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May 29
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Srilata K.

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
K., Srilata. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online, 29 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/srilata-k/ .

Chicago:
K., Srilata. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 29, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/srilata-k/ .

Q:  To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Srilata K.: Like most Indians, I grew up in a multi-lingual environment. My schooling, however, was largely in English and the poetry and fiction I read were mostly in English. Quite soon, it became the language I thought in – though I did revert to thinking in Tamil every now and then, depending on the circumstances. I was never self-conscious about that switch. So even now, while I write in English, that English is imbued with Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and a sprinkling of other Indian languages. I don’t think that question has the urgency it had in the 60s. Languages choose us depending on the paths that nation states forge for themselves. The important thing is to learn to use the language that has chosen us as well as we can in the writing of poetry.

 

Q: In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

S.K.: I have been hugely influenced by AK Ramanujan’s translations of Sangam poetry. I tend to fall back on that register unconsciously – especially these dates in my own re-imagining of the Mahabharatha. Kamala Das too shaped me as a woman poet. I don’t think my poetry exists outside of this long tradition. I may or may not be conscious of where I am located vis a vis the tradition but that’s another question.

 

Q: What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

S.K.: I don’t think of readership at all when I write. I think that anxiety could get in the way of composition. That said, I find that there is a lot of interest in younger people. In Chennai, for instance, there is an active slam poetry presence and so many young people write poetry. Poetry often thrives outside of English classrooms I think!

 

Q: Do you read, write, or translate poetry in a language other than English? If yes, how does it influence your poetry in English?

S.K.: I translate Tamil poetry into English. And as I said earlier, I think the tonality of Tamil and sometimes words, seep into my own poetry even though it is in English. I have actually written about this in my poems.

 

Q: Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

S.K.: For close to two decades I taught a workshop course in Creative writing at IIT Madras. I continue to teach it Sai University, Chennai. A large part of the course consists of poetry. At first, students assume that they won’t get poetry. But I find they grow into it. Trying to write poetry I think helps them understand it better. As a teacher, I refrain from over-explaining the poem, letting the words take over.

 

Q: What are your views on the poetry that appears today on such popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

S.K.: Let me just say I follow it all with great interest!

 

A poet, an author, a columnist, a translator, a writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, at Sangam house and at the Yeonhui Art Space in Seoul, Professor K. Srilata currently teaches English literature at Sai University and formerly at IIT-Madras. Her recent book is This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story (2022).

 

 

Header Image Courtesy: Srilata K.

 

May 22
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Saleem Peeradina | Pramila Venkateswaran

By Critical Biography One Comment
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Venkateswaran, Pramila. “Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online, 22 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/saleem-peeradina-pramila-venkateswaran/ .

Chicago:
Venkateswaran, Pramila. “Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 22, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/saleem-peeradina-pramila-venkateswaran/ .

Saleem Peeradina (1944-2023): A Critical Biography

Pramila Venkateswaran

Saleem Peeradina belongs to the generation of Indian poets who began to think differently from earlier poets such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu who wrote poetry imitative of Romantic and Victorian styles. As part of what is known as the “Bombay School,” Peeradina and his fellow poets redefined their place in an India that was just beginning to come to terms with life after Independence. The consequences of a two hundred-year colonial rule had left their mark on all aspects of life—political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual. He was among a group of Bombay poets writing in English who were grappling with existential questions about the self, the environment, the existence of God, and the nature of urban reality.

Saleem Peeradina was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1944. He received his B.A from St. Xavier’s College in 1967, his M.A. from Bombay University in 1969, and another M.A from Wake Forest University in 1973. In 1980, he published his first volume of poems, First Offence. Peeradina’s poetry in the 1970s, collected in First Offence, shares with Nissim Ezekiel an Eliot-like crafting of language, blending English with the cadence of the regional language, and mixing colloquial with standard English. Peeradina’s distinctive style was the description of the minutiae of urban life, the ironic insight into daily moments, and locating the sublime in the mundane.

Writing about the self and exposing the foibles of society were common to intellectuals of his generation, regardless of their religious background, who were coming of age in a swiftly-changing India experiencing a newly-minted, post-Independence, constitutional democracy where every belief was examined, discarded, or retained. Like other modernist poets of his generation, Peeradina explored “both external and internal poverty and sorrow with remarkable persistence” (Paranjape 1055). In his poems, such as “Bandra,” (First Offence), we see his blending of the regional and the colloquial with standard English to capture the flavour of the everyday reality of urban India. Smells of meat in the streets and perfume from parked cars give way to “dirtheaped mohulla,” “kitchensweat guttersmell,” and the “shitmemorial lane” (Heart’s Beast 4). Combining words to create a lexicon that captures a language unique to a postcolonial culture was unique in the works of Peeradina and the Bombay school of poets. Nissim Ezekiel’s blurb on the cover of First Offence reads: “There are many ironic touches, passionate moments disciplined into clear, economical statements . . . and a frequent playfulness that I find altogether charming.” Peeradina juxtaposes poverty and modernity, “sewagewater” “thriv[ing] like a running boil” in a metropolis bursting with “shops, cafes, cinemas, churches, / hospitals, schools, parks,” as well as villas and lawns, decrepitude and beauty alike, a “versatile” “mud.”  (Heart’s Beast 3-5). In poems such as “Bandra” and “Group Portrait,” Peeradina wonders about the self in urban existence, maintaining its ironic distance from the throng and at the same time participating in city life.

After receiving an M.A. in English Literature from Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, in 1973, Peeradina returned to Bombay to teach at Sophia College, where he spearheaded the creative writing program in 1980 as part of the college’s innovative offering, the Open Classroom. In this novel space, he was able to practice his ideas of poetics, influencing young students who were becoming exposed to contemporary Indian poetry. There was a major shift in the Indian English poetry scene which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Poets of the Bombay School veered away from a style imitative of British Romantic poets to one that was expressive of the modernity of post-Independence India. Peeradina was a contemporary of poets such as Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Gieve Patel, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Menka Shivdasani, Eunice De Souza, R. Parthasarathy, and Darius Cooper. In his landmark anthology, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection (1972), Peeradina captures the poetry of the ’70s as the decade that witnessed the shift in Indian English poetry, in voice, subject matter, form, and approaches to poetry in general. In the “Indian counterpoint of Anglo-American modernism, . . . poets in practically every language broke away from traditional (often highly Sanskritized) meters, stanza patterns, styles, materials and themes to invent ‘free verse’ poetry” (Dharwadkar 189). Each of the poets writing in English had his or her own distinctive style, which brought to the fore the versatility of English as represented by specific linguistic, formal, and topical solutions. While Ezekiel’s poems exhibit dry humor, wit, and irony, Kolatkar’s poems are musical, blending the physical and emotional landscape with the voices of the region, and present an ironic expression of the human condition. Eunice De Souza’s poems are witty and sarcastic, and Parthasarathy’s are deeply personal. In his anthology, Peeradina was mindful of the changes demanded by modernity but kept his foothold on some of the traditions that sustained his work. He expresses candidly that it is important not to follow trends but to aim towards authenticity. This was his guiding principle in the anthology. As he exclaims, “why are we so hung up about a notion that is rammed down our throats by the hegemony of critical ideas of a Euro-centric origin? Shouldn’t we, as moderns, also be questioning and disagreeing with commandments handed down to us” (An Arc of Time 100)? He challenges the blind imitation of the European notion of alienation and angst used by all the regional poets as a norm.

Bruce King observes, Peeradina was “consciously concerned with and engaged in various changes India faces in the process of modernization including the retention and modernization of traditional culture so that it does not become a reactionary feudalism when challenged by change” (351). Like his contemporaries, he “sought greater emotional room, more opportunities for a free play of thoughts and feelings . . . with greater self-assurance and lesser inhibitions (Paranjape 1056). Peeradina describes the influence that the cinema and the songs he grew up with had on his poetry. The likes of Saigal and Hemanta Kumar are his “respectable literary ancestors,” rather than any “tool pulled out of the trick bag of modernism” (An Arc of Time 100-101).

In 1988 Peeradina moved to Michigan, and in 1989 he began teaching in the English Department at Siena Heights University. In 1992, he collected the poems he had written in the 1980s in the volume Group Portrait. In “Group Portrait,” the titular poem, we are offered not just a personal experience of a whole family on a “two-wheeler” (in this case, a scooter), enjoying a weekend getaway from the city to the beaches, but also a cultural portrait. We are offered a vignette of the typical Indian household finding freedom in this particular mode of travel in a congested metropolis and experiencing the joy of being close together. The opening lines offer us an urban vignette—freedom, family togetherness, finding beauty in the ordinary and making it special, and city life versus the outskirts. The acrobatic metaphor aptly conveys the idea of balance, so necessary in this precarious journey.

Four heads on a two-wheeler
is a tight-rope dance
promising edge-of-seat
suspense to the riders. For many,
This is an everyday machine of convenience.

No performer of tricks, or expert dodger,
this forced daredevilry. (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 46)

Peeradina shows us that the typical male is socially constructed by urban culture to become an expert at balancing the many demands in his day-to day-life. The two-wheeler becomes the synecdoche for all matters precarious in the metropolis, from work and raising a family to basic resources such as water and electricity. Peeradina combines humor with the image of the “four heads on a two-wheeler” as an example of daredevilry, which at the same time captures the performance of daily life by a family living in an urban space, which is liberating as well as precarious. The experience he describes is of the children enjoying the simplicity of the family leaving the city for the seashore: “the children race into its open arms” (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 46). In the 1980s the notion of life in a new capitalist economy was to work in the city’s cramped spaces and find freedom for a short span of time in nature. The new “independent” locomotion, seen in the affordability of a two-wheeler, symbolises individuality in capitalist modernity.

While juggling teaching and writing, Peeradina wrote some of his most important work. He moved from the “prosaic-ironic, self-and-society castigations” (Perry 265) that Perry describes as common among Peeradina and his contemporaries, to a more personal and affective mode. Inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s translations of medieval devotional poetry and Hindi film songs (such as the Urdu poems performed by popular singers like Mohammad Rafi), Peeradina wrote Meditations on Desire, a series of sixty-four numbered sections, which came out as a book in 2003.

During this time, he worked on his memoir, The Ocean in My Yard, published in 2005. While there is much written about Peeradina’s poetry, not much has been said about his prose, which is animated by imagery, sound patterns, metaphor, symbolism, and other devices and techniques commonly associated with poetry. The opening chapter is about the family’s praise of baby Saleem’s feet. He writes, “my feet became protagonists in outlandish adventures;” “A lifelong student of the silvered surface, I was locked into an agonizing self-scrutiny that magnified my imagined flaws;” “the feet could successfully live a subterranean existence, but what could one do with an abnormal nose” (4-5)?  Feet become the metaphor for journeying through the stages of life as a young boy, man, poet, teacher, immigrant, husband and father. Humor and nostalgia combine to produce sentences that are sonorous and precise, elements that carry over to his poetry.

In this memoir, he writes about growing up in Bandra. He looks unsparingly at the vagaries of a strict Muslim upbringing which resulted in his deep questioning of everything religious and his awakening to the hypocrisies he encountered, such as the gap between what was preached and his experiences of discrimination in the family. Peeradina describes being deeply affected by the piety he was forced to observe but which did not translate to day-to-day life, where his mother and his sister were expected to adhere to patriarchal and religious rules and the children were threatened with punishment if they did not observe them. The “terror of damnation,” central to Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, and his own observation of familial “public display of piety” masking “a private reign of terror” (An Arc in Time 10-11) disenchanted the young poet, turning him into an agnostic. Feeling liberated by the absence of God in his life, Peeradina found support in the knowledge he garnered from existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, and the rich intellectual life he cultivated in the cosmopolitan Bombay of the 70s and the 80s.

