My review of Hanifa Deen’s On the Trail of Taslima appeared in the print version of Himal Southasian 26.3. Below is an excerpt.
Who is Taslima Nasrin?
A new book unravels the mythology and persona of the controversial author, but when will it reach Southasian readers?
On the Trail of Taslima: An International Human Rights Saga, by Hanifa Deen. Melbourne: Indian Ocean Press, 2013. (Purchased in Australia).
Hanifa Deen, a Melbourne-based author of Southasian descent writing narrative non-fiction (as she calls her genre), has built a career exploring issues related to Islam and women, and particularly to the mutual misunderstandings that often arise between Islam and the Western world. Understandably, Deen has long been intrigued by Taslima Nasrin, best known for the controversy surrounding her 1993 Bengali novel Lajja (Shame), which prompted threats against her life from Islamic fundamentalist groups and forced her into a protracted exile from her native Bangladesh since 1994. Deen included a section about Nasrin (I follow this more common spelling, though Deen prefers ‘Nasreen’) in her 1998 book Broken Bangles, and she returns to the subject in her latest book, the extensively and painstakingly researched On the Trail of Taslima, published in Melbourne earlier this year.
This, however, is not the book’s only avatar. In a slightly different form, On the Trail of Taslima was originally released in 2006 by the US publisher Praeger under the title The Crescent and the Pen: The Strange Journey of Taslima Nasreen. But the US edition was only published in hardback and sold at high cost, and was barely distributed in Australia, where Deen lives. Deen correctly felt that the story, and the enormous amount of research that went into it, deserved wider recognition. In 2012, Deen purchased the paperback rights from Praeger and revised the manuscript to reflect intervening political developments and changes in the lives of her protagonist and informants. She then re-published it herself under her preferred title, which captures the essence of the book and the motivations behind it far better than the original one.
[The rest of the article is in Himal Southasian 26.3, available to purchase here.]
There’s been some very nasty business going on in the Indian media world this past week, and I’ve avoided commenting on much of it because so much seems to be laden with vitriol and sexism (particularly towards Shoma Chaudhury who, although has clearly made mistakes, does not warrant the personal and often sexist attacks that have been leveled at her). This piece, however, from the journalist who was allegedly assaulted, is worth sharing. Not least because of her articulation of some important feminist principles that I hope aren’t lost completely in the fallout of what is going to happen.
This is the full text of the statement issued today to the media by the gutsy woman journalist who refused to take sexual harassment as routine. More power to her and others like her!
I am heartened by the broad support I have received over the past fortnight. However, I am deeply concerned and very disturbed by insinuations that my complaint is part of a pre-election political conspiracy.
I categorically refute such insinuations and put forward the following arguments:
The struggle for women to assert control over their lives and their bodies is most certainly a political one, but feminist politics and its concerns are wider than the narrow universe of our political parties. Thus, I call upon our political parties to resist the temptation to turn a very important discussion about gender, power and violence into a conversation about themselves.
My review appears in the print edition of Himal Southasian, 26.2. Below is an extract:
History repeating?
Dalrymple’s detailed look at the first Anglo-Afghan war hypothesises parallels between then and now. But how many of these pass muster?
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842, William Dalrymple. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 567 + xl pages. ISBN: 978-1-4088-1830-5
William Dalrymple’s eagerly awaited Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842, is the third of the author’s major historical works that looks at the British colonialists in Southasia from a hybrid British-Southasian standpoint. It is the history of a war that the Afghans never forgot, that still lives in their collective and folk memory, but which Britain wilfully consigned to amnesia. And perhaps for good reason, from their perspective:
At the very height of the British Empire, at a point when the British controlled more of the world economy than they would ever do again, and at a time when traditional forces were everywhere being massacred by industrialised colonial armies, it was a rare moment of complete colonial humiliation.
