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| Ratika Kapur's Overwinter |
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| 22nd November 2011 |
| Ratika Kapur's debut novel Overwinter published by Hachette India is due out in December! Preorder Overwinter now on Flipkart! |
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| Shrilal Shukla is no more |
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| 6th November 2011 |
The history of literature is an unfolding scroll on which the names of those who have spoken the truth are written in gold. On the 28th of October 2011 one more name was added to this scroll. Shrilal Shukla passed away, leaving behind, as our collective inheritance, a body of work that cuts a tunnel into the mound of falsehoods and corruption on which the nationhood of independent India is built and excavates the hollowness that lies within.
Shrilal Shukla’s writing circles around one basic question: Is moral action possible in a deeply corrupt world? The frustration engendered by this question transmutes into coruscating anger, an anger that enters Shukla’s skilful pen and pours out onto the page as a torrent of some of the funniest prose that Hindi, or any other language, has ever seen. But it is tragic that Shukla is best known for his satire, because in his oeuvre he has managed to conquer the hopelessness that satire expresses, and discover that larger world of moral possibility whose existence can only be known to those whose spiritual or artistic endurance is equal to the task.
The journey begins in Sooni Ghati ka Sooraj (first published in 1957), a story of predestined failure. Its protagonist is heroic, prodigiously talented, very determined, and scrupulously honest: the kind of young man Vivekanand would have approved of. He is, in that sense, Shukla’s weakest character. His eventual destiny is poignant and its poignance is an attack on a system that destroys people like him. There isn’t much more to it than that.
But the early work needs to be written so that it can be surpassed. And surpass it Shukla eventually did, in Makaan (1976) – after writing another novel with an innocent protagonist overwhelmed by the rottenness of society, Raag Darbari, which is nonetheless an immortal work of literature. Makaan is the story of a craven clerk, Narayan Banerji, who also happens to be an immensely talented sitar player. Like most of Shukla’s best conceived male characters, Banerji’s masculinity is a circumscribed one. He lusts after his female students who worship his musicianship while simultaneously emasculating him by ridiculing his half-baked attempts at seduction. Made miserable by his unsuccessful attempts to secure a house for his family and confused by an adulterous affair he has somehow managed to start with a new student, Banerji seeks solace in his art. Here we find some of the most evocative writings on music that literature has ever seen. Shukla has performed a truly astounding feat in the writing of Makaan: he has changed the course of the emotional stream that feeds music: he has made it flow through written prose. The consequence of this feat is that, without being told, the reader realizes that Banerji’s connection to the sacred art he practices is what redeems him, what implicitly makes him a moral being despite his worldly failings. In the scheme of this book art is the only possible locus of morality, and while this affirms the existence of the moral, it puts it out of the reach of most people, even of the clerk Narayan Banerji when he is without his sitar.
The fear of another defeatist narrative looms when we begin to read Pehla Padav (1987), one of Shukla’s own favourites amongst his oeuvre; a novel he planned as the first part of a never-completed diptych that would give utterance to the sympathy he had for some of India’s most wretched: migrant Bilaspuri construction labour. The protagonist, Santosh Kumar aka Satte, a layabout law student, and a formerly lumpen daily passenger on the railways, has taken a job as an overseer on the construction site of a new house being built by an important person from his village. Satte spends his time on the site idly lusting after Jasoda, an uncommonly beautiful construction worker. When Jasoda’s husband gets killed, Satte finds himself trying, in his own worldly and cunning way, to discover who has killed him and why. We begin to realize it is his earlier lasciviousness that has now, by some strange but heartening alchemy, turned into sympathy for these downtrodden people who he has been involved in exploiting. The mystery remains unsolved at the end, but Satte’s conscience emerges, and with it emerges a new sense of hope in Shukla’s work. Shukla has said in an interview that Satte was one of those characters who took on a life of his own, who refused to be confined within the initial conception of him. I like to think that perhaps Satte confounded his creator by refusing to accept that a moral life was impossible.
