Archive for the 'Books' Category

South Asians and the Shaping of Britain

Published on May 23, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Sarfraz Manzoor in The Telegraph, London:

southasian-bookMahinder Singh Pujji, a 22-year-old Indian man, was queuing to see a film at his local cinema. The man in front of him saw his turban and uniform – Pujji was a member of the RAF – and said: “Sir, you don’t have to stand in the queue.” He ushered him to the front of the line. No one grumbled and the woman working in the ticket office, again seeing his turban and wings, refused to accept money for the ticket.

This incident would be surprising and heart-warming if it occurred today; in fact, the film that Pujji was queuing to see was Gone with the Wind, and the year was 1940. What makes this story so powerful is that it challenges established narratives about south Asian migration to Britain: it shows us that years before Commonwealth immigration there had been migrants from the subcontinent; it questions the assumption that migrants were always treated poorly, and it reminds us of the contribution many made.

South Asians and the Shaping of Britain excavates the archives for letters, diaries, books and articles relating to this subject. Taking the year 1870 – the zenith of empire – as the starting point and traversing 80 years to 1950 – a period that witnessed two world wars, the decline of empire, the fight for Indian independence and Partition – the book demonstrates that Britain has a more complex multicultural heritage than is usually acknowledged. More:

How a single spy helped turn Pakistan against the US

Published on April 10, 2013 in Books and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

What really happened after Raymond Davis killed two men in the street in Lahore. Mark Mazetti in The New York Times Magazine:

The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.

“America, you from America?”

“Yes.”

“You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”

“Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked.

“Yes.”

“As a . . . ?”

“I, I just work as a consultant there.”

“Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?”

“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.

“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”

“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.

“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.

Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”

Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?” More:

A better quality of agony

Published on April 10, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Teju Cole reviews Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave in The New Yorker:

Sorrow flattens her. Then sorrow gives way to anger and suicidal fury, and it takes a dedicated group of relatives and friends to lock away the knives and hide the pills and keep her from self-harm. There’s a period of alcoholism, and for a while she harasses, with demonic inventiveness, a Dutch couple who have rented her parents’ home. Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly. That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths. I am reminded of what Anne Carson wrote in the introduction to “Grief Lessons,” her translation of four plays by Euripides:

Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.

Carson is writing specifically about Greek tragedy, works of tragic fiction, and of course a book like “Wave” is only too real. There’s nothing put on about Deraniyagala’s suffering. But part of what Carson says applies. In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles. More:

Thatcher, Chandraswami and I

Published on April 9, 2013 in Books, Leaders and Obituaries. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

India’s former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh in The Hindu (Extracted from K. Natwar Singh’s new book “Walking with Lions — Tales from a Diplomatic Past,” HarperCollins):

India House is among the better known diplomatic establishments in London. I first set eyes on the imposing building in 1952, when I was a student at Cambridge University. Thirty years later I entered India House as Deputy High Commissioner. One of my less attractive duties was to meet the unreasonable demands of visitors from India. Not all were disagreeable but many were.

Early in the summer of 1975, Mr. Chandraswamy telephones me. He was in London. The late Yashpal Kapoor had asked him to contact me, Chandraswamy invited me to meet me at his place. I said if he wished to see me, he should come to India House. This he did the next day. At the time he was in his late twenties. He was in his “Sadhu” attire. He did not speak a word of English. Now he does.

At this, our first meeting, he dropped names. After a few days he again come to see me. He invited my wife and me to have dinner with him.

The food was delicious. After dinner he said to us, “I will show you something you have never seen”. He then produced a large sheet of white paper and drew lines from top to bottom and left to right. Next he produced three strips of paper asked my wife to write a question on each strip, make a ball and place each one on a square on the chess board. My wife wrote the questions in English. He closed his eyes and went into a trance. I was, by this time getting restless. Suddenly he asked my wife to pick up any of the paper balls. She did so. Opened it. Chandraswamy then told her what the question was. He was spot on. My wife, who is an amateur astrologer, was sceptical at this stage. When Chandraswamy got the next two questions right, she was amazed and interested. I was intrigued. I could not, as a rationalist, accept mumbo-jumbo. Neither could I dismiss Chandraswamy as a complete hoax. More:

The Judge’s Will — by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Published on March 19, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: .

In The New Yorker:

After his second heart attack, the judge knew that he could no longer put off informing his wife about the contents of his will. He did this for the sake of the woman he had been keeping for twenty-five years, who, ever since his first attack, had been agitating about provisions for her future. These had long been in place in his will, known only to the lawyer who had drawn it up, but it was intolerable to the judge to think that their execution would be in the hands of his family; that is, his wife and son. Not because he expected them to make trouble but because they were both too impractical, too light-minded to carry out his wishes once he was not there to enforce them.