The Great Game was at its height in 1839, and Britain was increasingly worried about the threat Russia posed to their imperial hegemony in Southasia. In response to faulty or misconstrued intelligence that Russia was taking an interest in Afghanistan, Britain invaded the latter with an army of some eighteen thousand. They deposed the ruling Amir Dost Muhammad Khan, a popular leader even in some contemporary British accounts, after he seemed to be becoming too friendly with the Russians. His defeat seemed remarkably simple. Shah Shuja, a deposed rival of Dost Muhammad’s who had been exiled in India for many years, was installed by the British as a puppet ruler. Entering the country proved easy, but staying and convincing the Afghans that they had a right to be there did not. The occupation was unpopular with the Afghan people, and resistance gathered behind Dost Muhammad and his cohort.
The rest of the article is available in Volume 26 No 2 of Himal Southasian, available to purchase here.
At a session of the 2013 NCell Nepal Literature Festival, Nepali author Rabi Thapa asked whether small literary magazines still have much of a role to play in the promotion and dissemination of literature, considering they are so difficult to keep afloat. It was, however, somewhat of a rhetorical question, as Thapa himself is the editor of La.Lit, a Kathmandu-based literary magazine launched in January 2013. The word lalit is derived from Sanskrit and used in modern-day Hindi, Nepali, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent to mean finesse, grace, elegance, or beauty. The play on words is clear in English (the ‘Lit’ suggesting literature), but the title has another level of meaning, as Lalitpur, where it is based, is an old kingdom of the Kathmandu Valley that these days is part of the greater Kathmandu urban conglomeration. La.Lit is produced in two forms: on the web and in print, the second volume of which was launched at the Literature Festival. There is some overlap of content in the two formats.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. (Purchased in India).
It was Ramachandra Guha’s endorsement on the front of the Indian version of this book that drew my attention to it: “The best book about contemporary India, the best work of non-fiction that I have read in the past twenty-five years.” I don’t tend to take these author recommendations too seriously, as who knows what behind-the-scenes machinations go on to get endorsements from prominent writers (some truly good writers have endorsed books by Kamila Shamsie, an author who I have vowed never to read again). But this one got me interested because on the surface it didn’t appear that Katherine Boo was doing anything new in writing a book about the slums of Bombay. Such literature and reportage has almost become an industry in itself, especially post-Slumdog Millionaire, and details of plot and character, you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. So how could such a hackneyed topic have caught Guha’s attention?
Boo’s extraordinary writing. This is a work of non-fiction, but it doesn’t read like it. The author enters the heads of the characters, understands their motivations and speaks their words. This could all read as creative license, and indeed I thought it was, until I read the astonishing author’s note at the back of the book: Boo did extensive fieldwork in Annawadi, the slum that is the setting for the book, recording hundreds of hours of interviews, visiting and revisiting her subjects in order to clarify details, employing a translator, gaining access to court records. The kind of research that only very dedicated and inspired writers can pull off (and that should put those like Ned Beauman to shame, who recently, at the NCell Nepal Literature Festival in Kathmandu, admitted that he loved the internet as a writer’s resource because writers like himself, “who couldn’t be bothered”, didn’t have to actually go to the places they were writing about.)
Boo follows the lives of several families in a small section of Annawadi, a slum situated next to Mumbai airport, over the course of a couple of years. I give nothing away in saying that the pivotal event (that happens early on) is the burning-to-death of a Muslim convert woman, over a neighbourhood dispute, and the ruination of a neighbouring family in being implicated in it. Even before I understood how much research had gone into this book, I inherently believed Boo’s portrayal of surroundings as accurate:
“And here at Cooper [government hospital], where fluorescent lights buzzed like horseflies, she continued to feel like a person who counted. Though the small burn ward stank of fetid gauze, it was a fine place compared to the general wards, where many patients lay on the floor. She was sharing a room with only one other woman, whose husband swore he hadn’t lit the fateful match. She had her first foam mattress, now sopping with urine. She had a plastic tube in her nostrils, attached to nothing. She had an IV bag with a used syringe sticking out of it, since the nurse said it was a waste to use a fresh syringe every time. She had a rusty metal contraption over her torso, to keep the stained sheet from sticking to her skin. But of all the new experiences Fatima was having in the burn ward, the most unexpected was the stream of respectable female visitors from Annawadi.” (pp. 99-100)
The sequence of events that follows Fatima’s death illustrates the fragility of the ability to make one’s living in the slums; the corruption and degradation that is an everyday fact of life; the ability of the desperate to keep on living when they have to. Despite ‘hope’ featuring in the title, I didn’t feel that there was very much of it here, unless it can be considered hopeful that life continues, no matter what.
