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Beyond boundaries

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on January 24, 2010

in Faith, India and Religion

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India’s heterodox religions and their traditions remain stronger than the idea of a unified nation-state. They have survived a long and violent history, writes Pankaj Mishra in The National

India is one of the world’s oldest civilisations; but as a nation-state it is relatively very new, and its nationalism can still appear weak and unresolved, as became freshly clear in August, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party expelled its veteran leader Jaswant Singh. Singh had dared to praise, in a new book about the partition of India, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Indian nationalists, of both the hardline Hindu and soft-secular kind, see Jinnah as the Muslim fanatic primarily responsible for the vivisection of their “Mother India” in 1947. But Singh chose to blame the partition on allegedly power-hungry Hindu freedom fighters, rather than Jinnah, who he claimed had stood for a united India. more

Literary magic

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on January 24, 2010

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Niall Ferguson, Stephen Frears, and Wole Soyinka kick off the fifth annual Jaipur Literature Festival. Olivia Cole reports for The Daily Beast

For over a hundred years, Jaipur, the so-called “Pink City,” was famously gray. It was only in 1882 that it was painted pink (the traditional color of welcome) in honor of a visit by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. That sense of hospitality is apt for its literary festival, opening today. Now in its fifth year, from the start the philosophy has always been that it should welcome as many readers as possible. Some 20,000 are expected, but this is not a place with green rooms, wrist bands, or VIP areas, despite the fact that this year’s lineup is just a few starry names shy of a large constellation. more

Come ye all to Asia’s biggest literature fest

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on January 21, 2010

in Books and India

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William Dalrymple, Co-director, Jaipur Literature Festival, in the Hindustan Times:

In January in 2004, I was invited to give a reading in Jaipur at a new festival of music and dance that had just started in the Pink City. The reading took place in a small room at the back of the university. No one was able to find it and the event was sparsely attended —maybe 30 people, largely elderly aunties, turned up to hear it.

That evening, I suggested to the organiser, Faith Singh, that maybe something could be done to start a small literary festival around her Jaipur Heritage Festival, just as Edinburgh had its Book Festival running alongside the main Edinburgh International Festival.

Two years later, the festival finally kicked off with 18 authors. All were Indian-residents, “and two failed to show up,” remembers my co-director, Namita Gokhale, who has done more than anyone else to make that idea a reality. More:

Back with a bang: Jaipur Lit Fest

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on January 18, 2010

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Posted by Namita Bhandare

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, the DS Jaipur Literature Fesival is back with Season V (Jan 21-25), with more international writers, more Indian writers and certainly a bigger anticipated audience than previous years.

Writers who’ve confirmed attendance include Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle and Amit Chaudhuri, widely regarded as India’s best-known writer of his generation.

To pretend that there is a hierarchy or even a social pecking order at the fest would be misleading. There are no tickets; entry is free to all. Everybody queues up for lunch and dinner — everybody including Salman (Rushdie), Pico (Iyer) and Vikram (Seth). Writers and readers lounge in the winter sun, signing books, drinking coffee and gossiping (oh, the gossip).

The Lit Fest is the baby of writers William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale. Writing for The Guardian recently, Dalrymple said: “Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India.”

And so, began India’s quest for a fest. Starting with 17 writers over three days, the fest will this year include 160 writers and performers. [See the complete programme and list of writers attending here.]

This year’s festival is set once again in the charming, heritage Diggi Palace, the haveli of the Thakurs of Diggi, a small princely state. The Durbar Hall with its Venetian mirrors and framed portraits of venerated gods and ancestors seats about 300. Over the years, however, as the number of writers descending on Jaipur has gone up, Diggi Palace has sprouted new venues. There’s the Mughal Tent (which seats about 100 people), Baithak (about 75) and the front lawn (can easily take upwards of 1,000).

It was at the front lawn, last year where Vikas Swarup received news that Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film based on his book Q&A had received 11 Oscar nominations. The crowd erupted in a roar as Swarup made his hasty departure for the film’s Mumbai premiere. Jai Ho.

Every fest has its own little gem, its highlights: Salman Rushdie ticking off ‘hostile’ journalists for what he saw as unfriendly reports in the press. Vikram Seth getting ticked off by a local newspaper for sipping a glass of wine while speaking to his moderator Sonia Faleiro.

This year’s showstopper could well be a controversial, woman writer and thinker. Her name is not up on the official programme yet, because she is yet to get a visa. But, do watch this space. If she comes, fireworks.

