[Did my best to write a "good" Sri Lanka story, but I was a tourist in that country. Like Nadine Gordimer's definition in The Pickup: "...The tourist who like all tourists didn't know what she was really looking at." This came out in Outlook Traveller's August issue.]
Michael Ondaatje tried to warn us, he really did, but I wasn't
listening hard enough:
"All this glory
preparing us for Anuradhapura
its night faith
A city with the lap
and spell of a river…"
he wrote in Handwriting. Now, after a four-hour drive in molasses-slow traffic from Colombo, a journey pleasantly broken by sampling halts for rambutans, mangosteens, and egg hoppers (the classic eat-the-container dish), all washed down with Elephant ginger beer and king coconut water, our neatly typed, unforgiving itinerary collides head-on with the generous sprawl of Anuradhapura.
This is where one story of Sri Lanka begins, with Pandukabhaya, a prince hunted by his uncles, befriended by yakshas and bhoots, who won his spurs in a grisly battle. The Mahavamsa recounts: "When the prince saw the pyramid of skulls, where the skulls of his uncles lay uppermost, he said: "Tis like a heap of gourds; and therefore they
named (the place) Labugamaka."' But the city he founded, that would last for over 1,500 years before the kings of Sri Lanka shifted to Polonnaruwa, was called Anuradhapura after Pandukabhaya's great-uncle, Anuradha, who was presumably too bright to fight a warrior who had yakshas at his beck and call.
The old cities of Anuradhapura blend seamlessly into the new; ruins rise from the forests, from behind new buildings, from the sidewalls of teastalls. This is tourist hell, if you're on a rigid timetable, a nightmare of signs pointing to the ancient tank decorated with rearing king cobra heads where schoolchildren splash around; the pristine dagoba, white against an eggshell blue sky, where a tired monk sleeps
against its huge silhouette, his robes fluttering in the strong wind; the famous moonstone, its carvings gleaming in the sun; the barnacle cluster of buildings at Issurumuniya where the sculpted form of The Man and His Horse compete for attention with a frieze of two lovers.
It isn't all poetry in stone. Outside the shrine to Sri Maha Bodhi, the sacred Bo tree whose seed was exported to Sri Lanka along with the teachings of the Buddha, the flow of the long line of votive lamps, black with years of grease, is broken by metal detectors. In 2002, while pilgrims were at prayer during a major festival, LTTE troops opened fire, killing 80 people.
I'm trying to make sense of all this; history, guide maps, stumbling tourists caught unprepared like us by the quiet, unobtrusive but unignorable scale on which Anuradhapura unfolds. Then I feel a gentle tug on my T-shirt and look down to see a tiny, old bird-like bhikkuni in maroon robes and ancient Reebok sneakers. Her eyes are gleaming with curiosity, but we have no language in common; she frowns, then
points to the dagoba in the distance. "Bee-yoo-tiful?" she says questioningly. "Beautiful," I agree. I offer her a Polo mint, she reciprocates with slices of raw mango, and we share this odd meal in perfect accord.
I miss her later in the evening, when we're at Mihintale, a quiet cluster of shrines populated by shy monkeys and hawkers, neither of whom have learned the art of hardsell. As my complaining bones are beginning to remember, the chief feature of
shrines, Buddhist or Hindu, seems to be the architect's desire to make pilgrims climb a lot for their glimpse of God. Here, a trail of stone steps leads down into the jungle towards a small sliver between two mammoth rocks where the first disciple of the Buddha meditated, the emerald green forests of Lanka splayed out before him. There are no memories of blood here, just graffiti confessing almost apologetically
in the curving letters of the Sinhala script to some schoolboy crush.
The rock fortress of Sigiraya is a reminder that history rarely chronicles the doings of peaceniks. King Kassyapa, the man who built this massive complex out of a 600-foot high rock, dealt with the usual father-son disagreements by bumping off his dad, King Datusena. Sigiriya was built in the shape of a crouching lion; only the paws,
the toenails long, curved and oddly manicured, survive, but to ascend the fortress you must go up through what used to be the lion's throat.
Scores of schoolchildren rampage cheerfully up and down a vertiginious staircase cut into the rock (they're everywhere, as though the school board of Sri Lanka has decided to swap monuments for classrooms). They giggle at the maidens of Sri Lanka, immortalized in vivid frescoes on a wall below the lion's paws, and giggle even harder when the guide points out a mistake where the artist added an extra nipple to an already well-endowed bosom. The palace-fortress was turned into a monastery when Kassyapa died, and the monks disapprovingly destroyed most of the frescoes. I'm not sure the artists would have been pleased to learn that of all their work, what's been preserved includes the three-nippled error. But then again, we're talking monks, not art critics.
