Title: Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-Continental Adventures with the Tummy (A Memoir À La Carte)
Author: Zac O’Yeah
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-Continental Adventures with the Tummy (A Memoir À La Carte)is a culmination of thirty years of experience with the three things Zac O’Yeah loves most about life — eating, drinking and travelling — that put together a delightful travel-cum-food book. A detective novelist, O’Yeah is the creator of the Majestic Trilogy. He freelanced for the Swedish radio for 25 years before moving to India in 2000. Subsequently, he has written several bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction. His writings have been part of Hindu Business Line and National Geographic Traveler.
The Scandinavian-Indian novelist takes us on an entertaining and informative journey through the country in this book. We learn about dishes we may not have heard of before, and food habits we may not have known about. The author takes the reader through the pleasures of drinking beer in Bengaluru, drinking toddy in Kerala, and eating boiled vegetables and masala-less curries in Sevagram, Maharashtra, to prepare himself for Rajasthan’s rich red flavours. During his travels, he discovers Goa’s literati culture while sipping cashew fenny. He finds two of his favourite foods, mushrooms and cheese, in Bhutan, and finds out what astronauts eat and drink in space.
The book is an intriguing and profound story of an avid traveler’s untiring quest for evolving cultural and culinary experiences. It is a fast-paced, exciting book. In a nutshell, it is a very substantial, coconut-sized shell that captures all of India within its dimensions. It is the right place to learn about dishes we might not have heard of before, and food habits we may never have known existed. It is similar to what we experience when accompanying O’Yeah on a ‘spare parts’ tour. This starts in Shivajinagar, Bengaluru’s slaughterhouse area, where the exploration begins.
As he winds his way through India, he shows us the pleasures of drinking beer in Bengaluru (a slang for ‘beer galore’), drinking toddy in Kerala, and eating boiled vegetables and masala-less curries in Sevagram, the Mahatma’s ashram in Maharashtra, to prepare him for the rich red ‘lal maas’ [deer meet] in Rajasthan. During his visit to Goa, he discovers the literati culture of the state while sipping cashew fenny alongside Nobel laureates Orhan Pahmuk and Amitav Ghosh. In a delightful digression, he explores two of his favourite mushrooms and cheese in the Bhutanese dish, shamudatsi, and learns — while still on earth — what astronauts eat, and more importantly, what they consume, in outer space while still on earth.
It takes O’Yeah more than three hundred pages to guide us through India’s diverse food culture, which he explores in a fascinating way over the course of the book. The author combines history, anecdotes, and travel effortlessly. It is a mesmerising narrative that captures the reader’s attention.
He tells us Indian food traditions are no exception to the diversity of cultures in the country. The cuisine is incredibly diverse, with influences from many cultures. He explains how customs and religion are reflected in food. Food culture is incredibly varied, ranging from the spicy, vegetarian dishes of the south to the rich, meaty curries of the north. Many dishes are cooked with a variety of spices, from mild to extremely hot. Rice is a staple in many parts of the country, and chapati, a flatbread, is common.
Indian cuisine is also known for its wide variety of desserts. Sweets are usually made with milk and sugar, and often feature nuts and dried fruit. One of the most popular sweets is non-diary, jalebi, a deep-fried, syrupy dessert. The cuisine also features many savoury dishes. Another favourite is dal, a stew made with lentils or beans, and spices. Samosas are also a favourite snack, usually filled with vegetables and served with chutney.
He contends through his narrative how the country’s culture can also be observed in the process by which people prepare and consume their food. Meals are often served on large plates and eaten with their hands. “Eating off the floor” is a tradition in India that reflects the country’s diversity and history. India has something for everyone, including vegan curries and rich desserts. Whether you’re looking for something spicy or sweet, he concludes, India has a dish to suit every taste.
A thoroughly enjoyable and informative tour through Indian culinary art, Digesting India is the perfect introduction to Indian cuisine. As O’Yeah explores it, he can stomach anything and everything that grows or walks on earth. A delightful romp based on thirty years of understanding India through its food culture.
The book is an engrossing read — it’s like having a multi-course meal full of wonderful discoveries at every turn. There are thousands of interesting, unanticipated facts about local foods and the many places they come from in this book. A virtual adventure awaits you in the book.
.
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
Title: The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm
Author: Rhys Hughes
Publisher: Telos Publishing
The cover image of this book, depicting kangaroo like feet fitted to a patch of land and carrying homes, hopping through what it seems like a desert is as incredible an image as the story that the book proceeds to tell. At first glance one wonders what kind of imaginative world the author has invented and given life to in these pages and where is this thing hopping to and why.
It doesn’t help that the subtitle line reads “The Absurdity of Existence and The Futility of Human Desire”. For as the book begins, we are flung into the realms of a fantastical world swathed up in saudade and encountering bizarre events. Incidents triggered by the bittersweet longings of human heart, which makes the absurdity seem plausible amidst the ludicrous.
Such is the allure of the words crafted by Rhys Hughes. Nimbly, he makes use of the elements of the fantastic, comic and absurd in a highly imaginative setting while focusing on the human condition brought about by an intense yearning for something unattainable or saudade. An English writer of speculative fiction, much like the narrator of this book is, Hughes employs inconceivable ingredients, making this book a fun riot in every sense. Having written nearly fifty books, more than nine hundred short stories and innumerable articles, his style assumes certain effortlessness, turning the reading experience of this book into a marvellous excursion.
The book begins with Perceval Pitthelm, the narrator, arriving in Portugal in the quest of finding a quiet place to live and write. He rents a most peculiar house which arouses his curiosity to know about its history. His search leads him to the former owner old Rogerio, a seller of saudade, who goes on to tell him the tale of the house, originally situated in the town of Kionga in Africa and transported along with the town to Portugal on big hopping legs coursing a journey through the deserts. And thus begins the fantastical tale which not only captivates the narrator but also suffuses his heart with a passionate desire to taste saudade.
The events that succeed set in motion an adventure, taking us onto a journey through sea and desert, by boat employing huge hands, submarines battling giant squidmills and rafters sliding across desert. We witness cheek trees whose petals flush furiously and are accompanied by sweet and painful strains of Fado singing. We behold the play of a cheek tree guitar by giant Django hands and ripping open of Fado singer Cristina into a mist. We bump into a Don Quixote like Captain of the submarine followed by his own Pancho Sanza, on their mission to free the human existence from giant squidmills. We meet Mustapha, the inventor of hopping legs; a cast away on the desert who wishes to have a revenge on the world but instead finds love and goes onto find a quiet place to settle. Towards the end, our narrator, now free from saudade, is left with a bottle of song and the tale he is left with to recount.
The roller coaster of the ride that this book turns out to be is every bit delightful. In a subtle way, it does lead to contemplation upon the absurdity of human struggle to achieve the impossible whilst all that is needed is a little love and peace.
The book wraps up with a review of the works of Perceval Pitthelm by a reviewer who turns in a ruthless critique, a reviewer who is a large orange gargoyle with three eyes (invented of course by old Mustapha) and who has to write reviews for a living. This critique appears to be echoing Hughes’ own oeuvre of work and a quip on reviewers who put an eternal curse on the readers! A curse, if I may add, from which there is no respite for the readers who stand on the shore of his writing, intoxicated by the desire to delve into the unbelievable world conjured by him.
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
There are many places that poetry comes from — desire, death, dream, memory, sharp sensuous apprehension, the wrist-grip of language’s freedom and magic, the joys and fractures of the world that we engage in everyday, the necessity to commit to paper (or to posterity) what weighs upon the heart or head, the existential imperative to express, or the naïve hope of making the world a better place.
