Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival – Part 1

[Random Shots: Journalist and novelist Tarun Tejpal interacting with his readers at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2013]

24 January 2013

On the first day, I attended three sessions: the Art of the Short Story, Ismat and Annie, and the Novel of the Future. I did not take any notes. I wrote down the following the next morning (from whatever I could remember). If some statements sound weird and don’t make sense to the readers, I take the blame for sloppiness and apologize in advance.

We don't tell novels, we tell short stories

The Short story: The Art of the Short Story panel had Nicholas Hogg, Richard Beard and Yiyun Li and Anjum Hasan was the moderator.

- Yiyun Li said show and tell is a wrong advice

- Bring the narrator back

- She said she represents only herself (not any group or community as a writer)

- Length in a story does not matter; she refused to reduce the length of a story just to get into The New Yorker

Anjum Hasan referred to the Chekhovian Little Man (mentioned Frank O'Connor's book on short stories)

- Why do you write short stories: The panelists said that one is able to explore other lives through short stories

- Short stories are great as a genre as they allow great room for experimentation (for example, the stories of Georges Perec)

The panelists were of the opinion that short story as a genre is not dying; it will live as long as there will be human beings. It is very natural for us—we don't tell novels, we tell short stories

Ismat and Annie

This session was about two famous Urdu fiction writers: Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Haider.

In this session, Javed Akhtar and Ameena Saiyid (head of OUP, Pakistan) were in conversation with Syed Shahid Mahdi.

Javed Akhtar: Both Ismat and Annie (Haider) were rebels in their own way. Annie was from an aristocratic background and was scholarly; if she was confident about something, she would put her foot down. Otherwise, she would say I don't know anything about it; tell me about it. She would quote from magazines and books. She would think in terms of centuries. 

Ismat was more from a middle class background. She was a fighter and was so dogged that even if she had said something wrong and she knew it, she would stick to her point. She thought in terms of mosaic, short stories.

In this session, Javed Saheb said some very interesting things about the Urdu and Hindi divide, which he considers an artificial divide. He said that what we commonly speak in India is Urdu or Hindustani. But what is people’s attitude? When do they think one is speaking Urdu and not Hindi? “Jab kah (baat) samajh me aaye toh who Hindi hai. Jab samajh me aana band ho jaye toh Urdu hai.” 

He exhorted people to learn Urdu if they wanted to enjoy the works of genii like Ismat and Annie. “Learning Urdu is not that difficult,” he said. “Learn the script. Don’t just look at the script and run away scared. Doosre ki galiyan hamesha tedhi medhi lagti hain.”

In the futuristic scenario, everybody is a writer, no one is reader

“The Novel of the Future” was a very interesting session. The participants were Howard Jacobson, Nadeem Aslam, Linda Grant, Zoe Heller and Lawrence Norfolk and the moderator was Anita Anand. Mohammad Hanif was supposed to be a part of the panel but he did not show up. Later on, I found out that he got his visa too late in the day and cancelled his plans to come to Jaipur.

The discussion opened with a reference to the famous Naipaulian claim that the novel is dead. Long ago Naipaul had declared that the novel is dead.

Nadeem Aslam: The novel's health is not exhausted in my study.  If you say the novel is exhausted, it means you are exhausted.

Howard Jacobson: Looking at the success of Fifty Shades (the trilogy by E L James), we are doomed. 

The problem is with readers, not novels

Everyone wants to write, not read

Meeting authors has replaced necessity to read

We need novels. It is an argument, not a single voice of dictatorship.

In the futuristic scenario, everybody is a writer, no one is reader.

Anna Karenina is a young adult novel.

Don't change your writing to suit the market; stick to your style, at any cost, and your audience will change

Zoe Heller: What is worrying is that kids are losing the art of reading long fiction; they have short attention spans.

What's happening in the US will happen in India too. The market for novels is shrinking in the US. The same will happen in India in the future even though right now the market here is expanding.

Howard: Don’t read novels for information. Novels have no information to provide.

Others

Someone asked: What about the novel in the e-form, with embedded video and all that jazz we could do with the form in a digital age? Answer: Novels will change—like a parachute, with trimmed strings. Will the parachute remain the same and will provide the same functionality if you trimmed it strings?

E-books are not same as the hard copy novels.

Nadeem: You don’t need video and music to be embedded in the novel’s pages. The words, the sentences, they should evoke the music and picture in your head.

Voices from the Jaipur Literature Festival

There was a time when India barely had any literary festivals. There were readings and book launches, there were mushairas and kavi sammelans but not literary festivals—it is a western import like the ‘novel’.

Just as there is an epidemic of novel-writing in India these days, there is also an outbreak of literary festivals in the country. Every city worth its salt has a lit fest going on and writers, publishers and readers aren’t exactly complaining. In India, when we like something, we tend to go overboard. The same is true of lit fests. But I hope we stop at the city level and don’t take literary festivals to the mohalla level. A Kirti Nagar literary festival or a Jorbagh lit fest does not sound right. A reading group would be much more appropriate at that level.

I was recently in Chennai and one of my friends told me that his daughter who is in third standard wants to become a writer. That’s great, I said. When I was in school, I could barely get my head around what was happening in the classroom, let alone think of becoming a writer. India’s new generation will take the country to another level. Who will not welcome such glad tidings about India?

On my way to the Jaipur literature festival (JLF) this January, I was pondering why was there so much growing interest in reading and writing in India now? Why so many literary festivals? While this is a welcome pandemic, there must be some robust reasons behind it.

I found the answer in one of the sessions by Javed Akhtar Saheb, who is a well-known poet, screenplay writer and Hindi film lyricist. His name has become synonymous with JLF. He and Gulzar Saheb (though the latter was absent this year or maybe I missed him at the festival) have been crowd-pulling festival regulars.

In one of his sessions, Javed Saheb had this to say about the revival of our interest in the arts: “We had abandoned language and arts in the last 30-40 years. We wanted cars and fridges. Now today's generation takes them for granted. They want something else. They want arts, and literature, and so this revival.” What he says makes sense. Perhaps it is even true. But is this view too simplistic?

