Review Archives - Indian Writing In English

Nov 18

The Physician’s Pledge to Storytelling: A Review of Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water | Neeraja Sundaram

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Review: Abraham Verghese. The Covenant of Water. Grove Press, 2023.

Abraham Verghese’s 2023 novel, The Covenant of Water has had a very successful year. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list, won prizes, [1] been reviewed and written about extensively and captivated both nations comprising the author’s primary readership – America and India. Verghese is by now well-known among writers inhabiting the intersecting circles of Indian writing in English, popular science writing on issues of health and medicine and STEM researchers engaging with key issues in the Humanities. Verghese was born to Indian parents in Ethiopia, completed his medical education in India before emigrating to America in the 1980s. He is an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he is one of the founding members of PRESENCE, an initiative that seeks to centre human experience in the practice of medicine. A winner of the National Humanities Medal in 2014, Verghese’s citation for the distinction sums up his appeal across Medicine and the Humanities: “His range of proficiency embodies the diversity of the humanities; from his efforts to emphasise empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.”[2] Over the past year, The Covenant journeyed through numerous podcasts, news articles, interviews, literary festivals and bookstore events as the newest vehicle for its author’s abiding message: the physician heals by discovering the patient’s story, not the symptoms of disease.

The Covenant of Water contextualises several medical themes by offering a detailed history for the characters and situations that represent them. The Parambil family, who are at the centre of the novel, carry a genetic disorder that causes a fatal intolerance of water over several generations. In telling the story of Digby Kilgour, a Scottish surgeon who arrives to practise in british-occupied India in the early 20th century, Verghese charts a fascinating social history of colonial institutions like the Indian Medical Service and the Christian Medical College in Vellore. Para institutional practices of medicine are equally suffused in the novel. Mariamma, a third-generation character in the Parambil family, the first to go to college and training to be a doctor, gains her medical apprenticeship at the nearly defunct medical mission hospital near her rural Parambil estate and with noone better qualified than the estate farmhands whom she trains to assist her in surgical procedures. Mariamma cracks the medical mystery afflicting her family not only owing to her medical training but with key pieces of evidence from her father’s journals and the town’s most renowned matchmaker’s scrupulous records of family histories. Digby’s presence in the novel’s colonial India allows for the exploration of the stories of other foreigners whose lives intersected with the subcontinent’s medical history, especially medical missionaries. Rune Orquvist is a Swedish surgeon whose leprosarium and its efforts to rehabilitate those afflicted by the disease is eventually taken over by Digby. Rune and later, Digby’s treatment of those cast out by society parallels their own alienation from the professional practice of medicine under the Indian Medical Service. Digby and Mariamma are mentored in the early years of their medical apprenticeship under the watchful eyes of nurses whose professional acumen, bedside manner and knowledge of local cultures outshines that of senior medical residents and doctors.

In following the story of individuals living between the years 1900 and 1977 in India, Verghese brings into conversation medicine and several other key contexts that shaped lives during this transformative period. Big Ammachi, whose perspective as a child bride sets the narrative action in motion in the 1900s in Travancore at the start of the novel, inhabits a divided society whose oppressive hierarchies are such a part of the fabric of life that they are naturalised. Her husband, the thamb’ran builds the Parambil estate in coastal Travancore in the image of caste relations everywhere else in rural colonial India: he controls the land and by extension, employment in the region and over the course of a couple of decades, establishes a colony comprising members of his own family, families of craftsmen that have helped build the estate – goldsmiths, stonemasons, potters – and the families of the landless pulayars whose labour runs the estate. In the 1920s, Big Ammachi’s son Phillipose learns for the first time that his playmate Joppan, the son of his father’s pulayar Shamuel, is not his social equal in the eyes of the estate’s newly appointed schoolmaster. This is the start of a thread in the novel that contextualises different life outcomes for Joppan and Phillipose, both the first generation to learn to read and write in their respective families. While Joppan is able to finish school and later, college with Big Ammachi’s intervention, Phillipose reaches Madras Christian College only to find out that he has a case of nerve-related deafness that will not allow him to continue his education at a university-setting.

