Khushwant Singh's Journalism: The Illustrated Weekly of India

Khushwant Singh was someone I naturally gravitated towards as a young literature scholar, as he was one of the very few modern, secular Sikh writers with an international profile. (Now we have Brit-Asians like Nirpal Dhaliwal -- though judging from this, I'm not really sure that represents progress.) But while I did read everything I could find by Khushwant Singh early in graduate school, I ended up not writing about him, barring one seminar paper that my professor at the time didn't particularly like.

The truth is, from a literary perspective Khushwant Singh's novels really aren't that great. They aren't as adventurous as G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, and not quite as carefully controlled as the novels written by his contemporaries in the 1950s -- i.e., R.K. Narayan. Train to Pakistan sold very well in the west, and was in print for years and years. As partition novels go, it isn't bad -- it's actually nicely plotted and suspenseful -- but it's just somewhat unremarkable. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi, by contrast, aren't especially readable.

After the 1950s, Khushwant Singh changed gears, and became more and more involved in journalism, which is where, I think, he's made his greatest contribution. For nine years, between 1969 and 1978, he was the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, an ancient institution that lasted for more than 100 years, and was, until the 1980s, the biggest English-language news-magazine in India (perhaps in all of Asia). Under the British, it was effectively a colonial society magazine, and it didn't change much under its first two Indian editors. Khushwant Singh was the third Indian editor, and he turned the ethos of the magazine on its head. He describes his approach in the preface to a collection of columns called Khushwant Singh's Editor's Page (1981):

Under its first two Indian editors [The Illustrated Weekly] became a vehicle of Indian culture devoting most of its pages to art, sculpture, classical dance and pretty pictures of flowers, birds, and dencing belles. It did not touch controversial subjects, was strictly apolitical and asexual (save occasional blurred reproductions of Khajuraho or Konarak). It earned a well-deserved reputation for dull respectability. I changed all that. What was a four-wheeled victoria taking well-draped ladies out to eat the Indian air I made a noisy rumbustious, jet-propelled vehicle of information, controversy and amusement. I tore up the unwritten norms of gentility, both visual and linguistic. . . . And slowly the circulation built up, till the Illustrated did become a weekly habit of the English-reading pseudo-elite of the country. It became the most widely read journal in Asia (barring Japan) because it reflected all the contending points of view on every conceivable subject: politics, economics, religion, and the arts.

I've spent some time looking at the magazine before, during, and after the Khushwant Singh years (1969-1978), and what he says above rings true. The earlier editors were very "respectable," with relatively safe short stories (often with a 'village' theme), and relatively bland features that mostly just synthesized the news. (In the 1960s, the magazine had a special section for "Women and Children," which says a lot about how it conceived of its readership.) Most English-speaking and reading middle-class Indians in the 1960s hadn't really remiagined themselves in a way that challenged the dominance of English norms. Given how limited the use of the English was at the time demographically, it's not hard to see how a continued dependence on England and Englishness could occur. (Several issues gave lavish coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's tour of India in 1967, for instance.)

Khushwant Singh has always written in English, and he was in every sense a contemporary of the "transitional" colonials: at the time of independence, he was already thirty-two, and had spent several years studying Law in Cambridge and at the Inner Temple, London. But as a journalist I think he broke the stranglehold of Anglophilia by taking the United States as his English-language reference point rather than England. As an editor, it was wild, sometimes trashy American culture in and after the 1960s that Khushwant brought into the pages of The Illustrated Weekly: rock n' roll, the Vietnam war protests, and the counter-culture (including the signficiant component of barefoot, Enlightenment-seeking hippies who ended up in India). Admittedly, some of the pictures of bikini-clad free-love kids in Goa splashed on the pages of The Illustrated Weekly were rather more like tabloid sensationalism than serious journalism, but there's no doubt that these images had an effect on how Indians saw themselves in that era.

I admire Khushwant Singh's secularism, which for me is always best represented by the Mario cartoon he used on his "Editor's Page" in The Illustrated Weekly: a caricature of himself, sitting next to a pile of books, a bottle of scotch, and a girlie magazine. This is the basis for the familiar Khushwant Singh slogan, "sex, scotch, and scholarship," which is also the title of one of his later books of essays. Much has been made of the "sex" and "scotch," both of which are somewhat ironic since testimony from people who've known him has confirmed that he's neither a womanizer nor a heavy drinker. "Sex, scotch, and scholarship" isn't literally Khushwant Singh's lifestyle (nor does it accurately represent his attitude towards women); it's rather a slogan for his fiercely independent ethos. It's something India still has need of: a willingness to publicly be something other than "respectable" and "respectful," to tell the truth rather than wrap the world in mysticism or one or another political ideology.

That's not to say that Khushwant Singh didn't make mistakes from time to time. His support for Indira Gandhi during the Emergency now looks extremely questionable, in that Christopher Hitchens-has-he-lost-his-mind? sort of way. And he probably should never have gotten involved with politics (though it could probably be argued that a Rajya Sabha seat isn't really a "political" post), though at least he knew when it was time (i.e., after 1984) to walk away.

The Sikh community has been somewhat ambivalent about Khushwant Singh over the years. Earlier, he was seen as too close to Indira Gandhi, despite his public rebuke of Operation Blue Star. During the years of militancy in Punjab, his strong opposition to the secesionist movement made things dangerous for him (I believe there was a price on his head for awhile). And even separate from these specific political questions, of course, Khushwant's aforementioned secularism -- his preference for scotch (Sikhs, remember, aren't supposed to drink alcohol), his crude humor, and his public declaration that he has no faith, have all eroded support for him from devout Sikhs. Despite that ambivalence, it's widely recognized that Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs is still a benchmark as a written introduction to the Sikh tradition. (Patwant Singh's recent book hasn't really caught on.) And he has, after all, retained the turban and beard that are so important to Sikh cultural identity. In short, despite everything, for most people, Khushwant Singh is still the same old Sardar.

To wrap up. In my view, Khushwant Singh's talent has lain not in deep or revolutionary thinking, but in the writing of his weekly columns and in a keen sense of what is timely, interesting, and important to talk about. He started doing this in the 1960s, and kept it up for thirty or more years, leaving a sizeable body of work. In a sense, this nurturing of the individualized, independent public voice is quite on par with what we bloggers ourselves do. Writing for The Illustrated Weekly or The Hindustan Times (which he took up in 1980), his voice perhaps had more authority than the average blogger's, but his consistent egalitarianism and irreverent tone gives me every reason to believe that Khushwant Singh would have a blog if he were fifty (or indeed, seventy) years younger. But who knows: the guy is still at it -- he might start one one of these days.

