This review appeared in the India Today
There is perhaps no perspective more powerful than that of the outsider and Tamil Dalit Christian writer Bama’s ‘Sangati’ testifies to this. If Art has hitherto reflected ‘high life’ rather than life, such ‘outcaste’ stories, literary cousins to the historical subaltern study can be extraordinarily powerful and provocative. They reveal a consciousness long suppressed, that is increasingly finding expression in a trenchant idiom that eschews traditional literary aesthetic. Dalit writers like Bama and Sharankumar Limbale (‘The Outcaste’translated from Marathi), and Lakshman Gaekwad (‘The Branded’) works’ are, in the remorseless violence of their stories as well as the anguished emotion of their narrative voices, a world away from other more pop ‘outsider ‘stories like Hollinghursts ‘The Line of Beauty’ and ‘The Nanny Diaries’ where a delightfully self conscious ironic narrator views an alien world. In Bama’s autobiography ‘Karukku’ (pub. in translation 2000) for instance, chronology and characterization come a poor second to the primacy of protest – the book is a disturbing blur of anguished impressions, questions and reflections.
In ‘Sangati’, written after ‘Karukku’, Bama takes us into the elemental, impoverished and most often violent world of the Dalit woman – Bama’s paati (grandmother) tells her of her aunt’s death, “I reared a parrot and then handed it over to be mauled by a cat. Your Periappan actually beat her to death …He killed her so outrageously, the bastard”. Later on in the book we witness the village trial of the aunts daughter Mariamma who has been accused of being together in secret in the pump set shed with another village boy by the landowner Kumarasami, to hide his own sexually predatory actions . The entire episode in cinematic in its description, almost surreal if it were not so totally tragic. When Manacchi, a village girl becomes ‘possessed with a pey’, Bama watches the whole violent sequence of exorcising the demon with a skeptical eye, analyzing later why it was always a woman who was possessed,” in the fields there is back-breaking work besides the harassment of the landlord…And once they have collected water and firewood, cooked a kanji and fed their hungry husband and children, even then they can’t go to bed in peace and sleep until dawn. Night after night they must give in to their husbands’ pleasure…The ones who don’t have the mental strength are totally oppressed; they succumb to mental ill health and act as if they are possessed by peys.”
Centuries of history , folklore and economic deprivation may conspire together to heap every imaginable burden on the woman and yet Bama finds herself amazed by the Darwin like survival capabilities of the Dalit women – their spirit and energy as illustrated in their loud quarrels (“If he shows his strength of muscle, she reveals the sharpness of her tongue”), their immense capacity for hard physical labor and appreciates their freedom to work outside the house ( as opposed to upper caste women), the absence of dowry in their social system and the right to remarry. The vignettes of the women in this book from Mariamma to the little girl Maikkanni who works in a match factory and Sammuga Kizhavi (who pissed into the landowners water pot because he beat up a small child whose hand brushed against the pot), are vivid and compelling and the stories heart rending – all told in a style that maybe straightforward but is hugely energetic and elemental.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Book Review - Chasing the Monsoon
This appeared in the July 26th Books section of The Times of India
In Shantaram, the latest hip book on Mumbai’s seamy side, escaped convict hero Gregory Davis alias Shantaram, discusses the weather with acquaintance Lisa as they await the monsoon – “It’s always worst just before the monsoon…this is my fourth monsoon…You start to count in monsoons after you’ve been here a while,”, says Lisa, “This is my second”, says Davis,”I love the rain even if it does turn the slum into a swamp”.
Time and place are truly measured in monsoons for many of us and that’s why Alexander Frater’s excellent and even exciting ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ touches so many chords. Travel writer Frater grew up on an island in the South Pacific where “tropical depressions moved in and out like trains”, and where his favorite rainy scene bedroom print was entitled “Cherrapunji, Assam, The Wettest Place on Earth”.
Many years later, having moved to England, after a particularly dank, dismal and depressing winter, Frater decides to follow the monsoon on its journey from Trivandrum in South India onto Cochin, Goa, Bombay, Delhi , Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji. ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is the story of that meteorological pilgrimage, an English weather buff ‘s account of people and places, meetings with weathermen, poets and politicians, monsoon massage men , waitresses and doormen. In Trivandrum, where ‘the monsoon hijacked every conversation’, Frater meets the Meteorological Departments Julius Joseph, who is reporting the monsoon’s progress to the PM’s office- “At eight am it was cutting through upper Sri Lanka…Well, two days maybe three”. In Cochin “in the dark harbor small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously with pink light”. Frater meets the McCririchs, an expatriate couple with Harrisons Malayalam, a company that owns tea and coffee plantations. Sitting in their ‘enormous, high ceiling’ bungalow, Anne-Marie McCririch talks of monsoon power failures and the snakes and cobras the rains bring out. In Goa where ‘miles of flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the pewtery light’, Frater attends a monsoon do, then going onto Bombay and then to Delhi where he runs the bureaucratic rounds for permission to visit the rainy , rebellion filled North East . Armed with his hitchhikers guide, a well thumbed ‘South East Monsoon’ by Y P Rao, Frater‘s delight in the vagaries of wind and weather is infectious. He dips into history ever so often, and generally ruminates on the rain. Of the deluge at Cherrapunji he says,” I felt little of the excitement I had known when the burst arrived in the South. Those had been occasions for public jubilation. This was a routine matinee….awesome certainly but exhilarating only to the collectors of meteorological records; such specialists would now be watching, incredulous, as their gauges foamed like champagne glasses.”
‘Chasing the monsoon’ is wonderfully entertaining and very empathetic , and while Fraters vantage point may not be a Cuffe Parade slum, (he “chases it [the monsoon] by plane with intermittent pit stops in the swankiest of hotels “ as one acerbic critic puts it) it is nevertheless quite the best monsoon story you are likely to come across.
In Shantaram, the latest hip book on Mumbai’s seamy side, escaped convict hero Gregory Davis alias Shantaram, discusses the weather with acquaintance Lisa as they await the monsoon – “It’s always worst just before the monsoon…this is my fourth monsoon…You start to count in monsoons after you’ve been here a while,”, says Lisa, “This is my second”, says Davis,”I love the rain even if it does turn the slum into a swamp”.
Time and place are truly measured in monsoons for many of us and that’s why Alexander Frater’s excellent and even exciting ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ touches so many chords. Travel writer Frater grew up on an island in the South Pacific where “tropical depressions moved in and out like trains”, and where his favorite rainy scene bedroom print was entitled “Cherrapunji, Assam, The Wettest Place on Earth”.
Many years later, having moved to England, after a particularly dank, dismal and depressing winter, Frater decides to follow the monsoon on its journey from Trivandrum in South India onto Cochin, Goa, Bombay, Delhi , Calcutta and finally Cherrapunji. ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is the story of that meteorological pilgrimage, an English weather buff ‘s account of people and places, meetings with weathermen, poets and politicians, monsoon massage men , waitresses and doormen. In Trivandrum, where ‘the monsoon hijacked every conversation’, Frater meets the Meteorological Departments Julius Joseph, who is reporting the monsoon’s progress to the PM’s office- “At eight am it was cutting through upper Sri Lanka…Well, two days maybe three”. In Cochin “in the dark harbor small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously with pink light”. Frater meets the McCririchs, an expatriate couple with Harrisons Malayalam, a company that owns tea and coffee plantations. Sitting in their ‘enormous, high ceiling’ bungalow, Anne-Marie McCririch talks of monsoon power failures and the snakes and cobras the rains bring out. In Goa where ‘miles of flooded paddies and puddle roads reflected the pewtery light’, Frater attends a monsoon do, then going onto Bombay and then to Delhi where he runs the bureaucratic rounds for permission to visit the rainy , rebellion filled North East . Armed with his hitchhikers guide, a well thumbed ‘South East Monsoon’ by Y P Rao, Frater‘s delight in the vagaries of wind and weather is infectious. He dips into history ever so often, and generally ruminates on the rain. Of the deluge at Cherrapunji he says,” I felt little of the excitement I had known when the burst arrived in the South. Those had been occasions for public jubilation. This was a routine matinee….awesome certainly but exhilarating only to the collectors of meteorological records; such specialists would now be watching, incredulous, as their gauges foamed like champagne glasses.”
‘Chasing the monsoon’ is wonderfully entertaining and very empathetic , and while Fraters vantage point may not be a Cuffe Parade slum, (he “chases it [the monsoon] by plane with intermittent pit stops in the swankiest of hotels “ as one acerbic critic puts it) it is nevertheless quite the best monsoon story you are likely to come across.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Book Review - Maximum City
This review appeared in The Telegraph
IN THE RECYCLED MESS
Part of the rot
Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
By Suketu Mehta, Penguin, Rs 595
Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus on Bombay is impossible to put down. The New York-based writer returns to Bombay 21 years after his family migrated to New York, this time to plumb the dark underbelly of the metropolis. Mehta moves from the cages of Kamathipura to the gullies of Madanpura, the slums of Jogeshwari and Dagdi Chawl to the matchboxes of Mira Road with ease. In this reportage of the city, fixers, shooters, rioters, policemen and film directors come alive in vignettes both stark and cinematic.
The stories are powerful and haunting. They shock with their graphic descriptions of violence and of police brutality. Mehta takes a hard look at Mumbai’s police force, socializes with Bandra cop Ajay Lal in a Bandra police station, and discusses police encounters with assistant police inspector, Salaskar. He befriends underworld shooters Mohsin and Satish, who explain their techniques and describe their habits in a matter-of-fact manner.
Mehta spends nights at Sapphire and other beer bars, hangs out with the sexy 20-year-old dancer, Mona Lisa, at trendy cafeterias or at her home, where she tells him her story. She talks about her father, who abandoned the family, her mother, who sent her to the beer bar, and the lover for whom she slashed her wrists.
He meets film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, co-writing his script for Mission Kashmir. Mehta is relentless in his exploration of the urban landscape — both physical as well as mental. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” he asks Sena activist, Sunil. He analyses the men in the mob responsible for the horrific 1992-93 Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai. “The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweats and farts …Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob.”
The underlying theme that runs through the book is one of rot that comes through powerfully in the images of filth. In one such image adman Prahlad Kakkar tells Mehta, “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit everyday”. When Mehta’s foreign-born children fall sick with amoebic dysentery he says, “We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come from the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in... There is no defense possible. Everything is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.”
The book is a deeply disturbing, disquieting portrait of a city where, as Sunil the local Sena boss declares, “even murder is all right”. Mehta’s Bombay has none of the magic of Salman Rushdie’s childhood world, or the affectionate idiosyncrasies of Pico Iyer’s travel tales or even the hopeless nostalgia of Rohinton Mistry’s Parsee protagonists. Instead, we are drawn into a world sans basic amenities, where the neighbourhood pav-wallah is set aflame, where the primeval impulse for territory makes men loot and kill with equanimity, where models and bar girls measure their grief in the number of slashes on their wrists. Mehta may be the quintessential artist as outsider, but he leaves behind a vision that is compelling.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
IN THE RECYCLED MESS
Part of the rot
Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found
By Suketu Mehta, Penguin, Rs 595
Suketu Mehta’s magnum opus on Bombay is impossible to put down. The New York-based writer returns to Bombay 21 years after his family migrated to New York, this time to plumb the dark underbelly of the metropolis. Mehta moves from the cages of Kamathipura to the gullies of Madanpura, the slums of Jogeshwari and Dagdi Chawl to the matchboxes of Mira Road with ease. In this reportage of the city, fixers, shooters, rioters, policemen and film directors come alive in vignettes both stark and cinematic.
The stories are powerful and haunting. They shock with their graphic descriptions of violence and of police brutality. Mehta takes a hard look at Mumbai’s police force, socializes with Bandra cop Ajay Lal in a Bandra police station, and discusses police encounters with assistant police inspector, Salaskar. He befriends underworld shooters Mohsin and Satish, who explain their techniques and describe their habits in a matter-of-fact manner.
