Found in translation

[From my Forbes Life column - about some notable translations of books from regional Indian languages into English]

In Anita Desai’s short story “Translator Translated”, a lecturer named Prema is eager to translate an unassuming Oriya writer’s works into English so that they may reach a larger readership. But our view of Prema’s motives is altered when we learn she is a failed writer herself and that this could be a way of realising her suppressed ambitions. At one key point she exceeds her brief by taking liberties with the original text, and Desai underlines this transgression by changing the form of her own story; the narrative shifts from the third person to Prema’s voice.

The proprietorial translator exists in the real world too, of course. Recently I heard the veteran Tamil writer C S Lakshmi speak of her experience with translators who fancied themselves as critics, providing suggestions for changes to the original text, rather than focusing on their own work. But even when a translator has no hidden agenda, the process is a tricky one. A question that often arises is, what does being “faithful” to a text mean? Does it mean a literal, sentence-by-sentence rendition – which can result in stilted prose, given the inherent differences between languages – or should one set out to capture the "spirit" of the original? There are no easy answers – it usually depends on the nature of the writing, the envisioned readership, and the cultural assumptions involved. (As Lakshmi pointed out, the line “Someone touched me with cool hands” implies a pleasant experience when the reader is in Tamil Nadu, but when translated into an Eastern European language it may be changed to “someone touched me with warm hands” to achieve the same effect within a single sentence. However, making such a change can cause other problems within the narrative.)

During a panel discussion about translation in Delhi, the publisher Ritu Menon noted, half-jokingly, that the panel had only women on it “because translation has a long and difficult gestation period, with huge investment and slow returns”. In a country as culturally varied as India, the obstacles can be particularly daunting: as Geeta Dharmarajan pointed out during the same talk, we can’t give, say, an MT Vasudevan Nair to all our literate children in the way that the US can give Nathaniel Hawthorne to its students – “Bihari and Rajasthani children will have different behaviour types, different cultural reference points. And as a nation that is still going from the oral to the written traditions, how do we get illiterate people into the joy of the written world?” How to convey the subtle shifts in dialects within a particular language such as Bengali, wondered Anjum Katyal shortly afterward - "do we use a Cockney-fied English to indicate the differences?"

Despite these difficulties, there has lately been a surfeit of fine translations from the various Indian languages into English. Until a few years ago there was a dedicated but small band of translators, such as Arunava Sinha, who continues to bring a wide range of Bengali writings – from classics like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini to contemporary avant-garde works like Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart – to new readers. But the net is spreading wider now, and encompassing literature from across the country.

Given that the very act of translation from a regional language into English can be seen as a comment on the clout of Indian Anglophone writing, it is poignant that many of these books and stories are tales of marginalisation to begin with. A strong expression of the sense of neglect felt by non-English writers occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator here, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences.” The mollusc’s voice is being heard now: “Mangosil” appears with two other Prakash stories – about other forms of inequalities – in The Walls of Delhi, translated by Jason Grunebaum. The translation does contain the odd jarring note – phrases like “Isn’t this peachy?” feel out of place – but Grunebaum has clarified that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership.

A cheekier take on hegemony occurs in the Tamil Dalit writer Bama’s Harum-Scarum Saar (translated by N Ravi Shanker), about lower-caste Dalits' refusal to kowtow to their landlord “masters”. The rebellions here are not violent or dramatic (the circumstances of these people’s lives would permit no such thing), but the societal order is overturned in subtle ways, through rude speech and small acts of defiance: in one story, “Pongal”, the son of a labourer refuses to accompany the rest of the family on an obligatory gift-bearing visit to the landlord. The writing is conversational and salty (something the translation captures nicely), full of rhetorical questions (I knew people were there in the well, otherwise would I have jumped?) and phraseology that isn’t grammatical in the strictest sense but conveys the flavour of the setting.