* * *

A final note. Khushwant Singh, at the age of 92, is still out and about. This summer he has been doing public lectures in Delhi on the history of the city (his father had a hand in the building of Edward Lutyens' New Delhi in the 1910s and 20s). He's also been publishing essays and books pretty regularly, though they aren't really of quite the same quality as some of his work from the 1970s.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Censorship Article in Himal, and Other Links

I have a short piece on censorship in this month's issue of Himal Southasian. Probably the key paragraph is this one:

While India as a whole seems to be marching towards liberalisation on both the political and cultural fronts, the future of censorship remains uncertain, partly because of a possible contradiction in the Indian Constitution itself. The very first section of Article 19 guarantees freedom of expression, but the second clause subsequently indicates that the government retains authority “to legislate concerning libel, slander, defamation, contempt of court, any matter offending decency and morality, or which undermines the security of or tends to overthrow, the State.” It is this text that is repeatedly cited by the state when it agrees to demands by religious groups to ban works of art: the security of the state. But security for whom, and from what? The irony is that the threat to security from censorious religious groups is the threat they themselves pose. It is hard to understand why the religious groups responsible for fomenting riots against offensive works are not being prosecuted, and in their places are writers, artists and filmmakers.

Overall, it's probably not the most brilliant thing I ever wrote, but it's satisfying to have one's views "in print."

* * *
I should also link to Yesha Naik's podcasts of a moderated panel I was on with Amitav ghosh and Vijay Seshadri at the SAWCC conference back in May. I was asking the questions for the first half hour, when I turned it over to the audience:

Part 1
Part 2: What is the writer's responsibility?
Part 3

Thanks, Yesha, for editing these and posting them online!

* * *
Enough tooting my own horn. There's lots of other stuff to read online this week:

--I found this extract from Bruce Lawrence's new book on the Quran to be very informative. Lots of basic information on the history of early Islam.

--I'm always a bit shocked to find how insistent the presence of religion is in some public school systems in the U.S. This article in the Times on a Jewish mother's struggle to fight open Christian proselytizing in in a rural Delaware district (actually not that far from Philadelphia!) is an eye-opener.

--A great article on Samuel Beckett in the New Yorker.

"Omkara," "Othello," and the Dirty Business of Politics (a film review)

We went over to the multiplex in Doylestown yesterday to watch Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara on the big screen. It was nicely done -- relatively crisp at two and a half hours (not bad for a faithful rendition of a Shakespeare tragedy), and unpretentiously shot in rural Uttar Pradesh. It was also well-acted by a group of talented actors -- Ajay Devgan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kareena Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Viveik Oberoi (formerly known as "Vivek"), Saif Ali Khan, and Naseeruddin Shah. The standout performance is probably Saif Ali Khan's Langda Tyagi (Iago), though I also thought Konkona Sen Sharma was quite good as Indu (Emilia).

Omkara bears some similarities to R.G. Varma's Sarkar in that it takes the gruff realism of modern Indian gangster pictures and applies it to politics rather than the criminal world -- the point being, of course, that there isn't that much difference between the two. While Varma's Sarkar was an allegory for the Shiv Sena's Bal Thackeray, the "Bhaisahib" in Omkara is a rural political chief, perhaps a Chief Minister like Bihar's Lalu Prasad Yadav (formerly known as "Laloo"). In his home environment, he commands near absolute authority and devotion from his folloowers -- and reaps untold financial profits -- though the legal system at the Center (commanded by "Auntyji," possibly a figure for Sonia Gandhi) is constantly nibbling away at his fiefdom. In Omkara, Bhaisahib is in and out of court, and he relies on his faithful "General," Omkara, to handle his equally corrupt political rivals -- sometimes by exposing them (on MMS cell phone video, no less), and sometimes by simply shooting them down.

Omkara, like Othello, is not a comforting, uplifting story. Though this is easily one of the best Hindi films of the year in filmic terms, it's unthinkable that it will be a popular favorite because it is thematically so dark. It may do well briefly in the urban centers, but I doubt it will succeed out in the smaller towns and countryside, even though the film is set there.

And the language of Omkara is something else -- there are some extraordinary, even brilliant arrangements of Hindi expletives in the film (leave the kids at home!). Most of it comes out of the mouth of Saif Ali Khan's "Langda Tyagi" (Iago), though some of the other characters are equally coarse. Of course, Shakepeare's own Othello itself has some inspired moments of coarseness, mostly from Iago's mouth. There's the famous "beast with two backs" line, as well as passages like the following, where Iago is trying to alert Brabantio to the fact that his daughter has eloped with Othello:

'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on
your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise;
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you:

The way this is rendered in a rural, Uttar Pradesh dialect of Hindi in Omkara is pretty much unprintable in a family-friendly weblog.

Ajay Devgan is well cast as Omkara. He has the kind of glowering, brooding presence one expects of an Othello, though he isn't visually marked as different. Instead of a racial other (the "Moor" of Venice), Bhardwaj marks Omkara as a "half-caste," which is emphasized a great deal at the beginning of the film, only to drop out. Bhardwaj also makes "Iago" Omkara's brother rather than his lieutenant, and gives Omkara a full, established household -- whereas in Othello, the Moor stands absolutely alone.

In an Indian film that revolves centrally around the question of a woman's fidelity, it's hard to escape reference to Sita's trials in the Ramayana. Thankfully, Bhardwaj is relatively restrained in his allusions to Agni-Pariksha. Still, it's hard to escape the fact that Omkara, like Othello, is not a story where women get many good lines.

Political pseudo-pundit that I am, I would have liked more politics and more discussion of caste in Omkara, especially since we're coming off a pretty intense period of debate over caste-based reservations in the Indian education system. But Omkara is pretty well-balanced between these types of questions and the more intimate dynamics and word-play ("O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on") that also make Othello so riveting.

See also: the Yahoo! India review of Omkara.

My review of Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, a version of Macbeth.

Spinoza

A quick link to an editorial by Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein in the New York Times.

Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews, and his works were widely banned in Christian Europe during his day:

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.

The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the “New Christians,” as they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe’s first experiment in racialist ideology. (link)

He was a strong believer in the individual's capacity to reason, and in democratic, secular governance:

Spinoza’s faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government — only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion not only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others. (link)

Just some food for thought.

Ismat Chughtai's Short Stories

Though her life wasn't as drastically messed up as that of her friend and contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai was definitely a born rebel. She lived her life the way she wanted, and wrote the truth in her many stories, novels, and nonfiction essays.

Chughtai's most famous story is 'Lihaf' (The Quilt), which deals with a lesbian encounter within an all-woman setting (Zenana) in a traditional Muslim household. It's a funny and scandalous story (read it here), but actually, my favorite short story by Chughtai is called "Sacred Duty." I came across it in a recent collection called The Quilt and Other Stories. It's beautifully translated by Tahira Naqvi, who has been Chughtai's committed translator and one of her great champions.

The story is not online anywhere, so perhaps I should briefly summarize it and quote a little. Samina, who comes from a respectable Muslim family in Delhi, is engaged to be married to a respectable Muslim boy. However, the day before her wedding she runs off with her boyfriend with Tashar Trivedi, a Hindu whose family lives in Allahabad. Samina accompanies Tashar to Allahabad, where converts to Hinduism and is married to Tashar in a Hindu ceremony. When her parents get Samina's note explaining her disappearance, her mother's first reaction (the story is told from her parents' perspective) is "Let's go to Allahabad and shoot them both!" Lovely.