From atop the fortress, whipped by the breeze, what comes into relief are the fortifications, the watch-points, the 360 degree view of the plains ringed by hills. That lion has long since crumbled into dust, but if it could speak, what it would say is, only the paranoid survive. Kassyapa died almost by accident: riding into battle, his elephant turned aside at a swamp. His armies assumed the king was injured or dead, and fled in terror. According to legend, the king, betrayed by a marsh, killed himself rather than be taken captive.
There's a point in any trip where, tourist or traveller, serendipity intervenes; and since Sri Lanka is the place where the word was coined by Hugh Walpole, for 'Serendip', island of peace and unexpected, fortuitous happenings, it must happen here. We begin to meet the Buddha on the road, as if He's decided to rework the itinerary. In Dambulla, a contemporary statue of the Buddha in shrieking gold, decorated with crude pink lotuses, can't detract from the majesty and harmony of the images in the five cave temples.
The first temple was carved into the rock by a refugee king, and some of his loneliness seems to have infected the quiet, sleeping figure of the Buddha enshrined in stone here, around 1 BC. In the second cave, the drip of water from the ceiling, collected and used for sacred rituals, is all that's audible as spectacular images of the Buddha and of Hindu deities dominate the huge space under a painted fresco sky,
the 19th century colours contrasting with the agelessness of stone. Outside, monkeys play with purple lotuses as a sleeping cat keeps one wary eye on them.
We meet the Buddha again at Aukana, where a magnificent standing Buddha carved out of a single piece of rock testifies to a competition between master and student. According to local legend, the master finished carving the Aukana Buddha before his student finished; the student accepted defeat, leaving the Sasseruwa image unfinished. A monk meekly greets us, his ochre robes sounding a high note of colour
against the beige stone; he meekly sweeps the red dust in front of the statue; he stands with meek patience, waiting for us to leave. It is only when Roy, our much-tried guide, bows in reverence to him that we learn he's the head monk. We bow; he blesses us, sticks the broom in a corner, and goes off to his classes.
I think of him when I see the monks at Kandy, where the Temple of the Tooth guards one of the most sacred relics of Sri Lanka, one of the Buddha's teeth apparently snatched from the funeral pyre in 543 BC. The monks here are sleek and watchful; they exude power as much as wisdom; they are shadowed by bodyguards in white shirts and dark glasses. We've seen this in a few other places, including one temple where I'm told the head monk was shot at by a fellow brother in a bid for control of the monastery some years ago. Now they're all bulletproof monks.
The Buddha's tooth was smuggled into Sri Lanka in the elaborate hairstyle of a princess, it's been in and out of Kandy, up and down the countryside, trapped by the legend that says who owns it will rule Lanka. In the 16th century, the Portuguese seized the Tooth and burned it to ashes. One version says that the Tooth miraculously
reconstructed itself; another says that the monks had the real Tooth hidden away safely, so what the Portuguese destroyed was just a replica. (Incisor, canine or molar? Blasphemy, but I can't help wondering.)
No one knows the whole truth, but everyone believes that nothing but the Tooth is ensconced in Kandy's temple. I see the devotion shining from the eyes of worshippers, the care with which even the humblest lotuses are added to the heap of flowers to form a pattern, and I realise it doesn't matter. In a few weeks, when the annual perahara (religious procession) goes out and the sacred elephant bears the casket of the tooth on his back, everyone will bow down to what they firmly believe is the real thing.
The evening in Kandy is magical, with the lights of the town softly glowing in the mist from the river; the city provides the pause, the space for reflection that even the most driven tourist needs. It's almost possible to forget the twin frescoes in the Temple. The first, ancient, beautiful, is torn to bits, spattered with bulletholes, the souvenirs of a 1998 bombing of the temple by the LTTE; the second is a perfect replica of the first, hanging defiantly beside the tattered original.
But the next day brings peace in the form of elephants, at the Pinnawela Orphanage for pachyderms. The herd splashes in the river, the mothers protecting the two youngest calves from too much roughhousing; they beg furtively for bananas when the mahout isn't looking and sulk when it's time to leave the water, their trunks swaying in complaint as they lumber up the track. One--her name is Sama--limps along on three legs; the fourth was blown away by a landmine.
