Tahira Naqvi, the Pakistani American writer, has extensively translated the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor, and the majority of works by Ismat Chughtai from Urdu into English. As a teacher/professor of Urdu language and literature at New York University, she has regaled us with several short stories that speak of cross-cultural encounters of immigrant Pakistanis in America, especially about how women experience acculturation in the New World. The History Teacher of Lahore is her first novel where she recollects the sights, sounds, and ambience of growing up in Lahore in intimate details. The setting of this novel is the nineteen eighties, which was particularly a time of unrest in Lahore. In this debut political novel, Naqvi eloquently portrays the struggle between a besieged democracy and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand, and the thriving cultural traditions of Urdu poetry on the other.
The story begins with the young protagonist Arif Ali who moves from his hometown of Sialkot to Lahore with a dream of being a history teacher and a poet. A ‘tall, slight man in his late twenties,’ we find him relaxing on a bench in Jinnah Park — a place that has become haven for him to spend his time reading, far away from the ferocity of traffic and street crowds. In the days that followed, Arif realised that in the Government Model School for Boys where he taught, he was forced to teach the boys another kind of history for his sake as much as theirs. But that required deep thought, time, and enthusiasm. He befriended Salman Shah, another teacher in his school, and his rapport with him grew stronger by the day. But once again, Arif found the atmosphere in the school was becoming increasingly confining. He would often engage in animated chatter with the high school Islamiyat teacher Samiullah Sheikh, whom he found disagreeable. Not only dressed in Shariyah compliant clothes, but this man was also waiting for his opportunity to teach at a madrassah[1]. This was the period when bans were being imposed on popular music of the kind Nazia Hasan and her brother sang for the younger generation, and even though ‘Disco Deewane’ and ‘Dreamer Deewane’ were sung loud, fear had become an elixir for rebellion. Arif was forced to resign from the school and along with his friend Salman. he ultimately got another position as a history teacher in another private school, Lahore Grammar Institute, where there was more freedom to teach than in the earlier one. The free socializing among the sexes here was new and noteworthy for Arif.
As Arif’s impotent rage towards the increasing religious intolerance grew, he joined his friend’s uncle Kamal and his partner Nadira to secretly help them rescue underprivileged children in clandestine ways. In the meantime, his poetic creations found great impetus when he found a secret admirer in Roohi, Salman’s sister, and started sending her his poems regularly. Though they never met, Roohi would write letters to him every week, and gradually, the more letters Arif received from her, the more his feelings for her grew. The secrecy of their epistolary courtship continued for quite some time till things were disclosed and after a lot of twists and turns in the story, they were finally engaged to get married.
In the meantime, his friend Salman got engaged to a colleague Zehra Raza, and despite the Shia-Sunni clashes that prevailed in society all around, they were unaffected by such ideology. The three of them developed a close camaraderie among themselves, but soon after, the General’s death brought in a lot of political turmoil in the city. The mentality of the public also changed, people went en-masse to watch public flogging, and trouble loomed ahead when Sunni Shia, Ahmadi non-Ahmadi, Punjabi Urdu-speaking, Protestant-Catholic, divisions and sub-divisions, inter-faith, inter-class and inter-religion issues became more and more marked in all spheres of society. The warp and weft of faith produced such tangled intricacies as could only be imagined in nightmares.
As the nation was caught in the vortex of religious extremism, Arif’s position also underwent a great change in the school when he wanted to teach ‘true’ history to his students. He was caught in a dilemma when he found he was forced to teach false historical information in the doctored textbook that Aurangzeb with his hatred of other religions was adored whereas Akbar with more religious tolerance was totally sidelined. He tried to rectify the errors by providing supplementary notes to his students, but that landed him in more trouble. Apart from differences of opinion with the other teachers in school, Arif’s was gripped with a kind of fear and frustration when some unidentified goons threatened him to stay away from issues that did not concern him. Things got worse when a Christian student in his class was falsely accused of blasphemy and Arif decided to save him from being arrested. He embarked on a dangerous mission to resolve this Christian-Muslim conflict that landed him in the middle of sectarian clashes and without giving out all the details, one just mentions that the novel ends at a tragic moment.
In the acknowledgement section Naqvi states that she is grateful to her father for many things but especially for his Urdu poetry which she has used freely in translation. These poems, ghazals and nazms, help to explain the different moods of the protagonist and his mental situation very clearly. One interesting aspect of the novel is that each of the twenty-two chapters is prefaced by a small quote that in a way summarizes the mood and content of that chapter. Most of these quotes are from Jean-Paul Sartre, while others are from Spinoza, Ghalib, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, H.W. Longfellow, Jacques Derrida, Tertullian, Thomas Mann, and four entries particularly from The Lahore Observer dated 15 September 1990, December 1990, January 1997, and January 1998 respectively. These wide-ranging quotes not only increase the story-telling impact, but also endorse the erudition of the novelist herself.
To conclude we can say that Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Ice-Candy Man gave us the sights, sounds and details of Lahore during the Partition in 1947, and the same city becomes wonderfully alive again through the pen of another woman writer from Pakistan who had spent her growing years there, and who gives us details about it from the 1980’s onwards when the political situation of the country was once again very murky. The novel wonderfully portrays the radical Islamisation of the country that included murder, mayhem, and public flogging and more that was visible in Lahore, as this process resulted in terrible uncertainty in the lives of the city’s residents from all walks of life. Strongly recommended for all readers, we eagerly wait for more novels by Tahira Naqvi in the future. The insider-outsider’s point of view offered by her is remarkable and this debut novel can be counted as a collector’s item.
Author: Srijato, translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty
Publisher: Penguin Random House
“I believe I would want nothing else if I am allowed to just think. If it were a real job, I would be the first to get it. The only problem then would be that I would have to think on someone else’s command. Now I am free to think whatever I want.”
A quiet tenderness beckons the reader to A House of Rain and Snow. The title suggests everything generous and hospitable. Once inside the cosy house of this novel set in days before the internet revolution, there is, indeed, no disappointment. A translation of Srijato’s[1]Prothom Mudran, Bhalobasha[2]from the original Bengali into English by Maharghya Chakraborty[3], the novel offers, on the face of it, a simple coming-of-age story but such simplicity is only deceptive. Churning within the novel’s agonised romantic spirit are vital interrogations of the relationship between life, living, and livelihood, art and the market, the value and significance of art to life, and the question of integrity in both.
A Künstlerroman[4] that primarily focuses on Pushkar’s journey from an aspiring poet to a published artist, the novel frames more narratives than one. There is the story of Pushkar’s parents – Abanish and Ishita, of his friends, Abhijit and Asmita, and that of his mentor, Gunjan (and Parama), each constituting a mirror of the narrative prism in which Pushkar, the reflected subject, kaleidoscopically understands himself and his journey better. But Pushkar is not alone. Journeying with him in spirit are Nirban and his circle of poet-friends, the girl he is in love with – Saheli, and his most cherished friend and ‘confession box’, the milkwood tree.
Where does art come from? For Srijato, art is not extraneous to life but intrinsic to the very fabric of living. Every character in the world of the novel needs art, in one form or another, to survive. Not everyone, however, can become an artist. This privilege and responsibility is offered to the chosen few — those who can step out of their self-obsessed private worlds to establish a sincere relationship with the wider currents of life. Pushkar, for instance, tells the milkwood tree:
“…solitude is entirely a relative thing, silence too. I cannot understand myself without the immense tumult of this city, that’s where my silence lies. Unless I am standing in this swiftly moving crowd, I cannot find any solitude.”
Art, as the novel seems to assert, cannot be born except within life’s chaotic womb. A house of rain and snow can only be a nursery, a protected locale to nurture vision and aspiration. For the artist to grow, an engagement with the wider world would be mandatory.
But how does one engage with the world? Would the world even be worth engaging with? Is art a means of engagement or retreat, activism or escapism? No clear-cut answers to these questions are possible but A House of Rain and Snow attempts, as all worthy stories do, to shine its own light upon them. The novel’s world is divided into two kinds of people — those who view art as an existential end and those who, like Parama or Sumit Dastidar, view it only as a means or an avenue to something else. Those who see art as an end in itself understand that commitment in art does not necessarily guarantee accomplishment. Neither does accomplishment guarantee material success. As an aspiring artist, one can only bring all of one’s life and living to art without expecting anything in return, the fact of journeying being the artist’s only receipt.
