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Dec 16

A Portrait of the Writer as a Daughter: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me | Megha Manjari Mohanty

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Mohanty, Megha Manjari. “A Portrait of the Writer as a Daughter: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me.” Indian Writing In English Online, 16 December 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/a-portrait-of-the-writer-as-a-daughter-arundhati-roys-mother-mary-comes-to-me-megha-manjari-mohanty/ .

Chicago:
Mohanty, Megha Manjari. “A Portrait of the Writer as a Daughter: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me.” Indian Writing In English Online. December 16, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/a-portrait-of-the-writer-as-a-daughter-arundhati-roys-mother-mary-comes-to-me-megha-manjari-mohanty/ .

Review: Arundhati Roy. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Penguin, 2025

In 2011, G. Thomas Couser, looking at the widespread popularity and consequent rise in sales of memoirs, declared that we are living in “an age– if not the age– of memoir” (3). Over the past decade or so, the commercial and critical success of several memoirs, such as The Test of My Life (2013) by Yuvraj Singh, Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants (2017) or Salman Rushdie’s Knife (2024), attest to the memoir’s rise to cultural prominence. Of the large number of memoirs that flood the market every year, a substantial share is made up by memoirs written by celebrities, or as Lorraine Adams (2001) famously terms it, the “somebody” memoir. The logic behind this is fairly simple– the more famous, or better yet, controversial, a person is in the public eye, the better the sales and easier the marketing will be.

Pramod Nayar (2017) notes that Arundhati Roy, in cutting across genre and domain, “has demonstrated a kind of celebrity that is rare in India” (2). This makes Roy an ideal candidate to author a memoir; her reputation as Booker-Prize winning writer as well as her activism and contentious polemic guarantees a ready readership. So when she did write a memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), Penguin did not miss a beat in launching one of the largest marketing campaigns the publishing industry has seen in recent times. Beyond the usual autographed pre-ordered copies and merchandise and Roy’s appearance on The New York Times “The Interview” podcast, the book has an Instagram profile of its own, offering exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and is even available on quick commerce platforms like Blinkit. The memoir’s launch was no less than a cultural event that signaled the evolving future of the genre’s publicity in the “algorithmic new age”. Barely over a month into publication, Roy’s memoir has already stirred up controversy over the cover page featuring a picture of the author smoking, without any statutory warning. On the other end of the spectrum, however, it has met with glowing reviews by The Guardian and The New York Times, and the wave of personal reflections it has triggered, by daughters about their own relationships with their mothers, is a testament to the memoir’s reach and resonance.

Arundhati Roy began writing Mother Mary Comes to Me after the death of her mother, Mary Roy; a loss that left her “heart-smashed” (2). By way of an apologia or justification of her writing the memoir, she explains that she writes “to bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched, and the thorns she set down for me” (7). Mary Roy, on one hand, was a formidable woman who established the Pallikoodam school in Kottayam, Kerala and challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act in the Supreme Court to secure equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. On the other, she was an unapologetically exacting and volatile mother who inspired in her daughter a mix of admiration and resentment. Roy recalls episodes of humiliation and rage prompted by her mother’s relentless pursuit of perfection that often left both of her children feeling diminished, unloved and at times, physically and emotionally wounded. In a telling incident from her childhood, she recounts her mother punishing her brother almost malevolently in the middle of the night, beating him with a wooden ruler until it broke, for his poor grades at school while Roy secretly watched through the keyhole, filled with terror. The very next morning, when Mrs. Roy praised her for scoring exceptional grades, a young Arundhati was consumed by a sense of shame that she claims has shadowed her ever since. Roy writes, “Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding. On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is” (43).

Yet, Mary Roy is not a villain. Rather, Arundhati Roy shows her to be a woman shaped by her own history of the oppression and isolation that she faced at the hands of her violent Imperial Entomologist father, a husband who turned out to be a drunk, and the society at large, which chastised her for marrying outside the community, labelling her children “Address illathupillaru” or “the children without an address” to indicate that their parentage was dubious, making them socially illegitimate (317). Her harshness, Roy suggests, is an armour that she wore to survive a patriarchal society that punished independent thinking in women. The narration oscillates between pain, understanding and forgiveness showing how, ironically, love and violence coexist within the same intimate, originary relationship. Mary Roy’s rage becomes, in Roy’s narration, both the fire that inflicts her deepest wounds as well as the crucible that forged her fierce autonomy and shaped her into the writer that she is today. After all, Roy claims, “She was my shelter and my storm” (8).

What makes Roy’s memoir so compelling is her characteristic humour–witty and piercing, yet always self-aware and humane. She uses irony, witty observations and sardonic asides to cope with grief and also as a form of defiance to reclaim power over painful memories and expose the absurdity embedded in both domestic and social life because as Umberto Eco (1984) reminds us, “we can pass over in laughter the difficulty of living” (2). Her descriptions of her mother’s ferocity, the eccentricities of her friends and foes, hypocrisies of the media and the nation-state are laced with sharp yet mischievous humour that refuses victimhood. In one instance, she insists on putting down her mother’s name instead of her father’s on a government form, only to have it rejected by the person at the counter, who remarks “This is India, my dear” (159). She turns this statement on its head and uses it as a kind of refrain throughout the memoir, to comment on the normalized injustices and banal patriarchy of Indian society, most memorably when she talks about the church refusing her mother a burial in its cemetery for marrying an “outsider” and yet having no problems in allowing her uncle to rest there, despite him having married twice, the first time to a Swedish woman he had met at Oxford.

The memoir also serves as Roy’s creative self-portrait, tracing the origins of her novels and the evolution of her literary style and voice. It brings to life the real-world figures who inspired the characters in The God of Small Things (1997)— a handsome young man who befriended a six-year-old Roy and taught her to fish became the inspiration behind Velutha; Mary Roy’s brother, the Rhodes scholar, G. Isaac, inspired Chacko; her absent father Mickey Roy became Baba; while the Imperial Entomologist grandfather became Pappachi and the almost-concert-violinist grandmother became Mammachi. We also meet the Meenachil River, which became Roy’s muse and confidante, as she conceptualized the emotional landscape of the novel. Particularly poignant is her account of the real-life inspiration behind Pappachi’s moth– a cold, fluttering presence Roy imagined visiting her each time her mother made her feel inadequate, which went on to become the novel’s symbol of shame and sorrow. The memoir also traces how Roy developed her characteristic visual style of writing. She explains “I knew that if I could describe my river, if I could describe the rain, if I could describe feeling in a way that you could see it, smell it, touch it, then I would consider myself a writer.” (215). Roy talks too about how her early screenwriting experience shaped her desire to create what she calls a “stubbornly visual but unfilmable book” (215), adding a nuanced rationale to her oft-repeated refusal to allow The God of Small Things to be adapted for the screen, something she once described as her resisting the “novel to be colonized by one imagination”.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is, at once, an act of mourning and an act of making. What begins as an elegy for her mother soon expands into a journey where we see how Roy’s stories are born from pain, resistance and resilience. The memoir reminds us that her literary imagination and political voice spring from the same source– her ability to see beauty and absurdity, tenderness and cruelty as two sides of the same coin, coexisting in the same moment. As she oscillates between the two, she redefines what it means to write about care, loss and survival. In doing so, the memoir becomes not just a daughter’s reckoning, but a writer’s declaration of how language can hold both love and defiance.

Works Cited:

Adams, Lorraine. ‘Almost Famous’. Washington Monthly, 1 Apr. 2001, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2001/04/01/almost-famous/.

Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011.

Eco, Umberto. ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’. Carnival!, eds. Umberto Eco, V.V. Ivanov, Monica Rector. Mouton, 2011, pp. 1–9.

Gidla, Sujatha. Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. Macmillan, 2017.

Nayar, Pramod K. ‘Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy’. Open Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan 2017, pp. 46–54.

Roy, Arundhati. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Penguin Random House India, 2025.

———. The God of Small Things. Indiaink ,1997.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder. Random House, 2024.

Singh, Yuvraj. The Test of My Life: From Cricket to Cancer and Back. Penguin Random House India, 2013.

Megha Manjari Mohanty is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. She also teaches English at Aska Science College, Odisha.

Header Image: Penguin Random House India

Nov 07

Love0

Sarojini Naidu and Indian Womanhood | Usha Mudiganti

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Mudiganti, Usha. “Sarojini Naidu and Indian Womanhood.” Indian Writing In English Online, 7 November 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/sarojini-naidu-and-indian-womanhood-usha-mudiganti/ .

Chicago:
Mudiganti, Usha. “Sarojini Naidu and Indian Womanhood.” Indian Writing In English Online. November 7, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/sarojini-naidu-and-indian-womanhood-usha-mudiganti/ .

Sarojini Naidu celebrated India through her words. She started writing poems about Indian life and culture at the age of thirteen and continued to write poetry during her years of deep involvement in public work as a leader of India’s struggle for freedom. Her engagement with Indian culture is evident in her poetry and in her speeches as a social worker, freedom fighter and administrator. Through her speeches Naidu advocated for modern reforms to reach the common people of India, while her poems celebrated many of its ancient traditions. The seemingly contradictory ideological locations that she placed herself in with her life as an activist and as a poet do not seem to have affected Naidu’s commitment to either of the causes. She romanticised traditional culture through the image of the Indian woman in many of her poems while persistently demanding in her public speeches and political writing that the benefits of modernity reach her. By making Indian women and women’s cultures the focus of her creative and social work, Naidu was presenting Indian femininity as a significant culturally accepted ideal that could contribute to social progress in the colonised nation.

Born in 1879 in the Nizam ruled province of Hyderabad, Sarojini was the first of eight children of Dr Aghorenath Chattopadhyay and Baradasundari Debi. Being progressive in thoughts and practices, her parents worked towards encouraging formal education for Indian girls and frowned upon child-marriage, polygamy and sati. They encouraged her to appear for the matriculation examination at the age of twelve, which she cleared with distinction. They also supported her creative leanings by privately publishing her juvenilia in 1896 as “Poems by Miss S. Chattopadhyay” (Ash 147). Earlier, as a thirteen-year-old Sarojini had written a poem based on a Persian romance titled “Mehir Muneer” (Paranjape x). She was sent at the age of fifteen to London and to Girton College, Cambridge, on a scholarship from the Nizam of Hyderabad (Alexander WS68). Her parents had hoped that she would progress towards working in the developing areas of physical and natural sciences. Sarojini, however, stuck to her interest in literature. She had attended some literary soirees held by Edmund Gosse and had shown her early verse to him during her three-year stay in England. Her work had been noticed and encouraged by Arthur Symons too. In Sarojini’s unpublished autobiographical work titled “Sunalini: A Passage from Her Life”, written in Switzerland during her journey back to India, the young woman recorded “her sudden realisation that she was a poet with ‘new irresistible, unutterable longings and sensations’” (Ash 147).

As a teenager, Sarojini had fallen in love with Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu, ten years her senior in age and a widower from a different caste and linguistic community. The young couple persevered in the face of parental resistance and eventually convinced her parents to agree to their union. In one of the early inter-caste marriages in India that was solemnised through the Special Marriages Act (Paranjape x), Sarojini got married at the age of eighteen. The young Naidu couple had four children in quick succession and Sarojini devoted herself to a domestic life (Ash 147). Although her choice of domestic bliss over her parents’ career goals for her seems counter-productive, Sarojini’s desire for love, marriage and the life of a householder was in sync with the lives of the majority of women her age at that time. Considering the fact that the Age of Consent Act in colonial India raised the age of consummation of marriage for girls from 10 to 12 years in 1891, marriage and conversations about it would have frequently figured in women’s lives in that period. Her contemporaries in families that had access to colonial modernity were divided between allegiance to traditions and adapting to the modern ways introduced by anglicised men. Women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Kashibai Kanitkar, Tarabai Shinde, Rokeya Hosain Sakhawat, and Lakshmibai Tilak record the struggles of women who navigated the radical split between the worlds of women, including child-brides, within traditional households and the expectations their modernised husbands or fathers had of them. (Kosambi ix, 1-57; Tharu and Lalita 221-234, 275-280, 309-319, 330-340, 340-315). While these predecessors and contemporaries of Sarojini Naidu poignantly recorded their pyrrhic arrival into a twentieth century Indian modernity for women, Naidu’s body of work can be read as an attempt at closing the gap between the home and the world. Her poems recorded the quotidian joys of Indian women, and her speeches earnestly called for social reforms to reach the world of women in Indian homes.

Naidu’s awareness of herself, as an individual with the freedom to make choices, is evident from her early diversion from the path her parents had chalked out for her. Further, she made time for creative writing and for public service while bringing up four children. From her location in the domestic sphere as a wife and mother, she observed the life of the common people around her in the bustling metropolis of Hyderabad. She recorded it in her poems as an insider, in colonial India. Her exposure to England and the colonial education system informed the form of her poetry (Chaudhuri, 2016, 69) but the content was mostly a celebration of Indian culture. She compiled her first collection of poems and gave it the title The Golden Threshold. She then sent it to England, to William Heinemann, who published it in 1905. Naidu also got Arthur Symons to introduce her poetry and dedicated it to her mentor, Edmund Gosse. Symons declared that the poems had “an individual beauty of their own (n p, 1905)”. Within a decade of her first book of poems, she had published two more collections of poems: The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). Many years later, her eldest daughter, Padmaja Naidu, compiled a posthumous collection of her mother’s poems, titled The Feather of the Dawn (1961)—these were poems that Naidu had probably written in her spare time after she had donned the mantle of an activist.

Naidu’s first collection of poems carried a sketch of the young poet made by J B Yeats, the father of the poet W B Yeats (Reddy 571). Sheshalata Reddy remarks that the drawing presented her as “precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting” (571). Further, she comments that the “blurred sketch echoes Naidu’s own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian not wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess” (571). While the visual representation of the author and Symons’s introduction presented Naidu as a talented but exotic young woman of the East writing in English could complicate the perception of Naidu’s position as a poet, Chandani Lokuge argues that Naidu was “an astute dialogist who strategically and expediently manipulated her way through the colonizer’s myopic ways of seeing” (115). Lokuge posits that “Naidu’s poetical and political careers would be steered by three major ideals: Romanticism, internationalism and overriding both, the deepest patriotism” (117).

K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar lists Naidu among the writers who wrote in English “but only as Indians” (20) would do. He elaborates that the Indian poet of the time drew “inspiration from the opulence of national or regional myths or the reserves of his [sic] spiritual heritage” (21). Further, Iyengar describes the lyric form, which Naidu often uses in her oeuvre as “a sudden surge of consciousness that apprehended ‘the pure thrust of life in its ideality’” (188). Naidu’s depiction of the ideals of traditional Indian culture might seem like a glossing over of the hardships of life while focusing on a celebration of India’s traditions and culture. However, her poetry also served the purpose of representing the joys of Indian life during the colonial period when most sympathetic representations of India focused on the despair of the people. Rosinka Chaudhuri argues that women poets in colonial India, writing in English, engaged with “multiple literacies and complex cultural exchanges as they negotiated distance and belatedness with respect to the metropole” (78). She goes on to point out that these women worked against the odds to make “poems that attest to cosmopolitan sensibilities forged within or against the constraints of religious dogma, British paternalism, and domestic labor” (78). Although Naidu was among the miniscule educated, upper-class, upper-caste women in India of the time, who could outsource much of the domestic work of household management and child care, she was a wife and mother in early twentieth century India. She would have greater familiarity with the lives of women within the domestic sphere than with the engagements of men in the public sphere.

Ranjana Sidhanta Ash describes Naidu’s poetry as “celebrations of women and womanhood” and elaborates that her poems “revel in metrical variations and in highly embellished images and lilting cadences akin to song, all of which are used to put on show a romantic India of myth and legend. There are also fanciful recreations of rural and city life and poems of patriotism” (147). Ash quotes Arthur Symons’s opinion that in Naidu’s verse there is “‘the temperament of a women [sic] of the East finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences’” (148). She records Symons’s advice to Naidu to show through her poetry “‘some revelation of the heart of India’” (148). She then declares that “Naidu heeded his advice and ‘Indianised’ her verse with delight” (148). Ash also mentions that Naidu “described some of her poems as ‘folk-songs’ and it is easy to see why” (148), especially in her reading of “The Palanquin-Bearers” because the anapestic metre of the poem is likely to “conjure up the rhythmic movement of the men carrying palanquins” (148). The poem’s form conjures the image of common folk singing while working but its content is a romanticised image of Indian womanhood. The description of the woman in the palanquin swaying as a flower while being carried in comfort presents the Indian woman as a delicate person who is carefully borne by strong men. While the sentiment of care the men exude for their fragile charge is reiterated through the repetition of the words ‘lightly’ and ‘softly’ and with the onametapoeic exclamation “O” punctuating the phrases, Naidu carefully shifts the perspective to the perceived emotions of the woman in the palanquin – a bride. Although the woman’s voice is not presented in the poem, the men’s song includes a sensitive recognition that a woman experiencing a life-altering moment will feel the turbulence of the change. The palanquin bearers are aware that their contribution to her journey should be done with care and sensitivity. The cultural significance of this journey is recognised in songs of bidai1 that are sung during weddings in many regions of India.

Naidu’s celebration of the Indian bride must have sounded a discordant note for readers of English when the British were publicising the subservient status of Indian women through articles like “The Hindu Woman” in the very first volume of Girls Own Paper (1880) and the American press was advertising Pandita Ramabai’s fearless representation of the plight of her contemporaries in The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887). However, Naidu was presenting the tradition of caring for the bride, which is a practice that transcends demographic divisions of class, caste and religion among most families in India. Naidu records the loving care with which girls are prepared to enter the state of matrimony in her poem “In Praise of Henna”. The poem describes a traditional springtime activity among women in rural India— the gathering of henna leaves and grinding them to a paste to draw designs on palms and to dye hair. She brings in the aesthetic as well as the purported medicinal value of henna “for lily-like fingers and feet” (16). By noting that the “tilak’s red” is for the bride’s brow and the “betel-nut’s red for lips that are sweet” Naidu not only describes the traditional shringar for the bride but also indicates that betel leaves and nuts were essential symbols of eros in the shringar rasa of Indian aesthetics.

Many women-centric and bridal rituals within the Indian wedding ceremony showcase the simple pleasures of Indian women and give voice to women’s concern for each other. Songs of older women often include a careful gaze at a growing daughter who will soon be sent away to make a home among strangers and advice to the young woman on adapting to married life. Naidu’s “Village Song” presents the complexity of the mother’s anxiety-laden recognition of the daughter’s blooming sexuality. The mother’s loving entreaty to her “Honey-child” (14) to stay within socially sanctioned processes of preparing for matrimony is disrupted by the girl’s perception of the sensuality of springtime. Naidu evocatively depicts the daughter’s pull towards the haunting calls of the koel, the strong smell of the champa and the tropical breeze of the “koel-haunted river-isles where lotus lilies glisten” (14). The daughter declares, “The voices of the fairy folk are calling me: O listen!” (15) In her rejection of her mother’s gentle training towards marital sexuality for the exuberant sensuousness of the natural, the daughter establishes her awareness that “[T]he bridal-songs and cradle-songs have cadences of sorrow/ The laughter of the sun to-day, the wind of death tomorrow” (14-15). The knowledge of the gritty realities of the lives of married women by an unwed woman reveals that Naidu did not perceive young Indian girls to be docile and innocent people who would uncritically accept the attempts of older women to mould them into containing their sensuousness. The village girl does not expect to be gently borne by palanquin bearers to her marital home. She rejects the contained sexuality of marital bliss with the declaration: “Far sweeter sound the forest-notes where forest-streams are falling;/ O mother mine, I cannot stay, the fairy-folk are calling” (14-15).

In Naidu’s poetry, it is not just the village girls who are aware of the sensuality of growing into womanhood. Girls and women in urban areas too are drawn by the call of the “Bangle – Sellers” who are hawking “delicate, bright/ Rainbow-tinted circles of light” that the sellers describe as “Lustrous tokens of radiant lives/ For happy daughters and happy wives” (63). This romantic depiction of Indian womanhood is based on the symbolism of glass bangles that are markers of marriage and fertility. They are an integral part of shringar for Indian women. However, as Ash points out: “[F]or all her Romanticism, [Naidu] was aware of the oppression a Hindu woman lived under – the symbols of woman’s married life, the bangles of Naidu’s poems, were broken almost at the very instant of her husband’s death” (149). Naidu’s poems such as “Suttee” and “The Old Woman” depict the loss of a woman’s status in Indian society when she loses her husband. Naidu was keenly aware of the precarious position of Indian women whose safety and status were largely based on marriage and motherhood. She also romanticises the Indian mother in “Cradle Song” (1905) in which the mother tells the baby “For you I stole/ A little lovely dream” (20) and places much faith on the shoulders of brave and strong men to ungrudgingly carry Indian girls into womanhood with the care with which the palanquin bearers say that they do: “Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing/ We bear her along like a pearl on a string” (11). However, in poems like “Village Song” and “Slumber Song for Sunalini”, Naidu presents a world of women where they bond with each other due to gendered experiences. In The Broken Wing (1917), the last collection of poems that she compiled herself, Naidu invites her young daughters to cherish the sensuousness of nature by dedicating “The Call of Spring” to them. Through her depiction of folk traditions and use of lyrical forms such as the lullaby, Naidu presents the world of Indian women. In her 1905 poem “Wandering Singers,” she shows that women’s awareness of folk and oral narratives helps them access the “laughter and beauty of women long dead” (12). Although Ash opines that the “claims of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity are not contesting ones in her poetry” (148), many of Naidu’s poems and speeches present the heterogeneity of Indian womanhood and she clearly establishes that women’s lives were significantly different from the perceptions of Indian womanhood in Britain and the United States of America.