I am asking this because a danger lurks around the corner of this insight. While lit fests are an endearing feature of a changing India (along with the nationwide ban on plastic bags), they could signal something else altogether and “Booker-award winning” novelist Howard Jacobson had this point to make which is equally convincing: Today, we have more writers than readers. We complain of the death of the novel. But the problem is with readers, not novels. Everyone wants to write, and no one wants to read. Meeting authors has replaced the necessity of reading.

He had made this point in one of his columns too—I remember reading it. He was, in his column, referring to a literary city like London. The point he is making it this—are literary festivals replacing the reading habit? Is meeting authors, listening to their talks and getting their autographs enough to qualify us to skip the hard work of actually reading their books?

On a panel discussion on the future of the novel, Howard Jacobson was at his cantankerous best, and I loved everything he said. Howard was among the three writers this year who drew me to the festival—the other two were Yiyun Li and Musharraf Ali Farooqi. I admire all three of them (I heard them but did not meet them in person; I did not even take their picture. I just listened to them and took mental notes).

This was my first time at JLF and the festival was as colourful and cacophonous as I had expected it to be. In its first edition years ago, it had attracted 7,000 people. This time the organizers said footfall was about 2 lakhs (Sounds like a mall, doesn’t it?). Getting a seat was always a problem at the festival but people were unfazed. They fought for seats.

While the festival attracts top writers from all over the world, one reason for its popularity is Bollywood. Members of India’s film fraternity are an integral part of the festival (Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Shabana Azmi, and this year Neelesh Misra too was introduced to the public). Not satisfied with their popularity, this year the festival organisers added cricket and religion to the mix to a great effect. We had Dalai Lama and Rahul Dravid at the fest who injected a dose of spirituality and sports into the milieu in their own way.

But this was not everybody’s idea of how a lit fest should be. At the same time when Dravid’s session was going on, eminent Hindi writers like Ashok Chakradhar, Ikraam Rajasthani and Atul Kanakk were holding a session on ‘Navras’. The crowd was going hysterical on Dravid’s side (Tata Steel lawns). Ashok made us do a ‘ho ho’ too as a counterpunch to the other side’s level of enthusiasm: it was cricket vs Hindi and the audience did not let Hindi down. It was good fun.

To enter the venue, one had to go through many security checks. But this was not that unpleasant, and once inside, you were in for a treat. Colourful tents, sunshine, bookstores, art and craft shops, people with elongated lenses attached to their cameras, autograph hunters, writers, and food for thought. A lot was going on inside the barricaded Diggi Palace. Besides the chai in earthen cups and pyaaz kachodi with delicious chutney, there was a variety of food available at Diggi Palace. Unfortunately, smoking was banned on the second day but we saw many foreigners smoking away, oblivious to the promised fine of Rs 200 that had been imposed on those who smoked inside the festival venue. When my friend complained to the police, they said, “Kya Karen Saheb? Yeh toh foreigners hain.” (What to do, sir? These are foreigners). My desi friend’s cigarettes had been impounded at the entrance of the Diggi Palace and so he was angry. If JLF organizers are reading this, they should designate smoking areas at the festival venue. Smokers will smoke and if you force them to do it surreptitiously, they become fire hazards. So please, be a little more practical.

The auto wallahs had a field day during the festival. They happily overcharged us everyday from the venue (some 7 kilometers) to our hotel. They justified the overcharging by saying that the traffic is very bad because of the police bandobast. Many fellow attendees I talked to said that orgainsers should arrange bus service to hotels. Another great suggestion.

I had hoped to meet Musharraf Ali Farooqi (whose work of translation, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, I had been enjoying) at the Random House party on January 25 but unfortunately the party was moved to another day because it fell on a dry day. I had to return to Delhi the next day, so I missed the party altogether. We were, however, on the same flight from Delhi to Jaipur and that was a consoling thought.

On the way back to Delhi, I saw newsman Rajdeep Sardesai (CNN-IBN) boarding our plane. He kept to himself and after landing in Delhi, on the bus to the terminal, I got a seat right in front of him. A lady with a toddler was too excited to see him and when she could not contain her excitement, she asked the man: Are you Rajdeep Sardesai? Rajdeep politely smiled and nodded yes. The woman beamed for a while at this affirmation. Soon, we reached the airport terminal and went our separate ways.

During the festival, I did not mob anyone for autographs. I did not buy any books as I had already ordered the books that I wanted to buy through Flipkart. All I had were some good memories, and there were voices from the festival that echoed in my head. I was glad that this year the festival did not generate any controversy. I was so wrong.

The next day I read of the Ashish Nandy controversy in the papers. I had completely missed it but I could not stop smiling. JLF and controversy go hand in hand now—last time, it was Rushdie (in absentia) and this time, Nandy.

Tales from Timbuktu

For most of us, Timbuktu has been a noun and an adjective—a shorthand for a far off place. I also knew of Timbuktu as the title of a Paul Auster novel. Over the decades, Timbuktu has come to acquire the same kind of mystic aura that is reserved for places like Casablanca, thanks to the classic Hollywood love story. What has happened in the case of places like Casablanca and Timbuktu is that cinema and literature have turned a real place into a mythical landscape

Yet, in the last few days, Timbuktu has been hogging the limelight for all the wrong reasons—the desert town had been captured by Tuareg nationalist rebels and Islamic extremists and the French army had to intervene to flush them out.

In the process, it was reported that something very precious was lost—a treasure trove of ancient Greek and Islamic texts. The rebels had torched a library (The Ahmed Baba Institute) that was the repository of these ancient texts. They also destroyed some sufi shrines, “claiming such shrines were forbidden” in their version of intolerant Islam.

 

The loss was mourned internationally and it was on the news everywhere. The rebels, who were adamant on imposing shariah laws, were condemned. 

You can’t miss two ironies here. One, Islamic extremists setting fire to texts that were part of their own heritage. They were not the infidel Mongols who had raided and destroyed the ancient libraries in Baghdad in 1258. During the siege of Baghdad, many books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy were destroyed. The siege marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age.

