“The past does live on, in people as well as in cities.”

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It is 1989, a time of great flux for Samar, as it is for India.

Rajeev gandhi hasd set into motion the machinery for the economic liberalisation that will culminate in the reforms of 1991, and will be defeated very soon in the general election. The next two years will see two diffferent prime ministers, till Narasimha Rao comes and stays from 1991 to 1996.

Samar, a Brahmin autodidact and all-round bookworm who was brought up in a village without any companions and with a not insufficient awareness of his caste and social position, has just moved from Allahabad to Benares, next door to the British Miss West, who will introduce him to Western Classical music and Benares’ teeming Western society.

His strangeness in the world of Westerners who have always had social lives is in fact deeper than just habit. It is a difference in culture itself. He doesn’t think and perceive the world in the same way.

..and the word ‘pretty’ came to be crystallised by the lovely vulnerability of her face, the clear olive skin, the large hazel eyes that looked out at the world with a mixture of uncertainty and sadness, the full lower lip, the dark wavy hair that formed a perfect inverted V over her forehead. After this, her soft French accent seemed oddly childlike, more human, more manageable.

***

But his new social life doesn’t just involve foreigners and Indians who spend time with foreigners; there’s also a violent student activist in the Benares Hindu University who comes from a dirt-poor family and reads Rumi.

***

Things happen and, like in organic chemistry, bonds break and bonds are formed, and, also like organic chemistry, we are interested not by the bonds themselves but by how they break and form.

***

Overall, it works as a complex portrait of a country in flux, but much more compellingly as one of a man in flux, gaining a social life, suddenly finding himself in a mire of feelings, then in a position from where he has to proceed with the utmost caution, and then having his heart broken and retreating ffrom his feelings till they come back and hit him in the face; and then his final confrontation of them – if that is what it is.

***

Even on the writing front, Mishra is pretty much excellent. He combines an immense sensitivity to Samar’s state of mind with a searing eye for detail and adds to it the mildly odd turn of phrase characteristic of Indians who taught themselves fluency of English by reading voraciously.

In some sense, I travelled everywhere and nowhere. The miles clocked up, and there came a point when I could no longer distinguish between the settlements that clattered past my jaded eyes – the overpopulated slums with their tottering houses, fetid alleys and exposed gutters, their cooped-up frustrations and festering violence, their hardened ugliness. The small and big towns where I often spent a sleepless night in tiny bare hotel room all began to merge together. I would often be kept awake by the varied cacophony that emanated from the other rooms, where young men of distinctly criminal appearance drank rum and watched jaunty Hindi musicals together.

***

Is The Romantics a great book? I don’t know; it could well be, and I suspect it in fact is, but it’s certainly one that I love, and one that I will always cherish.

“I am, he thought one day, part of the twentieth century.”

You might have read or heard Indians telling people to “think deeply” about something. In fact, if you are an Indian, you are probably wondering what point I could hope to make with this. We Indians are bombarded with this phrase so often that we don’t notice that it actually sounds somewhat clunky in most sentences; most Western texts prefer to perform an “involved inquiry” or something similar. If you aren’t Indian, forgive the next one who says that, because it’s just the literal translation of a popular Indian idiom which isn’t clunky in our language. Translations from Indian languages are full of these, which make novels which try to translate everything into English sound either unbearably clunky (for a well-handled example, read Raja Rao) or, if you change over to more common usage, unbelievably artificial. Vikram Chandra, in his latest book Sacred Games, has found a way out of this quandary in a remarkably simple way:

Her Hindi was accented, functional and fluid, but improvised, it stumbled confidently past feminine possessives and tenses. Sartaj was sure her English was better, but his own English had rusted into awkwardness. They would get by in some knocked-together mixture, some Bombay blend.

When I read this, I noted down the page number because I thought it sounded very nice. It is only now that I realise how perfectly it describes the style of the book, and how it anchors it in what is obviously the book’s point: to Bombay. Which means to describe it, to serenade it with an ode about it.