Discussions about contemporary Indian fiction in English often touch on the lack of truly startling work that aligns stylistic experimentation with political engagement. One of the most formally provocative books I have read is P Sachidanandan’s The Book of Destruction (original Malayalam title Samharathinthe Pusthakam), about a man trapped in a series of surreal situations involving the bombing of a discotheque, a mysterious stranger whom he regularly meets during train journeys, and a tailor cannibalised by the people whose personalities have been shaped by the clothes he stitched; the human race is bound by the destructive impulse, says this hard-hitting critique of social conformity. But there are more linear, narrative-driven works available in translation too, many of them by Penguin’s Modern Classics imprint. These include fine translations of important Indian writers such as Yashpal (This is not that Dawn), Sundara Ramaswamy (Tamarind History) and Fakir Mohan Senapati (Six Acres and a Third). One of the imprint's lower-profile gems is the Telegu writer Chaso's Dolls’ Wedding, a collection of  deceptively unfussy stories that have spare “plots” but provide tangential entry points into people’s inner lives through an accumulation of detail: as an ancient great-grandmother tells tales of her childhood, the reader is made aware of the significance of what is not explicitly said; how the old woman appears dimly aware of, and resigned to, the injustices of her life.

Elsewhere, genre and popular writing are also reaching new readers. The Urdu scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi recently expanded his own novel Kai Chaand thay Sar-e Aasmaan into a multigenerational 19th century epic titled The Mirror of Beauty – a respectable “literary” venture, if there ever was one. But a few years ago Faruqi had indulged himself with a more light-weight project: translations of four “Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers written by the legendary pulp writer Ibn-e Safi in the 1950s. These adventures – with such titles as Laughing Corpse and Poisoned Arrow – “star” the imperturbable super-sleuth Colonel Faridi, his assistant Captain Hameed and a pet goat named Bhagra Khan, and are set in an improbably Westernised city with posh nightclubs, harbours and skating rinks. It is easy to dismiss such books as trivial, but their storytelling energies and plotting skills have influenced writers and artists for decades, and seeped into our popular culture, and in his translations Faruqi has combined his writerly strengths with the childlike enthusiasm of a fan who was mesmerised by Safi as a boy. That combination lies at the heart of so much good translation.

[Some earlier posts about fine books in English translation: Lal Singh Dil’s memoirs, Revathi’s A Hijra Life Story, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din, Geetanjali Shree's Khaali Jagah, Blaft's Tamil folk tales and pulp fiction, Syed Muhammad Ashraf's The Beast, MT Vasudevan Nair's Randaamoozham]

Emotional palettes: Vikram Chandra on mixed rasa in ancient literature and popular cinema

There are so many stimulating things in Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code that I won’t try listing them all – or doing a consolidated review – but one passage that struck a chord was a reference from the Mahabharata’s Stree Parva, the book about the women on the post-war battlefield. In the original text, Gandhari’s extraordinary monologue includes a description of the slain warrior Bhurishravas’s wives finding his severed arm, then holding and caressing it. The imagery haunted me for a long time when I first read it (in the Kamala Subramanian version, I think; the more literal and dreary Kisara Mohan Ganguli translation is on this page) and I was reminded of it when I read Mirrored Mind. Chandra quotes a rendition by the ninth century scholar Anandavardhana wherein one of the wives, gently stroking the gory limb she has placed on her lap, says:

“This is the hand that took off my girdle,
That fondled my full breasts,
That caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,
And loosened my skirt.”**

Here is, as Chandra points out, an example (one of countless in the Mahabharata) of the mixing of rasas. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different – some might even say inappropriate – mood.

Concepts like rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance), dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader) and vyanjan (suggestion) have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, and Chandra writes about them at some length, drawing on the work of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, and discussing the function of rasa and dhvani in old literature. But he also mentions a more modern medium.

The urge to savour is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song.

According to Anandavardhana: “While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant… [But there is] no obstruction to a single rasa by its being mixed with others…Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work.”

Chandra continues:

A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasas that will strengthen the predominant rasa of the whole.

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I had a nice session with Chandra the other day (two sessions actually, a private conversation followed by a public one), and part of our discussion was about the often-uninformed, kneejerk denigrating of works that are deemed “unrealistic” or “melodramatic”. When I interviewed him in 2006, he had said:

I feel very strongly about this notion of what is "too filmi" as opposed to what is realistic. In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we've had an education that's trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the tradition of psychological realism. So when we see the other kind of representation – of mainline cinema – we deny its reality. But the idea that the novelistic/psychological-realism form can transparently give us what is "real" is very naïve. It's a distressing aspect of critical talk, and given the history of colonialism, we should be more suspicious of this idea.