The appearance of Kunwar Jayanti Prasad, a truly loathsome protagonist in Bishrampur ka Sant (2000), is an even steeper jump for the author’s sensibility. We meet him for the first time when he is eighty, coming to the end of a long career in public service built on opportunism. Failure to get a coveted ambassadorship coupled with the death of Sundari, a woman he had lusted after some decades ago, takes him back to his village where he begins to work with the remnants of the Bhoodan movement. It is fitting to mention here that on the 23rd of May 1952 that well-intentioned but poorly conceived movement led by a saintly figure who drew his aura from Mahatma Gandhi, took a significant turn when a “whole village” was donated to it. This village, Mangroth in Hamirpur district, came under the jurisdiction of a sub-divisional magistrate called Shrilal Shukla who happened to be present when the charismatic Vinoba Bhave swept into the village and declared its land donated. I can see the young author melding into the background with other junior government officials, the dramatis personae of the event not imagining that almost fifty years later he would write a weighty novel that would unravel the self-righteousness of all those movements that attempt to usurp the moral high ground with half-baked populism. But even more important than the attack on the Bhoodan movement is the development of conscience in the easily demonized Kunwar Jayanti Prasad. Here Shukla makes an empathetic leap across a seemingly unfordable crevasse. By making Kunwar Jayanti Prasad capable of a final redemptive action, Shukla shows us, once and for all, that the moral impulse lives within each one of us, and that it is never too late to discover it.
There is another important lesson that Shukla leaves behind in an interview given on his seventy-fifth birthday. When asked what inspires him to continue writing at his age, he said: “The same thing that was there earlier, a convoluted set of experiences...It considers what has already been written to be insufficient, it engenders the pain of incompleteness, it continuously incites me to write something new.” Shrilal Shukla’s writing career is an exemplar of how a writer must always strive against incompleteness and insufficiency, knowing, perhaps, that this struggle is ceaseless, that one day the individual’s struggle will end, as it did for this colossus of letters on the 28th of October 2011. But the books are still here, available to bear witness, the way the world’s greatest literature does, to man’s fundamental yearning for a moral life.
This essay first appeared in Open (Vol 3, Issue 32, dated 10-16 Nov 2011). |
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| Bangalore in books |
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| 30th March 2010 |
Recently I read two books set in Bangalore, Neti Neti by Anjum Hasan and Monkey-man by K R Usha. While the former is a Munch-esque scream at the horror of the new Bangalore, the latter is an elegy to a lost time in the city's history. Reading them together is perhaps unfair to both of them, they both have their individual qualities, and failings. But they both made me think of the different kinds of responses that people, and writers are also people I suppose, have to change. And what Bangalore has been going through appears, from this distance, to be a major transformation, not just a gentle meander in the stream of history.
Clearly the responses to such change can range from grief to anger to disappointment, and perhaps they can go on to acceptance. But what does it mean to accept something that is ugly, that clearly threatens to demean human life and eat into the structure of relationships that sustains a population? And how is this acceptance rendered in fiction? Difficult questions, not easy to approach. But it is good to know that Bangalore has a couple of writers who are working on their answers. |
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| Ratika and Omair longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize |
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| 24th July 2009 |
Ratika Kapur, debut novelist and wife to myself, has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009 for her debut novel Overwinter. Also, my friend Omair, author of The Storyteller's Tale has been longlisted for his manuscript Jimmy the Terrorist. Wait for these two upcoming books. I promise you, you won't be disappointed. |
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| The storyteller's tale |
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| 13th February 2009 |
| Omair Ahmed's new book is in the stores now. I'm going to get my copy today. Watch this space. |
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| Pages from The Failure Handbook |
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| 14th September 2008 |
So here's a brief primer on what to do when your book has not won an
award it was shortlisted for. The first thing, when the winner's name
is announced, is to put on your least fake happy face and raise your
hands where the entire room can see them. Clap. The second thing is to
reach into your pocket and make sure that the acceptance speech you
had hurriedly scribbled that afternoon is still in your pocket, and
push it further in so that it doesn't fall out to be picked up
later. By the time you've done this your close friends will have
turned to you and inquired if you're okay. It's normally difficult to
have something witty ready for this unless you're one of those people
who prepares for failure, or one of those Kipling-inspired folks who
can actually treat those two imposters, failure and success, just the
same. So say something lame, like "maybe next time" or "it's okay, I
knew I wouldn't win". The judge who announced the winning book's name
is now listing its qualities. You will probably take each strength of
the winner, invert it and take it as an implicit weakness of your own
book, but if denial is your strong suit, conclude that one of the
other losing books has this particular shortcoming. Ensure that you
accept at least one of the strengths of the winner as your own
weakness. Not doing so might cause your denial mechanism to collapse
altogether.