In general, the act of poetic creation draws its sap simultaneously from several of these sources. Many a time, however, one of these inspirations is bound to tower over all the rest. In the case of Prerna Gill’s Meanwhile (HarperCollins, 2023), the mysterious seduction of words combined with an urge to dress the world in impenetrable veils of meaning by conscientiously shuffling the charted signifiers and signifieds of language, seem to offer the veritable will-to-poetry.
One is drawn to the studied casualness of the title which, with its quiet, meditated understatement, purports poetry to be a by-the-way affair, a random afterthought. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the title as well as in the book as a whole, there is a skilled juxtaposition of two contiguous temporal frames — the physical and the psychic. The physical frame is the one in which the seemingly significant events of life take place. The psychic frame constitutes the ‘meanwhile’ of poetry.
This ‘meanwhile’ is not to be treated lightly for it is in these pockets of found time that the actual business of confronting the self for survival takes place. Here is a drawn-out negotiation with history, experience, emotions, pain, and trauma, and a poignant reconciliation with each of them. The psychological explorations of the ‘meanwhile’ in this collection are all-absorbing and have the potency to completely obstruct, offset and vanquish the eventful flow of physical time — “it’s always hungry in here” (‘An Hour Stays’). Nevertheless, this is not allowed to happen and both frames persist together, their density often overlapping.
If one pays sufficient aural attention, there is to be heard a silent ticking within Prerna’s poems, a tense balance between the physical or material and the psychic or mental, that threatens at any moment to collapse – “I sink through deep green waters/ To a cement floor buried/ Under boxes, old chairs, a pantheon in a funk” (‘Visit’). The fifty-nine poems in Meanwhile, then, manifest themselves as an acknowledgement of this essential fragility of time, balance, and life — a realisation that if the mind’s playhouse is affected or darkened, the lights in life’s theatre will inevitably be extinguished.
In the author’s words, the book is “an attempt to understand the less-than-shiny things that I can’t quite ignore any longer. The everyday things. The things that let the shadows in.” The paradoxical nature of time, emotional spontaneity and polyphony, the weaving/unweaving of the self, its fragile alignment/dealignment with the world, and the conglomeration of being constitute the thematic canvas of these poems. The cover image of a huge butterfly replacing the forehead and eyes of a human (woman’s) face looms to significance here. The symbolic suggestion of an alternative (inward or non-human) vision is hard to rule out (for animals occupy an enviable space in many poems of this collection) even as one is brought to mind of the butterfly effect of causation that operates, perhaps, most relentlessly in the headspace.
The acuteness of experience, the intensity of its processing, and its configuration through terse but often abrupt and abstruse images constitute the three essential prismatic walls of Meanwhile. Here is a carefully constructed theatre of the mind where lights and sounds radically transform in meaning through connotative and symbolic suggestions. In much of Prerna’s poetry is a semantic and narrative inscrutability that seems to operate as conscious poetic strategy. In the noumenon of these poems is both illumination and construction. Language is both torch and subterfuge, revelation and concealment, statement and retraction so that travelling through these poems is to traverse an experiential space that is deliberately half-lit.
In ‘Unmasked’, the poet writes:
Glaucous moon shivering inches of glass
She cuts her shape, cuts at it in echo
Grows it asking after her sons and rent
The possibility of rain and grandchildren
And if they glimpsed her first body
In birthmark, headline, running stitch
Here, as in many of her pieces, the real and the surreal walk together, undistinguished. In ‘Chedipe’, for instance – “Never could tell if she first saw him/ From behind green bottles or tall grass” – the atmosphere often turns disturbing and sometimes, singularly acherontic. In ‘Tributary’, the witnessing of the phenomenon of death opens a startling avenue of perception:
Until his splintering close enough to see
How easily a tributary is made:
A young man slipping from the course of the day
His hours held close as cards
In these poems’ handling of the self as subject, one finds little narcissism. The mind that is sculpted by particularity of experience, memory and upheaval of feeling is, to be sure, intensely subjective and yet, the distillation of these experiences in poetry makes way for a rich reading. What animates these poems and renders them more than abstract musings of an idiosyncratic mind is their keen and devout understanding of life’s complexity, its essential sense of injustice, and its brief but significant redemptions – “days pressed to currants between/ Pages folded for the edge of winter/And winters still” (‘Ant, Grasshopper’) or “Things of a hard blue sky yearn/ For the only light they do not share” (‘Before This Summer’) The use of short, clipped, often dramatic sentences; the frequent avoidance of punctuation; a polished, urban vocabulary; and an essential belief in the lability of time chisel these poems into pieces reflective of a deeper and highly nuanced reality of the mind as of the world.
The collection has several memorable poems. ‘Bucketsful’, for instance, brilliantly conjures childhood memory, loss, diminishing, and incommunicability through the bulbous image of frogs “Leaping to the rim/ Like it knew a boiling hurry” and ends with words that “balloon my throat and the only ones who would understand them/ Have long skipped town”. In ‘Trees’, the “verdant announcements” of foliage are capable of sustaining life despite its monotony – “Allergies, dry cleaning, soup” so that “in one glance/ The world becomes/ Leaves”. ‘Autopsy’ builds itself around a single cinematic image – “The naked bulb above the table/ Flickered too much” and as a verb, can symbolically extend itself from a person to a situation to life itself. ‘The Dollmaker’, one of those poems that makes the act of reading this collection inseparable from the recognition of the author’s experiences as a woman in the world, skilfully builds up the automated rhythms of a woman’s being in a sexist universe.
Meanwhile, thus, offers a whole new world for our absorption, intriguing in its opacity, and plumbing a depth that is accessible only to those who are prepared to lose themselves in the sharp silhouettes of its images. Here is the gradual but steady eclipsing of material geography to throw light upon the imperialism of the psyche and in this, there is a fine and fluid celluloid effect at work. On the wide screen of language, Prerna’s images travel with a terse celluloid confidence – aware, both, of being and non-being, of leading the reader through a range of signification that can never be pinned down to conclusion, of living a lie and yet upholding the truth.
As a debut collection of poems, Meanwhile stands out for its innovative experimentation with language which borders, often, on the existential, as if sanity and survival depended upon these elaborate linguistic disguises — the trickery of words, the enticement as well as the connotative distance of images, and the impossibility of locating a referential kernel to crack. In the measured pace of Prerna’s poems is a chromatic adventure that navigates the complex terrain of human emotions via a symbolism of shape, feeling and colour illuminating the little-known multiverse of the subconscious – “Square fingers running a pen/ Over prescription or continent” (‘Maps’) or “You, with nights under your fingernails/ Tell no one how it happened” (‘Black’).
In the excavated or found space of ‘meanwhile’ flows a continuous and consistent dialogue between the various selves – the past and the present, the mentor and the mentee, the seeing and the knowing, the forgetful and the cautious, and so on and so forth. When this space transforms itself into the intersubjective bond of poetry it becomes therapeutic, healing both the speaker and the listener from a pain that is deeply shared as inhabitants of a difficult world — “Some mornings I think of a rabbit with orchid ears/ The stray toms left her in a pit in my stomach/ Filled with lettuce and sweet straw (‘Keeping’) or “In this way, we are brittle femur/ And like this, we are sky” (‘White’).
The world will, perhaps, continue to be what it is. Meanwhile, here is a book that promises to be a friend.
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: Behind Latticed Marble: Inner Worlds of Women
Author: Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen, translated from Bengali by Apala G. Egan
New Delhi: Niyogi Books
The very mention of the name of Jyotirmoyee Devi (1894 – 1988) brings to our mind the strong feminist Bengali writer, author of the famous Partition novel, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning), mainly depicted the lives of the women in Bengal who bore the burden of this communal divide, their bodies being inflicted with sexual violence, rape, and social exclusion as a consequence to the former two. Owing to the dearth in the literature that records such gruesome atrocities that were inflicted upon women, till date her work is extremely important. This present anthology however focuses on a totally different perspective of the writer where she tells us interesting stories about the life of the women and little girls of Rajasthan, and the discriminatory gender and caste norms that policed and defined their existence.
