I am putting together a reading list for next term, and thought it might be fun (under this whole rejuvenated CM lately) to post some more primary source reading. Below is an editorial from NYT. It is quite a remarkable document for a number of reasons, not least that it was written in NY- the notion of imperialism, the defense of British civilizational mission, capital, religious righteousness: it is all here. Rinse. Repeat.

- “Progress of Events in British India“, New York Times, Oct 24, 1857

Progress of Events in British India.

The not improbable rumor of the recall of Viscount Canning from the Viceroyality of India, is but one of many indications that the Government of England is now fully alive to the importance of the struggle in India, and fully determined to put forth the whole force of the empire in the suppression of the Mohammedan mutiny. For although Lord Canning has exhibited qualities not unworthy of his name in the trying crisis through which he has been called to pass, it has been reported, on credible authority, that he had brought or suffered himself to be brought into collision with Sir Colin Campbell on questions of policy. That, in such an emergency, the civil official should be sacrificed to the military, proves how clearly the government of Lord Palmerston appreciated the natures and severity of the ordeal through which British authority in India is passing. The maxim of Malcolm rules and must rule the hour. India was won by the sword, and must be kept by the sword.

As we have constantly maintained since the outbreak of the disturbances at Meerut, so we now repeat – England is contending with a mutinous army, and with a mutinous army only, and if she be not utterly recreant to all the traditions of her national history, it is impossible that she should not come out of the contest victorious over all her enemies, whether in one, in two, or in all the Presidencies of India. Blundering imbecillity may hereafter aggravate, as it has already aggravated the difficulties of the task; but it must and will be achieved. As Damies said of that dreadful day of doom which was to witness his own death by torturers, which are the eternal disgrace of the French monarcy, “La journée sera dure, main elle finira“; so may it be said of the trial which awaits Great Britain in the East – the day may be long, but it must come to an end – and it is irrational to expect that end anything but the reëstablishment of British authority upon a basis of broader justice to India and England alike, and under the conditions of a sounder policy than has ever ruled the relations of these countries in the past.

For it is an immense, though a very common mistake, to suppose that the Indian Empire of England has in times past been of essential importance to the prosperity of the metropolis. It is for the prospective, rather than for the actual value of her imperial sway over the Hindoo millions, that England is now contending. It is in the cause of the world’s commerce yet to be, as well as of teh interests of Chrisitanity, and of civilization, that the bayonets of the “gallant Tipperary,” and the broadswords of the Highlanders, are making sharp for the battle in Bengal and in Oude.

From the very first, India has been a mirage of magnificence to England. When the factories of the Hoogly grew into a fortress, and the garrison of Fort William expanded into an army, and the English merchants in the East suddenly came before their countrymen with an empire in their hands, a policy was inaugerated in regard to India which was founded on false representations, and has resulted in perpetual deceptions. England had regarded her West Indian and her American colonies simply as markets for her goods. Her sons in the West were dear to her only as her customers. But India was to pour into her lap untold millions of wealth, the creation oflloms which had supplied the Pharoahs with purple and fine linen, and the produce of the mines whose fabled splendor had turned the brains of an Alexander and of a Caesar.

When after the conquest of Bengal, Behar and Orissa by Lord Clive, the East India Company applied for a charter befiting their new estate of a great territorial power, they engaged to pay into the English Treasury in three years time, the sum of $2,000,000. This was in 1767. In 1769 the period was prolonged by four years. In 1793 the obligation falling due was met by a demand from the Company, of a loan of $7,000,000! This was granted on the condition of their reducing their dividends from 10 to 6 per cent. In 1798, Mr. Fox, in introducing his famous India Bill, declared the Company insolvent, with debts of over $50,000,000 and assests of $16,000,000! Mr. Fox’s bill was defeated, and the Board of Control created. But this did not mend matters. In 1793 Lord Cornwallis had “extended again the area of civilization”. His conquests swelled the revenues of the Company to over $40,000,000 and Mr. Dundas, representing their interests, promised all manner of splendid things for the future. In the course of a very few years India was to put $28,000,000 per annum wholly at the disposition of Parliament for the use of the nation, independently of all the other goods she was to yield to the Empire. In 1795 that curse of companies, the “floating debt,” mysteriously began to incease, and in 1799 Mr. Dundas instead of giving away two millions and a half was compelled to own a deficit of nearly six millions. The victories of Lord Wellesley’s belligerent administration were followed by similar results. In 1805 the Indian Budget revealed a revenue of over $75,000,000 against an expenditure of about $85,000,000.

Meanwhile the natural currents of commerce having been choked, India was of but little use to England as a customer. Up to 1815 the exports to India were less important than the trade with the Channel Islands.

The revised charters of the Company have produced a decided improvement in all respects during the last thirty years, and the general prosperity of India, which has undoubtedly advanced under British rule, has brought with it a corresponding change for the better in the fiscal as well as in the commercial relations of England with India. But, as we observed the other day, any serious prolongation of the disturbances in Bengal and Oude will bring the Indian Treasury empty-handed into London – and the Indian loan of a million sterling, reported by the Niagara a week ago, prefigures the possible arrival of this crisis at an earlier hour than we had anticipated.

The commerce of England with India, however, could not be carried on for any great number of years with advantage to England, under its past conditions. A few facts will suffice to make this very plain. From 1831-5 to 1841-2 the total exports from India, inclusive of bullion, rose from £9,674,728 to £16,020,837. During the same time the imports into India, inclusive of bullion, rose from £7,654,485 to £11,473,110. That is, the balance of trade in favor of India rose during the eight years 125.10 per cent. From 1849-50 to 1853-4 a still greater proportional increase in favor of India was manifested, the actual balance remaining unpaid in favor of India at the end of these five years, amounting to £20,828,923. And during the past century it is estimated that India has absorbed and never restored any appreciable portion of $500,000,000 in silver and gold. Modern India, in fact, has up to this time continued to be what ancient India was described to be by Pliny, “the sink of the precious metals”. In the existing state of the commerce and manufacturers of mankind, this character of the Indian trade is a vitally disorganizing and disturbing element.

If India were to be released by England, then it is clear that the world at large would be simply the loser by so much more gold and silver as would be poured into India in consequence of the diminution and decay of the gradually-growing demand for foreign goods which the rule of English civilization alone has created and fostered. And the commercial interests, as well as the religious and moral convictions of Christendom, are therefore quite as deeply involved as are any imaginary necessities of Great Britain in particular, in the triumph of her armies over the disloyal and fanatical hordes of their enemies. Mohammedan India becomes a second China, controlling, however, the supply of staples much more essential to modern commerce than the silks and teas of the Celestial Empire. British India promises to become a regular and legitimate member of the family of nations. Annihilate the rule of England in India at this hour, and save in Eastern elements of national prestige, the British Empire would be to no positively appreciable extent a serious loser in power or in wealth. Reinforce British authority firmly in India, and the millions of Hindostan, multiplying their wants with their numbers under the wholesome influences of civilization, will eventually cease to be the “sink of specie” and enter the markets of the world as buyers, on terms of equality with the rest of mankind.

Maya Yazigi, “Defense and Validation in Shi’i and Sunni Tradition: The Case of Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr” Studia Islamica, No. 98/99 (2004), pp. 49-70

One further factor needs to be taken into account. The horrific death that Muhammad b. Abi Bakr met in Egypt at the hands of Mu’āwiya’s men made him a perfect exemplar of the atrocities associated with civil war in both traditions. The precise circumstances of his death are unclear. Some reports suggest that he died in combat. The more general belief, however, is that he was killed outside the main fray, then stuffed into the carcass of a jackass and burnt, or even – according to one report – burnt alive inside the carcass. Other reports suggest that he was decapitated before being burnt and that his head was sent for display at the court of Mu’āwiya. Whatever its basis in reality, this richly symbolic gesture became an important topos in Islamic historiography. It allowed Muhammad’s death to be remembered in a realm apart, that of firsts (or awā’il): the same accounts that report the despatch of his head to Mu’āwiya also make this the first head to be so transported and paraded in Islam.

Stephen Merritt:

Tiny Tim was, like yourself, a song historian.

Well, he had a pick-up band who had not rehearsed at all, I think. And what he did was play three chord cycles over and over again, and sing on top of that. The songs from the entire 20th century and part of the 19th century – songs that happened to go over those chord progressions. And every 20 minutes or so, he would switch the chord progressions he was playing. So, sort of “CFGG”, then her would switch to “CGFF”. And the amalgamation of the songs in a pretty random order was eventually deeply, deeply moving. And everyone in the bar, the nightclub, was crying at some point. There were six people in the audience. And very few people working. So maybe the total number of people in the room, including onstage, was 12 or something. And all of them were crying at some point. Including Tiny Tim. I think he was just very sad that night.

I have a new piece up at The Review, Pakistan’s new paranoia, on Zaid Hamid.

A man named Zaid Hamid, who has perhaps done more than anyone else to promote the new narrative of national victimhood, says that he has a clear answer. We are, he argues, living in the apocalyptic end-times – and Pakistan must emerge as the leader of the last struggle. Clad in his trademark red hat, he is leading rallies on campuses and in auditoriums across the country. His words – and the excited reactions of his audiences – are captured by camera crews, and the footage posted on YouTube and Facebook.

In his ceremonial Urdu, laced with Quranic verses and English idioms, he tells the gathered that they represent a generation hand-picked by God to lead Pakistan. He warns them of the sinister forces arrayed against the blessed nation of Pakistan. He assures them that prophecies predict their victory – all they have to do is mobilise. They have to leave their seats and take back their country. Only then can they conquer India and Israel. Only then can they rebuke the United States. Only then can they fulfill the dreams of Pakistan’s founding fathers. But the first step has already been taken – they came to his rally, they heard his call to action.

We have been discussing him here for a while – and after seeing a few hundred of his appearances on youtube, I can offer a few bits of analysis.

Perhaps analytically most crucial is the point that he is not merely a conspiracy theorist. That aspect of his appeal has received the most attention and it does resonate widely in different spheres (and for varied reasons) but he has significantly more to offer the starry eyed. His primary appeal rests in propagating a prophetic apocalyptic tradition – both specific to the Prophet and symbolically linked to folks like Muhammad Iqbal. This prophetic tradition contains both an explanation of the current disasters but also a promise of restoration, of victory. From Islamic history, he takes ahadi’th proclaiming the triumph over India (and Jersualem); from (what he terms) “spiritual” realm, he takes the quatrains of Naimatullah Shah which make exactly the same amount of sense as Nostradamus; from Iqbal and Jinnah, he takes the nationalist “prophesies”. All this is amended and aided by the usual coterie of dreams, sufi sayings, “feelings” and “emotions”. This last bit is perhaps the most important to keep in mind – he argues for a “rational” argumentation (so “reports”, “findings”, “evidence” are prominent keywords in his speech), but it is the emotional landscape where he actually rests his case. He repeatedly calls upon his listeners to contemplate their feelings – scared, helpless, angry, righteous – and then work out how they can actively engage with them. The corrosive power of nationalist or religious slogans is most readily apparent here. I have a lot more to say about this affective turn in political punditry but, for now, let me stick with the prophetic tradition.

