Happen To You?” and “Literary Character, Plot and Time” delve on issues related to the relationship between the protagonist of the novel, the author and the reader. Pamuk admits that it would be difficult for him to convince his readers that they should not equate him with his protagonist (Kemal inThe Museum of Innocence); at the same time he did not intend to exert a great deal of effort to prove that he was not Kemal. In other words, he intended his novel to be perceived as a work of fiction, as a product of the imagination – yet he also wanted readers to assume that the main characters and the story was true. Another reason he loved the art of writing novels is that it forces him “to go beyond [his] own point of view and become someone else.”

As a proponent of the realist novel, Pamuk actually has no significant theory to propagate about the genre of the novel per se. As he himself states, his “experiences as a novel-reader and novel-writer are intertwined.” Most of his

101 declarations stem from his interest in modern fiction as a reader and not so much as a writer. He says that experience has taught him that there are many ways to read a novel. “We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fibre of our being.” Giving us a long list of the beloved novels of his youth and ranging through such writers as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Mann, and Naipaul, Woolf, he explores the oscillation between the naïve and the reflective, and the search for equilibrium that lie at the centre of the novelist’s craft. In fact the last essay entitled “The Center” elaborately explores this idea that “a novel is defined by its center” and “often the center emerges as the novel is written.” Giving examples of juxtaposing multiple plots in an artistic way (here Faulkner’s The Wild Palms) he even goes on to state that the challenge of defining a center of a literary novel should remind us that the literary novel is an entity whose meaning is difficult to articulate or to reduce to anything else – just like the meaning of life. Thus the real pleasure of writing is pinning down an emerging novel’s ever-shifting center and the real pleasure of reading is the search for this center. Pamuk understood that “digressions and detours from the supposed subject, in the style of Tristram Shandy, were actually the real subject of the work.”

In his fifth lecture “Museum and Novels,”, Pamuk describes in details his search for the real-life objects featured in his latest novel, The Museum of Innocence.(It is interesting to note that he had been collecting objects for the past ten years to establish an actual museum in Istanbul). He also tells us how over the years his perspective of writing a novel has changed. When he wrote his historical novel My Name is Red, he included numerous references to the contemporary world where the daily life of the family in the novel was based on his life with his mother and brother. But later on, with the influence of ‘postmodernist’ writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, who were essentially researchers into the metaphysics of fiction rather than novelists in the strict sense of the word, he too changed his stance, forced himself to be modernist and experimental and “found his own voice.”

In the essay “Words, Pictures, Objects,” Pamuk informs us that at the age of twenty-three, he gave up the dream of becoming a painter, which he had cherished since he was seven and started writing novels. Then he goes on explaining how “novels are essentially visual literary fictions.” At one point he tells us, “Writing a novel means painting with words, and reading a novel means visualizing images through someone else’s words.” Again, “As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words, I strive to visualize each scene like a film

102 sequence, and each sentence like a painting”; or “Novels, just like paintings, present frozen moments”; or “The creative urge to write novels is motivated by an enthusiasm and a will to express visual things with words.” Though Pamuk gives the example of Henry James’s preface to The Golden Bowl where James uses the expression “seeing my story” and then describes the narrator as a “painter” or recalls Proust’s comment “My book is a painting” or “My novel is a picture,” this section seems a bit too naïve and simplistic as he seems to be reiterating very well known facts. The emphasis on the visual element in fiction gained prominence in modern fiction right from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth but maybe because of his exposure to novels written in English only through translation, and his coming from “the poorer, non-Western part of the world,” where he envied “American novelists for their lack of constraint, for the confidence and ease with which they write,” Pamuk feels this visual element to be unique. Surprisingly, there is not even a single mention of Joseph Conrad whose credo for the visual element is so well-known.

At the end of it all, though one might not agree with some of the simplistic declarations that Pamuk makes regarding a novelist’s aim and purpose, this slim volume of non-fiction is really worth reading for its lucid, conversational style. Apart from the interest it would generate for students of literature, die-hard Pamuk fans, creative writers, and serious academics, the book is a brilliant testimony of how a practicing novelist evaluates the quintessence of the entire creative process of writing fiction. It can be valued as a less serious addition to the series of earlier books on the theories of the novel – E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (a book which Pamuk was “convinced was outdated” but later “felt that its reputation should be restored”); Gyorgy Lukacs’ The Theory of the Novel (again which according to Pamuk is “more a philosophical, anthropological, surprisingly poetic essay than a detailed theory of the novel” written by Lukacs in the period before he became a Marxist), John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction or James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

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Gender, Politics and Islam Edited by Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, & Judith A. Howard New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002. Rs. 350.00; 354 pages ------At a time when our newspapers are filled with interesting reports of Iranian policewomen practicing the firing of guns with their burquas on; when a band of rebellious Muslim women in Tamilnadu, embittered by the inequalities of Shariat laws and society, is going about settling nikah disputes and problems related to dowry and domestic violence through a Jamaat which has only women members; when Taslima Nasreen is entreating the Indian government to grant her resident status in order to escape from the fatwa declared upon her by fundamentalist ; and when Amina Wahud, a Professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University created headlines by leading the first public, mixed- gender Muslim prayer service in New York, this collection of nine groundbreaking essays is sure to appeal to all serious academic scholars, sociologists and laymen as to the definition and understanding of Islamic feminism and its discontents.

Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, the essays (many of them outcome of actual field studies done by sociologists in Western academia and published earlier in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society) focus on the complex relations of power that shape women’s negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. Bringing together these essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora, from rural Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Iran, Israel/Palestine refugee camps, urban Pakistan, and elite Yemeni households to explore how Muslim women negotiate 104 indigenous identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights, the editors help us to dispel two primary notions, namely that there is something called Islamic feminism that cannot be brought under the rubric of the Western feminist model and that even in this there are no homogenizing factors since Islam is not monolithic in its impact on women’s lives.

Through analysis of indigenous feminist projects, some authors explore Islam and Islamic movements as an alternative to Eurocentric liberal humanism and the maternalism of western feminist models. In addition they also expose tensions between local definitions of women’s struggles and their reinterpretation through the process of globalization, including diasporic movement of peoples, texts, and scholarship. One interesting essay explores the hybrid identity negotiations of underrepresented minority women, such as Shi’a Muslim women within Sunni dominant Pakistan. Investigation of the Shi’a women’s religious mourning rituals or majales in Peshawar reveals how women, no matter how loyal to their social group’s values, religion, and aims in troubled times, may nevertheless find means for self-development – and thus potentially also for an evolving self and worldview and for gender transformation – through the very practice of their group service. Again, others examine the ways in which women authors and their texts discursively construct Arab or South Asian Muslim women for local or western consumption. For example, the West’s interest in Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi and Bangladeshi Taslima Nasreen is tied to its interest in and hostility towards Islam, for these women are often portrayed as lone crusaders against the patriarchy of their cultures, as victims of Islamic fundamentalism’s repression of women, rather than as part of larger intellectual and feminist movements. These cases expose the extent to which women’s agency is circumscribed by the West’s political and economic role in shaping the gender politics of the regions, as well as by its politically interested interpretations of women’s lives.

In an interesting study entitled “Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone,” we are told how Palestinian women, both in Lebanon during the civil war (1975-91) and in the West Bank during the intifada (1987-93) responded to the conflation of mothering with nationalism and acted within its parameter while asserting their own demands and claims on, as well as critiques of, the polity. At a time when Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, declared that mothering was equivalent to participation in the national struggle, with the transition to a highly circumscribed form of autonomy, maternal practice and sacrifice thus became components of feminist demands for equal rights. Also, this particularly feminine practice of motherhood acquired a political status that mothers conceived as empowering but not transformative.

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In the Yemeni context, gender is at the core of female personhood of both unmarried and married women. Yemenis do not assign a feminine identity to an unmarried woman, but in anticipation of her future role as a wife and mother, she is treated differently from an unmarried man. Gender thus becomes more central to a woman’s identity after marriage, and is even more fully developed when she embarks on her reproductive career. Also, enhancement of the body by means of cosmetics and attire is contingent on her conjugal status. Irrespective of their pursuit of salaried labour and the wealth they own, Yemeni women can rarely act as self-governing agents.

In Bangladesh, on the other hand, state policies regarding women, gender and development is complicated as it is confronted with contradictory agendas imposed upon them by donors with very different agendas, for instance, the United Nations on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia on the other. The poor, landless women there are thus pulled by competing interpretations of modernity, development, Islam, and feminism. They are on the one hand successful in taking advantage of the micro-credit system and yet on the other hand face varieties of punishments imposed upon them by fatwas that are increasingly being used to express local objections to their increasing access to credit, employment, and educational opportunities outside the home. The contemporaneity of such issues in this book will interest readers who discover that the use of the hijab can also be an act of empowerment and expression of the soul of Islamic women throughout the world.

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Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography Geraldine Forbes New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2005; 214 pages ------For historians and scholars of women’s studies in Kolkata, Geraldine Forbes has become a familiar, household name. A Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the State University of New York, Oswego, Forbes began her research career in India way back in 1969 and has specialized on the history and lives of Indian women. Her published books on this subject can put any Indian researcher into shame. As the subtitle of this new anthology suggests, Women in Colonial India comprises eight essays in women’s history on politics, medicine, and historiography, all written between 1979 and 2003 with “the desire to celebrate women’s achievements in difficult circumstances.”

Her first published articles focused on the “new women” of the 1920s and 1930s who joined women’s organizations and entered politics. By taking a close look at the institutions that reproduced gender hierarchies and the extent to which women were complicit in these institutions, “Caged Tigers: ‘First Wave’ Feminists in India” attempts to locate these individuals and this history within the larger context of world history. Although ‘feminism’ because of its origins in the West and emphasis on individualism, is a problematic concept in India, Forbes argues that the first women to enter political and social organizations were deeply concerned with improving women’s status. “The Politics of Respectability: Indian Women and the Indian National Congress” examines how the parameters of women’s entry into nationalist politics were set by male leaders and defined by women. The freedom struggle legitimized women’s involvement 107 in politics and presence outside the home but it did not liberate them from deeply held notions of female modesty and the necessity of male protection. The third of the political articles speaks of women’s efforts to gain the vote and connects this movement to the current debate over reservations for women. Historically, activist women were trapped by their own rhetoric. While they used essentialist arguments to demand a role in politics, their connections to the Indian National Congress led them to support universal franchise. These two arguments were not compatible historically, but Forbes argues, with universal franchise a fact of life in democratic India, many feminists now support reservations for women though for different reasons than their essentialist grandmothers.

The next three essays on colonial medicine bring into focus the dichotomy in the definition of the voice of progressive Indian women. The members of women’s organizations defined themselves as modern, yet at the same time they were also influenced and constrained by the reconfigured notion of the “ideal Indian woman.” For example, they stood for equal educational opportunities but supported both separate schools for girls and home science education to make girls into efficient homemakers. At the same time, they insisted co-educational institutions be opened to women who wanted to attend them. And while they wanted to help poor women, they were seldom willing to work with prostitutes, and some worried they might be confused with their fallen sisters. In “Managing Midwifery in India,” Forbes looks at their stand, solidly in favour of Western medical science and against indigenous traditions and dhais. The next essay looks at three kinds of medical education for women – that of midwives, medical doctors and hospital assistants. As students of the Campbell Medical School in Calcutta who were imparted education through the vernacular medium, Campbell graduates had an easy time finding positions in the new women’s hospitals and dispensaries being built in the districts of Bengal. Though well-paid and often having long and productive careers, these professional women still had to face sexual harassment from doctors and other men. Citing the example of Haimabati Sen, one of India’s early women doctors, who had been trained as a “hospital assistant” and not a full-fledged doctor, Forbes frankly discusses the sexual and economic exploitation of these women doctors in great details.

The last two articles address the question of feminist historiography and focus on women who were literally and figuratively left out of history. By meeting Shudha Mazumdar, the great granddaughter of one of the founders of Hindu- Positivism and getting to read her unpublished memoir, Forbes realized the need for non-conventional sources and archives of research – especially memoirs, photographs and oral narration. In the early days of her research, she states, she had argued for a separate women’s history because the history being written

108 overlooked women and ignored gender as a category of analysis. Her goal was a new history, a new metanarrative inclusive of women and gender. With time she realizes that many young historians have lost sight of this goal and are keener in exploring apolitical topics. None of the schools of history in India – colonial, national, Cambridge, and Subaltern – has existed separate from politics and none has been friendly to a feminist perspective. So she reiterates that she cannot afford to ignore the impact of international politics and globalization on themselves as historians and on the histories they write. Like Sumit Sarkar, she would see the challenges facing historians as two-fold: from the political system which would use history for its own ends and from new disciplinary imperatives. One can read up the lucid articles to understand the further challenges in writing the history of women and gender in South Asia and what can be done to keep feminism relevant in the twenty-first century.

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Women of India: Colonial and Postcolonial Periods Ed. Bharati Roy New Delhi & London: Sage Publishers/Thousand Oaks, 2005/622pages ------As women we may mothers be Also wives we may, But as women we claim our place As women to have our say.

These lines of Kamini Roy (1864-1933), one of the first generation of educated Bengali women, serve as an apt introduction to this 622 pages book. Part of an 109 ongoing project on “History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilisation” with D.P. Chattopadhyaya as the General Editor, this volume (Volume IX Part 3) in six sections comprises of twenty-four essays on diverse aspects of Indian women in the colonial and postcolonial periods. They explore the operation of power and the resistance to it, the space that was denied to the disadvantaged gender – women – and the space they created for themselves. The topics range from issues related to family and law, body and sexuality, knowledge system, work, creativity/voices and politics. Fully cognizant of the complex interlinking of class, cast, ethnicity, religion, nation, state policy and gender, the editor Bharati Roy, an erudite scholar herself, follows a middle path between extremes of narrativism and theoreticism and admits that the nature of the different essays to be in tune of “methological pluralism.” Historically, the period discussed in this study coincide with the end of one era and the beginning of another, with two hundred years of British colonial rule and, following that, fifty years of an independent India.

Realizing the fact that women cannot be understood in isolation, the first section looks at how personal laws shape, structure and affect women’s interests within the ubiquity of patriarchy. Personal laws in India are based on religion and they define and regulate relationships in the family – marriage, divorce, custody, adoption, inheritance and property. Focusing on family laws of various communities in colonial India roughly from 1850 to 1950, Flavia Agnes traces the history of Hindu women’s right to separate property and how this right was throttled. She also examines the political motives beneath the various statutes affecting the rights of Muslim women during this period. Apart from the Hindu- Muslim binary, Agnes also examines the situation vis-à-vis the plight of women from the minority communities, namely the Christians and the Parsis. She also shows us how women’s rights became a highly contentious issue within the discourse of national identity towards the end of the 19th century and although several acts have been passed after independence, the issue of women’s rights still remains to be renegotiated.

It is interesting to note that the contributors to this anthology come from various walks of life-- eminent scholars on women’s studies and reputed scientists, drawn from different parts of India, and they present themes that are crucial to the understanding and experience of gender in India. In so doing, they add to our historical knowledge and also partly change our vision of history. Taken as a whole, the essays raise our awareness of overt and hidden discriminations, and restricted options and possibilities for women’s agency, while reminding us of the multiple ways in which women manage to survive and thrive despite familial,

110 community and state neglect. Strongly recommended for any and anyone interested in gender, race, class and in the nation-state called India.

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Ashapurna Devi and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal: A Bio-Critical Reading Dipannita Datta Oxford University Press, 2015. 335 pages. Rs.895/------

‘Since I write about what is most familiar to me, day-to-day experiences in middle class homes, my readers feel that what I write about is very close to their experience, and want to read more and more.” – Ashapurna Devi

Trying to assess a prolific writer like Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995) who left behind her a treasure of 240 novels, over 2000 stories and 62 books for children, along with many other unpublished essays and letters is not a very easy task for a researcher, however dedicated he or she might be. Most of her novels and many of her short stories throw light on the marginalized condition of middle-class Bengali women and the courageous efforts of some of them to resist that. In the Preface to the volume under review, the author states that this book pays ‘homage to Ashapurna Devi, the Indian activist writer, who silently lived her life thinking and writing for women and working towards human solidarity.’ As the title of the book suggests, Dipannita Datta begins the volume by providing a

111 critical overview of the writer whose writings offer newer queries about the Indian women’s identity. Steering clear of labelling her as a mere proponent of ‘women’s question’ in Indian feminism as is revealed through her woman-centric writing, the present study on the other hand looks for an effective way to address the perplexity that the ‘Other Ashapurna’ provides us with.

For a woman born in colonial Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century, till her death just five years before it ended, Ashapurna witnessed the transitions and transformations that took place in society, culture and family life and was from the beginning aware of the ‘gendered’ nature of reality. She wanted women to possess a special kind of self-sufficiency that can come only with the consolidation of female power. Feminism for her did not need a separate domain. Asking women to remember that their struggle should be against injustice and inequality and not against the male sex, she was confident that equal rights could be ensured only when men and women attained the same level of consciousness. Discussing several issues on the role of women and the nationalist question as propagated by scholars like Partha Chatterjee and others, Datta tries to show how Ashapurna interrogates the situation and offers a feminist critique of male ordering. Though not an active participant in the anti-colonial struggle, she sensitively absorbed the complexities of her time from quite a tender age and voiced it in her writings. For her, women should be able to initiate changes and challenge the system from ‘within’ by a combined process of reconciliation and resistance to patriarchal ideology. As she matured, her writings took the form of activism. As Datta rightly points out, while attempting to read through Ashapurna Devi’s works, one will not fail to overlook her impressive agency as a writer, an agency that enables her to strategically emphasize and minimize certain dimensions of her subjectivity for specific political, religious, or social purposes.

Though self-taught and groomed in a conservative atmosphere, we are aware of how Ashapurna was a dedicated daughter-in-law, a loving partner to her husband, and an ideal mother. She always devoted prime attention to domestic chores before her creative writing and did not have any special space or requirements for it. Like her protagonist Satyabati, she proved that even by attending to the daily grinds of household matters one could earn a keep and have a space of her own through sheer motivation. Though anti-patriarchal issues are prominent in her writings, she was however never in doubt that all patriarchal norms are historically, socially, culturally and politically conditioned. Relying a lot on memories of the past, Devi continued to write about the world she knew. Her famous declaration, ja dekhi tai likhi -- I write what I see – is reflected in her writings which focus on cultural impositions on women and is

112 induced and accentuated by colonialism and patriarchy. Her agenda was to create a space for women where their plight would be voiced and consequently be transmitted in order to be heard. Ashapurna’s works also highlight the fact that Indian women were under double subjugation and their movement sharply differed from the suffragette movement to which much of Western feminism owes its roots.

The five essays of Ashapurna Devi that have been translated and included in this volume are particularly important documents in the Third World context as they are essential social critique on the post postcolonial condition of women of Bengal or in a sense of India too. These essays --“Society and the Role of Women,” “Present Education System and Women’s Self-Sufficiency”, “Girls of Kolkata – Then and Now”, “Laws are Not the Sole Answer to Problems”, and “Women in the Service of Humanity,” along with some selected letters, are indicative of Ashapurna’s comprehensive attitude towards life. Since she had never been exposed to Western theories, as she had no access to English or foreign languages, what she wrote was completely her original thoughts, but based on her personal experiences and her analysis of women’s place in society. Ashapurna’s explanation about why she never wrote an autobiography offers an interesting insight into her oeuvre. She believed that one cannot write as honestly as one should be in writing an autobiography as private truth and social truth are different and complicated. The five interviews given to Shubhadra Urmila Majumdar, Partha Chatterjee, Chitra Deb, Jhara Basu, and Enakshi Chattopadhyay, which are included in this volume also prove that she did not differentiate her life from literary activism.

Apart from the inclusion of thirty four black and white photographs of the author in different stages of her life, which is an added attraction for the volume, one also needs to appreciate Datta’s inclusion of the three annexures at the end of the book which she has painstakingly put together with the help of Nupur Gupta, Devi’s daughter in law. The first offers a brief chronological biography of Ashapurna Devi which is a ready reckoner for the long career spanning so many decades beginning from the age of thirteen till her death at the ripe age of eighty-four. The second entry taken from the author’s Diary which gives us details of the money she received from different sources for the financial years 1977 to 1979 is rather illuminating. From receiving cheques of Rs. 20.00 from a magazine in Poona, Rs.17.50 from All India Radio (Jammu), Rs.109.35 from Macmillan to Rs.4000.00 from Anandamela, they speak about the reception and popularity of the writer during her lifetime and show subsequent increase in her earnings as the years go by. The last annexure, which is a list of all translated

113 works of Ashapurna Devi in English is very significant as a ready reckoner to assess her pan-Indian reception.

All said and done, this book is not only the outcome of years of painstaking research by Dipannita Datta but is definitely a milestone for anyone who is interested in learning about Ashapurna Devi’s oeuvre. Though lots of critical writing has come out on Devi’s feminist ideas vis-à-vis her famous trilogy and some of her selected short stories, this is probably the first text where serious attention has been paid to read her life through her non-fictional writings, especially letters, essays and interviews. This has elevated Ashapurna’s status from being called a ‘kitchen’ writer or a ‘Bengali Jane Austen.’ The reviewer humbly suggests that if possible, a complete list of all her publications may also be appended in a future edition for the benefit of all Ashapurna Devi readers and fans.

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The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered Edited by Barnita Bagchi Sage Publications, 2012, 241 pages, Rs. 750.00 ------The very mention of the word ‘utopia’ brings to our mind the Latin tract written by Sir Thomas More in the early 16th century where he had coined the word for the first time. Now it has become one of the most resonant political,

114 philosophical and literary concepts of our times. As the title of the volume explains, this anthology brings together chapters on utopia and dystopia from a rich breadth of disciplines: history, literature, gender studies, political science, sociology, anthropology and Native American studies. As the editor succinctly explains in the introduction, utopia is at once a place of dreams, a place of the good, and a place which is nowhere to be found. Etymologically speaking, Utopia, with its Greek pun on a ‘good place’ (eu-topos) and ‘no topos’ (ou-topos), offers simultaneously a locus of possibilities for human development as well as the idea that it might be difficult or impossible to actualize that same idea in reality. Since ‘topos’ also means space and a place, the utopian mode works with both these meanings and moves between fictional and non-fictional writings. It is also not surprising that along with utopian narratives we also have its opposite, namely writings that focus on dystopia.

This volume is divided into three sections. The first section, “Utopia and Dystopia: Debates and Resonances” has six chapters on the history, political theory and cultural politics of utopia-dystopia. It focuses on the relationship between utopia/dystopia and time/memory. The chapters by Miguel Abensour, Peter Kulchyski and Rachel Foxley speak particularly about the themes of utopia, history, time and memory. Abensour ‘s view of utopia seeks not to control or domesticate it within a dialectical game of totalities and proposes on radical alterity. He finds the fictional correlate for his philosophical argument in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) in which the future society would experience at the outset a stasis of time and an epoch of rest. Kulchyski argues that we have in our contemporary world grounded communities of hunting gathering peoples who challenge capitalism and its dystopia and in their society economic, social and cultural practices which appear to be utopian actually exist. Foxley looks at the ways in which early modern writers presented their visions of social and political transformation. Comparing works which seem overtly ‘utopian’ in their framing, from Thomas More onwards, with the writings of the 17th century Levellers and Diggers, she suggests that they share many strategies for imagining change without arguing explicitly for ‘innovation.’

The relationship between utopia/dystopia and time and history is reconfigured by a politically radically creative work like Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khoabnama (Dream-Elegy) in which the writer has explored the contradiction and conflict between the dystopic illusion propagated by the Muslim League and the utopian praxis spearheaded by the Leftists and the peasants in Bengal of that time. Subhoranjan Dasgupta argues that in this novel the dividing line between utopia and dystopia gets blurred, perhaps even erased, when agents of the latter borrow and usurp elements of the utopian programme to attain their own objective. He

115 also shows how dystopia can come dangerously close to utopia, yet how incompatible and antithetical the two are in terms of practice. In “Palestine: Land of Utopias” Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun argues that the geographical area of Palestine, having been a privileged ground of Oriental fantasies, then became from the late nineteenth century a place of utopian projections that brought together different kinds of national inspirations, feminist or socialist ideals.

The second section entitled “Engendering Utopia and Dystopia” consists of five very interesting essays on the gendered politics of utopia and dystopia. It focuses on Europe and areas outside Europe at the same time. In “Empire Builder”: A Utopian Alternative to Citizenship for Early-twentieth –century British ‘Ladies’”, Martine Spensky analyses the periodical The Imperial Colonist, a women’s review written by women for women, which first appeared on 1 January 1901 with the main objective of encouraging the emigration of British women to the colonies. The women who contributed to this journal did not share a restricted vision of womanhood and women’s role in society but instead their utopia was a world of equality and respect between men and women. In another interesting essay Samita Sen discusses the vision of a dystopia described in a Bengali (vernacular) 19th century popular tract named Meye Parliament ba Dwitiya Bhag Bharat Uddhar (Women’s Parliament or Second Part of Rescue of India). It draws on the considerable scholarship on 19th century Bengal, exploring how emerging literati perceived, in the rapid social change brought about by colonialism, a breakdown of the traditional social order. This perception led to the powerful images of Kaliyuga, the dystopian fourth age of time period conceptualized in Hindu cosmology, to describe processes of modernization. Two remarkable features of this tract are significant. First it speaks of a reversal of gender equations in the polity and in the wider social sphere; this is not a land of women, but one ruled by women in which men were suppressed and subordinated. Second, the women actively seek to address some of the chief elements of their subordination, particularly in respect to marriage and motherhood. In the last vignette, the author sketches in the terrible consequence of this dystopia, a prostitute colony in the outskirts of Calcutta, with men as service providers and women as clients.

Barnita Bagchi in her essay analyses the oeuvre of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s writings, with special emphasis on her classic female utopian narrative, Sultana’s Dream written in English as early as 1905. Published before the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, we find Rokeya’s great desire for scientific and technological prowess wielded by women, with schemes for cultivation of land through electricity, the harnessing of solar power, the control of weather, and aerial transportation. After discussing her other significant writings, Bagchi argues that Rokeya posits an emancipatory socio-political public

116 domain of action, with utopian contours, led by women, holding out the promise of resisting colonial and patriarchal dystopia. In an interesting study of the South African novel When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) by Bessie Head, Modhumita Roy points out how this novel stands as a good example of what might be called ‘a realist utopia’ among the apartheid novels of the 1960s and 70s which are all filled with realism of dystopia. The novel opens with the protagonist’s exit from a nightmarish world of barbed wires, violence, and destruction to a settlement of people who have all gathered to make a ‘new’ world, which is of course not heaven on earth, nor has it been brought into being through revolutionary change.

The third section consists of a long essay by Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp entitled “Globalization, Development, and Resistance of Utopian Dreams to the Praxis of Dystopian Utopia” in which the writer argues that critical work on modernism, and on totalitarian domination in the twentieth century and its long genesis (colonialism, imperialism, and ‘total’ war’) have battered the optimistic doctrines of progress present in theories of development and has made us question the ‘natural’ link between war and revolution. After a lot of questioning, the writer finds a somewhat new place between utopia and dystopia.

What is significant about this volume is that it makes the readers realize that utopia/dystopia studies cannot be and is not restricted to any period of time and place. Such narratives are written globally, across historical periods and that this mode is ‘inherently paradoxical, contradictory and oscillatory. ‘ Thus we get writings from colonial India, white colonial New Zealand, seventeenth century England and twenty-first century indigenous Canada all exploring different moods in utopian/dystopian themes under one cover and it only reiterates the notion that narratives in this genre will also be written in days to come.

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Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture Rosinka Chaudhuri Orient Blackswan, 2013. 212 pages ------Before one starts reading the book under review, the first question that arises in our mind is why we should read another book on nineteenth-century Bengal when this area has already been well-researched and well-documented. The stereotypical pictures of that particular period that come into the mind of the lay reader obviously range from the Western-educated Indians of the movement, the steps taken by Rammohun Roy and others to remove social evils such as sati, child marriage and caste, the impact of English education and the social and cultural scenarios depicted in such texts as Pearychand Mittra’s scathing account of decadent babus in his novel Alaler Ghare Dulal or Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyachar Naksha. By the time we read the introduction of this book we are aware that much work in the field of literary and cultural history, especially in relation to the decisively formative period of the nineteenth century is an area that begs serious studies. As Partha Chatterjee also endorses, this book “takes up seriously, perhaps for the first time, the literary productions of the racially mixed Indo-European civil society of Calcutta of the time. By turning to under-researched figures such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Henry Derozio, Ishwar Gupta and Madhusudan Dutta, Chaudhuri has shed new light on the origins of literary modernity in India.”

Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture explores path-breaking debates to do with the literary, with identity, and with cultural authenticity in nineteenth- century Calcutta--- debates arising from the flux of creative and critical work in

118 that period. The seven essays collected in this book range across a diverse field of interests. We are aware how Tom Paine’s book The Rights of Man, brought to Calcutta on an American ship became such a bestseller among the college- educated inhabitants of Calcutta that it was eventually sold at about five times its original price. We also know about the scandal that erupted in Calcutta on 23rd August 1831 when a group of Derozio’s students gathered at the home of their friend Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay the previous night and in his absence indulged in forbidden food in the form of ruti-mangsho brought from the Muslim bazaar. The scattering of the bones in the neighbouring houses and the expulsion of Bandyopadhyay from his Kulin Brahmin family forever and ultimate conversion to is also well-known. But few of us are aware of how a humorous poem written by Henry Meredith Parker (1796–1868) about the newly educated youth of Calcutta is used to frame debates for and against meat-eating as the issue played itself out against the backdrop of a developing Indian nationalism. In fact the title of the book is borrowed from his poem “Young India: A Bengal Eclogue” that is itself situated in the confluence of margin and centre by virtue of having been written by an Englishman in colonial Calcutta about young Bengalis, to examine that context of reform and revision initiated in Bengal from 1827 to the 1830s by a section of Indians. The ‘freedom’ mentioned in his poem of course implies not freedom from British rule, but freedom from the backwardness of Indian society. What is interesting is the fact that Parker belongs to the middle ground between the West’s Orientalism and the world of the colonized, for although he is observant and sensitive to the situation of the colonized, he cannot share their predicament. The author also differentiates between Parker’s and Kipling’s attitudes on race, reform and colonization.

In the second chapter we are told about the construction of colonial/communal stereotypes in the poems of Henry Derozio. Derozio announced himself categorically as an ‘East Indian’ and declared that he was ‘proud to be called a native of this country.’ His work, nothwithstanding his marginality in the context of contemporary Indian society, led to a forceful centrifugal dissemination of the idea of the Indian nation as ‘my native land’ radiating from him in the early nineteenth century. A closer look at the political poetry written by a radical iconoclast such as Derozio reveals the communal stereotyping of the ‘Muslim’ as Other -- representations in keeping with British historiographical orthodoxies of the time. Yet, as Chaudhuri rightfully tells us, to call Derozio simply anti- Muslim would dishonour the legacy of the man and deny the peculiar character of the colonial situation. For a man who was renowned for his liberalism, his anti-establishment views and what would today be called ‘secularism’ in the Western sense of the word, he advocated the primacy of reason over religion in

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Indian life. The next chapter called ‘The Politics of Naming’, while staying with the figure of Derozio, moves away from the ambiguities found in his poetry to deal with the early history of the politics of the mixed-race community in India. Scrutinising early letters written to the Calcutta Journal in 1819 about the Anglo- Indian community’s thoughts on naming and defining itself, and following the issue up to the founding of the first literary society in modern India, Rosinka Chaudhuri highlights the importance of the Anglo-Indian community to the cultural sphere of the colonial city of Calcutta.

In the fifth chapter Chaudhuri in a very interesting way draws our attention to the changing modes of everyday cultural experience in the city as experienced in the shifting representations of the drawing rooms of colonial and postcolonial Bengal. The spaces within homes during this period were redefined and rearranged to accommodate the arrival of modernity. Chaudhuri contends that in Bengal, the bourgeois drawing room came into its own at about the same time as the adda attained respectability by its association with literary and political groups in Calcutta in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus within the space of the home the drawing room metamorphosed from an exercise in colonial mimicry to an attempt at self-definition and national identity. Closely related to this was the emergence of women in this space as examples from Ghare-Baire, Noukadubi and the film Udayer Pathe illustrate. Apart from the influence that the Jorashanko Thakurbari had in bringing about this revolution, one is surprised to read about the modern drawing room of none other than Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in his house at Chandannagore with its Western style furniture and fittings.

Chapter six focuses on the recurrent problems in modernist readings of the poems of both Milton and Bengal’s greatest nineteenth-century poet, Madhusudan Datta. It explores the parallels between English critics on Milton and Bengali critics on Madhusudan to show how it might still be possible to retrieve these canonical authors for contemporary times. Finally, in the last but very significant chapter on certain subalternist historians’ (mis)readings of Tagore, the author investigates the place of the relation of history and literature in history-writing today. She shows us how Ranajit Guha, the founding father of Subaltern Studies, finds a ready-made manifesto for this programme in one of Tagore’s essays called Sahitye Aiitihasikata or Historicality in Literature (1941) where Tagore speaks up against the ‘pedantic historian’ and consequently he endorses the idiosyncratic approach of the creative writer to history as an aim for historians generally. Pointing out essays and lectures on Tagore by other members of this group like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee and others, we see how Tagore becomes a site in which both the

120 personal and the intellectual elements that inform these subalternists’ project come together in a problematic way.

In conclusion it is needless to add that this slim volume will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Situated in a modernity that was both radical and traditional in texture and forms of play, the texts examined by Rosinka Chaudhuri in these essays challenge received ideas of historicity through their own particularity. She points out how certain things which are taken for granted today as staples of our contemporary culture were in actuality nineteenth century inventions and they have to be looked at in some details.

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Gender and Cultural Identity in Colonial Orissa Sachidananda Mohanty Orient Longmans Private limited, 2008. 176 pages; Rs.245.00 ------Till the creation of a separate state in 1936, Orissa, like Assam and , had been part of the erstwhile Bengal province. According to several scholars, the state, though rich culturally and linguistically, could not get out of the hegemony of Bengali intellectualism and domination for a long time. This situation offers an interesting study in postcolonial times because on the one hand globalization promotes language monolingualism, and on the other hand, each individual state

121 is attempting to crystallize its own cultural and linguistic identity by combatting forces of internal colonization.

The present study attempts principally to unveil the cultural history of colonial Orissa from the British rule to the independence movement in the state that, according to the author, has suffered immensely in political, economic and intellectual terms. Drawing primarily from literary sources of the nineteenth century, the sixteen articles of the anthology are divided into two sections, namely, ‘Gender’ and ‘Culture’. Since gender plays an influential role in community building, the first ten articles talk about the role of women in shaping the Oriya identity during the colonial period. These range from women’s search for identity through education; analysis of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s ‘Rebati’ that serves as a prototype for female education in Orissa; Jagabandhu Singh’s Gruhalakshmi as an iconic text with a regressive agenda; the role of female agency through the icon of Shakti; the contributions of Kuntala Kumari, Sarala Devi, Sailabala Das, Bidyut Probha Devi and others whose use of idioms, style and diction were unique.

The second section opens with Fakir Mohan’s study of the dialectic of language and moves on to examine Radhanath Ray’s attempt at the construction of the Oriya cultural consciousness. An interesting article highlights the role of the missionaries in spreading both evangelism and secular education in the state. Mayadhar Mansingh’s Odiya translation of Othello and Sashibhusan Rath’s Journey to South in their own ways further highlight issues related to colonial Orissa. Basing his research exclusively on archival material the author believes that a recovery of the past offers a clue to understand Orissa’s present identity. No doubt he has been successful in this sort of a path-breaking study.

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Travel Writing in India Edited by Shobhana Bhattacharji New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008. 189 pp. Rs. 120.00 ------

Cultural exchange has always enriched India and a vehicle of this process of exchange has been the rich corpus of travel writings by Indians and foreigners about the home and the world. Perceived in at least two perspectives, travel within and outside the country for both pilgrimage and leisure, the journey is the rite of passage into more realms of experience and Indians have recorded them in different kinds of literary genres for a long time. Always wanting to tell others at home about what they saw on their travels, travel narratives have been intimately linked with the construction of identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public.

Although the travel book has always attracted a wide readership, it has only recently won significant attention from scholars. Because of its loose form and matter-of-fact style of documentation, this genre was not taken seriously for a long time till the western academia started recognizing it as a specific discipline and theorized it. As Mary Louise Pratt states, travel writing is a study in genre as well as a critique of ideology -- when the travelling ‘self’ reaches the ‘contact zone’ and interacts with the ‘other’, it undergoes a radical change. Coming to the book under review, the seminal question that bothers one is what constitutes “Travel writing in India”. Is it narratives about India written by Indians and foreigners or narratives written by Indians only about their sojourn within and outside the homeland? The multifarious nature of the sixteen articles that comprise this anthology do not give us the answer and explains the difficulty of

123 labelling this genre. In the introduction, the editor states that the book is “among attempts to redress the balance by locating, defining and trying to arrive at analytical tools for travel writing in India” and justifies its “lean upon reprints.” She also explains that the contributors have assumed that when they deal with travel writing in India, “the journeys may be to anywhere in the world but the writer must be Indian.”

In his overview K. Satchidanandan catalogues a whole list of Indian travel narratives written from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and reiterates that the nature of this genre “is too complex and too varied to be subjected to any neat classification.” He states that travelogues belong to an interdisciplinary realm where discourses like literature, history, politics, anthropology, geography, economics, ethnography and even linguistics cross one another thus turning it into a proper subject of cultural/inter-cultural studies. Tabish Khair points out that travel writing by Indians after the end of colonization has had more visibility than pre-colonial or colonial accounts by Indians. In writing about the Himalayas, Bill Aitken distinguishes between the Indian and the Western point of view – for the Indians the Himalayas is essentially mystical and inspirational for the growth of the soul whereas the Western regard focuses on the outer impressiveness of the range and how to exploit its height for sporting (and political) prestige and its products for commercial profit. Harish Kapadia’s narration about the Argans or Arghons, a nomadic tribe in Leh, and Tarun Kumar Bhattachrjee’s travel to Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh all add to the wanderlust that the mountains offer.

Since travel was primarily a male-centric enterprise, the two articles that focus on women’s travels offer interesting insights. In a detailed bibliographic essay Siobhan Lambert-Hurley writes about the foreign travel writing by Muslim women in South Asia in the modern period. Beginning with the mid-19th century narrative of the female ruler of Bhopal, Nawab Sikandar Begum’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca, her granddaughter’s narrative of her own hajj pilgrimage at the beginning of the 20th century, we are told about Maimoona Sultan’s trip to Europe, Begum Hasrat Mohani’s trip to Iraq, Sughra Humayon Mirza’s safarnama to Europe and many other short narratives, roznamchahs, that provide a window into the lives of a group of individuals often twice-silenced as women and as Muslims. The other article by P.K. Mohanty focuses on the travel writings of the Oriya writer Pratibha Ray. Though the author mentions that “Oriya literature is very poor in travel writing” and that Ray had written seven books in the genre, he does not give us the names of any of them and thus the reader is unable to overcome the poverty.

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Stephen Alter’s narration of “Attari, The Grand Trunk Road,” Travel Writing in Tamil by R. Balachandra ‘Bala’, Mihaz-Us-Siraj’s “Tabakat-i-Nasiri :An Account of Assam”, two articles on Gujarati travelogues by Rita Kothari and Tridip Suhrud, one on Amitav Ghosh’s travel writing by the editor herself, and Bikash Chakravarty’s account of ‘Romantic’ travelogues penned by Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyaya complete the fare. One is a little puzzled how Kerstin W. Shands’ article “Visiting Aliens: Travel in Swedish-Indian Contact Zones” -- where she talks about travels to India covered by Swedish media -- fits into the paradigm of travel writing “in” India set at the beginning of the anthology. Maybe the protean nature of the genre is responsible for the inclusion. This moderately priced book will be of interest to scholars of history, literature, culture studies, and also to the lay reader who simply wishes to delve into the multifarious depths of Indian travel writing. All the essays are not of equal length and a little better proofreading probably would have done away with several typos in the book.

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Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power Edited by Lata Singh Oxford University Press. Rs. 895.00

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& Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader Edited by Nandi Bhatia Oxford University Press, Rs. 895.00 ------The colonial period in India is very significant as there was an intimate link between theatre and colonial history from the late 19th century until independence. As the sub-title 'Play-House of Power' suggests, this anthology explores various aspects of colonial theatre in India in terms of its social, material and political backdrop, along with its linkages with modernity. Right from its inception in different regions of the country, theatre was an important site of representation of dominant political forces and counter hegemonic struggles in colonial India.

This book is divided into two sections. Comprising of six essays, the first section entitled "Theatre: A Contested Site of Modernity and Appropriation" deals with multifaceted perspectives on Indian theatre during colonial times. Among the two articles on Marathi theatre, Urmila Bhirdikar focuses on the composition, performance, and reception of music in the SangitNatakbetween1910 and 1920. Sharmila Rege draws our attention to issues of caste-based forms of cultural labour in Maharashtra such as the lavani and the powada, as grounds on which cultural and political struggles are worked out and argues that struggles over cultural meanings are inseparable from struggles for survival. Travelling south, we have two articles focusing on Tamil theatre. Susan Seizer considers the hybrid theatre form of Special Drama (a genre of popular Tamil theatre that began inthe late 19th century) as the first modem theatre of India because it is a malleable popular theatre genre of music drama which continues to morph into regionally attuned forms of hybrid theatre that are neither purely commercial nor ritual, neither urban nor rural; rather they are both. A.Mangai and V.Arasu's article attempts to trace the changes that occurred within the genre of popular theatre in Tamil Nadu and also the ways in which drama responded to social and political changes of the times.

Exemplifying the coexistence of tradition and modernity in Bengali theatre, Devajit Bandyopadhyay shows us how modem theatre in Bengal, shaped both by the tradition of classical Sanskrit plays and the style of contemporary European theatre, also borrowed songs from the jatra - the native folk theatre. Another article highlights an Indian adaptation of Shakespeare where Javed Mallick looks at Karimuddin Murad Barelvi'sUrdu play KhudadadurfDad-e-Dariya (1890) as an adaptation of Pericles, the Prince ofTyre by a Parsi theatre company.

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The second part of this anthology focuses on theatre's multifaceted relation to gender. Indian conventions of performance and representation have been patriarchal and a majority of them still deny a space to women as performers. Sudhanva Deshpande tells us how in representing the 'ideal' woman in Marathi theatre, a large section of women were ‘othered.’ Though some socially outcast women also performed on the stage, in several popular forms, men enacted female roles. This practice of female impersonation was shaped by the social practice of caste, gender and respectability. This issue is highlighted in several essays whether related to Manipuri theatre or the Kattaikkuttu performers in Tamil Nadu. Malini Bhattacharya emphasizes the significance of IPTA in creating a new theatre culture in Bengal in which woman had a larger space than before. It facilitated a radical change in women's perception of culture and their own role in it. Even English actresses, as Bishnupriya Dutt tells us, contributed to creating the colonial institutional culture space, highlighting personal and colonial agendas on the one hand and becoming the model of the orientalist, imperialist popular discourse on the other.

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Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader brings together critical essays, excerpts, and theoretical and political statements that reflect upon the changing visions for theatre since the late 19th century (1876 to be exact). Representing a wide spectrum of perspectives including those of playwrights-directors themselves, important voices in theatre criticism and history, practice and direction, the articles reveal the multifaceted, hybrid, and contested formations of modem Indian theatre. The perceptive introduction by Nandi Bhatia enables an informed understanding of theatre's ambivalent and paradoxical relationship to 'modernity', both in terms of form and content. Though it is not possible to cover the entire terrain of modern Indian theatre in a single text, and often the editor's choice of articles becomes subjective, the pieces in the current volume speak about the many entanglements of traditional and European, classical, folk and ritualistic, and rural and urban forms and practices. Collecting relevant articles from different published sources the essays and excerpts presented in this reader provide a sampling of varied yet interconnected responses to the debates in the field of modern theatre.

Divided into six broad sections, the writings in this anthology address questions relating to theatre's negotiation with issues of class, caste, and gender; the ways in which 'nation'came to be imagined at critical historical moments; the response of drama to theemergence and domination of mass media, and the proliferation

127 and influence of Western media in India; and the role of actors and the myriad meanings of scenery, performance spaces, architecture and language. In the first section, four scholars, Rakesh H. Solomon, Ananda Lal, Anuradha Kapur and Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker try to historically map the ‘modernity’of Indian theatre. Because of overlapping influences amongst various dramatic practices, they alter the ways of seeing theatre strictly along linguistic orregional lines or neat divisions of Sanskrit, traditional European, or folk theatre.

Section II comprises of four essays all focusing on the issue of nationalism. Jyotsna Singh writes about Shakespeare's plays adapted in colonial and postcolonial India beginning from 17 August 1848 when Baishnav Charan Adhya performed the role of Othello at the Sans Souci theatre in Calcutta and ending with anthologies recording performances in contemporary times. While Malini Bhattacharya gives us an overview of the IPTA movement from 1942-1947, Sudipto Chatterjee focuses on late 19th century Bengali Theatre and S. Theodore Baskaran defines nationalism as found in popular theatre in South India.

The interesting section of interrogating the nation from the margins focuses on race and religion issues in plays written by Parsi Zoroastrians in India, the politics of translating Dalit drama, the Devadasi and her dance tradition, and the role of women in the history of Marathi theatre. Vasudha Dalmia's perceptive article, “’I Am a Hindu’: Assertions and Queries” tries to capture the space created by the radical feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s that was partially to be occupied by the firebrand rhetoric of Right Wing Hindu women ideologues, who assimilated the emancipatory idiom under the old heads of ‘wife’ and ‘mother’, allowing for some agency which could, however, only move within the well- defined parameters of Hindutva.

The rural/urban and folk/classical binaries in post-independent India are addressed in a couple of interesting articles that leads to the next section on language, myth and media. We get to read about contemporary Panjabi drama, Indian Drama in English, Neo-Sanskritic and Naturalistic Hindi drama. J.C.Mathur's focus on the importance of contemporary mass media, including radio performances and television shows proves that the walls between Hindustani and Karnataka system and between margi and desi styles are no longer impregnable. For ages, 'drama' had been almost synonymous with 'theatre' but with the emergence of media like the films and television the connotation of 'drama' has changed and widened and now we have different manifestations of drama in all the three media. Questioning what is TV drama, Kirti Jain highlights some of these issues.

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The last section entitled ‘Statements’ seemed significant to this reviewer because it contains theoretical/critical views on Indian theatre from different perspectives and acts as a ready reference. Beginning from “A Bill to Empower the Government to Prohibit Certain Dramatic Performances” passed in Calcutta in 1876, we get to read Rabindranath Tagore's view of ‘The Stage’, the ‘Proscenium-arch Stage’ by Satya Prasad Barna, the idea of a ‘National Theatre’ by Bellary Raghava, the organizational principles of the IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) manifesto of 1943, the idea of a ‘National Theatre’ by (1945), Utpal Dutt's ‘In Search of Form’ and 's views on ‘Contemporary Indian Theatre and its Relevance.’ It alsobecomes clear that modern Indian theatre undercuts the rubric of a 'national' theatre thatrejects its multiple and contested formations.

That the editors of these two volumes come from two different academic disciplines, namely literature and history, but evince the same interest in Indian theatre speaks of theinterdisciplinary nature of the genre. Some contributors like Malini Bhattacharya and Nandi Bhatia are present in both the anthologies. Though it might have increased the costof production, it would be beneficial if the publisher gave us an opportunity to glancethrough a few pictures of actors/performances of this powerful visual form existing in somany different nuances. Both these anthologies will engage and inform students and teachers of Indian theatre and performance studies, theatre critics, social historians, as well as general readers.

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India and the World: Postcolonialism, Translation Studies, Indian Literature A Festschrift for Harish Trivedi. Edited by Ruth Vanita Delhi: Pencraft International, 2014. 284 pages; Rs 850/- ISBN 978-93-82178-02-6 ------In academia, a festschrift is a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory (piece of) writing. As the Wikipedia aptly defines it, a Festschrift contains original contributions by the honoured academic's close colleagues, often including his or her former doctoral students. It is typically published on the occasion of the honoree's retirement, sixtieth or sixty-fifth birthday, or other notable career anniversary. The essays usually relate in some way to, or reflect upon, the honoree's contributions to their scholarly field, but can include important original research by the authors.

The present volume under review suits the definition perfectly and is a collection of essays honouring Professor Harish Trivedi of the University of Delhi and is edited by Ruth Vanita, who as a reputed academic in her own right, also happened to be a research scholar and former colleague of Trivedi in Delhi several years ago. As is evident from the eighteen essays, Harish’s interventions have energized thinking in several inter-related fields, from comparative literature to translation studies, post-colonial studies to cultural studies, and even mainstream literary criticism. In the introduction Ruth Vanita states, “Prof. Trivedi’s success in adhering to the ideal of liberty is attested by the range of stellar figures with widely divergent views who agreed to contribute to this volume.”(3) and rightly so the contributors hail from more than a dozen countries (who live there by birth, residence and work) include eminent scholars, some of whom have shaped these fields, and also a couple of younger scholars too. They are Richard Allen, Susan Bassnett, David Dabydeen, David Damrosch, Anannya Dasgupta, Walter Goebel, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner, Tabish Khair, Zhang Longxi, Loredana Polezzi, Frances W. Pritchett, William Radice, Rupert Snell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephanos Stephanides, Gerhard Stilz, Ruth Vanita, and Robert JC Young.

Given the diversity of perspective and topic the essays are divided under four sub-groups namely, “Ways of Reading,” “Ways of Translating,” “The Text and the World” and “East in West, West in East” but could have been arranged in many other ways. The multifarious topics range from Meghaduta to Tagore, the ghazal to the Hanuman Chalisa, translating Bihari to debating the purpose of 130 literature. In the first essay “Reading Literature as a Critical Problem,” Zhang Longxi argues that the future of our discipline, reworked as global literature, lies in revitalizing the common purpose of reading and re-reading – and in leading our students towards the complex aesthetic pleasure of engaging with great works of literature. In a contrasting vein, in the next essay entitled “Teaching Literature Today” Gayatri Spivak exhorts us to ‘think social text’ and ‘train[ing] the imagination for epistemological performance for social justice’ in order to produce ‘fully prepared global citizens and leaders’. She suggests that our subcontinent is in some ways a simulacrum of globality in that each one of us is in an island of signs in an ocean of traces, other Indian languages that we do not know. She therefore suggests that we in India reinvent our linguistic diversity as an image of how literature supplements globality, and be aware that, given the system, it is not an easy thing.

Most of the other essays in this volume tend in one of these two directions, most often implicitly but also sometimes explicitly, as when Evelyne Hanquart-Turner (who writes on Shashi Tharoor’s novel Riot) acknowledges Spivak’s influence, or when referring to ‘West Indian Writers in Britain’, David Dabydeen writes about the critical reception of this writing in the 1950s and 1960s and finally brings the story up-to-date but avoids the ‘brutalist jargon of theory which is designed to confuse.’

A number of convergences are also seen when for example, Frances Pritchett writes about ‘Lovers, Beloveds and Charges of Sexism in the Urdu Ghazal’ and Anannya Dasgupta also ruminates about “Teaching the Ghazal in an American Classroom: Lessons in Creative Pedagogy”. Both the writers examine the unconventionalities of the ghazal in entirely different contexts. Again, Tabish Khair and Walter Goebel, pursuing distinct trajectories, both focus on the novel as a changing genre. In “Myths of Storytelling: Transcendence and Exoticism” Khair endorses Harish Trivedi’s own view that to narrate/read the ‘post-colonial’ is always to engage with that which is not just ‘colonial’; to narrate/read the ‘non- European’ is always to engage with that which is not just ‘European.’ Hence the process requires an effort to transcend one’s own space, particularly so on the part of the ‘Western’ or ‘Global’ readership of postcolonial literatures. However, this bid to transcend can very easily lapse into exoticism on the part of the writer, the reader, the critic or all three. Goebel in his paper aims to add complexity to Franco Moretti’s planetary image of the growing tree by focusing on generic dissention in two postcolonial novels, namely Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the interpretation of which, to some extent even the formation of which, appear to be inspired by the concept of acquisitive individualism.