The Covenant of Water has been criticised for its hope-led and rose-tinted engagement with the socio-political landscape of India. [3] While Joppan’s story may not be representative of landless labourers in colonial India and a landlord’s benevolence alone may not ensure the pulayars’ education, The Covenant of Water illustrates a novel perspective on social class, a commitment to helping others and the medical profession. It is Joppan, rather than Philipose, who eventually articulates the importance and necessity of a professional education when Mariamma returns to practise at Parambil and the one who becomes indispensable to the work of healing rather than the running of the estate. The resolution of several narrative arcs in the novel necessitates either cooperation across social and cultural lines – British and Indian, landlord and labourer, the doctor and astrologer – or suggests a blurring of lines that has always existed either through forgotten, intertwined histories that return to haunt the characters’ present or a predestined coming together across seemingly insurmountable barriers. Several individuals in Verghese’s novel never hesitate in embracing the work of lifelong care for someone ailing in the family or waver in their commitment to fostering relationships across ideological boundaries. The work done by physicians in the novel (articulated in the novel through several riveting scenes of lives saved and lost during health emergencies) is subsumed within this larger and more general impulse to care that drives several characters.

The most representative example of this kind of intersection Verghese sees between the work of medical care and healing across social divides is in the account of Lenin Evermore. Like the perspective of the pulayars, carried by singularly representative voices that are ill-at-ease in the society whose narrative portrayal dominates the novel, Lenin’s story is meant to signify the life of a Naxal in newly independent India. Lenin’s close relationship with the Parambil estate allows characters like Mariamma to witness first-hand, the many societal and personal impulses for joining forces with the Naxalite movement in Kerala. While the novel argues for a kind of predestination in a character growing up in Lenin’s circumstances and the pull towards a revolutionary movement and a consequent rejection of the security afforded by societal structures like education, employment or even marriage, it undercuts this sense of “choosing” a life of rebellion by exposing a universal dependence on healthcare. A chance encounter between Lenin’s mother and Digby Kilgour (she is pregnant at the time with Lenin and has suffered an injury that could be fatal to both mother and child) plays a crucial role in ensuring Lenin’s very existence. Lenin’s life is spared yet again as an adult when he is on the run from the authorities, by timely medical intervention carried out in secret at Rune’s leprosarium by Mariamma. Mariamma is able to restore Lenin’s health (seen to be destroyed by life in the forest, and from frequent run-ins with state authorities unafraid to use violence) long enough to escort him to the Christian Medical College in Vellore where he receives more professional care. Being institutionalised at Vellore also affords Lenin a “public” arrest, thereby guaranteeing his safety even as several other Naxalites faced the threat of execution upon capture by government authorities. The medical institution and the work of restoring health and preserving life emerges as the most enabling frame for the narrative outcomes of characters in Verghese’s post-independence India.

Notes

In 2023, The Covenant won the Golden Poppy Award for fiction and the Viking award for fiction with a sense of place.
The White House citation for the 2014 National Humanities Medal, available at the National Endowment for the Humanities page: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/abraham-verghese
See for example, Andrew Solomon’s review in The New York Times which finds that Verghese’s view of India does not achieve the “plangent intimacy” of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy or the “dark and fantastical complexity” of the country portrayed in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/books/review/covenant-of-water-abraham-verghese.html.

Neeraja Sundaram teaches Literature at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

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Sep 03

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Escaping Identities Through Language | Sourav Jatua

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MLA:
Jatua, Sourav. “Escaping Identities Through Language.” Indian Writing In English Online, 03 September 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/escaping-identities-through-language-sourav-jatua/ .

Chicago:
Jatua, Sourav. “Escaping Identities Through Language.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 03, 2024. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/escaping-identities-through-language-sourav-jatua/ .

