In her excavation of history, the Indian novel had been emerging in unusual form well before the nineteenth century. The first two books that snagged Meenakshi Mukherjee’s attention dated back to 1835 (Kylas Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945) and 1845 (Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s The Republic of Orissa) respectively: both were works of alternate history, imagining an uprising against the British, and a future without English rule.
Years later, when she translated Lokenath Bhattacharya’s unusual and sadly forgotten fantastical novel, The Virgin Fish of Babughat, she was fascinated by the question of imagination. The Indian expression of it may have been influenced by magic realism, or by the European novel, but it had a different fountainhead, in her opinion. Bhattacharya’s novel, for instance, is set in an imaginary prison where the inmates have the ‘freedom’ to explore sexuality. But it’s the guards who decide on the pairings of prisoners, and erotic exploration soon becomes just another fatigue-inducing prison ritual.
The narrator of The Virgin Fish of Babughat is bound by different rules—he must commit his thoughts to paper, by order, and he is rendered frantic by the fear of losing language, the necessity of facing blank page after blank page every day. Typically, she didn’t just translate The Virgin Fish of Babughat—you might say that she excavated and resuscitated it in the 1970s, an operation that she would perform often as a critic, gently and sometimes forcefully reminding us of a history of Indian writing that seems all too perishable. ‘We have bad memories as a nation,’ she once told a group of her students. ‘We prefer to reinvent our histories and erase the inconvenient parts of it rather than to learn from it.’ Over the decades, some of us have watched as classics of Indian writing die, and are sometimes rediscovered—G.V. Desani’s All About H Hatterr is embraced by one generation, forgotten by the next, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri was allowed to drop into obscurity until the New York Review of Books brought out a new edition this decade. I have often thought that Meenakshi Mukherjee was right in assuming that the critic’s job in India is also to be the keeper of memories.
In one of the last conversations we had, just before Meenakshi Mukherjee was supposed to come to Delhi for the launch of her biography of R.C. Dutt, we discussed the Indian writer’s love for fantasy, for the picaresque and for alternate histories—all these exerted a powerful fascination for the early pioneers, before the conventions of the middle-class novel took over.
It’s worth mentioning her original essay, ‘The Anxiety of Indianness’, which provoked an intense exchange between her and the author Vikram Chandra. The debate that she and Chandra had over a decade ago is an old one; it’s dogged Indian writing in English ever since Bankimchandra’s novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, came out, and the question of who (and what) puts the Indian in Indian writing in English is very much alive today. Prof. Mukherjee wrote: ‘If I were to write a novel in Marathi, I would not be called an Indian writer in Marathi, but simply a Marathi novelist, the epithet Marathi referring only to the language, not carrying the larger burden of culture, doctrine and ethos. No one would write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness of my novel . . . Our discourse on Indian novels in English tends to get congealed into fairly rigid and opposed positions.’
She went on to make a point that often gets lost today: it’s not just the authenticity of the writer in English that is debated and picked apart; the assumption, as she says, is that an indigenous readership was presumably more ‘authentic’—a viewpoint that she personally did not subscribe to. The unspoken premise in this war, she continued, is that writing in English and writing in the other Indian languages are antithetical enterprises marked by a commitment to, or betrayal of, certain cultural values. ‘To me, the issues are not moral but social, entangled with questions of class and regional mobility. Those who write in English do so because—no matter what language they speak at home—they have literary competence only in English. Contrary to popular belief, not all of them achieve fame abroad and most are read by numerically fewer people than those who read a bhasha novel.’
It’s sad that one set of writers will remember only the skirmish between the professor and the writer Vikram Chandra, which he documented, memorably, in an essay called ‘The Cult of Authenticity’. Meenakshi Mukherjee had noted the tendency of some Indian writers in English to exoticise India unnecessarily, to produce the modern equivalent of sadhus and maharajas in an attempt to establish their authenticity.