There is very little physical action here. The journeys in A House of Rain and Snow, as the reader will observe, are all psychological. Place and time are important coordinates in this movement. The city of Kolkata emerges evocatively as inspiration and muse, its descriptions exuding a clear eye for detail, a deep sense of cultural nostalgia, a delineation of not just place but of spirit, and a documentation of the city’s multifarious, shapeshifting life — its strength, tenacity, and bustling beauty. Concrete yet shapeless, definite yet blurred, prosaic yet poetic, the city firmly anchors this novel as both stage and ship, contouring its artists’ perspectives on life and art.
The idea of time, in the novel, is as fluid as that of space. There is the constant sense, awareness, and reminder of its passage and yet, in Srijato’s fictional world, time refuses to be linear with the past, present, and future merging frequently through hallucination, dream and memory:
“Today, Gunjan notices the newspaper, he has never seen one in the moonlight. He bends over to pick it up from the mosaic floor gleaming under the light of the moon and, instead of the paper, comes back up with a tiny doll that had fallen on the ground a little while ago. A little more than seven years, to be precise.”
There is a strong visual quality about Srijato’s writing, intricately woven cinematographic effects which, had they been of any significance to the plot, might have amounted to magic realism. But being strictly organisational and descriptive in function, this cinematic quality is instrumental to the novel in other ways — it insulates the narrative from realism, liberates it from answerability to everyday logic, defamiliarises the familiar, and renders the strange intimate. Most importantly, it creates a surrealist impression, reminding us of all that remains constant in our consciousness in the most bizarre of circumstances, and manifests itself in the novel as an artist’s specialised and idiosyncratic way of relating to the world. Examine the windows of rain and snow, for instance:
“No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.”
It is worth noting that it is not Pushkar alone who has such experiences. Other characters like Abanish and Gunjan also experience such strange reconfigurations of time and space — expansion, compression, repetition, alternation, all of which can be interpreted at a symbolic level.
Surcharged with intense lyrical passages, A House of Rain and Snow is quintessentially an exploration of the aching need for art in life. Life, in the pages of the novel, is almost unliveable without the solace of art. Art, in turn, can be born only out of love, the kind of love that Pushkar can extend to the milkwood tree and the world around him:
“He, Pushkar, is in love. A little too much, with everything. …Why, he is not sure. How, he is not sure either. All he knows is that at this very moment, it is love that is becoming his language, his constant recourse. Love. Not just for the people close to him or his writings or his own life. Love for everything. Everything happening around him at this moment, the moving earth, every incident everywhere in the world, the forests, the oceans, the mountains, the plains, the cities, the sky, even the vast outer space beyond earth.”
The translation wonderfully captures the linguistic nuances of Bengali in the English language, its semantic eccentricities, syntactic pace, and its lush images, making the novel a rich and rewarding read. A number of images linger steadily in the reader’s mind long after the book has been read – a tall, wet milkwood tree, an idol-maker shaping a goddess out of clay, and a young boy lifting his exhausted father on his palm.
[1] Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).
[2] Literal translation from Bengali: First Gesture of Love
[3] Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: Faking It : Artificial Intelligence In a Human World
Author: Toby Walsh
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has revolutionised industries, from healthcare to transportation and manufacturing. However, some people may seek to artificially enhance AI to deceive others. This is called “faking AI”. There are several reasons why someone might fake AI.
Faking AI can enable individuals to impersonate someone else or appear as experts in a particular field. This can have negative consequences, such as fraud or phishing scams. Creating AI from scratch can be complex and time-consuming. By pretending to have AI, individuals can save time and effort while still achieving their desired results. In some cases, individuals may prefer to keep certain aspects of their AI-driven projects confidential. Faking AI can provide privacy and discourage further investigation.
One of the most common methods of fake AI is to manipulate data. By selectively choosing or modifying data, individuals can create artificial patterns or results that seem AI-generated. Another approach is to use pre-trained models, which are AI systems based on large datasets. These models can be repurposed and fine-tuned to deliver specific results without significant effort.
Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms enable individuals to create AI models without technical expertise. These platforms often offer pre-trained models to generate fake AI results. Fake AI APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, can simulate AI functionality. These APIs provide AI-driven responses or data but rely on predetermined algorithms or scripts.
While pretending to have AI may have certain advantages, it also has several disadvantages. Faking AI can mislead consumers about AI quality and authenticity. This can erode trust in AI technology and hinder its widespread adoption.
Faking AI may violate ethical guidelines and legal requirements. The use of AI without disclosing its true origins or limitations can contribute to legal consequences, including breach of contract or fraud. Faking AI can result in inaccurate predictions and decisions. This can lead to serious consequences in industries where AI plays a significant role, such as healthcare or finance.
Faking It: Artificial Intelligence In a Human World by Toby Walsh goes into the subject. A world leader in artificial intelligence, Walsh has spent his life dreaming about and researching how machines think. Scientia Professor of AI at the University of New South Wales and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Toby is passionate about ensuring AI improves, not harms, our lives. He authored It’s Alive! From the Logic Piano to Killer Robots, which was named one of the year’s best books by the New Statesman. Toby contributes to American Scientist, New Scientist and The Guardian.
The blurb says: “Faking AI has become an increasingly prevalent concern in today’s digital age. It is crucial for individuals and organizations to be aware of the methods and motivations behind faking AI and take appropriate measures to detect and protect against it. By implementing best practices and promoting transparency, we can build trust and preserve the integrity of the AI-driven world. Artificial intelligence is, as the name suggests, artificial and fundamentally different to human intelligence. Yet often the goal of AI is to fake human intelligence. This deceit has been there from the very beginning. We’ve been trying to fake it since Alan Turing answered the question ‘Can machines think?’ by proposing that machines pretend to be humans.”
As Walsh argues in his book, we are on the verge of developing artificial intelligence that can be used to deceive us. ChatGPT is an example of an artificial intelligence that is capable of fooling us into believing that it is intelligent and blurring the line between what is real and what is not. The truth is that they are devoid of true understanding, sentience, and common sense.
In spite of this, they are still capable of making a difference in the world. He raises fundamental questions in the book, including: Can artificial intelligence be creative? Can they be moral? What can we do to ensure they are not harmful?
Toby Walsh takes us through all the ways artificial intelligence mockups human emotion in this exciting and fascinating book. Also, he examines the implications of this for humanity in the present and the future of our planet.
.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
An introduction to Ratna Magotra’sWhispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon (Konark Publishers) and a conversation with the doctor who took cardiac care to the underprivileged.
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy?”— Tagore, Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeonby Ratna Magotra
“There are at least five estimates of the number of poor people in India, which put the number of poor in India between 34 million (equivalent to the population to Kerala) to 373 million (more than four times the population of West Bengal). This puts the number of the poor between 2.5% of the population to 29.5%, based on different estimates between 2014 and 2022.”
How are the healthcare needs of the poverty stricken met in a country with a vast number who are unable to foot their daily food, housing, and potable water needs? This has been a question that confronts every doctor in cities where labourers who build housing for the middle class are themselves homeless just like the street side immigrants who beg. Even dwellers of shanties that spring up around colonies of the well-to-do to provide informal labour to the affluent are hardly any better off. Few in the medical profession move towards finding solutions to bridge this gap.
Dr Ratna Magotra, who moved from Jammu to find a career in healthcare in Mumbai, is one such person. Recently, she wrote an autobiography which has consolidated the work being done by cardiologists to bridge this gap. In her book, Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon, while identifying this divide, she writes: “Poverty, inequality, deficient primary healthcare, unequal access, and the escalating commercialisation of medical care were causing an angst that I found difficult to make peace with. As medical practitioners, our expertise lies in providing treatment, but we often overlook the broader social factors underlying ill health. It might escape the attention of a surgeon performing intricate heart surgery that a child who survived a complex heart surgery could succumb to diarrhoea due to the lack of access to clean drinking water. Issues like malnutrition, skin infections, superstitious beliefs, and poverty may be the harsh realities in the patient’s actual living conditions beyond the confines of sanitised medical environment. /Medical training, regrettably, seldom includes the connection between poverty and disease.”
The land reforms laws that followed post-Partition[1] led to her family losing their wealth. But Magotra bears no ill-will or scars that have crippled her ability to contribute to a world that needs to heal — of taking healthcare to those who can’t afford it. She starts her biography with vignettes from her childhood: “I recall that the agricultural land we owned in our village in Jammu was considered very fertile with the best Basmati rice grown there. Though I was very young, I have faint memories of the house amidst lush paddy fields and a small stream that we had to cross to enter the village. It was very close to the international border between India and Pakistan. The way my mother was respected reflected the high esteem that villagers had for my father. Though their tenant status had changed to that of being landowners, the villagers visited the house as they did before and received generous gifts from her. /They would indulge us children with home-made sweets made of peanuts, jaggery and spices. Rolling in heaps of post-harvest grains piled up in open fields was great fun.”