Two, the saviours in Timbuktu were the French. In 1789, when Napoleon entered Cairo and “vigorously appeased conservative Muslim clerics in the hope they might form the bulwark of pro-French forces in the country,” there were many revolts against his occupation. “Many other Muslims saw plainly the subjugation of Egypt by a Christian from the West as a catastrophe;” writes Pankaj Mishra in his brilliant book, From the Ruins of the Empire, “and they were vindicated when French soldiers, while suppressing the facts against their occupation, stormed the al-Azhar mosque, tethered their horses to the prayer niches, trampled the Korans under their boots, drank wine until they were helpless and then urinated on the floor.”

One can argue what Napolean’s army did was more an act of bravado, showing how they could morally subjugate an occupied people and disrespect their culture; something quite different from an act of pure philistinism as was demonstrated by the fleeing extremists in Timbuktu.

How do we square these ironies? Let’s put it this way: time heals everything, people are ennobled by forces of civilisation and there is redemption in God’s kingdom.

Now, let us come back to the present.

While peace has returned to Timbuktu, new stories about the burning of manuscripts are coming out into the public. I read in today’s newspaper that all has not been lost.

According to a report in the IHT, the imam of a mosque in Timbuktu was able to save 8,000 volumes of ancient manuscripts by moving them into a bunker in an undisclosed location—that was before the attack. “These manuscripts, they are not just for us in Timbuktu,” said Ali Imam Ben Essayouti. “They belong to all of humanity. It is our duty to save them.”

And that’s the point I want to make here: it is our duty to save them. So what can be done?

While the act of this saviour Imam is laudable, something more needs to be done by the international community, and organisations like UNESCO and Google can really help in this matter.

Given the kind of turmoil the Middle East and Africa are going through, won’t it be wise to get all ancient manuscripts scanned and digitally saved? UNESCO knows where all these treasure troves are. Google already has a global book scanning project on. If we do this, we need not fear the extremists torching ancient libraries anywhere in the world anymore. Not that we want it to happen, but better safe than sorry.

Implications of an Indian Gang-rape

My opinion piece in the Asia Sentinel today:

The moment I heard that the Delhi gang-rape victim was being flown into Singapore, I knew what was going on. That unfortunate woman, whom we will call Amanat, was the victim of a horrible gang rape and mutilation at the hands of a bunch of hoodlums in Delhi. She was clinging to her life. Doctors had removed parts of her intestines at Safdarjung Medical Hospital and she was surviving on life support. It was difficult to imagine that she would be able to live.

As has been reported across the world, generating spreading outrage, the victim, a paramedical student, was brutally raped and assaulted in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of Dec 16. Moving her to Singapore was clearly a political decision. If she had died in Delhi, the public outrage, which was already bursting out of control (a constable, Subhash Tomar, had died during the violent demonstrations at India Gate in Delhi), would get even more fierce. News of her death coming from Singapore would be much more manageable for the establishment. This is exactly what happened. 

Right after the news of the victim being moved to Singapore flashed across TV channels, I tweeted about the same from my Twitter account. So far, I had avoided saying anything about the girl or the tragedy that had rightly incensed Indians across the world; not that my saying anything on this issue mattered-I am hardly Sonia or Rahul Gandhi. 

My response was mute because for years I had been reading about crimes against women in India, including rape, mutilation, murder and communal humiliation (being paraded naked on the streets or in villages by men). In 1994, Shekhar Kapur had made a stunning film on this subject-Bandit Queen. The film was based on the life of Phoolan Devi, a poor girl who turns into a dreaded dacoit after high-caste men in her village gang-rape her. 

Over the years, I have read too many reports to count of girls being kidnapped and raped in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR), including many of such crimes being committed on buses (I personally dreaded living in Delhi for the lack of safety and also worried about my family members when they were out on the streets). Every time I read such hideous stories, I would be filled with anger and revulsion. And it was not just Delhi where such crimes were rampant. It had been happening all over the country. 

Read the full story here at Asia Sentinel.

Why I wrote The Singapore Decalogue?

My first collection of short stories, The Singapore Decalogue: Episodes in the Life of a Foreign Talent (Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2012) was released in November this year at the Singapore Writers Festival. The book was supported by the National Arts Council Singapore under the Arts Creation Fund grant.

In this collection of short stories, I have tried to create vignettes of life in Singapore. This is my tribute to this city state, which has built its social capital with great wisdom, civic sense, and quotidian practicality.

Like many modern metros, the Lion City is compact, with people of various ethnicity and nationalities living side by side. Though they live mostly secluded, private lives, there are times when their paths cross. This civic commingling of people can be harmonious or chaotic, depending on the circumstances.

In these stories, I have tried to portray the hopes and frustrations of a few interconnected characters (that was truer for the earlier draft when the characters were varied). The bustling metropolis attracts all kinds of people who want to make a life here. What happens to their dreams? What kind of struggles do they go through? Do they feel alienated? What do they love about the city? And so on.

Through the panoply of characters, mainly built around a main character, Asif Basheer, an aspiring poet from India, I have woven together a web of stories that throw light on various contemporary themes. The initial aspiration, following in the footsteps of Tolstoy and the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (especially his film cycle, The Decalogue), was to explore themes based on the Ten Commandments, but I finally transformed the idea. I was anxious, even afraid, that the stories might come across as too moralistic or formulaic if I went down that route. Nevertheless, my moral concerns about making choices in life still shaped and informed the stories in The Singapore Decalogue.

As I have said elsewhere, more than a writer I am an inspired reader. In terms of actual inspiration behind the stories in this collection, there were many influences—both from life that I have seen from close quarters and from books that I have read over the years. So, in these stories, besides expressing my appreciation of the city and its people, I have also tried to pay my debt to many of my favourite writers and their works that I have benefitted from. The first story, that introduces the main character, is my homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky. In fact, the story begins in the same way as the master’s novel, Crime and Punishment. His protagonist, Raskolnikov, a conflicted and aspiring intellectual, finds a modern day reflection in my main character, Asif Basheer. As the stories unfold, we become privy to Asif’s trials and tribulations and see life in Singapore through his life’s prism. We meet characters who interact with Asif or come into his life. In the earlier version, Asif’s story culminates in a bizarre incident in Boat Quay—Singapore’s commercial heart but that has changed in the final version.

