On book reviewing--Mitali Saran

"I have a dream," writes Mitali Saran in Stet.

"The dream is that one day, we in India will be able to deal in the currency of ideas and opinion without letting our giant mutant egos get in the way. In this la-la land that I inhabit, Shah Rukh Khan would be able to pick Pakistani players for his cricket team and the Shiv Sena could froth at the mouth like a rabid dog but not be able to shut down his upcoming movie (My Name is Khan). A woman’s dress might provoke catcalls or comment, but not molestation or sexual assault. And book reviews would be both written and read professionally — that is to say, as subjective opinion, formed as objectively as possible."

Read the rest. And if you like, join the discussion on this recent post/ rant of mine on the state of Indian criticism. (To those of you who're wondering why there's a time lag on your comments, my apologies. I had to turn on comment moderation recently after a persistent spam attack, and while all comments go through barring spam and outright abusiveness, there's sometimes a delay if I haven't been checking my mailbox. Thanks.)

Rant: The Death of Criticism (Yes, Again)

This post by Amitava Kumar reminded me of a debate that happened in several tents at the Jaipur Litfest, and that's been continuing in several virtual tents for the last decade in India. It's second only to the Whither? (Whither the Novel? Whither writing in English in India?) questions in the persistence with which it comes up, and can be summarised as Criticism in India is Dead, Let The Lamentations Begin.

I've always maintained, and continue to maintain, that we're wrong to say that there are no good reviewers left in India; personally, I look forward to reviews by Manjula Padmanabhan (trenchant and always honest), Chandrahas Choudhury, Anita Roy, Jai Arjun Singh and Sanjay Sipahimalani, to name just a few, as well as the old stalwarts. (All of them are friends, which may be seen as yet another pointer to the incestuous circles of Ind.Lit--but it may also be revealing that all of us became friends through our work. The bylines came before the coffees and the lunches.)

But Amit Chaudhuri captured one glaring absence in the Indian scene when he said that we have no Indian-grown magazine that has the authority--or the readability--of a NYRB, a Paris Review or of, say, the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Biblio and The Book Review have been soldiering on for years, and offer excellent reviews; but both operate under severe budgetary constraints, which limits the kind of reviewers they have access to (neither has the budget needed to dispatch books to reviewers outside India, for instance, or can match the kind of payments an NYRB or Granta might make), and the kind of articles they can commission (chiefly book reviews--no original reporting, limited fiction, etc). Civil Lines looked as though it might fill this gap for a while, but the gaps between issues are now chasm-sized; Caravan is promising, but it's just two issues old. The Little Magazine carries respectable book reviews, but where it scores is in offering essays and fiction in translation--it doesn't position itself as a literary magazine so much as a magazine of ideas.

The politics of book reviewing have changed over the last five or six years. We've contended with not just shrinking book review pages, but shrinking space for reviews: as I've often said, a 400-word 'review' is a blurb, and the most generous magazine spaces seldom go beyond 800 words, which is adequate for a book notice--it doesn't really allow for a serious review. The Hindu Literary Review comes out just once a month; Tehelka and The Calcutta Telegraph are unusual in that they often offer classic "editorial" space to book reviewers, but they remain rare examples. Most newspapers and magazines in India ghettoise books; it's rare to find writers (including historians and non-fiction writers) offering opinions or commentary on the editorial and op-ed pages.

Books page editors struggle to balance the political needs of their editors: several of the more respected publications use the books pages as a kind of social gossip section. This is actually quite fascinating. It makes the books pages a great way to track who's in and who's out, as though it were a kind of Sensex of the social world, but it doesn't do much for books pages as literary pages.

Many of the old conventions--a full disclosure on the part of the reviewer of biases, the practice of not assigning a book to a hostile (or an eager-to-please-the-author) reviewer, even the practice of assigning books to experts in the field--are observed only by a tiny handful of reviewers and books page editors. And as many of us know, this *is* an incestuous circle: the worlds of publishing and writing are still very small in English-speaking India. This has its benefits--it's easier for young or emerging writers to find space in the circle, but it turns into a kind of Indian joint family system after a while, where everybody knows why Cousin x has a blood feud on with Maasi y. Many of us have also watched the disappearance of some of our best reviewers off the books pages with some alarm: as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, there's no satisfaction to writing a blurb-sized book review with just a week in hand to consider the book, and you see far fewer reviews by the likes of Mukul Kesavan, Ram Guha, Sunil Khilnani and company than you might have just a few years ago.

Up to this point, what I've offered are the old, familiar lamentations. This often turns into a pointless, circular argument. Reviewers in India often admit that they hold Indian writers to a lower standard--or expect less of their work--than they have for the Junot Diazes and Lorrie Moores of the world. And of course, reviewers blame books page editors; editors often cite the relative pusillanimity of today's reviewers, who won't give a negative review to a Big Name Author, and many editors also say that there are very few reviewers with the right reading credentials. Everyone blames publishers for highlighting and pushing trivial books; publishers blame the media for concentrating on the fluff instead of on works of substance. Faintly, in the distance, a few voices lament that no one pays any attention to poetry, works in translation and children's books, but no one pays any attention to them. And we can continue like this ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I don't have solutions to offer, just a few questions.

1) Might it change the situation if publishing houses fill the gap between mainstream media and literary magazines by continuing to publish anthologies of new writing, and to commission anthologies of short stories etc? Several of them are experimenting with new forms: Penguin and Tranquebar have commissioned novella-length work recently, marketing them as Metro Reads and as easy, accessible reading.

For this to work, though, gatekeeping standards need to be much higher than they've been, and I say this as someone who's committed my fair share of sins by letting average work through the gates, both in publishing and in journalism, because of deadline pressures and other exigencies. It would be great to have more ruthless editors; to have anthologies so good that writers would mudwrestle each other just to get their bylines in the Table of Contents.