Review: A.K. Ramanujan. Soma. Edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

The publication of Soma brings to light A.K. Ramanujan’s creative pursuits during the 1970s in the United States. Editors Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez have traversed through a wide array of unpublished notes and poem drafts to compile the intellectual reaction of one of the country’s prominent poets to the legend of ‘Soma’. This reaction is based on Ramanujan’s experience of the substance hallucinogen mescalin, an earthly substitute of the mythical plant and the source of an eponymous divine drink mentioned in the Rig Veda. Like many others before and after him, Ramanujan’s interest in the legendary ‘Soma’ plant was roused by R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushrooms of Immortality (1968).

There are a total of 22 poems in this volume (with some of them having been already published elsewhere under different titles) along with three scholarly pieces, two of which are written by the editors themselves and another by Wendy Doniger. Krishna Ramanujan offers us an up close (and occasionally frank) view of his father’s experience of mescaline; and how Ramanujan’s identity as a conservative Hindu Brahmin conflicted with his interaction with substances and their use in the States. He opines, “In this way, perhaps, his effort at imitating the composing practices of Vedic priests was a moment when a dichotomy between his Brahmin roots and his pull to experience a modern world came together” (Ramanujan 5-6). Rodriguez in his essay “The ‘Ordinary Mystery’ Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry” opines that,

As a poetry project, ‘Soma’ was for this south Indian professor living in the crisis-ridden America of the 1970s above all an attempt at ‘demythologization’ that carried with it a fatality and healthy dose of irony. It was meant as a personal coming-to-terms with poetry as religion, which is a profound universal theme. (Rodriguez 25)

Rodriguez provides us two distinct ways of thinking about the poems. One, as a learned classical scholar and translator himself, Ramanujan sought to defamiliarize the mystical aura that existed around the ‘Soma’ plant. This is where Rodriguez’s argument of ‘demythologization’ works in the poems. Ramanujan’s move to bring ‘Soma’ within the confines of everyday life defamiliarizes the same for its poetic speaker. This also correspondingly constitutes his ‘attempt at demythologizing’ ‘Soma’ (as a myth) for his readers.

This leads us to the second point in Rodriguez’s argument. Ramanujan’s demythicization of the ‘Soma’ plant is an attempt to disassociate the same from the binds of the deep-rooted cultural lineage to which it belongs. This process of dislodging ‘Soma’ from its mythic and subsequently religious connotations by writing about the same in an everyday lyric form became a method for Ramanujan to negate the culture of religious reverence inculcated in him. This is the point where I believe Ramanujan departs from Rodriguez’s argument that his attempt at ‘demythologization’ is a “personal coming-to-terms with poetry as religion.” Poetry, instead, became for Ramanujan a way to escape his own association with religious reverence.

Thus, these poems attempt to carve a (sense of) freedom for Ramanujan both at a personal and a literary level. A closer look at the poems confirms this. The subversion of the ‘godly’ lies at the heart of the seemingly innocuous invocation of the mythical plant by personifying it through pathetic fallacy – “Soma is restless. / Grab him, he breaks away.” (Ramanujan 55) This act of ‘breaking’ then constitutes and sets forth the process of re-characterizing the legend around Soma- “Soma, Soma is no god. … He can churn no sea, burn no forest, /turn no mountain.” (56)

By equating and in turn interchanging his own identity with that of the mythical plant, Ramanujan enmeshes the divine and the ordinary as equals. This is evident in the titles which place the plant alongside the mundane: titles such as, “Soma: he watches TV”, “Soma: he reads a newspaper”, among others. This yoking of the divine and the everyday results in the emergence of a personal narrative of Ramanujan’s own life; thus, after realizing that “Soma, once eye of heaven, /now a mushroom at my feet.”, (58) the poetic speaker-author can speak about Siva and Vishnu and Soma “in the middle of a thought, /at the corner of 57th Street, …”. (66) This interchanging progression continues in the rest of the poems as the mythical element of Soma is demystified to make it fit into the mundane life of the human. This recasting of the divine constitutes the subordination of the divine in the poems.

