It can be argued that Southeast Asian Writing in English has not achieved as much attention as African Writing in English or Indian Writing in English, even though English as a language reached most parts of the world wave after wave as a result of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila have been major outposts under British and American colonialism, but the output in English from these big Asian cities has not made much impact on the global literary landscape, the same way that writings from India or Africa have. Where is Southeast Asia’s answer to Midnight Children or a House for Mr. Biswas or Things Fall Apart?
Moreover, many colonial era writers made this region their hunting ground for exotic tales –Anthony Burgess in Malaysia, Orwell's work on Burma (Burmese Days), Graham Greene's on Vietnam (The Quiet American) and the stories by Somerset Maugham (The Casuarina Tree), to name a few expat writers. Did they leave any impact on the local writers? What kind of writing emerged in Southeast Asian countries (mainly, The Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong) in the latter half of the 20th century when colonial powers receded from the region? What kind of themes and issues are being investigated into by contemporary writers and poets in Southeast Asia?
In the book under review, the authors, associate professors in the Department of English and Literature at the National University of Singapore, try to answer these and many more questions. The volume traces the development of literature (focusing on fiction, poetry and drama) in the region with its historical and cultural contexts.
To attempt a volume like this is clearly a challenging endeavour as the authors themselves admit that this kind of literary historiography works within two limiting factors—linguistic and regional. The authors, in their introduction, submit that their aim in writing this book is not for the chimera of ‘objectivity’ but for persuasion and critical awareness.
Post introduction, the first two chapters in the book provide historical and literary contexts of writing in English in the region. The fourth chapter surveys Malaysian and Singaporean writing up to 1965, followed by a chapter on Filipino writing to 1965. Then there are three chapters, each providing a regional overview of narrative fiction, poetry and drama between 1965-1990 in Southeast Asia. After this, there is an independent chapter exploring the expatriate, diasporic and minoritarian writing—this is where you can read about the writings of Burgess or Maugham. The last four chapters look at contemporary fiction, poetry and drama. It also explores the prospects of Southeast Asian writing in English (where does it go from here) in indulges in future gazing. This last chapter also includes some details on publishing in the digital medium—the medium of the future—and how it is not just replacing text but has also led to increased generic experimentation and creation of a larger audience. It is a good sign as it indicates that the authors understand the increasing importance of digital media’s role in the dissemination and consumption of literature.
Overall, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English is a very useful companion for those who seek a handy understanding of Southeast Asian writing in English. The astute authors of this volume have enriched it with maps, box items, a glossary of terms, and references. There is also a guide to further reading that can help quench the thirst of those who want a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asian literatures and cultures.
Before we get to talk about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), let’s have a quick quiz. Who, among the three infamous dictators—Hitler, Stalin and Mao—caused the maximum number of civilian deaths in his country (“democide”)?
If your answer is Hitler, then you are wrong. According to historical estimates, the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (20 million) and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin (61 million).
And yet how many Hollywood films are made with Mao as the arch villain? Or even Stalin?
It’s not that Hitler becomes less evil because he killed less number of people than Stalin or Mao did. The German dictator’s genocidal atrocities or policies of eugenics were despicable. Still, the constant projection of Hitler as the only evil doer in the western man’s consciousness baffles me. Excepting Idi Amin, I haven’t seen Hollywood going after other dictators as vigorously as they go after the fuehrer.
Clearly, Hollywood is fascinated by Hitler: Almost every year, Hollywood studios plan a slate of anti-Nazi movies. Last year, the offerings peaked (with "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," "Adam Resurrected," "The Reader," "Valkyrie") as The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott noted: “A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance…” (Why so many Holocaust films now, and for whose benefit?)
Scott goes on to ask: “The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?”
Perhaps Scott wrote the piece too late in the day. Or maybe the failure of Death Proof hastened it. Apparently Tarantino had been working on the script of Inglourious Basterds for ten years, even before he did Kill Bill. He is said to have delayed the project because he was not finding the right ending. I can understand his dilemma but he never resolved it. In a relatively well-made Holocaust revenge film, it is the ending that rankles, that seems a bit forced and contrived. A brilliant opening sequence should have been offset with a masterful last scene but it doesn’t. It is a narrow miss that prevents a good Inglourious Basterds from leapfrogging to being great.
I was curious about the film’s title from the beginning (and thought Vishal Bhardwaj stole it for his Kaminay) but like most other motifs in Tarantino’s films, this too turned out to be derivative (or homage, whatever you may choose to call): It comes from a European film Quel maledetto treno blindato (1978) which was released in the USA by the title The Inglorious Bastards. Maybe that’s the reason why Tarantino film’s title is slightly misspelled. Major change that one, huh?
Set in the second world war, Tarantino’s fairy tale Inglourious Basterds(it was earlier meant to be titled as "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France") has a four track narrative underpinned by a main villain—Christoph Waltz as the Nazi Col. Hans Landa, a polyglot evil genius and a Jew-sniffer par excellence. There is the perpetrator (the Nazi occupiers of France, represented by Col. Hans), the victim (Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus), the spy (Diane Kruger as double agent Bridget von Hammersmark) and the avenger (Brad Pitt and his team of Inglorious Bastards).
As I have mentioned earlier, the opening scene of the film is excellent, classy as a masterpiece, more visceral and evil than scenes of scalping mined throughout the film. Christoph Waltz establishes himself in this very first scene and you look forward to seeing him time and again on the screen. After Waltz’s introduction, when Pitt and his mates make their onscreen appearance, they don’t make that much of an impact—even though Pitt’s voice and body language are well-directed. Eli Roth (as Sgt. Donny Donowitz), with his deadly clubbing scene, is chilling—more chilling than the scalping scenes that looked a bit fake to me.
When it comes to violence and bloodshed, Tarantino seems to take unpretentious pleasure in making people suffer and bleed. He did it with some sophistication in Jackie Brown (Samuel Jackson’s killing of Chris Tucker and Robert De Niro) but it has all been gruesome and in-your-face in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2. His films, one can argue, document the ways in which violence can be inflicted upon people, good or bad. Inglourious Bastards abounds in some new (different from his past oeuvre) methods of sending folks to the next world: scalping, clubbing and even the good old technique of strangulation.
What redeems Tarantino’s nearly B-grade penchant for portrayals of violence is his great ear for dialogues. And there are plenty of clever lines in this film. I loved the line by Goebbels in the film when he says, ‘America’s gold medals can be weighed in negro sweat’. But my favourite still remains the Harvey Keitel line from Reservoir Dogs: “If you shoot me in your dream, you better wake up and apologize to me.”
Despite the unusual screen time (nearly three hours), the revenge drama flows smoothly. As the scenes roll out, you recognize the typical Tarantino stamp on them: the book-like chapterisation, the set-piece of the theatre’s burning down (the revenge), the shootout scene in the restaurant (reminiscent of the garage scene in Reservoir Dogs but amazingly executed), and the imagined sex scene between Goebbels and his assistant (reminiscent of the sex scene between Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown). Tarantino’s favourites Samuel L. Jackon and Harvey Keitel are also present in this film through their voices.