Mehta spends nights at Sapphire and other beer bars, hangs out with the sexy 20-year-old dancer, Mona Lisa, at trendy cafeterias or at her home, where she tells him her story. She talks about her father, who abandoned the family, her mother, who sent her to the beer bar, and the lover for whom she slashed her wrists.
He meets film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, co-writing his script for Mission Kashmir. Mehta is relentless in his exploration of the urban landscape — both physical as well as mental. “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” he asks Sena activist, Sunil. He analyses the men in the mob responsible for the horrific 1992-93 Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai. “The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweats and farts …Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob.”
The underlying theme that runs through the book is one of rot that comes through powerfully in the images of filth. In one such image adman Prahlad Kakkar tells Mehta, “Half the population doesn’t have a toilet to shit in. That’s five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that’s two and a half million kilos of shit everyday”. When Mehta’s foreign-born children fall sick with amoebic dysentery he says, “We have been feeding our son shit. It could have come from the mango we gave him; it could have been in the pool we took him swimming in... There is no defense possible. Everything is recycled in this filthy country, which poisons its children, raising them on a diet of its own shit.”
The book is a deeply disturbing, disquieting portrait of a city where, as Sunil the local Sena boss declares, “even murder is all right”. Mehta’s Bombay has none of the magic of Salman Rushdie’s childhood world, or the affectionate idiosyncrasies of Pico Iyer’s travel tales or even the hopeless nostalgia of Rohinton Mistry’s Parsee protagonists. Instead, we are drawn into a world sans basic amenities, where the neighbourhood pav-wallah is set aflame, where the primeval impulse for territory makes men loot and kill with equanimity, where models and bar girls measure their grief in the number of slashes on their wrists. Mehta may be the quintessential artist as outsider, but he leaves behind a vision that is compelling.
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Artist profile - Sunil Das
This appeared in the Deccan Herald in April 2005
Sunil Das is at Mumbai’s Jamaat Art Gallery in downtown Colaba for his exhibition entitled ‘Horses and Bulls’. The seventh floor gallery is full of light and breeze and tug boats and steamers glide by on the blue grey Arabian Sea, as the artist settles down with black coffee and a cigarette to talk art. The Gallery and its deceptively spacious Annex, once perhaps a sea view balcony, are today an appropriate setting for the paper and canvas works of impetuous animals that line its walls. You can almost see each magnificent animal draw in its breath, sometimes rearing, sometimes snorting or else gamboling. There’s mobility, power and a sinuous grace in every frame – Das’s skill lies in creating a form simultaneously abstract yet wholly representative, in definitive strokes that flow, using a palette that is minimalist and yet absolutely expressive, not only in terms of the sheer physicality of the beasts, but also in terms of its spirit – sometimes tempestuous, sometimes temperate or just plain playful! The black and white bull on a 6 by 4 feet canvas seems to almost leap at you from a background that somberly golden acrylic, there’s a flash of movement – perhaps he is charging and perhaps he is just spirited.
Sixty something, Kolkata based post modernist Sunil Das has an impressive oeuvre both in terms of the medium that he works with as well as his choice of subjects. Das uses paper, acrylic and canvas as well foil, nails or anything else that strikes him to impressive aesthetic effect. All this sells well and Das says he has sold even his student sketchbooks which figure several thousand horses. The first time he began to draw bulls, sitting at bull fights in Spain, people around him would buy the drawings then and there. Today, his soulful series on women and other work notwithstanding, horses and bulls continue to be a leitmotif of sorts for the painter, who explains why. Studying at the Government Art College in Kolkata, the young Sunil would complete his classes and spend the rest of the day walking around the streets of Calcutta, sketching everything he saw around him, and catching the very last train home. One day he was struck by the mounted police and followed the horses back to the stables, and began to sketch them. Thus began a life long affair with these magnificent beasts – “I became known as Horse Sunil – one of my horses was sent to Delhi to the President and I won the national Award as an undergraduate”, he recounts,” I suddenly became well known, the college had a special holiday, girls who had never even looked at me before now started to”. Das reminisces about his scholarship interview, where he enthusiastically walked into the office staggering under a load of all his drawings, unlike the other candidate with neat business like single file folder resumes – needless to say he won the scholarship! His stories of how the young, unsophisticated Sunil found his feet in Paris are fascinating, peopled with an unfeeling Indian Embassy (who later he delights to tell, found themselves wiping wine glasses for receptions for the now well known Indian artist!), a young African boy and a Frenchman who appeared miraculously in response to his fervent appeals to God.
Several exhibitions and awards later, Das has now opened his own Gallery at Kolkata, called Gallery Sunil where he discusses art with prospective buyers by appointment over a cup of coffee .
Sunil Das is at Mumbai’s Jamaat Art Gallery in downtown Colaba for his exhibition entitled ‘Horses and Bulls’. The seventh floor gallery is full of light and breeze and tug boats and steamers glide by on the blue grey Arabian Sea, as the artist settles down with black coffee and a cigarette to talk art. The Gallery and its deceptively spacious Annex, once perhaps a sea view balcony, are today an appropriate setting for the paper and canvas works of impetuous animals that line its walls. You can almost see each magnificent animal draw in its breath, sometimes rearing, sometimes snorting or else gamboling. There’s mobility, power and a sinuous grace in every frame – Das’s skill lies in creating a form simultaneously abstract yet wholly representative, in definitive strokes that flow, using a palette that is minimalist and yet absolutely expressive, not only in terms of the sheer physicality of the beasts, but also in terms of its spirit – sometimes tempestuous, sometimes temperate or just plain playful! The black and white bull on a 6 by 4 feet canvas seems to almost leap at you from a background that somberly golden acrylic, there’s a flash of movement – perhaps he is charging and perhaps he is just spirited.
Sixty something, Kolkata based post modernist Sunil Das has an impressive oeuvre both in terms of the medium that he works with as well as his choice of subjects. Das uses paper, acrylic and canvas as well foil, nails or anything else that strikes him to impressive aesthetic effect. All this sells well and Das says he has sold even his student sketchbooks which figure several thousand horses. The first time he began to draw bulls, sitting at bull fights in Spain, people around him would buy the drawings then and there. Today, his soulful series on women and other work notwithstanding, horses and bulls continue to be a leitmotif of sorts for the painter, who explains why. Studying at the Government Art College in Kolkata, the young Sunil would complete his classes and spend the rest of the day walking around the streets of Calcutta, sketching everything he saw around him, and catching the very last train home. One day he was struck by the mounted police and followed the horses back to the stables, and began to sketch them. Thus began a life long affair with these magnificent beasts – “I became known as Horse Sunil – one of my horses was sent to Delhi to the President and I won the national Award as an undergraduate”, he recounts,” I suddenly became well known, the college had a special holiday, girls who had never even looked at me before now started to”. Das reminisces about his scholarship interview, where he enthusiastically walked into the office staggering under a load of all his drawings, unlike the other candidate with neat business like single file folder resumes – needless to say he won the scholarship! His stories of how the young, unsophisticated Sunil found his feet in Paris are fascinating, peopled with an unfeeling Indian Embassy (who later he delights to tell, found themselves wiping wine glasses for receptions for the now well known Indian artist!), a young African boy and a Frenchman who appeared miraculously in response to his fervent appeals to God.
Several exhibitions and awards later, Das has now opened his own Gallery at Kolkata, called Gallery Sunil where he discusses art with prospective buyers by appointment over a cup of coffee .
Book Review - Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
This review appeared in the Times of India dated May 1st
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s best selling ‘My Name is Red’ and ‘Snow’ have catapulted him centre stage onto a Western world, both politically baffled and intellectually bewildered by a rising Islamic sensibility. Western educated Pamuk, with a cultural consciousness that seems to alternate effortlessly between Flaubert and Turner, Turkish memoirist Hisar and journalist- historian Ekrem Kocu, has emerged as an interpreter par excellence, a subtler Edward Said, whose own 1978 brilliantly incisive ‘Orientalism ‘ transformed the world’s West-defined intellectual map. ‘My name is Red’ , a murder mystery set among the miniaturists of a medieval Istanbul vowed western readers with its mesmerizing mix of intrigue and aesthetic theory, as well as a tautly controlled ‘1001 nights’ structure of story and allegory. ‘Snow’ , the story of returning immigrant Turkish poet Ka’s struggle for identity , amidst the conflicting forces of a once glorious history and present day polity and poverty, went on to garner further intellectual praise for its poignancy and ironic sensibility.
Pamuk’s latest offering ‘Istanbul’, part early autobiography and part cultural memoir, is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of what is arguably, the most intriguing city in the world. ‘Istanbul ‘s opening lines, taken from late nineteenth century Turkish columnist Ahmet Rasim quote,’ The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy’, and indeed much of Pamuk’s urban love letter is suffused with this sentiment, one he describes as ‘huzun’, not merely the melancholy of what was once a great city but also the huzun shared as a community –“of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter…of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear…of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men..” Peppered with such ‘painterly’ observations and poetic reflections, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ accompanied by its black and white reproductions of cobbled streets , boats and the Bosphorus and its stories of ‘Famous Fires and Other Disasters’ , is as vibrant in its own way as Kocu’s celebrated Istanbul Encyclopedia that Pamuk profiles so affectionately.
Pamuk’s personal memoirs follow a somewhat meandering narrative, with frequent digressions that range from fascinating to outright esoteric as he analyses perspective in Melling’s Istanbul paintings, tells anecdotes about Flauberts syphilis stricken anatomy and philosophizes on the ‘picturesqueness of ruins’ for prosperous other world travellers like Nerval and Gautier. A fascinating if arcane mix of geography, history, philosophy and aesthetic theory, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ is a definite don’t miss for anyone ever intrigued by Istanbul and of course for all Pamuk fans.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s best selling ‘My Name is Red’ and ‘Snow’ have catapulted him centre stage onto a Western world, both politically baffled and intellectually bewildered by a rising Islamic sensibility. Western educated Pamuk, with a cultural consciousness that seems to alternate effortlessly between Flaubert and Turner, Turkish memoirist Hisar and journalist- historian Ekrem Kocu, has emerged as an interpreter par excellence, a subtler Edward Said, whose own 1978 brilliantly incisive ‘Orientalism ‘ transformed the world’s West-defined intellectual map. ‘My name is Red’ , a murder mystery set among the miniaturists of a medieval Istanbul vowed western readers with its mesmerizing mix of intrigue and aesthetic theory, as well as a tautly controlled ‘1001 nights’ structure of story and allegory. ‘Snow’ , the story of returning immigrant Turkish poet Ka’s struggle for identity , amidst the conflicting forces of a once glorious history and present day polity and poverty, went on to garner further intellectual praise for its poignancy and ironic sensibility.
Pamuk’s latest offering ‘Istanbul’, part early autobiography and part cultural memoir, is a hauntingly beautiful portrait of what is arguably, the most intriguing city in the world. ‘Istanbul ‘s opening lines, taken from late nineteenth century Turkish columnist Ahmet Rasim quote,’ The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy’, and indeed much of Pamuk’s urban love letter is suffused with this sentiment, one he describes as ‘huzun’, not merely the melancholy of what was once a great city but also the huzun shared as a community –“of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter…of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear…of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men..” Peppered with such ‘painterly’ observations and poetic reflections, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ accompanied by its black and white reproductions of cobbled streets , boats and the Bosphorus and its stories of ‘Famous Fires and Other Disasters’ , is as vibrant in its own way as Kocu’s celebrated Istanbul Encyclopedia that Pamuk profiles so affectionately.