Jyotirmoyee Devi was born in Jaipur in an upper-caste and economically well-off family. Her grandfather, who had emigrated there from Bengal during the British Raj, rose to occupy a high administrative position as the dewan or prime minister to the Maharaja of Jaipur. Thus, Rajasthan had a profound impact on her writings in the later years. Not being given an opportunity for formal education, her sole means to establish a relationship with reading became her grandfather’s library where she, along with her sister, were assigned to arrange newly arrived books and magazines. Therefore, even though she was a little girl, she attempted to make use of her multiple privileges that could help her access books and writing material. Married at the age of ten and widowed at twenty-five, she returned to her parents’ home along with her children and became a prolific writer during her long period of widowhood.
The ten fictional narratives in this anthology are all set in Rajasthan, and they create an elegant tapestry amidst the backdrop of Rajput grandeur and chivalry. Based on an eyewitness account of life in royal harems, these stories describe the very human interaction between men and women in this milieu. They highlight power play, disinheritance, and the threat of assault, which are perennial concerns for women. These include fascinating narration about the machinations that went on inside the royal households, as well as stories which tells us the plight of the veiled women in different strata of society. For instance, in “Beneath the Aravalli Hills,” a young village girl Dhapi disappears in the city where her father sold her for two hundred rupees. She is kept in a harem and punished for entering the festive hall without permission, she ends her life in prison. In “Frame Up” when the king dies, there is a heavy pall of suspicion in the kingdom that the queen had murdered him. Two decades later, when she is on her deathbed, she calls her son to tell him that the harem housekeeper and the chief eunuch had hatched a plot to kill his father but the young king walks away without acknowledging his mother’s innocence. In “The Child Bride” we read about the plight of a young widow Kesar whose jewellery is unlawfully snatched from her by the in-laws and she spends the rest of her life in poverty by serving like other destitute widows in the Govindji temple at Vrindavan.
Women-centric issues also recur in a story called “The Queen and the Concubine” where despite having plenty of riches befitting the Rajput royals, the ladies muse secret sorrows since their husbands, seldom, if ever, visited them. They spent their time in their sumptuous villas by holding pageants, dance dramas, and musical soirees. It tells the story of how the protagonist Kesar moved to the king’s harem upon his desire, metamorphosed from a mere maid to a courtesan, till she was burnt to death in the end. As per the rules of the state, sons of courtesans and concubines also lived luxurious and leisure lives, but somehow there always existed a fine dividing line between these men and the real heir to the throne. “The Taint” tells us of the king’s youngest son Samudra, who after receiving college education decides to take up a simple job in the British Indian army while his father arranges for his marriage with plenty of dowry albeit without his consent.
The human side of man is beautifully expressed in “Ungendered” where the royal eunuch decides not to have an heir and lets two young boys live a normal man’s life. Several other stories reiterate tragic tales of women in purdah and how many of them reach unfortunate ends when they try to escape from the strict socially imposed patriarchal norms that keep them totally voiceless. “The Princess Baby” (Beti ka Baap or Father of a daughter) calls for attention towards the evil of female infanticide by feeding them with an overdose of opium and focus on the limited social interactions allowed to young women. Though sometimes repetitive, the stories overall try and tell us about the miserable plight of women in Rajasthan, whether they were commoners or part of the royalty.
Before concluding, a few words about the translation. This anthology contains ten stories, each of which had been translated and published in different journals abroad (nine in different American journals and one in Turkey) before collating them into this present volume. The translator, residing in the USA, obviously had the western reader in mind and sometimes several complicated and difficult words and phrases are used probably to remain politically correct to the original text. But what this reviewer finds problematic is the introduction by the author. Who are the targeted readers? In her introduction, she mentions at random women’s issues from around the world and in different ages one wonders why the context of the stories translated here is not provided at all — except for giving us a bio-note of Jyotirmoyee Devi which is briefly included in the back flap cover. Also, the page-long bibliography provided at the end of the rather out-of-context introduction seems totally redundant. Apart from this lacuna of course, the volume will interest those readers who marvel at the eyewitness accounts of life of women and men, common and royal alike, in Rajasthan in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
Somdatta Mandal, author, academic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
In Conversation with Mitra Phukanabout her latest novel, What Will People Say?A Novel , published by Speaking Tiger Books, March 2023
Mitra Phukan. Courtesy: Speaking Tiger Books
What will people Say? A Novel by Mitra Phukan, a well-known writer from Assam, plays out like a sonata with fugues introducing complexities into the narrative. It concludes in a crescendo of hope with an acceptance of love. At the end, Phukan writes: “It was love. A love great enough to conquer all the ‘What Will People Says’.”
What is remarkable about the novel is the light touch with which it deals with major issues like communal tensions, acceptance of love across divisive human constructs and questioning of social norms. She elucidates: “I have written What Will People Say in a conversational, everyday style, sprinkled liberally with humour, even though the themes are very serious.”
Phukan’s novel moves towards a more accepting world where social norms adapt to changing needs — perhaps an attitude we would all do well to emulate, given the need for a change in mindsets to broach not only divisive societal practices but the advancing climate crises which calls for unconventional, untried steps to create cohesive bonds among humanity.
The story is set in a small town in Assam called Tinigaon. Where the protagonist, Mihika, a widow and a professor, upends accepted social norms with her budding romance to a Muslim expat, a friend of her deceased husband. She has strong supporters among her family and friends but faces devastating social criticism and even some ostracisation. This makes her think of giving up the relationship that drew her out of the darkness of widowhood.
Suffering during widowhood is a topic that has been broached by many Indian writers ranging from Tagore, Sunil Gangopadhyay to many more. Before the advent of these writers, in 1856, the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act was brought into play by the efforts of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who had also written on the issue. But despite the law, has it as yet been accepted by conventional society? And how would such a society which bases its perceptions on rituals and traditions respond further to a relationship that discards marriage as a norm? These are questions that Phukan deals with not only in her novel but in the conversation that follows.
The plot showcases an interesting interplay of different perspectives. In certain senses, it has the delightful touch of a Jane Austen novel, except it is set in India in the twenty first century, where relationships are impacted by even social media. Phukan, herself, sees “ageism” and female bonding and friendship” as major issues addressed in the novel. She says that women’s bonding is a theme that “has not been focused on enough, at least in Assamese writing”, even though, it is a fact that this has been the focus in other literature like, Jane Austen’s novels written in the nineteenth century and in subsequent modern-day take-offs on her novels, like the The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, published in 2004. In the sub-continent, Begum Rokeya described a full woman’s utopia in Sultana’s Dream(1905), though Rokeya’s story is essentially a feminist sci-fi. Unlike Rokeya’s book, Phukan’s is not an intense feminist novel. The protagonist, Mihika, has men well-wishers and men friends-cum-colleagues too. The tone is lighter and makes for a fabulous read, like Austen’s novels.
As if rising in a fugue to Mihika’s romance are two more relationships of a similar nature. One is between her daughter and a young boy from a traditional, respected, conventional home. The other, which I found more interesting, and I wish Phukan had explored a bit more, is a relationship between Mihika’s Bihari beautician, Sita, and a tribal boy. While the girl is from a traditional vegetarian strictly Hindu family, the boy is an orphan, a tribal. It is a romance that is outside the conventional affluent, middle-class circle. And is used as a contrast to Mihika’s and her daughter’s experiences. Sita’s narrative highlights how the conventional finally accept the unconventionality of a romance that in the past might have been completely rejected.
The novel rises above victimhood by looking for resolutions outside the accepted norms subtly. The plot weaves the triangular interplay of relationships with notes of harmony. The story, devoid of gender biases and darker shades of drama, delves into serious themes with a feathery touch.