Even though cinema is all make-believe and cinematic reality is different from historical reality, it is the film’s ending that is dissatisfying—or more than dissatisfying, irrational (yes, even fiction, to succeed, must make us suspend our disbelief!). Why would a hardcore Nazi officer change side? If he did not believe in Hitler’s philosophy, why did he comply with his orders for so long? Oh, yeah, he was just doing his job and somebody tipped him offscreen that the Hitler was anyway going to lose the war!
If you don’t have a higher threshold for suspension of disbelief, you may as well forgive the film’s somewhat irrational ending (or not even notice it) and come home thoroughly entertained. As for me, I would like to ask Tarantino what was the alternative ending that he had in mind.
The Deer Hunter, a 1978 war drama co-written and directed by Michael Cimino, is not your typical Vietnam war film. It's not your Apocalypse Now or Platoon. Perhaps its appeal lies in its small town characters, primarily factory workers, played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and some other actors. Meryl Streep plays the love interest of Christopher Walken. Robert De Niro is also interested in her. The innocence and playfulness of their lives suddenly vanishes when they are thrust into the Vietnam War. The war upturns their lives and they are never the same again. The scenes in Vietnam, especially the underwater prison scenes and the Russian roulette scenes, are unforgettable.
More than the performances (though Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and streep have given fine performances in this film), it's the film's structure and its editing that struck me as unique. The film starts with scenes of happiness, a bunch of wild, playful factory workers, wedding and frolicking scenes in the small town and ends with a death and a funereal atmosphere engulfing the townsfolk. But life goes on. The editing is without frills. Notice it especially when the story goes back and forth between America and Vietnam.
It is difficult to imagine soldiers like Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and many others coming to Singapore for R&R during the Vietnam war. But this is largely what happens in Saint Jack, a 1979 film based on 1973 novel by Paul Theroux.
The movie, which was banned in Singapore until a few years ago (2006), is about Jack Flowers, an Italian American pimp in Singapore, who tries to make money by setting up his own bordello. His plans go awry when he is beaten up by the Chinese mafia and his brothel is destroyed. He goes a little more deeper into more humiliating circumstances before he finally wakes up to his own dehumanization and finds his moral compass.
Ben Gazzara plays the main character in the film, and I loved his performance. He is totally into the role. The film's director, Peter Bogdanovich, has done a great work--at least it shows us the Singapore of 1970s. This was the first Hollywood film to be shot on location in Singapore.
According to the director, the film was suggested by Orson Welles to Peter's Guru, Roger Corman. Corman bankrolled the project and Peter came over to Singapore to shoot the film. The Singapore government was opposed to the film's shooting. Peter had to create a fake synopsis (more than 35 pages long!) for a film called "Jack Of Hearts". The film was shot and made purported to be "Jack Of Hearts" and not Saint Jack. Peter counts it as one of his two best films (his most famous and acclaimed film being The Last Picture Show, 1971). It won him the best director award at Venice.
The film is part of, as it were, Singapore's history now. Though there is some nudity in it, there is an uncanny charm in Ben Gazzara and his friend's character, who dies in the film. Even Peter Bogdanovich plays a part as Eddie Schuman.
There is something in the picture--maybe it is Ben's moodiness, his interpretation of the Jack character, his walk and talk, his gait, his soulful gaze, his philosophical smile--that makes you aware that you are watching a classic. I was moved (and disturbed) by the scene where Jack sends his dead friend's ashes to Hong Kong via post and the post office girl flicks the pack (Jack says the packet contains personal effects) into a pile of postal stuff. Life, gone--just like that! What if it were me in that box? Is life so meaningless that it could be flicked off and forgotten like that? It is elements like these that ennobles the film, despite its seedy setting, and in turn, the viewers.
I recently published a review of Daniyal Mueenuddin's collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, at Writersconnect.org. To read the full text of the review, go here. Excerpts:
Though the stories do reveal and expose the poverty and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the human desire of doing better in life, escaping the trap of being limited by one’s circumstances, they also tell us about the dying feudal world of Pakistan—“the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities.” All this is happening in a Pakistan which was supposedly carved out of India to develop as an exemplary Islamic country (with secular values). Instead of establishing an egalitarian society, Pakistan came to be ruled by the feudal lords who control all levers of power in the country. The vast majority of its poor citizens, as a result, suffer, struggling for their survival, conniving and scheming to come up in life by any means. Religion is the last thing on their minds.
For an Indian, it is not difficult to understand the moral ambiguities of the feudal rich. But what surprises me, and must would have done to most other readers of this book in the West, is the lack of morality—be it in business dealings, law enforcement or matters of sex and matrimony—in the characters, cutting across layers of society (even though, perhaps Daniyal is a little biased as he shows Helen, an American in love with a Pakistani Sohail, in Our Lady of Paris, to be morally upright, and not deviant as he shows Husna in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders or Zainab in Provide, Provide).
One might read a book on Pakistan and expect to read a story or two on fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists (his three fellow expat Pakistani writers’ recent books directly or indirectly deal with terrorism: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamshie, and The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam). Daniyal’s book is about Pakistan but there is not a single character in his stories who is a fanatic. There are devout Muslims, they tell their rosaries, say their prayers but they still indulge in amoral acts. This juxtaposition, this revelation, must be interesting to most readers, affording one the satisfaction that Pakistani Muslims too are like any other people—the rich and poor not necessarily being gentle, innocent and benevolent. This (realization) was so at least in my case. That was the biggest reward of reading this book.
What do you look for in a great, even good, writer? A unique and exact way of looking at things and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, as Raymond Carver once said. In Daniyal’s case, that talent is very much on display. I rate Daniyal’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders very highly and can safely say that this debut collection can be put in the same league as The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (US/India) and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (US/China). With his very first book, Daniyal has shown the talent of a special way of looking at his universe. A writer like him should be around for a time. I wish him longevity.
I met the Scottish novelist and writer Suhayl Saadi (he was born in Yorkshire in 1961 of Afghan-Pakistani parents, and grew up in Glasgow, becoming a medical doctor) a couple of years ago in Singapore during a lit fest. He came across as a very charming, fearless and articulate speaker during one of the panel discussions. It's been a while since I caught up with him, but when his new book, Joseph’s Box (2009) came out, I could not resist the temptation of asking him a few questions. Always courteous, Suhayl obliged and the result is a fascinating interview with this writer who treads a path less traveled by most authors of South Asian descent. Please read the full interview here to understand what I mean by the road less traveled in this case.
Excerpts:
What is your take on e-publishing and the future of books? Will e-publishing and Google’s espresso instant books (machines can print and bind a paperback in 4 minutes flat) change the future of publishing, how writers distribute their books and reach out to the readers? Will the publishers cease to be the gatekeepers of content?
