Here is a review I did for Dhvani magazine. They have an interview with the author, Shilpa Agarwal. Also look for an interview with the delightful Manjula Padmanabhan. Welcome your comments on the following:

‘Haunting Bombay’ is a supernatural thriller/mystery and a coming of age story. Pinky is a precocious thirteen year old orphan, who lives with her grandmother and extended family. One day, Pinky opens a forbidden door and unleashes a ghost, the vengeful spirit of a dead infant. Subsequently, a fierce haunting ensues and forces the entire family to deal with all that is corroding their souls; all the secrets and prejudices that lurk under the veneer of respectable families living on Malabar Hill.

Its an intricate and complex narrative. Ghosts lurk, grandmothers hobble around being tough matriarchs, and adults in general behave quite badly. There is a huge cast of characters in this extended household, which includes all the servants and the neighbors. And all of them get their arc and back stories. A tall order for any book. It makes for a jam packed narrative which keeps you turning the page to find out what happens next.

Haunting Bombay is smart genre fiction. It follows the imperatives of its genre, with its particular requirment of plot and character. However, it does so with a consciousness of the intellectual work that has gone into the questions that interest the author. And indeed Agarwal acknowledges sources as diverse as Ashis Nandy and Richard Burton. The book explores, very explicitly the postcolonial condition and how class and gender inflect relationships in post-independent India. Some of this exploration is achieved through meticulous research into the materiality of the characters’ lives. We find out details like how the first train service started from Bombay to Thane, and that Cherry Blossom shoe polish was the brand of choice in post-independent India. Sometimes these details are woven seamless into the narrative and sometimes they feel a little more self-conscious. But a lot of care has been taken with these details, and a lot of the pleasure of the book is in these minutiae of everyday life. One trusts the author about things like the cake delivery man on a bicycle, with a tin trunk full of cakes made by an enterprising family in Dharavi. In a sense, a ghost story/thriller is the perfect vehicle for the author’s project. It performs an archeological operation into the psyche of modern India. It may not always do so very effectively, but its exciting that it is being tried.
Another reason to celebrate ‘Haunting Bombay’ is that popular fiction in English, set in India is finally finding a place. There is popular fiction in Hindi and other languages, but the offerings in English have never been that plentiful. The expansion of a popular idiom means that Indian writing in English need not expire on the segregated and rarefied shores of Booker Prize winning High Art. It can finally be a multi-dimensional enterprise. We have our Rushdies and Mistrys, we need our Chandlers and Stephen Kings.

Here is a review I did for Shrabani Basu’s Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan for the Sawnet website:

The story of Noor Inayat Khan is a remarkable one. A descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor’s father was a musician and a Sufi teacher. Her mother was an American from New Mexico, who defied her family to marry the much older Inayat Khan. Noor was the eldest child in this non-traditional household. The Khans lived in Paris, where Noor went to the local school, while her father and uncles ran the Sufi Order International and gave music performances.

Noor might have become a leading author and illustrator of children’s stories, when history intervened, and she became a radio operator working for the British secret service in World War II.

Shrabani Basu’s ‘Spy Princess’ is a meticulously researched biography of this World War II heroine. Basu takes care to not make any claims she can’t back up with documentary evidence. She is very careful to avoid exoticizing Noor as some sort of a Mata Hari figure of popular imagination. Using papers that were declassified in 2003 and Noor’s personal papers, Basu sticks to the facts. At times, this can make for some dry prose. However, Noor herself is a heroine to the writer, who sees her as a brave and gentle soul who followed the dictates of her conscience. This creates an interesting tension in the writing. On one hand it almost reads like the research notes of a diligent graduate student– quite often we find out the exact date and wording of a banal memo, coupled with hagiographic asides about Noor’s patriotic feelings. This has a curiously flattening effect, especially in the first part of the book which deals with Noor’s childhood and adolescence. We get the relevant facts about the Inayat Khans and Noor, but it doesn’t add up to a complete picture. One senses that the Inayat Khans are a brilliant family who have to deal with an uncertain financial situation, and depend on the goodwill of their followers to be able to live. Indeed, their home in Paris, Fazal Manzil was donated to them by a rich Dutch aristocratic follower of the Sufi order. This is not a typical bourgeousie family.

By all accounts, Noor’s family was an unusual one, probably more so by virtue of the era, when a mixed race family of musicians and Sufi teachers must have brought its own baggage of being held in high esteem in some quarters, and viewed with suspicion in others. But its hard to get a sense of what it was like to be such a family in that particular time. Perhaps, in the interest of keeping the book focussed on Noor, Basu does not provide the sort of context which would be required to get such an insight. She performs her role as a writer as one who reports back to us only what she could tangibly observe, rather than as a social scientist who can bring in other strands of knowledge to help us see things in a new way. Or a documentary writer who sticks to the “facts” but nevertheless understands the imperatives of narrative.

