Here's the discussion thread. I'm going to copy over a number of posts from the recommendations thread to here, since it has already gotten going.

Message 72: wandering_star

I hope that no-one will mind if I start posting early. I started reading early after discovering that I had several months' worth of unread books which could fit into this challenge.

I have so far read three of them - very different books which present very different faces of India.

The first is Surface by Siddhartha Deb. Amrit is a washed-up Calcutta journalist who doesn't even have the energy to be cynical. He stumbles across a photograph and becomes intrigued by the story behind it - which he believes might give him his big break, a story he could sell to foreign newsmagazines. This leads to a trek up to "the region", which remains unnamed throughout the book, but is an insurgent-ridden area of Northeast India close to the Burmese border. As he gets closer to the story, the details become increasingly blurred and murky, and his task begins to seem futile.

The most striking thing about the book is the atmosphere - of corruption and compromise, failure and futility. The spirit of the story lives in the flickering light of a cheap, decaying hotel. The local administrative officer, far from his Keralan home, spends his evenings alone in his vast, dusty residence and travels to his chaotic office through streets which are deserted but for the soldiers who are there to put down the insurgency.

This contrasts with the bright-futured image of India that some of the book's characters live in, or at least aspire to. This is a small part of the book - but since the main theme is the power of the image over the reality, you have to wonder whether Deb is making a wider point about the country.

The thriller side of the story doesn't work so well - it's not entirely plausible, and it loses energy towards the end. But I would still highly recommend the book - and, since it was Deb's debut effort, I'll definitely try and get hold of his others.

I wouldn't say the image of India presented by this book was entirely new to me - I recognise the angry critique of modern India's political corruption from books like Bunker 13. But from the epigraph (the last 12 lines of Seamus Heaney's beautiful From the Republic of Conscience), it seems that Deb wants the book to bear witness to those parts of India which are edited out because they don't fit with the current shiny image.


Message 73: wandering_star

The second book I read for this challenge was The Bus Stopped by Tabish Khair. Funny thing, I would have sworn that I got hold of this book because of a large number of rave reviews on LT. And yet I see from the book's homepage that in fact there aren't any...

The Bus Stopped is a light, warm read which gives us glimpses into the life stories of several people who are all taking the same bus journey in Bihar. Bihar, of course, is one of the poorest and least developed states in India, but the focus of this book is very much on the human stories - the different things that the passengers are running away from or hurrying to, and other stories from lives which touch theirs. We are shown daily life in a city block, childhood reminiscences of a boy from a wealthy family about the family cook, the tension between the lazy, sensual driver and his more upright conductor. All this is told in deceptively simple but moving prose.

One thing about reading this for this challenge, however: I enjoyed it a lot, and I don't think it is a cliched view of India exactly, but there is certainly nothing here which would confuse or challenge the most ignorant backpacker, in terms of the India that it presents.

Message 75: wandering_star

Finally (for the moment), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel. This is a retelling of the Mahabharatha as a story of the modern history of India. It's an amazing book - combining wit, broad humour (including a collection of really horrendous puns), passion and polemic.

It's densely allusive: as my knowledge of both the Mahabharata and modern Indian history is little more than outline, I couldn't tell you how much twisting of each is necessary to make them fit together. But even from my position of ignorance, I picked up all sorts of little references - for example, every Westerner who's produced a famous portrayal of India lends his name to a bit-part player, from EM Forster to Richard Attenborough (director of the film "Gandhi"), and I also spotted throwaway references to both Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Even the title has two or three meanings packed into it: maha=great, bharata=India.

This should not, however, make the book seem like a chore to read. It was a delight - a fast-moving, epic tale, which is funny as well as moving.

In its broad sweep and linguistic creativity this is on the Rushdie end of the spectrum for Indian novels, but more accessible (and I say that as someone who really likes Salman Rushdie).

Message 76: wandering_star
Couple of thoughts from my last few days of reading. I was really struck by the fact that although these books are all hugely different from each other, in content and style, none of them present something completely new in terms of images of India. I suppose that is a sign of just how much Indian writing is available. All these books were written in English, though - it would be really interesting to see whether translated fiction from India is clearly different.

That said, I did think that we should play some sort of 'image bingo' with the books. The Ambassador car, for example, certainly cropped up in the latter two books and possibly in all three.

Message 77: avaland
I am also going to post early, as I am likely to forget if I don't.

While I intend to read the Indian portion of my ongoing contemporary Asian women writers anthology sometime in the near future, I did read Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya yesterday.

A bestseller in 1954/55, Nectar in a Sieve is a short novel about the life of Rukmani, the 4th daughter of a village headman and was given in marriage at age 12 to a tenant farmer in rural southern India in the time just after India's independence from Britain. It is a nicely written, but heart-wrenching story of cyclical poverty, adaptation to change, courage, and a certain nobility of acceptance. Making periodic appearances in the story is a British doctor, Kenny, who provides a Western viewpoint as a counterpoint:

(Kenny)...'I have told you before, he said, I will repeat it again: you must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life.'

(Rukmani) 'It is said—' I began

(Kenny) 'Never mind what is said of what you have been told. There is no grandeur in want—or in endurance.'

(Rukmani) 'Privately I thought, Well, and what if we have in to our troubles at every step! We would be pitiable creatures indeed to be so weak, for it not a man's spirit given to him to rise above his misfortunes? As for our wants, they are many and unfilled, for who is so rich or compassionate as to supply them? Want is our companion from birth to death, familiar as the seasons or the earth, varying only in degree. What profit to bewail that which has always been and cannot change?'

Despite the unrelenting poverty and disaster, the story of Rukmani's survival and resilience is compelling and moving. I could not help though but think that the story resembled the genre of American stories about the wisdom of rural simplicity... (which may have been why it was a bestseller) yet, it also reminded me a bit of Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta's work about women's lives caught in the transition between tradition and modernity.

