They look out of the bus window and what the hell is that a guy with a bear on a chain? Where? Can’t see anymore. Well, it looked like a guy with a be They look out of the bus window and what the hell is that a guy with a bear on a chain? Where? Can’t see anymore. Well, it looked like a guy with a bear on a chain.
Yes, it was…. And his story is the third of these five interlinked-kind-of (see above) sorry tales of modern India. The guy with the bear is from a drastically poor village, one day he just finds a bear cub
The trembling, blinking creature is slightly larger and weightier than a fat dog
and a lightbulb goes off in his dim, cruel mind – this could be a money-making proposition. You know, a dancing bear. So begins the most upsetting, horrific 75 pages I read so far this year. This bear is the most memorable character in the whole book.
The other main story (100 pages long) is about Milly, a poor girl from the village, and her grim progress through her allotted trail of miseries. She never quite comes to life as a character, but I thought well, that’s appropriate, since the iron fist of Indian poverty never allows her to come to life in her own life, so to speak.
So yes, this is another 260 pages of unhappiness for you. Does anyone smile on any of these pages? Well, some of them laugh at the bear.
Indian novels - there are the moony, mournful, melancholic, meandering ones like The God of Small Things, The Inheritance of Loss, The Clear Light of Indian novels - there are the moony, mournful, melancholic, meandering ones like The God of Small Things, The Inheritance of Loss, The Clear Light of Day – they all win awards - and there are the rackety, ratatat, bang-up-to-the-minute, slangy, bawling brawling middle of a traffic jam ones like Slumdog Millionaire and The White Tiger and this one. They all get made into films. Well, this one hasn’t yet but it exudes a confidence that says it’s only a matter of months and I believe it.
The first sort include many droopy recollections of the grand days of a family now in terminal decline, money nearly all gone, boo hoo. These are stories told by women. The second sort are rags to riches tales told by a motormouth chancer who is going to tell his unlikely story at breakneck speed until you or him keels over from exhaustion. These are stories told by men.
The title How to Kidnap the Rich gives it away – our genre here is satirical comedy caper, and our tone is full-on caustic loathing of all things Indian. Sample nasty comment – referring to the bad parts of Old Delhi :
Where people lived like gnats on a lemur’s ballsack, where everyone was missing teeth or organs or legs and nothing got better even as the GDPs and the HDIs were going up, up, up all over United Nations Powerpoint slides.
Rahul Raina is an equal opportunities insulter, so naturally the rich will get the sharp end of his tongue too :
In a few years he’d turn into his dad and hate himself until he died. You know, the normal life-cycle of the upper-class Indian male.
Ramesh, our narrator, is upfront about his bad attitude :
My hate could have made India the world’s leader in renewable energy.
He likes to editorialise about India in ways which can take your breath away :
You can’t say anything nice about your parents. That’s the first commandment of being Indian.
or
We Indians are the horniest people on the internet, as any comment section on any video will tell you. We crowd around women, be beg for attention, we will even ask nymphs in sixteenth-century frescoes for their phone numbers.
He loves to shoot from the hip. His industrial strength projectile sneering can happen at any time :
We turned up to a glass-windowed office. The receptionists were white. That’s how I knew I’d really made it.
or
He looked full of charity and joy and other things that make no money.
MORE FUN WITH YOUR SIMILES
One of the things I love to do with modern novels is collect the outrageous similes that authors love to spice their prose with – here are some favourites.
He was totally disarmed, like Pakistan after a war.
I had been squeezing my head fuller than a three-child family on a motorbike
Staring at us like an uncle at a wedding buffet that’s run out of butter chicken
His face expressing terror…like he had just accidentally beaten his boss at the golf course
We would be welcomed like sons returning without white girlfriends from MIT
She was busier than our civil servants are in January editing government websites to remove any mention of last year’s targets (Wins the prize for the most convoluted simile!)
I should stop now or this review will be like one of those damned film trailers that include all the best jokes.
DID YOU LIKE IT?
The first third of this novel is terrific – line after line of great comedy (if you like it bitter). Unfortunately the kidnapping plot then takes over – yes, there is actual kidnapping here, and there are tough guys who say shit like
Tell Pratap to put the knife down, madarchod, or I’m giving your sweet rasgulla one in the balls.
And shoved into the middle of it all like an undercover cop at a BLM rally there is a tiresomely winsome Love Story, naturally, since this will be a film and we need one of those. The loved one is alas straight from central casting. There are two or three cardboard villains, of course. Everything in its rightful place. But as the plot sent the characters ricocheting around Delhi like seismographs in a tsunami the author seemed to run out of killer one-liners and I couldn’t care enough about the villains to want them to suffer. I wanted to like this way more than I did. But that’s me. Mr Hard to Please....more
The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.
Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.
After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .
SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL
Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974) Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)
Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.
But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:
Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.
And we have many, many little lists too :
Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans. The inflatable goose. The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks with separate colored toes. Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses. A watch with the time painted on it.
SIMILEWATCH
As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :
Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant Like substandard mattress-stuffing Like shining beads on an abacus Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been Like lumpy knitting Like hairy cannonballs Like an unfriendly jewelled bear Like sub-tropical flying-flowers Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate
INDIAN WRITERS
For me they divide into the plain
R K Narayan Rohinton Mistry Adiga Aravind Sunjeev Sahota Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
And the flowery
Salman Rushdie Nadeem Aslam Kiran Desai And Arundhati Roy
Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.