In all of this, Noor herself disappears. She emerges more or less a paragon of virtue. A dutiful daughter, loving to a fault; a diligent student with an artistic bent. We don’t really get a sense that she is a complicated person, with contradictions. To be fair, it is hard to get to know Noor, who doesn’t seem to have left too many clues about her internal life. And with so many people who were close to her now dead, it is difficult to actually fathom her motives and feelings. Especially glaring, is the opacity of one of the most important romantic attachments in Noor’s life, to a Romanian Jewish musician and fellow student. The only thing we learn about him is that he had the surname Goldman. Noor’s family disapproved of the relationship and apparently it was a source of great stress to her. Basu is very careful to not say anything that might be construed as being critical about the family, probably in deference to Noor’s brother and nephews who made their family papers available to her. So the tone of the writing may be very objective, but it ends up not being very revealing.

The book picks up during the war years. The writers fondness for bureaucratic minutae serve the book well when describing the working of the covert Special Operations Executive (SOE). They seem to have left enough of a paper trail to demonstrate their incompetence and amateurishness. If you are fond of reading memos and bureaucratic entries, this section is actually pretty exciting. Through cumulative detail, Basu manages to convey the danger and drudgery of covert operations during the war. She is able to throw into sharp relief Noor’s bravery and intelligence. It seems that though Noor was a talented and smart radio operator, she was not well suited to spy work. She could be careless of her personal safety, was liable to leave her code book lying around, and was hopeless at dealing with the simulated interrogation she was put through. Being a radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs during the war, since the likelihood of detection was very high. Despite this, the shortage of radio operators in enemy territory prompted the SOE to send Noor to France, before she was quite ready.

Despite her unsuitability to be a spy, Noor performed her duties with success and dedication. In the end, she was betrayed to the Gestapo. Noor tried to escape on several occasions and was ultimately deported to Dachau. After suffering the horrors of solitary confinement, being chained, starved and beaten, Noor was executed in 1944.

Noor Inayat Khan is a difficult subject. She remains elusive, all we are left of her are a mosaic of details that hopefully focus into a gestalt.

Escape Pod (a sci-fi podcast) is one of my reliable companions on long walks. A few weeks ago they had a story, Artifice and Intelligence, about a super intelligent entity called Saraswati and her human companion, Pramesh, a tech support guy somewhere in a bunker in Pondicherry. It was pretty good, though it didn’t live up to its promise-the characters were interesting, and by the time they were developed, the story was over. It didn’t really develop the social or psychological relationships between the characters, which good sci-fi seems to do economically and effectively, like the brilliant play, Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan.

Its interesting to compare the two, since both the narratives involve First World and Third World characters, but the stakes are  much higher in ‘Harvest’ and there palpable sense of  power imbalances between the characters, which is missing in the artificial intelligence story. I guess its problem is that it just doesn’t seem to have that much to say. And no, it doesn’t have to be only about the Third World being exploited for its wombs or back office workers, it could be a Bollywood tech story like Transmission (which I enjoyed a great deal). Outsourcing is ripe for a ripping sci-fi story, so I am sure one will come along pretty soon, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy Escape Pod and its fine fare which makes my iPod, oh so worth having.

See Dilip D’Souza’s post on the latest attack on Taslima Nasrin. As usual “religious sentiments have been hurt” is being handed out as so much stale mithai, and as Dilip points out, it has an eery resemblance to recent events in Baroda. This shameful episode is rightly being condemned widely, however, with certain qualifiers:

“The government should immediately cancel her visa and make her go out of the country,” he said adding, “she should realise that this is not Bangladesh or Pakistan, but India where the sentiments of all communities are respected”.(Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui)

And further:

No doubt Taslima Nasrin’s penchant to flirt with the religious sentiment of the Islamic community and her outright defense of right to indulge in sex outside marriage is not less outrageous as such ideas in print form only contribute to pollute the purity of the general mind to a larger extent.

Taslima Nasrin makes everybody uncomfortable. There are those who are complaining that “secularists have double standards because they are not doing dharnas.” Which, as Amardeep points out doesn’t seem to be completely true. And others who are annoyed with her because it makes Muslims look bad in the eyes of the West (look what you are making the crazy mullahs do, stop writing this sh!t already) because:

If Taslima is all about this major literary voice being stilled, why is it that very little analysis is being done of her writings? Why is she always in the news for a perspective other than one of literary or ethical significance? Even when she wrote an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures were mentioned, not for their role in damaging society but for sleeping with her, she was harping on freedom of speech.

