Snow
Snow is the story of a forty-two year old Turkish exile living in Germany, who returns to a small town of Kars, situated in the north-eastern Turkey. Kars is suffering from a strange suicide epidemic among women. It is on the verge of a coup, a coup by the Kemalists to save it from falling in the clutches of either the political Islamists or the modernists. An education official who had banned the use of headscarves is brutally murdered by an Islamic terrorist. Kars has complex history with Armenian and Russian layers under the Turkish ones.
Being post-modern, it has its confusing points – a near-absurdist plot, a dreamlike sequence of events, and caricatures which are not individuals enough. The speech of the Islamic terrorist, in which he tells the education official the reason of assassinating him, is the only non-modernist text in the novel. All these things make it a little difficult read. But it has flow and structure. Under all this post-modern paraphernalia, there are real issues discussed, like the rise of political Islam, the Westernization of Turkey, and the struggle between the Kemalists, the Communists and the Islamists. It is the discussion of these real issues which hooks the reader to the book.
A Panorama of Kars
Istanbul, the non-fiction book of Pamuk makes one wonder that if Pamuk can write in simple non-post-modernist prose then why does he go so post-modernist in his fiction? Perhaps the reason is the nature of the sensitive issues he discusses in his books. In this world of political correctness where criticizing Islam is a taboo; a world dominated by the Islamic apologists like Edward Said and Karen Armstrong, it takes a lot of courage and defiance to write about the issues Pamuk writes. His predecessors from the Islamic world like Naguib Mahfouz and Farag Fouda, who tried to criticize Islam, paid a heavy price. Maybe this is why Pamuk shrouds these issues in his post-modernist plots.
If you are sufficiently interested in all these issues – Islam, Islamization vs. Westernization, the East-West conflict of Turkey – then you will happily wade through Snow.
- The New Life
Orhan Pamuk entered the post-modern writing, with The White Castle. He established himself firmly into it with The New Life.
As the title suggests it’s a symbolical journey of a nation into the modern era, an era free of religious fanaticism. The narrator, Osman, runs away with the heroine, Janan, after reading a life transforming book, The New Life. Yes! There are a lot of self-references in Pamuk’s works!
The book promises a new life which will give voice to the new generation. Naturally the Kemalists, the Communists and most zealously, the Islamists are against them and trying to kill them. That is why Osman and Janan are trying to flee the religious fundamentalists. Janan loved Mehmet who was shot at by the Islamists but escaped. These Islamists are against everything produced by the West, including Coca-Cola. According to them there is a Great Conspiracy which aims to undermine the Islamic culture and destroy it at last. This is the reason the Islamists are against the books and everything printed, as they are the mass producers and carriers of the Great Conspiracy. According to them, watches and guns are the only two useful products ever invented by the West.
They go on a surreal and violent bus journey which at last has a horrible accident. In a surrealistic scene they see headless bodies and severed limbs, but the TV screen is intact and the hero kisses the heroine long. They reach the house of Mehmet’s father, who himself is against everything new. The book drifts off into more dreamy scenes and the protagonist tries to find the real writer and the real meaning of the book, The New Life.
This is a post-modern piece and is a hard read. The New Life is a Borges’ story extended to a novel, as put by D. M. Thomas. No matter how zealously postmodernists argue in favor of post-modern writing and the inevitability of it, it is not easy to go through it and no matter how confused and disillusioned the modern psyche maybe, most of the readers still love a good story. This is the reason most Hollywood movies are still rooted in the ‘old fashioned’ way of a good story and engaging action. This is the reason that now-a-days, thriller writers like Dan Brown sell far better than ‘literary’ authors. Everyone can enter the world of Khaled Hosseini. It is so accessible and comprehensible, but in order to read a post-modernist story of Borges, you have to be in a certain frame of mind, certain mood, which is very hard to induce and may never be induced by itself. With Borges, however, the reader has to remain in that idiosyncratic world for just a few minutes; while with writers like Pamuk you have to keep the pace for more than three hundred pages. The New Life is a metaphysical thriller which makes it a hard read.
Orhan Pamuk
What kept my attention is the struggle of Islam and the West, a topic in which I am immensely interested. Pamuk is a diligent student of history. The New Life, like other of his novels, is littered with cultural, political and religious references which are very relevant to the debate of Islamization vs. Westernization. This is what makes it a compelling read for me. This is what kept my attention to the book. If not for those stray references about, Islam, the Quran, the Prophet, Kemal Ataturk and the West, I would have left this book unread or drifted off to sleep in one of those metaphysical, surreal passages of gore and death.
The White Castle
The White Castle is set in medieval times. A Venetian sailor is captured by the Turkish pirates and is forced to convert to Islam. But he refuses to do so. He then is given as a personal servant to the emperor and is employed with the royal scholar Hoja, who is an exact physical resemblance of the narrator.
Hoja tries to learn everything from the narrator, and slowly the mutual exchange of ideas makes them resemble each other more and more, until at last the reader absolutely cannot make any distinction between them. They are ordered to build a war machine to siege the white castle in the Carpathians, which they do but ultimately the machine fails and the only meaningful thing they do all this while is to know each other. At last the narrator returns to Italy, but the reader is not entirely sure whether it was really him or Hoja who returned. The White Castle is an attempt, rather a hope of making the West and the Middle-East meet. Pamuk sees the West as too inner-directed and the Middle-East as too outer-directed.
Those who are familiar with Buddhism and Hinduism will know that the meaning of being inner-directed is entirely different from what the West means by it. For the West it means intensive individualism. For the East, it is a journey of self-exploration by meditation.
