Vikram’s Talking Points

You Wrote from Los Angeles

"In the stores here, in hotels, across the streets,

Indians and curs are measured with the same yard-stick;

‘Niggers’ ‘Blacks’! This is the abuse they fling me

And deep in my heart a thousand scorpions sting me".

Reading all this, I felt so damn good!

Now you’ve had a taste of what we’ve suffered

In this country from generation to generation . . .

-Daya Pawar, 1974 

(Translated from Kannada by Graham Smith.)

India’s literary godfather Amit Chaudhuri, who writes lackadaisical novellas about the Kolkata middle class, claims the most exciting English writing in India is in poetry. Who? What? Where?

Opinion & Analysis

The Man Booker Prize is open only to British and Commonwealth citizens and Indian-born Desai has yet to apply for a US passport, although she has lived in New York for 20 years.

"George Bush won once and he won the second time and I couldn’t bring myself to (apply)," Desai said late last month in an interview in Toronto as she voiced her disapproval of the president’s foreign policy.

"So I really owe George Bush my Booker, in an odd way. It’s really very funny." [Link]

A few thoughts on her book, The Inheritance of Loss:

I didn’t like it. In fact, I forced myself to finish the last 50 pages about a week after reading the first 300. (I was not expecting an exciting denouement.) The story revolves around a community of anglicized misfits and their interlocutors on the India-Nepal border, and wends its way occasionally to the subterranean New York of illegal immigrants. The anglicized folks live a content life, reading Trollope and simulating colonial Britain in the Himalayas, until their world is turned Upside Down by a Gorkha separatist movement roiling through the region.

Desai’s book is populated with characters thin with meaning. There is Sai - a young girl forced to decamp to her to her grandfather’s home when her parents are killed in a freak accident in Moscow; her grandfather - a bitter misanthrope who can find no love for anyone in his life save his dog; the son of the family cook - a failed New Yorker whose return to India reminds us that immigration basically sucks; the family cook - a feckless man whose life is forever bound to his son’s immigration to America; Sai’s Gorkha boyfriend, who scorns her for the separatist movement…and so many stereotypes skipping about in puddles of inconsequence.

They did not move me, and neither did the subtext. The hopelessness of -

the anglicized class,

separatist politics,

immigration to America,

globalization,

secularism,

the Indian state 

- is limned with such predictability as to render even a lugubrious reader completely unsympathetic. This is the Left frowning at the abyss; there is no redemption to be found here.

Desai delivers a clever phrase now and then, but with her disjointed style - where long sentences are killed off with one-liners, where descriptive prose is fractured by running social commentary - one is never quite on terra firma. After a while, it simply does not please. 

But what do I know? The Booker committee loved it. Perhaps it was time for another India novel to take the honor.

Bleh.

Life & Leisure

From Jai Arjun Singh’s review of Srividya Natarajan’s novel No Onions No Garlic, which appears to be a satirical mashup of Shakesperan comedy and the politics of the Tamil caste system. Sometimes, the only way to deal with the hidebound orthodox among us is to poke a little fun at them.  

Speaking of books, the big Indo-diasporic release on these shores this summer seems to have been Londonistani, by the English journalist Gautham Malkani. I read three pages of the novel, written in the patois of Sikh street toughs, and put the dang thing down. Odious, I tell you. 

I have no patience for Londonistani-type novels: I could never read beyond page five of the highly-dialected cult classic Trainspotting, which many compare to Malkani’s book. Going more high-brow, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rendered me befuddled and twisted up, and even the canonized Joyce confounded me to pieces - Finnegan’s Wake? wtf? - though his early short fiction, I will admit, is superb.

In the Lok Sabha, BJP deputy leader V.K. Malhotra said it was unfortunate that some people were objecting to the song [Vande Mataram]. … "Its singing should be made compulsory. Those who do not wish to sing this can leave the country," Malhotra said.

Parliament rocked over ‘Vande Mataram’ | IndianMuslims.info

Vande Mataram (’Victory to the Mother’) is a patriotic song written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee that first appeared in his 1882 novel Anandamath. Anandamath depicts a fictional band of militant Hindu ascetics who overthrow Muslim rule during one of the 1770s famines in Bengal. It is widely considered to be the seminal work of early Hindu nationalism. Chatterjee put forth the case - not only in Anandamath but through a large opus of stories, essays and articles - that Hindus were not amorphous congeries of castes and communities, but a single cohesive body, a nation.

I recently read a new, largely adequate translation by Cambridge Indologist Julius Lipner. Chatterjee is one of the shapers of modern Bengali, and I have the feeling that some of his lyricism cannot be represented in English - and Lipner, unfortunately, is no poet. The translation includes an introduction concerning Chatterjee’s views on Hinduism, his literary career, and the novel’s reception among the Bengali cognoscenti - in addition to copious explanatory notes. Anandamath makes it utterly clear that Chatterjee regarded Muslims as foreign interlopers who had subjugated and colonized Hindus, and early on, Indian Muslims protested the Hindu symbolism in the song.

But by the year of Anandamath’s publication, the British had long since usurped power from feckless Muslim overlords, so the novel is actually a protest against their rule. The sanyasi’s song swiftly became a rallying cry for the Indian independence movement; freedom fighters of all religious backgrounds sung the song at meetings of the Indian National Congress. The British characters in the novel are grotesqueries whose Bengali is riddled with malapropisms, or straight-backed Machiavellians scheming for control of Bengal. Chatterjee was actually forced to change the novel’s ending so as to justify British rule.  

The song is thought to be India’s national song, though its official status is quite ambiguous. Another song, Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Mana Gana, enjoys, I think, higher standing, as India’s national anthem. Here’s how Dr. Rajendra Prasad, one of the drafters of the Indian Constitution, described the status of the national songs:

The composition consisting of words and music known as Jana Gana Mana is the National Anthem of India, subject to such alterations as the Government may authorise as occasion arises, and the song Vande Mataram, which has played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom, shall be honored equally with Jana Gana Mana and shall have equal status with it. (Applause) I hope this will satisfy members. (Constituent Assembly of India, Vol. XII, 24-1-1950) [Link]

My take: The song has long since transcended its context. It’s a national symbol, a reminder of the struggle against imperialism, a thread in the fabric of the secular Indian Republic, and ultimately uniting. If you don’t like it, do as the American atheists do when they are subjected to the God-centric Declaration of Independence: excercise your right to sit down. Otherwise, stand up and sing. Narrow-minded nationalists and opportunistic rabble rousers should not use the song as a wedge to divide religious communities.

Here is a (rather Victorian) translation by Sri Aurobindo.