Tag Archives: India

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival

March 25, 2024 By in Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Last week I had a special experience. I was invited to the north eastern Indian state of Assam to participate in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. It was my second visit to Assam. Five years ago, I was part of the Brahmaputra Literary Festival, a wonderful experience that I recorded on this blog.

DUILF was organised by the Foundation for Culture, Arts & Literature (FOCAL) and curator and chief coordinator Rahul Jain, who also masterminded the Brahmaputra festival, so I knew that it would be a special occasion. Even so, I was not prepared for the warmth and celebration that met the writers from 17 countries who flew in to take part.

Literature festivals can often be quite clinical and hierarchical, with the red carpet rolled out for the big-name writers and relatively little welcome extended to those with less following. In Dibrugarh, however, everyone was an honoured guest. Our faces were featured on banners lining the roads around the university campus, and we were all greeted and entertained as celebrities.

And there were some real celebrities in the mix. A number of India’s most revered contemporary writers were on the bill, among them the legendary Tamil author Ambai. She spoke incredibly powerfully about her experience as a feminist writer over a career spanning more than 60 years. I have since started reading her short stories and have been blown away.

I was also delighted to chair a session with prolific Malayalam author Benyamin, whose Goat Days (translated by Joseph Koyippally) is set to be a major film, and to speak to Goan author Damodar Mauzo, who writes in Konkani, the only language to appear in five different scripts. A winner of countless awards, including the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, he is an inspiration. It was humbling to hear about his process – which draws on the fine observation of small details, many of them gleaned while minding his shop – and thought-provoking to listen to him talk about his experience of finding his stories celebrated in English decades after he wrote them.

From further afield, some of the other key figures included Ukrainian writers Irena Karp and Halyna Kruk, who heard she had been longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize during the festival; Caribbean region Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2016 winner Lance Dowrich; and Australian writer Kate Mildenhall, with whom I had the luxury of a staged conversation about our writing journeys.

This session also delivered one of my personal highlights. During the question and answer section, a young man stood up and said that he had a confession to make: he had found The World Between Two Covers (the US edition of my Reading the World book) in a library in 2015 and been so gripped by it that he couldn’t bear to return it. He had it still. For me it was a moment of real joy – and a reminder of the extraordinary power of writing to link us across boundaries of all kinds.

I also had the privilege of taking my Incomprehension Workshop to the festival. I was a little apprehensive as to how it would be received: although I have run versions of it with readers of many different backgrounds, this would be my first experience of trying it with people raised exclusively in a rather different education system.

My fears proved unfounded. The audience, consisting largely of university students, proved to be the most imaginative and receptive I have ever worked with. Their responses and reactions were incredibly creative and warm. They taught me anew the value of this work, enthusing me for the final stages of drafting my next book on reading, drawing on my work with incomprehension over the last few years, details of which I’ll be sharing here soon.

As in Guwahati, at the Brahmaputra festival, my conversations with curator Rahul Jain proved inspiring too. I was particularly struck by something he told me on the last day, when a few of us were sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting to leave for the airport. The wonderful way the festival celebrated writers came up for discussion, prompting Jain to share his perspective. It was simple, he said. In Buddhism there is the concept of dependent origination: a thing can only be what it is meant to be by virtue of other things. He cannot be a husband without his wife; he cannot be a father without his children. The same is true of his role as a festival coordinator: he cannot be this without writers. Therefore it is his duty to honour them and readers because they make him who he is.

Book of the month: Perumal Murugan

October 31, 2023 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of holding the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This sees me co-curating and participating in a range of events about international storytelling at the UK’s oldest book festival.

Highlights this year included getting to interview my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie – the writer I’ve most wanted to meet since I encountered his amazing memoir An African in Greenland (tr. James Kirkup) back in 2012. Building on our Zoom conversation last year, the discussion was as lively, joy-filled and life-affirming as his writing.

I also got to run a ticketed version of my Incomprehension Workshop for curious readers. It sold out and the responses were wonderful, further fuelling ideas for my next non-fiction book, of which, I hope, more soon.

