Book Review: The Cousins by Prema Raghunath

Marriage, as an institution and an instrument of hegemony, can only delineate desire. It cannot expunge it. In a post-feminist world, and we cannot overestimate the role of feminism here, it is an institution confronted with either a complete collapse or a deliberate and measured dismantling and refashioning. To live, love, court and couple in such a time is often bewildering, but not so bewildering that the contrasting lack of agency of only a few decades or generations ago has vanished out of sight. The characters of Prema Raghunath’s The Cousins exist in a space of arranged marriages and filial duty, the norms and expectations of their early 20th century upper caste Tamil milieu determining the courses of their lives. They do not have agency as we now assume it. They do, of course, have desire and personal volition – and by extension, must endure consequences and repercussions both of their own making and because of the inextricability of questions of public morality, custodianship and duty from their own choices and the choices made on their behalves.

The book’s titular cousins, Goutami and Krishnanand, spend their entire lives as ships passing in the night. Goutami is the product of an unhappy childhood – she loses her mother as a toddler, loses her sister as a teenager and is raised as little more than a servant maid by her aunt. Krishnanand is the archetypal playboy – he deflowers his female cousins in the days before their weddings, is above reproach on account of his superior charm and the fact of his gender, and squanders opportunities at home and abroad in carefree sprees. She falls in love with him while still little more than a child, her older brother Achyutan (who loses himself in drink and mourning) discourages the match, and Goutami is married off to the dependable and conscientious Seshadri. Krishnanand also marries briefly, to a haughty woman who essentially puts him in his place and leaves him repentant in a number of ways.

Goutami and Krishnanand share only one kiss, that too in their youth, and remain consumed by longing well into old age. Their paths cross often, and sometimes improbably, such as in a distant Himalayan town where both Seshadri and Krishnanand are coincidentally posted. Goutami is unfaithful to her husband, a matter which both her own father and Seshadri himself handle with little emotion. “You were a bad girl,” says her father to her, many years after an affair, as though this is how a woman’s infidelity has ever been dealt with. Oddly enough, Raghunath’s curious and somewhat unrealistic handling of the nature of desire and its corollaries is the one thing that ultimately makes the book interesting. Unsatisfied by the way this novel explores love, commitment and sexuality, one is left pondering the question of articulation – how did people in less permissive eras express desire? The concept of sin intrinsically lends itself to binaries; how were liminal spaces negotiated? In what ways is our understanding of romance in generations past coloured by our own misperceptions?

The Cousins’ chief problem is in its structure: it shifts constantly between speakers when it could just as easily and probably far more successfully have been told in a single narrative voice.  One moment Goutami is speaking to her granddaughters, relating the story of her life. In the next, Achyutan reflects on how many people’s ashes in urns he has set into rivers. If the star-crossed love between the cousins is the fulcrum on which the novel pivots, this is certainly lost in the cacophony. Instead, all sympathy goes toward an unlikely hero: Seshadri. That he stays by his wife despite her straying is irrelevant, because loyalty is a far more complex subject than this novel chooses to grapple with. What makes him likable is that he chooses to educate his daughters, first defers the default option of marrying them off and then allows them to marry to their own liking, and even arranges at one point for Goutami to spend time living and working in England while he remains in India. He emerges as far more progressive in his thinking and actions than the self-involved and fairly insipid duo the novel is ostensibly about. In contrast, it’s difficult to feel much for Krishnanand and Goutami, who have no qualms about running roughshod over other people in general but lack the courage to find a way to be together.

It’s not clear what Raghunath attempts with this novel: to tell a love story, to present a portrait of a bygone era, or to explore the ambiguities of lived experience. In the first two regards it does not fare well. In the last, however, it does in some way inspire thoughts and questions. An otherwise completely mediocre work, The Cousins is salvaged, ironically, by the fact it does not satisfy, and in doing so prompts the reader to turn those questions elsewhere: to the self, to other people, and to better-written books.

An edited version appeared in The Sunday Guardian.

Book Review: Apradhini: Women Without Men by Shivani (trans. Ira Pande)

In the alluringly subheaded Apradhini: Women Without Men, the late Hindi writer Shivani turns a spare and elegant eye towards the lives of women on the fringes of their societies: prisoners and mendicants, domestic helpers and viragos, those whose existences are rarely registered as anything other than pitiable ciphers or outright contradictions. Shivani, however, seeks them in more liminal spaces, quite successfully avoiding the tropes that usually jaundice narratives of subalternity. She seeks them, most of all, in the liminal space of conversation: of what one woman will say to another when no one else is around.