In the original version, the last story summed up the aspects of Asif’s life in epistolary form and it was meant to be my tribute to Gustave Flaubert who wrote some of the most beautiful and passionate letters that I have ever read. In my view, this completed an arch—the first story and the last—as both Dostoevsky and Flaubert were contemporaries in 19^th century Europe, and died one year apart (1880 and 1881 respectively). This was how I had tried to connect the past with the present. No matter how times change, people and their hopes and sufferings remain the same. Besides these two great writers, there are stories in the collection that are inspired by the styles of my other favourite writers—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Hanif Kureishi. Initially, my model was Joyce’s Dubliners in which he tried a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. A lot changed from the initial idea but that was what I had in my first draft.

A note of explanation here: by dropping big names (Joyce, Hemingway, et al.) I don’t claim any greatness for myself (how could I?). That would be preposterous and arrogant of me (some have already charged me of being a snob because I don’t like most of the books that are being published today, especially fiction—so I don’t want to aggravate matters here). I am doing that because I want to acknowledge my debt and put on record that I drew inspiration from their works, and that I feel a sense of kinship with them (as many reader would feel towards their favorite writers).

The first draft of The Singapore Decalogue was ready in 2011 and as I started working on the book with my publisher and my editor, the contours of the collection began to change. The publishers had liked the opening story, Crime and Punishment, so much that they wanted to have Asif Basheer, the main protagonist, as the lead in each story. That was not my plan.  This meant that I had to drop almost half the stories from the collection and write new ones. I needed some time to do that. By that time, I was also working on my non-fiction book, The Resurgence of Satyam, and had started work on a screenplay. So, there was a hiatus between the first batch of stories that I wrote in 2010-2011 and the later stories that went into the collection. They were written after July 2012.

I still like some of the stories that were dropped from the first draft. Who knows? They might go into The Singapore Decalogue 2.

Copies of The Singapore Decalogue are available at Kinokuniya, Singapore for purchasing and at all branches of National Library Singapore (NLB) for borrowing. 

Share this:

Tokyo Not Cancelled

We (I was accompanied by my wife) reached Tokyo in the afternoon of November 24. We were very tired as we had to leave house around 3am to catch the 6am Delta flight. Not only we were tired, we were very hungry too. We had a quick sandwich at Starbucks before we boarded the flight. I could hardly sleep on the plane as I am always tempted to watch movies on a flight and I always have a backlog of movies that I wish to watch.

Just two days before the flight to Tokyo I had watched almost an hour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel en route to Bangkok and had loved it completely (especially the humour in the film). So, during the flight to Tokyo, I first watched that movie (from where I had left it off) and I don't regret it. Perhaps it was the best film of this year for me. Many Indians, including myself, dislike India for its crowd, squalor and poverty, and the film sort of showed me how to see the same situation in a different light ("In India, life is not a right," says one character. "It's a privilege."). That is the beauty of the film.If you haven't watched it, you must. There is a lot of good humour in the film. I thought it was a well-written movie.

Coming from Singapore, almost any airport in the world will disappoint me--in terms of ease of movement, layout and sheer opulence. Narita was no different. Anyway, the immigration process was very smooth and after collecting our bags, we boarded the Narita Express (NEX) to our hotel in Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is one of those little districts in Tokyo where high life and low life come together in a confluence. Our hotel was a short walk away from the station (the world's busiest railway junction, says the guide book). After checking into our hotel, we rested for a while in the room--even for a four-star hotel, the room was very small: a double bed, a desk, and one chair. There wasn't any cupboard in the room. And there was a narrow space between the bed and the wall, narrow enough to put a suitcase down. Freshly pressed robes waited for us. There was TV which had only Japanese channels on it: I found one channel where a man was furiously talking about some products. The shower room was even smaller but the snazzy toilet seat more than compensated for it. It had some amazing functions and I wonder why hasn’t the world (or, at least Singapore) adopted technologically advanced Japanese toilets? Think of it: today we carry so much advanced smartphones but when it comes to toilets, we have not evolved much. It is a shame.

After a while, we hit the streets. It was evening and it was very cold, and we admired our cleverness that we had packed enough winter clothing to brave the Tokyo weather. The streets around Shinjuku had a quaintness to them—small, narrow streets, with small, little shops and lots of neon signs and locals, mostly youngsters, pounding them in groups. My wife thought we were back in the 70s. Despite the cold, it seemed there was enough cheerfulness in the atmosphere and it didn't seem like a country that had been stuck in economic stagnation for decades now.  The traffic was slow and there didn't seem to be a mad rush for anything (or was it because it was a Saturday?), and many people rode bicycles on the streets. Even the taxis looked of an old vintage but they were all in good condition. The whole atmosphere reminded me of a Dev Anand film shot in the 1970s or 80s. My wife was right about the feel of the district.

Next to our hotel and across the street there were plenty of vending machines. That's where I first saw vending machines that dispensed cigarettes. Also, every now and then, one would find a Family Mart or a Seven Eleven store to buy items of daily and frequent use, including food items, water and fat, comic magazines that were sealed to prevent thumbing by browsing-happy readers.

The streets were packed with noodle bars and restaurants (the signs were sometimes vertically displayed, implying different restaurants at different levels of a building) and global fast food restaurants like McDonald's and KFC were easy to find. We also spotted a Yoshinoya outlet but it looked so different from what I had seen in Singapore that I decided not to enter it. There didn't even seem to be a menu at the counter.

Across the Shinjuku station, there was Takashimaya, the shopping complex of the same-name that we have on Orchard Road in Singapore. That's where we planned to spend the evening. On the way to the mall, we came across beautiful Christmas decorations. We saw people taking pictures around the decorations.