After some months tempers have cooled, and Samina's father goes on a mission to Allahabad to reconcile, and to invite Samina and her husband to their house in Delhi. He is so gracious and understanding that the Trivedis agree. But in Delhi the young couple find that the Siddiqui family have quietly arranged a second, Muslim marriage ceremony, which requires Tashar to convert to Islam and Samina to reconvert. He's ready to do it, though Samina isn't, and a great deal of poisonously comical bickering ensues. Finally, from their hotel, Samina and Tashar sneak off by themselves to an undisclosed city, leaving both their manipulative families behind. The high point of the story is the delciously snarky letter that Samina sends her parents as she and her husband disappear:

And then, Papa, you arrived on the scene; you're such a good actor -- how genially and amicably you convinced Papaji [Samina's father-in-law] -- I was so touched. My father's so broad-minded, I told myself. Papaji had managed to whisk us off to Banaras with the help of his cronies. First it was Papaji who waved the magic wand at us, but when you warmly expressed forgiveness and brought us to Delhi, you too exposed yourelf as someone really petty; you also made us dance like a monkey and its mate. And we took everything as a big joke, that comic drama too. Don't worry, we're not going to give away your secret -- tomorrow morning, when Papaji [Tashar's father] looks at the newspaper there'll definitely be an explosion [when they hear about the Muslim ceremony]. No, we only said goodbye to them. Goodbye to all of you too -- no, you don't want to know where we're going. If we've hurt you, please forgive us. No, we haven't hurt you, it's you who have caused us pain, you're the ones who should apologize. You have made us a laughing stock. What kind of parents are you, who make your children dance like monkeys to any tune you like?

I love that reversal of guilt onto the parents themselves. In the name of "respectability" and "the family honor," they seem willing to do any number of disreputable and hurtful things. (Indeed, the old tradition of the "honor killing" is alive and well, even in the South Asian diaspora.)

With its rude ending, "Sacred Duty" is a brilliant and fitting change-up on the old arranged marriage drama. And as a story it still feels completely fresh and relevant though it was written fifty years ago. Many of Chughtai's other short stories work the same way, especially when they're competently translated.

* * *

Who Was She? Some Biographical Background

Chughtai was greatly helped in her aspiration to be a professional writer because her husband, Shahid Latif, was a successful script-writer who actively encouraged her (through him, she also tried her hand at script-writing, and was involved in some fourteen or fifteen films in the 1940s and 50s). Chughtai wrote in Urdu and was early on associated with the Progressive Writers' Association. She was a friend of Manto's, and often compared to him, so this post is in some sense a complement to my earlier post on Manto. Manto's inspired take on Chughtai in his essay on her, included in a splendid collection called Ismat: Her Life, Her Times (Edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Sadique), is well worth reading. Some of Manto's comments about Chughtai's status as a woman writer are a bit controversial (Manto was no feminist; he wanted Chughtai to write like a woman). But others are witty and affectionate:

Ismat's pen and tongue both run fast. When she starts writing, her ideas race ahead and the words cannot catch up with them. When she speaks, her words seem to tumble over one another. If sheenters the kitchen to show her culinary skill, everything will be in a mess. Being hasty by nature, she would conjure up the cooked roti in her mind even before she had finished kneading the dough. The potatoes would note yet be peeled although she would have already finished making the curry in her imagination. I feel sometimes she may just go into the kitchen andcome out again afer being satiated by her imagination.

I've tried that, and I must admit it doesn't work so well for me.

Incidentally, Chughtai also wrote an essay giving her take on Manto, which I haven't been able to track down.

* * *

An Excerpt from Chughtai's Memoirs Online

The excerpt from her autobiography published at Chowk is well worth a read. Chughtai talks about her sense of rebelliousness, which began in childhood and continued up through her decision to marry the film-writer Shahid Latif. The anecdotes she tells and her style of telling them reinforces the sense one has of Chughtai as someone with a quick wit with an extraordinary ability to use humor to point out the truth -- and get her way. Here, for instance, is how, as a young girl, she convinced her father to excuse her from learning how to cook, and give her instead the opportunity to go to school and get an education:

"Women cook food Ismat. When you go to your in-laws what will you feed them?" he asked gently after the crisis was explained to him.

"If my husband is poor, then we will make khichdi and eat it and if he is rich, we will hire a cook," I answered.

My father realised his daughter was a terror and that there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

"What do you want to do then?" he asked.

"All my brothers study. I will study too," I said.

My uncle was assigned the job of teaching me. After a month of extensive study, day and night, I was accepted into the fourth grade at a local school. After that I got a double promotion and was promoted to grade six. I wanted to be free and without an education, a woman cannot have freedom. When an uneducated woman gets married, her husband addresses her as "stupid" or "illiterate". When he leaves for work, she sits at home and waits for him to come back. I thought that no matter what happens, I would never be intimidated by anyone. I would learn as quickly as I could.

It's not as if Chughtai's family were that much more progressive than other affluent Muslim families of her generation. But Chughtai knew how to work her family members to ensure access to an education, through which she was able to get out of her parents house and eventually marry a man she herself chose.

* * *

The Obscenity Trial for 'Lihaf' (The Quilt); Her Account Online

Chughtai's account of her obscenity trial in 1944, over "Lihaf," picks up where the autobiographical sketch leaves off. This is the incident in Chughtai's life for which she is most famous, and it's interesting to see that at the time she took it rather lightly. She emphasizes the pleasant time she and her husband had with Manto in Lahore, where the trial was held, over the legalities and the question of whether or not her story was actually obscene.

In this memoir of her trial Chughtai does of course get into some of the specifics regarding her interest in the subject of "Lihaf," though these discussions happen not in the actual trial, but in the informal "trial" she went through from the respectable people in her social circle. Here is her response to one of her husband's friends, Aslam, when he criticizes her for her story:

Using a mild manner and a tone of entreaty, I said, 'Aslam Sahib, in reality no one ever told me that writing on the subject I deal with in "Lihaf" is a sin, nor did I ever read anywhere that I shouldn't write about this . . . disease . . . or tendency. Perhaps my mind is not the brush of Abdur Rahman Chughtai but only a cheap camera instead. Whenever it sees something, it releases the shutter on its own and the pen in my hand becomes helpless. My mind tempts my pen, and I'm unable to interfere in the matter of my mind and pen." (link)

It's a rather ingenious defense: the issue of homoerotic desire between women was such a profoundly unspoken thing that it wasn't necessarily clear to Chughtai that it was in fact a "sin." (Of course, this defense doesn't hold if you actually read the story closely -- there one sees there is a strong sense of shame in the chld protagonist's perception of the acts committed by Begum Jan and her lover, the servant Rabbo.) The second part of Chughtai's defense of her writing may be the more important: she saw what she was doing as in some sense an act of recording. In fact, there is some indication that the story was based on real people.