Boo’s writing is what makes this book so brilliant. She has a novelist’s ability to follow characters and plot, and a poet’s sense of language. For instance: “He often presided over his lavender-walled, lavender-furnished living room in an undershirt, legs barely covered by his lungi, while his petitioners flopsweated in polyester suits.” (p. 21) I have often been dumfounded by Indian lads in their top-to-toe shiny polyester in the heat, and now have a new word with which to describe them: flopsweaty.
And the title? I had assumed it was a reference to Bollywood movies. That this book would document what happened once the cameras stopped rolling, once the beautiful happy-ever-afters were screened and everyone went home. But happy-ever-after isn’t a common trope of Bollywood movies, whereas tragedy is, perhaps more fitting for this book. Nevertheless, I was wrong, the reference isn’t to this at all. A “beautiful forever” is a particular wall in Annawadi, keeping some things out, others in; perhaps a more fitting metaphor for the lives retold in this book.
Part 2 of the dispatch on the NCell Nepal Literature Festival is now up on the Asymptote blog. This reports on the English-language sessions at the festival.
Asymptote reports on the English sessions at the festival
Though there were more sessions in Nepali than English ones, internationally known writers still made the trip from India (Shobhaa De, Ravinder Singh, Prajwal Parajuly, Prakash Iyer, Abhay K, and Annie Zaidi), Bangladesh (Farah Ghuznavi), and the UK (Ned Beauman) to discuss their work and the work of their peers.
I’ve just had my review of Nepali writer Sushma Joshi’s The End of the World published at Kitaab, an online magazine specialising in Asian fiction in English.
The End of the World, by Sushma Joshi. Kathmandu: Sansar Books, 2013 (2008). (Author supplied review copy).
The experience of the way this book reached me was, unfortunately, emblematic of the present state of literary circulation in Nepal. I knew that the review copy had been sent to Kathmandu from Singapore, so I waited and waited. And waited. It never arrived. It still may, but I am not hopeful. This was not my first or last experience of things going missing in the mail. The ‘postal system’ of Nepal is not to be trusted, to put it mildly. How, then, can Nepali writers hope to be reviewed internationally and gain recognition outside Nepal, unless they have efficient and forceful promotion and distribution channels based outside the country?
The Nepali constituent assembly elections are due to take place in five days as I write this. In the last couple of days several bombs have been set off around Kathmandu and other parts of Nepal, mainly petrol bombs lobbed at buses defying the transportation bandh (strike) that the CPN-Maoist have been trying to impose, in an effort to prevent the 19th November elections going ahead. The current political situation in Nepal is complicated. Even after living in the country for three and a half months I don’t feel able to summarise it; there are so many parties, factions, competing and contradictory interests, as well as the corruption and horse-trading that is a feature of politics everywhere. The current government has praised people for defying the bandh and going about their lives, but defiance in the face of risking attack is a very serious thing. My office, and from what I’ve heard all places of work, will be shut on Monday and Tuesday, both as a way of allowing people to vote, and as a precautionary measure against violence that could occur as people commute.
In this long (469 pages) social and political saga, The Tutor of History, Nepal’s best-known contemporary English-language writer did something that no amount of newspaper reading had managed to: help me understand the nuances of contemporary Nepali politics. Granted, it was first published in 2001, the exact mid-point of Nepal’s ten year long civil war, but the political climate that Manjushree Thapa illustrates is not so different from that of today, even if the details are slightly different.
The Tutor of History is set in Khaireni Tar, a real town south of Pokhara, during the campaign for elections. Thapa follows the lives of several ordinary, probably typical, small-town Nepalis as they juggle life and politics, the latter something that nobody can avoid uncomfortable confrontation with in this country. The titular character is Rishi Parajuli, an over-educated, under-employed, disillusioned communist who helps in campaigning as a way into a more stable job. Despite the title, no one character dominates the narrative. We also follow an alcoholic chairman of a local political committee; a former British Gurkha soldier; a brave but fearful widow; and a couple of teenaged characters who, while unable to avoid being touched by politics, are still more concerned with the things all teenagers are: love, sex, fashion.