(Full interview here)

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. In a chapter titled “Histories and Mythologies”, Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver). And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven; how entire modes of artistic expression get labelled inferior and “premodern” as a result; and what effect that has had on how we continue to view our art and culture even in post-colonial times. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he says:

The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble”, the frightening “throb of drums” that he refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into ‘tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours’ […]

These parts of Mirrored Mind particularly appealed to me because I can relate – to a degree – with Chandra’s ambivalence. My own informal “education” in cinema – taking the medium seriously, as something that could be analysed and written about – really began when I exited the world of Hindi films in my early teens, became obsessed with old American films, and began reading criticism by V F Perkins, Robin Wood and others; criticism that was very much rooted in the models of psychological realism, and in a limited worldview where an Indian director worthy of being held up as a major creative force would have to have the particular sensibility and method of a Satyajit Ray. 

It is only in the past few years that I have rediscovered the creative energies of the really good popular Hindi films, and attempted – as a viewer and writer – to understand their “language” and the assumptions underlying it. And so, even while I have written posts like this one in response to sweepingly condescending pieces about Indian cinema – or this one about Hindi-movie songs – there’s a tiny part of me that still feels a bit embarrassed about the tropes of our popular movies; still reluctant to fully embrace the best of them as art (as opposed to “enjoyable entertainment, but nothing more”). There is some irony here, because when it comes to old Hollywood, I have always found it easy to reject Pauline Kael’s simplistic Art vs Trash formulation. I have no trouble placing popular or genre films like Hawks’ Monkey Business in the same circle of artistic merit as more obviously serious-intentioned films. But it feels like a greater leap to put a popular Hindi movie – even one that is extremely well made and has a fully realised “emotional palette” – in that circle. It’s an aspect of my conditioning that I struggle with.

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Like I said, there is much else of interest in Mirrored Mind, though it is a difficult book in places: an honest report of the reading experience might be “Stirred, then daunted, even stupefied, then stirred again”. It isn’t easy to get into it – if you know nothing about the world of code and computer programming, you might back gingerly away on seeing the first page with its List of Figures that goes “CIL for Hello, world! program in C#” and “Subtraction operator with inputs 4.2 and 2.2” and suchlike.

When I last encountered Chandra’s work, it was in the form of Sacred Games, that epic novel about cops and gangsters in Mumbai – a fast-paced, accessible thriller as well as a thoughtful look at human lives and destinies colliding in a dynamic city, with the reverberations of the distant past constantly running through those lives. So coming to Mirrored Mind, all this talk about algorithms and logic gates and computer programming was a bit scary. But a couple of things happened as I continued reading. First, Chandra’s writing made the world of code and software immediate and interesting. Second, the book morphed gradually into other things. It became a memoir of a reading life and a writing life – of Chandra’s coming of age as a writer, his parallel life in programming, and how the two pursuits have intersected, diverged, or complemented each other (“the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative”). And eventually, a wide-ranging history of Sanskrit grammar and theory.

That might seem a quirky range of topics for a single book, but they come together very well here, and there are all sorts of little ideas and revelations. For instance, it was news to me that good code can aspire not just to functionality but to elegance and beauty as well; that an ambitious programmer can be like a writer who wants to polish his sentences and express himself as well as possible, rather than simply relay information. At one point Chandra quotes Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who was underwhelmed by a particular code: “It was plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.” 

Which almost suggests that a version of the form-and-content debate may exist even in this seemingly cold, mechanical world! Perhaps future editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival can have sessions with titles like “Visual Basic, C# and FORTRAN: three celebrated programming languages discuss what aesthetic transcendence means to them."

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** The Stree Parva excerpt above is from Luther Obrock’s English translation of Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka

Lingua fracas in Nayakan and Inglourious Basterds: movie characters confounded by language

One of last year's most popular feel-good films was Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish, with Sridevi as a diffident, middle-aged woman visiting America and barely knowing how to get by, given her limited knowledge of English. On arriving in New York, she is beset – both on the streets and in her sister’s house – by words spoken in incomprehensible accents, and generally disoriented by the pace of life around her. At one point the film’s music track expresses her state of mind through a melange of sounds coming at her from all directions; meanwhile the title song gently combines English with Hindi in ways that are familiar to most middle-class Indians. (“Badlaa nazaraa yun yun yun / Saara ka saara new new new.”)