Now comes the hard part, or the easy part: please join us for
cocktails. The wine might taste a little vinegary, the kathi rolls too
spicy, and the dessert not chocolaty enough. If you're lucky, one of
the judges might come up to you and privately whisper that they liked
your book in an attempt to make you feel less disheartened. If you
aren't that fortunate, the judges will either avoid you or just smile
when you pass by on the way to or from the snacks. Don't throw the
wine in their face, unless it's really vinegary.
Line up for the photo-op with good humour. Try not to be irritated
when the winner is delayed by a mob of autograph-seekers and
hand-pumpers. When the photo is finally taken, congratulate the winner
with a broad smile. Don't strain your cheek muscles too much; the last
thing you need right now is an aching jawbone.
The evening will finally end. You will return to the guesthouse and
begin to reflect on the nature of awards, and of writing. I don't
write for awards, you will tell yourself. I write because I must. I
write because I love language. But still, you will find yourself
thinking, it's good to get a little recognition. I don't think they
get my book, they don't really really get it. It will be quiet in the
room, just the soothing clatter of a fan overhead, and you will
perhaps fish out your acceptance speech from your pocket. You will
find yourself thanking quietly the people you were hoping to thank in
public, you will feel love for them that is perhaps stronger than you
might have felt if you were saying their names out in front of a
crowded room. You will feel again the power of the lessons you have
learned along this hard way. And as you are remembering everything
that this writer's life has brought to you, sleep will come and it
will be peaceful and dreamless.
The next day you will call the organizers on your way to the airport
and thank them profusely, and you will mean it. When you finally make
it to security check, the scanner will find a metal feather--the
memento the organizers thought fit to give you--and your bag will be
put to the side. The khaki-wearer will ask you what it's for. You'll
tell him that it's for a novel you wrote. He will then look up at you
and say: 'Aap Ekta Kapoor ko jaante hain?' You'll admit that you
haven't met her but suspect that you might somewhere done the
line. 'Kya aap unse sahmat hain?' he'll ask. You'll look at his face
and find the right answer: absolutely not. "Ye sab saas-bahu aur
machine gun. Is se ladies par psychological effect padta hai. Yeh
theek hai kya?" You will shake your head no. "Aap kuch kar rahe hain
iska?" Me? you will think. "Ek vakt ka khana miss ho jaye, serial
nahin miss hona chahiye. Mein bhugat raha hoon, na." Then he will
pause and again say: "Aap kuch kar rahe hain iske baare main?" Here's
someone who sees literature as something bigger than reviews and
awards and advances on royalty, you will think, someone who sees
writing as something that can solve his domestic problems. "I write
things the way they should be written," you will say, "and readers can
judge for themselves what is better." He will consider this for a
moment and then say: "Isse kuch nahin hoga."