Here is how Chughtai describes the actual trial:

There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that "Lihaf" was obscene were beginning to lose their never in the face of our lawyer's cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of search a gentleman said, "The sentence 'she was collecting ashiqs (lovers) is obscene."

"Which word is obscene," the lawyer said. "Collecting," or "ashiqs"? (link)

And from there the case against her begins to crumble.

The question of obscenity and censorship is still very much with us today, as many recent incidents have reminded us. The only difference now is that while representing sex acts are considered more or less acceptable in works of literature in India at least (Shobha De has never been tried for obscenity), now the censorship battleground is religion. But even if the theme is different, the arguments are the same: the question of what specifically makes a serious literary work obscene or offensive is as hard to answer now as it was in 1944. Most people recognize that there is a difference between representing an act of communal violence and celebrating or encouraging it. But somehow one still finds that the works of writers and filmmakers whose works criticize communalism -- most recently, Taslima Nasreen -- are banned because they "hurt religious sentiments."

"Lihaf" can be found online in numerous locations, but I would recommend the version translated by Tahira Naqvi here. (The other translation I came across does something odd with the ending.)

More materials online:

Fran Pritchett's Ismat Chughtai links

An essay by Chughtai: From Bombay to Bhopal (PDF)

An essay by Chughtai: Communal Violence and Literature (PDF)

I also want to thank Ruchira Paul for inspiring me to do this post, and for sending me a copy of Ismat: Her Life, Her Times.

[Cross-posted to Sepia Mutiny]

More Censorship

Sometimes blogging lands you up in funny places. Abhi and Patrix from Desipundit were recently quoted in an excellent San Francisco Chronicle regarding the new Indian comic books. A mystery man named "Ennis Singh Mutinywale" was quoted all over the place after dropping this bombshell. Manish Vij had, as mentioned earlier, a quality piece in Salon after the Mumbai blasts. And a number of bloggers (naturally) were quoted in mainstream media coverage of the Indian blog ban -- not surprising since several prominent desi bloggers are also professional (or at least freelance) journalists.

Today it was my turn, albeit in a smaller way: the Times of London called for a comment on Sonia Gandhi's attempt to suppress Jag Mundhra's planned biopic about her (starring Monica "Mary Magdalene" Belluci as the young Sonia Gandhi). I blogged about it two months ago, and somehow that turned into this:

Despite priding itself on a constitution that guarantees freedom of expression, India has a history of censorship. It was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Central Board of Film Certification regularly uses the fear of civil unrest between its Hindu and Muslim communities to demand cuts from directors or to keep certain films out of cinemas. Only yesterday, a ban was lifted on 17 websites that ministers claimed were fanning religious hatred after the bomb blasts in Bombay on July 11.

Amardeep Singh, assistant professor of English at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, was not surprised by Mrs Gandhi’s attempts to stop the film. "There is a knee-jerk censoriousness in Indian politics and it is a sad reaction to try to suppress the film before it has even been produced," he said. "It is meant to be a respectful biopic, but I think they’re just nervous because the director has a reputation for the unsavoury." (link)

Admittedly, that last statement was pure speculation on my part (one always wishes the reporter quoted the other thing you said!). But this censorship problem is, as Dilip D'Souza has ably argued, a systemic problem we need to be continually vigilant about. India would be a better place if the default were to allow people to have their say rather than block, ban, and censor. (And it's not just a Congress Party thing; the BJP were no slouches when it came to censoring views they weren't happy about.)

Sadly, the filmmakers here have apparently decided to shelve the film rather than insist on their right to make it.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

"But I Warn You, They Are Not as Peaceful as Me"

Community leaders from Tower Hamlets, London have started a campaign against the filming of Monica Ali's 2003 novel Brick Lane. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a big commercial and critical success. Reactions by many South Asian readers I heard from were mixed, mainly because of Ali's use of a kind of pidgin English in the letters from the main character's sister in Bangladesh, Hasina. (Our blog-friend DesiDancer also had a succinct review: "utter crap", were her delicate, carefully chosen words)

Of course, the quality of the book is mostly irrelevant to the censorship campaign under way. This campaign seems to be an extension of the campaign against the book itself in 2003, and includes some of the same players and the same sad rhetoric of outrage and offense that is routinely trotted out these days in response to something or other:

In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing "pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes" and of containing "a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community".

Community leaders attacked the book on its publication in 2003, claiming that it portrayed Bangladeshis living in the area as backward, uneducated and unsophisticated, and that this amounted to a "despicable insult". (link)

The misguided attempt to protect the community's honor through censorship will be ineffective, and the censorship campaign itself has the ironic effect of making the community look really, really bad.

The leader of the campaign is making an only thinly-veiled threat of violence if film cameras are brought to Brick Lane:

He brushed aside suggestions that a work of fiction couldn't be seen as an attack on a community. "It's not a fiction book," he explained. "This is all lies. She wanted to be famous at the cost of a community."

He also claimed that community groups prevented Monica Ali from being awarded the Booker prize. "This book was contesting for the Booker prize," he said. "We stopped that."

Mr Salique raised the spectre of a worsening in community relations if filming goes ahead on location. "We are living in a multicultural society," he said. "We are in a peaceful situation. This film will make a lot of problems for local people."

He threatened mass protests if the company attempts to film on the streets of Tower Hamlets, saying that "the community feels strongly about this. We are not going to let it happen.

"Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me." (link)

I love the part where he says, "this is not a fiction book . . . It's all lies." Speaks for itself, donnit? And "I warn you they are not as peaceful as me" is a really ominous, nasty little threat, which I hope the filmmakers will ignore.

Here's a paragraph from the novel itself describing the physical space of Brick Lane in London. Does it really merit this kind of censorship campaign?

A horn blared like an ancient muezzin ululating painfully, stretching his vocal cords to the limit. She stopped and the car swerved. Another car skidded to a halt in front of her and the driver got out and began to shout. She ran again and turned into a side street, then off again to the right onto Brick Lane. She had been here a few times with Chanu, later in the day when the restaurants smelled of fresh boiled rice and old fried fat and the waiters with their tight black pants stood in doorways holding out menus and smiles. But now the waiters were at home asleep, or awake being waited on themselves by wives who only served and were not served in return except with board and lodging and the provision of children whom they also, naturally, waited upon. And the streets were stacked with rubbish, entire kingdoms of rubbish piled high as fortresses with only the border skirmishes of plastic bottles and grease-stained cardboard to separate them. A man looked up at some scaffolding with an intent, almost ardent, expression as if his love might be at the top, cowering on the high planks or the dark slate roof. A pair of schoolchildren, pale as rice and loud as peacocks, cut over the road and hurtled down a side street, galloping with joy or else with terror. Otherwise, Brick Lane was deserted. Nazneen stopped by some film posters pasted in waves over a metal siding. The hero and heroine peered at each other with epic hunger. The scarlet of her lips matched the bandanna tied around his forehad. A sprinkling of sweat highlighted the contour of his biceps. The kohl around her eyes made them smoke with passion. Some invisible force was keeping them (only inches) apart. The type at the foot of the poster said: The world could not stop their love. (Brick Lane, page 32)

Now, if I lived in Tower Hamlets or worked on Brick Lane I might not be happy about the piles of rubbish Ali describes (from my own experience visiting the place five years ago, I don't remember any piles of rubbish, though I visited in the middle of the day). But why are people always so quick to find characterizations like these "offensive" or "insulting"? Is it really worth rioting over?