Previously on AW

The greatest literary show on earth

Rough Guide to the Fest

William Dalrymple on Jaipur LitFest

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on January 17, 2010

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From the Observer:

Each December and January my normal life dissolves in the face of a million emails generated by my favourite commitment of the year: helping direct the Jaipur Literature Festival, which kicks off at the end of this week in the capital of Rajasthan. Private Eye recently ran a cartoon showing two survivors of a shipwreck watching their liner sink from a desert island, shaded by a single, drooping palm tree. One says to the other: “Well, I suppose the first thing to do is to start a literary festival.” The cartoonist had a point: literary festivals now seem almost as globally contagious as swine flu.

But it certainly didn’t seem that way in 2004, when I moved my family back to India from London, and first discussed starting a literary festival in Jaipur. Then, as now, India appeared to be at the centre of the global literary hurricane: every year, it seemed another brilliant young Indian wunderkind would storm the bestseller list and run away with the Booker.

Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India. Arriving back in Delhi, I found to my surprise that one tended to meet far more of what the west regards as the A-list Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, in the Welsh countryside, or Edinburgh or even Sydney, than one ever did in Bombay or Delhi. More:

Spiritual awakening

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on January 1, 2010

in Books, Culture, Faith, India, Religion and Society

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William Dalrymple in the New Statesman:

On a foggy winter’s night in November 1998, Om Singh, a young landowner from Rajasthan, was riding his Enfield Bullet back home after winning a local election near Jodhpur, when he misjudged a turning and hit a tree. He was killed instantly. As a memorial, his father fixed the motorbike to a stand, raised on a concrete plinth under the shelter of a small canopy, near the site of the crash.

“We were a little surprised when people started reporting miracles near the bike,” Om’s uncle Shaitan Singh told me on my last visit. “Om was no saint, and people say he had had a drink or two before his crash. In fact, there was no indication whatsoever during his life that he was a deity. He just loved his horses and his motorbike. But since his death a lot of people have had their wishes fulfilled here – particularly women who want children. For them, he has become very powerful. They sit on the bike, make offerings to Om Singh-ji, and it is said that flowers drop into their laps. Nine months later they have sons. Every day people see him. He comes to many people in their dreams.”

“How did it all begin?” I asked. We were in the middle of a surging throng: crowds of red-turbaned and brightly sari-ed villagers gathered around the bike, the women queuing patiently to straddle its seat and ring the bell on the canopy. Nearby, two drummers were loudly banging dholaks, while chai-shop owners made tea and paan for the pilgrims. Other stalls sold plaques, postcards and statues of Om Singh and his motorbike. Pieces of cloth were tied to branches all over the tree and gold flags flapped in the desert wind. Everywhere buses and trucks were disgorging pilgrims coming to visit Rajasthan’s newest shrine. More:

A spiritual journey

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on October 25, 2009

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In the Guardian, a review of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Penguin India):

William Dalrymple thrives on illuminating the points at which seemingly antagonistic cultures intersect. His erudite essays in the New York Review have blurred the allegedly irrevocable boundaries between Islam and Christianity. City of Djinns, a thoughtful, provocative travelogue, questioned the seemingly rigid lines that separated coloniser from colonised in British India.

There is a similar awareness of the world’s innate cosmopolitanism in his new book, Nine Lives, in which he conjectures that the Hindu goddess Tara might have the same Mesopotamian roots as a Catholic cult. But this book, a blend of travelogue, ethnography, oral history and reportage, isn’t primarily concerned with exploring the world’s age-old interconnectedness. Instead, it is an attempt to discover if India offers “any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism”, or if the rapidly developing nation is just another satellite of the “wider capitalist world”.

Dalrymple sketches each profile with succinct historical context, explaining why the Jains consider fasting to death to be their highest goal or how the devadasis’ status has dropped due to modern social reform. He’s mainly interested in what the person practices, how they came to such a way of life and how its continuation extrapolates in a modernising world. Many of his subjects are apprehensive about how their particular sacred extremity will live on after them.

What Dalrymple declines to do is provide his own position on a subject’s practice and fate. For, contrary to the blurb, this is not a travel book. It does travel to different parts of India in its search, but its subject remains close to the profiled individuals rather than any larger understanding of their phenomenon.