I hope so. It needs a revolution. I would like to (here, I have delusions of Sidney Poitier) ‘knock that big old white bastard off his hill’. Let’s democratise but try not to continue to dumb-down. There are far too many stupid, and stupefying, books out already by chefs, gardeners, estate agents, DIY experts and vacuous ‘celebrities’ which are heavily promoted in the ‘front fifty feet’ of bookshops and this mirrors the inanity of much television. Give ‘em what they want! is a big lie and is a recipe for the incipient snuff-movies and ritual humiliation which now pass for entertainment and which, ultimately, are tools of social control and mechanisms for the concentration of wealth. It’s not really about gatekeeping - that’s merely an instrumentalisation of these strategies - it’s really about what kind of human society, what kind of world, we want. The bottom line is that writing, invented in Iraq 5,000 years ago, is important and at some level, is feared by those in power. Stalin, the one-time published and acclaimed poet, knew - and stated - this perfectly well when he attempted to justify banning Dostoevsky’s works. Stalin was terrified of Dostoevsky and even eventually, of Gorki. The process of capitalist censorship is more systemic, less directed, more subtle, less obvious, but in the end it is even more effective in the engineering of pliant societies. Of course, Google is a big white corporation, too. We have to be attentive - to paraphrase from the Spanish writer, Ibn Tufayl, in order to stay alive, we have to remain awake!
Internationally, studies have shown that abuse of the human rights of terror suspects increases terrorism by alienating the government from members of the population who could provide it intelligence about terrorist groups; by causing conflicts with other political forces in the country thereby damaging the efficacy of the government’s counter-terrorism policy; and by reducing international willingness to cooperate with the government.
Observers have warned that state violation of human rights augments grievances of the constituency on whose behalf the terrorists claim to act and makes their appeals for support more effective. Such violation has been found to alienate people from the authorities to such an extent that they either actively support terrorist activities or turn a blind eye to them.
Fortunately, so far, the family of Ishrat has been brave enough to resist such tendencies and to maintain their belief in the legal system and fight the culture of impunity of the police with determination. As Vrinda Grover, counsel for Ishrat’s mother, says:
“It has been very difficult, but I think that the people, regardless of their religious denominations, see themselves as citizens. They see the courts as their forums for justice. They do not feel that they are not part of this country and I think there is a serious responsibility of the judiciary to deliver justice.”
The absence of justice is inordinately difficult to accept for countless victims, particularly women and children. Muslim leaders must handle these cases with utmost sensitivity to prevent any violent reaction. The Quran urges Muslims to fight against injustice. But if they fail to secure justice on earth, they should leave it to Allah. Muslims must grant unilateral forgiveness to those who carried out these horrors. That is the essence of Islam. That will please Allah, and He will compensate the victims, while inflicting His own severe punishment on the oppressors. Muslim pain and trauma will gradually become a memory as they turn their attention to quality education and business.
Forgiveness may also serve to awaken the conscience of Hindus, both in Gujarat and across the nation, to the enormous damage done to Hinduism by the tragedy of 2002.
Vedantic Hinduism is a vast ocean of spiritual grace and beauty. It is best exemplified by the life of the greatest Gujarati of all time: Mahatma Gandhi. In this frenzy of hatred toward Muslims, Narendra Modi and his parivar may have done great harm to their own faith and to the memory of Gandhi.
Forgiveness does not imply we forget. As Harsh Mander rightly quotes the philosopher Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is very relevant in the present context, with Narendra Modi poised to play an important national role in the future. Eternal vigilance is the only way to handle Modi.
Muslims have changed a lot since 2002. The fear is gone. There are over 650 Muslim schools today as against 250 seven years ago. There is a sharp rise in the number of Muslim engineers and doctors. There is a renaissance within the community. But we will never pardon the Sangh parivar for its perfidy.
In Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson (a 1983 novel, the third one from Roth to feature Nathan Zuckerman as the main character), writer Nathan Zuckerman, having badly injured himself, suffers from terrible neck pain and is reduced to having sex with a variety of women on his playmat. His mind wanders and he undergoes a mid-life crisis and decides to change his profession: he now wants to become a doctor at the age of 40!
He apparently was inspired by Thomas Mann to become a writer. Mann had come to his university and had lectured on writing: "Writing ... was the only worthwhile attainment, the surpassing experience, the exalted struggle, and there was no way to write other than like a fanatic."
"Without fanaticism, nothing great in fiction could ever be achieved," concluded Nathan. But soon, the daily struggle of filling up the next page bored him to death.
So, off he goes to Univ of Chicago to enroll himself in medical school. On the way, he pretends to be a porn magnate, a competitor to Hugh Hefner whom he despises, and wisecracks with an unsuspecting co-passenger. He does the same with the female chauffeur of the limo that he hires at the airport. Quite hilarious!
I loved this passage on marriage from an early part of the novel:
"Marriage had been his bulwark against the tremendous distraction of women. He'd married for the order, the intimacy, the dependable comradery, for the routine and regularity of monogamous living; he'd married so as never to waste himself on another affair, or go crazy with boredom at another party, or wind up alone in the living room at night after a day alone in his study. To sit alone each night doing the reading that he required to concentrate himself for the next day's solitary writing was too much even for Zuckerman's single-mindedness, and so into the voluptous austerity he had enticed a woman, one woman at a time, a quiet, thoughtful, serious, literate, self-sufficient woman who didn't require to be taken places, who was content instead to sit after dinner and read in silence across from him and his book."
In my case, it's many things but goats. I keep reading about goats, specially when I read stories to my daughter before bedtime or otherwise. There is the Billy Goat Gruff story. There are goats in Heidi's story (I once borrowed the Heidi DVD from the library but had to return it--now my daughter cries for it whenever she remembers it).
When I was a kid in school, I had read a story: Abbu Khan Ki Bakri (Abu Khan's Goat). And there was another famous story of Lali, the goat that goes missing one day.
Even these days, I think and read about goats. There is a goat in one of my short stories, The Rats (you can read it here). And I recently spotted a goat in a story, Saleema, in Daniyal Mueenuddin's brilliant collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. In that story, the goat is just a part of the backdrop, like a piece of furniture in the mise en scene. In a completely bare single room belonging to Saleema's mother, is a goat, tied to a stake, nibbling at a handful of grass.
Now, I hear about this George Clooney movie, The men who stare at goats, with a strange plotline, involving the US armed forces and techniques of psychic killing (by staring at a goat, a man can kill the poor creature). You can see it in the trailer itself:
But perhaps, Clooney & co. don't know that there is one more type of people who stare at goats: the microfinance people in Bangladesh, inspired by the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. In the global financial crisis that has engulfed the world, these people (of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh) who are betting on herds of goats (and staring at them, to speak figuratively, for good returns) are seeing almost 100% returns. So, staring at goats does have its profit. Here is the story: It's better to give out 'loans for goats'.
Visiting Professor Amitava Kumar's blog is always a good trip--it results in my coming back with some new information, novel insights.
In one of his recent posts (inter alia, referring to a post at Maud Newton), he talks about William Maxwell and his mining of experiences from his own life and dressing them up as fiction. Is that a moral hazard? Are there any limits of doing it? Many questions arise.
Then I follow a link to Maud Newton's blog and to an article on Maxwell in The Washington Post. It's a review of Maxwell's novel, 'So Long, See You Tomorrow'. Some sentences strike me further: The reviewer makes fun of memoir as a genre: "But Maxwell doesn't use this lurid tale to launch on the kind of self-dramatizing sleuthing that has made the memoir more of a recovery workbook than a literary genre."