Later, in Galle, the severe beauty of the Dutch Reformed Church, with its antique church organ, is undercut by the sign that refers to the "188 members" who "had their own church-chairs, carried by slaves". Galle is impatient to move on from the tsunami, though on the road from Colombo, we see the signs touting ruined trains and destroyed villages, tourists videotaping each other's offerings of chocolates
and chips to the hard-eyed children of Thalwatta who can speak English: "Hello! Help? Tsunami. Money?" Galle stadium was smashed into pieces; but the Fort next to it is intact, the "umbrella lovers" cuddling on its walls under the cover of sunshades. It is, we are informed, because of their "goings-on" and "what-all" that the Lighthouse of Galle is now closed to tourists.
Back in Colombo, a corpse has been found in Cinnamon Gardens; the mystery unravels to reveal an underworld killing worthy of Bombay. We relax that evening with the wonderful couple who runs Barefoot, a café, gallery and shop rolled into one; we watch Dominic Sansoni's stark film on war-torn Sri Lanka; we listen to old rock n'roll standards at a local nightclub.
No tourist could "do" Sri Lanka in a week; the real country is caught somewhere between the war stories and those ageless Buddhas. Perhaps it's to be found in Kelaniya, the Buddhist Maha Vihara outside Colombo where the Buddha preached 2,000 years ago, where the ceilings tell fantastical stories and the gods are shrouded in veils of the lightest gauze, where a young boy monk talks excitedly about his months of study in the UK, where rows of pilgrims pray and chant, their faces illuminated in the gathering night by flickering flames from oil lamps.
Perhaps it's lurking in Michael Ondaatje's sensuous poetry about monks who came down the rivers and the indelible scent of cinnamon, or in Carl Muller's rambunctious prose about Burgher life, or Shyam Selvadurai's thoroughly modern tales of Colombo. Or perhaps all I was looking for was an elephant with a taste for slightly raw bananas, her spine curved into a question mark with the effort of getting by on
three legs, who has to limp to get anywhere at all. But she gets around all the same.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
I'll just take the leftovers, thanks
Like most relics, the Buddha's Tooth, preserved carefully in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, has quite a history. It was smuggled from India into Sri Lanka in a woman's elaborate hairstyle; it travelled up and down the countryside as monks, kings and invaders tried to get their hands on it; the Portuguese claimed to have destroyed the relic, but no, say believers, what they burned was not the real tooth, just a replica.
The tooth itself is only rarely on display, and what most worshippers get to see is not even the casket that contains the tooth, but the container that contains the casket, if you get my drift.
I've never quite understood the fervour that relics inspire, though I respect the devotion of true believers for whom these things--a bit of bone, a bit of shrivelled flesh, a bit of cloth--are actual conduits to the divine. I have a blunt mind, one that forces me to think about the cremation or burial of saints and religious figures, and picture the mad scramble for the mortal remains.
And the old imagination works overtime when someone mentions incorruptible saints: saints who were so much part of divinity that their physical bodies didn't decay in the normal course of things. There's a long and very gruesome tradition with particular regard to incorruptible saints, where some have been decapitated or had their hands or feet cut off after death; those relics are preserved in a separate church while the rest of the body is preserved elsewhere.
There's a part of me that marvels at the strength of faith--in any religion--that will allow believers to make the imaginative leap from the relic itself to the presence of holiness. This is the bit about relics that I find touching: that the sacredness they're supposed to contain overrides our "normal" fear of anything to do with death, our instinctive shrinking from ashes and cremains, from bone and decayed flesh, that we might see past the apparently corrupted object before us to the person whose wisdom, or goodness, or holiness we want to remember. People who shrink from death and graveyards and cremation grounds will find themselves, in the presence of a relic, not seeing the colours of rot and decay, not seeing just the skeleton implied in the bit of bone; they embrace what they would normally have feared.
Part of me, more cynically, thinks that this is just an old human reflex, the same impulse that drove warriors in one age to eat the brains or part of the body of the men they had just killed, so that some of their opponent's strength might enter them. We want what we always want, some of that power to be transferred to us: so the laying on of hands, so the scramble for rock stars' underwear (no one ever thinks that a guy who's been thumping around energetically in black leather under strong lighting isn't going to have lavender-scented lingerie, but that's another issue), so the need to kiss the hem of Caesar's robe, the desire for a writer's or film star's autograph.