In “Erasing God,” the opening essay of An Arc in Time (2022), he quotes his poem, “Strange Meeting,” on the birth of his daughter as a moment that brings him close to the spiritual (14). He describes the moment of conception as a “yearning,” that attaches itself to the “flesh of its father,” aided by a force outside the human: “God alone could have sowed this urge / in the womb’s / Ancient slush. To initiate him / into the mystery / of His life-giving breath” (15). The child makes him witness “his own soul // Revealing to him the face / of a timeless love /That took his breath away” (15). Witnessing birth is the defining moment for Peeradina, where he experiences his spirituality intensely — very different from the dogma he learned as a child. His willingness to feel deeply can be attributed to his keen observation of the reality of life in urban India and his willingness to delve into “life that existed beyond the quotidian” (xv).

From his early work, we see Peeradina’s gentleness towards, empathy for, and understanding of, women. As Salil Tripathi notes in his introduction to An Arc in Time, “He writes about women as a father, a lover, a friend with a gentle tone and profound understanding. . . . His feminism is consistent” (xvii). He bridges the cultural gap between men and women by broadening his sensibility and thus expanding the beauty of his poetry.

His feminist poems are not acts of impersonation but of empathy and sensitivity. Acutely aware of how insensitive men often are towards women in general, how vulnerable and insecure women usually feel, and how unexpressed their conflicts and pains remain, he enters compassionately into the female consciousness and depicts the world (the men’s world) as a female would perceive it. (Dev 185).

Peeradina indicates in his essay, “Inner Worlds, Interior Lives,” the poet’s ability to enter imaginatively into the world of the other, “to interpret the other through the feminine consciousness. . . . You step out of the confines of your ‘self’ and discover other ways of looking and feeling. In close relationships, this is of great importance, particularly in the intimacy of man and woman” (An Arc in Time 158). We see his “feminist consciousness” operate most poignantly in “Ode to her Legs,” where he lists the ways in which women bear the burdens of society: the feet carry the weight of their work, pregnancy, caregiving, and emotional and mental burdens. The poet advocates:

think of them as pillars
That hold your world upright, that keep your days
In order. Everywhere—behind counters, desks,

Hospitals, mills, fields, factory floors;
In sweatshops, bazaars, stores, and offices—a woman
Is standing, waiting or running, her legs clocking

Miles in silence. When everyone else is off-duty
Her feet are still plodding. When there is no one else
To count on, she unfailingly answers

Your call. As for being bone-weary, you have no idea
What she endures.

He urges men to attend to the ache of a woman’s feet; feet become the synecdoche for women and all that is culturally demanded of them in a patriarchal world:

Cherish them

As if those legs were the most precious and prized
Of your belongings; as if you were under oath
To God to keep your holy promises. It may turn out

That Heaven lies underneath a woman’s feet.
Honor them as if they were—but they are–
Your beloved’s legs. (Peeradina, Heart’s Beast 130)

Conscious of “the treacherous relation between power and powerlessness as it operated behind the safety of four walls and in the wider social arena” (An Arc in Time 157), Peeradina breaks the masculine norm by presenting the modus operandi of male domination and its antidote, which is anti-oppressive behaviour. In a postcolonial India trying to find its voice against every kind of fundamentalism, patriarchy, and colonial domination, harnessing the feminist voice in men and women alike is indeed a major decolonising effort. We note his use of the imperative, as in “Cherish them,” and “Honor them,” which lends a didactic tone to the poem. He rises to the responsibility of the poet as society’s conscience keeper.

The poet’s politics of decolonisation deepened as a result of his relocation to the United States in 1988. Cultural dislocation became the dynamic subject of Peeradina’s poetry. His altered physical space contributed to the kind of turmoil most immigrants experience. His concerns were: Where do I belong and how? How do I fit in with American ways and how do I not fit in? How do I make meaning of the new kinds of experiences that now dominate my life, even circumscribe it in certain ways? These quandaries emerged for him as a father of daughters growing up in white-dominated Michigan of the 1990s, where Indians and Muslims were as alien as one can imagine.

The essay, “Giving, Withholding, and Meeting Midway: A Poet’s Ethnography,” published in Distant Mirrors: America as a Foreign Culture (1992), as well as the volumes of poetry, Slow Dance (2010) and Final Cut (2016), were Peeradina’s responses to the conundrum of the ever-shifting lines between belonging and not belonging, between desire and loss. To explore these themes further, he moves to genres other than poetry. For example, he writes in “Giving, Withholding and Meeting Midway,” about the differences between living in India and living in the American suburbia. He says, “People solemnly munch brown bag lunches in company without being the least bit self-conscious. The same scenario among Indians—an impromptu and jovial division of the spoils from bags and tiffin boxes to everyone present is undertaken” (An Arc in Time 27). Besides cultural differences, he notes the difference in undergraduate students’ attitude toward poetry as self-expression and therapy rather than a sustained engagement with the world of letters (36). In a 2015 interview for Ariel, he states:

Though not common knowledge, my essay writing has been an important part of my writing life. In Bombay, this had been central since I was a graduate student. In addition, I wrote reviews of movies, theatre, art, and of course books. I conducted interviews for print publications and later for a nascent television channel. Poetry came alongside, so I was going full throttle on several fronts (Venkateswaran 181).

During his tenure as a professor in Michigan, he published poems in journals, many of which became part of his volume Slow Dance, published in 2010. In his interview in Ariel he observes that writers are typically products of their environment and respond to it. To him, everything is a subject for poetry. “For me, writing poetry is like doing ethnography: as a poet and social commentator, I am always in the field. The gestures, products, and systems of culture are my raw material . . . . I am simultaneously witness, participant, and scribe” (An Arc in Time 300). Immigrant writers are not immune to the pushes and pulls of forces that buffet them. As a poet who is deeply cognizant of the realities of everyday life, Peeradina pays attention to his emotions in the context of his family, his community and work relations. He explains,

I am never off-duty. And while the altered states of being in a new place causes disturbances, even turmoil of a sort, for the writer it presents rich new resources. Through the heartache and spiritual disquiet, the central questions were always: How to make oneself at home? How to belong to the new community? How to understand American ways? How to give meaning to our lives? (Venkateswaran 181)

Poems such as “Michigan Basement 1,” “Sisters,” “Beginnings,” “Speculations,” and “A Sister’s Lament” draw us deep into the life of a poet who is doing the balancing act of writing and teaching while maintaining his family in the cold isolation of suburban America.

After his retirement from teaching, Peeradina published Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems in 2017, which maps the trajectory of his poetic oeuvre. Most recently, he has been anthologised in Future Library, published in 2022, edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji.  As Adil Jussawalla observes in his blurb on the cover of Heart’s Beast, Peeradina “has kept faith with his listeners by having left himself open to varieties of response rather than to the echoes of solipsistic self-absorption” (Heart’s Beast). As the poet realises in “The Lesson,” even if we are travelling on the wings of imagination, we cannot afford to dwell someplace else. He instructs about the poetic imagination by using concrete examples of drawing the earth and the planets:

Place this sheet at one end

Of a panoramic scene and proceed to jump off the brink of our universe

Into neighboring galaxies spiraling outward, endlessly.

…

We have to make the journey back to reclaim the earth (Heart’s Beast 149).

Poetry is the act of taking imaginative leaps and finding our way back to the mundane. Peeradina defines his view of poetry as travelling from the inner to the outer world, “finding analogues in the visible world” to describe “one’s private concerns” (An Arc in Time 156).

Jerry Pinto, writing in The Indian Express about Peeradina’s 2017 collection, Heart’s Beast, remarks insightfully,

Peeradina never slips into the easy mode of othering, but he does not look away. This sense of unbelonging is not just a part of having a hyphenated identity. It is my contention, for instance, that everyone in India has a hyphenated identity, that segues across the blood-iron lines of caste, the crass lines of class, the cartographer’s lines on maps. Saleem Peeradina was perched on a hyphen long before he left India. (Pinto)

The sense of otherness is evident in all of Peeradina’s work; the poet’s ironic perception of himself and his world, as seen in “Body Primal,” (Final Cut 58) for example, was common among his contemporaries. The two stanzas, which are sonnet-like, mirror the disjunction between the wonder of the body and the “body lost in search of itself,” registering both the speaker’s praise and disgust for the body. Wondering about the materiality of the body, the speaker refrains from any religious inquiry, while engaging in a philosophical quest for its origins and purpose. Internal rhyme, the repetition of the “s” and “sh” sounds in the first stanza and the “l” and “ing” sounds in the second stanza, alliteration, and assonance make “Body Primal” musical, although the poem edges on uncovering the dissonance of the body. We hear and feel the disgust of the body in the repetition of sounds and assonance in “misshapen, spongy mess feeding / on ancient slime,” as opposed to the internal rhymes of “ing” suggesting sweetness, as in “body growing wings, leaping, dancing, taking off” (Final Cut 58). The poet holds the paradox of the body as beautiful and disgusting together with the harmony of sound patterns.

Peeradina’s philosophical inquiry extends into his ekphrastic work as well as his attention to the small things around him—objects, birds, and fruits. In “Exhibit A,” “Exhibit B, and “Exhibit C,” on Hiroshige’s art, his attention to the minute details of the paintings reveals his interior vision: “The figure of a wanderer // or recluse, modestly miniature drifts into the scene / Standing there to tell us…/ I am nothing” (Heart’s Beast 107). The wanderer is placed against the etching of cliffs and waterfalls, a raconteur who is paradoxically both nothing but also makes meaning of the world in which he is placed. The artist is “Everywhere. He missed nothing” (Heart’s Beast 109).

Whether Peeradina describes the flaring of the taste of persimmon on the tongue, or the calling of a crow that recalls other crows from history, everything unravels a mystery or becomes a koan. Thus, in Slow Dance (2010) and Final Cut (2016) he continues to explore the themes of the ever-shifting lines between desire and loss, belonging and exile, the need for simplicity to deal with chaos. His words in “Slow Dance,” “For me, this night blooming into day is enough” and “All I own I fit into a single bag” (Heart’s Beast 141) sum up his perception. Jai Dev observes that “Through most of his poems runs a celebration of the world and its every nuance and detail. This wondrous, celebrating love is a product of deep affection, sensitive concern and precise observation (Dev 188). His advice in “Tips on Eating With Your Hands,” can be taken for writing poetry or living one’s life: “you’ve got to stop watching / What you are doing to do it right. Loosen up, / And lose yourself in the meal” He follows his own instructions, losing himself in the journey of living and writing.

 

Works Cited

Works by Saleem Peeradina:

Poetry

Peeradina, Saleem. Editor. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English: An Assessment and Selection. Macmillan, 1972.

_______. First Offence. Newground, 1980.

_______. Group Portrait. Oxford UP, 1992.

______ . Slow Dance. Ridgeway Press, 2010.

_______. Final Cut. Valley Press, 2016.

_______. Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems. Copper Coin, 2017.

 

Prose:

Peeradina, Saleem. The Ocean in My Yard. Penguin, 2005.

