"The Age of Shiva" -- a Review

I was surprised by how much the others in my book group didn't like Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva. The biggest complaint was from the mothers in the group (including my better half), who didn't like Suri's use of a first/second person narrative method (the novel is written in the voice of a woman named Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin). Several people said they didn't think Suri really pulled off the trick of writing about the intimate space of family life from a woman's point of view.

Reading as a man, I didn't notice any particular moments where I felt there was an unrealistic perspective, though obviously I can't be the judge. Certainly, some of the intimate passages regarding things like Meera's breastfeeding of her son (the opening paragraphs of the novel) are quite risky -- stylistically overwrought but certainly plausible, to my eye.

(Chandrahas Choudhury, reviewing the novel in the Guardian, wasn't bothered by this aspect, but by other things. Jabberwock, whose opinion I respect, loved the novel, and found Suri's attempt at a woman's point of view convincing. Then again, both reviewers are men. The only review of the novel by a woman I've come across is by Caryn James, in the New York Times -- and she doesn't take issue with Suri along these lines.)

Though I suspect other readers may share my book group's distaste, I did think The Age of Shiva had some real strengths. My friend "SN," for instance, liked the psychological complexity of the bond between mother and son in the novel, something I also appreciated. The Age of Shiva is, more than anything else, a novel about the overwhelming, consuming love a parent can feel for a child, especially in a situation where the parent has little else to live for. With this as its central theme, the novel is actually somewhat unique (most contemporary Indian writers tend to balk at this much psychology -- where 'nothing really happens').

A second theme will be more familiar: the changing circumstances and possibilities for Indian women in the years after independence. On the one hand, some major cultural transformations seemed to be underway, symbolically represented by Indira Gandhi's rise to power. In the novel, the main agent for "progressivism" is actually Meera's father, who champions what the Congress party says (it takes time for him to learn that there is a big gap between what Congress says, and what it does). But for ordinary women, even in cities like Delhi, not much had really changed through the 1960s, and even "progressive" ideologies can come across as coercive. To illustrate what Suri is after regarding gender relations, here is a representative passage from shortly after Meera's marriage into the Arora family, as she's observing the customs practiced by her much more conservative in-laws:

Each morning after her bath, I would see Sandhya [Meera's sister-in-law] in the courtyard, performing her pooja of Arya [Sandhya's husband]. She would swirl an earthenware lamp resting on a round metal thali in a circle before Arya's face, as one might in front of a picture of a shrine. She would mark his forehead with ash from the platter, and sometimes dab on some vermilion and a moistened grain of rice. She would bend her head and wait for him to color the parting in her hair with a line of the vermilion. Then she would bend even lower to touch his feet--first the right, then the left. She would run the same hand over her head to bless herself as she began to rise.

The first time I saw this pooja, I stood in the kitchen transfixed. The touching of feet was a ritual strictly forbidden by Paji [Meera's father] in our house. 'All this scraping, all this servility--hasn't anyone in this country heard of human dignity? Aren't there enough gods in the temples already to satisfy this national hunger for groveling? We spent two centuries licking the boots of the British--did you ever see them prostrating themselves at anyone's feet?'

Meera's father, referred to in the novel as Paji, is a "reformer" who sharply limits the role of religion, specifically these kinds of religious rituals, in his house. Clearly, part of his distaste at the type of pooja Meera witnesses in her in-laws' house derives from a kind of colonial hangover -- the British didn't do this, so why do we? On the other hand, quite separate from the British, isn't he right about the insidious effects of "servility" and "scraping"?

Interestingly, Paji's character turns out to be coercive and sometimes flat-out cruel. By contrast, the kind of deep devotionalism embodied by Sandhya in the passage above is linked to being utterly disempowered, but it is at least honest. The tension between the two ways of thinking -- two ways of being -- is really the central tension in Meera's mind, as she attempts to survive her unhappy marriage and limited prospects.

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There are other things to appreciate in The Age of Shiva. Meera's husband Dev, for instance, is a singer who tries to make a go of it as a playback singer in Bombay in the 1960s. His idol is the great 1940s icon, K.L. Saigal, who was best-known as a singer of mournful romantic ballads like this one ("Jab Dil Hi Toot Gaya"). The tragic image of K.L. Saigal is a kind of running leitmotif in The Age of Shiva, and adds somewhat to what is a somewhat elegiac tone overall.

Indian Literature: Translation Stories

There have been quite a few stories in the past couple of weeks about the issue of translation in Indian literature, most of them stemming, I think, from the annual Jaipur Literary Festival which took place last month. (Incidentally, I've been keeping up with these stories through The Literary Saloon, by far the best blog for world literature out there right now. All the links below come from that blog.)

