Indian Writing

Yes of course we must celebrate Bandra. If we can get there, that is. I spent an hour and a quarter getting there to meet Nalini Jones who has just published a book of short stories based on Bandra. So when I decided to see the play “Jazz,” based on Goan jazz musicians (researched by Naresh Fernandes) I left an hour earlier, only to find the entire area had suffered a power failure. We milled around in the dark, with everyone remarkably good-natured about it all. The play could only begin an hour later than scheduled.

Traffic and power cuts are all in a day’s work. What’s surprising was to find Bandra described online, as a “small Catholic town in rural India.” (Introduction to interview with Knopf editor Carol Janeway), and “a Catholic town in India” elsewhere. And there was Amit Chaudhuri, for whom there can be no excuse, putting his foot in it again. “Nalini Jones,” he says in a review, “writes about the marginal community of Christians in Bombay and the neighbourhoods in which they live.

To the outsider, these seem to possess a fabled calm, but the insider knows they are in many ways on the brink of dissolution.” I don’t know whether Chaudhuri means Christians are on the brink of dissolution, or the neighbourhoods in which they live are.

Does Chaudhuri see himself as the insider who knows?