The structuring of the novel arrests the reader with its seeming simplicity but each is fitted into the composition to create a fiction that touches your heart and leaves you pining for a bit more… like the strains of a composition that has the deftness and neatness of a Jane Austen novel, written in the context of twenty first century Assam.
Phukan herself is a trained vocalist in Indian classical, a columnist, a translator and a writer. In this conversation, she reveals more about the making and intent of her novel and her journey as a writer.
You wear a number of hats — that of an Indian classical vocalist, a columnist, a children’s writer, a translator and so much more. How does this impact your work as a novelist?
I feel everything is related; everything flows seamlessly into the other aspects. Yes, I am a trained Shastriya Sangeet[1]vocalist, though I have retired from performances now. But at one time that was my life…even now, I write extensively about music through essays and reviews. And I’m always listening to music, of many genres.
I began writing, hesitantly comparatively late, though I always enjoyed it, getting prizes in school and college. Later, I began to write stories, etc, for magazines such as Femina, Eve’s Weekly. Mainly though it was the paper The Sentinel and its editor D N Bezboruah which gave me a platform through middles, short fiction, essays and other genres. My children were very young at the time, and somehow the children’s stories came to me at that point. Now that they are grown up, those stories don’t come any more…and I regret that.
Translation happened because two stalwarts of Assamese literature, Jnanpith awardee Dr Indira Goswami and Sahitya Akdami awardee poet Dr Nirmal Prova Bordoloi encouraged me to try my hand at it by translating their work. I found I enjoyed it …and the journey continues!
Writing fiction, especially novels, needs the writer to have a wide view of life, I feel. I love storytelling. I write from observation, but also, I learn a lot about the literature of the place I come from, Assam, through the works of the greats in Assamese.
Do your other passions, especially music, impact your writing?
Music, definitely. In What Will People Say, for instance, there are so many references to songs and music, to concerts and musicians. There is an entire chapter devoted to songs in Hindi and Assamese where the theme is music. Besides, my novel A Monsoon of Music is about the lives of four practicing musicians. Many of my short stories from A Full Night’s Thievery have music as a theme …’The Tabla Player’, ‘The Choice’, ‘Spring Song’, and so on.
Also, musical metaphors seem to creep in, unbidden, to my writing…
Among the other passions that are reflected to a greater or lesser degree in my writing are gardening, and of course food!
What led you to write What Will People Say?
My stories, whether long or short, are always triggered by events, people, that I see around me. Sometimes it could even be a sentence I overhear while waiting at an airport, or maybe an expression on somebody’s face. They are based on reality, though they are fictionalised as they pass through the prism of my mind, my imagination.
What Will People Say was triggered by the fact that I see so many older women who have lost their spouses spend their lives in loneliness and sometimes despondency. Yes, their children may be caring, they may have women friends, a profession, but that is not enough. Love, finding a romantic partner, even companionship, is very unusual as a senior. There are so many unwritten codes, so many taboos and restrictions, especially in the small, peri-urban places.
And yet I find that change is coming. After all, people are exposed to other cultures, where going in for a second relationship is not seen as a betrayal of the dead husband, as it tends to be here.
The need for social change and a questioning of norms is part of the journey you take your readers through in your novel. Were these consciously woven into the story or did the story just happen? Please tell us about the journey of the novel.
This was the theme I have had in my mind for a while now. It was a conscious decision, and not always an easy one to implement, because of the binaries involved.
The place where I live, the larger society, prides itself on being “liberal”. And it is, compared to some other places on the planet, or in the country. But in the twenty first century, we are aware that there is much more that needs to be done, a much longer path to be traversed. The theme came first. After which I began to think of the storyline, the characters, the incidents that would make the theme come alive, all in a fictional way, of course.
What Will People Say, the line, is a kind of whip used to keep “straying” members of society, usually young people, within the fold. But here I have inverted it …it is the older members, those who are supposed to uphold the status quo, who are doing what, for many, would be the unthinkable.
Do you still see widow remarriage as an issue? Is it still an issue in Northeast India as your book shows?
Assam is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-religious society.
The community I am describing is what is known as the “caste Hindu” society, in which, traditionally, widow remarriage is not “allowed”. Even now, even in urban Assamese society, it is uncommon. There are unspoken taboos, unwritten codes of conduct. The extreme strictness of the past has lessened no doubt, but also a lot depends on the economic and social status of the woman. I never, for instance, saw my grandmother, a staunch Brahmin, wear anything but stark white after she was widowed. Her vegetarian kitchen was separate from the main kitchen …leave aside meat or fish, even onions, garlic were not allowed there. My mother wanted to follow the same route after my father passed away, but her doctor forbade her from doing that, while her children insisted, she wear colour. Today, my generation of women wear colour and eat non-vegetarian after the demise of their husbands, so things are slowly changing. But a second marriage, or a romantic relationship, in middle age is still very rare indeed.
Your book describes middle class liberals, conservatives as well as immigrants and tribals. What kind of impact have tribals and immigrants had in Assam over time?
There have been many waves of migration into this fertile valley of the Brahmaputra. As a result, it is a rich cultural and linguistic mosaic. Different influences are at play all the time, communities that live in proximity to each other are definitely influenced. But it is a slow process, naturally. And usually takes place over generations.
You have hinted that tribals are more liberal and out of the framework of Hindu rituals. Is that a fact?
Many tribes are, in general, indeed more liberal when it comes to widow remarriage, as are the large Muslim and also the Christian communities. It is the “caste Hindus”, especially those from the “top” of the caste pyramid, who mostly have these taboos. The original inhabitants of these valleys were different ethnic groups, which, because of the riverine, heavily forested aspects of the region, tended to remain in isolation from each other. As a result, cultural practices were unique to each one. Different waves of immigrants from both the East of the region, from Southeast Asia and beyond, and from the rest of India in the west brought in different influences, which were absorbed slowly. We see this in the food practices, the music, the weaves and clothes that we traditionally wear, and religious and social practices, among other things.
How do your characters evolve? Out of fact or are they just a figment of your imagination?
All are creations of my mind, my imagination. But I try to keep them as real as possible. It is all fiction. I love adding layers to them as I go along, till they have their own individuality, their own body language, their own ways of thinking, speaking, their food preferences, everything. By the end, they are “real” to me, though they actually exist only within the pages of a book.
What writers/ musicians/art impact you as a writer? Is there any writer who you feel impacts you more than others?
My music gurus have impacted me in many ways, beyond music. Guru Birendra Kumar Phukan, especially, taught me …through his music …what it means to be steeped in spirituality, and how to aspire higher through Shastriya music, which, to him, and sometimes to me, too, was and is prayer.
As for writers, there are so many I admire deeply. Among the Assamese writers are the scholar and creative writer of the 15th-16th Century, the Saint Srimanta Sankardev, Jnanpith awardees Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya and Indira Goswami. I am always deeply moved by their humanity. Their works, their characters, are drenched in it.
Among writers that I have read in English are the obvious ones, so many of them …but for style and humour, I think nobody can beat P G Wodehouse, and for irony, Jane Austen. And my Go To book during the pandemic was Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, for an instant lifting of spirits.
You have written a lot of children’s stories and written columns. Have these impacted you as a novelist? How is writing a novel different from doing a fantasy-based children’s story or writing a column?
I have written biographies, short stories and essays too. Basically, I see myself as a storyteller, though I write non-fiction too. The children’s stories came from my observations of the child’s world at one time, the way they thought and reacted. My columns are commentaries on society, couched in different “rasas”, including the humorous, but are sometimes a narration in the form of a story. The practice of writing, whatever the genre, and the habit of observation, have all helped me in the marathon task of writing novels!
What can we look forward to from you next? Are you working on a new novel?