It’s necessary to mention upfront an issue that does the book a disservice, however. We understand, if only from a brief note somewhere on the back cover, that this collection of sixteen sketches is a mix of non-fiction and fiction. One surmises upon reading that the book’s final section, of three pieces, contains the short stories, if only because of a detectable nuance in tone. But no indication is given otherwise as to which category any given piece falls into. This is a glaring oversight, doing justice to neither the author who compiled or created these stories nor the women whose lives they are. To deny credit to the former for works of the imagination is less grave, however, than to deny the latter the basic dignity of being read as a person and not a character.

This begs the question of whether one must approach the reading of what is presented as fact and what is presented as fiction differently. The succinct answer is yes – good literature will illumine the world no matter which medium it appears in, but to pass off the imagined as the experienced is an act of questionable integrity. The decision of Shivani’s estate, translator (her daughter Ira Pande) or publisher to make no distinction between works of fiction and non-fiction is a pity, casting unnecessary confusion over a book of tremendous strength and sensitivity.

The women we meet in these pages, these eponymous women without men, would have suffered at the hands at a writer concerned with sensationalism or self-interest. They could very easily have been rendered one-dimensionally as superficial objects of pop or pulp, driven by their sexuality and selfishness. But Shivani etches them so delicately that even the most lurid of their stories is full of empathy and nuance. We meet several of them behind bars, most often for murders. A few, like alms-seeking travellers Alakh Mai and Rajula, live without address. “There is no jail on earth that can shackle a free spirit and no spirit so free that its feet cannot be bound in chains we cannot see,” writes the author, and this line underscores the spirit of the collection on the whole. Unsentimental yet compassionate and peppered with enjoyable, slightly humourous moments without becoming tasteless, Apradhini’s most victorious effect is that it assigns such importance to the vagaries of fate – how arbitrary it is, in the final reckoning, that one is only someone who reads about such lives, and not a person whose life such is.

And not, for instance, the deeply sensual Muggi, who left a trail of fourteen conned husbands behind her before falling in love with the fifteenth and who eats terracotta to assuage her sadness. Or Janaki, who helps her brother-in-law murder her husband as he sleeps in the same room with their children. Or Alakh Mai, a child-bride who pushed a buffalo, her husband and his mother over a ravine before turning to the spiritual life, the only option available to her. Or Deshpat, who enjoyed the power of being a gangster moll till the love of one piece of gold ruined her life. In these lightly-etched but strikingly powerful vignettes, we feel intimately connected to their lives, and appreciative of their agency – not, as would have been the case with a more emotionally manipulative author, feeling badly for or towards them.

There are, however, a few pieces that miss the mark. The first is “Ama”. a recollection of the author’s own mother; in this instance, the subject seems to cut too close to the bone and thus comes across as slightly too maudlin. But the more notable failure is that of the three pieces that consist of the book’s final section and are most likely to be fiction, two – “Shibi” and “Dhuan” – are both about high class courtesans who fall from grace. This line of storytelling carries far too many shades of regressive, parochial cautionary tales on female immorality – a big disappointment in an otherwise obviously feminist collection.

Thankfully, the book closes on a less judgmental and far happier note: “Tope”. Ironically, one of the book’s most notable figures is hardly a woman without men – the flamboyant and excitable Christina Victoria Thomas rabble-rouses right from “the historic time when she really spewed fire and brimstone” all the way into old age. Fiction or non-fiction, heroine or harridan, we could always do with more women like her.

An edited version appeared in today’s Hindustan Times.

The House and the Kitchen Table

So V.S. Naipaul thinks no woman writer is his equal. Boring. Why waste column inches – let alone energy – on outrage? I take Naipaul’s statement about as seriously as one should take any statement by a cranky old egotist known for his bad moods, long sulks and antiquated bigotries – it might make for an awkward dinner party, but if you’re there at all, you can spend it plotting what to include when you deliver his eulogy. His former editor (and most recent object of his derision) Diana Athill has gone on record to say she used to remind herself in moments of strife, “at least you’re not married to him”. We, thankfully, don’t have to entertain the invidious Sir Vidia in person at all.