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Rabindranath Tagore, whom Harish has called ‘arguably the greatest writer of modern India’, not only figures centrally in William Radice’s study (“Gitanjali 100 Years On: A Reconfirmation”)and in Gayatri Spivak’s demonstration of what she terms ‘regionalizing’, but he makes brief appearances elsewhere as well. Again, in another instance of similarity of themes, both Rupert Snell and Ruth Vanita examine the continuing life of poetry in Braj and Awadhi, two languages that may appear to have lost the race for success in today’s world. As an expert in his field, Snell writes about his experience of translating Bihari’s Satsai, a 17th century Braj Bhasha text which contain a collection of some 700 independent couplets on interrelated themes, including love, the world, and beyond and comes up with the realization that Bihari was a poet of the moment whose verses’ immediacy of feeling belies their antique patina. Vanita on the other hand chose to read the Hamuman Chalisa, which can be said to constitute Awadhi’s best claim to popular immortality, as a celebration of the intellect. She also does not forget to mention that whether coincidentally or not, Harish Trivedi also grew up speaking Awadhi at home.

Another connecting thread can be found in the area of translation studies which happens to be one of Harish’s favourite subjects as well. In a very personal essay entitled “In Praise of Rereading and Rewriting” Susan Bassnett feels honoured to write for “a friend for well over a quarter of a century”(44) and tells us how though coming from different cultures, with different histories and different life stories, she and Harish have forged a profound friendship based both on recognizing and respecting difference, and on a shared passion for literature. Speaking about the importance of rereading, she cites the example of reading Kim again (a volume edited and gifted by Trivedi):

The Kim that I have reread in 2012 is a far more complex novel than the Kim I have read in earlier lives, perhaps because as one grows older one sees the world in shades of more subtle colours, whereas in one’s youth the tonalities are sharp and strong and absolute. (55)

Before concluding Bassnett also does not forget to mention how she and Harish Trivedi have shared a passionate belief in the importance of translation as a literary activity, as a shaping force in world literatures across the ages. In “Translating Transgression: Audiences and Endings in Books and Movies” Richard Allen discusses a series of films by comparing them to the pre-existing fictions on which they are based and try to see the way the different mediums, like different languages, work within different socially formed conventions to create meaning.

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In the article “Return to Memphis” Robert Young chose to write in the vein of a memoir whereas others elected non-academic genres like sketches and poetry. The sample of ten sketches by Gerhard Stiltz of different tourist locations in India, dedicated as they are to Harish Trivedi, is used as chapter divisions in this volume and though some of them might be interpreted as clear instances of a late colonial gaze, Stiltz himself wants to assure his readers that they were guided by a life-long sympathy and respect for India’s civilizations. Again, Stiltz’s self- consciously German outsider’s gaze provides a counterpoint to Loredana Polezzi’s account of two Italian authors’ interactions with India. In that article the scholar maps Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s travel to India in 1961 and show that in one way or another, their travel accounts were also influenced by a broader European tradition which ranges from Kipling to Loti and Hesse and testifies to the enduring role played by the subcontinent in the Western imagination. One must mention here that Young’s and David Dabydeen’s essays also bring into the dialogue other once-colonized lands, places that have old associations with India, whether by accidents of history or connections deliberately forged. This volume demonstrates the transnational scale of literary conversations about India and also the continuing vigour of several methodologies, from postcolonial neo-Marxism to Asian theories of poetics and rhetoric to close reading and historicism. The biographical note on Harish Trivedi and the list of publications at the end of the book is an added attraction and shows how he is adept in both academic settings and in non-academic forums, such as newspapers and magazines both in Hindi and English. A little more careful copy-editing would have helped in evading the few typos that are found in the volume. But all said and done, whether one knows Harish Trivedi personally or not, the volume will interest all scholars of postcolonial and Indian literature.

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III: FICTION

The Gurkha’s Daughter Prajwal Parajuly London: Quercus, 2013, 296 pages ------It is no new knowledge that in the last two decades fiction from the South Asian Diaspora has managed to hog the limelight in the western world and has helped several of these writers also bag a few prestigious awards. The term South Asian Diaspora approximates the region of the SAARC countries – Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, , Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The region shares cultures, religions, economic ties, histories of migrations, political ideologies a well as a past history of colonialism. It also shares traditions and traditional discriminations of race, caste and gender. Against this background, it is but natural that their present/s have evolved out of similar pasts but taken different directions.

One of the complaints against writers of the South Asian Diaspora is that its Indian members have been playing big brother and have almost monopolized this literary arena for quite sometime. Though several new diasporic voices have now been coming out of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the other countries are still completely marginalized. In this context the present book under review holds greater significance because apart from the writings of Manjushree Thapa (A Nepali residing in Canada), we are not much familiar with any work of the Nepalese diaspora. In his debut collection of short stories entitled The Gurkha’s DaughterPrajwalParajuly gives us eight stories that describe and dramatize the experiences of both the Nepalese people and the Nepalese diaspora –the people

134 whose culture and language is Nepali but who are dispersed in India, Bhutan and beyond. The son of an Indian father and a Nepalese mother, Parajuly divides his time between New York and Oxford, and as he describes himself in the book, he is one who often “disappears to Gangtok, his hometown in the Indian Himalayas, at every opportunity.” It is quite a few yearsafter Kiran Desai penned her The Inheritance of Loss setting it in the 1980s and telling us about a troubled Gorkhaland agitation brewing in the hills of North Bengal, that we are able to read stories from this region once again. Here we have Gurkhas who are sometimes unsure of their identity in a post-independent India because they no longer have to pay allegiance to their British masters. But Parajuly’s book has definitely provided an in-depth study and given voice to the much neglected and lesser-known Nepalese speaking people, be they from Gangtok, and Kalimpong in India or from distant Manhattan in .

The mixed parentage and transnational nature of his own living gave Parajuly the right exposure to pen his stories and each of them brings to life the dilemmas and constrictions of daily Nepalese life. Reminiscent of the journey that the pilgrims undertook in Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the first story “The Cleft” narrates the plightof a lady called Sarita, her foreign paying guest called Erin, and her young maid servant called Kaali, who are all undertaking an arduous journey from Kathmandu to Birtamodby road in order to attend the funeral ceremony of Sarita’s father. The title of the story refers as much to caste division as to the young servant girl Kaali’s deformity of a cleft lip. Though despised by the master’s family, she still lives in an imaginary world of her own. In a stream of consciousness style of narration we are told how she plans to flee Nepal after being lured by a wily agentwith false promises of freedom from bondage and with the prospect of becoming a big star in the glamour world of Bombay. Set in Kalimpong, “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie” speaks about class and caste differences within the Nepalese society and narrates the poignant story of a struggling shopkeeper who has to tolerate the kleptomania of a young girl who happens to be the daughter of a reputed doctor in the vicinity. Unable to sort out the problem the shopkeeper faces an impossible dilemma and in the end has to bring his own burka-clad wife to help him man the shop counter as she would at least be able to see through the burka without herself being seen by anybody.

The problem of caste and class is so predominant in our South Asian societies that often a genuine love affair is broken at the insistence of the parents who force their children to agree to arranged marriages according to caste and class, though very often those marriages result in disaster. Set in Gangtok, “A Father’s Journey” narrates such a sad story where a suffering girl justifies her broken marriage by consoling her family members that at least her husband is a Brahmin.

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When she was a child she had posed a naïve question about the inequalities of the caste system; yet she embraces its strictures when as an adult, she chooses a Brahmin as her husband in a misdirected effort to please her father. The story “Mixed Blessing”, which according to Parajuly is closest to his heart, brings out the problems of poverty that ails many middle-class homes and also touches upon the complicated relationship between Hindus and Christians. It tells us about a Hindu religious festival in Darjeeling that brings with it a sacrifice when a young man in Darjeeling prepares for his wealthy relatives’ arrival while figuring out his missionary friends. Again, the problem of exile and migration of Nepalese origin people being sent away from the neighbouring Bhutan and presently residing in camps is highlighted in a wonderful story “No Land is Her Land.” HereParajuly paints a wonderful picture in the way the dysfunctional clan of Bhutan refugees cherish an American dream as chimeric as the image of the ‘perfect family’ that they somehow convey to their green card interviewer.The title story “The Gurkha’s Daughter” tells us about the secret bonding between two young nine-year old girls whose fathers were close friends in the Gurkha regiment. They don fake moustaches to play-act their fathers talking about booze and Brits. The problem of identity formation becomes quite significant in this tale.

In “Passing Fancy” a retired woman contemplates an affair. Interestingly, the protagonist’s marital conversations are given in direct speech whereas the dialogue with a neighbour is presented indirectly. We guess that the creative writing courses that Parajuly attended helped him greatly to hone his skills in this sort of narrating experimentation. Perhaps the most moving story in the book is the eighth one called “The Immigrants” which is quite autobiographical in tone and is set in Manhattan in New York. It poignantly narrates the plight of two arriviste Nepalis from two different classes who ultimately overcome their mutual native prejudices in a strange land. A relationship that was totally unimaginable in the homeland thus becomes possible in the socio-cultural ambience of the diaspora.

After being shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2013, Parajuly’s book has already been translated into many different languages and along with his reading sessions in many different cities around the United States, it has made him confident to keep on writing about his homeland and people from that region. His first novel Land Where I Flee (2014) also is an interesting read (an exclusive extract of which is appended at the end of this volume) and those who have not yet managed to read The Gurkha’s Daughter should grab a copy at the earliestto see how from every perspective and on every page, PrajwalParajuly blends rich

136 colours and the vernacular tongue to paint an eye-opening picture of a unique world and its people.

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A Chughtai Quartet [Translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi] Women Unlimited, 2014; 331 pages; Rs. 400.00 ------

Her reputation as the enfant terrible of Urdu literature never abandoned her. Ismat Chughtai (1915 – 1991) was known for her indomitable spirit and a fierce feminist ideology. Considered the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Chugtai was one of the Muslim writers who stayed on India after the subcontinent was partitioned. As one of the four pillars of modern Urdu short story (the other three being Sa’dat Hasan Manto, Krishnan Chander, and Rajinder Singh Bedi) her role remains that of an innovator and revolutionary in the area of fiction. Also along with Rashid Jahan, Wajeda Tabassum and Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat's work stands for the birth of a revolutionary feminist politics and aesthetics in twentieth century Urdu literature. Inseparable from her milieu and thoroughly seeped in her culture and its particular linguistic expressions, her writing stands apart as a class of its own.

The present volume under review contains four novellas spanning Chughtai’s literary career from its early stages to the last years of her writing life -- Dil ki Duniya (The Heart Breaks Free) written in 1918; Ziddi (The Wild One) in 1939; Saudai (Obsession) in 1966, and Jungli Kabutar (Wild Pigeons) in 1971. These works offer valuable insights into the ways Chughtai develops her characteristic themes revolving around the lives of women and how she steps out of an insular domestic space into a more expansive universe comprising the home and the world. In all the four stories we find women protagonists who despair in love, face tragedy when they try to cross social boundaries, seek and find agency in the

137 exercise of an obdurate will that cannot be bent, and therefore cannot be defined as tragic figures.

In The Heart Breaks Free, Chughtai draws on her own childhood memories of life in Bahraich where society is made up of the women in the narrator’s household, aunts, mothers, mother-in-laws, housekeepers. She has repeatedly brought to our attention the cruel treatment that women dole out to each other and how all of them get together to ruin the life of Bua, a free spirit who “had created a free world of her own where she ruled.”

The Wild One seems to be a traditional love story complete with a love triangle, but on closer examination we see that the plot has been complicated by Chughtai’s critique of class differences. Set against the backdrop of a feudal family, her critique is located in the relationship between master and servant, when Puran falls in love with a beautiful servant girl Asha. After a lot of hounding out by societal demands, Asha, the stubborn one, succeeds to be with her beloved.

Chughtai’s connection with the film world in Bombay is well-known. In collaboration with her husband Shahid Latif she wrote twelve film scripts and made five films independently. As a matter of fact, the films bear an important relationship to her writing. In 1951 Shadid and Ismat made a film called Buzdil (The Coward) and in 1966, in a reverse process, Chughtai turned her screenplay into a novella and called it Saudai. Here too, she continues with the trope of master-and-servant romance. The female protagonist Chandni is again depicted as a woman who defies convention, and despite her lowly position in society, commands everybody’s attention.

In Jungli Kabutar, the last novella in this collection, Chughtai probes into the theme of infidelity. As usual, she treats the theme in a unique way where she portrays the feelings and emotions that wrack both the person who betrays and the one who is betrayed. Once again, ignoring all conventions, Chughtai creates a female character who has a thinking mind and who is unwilling to bend herself to the demands of society.

Because of her preoccupation with women’s lives, Chughtai has been labelled as ‘a woman writer’. She explored feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility and other evolving conflicts in modern India by being influenced by Western fiction writers of the late nineteenth century. She treated these themes with frankness and sensitivity, without being judgmental. Though she is sometimes criticized for writing about a limited world she was most familiar with, she is always best in

138 portraying different facets of issues pertaining to women. Her outspoken and controversial style of writing made her the passionate voice for the unheard, and she has become an inspiration for the younger generation of writers, readers and intellectuals. She developed the markings of a feminist in the early 1940s when the concept of feminism was in its nascent stage, even in the West; she spoke her mind unreservedly, was afraid of no one; in fact she was a rebel. We are aware of the controversy and court case that ensued with the publication of Lihaf in 1942.

A thank-you note to the translator also needs to be added in the end. Tahria Naqvi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, has been writing excellent short stories on the acculturation of new arrivals from the Indian subcontinent to the New World, but her major contribution for the non-Urdu knowing populace of the world has been translating the works of Sa’dat Hasan Manto, Munshi Premchand, Khadija Mastoor and now Ismat Chughtai into English. As Naqvi mentions in the prefatory note, “Chughtai is never a comfortable read. She jolts the reader out of any sense of complacency, creates havoc and practically bullies the reader into digging deep into its many meanings concealed in her powerful idiom, her tapestry of images and her rich symbols and metaphors. But she never disappoints.” Though scholars speak about the loss of the original in translation, Naqvi’s lucid style makes the reading seem like an original English work. A collector’s item, no doubt.

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We Are Not in Pakistan Shauna Singh Baldwin Rupa & Co, 2009; Rs. 295.00; 266 pages ------“I love the hybrid world” – Shauna Singh Baldwin She is two novels and two short-story collections old. Her first novel What the Body Remembers narrated the story of two Sikh women in a polygamous marriage in colonial India. Her second novel, The Tiger Claw moved to a totally different terrain and narrated the story of espionage during the World War and Noor Inayat Khan’s search for her beloved through Occupied . English Lessons and Other Stories was followed by the co-edited A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America which looked at beauty pageants for older women in the US. And now we get this anthology of ten stories called We Are Not in Pakistan that are each different in their themes and content but go back to basic questions like what is ‘home’, what is ‘citizenship’, what love, compassion and human bonding are like in a multicultural multi-racial world today.

Unlike many other diasporic writers from the Indian subcontinent, Shauna is different -- someone whom we can label as a transnational writer in the truest sense of the term. Like several other Sikh families, her parents had migrated to Canada in the 1960s. Though born in Montreal, she was raised in New Delhi till she completed her secondary school. Later, she went and settled in the United States at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, married to an Irish American. This return to the roots during her growing years has resulted in a sense of intimacy as well as an objective distance in her writings as well. In several interviews she speaks about her hybridity – she thinks in English, Punjabi, Urdu and French, depending on what is the most applicable word.

The stories in We are Not in Pakistan surprise us by not conforming to the traditional immigrant ones focusing on assimilation, acculturation, nostalgia for homeland etc. Shauna’s ability to think in multiple languages has enabled her to create interesting stories each radically different from the other – both in form and content. We have characters that hail from Ukraine, Central America, Pakistan, Los Angeles, Mexico, Costa Rica. They are old, young, rich, poor, and of different social strata and religious beliefs. At the same time they share commonality in their human values – in their desires, aspirations, their flaws and fears and acceptance of life.

The opening story “Only a Button” takes on the after effects of the Chernobyl disaster from the point of view of an Ukranian woman Olena, whose husband works at the nuclear plant during the explosion. Olena’s husband and child

140 evince the signs of radiation poisoning, signs that aggravate once the family, including the mother-in-law, move to the United States. But along with the radiation poisoning, an old hurt between Olena and her mother-in-law festers and poisons their relationship. Her daughter Galina is unable to understand this hitch and Olena promises her that at least for her wedding day, she will become friends with her old mother-in law.

In the next story “Naina” Shauna uses magic realism to depict the fear for of a woman pregnant with a daughter who refuses to be born for fourteen years. An Indian who got pregnant ‘dating a gora’ she is reluctant to bring the child to the world of multicultural Toronto till such time she is mentally prepared to feel that ‘the hybrid little being’ would feel comfortable there.

The setting of “Rendezvous” is a café owned by a Greek immigrant where the protagonist, an illegal Mexican immigrant in the United States has the fear of deportation constantly lurking being his mind. Narrating the plight of other Chicano immigrants like himself, he is keen to develop ‘friendship’ than to earn money. “Fletcher” is told in part from the point of view of a dog, a Lhasa Apso, as well as from the perspectives of others in a series of monologues. It explores the desire for love and connection between lovers regardless of their sexual orientation, between a dog and its owner, between relatives, and the risk of loss inherent in the act of seeking that connection. Finding himself between Colette, his mistress and her commitment-phobic boyfriend Tim, the dog even questions the idea of ‘Loyalty’ and believes that it is for him that they do make it to the altar in the end.

The attempt of a young woman Tania who tries to transform herself from an exotic dancer into the rich but bored wife her doctor husband wants her to be, becomes the subject of “Night of the Leonids”. In “The Raghead” Shauna ironically portrays the character of a senior citizen Larry who cannot think of Dr. Bakhtiar, a Pakistani immigrant doctor in the adjoining medical clinic where he goes for treatment as none other than a “terrorist.” Yet it is this ‘raghead’ of a doctor on whose experience and compassion he has to trust in the end when he is wheeled off the ambulance.

The title story “We Are Not in Pakistan” focuses on inter-generational and inter- racial differences. Sixteen year old Kathleen hates her Pakistani grandmother Miriam for her Old World ways. Though she is a Christian, she is full of un- American beliefs and customs. Being over-protective, she forcibly accompanies her granddaughter to school every day and goes on and on about Pakistan, about the advantages of women in burqa. Kathleen even hated grandma’s warning, “Be

141 careful what you wish for it may come true.” The story gets a surprising turn when the grandmother goes missing and when Kathleen starts valuing her grandmother’s ways and makes friend with a hijab-wearing Muslim girl from Iran at her school, telling her, “Everyone’s connected to everyone. We just need to figure out how.”

The racist attack on the Sikhs living in America after the 9/11 incident is portrayed poignantly in the last story of the collection, “The Distance Between Us”. Here Shauna brings together a Sikh man named Karanbir Singh, a college professor in Santa Barbara, California, and Uma -- a daughter he didn’t know he had till such time he receives an email from her stating that she is the child of a marriage of convenience -- a two year long union to a western woman for green card purposes back in the 1980s. Uma had promised her mother to look up her father after her death and the interaction between the father and the daughter vacillates between faith, trust, suspicion and bonding. Karan ruminates, “What’s a father supposed to be, anyway? Teacher, coach, older brother, friend and boyfriend all at once? And if she wasn’t the kind of daughter he wanted, then…?” The bonding strengthens after racial violence erupts and neighborhood boys burn their house and they find themselves alone in the world.

Summarizing her stories is actually doing great injustice to Shauna Singh Baldwin as a lot of subtle nuances she employs in them are lost in the process. One has to actually read them carefully to appreciate her mastery of narrative style and form. Considering the vast range of her subject matter it is very difficult to label her as a particular kind of writer. Actually it is her very eclectic approach that makes this story collection a must read for serious scholars and casual readers alike.

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Something to Tell You Hanif Kureishi London: Faber and Faber, 2008. ------A hallmark of Hanif Kureishi’s work is the way he both exploits and resists his ethnic identity. As a British writer of Pakistani origin and mixed parentage, his early complicity with this role is ironic in that much of his later work questions some of the problematic implications of traditional conceptions of cultural translation, in particular the implicit assumption that the two cultures undergoing translation are discrete entities sealed off from one another, where the translator bridges separate cultures. Kureishi undoes this assumption, underlining the extent to which the histories of the subcontinent and Britain are ineluctably intertwined and continue to be so despite the separation of decolonization. He avers that notions of Asian and British cannot be defined separately. His protagonists live the potentials and experience the pitfalls of mixing and metissage, emphasizing the precarious, ambivalent nature of all cultural translations. His work parodies the idea of homogeneous, distinct, racially defined communities.

The book under review is Kureishi’s sixth novel and Something to Tell You is once again a part-autobiographical account of the writer negotiating his own growing up in London – the London of the colourful 1970s and ‘80s – something that the reader is already acquainted with in The Buddha of Suburbia and to some extent in My Beautiful Laundrette. Against the discouraging political backdrop of this period, Kureishi’s books and films upheld hedonism as a form of personal liberation. Extreme individualism of the Thacherite sort, they seemed to say, could be fun when practiced in the realm of sex and pop culture. At the same time Kureishi was superbly aware that the temptations of the modern world

143 provoke many contradictory impulses among people from traditional-minded communities. Jamal Khan, the protagonist of Something to Tell You, is a man like Kureishi himself, with a Pakistani father and an English mother who grows up in the suburbs, gets a philosophy degree and ends up as a psychoanalyst. Even as a successful psychoanalyst, he is haunted by his first love and a brutal act of violence from which he can never escape. Looking back, his coming of age in the 1970s forms a vivid backdrop to the drama that develops thirty years later, as he and his friends face an encroaching middle age with the traumas of their youth still unresolved.

Jamal is also at a stage of midlife limbo. He’s still involved with his 12-year old son Rafi (‘We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo bro-dog!”’) but on terms of armed truce at best with his estranged wife, Josephine. At the end of the novel he states that his son will soon be an adult and he wants to travel with him and his mother – if he can raise their interest – to the places he had loved. Jamal’s clientele includes a premier footballer and, at any rate prospectively, Kate Moss. Festooned with grand literary friends, such as upper middle-class theatrical director Henry, his gaze also extents to crazy bohemia, here represented by his sister Miriam, by whom Henry is unexpectedly besotted and who accompanies her paramour to sex clubs convened beneath the Vauxhall viaducts. Miriam is depicted as a bisexual, tattooed, pierced socialist with several children from different fathers, who lives in squalor with a taxi driver. Jamal in the meantime, develops his relationship with Ajita, the love of his life, for whose abusive father’s death he was indirectly responsible. Much of the novel deals with the repercussions of that act -- the past therefore “rode on my back like a devil, poking me, covering my eyes and ears for its sport.” Having no other means to forget the incident, Nietzsche is brought in to confirm that “The sexual passion is the heart of the will to live.”

Towards the middle of the book, Jamal Khan meets a gay Muslim peer, Lord Ali, at a party in Soho. Until this point, Jamal has been looking back at his hectic youth and describing the dramatic makeovers of the leftists and anti-racists of his countercultural generation. The bohemians who once hung round kitchens “packed with pulses and gluten-free pasta” and “Labour party branch meetings held in draughty halls on run-down estates” have now metamorphosed into members of the chattering classes. Still we are surprised when this Lord Omar Ali, a successful gay launderette-chain entrepreneur in middle age turns out to be the same Omar, the young, gay hero of My Beautiful Laundrette. He has used his success in business to heal his racial and sexual wounds, has invented himself as a media tycoon in the age of New Labour. “The Pakis,” Jamal writes, “had always been considered socially awkward, badly dressed, weirdly religious and

144 repressed.” Ali, though, has shown “how hip and fashionable minorities – or any outsider – could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy.” Challenged on his support for the war in Iraq, Ali says, “As a gay Muslim I believe that other Muslims must have the opportunity to enjoy the liberalism we do.” Through this statement Kureishi makes it clear that the multicultural metropolis of London, with its teeming immigrant population has changed in nature from the 1970s with its strikes, IRA bombs, food and petrol shortages, and the overwhelming sense of continuous crisis.

This change in the political and economic atmosphere of London is also revealed through the other characters of the novel. With unfailing deftness of touch Kureishi creates a memorable cast of recognizable individuals, all of whom wrestle with their own limits as human beings, haunted by the past until they find it within themselves to forgive. The novel runs historically till the 7/7 blasts of 2005 in central London. In the meantime we have brushed ourselves with Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Plath, Thatcher, Emerson, Bush and Mick Jagger. What redeems it in the end is Kureishi’s ironic distance from his narrator who after “sitting dreamily” in his psychoanalyst’s chair for a long time shakes himself and gets up to open the door to let in a new patient, empty his mind and give him a patient hearing. So what has he been thinking all this while? He is certain that he has not “finished with love, either in its benign or disorderly form” but at the same time he realizes that he is “no longer young.” Expressing his wanderlust to discover new cities and places he had loved he states: “I have reached the age of wondering how I will live, and what I will do with my remaining time and desire. I know at least that I need to work, that I want to read and think and write, and to eat and talk with friends and colleagues.” Most of Kureishi’s readers would probably express the same desire till another novel on cross cultural transnational London appears from the writer’s closet.

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Season of the Rainbirds Nadeem Aslam Faber & Faber, 2005; 3.25 Sterling pounds;195 pages ------Nadeem Aslam, a young writer of Pakistani origin now living in the UK, shot into fame last year when his highly-acclaimed Map For Lost Lovers was long-listed for the Booker Prize. Riding on the wave of his popularity, Faber and Faber seized the opportunity to publish this exquisite Betty Trask Award winning debut novel, originally published in 1993, with a grand endorsement on the cover by Salman Rushdie, claiming it to be “one of the most impressive first novels of recent years.”

Set in an anonymous small town in post-Partition Pakistan when most of the Hindus had emigrated to India and Muslims had come in the other direction to replace them, the writer creates an exotic and timeless world, but one whose traditional rituals of everyday life are played out against an ominous backdrop of faraway civil wars, assassinations, changing regimes and religious tensions. The protagonist seems perturbed by the question as to who actually runs the country now – is it the army, or the politician, or the industrialists, the landowners, or is it God? The preface in italics, narrated by an unnamed girl and quite Joycean in its style, forms the background and setting of the story and we are launched into the interiors of typically middle-class Pakistani households where characters voice liberal and orthodox views on Islam and on superstitious beliefs. She is told that men with black beards are to be avoided, while those with white beards are kind and gentle. The maulavi is worried that the mosques are being

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‘conquered’ by armed mobs of rival sects, the people are worried not because the deputy commissioner has kept a mistress, but because she is a Christian.

Beginning from one Wednesday and ending on the Saturday next, the ten chapters of the novel are named according to the days of the week and through them Aslam tries to bind the discordant stories of each family together not only through their interactions with the maulavi but also by instilling a sort of mystery when a sack of letters lost in a train crash nineteen years earlier mysteriously reappear and everyone waits anxiously to see what long-buried secrets will come to light. The list of the principal characters at the beginning of the book and a glossary of Urdu words at the end clearly indicates that the target readership is the west. Nevertheless is it delightful reading the novel where papihas are singing in the rain, and words like putar, janvar, shaitan adding the necessary exoticism.

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The Assassin’s Song M.G. Vassanji Penguin Viking, 2007; 375 pages

India is a nation of diaspora, and Indians are masters at adapting to new environments while remaining passionately attached to their own culture, no matter where they are. In an age of globalization, it seems perfectly natural that their books continue to be written from all corners of the earth. An ethnic Indian

147 born and raised in East Africa and at present living in Canada, Moyez G. Vassanji’s sixth novel, The Assassin’s Song is not so much about diasporic identity and its problems but a quest for roots that plagues all immigrant authors at certain point in their transnational and transcultural lives. The novel grapples with religious fundamentalism in India and suggests that dealing with sectarianism is among India’s most pressing needs. It begins in April 2002 in Shimla, where the aged protagonist is engaged in the library of Rashtrapati Niwas trying to find the origin of the medieval, controversial Muslim sect of the Assassins, who had occupied a number of fortresses in western Persia and had come to Gujarat after facing persecution there. These Assassins, also called the Ismailis, were a mystical Shia sect who disclaimed the outer forms of worship and the Muslim laws of Sharia for inner spiritual truths. The novel therefore jumps between the late 13th century and the past half century and ends in Pirbaag, Gujarat in August 2002 after the Godhra riots. In between it traverses the western world by taking the protagonist to Cambridge, Massachusetts and British Columbia and also captures important moments in Indian history – the war with China in 1962 etc.-- in wonderful details that links to the personal tale at the center of the novel. It examines the themes of extremism and sectarian violence – curses that continue to scar India in spite of its rich history of tolerance.

For someone who himself belongs to the Khoja Ismaili sect of Muslims from Gujarat, interest in one’s roots, padded up with imagination, results in the development of the protagonist, Karsan Dargawallah, the estranged elder son of the Saheb of Pirbaag, and of Nur Fazal, a mysterious 13th century Sufi saint who came and settled in Gujarat. Karsan is destined to be “chosen” -- the latest in a centuries-long familial line to inherit the Shrine of the Wanderer, an important place of Sufi worship in Pirbaag. Knowing for certain that he was the gaadi-varas, the successor and avatar to come at Pirbaag after his father, the young Karsan despises his forced ordination into priesthood. He falls out with his father and loses his faith, escaping to North America instead where he struggles to become ‘ordinary’, and tries to understand himself. He wants to see and judge things in their proper perspective, including his own backward, primitive tradition in which a mere man is treated like God and even believes himself to be an avatar of God. When he returns after thirty years, after the riots that ripped apart Gujarat in 2002, India is a different place altogether. Witnessing even the neutral Pirbaag razed to the ground, Karsan is forced to re-examine his beliefs, his family and himself. He ends up asking several important questions: “Truth as it was then; in some respects unfair and naïve – what is a secular Indian, after all? Is such an entity possible? Haven’t recent events in my home state disproved even the ideal of such a nation?”

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Like all diasporic fiction, the search for identity lies at the root of this novel too. But what disturbs Vassanji as well as the protagonist Karsan, is the loss of faith in the Sufi mystical faith promoting tolerance among different classes, castes and faiths of people and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. This is depicted through the character of his renegade brother Mansoor who even changes his name to Omar and joins a group of radicals who are wanted by the police for terrorist activities. His brother tells him how he grew up in a different India than the one he knew, and that he was proud to be a Muslim. Tutored by his father in the garden of his ancestors to believe that all differences are superficial; in fact, nonexistent, Karsan cannot believe that the world is now neatly divided into “we” and “them”. Thus in spite of the fact that the holy place of Pirbaag is destroyed by rioters from both Hindu and Muslim sects, Karsan in the end decides to resurrect the place and don the mantle of a Pir once again. He remembers the belief of his father that everything is connected and has a purpose, there are no accidents and so he has to retain the parampara that has been going on for centuries. He is also reminded how his Dada had no intention of throwing in his lot with anybody, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christian.

The painstaking research that Vassanji undertakes about his own roots, about his origins, sometimes grows a bit heavy on the casual reader. But like all his earlier novels which were prizewinners (The Giller Prize in Canada, the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize etc) Vassanji creates characters who like the mythical ‘trishanku’ are bound in a double vision of themselves. As in his earlier novels, Vasanji’s style is lucid too. The real surprise is that there are still people who moan that books about India written by expatriates and émigrés are less important or less genuinely Indian. But distance often allows writers to see their homes more clearly and objectively than those still living there.

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The In-Between World of Vikram Lall M G Vassanji Penguin Viking, 2003, 400 pages, Rs. 425/------

Examining the themes of identity, displacement and race relations is the staple stuff of most novels on the diasporic experience, but what makes Vassanji's Giller Prize winning novel interesting is the fact that in spite of the author claiming it to be a work of fiction,it is a thinly veiled autobiographical work. Here Vikram Lall tells us about his own evolution in a world of bribery and corruption that spans forty-seven years of history in Kenya.

Like the indentured labourers who went to Mauritius, the Caribbean islands, Fiji and other places to work in colonial sugar plantations, this story tells us about three generations of Hindu Punjabi migrants who went to East Africa to work as labourers to lay tracks for theBritish colonial East AfricanRailways. It also gives a vivid picture of the Shamshis (to which Vassanji himself belongs), the Kutchis and the Gujarati businessmen who flourished in this region butwere eventually uprooted and displaced at the end of the colonial rule, and especially after the Mau Mau uprisings and the presidency of the ‘Old Man,’ Jomo Kenyatta.

Growing up in Nakuru, Kenya in the 1950s nine-year old Vikram Lall and his sister Deepa who are the children of Indian merchants, become friends with two British children, and with Njoroge, a Kikuyu who lives with his grandfather, the gardener of the Lalls and several other families. While Vic is secretly in love with the British girl Annie, Njoroge is secretly in love with Deepa, both childhood 150 relationships ignoring the cultural and colour barriers of that era. It was a time when avoiding the pull of the ‘homeland,’ most Indians paid their allegiance to the British crown and longed to settle in England. This is also the time when the Mau Mau, a Kikuyu group dedicatedto rid their own country of the British rulers, started up underground terrorism and violence.

Alternating points of view between the present, when Vikram Lall is in his fifties and lives outside Toronto with the distinction of being numbered “one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning,” and the early 1950s, in which as a child he lived in a diverse Kenyan community, Vassanji gradually establishes the conditions which make life in Kenya for a non-African a difficult and sometimes dangerous activity. It shows us how in spite of their wealth, the Asians were always considered Shylocks, never to be trusted. Yet the protagonistis aware that they “all carry the past” inside them in some way and “can't help it.” Vividly describing Vic's ties with the Indian community, both inKenya and with the family “back home,” he shows how the Lalls are doubly alienated, first from their family in India, whose village near Peshawar, thanks to the British Partition of India, is now part of Pakistan, and from the majority population in Kenya.

When violence strikes closer home, Vic moves with his family to Nairobi and the disintegration of his family and personal life begins. Getting a job in the Ministry of Transport, Vic soon moves up the political ladder, working for ministries and powerful individuals, but is made the proverbial scapegoat when money-laundering charges are thrust upon him.Slowly Vic is depicted as a manwho has reached a point of noreturn when political whims decide his personal agenda. He is an Indian without a constituency, whom the rulers could hold up and display tothe World Bank and otherdonors as the “crafty alien corruptor” of their country.

Like VS Naipaul in most of his writings, there are bits and pieces of Vassanji’s own story in this novel. An Indian bydescent, a Kenyan by birth, anda Canadian by citizenship, like his fictional hero Vikram Lall, Vassanji is the proverbial outsider.Left dangling without seeing any way out of his predicament, Vikram's condition reminds us of Trishanku, the character from theRamayana who went ‘embodied’ to heaven but had to settleat an intermediate virtual thirdspace midway between the earth and paradise. This condition, earlier described by fellow Indian Canadian diasporic writer Uma Parameswaran, serves as a metaphor for themodern expatriate/ immigrant. In his obsession with going to heaven in his own body, Trishanku represents the consequences of narcissism; his story includes an encounter between the divine and the human, but above all

151 highlights the dichotomy between the body and the spirit. Even in Canada, the chosen hiding place for a self-exile, Vikram Lall still craves for his African and Indian roots, though he knowsquite well that he will belong to none and has to be satisfied with his “in-betweenness.”

Using Swahili, Kikuyu, Hindi, Punjabi, and Gujarati words throughout the text that are self-explanatory in their contexts, Vassanji makes it clear in the epilogue that the terms “Indian” and “Asian” are interchangeable in this book, beingterms in use in East Africa and meaning "South Asian." The lucid prose style of a person who has a doctoral degree in nuclear physics and who left his job at an atomic power station just to become a full-fledged writer, is evident in this very gripping narrative; and is highly recommended for both serious and casual readers.

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The Tyrant’s Novel Thomas Keneally Hodder & Stoughton, 2004 £ 7.99; 292 pp. ------

For a writer whose writing career spans forty years; who has more than two dozen novels to his credit; who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times and won it with Schindler’s Ark; who writes successful and diverse historical novels; writing is a craft that comes very easily to Thomas Keneally. Combining fictional talent with his engagement in world politics, his latest book, The Tyrant’s Novel, is an excellent piece of metafiction where through the protagonist’s writing we get to see him as a man caught between the demands of his government and

152 his impulse to run for his life. In a detention camp where he is neither granted asylum nor readied to be sent back to his native land, a detainee bides his time. He insists on being called Alan Sheriff, a westernization of his given name; he was born in a country that had once been a friend to the United States but is now its enemy. Little else is known about Sheriff until a writer comes to interview him. Sheriff decides that the time is right to tell his visitor his story and embarks on the unraveling of events that have led to his current state with extraordinary detail – the basis of which forms this novel within a novel.

“My story is the saddest and silliest you would ever hear,” says the Scheherazade- like writer who is already a celebrated novelist in his own country, getting huge advances from Random House and other American publishers for publishing his fiction on social realism. Set in a Middle Eastern republic clearly intended to represent Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the country is ruled by a brutal peasant the narrator calls Ian Stark, the self-appointed “Great Uncle of the People.” This mustachioed dictator has plundered the state coffers and put his numerous families in power. He likes to be photographed holding an AK-47, has dozens of palaces for himself, and dotes upon his psychotic, cocaine-addicted gun-toting son named Sonny, who has recently fought against an enemy-- known only as “the Others”-- a bitter border war in which he deployed chemical weapons. At the time when most of the book’s action takes place, Great Uncle’s realm is suffering under international sanctions that make it difficult for the country to sell its plentiful oil in the world market. At first glance, the narrative moves backwards and forwards and to forestall confusion over Muslim-sounding names, Keneally has chosen to give his Arabic characters Anglo-Saxon ones. Thus, Kennedys and Carters fill the scene and Mediationists and Intercessionists (Shias and Shiites) are arranged as would be their real life counterparts.

Alan Sheriff acknowledges that he is one of the privileged elites of the country, with friends in the media and the arts. His drunkenness insulates him from the reality of life in which the majority of the people exist. His excursions among the black markets and the oil barges are for research only and he seems to have little connection with what goes on around him. While this apparently successful Sheriff is still mourning the sudden death of his actress wife, he decides to while away his time by subtitling successful British and American movies. He is summoned by the brutal leader “Great Uncle” to ghostwrite a work of fiction, the very publication of which would overturn Western sanctions, and shame the Unites States in the impending G-7 summit. Desperate for international approval Great Uncle wants “his” novel to impress liberal New York literary circles. For Alan, the one-month deadline is impossible, he becomes “giddy with a new kind of despair,” but the government enforcers guard his house and stalk all his

153 moves. It is not long before Sheriff becomes the tyrant’s “caged canary” as he races against the deadline that threatens to cost him everything and everyone he holds dear. Unable to write “this soap opera in such a way that it had the plausibility of a real book,” he starts drinking, contemplates suicide. He is still mourning his wife’s death, a sudden victim of an undiagnosed aneurysm, and in his grief has interred with her his all-but-completed new novel; the manuscript and disks in the coffin and his laptop at the bottom of the river. The only way for Sheriff to write like Steinbeck or Achebe, Hemingway or Ben Okri, John Updike or Marquez becomes possible once he retrieves his earlier manuscript from his wife’s grave, makes light revisions, and swiftly completes the novel for Great Uncle. The dictator declares himself to be delighted and he is gratefully reprieved. However his self-disgust is such that he determines to flee his country. He stows away on board a ship and is detained in a refugee camp, having become a wretchedly disaffected asylum-seeker.

With its blend of documentary sources and invention, Keneally’s narrative, fortified by flashes of acerbic humour, exudes sympathy for the Arabic oppressed as well as a rage at the West’s apparent maltreatment of asylum- seekers. In his acknowledgement at the end of the book, he mentions that the concept of this novel arose as a result of reading “Tales of the Tyrant,” an article by Mark Bowden published in Atlantic Monthly, May 2002, which is a thoroughly researched portrait of Saddam Hussein. A gripping thriller and a neatly written postmodern novel, it reminds us of how fortunate we are for not having to endure the kind of tyranny depicted in the story. Some of the readers may also identify themselves with Alan Sheriff, the deadline-panicked, mentally blocked writer, despondent and sick to death of himself. Pick up the book and test it for yourself.

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The Broker John Grisham Century, London, 2005; 357 pages ------For an author who has churned out fifteen legal thrillers over the last decade, one book on the ball game, and one on what happens to a couple who wants to skip Christmas celebrations, venturing into new ground is not so easy a task. So in the author’s note to this new book, John Grisham has to justify to his readers that he is trying to write a political thriller, that too not set in his well-known terrain of the southern states of America, but in the dirty political environment of Washington D.C. and on European soil:

“It’s all fiction, folks. I know very little about spies, electronic surveillance, satellite phones, smartphones, bugs, wires, mikes, and the people who use them. If something in this novel approaches accuracy, it’s probably a mistake.”

I have been a Grisham fan right from his first novel, The Client, but I too must admit that of recent times he was growing a bit boring. So this new genre of writing a spy thriller is a welcome addition to his stable. Here Joel Backman, the protagonist, is a broke, disgraced, disbarred former lawyer-cum-lobbyist in Washington D.C. who is surprisingly granted a controversial last-minute pardon by the outgoing President during the final hours in the Oval Office. With fourteen years still left of his twenty-year sentence in a federal prison, no one knows that the president’s action is the result of an enormous pressure from the CIA. It seems Backman, in his power broker heyday, may have obtained secrets that compromised the world’s most sophisticated satellite surveillance system

155 and tried to sell that software to the highest bidder. In the meantime, the two Pakistani computer wizards who were trained to track the Indian espionage satellites but managed to discover the hidden spy satellites are brutally murdered and Joel manages to stash away the documents in the safe deposit vault of a Swiss bank before marching into the safe confines of the federal prison.

Soon after the pardon, the surprised Joel is secretly smuggled out of the country in a military cargo plane, given a new name, a new identity, and a new home in northern Italy. In his new incarnation as Marco Lazzeri in the Italian university town of Bologna with strong leftist leanings, he realizes that words, language, culture mean survival and movement for him. In order to blend into the background easily, he tries to master the Italian language as fast as possible. He also secretly contacts his son, a respected lawyer back in Virginia, for any assistance he can provide. Eventually, after he settles down into his new life, the CIA leaks his whereabouts to the Israelis, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Saudis. Then the CIA does what it does best – just sit back and watch. The question is not whether Backman will survive –there is no chance of that. The question the CIA needs answered is, who will kill him?

The novel contains some elements of Grisham’s legal thrillers – a flawed anti- hero, an unusual love story, a father-son reunion, betrayal, guns, chases, etc. but the central drama focuses on high-tech gadgets and state-of-the-art internet communication. But what it misses is his traditional courtroom scenes with its bigoted and besotted judges, the unpredictable jury, anti-hero lawyers with questionable ethics, and so on. Sometimes the plot weakens down to seem like a travelogue – you can get the sights, sounds and tastes of all the streets, lanes and cafes in the city of Bologna. The reader also receives a language tutorial and mini-tour of Italian churches as he follows Backman’s progress on linguistic and romantic fronts. The characters too are often stereotypes, lacking flesh and blood, often predictable. Grisham might have had Hollywood producers in his mind when he wrote this novel. Though some might have a lukewarm response, all Grisham fans might not be disappointed, since for the novelist, law has always been part politics, part pyrotechnics and part passion.

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The Idea of Perfection Kate Grenville Penguin Books India 2004, 401 pages. Rs. 395 ------

The story of this novel is set in the small drought-stricken country town of Karakarook in New South Wales, Australia, with a meagre population of 1374. The description of this laid-back place is reminiscent of the small towns that American western films have made so popular. With its depressed economy, bare general store and rusting iron roofs, the town “looks as if it had just slid down to the bottom of the valley, either side of the river, and stayed there.” But plans are afoot to rejuvenate Karakarook through tourism, by establishing a Pioneer Heritage Museum, and by saving an old wooden bridge called Bent Bridge. Floods have pushed this bridge into a question-mark shape: “it has chosen to bend rather than break” and some of the townspeople think it should be pulled down. Others think it will bring the much-needed tourist dollars to the town.

Into this town therefore arrive two people at cross-purposes –Douglas Cheeseman as the engineer who has been sent to demolish the bridge and replace it with a concrete one, and Harley Savage as an expert to advice the local heritage committee about the museum they plan to establish. Both of them are haunted by the idea of perfection – they are painfully aware of their own inadequacies, and this creates seemingly insuperable obstacles to developing relationships with other people. Douglas is a kind of divorced middle-aged man one never glances at twice, and Harley, who has gone through three husbands, is big, plain, and uncompromising. Douglas has been told, especially by his ex-wife, that he was

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“no good with people.” His idea of himself has been eaten away until now, in his fifties, “sometimes he felt the urge to apologize simply for existing.” He sees the strength in Harley as well as the weaknesses, and loves her for both. Carrying with her the accusing fact of her third husband’s horrific suicide, Harley feels, deeply, that she’s no good, that she is dangerous. The closer people want to get to her, the more she needs to push them away: “Being adored was something she had come to mistrust.” Over the years she developed an abrupt and abrasive manner. In the course of their month in Karakarook, both Douglas Harley undergo profound changes. They come to terms with their own inadequacies and faults, as Harley comes to see: “She was only the most ordinary of criminals, a human being.” Having forgiven themselves, they also forgive each other, and come together at last.

Juxtaposed with them is another subplot of two other characters. Standing in relief of the imperfection of the earlier pair is Felicity Porcelline, an aging, yet flawless beauty, a banker’s wife and ex-Pamolive model. For all her perfection, she is the most unhappy character, neurotic, slightly tragic, afraid to laugh or smile for the wrinkles her joy may bring on her face. In a funny and playful way Grenville describes Felicity flirting with the Chinese butcher, Freddy Chang and the more fiercely she tries to control the world around her, the more chaos erupts and threatens to destroy her. The affair with Chang is just one more in what seems to be a long line of what she euphemistically thinks of as “little awkwardnesses.” There is a third couple in the book. Henry Henderson and his wife Coralie, who though supporting opposite camps in the bridge versus museum debate, love each other in a way that goes beyond disagreement. Public conflict has nothing to do with their private reality.

The Idea of Perfection is therefore a book of opposites and paradoxes. “Only God can make something perfect,” observes the narrator, “so a quilt was supposed to have a little mistake in it.” Indeed, the novel is a quiet celebration of imperfection, a theme that is stated and restated, via setting, character and plot. The Bent Bridge is one such paradox. Though it is damaged, it is mentioned that “the damage was the very thing that made it strong.” Again, the heritage museum is full of workaday things that people have improvised out of poverty, and it is these things that have now become priceless objects of art.

Another kind of paradox is provided by the concrete that Douglas loves so much. As ordinary material, it is despised by everyone. But the way he sees it, concrete is the most miraculous of materials. It is a fluid medium that simply takes up the shape provided for it rather than imposing its own, and in the end, concrete becomes his ingenious plan for saving the Bent Bridge. The epilogue of

158 the book is a famous quote from Leonardo Da Vinci that states: “An arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength.” Leonardo was talking about bridges, but the novel takes the idea and plays with all its possibilities.

As well as the humans, fretting in their different ways about their lack of perfection, there is a dog that attaches itself to Harley as soon as she arrives in Karakarook. The dog is not at all troubled by the idea of perfection and though rejecting its attachment at the beginning, Harley comes to accept the gift of uncritical love that the dog offers.

Originally published in 1991, the book won the Orange Prize in 2001. Kate Grenville’s work proves that after being latched on as an appendage to British fiction for quite a long time, Australian fiction has ultimately found a voice of its own vis-à-vis its writer, its setting and its reception. Grenville’s prose is fluid and evocative, distinguished by precise, often haunting imagery. A pleasant reading for readers interested in discovering ways towards which commonwealth literature is heading.

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The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me Suzanne Kingsbury Vintage, 2003, 300 pgs. ------In America’s collective imagination, Mississippi, a state that aptly may be described as the most southern place in America, is often deemed a sinister, forbidden landscape. While popular conceptions of other states are evoked by rosy likenesses chosen by promoters of tourism, the mere word ‘Mississippi’ too

159 often conjures thoughts of brutality, repression, backwardness, and miscegenation, its antebellum past and Reconstruction The Magnolia state in all its great diversity of peoples and terrains – free and slave; rich, poor, and middling; coastal, hill country, Delta; black, white, and Native American has been the center of America’s regional literature. In short, Mississippi remains an ever controversial, ever puzzling, and ever fascinating locale for the average American. When Suzanne Kingsbury, a former Fulbright scholar moved from Vermont to Oxford, Mississippi in 1999 to research and write a debut novel on this state, the result was The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me. According to her press materials, she quit her job, broke her lease, and moved to the south to work the breakfast shift in a Mississippi diner and spend time smoking cigarettes on William Faulkner’s grave.

Apart from the homework that Kingsbury did for writing this novel, what really attracts the reader is her very nicely-paced writing style. Using two alternating points of view (the voice of Fletcher Greel and the voice of his love, Haley Ellyson) she tells only the things that the reader needs to know.

Despite Kingsbury’s novel dealing with small-town secrets, racial, sexual and family tensions, a Southern summer setting that may remind some readers of Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams and Harper Lee, capturing all the intensity and exhilaration of young love and rebellion, the ending of the novel is interesting and surprisingly new, as it does not deal with the typical “and they lived happily ever after” fantasy. For anyone who would love to read a fresh and vivid rendering of timeless themes, The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me captures the exhilaration of first love and the consequences of rebellion in a place that is till date quite resistant to change.

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Sultana’s Dream & Padmarag Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain Penguin, 2005; 197 pages, Rs. 200.00 ------

A person visits a place and finds hundreds of women walking around there but not a single man. On enquiring where the men were she is told that the men are all in “their proper places.” Since they are fit for nothing, they are caught and put in the zenana. The visitor is further illumined that it is not likely that the men would surrender their free and open life of their own accord and confine themselves within the four walls of the zenana! ‘They must have been overpowered.’ Sounds like a fantasy all right, but this image of Ladyland, free from sin and harm, is taken from “Sultana’s Dream,” a feminist utopian short story published in English way back in 1905 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. It further tells us how the men perform all the daily mundane chores while the women, headed by a queen, ably supported by two female principals of two universities, use their superior intellectual ability to govern the country wisely and well. Seeing their manufactories, laboratories and observatories, the visitor alights an airplane to leave the land and soon wakes up to reality finding herself still lounging in her bedroom easy chair.

“Padmarag,” the second narrative, was published in Bengali in 1924 and complements “Sultana’s Dream” in its espousal of women’s personal journeys towards emancipation. Resonant with autobiographical undertones, the novella is both a powerful indictment of male oppression and a celebration of Rokeya’s faith in a universal society where women, regardless of race, class, creed, religion,

161 reject the dictat of a tyrannical patriarchal society in favour of a life devoted to improving their lot. Rokeya narrates several horrid tales of women whose arranged marriages have all gone wrong and who all arrive at different times at a philanthropic institution called Tarini Bhavan, run by a woman from the Brahmo community. We hear the story of Helen, whose marriage was dissolved when her husband divorced her for another woman; Usha, whose “man,” a coward, left his family and escaped when robbers attacked their house; Sakina, who was sacrificed in the interest of her country’s laws and customs and to whom fate never gave a chance to enter her husband’s home; and Saudamini, who wanted to redress all injustices done to the abandoned, destitute, neglected, helpless, oppressed women through the Society for the Upliftment of Downtrodden Women at Tarini Bhavan.

Apart from these women who have all suffered untold misery through patriarchal oppression before finding a vocation at the institution, the writer keeps the reader in suspense about the mystery surrounding its heroine, Siddika, earlier known as Zainab, now nicknamed Padmarag. The process of Siddika’s evolution, from a solitary, secretive and melancholy young girl to a competent, self-assured woman ready to face the future, begins when she enters Tarini Bhavan. At the end of the story, the protagonist decides not to go back to her long lost-and- found husband, nor stay in the safe confines of Tarini Bhavan but venture out into the wide world, into ‘another life.’

Begum Rokeya, as she is most popularly known, needs no introduction in the scenario of women’s emancipation and education in Bengal. More than seventy years after her death, she has come to acquire near-iconic status in South Asia. However archaic the narrative pattern of the stories might seem today, both the works share one feature: they celebrate the importance of education as holding the key to the women’s empowerment and progress. In the earlier tale we are told that the key to the success of Ladyland is women’s education where there is the triumph of the virtuous, enquiring, scientific, enlightened and welfare- oriented spirit in women. In the second story, we are shown how communities of educated and competent women, working together, can provide the encouragement their less fortunate sisters need. At the end of the story, she has matured enough to take a bold and unconventional decision about her future life.