Every character’s negotiations with politics are means to ends, it’s just that their ideal ends vary. As during most revolutionary periods, it’s often difficult in Thapa’s narrative to justify the means employed for the ends actually achieved.
Strong echoes of Thapa’s background in rural development come through in this novel. In her earlier Mustang Bhot in Fragments she railed, from first-hand experience, against aid projects that cared little for the desires of the communities involved. Here we see that rural development is used as a political football, which after elections is kicked off into the wilderness. Until the next election cycle, that is:
“People spoke of hunger, they spoke of injustice, they spoke of the kind of changes they wanted to live to see. Their dreams weren’t lavish. A bridge here would change their lives. A hundred-metres-long PVC pipe to bring drinking water to the village. A few benches for the school. A little more thought in the way they were treated by the district government. Who was talking of big sums? Small allocations sufficed. Perhaps the district centre could allot money for one medical camp a year?” (p. 262)
This isn’t fiction, it’s real, and should be realised by all who perpetuate an image of Nepal as a peaceful, friendly, Himalayan Shangri-la, astonishingly common still.
It was said at the recent NCell Nepal Literature Festival that so much contemporary Nepali literature is of the social realist bent (not to be mistaken for socialist realism). This comment was made largely of literature from Nepal in the Nepali language, there being relatively little English-language literature from the country. Yes, Thapa’s novel could be considered social realism, but it is deeper and smarter than that, playing with satire throughout. I largely appreciated The Tutor of History for what it revealed to me about the country I’m currently living in, but Thapa’s satirical tone and vivid portrayal of small-town Nepali hill society make it a book I would recommend to all readers interested in politically-motivated fiction.
As well as my day job, I am Asymptote literary journal’s Editor-at-Large, Nepal. I recently attended the NCell Nepal Literature Festival in Kathmandu, and have written up my observations on the Asymptote blog:
What’s up in Kathmandu?
Editor’s Note: Ever wonder what’s happening literature-wise in Kathmandu? Wonder no more, our editors in Nepal are here to fill you in, and it turns out, there’s no lack of corruption and infighting… This is part 1 of a 2-part dispatch.
The 2013 NCell Nepal Literature Festival started inauspiciously for us, as they say in this part of the world. Arriving at the Nepal Academy in central Kathmandu ten minutes early on the first day, Ross asked in Nepali where the opening ceremony was being held, and we were ushered upstairs into a packed auditorium, where there was a man already speaking. Strange, I thought, as we were early, and things do not generally start on time in Nepal. We clambered into some seats in the middle of a row. Ross began listening to the speaker. “He’s not talking about literature,” he informs me. “He’s talking about the truth.” It dawns on us that we might not be in the right place, so we hope things will wrap up soon and move on to the event we came for. Ross continues to listen. “Oh no, we’re in a Christian convention!” We clamber back out sheepishly, avoiding eye contact. Some better signage from the organisers of the literature festival would’ve been welcome!
Mustang: A Lost Tibetan Kingdom, by Michel Peissel. London: Futura Publications, 1979 (1968). (Purchased in Nepal).
This was the perfect book to accompany me on the Poon Hill trek in the Annapurna region that I did a couple of weeks ago. Not only because Frenchman Michel Peissel’s account of his travels to and stay in the northern Nepali region of Mustang in the 1960s passed through some of the same spots that we did on this trek, but because I realised how comparatively easy the trek I was doing in 2013 was in comparison to how he had travelled in the 1960s. (To read about the fun/ordeal of my trek, take a look at my post on my other blog).
Mustang is an ethnically and culturally Tibetan region of Nepal, and access to it is still restricted to outsiders. Trekking permits to Upper Mustang cost $500 for a ten day period, and you can only go on an organised trek, meaning that it is inaccessible to all but wealthy foreigners. The place has interested me since I read Manjushree Thapa’s Mustang Bhot in Fragments (https://southasiabookblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/mustang-bhot-in-fragments-manjushree-thapa-1992/), largely because it does seem very romantic and mysterious. I know this is an inadequate perspective to have about a twenty-first century society, but lack of information feeds such impulses, as do books like Peissel’s Mustang: A Lost Tibetan Kingdom.
