An edited version of this appeared in the 14th August Times of India Book section
The particular resonance of the female voice in Partition literature comes, perhaps, from the vulnerability of women as victims.
Subject to the most terrible abuse and alienation, at both private and political levels, these women find their voices in the fiction and commentaries of those times. Ayesha in the film ‘Khamosh Pani’ whose father orders her to jump into the well rather than risk dishonor, Lajwanti in Bedi’s eponymous story whose husband would not touch her after her abduction, are tragic archetypes that recur in Partition literature, and most powerfully in the following books.
The Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa (1983)
Set in 1940’s Lahore, this classic Partition story employs an unusual narrative device. Told from the perspective of eight year old polio stricken Lenny, it portrays poignantly the insecurities, shifting allegiances and, betrayals of those tumultuous times. Petrol cans hidden in the back of the family car, great fires that can be seen from the family roof tops, the troubled house next door, where ‘fallen’ women cry and wail all night are some of the searing images in this book that echo and illustrate history the way no text book could. We are introduced to an unforgettable cast of characters, the ice candy man, the Masseur and of course Lenny’s beloved ayah. Ayah, who is betrayed to a mob gone mad, a mob made of men who were her friends and even suitors. And when Lenny eventually finds her again she is an empty shell of her former cheerful nineteen year old self.”I don’t want her to think she’s bad because she’s been kidnapped”, says Lenny, in stark contrast to the attitudes such abused women were subjected to, attitudes reflected in films like ‘Pinjar’ or in Bedi’s moving short story ‘Lajwanti’ . The Ice Candy Man (later editions renamed ‘Cracking India’) has also been made into a feature film, ‘Earth’ by Deepa Mehta.
‘My Temples too’ (Urdu 1948, trans. Eng. 2004) and ‘River of Fire’ (Urdu 1959 trans Eng.1998) by Qurratulain Hyder
Hyder belongs to a Lucknowi zamindari family and her novels mourn the loss of that golden world. In ‘My Temples too’ the young idealistic Rakshanda Begum , editor of the progressive Muslim magazine New Era and her friends are thrust from their hallowed Nehru’s autobiography and Confucius quoting world to a barbaric one. ‘Everybody seemed to have changed , or so it appeared to Rakshanda who noticed a group of Muslims on a wayside platform looking strangely scared .There they are, she thought bitterly, strangers in their own country.’
Hyder’s magnificent magnum opus ‘River of Fire’ looks at 2500 years of Indian history, coalescing and interweaving only to sunder irrevocably in the terrible tragedy of Partition.
‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ by Attia Hossain (1961)
Largely autobiographical, this critically acclaimed book tells the story of Laila, who is the orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, and is, set in Oudh and Lucknow. Laila’s coming of age, her choices and fight for independence, are juxtaposed with the political upheavals of the time and their implications for her larger family.
‘What the Body Remembers’ by Shauna Singh Baldwin (1999)
This best seller tells the story of Sardarji, an engineer in the British government and his two wives, haughty barren Satya and young beautiful Roop. The saga of the woman’s lives is set against the back drop of the history of the day, culminating in the horror of their nightmarish journeys across borders. The description of these two journeys, Sardarji’s by train and Roop on the Grand Trunk Road emerges the most powerfully unforgettable section of the book
The Other Side of Silence, Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (1998)
A seminal collection that employs a mix of interviews, reminisces and personal recollections, diaries and autobiographies to look at the effects of violence on women including rape, kidnapping and then after that often the trauma of return. Original and analytical, though it does tend towards the abstrusely academic turn of phrase.
‘No Woman’s Land’ Ed. By Ritu Menon (2004)
Activist and Women’s Publisher Ritu Menon puts together a section of essays and stories by women from different countries. Some like Ismat Chugtai’s reflections on Partition literature are fascinating, so also Sara Suleri on ‘Papa and Pakistan’. Others catalogue personal stories of tragic deaths and displacement and memories of violence and abandonment. Some like Shehla Shibli speak more hopefully of life in ‘Either, Neither, or Both
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Plastics on Juhu Beach
This appeared in the August 11th edition of the Mumbai Mirror
Tere mere beach mein...
Walking down the narrow lane that leads to Juhu beach on a Sunday evening, is a strangely different experience now. There is no holiday crowd in noisy conversation and I miss the medley of shrill voices, motorbikes and the jingle-jangle of women’s anklets. Instead, the road is a deserted stretch, pitted and puddled. There’s a fierce wind though, chilly and uncontrolled.