Barnita Bagchi, the translator of the second novella, who calls herself a feminist academic, has done a good job by adding a very useful introduction to the book. She tells us how both these feminist utopian narratives illustrate Rokeya’s brand of feminism, her creativity, the focus of her intellectual musings, the challenges

162 she dared to take up and the down-to-earth attitude she adopted while carrying out her welfare-and-development work. This slim volume, with an attractive cover illustration done by Pinaki De, is a must read not only for feminists but for anyone interested in understanding the socio-cultural emancipation of women in Bengal in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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Lifelines: New Writings from Bangladesh Edited by Farah Ghuznavi New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012. Rs. 325.00; 192 pages ------South Asian Writing in English has already established itself as a popular genre of writing in the postcolonial parlance and needless to say, writers from India have become the big brother who has been duly overshadowing the neighbours of the region. Nevertheless, new voices from our neighbouring nations are adding to this burgeoning area of fiction. The present anthology of fifteen stories is one such attempt to showcase young female voices from Bangladesh, all originally written in English. Women writers have long had an established place within the pantheon of writers from Bangladesh. The works of novelists and poets such as Sufia Kamal, Razia Khan Amin, Selina Hossain, Shaheen Akhter, Niaz Zaman and many others – as well as the pioneering work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain before them – outstanding as it is, remains only partially accessible to a wider audience. It has been suggested that the reason Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain chose to write her seminal work Sultana’s Dream in English (she later translated it into Bengali herself) was in order to make the thoughts

163 and ideas of Bengali women accessible to a larger readership. And as Selina Hossain noted at the Hay festival Dhaka in 2001, this remains a challenge for many of those writing in Bangla.

Recently only a handful of Bangladeshi writers like Monica Ali and Tahmina Anam have received significant attention worldwide but a lot of them are waiting at the wings to come into the centre of the stage. Socio-economic changes within Bangladesh and the widespread impact of globalization have helped them to shape the development of a newer generation of women writers from that country who choose to express themselves in English and their life experiences, as well as their understanding of their Bangladeshi identity, vary enormously. Since this is a generation that has seen travel and overseas education become a norm for many upwardly mobile families, even this Islamic nation has produced a present generation where attitudes to sex and drug use are very different from those that existed even a few decades ago. Living and working abroad for a few years is not so unusual as it once was and therefore it is not surprising that writers in this volume reflects a noticeable urban bias, whether their stories are set in Dhaka, or in cities around the globe, like New York, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, London or Vancouver. Of course, some have also chosen more traditional settings, including villages, mofussil towns and provincial university campuses.

In this anthology a number of contributors have chosen childhood as their setting, allowing for the use of a very particular viewpoint and a degree of clarity about situations that are sometimes harder for adults to acknowledge or capture. Sharbari Ahmed’s “Pepsi” tells the story of a child whose privileged status as the offspring of UN workers in Addis Ababa cannot compensate her for the loneliness of their peripatetic lifestyle; when the opportunity for companionship comes from an unexpected source she takes it without thought for the consequences. Shabnam Nadiya’s “Teacher Shortage” provides a chilling insight into how the adults in a provincial university campus community refuse to acknowledge the spousal abuse taking place behind closed doors, which is an open secret among the children who play together. Tisa Muhaddes’s story “Over and Over Again” examines another form of gender violence when the actions of a paedophile uncle have unimaginable consequences for everyone caught up in the situation.

Sexual awakening and the confusion it often brings in its wake are touched upon in several of these stories. In “Gandaria” Iffat Nawaz describes a young girl’s growing awareness of sexual undercurrents within her wider family. Rubaiyat Khan’s “Rida” demonstrates how protestations of love can intermingle with the violence of sexual obsession. Abeer Hoque’s “Wax Doll” portrays a young

164 woman trying to identify the decision that will bring her happiness, caught between the desires she does not understand fully, and the illusion of security being offered by an arranged marriage. Romance and desire are recurrent themes, whether from the point of view of an older man seeking his lost love in Munize Manzur’s “Bookends” or the young woman in Lori S. Khan’s “Mehendi Dreams” who tries to understand – at her young sister’s henna ceremony – why she herself should be considered so much less desirable. Some of these emotions also recur in more traditional stories such as Shazia Omar’s portrayal of the tensions between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law in “Table for Three” or Sadaf Saaz Siddiqui’s age-old tale of seduction, pregnancy and rejection in “Daydreams” though both of them offer interesting twists at the end.

As might be expected in a contemporary anthology from Bangladesh, migration in its many guises is a key theme. Studying abroad is one such experience, and in these stories, does not necessarily evoke a sense of displacement for the protagonist, though memories of the past are inevitably transported along with the traveller. In S. Bari’s “Touch Me Not” a young man travels to America, only to find himself catapulted back to a rural childhood by an unexpected encounter with someone from his past. Similarly, Sabrina Ahmad’s “Something Fishy” shows how a postgradualte student discovers, after receiving a fishy gift, that echoes of Bangladesh have followed her all the way to Canada. Migration also offers a form of escape for some. In Srabonti Narmeen Ali’s “Yellow Cab” the narrator realizes the limits of opportunity as he reflects on his failed aspirations and his fall from grace after the events of 9/11. In Farah Ghuznavi’s “Getting There” a successful female architect is forced to return to Chittagong – a place of bitter childhood memories – after a family accident forces her to face up to what she rejected years ago by moving to Dhaka.

The sheer diversity of the tales showcased here meant that a single overarching theme is not impossible to identify. The selection of the title Lifelines is significant because it reflects a number of key themes. Most of the characters in these pages are making journeys of their own – physical and/or psychological – to reach resolutions that are often unexpected, if not always unwelcome. In the process, they are learning to adapt to situations that are beyond what they have previously experienced – and transformed themselves in ways which they never anticipated. Displacement is by no means specific to those who have moved elsewhere – it lives within troubled souls who must chart their own paths to peace of a kind, developing maps for journeys even as they are travelling them. Thus, in a nutshell, what we get from this volume is a new global Bangladeshi identity that is reflected in such new writing. Kudos to Zubaan, the independent feminist publishing house, which under the stewardship of Urbashi Butalia has brought

165 out such an engrossing volume of stories by young, below-forty contemporary women for us.

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A Golden Age Tahmima Anam London: John Murray, 2007.10.99 pounds; 276 pages ------Long before the book officially saw the light of day in March 2007, with excellent pre-publication excerpts (courtesy western publication strategies) and reports hailing her as the suitable rival of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Adib Khan, Tahmima Anam made news by becoming a debut novelist from Bangladesh who has made London her home at present. What added to the eagerness was that being raised in Paris, New York City and Bangkok, this diasporic writer did not write a saga about immigrant life in Britain, as did Monica Ali, but instead wrote about the country of her birth, Bangladesh. While writing her doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the oral history of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement, Anam is said to have interviewed hundreds of people in Bangladesh about their experiences in the war and soon decided to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and write a novel simultaneously on the same theme. So A Golden Age is born. Set against the background of the Muktijuddho (the liberation struggle which most Bangladeshis refer to as simply “71”), the novel is about an age of idealism, heroism and romance, and a people’s struggle against

166 oppression. It is perhaps the first novel in English to deal with this theme and hence touch the right chord in many people’s lives.

A Golden Age is the story of a young Urdu-speaking widow, Rehana Haque and her struggle to bring up her two children, Sohail and Maya, against all odds. For this woman, born in the western ‘horn’ but living in 1971 in the Bengali East, the chasm dividing Pakistan has long been metaphorical as well as geographic. It was to the West (Karachi) that her two small children had been sent in 1959 after she lost a court appeal to keep them. This loss defines her life. When war comes in 1971, she discovers that, for all her inability to “replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one”, it is the East that is now ‘home’, and it is Bangladesh for which she will make the greatest sacrifices.

Set in Dhaka and to some extent in Calcutta, peopled entirely with a local set of characters, by closely spanning the war-torn months of 1971, with each chapter corresponding to a month or several months of that year in their lives, the book relives history both at the macro, as well as the micro level. Caught between collective glory and personal loss, as the novel makes its way through stories of guerillas and refugees and torture, we remain within Rehana’s consciousness. Anam manages to beautifully blend the story of domestic loss with the narrative of civil war – the story of a family juxtaposed against the story of a nation.

Groomed in a creative writing course, Tahmina’s language and narrative style is really appealing. The opening of the novel is startling in its stark simplicity – “Dear Husband, I lost our children today” as is it’s ending: “This war that has taken so many sons has spared mine. This age that has burned so many daughters has not burned mine. I have not let it.” In many ways Anam reminds us of Jhumpa Lahiri whose distance as well as intimacy based on her trips to the subcontinent, added to the stories she has heard from members of her family, make her both an outsider and insider in the story’s narration.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its decision to show war from the perspective of the women who cannot join the armed resistance and must instead find a way to live in the limbo world of a city in curfew. These women change their kitty party routine to secret gatherings where they stitch kanthas for the guerilla fighters and try to maintain a deceptive normality in their daily lives while the soldiers bury guns beside the rose bushes in the garden, or secretly nurse injured men in the backrooms of their bungalows. Anam also skillfully brings in the latent complexities of the language movement (the Bhasha Andolan) of her country by focusing upon Rehana’s love for Ghalib’s poetry – which, written in Urdu, is also the language of the oppressor.

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Like most subcontinental writers in English, Anam instills the right amount of exotica and Bengali words into her writing to make everything seem very authentic. Characters therefore use the gamcha, each jao bhaat or morog polao, move tara tari, salaamed and nomoskared each other, move with their jeeneesh- potro and see grass-green tiktikis. So much so good but when she describes Rehana sprinkling a few bokul seeds around her husband’s grave and “a few weeks later the tiny white bokul flowers appeared, casting themselves resolutely upwards”; when someone covers her head with the Calcutta Statesman; or when she mentions the visit from no.8 Theatre Road to the refugee camps at Salt Lake and the route takes her across Howrah Bridge, driving into the wilderness by “leaving the perimeter of Calcutta” with barren landscape and “yellow with fields of drying hay”, you can either call it poetic license, gross negligence, or the ignorance of the British editor whose “sheer editorial brilliance” is acknowledged profusely at the end of the book.

Despite these lapses, Anam’s work holds a lot of promise as a new Bangladeshi voice that has gained the maturity to shed its image of riding piggyback on Indian Writing in English for a long time. So we wait for the prequel of the book which Anam is writing now and which, based on earlier times, will be “about the Partition of Bengal experienced from a Muslim perspective” and only hope that the little slips of misinformation will not creep in again.

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How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life Kaavya Viswanathan Times Warner Books, 2006; 314 pp.

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A catchy title. An eighteen-year-old debut novelist of desi origin now studying at Harvard. A kind of new edition of Jhumpa Lahiri. The youngest ever author signed by Boston’s famous publishing house Little, Brown & Co. in its 109-year history. Another example of the Cinderella-syndrome of receiving half-a-million dollar advance and promises of more money when Dream Works Studios will turn it into a movie. Well we have heard it all and now, just before the review was being dispatched to the newspaper editor, a leading news in the front page of the daily stating that the author “may have” plagiarized certain sections of her book from a novel by Megan McCafferty entitled Sloppy Firsts published by Random House turned this reviewer’s pure adulation into slight cynicism. Whether she has really lifted out certain passages, characters and plot from the earlier novel remains a million dollar question that time itself will answer.

In the meantime, a little explanation of what the book is all about. Told in the simplest terms, it is the story of an over-achieving Indian girl in her senior year of high school whose lifelong goal is to be part of the Ivy League clan by attending Harvard. Right from the age of six, Opal Mehta (a thinly-disguised sketch of the author herself, in spite of her denial that it is not an autobiography) lives within the parameters of a formula set by her equally over-ambitious parents. This formula HOWGIH – acronym for How Opal Mehta Will Get Into Harvard – leads her into achieving straight A’s in school, extra classes of music, social work, and all that is required to make the resume look impressive. When she arrives for the early admission interview her ambitions get derailed when the Dean of Admissions asks her two simple questions – what she does for fun and who are her friends and Opal cannot answer. Despite her impeccable resume, the dean basically tells her that she’s too nerdy for college (not cool enough for school) and that for the next few months, she should “get out there and experience being young.”

Though taken aback at first, she pulls herself together and with the help of her hyperactive parents (as most Indian parents love to shine in the glory of their children’s feats) her goal in life changes to HOWGAL – How Opal Will Get A Life. Then begins a simplistic tale with stock characters and absurd bends in the plot – the parents help her in changing her clothes and hairstyle, forces her to watch all the television soaps, read the trash popular magazines, listen to the latest pop music; and so on – all perfectly timed and logged in the home computer as well as in her Burberry. Soon Opal change her set of academic friends in school to become a member of the popular “Haute Bitchez”(the HBz) group, is forced to go partying, drinking and ultimately with the utmost effort 169 manages to kiss one of her classmates—a moment immortalized by her over- worrying parents in a camera shot taken from behind the garden bush. All this is immense torture for the young academically-inclined Opal who is keen to solve the Fermeculi Formula in the physics lab and at one point the poor girl compares her tragic assimilation into high school high society to Operation Desert Storm; at another, she says that the lunchroom hierarchy at Woodcliff High School is like the caste system in India.

After a series of unrealistic incidents, the story has a fairy-tale like ending when Opal eventually does manage to learn how to be herself and be happy. Though western critics might call this ‘chic-lit’ or a YA (young adult) novel, what really is appreciable in the story is the authenticity with which Viswanathan portrays the angst, the loneliness and the anxiety of alienation that form part of all immigrant literature. The best sections of the novel are the ones that describe the Indian get-togethers within the extended Mehta clan, where competitions between the parents were fierce and unforgiving, when over-enthusiastic aunts tried to find matches for all the second-generation youngsters; where all the Indian families were cookie-cutter copies of each other; physician fathers, ladies-who-lunch-type mothers, and desi kids who were poster-people for the label NRI. Before the plagiarism controversy actually raises the demand and sale of the book, read it.

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The Three of Us Abha Dawesar Penguin, 253 pp, Rs 250/- 170

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Opening a debut novel by a 26-year-old Indian woman who grew up in Delhi, graduated from Harvard University, and is now living in New York, one expects the story line to be marked by the typical cross-cultural problems - filled withcharacters who reveal the diasporic angst of straddling different worlds and being comfortable in none. In other words, one expects her tobe following in the footsteps of Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee and the whole gamut of South Asian women writers who have established themselves comfortably in the West, offering their readers doses of the exotic homeland along with acculturation problems in the New World. So there isan initial shock to confront a story narrated from a bisexual white man's point of view - one who graphically explores his sexuality.

Set in Manhattan, New York, the story is about Andre Bernard, a24-year-old, white, male, financial analyst who moves to Manhattan for a corporate job and in the opening chapter visits Skirts - a strip club where women in G-strings perform lap dances for male customers - with his boss, Nathan Williams. By page 11, Andre finds himself having sex with his handsome supervisor, which turns out to be a torrid gay relationship. Enter Sybil, Nathan's sensual wife, who stakes her own claim on Andre. Neither husband nor wife is aware of the other's involvement. With only a trusted miniplanner to aid him in balancing the intricate timetable of his after-work cosmopolitan life, (read sex in all possible variations and combinations), Andre juggles business with pleasure which often turns comical too. But this is not all. The reader is fed with doses of other sexual exploits by Andre. These include casual affairs with a French tourist; a black man, his former lover and friend, Madhu (who is predictably disillusioned by her arranged marriage to an Indian man and conflicted in her feelings for Andre), and Martha, the office secretary whom he gets pregnant and who refuses to abort the child and decides to bring it up single-handedly. Bisexuality, infidelity, fidelity, love, passion, deception, death, ambition - all of these are neatly packed into the story linewhich is excessively simple with nothing much to connect the reader to the characters, apart from the Viagra-charged protagonist. But Andre Bernard's case is actually that of a lost individual who suffers from the contemporary predicament of isolation and alienation, one who realises that “maximising sex was hardly an escape from this kind of existential angst” but still cannot get out of it. The way he becomes involved with the future of his unborn child, naming him Camille - he considers the mother to be just ‘a vessel’, ‘a bearer’ - makes him feel optimistic about life in the end because this was, he feels, the only permanent thing in his life.

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This novel had been published in 2000 by Cleis Press - a small publishing house in San Francisco - under the title Miniplanner and the writer was happy that it was not slotted as a gay book. “It was heartening that the publishers thought the primary readership will be heterosexual women in big cities,” she confessed. That such a book has beenmainstream publishing house (albeit with a new title) speaks of the fact that gay and lesbian writing is gradually coming out of their closet status in ourcountry.

The novel is a quick read or an easyskim depending on the taste of the reader. If one cannot appreciate the steamy, sex-filled, explicitly-descriptive scenes, one has to appreciate the often hilarious story written in swift, crisp prose and simple, short sentences which also include some passages of reflective introspection. “If you are living in 1999 in New York as a gay man, I don't think you are going to be coy,” says Dawesar justifying her choice of subject and authenticity of tone. “You are going to speak the way gay men do and not talk about sex as a young Indian woman who is 26, orfor that matter a middle-aged Indian woman in New Delhi.” Thus, whatever drawbacks the novel might have, it has clearly proved the fact that writing by South Asian women can no longer be stereotyped or considered marginal.

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The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy New Delhi: India lnk, 1997. 172

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Writing a review for a book which has already received so much attention from the media is a really difficult task. By this time stories like how a literary agent took an unannounced flight from London to land up at thewriter's doorstep in the middle of the night, or the first reader of the manuscript jumping out of the train much before his destination to call Arundhati Roy telling her about her excellent first endeavour; or the jump from anonymity to fame for a writer who received more than a million dollars in advance for a first book, which, according to the writer herself was more of a labour of love emanating from the practice in word processing on her personal computer and which led her on and on for four continuous years; the novelist herself globetrotting to promote the sales of her maiden venture; facing journalists keen on photo sessions for the New Yorker; securing a permanent place in all anthologies of Indian writing in English; and now facing the charges of obscenity dragging her to courtrooms - all this is history.

Told in the simplest terms, the novel is set in Ayemenem house in Kottayam, a small town of Kerala during the rise of communism through the 60's to the 90's with a Syrian Christian family at the heart of things. Deftly weaving a saga of a family in which past and present time is excellently juxtaposed (a style perfected by the writer's screenwriting assignments as well as reminding one of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness fiction as well as the 'magic realism' of Salman Rushdie), the central act of the story is that of Ammu, doing an 'unChristian' act i.e. marrying a Bengali Hindu, then after subsequent divorce, coming back to live with her family along with her seven year old fraternal twin children, Rahel and Estha. These "two-egg twins" are mute witnesses to the tumult in the house. Besides the death of Sophie Mol, the visiting cousin from England, daughter of Ammu's brother Chacko and his estranged English wife, the forbidden love affair between Ammu and a low caste ‘Paravan' called Velutha, the tale of how Baby Kochamma had tried to seduce an English priest but failed or the story of Chacko, the closet Marxist, who tries to keep the Paradise Pickle factory going. The story line seems apparently thin, But within this easily summarizable plot which is based on this ‘undiasporic ' act (all the people coming back to Ayemenem House to get what is in store for them) Roy competently rips apart the Christian edifice of morals and values and scoffs at the social mores like caste, women’s misery and communist politics. The god of small things, ie. social propriety, is the novel 's victor and the deity of love and happiness loses out in the end.

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What can we call the book then? It reads like a ferociously reinvented memoir, and according to the author, in some ways The God of Small Things is a story that has "always been with her". Arundhati Roy is from a Syrian Christian family, and her mother Mary shared part of Ammu's fate: her family would not accept her marriage to a Hindu tea planter and never forgave the eventual divorce. Roy and her brother grew up with those family tensions, although her mother took the opposite path from Ammu, successfully contesting inheritance laws that denied daughters a share of the family property. Apart from the merging of the line separating autobiography and social history, what is most remarkable about the book is the absolutely fresh literary style; a visual language resplendent with the brevity and clarity of a script-writer. Roy’s use of indigenous idioms places her in the literary canon of the globalised Indian, one of the basic tenets of post- colonial literature and at the same time she has the advantage of not subconsciously imitating her predecessors; the whole host of Indian writers in English who use adulterated western material along with their Indianness - thus radiating a sense of hybridity, of melange, what Salman Rushdie very aptly once called the "chutnification" of history1.

From the very beginning of the novel, we observe how different cultures continued flamboyantly to mix and mingle with one another, a development which has blown the English language, as once was, to the four winds. Roy’s work firmly reiterates the fact that English has moved a long way from the bastion of the 'real' Westernized long-dead white male. A preliminary glance at the names of each individual chapter seem quite intriguing; “Wisdom Exercise Notebooks" (7); "Abhilash Talkies" (4); "Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti” (3) or "KochuThomban" (12) are as readily Indian and yet reminds us of another Indian which again may be lessacceptable to traditionalists. Roy reconfirms Rushdie's dictum that "India is now a big city culture ... certainly in (this) generation" and "includes large amounts of what you may call adulterated material". From the very first page of the novel, Roy embellishes each noun with several prefixed or suffixed adjectives. Apart from descriptions like Communism "seeping through Kerala like tea out of teabag" (33), a beige gecko in the room 'the colour of an undercooked biscuit' (239), or Mammachi who 'was used to being beaten from time to time cried at Pappachi's funeral' (50), "terror, sweat and talcum powder blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma's rings of neck-fat" (79), Roy loves to play with words. For instance, in talking about the locus-standi of a person, she writes it as interpreted by the seven-year-old Rahelas 'Locust and I'. In another instance when "Margaret Kochamma told her tostoppit. So she stoppitted" (141); or "When Ammu was really angry, she said Jolly Well. Jolly Well was a deeply well with larfing dead people in it..." (148) remind us that in the Indian context, westernization has not yet been able to

174 overcome the class barriers imbedded in the minds through generations.Sometimes again, certain sections of the descriptions border on poetic lyricism, for example the way she mentions how men leave specific shaped holes in the Universe, the "History -shaped hole in the Universe through which, in twilight, dense clouds of silent bats billowed like factory smoke and drifted into the night" (307). Roy also uses stark colours at random "Distant sky-blue car sounds (past the bus stop, past the school, past the yellow church and up the bumpy red road through the rubber trees) sent a murmur through the dim, sooty premises of Paradise Pickles" (171); "And on that sky-blue December day it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin. ...Through the jagged umbrella holes Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and red flags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark."

One of Roy's great abilities is that she can describe minute matter of fact details in such an apt yet simple way that it startles us, making us wonder why we cannot describe them so well. In certain portions of the novel her minute observation of Rahel and Estha'sbehaviour reminds us of Alice and John in Charles Lamb's "Dream Children".

"Ambassador Estha looked down, and saw that his shoes (from where the angry feelings rose) were beige and pointy. Ambassador Rahel looked down and saw that in her Bata sandals her toes were crying to disconnect themselves. Twitching to join someone else's feet. And that she couldn’t stop them" (148).

A striking feature of this novel is the way in which Roy has imbedded theIndianness of the situation without bothering for its acceptability via the west, as in many cases of the empire writing back, something that Chinua Achebe describes as "stories defining us". Examples can be quoted at random. For instance, "Comrade Pillai held his poverty like a gun to Chacko's head” (275); little Rahel's hair tied in a fountain with 'Love in Tokyo'; the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed in the house "for Chacko to pursue his 'Men's Needs' discreetly; the way in which VellayaPappen, an untouchable, a 'Paravan', owed obligation to the Ayamenem house; Mammachi undergoing beatings at the hands of her husband; use of words like ‘Veshya'; the country boat "vallom", or the commercialization of classicaldance forms like Kathakali to suit the two-hour recitals for foreign tourists, and then re-enacting the scenes from the Mahabharata to atone for their sins; the clip steel sounds of the bus conductor asking for tickets; the turmeric stains on Baby Kochamma' s dress; the sudden

175 traffic hold ups at the roadside level crossings with the 'air full of the impatient sound of idling engines' (61); the names of luxury buses - "all girls' names - Lucky Kutty, Molly Kutty, BeenaMol”; the row of bald headed pilgrims returning from Tirupati seen" above evenly spaced vomit streaks" in the bus window; the 'Air India Maharaja’ mustachioed police inspector at Kottayam Police Station with his 'sly and greedy' eyes; the miserable state of the HIS and HER toilets at Abhilash Talkies; the way the installation of a dish antenna had radically altered the lifestyles of Baby Kocharnma and her cook Kochu Maria who were stuck all day long at the drawing room sofa channel surfing; the Eagle brand of thermos flask; the noisy din of the railway station; the laddoo eating happy family travelling with Estha on the Madras Mail; the birdshit on the airport building; the "Foreign Returnees in wash'n'wear suits and rainbow sunglasses"' at Cochin Airport, - all these vignettes are too Indian and part of our daily existence, symbolizing the heterogeneity of our country. Roy approves the fact, once again, that within a familiar framework of grammatical and symbolic structures, our Indian imagination is able to work associatively.

As for the character sketches, once again the Indianness is striking. Baby Kochamma, who after a failed love for a priest was sent abroad to learn “Ornamental Gardening"; Chacko, a Rhodes scholar from Oxford who marries Margaret Kochamma, a waitress; Comrade Pillai, the shrewd owner of the printing press, with his son Lenin; Arnmu, the Half-Hindu who was treated as a social outcast by the Orthodox Syrian Christian community and denied burial in the church; the 'Reretumed' Estha and her egg-twin, Rahel, “Bewildered Ambassadors of God Knows What", who manifest themselves inan intimacy that defies description. They are both of the trauma of separation and other realities of life which only these two share and which form a bond nobody else can understand; the great 'Anglophile' Pappachi, who according to Ammu was "an incurable British CCP, which was short for chi-chi-poach and in Hindi meant shit-wiper" (51) all these characters are quintessentially Indian. In an interview given to Nivedita Mukherjee,2 Roy states that "(t)he frightening thing about a writer is that he or she begins to identify with each character in the book. It makes you a split personality. In this novel, the people are more important than the events and I hope it will be remembered for that".

Roy thinks that what makes her book different could be that it is about “deeply personal things ... it is about human biology and not human history.” If there are any rebels here, they are Ammu and Velutha, The love scene between Velutha and Ammu along the bank of the Meenachal River is highly reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence especially his depiction of love as a primeval instinct irrespective of caste, creed or colour. Roy's predicament here is once again best explained by

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Salman Rushdie when he says, "I can't give you a one sentencedescription why this stuff is Indian. All I can say is that you don't find that particular blend except in India''. Though we are still uncertain whether Arundhati Roy is really the novelist of the future, we can rely on her own statement which slates. "For me this book is a little like showing someone part of your gut ... I didn't know the rules. So I didn't know I was breaking them".3

Notes 1 See Salman Rushdie’s interview, “There is a kind of buzz around Indian writing in English". India Today, July 14 1997. Pp. 88-90. 2 The Statesman, April 18, 1997. 3 Interview given to Binoo K. John. India Today, March 15, 1997. p. 117. Back to table of contents

Queen of Dreams Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Abacus, 2005; 307 pages; 5.50 sterling pounds ------The critical acclaim and increasing recognition that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni received till date has established her as a promising diasporic Indian writer interested in the immigrant experience but the movement is not necessarily from

177 east to west. It is a cross-cultural scenario where, the writer has carved a niche for herself in portraying both the worlds simultaneously. After Sister of my Heart and its sequel, The Vine of Desire, which talked about Indian immigrants and their problems of surviving between the pulls and pushes of an alien culture, Divakaruni’s sixth novel, Queen of Dreams (2004) once again reverts to magic realism that qualified her first novel, The Mistress of Spices.

Like Tilo, the protagonist in that novel, who runs a grocery store and uses spices to help customers solve their problems, in this novel, Divakaruni gives us Mrs. Gupta, a first-generation Indian immigrant to America who dreams the dreams of others, so she can help them in their own lives. Beginning as an orphan in Calcutta who paid a huge price to emigrate from her homeland, she defied the sect of elders who trained exceptional women like her in hidden mountain caves. Despairing as her gift begins to fade, she sacrifices marital joy to continue her mysterious life as the ‘Queen of Dreams.’

This gift of vision and ability to foresee and guide people through their fates fascinates her daughter Rakhi, who as a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a world in alarming transition. Rakhi also feels isolated from her mother’s past in India and the dream world she inhabits and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her own painful secret, Rakhi’s solace comes in the discovery after her mother’s death, of her dream journals. “A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” Rakhi’s mother writes in her journals and this opens the long-closed door to her past.

Rakhi and her friend Belle run the Chai House, a homely neighbourhood bakery and teahouse whose future is soon endangered by the arrival of ‘Java,’ a Starbucks-style competitor across the street. As Rakhi attempts to divine her identity, knowing little of India but drawn inexorably into a sometimes-painful history she is only just discovering, her life is shaken by new horrors. In the wake of September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Her shop is attacked by hoodlums who beat them black and blue and the ugly violence visited upon them forces the reader to view those terrible days from the point of view of immigrants and Indian Americans whose only crime was the color of their skin or the turban they wore. As their notions of citizenship are questioned, Rakhi’s search for identity increases: “If I am not American,” she asks, “who am I?” Here she is helped a lot by her father, who after her mother’s death, turns over a new leaf by turning into a friend, philosopher, guide kind of a figure. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new

178 love and understanding for her family.

As a master storyteller, Divakaruni juxtaposes the ‘Dream Journals’ sections of Mrs. Gupta with those of Rakhi’s realistic narration. She takes great pains in describing the ambience of the Chai Shop and later Korma House International in the Bay area of California where Mr. Gupta fries besan pakoras and cauliflower samosas to lure an odd assortment of customers. As a second generation Indian American woman Rakhi’s idea of the homeland is vague and often blurred, something that resembles, to borrow Salman Rushdie’s phrase, “Indias of the mind.” Apart from the dreams of snakes, spiritual guides, kings -- meanings of which are exemplified in the Brihat Swapna Sarita -- and the Indian myths of Ravana, Tunga-Dhwaja, Narad-Muni, that lend their eastern exotic flavour to the story in the right doses, Divakaruni also tells us a lot about contemporary Bengali culture. This ‘desi-ness’ is provided through the story of Rakhi’s father growing up as a destitute, working at Kesto’s corner shop in Calcutta to supplement his family’s meagre income. Full of unglossed words, the western readers are given the authentic ambience of the ‘chaer dokan’ where jilebi, nimki, sandesh, beguni, mihidana, pantua are fried in hot oil in large iron woks, where a mother addresses a daughter as shona. It seems that through this means Divakaruni wants the reader to accept these as a natural part of the characters’ world and of their language. Readers who were feeling tired of the repeated stories of immigration and acculturation in the New World churned out by the author should be tempted to read this eloquent novel because of its perfect mix of dreams and the unconscious on the one hand and politics and sociology on the other.

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The Palace of Illusions Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Doubleday/ Picador India, 2008; 360 pages ------She had established herself as a writer of magic realism with her debut novel The Mistress of Spices in 1997. After that she regaled her readers with stories of acculturation, immigration, of people caught in the clash of cultures and the angst of Indians surviving in a materialistic western world. Her last three books have been selling India – its myths, its rich heritage, its epics -- and the target have been young readers. Thus Neela: The Victory Song (2002) is the story of a twelve- year old girl caught up in the Indian Independence movement. The Conch Bearer (2003) blends action, adventure and magic in a kind of quest fantasy where the young protagonist Anand is entrusted with a conch shell imbued with mystical power and has to return it to its rightful owner in the Himalayas while encountering good and evil both in himself and in those around him. The plot of The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming (2005) is also personal in some ways where Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is telling stories to her sons Anand and Abhay, who become characters in the story and who, like scores of second-generation Indian American children, have to be fed with Indian mythical tales full of visions, powerful sorcerers, princes and jinns capable of unspeakable magic. Now, Divakaruni has gone back to a period that is half-history, half-myth and wholly magical. Taking the ancient epic tale of the Mahabharat she retells the transcreated story in a novel called The Palace of Illusions.

In the “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the novel, Divakaruni tells us that since childhood days when she listened to the stories of the Mahabharat in her grandfather’s village home and later pouring over the thousand-page leather- bound volume in her parents’ home in Kolkata, she was left unsatisfied by the portrayals of women. It wasn’t as though the epic did not have powerful, complex women characters that affected the action in major ways. But in some way, they remained shadowy figures, their thoughts and motives mysterious, their emotions portrayed only when they affected the lives of the male heroes, their roles ultimately subservient to those of their fathers or husbands, brothers or sons. Divakaruni then decided that if ever she wrote a book she would place the women in the forefront of the action. She would uncover the story that lay invisible between the lines of the men’s exploits. Better still, she would “have one of them tell it herself, with all her joys and doubts, her struggles and her triumphs, her heartbreaks, her achievements, the unique female way in which he sees hr world and her place in it.” And who could be better suited for this than

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Draupadi, or Panchaali? Divakaruni thus welcomes her readers – “It is her life, her voice, her questions, and her vision that I invite you into The Palace of Illusions.”

This attempt at retelling the male-centric epic and trying to examine how the world would have seemed from inside Draupadi’s head, might be a new trope in America but not so new in our part of the world. Many other women have thought about it and done it before her – Irabati Karve retold the epic from a woman’s point of view in Yugant as did Pratibha Roy. In her excellent solo performance Nathabati Anathbat, Shaoli Mitra recreated the age-old story with Draupadi as the protagonist. Even Teejan Bai in her Pandavani performances narrates the plight of this central character in her rustic Chattisgarhi. In many of these retellings Draupadi has been depicted as a woman more sinned against than sinning. But according to Divakaruni she wanted to do something similar to what John Gardner did in Grendel, where he transforms the traditional monster-villain to a hero. She wanted to make her readers see Panchaali in a wholly different way. “Quick tempered, immensely proud, headstrong, Machiavellian when necessity calls for it – she’s larger than life but definitely human” and she hopes the readers “will find her sympathetic.”

The Palace of Illusions thus traces the princess Panchaali’s life, a life that was foretold when she was born. Beginning with her magical birth in fire and following her spirited balancing act as a woman with five husbands who have been cheated out of their father’s kingdom, she always insisted on doing what none of the other women around her were doing, trying desperately to live a life on her own terms. Panchaali is swept into their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their sides through years of exile and a terrible civil war involving all the kings of India. In some ways she becomes the catalyst for the great war and perhaps the one who suffered the most as a result of it. Meanwhile we never lose sight of her strategic duels with Kunti, her mother-in-law, her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna, or her secret attraction to Karna, the mysterious man who is her husband’s most dangerous enemy. Keeping true to the original and complicated story of a great war, Divakaruni changes the focus and the significance of actions and characters, suggesting different motives, and creating intimate moments that give us a wholly different understanding of Panchaali’s character.

Panchaali exemplifies different kinds of love throughout her life – protective love for her brother Dhristadyumna, the love she feels for Dhai Ma, the surrogate mother figure, romantic love for Krishna, marital love for her husbands, regretful love for her sons, and the spiritual love she discovers at the end of her life. She states that none of her husbands had the power to agitate her the way the mere

181 memory of Karna did. During the war she weeps for Abhimanyu, for Arjun and also for Karna Take for instance how she felt when Karna fell. She says,” Part of me was glad that the unbearable tension of the battle was over. Part was relieved that my husband had won, that he was safe. Part realized that we were very close to achieving the vengeance I’d craved – though it gave me no satisfaction. Part was thankful that this dreadful war would now end – for without Karna, what hope did Duryodhan have? Part sorrowed that a great warrior and a noble soul had died. But the part that was a girl at a swayambhar facing a young man whose eyes grew dark with pain at her words, the part that didn’t owe loyalty to the Pandavas yet, couldn’t hold back her tears. Regret racked me. How might Karna’s life have turned out if I’d allowed him to compete that day? If he’d won? The longing that I’d supposed all these years crashed over me like a wave, bringing me to my knees. He’d died believing that I hated him. How I wished it could have been otherwise!” Then she adds something she says Vyasa didn’t put down in his Mahabharat. Before Karna’s soul soared into the sky and disappeared, it grew into a great radiance around her. A feeling emanated from it that she had no words for. It wasn’t sorrow or rage. “Perhaps, freed of its mortal bondage, Karna’s spirit knew what I hadn’t ever been able to tell him.”

The novel ends with the downfall of Panchaali on the way to mahaprasthan. We are not told what happened to the five brothers but only how Krishna acts as her redeemer at the penultimate moment. It was then that she realized how Krishna had always been there, sometimes in the forefront, sometimes blended into the shadows of her life. Krishna touches her hand and at his touch “something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below.” As Krishna touches her hand, she becomes buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – someone beyond name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. As her soul rises, for the first time in her life she realizes that she’s truly Panchaali. Interestingly, she reaches out with the other hand for Karna, for his “surprisingly solid clasp!”

An obvious question that comes to our mind while reading this novel is, who is the target reader? If the dust jacket blurbs give us some cues it becomes quite clear that the average American reader or critic has really not been able to grasp the immense complexities of the epic tale. However simplistically Divakaruni might narrate certain incidents, too many subplots, too many characters, too many myths surely seem to have confused the average western reader. They seem to miss the quintessential essence of the epic and their evaluation often becomes superficial. Thus the Baltimore Sun calls the novel “a masala of page-turning addiction”; the Los Angeles Times feels that it examines “the subtle extrasensory connections between mothers and daughters”; the critic of USA Today feels that

182 the novel “will resonate with anyone who has struggled with modern love, mores and parenthood.” One of the reasons that attracted Divakaruni in retelling the story of the Mahabharat is that we continue to live in a war-torn world. She states in an interview that people around the world and especially Americans are feeling the effects of war. War is particularly hard on mothers – seeing the life that came out of your own body being maimed or destroyed is devastating. “In this novel I wanted to focus on the immense and debilitating costs of war, and (as we are re-learning to our sorrow in this country right now) how easy it is to begin a war and how hard to end it. So the retelling of the great war novel that has enamoured her since childhood.

In spite of simplifying many complicated situations of the source text, what redeems the book is the beautifully lyrical and poetic prose – something that Divakaruni has mastered well after teaching creative writing courses at American universities. The questions constantly asked by the narrator and the answer supplied in the very next sentence is an interesting trope used in a first person narrative. Sometimes the continuity of the story is maintained through use of dreams, flashbacks and stories-within-stories which Panchaali mentions having heard from someone. Again there are certain sections which are Divakaruni’s own additions and interpretations of the traditional mythic tale. Though she does not attempt to translate words as ashtras, swayambhar or mahaprasthan, sometimes Americanisms become a bit jarring to the Indian readers. For example, when Draupadi constantly refers to her brother Dhristadyumna as Dhri or talks about the other wives of her husbands as ‘syrupy beauties.’ “If they were pearls, I was the gold wire on which they were strung,” says Draupadi with pride.

An interesting addition to The Palace of Illusions is the name of the author. Reclaiming her Bengali/Indian identity Chitra has added ‘Lekha’ back to her name, something that she had shorn off after her college days in Calcutta and before leaving for the United States. Whether this is a deliberate and well- calculated move only future novels of Chitralekha Banerjee Divakaruni will tell.

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One Amazing Thing Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books India, 2010. 209 pages; Rs.450.00

Just when we thought that she has run out of her multicultural stories of Indians in America and was selling India through retelling the Mahabharata story from a woman’s point of view (The Palace of Illusions) or children’s stories based on fantastic adventures in the Indian subcontinent, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has come back with a bang so to say, with her latest novel One Amazing Thing. As a seasoned storyteller writing her eleventh novel and sixteenth book, the novel is not only a captivating read but also a testament to the redeeming power of human love and connection.

The story begins one late afternoon in a basement of an Indian Consulate somewhere in America where people are waiting to get their travel visas to India. Though the place is not mentioned it seems to be a city in the west coast like San Francisco, which is situated near the earthquake prone zone of San Andreas Fault and had been home for the author for several years. Nine individuals -- an African American ex-soldier named Cameron who is searching for redemption, an Indian American college student Uma who is haunted by a question about love, an old Chinese woman Jiang with a secret past and her Goth granddaughter Lily, a white elderly upper class Caucasian couple Mr. and Mrs. Prichett whose relationship is disintegrating, a young Muslim-American man Tariq who is struggling with the fallout of 9/11, a South Indian visa officer Malathi and her boss Mangalam who are on the verge of an adulterous affair – all get stuck there because of a massive earthquake. This multicultural group is quite representative of contemporary America in the 21st century and as the author aptly puts it -- “It

184 was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races randomly thrown together. Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini UN summit in here.” (4). Out of the nine people we find at least three characters who are second- generation Indians in the US. The way Divakaruni handles the stories of Uma, Tariq and Lily, who talk of America as the only home they have known, we realize that she has moved away from depicting only first generation immigrants who wallow in nostalgia and have started probing into the attitudes, psyche and problems of people of the younger generation.

When the earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine wildly individual characters together, their focus first jolts to a collective struggle to survive. There’s little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, “one amazing thing” from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And so Jiang begins her story. As their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. Though all the stories are not compelling enough and at times we do feel a wee bit disappointed, it shows how in tragedy even ordinary people can show resolve. Their strength comes from the stories that they carry within themselves and since the narrators are allowed their own individual identities, their styles are different. The story of the Chinese grandmother growing up as a young girl in Calcutta’s Chinatown in the 1960s who had to escape to America is much more compelling than the tale of the visa officer Mangalam who realizes that he “might die here -- perhaps in the next few hours” and announces that “Karma’s wheel is intricate” and his present suffering is because he had betrayed his wife Naina. (Well, little doses of Indian exotica and Eastern spirituality are necessary for a book to be sold and easily marketed in the west!)

One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival—and about the reasons to survive. It reminds us of grace under pressure. Each story is a revelation (“one amazing thing”) and a salvation. The survivors are able to bridge cultural boundaries with compassion. The appeal of these life stories, like that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is that they throw the spotlight onto varied lives, each with its own joys and miseries. (That one of the characters sits reading The Wife of Bath’s Tale is also a clear indication of the Chaucerian influence on the author.) The trope of narrating a story in the tale-within-a tale framework is nothing exceptionally new. Apart from Canterbury Tales, we are reminded of Boccaccio, of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (published a couple of years ago)

185 which have the same format – strangers brought together under circumstances which force them to share their lives with each other. Together, the stories show how easy it is to divert young lives into unforeseen and restrictive channels, and how hard it is for people to realize their early dreams. Their shared experiences and fears form the frame that holds together this compendium of short stories into an absorbing novel.

Whether those applying for the visa make it out alive or not is not important. Instead what is important is the reaffirmation on character’s part of their reason for wanting to make it out alive. Divakaruni emphasizes on this redeeming power in the concluding sentences of the novel when survival is at stake: “The clankings grew louder. The giant was on his way down. As they waited to see what would happen next, Uma began the end of her story.”

Apart from the several other laudatory remarks on this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri said of the book, “One Amazing Thing collapses the walls dividing characters and cultures; what endures is a chorus of voices in one single room.” It certainly does that with the feel good effect but at the same time what mars the good production from a reputed publishing house like Penguin India is the typos that stare at the readers on a few occasions (for example ‘weekened’ in page 196 should read as ‘weekend’ or ‘ you mother’ in page 197 should read as ‘your mother’). Also, sometimes we have to apply a willing suspension of disbelief as to how people were seeing things in the dark, how they could measure the level of water rising in the room, how the sounds outside made them hopeful, etc. But over and above, Divakaruni has been able to successfully blend seriousness and philosophical issues of life with some tropes borrowed from cheap popular horror stories and this is where the success of the novel lies.

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Oleander Girl Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Penguin Viking, 2013. 289 pp. ------She excels in narrating cross-cultural stories – of ordinary Indian making it in America or returning as a misfit like poor Mrs Dutta, the protagonist of one of her short stories, who decides to come back to Kolkata, unable to adjust herself in her son and daughter-in-law’s house there. America offers freedom to a young Bengali middle class wife who, with tacit support from her husband and in-laws, is forced to abort her foetus because the ultrasound report confirms it to be a girl. One is also reminded of the culture shock that another young Bengali protagonist from Kolkata faces on her first visit to America, where her dream country supposing to have ‘silver pavements and golden roofs’ gives her the rudest shock in the form of racial abuse and humiliation in the suburbs of Chicago.

Apart from the few children’s fiction she wrote, like Neela’s Song or The Conch Bearer which contained Indian exotica, heritage and local myths seeking the holy grail in the Himalayas, she also wrote The Palace of Illusions as a retelling of the Mahabharata story from a woman’s point of view. Though her western readers were enamoured when they read about Draupadi asking all sorts of questions on gender discrimination, this kind of retelling of the epic was nothing very new or unique for Indian readers. One Amazing Thing found her locating the novel in a basement office of the Indian Consulate in California where a motley group of people had gathered to obtain visa to travel to India for different reasons. But when a sudden earthquake forcibly maroon them in the room, they while away

187 the time by telling stories about their own lives and what amazing thing they could remember – sort of a modern American version of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

Now after a gap of a couple of years Divakaruni has come up with her latest novel Oleander Girl which finds her more mature as a wonderful storyteller – a writer par excellence who is capable of engrossing the readers who want to know “what happened next” and proceed at great speed. Like all her earlier works she treads on a ground she knows well – Calcutta (her own home town where she was born and grew up till her undergraduate years), and USA (where she went on for her graduate studies and stayed on till date). This is the first novel perhaps where Kolkata becomes the topos or space where she builds up her plot, the primary locus of the story, a city which is partly narrated from first hand experiences and partly through fictional stereotypes. In this city she weaves the fortune of two families, one in North Calcutta at 26, Tarak Prasad Roy Road where Bimal Prasad Roy, a very strong-headed practising lawyer lives with his wife Sarojini and granddaughter Korobi (from whose name the title of the story is derived), and another family of the Boses in South Calcutta who belong to the nueveau riche class whose members consist of an art dealer Mr Bose, his wife Jayita, their grown-up son Rajat, and young school-going daughter Pia.

Both the families have other stereotypical support staff – the Cook who dishes up the most authentic traditional Bengali fare; Bahadur, the ever-loyal Nepali durwan-cum-driver of the aristocratic Bentley that the Roys own. In the Bose household there is Shikha, the (wo)man-Friday ever loyal to the household, and Asif, the driver of the fleet of fancy cars which the family owns – Mercedes, Toyotas, Hondas and what not – (at one time we even find Sonia, daughter of an extremely rich business tycoon and erstwhile girlfriend of Rajat, also driving among other expensive cars, a Porche in the streets of Calcutta!)

The Roy household, like most old mansions in Calcutta, is sprawling and in a state of disrepair, with huge tamarind-lined trees leading to the decrepit family temple, which becomes the site for the patriarch to secure promises from his US- bound daughter Anu that she will not marry anyone there; the frequent visits there of one Mr Bhattacharya, a powerful political figure, businessman, and Hindutwa proponent, who will act as a saviour of the family in dire financial needs; and finally the site for the solemn fairytale-like marriage between Korobi and Rajat at the end of the story. The rich jewellery from the family heirloom has to be sold off to pay for the maintenance of the cracking walls and leaking pipes of this mansion, and especially to fund Korobi’s trip to the US where she goes looking for her unknown American father, a man whom she thought the ghost

188 of her dead mother Anu had instructed to find out on the night after her engagement with Rajat.

The mission to find out more about her long-lost parents (as she was believed to be an orphan brought up by her doting grandparents) leads Korobi to America and there we get more clichéd, formulaic sub-plots leading us breathlessly through her exploits to trace her father. We have her landing in the house of one Mr Mitra, who serves as the manager of the Bose’s art gallery in New York, but is actually one of the bad guys who blackmails the family, gambles, and puts Korobi into more trouble than desired. The post-9/11 atmosphere of suspicion, detention and humiliation that many South Asians had to face after that cataclysmic incident is also deftly grafted into the narrative where the man finds it difficult to maintain a decent lifestyle or provide sufficient emotional and financial support to his pregnant wife. He now lives cooped up in a run-down cockroach-infested tenement in a not so safe part of the city. We also meet the believable Mr Desai, who runs an investigating agency in a run-down section of New York City who tries to help Korobi in the search for her father – one of the innumerable Robs residing in different parts of the country. His office is now in such a notorious part of the city that it is not safe for a woman to move alone at any hour of the day. Disillusionment in the New World takes its toll as usual on our young protagonist, where dwindling finances lead her to sell her beautiful locks of hair and prevent her from indulging in the flesh trade; the two wrong leads to other men having the same name of her unknown father leads her to part physical and part verbal abuses.

To counter her share of disillusionment we have Vic, the young nephew of Mr Desai, whose loving care in acting as her escort to various places makes him a kind of Prince Charming figure. They have to get stranded overnight in a highway motel while driving down from Boston during a dangerous snowstorm, thus adding more fuel to Rajat’s jealousy and suspicion back in Calcutta. Born and brought up as a second generation Indian-American in the US, Vic might have a nuisance value to his uncle but is the perfect gentleman, loving and caring for Korobi and even coming to her rescue at the right moment when physical assault by one of the prospective father figures would have turned worse. All this inevitably leads the reader to his expected proposal of marriage and offer to Korobi to stay back in the US for ever.

The ultimate discovery of her real father, a light-skinned African American university professor is not the grand finale to the tale. Korobi is shocked to learn that she is a love child born out of wedlock and how in spite of her father’s sincerest efforts to trace her and her mother in Kolkata was thwarted by her

189 heritage-conscious patriarchal grandfather who supplied false certificates (and even ashes in an urn) to prove that both the mother and the child were dead.

Back in Calcutta, the ramifications of other sub-plots keep the reader quite engrossed too. The hotels and nightclubs which Rajat frequents either with Korobi (Americanized to Cara), his ex-fiancee Sonia or his doting sister Pia seem quite authentic, especially the interiors of the Oberoi Grand Hotel where the Boses had originally planned the lavish engagement party announcing their son’s marriage but which got aborted due to the sudden demise of Korobi’s grandfather. The labour conflict in the Bose’s warehouse brings in protests and strike by the labour union, Hindu-Muslim divide among workers fans up communal strife, Sonia’s machinations to woo back Rajat and break off his engagement with Korobi leads her to employ hired goons and car accidents, hospitalization, change of hearts – all very beautifully contrived by Divakaruni to make them convincing enough.

The story and parts of the plot outlines discussed here makes it comparable to a very well-structured Bollywood movie– full of love triangles, mistaken identity, machinations by villainous characters, exotic locales and settings in snowstorm- struck Boston, long redwood forests of California, the disreputable places in the underbelly of New York City, the promenade of the Hooghly River bank, the quick weekend getaway to Digha, the unravelling of mysteries, solving of all misunderstanding, change of hearts, till everything becomes right in the state of Denmark and the protagonists, after physical, mental, financial trials and tribulations, are united in a solemn wedding to ‘live happily ever after.’ All the masala needed for a commercial movie, a cinematic adaptation, or a serial soap opera is supplied readily by the author in this novel.

This review does in no way demean or undermine the excellent story-telling ability of Divakaruni. It is much better than some of her earlier works of fiction where India and America often seemed forcibly juxtaposed to carry on the storyline. Here she has managed to create an engrossing tale (in spite of taking recourse to many clichés and stereotypes) and if we are willing to suspend our disbelief about the veracity of the descriptions of localities and inhabitants in Kolkata (the same of course applies to America), the novel is definitely a good read for lay readers, for people interested in diasporic Asian American writing, for the western reader, a great number of whom are Chitra Divakaruni’s fans and who consume the exotica as part of their greater understanding of the treasure house and tradition of an enigmatic country called India. As a professor of creative writing herself, Divakaruni’s narrative style deserves kudos even from the strongest critic of her novel. Earlier the mention of Bengali/Indian words

190 without italics or glossary would sound a bit contrived in some of her fiction but now she has perfected the art so well that fares of khichuri with sona mug dal and kamini bhog rice sounds as convincing as it is intended to be. Thus in one word Oleander Girl becomes just ‘unputdownable.’

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So Good in Black Sunetra Gupta New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2009. 291 pp, Rs. 350.00 ------

Her last novel A Sin of Colour was published exactly ten years ago, in 1999. Since then So Good in Black is Sunetra Gupta's first novel for almost a decade and fifth in her career as a novelist that began with the Sahitya Akademi award winning novel in 1992. Like its forbears, it revels in the use of complex language and thought, non-linear narrative technique, and an intensely lyrical prose that fuses time, memory and space, entitling her to be a young heir to Virginia Woolf. It sustains the reader’s interest also as a sort of mystery thriller.