Another lovely thing about the role is that I also get to hear about books from elsewhere and meet experts in storytelling from around the world. This year, these included international delegates from book festivals in Argentina, Botswana, Türkiye, India and Nigeria. From these passionate experts, I gleaned a number of book recommendations, including my latest Book of the month, which was one of several titles recommended to me by Dr T. Vijay Kumar, director of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.

Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman was a smash hit when it was published in India in the mid-2010s, drawing lakhs of readers, prompting the writing of two sequels and changing the course of its authors life, as Murugan explains in his afterword. It tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a married couple who find themselves coming under extreme pressure as the years go by without them having children. Despite the strength of their bond, the rituals, penances and indignities to which they feel obliged to submit in the quest for a child take their toll. At last, the pressure to participate in a controversial rite on the 18th day of a local festival pushes them to breaking point, bursting open the assumptions and prejudices that have made them who they are.

For anglophone readers from the global north, this novel is an intoxicating mixture of the familiar and the strange. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed loved ones battling infertility will find much to recognise in its pages. ‘Please save me from being the talk of the town,’ laments Kali, expressing perfectly the pain of having such private matters made public, while Ponna enters into a masochistic loop, goading herself through ever more punishing and demanding ordeals in the hope of having her prayers answered. ‘Seeking a life, we have pawned our lives,’ she says, while joining her husband to sneer at those with too many children.

Yet instead of medical procedures and gruelling rounds of drugs, Ponna and Kali must do penance, make donations to temples, drink bitter concoctions and ensure they win the gods’ and goddesses’ favour. And at the heart of the novel is the ancient rite that at once lures and terrifies them: the night on which men become gods and all rules are relaxed in the dark streets of a nearby town.

Translator Vasudevan has done a fabulous job bringing the narrative into Indian English. The rhythms and structures of the prose complement the subject matter and setting perfectly, while the repeated use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ gives the story a mythic quality, blurring the edges and making us half-believe we are reading a fable set long ago. Even linguistic challenges, such as the nuances of the Tamil term for son-in-law, are conveyed in an easy, conversational style.

Yet, despite the relaxed, sometimes mythic quality of the prose, there is nothing imprecise or vague about Ponna and Kali’s relationship. Murugan captures it perfectly, portraying the dynamism that keeps strong marriages alive and presenting a portrait of love that is truly touching – and makes the threat of its unravelling all the more poignant.

There is sharp-eyed comment on contemporary issues too. The legacy of colonialism threads through the pages, knotted around a family story of a humiliating and degrading competition run by a British officer, in which Kali’s grandfather participated.

But the natural world is never far from the story. The tone for this is set in the opening lines, with the planting of the Portia tree that rises and spreads its branches over Kali and Ponna’s travails throughout the course of the book. Alongside this, a number of other natural symbols dot the narrative, drawing and concentrating the reader’s gaze, and complicating questions just as they seem to become clear. ‘He never explained anything. He only drew your attention to things,’ writes Murugan of Kali. He could be describing his own writing style too.

In his afterword, Murugan explains that the novel was prompted by hearing a single word (which he does not reveal) and that writing the story taught him what can happen ‘if the world of values packed within a word bursts open’. ‘I am very eager to know the kinds of experiences it [One Part Woman] might now bring to literary readers across the world,’ he explains. Well, Perumal Murugan, your book centres around one word for me too: wonderful.

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press, 2019)

Picture: ‘Parshvapippala (Sanskrit: पार्श्वपिप्पल)’ by Dinesh Valke on flickr.com

Brahmaputra Literary Festival

February 13, 2019 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This project has led to many extraordinary experiences for me. From speaking at TED Global and delivering TEDx talks in Geneva and Hanoi to having a book translated specially for me by a team of volunteers and appearing on a panel with the deputy prime minister of Jordan at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai, my quest has opened up many more things than I could ever have imagined when, one rainy night in October 2011, I decided to try and read a book from every country in the world.