In one of the youtube exchanges, he is part of a panel interview with various military/political folks. One of the mustachio’d ex-military objects to his constant claims to the “spiritual warfare” saying that his emphasis on “sufi prophecies” was rather stunted. Hamid immediately jumps back to the Prophetic had’ith to make the same claim. The mustachio’d one has no choice but to acknowledge that the Prophet must be right. This line of reasoning – “the Prophet said” – is also deployed by his supporters to shut down the debate regarding his insane policies.((The prophesies are listed in his Nimatullah pamphlet linked here and you can listen to him expound here)) The response of the left/progressive/sane folks has been to mock – to great effect. I certainly have the impulse to simply state “Bullshit” to all his stories of 110 year old saints predicting this or that, to some random who or whom and presto! One only needs a modicum of common sense to see through that. Yet here we are.

So, I believe we need to deconstruct his claims on historical basis – while also, I guess, stating “Bullshit”.

The End-Times Narrative:

To historicize his claims to these “prophetic traditions” lets start with the hadi’th he claims predicts a Muslim army in al-Hind. Only scattered references to al-Hind as a geographical entity exist in the Sahih collections.¹ The “prophetic ones” Zaid Hamid cites actually come from the accounts of thughūr al-Hind (frontier of al-Hind) which were compiled in eschatological collections. Just to be clear again, they do not appear in the collectively accredited ahadi’th. They number around five or six (repeated). In these short accounts, al-Hind is one of the stages for the battle between good and evil – between dajjāl (the anti-Christ in Christian eschatology) and the Muslims, at the end of time.² An example is this oft-reproduced tradition: “The Prophet proclaimed that two groups from my ‘ummah will be protected from the fires of Hell. One is the group who will fight in the frontier of al-Hind and the other group with will stay with ‘Isa b. Maryam (Jesus Christ).”³ This is the tradition repeatedly cited by Zaid Hamid.

It appears in Kitab al-Fitan, the compendium of eschatological traditions by Nu‘aym ibn Ḥammād (d. 844). In a very short section entitled Ghāzwāt al-Hind (battles in al-Hind), Nu‘aym recounts traditions which collectively tie the conquest of al-Hind, and the capture and manumission of its Kings to the end of times. Within eschatological timeline, the conquest of al-Hind is portrayed as the penultimate step, after which, both ’Isa b. Maryam (Jesus) and dajjāl will finally emerge. For example, another tradition reported by Nu‘aym presents the prophecy of the Prophet that Jesus will arrive after the conquest of al- Hind and the captivity of the kings of al-Hind: “It is narrated by al-Wālid who received it from Sūfy’an bin ‘Umar who received it from the Prophet: He said, “From my ‘umma, someone will conquer al-Hind in the name of Allah and put the kings of al-Hind in chains. Allah will forgive them, and they will roam and explore Syria and they will find ‘Isa b. Maryam in Syria.⁴ The motif here is certainly not “conquest” but rather “humiliation” – i.e. of seeing the King brought in chains. This emphasis on mulūk (Kings) of lands far to the East is a key motif, with Kings of China also equally represented: “There is no army greater in reward than the army going to China, then they will bring the kings of China and the kings of al-Aqaba back in chains, and when they bring them they will find that [Jesus] son of Mary has already descended in Syria”.⁵

To properly contextualize such traditions, we have to first conclude that these traditions reflect current thoughts and realities – as in, localized, contemporary propaganda at the margins of an expanding empire. When one compares them to the canonical traditions – and attempts to date them – this becomes clearer:

Historical apocalyptic traditions should be recognized, in general, to be the result of frustration and pre-conquest propaganda. Therefore, the most reasonable place to locate them would be in these intervals of inaction, especially after the major defeats of the reign of Hishām (r. 724-43). This period and the beginning of the `Abbāsid dynasty were, in all likelihood, the major periods of apocalyptic activity in Syria, which as come down to us in the form of historical apocalypses, and was mostly collected by Nu’aym two generations later.⁶)

Al-Hind in these eschatological traditions, is both an outlier and a rhetorical point. These traditions are focused on Byzantium – and the kings of India or China are there to serve as demonstrations of rising Muslim power, as well as markers on the end-time-line. These are certainly not “prophecies” – as Zaid Hamid is treating them – they are remnants of a messianic debate between expansionist and conservative cadres in the 9th and 10th centuries at the Muslim borderland with the Byzantium.

I will deal with the “Foreign Hand” and the quatrains of the Naimatullah Shah in the near future.

1. Those would be Muslim, al-Bukhārī, al-Tirmidhī, Ibn Māja, al-Nasā’ī, Abu Da’ud
2. On al-Dājjal and Christ in Muslim eschatology, see Neal Robinson, “Antichrist,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān.
3. Sunan Nasā’ī, Bab Ghazwat al-Hind
4. Nu‘aym ibn Ḥammād, Kitāb al-Fitan (Mecca: Maktabah al-Tājarʼiāh, 1991), 252-3.
5. Nu’aym, 252-3
6. See David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2002

I have now discovered Do not get angry, Dude in Germany along w/ a commemorative stamp. It was invented by the clerk Josef Friedrich Schmidt (1871-1948) for his three children and then commercialized in 1914.

[originally published Aug 30, 2005 @ 9:03]
This falls squarely in the well-established tradition, here at CM, of wasting time. Raven’s post on Ludo [which you should also go read] made me really curious about the history of this board game most Americans know as Parcheesi.

The game has many names: Pachisi or Chaupar being the ancient Indian/ medieval Mughal names [there is some difference in the rules for the two], and Parcheesi or Ludo being the American/colonial ones. Essentially it is a dice game, with cogs for players, five safety points [traditionally arranged with four points of the compass and the center of the earth], with the objective being to reach the safety points while taking out the cogs of your competitors. The origin of the game is a tad mystical. It is Duryodhana’s deception at this dice game, which emulates the realm of earth as its board, that sets up the epic war of Mahabharata. I will allow Mughal historian and chronicler Abu’l Fazl to set the stage:

Duryodhana was beside himself at the sight of their sovereign splendour, and the pangs of envy drove him more distraught. With deceptive intent, he held a festival and invited the Pandavas and proposed a game of chaupar, playing himself, with cogged dice. By this means he won all they possessed. The last stake was made on the condition that if the Pandavas won, they should recover all that they had lost, but if otherwise, they were to quit the royal dominions and wander in the wilds for twelve years in the garb of mendicants after which they might return to civilised life for a year, and so conduct themselves that none should know them. If this last particular were infringed, they would have to pass a similar period of twelve years in the forests. Unsuspecting foul play, their uprightness brought them to ruin.

Let’s go from the realm of gods to those of men. Herodotus claimed that Lydians invented dice while Socrates thinks the Egyptians did. Both are obviously wrong because dice, as you may or may not know, was invented by one of our common ancestors named Javihm who found some knuckle bones lying outside the cave while he was recuperating from a nasty case of poison ivy. More interesting is the case of the “board game”. Leslie Kurke in Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them mentions two games which I found interesting, polis and pente grammai – both involving a lined board, throwing dices, moving pieces and capturing pieces. In the case of polis, Kurke maintains that the board resembled the layout of the city. The pachisi board, like I said, takes the idea of the polis but to the global scale.

In terms of archeological evidence, we have the ancient game of Pa‚àö¬±ca[game of five], found in Tamil, with a board with five safe spots, player tokens that moved across the board after the roll of dice. However, the board here could be of any shape [and was often in any shape]. It is conjectured that this earlier board travelled all the way to Egypt to become the Dogs and Jackals Game, as well as Snakes and Ladder, which, in turn, gave us the Game of Goose and Chutes and Ladder. The board with the four points of the compass symmetry of Pacisi spread to Ceylon [panca], Korea [nyout], Vietnam etc. There is some controversy around E. B. Tylor’s claim that the ancient Aztec game of Patolli is also related.

Anyways, back to Pachisi, Chaupar and to the medieval/early modern era. Akbar, the Great Mogal King [as I like to call him], was a big fan of Chaupar. In his capital at Fatehpur Sikri was a courtyard which doubled as a Chaupar board and on which the life-sized game was played in the King’s attendance [those fetching kaneezis being the gotis]. Here and here are a couple of contemporary pictures. Just as Akbar was a big fan of the game [or maybe because Akbar was a big fan of the game], there was wide popularity for the game [I love that painting]. In folklores of Sindh and Punjab are many tales of the game being played amongst wily and cunning opponents. The hardcore players kept the cloth board rolled up in their pagris and hats. The pieces [got] were often carved out of wood [or ivory for the fancy folks] and dyed in red, green, yellow or black colors. I’d imagine that this was a great source of entertainment for travellers, and wayfarers. It also caught the fancy of the colonials. Here is a photograph taken by William Chapin in the early part of the twentieth century. India, being timeless and all, I am sure that their medieval counterparts behaved much in the same way.

Selchow & Righter, the American board-game company, trademarked Pachisi as Parcheesi and started marketing it as a children’s game in 1868 or so. It had reached England a few years earlier but by the 1920s, it was marketed as Ludo [latin for "to play, sport /imitate, banter /delude, deceive"]. Ludo was the version I grew up with.

So, there you have it. A game of chance played on a board of the world. Wasting my time….

Javed Akhtar on M. F. Hussain’s Rights, Sunday, Mar 07, 2010:

Javed Akhtar: You know, please allow me to digress a little. Till now we are talking about the Hindu fanatics and the Hindu fundamentalists. Now, we are talking about the Muslim fundamentalists. And their resemblance and similarities is uncanny. It reminds me, you know, some four hundred and fifty years back when Tulsidas wrote Ram Charit Manas in Awadhi, he was disowned by the Brahmin community and he had become an outcast. They were upset with him that how can he write a story like Ramayana in a language like Awadhi?

Such an ordinary, common man’s language. It is an insult to Ramayana and some two hundred years back, in the same very city Delhi, Shah Abdul Kadir, a gentleman, for the first time, translated Quran in Urdu in 1798 and all the Ulemas of that time gave the fatwa against him that how dare he translate Quran in such a heathen and such a perverse language. So, you see that these people, their minds function in the same way. People who are against Husain are a mirror image of the people who are against Taslima Nasreen.

Full transcript of MF Husain’s interview with Burkha Dutt, Wednesday March 3, 2010:

Barkha Dutt: You’re 95, in your twilight year, usually people want to return home, people need a sense of home much more than other stages of life.

MF Husain: I really, I fail to understand this physicality of an existence on which you are putting so much stress on. I am not 20 years old that I need a house; I have passed that stage. When you’re young you’re always ready to pounce on anything, like a prey you jump on it. As they say, first you accumulate, jise bhog kehte hain, now this is the time when you say: Neti neti neti…not this; not this.

This is the time to eliminate everything and come to zero, this is what I am trying though I have not reached that point. Only saints can do that.

Barkha Dutt: You said had you been forty you would have fought tooth and nail. Why don’t you fight today? Why did you stop fighting?

MF Husain: Haan, that is true but that stage is gone. At 40, if I wanted to marry a daughter of a king – which was impossible, I would not have given up; I would have kidnapped her. But now that stage has passed.

Abroo H. Khan. “An Interview with Dr. Muhammad Umar Memon“. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009): 180-199 [pdf link]

What prompted me to translate? I used to translate even back in Pakistan. But then, in the same way as my creative writing, my translation work was not a matter of conscious choice. I can’t give you any reason for it. Much of this activity moved to a conscious level when I came to the U.S. in 1964, but even then not really until 1970 when I started teaching at the University of Wisconsin. Between that time and now, I can see basically three reasons: practical, necessary, and emo­tional. While teaching Urdu fiction in translation at the UW, I had problems finding enough quality translations done with some thought to the chronological develop­ ment of the short story form in Urdu. The existing material was in most cases unrliable and poorly done so I decided to translate. I later collected the resulting stories into my several anthologies (The Tale of the Old Fisherman, Domains of Fear and Desire, The Colour of Nothingness, An Epic Unwritten, and most recently Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind?). So this was the practical reason.