About the author: Kamala Markandaya, (1924-2004) is the pseudonym of Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, who was an author and journalist. She married a fellow journalist, Bernard Taylor, and moved in 1948 to Britain after India's independence. She is the author of ten novels and is considered a literary "pioneer of the Indian diaspora". A nice 'homage' can be read HERE


Message 78: urania1
I have just finished R. K. Narayan's The Bachelor of Fine Arts and continue to read Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Of the former, I am still pondering why this book reminds me of a Jane Austen novel. Of the latter, my world has been turned upside down. Everything I thought I knew about Indian cuisine has gone out the window. I've been sobbing into my dal nightly. I am also learning a lot about Indian history along the way. I am preparing a Curry Quiz for this thread once I finish the book. I am also reading Was Hinduism Invented? by a former colleague of mine. I figure I might as well toss everything I thought I knew about India out the window while I'm at it.

India-wise, all was going well for me until I was distracted by Effie Briest, a German novel that has absolutely nothing to do with India. In fact, I had never heard of it until yesterday evening, when I found out (quite by accident) that Thomas Mann considered it one the six best German novels of all time. I immediately rushed to my beloved (but inconstant) Baron von Kindle. He had the book, and zuts, today I read Effie, milk the goats, and mulch the rose beds. Query: Why was I reading about Thomas Mann last night????

P.S. Curry Question of the Day: Why have none of urania's husbands liked curry?

Message 80: markon

A_musing - yes, let's get a second thread going.

In addition to the hungry tide I'm also reading some stories from Story-Wallah: short fiction from South Asian writers (touchstone not working) edited by Shyam Selvadurai. This is a mix of contemporary authors, mainly from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (Canada, Trinidad, Sri Lanka . . .)

I'm reading just the authors from India to start with. So far my favorite is "The Courter" by Rushdie for the combination of humor and pathos, along with the evocation of the time using popular music. (The only other Rushdie I've read is Harouun and the sea of stories.)

Message edited by its author, Oct 26, 2009, 5:59pm.

Thanks for setting this up, A_musing. I'm hoping to get another India read in during the month.

I have been reading Begums, Thugs And White Mughals, an edition of the journals of Fanny Parkes, selected by William Dalrymple. Fanny Parkes lived in India from 1822-1846, and wrote the journals so her mother would be able to imagine the way she lived. I thought this would be interesting after the (justifiably) acerbic comments that Shashi Tharoor's narrator had to say about the Raj.
I think the best way to introduce Fanny is to quote from the introduction:

"We are rather oppressed just now by a lady, Mrs Parkes, who insists on belonging to our camp,' wrote Fanny Eden in January 1838. "She has a husband who always goes mad in the cold season, so she says it is her duty to herself to leave him and travel about. She has been a beauty and has remains of it, and is abundantly fat and lively. At Benares, where we fell in with her, she informed us she was an Independent Woman.'

Dalrymple explains that Fanny Eden was effectively the First Lady of British India, and that her (and her sister Emily Eden's) books on India are still often read. Yet Fanny Parkes' book (originally titled Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque) never went into a second edition - even though she is "an enthusiast and an eccentric" where the Edens are "witty and intelligent but waspish, haughty and conceited".

Fanny is curious about everything that happens around her, and fearless in finding things out (when she is travelling upcountry and some of her party spot a tiger, she gets out of her palanquin to have a look at it). Sometimes she seems quite gleeful at her own adventurousness: on her first trip into the hill country, she writes proudly about getting used to riding on the precipitous paths ("At first I felt a cold shudder pass over me as I rode by such places; in the course of a week I was perfectly accustomed to the sort of thing, and quite fearless").
One of the pleasures of the book is following her viewpoint from her first arrival in India. Imagine experiencing a tropical thunderstorm for the first time, seeing palm trees, or riding an elephant ("when he rose up, it was like a house making unto itself legs"), with no images from tv or films to tell you what to expect. But more than that, Fanny's understanding and love of India also grows. Her first visit to a Hindu temple is dismissed with a comment about native superstition and gullibility. But by 1830, her description of Diwali festivities moves into an explanation of the different ways in which the goddess Kali is worshipped. She learns to play the sitar and speak Urdu (the court language), and comes to admire and respect much of the culture of the Indian ruling classes.

At the same time, she maintains her breathlessly enthusiastic style, and includes plenty of domestic detail - every winter, ice is stored up, and the stores are opened around April or May - and every year in late summer Fanny wonders how much longer the stocks will hold out. She rambles all over Northeastern India, from Delhi and the hills to Calcutta - including a two-month boat trip upriver to visit the Taj, which she is deeply moved by.

The primary interest of this book is probably Fanny herself - her personality, and the window onto an extraordinary life. However, it's also an insight into some aspects of early nineteenth century India - there is a lot of detail about how different religious festivals are celebrated, for example, and also about life in the women's quarters. Fanny becomes friends with a number of aristocratic women, and some of the most interesting parts of the book are where she reports them quizzing her on English life and customs, especially the way that women are treated. It would be wonderful to have a description of her from the Indian women's point of view!

(A note on the title - as well as being fascinated by the women of the zenana, Fanny (particularly in the early days) is intrigued by Thuggee, often copying out long passages from the newspapers. The third part of the title comes from William Dalrymple's argument that there was a period of time after the British arrived in India where it was possible for them to engage with Indian culture as equals - before the Raj reached its peak and Indian culture was dismissed as backward and degenerate. Dalrymple argues that Fanny was one of the last wave of these 'white Mughals'.)

Ah, Wandering Star, I've enjoyed William Dalrymple before and you'll see that argument run through his books. You might enjoy The Last Mughal, where the focus is on the Indians themselves more than the now very different British players, but where some of the Indianized descendents of the early white mughals make appearances, or The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India, which is a book centered on that argument.

I think Dalrymple is one of the better popular historians out there. I'm going to have to pick that one up soon. My recollection is that Dalrymple was relatively food-aware, too - I wonder how Fanny dealt with Indian food?

I started Midnight's Children today; I felt like I'd been transported to Kashmir and Agra, pre-partition. I love hearing about making all the condiments...