Last weekend brought another first: seeing my face on a large cube sculpture (pictured above). The cube was one of a number of installations at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Guwahati, India, where I and some 130 other writers from 20 countries met at the invitation of the Publication Board of Assam to engage in three days of panel discussions about books.

At least, I was supposed to be there for three days. In the event, however, a cancelled flight meant my journey got rather delayed and, after an erratic, three-stop hop across the world (taking in Cairo, Kuwait and Hyderabad), I arrived in Guwahati with just 34 hours to go until I was due to leave again.

The experience was worth the effort, however. From the moment I was met at arrivals and driven through the city, where banners advertising the festival fluttered from almost every hoarding and the faces of the writers taking part smiled at me from giant arches over the road, I knew I had been invited to join in something extraordinary.

The celebratory mood was heightened by the fact that the date of my arrival was a special day in India. As my wonderful guide, Pourshali, one of the many young volunteers helping to make the festival a success, explained, that Sunday was Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the goddess of knowledge. As a result, the women of the city, Pourshali included, were wearing their finest saris.

Along with the occasional glimpses of my face on advertising hoardings, I was delighted and occasionally unnerved by the sight of many exquisitely dressed people in flowing skirts riding pillion and side-saddle on the back of mopeds weaving through the traffic.

Generously, Pourshali gave up her share in the festivities to show me around. Our adventures included trips to the science museum – a thought-provoking monument to the discoveries of the mid-twentieth century, featuring a display of planets minus Pluto – and a mall where, under the bewildered eyes of the shop assistants, she took the role of personal shopper, advising me on purchases. ‘They are thinking, “What are these two people doing together? They look like they’re from different worlds,”‘ she whispered to me with a laugh.

The highlight, though, was the festival itself. Despite my late arrival, I managed to sit in on several fascinating sessions, including a discussion of fictional portrayals of sport, and a consideration of literature by prisoners of conscience, featuring the courageous Burmese writers Dr Ma Thida and Nyi Pu Lay.

The next day, after an evening of chats over dinner with Australia’s YA author Neil Grant and Indonesian novelist Ahmad Fuadi, among many others, it was my turn. My first session brought me into conversation with one of Pan Macmillan India’s senior commissioning editors, Teesta Guha Sarkar, author and editor Sutapa Basu and author and editor KE Priyamvada to discuss why writers need editors. We agreed on the need for trust and respect between writers and editors, and explored the tricks you might use to bring texture to a threadbare manuscript. Chief among these were giving characters quirks and applying fiction techniques to non-fiction.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the hotseat, moderating a discussion on the role of research in creating fictional worlds. My panel were an international bunch, comprising Latvian bestseller Janis Jonevs, Lithuanian novelist Gabija Grusaite, award-winning Shehan Karunatilaka from Sri Lanka, celebrated and prolific Indian novelist Arup Dutta, and Assamese prizewinner Jayanta Bora.

An hour was only long enough to scratch the surface of the topic. Nevertheless, the discussion generated some excellent insights into the writing process, shared to a packed audience largely made up of students from schools and colleges across the state. While Jonevs talked about the pain of emotional research and the challenge of projecting himself back into his teenage self, Grusaite explained how a new development in a real-life Malaysian murder case had changed the course of her plot. Karunatilaka raised many a laugh with his tales of hanging out with drunk old men and watching cricket, Dutta described observing elephant trapping, and Bora talked about the 25 years of research that went into his debut.

Perhaps the most inspiring talk I participated in, however, was not on stage but during a conversation with festival curator Rahul Jain, during which the reasons for the effort that had gone into arranging and promoting the festival became clear.

‘We don’t have a literary culture,’ he told me. ‘But if these young people come here and see writers being glorified and people running from tent to tent as though literature is their lifeblood, they will realise that writers are important for a civilised society.

‘They can’t all be writers. But they can all be readers.’