While presenting women who were celebrating cultural roles in her poetry, Naidu frequently spoke for ensuring honour and dignity for Indian women within domestic spaces. At her first meeting of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in December 1904 Naidu advocated education and careers for Indian women. She also spoke for focused work towards improving the social status of women; discouraging the practice of polygamy; stopping the then widespread tradition of child marriage; and encouraging remarriage of widows. In consonance with the work she was doing in India, Naidu apprised herself of the struggles of the suffragettes in the UK and USA. Speaking at the Lyceum Club in London on 5^th March 1914 she declared: “‘Women’s movement is one the world over. Women in this country are asking for the vote yet the fundamental principle underlying every stage of the movement is that women are demanding their right.’” (Banerjee 24). She was also among the earliest proponents of suffrage rights for Indian women. During the discussions on electoral reforms in British India, Naidu had led a deputation of fourteen women to meet the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Samuel Montagu in December 1917 to propose that franchise should be extended to include Indian women too. The memorandum stated that “members of the Council should be elected by the people and the franchise should be extended to the people. Women should be recognised as ‘people’ and there should be no sex disqualification. Local self-government should be granted and women should be represented” (Banerjee 62). Within a few years, though, she started drawing a clear distinction between the identity struggles of women in the West and the aspirations of Indian women for better lives.

Having met Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1906 and 1914 respectively, Naidu started regarding the former of the two leaders as her mentor and the latter as an extraordinary human. Meena Alexander states that Naidu’s “first meeting with Gandhi helped set the tone of her political life” (WS68). She channelised her incredible oratory skills to convince many people to pledge themselves to Gandhi’s three-pronged strategy of Swadeshi, Satyagraha and Ahimsa to gain freedom from British suzerainty (Banerjee 1998 and Paranjape 2022). As a committed practitioner of non-violence, Naidu told the West Minister Gazette that she “disliked militancy though sympathising with the militant women in England” (Banerjee 60). She then went on to proclaim: “the vote means nothing (to Indian women). Here no doubt it is a symbol of standing for the ideal of equality. There it is an empty word suggesting a foreign ideal” (Banerjee 60). She explained the difference between the two cultures to the British press as: “ours is an absolute unbroken tradition, overlaid and obscured but still so real that it has prevented the raising of anything like the sex barrier I find in this country” (Banerjee 60). Naidu was convinced that India’s ancient tradition held within its voluminous folds some remnants of a golden age of Indian womanhood, in which women were not subordinates to the men in their lives but shared equal but distinctly different rights and responsibilities. This belief in the significant role of Indian women in upholding Indian traditions and culture is evident in Naidu’s poetry too. In her poems that depict rituals of an agrarian community, for instance, “Harvest Hymn” in The Golden Threshold and “Hymn to Indra, Lord of Rain” in The Bird of Time, Naidu presents disparate voices of men and women joined in prayer to the gods for blessings.

In many of her public lectures, Naidu invokes the archetype of womanhood in Indian culture by recalling the women from the Upanishads, the Puranas and the epics of the land with Sita and Savitri as her ideals, and Gargi, Maitreyi and Damayanti as exemplars of erudition and wisdom (Tharu and Lalitha 1991). With much faith in an image of the Indian woman as a wise, competent and compassionate person who was traditionally accorded a significant role in the family, Naidu drew a clear distinction between Indian women and her contemporaries in Britain and America. Therefore, Naidu believed that the Woman Question in India was very different from that in the Anglo-American nations. Her ideal for Indian women was education, care and the dignity of an equal partnership with their husbands within the home. She thus combined a nativist form of nationalism and a certain proto-feminism when speaking of Indian women.

Among the demands made in the memorandum to Mr Montagu by the delegation that Naidu led were the following attempts to ensure that the gap between the genders would be bridged through electoral reforms:

Compulsory free primary education was demanded for boys and girls, and secondary education to be extended. The number of training colleges for women had also to be multiplied, scholarships were to be provided and widows’ homes constructed. A strong memorandum was tendered for more medical colleges for women and short maternity courses and other medical facilities. (62)

To the incredulous query by Mr Montagu: “do you think that men of India will allow for such a thing”, Naidu responded with her firm belief that “far from objecting to the right being granted to women, they would support it” (63). The following year, at the eighth session of the Bombay Provincial Conference in Bijapur, during the passing of the resolution on women’s franchise, Naidu rose to add that, “the word ‘man’ should include politically ‘Woman’ in all discussions of rights of the citizen, and women should form a part, of the set-up of all talks when the Congress-League scheme would come into existence” (63-64). Although she espoused complete faith in Indian men’s perceived intention to treat Indian women as their social and political equals, Naidu ensured that all resolutions recorded women’s participation in public life in the nation’s struggle for freedom.

With her frequently mentioned faith in Indian coupledom as a lifelong journey towards a common goal, Naidu brought her poetic sensibilities into her public orations on social reform in India. She was chosen as a spokesperson for an ancient civilisation and sent on her first trip to the USA in 1928 by the leaders of the Indian independence movement. Dressed in a silk sari accessorised with gold jewellery, Naidu began her introductory address on that trip with the traditional Indian gesture of namaskar and spoke in English to address a purported incredulity at meeting an educated and articulate Indian woman. Although she presented herself as a representative of Indian womanhood, Naidu’s life and work are testimony to her being unique among her contemporaries. However, she had been sent there to counter the idea of Indian womanhood that was circulating in the West on account of the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Mayo had presented a bleak picture of womanhood in the land whose political leaders were glorifying the image of mother as a symbol of divinity while many women could not access the gains ushered by new technology. Through the trip, Naidu faithfully stuck to her long-cherished image of the ideal Indian woman as a strong and knowledgeable person who confidently articulated her cultural moorings. During a farewell address in India, on 18 August 1928, Naidu described that the objective for her trip was to be a cultural ambassador who was “on a mission to interpret the doctrine of Shakti through an Indian woman to a foreign young country” (Banerjee 54). She hoped that she would be able to suggest to the American people: “To the ancient radiance of the womanhood of yesterday, you should not add darkness. You should understand [the] truth of love and sacrifices” (Banerjee 54).

While interacting with the American press at her various halts through the length and breadth of the USA, Naidu firmly discouraged second-hand perceptions of the deprivations faced by Indian women that were described in Mayo’s book. She “questioned the right of other nations to interfere with her country’s desire to follow its own tradition and condemned their propaganda of strife, sectionalism and inferior status of women the existence of which she denied. Among other points, she stressed the most important was woman’s equality with man and establishment of equal rights for all classes” (Banerjee 49). She spoke to the Americans on an equal footing and pointed out the differences between the two cultures and hoped that they would not continue with their fault-finding mission. She also requested for “international decency” (Banerjee 50). In December 1928, The Post commented that “the Hindu Poetess interpreted the immemorial East for the young West” (Banerjee 51) thereby declaring Naidu’s mission a success.

Naidu too thought that she was successful in her task of presenting a powerful image of Indian womanhood. She had honestly conveyed to the world the ideal of Indian womanhood projected by Indian leaders of those times. To this end, Naidu invoked some archetypal feminine figures from Indian literature and located herself among the women of India who see their role in their families and communities as complementary. She had often stated that she was ‘not a feminist’ (Allender 235) and explained that “the phrase ‘feminist’ did not characterise the social context of Indian women, who she considered were psychologically and spiritually different from men” (235). In her speeches and poems, Naidu presented pithy descriptions of some of the available archetypes, such as Shakti and Durga, for Indian women to emulate in their journeys through their homes and the world. With bold declarations in the course of her work as a woman leader, poet and ambassador of Indian womanhood, Naidu not only spoke for an essential plurality in the perception and representation of Indian femininity but also portrayed dignified images of Indian womanhood.

In a tribute to Sarojini Naidu, Mathangi Subramaniam begins her 2015 novel for children, Dear Mrs. Naidu, with a short and powerful epigraph, quoting a 1930 speech of Naidu’s where she tells young girls to “not think of yourselves as small girls” and goes on to remind them that they “are the powerful Durgas in disguise” and proclaims: “Forget about the earth. You shall move the skies” (n p, Subramaniam 2017). Through her public speeches, she regularly reminded Indian young women that there were powerful ideals within Indian literary and cultural texts for them to emulate.

While Naidu invoked feminine archetypes as ideals and exemplars, she was not oblivious to the realities of the women around her. In reminding young girls that each one of them was Durga and advising young women in schools and colleges to harness the Shakti within to progress in their lives, Naidu was presenting the immense possibilities for Indian women to reach their potential without losing their cultural linkages. For Naidu the women who delight in traditionally feminine articles of women’s shringar are also capable of channelling themselves to serve Indian society. Through various depictions of womanhood in her poems and speeches, Sarojini Naidu presents Indian culture as one that recognises the dignity of femininity and cherishes the feminine, but also seeks autonomy and agency.

Works Cited

Alexander, Meena. “Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol.20, no.43. 1985. pp. WS 68–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4374972 .

Allender, Tim. Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820 – 1932. Manchester UP, 2016.

Ash, Ranjana Sidhanta. “Two Early-Twentieth Century Women Writers: Cornelia Sorabji and Sarojini Naidu.” A Concise History of Indian Literature in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Permanent Black, 2016, pp. 142 – 50.

Banerjee, Hasi. The Traditional Feminist. K P Bagchi & Company, 1998.

Chaudhuri, Rosinka, editor. A History of Indian Poetry in English. Oxford UP, 2016.

Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, and Prema Nandakumar. Introduction to the Study of English Literature. 1966. Sterling, 1990.

Kosambi, Meera, translator and editor. Feminist Vision or ‘Treason Against Men’?: Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature. Permanent Black, 2008.

Lokuge, Chandani. “Dialoguing with Empire: The Literary and Political Rhetoric of Sarojini Naidu.” India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connection, 1858 – 1950, edited by Susheila Nasta. Palgrave, 2013, pp. 115 – 33.

Naidu, Sarojini. The Golden Threshold. 1905. Introduced by Arthur Symons. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/680/pg680-images.html.

_____ . “Bangle-Sellers.” ‘The Bird of Time’ (1912). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, pp. 63-64.

_____ . “Cradle Song”. ‘The Golden Threshold’ (1905). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, p. 20.

_____ . “In Praise of Henna”. ‘The Golden Threshold’ (1905). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, p. 16.

_____ . “Palanquin Bearers”. ‘The Golden Threshold’ (1905). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, p. 9.

_____ . “The Gift of India”. (August, 1915) ‘The Broken Wing’ (1917). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, p. 78.

_____ . “Wandering Singers”. ‘The Golden Threshold’ (1905). The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, p. 12.

Paranjape, Makarand. Introduction. The Essential Reader: Sarojini Naidu. Penguin, 2022, pp. ix-xviii.

Reddy, Sheshalatha. “The Cosmopolitan Nationalism of Sarojini Naidu, Nightingale of India.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, September 2010, pp. 571-89.

Sarasvati, Ramabai. The High Caste Hindu Woman. 1887. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ramabai/woman/woman.html .

Subramaniam, Mathangi. Dear Mrs. Naidu. 2015. Young Zubaan, 2017.

Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, editors. Women Writing in India: 600 B C to the Present. Volume 1. The Feminist Press, The City University of New York, 1991, pp. 221-34, 275-80, 309-19, 330-40, 340-352.

“The Hindu Woman”. The Girl’s Own Paper, vol. 1, 1880, pp.118-19. https://www.victorianvoices.net/magazines/GOP.html

Oct 09

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Book Review: The Elsewhereans by Jeet Thayil | Shahim Sheikh

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Sheikh, Shahim. “Book Review: The Elsewhereans by Jeet Thayil.” Indian Writing In English Online, 9 October 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/book-review-the-elsewhereans-by-jeet-thayil-shahim-sheikh/ .

Chicago:
Sheikh, Shahim. “Book Review: The Elsewhereans by Jeet Thayil.” Indian Writing In English Online. October 9, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/book-review-the-elsewhereans-by-jeet-thayil-shahim-sheikh/ .

At the time of writing, Amazon India lists The Elsewhereans as a bestselling book in their Photography category — a peculiar honour it has had since it was released. The book does contain a few photos of people, places and objects but the classification is still a stretch. Then again, it’s also true that reading Jeet Thayil’s latest is akin to sifting through an old photo album; where photographs tell, hide and tease stories at regular intervals yet all convey the same old adage — time is frozen here.

Instead of a linear progression, The Elsewhereans unfolds as short episodes where each has little regard for the time and place of the next; it is only when viewed as a mosaic at the end that the proverbial thread of a narrative finally tightens. On the one hand are stories of Thayil’s parents, Ammu and George, and other relatives and acquaintances. On the other are episodes from his own life, rearing their heads from time to time to remind us that the austere tone should not alienate us from his own relation to them. All of this ties up to the strange burden that he has taken on with the ‘documentary novel’ title — the oxymoron affording him the opportunity to use imagination to fill in the gaps that recollections by others have failed to detail.

In the sleepy hamlet of Mamalassery, Ammu and George get married in 1957. It is the place where their story begins and later on, Thayil’s own. The itinerant artist clearly has his fondness for this backwater of Kerala. The verdant images and damp atmosphere of a monsoon wedding feast and its varied attendants remain the most evocative images of the entire novel. These are constructed without the reliance on description that creeps in during the Vietnam road trip. In fact, this opening gives us a neat view of how he has approached these stories; or even, how they have approached him.

Ammu and George’s early days as a married couple in Bombay or their time at Anniethottam (Ammu’s house) are the novel’s most vivid sections. Thayil mixes speculation with a caution for retaining the fidelity of what he remembers and has heard in a wonderful balancing act that makes these stories tell a lot despite the laconic language — such as George’s incarceration in Bihar or the half-remembered memories of his uncle Markose, lawyer and Baudelaire-devotee. When the same remove is applied to Thayil’s own experiences, it does not yield a similar effect. He is wonderful at conjuring up the lives of others as heard, from a distance, but cannot quite depict his own experiences with similar poetic elan. Perhaps he does not wish to do so but there is, nonetheless, some lesson here in the difference in tone a biography and an autobiography demand.

George is the perfect 20th-century-man — constantly absorbing and responding to the ever-changing geographies and politics around him. In one chapter, he leaves for Vietnam with a communist friend to place himself in the midst of the significant final days of a waning war. In another, he becomes a co-founder of a news magazine in another city approaching the end of its colonial subjugation. It is hard to read about this ideal of the Nehruvian figure and not romanticise the looser boundaries of the globe from half a century ago. Thayil gives George the exact reverence that he clearly has for him while maintaining a certain distance that has characterised the father-son relationship throughout his life. What does feel lacking is the story of Ammu. We find out about her painfully prolonged delivery of Jeet, and her stock market ventures while in Hong Kong but few other glimpses of this quiet observer of the lives of an illustrious husband and son are provided. Perhaps she was an unassuming figure yet this diminution might be forgiven in the hands of a writer who is not her own son. After all, a brief moment in the final chapter shows that mother and son have not had a relationship lacking affection.

It’s important to note here that George, Ammu and Jeet are not the sole figures of this collage. At regular intervals, other people turn up as representatives of a period. George’s friend and guide, Nguyen Phuc Chau, gets an entire chapter dedicated to her. It is a sizeable allocation and justified given the enigmatic presence she had in his life for over a decade, which also invited Ammu’s anxieties about their relationship. Jeet’s sundry acquaintances are the highlights of his sections in the book. A particularly interesting one is the tale of Huang, noodle stall owner at Chungking Mansions who was once China’s conscience-maker as ghostwriter of Mao Zedong’s epigrams. Short sections such as this or how Jeet once ended up bunking in Shakespeare & Co. due to a penniless trip to France reiterate his gift of brevity.

With The Elsewhereans, Thayil has succeeded in weaving what many of us fail or even wish to imagine — accounts of parents as people, before they were the former and how they continued to be people while being parents. It is a moving novel, a patchwork of stories remembered and heard over the course of the author’s life that come together to form an intimate epic. As we transition from the early days of postcolonial India to a Kerala combating the ravages of Hindutva in 2021, the cover image of Nguyen on a motorcycle, from 1973, begins to make sense. Just like she does not wish to be photographed in 2018 so George can continue to remember her as his young guide in Vietnam, so does this series of stories long to be left to the time and place they once occupied.

Shahim is a graduate of the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad and currently works in the Arts and Culture sector. He has an interest in cinema, photography and other visual mediums.

Header Image: HarperCollins Publishers India

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Interview: Jeet Thayil "How to be a Girl""The Other Thing"

Sep 28

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Kamala Das’s “My Story” at 50: Reflections | K. Narayana Chandran

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Cite this Essay

MLA:
Chandran, K. Narayana. “Kamala Das’s My Story at 50: Reflections.” Indian Writing In English Online, 28 September 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/kamala-das-my-story-at-50-reflections-k-narayana-chandran/ .

Chicago:
Chandran, K. Narayana. “Kamala Das’s My Story at 50: Reflections.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 28, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/kamala-das-my-story-at-50-reflections-k-narayana-chandran/ .

KAMALA DAS’S MY STORY AT 50: REFLECTIONS

Madhavikutty who wrote Ente Katha was not Kamala Das who rewrote its English, My Story. The new name needed a voice and address different from the ones that began the telling. Only the Psalmist believes that we spend our lives as a tale that is told. Writers probably do not. They may not think they will be born again, but they hope for the afterlives of words. Life does not have words, but we do. The laws that we devise to tell lives are ours. We even amend them in order to explain our life we call experience― where we live, what we live for, as Thoreau puts it memorably. Those words, sometimes Malayalam, some other times English, live. Or so they must, as writers fancy.

My Story was destined to run at least for 50 years, and was meant to read like an English family saga in parts, one written in anticipation of a literary-critical tradition whose infinite variety has certainly run its fairly decent course. The printings for successive generations find in Kamala Das’s story more and more traces of the straight, and not-so-straight, erotics whose names are legion. There is hardly any truth in it we could say is “self-evident” to hold it for long. A story for all seasons of critical thought, My Story now engages many readers as a bellwether that tells them what it means to study, not the book but its readers reading a Malayali woman who dares write her English story. (1)

Why this should happen to only Kamala Das among Indian writers, and why her story continues to be read today still puzzles me, but I often relish my story of first reading it serially. When the Malayālanādu pages of the early 1970s carried Madhavikutty’s weekly story, I was all of twenty. In retrospect, everything seemed new to me at the time, even the ordinary details and facts that fed informed readers and reading. I was a non-discriminating reader of all stuff that did not sting my eyes or tax my small brains. I was beginning to learn, unassisted by the ministrations of a syllabus, that the loneliness of the kind I made peace with was one of understanding but not being understood. With little conscious effort on my part, what needed lodging in my memory got lodged. For sure, I do not even recall my wondering why Ente Katha was either received with benign puzzlement or angrily rejected by some establishments. Pamman’s Vaṣaḷan was processed by my turbine with as much care or the lack of it as it did this story. Both Pamman’s man and Madhavikutty’s woman told roguish tales. With such tales, one tale leading to another, were the Malayali readers at the time really opening alternative portals to the good old picaresque? Perhaps. I dared not ask all this then, for want of appropriate critical idiom, but I seemed to sense in such writing a “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Or, such writing appealed to me, a little like an invitation to look over the walls where young people are apt to be doing something slightly unusual, shaded as they assure themselves from public view.

My Story retains for me that look of Ente Katha’s guilty shadow. I dare not adduce all my reasons for this feeling, but at least this. First of all, I do not have a digital footprint to follow the precincts my old reading. The Malayālanādu numbers are beyond my material reach today, their temporal aura underscored by supplementary data, the company Ente Katha had then kept (the 1970’s cover pages and contents, advertisements, trade notices, cartoon sketches, literary and political writing, cinema reviews, and the editorials …) largely missing even in a Malayalam reprinting of the original text. (2) But memory is such a shifty and shifting affair. We misremember the quanta and affects when our reading habits change. Second, when a writer changes the language of her story, she changes not just the fiction but its reading public to a certain unforeseeable length. So much so that the first readers who were privileged to see or read the story in both languages now forfeit that radical innocence vouchsafed only to the less privileged. I am sure what I am saying is not easy to appreciate unless someone hardier than most researchers undertakes to read the best Malayali critics of Ente Katha to see how different they sound in comparison with those who write in English on My Story. Perhaps a more scholarly and useful work would be to undertake a textual-genealogical exercise, beginning with some prefatory matter relating the book’s publishing history including its various modes and strata of reception, its multiple texts and reprintings, the layered editorial interventions that gave us newer palimpsests of Ente Katha / My Story through the last few decades. Unfortunately, that is not yet to be from what I see around my academic vicinity. Everyone wields a nondescript theoretical hammer. They can only see prurient nails to pick from My Story. Who could stop them?

_____________

Over the years, it has given me sheer fun to investigate how readers have seen My Story in ways that probably made it an object of study: in generic terms, as a feminist confessio amantis of sorts; in socio-historical light as a document of cultural realism; in a restrictive critical format as a sob story interspersed with lighter moments of self-discovery; in comparative crosslight, perhaps as a Malayali retelling of Judy Blume’s pop-classic Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? (1970). Since My Story is and is not a “Me-Too” outrage, and in any case was not meant to be, some future reader will certainly look still for those Adela Quested moments in it― for that fantasy muddle that does not quite speak its name: who touched who, first ….

Be that as it may, I sometimes wonder what is it those readers’ clubs gain exactly by organizing a do at enormous cost to remind us of the 50 or 100 years of some book. Do they really want to ask whether this book or that juncture in literary history marked the birth of a classic? Or what signalled for us the obsolescence of which canon? Are they holding a memorial service for a still-born trend, mounting a hit-parade, commemorating a writer’s/ an event’s passing, or celebrating the triumph of some critical goodwill? What history has been made, or since then been unmade? (If, on an attributed merit being an “old” reader, I don’t willingly join such readers’ clubs, I might well be clubbed into admission, pretty much like the evidence on offer here.)