A powerful exploration of friendship and morality set in Calcutta, Ireland and London, this grippingly and intricately layered novel begins in extraordinary circumstances on the shores of Digha in West Bengal. At its centre is a character called Byron Mallick, a refined Bengali businessman who is intensely charming

191 and ostensibly extremely corrupt. But the person who tells this story is his American friend Max Gate, a diplomat turned travel-writer based in London who had met Byron Mallick while working for the State Department in Calcutta. Max begins an obsessional love affair with Ela, the daughter of Nikhilesh, one of Byron’s closest friends, ruining his marriage with Barbara and tying him deeply to Byron, who knows his secret. Ela ricochets between her deep attachment to Byron, her loyalty to her husband Arjun and her desperate love for Max. A decade later, Max returns to Calcutta to attend the funeral of Damini, Ela’s cousin and best friend, a journalist and anti-poverty activist and learns that Byron is implicated in her “accidental” death. Meanwhile Max’s former brother-in-law, Piers O’Reilly, is determined to bring Byron to justice. Max is forced to re- examine his notion of love, loyalty and morality as he confronts Byron with the truth.

It is really interesting to see how Sunetra has returned here to the vulnerable male voice to explore notions of morality and the torque between loyalty and love. She feels that Max is the person to tell this story because he experiences moral dilemmas in a way that is helpful to the reader. The dilemmas are stark and surreal. It is declared at the outset that Byron is implicated in a heinous crime. He admits to having adulterated infant milk formula for profit, although he denies involvement in a murder that occurs as a result of the investigation into the crime. Sunetra juxtaposes the impending judicial trial of Byron with the famous trial of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of British India who was impeached in 1787 for corruption. There are several connections made to a period of time in the late 18th Century when British society was forced to think carefully about the language of morality notably within the context of the trial of Warren Hastings as many important figures were involved in the proceedings like Edmund Burke who made many an impassioned speech to condemn Hastings. Byron's own notions of “geographical” morality are borrowed from Warren Hastings; the idea that different moral standards apply in different settings. As the voice of the devil, Byron functions as a spokesman for extreme latitude in morality. Max however is playing a different game in that he is constantly attempting to construct a moral code that is rigid enough to be of some use to him and yet flexible enough to accommodate his own weaknesses. There is a collision in this book between these two sensibilities.

The title of this novel comes from a popular song by Neil Finn and two of its lines form the epigraph of the book – And he can’t stand Beelzebub,/’Coz he looks so good in black, in black--. Since the protagonist Byron Mallick has all the attributes of the devil, the title resonates with that idea.

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A diasporic Indian writer born in Calcutta, spending her childhood in several African countries, studying in the United States and now settled in Oxford, Sunetra Gupta belongs to the younger generation of immigrants to Britain. As they all do, she seeks to create through her fiction identities that defy the borders of the modern construct of the Western nation state – something that is endorsed by her own peripatetic lifestyle. Elucidating the very important idea of exile, we have one of the characters in the novel show the narrator how “exile could be found more easily in the spaces between integers than in any foreign land.” So Good in Black also bears all the characteristics of a typical postcolonial novel in its use of transnational setting and characters that travel across continents with ease – a trope that Sunetra has been using in all the novels she has written till date. So we have Calcutta, rural Bengal, Digha share equal space with New York and London, Cork in Ireland, Princeton, New Jersey, Ghana, – all places so beautifully integrated in the storyline that it does not seem like cataloguing. Among the places, Calcutta of course gets the biggest attention – its streets, locales make the novel vibrate with Bengali culture – added to that is the author’s penchant for including songs of Rabindranath Tagore, something that she used extensively in her first novel, Memories of Rain. So we find Byron Mallick singing different Tagore songs to match his moods and even reciting sections of Karna- Kunti Sambad to soothe himself in his state of extreme stress. Sunetra also uses Jibanananda Das’s poem on death – a lament for a suicide – when she analyzes Damini’s character (though it is unfortunate that the poet has been wrongly spelt as Jibananda in page 124).

As a professor of zoology at Oxford University, Sunetra’s scientific sprit also permeates through the novel. We have the mention of mathematical formulae, Captain Cook and celestial triangulation, Pythagoras theorem and the Celebrated Discourse of The Transit of Venus Across the Sun by Jeremiah Horrock, something that is especially interesting because the event of the transit of Venus would occur again on 8th of June, 2004 for which Byron Mallick sets up a telescope on his terrace in his bungalow at Digha to witness this rare sight. But all these scientific references are so well integrated in the story that they do not provide any hindrance to the ordinary layman reader.

The cover photograph done in black and white by Benoit Lange enhances the appeal of this paperback novel. Several years ago in an interview Sunetra had stated that she was not involved in any political movement as her main interest was to try to uncover human conditions and that writing for her was “an essentially spiritual exercise.” Not a run-of–the-mill novel on diasporic angst, So Good in Black, reconfirms her professed point of view and is worth reading for the scope and range of her interests.

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The Lowland: A Novel Jhumpa Lahiri Random House India, 2013; 340 pages

She does not write at an express speed. A few years have elapsed since Unaccustomed Earth, her collection of short stories was published, and while we were all expecting to read her fiction again, a very engrossing story entitled “Brotherly Love” appeared in the June 10th issue of The New Yorker this year. The story was located in a quiet enclave in Tollygunge which was full of narrow lanes and modest middle-class homes with tile or tin roofs, and with two ponds and a lowland spanning a few acres behind it. Close by in direct contrast was the high walls of the Tolly Club, a totally different world of the rich and upper class which the two young siblings of the story, Subhash and Udayan wanted to explore. Born just fifteen months apart they were inseparable brothers and though they grew up, played, and studied in school together, they were also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. The period of the story is the late 1960s, and once in Presidency College, Udayan – charismatic and very impulsive -- finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement. Like many misguided youth of his generation he risks his life and wastes his time and energy on the ideology that he can change the world. Subhash, the dutiful son, who studies in Jadavpur, does not share his brother’s political passion and leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research on oceanography in a quiet seaside university in Rhode Island, America. Later when he learns how his brother is

194 shot to death by the police in the lowland outside their family’s home, he comes back to Calcutta with the hope of picking up the pieces of a shattered family. He sees how his parents did not accept Gauri as part of their family or as an ideal daughter-in law, and misbehaved with her. In order to heal the wounds he decides to marry Gauri, his brother’s expecting wife, and take her to America.

This short story, with a few additional details interspersed in it, becomes the first three chapters of the present novel under review. It is amazing how Jhumpa Lahiri creates the rest of the story, and turns it into an engrossing family saga comprising of four generations. The behaviour of Gauri, who finds liberation in America and educates herself further with a doctoral degree in philosophy and is yet unable to turn herself into a normal wife for Subhash or a caring mother to her daughter Bela, the different stand in and casual relationships that Subhash, Gauri, and later their daughter undergo, all seem so common and yet are uniquely depicted by the novelist. Shifting among the points of view of a wide range of richly drawn characters, all of them sketched to the most convincing details, the story moves from Tollygunge and North Calcutta into different locales of America -- from New England where Subhash continues his research-oriented job, to California where Gauri separates and moves secretly to take up a teaching position at the university, different mid-western cities and non-descript little towns and villages where Bela leads an almost nomadic life, and ultimately ends in a small town in Ireland. We are made acquainted with the flora and fauna of the New England sea coast and since Jhumpa grew up in Rhode Island herself, it is difficult to separate facts from fiction -- the locales, the description of the university, the neighbourhood all seem so real. But one should not play a spoilt sport and let out the unexpected turns in the story that makes one wonder how Jhumpa manages to build the intricate web of human relationships by delving into the psyche and plausible behaviour of each character. One has to read this novel to understand it.

Apart from geographies we are also equally fascinated by the way she intersperses history of the Naxalite movement with real life names like Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Che Guevera and many others with the fictional characters. (At the end of the novel she acknowledges a long list of books that she had to consult to understand the movement). For those of us who were growing up or studying in college during that turbulent period it is history reiterated in front of our eyes once again. The Maoist slogans and posters splattered all over the walls in Kolkata, Presidency College, the hotbed of students’ activities, the terror created by the search teams of police and paramilitary forces and arrests and killings without trial are nothing new for the people of Bengal. Yet it is amazing how this theme could be expressed so convincingly by a second generation American

195 writer of Indian descent, who was not even born in this country. We know that the novelist has an extraordinary eye for observing details as her earlier stories related to Kolkata and Bengali characters have revealed. In this story too, apart from the Naxalite movement, she manages to integrate the history of the Mitra family with other historical facts like the famine of 1943, the partition of the country and the post-partition rehabilitation that changed the demographics of the suburbs of Kolkata. But above everything else the brevity of her style of narration in this novel really fascinates us.

The use of the word ‘lowland’ in the title is interesting. It is a place that actually existed during the 1960s and 1970s as a part and parcel in the lives of the two brothers and their parents living beside it in Tollygunge. Later it totally vanished as the housing construction mafia gradually filled it up with garbage to build new apartments buildings. When Gauri, towards the end of the story, comes to Kolkata after forty years and is unable to locate the place where her husband had been shot because the lowland no longer existed, we can symbolically take it to be the denouement of the story.

Already nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the results of which will be declared very soon in October, we are all expecting that the coveted prize is awarded to Jhumpa Lahiri for this wonderfully crafted novel. Since she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, we Bengalis have already appropriated her to become ‘amader meye’ – our girl – and have been basking in the glory of her success. The story of Gogol Ganguli’s search for identity and roots as a second generation Bengali born and brought up in America made her earlier novel The Namesake another bestseller. This time we want another feather to be added to our caps.

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Family Life: A Novel by Akhil Sharma New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014. 218 pages ------A new kid on the Indian diasporic block has arrived in the United States. Ever since a new novel/memoir Family Life was published by W. W. Norton & Company in the U.S. and by Faber & Faber in the U.K. in April this year, reviewers in the New York Times, the Guardian and other papers have been citing it with overwhelming praise and its author, Akhil Sharma, who is at present an assistant professor in the creative writing MFA program at Rutgers University- Newark, is already basking in the glory of his long-desired fame and popularity.

Born in Delhi, Akhil Sharma immigrated to the United States along with his family when he was eight, and grew up in Edison, New Jersey. He studied at , where he earned his B.A. in public policy, then won a Stegner Fellowship to the writing program at Stanford, where he won several O. Henry Prizes. He then attempted to become a screenwriter, but, disappointed with his fortunes, left to attend Harvard Law School. He worked as an investment banker in New York for some time when his debut novel An Obedient Father, was published to great acclaim in the US in 2001.

An Obedient Father told the story of Ram Karan, a lowly and corrupt functionary in the physical education department of the Delhi school system. He is a man of voracious appetites whose job consists primarily of extorting bribes for his political superiors. At home, he is haunted by the memory of sexually abusing his daughter, Anita; recently widowed, she and her eight-year-old daughter, Asha,

197 now live with Karan in a Delhi slum. He is guilt-ridden by his rapaciousness, but persists nonetheless, molesting his granddaughter and betraying his political mentor to save his own skin in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. Though Sharma managed to win the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates for this novel, it was a difficult book for the average Indian reader to digest. Sharma tried to give a slice of contemporary Indian life to his western readers, and tried to make the monstrosity of Ram Karan as a believable and down to earth reality in our contemporary lives. Thus the book became heavy towards the end when Sharma tried to keep his reader within the range of forgiveness and compassion as Ram awaits his overdue punishment. The western readers appreciated his book because they thought it was giving an authentic picture of globalized India where corruption, bribery, and sexual aberrations are rampant.

Now after a long gap of thirteen years, a really long gestation period for his second novel to see the light of day, Akhil Sharma has come in the news in a big way with the publication of his new book Family Life: A Novel. He is receiving praises from all quarters. He is being hailed as a “supreme storyteller”(Philadelphia Inquirer); for his “cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived” fiction (New York Times); he is said to be possessed of a narrative voice “as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoevsky” (The Nation); he has written of the Indian immigrant experience with great empathy and complete lack of sentimentality. Some of his fellow novelists have also showered praises upon him. Kiran Desai calls him the “most unsentimental writer [who] leaves the reader finally and surprisingly moved”, Mohsin Hamid feels that his “unsentimentality has the effect of making his writing uncommonly touching” and Edmund White thinks it is “a nearly perfect novel.” So what’s the novel about?

Family Life is the story of an Indian family that immigrates to America in the late 1970s as part of the first large wave of Indian immigration to the US. At the beginning of the novel we meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight year old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. They come for the opportunities that the country offers for the family’s two children. America to the Mishra’s is indeed, everything they could have imagined and more; when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them.

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At first everything they hope for occurs: the older of the two sons gets into the Bronx High School of Science. Soon, though, after they have been in the country for two years, their extraordinary family suffers a tragedy: the older son Birju dives into the swimming pool, strikes his head on the bottom of the pool, is knocked unconscious, and remains underwater for three minutes. When he is pulled out, he is severely brain damaged. Ajay has been constantly overshadowed by Birju, who is doted on by their mother, Shuba; there is the inherent sibling rivalry, but everything changes when Birju is confined to a hospital bed and has to wear a hospital mask for the rest of his life. The rest of the story takes a strange turn when Mr. Mishra turns alcoholic fighting legal tussles with the insurance companies and his wife who believes in faith healing is revered by streams of visitors as news of the mother’s saintly blessing spreads across communities. This is the opportunity for Sharma to sell some exotica to the west. Akhil Sharma’s pre-determined and targeted readership becomes clearer towards the end of the novel when he makes Ajay resort to the typical Horatio Alger myth of the American Dream of Success. He is now an investment banker making seven hundred thousand dollars and finds it hard to spend the money. He even gifts a quarter million dollars to his mother on her sixtieth birthday. But apart from this make-believe ambience, the novel, written in lucid prose, is also a good coming of age story of an Indian immigrant in the west. Certain descriptions of incidents in Ajay’s adolescent life are very touching and down to earth. We empathize with him when he is uncertain about his future and wants to be a writer and get famous like Ernest Hemingway. We understand his plight when he goes through the typical mental turmoil of an immigrant and says: “Standing there I had the sudden realization that probably we would never go back to India, that probably we would live in America for ever. The realization disturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone (98).” Though almost everything in this first person narrative is true and autobiographical, Sharma calls it a novel instead of a memoir because he believes that a memoir is nonfiction and non-fiction has to be absolutely true. In the novel, though, things do not occur in the order that he describe them as occurring in. There are also many things which he says that he left out which were important to his formation. He confessed to Mohsin Hamid that “the novel is about a child in a claustrophobic family turning into a self -- and about the grown-up going back and trying to figure out what happened. This as you know is a traditional thing for a modernist novel to do. I would compare Family Life to The Way of All Flesh, for example, or to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was inspired by The Way of All Flesh. But to me it is also the story of my generation of Indian Americans. My sense is that this is

199 something new: a rigorous modernist novel of the childhood self that deals specifically with the Indian immigrant experience.” As a novel, Family Life is definitely a marked improvement upon An Obedient Father. Sharma has stated that he found it very difficult to write the book and also feels as if he has ‘shattered’ his ‘youth’ on it. Now it is for the Indian readers to judge the merits and demerits of this new novel and opine whether this Indian diasporic novelist is doing justice in the depiction of his motherland or the prodigal son is betraying her to earn a few dollars more. Back to table of contents

The Age of Shiva Manil Suri Bloomsbury/Penguin, 2008; 454 pages ------It is a matter of peculiar distress to many Indian bibliophiles that most of the successful Indian books of the past few decades have not only been written in English but authored by Indians, or the children of Indians, living outside the country. “Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex, and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?” wondered novelist Amit Chaudhuri in the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Yes, wrote Salman Rushdie in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing. As a representative Indian diasporic writer he has very successfully coined the phrase

200 relating to the intermingling of memory and imagination of the home country as “Indias of the mind.” Now, more than a quarter of a century after Midnight’s Children came out, diasporic Indian fiction in English continues to be assailed with questions such as whether they are being authentic to their culture or commodifying it for the benefit of foreign publishers, markets and readership. To add to that, apart from the incredible amount of advances received by some of these writers, pre-publication excerpts, book reading and launching tours by the authors themselves, other aggressive marketing strategies have all received attention from readers and critics alike.

The book that has raised all these issues again is written by an expatriate Indian writer who hasn’t lived in India for more than twenty years, a mathematics professor in the US by profession, and though the book is entirely Indian in its theme and content, the issue whether a writer living outside India forfeits his right to comment on behalf of an entire nation or not still remains unresolved. When Manil Suri's first novel, The Death of Vishnu, was published in 2001, it was universally celebrated as a literary phenomenon. Winning several literary awards and translated into twenty-two languages, it was an insightful, lyrical and real life portrait of the inhabitants of a Bombay apartment building which centered around Vishnu, a homeless man who laid dying in the hallway. Time Magazine proclaimed Suri a "Person to Watch," and praised Vishnu's "eerie and memorable transcendence"; Michael Gorra, in his cover review in The New York Times Book Review, observed that the book "[reminded] me of the work of an earlier writer, the deliberately modest and beautifully constructed novels of R. K. Narayan".

In several interviews that he gave around that time, Suri stated that one of the pleasures of writing the novel had been the opportunity to study the rich store of wisdom and beauty embodied in the mythology and religious texts of Hinduism. He also promised a trilogy with Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma in the title. “The goal will not be to write treatises on Hinduism, but create narratives and characters that throb with the spirit of what each deity represents. Shiva, for instance, is not only the destroyer but also the ascetic, and since he is unattainable, this asceticism makes him an erotic figure. The second novel will therefore involve characters who experience unrequited attraction, set against the backdrop of Shiva exercising his tremendous power of purification. To renew the cycle will be regeneration as represented by Brahma.”

Now seven years later, The Age of Shiva is Suri's follow-up to that remarkable debut, a novel that captures the sweep of Indian history from the time of partition until 1981. Setting the locale of the story simultaneously in Delhi and

201 in Bombay --the latter city being that of the novelist’s own birth and growing up—Suri continuously juxtaposes incidents taking place simultaneously in the personal and micro level as well as the political and macro level of India. Beginning a few years after the Partition it traces the country’s advancement through Nehruvian socialism of the 1950’s decade, the Chinese aggression of 1962, the Indo Pak skirmish in 1965, the Emergency declaration by Indira Gandhi, the political experiments of the Janata Dal of Jayaprakash Narayan, with the extreme right wing agenda of the RSS (here in the book ficticiously termed the HRM); up to the liberation of Bangladesh in 1981 (the time that the author migrated to the United States). With such a sweeping political canvas as the background, the novel is also richly layered with themes from Hindu mythology. It is both a powerful story of a country in turmoil and an extraordinary portrait of maternal love. In it, India's birth as a new nation parallels a woman's complex psychological journey confronting tradition and modernity.

Narrated in the first person by the woman protagonist called Meera, a mother tells the story of her life and times in great details, and by the end of the novel, we pass through several facets of her life – as a young girl growing up in Rawalpindi till the partition brings her to her father’s upper-middle class household in Delhi; as a lover of her sister’s boyfriend Dev who aspires to become a famous playback singer and with whom she has a stormy physical relationship thus leading to a hasty marriage; as a wife after her marriage to Dev and resettlement in the lower middle class surroundings of her husband’s joint- family home in Nizamuddin railway colony where she has to share a room with her ogling brother in law Arya and his wife Sandhya. Meera first finds solace in Sandhya, her tender-hearted sister-in-law, whose inability to bear Arya a child leads to tragic consequences; and finally her isolating shift to Bombay where according to her father’s wishes she has to enroll in college once again and leave it unceremoniously. Her role as a wife undergoes a massive change with the birth of a son who serves as the fulcrum for a relationship marked by a dangerous mixture of jealousy and desire. Guided and financially supported by her rich father from Delhi, Meera finds life more problematic when her husband’s dream of becoming a singer never materializes and ultimately leads him to acute frustration, degeneration, drinking bouts, and death. In the meantime, Meera receives her consummate source of comfort: her baby boy, Ashvin. As Dev's career falters, Meera's hopes shift completely to her son. She dotes on her beloved Ashvin with such an intensity of feeling that it strains the boundaries of love between mother and son. Their relationship tests the truth of Paji's saying that: "to be a parent is to be guilty." Then comes the phase of widowhood, eroticist, and finally, a friend and mother whose over-possessiveness towards her son leads to dismay and despair. After Ashvin leaves for boarding school at

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Sanawar, Meera undergoes the broken nest syndrome and, unable to cope with her loneliness, decides to commit suicide. She is, of course, ultimately saved in the penultimate moment by Zaida, her Muslim neighbour and friend who undergoes more mental torture than Meera.

Suri’s style often verges on the level of a docu-drama. Told in simple language without any glossary or unnecessary desi words, the novelist manages to balance sensual beauty and visceral reality with ease. The opening paragraphs, in which a mother breast-feeds her son and carries on a conversation with him, touch upon one of Suri’s concerns in the novel:

“Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body. Ashvin. Do you know how tightly you shut your eyes as with your lips you search my skin? Do you know how you thrust your feet towards me, how you reach out your arms, how the sides of your chest strain against my palms?…Ashvin. Your eyes still closed, drops of moisture dappling your nose. Do you know how innocent you look, how helpless, as I guide the nipple towards your mouth?”

Addressing seminal questions about motherhood, Suri tries to probe into its meaning by indulging in a strange relationship between a mother and her son that often verges between innocence, guilt and erotic overtones, highly reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence’s works. Suri has also conjured a world of terrific promise and terrible fear in the novel. He draws from the Shiva-Parvati myth to add extra-poignancy to the story of Meera and Ashvin, who carries within him (as explained elsewhere in the novel) both Vishnu and Shiva. Like a mathematical quiz, Suri tells us to rearrange the first five letters in Ashvin’s name to get Shiva, then replace the letter A with U and it becomes an anagram of Vishnu. The themes and contradictions in Hindu mythology (most notably of Shiva, known as a deity with both destructive and transformative power) mirror the adult life of Meera, a riveting, unpredictable protagonist with a stubborn desire to follow her own path through the male-dominated landscape of post-colonial India. The presence of powerful men is a shadow cast upon Meera's life.

Like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and several other novels based on the city, Suri gives us authentic details of Bombay throughout the novel. The Chowpatti Beach, the recording studios where Dev works, the rallies on the streets, the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, the inter-religious relationships between Hindu and Muslim families living in the same apartment

203 building, et al. Similarly Suri’s selective eye does not miss the authentic details of the sections narrating incidents taking place in Delhi – Darya Gunj, Chandni Chowk, Connaught Place, Nizamuddin. The details of the Karwa Chauth festival, the emergence of a refrigerator, a gramophone, a pressure cooker in Dev’s house as part of the wedding dowry are so realistic and Indian that it does not strike us as special at all. It would therefore be no exaggeration to state that leaving aside Sashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (which told us the Mahabharata story in modern times), Suri’s novel is in the true sense another ‘Great Indian Novel’ both in theme and content.

Thus, at once a bold departure from his best-selling debut and a continuation of its captivating themes and settings, The Age of Shiva will surely confirm Manil Suri's reputation as a novelist of singular talent and imagination. He claims that writing has been a way for him to escape the horror of being a mathematician. Like many writers who had to endure the series of rejection slips before their creativity saw the light of day, Suri’s writerly craft has also been polished through creative writing workshops with authors like Michael Cunningham, Jane Bradley and Vikram Chandra. It is probably this polishing that enables us to glide through the four hundred and fifty plus pages of the novel with ease and curiosity. All Suri fans will now patiently wait for the third part of his intended trilogy, The Birth of Brahma, to see the light of day.

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The Lives of Others Neel Mukherjee Penguin Random House India, 2014. Rs. 599/- 516 pp.

------

In spite of being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 and getting high praises from novelists like Amitav Ghosh, A.S. Byatt, Anita Desai, Patrick Flannery and others, he missed it by a whisker. Neel Mukherjee, the new kid on the British South Asian (read Bengali from Kolkata) Diaspora block had really toiled very hard to impress his readers with a story set in Kolkata and simultaneously in the different districts of West Bengal and spanning a timeline of three years, 1967to 1970 to be exact.

Beginning with a family history of the Ghoshes who reside in a big four-storey mansion in Basanta Bose Road, Mukherjee gives us ample information about how apparently this joint family of twenty (including the long-serving servants) begin to live their lives without hiccups or mishaps but soon subterranean conflicts, differences, etc. Keep on cropping up. This is nothing exceptional as questions like if all the brothers contribute equally, why should the eldest brother be getting preferential treatment in the family probably occurs in the minds of many members living in a joint family set-up. In this Ghosh family, we have the eldest brother performing the role of the traditional patriarch, and the ups and downs in the different businesses they own determine the fate and fortune of the family. Discrimination within the members occur when the widow of the younger brother is forced to live miserably with her children in a damp, ground floor room while the other wives enjoy prosperous lives. Among the other members we find a young college-going girl having a secret love affair with a local boy not of their own caste, a young unmarried aunt whose dark skin 205 prevented her from getting married at the prime time of her life and now lives with all her occasional mood swings and tantrums, the sisters-in-law vying with each other in their possession of saris and jewellery, a faithful servant who knows no other home and who has to pay a very heavy price in the end when he is wrongly dismissed and jailed for theft of the family jewels. There are even secret sexual trysts among a couple of members. The ageing patriarch and matriarch of the family remain unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. The plot and the characters are so true to life that any middle class Bengali reader who has grown up in a joint family or witnessed one at close quarters will be able to identify themselves with.

Apart from the stereotypical characters, we have two young college-going young brothers called Supratik and Suranjan and their lives flow in absolutely opposite directions. Whereas Suranjan becomes a drug addict and leads a wasted life, the novelist develops an alternative narrative within the novel when the chapters alternate in a different font and gives us a first person narration by Supratik, the other brother. As a Communist activist from his first year at Presidency College, Supratik, like many other young students who got inspired after reading The Little Red Book, became part of the movement that rocked Presidency and genteel Bengali society in those six months in 1966 and 1967. Aware of the wide chasm that exists between those who have and those who have not, and wanting to become an activist and not only follow the idealism that comes from books, he leaves home secretly and goes to the villages to organize the landless peasants, share-croppers, wage-labourers and impoverished tenants into armed struggle. He even does not hesitate to steal his aunt’s jewellery to finance his terrorism and lets the honest servant Madan bear the brunt of it. Through his diary-like narrative we get a detailed description of how the Naxalite movement functioned and how in the end it fizzled out when a lot of the young members lost their lives in police encounters.

The novel is about many things, including the limits of empathy and the nature of political action. It asks how we imagine our place among others in the world. Can that be re-imagined? And at what cost? There are two epilogues that occur at the end of the man story which try to retain a sort of optimism and suggest that everything is not over. The first one locates Swarnendu Ghosh (who was a shy school-going kid in the novel) as a recluse Indian mathematics professor at Stanford University who has won several prizes but nevertheless radiating with an innocence which the world has not been able to touch. He still lives with his widowed mother, who came over to join him shortly after he was offered his teaching position in the Faculty at a very young age. Epilogue II is set in September 2012 which narrates the proliferation of the Naxalite movement

206 throughout eastern India and young Maoist activists, both men and women, are still busy carrying subversive activities to suggest that that their fight against the authoritarian regime is far from over.

All said and done, the neo-orientalist agenda of the author is very clearly revealed in this book. As the new avatar of Orientalism the discursive practices about the Orient by the people from the Orient and located in the non-Orient is a recent trend in Indian English writing. The west determines the agenda and camouflages the discourse about the Orient as ‘rethinking’ or ‘reconstruction’ and attracts and persuades Oriental scholars to be part of it. When Jhumpa Lahiri published The Lowland in 2013 devoting a major part of the novel to Kolkata of the 1960’s and the Naxalite movement, she had received criticism from several quarters for giving us a watered down version of the actual movement and though she mentioned several reference books, she was labelled as an outsider not conversant with the actual state of affairs. In Neel Mukherjee’s case, as someone who grew up in Kolkata but presently residing in London, the situation is a little different. Though he has done his homework better than Lahiri and given much more elaborate details of the Naxalite movement, especially through the diary entries of the character called , reading through the details of those sections in the book also reminds us of the deliberate neo-Orientalist effort he has made to give his readers the history of the movement (something which he too did not witness first hand as he was probably not even born then or was too young to remember anything).The result is that the book with more than five hundred pages hangs under its own weight of too many details losing the ‘what- happened-next’ spirit to sustain the readers’ interest.

Mukherjee’s narrative style is engrossing and one is amazed how he managed to pay so much attention to intricate details of middle class Bengali life. Like many contemporary Indian writers in English his text is also full of Bangla words and phrases and the extensive glossary at the end of the book points out his aim at capturing the hearts of non-Bengali, pan-Indian and western readers. But one cannot pardon him for explaining the word jaa as husband’s older sister in the note especially provided on names and relations. As someone who grew up in a joint family in Kolkata during these turbulent years and witnessed the Naxalite movement first-hand, this reviewer found a lot of the descriptions too well known and it seems many of the readers of the novel will feel the same. But it is worth the read nevertheless.

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A Mirror Greens in Spring Selina Sen New Delhi: India Ink/Roli Books, 2007; 305 pages; Rs. 295.00 ------Ever since handsome money is being awarded through different literary prizes, trying to hit the jackpot has resulted in the emergence of many new writers, some of them deviating for a while from their matter-of-fact practical world of reportage to the illusory and imaginative world of fiction. Likewise, at the beginning of her debut novel A Mirror Greens in Spring, Selina Sen acknowledges how her son kept her going through the various drafts with tales of J.K. Rowling’s rags to riches story.

After the partition of India, Delhi witnessed a large-scale migration both from Punjab and Bengal and these diverse refugee cultures brought in issues of identity, displacement and resettlement to the forefront. This runs as a distinct motif throughout the novel. The story begins with the contrast between two sisters in an immigrant Bengali family, victims of an internal diaspora, growing up in the EPDP Colony at Chittaranjan Park. Chhobi, the elder is sensitive and intelligent and is forever trying to rein in the beautiful and narcissistic Sonali. Though shabbily dressed, she is smart enough to earn a living by writing articles on the style of Delhi’s monuments and in the end is rewarded by an American university scholarship to pursue her doctoral degree. Sonali on the other hand falls in love with a rich, handsome and arrogant Punjabi boy called Sonny Talwar, who uses his red Datsun to lure her into a picnic seduction and then dumps her to marry the bride of his parents’ choice. After her thwarted love affair, Sonali marries Karan, a cousin of Sonny, who works in a merchant shipping company

208 but soon loses his job. He is then forced to accept another job in one of the Talwar ships with questionable and somewhat sinister business ethics. The other important character is that of Ma, their mother who struggles with her loneliness after being widowed in her thirties. The close-knit Bengali family unit also comprises of the grandparents – Dida, the feisty grandmother and real matriarch of the household whose indomitable spirit and culinary skills prod the family on during times of adversity, and Dadu, thrown out as an army doctor, a man perpetually homesick for his estates, still living in the nostalgia of his erstwhile homeland in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, and often dreaming of a silvery shining tributary of the Brahmaputra river – a river “always lapping at the edges of his consciousness” and carrying him back to the “spring tides of his life.”

Though borrowing the title from Mirza Ghalib, Sen includes historical facts by locating the story in 1984, a year which marked the end of an era in New Delhi, a city simmering with ethnic strife during the anti-Sikh riots consequent to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. This cataclysmic public event is juxtaposed with the disappearance of the ship in which Sonali’s husband works and hence provides the reason for writing about gun-running, LTTE activities, conspiracies, characters in diplomatic service, etc. [The writer claims that although the vanishing of the two ships is based on a real-life incident that took place in 1985, all other events and characters, except for the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi and the ensuing anti-Sikh riots, are completely fictional.] The story is further padded up with real estate sharks prying on weak landowners, local boys of the club who are always helping out the Bengali family in moments of crisis, and good-for nothing nosey neighbours who are highly stereotyped and predictable in their words and deeds.

Sen has also managed to intersperse the story with the right amount of exotica and Indianness through detailed recipes of some Bengali dishes and culture- specific words (obviously unglossed and non-italiczed) like jalkhabar, kadamba trees, beel, dhenki, dhonkar dalna, panch phoron etc.( some of them explained in too much intricate details, obviously with a non-Bengali western readership in mind). Verses from ’s Geeta Govinda and the Chandipatha thus share space with Ghalib’s ghazals, and verses from on the Gaiety Theatre at Simla [a place where the author did her schooling, of course]. But why Goddess Durga is described as ‘Maheshasura’ and not ‘Mahishasura’ remains unexplained. Sen also has taken great pains to juxtapose the cultured Bengalis with the crude Punjabis and at the same time trace the gradual erosion of old values and acceptance of new identities.

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As a debut novel the book shows a lot of hard work and background research, trying to put the best of everything often to unnecessary details. The language is lucid. If one can overlook some of the moralistic overtones and predictable pattern of the story line, the book will be another interesting addition to contemporary Indian fiction in English.

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Kalikatha Via Bypass Alka Saraogi New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2002, Rs. 295/- 295 pages ------The story begins in 1997 with a seventy year old man. Kishore Babu jay walking the streets of Calcutta and ends in the typical O'Henry style on the first day of January of this new millennium in front of the Victoria Memorial where this same man arrives to keep his promise made to two of his friends several decades ago. The promise to meet in front of Queen Victoria's statue (even if the Queen was there no more) had deep resonance and since all three of them would become seventy-five years old, the trio could head for sanyas together. In between, through fourteen chapters, Kishore Babu, born in 1925, wanders back to his schooldays, to the days of his great-grandfather Ramvilas Babu who migrated from Bhiwani in Rajasthan and settled in Calcutta, to the great famine of 1942, the great Calcutta Killing, the political machinations of Hitler and Nehru, the Freedom Movement, the times of Clive, Sirajadaulah, Mir Jafar and mid-18th century Bengal, the friendship that the Marwari business community developed with the English sahibs like Teggart and Hamilton, and the nationalistic associations that his friend Shantanu got involved with.

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This a-chonological fashion of narration, this free movement of time and space is made possible, we are told, because Kishore Babu has sustained a head injury due to negligence during his heart bypass surgery, and in a typical postcolonial fashion therefore, does not have any difficulty in crossing borders and boundaries. He “wishes" to have a part inhis story writtenwithout any predetermined form.” Even at the risk of the story straying too far, he proposed to narrate it "with the same words, form, flavour, and fragrance with which it had come tohim. In a typical pest-modernfashion he even talks about the self- reflexivity of the narrative form-"What kind of a story would it be that doesn't allow the reader to stray beyond the frame of the story itself?" (162) Thus, as the protagonist wanders the bylanes of reminiscence, recalling the loves and labours of his ancestors and his son, heevokes an authentic and detailed portrait of an entire community –the community of Marwaris who like migratory birds left their native desert land. The novelis alsothe story of a cityin its minutest details - the Calcutta of the British Raj, the Calcutta with its Burrabazar and Ballygunj, with its traffic jams and political dharnas.

Kalikatha: ViaBypass is Alka- Saraogi's first novel and it won the Srikant Verma and the Sahitya Akademi awards. The title signals a multilingual, multicultural subject and point of view."Kalikatha” refers not only to the old name for the city of Calcutta. It is also meant as a pun on a tale of kaliyuga- the last yuga according to the Puranas- the epoch of vices. Similarly, "bypass" remains a keyword to the novel, indicating the zeitgeist of our times - that of finding ways out of a problem rather than confronting it. Kishore Babu's bypass takes him face to face with those situations, which he has successfully managed to bypass so far. But at the same time, it makes his a vagabond, a misfit in society, a man who starts questioning the basic conservative tenets of his community, of his relatives who seem to be intoxicated by the prospect of earning more and more money. Considered as a kind of Shakespearean fool whose wisecracks often make moresense than the most knowledgeable man, it is easy for Kishore Babu (said to be in thethird stage of his life) to make candid statements and observations now. He does notbatter an eyelid to tell us that his Mama had no use for the high-flown ideals of servingthe country by not helping the English, nor any concern for Gandhi-Nehru rotting in jail. “All that matters to them is minting money.” Thus the more he is perturbed about thequestionof dowry, about the non-descript lives that the Marwari women live, jailed athome all day, the more disturbed his wife becomes. She does not know whether to consult any pandit or any doctor and is unable to comprehend the fine philosophicalquestions that makes her husband tread the line between sanity and insanity.

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An engrossing novel though it is, Kalikatho: Via Bypass is not without its disappointments, of course. Though there is no perfect way of translating a text, one expected a little more finesse on the part of the author, especially when she was confident that it was she who would be able to do justice to her novel. She claimed that she had "rewritten" most of it and even though Saraogi admitted in the acknowledgements section of the book that her self-translation was faulty, what with her "little confidence in [her] Hinglish," certain grammatical errors and faulty literal translations could have been avoided. Phrases like the "weekly schedule of the his classes" (l73); "the British have broken the back of Bengal"(202); "Kishore Babu was put in mind of a three-month-old foetus"(247); "Perhaps it her fate"(242); or "making a flag out of the front of your sari'' (264) definitely lowers the charm of reading a SahityaAkademi winning novel. Also, it was not expected of the author - what with her excellent historical research on Bengal - to call the most expensive and the best mango that was particularly liked by the nawabs of Murshidabad "Kohinoor" instead of "Kohitoor". In spite of all its drawbacks, any Calcutta-lover would definitely love not only to read but to possess a copy of this novel.

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Pervez: A Novel Meher Pestonji Harper Collins India, 2003. 318 pp, Rs 295/------The storyline is simple. A young Parsi girl growing up in a rich Marine Drive home (aptly named Sagar Mahal) in cosmopolitan Mumbai has a terrible crush for a Goan musician who somehow makes a living by singing in night clubs, and in the typical filmi style elopes with him, becomes a Christian to marry him, and settles down in idyllic Goa in a lower middle class family. It takes eight years for 212 this 29 year old woman to realize that Frederick, her husband, has lost interest in her and that in spite of learning to eat with her hands and cook and sew, she cannot take her “de-classing” forever.

After wallowing in self pity and filling several diaries full of poems written in the solitary beaches of Goa, she comes back to Mumbai to her rich brother's house but lives off her own inheritance. It is from this point that the education of Pervez really begins. Enrolling for a Master’s course at the university, she starts moving with her socialist friends who try to teach her what reality actually is.

Moving in and out of her posh home, she starts her socialist education and political maturation by living in a middle class flat in Kalina, trying to savour the best of both the worlds. She starts visiting the slums of Dharavi and getting to know what political activism really means. This intensifies with the demolition of the Babri Masjid, when Bombay faces one of the worst riots in its history. Soon Pervez finds herself confronting fundamental beliefs regarding social privilege, justice, religion and secularism. By questioning the neutral stance of a Parsi in a Hindu-Muslim feud, she wants to remain the objective observer and commentator on all the ill doings of society. By the time the narrative ends, her education is complete, she has found ground beneath her feet, and as a new woman, tries to motivate her young students to work for humanitarian causes and preach tolerance to mankind.

As autobiographical as debut novels usually are, Pervez is written with compassion and the conviction of belief of a freelance journalist who participated in several social campaigns which included the changing of rape laws in the 70s, the struggle for slum dwellers’ housing rights, children's rights, anti-communalism campaigns and detailed reporting on the Srikrishna Commission instituted to investigate the Mumbai riots. In a 1999 interview Pestonji called herself an accidental Parsi," and stated that being a Parsi and a journalist were two different things, resulting in a split in her thinking and in her identity.

It is this split that is carried forward in this novel and makes its narrative framework rather weak. By constantly juxtaposing characters and incidents from the two strata of society - those of her brother and sister-in-law and their friends, and the down-to-earth men and women who find it very difficult to make both ends meet - the novelist often becomes too naïve and simplistic in her descriptions. For instance, in order to project Goa as an other-worldly place full of poor yet happy-go-lucky people, she tells us that Pervez could not be informed of her father's death in time because her house did not have a telephone connection, and this is after 1984! Yet, in another instance she tells us that she

213 learnt in Goa that ironing once a week saves electricity. Moreover, though growing up in a rich cosmopolitan society in Bombay, she unconvincingly comes back from Goa with the manners of a village rustic.

Again, apart from real life politicians like Bal Thackeray, LK Advani and others, the fictional characters are all stereotyped - the young Muslim boy who loves a Hindu girl, the dependent aunt who survives on charities, the ever-suffering friend Naina who lives together with Siddharth, the socialist with too much of idealism, the repentant husband of Pervez who wants to mend his manners and come back to her, the young model Vandana who would like to turn rich overnight by doing nude modelling, the wily hotel owner Chawla who lures the naïve Pervez with a job and who is taught a lesson by her later. Thus, in spite of her most sincere efforts to juxtapose real life incidents with a made-up tale, the novel at times becomes either too unnatural or too didactic. Very often, the journalistic sections and the romantic sojourns of the protagonist do not jell. There are several weak sections in the narrative, especially the very places where Pestonji appears to take for granted the naïvete of her readers and starts explaining what Hindutva is, who the Dalits are, how the Parsis conduct special ceremonies, what the agenda of the kar sevaks was, how the song "We shall overcome" was taken from the black protest movement in America, and so on.

Apart from this, the contrived epilogue seems a deliberate attempt on the part of Pestonji to educate her readers on the correctness of the Godhra massacre. Shifting the locale of her earlier narrative by a great jump of ten years is too contrived. Further, as in the earlier sections of the novel, her desperate attempt to give us all the data she had collected as a journalist takes its toll on the storyline.

However, even a carping reviewer must not end with blame. The final word about this novel must be praise - for its many interesting departures from standard debut novels. Though it cannot be compared with the writings of Rohinton Mistry, it is a thought-provoking work; written with compassion and. the conviction of belief.

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Sleepwalkers Joginder Paul Translated by Sunil Trivedi & Sukrita Paul Kumar Delhi: Katha Publications, 2001 ------The partition of the Indian subcontinent was the single most traumatic experience in our recent history. It has given rise to a plethora of tales, the number of which is steadily on the rise. Most of the stories in this genre of fiction transcend time and space, demolish racial and cultural barriers, and harp upon the universal themes of pain, anguish, and trauma of separation. They have more todo with the actualities of human experiences than with ideologies. Joginder Paul's novella, Sleepwalkers, is one such story. First published as Khwabrauin Urdu in Lahore in 1990, itwas made available to Indian readers in monthly instalments in the journal Shair before the publication of the first Indian edition in 1991. Now this excellent translation makes it possible for the non-Urdu-speaking reader to appreciate the story.

The protagonist of the story is Deewane Maulavi Sahab, who like the other mohajirs migrated from Lucknow to Karachi after the partition of the country, but transported the entire city "within the folds oftheir hearts.'' While the other mohajirs hadcreated another Lucknow in Karachi, he believed that he continued to live in the old Lucknow, just as before. The problem that the mohajirs in Karachi face is that theyare compelled to remain mohajirs in spite of being permanently settled there. One or two of them were shocked intoinsanity and thus freed of these worries. But Deewane Maulavi Sahab does not feel the pain because he is a sleepwalker and finds security in the world of dreams. Others call him mad, but it is his-madness that helps him keep his sanity.Evenhis sons see 215 the oddity in him. But his wife tells them not to subject the old man to psychiatric treatment. "If he issane, it is because of his madness," she says. In a different context, she reinforces her understanding, "It would be very difficult for him to live outside his Dream." He ishappy in this world of self-induced amnesia -"Nomatter where he went, his journey was always from Lucknow to Lucknow"- and concludes that he has not moved away from his roots. His living in the past is also reinforced by the fact that he feels his wife Acchi Begum still looks as she did when he'd brought her home as a bride. She too helps her husband live within his make- believe world and tells her son, "If oureyes can discover our past by digging into this land, what is the harm?"

The other characters in the story also suffer from cultural alienation and the pangs of diasporic existence in their own individual ways. Nawab Mirza, the old man's elder son does not fully understand his younger brother Ishaq Mirza, who was born and educated in Karachi and married a Sindhi girl despite stiff opposition from his family. His exile and separation from 'Lucknow' caused frequent seizures of his mother Achhi Begum. But he has always been aware of the trick that contemporary history has played with the mohajirs. He knows too well the reality of the myth of the Indian Lucknow in Karachi.The Sindhi cook of the family also feels alienated in his own peculiar sort of way because he was forced to move from Sindh to Karachi and hence feels like a refugee in his own country. He tells Deewane Maulavi Sahab, “I have no home, no neighbourhood, no bonds with the past or future ... I am virtually a Mohajir."

Since memory and oblivion play such important roles in the story, a non-linear narrative technique is all but expected. Also, memory is art's alternative to history. But Joginder Paul manages to introduce a sharp tum in the story when the old man, the sleepwalker, is woken up from his paradise by a bomb blast in Nawab Mahal in which his beloved wife, his eldest son and daughter in law lose their lives. We find that the madman is no longer mad. He weeps bitterly on the shoulders of his Sindhi cook and comes out of his madness to suddenly discover, after all these years, that he is in fact in Karachi. The nature of his madness changes. He feels homesick to return to 'his' Lucknow. "I have seen Karachi tomy heart's content,"he tells his IshaqMian. "Send me back to my Lucknow." The story ends on a particular day when the old man is once again taken over by his obsession to go back to his Achhi Begum in Lucknow and is adamant about his departure. Packing up his bags, he tells his young grandson Salim,

"Get ready. Beta. We are going today. " "Going where, Bade Ahbu?" “To Lucknow, Beta! To ourLucknow.”

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Salim fails to understand which Lucknow his Bade Abbu is talking about. Chasing his ball, he runs off saying, "But this is Lucknow, Bade Abbu!" For the boy, his roots are right there at Karachi, but not so for the old man.

The epilogue "On Writing Sleepwalkers," is interesting because it provides the background of conceiving such a tale. A visit to Lahore in the mid-eighties made Joginder Paul realize that "the situation itself is the meaning that inspired [him] to attempt the novella." He candidly admits, "Suffer did I no less than Deewane Maulavi Sahab, the suffering having driven the old man out of his wits, and me to an insanepursuit of premature sanity." The universality of the theme is also harped upon when the author narrates how a German Indologist burst into tears after reading the story, managing to say between sobs, "But this is my story. This is the story of all of us living oneither side of the Berlin wall." Though the wall has come down, the mental barriers still remain.

In his introduction to an anthology of partition stories Alok Bhalla divides them into four categories, namely those which are communally charged; stories of anger and negation; stories of lamentation and consolation; and stories of the retrieval ofmemories. In Sleepwalkers the last two categories overlap and the writer succinctly perceives, explores and comprehends far reaching cultural and psychological truths inthe everyday, ordinary events of life. His declaration at the end of the epilogue, "I do believe I am no other than Deewane Maulavi Sahab of Khwabrau and, living here in lndia, I did experience every detail of his life in Pakistan." The occasional glossary and culture specificity of the story also transcends the limitations of translation.

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Rerun at Rialto Tom Alter Viking Penguin India, 128 pp, Rs 195/------For an actor, commentator, and compere whose penchant for writing articles in the sports columns of various magazines is well-known, Tom Alter in this debut novel tries to combine a mystery thriller, a nostalgia trip to his home town Mussoorie, where he was born and raised, combined with a sense of unreality exuded by film stories, songs and characters. Suffused with the charm and intimacy of the Indian hills, this is not only a detective story but also a tale ofmemory, the magic of old movies, and the oddness ofromance. Alter's protagonist, Allan Kohli, “a famous IG” of police based in Delhi, whose duty it is to “check up on what is really happening in this ever-changing world,” is somewhat troubled by a vague disenchantment in the middle of his life and finds himself back in Mussoorie one night. In the thirty years since he has left his hometown, Kohli had never gone back. But with the homecoming of the prodigal son, the rush of memoriesand nostalgia almost overwhelms him - the detailed smells and sights of his childhood hill town with the clock tower “where time has stood still” a la Ruskin Bond.

But a mystery, a possible crime, awaits him here too, centering around the disappearance of an attractive middle-aged woman while Mughal-e-Azam was playing at the local cinema. Working on instincts and with his great sense of order Kohli had earlier solved some of the most baffling crimes. But this time he too is overwhelmed by the memory of those young days when Madhubala and Dilip Kumar had them sobbing in their seats. Yet he ultimately proves that the message

218 of the theme song of that film “Zindabad, zindabad - aeimohabbatzindabad!” is even truer in life than in a film.

Well known that Alter is for his histrionic abilities, the Anglo-Indian upbringing of “AIlan baba” with his nostalgic longing for his ‘aloo-tikkis,’ cokes and ‘kaleji fries,’ seems like the writer, suffering from nostalgia and mid-life blues, speaking for himself. Moreover the smattering of plenty of desi words - fashionable with Indian Writers in English nowadays - lends a local flavour to the narrative. Speaking of which one must overlook theseveral loose ends of the story, although the writer tries to bring in the twist in the tangled tale of romance and mystery only after the corpse has been discovered and the case closed officially. Further, whatever romance we have in the story happens offstage.

Most of the characters are painful stereotypes. Kohli himself is the perfect bachelor who is so focused on his job that he has no time for love or family. He travels unannounced in jeans and jacket, or faded tracksuit, from police station to police station, town to town, dhaba to dhaba, and is confident that situations are always '”under his control.” But he has a sensitive soul under a rough-cop exterior; like all good two-dimensional policemen, his addiction to work is so strong as to leave hardly any time for romance. He had already learnt that the “paths and pagdandis” of his childhood were now “as unfaithful as Shashikala in those black-and-white movies.”

Then there is Chandu who works as the ticket checker at the newly reopened Rialto cinema, a staunch pahari with a heart of gold. The narrator continuously reminiscences about his goodness as to how he had helped the young schoolchildren with free entry to the movie hall every week. The other characters, like the police officer Khanna and his wife (who tries to latch a saheli of hers on to Kohli because “still unmarried at forty” she has never found “the perfect man"), Salim, the chaiwallah, Bhandari-kaka the projectionist, and the other Garhwali policemen, all fall in place.

Whatever lapses the detective part of the storyline might have is aptly compensated by the very neat production of this sleek volume which, accompanied by nine full-page sketches by Shalini Agarwal which are reminiscent of the illustrations of Satyajit Ray in his Feluda series. Not especially memorable as a whodunit, the book nevertheless manages to be an entertaining piece, suitable for an after dinner reading, as long as you remember that Tom Alter, himself a filmi hero, has a filmi story to tell.

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Danny Boy Jo-Ann Goodwin Bantam Press, £ 9.99

Starting to read a debut novel by a woman, one is instantly surprised at the content of the tale - a fresh and engaging look at the hellish drug and crime- infested underworld of contemporary urban English society. Set in Doncaster, the story revolves around the exploits of the 19 year old protagonist, Danny Macintyre, who along with his friends Dekka and Chico Latino, survives on a drug habit financed by expert thieving and a girlfriend on every street corner. As a typical case of having an alcoholic mother who single handedly brought him up, (the father having quit the very day his coming into this world was announced), Danny is a good-for-nothing boy who idles away his time with his good-for-nothing friends. "It was good to be out, money in me pocket, smack running in my blood, sitting with me marrers and the day to kill - no wonder the sun was shining." But then on a Tuesday afternoon beneath the overcast skies of sunny Donny, something very nasty happens. A strange-looking bundle is found floating on the oily surface of the canal. Mutilated beyond belief, the boy, whom they identify as their pal Teapot, did not die quickly. Danny recognises the handiwork of a man called Gibbsey and before the police would like to have a word with him, in “the time-honoured tradition of generations of Donny deadbeats,” he decides to escape for the time being to London.

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Thus begins the journey of our picaresque hero, who hits the London underworld looking for drugs and escape from Gibbsey and his satanic cohorts. A modern blend of Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn, Danny travels to the Nottingham suburbs “back on home turf, back among the badlands,” and then along with his two pals to London. Away from the land of his birth Danny keeps on wondering whether he is losing it. After several sets of adventures of winning and losing games and opportunities, like the classic anti-hero, he always manages to remain street-savvy in the end. Apart from the detailed description of the life- styles of drug-addicts and their activities in night clubs and pubs, Goodwin blends facts with fantasy in the form of this tale by reiterating upon the appearance of three characters who seem to be overseeing Danny’s escapades and whose off and on appearance guide the further course of his actions. One is a “fat bloke with a funny haircut” who keeps talking to him in riddles; the other one is a “tall, blond and worrying man (Mr Tall and Golden)” who is forever whispering things intoDanny's ears whenever necessary; and most significantly, there is the beautiful and alluring Eleanor, with “the moon at her feet and stars in her hair,” her face, “gentle and beautiful a-shining with the radiance of a thousand stars” who always appeared in front of him at crucial moments but receded like a dream the moment he wanted to get close to her.