___________. An Arc in Time. Copper Coin, 2022.

 

Works about Saleem Peeradina:

Dev, Jai. “The Poetry of Saleem Peeradina.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, pp. 185-189, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40872974

Dharwadkar, Vinay, and A.K. Ramanujan. Editors. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry. Oxford UP, 1994.

Hasan, Anjum and Sampurna Chattarji. Editors. Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing. Red Hen Press, 2022.

King, Bruce. “Book Reviews.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 351–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873259 . Accessed 4 Sep. 2022.

Paranjape, Makarand. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, May 2-8, 1998, pp. 1049-1056.

Perry, John Oliver. “Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” World Literature Today, Spring, 1994, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 261-271. http://www.jstor.com/stable/40150140 .

Pinto, Jerry. “Perched on a Hyphen.” Indian Express. 17 June 2017,  https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/perched-on-a-hyphen-4707811/. Accessed 4 Sep., 2022.

Venkateswaran, Pramila. “A Living Legacy: An Interview with Saleem Peeradina.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp. 179-193, https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/35789. Accessed 4 Sep. 2022.

May 08
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | Nalini Iyer

By Critical Biography No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online, 08 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .

Chicago:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 08, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific and a popular South Asian American writer. Her works combine storytelling and social justice with a focus on immigrant rights, gender, citizenship, and belonging. In a blog post on her author website, Divakaruni writes: “Sometimes I’m asked if I would have become a writer if I hadn’t moved to the United States. I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know, though, that I couldn’t have written the same kinds of stories, hybrids born out of the melding of the Indian and American cultures”(https://www.chitradivakaruni.com/blog/2013/7/7/america).  Divakaruni who is a poet, novelist, activist, and academic was born in Kolkata on July 29, 1956. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Calcutta, she moved to Wright State University in the United States for an M.A. She  completed her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She has taught at several American colleges and universities and is currently the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Texas. As an activist, she is the founder of Maitri, an organization in San Francisco that supports women who are victims of domestic violence. She also serves on the board of Daya, a Houston based organization that does similar work. Her literary works have won several awards including the American Book Award  (1996), the PEN Josephine Miles award (1996), and she has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (1997).

Divakaruni’s work is shaped by her experiences as an immigrant woman, and many of her works focus on how women navigate the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience. She also depicts strong women characters who overcome adversity and establish life pathways for themselves. In recent years, she has turned to reworking Indian mythology and history from the perspective of women and thus her The Palace of Illusions (2008) retells the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective, and the The Forest of Enchantment (2019) presents the Ramayana from Sita’s viewpoint. Her most recent novel, The Last Queen (2021), tells the story of Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharajah Ranjit Singh and her struggle against the British Empire while serving as a regent who protected her young son’s rights.

 

The Immigrant Experience:

Like many middle-class and upper-caste Indians who emigrated to the United States, Chitra Divakaruni also arrived there as a graduate student. In 1965, the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act which provided opportunities for educated Indians to study and work in the United States. While such  changes in the law benefited many in the technical and scientific fields, there were people who also pursued studies in the Humanities like Divakaruni. Her first publication was a poetry collection Black Candle (1991) that  garnered praise for its South Asian metaphors and images. For example, in “The Garba” set during the Navaratri, “Light glances/off the smooth wood floor of the gym/festooned with mango leaves/flown in from Florida” (43), the poet simultaneously invokes the nostalgia and displacement of the diasporic subject. Some of the poems were inspired by the art and film of others. For example, “The Rat Trap” was inspired by Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Elipathayam  and “Two Women outside a Circus, Pushkar” was influenced by one of Raghubir Singh’s photographs. Her second collection Leaving Yuba City (1997) is notable for its final sequence of poems in which Divakaruni tells the stories of the early Sikh immigrants to the Imperial Valley in California. Her poignant poems speak to the loneliness of the immigrant men who were either single or had left their wives behind. She writes of the bewilderment of the women who arrive years later to find their husbands changed, of young men whose interracial marriages to Mexican women transformed their everyday lives, and of the daughters of the early immigrants who struggled to escape strict homes. These poems frame lyrical narratives in the context of the lesser-known history of South Asians in the Pacific Coast.

 

Divakaruni’s first work of fiction was Arranged Marriage (1995), a collection of eleven women-centric stories that focused on urgent topics such as domestic violence, the  isolation of immigrants, and the stigma of divorce. Divakaruni’s stories in this collection are notable for raising awareness about violence within immigrant families that are exacerbated by the challenges of migration. In the 1990s her fiction addressed topics that were relatively underexplored in South Asian American writing. Divakaruni’s  first important novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) marks her shift from the realist mode of her debut short stories to a melding of realism and fable. Her protagonist Tilo has magical healing powers and arrives in a spice store in San Francisco, where her customers share their stories of struggle and she offers them spices that give them solace. She falls in love with a Native American man, Raven, and in committing to him breaks the code for spice mistresses. Her choice between conformity to the mistress’s code and autonomy mirrors the struggles of her clients. The narrative is thus a celebration of Tilo’s  autonomy. Scholars like Inderpal Grewal have critiqued the novel’s dismissal of the violence of the spice trade and its embrace of an American vision of multicultural solidarity by “producing ethnic identity through exotic difference” (Grewal 76). However, as I have argued elsewhere, the spice store setting shows Divakaruni’s understanding of that violent history and traces its continuity in current times as an exotic grocery store in the Bay area where, ironically, the customers unaware of the history of the spice trade are nevertheless experiencing racism, alienation, and prejudice that trace their roots to that colonial trade (Singh et al., 7).

Divakaruni’s depiction of the immigrant experience takes a significant turn after 9/11 when she begins documenting the struggles of South Asian immigrants in the United States in the new racialized regime with intensified Islamophobia. In an essay she published in the LA Times, Divakaruni writes about how 9/11 led to her displaying an American flag in her home because she cherished American values of liberty, equality, and justice and notes also that immigrants like her are always viewed with a suspicious lens (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-21-op-59757-story.html). In Queen of Dreams (2004), she once again works with magical realism as she had done in The Mistress of Spices. Rakhi, her protagonist, the child of Indian immigrants, is distanced from her mother who had the ability to interpret and experience the dreams of others. In exploring her mother’s dream journals after her death, Rakhi learns much about her family history. When 9/11 shatters Americans’ sense of security and invulnerability, Islamophobia dramatically increased in the United States. There were many violent attacks on South Asian immigrants, including Sikhs, who were misidentified as the Taliban. This rise in violence shattered many immigrants’ ‘American Dream.’ Rakhi’s child who has inherited her grandmother’s ability to interpret and experience dreams struggles with her nightmares about burning buildings. Rakhi and her friend Belle witness violence against their Sikh friend who is mistaken for a Muslim. Their café and restaurant, like Tilo’s spice store, become a space for community and solidarity for immigrants of color.

In Oleander Girl (2013), Divakaruni once again explores the impact of 9/11 on Indian immigrants when her protagonist, Korobi, visits from Calcutta to search for her father whom she had believed dead. Using her family’s wealth and business connections, Korobi embarks on a search for her father. Her quest takes her from New York to California. Korobi, who has been raised in a wealthy Calcutta family, and is about to marry into a wealthier one, has a limited understanding of race and racism. She has experienced prejudice in India for her dark skin, and in her travels in the United States, she learns of the hardships and racism that Indians have experienced in post 9/11 America. She witnesses domestic violence and marital breakdown due to racism in the lives of the Mitras, the couple who host her in New York. The Mitras manage an art gallery for the Boses, Korobi’s prospective in-laws, and the attacks on their business threatens their economic stability and also that of the Bose family. She undertakes a road trip to meet her father and is surprised to learn that he is Black. Her assumption as a child was that her American father was white, and her discovery that she is half-Black leads to a recalibration of her identity and her experiences with colorism. In meeting her father, she learns about her parents’ romance but little about her father’s experience of race as a Black man. She understands that the rejection of her father by her grandparents and the subsequent secrets about her birth reflect an intertwining of anti-Black racism with both caste and colorism in India. The novel undermines the popular idea of Indian Americans as upwardly mobile and wealthy professionals. Through the story of the Mitras and of Vic, a working-class Indian American man, Divakaruni challenges the model minority myth. However, when Korobi returns to India to marry Rajat Bose, she seems to set aside her African-American heritage and fully embrace her Indian identity. Thus, while Divakaruni draws a connection between the experiences of racism in the US and the anti-Black views in India, the novel’s ending emphasizes Korobi’s re-assimilation into her wealth and privilege.

Reworking Myth and History:

In recent years, Divakaruni has shifted the focus of her fiction to Indian myth and history. As a feminist writer, she seeks to recover lost or marginalized women’s voices through fictionally reimagining well-known narratives from women’s perspective. Her The Palace of Illusions (2008) rewrites the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, from the perspective of Paanchali (Draupadi). She presents Paanchali’s story of birth, her marriage to five brothers, her deep involvement in her husbands’ quest for their lost kingdom, and her relationship with Lord Krishna. In The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Divakaruni retells The Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. Framed as a feminist retelling, the novel not only makes Sita the protagonist, it also highlights and reworks perspectives on other female characters including Surpanakha (Ravana’s sister), Mandodari (Ravana’s wife), and Sunaina (Janaka’s wife). Divakaruni’s retelling of the Hindu epic participates in the long tradition of retellings, what Paula Richman has called “many Ramayanas,”(9) through which the epic is kept alive. Divakaruni portrays Sita as a warrior princess who is skilled in archery and also as a healer and an eco-feminist. Drawing not just from Valmiki’s Ramayana but also from Krittibas, Kamban, Adbhuta Ramayana, and Jaina traditions, Divakaruni remains focused on not just the greatness of Rama but the role of the women in his life. Kaikeyi is portrayed with compassion and Lakshmana’s wife Sumitra as one devastated by his decision to exile himself with his brother. In her retelling, Divakaruni also suggests the possibility that Sita is the child of Mandodari and Ravana who is abandoned by her parents because her birth foretells the doom of her father and thus hints at an incestuous relationship between Ravana and Sita. Divakaruni imagines the everyday life of Sita as Queen when she returns to Ayodhya and needs to resurrect a household that has been neglected for many years. She also explores palace intrigues in great detail and adds in the human dimension to a narrative that is often read as divine.

In The Last Queen (2022), Divakaruni returns once more to a Queen whose story, like Sita’s, has been overshadowed by that of her warrior husband. Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, is the center of this narrative and Divakaruni writes of the King’s courtship of the young daughter of one of his employees, a keeper of horses. The teenage Jindan falls in love with a much older king and the marriage occurs by proxy when the girl marries Ranjit Singh’s sword because he is absent, being at a war. The courtship of Ranjit Singh and Jindan is portrayed as in any contemporary romance novel, and as with The Forest of Enchantments, much narrative energy focuses on palace intrigues—power plays amongst queens and concubines, poisonings, household factions and so on. Once Ranjit Singh dies, Jindan finds herself and her baby son in danger. But with clever political maneuverings she becomes the regent when her child, Dalip, is installed as Ranjit Singh’s heir. When the Sikh Empire falls to the British, Dalip is sent to England as the ward of Queen Victoria and his mother is imprisoned. She tricks her way out of prison and makes a harrowing journey to Nepal where she is at first welcomed and offered refuge, and later despised for her politics. The narrative traces her reunification with her anglicized adult son, and her eventual death. The novel is both a critique of how women’s roles in politics are overlooked by historians and an examination of the British destruction of the mighty Sikh Empire. Although The Forest of Enchantments rewrites an epic and The Last Queen draws on a historical figure, the narratives depict the women protagonists similarly—beautiful, clever, able to manipulate palace intrigues, and sexually empowered. Such similarities in character development render these women almost anachronistically contemporary and framed by second-wave American feminism as developed by critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, among others. Second-wave feminists focused on recovering the works of overlooked women writers (Showalter) and in understanding Victorian women writers and their female characters (Gilbert and Gubar). Thus, Divakaruni’s feminist depictions run the risk of what Chandra Mohanty identified in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonialist Discourse”—the production of a monolithic “third world woman” (51, Indian woman in Divakaruni’s case), and producing feminist knowledge about India using Western strategies and analytic categories. This alignment with second-wave feminism makes Divakaruni popular with North American readers.[1]  By foregrounding women of color in her fiction and for telling stories of their struggles against a stereotypical Indian patriarchy, Divakaruni’s writing aligns with the North American publishing market’s drive for diversity in their lists.