For those who are musically inclined, I offer a short break for Mango Pickle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuEZRWZeP...

>4 I've read (and enjoyed) White Mughals - and I think I own The Last Mughal, but where is it? Don't tell me I have even more India books stashed somewhere...

Actually I don't remember Fanny talking about food at all. Lots about drinks - the joy of an iced soda water in the hot season. Good question.

I'll be getting A Passage To India in the next couple of weeks .

Just finished a class discussion on Kalidasa's Sakuntala. Kalidasa is considered India's Shakespeare, though in the tradition of Sanskrit/Hindu/Buddhist drama, all of his plays are romances. Sakuntala is a charming, mythic tale of a king who falls in love with a nature maiden -- troubles ensue caused by the curse of angry monk, nymphs and gods come to the rescue and all ends happily. Wonderful contrasts between the natural world and the artistic world of the court. Although reading it can never capture the multi-art (poetry, dialogue, dance, song) performance, it's still a delight.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 12:01pm.

Jane,

Are there any YouTube videos of Sakuntala?

P.S. Jane your comments on Sakuntala a a bit brief. Would you mind posting some of your class notes on the book? I have just ordered it on Kindle. it has already arrived.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 12:52pm.

Two India books I read earlier this year which may be of interest here are:

Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor. Taylor was a British police official in India during the 1830's. Part of his job was the eradication of the Thugee. This is a fictionalized account of the life and exploits of a Thug, based on the confessions of Thugs actually taken by Taylor. It is interesting because while the voice of the British interrogator/author occasionaly inserts itself, for the most part the pov and words are those of the thugee.

Train to Pakistan byKhushwant Singh is a novel of the Partition. It relates the life in a small border town where Muslims and Hindus coexisted (albeit occasionally suspicious of each other) until the "death trains" full of massacred transportees began passing through the town in both directions. The anniversary edition I read was illustrated with Margaret Bourke-White's incredibly moving photographs of the conditions in India at the time of the Partition.

I plan to try to read at least one of the following this month:

Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya (reread of a novel I loved in middle school)
The Tagore Omnibus by Rabindranath Tagore

>9,10 -- Mary -- My notes on Sakuntala are at school, and I'm at home. However, here is a PPT I used for background lecture -- most of the info came from the Norton introduction to Classical Indian literature: http://faculty.mccfl.edu/jonesj/JanesPPT... . In class today I just tried to tease out the aspects of the different worlds that Sakuntala and Dusyanta inhabit, and how they complement, rather than contradict each other. We also spent some time comparing the cultural values of the Gupta court compared with the values of Persian/Iranian court of "Sohrab and Rustum" from the Shahnamah. I didn't search very far on YouTube, as our library has a DVD, that unfortunately has little attribution -- we must have gotten it from some obscure provider.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 7:30pm.

HEY EVERYONE - CLICK ON JANE'S LINK IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY!!!

I like that power point. I love Sakuntala - it is on my list of greatest works of all time.

I haven't started yet, but I'm hoping to get to at least one of: A Fine Balance, Q and A (filmed as Slumdog Millionaire), or Shantaram.

So many fine books, so little time!

I am now about 1/4 through Midnight's Children, which I'm finding fascinating. Rushdie writes marvelously, and has a very long lead in giving the family history of our protagonist prior to partition. The protagonist is born with India in 1947, both of them being born exactly at midnight. We get the lead in to partition from a Kashmiri Islamic perspective, though there is clearly great ambivalence about partition. More as I get deeper in.

Message edited by its author, Nov 4, 2009, 10:47pm.

I read The Madwoman Of Jogare by Sohaila Abdulali and Nampally Road by Meena Alexander. Both of these were bought in India and may not have been published outside the country. They are both first novels written in English. There are other similarities as well - both have a central character who is a woman running a healthcare centre for the disadvantaged (in fact, both of them feature a basic hygiene class for young, uneducated mothers), and another who is a young woman struggling with corruption and trying to make sense of what is around her through art (painting and writing, respectively).

However, The Madwoman Of Jogare was written and set in the late 90s; Nampally Road was written in the early 90s and set in the early years of the Emergency, and the similar themes are addressed in very different ways.

The Madwoman Of Jogare is set in a village in Maharashtra, and has two focal points - the most important family in the village, whose patriarch loves the surrounding forest and has worked hard to preserve it, and the staff of a local development centre working largely with the tribal population. One day, village life is disrupted by the arrival of a brash Bombayite who dreams of building luxury bungalows on the prime land.

It's not an entirely successful read. The prose can be lumpy, and the structure is all over the place - many of the narrative threads peter out. Also, considering that the central figure's mother tells her 'if you think you can see clearly who is the goodie and who is the baddie, you don't understand the situation', it's disappointing that the baddie is so cartoonish - he's homophobic, prejudiced on grounds of religion and caste, he throws litter, he has no taste, and he bulldozes trees for fun.

And yet, the book is undeniably sincere, and it ends up with a rather moving personal epiphany (even if it's rather a shock since you are wondering what happened to all the other storylines).

Nampally Road deals with a young woman, recently returned from studies in the UK. She teaches at a university and watches the way her students react to the political situation, while she herself tries to decide whether to withdraw into writing, or to take action against the injustice that she sees.

This book seemed to be based on personal experience as much as The Madwoman Of Jogare (Alexander also studied in Nottingham and returned to teach at an Indian university). And yet it managed to have more relevance and interest, probably because it did focus on the political as well as the personal.

It was also much better-written than The Madwoman Of Jogare - Meena Alexander also writes poetry, and I see from LT that she has written a couple of memoirs. I will keep a look out for them.

Message edited by its author, Nov 5, 2009, 10:16am.

Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices by Chitrita Banerji.

Warning: this book is likely to induce cravings. It is best read in a place where good Indian food is easily accessible. (Sadly not the case where I am - I was in Singapore a couple of weeks ago and I should have been reading this then, so I could have found a meal which at least approximated the delights I was reading about). In fact, it is best read while planning a trip to India, and then read again for a second time when you are actually there.