So there’s really nothing remotely rewarding about taking apart Naipaul’s arrogance. There is, however, one other thing that the eminent curmudgeon said about this matter that’s of some interest. Somewhere in his diatribe about sentimentality and “tosh” in writing by women (which you are no doubt already familiar with), Naipaul is also quoted as having said: “”And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

Now that is an almost empathic statement. Too bad about the context.

In their own way, Naipaul’s words echo a different response to the question of women and fiction. When it was put to Virginia Woolf in 1929, Woolf went on to write the canonical essay “A Room of One’s Own”, which posited that financial autonomy as well as actual physical space are imperative to the writing process. She argued that it is necessary, in short, for a woman to be able to literally lock herself into her work and lock the world out in order to produce it at all.

Decades later, the African-American womanist Alice Walker challenged and expanded what she believed was Woolf’s privileged point of view: she wrote (in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”) that before a woman could own a room with a key, she first had to own herself – a prerogative literally denied to slaves and others of disenfranchised backgrounds.

So when Naipaul speaks of a woman not being “a complete master”, he actually wanders into feminist vocabulary, an interesting if unwitting step in an otherwise unexcitingly misogynist contention. It is, in effect, a concession: the acknowledgment that one’s experience of the world is limited by gender, and that gender roles in turn continue to be asymmetrically demarcated. Naipaul is correct in saying that the perspectives of women writers are influenced by their lack of dominion in various spheres of life. He is inexorably wrong, however, to dismiss these perspectives as any less important than his own or those of any other male writer.

The most elementary rule of writing is that one must write what one knows about. Good writing, even fiction, comes from an empirical place. So if the narratives produced by women writers reflect, as Naipaul says, a “narrow view of the world”, then the more pertinent question is – do they reflect that world truly? Do they speak for it? Are they authentic?

So if we are to assume that most women, in some regard, live without autonomy, then we must also allow that those who write have done so in a variety of less than ideal compromises: in secret, under pseudonyms, at the kitchen table, between feeding times, in custody, against regimes domestic and otherwise, without intention or access to publish. They have done so, more often than not, not from the comfort of a private office, but in the liminal spaces and snatches of time afforded by lives that do not, generally, afford much space or time, or respect.

If their writing is coloured by the fact that they are mothers, wives, daughters, wage-earners, dependents, care-takers, then by that same token Naipaul’s is surely also coloured by the fact that he is a racist, masochist, elitist, sexist misanthrope. But the circumstances out of which these women – or anyone, regardless of gender, who is disadvantaged in any way – write out of do not diminish their work any more than Naipaul’s infamous abuses in his personal life and corrosive statements do his own literary output. To write in spite of possessing a “small” life is an act of agency. Naipaul, whose own father took to writing as a means of escaping poverty, should certainly know this.

The work of the writer is to bear witness – but this is not as grandiose a trope as it sounds. To bear witness to life is to bear witness to its kitchen tables, its bedrooms, its little heartbreaks, its disappointments, its pettiness, its fleeting fulfillments and – yes – its sentimentalities. If the fiction produced by women writers does all these things, then I would say they are doing something correct. A narrow but clear view of the world is far preferable to something sprawling, sweeping, but ultimately in denial of the world itself.

An edited version appeared in Times of India’s iDiva supplement today.

Book Review: Rebirth by Jahnavi Barua

There are books that blow one’s mind open. There are books that leave one shaken, altered, destabilized. Those books are easy to talk about, their effects easy to describe in superlatives. And then there are books that wander in without bells on, as quiet as the comfort that fills the heart while watching the day’s first or last light from one’s own window, alone but for the succor of a cup of tea. Perhaps that is the analogy that comes closest to expressing the peace that Jahnavi Barua’s Rebirth brings. This profoundly intimate novel is one of the most beautiful books seen in Indian fiction in many years.

We are held for a time and then we are released imprinted, as though from within a womb – a testament to Barua’s impeccably crafted narrative voice, for this is exactly what the novel is about. Kaberi is a homemaker in Bangalore, pregnant with a longed-for baby about whom no one – not her estranged husband, not her parents in Guwahati, not her few friends in her adopted city, not her domestic help – knows, except for her gynecologist. Her second trimester has begun, and before long she will not be able to conceal her expectant state. Rebirth is her monologue to that child who begins as a secret and an uncertainty, then turns into the pivot on which she will renew her life itself.