A former professor, Shohini Ghosh, has an article, Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms (its a pdf download) in the Sarai Reader. The article was written in response to the West Bengal Government’s ban on Nasrin’s autobiography in 2003, and is about the “critical overlap between hate speech and sexual speech.” She points out how Taslima’s writing are neither “traditionally feminine nor desirable by Bengali canonical standards.” And how, “too much sexual agency deserves to be punished.” It points out how sexual stigma is used in hate campaigns. It leaves one with a chilling sense of the implications of these various forms of moral policing that are being advocated.

The knighthood of Salman Rushdie and the idiotic protest in Pakistan and Iran (see Amardeep) are two sides of the same coin, somewhat, read Priya Gopal on the subject:

To see the knighthood as “belated” endorsement by the British establishment is to miss the point entirely. Until, and even after, the vicious death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie could not possibly have been endorsed by an establishment he had committed himself to undermining in merciless prose and brilliant satire.

Mahasweta Devi gave the inaugural speech at the Franfurt Book Fair. You can read excerpts on Tehelka’s website. Like everything about her, the speech is fearless, eloquent and fierce:

I have said over and over, our Independence was false; there has been no Independence for these dispossessed peoples, still deprived of their most basic rights.

How to save and protect one’s culture in these circumstances? Which culture do we protect? And what do we mean when we speak of Indian culture in the 21st century? What culture? Which India? Sixty years after our hard-won Independence, the khadi sari is India just as the mini skirt and the backless choli is. A bullock cart is India just as much as is the latest Toyota or Mercedes car. Illiteracy haunts us, yet the same India produces men and women at the forefront of medicine, science and technology. Eight-year-old children toil mercilessly, facing unimaginable working conditions and abuse as child labourers. That is India. On the other hand, there is another lot of eight-year-olds who spend their time in air-conditioned classrooms and call their mothers at lunch break using their personal mobile phones. That too is India. Satyam Shivam Sundaram is India. Choli ke peechchey kya hai is also India. The multiplex and the mega mall are India. The snake charmer and the maharishi — they too are India.

I feel luck to have spent a week in her company filming her. It was a privilege.

Today was the last day of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. They have a list of the most “challenged” books from different years. The 2005 list still has J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, after 55 years of being in circulation! Other authors challenged over the years include Mark Twain (for Huck Finn), Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck (we’ll all turn into communists if we read him), J.K. Rowling (can’t have un-Christian sympathies for Witchcraft), James Joyce (I can’t believe any of the challengers have actually read Joyce), Harper Lee and our own Bapsi Sidhwa. Predictably, Judy Blume, and anything to with sex ed or homosexuality makes the list. I guess people like Bataille and de Sade pass completely under the radar.

You can see a list of banned classics from Google and a pretty comprehensive list with reasons given for the banning, from banned-books.com. The list includes the American Heritage Dictionary from 1969 (?!)

Today is the anniversary of the massacre in 1941 at Babii Yar, near Kiev. Here is a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the event. I especially like the italicized lines (mine), about the monuments that nature builds when societies refuse to acknowledge the history in their midst. It reminds me of the poetry of Night and Fog. I am not too keen on the line about the “Philistines” considering where that sort of thing has led us, but the poem is worth reading nonetheless.

Babii Yar

No monument stands over Babii Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified, on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
I seem to be
Dreyfus.
The Philistine
is both informer and judge.
I am behind bars.
Beset on every side.
Hounded,
spat on,
slandered.
Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace
stick their parasols into my face.
I seem to be then
a young boy in Byelostok.
Blood runs, spilling over the floors.
The bar-room rabble-rousers
give off a stench of vodka and onion.
A boot kicks me aside, helpless.
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.
While they jeer and shout,
“Beat the Yids. Save Russia!”
some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.
O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land.
How vile these antisemites–
without a qualm
they pompously called themselves
“The Union of the Russian People”!
I seem to be
Anne Frank
transparent
as a branch in April.
And I love.
And have no need of phrases.
My need
is that we gaze into each other.
How little we can see
or smell!
We are denied the leaves,
we are denied the sky.
Yet we can do so much–
tenderly
embrace each other in a dark room.
They’re coming here?
Be not afraid. those are the booming
sounds of spring:
spring is coming here.
Come then to me.
Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
No, it’s the ice breaking…
The wild grasses rustle over Babii Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning gray.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The “Internationale”, let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!

(Translated by George Reavey)

About 30,000 Jews were killed over a period of 48 hours in the ravine of Babii Yar, and later 60,000 Roma, Soviet POWs and other “undesirables” were slaughtered at the same spot.

I suppose the poem could work just as well for Delhi 1984 and Gujarat 2002.