The point is that I am still not sure who declared My Story a classic― those who have been reading it still with much the same excitement as they had 50 years ago, or those who perfunctorily feel summoned to observe all publishing events and celebrate impressive print-runs to keep the research pot boiling in our departments of English India? There are, regrettably, more “my stories” to tell today than one would guess. In my department alone, I recall a virtual “My Story season” in the 1990s when nearly every M. Phil. student first thought of Kamala Das’s as a capstone text for their dissertations on any topic related to writing on or by women in India. A large body of such critical work begs not for further interpretive rumination but a far less glamorous task. A professionally neat bibliographical ledger or annotated survey is in order, pointing to the role of My Story in determining our business for those curricular calendars in our English halls. Did all that effort eventually let us notice that Kamala Das had not had, ever, the slightest regret of being a woman, but often had wondered why men (and the women who pleased them) did not even know what to make of a diminished woman thing to whom they nevertheless sang amorous paeans? In all seasons of love, therefore, such men make fools of themselves. Of course she was angry, very angry, at what was made of her gender. The exasperated spirit of Kamla Das gave up one faith for another just to see if there was any change in another theo-patriarchal matrix.

_____________

P. P. R. Talking of disguise I see that some of the poems are used as epigraphs to My Story. Does this imply any kind of continuity between the two?

K. D. My Story was written with a purpose, and was prompted by somebody very close to me.

P. P. R. Similarly, some of the poems seem to be reworkings of short stories originally written in Malayalam. Or is it the other way around?

K. D. There are so many complaints that I sell the same stuff as poetry, as story and as essay. […] I just dabble in all these areas, that is all.

(Raveendran 149)

To the first question here, Kamala Das is evasive. (Recall, Gertrude Stein’s last words to her death-bed attendant: What was the question?) P. P. Raveendran however does not hold her on to the point and insist. Evidently, she has neither misheard the question nor drawn a blank on the epigraphs but she would rather offer a roundabout explanation. PPR’s is a question about binding or bending genre, rather its lawlessness, in Kamala Das. Her answer asserts however a writer’s right to a generic laissez-faire. True, most readers have a subliminal insistence on a name for the piece of writing at hand. At least, on a fairly consistent style of emplotment to which they feel inured in time. For reading comfort, so to speak. And perhaps for sheer commercial purposes. When prose masquerades as verse, or sports a lyric mask before the prose begins; when the text before them misses a narrative beat or two, readers grumble. Complaints is probably ill-chosen, but Kamala Das might have noticed the discomfort of her readers who look for the missing novel in her shorter works, and stories that seemingly prolong her life, each shorter by turns as mere anecdotes or sketches. Probably she mildly resented PPR’s “disguise,” a true description nonetheless of her nomadic acts, just dabbl[ing] as she says among the conventional types and materials of storyworlds.

How many of us might have wondered why My Story gives us the impression of a young lady who just walked out on those tumultuous years of national Independence one day, and left an entire lifetime behind? That Kamala Das lived a segment of history is an illusion she creates in us, but certainly she cannot give us the impression that she herself was capable of being so disillusioned, then or later in life, about that illusion. She commanded the economic and circumstantial resources of the upper class to afford such a luxury of moving in and out of locales, across the whole continent, enjoying the comforts of a genreless jaunt. It amazes me to think that My Story is that rare book of episodic nomadism that answers to the now-fashionable narratives celebrated by someone like Pierre Joris. “A nomadic poetics,” writes Joris, “is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refueling halts are called poases; they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on” (26, Joris’s emphasis).

Look at those flash profiles in My Story: the Lizas, Mabels, Kunjis, Velus, Durgas, Unnimayammas, the Kunhappas and the Panickers. They exit as quickly as the cooks of the Nalapat House enter, falling in and out of feudal favour in Chapter 7. In a story driven by a breathless plot line, they are pretty much like Prufrock’s women who come and go― just names, but no character either in a moralistic or novelistic sense. And that, I believe, was the point Kamala Das wants us to accept. Her effigies are adrift on a narrative runnel, for the most part. Faceless, they remind us of their oddities. They are not persons with any distinctive voice, own language, a human idiom, to know them by. Even Carlo is more of a wall his lover chooses to bounce a lubricious ball off. Intermittently, without the slightest remorse:

‘You can marry me,’ said Carlo. ‘You can forget your grey-eyed friend, leave your indifferent husband and come with me to my country.’

‘We can probably have a love affair,’ I said, remembering the peace of my nights and the faces of my little sons closed in sleep. ‘I am not the divorcing kind…’ ‘And I am not Vronsky,’ said Carlo laughing. (My Story 115)

Frankly, I still cannot help laughing at this English probably (but what was its Malayalam, I forget) that modifies “can have.” But I am sure Carlo knows as much as we do that a fling is just that as they walk along the dirt road leading to the sea. “‘What is my future’ [Carlo] asked me. Have I a future at all?’” (My Story 117). Stooges know what they are for, in a plot. No tenses for them. Too bad, if they don’t see at least this much.

_____________

It is time we stopped worrying about My Story’s authenticity as an in-propria-persona book because I know of no writer’s published life that bares all the truth, and tells it straight. I love the word (and concept) Edith Wharton uses to call that character through whose sensibility a story is told: reflector. A reflector is one among the servants who lives the fiction of their maker, pace Count Axël’s “as for living” condescension in Villiers’s eponymous dramatic prose. No harm if some servants fare better in fiction than their betters.

For the sake of clarity, then, let us call the My Story-narrator a reflector. Let us add that it is easy for anyone to see Kamala Das’s admixture of genres if they take their minds off the unavoidable female or other sexualities in My Story. Rosemary M. George for one finds that generic mélange to be “queer,” perhaps viewing the reflector’s queer as physical and narrative, perhaps one involved crucially in affecting the other. George’s reading is exceptional in that it gives at least a straight look at “the slipperiness of [Kamala Das’s] writing” (741). That phrase refers to the “calculated unreliability as a narrator of autobiography,” which she believes “result[s] from a perennially unstable set of referential contexts [that] heightens the queer charge of autobiography” (741).

I regret however that George has stopped short of a bold exploration by not twinning gender-genre in advancing her queer thesis. In other words, before our simplistic academic insistence on writing styles, forms, and patterns of the kinds set in, no one in our hoary cultures ever bothered with genres when the mind processes language. All discursive traditions rightly know that raconteurs do not quite want us to tell the Dancer from the Dance. For they seldom use language the way we imagine they do. They often let language imagine language, and in so letting writers do what they are destined to write. Naturally, then, the strictly prosaic is never so much that, or only that. The lyric or the dramatic again is not as disciplined as it looks on our printed pages. Collapsing, combining, even complicating telling moods and teller-disposition, a story has only a for-the-nonce life, and is none the worse for it. Now think of our sexuality so called. Has it ever been curmudgeonly set to any stringent definitional remit, when we act sexually? And when someone goes the whole hog? Hardly. Like most of us, sex has a social life all its own whose signs are nuanced and known to be practised discreetly by the agents. Gore Vidal was once asked by a youngish interviewer about his first “sexual experience.” When he began, rather slowly to recall the event, the interviewer tagged on a bit, “With a man or a woman?” Vidal: I was too polite to ask.

I take it that the message of Kāmasūtra is to least bother about style sheets, mess with non-negotiable formats, when Kāma rules. (3) It is uncomplicated only when you read Kamala Das’s story as an autobiography tout court. It is “queer” if you see her point in telling those episodic loves slantingly. George has a short introductory article in Gender and History (2002) where, round and about, she extends the range of her “queer,” now suggesting that no figure, or the ground on which it stands, is fixed. That is, to say queer involves questioning the preset, if only to mean it fluid, or simply other. Drawing upon ancient eastern traditions of amorous thought, citing C. M. Naim’s authority on “Persian and Urdu literature,” George endorses Naim’s “[caution] against too easily inferring social reality and relations in any historical period through the lens provided by the literary texts from that period. He urges us to consider the pressures exerted by literary genres in shepherding meaning through specific ‘conventional’ routes” (10). The point is that hidebound queerism of the academy feeds generic slavery. It feels awkward when things involving love among the humans do not neatly click into place. Such queerist notions are still founded on highschool biology, despite the grown-up knowledge of the abundant light etymology casts on reproductive anatomy. And that knowledge treats gender and genre as scions. The gene makes for such guilt-free cohabitation.

_____________

In Art and Revolution (1969), John Berger observes that “The two great sensuous and imaginative distinctions― between life and death and between male and female― are neither nude nor enjoyed at skin level. It is necessary,” he adds, “to go further into the interior of the being until, ideally, we touch not the body but the experience of the body” (108, emphasis mine). It is a pity that most gender/ sexuality debates around fiction and the figures of life they engage do not even get round to this crucial detail, “the experience of the body.” My Story is not at any rate unaware of Berger’s distinctions but its tantalizingly short and occasionally fleeting records of the physical do not make for deeper thought. Maybe the serial cut of its Malayalam original played some role in diminishing such options for the writer. It may also be that Kamala Das couldn’t help being a vacuous poet of the soul rather than a sturdy chronicler of the body when passion calls. The following is perhaps not as perfect a sample as one would like to read, but it is handy enough to let us see how the reflector is in a hurry to catch her flight:

When I recovered from my serious illness I grew attractive once again. Then at the airport I collided with the elderly man who had once fascinated me just by turning back to glance darkly at me. I had heard of his fabulous lusts. He drew me to him as a serpent draws its dazed victim. I was his slave. That night I tossed about in my bed thinking of his dark limbs and of his eyes glazed with desire. Very soon we met and I fell into his arms. (My Story 174)

Back home, Amy dreams. The almost ethereal glow of her vision is owed to an abiding Krishna consciousness, one borne on the “inside of [her] eyelids, the dark god of girlhood dreams” (174). Charming for sure, yet low voltage.

Not an issue if Kamala Das wants to keep it that way, but we also hear some occasional griping, a resentment of sorts, that suggests that a woman of her distinction and privilege has often been baulked of pleasures that other, plainer, women seem to enjoy without any inhibition. (Perhaps Kamala Das is a forerunner of Arundhati Roys and Jhumpa Lahiris who celebrate such besetting “sins” of upper-middleclass Indian women.) The Nalapat traditions, social standing, and the cultural goodwill the reflector enjoys among her peers sometimes constitute an invisible law that she feels emboldened on occasions to transgress. Or, as I sometimes guess, is it the other way round? She ends up transgressing because the law throws up the challenge? Either way, the folkways require a law-breaker for them to exist in the first place. Carnal pleasure is that youthful body’s standing reproach to (and an old body’s grouse about) a class-code, the “right” conduct. Only its violation fulfils it. The vicious here is punningly a circle: the taboo depends for its force on the bold commitment of the vice it taboos. (4)

_____________

The truism that reading has changed rarely indicates how or why the young deal with old writing differently. Cases like My Story give us a reason to ask what has changed about its writing to which our young readers respond in a manner that surprises us. The tardiness of an event (among many others, the incident with which Chapter 22 opens), the slow unfolding of a scenario (such as the whole of Chapter 13), the dragging consequences or reactions on which the narrator dilates (“I tried adultery once” that begins Chapter 43 and ends with Krishna coming to her “in myriad shapes”) ― few young readers can put up with this tedium, attuned today as they are to instantaneous digital gratification. My Story belongs to a band of narratives that circulated serially in what economists call an age of “deferred gratification.” (The Kottayam town I grew up in during the first 20 years of my life advertised long-shelved and unsold goods and services ON SALE. What that meant for consumers then was that if they were willing to wait, the prices would fall and be affordable for the needy.) A reader of those years knew nothing of great consequence that awaits them in the serial story even if the suspense remained deferred for a couple of weeks. When the telling is slow, the teller trains the listener to be patient, a precept readers of the Book of Job learn to appreciate besides the devotional rigour it entails.

The uses of nostalgia however are another thing. Only that we are embarrassed while rummaging a curated past that the younger generations find quaint. Only other people’s longing offends. For my peers, My Story cannot help bring back memories of a world where we have often had interesting lives before the electronic/ cable revolutions. My own memory was both collection and storage in a simple brain which most of the time I effectively mined for information, knowledge, and that little bit of wisdom I had fought hard to value. My Story is certainly not one of the memorable things I would have loved to preserve from the old Malayālanādu pages, but I still miss other gems they had once held: an occasional poem or two, for instance, by M. Govindan whose short uḷpozhivukaḷ I regret not finding anywhere anymore, not least because I still am unsure what the word means, or what it had meant for the readers of that poem in the late ’seventies. Frankly, I do not regret that I missed any episode from My Story in the last 50 years, although I have sensed a sneaking interest I seem to have in what a newer study by students still made of it. By and large, I have found such critical work more suggestive of the minds of young readers than of any interesting idea that has been fully worked through. Few of them have escaped the sentimentalist or the moralistic trap set by their elders whose work the young readers seem to have assimilated.

What has sometimes struck me as rather odd is the circumambience of the Indian book world that invested My Story with a credible look and feel at which many Malayali writers of that generation would have marvelled. The publishing conditions that handpick items from a vast repertoire of excellent writing in the bhāṣās are no secret. There are valid reasons for the limited exposure of Indian regional cultures abroad, and not all of them have to do with discriminatory cultural intermediaries or the paucity of “good” translators. That granted, the smart set that gets their books marketed abroad from a hinterland looks at that success as compensation for having shared their lives, dared telling them with all the risks involved. Some deceit might always lurk behind or beneath the confession, but you cannot deny that those writers braved the confession, à la Saint Augustine, Rousseau. So, the initiative matters when the writer wills to be seen and heard across sensitive borders. Water finds its level, again, the way a writer finds her translator. And that writer has a bilingual grip, however tenuous, on the mechanisms of getting her words into print that more readers can access. If the writing is cinematic to boot, even potentially, that certainly helps. My Story will someday receive better attention to such trade privileges than it has.

_____________

At 50, what then shall we say about a piece of writing so widely applauded once as a fair sample of a modern autobiography in English India? That story is still refreshing in its refusal to capitulate to the Writing Workshop protocols such as they are understood in our country. Not written to a stringent genre-format either, My Story is easy to read, each of its chapters opening, sometimes with a teasing, mischievous hint of adventure, mystery, even romance: “A friend of my family warned me against associating with an eighteen-year-old girl residing in a college hostel, but when … I met her [I] felt instantly drawn towards her” (My Story 74). Love has always been in the air since then, and Chapter 20 that begins this way ends with some girlish fun “a dark corner behind the door” gives this person who lets us know that humans begin skin-deep love sometime before “An Arranged Marriage” of Chapter 21. And that “story” might be true, maybe she has just been telling it wrong.

Someday, some curious student is likely to see in My Story a handy case to speculate (just for polemical fun, perhaps) whether texts determine readers, or readers determine texts. In either case, the case here will not be settled for good because Kamla Das’s book appears to have enjoyed so much predetermined reception thanks to those who shepherded its publication, the first reviewers, publicity brokers, gossips, and the blurbists who habitually speak only fine things, the latter much in the vein of a polite admission that the book is readable but not quite a classic of its kind. In other words, My Story had told us so much about itself in the last five decades that we did not really have to read it again. The HarperCollins text I have used here calls it a “memoir … far ahead of its time and is now acknowledged as a bona fide masterpiece” (blurb, 2009).

One thing more. About Kamala Das and her English style. I am not sure that Madhavikutty’s non-education freed her into her own learning or was rather enclosed by it. In Malayalam, her chatty sparseness does not quite spoil the fun of reading her because the Malayali knows where those elliptical and oblique bits lead, mostly to moods that flipflop and settle like a pesky moth on a lighted wall. In English, an old highschool-grammar holds her hand, leaving her very little room for paratactical flourishes. In both Malayalam and English, probably a sly editorial hand might have worked. Of such things, we have no clue. (5)

_____________

Great books are monuments for the mind. However precarious, they endure because we teach them, urging our wards to read them. Especially, by attending to the experiential texture of what they are reading at the moment. We learn by what we reject as well as by what we accept. All that, I believe, is true but I cannot foresee a renewed interest in My Story, say, among the likes of the two or three latest post-Covid batches of Master’s students I taught who are averse to reading anything longer than a few dozen pages with genuine literacy or scholarly involvement. I do not sense a chorus of groans as I mention take-home reading of longish texts, but outside assigned reading and required writing, Kamala Das’s book is unlikely to be sought after by all students. Even by, I think, those enterprising ones who might be willing to read all Ruskin Bond for their term-papers on climate change or ecological disasters. It is no small mercy for the reader that My Story ends at that juncture where the elasticity of its writer’s mental processes slackens: “I have left colourful youth behind. … My heart resembles a cracked platter that can no more hold anything. … Perhaps I shall die soon” (213). Lives, it appears, are welcome when told of their short stretches. In any case, a tip-toed prolepsis Kamala Das calls the “reality” of death fills the last chapter of My Story. Too tragic, it does not quite tell us how to grieve in appropriate response. Unrelieved in its melancholy, this is rather tepid philosophy, mildly amusing fiction.

But all this is arguably beside the point. Who knows? I might still wager that Amy/ the reflector of My Story is that unusually intelligent woman who situates her self in the most difficult relationships to those who oppress her. Her disruptive potential to undermine normative negotiations between gendered creatures is not small. Although the craziest things in this book sound like those done for the sake of the memory of just having done them, it will be a pity if we do not recognize that her investment in, and dependence on, those very structures she rejects are heroic indeed.

Another way of saying all this is to concede that it is too early to treat My Story as a closed book. It will not that easily come up for sale in an intellectual flea market. After all, newer regimes of thought will find newer communities of learning. A new hunger for style, humour, and even frivolity will likely ask for food, cold-packed in storage. And such readers are likely to be tolerant towards a writer who gets the rich texture of human experience of whatever kind into view. If that happens, who can deny that My Story will, in time, court incisive readers? And some, indeed, will arrive before we recognize them.

NOTES

I wish I knew that Madhavikutty’s story of her life was written first, from which emerged the much-later My Story. The dates of publication are apparently a mess. But that is another story. I am not a textual genealogist nor do I have the bibliographical means to crosscheck such details for accuracy. Conflicting accounts confront me wherever I look for information, but it seems almost certain that English has substantially coloured the scenes of nearly all the episodes even in the Malayalam story. Explanatory bits far outnumber regular unaffected telling in English, a sure sign that Kamala Das was aiming at a wide audience and large community of readers. (I thank Meena T. Pillai for answering my queries on the dates and publishing history of My Story. I am grateful again to P. P. Raveendran for answering my query on Madhavikutty’s formal education.)

What has sometimes fascinated me to no end is the auratic look or feel of a piece of writing. What an article, poem or play, first looked in its first appearance on the pages of a magazine or broadsheet interests me because the site-specific appeal of art is often underestimated. That space is special and unique in that a writer of intangible goods and services rubs shoulders (only here) with rank commercialists and the crude business class. A site-sensitivity seems to inhere all writing, also because the first readers matter. A context in which a piece of writing/ art is received makes for our silent conversations with those curious items boxed adjacent to its discrete columns. The ad-space tells us what pained and what pleasured the reading public most during the period in which a story or poem was first published― balms for aches, emollients bandied as beauty products, analgesics and abortifacients, affordable housing options and fashionable clothing, pop entertainments, etc. Most anthologized and reprinted work is repurposed with trade motives of which newer readers are mostly unaware. I am still not sure that this is good or bad, but I am sure readers miss something when they remain unaware of the first public use of a literary object, unless they care the least for the ‘intentions’ of its maker.

If we go beyond the graphics of the Kāmasūtra sketchbook, it will settle for us nearly all misgivings about the range of the “sexual,” besides alerting us to the literary genres and typological etiquette of social intercourse. It is a pity that most readers still find in it only the acts of physical love in “ancient India.” If one were to reflect on Vatsyayana’s klība alone, a book like My Story will begin to speak more to us about most men we meet on its pages. At least a newer reading of Kāmasūtra will open for us another door to dharma, a bid Kamala Das probably tries her best to make in all her writing. Put differently, the evenly quartered stages/ goals of Hindu spirituality are at least not to be seen as discretely mapped out and progressively outgrown by only men. A little kāma always inflects a self as it advances through arthā, dharma, and mōksha. No wonder, such wisdom is vouchsafed to insightful women.

This, to my mind, compares with Sigmund Freud’s “Some Character-types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work” where he writes: “Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely― the misdeed arose from the guilt” (332).

It may be small, but a detail hard to ignore: like most writers of English India, Madhavikutty never sat in an Eng. Lit. class to read the classics and the canon. She has never been to college, hardly ever qualified herself, in a way, to write the language of her life. Have her writing choices been served by being so unwaveringly stubborn and precociously independent? An open question.

WORKS CITED

Berger, John. Art and Revolution. Vintage, 1969.

Das, Kamala. My Story. 1988. Harper Collins, 2009.

Freud, Sigmund. “Some Character-types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work.” 1916. Selected Essays, vol. 14, pp. 309-33.

George, Rosemary M. “Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading My Story.” Feminist Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, 2000, pp. 731-63.

—, et al. “Introduction: Tracking ‘Same-sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia.” Gender & History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 7- 11.

Joris, Pierre. A Nomad Poetics: Essays. Wesleyan UP, 2003.

Raveendran, P. P. “Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das.” Indian Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 1993, pp. 144-61.

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Meena Alexander: A Critical Biography | Sireesha Telugu

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Meena Alexander (born Mary Elizabeth Alexander, 1951-2018) was a poet, teacher, essayist, and author who lived in India, Sudan, England, and the United States. Born in India, Meena Alexander moved to Khartoum, aged five, along with her father, a meteorologist, who was posted to Sudan soon after it gained independence. She published her poems in Sudan and decided to adopt the name Meena Alexander instead of Mary Elizabeth Alexander. When she changed her name, she felt “stripped free of the colonial burden” (Fault Lines 74), perhaps inspired by India’s and Sudan’s newfound independence from the British. After completing her doctorate in British Romantic literature in 1973 from the University of Nottingham, Alexander returned to India and accepted teaching positions at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad (now known as the English and Foreign Languages University) and the University of Hyderabad. Eventually, she settled in the United States after marrying historian David Lelyveld. She held teaching assignments at various institutions in the United States, including at Fordham University, Hunter College, City University of New York, and Columbia University.