And the rest of me is already tired of looking at temples built to commemorate the sites where various bits of Sati's dismembered body fell, and looking at shrivelled bits of what used to be a person, saint or not. There are many reasons why I'm not a saint: add this to the list, that I really don't want people sifting through my ashes for usable bits once I'm gone.
The tooth itself is only rarely on display, and what most worshippers get to see is not even the casket that contains the tooth, but the container that contains the casket, if you get my drift.
I've never quite understood the fervour that relics inspire, though I respect the devotion of true believers for whom these things--a bit of bone, a bit of shrivelled flesh, a bit of cloth--are actual conduits to the divine. I have a blunt mind, one that forces me to think about the cremation or burial of saints and religious figures, and picture the mad scramble for the mortal remains.
And the old imagination works overtime when someone mentions incorruptible saints: saints who were so much part of divinity that their physical bodies didn't decay in the normal course of things. There's a long and very gruesome tradition with particular regard to incorruptible saints, where some have been decapitated or had their hands or feet cut off after death; those relics are preserved in a separate church while the rest of the body is preserved elsewhere.
There's a part of me that marvels at the strength of faith--in any religion--that will allow believers to make the imaginative leap from the relic itself to the presence of holiness. This is the bit about relics that I find touching: that the sacredness they're supposed to contain overrides our "normal" fear of anything to do with death, our instinctive shrinking from ashes and cremains, from bone and decayed flesh, that we might see past the apparently corrupted object before us to the person whose wisdom, or goodness, or holiness we want to remember. People who shrink from death and graveyards and cremation grounds will find themselves, in the presence of a relic, not seeing the colours of rot and decay, not seeing just the skeleton implied in the bit of bone; they embrace what they would normally have feared.
Part of me, more cynically, thinks that this is just an old human reflex, the same impulse that drove warriors in one age to eat the brains or part of the body of the men they had just killed, so that some of their opponent's strength might enter them. We want what we always want, some of that power to be transferred to us: so the laying on of hands, so the scramble for rock stars' underwear (no one ever thinks that a guy who's been thumping around energetically in black leather under strong lighting isn't going to have lavender-scented lingerie, but that's another issue), so the need to kiss the hem of Caesar's robe, the desire for a writer's or film star's autograph.
And the rest of me is already tired of looking at temples built to commemorate the sites where various bits of Sati's dismembered body fell, and looking at shrivelled bits of what used to be a person, saint or not. There are many reasons why I'm not a saint: add this to the list, that I really don't want people sifting through my ashes for usable bits once I'm gone.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Speaking Volumes: Champagne supernova
(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, August 10, 2005. This column kicks off what I hope will be an occasional series--once every month or so--that turns the spotlight on new Indian writers who're below the hype decibel level, but who really do their stuff well. Is it necessary to say that I love Vandana Singh's work, or does the piece below say it loud enough?)
India shows up in classic science fiction in strange, sideways fashion. The country's often lurking in the background of SF short stories and novellas as a landscape. And given that many SF writers have a hard science background and are inquisitive about other cultures, it's not unusual to come across a Chandra or a Veena alongside the Alexes and Robertas.
But we were cameo players; scene setters; contributors to the ideas that make up the backbone of an SF plot. Then, a few years ago, an unheralded writer called Vandana Singh came out with a children's book, Younguncle Comes To Town. The book now has a sequel, Younguncle in the Himalayas, written in a completely natural voice that's unusual in Indian children's fiction.
For once, what snagged my attention was that bit of ad copy that reviewers in search of a lead sentence usually sneer at—the blurb. Younguncle had a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin.
Now, in the SF universe, Ursula K Le Guin occupies a small galaxy all by her self. Her books—the Earthsea saga, Left Hand of Darkness--are contemporary classics; she's out there on the frontier of the imagination, upending everything we think we know about gender and human societies. Blurbs by Salman Rushdie are highly prized; blurbs by V S Naipaul are rare, unless you happen to be a close personal friend who hasn't yet been asked to take it on the chin and move on; blurbs by Umberto Eco are the kind of thing young writers dream about. But a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin, for a children's book written by a young woman who hasn't been advanced, royaltied and hyped to death? That's like having Brad Pitt as your date your first time out at a formal party. And yes, I know it's advertising; but reading Vandana Singh's effortless prose, I conceded that sometimes there is truth in advertising.