This suspicion was confirmed for him by the way Binny received his secret. Any normal wife, he thought, would have been aghast to learn of her husband’s long-standing adultery. But Binny reacted as though she had just heard some spicy piece of gossip. She was pouring his tea and, quivering with excitement, spilled some in the saucer. He turned his face from her. “Go away,” he told her, and then became more exasperated by the eagerness with which she hurried off to reveal the secret to their son. More:

Black and Bengali

Published on March 17, 2013 in Books and Culture. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Fatima Shaik at In These Times:

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. There, people talked to each other about whether to lie to the census taker and which lie to tell, and that conversation produced stories about who had disappeared from us and who had stayed, and what was more important: loyalty or money.

That was the mentality in Creole New Orleans from as far back as I can remember—that is, the 1950s—until recently. The lying, the disappearing, the money and lack of it had everything to do with race.

We were part of a mixed-race community of immigrants and Louisiana natives, and there was no place for us in the data tables of the census or in the mind of a black-and-white America. And yet we existed, for generations. Now, in a thoroughly researched new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald traces one vein of our lineage, from a most distant country.

Bald follows Muslim peddlers and, later, ship workers who journeyed from India to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. As local Indian markets for fabrics lost value in the 1880s, Muslim Bengali men began traveling abroad to find customers for “Oriental” wares—silk and cotton, handkerchiefs, bedspreads and tablecloths, and rugs. More:

“Wave”: A family vacation turns into the worst kind of nightmare

Published on March 8, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Economist Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, parents and two young sons in the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. They had been vacationing on the southern coast of her home country Sri Lanka when the wave struck. A review of her book “Wave” in Salon:

The first time Sonali Deraniyagala heard the word “tsunami,” she was shut up in a darkened bedroom in her aunt’s house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was 2004, and the wave had just taken her parents, her husband and her two young sons.

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband’s face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

“Wave” is Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years. More:

And in NPR:

Sri Lanka, July – December 2005

Someone had removed the brass plate with my father’s name on it from the gray front wall. It had his name etched in black italics. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend Mary-Anne’s car, my eyes clinging to the holes in the wall where that brass plate was once nailed.

This had been my parents’ home in Colombo for some thirty-five years, and my childhood home. For my sons it was their home in Sri Lanka. They were giddy with excitement when we visited every summer and Christmas. Vik took his first steps here, and Malli, when younger, called the house “Sri Lanka.” And in our last year, 2004, when Steve and I had sabbaticals from our jobs and the four of us spent nine months in Colombo until September, this house was the hub of our children’s lives. More:

Love and ambition in a cruel world

Published on February 24, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

mohsin-hamid-bookMohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” was an artful tour de force, a lapidary monologue delivered by a young Princeton-educated Pakistani that opened out to become a puzzlelike exploration of identity, and a suspenseful, post-Sept. 11 meditation on the nervous, mutually suspicious dynamic between America and the Muslim world. Mr. Hamid’s new novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” also tells a compelling story that works on two levels — in this case as a deeply moving and highly specific tale of love and ambition, and as a larger, metaphorical look at the mind-boggling social and economic changes sweeping “rising Asia.”

Set in an unnamed country that resembles Pakistan the novel chronicles the 70-odd-year-long life of an unnamed hero who journeys from an impoverished village to a sprawling city and who makes — and loses — a fortune in the water (“bottled hydration”) business. The story is couched as a kind of self-help book and told in the second person, with a protagonist referred to only as “you.” What might initially seem like a clumsy narrative technique is actually a device that allows Mr. Hamid to zoom in and out from his hero’s life, as though he were using a telephoto lens, moving in to give us up-close-and-personal glimpses of “you’s” enduring relationship with a woman he meets when they are teenagers (she is always referred to as “the pretty girl”) then moving back to show us the ways in which his entrepreneurial career mirrors that of millions of others as they become part of a new urbanized demographic that is changing the shape of the world. More:

The Nandy bully

Published on February 3, 2013 in Books, India and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

S. Anand in Outlook:

Ashis Nandy is a reason-buster. That is his e-mail id, his raison d’etre. And when he makes totally unreasonable comments, his friends expect us to stand and applaud. His acolytes—who have predictably and unimaginatively started an online petition to save his right to free speech and have created a blog dedicated to him—tell us that the political psychologist (a term he uses to describe himself) likes to “illuminate through anecdote, aphorism and irony”. But apparently Dalits, adivasis and OBCs—he lumps together 70 per cent of the population—and those of us non-Dalits whose work requires us to actually know something about caste, cannot understand such nuances.

 At the outset, let me state that I am not for Nandy’s arrest—though an absolute right to free speech should make us defend the Thackerays and Akbaruddin Owaisi as well—under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, for that would trivialise the realities of caste violence. Like my friends Chandra Bhan Prasad and Kancha Ilaiah have said with such grace and maturity, let us forgive Nandy and not drag him to court.

 But first let us look at what exactly Nandy said in Jaipur. Here is a faithful, unedited transcript based on a YouTube video via ABP News. My comments figure in parenthesis, and these are necessary, for what transpired on stage was a performance with gestures, pauses and interruptions adding to the overall effect.