Of all the psychic locales that writers over millennia have explored, there are none as complex as a woman’s interior landscape, a landscape so fascinating that long before feminism put pens into women’s own hands, male bards sought to emulate their voices. There is no dearth of the first-person female voice in the genre of the contemporary novel today, but Barua’s contains an unusual timelessness – it has a curious but highly successful lack of urbanity and modern neuroses, thus delivering the sense that, as with some of Kamala Markandaya’s work, it could be set anywhere within a span of decades. This is one of the book’s strengths: chiseling Kaberi’s experience down to her most private sphere, influenced solely by her own emotionality.

What emerges is delicate: we are not subjected, for example, to melodramatic outrage about her husband’s infidelity, or unmitigated grief about the deaths of loved ones, or even self-consciousness about Kaberi’s own promising work as a writer. It is only much later into the novel, when the pregnancy is no longer a secret and a salvaging of the marriage is being negotiated, that Kaberi begins to regard the unborn baby as an entity to whom stories must be told, and a sort of rhetorical distance emerges. Until that point, the baby is but an extension of her psyche, and her single source of solace. Over the course of her pregnancy, she acquires the strength to support both her child and the needs of her own evolution. Barua traces this journey with a fine sense of nuance.

Rebirth is a deeply compassionate novel, consoling the reader the way Kaberi’s baby consoles her for many months – gently, with tenderness, and with neither demand nor plea. The tranquility it offers lingers similarly: this is not a novel in which characters haunt, petitioning us to find absolution for their unexplained futures and unanswered questions. Instead, one is content to leave them where they leave us, carrying forward the perfection of the brief time we have spent with them. With extraordinary intimacy and understanding, Barua has found a way to echo gestation itself: holding the reader safely, but just long enough so that they reenter the world calmed, soothed, deeply moved.

An edited version appeared in today’s The Hindu Literary Review.

When You Chose Me

I found this beautiful poem just as it was about to be retired from the Poetry Daily archive. I found it just when I needed it. And because I have always been better at saying to the world what I cannot say quietly, I share it with you.

When you chose me

By Pedro Salinas
translated from the Spanish by Willis Barnstone

When you chose me—
love chose—
I came out of the great anonymity
from everyone, from nothing.
Till then
I was never taller than
the sierras of the world.
I never sank deeper
than the maximum
depths marked out
on maritime charts.
And my gladness was
sad, as small watches are
without a wrist to fasten to,
without a winding crown, stopped.
But when you said: you,
to me, yes, to me singled out,
I was higher than stars,
deeper than coral.
And my joy
began to spin, caught
in your being, in your pulse.
You gave me possession of myself
when you gave your self to me.
I lived. I live. How long?
I know you will back out.
When you go
I will go back to a deaf
world that does not distinguish
gram or drop
in weight or water.
I’ll be one more—like the rest—
when you are lost.
I’ll lose my name,
my age, my gestures, all
lost in me, from me.
Gone back to the immense bone heap
of those who have not died
and now have nothing
to die for in life.

The Mucukunda Murals

Two hours by car from Tanjavur, through a meandering scenic route of paddy fields, bucolic groves and glimpses of the sun-dappled Kaveri river, is the temple town of Tiruvarur: birthplace of Carnatic music’s triumvirate of doyens (the composers Kakarla Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri), and the site of the crown jewel of the South Indian Shaivite cult, the Sri Tyagarajasvami temple. Estimated to be around 1300 years old, the temple blossomed under the aegis of the major reconstructions of the Chola dynasty, and gained prominence owing to the many travelling bards who, seized by revelations, were moved to song within it. In the modern era, however, certain parts of it fell to neglect, most notably the Devasiriya Mandapam, an auxiliary hall within which is contained a trove of radiant 17th century ceiling murals.

Up until three years ago, the murals were in a rapidly deteriorating state owing to water seepage, fire, human negligence and other factors. When Ranvir Shah, the maverick behind the Chennai-based arts and culture organisation Prakriti Foundation, was told by temple authorities a decade ago of plans to whitewash the paintings, he managed to stave off this travesty for eight years, when the necessary permissions for restoration were secured and a collaborative effort with the Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) could begin.