Anita Jain, author of Marrying Anita, had mocked at certain kind of novelists when she was in Singapore: Why do they hide behind novels when they could write a memoir, she had asked.
Is there something in here for Anita, I innocently wonder.
"In talking about the past," Maxwell writes, "we lie with every breath we draw."
Does it mean that even if we write something from our own lives, it changes in writing: the mere acting of putting "the reality" in words changes the reality?
Maxwell says: "I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise — except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception."
This reminds me of one of my own short stories, The Revolt. In the story, a character rises against the writer in revolt and takes his revenge on him for portraying him in a certain light (obviously, not very flattering). It was written some years ago--before I had heard of Pirandello.
Among the bunch of famous Indian novelists and writers, Richard Crasta’s name might not be as widely recognized as that of a Seth or a Rushdie, but few would come close to him in being funny, witty, satirical and daring–all at the same time. If you don’t believe me, I can get American legendary novelist Kurt Vonnegut to vouch for him who found his first novel, The Revised Kama Sutra, “very funny”. After Khushwant Singh (who is 90 plus old but still active as a below the belt heavy hitter), if any Indian writer has pushed the boundaries of satirical writing, with dollops of sexual humour (and satirical writing on a lot of other serious stuff) in his own distinctive style, it’s Richard. But, in fairness, his writing is more than that, and multifaceted, covering areas as wide as, in his own words, “autobiography, humor, satire, political critique, sexual critique, and literary criticism.”
In the early 1990s, when a new breed of Indian writers in English were taking birth (most of them midwifed by Penguin Books, India, under the watch of David Davidar), bursting forth with all kinds of coming of age or cultural or exoticised tales from Indian life, Richard Crasta chose to take a daring look at Indian sexuality. One of the funniest and most talked about novels to come out of India, he subtitled The Revised Kama Sutra, as a “Novel of Colonialism and Desire with Arbitrary Footnotes and a Whimsical Glossary”. It was one of the most talked about books when it came out, and was loved as much, if not more, as Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. By the way, both the novelists are from Indian Civil Services, the only difference is that Crasta is now an ex (civil servant).
Richard’s writing is uniquely hilarious, and believe me you, this is not a hyperbole. But in terms of recognition, the man was just a blip in India’s literary firmament. For years, he has been out of the Indian mainstream media’s radar. What went wrong? Plenty, we are told. He was embroiled in controversies. Mainstream publishers shunned him. He became a writer without a platform.
But Crasta did not feel crestfallen. He was in the USA, doing his own stuff–writing more books and publishing them from a publishing house that he owns. And ever since, he has kept at it. After writing 6 full-bloodied books, his latest book is The Killing of an Author, of which veteran journalist Kuldeep Nayar says that this is a must read.
In this exclusive freewheeling interview with Kitaab’s editor Zafar Anjum, Crasta not only talks about his new book but also looks back at his past, his beginning as a writer, his tribulations and his future plans. For the readers in South East Asia, the good news is that one of his in-the-works novels is based in Thailand and Indonesia, and is, in his words, “almost as funny and sexually daring as The Revised Kama Sutra.”
True to his name, Richard in this interview is bitingly honest, lucid but insightful, funny and provocative. Here is the transcript of the interview. Have fun!
When your first novel The Revised Kamasutra appeared in India , it made quite a splash. Is it fair to say that the books that followed your debut novel did not get that much attention in the country of your birth? Was there any particular reason for this kind of reception?
I feel gratified that the huge response to my novel came from common readers and middle-class reviewers. It was not engineered from the top, or from London or New York; Indians found themselves loving the book, though they were shocked and sometimes embarrassed by the title or the contents, and its reputation spread by word of mouth. With many later writers, the hype started with a megabucks Western advance. Hype has a way of becoming self-fulfilling, and one can never be sure how those books would have performed had the huge advances and media coverage not preceded the reading of the books themselves.
To be fair, I spent eight years on The Revised Kama Sutra and an average of 18 months for the subsequent books, so the former is naturally richer, denser, and more multi-faceted. Having noted this, there was still, for other reasons, a difference between the reception for the first book and subsequent books: Because The Revised Kama Sutra is fiction, and some people—including my Penguin India editor—thought the book would become a worldwide sensation, and make plenty of money, they could wink at its anti-Establishment tone, which did not directly target either my publisher or his Indian friends. Also, the humor was a cloak, which allowed you to treat the book as a joke. This changed with the second and third books, Beauty Queens and Impressing the Whites; the latter is a no-holds barred satire on the culture of sycophancy and subservience and of giving white people and Western honors far greater legitimacy and respect than equivalent Indian ones. Once my second and third books hit home, my fourth, fifth, and sixth books, especially What We All Need and The Killing of an Author, simply didn’t have a chance.
Professor Amartya Sen says that it is good to have debates and discussions and it is good to argue with others on topics of importance. I didn’t have exactly this in mind when I forwarded an article, “Why Ayn Rand Is Still Relevant”, to one of my Singaporean colleagues (I have given his name here as K). He has been recently reading books by Ayn Rand and I thought he might be interested in it. I had read one or two books by her when I was in college and by now I did not exactly remember what she preached in those books which were very popular among the English-speaking students (what I remembered was that she preached capitalism even though it meant the rule of the robber barons). K got back with some feedback on that article and I reverted with my own comments and this way we had a good exchange. Here is the transcript of that exchange.
After this exchange, which ended in an honorable disagreement, I watched some interviews of Ayn Rand and got to know her philosophy better. You can find many videos on her on YouTube. I don’t think major economists or philosophers have taken her philosophy that seriously. And I am sure there are many, like this scholar, who have challenged her views. I have my own philosophy which, in Rand’s epistemology, can be called rational-mythological. Share with us what you think of Ayn Rand and how is her philosophy relevant today?
Her theory or philosophy, to me, comes across as anti-egalitarianism and anti-welfarism (the greater common good is not important for her) and she says many things that Milton Friedman also has said later on.
Me: "From the time we’re young we are taught that the essence of morality is to sacrifice one’s own interests for the sake of others, and that to focus on one’s own interests is immoral and destructive...."
http://www.cnbc.com/id/32285949
I ask, if this is the essence of capitalism (according to Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism), how can it be reconciled with Biblical teachings? I think both extremes (extreme capitalism on one hand, extreme socialism or collectivism on the other hand) are bad. There has to be a balance. Middle path, preached by prophets like Buddha and Mohammad, are more reasonable. Enterprise with humanity is more reasonable than enterprise supported by rapacious laws (think of debt prisons or seizure of properties).
From K:
The intriguing perspective I feel I'm taking in regards to Ayn Rand's views and how it would connect to the Biblical perspective is that at the end of the day, sacrifice is not the best ends to make things work out in our relationships to people and ourselves. Perhaps sacrifice is required in many scenarios, but just because 2 - 1 = 1 on the other side of the equation doesn't mean it's the best methodology to help others. Her view that in being 'selfish' to our own goals, we invariably create conditions that would help others as a by result. It's a pictorial of the golden goose - a goose lay eggs not because of sacrifice but self-interest and preservation, yet but lying the eggs, others benefit from her production and output. To sacrifice her for a meal would surely be beneficial for a moment to others, but the cost is great. I recall Jesus saying that when he was hindered by the religious community in healing a man on the Sabbath, he asked,'Is the Sabbath for man, or man for the Sabbath?' The crowd wanted to sacrifice the sick man's welfare in order to preserve their 'religious laws' but Jesus' response was that they got the idea all wrong.