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

A Poem on Bombay, from Adil Jussawalla

I found the following in the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry.

Sea Breeze, Bombay

by Adil Jussawalla

Partition's people stitched
Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind.
An opened people, fraying across the cut
country reknotted themselves on this island.

Surrogate city of banks,
Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port,
Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work
Loose like a skin, spotting the coast,

Restore us to fire. New refugees,
Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat,
come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north,
Dazed, holes in their cracked feet.

Restore us to fire. Still,
Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze,
Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing,
Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root,

And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories.

This poem is really a response to the Partition of 1947, but I think it has bearing on the questions people are asking a day after a particularly horrifying terrorist attack.

Jussawalla describes a rootless island city that is in some sense cut off from the "mainland's histories" -- that is on its own. But that sense of detachment has its limits, as Bombay has also been the destination point for waves of migrants and refugees from the subcontinent's recurring troubles. These immigrant Bombayites (or now, Mumbaikars) bring new life and energy to the city ("restore us to fire"), and also tie the city tightly to the mainland's darker episodes (the other meaning of "restore us to fire"). Some elite Bombayites have historically been ambivalent about their connection to the mainland, and even today, there are people who talk about instituting a kind of Hong Kong-esque autonomy to Mumbai, to prevent its being held back by the mainland's elephant slowness.

The idea of Bombay paying for traumas occurring elsewhere was probably true in the case of bombing and riots of 1993, which were triggered by the razing of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, though it's undeniable that local Muslim-led gangs and homegrown Shiv Sena thugs exploited that event for their own purposes. Something similar may be afoot now, if we assume that the bombers in yesterday's Western Line attacks were associated with Kashmiri separatist militants.

And yet, through it all, though the trauma of the tearing and re-forming of communities, and the chaos of life in Bombay (even without terrorism), there is, as Jussawalla says, the reassuring constancy of a cooling sea-breeze, which "uncovers no root,/ And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories." Rootless, and yet yet never detached -- that's Bombay.

Bombay Blasts

Some recommended links:

Mumbai Help (in Bombay)
Desipundit
Ultrabrown (in Bombay)
Sepia Mutiny
Dilip D'Souza (in Bombay)
India Uncut (in Bombay)
Suketu Mehta at the Washington Post
Indianblooddonors.com
Mumbai Train Blasts blog

Raja Rao (RIP) and Czeslaw Milosz

Indian author Raja Rao passed away in Austin, Texas, at the grand old age of 96. He's best known as the author of Kanthapura, and is one of those authors so strongly identified with the 1930s and 40s that it was actually a little surprising to find out he was still alive. (But then, his contemporary Mulk Raj Anand only passed away fairly recently himself.)

Rao was born and raised in Mysore, and oddly enough for a South Indian brahmin boy, he received his education mainly at Muslim schools in Hyderabad (his father worked for the local government, I believe). According to excerpts of his memoirs here, he also studied at Aligarh Muslim University until he received an invitation to come to a university in Montpellier, France from a visiting French professor, in the late 1920s. He ended up staying in France for more than a decade, studying Christian theology -- and married a French woman who was also in acdemia. The marriage soon fell apart, and Rao return to India on the eve of the Second World War, becoming more and more religious. He spent a great deal of time in ashrams in the 1940s, though he was also active in the independence movement. Later Rao returned to France, though he ultimately moved to Austin, Texas, where he taught Philosophy (alongside G.V. Desani) until he retired in 1980.

* * *
One of the most remarked-upon aspects of Rao's writing is his language. Though Rao spoke Kannada and studied extensively in France, he wrote in English. Some critics have said that he didn't actually know English all that well at the time he wrote his first novel, while others have presumed that he intentionally implanted a Kannada rhythm into his language in Kanthapura, for effect. Here are the opening paragraphs -- what do you think?

Our village--I don't think you have ever heard about it--Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugar cane. Roads, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forest of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee get into the ships the Red-men bring, and, so they say, they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers live.

Cart after cart groans through the roads of Kanthapura, and on many a night, before the eyes are shut, the last lights we see are those of the train of carts, and the last voice we hear is that of the cartman who sings through the hollows of the night. The carts pass through the main street and through the Potters' lane, and then they turn by Chennayya's pond, and up they go, up the passes into the morning that will rise over the sea. Sometimes when Rama Chetty or Subba Chetty has merchandise, the carts stop and there are greetigns, and in every house we can hear Subba Chetty's 350-rupee bulls ringing their bells as they get under the yoke.

While some of the unusual stylistic elements here may be for effect, there are a few phrases that do come across as non-idiomatic English. I find it somewhat uninteresting (and unlikely) to think that the unusual idiom of Kanthapura is purely an accident of the author's imperfect mastery of the English language. It might be both correct and charitable to say that most of the effects are intentional, while some odd phrases ("granaries of trade") are accidents of Rao's newness to the language.

Unlike some readers of the book who might find the eccentric language charming, I tend to think that the more awkward phrases ought to have been edited out of the book by a friend or an editor.

One doesn't see such phrases in Rao's later fiction, though I must confess that aside from The Serpent and the Rope I haven't read very much of the later books. And I even found The Serpent and the Rope quite difficult to get through, though I was an impatient graduate student when I read it. It might read differently now...

* * *

Rao studied in Europe near the peak of the modernist moment, and was hardly untouched by that experience. Indeed, in some ways even his approach to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism in his later books seems to be tied up with modern western philosophical concerns. Throughout his career, he was in continual dialogue with many of the great world writers of his era, one of them being the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz devoted one beautiful poem to Rao, which explored their commonalities (they were both nomads as well as religious seekers), but also stressed at least one key philosophical difference. Here is an excerpt from Milosz's poem "To Raja Rao":

[From “To Raja Rao"]

Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hopes of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
(on the border of schizophrenia)
to the messianic hope
of my civilization.

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.

Building in my mind a permanent polis
forever depreived of aimless bustle.

I learned at last to say: this is my home,
here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

A couple of things should be said to explain these lines. First, one might want to refer to some biographical background on Milosz. The "tyranny" above is Poland under the Nazis. One "republic" would have been Paris, where Milosz lived in the 1950s. After 1960 he lived in the U.S., the "great republic, moderately corrupt" mentioned above. Those places are important in Milosz’s writing more broadly (he has a lot to say about California in particular, which he was pretty ambivalent about).