I thought about the hegemony of language again recently while watching scenes in two very different films, scenes that showed how fluency or lack of fluency in a language can affect our perceptions of people: the powerful can seem like underdogs, good guys may appear ridiculous, bad guys almost admirable. The first was Mani Rathnam’s 1987 classic Nayakan, fuelled by Kamal Haasan’s stunning performance as Velu Nayakan, who becomes an underworld don and a godfather to the South Indian community in Bombay. I had a strange moment watching Nayakan: having become immersed in the story, and taken its “Tamil-ness” for granted (this was a clearly South Indian film, I had to read subtitles to understand it), I temporarily forgot that the setting was Bombay, and that people outside Velu’s immediate, enclosed environment speak in Hindi or Marathi.

This came home in a scene where Velu – already a well-respected don – has to interact with dons from other parts of the city. Suddenly traces of uncertainty, wariness, even vulnerability, appear on his face as he tries to size up these potential rivals or enemies, whose speech he can’t easily follow. As viewers, we have been thinking of Velu as a larger-than-life figure, firmly in control of his fiefdom, but now we see him in more human terms. There is also something moving about the suggestion that Velu, despite spending almost his entire life in Bombay, never properly learns the city’s majority languages – this gives his situation a nuance that differentiates it from the story of the young Vito Corleone in Little Italy in The Godfather Part II (a film that Nayakan has clear links with), slowly picking up English as he makes his way in the world, so that the transition from the Italian-speaking Vito (played by Robert de Niro) to the English-mumbling patriarch (Marlon Brando) seems wholly natural. Nayakan, on the other hand, gets much of its edge from Velu’s immutable foreignness. No wonder Mani Rathnam expressed dissatisfaction (in one of his interviews with Baradwaj Rangan) with the Hindi remake of the film, Feroz Khan’s Dayavan: the remake was about a Mumbaikar in Mumbai, where he is culturally and linguistically at home, which meant an important subtext about alienation was absent.

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The other scene is a comic one, but provides food for thought too. It is from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a wish-fulfilling alternate history in which Nazi hunters save the day during World War II. The villain here is Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz: he is terrifyingly smooth, sharp... and a polyglot, which gives him an edge over the good guys, the “Basterds” led by Aldo (Brad Pitt), all of whom are barely fluent in one language, English (more accurately American, spoken in a distinct Southern drawl). One of the film’s funniest scenes has Aldo and team disguised as Italians at a party, while Landa – well aware that they are imposters – toys with them like a cat slowly prying open a box of inauthentic but tasty pasta. (Earlier, when we heard Brad Pitt say “I can speak some Aye-talian” - in response to his German informer contemptuously asking if they know any language other than English - we could tell these boys would soon be treading on thin ice. And so it comes to pass.)

It’s an excellent comic premise, one that combines tension with laughs, and also invites the viewer to consider his own responses to the characters. Here are Aldo and company trying to save the world by infiltrating the dens of the Nazi top brass, and yet they barely understand a word of German. We are supposed to be rooting for them, but they look and behave like hicks – the Three Stooges handed a World War and unsure what to do with it – confirming every stereotype of the insular, ignorant American; in comparison the nasty Landa seems like a higher, more cultured species. We cringe when Aldo says “Bonjourno”, enunciating the word much too deliberately. Then we chuckle when Landa (who seems able to toss off any language as if he were born speaking it) turns out to be a fluent Italian speaker too, and when he deferentially asks the “Italians” if his pronunciation is right. (“Si si, correcto,” Aldo replies, before grunting “Arrividerci” - or "A river derchy" - in a ludicrously fake accent.)

Almost in spite of their tomfoolery here, the good guys do eventually get the job done. But when Aldo gets the better of Landa in the film’s last scene, he does it not by winning a verbal duel but by using a knife to carve an incriminating swastika on his adversary’s forehead. The caveman comes out on top because he knows how to use crude tools – and speech be damned.