Even though the mall was sprawling, the layout of the stores seemed to be a bit confusing or maybe it needed many more trips to get used to it and find our way around with ease. We had spent nearly half an hour inside the mall and as we entered an elevator to go to the fifth floor, we had a taste of the famous Japanese earthquake. The elevator shook, the lights sputtered off and the doors forestalled. Luckily, we were not between two floors so all of us rushed out of the lift.

The mall's staff sprung into action: all elevators and escalators were jammed up, and they showed the shoppers the exits. I wanted to see Kinokuniya the bookstore but my wife didn't want to hang around anymore so we followed a bunch of locals who took the staircase down. Somehow we managed to get out of the building. Outside, people were milling round on the streets as if nothing had happened. We went to a Starbucks which was very crowded, (and it seems young people in Tokyo love hanging out in Starbucks) and ordered a cappuccino. We collected our drink and sat outside and as we began to sip it, we realized we had been given the wrong drink. But the cinnamon-flavoured tea tasted nice in the cold and we carried on, dropping any idea to complain to the café’s staff.

We had our dinner at McDonald's--we got some burgers and we had to ask for ketchup. It was really self-service in there as we had to clear the table after we had eaten--everyone was doing that in the restaurant. Japanese shops seemed to get along fine with minimal staff and we saw it everywhere. They could hardly speak English but communication was not a problem. Gestures and pictures supplemented pidgin English.

I slept at night wishing for our safety. There weren’t any more tremors that night.

The next morning we set for Odaiba, a reclaimed island next to the Tokyo Bay. The train ride across the Rainbow Bridge offered amazing vistas. We had to change three lines but the train rides were comfortable and the trains ran on time, exactly as I was told. Tokyo has one of the best metro systems in the world. They have about 16 lines in operation.

We entered one of the shopping malls in Odaiba and by the time we were done with our shopping it was dark outside. We had our lunch inside the mall--we ate the delicious beef bowls at Yoshinoya, and I put a check on my list. 

After coming back to our hotel room, we went out again. I had to see the original Kinokuniya in Tokyo and finally after asking a couple of helpful Japanese staff at Takashimaya, I was able to step inside the 6 story building that housed Kinokuniya. The annex (building) was old and the elevator didn't work. It was ten minutes before closing time and we had to use the escalators. I finally managed to reach the English language section of the bookstore which was on the 6th storey. Just for fun I asked them if they my books. They didn't have them. I bought a novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, for the sake of memory, and they kindly draped my copy with a cover. Nice gesture!

That night we had our dinner at KFC and the portions (true for both the pieces of chicken and fries) were really small. But the taste was fine.

The next morning we left Tokyo for the United States. The journey from the hotel to the Narita airport turned into our biggest adventure in Japan, and what was meant to be a 90 minutes journey turned into a 3 hour long rush. That is something I have to tell you when we meet (remember to ask me), and not write about it here. 

I bankrupted myself while writing Maximum City: Suketu Mehta

New York-based writer Suketu Mehta is one of my favourite writers. I became a fan of his writing (he also loves Hemingway and Naipaul like I do) when I read his autobiographical account of his experiences in Mumbai (where he was born and partly raised before his diamond trading merchant family moved to New York), Maximum City. The book was published in 2004 and I read it shortly after I moved to Singapore. I loved the book because it was not a chore to read; it was like watching a Bombay film. Why was it an easy read? Mehta explains in an interview:

"... the impression readers have that Maximum City is a quick read is a false one because it was certainly not a quick write. But it takes a lot—Hemingway taught me this—to make writing seem effortless. It took me a long time before I learned how to write simply. My early sentences back in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were long. As Indians we tend to like longer sentences."

Unlike many contemporary writers who are in a hurry to churn book after book, Suketu is a patient writer. He took seven years to research and write Maximum City. What I did not know though is that he had bankrupted himself while doing this book. This happened to him even though he had an advance from the publishers. In this interview with NDTV (Power of One), he reveals that he incurred a considerable amount of debt by the time he was done with the book. "When I finished my book, I was 40,000 dollars in debt," he tells NDTV's Srinivasan Jain.

How many writers will take this kind of risk?

In an interview with Karan Mahajan, Mehta revealed his method of working in Mumbai: he would hang out with his book's characters until 3 am and would write down everything between 3am and 6am:
  
"I wrote as I reported [in Bombay]. So I would meet, say, a gangster, I’d go hang out with him, then I’d go to the beer bars and meet Mona Lisa [an alias for the bar girl in Maximum City], and then I’d come back home at 3 a.m. From 3 to 6 a.m. I would just write. It was the easiest writing I ever did. It was all in my head and I needed to get it out in real time. So I wrote these long sections—it was great. I was on speed or something, not literally. Better than speed"

In the same interview, Mehta says he also loves to cook his own meals and loves to take an afternoon nap--very much my kind of guy (but I can't have naps; I am in office in the afternoons).

Suketu currently lives in a Manhattan apartment and teaches journalsim (narrative nonfiction) at New York University. In the NDTV interview, he says that he has been working on a book about the New York City immigrant experience. The current reality is that every two in three New Yorkers are immigrants, he says, and he wants to tell the story of the city from that point of view.

India books a big mistake

Mehta is skeptical about the recent crop of India books--big books that try to define the phenomenon of a changing India within a few hundred pages. "All big books that have recently come out about India are a big mistake," he says. Why? Because it is insane to try to capture such a vast country within a book. However, he says Aakash Kapur has done a relatively better job in India Becoming where he follows a set of characters.

Mehta is also an admirer of Katherine Boo's book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. "I was filled with envy when I read Kat Boo's book," he says. "She has done exactly the right thing with the book ... and I am amazed that she could do it without (understanding) the language".

Mehta then talks about Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, an American journalist who writes on the marginalized members of society (adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison) and mentions her seminal book, Random Family (2003). "Her book was inspiration for our books," he says, "mine and Kate Boo's."

When Jain asks him if he likes any nonfiction books done in India, he mentions Following Fish by Samant Subramaniam.