I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED
That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.
So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off....more
Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing after that was going to be even half as good, probably. Anita Desai drew the short straw and she won’t be happy about that. Sorry, Anita. Your novel is okay-ish, that is, it’s not terrible, but er… well… hmmm….
Actually, between you and me, I didn’t think it was up to much. It gets a lot of Goodreads love but I could have done without it. I can’t think I would ever bitterly regret not having read this novel. Four middle-class kids grow up in Delhi, the parents are distant bridge-playing don’t bother me I’m busy types. The kids are frankly kind of cliched – arrogant son who expects sisters to obey his every whim, older plain Jane sister at war with everybody & taking all responsibility, younger pretty sister something of an airhead, youngest brother mentally impaired. He is obsessed with an old wind-up gramophone. He plays the same bunch of 78s over and over. That would get on your nerves. I like “Lili Marlene” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as much as the next guy but I couldn’t take them every day of the week. And I thought the number of times Anita Desai detailed this obsessive behaviour was verging on the obsessive itself.
Half the book is set in the present where the family has disintegrated – cue much moping and maundering about the past, the past oh the past and how the house needs repainting now and wasn’t it sad when the cow fell in the well; and the other half is in 1947 just before Partition when fortunately for this family they avoid all the mayhem.
One of the major conflicts in the story is when Bim (older sister) is trying to decide whether to sell the shares in their father’s insurance company. I mean, it’s not Dostoyevsky, is it.
Forster deals blows right and left in this novel and modern readers will grimace when they read the intricately exposTHIS IS AN ANTICOLONIAL NOVEL BUT
Forster deals blows right and left in this novel and modern readers will grimace when they read the intricately exposed racism of the British in India (the lofty British ladies learning just enough Urdu to be able to give instructions to the servants); but alas, some of the generalisations about Indians will jar as the narrator throws out stuff like
Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.
Or
What they [the Indians] said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same. They had numerous mental conventions and when these were flouted they found it very difficult to function.
or
Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend.
That doesn’t sound very nice to me, I had thought that Mr Forster was a nice man. Well, he was a nice man. This book was published in 1924 and is brilliantly anti-colonialist but even progressive minds could not help generalising about The Oriental.
THE MYSTIC EAST
Part of the opposition displayed between western colonialists and Indian subjects is expressed as the English demanding facts and figures and making religion a department of the Colonial Office (“God who saves the King will surely support the police”) versus continual suffocating Indian religious fervency, both Islamic and Hindu. This cliché had caterpillar legs, it was very strong 40 years later when the Beatles set up a tax avoidance scheme called Apple and then immediately left for Rishikesh to meditate on ineffability with the Maharishi. But the insistence on the hardnosed versus the floaty mystical-twistical can be irritating and possibly strike the reader as crypto-racist. Forster himself seems to participate in this Mystic East schtick. Here is the narrator waxing not so much lyrical as borderline incomprehensible :
All over the city and over much of India the same retreat on the part of humanity was beginning, into cellars, up hills, under trees. April, herald of horrors, is at hand. The sun was returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty – that was the sinister feature. If only there had been beauty! His cruelty would have been tolerable then. Through excess of light, he failed to triumph, he also; in his yellowy-white overflow not only matter, but brightness itself lay drowned. He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.
TUMESCENCE/DETUMESCENCE
The action of the plot turns into a big courtroom drama. This is the second classic in a row that I read with a John Grisham tendency, the other one was The Brothers Karamazov. The case collapses in dramatic fashion and after that comes a lot of ruefulness and bumbling and personal bitterness but not too much happens. There is maybe seventy pages of deflation. I could imagine that some reader might be a trifle impatient with that.
ON THE OTHER HAND
You have to love zingers like
A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air.
And a crafty observation like
There is always trouble when two people do not think of sex at the same moment
1) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 19241) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 1924 – the plot turns round a charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott in 1966 – another charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then Heat and Dust in 1975 which gives us the shocking tale of an English woman who elopes with an Indian man.
2) This novel is another of those very melancholy drooping meandering quiet humble softly despairing everything under the surface not really a plot at all books like Hotel Du Lac and Staying On and The Remains of the Day. They can be brilliant – Remains of the Day is really great – but sometimes you want to light a jumping jack under their arses. Heat and Dust was just eurghhhhhhh.
3) 1975 must have been a dire year if this won the Booker Prize....more
Short and sweet unless you think that women should not be slaves to their husbands, in which case, short and bitter.
Full of weird oldfashioned 1938-sShort and sweet unless you think that women should not be slaves to their husbands, in which case, short and bitter.
Full of weird oldfashioned 1938-style Indian English dialogue such as :
Husband to small daughter : Learn not to whimper before your mother.
Husband to wife : I have not come all the way to be told "some other day". I am not a vagabond to come in and go out without a purpose.
Husband to wife : It is no business of a wife's to butt in when the father is dealing with his son. It is a bad habit. Only a battered son will grow into a sound man.
The modern reader may be heartily wishing the pompous arse of a husband in this novel himself gets a good sound battering very soon, but (spoiler) R K Narayan is nothing if not true to life, so you you can whistle for your battering.
The title The Dark Room is a metaphor for women's experience of marriage. So that makes it sound awful gloomy, but R K Narayan is like a cork on the ocean, can't keep him down for long, always finding something cheery in the woof and weft of life.