As well as an excellent guide to the cuisines of different Indian regions, it's a good introduction to all the changes that India has been through - from successive waves of conquerors and immigrants throughout history, to the social changes of today. Banerji's thesis is that India's food reflects a long history of intermingling influences - she traces the Portuguese influence on Bengali sweets, and points out that chillis, tomatoes and potatoes are all immigrants to India.

It's more of an overview than a detailed guide, but Banerji writes so well about such interesting topics that it hardly matters - and of course, trying to cover all the cuisines of India in detail would be a mammoth task.

One interesting effect from clustering my India reading in this way - Banerji refers to a couple of events from the history of the Raj (and from the Mahabharatha) which I recognised from their appearance in The Great Indian Novel but I hadn't been aware of previously - such as the annexation of Avadh.

PS - Looking forward to urania's curry quiz...

wandering star - I've got to read this book! I love the combination of food and history.

Help! I am mid-way through Sea of Poppies and desperately seeking a glossary. I thought I knew something about India during the Raj, but clearly I am wrong, wrong.

Ghosh's tale is engaging, and now that all of the main characters have been established the story is moving quickly. I just think the book would be even more enjoyable if I understood some of the terms used to describe peoples' positions, the various castes and the pidgin used on the ship.

I have Nehru's Discovery of India next in line. Should I have started with that? I know it won't help with the shipboard pidgin, but perhaps with the other?

I will appreciate anyone's suggestions as to how to acquire the necessary knowledge.

I began The God of Small Things and ended up applying "the pearl rule", which I very rarely do and PBS'ed it away quick as a wink. Did not even get into it. Don't know why. Just didn't like it. I am going to give A Fine Balance a try and see if I do any better with that one. Also waiting in the wings, I have Kim and A Passage to India, so I should be able to find something I can stick with.
Right now I am reading and enjoying Vanity Fair. It is so much better than I was expecting. My first Thackeray and I am so loving him.
belva

Right now I am full of doom and gloom as I prepare for A_musing's not so a_musing December "side read" at Le Salon: of all things, an obscure narrative poem by Melville that goes on forever. It's entitled Clarel in case you wish to avoid it. I think some kind of shampoo and hair dyes were named after it.

Some years ago I was talking to a friend of mine who worked at the Indian High Commission. He said that the whole of the Indian Foreign Service was buzzing with the news that one of their own had recently sold a novel for a record advance, and the film rights were being optioned. According to him, every Indian diplomat is writing a novel, so there was a firestorm of envy at this success.

The author turned out to be Vikas Swarup, the book Q & A, and the film, of course, Slumdog Millionaire.

I'm probably the last person in the world who hasn't seen the movie, but even so I had an idea what to expect from the book. For anyone who doesn't, the premise is that a Mumbai street kid manages to answer 12 increasingly complicated questions on the quiz show, Who Will Win A Billion?, and is promptly arrested for cheating - how could he possibly have known the answers? It turns out, however, that in his downtrodden and varied life, there have been twelve episodes which corresponded to each question.

I love this premise. But I found the book itself a strange combination - the 'rags' part of the story is an uneasy mix of squalid realism and melodrama, even before you layer on the fable-like elements of the 'to riches'.

On one level the book is a homage to Bollywood escapism - at one point Ram (the slumdog) watches a film "about a poor middle-class family coping with a whole heap of problems ... I think it is ridiculous to make such movies. What is the point of watching a film if you can see the real thing in your neighbour's house?" So I get the point that the story is not meant to be realistic. But for me, neither the writing nor the story was good enough for me to overcome the awkward juxtapositions of tone.

I can't judge whether the film is better, but this is certainly a book that was almost designed to be a movie.

If you're looking for a book that has the exuberance and variety of a Bollywood film, I'd recommend Shashi Tharoor's Show Business instead.

Wandering Star, I'm thoroughly enjoying your posts. You really should see Slumdog Millionaire: I am very interested in your reaction. I spend a fair bit of time dealing with India and Indians through my work, and I really focused on the uplifting parts, and found it a wonderfully upbeat, fun film. My wife was devastated by the slum scenes, particuarly some of the things the poor children lived through, and had trouble getting past them to really appreciate the love story (she did, but really did find the slum part memorably difficult).

There is a way in which I think the dire poverty, much heightened by caste distinctions, has becoming an overriding and difficult backdrop for 20th and 21st century Indian writing. How to deal with it without becoming melodramatic or obsessive? In his forward to Midnight's Children, Rushdie praises the great Indian author Dickens for showing some of the way.

I am in some remote Indian village with this American dude by the name of Clarel who is trying to get his oom together. I wish he put on a kurta. He looks pretty silly slepping around India in a black turtleneck and beret. In my opinion, books of this sort should be burned. I have no earthly idea why I am hanging out with him.

Hello????? Is anybody at home?

*waving to Mary*

I know folks are reading and lot's from Wandering Star and others above - any interim reports? Any questions about the prior works?

I'm in the middle of two works by Indian Writers, Midnight's Children, discussed briefly above, and The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (which I'm likely to not discuss here since it's all about San Francisco). I'm about 1/4 through Midnight's Children, but don't expect to have another big chuck read until the weekend.

One of the interesting things about Midnight's Children is that it is very consciously Indian in tradition and self-identification, even with parts playing out in Pakistan, but it is also very much Islamic. Are people running into a lot of "religious" thinking in their reading?

I have finished The Hungry Tide. I enjoyed it, but my first reaction was that it was pretty "light" - good story, but not much beyond that. Then I started to think about what I would say if I reviewed it, discovered it had a lot more resonance than I realized.

Hopefully, i'll have time for a longer post this weekend.

I'm starting a recent book called Leaving India. This one is non-fiction.

Just as soon as I can finish up with the two short books I'm toying with, I'll get back to my Asian women anthology to read the "India" section. This is a current anthology with contemporary stories. I have two other anthologies in the stacks: The Inner Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women, edited by Laskshmi Holmstrom (1990) and Tales from Modern India: Twenty Stories by India's Most Distinguished Writers, edited by K. Natwar-Singh (1966).