In the Telegraph, London:

Dalrymple travels around India in search of representatives and, for the most part, allows them to tell their own stories in their own words. Inevitably, some stories are more engaging than others. The first subject is a Jain nun in Karnataka, who appears to lead an admirably blameless life, following a strictly vegetarian diet and being careful not to harm any living creature. In other ways, however, the path she follows seems unattractively life-denying: ritually plucking her hair out, rejecting her family rather as the more pious and self-regarding young Christian saints were said to do, and eventually embracing sallekhana, a process by which the devout starve themselves to death. It is with faintly guilty relief that the reader turns to the frenetic actor-dancers of Kerala, the apparently inexhaustible storytellers of Rajasthan and the skilled sculptors of Chola bronzes in Tamil Nadu.

Maharaja: The splendour of India’s royal courts

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on October 3, 2009

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William Dalrymple on Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, the new exhibition at V&A, in the Guardian:

Even at the height of the raj, the British directly controlled only three-fifths of India. Two-fifths of south Asia’s vast landmass always remained under the control of its indigenous princely rulers, split up between nearly 600 states. “God created the maharajas,” wrote Kipling, “so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces.” Aldous Huxley came to more or less the same conclusion. Arriving in Delhi at the time of the Council of Princes in the early 1930s, he found the city “pullulating with despots . . . At the viceroy’s evening parties, the diamonds were so large they looked like stage gems. It was impossible to believe that the pearls in the million-pound necklaces were the genuine excrement of oysters.”

Not all observers, however, were so enamoured with India’s princes. Indian nationalist politicians such as Nehru and Gandhi regarded them as foolish and wasteful playboys, spineless Quislings of the British and enemies of India’s freedom movement. Lord Curzon took a similar view, and railed in his despatches home against “the category of half-Anglicised, half-denationalised, European-women-hunting, pseudo-sporting, and very often in the end spirit-drinking young native chiefs”. Writing to Queen Victoria, the viceroy detailed at surprising length the failings of the “frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers” who, he believed, constituted such a large proportion of her princely subjects. The Rana of Dholpur was “fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot”; the Maharaja of Patiala was “little better than a jockey”; and Maharaja Holkar was “half mad and addicted to horrible vices”. More:

Inside India’s sacred heart

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on September 27, 2009

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An excerpt from William Dalrymple’s forthcoming book, Nine Lives (Bloomsbury/Penguin), on a modern nation’s ancient beliefs. In the Times of India:

Two hills of blackly gleaming granite, smooth as glass, rise from a thickly wooded landscape of banana plantations and jagged palmyra palms. It is dawn. Below lies the ancient pilgrimage town of Sravanabelagola, where the crumbling walls of monasteries, temples and dharamsalas cluster around a grid of dusty, red earth roads. The roads converge on a great rectangular tank. The tank is dotted with the spreading leaves and still-closed buds of floating lotus flowers. Already, despite the early hour, the first pilgrims are gathering.

For more than 2,000 years, this Karnatakan town has been sacred to the Jains. It was here, in the third century BC, that the first Emperor of India, Chandragupta Maurya, embraced the Jain religion and died through a self-imposed fast to the death, the emperor’s chosen atonement for the killings for which he had been responsible in his life of conquest. Twelve hundred years later, in AD 981, a Jain general commissioned the largest monolithic statue in India, sixty feet high, on the top of the larger of the two hills, Vindhyagiri. This was an image of another royal Jain hero, Prince Bahubali.

It was in a temple just short of the summit that I first laid eyes on Prasannamati Mataji. I had seen the tiny, slender, barefoot figure of the nun in her white sari bounding up the steps above me as I began my ascent. She climbed quickly, with a pot of water made from a coconut shell in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she climbed, she gently wiped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn’t stand on, hurt or kill a single living creature on her ascent of the hill: one of the set rules of pilgrimage for a Jain muni or ascetic. More:

Home truths on abroad

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on September 19, 2009

in Books and Travel

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William Dalrymple on travel writing in The Guardian:

Last November, for example, I managed to track down a celebrated tantric at a cremation ground near Birbhum in West Bengal. Tapan Goswami was a feeder of skulls. Twenty years ago he had been interviewed by an American professor of comparative religion, who went on to write a scholarly essay on Tapan’s practice of spirit-summoning and spell-casting, using the cured skulls of dead virgins and restless suicides. It sounded rich material, albeit of a rather sinister nature, so I spent the best part of a day touring the various cremation grounds of Birbhum before finally finding Tapan sitting outside his small Kali temple on the edge of the town, preparing a sacrifice for the goddess.