I think beneath the common call for sacrifice, one might sometimes do better by taking a rational view of how other methods might be more effective and proper towards the end result. The Bible mentions that 'as a man thinks, so he is' - that isn't all that different from what Ayn Rand's John Galt is preaching. I think I'm attracted to her views because it's extreme... somehow, I think that might actually be a good medicine for society, which tends to self-destruct and most of the time while it's doing so, lukewarm theories hardly have a chance in altering their march to death.
Just my views though :)
Me: Interesting views and this is exactly how the world is working, and this is where we are headed. Capitalism marches on. But in my view, it is not an absolute view or solution.
Here is my understanding of things:
It is not just sacrifice or just profit. The two don't necessarily have to clash. That's my point. When Jesus says Sabbath for man or man for Sabbath, he is perhaps talking about making a choice. So you have to make a choice--a rational choice depending on the circumstances. But if it is just the profit motive, is infinite profit the good thing? That's my question.
If you are smart/powerful and you amass all the goodies and all your neighbours are hungry, what will you do? You will share your things with your hungry neighbours or you just won't do anything?
The capitalist will open a bank and the socialist will open a cooperative. But you need a government in both the cases to ensure that there is no injustice/rapaciousness in the system. How little or how big the govt will be, let the people decide. The extreme capitalist (free market advocate) will say--very little govt so that it can exploit everybody--make you work as a cheap worker, with minimal rights. It will break the families, make everyone a worker and create a consumerist society and culture (free to pursue what makes you happy). And when people begin to fail to pay the bank debts because they lose jobs (because of its in-built cyclical booms and downturns), they will be put in debt prisons. Then they will use the "little govt." to catch the small guy and put him in jail or seize his property.
I am not saying you sacrifice everything (You can have both--profit with underpinnings of morality). But you MUST have a check on the capitalist. Don't let the market run amok. That's my point. No matter what Ayn Rand and her acolytes say, that is what the current downturn has proved.
K: Indeed, there're multiple views to the idea. But I think it can be easy to dismiss Ayn Rand's views simply due to the unfavourable 'words' she has used to establish and evangelise her cause. Her view of capitalism is not about just inifinite profit, but 'earned' profits - money that one exchanges on a fair weighting based on the simple laws of economics - supply/demand/scarcity/abundance. If a capitalist would exploit people, then it's simply a 'looter' in her terms - the exchange is not fair, but forced. Look to the man of Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged - he is a capitalist in every sense, yet nowhere do we see exploitation. It's easy to be biased and think that when one man is made rich, the rest will surely suffer. That is what perhaps she is trying to fight - that the idea of true capitalism is not a dirty word, and any other variant (corrupted) of capitalism that does not base its exchange fairly is not true capitalism at all.
Should the people decide? I've heard from my parents each time the election is near to cast the vote for the opposition, from countless taxi drivers that we should have more say. Ayn Rand's argument is that the voice of the crowds doesn't necessarily count as just, and I agree with it. If Lee Kuan Yew gave in to every whim of the people, where would we be? Can democracy really be the answer? I remember reading somewhere in a crowd psychology book that says the level of the crowd is as high as its weakest link. I read about the witch hunting that led to the massacre of innocent people. I read about how women are abused and oppressed in Tehran for ages because of such a voice.
Are what we view easily as 'oppression' today really that? When a man fails and gets into debts, what proportion of that disaster is his responsibility? None? No, if he is true he understands the risks of his undertakings, both good and bad. So many have preached that the world is to be a fair place, but is it? How do we view justice? Ideal or practical reality? The fact that in Atlas Shrugged all the true capitalists pulled out and went into hiding was because of the misguided voice of the crowd. Is the market amok today because of 'capitalism', or is it really just an easy scapegoat so the masses can point a finger at when things go wrong? Did the average retailer make accusations when times were good? Did the average person refrain from excess when he had bonuses and payouts? The masses' failure to embark on Joseph's lesson from the Bible of using the '7 years of good to prepare for the 7 years of lack' is what caused them their misery today, not capitalism.
If capitalism is truly evil, then the children of Africa should have been spared. The children of China should not be progressing onwards to this evil since Mao. They should be blessed in their previous run, why rush towards capitalism like lemmings to their fall? The current downturn is not to me a byproduct of capitalism, but of foolish indulgence. It's like the kid who screwed his life up with drugs and stuff and points at his own family and calls them dysfunctional and responsible for his downfall. It's the evading of responsibility that has cost us, not the desire for self-interest. If a country suffers, the people cannot evade responsibility. Whether they are ruled by a dictator or not, the truth remains - Hitler is an easy scapegoat, the true culprits are the masses who appointed him their puppet for the promise of a chicken in their pot.
To think otherwise, is to insult the martyrs and revoluntionaries who paid for the truth and their responsibility in blood. P.S. Seriously though, by not allowing banks and crap companies to fall, isn't it beginning to look like Atlas Shrugged deja vu?
Me: Good debate.
I can see where you are coming from. But you are confusing a lot of issues--I can see that too. The systems (mark that word systems pls) in US, Singapore and Iran are very different. I will not go into details.
I don't know what exactly Ayn Rand preached (but can take her as a preacher of free markets), but perhaps I have some understanding of capitalism (and free markets). Capitalism is just not about money or banks--it is the whole ecosystem that you see in a society. The American kid that grew up there, learnt to have drugs and learnt to run his life on credit--did all that within that system. Who taught him that? Why did he behave in that way? Why did others in other countries not behave that way? Ask yourself that question.
So, you can see where I am coming from.
By blaming the masses for their choices (are there real choices? Even that is debatable) you are delinking democracy from capitalism. That is again a big subject. And let us not go into China or totalitarianism (Hitler, etc).
So, basically, answer these two questions:
1. You believe in capitalism without democracy? If there is no democracy, what will be the form of govt.? 2. If a poor guy, because of his stupidity or for some systemic reason (say downturns or layoffs), falls on bad times, will you let him suffer and die or will you extend a helping hand to him?
With answers to these two questions, we can conclude this discussion.
K: Ok,
1. I believe in capitalism, and the freedom to every man for himself. Let each man govern and be fully responsible for their own actions. Perhaps that may lead us down the trail towards the survival of the fittest, but nature hasn't complain for a while, maybe it's not too bad.
2. I refer to the proverb - 'Give a man a fish, you feed him a day. Give the man a rod, you feed him for life.' I believe in extending a helping hand if he can embrace change and help himself, or else better die a victim, then live a persistent fool.
In his brilliantly written essay Capital Gains (Granta), novelist Rana Dasgupta makes us meet MC who is just 28. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. MC tells Rana that "that is just the beginning" and that "he is moving on to much bigger plans". What are these bigger plans? Let me quote from the essay:
‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’
He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.
‘Where?’ I ask.
‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’
MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.
‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’
Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.