Alexander received the “Pen Open Book Award” for her book Illiterate Heart, an honour recognising the “most outstanding voices in literature across diverse genres,” besides the “Altruss International Award,” and “The New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Award.” Other notable awards include the “South Asian Literary Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature,” the “Imbongi Yesizwe Poetry International Award,” and the “Word Masala Award.” Her memoir, Fault Lines, was chosen as one of the best books of 1993 by Publisher’s Weekly.

Her poems were first translated into Arabic and published in Sudanese newspapers. Later, they were anthologised and translated into numerous languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, German, Hindi, and Malayalam. She has published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997). These novels exemplify Alexander’s attempts to connect to her roots. Nampally Road tells the story of a young woman searching for an identity, while Manhattan Music investigates the hybridised individuals’ conflicted and fragmented identities. In both novels, the protagonists engage with gendered identity in postcolonial societies.

Meena Alexander addresses themes such as race, displacement, patriarchy, identity, and postcolonialism through her prose, poetry, fiction, and critical work. As critics note: “Alexander has written, in multiple genres, about her intensely personal anguish, her life-long search for homelands” (Shankar 32-33), as well as issues of extremism, ethnic minorities and multiracial rigidities, multiracial identities that reflect complex interactions between different racial and ethnic groups. Though Alexander has displayed her mastery in various genres, she affirms in an interview with Ruth Maxey that there is “integrity to writing poetry,” and it is “a great glory…, a gift” (Maxey 23) to be a poet. She presents herself as an Indian in all her poetic years, but with multiple cultural backgrounds: born in Allahabad, raised in Khartoum, living in New York.

Alexander has also authored two academic works, The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1983), which explores the poetic endeavour to construct a self, and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989), that studies the life and works of the three prominent women writers from the Romantic era. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections of Postcolonial Experience (1996) combines essays and poems representing Alexander’s “combination of real and imaginary” experiences on writing, relocation and life in the USA. In revisiting and reconnecting with memories, history, and experiences in India, Sudan, and Manhattan, Alexander presents crucial aspects of the diasporic sensibilities. The effects of colonialism and diasporic experiences provide the personal and poetic context for her writing. As such, Alexander “challenges her position as an ethnic minority in the United States, redefining herself as a postcolonial and diasporic writer within a global context marked by colonial transoceanic voyages” (Sabo 68). Her prose and poetry, informed by feminism and postcolonialism, interweave the harrowing truths of body and language.

Alexander’s early volumes, I Root my Name (1977), The Bird’s Bright Wing (1976) and Without Place (1977), delve into the complexities of migration, displacement and identity. Her first book, published in the United States, House of a Thousand Doors (1988), is a collection of poetry and prose divided into three sections, focusing on the poet’s personal experiences and the world she lives in. The titular poem represents the diverse forces that act upon an individual, emphasising the consequences of colonial exploitation and the entrenched patriarchal milieu in colonial and postcolonial India. In “House of a Thousand Doors,” she writes:

She kneels at each
of the thousand doors in turn
paying her dues.
Her debt is endless.
I hear the flute played in darkness,
a bride’s music.

A poor forked thing
I watch her kneel in all my lifetime
imploring the household gods
who will not let her in.

(House of a Thousand Doors 3)

The last lines of the poem evoke the memory of her grandmother. Alexander’s personal writing serves as a window to view the fragmented experience of her grandmother, for whom identity remained conflicted. Further, the power of the images evoked by these words is underscored by the ‘gods’ in lowercase. The ‘gods’ here can be a metaphor for the men in the household, symbolising the oppressive forces that confined the women. Alexander suggests that the grandmother’s experiences are common to most women in India’s patriarchal society.

The poet also reflects on the servitude of the nation and the lasting impact of colonialism. The house is symbolic of India being colonised by the British. Just like the grandmother who kneeled at each of the thousand doors, India had to bow before the colonial powers. Likewise, through the complexity of her memories, Alexander draws connections between patriarchy, womanhood and postcolonial identity in “Her Garden,” “Her Mother’s Words,” and “Passion.”

In “Question Time,” she explores womanhood caught in a patriarchal system. “Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt, /Hand raised in a crowded room – /What use is poetry. /Above us, lights flickered, /Something wrong with the wiring…Standing apart I looked at her and said -/We have poetry.” (Black Renaissance 129). Suppression is symbolised as “flickering lights” and therefore of accompanying “darkness.” The poet’s imagery suggests a disarranged postcolonial identity, which also signals the miserable lives of the Indian women.

Alexander’s poetry also depicts her cosmopolitan upbringing and influences. In The Shock of Arrival, the poem “Art of Pariahs” foregrounds racism and racialised attacks in New York, violence in the borderlands, the harsh realities of displacement and, again, the world of womanhood. The poet uses three queens to represent different trajectories of the poet’s identity. While Draupadi, from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, embodies the poet’s ethnic and racial identity, Rani Lakshmibai represents India’s colonial history, and the Queen of Nubia signifies the transnational aspect of her writing self, being raised in Sudan:

Back against the kitchen stove

Draupadi sings:

—-

The Queen of Nubia,…

The Rani of Jhansi,…

.…They have entered with me

into North America and share these walls.

We make up an art of pariahs:

(Shock of Arrival 8)

Draupadi, the Rani of Jhansi, and the Queen of Nubia from diverse cultures also enable Alexander to suggest the role of indomitable women. Draupadi, a mythological character sent into exile, is presented as a young immigrant in the new land. Draupadi is seen singing in her kitchen in New York City, and the song that Draupadi sings is sad and exemplifies racialised trauma. Alexander represents her multicultural and transnational self through the Queen of Nubia and her rootedness in her motherland through the Rani of Jhansi. Her poetic images and representations express the deprived existence of a migrant woman and the constant longing to be free from subjugation, race, and colour, but also draw upon the many cultures she had grown up in.

She also highlights racial discrimination and its devastating consequences in a country where people from different communities live. The violence that she had heard of and experienced is powerfully sketched for us:

Two black children spray painted white,

their eyes burning,

a white child raped in a car

for her pale skin’s sake,

an Indian child stoned by a bus-shelter,

they thought her white in twilight.

(Shock of Arrival 8)

The children in Manhattan embody ethnicities that are determined by existing cultural presumptions. The underground railroad recalls African-American culture, whereas Manhattan’s mixed rivers rising against all obstacles embody the heterogeneous composition of the inhabitants of America. At the end of the poem, the poet urges the readers to “Come walk with me toward a broken wall,” thus merging the firmness of the wall with the fluidity of “Manhattan’s mixed rivers,” in order to suggest the need for both strength and fluidity in identity formation. The poem also calls for due respect and regard to diverse cultural and literary traditions. “Pariah,” roughly translated as outsider/outcaste, is a poem about practices of social and cultural inclusion and exclusion in diasporic societies. The poet hopes for a better future where the walls of racial and cultural prejudice will be dismantled to enable the growth of a peaceful transnational world.

Alexander’s poetry reflects her understanding of multiple migrations and diasporic experiences. On the one hand, it represents the trauma inflicted through dislocation; on the other, it attempts to transcend cultural barriers. In poems like “Central Park” from the volume Raw Silk and “San Andreas Fault” from the Illiterate Heart, Alexander demonstrates the experience of immigrants and the burden of racial and cultural discrimination they carry. “Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers” is an excellent example where she seeks to reach a more robust understanding of the attacks on South Asians in the aftermath of 9/11:

What a shame

they scared you so

you plucked your sari off,

crushed it into a ball

then spread it

on the toilet floor

Sparks from the towers

fled through the weave of silk.

With your black hair

and sun dark skin

you’re just a child of earth.

Kabir the weaver sings:

O men and dogs

in times of grief

our rolling earth

grows small.

(Indian Literature 15)

The poem focuses on the migrant lives caught in the aftermath of 9/11 in the postcolonial, globalised world. Dislocated and relocated into multiple cities, languages and cultures, “Kabir Sings” represents a poet who is a woman of colour, “a South Indian woman who makes up lines in English . . . . A Third World woman poet . . . ?” (Fault Lines 193).

Raw Silk (2004) continues the themes of dislocation, displacement, heterogeneity, terrorism, trauma, and fragmentation. Alexander moves across different forms of identity-based violence. Violence perpetrated through terrorism echoes in the poem “Aftermath”:

There is an uncommon light in the sky
Pale petals are scored into stone.

. . .

But its leaves are filled with insects
With wings the color of dry blood.

At the far side of the river Hudson

By the southern tip of our island

. . .

An eye, a lip, a cut hand blooms

Sweet and bitter smoke stains the sky.

(Raw Silk 9)

The poet uses the terrain to show the effects of the 9/11 attacks. Death, brutality, radicalism, and destruction are personified through several images in her poetry.

In other poems, she writes about the atrocities committed against minority groups in India. In “Naroda Patiya,” Alexander writes:

Three armed men.

out they plucked

a tiny heart

beating with her own.

No cries

were heard

in the city.

Even the sparrows

by the temple gate

swallowed their song.

(Raw Silk 75)

The poem references the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre in Gujarat. Alexander recalls the horrific incident of a nine-month pregnant woman ripped open, her foetus pulled out and thrown into the fire. The poem is a powerful account of the violence perpetrated against the minorities in India. In other poems, she speaks of the hatred between communities in poems like “Bengali Market” :

In our country there are two million dead
and more for whom no rites were said.
No land on earth can bear this.
Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.

All day I hear the scissor bird cry
cut cut cut cut cut
It is the bird Kalidasa heard
as he stood singing of buried love.

(Raw Silk 81)

These lines capture the extreme violence, the damage to the human psyche and the politics that causes the violence. “Two Million” is a poem that is built around the statistics of the catastrophe.

Atmospheric Embroidery (2015) is another collection of poems reflecting her loneliness and struggle to reconcile with her homeland. It also provides an insight into her personal and political thoughts across India, America, and North Africa.

Strong emotions mark the poems and often thematise violence. “Moksha” reflects the pain and trauma inflicted in the Nirbhaya case (2012):

By her, in a kurta knotted at the sleeves

– Who knew that spirits could beckon through clothes –

The one they called Nirbhaya –

A young thing, raped by six men in a moving bus.

(She fought back with fists and teeth)

Near Munirka bus station where I once stood

Twenty-three years old, just her age,

Clad in thin cotton, shivering in my sandals

(Atmospheric Embroidery 34)

These lines indicate the horror and psychological trauma of a rape-and-murder victim, while emphasising the vulnerability of women in public spaces.

In “Death of a Young Dalit,” a poem on Rohith Vemula’s suicide, Alexander captures the history of discrimination in India:

A twenty-six-year-old man, plump boy face
Sets pen to paper – My birth
Is my fatal accident. I can never recover
From my childhood loneliness.

Dark body once cupped in a mother’s arms
Now in a house of dust. Not cipher, not scheme
For others to throttle and parse
(Those hucksters and swindlers,
Purveyors of hot hate, casting him out).

(World Literature Today 31)

The images capture the lives of young people caught in a biased education system. “Fatal accident” as a phrase from Vemula’s suicide note gestures at the societal rejection of the marginalised people.

Alexander’s poetry is invariably imbued with the idea of home, memory, and identity. Most of her volumes, viz., Stone Roots (1980), River and Bridge (1995/ 1996), Illiterate Heart (2002), Quickly Changing River (2008), and In Praise of Fragments (2020) contain poems that trace her childhood memories of Kerala, both pleasant and unpleasant, such as “Black River, Walled Garden,” “Gold Horizon” and “Field in Summer.” On being asked by Lavina Shankar in an interview for Meridians about constantly re-examining the past in her works, the poet responds that “going with the dark, backward in a dismal time, and coming back, there is a recuperation, a constant series of recuperations” that allows her to “recover traumatic memories” (Shankar and Alexander 35-36).

At the same time, her poetry examines the relationship between the past and the present. Multiculturalism finds insistent expression in Alexander’s poetry. Her transformation from “Mary” to “Meena” erases a troubling colonial history but also has religious connotations. Thus, the appellation “Meena” could allude to “fish” in her mother tongue, Malayalam, and/or the diminutive for the art of enamelling in Urdu and Persian. Such lines emphasise her hyphenated identity of being an Indian and an American, with Christian, Hindu and Islamic cultural backgrounds, representing numerous worlds in her past.

Nostalgia, the anonymity of being an immigrant, and trials of assimilation, belonging, and identity are reflected in her works. Alexander travelled multiple geographical spaces where cultures meet to construct identities. Her poem “River and Bridge” symbolises the journeys she has undertaken:

I have come to the Hudson’s edge to begin my life

to be born again, to see as water might

in a landscape of mist, burnished trees,

a bridge that seizes crossing.

(River and Bridge 25)

Alexander says in her essay, “An Intimate Violence: Race, Gender, and the Making of Poems,” that she wrote the poem “River and Bridge” during her migration when she “felt that she needed to begin another life, to be born again” (3). A “bridge that seizes crossing” signifies the hurdles one must encounter in migration and acculturation into the new land. Furthermore, she writes, “to be born again is to pass beyond the markings of race, the violations visited on” (3). The cosmopolitan self of the poet hopes for a better future where the walls of patriarchal, racial, and cultural prejudice will be dismantled.

Alexander’s memoir, Fault Lines (1993), reflects on her multiple dislocations and relocations. The book discusses questions of race, gender and ethnicity. In addition, it unpacks the poet’s anguish from her childhood days. It narrates the sexual abuse and intimate violence foisted on her by her maternal grandfather, who was seen as loving and caring by others. The memoir focuses on the growth of Alexander’s complex identity and selfhood. Her ethnicity as an Asian American is delineated with intensity and acuteness She asks: “Can I become just what I want? So, is this the land of opportunity, the America of dreams?” (Fault Lines 202). According to Alexander, the book’s title represents the cracks formed on the land’s surface after an earthquake, revealing the commotion and disaster it has caused. Similarly, the book enumerates the circumstances that led to disruptions in the poet’s diasporic life, that have left faultlines in her self. “This is Alexander’s invention and contribution to the way in which loss of home and country split the migrant/immigrant” (Valladares 281).

Meena Alexander’s poetry is a journey through borders, languages, and cultures. Her literary works are marked by her multiple displacements and relocations that have “shaped her literary aesthetics” (Sabo 68).

Works Cited

Alexander, Meena. Atmospheric Embroidery. Hatchett India, 2018.

—. “An Intimate Violence: Race, Gender, and the Making of Poems.” The Journal of

Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, vol. 9, no. 2, Fall

1998, pp. 1-8.

—. “Death of a Young Dalit.” World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 6, Nov-Dec 2016, p. 31.

—. Fault Lines. Feminist Press, 1993.

—. House of Thousand Doors. Three Continents Press, 1988.

—. Illiterate Heart. Tri Quarterly Books, 2002.

—. “Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers.” Indian Literature, vol. 46, no. 6, 2002, p. 15.

—. “Question Time.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, vol. 10, no. 2-3, 2010, p. 121.

—. Raw Silk. Tri Quarterly Books, 2004.

—. River and Bridge. TSAR Publications, 1995/1996.

—. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. South End Press, 1999.

Maxey, Ruth. “Interview: Meena Alexander.” MELUS, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 21–39.

Ray, Sanjana. “Naroda Patiya Riots: A Timeline of the Case that Killed 97 Muslims.” The

Quint, 20 April 2018. https://www.thequint.com/news/india/a-timeline-of-the-naroda-

patiya-case.

Sabo, Oana. “Creativity and Place: Meena Alexander’s Poetics of Migration.” Imagining

Exile and Transcultural Displacement, special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary

Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67-80.

Shankar, Lavina. “Re-visioning Memories Old and New: A Conversation with Meena

Alexander.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. Duke University Press, vol.

8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 32-48.

Valladares, Michelle Yasmine. “Remembering Meena Alexander.” Women’s Studies

Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1 & 2, 2019, pp.

279-86.

PUBLICATIONS BY MEENA ALEXANDER

Poetry

The Bird’s Bright Wing. Writers Workshop, 1976.

I Root my Name. Writers Workshop, 1977.

Without Place. Writers Workshop,1977.

Stone Roots. Arnold-Heinemann, 1980.

House of Thousand Doors. Three Continents Press, 1988.

River and Bridge. TSAR Publications, 1995/ 1996.

Illiterate Heart. Tri Quarterly Books, 2002.

Raw Silk. Tri Quarterly Books, 2004.

Quickly Changing River. Tri Quarterly Books, 2008.

Shimla. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2012.

Birthplace with Buried Stones. Tri Quarterly Books, 2013.

Atmospheric Embroidery. Hatchett India, 2015.

In Praise of Fragments. Night boat Books, 2020.

Chapter Books

The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts. Red Dust, 1989.

Night-Scene, the Garden. Red Dust, 1992.

Otto poesie da Quickly changing river (in Italian). Translated by Fazzini, Marco. Sinopia di

Venezia, 2011.

Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems. Al-Quds University, 2012.

Dreaming in Shimla: Letter to my Mother. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2015.

Prose and Criticism

The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. South End Press, 1999.

Poetics of Dislocation. U of Michigan P, 2009.

Novels

Nampally Road. Mercury House, 1991.

Manhattan Music. Mercury House, 1996.

Memoirs

Fault Lines. Feminist Press, 1993.

Meena; wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Fault Lines (2nd ed.). The Feminist Press, 2003.

Criticism

The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism. Humanities Press, 1979.

Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.

Macmillan Education, 1989.

Edited Collections

Indian Love Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing. Yale UP, 2018.

Other Works

In the Middle Earth (One-Act Play) – (Enact, 1977).

Introduction. Truth Tales: Stories by Contemporary Indian Women Writers. Feminist Press,

1990, pp. 11-24.

Foreword to Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns (eds), Blood into Ink, Twentieth

Century South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War. Westview Press, 1994,

xi-xviii.

“Bodily Inventions: A Note on the Poem.” Special Issue of The Asian Pacific American

Journal, vol.5, no. 1, 1996, pp. 21–27.

Preface. Cast Me Out If You Will: Stories and Memoir Pieces by Lalithambika

Antherjanam. Feminist Press, 1998, pp. viii-xii.

Foreword. Indian Love Poems. Knopf, 2005, pp. 13–18.

Header Image: Marion Ettlinger/poets.org

Sep 02

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Finding Home Again: Our Quest to Belong by Richa Sharma | Aparna Rayaprol

By IWE Online Review No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Rayaprol, Aparna. “Finding Home Again: Our Quest to Belong by Richa Sharma.” Indian Writing In English Online, 2 September 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/finding-home-again-our-quest-to-belong-by-richa-sharma-aparna-rayaprol/ .

Chicago:
Rayaprol, Aparna. “Finding Home Again: Our Quest to Belong by Richa Sharma.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 2, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/finding-home-again-our-quest-to-belong-by-richa-sharma-aparna-rayaprol/ .

This debut novel by Richa Sharma, an alumna of the University of Hyderabad, explores the uncertain condition of today’s migrants, their belongingness to place and their feelings of homelessness. Literature around the globe and in India is full of stories about home, belonging, and homelessness. Edward Said had described exile as a generalised condition of homelessness. Whether it is a Palestinian in the United States or an African refugee in Germany, there is a sense of oneself that is cut off from the original homeland. Exile in the context of the Holocaust often resulted in forced migrants establishing a diaspora. A diasporic community always had a connection to a homeland, imagined or real, depending on when migration happened. Border crossing and migration may be both voluntary and forced and it is the migrant who knows that the meaning of finding home is often a psychological, social, and physical entity.

In this novel, the context is not about people crossing international borders, but of the migration within India by upwardly mobile middle-class people who are the beneficiaries of education and cultural transformations. It is a novel about intergenerational mobility, communication gaps in families, and the growing distance between old towns and new metropolitan lifestyles. Families with their intricate and complicated relationships and emotional drama are a favourite topic for many writers and this novel is no exception. The story is woven around the derailment of a train in flood-ravaged Assam, the loss of lives and the aftermath seen through the lives of three characters, Mridula, Kranti and Maya. The three of them have to deal with the reality of bodies, hospitals, and the distraught family trying to search among the debris of the accident.

These central characters are in their thirties, enmeshed in fragile relationships and constantly seeking love and acceptance. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Bangalore are the places where the plot unfolds. Bangalore signifies a destination for those having made it in the world, Arunachal Pradesh is depicted with nostalgia and offers the emotional connect to the homeland, and parts of Assam as the home that one needed to forget and leave. The writing often renders the description of places as incidental, and could have been more detailed. Every place exists in the novel only in relation to the memory of the character, so the descriptions tend to be fleeting and rather abrupt. The strained marital relations between the three couples often seem to centre around the social etiquette that comes with class differences between spouses.

The novel introduces Mridula searching near the train for the husband she no longer loved, but who is still her child’s father. Her character is somewhat sidelined in the novel and brought back to the centre only at the end. Her own bad marriage is the backdrop upon which her character is built, but the reader never gets the whole story. Patriarchal practices are changing with time, but in a way that makes the younger woman less bound by tradition, but psychologically weaker. Her cousin Kranti who offers to help Mridula is the typical hero of today, haunted by his dreams and nightmares like the rest of the main characters. His wife in Bangalore is a symbol of his upward mobility as she is more urbane and sophisticated. Kranti seems to be moving away from his wife perhaps because his return to Assam reminds him of things that do not match with her personality. But this is not explicitly explained and left to the imagination of the reader.

Maya is the primary protagonist who is searching for her parents who were passengers on the ill-fated train. The strength of the novel lies in the way the story is woven around Maya’s struggle to find her parents, dead or alive, her fight against the demons in her head and to come to terms with her upbringing. She encounters several people willing to help, but they are reminders of the life she chose to move away from. Her encounter with Kranti is the main plot of the novel and their attraction toward each other seems to be connected to place and home. Both have partners back in Bangalore, but they seem to have unresolved issues with them. The reader wonders whether they will find each other and make peace, but the author does not let us know.

