Naak naak, who's there?

[So, Kindle magazine asked me to do a piece for their cover spread about women “reclaiming” their bodies, and I obliged with this series of vignettes about the Nose. (The essays in the issue are about various body parts.) Still a bit unsure about what I was trying to do exactly, and it reads like a mix of personal anecdote and po-faced social commentary from the “look-at-me-I’m-such-a-sensitive-male” catalogue. But hopefully it isn’t a complete... stinker.

Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]

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My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
 

Illustration: SOUMIK LAHIRI

Learn the context though, and it becomes funnier. Two years ago Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the weird kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside but which comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia that lies just out of sight: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels too. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, with the skin closing over it – and she discovered this only when she managed to remove most of the ring and realised something was still lodged inside, where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.

Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.

It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.

However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”

Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.

Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.

*****

The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire.

Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.

“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”

To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.

The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)

Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.

*****

I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.

Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.

Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”

In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.

On "liberal extremism" (and soft oppositions to freedom)

I’ve had a cordial relationship with Chetan Bhagat for a long time; there are things I like about him, as a person and – yes – as a writer too. I once faced flak in literary circles for saying mildly nice things about his early work, and I still often have arguments with friends who make condescending remarks like “Why has Chetan Bhagat been invited to a literature festival?” But I’m deeply disturbed by the position he has adopted on the Salman Rushdie-Jaipur issue, especially his repeated endorsement of the bizarre idea that the whole mess was jointly caused by “extremists on both sides”.

Two exhibits. First, some samples from Chetan’s Twitter feed:

“When extremists on both sides turn a festival into an activist venue, there's a security risk.”

“In a fight between extreme fundamentalists and extreme liberals, the sufferer is the beautiful jaipur litfest, the gainer an appeasing govt.”

“Extreme fundamentalists. Extreme liberals. Extremely difficult to deal with either.”

“If you are truly religious, you believe in forgiveness. If you are truly liberal, you respect other points of view. Sadly, don't see it much.”

A response to that last Tweet: sure – if you’re truly liberal, you respect other points of view. (Since the meaning of “respect” is often hazy in this context, a clarification: it means that you believe people should have the freedom to peacefully express their views, no matter how strongly you disagree with them.) What you emphatically DO NOT respect – or condone – is the demonstration of those views through threats and violence, which curtails the similar rights of other people. And it’s the religious extremists who have been curtailing rights in the Rushdie case; the “liberal extremists” have been responding to the bullying with non-violent protests. This is an important distinction. Even if you find it convenient (for whatever reason) to think of strong-voiced liberals as extremists, do have the grace to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between these two forms of “extremism”.

Exhibit 2: this CNN-IBN video featuring Chetan, Ruchir Joshi (who was one of the four authors who read from The Satanic Verses in Jaipur) and Asaduddin Owaisi, who called for the arrest of the writers.

On view here is Chetan as the “balanced” diplomat-cum-moderate who is willing to listen to both points of view and who badly wants the two parties to find a middle ground – “because otherwise this whole controversy is kind of useless”. I will not comment on individual actions, he starts by saying. Then, “As an artist you have full freedom to write whatever you want to. However... Should you be exercising the right to hurt people?” And to Owaisi, “I request you to withdraw your case”, followed by this astonishing statement: “We are all Indians here – we will not let someone who is not Indian [meaning Rushdie] affect our unity.”

“This is a great issue to unite the country,” he says – apparently “uniting the country” means ensuring that no one says or does anything that might be perceived as offensive to any community’s God, be it Allah or Krishna or Saraswati. “We Indians are believers. Our value system is not the same as London or Paris or Amsterdam.” (Incidentally, Amsterdam was where Theo van Gogh was murdered by a religious fanatic not so long ago because he made a film – and it should be clear to any thinking person that no corner of the world is safe from the extremisms of the “value system” Chetan is so proud of – but let that pass for now.)

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In this piece, Chandrahas Choudhury lists three types of opposition to freedom of speech in India. The third of these, he says, is an “insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas”:

“... what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship [...] that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that ‘religious sentiments should always be respected’ and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred”

I have had dozens of encounters with “soft opposition” of this sort. These typically involve conversations with well-meaning family members or acquaintances who might very loosely be described as “liberals” (or at least as “cool” or open-minded people). When the subject of an artist offending religious sentiments comes up, they usually say: “Yes, but was it necessary to write that article/do that painting/make that cartoon? Couldn’t he have been more sensitive?” Or “I agree that he has the right to do or say this. But should he have done it?”