How 9/11 changed writing

At one point of the interview, Mehta says that "more students now want to do narrative nonfiction than fiction" in the context of his journalism classes."9/11 had a lot to do with it," he says. "After 9/11 we realised what kind of fictional image could be created that could compete with this image of two giant airliners
slamming into two giant towers and the whole world changing as a result." Fact had become stranger than fiction and fiction could not compete with it--or was confused to deal with it for a while.

However, he says that now, some American novels are dealing with the 9/11 tragedy. He mentions Netherland by Joseph O'Neil as a good example.

On Social Media

Mehta is on Twitter but he rarely tweets. "I have only tweeted 7 times," he claims. Even though there are very few writers on twitter (Salman Rushdie is there), some have made good use of it. "Teju Cole has taken the form and made it literary," says Mehta about the writer of Open City. He likens the twitter form to the form of Haiku.



Mehta is not worried about the future of books or writing. "Storytelling is a basic human need," he says. "It will always be there, only the forms of delivery will change." How reassuring!

Fellow New Yorker Salman Rushdie is a friend and Mehta says he likes his memoir, Joseph Anton, and he is aware that some have not liked it and some complain of his artistic decline after the fatwa was imposed on him. Mehta has a very simple explanation for all the Salman-bashing: "People hate Salman because he gets a lot of chicks around him."

Apart from the New York book, Mehta is also working on a new translation of Gandhi's autobiography. This is what he told Karan Mahajan in an earlier interview:

"Once, I was telling my father how I think The Story of My Experiments with Truth is really not well written, how it’s long-winded, even if the material is certainly fascinating. My father said, “But it’s really beautifully written. It’s really elegant and concise.” I said, “We’re not talking about the same book.” He said, “Which one are you talking about? I’m talking about the original, in Gujarati.” Then we compared the Aatmakatha with the English version. This book was written in the salad days of the century and it was translated by two of his political secretaries—Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal—who were very good political secretaries but not necessarily good writers in English. Gandhiji did look over the translation and corrected it, but, you know, he had a few other things on his mind, like leading a country to independence!"

More power to your pen Mr. Mehta and may you get to take a lot of afternoon naps!

V S Naipaul and Indian Muslims

V S Naipaul and controversy go hand in hand.The master was recently speaking at Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai where he was being honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award. Naipaul had said something like "Muslims destroyed India" during his talk and it ruffled many feathers. In reaction, playwright Girish Karnad, speaking at the festival on Friday, "took the audience aback with his unexpected criticism of V.S. Naipaul for his “rabid antipathy towards Indian Muslims”, and asked for an explanation from the festival’s organizers on why they had honoured the author with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award."

When I saw these headlines in the media and read Karnard's arguments (Girish Karnad takes on V.S. Naipaul), I was reminded of my own essay "A Convert's Complaint: Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam" that I had written probably ten years ago when Naipaul had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I am pasting it here for reference in case some people want to take a look at it. It was first published in Akhbar, a Delhi journal. 



A Convert’s Complaint

Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam

By Zafar H Anjum

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s views on Islam have come into sharp focus after he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. In the context of the September 11 (Black Tuesday) attacks and the subsequent bombing of Afghanistan by America, his much-quoted and debated views on Islam and the Islamic world have gained immediate significance. However, his views on Islam have been very much in the circulation (in the media) ever since he wrote Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998). In this essay, I am not denying Sir Vidia what is his rightful due: the Nobel belonged to Naipaul as much as he belonged to the Nobel. There is no doubt about that. Naipaul is one of the greatest living writers in English today. In this essay, I intend to analyze Sir Naipaul’s famous remarks on Islam.

Naipaul claims that Islam asks its followers to abandon their past histories, culture, and identities. His quotes on Islam, among others, have appeared in different magazines after he won the grand prize, and here I quote him from different sources. Naipaul has been quoted to be saying, “Islam has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it does not matter’….”

Elsewhere, Naipaul is known to have said, “Islam is in its origin an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands. His sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own: he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his.”

Reading such views on Islam, two basic questions arise in my mind. What’s new about these Naipaulian claims? Before Naipaul, there have been many commentators who have expressed their unfavorable views on Islam. And secondly, are his accusations true for Islam only?

It seems Naipaul has been making sweeping generalizations apropos his views on Islam. He is used to doing that (As we know, he has also “arisen much controversy because of his politically incorrect views of the ‘half-made societies’”). One may well ask how can one say something like this about Sir Vidia. For this, and, before we go into analyzing the merits of his views, we must know how Naipaul formulates his opinions. I think knowing that is important as the act (of forming an opinion) is the result of a process (of accumulating details, of gathering information from various sources). No one takes the credit from Naipaul that he is a meticulous observer (his self-admitted role as a writer "to look and to look again, to re-look and rethink."); however, he has his own ways of making observations, which may not be agreeable to everybody. Let’s see an example.

Charudatta Deshpande who used to work with The Indian Post had the chance to spend a week in close contact with Naipaul in Bombay when he came to collect material for his book, India: A Million Mutinies, in the 80s. He writes in Gentleman (May 1989) recollecting the experience (after Naipaul has spent three hours interviewing Namdeo Dhasal):

After the interview, Naipaul thanked both Namdeo and Mallika profusely.

“On our way back to the hotel, I was surprised to hear him comment: “Very superficial people, without depth. Don’t you think so?

“I don’t agree with you. We met only thrice and that too, formally. I don’t want to refute your observation but I feel because of the language and cultural differences, they may not have expressed themselves fully in the interview.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think they had much more to offer than what they have already given us,” said Naipaul.

Clearly, Naipaul is not known to entertain views other than his own. From the above quoted interaction, one could imagine the personal liberties taken by Sir Vidia while formulating his opinions about people and culture. I find his style dangerous and unbalanced. [Excuse me for digressing here: I have similar feelings about his views on E. M. Forster. How does it matter if Forster was a homosexual? If a writer’s moral uprightness is so central to his standards of judgment, then why is Naipaul so oblivious to his own shortcomings? Paul Theroux has a lot to say about him on this score.]