He wasn’t the only one concerned with preserving the stunningly detailed, exquisitely painted murals. The Indologist David Shulman, in what he calls “an act of despair”, visited in 2006 with the photographer V.K. Rajamani so as to document the images before they were lost forever. Shulman and Shah, among others, met – propitiously, as anyone associated with this project now says – and from this was born a major undertaking to restore and preserve what are now known as the Mucukunda Murals.

Dating to the late Nayaka/early Maratha period, the murals narrate, over the course of 50 panels, the mythology of how Tyagarajasvami – or Shiva in his mode as householder and king, flanked by his consort and child-prince in the iconic Somaskanda configuration – came to reside in Tiruvarur. Legend has it that the monkey-faced Chola ruler Mucukunda brought the deity from the heavens at his own request. Tyagarajasvami, who before this had rested on the chest of Vishnu in the cosmic ocean, moving in tandem to that deity’s breath, was bored in Indra’s heaven. This god of momentum and relocation desired settlement – specifically, in a locale already associated with Kamalambal, a powerful goddess with Tantric significance, as well as a different, more primitive aspect of Shiva as lord of the anthill. When Mucukunda, having helped Indra defeat a demon, is offered a boon, Tyagarasvami secretly communicates to him the desire to be taken to Tiruvarur.

Indra, hesitant to part with the god so quickly, has six more identical figures made, and asks Mucukunda to choose the original. Again, Tyagarajasvami gives Mucukunda a signal (different sources suggest a smile, a wink, or an intuitive understanding), thus allowing him to leave the ennui of heaven, and make the town his abode.

The origin story of Tyagarajasvami thus exalts him as a god who chooses his own tribe, and this sentiment remains strongly ensconced among those involved in the restoration of the murals. The release of Shulman and Rajamani’s elegant coffee table tome, The Mucukunda Murals, on January 26 in the Devasiriya Mandapam celebrated the near-completion of the restoration work, and was well-attended by a large gathering of scholars, aesthetes and local devotees, who carried mirrored trays as they walked beneath the murals so as to look at them without strain.

In brief lectures, a panel of noted experts on Tiruvarur – Professor Rajeshwari Ghose, Professor Saskia Kersenboom, Professor Davesh Soneji and Professor Shulman – shared their personal connections to the temple and its deity. Kersenboom, author of the pathbreaking 1987 book Nityasumangali, spoke about the “cinematic flashback” she experienced during her first visit to the temple in 1975, during which she saw the devadasis in procession as they had been in the generations before their art was banned. Ghose quoted an anonymous Tyagarajasvami kavacham, in which the poet tells God to take away anything from him but his ability to appreciate the arts, because it is through them that he experiences divinity. She also credited the temple for having been the wellspring of the Tamil bhakti movement, inspiring the pilgrimages of the Nayanmars and Alwars and giving the collective Tamil consciousness a meaningful identity.

At no point was the numinous quality of the events that led to the restoration, and indeed to that particular day of celebration itself, underplayed. In what is perhaps an unusual method of doing things in this modern (and that too, academic) context, the lectures ended to coincide with the Sayaraktsha Pooja, the dusk prayer to the deity. The entourage reassembled at the sanctum sanctorum, chanting Om Namashivaya Namaha in front of the glittering Tyagarajasvami, before the evening’s performances began.

Evoking the panegyrical element of all pre-colonial temple performances, the concert was highlighted by the magnificent recital of a portion of the mohamana varnam by dancer Shymala Mohanraj. A disciple of the legendary devadasi Balasaraswathi and one of the foremost torchkeepers of that lineage, her supreme command of the stage and consummate, unostentatious grace were breathtaking to behold. A deeply endearing rendering of kuruvanji songs by Tilakamma, who is also of devadasi heritage but no longer able to dance, also served to fortify the idea that age is an externality – beauty and passion transcend such limitations. A nagaswaram presentation by T.K. Selvaganapathy and T.S. Palaniappan (who trace their musical lineage to 22 generations), accompanied in part by a padam by Kersenboom, and as a performance by eminent vocalist Aruna Sairam rounded off the evening. At the heart of the entire ceremony was an exploration of lineage in all its forms – hereditary, intangible, karmic and incidental. But most importantly, a new understanding of lineage, stripped of hegemony and baggage and brought to the simplest level: the absolutely personal epiphany of the workings of cosmic leela, and one’s place within it.