All the characters seem to have dreams and nightmares strongly connected to place and memory. There is much emphasis on childhood trauma, possibly resulting out of the bad marriages of parents, without giving us details. The author deals with inter-generational conflict without resolutions, and it seems that she is hinting that parents are responsible for the dysfunctional children they raise. It is suggested that it is this childhood trauma that leads to the apparent feelings of homelessness among the protagonists of the novel. The emotional fragility of the three characters and the way they actually deal with life is somewhat reminiscent of the present generation who contend with mental health and strained relationships. Unhappy marriages, lost homes, and, perhaps, a need to find peace with the past are some of the key themes of the book.

I like the way that Arunachal and Assam come across as clearly separated politically and physically, but with their similarities in the street life, the towns, and food. The descriptions of food and the way that it is served in restaurants and homes are quite rich and real.

It is a good debut novel and will strike a chord with those making multiple homes in different locales and who realise that there are no neat answers or resolutions in life.

Aparna Rayaprol teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hyderabad.

Header Image: Penguin Random House India

Jul 31

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The Worlds within the Words of Manjula Padmanabhan | Elwin Susan John

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Manjula Padmanabhan is primarily known as a playwright and a novelist. However, she is also a graphic artist, designer, and cartoonist. Born into a diplomat’s family in 1953, she spent her early years in Europe and Southeast Asia. Her cosmopolitan upbringing is evident in her approach to the social issues that she represents through her works. Currently, she divides her time between her homes in the US and India. The multiple hats worn by Manjula Padmanabhan as a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, playwright, children’s book author, illustrator, comics writer, etc., can be contended as the struggles of a woman writer in finding firm ground in the arena of Indian Writing in English. The history of Indian Writing in English can be traced back to Macaulay’s minute and the subsequent introduction of English studies in India for an efficient colonial administration. In the earliest phase of this new band of writers, one would not find male and female names in parity. The reformist policies enabled women’s education and women’s participation in the Indian nationalist movements, resulting in the emergence of scattered names like Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain etc. During the post-independence period, there was an increase in the number of women writers in English which can be juxtaposed with the rise of feminist movements in India. Rekha Pande notes in the essay, “The History of Feminism and Doing Gender in India,” that “in the post-independence period, the women’s movement has concerned itself with a large number of issues such as dowry, violence against women, women’s work, price rise, land rights, political participation of women etc” (np). Quite evidently, Manjula Padmanabhan’s oeuvre directly fits into this phase of the history of women’s movements and feminism in India. Padmanabhan’s first play came out in the year 1983, when India was already four decades into its independence. Her contributions to the literary history of Indian literature will help one reimagine the contours of Indian Writing in English. Her plays were published as two edited volumes in 2020. The first volume, Blood and Laughter, is mostly on science fiction and social issues, while the second volume, Laughter and Blood, is a collection of her short performance pieces.

Manjula Padmanabhan can be perceived as a writer who has carefully distanced herself from being called a political ideologue. Even where her writing is inspired by historical events, she has distanced herself from their political ramifications. However, a close study of her works suggests that Manjula Padmanabhan is a futuristic writer, particularly in her choice of themes. She is a feminist science fiction writer whose characters openly question issues such as patriarchy, gender inequality, poverty, unequal distribution of resources etc. Her most recent collection of science fiction stories, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities, was published in 2023. This essay takes a closer look at the multiple worlds in Manjula Padmanabhan through a survey of her plays, novels, short stories, and comics.

Manjula Padmanabhan stands out for the unconventional themes she chooses for her plays. Her Onassis prize-winning play, Harvest (1997), belongs to the genre of science fiction, a rather challenging genre for theatre. It was initially rejected by Indian theatre professionals as they felt that it was un-performable. The play was eventually directed by Mimis Kougioumtzis and performed at the Teatro Technis Karolous Koun, Athens, in 2000. It was also broadcast on the BBC in 2001. It was adapted into a bilingual movie Deham which was directed by Govind Nihalani in 2002.

In this futuristic play, a transnational, pharmaceutical company named InterPlanta Services is in the business of providing healthy organs to its wealthy, aging, and unwell First World customers. The healthy organs for transplantation are procured from the impoverished and racially subjugated parts of the world. In the play, we also find that the humans who serve as donors are groomed and taken care of in a healthy viable environment for whole body transplants. Harvest progresses through five main characters and the story closes with the literal and figurative elimination of all the characters except one.

The three main categories of characters in the play are the Donors, Receivers, and the Agents and Guards. Each of these categories represents a socio-cultural class. The Donors stand for the impoverished class which includes Om Prakash, who signed up for a job with InterPlanta services, his wife Jaya, his brother Jeetu, who is a prostitute, and their mother Ma, Indumati, who dislikes Jaya. They live in a chawl in Mumbai and represent the indigent Third World nation. The Receiver is Ginni/Virgil who represents the First World. The third group is the Guards and Agents – the interface between the Donors and Receivers. They represent the corporation that facilitates organ harvesting. The Donors sacrifice their personal freedom and privacy in exchange for the material comforts provided by the corporation on behalf of the Receivers.

The digitization of identities in Harvest (the Prakash family is under constant surveillance through the ‘Contact Module’, a virtual meeting platform), and a separation from the physical form foreground a blurring of boundaries along the categories of technology, gender, and humanity.

As the play progresses, it is revealed that the male bodies are harvested for their organs whereas the female bodies are nourished and secured for their wombs as the First World women have lost their ability to reproduce. Subsequently, Virgil offers to impregnate Jaya. However, she refuses to accept the offer and threatens to take her life. She is the only character in the play who is assertive about her personal rights over her life and body. Harvest can therefore be read as a feminist science fiction play as well.

The commodification of human body parts is a dismal reflection of human greed, corporate profit, and an economy of death. Lesley Sharp’s cultural study of transplant medicine argues,

today the human body is a treasure trove of reusable parts, including the major organs (lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, intestine, and bowel); tissue (a category that includes bone, bone marrow, ligaments, corneas, and skin); reproductive fragments (sperm, ova, placenta, and fetal tissue); as well as blood, plasma, hair, and even the whole body (11).

Manjula Padmanabhan’s depiction of organ harvesting in Harvest is not about cadaveric donations of body organs, but real time breeding and grooming of healthy viable bodies from which organs can be taken out depending on the age and ailment related requirements of the receivers. This also appropriates the language of capitalism as the demand and supply of this invaluable commodity keeps increasing. Moreover, capitalist medical practices facilitate organ transplantation for life sustenance, prolonging of life, and for body augmentation and modification. This commodification of the human body is without social and moral conscience. Nevertheless, Harvest grants agency to the female lead character Jaya to question the capitalist, materialist, dehumanised treatment of human body and life.

Padmanabhan wrote her first play Lights Out (1984) from a sense of guilt and shock. As she elaborated in an interview with Sharmila Joshi, the riots and the ruthless brutality that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 made her reassess the collective paralysis of the society and the lack of an ideological stance in her literary contribution. The play is based on a real-life incident about the frequent rapes in a middle-class locality in Mumbai, where instead of helping the victim, the entire neighborhood resorted to a set of absurd practices like switching off the lights when the crime recurred or avoided dinner at that time. Lights Out makes a visible statement — it questions the absence of compassion among individuals. The play does not offer solutions but it urges the readers and viewers to take responsibility for the sake of humanity and to foreground the affective quality of compassion towards fellow beings. Kelly Oliver suggests, “the victims of oppression, slavery, and torture are not merely seeking visibility and recognition, but they are also seeking witnesses to horrors beyond recognition” (79). Lights Out emphasises the need for witnessing. It goes beyond the politics of representation to suggest strategies of affect, accountability, and retribution. The representation of the victim in Lights Out questions the authenticity of depicting and witnessing the pain of the ‘Other.’ Quite strikingly, the woman who is raped in the play never appears on the stage except in terms of her screams. This mode of representation symbolizes the larger context of women’s helpless screams. Though neither Harvest nor Lights Out gained a lot of attention when they appeared, the themes discussed in these plays are now ideological commonplace.

This section looks at Padmanabhan’s novels and short stories which negate gender binaries and construct a dystopic matriarchal solidarity. Unprincess! (2005) is a collection of three children’s stories that deconstruct the traditional representations of a fairy-tale princess. Each of the stories subverts and questions the stereotypical caricatures of princesses as petite damsels in distress, waiting for their gowns and ballrooms. These stories interrogate patriarchal constructions of womanhood and validate its existence beyond such restrictive parameters.

Padmanabhan interrogates the question of gender using the lens of postcolonialism and ecological concerns. These contingencies are seemingly disconnected, yet her works present a convincing case for the emergence of feminist science fiction as a postcolonial phenomenon. Feminist science fiction echoes the (anti)colonial narratives of postcolonial writers. The characters question their subjugated positions, and exhibit a subversive potential to challenge the normative. Padmanabhan presents womanhood as subaltern in terms of gender as well as by virtue of being a postcolonial subject. In Harvest, there is a commodification of body parts from the Third World countries, which includes the purchase of wombs. This can be viewed as a continuation of the colonial project of commodifying and exploiting the resources of the East. In Padmanabhan’s more recent dystopic fiction Escape, women are absent within the world of the novel, and the act of reproduction occurs through technology-assisted-cloning.

In the novels Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015), Padmanabhan creates a dystopic world where gender itself is challenged. These narratives trace the life of a young girl, Meiji, who escapes the civil war and a genocide that erases all women in a certain region. Having grown up in a world with no women, Meiji finds the differences between a man and a woman’s bodies truly puzzling. This biological difference and its rarity in the dystopian world highlight the politics of gender in our society. Moreover, Escape depicts the sociotechnical design and the future of gender. It is a study of the discrimination of women through female foeticide which is still popular in many parts of India. In other words, it portrays the position of women within a state apparatus which is otherwise vocal about technological flawlessness and gender equality.

Padmanabhan’s imagination of the future of gender gestures at technological determinism, and a technological reshaping of our material relations with the world. Padmanabhan suggests that changes in socio-technological relations may effect our notions of gender. In Escape, women are not even required for reproduction. Male species reproduce by cloning themselves as and when required. Women are no longer ‘useful’ for sexual pleasure either, since heterosexuality has been replaced with homosexuality. This model of a civilisation ruptures the relations between human beings, and processes such as procreation and sex, because technology replaces, or at least determines, the processes. Within this context of a technological reconfiguration of feminist speculative fiction, Sherryl Vint proposes that

what is needed, then, is not merely more women but a ‘gendered makeover’ of the technological imagination itself. Technologies come embedded with systems of values that have been built into their design, often without one consciously reflecting on this fact because the hegemonic values present themselves as if there were no alternatives to them. (5) Padmanabhan critiques the invalidation of women’s contemporary roles. As Esterino Adami suggests,

it evokes the classic sci-fi theme of eradication of individuality in favour of an identity-less and dehumanised wholeness, devoid of selfhood and conscience, whilst on the other, it dramatises the treatment of women, when they are considered nearly a burden in Indian society given their liminal position. (“Feminist” 3)

The position of women in Padmanabhan’s works connects feminist science fiction with postcolonialism. In patriarchal societies that are known to deny women’s identity and marginalise women because of their life-bearing capacities, the location of Padmanabhan’s contemporary works is noteworthy. They explore non-conforming alternatives in postcolonial countries like India. While extending alternative femininities, Padmanabhan’s work splices women with Nature in postcolonial societies, showing how both are exploited, and thus, calls for an “oriental ecofeminism” (Panda 72).

In Escape, uncontrolled pollution and continued storage of nuclear waste from the West have transformed India into a wasteland. The nation devoid of women recalls popular practices like female infanticide and the decline of sex ratio in contemporary India. Padmanabhan’s short stories like “Gandhi-Toxin,” “2099,” “Sharing Air” etc from the collection Kleptomania also deal with environmental anxiety. Her science fiction addresses humanity’s tendency towards self-destruction and anthropogenic ecocide.

Manjula Padmanabhan is also credited as India’s first woman cartoonist and she earned this title while writing and illustrating a comic strip with the central character Suki for The Sunday Observer (1982-1986) and The Pioneer (1991-1997). Suki was one of the earliest comics from India when it appeared in newspapers as a comic strip during the 1980s. Suki currently appears once a week in The Hindu’s Business Line, as Sukiyaki. In Peter Griffin’s coverage of the The Hindu’s “Lit for Life” event, Padmanabhan mentions that Suki started as her alter ego and later evolved to become an independent character known for her unruliness and a certain quotidian nature (Griffin np). Suki stands out as she is an emblematic female comic icon of the 1980s India. If one is to compare Indian graphic narratives of the time with their Western counterparts, Suki fills the gap of a relevant woman comic presence in India.

Fig 1: The first panel of “The History of Humankind” Pioneer, New Delhi

Suki’s observations highlight the multiple dimensions of Indian feminist thought. Suki claims an agency for women by questioning the objectification of women in media while also arguing for improved visibility for women. Her social dilemma can be largely understood as the anxieties of the time period. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out,

the connections between the educated bourgeois woman’s knowledge of western literature and her emancipation cannot be offered in the spirit of simple celebration. The costs and limitations of the enterprise are only too apparent: a ‘western’ feminism that essentially promotes the individualism of the singular female subject, and access to which is mediated by an elitism of class and caste positions is clearly limited and problematic. But the fact remains that to a notable extent the rallying cries for the emergent new Indian woman were framed by the literary representations of an Antigone, a Nora Helmer, or a Jane Eyre. (66)

This influence of western feminism is evident in the case of Suki. It can be argued that Padmanabhan’s Suki witnessed the evolution of India as a nation-state through its radical transformations like the rise to power of women political leaders, the establishment of modern banking systems and the introduction of new communication technologies in the 1980s. Suki has responded to normative gender roles, climate change, existential questions, financial crisis, economic inequality, religion, spirituality, extra-terrestrial beings, racism, foreign travels, body shaming, romance, etc. She is a signifier of an educated Indian woman in the 1980s, who questions the injustices around her – a radical presence in the graphic narrative medium. In fact, Suki is outspoken and responds to corruption in very creative ways, as in the following conversation:

Fig 2: “The Protesting Reader”, Sunday Observer, Bombay

Padmanabhan is an artist who located herself within the context of coming-of-age of ‘Indian English’ as a medium of creative expression in post-1980s.

Select List of Works by Manjula Padmanabhan

Padmanabhan, Manjula. Taxi. Hachette India, 2023

—. Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities. Hachette India, 2023

—. Shrinking Vanita. Tulika, 2021.

—. Blood and Laughter: Plays. Hachette India, 2020.

—. Laughter and Blood: Performance Pieces. Hachette India, 2020.

—. Getting there. Hachette UK, 2020.

—. Lights Out. Worldview Publications, 2020.

—. The Island of Lost Girls. Hachette India, 2015.

—. Three Virgins and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2013.

—. Escape. Hachette India, 2008.

—. I Am Different! Can You Find Me? Tulika Books, 2007.

—. Double Talk. Penguin, 2005.

—. Unprincess! Penguin, 2005.

—. Kleptomania: Ten Stories. Penguin Books India, 2004.

—. Mouse Invaders. Macmillan Childrens Books, 2004

—. Mouse Attack. Macmillan Childrens Books, 2003

—. Harvest. Kali for Women, 1997.

—. Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Stories. Kali for Women, 1996.

Works Cited and Consulted

Adami, Esterino. “Waste-Wor(l)ds as Parables of Dystopian ‘Elsewheres’ in Postcolonial Speculative Discourse.” Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 91-102.

—. “Feminist Science Fiction as a Postcolonial Paradigm.” Institutional Research Information System. University of Turin, 2010

Gilbert, Helen. “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Global Technoscapes and the International Trade in Human Body Organs.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 123-130.

Griffin, Peter. “Manjula Padmanabhan described the evolution of Suki in her illustrated talk.” The Hindu. 21 Jan. 2019. https://www.thehindu.com/lit-for-life/manjula-padmanabhan-described-the-evolution-of-suki-in-her-illustrated-talk/article26048831.ece?homepage=true .

Joshi, Sharmila. “I Wrote Under Compulsion of an Extreme Sense of Guilt and Shock.” Sunday Observer, August 1986.

Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Padmanabhan, Manjula. “Strip the Skin.” The Outlook, 05 Feb. 2022. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/strip-the-skin/267567 .

Panda, Punyashree and Panchali Bhattacharya. “Oriental Ecofeminism Contrasting Spiritual and Social Ecofeminism in Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape”. UNITAS: An International Online Peer-reviewed Open-access Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society, vol. 92, no. 2, 2019, pp. 72-96.

Pande, Rekha. “The History of Feminism and Doing Gender in India.” Revista Estudos Feministas, vol. 26, no.3, 2018.https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584-2018v26n358567.

Sharp, Lesley A. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and The Transformed Self. University of California Press, 2006.

Vint, Sherryl, and Sümeyra Buran, editors. Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction. Palgrave, 2022.

Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan on IWE Online

Jul 13

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Ved Mehta: A Critical Biography | Durba Mukherjee

By IWE Online Critical Biography No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Mukherjee, Durba. “Ved Mehta: A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 July 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ved-mehta-a-critical-biography-durba-mukherjee/.

Chicago:
Mukherjee, Durba. “Ved Mehta: A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online. July 13, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ved-mehta-a-critical-biography-durba-mukherjee/.

Ved Parkash Mehta (21 March, 1934 – 9 January, 2021) was born in Lahore in the erstwhile undivided India in a middle-class, Hindu family. He was an author and a journalist based in Manhattan, New York, and contributed to the New Yorker for around three decades. Mehta succumbed to Parkinson’s at the age of eighty-six. Blinded by meningitis when he was only four, Mehta’s prolific literary career is a remarkable achievement, not merely for its exhaustive volume, but also for the detailed graphic accounts that frequently feature in his texts. With limited access to education since amenities for Braille learning were almost non-existent in India during Mehta’s upbringing, his literary career is an example of grit and a unique self-fashioning. Not only was it a fact, during his milieu, that visually impaired persons in India found a professional career nearly impossible and the only decent alternative was to become a music teacher, but also most of them lived a life of poverty and dependency. In The Ledge between the Streams, Mehta reminisces, “‘I knew what I didn’t want to be—a beggar, shopkeeper, or street hawker” (80). He adds, “singing may be about the only profession that can provide a respectable livelihood for a blind person” (80). But he was reluctant to pursue it professionally. He was sent to Dadar School for the Blind, Mumbai (founded in 1900), a primary school that is located some fourteen hundred kilometres away from his family in Lahore. At the age of five, Mehta experienced an early dissociation from his familial home to which he returned after a preliminary training, but his stay was curtailed by the violence of partition.

With Lahore declared as part of the Islamic state of Pakistan in 1947, most surviving members of Mehta’s family found themselves uprooted as refugees in India. [1] Once in India, Mehta’s immediate family moved to Shimla, where his father was posted as the director of the Public Health Department, East Punjab. During their stay, Mehta often visited the refugee camps around Ambala along with his father, while the latter was on his duty-vigils. It was on these visits with the senior Mehta that the author found himself overwhelmed by the state of homelessness and poverty of the refugees. This experience propelled him further to seek formal education because he believed it to be the only antidote to unemployment and poverty. At around the same time, he moved to Dehradun’s St. Dunstan’s for basic Braille training. Braille copies of English texts in India were rare but it was during his stay at Dunstan’s for a period of eight months that Mehta read a few Braille English books and magazines available in the library and grasped rudimentary English from his interactions with the Scottish gentleman who ran the school. After repeated failed attempts to enrol himself at American institutes due to the lack of his formal schooling and limited knowledge of English, a fifteen- year-old Mehta finally found acceptance at Arkansas School for the Blind and he moved to America. His training at Arkansas, was followed by a bachelor’s degree at Pomona College. Mehta went to Oxford for his second bachelor’s degree in history, and later returned to Harvard for his master’s degree. Since then, Mehta had been mostly living in the west, finally settling down in Manhattan, New York, where he breathed his last.

Repeated displacements, partition experiences and trauma of communal riots had strong and lasting impressions on his mind. His return to India after his education at Oxford in late 1959 was preceded by a phase of self-introspection in terms of his socio-cultural and national belonging which he records in his autobiographical work, Face to Face. If Face to Face (1957) can be considered Mehta’s earliest attempt at engaging with his identity vis-à- vis his displacements, then his first travel memoir, Walking the Indian Streets (1960, originally published in parts in the New Yorker), foregrounds his hopes of nostalgically restoring an Indian homeland through his return and re-engagement with the physical space of India. Indeed, the repeated dislocations, his sense of cultural belongingness to India, hinged on the Nehruvian appeal that underlined the Indian middle-class milieu created a deep desire of returning to and contributing towards building a modern India. As he travelled across the subcontinent Mehta realised that the “reality [of India] was too much with [him]” (Face to Face 119), despite his initial insistence. The desire of restoring his homeland being thwarted on his physical engagement with the country, which is the problem that informs his literature of return on India (for details on Mehta’s literature of return, see Durba Mukherjee and Sayan Chattopadhyay), Mehta goes onto engage deeper with his understanding of self within his socio-historical context. As a consequence, Mehta turns repeatedly to the autobiographical genre as a literary form, and, through the course of his life, writes a formidable compendium, titled, the Continents of Exile. The collection strings together a vast body of writings about the authorial self. The collection begins with the autobiographical texts, Daddyji (1972) and its accompanying text, Mamaji (1979) that chalks up the familial trajectories of his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, and his mother, Shanti devi Mehta nee Mehra, and how they strongly shaped his own identity as a modern Indian through his early days. While the first is the story of his father and his Hindu family’s migration from a rural India to a modern, urban, colonial India and his initiation into an Indian middle-class identity, the second, as Mehta describes, is the story of his mother, who was born in an urban, colonial India and her side of the Hindu family that sought to “consolidate its place” (1979, i) within the changes brought about by the colonial history of the country.