Every Hindi/Marathi word in the book, of which there are plenty, is sufficiently comprehensible; we mostly don’t get what exactly the word means, but we always get the sense of it. For Chandra, to sprinkle these words in the book was downright necessary, because he has taken on the task of describing Bombay, and he chose the underworld because cops and robbers between them make their way around every level of life in the city. And if you’re choosing the underworld, you have to use the local slang (imagine a Scorsese movie in immaculate English). You can’t translate it because for a gangster to describe a woman he’s taken for a night as a “to be beaten” (“thoku”) is a way to make Stephen Hawking’s publisher say, “Every translated piece of slang means hundred less copies sold.” For a nine-hundred page book, that would be in the negative infinities.

But saying it’s necessary doesn’t mean that Chandra doesn’t enjoy it. In his previous outing Love and Longing in Bombay, he managed to keep the language by providing translations after the word. Most of the time, that is. For this new book, he went back to those instances of no translation in that book and copied the method to every page of this one.

Focusing on this fact so much makes it sound like this was the best thing about the book. Let me assure you, no. This was just a part of the style, like diary entries or psychedelia. It just gains importance when you are writing about the book. The best thing here is the characters, and the world they live in.

The world is brought to life with painstaking verisimilitude. Take, for example, a moment when an inspector – Sartaj Singh from the story ‘Kama’ in the last book – and his constable partner – Katekar, also from there –  bond while

Katekar drove with an easy grace that found the gaps in the traffic with balletic timing. … You went forward, and someone always backed off at the last moment, and it was always the other gaandu.

Or take how within one dialogue we can see the influenc e of Bollywood and Hinduism (the modern form):

‘So don’t choose that one. Make a shortlist. Then we’ll consider family background, education, nature of girl, horoscope, and move on from there.’

‘Move on?’

‘See the girls, of course.’

‘We’ll go to her house? And she’ll bring in tea while her parents watch?’

Or how alien Sartaj finds the West (if you look closely enough, you can also spot alienation from his own culture):

Some entertainment could be exactly what would fix him up, and revive him like a good morning walk in Buffalo. Where in America was Buffalo? And why was it called Buffalo? Sartaj had no idea. Some more of life’s mysteries.

Now that I’ve overdone that, let me give short shrift to the characters (hey, at least I’m giving them some shrift). There’s Sartaj, who’s not as interesting as he was in ‘Kama’. There’s too much happening in his parts, not giving us enough time to get into his head. He’s just like a pawn for the plot. We catch him himself thinking that he’s a pawn for bigger events; ironically, this gets less and less true as the events progressively blow up. There’s Gaitonde, one of the city’s two biggest gangsters who’s narrating his life story to Sartaj from what would seem at first to be beyond the grave (he dies in the second chapter itself). This narration takes up nearly every alternate chapter. And there’s Swami Shridhar Shukla, who doesn’t mind people not believing in God, who is taking Hinduism back to its philosophical roots in the Vedic texts, who answers at least two of the big questions in Waking Life. And there are a multitude of others, but these are the ones that stick most strongly in the head.

I said that these characters and their world was the best thing about this book. True, but also extravagantly false; from another perspective of ‘thing’, the best thing is the ‘insets’, little vignettes that in some way relate to the main story. These could be short stories in their own right, and lovely ones at that. It is in these that Chandra exercises his enjoyment of portraying a multitude of different voices, and since this is one of my favourite things about his writing, I loved the insets.