The joy of book clubs

February 24, 2018 By in Asia, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

One of the trickiest things about setting out to explore the world’s literatures is deciding what you’re going to read. There is so much out there that it can feel overwhelming, particularly when most of the works you encounter – at least to begin with – will be by writers you have never heard of. How on Earth do you choose?

I think it’s for this reason that many of the people who contact me to say they have decided to read the world often tell me that they are going to use my list as a guide. I’m more than happy for readers to consult my choices as a starting point, but I always hope they’ll get inspired to do some exploring of their own too – so many wonderful books have been translated into English in the six years since my quest and although I continue to add one new discovery a month to the list, many hundreds of other wonderful titles deserve an audience.

There are a number of ways to find out about some of the best. Awards such as the Man Booker International Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award (the longlist for which is drawn up from nominations supplied by libraries around the globe) highlight many of the most ambitious and popular titles. Meanwhile, funding programmes including English PEN’s PEN Translates help bring brave and exciting works into the world’s most published language.

For those with limited time, there are also subscription schemes. One of the most recently launched is Asymptote Book Club, which sends those who sign up a surprise handpicked work of fiction every month. Drawn from the lists of independent publishers in North America and the UK and selected by the team behind the award-winning world-literature journal Asymptote, the titles promise to be as intriguing as they are diverse. So when  blogger Marina Sofia, who works for the site, contacted me to ask if I would be interested to review their second pick, I wasted no time taking a look.

It’s fair to say that I would probably never have found Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aranyak (translated by Rimli Bhattacharya) on my own. Indeed, had Seagull Books not released an English version, some eighty years after the Bengali original appeared, it’s likely that the work would have remained forever off-limits to anglophone readers. That would have been a great pity because it is an extraordinary creation.

Told through the eyes of Satyacharan, a young man from Calcutta who accepts a job managing the leasing of land for farming in a remote part of neighbouring Bihar, the book captures a fragile, fading and enchanting world. As he falls in love with the jungle that his work must gradually destroy, Satyacharan records the encounters he has with many of the people and animals who make their lives in this unpredictable environment. In so doing, he reveals the way a place can work itself into the hearts of its inhabitants, changing them as they develop and transform the landscape.

The best English word we have to apply to this book is ‘novel’, but the term does not fit comfortably here. The narrative arc anglophone readers might look for in long-form fiction is largely absent from Aranyak. Instead, the book is a series of loosely threaded episodes that often give rise to musings on humankind’s place in the world. I’ve seen it described as a kind of anthropological monograph – and, indeed, it draws on the author’s observations recorded in his diaries while he performed a role similar to the one his protagonist undertakes. But although that description makes sense, it risks missing the essence of the book, which is its exquisite writing.

Lacking the narrative drive that often keeps pages turning, Aranyak entrances readers by virtue of its vivid and moving descriptions. Although the narrator frequently expresses frustration at his inability to represent ‘the real face of [his] country’ adequately on the page, Bandyopadhyay and Bhattacharya’s work contradicts him.

Spine-tingling evocations abound. Take, for example, this description of a vista the protagonist often catches sight of while out on business:

‘The place is densely shadowed and lonely; from wherever you look, you can see in the far horizon a ring of blue hills like children holding hands and playing a game.’

Just as the narrative shape is unfamiliar, so the way language is used defies anglophone conventions. Although the prologue locates the events of the story firmly in the past, the tenses vary throughout the book, as though the narrator is reliving his memories. The text is also peppered with terms likely to be unknown to most Western readers, although these generally do not obscure the sense (indeed, I am grateful for the editorial decision to keep footnotes to a minimum).

As is so often the case with works from traditions rather different to the anglophone canon, the book requires readers to approach it with openness and a readiness to put things that jar down to their own unfamiliarity with the genre rather than flaws with the work. Those that do so will be richly rewarded: this is a rare and precious glimpse into a kind of storytelling as enthralling as it is strange to Western eyes.

If Asymptote Book Club keeps finding such gems, subscribers are in for a treat.