I look forward to my next RKN novel with lipsmacking relish....more
3 June 1947 – Viceroy Mountbatten announces the plan for the Partition of India into two independent states. Independence Day for the new countries wi3 June 1947 – Viceroy Mountbatten announces the plan for the Partition of India into two independent states. Independence Day for the new countries will be 14 and 15 August.
Journalist : Do you foresee any mass transfer of population?
Viceroy Mountbatten : Personally, I don’t see it.
Why did Jinnah and Nehru accede to such an insane, precipitous, huggermugger plan?
The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years…the plan for partition offered a way out and we took it. – Nehru in 1960
Yasmin Khan, from her book The Great Partition:
By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarized police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Forces and a petrified and well-armed population.
If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a modern, democratic nation state. Instead, you would suffer oppression, exploitation, the dishonoring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death.
As I said in my review of that book, the flight of millions of refugees from or to Pakistan happened without state intervention – both of the brand new states had hardly any military available to them to enforce any controls whatsoever. This was unplanned chaos fuelled by self-fulfulling convictions of the worst version of what people are like. This was stampeding for the exit. The number of deaths was never established. Between one and two million, probably.
Khushwant Singh takes all this complexity and organises it into 180 perfectly controlled and orchestrated pages. He is not overwhelmed although his readers may well be as they are whirled along in this dance of death.
Number of horrible things that happen to people : 825
Number of nice things that happen to people : 3
Number of times young SiTHE FACTS ABOUT THIS NOVEL
Number of horrible things that happen to people : 825
Number of nice things that happen to people : 3
Number of times young Sikh illegal immigrants ask shops, factories, take-aways and warehouses for work : 279
Number of times they actually get a job: 7
Number of times they eat roti : 933
Number of untranslated Panjabi words : 24,677
Number of times I thought Oh that's great, I must quote that bit for my review : 0 (it’s just not that kind of novel)
Number of times I thought well, this will do until the next Rohinton Mistry novel, and by the way, what's taking him so long : several
Number of days it took to read : 16, but I had a couple of distractions, like for instance my daughter went off to university (York) and that was a kerfuffle of course, and then I started watching The Legacy – another of those lonnng Scandinavian dramas you know – I’ve nearly finished series 1 and am thrilled to know series 2 is also available, and well you can’t do everything at once
Number of times I changed my mind about the star rating : 3 (I thought ooffff, this book is so earnest, there’s not a laugh to be had here, not even a smile, two stars; then it picked up a little bit more action which unkind observers may could like to possibly describe as moderately soapy; and finally yesterday & today it all came together – I started figuring out who these dadblamed characters were – and it then progressed smoothly through the satisfied three star zone into the frankly impressed - be honest - very impressed four stars it ended with)
Number of times it strikes the Western reader as bitterly ironic that a book like this would be published in the middle of the biggest migration wave into Europe for generations, given that it paints such a uniformly grim picture of immigrant quasi-legal and illegal life in this country : 479, once per page ...more
This was like walking into a plate glass door, bang! right on the nose, didn’t see it coming at all, ouch ouch. It was also like having one of those d This was like walking into a plate glass door, bang! right on the nose, didn’t see it coming at all, ouch ouch. It was also like having one of those distressing conversations with a good friend where you go - what was that you just said? You don’t seriously believe that do you? - after which things get really awkward and you have to re-evaluate everything you thought they were. I previously read three RKN novels and thought they were a joy as everyone does, hence my consternation.
So, to be clear – first two thirds of this book 4 stars, last third two stars. And because of the problems of the last third, it can't be bumped up to three, sorry.
This novel cannot be discussed without complete spoilers, so(view spoiler)[
This is the semi-autobiographical story of Krishnan the young English teacher who has a lovely wife, Susila, and a baby girl, Leela, and life is looking good, and then she catches typhoid randomly and takes quite a while to die. After that Krishnan wakes up to the wonder that is his daughter, and looking after her becomes his salvation. All of this is pure RKN, which is to say, understated, brimming with quiet humanity, practically perfect.
But then, Krishnan, beset by grief, and this is a novel about grief, encounters a medium who can speak with the dead, and who, by means of automatic writing, demonstrates this by taking dictation from the spirit of Susila, long elaborate dictations. And this becomes the whole obsession of the last third of the novel. Krishnan lives for these revelations, and then strives mightily to be able to communicate directly with his dead wife. The whole medium thing is presented quite seriously, the guy is not a chiseller, not a fake, and here’s the thing, we have to take it at face value.
And oh! What drivelly banal conversations the live man and the dead woman then proceed to have. James Joyce in Ulysses had mercilessly parodied this very thing 20 years before The English Teacher :
It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C.K. doesn't pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H.J. O'Neill's popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen's to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known.
And now here is Susila’s spirit speaking to Krishnan:
There are about fourteen letters…I don’t remember whether they were yours and mine, but I remember tying them up in a bundle; you will find them either in my trunk or in one of the boxes in my father’s place…. I am sure of these fourteen precisely. I counted them, I tied them up and did not give them to you because you were very busy with something or other. I can’t say how long ago. But I put them away and then I remember coming across the bundle again and again. What I can’t recollect is whether it was in my father’s house or in ours.