Pamuk’s personal memoirs follow a somewhat meandering narrative, with frequent digressions that range from fascinating to outright esoteric as he analyses perspective in Melling’s Istanbul paintings, tells anecdotes about Flauberts syphilis stricken anatomy and philosophizes on the ‘picturesqueness of ruins’ for prosperous other world travellers like Nerval and Gautier. A fascinating if arcane mix of geography, history, philosophy and aesthetic theory, Pamuk’s ‘Istanbul’ is a definite don’t miss for anyone ever intrigued by Istanbul and of course for all Pamuk fans.
Artist Profile Badri Narayan
This feature appeared in The Deccan Herald dated 26th September 2004
Badri Narayan is a lot like his work, disarmingly gentle and simple, yet with a depth of meaning waiting to be discovered in his simple sentences, his stories, his illustrations and indeed, in all his art.
The recent exhibitions at Mumbai and Bangalore that highlight his paper and water color series emphasise this quality.
Born in Secunderabad, then part of the Nizam Dominions, Badri Narayan discovered that painting and story telling were skills that came to him, early in life.
He began writing for children, as well as providing illustrations for the stories.
Moving to Bombay, the artist continued with his labour of love, painting scenes from mythology, conducting workshops for children, as well as writing and illustrating mythological stories for children, like the beautifully produced Orient Longman illustrated “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”
This close association with children and belief in their art as well as the power of simplicity are profound influences on Badri’s art.
He has over the years, explored the nature of reality and the principles of religion through his stories and sketches.
In his works, archetypal figures like Prakriti, the artist and the wise man inhabit vibrantly washed worlds in shades of rusts, ochres, yellows and blues.
Clean, uncluttered lines delineate visages tranquil and ageless, yet firmly standing in the moment. Badri uses a wealth of mythological and aesthetic tradition in an exploration of both the spiritual and the artistic, his use of motifs like the drifting boat, the castaway garment and symbols like the unicorn and the elephant situate the artist’s personal quest in ancient philosophical traditions.
This is perhaps inevitable, given the artist’s deep involvement with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies as well as their wealth of mythology.
The book lined shelves of his studio at Sion in Central Bombay, bear voluminous witness to the weight of his philosophical leanings from The Puranas to the Jatakas, to Aurobindo and a “Survey of World Civilizations.”
This philosophical bent is what distinguishes his paintings, which frequently feature the exploring artist in several forms, whether in self portrait or as the wise man, the monk or the pilgrim.
Besides Hindu mythology, Buddhism and its tenets also recur.
The artist’s paintings of the Buddha and the Buddhist monk spring from this belief, as does the elephant, for the elephant is, as the artist explains, an illustration of the great principle of a unique combination of strength with gentleness.
Badri relates the pithy simplicity of the ancient mythological parable to the art of the child.
The aesthetic of children’s art was only recognised as late as the 20th century, and the artist states a favorite quote of Picasso’s, “Not for me the horses of Parthenon, but the rocking horse of my childhood.”
Badri’s own stories and illustrations, as well as his water colors seem to hark back to this intuitive expression, using story, mythology and vibrant color to create a mythical narrative world.
The uncertainties and paradoxes of this realm are reflected in the shadows and dark spaces as well as use of devices like the drifting boat, yet the overall mood is one of lightness and brightness, a sense of peace and of hope.
Badri Narayan is a lot like his work, disarmingly gentle and simple, yet with a depth of meaning waiting to be discovered in his simple sentences, his stories, his illustrations and indeed, in all his art.
The recent exhibitions at Mumbai and Bangalore that highlight his paper and water color series emphasise this quality.
Born in Secunderabad, then part of the Nizam Dominions, Badri Narayan discovered that painting and story telling were skills that came to him, early in life.
He began writing for children, as well as providing illustrations for the stories.
Moving to Bombay, the artist continued with his labour of love, painting scenes from mythology, conducting workshops for children, as well as writing and illustrating mythological stories for children, like the beautifully produced Orient Longman illustrated “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana.”
This close association with children and belief in their art as well as the power of simplicity are profound influences on Badri’s art.
He has over the years, explored the nature of reality and the principles of religion through his stories and sketches.
In his works, archetypal figures like Prakriti, the artist and the wise man inhabit vibrantly washed worlds in shades of rusts, ochres, yellows and blues.
Clean, uncluttered lines delineate visages tranquil and ageless, yet firmly standing in the moment. Badri uses a wealth of mythological and aesthetic tradition in an exploration of both the spiritual and the artistic, his use of motifs like the drifting boat, the castaway garment and symbols like the unicorn and the elephant situate the artist’s personal quest in ancient philosophical traditions.
This is perhaps inevitable, given the artist’s deep involvement with Hindu and Buddhist philosophies as well as their wealth of mythology.
The book lined shelves of his studio at Sion in Central Bombay, bear voluminous witness to the weight of his philosophical leanings from The Puranas to the Jatakas, to Aurobindo and a “Survey of World Civilizations.”
This philosophical bent is what distinguishes his paintings, which frequently feature the exploring artist in several forms, whether in self portrait or as the wise man, the monk or the pilgrim.
Besides Hindu mythology, Buddhism and its tenets also recur.
The artist’s paintings of the Buddha and the Buddhist monk spring from this belief, as does the elephant, for the elephant is, as the artist explains, an illustration of the great principle of a unique combination of strength with gentleness.
Badri relates the pithy simplicity of the ancient mythological parable to the art of the child.
The aesthetic of children’s art was only recognised as late as the 20th century, and the artist states a favorite quote of Picasso’s, “Not for me the horses of Parthenon, but the rocking horse of my childhood.”
Badri’s own stories and illustrations, as well as his water colors seem to hark back to this intuitive expression, using story, mythology and vibrant color to create a mythical narrative world.
The uncertainties and paradoxes of this realm are reflected in the shadows and dark spaces as well as use of devices like the drifting boat, yet the overall mood is one of lightness and brightness, a sense of peace and of hope.
Monday, June 13, 2005
On Corporates and Culture
Thsi appeared in the Deccan Herald
It’s monsoon time and Malhar, the festival at St. Xaviers College Mumbai is in full swing with animation and activity in every frame of an entire generation that populates these ancient premises with such joie-de-vivre.
The famous wooded quadrangle houses the festival stalls, and Pepsi very prominently, while BPCL banners and logos compete with red and white AirTel logos in the approach quadrangle. It’s an industrious mix of college and the corporate and a combination that seems completely Win-win.
For college fests today are increasingly becoming mega-events, mini microcosms as it were of a competitive world, where contestants write copy, design board games, plead cases in courtrooms and sing for a lot more than their supper. The heart of these creative, very “productive”, fun extravaganzas is of course the corporate sponsorship.
Types of sponsorship
Varying in degrees, such sponsorship could begin with contributing prizes for informal events like quizzes, to picking up the tab as the title sponsorship for amounts ranging from a few lakhs to ten lakhs. For the students it's the only way they can plan an event of such magnitude, and as Anindita Sanger of Sophia's Kaleidoscope succinctly puts it, “Without the money there’s no show”.
Festivals today typically have several competitive events packed into 3-4 days, with 2 or 3 special performances from well known artistes, both classical, pop, fusion et al. Besides this there are workshops on varied themes ranging from pottery and theatre to dream analysis! All this comes at a price though ranging from a couple of lakhs for the smaller fests to as high as Rs 25 lakh for fest at the larger better-known colleges. There’s a tremendous amount of fun and learning and talent that goes into both the organisation and the participation of such events and this is the other aspect of sponsorship — just as corporates invest in Art, as Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel explains, “Youth is all about fun and we as corporates should step in with our support.”
Market penetration
It’s also all about marketing and market penetration. For corporates, especially those who have a “youth brand” association, a college festival with its concentration of an ideal target audience, provides a unique advertising opportunity. As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee explains, “For a youth brand like Lee, college sponsorships are an important part of the brand’s promotion plans. Connecting with the youth is a challenge in these times when media is fragmented and the lifestyles of the young involve “hanging out” in cafes, pubs etc rather than appointment TV watching. Also, the task is complicated as getting mind share is even more difficult as the young are often into multi-tasking when engaging in traditional media - e.g. sending SMS messages, surfing the net, reading magazines while watching TV or listening to radio.”
Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel, agrees with the importance of brand presence at a college festival. “We target the upwardly mobile youth segment, they are very critical to us both in terms of being brand ambassadors of a sort through their usage and also in providing a large potential as we take them up the lifecycle.”
For AirTel, College Fests are the beginnings of the student corporate interaction and one that sometimes develops into live projects and a marketing effort that is truly “viral”. Himanshu Chakrawarti, General Manager Marketing at Tata’s lifestyle store, Westside, also finds College fests an important marketing platform, “the college going crowd, which forms a large part of our target segment is difficult to reach through regular media. Participation in such festivals through sponsoring events like the fashion show gives us an opportunity to showcase our products and to build better bonding, encouraging students to come to our stores.”
Westside’s experience has been very positive, participation in college fests has actually seen an increase in sales every time- so much so that Westside has begun to conduct inter college fests in Pune and Chennai.
Yet for all this, marketing departments at the fests, whose job it is to go out and collect sponsorships describe it as a hard job. Sangram Kadam, Member of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Core Committee, explains how marketing for the fest held in December every year begins as early as May. “It’s all about bargaining,” says Anshuman, marketing for Xaviers Malhar.
Value for money
Corporates in turn discuss the value for money concept, as sponsorship amounts for the larger festivals could be high enough to pay for 4 or 5 ten second spots on prime time television. The title sponsor for Xaviers Malhar, spread over 4-5 days with an exposure to several thousand students, could instead feature a hoarding at a prime location on Marine Drive, Mumbai for as long as two months for the same price. Besides this sponsorship has also to be woven in intrinsically into the festival rather than being pasted on.
As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee elaborates, “Sponsorship and the brand should be worked well into the event rather than just be an exercise of putting up brand posters and banners in the event location and getting a few mentions from the MC. In Lee, for example, last year, we had sponsored freshers’ parties for a few colleges in Delhi where the brand was worked into a personality contest among the freshers and a Mr Lee and a Ms Lee was chosen from among the freshers.”
Where corporate sponsorship has transformed the face of the festival, it has also intensified commercial exposure to a class that’s increasingly consumerist. Yet in the ultimate analysis, it is a reflection of the real world as also a symbiotic meeting of mind and matter, with a product thrown in for every prodigy, be a it a biggie like the Hero Honda for Mr Umang at the N M College Festival or coupons for coffee.
It’s monsoon time and Malhar, the festival at St. Xaviers College Mumbai is in full swing with animation and activity in every frame of an entire generation that populates these ancient premises with such joie-de-vivre.
The famous wooded quadrangle houses the festival stalls, and Pepsi very prominently, while BPCL banners and logos compete with red and white AirTel logos in the approach quadrangle. It’s an industrious mix of college and the corporate and a combination that seems completely Win-win.
For college fests today are increasingly becoming mega-events, mini microcosms as it were of a competitive world, where contestants write copy, design board games, plead cases in courtrooms and sing for a lot more than their supper. The heart of these creative, very “productive”, fun extravaganzas is of course the corporate sponsorship.
Types of sponsorship
Varying in degrees, such sponsorship could begin with contributing prizes for informal events like quizzes, to picking up the tab as the title sponsorship for amounts ranging from a few lakhs to ten lakhs. For the students it's the only way they can plan an event of such magnitude, and as Anindita Sanger of Sophia's Kaleidoscope succinctly puts it, “Without the money there’s no show”.
Festivals today typically have several competitive events packed into 3-4 days, with 2 or 3 special performances from well known artistes, both classical, pop, fusion et al. Besides this there are workshops on varied themes ranging from pottery and theatre to dream analysis! All this comes at a price though ranging from a couple of lakhs for the smaller fests to as high as Rs 25 lakh for fest at the larger better-known colleges. There’s a tremendous amount of fun and learning and talent that goes into both the organisation and the participation of such events and this is the other aspect of sponsorship — just as corporates invest in Art, as Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel explains, “Youth is all about fun and we as corporates should step in with our support.”
