Goodbye Khushwant Singh

In 1989 VS Naipaul was travelling India to research for Million Mutinies Now. While on his way from one place to another in Mumbai he was reading a popular Indian magazine trying to understand the reason for its success. Meant for house wives, it was a lowbrow magazine covering issues of domesticity without any intellectual pretensions. After flipping through it, Naipaul decided that the magazine was popular with its readers because it didn’t intimidate them, a fact that made it endearing and friendly.

It would be unfair to compare an obscure magazine with a successful author journalist who wrote on a wide range of issues and was read equally widely for close to five decades. But many of Khushwant Singh’s readers would be tempted to draw this analogy between the magazine and Singh as a writer arguing that it’s the simplicity of his style which made him one of the most popular columnists and writers of India.

There are few writers and columnists who can connect with their readers so well. Khushwant Singh’s writing was never too deep or insightful but unpretentious and direct. There was another attribute of KS’s writing which was available in almost all his essays I read – I read almost all his essays and articles – brevity.

Except a few of his essays and articles, all his pieces were short, so you could know about historical personalities, famous entities, swathes of history (mostly Indian), books and writers reading two or three pages. He, in fact, had less patience for lengthy pieces or long books - he liked the quickies. This ability to cover lengthy subjects with brevity meant you never spent too long on any piece to know its subject from one end to another.

Although his simple style is much celebrated, not many readers have noticed that Khushwant Singh’s language was not always as simple as it had become later. If you read his early pieces from the 50 and 60s, the style is direct but the language is guilty of authorial indulgence. I think he did away with his turns of phrases and use of literary words as he started spending more time on journalism than novel writing. Or it could be that as India started becoming more and more comfortable with English, some heavy phrases which were in use in the 40s and 50s became obsolete and they fell off Khushwant’s writing.

One day, when the post partition riots were at their pick, Khushwant was driving to a place somewhere in north India. And he saw a group of Sikhs standing on the way. They hailed his car and asked Khushwant for a lift. Once in the car, they told they had just killed a train full of Muslims headed to Pakistan. And A Train to Pakistan was born, a tight novel with well-crafted  characters, and the milieu of a village in Punjab authentically created. Albeit, Train to Pakistan never found respect from critics who mostly call it a flimsy work.

It’s a novelist that Khushwant Singh had set out to become; journalism was just a career compromise although it brought him much more renown and success than novel writing. I have read all his short stories except one which he had written much later in life….I liked some of them, found some passable and some a little silly. 

But all of them were characterized by ribaldry with earthy humour which was Singh’s trademark and was available in all forms of his writings. Perhaps telling that Singh had set out to become a novelist is a little factually wrong. He had, in fact, not even set out to become a writer. He started considering writing as a career when the other careers he had pursued earlier - law and diplomacy - disappointed him. He used to call himself a briefless lawyer and a tactless diplomat who didn’t have too many career options before him.I read this many times in his columns and interviews, but don't really believe it.

I think that failure in other professions pushed him into writing and he became a famous writer - was a clever story he had created later, having found literary success. His law and diplomatic careers may have been disappointing but writing wasn’t an afterthought. He had written a collection of short stories – The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories – while on a diplomatic assignment in Canada and the book had received good press in the west. 

Profiling Nirad C Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh had written that Chaudhuri lived a dual life: when he stayed indoors he was in dhoti and kurta and ate on floor but when he stepped out he was in suit and hat. Khushwant Singh also had a duality to him, the Khushwant Singh that emerges from his writings – a fun-loving, garrulous, light-hearted, sex-obsessed Sardar and the other is how people who personally knew Singh describe him, a serious person who liked the company of women but was very decorous to them. I am not sure which one was the real Khushwant – maybe both of them or maybe how his readers knew him was just an image he had created of himself to find acceptability as a writer of light pieces.

So as obits are pouring in since Khushwant “‘made an exit” last week, what must the iconoclast, agnostic and loner (whose favorite place was graveyard because of its calm) be thinking sitting up there? He must be sipping his favorite scotch chota, chuckling and telling: “They still take me seriously!”