In the afterglow of this rare, possibly miraculous, story of triumph over the forces of aesthetic ignorance and bureaucratic negligence, it’s easy to forget that a multitude of precious structures throughout India face dissimilar fates. The Mucukunda Murals have been saved, for now, by “the co-operation of public and private interests in temple conservation”, as Soneji puts it. “I hope this is a model that will catch on”. Perhaps God only winks at a chosen few, but the responsibility for the protection and maintenance of our architectural and artistic heritage lies with all who care to watch, refusing to allow such losses in our own lifetimes.

An edited version appeared in today’s The Sunday Guardian.

Mira Sundara Rajan: Moral Rights

Your new book, Moral Rights, deals with the issue of intellectual property in the digital domain, which is a new area of concern. Can you give us a brief introduction to moral rights and their doctrine?

Basically, moral rights protect an author’s non-commercial, personal and cultural rights. The expression comes from the French – droit moral – which means “personal rights” or “intellectual rights”, but doesn’t have the same connotation in English. Attribution and integrity are the two rights that are protected: attribution is the right to be named and identified as the author, and integrity is what protects the work from harm (for example, preventing a moustache being painted on the Mona Lisa!). The moral rights aspect of creative work in the technological context has not been addressed. Discussion of copyright issues, especially at the international level is focused on the economic rights and how much money an author can make from his or her work. My interest is in the cultural side of things, not the economic side. And I think it’s a serious concern in the Internet age. To give you an example, a person could find a poem online that is attributed to Subramania Bharati, He or she would suffer the harm of false knowledge; this would affect how someone understands his or her own culture.

You’ve explored moral rights in various global contexts in your book. Do you feel that the concept, or the understanding of it, varies based on the cultural and historical framework?

The short answer is: it does, yes. Each country has its own perspective on moral rights, depending not just on legal factors but also on cultural factors. The law is really an expression of the culture. I’ll give you two examples – in England, they have moral rights in the Copyright Act, but they are bit skeptical about authors’ personal interests, so they don’t really embrace the concept. And in contrast would be India, which has a very strong understanding of moral rights, and even more than the government, the courts really feel they have a mission to protect India’s culture.

But the protection of culture is also something that has been co-opted by religious fundamentalists, communalists, misogynists and the like. How do you see this in relation to moral rights?

Actually, moral rights are a very important way of fighting against that. The whole concept of moral rights is to protect the special relationship between an author and his or her work. So think of the implications for censorship for example – no one can interfere with that relationship if the moral right is upheld. For example, Anand Patwardhan sued because parts of his film had been reused by filmmakers who had misrepresented his secular perspective, and the Mumbai High Court upheld his right.

How are moral rights placed in relation to the Copyleft movement, and movements like Creative Commons?

The common wisdom is that moral rights and Copyleft/Creative Commons don’t get along. But if you look more closely, they actually do protect moral rights. My observation is that they are highly compatible. In the US, apart from one very conservative federal law that only covers visual arts, they have no legislative protection for moral rights. In this sense, the Creative Commons might be the only protection generally available there for moral rights because the Creative Commons system of licenses is based on attribution. The Creative Commons community is really interested in protecting the quality of the knowledge that is disseminated, protecting it from adulteration. But, these movements – Open Source, Copyleft, Creative Commons – the question of how authors are supposed to earn a living from their work, and I do criticize them for this in my book. In order to write the book, I had to take a year’s sabbatical, and I question whether any serious author could have done otherwise. There has to be a way to provide financial support for artists and writers.

What are your thoughts on censorship, which is also connected to creative rights and freedoms?

I think censorship is a very bad thing, to put it very simply, and I think moral rights are a very important legal mechanism to protect people from censorship. And remember you are protecting both the author and the reader, because censorship distorts the truth, it distorts what was created, and that is just as bad for the reader as for the writer.

Intellectual property law is only one aspect of your work – you’re also an acclaimed classical pianist. How does your academic research lend itself to your creative life, and vice versa?

They have quite a natural relationship. I got interested in this aspect of law because I am an artist. And the artistic community is interested in me because of my knowledge of IP rights. I think it’s much easier, or even necessary, to have an understanding of art in order to have an understanding of IP law. And that’s a deficiency a lot of IP lawyers have – they don’t understand the psychological impact of how an artist feels when something is done to his or her work.

I don’t mean to embarrass you, but do you feel genius can be inherited? You’re a great-granddaughter of Subramania Bharati, after all.