The necessary reason—and I mean “necessary” in an existential sense— was my desire to let the West know that regardless of our deplorable performance in contemporary times, we have still jealously preserved a stout spirit of liberalism in the finer works of our imagination. Eventually what must define us is this liberalism. It will remain and withstand the test of time.

The purely emotional aspect is that I love Urdu—even though we are Memons whose language is Gujarati/Memoni and my mother, to her dying day, couldn’t speak Urdu flawlessly. And though emotional, my love is not uninformed. I have a fairly good grasp of modern Arabic and Persian literature. Nothing like what our prose writers and poets had already achieved by the 1940s exists in early­ modern Arabic and Persian, although we started to fall behind after the 1950s. It should come as no surprise that the first collection of modern Persian poetry was made by an Indian at Aligarh when modern poetry was still struggling for accep­ tance and recognition as a valid and viable form in Iran.

• LRB, Letters, Beauvoir Misrepresented? Vol. 32 No. 5 · 11 March 2010
• Boston Globe, “The other author of ‘Don Quixote’: Translating literature should count as an art, says Edith Grossman” by Peter Terzian. March 7, 2010
• The Guardian, “Poland’s ace reporter Ryszard Kapuściński accused of fiction-writing: New book claims journalist repeatedly crossed boundary between reportage and fiction-writing” by Luke Harding. Tuesday 2 March 2010
• The Hindu, “Caustic allegory“. A review of The Beast by Musharraf Ali Farooqi – translation of Numberdar ka Neela by Syed Muhammad Ashraf.

I’ve never really written anything outside of this house. I wrote a very
thick Ph.D. thesis for Allahabad University, but I couldn’t have actually
written it there. I would collect everything and come back home to write.
Suppose I have a story to write and I’ve gone out of town for a couple of
days: not a line of it gets written. Someone said that when you go out
somewhere you gain experiences and ideas, but if I lived outside Lucknow
I wouldn’t be able to write anything at all. Or, I wouldn’t be able to write
like this. There’s a phrase that’s used, ghar ghunsna [stay-at-home], as in
“this is a really stay-at-home kind of man,” meaning someone who never
wants to go out, but just wants to be stuck at home all the time. That
applies to me. If I go somewhere for a couple of days, I start missing home.

Naiyer Masud, from an interview with Sagaree Sengupta in the Annual of Urdu Studies

A Literary City
Shortly before I left the world of scholarly pursuits, I paid a work-related visit to Lucknow. I was at that time employed in an administrative post at a major research university, and I was visiting Lucknow to look in on an Urdu program there. Since I knew I might not be coming back any time soon, I had it in my mind to do something memorable, something aside from my administrative tasks. I put it to the ‘in-charge’ of the program, Aftab Ahmad, himself a scholar of Urdu satire, that I would like to buy some Urdu books while in Lucknow. But not just any books. I specifically wanted to buy an Urdu collection of short stories by the Lakhnavi author Naiyer Masud, whose work I had actually come to know via an excellent volume of English translations of his stories, The Essence of Camphor.

For me, Lucknow is an essentially literary city. I realize to many people, it is just another sprawling, dirty, exhaust-filled north Indian town, crime-ridden and filled with corruption. But Lucknow is the city of Umrao Jaan, of Pakeezah; it is the home of the Hindi author Yashpal and the hometown of Urdu scholar CM Naim (well properly Naim Sahib is from Barabanki, as Sepoy points out, but it’s close). The busy intersection of Hazrat Ganj is where one goes to visit Ram Advani’s bookshop to chat with the worldly and infinitely helpful proprietor, who has provided a haven for book-lovers, scholars and students for so many years. When I step out into the busy traffic after having tea with Ram Advani and nearly get wiped out by the endless swirl of vehicles, I think nostalgically of a character in a story by the Hindi author Ashk, who gets a terrible head cold after riding around Hazrat Ganj on Basant on his scooter wearing a dashing brightly colored turban instead of a woolen hat. On the train down to Lucknow from Delhi, I always half hope that if I get drowsy and nod off, some mysterious stranger will come and leave a scented note written in flowery Urdu between my toes. This, despite all indications to the contrary in the distinctly unpoetic chair car of the Shatabdi Express, with its blue vinyl seats and smudged, tinted windows.

Book Shopping
Aftab was enthusiastic about my request and we set off to the neighborhood of Aminabad after classes ended. My romantic notion of a day spent shuffling through richly stocked Urdu bookshops came to an abrupt halt within an hour. Aftab took me to the famous Danish Mahal bookstore, which a number of readers have sent photographs of. Pictured below, a shot by Aligarian. The shop is smallish, with books covering three walls, very high up to the ceiling. The fourth side is open to the street. We were waited upon by a very, very old man. He seemed hazy about whether or not he might have any books by Naiyer Masud, a troubling sign, and feebly scanned the shelves without really moving much. Aftab was having a hard time getting him to commit to whether or not he might have any such books. Finally, he said he thought probably not. We asked where else we might try. He hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said he thought we could get books by Naiyer Masud at the home of Naiyer Masud himself. Both of us were surprised. I asked where it was. He gave hazy directions. Finally, Aftab got him to write the address down. He found a very old piece of paper and wrote down something that vaguely indicated the location of the house.

After this, we made a brief and fruitless try at the Khursheed Book Depot, one of those bright shiny places that stocks textbooks and stationary. The place was teeming with students and staffed by two busy people. Aftab managed to get in the question and they politely responded that they did not carry anything of that kind. We were now left with a quandary. Did we really have the chutzpah to go to the home of an eminent author and demand to buy his books? We decided we would do it. Later, as we analyzed the day, we realized that I had agreed on the basis of my assumption that this course of action had been suggested because that’s how things were done in Lucknow. Aftab, on the other hand, had agreed based on his assumption that this was the sort of thing that Americans did– brashly beating down the doors of literary luminaries to ferret out the merchandise we wanted.

Recently I asked Aftab if he remembered any particular details from that part of the day that he wanted to remind me of. His answer came, Rashoman-like, and in its intricate observation of social details worthy of any 500-page novel, something which I desperately hope he will write someday:

I don’t know if you remember that we met two girls in Aminabad. When we were heading toward Danish Mahal, one of the girls came to me and said salaam to us. I introduced her to you, saying this is my cousin. She then addressed me as “uncle.” Why must everyone address one another as uncle? I was feeling a little embarrassed because I had introduced her to you as my cousin. You know the complex relationships in India. I later realized that I had reflexively introduced her as my cousin (although she was not even my distant relative) because we lived in the same building and her older sister called me ‘brother’ (I called her ‘bhabhi’) and her brother- in -law I called ‘brother.’ So this girl was obviously a sister to me. But she called me ‘uncle’ (I had never noticed this before that) because she was a friend of our landlady’s daughters. My landlady’s daughters called me uncle because I called her bhabhi, defining her husband as my brother. I don’t know if you noticed the discrepancy then or not.

The Homebody
I now realize, when leafing through the English collection The Essence of Camphor, that we had pulled up to the back door of the house. In the introduction to the collection, there is a photograph of Masud’s home, which his father dubbed “Adabistan,” or ‘domain of literature.’ The photograph shows a magnificent wedding-cake of a haveli, all ornate details, balconies and archways, surrounded by beautiful trees. Our car pulled up in an alley way, and in the style of antique Subcontinental neighborhoods, it was difficult to tell where any number of houses began or ended.

As indicated in the quote that begins this post, Naiyer Masud has spent his whole life in Adabistan. From an earlier part of the same interview:

Sengupta: You’ve never gone outside of Lucknow?
Masud: True, or practically speaking, never. I went to Allahabad to do my Ph.D. in Urdu, for three or four years. I used to come back to Lucknow every month. My sister lived in Allahabad, and I stayed with her. So that didn’t really amount to living “outside Lucknow.” Other than that, I once went to Iran for sixteen or seventeen days. I’ve been to other cities, but not for more than four or five days. My whole life has passed in Lucknow, in this same house.

In the annals of authenticity, a debate that I dismissed as a red herring last week, Naiyer Masud would be the quintessentially authentic author. If anyone were looking for an Indian writer that was indisputably authentic, who better than someone who has never written a word outside the house in which he was born? Despite the fact that this is a fascinating idea, and worthy of its own fictional treatment, I’m sure that Masud himself would laugh at the absurdity of the notion that always living in the same house confers a greater degree of Indianness to his writing.

Essences of Masud
In fact, in the introduction to The Essence of Camphor collection, Muhammad Umar Memon, who selected and edited the volume, argues for a reading of Masud’s work as not quintessentially like anything but itself. Memon’s introduction, which is the kind of masterful close textual reading that is not currently in vogue in literary critical circles, offers a very rich background and basis for interpretation of Masud in only eight pages. As Memon observes:

Entirely un-derivative and unlike anything that preceded them in the history of Urdu fiction, these stories stand in a class by themselves. They are different from the work of the early Urdu Romantics and Didactics on the one hand, and the Social Realists such as Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) and the Progressive writers such as Sajjad Zaheer (d. 1973), Krishan Chandar (d. 1977) and Ismat Chughtai (d. 1991) on the other. Strangely, they also do not approximate to anything of the modernist abstraction and symbolism that had swept over the Urdu fictional landscape in the 1960s and onwards with such relentless force.

Memon goes on to describe how the Urdu in Masud’s stories is also unlike any other author’s style:

The shimmering but elusive quality of the stories may derive from a number of factors. Not the least of which is the terse and highly clipped prose of the writer, one that shuns even the slightest trace of hollow rhetoric, so stark in its suppression of qualifiers that it unsettles the mind. Few idioms or none, no verbal pyrotechnics of any kind. It is Urdu all right, but it does not read like ordinary Urdu…..The economy, the avoidance of even an occasional exaggeration or embellishment, lend his prose an element of unfamiliarity, if not unreality.

The stories in the collection were translated by Memon himself, as well as Shantanu Phukan, Aditya Behl, Moazzam Sheikh, Elizabeth Bell and Sagaree Sengupta. That the style of the translations is uniform and quite smooth may be attributed to the fact that Masud himself worked with each translator on their individual stories, during which process, Memon suggests, Masud was quite demanding, with Memon finding that his “better judgment and patience were taxed to their limits.”

The stories are elusive and difficult to grasp, being, as they are, unlike anything else, but also because they lack almost any reference to specific places, times, dates, politics or history. Descriptions can be elaborate, but they leave the reader with no bearings in terms of specific locations or historical eras. Take, for example, this passage from the title story, “The Essence of Camphor.” The narrator is describing the camphor essence that he himself makes:

In my extract, however, one does not smell camphor or any other fragrance. It is a colourless solution inside a white, square-bottomed china jar. No fragrance of any kind wafts through the jar’s narrow opening when the round lid is removed. Attempting to smell it one feels a vacant forlornness and the next time round, breathing it in more deeply, one detects something in this forlornness. At least, that’s what I feel. I cannot say what others feel since no one has ever smelled the extract in its purest form, apart from me. It is true that when I prepare an essence with this foundation those who inhale it think there is something else underneath the expected fragrance. Obviously, they cannot recognize it for there is no fragrance at all in my extract of camphor.