[Did a version of this for Business Standard. An earlier post here on Tarantino's Django Unchained, in which Christoph Waltz plays another character who uses language so fluidly that everyone around him looks like they've just stumbled in from the Paleolithic]

Of snails and superhumans - Uday Prakash's tales of deprivation

[Did a version of this review for Mint Lounge]

With the surge in Indian English publishing and a concurrent increase in literature festivals with an Anglophone slant, it is no secret that writers who work in the other Indian languages have felt increasingly neglected and undervalued. A particularly sharp expression of this occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator, a possible stand-in for Prakash himself, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder.”

The chilling sense one gets from this passage is of someone trapped in a hermetically sealed room, failing to be heard (much less understood), the echoes of his own cries bouncing off the walls. It is unsurprising then that Prakash’s collection The Walls of Delhi - three stories translated by Jason Grunebaum - contain powerful representations of other forms of marginalisation too. The world of this book is one of spectral tunnels in which the untold chronicles of the dispossessed lie hidden (“walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart – and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out”) as well as hollow walls containing the dark secrets of privileged people.

Thus, in the title story, a poor man named Ramnivas finds seemingly limitless treasure in an improbable but oddly appropriate place: inside a wall of a south Delhi gym to which the children of the rich come to work off the weight they have accumulated from eating too much (even as Ramnivas mulls that one of his own children died after eating fish caught from the sewer). The stacks of currency notes change Ramnivas’s life – and a man who had looked like an emaciated version of the actor Jeetendra transforms into a “gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile” – but soon his dream begins to unravel. In “Mohandas”, a lower-caste man discovers that his name and job have been stolen by an upper-caste loafer, and then comes upon what seems to be a village of doppelgangers, each usurping another’s rightful place in the world. (“Were all the people who had good jobs and held high positions and ran around in automobiles and caroused who they really claimed to be?” he wonders.) And in “Mangosil” a child’s head grows at an abnormal pace because it knows things other heads don’t know, or don’t want to know; the virus that causes this mysterious disease, we learn, is poverty.

These are angry, sarcastic stories, infused with the rage of someone who has seen far too much meaningless injustice to want to withhold judgements or trade in nuances. It is the rage that comes with seeing the cities of a half-developed country from the sky, as “incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud”. Prakash’s writing is full of poetic imagery. “One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning,” it is said of a child’s birth in a poor family. Insects seem to recognise the cough of a dying man and arrive in droves as his phlegm hits the ground. When Mohandas wades into a river to pray, “tiny kothari fish swam to the surface and fought to nip at the salt from his teardrops”. And the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall by giving us parenthetical asides about politics or the economy, showing a sense of curiosity about the wider world and about the lives of distant figures like Bill Clinton, almost as if trying to convince himself that his derelict protagonists really do inhabit the same planet as the one on which these other, “important” things involving supra-humans are taking place. (One thinks again of the snail and the well-cushioned bipeds.)

Not having read these stories in the original Hindi, Grunebaum’s translation seemed serviceable to me, though there is the odd jarring note: an old man says “hey blindy” – an awkward, slangy rendering of “andhi” – to his wife, and some phrases – “Isn’t this peachy?” – feel culturally discordant. But Grunebaum clarifies that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership, which is as well, for their content is unsettling to begin with; there are some obviously fabulist elements in them, especially in the story of the large-headed Suri. At the same time it is useful to remember how strange reality can be. In his Afterword, Grunebaum mentions a trip with Uday Prakash to Chhatisgarh, where they just happened to run into the “real Mohandas”, walking on the road, “looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story”. They spoke for a bit, took some photos and then went their separate ways – “Mohandas” presumably to continue fighting his small battles against shadowy imposters, Grunebaum returning to translate stories about deprivation for a readership that can sympathise but perhaps not fully understand.

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[Also see: Jason Grunebaum speaks with Trisha Gupta about translation here]

Swearing in Swahili, living in Canada, rediscovering India... a conversation with M G Vassanji

[Did a shorter version of this profile-cum-interview - of a writer whom I hold in high regard - for the Hindu Literary Review]

More than halfway through M G Vassanji’s new novel The Magic of Saida, the protagonist Kamal Punja is horribly unwell in a small hotel in Kilwa, Tanzania. Having lived in Canada for 35 years and unused to the more pliable standards of hygiene in the country he is visiting – the country of his birth and childhood – Kamal has been fortifying himself with vaccinations, insect repellents and prophylactics. However, a single, unsterilised glass of water has done for him and now he is gripped by fever, ailments of the stomach and nervous system. “Africa invaded him, reclaimed him once again,” the narrator – a publisher named Martin, who has just made Kamal’s acquaintance – tells us.