Yes. I do have a novel in the pipeline, am giving it some final touches now. But what is due to be published next is a biography of Dr Bhupen Hazarika, a monograph really. He is a musical icon and so much else for us. It is being published by Sahitya Akademi. And then there is a translation of a novella by Sahitya Akademi Awardee Dr Dhrubjyoti Borah, to be published later this year by Om Books. And then of course there are the columns which I really enjoy doing, since the paper that I write for, The Assam Tribune, reaches the deepest areas of rural Assam. Many of the readers of this column, ‘All Things Considered’ are first generation literates, and that makes me really happy.
Title: Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada
Author: Ujjal Dosanjh
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
The Punjabi Diaspora is a global phenomenon that has grown in size and complexity in recent years. It is estimated that there are around 20 million Punjabis living outside the Punjab region in India and Pakistan. This is stretching across multiple continents and countries. Punjabis have migrated to different parts of the world since the British Raj. However, this diaspora has become more visible in recent decades due to technology and global connectivity.
Highly diverse and dynamic, with different groups of Punjabis living in different places around the world. In North America, Punjabis are concentrated in the United States and Canada. In Europe they are mainly settled in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and France. In the Middle East, they are found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In South East Asia, they are mainly settled in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Punjabis have had a significant impact on the culture and economy of the countries where they have settled. Their positive contributions were felt in multiple industries, from agriculture to tech. They have been key to spurring economic growth in the areas where they have settled. They have also had a major influence on the culture and cuisine of these countries, with Punjabi food being a popular choice in many areas.
Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life : From India to Canada by Ujjal Dosanjh speaks about the Punjabi diaspora in all its splendor. Dosanjh was born in the Jalandhar district of Punjab in 1946. He emigrated to the UK in 1964 and from there to Canada in 1968. He was Premier of British Columbia from 2000 to 2001 and a Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament from 2004 to 2011, including a period as Minister of Health and Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, Human Rights and Immigration. In 2003 he was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred by the Government of India on overseas Indians.
The blurb contends: “Journey After Midnight is the compelling story of a life of rich and varied experience and rare conviction. With fascinating insight, Ujjal Dosanjh writes about life in rural Punjab in the 1950s and early ’60s; the Indian immigrant experience—from the late 19th century to the present day—in the UK and Canada; post-Independence politics in Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora— including the period of Sikh militancy—and the inner workings of the democratic process in Canada, one of the world’s more egalitarian nations.”
Dosanj states candidly: “Today’s world has few leaders brimming with great ideas. The paucity of great leaders afflicts India as well. There are no inspiring giants on the national stage tall enough to lead India out of the ethical and moral quagmire. Asked whether he was working to create a new India along with seeking its independence from Britain, Mahatma Gandhi had declared that he was trying to create a new Indian–an honest, fair and just Indian for a proud, progressive, prosperous and caring India. Since the Mahatma’s time the moral and ethical values of India have decayed. In Indian politics, civil service and public life, there is little evidence of the ideals he lived and died for.”
He continues: “A substantial portion of the Indian economy is underground; all due to the sadly enduring disease of corruption. The albatross of financial, ethical and moral corruption is strangulating and shortchanging the country. Those who say economic progress will by itself free India from corruption are just as wrong as those who in the 1950s maintained that education by itself would reduce corruption. It obviously hasn’t, and India finds itself counted among the most corrupt countries on earth. Corruption shatters human dreams and stunts ingenuity. It constrains personal and political liberties. It severely limits opportunities. The main hindrance in the path of social, political, economic and cultural progress is the disconnect between knowing what is right and doing the right thing; most know what is the right and the ethical thing to do, but they continue to do the wrong and the unethical thing; hence the ubiquitous corruption.”
Calling upon the Indians for a moral revolution Dosanj writes: “The sculpting of Gandhi’s Indians, and the building of the India of the dreams of its founding fathers and mothers, requires a moral and ethical revolution-a revolution of values that are of Indians, by Indians and for Indians. No matter how bleak the political and ethical scene today, I’m certain there are great minds fearless, humane and brave among the billion plus residents of India. We may not see them, but they exist. We may not know them, but they are among us. They must heed India’s call. They must come forward and lead. India’s destiny demands it.”
In the ‘Afterword’ he laments about the state of affairs of Punjab in recent times: “Punjab is staring at the prospect of turmoil, radicalization and violent fundamentalism, and yet many in the government and otherwise seem obsessed with presenting and treating the likes of the late singer Moosewala as modern Punjab’s heroes. That the young singer’s life was cut short by gangsters’ guns was horrible and must be condemned. Beyond that the AAP and others must be careful not to glorify violence. Unfortunately, almost the whole of Punjab seems taken with Moosewala; the young man was a talented singer but much of his poetry and music was about guns and aggressive machismo. Is that what Punjab needs and must idolize?”
Dosanjh writes candidly about his dual identity as a first-generation immigrant. And he describes how he has felt compelled to campaign against the discriminatory policies of his adopted country. He opposes regressive and extremist tendencies within the Punjabi community. His outspoken views against the Khalistan movement in the 1980s led to death threats and vicious physical assaults, and he narrowly escaped the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Yet he has remained steadfast in his defence of democracy, human rights and effective governance in the two countries he calls home—Canada and India.
The writing style is fluid and languid. This is not a book that can be judged on the basis of its literary merit. It isn’t just a simple memoir, but rather a record of a turbulent period in India’s history. It is a book that represents a lifetime journey, crossing oceans and cultures. As a memoir, Ujjal Dosanjh’s book is at once personal and political, but most importantly, it is inspiring.
.
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
Jaydeep Srangi is an academic who writes beautiful poetry. letters in lower case is his tenth collection of poems. The poem that bears the title in the first section, blithely mentions the names of super figures such as Tagore, Tutankhamun, Ashoka and others in lower case, like it is an act of defiance, with the last three lines taking on a tongue-in-cheek tone to explain:
my letter to my boy hood idol is undelivered navigating an outswinger, the peon is on leave. all letters are in lower case. (Letters in Lower Case)
He dedicates this book to his father-in law:
I know not how to pray -- the hot tears I possess with that I will worship your cold feet. (Dear Departed)
The poems are classified broadly under three sections – ‘Laws of the Land’, ‘Gesture of Surrender’ and ‘The Window you Hold’. Poetry is often born between the said and the unsaid. Sarangi’s best poems leave some things half-said to reverberate in the mind of the reader. Sarangi returns to the lower case in another poem in the last section, only this time it is not just letters but life itself that is in lower case.
I take off the shirt that i liked so much, names written in only lower case here i shall rest in peace. (Life in Lower Case)
The ‘I’ takes its place in a diminutive ‘i’.
Sarangi’s poetry has a distinct sense of geography. Jhargram in West Bengal where the poet spent his boyhood days, together with the river Dulung, become powerful motifs. They are magnified manifold times to haunt, to evoke associations and emotions that one cannot always explain. Sarangi writes:
Stand near me, speak to me. Time arrives at my lips.
He goes on to evokes a series of vivid images before he concludes:
With body carrying memories, dysfunctional habits, I wait for your green touch sometime, somewhere. (When You Visit Jhargram)
In a number of poems, Sarangi has internalised the river so deeply that it seems to flow in his bloodstream.
Dulung in summer. Where farmers can cross Cows can walk down. Each leaf is green.