This may be a comment on the nature of humanity – if we were to be able to communicate with the dear departed, it could be that we would fall headlong into idiotic conversations like this, you know, “You should have cut the hedge by now” “How do you know that I haven’t cut the hedge?” “We in the spirit world can see everything” “Well, I’ll get round to it on Sunday”.
So let us take a pace back. What is RKN’s actual attitude to the matter of speaking with the dead which the book accepts as a flat-out fact?
1 – He believes in it completely because he’s done it. You can chat with dead people, absolutely.
2- well, he didn’t actually believe this literally but he kind of half believed it at one point in his life and thought his readers would and thought anyway that the whole thing was a poignant metaphor or something for the state of grieving.
The limpid guileless qualities which shine through the book seem to be to favour the first possibility. Which, being a rigidly logical empirical Western type person I must say I think is bonkers.
Or is it all magical realism? It surely isn’t very magical. The last part, where Krishnan is trying to become a medium himself and communicate directly with his wife, is excruciating, like overhearing a mobile phone call which is entirely about mobile phones, makes you want to smash your head against a wall:
Spirit of Susila : Just as I am thinking of you, I know that you will be thinking of me. But I want this thought to be coupled with the desire to commune with me. It is this aspect I want to impress upon you as necessary for psychic development and free communication between us. Krishnan : So do you wish me to check thoughts of you at all other times? Spirit of Susila : No no no. At stated hours sit for psychic development, that is, to enable me to get into touch with you directly without the intervention of the medium; this I will make possible. Krishnan : Should I sit down with pencil and paper? Spirit of Susila: It is a secondary matter.
Aargh. The abandonment of realism in this realistic novel is complete. At no point does Krishnan say – “hold on, this is big, this is huge, I’m talking to my dead wife, I really am, life after death is really true, amazing!” . The whole thing weirded me out. It left whatever ball park I'm in. And such a shame because there were glimpses of some genuinely real thing lurking inside this novel which made me perk up and wish it was a different one. Here’s Krishnan planning his letter of resignation from the school :
I was going to explain why I could no longer stuff Shakespeare and Elizabethan metre and Romantic poetry for the hundredth time into young minds and feed them on the dead mutton of literary analysis and theories and histories, while what they needed was lessons in the fullest use of the mind. This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage.
More of that would have been good, and a whole lot less of the astral plane. (hide spoiler)]...more
“Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless.” - Anonymous letter written to a local Lahore Congress Committee, mid 1947
“My father had a soda water sh “Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless.” - Anonymous letter written to a local Lahore Congress Committee, mid 1947
“My father had a soda water shop. We put all the soda water bottles on the roof, lined them up, thinking that when they come we will attack them with bottles. But they were no use because they came with machine guns.” - Shanti Seghal, aged 20 in 1946
“I am of 56 and forcibly exiled from my home I am wandering disappointed. Will you kindly advise me what to do and where to in this critical moment of my life.” - Letter to local Congress Party, 1947
The precipitous end of the British Raj and the agonizing birth of modern India and Pakistan must be one of the most tremendous events in 20th Century history, but until I read this book I had only the sketchiest idea of what happened. I thought this might be simply down to my own eurocentrism, but Yasmin Khan informs me that this cataclysm is hurried past in the current history text-books of both countries, dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. Eyes are averted. Rwanda, Cambodia under Pol Pot, even distant Darfur, all have become much better known than the great Partition, during which between 500,000 and a million people died. Accurate numbers are not available.
WHAT WAS PAKISTAN BEFORE 1947?
Muslims had evolved the concept of Pakistan, a land governed by Muslims for Muslims, slowly, vaguely, wishfully, daydreamingly – and one surprising fact is that the name Pakistan was only coined in 1933, just 14 years before it became a reality. It was kind of synonym for Utopia; and for a lot of Muslims it seems to have been a pleasant fantasy - or a fierce political fantasy - but hardly anyone answered the question about WHERE this Pakistan would actually BE in the real territories of British India.
Nobody knew what this map was – and nobody was contemplating migrating in 1946, let alone the mass movement of twelve million people only one year later.
What happened was that the British, worn down by years of passive resistance Gandhi-style, almost bankrupt at the end of World War Two, knew they were going to have to let India go, so they did it in the worst possible way, and stole away like a thief in the night, no concept of duty of care or responsibility anywhere to be had, no thought that things might go haywire, it was like – Okay, you bastards, you want your independence? HERE! You want your Pakistan? HERE! And the devil take you all.
Well, the devil took a lot of them.
HINDU WATER, MUSLIM WATER
Another surprising fact - How many Europeans living in India in 1946? Best guess: 97,000.
And now a question - was there an Indian apartheid between Muslims and Hindus before Partition? I had not thought so, but YK says:
Reminders of religious “difference” were built into the brickwork of the colonial state; a Muslim traveler would be directed to the “Mohammedan refreshment room” at a train station and drinking taps on railway platforms were labelled “Hindu water” or “Muslim water”. p19
That surprised me too. How pervasive this apartheid-style separation went outside of railway stations is not mentioned. Another thing I did not know : there were “Nationalist Muslims” who strongly opposed the concept of Pakistan.
Some of the most forthright and bloody opposition to the Muslim League came from within the Muslim communities themselves
ACCURATE NUMBERS ARE NEVER AVAILABLE
Between 16 and 18 August 1946 there were riots in Calcutta. Three days, 4000 dead, 10,000 injured. That was the first big one. Then the violence began to boil up over Bihar, the United Provinces, East Bengal (about 5000 people dead), and on and on. What was going on here?