The light was beginning to fade; a funeral pyre was still smoking eerily in front of the temple. Tapan and I talked of tantra, and he confirmed that in his youth, when the professor had interviewed him, he had indeed been an enthusiastic skull-feeder. Yes, he said, all that had been written about him was true, and yes, he did occasionally still cure skulls, and summon their dead owners, so as to use their power. But sadly, he said, he could not talk to me about the details. Why was that? I asked. Because, he said, his two sons were now successful ophthalmologists in New Jersey. They had firmly forbidden him from giving any more interviews about what he did, in case rumours of the family dabbling in black magic damaged their profitable East Coast practice. Now he thought he might even give away his skulls, and go and join them in the States.

Living in India over the past few years, I have seen the country change at a rate that was impossible to imagine when I first moved there in the late 80s. On returning to Delhi after nearly a decade away, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometres from the boom town of Gurgaon, on the south western edge of Delhi. From the end of the road you could just see in the distance the rings of new housing estates springing up, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier had been virgin farmland. More:

[William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is published by Bloomsbury next month]

In search of India

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on April 20, 2009

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This year’s London book fair celebrates the diversity of contemporary Indian writing. How much do the novelists of the new generation have in common, asks Amit Chaudhuri. In the Guardian:

The theme of the London book fair this year is Indian writing. Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, William Dalrymple and other writers in frequent circulation in this country are going to be joined by writers – K Satchidanandan, Javed Akhtar – distinguished or popular on their own terrain but less known here, for five days of discussions and celebrations. Something like this happened in 2006 to the Frankfurt book fair, when planeloads of Indian novelists and poets descended on the Intercontinental Hotel, waved to each other over breakfast, and then read from their work to courteous audiences in the afternoons and evenings.

The theme then, too, was India; and the “idea of India” acted as a catalyst to a process that might have already begun, but received, at that moment, a recognisable impetus – the confluence, in one place, of literary and intellectual dialogue with what is basically business activity, each bringing magic and movement to the other. The India-themed Paris book fair followed swiftly.

‘I’m not going to criticize or mysticize’

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on March 14, 2009

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William Dalrymple on his forthcoming book. From Mint-Lounge:

Where did you find the fascinating people on whom the profiles in Nine Lives are based?

(Laughs) On the road mostly. Sometimes I bump into them myself. Sometimes people tell me about them. The Tibetan monk was a lead someone gave me at the Jaipur literary festival. So there is a little bit of providence in the way I get them.

Is this William Dalrymple’s Eastern spirituality book?

Yes, it is so clichéd, isn’t it? The Western guy who comes to India and suddenly discovers the meaning and purpose of religion in puffs of mystic smoke! But I’ve lived here for 25 years now. So I am not exactly the amazed foreigner. And besides, my book is trying to talk about religion through biographies and lives. So I am not going to criticize or mysticize. Just say it as it is. More:

The greatest literary show on earth

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on January 28, 2009

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The annual Jaipur Literature Festival might have met with lukewarm coverage by the Indian press, but the world press goes ga-ga. Amulya Gopalakrishnan writes for Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, calling it with considerable hyperbold the ‘greatest literary show’ on earth. Brown was also one of the speakers at Jaipur.

Every January, the ancient city of Jaipur, India, celebrates the written word in a literary festival co-founded by Indian writer Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, the British travel writer and historian, that easily places first in Asia for cultural cachet and star power. It’s hard to believe that the festival is only three years old, given the crackle and buzz around its events and personalities—Salman Rushdie chose the occasion for his first public appearance after the fatwa. And this year too, through five sun-drenched mornings and vivid, musical evenings in the dignified old Diggi Palace, the festival made headlines across India.

And Jeremy Kahn in the International Herald Tribune says the fest has grown from a small, regional affair to one of international stature

In India’s headlong rush into modernity, Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is hardly on the cutting edge. A fixture on the tourist circuit, it is best known for its pink-walled old city, its 18th-century Maharashtra’s forts and havelis, its classic jewelry and its traditional, technicolor patchwork textiles. But for a few days each January, this city lays claim to a place at the heart of the contemporary literary world.

Slumdog glory. But where is the author?

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on January 22, 2009

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Posted by Namita Bhandare from the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Spot the author

Spot the author

On the day that Danny Boyle, A.R. Rahman, Anil Kapoor and the cast of Slumdog Millionaire lit up the red carpet in the film’s Mumbai premiere on Thursday, January 22, one man without whom the film wouldn’t have existed was airdashing from Jaipur to make it just in time to get news of the film’s stupendous 10 Oscar nominations. It was Vikas Swarup who wrote Q&A, the book on which the film is based.