Over the next few years, Vandana Singh's short stories were being published in journals well-known in the SF world, but unfortunately invisible to the mainstream litcrit universe. We flag new talent immediately when we spot it in the pages of the New Yorker; but India has little SF writing history of any note, with stray exceptions like Jayant Narlikar, Satyajit Ray and more recently, Manjula Padmanabhan and young SF/ fantasy writer Samit Basu. So it's easy to miss stories published in The 3rd Alternative and Strange Horizons. It's easy to miss the significance of what's going on here, because we've got used to having our writers flagged for us as "important" by bragging-rights-included book deals.
Vandana Singh has a background in physics, teaches at a US college, and knows Delhi—among other places, not all of them entirely of this solar system—like the back of her hand. Her blog moves eclectically between eulogies to mangoes and musings on Kaliyuga. And she has a story in the Bible of SF: The Year's Best Science Fiction, the Authorised Version of what's new, provocative and irresistible in SF, edited by the legendary Gardner Dozois.
I'm looking at 'Delhi', in an anthology where Singh's companions are the likes of Nancy Kress and Robert Reed. This is the first time that I've seen an Indian name share the spotlight in any mainstream SF anthology. What if it's no good, what if the first author of Indian origin to make the cut has, well, messed up?
I needn't have worried. Delhi is a tale of a man who can see ghosts from all of the ancient cities and who can't leave the city that's haunting him. It's good SF; and it's a truly great Delhi story. "Only for Aseem are the old cities of Delhi still alive, glimpsed like mysterious islands from a passing ship but real nevertheless. He wishes he could discuss his temporal visions with someone who would take him seriously… but ironically, the only sympathetic person he's met who shares his condition happened to live in 1100 AD or thereabouts, the time of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi."
Some day, Vandana Singh's going to write that novel, put out that story collection. There may not be dollar signs winking around the book to signify its importance, but read it anyway. Read it in homage to the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world; or read it simply because she writes with such a beguiling touch of strange.
India shows up in classic science fiction in strange, sideways fashion. The country's often lurking in the background of SF short stories and novellas as a landscape. And given that many SF writers have a hard science background and are inquisitive about other cultures, it's not unusual to come across a Chandra or a Veena alongside the Alexes and Robertas.
But we were cameo players; scene setters; contributors to the ideas that make up the backbone of an SF plot. Then, a few years ago, an unheralded writer called Vandana Singh came out with a children's book, Younguncle Comes To Town. The book now has a sequel, Younguncle in the Himalayas, written in a completely natural voice that's unusual in Indian children's fiction.
For once, what snagged my attention was that bit of ad copy that reviewers in search of a lead sentence usually sneer at—the blurb. Younguncle had a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin.
Now, in the SF universe, Ursula K Le Guin occupies a small galaxy all by her self. Her books—the Earthsea saga, Left Hand of Darkness--are contemporary classics; she's out there on the frontier of the imagination, upending everything we think we know about gender and human societies. Blurbs by Salman Rushdie are highly prized; blurbs by V S Naipaul are rare, unless you happen to be a close personal friend who hasn't yet been asked to take it on the chin and move on; blurbs by Umberto Eco are the kind of thing young writers dream about. But a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin, for a children's book written by a young woman who hasn't been advanced, royaltied and hyped to death? That's like having Brad Pitt as your date your first time out at a formal party. And yes, I know it's advertising; but reading Vandana Singh's effortless prose, I conceded that sometimes there is truth in advertising.
Over the next few years, Vandana Singh's short stories were being published in journals well-known in the SF world, but unfortunately invisible to the mainstream litcrit universe. We flag new talent immediately when we spot it in the pages of the New Yorker; but India has little SF writing history of any note, with stray exceptions like Jayant Narlikar, Satyajit Ray and more recently, Manjula Padmanabhan and young SF/ fantasy writer Samit Basu. So it's easy to miss stories published in The 3rd Alternative and Strange Horizons. It's easy to miss the significance of what's going on here, because we've got used to having our writers flagged for us as "important" by bragging-rights-included book deals.
Vandana Singh has a background in physics, teaches at a US college, and knows Delhi—among other places, not all of them entirely of this solar system—like the back of her hand. Her blog moves eclectically between eulogies to mangoes and musings on Kaliyuga. And she has a story in the Bible of SF: The Year's Best Science Fiction, the Authorised Version of what's new, provocative and irresistible in SF, edited by the legendary Gardner Dozois.