2) Is part of what we're lamenting part of a wider decline in the quality of our public intellectuals? Ram Guha gave an interesting talk recently about the demise of the bilingual intellectual--in passing, he mentioned that he had trouble naming the next generation of public intellectuals with all-round interests under the age of 40. This might be part of a slow degeneration in the overall quality of debate in the public sphere: I would love to see more dissent and informed response, not just in the field of books and writing, but in a wider sense.

3) And an aside to published writers: when was the last time you had fun writing a review? Do most published writers feel free to criticise a "colleague", and would they spend as much time crafting a truly entertaining, thoughtful review as they would on turning a piece of fiction? (Damn, I miss Dom Moraes: one of the last of the grand old school of reviewers, absolutely fearless, absolutely honest and such an entertainer.)

End of rant, back to the deadlines, and thank you for listening.

The BS Column: Meenakshi Mukherjee: The Death of a Critic

(This was a week of loss and funerals; and memories. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught me years ago at JNU, and helped me make the key decision to pursue freelance writing instead of a PhD; I think her acute eye saw what a misfit I'd have been in academia. We stayed in touch sporadically over the years, calling each other to discuss new books, reviews, translations, ideas. "You lead a much more productive life away from the Delhi social whirl," she told me when she moved some years ago to Hyderabad. "Most of it is distraction. I enjoy not being distracted these days."
She died of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, on her way to Delhi for a book release, in a year when she was on the panel of judges for the Shakti Bhatt prize and at 72, was humming with the productivity she'd wanted so much in her sixties. "What have you been reading?" she asked in our last conversation. I told her; she listened. "So many good books! We're lucky to have time to read, aren't we? Which ones should I buy first? Have you read this? And that?" That energy, that appetite, that freewheeling curiosity: I'll miss all of these.)

The Prospectus of the 19th century Mookerjee’s Magazine declared that, “Our Magazine will be a receptacle of all descriptions of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, vers de société, Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology…” and so forth for another two ambitiously inclusive lines.

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, scholar, critic and writer, who died last week at the age of 72 of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, sometimes quoted the Prospectus; in some ways, it reflected the contents and broad scope of her own formidable mind. (She gave vers de société a wide berth, but was open to the rest.)

Criticism of Indian writing in English suffers from two major problems. Much of it is unintelligible, especially criticism as practised by followers of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and requires the skills of an expert in linguistic forensics to decode. Much of it is invisible, relegated to obscure academic journals or to the thriving but insular seminar circuit. Very little of it is actually influential, or lasting, but Meenakshi Mukherjee’s contributions are likely to fall into this category.

There was no sense, in her presence, of reading literature as dead texts from a distant past. Her years in research, and her long partnership with her equally distinguished husband, the late translator and academic Sujit Mukherjee, gave her a holistic view of Indian writing in English that few other practitioners possessed. Meenakshi Mukherjee could trace the lineage of IWE much further back than Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—considered the first true novel written by an Indian in English. Through her scholarship, she offered a much more interesting history than the accepted one of a novel, imitative of its Western counterparts, that sprang out of nowhere from Bankim’s mind.

In her excavation of history, the Indian novel had been emerging in unusual form well before the 19th century. The first two books that snagged Meenakshi Mukherjee’s attention dated back to 1835 and 1845 respectively—both were works of alternate history, imagining an uprising against the British, and a future without English rule.

Years later, when she translated Lokenath Bhattacharya’s The Virgin Fish of Babughat, she was fascinated by the question of imagination. The Indian expression of it may have been influenced by magic realism, or by the European novel, but it had a different fountainhead, in her opinion. Bhattacharya’s novel, for instance, is set in an imaginary prison where the inmates have the “freedom” to explore sexuality. But it’s the guards who decide on the pairings of prisoners, and erotic exploration soon becomes just another fatigue-inducing prison ritual. The narrator of The Virgin Fish of Babughat is bound by different rules—he must commit his thoughts to paper, by order, and he is rendered frantic by the fear of losing language, the necessity of facing blank page after blank page every day.

In one of the last conversations we had, just before Meenakshi Mukherjee was supposed to come to Delhi for the launch of her biography of R C Dutt, we discussed the Indian writer’s love for fantasy, for the picaresque and for alternate histories—all these exerted a powerful fascination for the early pioneers, before the conventions of the middle-class novel took over.

It’s sad that one set of writers will remember only the skirmish between the professor and the writer Vikram Chandra, which he documented, memorably, in an essay called The Cult of Authenticity. Meenakshi Mukherjee had noted the tendency of some Indian writers in English to exoticise India unnecessarily, to produce the modern equivalent of sadhus and maharajas in an attempt to establish their authenticity.

Mukherjee picked on Chandra’s collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, as an example of this trend, for his use of words like Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha in the titles. In retrospect, she was right about the anxiety of writing India that infected a certain group of writers—and perhaps still does. But she was dead wrong in her selection of offenders—Chandra couldn’t be accused of this particular crime. When some of us taxed her with evidence to the contrary, years ago, she was delighted. “A proper argument!” she said, and settled to it with her trademark relish and acumen. Neither side succeeded in convincing the other, but we, at least, retired with a far broader sense of our literary history once she was done with her examples.

This isn’t my favourite Meenakshi Mukherjee memory, though. That would be one shared by generations of students at JNU and the many other universities where she taught: the memory of engaging with “MM” as she opened up our forgotten literature and unexplored past to us via Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, inviting us to claim Indian English, in all its richness and complexity, for ourselves. To borrow from the title of one of the many anthologies edited by her, there was another India out there, and she wanted every reader to make their own explorations of that familiar and unknown country.