She lost all that and her father. But with supportive family and friends, drawn to healthcare, she became a doctor in times when women doctors were rare. If they at all specialised, it was mainly in gynaecology. She chose cardiac surgery trained in UK and US. She made friends where she went and with a singular dedication, found solutions to access the underprivileged. She elaborates: “The quantum leap in India’s healthcare sector occurred during the 1990s following the economic reforms and the liberalisation of the economy. The end of the licence raj system facilitated the imports of advanced technology and medical equipment. Specialists, who had long settled abroad, began contemplating a return to India.”
While she attended an International Course in Cardiac Surgery at Sicily to update her skills, she tells us: “During our interactions, some German surgeons raised questions about the rationale behind a developing country like India engaging in an expensive speciality like cardiac surgery. I realised how biased opinions can be formed and spread, though rooted in ignorance. /By this point, however, I had grown accustomed to explaining the paradox — why it was essential for India to advance in specialised care alongside its priorities in basic healthcare and poverty alleviation.”
She cites multiple instances of cases that she dealt with from the needy rural population, for who to pay prohibitive costs would mean an end to their family’s meals. Magotra writes, “I had seen numerous poor heart patients who suffered not only from the ailment itself but also from financial burden of the treatment. The medical expenses incurred for a single family member affected the well-being of entire household, depleting their limited resources and savings. Unfortunately, medical education does not include health economics as a subject. As a result, doctors, especially specialists, trained in a reductionist approach to diseases tend to move away from a holistic perspective. They readily embrace new technological advances, often neglecting proven and cost-effective treatment options. This, in turn, drives up healthcare costs and makes it unaffordable for the common man.”
Living through a series of historical upheavals, she brings to light some interesting observations. She came in contact with Jinnah’s personal physician while looking for a placement in Mumbai. There she mentions that many wondered if the Partition of India could have been averted if this doctor had shared the information that Jinnah had limited life expectancy as he had advanced tuberculosis. She has lived through floods in Mumbai and riots and wondered: “I was staring at the blood on my clothes, which had come from multiple patients. In that quiet moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a ‘test’ to distinguish between a Hindu blood and a Muslim blood.” She joined the anti-corruption movement started by Anna Hazare and fasted! She has travelled and watched and collected her stories and she jotted these down during the pandemic to share her world and her concerns with all of us. In the process, recording changes in health care systems over the years… the historic passing of an era that documents the undocumented people’s needs.
Dr Ratna Magotra
An award-winning doctor for the efforts she has made to connect with people across all borders and use her experience, she talks to us in this interview about her journey and beliefs.
What made you write this book? Who were the readers you wanted to reach out to?
I had asked myself the same questions before I started and even while I was writing: Why and for whom?
Some younger friends and family members would find the anecdotes and stories, I would relate to them from time to time, interesting. They would often prod me to write about these. People, situations, my travels to places — not the usual popular tourist destinations, invoked further curiosity in them to know more about my life. As such I like to write my thoughts (usually for myself) and have been contributing small articles to newspapers, magazines, and Bhavan’s Journal for their special Issues. The pandemic provided me an opportunity to contemplate further when I seriously considered about writing an autobiographical narrative.
As I progressed with my account, I envisaged a wider readership outside the medical community as multiple facets emerged about places, people and events of varying interests.
What were the hurdles you faced while training as a doctor — in terms of gender and attitudes of others?
Fortunately, I can’t recall any specific hurdle or adverse experience because of my being a woman. Studying for MBBS degree at Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC), made it a normal affair as LHMC was an all-women medical college.
The struggle that I faced in getting PG admission in Bombay also had nothing to do with gender. The problem was being an outsider in Bombay when number of seats were limited. Students from local medical colleges and rest of Maharashtra had first preference for selection to PG courses. Anyone in my place would have had to go through a similar grind as I did.
Once PG admission was secured, it was smooth sailing through training and working alongside male colleagues! I asked for no concessions being a woman and worked as hard as they did or may be little more. We had a very close and harmonious working relationship with healthy mutual respect leading to lasting friendships.
What made you choose cardiac surgery over other areas of specialisation?
The decision to become a doctor and a surgeon was firmed very early in life. Interest in Cardiac surgery was acquired much later when I started working with Dr Dastur in Bombay. Seeing and touching a beating heart was fascinating and at the same time very challenging at that time. I was tempted to take it up for further specialisation. And yes, it was a very glamorous specialty at that time with names like Denton Cooley[2] and Christiaan Barnard [3]making waves in mainstream conversations!
Cardiac surgery was perceived by some as the forte of the rich, but you have shown how many villagers also had the need for the same specialised care. So, what was it that made you realise that? What could be seen as the incident that made you move towards closing social gaps in your horizon?
Heart disease affects the rich as also the poor. In fact, in earlier times when lifestyle diseases were not as common, it was the poor who suffered more from many afflictions including heart disease. Rheumatic heart disease was the bane of the underprivileged, living in overcrowded spaces with repeated streptococcal throat infections that eventually ravaged their heart valves. Congenital heart disease was common though not diagnosed as often. While the rich and affluent could afford to travel abroad to get treatment, in turn costing precious foreign exchange to the nation, others had to make do with whatever was available. Indian surgeons stretched their resources, skills and imagination to fill the gaps in the infrastructure.
Working in teaching hospitals, I saw the suffering and helplessness of the poor from very close. Inadequacies in healthcare stared at us every day. Moreover, those days cardiac surgery was being performed only in 4-5 teaching hospitals in the country.
I tried looking beyond the patient, connecting their illness with the social and economic environment they came from. Their personal courage, resilience and faith in overcoming difficult moments of life stirred something inside me. One such incidence involved a patient, Ahir Rao, from interiors of Maharashtra. His surgery at KEM and my subsequent visit to his home opens the chapter on ‘Reaching the Unreached’ in my book.
Ironically flip side of development and changing economic status, is that lifestyle diseases like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease are affecting less affluent even more. Lack of awareness about diet, and rapidly adopting urban fads have changed the rural-urban spectrum of heart disease.
The prejudices and biases of the developed countries influenced many in the country also to question a developing country like India from investing in super-specialty like cardiac surgery instead of focussing on providing basic amenities to the people.
It was amusing to see the BBC presenters asking the chronic questions as recently as the landing of Chandrayaan on moon in August 2023 — whether India should have space missions? Persistence of same mind set exposed their ignorance about the benefits the technology and the science bring to common man as also reluctance to accept the progress India has made!
How did your travels to other countries impact your own work and perspectives?
Traveling is a great education to broaden one’s horizon. My travels in India and to different countries contributed towards my personal growth by helping me connect to the geography, nature as also the people belonging to different cultures and sensibilities. Different foods, attires or attitudes but with one common underlying bond of humanity with similar aspirations.
Professionally, going to advanced centres exposed me to a work culture that was very different from ‘chalta hai’[4] attitude back home. Staying ahead with the best research, better working conditions, new technology were just the stimulants I needed in doing better for our patients.
There were many people you have mentioned who impacted you and your work. Who would you see as the persons/organisations who most inspired and led you to realise your goals?
I owe so much to so many people, whom I met at different stages of my life and who influenced my thinking, values and my work. It is difficult to pick one or two, however, if asked to narrow down to three or four most important individuals, these would be my mother and Prof Rameshwar in early years, and Dr K. N Dastur in my professional choice and career. However, biggest influence in my later life has been my Guru, Swami Ranganathananda — who imparted the wisdom of practical vedanta giving ultimate message of oneness and freedom of thought and action for universal good as propagated by Swami Vivekananda.
Why did you join Anna Hazare and his organisation? How did it impact you? What were your conclusions about such trysts?
I had heard of Anna Hazare as an anti-corruption crusader and had met him once at his village while accompanying Dr Antia. It was very admirable the way he had motivated the village people to participate voluntarily in the economic and social development making Ralegaon Siddhi a model village. This simple rustic person could stand up to the high and mighty and often made news in local newspapers; the politicians took his protests seriously at least in Maharashtra. When India Against Corruption (IAC) came into existence in 2011, I didn’t think twice before joining the unique coming together of civil society to fight corruption in the highest corridors of power. I was personally convinced that corruption had eroded and marred the dream of India keeping the common people poor and backward even as the corrupt flourished. As an individual, one could not do much beyond complaining and paying a price for a principled life. It required the civil society to stand up collectively to oppose the corrupt who were (are) actually very powerful!
There was nothing personal to gain by joining the protest but only lend my voice to the common objective of checking, if not eradicating, the menace of corruption.
The experience, highs and lows of the movement form a chapter in my book. The movement becoming political and losing the momentum of a countrywide movement was a big disappointment.