I'm looking at 'Delhi', in an anthology where Singh's companions are the likes of Nancy Kress and Robert Reed. This is the first time that I've seen an Indian name share the spotlight in any mainstream SF anthology. What if it's no good, what if the first author of Indian origin to make the cut has, well, messed up?
I needn't have worried. Delhi is a tale of a man who can see ghosts from all of the ancient cities and who can't leave the city that's haunting him. It's good SF; and it's a truly great Delhi story. "Only for Aseem are the old cities of Delhi still alive, glimpsed like mysterious islands from a passing ship but real nevertheless. He wishes he could discuss his temporal visions with someone who would take him seriously… but ironically, the only sympathetic person he's met who shares his condition happened to live in 1100 AD or thereabouts, the time of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi."
Some day, Vandana Singh's going to write that novel, put out that story collection. There may not be dollar signs winking around the book to signify its importance, but read it anyway. Read it in homage to the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world; or read it simply because she writes with such a beguiling touch of strange.
Speaking Volumes: The lost and found department
(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, August 2, 2005)
In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel compiles his list of books for a "sentimental library". These include Alice Liddell's copy of Alice in Wonderland; the copy of Leaves of Grass that Walt Whitman gave to his lover, Peter Doyle; and whimsical but irresistible, Freud's copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
One could construct a parallel library: a repository of lost manuscripts. It would contain the missing works of Sophocles, all of Sappho's poems, Bhasa's lost plays, the Gandhari manuscripts found in the 1830s that crumbled before they could be read, the Hemingway manuscripts that were lost on a train, and a score of other missing-in-action books.
How do you recover the past? It can happen by serendipity, as with the fragments of a poem by Sappho, lost for over 2,600 years, that was found on papyrus that had been used as part of the wrappings for an Egyptian mummy. Or it can take years of devotion, as with the lost Alexandre Dumas work, The Knight of Saint Hermaine.
One of Dumas' novels was "recovered" last year, a swashbuckling, guillotine-haunted tale of Marie Antoinette. But The Knight of Maison Rouge hadn't been lost so much as forgotten: it was the first time in a century that the book had been brought back into print. Dumas fans were happy; a novel that hadn't been read for a hundred years was just as welcome a discovery as a novel that had been truly lost.
In the 1980s, a retired lecturer called Claude Schopp found a handwritten letter by Dumas that sent him to the archives. There, after five months, he found a serial by Dumas that had run in a periodical called The Universal Monitor. The existence of the novel was known; it formed the final part of the Companions of Jehu trilogy, but was never published in book form. Dumas died before he could revise or finish The Knight of Saint Hermaine; Schopp used the author's notes to construct a suitable ending. The hero of the novel is a French sharpshooter who, in Dumas' fictional rendering of Trafalgar, is the man who shot Admiral Nelson.
In the case of most authors, a hunt for the final, unfinished novel would have been undertaken earlier; but Dumas was terrifyingly prolific, and with over 95 works to examine, The Knight of Saint Hermaine had slipped through the cracks of history. The French language edition was published this year, and is outselling even the Potter brat's chronicles in Dumas' country. It's a mammoth work, even by Dumas' standards, weighing in at over 900 pages, and unusual in that he wrote it on his own, instead of relying on his vast stable of assistants. But his penchant for collaboration has survived his death; Claude Schopp has the detailed notes that Dumas had set down the sequel and is using them to write the "last Dumas".
But one of the most ambitious and exciting attempts to recover old manuscripts is happening in India. The National Mission for Manuscripts (http://namami.nic.in) has launched a campaign to collect, preserve, protect and archive India's manuscripts. It has recruited about 30,000 footsoldiers to track down manuscripts across the country. Last year, they ran a pilot project in three states, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, covering most of Orissa and a sampling of districts in the other two states. Over a period of five days, with 2,700 surveyors fanning out to temples, madrassas, homes, libraries and other centres, they documented over 1,00,000 manuscripts—and picked up information on a total of 6,50,000 more.
Even if you assume that many of these manuscripts would have consisted of no more than fragments, and that a great deal of what was found would have been just the waste paper of the past, that's still a lot of history. In the lost and found department of literature, a fragment of an ode by Sappho, one missing novel by Dumas—these scraps are enough to fill us with excitement. What the NMM is trying to do is to show us how much of our own past we haven't even bothered to find, because we never knew it was lost in the first place. If you have old manuscripts or information of any sort, contact them at director.namami@nic.in. It's a rare chance to be part of India's largest treasure hunt.