This type of conversation sometimes reaches a critical point if you reply: “Agreed - it might have been nicer/more sensitive to do things in another way. But what if the artist politely hears you out and then says he has chosen to disregard your advice – that he will go ahead and do this anyway? What will your response be then?” I've found that the mask of unequivocal “liberalism” can slip off very quickly in this situation.

It’s worrying that so many people in India seem not to understand what good art can be all about, and the conditions necessary for its meaningful survival. As Ruchir Joshi writes in this piece in The Hindu (bold-marks mine):

I have memories of writers, artists, film-makers being pushed into narrower and narrower pens by people who had no interest in literature, art or cinema other than to use these as excuses to expand their own illiterate, illiberal, poisonous power under the guise of identity politics...

And Amit Chaudhuri in The Hindustan Times:

In India, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a 'free speech' issue. Indians know how to talk about writers, but not about writing.

Little wonder that artistic liberty is among the first things to be held hostage (or made conditional, which is the same thing) when "sentiments" are deemed to have been hurt. A friend told me not to write a post about Chetan Bhagat because “he’s such a soft, easy target”. Well, maybe, but here it is anyway, because I think his stance tells us something about the level of discourse around us today. It’s a pity that one of India’s most popular writers seems unwilling to acknowledge that one of the oldest functions of art is to disturb people and encourage them to look with new eyes at everything they hold sacred. We already see too much of that apathy and ignorance in people who don't work in the creative field.

Artists and dabblers: thoughts on Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals

I’m finding it hard to articulate my feelings about Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel The Immortals: though I admired it a lot, it was difficult to get through. Part of this is circumstantial – things have been busy lately, there’s been some traveling and some travel planning and other things to keep me preoccupied, and as a result I’ve a) cut back on official reviewing for a bit, b) sidestepped serious literary fiction in favour of relatively light, fast-paced reading (exhibits: John Wyndham, the Millennium Trilogy, Simon Majumdar’s Eat my Globe, Surendra Mohan Pathak’s The 65 Lakh Heist). The Immortals was the exception, and what a hefty exception it turned out to be!

There’s always been a distinct, easily identifiable stillness in Chaudhuri’s work, which I find very appealing: a ear for the sort of quiet conversation that family members might have during their more unguarded moments when nothing of pressing significance is being said; little passages that might not appear to be “about” something in the conventional sense of carrying a plot forward, but which gradually reveal things about people and their circumstances, through the accretion of little details. The Immortals takes this form to a new level: it’s so marked in its refusal to be driven by a plot that even “slice of life” can seem like an over-dramatic way of describing it. There’s no question of picking it up for 15-minute sessions at various points in a hectic day – it’s demanding, requires patience, and is not recommended for the reader who needs a story with a beginning, a middle and an end (which has been the case for me these last few weeks). This book is all middle, like a fragment of a poem - the narrative is drifting and non-linear, the chapters aren't numbered or labeled, there isn't a definite resolution. Even Chaudhuri’s abundant use of semi-colons (where a comma would suffice - “She knew she could have been famous; but she had opted for the life of a Managing Director’s wife”) creates poetic pauses in the writing and conveys the sense that there are things left unsaid.

The Immortals moves between the lives of three people over the span of a few years through the 1970s and early 1980s: a young dreamer named Nirmalya Sengupta who acquires a strong interest in Indian classical music (at a point in his life when he’s trying to decide between studying economics and philosophy); his mother Mallika, the wife of an upwardly mobile businessman, and a woman who might – if circumstances were different or if she had been more ambitious – have become a renowned singer herself; and her music teacher Shyamji who, being the son of the revered guru Pandit Ram Lal, lives in the shadow of his father’s reputation, a permanent Salieri (“he’s only four annas compared to Panditji,” someone says matter-of-factly). Through the different levels of engagement of these people (and others) with classical music, a whole spectrum is revealed – a spectrum that extends from the rigour of Ram Lal’s early life and training to the more superficial interest in music seen among the cocktail-party crowd in south Bombay, where Nirmalya’s family live.

It occurred to me that though this book is specifically about classical music, its devotees and dilettantes, the questions it raises apply to other art forms too, including literature itself. We live in a world where art is losing its exclusivity and being “democratised”, where everyone wants to participate rather than merely observe. (Look at mass-market publishing, and look at how blogs have made it possible for nearly everyone to fancy themselves as writers.) At one point Chaudhuri describes a sammelan where Shyamji’s disciples – “from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold, whose husbands had put a full-page advertisement in the souvenir” – are interested not so much in the performances of the professionals (who have devoted their lives to their calling) as in usurping the stage themselves, to become performers, if only for 15 minutes.