If you read the essay, and you should, you will also find MC later admitting that there are many many super rich young businessmen like him in India.
It's not just MC and rich businessmen like him who are eying Africa. There are many countries who are leasing land in Africa to ensure their food security. A new land grab is on as food is becoming the new oil:
Governments and investment funds are buying up farmland in Africa and Asia to grow food -- a profitable business, with a growing global population and rapidly rising prices. The high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly is leading to a modern colonialism to which many poor countries submit out of necessity.
But what happens, as Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt ask, in a globalized world when colonies arise once again? We will have to wait and see but it may not be a peaceful reaction.
These days I have been reading some of the plays written by Singapore playwright and director Elangovan. He often goes for very provocative themes (The Gandhis of India being the subject of his latest production) which sometimes lands his plays in unsavoury situations. Most of his plays have politics for theme which is always interesting but a risky exercise. I assume that he enjoys that element of risk and provocation in his creative work--he is an adventure sportsman of theatre, if I may say so. And when I say this, I'm not being mean or disparaging.
His plays, I found, are rich in information but that makes them very verbose (he would have made a great investigative journalist). I don't know how his actors manage to deliver their lines as dialogues in his plays sometimes run to several paragraphs or even more than a page! A tough act! Nevertheless, his plays are important because they record things that nobody else will say or write.
But this post is not about him or his plays. Maybe I will write about that in future. What I want to relate here is that in Singapore, I got the opportunity to watch some theatre, follow some action in this line and I intend to keep doing that.
I had very little exposure to good theatre in school or even in college. At Aligarh, some of my friends were doing theatre but I hardly went to see any. I wanted to join theatre in college but unfortunately I did not read the list of selected candidates for the drama group@JNU and lost my chance. Never tried again. I was too lazy or too worried about my career. So, Mumbai, you are one 'struggler' less. More on that some other time again.
This post is about a man, an actor, who I have always admired. One of India's greatest actors, Naseeruddin Shah reminisces his past and present engagement with theatre as an art form, in a personal piece in Tehelka. Here, he reveals his love and respect for Geoffrey Kendall and his group Shakespeareana. In this piece, he also talks about Jerzy Grotowski, a great theatre actor, director and teacher whose style of theatre expounded in his book Towards a Poor Theatre greatly influenced Naseer:
Grotowski had extreme contempt for Broadway. Theatre can never match cinema’s illusion, so why was it competing to be the same? He asked three big questions: Is what theatre could do being done better than cinema? The answer was no. Then what was it that theatre used to do before the advent of cinema? And third, where had theatre sprung from? Theatre, he said, began with man’s need to communicate, not to dazzle. And in order to communicate, you don’t need huge castles disappearing on stage and helicopters and gondolas. The essential magic of theatre was to stimulate the imagination. Our poverty of resources should be our strength, not our weakness, he argued. If you remove everything extraneous – sets, lights, props, costumes – all you need is one actor in a black suit willing to work his butt off, and you have theatre. When you have two people who meet and talk, you have theatre. In his later life, Grotowski extended this argument so far, he began to dispense even with dialogue. He went on a different trip, searching for the primal state and sound. Theatre became synonymous with life – to a point where you couldn’t get a straight answer from him to any question, like what time of day it was.
Now, Naseer wants to stick to Dastangoi. I am eager to see him do it--I hope his group performs in Singapore in future. View this dastangoi clip (the only one I could find on Youtube) and tell me what you think of it. Do you also think that something like this could have inspired the great Dev Anand to speak the way he does (he delivers his dialgoues in a trademark Dev Anand style) or vice versa? I don't mean any disrespect to anyone but that's what came to my mind when I saw it.
Though it was published last year in December, I recently spotted this Soumya Bhattacharya (writer and editor of HT, Mumbai) interview in Granta (thanks AA). This is the part I liked most:
In India, the cultural discourse about books is dominated by news of prizes and advances. A lot of people here tend to think that writing is a get-rich-quick policy. While that is puerile and shameful, it does inspire more and more people to write. Most of the people who write because they want to get rich are unlikely to produce anything of any worth. But at least it’s become okay to say that one is working on a book, that one wants to do one. This is relatively new. Ten years ago, if you were writing something, it was a furtive exercise, a sort of sinful, closet endeavour. That has changed, and I think that is good.
Aravind Adiga on his growing up years in Mangalore (The Independent):
... my grandfather, an Indian nationalist, disdained to speak English, except to correct another man's.
He was a prominent local lawyer who dressed in hand-spun cloth (as Gandhi had), spoke only the local language, Kannada, and scorned anything "Western". Except for the one occasion when he had come out of his law office to chide me, in precise English ("You cannot 'put a gate'"), I had never heard him speak the language. My other grandfather, a surgeon in Madras, belonged to the opposite school of thought, once refusing to attend an official dinner in honor of the president of India, Zail Singh, on the grounds that the president's English was inadequate.
Such debates were dead for my generation. What my grandparents called the King's English, I call Nehru's English. The prime minister's great speeches in English – the "tryst with destiny" oration delivered on India's independence in 1947, or "the light has gone out of our lives," to announce Gandhi's death to the nation the next year – were taught in school, quoted on radio, and their fragments were found, like DNA strands, in all newspapers and magazines.
Nehru could only have made these speeches in English, because had he spoken in Hindi, we – in the south of India, where Hindi is not spoken, and is often abhorred – would not have understood him. Every foundational document of India was known to me only in English: the Constitution, for instance, and even Gandhi's autobiography, written in his native Gujarati, but taught in school in an English translation.
How could we function without our only common language? Doing away with English seemed to me tantamount to doing away with India: We were the language's, before the language was ours.
My daughter is not well and I am holed up at home—taking care of her. She is recuperating and I have put her on medicine and on strong dosage of 101 Dalmations and some Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Sad to note in today’s newspaper that Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad (of Sepet) has died. Too young to die.
Just wanted to write down a few lines on the movies that I have seen in the past two weeks: Shortkut (Hindi) was a disaster. Enjoyed watching Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (had seen it before) and Nayak—the latter was very well-made (one of Uttam Kumar’s best performances; such nuanced acting) and provided an insightful look at acting (theatre vs film acting; and the price and privileges of fame, etc.). I just loved the concept of train journey that becomes a metaphor in the film.
Also watched the first few chapters from Antonioni’s The Red Dessert. Despite its apparent beauty and comment on industrial decadence, I could not connect with the characters.
The real discovery was the Turkish film director, Nury Bilge Ceylan. He was a photographer and that shows in his film Kasba—but he seems overwhelmed by his love for photography and the story gets neglected. It was his other film, The Clouds of May, that I absolutely loved (and ready to forgive the indulgences that he makes to capture light and darkness, silhouettes, shadows and landscapes). More than a film it looked like a creative non-fiction piece to me (complete with non-professional actors). If Naipaul was not a writer and if he were to be filmmaker, perhaps he would have made films like this (of course, they would have become more political).
Also watched Tarufautt’s Soft Skin which was delightful—can David Dhawan adapt it without being crude and over the top and with no songs?