Death was among his lifelong obsessions - when he was 28 he had written a short story titled Obituary. Goodbye, Khushwant Singh.

Midnight's Children - an experience

About 12 years ago, I had bought a pirated copy of Midnight’s Children while strolling in Dalhousie, in Calcutta, and 20 pages into the novel I had lost track of the plot (too many things were happening and the narrative timeframe was shifting back and forth too much and too fast).

I still continued reading only to give up 30 to 40 pages later. In early 2013, I read Anton Joseph, Rushdie’s memoir, where Rushdie extensively described the making of Midnight’s Children, starting from conceptualization to finish. The process had taken four years.

The idea for Midnight’s Children had come to Rushdie in bits and pieces. And once the bits and pieces crystallized into a concrete idea, he knew he had a novel, one whose setting would be India, his homeland which he had left as a child to go to England for studies but where his cultural roots still lay. But India is no England. It’s a country which is not just geographically vast but also diverse in every possible sense.

To taste its soil in all its complexities and diversities, Rushdie decided to come to India and crisscross the country as a low-budget tourist. After he returned to England, he left his full time advertising job to begin work on Midnight’s Children. Four years and some months later, this novel hurled him into the world of literary stardom.

The reason why I brought up Rushdie’s India tour is that it’s the key to my Midnight’s Children experience. The plot seems to join all the dots that together form the map of India also taking Pakistan and Bangladesh (in other words, the entire subcontinent) into its whirlwind narrative. At another level, the book is a deep and rich experience of India, to the extent that it can be safely called an India book, above everything else. (Rushdie has, in fact, called it his love letter to India.) Through the use of language, imagery, anecdotes, mythology, history, lives of common people and those not so common, it creates a complete image of the country reflecting all its characteristics.

MC is also a piece of stupendous story telling including three generations of a family, some 80 years in the life of a country (India – starting from 1920 to 1981). However, it’s on 15^th August 1947 that the story takes its most significant turn with the birth of Saleem Senai. (How Rushdie has mingled fiction with history - Saleem is being born and the coming of independence marked by celebration on streets by people and Nehru's momentous speech - is legendary and something for writers to learn from.) From here on, the plot traces the life of Saleem Senai together with the life of its co-born, India, with the paths of the twins crisscrossing several times over as the two move through their formative years through triumphs and disasters. 

But enroute to adulthood, Saleem's life takes him to Pakistan and from there to Bangladesh where he is witness to and participants in their histories (some military coups and the 1971 war) and then returns to India to go through the travails of Emergency. (The story ends vaguely in 1979.)

In the narrative, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Bhutto, Mujibur Rehman share space with commandeering grandmoms with speech quirks, philandering husbands, conspiring aunts etc. It makes the canvas not only vast but also deliciously varied.

In the foreword, Rushdie has acknowledged his debt to Dickens and that’s one thing that any keen observer will notice almost throughout the book – its similarity with Dickensian milieu: in situations, characters and the overall canvas – all of them have a dramatic and larger than life character to them. 

Almost all the characters have some idiosyncratic trait (either in appearance or behavior or speech) which makes them endearing and enduring, both within the plot and beyond. In almost all situations, you will find drama and theatrics of the kind that we have come to associate with Dickens.

The canvas, characters, the language, as also its success (two Bookers), Midnight’s Children is every bit a grand affair. And reading it was a special experience.

Why we shouldn't blame Penguin for the Doniger debacle

After quite some time book banning is in news again with the withdrawal of Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger by Penguin from Bharat.  It has triggered varied reactions from the media and intelligentsia alike but one question no one seems to be asking: in an internet era can books really be banned? I have not heard whether if you want to buy an ecopy of Hindus online you will be denied the purchase if you are from Bharat. I don’t think you will be.

Nor do I think if you buy a hard copy online and want to have it delivered at your place the online retailers will refuse to deliver you the copy if the delivery venue lies within India. The book is still freely (and also for free; someone circulated it on Twitter) available online. If we go by the court verdict, it doesn’t mention anything about the online fate of the book (at least as much as has been reported by papers)..