In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel compiles his list of books for a "sentimental library". These include Alice Liddell's copy of Alice in Wonderland; the copy of Leaves of Grass that Walt Whitman gave to his lover, Peter Doyle; and whimsical but irresistible, Freud's copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
One could construct a parallel library: a repository of lost manuscripts. It would contain the missing works of Sophocles, all of Sappho's poems, Bhasa's lost plays, the Gandhari manuscripts found in the 1830s that crumbled before they could be read, the Hemingway manuscripts that were lost on a train, and a score of other missing-in-action books.
How do you recover the past? It can happen by serendipity, as with the fragments of a poem by Sappho, lost for over 2,600 years, that was found on papyrus that had been used as part of the wrappings for an Egyptian mummy. Or it can take years of devotion, as with the lost Alexandre Dumas work, The Knight of Saint Hermaine.
One of Dumas' novels was "recovered" last year, a swashbuckling, guillotine-haunted tale of Marie Antoinette. But The Knight of Maison Rouge hadn't been lost so much as forgotten: it was the first time in a century that the book had been brought back into print. Dumas fans were happy; a novel that hadn't been read for a hundred years was just as welcome a discovery as a novel that had been truly lost.
In the 1980s, a retired lecturer called Claude Schopp found a handwritten letter by Dumas that sent him to the archives. There, after five months, he found a serial by Dumas that had run in a periodical called The Universal Monitor. The existence of the novel was known; it formed the final part of the Companions of Jehu trilogy, but was never published in book form. Dumas died before he could revise or finish The Knight of Saint Hermaine; Schopp used the author's notes to construct a suitable ending. The hero of the novel is a French sharpshooter who, in Dumas' fictional rendering of Trafalgar, is the man who shot Admiral Nelson.
In the case of most authors, a hunt for the final, unfinished novel would have been undertaken earlier; but Dumas was terrifyingly prolific, and with over 95 works to examine, The Knight of Saint Hermaine had slipped through the cracks of history. The French language edition was published this year, and is outselling even the Potter brat's chronicles in Dumas' country. It's a mammoth work, even by Dumas' standards, weighing in at over 900 pages, and unusual in that he wrote it on his own, instead of relying on his vast stable of assistants. But his penchant for collaboration has survived his death; Claude Schopp has the detailed notes that Dumas had set down the sequel and is using them to write the "last Dumas".
But one of the most ambitious and exciting attempts to recover old manuscripts is happening in India. The National Mission for Manuscripts (http://namami.nic.in) has launched a campaign to collect, preserve, protect and archive India's manuscripts. It has recruited about 30,000 footsoldiers to track down manuscripts across the country. Last year, they ran a pilot project in three states, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, covering most of Orissa and a sampling of districts in the other two states. Over a period of five days, with 2,700 surveyors fanning out to temples, madrassas, homes, libraries and other centres, they documented over 1,00,000 manuscripts—and picked up information on a total of 6,50,000 more.
Even if you assume that many of these manuscripts would have consisted of no more than fragments, and that a great deal of what was found would have been just the waste paper of the past, that's still a lot of history. In the lost and found department of literature, a fragment of an ode by Sappho, one missing novel by Dumas—these scraps are enough to fill us with excitement. What the NMM is trying to do is to show us how much of our own past we haven't even bothered to find, because we never knew it was lost in the first place. If you have old manuscripts or information of any sort, contact them at director.namami@nic.in. It's a rare chance to be part of India's largest treasure hunt.
Amartya Sen on the idea of India
(Did the interview with Amartya Sen for the Business Standard; will put the transcript up as soon as I have some time, because it's got much more meat than the piece below.
It was, from my perspective, a slightly strange experience: I'm used to interviewing writers or artists whose works are familiar, used to being able to research the background adequately before I go in.
But Professor Sen, quite apart from being formidably well-read and possessing a sharp, clear intellect, is an economist: I know of his work in the most general terms, and lack the background to analyse or even understand most of it.
That's one reason why I have a great respect for the "generalists" among journalists, the people who are able to shift from business to literature to politics apparently seamlessly, having done awesome quantities of spadework in order to get their questions right.
The other thing that bothered me about the interview is what increasingly troubles me about the media interview in its present form. Amartya Sen had been interviewed for the past three days, about his book--The Argumentative Indian (read Jai's post here)--about the economy, about China, about India's political situation, about globalisation...