Michel Peissel had been learning Tibetan with the aide of a grammar book for some time, and while living in Kathmandu fortuitously gained permission from the king of Nepal to not only travel to Mustang, but to stay there for a few months to research its history. He claims to be the first foreigner to be granted permission to reside there, and much of the rich description of the book revolves around the meeting of two different civilisations, for Peissel is as curious to the residents of Mustang as they are to him. With the help of a Tibetan-speaking friend and guide he stays in Lo Mantang, the kingdom’s capital, for several weeks, meeting the king and important religious figures, and later travels around the kingdom searching for written records of Mustang’s history housed in monasteries.
First published in 1968, this book is reminiscent of other male travel writing of the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly the slightly earlier Eric Newby, and the slightly later Peter Mathiessen. Peissel is much more earnest than Newby, and more detailed than Mathiessen. The nuances of the three writers are very different, but the general gist is that white man is explorer, his duty is to inform other white men about quaint other cultures elsewhere. Added to this is Peissel’s case is the fact that he’s an anthropologist of the traditional type, and this comes through in much of his categorical language. He is a reflection and a product of his times, and this leads to a large number of cringe-worthy moments in Mustang, such as the following (although I rather liked the naive enthusiasm of this one, despite its seriously problematic conflation of the medieval and the non-western):
“One thing that pleased me very much during my stay in Mustang was that I was not obliged to imagine what this lost kingdom had been like in the past. I have spent most of my life imagining what things must have been like… how the Tower of London had looked in the Middle Ages… what Versailles was like in the time of Louis XIV… the appearance of New York when it was a Dutch colony… All the buildings I have admired in Athens, Mexico City or Rome, have needed to be seen more with the imagination than with the eyes. […] In Mustang, nothing disturbs the general harmony of buildings and objects and also of people. There were no intrusions of foreign objects to mar the beauty and charm of the land.” (p. 231)
Peissel desires purity from his exotic land, considering foreign influence corrupting, yet at the same time seems to delight in comparing the ‘civilised’ west with the ‘uncivilised’ east. It’s that old colonial-era paradox. Yet it is clear that Peissel really loves Mustang and Tibetan culture on more than just the level of curiosity:
“As we gradually left the Hindu world behind, I felt more and more in my element, and could not help making a comparison between the sturdy, open-faced Tibetans and the timid, ragged Hindus.” (p. 48)
As old-fashioned as this turn of phrase sounds, I hear a contemporary equivalent of it a lot in Kathmandu, from western ex-pats and travellers who proclaim how much they prefer Nepal to India “because the people are so much easier going”. This judgment arises, I have found, from a fear of India and Indians, from an inability or unwillingness to learn the codes of behaviour that one needs to have a comfortable time travelling in that country. As an Indiaphile I cannot agree with the assumptions that make it so easy and acceptable to praise the Nepali character by shunning the Indian. But I digress.
All this aside, Peissel’s Mustang is an impressive and engrossing book, and very informative. Though almost half a century old now, it still contains a wealth of historical detail, even if it couldn’t be used as a guide book any longer. And it cleared up questions I had about horses:
“At one time I had wondered whether the name ‘mustang’, for the wild horse of North America, might not have been derived from the fame of the horses of Lo Mantang [the local name for the kingdom]. But this idea, I soon found out, could not be correct, as the name ‘mustang’ was used for the wild horse before the name ‘Mantang’ was deformed into ‘Mustang’ in 1850. ‘Mustang’ comes from the Spanish word ‘mostrenco‘–wild one. As for the quality of the local horses in Mustang, I learned from the King’s son that the best of them came from the Amdo region of Sining in northeastern Tibet.” (p. 144)
After my brief encounter with trekking in Nepal, I have sworn off ever travelling by public transport on Nepal’s mountain roads again. Taking three hours to travel the twenty kilometres between Tatopani and Beni was far too traumatic an experience to repeat. I would be very reluctant to take certain flights, too (particularly those to Jomsom and Everest Base Camp, which have appalling safety records). So, if I am ever to travel to Mustang, which I’d love to, it looks like it’ll be on foot, just like Michel Peissel.
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