Really, in the internet era, that is post Satanic Verses, it has become pointless to slap country-wide or state-wide ban on books. Internet has contracted the potential of a book ban to the confines of, at the maximum, a university syllabus or school curriculum. In other words, outside the controlled and controllable contours of educational institutions or defined programs book bans don’t work anymore.

And frankly, it’s not that ban seekers aren’t aware of futility of book bans.  Despite knowing that ban doesn’t work anymore, if they continue to seek ban on books or films, it’s because it has been seen time and again that ban politics ensures returns for ban seekers with little or no cost borne by them: because each time a brouhaha is kicked up on a book or a film (or any artistic output) our institutes cave in giving the ban-seeking group the halo of being protectors of community pride or identity which was under attack. This pays rich dividends to practitioners of identity-based politics which most political parties in India practice, a fact that explains why all of them have subverted freedom of expression (books, films etc) from time to time.

The Congress government under Rajiv Gandhi caved in and banned Satanic Verses. The Congress government in Maharashtra, few years ago, had Such a Long Journey removed from syllabus. Narendra Modi slapped a ban on a book on Gandhi because it argued that the Mahatma had homosexual leanings for a Jew. A year or so ago, Jayalalitha didn't offer Kamal Hasan any protection to  ensure the release of his movie Viswarupam until the actor producer agreed to truncate his movie to make sure his movie didn't offend some mad mullahs who alleged that the movie had scenes that showed them in poor light. The Left government in Bengal hounded out Taslima Nasreen some years back in the wake of protests by a fundoo Muslim group. And now an obscure Hindutva group manages to bully Penguin. 

I don’t know the legal details of the books that were slapped ban on by our courts, but one – Satanic Verses. There is no ban on production or possession of Satanic Verses. The ban is on public display of the book: you can’t keep the book in stores but can at home. (And I don't think the other court verdicts on books differ very much in essence.) 

If public display is the issue then I am sure those who slap bans don't read the content of a book to determine whether the allegations made against the book indeed stand the test of logic; what is considered is the impact of availability (public visibility) of the book. In other words, it's the risk that its public visibility poses to law and order which is the deciding factor for slapping a ban. 

This, in other words, means a book ban slapped by an institution is an admission of its inability to handle law and order without submitting to the demand of a gunda group. One can  also say putting to test the ability to maintain law and order without submitting to the demand of a gunda group for the sake of a nebulous concept like freedom of expression is not considered worth the effort by our institutes. 

The Wendy Doniger incident is a little different. Here the publisher agreed to withdraw copies of a book directed to do so by a court. And many have said that Penguin, with its deep pockets, could have challenged the verdict in a higher court. But, given the commitment shown by our institutes to protecting artistic outputs when attacked by lampoons, who can say that Penguin wasn't worried that Hindutva elements would harm their business interests in India, especially in an election year, unless they met their demand without showing a whimper of protest? You can't count on authorities anyway!

Colomboscope 2014 - arts and history

The literature festivals taking place across various big cities of India make you think whether literature is becoming to art what cricket has become to sports in India where cricket occupies the center stage and other sports disciplines remain either off stage or occupy a quiet corner on it. I like the literature festivals, have visited the one that happens in Bangalore and track the ones in other cities in newspapers. 

However, I do wonder if this partisan approach prevents us from developing a holistic view of a subject – art in this case - keeping us confined to only one of its sections - literature – and not letting us appreciate the whole.

Colomboscope 2014, Colombo’s arts festival, to be held from 30th January to 2nd February 2014, is quite a departure from this selective approach. The festival will celebrate contemporary literature, music, film and dance, bringing together national and international academics, authors, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and actors to reflect upon history, which is the broad theme of the festival which thematically connects all its events and discussions with a setting to complement it – places like Whist Bungalow and its gardens in Modera; the Old Town Hall – Pettah; the Grand Oriental Hotel & St peters Church – Fort and so on.