And after a long wait, finally watched Werner Herzog’s Aguirre—The Wrath of God. I saw it as an allegory of pursuit of power and fame. It shows how one can lose his mind and everything else in such a pursuit. One needs madness to achieve something of great importance but that can well be an illusion that can demand all kind of sacrifices.
Gouri Dange (Outlook) on Chandrahas Choudhury's Arzee The Dwarf:
From the first page, this is a triumph of storytelling in what Chandrahas Choudhury chooses to reveal, and at what precise pace. More importantly, given the protagonist’s evident handicap—physical and consequently emotional—Chandrahas manages to steer firmly clear from portraying any of the over-obvious indignities and humiliations that could well have found their way into the story of a poorish dwarf in a run-down cinema hall. Chandrahas also uses his great felicity with imagery and language with restraint and discernment.
The Delhi high court ruling against the IPC 377 sent a wave of jubilation in India 's homosexual community. Suddenly the criminal stigma of being a gay in India is gone. But the society still has miles to go in accepting gays for what they are. Here's my piece on this topic published at the Outlook Magazine website:
On June 2 this year, an American website Edge (Boston , MA) published a news story. Its headline was "Life Only Gets Worse for LGBT Iraqis"
The story was about two young gay men who were found dead in Baghdad ’s Sadr City slum. They were found wearing diapers and women’s lingerie. The bodies of four other men, beaten to death, were discovered by Iraqi police, each bearing signs reading "pervert" in Arabic on their chests, the report noted.
It was an email from a stranger, a fellow Indian, that drew my attention to this news item.
It was a just few days before the much celebrated Delhi High Court judgment in favour of gays and lesbians in India.
"I am writing to you from India ," Zahid, a young Indian doctor, wrote to me in his email. "I am born with Muslim parents, Al-Hamdu-lillah (praise be to Allah). And I have accepted myself for being the person I am -- gay in orientation."
Zahid was born and raised in Saudi Arabia as his dad had moved there for work. He finally moved back to India in 2003.
Being a fellow Muslim and artist (his words!), Zahid wanted me to condemn the killing of gays in Iraq . "Please just speak of the evil behind any kind of discrimination and human torture," he wrote. "It is not very happy to feel threatened. You see how all this affects life of gay people and again it shows how mob reaction rules over rational thinking and respect for others in Iraq ."
I assured him that I would condemn the act of murdering the Iraqi homosexuals (that’s what I’m doing by writing this article). Sexual orientation is a personal matter and no one has any right to kill a fellow human being on account of his or her sexual orientation. What happened in Iraq was clearly wrong, extra-judicial and illegitimate.
My friend Nishant, a Delhi-based journalist and social worker, has sent me a strong, well-argued rejoinder to my post on Arundhati Roy (Roy's Rage). In his response, Nishant makes some nuanced observations (like the cast angle in Kashmir issue) which can only come from a person who has seen things on the ground. I am reproducing his letter here, with his permission:
Hi, Zafarbhai. Interesting posts you send me. They are thought provoking, and sometimes provocative too, like this one. I thought I would write my views on your views on Arundhati Roy. I decided to write, because I think there is one very obvious school of thought you have omitted, among many others, in the hate-Roy-love-Roy binary. There are people who are on the side of the issues that Roy raises but do not agree with her approaches to them. I am one such person. In fact, I think she needs to do some theoretical thinking to bind all the struggles through a coherent thread.
I have watched Roy closely ever since her first essays during the NDA regime started coming out. I mostly agreed with her in those days. But, with time she has shown the biases that rooted NGO-wallahs show in India, rather north India. Or, should I say in the Indo-Aryan India.
I will keep my criticism short, for I want to make it a bigger intellectual exercise some day.
Since you have talked about Kashmir in the post below and because this is Roy's favourite milch cow these days, let us begin with it. For a very long time, the security forces are involved in gross human rights violations in the Kashmir valley. And, for the equally long time the activists in Kashmir, the rest of India and other parts of the world have been trying to highlight the travails of the Kashmiri people. But, what Roy has started doing is using these violations to make a political point. She calls Kashmir India's colony. It will be great to know Roy's definitions of both 'colony' as well as the 'imperial centre'. But, no definitions ever emerge from her writing, for she is forever creating 'a maze of words'. If Kashmir is a colony, then is Punjab a colony as well? What about the Northeast then? And, the Red Corridor? And, the small Dalit ghettos that we find everywhere in the country? Is the net flow of money from the Kashmir valley to New Delhi? If we start defining the term colony in such a way, soon we will be left only with a Hindu India, which I think is an RSS project.
Perhaps, creative writers don't waste their time defining what can be called a colony and what cannot be. Perhaps, they are there only to create creative works out of popular struggles, without giving much thought to the discontents of these struggles. Or, perhaps, it's much easier to declare a bigger entity your enemy, rather than the negative forces contained in popular struggles.
It doesn't matter much to Roy and people like her -- I can count on my fingertips how many of them work closely to come out with a coherent line of thought on Kashmir and similar issues -- that the struggle in Kashmir is spearheaded by upper-caste Muslims, the likes of Gilani, that Brahmin among Muslims, with the sole exception of Yasin Malik. It does not matter to her that almost all lower caste Muslims of the valley are against the Hurriyat politics. It does not matter to her that no upper-caste Muslim is ever interested in getting Hindus back in the valley. It does not matter to her that the upper-caste leadership of the Kashmiri struggle is not only religious in nature, it is opposed to Left-wing politics as well. The second target of the Kashmiri militants in the early 1990s were left-wing activists of the valley, the first being Kashmiri Pandits.
It also does not matter to her that lower-caste Bihari Muslims and Hindus who go there every year for work work under abysmal conditions and suffer abuses from the elite of the valley. Gilani is a Bal Thackeray-like figure of the valley. He abuses all outsiders and particularly hates Biharis. He makes fun of Hindus and believes the Islamic culture is the most superior form of culture available. If he was borne into a differnt religion, Roy would have been writing articles against him.
Perhaps, it is more profitable to be left-wing in Delhi and quiet about ideology in Kashmir.
In 2004 summer when I was in Kashmir, I read hatred-driven articles in a religiously coloured newspaper called Greater Kashmir (Roy loves this paper; she keeps quoting from it). That was the time of the annual Amarnath yatra. We were yet to see the communal protests in the valley against it that we saw last year. But, in retrospect I can say that the unrest was building up. The Muslim elite of the valley has always been against the popularity of the Amarnath yatra, though their official stand is that it shows the syncretic spirit of the valley. In once such article, I read how the writer had described in graphic detail the scene of the base camp or the route of the yatra. It was full thinly-veiled caste remarks about the kind of people who had come to the valley from outside and spoiling its environment. The writer wrote about the shit gathered on the banks of the Lidder. A friend of mine did a performance at Khoj Studios called The Shit of the Other. I connected the two stories when I heard about his performance much later.
Much later when the Amarnath row broke out, another of such activists Gautam Navlakha reproduced that argument of the beautiful Lidder and the shit of the other. Needless to say, you have to be Brahiminical to hate shit so much.