Their relationship with music had begun embryonically, in their prehistory as listeners; they’d hummed along in an undertone with the artists they loved best, or loudly, solitarily, to themselves; and then, at some point, they’d asked themselves the unimaginable, something that wouldn’t have occurred to them six months before, or which they didn’t have the courage to admit: “Can’t I be a singer? Can’t it be me?” Why should they only listen; why shouldn’t they be listened to?

In the other corner are those who have come to symbolise an older way of life that has all but faded: people like Shyamji’s brother-in-law Pyarelal, who claims to have danced in Raja Man Singh’s court when he was four years old and who is described as “a jetsam of the old world, part of the coterie of artists that had been disbanded with the palaces...[he had] a bit of the stardust of the vanished courtly life around him”. And, perhaps, people like the now-forgotten music director who gave the young Lata Mangeshkar a memorable tune. When the elitism – and specialisation – associated with the higher arts has been diluted, where do these people stand? In such a world, do meaningful benchmarks for judging the quality and long-term worth of artists still exist? Who are the “immortals”?

There are other questions about artistic integrity. In two key passages, separated by half the length of the book, we get first Nirmalya’s and then Shyamji’s perspective on a conversation about whether it’s possible to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to art when one has to think about the basic necessities of life. “Baba, you cannot practise art on an empty stomach – let me first make enough money from the lighter forms, then I’ll be able to devote myself to classical,” says Shyamji. “That moment will never come,” replies Nirmalya fiercely, “the moment to give yourself to your art is now.” Is this the simple-minded idealism of youth pitted against the experience of age and its understanding of compromise? Or is it the hard-edged stance of the genuine artist against the relatively lackadaisical attitude of someone who has given up too soon?

The non-insistent, gently probing way in which the book raises these questions is very effective. But if you do decide to read it, make sure you have plenty of time - and no distractions - on your hands. You can't read it with anything less than full concentration.

Of penumbras and KRAs

[Have spent the last few days putting together longish feature stories about the literary festival and such, so it was a nice break to do this lightweight “My Week” column in personal diary-form, for the Sunday Business Standard.]

Friday
A freelance writer is more likely to be going to bed at 3.30 AM than waking up at that time, but I have to be ready for the early-morning drive to Jaipur – I'm going with a group of friends (fellow bloggers and journalists) for the annual literary festival and have decided to take my car, having suffered motion sickness on the bus journey last year. Co-travelers offer to share the driving if I get tired, but my insides can stand a long road journey only if I’m behind the wheel myself. (This makes life very complicated. Midway through a journey from Shimla to Kalka once, I had to ask a startled cab-driver to stop and allow me to drive the rest of the way.)

Once on National Highway-8, I briefly regret my decision as we find ourselves in the middle of a bizarre (for this time of day) traffic pile-up just outside Gurgaon; I ruminate darkly on all the things I've heard about improved roads and infrastructure. Later, alarm bells ring when we see a long line of trucks heading back towards us on our side of the road, but the traffic clears and there are no further problems. Unfortunately we reach Jaipur only around 11.30, having missed a session I badly wanted to catch - the one featuring domestic worker-turned-author Baby Halder.

In the next three days we attend readings and discussions, laze in deckchairs on the Diggi Palace lawn, chat with writers and publishers and go out for non-literary dinners each night (note to anyone visiting Jaipur: try Cafe Kooba, it's excellent). While shopping in the Walled City, a prominent blogger friend who shall remain unnamed is miffed when a crafts store assistant asks him in polite English if he "would like to try a sari". (Immense emasculation proliferates.)

Saturday
At an otherwise excellent session featuring author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with editor/critic Anita Roy, I hear the former use the phrase "the Penumbra of the Self". Having long believed that "penumbra" was either a gruesome inner body part or a six-headed mythical monster, I am stunned into reverential silence. These literary festivals really do expand one's mental horizons, even if the coffee is below par.

“I am truly mesmerised!” the short balding man in the audience says to the beautiful poet who has just finished a reading. “You seem obsessed by the human body. Can you tell me your worldview please?”

Sunday
Jade Goody, who said all those mean things about Shilpa Shetty, has been evicted from the celebrity house and India has once again chastened the rest of the world with its Moral Superiority. A newspaper quotes Shetty's family as saying "good has triumphed over evil, just like in Bollywood films". I shake my head so hard it falls off.