So in The White Castle, the inner-directedness of the West means individualism at its best, and the outer-directedness of the Middle-east means materialistic totalitarian society, like that of the Ottoman times. Pamuk hopes that these two ends can meet.
A Turkish Siege
A brief look at the nature of Islam and Christianity makes it hard for us to believe that they indeed can meet. Both of these religions are the extreme forms of monotheism, bent upon world conquest through sword. Being extremely exclusivist they do not tolerate any difference, any idea of ‘the others’. Their followers meet only when their authority is slackened by local restraints, and as soon as it is again possible to oppose, they do. Even then, only the followers meet, not the respective religions.
The White Castle is to be enjoyed for its style. Observer says about Pamuk, ‘Up there with the best of Calvino, Eco, Borges and Marquez’. This is very true about The White Castle. If you are prepared to delve into the late medieval times and the Ottoman alleys with a magical, exotic touch, then this is the book for you. Though this art form will be developed more thoroughly by Pamuk in his later book, I am Red, the reader will not be disappointed in this work.
- Splendid Indeed!
Splendid Indeed! I would like to use all those hackneyed expressions about Hosseini which usually appear on the cover page of a bookseller. Excellent! Suspenseful! Unforgettable! Gripping! Heartbreaking! I would be honest in using all of them and still it wouldn’t be enough! Yes! Hosseini is that good!
Since, The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series I haven’t read a more gripping book. A Thousand Splendid Suns has everything you may want in a book. I won’t go into the details of the story. It tells stories of two Afghan women and the traumas they have to bear under the Islamic regime of the Taliban.
Hosseini is indeed a master storyteller and you get hooked to it. He is so intensely graphic that you see every little movement described in the book, and listen to every wind rustling; every sigh falling.
He moves our deepest emotions and we get carried. We laugh with the characters; we feel their pain; we look at Afghanistan the way Afghans do.
- A Street Bazaar in Kabul
The narrative is very authentic. Hosseini knows about the place he is talking about. He knows his Afghanistan, very unlike the Booker winner Adiga, who knows next to nothing about India. He is also clear about his content and has no tolerance for Islamic fundamentalism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is also not politically motivated like, A Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.
The havoc Taliban brought upon Afghanistan is vividly portrayed. He does not ignore its tragedy for the sake of being politically correct. The inhumanity of Taliban and all its supporters, the barbarity of Islamic fundamentalism and the brunt women have to bear under Islam is truthfully portrayed.
- The women of Afghanistan
He does not forget to pay a tribute to the destroyed statues of Bamiyan. He does not express joy over 9/11, like Hamid does in A Reluctant Fundamentalist. He does not shun the truth.
His style is pleasantly accessible and familiar. He suffers from no –ism and nothing of post-modern claptrap enters into Hosseini’s narrative. If the First World War jilted European psyche, making their poets and writers confused, the Afghanistan War has made Hosseini even more definite in his narrative, clearer in his vision. Some call him, an ‘old fashioned writer’. I love him for it. He is a little melodramatic and uses some standard attention engaging techniques of novelists and thriller writers, something which may throw him out of the mainstream of standard literature, but looking at the crap ‘mainstream’ literature is producing these days, it is better not to be included in it.
- Khaled Hosseini
Not since reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie, have I wept over a book. Russia and England were two places which had become alive in my imagination through literature. I now add Afghanistan to that list.
- Onitsha
Onitsha by 2008 Nobel prize winner in literature, J M G Clezio, was a surprisingly pleasant read. When I started it, I didn’t mean to finish it. Just browse. But in five hours I had gone through it, right up to the end. It’s an honest, if a limited account of Africa. Rather, it is more an African experience by a European, than a book about Africa.
Onitsha is the story of a European child, Fintan, who is migrating to the Nigerian town of Onitsha. It begins with the journey on the ship Surabaya. Clezio descries all the small ports and towns minutely. We flow along with Surabaya, keeping Africa at a distance, but never losing sight of it. We feel its strangeness, its frightening otherness, but also its irresistible charm.
After arriving at Onitsha, Africa overwhelms Fintan and Maou, his mother, as well as the reader. Clezio then writes about the usual European experience of languor and lethargy of Africa. The descriptions of Niger River are full of it. Losing the sense of time; feeling the lethargy of Africa; absorbing the vast stillness of a strange continent. We feel it all in the works of Doris Lessing and J M Coetzee too, but for Clezio it is neither lethal, like is it for Lessing, nor is it sense-numbing, like it is in Coetzee’s works. Unlike Coetzee and Lessing, Clezio falls for the dreamlike languor of Africa and the Niger River. Everything from rain to wind comes alive and the reader starts looking at Africa in a way which is similar to that of a native.
Here is an example:
“All at once she understood what she had learned in coming here, to Onitsha, and what she could never have learned elsewhere. Slowness, that was it, a very long and regular movement, like the water of the river flowing towards to sea, like the clouds, like the sweltering afternoon heat, when light filled the house and the tin roofs were like the walls of a furnace. Life came to a halt, as if time were weighted. Everything became imprecise, there was nothing left but the water flowing downstream, this liquid trunk with its multitude of ramifications, its sources, its streams secreted in the forest.”[ Clezio, J M G, Onitsha, Rupa Publications, p.120, 2008]
Clezio speaks about colonial repression and how it destroyed the native cultures. The Yoruba and Egyptian myths discussed in the novel mirror it. The vision is limited and there are the familiar exploitation stories, but Clezio is not embittered and at last the reader is left with a pleasant under-taste in his mouth.