On the day I met him, he was generous with his time, incisive and patient--but he was also extremely tired. He'd done back-to-back interviews for about five hours running. Most of us weren't going to get to use more than three "soundbytes" or so; a few had the luxury of a full page, or an hour's worth of television time. Many of the questions we asked must have been similar, even though he's one of those polite souls who takes the trouble to vary the answers.
In some ways, it makes more sense to me to do this sort of interview over email. It forces the interviewer to sharpen his or her questions; it allows the interviewee the luxury of writing one-size-fits-all general answers and then tweaking them a bit for each person. If we need to "see" the person in order to compose our stories, fine, maybe we should have "manna moments": five minutes of time in the sacred presence, during which (just for fun) he gets to talk about whatever he'd like to talk about. But then, I guess if this was the way it worked, I would never have got such personal pleasure out of Prof Sen's erudition, most of it omitted from the story for structural reasons.)
When the Nobel Prize marked its centenary in 2001, the foundation asked a handful of laureates for two mementos each that might be included in an exhibit.
"They took away my bicycle, on which I had done a lot of field research on the famine and indeed later my research for gender inequality in Bengali villages," says Professor Amartya Sen. "Also a modern print of Aryabhatta's book on mathematics and astronomy. These were the two, to reflect my past."
There are many ways in which you might attempt to describe the progress of Professor Amartya Sen, from his brilliant career at Cambridge, returning to India to set up a new department of economics at Jadavpur University at the tender age of 23, to the pathbreaking work in welfare economics that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1998.
You might want to point to his books--on subjects as diverse as economics, gender, philosophy and now, with The Argumentative Indian, on the idea of India; or to the six-page long list of honorary degrees conferred on the former Master of Trinity. But the mementos, one a tribute to the image that many in Shantiniketan still carry of Sen, bicycling down the paths of Tagore's university, the other testimony to his deep and passionate love of learning and his early acquaintance with Sanskrit, will do.
Earlier in the week, Sen gave a talk in which he set out the positions he's taken in The Argumentative Indian, one of the most profound and wide-ranging inquiries into the idea of India written in recent times. Indians like to argue, he said, pointing to what he calls the "argumentative tradition", an acceptance of plurality as the natural state of affairs, a long and robust tradition of heterodoxy, dissent, inquiry and analysis. During question time, the audience proved his point, to excess. Sen responded with patience and wit, producing answers of admirable brevity and depth to questions of astonishing prolixity and obtuseness.
Speaking of his view of Indian history, he says, "There was a great strength in the old Indian tradition, where you took plurality as the natural state of affairs. Ashoka in the 12th century BC mentions the fact that we have different beliefs, we should listen to each other, we must argue with each other. That was an acceptance of heterodoxy."
In recent years, that tradition has been threatened: "When we have a miniaturized view of Hinduism and of the Indian past, presented by the Hindutva parties, suddenly all that intellectual discourse disappears. We're concentrating on where Rama was born, allegedly, with the holiness of the cow, the nastiness of Christian missionaries trying to convert us. It was the psychology of the loser--if we can't win the argument, we will eliminate the argument. That debate continues. But I definitely hope that those who are in favour of a non-miniaturised view of India in which arguments of different quarters could be entertained continue to occupy a good position."
His view of history clashes, as William Dalrymple pointed out, with the opinions expressed by another Nobel laureate, V S Naipaul. Sen won't comment on Naipaul's views directly--"I leave it to him to determine his own position"--but he makes his position clear. "To see the Muslim arrival in India as primarily destructive is to blind oneself to a big part of Indian history," he says, pointing to the interactions between Islamic and Hindu culture in art, in literature, in politics, the encounter between Muslim Sufi and Hindu Bhakti thought between the 15th and 17th centuries.
We trace the history of Aryabhatta's contribution to mathematics in the 5th century, the export of those ideas to Europe via the Arabs in the 11th century, the fallacy of the belief that democracy is strictly a Western invention, how you might explain the occasional but prevalent Indian suspicion of the outsider and of "foreign thought" through the parable about the Kupamanduka, the frog in the well who can see nothing but the inside of the well.
"Our understanding of right and wrong is really dependent on our ability to listen to other arguments and think about it. To me, knowledge is post-interaction and post-openness, rather than pre-interaction and pre-openness. It's not a question of winning the argument; it's a question of making a perspective available that people can invoke later, even if at that time it doesn't win the day." Given the intensity of the battle over Indian history in recent years, one hopes that the last word will rest with Amartya Sen.
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