Subsequently, Mehta wrote Vedi (1982) as an attempt to re-visit and make sense of his atypical days of schooling and Braille training at Dadar, between February 1939 and May 1943, among children, who were either waifs or belonged to economically marginalised families. The children all spoke the regional language, Marathi, which the Punjabi-born Mehta picked up soon, indicating his capacity to adapt to an unfamiliar space that is further revealed in the next memoir. These three texts are followed by a revision of Mehta’s debut-memoir, Face to Face, and is titled, The Ledge Between the Streams (1984). The text re-drafts his experience of partition by revisiting his notion of the Indian sub-continent as his familial home and his contrasting experience of finding his identity through the Western education system and the institutes of education in the West. In his next book, Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986), Mehta reveals that it is in America that he finds a sense of social freedom for the first time as he learns to navigate the streets by himself, unlike in his childhood in India, where he would feel uncomfortably conspicuous due to his visual impairment. Torn between his initial longing to return to India, which he still identified as his homeland, and his new-found sense of belonging to America, the book depicts the guilts and yearnings that shaped his adolescence as he moved to California from Arkansas. The Stolen Light (1989), that was published next, takes his readers through his intimate adolescent life, heart-breaks, and his search for a sense of security in the spaces that homed him till date. Up at Oxford (1993) is a curious description of Mehta living his childhood dream of being at Oxford and his encounters with his fellow Oxonians, W.H. Auden, Peter Levi, Allen Ginsberg, Isaiah Berlin, E.M. Forster, Dom Moraes, etc. in the 1950s as a student at Balliol College.

Unlike his previous books that grapple with his evolving sense of identity with regard to the societies that he encounters, Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing (1998) is a book that commemorates Mr. William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987 through his personal interactions, letters, and interviews, and portrays him as a major influence on Mehta’s career as a journalist. All for Love (2001) and Dark Harbour: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island (2003) are two very intimate accounts of finding his emotional bearing in the States through a period of quest for companionship and a home-space respectively. The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period (2004) is another intimate disclosure of his father’s clandestine affair and through the process of writing an effort on his part to understand more closely the senior Mehta. [2]

Quite early in his career, Mehta also wrote Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1963) based on his interactions with some of the prominent British historians and philosophers. In the course of the book, Mehta hosts a light-hearted, very British banter regarding scholarly ideas, rigorously discussed among the British intellectuals of his time. He takes up the identity of a critical spectator and through a presentation of his lively encounters with British intellectuals, like the Oxford philosophers, who are often expostulated as “linguistic philosophers” (1963, 5), or historians belonging to the coterie of the “New Cambridge Modern History” (248), who are often accused of being “dull and static” (248), argue for the case of a compassionate approach towards their individual frailties through his personal interactions with them. Mehta also wrote The New Theologian (1966), where he dealt with Right Reverend John Robinson’s theological ideas that created a stir in British society. [3]

Commending his work on India, after the publication of The Ledge between the Streams, Robin Lewis, a professor of Indian literature at Columbia University, stated in an interview that was published in the Times, “[in] a very quiet way, Ved Mehta is breaking the Western stereotypes and getting America to look at India as something other than a grandiose stage setting” (qtd. in Smith). Lewis added, “[he’s] taking the raw material of his personal experience and combining it with some of the pains, crises and historical dislocations that India has gone through” (qtd. in Smith). Apparently, Ledge between the Streams might seem like a cursory revision of Mehta’s 1959-memoir, Face to Face, being published at a later juncture of his writing career as an autobiographer. Yet, read in the light of Mehta’s re-engagement with the physical space of the Indian subcontinent on his returns and the near twenty-five years of self-introspection that separated the two books, one finds some interesting revisions that characterise the latter text. In Face to Face, Mehta writes about “tragedy, division, and change” (x; foreword) with regard to the Indian partition that he witnessed as a child at Lahore and Rawalpindi under the sub-section “India and Home.”

However, with subsequent returns to the subcontinent years after the traumatic experience, Mehta in the later text abandons the subtitle, “India and Home” and resorts to shorter chapters individually titled that signified distinct experiences that are outlined in his memory and shaped his identity, like “The Two Lahores,” “January, 1947,” and “February.” The switch in nomenclature in the latter text marks his transformation, as Mehta no longer seeks to restore his Indian home in his writing, like he sought to do in the earlier memoir, but merely reflects on the loss and change that he experienced. In turn, he also steps closer to the understanding that his Indian home is merely a feeble shadow of his familial home of Lahore, or the homeland that he sought to identify with. Besides the trauma of partition, Mehta reveals his sense of acute proprioceptive crisis while in India which is revealed in a statement, quoted from a personal conversation with the author by Maureen Dowd in his article for The New York Times Magazine, “[the] basic wound of growing up in the India of my childhood was that blindness was considered sexually crippling.” Also, with the critical scholarship in India framed by nationalistic consciousness in the decades after Indian independence, literatures in other Indian languages were prioritised over English (for details on the debate about the use of English in India, see Sadana 16 – 18; Jussawalla), and often within Indian writing in English, like most early sections of postcolonial writings, the critical approach was to marginalise elitist (read Anglicised here) authorial voices (for details, see Lazarus xiii) writing about the postcolonial (read Indian) society. In turn, though Mehta’s texts about India found a significant readership in the West, primarily in America, his voice as a critic of modern India seems to be explored only marginally. It is thus understandable that Mehta not only embraced America, the country that honoured him with the MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, for the acceptance that he found in the country as an author, but also, as he puts it, “America […] did not hold blind men at arm’s length” (Face to Face 183).

His sense of belongingness, therefore, to America and his coming to terms with the facts that neither can he restore his imagined homeland in India, nor will he find his professional grounding in the subcontinent, in turn, resulted in his lengthy and often critical discourse about India, writing from his metropolitan First-World perspective, through which he found a sense of agency that he lacked in his earlier days. Further, even though dislocations underlined Mehta’s search for a sense of belonging, and in turn, interrogate his self-identity, he was largely influenced by his colonial middle-class background. Consequently, Mehta’s life and literary trajectory sustain two significant characteristics of his immediate literary predecessors within Indian literature in English. First, his writing is primarily concerned with his self-fashioning as a middle-class, westernised gentleman which explains Mehta’s choice of the autobiographical form for most of his writings. [4] Second, his returns to India and the period of his stay in the subcontinent is inextricably woven into his exploration of India, and subsequently, his own Indian identity through his middle-class sensibilities. [5] Once he was able to resolve the crisis that he was faced with on the loss of his imagined Indian homeland and could accept his diasporic identity in that that despite making New York his home he could find his grounding in India through his writing, Mehta more readily gravitated towards the genre of literary journalism about India.

In turn, his Portrait of India (1970), Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles (1977), A Family Affair: India under Three Prime Ministers (1982), and Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom (1994) are not only some of the early attempts at literary journalism within the field of Indian English literature, but can also be considered the author’s attempts at politically portraying the heteroglossia that is India. The first book on Gandhi attempts to understand one of the most popular mass-leaders of 20^th-century India through the eyes of his disciples. By espousing Gandhi’s unwavering task of alleviating poverty, caste-system, and marginalisation through non-violence, the book draws a closer image of the figure through the eyes of his closest disciples. Subsequently, as Mehta suggests, though none of his disciples conceives of Gandhi as a hypocrite, it is ironic that the ideals that he upheld could mostly be sustained by individuals trained within the colonial discourses of humanism and rationalism. Interestingly, Mehta critiques Gandhi as a paradox as much as he found India as a country to be in the first place (Walking the Indian Streets 12). Likewise, Mehta’s next book, A Family Affair, is simultaneously a critique of the India under Indira Gandhi’s rule and that of the Janata coalition in Indian politics in portraying the widening gap between a secular-minded, Western-style educated middle-class and an atavistic, populist, caste-prejudiced section of the Indian population. Further, from the days of his initial dejection of and a feeble suspicion of Nehruvian socialism and its failure in eradicating poverty, as can be observed in his earlier texts, the last two biographical works are more directly critical of the economic system as he suggests that the government has instead led to a steady rise of sycophants and social-climbers, who have systematically disrupted a secular and uniform development of the country that was envisaged during the days of its emergence as an independent nation. Yet, apart from his laconic observations, Mehta fashions these four texts as representations of the late-twentieth-century India in the form of a collage of his interactions with people and the conversations that he overheard.

In fact, by the time Mehta engages with the political, socio-cultural, religious aspects of India in his first piece of literary journalism in the early 1970s, he had already established himself as a journalist, having worked for the New Yorker (which he joined in 1961) for around a decade. It is interesting to note that Mehta had once aspired an academic career. However, as he writes in the introductory essay of his book, The Ved Mehta Reader (1998), that it was while he was at Oxford that Mehta first developed a discerning eye for individual voice and writing-style by reading classical authors but, more importantly, as he writes, patiently writing and revising, persistently focusing on the “economy of thought and language” (xii). With patience and practice, Mehta built his style of prose-writing that read both eloquent, yet, practical and ironically pictured people and places with careful details, allowing him to live an authorial persona that was boldly visual. Perhaps, the world that he was dealing with in his writings vividly remained etched in his imagination, especially when considered that Mehta was visually capable till he was a boy of four, providing him with the zeal to engage with autobiographical literature at the early stage of his literary career. Having successfully produced some of his memoirs, it is understandable that Mehta employed his professional expertise to explore his country of origin when he was not employing the form of memoirs. Mehta’s choice of writing memoirs offered him a space to engage with his evolving self-fashioning as an author, whose identity was as much shaped by his affiliations to India, as it was informed by his association with America and England. In contrast, Mehta’s choice of the genre of literary journalism allowed him to parallelly project his association with the kind of cosmopolitanism that allowed him to be a metropolitan observer, who is writing about his country of origin, India. It is thus that in a later interview Mehta says, and Dowd quotes, “I don’t belong to any single tradition. I am an amalgam of five cultures – Indian, British, American, blind and The New Yorker.” Mehta’s identification of himself in such terms, late in his life, was an outcome of his acceptance of the various aspects that he earlier perceived as at odds with each other, just like his anxiety of returning to the physical space of India and settling down in the country was looked upon as a disjunction with his Indian identity. Contrastingly, through his writings and over the course of time, Mehta realised that he can as well shape his Indian identity through his engagement with the country in his writings, while being settled in any part of the world. Likewise, he sought to make up for his visual impairment through the visual images in his texts. As an author, Mehta’s multiculturalism is more an assertion of the facets of his identity that he consciously built in his writings as he evolved through his experiences rather than a blind acceptance of the experiences that shaped him.

Apart from a significant body of autobiographical and journalistic writings about India, Mehta also wrote several journalistic essays on philosophical and intellectual topics that are published in the collection, A Ved Mehta Reader: the Craft of the Essay (1998). A postscript by the New Yorker, “Remembering the Longtime New Yorker Writer Ved Mehta,” states that the essay, “A Battle Against the Bewitchment of our Intelligence” (originally published in 1961) that dabbles with the intellectual debates of the 1950s British society is one of the most intellectually stimulating and, simultaneously, compassionate in tone. Another book by Mehta, John is Easy to Please (1971), is an engagement with Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Besides, Mehta authored Photographs of Chachaji (1980) that was adapted into a documentary and he is also the author of a short novel titled, Delinquent Chacha (1991) with an anglophile protagonist born in colonial India, who is nostalgic for colonial rule in independent India. Mehta’s Three Stories of the Raj (1986) is a collection of short stories and deals with the socio-political situation of India under the colonial regime. Stories such as “Four Hundred and Twenty” highlight discrepancies between British law and the disparity when it comes to practicing the same in the colonies. The collection also embodies nostalgic portrayals of changing value systems, from traditional Indian societies to postcolonial, modern India, as in the stories, “The Music Master” and “Sunset”. The stories are first-person reflections of a sensitive and humane observer, elegantly sewing his memories together. Mehta also wrote a terse, journalistic enquiry of India during Indira Gandhi’s regime, titled The New India (1978), expressing a sense of disillusionment with the new India that he saw take shape since the two and a half decades of its independence. Despite his personal transformations as an author, from being a hopeful Indian citizen to a disillusioned Indian expatriate, and a vast spectrum of subjects that his writings deal with, what remains constant throughout Mehta’s writing career, is the ability to paint vivid visual details. Besides contesting his physical sense of lack that informed his childhood and adolescence in India in his adoption of a bold visual persona, it can be added that Mehta consciously harboured a keen, almost boastful, ability to portray his surroundings, exemplifying which, his Portrait of India opens with:

I present myself at nine o’clock at the Imperial Hotel, an embarkation point for city tours […] I take a seat in the front of the first bus, near the guide, who is an elderly Sikh with a long beard. He is clad in dingy beige turban, a patched beige tweed coat, loose gray flannels, and brown sandals, with a white drip-dry shirt, which is the only immaculate part of his dress; the shirt is open at the neck, showing a bit of maroon neckcloth. (6)

Another interesting aspect of Mehta’s writing is the fact that though he talks in detail about his blindness and his adaptations in getting around and keeping pace with the world in Face to Face, he chooses not to refer to it at all in Walking the Indian Streets, except for its preface. Speaking about Mr. Shawn’s influence on Mehta, Hemachandran Karah notes, “Mr. Shawn counselled the writer not to dwell on his blindness unless it is the theme of his work. […] For Mr. Shawn, blindness seemed like a narrative theme rather than a mere sensory deprivation. […] As a true Shishya to Mr. Shawn, Mehta dwells on the theme of his blindness only when he writes specifically about it” (“Blindness, Lockean Empiricism, and The Continent of Britain” 263). Also, in wilfully underplaying his blindness in his body of writing, Mehta recreates for himself an independent authorial identity, that is as much sensorily plugged-in to the surrounding, as imaginatively invested in the space/subject that he chooses to portray. [6]

Endnotes

The traumatic memory of partition that complicated Mehta’s association with India was further aggravated by the crisis of secularism in modern India and he engaged with the issue of fundamentalism in India in his analytical work, “The Mosque and the Temple: The Rise of Fundamentalism” (1993).

The article, “Mehta, Ved 1934-” in the Cengage website, https:// encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/mehta-ved-1934 , very comprehensively summarises the contents of the eleven texts in Continents of Exile besides talking about Mehta’s writing career. It also provides a comprehensive list of all the awards and fellowships that Ved Mehta won during his lifetime.

It is to be noted that most of Mehta’s texts were originally published in parts in The New Yorker.

Most colonial Indian middle-class returnees after a period of dislocation in the west, have engaged with the genre of life-writing. Thus, Indian writing in English has a vast repertoire of life writings from the early twentieth century onwards by writers like Surendra Nath Banerjea, Cornelia Sorabji, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Santha Rama Rau.

Mehta’s trajectory of self-fashioning as is explored in his life writing, Walking the Indian Streets, when read alongside Dom Moraes’s Gone Away (1960) who was his peer at college in Oxford and a fellow traveller across India in 1959, provide two very different engagements with the subject of returning to and self-fashioning vis-à-vis one’s country of origin.

Two unique views on the way Mehta negotiates with his visual challenge are explored by Hemachandran Karah (2012; 2018) and John M. Slatin (1986).

Primary Sources

Mehta, Ved. All for Love. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001.

—. Daddyji. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

—. Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

—. Delinquent Chacha, Harper, 1967.

—. Face to Face: An Autobiography. Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1957.

—. A Family Affair: India under Three Prime Ministers. Oxford UP, 1982.

—. Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals.1963. 2nd ed., Columbia UP, 1983.

—. John Is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971.

—. The Ledge between the Streams. W.W. Norton, 1984.

—. Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles. 1977. 2nd ed., Yale UP, 1993.

—. Mamaji. Oxford UP, 1979.

—. The New India, Viking, 1978.

—. The New Theologian, Harper, 1965.

—. The Photographs of Chachaji: The Making of a Documentary Film. Oxford UP, 1980.

—. Portrait of India. 1970. Revised ed., Yale UP, 1993.

—. The Red Letters, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.

—. Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom. Yale UP, 1994.

—. Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing. Overlook Press, 1998.

—. Sound-Shadows of the New World, W.W. Norton, 1986.

—. The Stolen Light, W.W. Norton, 1989.

—. Three Stories of the Raj, Scholar Press, 1986.

—. Up at Oxford, W.W. Norton, 1993.

—. Vedi. Oxford UP, 1982.

—. A Ved Mehta Reader: The Craft of the Essay. Yale UP, 1998.

—. Walking the Indian Streets. 1960. revised ed., Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

Secondary Sources

Dowd, Maureen. “A Writing Odyssey through India: Past and Present.” New York Times, June 10 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/10/magazine/a-writing-odyssey-through-india-past-and-present.html. Accessed 30 May 2023.

Encyclopedia.com. “Mehta, Ved 1934-.” Cengage. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/mehta-ved-1934. Accessed 13 June 2023.

Karah, Hemachandran. “Blindness, Lockean Empiricism, and The Continent of Britain: An Examination of the Identities of Mr. Spectator and Theseus in the Writings of Ved Mehta.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol 6, no. 3, 2012, pp. 259–274.

Karah, Hemachandran. “Blind Culture and Cosmologies: Notes from Ved Mehta’s Continent of India.” Disability in South Asia, edited by Anita Ghai, Sage, 2018, pp. 215–227.

Lazarus, Neil. “Introducing Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 1 – 16.

Mehta, Ved. Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals.1963. 2nd ed., Columbia UP, 1983.

Mukherjee, Durba and Sayan Chattopadhyay. “‘Walking the Indian Streets’: Analyzing Ved Mehta’s Literature of Return,” Life Writing, vol 19, no. 3, 2022, pp. 423 – 440.

Postscript. “Remembering the Longtime New Yorker Writer Ved Mehta.” The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/ved-mehta-1934-2021 . Accessed 13 June 2023.

Sadana, Rashmi. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India. U of California P, 2012.

Slatin, John M. 1986. “Blindness and Self-Perception: The Autobiographies of Ved Mehta.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, 1986, pp. 173–193.

Smith, Harrison. “Ved Mehta, whose monumental autobiography explored life in India, dies at 86.” The Washington Post, 11 Jan., 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ved-mehta-dead/2021/01/11/b2aba446-5420-11eb-a08b-f1381ef3d207_story.html. Accessed 30 May 2023.

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Indian Crime Fiction in English | Lakshmy Ravindranathan

By IWE Online Essay, Survey No Comments

As a genre that has existed since the nineteenth century, crime fiction is popularly confused with detective fiction, although scholars of the genre discern nuances in the usage of the terms. In the traditional history, crime fiction in English stems from Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), featuring C Auguste Dupin (Priestman 2). However, according to Ian A. Bell, the history of crime writing in English can be traced back to the publication of seemingly “true narratives” of criminal lives and their “(often fabricated) last confessions” which were generically known as the Newgate Calendar in the eighteenth century (7). Later, a body of fiction which chronicled the exploits of popular robbers, murderers, and bandits grew extremely popular between the 1830s and 1860s; today this narrative type is referred to as the Newgate novel. According to Ernest Mandel’s analysis of crime fiction in relation to the evolution of capitalism, the literature eulogising roguery eventually transformed into detective fiction by the end of the nineteenth century and the bandit was replaced by the rational detective in the protagonist’s role because of the strengthening of the bourgeois social order (8-9).

The Newgate Calendar and the Newgate novel cannot be classified as narratives of detection since they foreground transgressive behaviour and the corporeal punishments meted out to criminals by the legal system. In addition, Priestman points out that they lacked the “‘textual space’ for the figure of the detective” (3). The first English story which valourised the prowess of the detective was Poe’s “Murders”. The detective story depicted crimes against individual property and persons that were solved conclusively by a detective. Famous successors to the pattern established by Poe were Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. Due to its popularity, the nineteenth-century British detective story established a formula — the progression from the reporting of crime to its solution via the genius of the detective — that eventually became stereotyped.

In America the detective story flourished in the form of a variant known as hard-boiled fiction, which featured a professional detective agent who was not averse to relying on violence to solve the cases entrusted by clients. By the second half of the twentieth century fictional writings about crime evolved into variants such as the police procedural, the spy thriller, the crime thriller, and metaphysical detective fiction. Other subgenres include, but are not limited to, fiction featuring feminist, homosexual, African American and Native American detectives. Fictional crime writing has also established its presence in postcolonial nations by featuring detectives with national or regional identities who investigate crimes that are relatable to national audiences.

Charles J. Rzepka highlights the need to differentiate between detective fiction and crime fiction since perceptions of crime and social order have evolved substantially since the nineteenth century. According to Rzepka, crime fiction can be understood as the “voluminous umbrella” term for multiple, overlapping categories of crime writing with each offering particular perceptions of crime, its causes, and its solvability (2). Peter Messent explains detective fiction as a narrative of crime which builds tension till the moment the detective reveals the identity of the culprit (33). On the other hand, crime fiction is the appropriate term to refer to a range of fictional crime writing which introspects on social order and therefore has the capacity to function as “reflective investigations into the state of contemporary society” (Messent 34). While crime fiction could include the triangle of crime, detective, and the guilty, it is more concerned with discerning the social causes of crime. Through this trait crime fiction suggests that crime cannot be contained.

Although crime fiction has been in circulation in India since the nineteenth century, publishers today promote the ‘newness’ of the genre, relegating its Indian history to a “side-note”, as Neele Meyer points out (122). A colonial import, Indian crime fiction first took root as detective stories in commercial Bengali publications for children. In its earliest phase, Bengali detective fiction consisted of direct translations of English detective stories. Shatarupa Sinha explains that Bengali detective fiction evolved into a genre for adult readers very gradually (106). Most of the detectives were modelled closely on the iconic Sherlock Holmes, whose popularity owed much to his keen scientific observation and encyclopaedic knowledge. Since the publication of much nineteenth-century Bengali detective fiction coincided with the release of the Holmes stories in Britain, Sinha suggests that such mimicking might have been an ingenious marketing strategy (107). According to Francesca Orsini, the blind adoption of Englishness should be interpreted as Bengal’s assimilation of colonial modernity and its acceptance of colonial structures and social hierarchy (436).