Market penetration
It’s also all about marketing and market penetration. For corporates, especially those who have a “youth brand” association, a college festival with its concentration of an ideal target audience, provides a unique advertising opportunity. As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee explains, “For a youth brand like Lee, college sponsorships are an important part of the brand’s promotion plans. Connecting with the youth is a challenge in these times when media is fragmented and the lifestyles of the young involve “hanging out” in cafes, pubs etc rather than appointment TV watching. Also, the task is complicated as getting mind share is even more difficult as the young are often into multi-tasking when engaging in traditional media - e.g. sending SMS messages, surfing the net, reading magazines while watching TV or listening to radio.”
Alok Jhamb, CEO, AirTel, agrees with the importance of brand presence at a college festival. “We target the upwardly mobile youth segment, they are very critical to us both in terms of being brand ambassadors of a sort through their usage and also in providing a large potential as we take them up the lifecycle.”
For AirTel, College Fests are the beginnings of the student corporate interaction and one that sometimes develops into live projects and a marketing effort that is truly “viral”. Himanshu Chakrawarti, General Manager Marketing at Tata’s lifestyle store, Westside, also finds College fests an important marketing platform, “the college going crowd, which forms a large part of our target segment is difficult to reach through regular media. Participation in such festivals through sponsoring events like the fashion show gives us an opportunity to showcase our products and to build better bonding, encouraging students to come to our stores.”
Westside’s experience has been very positive, participation in college fests has actually seen an increase in sales every time- so much so that Westside has begun to conduct inter college fests in Pune and Chennai.
Yet for all this, marketing departments at the fests, whose job it is to go out and collect sponsorships describe it as a hard job. Sangram Kadam, Member of IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo Core Committee, explains how marketing for the fest held in December every year begins as early as May. “It’s all about bargaining,” says Anshuman, marketing for Xaviers Malhar.
Value for money
Corporates in turn discuss the value for money concept, as sponsorship amounts for the larger festivals could be high enough to pay for 4 or 5 ten second spots on prime time television. The title sponsor for Xaviers Malhar, spread over 4-5 days with an exposure to several thousand students, could instead feature a hoarding at a prime location on Marine Drive, Mumbai for as long as two months for the same price. Besides this sponsorship has also to be woven in intrinsically into the festival rather than being pasted on.
As Suparna Mitra, Business Head, Lee elaborates, “Sponsorship and the brand should be worked well into the event rather than just be an exercise of putting up brand posters and banners in the event location and getting a few mentions from the MC. In Lee, for example, last year, we had sponsored freshers’ parties for a few colleges in Delhi where the brand was worked into a personality contest among the freshers and a Mr Lee and a Ms Lee was chosen from among the freshers.”
Where corporate sponsorship has transformed the face of the festival, it has also intensified commercial exposure to a class that’s increasingly consumerist. Yet in the ultimate analysis, it is a reflection of the real world as also a symbiotic meeting of mind and matter, with a product thrown in for every prodigy, be a it a biggie like the Hero Honda for Mr Umang at the N M College Festival or coupons for coffee.
Author Profile - Jean Echenoz
This appeared in The Hindu Literary Review
`IT is fashionable in France to pronounce the novel dead every 10 years,' says best selling contemporary French novelist Jean Echenoz. Winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, for his Je m'en vais (I'm Gone), Echenoz is at Cercle Litteraire in Mumbai's Fort district for the launch of Mark Polizzotti's critically acclaimed translation of the same. Published by Rupa France, in a slim black and white soft cover version, this tale, like Echenoz's others, fairly bubbles over with intrigue and unlikely adventures, all told in a delightful pop culture idiom.
The joy of fiction
Part of a literary legacy whose best known and translated writers, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, were winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and 1964, Jean Echenoz is today one of the leading lights of the stable of writers assembled by legendary editor Jerome Lindon at "Editions de Minuit", including Samuel Beckett and Nouveaux Romanciers novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet as well as contemporary, well known and translated authors like Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Ndiaye and Marguerite Duras. These are cultural touchstones and influences that both fascinate and inform the author and he speaks at length about that amazing literary form — the novel, which, phoenix-like, reinvents itself every time. "The joy of fiction, the very words inspire me", he confesses, "and it is this love that enables me to write". Jean Echenoz's novels are anchored for most part in Paris, yet make great peripatetic leaps into exotic lands — Felix Ferrer, the failed artist turned contemporary art dealer in I'm Gone, journeys to the North Pole, while mysterious villain Baumgartner, travels through southwest France in picaresque fashion to Spain, Pons in Double Jeopardy moves to a Malaysian plantation, while Max in Piano wakes up to find himself as far away as in the afterlife. Shifts in time and place are handled almost cinematically, in prose that maybe spare, but is wonderfully inventive and evocative — the airport where Ferrer begins his journey "a belvedere... where rabbits with kerosene breadth leap and bound" to the Arctic; "the boreal summer progressed. Night never fell."
Like fellow novelist Daniel Pennac, Jean Echenoz's genius lies in his appropriation of the romans policier (detective story), once derided as railway station reading not worthy of a literary label. His novels may deliciously subvert the detective story genre, with their anti-heroes, in simultaneously prosaic and banal and then wildly improbable scenarios, but Jean Echenoz, an admirer of Dashiell Hammett`s hard boiled detective fiction, prefers to look at it as paying homage to the genre. Indeed, not only does he reinvent the romans policier, he uses it skilfully to experiment with multiplicity of narrative — the exploration of a shifting je; the "I" of the character moves to the narrator, the author or sometimes even to an unnamed, undescribed casual bystander who maybe witness to the action. Characters disappear, merge or reappear, and this confusion with identities often becomes, rather like Graham Greene's The Third Man, the heart of the mystery story. The denouement, when it finally arrives after many lively digressions, often ends up asking more questions than it answers. For Echenoz's characters, the central quest maybe defined in whodunit terms, but emerges as so much more fundamental and existential. Their quests never seem to go anywhere, rather like Felix Ferrer — "And since Ferrer, subject to these immutable orders asked himself every morning how to break out of this ritual, the question itself became incorporated into the ritual". Ferrer spends the rest of the novel travelling, both geographically and through a succession of relationships with women, only to return 364 days later, Sisyphus like, to where he began.
Moments of insight
So, does Echenoz view man as fundamentally isolated and alienated? "I am not a philosopher or a thinker, I am just a novelist," says the fair-haired, soft-spoken author, firm despite his hesitant English. For all that, his novels have more than their moments of extraordinary insight. Predominant aspects of pop culture appear delineated in a dry wit that moves from mild to mordant. Drugs, celebrity and murder (Big Blondes), gun running (Double Jeopardy) all get their fair share of attention. Echenoz's descriptions of the modern art world in I'm Gone are particularly striking — note Ferrer's recommendation of a work of juxtaposed aluminium squares painted light green, "at least when you come home and find that on your wall you don't feel attacked. There's always that." Or of the "smug and self satisfied" young plastic artist whose "trick is... instead of hanging a painting on a wall, he eats away at the corresponding place in the collector's wall with acid: small rectangular format... exploring the concept of negative work, so to speak." Echenoz's text fairly abounds with these instances. His wonderfully evocative descriptions, whether of the Arctic sled dogs or of Parisian art, make this book a delightful read. After this we look forward to his earlier works, already translated and available overseas, being made available here as well.
Book Review - Fearless Nadia
This book review appeared in The Week
Interest in Bollywood’s blond-haired and blue-eyed 1930s and 40s stuntwoman heroine Nadia, the ‘fighting, climbing, riding, courageous Lady Robin Hood’ of a whole genre of box-office stunt film hits, was revived with grand-nephew Riyad Wadia’s award-winning 1993 documentary, Fearless—the Hunterwali Story. Dorothee Wenner’s biography makes for fascinating reading, situating Nadia against the socio-historical and cinematic map of her day.
Stop me if you can: Fearless Nadia in Lutaru Lalna
The chronology of Nadia’s story is interspersed with a rich combination of analysis and anecdote, from stunt sequences to the ideological and creative impulses for various plot developments. Besides the daring and thrilling fighting scenes like those atop a train on Miss Frontier Mail (1936) or in a waterfall in Diamond Queen (1940), what made the Nadia films superhits were also their basic themes.
Wenner quotes film historian P.K. Nair: "The viewers always had the impression that the Nadia films dealt with precisely the conflicts which most affected them", going on to describe Nadia’s freedom dance in Bambaiwali (1941) and her fiery plea in Tigress (1947) against landholders. Yet ‘with raised eyebrows and slightly nauseated by the vulgar hurly-burly at Nadia’s showings—the secret of Nadia’s success was snobbishly put down as violence glorifying action entertainment’ and critics like Baburao of Film India repeatedly exhorted the Wadia Movietone Studios to move towards ‘social action’ themes.
This may have led to the split between the two Wadia Brothers. The elder J.B.H. wanted to move towards social drama like The Court Dancer, while the younger brother Homi, now married to Nadia, wanted to continue the stunt hits.
Wenner tells the Nadia story with all the delightful detail of an admiring insider, illustrating the radical social messages of the Nadia films, where the cult actress sidesteps the saint-immoral vamp polarity to emerge as a truly empowered individual.
Interest in Bollywood’s blond-haired and blue-eyed 1930s and 40s stuntwoman heroine Nadia, the ‘fighting, climbing, riding, courageous Lady Robin Hood’ of a whole genre of box-office stunt film hits, was revived with grand-nephew Riyad Wadia’s award-winning 1993 documentary, Fearless—the Hunterwali Story. Dorothee Wenner’s biography makes for fascinating reading, situating Nadia against the socio-historical and cinematic map of her day.
Stop me if you can: Fearless Nadia in Lutaru Lalna
The chronology of Nadia’s story is interspersed with a rich combination of analysis and anecdote, from stunt sequences to the ideological and creative impulses for various plot developments. Besides the daring and thrilling fighting scenes like those atop a train on Miss Frontier Mail (1936) or in a waterfall in Diamond Queen (1940), what made the Nadia films superhits were also their basic themes.
Wenner quotes film historian P.K. Nair: "The viewers always had the impression that the Nadia films dealt with precisely the conflicts which most affected them", going on to describe Nadia’s freedom dance in Bambaiwali (1941) and her fiery plea in Tigress (1947) against landholders. Yet ‘with raised eyebrows and slightly nauseated by the vulgar hurly-burly at Nadia’s showings—the secret of Nadia’s success was snobbishly put down as violence glorifying action entertainment’ and critics like Baburao of Film India repeatedly exhorted the Wadia Movietone Studios to move towards ‘social action’ themes.
This may have led to the split between the two Wadia Brothers. The elder J.B.H. wanted to move towards social drama like The Court Dancer, while the younger brother Homi, now married to Nadia, wanted to continue the stunt hits.
Wenner tells the Nadia story with all the delightful detail of an admiring insider, illustrating the radical social messages of the Nadia films, where the cult actress sidesteps the saint-immoral vamp polarity to emerge as a truly empowered individual.
Literature and the Immigrant Experience
This feature appeared in The Hindu Literary Review
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
WHAT is it that makes the immigrant experience such fertile literary ground? Popular and prize-winning, these angst-ridden accounts of the aspiring outsider seem to sweep the bestseller stakes. Whether it's Irish immigrant author Frank McCourt in Tis or British born Bangladeshi , Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the stories weave a tapestry that's both familiar and faraway .
For, the immigrant is in a unique position to tell a tale. Like every great epic, from The Odyssey to The Ramayana, his story is also that of a traveller. The immigrant journeys to the promised land and battles adversity, both mental and material. Jasmine in Bharati Mukerjee's Jasmine, for instance, begins her journey travelling through the underbelly of the immigrant trade route on forged papers, through the tiered bunks on the trawlers out of Europe, and ends up making good as a respected "caregiver" as opposed to the more servile Indian version of the "ayah" and then a wife . She moves from Jyoti to Jasmine and eventually to Jane Ripplemeyer, shedding personas like so many skins, eventually metamorphosing into a creature ready to fight fate and "reposition the stars".