Divakaruni’s most recent novel is Independence (India, 2022; United States, 2023) in which she tells the story of three sisters—Deepa, Priya, and Jamini—and their quest for autonomy set against the backdrop of Indian independence and Partition. Using brief epigraphs to sections of the book, she gestures toward the larger political issues such as the Radcliffe line or Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. She also examines the Partition’s impact on the lives of the three sisters and their mother. The family loses the father in the violence following Direct Action Day in 1946 in Calcutta and experiences growing poverty in their small rural community. As they strive to make ends meet, they are helped by an avuncular local wealthy man, and each sister forges her own path. Deepa elopes with a Muslim doctor and moves to Dhaka; Jamini struggles with her disability and her unrequited love for Amit, her sister Priya’s fiancé; and Priya is forced to choose between her aspirations to study medicine in Philadelphia and her impending marriage to Amit. Sisterly relationships, women’s struggle for autonomy, the challenges of living in a patriarchal society are the themes that are echoed from Divakaruni’s prior fiction. The sections outlining Priya’s life as a medical student in the 1940s in America is reminiscent of Divakaruni’s ongoing interest in pre-1965 Indian immigrant history demonstrated by her Yuba city poems. As a historical novel, Independence is noteworthy for its focus on the Bengal partition and the political challenges in East Pakistan that eventually led to the formation of Bangladesh.

 

The first anthology of criticism, Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora, was published in 2022.  It contains 12 critical interviews on a range of Divakaruni’s work and 3 reprinted interviews as well as a substantive introduction by the editors. In the scholarly works published on Divakaruni, certain novels predominate, and these include The Mistress of Spices, Queen of Dreams, and The Palace of Illusions. Much of the scholarship examines themes of diaspora, displacement, feminism, and women’s empowerment. Divakaruni herself  maintains an author website www.chitradivakaruni.com that is a useful resource for her readers.

Chitra Divakaruni is an important voice in South Asian diasporic fiction. She explores a range of forms and techniques in her writing- from poetry and essays to realist short fiction, magic realism, and historical fiction. As a feminist writer, she has (along with Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri) foregrounded the experiences of Indian middle-class women with immigration, alienation, family struggles, and racism. Her focus on women overcoming hardships and finding autonomy offers a hopeful approach to the challenges of diasporic living. Divakaruni has contributed significantly to the mainstreaming of South Asian American voices in the realm of ethnic literature in the United States.

Primary Texts

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Black Candle. Calyx Books, 1991.

—. Arranged Marriage. Anchor, 1995.

—. Leaving Yuba City. Deckle Edge, 1997.

—. The Mistress of Spices. Anchor, 1997.

—. Queen of Dreams. Doubleday, 2004.

—. The Palace of Illusions. Anchor, 2009.

—. Oleander Girl. Simon and Schuster, 2013.

—. The Forest of Enchantments. Harper Collins, 2019.

—. The Last Queen. Harper Collins, 2021.

—. Independence. William Morrow, 2023.Selected Bibliography on Divakaruni

Buley-Meissner, Mary Louise. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A Bibliographic Review of Resources for Teachers.” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies, vol. 1, no.7, 2010, pp. 142-153.

Erney, Hans-Georg. “Draupadi Returns with a Vengeance.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no.4, 2019, pp. 486-497.

Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diaspora, Neoliberalisms. Duke UP, 2005.

Iyer, Nalini. “Embattled Canons: The Place of Diasporic Writing in Indian English Literatures.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 3-21.

Rasiah, Dharini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, U of Hawaii P, 2000, pp.140-153.

Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “Not too Spicy: Exotic Mistresses of Cultural Translation in the Fiction of Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 23-52.

Singh, Amritjit, Robin E. Field, Samina Najmi, editors. Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora. Lexington Books, 2022.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination. Yale UP, 1980.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 , vol.12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333-358. Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. U of California P, 1991.

Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Viking, 1990.

 

[1] Actual data on point-of-sale numbers for books is only accessible to publishers. Mistress of Spices was reviewed in the New York Times and was on their bestseller list. Her latest, Independence, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her One Amazing Thing made it to citywide reading programs in nine American cities and was on all “campus-reads” programs on twenty-three college campuses.

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M
Apr 27
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English and the Indian Everyday | Nandana Dutta

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MLA:
Dutta, Nandana. “English and the Indian Everyday.” Indian Writing In English Online, 01 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/vernacular-english-nandana-dutta/ .

Chicago:
Dutta, Nandana. “English and the Indian Everyday.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 01, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/vernacular-english-nandana-dutta/ .

Review: Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India by Akshya Saxena. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2022.

Concern with English in India has expressed itself in three clearly discernible areas – the teaching of, or often, the place of the English language in Indian higher education, the social life of English (literature and language) and the development of the discipline of English Studies (a term increasingly used to embrace the study of language and the teaching and research into Anglophone writing, mostly at BA and MA in universities, colleges and institutions like the IITs). This book Vernacular English is positioned in a zone surrounded by all of these. At the same time by orienting it through a prefatory gesture at two very different users of English – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rohith Vemula (Dalit PhD scholar who committed suicide): “Modi turns to English to uphold a neoliberal and casteist Hindu state, whereas Vemula used English precisely to resist this vision” (xiii) – the author, Akshya Saxena, creates a rationale for the book that takes it out of the tired reiterations of English in Indian education/higher education and places it squarely in the middle of the chaotic post-independence everyday of India. She looks for its use among those who know or do not know English, among those who read, hear and see English – an “economy of literary, sonic and visual English across languages and media”, in order to “retell[s] the story of English in India as the story of a people’s vernacular in a postcolonial democracy” which is made up of the “political vernacular” of the postcolonial state and the “popular vernacular that emerges amid varying degrees of literacy” (6). By shifting the terms of the narrative of English in India out of the academy to a sensual perception of the language (memorably expressed in the ‘talk, walk, laugh, run English’ speech from the 1982 Amitabh Bachchan movie, Namak Halaal), in everyday life, Saxena achieves something that is likely to influence the way English is understood even within its disciplinary limits. She opens up what has always been tacitly accepted, that English sits alongside the vernacular in India; and whether this is acknowledged or not, when teachers of English and its elite users crib about poor English speech and writing in classrooms or in public, it is really the ghostly presence of the vernacular that troubles them.

Saxena argues that the “vernacular [is] a useful framework for the study of the English language” (7), and points to its subversive and transgressive potential in “gathering the bodies that read, write, speak and hear English, whether they are supposed to or not, whether they can or not, whether or not we as scholars recognize them as literate in English” (8). The five chapters accordingly “consider English as a law, a touch, a sight, and a sound” (26). The first chapter studies the “democratic promise” of English by setting two kinds of discourses against one another, using a collection of ‘pro-English essays’ by political leaders, India Demands English Language (1960), and three satirical novels – Srilal Sukla’s Raag Darbari (1968), Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August (1988), and Mammaries of the Welfare State (2004). The three novels collectively and singly demonstrate the distance of English from the people even as they are swamped by the English of documents, circulars and the officers who try to mediate them, with “English becom[ing]s a fetishized object whose power does not always conjure the authority of the state” (56). The second and third chapters feature caste in two closely related sites – the significance of the Dalit writer writing in English and the representation of caste in Anglophone literature. The chapter titled ‘Touch’ is a nuanced reading of the practice of English in the context of untouchability that is evocatively stated: “Hands that write not only define the individual, they also reach out to intentionally touch the other. Against the bodily regulation in the caste system, the physicality of writing in a shared language produces new modalities of seeing and touching the figure of the Dalit as the literary subject” (64). The politics suggested here through a set of Hindi and English Dalit texts reiterates the argument about English as a language of empowerment but understands it distinctly through this novel reading of ‘touch’. The next chapter, ‘Text’ reads Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as featuring two kinds of English, one the medium of the novel, and the other, that attributed to the low caste character to reflect on the desire for English as “a caste-marked desire,” while also gesturing at the connotations of sound or hearing in the word ‘Anglophone’ (123). How English is heard is one of the key tropes examined in the book. The next chapter titled ‘Sound’ explores the ‘oral and aural experience of English’ through an event (the naked protest of the Manipuri mothers in 2004) and the literature of protest of Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy, as well as the English ‘literature of Northeast India’ (specifically one story by Yumlembam Ibomcha and two by Temsula Ao) to make the not-so-original point that “English carries the sounds of a traumatized landscape and offers mediations of a counterhistory” (147). This chapter does not have what I would like to call the ‘inwardness’ or conviction of the earlier ones, as the readings are less substantial and the oral-aural argument not entirely convincing. The final chapter, ‘Sight’ tracks sites where “English . . . achieves visible form in mundane objects” (151), and where its script is visibly manifested as ‘images’ – in books being sold on the sidewalk, on billboards, storefronts, advertisements, etc., and in films like Slumdog Millionaire and Gully Boy which stage different kinds of encounters with English in the slums of Mumbai. Saxena also briefly notes the roles played by English in the Hindi-Urdu cinema of Bollywood, the reception of Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, and the Censor Board chairman’s estimation of audience reception for English and Hindi films. This last offers a tantalizing glimpse of a hitherto unexplored site, with the English of ‘English’ films (usually from Hollywood) serving as vehicle for an entirely different culture and ethos that is heard, read, and seen with very different results.

Reviews of the book (Rosinka Chaudhuri [TLS, July 15, 2022], N.S. Gundur [The Hindu, Sept 10, 2022], Soni Wadhwa [Asian Review of Books, May 18, 2022]) have noted its unexpected vantage points and associations, its use of political and popular cultural contexts and its rejection of the Indian language-foreign language binary. The new material incorporated into the discussion is worth mentioning as is the author’s often charming takes on this material primarily because of the sensory perspectives she adopts in each chapter.

By virtue of its design the book transgresses boundaries between different domains, which, while fascinating, leaves the reader with a sense of randomness in the choice of events, episodes and sites. Is such randomness inevitable in the study of English in the unmeasurable, varied, and crowded cultural, political, regional, colonial-historical realities of India? As more books of this kind that are intensely interesting and intensely selective appear, perhaps we will begin to find comfort in the idea of randomness itself as a premise for the study of “English in India” and no longer seek the comprehensive study of the field that always leaves one unsatisfied.

Nandana Dutta teaches English at Gauhati University. Her current area of interest is English Studies in India.
Apr 24
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An Eclectic Spread | Meenakshi Srihari

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MLA:
Srihari, Meenakshi. “An Eclectic Spread.” Indian Writing In English Online, 24 April 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/longform-2022-meenakshi-srihari .