Swarup was clearly the star of the Jaipur Literature Festival’s first day’s events as a line of school children and other fans queued up to get a copy of their book signed by the diplomat-author. On the day the Oscar nominations were announced, Swarup slipped away to make it to the Mumbai premiere, although festival organisers said he was expected to return to Jaipur. Back in Jaipur it was another star associated with the film, lyricist Gulzar who basked in the glory of the announcement as champagne was popped and the audience broke into huge applause.

Swarup is chuffed about the film based on his novel reaping such huge dividends in the awards circuit (it won four Golden Globes, picked up 11 BAFTA nominations and has now received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Simon Beaufoy for best screenplay adaptation). But he told author William Dalrymple, festival director with whom he had an hour long public interaction, that he had not been invited to the London premiere and finally had to buy his own ticket from Pretoria in South Africa where he is posted to London. “People kept asking me what I thought about the film and I hadn’t even seen it. So, I finally decided to buy my own ticket.”

Swarup seemed reconciled to the many changes and departures from his book in the film, although he said that the first draft of the screenplay had certain inaccuracies which he then had to fix. “However, the author becomes obselete once the film-makers come into play,” he said.

In Swarup’s book, the protagonist is named Ram Mohammed Thomas, a name changed to Jamaal Malik in the film. Salim in the book is not Jamaal’s brother but rather a street-smart friend. Even the title Q&A — which has a certain iconic ring to it, as pointed out by Dalrymple – was changed. Swarup defended the change saying that Slumdog Millionaire had a certain evocative quality. Moreover, he conceded that Beaufoy has been ‘faithful to the central premise in the book’.

But there were others in Jaipur who felt that Swarup ought to have been given more importance at the premiere and award ceremonies of Slumdog. “It’s a bit sloppy on the film-makers’ part to have left him out. I can only hope that it is an oversight,” said an admirer who didn’t wish to be named.

Swarup also brushed off criticism — most notably from Amitabh Bachchan — that Slumdog is too negative in its portrayal of a seamy underbelly of Mumbai. “India is so large and multifarious that a single book cannot represent the whole reality. It is at best only a slice of Indian life; not the only version of it,” he told Dalrymple.

Slumdog was to have premiered in Jaipur as part of the literature festival on Wednesday January 21, a day before the Mumbai premiere. The festival’s official programme lists the premiere in the presence of Vikas Swarup and Anil Kapoor, the film’s most recognisable Indian star. But the organisers announced that the premiere had been postponed to January 23 — and gave no reason for the decision.

Ironically, the copies of Q&A available at the festival venue (and the copies that Swarup signed in Jaipur) had a still from Slumdog the movie prominently displayed on the front jacket and was being sold as Slumdog Millionaire, the book previously known as Q&A! So, Slumdog could end up pushing the sales of his book. Don’t be surprised if he ends up having the last laugh.

See reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the Indian press here, here and here.

Pakistan in peril

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on January 22, 2009

in Afghanistan, Books, Pakistan and Terrorism

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William Dalrymple reviews “Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia” by Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

The tribal areas have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but they have now been radicalized as never before. The rain of armaments from US drones and Pakistani ground forces, which have caused extensive civilian casualties, daily add a steady stream of angry footsoldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-Western religious and political extremism continues to flourish.

The most alarming manifestation of this was the ease with which a highly trained jihadi group, almost certainly supplied and provisioned in Pakistan, probably by the nominally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba-an organization that aims to restore Muslim rule in Kashmir-attacked neighboring India in November. They murdered 173 innocent people in Bombay, injured over six hundred, and brought the two nuclear-armed rivals once again to the brink of war. The attackers arrived by sea, initially using boats based in the same network of fishing villages across the Makran coast through which a number of al-Qaeda suspects are known to have been spirited away from Pakistan to the Arab Gulf following the American assault on Tora Bora in 2001.

Bachchan, Slumdog & more: a rough guide to the Jaipur Lit Fest

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on January 15, 2009

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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

I know the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival (Diggi Palace hotel, Jaipur, January 21-25, entry free to all) love to say that the festival is democratic and that they don’t want to pitch one session over and above the others but here’s what I think will be the star events at the Lit Fest:

