Indian Writing

Here’s a Slate article about some so-called new research that wonders whether imperialism wasn’t so bad for the colonies after all.

Feyrer and Sacedote’s key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births….

So, what did the Europeans do right? The authors conclude that there’s no simple answer. The most plausible mechanisms include trade, education, and democratic government. When the study directly measures these factors, some of them help to explain income differences among islands—for example, the places that traded only basic agricultural products in colonial times now have lower living standards. But even after accounting for these concrete determinants, longer European colonization has some extra pro-growth effect. Exposure to European colonizers, it appears, benefits living standards for reasons apart from the direct effects of government, education, and markets.

And guess what? There’s a little hierarchy of colonisers in terms of their ‘beneficial impact’:

the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.

As for the conclusion of the Slate article -

There is no disputing that thousands died in the wake of European explorers’ discovery of the New World. That’s bad. But we can still give a small cheer for Columbus, because European colonization brought riches in its wake.

- here’s one of the responses, from the Fray:

It’s like deciding to cheer the development of Hollywood because the Holocaust gave us all those nice Jewish-American directors.

This young girl wanted new clothes for the festival. Her mother couldn’t afford the expense. The girl ran away from home. A rickshaw-puller found her, took her to his house, gave her something to eat. The village came together to get her some new clothes and send her home.

Devyani Onial on some of the things she heard while visiting Imrana’s home in Muzaffarnagar last year:

One neighbour, a woman: “Don’t ask me, I am a Tyagi and that woman is a Qureishi — kasai (butcher)… Imrana’s family is Ansari — julaha (weavers), so how should we know anything about them.”

Another neighbour, Dr Mohd Hanif Tyagi: “It’s basically a property dispute. She and her husband Noor Ilahi wanted to sell this house but her in-laws didn’t want that. She has framed them. Let the case be tried. If Ali is proved guilty, then punish him.”

The SHO at the police station: “I have been posted in many areas with a high crime graph but in all my postings I have never got fame like this. Now when I walk in the market, people point towards me and say there goes the daroga.”

I wonder when Farhan Akhtar will realise that there’s more to life than cool haircuts, Aki Narula clothes and neckties worn under the shirt (oh yeah, what was that about?). And SRK has become one big quivering mass of tics and mannerisms. At one point, when Priyanka Chopra is dabbing at SRK’s wounds with bits of cotton (aargh, I hate those dab-dab moments), she looks up at Arjun Rampal and seems to have a nirvana-moment: Wow, this guy’s sooo much nicer-looking…

Why the Munch painting (yeah, that one) in the saferoom, why the bullock-cart to depict India before Don’s Sonata whizzes by, why the sacrilege of refilming a song that can only ever be Amitabh’s, and why oh why this silly little shadow of a movie at all?

Farhan’s Don is one of the big disappointments of the year. The only good thing is that the people on FM will stop blathering on about Don ko pakadna mushkil nahin, etc. Oh, and we can hope that people (Ramu, J.P.Dutta, koff,koff!) will stop meddling with old hits.

Margaret Atwood on Orhan Pamuk:

Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth. Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience at a particular place, in a particular time. And as with all great literature, you feel at moments not that you are examining him, but that he is examining you.

And here is Pamuk’s translator Maureen Freely:

Last year - not long after Orhan Pamuk was tried for insulting Turkishness - an Istanbul newspaper ran an article entitled ‘Who is Maureen Freely?’ Their answer was that I was more than just Orhan’s friend and translator - I was a shadowy master agent whose sole purpose in life was to win my client a Nobel Prize…

And Elif Sharak:

Novelists are the “babas”, the fathers of their readers. They are loved and hated, looked up to and looked down upon. This is a society which is writer-oriented, not writing-oriented.

Orhan Pamuk has been working against this background for years. He writes with great passion and determination, all the while endorsing, publicising and internationalising the Turkish novel. As conspicuous as his books have been, he himself has always remained almost unreachable. If he has been any kind of “baba” to his readers he has only been a detached father more inspired by his own imagination than by his nation. Perhaps it is this that triggers some sons, some segments of Turkish society, to attack him…

In my film, the cop was honest and so there was the fight between the good and the bad. But here, there are two Ravans, so how can there be a conflict?

Chandra Barot on Farhan Akhtar’s Don.

Animals fear Diwali, because they are much more sensitive to noise than humans, and the loud fireworks terrify them. Stray animals on the streets have a particularly bad time because of the noise, the smoke/dust, and the junk left on the pavements.

Which is why I can’t agree with Jaitirth Rao when he talks about the ananda of bursting noisy crackers.