Chicago:
Srihari, Meenakshi. “An Eclectic Spread.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 24, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/longform-2022-meenakshi-srihari .

Review: Longform 2022, An Anthology of Graphic Narratives, edited by Sarabjit Sen, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukherjee and Pinaki De. Penguin Books, 2022.

What sets the Longform Anthologies (the first was published in 2016) apart from most other Indian comics anthologies that have cropped up steadily over the last decade –such as the monumental collection on the Partition, This Side That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, or Blaft’s Obliterary Journal, with comics attempting to ‘obliterate’ text-dominant literary cultures (in Volume I) and those on meat-eating (in Volume II) is the lack of an announced theme. While in many ways this suffuses the reader’s expectations with mystery, the range in terms of technique and complexity across the eighteen texts collected in the Longform Anthology (Volume 2) makes its evaluation impossible, perhaps reiterating that a single story about India cannot exist. At least a couple of broad themes and formal devices connect the stories in this anthology, such as homes and homelands, coming-of-age, and illness and the body, though for the most part, the curation remains an eclectic spread.

“Noor” narrates the story of a young boy whose happy life is destroyed by a fire that kills his mother and takes away their home. The only remnant of this life is his mother’s red box, which Noor carries everywhere with him as he wanders off by himself and is eventually rescued by Misbah, a ragpicker and drug peddler. Drawn with a largely black and white palette, red emerges as a character that consumes Noor, appearing first as the flames that brought down his house, then as the box that sustains his memories of the past, and finally as the container of a drug that Noor uses to drift into a world of memories. The scantily worded story represents the precarious lives of characters such as Noor in this country – young, poor, displaced, and doing anything to survive. Sarabjit Sen’s ironically titled “A Pilgrim’s Progress”, more directly brings homelessness and poverty into the picture through his depiction of how capitalism lures the poor into further doom.

“Murder,” the opening story by Debjyoti Saha is another boyhood story which examines the myth making that surrounds crows in India. If crows seem like unlikely characters for a story (not very unlikely – we have, after all, grown up with Amar Chitra Katha’s Kalia the Crow), they soon entirely occupy the protagonist’s head as he begins seeing them everywhere. With some witty panels that set up interesting contrasts– one with a caged bird, followed by the text, “Aren’t birds supposed to be sweet and dainty” (9) stands out – Saha points to how storytelling lies at the heart of how we paint and perceive the other and decide our relationship with them.

The first of at least three narratives that are surreal in terms of storytelling and/or art is “Fledged” by Jerry Antony, which with blue washed out colours follows a conversation between a young boy and a giant rabbit which can fly (this does not, to the writer’s credit, surprise us at all), and which asks if to fly is also to let your imagination soar. Noah Van Sciver’s “Holly Hill” is another boyhood story, and could easily be the most composed story of the lot, recollecting those years of adolescent life when time seems infinite and the luxury of ambling through everyday life, very real.

Among the graphic narratives in the collection that follow some typical conventions of the visual medium, including cinematic techniques such as focalisation, we find a careful and deliberate use of spatiality to show the passage of time, a trademark of the “juxtaposition in deliberate sequence” that Scott McCloud declares as the definition of comics in the first few pages of Understanding Comics. Time and the coalescing of temporalities form both the theme and an important formal technique in a few of the narratives.  In “Oye Tubbu”, for example, where we look at the humdrum life of a man and his grandma, the emphasis on fabula time makes everydayness a prominent theme and defines the grammar of the narrative. The narrator undertakes the task of describing his grandma through elements she engages with most – medicine, food, and religion, focusing on moments of comic relief that one encounters in the otherwise arduous process of ageing.

Movement is once again the hero in the cinematically structured “Kallan” – Malayalam for thief – set in a crowded marketplace in Cochin, where we follow the stealthy movements of a thief until in a twist of fate – and a sudden change of momentum in the narrative – the thief gets caught in a bus for a crime he does not commit. Some stories in the volume appear merely as flights of fancy, experimenting with form and figure, such as “Storm Over a Teacup”, which while surreal in its depiction of people with multiple sets of eyes and teeth, stays true to its title, dramatically portraying an otherwise mundane day at a tea stall. Both “Kallan” and “Storm” appear as exercises in focalisation and narrative time.

Another theme that one discovers in the anthology is illness and the body. We walk through the doors of an HDU (a High Dependency Unit) into the story of “Patient No. 259”, in which Sudhanya Dasgupta makes an important point through the fictionalised recollection of her mother’s hospitalisation after a cerebral attack: that the diminutive labels that medical terminology imposes upon a person often lack, what proponents of Narrative Medicine have called a “thick” description of their story. Dasgupta and Manisha Naskar supplement this lack with a foray into the mother’s memories of a childhood spent as a refugee in Calcutta. The coming together of an illness and partition narrative brings the idea of a corporeal home and a geographical home into neat conjunction. Other tales revolving around the body include “It was just another day” by Gayatri Menon, a mother’s rumination about her unborn child after a surgery removing the foetus, and one of the more experimental tales in the anthology, “Chimera” by Srijita and Oz, that describes addiction in a cyberpunk style that pops with colour and swanky font but is hazy in terms of plot.

A standout piece in the anthology is “Bose Vs Bose” by Arghya Manna, who paints in the fictionalised biographical sketch of the physicist, biologist, and philosopher Jagadish Chandra Bose the inner turmoil caused by questions of the commingling of science and spirituality. If Manna’s journey to the limelight was through his publication in a medical journal[i] where his skills at scaling up and animating microscopic events such as the splitting of spit bubbles came to the fore, “Bose Vs Bose” shows a scientist exploring a world that grows around us, inside us, and impinges upon our consciousness, making all borders permeable. The idea of imagination and its limitlessness that runs through several of the stories is at its best in both theme and form in the story. It leaves us with this provocation: “The real is one. Wise men call it variously” (103).

The Longform Anthology joins other commendable (and arguably, more nuanced) comics published in 2022 such as the four issues of the Orijit Sen-edited Comixense, Nikhil Gulati’s The Story of Indus and the republished River of Stories. 2022 also marked a seminal point for comics scholarship, with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics turning 30. If scholars worldwide are deliberating[ii] how McCloud’s definitions of the panel or the gutter have grown beyond their initial descriptions in the last three decades, a formally inventive volume like the Longform Anthology is only testament to the ever-morphing nature of the comics form.

 

Works cited:

Manna, Argha. “Be Aware of Droplets and Bubbles.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019, Web only, doi: 10.7326/G20-0114.

McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1993.

Sen, Sarabjit, Debkumar Mitra, Sekhar Mukerjee and Pinaki De, editors. Longform 2022, An Anthology of Graphic Narratives, Penguin Books, 2022.

“Understanding Comics at 30,” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, edited by Rachel Miller and Daniel Worden, vol. 6, no. 3, Fall 2022.

_________

Notes:

[i] The Annals of Internal Medicine carried Arghya Manna’s graphic piece on spit bubbles and covid infections in 2019.

[ii] See for instance, Ohio University Press’s Inks, volume 6, issue 3, which is dedicated to examining McCloud’s Understanding Comics at 30.

Meenakshi Srihari teaches at NIT, Andhra Pradesh and is Project Assistant with the IWE Online project and the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. Her interests include the Health Humanities and Graphic Medicine. Her work has appeared in Medical Humanities, Media Watch and Synapsis.
Apr 17
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Aravind Adiga | Ulka Anjaria

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MLA:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 April 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .

Chicago:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 17, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .

“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings… But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind… We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten.”

 —Aravind Adiga, Selection Day (233)

 

 

Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Chennai, and completed his schooling and advanced degrees in India, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is best known for his novel The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 2008. He is also the author of several short stories as well as three additional novels: Last Man in Tower (2011), Selection Day (2016), and Amnesty (2020).

The White Tiger broke new ground in Indian English fiction for its move away from some of the genre’s common themes and aesthetics. In contrast to the writings of previous Indian winners of the Booker Prize, The White Tiger noticeably eschews pathos and rejects the sensitive and emphatic portrayal of characters from marginalized sections of society as seen in the writings of Rohinton Mistry, and the righteous sense of injustice or anger against the system as seen in Arundhati Roy. Rather, Balram Halwai, The White Tiger’s protagonist, is a ruthless self-promoter, his frustrations at the obstacles put in the path of his social advancement generating a sense of gritty motivation that leads him to become a social climber at all costs. He uses the language of late capitalism to articulate his own aspirations; he is a self-styled “entrepreneur” (1). He is a member of an underclass that does not seek pity or empathy but faces challenges with a hard-nosed pragmatism that is at once cynical and agentive. If some of the most famous Indian novels in English of the 1980s and 1990s reflect a profound disillusionment with the failures of the Indian nation-state, Adiga’s works mark a newer era in the genre, which we might call post-disillusion, when there is nothing of the illusion left at all and so rather than lament its loss the only thing to do is pick up the pieces and stitch together a livable life from them.

The White Tiger is set in a contemporary India that has been stripped of its moral values. Any symbol or model of moral righteousness – Gandhi, Nehru, literary icons, spiritualism, secularism, socialism – is presented in his works through a cynical gaze, upturning conventional morality so that, at its extreme, right is wrong and wrong is right. For instance when Balram walks into a tea shop for his first day at work, he sees the shopkeeper “sitting under a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and [he] knew already that [he] was going to be in big trouble” (31); the image of Gandhi, which might have once signaled virtue, now represents its opposite. Balram scoffs at the men working in tea shops in rural India who “do [their] job well – with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt” (43), aware that their hard work will get them nowhere in life. By contrast, Balram claims, “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience” (43), while this is a humorous inversion of conventional ideas of education and enrichment, it is also a perceptive critique of the limitations on social advancement in contemporary India, where if you’re poor or otherwise marginalized, hard work is futile. Instead, Balram “used [his] time at the tea shop… to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. [He] decided that this was how [he] would keep [his] education going forward” (43). Balram presents street smarts and cleverness, rather than belief in the virtue of labor, as the only option for social mobility in a profoundly broken system.

Although The White Tiger advances a social critique, there is no hope of reform; patriarchy, capitalism, casteism, greed and selfishness have so completely taken over that the only “hope” (which is in fact a cynical gloss on hope) is to bend these forces to one’s advantage. Thus, victimhood can become agency, even if that agency involves theft and murder. In The White Tiger, Adiga replaces the bleak/fatalistic attitude of an earlier generation of Indian writers in English with a more cynical/pragmatic perspective that is always on the lookout for an opportunity for breaking out of one’s social circumstances but is not at all interested in reforming the whole system. For this reason, The White Tiger has been criticized by some scholars as being neoliberal –celebrating a rags-to-riches, bootstraps narrative rather than offering a concerted critique of structural inequalities. Certainly, there is very little that is Marxist about The White Tiger; there is no class solidarity and the narrative of advancement is not only individualistic but actively anti-collective. This is less a progressive critique of capitalism than a perceptive recognition of a new world order in which the very possibilities for subaltern advancement have already been tainted by half-a-century of corruption that has saturated the very fibers of Indian society.

Indeed, one wonders if these critiques of The White Tiger had some influence in shaping the direction of Adiga’s subsequent novels. In all three, the cynicism is still there, as are characters who have no moral compass and who, like Balram, reject the language of liberalism and act in extremely self-serving and socially destructive ways. However, in contrast to The White Tiger, at the center of each of the three later novels is a protagonist who has a heart and who does his (they are all men) best to resist the forces of the deeply corrupt world around him. While Balram found criminality as the only path forward in a nation of criminals, the protagonists of the other novels try to remain ethical despite the pressures around them.