Eighteen-year-old Nazneen, in Monica Ali's Brick Lane may have a smooth maiden flight to London, but she is to be married to a man she has never met, pot-bellied, stomach-stroking Chanu, and this is a battle for her nonetheless. Cloistered in her cluttered Brick Lane apartment, Nazneen struggles to find meaning in her day-to-day existence, gradually coming of age by attending activist meetings and eventually achieving economic independence and identity. Gogol in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is born at Saint Auburn Hospital, overlooking Boston's Charles River and the Memorial Drive, but he must nevertheless struggle all through school and even later for a sense of self. He is not born Indian, definitely not yet American. Appropriately and wholly unintentionally, he is somehow given a name that is neither Indian nor American, taken from the surname of his father's favourite Russian author.
The immigrant, like the Greek hero, also takes on the force of Fate itself whether it's the Chinese mothers in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Nazneen in Brick Lane. The primeval power of Destiny and men and women's struggles despite it, has always been the stuff of compelling story-telling and these stories are no exception. Fate appears as a leitmotif in Brick Lane where Nazneen's is born stillborn and left to her fate but still survives, this being a precursor to the many events in her life. The opening pages of Jasmine, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, introduce an astrologer cupping his ears ("his satellite dish to the stars") and foretelling Jasmine's widowhood and exile. Such stories, then, deal with the self and spirit yet viewed through the safety of the prosperous western prism. This is also what perhaps gives these books their "feel good" factor and makes them prime contenders for Western awards — for all the trouble these immigrants endure, their dauntless participation in the Great American Dream is what ultimately "liberates" them. The figure of the immigrant is romanticised as a spiritual vagabond and his or his progeny's ultimate assimilation seen as "coming of age".
Besides, the many exotic trapping of these stories, sketched on a canvas that stretches backwards in time and space, give these the universal appeal of the traveller's tale. Spice-filled kitchens compete with arranged marriages and vermillion filled partings, all adding up to create an atmosphere of these foreigners and their quaint colourful little ways. Third world cultures are painted as better somehow, more spiritual, earthy and even sensual but in nice non-threatening ways as in Irish or Asian lamb stew or wrapped up neatly in fortune-cookie wisdom. There's a multicultural richness in these accounts, in their creation of an exotic backdrop, the literary equivalent of "Casablanca" or Arabia of "Lawrence of Arabia". The description of food, clothes and festivals is in a language that flows and enfolds, appealing in a quirky crossover way — Mrs. Sen's kitchen knife in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, is described vividly as a "blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas". Yet for all the exoticism and nostalgia, the "home" left behind is undoubtedly not the place to be. Chanu in Brick Lane is muddled and misguided in his quixotic intent to return — the Bangladeshi village may be sylvan in retrospect, but Nazneen's sister Hasina's letters paint a dismal picture of the sordid life a woman might have to lead if trapped there. Gogol and Sonia in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dread their holidays to Kolkata, the crowds and the discomfort, and rejoice in their return, "once again free to quarrel. To sleep for as long as they like". Immigrants like Hanif Kureishi's Karim in Buddha of Suburbia or Frank McCourt in Tis bring with them a whole new perspective on the structure of society, this brilliance of perception probably being possible only by virtue of their exclusion. Ultimately and importantly however, there is a complete validation of the Promised Land. Frank McCourt cribs and carps about the aloof unemotional American approach to life where taking in a meringue to a movie is construed as a huge breach of conduct, yet he can think of nothing worse than those poor souls who reached Ellis Island, who were turned back.
Set firmly in the context of a validation of the present way of life, an immigrant's story is thus powerful both in terms of story and setting, as well as politically correct. Asian historical memoirs from Wild Swans to Daughters of Arabia are stories of oppression and unhappiness, now safely told from the haven of the New World. Novels like The Joy Luck Club and Brick Lane reiterate this. They also deal with complex and very universal issues of enquiry into identity and being, striving to make sense of life mysteries — who am I, what is my name and where is home? It's a potent combination of the particular with the profound and in a world where boundaries simultaneously blur and yet don't go away; this is a story for us all.
Artist Profile - Satish Gujral
Satish Gujral is in Mumbai after three years. At a preview of his paintings and sculptures in the courtyard of the magnificent heritage Deutsch Bank building , the artist and his stately wife Kiran converse with bankers, gallery owners and other art aficionados. Gujral’s exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery begins two days later, amidst a flurry of high profile viewings that include superstar Sharukh Khan, industrialists and fellow artists. For Gujral is, in many ways, a legend.
Extraordinary not only for his vast and versatile artistic talents but also for his sheer grit and gumption. His life story is a fascinating saga- born in Jhelum in 1925 in pre-partition West Punjab, he never allowed an early loss of hearing at the age of eight to come in his way, as he studied art at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and then at J J School in Bombay. It was while studying art at Lahore, where the school’s curriculum included various techniques for stone and woodcarving, metal smithery, clay modelling, drawing and design, that the seeds of his very real versatility were sown. For Satish Gujral is remarkable in the sheer breadth of his oeuvre that stretches from paintings and sculpture to wood work, ceramic, plastic and murals.
You see his magnificent and multi-faceted talent in each sculpture and canvas in this current collection. The paintings feature a series of stunning acrylics of both human and animal figures. Each canvas has an amazing degree of complexity, working at several levels in terms of colour and texture.
Advertisement
The artist uses multiple frames within the same canvas, creating a many layered effect of mood and meaning as well as a multiplicity of perspective- it is, he explains part of a conscious effort to depict the complexity and strength of his subjects, mentioning Picasso and the Cubists as influences. Gujral’s lines are akin to master draughtsman’s in many senses, clean and free flowing, perhaps an influence of his architect abilities. (He has won several awards for designing the Belgian embassy in Delhi). The use of gold and a vivid earthy maroon as well as vibrant emerald greens in contrast to pale grays and muted whites all within several geometrical loci in a single canvas is striking. Gujral has long been a student of colour and it shows. His exposure to acrylics began many years ago, when he worked in Mexico in apprenticeship to Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros. “I used to make my own colours then,” he says, adding, “And even now when acrylics are so readily available I work with a combination of commercial colours as well as my own colours”.
Another feature that distinguishes a lot of Gujral’s work is the influence of mural art. The artist has long held for the need to discover an individual and distinct Indian style. “A work of art should be like a person,” he declares, “you should look at the painting and be able to tell it’s Indian”. Through it all, the fame and the fortune, Gujral remains essentially his own person and in many ways the anti-thesis of a lot of very media savvy artists of today.
Extraordinary not only for his vast and versatile artistic talents but also for his sheer grit and gumption. His life story is a fascinating saga- born in Jhelum in 1925 in pre-partition West Punjab, he never allowed an early loss of hearing at the age of eight to come in his way, as he studied art at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and then at J J School in Bombay. It was while studying art at Lahore, where the school’s curriculum included various techniques for stone and woodcarving, metal smithery, clay modelling, drawing and design, that the seeds of his very real versatility were sown. For Satish Gujral is remarkable in the sheer breadth of his oeuvre that stretches from paintings and sculpture to wood work, ceramic, plastic and murals.
You see his magnificent and multi-faceted talent in each sculpture and canvas in this current collection. The paintings feature a series of stunning acrylics of both human and animal figures. Each canvas has an amazing degree of complexity, working at several levels in terms of colour and texture.
Advertisement
The artist uses multiple frames within the same canvas, creating a many layered effect of mood and meaning as well as a multiplicity of perspective- it is, he explains part of a conscious effort to depict the complexity and strength of his subjects, mentioning Picasso and the Cubists as influences. Gujral’s lines are akin to master draughtsman’s in many senses, clean and free flowing, perhaps an influence of his architect abilities. (He has won several awards for designing the Belgian embassy in Delhi). The use of gold and a vivid earthy maroon as well as vibrant emerald greens in contrast to pale grays and muted whites all within several geometrical loci in a single canvas is striking. Gujral has long been a student of colour and it shows. His exposure to acrylics began many years ago, when he worked in Mexico in apprenticeship to Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros. “I used to make my own colours then,” he says, adding, “And even now when acrylics are so readily available I work with a combination of commercial colours as well as my own colours”.
Another feature that distinguishes a lot of Gujral’s work is the influence of mural art. The artist has long held for the need to discover an individual and distinct Indian style. “A work of art should be like a person,” he declares, “you should look at the painting and be able to tell it’s Indian”. Through it all, the fame and the fortune, Gujral remains essentially his own person and in many ways the anti-thesis of a lot of very media savvy artists of today.
Book Review -Tokyo Cancelled
This review appeared in the Deccan Herald
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
Thirteen passengers stranded overnight in a strange airport tell each other stories all night in Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel. The darkened airport lounge (“like the back corridor between 2 worlds ..where people only alighted when something was seriously wrong with the eschatological machinery”) works effectively as an eerie setting for the strange and magical tales exchanged between these displaced individuals.
The stories themselves are striking - not only for their page turning ‘what comes next’ quality, but also for the richness of their resonances. Dasgupta draws inspiration from a timeless fairy tale genre, simultaneously subverting it, by situating each story geographically and temporally in a magical and yet tangibly disquieting reality. This could be our world, as on the streets of Paris and London, Delhi, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, poverty and the plague coexist with industry and money.
And yet it is a fantastic fairy tale world peopled by kings and princes as well as tailors, sailors and magic map readers, a rich Indian industrialist who makes a Faustian bargain with a cloning scientist and an Argentinean video store owner who turns recycler of garbage - or is he all along really the dictator?
The many tragic twists and turns in these modern day fairy tales make for racy reading and also for much provocative questioning - events are arguably driven not so much by destiny as by greed and power, and the magic that could so easily have been technology gone all awry. All this in events and symbols that could only belong to today.
So the Cinderella like figure in the fifth story is really actress Isabella Rossini’s illegitimate daughter and her Prince Charming none other than Robert de Niro’s illegitimate taxi driver son Pavel. Tellingly the transforming magic potion is no simple ‘Alice in Wonderland’s’ ‘Eat Me’. Instead in a world straddled with big brands, it is very appropriately, an Oreo cookie. This cookie when crumbled doesn’t make Isabella a predictable princess; instead it transforms her into a glass and concrete swanky super store on Madison Avenue.
Another story follows the fortunes of Riad, a modern day mariner, who like his ancient ancestor is also marooned at sea - and this time it’s not wind that’s the villain but matters of custom and immigration.
An albatross emerges from his throat flying to Istanbul, to his Bangladeshi sweetheart who organises a rescue mission.
Structurally the stories are somewhat thinly threaded to each other and even less so to the travelers who tell them. Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims who are described in great detail, these commuters remain largely undefined except in indistinct glimpses like ‘a large middle aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face (the plague survivor?), ‘the Japanese man’ (the doll fetishist?) or ‘the backpacker girl’.
Yet their stories seem to come from the same world - a curiously dialectic space driven as much by possibility as by privation, its motivations sometimes magical and other times merely mercenary.
In fashioning this and in creating its protagonists, modern day versions of age old archetypes, Dasgupta gives us a powerful vision of both - the cloned rich industrialist’s daughter Sapna as modern Rapunzel, rich inventor and map reader Klaus as Blue beard, Riad as Sindbad, Katya as Karna and Isabella as Cinderella are strangely memorable, and the multiple resonances of their stories make them curiously haunting
The Publishing Industry in India
This feature appeared in The Tribune
THE publishing industry in India is worth Rs 6,000 crore and is the third largest in the world. Business is also booming. But why aren’t writers being paid what they deserve and why aren’t the prices of books falling?