Hindi detective fiction was known as jasusi upanyas, but the term was also applied to adventure thrillers. Orsini places nineteenth-century Hindi detective fiction as part of “a more general trend: the growth of a commercial literature of entertainment which was part of, and sustained, an entertainment industry comprising theatre, songs and music” (447). Detective fiction in Hindi was discontinuous with the Bengali oeuvre, especially since it featured detectives who functioned independently of colonial institutions of law and order. Orsini interprets this disregard as the Hindi heartland’s “own trajectory of adaptation to the colonial regimes” (436). Often, the crimes under investigation connoted the social flux triggered by colonisation and modernity.

In an analysis of early-twentieth-century Urdu detective fiction Markus Daechsel underscores that the stories were actually an amalgamation of indigenous adventure narratives (the dastan) with the formal features of the English detective story (211). Daechsel highlights that publishers treated the genre as a primarily commercial endeavour which was evident in the marketing and packaging of the books designed to catch public attention at the lowest cost possible (206). The stories were popular among the urban youth because they provided a vicarious outlet for the young readers’ individual aspirations which were prohibited by the religious and traditional codes of behaviour in early-twentieth-century India. Just the act of reading detective fiction was considered a fashionable break from tradition since readers perceived the genre “as a marker of sophistication” (Daechsel 222).

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the popularity of regional crime fiction was challenged by the introduction of cable TV entertainment. Hindi detective fiction was at its zenith in the 1980s when the advent of cable television destabilised its popularity. Coupled with the changes initiated by globalisation, Indian readers today are consciously shifting towards English texts, fiction and nonfiction. This transition could have been motivated by the social capital that English signifies, since fluency in the language somehow promises readers that upward social mobility is achievable. Hence, Akriti Mandhwani connects the decrease in the conspicuous consumption of Hindi crime fiction to the lifestyle changes demanded by globalisation: “the new culture of belonging dictates that a reader might as well read a popular, and most importantly, English novel than a popular Hindi one.”

The earliest English crime fiction centring on India could be Philip Meadows Taylor’s fictionalised account of a criminal in Confessions of a Thug (1839). India is an important presence in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) too as the mystery in the plot stems from the theft of a precious stone which was originally placed on the idol of a Hindu deity. The immense popularity of Taylor’s Confessions laid the foundation for the canonical spy novel based on the British Raj: Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). The Mysterious Traders (1915) by S. Mukherjee, S. K. Chettur’s Bombay Murder (1940), and Kamala Sathianadhan’s Detective Janaki (1944) are early crime novels in English written by Indians. H. R. F. Keating, a British crime novelist, wrote a series of novels featuring the humble Inspector Ghote. The first Inspector Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder (1964), won the prestigious Golden Dagger Award. While Keating’s novels are situated in India, his description of the nation was mostly second hand; i.e., he sourced information from friends who had visited India, TV shows, movie clips and newspaper articles. Regardless of the several discrepancies in Keating’s description of India, the Inspector Ghote series is one of the most popular representations of Indian crime fiction in English.

Therefore, while publishers and reviewers highlight Indian crime fiction in English as a direct descendant of English crime fiction, contemporary Indian crime fiction is not a novelty and it emerged from the contexts of capitalism and the commercialisation of entertainment that also nurtured the development of detective fiction in colonial India. These continuities are not emphasised even by contemporary authors who project their works as part of a global current; for example, authors Ashok Banker and Kalpana Swaminathan allude to British crime fiction in their novels.

Today, the term Indian crime fiction in English is applicable to the work of Indian authors residing in the nation (such as Anita Nair and Kalpana Swaminathan). In addition, it is also used to describe writing by diasporic Indians (such as Kishwar Desai) and that of authors who are partly of Indian origin and based outside the nation (such as Sujatha Massey). The works of foreign-born authors settled in India (for instance, Zac O’Yeah) are also categorised as Indian crime fiction in English. So too, is fiction written by authors who are not Indian by birth or citizenship but have great interest in situating their works in the nation (for example, the novels of Tarquin Hall). The commonalities binding this vast corpus of writing are the Indian milieux of the plots, the frequent references to Indian social norms, traditions, lifestyles and popular culture, and the cast of characters who are mostly Indian in terms of origin and residence.

In the twenty-first century, Indian crime fiction in English is among the new genres of Indian fiction which have emerged post-liberalisation. These works are referred to as genre fiction because of their allusion and/or adherence to certain formal and plot-based conventions which distinguish them from other types of fiction. Traditionally, genre is a term applied to differentiate various types of narration (such as the short story, the novel, and drama). Another usage of the term is in reference to the repetition of motifs within certain narrative modes. Such an application has emerged in modern times with the mass production of fiction which is oriented towards particular readerships. Thus, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et. al. emphasise the usage of the term genre fiction for fiction which is a “collection of motifs” and/or which is “produced by new ways of publication and distribution” as part of the “mass cultural genre system” (“Indian Genre Fiction”).

Crime fiction and other Indian genre fiction in English– such as mythology fiction, campus fiction, chick lit – are also referred to as “Indian ‘commercial fiction’ in English” by Suman Gupta, since their publication is dependent on an estimated “profitable career within the Indian market” (46). This market-based fiction is distinguished from ‘literary’/ ‘serious’ Indian English fiction with the latter gaining international visibility, critical recognition, and academic acclaim, while commercial fiction addresses a national audience and is deemed undeserving of attention by literary critics and the academia. Gupta elaborates on this differentiation: “Literary fiction is the respectable face of Indian literature in English abroad and at home, while commercial fiction is the gossipy café of Indian writing in English at home” (“Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’”47).

The tendency to view Indian crime fiction in English as a primarily commercial genre should be explained in relation to India’s economic liberalisation. In 1991, the Indian government under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao ushered in a series of neoliberal economic reforms which facilitated foreign direct investment in various industries. Under the Nehruvian economic model the publishing sector was dominated by Indian establishments; popular Indian fiction in English was largely underacknowledged since “India was generally perceived not to have a large enough readership for English popular fiction” (Meyer 104). Today, however, Indian publishers (such as Rupa, Roli Books, and Aleph Book Company) compete with international publishing houses like Penguin Random House, and Harper Collins. International publishers have considerably regulated and moulded the titles that are produced in the Indian market by encouraging the publication of formats that have reaped success in Western markets. Interestingly, editors’ and publishers’ opinions take precedence and often publishers gauge popular taste before seeking a writer who can deliver according to market demands (Gupta, “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’” 47). Hence, Indian genre fiction in English is visualised and presented as a commodity, rather than as an output of individual, artistic creativity.

The readers of post-millennial Indian genre fiction are young urban middle-class professionals who are sufficiently proficient in English. They could be residents of small towns for whom English fiction provides a gateway to social mobility. The targeted readership also consists of city youth who actively participate in the consumerist lifestyle enabled by the neoliberalist economy. Giraj M. Sharma describes these readers as “jumping up and down the aisles at a bookstore or browsing websites to pick up books that they want to read, books that are written for them” (45).

An aggressive economic logic underpins the contemporary Indian publishing scenario resulting in the promotion of marketable authors and genres. Publishers have introduced novel methods of marketing, and the corporate practice of “[a]dvance launches … organising events and festivals” (Gupta, Contemporary Literature 65) to launch new works and authors is a favoured tactic. Liberalisation has ensured a regular inflow of international bestsellers and fiction by internationally acclaimed writers due to which

[c]ertain sorts of texts simply do not have the opportunity to surface for the gauging of informed readerships; certain sorts of texts are pre-framed in a manner that makes them unavoidably visible before they are read in any meaningful fashion; and certain sorts are pushed on readers in so concerted and predetermined a fashion … that their readerships are circumscribed in advance. (Gupta, Globalization 161)

Hence, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games has gained more visibility via research, awards, book fairs, and media promotion than most other Indian crime fiction; however, very few Indian crime novels in English are distributed internationally. Meyer reasons that Indian authors with a national readership are unwilling to project India in an exotic fashion and this could explain the lack of interest by the international market (9). Another factor is the power imbalance in the publishing sector which demands non-canonical authors from the Global South to pass several levels of gatekeeping by the “centers of literary production” in the North before reaching the global market (Meyer 12). Ed Christian elaborates that regional detective fiction from former colonies receive scant attention, especially if it is not in English. Moreover, English detective fiction from the postcolonial world is not promoted globally unless publishers are certain of their profitability. In addition, publishers are wary of the quality of detective fiction from the non-western parts of the world since the genre has traditionally been associated with low literary credentials (Christian 5).

Interestingly, the list of Indian fiction in English distributed internationally is starkly different from the stories preferred and read by the national audience (Meyer 10). This results in a “circulatory matrix” of “Indian texts by Indian authors being produced in India for Indian readers” (Gupta, “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’” 50). Indian crime fiction in English falls into this circuit, as it is circumscribed by market requirements and the homogenising practices of globalisation.

Two novels that pioneered the recent output of Indian crime fiction in English after liberalisation were Ashok Banker’s Ten Dead Admen, The Iron Bra and Murder and Champagne in 1993. Indian Crime fiction has attracted even ‘serious/literary’ authors; for example, in 2003, Shashi Deshpande published a short story, “Anatomy of a Murder”, which ruminates on the bizarre motives of murder. From 2012 onwards, Anita Nair has written three crime novels in the Inspector Gowda series. Starting with Cut Like Wound (2012) Gowda’s investigations unravel the contradictions between Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism and its underworld of sex trafficking, prostitution, and illegal gambling. Another established name is Vikram Chandra whose short story “Kama” and novel Sacred Games (2006) feature police officer Sartaj Singh. Sahitya Akademi awardee, Jerry Pinto published Murder in Mahim (2017) which directs attention to the prevalence of conventional attitudes towards homosexuality in contemporary Mumbai. Shashi Tharoor’s Riot can be classified as a crime novel since the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s murder is central to the narrative. Prominent illustrator and cartoonist Ravi Shankar Etteth’s The Tiger by the River (2002) is a historical crime novel, while The Village of Widows (2004) features Deputy Police Commissioner Anna Khan. Khan reappears in Etteth’s The Gold of their Regrets (2009) to investigate a murder which took place during World War II.

Sujatha Massey gained international attention with the publication of The Salaryman’s Wife (1997), which debuted the amateur sleuth Rei Shimura who is of mixed white and Japanese ancestry. In 2019, Massey published the first novel in the Perveen Mistry series which is set in early-twentieth-century India. The sleuth Perveen has a degree in law and assists her father at his law firm. The first novel of the series, The Widows of Malabar Hill (2019) won several awards including the Mary Higgins Clark Award and the Agatha Award. Following in the Christie tradition, the Perveen novels are murder mysteries devoid of explicitly violent content. However, the series details Perveen’s personal heartbreaks due to the stigma she has to face as a divorcee. The crimes that Perveen investigates, together with, her personal crises draw attention to women’s limited agency in colonial India.

The Simran Singh novels by Kishwar Desai feature an amateur sleuth who is a social worker by vocation. Through the series Desai exposes the deep-rooted sexism across contemporary India: Witness the Night (2010) unravels the persistence of female foeticide; Origins of Love (2012), exposes the unethical aspect of commercial surrogacy; The Sea of Innocence (2013) shows Simran investigating the gang rape and murder of a tourist in Goa.

Kalpana Swaminathan is a practising paediatrician whose crime series, beginning with Cryptic Death and Other Stories (1997), features a retired police officer called Lalli. A few novels in the Lalli oeuvre are The Page Three Murders (2006), The Gardener’s Song (2007), The Monochrome Madonna (2010), The Secret Gardener (2013), and Greenlight (2017). Lalli’s age, sharp intelligence, and social awareness are reminiscent of Miss Marple, while her penchant for reading and solitude echo the Holmesian tradition. Almost all Lalli novels are murder mysteries situated in the domestic space. Unlike Christie, however, Swaminathan forthrightly blames regressive middle-class attitudes for much of the gender victimisation happening in Indian homes.

Bengaluru-based Zac O’ Yeah, of Swedish origin, uses the city as the backdrop of his series featuring Hari Majestic, a former tout who currently earns a living as a conman. The first novel in the Hari Majestic series was Mr Majestic! The Tout of Bengaluru (2012). This was followed by Hari, a Hero for Hire (2015) and Tropical Detective (2018). O’ Yeah has also authored a police novel titled Once upon a Time in Scandinavistan (2010). O’ Yeah’s novels incorporate the traits of Swedish noir crime fiction, and his detectives, Hari and Herman Barsk, are self-deprecatory men who resignedly accept the recurrent nature of crime.

Vish Puri, who appears in a series authored by the British writer Tarquin Hall, is a middle-aged Punjabi detective who lives in Delhi and runs an agency called Most Private Investigators. A few of the titles — The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (2012), The Case of the Love Commandos (2013), The Case of the Reincarnated Client (2019) — align the novels with the stereotypical exoticisation of India, its culture and food. Moreover, the eponymous detective’s weakness for rich food, his rotund figure and his amicable nature can be interpreted as clichéd representations of the Punjabi community. However, unlike Keating, Hall is quite familiar with Indian culture having worked as a journalist in South Asia, and his knowledge of the region’s society and politics is discernible through the ‘cases’ that Vish Puri investigates.

Smitha Jain’s Piggies on the Railway (2010) shows Kasthuri, a former police officer who currently owns a professional detective service, tracing a missing Bollywood heroine. Piggies has been commended for redefining crime fiction using the tropes of chick lit (Varughese). Jain’s Kkrishnaa’s Confessions (2008) features Kkrishnaa who assumes the role of a sleuth as a consequence of accidentally witnessing a murder. Apart from crime novels, Jain has also published the crime stories “An Education in Murder” (2012), “The Body in the Gali” (2012) and “The Fraud of Dionysus” (2021) in the anthologies Chesapeake Crimes: This Job is Murder, Mumbai Noir and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine respectively.

The Muzaffar Jang mystery series by Madhulika Liddle is probably the most widely read historical Indian crime fiction in English. Currently, Liddle has written three novels, which are set in seventeenth-century Mughal India, as part of the series: The Englishman’s Cameo (2009), Engraved in Stone (2012) and Crimson City (2015). The detective is a young man who is reminiscent of Holmes due to his keen observational ability, intelligence and eccentricity. The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries (2011) is an anthology of Muzaffar’s several cases.

Ankush Saikia’s series featuring the professional detective Arjun Aurora includes Dead Meat (2015), Remember Death (2016), More Bodies will Fall (2018) and Tears of the Dragon (2023). Saikia is also the author of the thrillers The Girl from Nongrim Hills (2013) and Red River, Blue Hills (2015). Saikia weaves the milieu of the noir with that of the hard-boiled as he narrates the gruesome murder cases entrusted to Arjun (Dead Meat opens with a mutilated body in a tandoor) and recounts the complex realities of the North-East.

Anuja Chauhan’s Club you to Death (2021) introduces ACP Bhavani Singh, a maverick police officer who is quite close to retirement. The novel has been adapted as a film for OTT streaming. Chauhan’s second novel The Fast and the Dead (2023) is a mystery adhering to many of the traditions established by Christie. The Fast employs crime as a springboard to discuss issues pertinent to ‘New India,’ i.e. Islamophobia and the hyperpresence of visual media, thereby negotiating the boundaries of crime fiction and the “New India novel”; an emerging body of post-millennial Indian fiction which specifically “reflect the socio-political conditions of the country since the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014” (Gupta “Review”).

Environmentalist and professor of Ecology Harini Nagendra is also the author of a three-part crime series which depicts Bangalore in the 1920s. The novels in order are: The Bangalore Detectives Club (2022), Murder under a Red Moon (2023) and A Nest of Vipers (2024). Nagendra’s detectives are Kaveri, a young, saree-clad, resourceful homemaker and her husband Ramu, a doctor. The Bangalore Detectives Club makes for an unconventional murder mystery because of the insights it provides into urban ecology and the Indian nationalist movement. Like Nagendra, Kiran Manral too is an environmentalist who also writes crime fiction. Manral’s oeuvre includes The Reluctant Detective (2011) and The Kitty Party Murder (2020), and a psychological thriller, Missing, Presumed Dead (2018).

British-Indian author Abir Mukherjee was awarded the CWA Endeavour Dagger for his historical crime novel A Rising Man (2016) which commences a series featuring Sam Wyndham. Wyndham formerly worked in the Scotland Yard before being deputed to Calcutta, and once in India, he finds himself underprepared for the entrenched racism in the police force. The series continues with A Necessary Evil (2017), Smoke and Ashes (2018), Death in the East (2019), and The Shadows of Men (2021). Depicting colonial India, the series documents how the nationalist movement in India challenges colonial discourse.

Vaseem Khan too is a British-Indian author who has published seven novels in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency Series featuring Inspector Ashwin Chopra and Ganesha, an elephant calf. Starting with The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (2015), there are six novels currently in the series. Simultaneously, Khan published another crime series featuring Persis Wadia, a Parsi female police officer who has earned the distinction of being the first female police inspector in a newly independent India. The novels — Midnight at Malabar House (2020) and Dying Day (2021) — portray the sexism Wadia has to constantly negotiate due to her unique achievement.

An interesting development in Indian crime fiction is the crime thriller which focuses on terrorism. While the crime thriller might not exhibit the typical progression from crime to its resolution, it is an acknowledged subgenre since the plot hinges on criminal transgressions, at micro or macro levels. In Vikram A. Chandra’s The Srinagar Conspiracy (2000), the protagonist Major Vijay Kaul leads an operation against an imminent terrorist attack that is timed to coincide with the American President’s visit to India. Sasi Warrier’s Night of the Krait (2008) depicts the Kashmir insurgency, and, here, Colonel Raja Menon Raja leads a team of commandos to subvert the hijacking of a train coach. Other thrillers by Warrier include Sniper (2000), The Orphan Diaries (2009), and Noordin’s Gift (2014). The chaos of Kashmir politics surfaces in Bharat Wakhlu’s Close Call in Kashmir (2010). Terrorism is once more the crux of the crisis in Mukul Deva’s The Dust will Never Settle (2012) and Lakshar (2013).

An interesting offshoot of the amateur sleuth fiction is the crime narrative which features the journalist-detective. The sleuth in Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects (2008) is Arun Advani who is an investigative journalist. The novel is based on a true high profile murder case which received great media attention in India. Another interesting format is the crime story, or crime fiction in the shorter format. Although the genesis of fictional crime writing can be traced back to the short narrative form, the latter has been underrepresented by reviewers and print media. Delhi Noir (2009) and Mumbai Noir (2012) are part of the Akashic Noir series which anthologizes noir stories from cities across the world. The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (three volumes have been published since 2008) is significant for Indian crime fiction as it provides translations of the prolific Pattukottai Prabakar and Rajesh Kumar among others.

Blaft’s translations of Urdu author Ibne Safi’s jasoosi series with the detective duo Colonel Faridi and Captain Hameed are valuable additions to the corpus of Indian crime fiction. Ibne Safi was one of the most widely read authors of Urdu crime fiction. His jasoosi duniya featuring the aforementioned duo and the Imran series attained cult status in the 1950s across India and Pakistan. Currently, Blaft has published four tales from the Faridi-Hameed jasoosi duniya series, translated by the illustrious Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. The translations offer readers and critics an understanding of the indigenous appropriation of pulp conventions.

Despite the diversity of its subgenres and its capacity for social critique, crime fiction did not receive commensurate attention in academic circles, till recently. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English elaborates how contemporary Indian crime fiction in English unveils the multiple untoward conditions of ‘New India’ due to which “in striving for a sense of Indianness today, people are challenged and often driven to commit the most inhumane acts” (Varughese). Since crime fiction investigates the complexities of the social structure, it has the capacity to weave counter narratives about political corruption, moral degeneration, gender inequality, casteism, and religious fundamentalism. with the main plot. One example of crime fiction’s critical examination of social norms is Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night which documents the persistence of sex selective abortion in India, leading to female foeticide. Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Love Commandos commences with the crisis faced by a young inter-caste couple who have been forcefully separated by the girl’s family. The novel connects the lovers’ tragedy to electoral politics and a causality does not appear outlandish considering the caste-based political manoeuvres in contemporary India.

However, fictional crime writings are often considered reactionary due to their espousal of bourgeois values. The roots of European crime fiction as a distinct genre of writing in Europe lie in the visibility of the bourgeoisie, which is why Ernest Mandel attributes the genre’s origin to the intersections of “capitalism, pauperism, criminality, and primitive social revolt against bourgeois society” (10). Crime fiction has traditionally buttressed bourgeois politics, especially via the identity of the sleuth, who was presented as a member of the same social class as the readers, i.e. the middle and/or upper middle classes. The middle and upper classes are at the forefront of voicing anxieties about crime; ironically, they are statistically least likely to experience victimisation (Comaroff and Comaroff 6–7).

Indian crime fiction too has conventionally favoured a middle-class worldview, such as in the famous stories of Byomkesh Bakshi by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and the Feluda fiction by Satyajit Ray wherein the narratives seamlessly mirror the realities of their readers. This alignment is even more apparent today as crime fiction, like other contemporary genre fiction in English, “concentrate[s] on the anxieties of the present embroiled in national politics as well as to the politics of visibility of the new Indian middle class” (Ghosh 75). Such a marked transition could be explained by the prioritisation of the Indian middle class as consumers and as representatives of “a cultural standard associated with the globalising Indian nation” in the mainstream media after liberalisation (Fernandes 2418).

This explains why most Anglophone Indian crime fiction depicts localities and scenarios that the readership would be familiar with as citizens and as consumers (Meyer 125). For example, most of Swaminathan’s Gardener’s Song takes place in an apartment complex which has only middle-class residents. Interestingly, the detective, Lalli, delivers a tirade against the residents’ rigid and archaic mindsets. Yet, such criticism can be problematic too, as in the case of the Simran Singh novels. While Desai’s Simran Singh series is fiercely anti-patriarchal, its counter-hegemonic stance is questionable due to the detective’s upper-middle-class viewpoint which dominates the narration.

