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Dec 28
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Book Review: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, The Distaste of the Earth (2024) | Jobeth Ann Warjri

By North East Indian Writing in English, Reviews No Comments
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MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Anne. “Book Review: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, The Distaste of the Earth (2024).” Indian Writing In English Online, 28 December, 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/book-review-kynpham-sing-nongkynrih-the-distaste-of-the-earth-2024-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .

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

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

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

 

Header Image: Penguin Random House India
Nov 18
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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

  1. In 2023, The Covenant won the Golden Poppy Award for fiction and the Viking award for fiction with a sense of place.
  2. 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
  3.  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.

Header Image: Grove Atlantic

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.

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.

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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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Cite this Essay

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.
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