Nandy: How should I put it? Almost a vulgar statement on my part. [Raises his voice and speaks slowly, with deliberate emphasis on each word.] It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs, and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes. And as long as this is the case, [the] Indian Republic will survive… [some interruption, with moderator Urvashi Butalia saying “Alright” as if sensing the tension and wanting to move on; TV journalist Ashutosh is raising his hand in protest, but Nandy soldiers on]. Also, I’ll give an example. One of the states with the least amount of corruption is the state of West Bengal, that is when the CPI(M) was there. And I want to propose to you, draw your attention to the fact that in the last hundred years [pause] nobody from the opp… [opposition? oppressed?], nobody from the OBCs, the Backward Classes, and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes have come anywhere near power in West Bengal. It is an absolutely clean state. [Point made, Nandy wants to pass the mike.] More:

The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: by Patrick French

Published on February 1, 2013 in Books, India and Leaders. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The Telegraph:

This week, the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous “Gay Gandhi” headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters “Sinly yours” might be a clue (seemingly unaware that “sinly” was once a common contraction of “sincerely”).

The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical.

Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat. The official record of his sayings and writings runs to more than 90 volumes, and reveals that his last words before being assassinated in 1948 were not an invocation to God, as is commonly reported, but the more prosaic: “It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute.” More:

Why Salman Rushdie could not set foot in Calcutta

Published on January 31, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In The Telegraph:

The state machinery swung into action to prevent Salman Rushdie from setting foot in Calcutta today and launched an equally spirited effort to conceal its footprints, accounts from multiple sources and events through the day suggest.

 Hours after it was confirmed that Rushdie would not reach the city, one of the senior-most government officials made a statement at Writers’ Buildings on one condition: his name cannot be revealed.

 The official declared: “The state had no information about Salman Rushdie’s visit. But a rumour spread last evening that the author was supposed to come to the city for a series of programmes. The city police were asked to enquire about this. The Mumbai police confirmed to the city police that Rushdie was not supposed to visit Calcutta today (Wednesday). The city police informed the state home secretary last night.” More:

The Dalai Lama in conversation with Pico Iyer at Jaipur LitFest

Published on January 28, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

William Dalrymple: a life in writing

Published on January 20, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In The Guardian:

How could you write such an off-message book, I ask Dalrymple. Even though he’s travelled overnight from his farm outside Delhi to his publisher’s offices in Bloomsbury, and left his wallet in India, he giggles amiably. “We have a very good record of defence secretaries saying clever things about Afghanistan. ‘They won’t even have to shoot a single bullet’ – remember that? John Reid. I was on a panel with him last year and reminded him.” He laughs again, and admits that the timing of the publication of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan is not entirely fortuitous. “There was an element of calculation that this could happen – that they could withdraw some troops.”

And is the fourth occupation of Afghanistan, featuring Hamid Karzai’s western-backed regime, a debacle? “Well, Kabul is the safest place in Afghanistan by a long way. It’s almost like a French finishing school – lovely-looking French girls working for NGOs and handsome-looking French archaeologists digging away. But when I was last there last year you couldn’t go outside Kabul in safety. I wanted to go to the wonderful Buddhist monastery one mile outside the city – one mile – but couldn’t. Jalalabad – you take your life in your hands. As you drive there, you see burned-out cinders of other cars that have been hijacked. Ghazni is so dangerous that I’ve never been there. And as for Kandahar …”

Dalrymple pulls out his phone and shows me a holiday snap from Kandahar. A single bullet has shattered a pick-up’s rear window. “I was with a security company’s driver out at the airport – fortunately behind bulletproof glass. A sniper shot to the back of the head. This is the driver,” he says, showing me another photo, “looking chuffed to have met me.” Why were they shooting at you? “Because we’re an occupying army and they assume I’m intelligence or army up to no good.” More:

Left with no choice

Published on January 20, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A chilling account of the circumstances under which a Kashmiri Pandit family was forced out of the Valley. Excerpts from Rahul Pandita’s latest book, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, in Open:

19 January 1990 was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds. In the afternoon, I played cricket with some boys from my neighbourhood. All of us wore thick sweaters and pherans. I would always remove my pheran and place it on the fence in the kitchen garden. After playing, I would wear it before entering the house to escape my mother’s wrath. She’d worry that I’d catch a cold. “The neighbours will think that I am incapable of taking care of my children,” she would say in exasperation.

We had an early dinner that evening and, since there was no electricity, we couldn’t watch television. Father heard the evening news bulletin on the radio as usual, and just as we were going to sleep, the electricity returned.

I am in a deep slumber. I can hear strange noises. Fear grips me. All is not well. Everything is going to change. I see shadows of men slithering along our compound wall. And then they jump inside. One by one. So many of them.