What would be the best way of closing the divides in healthcare?
There has been some forward movement in healthcare at grass root levels in last two decades or so. These gains need to be streamlined as at present we have islands of excellence with vast areas of dismal healthcare — the imbalance needs correction.
Increased spending by the State for healthcare, forward looking national health policy keeping in mind the diverse needs of such a vast country, rural urban realities are the way forward. Investment in medical and nursing education, primary health care, paramedics, rational use of appropriate technologies — all these need to be considered in totality and not in isolation.
Lot of the healthcare work is bridged by NGOS as per your book. Do you think a governmental intervention is necessary to bring healthcare to all its citizens?
My narrative belongs to the eighties and nineties when NGOs were vital in taking basic medical services to remote places where none existed. These organisations did a herculean task and several continue to be a significant provider even as the governments, both at the Centre and State level, have initiated many schemes that include healthcare besides general rural development. I personally think that the NGOs too need to retune their earlier approach of being stand-alone providers seeking funding from government and foreign donors to remain relevant. NGOs, though a vital link between the governments and the communities, have traditionally taken adversarial position to the governments. While keeping their independence of work, maybe they should strive to avoid duplication of services; provide authentic data, and create awareness. These along with constructive criticism and cooperation would benefit the communities and the stakeholders alike. Health education, women empowerment, strengthening the delivery of healthcare integrated with holistic rural development are best done by NGOs working at ground level.
What reform from the government would most help bridge these gaps and can these reforms be made a reality?
The question has been partially answered as above. Increase in budgetary allocation and intent are the prime requirement with focus on nutrition, clean drinking water, sanitation (end of open defecation, provision of toilets, is a major reform) and clean cooking fuel impact public health at grassroots substantially, especially that of women and children. These alone should reduce the load of common diseases and prevent 70 to 80 percent of maladies in a community. This is similar to what Dr Antia used to advocate — “People’s health in People’s hands”. No medical specialists are required, and community health workers would be fully capable of taking care of routine illness. The gains would need to be evaluated periodically to see the impact by way of reduced infant mortality, maternal health, reduction in school dropouts and increase in rural household incomes. Use of technology is an important tool to connect the masses with healthcare centres for more advanced care.
More thought is necessary for specialist oriented medical care. I am aware that we have some very wise and thinking people at the top deciding on national medical policy that should actually map the number of specialised centres and the doctors in each specialty and super specialities (SS) required over say next 10 years. The number of training programmes should be tailored accordingly. It is saddening to know that so many seats for post-doctoral training continue to remain vacant. It is specially so in surgical SS like cardiovascular, pediatric, and neurosurgery that are seeing less demand with interventional treatment making roads in treatment.
The change in the attitudes of administration as also the medical community is important. The benefits should be harvested with honest appraisals for course correction where needed for better planning in consultations with doctors, civil society, and the NGOs working in the rural areas.
Another idea close to my heart has been to motivate or even incentivise the senior medical practitioners to serve the rural areas for 2-3 years prior to their retirement from active service. They would carry experience and wisdom to manage medical needs even with limited resources as compared to enforced bonds for fresh graduates who are short of practical experience, anxious about their future and that of the families. Seniors on the other hand have fulfilled their responsibilities and may be really looking forward to satisfaction of giving back to the society. Having secured their future and relatively in good health, can be very useful human resource for the governments and the communities. This should be entirely out of volition and not under any pressure from the authorities.
Now that you have retired, what are your future plans?
Life is unpredictable at my age. I would, however, wish to remain in reasonable health to be able to be a useful citizen. I have no firm plans and will go where the life takes me like I have done so far.
I am aware that the age would no longer allow me to continue with specialised and highly technical profession I am trained for. Modern communication has narrowed the distances and made it possible to stay connected. I should be satisfied if I can provide any meaningful inputs, retain the attitude of service and remain contended in my personal being.
A conversation with Gajra Kottary, focusing on her new short-story collection, Autumn Blossoms, published by Om Books International.
Gajra Kottary is an eminent screenplay writer on Indian television. She has had many awards and accolades for teleplays that ran into a few thousand episodes, including the very popular Astitva Ek Prem Kahani (Existence: A Love Story, 2002-2006). Trained as a journalist, she turned into a screenplay writer, and now, she opts to go back to writing books.
Her collection of fifty stories in Autumn Blossoms bloom through five hundred pages with an epigraphic verse at the start of each story summing up the intent of the narrative. The focus group of the content is mainly upper middle-class women in India—people who have studied in privileged schools and colleges, though there is a story about a tribal woman who “evolves” to be a leader. The language flows capturing the nuances of her characters, replete with their values, biases, and attitudes. The stories, like her tele series, bring to light not only societal issues but also the interactions between different economic and social strata within the country. They give a glimpse of the world she inhabits.
Forwarded by Anupam Kher, a well-known actor, director and producer, the narratives despite being women-centric are not feminist in intent. There is a story about a girl who while opposing the patriarchy of her married home, runs away to that of her guru only to discover he lives by even more stringent rules and has an extremely gifted wife who practically gave up her life to look after the needs and career of her husband. The turn of events is such that the protagonist returns home, changed in her outlook. The story in a way upends the current norms towards concepts like patriarchy and yet, it dwells on the strength that can be found among common women, women who are housewives and ostensibly live in the shadows of men. The character of the guru’s wife brings to mind Scarlett O Hara’s mother in Margaret Mitchell’s original novel, Gone with the Wind (1936).
The plots of the stories are involved. And each story takes you through a different world. It’s like you have lived the lives of umpteen women within the social constructs of India. You live through murders, weddings, divorces, parties, terrorist kidnappings and even revolutions! In the centre of it all, are the stories of all humanity with their varied moods and flavours, their loves, compassion, happiness, grief, disappointments, and achievements.
In her ‘Afterthought’ — what in common parlance would be afterword — Kottary tells us the name, Autumn Blossoms, is the “generic descriptions of the stories” in the collection. She contends she is “a firm believer in the fact that women, and for that matter men too, bloom and discover strength in the autumn of their lives. As do many protagonists in these stories, where autumn stands as much for the vagaries of age as for what they are experiencing in life which gives them a new perspective.”
There is a story behind the book told in the afterword… how all the stories were curated into this collection. Some of the stories from her earlier collections were redone by the writer to suite her current needs. As there were many stories, she tells us the editor, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, “suggested that we categorise them into three sections”. She further elucidates: “The first would be the section about women’s relationships with men. The second section would be women’s relationships with other women. The third would be about women’s relationships with themselves, by far the most complex of them all. Of course, there are bound to be overlaps – these categories have permeable boundaries, so that it is possible for one story in one category to resonate in another. That too provides a sort of unity to the entire collection – apart from the overarching commonality of women being at the centre of each narrative.”
We invite you here to read what the queen of screenplay has to share with us about her journey as a writer and also on her current book, Autumn Blossoms.
Since when have you been writing? Tell us about your writerly journey.
I have been writing ever since I learned to write – quite literally. Ironically as a kid, like many silly things kids do, it was about trying to connect thoughts and make them rhyme in poems. I went to a convent school but more than my English poetry, it was my Hindi writing that got noted. I edited the Hindi section of our school magazine and I always knew I would end up with some sort of career in writing. Then in college, I tried my hand at writing middles and short journalistic pieces for The Times of India, Hindustan Times and some evening papers and women’s magazines. I was emboldened when they got published. So I did the next best thing for those times. I enrolled for a journalism diploma at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications. The course was great, but when I got down to brass tacks, I didn’t enjoy myself at all – reporting and subbing were not my scene at all. I did it for a while, but then took a motherhood break since I had married by then. My break and the quietude it brought helped me to analyse where I was going, helped me find my true calling within writing … which was fiction.
Short stories, published in 2003Novel , published in 2014
Starting with two short-story collections, I soon moved to writing for film and television and it consumed me completely for more than a decade. Until I realised that I also needed to write purely for myself too. I wrote my first novel in 2011 and have written three more after that, simultaneously with my TV work. The former has no deadlines beyond the self-imposed, while TV is all about deadlines so it’s a great mix.
What gets your muse going?
Random thoughts triggered by happenings around … whether it’s in the news or through people’s conversations around. Basically the ‘what ifs’ part of any incident or happening is what triggers the chain of a story in my mind. There is a lovely term in Hindi called ‘udhed-boon’. By now my mind is attuned to churning the thoughts around the ‘what ifs’ to design it into a tale. One has learnt to also decide to design the idea around as a story for a TV show or a short story or a novel. For most of the time, the idea itself speaks in a manner that can be easily identified or slotted. For example, when I read about the phenomena of bride buying in Haryana, I knew I could write a whole TV show around it – so Molkkiwas born. Similarly the concept of age difference in marriages … it’s thematic and therefore lends itself to exploration of its myriad aspects and nuances through a long-format series like Astitva and Na Umr Ki Seema Hodid. Similarly, most of the short stories in Autumn Blossoms are short tales that can’t be stretched very long, or else they would lose their punch.