Here is an intricate description of something which, it becomes clear by the end of the paragraph, is indescribable. It is a camphor essence that does not smell of camphor or anything else. It has no color; it sits in plain white jar. It does not emit fumes, and its effect is to fill one with a ‘vacant forlornness.’ Moreover, no one has ever smelled it but the narrator. One is pulled into an intimate, intricately described world that simultaneously bears no known or knowable markers, and that is as ineffable as the vaporless vapor it describes.

This ineffable, detailed world makes Masud’s work simultaneously extremely difficult to understand and highly translatable across languages. With barely any specific references to cultural objects, specific customs or even family relationships (the narrator’s female relations are referred to in the same story as his ‘women relatives’). Contrast this to Aftab’s reminiscence about the Aminabad Market. A brief encounter with two women is parsed in terms of highly elaborate habits of defining social and familial relationships. In a social environment in which Aftab’s reconstruction of that moment captures the norm of every day life, referring to characters in a story as ‘women relatives’ is bizarre and disorienting. But in terms of translation, it works exceptionally well. Nothing is more aggravating to the translator than trying to convey such things as kinship in terms that are not aggressively distracting to the reader. In Masud’s work, such challenges appear to be wholly absent.

Adabistan
It never crossed our minds, when we set out to Naiyer Masud’s house on the patently ridiculous instructions of the bookseller at Danish Mahal, that we would actually encounter the author himself. Despite the fact that Aftab and I were approaching the adventure from two utterly different perspectives, I believe that our one shared assumption was that an eminent writer of such mysterious works would surely have a system of gate keepers and ‘female relations’ who would protect us from appearing foolish in our errand when we arrived at the house.

Such was not the case. Our driver pulled up at a door in a wall. We walked through the door into a small courtyard, and there was Naiyer Masud, lying in the sun, arranged upon a bench, chatting with a man I later learned was an Urdu professor at Lucknow University.

I was suddenly seized with anxiety. My Urdu was not good enough for this. I would not be able to think of refined Urdu words for literary things. I knew that Shuddh Hindi words would pop up in their place. I couldn’t even remember the Urdu word for literature at that moment. My thoughts were racing through the linguistic inventory, routing all queries for Urdu through the much more secure Hindi compartment of my brain. I was mortified at the idea that I would have to speak to Naiyer Masud using English nouns strung together with Urdu grammar. The Hindi would only provoke peals of laughter, I knew from experience. But then I felt reassured. I was there with Aftab, the head of the Urdu program. He has a PhD in Urdu literature!

But as I stared expectantly over at Aftab, he was totally silent. Somehow our mission was explained, but Aftab barely said a word. I ended up plunging into the Englished Urdu I had dreaded. Masud was very gracious. He did not tell us that the idea that the only place to find his books was in his house was ridiculous. But, he explained, he himself did not have any spare copies either. He was sanguine about the matter and shrugged it off. There simply weren’t very many copies. Perhaps they were available in Pakistan.

Since I had come so far, he said he would give me another book. He was ill, and pulled himself up with difficulty, moving slowly over to the large metal almirah nearby on the porch. He fished about in it for a while, and pulled a slim volume. It was a critical work on Ghalib he had written. He asked me my name and wrote an inscription in it, first crossing out what looked like an inscription to someone else. We talked a little about this and that. Aftab continued stayed silent. Perhaps we had some tea.

Finally, feeling that we had already taken too much of his time, especially considering that he was not feeling well, we said goodbye and drove away. In the car, I asked Aftab why he had been so silent. I might even have expressed a bit of annoyance at being left to fend for myself.
“But I couldn’t say anything,” Aftab replied, “because I’m not from Lucknow.”
“What do you mean you’re not from Lucknow? You live here.”
“But I’m from a village. I’m too embarrassed to speak Urdu in front of real Lakhnavis like Naiyer Masud. They’ll know right away I don’t speak real Lakhnavi Urdu.”

Since moving to Berlin, I haven’t watched any Fox or gone to political websites or kept up with all that stuff. Guido keeps me up. Check this, though. Huma Imtiaz and Rahma are twittering across Sindh/Punjab and beyond (follow them here and here) and snapped this at a bazaar in Multan.

Obama's Pakistani National I.D. Card

The reason it makes it a worthy induction into the Yes! series is that the entry for “Distinguishing Marks” reads Aasteen ka Sanp – literally the snake which lives in one’s sleeve. An idiomatic phrase, this is a contraction of Aasteen mein Sanp palna – to nurture snakes in one’s sleeve – meaning to keep one’s enemies at really close quarters. As Mushafi (1748-1824) said, Daytah hai apnay dil mein us zulf ko jo jahGah/Goya kay Aasteen mein wo sanp palta hai – Whoever gives that (curling, maybe) Lock (of hair) a place in his/her heart; It is as if he/she grows a snake in his/her sleeve. Wow, that is the least effort I have ever made in a translation.

So, Obama then, in Multan, is a snake, hiding in someone’s sleeve (Zardari?). Brilliant.

Previously on Yes! I, II, III, IV, V,VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.

I really want this book. CM readers in Lahore/Karachi, with access to a post office and a paypal account, I am looking at you.

From Huma Yusuf’s review in Dawn.com:

Readers will enjoy flipping through old advertisements as well as gathering tidbits about brands that they’ve always consumed, but perhaps never really known.

That said, serendipitous finds — essays on artifacts and practices one didn’t expect in a volume on Pakistani visual culture — are amongst the most engrossing. Michel Boivin’s ‘Horsemen and Saviours: Iconography in Hindu Communities of 20th Century Sindh’ considers the role of the horseman in Hindu visual narratives; Malcolm Hutcheson and Atteqa Ali’s ‘Rooh Keench: Backdrops for Photography’ deconstructs the escapist backdrops for portrait photography; Aasim Akhtar’s ‘The Mace and the Sceptre: Iconography in Pehelwan (Wrestler) Posters’ evokes the fascinating sub-culture of wrestling; and Fancisco José Luis’s ‘Guru Nanak Shah Faqir: Sufi and Shia Elements in the Representation of Guru Nanak’ offers a detailed analysis of a mid-19th century portrait of the Sikh guru.

Barbara D. Metcalf, the president of the AHA, is a wonderful historian of Islam in South Asia. I recommend reading her short note, Historians and Chemical Engineers, in the February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History.

History may in some ways be primarily the purview of professionals, but it is also an intimate part of personal identity and a critical element in social belonging. It is learned in multiple dimensions of everyday life. Scholarly publications, and arguments communicated in a variety of settings by professional historians are, at best, only one source of anyone’s convictions about the past. This is because arguments from history become justifications for, and explanations of, public policy and public life more generally.
…
History does not tell us what to do about ethnic stereotypes or same-sex marriage or anything else. But an analytical examination of the past illuminates the frameworks of our perceptions, and helps us see the origins of present predicaments more clearly. Maybe, a clear exposition of documentary evidence will make my correspondent reflect and reexamine his views, if not change them.

Having just taught a class on public/popular consumption of historical narratives, I have renewed my faith in the belief that as historians we must reach beyond the academic market to make primary sources and credible secondary analysis available to as wide of an audience as possible.

A long while ago, I was a Physics major. This was a default setting. My father, an electrical engineer, expected something similar; as did I. In college, we had some inspirational teachers. Bashir Tahir, our Math teacher for example, was particularly somnambulant to all appearances but had a wicked sharp sprint. I know this because he would sleep-walk as close as possible to our very illegal cricket-on-the-grass proceedings and then usain bolt at us. His hope was to catch us, make us give up our student i.d. and then fix up a fine from the Registrar.

Why do I always digress when I remember my Lahore days?

So Prof. Naseer taught me Physics. We would both get to the college really early in the morning. And despite the healthy fear/loathing inherent in the student/teacher relationship in desh, we would talk over chai. Usually about quantum physics. I was completely enamored with it; and completely enamored with my utter ignorance about it. I thought reading biographies of Einstein and Bohr would explain something. Prof. Naseer would recommend that I read actual journals/books dealing with quantum physics. I told him that I had tried my best to find secondary material (materials outside of our really, really, and I mean really, bad Physics textbook) but had come up with very little. Here, he said, write to Dr. Abdus Salam. He said.

I knew of him but I didn’t know of him. If that makes any sense. I wrote a simple letter, basically stating that I was taking this class which had some quantum physics material and it was really interesting and I would like to learn more. I mailed it to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. Some time went by. I cannot tell you how much. One day, I came home to a box bearing lots of stamps and obvious signs of tampering. It contained a number of publications from the center, some papers authored by Dr. Abdus Salam, and a few books. There was a letter. It wished me luck in my pursuit of studies. It offered me more help and guidance, should I need it. It welcomed me with a “Dear Mr.” I remember that “Mr.” I remember, vividly, the energy I received from that letter, from that package. Some one far, far away, had cared to respond. I remain enthralled by his kindness.

I learned that he came from the same part of southern Punjab as my father. Sahiwal. I wrote him a letter back, telling him of my discovery. And thanking him. I never heard back. I doubt that my letter reached him. I learned that he was considered an outcast to the state of Pakistan.

Some good people are making a documentary on Dr. Abdus Salam – the only Nobel Laureate from Pakistan. They are raising money for it. I urge you to give. His is a story that needs told.

Dear Mr. Nanga Fakir,

We’re writing to let you know that the Committee for the Haminder Subah Sath Mehmil Memorial Foundation Annual Chapati Fellowship has met. After reviewing a very strong pool of thousands of international applicants, your dossier was chosen as the winning application. The Committee was particularly impressed with your strong commitment to the field of excellence in both of your areas of specialization, Nangepan and Fakirbaazi. In keeping with the Foundation’s values of excellence and achievement, along with a special focus on specialization, we at Chapati Mystery annually award one Chapati Fellowship to the applicant that most successfully demonstrates a commitment to those core principles.

The Committee was particularly impressed with your skillful use of David Foster Wallace Pastiche to describe a person’s lip (your own?) being hit with a squash racquet. We felt that the piece was made particularly strong by the inclusion of a footnote that compares the ripping apart of the skin on the lip to “Shakti Kapoor & Gulshan Grover’s tearing through the Clothes of the Hero’s Sister in the quintessential mainstream ’80s Hindi film.” Some members of the Committee were reminiscing about Shakti Kapoor’s best lines of dialogue in that particular film only last night. No less impressive was your use of comparative technique to tease out important qualities of an interview with David Foster Wallace. It had not previously occurred to the Committee to view David Foster Wallace’s demeanor and speech patterns through Nirmal Verma-colored glasses. In fact, some members of the Committee have never read David Foster Wallace at all, much less given him any thought (except on the occasion of his tragic suicide, which served as an unwelcome reminder to members of the Committee that life is nasty, brutish and short, and depression a nation-wide epidemic), and it was decided that your discussions of that late author provided a valuable service to the members of society that have not read, and perhaps do not plan to read, the works of that departed luminary. It was thus that the Committee voted to bestow upon you the great honor of a Chapati Fellowship.