No, I don’t think so. I think genius is the most unexpected thing in the universe. It can come up anywhere, and that’s why it is wonderful. In the US there are a lot of parents who think they can educate their children to be geniuses from the age of 2! But the factors that make a person a genius are so complex – it has to do with historical circumstances, the environment and many other factors. I don’t want to discredit my great-grandfather for my own accomplishments, whatever they may be, because of the access to education I had because of him, and my family background. My mother was the first Bharati scholar, and my father was an English professor and Bharati devotee, so I had a parallel education in addition to school. The environment in which I grew up was completely shaped by Bharati’s writings and his ideas on education and the development of the human personality. But Bharati’s own example is a case in point of the unexpectedness of genius. Why would this man coming from Ettayapuram think that he could singlehandedly get rid of the British empire, which was then the most powerful entity on earth? And he did, in a sense.

You also write poetry, but have only published your academic work so far. Can you tell us more about your poetry, what inspires it, and why you haven’t yet shared it with the world as you have your compositions and legal research?

I write poetry and prose (short stories and non-fiction essays). I’ve been writing since I was about 7 years old and the prosaic answer to your question is that I just haven’t had the time to do anything with it because of my education and what followed. But I have plans. In terms of what it’s about, there are lots of different themes; I am interested in all aspects of human experience. Bharati is definitely an inspiration because his writing is very comprehensive and deals with aspects of life. His optimism as an artist and thinker is also unique, and a tremendous inspiration.. The classics are important to me – I’ve read a lot of French literature in the original, and because of my interest in Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are also influences. Reading bad writing can be like eating junk food.!

Having grown up outside of India, in what ways – if any – do you remain connected to this cultural ethos?

It is important to me and my connection is really through Subramania Bharati. That’s everything.

An edited version appeared in today’s The Hindu.

PechaKucha Night Chennai Vol 5

PechaKucha Night Chennai Vol.5 will take place on Saturday, April 16th as part of  ‘Global PechaKucha Day – Inspire Japan’ – a fundraising event that will benefit Architecture for Humanity’s Rebuild Japan plans.

I’m excited to be one of the presenters. The full list is as follows:

Kaustav Sengupta
MacTrics
MV Bhaskar
Nikhil Joseph
Pooja Bhatia
Sharanya Manivannan
Shradha Mohan

PechaKucha Night Vol 5 is at 7pm on April 16th at Madras Centre, Thirumurthy Nagar Main Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai.

Guest Column: Say Cheese

A couple of months ago, I was told that I had appeared in a newspaper’s tabloid section, in one of those visual round-ups of who had been wearing what at which party. This wasn’t the first time this had happened and it probably won’t be the last, but to the best of my knowledge it may have been one of the few occasions on which I had appeared…. accompanied.

“My friends said we were, like, holding each other,” said the boy in question.

“Really?” I said, archly (or so I’d like to think). “And exactly where was this photo taken? Your house?”

Of course, nobody had informed me of the same. I deduced that this was either because they all thought I was a celebrity, and came out in these pages too often to notice, or that I was a harlot, and publicly cuddled up with cutiepies too often to notice.

Naturally, I was really curious about this picture.

I checked out some e-archives. Nothing. I asked a couple of friends. Nothing. But I knew this boy’s friends hadn’t been lying, because you see – I had gone to that party with him. And when a photographer I recognized from various events in the past requested permission to click, I had called him over.

Reader, I posed.

Never trust a person who tells you she doesn’t like being photographed. Because the truth is, we all do. Especially if we’re dolled up and accessorized with pretty baubles and a prettier boy to match. Especially if we’re having fun. And whether we’d like to admit it or not – especially if there’s a chance that we might appear somewhere in the pages of the ultimate peacockry known as Page 3.

“Page 3 culture is so stupid!” a friend exclaimed when she heard I was writing this. I thought she meant that a culture of exhibitionism and attention-seeking was stupid. But she continued. “The photographers and editors should really know better than to snap people with no fashion sense and give them moronic captions like ‘Spotted in Polka Dots’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’”.

Ah. Viva la vainglory. Like I said, I’m only friends with honest people. And people honestly love looking hot.

There’s really no reason to intellectualize Page 3. Of course it’s all a farce. Of course it’s ridiculous. Of course it really means absolutely nothing – so why bother being bothered by it? To take it seriously is to defeat the point of it. The fine line between a poser and a loser is that the former has a sense of humour about it.

I once walked into a book launch and had a dozen cameras go off immediately. “You do know,” I said archly (or so I’d like to think). “That I’m not the author, don’t you?” And then I smiled sweetly for the next round of flashes. I go to these events because they are interesting for my work, because my friends are involved, because I am curious. I don’t go to be seen. I’m seen because I go.

All that said, of course, I do dress for the occasion.

An edited version appeared in Times of India (Chennai) today.

Book Review: Invitation by Shehryar Fazli

There is no good reason why Shehryar Fazli’s Invitation should be so very boring. It is, for a start, supposedly the book that introduces the “Karachi Noir” genre, and the literary equivalent of being born with a silver spoon for any author is to make his debut already named paladin of a city, trustee of its milieu and mythos. Its protagonist is theoretically ideal: the sort of world-weary, multifarious man who doesn’t think twice before downing a glass in a cabaret dancer’s quarters and doesn’t flinch upon being told it has been spiked with opium, who wanders through its darker districts considering the novel’s single good line, “So much of a city’s value depends on what it offers the lonely”. Even its cover, if one can be so facile, is tantalizing: curving hips corseted in rhinestones, the novel’s title posed alluringly where the belly ends.

The narrator, Shahbaz, returns to Pakistan after two decades in Paris, an emissary on his father’s behalf to negotiate a family dispute over a large orchard. His aunt, the tempestuous, mentally unstable Mona Phuppi, wants to sell it. Shahbaz’s father, in exile at a distance, refuses. Shahbaz first sets up shop at the Khyber Hotel, then moves to the home of his father’s old friend, a well-connected brigadier. He becomes involved with Malika, a dancer from Cairo who calls him “darleeng” and both talks and behaves like a caricature. These are the ‘70’s, and Pakistan is still a nation divided into East and West, and Karachi’s cultural life is not just politically-motivated, but also something out of Bollywood: seedy, sleazy, and a little over-the-top.

Yet, it’s a challenge to keep turning Invitation’s pages. Even as far as halfway into the story, it fails to seize the reader’s attention. Shahbaz does not contain, in spite of a very few revelatory moments that suggest he might, enough in himself to moor the work. There is only one incident that carries in it the tensions this novel aspires to recreate, and that is a memory, a comparison between the dangers of Pakistan and France: caught unawares doing lines of coke in an unlocked bathroom stall in Paris, Shahbaz gives up the Ayatul Kursi he wears to the stranger who insinuates that there will be trouble otherwise. He follows the stranger. He does not know what to do, feels locked out of the city’s ciphers, contemplates his own helplessness. This consciousness of urbanity, human weakness and peril, ostensibly what the novel is all about, emerges nowhere else.

Fazli fares worst when it comes to evoking the urgency and intrigue of the times he is writing about. The weight and charge of history never fuels the plot in a convincing or exciting way. Karachi itself, as a figment of fiction, takes on no distinctive dimensions: it could be the underbelly of any city, anywhere, give or take a few locational markers and references. Even still, this underbelly lacks shape in some ways – it is dutifully sordid, but ultimately not thrilling or gritty.

The novel moves at a curious, uninspiring pace: not eloquent enough to be literary fiction, not snappy enough to be pulp fiction, and certainly not sexy or ambient enough to be noir. There is, through the narrative, what can only be described as a sense of laziness – as if the author threw in a little sex, a little violence, a dusting of old school family saga charm, set it all against the backdrop of historical incidents, then sat back and expected a full-fledged book, confident in the formula.

One wishes this was a bad book. That it uses language poorly, gives in to easy emotional manipulation, or takes leaps of logic and license. It would, in that case, either have been entertaining in some cynical way or at least ingratiating enough to write at length about. Instead, it is the worst thing a book can be: lackluster and forgettable. So much so that even skimming its pages during a perfunctory second reading, a search for a single quotable paragraph that might illustrate its sorry state yields nothing. The entire novel is composed of paragraphs so perfectly colorless that none stands out as more so than any other.

This, then, is perhaps simply the curious case of the kind of book that emerges at a certain lucrative moment, when the eyes of the world have been trained on works in a similar category (in this instance, the current explosion in Pakistani fiction, propelled by the likes of Daniyal Mueenuddin and a definitive Granta anthology), and moves along buoyed by a tide not of its own origination. Little else explains its lack of imagination.

An edited version appeared in today’s The Sunday Guardian.