Naipaul posits that Islam asks the converts to deny their ancestral culture. How can it happen? To any educated Muslim, there is no doubt about the historical veracity that he has studied in the textbooks. In that sense, say for an Indian Muslim, Asoka and Budhha and Shivaji and Babar are part of his heritage. If you ask an educated Indian Muslim, he would not be dismissive about his heritage. He would find, as I found out, his heritage—Islamic or un-Islamic—rather ennobling—a source of mixed baggage to learn from, to make this life worth living.

Naipaul says, “Islam is in its origin an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands.” It is true that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was revealed in Arab. The seed of this faith, like any other faith, traveled to different parts of the world from that epicentre. However, it is a misnomer to label it as an Arab religion. This term gives the impression that it (Islam) was meant only for the Arabs. A Priori, it may also imply that those non-Arabs who converted to this faith were somehow illegitimate or inferior in doing so. However, it was Islam, which preached the message that no one—Arab, non-Arab, white, black, tall, short—is superior or inferior to any one else, except in terms of piety. Naipaul’s second assertion is historically unsound. The fact is, even the first generation Muslims who became Muslims on the call of prophet Mohammad were converts—converts from their pagan faiths. Not even the prophet was a born Muslim. After he got enlightenment, only then did he become the messenger of God. Taking the logic further, can we ask if we can call the Europeans converted Christians or the American Jews as converts?

Naipaul says, “a convert’s worldview alters.” Really? I don’t think so. If I’m a convert, how does it affect my worldview for it is as good or as bad as any of my non-convert (read Hindu!!) fellow Indian? Therefore, I fail to understand how my worldview is going to be affected by the fact that I am a convert or not. However, my logic says that one’s education (plus the quality of education) can definitely affect one’s worldview. Then what is Naipaul hinting here? Is he identifying Islam as a faith with an automatic and in-built ignorance (towards the outside world) that it infuses in is followers?

Naipaul says that his (a convert’s) holy places are in Arab lands.

True (and what’s wrong with that?). But also sacred are the local neighborhood mosques, the dargahs, and the famous mausoleums of the innumerable saints. For example, for the Indian Muslims, the dargah of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz is so sacred. Similarly, if one can ask Naipaul what’s wrong if the Jews and the Christians have their holy places in the Arab land?

Naipaul says that his (a convert’s) sacred language is Arabic.

True. But what’s wrong with that? It does not take away, for example, the convert’s love for one’s mother tongue (Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, etc.)! Now for decades in India and Pakistan, we have been reading the Holy Quran in Urdu and English to understand its meaning. Mustafa Kemal Pasha allowed prayers be said in Turkish instead of Arabic. Things change and people adapt things to their convenience. (Must I add here that the Jewish language is sacred to the Jews and I see no problems with that? Does Naipaul need to be reminded that once the Bible was supposed to be sacrosanct in Greek only? Has he forgotten what commotion it created when it was first translated into German?)

Naipaul says, “Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands.”

True. But also true is that fact that this is the case with almost all the religions. The only thing or distinction about Islam is that it is the most recent religion, and hence the most strident. It came to the world through Prophet Mohammad only some 1400 years ago, and hence it is the Islamic countries/societies in the world, which are experiencing tumultuous conditions of historical change. Some of the Islamic countries are as new as 30 years (Bangladesh). Societies take time to settle down peacefully with their past in the face of a changed present.

Naipaul asks why this tumult only in the Islamic societies? It is because of Islam’s historical recency that we come across tumultuous situations in the Islamic societies.

Let’s go a little deeper.

The fact is very simple. Any new idea or religion, which enters a society, seeks rejection of the old. Rather, the acceptance of this new idea is based on the premise that the old is not reasonable any more, and hence it’s abandonment, and the embracing of the new faith. What’s discarded in the process is what had become old, trite, and useless—a part of the process of cultural/ideological evolution. What is left behind is what is historically moribund. History is witness to this process. For instance, when Christianity came to Europe, did it not replace the pagan faiths in the continent? People accepted Christianity because they found it more acceptable than what they previously believed in. So, what was wrong with Christianity? Similarly when the Aryans came to India with a new faith and lifestyle, did they not change or affect the cultural and ideological space of those who had been living here. That is the process of historical evolution. It is irrational to think that this will not happen in societies.

We all know that the communal divide that we see in India is the construct of the British colonials. First they captured power in different Indian states with the help of Muslims. After the 1857 revolt, they lost their trust in their Muslim collaborators. Then they thought of promoting the Hindus as their new allies. This is how the policy of divide and rule started in India. We all know this. The British sowed the seeds of this “Hindu Muslim divide” canard not only to strengthen their hold on India but also to justify their imperialistic policies to their own people. Let me quote from a conversation between two working class British citizens, Tom and Jim, in London from Sajjad Zaheer’s novel London Ki Ek Raat (1938) [Like Naipaul, Zaheer studied in England]. The setting is a pub where both of them are having drinks:

“Tom!” Jim said slowly. “If we leave India what’ll happen to that country? We read in the newspapers that there the Hindus and Muslims are the followers of two different religions and they always fight with each other. They are each other’s sworn enemies. If we don’t maintain peace in India and get out of that country, there is the danger of a bloody civil strife there.”

This dialogue clearly shows how the British systematically developed and disseminated this “Hind-Muslim divide” lie that the common man in England believed it to be an original characteristic of India (and not a British construct of power which it actually was).

If we look into Naipaul’s writings, we find that he first dug up his Hindu past. Then he declared that the Muslim invaders were responsible for destroying all that was good and great in India. I admire Naipaul’s sincerity of exploration and investigation, but where he fails, which he himself does not realize, is his falling into the trap of political history as Hindu history and Muslim history. This was how the colonial historiographers had started to give a communal interpretation to history. The fact is history is not about the religions of the historical cast. It is about the victors (stronger people or ideas) and the vanquished (weaker people or ideas). Seen from this viewpoint, one finds Naipaul a victim of the colonial mindset. No wonder he studied in England, and he still wears a hat.