Aranyak by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Rimli Bhattacharya (Seagull Books, 2017)

Book of the month: Vivek Shanbhag

September 26, 2017 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Since completing my year of reading the world, I’ve been fascinated by literature translated from the 22 languages other than English that have official status in India. One of the most interesting discoveries I made during my project was when an Indian journalist opened my eyes to the work Malayalam writer, MT Vasudevan Nair. So I was delighted to hear about the publication this year of a novel translated into English from the South Indian language of Kannada, which is still barely represented in the anglophone reading world.

Although Ghachar Ghochar is Vivek Shanbhag’s English-language debut, the book is far from being his first work. The celebrated  author from the Indian state of Karnataka has published eight works of fiction and two plays.

His experience and expertise is quickly apparent when you open this novel. Deceptively simple in its premise – the destabilization of dynamics when a business venture dramatically improves a family’s financial circumstances – this slender work relies on deft writing and keen-eyed observation to carry it along. Shanbhag and his translator Srinath Perur – who worked closely together on the English-language version – provide these in abundance.

In a lesser author’s hands this book might easily be a creaky parable about the threats to traditional hierarchies posed by India’s economic boom, or a rambling disquisition on the discontent of the newly comfortable protagonist Vincent. Instead, although the best elements of both these things are woven neatly into the fabric of the story, it is a vivid and moving portrait of humanity in all its contrariness and perversity.

The delight is in the detail. Domestic objects represent and reveal great emotional shifts. For example, in the revelation that Vincent now feels it would be meaningless to buy his mother the sari he dreamed of getting her as a boy when his family lived in a shack on the other side of Bangalore, we see the price of financial gain.

Similarly, profound truths are expressed in handfuls of everyday words: ‘The well-being of any household rests on selective acts of blindness and deafness’; ‘the last strands of a relationship can snap from a single glance or a moment of silence’; ‘it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable’.

It is no surprise to discover that, as Shanbhag reveals in an interview on his English-language publisher’s website, the author is a fan of Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory – ‘that most of the story is beneath the surface’. Indeed, he extends this to translation too, regarding the process as the business of ‘taking what is unsaid in a work from one language to another’.

Yet Shanbhag’s writing is warmer than Hemingway’s usually manages to be. There is humour in the occasionally querulous tone of his narrative and evidence of an eye for the ridiculous in the manner in which he sets out his characters’ quirks – the family’s nearly year-long resistance to buying a new pressure cooker on the off-chance that one might be given away at a conference, for example, and the way Vincent’s father, in his original sales job, would spend evenings going over figures ‘again and again until they gave in and agreed’.

The abruptness of the ending will bring some readers up short. Yet, when considered in light of the novel’s title – a nonsense phrase that, among Vincent’s wife’s relatives, signifies things getting tangled up – it makes a kind of sense. The title becomes a prediction – no sooner do we understand its significance than we see it embodied in the story.

Unlike his novel, though, Shanbhag’s English-language career looks far from ending in a knotted mess. Ghachar Ghochar has garnered rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and Shanbhag and Srinath Perur are already preparing another of his books for the anglophone market. About time too.

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (Penguin Random House, 2017)

Picture: ‘Busy busy Brigade Road in Bangalore’ by Ryan on flickr.com

Postcard from my bookshelf #5

May 15, 2017 By in Post-world, Postcards from my bookshelf, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments

Last month, I sent a translated book to someone from the nation that showed most interest in my 2012 Year of Reading the World. This month, I’m giving one to someone from the country that, in many ways, provided me with the biggest challenge during the quest.

While I struggled to find a single translated work from numerous places – many of the lusophone and francophone African nations had no commercially available literature in English, for example – there were some nations that posed the opposite conundrum. These were the countries that had such a wealth of literature available that the idea of choosing a single book seemed ludicrous.

India was by far the trickiest of these. As I recorded in my blog post at the time, I was swamped with recommendations for titles from this vast and diverse nation. And every time I asked someone to help me choose my Indian book, they simply added more suggestions to my list.