A soap that focussed on the hunt for a woman’s identity (2002-2006)A TV series centred around exploring Molkki, an Indian tradition that involves marrying off poor girls to a wealthy man in exchange for money (2020-2022)
Tell us briefly what made you opt towards moving back towards books when you are a well-known screenplay writer?
That’s my favourite question to answer. When you write for the screen you train to be collaborative. To cooperate, convince and compromise. Since the ownership of the final product is going to be shared, democracy is the need of the medium.
Published in 2011
But it is important for a writer to be in touch with their solo voice to know what it sounds like, apart from coping with the cacophony of many voices involved in screenwriting. In fact I don’t really understand why more scriptwriters don’t feel this urge to have their individual voices heard and write for print too. It is a most empowering and self-affirming thing to do, but maybe scriptwriting is so tiring that inertia creeps in.
As far as I am concerned, I desperately needed to hear my own voice after more than a decade of collaborative writing, although I started writing short fiction way before scriptwriting. So, I finally wrote my first novel in 2011. I really loved the process though it was an edgy and confusing one all through. Once I had written Broken Melodies and gauged for myself what it added to my skill set, I made a habit of periodically hearing my own voice, along with participating in the chorus of the songs of scriptwriting.
How is writing a book different from writing a screenplay?
I am not a ‘go with the flow’ writer and need to have my goal or destination in sight before I embark on writing a new story. In that sense the process is the same for me in both kinds of writing. But after having done that basic planning for structure, while writing a book, spontaneity takes over. While writing a screenplay one has to be so much more conscious of the craft and style, the judicious part of what ideas to keep and what to discard. In a book one looks at editing much later. Although every good story should have the three-act structure working quietly in the head of the writer, I find that a book or writing for television has most of its texture in the mid portion. The first and third acts are the bookends, the former is a diving board and the latter is a climb to the crescendo. If one can get the middle right, one is sorted. Writing a book is like taking a walk in the park or the open … there’s unpredictability, adventure, mystery, open skies, fresh air to breathe and sights to savour on the way. Scriptwriting is much like walking on a treadmill – you get the required exercise and benefit but it’s not like an entire life experience.
By what I gathered from your ‘Afterthought’, these are stories that have been written over a period of time. How old is the first story and how recent the latest story? What made you think of bringing them out as a collection now?
Yes, these are virtually all the stories in the category of short fiction that I have ever written, including audiobooks. My last published collection of short stories came out in 1996, which is therefore nearly thirty years ago. The audiobooks are fairly recent. Many were written more than a decade ago when I was in between full-time writing for TV. And the last two were written a few weeks before the book went to press, so that we could reach the magical number of 50!
About the reason of bringing them out as a collection. Well it’s every writer’s dream to have a lifetime collection out, I wasn’t actively working towards it.
This book has happened solely because of its editor Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri. He is also a columnist and was writing a piece on my writing journey. As part of his research I shared with him my published, slim volumes of short stories. After he had read them – at record speed at that – he asked if I had written any more that were as yet unpublished. One thing led to another and now we have this door stopper of a volume titled Autumn Blossoms. Both Shantanu and I believe in short fiction, which frankly is challenging to sell. But the challenge is what has driven us both to bring an entire compendium out. Frankly, logically there is no real reason why short fiction shouldn’t be selling even more than novels, in these days of shorter attention span.
Why did you feel the need to have epigraphic verses at the beginning of each story? Are these epigraphs your first attempt at writing poetry … you mention in your ‘Afterthought’ they got you in touch with the ‘closet poet’ in yourself?
The idea to have epigraphic verses at the beginning of the stories was again an innovative suggestion that came from Shantanu after he read some lyrics that I had written in Hindi, and a few in English. They had all been commissioned lyrics, for music albums and the odd theme song for my own shows on TV. Shantanu is quite a poet, having published his poetry too. For me, it was like going back to my early days as a writer who had tried out all genres before I settled for quintessential storytelling. Writing these quatrains was some work and a lot of fun too and discovering the closet poet in myself gave me something to look forward to doing as an option for the coming years. A retirement activity when I perhaps won’t get story ideas anymore. It also gave me a kind of perspective of the essence of each story that I might not have made the effort to analyse otherwise.
Is your writing impacted by any writer, art or music?
My father was a classical musician, though I never pursued music. I love to listen to his music, as well as soulful Hindi film music, and for me the lyrics are as important as the melody. I love Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films and their music and my regret over the last few years is that I have not been reading as much as I should or would have liked to. I used to love Roald Dahl, Manto, Jane Austen, and most of all Tagore. In recent times I was bowled over by Elif Shafaq’s Forty Rules of Love. I suppose when one admires an art form or artiste, influences do seep in, in terms of both style and content, so all these people’s works have impacted my writing. And also, the aspiration to be as impactful as they have been, since they have been influential across art forms.
You are writing a novel too. Tell us a bit about the novel. Would they too have something to do with these short stories?
Published in 2017
I am almost ready with two novels. Both have male protagonists at the centre which is unusual for me. They are both very different stories from each other. One is a slice-of-life story that is light-hearted in its telling – quite a challenge for me actually – and is tentatively titled Sibling Revelry. The other is a thriller, also a social commentary. It’s tentatively titled Bonds and Bondage. Both the stories, like my earlier novel Girls Don’t Cry have their roots in stories from Autumn Blossoms, that tugged away at me to develop them more, which I eventually did. My forthcoming novels are broader versions of the stories titled ‘Hello, Goodbye’ and ‘Sugar and Spice and All Things…’ respectively.
I don’t know whether this happens with other writers, but this crossover writing does happen with me at times, as I write across media and genre. By now I have come to enjoy the process of finding more and more layers to my own story as I develop some of them from one medium to another.
There are yet some more stories in Autumn Blossoms that I didn’t see as possible novels when I wrote them. But in the process of revisiting them for the collection, I feel they merit a longer format … ‘Friends Indeed’ is a case in point.
What is your favourite genre as a writer?
Honestly, there is no favourite genre. They are all flavours of the season, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. Currently it is the short-fiction genre, but I know that it will be my new TV show next and when that hopefully settles, my novels will draw me to them. I guess this makes my imagination more agile, though when there is an unplanned overlap of projects, I get very tired and these days, I get anxious too as energy levels are not as high as they were a few years ago.
What can we expect from you in the near future – more books or serials or both?
God willing, there should be both, but I need to calibrate my involvement in both spheres. I am going to distance myself from the very tiring process of everyday series writing. Though of course, I will still be involved as I am experienced and can bring some wisdom to the table. I dream of writing books at a more leisurely pace; quite literally blossoming in the autumn of my life.
Thank you for the wonderful answers and your writings across the screen and in books
(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Title: Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet
Author: Scott Ezell
Publisher: Speaking TigerBooks
This is one of the rare travelogues written by a gifted writer. The topic Scott Ezell covers is equally intriguing- China and Tibet. In about two hundred eighty pages, he takes readers on a tour of the most contentious part of China. Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet is an essential read.
American musician and poet Scott Ezell has a background in Asia and indigenous cultures. Between 1992 and 2004, he lived in Taiwan and traveled extensively in China, India, and Japan. He has been working on a project since 2009 that documents the impacts of centralised state power, civil conflict, and destructive resource extraction in the China-Southeast Asia border region. A Far Corner is an account of his experiences living and working with an indigenous artist community in Taiwan over a period of three years.
Says the blurb: “On foot, by rattling truck and local bus, by jeep and motorcycle, American poet and musician Scott Ezell explores the Tibetan borderlands in the twenty-first century Chinese empire. The journey starts in Dali, in the foothills of the Himalaya in southwestern China, and extends north a thousand miles through towns and villages along the edge of Tibet, finally arriving at Kekexili, the highest plateau in the world, and crossing the Kunlun Mountains. Ezell takes us through landscapes of blond and gold barley fields, alpine meadows ablaze with wildflowers, silver-blue rivers beneath ‘clouds like burning aluminium’, and snow peaks ‘cracking and shattering into jagged resplendence against the sky’.”
Along the way, Ezell speaks Mandarin with farmers, shopkeepers, lamas, nomads, and police officers. Throughout Ezell’s account, there is also outrage, as he observes the rise of militarization, surveillance, destructive resource extraction, and the destruction of entire river ecosystems by massive dams over the course of many years and numerous trips.