Mukherjee picked on Chandra’s collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, as an example of this trend, for his use of words like Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha in the titles. In retrospect, she was right about the anxiety of writing India that infected a certain group of writers—and perhaps still does. But she was dead wrong in her selection of offenders—Chandra couldn’t be accused of this particular crime. When some of us taxed her with evidence to the contrary, years ago, she was delighted. ‘A proper argument!’ she said, and settled to it with her trademark relish and acumen. Neither side succeeded in convincing the other, but we, at least, retired with a far broader sense of our literary history once she was done with her examples.
This isn’t my favourite Meenakshi Mukherjee memory, though. That would be one shared by generations of students at JNU and the many other universities where she taught: the memory of engaging with ‘MM’ or Meenakshidi as she opened up our forgotten literature and unexplored past to us via Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, inviting us to claim Indian English, in all its richness and complexity, for ourselves. She was, like many in her generation, comfortably bilingual; unlike Raja Rao, she had made a home for herself in English as well as Bangla, and in her criticism as well as her teaching, language and spirit went hand in hand.
To borrow from the title of a key anthology edited by her, there was another India out there, and she wanted every reader to make his or her own explorations of that familiar and unknown country.
(Written in 2009, in tribute to Prof. Mukherjee after her sudden death.)
3
Sham Lal
Editor, Biblio
For a certain generation of writers, thinkers and intellectuals, Sham Lal was not a man, but an institution. For another, younger and more fashionable set of ‘intellectuals’, Sham Lal was a half-remembered name, his integrity almost old-fashioned in a time when it was normal to change one’s opinions as casually, and as frequently, as you changed your clothes.
Sham Lal, who died at the age of ninety-four, was not to be found on Page 3 or among the rent-a-quote intellectuals who make their names on television shows. He had been the editor of The Times of India in an era when the measure of a newspaper lay in the quality of its writing and reportage, rather than the quality of its marketing campaigns. He was one of the founder-editors of Biblio, the literary magazine that used to function as an oasis of intelligence in a desert of fatuity, and many of us looked forward to the essays he wrote for The Telegraph well into his nineties.
I was a junior dogsbody at Biblio when I was taken to Sham Lal’s house to meet the editor. Like many other first-time visitors, it seemed to my dazed eyes that the house was constructed of books. Bookshelves reached from floor to ceiling in every room, their contents neatly ordered, spanning several centuries of human thought and creativity. He had original issues of The Paris Review, Criterion, and of defunct but once-great Indian literary magazines, vast collections of poetry and drama, and what appeared to be every important work ever published in the fields of history, criticism and the humanities. It was one of the best private libraries I had ever seen, and being there was like being inside a particularly well-stocked, curious and disciplined mind. Sham Lal himself was lying on a couch, reading Isaiah Berlin while columns of books rose up from the floor to spill over the cushions, keeping him company.
He was not a hoarder of knowledge. The book-lined house in Delhi’s Gulmohar Park functioned as a superior literary saloon for many years, with some of the greatest and most interesting figures of the age, from Octavio P
az to Bipan Chandra, dropping in to spend time with him.
I am often saddened, and sorry, when I meet younger writers or colleagues in journalism who don’t know of Sham Lal, even when I know this amnesia is not their fault. They have missed out on so much. Most of his writing retains its freshness, clarity and incisiveness, and he wore his erudition lightly. His intellectual engagement with the world stemmed from an enormous respect for ideas, beliefs and the language that provided the building blocks for argument: ‘At a time when political rag chewing, hack writing, mass media banalities and high pressure sales talk do as much to corrupt the language as industrial wastes to pollute air and water, it is the poet’s job to preserve the integrity of the written word.’ This may have been the poet’s credo, but it was also Sham Lal’s own.