Noisy crackers are objected to by crackpot environmentalists who see pollution everywhere and deny that life on this planet is about joy and its pursuit. Varuna tells Bhrigu in the Taittriya Upanishad that the core of being human is not about the fact that we eat or that we breathe or that we think, but that we have the capacity for ananda. And what can give more ananda than a series of burning flower-pots followed by a series of red crackers going off and assaulting the ears…

Ananda must be noisy, rejecting at least at this time the hushed tones of patronising kill-joys. Let us learn to celebrate with wholehearted vim and gusto our wonderful traditions of gambling, baksheesh, lights and deafening noise!

Sure, the gambling, baksheesh and lights are part of the festive spirit or ananda, whatever. But I do hope there will be less noise this I’m year. What can I say, I’m just a patronising kill-joy I guess.

John Updike: “Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie in his new novel call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?”

Salman Rushdie: “A name is just a name. ‘Why, oh why … ?’ Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called ‘John Updike’.”

Rushdie goes on: “The thing that disappointed me most about Updike is that he did not say in that review that he had just completed a novel about terrorism. He had to sweep me out of the way in order to make room for himself. I don’t subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and some of the short stories, there’s a lot of … slightly … garbage. Think of The Coup! The new one [Terrorist] is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do.”

Boys will be boys, eh…

The whole story here.

Remember Imrana? The woman who, when she was raped by her father-in-law, was asked by community leaders to stop living with her husband? Imrana, wife of rickshaw-puller and part-time brick-kiln worker Nur Ilahi, is the mother of five children. When her father-in-law raped her, the only thing the community leaders advised was that she should stop living with her husband and return to her parents’ home. A clear example of punishing the victim, of course - the easy way out.

Well, this week Imrana has obtained justice. Her father-in-law has been found guilty and sentenced to ten years.

Update: while the All India Muslim Personal Law Board has welcomed the verdict, the local clerics don’t seem to get the point. Earlier they said that Imrana should treat her husband, Nur Ilahi, like a son. Now they’ve declared that Nur Ilahi should leave Imrana. A woman has been dealing with the shock of a horrendous crime, a family has been coping with all the complicated after-effects - but these opinionists just can’t seem to stop meddling.

The “demure young woman”? The “sing-song Indian convent school accent”?

(When oft upon my couch I lie…)

Sushmita Sen on her new film Zindaggi Rocks:

The film was not meant to be a blockbuster. It is not a blockbuster. Yes, it has been defined as Sushmita Sen’s story. It is what life’s about. Zindaggi Rocks doesn’t mean that we go on rocking. No matter how it defines your graph high or low, you make it rock. Yes, as long as I remember I have made that choice.

Gosh, that sounds like it makes so much sense.

She’s also starting a new project in Kolkata:

The night club, which is the noisiest corner is called Ssshh, the restaurant will be called Poison and the lounge where you would surrender to the moment is 8, which when lies down becomes infinity. We are going deep into everything.

Bingo, my mother-in-law’s dog who gave the entire family fifteen years of love and caring, died in Calcutta early this morning.

Go well, old friend. May you find many mishtis and Marie biscuits on the other side. And a couple of crows to chase.

(Not sure if I’ve posted this before. It’s still slow times around here, so here’s something from last year)

****

Next to the Wilson College hostel, right under the Aaram Guest House and next to the Aaram Paan Shop, is Crystal, the pride of Chowpatty. Shabby décor, a couple of mirrors, and not one piece of crystal that would justify the name – but who cares? The food is hot, the kheer ice cold, and the prices have hardly moved since the early nineties.

If we go there now on this wet Saturday afternoon, just before a late-afternoon movie, it’s not for old times’ sake, nor for the prices. It is, quite simply, for the food. The paneer bhurji smells divine; the gobi parathas sizzle; the dahi is chilled and tart; slices of kaanda, neembu wedges and achaar come free, and we tuck in. And oh yes, thank you, we know to book our bowls of kheer before the safari-suits arrive.

College students, families, salesmen coming across from the nearby auto showroom: everyone’s here, and everyone’s happy. We’re upstairs, surrounded by noisy fans, dark beams, and yellow globes that spill light recklessly over all of us.

And it is a reckless mood, the kind of mood in which you’d invite that solitary person at the other table to join you at yours. Where you might have a fight with your boyfriend, and the man at the next table, who’s wearing several colourful rings on his fingers, might gallantly bend across to ask: Sister, is that man bothering you?

And even the rain outside pours down with reckless abandon. I see the slick darkness of the road, the taxis hissing by, the bus waiting in traffic, the blank face at the window.

And beyond the trees, Chowpatty’s golden sands.