Luckily, just as I was beginning to despair of ever finding a satisfactory way of selecting one thing to read, a journalist called Suneetha Balakrishnan came to my rescue. She had noticed that all the titles people had suggested were written in English. To her mind, this was second best when you considered that there was so much Indian literature written in other languages – the subcontinent is home to 22 officially recognised tongues, along with hundreds of others.

One of her favourite writers was MT Vasudevan Nair, who writes in Malayalam. She suggested I try to find a translation of one of his books.

Suneetha’s argument made sense to me. More than that, as happened so often that year, it highlighted a blind spot in my thinking. Despite the quest being driven by my desire to read more diversely, it hadn’t occurred to me to seek out Indian literature written in languages other than English.

I followed her suggestion and found a translation of Vasudevan Nair’s novel Kaalam. I enjoyed it very much and it opened the door for me to start exploring numerous other Indian literatures, which I have continued to do over the last five years.

(Incidentally, the exchange provided a lightbulb moment for Suneetha too. Realising how neglected Indian literature in languages other than English often is, she launched her own Reading Across India blog, an idea which she adapted for Mslexia magazine.)

Suneetha applied for a postcard and I was very tempted to choose a book for her. Had I done so, it would probably have been my UK choice, Caryl Lewis’s Martha, Jack and Shanco, or another book translated from Welsh because my discussion with Suneetha also inspired me to think about literature in languages other than English in my home country.

However, this project is about sending books to strangers and, although Suneetha and I have never met in person, I feel we are friends through the exchanges we have had. (Thanks once again for all your interest, support and wise words, Suneetha. I hope we will share many more reading ideas in future.)

As such, I have decided to send a book to one of Suneetha’s compatriots instead as a sort of thank you-by-proxy. After reading through the many Indian entries, I settled on Azfar Zaidi. He told me this:

I’ve been reading the replies to this post, and frankly, I feel a little unqualified. […] I’m nowhere near as “international” as anyone here. I’ve never sat on an airplane, and there are few cities in India that I have explored. But I read, and that breaks borders. Being able to imagine a parallel world through the descriptions and situations in a book is one thing I love to do. However, I believe that every book has a bit of its author’s own world in it. No matter how fictitious a book is, there’s an element of the author in it. It gets reflected by the way he narrates, describes or argues. Exploring parallel worlds through the medium of books somewhat compensates for the (current) limits of my world. I don’t have a specific genre to request. I read what comes my way, and I leave it to your discretion as to which book you’d like to send me (if you do). I’m only looking to widen the horizons of my mind. And I hope you’ll help.

Just as Suneetha’s words did five years ago, Azfar’s comment struck a chord with me. Reading does break borders and expand horizons. That was one of the most powerful things I took away from the project and continue to experience with my literary explorations to this day.

He also made me think almost instantaneously of the book I wanted to send him. It is a memoir by someone who, like Azfar, had never been on a plane, but ended up discovering the world through reading and his own curiosity.

The book in question is An African in Greenland by the Togolese writer and explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie. It was one of the most joyous, funny and heartwarming books I read during 2012.

Azfar, it will shortly be travelling across the world to you. I hope you enjoy it.

If you’d like a chance to receive a postcard from my bookshelf, visit the project post and leave a comment telling me a bit about you and what you like to read. The next recipient will be announced on June 15.

Book of the month: Shanta Gokhale

September 30, 2014 By in Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

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Those of you who followed this blog during my year of reading the world in 2012 may remember the difficulty I had choosing a book to read from India. With such a wealth of stories available from this nation of 1.2 billion people, it seemed impossible to find a way to select just one for my project.

Luckily for me, the dilemma was solved when Indian writer Suneetha Balakrishnan stopped by the blog and observed that all the recommendations I’d had were for books written in English, and that there was a huge amount of even better literature written her nation’s 22 other official languages – not to mention the many unofficial tongues also spoken there. On the strength of Suneetha’s comments, I chose a book by one of her favourite authors, MT Vasudevan Nair, who writes in Malayalam. As you can see from the post I wrote at the time, it proved to be a great decision.