Roy herself wasn't very far behind when she quoted from a placard that one protester was carrying during that mammoth march in Srinagar during the Amarnath row, which she described in her first major essay on Kashmir. The placard said something like 'Bhookha nanga Hindustaan, jaan se pyara Pakistan'. Being rooted in the Indo-Aryan ways of anti-establishment protests in north India, Roy gave a twist to the slogan. She thought the people of Kashmir were questioning the globalisation policies that India has pursued in the last few decades and which have increased poverty in India. Great interpretation. Even if that protest had taken place three decades back, the protesters would have carried similar banners. She missed the caste abuse implicit in the slogan. She forgot that Pakistan was an upper-caste Muslim's upper-caste dream. She forgot that when the Muslim elite of the Kashmir valley see kinship in Pakistan, it's nothing but a caste kinship. She obviously has read no literature of the partition time, in which both upper-caste Hindus and upper-caste Muslims hurled caste abuses at each other when they counted the underbelly of both religions.
My friend Sanjay Kak made a film on Kashmir. He is Roy's friend as well. I remember one scene in which he is trying to show the strategies used by the security forces to win over a local villager. A uniformed officer is seen to be felicitating the villager with a radio set. The context of the film makes it look like an Indian nationalist trick. But, Kak too belongs to the same caste group that so much dominates India, both in its oppression and its opposition to its oppression. He forgot to seek the opinion of the villager who accepted the 'gift'. I guess the villager was a Gujjar. The caste of the villager makes him that sort of character that you see in the paintings of the colonial times, where among sahebs, both white as well as brown, you see a lower-caste dhobi, maali, malishwala or one such professional almost tripping out of the painting at the edge. I like to believe that Kak muffled a voice. Perhaps, he missed out on an Ambedkar. He had the golden chance of following a lower-caste voice in a film otherwise full of upper-caste characters.
Zafar, if there is one dominant struggle in India that is upper-caste in character, this is it. And, I am not surprised that an activist community that is characterised by their annual candle-lighting exercise at the Wagah border -- that another symbol of caste solidarity and hatred at the same time -- feels so close to the struggle in Kashmir.
You have quoted Roy as saying, 'No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir Valley.' I guess you know that some of these candidates were from the Bahujan Samaj Party. Mayawati is expanding. Hers is the only national party that has found support in every corner of the country. She put up candidates in all assembly segments in the elections last year. I think the BSP managed around 5 per cent votes. It will be great to do a caste analysis of Mayawati's candidates and the ones who issue election boycott calls in the valley. Roy will get her answer then.
Some day Roy should also tell us where she has got the figure of 'one armed soldier for every 20 civilians' from. Whatever number of soldiers we have in Kashmir is a huge and horrible number, but Roy's number borders on propaganda and it keeps changing. According to the 2001 census, the population of the valley was approximately 56 lakh. Is she using this figure to make her point? If yes, then total number of armed soldiers will be 56 lakh/20 = 2 lakh 80 thousand soldiers. But, she has quoted a much higher number on different occasions. In this interview given in Feb. 2009, she says this number is between five lakh and seven lakh. Other activists and my friends in Kashmir have quoted a figure of 10 lakh soldiers as well. Pakistan also quotes a figure of one million soldiers. I guess you get the point here.
This is not to say that I don't agree with her that Kashmir is a heavily militarized zone, but perhaps one should not get carried away in creating a scary picture that can bring personal benefits.
Let's come to her ideas on the nuclear bomb. She wrote a lengthy article on the issue of India and Pakistan going nuclear. The BJP government was in power in those days, and the tests were done by a BJP prime ministers. When a right-wing government is in power, it's much easier and simpler to hate the state. Then one does not get into the ideological complexities that she got into on the Kashmir issue. But, Roy has no original argument ever. She picks them from here and there, most notably from the popular struggles which already have developed arguments. This is what she did in the case of her anti-nuke arguments.
If you notice, Zafar, these days our rhetoric against nuclear bombs is based on the same principles on which our nationalism is based. Many dominant groups in India see the nuclear bomb as a signifier of an assertive India. And, these groups include both pro-bomb guys as well as anti-bomb buys. The idea of India that both these groups have in mind are the same upper-caste elite of India who sometimes hate Pakistan and on other occasions want to love it, both on the ground of race solidarity.
But, I object to viewing a nuke only through this lens. I feel a nuke is a signifier in a pure sense. When a right-wing government uses it, it acquires a right-wing character. And, if a left-wing government wants to use it, it can use it international negotiations. Is it important to tie the Indian nuclear bomb to Pakistan? Isn't this a 90s phenomenon? When Indira Gandhi ordered first nuclear tests, she was willing to be on the side of the global left than on the side of the Indian right. But, half-baked arguments of people like Roy and Anand Patwardhan do is make all other interest group retreat from the nuclear debate. They project the bomb as a Hindu bomb to be deployed against a Muslim neighbour. So, other groups that may have believed in the theory that either everybody can have this bomb or nobody should have it are forced to retreat.
Both Patwardhan and Roy ignore the fact India has and is developing missile capabilities that can deliver a nuke up to and beyond 2,000 kilometres. If we were to have only Hindu nukes, then there is no need to waste money on developing more missiles. Pakistan is already covered in the existing range. But, such details usually escape creative writers. They are more interested in creating impact through their works than argue their case. This is not to say that India's nuclear programme is not directed against Pakistan, but it is not exclusively tied to it.
And, of course, the anti-nuke lobby has never heard of using the bomb to press for disarmament.
I have an observation on Roy's stand on the Narmada issue as well. I quite liked her article on the Narmada dam. That, I think, is her best argued work. Even if all arguements are borrowed, we need such articles. And, I don't support Ramachandra Guha's critique of Roy's stand on the Narmada dam. But, I do agree with him that she is more interested in her popularity than the fate of the cause.
Look at what happened to the whole issue after the Supreme Court judgment. Both Medha Patkar and Roy have moved on to greener pastures, Patkar to Singur and SEZ-related issues and Roy to Kashmir, after making many other popular stops. I think the Narmada issue is one of the biggest defeats of the social movements in India. And, look at the contrast: while the peole have lost their land and livelihood, its leaders have prospered in their social standing.
The Medha Patkar kind of politics that Roy supported is primarily the cause for this defeat. Because Patkar is Gandhian, she did not allow any violence to take place on the Narmada issue. When the state and the courts went against the people, she simply retreated, or, should I say, moved on. Compare that to the fate of anti-land-acquisition movements. A lot of them, like Singur and Nandigram, are successful, and in many of them Patkar is involved. The deciding factor, however, was that no Gandhian was the supreme leader of these movements. In fact, violence proved to the ultimate deterrent against the capitalist encroachment.
These days Roy is busy lauding Kashmiris for their non-violent struggle. She may end up helping the people she is fighting against, which I won't mind in this case. But, her record is that wherever she goes, that struggle is screwed in a few years. A very dangerous activist to have among your midst.
It can be argued that Southeast Asian Writing in English has not achieved as much attention as African Writing in English or Indian Writing in English, even though English as a language reached most parts of the world wave after wave as a result of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila have been major outposts under British and American colonialism, but the output in English from these big Asian cities has not made much impact on the global literary landscape, the same way that writings from India or Africa have. Where is Southeast Asia’s answer to Midnight Children or a House for Mr. Biswas or Things Fall Apart?