For many of those who supported Congress, Pakistan was perceived as a total and sweeping threat which risked shattering the whole of Mother India, rather than as a question of territorial self-determination in a specific part of the sub-continent. …Pakistan had come to signify anti-freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims
There were three concepts in the minds of Indians in the 1940s, two of which had terrible consequences. First was swaraj, freedom, independence. That could only be good. Second was Pakistan. As already said, that was never defined, was cloudy, a sometime-maybe thing which the hotheads banged on about - but then became ever more urgent, ever more dominating, like a small unnoticed cloud on the horizon which grows and grows until the sun and all rational thought is blotted out; and then the third concept which grew necessarily out of Pakistan was PARTITION, and that drove people insane.
KM Panikkar, historian and diplomat
Hindustan is the elephant…and Pakistan is the two ears. The elephant can live without the two ears.
Aside from being a rather Undiplomatic statement, also uniquely laid-back. No one else was taking this line, unfortunately. Au contraire, says Yasmin:
Like a distorted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped , frightening, oppositional images of one another. p104
HUGGER-MUGGER
3 June 1947 – Viceroy Mountbatten announces the plan for the Partition of India into two independent states. Independence Day for the new countries will be 14 and 15 August.
YOU HAVE 70 DAYS TO FORM SEPARATE ARMIES, SORT OUT BORDER CONTROLS, CREATE TWO SETS OF GOVERNMENT APPARATUS, ALL THAT JAZZ – BETTER GET GOING!
One does not have to look far to find signs of the utter confusion which greeted the 3 June plan…[which was] foisted on a population entirely uninformed about its details and implications. Shahid Hamid, private secretary to Auchinleck :
It was a bombshell! Does he realize the consequences? Why this hurry? Why this shock treatment? Why is he bulldozing everything and leaving no time for an organized handover?
Journalist : Do you foresee any mass transfer of population?
Viceroy Mountbatten : Personally, I don’t see it.
So why did Jinnah and Nehru accede to such an insane, precipitous, huggermugger plan?
The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years…the plan for partition offered a way out and we took it. – Nehru in 1960
By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarized police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Forces and a petrified and well-armed population. P128
If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a modern, democratic nation state. Instead, you would suffer oppression, exploitation, the dishonoring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death. P 111
In the minds of millions of Indians, once they had an idea that they and their family would be part of the minority in the new country, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that for them the future would be like Jews under Hitler. The terrible decision to stay or go had to be made. This led, in a few months, to
Foot columns sometimes 30-40,000 strong created human caravans 45 miles long in places. P 160
In Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR, mass relocations of entire populations were ordered frequently – Crimean Tatars and Chechens to Central Asia, Jews to Poland - these cruel events were enforced by the military. The flight of millions of refugees from or to Pakistan happened without state intervention – both of the brand new states had hardly any military available to them to enforce any controls whatsoever. This was unplanned chaos. This was stampeding for the exit.
The two new governments had to solve the crisis almost entirely alone, with the international community barely involved p 168
No Bing Crosby and Doris Day headlining Refugee Aid for them in 1947. The benevolent white races had just nearly obliterated themselves. Sorry India, we know this is not a good situation, but we’ve got our own disaster to recover from.
DELUSIONS
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan,” Jinnah told Hindus and Sikhs…even as arson attacks on these religious buildings and murder of their worshippers continued unabated. P 155
THIS BOOK
This is a short book (210 pages of text) but an extremely dense one. I salute Yasmin Khan, undaunted by the huge task of compressing this dizzying , complex, vast story into a comprehensible tale, but I have to say she will win no prizes as a prose stylist. Her book is studded with tired phrases, it’s often stilted and awkward, and she loves her outdated clichés –
Evidently, in the run up to Partition something had gone badly wrong between Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. P18 (you think, professor? You think?)
With the stakes so high and the number of voters so low, winning seats by fair means or foul was the ultimate end of every party p33
Security was the paramount need of the hour p84
And so on. The tale got told in the teeth of these infelicities. But what a tale.
[image] (A librarian is given the task of dividing the books in his library, 1947)...more
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH KATHERINE BOO DID NOT START WELL
What, we need another well-off well-bred well-fed well-educated white person to tell us about theMY RELATIONSHIP WITH KATHERINE BOO DID NOT START WELL
What, we need another well-off well-bred well-fed well-educated white person to tell us about the miseries of extreme poverty in the developing world? Because we just know the poor people couldn’t tell us themselves. It’s like in so many movies about the poor countries, you have to have a white guy as the hero – The Last King of Scotland, which is about Uganda, or The Constant Gardener, about Kenya; and lots more. I hate that.
AND THERE WAS THE MATTER OF HER SLIGHTLY GRATING STYLE
American hi-octane journalese, not my favourite form of entertainment. Sample sentence :
Sunil had inherited his father’s full lips, wide-set eyes, and the pelt of hair that swooshed up from his forehead.
Or
Later he realized it was the first long rest he’d ever had, and that during it, something had happened to his heart.
(Groan!)