All in all, I would recommend the book, but I strongly feel that this is his worst book. While this is unmistakably a Chandra book, it is too… conventional. Take away the insets, and I would say that the job could have been done better by someone else. His love of storytelling, as done by his characters, only comes through sometimes. Oppose that to Red Earth and Pouring Rain, which is the narrative of a monkey telling the story of a man who’s narrating the story told to him by a woman who’s seeing the story of the monkey’s past life through a bit of water(and some divine intervention). Or Love and Longing in Bombay, which is a set of stories told to one well-rounded character by another. I have come to love Vikram Chandra books for being different, completely madcap. About Red Earth and Pouring Rain, I wrote “The only accurate word I can think of to describe this book is big. Not in terms of length, not even in terms of scope and imagination but in terms of the realistic universe Chandra creates. Here, by realistic, I mean rooted in reality: it could very well have happened and we don’t know about it because we just didn’t see it. Every new element of fantasy he brings in first looks like it is only there to satisfy Chandra’s sense of humour. Then, we eventually get to see the self-wrapped ness, so to say, of the universe he’s created and how every element fits in.” Sacred Games, by contrast, ends up having the plot like that of a Hollywood action movie. Yes, considering the plot, the book is remarkably good, but… I want to say to Chandra about Sacred Games what Ebert said to Tarantino about Reservoir Dogs, “OK, now you’ve shown you can do this, now go and do something better.”

“My name is A. B. C. D. Douglas; Father’s name: E. F. G. H. Douglas”

Cover painting by Jatin Das

Fakir Mohan Senapati(1843-1918) has a really interesting name, because Mohan Senapati is a Hindu name whereas Fakir is a Muslim name. So, I thought I might as well explain it, my source being the introduction to this edition by Satya p Mohanty. He was born Braja Mohan Senapati. In his childhood he fell gravely ill. After his grandmother had prayed to all the Hindu Gods she turned to two Muslim saints. In exchange for curing him, she promised to give him up to their religious order as a Fakir. When he recovered, she reneged, but agreed to give him up symbolically by changing his name to Fakir.
Six Acres and a Third(Oenguin Modern Classics edition, Rs. 250) is his first novel. He is also said to have pioneered the genre of the short story in Oriya, though his pioneering story has since been lost.

Ramachandra Mangaraj was a zamindar – a rural landlord – and a prominent moneylender as well, though his transactions in grain far exceeded those in cash. For an area of four kos around, no one else’s business had much influence. He was a very pious man indeed: there are twenty-four ekadasis in a year. If there had been forty such holy days, he would have observed every single one. This is indisputable. Every ekadasi he fasted, taking nothing but water and a few leaves of the sacred basil plant for the entire day. Just the other afternoon, though, Mangaraj’s barber, Jaga, let it slip that on the evenings of ekadasis a large pot of milk, some bananas, and a small quantity of khai and nabata are placed in the master’s bedroom. Very early the next morning, Jaga removes the empty pot and washes it. Hearing this, some people exchanged knowing looks and chuckled. One blurted out, “Not even the father of Lord Mahadeva can catch a clever fellow stealing a drink when he dips under the water.” We’re not absolutely sure what was meant by this, but our guess is that these men were slandering Mangaraj. Ignoring their intentions for the moment, we would like to plead his case as follows: Let the eyewitness who has seen Mangaraj emptying the pot come forward, for like judges in a court of law we are absolutely unwilling to accept hearsay and conjecture as evidence. All the more since science textbooks state unequivocally: “Liquids evaporate.” Is milk not a liquid? Why should milk in a zamindar’s household defy the laws of science? Besides, there were moles, rats and bugs in his bedroom. And in whose house can mosquitoes and flies not be found? Like all base creatures of appetite, these are always on the lookout for food; such creatures are not spiritually minded like Mangaraj, who had the benefit of listening to the holy scriptures. It would be a great sin, then, to doubt Mangaraj’s piety or unwavering devotion.

Jonathan Swift – about whom I speak solely from reputation and hearsay – felt the need to create believable characters and put them in situations strangely reminiscent of reality to perform his satire. Fakir Mohan Senapati, in his Six Acres and a Third (translated by a veritable army consisting of Satya P. Mohanty, Rabi Shankar Mishra, Jatindra K. Nayak and Paul St-Pierre),feels no such need. His characters are all caricatures, his Orissa a land that exists only inasmuch as it helps him make his point, but I believed in them nevertheless.