Some of the stories read kind of like pep talks for translators -- come on guys, get translating! This story, in The Hindu, might be one such example. Mini Krishnan focuses on the idea of a translator as a creative figure in his or her own right -- a "conjurer." One of the translated passages she quotes, from a Tamil writer, seemed particularly evocative to me:

The translator throws her voice so skilfully that the truth of a text originally written in an Indian language is “heard” in English. Here is Vasantha Surya translating the Tamil writer Ki Rajanarayanan: “Taking out the betel leaves one by one as if he were taking things out of a pooja box, he would lay them out with the devotion due to objects of worship. . . Next he would sniff the broken areca nut. Then he would blow on it. This sniffing and blowing procedure was repeated several times, his hand transporting the areca nut from nose to mouth, nose to mouth, more and more rapidly until ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, dabak! Into his mouth the areca nut would go, having been noisily purified.” Which Indian — educated in English, unable to read his mother tongue or born of a mother other than Tamil — will not thrill to such a retelling? (link)

What I liked about this is the fact that the translator doesn't feel the need to translate every word. Even though I don't know Tamil, I have a pretty good idea of what a word like "dabak" must mean, just from context. I think even writing originally written in English can often get away with the inclusion of many more words from Indian languages than people might think. (I've seen my students pick up words on their own as they read books by Indian authors. They often have no idea how to pronounce them, but the foreignness of the words usually doesn't stop a dedicated reader; if anything, it presents them with an interesting puzzle to solve while reading.)

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There's also another story in The Hindu, this one about the future of Hindi literature. Much of the article rehearses the trend we might expect -- Hindi literature is in trouble because of the growing emphasis on English in Indian cities. On the other hand, things look quite different once you get out of the big metros, so perhaps the situation isn't really that dire:

Battling the two formidable adversaries of the Internet and English writing, the consumption of Hindi literature has long been restricted to school curricula and competitive examinations. Then there are some who accuse publishing houses of not putting in enough to propagate Hindi literature. “Hardcover books are expensive and beyond the reach of most Hindi readers. Paperbacks are released only after the hardcover has raked in enough profits. The publishers should take pains to promulgate this literature to places where it is sure to be voraciously devoured,” said Khalsa College student Brijesh Kumar, adding that another undeniable aspect of the scenario was Hindi’s limited scope in professional set-ups, particularly with the advent of the new MNC/BPO culture.

Another significant facet of the readership equation is the apparently increasing age of readers — Hindi books seem to be read only by people well into or well past their middle age.

Author Teji Grover, however, said to arrive at an accurate reading of the scenario, one would have to make a trip to the rural areas where there is a hunger for Hindi books that rivals the obsession with cinema. “I don’t think there is a readership crisis at all. If one diverts one’s gaze past the urban centres, children vie to read even the smallest scrap of paper they find lying around. I have chanced upon discussions comparing Premchand to Gorky in remote villages.” (link)

In short, maybe it depends on where you're standing. If Hindi literature publishers can find ways to sell cheap books out in the smaller towns and villages, they might find a potential readership numbering in the hundreds of millions.

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It's not only literature, of course, that needs to be translated. The coverage of the Jaipur Literary Festival in the Deccan Herald had an interesting point about the urgent need for translation of science and technology terms.

What was Dr Suman Sahai, president of Gene Campaign, doing at the Translating Bharat festival? Throwing new light on language, of course. Sahai started Gene Campaign in 1993. The Campaign is a grassroots organisation with a presence in 17 states across India. Gene Campaign is a research and advocacy organisation working on farmers' and community rights, intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge, among other related issues.

These are all regions where language – and its accurate translation for proper comprehension – plays a primal point. “There is a need to bridge India and Bharat, a need to simplify our dialect,” she pointed out. Science and technology continue to be in India, while the people who practice the laboratory findings of science are on the fields of Bharat. She is convinced that it is time that we got down to reporting science and technology in Hindi. And in regional languages, of course.

The time is more than right, indeed, it has been so for a while, to develop a contemporary vocabulary in science and technology. The challenge is not as simple as, say, translating telephone as ‘doorbhaash’. That is one example of how a word can be accepted in the ‘foreign’ language and Indianised with no lapse anywhere: it’s still called telephone, or teliphoon, if you wish, almost across the country. So, the translation has to be simple enough to be taken to the farmer, to be accepted at the grassroots and carry with it some flavour of the technology.

Well, if you think that’s simple, try this one that kicked up a bit of a debate at the conference: How do you explain gene modification to the farmer? While you ponder on that, here’s a hint from Dr Sahai. Try, gene ‘sanshodhan’. Or would you like to make that simpler? (link)

In France, there are government bodies that make sure that every new technology object has a proper French word that has some kind of justification linguistically. I don't know if this is being done in Hindi and regional languages -- but perhaps it should be.

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And finally, The Hindu has yet another story, this one on the publisher Namita Gokhale, who is starting Yatra Books, a publishing house dedicated solely to translations -- back and forth, between English and any number of Indian languages (and from one Indian language to other Indian languages). An interesting bit about the publisher's approach to translation comes out when one of Gokhale's associates describes the direction given to the translator of a novel by "Shobhaa" (Shobha De?):

Neeta Gupta joined us as we chatted in Namita’s cosy study, with the winter sun’s rays prying gently through the window. She said, “We are trying to discount Sanskritised Hindi promoted by hardcore bhasha followers. We tell our writers and translators not to shove in difficult words that sound pompous unless it’s a text that demands classical Hindi like Shakuntala. We used Bombaiya Hindi in Shobhaa’s Spouse. We want to throw away that baggage of having a rigid vocabulary, the Raj Bhasha angle and its tediousness has to go.”