As you may know, your fellowship will consist of five hundred buttery chapatis (hot, as of this writing), to be mailed to you upon your completion of the attached forms. As you will see, you will be asked to provide information about your visa status, as well as other pertinent details. Please keep in mind that processing of your fellowship can be delayed up to two years with certain types of visas. In addition to the five hundred unrestricted chapatis that you will receive, you are also eligible for reimbursements for certain types of research and writing expenses as permitted under federal guidelines (see attached handbook). You may receive reimbursements for up to five hundred additional hot, buttery chapatis as and when you complete the attached green forms, and attach, but do not staple, your receipts to them. The receipts must be legible, non-credit card receipts with all purchased items listed on them. These must be taped to 8 1/2″ x11″ sheets of plain white paper, with explanatory notes next to each receipt. In addition, a type-written list of the receipts, and a justification of each expense, should be stapled (not clipped) to the green forms and the sheets with the receipts taped to them. All typed correspondence should be written in 12 PT Times or Palatino fonts with a minimum 1″ margin and right-left justification.

The Committee wishes to congratulate you on your successful application, and your award of this great honor.

Sincerely yours,

Chapati Fellowship Committee

Some may recall that I had pointed out Atiya Khan’s critique of my piece in the Nation some while ago. I had wanted to not turn it into some silly blog tiff, and sent in a letter to the editor, who graciously published it in Platypus Review, issue # 20. You can read it on-line here, but let me highlight a footnote (which liberally uses wonderdust):

The groups now collectively labeled the “Taliban in Pakistan” are in fact an amalgamation of various groups—from states’ rights advocates in Swat to tribal warlords in Waziristan to trained militia (against India in Kashmir) in southern Punjab. More than a few are now allied with domestic anti-statist organizations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the international ones like al-Qaeda, and some of the local warlords now have national aspirations. Collectively, they are responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in the cities of Pakistan. To effectively counter the threat they pose, we have to disaggregate them into their constituent parts, and deal with them accordingly. Some groups will respond to political dialogue, while others can only be eliminated by force or by the civil justice system. Since they claim various political goals—and it is absolutely crucial to understand that these are “political” goals though they often change from venue to venue and from spokesman to spokesman—we have to engage them within the political realm. This is where U.S. endorsement of the rigged Afghan election, and the longer history of maintaining Karzai’s puppet regime, leave us with a significant political handicap. This also means that political legitimacy must be stripped from these groups. The lingering issues of states’ rights for Swat and Baluchistan require political solutions. The Pakistani military must remain under civilian political leadership and military solutions cannot be allowed to escalate into open-ended civil warfare.

The politics of the groups lumped together under the “Taliban” label is religious in its markers, its symbols, and its public face. This means that any counter-strategy must also include a public effort to “reclaim” the religious front. These groups are heavily armed and supplied in consequence of public donations, the illicit trades in heroin and electronic media, and direct funding that still comes from sources both internal (whether the continued involvement by Pakistani intelligence agencies or other social and civil groups) and external (diaspora communities as well as Saudi Arabia). The state of Pakistan must criminalize weapons possession and revoke licenses in order to start an effort to clean out the cities and stop the influx of smuggled weaponry. The recruits are overwhelmingly young, male, and illiterate. As such, they are strongly against the existing status quo, women, and education. The reform of primary and secondary education (including madrasas) should also be a priority. The state needs to enshrine the right to education within the Constitution.

Update: Deadline is one week from today– Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 12 noon EST

Dear Readers,

I am working on a post about book buying, browsing, searching in South Asia. I would like to solicit from you anecdotes and stories about looking for books in any language other than English while in South Asia. I have found when looking for Hindi books, for example, that it is very hard to browse for and discover books in Hindi bookstores. Below are the guidelines for submissions, which can be anonymous or named. Depending on volume, I may not be able to post everything I receive, but I will try to put up as many as I can, and summarize the rest.

Aap ki,

Lapata

Format for submission:

1. Name (you can be anonymous, or choose initials)
2. Location (also can be skipped)
3. Language-literature you have experience looking for and where
4. Anecdote or description of how bookstores are organized for this language/literature, what kind of people go there, how un/appealing the book bindings are, etc.
5. Send me a photo of a bookstore, even if it’s a cell phone picture
6. Email it to lapatastic [at] gmail [dot] com

The commercial would begin with a shot of a blue-green planet afloat in dark space. Then, with instant thousand-fold
magnification, the camera would digitally zoom into the part of the landmass in the northern hemisphere that lies above the Indian Ocean, the subcontinent flecked closer to the top of the screen by the white crest of a wave representing the Himalayan snow-peaks. The camera would veer right, coming closer to the ground to reveal, for one-five-hundredth of a second, the muddy expanse of the Ganges, and then fanning above it a city visible only as a dirty wash of miniature roof tops, their colour a uniform grey. Binod saw very clearly in his mind the spreading delta of underdevelopment; almost despite himself, he smiled.
And Rabinder, getting more excited, said that the camera would be at ground level now, approaching a heavily loaded Ashok Leyland truck on the highway: as it got close to the truck, a white Maruti would zoom out from behind the truck. A few drops of rain would fall on the lens as the camera swerved, forcing a policeman on his bicycle into a puddle. The man would be wearing his khaki uniform and a red cap. The camera would avoid hitting the bicycle and, almost within that same instant, its eye would pick out a large yellow building. There would be a short pan along the length of a tall wall before pausing at a barred room in which would be a solitary man, sitting.
The film would cut to a shot from above: the top of the man’s head and, pressed to his right ear, a mobile phone. The place would be a prison near Patna.

From Home Products by Amitava Kumar (pp. 34-35)

A number of years ago, I took an overnight train with my family from Allahabad to Puri, in Orissa. It was a long ride in 2nd A/C, and, as usually happens on such trips, the people around us became our temporary friends. The train passed through Bihar in the middle of the night; the next morning, when breakfast arrived, we were in West Bengal. The little children from the compartment next to ours came racing in and exclaimed breathlessly, “We made it through Bihar! Our parents were worried bandits would attack the train, but we made it!”

Bihar is what is known in the US as flyover country. In the phrase of the guidebooks of old, ‘there is nothing here that need detain the traveler’– unless the traveler is Buddhist, and going to Gaya and Bodh Gaya. When one opens the papers in other parts of India, there is invariably news of some ghastly crime or another that has taken place in Bihar, or a corruption scandal, or some other example of ‘backwardness’ to add to the pile of reasons why we never would want to get out of the train in Bihar. A Bihari accent in Hindi is to be avoided, and makes a person sound uneducated, and of course, because poverty is widespread in Bihar, many laborers and servants in Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay are from Bihar. In my experience in India, it has always seemed as though prejudice toward Bihar and Biharis does not need to be hidden; Bihari jokes are never off-limits.

Aanchalik Literature
It was my good fortune that my first real knowledge of Bihar came not from the pervasive stereotypes of the area, but in Hindi class, with a seminar on the novel Rati Nath ki Chachi by the great Bihari author Nagarjun. I will admit that my Hindi was not up to the challenge of reading Nagarjun at the time. Nagarjun was part of a literary movement in Hindi known as Aanchalik literature. The word aanchal, in Hindi (of which aanchalik is the adjectival form), means a number of things, including ‘region’ and also the border of a sari.* The term Aanchalik Sahitya is usually translated as ‘regional literature.’ But with its other meanings, the word carries with it connotations of warmth and comfort, as of the protection of a mother who shields her children from the world with the border of her sari.

Aanchalik writers experimented with carving out a niche for local language and culture in the areas of India where Hindi is the trans-regional standard language. Thus, Nagarjun, an author from the Mithila region of Bihar, inflected his writing with Maithili language and culture, while loosely retaining standard Hindi as the narrative glue. In Aanchalik fiction, dialogue is often written either in a local dialect, or heavily marked by features of that dialect.

For the language student, this style of writing is almost completely impenetrable because of the excessive demands it makes on one’s limited reservoir of vocabulary. I remember spending many hours futilely searching for words in the Hindi dictionary that weren’t even there because they weren’t actually Hindi. Nagarjun waxed eloquent about the mango in all its stages of development, for each of which there was a different word. In addition to this, there were also words for the things that can be done to mangoes in specific stages of development, all of which are apparently very tasty.

Long after reading Nagarjun, when my reading skills had much improved, I had the courage to undertake reading another great Bihari Aanchalik author, Phanishwarnath Renu. I had wanted to read Renu for a long time, as I had heard such praise for him. But I had not wanted to mar my experience of his aesthetic by my own ineptitude, as had been the case with my reading of Nagarjun, from whom I was left with a sense of an indistinct landscape littered with slowly ripening mangoes and punctuated by some surprising illicit (but hazy—to me) sex scenes.

Reading Renu was still difficult without knowing any Maithili or Bhojpuri, but I was at that point able to wing it. Renu’s 1954 novel Maila Aanchal is as magnificient as everyone promised. Set during the 1942 Quit India Movement in Northeast Bihar, and told from the perspective of a young doctor, the novel brings together a large cast of characters and showcases myriad aspects of the social structure of the village where it takes place. It also has an excellent plot. The title, which sounds poignant in Hindi, poses problems in translation. When looking online to see if there were English translations of the novel, I came across a host of infelicitous renderings such as ‘Soiled Border’ and ‘Soiled Linen.’ Maila means ‘dirty’ but it is a mellifluous word– unlike, for example, ganda or the English words ‘filthy’ and ’soiled.’ Because aanchal means ‘region’ and the border of a sari, the title carries both connotations. The feel of the phrase ‘maila aanchal’ is not negative—it makes one think of a region-as-mother, a protective space, that is dirty, but not in the sense of being soiled. Perhaps translators have chosen the word ‘soiled’ because they feel that it carries the connotation of soil-as-earth, but frankly, that’s just not how it comes across in the phrase ‘soiled linen.’

The limits of Aanchalik literature’s translatability, with its heavy use of regional vocabularies and dialogue in dialect, are critical to developing an understanding of what it means to write realism in a deeply multi-lingual society. One could draw an equivalence between the attempts by 19th century British novelists at capturing a heavy brogue or a peasant accent, but the comparison has its limits. On a purely orthographic level, the scientific phoneticism of the Devanagari alphabet makes it possible, if not advisable, to render any accent, regionalism, or even a twang, with absolute precision (for example, the Hindi author Ashk sustains a dialogue between his protagonist and a girl with a nasal accent for pages by draping chandra bindus (diacritics denoting a nasalized vowel) over each and every word). English, with its arcane spelling and pronunciation rules, cannot incorporate non-standard accents with ease through spelling and must resort instead to syntax-play and word choice.

Underlying the effort on the part of the Aanchalik authors to introduce a regionalist flavor into Hindi literature, rather than simply writing in one of the regional languages, such as Maithili, is the fact that Hindi is a pan-Indian language. Anyone writing in Hindi is likely to get a broader readership than they would if they were to write in a language such as Bhojpuri. The effort contains both a financial motivation as well as a nationalist one. Some specificity is lost but since the project of realism is not to recreate reality, but to create the illusion of reality, the exercise of writing Aanchalik fiction is perfectly in tune with the realist aesthetic.

Flattened Contours
India is multi-lingual and multi-literary, but not all languages are created equal in terms of the socio-economic hierarchy. While writing in Hindi is more lucrative than writing in Bhojpuri, writing in English is far more lucrative than writing in Hindi. These differences of course reflect the socio-economic differences of the people who use the languages. To be a “Hindi-medium” person is generally to have ones life-choice possibilities more circumscribed, than those of an “English-medium” person, and so on. Writers in English reach an international audience, and in India, that audience is distinctly more well-to-do than the Hindi-reading audience. If the Aanchalik authors had to flatten out the contours of local dialects and languages when they chose to write in Hindi, authors using English face an even more daunting task if and when they wish to represent the speech and lives of characters that are not members of the fluently English-educated elite. Hindi is at least closely related to many regional languages such as Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, etc., but English is something completely different.