I woke up startled. But the zero-watt bulb was not on. The hundred-watt bulb was. Father was waking me up. “Something is happening,” he said. I could hear it—there were people out on the streets. They were talking loudly. Some major activity was underfoot. Were they setting our locality on fire?

So, it wasn’t entirely a dream, after all? Will they jump inside now?

Then a whistling sound could be heard. It was the sound of the mosque’s loudspeaker. We heard it every day in the wee hours of the morning just before the muezzin broke into the azaan. But normally the whistle was short-lived; that night, it refused to stop. That night, the muezzin didn’t call. That night, it felt like something sinister was going to happen.

The noise outside our house had died down. But in the mosque, we could hear people’s voices. They were arguing about something. More:

Rajat Gupta’s phone call: by Sandipan Deb

Published on January 14, 2013 in Books and Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In Mint, a chapter from ‘Fallen Angel’, Sandipan Deb’s new book on the rise and fall of Rajat Gupta. [Sandipan has two books out in the market in one month. The other book is on Mahabharata set in Mumbai's underworld.]

The only phone conversation between Rajaratnam and Gupta that the US government was able to tap took place in the early evening of 29 July 2008. It lasted eighteen minutes. The conversation is, to say the least, revealing. Gupta sounds unsure and confused at times, and is looking to his friend for career advice. He is also lobbying for a bigger role in the Galleon Group—and more money.

It is obvious from the conversation that Gupta is well aware that his long-time protégé, and McKinsey employee, Anil Kumar, is working on the sly for Rajaratnam and is getting paid for it. Gupta has now been retired from McKinsey for about a year, but the conversation implies that it is very likely he knew about the arrangement between Rajaratnam and Kumar while he was still working at the firm.

After the usual pleasantries, Rajaratnam, who is suffering from a cold, mentions that he has called because he is meeting Gary Cohn, president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, in two days, then goes on: “And there’s a rumour that Goldman might look to buy a commercial bank.” Gupta is initially non-committal, but Rajaratnam asks him point blank: “Have you heard anything along that line?” He mentions Wachovia, at that time the fourth-largest bank holding company in the US in terms of assets, but in deep trouble. More:

Mahabharata set in Mumbai’s underworld by Sandipan Deb

Published on January 14, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In Open magazine, an extract from Sandipan Deb‘s The Last War. The novel is a re-imagining of the Mahabharata set in the Mumbai underworld:

‘Are you ready?’ asked Kishenbhai.

 Jeet was standing at the window, looking out at the apartment buildings on view. They were all dark, the inhabitants were all asleep. Dead to the world, in deep sleep, or fitfully, or just pretending. Some of them would have their minds peopled with as many ghosts as I have in mine, thought Jeet. No, not as many, but they would never know. Every man gets the number of ghosts he deserves. Or can bear. Lying there in bed, all alone, with his wife sleeping peacefully, a foot or two away…The balconies of all the apartments Jeet could see were grilled. In effect, they had all been converted to little ironing chambers. All of them had ironing boards in them. How many clothes did they iron every day? I have never ironed anything in my life. The ironing just happened. I don’t even know who ironed my clothes. Bizarre.

 Jeet touched the gun snuggled in his waistband. He had dismantled it, cleaned and oiled it and put it back together a few hours ago. He loved doing that. Maybe ironing gave the same sort of pleasure…bringing something back to full efficiency and the original pristine identity. That was perhaps something everything in the world deserved. Except for living beings. They grew old and died. More:

And another extract in Outlook:

 

The hidden history of Bengali Harlem

Published on January 13, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

From MIT News:

While it is commonly known that a wave of well-educated South Asians arrived in the United States after 1965, this earlier saga of immigration and assimilation has largely been overlooked. Until now, that is: A new book, “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America,” by MIT assistant professor Vivek Bald, illuminates this thread of history in unprecedented detail.

“Without these stories, the history of South Asians in the U.S. is incomplete,” Bald says.

One reason the subject has particular resonance for the present day, Bald believes, is that many of the immigrants in question were Muslim. “I wanted to make clear the depth and the persistence of the South Asian presence in the U.S.,” he says, “and specifically the South Asian Muslim presence in the U.S., at a time when Muslims are being portrayed as newcomers, enemies and outsiders.”

The genesis of “Bengali Harlem,” published this month by Harvard University Press, comes in good measure from conversations Bald had with Alaudin Ullah, a New York-based actor and playwright and the son of Habib Ullah. Hearing about the Ullah family’s odyssey sparked Bald’s curiosity. More:

Swami Vivekananda: Social reformer or caste votary?