In the evening we are entertained by a stream of quotable quotes by Salman Rushdie as he holds forth on faith ("my mother developed religion in her old age – but it was like arthritis"), censorship ("you can't burn a thought"), the Indian Army in Kashmir, and many other topics.

Monday
I reach Delhi around 12 PM after another long morning drive, and with fever and a bad cough to show for my pains. The rest of the day is spent staring listlessly at the TV screen. Outstanding match between two of tennis's finest youngsters, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray, and I wonder philosophically whether you get more brownie points in the afterlife for writing a dozen good books, winning a dozen Grand Slams or participating in a dozen reality shows.

The "We support Shilpa" messages on the tickers of news channels read: "My sentiments, and the sentiments of millions of We Indians, have been offended". Seeking comfort in numbers, what? I consider possible National Mottos to go with our national anthem and national song: "I am Indian and my sentiments are always hurt." Pleased with this small contribution to the national cause, I sleep, only to be tormented by nightmares about Amit Chaudhuri's penumbra chasing me through a cold and dark forest where the trees are all painted in the national tri-colour.

Also
The features department in office is abuzz with talk about a grand new concept called "Key Result Area" (KRA), conceived by the human resources team as a way of measuring employee performance. It sounds very promising, but a senior editor tells me the acronym makes much more sense when you add the letter "P" to it. Another sniffs, "How can you quantify a writer's work or reduce it to cold figures?" It feels like I'm back at the lit-fest.

Jaipur fest session notes 2: Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri has this air of gravitas but he can be very funny in his understated way. When Anita Roy, moderating his session, cautiously said, “I hope you don’t take offence, but it seems you’re something of an oddity in the pantheon of Indian writers…”, Chaudhuri promptly retorted with a faux-offended “How dare you!” (Was it just my imagination at work or did it seem like a Naipaul send-up?)

Anyway, Anita’s point about Chaudhuri being an “oddity” was that he seems to belong to a different time-zone from the other major Indian writers of his generation – in terms of his influences and the nature of his writing. “On the one hand there’s been this prevailing notion that only big, sprawling books can capture the reality of this big, sprawling country,” she said, “but on the other hand your work is almost miniaturist.” (At this point Hurree leant across to remind me that Chaudhuri had once referred to a certain type of Big Book as “baggy monsters”.)

And yet, Anita continued, despite these differences, you are seen as a 36-point figure on the Indian literary scene rather than, say, a 24-point figure. (I enjoyed this cheeky way of expressing the difference between a heavyweight and an author of medium standing; also thought it was a nice comment on literary hierarchies.) Chaudhuri responded by discussing his discomfort with “the triumphalist nature of Indian writing” and by mentioning some of his early influences, including Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: “this lineage is as important as the huge monuments of Rushdie and Midnight’s Children.” Here, he also touched on how his relationship with most of the books he read in the late 1970s has changed over the years. “I don’t feel the same way now about many of the books I enjoyed in 1976, and vice versa. Jejuri is one of the exceptions – I loved it then and I still love it.”

Shortly afterwards, he was asked what he thought of Suketu Mehta’s remark (made during an earlier session) that Indian writing in English is more interesting and dynamic than in other languages because Indians who are thinking/writing in English are seeing more rapid change. Chaudhuri looked around faux-surreptitiously. “Is Suketu here? No? Then it’s safe to disapprove?” He then proceeded to tackle the question in seriousness – he didn’t argue against Mehta’s position forcefully but with quiet effectiveness, by asking rhetorical questions: “Are good writers simply a product of rapid change? I’m not sure.” The classes of society that are not seeing very rapid change, he pointed out, still produce great writers (C S Lakshmi, for instance) because great writing can come out of a search for freedom – from feeling in the dark, and pushing the walls back.

“The old language of literature is being replaced by the language of the market,” he said later, alluding to the blurb culture. “There was a time when it took a while for a book to develop a reputation. Today we’re being told even before a book’s release that it’s a masterpiece. Time has turned around.”

P.S. Anita is a hugely entertaining moderator. She allows herself to be cheeky, gets sidetracked now and again and refuses to be didactic about the Big Issues – and paradoxical though it might sound, I think these qualities makes authors feel more comfortable when they’re talking to her. The format of a panel discussion at a literary festival is a bit stifling anyhow – it’s understood that serious issues are going to be discussed and meaningful things said, and some lightness and irreverence during the actual discussion always helps. Of course, what made this session such a success in the final reckoning was that Chaudhuri himself was responsive and articulate.