Philosophically, Milosz extends the framework of the Platonic ideal ("the city of real presence") to modern social and political anxieties. For him the "city of real presence" (which is clearly an allusion to Plato’s Republic) is longed for not just because it represents Truth, but because it represents something like a functional, happy community. That’s happiness. And it’s not that the "republic" doesn’t exist at all. Republics do exist, but they are all in some sense corrupt. By the last stanza quoted above, it seems like Milosz has taught himself to accept them as they are, far from ideal.

The end of the poem brings us back to Rao (I'm omitting the middle part of the poem):

I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru’s.

No, Raja, I must start from where I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.

Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.

We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.

No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
prayer for the kingdom
and reading Pascal.

Like Milosz, Rao also led a very complex, nomadic, 20th century life. Rao, like Milosz, studied Catholic theology intensely at a time of political repression. In the section of the poem above, "liberation" seems to have somewhat of a political connotation, though clearly the primary emphasis is spiritual.

Milosz, I think is partly defining himself as a realist against Rao's spiritual idealism ("I must start from what I am"), and partly marking the lessons learned from the violence of the 20th century first hand. "I am those monsters which visit my dreams" is a way of talking about the psyche, but I also read it historically, as a reference to Poland in the war. And of course, it's an acknowledgment of Milosz's attachment to Catholicism, in which "my part is agony,/ struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,/ prayer for the kingdom/ and reading Pascal." The difference between Milosz and Rao is in that sense theological: Rao's is a sprituality without "self-hate," while the "agony" must be the starting point for Milosz as a philosophical Catholic.

As far as I know, Rao did not respond publicly to this poem, though I am quite curious as to what his thoughts might have been.

[Note: a predecessor for this post can be found here, warts and all. Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny.]

Saadat Hasan Manto's "Letters to Uncle Sam"

Even in translation, the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto are blindingly good. Manto published about 250 short stories in a very brief career -- alcoholism killed him at the age of 42 -- and countless nonfiction pieces for newspapers and magazines. Much of Manto's nonfiction writing is witty and sharp, though he also has a dark side that comes out in some of his best work. Partly because they're available online, today I'd like to point readers to a series of rhetorical "Letters to Uncle Sam" Manto wrote in the early 1950s. There were nine in total, and four of them have been put online at Chowk: one, two, three, four.

If you know Manto well, you might want to skip down a bit for quotes and comments on the "Letters." For those who don't know Manto: the stories are amazing, often horrifying. The Partition stories Manto wrote are about the darkest you'll ever see. Several of them deal explicitly with the psychic effects of rape, on both men and women, perpetrators and victims. Even Manto's pre-Partition writings (stories like "Khushia," for example) are deeply pre-occupied with the problem of masculinity and the dehumanization of women, from a perspective that is only partly feminist.

Manto was in Bombay through the Partition (in 1948, he decided to move, with his family, to Lahore), so it's unclear to me whether he personally knew people who had experienced this kind of violence. But stories like "Open it!" and "Cold Meat" (both of which provoked obscenity trials in Pakistan) seem to be inspired by a very personal awareness of the effects of traumatic violence. Whether or not he was there, Manto's partition stories keenly capture the dehumanization that follows communal violence.

(As a place to start, I would recommend the collection Black Margins, though pretty much any collection will do.)

On to the "Letters to Uncle Sam," which were written in Urdu between 1951 and 1954. These "letters," which Manto says he cannot send as he lacks money for postage, are opportunities for Manto to comment on the strangeness of his new country, as well as on the surreal aspects of American life as discerned from magazines and newspapers. In the letters, Manto happily describes his poverty, and contrasts it to the image of fabulous American wealth. But in some ways, Manto argues, the two countries may not be that far apart after all; the letters are as irreverent in their treatment of "Uncle" as they are of life in Pakistan.

Manto begins the first letter with a note of rancor over the Partition, which led to his displacement from his film-writing career in Bombay and his resentment at the recurring obscenity trials:

My name is Saadat Hasan Manto and I was born in a place that is now in India. My mother is buried there. My father is buried there. My first-born is also resting in that bit of earth. However, that place is no longer my country. My country now is Pakistan which I had only seen five or six times before as a British subject.

I used to be the All India’s Great Short Story Writer. Now I am Pakistan’s Great Short Story Writer. Several collections of my stories have been published and the people respect me. In undivided India, I was tried thrice, in Pakistan so far once. But then Pakistan is still young. (link)

Manto was right: Pakistan was indeed still young then. (There would be two more obscenity trials for his stories before his death. If Manto had lived, you can presume he would have spent most of his life in prison for his writings.)

Of course, America wasn't without its own controversies over obscenity. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was still banned in the early 1950s, and Manto was struck by the obscenity trial of a novel by Erskine Caldwell, called God's Little Acre:

All I really wanted to do was to convey my good wishes to brother Erskine Caldwell. You will no doubt recall that you tried him for his novel God’s Little Acre on the same charge that I have faced here: pornography.

Believe me, uncle, when I hear that this novel was tried on an obscenity charge in the land of seven freedoms, I was extremely surprised. In your country, after all, everything is divested of its outer covering so that it can be displayed in the show window, be it fresh fruit or woman, machine or animal, book or calendar. You are the king of bare things so I am at a loss to understand, uncle, why you tried brother Erskine Caldwell.

So, I read the Caldwell judgment . . . The last lines of [the judge's] judgment point to the intellectual reach of his mind. He writes: "I personally feel that if such books were suppressed, it would create an unnecessary sense of curiosity among people which could induce them to seek salaciousness, though that is not the purpose of this book. I am absolutely certain that the author has chosen to write truthfully about a certain segment of American society. It is my opinion that truth is always consistent with literature and should be so declared."

That is what I told the court that sentenced me, but it went ahead anyway and gave me three months in prison with hard labour and a fine of three hundred rupees. My judge thought that truth and literature should be kept far apart. Everyone has his opinion.(link)

Ah yes, everyone has an opinion (including a judge); it's in those last lines that you see Manto's characteristic barbed wit at its finest.

The second letter is lighter in tone, and details some of Manto's run-ins with American troops stationed in Bombay during the war. Perhaps the highlight is where he talks about women's legs in American films:

Uncle, your women are so beautiful. I once saw one of your movies called ‘Bathing Beauty’. “Where does uncle find such an assemblage of pretty legs?” I asked my friends later. I think there were about two hundred and fifty of them. Uncle, is this how women’s legs look like in your country? If so, then for God’s sake (that is, if you believe in God) block their exhibition in Pakistan at least.

It is possible that women’s legs out here may be better than legs in your country but, uncle, no one flashes them around. Just think about it. The only legs we see are those of our wives: the rest of the legs we consider a forbidden sight. We are rather orthodox you see.