All the same, I remember being frustrated that I couldn’t explore more Indian literature in translation during that year. It seemed that there was a rich variety of amazing stories that we English-language speakers rarely if ever hear about.

So I was delighted to hear from Suneetha this summer that she has been blogging for women’s writing magazine Mslexia about Indian literature written in languages other than English. In celebration of this (and because I enjoyed her previous recommendation so much), I decided to feature one of the novels she has reviewed as my September Book of the month.

I plumped for Crowfall by Shanta Gokhale. This was partly because of Suneetha’s enthusiasm for the book, which you can read about on her post, and partly because I was intrigued by the process the novel went through to get into my hands. Not only did Ghokale write the original version in Marathi, she also translated it into English herself. I was intrigued to see how it had turned out.

Crowfall is a big and ambitious book. It weaves together the experiences of three painters, a musician, a journalist, a teacher and the widowed mother of two of them in Mumbai. Recording their struggles as they attempt to define their careers, themselves and one another – and overcome their grief at a series of untimely deaths and a loved one’s disappearance – it uses individual lives as a prism through which to look at large questions of identity, prejudice, the caste system and what we mean when we talk about art.

Though the premise might be tricky to unpick, the language certainly isn’t. Gokhale has worked as a translator during her career and her facility with words shines through in the beautiful clarity of her sentences. Time and again, succinct phrases capture complex ideas and emotions. From writing about the experience of being crushed between passengers on a bus ‘like chutney in a sandwich’ and describing an extreme method for dealing with Eve-teasing, to a skilful elucidation of the way performances based on raags (melodic modes) work in Hindustani music, Gokhale brings us along with her, by dint of her clear, compelling voice.

This linguistic precision makes the discussion of many of the larger issues that pepper the narrative a joy to read. I particularly liked the exploration of what constitutes art in the book, which is accompanied by many insightful descriptions of what it is like to be caught up in the creative process, such as this one:

Creative ideas are like that. You don’t plead with them to come. You pretend you can live happily without them. Then they steal upon you like thieves. Just be alert to grab them by the hair.

Gokhale’s portrayals of the experience of consuming art (as well as the platefuls of delicious-sounding food served throughout the book) are similarly eloquent – no mean feat, as many writers fail miserably when faced with conjuring up what it is like to look at a colourful, urgent painting in flat, grey words.

With such a large cast of central characters and numerous peripheral figures, the book can be confusing at times. This isn’t helped by Gokhale’s decision to leave considerable amounts of dialogue unattributed, so that you can find yourself confronted with long stretches of sentences in speech marks, wondering who said what. In addition, the numerous philosophical discussions – though skilfully rendered – slow the narrative down. There are times when you get the sense that Gokhale is much more interested in evoking experiences and exploring ideas than telling a story.

For all that, though, this is a marvellous read. As intricate as a performance of a raag, it intertwines experiences, lives and cultural specificities to create a powerful and thought-provoking – if sometimes dissonant – whole. Once again, like MT’s work, it provides a tantalising taste of the banquet Indian writers working in languages other than English have prepared.

Crowfall (Tya Varshi [That Year]) by Shanta Gokhale, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale (Penguin Books India, 2013)

India: an impossible choice

August 18, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 129 Comments

How do you choose one book from a nation of 1.2 billion people – a country that is one of the most culturally rich and diverse in the world and a country, that, as I discovered when I was lucky enough to visit West Bengal last year, is so varied in its constituent states, let alone across its 1,269,219 square miles, that it makes a nonsense of the term ‘nationality’ as it is commonly understood?

I’m afraid I still don’t have the answer to this question. I struggled with it long and hard. As the suggestions of Indian writers poured in from visitors to this blog I did my best to research and weigh up each one. All to no avail: the more I looked into the many excellent and intriguing Indian authors whose names I’ve heard this year, the more impossible it seemed to limit my selection to just one work. An Indian friend of mine kindly posted my dilemma on Facebook and yet more names flooded in. The truth was, I could have spent a decade reading Indian literature and still barely have scratched the surface of the literary delights this country has to offer.