Last Man in Tower’s Masterji is a former teacher and elderly resident of a Mumbai apartment building targeted by a builder for redevelopment, providing that all owners agree to the deal. The rest of the residents are gradually convinced, but Masterji remains steadfast in his refusal to sell, partly because of the memories of his deceased wife that still pervade his flat. The other residents get impatient as the deadline comes closer, and in a bid to get the deal through, one of them pushes Masterji to his death, off the building terrace. In this novel, the middle-class society is represented as thoroughly amoral and materialistic. Though Masterji, tries to stay true to the values of learning, family, and morality, he is ultimately a victim to it.

Selection Day is also set in a world,among characters,completely warped by violence and greed. Radha and Manju are brothers and cricket prodigies. They live with their unemployed, controlling, and at times violent father who treats them as his property. Manju, the younger brother, is the novel’s protagonist. Not only does he grow up in the shadow of his older brother and gradually outshine him in cricket, earning both Radha’s and his father’s anger, but he also finds himself sexually attracted to a wealthy boy, Javed, who treats him alternatingly with affection and disdain. Selection Day is a cricket novel – a critique of the business of cricket in contemporary India, from match fixing to corporate sponsorships to the recruiting industry. Manju resembles Balram in that he too must make compromises to succeed. But unlike Balram, who murders his boss and never faces the consequences, Manju’s denial of his sexuality and his abandonment of Javed for the sake of his cricketing career prove ultimately hollow. Manju remains a sympathetic character throughout, from his childhood when he is the victim of emotional and physical abuse by his father, through his adolescence and the eponymous selection day, and beyond, into his listless adulthood. Unlike Balram, the novel focalizes its narration through Manju, allowing us to glimpse his hazy memories of his mother who left when he was a child, his love of the television show CSI, his secret dream to work in a morgue rather than be a cricketer, his fear of his brother and his father, and his unarticulated desire for Javed. In the midst of the ruthless world in which he lives, and despite his own flaws, Manju remains profoundly human.

Danny, the protagonist of Adiga’s most recent novel Amnesty, is also a sympathetic character in an unforgiving world. As an undocumented Tamil Sri Lankan having escaped the Civil War and state repression, Danny lives in Sydney when the novel begins and works as a house cleaner. The novel takes place over the course of a single day that begins with Danny learning that a former client named Radha Thomas has been murdered. In a series of flashbacks, we learn more about Danny’s strange relationship with Radha and her extramarital lover, Dr. Prakash, who were both gambling addicts and highly unlikeable people. Additionally, they knew of Danny’s illegal status and were using it to try to control him. Danny immediately suspects Dr. Prakash as Radha’s murderer, having witnessed violent arguments between them, but realizes that turning Dr. Prakash in to the police would require implicating himself – living in Australia illegally – to the authorities. Danny struggles with the decision over the course of the day, calling the police hotline several times but ultimately hanging up. Finally, having realized that Dr. Prakash is planning to murder Radha’s husband next, Danny does the right thing. The last page of the novel is a press release that reports the tip that resulted in the arrest of Dr. Prakash and in preventing the second murder, but also notes that “the person who tipped police off on the hotline confessed during questioning to being illegally present in Australia and is now being processed for deportation to his home country”(217). Danny’s sacrifice of his own happiness – contrary to his repeated mantra, “I am never going back home” (207) – exposes, once again, the immorality of the outside world through the foil of a character who is able to act morally despite it.

These various male protagonists who struggle to make it for themselves under the ruthless logic of late capitalism also demonstrate the ways in which Adiga links masculinity and class. We see this in the scene in The White Tiger where Balram tries to imitate Mr. Ashok, his employer by hiring a blonde prostitute. Balram  is devastated when he discovers that her hair is dyed. The fact that the idiom of Balram’s desire for social and economic mobility is that of sex suggests the deep imbrication of class and sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality is more nuanced in Selection Day, where Manju’s burgeoning understanding of his own queer sexuality makes him the target of homophobic taunts from his father and peers, but – and more importantly – gives him a new perspective on ordinary things that allows him, at times, to detach himself from the world around him. In this novel, queerness is presented not only as a question of desire but also as a kind of secret world of survival that enables Manju to develop a sense of self which  is at times magically distant from the crude material needs, both bodily and financial, of everyone else around him. Indeed, it is only when he turns his back on his own queerness does his life relapse into mediocrity.

Adiga’s interest in questions of masculinity does not really extend to women, and across the four novels there are very few notable women characters. The White Tiger’s Pinki Madam is a morally reprehensible, wealthy NRI who drives drunk one night, ends up killing someone sleeping on the street, and forces Balram to take the blame. In Amnesty Danny has a healthy relationship with Sonja (probably the only living healthy relationship across all Adiga’s fiction), but the main female presence is the murdered Radha Thomas who appears in Danny’s flashbacks as domineering,manipulative, and entirely reflective of the privilege of her elite class. Yet, while all the female characters verge on caricatures, most of the male characters do as well – the vast majority of characters in Adiga’s fictional worlds are reflections of the corruption of the late capitalist order and have little redeeming about them at all.

Adiga also inhabits a new “transmedia” arena marked by a more complex relationship between literature and other forms of media. Arundhati Roy refused to authorize a screen adaptation of The God of Small Things, and while there have been adaptations of earlier Indian novels in English (perhaps most famously Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the BBC’s recent miniseries A Suitable Boy), the classic IWE texts of the 1990s have rarely been adapted for the screen. But this changed in the first decades of the 21st century, not only with OTT platforms allowing for a wider distribution of varied types of content, but also because authors started writing with adaptation in mind. This is clear in the works of authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan, among others, whose fiction reads as somewhat filmi in its characterization, narrative arc, and at times rapid “cuts” between scenes. Both authors’ books have been made into films. Adiga’s novel Selection Day was similarly released as a series by Netflix in 2018, and three years later the film adaptation of The White Tiger was released on the same platform. As Sangita Gopal reminds us, this is not just a question of unidirectionally adapting fiction into film, but of upturning the idea of an original versus an adaptation; a transmedia project means that a film or television series is not a secondary version of an original fiction but that the book too is a version that might find form in another medium. Adiga’s participation in this arena is part of a new moment in Indian literary production in which the sanctity of the book is replaced by a more lateral proliferation of possible forms.[i]

Unlike many contemporary writers, Adiga is a private person who stays largely out of the public domain. He is not active on social media and has never attended the high-profile Jaipur Literary Festival, despite his popularity and the critical acclaim garnered by his works. In this sense he seems to have avoided the pressures that contemporary writers often face to be political commentators as well as practitioners of their craft. But this reclusiveness does not lend his writings a sense of apartness; rather, his stories are marked by their contemporary quality, their grittiness and their refusal of pity or sentiment. For these reasons, his impact on the field of Indian writing in English will continue to grow.

 

Primary Sources

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. Atlantic Books, 2008.

—. Between the Assassinations. Picador, 2008.

—. Last Man in Tower, Atlantic Books, 2011.

—. Selection Day. Picador, 2016.

—. Amnesty. Scribner, 2020.

Selected Adiga Criticism

Anjaria, Ulka. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple University Press, 2019.

—. “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 1,2015, pp. 114-137.

Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel.’” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5,2011,pp. 535-545.

Mendes, Ana Cristina. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275-293.

—. and Lisa Lau. “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022, doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099940

Shingavi, Snehal. “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 9, no. 3,2014, pp.1-16. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1837.

Walther, Sundhya. “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 579-598.

 

[i] Sangita Gopal, “‘Coming to a Multiplex Near You’: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 359-372.

Edited by: Sreelakshmy M
Mar 27
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Rebels Against the Raj (Cover)

The Spectre of Gandhi | Atul V. Nair

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MLA:
Nair, Atul V. “The Spectre of Gandhi.” Indian Writing In English Online, 27 Mar 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the-spectre-of-gandhi-atul-v-nair/ .

Chicago:
Nair, Atul V. “The Spectre of Gandhi.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 27, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the-spectre-of-gandhi-atul-v-nair/.

Review: Ramachandra Guha. Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom. Penguin Allen Lane, 2022.

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat”

Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

Less than four years after Kipling’s poem first appeared in The Pioneer on 2 December, 1889,[1] the first of Ramachandra Guha’s “rebels” arrived in Tuticorin in South India (7). This was the Irish theosophist and educationist Annie Besant, who in 1917 would go on to become the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. Guha’s latest book Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (2022) is an account of seven such individuals who transgressed national boundaries and racial prejudices to identify with and participate in the Indian struggle for independence. It is an eclectic mix of some well- known (like Besant and Madeleine Slade/Mira Behn) and some lesser known (like Philip Spratt and R.R. Keithahn) but equally remarkable individuals that he brings together. Of the seven, four are British (B.G. Horniman, Madeleine Slade, Philip Spratt, and Catherine Heilemann/Sarala Behn), two are Americans (Samuel Stokes, R.R. Keithahn), and Besant the sole Irishwoman, highlighting the diversity within this group of western “rebels”. While Stokes and Keithahn came out to India as Christian missionaries, the former converts to Hinduism (adopting the name Satyanand), much like Philip Spratt’s transformation from a radical Communist to a bitter critic of Communism (and also of the Congress). One of the merits of Guha’s book is that he has successfully captured such shifts in the religious and political convictions of his protagonists.

However, in his prologue, explaining the rationale behind his selection, Guha states that “detention in British India (or externment from British India) is a sine quo non for inclusion here. Imprisonment or banishment signified the depth of their commitment to the cause” (xvii). Imprisonment or banishment as a necessary condition for selection seems rather arbitrary, as does the presumption that it is a faithful measure of their “commitment” to India’s freedom. An acknowledgement of the fairly large number of foreigners in the freedom struggle would have been a plausible justification for focussing on just seven. The issue of selection points to a larger structural limitation of the book. By restricting himself predominantly to the freedom struggle of the first half of the twentieth century, Guha excludes a much older history of the Raj being questioned by the British themselves, as well a series of anti-colonial struggles that punctuated (even defined) the British presence in India: these include the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767-99), the Vellore Mutiny (1806), the Santhal Rebellion (1855), and the 1857 Uprising, leading up to the final sustained political struggle in the twentieth century of which Guha’s seven “rebels” were participants. The conduct of the East India Company (the predecessor of the Raj) was being intensely scrutinised by the British public as far back as the 1780s during the impeachment proceedings of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the writings of well-known English authors such as Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Leonard Woolf expressed a sense of discomfort with the Raj (even though none of them actively rebelled against it).[2] Benjamin Guy Horniman, one of Guha’s “rebels” and the editor of the Bombay Chronicle who was deported from India in 1919 for his criticism of the Rowlatt Act, has a forerunner in James Augustus Hicky, the editor of India’s first English newspaper, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780-82), who was arrested for his criticism of Warren Hastings. Further, the active role played by Anglo-Indian journalism in national politics and public affairs can be traced back to the reportage of the 1857 Uprising in the burgeoning mid nineteenth-century English language press in India.[3]

This intellectual tradition of the western critique of the Raj is not treated with sufficient detail in Guha’s rather inadequate prologue. A more comprehensive introduction would have foregrounded this historical background to the exploits of the seven “rebels” in India. Instead, Guha resorts to a biographical method which serves his purpose till the narrative deals with Indian independence. However, in the third and final section titled “Independent Indians”, which is set in independent India, each chapter reads like a disparate account in the absence of the freedom struggle as a grand narrative to unite them.