The same sands on which the desperate, spectacular closing scene of Satya unfolded: rains lashing down, men wading thigh-deep into the sea, their shirts drenched with colour and rain and salt spray. Drums thundering, crowds pushing, revellers dancing, screams going unheard, and Bhau’s blood oozing into the salt water.

Chowpatty. Where the rain washes away thousands of footprints every hour, and reduces it all to a uniform flesh tone. Where couples stand on the beach, shivering in the rain, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, watching the waves roll in and out.

When the rain stops, nanas and nanis return to sit in their garden. A small crowd forms around the bhutta woman. Bhelpuri, balloons, garam chana. Families, who have come from a long way off just for this expanse of sea and sky, toss off their chappals and sit cross-legged on the sands. A man arranges a rope of jasmine in his wife’s hair. Children dig with their small bare hands and pat the sand into fragile shapes. The pigeons whir and flap their wings on the way to Walkeshwar. A solitary egret looks for a moment’s rest. A stray dog jumps off a deck-swing and goes off to look for food. A fishing boat bobs on the grey water.

Crystal is cheap, but the best things in life are still free.

(Mumbai Mirror, July 2005)

Professor Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank that he started in 1976 in Bangladesh have together been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006. This 1995 Atlantic article describes how it began:

One afternoon in 1976 Muhammad Yunus was taking a walk in a village a mile from Chittagong University, where he was the head of the Department of Economics, when he encountered a woman weaving bamboo stools.

Yunus had returned to Bangladesh in 1972, after the country had become independent. Prior to that he had spent seven years in Nashville, Tennessee, completing a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. Yunus had been influenced by the student activism of the late 1960s, especially the civil-rights movement, and the message he carried home was that it was possible for young people to change society. As a professor of economics in Bangladesh, he asked his students if, for all their knowledge of equations and formulas, they really knew how 90 percent of the people in their country lived. He challenged them to close their textbooks and get involved with local villagers, and for four years he spent his afternoons with them in villages, studying the informal economy, organizing immunization programs, and helping local farmers to grow more food.

Yunus had never met Sufiya Khatun on his many walks through her village. Sufiya, a widow, was trying to support herself by constructing and selling bamboo stools. She earned two cents a day. When Yunus asked why her profit was so low, she explained that the only person who would lend her money to buy bamboo was the trader who bought her final product—and the price he set barely covered her costs.

Yunus’s instinct was to dig into his pocket. But first he wanted to see if there were other villagers in similar circumstances. He and a few students canvassed the village and compiled a list of forty-two people whose capital requirements, in order to buy materials and work freely, added up to about $26.00…

Today the Grameen Bank reportedly has 6.6 million borrowers, 97% per cent of whom are women, and provides services in more than 70,000 villages in Bangladesh.

What a great effort for change.

Picture via.

What lovely news. A new bird species discovered in India after half a century. The Bugun Liocichla. There’s hope for the planet yet, it seems.

Here’s a short story that I read some time ago: Ben Fountain’s “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera”.

No way Blair insisted to anyone who asked, no self-respecting bunch of extortionist rebels would ever want to kidnap him. He was the poorest of the poor, poorer even than the hardscrabble campesinos pounding the mountains into dead slag heaps—John Blair, graduate assistant slave and aspiring Ph.D, whose idea of big money was a twenty-dollar bill. In case of trouble he had letters of introduction from Duke University, the Humboldt Institute, and the Instituto Geográpica in Bogotá, whose director was known to have contacts in the Movimiento Unido de Revolucionarios de Colombia, the MURC, which controlled unconscionable swaths of the southwest cordilleras. For three weeks Blair would hike through the remnant cloud forest, then go back to Duke and scratch together enough grants to spend the following year in the Huila district, where he would study the effects of habitat fragmentation on rare local species of parrotlets.

It could be done; it would be done; it had to be done. Even before he’d first published in a peer-reviewed journal—at age seventeen, in Auk, “Field Notes on the Breeding and Diet of the Tovi Parakeet”—Blair had known his was likely the last generation that would witness scores of these species in the wild, which fueled a core urgency in his boyhood passion—obsession, his bewildered parents would have said—for anything avian.

The whole story here.

Orhan Pamuk, 54, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. The Nobel Prize site felicitates him as one “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

BBC profile here. Paris Review interview here. Guardian author page here. And NPR interview here.

Extract from Istanbul here:

Great as the desire to westernise and modernise may have been, the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. That which I would later know as pervasive melancholy and mystery, I felt in childhood as boredom and gloom, a deadening tedium I identified with the traditional alaturka music to which my grandmother tapped her slippered feet: I escaped this state by cultivating dreams.