Ramanujan reworks the conventional first-personal lyric subjectivity in these poems by anthropomorphizing ‘Soma’, thus merging human subjectivity with the divine. The result of this merging is that the everyday mortal existence of the poetic speaker is imbibed with a heightened and otherworldly consciousness around him. This allows him to develop an ‘othered’ subjectivity that represents his telling voice and simultaneously, becomes an alter-ego under the hallucinogenic effects of the plant. In the Vedas, the word ‘soma’ is used simultaneously for the drink, the plant and the Moon God, Chandra. Ramanujan here follows a similar pattern by rendering the conventional lyric subjectivity permeable with the fluid use of the term ‘Soma’ to refer to both the poetic speaker-author and his alter-ego. The aforementioned otherworldly consciousness is not developed to constitute a uniform internalized psyche of the poetic speaker, but is a conduit through which Ramanujan attempts to transcend his own lived experiences. The poetic speaker-author is one who has consumed Soma in real life and now he departs from any fixed sense of mortal identity. This escaping drive is observed specifically in the manner in which his speaking voice is constructed in the poems. This is where Ramanujan’s success in these poems lies; we hear an atemporal voice speaking, an ‘altered’ persona of the poetic speaker (after consuming Soma) which creates an absolute sense of freedom from pre-established identities. In the poem “He looks at the Persian rug”, for instance, this escape is aligned with the movement of animals for sacrifice:

A live chicken.

He thinks he can hear it cluck

but it’s plucked

when he looks again,

. . .

And before he can think

This chicken’s a buffalo,

A scapegoat slaughtered

in a village of sins

for the virgin goddess

black hag of plagues.

(86-87)

The poetic speaker is rendered objective with a third person subjectivity (‘He’), but it is simultaneously offset with the presence of the ‘I’ who appears later seemingly as a different persona; this is coupled with the stark images of sacrificial animals. The presence of the gory non-human (the hen and the buffalo) presents an implicit anthropomorphizing, suggesting a sense of identification with the same.

This theme of escape becomes the central focus in the poems for which a subjective externalisation from a unified sense of ‘being’ is important. The externalised perspective developed out of the poetic speaker-author works to this end; everyday mundane acts are reinterpreted and presented through an external lens by the poetic speaker, be it physical ailment in “Soma: Sunstroke”, hunger in “Soma: he is hungry but cannot eat”, literary influences in “When Soma is abroad”, or the world around in “Soma: he watches TV”. Ramanujan works the mad, divine influence of ‘Soma’ deftly upon the human experience in these poems. This challenges our conventional ways of interpretation in the beginning, but the poems have an infused vitality within their portrayal of multiple states of being that rewards a patient reader.

Works Cited:

Ramanujan, A.K. “Soma (121) (After Rig Veda 8.79)” Soma: Poems by A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan, Penguin Random House India, 2023, pp. 55.

—. “Soma”, pp. 56.

—. “On discovering that Soma is a mushroom”, pp. 58.

—. “Wish we could talk about Soma and such”, pp. 65.

—. “He looks at the Persian rug”, pp. 86.

—. “Soma: he watches TV”, pp. 76.

—. “Soma: he reads a newspaper”, pp. 69.

—. “Soma: Sunstroke”, pp. 78.

—. “Soma: he is hungry but cannot eat”, pp. 80.

—. “When Soma is abroad”, pp. 88.

—. Ramanujan, Krishna. “Hummel’s Miracle: The Search for Soma.” pp. 3-21.

—. Rodriguez, Guillermo. “The ‘Ordinary Mystery’ Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry.” pp. 22-52.

Wasson, Gordon. R. Soma: Divine Mushrooms of Immortality. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

Header Image: Penguin Random House, India

Sourav Jatua is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. In his dissertation, he studies the relations between the everyday as a thematic entity and the poetic speaker in Philip Larkin’s poetry.