Guha’s biographical method is often hampered by an over-reliance on the relationship that these western individuals shared with Gandhi. It is as if a close association with Gandhi is (like imprisonment or deportation) a necessary condition to be included in this narrative. While it is inevitable that an account of the Indian freedom struggle will have Gandhi as a protagonist, representing these individuals almost as his satellites (or shadows), seen most clearly in the case of Mira Behn (118-19), does not quite fulfil the extraordinary potential of the book’s central theme: “western fighters for India’s freedom,” which is the subtitle. In the final section, Gandhi remains the figure who unites these biographical accounts, since the freedom struggle is no longer a central concern—so, while Mira Behn was instrumental in the making of Richard Attenborough’s 1982 movie Gandhi (392), Keithahn helped establish a centre for rural education near Dindigul named “Gandhigram” in 1947 (365). Instead of letting the accounts of the seven “rebels” be overshadowed by the towering presence of Gandhi, Guha could have emphasised the connections and the contrasts among them. There are two instances in the book where he achieves this with considerable narrative effect—the first is the contrasting yet equally poignant love stories of Philip Spratt and Seetha (151-59), and that of Mira and Prithvi Singh (239-45); the second is the contrast that Guha draws between the personalities of Mira and Sarala (355). Despite offering parallel histories of seven different individuals, the book suffers from the risk of these biographies being subsumed under the overarching and ubiquitous spectre of Gandhi.

By dedicating this book to Jean Drèze Guha honours someone who is not just one of the world’s leading economists, but also someone who, like the “rebels” in this book, defied national and cultural borders and continues to work resolutely and self-effacingly with the people of rural Jharkhand. Such is Guha’s ability of weaving an engaging narrative around lesser-known figures and making unlikely heroes in the process, much like he did with Palwankar Baloo in A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002), where it was Baloo’s story that shone through despite sharing narrative space with such illustrious contemporaries as Maharaja Ranjitsinhji and B.R. Ambedkar. By relying on archival sources, personal correspondence, and early twentieth century print media, Guha reconstructs the tumultuous and eventful lives of these seven individuals in what is, despite its shortcomings, for the most part an eminently readable narrative.

_______________

Works Cited:

Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. Picador, 2002.

—, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Picador, 2007.

—, Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom. Penguin Allen Lane, 2022.

Joshi, Priti. Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India. SUNY Press, 2021.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Ballad of East and West.” The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. xxv, AMS Press, 1970, pp. 217-22.

—, “The Man Who Would be King.” The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. iii, AMS Press, 1970, pp. 189-233.

Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. i, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Secker and Warburg, 1969, pp. 235-42.

—, “Reflections on Gandhi.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. iv, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Secker and Warburg, 1969, pp. 463-470.

Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939. 1967. The Hogarth Press, 1975.

______________

[1] For a publication history of the poem, see https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_eastwest1.htm

[2] Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would be King” (1888) can very well be read as a cautionary tale against imperial ambitions. Also see Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949) as well as Woolf’s Downhill All the Way (1967), pp. 223-32. Interestingly, Guha quotes Woolf in an epigraph in India After Gandhi (2007, 3).

[3] See Priti Joshi’s recent book Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (2021).

Atul V. Nair is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad, and a Project Assistant at IWE Online. He works on Anglo-Indian periodicals of the long nineteenth century.
More Ramachandra Guha on IWE Online
What Gandhi Owed to Tagore
Mar 19
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Meena Kandasamy

By Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the 'State' of the 'Art' No Comments
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MLA:
Kandasamy, Meena. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online, 20 March 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/meena-kandasamy/

Chicago:
Kandasamy, Meena. “Indian Poetry in English: Questions on the ‘State’ of the ‘Art’.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 20, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/meena-kandasamy/ .

Q. To quote poet and publisher P. Lal from his questionnaire sent in the 1960s to an earlier generation of Indian English poets: “What are the circumstances that led to your using the English language for the purpose of writing poetry?” And of course, is such a question relevant to today’s poets, several decades after Lal’s query?

Meena Kandasamy: I wrote in English because of a really strange reason. My mother tongue was Tamil, but the closest government school near my home was a Kendriya Vidyalaya. I had two working parents, so they enrolled me there—and I ended up learning Hindi and English. In many ways I resent this happening in my life because I lost the special access to learning my own mother-tongue. So I started writing in English. I do not think that this question is relevant at all—there are a lot of people who are primarily using English as a mother-tongue, as their principal language. So, why not use it for poetry?

 

Q. In addition to poets from the Anglo-American canon, has your poetry been influenced by Indian English poets of an earlier generation (whether the 19th century pioneers like Derozio and Toru Dutt, or early 20th century poets like Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, or those from the post-1947 generation like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, and A.K. Ramanujan)? Do you consider your poetry a part of this two-hundred-year-old tradition?

M.K.: I have read the works of the 19th and 20th century poets which you mention but I won’t call them my influence. I however do consider Kamala Das a major inspiration and influence. AK Ramanujan is someone I likewise admire, more for his body of translations than for his own work. You are right—I do consider my work as something that belongs to this 200-year-old tradition of Indian writing in English.

 

Q. What are your views on a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English? Does such a thing exist outside English classrooms and literary circles? How much of a consideration is the readership in your poetic process?

M.K.: I do think that there is a readership/audience for Indian poetry in English. I do not think that we can only look at book sales and decide that there’s a negligible audience. Because a lot of people don’t buy books, but read poems online, watch stuff on YouTube, read pdf files and such-like. I do not consider the audience, for me everyone is an audience, even people who do not read English because that poem can reach them eventually through a translation.

 

Q. Do you read, write, or translate poetry in a language other than English? If yes, how does it influence your poetry in English?

M.K.: Yes, I read and translate poetry from Tamil. I also write sometimes, but only for my friend, lover or myself. I’m not yet confident of sharing it with the outside world. I think Tamil as a language and as a literature has been influencing me for a really, really long time.

 

Q. Have you ever taught poetry in a class, at a workshop, or in an informal setting? If yes, which aspects of poetry do you think can be taught?

M.K.: Yes, I’ve taught it in workshops. I too used to feel very anxious—thinking how can poetry be taught. But very fortunately, you often work with students who are poets in some rudimentary form—they are either readers or writers or someone who likes the feel of language, so it is a joy to teach poetry.

 

Q. What are your views on the poetry that appears today on such popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram?

M.K.: I think a lot more people are writing poetry because of the proliferation of social media, and that can only be a good thing.

Meena Kandasamy describes herself as “an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist and translator.” She is the author of poetry collections such as Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). She has also written three novels: The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017), and Exquisite Cadavers (2019).
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Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels | Jobeth Ann Warjri

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Cite this Review

MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 March 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .

Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 13, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .

Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat, Harper Collins, 2022; Where the Cobbled Path Leads by Avinuo Kire, Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2022; Spirit Nights by Easterine Kire, Barbican Press, 2022.

2022 was a good year for Northeast Indian Writing in English. The year saw the publication of at least three books that capture the changing contours of where the literature is at in the present. Taking after ecological concerns that have occupied the minds of academics, climate change activists and ecologists, Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (2022), Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads (2022) and Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights (2022) explore the mysteries of the natural world through the trope of journeys. Whether it is a journey through time as with Pariat or journeys to the spirit world as with Avinuo and Easterine Kire, the journeys effect change in the lives of the people who take them. I begin my review of the books with Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat.

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Everything the Light Touches is an ambitious book in scope, content and form. The novel spans across four centuries, covering four interconnected narratives: that of Carl Linnaeus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Evie (a botanist) and Shai. Beginning in the twenty-first century with Shai’s story, the novel is about journeys that are three-fold and overlapping—physical journeys, journeys through time and journeys towards self-discovery. Pariat combines these journeys with reflections on historical narrative, indigenous rights, folk practices and environmental concern, creating a truly heteroglossic text.

As with Pariat’s earlier book, Seahorse: A Novel, the protagonists of Everything the Light Touches venture into the unknown in order to find their “place” in the world. There are differences, however, in the way each of the characters approaches her respective journey. Shai is “directionless” and apprehensive about her return to Meghalaya (Pariat 23). Evie is uncertain about where her search for the elusive Diengïeï would take her, an uncertainty that is also compounded by the insecurities she feels about being a particular kind of academic (Pariat 113). But while the characters who are women are beset with these conflicts, the men—Goethe and Linnaeus—suffer no such worries. Goethe and Linnaeus, in Pariat’s novel, represent the white male explorer whose travels around the world leave him in no doubt of his belonging to and mastery of it. Even if mastery over the world is not the intention, as is the case with Goethe, the male characters are self-assured in their pursuit of knowledge. This idea also extends to other white, male characters in the novel such as Mr. Finlay, Evie’s love interest, and the devious Mr. Dossett. It is through such characterisations that Pariat’s research lends validity to the affective lives of her protagonists.

Pariat’s book draws upon a wealth of texts and archival material; among them, Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, Linnaeus’ Journey to Lapland, Pranay Lal’s Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Pariat’s novel has benefitted from her extensive research. The characters, taking after Pariat’s research, reveal their subjectivities accordingly. Pariat uses conversations to communicate the nature of her protagonists to the reader. Goethe is philosophical, Evie speaks like an academic even when she expresses self-doubt in being in a discipline dominated by men, Linnaeus’ poetry (except for the poem “Sestina for the Lost”) is seemingly devoid of feeling and concerned only with classifications and Shai is impressionable and undecided about her “place” in the way that those who have left home (as a fixed place) feel. There is, therefore, historical legitimacy and verisimilitude to Pariat’s characterisation that one does not often find in fiction of this scope. This attention to detail is also observed in Pariat’s description of places. As we travel with Evie from the port of Tilbury in England to Mumbai, for instance, the journey through each port and coastal town is meticulously described as they would have appeared during the nineteenth century. One is reminded, in these instances, of Amitav Ghosh whose research of the trade routes in South and South East Asia formed the backdrop and gave historical legitimacy to places in the Ibis Trilogy. Similarly, Goethe’s journey to Italy is marked by changing topographies and plant life, knowledge of the latter being a central theme in the book.      

     Everything the Light Touches is, most of all, a meditation on epistemology. It is about the process of knowing and how we acquire knowledge. While knowledge of nature is a central theme in the book, how we choose to know the world around us is equally, if not more, important. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fourth section which details Linnaeus’ journey to northern Finland or Lapland. Linnaeus’ method of documenting and classifying the flora in Lapland extends also to how he relates to the people living in the region. Unlike Evie or Goethe, who immerse themselves in the cultures in which they find themselves, Linnaeus views the Laplanders as little more than specimens. He acknowledges that their ways of relating to nature are different from his own, and yet, he makes no attempt to understand the world from their perspective. He is content with not knowing in spite of knowing – an epistemological blind spot, if there ever was one. Linnaeus’ concept of Enlightenment reason is also reflected in the way Evie and her contemporaries are taught botany. The dominant method of classifying plants, espoused by male professors and Professor Ethel Sargant (Pariat 112), leaves Evie feeling disconnected from the natural world she used to enjoy as a child (Pariat113). It is against such masculinist attempts at classifying the natural world that Pariat evinces a “new” approach to the natural environment couched in Goethe’s phenomenological idea of plants as ever evolving and whose uniqueness is contained in the whole (Pariat 199). Unsurprisingly, it is the women who embody this concept.