BUT THEN… SHE WON ME OVER
I’ll try to explain, but commenting on this book at all – having read it – seems almost impertinent. This was such a labour of love
WHAT KATHERINE BOO TAUGHT ME
1. The poor are vicious bastards. They have no compassion for each other. Divide and rule has worked 100% in Indian society. There is no bothersome communal action from slum dwellers, because they all hate each other. Did you think there was any possible tiny shred of integrity or nobility to be found in extreme poverty? Think again.
Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people. (p237)
2. It then follows that the poor view everything through a financial prism – “can I make any money out of this?” – which includes the misfortunes of their neighbours or their own family members. Almost any circumstance can be turned into something you might be able to sell – bits of discarded metal, bits of discovered information.
3. All of human society is crisscrossed by a complex mesh of conflicting hierarchies. In the west we’re familiar with the class struggle (which it has been modish to announce is a thing of the past – in your dreams, rightwingers!); the oppression of patriarchy; and the endemic racism that stereotypes everyone. In India you also have caste and regional affiliation; and then, of course, religion, which in the west never comes into the picture at all, being considered as an entirely private eccentricity.
4. Corruption : this word is bandied around so much in news reports about developing countries that it becomes tv news white noise. Boo gives you chapter and verse. Corruption is when every professional person charges the public for the services they are providing which they are already getting paid a salary to provide. The idea of professional standards for the police and medical profession is a polite fiction in such places. If an accident means your daughter has to go to hospital, woe to you. The nurse will not nurse your daughter unless a payment is made; and there will be no medicines in the cupboards because the nurses and doctors have sold them all; so you will have to go and buy the required items on the street. As for the police, they are like kidnap gangs where the victims politely walk up to them and ask to be kidnapped. Woe to you if the police ever notice your existence, as for instance, if you’re a suspect. They will explain that they will frame you and you’ll get 10 years unless payment is made. Sometimes the doctors and policemen must get out their terms and conditions of employment and have a great long laugh at them. These professions in India make Tony Soprano’s New Jersey mafia family look like acolytes of Mother Theresa by comparison.
5. Indian cursing consists of the forceful issuing of ridiculous threats –
I will tear out your eyes and fry them in front of you!
Or
I will encourage evil dogs to eat the legs of your new baby!
OK, I made those up. (You can use them if you want.)
AND WHAT WAS THE END OF ALL THE SHOW, JOHNNY, JOHNNY? ASK ME COLONEL, FOR I DON'T KNOW
This excellent book is impossible. What are we to do with this information? Nothing. Yes, there's a lot of LIFE, and God knows, enough of DEATH, but I did not see any HOPE on offer in this Mumbai slum. I think Katherine's editor made her put that in to the subtitle to give a little bit of a feelgood spin for potential purchasers. But this is a feelbad book. It makes you feel bad. It turns you into a gawking rubbernecker, a connoisseur of squalor - how does this compare with the American book Random Family, or the British documentary series Benefit Street? Contrast the differing levels of poverty shown in these three productions, addressing in particular the question of relative happiness. Is the famous Indian fatalism now more likely to be found in the decayed working class of Birmingham England? Are the famed entrepreneurial skills of America now transplanted to Mumbai’s undercity? Discuss. You have two hours. Start now. ...more
The thing about Rohinton Mistry That makes him unique in my reading history Is that he wrote three long novels quite fast Each one better than the last AnThe thing about Rohinton Mistry That makes him unique in my reading history Is that he wrote three long novels quite fast Each one better than the last And then in 2002 he stopped As if these three just couldn’t be topped And I have been waiting since then I, the most patient of men So finally I picked up these short stories Alas, not a substitute for former glories Not much of a feast, more a light snack Rohinton Mistry – please come back! ...more
(Chorus of GR friends : Say it, go on, you know you want to...)
but it was pretty ghastly for me. It was strI'm not going to say that this novel is bad
(Chorus of GR friends : Say it, go on, you know you want to...)
but it was pretty ghastly for me. It was strangled to death by a style you could describe as inane wittering, a crew of characters all of which are loveably eccentric and a plot that Ms Desai believes will take care of itself as the inane wittering puthers all over the loveable eccentrics.
You'll only find 4 and 5 star reviews for The Jewel in the Crown on this site. And it is, indeed, a towering achievement. Towering! Magnificent! So ..You'll only find 4 and 5 star reviews for The Jewel in the Crown on this site. And it is, indeed, a towering achievement. Towering! Magnificent! So ... er... what went wrong for me?
Do you remember James Joyce said that if Dublin burned down he wanted them to be able to rebuild it by reading Ulysses, meaning that every brick and stone, every chemists shop and stretch of beach, every busker and cabman's shelter was to be found in Ulysses in its exact location and condition in the book, not one atom changed around, so that in many ways Ulysses is not to be described as a work of fiction at all. (Joyce also took on the task of writing a book where if the whole English language was eaten by Godzilla they'd be able to reconstruct it again from Ulysses. But I digress.)
Paul Scott decided to do the same thing for the last days of the British in India. Brick by brick, house by house, room by room. Historians of interior decor 1945-65 can look no further. You have just won the lottery.
The bathroom is airless. There is no fan and only one window high up above the lavatory pedestal. At the opposite end of the bathroom - fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee - there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand with an ormolu mirror on the wall above, plain white china soap-dishes and a white jug on the slab; beneath the stand a slop-bowl with a lid and a wicker-bound handle. Here too is the towel-rack, a miniature gymnastic contraption of parallel mahogany bars and upright poles, hung with immense fluffy towels and huckabacks in a diminishing range of sizes, each embroidered in blue with the initials LC.