Though not a killer, Danny is very self-centred, doing everything for his own pleasure. He is depicted as basically a good boy who is going through his “wild phase,” and though not a loveable hero, in the end manages to enamour the readers. An allegory for modern times, Danny Boy is in a way a kind of a morality play. Apart from the Catholic references that appear off and on – the scene where he goes into the church through a side door at night to see his dead girlfriend Regina lying in her coffin is interesting - the book addresses Danny's inconsiderate behaviour by taking away the things he treats poorly. Once the things are gone, he realiseshe has been taken advantage of. One moral problem with the book is that his egotistical bent is never addressed and everything in the book happens for his benefit. The allegorical tale ends literally in the tenth chapter.

In the concluding eleventh chapter of the novel, where Danny gives a sort of self-introduction, he admits his criminal records, pities that he can never have a decent career as a teacher, or a policeman or a civil servantbut he still longs to be a doctor, “a world-respected authority” and does not want to be “a crap and old and finished when I'm twenty two” with all his “glory days” well behind him. He still has his dreams, and likethe mayflies wants to get the most of life before it is all over- “you’ll live for another fifty years or so, but your life is over, cos

221 you’ve fallen back to earth, your wings all crushed and broken. And you know you'll never fly again.” This is an affirmative conclusion to this allegorical tale.

Despite the druggie context and the colloquialisms, the book is compelling and absorbing reading and in the end does not slip into the easy cynicism of crime and mystery fiction by so many other authors. The positive note with which Danny affirms that “there’s got to be some way out” and that he and his “chavs ... deserve better than what [they] have got coming” makes the difference. In fact, in a sort of strange way, Goodwin makes us love and care for the junkies she writes about.

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Chinese Mask, Indian Eyes: A Mysterious Tale of Kolkata Ananda Mohan Kar Sarat Book Distributors, Kolkata, 2013, 264pp, Rs.200.00 ------

This is the first English novel on the Chinatowns of Kolkata. A whodunit in the style of Saradindu’s Byomkesh Bakshi or Satyajit Ray’s Feluda stories, its aim is to entertain as well as to impart information on the subject and hence written with a lot of background research. In this fiction there are detectives, their clients, and of course villains. But the readers would be disappointed if they look for daring crimes on every page and defeat of the notorious criminals in the hands of a sleuth with supernatural ability. They will miss such ‘suspense’ and ‘thrill’ in this story. The main emphasis of the novel is on a brief description of the history and social life of a small cultural group – the Chinese Indian community – living in Kolkata. Though the Chinese are in the city for more than two centuries, many Indians do not have any idea about this diaspora community except that they 222 provide excellent gastronomical fare and are engaged in professions like dentistry and tannery business. In this respect the slim novel provides interesting reading and is an eye-opener about how the Chinese landed in Kolkata and settled down. A little more meticulous proof-reading and professional editing for grammatical slips would have been more befitting for the painstaking research that the sociologist author has devoted to arouse our interest in this lesser known area.

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Of Ghosts and Other Perils Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay Translated by Arnab Bhattacharya Orient Blackswan, 2013. pp.258. Rs. 425.00 ------For those of us who grew up during the pre-internet decades, apart from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Gulliver’s Travels or Alice in Wonderland among the staples of children’s books handed down to us by the elders were more home-grown Bengali volumes like Thakurmar Jhuli, Muktamala, Bhut O Manush and Damaru Charit. Interestingly, the last three volumes, authored by Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay were enjoyed by the adults with equal gusto as they transported the readers, old and young alike, into a world of fantasy, often a rustic, humorous world where subaltern characters ruled the roost. In essence all of them had that quintessential Bengali touch in them – a world of spinning yarns where epic characters, non-entities,

223 animals, ghosts and the like jostled for the same space in the pages of the books. And we devoured them with relish. Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s literary life started after retirement from government service in various capacities. Known as the best satirist of Bangla language in the nineteenth century, Troilokyanath (1847-1919) nourished Bengali prose when it was still in its early stage of development. His opium-inspired stories and gossips earned him a distinct place in Bengali literature. Each of the seven stories translated for this collection is a reader’s delight, especially for the author’s play with the language and attempt to create a magic realist mode. Though his writings had a didactic tone, they are remembered for their pure humour. For instance at the opening of the story “Birbala” the author instructs, “Reader, please read the story with understanding.” “Lullu”, in spite of its satirical and moralistic tone, is one of the best-known Bengali stories for the genuine reading pleasure it offers. From childhood the characters in this story including the ghost, Ghanghon, and others mesmerized our minds to a great extent with the inimitatable style of Troilokyanath. “Nayanchand’s Business,” “The Pearl Necklace” and “Smile on Madan Ghosh’s Face,” are unusual stories and the sketches added along with them enhances their appeal even further. In a story like “Nayanchand’s Business” we have a band of opium-eaters who develop emotional bonds during their adda sessions and it is reminiscent of many contemporary writing of the nineteenth century like Hutom Pyachar Naksha. In all of them the author deploys the familiar Indian narrative modes extensively. The last two translations in this anthology are taken from his eponymous Damaru Charit, a collection of humorous and satirical short stories that recount the life and times of the hero Domrudhar in colonial India. The protagonist Domrudhar is portrayed as a dishonest man who rises from a lowly shop-assistant to a land owner. “A Story by Damarudhar” and “Another Story by Damarudhar” also contain adda which fall into the majlish category and where Damarudhar is the addadhari. For instance, in the first story when Damaru claims to have sent a letter from the tiger’s belly to one of his employees requesting the latter to rescue him, Lambodhar, his confident, retorts, “Okay, I understand everything. But let me ask you [one] question, how could you sent that letter from within the tiger’s belly?” At the beginning of the second story, the narrator tells us that those who read the earlier episode concerning Damarudhar will come to this conclusion: Read Damaru’s tales with great devotion, And happily break free from birth’s cyclic motion. Hang Chitragupta, Yamani blows her conch-shell. Yama wrinkles up his nose at spinach’s smell. That Elokeshi’s gold jewels glitter none denies. With side-long glances, mother-in-law bats her eyes. 224

Buy these tales, and preserve at home Good fortune will flow from that tome.

“The tale that you are going to read now will yield similar results, rather, something more.” Today translation is no longer seen as an adjunct of literature, but has become a mode of critical engagement with literature, a process of ‘carrying across’ or ‘mirroring’ a text from the source language and culture into the receptor language and culture. A translator can have many strategies to enable the text’s movement from one language and culture to another, and be alert regarding the ‘perils’ involved in undertaking such a movement. Hence, both ‘text knowledge’ and ‘world knowledge’ become important realms to recreate, and the translator must choose strategies to evaluate the amount or the kind of knowledge to be shared with the target readers in terms of his familiarity with cultural traces embedded in different linguistic and cultural webs. In Troilokyanath’s case the translator has added a ten-page long glossary of all the non-English words and phrases used in the text even before beginning the actual stories. At the end of his introduction, the translator states that his primary task for translating these stories certainly is catering entertainment and sharing a magic world. But there is a secondary purpose which is not to be overlooked –“this book intends to stimulate research on Traoilokyanath.” That is why alongside a biographical foreword, the book includes a critical/theoretical afterword as well. When the translator had such a serious agenda to fulfil he should have been more meticulous in proof-reading. In the Foreword he states that Troilokyanath was born in 1847 (xi) and in page xv states that in 1833 he went to Europe. Such slips apart, the volume is well translated and has come out at the right moment when scholars are once again going back to roots, to the lesser known nineteenth century texts to highlight indigenous Bengali culture, not much tainted by the imposition of Macaulay’s Minutes on Education. It is a really interesting volume to read and preserve especially for those contemporary generation of urban Bengali and pan-Indian readers who cannot read the primary text in original.

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IV: MEMOIRS

Warrior in Pink Sari: The Inside Story of the Gulabi Gang Sampat Pal as told to Anne Berthod New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012; 207 pages ------In the year 2005, Oh! Editions in France published a French memoir of Mukhtaran Bibi (later known as Mukhtar Mai) of Pakistan, a woman who had been gangraped by four Mastoi tribesmen in her native village as an honour revenge but she survived to fight back against that patriarchal society. She is one of Pakistan’s prominent rights activists today but we got to know the details of her life story only after French women’s rights activists brought her case into international prominence and when the book was translated into English and many other foreign languages. A similar incident happened once again in 2008 when the same publishers published another book in French entitled Moi Sampat Pal: Chef De Gang En Sari Rose (2008) which is the recorded autobiography of Sampat Pal Devi, as told to a French journalist, Anne Berthod. The recent English translation of this book is the subject of this review and though an entirely desi story it comes to us via western media again. Urbashi Butalia of Zubaan books should be sincerely thanked for handing us the story of the rise and fame of Sampat Pal Devi, the founder of the famous ‘Gulabi Gang’.

People had read about Pal’s activities in pursuit of justice in many newspaper reports but her life story has to be read to be believed. Born to illiterate parents in a remote village of Kairi in the Banda District of Uttar Pradesh, she belongs to the low Gadaria caste, comprising of people who are keepers of livestock. She

227 did not go to school directly, but for two years secretly followed the boys of the village and sat outside practicing the Hindi alphabets that were being taught by copying them on the mud with her fingers. After that her parents moved away from that village to even a remoter place called Hanuman Dhara in the Chitrakoot highlands which did not have electricity, running water, let alone a school. As is customary of rural women of this backward region, she was married off at nine, went to live with her husband at twelve and had her first child at thirteen. As she had an independent mind she soon became a troublesome daughter-in-law and was ostracized by her in-laws. Moving away to live in dire poverty along with her illiterate husband and children, she became more determined in her mission of speaking out for the oppressed. In order to remain independent she set up a stand in the village selling bidis, betel nuts and a few vegetables. She then started sewing clothes and selling them and later opened a sewing school in order to make both ends meet. At first she started settling disputes in the villages where the caste rivalry was a common phenomenon bust soon she realized that things cannot be done alone. Her rebellious instincts, fervour for justice and her desire to free women from their everyday oppression led her to organize the women in and around her village into a gang. The region where Sampat Pal lives is one of the poorest districts in the country and is marked by a deeply patriarchal culture, rigid caste divisions, female illiteracy, domestic violence, child labour, child marriages and dowry demands. The women’s group was soon given the name ‘Gulabi Gang’ because the members were made to wear bright pink saris and wield bamboo sticks. The gang soon became a threat to every policeman who refused to file a report on violence against a Dalit, every husband who beats up his wife, and every goon who grabs land that does not belong to him. Sampat says, “We are not a gang in the usual sense of the term, we are a gang for justice.” It’s interesting to read her choice of the colour pink for their uniform. According to Pal pink is the colour of life. First she had to

reject the blue colour because it was the official colour of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the green and white as Congress representatives wore them. Yellow too was reminiscent of pundits and sadhus so the only colour left was pink, one that was commonly found but remained exclusive to women and was easy to find in their wardrobe.

Initially the members of the gang would accost male offenders and prevail upon them to see reason. The more serious offenders were publicly shamed when they refused to listen or relent. Sometimes the women resorted to their lathis, if the men resorted to use of force. Today the ‘Gulabi Gang’ has tens of thousands of women members, several male supporters and many

228 successful interventions to their credit. But above all what strikes us is the grit of this single woman who masterminds everything. Whether it is ensuring proper public distribution of food-grains to people below the poverty line, or disbursement of pension to elderly widows who have no birth certificate to prove their age, or preventing abuse of women and children, the Pink sisterhood is in the forefront, bringing about system changes by adopting the simplest of methods -- direct action and confrontation. Interestingly, attempts of luring Pal to be associated with NGOs have failed till date as she says, “they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer funds to us.” She is wary of the loopholes and money laundering and the drawbacks in the governmental machinery and so she wants to go alone.

In spite of her daring activities, Pal is not a superwoman. Though she sometimes tries to take the law in her own hands, she knows her limitations. But we are really astonished at the moral strength and grit that she displays even during the most adverse situations. For instance she tells us about an invitation to speak at the university and none of the academics adorning the chair in the lecture hall bothered to offer her a seat. Later when she spoke from the dais she could bring all these educated people to bow their heads in shame and apologize for their behaviour.

Another incident towards the end of the book needs to be highlighted here to give us a taste of her unique way of handling adverse situations. Once Vikram Singh, the director general of the Uttar Pradesh police, opened a case against her claiming that she was a Naxalite and got her house ransacked by three policemen. In order to teach the man a lesson and shame the wrong doer, she took out her notebook and dialled the numbers of several journalists in the region asking them to meet her at a Hindu temple. The next day she brought a tray of food as offering to the deity and offering a lamp filled with ghee, started to kneel and pray aloud so that the journalists could hear her:

“My God, as you know, our beloved director general of police has lost his mind. The poor man seems to be really sick. I beseech you make him recover his health as soon as possible.”

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Vikram Singh found this hard to swallow but a week later he officially offered her his apologies.

Sampat Pal has her own share of failures and setbacks and knows that her encounters of resistance to the notions of gender equality and effort for social change might fizzle out after her death. Though she could not prevent child marriage of her elder daughters, yet she has hope that her youngest daughter and her son who are both into higher education now might come and take up their mother’s mantle as they have been morally supporting her ideology. We also hope that she does not meet an end like Phoolan Devi, whom she sometimes seems to resemble, though she has never taken law in her own hands or wielded a gun. But somehow stories about women like Phoolan Devi and Sampat Pal have always been looked at with some amount of scepticism by the women’s movement in India. Though these stories are of women’s agency, of women who have found ways of regaining some control over their lives, one does wonder whether agency and power are always positive reaffirming sources.

Here one also needs to mention Pal’s tryst with Indian politics. Invited by Sonia Gandhi to join the Congress Party, she was thrown out at the last moment because she was a woman. She did fight an election as an independent candidate in 2006 but lost. Learning the hard way she says that the image of politics is deceptive and reductive and believes that the real work is done on the ground, not in an office. Also women in power could do so much if they want to. Instead they settle for celebrating International Women’s Day on 8th March every year. She has now evolved her own brand of feminism and egalitarian politics. Mayabati makes her angry for changing sides and Pal feel that she has betrayed the cause she believed in and deceived those she said she would defend. Pal then categorically states, “I ‘m against the caste system, but one thing is clear – Brahmins and Dalits will become brothers only on the day that Brahmins agree to marry the Dalits.” So her ideal figures of worship are Rani Lakshmibai and Chanakya.

Sampat Pal’s autobiography/memoir ends in 2008. Many incidents have taken place during these last five years -- incidents related to new petitions she has filed, her further activism, etc. Pal has been receiving foreign journalists from the US, the UK, France, Italy and even Korea since 2007. In the meantime ‘Gulabi Gang’ has developed its own website, its activities can be watched over the Youtube; two documentary films have been made on her life and activities -- one called Pink Saris (2010) by Kim Longinotto and the other

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called Gulabi Gang (2012) by Nishitha Jain. Bollywood is not far behind and Anubhav Sinha is said to be directing a Bollywood film with Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla in the lead roles. But what is more essential at this point seems be the dissemination of Sampat Pal’s story throughout India through translation of this book in the bhasha languages so that it can reach and inspire other grassroot level activists throughout India and this is a role we academics and members of women studies centres need to play. The book is really an eye-opener and Pal’s life story reaffirms the age old saying, ‘Where there is a will, there is a way.’

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DAUGHTERS: A Story of Five Generations Bharati Ray Penguin Books, 2011. 318 pp; Rs.399/------“It is a personal story, a family story as seen mirrored through my own life.” – Bharati Ray

She dons many hats. As a historian and educationist who taught history at Calcutta University and was its pro-vice chancellor for seven years, Bharati Ray was also founder of the Women’s Studies Research Centre at the university and member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Empowerment of Women. So it is not surprising that in this book under review, she has ventured to write the history of five generations of women from her own family. In this part of the world where the history of a family usually operates within the patriarchal family structure, comes a book where the personal history of a family spanning from the late nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty-first is

231 narrated through the female line. It is a straightforward story of five generations, engagingly told and the main characters are women.

The first story that Bharati narrates is of her great-grandmother Shailabala, known to one and all as Sundar-Ma. Born in 1882 in a Kaviraj family in East Bengal, she was married off at an early age to Gyanadkanta Sen, a practitioner of Western medicine. The story of this ‘unattractive’ and ‘unrefined’ lady does not begin in rural Bengal but in a rich household in Hanuman Road, Delhi where her doctor husband had settled down and had a roaring practice. What is interesting about Sundar-Ma was that though she was an efficient homemaker and catered to the needs of her extended family, she was basically a loner and detached in family matters. She had a strong opinion of her own, never touched money and spent her whole afternoon reading books. Never complaining about anything, she suffered from alienation and was forever in search of something that she herself could not put a name to. Till her last days she had her books and her charkha to keep her company. Bharati remembers how as an injured eleven year old child, this lady gave her sane advice -- “Never wage a war on a man. If you have to, watch your step.”

Ushabala, Sundar-Ma’s eldest daughter and Bharati’s grandmother was born in 1900. Like the fate of many young girls of her age who showed keen interest in books and wanted to study, she met with her father’s disapproval. So when her uncle arranged for her marriage at the age of twelve, there was little that her parents could do to stop it. Jyotish Chandra Das Gupta, her husband was still a student and came from a poor family, and by nature was also very unambitious. He took up a college lecturer’s job and settled in Berhampore in Murshidabad district. Like homemakers in any other middle-class household, Ushabala had to struggle at home to make ends meet and like her mother she spent three hours in the afternoon reading books. It was her own private world which no one in the family had access to. This practice was never supported by her husband and he even inadvertently sold off all her diaries full of creative writings. Like Ashapurnadevi’s protagonist Subarnalata, she did not put pen to paper again. Ushabala had five children and she dreamed that her three daughters would become established on their own. Also like many ordinary women she made the mistake of leaving her own house and going to live with her son in Delhi and then with the other son in Kolkata where eventually she died an ignominious death.

Kalyani was Ushabala’s eldest daughter and she was packed off to Delhi to Sundar-Ma’s household to complete her studies there. Though a bright student and an excellent sports person, Kalyani was prevented by her grandmother to

232 study medicine. So she joined Indraprastha College to study mathematics and economics. But like the story of many wasted talents, Kalyani, then eighteen years old, obeyed her father to marry Byomkesh Sen Gupta, a coveted officer in the Bengal Civil Service. She did manage to sit for her BA final exams and was doubly blessed – first with a gold medal for securing first rank at Delhi University, and second, giving birth to a daughter, Bharati. Without enrolling for a master’s degree, Kalyani spent the rest of her life as an ideal housewife, as ‘Deputy babur ginni’, travelling with him to different parts of India. She was an extrovert and what truly appealed to her was the outside world. Bharati regrets her mother’s wasted talents thus: “It seems to me that while loving one’s husband is a good thing, erasing one’s self completely in order to meld with one’s husband’s is not such a great idea. And this is what happened to my mother.” Kalyani died of Parkinson’s disease and only at her death did Bharati realize the impact of the strange mother-daughter bond.

Bharati narrates her own story from her childhood, her school and college days at Berhampore, her shifting to Kolkata to study at Presidency College, her acquaintance with the Coffee House where they served a heady cocktail of politics, romance, friendship and intellectualism. Names of colleagues, friends and acquaintances flood the pages of this section. Then she narrates her marriage to Sukhendu Ray and how she is convinced that he never liked the idea of her being a working woman, but did accept it. Like the prevalent and recurrent history of women being deprived of opportunities, Bharati too had her share of frustration when her mother-in-law prevented her from going to Oxford for doing her doctoral research. Stating that home management was never her forte, Bharati candidly admits that she was always attracted to the working world outside. The rest of the tale is of her meteoric rise in the academic front with her husband on the home front disapproving her post as pro-vice chancellor, and her six years stint as an MP in the Rajya Sabha. “The journey leads from sunrise to sunset and back again from sunset to sunrise,” she concludes.

In the short fifth section Bharati narrates the story of her daughter Isha/Khuku. When she was born, Bharati was quite distressed. “How was this reaction any different from the way the birth of a girl-child was greeted a hundred and fifty years ago?” she asks herself. For a few years this girl became the central focus of her life till at the age of eighteen she left for higher studies at Oxford and told her mother that she should no longer interfere with her life. This generation gap made Bharati feel insecure as a mother even for her two other children. When Isha married and gave birth to a son instead of a daughter, the story of five generation of matrilineal bondage got severed. Bharati hopes that though the

233 story of her own family is over the changes in society will shape the lives of women differently in future.

In his Foreword, Amartya Sen states that though Bharati’s work may be compared to climbing an inhospitable mountain, the subject of her book is far removed from any tortuous landscape. Though the Bharati he knew at Presidency College didn’t seem to him as being particularly disadvantaged as her great-grandmother or grandmother, Sen feels that her book will be enjoyed immensely. And gaining some knowledge of social developments in the process is a bonus.

One of the plus points of the book is that though it is the translated version of the original Bengali Ekaal Sekaal published in 2008 by Ananda Publishers, the excellent translation by Madhuchhanda Karlekar reads like an original English piece of work. In her Foreword Bharati states, “This is merely an idle looking back at the past and glancing into the future. Just words strewn before you at will. A story purely, and nothing more. But true, nonetheless.” But the way Bengali social history is spanned for a hundred odd years, if it cannot be called subaltern history per se, at least can be called ‘ordinary’ history. It will be an asset for all those interested in women’s studies also.

For older generation of readers who have grown up in a Bengali joint family structure, some of the events narrated in the book will seem too familiar. But for the younger generation, and especially those who have been brought up in nuclear family units, the sharing, caring, bickering, sacrificing by the some of the characters in this narration will read not like truth but fiction. In fact it is the ‘ordinariness’ of the tale, the ‘personal story’, ‘the family story’ that is the USP of this book.

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Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang Mishi Saran New Delhi: Penguin, 2005.Rs. 495.00 ------“An Indian woman with a China craze, a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession; we had the same schizophrenia, the monk and I.”

--- Mishi Saran

Visiting exotic lands and narrating exhilarating experiences of those visits is the staple formula of all travel writing. But when that journey tends to retrace the same route undertaken in 629 A.D. well into the twenty-first century, i.e. about 1400 years later, and when the debut writer mixes lively reportage, high adventure, historical enquiry and personal memoir all together, the result is a narrative that is a reader’s delight.

In the 7th century A.D, the Chinese monk Xuanzang (the same person described in our history books as Hiuen Tsang or Hsuan Tsang) set off on an epic 10,000 mile journey from Xian in China to India to study Buddhist philosophy from the Indian masters. Travelling along the Silk Road, through the desolate wastes of the Gobi Desert and the icy passes of central Asia, now Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, Xuanzang found only remnants and shadows of , monasteries that were no longer alive as it had died by the end of the 6th century A.D. Braving blizzards and brigands on the way, the monk finally reached India where his spiritual quest took him to Buddhist holy places and monasteries throughout the sub-continent, ranging from far off places in Assam, South India, Gujarat, Punjab, as well as the holy cities of Kapilavastu, Lumbini, Nalanda, and

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Bodh Gaya. During this period King Harshavardhana was ruling India. Though a patron of Buddhism, in most of the places that he visited in India the monk found Buddhism already on the decline in the face of a resurgent Hinduism, and he had to defend his Mahayana Buddhist beliefs against the Hinayana sect. But India had drenched the monk, transformed him. By the time Xuanzang returned to China eighteen years later, carrying with him more than 600 sutras or scriptures which he translated from the Sanskrit to classical Chinese of the Tang dynasty, he had covered an astonishing ten thousand miles. Xuanzang’s travelogue, Ta Tang Xi You Ji (Records of the Western World (written in) the Great Tang Dynasty )was completed in A.D. 648 by order of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, who was then ruling China. This book, first translated into English by the Reverend Samuel Beal in 1884, provides much information about the history of Buddhism.

Some fourteen centuries after Xuanzang, Mishi Saran, an NRI journalist based in Hong Kong, and a scholar of Mandarin Chinese decided to undertake the same journey on the monk’s footsteps at the beginning of this century, May 2000 to be exact. In Xian, she locates a direct descendant of Xuanzang’s elder brother, the graves of his parents, as well his own remains, including the spot where his begging bowl was buried. Justifying the logic to take the same road, she declares: “An Indian woman with a Chinese craze, a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession; we had the same schizophrenia, the monk and I.”

The opening chapter of the travelogue, entitled “The Road to India” begins like a fairy tale and soon goes into factual details:

AD 600. One chilly morning deep in a village in China a woman gave birth as snowflakes filled over fallow fields and the river Chen curled and looped. She sweated and pushed, screamed and cursed under cotton quilts. Her fourth child came with crunched eyes, bunched fists, slippery with blood. She named him Chen Yi. Outside, they say, a phoenix flapped its wings and settled in a tree. It dripped gold light from the tips of its feathers, shuffled along a branch and twittered softly. What is born must suffer and then die, this is the law.

When the time came, Buddhist monks knelt the child on the floor to shave his head, and dark, silky hair fell in piles. They inducted him as a novice and changed his name to Xuanzang.

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Before he died, a journey took shape, a tale penned by the fragile light of candles, a brush lifted, a wrist poised for the first stroke of history. The story was one man’s truth, about his travels to India in search of scriptures, a journey as he chose to tell it, written in the classical Chinese of the Tang dynasty. Xuanzang’s account was precise. It consisted of directions, the number of days he walked, distances, crops, rivers, kings and customs. He recorded information from conversations he heard in monastic corridors, from traders roughened by travel and accustomed to risk.

Saran’s travel of course was obviously different. Beginning from China by train she went to Bishekek (Kyrgyztan’s capital), through Central Asia, and the now- vanished kingdoms in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Saran does an excellent job of juxtaposing the relevant sections of the monk’s journey, often described in the words of his companion and biographer, Hui Li, with contemporary observations. She engagingly writes about her own personal experiences and observations making smooth transition from the past to the present. At times when the details are unavailable, she even tries to fill up certain gaps in the monk’s narration with small surmises of her own. She felt as if the monk often held her by the scruff of her neck to rub her nose in the shambles of her own history. This smooth transition from the past to the present and then again to the past, reading about two journeys at the same time, makes the travelogue really enjoyable.

Saran’s journey, though undertaken by modern modes of transport, and hence not as exotic as that of the monk’s, was not always easy too. The vastness of the country was often supplemented with her moments of depletion, her lethargy to move on, her illusion of chasing a shadow. Visiting worn down and decrepit archeological sites, Saran repeatedly harps at the apparent indifference of a nation towards its history. Apart from the multifarious experiences in small towns in India, where she was continuously perturbed by the “holy trinity of questions” asked to her by all and sundry – how old she was, was she married, and did she have children – the most gripping part of the chronicle is during the last leg of her journey when she visits Pakistan and Afghanistan. In spite of her earnest endeavour to cross the Khyber Pass, to have the absurd urgency to have her dotted lines on the map meet, she cannot undertake it obviously for contemporary socio-political reasons. So she has to fly to New Delhi and spend November 2000 to June 2001 retracing the monk’s journey in India and then acquire a visa to visit Pakistan. After visiting Islamabad and Peshawar in Pakistan,

237 she is unable to traverse some places that now lie in POK, something that seems to remain as “the blank rift” in her mind.

The concluding section of the narrative comprises of an eyewitness account of Kabul under the Taliban regime, just about a month before the 9/11 disaster, complete with incidents of being followed around by intelligence cops with real Kalashnikovs and male members of a patriarchal society perturbed with a sole woman moving around without a burkha or full chador. Here she discovers the flaws in various NGO’s and UN relief agencies working across the war-ravaged country, of relief not often trickling down to the grassroots level. As the monk’s shadow recedes further and further, the narrative ends with the loss of a fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity, that Afghanistan had ultimately taken the monk away from her.

Mishi Saran was born in Allahabad in 1968, but has not lived in India since the age of ten. She graduated with a degree in Chinese studies from Wellesley College, USA, and spent two years in Beijing and Nanjing. In 1994 she moved to Hong Kong, where she worked as a news reporter until she became more interested in travel writing and fiction. A generous grant from her alma mater made this journey possible for her. Thus the book can also be interpreted as the author’s inner journey towards a new understanding of her roots and her identity – both very significant for an angst-ridden expatriate individual. She writes, “The monk and his quest were the background against which I struggled to understand the incomprehensible.” She also wrote this book because she “wanted to bask in the things [she] had learnt, [she] was afraid of the knowledge flying away, like a web of spider-spit torn loose from its moorings, floating into the blues of skies.” Apart from the casual reader who delights in armchair travelogues, the narrative, one of its kind, will also interest serious scholars of Buddhism. Married and presently living in Seoul, Korea, Mishi Saran, is said to be writing her next book and we all expectantly wait for its release.

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Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope Jael Silliman Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2001. ------Etymologically speaking, the term ‘diaspora’ originates from the Greek word ‘dia’ meaning ‘through’ and ‘speirein’ meaning ‘to scatter’, but today it no longer necessarily connotes religious persecution and forcible territorial displacement that was part of the Jewish diaspora. In its present-day use it encompasses a wide variety of people – expatriates, immigrants, the expelled, political refugees and alien residents, and encompasses that broad segment of people living outside their homeland. Some of the specific features that are associated with diaspora are, dispersal from a specific original ‘centre’ to one or more peripheral or foreign regions, retainment of a collective memory or vision, myth of their original homeland, the belief that they may not be fully accepted by the host society and therefore may have to return to their original home. Moreover, they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethno-communal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.

Unlike many writers who interpret ‘diaspora’ or transculturation as necessarily a traumatic experience – portraying overwhelming loss, exile and displacement, the very title of Jael Silliman’s book, Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope dispels such a belief. It suggests that diasporic movements can be understood as a process through which community members have flourished and do not have to be only conceived in terms of loss. The book is a socio-historical documentation studying the diasporic movements of the 239

Baghdadi Jews to Calcutta and the roles of women in these global flows told from the women’s point of view. Calling it a ‘collaborative narrative’, it is a book that is at the same time a scholarly and a family endeavour. Though at the beginning of the twenty-first century only a handful of elderly Baghdadi Jews remain, there was a thriving Jewish community in Calcutta in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

Offering a personal and social history of the author’s foremothers – Baghdadi Jews who lived most of their lives in the Jewish community in Calcutta, Silliman begins with a portrait of Farha, her maternal great-grandmother, who dwelled almost entirely within the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter where she and her husband traveled on business (Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore). Next is her maternal grandmother, Miriam (Mary), who was much more Anglicized than Farha and deeply influenced by British colonial practices. Whether in Sydney, London, or Jerusalem, Mary was part of the tight-knit Calcutta Jewish community as the diaspora shifted from its base in Calcutta to new sites. The third portrait, of Silliman’s mother, Flower, reveals a woman in a double transition: her own and India’s. Flower grew up in colonial India, witnessed India’s struggle for independence, and lived her middle years in an independent India. She was among the first generation of women in the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta to step out of her narrowly circumscribed Jewish world. The final sketch is of Silliman herself. Born in Calcutta in 1955 in the waning Jewish community, Silliman grew up in a cosmopolitan and Indian world, rather than a Baghdadi Jewish one. Her own travels have taken her to the US, where she is at present a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Iowa. As a teacher and scholar, and as her marriage to a Calcutta-born Bengali Brahmin gentleman, whom she met only abroad, her primary identification is with the “South Asian intellectual and professional diaspora.” She is “Indian and Jewish and now an American citizen.”

By exploring the making of personal and community identities in a small Jewish community in India from the 1880’s to the present, Silliman shows how the identity of community members shifted over each generation in response to political and economic shifts. The past is part of her present and future. The narratives of these women allow her to challenge essentializing notions of identity and nation by showing how women adroitly negotiated between distinct cultural sets: Sephardic Jewish, British colonial and Indian – to forge a strong sense of their selves. Thus whereas Farha and Miriram identified only themselves with Judaism, the author and her mother embraced several different identities. As she clearly states at the beginning of the book: “ In four generations we have variously identified ourselves as Baghdadi Jews, as British subjects, as Indians, as

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Israelis, and as Americans. The only identity maintained throughout the four generations was a Jewish identity.”(5) So whereas Judaism as a religious practice and a way of life structured Farha’s and Miriam’s worlds, it was more of a cultural identity for her mother and herself. But it was their Jewishness and strong family and community ties, rather than their relationship to the peoples, cultures and lands where they lived, that grounded them. Their community network and familiarity with global cultural flows facilitated their movements to other countries and places that enabled them to respond to new political and economic opportunities. These community ties as well as clear demarcations between them and non-Jewish others enabled them not to be overwhelmed by the diverse cultures to which they were exposed.

As Silliman’s research interests pertain to issues of gender and economic development and women’s attempts to transform these interventions and discourses to be more concerned with women’s priorities and rights, this book focuses upon the understanding issues of memory, identity and alternative narratives and historical accounts from women’s perspectives with South Asia as the regional area of interest. Inserting middle-class women from this global minority community into India’s colonial history also complicates current understandings of colonialism and the colonial encounter. The writer shows us how the Baghdadi Jewish women benefited from the colonial encounter to demonstrate the range of responses and accommodations with colonialism that existed within India across ethnic, class and gender lines. Thus through contextualizing women’s lives in distinct historical processes and geographical venues, she reveals the ways in which women were variously colonized and colonizing at the same time. She is also proud of her “third world feminist identity”(184). As histories of women in India have not yet focused attention on the lives of women in small minority communities, the book adds a new dimension to women’s histories in India.

Apart from the sights and sounds of Calcutta, which might make any elderly reader nostalgic about the bygone days, the layman reader is made aware of the differences within these small communities – the Anglo-Indians, the Armenians, the Parsis and the Baghdadi Jews – their insider-outsider syndrome and interestingly enough stereotypes begin to fall apart. The Indian independence forced the Calcutta Jewish community to come to terms with their ambivalent sense of identity. They were of India, but they did not see themselves as Indian. The ‘in-between-ness’ of their location in race-based British imperial structures complicates colonial discourses that is conceived of in terms of two analytical categories only – the colonizer or the colonized.

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Though there are several repetitions within the introductory and concluding chapters, the reference section of each chapter is also illuminating for the serious researcher who is interested in knowing about the strong community feeling of the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta despite the geographical distances that separated them. The writer gives us several reasons for this dispersal and is even nostalgic about the fact that the Jewish community in Calcutta “will exist only as a memory, though a few impressive structures mark the Jewish presence.” Being from Calcutta and living outside in the West, she is constantly reminded that the city is emblematic of poverty and degradation – it is the proverbial ‘Black Hole.” But she clearly states that neither the exotic, sanitized colonial version nor the impoverished representations do justice to the City. Her assertive statement at the end of the book, “To me, Calcutta will always be home”(187), once again reiterates her theory of a ‘diaspora of hope.’

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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood & Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return Marjane Satrapi Pantheon Books, 2003 & 2004. ------Graphic novels. Many readers have heard the term, but most are unsure of exactly what they are. Graphic novels are exactly what the title implies: full- length, original stories presented in visual format that share a great deal with their cousins, comic books – sequential art combined with dialogue and transitional text that is used to tell a story. Readers can find biographies, romance, historical and science fiction titles aimed at a younger audience addressing themes relevant to teenagers and young adults such as acceptance, coming of age, prejudice, social

242 injustice and conformity. Since pictures carry another kind of information than words, in the graphic novel both these forms interweave to give us an entirely different kind of experience. Though they have been written for a long time, the genre probably became popular with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, one of the most moving narratives about the Holocaust.

The two graphic books under review, Persepolis and Persepolis 2 were originally published to wide critical acclaim in France and narrate the story of Marjane Satrapi’s wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. With graphic pictures drawn by the author herself, who specializes in illustration, the powerful black-and-white comic strip images in the first volume tell us the story of Satrapi’s life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen -- years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating war with Iraq.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood begins with the cute picture of a veiled ten-year old Marjane in the year 1980 when she could not understand why it became obligatory for all children to wear the veil at school. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. From the age of six this young girl wanted to be a prophet because their maid did not eat with them, because her father had a Cadillac, and because her grandmother’s knees always ached. But soon she changed her reason – to be “justice, love, and the wrath of God all in one.” For this young girl, the revolution was like a bicycle – “when the wheels don’t turn, it falls” and for her God and Marx looked alike. As she grows up, she witnesses many historical events – the end of the Shah’s reign, the bombing of the F-14 Iraqi fighter jets, the shortage of food in the supermarkets, the arrest and execution of those who opposed the regime, and how the internal war became a big issue.

Through the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life, Marjane’s child-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does, the history of Iran and of her own extraordinary family. Kissing childhood goodbye by smoking a cigarette, she turns into a rebel, is taken to the committee for wearing western clothes and after her Jewish friend’s death she hits the principal and is expelled from school. Her parents decide to send her to Austria to study in a French school because she does not know German. She listens to her grandma’s last advice of not harbouring bitterness and vengeance -- “always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.” The book ends with the fourteen-year-old heroine – the cartoon

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Marjane – at Meherbad Airport with her hands pressed against airport glass as her father carries away her fainting mother. Marjane was being sent to the west to get an education, and to go through those best of times – the teen years – free from a totalitarian regime.

We meet Marjane again in Persepolis 2, laying face down on a made bed, in a pose typical of teenage angst. The entry along with this picture states that it is November 1984 and that she is in Austria where she had come “with the idea of leaving a religious Iran for an open and secular Europe” and that her mother’s best friend Zozo “would love her like her own daughter.” Coming from a traditionalist country, her culture shock begins almost immediately. Far from her friends and family, alone among her peers, yearning for acceptance and struggling to fit in, she confronts sex, drugs, and prejudice in short order. Within just four years, the teenager’s life has unraveled; homeless now, she wakes up hospitalized after two winter months on the streets. When a timely phone call brings her home, the repression of Iran’s totalitarian regime and the horrors wrought by a long war appear in broad relief.

But coming back to Iran also makes her a misfit – “a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West.” Her difficult homecoming forces her to confront the changes both she and her country have undergone in her absence, and her shame at what she perceives at her failure in Austria. She did not know anymore why she was living and this identity crisis leads her to psychiatrists and then to an attempted suicide. Suddenly she changes completely, becomes modern, seeks out a boyfriend, falls in love, and parties with like-minded friends in spite of the strictures imposed. She begins to study art at a university until the repression and state sanctioned chauvinism lead her to question whether she can have a future in Iran. The more time passes the more she becomes conscious of the contrast between the official representation of her country and the real life of the people, the one that went on behind the walls. Their behaviour in public and their behaviour in private were polar opposites and this disparity made the young people schizophrenic. Without listening to her parents wishes in 1991 she marries a man called Reza but immediately confined to the compromises of a married state, she starts regretting her decision and start living separately within a month. This was the period when Iraq attacked Kuwait and the Gulf War was in full swing. In 1992, a big event occurred—a satellite antenna was installed and this gave them the other side of the story. Goaded by her parents, she changed her life, realizing that “one must educate oneself.” Seeking a divorce from Reza, with the full support of her father, she realizes that the Iranians are crushed not only by the government but by the weight of their traditions. Not having been able to build anything in Iran, Marjane prepares to leave it once again and in 1994 goes to

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France with the family supporting her departure and advicing her not to come back. The last picture of the story, like in the first book is one of Marjane on the verge of leaving her country again but as she states, “the goodbyes were much less painful than ten years before” when she embarked for Austria; “there was no longer a war,” she was no longer a child, her “mother didn’t faint” and her “grandma was there happily…” This grandmother interestingly enough remains a sort of moral centre of both the books.

As funny as poignant as its predecessor, Persepolis 2 is once again a clear-eyed and searing condemnation of the human cost of fundamentalism. Though less traumatic in its events, it is much more subtle and in some ways, even more moving than the first volume. In its depictions of the struggles of growing up – here compounded by Marjane’s status as an outsider both abroad and at home – it is raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating. When we reach the climax we find three consecutive pages without words that justify the significance of the visual over the verbal.

In the Introduction to the first volume, the author gives us a brief historical overview of the origin of Iran from the second millennium B.C. and how the country entered a new phase in the twentieth century when Reza Shah decided to modernize and westernize the country; when the discovery of oil made it a target of the western countries. Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of her life in Iran, Satrapi knew that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing Persepolis was so important to her. She believed that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. She also did not want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. “One can forgive but one should never forget,” she adds.

Closely reminiscent of Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Satrapi’s memoir with its deceptively simple black and white drawings makes this reviewer recommend this feast of the mind and the eye for all kinds of reader

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My Ear At His Heart: Reading My Father Hanif Kureishi Faber and Faber £3.99, 242 pages, 2004 ------

Towards the end of this short, lucid, yet thought-provoking memoir, Hanif Kureishi explains that the book “began as an essay before becoming a kind of improvisation”. Interesting for its free-form, it is a biography as well as an autobiography, social history, meditation, complex literary contrivance and also gushing stream of consciousness added with wry self-revelation. Whatever he set out to write in “this pot into which I am stirring almost anything that occurs to me,” Kureishi has produced something fresh in form and memorable for the light it sheds.

The basic idea is simple enough. Living an unsatisfied life in the British suburbs, Kureishi hovers on the brink of 50, and is looking back as well as forward. He discovers an unpublished novel called “The Age of Adolescence” by his dead father. And so begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father’s birth in Poona, his privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to an adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley—his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistani embassy on London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. This is a voyage into, rather than around, his father, into the past and a lost world where truth and fiction coalesce. So we have Shani, the fiction's wandering survivor of adolescence, juxtaposed with the real life Shannoo Kureishi eking out a bureaucratic life at the Pakistani High Commission in Knightsbridge and dreaming of immortality - either cricketing or literary -

246 through his son. We also have Shani's fictional brother, Mahmood, in fact, Hanif's glamourous uncle Omar, the famous Pakistani cricket commentator and columnist, whose three volumes of autobiography provide a fillup for many loose ends of his father’s narrative.

Throughout the narrative, Hanif wavers between paternal introspection and his own experience, a writer talking about and almost to himself. He realizes that his writing was not only narcissistic but had some value in the world and he wasn’t writing for his own benefit alone; he had to make something that others might want. He artistically juxtaposes his father’s narrative with real life history of three generations of the Kureishi family knit together through bits of history. A patriarch from India who washed up on a distant shore of Britain, his father is both a tragic figure and the warmest influence, someone who searched for himself via Eastern esoterics, his desire to formulate values, a moral grid perhaps, a wisdom which would orientate the reader. Kureishi admits that during the writing of this book, he has missed writing fiction, the pleasurable freedom to be another, when anything can be said and done by the characters, uncircumscribed by some sort of fidelity to reality. Later he also finds another abandoned manuscript of his father entitled “The Redundant Man,” which presents a quite different version of the family. Here too, the protagonist Yusuf, an alter-ego of his father, suffers from persecution mania and wish fulfillment -- ideas that Hanif tries to analyze through Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

A significant aspect of this memoir is Hanif’s constant comparison of his and his family members’ plight with different writers of the world. These include Philip Roth, Chekhov, V.S. Naipaul, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’ Hara; Dostoevsky, Jack London, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski, Wittingstein, and J.S. Mill. The most interesting observation is of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who reintroduced the human into the novel. According to Hanif, Marquez’s preoccupation with dictator-fathers makes him an ideal author for a place like Pakistan, with its penchant for monsters, magic, and extreme religion.

Born of a mixed parentage, Hanif Kureishi’s hate for both India and Pakistan reveals itself in many places in the text. “India was my father’s country,” he says, and when East Pakistan broke away from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh in 1971, he calls it “the consequent invasion by India”. Unlike most exiled immigrants in an alien country, he is not keen to go back to his roots, or even express nostalgia about it. He states that he is not keen to return to Pakistan as it is “one of the world’s most dangerous and uncomfortable countries” where Moulvis envisage a society in which there is no culture at all but only religious imperatives. Thus eleven years after his father’s death, this book is not only

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Hanif’s tribute to ‘read’ his father, as the subtitle suggests, but also an attempt to evaluate himself standing at the cross-road of his own life. The effect is hypnotic and revelatory.

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The Tale of My Exile: Twelve years in the Andamans by Barindra Kumar Ghose Introduced and Edited by Sachidananda Mohanty Ashram, Pondicherry, 2nd Impression, 2014; 143 pages, Rs.110.00 ------

In recent years, the history of penal colonies has been widely discussed in the fields of colonial, postcolonial, and holocaust studies. Standing at the threshold of celebrating 68th year of India’s independence, this slim volume is an apt reminder of the struggle of one of the young revolutionaries who had dedicated his life for his motherland—something that has long been erased from public memory. A regrettably forgotten figure today, Barindra Kumar Ghose, popularly known as Barin Ghose and younger brother of Sri Aurobindo, was convicted in the Alipore Bomb Case and sentenced to death on 6 May, 1909, while Sri Aurobindo was acquitted on the same day. "Waging war against His Majesty the King-Emperor of India" was the usual charge levied against those involved in

248 the increasing number of revolutionary activities following the partition of Bengal; in this case, it was the abortive attempt to assassinate the notorious magistrate, Charles Kingsford. After serving time in Alipur Jail's "Forty-four Degree", as the barrack of 44 cells for those sentenced to death was called, and upon appeal to the High Court, on 23 November 1909, Barin’s sentence was commuted to transportation for life in the Andaman Cellular Jail. On 12 December 1909, he and six of his prison mates were taken on board the SS Maharaja from the Kidderpore docks in Calcutta for Port Blair, Andamans. Interestingly, the mood of the prisoners was extraordinarily upbeat. The prospect of leaving their homeland for an unknown island from which they may never return did not deflate them.

Upon arrival, the physical description of the Andamans engages Barin and he gives us a concrete feel of the place, which was important in his context since for most people, the Andamans were a remote, almost mythical spot beyond the Black Waters, of which nothing was known apart from sinister rumours which circulated periodically. The next chapter introduces us to the prison and the typical sequences in a convict’s life. After fifteen days in quarantine the prisoners enter the prison and are allotted work, varying in difficulty depending on each one’s physical condition. The narrative is full of inhuman incidents in the jail, the way they were forced to do menial labour beyond their capacity, the substandard food served to the convicts, and the eccentricities and perversions of convict officials.

In the opening chapter, Barin acknowledges his debt to Upendranath Bannerjee saying he will be guided by him when his own memory falters, and his readers are “requested to consider this tale of the Andamans as the joint utterance of two tongues.” In Chapters Nine and Ten he describes and analyses the prison system and points out its flaws and enumerates the worst aspects of prison life at the Cellular Jail namely, the contagion of company; how the incapacity to do hard labour makes one dependent on the tougher, more experienced convicts; how prison rules based on brutality break one’s morale and make one vulnerable; how addictions compromise one’s position. Again there are issues of how forced celibacy can turn one into a brute, how want of a religious life makes one desolate and how there is no incentive for healthy habits. Sometimes the terms of punishment are limitless, thereby becoming meaningless, and the jail officials are heartless too. Also unhygienic surroundings added to unhygienic lifestyles make a deadly combination so that even after release most of the prisoners are incapable of maintaining their rationality of mind.

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Barin was released in January 1920 in a general amnesty granted after the First World War to selected political prisoners in the form of a Government of India Act passed on 23 December 1919. Upon return, he wrote his memoir in Bengali as Dwipantarer Katha in 1920 and the brief but detailed account was translated by Nolini Kanta Gupta and published in 1922 by Arya Press, Pondicherry as The Tale of My Exile. The narrative is largely impersonal reportage and social commentary laced with doses of satirical humour. But unlike other incarceration narratives, the last chapter makes this book an exception. It is personal, introspective, and revelatory. First, Barin shares his feelings at being condemned to death. His intense love for life makes him pray to God to spare him. But at the same time a part of him remains utterly calm and content. He describes his own being as one house where a sombre funeral and a joyous festivity are taking place at the same time and so it becomes really difficult for the layman reader to ascertain the thought patterns of ideological prisoners like Barin Ghose. The suffering is very real and possibly more acutely felt on account of the heightened sensitivity characteristic of this type -- “A pain that we invited on ourselves, however lacerating, could not naturally overwhelm us.” His spiritual inclination after his return and his involvement in opening yoga teaching centres in Calcutta as per the instructions of his brother, makes his situation rather unique and can perhaps be better understood after reading his autobiography entitled Barindrer Atma Kahini (1379 BS) where he underlines the connection between Yoga and nationalism.

Out of public domain for more than half a century, this new edition of The Tale of My Exile is now available, introduced and edited by the Hyderabad-based academic, Sachidananda Mohanty. The slim volume, written by a man sentenced for life, not only provides a meticulous account of the minutiae of jail existence but also the growth of an individual sense of agency, so vital to prisoners in a colonial regime. Barindra was a fine writer and would become an author and editor of many more books in future. The present work also swings us in the waves of hope and despair, obedience and rebellion. Like Sri Aurobindo's reminiscences of his Alipore days as a prisoner in Kara Kahini, The Tale of My Exile is full of black humour without which probably no one could survive the tremendous ordeal under the terrifying regime of Khoyedad Khan, Gulam Rasul and Mr. Barry. What is significant about the narrative is to consider how the idealistic young Barindra turned easily to the expanses of spirituality.

It is hoped that the book will interest a new generation of readers for whom the national freedom struggle is largely a matter of textbook history. As Mohanty rightly points out, Barin’s narrative unveils the machinations of the colonial mind and the regimes of tyranny. These regimes are not dated and they continue in the

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21st century as well. Thus it is important to weave in the personal narrative Barin Ghose with the larger narrative of the nation in our effort to understand the true meaning of this long forgotten tale.

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Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal By Manohar Mouli Biswas Translated and Edited by Angana Dutta and Jaydeep Sarangi Kolkata: Samya, 2015; Rs. 350.00; 125 pages; ISBN 978-93-81345-09-2 ------Dalit writing in Bengal is different from that found in other regions of India primarily for several reasons. First and foremost it is only recently that different members of the scheduled castes in Bengal like namashudra, poundra, jele, malo, muchi, chamar, dhopa and others have united together to borrow the nomenclature ‘dalit’ as a unified term defining their marginality in society. The writing of Bengali literature by dalits with the consciousness of making a contribution towards an organized literary movement gained momentum only from the 1990s and the Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha [Bengali Dalit Literature Association] was set up in 1992 to carry on literary and cultural activities to bring these marginalized people under a common platform. Hence the dearth of dalit writing from Bengal as compared to the rich treasure of such works in other regions of India. The second interesting difference is that most of the members of the dalit community in Bengal had to face double marginalization – first as

251 untouchable people belonging to a lower caste who were ravaged by poverty, discrimination etc. but more so by becoming victims of the partition and gaining refugee status after migrating from erstwhile East Bengal. Survival for such people became a double bind and no doubt this was the reason why their experiential literary output took so long to bloom. Whatever it may be, given the late entry of Bengal in the dalit literary movement, this literature explodes the popular myth that caste does not matter in Bengal, a state that had the longest ruling Marxist socialist government at the helm of affairs in the history of India.

Manohar Mouli Biswas’s autobiography Amar Bhubane Ami Benche Thaki [Surviving in My World] was published in 2013 and the present volume under review is the English translation of the same done by Angana Dutta and Jaydeep Sarangi. Apart from presiding over his association and editing dalit journals like Chaturtha Duniya and Dalit Mirror that aim to mobilize people in favour of the movement towards social equality, Biswas is one of the leading dalit voices from Bengal. Born in 1943, in a family of small agriculturists among the formerly untouchable namashudra community in Metiargati, a village in the Khulna district of East Bengal, a wetland, Biswas has grown up not only wrestling poverty, starvation and discrimination against dalits but also practising their customs, participating in their economy and experiencing their cultural richness. “This autobiography is a document of growing up amidst deprivation” he states categorically. The lucid, simple narrative comprises of ten chapters and for the first nine, Biswas narrates selected a-chronological events of a few consecutive years of his childhood – “being born in a poor family in a land of rivers and canals, today I feel the beautiful experiences of my childhood are rich treasures of my life”(73). The tale is nothing exceptional – for anyone familiar with the rural life of poverty-stricken marginalized subalterns in any part of our country, it will be easy to associate himself with Biswas’s experiences. Helping the parents in their farm work, walking several miles to reach school, without proper books and stationery but gaining support from the illiterate elders of the family who realized the value of education, living in half starvation for several days of the year, engaging in childhood activities like fishing, boating etc. his story also portrays his entire community who struggled with poverty, illiteracy, superstitions, far flung from the benefits of medicine, transportation, electricity, state administration and every other boon of modern civilisation. Apart from his own life story, the narrative also provides us with insider’s view of namashudra lifestyles that are commonly looked down upon by the more conservative Hindu upper-caste and upper-class populace. The story is about their marginalized lives, economically and socially, and their struggle to move forward. It also gives us their coherent worldview with the Matua cult of Sri Harichand and Sri

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Guruchand Thakur undergirding their lives, inspiring them not to be wallowing in self-pity but leading them to political mobilization against the upper caste stranglehold that operated socially and economically.