The Indian English crime novel manifests harmony with middle class ideology through the social identity of the detective, the crimes being investigated and the solutions provided. Nair’s Cut Like Wound presents Inspector Gowda, a member of the middle class, with a series of murders of young men. The novel alternates between the first-person narration of a psychopath and an omniscient one which centres on the investigation. Gowda eventually discovers that the killer is the sibling of a powerful politician. A transgender, the murderer solicits young men and kills them to avenge a personal tragedy which took place in their adolescence. At the end the novel reveals that the psychopathic first-person narrator was none other than the murderer. Although the novel sheds light on the social stigma faced by the transgender community, it sensationalises their lives by highlighting the heinous nature of the murders and thereby the abnormality of the murderer. Further, Cut guides readers’ attention to Gowda’s investigative prowess, and, hence, the novel reduces the gravity of the societal and the institutional marginalisation of the third gender. According to Mandel, crime fiction is traditionally a bourgeois narrative because of its tendency to prioritise the investigation of crimes, hence dismissing crime as mysterious incidents or puzzles which test the detective’s intelligence (16). By equating crime to a puzzle which is solved by a persistent detective, the genre fails to recognise the several social and economic inequalities in the status quo which are crime conducive. In Cut, the murderer’s narration is a stark contrast to the depiction of Gowda’s investigation, particularly because of the former’s irrationality and inability to regulate their emotions. Therefore, the novel unintentionally espouses heteronormative perceptions via its treatment of transgenderism as a singular, potentially criminal aberration.

Anglophone Indian crime fiction’s representation of the middle-class perspective is a reflection of the peculiarities of New India, wherein the marginalised are being erased from dominant national discourse and culture since they are incongruent with the mainstream propaganda of ‘liberal’ India (Fernandes 2416). Leela Fernandes theorises this as the “politics of forgetting” as it is a practice of “political-discursive process”, along with “spatial politics and contestations unfolding in urban India”, that “centres on the visibility of the new Indian middle class [only]” (2416). Currently, the state and the middle class in urban India are actively involved in the spatial displacement of lower income groups and vagrants from residential premises and public spaces citing concerns of social disorder. In “The Politics of Forgetting” Fernandes explains that various state and national governments in India have increasingly sought to redesign urban public spaces to cater to and expand the consumerist lifestyle that the urban middle class have welcomed from the late twentieth century onwards. This creates a visual aesthetic which erases the visibility of the lower income groups and it encourages a spatial politics of class-based segregation which prioritises middle class requirements, since it is this demographic that is projected to underpin ‘New’ India’s capacity for gsrowth. Hence, the representational politics of Indian crime fiction in English is pertinent considering the governments’ and the media’s propaganda of “India Shining” — i.e., an India of economic growth and consumerist prosperity — which foregrounds ‘New’ India’s economic aspirations on the global scale following liberalisation, while spatially marginalising the economically disadvantaged citizens.

A fitting illustration of the genre’s social bias would be Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love. Simran actively champions the rights of surrogates, especially since most of them are from lower income households, and thereby reveals the ugly reality of the commercial surrogacy industry. Origins focuses on the journey of one particular surrogate, Sonia, since her journey towards surrogacy exposes how politicians sustain casteism by manipulating caste identity for their own gain. Yet, although Origins details the layers of exploitation that Sonia is subjected to, it alternates between homodiegetic and omniscient narration to convey the progress in Simran’s investigation and the destinies of the surrogates respectively. Such a narrative mode empowers Simran with agency while the surrogates are subalternised since they require a mediator, i.e., the narrator, to voice their plight. This representational imbalance in Origins is an example of Anglophone Indian crime fiction’s alignment with the “politics of forgetting” and its limited depiction of alterity since the novel prioritises Simran’s upper middle-class perspectives and leaves no scope for the surrogates to voice their own experiences. It must be mentioned that the authors of Indian crime fiction in English are members of a privileged minority in terms of their education, employment and social identities. A few of them — Desai, Massey, Banker, Chandra, Khan — are part of the Indian diaspora. Their audience share or aspire to belong to the same social status. Hence, the Indian crime novel in English modifies Gupta’s aforementioned analogy of genre fiction to ‘middle class Indians talking to middle class Indians’.

The issues that Indian crime fiction in English inclines towards are harmonious with the stereotypical representation of India circulating in the international media. Political and bureaucratic corruption, poverty and inequality of resource distribution apart, Bollywood too has earned the attention of the media and the oeuvre. Other typical representations of the nation that have been adopted by the genre include religious schisms, superstitious beliefs, cricket, the spicy Indian cuisine, chaotic traffic etc. Moreover, since the narratives are in English, they target a sophisticated readership defined by their fluency in English, their awareness of western culture, the nature of their income, and the luxury to have time at their disposal to read for pleasure.

The manner in which Anglophone Indian crime fiction views the nation can be understood better through the theory of re-Orientalism. Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi define re-Orientalism as the East’s agency of self-representation; “however this representation is not exempt from being partial and skewed, and, moreover, it is still Western-centric and postcolonial” (2). The theory of Re-Orientalism emphasises that many postcolonial authors (among others writing fiction or non-fiction about India) writing in English have inherited the West’s skewed representations of the Orient, or that they have been persuaded to mimic these colonial misrepresentations due to market pressures or for literary acclaim (8–11). Thus, they rely on narrative devices and select themes which re-exoticise the postcolonial world for consumption by a privileged national and an international audience.

While Indian crime fiction in English is intended for national consumption, it can exhibit re-Orientalist traits by participating in the stereotyping of India as a land of stark socio-cultural inequalities, corrupt governance, and the persistence of crime. A common re-Orientalist trait is postcolonial fiction’s inclination to highlight “Dark India” (Lau and Dwivedi 9), i.e., the persistence of widespread poverty, unemployment, and gender inequality which destabilise the propaganda of “India Shining.” Narratives of crime, corruption, poverty, gross socio-economic disparities, political instability, and the dominance of religious viewpoints cater to this re-Orientalist perception. Indeed, contemporary Indian crime fiction in English depicts the nation and the lives of its common citizens by promoting the assumption that the social order is criminogenic, if anything. However, individual novels within the corpus reveal variations in the depiction of India, its people, and their cultures. For instance, Sacred Games shrewdly mocks the stereotyping of India via its true villain, a Hindu spiritual guru who masterminds a plan to destroy Mumbai with the intention of igniting communal violence. Unveiling the modern manipulation of Hindu philosophy, the novel ridicules clichéd representations of India by showing the guru as a fanatic and a hypocrite.

Although, Indian crime fiction in English does not engage with issues and themes pertaining to postcolonialism (Meyer 94), the corpus is a manifestation of the condition of postcoloniality. Graham Huggan understands postcolonialism as an “anticolonial intellectualism” (6) put to work in textual and social resistance. Postcoloniality, on the other hand, provides symbolic and material value to the postcolonial condition and can thereby commercialise even the discourse of resistance (Huggan 6). The postcolonial world is converted into a commodity the market value of which is determined by its exotic capacity. Postcoloniality can result in the commodification of native products, utilities and services in external markets where they are sold as exotica, detached from their functional value and their authentic contexts, as part of the “aesthetics of decontextualisation” (Huggan 16). This is the “postcolonial exotic” which Huggan places at the intersection of the anticolonial resistance of postcolonialism and the capitalisation of this otherness by the global market (28), and it is mostly consumed by an international market.

The exoticisation of the postcolonial world is a characteristic of Indian crime fiction in English, despite its national audience. While the genre consciously rejects association with postcolonialism, its counterpositional backdrop of “India Shining” and “Dark India” and its disposition to re-Orientalise suggest its participation in postcoloniality both as a product of the postcolonial exotic and as a discursive paradigm of exoticisation. Titles like Sacred Games, The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, The Widows of Malabar Hill, Krishnaa’s Konfessions and Death of a Lesser God are a few examples of the exoticisation of contemporary India, albeit for a primarily internal consumption.

Despite Indian crime fiction in English’s manifold status (as social critique, as a record of readers’ perceptions, as a product of neoliberal capitalism, as neo-colonial discourse, as a re-Orientalist text), there is minimal research on the genre on these lines. This disproportionality results partly from the binary of highbrow/serious fiction versus lowbrow/ popular fiction. Popular/ Genre/ Commercial fiction was traditionally undervalued by scholars because it is overtly determined by market-driven formulae. From the latter half of the twentieth century onwards the dominance of feminism and postcolonialism, supported by the postmodernist rebuttal of distinctions between high and low literature, has sparked scholars’ interest in crime fiction. In addition, contemporary authors have found that the genre reads well as a counter- narrative of Eurocentric heteronormative patriarchal discourse. The novels of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are the most popular of a body of feminist crime fiction which invariably criticises patriarchal norms at the familial, societal, and institutional levels. Their detectives are fiercely feminist individuals who challenge traditional gender roles through their professional and personal lives. A similar strain can be discerned in the novels of Desai, Massey, Swaminathan, and Jain. Likewise, in the English-speaking world, crime fiction featuring non-European detectives and detectives with hyphenated ethnic identities who undermine white masculinist perceptions have increasingly been published since the 1980s. In the Global South, too, authors have reworked and appropriated the genre and its conventions to suit indigenous and national cultures. In addition, these national and diasporic authors have discovered the suitability of crime writing for shattering hegemonic notions of social order and disorder. It appears that the trend to revise the typical traits of crime fiction is a global phenomenon in order to reflect, with greater authenticity, contemporary realities consequent to globalisation and the spread of neoliberal capitalism.

In India, crime fiction is yet to gain acceptance from the academia at curricular and research levels. While individual courses on detective fiction are now being offered across higher educational institutions, the canon of Indian literature introduced to students continues its neglect of Indian crime fiction, thereby indicating the academia’s dismissal of popular fiction as literature that exists on the margins. However, Emma Dawson Varughese’s recent studies of Indian crime writing in Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English (2013) and Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Receptions of ‘Weird’ Narratives (2017) indicate the nascent post-millennial scholarly interest in the genre due to the critical introspections it supports of India’s changed socio-economic contexts. South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (2016) edited by Alex Tickell, Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (2019) edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al, and Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon (2022) edited by Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal are other critical works that contribute to the analysis of Indian crime fiction. Considering the economic circumstances which led to its current visibility, Indian crime fiction in English can be studied in relation to representations of New India, re-Orientalist strategies, the ‘new’ middle class of India and consumerism, among others. Indeed, the aforementioned works voice a much-needed transition in the perception and interpretation of Indian crime fiction in English as fiction (that is emblematic) of New India. It might not be whimsical to envision a day when boundaries have been dissolved and crime writing is welcomed to the literary centre.

End Notes

1 Incidentally, the Newgate Calendar was published with the belief that the narratives would
deter the masses from criminally transgressive behaviour by instilling the populace with a
fear of the terrible punishments which would follow upon apprehension. However, the
Newgate Calendar grew in popularity for an unforeseen reason; i.e., their sensational
depiction of crime and punishment which yielded to a voyeuristic form of entertainment
among the masses. The Newgate novel was criticised for glamourising delinquency since it
presented criminals as protagonists and as victims of social conditions (Pykett 20).

2 According to Tabish Khair, Janaki is the earliest female detective to feature in Indian
English fiction (64).

3 Meera Tamaya analyses Inspector Ghote, who works in India, as a post-colonial detective
since the character undermines the bourgeois and Eurocentric traits established by Sherlock
Holmes.

4 Prabhat K. Singh refers to Vikram Chandra, Ashok Banker and Tarquin Hall, all of whom
do not reside in India (9–10), in relation to the new wave of crime fiction being read by
Indians in the twenty first century. Neele Meyer too studies Chandra and Hall in her
comparative study of contemporary Indian and Latin American crime fiction, highlighting
that the location of the publisher also determines whether a narrative can classify as Indian
crime fiction in English (20). Meyer refers to the Swedish-born, but Indian-settled Zac
O’Yeah as an “Indian writer” since his crime novels are set in contemporary India (107).
Khair details the diasporic concerns and genre refashioning in the detective novels of author
Sujatha Massey who lives in the USA. Although her Rei Shimura series features a Japanese-
American amateur sleuth solving crimes in Tokyo, Khair analyses the novels as Indian
English pulp since it is written by a “Euro-Indian” (69–71).

5 Jean and John L. Comaroff propose that the current popularity of crime narratives in
postcolonial nations can be explained in relation to citizens’ “deepest existential dilemmas
about economy and society, about politics, personhood, and ethics” triggered by globalisation
and economic liberalisation (xii–xiii). They link this attitudinal change to the implementation
of neoliberal policies across the world, and highlight that with neoliberalism, governments
have transitioned from welfare governance to pro-capitalist policies which has led to an
apprehension of increasing lawlessness and social chaos among citizens. Such a scenario
nurtures the popularity of crime stories, “[t]he more dire they are, the better”, since they
“captivate an endlessly curious populace” (51) and reflect their deepest fears.

6 In fact, the repetition of motifs attributes certain narratives with their identity. In “The
Typology of Detective Fiction” Tzvetan Todorov elucidates that fidelity to the rules of genre
is an important factor for popular types of literature. Citing an example from detective fiction,
Todorov states, “[t]he whodunit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of
the genre, but the one which conforms to them . . .” (159).

7 Todorov categorises the thriller as a genre of detective fiction which was predominant in
America before and after the second World War. The thriller differs from the traditional
detective story in two ways: first, the narrative is propelled by action and secondly, the
narrator might not be cognizant of the events leading to the crime, even at the end of the plot
(161).

Works Cited

Bell, Ian. A. “Eighteenth-century Crime Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime
Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 7–17.

Chattopadhayay, Bodhisattva et.al. “Indian Genre Fiction-Languages, Literatures,
Classifications.” Introduction. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories,
edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al., Kindle ed., Routledge, 2019.

Christian, Ed. “Introducing the Postcolonial Detective: Putting Marginality to Work.”
Introduction. The Post-Colonial Detective, edited by Ed Christian, Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2001, pp. 1–16.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social
Order. U of Chicago P, 2016.

Daechsel, Markus. “Zālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective
Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity.” Of Matters
Modern: The Experience of Modernity in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia,
edited by Debraj Bhattacharya, Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 204–41.

Fernandes, Leela. “The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the
Restructuring of Urban Space in India.” Urban Studies, vol. 41, no. 12, Nov. 2004,
pp. 2415–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43197064.

Ghosh, Suchismita. “Indian Commercial Fiction: Chetan Bhagat and the Politics of the
Neoliberal Citizenry.” Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by
Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal, Routledge, 2022, pp. 73–86.

Gupta, Suman. Contemporary Literature: The Basics. Routledge, 2012.

—. Globalization and Literature. Polity, 2009.

—. “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’ in English the Publishing Industry and Youth Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 5, 2012, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41419848.

Gupta, Uttaran Das. “Review: The Fast and the Dead by Anuja Chauhan.” Hindustan Times,
20 Jan. 2024, hindustantimes.com/books/review-the-fast-and-the-dead-byanuja-
chauhan-101705693495456.html. Accessed 8 May 2024.‌

Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001.

Khair, Tabish. “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé.”
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol.43, no.3, Sep. 2008, pp. 59–74. Sage
Publications, doi: 10.1177/0021989408095238.

Lau, Lisa, and Om Prakash Dwivedi. Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.

Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. U of Minnesota P,
1984.

Mandhwani, Akriti. “From the Colloquial to the ‘Literary’: Hindi Pulp’s Journey from the
Streets to the Bookshelves.” Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories, edited
by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al., Kindle ed., Routledge, 2019.

Messent, Peter. The Crime Fiction Handbook. John Wiley &Sons, 2012.

Meyer, Neele. Glocalizing Genre Fiction in the Global South: Indian and Latin American
Post-Millennial Crime Fiction, Published Dissertation, LMU München: Faculty for
Languages and Literatures, 2017, nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-243418.

Orsini, Francesca. “Detective Novels: A Commercial Genre in Nineteenth-Century North
India.” India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, edited by Stuart
Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 435–82.

Priestman, Martin. “Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction.” Introduction. The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp.
1–6.

Pykett, Lynn. “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction 1830-1868.” The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp.
19–39.

Rzepka, Charles J. “What is Crime Fiction?” Introduction. A Companion to Crime Fiction,
edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1–9.

Sharma, Giraj M. “The Reader has Moved on. Long Live the Consumer!” Indian Popular
Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by Gitanjali Chawla and Sangeeta Mittal,
Routledge, 2022, pp. 43–55.

Singh, Prabhat. K. “The Narrative Strands in the Indian English Novel: Needs, Desires and
Directions.” The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium, edited by Prabhat K.
Singh, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 1–27.

Sinha, Shatarupa. “Papyrus to Celluloid: An Insight into the Oeuvre of Bengali Detectives.”
Indian Popular Fiction: Redefining the Canon, edited by Gitanjali Chawla and
Sangeeta Mittal, Routledge, 2022, pp. 105–25.

Tamaya, Meera. “Keating’s Inspector Ghote: Post-Colonial Detective?” The Post-Colonial
Detective, edited by Ed Christian, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001, pp. 17–36.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A
Reader, edited by David Lodge, Longman, 1988, pp. 158–65.

Varughese, Emma Dawson. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English.
Kindle ed., Bloomsbury, 2013.

Dec 28

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Book Review: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, The Distaste of the Earth (2024) | Jobeth Ann Warjri

By IWE Online North East Indian Writing in English, Reviews No Comments

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Anne. “Book Review: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, The Distaste of the Earth (2024).” Indian Writing In English Online, 28 December, 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/book-review-kynpham-sing-nongkynrih-the-distaste-of-the-earth-2024-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .

Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Anne. “Book Review: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, The Distaste of the Earth (2024).” Indian Writing In English Online. December 28, 2024. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/book-review-kynpham-sing-nongkynrih-the-distaste-of-the-earth-2024-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .

Named by The Conversation as one of the best books of 2024, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s The Distaste of the Earth (2024) combines the mytho-poetic folk narrative of U Manik Raitong with contemporary reflections on love, politics, and society. In the context of Khasi folklore, U Manik Raitong is the archetypal figure of the muse, particularly of music and poetry and the creative arts.

Like the bard of Asterix fame, Cacofonix, Manik Raitong is at once a figure who is derided as well as one that is anachronistic—what he represents seems out of time for a world that is mired in greed, corruption, and anthropocentric views about nature and the environment (See Fig. 1). But while the figure of Cacofonix elicits laughter (even if in a wry, ironic fashion), U Manik Raitong evokes the opposite, steeped as his story is in tragedy. This is, however, unlike Greek tragedy, in which the hero’s unfortunate end is usually one that is destined through divine will.

Fig. 1: Cacofonix singing in Asterix the Gladiator (1988, 2004)

Nongkynrih has gone to great lengths to provide a fictional backstory to the story of U Manik Raitong. What becomes evident in the course of the narrative is that much of Manik’s suffering—save for the deaths of his mother, brothers, and father—has been caused by humans who have strayed away from the path of virtue, what the Khasis call ka hok. In doing so, the society that punishes Manik for his sin of loving the queen, is itself one that the Supreme Being or God has abandoned. Manik himself shares in this sense of spiritual and divine separation:

He cursed his destiny; he cursed his God; he cried out for vengeance and justice. All his family—gone! All his property—gone! God has taken away all his loved ones; man had taken away all he possessed. God was battering his soul, man his flesh! How would he seek vengeance against God, that unknown and unknowable monster of a being? Or even against man? (Nongkynrih, Distaste 253).

And

God knew how I tried to save my sister! He knew how I rushed here and there looking for a cure, looking for a healer. But not a finger did he lift to save her. Futile were my efforts; futile were my prayers! Oh, the hard-heartedness of God!

And man? If God is indifferent and uncaring, man is active in his own evil. No sooner had my clan been wiped out than the syiem [king] and his myntris [nobles] started casting greedy and wicked glances at our wealth and possessions (Nongkynrih, Distaste 257-258).

A society that has lost the wherewithal to care for the destitute—Manik and his then-living sister being orphans—is one that lives without divine protection, as Manik himself knows. Atheism is the way out for Manik as divine intervention seems only to work on behalf of his adversaries. But while the protagonist is firm in his unbelief, Nongkynrih hints that Manik’s loss of faith might not be reflective of universal truths.

Nongkynrih frames Manik’s predicament against the larger society in which he lives. The novel itself begins with scenes from a pata kyiad or a drinking house/establishment. It is in the pata that we meet characters like Siewdor and Sapho who, as the author observes, drink because they need to drown their sorrows and the hardships they face in life. Siewdor, in particular, had lost a woman he loved to the callousness of his fellow soldiers while they were away on an expedition for the former king (Nongkynrih, Distaste 122-147). It is through these characters, who are pariahs like Manik, that divine retribution is carried out. They are the ones who keep the story of U Manik Raitong and Ka Lieng Makaw alive long after they are dead. Nongkynrih deftly explores the tension between unbelief (Manik’s) and divine will by making the folk a mouthpiece for the latter. As such, Nongkynrih’s novel comments on the power of quotidian remembrance in the face of forgetting and state oppression (Manik’s story is, in the novel, prevented from being told by order of the king).

Nongkynrih’s novel testifies to the power of storytelling to retrieve what has been lost. It speaks in the register of the man who swallowed the lost script, thereby giving birth to Khasi storytelling, philosophy, and worldview ever since the Khasis, as a community, have existed (Nongkynrih 2007: 16-20). Much of the details surrounding Manik’s “wretched” life have been lost. But his figure remains an inspiration for many who take up the pen to write and who choose to be remembered if only in songs.

Works Cited

Goscinny, René and Albert Underzo. Asterix the Gladiator. Trans. Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, 2004.

Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends. Penguin Books, 2007.

_. The Distaste of the Earth. Penguin Books, 2024.

The Conversation. “Best Books of 2024”. December 2024 https://theconversation.com/best-books-of-2024-our-experts-share-their-standout-reads-244149

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