I have digressed again but I will not apologise because this is the sort of writing you like. (link)

Note the passive-aggressive turn at the end: "this is the sort of writing you like." It's something Manto does again and again. Even as he's mocking the conservative values of the new Islamic nation, at any moment he might turn it around, and mock the absurdities of America as he understood it.

The third letter gets into politics and religion a bit. In addition to writing stories the authorities (British and Pakistani) deemed obscene, Manto was chronically irreligious, as illustrated by the following jab at the local Mullahs:

You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust and you caused several thousand children to be born in Japan. Each to his own. All I want you to do is to dispatch me some dry cleaners. It is like this. Out here, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar, use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding.

As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle.

[Ouch.]

One more thing. We can’t seem able to draft a constitution. Do kindly ship us some experts because while a nation can manage without a national anthem, it cannot do without a constitution, unless such is your wish. (link)

"Unless such is your wish" -- yes, exactly: a bit of fake obsequiousness to expose the often ethically dubious American approach to fighting Communism in the 1950s.

The fourth letter gets into films, Bollywood and Lollywood. As with the other letters, it seems oddly relevant to the present moment. Either our era is strangely similar to the 1950s, or nothing has changed and people have been talking about the same things for fifty years:

One more thing. Your moviemakers are taking a great deal of interest in the Indian film industry. We cannot tolerate this. Recently, when Gregory Peck was in India, he had himself photographed with the film star Surayya whose beauty he went on record to admire. Another American moviemaker put his arms around our star Nargis and kissed her. This is not right. Have all Pakistani actresses croaked that they should be ignored!

We have Gulshan Ara. She may be black as a pot but she has appeared as the lead in many movies. She also is said to have a big heart. As for Sabiha, while it is true that she is slightly cross-eyed, a little attention from you can take care of that. . . .

There is something about lipstick that I need to mention to you. The kiss-proof lipstick that you sent over did not gain much popularity with our upper-class ladies. Both young girls and older women swear that by no means is it kiss-proof. My own view is that the problem lies with the way they kiss which is all wrong. Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon. A book published in your country called The Art of Kissing is quite useless here because one can learn nothing from it. You may instead like to fly an American girl over who can teach our upper classes that there is a difference between kissing and eating watermelon. There is no need to explain the difference to lower and lower-middle class people because they have no interest in such matters and will remain the way they are.(link)

And there you have it, the great Saadat Hasan Manto. The next time you're kissing someone or eating watermelon, you will, I hope, remember him.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Contemporary Indian Speculative Fiction

Samit Basu has put together a wonderful series of essays and interviews on the subject of contemporary Indian speculative fiction ("speculative fiction" is an umbrella term, which includes sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and alternative history).

It's really a small encyclopedia rather than a blog post, so here are a couple of pointers to start you off. First and foremost, Samit deals with the question of Indian speculative fiction in the context of the recent flourishing of "literary" Indian Writing in English here. He deals with the question of "authentic" Indian superheroes (as opposed to the bad, but familiar, ripoffs of western superheroes) here. Both are highly recommended links. Basu also gets into some questions about the publishing industry and the current dominance of diasporic writers here; the publshing and marketing questions are less intrinsically interesting to me than formal ones, but in the case of this genre it's hard to get around them.

* * *

On the definitional and generic question, the highlight of Basu's essay may be the following:

This set of essays, however, is fundamentally flawed on many levels - it is about a nascent, hard-to-define sub-section of literature, the as-yet-mostly-nonexistent sub-genre of Indian speculative fiction in English, which is itself a bastard child of two parents who, not being dead, are difficult to analyze as they are not only infinitely complex at any point, but, to complicate things further, change all the time as well. . . . (link)

Note that the "two parents" are Indian Writing in English and Western speculative fiction, respectively. To continue:

What is Indian/South Asian literature in English? Even if we get past the tricky question of origin, which has obsessed scholars since the term came into being, and include the non-resident and the genetically partially South Asian, in recent years the growing diversity in South Asian English literature should lead to more questions –- having overcome the 'South Asian' part of the question by being all-inclusive, how do we now define 'literature'? Do we include comics and graphic novels, speculative fiction, thrillers, chick-lit, campus novels and crime fiction, all of which have reared their heads in India over the last decade? This should prove a lot more difficult for the sagacious and scholarly to do, given that literary snobbery is far more acceptable than racism -– and that Indian-origin writers abroad might have very thin connections with India, but large advances and literary awards add a great deal of density to the study of the field -– build its brand, in other words, however gut-shrinking that might sound, while diversity in the form of new, not necessarily mainstream writing increases the number of spices in the curry, but, in the eyes of many not-so-neutral observers, does not necessarily add to its taste. (link)

I think Basu is on the right track here. It doesn't make that much sense to rail against the "Opal Mehta's Arranged Monsoon Marriage Under the Curry-Smelling Mango Trees" school of masalafied Indian fiction, partly because such fiction does possibly "strengthen the brand," as Basu puts it. Writers like Basu himself may potentially benefit even by some irksome predecessors, partly because those predecessors carve out space on bookshelves for the next generation of writers, and raise the awareness of both publishers and readers. (Though that holds only if the reputation of the whole isn't permanently overwhelmed by the reek of rotting pulp.)

In his "Indian Superheroes" essay, Basu talks about the bad Indian copies of western superheroes ("Mr. India"; "Indian Superman") as well as the Indian connections of some western figures like The Phantom, before moving on to the real subject at interest, which is the emergence of real, homegrown "Indian superheroes," whose stories and cultural context is identifiably Subcontinental. To some extent the idea of authenticity means the symbolism of the superheroes may be derived from traditional Indian mythology -- though I think even simply grounding those figures realistically in the modern Indian cultural context probably goes a long way.

As a teaser, one of the gleanings from Samit's discussion of India-related superheroes is the baddie formerly called "Commcast," who is defined on Wikipedia as follows:

Garabed Bashur, a native of India, is a cyberpath who possesses the mutant ability to psychically retrieve, interpret and store data from any form of electronic media (essentially a highly potent electronic form of telepathy). He was trained in this ability by Professor Charles Xavier, but Xavier rejected Bashur upon learning of his criminal tendencies. (link)

In an era of outsourcing and the explosion of Indian high tech, it's not at all surprising to see Marvel Comics go this route. I think it's funny that they've given him a name ("Commcast") that essentially rhymes with the name of my current Cable/Internet company ("Comcast"). (And actually, it's a pretty good name for a villain.) And while he is a bit on the geeky side for a supervillain, at least they didn't give him the name "TeeVo"!

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

Hum

Today I almost bought you a hummingbird feeder,
thinking, why not have their long, hovering beaks over for nectar?

Since we have big weeds and loud singing birds already
squawking, really, in this sticky wet air,

With hammers and bells in the Sunday streets
And the steady blowing fan, the annoying horn of the train,

Until we reach a clearer hour, which flattens the bad music
Leaving only a hum that falls like water on leaves

After three years and three people soon in this house
And always more versions of “hum”-- nous, nahono, assi, uns

Just this something, only a bumbling attempt to express myself
With a wish for hummingbirds and other things to come.