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 14th September 2008. |
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| Is it all about the money? |
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| 10th August 2008 |
A bestselling author, let's call her Ms X, is out browsing furniture
when she comes across a gorgeous black leather armchair. She
flops down on it, immediately feeling her body being nurtured in its
sturdy, comfortable warmth. The salesperson smiles indulgently:
``That's forty thousand rupees.'' She stands up like she's been poked
with a cattle prod. Later relating this story to a colleague at his
house she delivers the punchline. The colleague and his wife laugh,
but a sister-in-law who is visiting them from Seattle is
puzzled. ``Aren't you a bestselling author?'' she asks.
Let us back up a little. Ms X spent about a year and a half writing
her novel. Of this the first six months she was working, then
realizing it wasn't possible to commute and work and look after the
house and write, she sat down with her supportive but not high-earning
husband and they decided she must quit her job. With the long-term
investment payments to be made and the car loans still trickling out,
it will be a tight situation, but for one year we can do it. All goes
as planned and one year later a manuscript is ready. They heave a sigh
of relief, she goes back to work, and they start making the rounds of
publishers. This isn't a horror story, so within nine months of
finishing the manuscript a contract is signed. This is fiction, so nine
months from the contract being signed the book is in the stores, three
years after she began. This is a fairy tale, and so her book becomes a
``bestseller.'' This means that she sells about 10,000 copies, each
of which is priced at Rs 200, of which she gets 10 per cent. In other
words, she makes a neat Rs 2 lakh, apart from having her picture in
the newspaper and people calling her for quotes every time Salman
Rushdie takes a new girlfriend. The slight problem is that the
publisher makes payments only once a year and her book just happened
to come out in June so she won't get any money till one year later
when it will be paid with tax deducted. So here is Ms X, the queen of
2008's literary scene, one lakh eighty thousand rupees to show for
four years of waiting. People keep asking her about her second book
now, and she says that she's finding it hard to write with the home
and the kid (yes, that's happened in these four years) and if she
could only quit her job she would be able to write full time. Why
don't you quit your job, they say. I can't afford it, she replies. How
come, they ask. Aren't you a bestselling author?
Ms X wants her book to be published overseas. That's the only way to
make real money. A 10,000 dollar advance from a US publisher, or 5000
pounds or 6500 euros, would be almost a year's salary. She could
write. She could spend more time with the baby. But the agents take
months to reply (which is odd because every so often she reads of how
so-and-so was picked up by some big-name agent who flew specially to
Coimbatore or Imphal to meet her.) When they do reply they talk about
how they liked the book a lot but how American/French/Dutch audiences
would find it hard to relate to. She remembers the time, now almost
five years ago, when she made a principled decision to write a book
without any glossary or words in italics, a book which would be an
arrow aimed at the heart of an Indian English-speaking
audience. Dragging herself back to her keyboard she writes a reply to
the agent, talking about how Stenbeck is read all over the world
despite being quintessentially American, as is Faulkner. The universal
comes out of how people deal with their specific, she writes. Then she
deletes everything, writing instead a polite email thanking the agent
for appreciating her potential and assuring him, as she has assured
three others, that she will share her next manuscript with him.
Getting up from her desk she sinks into her sofa and thinks about how
much she used to despise writers who wrote books for Western
audiences. But suddenly she no longer sees it as a despicable act. She
sees those writers, sitting alone at their desks, wondering how they
can take the turmoil that is within them and bring it to
publication. They all want a little success, that little money that
can buy them that little time they need to go to their laptops and
write. It doesn't seem like too much to ask, she thinks. Then her eye
falls on the thinning upholstery on the sofa's arm and she thinks of
how leather furniture is so much easier to maintain.