I still remember his piece on Kafka and Thomas Mann, which begins: ‘For long, I have had the uneasy feeling that the doctrine of karma takes us straight into Franz Kafka’s world. For, when most religions which had their birth in this country seek release—whatever the name by which they call it—from the cycle of rebirths, and explain away all that the individual suffers as a consequence of his or her deeds in a previous life about which he or she knows nothing, the story is not very different from what the Czech writer tells in The Trial.’ Sham Lal drew his philosophies from the world he was born in, and reached out with equal assurance to the wider world of Beckett and Kafka, Sartre and Berlin. Some writers escaped him: he found Jack Kerouac’s world of dharma bums vapid, he noted Ezra Pound’s insanity, but not his genius.
There is a term that has fallen into disuse these days, when hyperbole has turned every writer inexorably into a genius producer of masterpieces and every reviewer into a critic of searing insight and intelligence. It used to be honourable to be considered a man of letters—it stood for someone who was deeply engaged with the life of the mind. If you look at the index to A Hundred Encounters, a collection of Sham Lal’s writing, you gain some sense of the generous breadth of his world. It begins with Adorno and Akhmatova, moves through Baudelaire, the Bible and the Bhagavadgita and traverses via Vishnu, Vidal, Van Gogh and Vyasa to, finally, Andrei Zhadnov. If one generation of thinkers had every reason to remember Sham Lal, the next generation has every reason not to forget him.
(Written in 2007)
4
P. Lal
Writer’s Workshop
In the homes of Indian writers of a certain generation, there’ll always be the Writer’s Workshop shelf, given over to hand-bound books, the cloth borders taken from Orissa saris, the title often hand-calligraphed. You don’t find them in bookstores that often these days, but there was a time when Writer’s Workshop represented, in effect, the sum total of the aspirations of Indians writing in English.
Prof. P. Lal, the man behind Writer’s Workshop, and perhaps the last of the dying breed of ‘gentleman publishers’, died this weekend at the age of eighty-one in Kolkata, where he had lived and worked most of his life. In the fifty years since he had started Writer’s Workshop, Indian publishing had changed beyond recognition. There were now a multitude of publishing houses, literary festivals, book launches—all the infrastructure that was missing when he and a group of friends began Writer’s Workshop.
‘The reason I went into publishing is simple—nobody was around, in 1958, to publish me. So I published myself. Half a dozen others—friends—also found this expedient attractive. So we formed a group, a nice consanguineous coterie. We wrote prefaces to each other’s books, pointing out excellences, and performed similar familial kindnesses in other ways as well. We believed, with Helen Gardner, that criticism should flash the torch, not wield the sceptre,’ he wrote of its beginnings.
The ‘half-a-dozen others’ included Anita Desai, and Sasthibrata Chakravarthi, the author of My God Died Young and other minor works that had a brief vogue in the 1970s—but from the start, Writer’s Workshop would aim to encourage those who were not destined to become famous, opening its doors to major and minor talent. A.K. Ramanujan, Vikram Seth, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Agha Shahid Ali, Keki Daruwalla, Mani Nair, the enigmatic Lawrence Bantleman (who disappeared in Canada) and a score of Indian poets would find their first moorings within the elegant covers so carefully crafted by P. Lal’s endeavour—but so would hundreds of other now-forgotten writers.
On a personal note, I might add that one of their youngest members was my sister, who had written a precocious short story at the age of nine, and who for years was made welcome at their meetings. Chai would be ordered—‘and a Coke for Baby’—and while she never took up writing, she remembers the warmth and acceptance P. Lal and his circle handed out to everyone who happened to stray within its borders.
As Indian publishing came of age, the importance and necessity of Writer’s Workshop began to diminish. The space that P. Lal and his friends had created in 1958 was crucial—both in terms of establishing a publishing house for writers, and setting down the importance of Indian writing in English.