In love, I ask you to become a river. …
Dulung is sleepless tonight. It can’t wait to see How dreams meet in a river. (Gifts of the Night)
Dulung calls you at this hour, trees are deep with the night, mysteries of the world are back with bats calling a bad weather. (Dulung Moment)
where do we all go? my mate, you know me -- for years, since my family nestled on your bank you have watched me with care and concern. you always instructed me what to do and how to do.
dear river, pure silver of the earth true mineral in humans, by blood and voice lead me to your honest home, always faithful, but never take away the window you hold. (My Growing up as a River)
Like rivers, the rain holds a special fascination for poets, music composers, singers, dancers, and all artists. Interestingly, it means different things to different people. Sarangi’s poem “Rain Means” needs to be read whole to absorb the impact of the line ‘Rain brings me back to you’ that begins each stanza. So does the beautifully written poem ‘Rains in my Garden of Dreams’ and ‘Raining Always’. Life, memory, new experiences are all inextricably woven into the poem ‘Where the Rain is Born’. However, my favourite is ‘Waiting for Summer Rains in Kolkata’ with its laconic, understated humour, held on a tight leash. There is supplication, anticipation, yet an awareness of the wayward, capricious nature of rain. It is structured in a superbly ironical mode.
If she decides to come, she may not.
If the forecast is, she will come, she will not come.
Taking her on our side, we keep white flowers on doorways
The third section of the collection is refreshing in its mix of poems about some of the most precious things in our lives, such as friendship. A poet’s best tribute to a friend is to pen a poem that could be remembered. It was a joy to read Sarangi’s ‘Makers’ to his ‘Friend Forever’, reminiscent of feelings evoked while reading Alfred Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’.
With friends, Sarangi returns to rain again: ‘my old friends are fresh raindrops’ he declares. Other poems evoke memories so vivid and alive that Sarangi could have opened a box of perfectly preserved treasures. ‘In Folders’, he gives a feel of nostalgia with Jamdani muslin saris or his grandmother’s ‘delightful Bengali silks’. It is in the interstices between paradoxes and enigmatic ironies that Sarangi’s poems speak much the way life does – in fragments, snatches, lucid glimpses and haunting fade outs.
Keep me in the waiting Once you attend to my call My lines will lose charm. (Gifts of the Night)
Lakshmi Kannan, also known by her Tamil pen-name ‘Kaaveri’, is a bilingual writer. Her twenty-five books include poems, novels, short stories and translations. For details regarding the fellowships and residencies she received, please visit her website http://www.lakshmikannan.in
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Author: K.R. Meera, translated from Malayalam by Abhirami Girija Sriram and K. S. Bijukumar)
Publisher: PenguinRandom House India
In a multicultural and multilingual country like India, it is very difficult to ascertain the progress of literary creativity in all the regions because of language barriers. Translation is one of the means through which this deficiency can be met. Recently even big publishing houses are paying a lot of attention to translate texts from different bhasha[1] literatures into English so that they can cater to a pan-Indian readership. K.R. Meera’s original Malayalam novel Jezebel is one such recent addition. It has the eponymous protagonist Jezebel, a young doctor in Kerala, struggling against the cruel realities of a patriarchal world –realities that not even her education, resolve or professional brilliance can shield her from. Trapped in an abusive and claustrophobic marriage that had been arranged by one of her relatives for some ulterior motive, the novel begins with a powerful metaphor of suffering and endurance:
“As she stood in the family court, pelted with the blame of having paid a contract killer to murder her husband, Jezebel had this revelation: To endure extreme torture, imagine yourself as Christ on the cross.”
In this novel, which takes the form of a courtroom drama to show us the rich inner worlds of its characters, we see Jezebel reflect on her life and its pivotal points as she takes the stand. Through her memories, we see her grow from a reticent, serious young woman to a rebel who refuses to bend to the conventions of society. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Jezebel was a prophet and she was the only one to challenge prophet Elijah. She was at the same time a strong woman and an accursed one. Like the Biblical story of Queen Jezebel, who was much maligned as a scheming harlot and infamously thrown to her death from her palace window, Jezebel is a novel that asks if independent women can ever live lives that are free of judgement. The marriage between Jezebel and Ahab was an agreement between two communities that worshipped two different gods. Poor King Ahab was a good king who ruled for twenty-two years. His only mistake was to marry the Sidonian princess Jezebel. And that too to improve relations between the two kingdoms and to trade with them. When they got married, Queen Jezebel brought her gods along with her to Samaria. In our protagonist’s case, her already contentious divorce proceedings go suddenly awry, and her unhappy marriage holds complex secrets. Throughout the novel, K.R. Meera’s powerful prose makes resonant allusions to the Bible in different ways that elucidate the correlations between legend and the protagonist’s life while also exploring how sexuality and gender roles are manipulated by the dictates of society.
In the novel we are shown how Jezebel’s arranged marriage with Doctor Jerome George Marakkaran ended in disaster from day one, and in the two and a half years they lived together as husband and wife, their marriage was never consummated. Her father-in-law, George Jerome Marakkaran is a brute straight from TV serials, and starts cursing Jezebel right from the first day believing in his god-ordained mission to punish her in any form whatsoever. The court hearings frame the narrative, with the (very filmy) lawyer’s dramatic queries triggering flashbacks, each a tale of tremendous misery, shocking injustice or unbearable trauma – a veritable catalogue of the woes of a half of the world even in this day and age. The mother-in-law, Lilly George Marakkaran, however, is kind-hearted even if meek, and she too secretly supports her daughter-in-law to break the shackles of patriarchy and go out into the world – something she was unable to do. This inability leads to her suicide in the end. Jezebel’s parents, too, are characters who refuse to come out of clichés. The result is a series of unfortunate events, and they all end up in a family court for divorce. In order to narrate the plight of her protagonist from the very beginning, Meera creates the canvas with plenty of characters, who like Chaucer’s ‘God’s plenty’ fill the pages of the novel from the beginning to the end. Most of these characters are stereotypes and yet they manage to make the story convincing, though melodramatic at times. Jezebel has a difficult childhood growing up with her mother Ammachi who explains every move in Biblical terms and who argues that “a good woman will not ever speak a word” against her husband, however worthless he is; her maternal grandmother Valiyammachi is the one who understands her and asks her to discontinue her marriage immediately and live life on her own terms. Throughout the novel she offers her shoulders for Jezebel to weep upon.
In between, a lot of melodrama is thrown in. The novel itself confesses the soap opera part:
“John’s wedding was a frugal affair. George Jerome Marakkaran stood ramrod stiff, hands clasped behind his back, chin tilted up at a hundred-and-twenty degrees. In his sandalwood-coloured silk jibba and gold-bordered mundu, he looked every bit the father in television serials.”
The rigid patriarch that he is, George Jerome Marakkaran is no exception; almost all characters and situations befit TV serials. There are no surprises, no nuances, no gray between black and white. To give an entire cross-section of society, we have sympathetic characters like Father Ilanjikkal from the nearby church, Jezebel’s uncle Abraham Chammanatt, who was a party to the injustice inflicted upon her and to whom she begs, “Please give me back my life. That’s all. My happiness …my ability to laugh.” We also have sexually abused children, references to other broken marriages, gay relationships, the story of Advait, who had undergone a sex-change surgery to become a man, and who tells Jezebel, “To prove that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you need a certificate.” On another occasion explains it thus:
“‘Society is a great playwright, Jezebel. Our job is to act out our cliched roles again and again in the ancient play that it has scripted. Every role has its prescribed dress code, make-up, hairstyle, and dialogue. Our job is to play those roles, no matter how ill-fitting the costume, without changing the course of the script. If I decide to change my costume midway through the play, then what will happen to the play? What will the audience, eager to hear a story that they like, do?’ he sighed.”
Amidst the struggle of Jezebel to come to terms with society, Meera also mentions the flitting relationships that Jezebel undergoes with different men and all of which fizzle out due to different reasons. When her lawyer informs her that the verdict for her divorce suit would come out soon, this is how Jezebel reacts:
“Verdict? What verdict? Verdict against whom? In an instant, Jezebel was flung from heaven to the netherworld. She despaired about the she-who-was, and the she-who-had-been. She felt emboldened thinking about the she-who-would-be, though. Just then, she saw four creatures in the centre of and around the throne under the sea. They had many eyes in the front and the back. The first creature looked like Ranjith, the second had Jerome’s face, the third resembled Nandagopan, the fourth had Kabir’s looks. The four creatures had six wings each, many eyes all around and within. They proclaimed day and night. In their midst, she saw a lamb that looked like it had been slain.”