- Le Clézio
The style is accessible, not like post-modern gibberish, usual in French writing these days. Clezio spares his readers the persistent use of present simple for narration, with a few exceptions and I, on my part, am thankful for it.
It feels somewhere that the development of thought is not proper, but overall Onitsha is an entirely readable novel; not great, but an experience worth having.
- …from Africa
Waiting for the Barbarians is one of Coetzee’s early works, bearing the characteristics of his early phases of literary evolution.
The hero is an employee of the Empire, a magistrate running a borderland settlement, fencing it from the natives, the barbarians. In the typical Coetzee style, the Empire symbolizes the colonial government of nineteenth century South Africa. The magistrate’s feelings towards the natives take a dramatic turn when he falls for a native girl orphaned by the Empire. At first, his sympathies for the natives are mild but when he sees an interrogation of the natives by the Empire employees, things start to change. At last he turns against the Empire completely in a quixotic revolt against the racist injustice. He is imprisoned and persecuted by the Empire. The title is an irony over the racist situations. After the revolt of the hero, the Empire and its employees are called the barbarians.
The style of Coetzee improves dramatically in this work. We almost see the grace and ease of ‘Disgrace’. Waiting for the Barbarians is a pleasant though sad read. It flows smoothly. The use of present simple as narration makes it a little dreamlike. Though events and thoughts blend in but the reader can easily differentiate between thoughts and events.
Coetzee is still a fervent socialist and many dialogues in the novel hint at the Cold War situations.
It is a sympathetic narrative which touches one’s heart, but it is clearly the imagination of a late-twentieth century white male with liberal commitments. The setting of the novel in early nineteenth century does not seem natural. While the colonialists were definitely cruel and racist, judging them according to the present standards seems a little harsh. As compared to a full-blooded support of the natives by a white man today, even a slight insubordination to the colonial authorities on the part of a nineteenth century colonialist employee was a far greater act of bravery. Nikita Khrushchev may remain a reviled Commie figure in the West, but if he had not given that famous secret speech of 1956, denouncing Stalin, then the path for many who later brought down the Communist regime would not have cleared. We have to see history in this evolutionary light. Waiting for the Barbarians is essentially a twentieth century novel with all the latest liberal inputs and we witness the grafting of a twentieth century intellect over a nineteenth century landscape.
Coetzee is still to disavow himself from the commitment to the political Left. This he would do in Life and Times of Michael K.
- The Debut
Being Coetzee’s first work of fiction, Dusklands marks the signs of a debut work. It consists of two separate narratives set in different times and places, but united by a common theme of racist oppression. The first narrative is set in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. The U.S. is shown as a colonial power and the Vietnamese are shown to be suffering under its attacks. The protagonist is a captain, who sees the ‘truth’ and tries to convince the authorities to see it too, but predictably fails. Driven into frustration he kills his own son.
In the other narrative, a seventeenth century white explorer leads an expedition in the heart of the native territory. A petty incident is interpreted by him as an attack on the Empire and in a second attack he destroys the entire tribe, including his former servants.
The narratives are hard to read and it’s not easy to keep track of events, especially if we compare it with other works of Coetzee. Language is complex and the reader has certain difficulties in muddling through the text.
Coetzee’s vehement anti-Americanism shows the fervor of 1970s and Coetzee’s own youthful convictions. His leftist sympathies are clear and one feels that the parallels drawn between the apartheid regime of South Africa and the U.S. Government is forced and artificial.
First of all, the blacks have equal rights in the U.S. and the State does not discriminate against them. The apartheid regime had occupied the land of Africa, driven out the natives, killing indiscriminately and extirpating a lot of cultures and tribes. We have no such equivalent in Vietnam War. The U.S. did not kill innocent civilians. It did not displace people by transplanting American people on the Vietnamese land. It did not try to convert the natives.
Secondly, the Vietnam War was initiated by the Communists. Soviet Union and China were the clear aggressors. In a post-1945 world, they had blatantly tried to overrun a free country torturing and massacring thousands of locals who opposed the Communist invaders. The U.S. jumped in only to prevent another country becoming Communist. In the process, it saved Vietnam the pain of a nationwide cultural destruction, like of which China had to suffer during the Cultural Revolution. There were some tactical mistakes on the part of the U.S., but the Vietnam War was a Communist folly. The U.S. had to pay for a crime of communists. It was due to the heavily biased leftist media of the Cold War era, which through selective reporting turned the public opinion of Americans against their own country.
After failing to gain a foothold in Vietnam, KGB’s main focus was to slander America in which it succeeded. Many of the journalists and academicians were on the payroll of the Communists; many others with humanist concerns were swept away in the mass hysteria of 1970s anti-Americanism. Coetzee was one of such gullible humanists.
This work should be seen in this light; keeping in mind that the author had strong leftist sympathies and commitment when he wrote this work.
- Michael K
‘Life and Times of Michael K’ is Coetzee vintage. One of the few books marking the milestones in the author’s career… and I am not talking in terms of awards.
The protagonist Michael is a simpleton to the point of being mentally challenged, having been institutionalized in childhood. The apartheid war is going on all around him, but his is a life completely calm, until his mother falls ill. He then embarks on a journey to her birthplace. This becomes his quest, his purpose. On the way his mother dies but he continues the journey. At last he reaches the supposed birthplace of his mother and stays in the wilderness there, trying to live off the land. He is drawn into the war a few times but he refuses to participate in it and again and again returns to try living a simple life. At last he returns to the city, with the same sense of confusion and disorientation of war.
The protagonist Michael is a non-conformist, who is unwilling to join the war between the civilization and the barbarians, on either side.