In the past I have been very critical of the way in which Indian novels in English have represented the speech of characters that are not meant to be fluent in English. In fact, as recently as last week I was critical on that point. Following Tabish Khair’s excellent discussion in his book Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (pp. 99–129), I have found it troubling that non-English speaking characters have a tendency to speak in foolish-sounding pidgins marked with an assortment of Hindi words, and sometimes using particular Hindi syntactical features that, while non-humorous in Hindi, sound hilarious in English. I’m thinking in particular of Hindi-Urdu’s penchant for rhyming word pairs (chota-mota, ajib-o-gharib), echoing pairings, where the second word doesn’t mean anything (such as shaadi-waadi), and repeated words, that often add emphasis or even a layer of adverbial meaning (chota-chota, chalte chalte, dhire-dhire).

As a Hindi student I once found these features of the language hysterically funny, and when I read them used to create pidgins in Indian English novels, I found the dialogues both amusing and instantly recognizable as gestures to create the illusion of Hindi within the framework of a piece of writing in English. It was later, when I became used to these features of the language as I was more immersed, that I came to realize that saying ’shaadi-waadi’ was not actually supposed to be funny, it was just the rhythm of the language. Over time, I began to feel that this method of representing the verbal patterns of characters whose primary language is not English was not so successful, and often infantilizing. Since non-English speakers tend to be, if not of a lower class, then at least provincial to the English-speaking elite in cities such as Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay, these comical portrayals of their speech patterns can feed into existing hierarchies and the often de-humanizing perceptions of populations outside these metropolitan centers, such as the entire population of Bihar.

In a post just last week, I triumphantly declared that English writing in India created the illusion that one was reading a translation through such features as discussed above. In my desire to see more money and enthusiasm going into the translation and publication of Indian literatures not written in English, I implied that the fact that these novels make the reader feel as though they were translated is a bad thing, since it squelches the demand for actual translations. Now, one week later, I am going to have to eat my words, or at lease finesse my point to some degree.

Home Products
The quote at the beginning of this post is from the novel Home Products (Picador India, 2007), by Amitava Kumar, which will be published in the US in July 2010 under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. I first heard this excerpt, along with other sections of the novel, presented as part of a year-long lecture series on ‘the city’ as a unit of study. Kumar’s lecture was the final presentation of what had been a series of buzz-word-heavy talks dealing exclusively with issues surrounding the ‘mega-city’—massive metropolises such as Bombay, Hong Kong and São Paolo. Kumar’s lecture itself was titled “Lights, Karma, Action: Report from Bombay.” As the series had progressed, I had been perplexed at the lack of attention being paid to all the lesser cities of the world, the also-rans, where millions of people live, but one can’t find a good wild-mushroom risotto for love nor money. I settled in for this final talk with low expectations: another afternoon, another trip to Bombay.

The lecture was, from the start, a surprise, as it was not a lecture at all, but a reading of a work of fiction. I kept waiting for the story to stop and the dry dissection to begin, but it never did. And what I, along with the rest of audience no doubt, had assumed would be a “report from Bombay” to us, the audience sitting in a lecture hall at a major research university in the United States, was instead a report from Bombay to Patna, the capital of Bihar. This change in direction was shocking and destabilizing, as we reversed direction to travel instead from mega-city to provincial city. The reversal became most viscerally apparent as Kumar read the passage at the beginning of this post.

The passage begins when the novel’s protagonist, a Bihari journalist named Binod, has come from Bombay, where he works for an English-language newspaper, to Patna (his home town) to investigate a story that he hopes he might turn into a film script. In the scene above, he is visiting his cousin Rabinder in prison. Rabinder is an enterprising and likeable young criminal who is full of ideas, some inspired, and some of the kind that land you in prison. In the passage, Rabinder is explaining to Binod his idea for a cell phone advertisement that he thinks could be really big. Binod is bemused by the idea that the advertisement zeroes in on a person in prison and asks Rabinder why he has chosen that focus. Rabinder replies, “Honestly, can you think of any place where a mobile phone would be more needed than it is in prison?” (p. 35)

In Rabinder’s description, we find ourselves viewing the advertisement in our minds (it is so familiar), and our expectations tell us that after the world, the northern hemisphere, the Indian Ocean and the Himalayan snow-peaks, we will find ourselves dropped into a familiar spot in a megalopolis—Juhu Beach, perhaps, Rajpath in Delhi, a bustling market in Calcutta—this is how the world works, in advertising. After the landmass comes into view, one lands in a place of significance. But instead, the description abruptly de-centers the viewer/reader in the next phrase, “the camera would veer right,” and whisks us away from the mega-cities and into the heart of flyover country: “the muddy expanse of the Ganges, and then fanning above it a city visible only as a dirty wash of miniature roof tops, their colour a uniform grey. Binod saw very clearly in his mind the spreading delta of underdevelopment.” And so we arrive in the maila aanchal.

One might go on to assume that the final touch-down of the imagined camera upon the head of a man in prison was a metaphor for the confinement of the poor souls trapped in filthy Bihar. Perhaps this novel will be about escape to the bright city of Bombay from the confinement of a filthy, crime-ridden pronvinciality. In some ways it is, but in some ways it isn’t. Though the third person narration is recounted from the perspective of Binod, who has left Patna and lived in Delhi and then Bombay, Binod could hardly be described as appropriately reveling in his emancipation from his homeland. He returns often, to visit his family, to investigate news stories, and always, despite the flaws of it all (crime and corruption play a large role), it is clear that there is a stronger visceral connection to Bihar than to his new home in the mega cities.

Indeed, the prison metaphor, which would have worked so nicely, is made short work of a few scenes later, when Binod, still on his visit to Rabinder, accompanies his cousin to see a wrestling match within the prison walls. No guards are in sight, though one of the wrestlers turns out to be a guard, and the prisoners seem to be left to their own devices within the walls. As Binod takes his leave, Rabinder accompanies him to the guard house, where:

In the cavernous hallway, naked bulbs were suspended from the roof from dark, coiled wires. Guards in khaki shorts stood quietly in the shadows as if it was they who were the prisoners. (p. 43)

And so we see that the roles of prisoner and guard quickly blur, and the hierarchy seems to be in the eyes of the beholder.

The Hindi Aesthetic
This past week, some years after hearing Amitava Kumar read excerpts from Home Products, I was finally able to read the book. I had remembered that there was something about its aesthetic that seemed very familiar to me. As I began to read, I knew right away what it was. Home Products feels like a Hindi novel. It even feels like a translation of a Hindi novel. I say this as someone who has translated substantial quantities of Hindi literature. In fact, the day before I began to read Home Products, I had been revising some old translations of Hindi short stories. As I read, I felt tempted to get out my red pen and cross out certain word choices as too close to the literal translation from Hindi.

The pace of the narration, the close attention to the mundane details of daily life, a certain reserved quality, a sense of connectedness to history, to human struggles, to politics, these are all markers that are ever-present in the Hindi novels of the mid-twentieth century novels. Kumar makes it clear through sections of dialogue and narration that this similarity is no accident. Characters make references to prominent Hindi authors throughout; some have degrees in Hindi literature. Binod’s family is solidly Hindi-medium, English literate. Though Binod writes for an English-language newspaper, he chooses to do so after some deliberation between Hindi and English.

The fact that Home Products has been written in conversation with Hindi literature is astonishing. I can think of no other English language novel that does this. Because of the hierarchy of language-medium education in India, it is rare for a writer in English to have read any literature in Hindi whatsoever. In my experience researching Hindi literature, I found that the English-educated classes outside of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, people who could read, write and speak Hindi, had read virtually no literature written in Hindi and had heard of no Hindi author other than Premchand. The fact that I was studying Hindi literature at all was usually met with derisive laughter. What could there possibly be to read in Hindi?

This is not due to mass personal failings on the part of English speakers but to the structure and goals of English-medium education. Hindi will only be of utilitarian importance to this class of people, and when it comes to the arts, they will be better served by reading English literature. And of course, as is usually the case in a vertical hierarchy, the Hindi writers on the next rung down are very familiar with what the rung up is reading. In Hindi literature one finds a wide array of erudite literary references to Western writing, for example. Hindi authors whom I met and interviewed were widely read in English, including English translations of works from around the world.

Borrowing from the Hindi aesthetic also enables Kumar to forge a different path from the usual fare for representing dialogue that switches around between languages and dialects. He describes people switching between Hindi and English without using hardly any Hindi words, yet he still manages to retain the flavor of differences in speaking styles and backgrounds. An example I enjoyed takes place near the beginning of the novel when Binod goes to the home of a murder victim to ask her family questions about her life. The family, of a lower class than Binod, is suspicious of his motivations and does not wish to speak with him. Suddenly the victim’s sister switches to English:

The girl, all fury suddenly, spoke up in English. “I think you are a lawyer.”
“Lawyer,” Binod asked loudly, doing his best to look hurt. But he was genuinely surprised. A lawyer? Did they think he was a lawyer, perhaps here to entrap them, and is that why there was such suspicion and anger?
The girl took a step toward him. “You are a lawyer. Get out.”
The thin finger described a ridiculous arc through the air. Binod turned away. It wasn’t till he had reached the bottom of the steps that he realized that she had actually been calling him a liar. (pp. 6-7)

The misunderstanding comes from the tendency on the part of Hindi speakers who know some English, but are not that proficient, to pronounce the English word ‘lawyer’ the same way as ‘liar.’ The confusion that Binod feels is humorous, and meant to be, but is the joke on her, or him? She has switched to English to draw a line in the sand and introduce a tone of formality and distance. To her, the difference between communicating in English versus Hindi with Binod, a stranger who is more well-to-do and educated than her, is significant. Telling him in English to get out, she takes command of a potentially frightening situation. For a character like Binod, however, there is equal comfort in both languages. He is instead listening to her words, and looking for a further opening for discussion. The misunderstanding is subtly described, but speaks volumes about the differences in class and status between the two speakers.

Beyond the level of the word and the phrase, I was struck in particular by the way in which Kumar conveys so elegantly a sense of place. In descriptions of middle class homes, village houses, train compartments, street scenes—gone are the over-the-top forests of excess verbiage that Salman Rushdie turned into the best-selling formula for establishing the mise-en-scène of the Indian novel in English. The air is not dense with aromas of roasting spices, incense and excrement. The characters are not swathed in rich silk stuffs and draped in gobs of gold and precious stones. The descriptions of spaces are spare but evocative, such as this passage, in which Binod walks through the bedroom of his future wife for the first time, in order to use the bathroom:

He had never seen that part of the house before. It was a plain room, a thin mattress lying on a wooden bed that took much of the space, two metal wardrobes with new paint on them set against the wall, a desk and chair. On the wall was a poster nailed to the wall, showing a still from Pather Panchali, of the little boy Apu. The poster was for the film screening of Ray’s films organized by the Patna Cine Society. Inside the bathroom, the plastic buckets and mugs were stacked in bright, new colours. (p. 175)

Another familiar feature of Home Products is the prominent use of news stories, which are interwoven with the narrative as reporting assignments undertaken by Binod, or items in the newspaper, or discussion between family members. Most Hindi authors in the forties, fifties and sixties had been employed at one time or another by newspapers or All India Radio. Their intimate knowledge of the workings of daily papers is reflected deeply in the literature of that time period. In numerous canonical novels, the protagonist is a reporter, or at least an editor or a translator at a daily newspaper. This device is used to incorporate detailed descriptions of historical events, politicians and political movements within the narrative of the novels. Because a progressivist aesthetic dominated Hindi letters at that time, political events were integral to the narratives.