Writes Ezell in the introduction: “In September 2004 I set out on a journey along the edge of Tibet. Starting from the foothills of the Himalayas in southwest China, I traveled north into further, higher landscapes by local bus, hitchhiking, and a motorcycle I bought along the way. I speak Mandarin, which allowed me to communicate all down the road with villagers, Buddhist lamas, nomads with chunks of bone braided in their hair, and police at security checkpoints. After six weeks and 1,200 miles, I reached Kekexili, a wilderness reserve 17,000 feet above sea level. From there I crossed the Kunlun Mountains and descended to Golmud, a city at the crossroads of Tibet, China proper, and Xinjiang. That journey is the basis for the narrative.
“Over the next fifteen years I returned a dozen times to Tibet and southwest China. I witnessed transformations so shocking that I felt I was taking blows to my own bones. Massive dam systems killed rivers and displaced communities, mountains were raked apart to provide gravel for construction projects, and the region was increasingly militarized and surveilled as China tilted toward its grim police state superpower status.”
Ezell strikes a sympathetic note when he says : “Today China holds one million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang, democratic freedoms have been smashed in Hong Kong, human rights lawyers are held in black jails, and the government openly surveils its population. But the systematic oppressions of ‘empire’ are not unique to China. The seizure of land and genocide against indigenous peoples in the United States and elsewhere, the legacy of slavery and the present-day wage-slavery of the global economy, and the colonization of Tibet as a means of territorial expansion and resource extraction these are all variations of centralized authority exerting power over minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised peoples.”
The book evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating nearly pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song and a protest against environmental destruction, centralised national narratives and marginalised minorities.
.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Rhys Hughes’ creative adaptation of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam[1] is a delightful read. Located somewhere between tribute and parody, it has recreated the tonal and prosodic rhythms of the original translation, quartet by quartet. Yet, there is a thin line between parody and subversion, and Hughes’s adaptation negotiates this with a tongue-in cheek flippancy.
To illustrate the close parallel of the original 1st quartrain of Fitzgerald’s translation and Hughes creative adaptation:
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
The original aubade is wittily recast as:
Awake! For the alarm clock next to the bed
Is ringing the bells that can wake the dead:
And Lo! The ruby rays of the rising sun
Colour the espresso machine a pinkish red.
This paean to coffee is replete with personifications –“Dawn’s lips are coffee-smeared”(vi).
Some of Hughes odes to coffee poke fun at the metropolis and its quirky inhabitants, the poem(s) capture the rhythms of life and its frenetic pace in the urban metropolis. Thus in quatrain 18, we get a glimpse, a veritable word-picture of the tube/metro train commuter:
I sometimes think that never blows so hard,
The commuter who is late, reputation marred,
To cool his coffee so he can catch his train
Before all the doors are closed by the guard.
Literary- and other-Histories of Coffee
In a ‘Brief History of Coffee around the World’, Garrett Oden clarifies that , unlike tea and alcohol which have been around and in use for more than five thousand years, coffee has had a relatively recent history. Although it has supposedly been around for over a 1000 years, its first verifiable documented use was about 500 years ago. Accidentally discovered by a goat herder whose goats turned unusually frisky after consuming some red beans, it became popular in Yemen and the areas surrounding it, the area we know now as the Middle East or as west Asia. The journey of coffee to Europe and beyond is replete with narratives of colonialism, plunder, pillage and scandal. This murky history was often forgotten as the roasted magic bean became a rage in coffee houses across the world.
The dubious antecedents of this heady brew derived from the magic bean is invoked in literary works such as Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where the effects of coffee are thus described:
“Coffee, (which makes the Politicians wise, And see thro’ all things with his half-shut eyes)/Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s brain new stratagems” to fulfil his nefarious designs. Closer to our own times, we have T.S. Eliot’s line in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ where his persona declares, summing up the urban ennui of his quotidian existence, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, a line which is yet another testimony to the fact that coffee has become an inseparable and indispensable part of our everyday life.
Echoes of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat are interwoven into each quatrain and the poems follow the chronology of the original sequence. From the chess board (p 56-XLVIX) to the image of the “moving finger” which is replaced by the “moving tongue” (LI, p58), in poem after poem, we have many hyperboles to capture the effects of this drink which stands for a way of life. It is a way of life familiar to inhabitants of the modern metropolis where one’s life is lived under the glare of neon lights, and where sleeplessness, stress are all par for the course.
Although the poems employs the resources of several figures of speech like metaphor, personification, hyperbole, perhaps the most apt and commonly used figure is that of bathos. It is an effect of anticlimax created by a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial. A typical example is Pope’s line in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where he says, “Great Anna, whom three realms obey/ Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea”: In Hughes’s case, “the cosmos is nothing but a frappucino” ,”the inverted cup we call the sky.”
The poems are crafted in a spirit of irreverent good humour and this book is definitely a little nugget, worth savouring. Even if (to persist in the metaphor) one’s cup does not run over, it is definitely a cup that cheers.
[1] The translation was first published in 1859. Omar Khayyam, an astronaut, mathematician, a philosopher and a poet lived from 1048–1131 and wrote in Persian.
.
Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
India’s independence in 1947 came with its own set of political as well as social uncertainties and challenges. For the people displaced from their native places, it was a struggle to find a home in unknown places amidst strangers, a firm footing to hold. The stories in this collection by Ajeet Cour, a profound and powerful voice in Punjabi Literature, offer observation of everyday lives of common people in the wake of Partition and during the early years of settling of migrants in Delhi and Punjab. But more than accounts of struggle for their livelihoods, these are stories of interpersonal relationships, of pain, anguish, betrayal and heartbreaks.
Ajeet Cour was born in 1934 in Lahore and migrated to Delhi in 1947 after the Partition. She began writing short stories as a teenager and today is the author of twenty-two books which include novels, novellas, short stories, biographical sketches and translations. In 1986, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for her autobiography. In 2006, she was awarded the Padma Shri for her writing and her contributions in the field of social upliftment. She is the Founder President of the Indian Council for Poverty Alleviation, and has been President, Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature. In 1977, Ajeet Cour also founded the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature, a non-commercial institution in New Delhi for the promotion of the arts, literature, theatre, music and dance.
This book is a collection of fourteen short stories translated from Punjabi to English by Ajeet Cour and Minoo Minocha. In her note at the beginning of this collection, the author says:
“I write because I am a witness to the horrors of daily life, day-to-day existence of people living next door, or in Punjab or Kashmir or Assam, or in Bosnia or Chechnya or Rawanda, or anywhere else in the world, feeling my destiny entwined with theirs, living in fear, dying like flies. And I can’t look the other way. I write because I believe that those who remain silent become a part of the dark conspiracy.”
The stories comprising this collection are accounts of everyday horrors faced by common people, of the brunt of estranged and conflicted relationships bore by people even as they grappled to find and hold onto a ground in life after the suffering endured during partition. Most of these stories are women centered and carry a first person narrator. The story ‘Walking a Tightrope’ is that of a woman torn between her husband and an irresponsible son disowned by his father. The author offers a nuanced glimpse into before/after the partition in a big household. She employs the image of kitchen to demonstrate a married woman’s domain as well as her confines in a patriarchal household. ‘Death Among Strangers’ is a story of a grief stricken daughter who could not take care well for her father post Partition due to the apathy of her husband. Both stories use death as the pivot which jostles the main women characters out of their pre-determined roles of mother and wife respectively.
In some of the stories, characters navigate through the ‘babudom’ of Indian Bureaucracy. Trying to find ways to get their problems addressed, they often surrender to the system which becomes increasingly inaccessible to them. Often, the characters are irritated by the system which makes them invisible and works only at the behest of those in power. The title of such a story ‘Clerk Maharaja’, otherwise an oxymoron, denotes the high esteem accorded to a regular class government employee who carries enormous power when it comes to the movement of files from one desk to the other.
In the titular story ‘Life Was Here Somewhere’, a helpless and disgruntled narrator declares the whole country as a heap of garbage no one is interested in cleaning, and those running the country as visceral creatures feasting on the stinking pile.
The story ‘The Kettle is Whispering’ explores kinship between a single and a widowed woman whereas the story ‘Unsought Passion’ explores the ugliness of unwarranted attention. Both stories take us to the corridors of working women hostels in the early years of Delhi post independence, presenting a window to the dynamics of interactions and disagreements.
In a couple of stories the horror of terrorism is explored where the loved ones are either targeted by extremists or by the forces fighting extremism. These stories focus upon the suffering families, their anxieties and pain as they try to make sense of their loss. In ‘Dead-End’ a young woman tries to save a young wounded extremist even though she is apprehensive that he might have killed her brother.