Coetzee treats Michael K differently than his previous heroes. He is neither a brutalized caricature of a racist-colonialist like the hero of Dusklands, nor is he the romantic hero of ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ who, in a Quixotic act, turns against his own civilization, completely taking the side of the black Africans.
Coetzee is maturing in this novel. Unlike his unequivocal leftist sympathies of previous works, in this novel he just theoretically sympathizes with the barbarians. In practice he prefers living off the land, unconcerned with any side of war and favoring a Romantic return to the nature.
This is a disturbing novel. Ten pages into it and you feel dejected, confused and overcome by a sad lethargy.
In varying degrees, this is true of every work of Coetzee. Every page of his reflects the confusion arising from the African history. The delicate intellect of Coetzee looks with confusion at the innate violence of South Africa, the hopelessness of a nation made of irreconcilable halves and irresolvable issues, a nation clubbed together by historical accidents of its racist-colonialist past. The only emotions it can evoke are of horror, dismay fear and pity. But at the end every feeling mutates into a melancholic confusion. This is Coetzee’s reaction to the African tragedy. And this is the hero’s reaction too. Michael K is Coetzee, minus his intellect.
Michael also reflects the political orientation of Coetzee:
“Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language – by all political language, in fact.”[1]
Exactly! Skimming along the fringes of left but not completely owning it.
The novel asserts that a ‘simple’ man like Michael does not take any side. The only wish he has is to live a ‘simple’ life with Nature. But the reader suspects that the simplicity of Michael is not that simple at all. He muses whether it is an indifference forced upon a simple personality by a superior intellect, an intellect committed to a certain point of view, certain ideology.
A simple man would not have remained indifferent to such a human tragedy. He would have reacted with anger, pity, sorrow or dejection.
Such a vision as that of Michael can only be that of a white male of South Africa who is fiercely committed to the race, which is not his own and in consequence rejected by both of them. Only he can be so detached, so unable to take sides.
Any less delicate personality than Coetzee may have reacted otherwise. Such a literary genius as his deserved to be born in the pre-Victorian or Victorian England, patronized by the court or nobles. But unfortunately for him and fortunately for us he was born in a deeply disturbed time and a deeply disturbed place. All of his works stacked one upon other tell us this story, the story of a delicate literary genius trying to comprehend and prevent all the misery but at last unable to do so. The fact that Coetzee finally migrated to Australia shows that it came to a breaking point finally where he could no longer watch it.
[1] ^ Coetzee, J. M. (1992). Attwell, David. ed. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 394. ISBN 0674215184. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dZ7_o8ElbQoC&lpg=PP1&dq=doubling%20the%20point&pg=PA394#v=onepage&q=&f=false.
On 14 October 2008, the Booker Committee announced in London that Aravind Adiga will get the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, ‘The White Tiger’. The writer, Aravind Adiga claims in an interview:
“At a time, when India is going through great changes and with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.” He added that criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies [1]
In a single breath, Adiga takes upon his young self the huge responsibility of highlighting all the ‘brutal injustices’ of India, while feeling proud enough to compare himself with Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens.
One should be cautious while making self-comparisons with great personalities. Dickens wrote about London and English society as it was. Almost all his characters from David Copperfield to Oliver Twist have an autobiographical ring.
Adiga is thrice removed from the society and events he talks about in his book. Born in metropolitan Chennai, educated in Australia, the UK, and the US, he has nothing in common with his protagonist, Balram, a ‘low-caste’ driver from Bihar. This un-authenticity of narrative doesn’t bother Adiga. Indeed, he thinks it is a duty of a writer to go beyond his own experience; to take a leap beyond reality; to plunge into pure fantasy. He believes in writing by remote-sensing.
“I don’t think a novelist should just write about his own experience. Yes, I am the son of a doctor. Yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge as a novelist is to write about people who aren’t anything like me.” [2]
Dickens’ works are not a judgment on English society. His worldview evolves in his works. If we put them chronologically, we can see the intellectual development of Dickens, an observant mind becoming mature.
Evolution vs. Ideological Revelation
What we see in Adiga is not natural evolution, but sudden ideological revelation. He is not trying to learn anything. He knows it all. The ideas are pre-arranged. In the absence of cultural roots, he has ideology to guide him – Secularism. Fantasy and remote-sensing makes up for reality. Worn-out formula-writing replaces creativity. Adiga has hitched his wagon to a star – the star called Secularism in Indian heavens. It is THE Ideology.
Flaubert, the other writer Adiga compares himself with, is as distant from him as possible. Madame Bovary is a psychological drama of an individual, not a statement about French society, while Salambo is a purely artistic venture recapturing a remote event of history. No one who has read even a single work of Flaubert dares to compare him with any writer with a social agenda. It appears that Adiga just threw some random names of writers while being interviewed, without probably having read them.
Balzac is a different story. Again, Adiga has nothing in common with Balzac in the style and grasp of subject matter. Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. So-called progressive writers in India are fond of comparing themselves with great realistic writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac etc as they think Indian society is in eternal need of a Bolshevik-style revolution. Taking realism as the most abject form of self-denigration, Indian writers harp on ‘social injustices’ and feel proud positioning themselves amongst great writers.
Poverty of Style
On the level of language too, Adiga falls far too short. The style of narration doesn’t match the projected aim to point out the ‘brutal injustices’ of Indian society. His style takes him nearer to the post-modern writing while his aim is as ambitious as of a Communist ideologue. For this purpose Adiga inserts some of the most famous secular slogans in Balram’s speeches, but his narration being post-modern, is personal and individualistic.