BOOKS continue to be big business, the world-at-the-touch-of-a-mere-mouse mesmerisation of multi-media notwithstanding. Black and white still sells and how! Whether it is textbooks or general interest publications, the English language publishing industry today seems to have a lot going for it. As literacy increases, the demand for textbooks and other academic volumes continues to rise. As for fiction, world over the Asian subcontinent is definitely ' in'— whether it's Vikram Seth's hefty advance for his autobiography or Bangladeshi born UK-based Booker nominated Monica Ali, writing in English has well nigh exploded today. Mega bookstores like the Oxford Book Shops in Calcutta and Mumbai, Crossword Mumbai, Landmark in Delhi and Bangalore, compete with the famous US-based Barnes and Noble book chain, providing the customer with not just a book but the 'whole reading experience.' There's light and space, softly piped music and the rich smell of freshly brewed coffee to go with the rows and rows of print and paper.
With international publishing houses beating expectations on the street, where do their Indian counterparts stand? "Look around yourself and you'll get the answer", says Ravi Dayal of Ravi Dayal Publishers, adding, "with the proliferation of books and publishing houses, it’s obvious they are surviving and making money." And indeed several large international publishers like Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan and Picador have set up shop in India in the last 10 to 15 years. Besides other traditional heavyweights that include Oxford University Press, Orient Longman and indigenous publishing houses like Rupa and Jaico, a number of smaller niche publishing houses have come up as well. The Indian publishing scene today is populated with small, independent publishers, each with a distinctive profile and a separate specialisation. Kali for Women, for instance, was founded by two women Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia 18 years ago. Beginning out of a garage, it is today a profitable publishing house. So also Katha, an extraordinary non-profit organisation, that has begun to salvage the lost classics of vernacular India, translating them into English with flair and publishing them in beautiful editions. These and others like Tulika (academic and children's books), Stree (women's books), Ravi Dayal, India Ink, Srishti, Minerva, English Edition, Permanent Black (trade and academic books) are all becoming well-known.
With a market size that's estimated at Rs 6,000 crore (including books, newspapers, magazines, periodicals and academic journals), India actually ranks third in the world in its number of English publications per year, after the USA and UK. Publishers agree that the potential in this industry is tremendous. As Urvashi Butalia, founder of Kali for Women, analyses," I think the Indian publishing industry is in an exciting phase right now. The earlier profile, which was that 80 per cent of the books published were textbooks and these were the bread and butter books, is changing somewhat, That is to say while textbooks still remain the profit earners, many publishers are also beginning to turn to producing books for the general reader. This is what explains the success of publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins, who produce books for general readers, or books that are known as trade books. J.S. Sethi, who began by book distribution and now runs the publishing firm of English Edition, concurs, "The potential for publishing is very good. English Edition brings out two to three titles a week. As far as publishing houses that publish textbooks go, they have a captive market and are minting money". S.C Sethi of Jaico Publications also echoes these bullish sentiments, "We are doing extremely well and we are one of the biggest distributors of British and American publications in India."
Despite all the good cheer, however, volumes are quite literally abysmally low. Given the almost 20-million-strong English-speaking and reading public, print runs of commercially successful books could be as low as 1000 copies. What are the reasons for this paradox? "Book buyers are few," says Sethi. "The electronic media doesn't bother about books."
"It’s because prices are way too high," says T.S. Shanbagh of Mumbai's Strand Book Store, that old world cramped but comfortable bookstore that's irresistible to every aficionado. Quoting Tagore's Gitanjali: Where knowledge is free/..Into that heaven of freedom, my father / Let my country awake, Shanbagh puts the blame for low volumes and high prices on high margins and inefficient distribution, "The cost of a book may be as much as 10 times the cost of production, the reader often pays for the overheads of five administrations." Publishers in India today, he feels, also do not bother developing local talent, they often reprint international books, and in essence lack that "some little idealism, which is so necessary to this trade." It is this lack of commitment, of concrete investment in the product, the book and its author, that seems overwhelmingly to explain the problem of low volumes. Promotional budgets are low, and marketing professionals almost non-existent. "Whereas bestsellers’ authors abroad have a publisher’s dedicated marketing team to promote a book and make sure the backlist stays in print, a publisher here may have one person who has sold biscuits or toothpaste for the last so many years and is now told to sell books", points out bestselling novelist Shobhaa De. Agrees adman Alyque Padamsee, whose autobiography A Double Life was published by Penguin, "Marketing of books in India is zero and what the book industry needs desperately is professional marketing of books."
P. Sainath, journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, explains that publishing houses need to step out of the "cocktail circuit book launch at India International Centre, Delhi, with 40 people in attendance" and reach out in other ways. Bhawna Somaaya, film journalist and author of books like Amitabh Bacchan The Legend published by Macmillan India, Salaam Bollywood by Spantach and Lancer, UK, elaborates in the same vein, describing her efforts to market her books in the absence of any from her publishers. "For a creative person to be involved in the process of publishing is a huge responsibility and liability."
Other problems include those of piracy, as evidenced by the plethora of cheap photocopied bestsellers available at the traffic lights, that cause the publishing industry an annual loss of Rs 350-400 crore. The problem that was sporadic about 10 years back has acquired epidemic proportions now. "It is not just fiction but educational books like NCERT textbooks of the Central Board of Secondary Education and Andhra Pradesh Textbook Corporation's books for school kids, that have begun to have their pirated editions," said N. Subrahmanyam, Managing-Director of Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd in a recent interview. The amending of the Indian Copyright Act in 1986 , has helped and police raids and prosecutions have been carried out on unauthorised translations and photocopying operations. Piracy has also affected export markets, as S.C. Sethi of Jaico adds, " Indian textbooks are pirated in Bangladesh and Pakistan as well."
In the ultimate analysis, problems of piracy and production costs aside, Indian publishing continues to remain a poor cousin of the West, despite being placed in the most-populous marketplace. Book promotions may cost money but, as has been illustrated so successfully internationally, they make even more money. Here is where stepping out of the traditional promotional model of exhibiting at book fairs, small-scale book launches and making calls to editors to review books can make a difference.
Witness the marketing miracles of Oprah's Book Cub where talk show host Oprah Winfrey discusses her recommended books as well the carefully orchestrated, perfectly executed Harry Potter campaign and it’s obvious that good marketing can truly sell volumes and volumes.
THE publishing industry in India is worth Rs 6,000 crore and is the third largest in the world. Business is also booming. But why aren’t writers being paid what they deserve and why aren’t the prices of books falling?
BOOKS continue to be big business, the world-at-the-touch-of-a-mere-mouse mesmerisation of multi-media notwithstanding. Black and white still sells and how! Whether it is textbooks or general interest publications, the English language publishing industry today seems to have a lot going for it. As literacy increases, the demand for textbooks and other academic volumes continues to rise. As for fiction, world over the Asian subcontinent is definitely ' in'— whether it's Vikram Seth's hefty advance for his autobiography or Bangladeshi born UK-based Booker nominated Monica Ali, writing in English has well nigh exploded today. Mega bookstores like the Oxford Book Shops in Calcutta and Mumbai, Crossword Mumbai, Landmark in Delhi and Bangalore, compete with the famous US-based Barnes and Noble book chain, providing the customer with not just a book but the 'whole reading experience.' There's light and space, softly piped music and the rich smell of freshly brewed coffee to go with the rows and rows of print and paper.
With international publishing houses beating expectations on the street, where do their Indian counterparts stand? "Look around yourself and you'll get the answer", says Ravi Dayal of Ravi Dayal Publishers, adding, "with the proliferation of books and publishing houses, it’s obvious they are surviving and making money." And indeed several large international publishers like Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan and Picador have set up shop in India in the last 10 to 15 years. Besides other traditional heavyweights that include Oxford University Press, Orient Longman and indigenous publishing houses like Rupa and Jaico, a number of smaller niche publishing houses have come up as well. The Indian publishing scene today is populated with small, independent publishers, each with a distinctive profile and a separate specialisation. Kali for Women, for instance, was founded by two women Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia 18 years ago. Beginning out of a garage, it is today a profitable publishing house. So also Katha, an extraordinary non-profit organisation, that has begun to salvage the lost classics of vernacular India, translating them into English with flair and publishing them in beautiful editions. These and others like Tulika (academic and children's books), Stree (women's books), Ravi Dayal, India Ink, Srishti, Minerva, English Edition, Permanent Black (trade and academic books) are all becoming well-known.
With a market size that's estimated at Rs 6,000 crore (including books, newspapers, magazines, periodicals and academic journals), India actually ranks third in the world in its number of English publications per year, after the USA and UK. Publishers agree that the potential in this industry is tremendous. As Urvashi Butalia, founder of Kali for Women, analyses," I think the Indian publishing industry is in an exciting phase right now. The earlier profile, which was that 80 per cent of the books published were textbooks and these were the bread and butter books, is changing somewhat, That is to say while textbooks still remain the profit earners, many publishers are also beginning to turn to producing books for the general reader. This is what explains the success of publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins, who produce books for general readers, or books that are known as trade books. J.S. Sethi, who began by book distribution and now runs the publishing firm of English Edition, concurs, "The potential for publishing is very good. English Edition brings out two to three titles a week. As far as publishing houses that publish textbooks go, they have a captive market and are minting money". S.C Sethi of Jaico Publications also echoes these bullish sentiments, "We are doing extremely well and we are one of the biggest distributors of British and American publications in India."
Despite all the good cheer, however, volumes are quite literally abysmally low. Given the almost 20-million-strong English-speaking and reading public, print runs of commercially successful books could be as low as 1000 copies. What are the reasons for this paradox? "Book buyers are few," says Sethi. "The electronic media doesn't bother about books."
"It’s because prices are way too high," says T.S. Shanbagh of Mumbai's Strand Book Store, that old world cramped but comfortable bookstore that's irresistible to every aficionado. Quoting Tagore's Gitanjali: Where knowledge is free/..Into that heaven of freedom, my father / Let my country awake, Shanbagh puts the blame for low volumes and high prices on high margins and inefficient distribution, "The cost of a book may be as much as 10 times the cost of production, the reader often pays for the overheads of five administrations." Publishers in India today, he feels, also do not bother developing local talent, they often reprint international books, and in essence lack that "some little idealism, which is so necessary to this trade." It is this lack of commitment, of concrete investment in the product, the book and its author, that seems overwhelmingly to explain the problem of low volumes. Promotional budgets are low, and marketing professionals almost non-existent. "Whereas bestsellers’ authors abroad have a publisher’s dedicated marketing team to promote a book and make sure the backlist stays in print, a publisher here may have one person who has sold biscuits or toothpaste for the last so many years and is now told to sell books", points out bestselling novelist Shobhaa De. Agrees adman Alyque Padamsee, whose autobiography A Double Life was published by Penguin, "Marketing of books in India is zero and what the book industry needs desperately is professional marketing of books."
P. Sainath, journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, explains that publishing houses need to step out of the "cocktail circuit book launch at India International Centre, Delhi, with 40 people in attendance" and reach out in other ways. Bhawna Somaaya, film journalist and author of books like Amitabh Bacchan The Legend published by Macmillan India, Salaam Bollywood by Spantach and Lancer, UK, elaborates in the same vein, describing her efforts to market her books in the absence of any from her publishers. "For a creative person to be involved in the process of publishing is a huge responsibility and liability."
Other problems include those of piracy, as evidenced by the plethora of cheap photocopied bestsellers available at the traffic lights, that cause the publishing industry an annual loss of Rs 350-400 crore. The problem that was sporadic about 10 years back has acquired epidemic proportions now. "It is not just fiction but educational books like NCERT textbooks of the Central Board of Secondary Education and Andhra Pradesh Textbook Corporation's books for school kids, that have begun to have their pirated editions," said N. Subrahmanyam, Managing-Director of Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd in a recent interview. The amending of the Indian Copyright Act in 1986 , has helped and police raids and prosecutions have been carried out on unauthorised translations and photocopying operations. Piracy has also affected export markets, as S.C. Sethi of Jaico adds, " Indian textbooks are pirated in Bangladesh and Pakistan as well."