Guillermo Rodríguez Martín's essay on A.K. Ramanujan

Dec 11

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Secrets and Silences of Girlhood and Womanhood | T. Alma Poinamei

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Review: Fear and Lovely by Anjana Appachana. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

Anjana Appachana’s first novel Listening Now was published in 1998. Twenty-five years later, its sequel Fear and Lovely was published in March 2023. The sequel continues some of the concerns from the first book such as the themes of gendered listening, female solidarity forged through gossip and secrets, and the bildungsroman of the female character. The structure of the second novel also follows the blueprint of the first: the plot progresses through different characters’ points of view that intersect and overlap.

Fear and Lovely’s central character is Mallika (the precocious daughter of Padma whose bildungsroman was traced in Listening Now), who loses three days of her memory, following which she is diagnosed with mental illness. Considering it a taboo and a hindrance to a good marriage, her mother and her aunt, who Mallika is insistent on referring to as her second mother, go to lengths to cover it up as TB.

As in her first novel, Appachana emphasises the importance of female friendship. Solidarity is forged through gossiping sessions and keeping each other’s secrets. Mallika’s understanding of society comes from listening to the older women in the family and her female friends. Her relationship with her two ‘mothers’ and grandmother allow her to grasp the inequitable nature of a heteronormative marriage from as young as the age of thirteen. Additionally, listening to and watching her female friends grow into diverse personalities within different familial contexts allows her to assess the imposed models of girlhood and womanhood in a predominantly Hindu society. Mallika is the ideal listener, sometimes appearing as a stand-in for the readers: “The best thing about listening to people’s stories was that I didn’t have to talk. Those who spoke to me were the storytellers, and my ear (my sympathetic, fascinated, cornucopia-like ear) was their page” (9). However, Appachana does not just stop at listening as a solitary burden but demonstrates how Mallika, the listener, also needs a listener. The secrets that Mallika carries manifest in physical ailments that include a migraine, a miscarriage, and memory loss. She observes retrospectively, “for all the love we bore each other, we had no idea of each other’s silences. We didn’t even understand our own” (10). Appachana’s foregrounding of secrets often referred to as “silences” also extends to the male characters. While Listening Now offered very limited perspectives of the male characters, the sequel delves into the intricate thoughts of Mallika’s closest male friends, Randhir and Arnav. The writing propagates certain stereotypes of gendered speaking in that, their narratives are peppered with phrases like “fucking dead” (294) and “bloody” (296) amidst superficial conversations about Swedish cars (378). A male friend also tells Mallika, “I’m a guy, Mallika. Guys aren’t good at corresponding” (325). Despite this, Appachana is also careful to reveal that underneath their veneer of ostensible machismo, they carry secrets they do not find a listener for. Through their narratives, Appachana dissects the attributes of masculinity that they are expected to live up to in an Indian context.

While the first novel is set in the aftermath of the Independence, the second is set in the heart of the Emergency. College students talk politics with an idealistic fervour at parties and family dinners. However, national politics simply serves as a backdrop while the politics of the home take center stage. Mallika’s aunt, Shanta, is keen that Mallika learn the adages of domestic politics that she has acquired through her own marriage: “idealism without money was fatal to wives. But when idealism was borne aloft on money’s radiant arms, oh, how brightly it shone” (363). Appachana’s writings are unequivocally and unapologetically about women and domesticity. The arguments surrounding this genre of ‘women’s writings’ tend to focus on how they do not contribute to the discourses of the postcolonial nation, with some critics adopting a defensive tone in arguing for the relevance of this genre despite eschewing political concerns. This consistent burden placed on postcolonial Anglophone novels to talk about the nation and its historiography limits the discourses that can contribute to the ‘woman question.’ Appachana remarks on this in the novel when Mallika says, “If you wanted to talk about justice and injustice, truth and untruth, right and wrong, then talk about politics, talk about the Emergency, not about women, for heaven’s sake” (56). As was the case in her first novel, it is through the conversations among women that the readers are confronted with women’s lived reality. When Mallika’s friend, Prabha attacks a man on a bus for sexually harassing her, she is assailed by various responses: her parents chastise her, younger women advise her to ignore it in the future and her male friends find it hard to believe that this is a regular occurrence. But, with her female friends, Prabha feels understood and encouraged for her response to the incident.