However, what interests me intellectually is how the festival promises to explore its subject, history. When we talk about history, written and oral narratives spring to our mind. But those are just two ways of recording and narrating history – and there are many more mediums without whose contribution the essence of a period remains inadequately understood. At Colomboscope, art practitioners will discuss how histories are recorded and passed down through the ages, through the performance and visual arts, buildings and monuments, clothing, language and the written word, narratives and media.

But history is not just an impersonal account of others to be appreciated from a distance but also a local, personal and individual narrative. And Colomboscope will explore this aspect of history through citizens’ accounts in sessions such as Memory and Remembrance, History’s Lenses, Social History and the Rise of the Citizen Historian and Whose Narrative is it Anyway? Award winning local and international writers will debate and discuss how they have dealt with, and been witness to eventful periods in modern history, and read from their works.

Colomboscope 2014 is different from the other art festivals I hear and read about in many ways. Not just does it bring all the arts under one roof but also explores their roles within a context – history – discussing it through forms of discourse - events, conversations, screenings etc -  and rendering it palpable through its setting. Quite layered. I don’t know whether it’s the first one of its kind. I honestly don’t think it is, but surely it is a thoughtful way of putting together a festival.

Short stories by Satyajit Ray

I read a bunch of short stories by Satyajit Ray that perfectly meet the requirements of the short story. The stories have a slow start, good buildup and then gradual descent into denouement which may not be unpredictable in a Roald Dahl sort of way (which, frankly, is quite bizarre sometimes) but do give you a nice and pleasant surprise inducing you to reconsider the entire story in the light of the ending, a pleasurable activity.  

The themes are various – ghost, occult, mystery, sci fi – but most stories have something in common: a bachelor goes to an unknown place and something happens to him. Maybe Ray had a liking for carefree bachelorhood or it was simply a convenient plot device to have a bachelor as the protagonist - which helped him avoid crowding up his plots with family members. Ray wrote the stories for children’s literary magazine(s), which explains why the auteur didn’t deal with adult themes in them.

What held me in awe about the stories is Satyajit Ray’s range of imagination and his ability to bring them to life in words. We all know is ability to deal with complex themes about human relationships and social matters. We also know his ability to spin a gripping detective yarn – Feluda. In films like Gupi Bagha, Ray showed his penchant for the surreal. Even so, these stories impress you with their range and Ray’s ability to handle bizarre themes engagingly.  Somewhere above I wrote the endings are not Dhalian - but Dahl would have surely approved of the them.

One man, looking out for ideas to tell stories to his invalid son, meets another man who enthralls him with tales from distant past and future claiming to have known them through time travel –  alas, the first man realizes much later that he had met but a pickpocket! An aspiring writer, writing a book on indigo planters, ends up in an old countryside mansion, where, as he looks into a mirror, he finds an 18^th century British planter looking at him. And much more.

I felt the stories were immensely filmable but why Ray never adapt them into movies is a surprise.  

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

The novel, like other art forms, is an open-ended artistic output which can be interpreted in varied ways. A month ago, I read Stephen King’s ‘Stephen King on Writing’ which placed plot at the center of the novel as the main goal that authors pursue. Last week I finished Orhan Pamuk’s The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist where Pamuk has discussed the novel as a more esoteric form of art (he is, in fact, against it being considered as a craft which is why he loathes creative writing workshops where the novel is considered as a craft) where the writer pursues arcane goals like finding the center of the novel, using descriptions of locations, situations etc as a conduit to convey various aspects of the main character’s personality, situation, mood and so on.

The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist is a compilation of lectures delivered by Orhan Pamuk at Cambridge on various aspects of the novel inspired by EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel to which he acknowledges his debt. The book has generous autobiographical dollops about Pamuk’s coming of age as a reader (of mainly literary novels) and small bites of how the novel came about as a form of storytelling woven into the general narrative.