A_musing - I would like to see Slumdog Millionaire - I just wasn't organised enough when it was at the cinema. You've asked a couple of really interesting questions - about religion in writing from India, and about how to address the poverty and inequality of India without descending into cliche (as others pointed out on the recommendation thread) or becoming melodramatic. I have read a book (Sri Lankan I think, not Indian) whose main characters lived in an urban slum, but the fact that they lived in a slum was not the main thing about them. Of course, there were elements in the book about the way they were trapped in the slums, and the contrast between their financial situation and their white-collar jobs, but it was done in a very matter-of-fact way.

I have been reading some anthologies: New Writing In India edited by Adil Jussawalla, Truth Tales: Stories by Indian women edited by Kali for Women, and Truth Tales 2: The Slate Of Life: contemporary writing by Indian women, also edited by Kali for Women.

New Writing In India was published in 1974 and includes short stories, extracts from longer fiction, and poetry, mostly from mid-1960s to mid-1970s. Truth Tales was published in 1986 and Truth Tales 2 in 1990. They all aim to present translated Indian writing for English-speaking audiences - the majority of the stories and fiction seem to have been translated specifically for these collections.

New Writing In India is split into three sections - the first reflects on political-with-a-big-P events, from Partition to central politics; the second on social changes, and the third personal issues. In the introduction, Adil Jussawalla comments that "this is the part most likely to appeal to a Western reader". But in fact, the whole anthology is quite political (small p), even including the more 'personal' pieces - perhaps because of the era, and perhaps because of the selection. (The author bios are full of references to their political views or their aims for their writing.) That was quite a problem for me, as a reader. There were very few people with defined characters and motivations that I could understand - there's a lot of alienation, and Kafkaesque nightmare-sequences.

In the introduction, Jussawalla says that a lot of what non-English language Indian writing was doing at the time was trying to experiment and break away from the traditions of writing in that language. Also, the choice of vocabulary could be very significant - apparently at the time the Indian government was trying to "purge" Hindi of any Urdu influences and produce a "purer", more Sanskritised Hindi. Unfortunately, both these points are completely unconveyable in translation.

The stories in the two Truth Tales anthologies were much more accessible for me. A couple of them dealt with young women who were trying to be 'modern' while constrained and held by by family conservatism, and most of the others were, in one way or another, about women who were badly treated, either because they were poor or low-caste, or simply because they were women. A proverb which was quoted in two separate stories in the three books was "Whether the knife falls on the melon or the melon falls on the knife, it's the melon that is injured". I think my favourite stories were the ones which took a different approach - such as Hand-me-downs by Wajida Tabassum, in which the daughter of a servant takes revenge for the humiliation of a lifetime of accepting hand-me-down clothes.

One of the things I was thinking about was whether and how the India of these stories was different from the India of the English-language books I have read. In New Writing In India the distinction was clear - these pieces were written for people who had the same social concerns as the authors, or as angry criticisms of those who didn't. They might have been inspired by Kafka, Camus or Pirandello, but they were trying to address the issues they saw around them. It didn't seem to me that these concerns were 'translated' in any way for people who were outside that circle.

I didn't have quite the same feeling for the Truth Tales anthologies - perhaps because the subjects were more comprehensible to me, or because as the writing became more contemporary it became more accessible. Perhaps also the stories about women and poverty were being written more for a middle-class, socially concerned audience, and so were already a 'translated' portrayal.

Message edited by its author, Nov 14, 2009, 10:44pm.

I thought I'd post a list of the authors anthologised - in case anyone is interested in following up non-English language Indian writing.

New Writing In India:
Qurratulain Hyder, Urdu (an extract from River of Fire)
Doodhnath Singh, Hindi
N Pichamurti, Tamil
Vinda Karandikar, Marathi
Dhoomil, Hindi
Gieve Patel, English
Nissim Ezekiel, English (a good rebuttal of VS Naipaul's dyspeptic portrayal of India)
L S Ramamirthan, Tamil
M T Vasudevan Nair, Malayalam
Bhalchandra Nemade, Marathi
O V Vijayan, Malayalam
Gyanranjan, Hindi
P Lankesh, Kannada
Ashokamitran, Tamil
Badal Sircar, Bengali
Kishori Charan Das, Oriya
Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Bengali
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Hindi
Shrikant Varma, Hindi
Shanmuga Subbiah, Tamil
Baqar Mehdi, Urdu
Suresh Joshi, Gujarati
Mowni, Tamil
Sunil Gangopadhyay, Bengali
Balraj Manra, Urdu
Nirmal Verma, Hindi
Vilas Sarang, Marathi
Madhu Rye, Gujarati
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Gujarati
Benoy Mojumdar, Bengali
Amrita Pritam, Punjabi
L P Bantleman, English
Arun Kolatkar, Marathi
Dilip Chitre, English
Gopalakrishna Adiga, Kannada
Akhtar-ul-Iman, Urdu
Kamala Das, English
Ravji Patel, Gujarati
Shakti Chattopadhyay, Bengali
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, English

In the introduction, Adil Jussawalla comments that he would have liked to include writing by Kamleshwar (Hindi) and Mohan Rakesh (Hindi) but their works were too long to be included. He also mentions the following Indian authors writing in English who weren't included because their work was already available to English-language readers: Nirad Chaudhuri, Ved Mehta, Aubrey Menen, Dom Moraes, R K Narayan, A K Ramanujan, Khushwant Singh and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Truth Tales:

Mahasveta Devi, Bengali
Ila Mehta, Gujarati
Suniti Aphaie, Marathi
Mrinal Pande, Hindi
Lakshmi Kannan, Tamil
Ismat Chughtai, Urdu
Vishwapriya Iyengar, English

Meena Alexander, English
Wajida Tabassum, Urdu
Binapani Mohanty, Oriya
Rajee Seth, Hindi
K Saraswathi Amma, Malayalam
Ajeet Cour, Punjabi
Chudamani Raghavan, Tamil
Indira Goswami, Assamese
Dhiruben Patel, Gujarati
Bani Basu, Bengali

Thanks, WS!

I'm still working away at Midnight's Children. He does an admirable job of weaving together an awful lot of Indian history in a human story accessible to us Westerners; because he is writing about a wealthy Islamic family, he's able to present the extreme poverty and misery as shocking to the protected (but not completely cloistered) Islamic woman who heads out for a fortune telling before her son is born. It is interest that Rushdie gets an almost modern Western kind of reaction by looking at the scenes through the eyes of an Islamic woman. We share a similar kind of innocence.

Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2009, 8:40am.

Your very interesting comments are making me want to re-read Midnight's Children. It's at least 12 years since I read it, so I only have sketchy memories - that passage at the beginning about the pickle factory is one that has stayed vividly in my mind.

I read The Last Jet-Engine Laugh by Ruchir Joshi, which wandering_star (I believe) recommended as a contemporary work.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. It is an ambitious work, which combines a multigenerational story with a futuristic look ahead to 2030, along with some forays into environmental issues, photography and the meaning of reality, and space technology. I am glad I read this book, and I admire the author's ambition, but my feelings about it are mixed.

The protagonist, writing from the dystopic future of 2030, looks back at his own life as a photographer, son, husband, lover, and father; at his parents' lives, both real and imagined; and at the life of his daughter Para, formerly a fighter pilot and now on a military spaceship stationed above the Indian/ Pakistani border (a war is taking place between India and a Pakistani-Saudi alliance, tacitly supported by the US). At times the writing is beautiful and the story compelling, but at other times it is difficult to figure out what is going on, partly because of the untranslated Indian words (although the sense can often be figured out) and partly because it is often not clear what time period the novel is in or what is real and what is imagined.

As a final note, the book was written in 2000, which meant that, as a reader, I had to suspend my knowledge of what has actually happened in the middle east and Pakistan post-9/11 to accept the novel's vision of 2030.

Chowringhee by Sankar

I purchased Chowringhee in London this summer, after reading a glowing review of it in the Guardian earlier this year.

This novel was originally written in 1962, and is one of the most popular novels of 20th century Bengali literature. A movie of the same title was equally popular and well received. Chowringhee was not published in English until 2007, and the translation won two major awards. This edition was published earlier this year in the UK by Atlantic Books.

The setting of this novel is Chowringhee, a neighborhood in Calcutta, in the mid-1950s. The narrator, Shankar, is an ambitious young man who finds himself out of a job with an English barrister, and is barely surviving by selling wastepaper baskets door to door. As he sits in a neighborhood park, pondering his past and fearful of what the future holds for him, a friend of his passes by, who is shocked by Shankar's descent into poverty. He tells Shankar that he can get him a job at the Shahjahan Hotel, one of the city's oldest and most venerable hotels, as the hotel manager is one of his clients.

Shankar is immediately befriended by Sata Bose, the hotel's chief receptionist, and after a brief stint as a typist, Shankar becomes Bose-da's main assistant and close confidant. The manager, Marco Polo, takes a liking to him as well, and young Shankar is given more responsibilities by both men. The novel revolves around the guests, entertainers, and frequent visitors of the Shahjahan, but several members of the hotel staff get equal billing in Shankar's narrative. We learn about the seamy underside of the elite of Calcutta, whose greed, shady deals, and shameful behaviors are initially shocking to our naïve young man, but he soons become jaded and disgusted by them. The poverty of working and jobless Calcuttans is vividly portrayed, as those not in the upper echelon are only one stroke of bad luck away from living in the streets or in dilapidated hovels. Love is a central theme, amongst the guests and workers, with often tragic results.

Chowringhee was a very entertaining and light-hearted though tragic read, which richly and effectively portrayed the struggles, joys and frustrations of the different strata of mid-20th century Calcutta.

Delhi by Khushwant Singh. I read this as a book in praise of mixing, muddling and hybridity, and against dogmatism. Fittingly, then, it was a very hard book to pin down. Every time I thought I had a handle on it, it would shoot off in a new direction.

So what actually happens? The book starts with a passage where Singh extols the virtues of Delhi, under an unappealing exterior:

"I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Baghmati when I have had my fill of whoring in foreign lands. Delhi and Baghmati have a lot in common. Having long been misused by rough people they have learnt to conceal their seductive charms under a mask of repulsive ugliness ... What you have to do for things to appear different is to cultivate a sense of belonging to Delhi ... Then the skies over Delhi's marbled palaces turn an aquamarine blue ... I make Delhi and Baghmati sound very mysterious. The truth is that I am somewhat confused in my thoughts ... In these pages I will explain the strange paradox of my life-long, love-hate affair with the city and the woman. It may read like A Fucking Man's Guide To Delhi: Past & Present but that is not what I mean it to be."

The format is that the narrator alternates tales of his life in Delhi with episodes in Delhi's history, told by eyewitnesses. Initially the structure is fairly clear - the narrator squires some woman around Delhi, has sex with her at or near some famous monument, and then segues into the story of someone associated with the building of that monument. But it begins to decay: the narrator ages, and spends more time worrying about not having sex; and the historical episodes are less clearly linked to the events in his life.

The episodes in Delhi's history seem to focus on intolerance and massacre, with a very few stories that undermine that trend. There are a lot of self-justifying accounts by rulers, and a few stories from underlings who are buffeted by (or manage to take advantage of) forces much greater than them.

I had two problems with this book. The first is that the historical episodes take a lot of previous knowledge for granted - I found many of them quite hard to follow, especially the ones told by the rulers. The second is that I couldn't figure out the purpose in focusing all the stories of Delhi's history (and present) on such violence and hostility. I guess if I'd found it an easier book to read, I wouldn't have dwelt on this, but as it was I spent quite a lot of time wondering where it was going. The answer, as it turned out, was pretty bleak. I suppose it could have been (as quoted above) about the paradox of his love for Delhi, but for me there wasn't really anything that could explain the love, as well as the hate.

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

The story of the Ibis and people from all walks of Indian life who come together on the ship is enthralling. Fortunately, I found the glossary at the end of the book!

The initial setting is near Calcutta just before the Opium Wars, and one common thread is the importance of opium (hence poppies) to people of all castes and to the British occupiers. As just a story, this is a good one. With some additional knowledge of Indian history, it takes on more nuance.

Ghosh plans a trilogy based on this story, and I can imagine rereading Sea of Poppies after more India reading and before reading the next in the trilogy.

And a belated thank you to wandering star for your lists. Much being added to the wishlists.

The Adventures Of Feluda and The House Of Death by Satyajit Ray - two sets of short stories involving the private investigator Feluda. In the preface to the first one, Ray talks about his love of detective fiction, and there are definite Holmesian echoes in the stories - the intricate plots, but also the narrator's habit of referring to other, unwritten cases; Feluda also smokes (although Charminar cigarettes instead of a pipe) and establishes his credentials with a new client by making deductions from a small element of their dress or appearance.

These were originally written for a magazine aimed at teenage boys, so there are limits to the types of crimes covered - they are mostly dastardly murders and thefts. I think they're also meant to be a little bit informative - the crimes take place all over India, allowing the stories to introduce different areas to the reader. Feluda also teaches little bits of trivia to his 14-year-old cousin, the narrator.

These were enjoyable although the plots were too intricate for me to have any hope of figuring out whodunnit!

Incidentally, the first book was translated by Chitrita Banerji, who wrote the book about Indian food which I read earlier. Actually I preferred the second translation, though...

Message edited by its author, Nov 24, 2009, 10:53am.

While Wandering Star keeps throwing back more and more books (keep 'em coming! I've loving them), I'm still on Midnight's Children. I've decided that this is a complete virtuoso display of literary technique (All that foreshadowing! Let's throw in a dash of stream of consciousness, then pan out for a bit of magical realism!), but it actually gets to be too much and too varied sometimes. Other times it is hilarious (he comments in one place that contemporary Indian literature is a smorgasborg of things learned from the Europeans, while feeding us from the smorgasborg, of course), and other times it is just interesting, thoughtful or poignant.

I do slightly worry that I have hijacked this thread a bit. But it was too good an opportunity to make myself pick up some of the India-related books that have been hanging around on my shelves for a long while (I bought a lot of them in India, about 5 years ago). And I still have about 30 left...

Do not worry. I'd love to see more posts from others, but I'd love to see more posts from you, too.

India is on my list of places I need to go soon. How long did you spend there, and where were you?

>43, I agree in every way with A_musing. Many books to add to the wishlist about an old and fascinating country and culture.

I am reading Untouchable right now--just tripped over it in a used book store a couple of weeks ago and have started Discovery of India. I should finish Untouchable in the next couple of days, but Nehru's book is going to take a while. Work just gets in the way of concentrated reading!

Mulk Raj Anand wrote just 157 pages about one day in the life of eighteen year old Bakha, a "sweeper" in charge of cleaning three rows of public latrines on the edge of his town. He is an Untouchable.

Bakha starts his day working "earnestly, quickly, without loss of effort". He dreams of the day he will be able to do the work of his father, the head of all the local sweepers who is responsible for cleaning the streets of the town and the temple courtyard. His wish is fulfilled that very day when his father becomes ill, and he sends Bakha to do his job.

The actual horror of the position of an Untouchable emerges as we watch Bakha's sister wait in line with others of her caste for a kind hearted upper caste person who will take the time to fill her water jug, and as we see Bakha, overwhelmed by the sights on the street, forget to call to warn of his approach and accidentally touch a high-caste man. The "Lalla" proceeds to vilify Bakha: "Do you know you have touched me and defiled me, you cock-eyed son of a bow-legged scorpion! Now I will have to go and take a bath to purify myself. And it was a new dhoti and shirt I put on this morning!" And Bakha's day does not improve. He is thrown off the steps of the temple where wandered to listen to the prayers and try to see into the temple although he knew his presence would "pollute" the temple and it would then have to undergo a purification ceremony. He must then go to a row of houses to beg for bread for his family. When finally some is thrown to him, it falls to the ground where he picks it up to bring it home to his father, sister and brother.

Bakha actually displays a love of life that is momentarily depressed by these events, but which rises to the fore over and over. At the end of the day, Bakha is mystified by a Christian missionary who tries to "save" him from his untouchability through Jesus, an unexpected opportunity to hear (but not understand) the great Mahatma Gandhi expound his ideas for changing Indian society, and a local dandy explaining the ultimate solution to the problem of the untouchables--flush toilets. Bakha ruminates on the meaning of it all. Hopeful again, he turns for home to tell his father about Gandhi and the new machine--the flush toilets.

Untouchable was a contemporary story. It is still a stirring account of the basic humanity of those members of the lowest castes of Indian society, and the wretchedness of their lives.

ET correct spelling and punctuation.

Message edited by its author, Nov 29, 2009, 8:36pm.

Wonderful review, Lisa. I'm adding this one to my wish list.

40:Sea of Poppies - I'll definitelly have to try this, since I loved Ghosh's writing in Hungry Tide, though the story wasn't enthralling.

I'm posting my reviews tomorrow - I don't have internet access at home right now, so couldn't get them up this weekend.

Message edited by its author, Nov 30, 2009, 12:46pm.

Sorry, I just posted all of this on the wrong thread. Here it is again:

I haven't engaged with this group read at all, despite really wanting to get involved, because of other stuff going on and lack of time. I finally got round to reading one of the 2 Indian books on my TBR. It was the short story collection Snake Catcher by Naiyer Masud. Masud writes in Urdu, and is a past winner of the Saraswati Samman, an award for outstanding writing in a native Indian language. Despite this, and his translation into English, he is not well-known outside of India.

Snake Catcher is a collection of 11 fairly short stories (20-40 pages). They are garnered from a number of sources, including previously untranslated pieces. It is always tempting to discuss writers within a cultural context, such as comparing Masud to other Indian writers, but there is far more similarity between these stories and the metaphysical puzzles of Borges and Eco, among others. Masud's prose is steeped in Sufism, and, as the introduction points out, more concerned with states of being than in describing actions. In the title story, which was probably the outstanding one of this collection for me, a village snake catcher treats his victims by categorising their bites by the type of snake that gave them. His new apprentice draws his awareness to the subjectivity of these categories and, by extension, causes him to doubt their realities. Stripped of his certainties, he loses his ability to treat the afflicted, and even begins to doubt (as do we, the reader) the difference between a snakebite and the fear of one. We begin to wonder if he has only ever been treating the idea of a snakebite. The lack of trust in 'reality' precipitates a decline in the snake catcher's relationship to the world he lives in. Indeed this is a recurring theme in all the stories. Realities become questioned, as do the characters' relationships to them.

The tone is undoubtedly downbeat, even frightening. Whereas the writers I mentioned above share a playfulness when they manipulate their realities, Masud's characters are thrown into mind-numbing terror as their certainties crumble. It reminded me, in this sense, of Sadegh Hedayat's horrifying The Blind Owl. Masud's writing is no less disturbing. If 'philosophical horror' was a genre, this would be up there with the best of them. The ideas he writes about are familiar from philosophies such as Zen and existentialism, but I have never seen them twisted into such a terrifying vision of life before. This is a genuinely excellent collection from one of India's hidden gems.

Apologies. My flash drive has gone missing, and it has the only copy of the notes I had for posting. I'm taking December off for traveling & moving (my workplace), but I'll be back in January.

The books I read were The Hungry tide, Leaving India and Children of Dust. It's interesting to me that 2 of the 3 were non-fiction.

Message edited by its author, Dec 5, 2009, 2:32pm.

>44 I was lucky enough to live in Sri Lanka for a few years so I could make lots of short trips to India, mainly the south. One great trip was around Tamil Nadu, another started in Goa and then went inland, through Hampi (huge ruined city) and ended up in Bangalore.

A couple of quite different books to report on this time.

The Far Cry by Emma Smith. This is a strange but very interesting (and well-written) book first published in 1949 and revived by Persephone Books.

A shy and rather fragile teenage girl, Theresa, is abruptly whisked off to India by her self-aggrandizing father, ostensibly to visit her half-sister who is married to a tea planter, but in fact to prevent her mother from claiming custody (and, we surmise, to bring a bit of excitement into his dead-end life).

Smith herself travelled to India in 1946 - before that the furthest she had been from home was a wartime job on a canal boat in the Midlands. She kept a detailed diary of the journey, which I think is visible in the vivid descriptions of the trip - we see this first on the voyage out, whether she's describing the ship's dining room: "full of children and from them arose a continual overtone of massed wailing. Like a sea-spray it hung above the dozens of white tablecloths ... for fourteen days that chorus prevailed", or the Saharan sand being blown onto the deck as they approach North Africa. But in particular, the descriptions of India feel genuinely fresh - probably because in 1946 she had no idea what to expect and was not writing with a vision shaped through other travellers' reports.

The developing relationship between Theresa, her father, and the others around her is poignant and compelling, despite (like the inner lives of other characters) being set out in remarkably (and deceptively) simple and concise language. This is one of those books where an inattentive reader could almost miss a sentence which unflinchingly illuminates the depths of a personality.

The vivid surroundings and the painful human relationships do sometimes feel like two different books, though - and there are elements of other books too, like the brittle-wit social comedy of the relationships formed on board ship or between the planters. That's why I describe it as a strange book. But very much worth investigating, for both the main elements.

After that I read Everybody Loves A Good Drought by P Sainath. This is a collection of journalism from the poorest districts of India in the early 1990s, a time when the poor made up around 40% of the Indian population. The book is set out thematically. Sainath starts with a series of reports about farcically inept development programmes or encounters with officialdom - the dairy project which led to a decimation of the cattle stock in the villages where it was applied, or the two brothers, only one of whom can be registered as an adivasi (member of one of the "scheduled tribes" eligible for special benefits) - when he queries this Kafkaesque situation the official says "how can I explain things to you - you can barely read or write".

This is a meticulous but angry book about how people who are already powerless and marginal are further ignored, abused or even cheated by uncaring, contemptuous and/or corrupt officialdom, preventing them from ever having any chance of getting out of poverty. Some of it is quite incredible - the families who are bonded into virtual slavery, sometimes for decades, for one-sixth of the price of the book, or the land reform programme which gives people plots of land but doesn't tell them where it is. The title of the book refers to the way that drought relief payments are manipulated by local officials and how droughts are misreported by the media - very often the underlying problems have nothing to do with the level of rainfall, but that's too complicated for the tearjerking report that needs to be filed.

I wonder if the situation is any different these days. I suspect not, at least in the essentials. The other day I heard a podcast about a great new idea to develop some urban slums in a way that will bring benefits to the residents. I was certainly more sceptical than I would have been before reading this.

(I'm currently reading Journeys Through Babudom And Netaland, a memoir by an Indian bureaucrat who worked in Andhra Pradesh and for the central government. It's slightly too anecdote-heavy but he does describe the same kinds of corruption and self-serving behaviour going on even in the 1960s.)

Message edited by its author, Yesterday, 7:36am.

A late posting!

I started Shantaram and got part of the way through before being interrupted by Wolf Hall. While it read easily (although I felt some of the language was forced) and had a great feeling for the "real" India from an outsider, I'm not sure if I want to continue once I've finished with Wolf Hall. Mostly because the narrator was annoying.

But it's been great reading others' comments: I've got Q and A on Mt TBR, and I did enjoy Midnight's Children when I read it some years ago. And Sea of Poppies is on Mt TBR too, I must get around to that one sooner rather than later (especially since now I know there's a glossary at the back! ;).