Adiga betrays ignorance of rural Indian society – not that he knows urban India – at many points. For instance, he asserts that many water buffalos can be bought in seven thousand rupees. Let him purchase just one! [3]
According to Adiga, the salient features of India are:
- Every traditional Indian village has a blue-movie (pornographic) theatre [4]
- No one can enter Indian malls without wearing shoes. Shoes are compulsory [5]
- No low-caste man can ever enter an Indian mall. Even if he enters stealthily, he is then caught, beaten and publicly humiliated [6]
- In India, if an owner runs over a man with his car, his driver has to go to jail instead [7]
- If a servant steals anything, then his entire family, back home, is ritually lynched to death (their women being repeatedly raped) [8]
- Every Indian book stall sells ‘rape magazines’ [9]
- There are separate markets for servants [10]
- Indian brothels take extra money from servants, called ‘Working-class surcharge’ [11]
- Sadhus are actually homosexual hookers who get paid to be buggered by foreigners [12]
- Indian caste system is worse, or at least as bad as the secret police of a totalitarian state [13]
The last claim is the central theme of the novel. The Indian caste system is called the ‘Rooster Coop.’ Adiga compares the caste system with the secret police of a totalitarian state. This comparison is preposterous. Communism accounted for more than twenty million deaths in USSR, sixty-five million in China, one million in Vietnam, two million in North Korea, two million in Cambodia, one million in Eastern Europe, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan and millions of others [14]. And all this in less than seventy years! Does caste in its history of more than five thousand years have anything remotely comparable to equal this record?
The only place where he innovates is in hurting Hindu religious sentiment. The polytheism of Hindus is mocked as:
“How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses?” [15]
Balram is called as the ‘sidekick’ of Krishna. [16]
The hero goes on to murder his employers, earlier called Ram and Sita! Lord Krishna is called as a ‘chauffeur’ [17]. About, Kali, the Hindu goddess:
“…I looked at the magnetic stickers of goddess Kali with her skulls and her long red tongue – I stuck my tongue out at the old witch. I yawned.” [18]
Hanuman is called the slave-god of Hindus, an imposition which still makes the low-caste slaves of the upper-caste.
“Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love and devotion…. These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.” [19]
In 1994, Christian missionary Fr Augustine Kanjamala of Pune wrote an article in Deccan Chronicle titled, ‘Replies to Arun Shourie’: “Harijans worship deities of lower rank, while caste Hindus worship deities of higher rank. For instance, Hanuman is worshipped by Harijans and Rama is worshipped by upper caste in the same village… Hanuman was the servant of Rama; Harijans are servants of higher caste Hindus. A close affinity between their hierarchy of gods and the hierarchy of society” [20]
Later, indefatigable Arun Shourie had a face-to-face debate with father Kanjamala at Hyderabad. Shourie said, “This is insinuation, it is deliberate distortion… I can assure you that Hanuman Ji is as dear to high caste Hindus, as to low caste Hindu. If after two hundred years of Christianity in India… this is your understanding of India, much needs to be done… But there is a question… Does the servant and master relationship, high caste and low caste relationship, also apply to other Hindu gods? If not, then how does your thesis stand? Nandi is ridden by the Shiva. Is it that the low caste people are asked to worship Nandi? And high caste should not worship Nandi? What you have written in your article is a foolish thing to write” [21]
Booker Scandal
But in 2008, we found Adiga repeating this missionary propaganda again. Adiga is in the line of a new breed of writers like Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, who being Christian or having sympathy with Christianity, share hatred of Hinduism and Hindu society. It is not coincidence, but a deliberate act of the Booker committee to award all three. They have ignored really good novels from Pakistan. Why? Because by awarding Pakistani writers like Mohammed Hanif and Mohsin Hamid, the Left will gain nothing in the bargain. You may call it the Booker Scandal. This is how the alliance of Marxists and missionaries works against Hindu society.
Writing a novel in India is neither an intellectual nor spontaneous venture. It is organized according to the formula set by the demands of secularism, seeded during the Independence struggle and developed and codified during the Nehruvian era.
The literary establishment in India expects from a writer: a complete submission to THE Ideology, cramming all its popular slogans and clichés; choosing a story and then fitting all the ‘facts’ in it; inventing facts to patch up gaping holes; and putting in as many features of the formula as possible.
A writer is expected to follow the secular formula, which is to show how Hinduism is inferior to other religions; how superstitious and stupid Hindus are; how evil caste-system is; how vile Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas are, and how suppressed Shudras are. Show how violent Hindu mythology is, while the very word of Islam means peace. Show that just like Islam and Christianity, Hinduism is also an import in India, having no original claim. Make Hindu history in India as short as possible. Extend Christian and Islamic claims on Indian soil as long back in history as possible [22]. Throw in some exotic stories of widow burning, caste discrimination, infanticide etc. to pepper this secular curry.
Do not, in any case, criticize Islam! Try to extol its virtues, and if not possible just keep mum about its atrocities. Show how Muslims are extremely discriminated in every field such as education and employment. Do not criticize Christianity and its violent conversion activities.
Shift the focus of readers from primary problems like the Islamic destruction of India to secondary problems like corruption, poverty, population, unemployment etc.
This is the formula which guides every new book and every new writer in India. There is no new voice, no new question, nothing new under the sky. All has been discovered. Every question has been asked, every answer has been given by THE FORMULA, and every problem has been solved by it. What remains to be done is to repeat the secular slogans again and again. For this no tigers are required. Parrots are more than enough for the job.