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 10th August 2008 under the title It's all about the money. |
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| The secret of writing revealed |
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| 19th July 2008 |
From an interview of Paul Schrader in the Hindustan Times by Praveen Donthi
"What you can do is reach deep into yourself, pull out something unique and meaningful to you, then take that raw material and make that into a screenplay.”
and also this:His approach to screen writing is this: the most important thing is identifying the problem. Then finding a metaphor that’s not too close to the problem holds the key. Succinct and true. Only a screenwriter could boil it down to basics this way. |
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| The Indian campus novel |
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| 13th July 2008 |
There is probably a memo floating around the offices of one of the bookstore chains right now suggesting that a sign proclaiming ``Indian Fiction: Campus Novels'' be affixed atop a suitably chosen shelf somewhere near the front of the store. Right on top of this shelf, the memo possibly continues, will be placed twenty-five copies of Five Point Someone, next to which will be displayed ten copies each of Chetan Bhagat's other two books (that aren't set on campuses, but, yaar, he is identified with college fiction.) The remaining few IIT books will be represented by a copy each on the flanks. Below this will be three IIM shelves. At the bottom will be space for books about medical colleges, fashion design institutes, army training institutions, design schools, dentistry polytechnics and radical leftist campuses. Novels set in degree colleges and otherwise unremarkable universities will be displayed here only if they have some interesting angle, like if the narrator is from the North-East or is a lesbian. If this shelf is not entirely filled in the next six to eight months, it can be used to accommodate some of the overflow from the IIM shelves.
Why are all these people writing campus novels, yaar? That's me, not the memo. You can ask the other question: why are people reading these books? Interviewers do, and authors respond fatuously: ``They want to relive their college days''; ``they want to know what college is like before they get there''; ``they want to see if their own college experience is anything like what it used to be.'' Yawn, yaar. It makes much more sense to ask why these books are being written in the first place.
Debut novels (and most of these college novels are debut novels) are often an exercise in locating the writer's self. The setting of the book provides an important clue to where the writer was formed and, more broadly, from where a generation or a class of people are deriving their notion of identity. And the notion of identity I am thinking about here is not a bag of cultural identifiers--that's a red herring at best and plain incorrect at worst. Identity is the set of questions whose answers we will seek all our lives.
The protagonist could be Bibhutibhushan's Apu, unable to choose between the nature-suffused beauty of Nischindipur and the grey urbaneness of Calcutta. Or it could be Jack Kerouac's narrator, unable to do anything with his appetite but express it in broad gasoline-drenched brush strokes. Or it could be Upamanyu Chatterjee's August, unable to comprehend the India outside of the city and bewildered at having to make terms with it. These early works are just some examples of a formative trope that is the making of the writer, that forces--or allows--a person to become a writer. And a sensitive reading of these works can lead you to those important questions, those unresolvable dilemmas that lie at the heart of their writing and, we can conjecture, at the heart of their lives.
But, yaar, what has all this to do with a bunch of chalu page-turners written by people who believe that the best way to capture campus slang is by using the word yaar liberally? Everything. These authors aren't writing about how they grew up in Malviya Nagar or Mulund; they aren't writing about how their village had only one handpump and no swasthya kendra; they aren't writing about how their parents trekked over the border from Pakistan and camped for days at India Gate. They're writing about the places where they were taught how to be citizens of a global economy. They're writing about how they learnt to want the things that citizens of a global economy want.
These people may have come to IIT or IIM from many different places, but they were being groomed to plug themselves into the same three or four, at most five, different professional sockets. To be a banker or a consultant or a civil servant or, for that matter, a professor you need to acquire certain life skills, and you need to unlearn some other things. And that tension between what you once were and what you need to become to survive in urban India circa 2008 is the aloo in the samosa that is the urban Indian campus novel circa 2008.
But I don't think these writers were thinking sociology when they thought of writing their books. I know I wasn't. When I set out to write my own little piece of this puzzle all I was looking for was a compelling story. But I was looking in solitude, far from my eventual audience, far from the notion of an audience. So I chose the story that compelled me. In that pre-Chetan Bhagat era I often wondered why anyone would care about some kids running around moping about what appeared by all accounts to be already successful lives. Finally I wrote the book not because I thought someone else would care. I wrote it because I cared.