Published on January 12, 2013 in Books and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In Outlook, an excerpt from Cosmic Love and Human Empathy: Swami Vivekananda’s Restatement of Religion by Jyotirmaya Sharma (Harpercollins):

If there is one phrase in the popular consciousness that effortlessly invokes the name and memory of Ramakrishna, it is ‘Ramakrishna’s catholicity’. Vivekananda, more than anyone else, helped construct the elements that constituted this carefully edited, censored and wilfully misleading version of his master’s ‘catholicity’. He used it to mean what he thought was Ramakrishna’s tolerance, generosity and inclusiveness in relation to other faiths while carefully glossing over the sources and influences that produced this ‘catholicity’. The continued use of the term has had a longevity independent of Vivekananda’s remoulding of Ramakrishna from a “religious ecstatic to a religious eclectic”, and continues to be used even to this day by perceptive and critical readers of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda story.

Faith is a creation and gift of god and it is beyond the jurisdiction of humans to tamper with it: “Suppose there are errors in the religion that one has accepted; if one is sincere and earnest, then god Himself will correct these errors…. If there are errors in other religions, that is none of our business. God, to whom the world belongs, takes care of that.” Ramakrishna does not stop at this, but goes further to warn against the triumphalism that sets in when individuals or faiths arbitrarily decide that they are right and all others are wrong. They think of faith in terms of winning and losing, where, invariably, they perceive that they and their faith alone have won and all others have lost. “But a person who has gone forward may be detained by some slight obstacle,” warns Ramakrishna, “and someone who has been lagging behind may then steal a march on him.” God’s ways are mysterious, and triumph and defeat too are in his hands.

If these are the foundations upon which Ramakrishna’s inclusiveness, universality and doctrinal generosity rested, it is also true that there was a complete absence in the Kathamrita of a clearly articulated Hindu identity. Even less so was the idea of a threatening, antagonistic ‘Other’ in the form of Islam or Christianity. Sumit Sarkar is right when he says that in Ramakrishna and in the pages of the Kathamrita “there is no developed sense of a sharply distinct ‘Hindu’ identity—let alone any political use of it”. There is, however, one exception within the Kathamrita that causes a mild dissonance in our total and categorical rejection of the presence of a cohesive Hindu identity in Ramakrishna. It must also be said that this exception is vastly outweighed by the overwhelming evidence that points towards Ramakrishna’s radical rejection of differences, hierarchies and claims of superiority among sects and faiths. More:

‘His Inclusiveness Is A Powerful Myth’ Read interview with Jyotirmaya Sharma here.

The Snake in the Garden: Pico Iyer

Published on January 5, 2013 in Books and Essay. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Pico Iyer in NYT:

Once upon a time a friend told me about a retreat house in the hills of California. I drove three hours north from my mother’s home and came upon an 800-acre spread, with golden pampas grass tumbling down to a great expanse of blue 1,200 feet below. The place was radiantly silent — save for bells tolling three or four times a day — and I was so far from telephone and laptop that I could lose myself for hours in anything at all, or nothing. At dusk, deer stepped into my private garden to graze; an hour later, I stepped out of my room and found myself under an overturned saltshaker of stars.

The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary.

I stepped into my cabin on the slope above the sea, 12 days before our meeting — golden poppies and lupines everywhere — and instantly began to wonder how Steve would see it. What if the sky clouded over before his arrival, I thought, and he was greeted by rain and mist? Maybe the vegetarian food set out in the kitchen would fail to meet his exacting standards? What about the crosses on the walls? Might they trigger some unsuspected trauma from his Roman Catholic boyhood? Every day for the next 10 days I worried that the place might not live up to his expectations — or my billing. More:

The City of Devi

Published on January 5, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In Mint Lounge, an extract from Manil Suri’s new novel ‘The City of Devi’(Bloomsbury India). The is set in a Mumbai on the brink of its end:

“Bhaiyya, listen,” I try once more. “They’re dropping the atom bomb this week. Atom bomb, you understand, not some firecracker that’s demolished the market around you. On Bombay. Mumbai. Whatever you call it, the city’s going to be finished. What would you do even if you did manage to squeeze out the extra money from someone? Take it to heaven with you? And what if nobody else came to your store?—most of the city has fled, you know. Is this what you want to happen to your fruit?” I nudge the tangerine with my foot, and it crumbles into ash.

But the fruitwalla is adamant, he won’t sell for less. “It’s all up to Devi ma’s grace,” he says. “She’s the city’s patron goddess, after all. Now that she’s appeared in our midst, perhaps she’ll save us, who knows? But even if she doesn’t, even if she only lets me hold the money for ten minutes, at least I’ll have it for that much time. At least I’ll die with an offering for her in my hand.”

Suddenly, the futility of what I am trying to do overwhelms me—how ridiculous to put such hopes in a pomegranate! I look at the smoke billowing out of the buildings in the distance and smell the soot that hangs everywhere. The garbage collecting for days, the stench of bodies rotting in the air. Ever since I started my vigil for Karun eighteen days ago, I’ve kept close to my building complex, sheltered from the mayhem. Trying not to obsess over where he might be now, why he left. With the internet dying out, together with phones, radio and television, even electricity, my only news about the outside has been through tidbits from our lone remaining watchman. More:

The book boys of Mumbai

Published on January 5, 2013 in Books and Essay. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sonia Faleiro in NYT:

As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai, the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?”