Half way through that not untypical paragraph I was medically dead for about a whole minute.
So that was the first thing. The next thing I didn't like was the plot. Even before I started I didn't like it - the blurb announces that this is the story of a brutal rape perpetrated in somewhat mysterious circumstances upon an English woman in India. Yes, that's right, the self-same central plot of E M Forster's A Passage to India (which I thought was pretty good). How strange - it was obviously deliberate on the part of the author to lift this rape plot from Forster and re-do it, rock bands and film directors do this all the time, so why not authors? But this particular plot is kind of a drag, really. We've been down this symbolic road already - naive imperialists defiled by intimacy with the conquered peoples - it's all too crude for me. You could argue that Forster lifted the plot from Daisy Miller by Henry James and replanted it in India, and I daresay it isn't original to HJ either. Now it is true that the plot is hardly the main point of this novel because as Dr J said about Pamela, if you read this book for the story you would hang yourself. Meaning that moss, stalactites and your fingernails all grow faster than the plot in this book. So if your plot is just the hook you're hanging other things on, then get a more interesting one.
The next thing I would like to complain about is the length of many of the sentences. Paul Scott was evidently a major fan of the late Henry James and he likes to run amok with those clauses - there's a kind of effete machismo about the long sentence. It can be fun but it can so very easily be too much of a good thing. Dig the following (he is talking, as he always is in this book, about race relations) [note, the maidan is a public space in the town] :
Or is this a sense conveyed only to an Englishman, as a result of his residual awareness of a racial privilege now officially extinct, so that, borne clubwards at the invitation of a Brahmin lawyer, on a Saturday evening, driven by a Muslim chauffeur in the company of a Rajput lady, through the quickly fading light that holds lovely old Mayapore suspended between the day and the dark, bereft of responsibility and therefore of any sense of dignity other than that which he may be able to muster in himself, as himself, he may feel himself similarly suspended, caught up by his own people's history and the thrust of a current that simply would not wait for them wholly to comprehend its force, and he may then sentimentally recall, in passing, that the maidan was once sacrosanct to the Civil and Military, and respond, fleetingly, to the tug of a vague, generalised regret that the maidan no longer looks as it did once, when at this time of day it was empty of all but a few late riders cantering homewards.
Ooof... I need a lie down after a sentence like that. Was Mr Scott working with a typewriter on which the full stop key was about to break so he was trying to conserve its use? The full stop is such a pleasant thing. It is the reader's friend. It gives the brain a little pause, a little twiglet for our bird-thoughts to alight on for a second before the next sentence carries us aloft again. I like full stops.
The last thing I would like to complain about is that the characters who are given all the long monologues or who write the long letters are all tedious windbags. They don't know when to stop. I wanted to wring their scrawny necks. In my last example this guy is talking about the swanky country club in Mayapore :
The compulsory subscription was waived in the case of all but regular officers and two new types of membership were introduced. Officers with temporary or emergency commissions could enjoy either what was called Special membership, which involved paying the subscription and was meant of course to attract well-brought-up officers who could be assumed to know how to behave, or Privileged Temporary Membership which entitled the privileged temporary member to use the club's facilities on certain specific days of the week but which could be withdrawn without notice.
Oh my God.
No!
Finally, though, I just couldn't stand the company of the British colonial class in India, they were a hideous gaggle of superannuated racists so I abandoned this very remarkable and undoubtedly brilliant novel with relief.
note - I would like someone who five-starred this book to tell me if they actually liked the quotes above! Although if they do I'll probably back away slowly with wide scared eyes....more
The perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsenThe perfect companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, and if you didn't like that movie, you won't like this book for the same reasons. It's a no-nonsense bulldozing mordant splenetic jackhammer of a story written as a tough slangy 300 page fast-reading monologue. It's a novel of information, not art. It tells you all about modern India with a traditional rags-to-riches fable. Our hero murders his employer unapologetically, and that's how he gets his riches. This is not rocket science. This is smashing a guy over the head with a broken bottle of Johnny Walker. But 90% of the book is not really the story, it's an anguished howl of rage about a distance of eighteen inches. In India, and indeed in other places too, the Rich and the Poor inhabit different universes. But the rich hire some of the poor as servants. This novel is the story of a servant who was a driver. In the car, the driver is separated from his employer (the word used here is Master) by the short distance of 18 inches. But economically, psychologically, medically, it's really 400 light years, as we know. And yet, every day, there they are, cheek by jowl, 18 inches apart, the one regarding the other with irritated amusement or annoyance or contempt, depending on mood, and being reciprocated with fawning fear and even awe. Our hero Balram is the rare beast (white tiger) who does not succumb to this fear and awe. But it's a struggle, and I was glad to be along for the ride.
In the London Review of Books, Sanjay Subrahmanyam almost trashes The White Tiger. His main beef is the language of the novel :
"What of Balram Halwai? What does he sound like? Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning – as they say on cigarette packs – before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text."
and then devastatingly:
"The paradox is that for many of this novel’s readers, this lack of verisimilitude will not matter because for them India is and will remain an exotic place. This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down."