When I finished this book, I thought this was a ‘great’ book in the same way that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, because of its importance. It is widely touted, to the extent that it is touted at all, as being the apex of nineteenth century realism in Indian literature, as showing the ‘view from below’ before most of India had heard of anything along the lines of Marxism, as … well, quite a few more things, as described in Satya P. Mohanty’s (rather averagely written, even if makes good points) introduction. But, now, five days after having finished it, I realise that there may be more to the greatness this book than just importance. Not that I ever thought it wasn’t a very good book, but it just didn’t strike me as a candidate for greatness merely on basis of quality. Now, as I was typing up that quote, I realized that not only had Senapati got me to believe in the caricatures while I was reading it, I still believe in Ramachandra Mangaraj and co.

All he does is make no pretensions at depth, or naturalism. His narrator is nothing more than a ‘dispassionate’ (I’ll come back to these quotation marks) observer, who tells us merely what he sees, what he ‘concludes’, and the results of his ‘research’. This, you would think, isn’t very hard to do. Take, for counter-example, Albert Camus’s The Outsider, a review of which was my first post on this blog. My primary complaint with it was that it felt as if Camus wasn’t trying hard enough to convince us, because everything from the plot to the characters apart from the protagonist struck me as very poorly thought-out. Max Cairnduff commented saying that it wasn’t intended as a naturalistic piece in the first place. Which is a fair reason for disagreement; the primary reason we disagree about quality of art is that some things are more important to some people than they are to others. My point in bringing this up was that I felt no such irritation while reading Six Acres and a Third, which I feel even works as a naturalistic piece. This is so because Senapati makes so little pretence, makes everything he says sound so provisional, that I can take it as the version of truth as offered by someone not completely disinvolved.

And, therein lies the crux of the narration; the book is narrated by a person, or persons – even common people from Orissa and Bihar tend to use the royal pronoun, and the narrator could well be an investigator for the English, so I can’t be sure though I lean towards it being just one person –, who’s not involved but is making a thinly-veiled pretence at being one of the people whose life depends on these people whose dealings he talks of. I can say this because of the way it is said: looking at the quote, you can see three levels of narration, so to say. First, we have the fact that he is using Western courtroom logic to defend Ramachandra Mangaraj. Then, we have the fact that he is revealing facts that can only incriminate the man. Then, he is using the worst logic available to save him nevertheless, inasmuch as he will then be safe in a (caricaturised) court of law. He’s attacking Mangaraj, and thinly veiling it as a defence. The whole book – which, compliments to the author, is very short, less than two hundred very loosely packed pages – passes in such a flurry of multiple but obvious levels of deceit, most of the time more thinly-veiled than the rest of it. Sometimes, we even see trickery in the narrator’s mention of his target audience.

There is a plot, but it only comes in the second half of the book. Senapati packs most of it with a set of vignettes showcasing corruption at various levels – and the various branches of each level – of society, going as high as is relevant from the villagers’ point of view. Brahmins, peasants, zamindars, policemen, lawyers – especially lawyers, since it is their language which is used as the medium of satire –, they all come under scrutiny. There are six acres and a third, not to mention a cow, that are seized, and which go to court etc. Interestingly, even the victims of the seizing aren’t completely honest. Most interestingly, the only good people in the book barely talk; there are two, and one of them gets one scene with three, maybe four, barely functional dialogues. The other one? He only gets a few actions to perform.

It sounds so complex (here, I’m talking about morally complex, all the little implications; my ‘levels of writing’ are actually fairly obvious, even necessary for a book claiming to be a satire). But, when I read it, I thought the book was written in a simple, lucid style with few depths I was surprised to have plumbed. It is nothing more than the highest compliment to Senapati that all of his meaning came across so clearly. After I finished the book, I read Mohanty’s introduction, and there’s very little of this write-up that uses things I’ve learnt from Mohanty. Not because I found the points unworthy but because I already knew them. It was valuable only as a history lesson on this book. It is this simplicity, supported strongly by the cultural – it was the apex of nineteenth century realism in Indian literature – as well as historical – as a burning critique of the British administration – importance that makes this a great book. And I never even mentioned the anger simmering beneath the narrative, with about as much obvious force as this sentence.