Mumbai once prided itself on its literary culture — libraries, journals and poetry societies flourished; foreign books, though hard to find and prohibitively expensive, were all the rage. It was into this economy of scarcity and exclusivity that, somewhere around the 1970s, the book pirates stepped in.

Initially, these literary entrepreneurs produced only thinly bound copies, their pages spilling out or missing altogether. Popular fiction sold well, as did American cookbooks and Asian volumes of dress patterns. It wasn’t until the ’90s that best sellers were pirated; today, they dominate the black market, selling at less than half the Indian cover price. (Don’t tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.) Eagerly anticipated books like those in the “Harry Potter” series are often available the morning of their worldwide release. As a result, the books most readily found in Mumbai these days aren’t purchased in the city’s established bookstores but outside, where children peddle shrink-wrapped paperbacks. More:

Reporting poverty

Published on January 3, 2013 in Books and Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Emily Brennan interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo, in Guernica:

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?

Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written. More:

The Sanjay Gandhi story

Published on December 18, 2012 in Books and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Vinod Mehta on Sanjay Gandhi. In Outlook:

While Sanjay and Indira were fighting legal battles in court, at home the two brothers and the two wives were barely on speaking terms. Relations between Rajiv and Sanjay were always “chilly” and between Sonia and Maneka “frigid”. Indira Gandhi sought to remain neutral, desperately trying to maintain some semblance of family peace. One morning, B.K. Nehru and his wife Flori were breakfasting with the Gandhis. “Sanjay went into a rage and threw his plate across the room when Sonia failed to cook his eggs in the precise way he had ordered.” Indira did not say a word to Sanjay.

In January 1980, Indira Gandhi won back power from the Janata clowns, who gifted her the prime minister’s chair meekly. Morarji Desai led the strange cocktail which had dethroned Indira. Instead of concentrating on governance, they set out to ‘punish’ their nemesis by hook or by crook. This publicly stated goal was combined with vicious infighting. It would be fair to say the Janata leaders fell on their own swords with great facility. Indira Gandhi stood and won from two constituencies, Rae Bareli and Medak; Sanjay was elected comfortably from Amethi.

With mother and son back in power, furious speculation raged in early 1980 as to what role the mother had planned for her son. Also, whether both had absorbed the egregious lessons of the Emergency—primarily excesses in the family planning and slum clearance programmes. Would a measure of civility replace the dreaded midnight knock in public life? Indira Gandhi admitted some excesses might have been committed by sycophants and overzealous ministers, bureaucrats and assorted flunkeys, but her son, she insisted, was innocent and not involved. She characterised the excesses as “gross exaggerations” spread by the media and long-standing Congress enemies. This defence, repeated ad nauseam, suggested that Sanjay and his merry men would resume from where they had left off. Privately, Indira conceded the no-smoke-without-fire hypothesis, ie., there must be some truth in the sundry allegations. But her formal position was to live in denial.

On March 31, 1980, Maneka gave birth to a son. He was named Varun. Indira was over the moon. Now, she had three grandchildren, one from her problem son. Alas, Varun’s birth did not ease the tensions between the brothers and their respective wives. Rajiv and Sonia retreated into their private space. It was as if they were hermetically sealed from the hectic goings-on at India’s most politically active house. More:

William Dalrymple on his new book, Return of a King

Published on December 18, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Mukund Padmanabhan in The Hindu:

In this gripping piece of narrative history, impossible to put down once you have started, Dalrymple redraws the conventional images of a number of the principal players and persuades us to consider other ways of looking at them. For instance, the British hero and political envoy Alexander Burnes, who was hacked to death, was despised by Afghans for what they saw as his treacherous and dissolute ways.

As for Shah Shuja, Dalrymple shows us that he was refined and highly cultured apart from being strong and decisive when the chips were down; in short, nothing like the feckless British puppet he was made out to be.

Excerpts from an interview:

Western historians have regarded the first Anglo-Afghan war, or Auckland’s Folly, as a misadventure. But you also highlight its barbarity — particularly, the savagery and the destruction wreaked by the Army of Retribution, the avenging group that was formed after the British defeat to gain one final victory over the Afghans.

Yes, very much so. One of the things that brought me to this topic is that this was in some ways a dry run, a dress rehearsal, for the much greater savagery that follows in 1857 with quite a lot of the same cast. The people who go to loot, rape, and burn down Lucknow, Kanpur and Delhi, who were in their forties, are in their twenties in this [Anglo-Afghan] war. And they called it the Army of Retribution in 1857 too and so deliberately modelled it on what was done in Afghanistan. More:

And below, Bashrat Peer in Hindustan Times:

What made you write this book?