Namita added, “Languages are evolving, whether through Bollywood, advertising or even our daily speech. They have a vibrancy of their own; we have to let them go where they want to. Like Indian English is already accepted as a language, it has also developed its own dialects.” (link)

I strongly agree, and wish all the best for Yatra Books.

"All About H. Hatterr" Coming in October.

The NYRB Classics imprint has a blog called "A Different Stripe," which keeps track of where its authors are showing up in the media.

Recently, Sara, the blogger there, announced that NYRB's new edition of G.V. Desani's classic novel, All About H. Hatterr, finally has a release date -- October 23. The novel has been out of print in the U.S. since about 1986, so this is very good news. I used the NYRB Classics version of Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August in a class last year, and it worked out nicely. Hopefully I can teach the weird and remarkable Hatterr sometime in 2008. (My students won't know what hit them.)

Incidentally, I did a blog post about Hatterr here.

(I even ended up writing the formal article on Desani I was hinting at in that earlier post. It's currently under "revise and resubmit" with a British journal, which means -- fingers crossed -- it might actually be coming out sometime soon. Admittedly, I still have a lot of work to do on it before I can resubmit it.)

More Vikram Chandra Media Fun

On News.google.com, if you search for "Mild-mannered Author Delves Deeply Into India's Underworld," you'll get about 25 newspapers that printed an AP article by Marcus Wohlsen on Vikram Chandra.

I have a bite-size quote in this article too -- all 25 printings of it.

[UPDATE: Another 25 newspapers have titled the story "Author Delves Into India's Underworld." So the real number of newspapers that have carried the story is about 52.]

"This is a great novel, perhaps the greatest book on Bombay ever written. Certainly a contender for the Great Indian Novel," wrote one reviewer in the Hindustan Times.

Whatever the book's standing as literature, the popularity of "Sacred Games" is undeniable. It has remained on India's top-10 best seller list since its release.

Younger Indian readers have embraced the novel's rowdy social panorama of criminals, cops and slum-dwellers in a country still saddled with the class tensions of the caste system, says Amardeep Singh, a professor of world literature at Lehigh University who keeps a blog about new South Asian fiction. They also find its encyclopedic use of Indian obscenities "thrilling."

"It's a breaking of a certain unwritten set of taboos of what you can and can't talk about and the language you can use," Singh says.

"Sacred Games" has also sold well in England, where it was named a top book of 2006 by several British critics, and has been translated into 14 languages, from Hindi to French to Croatian.

HarperCollins beat out five other publishers to buy the U.S. rights to "Sacred Games" for $1 million, and has reportedly pushed the novel with a $300,000 marketing budget - a rare sum for a single book. There are 75,000 hardcover copies in print in the United States so far, with the book already in its fifth U.S. printing.

Ah well, not the greatest quote. But I do think there's an almost refreshing rudeness in books like Sacred Games and Maximum City.

UPDATE: Also check out this piece by Josh Getlin in the L.A. Times.

(Next week, I promise -- no more Vikram Chandra propaganda!)

In the Washington Post: Vikram Chandra, and a little from me

I'm quoted in an article in this past Monday's Washington Post, on Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games:

The seminal event of Chandra's 45 years, by contrast, has been the transformation, beginning in the early 1990s, of India's sleepy socialist economy into a dynamic engine of internationalization and growth.

"We're living through this precarious time when great changes are happening," Chandra says. The India he grew up in felt like "a little bubble at a far distance from the rest of the world." But in the India his 7-year-old nephew has inherited, "the West as a presence is completely available every day -- and his expectations of his place in the world are very changed."

This new India is a place where the middle class is growing in size and confidence. It's also a place, as Chandra points out, where there's still "this huge mass of people who have nothing" but who can now see what they lack.

And it's a place, according to Lehigh University professor Amardeep Singh, where "the stories people want to tell" aren't so much about colonialism anymore.

Singh teaches courses with titles such as "Post-Colonial Literature in English," using texts from regions as diverse as Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. He notes that Chandra's first novel was replete with colonial themes, but he sees "Sacred Games" as something quite different.

"I would use the phrase 'novel of globalization,' " Singh says. In "Sacred Games," he points out, the English language Chandra's upwardly mobile gangster struggles to learn is associated less with India's former colonizers than with the broader international economy that dictates its use.

Not surprisingly, the notion of a globalized Indian literature has sparked a backlash. Indian authors writing in English, especially those living overseas, have been charged by some critics with distorting Indian reality to cater to Western audiences. Chandra took some hits on this front himself, even before "Sacred Games," and was irritated enough to lash back in a Boston Review essay titled "The Cult of Authenticity."

His advice to any writer similarly attacked: "Do what it takes to get the job done. Use whatever you need. Swagger confidently through all the world, because it all belongs to you."