By now, though, the reader knows that Kamal has been invaded and reclaimed in more than one sense. A middle-aged doctor with a family and a successful practice in Edmonton, he has been drawn back to Africa by the memory of a girl named Saida, whom he knew and loved decades earlier. Arriving in Kilwa, it is almost as if the intervening years of his life fall away and he is pulled into time’s vortex: into his own personal history as the son of an Indian father (who vanished when Kamal was a child) and a Swahili mother, and the complex history of Tanzania, populated by an assortment of local and immigrant communities. The result is an intricate, moving – though also meandering – narrative, as Kamal’s recollections run alongside stories about his great-grandfather Punja who had journeyed to Africa from Gujarat in the 19th century, and an old poet named Mzee Omari who may in a moment of weakness have betrayed his people to the Germans who invaded East Africa in the 1880s.

These movements across space and time should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Vassanji’s earlier books. To read the work of this graceful, perceptive writer is to be constantly reminded of the famous last line of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past.” In the last two decades Vassanji has written novels set in Tanzania, Kenya, Canada and India and featuring characters with a range of life experiences, backgrounds and personal compulsions; but in some way or the other all his books deal with how the past operates upon the present.

Frequently this theme manifests itself in an examination of how childhood experiences can define, and sometimes petrify, a life. In The Magic of Saida, Kamal feels like his childhood “had been some conjuror’s creation, with the ability to change shape, parts of it to disappear like smoke” – and yet, it’s notable that the childhood sections here (as in other Vassanji novels such as The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and The Assassin’s Song) have more clarity, more fearful vividness, than the adult sections do. A boy’s sense of wonder and mystery are adeptly expressed in such passages as the one where little Kamal thinks he is being harassed by the old poet’s invisible djinn. (“Did Mzee Omari keep the dreadful Idris in a bottle?” he wonders, “Did he come out of it like a blue puff of wind like in the storybook?”) So is trauma: one gets a tangible sense of how devastated he is when his mother sends him to Dar es Salaam to live with his father’s relatives (“But I’m an African” he protests, “I don’t speak Indian, I don’t eat Indian! They eat daal and they smell!”) and by the consequent sundering of his relationship with Saida.

In my own favourite Vassanji book, the “in-between” Vikram Lall – an Indian who grows up in a Kenya torn by anti-colonial insurgency – is similarly haunted by memories of his childhood friend Annie, a British girl who was murdered by Mau Mau rebels. Through Vikram’s reminiscences we come to understand how his character has been shaped by that distant tragedy (the book’s epigraph is T S Eliot’s line “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”) but we also see how his becoming a political power-broker later in life affects – even if in a small way – his country’s destiny. Time and again, Vassanji shows how cultural and national conflicts knead individual lives, and how the subsequent actions of those individuals in turn shape larger histories.

The circularity of events is an equally important motif of his work – history as tragic farce, destined to coil back on itself no matter how much you try to stop it. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, goes the familiar aphorism, but one of the strengths of Vassanji’s writing is how he demonstrates – not in a gratuitously cynical way but through insightful stories about specific individuals – that even sensitive, self-aware people can become trapped in a web of historical wrongs. Without giving too much away, a climactic revelation in The Magic of Saida implicates Kamal in exactly the sort of moral inaction that had adversely shaped his own life.

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“In my work, the present is always interacting with the past,” Vassanji agrees when we meet at the India International Centre, Delhi. A beat of silence and then a little chuckle: “But maybe that’s the physicist in me!” (He specialised in nuclear physics at the University of Pennsylvania before embarking on a career as an editor and writer.) “There is a feeling of entrapment by history – one little decision and a whole wave comes crashing down on you. This is especially true of Africa, but even in India one thinks of all those who are trapped by the violent memories of Partition.” He is so soft-spoken, I am briefly concerned my recorder will be ineffective. Yet, as I soon realise, the gentle voice has a steady firmness.