Dalrymple on 1857: the Religious Component

William Dalrymple, a British travel writer and scholar of Indian history, sometimes gets himself into hot water with Indian critics. He was attacked by Farrukh Dhondy a couple of years ago for criticizing V.S. Naipaul's pro-communalist comments, and then more recently by Pankaj Mishra for lamenting the state of non-fiction writing in and about India. But whatever you think of his role in these arguments, Dalrymple as a historian is the real deal: his book Delhi: City of Djinns is an amazing historical travel narrative, which blends Dalrymple's experiences in modern Delhi with a great deal of careful research into Delhi's formidable past.

The current issue of Outlook India has a nice essay by Dalrymple on the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 (thanks, Indianoguy!). The essay is really in three parts: one is a fresh look at the fall of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the "last Mughal" -- whose sons were all executed (murdered) by the British after the Rebellion. The second part is a discussion of "Mutiny papers" in the National Archives of India that Mahmoud Farooqi has been translating from Urdu. These documents show the Indian perspective on the events of 1857, where one finds, among other things, that the rebels were motivated by religious rage to a very great extent. Finally, there is a discussion of contemporary Delhi -- in which preserving the emblems of this past is of very little interest to most people.

Though I remember reading somewhere that one of the main causes of the failure of the Rebellion was Zafar's age and his failure to act decisively (see details at Wikipedia), Dalrymple has a slightly different take. There's no doubt that Zafar was old at the time the Mutiny occurred (he was about 80), but his weakness was not his fault. He only ascended the throne at age 60, by which time it was too late to do anything to revive his family's dead empire. Moreover, he contributed a great deal to literature:

Zafar came late to the throne, succeeding his father only in his mid-60s, when it was already impossible to reverse the political decline of the Mughals. But despite this he succeeded in creating around him in Delhi a court of great brilliance. Personally, he was one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of miniature painters and an inspired creator of gardens. Most importantly, he was a very serious mystical poet, who wrote not only in Urdu and Persian but Braj Bhasha and Punjabi, and partly through his patronage there took place arguably the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history.Himself a ghazal writer of great charm and accomplishment, Zafar's court provided a showcase for the talents of India's greatest love poet, Ghalib, and his rival Zauq—the Mughal poet laureate, and the Salieri to Ghalib's Mozart. (link)

One could of course argue, echoing Tagore, that mystical poetry is the consolation of a defeated people, but this is definitely better than the standard image of Zafar as an indecisive invalid. (Some of Zafar's Urdu ghazals are here)

Dalrymple also strongly condemns the violence involved in the suppression of the Rebellion, including the (ghastly) British decision to summarily kill all of Zafar's sons and the wanton destruction of priceless monuments (including the palace inside the Red Fort) in Delhi and other Indian cities. This wasn't enlightened Liberalism or Imperial benevolence, but a dirty war in which indiscriminate killing and humiliation were used to ensure victory.

From my perspective, the most interesting parts of Dalrymple's piece detail the 20,000 Urdu documents in the National Archives that are now being translated by Mahmoud Farooqi. Partly they are interesting because they add to our image of everyday life in India at that time:

What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of the material. Although the documents were collected by the victorious British from the palace and the army camp, they contained huge quantities of petitions, complaints and requests from the ordinary citizens of Delhi—potters and courtesans, sweetmeat-makers and over-worked water carriers—exactly the sort of people who usually escape the historian's net. The Mutiny Papers overflow with glimpses of real life: the bird-catchers and lime-makers who have had their charpoys stolen by sepoys; the gamblers playing cards in a recently ruined house and ogling the women next door, to the great alarm of the family living there; the sweetmeat-makers who refuse to take their sweets up to the trenches in Qudsia Bagh until they are paid for the last load. (link)

But it's more than that. What the papers underline is the extent to which religious feelings drove the rebels. It goes well beyond the question of "greased cartridges":

As the sepoys told Zafar on May 11, 1857, "we have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith". Later they stood in Chandni Chowk, the main street of Old Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with those of the faith?" British men who had converted to Islam—and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi—were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately. It is highly significant that the Urdu sources usually refer to the British not as angrez (the English) or as goras (Whites) or even firangis but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians).

Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahideen, ghazis and jihadis. Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, unpaid, hungry and dispirited, the proportion of jihadis in Delhi grew to be about a quarter of the total fighting force, and included a regiment of "suicide ghazis" from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death—"for those who have come to die have no need for food". One of the causes of unrest, according to one Delhi source, was that "the British had closed the madrasas". These were words which had no resonance to the historians of the 1960s. Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 they are words we understand all too well, and words like jihad scream out of the dusty pages of the source manuscripts, demanding attention. (link)

I don't think Dalrymple is saying that everyone involved in the Rebellion of 1857 was motivated by this kind of religious feeling (indeed, as I understand it there were as many or more Hindu sepoy rebels). But it is worth considering whether people might feel differently about the concept of "jihad" when one shares a political and military goal with a Jihadi.

Finally, Dalrymple talks about the total indifference to the past that many contemporary Indians feel. As Dalrymple puts it:

I find it heartbreaking: often when I revisit one of my favourite monuments it has either been overrun by some slum, unsympathetically restored by the asi or, more usually, simply demolished. Ninety-nine per cent of the delicate havelis or Mughal courtyard houses of Old Delhi have been destroyed, and like the city walls, disappeared into memory. According to historian Pavan Verma, the majority of the buildings he recorded in his book Mansions at Dusk only 10 years ago no longer exist. Perhaps there is also a cultural factor here in the neglect of the past: as one conservationist told me recently: "You must understand," he said, "that we Hindus burn our dead." Either way, the loss of Delhi's past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early 21st century with a deep sadness. (link)

Cremating the dead is one thing -- but forgetting them entirely is quite another.

[Cross-posted at Sepia Mutiny]

More Vicarious Traveling: "The Lost Temples of India"

Someone posted a Learning Channel documentary called "The Lost Temples of India" on Google Video.

It exploits many of of the annoying clichés you would expect, including repeated references to elephants and a near obsession with the phallic symbolism of the Shivalingam.

It also plays a bit of a geographic and historical trick on viewers, by starting and ending with the erotic temples at Khajuraho (which it insists are "lost" and "forgotten"), and shots of the Taj Mahal. But in between it is actually mainly about the South: the temples built by Rajaraja Chola, the city/kingdom of Vijayanagar, and the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. The attempt to link the Hindu temples of Southern India with Khajuraho is nonsensical, but I suppose the producers felt they had to sex it up a bit (elephants alone would be insufficient!).

Despite its many flaws, it must be said that the cinematography in "The Lost Temples of India" is quite good -- there are some beautiful shots of the temples in question. And there are actually a couple of facts in the documentary, though they sometimes get lost amidst the Orientalist cheese. Since we're traveling vicariously, why not enjoy it a little?