Ajeet Cour poignantly portrays the internal and interpersonal conflicts as faced by ordinary people in the course of their everyday lives in the stories of this collection. Her writing resonates with their pain, her words capture their mindscapes bearing witness to horrifying bestiality humans are capable of and continue to exhibit in their dealings with their fellow human beings.
Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life
Author: Sudha Murty
Publisher: Penguin Books
For those who have not listened to her humorous and motivational talks and seen her bright and smiling face on social media platforms and talk shows, Sudha Murty is an educator, author and philanthropist who is the chairperson of Infosys Foundation. She is married to the co-founder of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy. Writing both in Kannada and English, she has authored collections of short stories, travelogues, technical books, non-fiction stories, novels, and children’s books. The present volume under review, as the sub-title rightly claims, are simple yet memorable stories from daily life.
In the ‘Preface’, the author tells us that she has written her stories based upon her personal experiences of a particular region in northern Karnataka where she was born and raised in a middle-class family and has chosen this area as the setting for this book since it is her homeland. She says: “The river Tungabhadra divides Karnataka into two parts – North and South. The northern part of Karnataka has its peculiar history…. There was an amalgamation of cultures, languages and food habits…. By and large, the people here are open-minded and outspoken, much like the flat and open land that Mother Nature has bestowed on them.”
Growing up in a small town with a distinct culture, she is well-versed with the customs of its community, though she herself has immensely changed with time.
Written in Sudha Murty’s inimitable style, Common Yet Uncommon is an invigorating picture of everyday life where the foibles and strange behaviour of ordinary people are charmingly depicted. In the fourteen tales that make up the collection, Murty delves into her memories of childhood, life in her hometown, and the people she’s crossed paths with. These and the other “unembellished” characters who populate the pages of this book do not possess wealth or fame. According to her, they are outspoken, transparent, and magnanimous and are not polished in their speech or appearance. The crude veneer is no testimony to their unparalleled love and affection. Yet, each one is unique. Their stories are tales of unvarnished humans, with faults and big hearts. But she has learnt something from each of them and they have left an indelible impression on her mind.
The title of each story is simple and tells us about fourteen unique characters who have nothing in common. They are “mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive”. But in all of them, Sudha Murty herself appears as Nalini –- fondly called Nali by several –- who keeps on peeping in and out of every chapter, sometimes as a young girl, sometimes as a young adult and sometimes as a married woman.
In ‘Bundle Bindu’, she portrays the character of a man called Bindu who “had a knack for exaggerating”, but whatever knowledge of history and love for Kannada that she inculcated was not from the history teachers at her school but because of Bindu’s lessons. So, she considers him one of the most influential people from her childhood. ‘Jayant the Shopkeeper’ describes the failed business acumen of the protagonist and how many people would gather at his shop in the morning to drink tea, read the newspaper, and leave without buying anything. Later, after investing his entire savings, Jayant’s new shop called Modern Gift Centre also closed permanently within three months of its inauguration. Thus, he had no other option but to go and look after his son’s house and his child in Bangalore.
The next story, called ‘Jealous Janaki’, talks about an extremely assertive woman who was like a military commander and who “loved gossip, rumourmongering, misunderstandings, looking down on people and passing sharp remarks”. ‘Ganga the Unadaptable’ tells us how the beautiful Ganga would reject marriageable boys for different things and ultimately continued a spinster. In ‘Hema the Woman Friday’, Murty finds Hema to be one of the best philanthropists she had ever met as philanthropy doesn’t always mean giving money but helping others without expecting anything in return. A strange sort of husband-and-wife relationship comes out in a story called ‘Not Made for Each Other’, where one need not express his or her love only through words, but emotions prevail even in quietude. ‘Selfish Suman’ describes the activities of a woman who always remained “within the circumference of me, myself and mine” and one who only looked out for her advantage in any situation.
‘Adventurous Bhagirathi’ chronicles the worldly-wise acumen of a woman brought up in a joint family whose prime asset was the balance of her mind and ‘Miser Jeevraj’, relates the story of a man who had always thought that money gave him an edge, and his wife and children would listen to him because of it. As time passed, Jeevraj became lonely and in the end, he realized that money is required in life, but it is not everything. ‘Amba the Super Chef’ tells the story of a man who realised his wife’s worth only after she became ill with typhoid and could no longer make different dishes in different seasons and take care of his health. In ‘Sharada the Fortunate’, we read the story of a widow who chanced to meet an earlier rejected suitor, marry him in strange circumstances during a pilgrimage, and lead a new life once again with a new identity. ‘Chami the Charmer’ describes another woman protagonist who believed in making a strategy for everything in life and follow it. The final interesting story entitled ‘Lunch Box Nalini’ is narrated in the first person by the author herself and begins like this:
“I am Nalini Kulkarni. Elders have always called me Nali – a typical shortening of the name in North Karnataka. Here, Anand becomes Andya and Mandakini becomes Mandi. No wonder, the transition from Nalini to Nali was effortless.
Until now, I have peeped into everyone’s life and written about their characters. Now let me talk about myself – the best way to joke is not at someone else’s expense but at your own.
But how did lunch box get affixed to my name, you may wonder.”
The rest of the story is told in an extremely humorous manner of how her lost lunch box ultimately managed to find a groom for herself.
Testament to the unique parlance of a small town, Common Yet Uncommon speaks a universal language of what it means to be human. Reading these simple stories, one is instantly reminded of R.K. Narayan’s inimitable style and glorification of the common man. “Each character in these stories is a pearl. I am just the thread that weaves into this necklace, which I owe to my people and my land,” admits the author. A must read for everyone who loves to indulge in light-hearted reading and the spontaneous narrative style of Sudha Murty.
.
Somdatta Mandal, author, critic, and translator, is a former professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A brief introduction to Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, published by Cambridge University Press, and a conversation with the author, Afsar Mohammed
Afsar Mohammad
In a world given to wars and fanning differences, an in-depth study of history only reflects how we can find it repeating itself. In Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, academic and writer, Afsar Mohammad, takes us back to the last century to help us fathom a part of history that has remained hoary to many of us.
On 15thAugust, 1947, when India and Pakistan ‘awoke’ to a freedom amidst the darkness of hatred and bloody trains and rivers, there was a part of the subcontinent which remained independent and continued under the rule of a Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII. This was Hyderabad. Later, in post-Jinnah times, when India decided to integrate the independent kingdom, which had even found a name for its independent existence — ‘Osmanistan’ — what broke out was an episode called Police Action, code name Operation Polo. Mohammad’s book is an exhaustive relook at the integration of a people into the mainstream nation of India, using the voices of common people.
There were strands of communists in the Telangana movement and the mercenaries we know of as Razakars. His own family was involved in the events, and he had an uncle arrested for the performance of Burra Katha, a form of theatre used by Left to educate the audience, somewhat like a musical street theatre. Mohammad has interviewed survivors extensively and knitted into his narrative findings which make us wonder if religion or nationalism were used as a subtext of power play and greed. For, we have the local cultural lore where the people despite differences in faith had a tehzeeb or a way of life, where Hindu writers wrote in Urdu for the love of it and Muslims used Telugu.
Afsar Mohammad interviewing an activist from abasti in Old Hyderabad. Photo Credits: Sajaya Kakarla
Hyderabad was perceived by some as a sanctuary, like writer Jaini Mallaya Gupta. He contends: “Like me, many leftist writers and activists had migrated to the city at that point and they became popular by using pseudonyms. Hyderabad was like a sanctuary as it could hide us in its remote neighborhoods where we were supported by local Muslim community too. But we all became really closer to each other and more connected to the Urdu literary culture that indeed provided a model for our activities.”
But did things stay that way post Operation Polo? Razia, a witness to the police action, states: “It was a phase of unfortunate turns—everything so unexpected! Not about the Razakars or the Nizam, but most of the ordinary Muslims (ām Musalmān) whom I know fully well since my childhood had a hard time. Particularly young Muslim men and women … all suddenly became suspects and many of them from their homes leaving everything. They just wanted to live somewhere rather than dying in the bloody hands of the Razakars and Hindu fundamentalists.”