1. The Indian premiere of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. That the film has reaped awards at the Golden Globe and is tipped to be an Oscar favourite has only added to the curiosity factor. And now that Amitabh Bachchan has blasted the film for daring to show the ‘murky under belly’ of Mumbai (has he taken over from where Raj Thackeray left off?), the pre-publicity hype has just got a notch hotter. As they say in showbiz, any publicity is good publicity. Anyway, to come back to the film: present at the premiere will be, no not Danny Boyle (he’ll be in Mumbai) but Vikas Swarup who wrote Q&A, the book on which the script is based, and also, apparently, Anil Kapoor. I’m a bit alarmed by the filmi flourishes which the festival’s PR guides seem to favour (they roped Aamir Khan in last year), but I guess they’re doing it because they believe it sells the festival. If you ask me, the festival (now in its fourth year) doesn’t need much selling. Continue reading ‘Bachchan, Slumdog & more: a rough guide to the Jaipur Lit Fest’

Mumbai terror: the link to Kashmir

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on November 30, 2008

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William Dalrymple in the Guardian:

Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on 11 August this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army. The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses. Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.

I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city’s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.

Mysteries in the marble

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on September 11, 2008

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In The Independent, a review of Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal. Giles Tillotson is an art historian specializing in South Asia and the author of many books including Mughal India and Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City.

The Taj Mahal at Agra stands for India in the eyes of the world. Yet the Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1861, which looks after the Taj, has never devoted a publication to its most famous site – not even a guidebook. Indeed, there was no architectural monograph until 2006, when Ebba Koch’s excellent The Complete Taj Mahal appeared.

The art historian Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal leans on Koch’s research, as he is happy to acknowledge; however, his accessible and enjoyable style will engage a broader readership. Like every author in Profile’s “Wonders of the World” series, Tillotson considers not only architectural history but also cultural heritage and resonance – picturesque 18th-century aquatints of the Taj, early 20th-century restorations by Lord Curzon, literary responses such as Rabindranath Tagore’s poem (“a teardrop on the cheek of time”), and the famous photo of Princess Diana posing alone in front of the “monument to love” shortly before her marriage break-up. Tastefully omitted is the Trump Taj Mahal, a casino resort in New Jersey built by property mogul Donald Trump.

In The Times, William Dalrymple reviews the book:

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mogul city of Agra is revealed to Adam after the Fall as one of the future wonders of God’s creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Agra had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its 2m inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. A succession of riverside palaces and “sweet-smelling gardens with sweet blossoms” spanned both banks of the river Yamuna.As the Mogul chronicler Abdul Aziz put it, the city was “the wonder of the age – as much a centre of the arteries of trade both by land and water as a meeting place of saints, sages and scholars from all Asia . . . a veritable lodestar for artistic workmanship, literary talent and spiritual worth”.

It was the Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) who was responsible for the jewel of the Agra waterfront, and the Mogul empire’s most enduring creation, the Taj Mahal. The Taj, which was designed by Shah Jahan’s master architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, is arguably the most admired building of the past 400 years, a masterpiece rising above the river Yamuna as perfect, beautiful and shimmeringly symmetrical as it was when its great dome was first completed in 1643.

All Indian life is here

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on August 23, 2008

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In The Guardian, William Dalrymple takes a look at an ongoing exhibition at the British Library on the Ramayana miniatures — many of them painted by Muslims

The BBC recently celebrated its success in drawing 10 million viewers to the final episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, but it was still a long way short of the figures achieved by Doordarshan, the Indian state television company, which in the late 1980s drew more than 100 million viewers to its mythological epic, the Ramayana.

This 78-part series was at the time the world’s most viewed religious serial, and between January 1987 and July 1988 it more or less brought India to a standstill for an hour each week. Everyone stopped what they were doing to sit in front of whatever television was available. In villages across south Asia, hundreds of people would gather around a single set to watch the gods and demons play out their destinies. In the noisiest and most bustling cities, trains, buses and cars came to a sudden halt, and a strange hush fell over the bazaars. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after the entire cabinet failed to turn up for an urgent briefing.

India’s writers tell Aids stories

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on August 17, 2008

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Some of India’s best-known writers have come together in a unique anthology — Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India — of writing which tells the human stories behind HIV/Aids in the country. From BBC:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)

Salman Rushdie with one of his subjects (Photo: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)

They include Booker Prize-winners Sir Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai; Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy; and internationally-acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple. Other contributors include novelist Amit Chaudhuri, leading Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, historian-writer Mukul Kesavan and popular novelist Shobhaa De.

[...] Sir Salman, for example, spends a day with eunuchs in the western city of Mumbai (Bombay) to write up a piece called The Half-Woman God.

“India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s. Yet… the third gender of India still need our understanding, and our help,” he says.

Kiran Desai travelled to the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh to meet its sex workers. The state has one of the highest rates of infection in India.