History of The Formula
This formula has a history, which is very well portrayed by Dr. Ravi Shanker Kapoor in his book More Equal than Others: A Study of the Indian Left, 2000 [23]. The literary establishment of India is guided by leftist intellectuals. All over the world, Communists have always infiltrated institutions in order to influence public opinion. Giving these institutions a neutral veneer, they sell Communist propaganda without letting the masses know the truth. They also fool some intellectuals in furthering their propaganda. So Bengal Friends of the Soviet Union (BFOTSU) was created with the blessings of Rabindranath Tagore [24].
Most importantly, leftists have infiltrated all the literary, arts and fine arts institutions in India. Thus pro-communist All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) was formed in which eminent people like Mulk Raj Anand, Munshi Premchand, Sarojini Naidu, Krishan Chander, KA Abbas, Shivdan Singh Chauhan, Ramananda Chatterjee and Ram Bilas Sharma participated [25]. In the field of theatre too, the influence of leftists was predominant. The Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA) is still very influential and continues to shape the world-view of the youth [26].
Novels in India, like Bollywood movies, are produced according to guidelines dictated by the establishment. If a new writer follows the secular formula, his books will be bought by all schools, colleges, universities and most importantly, all libraries across the country. For a year or two he will be interviewed by the media, invited to speak on the ‘problems’ of India and their ‘solutions’. The ‘intellectual circles’ of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata will throw some parties where these writers will fume and fret about the evils of Indian society. Pretty secure career.
Dr. Ravi Shanker Kapoor elaborates in another book How India’s Intellectuals Spread Lies, 2007 [27] that the motive is to drill guilt into the hearts and minds of the Hindu majority, so all ills of Indian society are blamed on Hindus. Adiga too indulges in guilt-mongering against Hindus. The Leftists have been largely successful in their endeavours; Hindus have been defensive.
The guilt pervades further, permeating the public debate, infecting the body-politic, dominating the minds and hearts of those who matter… [28] In India, more than half a century of guilt-mongering and other Leftist tricks have created a climate in which Marxist lies pass as gospel truth [29]
This is what Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul resents when he comments about Indian writing. Commenting on Nirad Chaudhari’s intellectual incompetence, Naipaul says:
“Sixty years after Independence that problem is still there. India has no autonomous intellectual life.” [30]
His words ring true in the context of Indian writers in general and Adiga in particular. There is no autonomous intellectual life in India. The literary concepts are dictated by the secular establishment.
“… no national literature has been created like this at such a remove, where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and read to a large extent by people outside.” [31]
Yes! No national literature has ever been created in a foreign language. In spite of tall claims and revolutionary agenda, the paradox of Indian English writing remains – a literature divorced from its native language. Indian writers rarely speak and never read or write in any of the Indian languages.
Most Indian writers who have won awards like Booker no longer live in India or have no connections with the rural India they claim to write about. They are rootless; hence their works lack authenticity. More the rootlessness, more the arrogance. Thus Arundhati Roy writes about the sexual attraction between zygotic brother and sister; Kiran Desai talks about non-existent ‘Garwhali Terrorism’, but not about the existent Islamic or Naxalite terrorism; and Adiga is worried about pornographic theatre in Indian villages!
Comparing Indian literature with Russian, Naipaul comments:
“In the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and Gogol and Herzen lived for some time outside their native Russia; but they wrote in Russian for Russian readers and (for all of them except Herzen) Russia was where they were published and had their readers. Russia was where their ideas fermented.”
“Nineteenth-century Russian writing created an idea of the Russian character and the Russian soul. There is no equivalent creation, or the beginning of one, in Indian writing. India remains hidden. Indian writers, to speak generally, seem to know only about their own families, and their places of work. It is the Indian way of living and consequently the Indian way of seeing. The rest of the country is taken for granted, and seen superficially, as it was even by the young Nehru…” [32]
So true and fitting on a writer like Adiga. The establishment prefers imitation which is safe over innovation which can be dangerous, ideology over reality, slogans and clichés over facts and truth. An ideological world-view makes up for the ignorance of history. A concern for the ‘brutal injustices’ of India makes up for lack of creative writing. Of course the ‘brutal injustices’ exclude Islamic terrorism and missionary activities.
Rooster Coop
No writer is recognized by the secular establishment if he doesn’t conform fully to the Formula. The mechanism which keeps the writer on track can be best described by Adiga’s own metaphor for the caste-system, the ‘Rooster Coop’. This Rooster Coop is maintained by the Formula, manned by their faithful ‘intellectuals’. The Coop is full of parrots who endlessly repeat the secular slogans. Once in a while if a parrot takes courage to break out of the coop and sing a different tune, he is immediately silenced by the intellectual community, Indian media and academia. His name is tarnished, his reputation destroyed, his positions in the Coop, lost. He is made to feel the fault of his heretic ways and finally he is brought back to the fold. Almost all of those who contribute to this mechanism are themselves the captives of the Coop.
But as Adiga would have it, the Coop has a mechanism of its own. The parrots imprisoned by this Coop help the Coop to remain intact. If one of their fellow parrots ever tries to do some unparroty acts, his legs are pulled back by his own mates. No one is ever allowed to leave this Rooster Coop of Secularism. The system goes on. The Coop remains intact. There are ever new parrots in the Coop, but all of them keep parroting the old tune. Adiga is no different.