Appachana also touches on ‘Indian thinking’ or ‘Indian philosophy’ about mental health, marriages, homosexuality, and individual desires. While ‘American thinking’ would appear to be posited as the antithesis, the actual critique is directed at a society that cannot accommodate non-conforming women and the changing ideals of a younger generation.

Listening Now subscribes to the “post-Rushdie tradition” (Majumdar 211) of “old-fashioned” (Mukherjee 2007) domestic novels akin to that of Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande. In a lot of these novels, the female characters begin their journey towards autonomy through a break from marital relations rather than parental authority (Abel et al. 12). However, in Fear and Lovely, Mallika’s bildungsroman begins by defying parental authority. The defiance also happens spatially when she leaves for America despite the reluctance of her two ‘mothers’. Besides this shift, the novel remains a nuanced portrait of women and the intricacies of domestic life. Through the foregrounding of women and the quotidian events that shape their social ontology, Appachana portrays a crucial facet of India’s postcolonial reality.

Notes:

1. Josna. E Rege writes that Appchana’s works are not “shoring up a disintegrating discourse of nation… but are exploring the possibilities of coming to terms with the past in new ways” (367). Meenkashi Mukherjee, in her review for Listening Now writes, “… to ignore the nation and the backdrop of history when a good part of the novel is set in the fifties needs a certain amount of defiance in the current climate” (2007).

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth et al, editors. The Voyage In. The University Press of New England, 1983.

Appachana, Anjana. Listening Now. India Ink, 1998.

—. Fear and Lovely. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

Majumdar, Saikat. “Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction.” A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 207-220.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “IndiaStar Review of Books: Listening Now by Anjana Appachana.” IndiaStar, 28 January. 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070128063638/http://www.indiastar.com/mukherjee2.html

Rege, Josna E. “Victim into Protagonist? ‘Midnight’s Children’ and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 29, no.3, 1997, pp. 342-375.

Themreichon Alma Poinamei is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on Indian Women’s fiction.

Header Image: Penguin Random House India

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Contributor last name, first name. “<Title of the Essay>.” Indian Writing In English Online, <Date Published dd mmm yyyy>, <link to the post> .

Chicago:
Contributor last name, first name. “<Title of the Essay>.” Indian Writing In English Online. <Date published mmmmm dd, yyyy>. <link to the post> .

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.

Mar 27

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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 12

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Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels | Jobeth Ann Warjri

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feb 17

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Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene | Akshata S. Pai

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Cite this Review

MLA:
Pai, Akshata S. “Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 Feb 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the_living_mountain/ .

Chicago:
Pai, Akshata S. “Of Dreams and Desires in the Anthropocene.” Indian Writing In English Online. February 17, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/the_living_mountain/ .

Amitav Ghosh. The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.

Amitav Ghosh’s latest work The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times continues his preoccupation with climate change which has previously produced works of non-fiction such as The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), the novel Gun Island (2019), as well as a work in verse, Jungle Nama (2021). In all these works, Ghosh has been concerned with the question of how to narrate climate change as well as its enmeshment in colonial history. Published in May 2022, The Living Mountain continues Ghosh’s search for a suitable form to narrate climate change, using here the form of the fable. Merely 35 pages long, it is different from Ghosh’s usual fare that has long been characterised by descriptive weight, complex characters, and well-researched attention to the particularities of history. In choosing the fable, Ghosh heads in the opposite direction. The prose as well as the narrative are stripped to their bare bones, and in its broadly sketched action, he attempts to condense colonial history and its dark aftermath which are inseparably entwined with the history of climate change.