That cultural hegemony has a tendency of typecasting languages based on political needs is shown as a myth by Mohammad as both Hindu and Muslims used Urdu and Telugu in Hyderabad. His book revives Hyderabadi tehzeeb as the ultimate glue for defining a Hyderabadi. This is somewhat similar to what Bengal faced which had been divided along religious lines in 1947. Professor Fakrul Alam, a well-known academic, essayist and translator, tells us in his essay on the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, “The key issue here was language and the catalyst was the insistence by the central government of Pakistan that Urdu should be the lingua franca of the country…” Bangladesh emerged as a protest against linguistic and cultural hegemony. Eminent writer, Aruna Chakravarti, goes further back in history in her historical novel, Daughters of Jorasanko (2016), and shows how Tagore was involved in preventing the division of Bengal proposed by Lord Curzon in 1905. However, despite these historic precedents, we are seeing the world suffer wars from such divides and common people continue to be affected by the violence and bloodshed, losing their homes, livelihoods and often, their lives. What happened in the last century continues to reiterate itself more virulently in the current world. In times such as these, Remaking History surfaces as a book that has much to offer, perhaps if humanity is willing to learn lessons from history.
Your book is focussed on a small group of people, the common people of Hyderabad who suffered during the integration into a nation. Why would this be important in a larger context? How would it assimilate into stories of the world? By stories, I would mean plight of Rohingyas,Muslims, Jews … more or less plight of minority groups of people. Do you see any emerging patterns in all these stories?
In this work, I’ve consistently used the category of ordinary people as related to Hyderabad and Deccan. I needed this term to speak about both Hindus and Muslims as I was constantly reminded of the divisive politics persistent in this region and throughout South Asia. Despite the focus on the Muslims of Hyderabad, this work emphasises the inseparability of Hindus and Muslims when it comes to the violence and trauma of the Police Action of 1948. According to many interlocutors, the violence had inflicted the entire community — mostly the ordinary people of the Deccan.
I started writing this book with a primary idea that this lens of ordinariness helps us to not just this 1948 violence in Deccan, but many other religious conflicts now rampant through the globe. The examples you just mentioned above are not an exception. Since we’re blind to an ordinary person’s approach or emotional life, we totally failed to capture many dimensions of these violent events. Most patterns, either subjective or objective, that emerge out of this violence and trauma have their origins in this search for ordinariness.
Along with a few interviews, you have brought up the issues through writings of great Telugu and Urdu writers of that time. Can you tell us if literature actually translates to real life situations?
To be honest, being a writer and poet by myself, I’ve always believed that literature is half-truth which is filtered by multi-dimensional subjectivity of a writer. Specifically, when there’s a political situation, literary writings also tend to project a partial reality. However, these gaps could be filled by empirical evidence that we gather from the stories of ordinary people who not only witnessed the violence, but also suffered many setbacks caused by such violence. Yet, we require a balanced perspective to level these oral narratives and written materials. In this way, rather than relying fully on a singular story, we can explore the possibilities of multiple stories of a singular event.
Your family and you profess Leftist leanings. And yet, you write of religious minorities. Historically, the Left professes to be above traditional religions, like Hinduism and Islam. How do you integrate religion into communist ideology? Would you agree with Harari that Left is a religion unto itself?
One of the major critiques in this work is to contest the left-centric approach to 1948 and even the Telangana armed rebellion of 1946-1951. As I argued in this book, leftist writers, poets and ideologues completely failed to capture the reality of the day. I’ve presented evidence for this argument from various writings and witness narratives too. Since their high emphasis on economic determinism, many key social and religious dimensions remained their blind spots. Various religious and caste developments during the periods of the 1930s and 40s were determining factors of modern Indian history. Yes, of course, I still believe in the Leftist ideology, but never worship it though! To put it simply, I’m a critical Leftist and critical Muslim!
‘Popular understanding is largely shaped by what exists in circulation. This is what we see in the form of how people understand the Police Action across India as well as folklore, including the reconstructed folk narratives such as Adluri Ayodhya Rama Kavi’s burra katha. Such popular representations further reinforce the larger narrative peddled by the state.’ What exactly is burra katha? And what was your family involvement in it?
Burra katha was a popular storytelling and music genre in Telugu utilised by the leftist organisations to circulate their idea of resistance against the status quo in Telangana and elsewhere. Shaik Nazar was an icon of this radical narrative tradition and he also trained hundreds of disciples in this genre. Most artists and writers from the leftist camp were busy producing stories based on the Telangana armed rebellion and other resistance movements to gather the people in the public meetings between 1946 and 1952. My family also had some role in the production and circulation of this genre. However, it’s a story beyond my family’s history and had numerous political and performative implications that I’ve discussed in my book. I already have a detailed narrative of these personal and professional connections in my book and I encourage my readers to access them directly from the book. Just a brief note, many performers were arrested and put in prisons for months and months during this armed rebellion and they also suffered heavily due to the oppression of the Nehru’s government.
A burra katha performance
Do you see a parallel between what was happening then to such performers and protest writers in more recent times? Do you find still that popular opinion is being shaped by stuff circulating in media?
I see many parallels between the past and the present conditions of performers and writers who speak out against the hierarchies and status quo. Recent times, we see more strategic ways of silencing such protest and performance genres. Various apparatuses of the state have become extremely powerful and most writers/performers are being cleverly trapped into a governmental system. Nevertheless, there’re always exceptions. This book captures such intense moments that stubbornly contested the government-led media or privileges. We need more such strong voices to change the current state of things.
Were Razakars the Nizam’s army? I had been under the impression that they were mercenaries — irrespective of religion. But you say they were volunteers. Can you explain who were the Razakars exactly?
During the earliest phase of the Razakar activism, this was not Nizam’s army. It was supposed to be a group of young Muslims who volunteered to initiate radical changes in the Hyderabadi-Deccan Muslim community. In that sense, Razakar was a “volunteer,” the actual literal meaning of the term. Later, when Kasim Razvi became the president of this group, it took on a totally different manifestation. Razvi promoted a version of the Razakar activism that eventually served the military needs of the Nizam. I actually tried to show these different faces/phases of Razakar activism by collecting evidence from various writings and oral histories.
Before the Indian government ‘integrated’ the state of Hyderabad, there seems to have been a simmering of resentment against the Nawabi lifestyle and the common people, irrespective of their religious beliefs as you have shown. Do you find in the world context such reactions against wars or cultural hegemony currently?
Before, during and after the integration of the state into the Indian national government, it was an extremely complicated situation which we could name it as a “transition” period. It was similar to many states in India, but Hyderabad state had a peculiar situation due to its local politics and Deccani identity. Of course, there was a resistance to the Nawabi lifestyle as the new generation Muslims were engaging with many facets of modernity and embracing a reformist version of Islam. Nevertheless, these changes were not merely the products of local Muslim life. As I argued in the book, local Islam and Muslim sense of belonging was in constant dialogue with the larger networks of Islam and Muslim politics. I see similar thread continuing in contemporary Muslim discourse since 1992 when Hindu nationalism became a defining factor for many identities.
Did and do common people resent the “integration” as they did the Nawab? What would be the cause of that? Was it religion or economic and social discontent that becomes the focal point of riots then and as of now?
Whereas the Nawab’s resistance had his own political and private reasons, as I noticed from the evidence, the resistance from ordinary people had more to do with the common good and also, there was a protest against the way the entire military invasion was initiated and promulgated. People were concerned about the atrocities of the military which were aimed at wiping out the leftist movement on the first hand. At the end of the day, the Nawab and the Nehru government remained safe and friendly, while thousands of people were killed for this power sharing. Despite several different viewpoints, most of the public opinion was against this military invasion and the killings.
Why is evolving a Muslim, or for that matter any religious identity, important in today’s world? Will these not lead to conflict as we are experiencing in the post-pandemic twenty first century?
It’s not about a specific religious identity: now it’s high time for any identity to be discussed and disseminated. I see this more as a conflict resolution so that we become aware of our differences and learn the limits of our discourses. We’ve bigger issues that the pandemic. We’ve caste, religion, gender and regional issues that we need to sort out gradually. Many conflicts around us are due to our failure to acknowledge these identities and their role in the making of our community.
“The nationalist/textbook version of history is determined by the nation-state as is seen in how a nascent India emphasized and celebrated the ‘integration’ with an utter disregard for native opinion or the costs people paid associated with the bloody event.” Is this true not just in the Indian context but in context of the battles we see happening in the world?
Yes! Absolutely! The desire for “integration” is a product of hegemonic politics and turning into global phenomenon and we’re all plagued by the idea of nationalism and we’re forced to declare a singular nation, culture and language in many instances. We’ve too many examples right now to prove this and I don’t have to rehearse everything here.
Can you suggest a solution to finding and enforcing, peace, love, kindness and forgiving?
At first, we need to realise our mutual desire for such love and compassion. Our sheer dependence on political parties and making their goals as our own goals is a self-defeat by all means. I see community as a larger concept and we need to acknowledge its real sources of being and belongingness.
Thanks for your time and the comprehensive book.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Borderless 