“What I had seen, really seen, were lives lived with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled,” Desai writes.

“The emotions of love and friendship, you’d assume would be missing or rotten, in these communities – existing even more so for their being sought amidst illegality, fragmentation and betrayal.

HIV/AIDS and the ethics of responsibility in India

An extract from Amartya Sen’s foreword to “Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” From The Telegraph:

The ethics of responsibility has been a big subject in analysing the social aspects of AIDS. The point has been made, with considerable influence, that since HIV infection is primarily contracted through voluntary acts, such as unsafe sex, it is the individual rather than the society that should take responsibility for avoiding the disease and accepting the consequences of irresponsible actions. This way of seeing the social ethics of AIDS would have vast implications for what an afflicted person can or cannot expect the state to do for the ill…..

The idea that somehow the afflicted person bears the responsibility for his or her own unfortunate condition, since the infection could have been avoided through changing personal behaviour, is indeed quite prevalent – not just in advanced countries like the United States of America, but also in India. There is certainly an element of narrow plausibility in this general outlook. Many of the actions that may lead to the infection are certainly within the person’s own control, and the role of personal responsibility is indeed an important connection to bear in mind in planning strategies for prevention, through greater availability and use of information and more social education and advocacy. And yet to see this as an ‘open and shut’ case of just personal responsibility also misses the nine-tenth of the iceberg that lies below the water, hidden from view.

Sisters and goddesses

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on June 28, 2008

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Legend has it that it was the apostle, Thomas, the doubting one, who brought Christianity to Southern India – and now, aside from the odd jealous spat, the Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati are worshipped with equal fervour. William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

On the edge of the jungle lay a small wooden temple. It was late evening, and the sun had already disappeared behind the palms. The light was fading fast, and the hundreds of small clay lamps lined up on the wooden slats of the temple all seemed to be burning brighter and brighter, minute by minute.

The oiled torsos of the temple Brahmins were gleaming, too. They had nearly finished the evening ceremony – surrounding the idol of the goddess Bhagavati with burning splints as they rang bells, chanted and blew on conch shells. The ritual prepared the goddess for sleep.

Only when it was over, and the doors of the inner shrine were sealed for the night, were they able to tell me about the goddess they served. Bhagavati is the pre-eminent goddess in Kerala, the most powerful and beloved. In some incarnations, it was true, she could be ferocious: a figure of terror, a stalker of cremation grounds who slaughtered demons without hesitation or compassion.

India: The place of sex

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on June 11, 2008

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William Dalrymple in The New York Review of Books:

You can still get a flavor of the intoxicatingly rich and sophisticated classical India that supplied these luxuries at the once-great port of Mamallapuram on the Coromandal coast. Here massive relief sculptures faced onto the port where, according to a seventh-century poet, “ships rode at anchor, bent to the point of breaking, laden as they were with wealth, with big-trunked elephants, and with mountains of gems of nine varieties.” The reliefs cover one side of a hill: at the right are two huge elephants, trunks swinging; nearby, warrior heroes and meditating sages stand below flights of gods and goddesses, godlings, nymphs, and tree spirits. There is a breezy lightness of touch at work: a flute is playing, there is dancing, and the heavenly apsara fertility spirits and goddesses are whispering fondly to their consorts.

The man who commissioned the sculptures was King Mahendra, a ruler of the Pallava dynasty who reigned from 590 to 630 AD. (The dynasty itself held power between the sixth and the eighth centuries.) Taking the titles Vicitracitta (The Curious Minded) and Mattavilasa (Drunk with Pleasure), Mahendra was an eclectic poet and playwright and an innovative aesthete and sensualist. He wrote two lost treatises on South Indian painting and music, and several plays-one of which, a cynical and sophisticated satirical farce called The Drunken Courtesan, tells the story of an alcoholic worshiper of Shiva and his courtesan-lover who get into an argument with a tipsy Buddhist monk over a drinking bowl left lying in front of a bar. The farce is still regularly performed in the south today.

In the name of the father

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on May 29, 2008

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In Tehelka, William Dalrymple writes that Fatima Bhutto’s journey to unmask her father Murtaza Bhutto’s killers has her standing between PM-in-waiting Asif Ali Zardari and his ‘clean’ record

AS THE CONVOY neared home, the street lights were abruptly turned off. The police snipers were ready in position; some had climbed up the trees lining the avenue to get clear shots. Their guns were loaded, the roadblocks had been erected, the surrounding lanes sealed off. The guards outside the different embassies nearby had been told to retreat within their compounds in expectation of trouble. By nine o’clock, all 80 police were in position, commanded by four senior officers. There was complete silence, but for the occasional buzz of static on the police radios.