Today Islam is the only religion, which is as big as the Christian faith. It is the only challenger to Christianity. What the West fears is the takeover of Christianity by Islam. In the Western world, the number of Non-Muslims converting to Islam is hopping. The West was smug when it converted people in the poor countries in Asia and Africa. Now it is alarmed when the East is taking away their own people (Americans, Europeans) into their folds.

What the British construct of “divide and rule” did to India in the colonial times, Samuel Huntington has done it to the world in the post cold war scenario. (More examples: The Nazis vs. the Non-Aryans; the Communists vs. the people with a God!). After September the 11th the Huntington era (The West vs. Islam) has begun. And in such times, perhaps no author is more relevant than Naipaul, and perhaps that’s why he has been bestowed with the Nobel Prize.

Summing up, I’d like to sign off with the comments from my friend, Yousuf Saeed, a Delhi-based filmmaker and journalist, who had the following to share on this subject. It is an Indian Muslim’s complaint to the legend we know as V. S. Naipaul:

“Naipaul claims that people who accepted Islam wrote off their pre-Islamic past. This must be true for countries like Egypt, Turkey, Tunis, Malaysia, and Iran, which Naipaul traveled in, and wrote about. But unfortunately, the country he forgot to travel to is his own India. He grossly underestimates the past and present of Muslims in India, which has the world’s second largest Muslim population, and would, in many ways, present an antithesis to his theories. Notwithstanding the current trends of the ‘Wahabization’ of Islam here, a large number of Indian Muslims, especially in small towns and villages, still carry a lot of their pre-Islamic cultural past. To begin with, one could simply visit either the local dargah (mausoleum) of a Muslim saint, or the observance of Muharram by typical Shia communities, and see for oneself the traditions, rituals, and iconography that has been carried over from the Hindu past. It is possible (and there are historical evidences of it) that similar multicultural scenarios may have existed in other Muslim countries prior to the recent trend of purification of Islam. And one needs to investigate this issue entirely before coming up with such generalization.”

What do you say Mr. Naipaul?

In memory of Jaspal Bhatti Saheb

This morning when I reached my office and checked the news, I was shocked to learn that comedian Jaspal Bhatti had died in a car accident. He was in Punjab promoting his forthcoming film, Power Cut!

Imagine promoting a movie called 'Power Cut' and suddenly your lifeline is cut by the almighty. What can one do? R.I.P Mr. Bhatti!

Bhatti Saheb showed his talent in Flop Show, a TV series that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan decades ago (actually, 1989). As a school-going kid, I used to love the show--comedy used to be in short supply in those days (there was no YouTube then).

To remember this great comic talent, who did not get his due in Bollywood, I am sharing with you this little comic piece that I wrote a few days ago on a whim. This is my tribute to Bhatti Saheb, my way of remembering him as he wanted us to laugh at ourselves.

This is the chapter 1 of I Break The Leg of Inglis, a book that I began to write a few days ago. The idea came to me on the bus on my way home. Let me know if it tickles your funny bones.

I Break the Leg of Englis

Hello! So please to meet you. I take the honour of shaking your hand. My name is Parvesh Sharma. I am a Bihari and I am here to break the leg of Englis.

Breaking the leg of Englis has been my lifelong dream. When I was a little boy in a little village called Angsola, I broke my own leg climbing a stool. I was reaching out to steal the rasgullas from the peak of the almirah. I was doing something wrong. God punish me badly. I become a little langda, but I become god-fearing from that time. Every mishappen has a lesson on it and that is why it is called a sting in the tale.

If you don’t fully understand me, I bend my behind in forgiveness and fully seek your support. We starting a new bank branch of Englis called Binglis. If there can be Hinglis, why not Binglis? If you don’t allow this facility, where is justice, haan?

Any way, when my father see my broken leg, he scold me black and blue. ‘If you have to break anything, break the leg of Englis,’ he shout. At that time I think Englis is name of some mild animal. So I remember what my father tell me that day and I tie it in the fold of my antenna.

Before I tell you more of me, I tell you the behind of my family. I belong to a long tradition of family history full of writers. My grandfather write letters for other people in deep trouble of not able to write a word. He write their happiness, he write their sadness, and he make money like that. He make money but my grandmother still not happy with him because he give lot of money to Congress and Gandhiji.

My father also a writer; he write big big words on walls and on big tin signs—the village people call him PhD master. He no PhD from some big university. He not even high school pass. But people call him that surname because he can talk Englis like a convent pass Angrej. My village very proud of my father.

When I born, my father tell the whole village: ‘My boy when grow up, he become even better than me. He break the leg of Englis in his own surf.’

What he mean is I talk and walk like an Angrej from England. And become a writer.

So, every time I do mistake my father remind me of his promise to his village people. ‘Don’t make keema of my ijjat,’ he tell me. ‘Break the leg of Englis.’

So, that became my possession—breaking the leg of Englis.

When I in primary school, my father give me Father Kamil Bilke dictionary. Every day I remember ten words. He become very happy and give me round round sweets to eat.

After primary, he send me for tuition to an Englis teacher for grammar. He very strict man. He talk with a ruler and hit your head if you make a wrong mistake. But he a man of bad habit. When he talk, he take out his tongue too outside his mouth like a snake. The spit from his mouth also fly out of his mouth and make us dirty. In few days I loss my appetite for grammar.

I never recover the loss till today. My guru Ketan Bagat says never mind. ‘You think all writers write books with perfect grammar?’ he tell me one day. ‘Beta, you can become a writer even with bad grammar.’ ‘How? I ask. ‘There are people in publishing house, mostly ladies, called editors,’ he say. ‘They clean copy like you clean a tea pot or a gwala cleans his cowshed.’

I turant understood what he mean. ‘You mean the press house like white house,’ I say. ‘Writers come, take shit and go out. The editors clean the shit and get money for their job.’

‘Correct,’ say my guru.

I touch his feet and say, ‘They are noble people. They clean dirt of others. God bless them.’

 

 (Copyright: Zafar Anjum, 2012)