Excerpt from Snow here:

Early that morning, before the city woke up and before he had let the snow get the better of him, he took a brisk walk through the shantytown below Atatürk Boulevard to the poorest part of Kars, to the district known as Kalealt. The scenes he saw as he hurried under the ice-covered branches of the plane trees and the oleanders—the old decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window, the thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators, the pack of dogs barking at every passerby from a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge as snow fell into the half-frozen black waters of the river below, the thin ribbons of smoke rising out of the tiny shanty houses of Kalealt? sitting lifeless under their blanket of snow—made him feel so melancholy that tears welled in his eyes. On the opposite bank were two children, a girl and a boy who’d been sent out early to buy bread, and as they danced along, tossing the warm loaves back and forth or clutching them to their chests, they looked so happy that Ka could not help smil- ing. It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come—in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.

Picture via The Ledge.

…when I first read it months ago, and now I’m thrilled that it has won.

(Thanks, Amar K & JM)

In Mysore, a seminar to mark the R.K.Narayan birth centenary. T.S.Satyan’s tribute here.

Here’s Pankaj Mishra on Narayan. And here’s Jhumpa Lahiri on his Malgudi Days:

The concentration of Narayan’s prose is astonishing. While other writers rely on paragraphs and pages to get their points across, Narayan extracts the full capacity of each sentence, so much so that his stories seem bound by an invisible yet essential mechanism, similar to the metrical and quantitative constraints of poetry.

An extract from Narayan’s memoir is available here. Among other things, it reveals that he failed the University entrance examination, wept over the stories of consumptive heroines, and kept a picture of Marie Corelli on his bookshelf.

*****

Above sketch of R.K.Narayan by his brother, cartoonist R.K.Laxman.

(Assorted reasons for my absence from blogging/email - travel, persistent computer trouble, other stuff…)

… in the ToI (read 542641 times as of now) today is this supplement story titled “High Time, Ash!” about Aishwarya Rai reportedly arriving late for a formal dinner at the Bachchans’ house, and being ticked off by Jaya Bachchan.

Just saying.

From Gopal Krishna Gandhi’s moving tribute:

Somnathbabu was at the door to meet me, standing tall like a Painted Stork on stilt-like legs, stooped and lost to thought. Rebadi stood just behind him. He was wearing a sweater though it was not cold, and had his head covered in a hand-knitted woollen affair. There were half-finished clay and wax forms placed on the floor and tables, besides books and plants. As he asked me to take a seat, I was struck by his fingers — unusually long and, strangely, as thoughtful as their owner. They moulded the air while he spoke…

I asked Somnathbabu whether he had ever met Gandhi or sculpted him. “In 1946, when Gandhiji had come at the time of the riots, I made it a point to follow him wherever he went. Even though I was — and am — not a believer, I attended his prayer meetings because I was fascinated by his personality. I did an engraving but did not sculpt him.”

He then told me of the engraving he had done of Gandhi addressing a Hindu-Muslim congregation in August 1947 at the Mohammedan Sporting Club galleries in Calcutta. This is a remarkable work, showing MKG in the distance, standing like a little matchstick on a far platform, with a multitude of Hindus and Muslims in telltale attire, listening rapt. One listener has a child — his future world — perched on his shoulder, as another in a fez sits with a combination of awe and hope. Difference, again. Somnath Hore was showing MKG not as an iconic superman but as the masses saw him through the hectic jostle of their fears, hopes and emotions…

Somnath Hore was more than an artist. He was a witness of the human drama but a witness with a skill that translated his witnessing into art. In an age when secularism, socialism and peace can be seen — or rubbished — as shibboleths, he knew them to be vital needs. In times when art can become a plaything of drawing rooms and auction halls, he kept it close to its springs — his very human sensibility.

And the closing paragraphs:

When Tara and I met him last, on September 27, he was prone, oxygen being ducted into his lungs, nourishment into his veins. But he could talk clearly. His sensitive fingers, bearing the tubes and needles of life-support, moved to his eyes as he said: “Your Excellency, I have lost my vision, I am blind now….” The honorific, never a favourite, was crushing. Here was a man navigating the twilight between this world and the next, maintaining the courtesy of terrestrial constructs.

“I do these wax sheets,” he had told me when I first met him, “and use these channels for the hands and legs.” I felt like wax, my hands and legs weakening as I rose saying “Get well soon, Sir”. I cannot remember how I responded to Rebadi as she too said in a courtesy of yesteryears “you have been ever so kind”…

Image: Somnath Hore, “The Holocaust”.