There are a lot of books about Afghanistan, but few about Afghan history. What brought me to write this book was thinking about Afghan history after rereading Peter Hopkirk’s classic The Great Game. It is a bit dated and features a lot of “treacherous Orientals”. Return of a King is the first book about the first Afghan war using Afghan sources, telling the stories from an Afghan point of view as well. It is the defining conflict that the Afghans remember as the source of their independence that they alone in this region never succumbed to colonial rule. 18,000 soldiers of the East India Company marched into Afghanistan in 1839 and, according to legend, one man returns alive from this debacle. The British army is destroyed at the peak of the British Empire. More:

V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, authors he loathes, and the books he will never write

Published on December 13, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In The New Republic:

“It was calamitous for me. I feel a deep, deep grief.” Sir V.S. Naipaul is talking about his dead cat. We are sitting in the spacious two-story London flat in Kensington where the author and his welcoming second wife, Nadira, stay when they are not at their Wiltshire country residence. “Now that Augustus has died, I want to spend more time in London,” he continues, slowly picking at the meal Nadira has provided. “It is too painful to be [in Wiltshire]. I think of Augustus. He was the sum of my experiences. He had taken on my outlook, my way of living.”

Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, is known for what one commentator described as a “terrifying honesty”—but not so much for his sensitivity. As his first wife, Patricia Hale, battled breast cancer, Naipaul left her alone for long periods, carrying out serious affairs with other women. When Hale was temporarily in remission, in 1994, Naipaul discussed his past visits to prostitutes in an interview with The New Yorker. “I think she had all the relapses after that,” he told his official biographer, Patrick French. “All the remission ended.” Of her death two years later, he added, “It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.” The day after the cremation, Naipaul invited Nadira, a Pakistani journalist, to move into the Wiltshire home he had shared with Hale.

“I must thank Nadira for bringing Augustus into my life,” Naipaul continues. He is visibly upset, and I ask when the cat passed away. “This last September,” he replies. It is October 1, and I offer a cliché about time healing all wounds. “No, no, the previous September 26th,” he explains, sounding deeply wounded. “A year ago. The terrible part of it is that people suggest to me that I get a new cat, that I invite this new cat into the home I shared with Augustus. As if this one should just be replaced so soon. It shows a lack of understanding.” More:

More than a kiss-and-tell

Published on December 5, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Namita Bhandare on the website Newslaundry: Three reasons why you should read Tavleen Singh’s Durbar and why it ultimately fails.

If you’ve been following Tavleen Singh’s weekly column in The Indian Express, you should be fairly familiar with her politics. At the very least, you would be aware of her antipathy to Congress policies, or more specifically to Sonia Gandhi. Yet, regardless of whether you agree with her politics or not, there are three reasons why you should read Durbar.

First, Ms Singh is a been there-done that journalist, covering every important event in contemporary India, and covering it the old-fashioned, hard way: by train, staying in dusty circuit houses, riding through pot-holed constituencies, sneaking into curfew-bound Amritsar, going the extra mile for The Story. You have to respect that and you have to concede that Ms Singh has certainly earned her gripes. more

“If I wanted to be bitchy, I could have said more”

Published on December 1, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In Mint, Tavleen Singh talks about her new book, Durbar but ticks off Mayank Austen Soofi for being a ‘victim of our colonized, slave mentality as most Indians are?’

Although columnist Tavleen Singh’s new book Durbar (Hachette,Rs.599) touches upon India’s contemporary history (the Emergency, the insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab, the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, et cetera), it focuses on the inner circle of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, especially when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister. In her introduction, Singh wrote, “I started to write it (Durbar) soon after Rajiv Gandhi died. I knew him well from the days when he was not a politician and found myself in a unique position to tell the story of how a prime minister with the largest mandate in Indian history ended up as such a disappointment.” While the book takes you inside Delhi’s power corridors as they functioned in the 1980s and the earlier decades, parts of it double up as a mirror to the drawing room society of that period.

Singh, whose widely-acclaimed first book dealt with Kashmir, responded to questions through e-mail.
The Gandhis are the most powerful. Your book is supremely critical, sometimes almost cruel, about them, especially Sonia Gandhi. Was it difficult to get a publisher?
No, it was not hard to find a publisher. But, the book was first bought by Tranquebar and had to be withdrawn because this publisher wanted to pre-censor the manuscript by showing it to the Tata Sons board before publication and I refused. Hachette were the second highest bidder but many others bid for it. Only in India, where we (and certainly you) continue to believe that powerful people are above criticism would such a question be asked. The President of the United States is the most powerful man in the world and the White House is obliged to hold a daily press conference to explain the President’s position on every issue of public or national interest. When people make the decision to enter public life they must accept the right of the public to criticize them. Why do you find it so odd that I should criticize ‘the most powerful people in the country’? Is it because you are as much a victim of our colonized, slave mentality as most Indians are? more

Mapping India

Published on November 16, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Malini Nair profiles cartographer Manosi Lahiri in The Times of India/Crest edition:

Maps of India that conform to modern rules of cartography started appearing only in the late 15th century and were based largely on Ptolemy’s measurements. They were drawn and used mainly by Europeans, says Lahiri. These early maps told mariners, explorers and traders where to expect pirates or find water bodies and local riches.