Pamuk substantiates his arguments by discussing novels - War and Peace, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina and many more - that have shaped him as a writer. In Anna Karenina there is a scene where Anna is trying to read a novel in a train compartment while returning home, but she is not able to concentrate on the novel thanks to a handsome army officer she met at a party who has kept her mentally occupied. While she tries to unsuccessfully read the novel, Tolstoy describes the view outside the window.

Pamuk observes that the view outside the train conveys the somewhat melancholic mood of Anna. This is one of the reasons why Pamuk says Anna Karenina is one of the greatest novels of all times: where everything is an extension of the protagonist’s personality (or state of mind). Being a visual writer, Tolstoy handled the situation this way. But Stendhal, for example, would have used the time, when the character is reading, to describe the compartment. It wouldn’t have mattered much to Fyodor Dostoyevsky as he wasn’t a visual writer like Tolstoy. And so on.

Compared to nineteenth century Russian greats, there are fewer mentions of writers from the West except a few like Daniel Defoe and Dickens for obvious reasons but also Virginia Wolf, Henry James etc. E.M Forster recurs several times but not for his novels but his book The Aspects of the Novel.

Pamuk informs that the novel was born in Europe and was later adopted by writers in eastern societies, but doesn’t say how and when the adoption happened and which countries where the first ones to adopt. But you can’t fault him for that because that’s not what the book is about.

According to Pamuk, there are two kinds of novelists – naïve and sentimental. Naïve are those who write without any plan, spontaneously, while sentimental are reflective writers concerned about the structure of the novel. Similarly, naïve readers are the ones who read without considering the larger message of a novel and the reverse applies to sentimental readers. Pamuk says people who received his lecture often asked Pamuk whether he is a naïve or sentimental novelist and he said he said, “I am both.”

The Professional by Ashok Ferrey

England is in news for an immigration issue where it is considering a law which would require those from a select group of countries (including India) to furnish 3000 pound as refundable bond as a warranty against overstay of visa period. Thankfully it has been dropped now. But the fact that the British government insisted on it suggests that England has long dealt with the immigration problem. (Alas, all big countries have but have reacted more soberly to it.)

That was the reason why I picked up The Professional (by Ashok Ferry): it promised a story about the immigrant experience in England not set in recent times but in the 80s. But that’s okay with me.

The Professional involves a narrative form I have come to like - where the narrative moves back and forth in time to cover a character’s past and present, with the past quietly explaining the reader what led to his present circumstances. The Professional narrates the story of Chamath seen through his older self 35 years later. Chamath, an Oxford alumnus, has applied for his residency permit and he is banned to work until he gets it.

And the only option to earn a living is the unorganized sector. In the meantime, Chamath’s father sends him a letter from Srilanka expressing his inability to send Chamath money and asking him to let out their flat in London which was bought some time back. Chamath finds an employment at a construction site where one day he is approached by two men who promise him good money for very little work. And thus starts Chamath’s dual life: a male escort in the evening and a construction site worker in the morning. His life in the evening takes him to people seeking company and pleasure and finally brings him to a couple who become his friends and benefactors.  

The Professional moves back and forth in time effortlessly and describes the world of a young Chamath, in London, and old, in Srilanka, quite well. It shows both sides of the immigrant experience: how is it for an immigrant to stay without a permanent resident status and the sacrifices parents make to send and educate their children abroad.

On the downside, however, the book moves from one narrative method to another without sometimes any change in content style to indicate the digression. Another thing that disappointed is that it documents the immigrant experience well, telling its highs and lows. But its synopsis promises more. The synopsis says the book would take you through the Thatcher years, England’s years of greed, as the synopsis puts it. 

But the story says very little about those years. The book informs that Chamath met with some prosperity as a real estate agent in later years which coincided with Thatcher rule and leaves it at that without detailing those years.

Detailing how he moved to prosperity would have been a good way to end the story on a more conclusive note; instead, the story ends Chamath’s England stay abruptly and later, in an epilogic fashion, informs what Chamath did in his later years in England, that he became a prosperous real estate person. It was my first book by a Srilankan writer and I liked it generally.