Each ordeal leads the reader to the next in a highly skilfully woven narrative that becomes unputdownable after the opening. That, arguably, is what Meera is aiming for, getting every reader to care for the fate of the characters no matter how stereotypical they might be. Indeed, their being stereotypes helps in making the story universal, whereas nuances and specifics might have made it different. While Meera’s story-telling abilities are way above average, the simplistic treatment of many subplots may mar the reading experience for a few readers. Paradoxically, that is what at the same time may compel the kind of readers who don’t bother about ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ to keep reading this novel till the end, and even think through it.
Jezebel reflects on her life and its pivotal points as she takes the stand. Through her memories, we see her grow from a reticent, serious young woman to a rebel who refuses to bend to the conventions of society. Jezebel is a novel that asks if independent women can ever live lives that are free of judgement. K.R. Meera’s prose, in this elegant translation from the Malayalam by Abhirami Girija Sriram and K.S. Bijukumar, makes resonant allusions to the Bible in powerful ways that elucidate the correlations between legend and the protagonist’s life while also exploring how sexuality and gender roles are manipulated by the dictates of society.
The beginning of the novel is set seven years after that day the Marakkaran family arrives at Jerusalem, Jezebel’s home, to “appraise” her. A broken Jezebel is facing a barrage of questions from Jerome’s lawyer in a family court which is hearing her divorce petition. She feels like Jesus Christ on the cross, enduring extreme torture. There is yet another round of accusations, all built around an alleged attempt to murder her husband. A courtroom saga begins as Jezebel looks back and remembers scenes from her marriage that brought her exciting life and career to a screeching halt.
Jezebel’s is not the only story of suffering in the novel. There is Sneha, a schoolgirl traumatised by the sexual abuse at the hands of her math teacher, and Angel, a four-year-old girl, who survived a mass suicide by her family because of debts, only to be sexually assaulted by her sixty-year-old neighbour. Jezebel is also a story of the will to survive physical and mental wounds and standing up to force the change of a medieval mindset. Anitha, one of the novel’s characters, picks up the brushes to become an artist after both her husband and lover abandon her. And Jezebel stands tall above everybody else while she fights a system rigged in favour of men. The novel is a serious attempt to end the silent suffering of gender injustices in homes and outside, especially when women find themselves always constrained by the limits that patriarchy imposed upon them. Indeed, the work is a testament to the fact that even in this modern age, in India at least, patriarchal social norms wield an inordinate power over women and restrict their ability to exercise their agency and achieve self-determination.
Reading through the 390 pages of a novel is not an easy task but the way K.R. Meera manages to retain the reader’s interest is praiseworthy. Despite having so many stereotypical characters strewn throughout the narrative, Meera’s manner of storytelling is unique and like a detective novel one often goes on guessing what happened next.
The book drags a little towards the end and would have read much better if some sort of precision was adopted in the narrative technique. To remain politically correct and elaborate on the reasons and ramifications of the story line sometimes, such details may have been unnecessary.
In the author’s acknowledgements section Meera states that she shadowed Dr. Dhanya Lakshmi in her professional life and for verifying the medical facts and interpretations in the novel. In some places these details seem superfluous and could have been avoided. The author also thanks the advocates who accompanied her to Kottayam’s family courts and observed the court proceedings. The way the interjections of the lawyer and the judge are narrated in the novel sometimes seems rather contrived as the author seems to rely on sensationalism as found in films. The translators use informal expressions in Malayalam for the retention of the local idiom and unlike several other translated texts where the reader is often confused because different relationships are addressed in the local lingo, in this novel it does not seem so. Finally, the way issues of ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ – the two main thrust areas of the novel – that plague contemporary society in Kerala even today, are wonderfully resolved by the author must be mentioned. K.R. Meera tried to break free from Malayalam literary traditions. Jezebel’s reluctance to take a stand for herself in the novel and the consequent adversities in her life tell a tale of epistemic marginalization. According to the author, “I have seen bold, patient women take their time to stand up for themselves. What we often forget is that to sprout wings, one must go through the stages of being a cocoon and a pupa.” The last sentence of the novel therefore speaks of the resilience of Jezebel when she turned her face up to the sun. The old Jezebel was no more. The new Jezebel is one who received the revelation — “And so, the woman adorned with the sun will weep and wail no more.” The novel is recommended to all readers who will find interest in reading about contemporary Christian society in Kerala and realise that societies in other parts of India are also not free from accepting a powerful educated woman who wants to live her life without paying heed to the shackles imposed at every step through patriarchal domination.
Shesher Kobita(1928-29)Translation of Shesher Kobita by Radha Chakravarty (2011)
Romance and reality inevitably clash. While Tagore is not unconvinced about the existence of conjugal love in some of his stories, conjugality and romance make uneasy bedfellows inFarewell Song. Marriage is rooted in the humdrum, quotidian, everyday but romantic love dwells on another astral plane. It is the realisation of the gap between the two that informs the novel/la, a realisation that never the twain shall truly meet, manifesting itself in the pages of this complex narrative that folds into itself a romantic love story, social satire and literary criticism. The multiple strands are brilliantly woven into the plot of this novel, which could be classified as a prose-poem. Its very title, “Shesher Kobita”, literally meaning last poem and translated by Professor Radha Chakravarty as Farewell Song, is evocative of its lyricality.
Shesher Kobita is primarily a love story between two young people, Amit Raye and Labanyalata, both of whom express their love in the most lyrical vein imaginable. Labanya, like many of Amit’s compatriots in Calcutta, is an avid reader and staunch admirer of Rabindranath Tagore’s writing, and her familiarity with Tagore’s work is evident in much of her conversation and in many of her perceptions. Amit, on the other hand, persists in citing the words of a ‘modern’ poet, Nibaran Chakrabarti, who is a persona created by Amit himself, to express his views about poetry. Readers see through this ruse quickly enough, and the third person narrative , often allows space for narrative commentary. As the translator, Radha Chakravarty points out, “Two schools of Bengali poetry, pro and anti-Tagore, are pitted against each other through the dialectic of the Amit-Labanya encounter.” Tagore cleverly plays out and into the literary /poetic debates of his later decades (1920s onwards) in order to prove his contemporary relevance and above all, the modernity of his work.
Amit, the protagonist, is from an elite and rich family, privileged enough to have gone to Oxford and wealthy enough to be under no compulsion to earn immediately. He’s a dilettante who is interested in the vagaries of style, which is seen as being a notch higher than fashion. Brilliant but restless, mercurial as quicksilver, he cannot commit himself to any one thing or relationship. Yet, getting away from the highly artificial social life of Kolkata, to the relatively pristine and pastoral world of Shillong, he falls deeply, unequivocally in love, with the quiet, studious but unassuming young girl, Labanyalata and establishes a soul-connection, as it were, with her. Yet this deep commitment pales and collapses in the face of the demands of the everyday social world. It is this space–“habitus”– which is occupied by Amit’s sister’s friend, Ketaki (Katy) Mitra. To quote from Radha Chakravarty’s introduction to her translation of the book, “Two forms of love are presented through Amit’s involvements with Katy Mitter and Labanya-one rooted in the material and the social, the other, embedded deep within the soul”
The expression of this soulful love dips into and is expressed through not only Bangla literature and poetry but is steeped in the idioms of English poetry, from Shakespeare to the metaphysical poets. Seeing a book of John Donne’s poems on Labanya’s table, Amit quotes, “for God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love.” And yet, his intense love seems doomed as an idealistic ephemeral bliss, to be swept away by the ‘real’. Not a keen observer of nature, Amit seems to indulge frequently in “pathetic fallacy”, appropriating aspects of the landscape in order to express his moods and feelings. The landscape is often symbolic with Amit and Labanya meeting for their trysts at the site of a waterfall, always a significant feature of Tagore’s landscapes. Mita (meaning friend) and Banya (of the forest) –the lovers’ names for each other– create a world of their own, full of poetry and lyricality. And yet, inevitably, inexorably, the social, material, everyday world presses upon them and the lovers part. And yet, as the novel draws to a close, we do not experience this parting/ estrangement as a tragedy but almost as much of a resolution and closure that the novel could offer.