One thing I did know: I wanted to read the work of an author who was prized and celebrated in India rather than one who had made his or her name outside the country. As Tim who recommended Kushwant Singh just this week put it, ‘rather a lot of the “Indian” writers beloved of the international literati seem to live in London or New York’. Talented though many of these authors are, they didn’t chime in with what I was looking for: I wanted to read the work of someone who wrote primarily for Indian readers.

With this in mind, one among the many comments I’ve had about Indian literature stood out. It was from Suneetha:

‘I am from India, and I note that both the suggestions in comments and your list for India reads are those written originally in English. I have to say these are just second best to what regional literature we have here in over 23 official languages and a couple of hundreds of other languages spoken across the country.’

This struck a chord with me. After all, if I was looking for an Indian writer who wrote to be read by his or her compatriots, surely I should choose something written in a regional language, rather than the international lingua franca of the country’s colonial past? And so it was that I plumped for a novel by one of Suneetha’s favourite authors: the much decorated Malayalam novelist and filmmaker M T Vasudevan Nair.

Kaalam (Time), which won Nair the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1970, follows Sethu Madhavan as he leaves home for college and tries to make his way in the world. The expectations of his rural village rest on his shoulders and his excellent academic record seems to promise him a bright future. Yet, as the years pass and Sethu staggers from one failure to another, consoling himself with a series of hopeless love affairs, his potential seems to tarnish and warp and he grows disgusted with his life. At last, obliged to return to the family home he has spurned for so long, he is forced to face up to himself.

MT (as he is known) excels at presenting experiences that are at once universal and very specific to his characters’ time and place. Readers everywhere will recognise the adolescent Sethu’s embarrassment at his relations’ eccentricities – his aunt who lies scantily clad on the verandah, for example, and his mother who grumbles whether anyone is listening or not – and his desire to hide his poverty from his friends, as well as the perennial graduate’s dilemma of needing experience to get a job and a job to get experience.

What makes MT’s portrayal of these relatively commonplace rites of passage is his insight into the inconsistencies and contradictions that wrestle beneath the surface of all of us as we seek to move through life. From Sethu’s exasperated interior monologue in the face of an interview panel, to his stilted encounter with a friend who left education long before him and is now married and running a company, the author is a master of the tricks we use to disguise our shortcomings and the way casual questions and pleasantries can strike a person to the bone. This is particularly evident in MT’s depiction of his protagonist’s dealings with women: Sethu’s delight in the ‘illusionary obstacles’ that mask the impossibility of his feelings for teenage Thangamani and his wild justifications of his cruelty to his first love Sumitra both point to the self-delusion that keeps him crashing blindly, wilfully on.

These insights are couched in scintillating descriptions, which make the novel a joy to read. There is the loveless married couple for whom ‘words had become brittle showpieces in a glass case, to be used only on special occasions’, the minutes that ‘swam before [Sethu’s] eyes like bubbles distilled from the indistinct colours of sunset clouds’ and, perhaps my favourite of all, Sethu’s numbed reaction to his mother’s death: ‘The news stood just outside his mind like a traveller in search of shelter’.

The editorial decision not to explain culturally specific terms in the text but instead to confine their definitions to a rather incomplete glossary at the back means that readers from other parts of the world may find it hard to work out some of the roles of and connections between characters. There are also some gremlins in the e-edition, which mean that odd words have been misrepresented, making for some rather strange sentences that have to be read twice to tease the proper meaning out.

These glitches in no way hampered my enjoyment of the novel, though. If anything, the initial confusion I felt over the interrelationship of the characters is an added bonus: it means that I will have to read the novel again now that I’ve got them sussed. I’m already looking forward to it.

Kaalam by MT Vasudevan Nair, translated from the Malayalam by Gita Krishnankutty (Orient Blackswan, 2012)