In the ultimate analysis, problems of piracy and production costs aside, Indian publishing continues to remain a poor cousin of the West, despite being placed in the most-populous marketplace. Book promotions may cost money but, as has been illustrated so successfully internationally, they make even more money. Here is where stepping out of the traditional promotional model of exhibiting at book fairs, small-scale book launches and making calls to editors to review books can make a difference.
Witness the marketing miracles of Oprah's Book Cub where talk show host Oprah Winfrey discusses her recommended books as well the carefully orchestrated, perfectly executed Harry Potter campaign and it’s obvious that good marketing can truly sell volumes and volumes.
The Runaway Thriller
This Feature appeared in The Hindu's Literary Review
AS popular art forms go, nothing captures public imagination in quite the same way as the thriller. Beginning with classic whodunnits, serial killers and spies, today's thrillers rock bestseller lists with their excursions into law, medicine, high finance and even religion. Moving from a genre that was wildly popular within its niche, the thriller, once defined both contextually and spatially, has broken all boundaries. The profusion and popularity of high voltage dramas set in court rooms, fast food corporations, hospitals, airports and computer firms is more than just a literary trend — it is a reflection of life as we know it today.
The last few decades have seen a virtual explosion in the genre of the thriller with traditional mystery and detective stories from P.D. James, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwall, spy stories from Ken Follet, Colin Forbes, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre competing with medical and sci-fi thrillers from Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, courtroom intrigues from Scott Turow, John Grisham, Steve Martin and now religious and art conspiracy thrillers from Dan Brown, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's latest blockbuster The Rule of Four. What is interesting though is that these intricate variations on the intrigue theme have each their distinguished predecessors. Sci-fi conspiracy dates back to H.G. Wells' War of the World. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic predecessor of Robin Cook stories like Chromosome 6 and Outbreak. Morris West wrote a racy religious Vatican conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s and lawyer cum detective Perry Mason stars in courtroom conflicts. So what makes this current spate of "specialty" thrillers different, almost a movement as it were?
Layman's manual
The answers to this seem to lie in the world we live in today — one of super specialisation and globalisation powered not just by politics but by micro economics. In this increasingly complex world, the thriller, with its detailed behind-the-scenes descriptions, whether in the esoteric world of banking as in Arthur Hailey's The Money Changers, or the frighteningly immediate yet complex world of medicine in Robin Cook's novels, becomes much more than a riveting airport read. It functions as a unique layman's manual, a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as it were. The same reader who'd follow Michael Crichton's Airframe or his path breaking The Andromeda Strain with fascinated awe would be hard put to pick up the equivalent textbooks on aerodynamics and anatomy. Similarly, the average layman would seldom venture into a jargon filled treatise on various aspects of the law, its loopholes, its provisions and precedents. And yet, as citizens in a democratic society, the rights and wrongs of conflicts, the understanding of how and why a government can order another citizen to pay money, give up their children, even to be imprisoned or put to death are issues of compelling interest. In this context a book like John Grisham's The Chamber is much more than a taut tale, it is an incisive and legally coherent argument against the death penalty.
The current crop of specialty thrillers is also striking in their delineations of grey. No more the black and white or red of political drama or the criminal versus society of the pure detective novel. Today's thrillers engage social themes and ethical questions with gusto whether it is racism and information technology in Hari Kunzru's Transmission or religious conditioning and conspiracy in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Grisham's thrillers trace the murky background of courtroom conflict and big business looking at jury selection and the tobacco industry in The Runaway Jury or law and crime in The Firm. Robin Cook's Fatal Cure attacks the anomalies of the health care system, his Vital Signs explores the issue of in-vitro reproduction and Toxin indicts the fast food industry.
Specialty thrillers today are therefore much more than suspense stories — they are in many senses social documents of fundamental interest, both in the way they pick up on society's current fears and in the manner in which they outline them. Packed with a wealth of circumstantial detail, they appeal to the general reader in their approximation to real life, the information they provide as well as their racy resolution.
New realities
Like modern day film, which gets technically more competent and more realistic, specially in conflict sequences, whether its epic battles or car chases, today's thrillers are truly cinematic. If Arthur Conan Doyle described a surgeon vis-à-vis his clothes and maybe his chambers, today's specialty thriller will get up, close and personal as he picks up his scalpel, glorying in the nitty gritty, the hows, the whys and the therefores. Like modern day science, the thriller investigates everything, and unlike science it has the benefit of an ethical viewpoint. Also unlike science it has the advantage of imagination on its side.
Fact and fiction
It is this provocative blend of fact and fiction most recently exemplified in the best selling Da Vinci Code that makes it so unique. Set against a backdrop of organised religion already reeling under allegations of long hidden conspiracies of silence, of excesses and of abuse, the events in the Da Vinci Code use a fascinating mix of religious geography, iconography and art history to uncover a secret conspiracy. From ancient history to technology, thrillers today dip into different areas of special research to construct concepts simultaneously novel yet frighteningly believable. In a world beset by religious fundamentalism and conflict as it hurtles towards progress, this heady combination of different specialist ideas, their consequences and resolutions seems one way of understanding reality — whether it is molecular manufacturing, biotechnology and the behavioural science of bees and ants in Michael Crichton's Prey or the combination of venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses in Hari Kunzru's Transmission.
AS popular art forms go, nothing captures public imagination in quite the same way as the thriller. Beginning with classic whodunnits, serial killers and spies, today's thrillers rock bestseller lists with their excursions into law, medicine, high finance and even religion. Moving from a genre that was wildly popular within its niche, the thriller, once defined both contextually and spatially, has broken all boundaries. The profusion and popularity of high voltage dramas set in court rooms, fast food corporations, hospitals, airports and computer firms is more than just a literary trend — it is a reflection of life as we know it today.
The last few decades have seen a virtual explosion in the genre of the thriller with traditional mystery and detective stories from P.D. James, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwall, spy stories from Ken Follet, Colin Forbes, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre competing with medical and sci-fi thrillers from Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, courtroom intrigues from Scott Turow, John Grisham, Steve Martin and now religious and art conspiracy thrillers from Dan Brown, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's latest blockbuster The Rule of Four. What is interesting though is that these intricate variations on the intrigue theme have each their distinguished predecessors. Sci-fi conspiracy dates back to H.G. Wells' War of the World. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic predecessor of Robin Cook stories like Chromosome 6 and Outbreak. Morris West wrote a racy religious Vatican conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s and lawyer cum detective Perry Mason stars in courtroom conflicts. So what makes this current spate of "specialty" thrillers different, almost a movement as it were?
Layman's manual
The answers to this seem to lie in the world we live in today — one of super specialisation and globalisation powered not just by politics but by micro economics. In this increasingly complex world, the thriller, with its detailed behind-the-scenes descriptions, whether in the esoteric world of banking as in Arthur Hailey's The Money Changers, or the frighteningly immediate yet complex world of medicine in Robin Cook's novels, becomes much more than a riveting airport read. It functions as a unique layman's manual, a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as it were. The same reader who'd follow Michael Crichton's Airframe or his path breaking The Andromeda Strain with fascinated awe would be hard put to pick up the equivalent textbooks on aerodynamics and anatomy. Similarly, the average layman would seldom venture into a jargon filled treatise on various aspects of the law, its loopholes, its provisions and precedents. And yet, as citizens in a democratic society, the rights and wrongs of conflicts, the understanding of how and why a government can order another citizen to pay money, give up their children, even to be imprisoned or put to death are issues of compelling interest. In this context a book like John Grisham's The Chamber is much more than a taut tale, it is an incisive and legally coherent argument against the death penalty.
The current crop of specialty thrillers is also striking in their delineations of grey. No more the black and white or red of political drama or the criminal versus society of the pure detective novel. Today's thrillers engage social themes and ethical questions with gusto whether it is racism and information technology in Hari Kunzru's Transmission or religious conditioning and conspiracy in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Grisham's thrillers trace the murky background of courtroom conflict and big business looking at jury selection and the tobacco industry in The Runaway Jury or law and crime in The Firm. Robin Cook's Fatal Cure attacks the anomalies of the health care system, his Vital Signs explores the issue of in-vitro reproduction and Toxin indicts the fast food industry.
Specialty thrillers today are therefore much more than suspense stories — they are in many senses social documents of fundamental interest, both in the way they pick up on society's current fears and in the manner in which they outline them. Packed with a wealth of circumstantial detail, they appeal to the general reader in their approximation to real life, the information they provide as well as their racy resolution.
New realities
Like modern day film, which gets technically more competent and more realistic, specially in conflict sequences, whether its epic battles or car chases, today's thrillers are truly cinematic. If Arthur Conan Doyle described a surgeon vis-à-vis his clothes and maybe his chambers, today's specialty thriller will get up, close and personal as he picks up his scalpel, glorying in the nitty gritty, the hows, the whys and the therefores. Like modern day science, the thriller investigates everything, and unlike science it has the benefit of an ethical viewpoint. Also unlike science it has the advantage of imagination on its side.
Fact and fiction
It is this provocative blend of fact and fiction most recently exemplified in the best selling Da Vinci Code that makes it so unique. Set against a backdrop of organised religion already reeling under allegations of long hidden conspiracies of silence, of excesses and of abuse, the events in the Da Vinci Code use a fascinating mix of religious geography, iconography and art history to uncover a secret conspiracy. From ancient history to technology, thrillers today dip into different areas of special research to construct concepts simultaneously novel yet frighteningly believable. In a world beset by religious fundamentalism and conflict as it hurtles towards progress, this heady combination of different specialist ideas, their consequences and resolutions seems one way of understanding reality — whether it is molecular manufacturing, biotechnology and the behavioural science of bees and ants in Michael Crichton's Prey or the combination of venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses in Hari Kunzru's Transmission.
Book Review - India in Mind
http://www.the-week.com/25may01/lifestyle_article5.htm
From Australian writer Robyn Davidson’s toilet travails with the Rabari nomads in the Thar desert to Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan quest for the snow leopard, India in Mind is a literary map of sorts, multi-dimensional in diverse perspectives that range from Rudyard Kipling to Mexican poet Octavio Paz to ‘beat’ gay writer Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (‘naked saddhus who don’t talk, crosslegged smoking dope/ to overlook the corpse meat-dolls’).
The collection is remarkable in the breadth of subjects it encompasses, with Hermann Hesse’s spiritual mysticism and Andre Malraux’s philosophical ruminations on Ellora and Elephanta cheek by jowl with Somerset Maugham’s portraits of the vina player and the Dewan of Travancore and Bruce
Yet it is a collection that disappoints—despite vivid descriptions of people and places, the characters remain cliched caricatures and slightly ridiculous in their attempts to measure up to western standards. Mark Twain’s bearer, whom he names Satan, V.S. Naipaul’s unreliable Kashmiri hotelier Mr Butt or J.R. Ackerley’s distracted maharaja. Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s stories are exceptions, yet, tellingly, Jhabwala’s patronising Margaret memsahib and Scott’s supercilious Mrs Grigson are not Indian.
Mostly, however, what you miss is a sense of the unexpected—an insider’s intimate view of the depths below the colourful vibrancy of the streets of Varanasi or the tombs of the Tughlaqs. You miss the belongingness of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy, the affection of Ruskin Bond or the matter of factness of Jim Corbett.
India in Mind is a collection whose literary credentials are impeccable—an expert and diverse selection accompanied by Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to each writer, which makes for interesting reading, yet it remains naggingly unsatisfying and somewhat uninspiring.
From Australian writer Robyn Davidson’s toilet travails with the Rabari nomads in the Thar desert to Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan quest for the snow leopard, India in Mind is a literary map of sorts, multi-dimensional in diverse perspectives that range from Rudyard Kipling to Mexican poet Octavio Paz to ‘beat’ gay writer Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (‘naked saddhus who don’t talk, crosslegged smoking dope/ to overlook the corpse meat-dolls’).