For Amit Ray/e is an embodiment of the modern split subject, the divided self. He has made up a world of words, and it is in this world that his heart and mind dwell. It is this inner space-the still centre of the turning world (to quote from another modern poet) that Labanya inhabits. And this is what Labanya, intelligent and perceptive, realises. Labanya, in her own way, is the new woman- independent and emotionally self-reliant, reminding one of Kalyani in ‘Aparichita‘, translated by Aruna Chakravarti as ‘The Stranger‘. They are women who dream of a life beyond domesticity and conjugal felicity. For them marriage would be a slippery slope, not a nesting ground. In these versions of ‘modern’ love, each person, especially the women, are complete and self-assured in themselves. This is particularly true of Kalyani, where we get a sense that she towers over the suitors in her life.
Labanya is able to connect to connect with Amit as a friend. to Amit, the friendship acts as an anchor, a stay against the vacuousness of his urban existence. Such a soulful connection belongs to the realm of dreams and these connects are what dreams are made of. However, dreams often shatter, or worse, fester. When Amit is asked whether in marriage, partnership and companionship cannot combine, his reply is illuminating. Marriage is the finite to the infinity of love and romance. He compares his relationship to the westernised Ketaki/Katy, his girlfriend in England who later becomes his wife, after the interlude with Labanya. “My initial relationship with Katy was indeed based on love but it was like water in a pitcher, to be collected daily, and used up everyday.” In contrast, his love for Labanya “remains a lake, its waters not be carried home but meant for” his “consciousness to swim in”. This realisation creates no inner conflict because he also glimpses that Labanya is someone who lives in his dreams, “in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses” (Tagore’s lines from Gitanjali, a basket of song-offerings). In a serendipitious resolution, Labanya also finds her companion in domesticity, her father’s brilliant student Shobhanlal, who has yearned for her for years, only to be spurned. Thus the story becomes not a tragedy of betrayal, but an extended musing and discussion on love, romance and marriage of the modern subject, in a world where the ground beneath the feet of the characters is constantly shifting.
It is this sense of a world in flux and its nuances that Radha Chakravarty’s translation deftly captures. Translating a novel of discussion requires a constant awareness of key concepts and multiple contexts — literary, social, cultural and philosophical. As a skilled translator and litterateur with an extensive repertoire and many years of experience, the editor-translator has brought her many accomplishments to the task of translation. Translating poetry and its nuances is challenging; here, the translation conveys immense wealth of meaning and richness of detail. The novel, in a sense, is a plea for romantic yearning and aspiration, for reaching out to those “unheard melodies” that are far sweeter than those which are available for the asking.
Unlike Bankim, who had depicted the new woman in an unflattering light a few decades earlier, Rabindranath was essentially sympathetic to women. Women were often among his closest associates and companions, and his friendship with women like the Argentinian Victoria Ocampo not only spurred him into song , but made him rethink the contours of modern cosmopolitan womanhood. Well-read and accomplished, women like Labanya not only challenge traditional ideas of womanhood, but is reflexive and aware enough not to judge Katy Mitra. Torn between the pull of intellectual independence and the desire for surrender, Labanya also represents the emergence of the female subject in modern Bangla literature.
.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers
Author: Anjali Deshpande / Nandita Haksar
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
A fire broke out around 7 pm on 18 July 2012 at Maruti Suzuki India’s manufacturing plant in Manesar (Haryana). It claimed a manager’s life. The workers have been in the public eye since. Basically, worker-management tension snowballed into a major fracas that day — a fire broke out in the plant. The manager, Awanish Dev, was suffocated to death. Workers were held responsible.
Within days, over two thousand temporary workers and 546 permanent workers were dismissed by the company. Thirteen of them— including the entire workers’ union leadership-were later charged for murder, ending yet another independent body for collective bargaining.
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workersby Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar tells the story of the biggest car manufacturer in India through the voices of the workers, interviewed over three years. They give us an understanding that the Maruti Suzuki revolution wasn’t the unmitigated success it was touted to be when they tell us about their resistance to being turned into robots by uncompromising management. It becomes abundantly clear that the Maruti Suzuki revolution was not what was expected. It is a fascinating account of what happened behind the scenes, particularly what happened both in the beginning and during the ensuing years. A closer look at the facts would cast doubt on the anti-worker judgment.
Anjali Deshpande is a journalist and activist. She has participated in many campaigns and movements including the women’s movement and the Bhopal gas tragedy survivors’ struggle for justice. She is also a novelist and writes in Hindi. Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer, teacher and campaigner. She represents contract workers and trade unions in the Supreme Court. She writes extensively and has published several books, including on the trade union movement in Kashmir and migrant workers from the Northeast.
Says the blurb: “Unions are the last, and often only, line of defence workers have in modern industries, especially when the management isn’t averse to undermining their rights, dignity and health in pursuit of higher profits. This was true of Maruti Suzuki. Workers would get a seven-and-a-half-minute break from physically demanding work—precise to the hundredth of a second—to run to the toilet half a kilometre away and force a samosa and piping hot tea down their throats. But they were denied two minutes of silence in the memory of a deceased colleague’s mother.”
The sabotage of their unionising efforts, generally in collusion with the Haryana state government, came as no surprise to the workers. Yet they struggled through and managed to form successive representative bodies at both the Gurgaon plant, and the one set up in Manesar in 2007. But not only were they crushed, some were never officially registered. The often misrepresented events of July 2012 were far from an isolated incident. But few today, as then, are willing to see the matter from workers’ perspective.
This book was the culmination of months of work by the authors, including locating and interviewing many workers and trade union leaders, including former life convicts out on parole. In the book, oral history narratives are interwoven with detailed analyses of legal processes as they are framed against the backdrop of widespread labour unrest, which makes for a book that has been meticulously researched. The context of a welfare state transforming into a corporate state, in which profits trump citizens’ rights, and Japanese-style management policies ruthlessly trample on workers’ rights, is clearly delineated, as is the sustained resistance of workers against this development.
As the factory got privatised, while Suzuki made more profits, workers experienced a steady deterioration in their work conditions. The level of automation increased, the number of robots grew and so did the dehumanisation of working conditions. The Japanese have a word for a phenomenon that distinguishes modern Japanese work culture: `karoshi’, meaning `death from overwork’. This culture was imported onto Indian soil.
Several changes were instituted after Suzuki tightened its grip on the Indian production units. Among these were some pseudo-spiritual measures: vastu expert, Daivajna K S Somaiyaji, conducted rituals over two or three weeks to rid the Manesar plant of `negative energy’ which he said was due to its once being a burial ground, and because three temples were razed to set up the plant. Brahmakumaris also taught yoga and meditation to workers, specifically to keep their emotions in check!
It is a must-read book for anyone who is interested in organisational behaviour, labour relations, social work, industrial psychology, law, or political science. Aside from the clarity of the writing, the vivid descriptions bring alive the lives of the people who participated in one of the most widely known but least understood conflicts in management-worker relation.
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
Borderless 