Initially, the maps were ornamented with an exotic cartouche, or pictorial emblem, at the bottom of the imagined Indoustan. These maps were not strictly accurate. They had phantom lakes and imaginary rivers drawn from old travellers’ tales. But then the British moved in, inching their way from trade to occupation and administration. The maps changed. They became painstakingly scientific. They were maps a ruler needed to establish and consolidate authority. Revenue zones, roads, forts and villages had to be clearly demarcated. The first surveyed map of India drafted by James Rennell, surveyor of British East Indian Company, appeared in the Atlas of Bengal in 1779.

“Historical maps of India were never for Indians, they were for European explorers, traders, colonisers, ” says Lahiri. It is not as if the Arabs, the Mongols and other Central Asians who travelled to or invaded India did not know mapping (Al Beruni took many astronomical measurements a millennia ago), but somehow none of them produced significant, scientific cartographic works, she points out. More

Inside Osama Bin Laden’s final hours

Published on November 14, 2012 in Books and Terrorism. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In an adaptation from his new book, Mark Bowden weaves together accounts from Obama and top decision-makers for the full story behind the daring operation. In Vanity Fair:

‘In the name of Allah the most gracious the most merciful. Praise Allah and pray on his prophet. To the esteemed brother, Sheikh Mahmud, Allah protect him.”

Holed up in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden sat at a computer and set down his thoughts in a long letter dated April 26, 2011, to Atiyah Abdul al-Rahman, his third-in-command and the link to his far-flung and beleaguered followers—the man he addressed as Sheikh Mahmud. It was the al-Qaeda leader’s sixth spring of confinement in Abbottabad. His hair and beard had grown white. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden’s life had shrunk to the cramped and crowded space of the upper two floors of a house behind high walls. His days consisted of familiar routines, rarely broken: his meals, his seven daily prayer sessions, his readings, the poetry lessons for his children and grandchildren, the sermons to three of his wives, the brisk daily walk around the vegetable gardens.

In his letter to Sheikh Mahmud, he raced to catch up with the Arab Spring, to interpret the events in light of his own immutable beliefs. Bin Laden also hammered home some advice about security. After more than nine successful years in hiding, he considered himself to be an expert: “It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a Mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him,” he wrote. “So adherence to security precautions makes their advanced technology a loss and a disappointment to them.”

The computer turned bin Laden’s words into neat lines of uniform Arabic. He was feeling confident. He had five days to live. More:

The Hindutva troll

Published on November 14, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

An excerpt from Patriots and Partisans by Ramachandra Guha (Publishing date: November 20, 2012), in Outlook:

In the past two decades, I must have published some forty articles that have dealt with the politics or policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, or of state and central governments led or directed by them. This constitutes somewhat less than 10 per cent of my total output—that is to say, at least nine in ten of my articles have dealt with other subjects. However, it is always articles that touch on the philosophy and practice of Hindutva that attract the most attention (and anger). They have brought me into contact with a certain kind of Indian who gets up before dawn, has a glass of cow’s milk, prays to the sun god, and begins scanning cyberspace for that day’s secular heresies. If a column I write touches in any way on faith, Hinduism, Hindutva, Guru Golwalkar, Gujarat, or Ayodhya, by breakfast I have had deposited, in my inbox—or perhaps in the ‘Comments’ section of the newspaper’s own website—mails which are hurt, complaining, angry, or downright abusive. A representative sample follows:

I think you are living on other planet. As historian, if India’s integrity is at stake from terrorist Islamic Shaitan Pakistan you are quiblling on small matters. …so called pseudo historians like you besmirch India in Western media from whom you get sinecures and royalty.

Ramachandra is very much a Hindu name. Please dont insult that name, and show your secularism by changing your name to rahim or rehaman. anyway… sanatana dharma does not want cowards like you!!! especially cowards who rape their own mother(land)!!!

It would be to your advantage if you get mentally treated before it is too late if you are suffering from a mental problem of distortions and if it is treatable and can be cured. Good luck. When muslims got a land to live out of the land that belongs to hindus of india since 2000 BC where is the need for muslims to continue to live in India and if they cannot go to there to the land given to them they should keep quiet and vote in Pakisthan elections not in India. You too can go with them to pakisthan and live there…I will be the most happiest man if a poison like you is not exist in this world. If so our country will be more safe with less one enemy.

Sometimes the mails are sent as letters to the editor of the journals where I write, with a copy mailed to me. These ostensibly impersonal rejoinders tend to be rather forceful as well. Consider these examples, where the historian is characterised as, respectively, a Naxalite sympathiser (but simultaneously a Nehru-Gandhi family loyalist), a newspaper sales agent, a covert Christian missionary, and as akin to a Swiss bank: More: