The Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi (2008)

(Translated from French by Polly McLean; Winner of Le Prix Goncourt, 2008)

Some readers might find it a bit strange that a book by an Afghani writer, about Afghanistan, is included in a blog on South Asian literature. This is where geo-political boundaries become a bit messy. Afghanistan is not strictly South Asia, but it is often included in this category for geo-political reasons. What happens in Afghanistan is deeply tied up with what happens in Pakistan, which is firmly South Asia. I do not feel the need to justify myself too thoroughly, because this is my blog, and I can write about what I choose! But I do recognise that Afghanistan is only arguably and occasionally considered South Asia.

But I will apologise no further for the inclusion of The Patience Stone in this blog, because it is a truly beautiful and mesmerising book. Atiq Rahimi has to be one of the most unique contemporary authors from this part of the world. Though the edition of The Patience Stone I read had an introduction by Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner), Rahimi is a far superior author to Hosseini. Whereas Hosseini leaves nothing to the imagination and finds it necessary to hammer home his political commentary in the most un-subtle ways, Rahimi’s writing is understated and humming with passion, anger and injustice beneath a deceptively measured surface.

Perhaps better categorised as a novella than a novel, The Patience Stone is a brief 141 pages, as the other of Rahimi’s books I’ve read, Earth and Ashes, is too. Best read in one sitting, like a long narrative poem, The Patience Stone follows the actions of an Aghani woman taking care of her bed-ridden, brain-dead husband. The sub-title of the book, and in fact its title in the original French, is “Sang-E Saboor”, which the introductory material describes as meaning “the patience stone”. According to Persian folklore, the magical patience stone is the receptacle of the troubles and pain that its owner may tell it in times of difficulty- it is believed that one day the stone will explode from the pressure of the hardships and pain it is forced to absorb. Once the woman protagonist of Rahimi’s tale realises that her husband cannot respond to her, she treats him as that mythical stone, and pours her secrets, frustrations and desires into him. The fear is, however, that like the magical stone, he may explode.

The tales she tells him are full of sexual frustration, hypocritical patriarchal injustices, and disappointed dreams. If ever proof was needed that men are capable of writing feminist literature, Rahimi’s The Patience Stone is it. His protagonist is not only capable of acting independently despite the harshest restrictions, but of thinking and feeling truly subversively. But in case a reader should mistake this tale for a uniquely Afghani one, and associate it with that particular strand of western literature that likes to point out how backwards “they” are so that “we” can applaud ourselves for being so liberated, the book begins: “Somewhere in Aghanistan or elsewhere”. Universality is a problematic concept, but the passions and the frustrations that Rahimi’s protagonist exudes could be those of women anywhere living under extreme patriarchal control. The context is Afghanistan, the problems are not restricted to there.

Rahimi himself is Afghani, but has lived in France since 1985. He writes in French, and thus my exposure to him has been through English translation. I don’t know what may be lost in translation, but it is difficult to see that anything has been, as the translation reads so beautifully and fluidly. If ever I was to need an excuse to learn to read French, it would be to read Atiq Rahimi. But for now, I will have to be satisfied with the translations, so I hope they keep coming.

Empowering Women? Feminist Responses to Hindutva

I’ve just had an article published in Australian academic journal Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. It looks at two books on women and communalism in India, Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia’s Women and the Hindu Right (1995) and Atreyee Sen’s Shiv Sena Women (2007). It’s an open access e-journal and available at the following site:

http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue28_contents.htm

 

India Vik, Liz Gallois (2006)

I am forever in search of writing by non-Indians about India that is unpredictable. By that I mean non-exoticising, non-romanticising, and not based around the very stale notion of “finding oneself” in that country. An absence of ashrams and yoga also helps, but I wouldn’t be opposed to them per se if the author managed to breathe new life into their portrayal. It must be an extraordinarily difficult thing for a writer to achieve, because so far I have found very few examples- Desert Places by Robin Davis (a book that I love so much that it would require an entire article, not just a blog review) and, arguably, the work of William Dalrymple. India Vik falls short and is, ultimately, as predictable as all that which I try to avoid. I should have suspected this from the first line of the blurb on the back: “Travel to India and be changed forever.” I think the antique Ganesh idol should have given it away, too!

The interconnected short stories in India Vik largely centre on Australian travellers in India. The remaining ones concern Indian characters in Australia, so there is some cross-cultural dialogue going on here. The Australians’ impressions of India are part of the focus, but there is more weight put on the various characters’ relationships with each other, and how their time in India impacts on this. For instance, there is the Honeymooning couple who spend more and more days exploring India alone, without the spouse in tow, as they are forced to realise that they want different things in life: their different approaches to travel in India is just symbolic of something larger. There is the mother, father, adult son and new daughter-in-law who travel to India together to get to know each other, but end up becoming completely estranged after the holiday goes horribly wrong. There is the young backpacker who left his girlfriend behind in Melbourne in order to “find himself” in India, only to find a gay love affair with a charming Frenchman. And, predictably, there is the solo female traveller who finds herself attracted to the carpet-seller whom she dubs Aladdin, and has a brief fling with him. The relationship vignettes were the strength of India Vik, accurately capturing not only the minutiae of individuals’ interactions, but the particular ways in which travel and being taken out of one’s comfort zone can strain these. You know, when you get really tired of your friend always wanting to go shopping when you’d rather go to a museum; or irritated by the way your father questions whether every morsel is safe to eat; or even just when you really admire the way your partner handled that difficult situation.

But, I have to admit I am not a fan of the short story, in general. The epic novel is more my thing, as the short story tends to leave too much to the imagination that I actually want the writer to provide. Liz Gallois’ writing was certainly minimalist, and dissatisfyingly open-ended. Nevertheless, if one is a fan of the short story, her sparse style has a certain charm. But I’m afraid I couldn’t get past some of the content. In the story “Box Wallah”, a family is staying in Kolkata:

“The problem was leaving the jasmine scented garden. The street waited, with its beggars, young mothers and a baby wrapped in the corner of the sari, legless boys on skateboards and taxi drivers soliciting our custom, ‘Come, I take you City of Joy’–we knew these were the worst slums in Kolkata–how voyeuristic were we expected to be? We tried to do all the proper visits, Victoria Memorial, the Nehru Children’s Museum, Tagore House. Here’s not the place to recount our audience with Mother Teresa.” (p. 30)

They did not take to Kolkata. I am not suggesting that Gallois is synonymous with her characters (she might love Kolkata, I don’t know) but does the world really need another such description of a city already blighted by a bad reputation? There is nothing fresh here. It would take much more skill to describe a place with a preceding reputation in fresh terms than to rehash the old. But perhaps Gallois had no intention of providing fresh eyes with which to view the city. If that is so, then I should not be critiquing this book, I should just be accepting that it was not the book for me.

The following types of description are not uncommon in India Vik, either:

“I own to a personal leaning towards Indians with dark skins, maybe I feel they are the true India, but I didn’t mind that Romesh had a light complexion as no one could have been more authentic than Romesh.” (p. 32)

Again, without wishing to conflate Gallois with her characters, I was still struck by the pure stupidity of such a description. I think the narrator of this story was meant to be slightly unsympathetic, but this is where the minimalism fails: if one, as a writer, is to create these types of thoughts in one’s characters, surely you wouldn’t want there to be any ambiguity surrounding whose thoughts they really are?

India Vik would probably appeal to an armchair traveller with a taste for literary travel fiction with no intention of ever going to India. But I found its attempts at stylishness dissatisfying and, well, just plain exoticising.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008)

The White Tiger grew on me. I started out vociferously disliking it, for all the reasons I had pre-determined I would dislike it. Indeed, I dislike the premise of this book, and its success, more than the book itself. I don’t want this to just turn into another argument about why a Booker-prize winning book shouldn’t have been given that award because they tend to be tedious (though, seriously, if Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy couldn’t win it then The White Tiger shouldn’t have even been longlisted!). So I shall start by stating my (admittedly, largely extra-literary) problems with it, before discussing it’s good points because it is, ultimately, an enjoyable novel. Would I have given it the Booker? Absolutely not. Now that that is out of the way, I will move on.

When I did my PhD research in India in early 2010, when this book was still being talked about in the literary circles I was interacting with, a lot of people expressed that it was not a well-loved book in India. One author told me her son had vociferously rejected it, without having read it, saying “Why would I want to read about servants murdering their employers?! Why would I want to be afraid every time I get in the car!?” She believed this was a common sentiment, but didn’t approve of it herself, recognising that the huge gap between rich and poor in India is something that the middle classes should be facing up to. The White Tiger provides one way, if one should so happen be able to leave one’s house on a daily basis with one’s eyes metaphorically shut.

But I am not a middle class Indian, I am a middle class “westerner” (whatever that is). And I find it distasteful at best, and disgusting, at worst, that periodically our society (again, whatever that is) finds some “third world” emblem to hold up as the epitome of what is wrong with some other part of the world that is not us. Sometimes this is accompanied by some mild anguished chest beating about how we could do more to help them, and then it is quickly forgotten. (Anyone seen anything about Kony 2012 in the last couple of weeks?) Poverty, inequality and exploitation exist everywhere, all the time, and I find it nauseating that such an emblem is required to get people to remember that. Sometimes those emblems, and the attendant “recognition” that they bring to the first world consumers, act in place of any real action (which, fundamentally, would be a complete overhaul of our neo-liberal capitalist society, but that’s another article again…)

And I had presumed that The White Tiger was just another one. Which it is, a bit. But, like Slumdog Millionaire (another such emblem) it’s also quite enjoyable. The premise is already known. The “white tiger”, Balram, is an ignorant village lad from “the darkness” who lands a job as a driver in Delhi. He’s quite a nice young man, exploited by his boss but always willing to do his best, until things go too far. He pre-meditates the murder of his boss, escapes, and sets up a successful business in Bangalore. I haven’t just given anything away, as all this is known from the beginning, and it is the humour of Balram’s exegesis that is the real strength of The White Tiger. Including one of my favourite types of humour, that directed towards silly western tourists in India (oh yes, I have been one, but not this kind, I like to tell myself!):

“every day thousands of foreigners fly into my country for enlightenment. They go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to Bodh Gaya. They get into weird poses of yoga, smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think they’re getting enlightened. Ha! If it is enlightenment you have come to India for, you people, forget the Ganga–forget the ashrams–go straight to the Natioanl Zoo in the heart of New Delhi.” (p. 275)

But the humour always gives way to something else, the darkness:

“Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries–two Indias. The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place, Old Delhi, is the other end. Full of things that the modern world forgot all about–rickshaws, old stone buildings, and Muslims.” (p. 251)

So, after all this, do I recommend The White Tiger? Yes, I do, to Indians and non-Indians. Just don’t be fooled into thinking that by reading this book and gaining enlightenment, anything will change.

Birthright, Vaasanthi (2004)

(Translated from Tamil by Vasantha Surya)

It was refreshing to read an overtly, unashamedly, unapologetically feminist novel by Indian feminist publisher Zubaan. Though Shashi Deshpande has a point when she says that she would prefer her novels be read as novels and not as feminist tracts (“why must I, each time I write a novel, present pictures of rebellion? Because I am a feminist? For God’s sake, I’m a novelist, I write novels, not feminist tracts” [Writing from the Margin and Other Essays, p. 159]), and though I see the value of feminist publishers like Zubaan trying to reach out to readers ambivalent about feminism by publishing a broad range of women’s writing, I still applaud this overtly feminist novel. The issues it raises are urgent, and if the only writers prepared to tackle them are feminist writers, publishers and readers should look beyond 2012 squeamishness about aligning with such a political stance and focus on what’s really important.

Birthright is ostensibly about sex-selective abortion in India, and of course, “sex-selective abortion” is itself a necessarily euphemistic term meaning the abortion of female foetuses (“female foeticide” is too problematic a term, though commonly used, as the implications of “foeticide” ally it with various religious right-wing groups, whether Indian, American, or whomever). The narrator of Birthright is Mano, a twenty-something year old doctor living in a small town in Tamil Nadu. A large part of her job involves scanning pregnant women, and aborting female foetuses, after the women don’t like what they discover. Mano is not ashamed of this fact, seeing it as an essential social service that will save the women from abuse from their husbands and in-laws, and save unborn females the pain of being a girl, and a woman, in a family and society that despises them. Whatever distaste Mano feels at this part of her job is translated into contempt for her patients:

“The delivery case was quite simple, no complications. No need to howl like that just for labour pains. Something else was making her howl. This was the second–the first was a girl. What was this one going to be? That was what the screaming was about. Meenatchi said the husband and the mother-in-law were waiting outside. When she screamed Ayyo! Amma! what she was really doing was trying to see if the wellsprings of compassion would open up for her. [...]
‘A boy!’ announced Meenatchi.
The woman who’d just given birth to it stared in disbelief, then clutched at my hand and kissed it as though she’d gone crazy. ‘Thayee! You’re a goddess, Thayee!’ she gasped and began to sob.
Wearily I detached myself from the rejoicing taking place around me and went to wash my hands. The very sight of that frenzy and those happy tears was humiliating. The husband and mother-in-law were passing around lumps of sugar. I wanted to tear them to pieces that very instant.” (p. 7)

The same rejoicing husband had threatened to throw the wife out if she gave birth to another girl.

The other major theme of Birthright is female property inheritance in India. Mano is an only daughter, something that puts her in a precarious position within her family. Before the death of her mother, her father had threatened to remarry in the hopes of bearing a son. After her mother’s death, rumours circulate that her father will adopt a son and heir. Mano sees remaining unmarried as her only hope of inheriting her father’s house and business–if she were to marry, tradition would dictate that she go and live in her husband’s home, relinquishing any small right she had to her inheritance.

Neither of these issues is resolved satisfactorily in Birthright. This would not be a problem if they were deliberately left unresolved–how can a novelist hope to resolve them!? But the ending is rather bizarre and too-tidy. Nevertheless, this is an absorbing and memorable book, and one that gives feminist novels a good name.

A Situation in New Delhi, Nayantara Sahgal (1977)

Originally published in 1977, Nayantara Sahgal’s A Situation in New Delhi was re-printed by Penguin India in 2008, something that should give you an idea of the importance of Sahgal to the corpus of twentieth-century Indian writing in English. And she really was writing at a time when Indian writing in English was more of a curiosity, an anomaly, an anachronism than it is today.

A Situation in New Delhi revolves around the lives of three main characters: Devi, her son Rishad, and Michael Calvert. But the real protagonist, already dead by the time the novel opens, is Shivraj, Devi’s brother, Rishad’s uncle and a close friend of Michael’s. Though someone more knowledgeable about Indian politics may be able to correct me, I think Shivraj was modelled on Nehru. An idealistic leader who has ruled India for several years, his death leaves a gaping hole in both Indian politics, and the lives of the individual characters. The order and hope that he represents rapidly diminishes.

I have read some of Sahgal’s other books, and I must admit that I have trouble telling them apart, when the dust has settled and I look back on them. They are different, of course, with different characters and settings (this one in New Delhi, another in Chandigarh…), but they mostly revolve around the intimacies and personalities of politics in the couple of decades after Indian independence. This is not so much of a criticism, or an obstacle, as it may sound. Her books are gripping (on the verge of being called thrillers, but not quite), with unexpected denouments.

What I particularly liked about A Situation in New Delhi was Sahgal’s ability to recreate the atmosphere (or what I imagine must have been the atmosphere) amongst the upper-class, political elite in India in the 1970s. This book was written around the time of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, after the hope of the immediate post-independence years had been shattered. Sahgal is, in fact, a member of the greater Nehru family, but is well known as one of her cousin Indira’s strongest critics.

A passage that particularly resonated with me, especially after debates we’ve had this week at work about some “western” scholars’ continued denial of coevalness in studies of India, follows. It also demonstrates Sahgal’s quiet, pondering, sometimes feverish style:

“this is a staggeringly old country. It makes my head spin to think how old it is. Older than the rocks. Old and settled and structured when Britons were painting their bodies blue. Already old when their epics and ancient books before the epics were written. That way of life and thinking still exists, and not only in the village. It’s there in the factory and the bazaar. It’s there if you scratch the surface of anyone who calls himself a modern Indian. It’s a colossal storehouse, some of it evil and repellent, and some of it as fine as the world has produced and very relevant to modern times, bombs and all.” (page 122)

Though I’m not sure that Sahgal has published any novels for a while, I cannot help but wonder what a novel on the Indian political scene of the early twenty-first century would look like. I’m sure she could sketch a lot of insightful parodies.

Curfewed Night: A Memoir of War in Kashmir, Basharat Peer (2011)

Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night is a moving memoir of an ordinary, middle-class, Muslim Kashmiri who has witnessed the destruction of his homeland. Writing on and from Kashmir has increased in the last few years–Urvashi Butalia’s Speaking Peace, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and Anjum Zamarud Habib’s Prisoner No. 100 (reviewed earlier by me) come to mind–but there is still a dearth of first-hand accounts from this region that is difficult to report from and relatively cut-off from the rest of India, psychologically as well as geographically.

Peer recounts his relatively peaceful early childhood in Kashmir, followed by his teenage years which saw Kashmir becoming increasingly militarised, his move to Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, to attend university, his time spent working as a journalist in Delhi, and finally his return to Kashmir. Despite his good job in Delhi, Peer felt the overwhelming desire, an obligation, to return to Kashmir and write about what he experienced in the state. As he writes:

“I had shared some stories with a few friends in Delhi, but I could never say everything. I would find myself stopping in the middle of a sentence, rendered inarticulate by memory. The telling, even in the shade of intimacy, was painful. And a sense of shame overcame me every time I walked into a bookstore. People from almost every conflict zone had told their stories: Palestinians, Israelis, Bosnians, Kurds, Tibetans, Lebanese, East Germans, Africans, East Timorese, and many more. I felt the absence of the unwritten books of the Kashmiri experience. The memories and stories of Kashmir that I had carried with me could fade away. I had to find the words to save them from the callous varnish of time. I had to write. And to write, I had to return and revisit the people and places that had haunted me for years.” (page 95)

This belief in the power of words, literature, reportage to help rectify the wrongs is repeated throughout the book. One cannot but help feel that it cannot make much difference to the situation, but that it is still necessary to expose the crimes in the hope that one day, enough people will be horrified by the brutality that some change can be made. Either way, the written and spoken word is all some people can do to try to make a difference.

The most poignant and horrifying tale that Peer tells in Curfewed Night, in my mind, is the story of Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani. A teacher of Arabic at Delhi University, Geelani was wrongly implicated in the attacks on the Indian Parliament in 2001. Despite a strong defense which, from Peer’s account, unequivocally proved that the evidence upon which his charge was based was extremely flawed, Geelani was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was acquitted after appeal, and allowed to return to his teaching job at Delhi University, but one cannot imagine the effect that such a false accusation could have on a person’s life. Many other horrifying stories of torture, mistaken identity and sheer terror are recounted by Peer, imploring the reader to wonder, however naively, what on earth the Indian government thinks they are doing with Kashmir.

Peer finds, however, that the injustices are not all one-sided, and that however horrifically “India” has behaved in Kashmir, the Kashmiri militant separatists have been guilty, too. Peer speaks to one ex-militant who had been imprisoned and tortured, badly damaging his eyesight and ability to conduct a normal life. Once released from jail, the support he receives from the organisation he fought for, the JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) is inadequate. Meanwhile, the leaders of that organisation live in big houses with fancy cars, with no understanding or little compassion for the torture that the men fighting on their behalf have suffered.

It may be one of the biggest cliches around, but Curfewed Night demonstrates, first hand, that in war there are no winners.