It was September 20, 1996, and Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s younger brother, was returning late from campaigning in a distant part of Karachi. He had come home to Pakistan the previous year after a long period in exile to challenge his more famous sister for a role in the leadership of the family party, the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP. Benazir was then the prime minister, and Murtaza’s decision to take her on had put him into direct conflict not only with his sister, but also with her ambitious and powerful husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

The irreverent hero Islam forgot

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on March 17, 2008

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Magic and adventure made the Hamzanama the most popular oral epic of the Islamic world. In Tehelka, William Dalrymple tracks its mad energy in its first-ever English compilation:

IN JUNE 2002, as Pentagon strategists were making their plans for the invasion of Iraq, a short distance away down Washington’s National Mall, the Freer- Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian were showing one of the most interesting exhibitions of Islamic art seen in the US for years. Ironically, the show was made up of illustrations of a story largely set in the very Iraqi cities which were shortly to find themselves as targets for the Pentagon’s munitions.

The Sackler show was unusual in that it displayed just one single painted manuscript – the Hamzanama: a spectacular, illustrated book commissioned by the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605). For art historians, the show was fascinating for it brought together the long-dispersed pages of what was the most ambitious single artistic commission ever undertaken by the atelier of an Islamic court: no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations were produced.

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Also, check out Jai Arjun Singh’s literary blog on the Amir Hamza epic

I don’t think much of phrases like “important/essential book” or “one of the year’s most significant publishing events” (pompous, best reserved for jacket descriptions written by the marketing divisions of publishing houses), but more than once I’ve been tempted to use them for The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s outstanding 950-page rendition of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza). As the first complete English translation of a medieval classic that has been in danger of neglect, this is a landmark work in its very conception – invaluable to students of Islamic heritage and Arabic literature – but the excellence of its execution makes it a fantasy-adventure that can be relished by readers from all backgrounds.

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Writes of passage

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on January 31, 2008

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Namita Bhandare in the Hindustan Times questions the wisdom of film star Aamir Khan’s presence as a delegate at the Jaipur Literature Festival

I yield to nobody in my regard for Aamir Khan as a fundamentally decent human being. I doff my (metaphorical) hat at his courage to follow his politics and I applaud from my heart at Taare Zameen Par (TZP) as a sensitive, socially-relevant film that every parent, teacher and thinking adult should watch.

Yet, even I have to question the wisdom of Khan’s opting to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival recently, not as a participant — because surely it was his right to attend an event that has free entry for all — but as a delegate.

Now Khan may be a fine actor and a sensitive director, but he’s no writer; not at least to the best of anyone’s knowledge although he does post occasionally on his blog. His conversation with Tehelka’s Shoma Chaudhury had little to do with books (though someone from the audience did ask what he had read in recent times) and more to do with films, particularly TZP. Quite clearly, even Shoma, a lit fest veteran, was aware of the awkwardness, beginning her conversation by wondering aloud what Aamir was doing at a festival that celebrates literature.

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Romancing with literature and culture

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on January 24, 2008

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A grande dame and a man who can never grow old. Indrajit Hazra on day one of the Jaipur Lit Fest in the Hindustan Times.

WHERE HAVE all the civilised gone? Nayantara Sahgal, resplendent at 80, received a standing ovation at the packed Diggi Palace hotel after she delivered the keynote address at the start of the third Jaipur Literature Festival.

Titled ‘Climate Change’, the author’s speech was (thankfully) not about greenhouse emissions, but about the current climate of change across the world in which cultural diversity is increasingly coming under threat either from religious quarters or from those hardselling globalisation. But it was her lament of people not listening and coming to terms with the ‘other voice’ today that left the Jaipur audience speechless.

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Vidal drops out of Jaipur Lit Fest. Political nieces, Fatima Bhutto and Nayantara Sahgal will attend

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on January 23, 2008

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An update on the Jaipur Lit Fest by Namita Bhandare

One day before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicks off at Diggi Palace, comes a press release that America’s most eminent man of letters, Gore Vidal will not be attending after all.

Vidal was slated for top billing and was scheduled for two interactions: one with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt on Saturday where he along with author and festival organiser William Dalrymple was to have spoken on The World Post 9/11. Vidal was also scheduled to have interacted with journalist Shoma Choudhury on Sunday on Life and Letters.

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