The news stories incorporated into Home Products don’t just set the stage (set against the backdrop of the Civil War!), they are part of the novel’s larger preoccupation with the truth, and how it is portrayed in writing and in film. While Binod is a journalist, his father is a documentary filmmaker. Their motivations and concerns and the stories that they record are contrasted throughout with discussions of actual Bollywood movies and with Binod’s, and later Rabinder’s, attempts to come up with a film script to attract the attention of a prominent Bombay director who has taken in interest in Binod. While Binod and his father attempt to embrace the truth as fully as possible in their journalism and documentary filmmaking, Binod finds himself again and again unable to truly grasp what is needed to create the right mixture of ingredients for a Bollywood script, where the truth is the least important factor.

This distinction between realism and fantasy is underscored in a fascinating scene in which Binod, his cousin Rabinder, and their childhood friend Neeraj Dubey, who is now a successful Bombay star, sit and watch the classic 1979 Yash Chopra film Kaala Patthar together. Kaala Patthar is based on the 1975 Chasnala mining disaster in Bihar, and the three men sit down to watch it for the umpteenth time on the anniversary of the event, coincidentally the same day as the 2004 Tsunami disaster. As the film progresses, Rabinder and Neeraj are totally engrossed in the film, reciting vast tracts of dialogue along with the stars. Binod becomes increasingly disgusted at the careless liberties that have been taken with the historical facts, as he compares the film to the actual events that had taken place at Chasnala. Along with most other wholly inaccurate aspects of the story, he is bothered that the main character, played by Amitabh Bachchan, is not supposed to be Bihari, as if this would make him less appealing. In fact, most of the main characters are not meant to be Bihari in this film supposedly dealing with a tragedy that claimed the lives of 372 Bihari miners.

When the film is over, Binod says sarcastically:

“A Hindi film version of the tsunami disaster will begin with the animals sensing the disaster and leaving for higher ground. Our hero will notice this, even though it is the middle of the night. He will begin to walk back to the shore and start singing a song about the wind. People will wake up to the music and join him in a dance. Thus, they will be saved. But the people in the next village will not be so lucky. The hero will have to go there next…”
Dubey spoke without cynicism. “You are speaking as a writer. How would you do it differently?”
Binod said, “I’d be less sentimental. More honest.”
But Dubey misunderstood him. He thought Binod was saying to him that Hollywood would do this better. That India always needed to learn from the West. He said, “as in Titanic?”
“Why Titanic?” Binod asked. “Because there is water?”
Dubey said, “Because in that film the hero drowns.” (pp. 270-1)

Dubey does not understand what Binod means when he says he is looking for ‘honesty’ in the telling of the Chasnala disaster. Binod sees the Bollywood production of Kaala Patthar as a story distorted beyond all recognition by its telling in a fantasy mode. What he wants, for justice to be done to the tragic story, is realism, which he sees as the narrative style best suited to bringing forth the truth. But Dubey understands realism differently. To him, realism is Hollywood’s courage to present a lavish fantasy such as Titanic, and then rain on everyone’s picnic by killing off the hero. Bollywood is pure fantasy (and therefore more enjoyable) and realism is Hollywood—a narrative style that brings you to the theater and then makes you feel depressed by the darkness. Of course Dubey’s understanding of what Binod is saying is completely off the mark, and he doubtless would only have the dimmest understanding of what realism is. But the exchange brings out an important point about the tension between the realist mode of narration in literature and film and what genres are able to reveal ‘the truth’ about life in India.

Authenticity vs. Realism
In an article in the Boston Review called “Bad News: Authenticity and the South Asian Political Novel,” Kumar, who is also a critic, discusses a number of recent South Asian novels that showcase the so-called ‘dark side’ (another recent article also discusses this supposed new dark side trend) of life in India and Pakistan. The dark side is crime, corruption and poverty, as opposed to previous Indian novels in English, which are now considered more frothy (itself a dubious point, in that the frothy novels, which do depict the privileged upper middle class lives of their characters at length also throw in vast sections on social ills—think, for example of A Suitable Boy and The Inheritance of Loss). Besides offering incisive critiques of several newer novels, such as The White Tiger and The Case of Exploding Mangoes, Kumar also offers us insight into his own struggles with writing Home Products, and the anxiety experienced by the NRI or upper-middle-class South Asian writer attempting to write authentically about the ‘real’ India.

In his discussion of the Booker Award-winning The White Tiger, Kumar worries about his own negative reaction to the novel’s stereotypical and demeaning depiction of Biharis (the state of Bihar itself is referred to as ‘Darkness’ in the novel):

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic.
….
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know. Look at Jhumpa Lahiri, who has assiduously mined the experience of Bengali immigrants of a fixed class. She is one of the better ones, writing about what she knows; lesser writers have been content to churn out what we all know: arranged marriage, dowry, saris, and spices.

Kumar goes on to discuss and quote an oft-cited article that also appeared in the Boston Review, “The Cult of Authenticity,” by Vikram Chandra. In that article, Chandra argues against charges of inauthenticity leveled against him and other Indian writers of English.

For the sins of their advantages, the gods visit upon some of the comfortable in India a powerful guilt. Those who are comfortable and speak English are burdened by a double guilt. Convinced that they are marooned by their comfort and their language, these good burghers are assailed by a constant, oppressive sense of unreality. If you’ve spent any time in Delhi, or read much Indian critical writing, you will have met the FabIndia-kurta wearing gentleman and the ethnic-bindi wearing lady who will wave their Scotches in your face and tell you that the “Real India” is anywhere but where you are, that the “Real India” is in the urban slums, in the faraway villages of Bihar, in the jungles of the tribals. So if you write in English, and are improperly contaminated by the West, if you’ve travelled across the Black Waters and lost your caste, then the “Real India“ is by definition beyond your grasp. “Real India” is never here, it is always there. “Real India” is completely unique, incomprehensible to most, approachable only through great and prolonged suffering, and unveils herself only to the very virtuous.

To Chandra’s call for the freedom to choose one’s subject matter and one’s own ‘real India,’ Kumar counters:

Chandra’s argument against the impossible-to-satisfy and hypocritical demand for purity is liberating. Yet I wonder where that leaves criticism. Does Chandra’s injunction to writers–“Be fearless, speak fearlessly to your readers, wherever they are”–not also apply to critics?
His opponent in the essay is an academic critic; Chandra shrewdly graphs himself as the street-smart writer. There is a lesson in this. Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.

To my mind, the so-called “authenticity debate” is a red-herring. Authenticity is a slippery quality that seems better suited to descriptions of food (“that restaurant serves a truly authentic Paella”) or artisanal crafts (“her wall-hangings are made with authentic Native American wools and dyes”) than for characterization and dialogue in fiction-writing. What seems to me to be at stake, beyond the upper class guilt of his accusers that Chandra cites, or the exile’s distanced perspective that troubles Kumar, is the art and craft of creating a realist narrative. Kumar seems to move just shy of this conclusion when he continues:

Unlike Chandra, I don’t think there is freedom at hand from the entire question of authenticity, largely because there is no escape from the yearning for the real. The painfully real, the brilliantly, euphorically real, the emphatically real. Either in our lives, or in our writing.

Realism is not reportage, and even in a novel such as Home Products, which is told from the narrative perspective of a reporter, the inclusion of Binod’s journalistic assignments, his reactions to them, his interviews with subjects of his stories is a form of realistic (meaning in the realist mode) writing. In Kumar’s critique of Adiga’s stereotyped portrayals of Biharis in The White Tiger, he is not saying that these portrayals are ‘inauthentic,’ he is saying that in their obvious cartoonishness, they are unsuccessful (and in their de-humanizing stereotyping, also offensive) in the art of realism.

Writing realism set in India is a special challenge, and the arguments about authenticity as well as ongoing discussions about whether or not an author has ‘captured’ (as a snapshot) a particular slice of life successfully seem more to do with the endless obstacles in using one language spoken by a relative few to create the illusion of even just one small corner of a society that is deeply multi-layered in terms of language, culture and class. Like a bas-relief sculptor, an author must make us feel that we are seeing multiple dimensions while using what amounts to a possibly limiting single layer of language. Even if words from Indian languages are thrown in, there are limits to how much this can be done before the narration gets bogged down under the weight of too many words from other languages.

I don’t wish to end on a note that implies that one kind of story-telling, or one kind of aesthetic, is objectively better than another. Reading literature is not running a science experiment and ultimately we will read whatever books subjectively please us. On the other hand, a novel like Home Products is not only an excellent read, but it also avoids reifying the dehumanizing and possibly dangerous stereotypes about an under-privileged area, while simultaneously opening up for readers all around the world the complexities of the every day lives of people living in the flyover country that is Bihar. If you like that sort of thing.

*Astute Hindiwallah reader VJ has pointed out to me that the word ‘aanchalik’ is derived from the Hindi word ‘anchal’ (beginning with a short ‘a’), meaning ‘region,’ and not from ‘aanchal,’ which means ’sari border.’ The two words do, however, share a common Sanskrit root, and so can be assumed to have some relationship, and it is more than likely that Renu chose the title “Maila Aanchal” for his Aanchalik novel in order to invite fuse the connotations of the homophonous and related words. Always the language learner, never the learned.

Very Promising new collection of essays on Pakistan. It will make a fine addition to this.

Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan
Edited by Naveeda Khan
Published by: Routledge India
Publication Date: 23/02/2010
Pages: 544

About the Book
Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self.

The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now, many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities. The arguments made in the book say that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy and therefore, can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements
Foreword, Veena Das, series editor

Introduction, Naveeda Khan

Part I: Artificiality of the State
1. Towards a Lyric History of India – Aamir Mufti
2. The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State – Tahir Hasnain Naqvi
3. A Real Terrorist- Oskar Verkaaik
4. Re-imagining the “Land of the Pure”: A Sufi Master reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity- Robert Rozehnal

Part II The Difficulty of Nationalist Visions
5. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 70s- Iftikhar Dadi
6. Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistani Army, Violence and Memories of 1971- Yasmin Saikia
7. Strength of the State Meets Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labor Struggle in Karachi- Kamran Asdar Ali
8. Jamaat-I Islami Pakistan: Learning from the Left – Humaira Iqtidar

Part III Foreignness Within
9. From Muslims to Apostates: The Legal Construction of Muslim Identity and Ahmadi Difference- Asad A. Ahmed
10. Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu and Muslim Publics in Bombay- Deepak Mehta
11. Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan- Sadia Abbas
12. Iqbal and Karbala – Syed Akbar Hyder

Part IV The Everyday
13. Look Who’s Talking Now: Voice and Authority in Pakistani Shi‘i Women’s Gatherings- Amy Bard
14. Madrassa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrollment in Pakistan- Tahir Andrabi,, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc
15. Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad- Matthew Hull
16. Mosque Construction or the Violence of the Ordinary- Naveeda Khan

Afterwords
Living the Tensions of the State, the Nation, and the Everyday- David Gilmartin

Anthropology and the Pakistani National Imaginary- Katherine Pratt Ewing

Bibliography
Note on the Editor
Notes on Contributors
Index

William Dalrymple by Lapata

“When you walk you are freed from the worries of ordinary life” – Kanai Das Baul.