Biswas’s narrative stops at the margin of his migration to West Bengal as a ‘vagabond refugee’ in the Indian dominion when he was eighteen years old (1961). In the tenth and last chapter of the text he suddenly jumps from the memories of his childhood to more contemporary times and tells us in a prosaic matter of fact way about his wife, sons, his job and how he still has to fight caste discrimination in this country. But the long interview he gives to Jaydeep Sarangi, Angana Dutta and Mohini Gurav which is appended to the end of his narrative gives us fillups to his life story. It tells us about his college education, his living in a refugee camp in Baharaich district in UP, how the seeds of activism germinated in him when he attended the First All India Dalit Writers Conference in Hyderabad in 1987. Biswas had admitted in the preface that he wrote this autobiography ‘out of pain’-- one of being pitied by others, the pain of being belittled, of being unwanted, of being enslaved. Now Biswas also tells us how he has been appropriated into Bengali bhadralok culture at present:

“The man who I was in untouchable society in my early life has undergone a total change by the influence of the society in which I have been present for a long time. The thing that has happened is really due to the sanskritization and acculturation.”(113).

Like all social activists, Biswas gives a detailed description of the objectives of his movement for social justice and ends his interview in an optimistic note: “I eagerly look forward to a better tomorrow when dalits will be treated as equal to others. I will be happy if my works can contribute to this.”

In conclusion it has to be admitted that narrativizing the self is a pervasive human impulse – to know the self, to know the other, and also the desire to make the self to be known to the other. Both author and object – self-expression, self- invention, self-fashioning – can indicate in a paradoxical way the truth claims as well as the continued derivations of the self. The urge to write the self in a narrative is not merely to carry out the linguistic resonances of it but to explore the ontological possibilities underlying such a venture. As Manohar Mouli Biswas’s autobiography makes it clear, any narrative of the self is a two-way process: the self that constructs a text is also constructed by the text. In his autobiographical venture Roland Barthes writes, “What I write about myself is never the last word”. As Biswas’s narrative has clearly shown, writing the self,

253 therefore, remains always an unfinished project. In the Derridian sense therefore writing can come to power or power to writing.

This slim volume will be useful for researchers, scholars and lay readers who are keen to follow the development of dalit literature from Bengal. The translators need to be thanked also for their sincere effort in making this text available to a pan-Indian readership.

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V: BIOGRAPHIES

Sarala Devi Sachidananda Mohanty [Makers of Indian Literature Series] New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2011 Pages: 53, Price: Rs 40 ------Though there has been a proliferation of Women's Studies Centres in many Indian universities, the sad state of archival research in writings by Indian women, especially in the Bhasha literatures, is awfully inadequate. So any publication on this neglected genre is a welcome addition to understand the important role many Indian women played in nation building, both through literary activities as well as direct involvement in regional and national politics. The present monograph under review is about Sarala Devi, an outstanding literary woman to emerge from – someone who donned different roles as poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, translator, feminist-activist, and freedom fighter.

Born at the beginning of the twentieth century (1904) in a conservative family in Odisha, Sarala had received formal education only till the seventh standard. She got married at the age of fourteen to Bhagirathi Mohapatra of Chatra, Jagatsingpur and was very fortunate to receive lifelong support for all her activities from her considerate husband, himself a Gandhian. Her zest made her a self-taught intellectual, someone who even learnt English while imprisoned in

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Vellore jail. She was perhaps the most acclaimed nationalist, feminist-activist and social reformer of her times. She was the first woman activist of Odisha to court imprisonment under Gandhiji's Movement and was the first elected woman member of the Odisha Legislative Assembly in 1936.

One of the significant literary contributions of Sarala Devi was to use her essays and speeches for social critique and social transformation. These included abolition of child marriages and marriages of women to old men, abolition of the 'Purdah' system and untouchability. Her essay “Narira Dabi” (The Rights of Women) spoke of women's oppression as a global phenomenon and reminds us strongly about the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. She was very careful to reject the view, as many later feminists did, of 'women as universal dependents.' She argued that our critique must be context specific and be informed by particular histories of women in given societies and ideologies. Another interesting radical idea of Sarala was her advocacy of an increasing control of women over their biological and reproductive selves. All these show that her views were always far ahead of her times. Her involvement with the writers of the ‘Sabuja Group’ to write a novel (Basanti) collectively with writers like Annadashankar Ray, , Baikuntha Patnaik, Sharat Chandra Mukhopadhyaya and Harihar Mohapatra speaks further of her status as a truly liberated woman. Though Sarala was an icon in her times, yet towards the latter part of her life and career, she suffered from disillusionment. It is a pity that when she passed away in 1986, she died neglected and unsung. It is equally disheartening to learn that most of her work is no longer in the public domain today.

The author Sachidananda Mohanty has been writing and researching on the pioneering works of early women writers from Odisha for at least the last two decades. He has done a commendable job in writing this monograph and bringing the life and works of Sarala Devi to us. As admitted in his Preface, it is not an easy task to compress the life and works of an extraordinary genius within the limited purview of this book and we sincerely hope that in due course a longer biography of her would be written and her writings will reach a pan-Indian readership through translation. Also it is really unfortunate that the manuscripts of so many creative writers are not preserved properly by their family members and in most cases are irretrievable.

Before concluding, a few words about the Select Bibliography section. There are a few double entries and minor typographical errors which could have been avoided. These can be corrected in future editions of the book.

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THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul Patrick French Picador, 2008. 555 pages; Rs. 595.00 ------“My background is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused” – V.S. Naipaul in his Nobel acceptance speech.

Writing a review of a book that has taken the literary world by storm is no easy task. The work becomes even more complicated when the subject matter is none other than the most controversial living writer in the world, V.S. Naipaul. With the author already on extensive book launches and reading programmes, the book reached us when interviews as well as excerpts from the text itself have made their rounds. Questioning the ‘authorized’ nature of the biography and who found whom, the writer his biographer or the biographer his author, Patrick French admitted that though he was commissioned to do the job and researched with full cooperation of his subject (including exclusive access to all his and his wife’s private papers now housed in a special collection at the University of Tulsa), Naipaul gave him such a free hand and candid interviews that the biography has become a landmark in itself. In fact French states in the introduction that Naipaul’s attempts to separate himself from the consequences of his own behavior, to present himself not as a person but as solely ‘the writer’ -- a figure who could in theory be studied objectively -- was what made this

257 biography possible. He could be “angry, acute, open, self-pitying, funny, sarcastic, tearful -- but was always intense.”

V.S.Naipaul is the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Producing uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction, he is a gift born of a forceful, visionary impulse. To critics and readers alike he remains an enigma because on the one hand he is one of the finest writers in the English language, while on the other, he is a mean man, a megalomaniac, a racist who always lands himself in controversies due to his rude behavior and acerbic comments. He accepted the Nobel Prize stating that it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors,” There was no mention of Trinidad, the place of his birth because he felt it might “encumber the tribute.” Wikipedia currently describes him as “a Trinidadian-born British novelist of Indo- Trinidadian ethnicity and Bhumihar Brahmin heritage from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India”.

Part One of the book begins with the history of his ancestors who left India to work as indentured laborers in the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean islands and this background of living in an extended family (the Capildeo clan) always on the verge of poverty and charity helps us to understand the predicament of the writer better. Born in Trinidad, moving from Chagunas to Port of Spain to Petit Valley, French describes Naipaul’s early privations, his life within the displaced community and his talent and fierce ambition at school which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. His father’s influence at this phase of his life is very vital. As a failed novelist himself, Seepersaud’s idea of literature, conceived in colonial isolation and arrived at by rejecting the florid Victorian tomes that had impressed him early on, became Vido’s. Once in England, loneliness, homesickness, depression, racial insecurity and rootlessless struck with great force causing breakdown till his marriage to Patricia Hale, a fellow Oxford student, whose own working class background did not prevent her from offering support to the aspiring writer. Gradually he overcame his ‘double exile’ and produced his early masterpieces such as A House for Mr. Biswas, An Area of Darkness and In a Free State.

Part Two of the book begins in 1962 when “the national mood of fatigue coincided with the arrival on India’s shore of its doubly displaced son Vidia Naipaul, whose approach to his ancestral land had been decided many years before.” Having the status of an ‘insider-outsider’, this ‘Trinidadian of Hindu Descent’ Indian, West Indian, neither, or both” found himself in an alien setting—It was a different place from the India of his mind. It had been a homecoming; as a child of the Indian diaspora he wanted to understand the

258 civilization of his forebears. While his wife saw the dignity and beauty and things like that, he saw the calamity and India remained for him “the land of my childhood, an area of darkness… I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial without a past, without ancestors.” In his visit to Africa after that, he saw it through Trinidadian eyes the mystical homeland of his compatriots who had been undone by the middle passage. The places and people he encountered during this visit gave him a plethora of literary material – it became his Naipauland. Displacement gave him a distinct view of the world. He was everywhere and nowhere, rooted in an English literary tradition, but outside it.

The rest of this section describes the homeless state of Pat and Vidia in the 1970s decade; the early 1980s when he was at the peak of his fame, a presence and an absence in the world of English letters, a globally itinerant writer who was there and not there, a prize name in America and an object of academic interest. Through the uncertainties of life in London, and later in Wiltshire, Naipaul and his wife were to stay together for over four decades, even after he embarked on an intense, twenty-four year love affair. French also gives us accounts of Naipaul’s relationships with publishers, agents, supporters and fellow writers. Hugh and Antonia Fraser, Francis Wyndham, a long-time supporter, and Diana Athill, his editor at Andre Deutsch, feature prominently. As a publisher Deutsch himself did not offer the kind of backing Naipaul deserved and there are many interesting incidents narrating Naipaul’s various deals with publishers and magazine editors in the post-Deutsch era. Also interesting to the reader are the accounts of Naipaul’s various travels, his information-gathering techniques, and his unique methods for converting research into writing. One marvels at his ability to extract favour from people, and learns amusing things such as what it is that he likes about hotels: “the temporariness, the mercenary services, the absence of responsibility, the anonymity, the scope for complaint.” As his reputation grew, as prizes and accolades were bestowed, as a second wave of breathtaking creation generated A Bend in the River, Among the Believers, and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul found and sustained an extraordinary position both outside and at the centre of literary culture.

Naipaul’s relationship to the three primary women in his life-- Patricia, Margaret and Nadira offers an interesting case of psychological study. Sexual incompatibility with Pat is clear from the beginning of their marriage. But eventually it is Pat – unable to have children, verbally abused, betrayed, continually exploited, publicly humiliated and finally killed off by terminal breast cancer –who tips the scales of suffering her own way. French has also focused on Naipaul’s love life. The Argentine mistress Margarita is defined as his creative

259 muse – he describes the ups and downs in their relationship, the Lawrentian religion of sex and how she is eventually dumped because she became “middle- aged, almost a lady.” The day after Pat’s brief funeral, her successor Nadira Alvi moves into her house and within a couple of months becomes Naipaul’s second wife. What surprises us is the tolerance of both Patricia and Margaret to Naipaul’s patriarchal domination bordering on sadomasochism--something endemic to South Asians and not Western women.

The biography offers a lot of explanation about Naipaul’s acerbic self, his snappy behavior, his often outrageous statements, his moods, his coarseness, his fits of anguish, the embedded inferiority complex that he wanted to overcome, his attempt to rise above class, his move in the postcolonial parlance from the margin to the centre. In the end, what ultimately emerges apart from the sensationalism is not only a human being with all his follies and foibles, but a man who has the guts to let the truth come out in spite of the damage it might cause to his reputation. His own attempts at writing an autobiography having failed, Naipaul believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of ‘narcissism and humility’. For a person who remained forever a full time writer, both in good and bad times, we see how fame became of him. Also this biography is probably the best weapon to combat the allegations raised by Paul Theroux in Sir Vidia’s Shadow, written after their relationship turned sour. Knowing full well that “the aim of the biographer should not be to sit in judgment but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader,” French’s narrative juxtaposes subjectivity and objectivity with ease. He quotes extensively from Pat’s diary, from the private correspondence of Vidia, from interviews with the author as well as different friends and foes leaving authorial judgement to a minimum.

Reading though the biography which at times seems like fiction, we notice the fact that even in his later life, when Vidia achieved some social success and financial prosperity, it gave him no sense of security. Like a true postcolonial migrant, he remains the perennial outsider, even unable to communicate freely with members of his extended family. By repeatedly disassociating himself, he also loses all his friends who drift away from him. Naipaul himself spoke of this ‘general insecurity’ but he remained determined never to lose his singularity. Unlike the Arabs in Africa he describes in A Bend in the River, cut off from the cultural authority of their homeland, he would not allow his own position in the world to be undermined. “The world is what it is,” he wrote in the first lines of that book, providing French with the title of this biography, “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

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By the end of the book (which incidentally ends on 18th October 1996, the day the writer and his present wife Lady Nadira drive down to the woods to scatter the ashes of Pat and with the man copiously weeping and feeling “grateful that she was able to do this for [him]”), the journey from Vidiadhar or Vido the boy, to Vidia the man, to V.S. Naipaul, the writer is really not complete. Though French ends with the word ‘Enough’ for the time being, he leaves the story open-ended for making necessary additions during the last decade and till the author’s death. Who knows we may be in for more surprise later on as truth is always stranger than fiction and especially when the subject himself has so emphatically declared, “ A writer is in the end not his books but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.”

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The Life of Graham Greene Volu m e I: 1904-1939 Volu m e II: 1939-1955 Volume III: 1955-1991 Norman Sherry Pimlico/Rupa/Jonathan Cape; 2004. 33 Sterling pounds; ------The very mention of Graham Greene inevitably evokes “Greeneland,” reviewers’ shorthand for the fictional terrain where all of Greene’s novels seem to be set – a desolate colonial outpost with unforgiving weather, which is inhabited by mid- level civil servants, simple-hearted locals, and adulterous wives. Greene was always annoyed by this trope, insisting that his books “carefully and accurately

261 described” the world as he experienced it. As if to prove his point, he once called his biographer Norman Sherry his doppelgänger, and extracted from him a promise to “follow in his footsteps” to wherever he had set a major work – Mexico, Paraguay, Panama, Haiti, Argentina, Liberia, Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo, and numerous other inhospitable locations. In the course of fulfilling this promise – to experience as far as possible what his subject experienced – Sherry contracted gangrene, which required the removal of part of his intestines. Operating under the assumption that every place Greene went and every person he met is significant, Sherry has inevitably become bogged down in the most minute details – the result of which is the three volume biography, the third of which has arrived fifteen years after the publication of the first and thirty years after Greene designated Sherry as his authorized biographer after going through the wonderful work he had done with the life of Joseph Conrad.

This biography is supposed to give us the complete picture of the enigmatic and stunningly prodigious writer that Graham Greene was and one has to admit it is not an easy task. During a writing life of more than sixty years, Greene published twenty-six novels, in an almost unseemly variety of genres, ranging from early thrillers and “entertainments” such as Brighton Rock and This Gun For Hire, through the famous “Catholic trilogy” of his middle years, to a more experimental later phase that includes such uncategorizable works as Travels with My Aunt and Monsignor Quixote. He also wrote plays, film scripts, memoirs, and travel books. His life, spanning most of the twentieth century, also touched, and his work transfixed many major historical events of this era: The First World War; the General Strike; the Great Depression; the Second World War; bitter civil wars in Liberia, Mexico and Vietnam; Mau Mau atrocities in Kenya; the War of the Running Dogs in Malaya; Cold War espionage; McCarthyism of the 1950s; and the political strongmen of the post war era.

Volume I traces in details Greene’s life from his birth in 1904 to 1939. The second volume covers the years from 1939 to 1955, proving to be the most prolific of the author’s life – both in his spying and literary careers. Here Sherry tries to move from Greene’s public reputation to an understanding of his inner vulnerabilities. Through numerous and extensive interviews, as well as study of his letters, diaries, journals and major novels, Sherry tries to find an answer to a central question: why was life so impossible for Greene? Why was suicide a constant thought? What sustained his formidable desire for self-annihilation? He discovered that Greene had based a number of his characters on real people, most important of whom, was Greene himself. This presents a particular problem. Greene lived his life to extremes: he had serious affairs, sometimes simultaneously with at least three women, amid a host of more casual liaisons;

262 he spied for MI6, smoked opium, visited prostitutes. Being a practicing Catholic also, he also displayed a remarkable equanimity in the midst of chaos and took the Catholic creed to heart: “Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body, and never will again.”

Greene practiced in his novels a peculiar form of realism: not a realism of the everyday but a vision of the psychological, political and spiritual difficulties that people face in moments of extremity. He once quoted a line from Browning as a suitable epigraph for all his novels:

“Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist.”

Delighting in a world of secrecy, he had even once written to Catherine Walston, one of his longtime lovers, “If anybody ever tries to write a biography of me, how complicated they are going to find it and how misled they are going to be.” No wonder that after three decades of continuous reflection, Sherry still finds him a “strange man” or “stranger of a man.” Till his death, Greene remained a man not easily caught in the act of greatness.

Till the publication of the third volume, Greene scholars had been annoyed with the biographer because of an ambiguous comma in a document Greene had signed on the day before he died on April 2, 1991 forbidding other scholars to quote from his unpublished material until Sherry’s project was complete. At well over two thousand pages, this authorized biography, which does not place any doubt about the sincerity of the project, sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of unnecessary details. Though one appreciates the photographs included along with the text [for example, one finds the novelist’s full page image on the cover of Time magazine of 29 October, 1951 with a subtitle “Adultery can lead to sainthood” inscribed under his name]; the comments in the Appendix by Mr. Osterling rejecting the nomination of Graham Greene for the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature as “a bit premature”; one fails to understand the necessity of including in the Appendix an elaborate list of Greene’s “Favourite Prostitutes.”

Rejecting the epithets like ‘unputdownable,’ ‘fascinating’ etc as inserted in the covers of the volumes, we appreciate Sherry’s stance of locating an exact date and time for the completion of his project and yet ending paradoxically on an inconclusive note. Greene had always believed that Norman Sherry, our modern- day Boswell, would not live to complete the third volume and so the biographer superstitiously wanted to fulfill Greene’s prophecy – “I haven’t completed the

263 work, so I still breathe.” Hope academics and scholars do the rest, and in the process separate the grain from the chaff.

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Martha Gellhorn: A Life Caroline Moorhead London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. 550 pages ------The very mention of the name of Martha Gellhorn brings to the mind of a layman the image of a woman who was the third wife of Ernest Hemingway who met each other during the Spanish Civil War and lived with him at the Finca Vigia in Cuba. The same man is not aware that the relationship lasted for less than five years and that Hemingway’s shadow infuriated her to the point where she allowed no mention of his name, ever, in connection with her own. A biography published five years after the death of a personality whose colorful life was more or less synonymous with the history of the twentieth century, attempts to clear many such misconceptions. From her birth in St. Louis, Missouri in 1902 to her death at the ripe age of ninety-six in the year 1998, this biography of an international correspondent is interesting because it is not only the depiction of a single person’s life, but also a social history of America, Europe, and several parts of the world that took part as well as suffered from different wars.

Beginning as a cub reporter, and having a mother busy with suffragette causes, Martha Gellhorn dropped out of Bryn Mawr College in 1927 to become a writer. The New Republic accepted a few of her articles, but Gellhorn wanted to become a foreign correspondent. Like many American expatriates during that time, Martha moved to Paris, with a typewriter and a dream of escape. In Paris, the left bank of which was already an established place for the literary and artistic world, she learnt of homosexuality, and she wanted to go everywhere, see 264 everything, and meant to write in her own way. Working for the United Press bureau, she became active in the pacifist movement and decided that her role was to be ‘the spokesman for a generation’ of young Americans. While moving around in villages of France, Switzerland and Italy she met Bertrand de Jouvenal, with whom she would continue to have a long relationship. After reporting on the Depression for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Gellhorn became friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1937, Collier's Weekly sent Gellhorn to cover the Spanish Civil War. Here she preferred to send reports of ordinary people, believing that what happened in Spain was “the affair of us all, who do not want a world whose bible is Mein Kampf.” She had also written to Mrs. Roosevelt that the war in Spain was one kind of war, the next world war would be “the stupidest, lyingest, cruelest sell- out in our time.” While in Spain she fell in love with Ernest Hemingway whom she had earlier met in Key West, Florida, becoming his third wife in 1940. In 1941, in her honeymoon trip to China, she became friendly with Madame Chiang Kai Sheikh. She also traveled to Germany and reported on the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II. Martha continued to report throughout the war, impersonating a stretcher carrier to witness the D-Day landings. Her visit to the Dachau concentration camp helped her for the first time to really understand the true evil of man and since then she lost the instinctive certainty she had clung to all her life that truth, justice and kindness would always, in the end, prevail. She no longer felt they would; and she never did again. As a witness of the Nuremberg trials, the Japanese surrender in Bali, in letters, in her diary and notebooks, even in her articles for Collier’s, she returned again and again to the theme of adjustment to a future without war. Detesting life as a vegetable, she wanted to be in the warfront all the time, if not as a reporter, at least as a witness to history.

After World War II, Gellhorn covered international affairs, including the Vietnam War, for The Atlantic Monthly. She even spent some time in Israel, trying to understand the crisis in the Middle East. Journalist, novelist, impassioned liberal and glamorous friend of the famous, Gellhorn also wrote four novels and a book about her life with Hemingway. What strikes us is the inherent restless that occupied her throughout her life—in spite of having several relationships and marriages, she could not sustain any of them for long. When she met Robert Capa in Spain, she had explained that she had five friends in her life, all men. When her marriage with Hemingway was on the rocks and he had complained that she was a selfish and ambitious woman, Martha eulogized him by calling him a ‘good man’ and though that she was wrong for him. She understood that two basically tough people could not survive together. Even her adoption of a

265 son, Sandy who later on turned into a drug addict, was another failure on her part to settle into a comfortable family life. Added to this was also the overwhelming presence of her mother Edna in her life.

Martha’s ambition to nurture her career as a war correspondent often left her living alone and even at the age of sixty she declared that she was not lonely but was alone. There were two enduring escape mechanisms in her life – reading and traveling. These were tropes that helped her to forget her pain, and to constantly live in the present. Her regular habit of buying old houses at various parts of the world including places like Mexico, East Africa, Wales, Cuba, New York, London, and the pains she took in renovating them spoke of the inherent restless, rootlessness and angst from which she constantly suffered. She needed ripples. Boredom was a far more malevolent enemy to her than change. Apart from being an egotist and a perfectionist, her tenacity and her keenness to stay physically fit at any cost was remarkable. In the 1970’s, when she tried to settle in London, she even started for the first time to seek solace in women friends.

Caroline Moorhead, professional biographer of Freya Stark, Bertrand Russell, Iris Origo and others, confesses that she was never one of Martha Gellhorn’s “chaps”, the close circle of younger friends who gathered around her in the last twenty years of her life. Yet, what is remarkable about this wonderfully written biography is that it reads more like a work of fiction, uncluttered with facts, figures and chronology. What really enchants the reader is the Afterword where Moorhead describes in details the meticulous way in which Martha planned her suicide. Unable to cope with near-total blindness, cancer of the ovary and the liver, and the trauma of living alone, when she decided that the moment had come, she took care of everything – wills, gifts, burning of personal letters etc, including tidying up her flat, and when she was found dead the next morning, ‘there was no sign of fear on her face.’ Though Martha occasionally talked about writing an autobiography on ‘sex, memory, and war’, to put the record right, she never overcame her distaste for writing about herself. Hence, in spite of its enormous length, this biography is strongly recommended.

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Less than a Treason: Hemingway in Paris Peter Griffin Oxford University Press, 1990. ------To either the casual or dedicated fan of Hemingway, a biography is always alluring. Less Than a Treason is the second volume of Peter Griffin's proposed biographical trilogy on Ernest Hemingway. The first, Along With Youth: Hemingway; the Early Years (1985) was interesting and valuable because it closely examined, more so than any· other biography, Hemingway's formative years to age twenty-two when he first married and decided to move to Paris.

Treason, this slim volume, consisting of ten chapters, focuses on Hemingway's formative years as an artist from 1921 to 1927. It begins with Ernest's and Hadley's trip to France on the Leopoldina and ends with his separation of Hadley and the coming over from America of Pauline. As in the first volume, Griffin vividly recaptures the heady atmosphere of expatriate Paris that Hemingway calls his home, the experiences, associations, attitudes and feelings he forged during these years, which would shape the remainder of the writer's work and life. The book is full of physical details - the sights and sounds of working class Paris, skiing in the Austrian Alps, and the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Griffin also presents a new interpretation of Hemingway’s friendships with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins.

At the very beginning of the book, Griffin cites Carlos Baker as the "official Hemingway biographer" and considers his work as the framework of this book. It is not wrong for Griffin and other biographers to dig over what he calls Baker's "goldmine" of information. However, as Griffin also mentions in his preface, his ultimate purpose is to “not analyze this well-examined life (but to) try instead to recreate it." This “recreation" part sometimes leads to too much of conjectures and assumptions on the part of the biographer. Unlike notable portraits of the 267 lives of literary figures wherein the biographer brings the writers' lives to their work, Griffin attempts to bring Hemingway's work to his life. Besides giving us details behind the writing of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises, Griffin leans heavily on the unpublished stories, "Philip Haines was a writer …" and "James Allen lived in a studio … '' (which were subsequently published in the Spring 1990 edition of The Hemingway Review) and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and Hemingway's memoir of the period A Movable Feast (which reveals the writer's approach to the veracity of what he wrote about himself: "It's all true - only I made it up.") It is true that Hemingway's stories were highly autobiographical. But Griffin's suggestion that published and unpublished stories inspired by the Paris years can be used as literal transcriptions of real experience seems to be carrying things a bit too far. Thus we cannot wholly agree with the fact that "much of the Ernest - Hadley- Pauline" triangle in The Garden of Eden is totally historical.

Some places of the book reads like fiction, especially in the detailed descriptions of the interiors of the ship Leopoldina. Again, details of the field trip that Heminway took while working for the Toronto Star and getting into conflict with Harry Hindmarsh, the editor, the fable behind the name Grand St. Bernard when Hemingway went for a trip to Chamby, do seem like digressions. The story about Hemingway's trip with F. Scott Fitzgerald to Lyon seems a verbal repetition of the original one in A Movable Feast. One notices a few factual errors in the book too. Griffinsays that Hemingway's first apartment was in Montmartre, the artistic area wherein he moved. It was in fact, Montparnasse. He also claims that F.Scott Fitzgerald was the namesake of Hemingway's cat, Mr. F.Puss. The name actually came from Ernest's nickname of his first wife, Hadley. Equally thin is Griffin's contention that The Torrents of Spring was not a pure satire of Sherwood Anderson but a personal "confession"; in fact, more than anything, this was Hemingway's ploy to break the contract with his publisher, who happened to also be Anderson's publisher.

There are some bright aspects in this biography too. Among them is Griffin's use of Bill Horne's private collections of letters written to him by Ernest Hemingway just after they returned from World War I. In 1985, Jack Hemingway donated to the Ernest Hemingway Collection all of his mother's correspondence and Griffin's access to this source is well utilized. Also commendable is his use of Hadley Hemingway Mowrer's taped interviews made a few years before her death. These sources add a lot of new perspectives to the biography. Last but not least, mention should be made of the very moving section of the book which deals with the break-up of Hemingway's first marriage and its immediate consequences. The epilogue ends with this sentence: "As the decade of the

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Twenties closed, Ernest Hemingway believed he had betrayed the two people in the world he truly loved: his father and his first wife. Yet his career was well under way."

Hopefully we wish that Griffin's next volume will do greater justice to Ernest Hemingway, an extremely complicated man whose true nature may, to a great extent, always remain obscured behind the myths that he, and others created.

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VI: TAGORE

Rabindranath Tagore GORA: A Critical Companion Edited by Nandini Bhattacharya New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015, 232 pages; Rs.1195.00. ISBN:978-93-84082-42-0 ------

Gora in Bengali is considered to be the best novel by Rabindranath Tagore for its epic range. Though written between 1907 and 1909 (when the author was in his forties), the action of the text is clearly set at least thirty years earlier, in the early 1880s and takes into account events that happened even earlier. If one takes into consideration the moment of Gora’s birth, then the action of the narrative should be said to begin from the year 1857. The novel is considered central to the nation question because it captures the Indian nationalist upsurge of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century in all its tragic complexity. Gora is produced in an awareness of Lord Curzon’s proposed partition of Bengal and the

270 consequent crystallization of the Bengal-Indian identity. The narrative evokes the image of a beauteous golden Bengal and this evocation also sustains the longing for its distinct identity and the urge for an emancipated desh (nation). At the same time the novel is equally embedded in questions of religion, modernity, and more particularly, orthodox Hinduism’s negotiation with colonial modernity’s ‘secular’ representations. It maps the ideological upheavals within the Bengali Hindu psyche, enunciating the first phase of Young Bengal’s arrogant agnosticism, the second phase of the emergence of reformist sects such as the , and the final phase of resurgent neo-Hinduism that asserts itself in an unabashed, aggressive manner. It is also this neo-Hindu revival/resurgence in Bengal that also shapes its nationalist intent. Yet, Tagore’s narrative is resolved by demolishing the very basis of any firm identity position. In its broadest and most humane of senses, Gora is rendered ‘foundational’ to India today.

Gora: A Critical Companion, the present volume under review, revisits Tagore’s text from perspectives as varied and interdisciplinary as textual and genre studies; translation and reception studies; narratology, gender, race and caste studies. The eleven contributors, including the editor have assessed the novel from as many different perspectives as possible and thus give us a more comprehensive understanding of this complex yet seminal text.

Like many of his other novels that were written to meet demands from magazines, Gora was published serially in Prabasi from August 1908 to February 1910 in 76 chapters and a conclusion. In April 1909, while twenty instalments of Gora had been published and eight more were to come, Kuntaline Press published an incomplete edition of the novel. It contained the first 44 chapters till Lalita’s attempt to start a girls’ school at Sucharita’s house and its failure. This is probably the only instance in the entire Tagore literary corpus, where a novel was published in book form, though the narrative was still halfway. This makes an interesting phenomenon in itself. Positing the vital difference between a ‘work’ and a ‘text,’ in the first essay SpandanaBhowmik decodes the causes/contents for change and elisions in Rabindranath’s narratives and gives the readers a taste of Textual History studies as an emergent discipline. She also explores the reason why Tagore was in such a hurry to see his novel in a book form.

In the second chapter, Ananya Dutta Gupta revisits the generic categories of ‘novel’ and ‘epic’ and their intertwined paths in the context of Gora. According to her the novel’s capacity to simulate the epic strain also implicitly points towards a certain flexibility and adaptability in the epic itself. Thus Gora may be described as epic in its projected literary function and, at the same time, a novel

271 in its representational philosophy and technique so that at the end it remains an open-ended Bakhtinian novel, culminating in the rejection of closure.

Discussing a distinctive Indian patriotic imaginary that Rabindranath Tagore elaborated in Gora, Tanika Sarkar contends that the novel offers a radically new way of being an Indian patriot. Discussing in details the theme of patriotism alone, what moves Sarkar most in the novel is its eventful failure to secure a reliable and convincing foundation for patriotism and in its own way it is a heroic failure. This is because patriotism slides into something more than a politics of place, a certain definition of the culture of the land becomes its defining essence. She further argues that it seems undeniable that Rabindranath of the Swadeshi era provided the model for the patriotic language of the early Gora in the novel. The novel is therefore autobiographical in a split mode as the early and the later Gora reflect the two different political moments in Rabindranath’s life. After detailed discussion of different issues related to Indian patriotism, Sarkar opines that in its heteroglossia and dialogic organization, as well as in many of its arguments, the novel anticipated much of the later GhareBaire, the novel that reflected on the Swadeshi experience. Also Gora’s vision of patriotism fails to resolve the intractable problems of finding a convincing locus for patriotism.

Questioning Tanika Sarkar’s position regarding the novel’s liberating possibilities in terms of creedal faith, Nandini Bhattacharya contends that Gora achieves the masking of majoritarian religious positions (in this case, Hinduism) and the rendering of religion so ‘invisible’ that it appears areligious; like some universally valid, ethico-cultural codes. Religion, like power, is no longer visible but permeated interstitially. Her essay therefore reads Gora as working out a largerand more insidious Hindu nationalist agenda. It is an exploration of religion’s negotiation with modernity in general, and modernity’s secular pretentions in the context of colonial Bengal in particular.

Two unique responses of non-Bengali scholars comprise the next two essays. While Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar’s essay deals with the issue of caste, and also seeks to situate Gora within the Telugu context in particular, and bhasa literatures of south India in general, Ana Jelnikar, a senior scholar from Slovenia, provides the global context of reading Gora today. Deploying Jacques Derrida’s theory of unconditional hospitality, she examines the moment of Anandamayi’s unconditional acceptance of the infant Gora amidst intolerance and the inhospitable climes of Mutiny violence. The global context is also provided by Sunayani Bhattacharya in Chapter 7. The first section of her essay provides a close reading of the novel’s ending to understand the transcendent subject position Tagore hopes to establish.Then, in order to focus on the broader

272 contextual questions that compel the framing of Gora’s body as outside categories of race and caste, she discusses two particular documents pertaining to the racial policies in colonial India – the Ilbert Bill (1883) and responses to it, and Herbert H. Risley and E.A.Gait’sReport on the Census of India1901. She submits Gora toareading in terms of race issues, examining atthesametimethe implicatednessof caste, creed and racial questions.

Tagore had penned innumerable songs throughout his entire life and in an interesting article DebashisRaychaudhuri explores the significance of the songs that he penned during the time Gora was being written. According to him, though Tagore never wrote songs directly for the novel, some of the songs that he composed between 1905-10 bear the themes that can be traced in Gora and Raja. To Rabindranath the bauls or the wandering mendicants represented the liberal, plural, anti-institutional, non-religious, non-fundamentalist spirituality that he emphasized so much in the true spirit of India. Through the songs of the bauls he was discovering his India which was not torn by the fundamentalism of the different warring religions. It is therefore not accidental that he begins the novel Gora with the song of Lalan Fakir which in translation reads as: “The unknown bird flies in and out of the cage, I know not how! /If only I could catch it I would chain its feet with the fetters of mind!”. The spirit of this song and the singer assume a deeper significance of a subtle leitmotif that one traces in a complicated tapestry within the novel.

Coming to the two other essays, while Uma Dasgupta discusses Gora from the perspective of Rabindranath’s educational reforms in Visva-Bharati University, Dipankar Roy explores the complex relations between the project of nation building and the reformation of women in a ‘new age’ in India. According to him, the novel is a testimony of how the overtly ‘political’ issues get entwined with the act of ‘self-fashioning’ and how the ‘troubled’ nature of the male self of the colonized ‘subjects’ makes its mark on the man-woman relationship. The ‘woman question’ as recorded in the novel, therefore, needs to be addressed in the context of the ‘wounded’ virility of the male self, a self that is caught in the crossfire between oppressive colonial regime on the one hand and strong winds of change on the other.

In the last essay of the volume Ritu Sen Chaudhuri contends that one may read Gora as a discourse on re-conceptualizing the theme of Bharatbarsha, the Bangla word for India, within an intricate structure of re-membering. She engages with questions of Bharatbarshaand its mutations (desh, rashtra, matribhumi) in the narrative, bringing together the many strands of criticism regarding the nation

273 state and Gora.In doing this she also alludes to RasasundariDasi’s autobiography, Amar Jiban, which is another moment of remembering Bharatbarsha.

The eleven essays in this volume thus offer critical support to the reading of a text as complex and as culturally embedded as Gora from different perspectives. Apart from these, two appended articles provide greater critical support to contemporary readers. The first one is Rabindranath Tagore’s essay Atmaparichay (Our Identity) that came out within a year of Gora’s publication and was anthologized in a book of essays entitled Parichaya (Identity). Translated into English by the editor herself, it contributes to the understanding of Rabindranath’s responses to, and recasting of, traditional Hinduism. The essay ponders over the complexity of the terms such as jati, samaj, dharma, and their volatile charge in the nineteenth century Bengali-Indian context and also situates Gora within its own ideological context and the polemics that shaped the Hindu- Bengali mindset.

BuddhadevBasu’s Bangla critical essay on Gora (first published in 1955) translated by Parjanya Sen is also appended herewith in order to situate the volume within its Bangla bhasa critical context. As one of the earliest and serious critical readings of the novel in the language in which it was originally written, it informs the readers about the novel’s reception. For Basu, Gora with its expansive treatment of its socio-political context and its unique blending of incident and thought is the most fulfilling as a novel within Tagore’s oeuvre. Admitting the fact that Gora is ‘a problem-oriented novel’ where Tagore does not present any particular crisis and offer a solution, the novel articulates the consciousness of a particular country caught within a particular socio-historic time frame.

At a time when religious intolerance and issues of nationalism are still contentious and critical items of debate in India, it would be worthwhile for readers to go back to Tagore’s masterpiece and re-read the text either in original Bangla or in the different available translations either in English or the bhasa literatures. Needless to say he/she would be greatly benefited if the reading is accompanied by this very resourceful companion.

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Meeting Mussolini: Tagore’s Tours in Italy 1925 and 1926 Kalyan Kundu Oxford University Press, 2015; 250 pages, Rs.750.00 ------‘I did not support Fascism. I have expressed my admiration for Mussolini, but only as an artist. I was careful to make this distinction that I was only speaking as an artist. About Fascism the only thing about which I was assured by almost everyone I met was that it had saved Italy from economic ruin.’ --- Rabindranath Tagore in conversation with Signora Giacinta Salvadori, 1926

Of the many countries that Rabindranath Tagore visited in his lifetime, his sojourn in Italy for two weeks in 1925, and the controversial trip from 30 May to 22 June 1926, especially at the invitation of Benito Mussolini, have been a subject of great interest to Tagore scholars and researchers for mainly two reasons. Firstly, the ethics, ideologies, and beliefs of these two human beings were a world apart and hence the acceptance of an invitation from a tyrant dictator by a great humanist baffled the international community at that time. Secondly, the high drama associated with the imperfect encounter aroused a great deal of media interest both within and outside Italy and also intrigued the scholars. The Tagore-Mussolini episode was largely debated in Indian, Italian, and the rest of the European media during the time of his tour and afterwards.

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Later of course, Tagore himself said, “Reports of fascist atrocities reached me from time to time and I had serious misgivings about coming back to Italy.”

Based on the information derived from different sources, Tagore scholars have summed up Tagore’s visit to Italy in 1926 in the following way: Rabindranath Tagore’s Italian visit at the invitation of the government was the result of a heinous ploy by Mussolini, whose international image at that time was an all-time low, especially after the assassination of two prominent socialist leaders, Amanadola and Matteoti in 1924. Hence it is said that the dictator wanted to divert the world’s attention by inviting Tagore to Italy, expecting that Tagore would praise his fascist government. He dispatched two professors, Carlo Formichi and Guiseppe Tucci, to Santiniketan with a generous gift of books for Tagore’s university library to encourage and influence him to accept the Italian government’s invitation. Tagore, being unaware of Mussolini’s plan and being ignorant of Italian politics, accepted the invitation in good faith, as he had responded before to other governments’ invitations, and spent a fortnight in Italy as a guest of the Italian government. The Italian government gave a royal reception to Tagore and his entourage, and Tagore was overwhelmed by Mussolini’s reception. His praise for Mussolini was reported in the Italian press with exuberance. As Tagore did not know the language, he did not realize that his speeches and interviews were distorted in favour of Mussolini and his regime.

Scholar believe that all this may have been carefully manipulated by the two professors, especially Formichi, to please their ‘Master.’ The European press was baffled to read the poet’s euphoric praise for Mussolini and his authority. However, after leaving Italy, Tagore realized his mistake during his days as a guest of and in the course of his meetings with some of the expatriates. Elmhurst told Romain Rolland that Tagore was upset at the manifestations of fascism. Finally, on 5 August 1926, Tagore wrote a long letter to Charles Freer Andrews explaining the context of his Italian tour and how he had been trapped by Italian reporters. In that letter published in The Manchester Guardian, Tagore wrote: “It is absurd to imagine that I could ever support a movement [fascism] which ruthlessly suppresses freedom of expression, enforces observances that are against individual conscience, and walks through a bloodstained path of violence and stealthy crime.” He also wrote to Romain Rolland, “I have to pass through a purification ceremony for the defilement to which I submitted myself in Italy.”

Though this seems to end all speculation on the saga of Tagore’s Italian sojourn, some critics however still raise many questions. First and foremost is the question why Tagore accepted the Italian government’s invitation at all. Tagore

276 rationalized with the explanation: he was entranced by the scenic beauty of Italy; he was eager to meet the great minds of Europe; and he had to redeem his pledge to his friends whom he promised a visit sooner or later. But it is said that Rathindranath and Prashanta Mahalanobis did not approve of Tagore’s visit, knowing the nature of fascist Italy; they however, did not have the courage to say it to Tagore. When they found that Tagore had made up his mind, they decided to travel with him and guard him against misinterpretation of his interviews. Nirmal Kumari Mahalonobis’s memoir of course narrates a breath- holding suspense story describing how Formichi manoeuvred and prevented Prashanta and her from joining Tagore on the boat and how they succeeded in eluding the watchful eyes of Formichi but a bit too late. At times the story of Tagore’s entire Italian visit sounds very striking and apparently plausible. At other times, like a whodunit many questions have remained unanswered and a meticulous analysis of the evidence still reveals discrepancies.

The main object of the current study by Kalyan Kundu is to resolve some of the discrepancies that have been circulating over all these years and try to free the readers from all kinds of aberrations. According to the research undertaken by the author, if we revisit Formichi’s account in India e Indiani with an open mind and take into account the evidence provided, which had been overlooked by previous scholars, and furthermore take this into consideration alongside the policy of the fascist regime, we have to rethink Formichi and Tucci’s action in a newer light before imposing any indictment on these two very distinguished Orientalists. Kundu uses Tagore’s tour itineraries, the nature of receptions, summaries of his lectures and comments, and finally his interviews to get a comprehensive idea as to what had actually taken place. Also by accessing the private archive of Clara Muzzarelli Formentini, the granddaughter of an Italian émigré Professor Guglielmo Salvadori, he has included the accounts of the meeting of Signora Salvadori and Tagore and some of their correspondence which were not referred to by earlier researchers. Salvadori’s version of the meeting with Tagore differs from the one that was published in The Manchester Guardian (7 August 1926). In this context Kundu even analyzed Tagore’s lecture in Milan in 1925 due to its controversial aspect. Also included in the Appendix is a transcript of a previously unpublished casual conversation on the subject ‘On Death’ between Tagore and Duke Scotti in Milan when the ailing poet was confined to his hotel. All these add up to throw new light on Tagore’s Italian sojourns.

We are all aware of Kalyan Kundu’s interest in the work, philosophy, and life of Rabindranath Tagore that led him to form an archive of the poet’s work in Britain, from which The Tagore Centre UK was founded in 1985. He has

277 contributed his interest in Tagoreana in several anthologies and research papers but none of them have been as compelling as this present volume. Congratulating Kalyan Kundu as a true Tagore scholar with a deep research- oriented mind, the Foreword by Indra Nath Choudhuri concludes with the following remark: “He has given a very objective and honest account of the Tagore-Mussolini episode, which still remains an enigmatic chapter in Tagore’s life history.” This reviewer just adds that Tagore had visited 34 countries of the world but no writing matches the controversial trip to Italy in 1925 and 1926. There are references to Tagore’s Italian tours in the biographies of Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, , Prabhat Mukhopadhyay and many others, but none of them matches the details that this book provides. It includes details such as an almost day-by-day record of the tour as well as newspaper reports on this subject published in English, Italian, French and Bengali, along with interviews and other archival resources on the subject. By getting many original documents in Italian translated into English for the first time, Kundu is able to reassess Tagore’s entire Italian tour of 1925 and 1926 in a new light. It is for this reason that we need to read this present volume which is not a mere travel narrative but a testament that tries to clear up some of the cobwebs of history. ------

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Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore Edited by Radha Chakrarvarty New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015. [Distributed by Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd.] 294 pages, Rs. 850.00 ISBN: 978-93-83166-084 ------

Although being widely published since 2011, (coinciding with his 150th birth anniversary), new books and anthologies on Rabindranath Tagore still continue to flood the market. With the publication of such volumes it becomes clear that the writer is inexhaustible and there is still much more to discover. It is probably this reason that prompted Radha Chakravarty, who along with Fakrul Alam had edited the excellent volume entitled The Essential Tagore [which was jointly published in 2011 by Harvard University Press and Visva-Bharati and which was probably the first volume to include all possible genres of Tagore’s writings within its covers] to come up with this new anthology wherein she has included Tagore’s writings in different genres that did not find place in the earlier volume. So with the help of eight other academics cum translators apart from herself, we get a new fare of Tagore’s writings which, as the title of the book suggests, reveal the ‘shades of difference’ in his oeuvre.

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Divided into seven sections, the book presents a selection of Tagore’s writings in several genres including fiction, essays, travelogues, poems, plays and letters. New translations by diverse hands are included here, along with many of Tagore’s own writings in English, and some of his works in translation. The first section includes five short stories namely, ‘A Fantastic Tale,’ ‘The Living and the Dead,’ ‘Trespass,’ ‘Misplaced Hope’ and ‘The Parrot’s Training’ (which is translated by Tagore himself). Two plays namely Chitra and Chandalika comprise the second section. The longest prose section comprises of fifteen essays which include seminal pieces like ‘What is a Nation’, ‘State vs. Society’ ‘The Welfare of the People,’ ‘The Divinity of the Forest’ and ‘Crisis in Civilization’. Five sample letters written to Indira Devi, R.G. Pradhan. C.F. Andrews, Margaret Sanger and Hemantabala Devi complete the next section. By the time we come to the Travel Writing section containing two entries, namely, “Letters from Russia” and “In Persia”, and the three conversations between Tagore and H.G. Wells, Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein, we already get a taste of certain core concerns that remain central to Tagore’s writings: freedom, equality, politics, education, rural reconstruction, culture, ecology, science, religion, forms of domination and marginalization, collaboration between cultures, tolerance, creativity and philosophy. The concluding section titled ‘Poems’ has excerpts from different phases of the poet’s creation – from Gitanjali, The Gardener, Songs of Kabir, Stray Birds, Fruit Gathering, The Fugitive, Fireflies, Poems (1942) and Kabir and the Woman.

Whereas one has to agree that the selection of the editor is an entirely subjective matter, one keeps on wondering why an excerpt from any of the novels has not been included here. It would have added a new dimension to the exercise of tasting another brand of Tagorean wine, something we can label as ‘Tagoreana.’ Apart from the printed matter, the ample illustrations in the book remind us that Tagore’s multifaceted genius encompasses much more than the written word. Even a single photograph helps the less perceptive reader delve into the depths of the poet’s life and times more easily.

While the reviewer is slightly critical about the choice of Tagore’s texts in different genres, it has to be admitted that the USP of this volume is also the accompanying audio-visual material entitled Tagore and His World that provides broader context for Tagore’s evolution as a thinker and artist, offering glimpses of his life, travels, educational vision for his dream university at Santiniketan and creative experiments in music, dance, theatre and the visual arts. Through a range of contemporary adaptations both from India and Bangladesh, accompanied by songs sung by contemporary artists, it marks how Tagore’s spirit lives on today, his legacy undiminished, for the world at large. As the editor rightly points out,

280 this material gives us a sense of Tagore as a man of his own times, but also reminds us that his creations live on even today. It alerts us to the difficulty of trying to label and define Tagore and how we just cannot pin down who the ‘real Rabindranath’ was. ‘In the infinite variety of his works and their changing reception throughout the years, the shades of difference are too many, and far too subtle.’

It should be mentioned that a little more emphasis on Tagore’s writings would have made this audio-visual aid even more appealing. All said and done, this new anthology will definitely serve as a launching pad for pan-Indian as well as western readers to become acquainted with a multi-faceted genius by the name of Rabindranath Tagore.

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Rabindranath Tagore: A Pictorial Biography Nityapriya Ghosh New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011. Rs. 1500.00; 278 pages ------The sesquicentennial birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore has flooded the world with Tagoreana in all conceivable art forms – books, songs, seminars, performances from his oeuvre, memorabilia, souvenirs, and so on. So a coffee table book of biography on the Poet written in simple, lucid prose, along with plenty of pictures accompanying the narration, is a welcome addition. In this book Nityapriya Ghosh chronicles the Poet’s contributions in the context of the period to which he belonged, bringing into light those incidents, anecdotes and

281 issues that according to him have been overlooked by mainstream biographers and which nonetheless are significant as they enable us to understand Tagore better.

Telling the story of an eventful eighty years life and works of a man is not an easy task and Ghosh admits in the Preface that he wanted “to fill in some gaps.” He wanted to portray a man of extraordinary abilities yet a man having ordinary expectations, someone who could understand the joys and sorrows of the common man keeping aside his own gains and losses. Thus we get the story, not narrated strictly chronologically under numbered chapters, but done interestingly under twenty-five different thematic headings along with a genealogical family chart at the end.

The first and most significant challenge of any biographer of Tagore is how to select the grain from the chaff; how to remain afloat with the essentials and not get submerged in the quagmire of too many unnecessary details. Ghosh has successfully managed to do that and has blended trivia and a lot of unknown facts with the already well-known historical and bibliographical details of Tagore. He has attempted to assess Tagore’s role as a son, brother, husband, father; his accomplishments as a poet, philosopher, writer, painter, choreographer, actor; his relations with his family, friends, contemporary writers and poets, as well as predecessors; his correspondences with the political leaders of his time within the nation as well as abroad; and above all, his interpretations about life, revealing his quest for love, faith and devotion and his deep-rooted anguish when his dreams and expectations remained unfulfilled.

For serious Tagore scholars (and especially those who can directly access Bengali sources), many of the details described in this book are too well-known but for the less-initiated ones, the well-researched and balanced approach of the author puts the Poet in proper perspective. So we get to know that he was the first Indian to give the short story its formal structure; how he countered the Marxist allegations of being a bourgeois writer (someone who “knew the common man but from the regal perch of his luxurious house boat” and “looked down on his prajas”); how his plays were not popular in public theatres of Calcutta; how he countered the controversy over his poem “Sonar Taree”, how he travelled across the world delivering lectures, singing songs, reciting poems and trying to raise funds for Visva-Bharati, “not with a begging bowl in his hand but in his voice” and focusing on Indian quietude versus European restiveness; how he countered the differences with leaders like Gandhi and Subhas Bose regarding his nationalist agenda; the publication and reception of Gitanjali; and how he countered his active public life with his personal and unfortunate family life.

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The sepia coloured special ‘boxes’ in some pages inserted in between the narrative text and designed like old scrolls are very interesting. A brief mention about the multifarious contents is necessary in order to show how Ghosh could bring in different facts of the Poet’s eventful life without too many digressions. These include selections from Jibansmriti (the plight of a singer), ‘Goethe and Rabindranath’, ‘Clara Butt on Tagore’s songs’ (the English singer’s account of her visit to Santiniketan), ‘Sarojini Naidu on the Tagore craze’, ‘Revision of His English’ (Tagore’s letter to Edward Thompson), Tagore as film director ( with the failure of Natir Puja), ‘Songs out of a Failed Journey’ (after an attempted visit to some old Buddhist caves in Gaya), ‘How Gitanjali was Published in German’, ‘Financing a Dream’ (Kalidas Nag’s account of Visva-Bharati written to Romain Rolland), ‘The Role Reversed’ (by Victoria Ocampo), ‘The Sparkling Green Drink’ (when Pramathanath Bisi as a student was given to taste a glass of neem juice to share from the Poet’s breakfast menu), ‘Gilbert Murray and Tagore’, George Bernard Shaw and Tagore ( narrating their relationship), and ‘Tagore and Bharatnatyam’ (Rukmini Devi Arundale’s memoirs).

Most of the pictures embedded along with the text are well-known with the exception of a few rare ones. The source of the pictures in most occasions is not acknowledged --probably a problem of compromising with quality when borrowing from secondhand sources. In some places the translation of the author sounds a bit archaic, especially the way he translated Rani Chanda’s narrative at the very end just before the Poet’s death. Also this reviewer has some reservations about Ghosh’s choice of certain words especially when he calls the Santhal villagers and the harijans as members of the ‘depressed’ classes. Probably ‘oppressed’ would have been a better word to use. In spite of such minor lapses, the book is a collector’s item and also a good gift for non-Bengali admirers of Tagore.

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Radical Rabindranath: Nation, Family and Gender in Tagore’s Fiction and Films Sanjukta Dasgupta, Sudeshna Chakravarti & Mary Mathew New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013; 343 pp. ------The 150th year of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 generated a lot of renewed interest in the writer’s works and the fruit of that is discernible in various new volumes available in the market. Each book comes out with fresh perspectives in reading the multi-faceted genius that Tagore was and assessing his contribution as a poet, writer, painter, musician, educationist, and Nobel laureate is no mean task. The three authors of Radical Rabindranath, two located in Kolkata and one in the United States, attempt a successful post-colonial reading of the poet that focuses on areas that have been marginalized because of the more dominant and compelling desire in the West to establish Tagore as an Eastern mystical poet and philosopher. Borrowing the title from Jawaharlal Nehru’s statement declaring that “contrary to the usual course of development as he (Tagore) grew older he became more and more radical in his outlook and views,” the present volume under review breaks new ground as it critiques Tagore’s non- conformism and occasional ambivalence as seen in his novels and short stories. Leaving aside the philosophical debate about radicalism and who or what constitutes the definition of being radical, the authors have tried to identify in Tagore’s narratives issues which deviated from the traditional normative systems of his time as well as locate his occasional indeterminacies regarding historical and social factors that have shaped his ideas and literary output.

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Beginning with the impressive history of the Tagore clan when Rabindranath’s ancestors moved from Jessore to Kolkata in the middle of the eighteenth century, the first chapter gives a bio-bibliographical sketch of the poet, his reception in the West, and speaks of his unique ability to be at home in competing cultural camps. The next chapter focuses on issues of patriarchy and society and analyzes the intellectual combats between Rabindranath and Chandranath Basu, Dijendralal Roy, Jitendralal Basu and others. Radical definitions of female empowerment is a significant part of the discussion and the authors draw our attention how Tagore’s heroines from his novels are cast in non-traditional roles even though they function within structures full of historical, psychological and social resonances from the past. The issue of the emergence of the ‘new woman’ of Bengal, who falls somewhere between Hindu conservatism and British modernism, and the problems of her inherent identity formation are also dealt with in some details. Closely related to this is the evaluation of Tagore’s short stories as resistance literature. Apart from gender issues one also reads about how ideas of the nation and politics are dealt with in novels like Ghare Baire, Char Adhyay and Gora. Gender politics and familial relations in novels like Choker Bali, Noukadubi, Jogajog and Shesher Kobita are discussed in details and we are shown how deeply emotional responses and complexities related to love, familial relationships and responsibilities and all such micro issues that define the domestic space is expressed in all the four female protagonists of these novels because they have significant education that enables them to read, write and argue about topics that were considered outside the domain of femininity in conservative colonial Bengal.

An interesting aspect of this book is the reading of Tagore’s narratives as films. Tracing the deviations from the original texts, the authors cogently argue that these film versions of Tagore’s fictional narratives prove Tagore’s relevance in post-colonial India and lately in a globalized twenty-first century India. Also as dominant film-makers of Bengal find it worthwhile to adapt his colonial texts for the silver screen, Tagore’s universal vision and inclusive spirit are unequivocally highlighted. It is interesting to note how most of the recent film adaptations emphasize gender positions, the politics of the sexualized body and body images. The filmography list appended will be useful for all those who are looking for a ready reckoner in this area. However, the title of the film Charulata 2011 is wrongly mentioned and the interesting documentary entitled Rabindranath: Life and Times (2011) directed by Mujibur Rahaman has probably slipped the authors’ attention. The authors conclude the book by reiterating the fact that though Tagore had certain ambivalences in his personal life, ‘in his intellectual and creative discourse Tagore’s mind has been fearless, egalitarian and inclusive and

285 it is in these aspects that his fictional narratives and the films inspired by them bear out so comprehensively.’

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Tagore: At Home in the World Edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta & Chinmoy Guha Sage Publications, 2013; 329 pp. ------Tagore’s role in the innovation of educational ideas has been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. When he established his innovative school in Santiniketan, the poet selected for its motto an ancient Sanskrit verse, Yatra visvam bhavatyeka nidam, meaning ‘where the world makes a home in a single nest.’ With the years Rabindranath had won the world and the world in turn had won him. He sought his home everywhere in the world and would bring the world to his home. It would be a meeting place of the East and the West. He dreamt of a cultural inclusiveness where the gap between world literature and local or national literature could be bridged, an idea clearly expressed in his 1907 lecture entitled Visva Sahitya where he stated: “We need to liberate ourselves from this regional conservatism in order to discover in every writer a sense of wholeness, and within that inclusive wholeness we must discover collective human expression, the time has come for us to take such a pledge.”

This volume under review, Tagore: At Home in the World takes this holistic and integrated world view of Tagore and presents us twenty-two scholarly essays on different aspects of Tagore’s oeuvre. Thematically arranged in seven sections the first part entitled “Tagore and the Language of Relationship” consists of one essay by Udaya Narayana Singh where he analyzes the linguistic strife within Tagore – whether his moorings were in the Oriental knowledge system or in the

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Western thoughts. The three essays in the second section called “Europe and Tagore” take us to Germany, Hungary and France. Whereas Martin Kampchen situates the poet in a politically tumultuous Germany and informs us how Tagore witnessed a gradual resurrection there through translations only after 1945, Imre Banha highlights how Tagore’s popularity in East Central Europe region came in three waves of translations between which there were periods of amnesia. In the third essay Chinmoy Guha recalls Tagore’s encounter with the beautiful and talented French socialite Anna De Noailles. Two essays in the next section highlight on Tagore’s travelogues and the third one by Tutun Mukherjee analyzes five short stories that deal with ghosts. The idea of the Nation, the concept of Nationalism and Tagore’s views on community, class and gender vis-à-vis the 1905 Partition of Bengal becomes the subject of four erudite essays by eminent scholars like Subhoranjan Dasgupta, Indranath Chaudhuri, Amartya Mukhopadhyay and Sudeshna Chakravarti.

The essays in Section V deal with re-reading of the texts of Tagore together with their linguistic and socio-cultural underpinnings. Sanjukta Dasgupta addresses the politics of language used by Tagore especially his own translations of his creative writing in Bengali and his original writings in English and shows how the poet was keen in acquiring a pan-Indian readership in colonial India by using the English language as an effective tool of communication. The other interesting issues explored in this section relate to Tagore’s sojourn in Shillong, his homage to his father through his essay Naibedya, the unique blend of passion and intellect in the poet’s paradoxical conception of bhalobasha or ‘love’ that was imbued with theretical as well as experiential difficulties , the research and pedagogical activities of Professor Vincenc Lesny, a personal Czech friend of the poet who was the first European Indologist to translate Tagore’s poems directly from Bengali to Czech without using the poet’s own English translations.

In the ‘Performance’ section we have three essays on Tagore’s songs and dance, his influence on Indian film music and issues related to translating his songs. The last section has three essays on such diverse topics as the poet’s experiments with education and setting up of Santiniketan institutions, his universalism and finally his focus on environment and ecology and the dynamics of space. As the editors have succinctly mentioned in the introduction, “all the essays in this volume reiterate in their several ways the spirit of timeless Tagore as an icon of creative freedom” who could successfully build bridges between the home and the world. It is needless to add that both these volumes are essential reading for anyone who wants to assess a myriad-minded man called Rabindranath Tagore.

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SWADES: Rabindranath Tagore’s Patriotic Songs Translated by Sanjukta Dasgupta Visva-Bharati, 2013. 83 pages; Rs. 100.00 ------Let me begin with an anecdote. A couple of weeks ago at a national level seminar on the theme of ‘Writing India’ a very erudite and learned professor from Delhi who was delivering the plenary address tried to argue that our great political leaders had committed a grave mistake by selecting Rabindranath Tagore’s Janaganamana as our national anthem because according to him the highly Sanskritized Bangla in which it was written did not arouse passion or make any sense to the ordinary citizens of our country. If educated people could not make out what they were actually forced to sing at the end of every function, what was the plight of the aaam admi? How could they be aroused with the spirit of nationalism with a song that had a ‘boring’ language and a ‘mere catalogue of regions’? According to him Iqbal’s Saare jahan se accha Hindusthan hamara should have been selected for its direct appeal to the masses and its clear nationalist fervour. Whether we agreed with this learned professor’s point of view and his proverbial attack on the cultural hegemony of the Bengalis in this matter is not the point that I am trying to make here. One thing is sure. The meaning of the words of our national anthem has not been disseminated sufficiently in either English or other regional Indian languages to make ordinary citizen across the length and breadth of India understand the zest and the implications that Tagore conveyed through this patriotic song.

It is here that the present volume under review fills up the lacunae by not only providing the translation of our national anthem and also that of our neighbouring Bangladesh (Amar Sonar Bangla ami tomay bhalobashi) but by offering all the forty-six poems written by Tagore and anthologized under the section ‘Swades’ in the 4th volume of Rabindra Rachanabali. Composed mainly at a time at the beginning of the twentieth century when Lord Curzon wanted to deliberately divide Bengal for political motives and the anti-partition and the was in full swing, these songs seemed to emerge as a sonorous weapon of resistance that inspired every thinking heart and resonated in every home of Bengal. Many of them had been first published in 1905 in different journals and some of them even several years after. Interestingly, eight of these forty-six songs had been translated by Dasgupta and had appeared in an earlier version in the volume The Essential Tagore edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakraborty for Harvard University Press in 2011. As the translator rightly

288 points out here, these patriotic poems are often regarded as milestones in the history of colonial Bengal and can therefore be read as resistant texts set to music. Though Tagore distanced himself from the swadeshi movement because he realized that the regional loyalties and the myopic scope of nationalism would not be beneficial in the long run, it would also not be an overstatement to admit that the simple worded songs, aroused the minds of both the young and the old in East and West Bengal in such a strong way that the British were forced to take cognizance of the concerted pledge of the people of Bengal to remain united and disallow any attempt at division of the state.

In the introduction to this volume, the translator has rightfully drawn our attention to the basic problem that all translators face, namely a sense of inadequacy that becomes more accentuated when lyric poems and songs are translated into a language with an entirely different syntax pattern and with no phonetic resemblance to the original text. Thus it has been a more challenging task for her to convey in the English language the simultaneous simplicity and philosophic profundity embedded in most of the lines. But though several of the original lines have remained untranslatable, she contends that laying more emphasis on the pleasure derived from conveying the spirit of the content by using culture-specific words has been a rewarding experience. Thus this slim book is another sincere attempt by the translator to bring Rabindranath Tagore closer to pan-Indian readers who are unable to gauge the significance of this multi-faceted genius because of their inability to read Bangla.

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On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today Amit Chaudhuri Penguin Viking, 2012, 178 pages, Rs. 399.00 ------

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The celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary around the world has flooded the market with plenty of new biographies, anthologies, criticism and translations of the poet’s works ranging from beautiful and pictorial coffee table books to slim little volumes that in their own ways contribute to the present ‘Tagoreana.’ Seizing this opportunity, Penguin/Viking has just brought out a new attractive and slim volume by Amit Chaudhuri entitled On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today which is basically a compilation of five essays that Chaudhuri wrote and published over a period of the last twelve years. He admits in the prefatory note that the reasons for writing about Tagore are both ‘personal and writerly’. On the personal level, Tagore appealed to him, not as a celebrity but through his songs that were sung by his mother Bijoya Choudhuri and Subinoy Roy. On the writerly context, Chaudhuri’s essays deal with Tagore and his milieu. He shows how Tagore’s secret concern was really with life, play and contingency, with the momentary as much as it was with the eternal. It is this strain of unacknowledged modernism, as well as life-affirming vision that gives his work its immense power. In the first essay “The Anniversary Begins,” that was originally published in The Guardian in 2011, Chaudhuri tries to justify to the western readers why Tagore should be read today. He compares Tagore’s concept of the ‘religion of man’ to what D.H. Lawrence called ‘life itself.’

“The Flute of Modernity: Tagore and the Middle Class” written originally in 1998, speaks of how Tagore seems to be reminding us that the recovery of history, for the Indian, was fraught with ambiguity and this becomes clearer with the passage of time in the 19th century. The Bengal Renaissance was, according to Chaudhuri one of the greatest cultural efflorescences of the modern age, its critical demands all the more intriguing because of its disputable nature. Tagore was at once its product, its spokesman, its inquisitor. After speaking about his oeuvre, the essay concludes with the idea that Tagore’s most profound engagement with history lay in the reticent, self-repeating, half-lit world of his poems and songs.

In “A Pact with Nature” Chaudhuri delves in details with the idea of ‘Orientalism’ beginning from Said-ian interpretations and going back to literature during Kalidasa’s times. Since it was primarily written for the western reader, some explanations given in this essay sound rather simplistic. “Poetry as Polemic” forms the introductory essay in the new book of translations entitled The Essential Tagore published jointly by Harvard University Press and Visva- Bharati last year. Here Chaudhuri includes a lot of personal information on how in each of his trip to London in the 1970s, his uncle attempted to indoctrinate him about Tagore (Rabi Thakur) who according to him was an amazingly contradictory agglomeration of virtues and characteristics. Overcoming his

290 adolescence impatience with the poet, Chaudhuri admits and elaborates on how Tagore basically remains an ‘untranslatable’ poet. Encountering him has to be ‘an unsettling experience – but one through which we also come to recognize our deepest unspoken urges and beliefs incarnated in the most surprising and incomparable language.’

In the short concluding piece, “Nothing but a Poet,” originally published in The Hindustan Times in 1910, the author tells us that few writers have had the misfortune, as Tagore did, of becoming famous for principally the wrong reasons. He argues that like Whitman and Laurence, Tagore is a polemicist for the value of life and song. He agrees with Ramchandra Guha that the Bengalis are primarily to blame for his neglect – especially as a mere ‘creative artist.’ Tagore needs to be shorn of his political and nationalistic affiliations and brought back in the company of poets who are his peers, and those who preceded and followed him. Chaudhuri concludes this interesting article with a question – whether we, in India, are ready for Tagore. Read together, the essays form a good example of one poet/writer’s tribute to another and Chaudhuri’s lyrical narrative style surely makes this book worth possessing.

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Tagore and Japan: A Retrospection Edited by Abhijit Mukherjee, Pratyay Banerjee and Anindya Kundu Sakura Academy & Citadel, 2011. 88 pages, Rs.200.00 ------Rabindranath Tagore had long desired to visit Japan. Beginning from 1916 to 1929, he visited Japan five times. But the Japan of 1916 was totally different from the Japan of 1905 or the Japan of Okakura. He had written to the Japanese scholar R.N. Kimura who was organizing his tour in Japan, “I want to know Japan in the outward manifestation of the modern life and in the spirit of its traditional past. I also want to follow the traces of ancient India in your civilization and have some idea of your literature if possible.” Of course Tagore did not get to see the Japan he dreamed of. This slim volume under review is a collection of eight articles of irregular lengths (six in English and two in Bangla) which is basically a collection of papers presented at an international seminar with the same title, jointly organized by Sakura Academy, Barasat and the School of Languages, Jadavpur University. They include different aspects of the Tagore- Japan relationship, namely – the impact that Japan had on Tagore’s first visit to the country; the aesthetic bond between the poet and Japan; Tagore and the Japanese language as revealed from the writings of Sano Jinnosuke; Tagore and Noguchi Yonejiro; Tagore and the introduction of jujutsu in Santiniketan;

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Tagore’s literature in the Japanese language; Tagore’s Japan-Jatri as a travelogue and the friendship between Tagore and the artist Katsuta Shoukin. The articles in a combined manner provide the reader a greater understanding of the relationship between the two countries, especially in aesthetic and spiritual affinities on the one hand and the poet’s political views of that country on the other.

The beautiful photograph of Tagore on the cover taken by some anonymous artist makes the book aesthetically pleasing to the eye but the lack of proper editing of the book, in spite of having three editors, actually mars it. The references at the end of the articles are often not documented properly according to basic editorial practices. There is no logic in which some words are italicized or made bold at random. A little bit of professional help would have enhanced the quality of the “new perspectives of the fraternity between Bengal and Japan” that the book wants to achieve “profitably”.

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Religion and Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Discourses, Addresses, and Letters in Translation Amiya P. Sen New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pages 242; Rs. 495.00 ------

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I cannot, with any clarity or definitiveness, claim to comprehend what religion means to me. It is not something that is prescriptive, nor written down in the form of some philosophical discourse. Once detached from everyday life, it is quite impossible for me to understand this religion. - Rabindranath Tagore, Atmaparichay (1917)

The 150th year of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 generated a lot of renewed interest in the writer’s works and the fruit of that is discernible in various new volumes available in the market. Each book comes out with fresh perspectives in reading the multi-faceted genius that Tagore was and assessing his contribution as a poet, writer, painter, musician, educationist, and Nobel laureate is no mean task. Also several new translated volumes of his oeuvre, which had never been done earlier, have made the poet more accessible to a pan-Indian as well as a global readership. Several of them focus on areas that have been marginalized because of the more dominant and compelling desire to establish Tagore primarily as a mystical poet and philosopher.

The present volume under review brings together the translation of selected discourses, addresses and letters of Rabindranath Tagore regarding religion and has treated it as a comprehensive but separate genre of study. Though the spiritual life force as inculcated in the Upanishads has been reiterated in many of his songs, especially in the series under “Puja”, and even in many of his poems, the lay reader is often confused by the different facets of Tagore’s thought pattern regarding religion. Beginning from childhood when he accompanied his father Debendranath in his sojourns to the Himalayas, and who being a Brahmo, inculcated the spirit of the Upanishads in his son, Tagore’s religious beliefs is not only deep rooted but operates at many levels. He was deeply influenced by the nirguni sants of north India, inspired by the Vaishnav poets’ belief in divine love, spoke about Christ, admired Kabir’s spirit of radical social protest, critiqued several practices of the contemporary Hindu faith, propagated ethical activism, and found solace in the Baul singers who used songs as their medium of expression. Generally speaking, Tagore’s religious ideas have been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. Reading the prose pieces therefore not only supplements the poetic expressions but is at the same time instructive and useful.

This anthology is divided into three sections. The first section entitled “Essays and Other Miscellaneous Writings” contains excerpts from fourteen selected pieces. Beginning with the song of the Baul in “The Power of Universal Love”, the different discourses focus on dharma (“all paths lead to the same destination, the only difference being that some of them are more circuitous than others”), Mukti (“the path to extend our consciousness is through love”), Vedanta, the 293 value of suffering, the worship of Shakti, etc. In an essay called “The Simple Ways of Religion” Tagore expresses his regret that religion itself now stands affected by great social complexities. Having been subject to endless ritualism, meaningless acts, abstract conceptions, and quaint imagination, it has become so obscure and unnatural that each day one man or another is able to create new and mutually conflicting sects out of this self-begotten fantasy. Rather than mould our lives in the light of religion, we are often driven to do the opposite. Since religion is capable of transcending the categories of time and space, Tagore believes that it is immutable and remains invaluable to human needs. It is because religion is larger than us that it offers itself a safe refuge in an ever-changing world. In another essay entitled “Religious Education and the Idea of an Ashram” Tagore is quite self- introspective in speaking of the problems that have been plaguing the Brahmo Samaj. He believes that in India there is a general feeling that religion is a desirable thing but hard to experience in our lives. Hence, it is something we keep seeking and hope to procure cheaply but only after we have met all our other needs. The Brahmo Samaj lacks the method by which a child’s mind may be adequately trained, an ideal that will hold things together. Tagore is also aware that some non-Brahmos take Brahmoism as a philosophy and not a religion and wants to justly claim that like other universal religions, Brahmoism too has developed out of the devotional outpourings of the human heart.

The fifteen essays selected from his discourses, public addresses and informal talk comprise the second section. Here Tagore talks about issues like the primacy of the soul, the solitary path to spirituality, harmony, the omnipresent God, self- surrender, the relevance of the Brahmo Samaj etc. In a polemical piece entitled “Do Hindu-Brahmos Qualify to be called Hindus?”, Tagore acknowledges his birth as a Hindu when he states, “The religion that we Brahmos have accepted is truly universal, and yet it is the religion of the Hindus. This universal religion we have conceived and developed through the mind of the Hindu.” He further mentions that Brahmo dharma may be his own religion but tomorrow he “may turn a Protestant, the day after, a Roman Catholic, and the following day, a Vaishnav.” Such identities are only temporary identities that he acquired but as a member of a certain nation or race, his identity has been “fixed by history”, and this truth which has a long history he does not have the power to change.

About the difference between the idea of the Jeebondebata (the Lord of my life) and God, Tagore found no difference. “There is a certain space where God is entirely mine; in that space, there is just Him and me” he states. However there was another point at which his personality merged with the universal. “Jeebondebata resides within me but also goes beyond me, towards that

294 indivisible, infinite, inexpressible joy represented by Visvadebata (the Lord of the Universe). The two well-known essays, “The Religion of Man” (where Tagore proclaims that “Man’s God is He who resides in his own heart”) and “The Truth of Man” (where he states that one should try to experience God within oneself and He is the Universal Soul) conclude this section of the anthology. Though this man-centered discourse did not originate with Tagore, in both he attempts to make man the measure of things. But for man, he feels creation itself would have no value.

The third and last section contains twenty-four selections from the poet’s correspondence with different people. They express unfeigned indignation at certain Hindu beliefs and practices and what he expressed through philosophical arguments quite subtly in his essays or sermons become quite direct here. “My religion is natural religion and the method of worship I employ is worship of nature,” he wrote to his niece Indira Devi Chaudhurani. To Mohit Chandra Sen he stated, “Deep inside me there lies a gigantic and an old “I”, He especially is the Lord of my life (Jeebondevata). It is His solemn and stealthy appearance that makes my soul approach the Divine.” Tagore’s letters to Hemantabala Devi and her daughter reveal how Hindu superstitions upset him. It pained him that God who represented Truth and beatitude should remain trapped in dark and dirty dungeons that went by the name of temples, that a countless number of hapless animals should be regularly sacrificed before deities, or that people should seek to gratify lifeless icons and greedy gurus rather than honour the living god who went about unfed and unclothed on the streets. Religious dogmatism and self- righteousness was equally unacceptable to him. He also found it unreasonable and disturbing when people tried to convert from one religion to another. He disliked astrology but interestingly enough, found science to be consistent with faith. “To accept science and history in their own domains is a part of accepting Him,” he stated and believed that “Anti-science is atheism because God’s own creation is founded on science.”

Jawaharlal Nehru had once declared that “contrary to the usual course of development as he (Tagore) grew older he became more and more radical in his outlook and views.” Though it was mentioned in a different context, reading the essays and other prose pieces on religion in the present volume, it becomes clear that Amiya P Sen has done yeoman service in giving us samples of Tagore’s prose writings on religious and philosophical subjects as it originally evolved from the 1880’s, grew and changed till the time of his death. In the introduction the editor/translator has very humbly mentioned that this volume comes nowhere close to a monograph on the religious life and thought of Tagore. He had essentially devised it for those who felt disadvantaged at not being able to access

295 important prose writings of Tagore, especially on religious and philosophical subjects, the bulk of which still remains untranslated. Since these entries are ‘equally instructive and useful’, he hopes they will inspire further scholarly interrogation. In spite of his apparent humility, Sen’s detailed introduction is not only scholarly, but places Tagore in the religious life and thought of modern Bengal beginning from Rammohan Roy, , Bankinchandra Chattopadhyay, and also the -Vivekananda movement. Needless to add, it also makes the book a definite collector’s item.

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Rabindranath Tagore: One Hundred Years of Global Reception Edited by Martin Kampchen and Imre Banga Editorial Adviser Uma Das Gupta Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd, 2014. 671 pages; Rs.1125.00

“The book aims to be a reference work, away from the anthology format.” - Editors

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms. These range from anthologies of critical essays, new editions of old texts,

296 translations, reappraisal of his fiction and non-fiction, facsimile editions, bilingual editions of the Nobel-winning Gitanjali et al. This volume is an exception. Though conceived in 2011 at a conference in London celebrating the sesquicentennial birth anniversary of the poet, the editors rightly felt that after the award of the Nobel Prize in 1913, when Tagore became the visvakabi, the world poet, it was the right time to take stock of his work and see how he was many things to many people. They asked Tagore experts worldwide to narrate how the Bengali author was received from 1913 until our time and now after three years of painstaking work, the mindboggling findings are out. Leaving aside his reception in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, this book therefore aims to present a near-complete survey of Tagore’s worldwide impact a hundred years later as found in the rest of the world. It therefore avoids both an India-centric and a Eurocentric approach.

Divided into five sections with a total of 35 entries, the essays in this book are based on geographical entities rather than on languages. Circling the globe in an East to West sequence and then moving from South to North, the layout of the book is interesting. In part One, representing ‘East and South Asia’, we have entries from Japan, Korea (South, of course as the North is still inaccessible), China, Vietnam, Tibet, Thailand and Sri Lanka. ‘Middle East and Africa’ covers the Arab Countries, Egypt, Turkey, Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel (Yiddish and Hebrew Reception), and the Portuguese –speaking regions of Goa, Angola and Mozambique. In part Three, ‘Eastern and Central Europe’ is covered by Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and its Successors, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and its Successors. ‘Northern and Western Europe’ is represented by countries like Finland, Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Belgium, Italy, France, Spain and Latin America, Portugal and Galicia and the United Kingdom. The last section entitled ‘The Americas’ cover Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, United States of America and Canada.

In the Preface the editors make it clear that the selection of countries and/or regions depended on the availability of competent academics who were willing to contribute to their project. Thus some geographical areas which they felt were important could not be covered or were done inadequately due to unavailability of contributors. For instance, there are no entries from the Asian countries that Tagore visited – Iran, Burma, Singapore, Malaya and Indonesia. Among the erstwhile Soviet republics only one entry from Latvia was not desirable. Again due to the country or region-wise organization of the material, we find that some articles have a slight overlap. Also since Tagore’s impact often transcended

297 national boundaries and moved along linguistic lines, restricting his interest within the boundaries of a particular nation state is not possible.

The modus operandi of all these divergent essays is the same. They outline the cultural relations the country in question had with India first, and then, within that framework, delineate the immediate response to Tagore’s Nobel Prize. With a list of all works available by Tagore (albeit in translation) and all criticism on his works in each country or region, they reflect the present state of research on Tagore’s works and his impact. In some essays the bibliographical accounts of the material available is more detailed whereas in others the authors put more emphasis on analysing the cultural and literary influences these publications had and continue to have on the social fabric of that particular country. Whatever the thrust area might be, it becomes clear after going through the book that often Tagore’s popularity in a particular country was the result of one individual’s effort, be it Marino Rigon in Italy, Andre Gide in France, Juan Ramon Jimenez in Spain, Victoria Ocampo in Argentina, Frederik van Eeden in the Netherlands, Vincenz Lesny in Czeck or Muhammad Shukri Ayyad in Arabic. All of these individuals pushed the Tagore legacy a giant step ahead before others took over.

While most of Tagore’s writings have been translated from English, they were occasionally translated from Russian, German, French, Italian, Chinese or other versions; hence they changed language three or more times before they reached their readers. The Arab world discovered Tagore early and read his works first in English and French and then in Arabic. Though problems of authenticity remains a constant factor whenever any material is translated from the source language to the target language, it is interesting to note that in the Arab countries the translators deliberately overlooked or evaded lines or words from Tagore, in fact whatever could embarrass or injure religious sensibilities.

Apart from the individual responses in different countries we also get many interesting information which are worth noting. For example, in a large number of countries Rabindranath Tagore had already been mentioned, reviewed and discussed before the Nobel Prize was awarded to him. Also, though Tagore arrived in many countries through the languages of Western colonial hegemony or through translations, many non-western cultures accommodated him in their own terms and presented him as close to the world view of Buddhism or Sufism. It is also interesting to know that in many countries he simply remained a representative of Eastern philosophical thought and though American critics first encountered the poet through the writings of his British admirers, the United States has produced more doctoral dissertations on Tagore than any other nation except India and Bangladesh. Again, the lack of interest of the French

298 elite for Tagore as a writer has been attributed to the arrival of Surrealism whereas the romanticising of India has remained a leitmotif of the German reception of Indian culture as a whole until today.

From the responses garnered from the 35 entries in this volume it becomes clear that Tagore was able to deeply integrate into the cultural fabric of countries of different religious and cultural backgrounds, encouraging and guiding national movements towards greater inclusiveness and humanity, though there were dissenting voices in a few countries like Russia after the 1917 Revolution, Germany during the Second World War and during Franco’s regime in Spain where he was deliberately censured and not published or publicised. In the United States, after the Second World War, the socio-political climate was unfavourable to Tagore’s anti-war and anti-nationalistic sentiment. Similarly, his stand against nationalism was rejected in Yugoslavia, Poland, Turkey, and in Japan because nationalism, it was believed, was what kept these countries united in their difficult times of transition. Thus Tagore’s anti-nationalist and anti-war sentiments had different repercussions in different countries of the world depending on the political climate of that particular nation. Also it is seen that the adulatory reception of the poet in one country at one particular period of time occasionally underwent dramatic metamorphoses later due to social and political changes.

Rabindranath’s popularity waned in many nation states post 1930s to get a sporadic revival in 1961 and again in 2011 and 2013 but as Kathleen M. O’Connell rightly observes the World Wide Web “has also become a major conduit to introduce his literary and artistic achievements to an entirely new generation worldwide.”(626) One may therefore rightly presume that Tagore’s popularity will spread in the years to come as the web grows to accommodate an ever expanding number of new users. Towards the end of the Preface to this volume the editors have mentioned that since the current bibliographical data has been restricted to a Works Cited section at the end of each essay, they are always not all-comprehensive. So a website has been launched (http://tagore.orient.ox.ac.uk) which aims at building up a comprehensive bibliography of works by Tagore and on Tagore in each country or language. The readers are asked to refer to this website and perhaps also contribute to it. So all of us who are interested to see that the legacy of Tagore continues to remain unabated in all parts of the world in future should turn cultural ambassadors and spread the word around. In conclusion the editors need to be profusely thanked once again for such an invaluable addition to the realm of Tagore Studies.

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JORASANKO Aruna Chakravarti Harper Collins India, 2013. 406 pp ------

Stories about the Tagore household sell. Over the last few years several Bengali novels have been published on this illustrious family where the writers have depicted Rabindranath’s relationship with Kadambari and Jyotirindranath’s relationship with Binodini in a manner almost bordering on sleaze. Recently we read another book about wallowing in self-pity for being neglected as a wife and feeling jealous because Rabindranath apparently had written more letters to her niece Indira Devi than to his wife. Though poetic licence can be an excuse for several conjectures and the novels are selling like hot cakes, they depict poor taste on the part of the authors. In this context a new book entitled Jorasanko written by Aruna Chakravarti breathes in fresh air in retelling the story of the Tagore family beginning from the end of the fifteenth century when a Brahmin youth from Piralya village fell in love with a Muslim girl, converted to Islam and married her. Then we are told how three hundred and fifty years ago, two brothers Sukhdev Kushari and Panchanan Kushari arrived in the village of Govindapur by the Adi Ganga and soon the Brahmins being looked upon as next only to God, they were dignified by the lordly title of Thakur which the British, unable to articulate correctly, changed to Tagore.

The next chapter shifts to 1859 with details of how seven year old Genu is brought into the Tagore household as the young wife of Satyendranath; how she went looking about for a mouse hole in the house to put in her broken milk tooth; how she played with dolls; and how she and Jyoti became the best of friends especially during the picking up of mangoes from the garden after the 300 storm. After that we move backwards in time to 1823 when Dwarakanath had left the mansion built by his grandfather Neelmoni Tagore and moved with his family into the larger, grander one he had constructed adjacent to it. In a beautiful lucid style with Bengali words, cultures blended within the narration, the author then takes us through high politics, romance, tragedy, and the little things that make up a family life in Jorasanko, Kolkata – the sprawling family home of the Tagores. Jorasanko was right at the hub of the Bengal renaissance, with the family at the forefront of the movement, and its women playing a pivotal role. Chakravarti provides a fascinating account of how the Tagore women influenced and were in turn influenced by their illustrious male counterparts, the times they lived in and the family they belonged to. She paints memorable portraits of women like Digambari , Dwarakanath’s strong willed wife who refuses to accept her husband’s dalliance with alcohol and Western ways; Sarada Sundari, the obese, indolent but devoted wife of Debendranath, whose first and foremost function is to produce children from her ‘golden womb’ but then never taking personal care of them. She is appalled to see the old world order slipping by and does not behave on several occasions as an ideal mother or mother-in-law. We are given a picture of the indomitable Jogmaya, who takes on Debendranath and splits the Tagore family into two. Interestingly Debendranath is depicted not as the ideal ascetic son of Dwarakanath who founded the Brahmo faith but also how he liked to see himself in the role of a patriarch who wielded absolute power but benevolently. His humiliation after having lost the case against Tripura Sundari, the widow of his youngest brother Nagendranath speaks of a shrewd, calculating patriarch and somehow could not tolerate the idea of financial independence by a woman of his household. It was also his rigidity that prevented the remarriage of Prafulla, the widow of his lunatic son Biru. At the same time we feel pity for him when the best pieces of the family heirloom is auctioned off from their mansion in order to repay the enormous debts that his father had left behind.

Several other scenes and incidents within the abarodh are deftly depicted by Chakravarti. The relationships between the young daughters and daughters-in- laws of the household; the tough, resourceful Jnadanandini who gave the women of Bengal a new way of wearing the sari and initiated the concept of the ‘nuclear family’; Swarnakumari, universally acknowledged as a pioneer of women’s writing in India, and of course Rabindranath’s muse – the gentle, melancholic Kadambari. We are given an interesting description when Robi, Som, and Satya are saved from the machinations of the servant Ishwar, who would eat up all the good food allotted for them. Kadambari brought some of the values of her middle-class upbringing into this vast opulent household run almost entirely by servants and turned herself into a little mother to these three boys and used to

301 prepare paanta bhaat for them after they came back from school. As she matured in years and grew in grace and loveliness, her soul yearned for love; the passionate romantic love of a full-blooded male. It took her quite some time to realize that her handsome gifted husband really did not have time for her.

Chakravarti ends the novel in 1902 with the death of Mrinalini and a dejected Rabindranath, being comforted by Jnadanandini realizing the fact that no two women could be more unlike. Before that we are told of the founding of the school at Santiniketan and how the shift from the palatial mansion of Jorasanko, in the heart of the city, to the small thatched cottage in the wilds of Birbhum was unsettling for them all. But it was Mrinalini’s stoicism and her ability to make the best of a situation that enabled her to render the passage as smooth as possible not only for herself but also for her husband and children. Was she a victim of the poet’s neglect? Chakravarti reiterates on the incident when he did not arrive at Santiniketan in person after hearing about his wife’s illness but sent some medicines instead.

At the beginning of the book Aruna Chakravarti has played safe by declaring that this is a work of fiction with some parts based on historical facts and that all situations, incidents, dialogue and characters in the novel, with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures are products of her imagination and not to be constructed as real. They are not intended to depict actual events, or people or to change the entire fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Why was she so particular to play safe of controversies? Most of the incidents described in the book have been chronologically narrated with particular dates and are quite well-known to us. The list of characters and the family tree that is provided at the beginning also proves that she is keen on reproducing facts. Maybe she wants to play safe. But whether we take is as a historical book or a piece of period fiction, the book is really worth reading.

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VII: CINEMA

Reading Rituparno Shoma A. Chatterjee Kolkata: Sparrow Publication, 2013. Rs. 399.00, 334 pages ------When a promising film director dies suddenly and there is a definite closure to his creative inputs, it is easier to form a more or less objective analysis of his work and contribution to the filmic genre. This is what prompted film journalist and critic Shoma A. Chatterjee to quickly bring out a book on Rituparno Ghosh just a few months after he passed away. The volume titled Reading Rituparno is not a biography of the filmmaker but a collection of articles appraising his films. Throughout her long career as a film journalist, Chatterjee states that she personally knew Rituparno since 1994 and met him several times but for some strange reason he had turned cold and reticent towards the end and even refused to give her any interviews when he was filming Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish. She of course sees this as a positive sign for turning more objective in her evaluation of his later films.

After several rambling observations in the introductory chapter, Chatterjee gives us the modus operandi of her study which “aspires to explore, analyse and critique the works through a classification of different phases of his career, not is chronological sequence but in terms of genres he explored, often quite unwittingly without conscious design.” She classifies the first phase with Rituparno’s women-centric films like Unishe April, Asook, Bariwalli and Dahan. All

304 of these four films are strongly feminist in principle, but according to Chatterjee, the director cushions the strident feminist elements through his character-driven script that flesh out each character to place them against their social history and backdrop. Classifying the second phase with films that focus on relationships, she discusses Utsab, Titli, Khela, Abohoman, Sab Charitro Kalpanik. But one fails to decipher why so much of space is given to analyse the stories of films like Deewar, Jai Santoshi Maa, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, and Jodha Akbar before beginning to discuss Rituparno’s work. Relationships in different forms occur in all genres of films and how these films were related to Rituparno’s films remains unexplained.

Slotting film adaptations from classic and contemporary literature in the third phase, we get films like Hirer Angti, Dosar, Raincoat, Antarmahal, Subho Muhurat and The Last Lear –adaptations from works of Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, O’Henry, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. In this section also one feels that detailed analysis of adaptations done by other directors could be mentioned casually and not given so much space in the chapter because right from the beginning of cinematographic history filmmakers have been relying on literary sources upon which to build up their films. Rabindranath Tagore provides fodder for the fourth phase with films like Chokher Bali, Noukadubi and Chitrangada- The Crowning Wish. Again, after devoting a lot of space to films by other directors who adapted Tagore’s fiction for the screen, the author concludes this chapter with an interesting observation: “When Rituparno’s films generate from literature, it is one step ahead of literature.” She of course rightly criticizes Rituparno for making a travesty of the documentary made on Tagore called Jeebon Smriti when he decides to be the anchor of the film and intercut the main script with his own entry into the frame along with his unit members. This is truly demeaning especially when the subject of the film is none other than Rabindranath Tagore.

In the last phase Chatterjee focuses on films which explore alternative sexuality where Rituparno was also the actor – Aar Ekti Premer Galpo, Memories in March and Chitrangada – The Crowning Wish. But before analysis of these three films we are once again given long and rambling discourses on alternate sexuality by referring to the Psychology Dictionary, Manusmriti, the Kamasutra, the Hollywood film Bringing Up Baby, Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, the film My Brother Nikhil and many other issues related to gay relationships. The films Satyaneshi and Sunglass are left out of the discussion for obvious reasons as they did not see the light of day during Rituparno’s lifetime. In the last chapter entitled “The Summing Up… Longings that Linger…Histories that Haunt…” Chatterjee speaks of any and everything -- cinema-within cinema, making stars act, structural mutations, the family, death as a message and metaphor, and music

305 and lyrics. She concludes the book by paying the ideal tribute to Rituparno Ghosh as filmmaker, scriptwriter, lyricist and actor by quoting the entire lyrics of the title song of Khela. The Filmography and Bibliography section at the end of the book is informative and a ready reckoner for anyone wanting to get information on Rituparno’s ouevre.

Reading Rituparno had a grand launching ceremony with Tollywood superstars and it was also covered in The Statesman along with an interview of the author on 10th November 2013. The book has plenty of coloured pictures of Rituparno himself in various costumes and moods and also still photographs from different films that definitely add to its attraction as anyone attempting to add colour photographs in a text usually receives lukewarm responses from the publishers because of cost escalation. But what really mars such an honest endeavour by the author is lack of professional editing and the book is full of several typographical errors and very faulty documentation style. In some places names of films are itialicised, at others underlined or printed in bold. Similar is the case with all references and endnotes. There is no doubt that taking some more time and getting things done more professionally could have enhanced the appeal of the book. But all said and done, till date, it is probably the only book in which film buffs and critics can find so much information included about Rituparno Ghosh’s films between two covers.

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SATYAJIT RAY: THE INNER EYE The Biography of a Master Film-Maker Andrew Robinson New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. 420pages ------In his introduction to the first edition of Satyajit Ray’s biography published way back in 1988, Andrew Robinson had mentioned that “non-Bengalis now have at least two good reasons for wishing to learn that beautiful but elusive language: to read Rabindranath Tagore in the original, and to follow Satyajit Ray’s films.” Whether Ray aficionados did master the or not they are certainly beneficial in receiving an updated biography of the great filmmaker almost sixteen years later.

At the very beginning we are told that what actually inspired Robinson to write this revised and extensively updated edition of this “definitive biography” was when in the summer of 2002, the National Film Theatre in London announced the first-ever complete retrospective of Satyajit Ray’s films. After viewing every film again on the big screen (including the long-lost documentary Sikkim for the first time), Robinson realized that his earlier work was faulty at places and needed revision. Also the lapse of ten years after Ray’s death certainly would lend an amount of objective appraisal of the director that was absent in the earlier version. It gave him the perspective to see more clearly that Ray was by any reckoning –not just for the cinema – one of the world’s greatest artists. Watching

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Ray’s films again as a body of work reminded Robinson, once more, of his incredible range – of period, setting, social class, tone and genre. No other filmmaker, apart from Kurosawa perhaps, had encompassed a whole culture; and no other filmmaker had covered such a range, from pure farce to high tragedy and from musical fantasies to detective stories. Hence the emergence of this biography in its new avatar.

Apart from biographical details, the book presents a broadly chronological film- by-film account of Ray’s work As for the individual films, Robinson stands by his first assessments almost entirely though he admits to a few revisions. For instance, he now feels that Pratidwandi is even more profound that what he wrote earlier, while Jana Aranya somewhat suffers when you already know the plot, and Mahanagar is “definitely too long.” The final chapter is the main change to the book which replaced the original ‘Postscript” of unmade films. The last three films – Ganashatru, Sakha Proshakha, and Agantuk -- which form the contents of this chapter (aptly entitled “Koh-i-noor”) are usually considered to have several limitations with too much emphasis on dialogue and too little action (because Ray was restricted to shooting in uncongenial circumstances due to his failing health). But Robinson lauds these films because of the sombreness of theme and because they were addressing current Indian concerns. He shows us how in Ganashatru, Ray changed Ibsen’s original idea in the play’s finale that “the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone” into the opposite idea, that strength lies in the unity of a just, like-minded group, even if is a beleaguered minority. Again, for all its simplicity of theme, Sakha Prosakha is according to Robinson, “an extremely sophisticated film, aimed chiefly at Bengalis” whose theme is the growing apart of a family with Ray’s much more extreme and bleak view of ‘corruption’ that he had projected in Simabaddha in the early 1970s. The kupamanduk (Bengali meaning for ‘frog-in’ the-well’) attitude of the Bengalis became the central motif of the last film Agantuk, and germinated from Ray’s own short story written in 1990 and which has the effective influence of his reading two books of anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss. Analyzing these three films in great detail, Robinson once again reaffirms Ray’s own comment to Time magazine that the most distinctive feature of his films was that they were “deeply rooted in Bengal, Bengali culture, mannerisms and mores. What makes them universal in appeal is that they are about human beings.” Quoting Aparna Sen’s comment to justify his argument, he also tells us that maybe those of us who yearn for the old Ray just need to get used to the starkness of his new language in these last films. He also hopes that fresh eyes will judge the films on their real, if limited merits.

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Regarding Ray’s selection of women in leading roles, Robinson makes certain interesting observations. We are told how Madhabi Mukherjee, who was all natural grace and intelligence in Mahanagar, is so finely tuned by Ray in Charulata that we can enter her every thought and feeling and that far more than her physical appearance, which can look quite ordinary, is what makes her beautiful. But the way the selection of the Bangladeshi actress Babita in Ashani Sanket is described sounds rather superficial. “Under western eyes,” Robinson explains, “she can seem overripe, not just honeyed but cloying – something like the effect en masse of Indian miniature paintings showing ladies pining for their lovers, especially for Krishna; a surfeit of sensuousness”. At a time when Bijoya Ray – as part of her memoirs in a leading Bengali journal -- has already admitted Ray’s involvement with other women without naming them, Robinson in a brief interlude mentions about Ray’s “own unrequited love” for Madhabi Mukherjee quoting from her idolatry remark that “they (meaning Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray) were the two great titans of our cultural life.”

Satyajit Ray is hailed as one of the best filmmakers of all time by several world- class filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorcese, James Ivory and George Lucas.Kurosawa’s acknowledgement that “Mr. Ray is a wonderful and respectful man.” And that he is a “giant” of the movie industry” had adorned the back cover of the first edition of Robinson’s book. Apart from the long list of excerpts from journals and reviews that don the dust jacket of this new edition, what interests the reader are the two eulogies that hail from two contemporary literary giants – namely Salman Rushdie (who stated in the London Review of Books that the book is “extremely thorough, often perceptive and at times highly entertaining”) and V.S. Naipaul. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Naipaul had been a long-standing admirer of Ray (which began way back in 1962 when he had visited Calcutta) and his calling this biography “an extraordinarily good, detailed and selfless book” definitely adds weight to the writer’s efforts.

Though the readers and serious film researchers have easy access to the foreign critical reception of Ray from the innumerable reviews that came out in the western media, what mars the fluid analysis of certain films and incidents is Robinson’s repeated quotes from Marie Seton and her correspondence with Ray. A little bit of more emphasis on Indian criticism would have probably made things more comprehensive. Also, there are several sections in the text where Robinson painstakingly explains the socio-cultural background of India or Bengal, which he feels, will felicitate the understanding of certain films. For example, whereas to the Indian viewer Charulata is one of Ray’s most popular films, we are told that the film has a poor reception in the West because it “conceals almost as much from the Bengali who is unfamiliar with western

309 civilization, as it does in other ways, from the westerner who does not know Bengal.” Robinson therefore devotes long historical background of the Indian nationalist movement before he analyzes Ghare-Baire; talks about the Naxalite movement and riots before analyzing the Calcutta trilogy; he tries to find out how the joint family system works in India before appreciating Mahanagar; gives us the history and background of Bengal famine of 1943 as a prelude to Ashani Sanket; tries to explain to his naïve readers about the hierarchy of the Indian caste system which he feels is essential for understanding a film like Sadgati; elaborates upon the British Imperial policies and the annexation of Oudh that changed the fortunes of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and how the ambience of Shatranj Ke Khilari was created. He therefore ascribes Chiriakhana to be the most unappealing of Ray’s feature films because “its plot hinges on untranslatable Bengali dialogues.” Thus, in spite of his sincerest efforts, the question of target audience and readership remains essentially western -oriented and for many Indian readers, and especially Ray enthusiasts, these sections might seem either too naïve or warmed–up fare.

One must of course mention the comprehensive filmography and bibliography at the end of the book, that, along with handsomely illustrated drawings, photographs, and evocative stills from Ray’s films, definitely help us to understand the oeuvre of a multi-faceted personality like Satyajit Ray and also the labour of love that Andrew Robinson has undertaken.

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Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema Satyajit Ray Harper Collins India, Rs.450.00; 171 pages ------

Though books on Satyajit Ray and his oeuvre are seen in the market off and on, it is after a gap of thirty-six long years when Our Films, Their Films was released in 1976, that all Ray fans are getting to read a collection of his own writings on various aspects of films once again. In the meantime, we did have Bishoy Challachitra in Bangla, but the present volume entitled Deep Focus: Reflections of Cinema, a collection of his writings in English, is the product of a collective effort on the part of many individuals ~ all Ray aficionados in some way or the other. Edited by Ray's filmmaker son Sandip Ray in association with Dhritiman Chaterji, Arup K. De, Deepak Mukerjee and Debasis Mukhopadhyay, the slim volume has also a foreword written by eminent filmmaker Shyam Benegal and has been published by Harper Collins Publishers India in association with the Kolkata-based Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films, better known as Satyajit Ray Society. The book is an outcome of an intensive search by the Society for long-lost articles written by Ray that lay scattered in various dailies, magazines, film bulletins and other publications like The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika, Hindustan Standard, Link, Filmfare, Sight & Sound, Sunday, Mainstream ~ some of which have now gone extinct.

In the Preface, Sandip Ray states that his father never made a meticulous effort to preserve his published writings. So when the Society launched a search to collect all his occasional writings, they had no idea what was in store but eventually they received overwhelming response from many Ray fans across the country and around the world. The pieces, that were beyond access for contemporary readers for a long time, offered revealing insights into the evolution of his father’s thoughts on aspects of cinema as a visual art, his own craft of filmmaking, and his views on other great directors of the world.

Deep Focus contains 22 essays and talks ~ some long, some very brief ~ focusing on Ray’s views on other filmmakers; his experiences at film festivals he competed in and attended as a jury member; what he thought of the art and craft of cinema and a discussion on adapting literary works to the big screen. The oldest article, dating back to 1949, well before Ray became a filmmaker himself, is called “National Styles in Cinema” and was published in The Statesman on 14th August 1949. Beginning with Renoir (obviously after interacting with him when he had come to shoot The River in Bengal), Ray eulogizes French cinema (“The French cinema is perhaps the richest in its absorption of all that is best in French

311 culture”), derides American cinema (“the average American film is a slick, shallow, diverting and completely inconsequential thing”), places British cinema in between the two (“possessing neither the subtlety and emotional candour of the French, nor the bravado of the American, the British cinema had to go through a particularly ignominious period until the war…”), he comes to the Indian effort. Stating that our films have made no progress since the first silent picture was produced, he asks two rhetorical questions, “Where is our national style? Where is the inspiration to transform the material of our life to the material of cinema?” Bombay, according to Ray had at least devised a perfect formula “to entice and amuse the illiterate multitudes” but Bengal had no such formula. It only had ‘pretensions.’

The essays have been divided into three sections ~ a) The Filmmaker's Craft, b) Pen Portraits and c) Celebrating Cinema. The long first section comprising of fourteen entries, (including the one already discussed), contains Ray's essays and talks on cinema and has several important issues and points of view of the filmmaker for serious researchers on film studies to ponder upon. For instance, speaking of his film Apur Sangar in “Should a Film-maker be Original?” he states that he, as the interpreter of a classic work of fiction has exercised his right “to select, modify, and arrange” through the film medium. In “The Changing Face of Films” he evaluates the film scenario in India thus: “We, in India, are of course seriously tramelled by prejudices, social taboos, by a warped sense of what is moral and immoral in art, and by a low general appreciation caused by lack of education.” But this should not lead India, which is a growing, newly independent country, to a lack of subtlety and artistic integrity. In “The Film Must Achieve It’s Objective” he states that the parallel cinema too will have to find its own market and its own audience. “The idea, you see, is to get the public into the theatre,” he opines. In “The New Cinema and I” Ray wrote that he sincerely believed that he could not have survived as a filmmaker but for the success of his first film in the West. He fully believed that he made “something new, even innovative, for India” with Pather Panchali. For him, his main preoccupation as a filmmaker has been “to find out ways of investing a story with organic cohesion…” The longest essay “Under Western Eyes” is an eye- opener of sorts and as Benegal also admits, could well be Ray’s film testament. In it he speaks of the uncertainty in his mind whether his first film (“I believed I had made a good film”) would be accepted or not, especially because it eschewed all the trappings of the exotic. He opines that it is more important for the West now to see our films than to understand them, though true understanding will take time ~ “Slighted for so long, India will not yield up her secrets to the West so easily, for cows are still holy here, and God is still a phallus.”

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The five entries in the second section give us Ray’s views on other great directors. Though his writings on Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder are not available in this volume, he writes of Sir Charles Chaplin as a complete filmmaker and master actor and marvels at the nuances of The Kid and Modern Times. He showers praise as well as criticism on Michelangelo Antonioni. On Jean Luc Goddard, he states that only a master like him can dare to break norms of traditional filmmaking and opt for experiments like the impeccable jump cut and other forms. He also refers to Uttam Kumar with whom he worked in Nayak and Chidiyakhana as an actor of solid substance.

The three entries in the third section deal with Ray's experiences of, and views on, film festivals at home and abroad. The book is rich with images like film and production stills, rare portraits of Ray, and sketches and photographs by Ray. Further, it also contains a detailed filmography of Satyajit Ray, a short piece on his contributions to films by others, a select list of the honours he received and a note on the Society's work to restore, preserve and disseminate his works as also their plans to set up a Ray Heritage Centre in his hometown Kolkata. One would do injustice to Shyam Benegal if his brilliant foreword to the book is not mentioned here. As a young man visiting Calcutta, he had watched Pather Panchali over and over again as the film “simply blew [his] mind” and he realized that here was a filmmaker “who had broken free of the conventions of both Hollywood and Indian cinema.” Since then had become a die-hard fan of Ray. Benegal also states that the influence of Satyajit Ray on the many cinemas of India had been immense but rarely acknowledged. He was neither overtly ideological nor given much to theorizing. I too conclude this review borrowing Benegal’s words ~ “This is indeed a valuable addition to the not so many worthwhile books on Indian cinema.”

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SEEING IS BELIEVING: Selected Writings on Cinema Chidananda Das Gupta Penguin Viking, 2011. 295 pp; Rs. 499 ------Sixty years is a long time in a person’s life and if that person happens to be someone who started writing on cinema since 1946, co-founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, founded the Federation of Film Societies of India in 1960, and had a lifelong involvement with the film society movement that influenced subsequent generations of Indian filmmakers, critics and discerning film audiences; has been witness about almost every development in India – the popularity of mainstream cinema and the rise of New India Cinema, among others, what would we expect from his pen? Seeing is Believing brings together some of film critic and film historian Chidananda Das Gupta’s finest writings on the subject of cinema, some as old as 1965-66 to 2004 and published in various magazines, and others composed as lectures to be delivered in different forums.

In the introduction Das Gupta tells us about how cinema as it existed in colonial India failed to meet the requirements of the situation as he saw it and how political independence and the beginnings of film appreciation are fused in his memory. By and large India’s art cinema has derived its inspiration from the West – American storytelling, Russian revolutionary innovations, Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, and so on. Along with many others, he too believed that a new cinema in post-independent India would emerge as an art and a social force, but “it is odd to find that the so-called art cinema should wear social problems on its sleeve while pure entertainment should conceal its social concerns in a secret chamber of its heart.”

The eleven essays in the first section of this volume deal with every possible facet of movie making -- the original and history of parallel cinema in our country; realism in cinema; the crisis in film studies; film as visual anthropology; the national film awards; the unique interface between politics and film in India; the portrayal of women, sex and violence in our films; the Indianness of Indian cinema, and the quintessentially Indian contribution to movies – the song. Some of Das Gupta’s observations are so clear and curt that they can be used as tag lines even out of the context of the essay concerned. For example, he tells us how there have been virtually no signs of creation of a space for the ‘other’ cinema within the film industry’s scheme of things and whatever osmosis has taken place between art cinema and commercial cinema has been fortuitous and unintended -- the acceptance of the margi-desi coexistence assures a much healthier give and take between the two. He writes, “India has, by and large, been

314 able to support art without dictating its content” but “the Marxist-reformist legacy in cinema ran into a frustrating inability to communicate with the people.” According to his definition, cinema is of two kinds -- the ‘popular’ versus ‘unpopular’ films and the ‘art’ versus ‘commerce’ films, and “the prudery of unpopular cinema is somewhat Gandhian (Christian).” Speaking of depiction of sex in movies he believes that by and large the reticence over sexuality is a marked characteristic of parallel cinema’s mix of attitudes. While “it is distinctly more puritanical than mainstream,” the extent to which mainstream cinema is able to celebrate the joys of sex without transgressing the line of control is astonishing. About the realist imperative he says, “No cine club, however esoteric, can completely reject the commercial cinema for then the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.”

In “Precursors of Unpopular Cinema” the author tells us that in tracing the development of the parallel cinema, it is important that there has been a slow but sure weaning from governmental patronage. Though some filmmakers have fallen by the wayside, the majority of them in this category have survived the ups and downs over the decades without governmental oxygen. In the chapter on cinema and politics Das Gupta analyzes the unique way, unparalleled in the world, politicians have used cinema consciously and deliberately in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. It explains how this experience is different from that of Ronald Reagan in the United States as MGR-NTR generated mythological vision of modern India caused a cultural revolution that reflected itself in politics. In several other essays too the author shows how some films are so involved with social problems that it is hardly possible to describe them as entertainment.

The second section of the book entitled “ Notes on Five Directors” contains Das Gupta’s evaluation of the work of India’s finest filmmakers. Speaking about ‘the first ten years’ and about ‘modernism and mythicality’ of Satyajit Ray’s oeuvre, Das Gupta states that Ray does not nostalgically idealize traditional India in his films and his contemplative, lyrical style is symptomatic of a remoteness from the immediate problems of the day. In discussing the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak he considers three basic ingredients in the formation of his outlook and his style: the influence of Rabindranath Tagore, the involvement with the IPTA of the 1940s, and the impact of the partition of Bengal at the time of India’s independence. He also tells us how Ghatak struck out a completely original path – not by design, but by the distinctive nature of his genius. Dasgupta then tells us how Kerala with its deeply regional culture and close proximity to classical learning shaped Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s filmmaking. As the prime mover of the film society movement in Kerala, Adoor can be regarded as one of the earliest talents to be discovered and brought to the fore by the process of social

315 engineering in newly independent India. Several interesting comments are offered on Mrinal Sen and his films. According to Das Gupta, Sen has mostly been perceived in two ways: the first sees him as a political filmmaker, a product of the broadly Marxist movement; the second as something of a loose canon, powerful in his blasts but unclaimable for any ideology or group. Sen’s post- Marxist agenda consisted of a revaluation of the worth of the individual. He also points out Sen’s pan-Indian awareness and his consciousness that extends beyond Bengal along with an adventurous spirit that is ready to face challenges. The last director in Das Gupta’s list is one with an “all-India identity.” Shyam Benegal, dubbed as “the chronicler of Nehruvian India” and as “only an Indian,” shares its socialistic bias and its foundations in secularism, pluralism, democracy, equality of opportunity, human rights, women’s rights and all their concomitants. According to the critic, the making of passionate films is not Benegal’s forte and most of them set up an objective truth to which the film-making approximates closely, with order, discipline and craftsmanship.

This “representative selection” of selected writings on cinema is a must read for all film enthusiasts and anyone interested in Indian cinema in general. It establishes the author as a critic par-excellence and Shyam Benegal’s tribute labeling him as belonging to “a rare and fast diminishing tribe of cinema critics” and rating him “the best film critic we have in our country” does not seem hyperbolic. Apart from being consistently erudite and engaging, what also strikes the reader is Chidananda Dasgupta’s lucid style and excellent command of the English language, which make even difficult subjects easily readable.

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MRINAL SEN: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema Dipankar Mukhopadhyay Harper Collins India; 2009. 316 pp; Rs. 399 ------

In his chapter on Mrinal Sen, Chidananda Das Gupta states, “No Bengali director reflected the diverse strands in the social and political fabric of India as widely as Mrinal Sen.” This eulogy finds a more detailed expression in the second book under review, namely, Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema, a book that traces the development of Sen as a filmmaker against the backdrop of his life and times. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay describes Sen’s life from the time when he was a little boy in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh) to his early struggles and then emergence as a great filmmaker whose convictions about how he saw cinema was unwavering come what may.

This is actually not a new book, but a revised version of the author’s The Maverick Maestro that came out in 1995. At eighty-seven, Sen may not be a maverick anymore, but he undoubtedly remains a maestro In the preface to the first edition, Mukhopadhyay was enamoured with Mrinal Sen’s “complete devotion or dedication to one’s profession” and stated that it seemed that Sen’s whole existence was “only for cinema and nothing else.” Justifying the reasons for redoing the earlier book the author states that his book was referred to as the only ‘standard biography’ of Sen and since the director was not a particularly organized person, and even had the habit of shooting extempore independent of a film script, it was often difficult to be authentic. Trying to update the cinematography and life story of Sen, the author ends his new preface in an adulatory tone when he says that he is fortunate to get yet another chance to pay his “humble tribute to this extraordinary man,” internationally considered a modern master of the audio-visual medium, who, along with Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, will always remain the third figure of the Holy Trinity of Indian cinema.

Though Sen’s fans know many details already, the book offers little nuggets of unknown facts as well. These relate to many of his early films -- how the director refuses to talk about his first film Raatbhore which he terms a ‘disaster’ – a film that has never featured in any of his retrospectives till today; Baishey Shravana, a film based on poverty, famine, death, destruction and a total erosion of human values; how Punascha was soft, sentimental, and to some extent, predictable; how Neel Akasher Neechey was banned by the government; how he got inspired to develop the main protagonist of Bhuvan Shome from a Railway official of that name who accompanied him on a trip to the Moscow Film Festival in 1969; how

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Calcutta remains the backdrop of all his city-based films, etc. In the later chapters Mukhopadhyay recreates Sen’s journey as a filmmaker whose convictions about how he saw cinema was unwavering come what may. His unrelenting principled vision, his successes and failures, especially in the films made in the seventies decade, are all captured eloquently in the book.

Apart from Sen’s own article “Quite a Few Things About Myself” that forms part of the Appendix and is a goldmine of information, readers can also get to read the infamous exchange of words between Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ashis Barman written to the editor of The Statesman between July and September 1965 that began as a debate regarding his film Akash Kusum. Ray had strongly criticized the film and then in 1991, a ‘private letter’ that he had written to a ‘friend’ criticizing Sen was leaked to an English daily, creating a major controversy. This divided the parallel cinema movement in Bengal into two separate camps and after that there was no change in their cold, formal relationship till Ray’s death. Even overlooking this incident, the book is a collector’s item for all people interested in Mrinal Sen’s oeuvre. Compliments are also due to Dipankar Mukhopadhyay whose bureaucratic duties and journalistic background made him venture into this project when he found that no one really celebrated Sen’s seventieth birthday in a grand way.

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The Films of Buddhadeb Dasgupta John W. Hood 318

Orient Longman, 2005. Rs.250.00; 224 pages ------“Then slowly something started to happen to me. It was poetry that made me. Slowly I started to see a film coming through the words of a poem.” -- Buddhadeb Dasgupta

One of the most strikingly individual and poetic filmmakers in India, if only for his distinctly minimalist approach, Buddhadeb Dasgupta had been a published poet for quite some years before he took to making films. This book traces Dasgupta’s childhood, his early musical training, involvement with literature, his own passion for painting, folk dance, his left ideology, sympathy for the dispossessed and oppressed – everything that was roughly concurrent with his formative years as a poet and his awakening to cinema. Short films and documentary work taught him the technical aspects of filmmaking and representations of metareality served a purpose similar to that in his poetry.

Poetic cinema always presents difficulties of interpretation for many viewers and the average viewer is often puzzled with Dasgupta’s emphasis on dreams, rhythm, balance, unconventional narrative structure, form and composition that are also the hallmarks in other art forms. The cinematic use of such elements of poetry as metaphor and suggestion and the compression of images, along with the foregrounding of the seemingly extraneous, paradoxical, or absurd, gives his films their distinctions from those of any other filmmaker. In all of them there is an abiding concern for the individual in isolation or alienation, for the misfit, the rebel, and the lonely. Since dialogue in his films is very sparse, while the visual as an agent of communication is elevated much more than is the case with most other filmmakers, he has been criticized for not providing provocative social ‘relevance’ and the intensity of drama that characterizes much of the work of Mrinal Sen.

Dasgupta’s first feature film Duratwa (1978) was about marriage, divorce and the hope of reconciliation and it forms a loose trilogy along with Grihayuddha (1982) and Andhi Gali (1984). Fundamentally concerned with social identity and ideological commitment, in each of them a man fails to find true meaning or happiness in life. Neem Annapurna, his second venture, is a depressing film whose affective harshness derives from the cruelty of the reality it portrays rather than from any artifice or cleverness – philosophical, political or aesthetic – articulated by the director. The survival of tradition and the threat to its integrity thrown up by an increasingly commercial world are central concerns in Seet Grismer Smriti, Phera, and Bagh Bahadur. The director reminds us that popular culture in Bengal

319 would be unthinkable without clay modellers, acrobats, conjurers, contortionists, animal tamers, Bauls, Patuas and the Jatra. Tahader Katha is a film about human suffering set against a national background and Shibnath’s tragedy of alienation remains heart-rendering. Lal Darja deals with the spiritual ossification of life in the contemporary bourgeois desert, and the ultimate interest of Uttara, the story of the wrestlers and the woman, becomes cultural rather than personal.

Hood’s detailed analysis of all the thirteen films that Dasgupta has made till date surely is commendable, more so because the last film Swapner Din made in 2004, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and having already travelled to thirty international film festivals, has not seen the light of day in Kolkata or anywhere else in the country. Making incidental though significant use of two manifestations of contemporary violence, we are told that it is one of Dasgupta’s most positive and optimistic films, and perhaps his most lighthearted.

It is also a matter of shame that so-called Bengali chauvinists and film lovers have to learn the details of the filmmaker’s art from an Australian scholar who, in spite of his sincerity and love of Bengali culture, makes several minor errors like mentioning Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay with the wrong title of Bandyopadhyay, spelling wrongly, or calling Neem Annapurna as ‘Biter Morsel.’ Also, pages coming apart in the very first reading, is not expected from a reputed publishing house that has produced this interesting book.

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Another Cinema for Another Society Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2005; 158 pages;Rs.150.00 &

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The Subject of Cinema Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2005; 259 pages;Rs.150.00 Gaston Roberge ------Serious scholars of media/film studies/cultural anthropology will unanimously opine that though there is no dearth of interest, books published in India in this area are rare, sporadic, and if available, often overpriced. Before going into the nitty-gritty of the texts themselves, this reviewer must first thank Seagull Books for reprinting these two seminal texts (in attractive new and colorful covers) which were out of print for a long time and the Foundation Jules Paul-Emile Leger, Montreal, Canada for providing the grant to make it possible. Though the author of both these texts hardly needs an introduction, for the uninitiated layman reader it must be mentioned that Gaston Roberge teaches Mass Communication and Film Studies at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and has been closely associated with Chitrabani, a communications center specializing in film studies in Kolkata.

Another Cinema for Another Society, originally published twenty years ago, in 1985 (with a then price of Rs.32/-) is one of the few serious yet lucidly written books on the aesthetics of cinema. In the preface the author states that he had been impelled to write his earlier books for his students, but the target readership of this book is the filmmaker himself – ‘a rather unteachable lot.’ Acknowledging that filmmaking is an extremely demanding profession, he expects filmmakers to ponder a little on the art-form which is theirs. The promotion of another, new and different, cinema can only be part of a large cultural programme and Roberge professes five principles in its implementation, namely, it should be part of a militant programme aiming at creation of a New World Information and Communication Order; a new cinema cannot be promoted in isolation from other mass media, particularly TV; the promotion of a new cinema requires the promotion of a new critical attitude in the film audiences; the promotion of a new cinema must be done at the level of the masses; and, the promotion of a new cinema requires that more films be made by more people.

Beginning with the accusation that Andre Bazin through his article “What is Cinema?” was projecting an assumption that there is a cinema, one cinema, Roberge argues that he should like to ponder on the question of what cinema can best serve the purpose of creating a new society. To do this he compares the film form with drama, talks of the aesthetics of the montage theory propagated by Sergei Eisenstein; ponders on the contributions of Orson Welles and Satyajit Ray; appraises the documentary tradition as extolled by Robert Flaherty; surrealism, neo-realism and the cinema-verite style of the west, and at the same

321 time discusses the problem that the Indian movie-man confronts when he has to face three different movie worlds, namely -- foreign, national, and regional.

Speaking of the differences between the ‘art’ film (which procures insight) and the ‘commercial’ film (which procures delight), Roberge feels that the distinction is not really between art and commerce but more precisely between art and entertainment. He is also against the use of the term ‘parallel’ cinema. Endorsing the notion that ‘art’ cinema cannot grow on the ashes of the ‘commercial’ cinema and attempts at dislodging the latter by the former betray a total misunderstanding of entertainment, he reiterates upon the idea that film education of the young is necessary to make them turn into discernible cinemagoers and the method of film education should be modified. As most film courses deal mainly with film classics (very much on the lines of literature), and since film teaching in India is said to be lagging behind due to a paucity of ‘good’ films, the author suggests that the courses should be formulated in such a manner that discussions can follow on whatever films are available and by encouraging students to scribble notes on how they feel about the film. By doing away with the logical, analytical and linear method of studying a film, he suggests the method of discovery which is determined in pace and content by the students of a particular group and by the film available at one time.

In the preface to the first edition of The Subject of Cinema (originally published in 1990) Roberge states: “When the reader finishes negotiating his or her way through this book, he or she should be able to say, ‘the subject of cinema? I am it.” Dedicated to the memory of Jean Mitry, this book is an attempt to catch up with current thinking about the film image and the subject which creates it or apprehends it. Comprising of seventeen lectures he gave way back in 1987 as the second Rita Roy Memorial Lectures series, Roberge here defines film theory and discusses its basics before giving a lucid account of the shift from an idealist mode of thinking to a materialist one which occurred around the mid nineteen sixties as part of a larger intellectual revolution, and led to a profound renewal of film theory under the joint influence of three main intellectual currents – structuralism, Marxism and feminism; and three main disciplines – semiotics, psychoanalysis and linguistics. In the process, from the necessity of mastering new concepts and methodologies, film scholars came to devote much attention to abstract studies that at times were or appeared to be quite remote from actual films.

While opening up the entire area of thinking, Roberge offers a close study and explication of the ideas of Andre Bazin (idealism in the cinema), Sergei Eisenstein (towards a materialist film), Jean Mitry (the ignored synthesis) and Christian Metz

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(cine-semiotics and the imaginary signifier); and illustrative analyses of several film classics(the structuralist activity of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the deconstruction technique of D. W.Griffith’s Broken Blossoms), particularly of approaches in terms of the new methodologies. Beginning with various types of discourse on film, namely – advertisements, reviews, criticism, analysis, theory, interpretation –he makes the readers aware how most of the great filmmakers had a well worked-out theory and how some of them were even full-fledged theoreticians – Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Godard, Bresson and Pasolini, to mention a few. Thus parallel to the film discourse, the film theory discourse created a context which made it possible to enunciate not only a possible meaning of the film but also its eventual significance to particular viewers. Other subjects of serious concern like theorization of the film genres, authorship issues with special references to Barthes and Eco, narrativity and various approaches to the study of stories, and problems of adaptation, along with its ideological and political implications, receive adequate mention in the text. In short, this book becomes a kind of a reference encyclopedia on any and everything related to film theory – something the uninitiated film studies scholar or enthusiast would find extremely useful. Apart from the simple and lucid style in which both the books are written, an added appeal lie in the ample pages of black and white illustrations and photographs from classical films all around the world.

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The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History Jyotika Virdi Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004 (258 pages) Rs. 595 ------With Bollywood, globalization, and crossover films making it big in the western world, with productions like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood Dreams running to packed houses on both sides of the Atlantic, a book on Hindi cinema’s importance in the Indian as well as South Asian cultural politics and history is a welcome addition to the stable of intellectual attention already paid to the genre by Sumita Chakravarty, Vijay Mishra and Madhava Prasad in the 1990s. Playing on the word ‘ImagiNation’ in the title, this book focuses on Hindi cinema’s importance in Indian cultural politics and how the idea of the “nation” plays out as a prominent trope along the terrain of gender, sexuality, family, and community.

Citing examples from about thirty popular Hindi box-office successes beginning from the the Nehruvian era, from films like Mother India, Deewar, Aradhana, Henna, Bombay, Amar Akbar Anthony, Upkaar, Roti, Kapda aur Makaan, Madhumati, Purab aur Paschim, and Pratighaat, the author tries to prove her basic thesis that the nation in Hindi cinema is constructed through a complex apparatus of metaphors, discourses and modes of address. Thus signifiers like dharti, mitti, dharti mata, khoon, paseena, hul, bandook and tiranga jhanda are regularly used by the film directors to imagine the nation. Divided into six chapters, the author first takes up films that celebrate the new independent nation and the euphoria of ending colonial rule – films that imagine the nation in terms of a successful bourgeois revolution. She shows how faith in traditional male heroes fades over the decades and is displaced by an alternative figure. She then goes on to illustrate how the idealized female figure is embedded in the national imaginary as the insignia of the nation. A repository of “Indian” tradition, distinct from her European counterpart, this idealization of Indian womanhood has serious implications for national debates on women’s place in the family, the private sphere. As a mother versus a sexual object, between the figure of the Madonna and the vamp, Virdi labels the Indian woman in popular Hindi cinema very much as the product of a Victorian- Brahminic axis, especially during the first two decades of independent India.

Analyzing the past five decades to trace the ways in which the nation is constructed not only along the topos of the family, anti-imperial rhetoric, and invocations of the grandeur of antiquity, Virdi then goes on to examine the situation through the dangers represented by the figure of the villain. Villains, the opposite of ideal masculinity, are fashioned by a changing public discourse on what imperils the nation, and the writer therefore feels that this changeable

324 face of villainy in cinematic discourse is vital to the discursive history of the nation. She further explores the normative duties pitted against women’s subjective desires in the form of romance triangles especially in the 1950s and 60s and also explores “women’s films” in which female protagonists wrestle with various aspects of patriarchal culture. The new “avenging heroine” that replaced the “angry man” image of the 1970s is also highlighted upon. The book ends with films of the 1980s and 1990s in which the narrative and form endorse and even embrace the values of globalization. Signalling the end of the Nehruvian era and inaugurating economic “liberalization,” romance occurs against a backdrop of the excesses of new commodity culture and opulence. This “revival of romance” also poses the patriarchal father as the new enemy. By tracing India’s post-independence social history through avowedly nonhistorical films, the nation in Hindi cinema is thus constantly resecured and reimagined.

In the introduction to her book, the author makes it clear that Hindi cinema’s own agenda – imagining a unified nation – is the organizing principle of her project. She also states that she has a “wide readership in mind” and is approaching the subject from a cultural studies approach – something that is popular in the Euro-American academy. “I think primarily western,” she states, and her focus is on “how the films play out the politics of caste, class, community, gender, and sexuality, all bearing traces of a specific Indian social and historical context.” Published earlier in 2003 by Rutgers University Press, this book is the result of doctoral research work of the writer, who tries to act as a third world cultural critic. So one finds enough mention of Hobsbawm, Gramsci, Partha Chatterjee and the ‘subaltern studies’ group, as well as random mention of the theories of other postcolonial critics like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Bill Ashcroft in order to haul popular Hindi films on to the high ground of critical theory. A few lines about the author would be beneficial for the layman reader. Also, since the target readership of such a work is obviously the west, in some instances the Indian reader will find her analogies quite farfetched. Overall, people interested in mass culture, popular media and the dissemination of Bollywood cinema throughout the world, will find certain sections of the book rather stimulating.

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Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India Shoma A. Chatterji Sage Publications, 2015, 299 pages; Rs. 895.00 ------We are all aware that India holds the top rank as the world’s largest producer of feature films, and the Bollywood film industry is now well-known around the globe. But how many of us are aware of the plethora of documentary films that have been produced over the last few decades in India? Though some of us have heard of some innovative and path-breaking independent documentaries, very few of us have actually found the opportunity to watch them. The author of the present volume under review is one of those fortunate and dedicated film critics who has not only seen a considerable number of such productions over the years but has brought us a compilation and analysis of noted and rare documentaries that have begun to form an identity of its own in India post-1970s.

At the outset the author tells us that and she felt that she should collect her ideas, conceptions and information on the documentary films that she had seen again and again, the filmmakers she had interviewed in great detail, the books and essays she had read, and it took her more than five years to write this book. Dividing it into eight chapters, she informs us in the introductory section how the dominant trend in documentary film-making by the Films Division, which was politically correct, socially neutral and myopically informative, was countered in the late 1970s by independent political documentaries which focussed on multifarious subjects like famine, homelessness, state atrocities, migration, women as victims of domestic and sexual violence, and issues of landownership. By the end of the 1980s and the turn of the 1990s, several parallel streams of documentary came about. Today, many young film-makers with their courage and dedication to the cause of cinema are rising in numbers, audience reach and

326 variety in subject matter, approach and presentation. We are also informed about the hegemonic role played by The Mumbai International Film Festival for documentary, short and animation films (MIFF) which insisted on seeking clearance from the censor board before screening any documentary and how that throttled many protesting voices and gave rise to new festivals called Vikalp – Films for Freedom, The Cinema of Resistance and many other fora which have been organized solely on people’s funding without governmental or corporate sponsorships.

The second chapter focuses on known and lesser known documentaries of lives and histories. One of the greatest contributions of the Films Division is its massive output of biographical documentaries viz. on musicians like Bhimsen Joshi, Pankaj Mullick, Salil Chowdhury, Naushad Ali, painter Jehangir Sabavala, filmmakers like Dadasaheb Phalke, B.N. Sircar, Satyajit Ray, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and G, Aravindan. Beyond Films Division we find documentaries on Mrinal Sen, Wasim Kapoor, Ritwick Ghatak, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Badal Sircar, Lady Ranu Mukherjee, Tapan Sinha, Bimal Roy, Banshi Chandragupta, P.K. Nair, and on Ellis Roderick Dungan, who came to India from America and stayed back for 15 years to make some outstanding box office hits in different south Indian languages, though he did not speak or understand a single word of the local lingo. Apart from well-known personalities like Rabindranath Tagore and , mention is also made of innumerable documentaries made on lesser known individuals.

The purpose of an ethnographic film is to let the people being filmed to express and explain themselves through their own words and action and this genre has become quite popular since the 1990s. The scope and range of topics dealt with in this section are also mind-boggling – baul songs, ethnic minority East Indian community in Mumbai, Chhau dance in Purulia, puppetry, dhakis (drummers) who perform during Durga Puja, the little magazines etc. Sometimes investigative films also overlap this genre and the author gives us a long list of examples of this kind of documentaries too.

The short fourth chapter entitled “The Ray Factor” discusses several documentaries made by Satyajit Ray and also films made on his oeuvre by directors like Gautam Ghose, Shyam Benegal, and Utpalendu Chakraborty. Under the category of “The Milestone Makers” the author has chosen filmmakers who despite their ‘signature’ connote diversity rather than unity, non- conformity rather than conformity and variation rather than repetition. Several documentaries of Anand Patwardhan, Amar Kanwar, Rakesh Sharma, Sanjay

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Kak, Ajay Raina, Ranjan Palit, Supriyo Sen, Joshy Joseph, Krishnendu Bose are discussed in details.

The sixth chapter focuses entirely on women film-makers and the title “Dialogues in Diversity” is borrowed from the title of the annual festival organized by The International Association of Women on Radio and Television (IAWRT).The question that initially arises in everyone’s mind is whether the feminine aesthetic sense in terms of cinematic image, while reconstructing reality, is distanced from such counter-cinema made by men. The answer is not really and the author cites examples of feminist film-makers like Manjira Datta, Reena Mohan, Nilita Vachani, Deepa Dhanraj, Madhusree Datta, Ananya Chakraborty Chatterjee, Suhasini Mulay, Paromita Vohra, Reena Mohan, Nishtha Jain who have made path-breaking documentaries and showed how they could become a political way of storytelling. At the same time we are made aware of the fact that there are dozens of other women who like men, have ventured into documentary films but rarely have the chance to venture into their second film because of funding issues.

Documentary filmmakers have long realized the power of cinema to spread awareness, concern, information and education about sustainable development through well-researched documentary films. Whether self-funded or through organizational sponsorship, they go about making films that contain positive stories about sustainable development and the next chapter focuses on this aspect.

We often use the phrase ‘odd man out’ to identify things that do not fall into a regular pattern. The eighth chapter deals with such documentaries which the author terms “out of the box” to define films that do not fit into the earlier mentioned categories. In some way or the other, they deal with the subaltern, the marginalized, the oppressed and the ignored. Whether it is Supermen of Malegaon, Saurav Sarangi’s Char – The No Man’s Island, Nakusha – The Unwanted which narrates the shocking story of 292 unwanted girls in Maharashtra’s Satara district, or wayside performers called ‘Nats’ that make the chaotic and colourful metropolis of Calcutta their temporary home for several months each year, we are given examples of several films that shed light on little-known areas of human rights violations of different kinds. The author reminds us that classifications may be considered necessary for a certain understanding of the terms of negotiation involved in them, but they are not really possible and might become subjects of debate among scholars, academics and film critics.

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In the summing up section we are made aware that one development that has truly liberated the documentary from the shackles of the past is technology. But though digital technology has helped the film directors in several ways, nevertheless, the independent documentary movement in India remains uncertain. In the meantime, these film-makers continue to struggle to have their messages heard by the Indian people.

This volume is definitely a collector’s item for all serious film scholars as well as the layman reader who will be simply interested in the knowing how Indian documentaries have been made in any topic under the sun. The author needs to be congratulated once again for her painstaking effort in writing this interesting volume but one has to be also a little critical of the copy-editors at such a reputed publishing house for repeating a whole paragraph twice in discussing the documentary Known Strangers (pages 126-127) and bungling up an entire paragraph in page 179 while discussing Joshy Joseph’s film One Day from a Hangman’s Life capturing a day in the life of Nata Mullick with facts relating to his other documentary Journeying with Mahasweta Devi. ------

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VIII: MISCELLANEOUS

The Renaissance in India James Henry Cousins Edited with an introduction by Dilip Chatterjee Kolkata: Standard Book Agency, 2005. Rs. 350.00 ------

In the ‘Author’s View’ section at the beginning of his 1918 book, The Renaissance in India, James Cousins states that the book is “not about the Indian Renaissance, but about the Renaissance in India, a small difference in words but a large one in substance.” Acknowledging that it is a contemporary view and hence not finished or assessed in retrospective, the writer limits his view to literature and painting, but through it tries to communicate a larger and deeper comprehension of the spiritual, mental and emotional forces that were moulding the India of the first two decades of the twentieth century. James Henry Sproul Cousins (1873- 1956) was an Irish writer, playwright, critic and poet who began his career in Dublin as a poet of the “AE” group under the direct inspiration of the Dublin Theosophical Movement and the Irish literary Renaissance. His plays were produced in the first years of the twentieth century by the Irish National Theatre; he also acted. He then taught and worked as an editor.. Influenced by Annie Besant, he arrived in India at the end of 1915. He used a pseudonym Mac Oisín and the Hindu name Jayaram. converting to Hinduism. His love for Indian art led him to found the Jagan Mohan Chitrashala in 1924 in Mysore.

Thinking in the same vein as the postcolonial historiographers of our time, Cousins advocates decolonisation, emphasizing “Indianness” of Indian painting and poetry and the Irish-Indian nationalism. His representation of India is different from the vast variety of Imperial representations of India as seen in Mill, Kipling, Forster and Archer. Also, differing from Said’s ‘orientalism,’ he envisioned a new world of values based on spirituality and confluence of cultures. The eleven chapters of the book range from subjects like ‘The Arts in Nation Building,’;”Religon and the Renaissance”; “The Bengal Painters” -- the school of Indian painting in Calcutta where the works of Abanindranath and Gogonendranath Tagore gave him an initial impression of microscopic delicacy but later went on to develop a lasting impression of largeness and strength. In subsequent chapters he mentions the close relationship between the arts and religion and philosophy in India as unlike the European model. In the field of poetry, Cousins also emphasizes the spirituality in the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu amd Sri Aurobindo. The chapter entitled “Ruskin, The

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Indian Race and Indian Art” has the most incisive argument against Mr. Ruskin’s view of Indian art and the Indian nation, which is “as fallacious as his view of the Indian people of his day or any day.” Cousins reiterates that the Renaissance in India needs a frank and intelligent literary and art criticism; a criticism that frees itself as far as possible from personal prejudice, that applies impersonal principles, and that is not less concerned with sympathetic exposition than with the pointing out of errors.

The text of Cousin’s book is 137 pages long and the introduction and bibliographical account by the editor spans a length of 135 pages. He divides this into five sections and initiates the reader into the socio-historical background of the Irish and Indian writers and thinkers in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The sincerity of the editor in making the seminal and long out-of-print book see the light of day is commendable but several grammatical and typographical errors mar the smooth flow of his detailed introduction. For example in page xxi he states: Among the few copies of it which are still found in the premiere libraries of our country, become either old or brittle.” Using ‘the’ at random, in statements like “buried in the oblivion”(xx); “published by the Ganesh and Company”(xxi), ‘released from the Vellore Jail” or by stating that Cousins “twice fell down during the last 18 months of his life”(cxxxv) further act as impediments to smooth reading of the text.. In several places the use of capital letters is used at most unlikely places and also avoided when they should have been used in terms like Renaissance, Adyar, etc. Hope the publisher, who in his own prefatory note states “We are extremely grateful to Ganesh and Company, Madras for ‘reprinting’ the original text” (xv) will get the text professionally proofread before publishing the next edition. Otherwise Chatterjee’s fine literary sensibility and his indepth study of a complex social and political scene in India and Ireland in the beginning of the twentieth century will stand to lose a lot of its sheen.

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India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion Edited by Chandrahas Chowdhury New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2011; 235 pages

In this age of globalization and multinational marketing network, a book is also a finished commercial product luring consumers to purchase it. The present volume under review is a good academic ploy to sell ‘India’ to western consumers (who need to consult the detailed glossary of Indian words at the end) and as the editor (whose debut novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award) rightfully claims, it is not just the crystallization of a theme, but also an ideal short introduction to modern Indian fiction. He wants the stories to “go out into the world,” many of them for the first time, and his intentions are to bring the reader “closer to the Indian landscape and the Indian imagination in all its variety.” In a flowery language he calls it “a basket of stories plucked out of the gardens of literature from India’s many languages.” In a good attempt at architectural balance, he not only selects the stories according to the language in which they were written; he also attempted equal distribution region wise. Thus three stories each from the north, south, east and west and one from the north- east, showcase India or maybe different Indias. While rooted in a particular world, “they often hum with the stirrings of distant worlds that have made India such a diverse and fecund civilization.” So the reader can taste ‘real’ India as opposed to Rushdie’s “Indias of the mind” and as we all know, exotica sells.

Out of the thirteen stories, six are originally written in English and the remaining seven are translations from the different bhashas. Salman Rushdie, Kunal Basu,

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Mamang Dai, Vikram Chandra, Githa Hariharan and Anjum Hasan contribute as Indian writers in English. In the translated section we have Lalithambika Antherjanam (Malayalam), Jayant Kaikini (Kannada), Qurratulain Hyder (Urdu), Phaniswar Renu (Hindi), Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay (Bangla), Fakirmohan Senapati (Oriya), and Nazir Mansuri (Gujarati). Though one can never complain about the subjective selection of regional writers, there are reasons to complain about the translated versions. As a Bengali myself, I was pained to read the translation of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s short story “Canvasser Krishnalal” done by Phyllis Granoff and originally published in Canada. Literal translations of words, though jarring at times (like the ‘Afghan peddlar’ for a kabuliwala, Ahiritola Dock replacing the ghat, the biri becoming a cigarillo, or the Sealdah station, Shiyalda), can be easilyunderstood, but it is most difficult to accept those Bengali words with combined alphabets – especially when Biswas becomes Bishbas and Dakshineswar becomes Dakshineshbar. Such complaints may mar other translations as well, but being incompetent to read all the other bhasha literatures, we must give them the benefit of doubt, especially because many of the stories have been published in volumes brought out by reputed publishing houses as Katha, Indialog, Sahitya Akademi and others.

In her Foreword, Anita Desai endorses the target readership of the anthology and states, “here we have a collection of stories that will present, we are told, audaciously: India. So the reader is turned into a traveller, and the book being read into a “companion.” She further assures the reader that the stories are a kaleidoscope of the tradition and the modern, the urban and the rural, the wealthy and the impoverished – a revealing glimpse into the many Indias encompassed by the fathomless word “India.”

In the Preface, the editor reiterates that the stories are arranged on a geographical basis, almost laid out on a map and hopes that the sample stories will arouse the reader to read more. So, in spite of its limitations, this small well-produced book, priced at Rs 399/-will become a very good gift to carry abroad or send to all foreigners who are interested in our country and her literary and cultural diversity. As the title suggests, the book can also easily find place in the more academic minded westerner’s backpack along with the Lonely Planet guides when they come visiting our country.

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Sita’s Ramayana Samhita Arni & Moyna Chitrakar Chennai: Tara Books Pvt. Ltd, 2011, 152 pages, Rs. 550.00

Sita is one of the defining figures of Indian womanhood, yet there is no single version of her story. Different accounts co-exist in myth, literature and folktale. Canonical texts deify Sita while regional variations humanize her. Folk songs and ballads connect her timeless predicament in the daily lives of rural women. Modern-day women continue to see themselves reflected in films, serials and soap operas based on Sita’s narrative. Sacrifice, self-denial and unquestioning loyalty are some of the ideals associated with popular perceptions of Sita. But the Janaki who symbolized strength, who could lift Shiva’s mighty bow, who courageously chose to accompany Rama into exile and who refused to follow him back after the second trial, is often forgotten. However she is remembered, revered or written about, Sita continues to exert a powerful influence on the collective Indian psyche. Also there are several versions which are narrated exclusively from a woman’s point of view.

When the 16th century Bengali poet Candravati rewrote the Ramayana, she presented it neither as a battle story nor as a celebration of masculine heroism. The central figure was not the warrior king. Its domain was not the public world. It was the story of a woman’s betrayal reflected in other women’s lives and thereby universalized. It turned from battles to their victims, and it looked inward into the turmoil of private lives. While she accepted the divinity of the main players, it was not the grand doings of divine personages that Candravati relates but the sufferings of mortals. Above all, she told the story from Sita’s point of view and in her voice, lamenting her undeserved suffering as common to

334 women’s lot in this world. This view of women’s destiny she further reinforced by drawing parallels to other women’s lives, notably Ravana’s queen Mandodari’s. Though Candravati did not tell the story as a challenge to the established order, she left it as a requiem for womankind, thereby redefining the very idea of epic struggle.

This 21st century version of the great Hindu mythological epic is called Sita's Ramayana and it has been presented in a racy, graphic novel style. Behind this unique book are two immensely talented women, separated both by distance and culture: Bengal Patua scroll artist Moyna Chitrakar, a native of Nirbhaypur village in the Medinipur district of West Bengal, who already had scrolls of the story and often sang aloud from them, while Bangalore-based Samhita Arni has given words to the story. The first thing that attracts the reader’s attention is the rich and visually unique images done in natural and vegetable dyes as per the patua tradition. We all know that the Patua is a folk form that combines performance, storytelling, and art. The story is recited or sung as the narrator holds up a painted scroll, pointing to the images that go with the words. Also the narrator tailors the rendering to suit the audience and the repertoire changes accordingly. As a kind of accompaniment to the beautiful images painted by Chitrakar, the succinct script written by Samhita Arni explores Sita's thoughts and emotions, looking at her individual journey. It is not an easy task to maintain the correct storyline in the briefest possible descriptions and dialogue.

As a preamble we are told that “for thousands of years the Dandaka forest slept” until one day, the daughter of the Earth came. At her touch the flowers, creepers and trees of the Dandaka awoke from their long sleep. Since this Ramayana is from a woman's point of view we are then told that Sita walked with pain, her belly huge with child, her ankles swollen, her delicate feet bruised by thorns and brambles. “Let me live here,” Sita begged. “The world of men has banished me.” And then the forest spoke: “Tell us sister, how you came here.” And so she began narrating her story from the point when her husband was banished from Ayodhya for fourteen years and came to Chitrakuta forest.

Even in this short, spared down storyline we find focus on women and so Sita’s first person narration in Lanka continues through Vibhisana’s daughter Trijatha’s eyes and reports. Also Tara, wife of Valin and Sugriva, plays a significant role in the story. After Valin’s death when Sugriva demanded that Tara return to his home as his wife, Tara was aghast and asks Rama whether it was right or just to become a widow and a bride all in the course of a single day. Again we find that Sita is not happy after Ravana’s death; she sympathizes with Mandodari when she hears the women of the house shrieking. Continuing in a feminist tone we

335 are told how “war, in some ways, is merciful to men. It makes them heroes if they are victors. If they are the vanquished – they do not live to see their homes taken, their wives widowed. But if you are a woman – you must live through defeat…” Commenting on the futility of war that makes women the mother of dead sons, a widow, or an orphan; or worse, a prisoner, Sita is seen at the end of the tale begging Rama’s permission to go – “Take care of our children. Having gained a father, they now lose a mother. You must be both to them!” Saying these words she disappeared and was never seen again. This is where the narrative ends. It is needless to add that present graphic novel is a collector’s item and will make a very good gift for the young and old alike in every season.

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TRAMJATRA: Imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by Tramways Edited by Mick Douglas Delhi: Yoda Press/ Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2005.

What does Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak have in common with Prabir Kumar Goswami, a tram conductor in Kolkata or the pata-shilpi Sarna Chitrakar? The answer, obvious from the title of the book, is of course supporting the cause of tramways. In the age of speedy automobiles, the death knell of the tramways system has been heard over the past few decades. Whereas Kolkata’s struggling tramways have faced a persistent threat of closure, the operation of Melbourne’s tramways has been privatized and automated. But every time, due to its advantage of being an environment-friendly mode of transport, it has managed to arise phoenix-like from its death.

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Melbourne and Kolkata are two cities with tracks of a shared past. Both cities were once the capitals of their respective new nations and regarded by the British in the late 19th century as jewels in their imperial crown. Both cities have prided themselves on being national centers for the arts, and both are the only cities in their nations to have continuously retained tramways. The tramjatra project, begun simultaneously in the two cities, reiterates old links in new ways and this book unfolds a story of friendship, inter-cultural dialogue and imagination, and the potential of tramways to connect people together in their differences. It explores the poetic relationship between the practical movement afforded by tramways as a mode of public transport, and the contemporary social, political, economic and creative forces of movement brought to tramways. It also examines relations between memory, tram travel and ticketing; locating tramjatra in the context of debates on transculturalism, international education and notions of public art; unravelling issues of translation in intercultural arts practice.

When tramjatra began in Kolkata in February 2001, Mick Douglas and Roberto De Andrea from Melbourne met a whole cross section of Kolkattans who came from varying social and economic backgrounds. From the lowest rungs came the patuas or scroll painters who belong to remote villages in Midnapur: Dukhushyam Chitrakar, Sarna Chitrakar and Moyna Chitrakar. Then there were artists like Jayashree Chakravary and filmmaker Mahadeb Shi who were higher up in the social hierarchy. Two tram activists Debasish Bhattacharya and Jayanta Basu, both vocal in their demand for retaining tramways in Kolkata also contributed their concern.

As editor Mick Douglas states, the book opens out from a loosely framed question: what happens when we utilize the way of the tram to imagine two cities and relations between them? Divided into four sections, DEPARTING visits the impulses and ideas from which a tramjatra has gained initial momentum, and so offers preliminary thoughts to accompany one’s travel. TRACKING takes us amongst tram conductors, artists, social activists and designers in the tracks of tramjatra events. Soumitro Das’s comprehensive article, “still, getting there” concludes by informing us how this project created a space – albeit mental – where two apparently disparate cultures could emote and the tracks had been re- laid in memory. The apparent simplicity of Dukhushyam Chitrakar’s refrain is appealing:

My home is within Medinipur’s Pingla Thana at Naya

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Thirty families of patuas live there

We are thirty families of patuas

Michael Douglas came from Melbourne

With Mahadev came Aparna Das

Came Aparna Das

Spoke about trams eloquently

They spoke about trams eloquently

I move ahead with trams.

Further connections to people and ideas are encountered in the NETWORKING section, where emerging writers and renowned scholars lead us through Melbourne and Kolkata considering the nature of public transport and issues of urban mobility and politics, community and culture, public art, education and learning, development and globalization, poetics and tramways, and the role of memory and imagination in civic culture. The lines of thought found in the more scholarly articles of this section are poised between the clatter of multiple voices evident in the articles at either end. The section opens with a chapter that collects diverse commentaries by ‘passengers’ who speak of how they have been transported by their encounter with tramjatra, whether with dismay, difficulty or delight. Dipesh Chakraborty nostalgically reminisces about the social homogeneity in the first class carriage of Kolkata trams and how they became something like neighbourhoods on wheels. Commenting on the various meanings of the word ‘jatra’ in Bengali, Spivak states that the allusion to work in the circulatory orbit of Mick’s video one needed first generation metropolitan migrants like Dipesh and herself. Stating that a ticket’s price is only one aspect of a journey’s value, Bruce C. Wearne gives his impressions of the Melbourne trams as social, treasured, historical, risk management, leisure and how they

338 symbolize our view of time The last article at the furthest end of the section veers towards possibilities, taking us through the speculative ideas of artists and designers that reveal some of the extraordinary potential value of tramways – a domain of urban culture little traveled. And just as all tramways systems have a place to gather, rest and share resources, the SHEDDING section is where we find curious and useful evidence of tramways, tramjatra and this book’s contents.

A collage of photographs, bilingual texts, maps, stunning visuals memorabilia in all conceivable forms, this book, published simultaneously in India and Australia offers a journey through two cities and a contemporary relation between them via the medium of tramways. As the blurb on the back cover states, is “a new form of creative globalization from below, built on friendship and dialogue,” and “shows a way forward.” It remains a real collector’s item. Considering the renewed vigour with which all tram tracks are being repaired in Kolkata at present, it seems that the consorted effort of the artists and tram lovers have started bearing fruit. Three cheers to Mick Douglas, the artist and senior lecturer in the School of Architecture & Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for his editorial venture.

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Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India Edited by Richard H. Davies

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Orient Longmans, 2007; 274 pages; Rs. 795.00 ------The colourful cover of the book is attractive. Showing the Bharat Mata in chains and flanked on all sides by Indian political leaders who were responsible for freeing her, (Gandhiji on her right trying to untie the knot of the chain and Netaji on the other side carrying the flag of independent India, with Nehru and the rest of the group looking eagerly at the event), this anthology focuses on the idea of nationhood that circulates in public sphere in India, especially through visual articulation. Challenging the scientific map of India as a protypical and representational project of the British colonial state, Bharat Mata appears, often superimposed over a map outlining India and holding or wearing the Indian flag, as “a territorial deity, presiding over the national space of ‘India’.” Figuring the nation as an embodied deity brings it within the purview of Indian devotionalism, and figuring it as a female encourages male viewers to regard the nation “as a vulnerable woman who needs their protection and as a mother who has to be rescued through heroism and sacrifice.”

Questions of nation, nationhood, national identity and participation in the national community have served as recurrent topics of Indian public discourse over the past century and a half. These issues have persistently been addressed and debated in visual as well as verbal forms. Picturing the Nation explores visual representations of India from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and though the concept of the nation is largely a western construct, offers the readers desi versions of imagination and analyses of the same. Consciously differing from writings where imagining the nation is a predominantly verbal and discursive activity, the book presents a visual history of modern India.

The well researched eight essays in the book, (written by art historians, social anthropologists, scholars of religious studies, film studies and visual art – all from the South Asian Studies departments of the western academia) along with ample illustrations consider a multitude of visual items including chromolithographs, films and television shows, official icons, architecture, and cultural displays. In the introduction, Richard H. Davies explains the different parameters through which visual articulation of the nation takes place. In flags and forts, in fast- moving cinematic dance scenes, in a motorized chariot that tours northern India (Lal Krishna Advani’s rath of course), and in chromolithographic images of an imprisoned child god, in a language goddess who sits atop the world playing an ancient stringed instrument (the Tamilttay) and in countless other forms, we encounter visual representations that aim in a great variety of ways, to articulate visions of the Indian nation.

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One common question that many of these scholars ask is through what means does the popular artist awaken their audiences and elicit devotion to an abstraction such as the imagined community of the nation? In modern times the nation has served as a fit recipient of bhakti. The urge to deshbhakti and calls for devotion and sacrifice on behalf of Mother India or another synecdoche for nationhood are common in Indian nationalist mobilizations, from the novel Anandamath on. Sumathi Ramaswamy rightfully observes that bhakti has always gone beyond the realm we conventionally define as religious. Piety, adoration, and reverence have routinely centered on sovereigns and parents; more recently on politicians, movie stars, and other figures of popular culture; and most distinctively in our time, on the nation.

In the life and visual depiction of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh, Christopher Pinney identifies a line of insurrectionist violence and a celebration of marital values close to the center of the anti-colonial movement. Against the dominant official imagery of Gandhian non-violence, he traces an alternative imagery of swords and bombs. He also shows how certain popular icons widely reproduced by the early litho-presses, such as the Cow Mother – containing within her bovine form all the Hindu deities and giving milk to India’s children – could be taken as signs of the “proto-nation,” and so become valuable to the national imagining work of the anti-colonial leadership.

Ajay Sinha looks at the anti-statist view of Rabindranath Tagore and his colleagues. Tagore had been a leader in the 1905 anti-British agitations, and remained an advocate of Indian self-rule, but he was also a cosmopolitan critic of nationalist mobilizations, beginning with his protests against nationalism during World War I. As Sinha indicates, Tagore’s resistance to the “idea of the nation” was embodied in his withdrawal to the ashram-like Santiniketan. While some at Santiniketan intended Benode Behari Mukherjee’s mural Medieval Saints to offer an allegory of Indian nationhood in the forming, Sinha shows how the artist inserted a tone of “equivocation” into the imagery that complicated or subverted any easy allegorical interpretation. This note of equivocation brings the mural more closely in line with Tagore’s own critical stance towards Indian nationalism.

In an interesting article, Sandria B. Freitag looks at the creation and imagery of calendar prints directed at the Muslim “niche market” throughout India. Looking at religious architecture of both Hindus and Muslims in Jaipur (with the mosque painted pink in the distinctive Jaipuri colour scheme), she feels that one primary feature of this iconography is the “two circle” theme where Muslims see themselves as having two loyalties, both to nation and to religion. Imagery

341 simultaneously evokes the assumption of a distinctive Indian national identity and also conveys a connection with broad trans-national icons of Islamic identity.

In her essay on chromolithographs, Kajri Jain traces developments before 1947, but focuses primarily on calendar prints produced in the decades immediately following Independence. Citing an interesting anecdote involving the film-star Nargis (whose role in the film Mother India (1957) as the long suffering, heroic female facing economic and familial disaster, was widely viewed in allegorical terms), who, in her first official speech as a member of parliament accused Satyajit Ray for focusing on Indian poverty in his films. She charged Ray for failing to provide “a correct image of India ” which led foreigners to think that modern India had no cars or schools. When the interviewer asked her what defined “modern India,” Nargis replied in one word, “Dams.” It thus becomes clear that within the visual imagery of the public sphere, it is probably not possible to discern a singe unitary vision of nationhood. Further, the bazaar ethos may reflect the entrepreneurial interests and moral values of certain groups, but as a commercial cultural product, the imagery produced there adapts itself to diverse consumers and varied purposes.

Christiane Brosius provides a detailed look into the careers and perspectives of two artists who created visual imagery for Hindu nationalist groups. Interestingly, the paradigmatic Other in Hindutva iconography is the Muslim and the presence and the threat of this Other, implied or explicit, is crucial within this iconographic project.

The last essay in this anthology examines “iconographies of power” and focuses on the spectacles of nationalism in the Ganapati Utsav of Maharashtra. Raminder Kaur traces the political history of this religious ritual from its reformulation by Bal Gangadhar Tilak in the colonial period. She studies the ways in which issues of national identity and values are debated in visual form within contemporary illustrative tableaux in pavilions or mandap. Here, too, the articulation of a Hindu nationalist iconography forms one looming strand of the current national debate. As Kaur observes of the Ganapati displays, the Other – whether British colonialist, Muslim or Pakistani infiltrator – acts as foil with which, and against which, national identity is crystallized.

After investigating several of the countless streams of images that flood the modern Indian landscape, and particularly those pertaining to varied conceptions of nationhood, it becomes clear that since imagery is constitutive, it presents differing visions and helps form the minds of human subjects. Thus as new technologies provide new media by which visual images may be inserted, ever

342 more prolifically and intimately, into the public and domestic spheres of Indians, the debates will continue.

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