This piece first appeared in Brunch on 13th July 2008. |
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| C of P |
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| 10th June 2008 |
I sat with the writer Mukul Kesavan out on his lawn on a winter evening and talked about the scene in The Shadow Lines where the narrator opens his atlas, places the point of his compass on Khulna and the pencil end on Srinagar, and draws a large circle. The novel revolves around a riot that occurred at the centre of this circle caused by the disappearance of a relic of the prophet at its periphery; a forgotten riot that happened many years before the rusty compass came out of the drawer. The narrator's uncle, Amitav Ghosh's most compelling character Tridib, died in it. And as the narrator draws the circle, there is an incantation of names: Rann of Kutch, Kandy, Phnom Penh, Hue, Chunking, Inner Mongolia. "It was a remarkable circle," the narrator says. "More than half of mankind must have fallen within it.'' The narrator dwells on the "tidy ordering of Euclidean space'', on the fact that the happenings on some points of the circle could lead to mayhem and death at the centre, while other points in the circle lived on unaffected. He talks of his perplexity at the current of emotion that flows so directedly, and destructively, in such narrow channels. We are a people at war with ourselves, he concludes, a people who have forgotten that we are people, people who have become nothing but states and nations.
It's an incredible scene, I told Mukul, with the nerdish excitement that often erupts in conversations with fellow nerds. And he pulls it off, said Mukul, making me suddenly aware--many years after I first read the scene, some time after I had poked fun at it in my own novel --of the risk involved in writing something so earnest and heartfelt.
That compass is a particularly poignant lens to look through. It is found conveniently lying at the back of a drawer "forgotten'' there by the previous occupant. Perhaps Ghosh's narrator does not want to admit that a grown up man who can make sweeping and important conclusions from old newspapers found in the Teen Murti archive, is still enough of a Bengali schoolboy to own a compass. It reveals something important, that compass, about the place from which the world is being surveyed, and about the person doing the surveying. When you think about that compass long enough, you begin to see that research student's hostel room, somewhere up north near Delhi University; you see the whitewashed walls and the tubelight, the crowded desk, the mosquito coil on its stand near the bed, and you see a young man bent over a map, trying to make sense of the past in an effort to deal with the present. Even if you had not read the interviews and the essays in which Ghosh has talked about how writing The Shadow Lines was his way of coming to terms with his experiences during the 1984 riots, when you think about that compass hard enough you begin to see that this novel of Calcutta and Dhaka and London reflects the way our subcontinent's traumas have been filtered through the consciousness of those who have lived and studied in Delhi. The Shadow Lines is, in some fundamental way, a novel of Delhi.
Reading Philip Roth made me want to be a writer, but it was reading The Shadow Lines that gave me permission to write. I know this now and perhaps I knew it intuitively back in 1994--when I first laid hands on The Shadow Lines six years after it was first published--that there was a thread of wonder and joy at the vastness of the world that ran through Ghosh's work. It may have been an inheritance from the likes of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyaya or Tagore. And to the
insatiable and wonderful curiosity of his forbears Ghosh had added a powerfully contemporary and equally beautiful awareness of a shared pain; the thing Iqbal was talking of when he ended his celebrated and celebratory taraana-e-hindi by saying "Iqbal koi mehram apna nahin jahaan mein / maalum kya kisi ko dard-e-nihaan hamara'' (Iqbal, we have no confidant in this world / who knows the pain we hide inside.) I don't think it was just me. I suspect that back in the nineties there was more than one young Indian person who was seduced by that combination of pain and wonder, who thought after reading The Shadow Lines that there was nothing better you could do in this world than to be a writer.
It's been twenty years since The Shadow Lines was first published, in simple elegant hardback by Ravi Dayal. In these twenty years Ghosh has continued to write books that are true to that pain and that wonder. And as we celebrate the coming of Sea of Poppies this month, I cannot help but think of the time when Amitav Ghosh first put his compass down and drew me--and Mukul, and the winter evening we spent together out on Mukul's lawn, and my city, and this subcontinent, and the suffering of each and every person who has ever lived--into his arc.
This piece first appeared under the title Circle of Life in Brunch on Sunday, 8th June 2008. |
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