Poverty and corruption are made a fetish in Indian writing as if they are not secondary problems having some primary cause, but the basic instinct of Indian civilization. If a writer tries to probe primary problems he is immediately labelled anti-poor, fascist and Hindu fundamentalist. The Coop is so strong that no insider is able to see the truth. Only an outsider like Naipaul is able to perceive the reality and express it courageously. Recognizing India as a wounded civilization he goes back to medieval times to search for the primary problems of India:
“There is a new kind of coming and going in the world these days. Arabia, lucky again, has spread beyond its deserts. And India is again at the periphery of this new Arabian world, as much as it had been in the eight century, when the new religion of Islam spread in all directions and the Arabs – led, it is said, by a seventeen year-old boy – overran the Indian kingdom of Sind. That was only an episode, the historians say. But Sind is not a part of India today; India has shrunk since that Arab incursion. No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.” [33]
Naipaul goes beyond the immediate and the superficial. He goes beyond poverty, unemployment and other clichés and finds the root of present Indian misery in its Islamic defeat during the middle ages.
“… its [India’s] independence has meant more than the going away of the British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far older defeat; that the purely Indian past died a long time ago.” [34]
He thinks it is necessary to go beyond these secondary causes:
“An inquiry about India, even an inquiry about the Emergency has quickly to go beyond the political. It has to be an inquiry about Indian attitudes: it has to be an inquiry about the civilization itself, as it is.” [35]
But these are untouchable subjects in the Rooster Coop. With every new addition to the Secular Indian tradition, the writers become even more confident of their worn-out formula.
Not surprisingly, Naipaul has this to say about Indian writers:
“The education of the new Indian writers – and nowadays some of them have even been to writing schools – also gets in the way. It seems to them they have the most enormous choice when, in imitation of the successful people who have gone before, they settle down to do their own book. They are not bursting with a wish to say anything. Nothing is going to force itself out in its own way; they are guided in the main by imitation…. This is where India begins to get lost…” [36]
Imitation is the hallmark of Indian formula-writing. Adiga is an imitation of his predecessors like Arundhati Roy, who were an imitation of writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Nirad Chaudhary, who in turn were an imitation of yet others… a tradition of imitation going back to the times of Lord Macaulay. In fact, he inaugurated this tradition in India in his famous note to Lord Bentinck, the then Governor-General of India – Minute of Education on India in February 1835:
“We must at present do our best to form a class who maybe interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; the class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” [37]
This defines Adiga’s intellectual ancestry. In many ways, Adiga’s book is not different from ‘Untouchable’ of Mulk Raj Anand, as artificial, as superficial, as far from reality, as incapable of asking questions, as faithful in following the intellectually bankrupt tradition of Secularism.
Looking at the ruins of the Hindu kingdom Vijaynagar, at the hands of Muslims, Naipaul reflects over the origin of the current intellectual bankruptcy of India:
“…I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years. What happened in Vijaynagar happened, in varying degrees, in other parts of the country. In the north, ruin lies on ruin: Moslem ruin on Hindu ruin… In the history books, in the accounts of wars and conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed… India absorbs and outlasts its conquerors, Indians say. But at Vijaynagar, among the pilgrims, I wondered whether intellectually for a thousand years India hadn’t always retreated before its conquerors and whether, in its periods of apparent revival, Indian hadn’t only been making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller, always vulnerable.
The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded old civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead.” [38]
The imitation has seeped into the sub-conscious of Indian psyche, and Indians are no longer aware of it. Thus Adiga thinks of himself as pioneer in bringing out the problems of India, but he is just parroting the secular slogans:
“The middle classes think of themselves still as victims of colonial rule. But there is no point anymore in someone like me thinking of myself as a victim of a colonial oppressor.” [39]
Commenting on India’s inability to judge, Naipaul says:
“India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it knows best about Indian writers and books are their advances and their prizes. There is little discussion about the substance of a book or its literary quality or the point of view of the writer. Much keeps on being said in the Indian press about Indian writing as an aspect of the larger modern Indian success, but literary criticism is still hardly known as an art. The most important judgments of an Indian book continue to be imported.” [40]
Nothing else can be more representative of the intellectual bankruptcy of rootless Indian writers than the fact that they do not even realize it. India is full of parrots, green, red, white, black, brown… but none of them are conscious that they are actually parrots. Some even think that they are tigers…even white tigers!
REFERENCES
1] http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/oct/16adiga.htm October 16, 2008
2] Ibid.
3] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New Delhi, p.236
4] Ibid. p.23
5] Ibid. p.148
6]Ibid. p.152
7] Ibid. p.309
8] Ibid. p.176-177
9] Ibid. p.149
10] Ibid. p.204
11] Ibid. p.232
12] Ibid. p.275
13] Ibid. p.175
14] Courtois, Stephane. The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999, p.4
15] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New Delhi, p.9
16] Ibid. p.14
17] Ibid. p.187
18] Ibid. p.156-157
19] Ibid. p.19
20] Arun Shourie and his Christian Critics, 1995, Voice of India, New Delhi, p.45-46
21] Arun Shourie and his Christian Critics, 1995, Voice of India, New Delhi, p.61-62
22] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New Delhi, p.272. The theory used here is Aryan Invasion Theory, a tool used by the British against Indians to keep them divided and to justify their presence on the Indian soil, as the theory claims that Aryans or the North Indians are also foreigners and came from Central Asia to India around 1500 BC.