The collection is remarkable in the breadth of subjects it encompasses, with Hermann Hesse’s spiritual mysticism and Andre Malraux’s philosophical ruminations on Ellora and Elephanta cheek by jowl with Somerset Maugham’s portraits of the vina player and the Dewan of Travancore and Bruce
Yet it is a collection that disappoints—despite vivid descriptions of people and places, the characters remain cliched caricatures and slightly ridiculous in their attempts to measure up to western standards. Mark Twain’s bearer, whom he names Satan, V.S. Naipaul’s unreliable Kashmiri hotelier Mr Butt or J.R. Ackerley’s distracted maharaja. Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s stories are exceptions, yet, tellingly, Jhabwala’s patronising Margaret memsahib and Scott’s supercilious Mrs Grigson are not Indian.
Mostly, however, what you miss is a sense of the unexpected—an insider’s intimate view of the depths below the colourful vibrancy of the streets of Varanasi or the tombs of the Tughlaqs. You miss the belongingness of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy, the affection of Ruskin Bond or the matter of factness of Jim Corbett.
India in Mind is a collection whose literary credentials are impeccable—an expert and diverse selection accompanied by Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to each writer, which makes for interesting reading, yet it remains naggingly unsatisfying and somewhat uninspiring.
The City and its Stories
juhujournal
By 2030 two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. No wonder then, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY, that the city is acquiring a literary identity of its own in modern imagination.
SHASHI ASHIWAL
Cityscape: A montage of joys and miseries...
THE city has always been an important backdrop for the story, from the bleakly industrial London of Dickens' Hard Times to the Baltimore of Anne Tyler's finely nuanced everyday world. Now it becomes protagonist in a new genre of books that hail it as centre-stage character — from the recently launched Bombay by Suketu Mehta to the critically acclaimed The Weekenders, a collection of stories set in Kolkata.
This trend is indicative of the increasing importance of the city. At a time when the urban population has for the first time in the history of mankind overtaken the rural population and is projected in U.N. population studies to account for two thirds of the world's population by 2030, the city is under intense scrutiny. Increasingly, it is acquiring a literary identity, its stories multidimensional maps where fiction, history, sociology and geography come together in fascinating accounts of people and pavements.
Provocative mix
Truth is stranger than fiction, and the city's provocative mix of both has a special appeal. It is, for the storyteller, the ultimate inspiration. Here's where Oceans of Stories and the Arabian Nights come together in a rich multiplicity of voices, immortalising both the prince and the pauper. The modern metropolis has an epic sweep, its many worlds both co-existing and colliding. Its juxtapositions, the poignancy of its unsung heroes and their immense isolation amongst the crowded streets, rather like Coleridge's ancient mariner with "water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" reveal life at its most powerfully ironic. The rickshaw puller, the bar girl, the taxi driver emerge from the choruses of grand heroes as icons of everyday existence — plebeian yet potent. So Monica Ali, in The Weekenders, writes of Deepak, a lost little boy who "works" in the carriages of trains that steam into Howrah station. The late Arun Kolatkar, that quintessential Mumbai poet, wrote in his Kala Ghoda Poems of the drunks and the dogs of the city and of the "Old Woman" showing us life "through the bullet holes she has for her eyes". The city is where emotions run high, where the minutiae of everyday, acquire in the retelling a status that is larger than life. Suketu Mehta's stories of the city, of hanging out in hotels and beer bars with Sena local bosses Sunil and Amol and shooters Satish and Mohsin, in five star hotels and cafeterias with Mona Lisa the bar dancer and with young unemployed Girish in his slum, prove fascinating in the context of the concrete pavements of that teeming, multitudinous city, Mumbai. Everyman is no longer faceless; his story is interesting as well an intriguing blend of fiction and social history. The appeal of such stories lies in their embrace of the marginalised many — of the cross dancer Honey, whose spectacular dancing skills earned her thousands every night at Mumbai's Sapphire Bar (Suketu Mehta's Bombay) and of Razia, Panna and Vimla , eunuchs who live in an old Mughal haveli in the gullies of Old Delhi, in William Dalrymple's The City of Djinns, among other such in-your-face but oft-ignored inhabitants.
The city emerges as a space where history and the contemporary story resonate, as William Dalrymple in The City of Djinns meets Pakeezah Begum, the youngest descendant of the Mughal Dynasty, in a ruined haveli near Faiz Bazaar, and visits tombs, palaces, graveyards and gardens in search of the stories of the generations of emperors and imperialist who held court on those very premises. Jerry Pinto recalls in the anthology Mumbai Meri Jaan the day during the Second World War in 1944, when the battleship SS Fort Stikine exploded and he saw a headless horse and Timeri Murari tells of the history of the Hindu Building in The Unhurried City Writings on Chennai. City stories are part reminiscence and part folk tale and the nostalgia of these personal metropolitan stories make history come alive in a way no text book ever could. So also journalist Pinky Virani's book on Mumbai, Once Was a Bombay, talks of Rozena growing up in of Mazgaon, of Pakya the shooter for hire, of politician Chaggan Bhujbal and film fight master Veeru Devgan, while simultaneously tracing the rise of gangsterism and religion in local politics.
This is history at its best, and social studies too. The story of the modern city is really the equivalent of the great battle tales of yore. For it is contemporary warfare at its refined best, deadly despite its deceptively civil veneer of good behaviour. The story of the city is that of constant conflict, as Kiran Nagarkar exclaims in his quirky tale of the Bombay chawls Ravan and Eddie — "They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour off a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump".
A riot of colours
You are impelled to read such city stories, because the city is a geographical entity you know, or want to get to know, a place where the streets have a name. The metropolis is a complicated character — no blacks and whites here, it's a virtual riot of colour — a montage of joys and miseries. And like the bazaars of the East, long the staple attractions of the traveller's tale, the many colours, sights and sounds of the city signify everything vibrant and diverse — an emblem of what life at its best should be. Nothing can quite beat the bubbliness of the bustling city. The liveliness and energy of the everyday streets is only surpassed by the many modern day extravaganzas. For, like ancient Rome and its gladiators, today's cities play host to colourful spectacles, marches, processions et al. William Dalrymple describes with much fascination the crowded spectacle of the partridge fight, also the majesty of the Id prayer, Suketu Mehta tells of the Ganapati celebrations in Bombay, the bull slaughter at Id and Sameera Khan describes "Muharrom in the Mohalla" in Bombay Meri Jaan, as colourful illustrations of this joie de vivre.
There are truly "six million stories in the naked city" , as Jules Dassin exclaims in his film starring New York and perhaps that explains why we seek to understand its soul.
By 2030 two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. No wonder then, says SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY, that the city is acquiring a literary identity of its own in modern imagination.
SHASHI ASHIWAL
Cityscape: A montage of joys and miseries...
THE city has always been an important backdrop for the story, from the bleakly industrial London of Dickens' Hard Times to the Baltimore of Anne Tyler's finely nuanced everyday world. Now it becomes protagonist in a new genre of books that hail it as centre-stage character — from the recently launched Bombay by Suketu Mehta to the critically acclaimed The Weekenders, a collection of stories set in Kolkata.
This trend is indicative of the increasing importance of the city. At a time when the urban population has for the first time in the history of mankind overtaken the rural population and is projected in U.N. population studies to account for two thirds of the world's population by 2030, the city is under intense scrutiny. Increasingly, it is acquiring a literary identity, its stories multidimensional maps where fiction, history, sociology and geography come together in fascinating accounts of people and pavements.
Provocative mix
Truth is stranger than fiction, and the city's provocative mix of both has a special appeal. It is, for the storyteller, the ultimate inspiration. Here's where Oceans of Stories and the Arabian Nights come together in a rich multiplicity of voices, immortalising both the prince and the pauper. The modern metropolis has an epic sweep, its many worlds both co-existing and colliding. Its juxtapositions, the poignancy of its unsung heroes and their immense isolation amongst the crowded streets, rather like Coleridge's ancient mariner with "water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" reveal life at its most powerfully ironic. The rickshaw puller, the bar girl, the taxi driver emerge from the choruses of grand heroes as icons of everyday existence — plebeian yet potent. So Monica Ali, in The Weekenders, writes of Deepak, a lost little boy who "works" in the carriages of trains that steam into Howrah station. The late Arun Kolatkar, that quintessential Mumbai poet, wrote in his Kala Ghoda Poems of the drunks and the dogs of the city and of the "Old Woman" showing us life "through the bullet holes she has for her eyes". The city is where emotions run high, where the minutiae of everyday, acquire in the retelling a status that is larger than life. Suketu Mehta's stories of the city, of hanging out in hotels and beer bars with Sena local bosses Sunil and Amol and shooters Satish and Mohsin, in five star hotels and cafeterias with Mona Lisa the bar dancer and with young unemployed Girish in his slum, prove fascinating in the context of the concrete pavements of that teeming, multitudinous city, Mumbai. Everyman is no longer faceless; his story is interesting as well an intriguing blend of fiction and social history. The appeal of such stories lies in their embrace of the marginalised many — of the cross dancer Honey, whose spectacular dancing skills earned her thousands every night at Mumbai's Sapphire Bar (Suketu Mehta's Bombay) and of Razia, Panna and Vimla , eunuchs who live in an old Mughal haveli in the gullies of Old Delhi, in William Dalrymple's The City of Djinns, among other such in-your-face but oft-ignored inhabitants.
The city emerges as a space where history and the contemporary story resonate, as William Dalrymple in The City of Djinns meets Pakeezah Begum, the youngest descendant of the Mughal Dynasty, in a ruined haveli near Faiz Bazaar, and visits tombs, palaces, graveyards and gardens in search of the stories of the generations of emperors and imperialist who held court on those very premises. Jerry Pinto recalls in the anthology Mumbai Meri Jaan the day during the Second World War in 1944, when the battleship SS Fort Stikine exploded and he saw a headless horse and Timeri Murari tells of the history of the Hindu Building in The Unhurried City Writings on Chennai. City stories are part reminiscence and part folk tale and the nostalgia of these personal metropolitan stories make history come alive in a way no text book ever could. So also journalist Pinky Virani's book on Mumbai, Once Was a Bombay, talks of Rozena growing up in of Mazgaon, of Pakya the shooter for hire, of politician Chaggan Bhujbal and film fight master Veeru Devgan, while simultaneously tracing the rise of gangsterism and religion in local politics.
This is history at its best, and social studies too. The story of the modern city is really the equivalent of the great battle tales of yore. For it is contemporary warfare at its refined best, deadly despite its deceptively civil veneer of good behaviour. The story of the city is that of constant conflict, as Kiran Nagarkar exclaims in his quirky tale of the Bombay chawls Ravan and Eddie — "They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour off a person's skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump".
A riot of colours
You are impelled to read such city stories, because the city is a geographical entity you know, or want to get to know, a place where the streets have a name. The metropolis is a complicated character — no blacks and whites here, it's a virtual riot of colour — a montage of joys and miseries. And like the bazaars of the East, long the staple attractions of the traveller's tale, the many colours, sights and sounds of the city signify everything vibrant and diverse — an emblem of what life at its best should be. Nothing can quite beat the bubbliness of the bustling city. The liveliness and energy of the everyday streets is only surpassed by the many modern day extravaganzas. For, like ancient Rome and its gladiators, today's cities play host to colourful spectacles, marches, processions et al. William Dalrymple describes with much fascination the crowded spectacle of the partridge fight, also the majesty of the Id prayer, Suketu Mehta tells of the Ganapati celebrations in Bombay, the bull slaughter at Id and Sameera Khan describes "Muharrom in the Mohalla" in Bombay Meri Jaan, as colourful illustrations of this joie de vivre.
There are truly "six million stories in the naked city" , as Jules Dassin exclaims in his film starring New York and perhaps that explains why we seek to understand its soul.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)