“I know it is not exactly like every family, but in this burning ground, in this place of sorrow, we have found new hope.” – Manisha Ma.

There are nine lives but eleven stories. Prasannamati Mataji and Prayogamati, Jain nuns who renounce the world to walk (carefully); Hari Das, a Dalit thayyam dancer who channels god for three months; Rani Bai, a beautiful devdasi struggling with AIDS and poverty; Mohanji and Batasi, a Rajasthani bard of Pabu’s epic; Lal Peri, a Bihari sufi, living at Sehwan Sharif; Tashi Passang, a Tibetan monk who renounced his vows, fought in Bangladesh, and now hopes to make amends; Srikanda Stpathy, the Brahmin who makes idols; Manisha Ma and Tapan Sadu, the Tara devotees who live in a crematorium; and Kanai Das Baul and Debdas Baul who sing their songs of syncretic devotion to the truth within us all. Eight of the nine lives in William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India belong to liminal beings – who flourish in ways incomprehensible to those of us desk-bound, foot-snared and upwardly-mobile. There is great sorrow, poverty, and pain attached to them, but along with those burdens, a great amount of love, self-awareness, devotion and humanity. Dalrymple lets them speak. To the reader, he provides some historical and theological context, but of the speakers, he asks simple and direct questions. Their answers, their stories, sometimes direct and sometimes summarized, comprise the social history of Nine Lives.

Others have written informed reviews of the book, you can seek them out, and I will point you to Wendy Doniger’s (in many ways, Nine Lives is to be read as a companion volume to her Hindus: An Alternative History). Let me instead just make a couple of points, in a somewhat splotchy manner.

In the Introduction, William Dalrymple writes that he “hopes to have avoided many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion”. Such clichés have, of course, a long and durable history since the seventeenth century. Partly governed by the self-righteousness of Christian belief and partly by wide-eyed wonder at incomprehensible practices, the Western observer has rarely moved beyond a descriptive text accompanied by a plea to some normative rule. I could re-hash this engagement – this Orientalism – but you are all enlightened beings. And though this Orientalism remained (actually remains), by the mid-18th century there were also leaps and bounds in the Western engagement with Indic religions – the provenance of what we can term lower-case-o-rientalism, an engagement that continues to this day.¹ William Dalrymple has certainly succeeded in presenting a humane, de-exotified account of these modern lives in India. But at least in one instance, he irritated me by re-stating hoary old clichés. Predictably, it is in his historical background. He writes on pg. 215:

These original esoteric medieval Tantric traditions nearly died out in India, sinking from view around the thirteenth century AD, probably partly as a result of the disruption that followed in the wake of the violence of the Islamic invasions, which broke many of the lines of guru-disciple relationships through which Tantric secrets were passed.

I would urge him to read his own chapter five, and his own discussion of Akbar or Dara Shikoh. Actually, scratch that, I want to know what disruption is he referring to in the thirteenth century. The beginnings of which were marked by an internecine struggle for domination over Multan, Lahore and Uch between the war lords Yildiz, Iltutmish and Qabbacha? The Mongols also disrupted a heck of a lot in Sindh and Delhi. But none of these were “disruptions” of sufficient socio-cultural force to reshape Tantric practices across India. I know it’s a nit-picky point but this “disruption” talk is a slippery slappery slope which inevitably leads to ahistorical claims of victimhood and vengeance. Dalrymple’s text – being a bestseller in India – will undoubtedly be used in ways and means un-intended by its author. So I pick nits.

The sub-title tells us that we are to learn about “Modern India” from these accounts. Insofar as these are contemporary lives, yes. As usual, a caveat floats up. By their practices or their thoughts, the people Dalrymple profiles do exert a tremendous influence on everyday life in their respective communities, but it is worth noting that they either consciously rejected those very communities (by their vows) or their caste and creed create an unsurmountable barrier – often of poverty – between them and the majority population. Dalrymple never directly provides the point of view of that overwhelming majority of South Asia who likes their religion compartmentalized, regulated, clear-cut, and restrained. They too represent a “sacred”. Perhaps it takes no great talent to imagine how those lives play out – the desire for a steady income, a good house, happy parents or children, prayers at prescribed times or places and a ready tendency to get suckered in by authority figures. Perhaps it is enough to just note that those other sacreds swim in turbulent waters of communalism, sectarianism, stringency to thought and practice and, sometimes, extremism. Maybe those other lives are more readily accessible from our daily news-reports. Yet, the “mainstream” lives also provide the essential stage upon which these nine lives play out. Leaving them out – only the idol maker Srikanda Stpathy is a middle class Brahmin – forces us to conclude that the only paths to sacred lie outside of everyday lives.

Related, is the issue of the nine human beings themselves. They are our contemporaries – not composites, not historical figures. They live and breath with us (Sadly, Dalrymple notes, Mohanji passed away). And they do so, by choice or by fates, in abject poverty and in harsh circumstances. As I read their stories, as I got to know them, I felt responsible towards them – as a human being. Their thoughts, and their actions, had made me think, made me reflect, and made me tear up. What happens to them, after the chapter ends. I really wanted Dalrymple to tell me the after-tale. I know that some of the musicians, singers Dalrymple profiles became part of a concert series which gave the world exposure to their amazing talent and stories (and I hope gave them both direct and indirect financial support). This was truly a commendable act by Dalrymple, for which he deserves far greater accolades than for chronicling their lives alone. I do hope that Manisha Ma, Lal Peri, and Rani Bai are also beneficiaries in some sense of this generosity.

I admit that all this was an excuse to get the incredibly au courant Lapata to paint a portrait of Dalrymple, which she has, and which crowns these meagre notes.

1. And lest you think, as most do, that this burden of polluted imagination lies solely upon the shoulder of the White Man, let me tell you about ‘Ajaib al-Hind. The Muslim rule in Sindh began in the eighth century, but until the tenth and eleventh century we find travel accounts (produced by merchants and sailors) of al-Hind wa’l Sind (the Indian peninsula as it was known in Arabic sources) largely focused on lists of commodities, communities and exotic sacred beings and practices. This archive is often termed as ‘Ajaib al-Hind (Wonders of India). We can trace this back to Greek sources, but that is less important at the moment. What is worth noting is that this genre contained an Indian “sacred” which was miraculous, awe-inspiring, and exotic. The sadhus, yogis, mendicants and ascetics who populated these tenth and eleventh century writings were little more than literary tropes wrenched into circumscribed lives by the collective imaginations in the milieu. India was the “Other” wherein both beauty and horror commingled to great heights. It is only after the balance of power shifted from Baghdad to Ghazni and the twelfth/thirteenth century migrations took place, that the Indian exotic became the local color and eventually acquired its own Islamic gloss and its own comprehensible logic.

[Acknowledgments: This paper was part of a conference panel; I want to thank my fantastic co-panelists: Abhijeet Paul and Anis Ahmed who wrote about Bengali literature; and the unfailingly insightful Aditya Adarkar, our discussant. I want to especially thank Richard Delacy, whose many keen insights into the use and abuse of Manto have most definitely informed my thinking. And, perhaps most importantly of all, my students in the many Partition lit courses I taught at Loyola University Chicago, where I was a visiting - where are you visiting from, Dr. Lapata? - assistant professor for five action-packed years.]

They do not want to

These works differ very much in form, in agenda, in style, in focus. All of these works present powerful portraits of all different aspects of the enormity of the Partition. But are they driven by tragedy? Are they portraits of pain? I am not entirely sure that this would be a fair characterization. If we look at the entire oeuvre of each author, we find that their Partition writings fit into larger agendas. There is always a danger of treating the realistic progressivist prose of so many writers in Hindi and Urdu in the twentieth century as journalistic or ethnographic writing, stripping it of its literary-ness. Neither Yashpal nor Manto, for example, were eyewitnesses to the Partition violence that they so eloquently describe. Both relied on oral narratives and the newspaper archive for their realistic descriptions, but all the same, their Partition writings fit into wider agendas, tropes and styles within their own writing and the literary and aesthetic imperatives of the day.

Nor they

…the tragic death of a lonely young woman whose nude body had been found on the roadside in Gujrat. … According to newspaper reports published that day she and her little baby had died of exposure after she had been kidnapped from a waiting room of a bus terminal, ravished by over half a dozen brutes and allowed to run out of their den, without a stitch of clothing, into the freezing wintery night.¹

For Manto, one might surmise, the Partition fit with a pre-existing authorial agenda and inspiration-gathering method. The news reports, the dark hints at depravity and the hearsay circulating in Bombay and Lahore in those days would have fueled his writing naturally.

And nor do these

For the Hindi writer Yashpal, the events of the Partition and their aftermath also fit well into an existing trajectory. Yashpal, a former freedom fighter in the Bhagat Singh group and a Marxist, literature was a space in which to explore the possibilities for the politicization of individual consciousness and applying Marxist philosophy to daily life. Beginning his novel-writing career with Dada Comrade, the story of a young freedom fighter and union organizer, Yashpal went on to write many progressivist short stories and novels, among them his great novel of the partition, Jhutha Sac. Though the first volume of Jhutha Sac contains a painstaking chronicle of the political and popular events that led to the Partition from the viewpoint of a young Hindu-Khatri Marxist newspaper reporter in Lahore, he gradually shifts his focus to the protagonist’s sister, who undergoes a series of atrocities, not the least of which is suffered at the hands of her own family, who arrange her marriage to a despicable RSS volunteer. The main villain emerges as her brother, Puri, the Marxist newspaper reporter, who proves incapable of living out his Marxist ideals in the face of his shame regarding rumors of his sister’s romance with a fellow party member who is a Muslim. These rumors endanger his budding relationship with a Brahmin girl and bring to the fore his deeply engrained bourgeois mentality and class consciousness. For Puri, Marxism is something for public life, but not for private life.

Is This What You Were Born For?

Manto’s Siya Hashiye and Yashpal’s Jhutha Sac may in some ways capture the experience of pain or cope with the tragedy of the Partition, but it is also important to look at the imperatives of the individual narratives and those of their authorial and literary contexts. Much of the current movement toward scholarship on the Partition and writing about Partition literature is driven by the very real urgency of the political and social climate of communalism today in South Asia. Many authors write of the shocking repetition of patterns of violence which have spurred on their work: Godra, the Babri Masjid, the 1974 anti-Sikh violence, all of these inform our understanding of the legacy of Partition today. But as we seek to inform, remember and educate about the Partition, we should also try not to lose the specificity of individual voices. Partition literature does not bear witness to the events of 1947 in the same way as eyewitness accounts, journalism and oral histories. While “Toba Tek Singh” and other works of fiction may be an excellent way to open up discussion in the classroom, they are not shortcuts to grasping the trauma of displacement and violence during the Partition.

Major historical events lend themselves to fictional narratives precisely because massive population displacements caused by war or other disasters open up spaces in which to experiment with rearranging social hierarchies and imagining unexpected combinations of characters. Such events also bring out the extremes of human behavior, both the valorous and the base. The American Civil War, the Holocaust and the French Revolution, just to name a few, have all inspired a rich and various literature as well. This is not to impugn the motivations or the importance of the growing body of literature set during the Partition, or to imply that the works of Yashpal, for example, should be seen in the same category as some potboiler Civil War romance. But fiction does not fill the gaps in the historical record, good historiography does.

1. Saadat Hasan Manto. Black Milk: A Collection of Short Stories (Lahore: Sang- e-Meel Publications, 1997): 33