23] Kapoor, Ravi Shanker More Equal than Others: A Study of the Indian Left, Vision Books, New Delhi, 2000
24] Ibid. p. 20
25] Ibid. p. 21
26] Ibid. p. 22
27] Kapoor, Ravi Shanker How India’s Intellectuals Spread Lies, Vision Books, New Delhi, 2007
28] Ibid. p. 158
29] Ibid. p. 159
30] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 191
31] Ibid. p. 192
32] Ibid. p. 192-193
33] Naipaul V S, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin India, 1979, p. 7
34] Ibid. p. 8
35] Ibid. p. 9
36] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 193
37] Macaulay, T B Minute of Education on India 2nd February 1835
38] Naipaul V S, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin India, 1979, p. 17-18
39] http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/oct/16adiga.htm October 16, 2008
40] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 193-194
Magic Seeds is Naipaul’s last or at least latest novel. It is written as the second part or a sort of sequel to ‘Half a Life’. Like most other novels of Naipaul, this one is also very autobiographical, not in details but in ideas. Willie, the hero is spending an uneventful but comfortable life in Berlin, with his sister. But his sister is restless and despite having a life of luxury and enjoying it with her husband Wolf, she is readying for a revolution, a revolution somewhere in India, a revolution of poor against the rich and the middle class, much on the socialist lines.
Later on we catch the action of the Naxalite movement in India. His sister goads him continuously and reproaches him for not being able to find a purpose in his life. A purpose in life for her is being a revolutionary, or being on a mission to engineer and change the world around you.
Referring to a person whom Willie met in the restaurant, she says:
‘Do you know why that man is worth more than you? He has found his war.’
Gandhi is analyzed almost like a subject of non-fiction in this novel. Sarojini comments about Willie:
‘When he was eighteen or nineteen Gandhi cam to England to study law. In London he was like a sleepwalker. He had no means of understanding the great city. He hardly knew what he was looking at. He had no idea of the architecture o the museums, no idea of the great writs and politicians who were hidden in the city of the 1890s. I don’t think he went to a play. All he could think o was his law studies and his vegetarian food and cutting his own hair. Gandhi in London in 1890 was floating on an ocean of not-seeing and not-knowing. At the end of three years of this half-life and quarter-life he became dreadfully depressed. He felt he needed help.”
This book of non-fiction conveys many things which are Naipaul’s vision of the world, mainly conveyed through his non-fiction. Sarojini comments on Indians also:
‘They feel they know it all. They don’t have to find out. It’s the Indian way.’
He then goes to India to join the revolution, but as soon as he joins them, he feels it all wrong, and indeed his sister writes to him that he has joined other people then she had intended to. The revolution has split like all other revolutions and he has joined the wrong side, like everybody else. He becomes disillusioned,
‘I don’t know what cause I am serving, and why am I doing what I do’
He experiences revolutionaries, common people and the relations between them. He finds it all artificial, false. Their grievances, their motivations and their aims are all imaginary. In a very unromantic manner, he attacks the romantic ideas of the revolutionaries. While putting up in the house of a revolutionary,
‘less than an hour later, lying in Shivdas’s bed below the high, black, cool thatch, in a warm smell of old clothes and tobacco which was like the smell of the third-class railway compartment of just a couple of hours before, Willie thought, ‘We think, or they think, that Shivdas does what he does because he is a peasant revolutionary, someone created by the movement, someone new and very precious. But Shivdas does what he does because he is instinctively following old ideas, old ways, old courtesies, on day he will not give up his bed to me. He will not think he needs to. That will be the end of the old world, and the end of the revolution.’
Describing a revolutionary he says,
‘He liked tramping through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely uneducated, and he was a killer. He sand dreadful revolutionary songs whenever he could; the contained the sum of his political and historical wisdom.’
In such a meeting of the revolutionaries, he thinks,
‘They all want the old ways to go. But the old ways are part of people’s being. If the old ways go people will not know who they are, and these villages, which have their own beauty, will become a jungle.’
At last he gets out of it, through his ingenious sister Sarojini. He then has to go to England to live for te rest of his life. In Africa also although he lived there for 18 years, he denied to be a part of the revolution happening there. In his seven years in India, he also comes to deny it.
More importantly, he comes to deny the whole idea of a revolution. In ‘Beyond Belief’, Naipaul denies the idea of revolution, as a false notion which is too simplistic to carry over the complexities of life and the many different worlds of the men participating in it. ‘In India: A Million Mutinies Now’ he also raises this question. ‘Magic Seeds’, contains many ideas which are discussed in ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’.
He regards ideologies as false, as they fail to integrate the immense complexity of life. There is no single solution to the problems of life and so we should not aim for such a thing. An ideology, a revolution is such an attempt to solve many problems by one stroke. This simply is impossible according to Naipaul.
‘But I know enough now to understand that life can never be simplified like that, and that there would be some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity of just letting one’s life pass, of treating one’s life only as a way of passing the time.’
In his final words in the novel,
‘It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts.’
According to Naipaul, there are no magic seeds which can cure every problem of life. They simply don’t exist.
This is the bottomline of Naipaul’s life and his work. To see the world, as it is, to steal the phrase from the starting line of the novel, ‘The Bend in the River’. This is what Naipaul has striven for whole his life, throughout his works, not to see world through any lenses of any color, whatever that may be. In every work of his, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, the overwhelming sense we get is to view the world as a detached observer, without any prism of ideology, without any coloring of –ism. World is what it is, with all its faults and problems, but we try to impose upon this reality our many –isms. This is what Naipaul denies. This is his intellectual honesty. The acceptance of reality, of truth without any romantic yearning for correcting anything in it.
In this case ‘Magic Seeds’ is a good novel, but I don’t think that after writing such good non-fiction regarding this subject like, ‘Beyond Belief’, ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’, ‘Finding the Centre’, ‘Literary Occassions’ etc. he need have written a novel regarding it.
Pankaj Saksena