Like in The Great Derangement and Gun Island, stories remain at the heart of The Living Mountain. It begins with a framing narrative in which two members of a book club choose the term “Anthropocene” as their theme for the year’s reading. One of the readers, Maansi, a New York-based sales manager, originally from Nepal, begins to read a cli-fi novel, and is so strongly affected by it that it triggers a disturbing dream. What follows is the narration of this dream whose tentacles tentatively reach out to the real world: Maansi suspects that the dream is not really a dream but perhaps a memory of a story told by her grandmother. It is notable that the trigger for this dream is not a news article or a scientific report, but a work of fiction. Even in the dream itself, stories remain of crucial importance as a repository of knowledge and as agents of desire and value.

Maansi dreams that she belongs to a people who live in the shadow of the Mahaparbat, an immense mountain in the Himalayas. They consider the Mahaparbat a living mountain, one that protects and nurtures its people.They revere this sacred mountain through stories, songs, and dances, always performed from a respectful distance. However, their relationship with it does not remain this way for long, as the “Anthropoi” invade the valley in order to access and control the mountain, whose “gifts” now become resources to be dug up and used (16). By naming these colonising forces the “Anthropoi” Ghosh pointedly breaks from the universalist discourses of the Anthropocene while also pointing to the exclusive nature of European humanism: the Anthropoi make themselves out to be a different species of being from the valley people.

Ghosh summarises the process of colonisation in his fable: from the ‘innocent’ gathering and organisation of knowledge to colonial myth-making and violent conquest. The fable notes not only the violence of colonialism but also the ways in which colonialism transformed the colonised people’s sense of what was possible, what desirable, and what futile. Ghosh deftly portrays this shift in an entire cultural worldview. The fable moves beyond the time of colonisation to track its continuities in the postcolonial world. In a haunting and feverish sequence, the text narrates how the desires birthed in colonial regimes turn into monstrous compulsions in postcolonial times. Devangana Dash’s inked sketches, in their economy of lines, perfectly accompany and illustrate this dire tale.

Despite its simplicity, at the end, the fable defies any attempt to draw simple morals from it. A lone surviving custodian of indigenous knowledge chastises the Anthropoi, and by extension, the readers: “Have you understood nothing […]?”, she asks (31).

The story of The Living Mountain was originally written for a trans-disciplinary anthology titled Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right edited by Julia Adeney Thomas and published in March, 2022. This original context helps to put the story in perspective. As a leading postcolonial author, Ghosh succinctly retells the Anthropocene narrative from a postcolonial lens using the form of the fable. As Harold John Blackham has said of the fable, Ghosh’s story runs its “metaphorical traffic on narrative rails” (xii). In its heavy symbolism, the story packs vast times and spaces within its narrow confines and alongside multidisciplinary takes on the Anthropocene, advances a strongly postcolonial and narrative perspective. As a standalone publication, however, the story’s shortness becomes more starkly perceptible.

At his best, Ghosh has been able to evoke the boisterous, complex, diverse worlds of colonial and postcolonial times in all their material and sensory details as well as their moral ambiguities. In fact, in many of his novels, he has told stories of the ways in which colonisation was ecological as well as political, whether in his descriptions of the systematic felling of ancient forests for timber or in the flooding of fields with opium or rubber. In some ways then, the fable summarises not only colonial history but also Ghosh’s own body of work while missing out on some of its best and most enjoyable parts. However, as one tracks the trajectory of Ghosh’s work, one senses in this short fable the urgency that now drives his oeuvre. This is no time for leisurely storytelling or immersive worlds, Ghosh seems to be saying. His fable is shaped by the powerful tides of climate change.

Works Cited

Blackham, Harold John. The Fable as Literature. Athlone Press, 1985.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times. Fourth Estate, 2022.

—. “The Ascent of the Anthropoi: A Story”. Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right. Edited by Julia Adeney Thomas. Cambridge UP, 2022.

—. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Penguin, 2021.

—. Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sunderban. Fourth Estate, 2021.

—. Gun Island: A Novel. Penguin, 2019.

—. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin, 2016.

Akshata S. Pai is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on contemporary environmental fiction.

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