One of the first controversies that erupted was the attack on Indian poetry in English by Buddhadev Bose, and then by Bose’s son-in-law Jyotirmaya Datta. The latter wrote an essay, ‘Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Poets’, that P. Lal responded to—with his usual spirited but gentle liveliness—and in many ways, these attacks offered a meeting point for those who were just beginning to write in English, using it as an Indian, not an alien, language.
P. Lal was also a writer, poet and academic, but he will perhaps be best remembered for his magisterial translation of the Mahabharata; it’s perhaps the most complete rendering of the epic available. It was typical of him that he would hold a weekly reading, every Sunday, open to all, from 1999 onwards, in honour of the grand oral tradition of the epic. So many of us, writers and readers in Kolkata, attended those sessions, discovering a community and a fellowship long before there was the season of book launches.
The impact of Writer’s Workshop cannot be measured by its 3,000-odd titles, or by the influence it once wielded as a publishing house. It was, like Clearinghouse in Bombay, a literary movement, fuelled by the agile mind and precise labours of P. Lal. In my copies of the books produced by Writer’s Workshop, there was always this, in calligraphy: ‘Layout and lettering by P. Lal with a Sheaffer calligraphy pen. Embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-bound by Tulamiah Mohiuddin with handloom sari cloth woven and designed in India, to provide visual beauty and the intimate texture of book-feel.’
Few publishers today, however brilliant their lists of authors, have that kind of passion, P. Lal’s celebration of ‘book-feel’, and his insistence that literature was a large, rambling house, its rooms broad enough to accommodate all, however modest or stellar their individual talents.
(Written in 2010)
5
K.D. Singh
Bookseller
The Book Shop in Jorbagh, Delhi, was a lot like the magical places of fantasy described in the books it carried: larger on the inside than it seemed from the outside. The space it occupied in the lives of city readers was far broader than its compact premises would indicate. You could leave some of Delhi’s large chain bookstores with a sense of dissatisfaction, a hunger unassuaged by any of the shiny titles that crowded their shelves, but the indie bookstores did better, from Midland to Motilal Banarsidass or Fact & Fiction and, always, K.D. Singh’s Book Shop.
K.D. Singh died last week, of cancer. He was one of the city’s finest booksellers for a reason: it wasn’t just his love of books that shaped The Book Shop’s stock, but the rare combination of talent, experience and an unteachable instinct. He often anticipated the curve, so that it was at The Book Shop that his readers found George R.R. Martin years before the HBO TV series made Game of Thrones a household name, or discovered Junot Diaz or Chimamanda Adichie back when they were promising unknowns. But he also had a great selection of translations. The Book Shop had Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari and Vaikom Basheer’s stories, for example, long after those books had gone out of sto
ck elsewhere.
His customers included most of the city’s writers as well as outof-towners like Ramachandra Guha and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. In turn, Delhi’s writers told visiting friends from other countries that they must stop by The Book Shop because its two walls and middle aisle of books contained more surprises than they might imagine. Octavio Paz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a dozen others visited, among many others.
The Book Shop opened in 1970 in Jorbagh; by the time its sister shop in Khan Market had shut down in 2006, Delhi had grown from a small town coming up in the shadow of the Walled City to a massive, tentacular metropolis. And yet, for such a large and ambitious city, Delhi has very few good bookshops. This generation of teenagers is exposed chiefly to badly stocked mall bookstores, places where indifferent staff sell kitsch merchandise and best-sellers, like prophylactic inoculations against the love of books.
For authors and readers, the understanding of how crucial bookstores can be in your life runs deep, and the urge to pass on that love of reading is strong. When Larry McMurtry, the author who is also a veteran bookseller, turned sixty-one, he went back to his hometown in Archer County in order to create ‘a newly born book town’. Ann Patchett had a smaller-sized dream: when she opened Parnassus Books in 2011 in her hometown, Nashville, it was because she missed the bookstores of her youth. ‘Mills could not have been more than 700 sq.ft small, and the people who worked there remembered who you were and what you read, even if you were ten.’
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 29