At the heart of Pariat’s novel is the Khasi folk narrative of the Diengïeï. An apparent physical manifestation of Goethe’s Urpflanze, an “archetypal plant that carried within it all plants of the past, present, and future” (Pariat 305) and “a tree that holds all trees” (Pariat 394), the Diengïeï marks a journey through time. It is this journey, marked by the quest for the archetypal tree, that causes those who seek it to arrive at some form of self-realisation and acceptance. The search for the Diengïeï links Evie’s story to Goethe’s and Shai’s as well as the historical contexts underlying each narrative. The Diengïeï, therefore, binds the ontological to the epistemological, the personal to the historical and the particular to the universal. Its story also connects the narratives in the book to the “original” nomads. When Evie ventures into the remote parts of Assam (now, Meghalaya), she meets the custodians of the Diengïeï, nomads known as the Nongïaïd loosely translated as the people who roam the earth. Themselves outcasts to Khasi society, the Nongïaïd promise Evie knowledge of what she seeks provided she leaves everything that she knows behind (Pariat 402). Like the Diengïeï which she seeks, Evie’s story ultimately passes into legend. If the quest for the Diengïeï is also representative of the quest for knowledge, then Pariat implies that true knowledge is arrived at through the relinquishing of the self. This is also true of Shai, whose narrative differs slightly from those of Goethe, Linnaeus and Evie.

Unlike the other three protagonists in the book, Shai does not actively seek knowledge; and yet, knowledge finds her. At the start, Shai possesses a shaky sense of self and sticks out like a sore thumb in Mawmalang, a village in West Khasi Hills. Her inability to accept the inevitability of death as a part of life constrains her relationship with Oiñ, her nanny. It is only when she understands the true implications of the Diengïeï that she comes to terms with mortality and the cycle of regeneration couched in Goethe’s statement, “All is leaf.” Like Evie, Shai sheds what she knows of herself in order to become what she truly is—a modern-day nomad. The book ends with Shai reconciling herself to Oiñ’s death and a sapling reaching out into the light. What belongs to the earth returns to the earth, a metaphor for the journey we must all undertake.

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Similar to Everything the Light Touches, Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads  has a tree as a central motif. Kijübode, “one of last surviving of the first trees”, guards the portal between the human and the spirit realms (Kire 112). It is through his counsel that the protagonist, Vime, learns to free herself from the spirit world and return to the world of the living.

Where the Cobbled Path Leads draws upon folk narrative, particularly, the Zeme folktale of a boy turning into a hornbill following his ill-treatment at the hands of his stepmother. In Kire’s re-telling of the same folktale, however, the protagonist is a girl who, in being mistreated by her stepmother, yearns to fly. The folktale provides a cultural frame to the grief that Vime feels upon the death of her mother and her apprehension at her father’s remarriage to Khrieliezuono (Khrielie, for short). Although Khrielie is reputed to be a good woman— “good” being, in the eyes of the community, a woman who can keep house—Vime is upset lest Khrielie takes the place of her mother. Like the girl in the folktale, Vime yearns for transfiguration and wants to be with her mother where she feels she truly belongs.

Unable to reconcile with her mother’s death, Vime takes a mysterious cobbled path leading to Kijübode and, from there, enters the spirit realm with the help of a mischievous spirit called Tei. Kire successfully weaves the fantastical with the folkloric in describing Vime’s experience in the spirit world. Apart from her mother, Vime meets a former weretiger, a weaver, a caretaker of the underworld and the souls of other people who have passed on. The narrative is almost Gaimanesque in the way that Vime, confronting the “other” world, also contends with the darkness within herself. The spirit world, such as it is, houses memories that living beings have of the dead, including Vime’s own memory of her mother; a Freudian (collective) uncanny. When Vime enters the spirit world, she also confronts the unresolved feelings she has towards her mother. Although melancholy is the dominant emotion, Vime also nurses feelings of anger and abandonment when her mother passes away. When she is tricked by Tei to remain in the spirit realm, however, help comes from an unexpected quarter: Khrielie, too, is lured by Tei into the world of the spirits.

Throughout the course of the novel, Kire highlights Vime’s difference from the women of her community. Using the traditional narrative device of foil characters, Vime’s impulsiveness and non-conforming attitude is a contrast to the gentler, subdued characters of Vime’s sister, Neime, and Khrielie. However, Vime shares with Khrielie the experience of being shunted out by the community to which they belong. Although Khrielie lives peacefully with her mother and grandparents in a small house in comparison to Vime’s, Kire tells us that Khrielie’s mother and her daughter were disowned by the grandparents owing to Khrielie being conceived out of wedlock (Kire 58-59). When Khrielie joins Vime in the spirit world, therefore, she already shares in the sense of alienation that the latter feels. More importantly, the journey through the spirit world allows Vime to put Khrielie’s needs before her own. Upon realising that Khrielie has been unwittingly trapped in the spirit world, Vime determines to forgo her desire to join her mother and fight instead to return to the world of the living for Khrielie’s sake. In forgoing her own selfish interests, Vime comes to terms not only with her loss but also finds the necessary strength to overcome her grief. When Vime narrates her experiences to her family members and relatives, moreover, she performs the role of a proverbial seer who is able to traverse the realms of living and the dead, a living Paichara, the wise women who ascended to heaven from an ancestral tree (Singh unpaginated).

Where the Cobbled Path Leads marks what Jyotirmoy Prodhani terms as an “ontological turn” in the literature of Northeast India (Prodhani 1-8). The novel shows how writers from the region have re-interpreted oral narratives to discover surprising ways to relate to their world. Kire’s book draws upon various legends and folktales of Naga tribes, especially the origin myth associated with the ancestral pear tree at Chitebo from which the Angami, Lotha, Rengma, Chakhesang and Sumi tribes are said to have emerged, migrated and dispersed (Singh unpaginated). In doing so, Kire’s reflections on grief and loss touch upon universal experiences that run through all the Naga lifeworlds and beyond.

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The ontological thread that one finds in Where the Cobbled Path Leads is also present in Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights. Like Avinuo Kire’s book, Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights also dwells on interactions between the human and the spirit world. These interactions re-align the characters’ relationships to each other and the world in which they live. There is, however, a strong anthropological undercurrent to Spirit Nights that sets it apart from the novels that have been reviewed so far.    

Written in Easterine Kire’s characteristic prose which is lyrical and lucid, Spirit Nights contains a glossary of indigenous place names and words and an account of the supernatural occurrence that inspired Kire’s main narrative. The novel, therefore, can be considered a work of creative anthropology wherein the ethnographer, in this case Kire, re-imagines a textual universe based on an already created story by the participants in her research. This, however, forms only one strand of Kire’s anthropological and literary endeavour. The second, more discreet strand is seen in the narration of different lores within the main narrative itself. As literary devices in the novel, the lores reflect ancient psychic states that connect the protagonists of the novel to their ancestors and, through them, to the Chang Naga lifeworld. The stories themselves effect transformation in that they serve as the basis for present and future action through numerous re-tellings. Structurally, therefore, the novel reveals a complexity that is belied by Kire’s matter-of-fact style of narration.

The narrative of Spirit Nights follows, at a cursory glance, a traditional story-telling plot: a hero is born in whose time, a crisis occurs which forces the hero to undertake a journey where, after finding himself and conquering his fears, peace and reconciliation are finally restored. But the similarity ends there. The main narrative in Spirit Nights is about a coming-of-age story about a boy, Namu, and his relationship with his grandmother, Tola. Gifted with foresight—their ancestors being seers—Namu and Tola occupy a world where past, present and future collide. In their world of dreams and visions, the path to becoming a seer is marked by visitations from spirits both malevolent and virtuous. The world of spirits sits comfortably alongside the world of the human. The spirit world, Kire reveals, is a repository of human memories pertaining to the past as well as a reflection of what is desired in the future. A journey to the spirit world, such as Namu’s journey into the mouth of the tiger spirit that wreaks havoc on the village, coalesces personal biography (Namu’s desire for biological parents) with the tales and identity of the collective (the memorialisation of Namu’s defeat of the tiger).

The spirit world represents a spiritual journey as much as a physical one. Namu’s and Tola’s journeys into the spirit world are treated by Kire as factual occurrences since the journey itself alters their physical and psychic states (Kire 124-125). A journey into the spirit world also foreshadows self-revelation. After having rescued Namu and the rest of the community from the darkness that envelops their world, Tola accepts her position as a seer; a position which had hitherto been denied because women among her tribe are not usually considered spiritual leaders. This gendered angle in Kire’s novel reflects a growing concern by writers from the Northeast region of India for greater representation of women in the canon. One is reminded, for instance, of Temsüla Ao’s Aosenla’s Story (2017) where the trials of an Ao Naga woman are rigorously explored within the confines of a heterosexual union. But while Ao’s protagonist is powerless to overcome her oppression, Kire’s Tola reveals herself as the ultimate seer by being a source of comfort and light when her community needed her the most. This transformation, however, is effected by the presence of the fictional village of Mvüphri.

It is in the village of Mvüphri that Tola’s real identity as a seer is revealed to the men in her community. Mvüphri is everything that the historical Shumang Laangnyu Sang is not. While Shumang Laangnyu Sang is, for a short period, led by a spurious seer, Mvüphri houses the most powerful seer in all of Nagalim. While the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang are beset by jealousies and scepticism, the people of Mvüphri are welcoming to strangers even if this would have cost them their lives. The village of Mvüphri, therefore, represents an ideal that, in being constructed through the fictional, reflects the humane end that all literature strives towards. That Kire treats this fictional place as though it were real testifies to the power of her storytelling.

The unique selling point of Kire’s novel is the boundaries that the novel breaks where narrative style is concerned. The anthropological generously spills over into the literary and vice versa such that the boundaries between the factual and the fictional merge. What is achievable in the fictional world is, Kire seems to imply, also achievable in our day-to-day lives. Spirit Nights appears at a time when the world is reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic. The isolation and anguish that the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang feel upon being separated from each other because of the unimaginable darkness and the losses they suffered because of its curse, feel eerily familiar. But if the Chang Naga community has overcome their moment of darkness, both in fiction and in reality, through the courage they have in telling their tales, then we too are capable of the same. The story is an event – what happens in stories also happens in life.  

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The novels reviewed here reveal the diversity in Northeast Indian Writing in English. Whether the approach to storytelling is historical as is the case with Pariat, ontological as is the case with Avinuo Kire or anthropological in the case of Easterine Kire, they all point towards universal human experiences that transcend their contextual particularities. In each fictional work, the natural world is treated as an entity that harbours its own mysteries but which is not separate from human life. Where Indian Writing in English is concerned, such works offer the possibilities of drawing upon specific cultural heritages while addressing universal challenges.

 

Works Cited

Ao, Temsüla. Aosenla’s Story. Zubaan Books, 2017.

Prodhani, Jyotirmoy. “The Saga of the A·bri dal·gipa: The Ontological Turn in Northeast Studies.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2, Mar.-Jun. 2022, pp. 1-8.

Singh, Menka. “Mythical Legends and Legendary Myths: A Case Study of Khonoma, Nagaland”. https://www.sahapedia.org/mythical-legends-and-legendary-myths-case-study-of-khonoma-nagaland. 26 December 2022.

Jobeth Ann Warjri is a writer and researcher. She completed her PhD from the Department of English, University of Hyderabad.
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