At the beach the familiar set of hawkers with their red and white plastic chairs laid out in neat lines, is missing. There is no bhelpuri wallah in sight and even the ubiquitous nariyal pani guy isn’t in attendance. A woman at the lone corn on cob stall calls out to me hopefully. A selection of roasted cobs sit on red hot charcoal but there are no takers. I search my pockets for some change – “I have only four rupees,” I tell one of them. “No matter,” the woman says, “Take one.”
There are piles of broken branches and sticks washed up all around the beach-front. There are bits of wood and even a wrought iron gate lying forlorn. And everywhere the deadly rubble of the urban metropolis – the virulently non-living, non-breathing and non-decomposing plastic bag.
I am reminded of my parents visiting from Delhi last month. Of promising them a beautifully breezy beach walk just down the road, only to turn onto a sea-front littered with miles and miles of muddy plastic bags. “You throw all this rubbish into your streets and nullahs all year long, and then the rains send it all into the sea. Now look, the sea is throwing it all back at you,” my father observes disapprovingly, unaccustomed as he is even to the sight of an open dustbin in South Delhi’s leafy tree-lined neighbourhoods.
I try and ignore the plastic, focusing instead on the slate grey Arabian Sea. There is a swell I haven’t seen before, and the waves come in hard and fast and foam flecked. Further away the sky is laden, heavy with the threat of even more storm clouds. I walk away from the fishing village by the sea, along a polythene plastered promenade. Grey windswept apartment buildings alternate with the glass and stone facades of the hotels that line this much vaunted sea-front.
Sun ‘n’ Sand with a large blue polythene (oops, not again) cover for its poolside, Holiday Inn with its lamp-lit glass frontage and further down, a darkened almost abandoned Tulip Star previously known as Centaur in better days. Now sale scams and scandals have all but shut it down. Still further is the beige stone and halogen lighted JW Marriot. Near Juhu Chowpatty and there are a few stalls open-steaming hot sugary chai, nariyal pani and unexpectedly a kulfi and falooda seller appears as if from nowhere. There are few people though, some strangers and some resident regulars. Lots more plastic bags and a narrow stretch of land the tide is already trying to claim.
Tere mere beach mein...
Walking down the narrow lane that leads to Juhu beach on a Sunday evening, is a strangely different experience now. There is no holiday crowd in noisy conversation and I miss the medley of shrill voices, motorbikes and the jingle-jangle of women’s anklets. Instead, the road is a deserted stretch, pitted and puddled. There’s a fierce wind though, chilly and uncontrolled.
At the beach the familiar set of hawkers with their red and white plastic chairs laid out in neat lines, is missing. There is no bhelpuri wallah in sight and even the ubiquitous nariyal pani guy isn’t in attendance. A woman at the lone corn on cob stall calls out to me hopefully. A selection of roasted cobs sit on red hot charcoal but there are no takers. I search my pockets for some change – “I have only four rupees,” I tell one of them. “No matter,” the woman says, “Take one.”
There are piles of broken branches and sticks washed up all around the beach-front. There are bits of wood and even a wrought iron gate lying forlorn. And everywhere the deadly rubble of the urban metropolis – the virulently non-living, non-breathing and non-decomposing plastic bag.
I am reminded of my parents visiting from Delhi last month. Of promising them a beautifully breezy beach walk just down the road, only to turn onto a sea-front littered with miles and miles of muddy plastic bags. “You throw all this rubbish into your streets and nullahs all year long, and then the rains send it all into the sea. Now look, the sea is throwing it all back at you,” my father observes disapprovingly, unaccustomed as he is even to the sight of an open dustbin in South Delhi’s leafy tree-lined neighbourhoods.
I try and ignore the plastic, focusing instead on the slate grey Arabian Sea. There is a swell I haven’t seen before, and the waves come in hard and fast and foam flecked. Further away the sky is laden, heavy with the threat of even more storm clouds. I walk away from the fishing village by the sea, along a polythene plastered promenade. Grey windswept apartment buildings alternate with the glass and stone facades of the hotels that line this much vaunted sea-front.
Sun ‘n’ Sand with a large blue polythene (oops, not again) cover for its poolside, Holiday Inn with its lamp-lit glass frontage and further down, a darkened almost abandoned Tulip Star previously known as Centaur in better days. Now sale scams and scandals have all but shut it down. Still further is the beige stone and halogen lighted JW Marriot. Near Juhu Chowpatty and there are a few stalls open-steaming hot sugary chai, nariyal pani and unexpectedly a kulfi and falooda seller appears as if from nowhere. There are few people though, some strangers and some resident regulars. Lots more plastic bags and a narrow stretch of land the tide is already trying to claim.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Gregory David Roberts
This appeared in the Hindu Literary Review dated August 7,2005
The bad boy of fiction
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
The bad boy of fiction
SONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
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