He's right, it didn't matter to me that a guy who doesn't speak English is represented as using hundreds of idiomatic English phrases. But for me that problem is the same as the one posed by the question "how can this first person narrator remember conversations in detail which happened years ago and anyway, who the hell is she talking to?" - i.e. it's a device, we suspend our disbelief, we do it all the time : every time we watch a movie we could be asking ourselves (but don't) "whose point of view is this all from?". Who gathered all those documents together to form the text known as the novel "Dracula"? Well, no one, because Bram Stoker made it all up. How could Clarissa have found the time to write all those long, long letters in "Clarissa"? And so on. (note : Subrahmanyam was the only really dissident voice I found regarding The White Tiger so I thought his argument was worth considering.)
Postscript
The White Tiger is the 9th Booker Prize Winner I've read and redresses the balance between the Splendid (this one, Midnight's Children, Remains of the Day and Sacred Hunger) and the What Were They Thinking (Life & Times of Michael K, Hotel Du Lac, Possession, Life of Pi and especially, remarkably, horrendously, Vernon God Little)....more
I remember this with warm affection and made a note years ago to read more of RK Narayan who - in retrospect - from the perspective of my woozy memoryI remember this with warm affection and made a note years ago to read more of RK Narayan who - in retrospect - from the perspective of my woozy memory - is like Rohinton Mistry's benign old uncle. Back then I also read The Vendor of Sweets and The Painter of Signs which was my favourite because of a spiky back-chatty young woman called Daisy who was extremely charming. But these are all 3.5 star books. And I never did read any more. So that must change... while I wait for Mr Mistry's next 700-page slab (Mr Mistry, Jerker of Tears), I should eat up more RKN novels. Let that be one New Year Resolution I might actually enjoy doing. ...more
This one will cheer you up. It's not especially funny, but it's like going where the weather suits your clothes and meeting people that you like when This one will cheer you up. It's not especially funny, but it's like going where the weather suits your clothes and meeting people that you like when you're there. I read three by R K Narayan and I had to stop, they were all so nice, all really charming and all as light as a summer breeze with hummingbirds stuck in it. I bet every one of R K Narayan's many books are just as good.
You can't spend all your time reading good nice pretty novels though. You have to read some horrible ones too....more
RIP Patrick French 1966-2023. Gone too soon. I should probably read his biography of V S Naipaul.
***
Original review :
In 1946 Nehru told a journalist RIP Patrick French 1966-2023. Gone too soon. I should probably read his biography of V S Naipaul.
***
Original review :
In 1946 Nehru told a journalist
When the British go there will be no more communal trouble in India.
In 1947 approximately one million people were slaughtered in a whirlpool of mutual hatred, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh against each other. The number of victims was never discovered. It was in everyone's interests to play down this Indian holocaust, because everyone was guilty, to one degree or another. And as Patrick French laconically observes,
mutual genocide never attracts attention in the way that a one-way genocide does.
Which helps to answer the Zen question : "If a tree falls in a forest where there are no ears to hear does it make a sound?" The answer clearly is : no. And always we hear the unarguable deathly tones of Joseph Stalin duly reminding us that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of one million men is a statistic. Is there a moral here? Yes, several, including - you have to get your story out, otherwise - no story.
Human experience is so often grotesque. On 22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian guy living in London, was shot dead by the London Metropolitan Police. The investigation into the circumstances of this death has taken up acres of newsprint, miles of newsreel footage, two investigations and an inquest costing millions. The De Menezes family has been the object of universal sympathy in Brazil, in the UK and elsewhere. This was a big story. Let me contrast that with an average suicide bomb from the last ten years - let's pick at random 13 July 2008 - this suicide bomber killed "at least 21" in a market in the Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan province in Afghanistan at about 10.30 local time. Who were they? No one knows apart from their own families. Now contrast that with this 1947 Indian holocaust. We don't even know where the deaths took place, except in general terms - "villages in the south of Punjab", or say in train sidings in some shunting yard in Sind province. This million of human beings, just as unique and irreplaceable as Jean Charles de Menezes, were butchered and thrown into the meatgrinder of oblivion and in many cases the butchers went back to their work as if they'd just been off for a short refreshing break in the countryside. One guy quoted in this book remembers a work colleague disappearing suddenly :
We all thought he must have migrated. Out of the blue he came back and told us that he had been away doing important work. 'What was the work?' we asked. He replied 'I have been killing Muslims. I have killed seventy-two of them in 35 days.' That was how people thought at the time.
So Liberty or Death is a very dense book, three books in fact. One is an expertly conducted dance through the maze of Indo-Anglo-& latterly Pak-relations from 1890 onwards which includes many delighful and funny character assassinations on the way (no one escapes unscathed). Another is a very tedious slog through the intricacies of the same which often gets bogged down in the accounts of various spy vs spy vs spy nonsense. (I hate spy stuff, it's ghastly tedious. Two Le Carres was enough for me.) The third is where French himself busts through the fourth wall to become a character in his own history book - chunks of travel writing suddenly appear like a welcome zephyr from Kashmir, like a scent of patchouli on a midsummer evening, like - well anyway, there should have been much much more of that stuff, I loved it.
Did this book tell me what I wanted to know?
Yes.
Does it have a really bad title?
Yes. For goodness sake, guys! Liberty or Death? Really?
Does the photo of the author on the inner cover put you off somewhat as it makes him look like someone on day-release from an institution?
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