Descended from the Khoja community of Gujarat, M G Vassanji grew up in Kenya and Tanzania, and went to the US to study at age 20. His first novel The Gunny Sack (set in the East Africa of his childhood, with a protagonist of Indian ethnicity, Salim Juma, delving into his ancestral past) was published in 1989; there have been nine more books, including two short-story collections. Two novels – No New Land and Amriika – are set largely in Canada or the US, but Africa has been the subject of much of his best writing, including The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, both of which won the prestigious Giller Prize. Clearly, that continent exercises a powerful hold over his imagination even though he hasn’t lived there since 1970.

“It’s hard to explain what Africa means to me,” he says. “Tanzania was a more or less tolerant society and there were so many people from Indian-origin communities; we had our identity, but at the same time we grew up with their language.” Though his characters tend to have very complicated childhoods, he speaks fondly of his own youth, of the revolutionary movements in Africa in the 60s and the politics of equality and non-alignment – a heady, optimistic time for an impressionable boy.

This perspective – of an insider, fully steeped in a culture – differentiates his work from that of the most famous Indian-origin author to have written about Africa, V S Naipaul. As Vassanji himself puts it, Naipaul in Africa is an observer. “He visits it and writes about ‘them’, which is fine – it’s an ancient tradition in travel writing. But I cannot write like that about my part of Africa, or even about India, because I identify directly with them.” Even today, if he visits Tanzania and someone calls him a foreigner, he points to his skin and asks: do I look white to you? “Being able to do that confidently, despite having been away for decades, is a big thing. The language has a certain lilt to it, which allows you to banter” – perhaps I’m imagining it, but Vassanji’s voice takes on a new cadence here; he seems to croon rather than speak these words – “and when you can talk like that you know you belong. I still tend to swear in Swahili!”

There is a passage in The Gunny Sack about the many shades of dark skin. “Yes, he was dark. Not the dark of charcoal, the mweusi of the African from the interior, the Hehe, the Ngoni, the Haya; or the light dark mweupe of the Chagga; or the red-dark of the half-naked Masai, his arse showing firm and proud as he walked; but the dark of the Indian, the persistent brown-dark of sedimented coffee that refuses to whiten.” Such depth of knowledge necessarily comes with being an insider, but Vassanji knows well that the complexities of places like Africa and India begin to get lost as you move further away from them. Those who view them from a distance see amorphous places with an all-embracing identity.

Which makes it notable that despite being based in North America throughout his writing life, he has found a warm and receptive readership for his work. “Canada has given me a generous environment to grow as a writer,” he says, “it has a mature and tolerant view of itself, it recognises that people come from different places and bring with them traditions and cultures, languages and idioms.” While he is comfortable being identified as a Canadian national, it’s understood that he has roots and tentacles elsewhere. “Cutting them off would be like cutting off an arm, or your soul.” Of course, he admits with some amusement, this attitude might get him into trouble with “cultural nationalists”, who expect him to plant a flag in one or another place. A Canadian who is also an African as well as an Indian? Surely that’s as unacceptable as being both Hindu and Muslim.

But Vassanji has a case for adopting that improbable duality too: in his travelogue-history A Place Within: Rediscovering India, he describes a founding legend of his ancestors, the Khojas, wherein a Muslim holy man came to a village in western Gujarat and joined Krishna devotees in the traditional garba dance. As a child, Vassanji was enthralled by ginans – verses and songs from the Sufi tradition – and learnt much about music and mythology from them. Though he is agnostic, there are strong elements of mysticism in his work: the story of the poet Omari’s petulant djinn in The Magic of Saida, for instance, or an episode where a magician plays detective, handing out “truth-telling” medicines to people. “Mysticism is basically the meaning of life,” he says, “it’s like theoretical physics, it asks the same questions about life and death, and I’m empathetic to it; when I see a woman at a temple, I see my mother.”

His syncretic upbringing – built on Hindu and Islamic streams of thought – must have made it especially disturbing when he visited the land of his ancestors for what was effectively the first time in 1993, and found he had landed right in the midst of the post-Babri Masjid communal riots. “Yes, that was bothersome,” he says with typical understatement, “I didn’t see why I had to deal with this scar of the Partition, which was never my experience – when my grandparents left India, there was no Partition.” It’s a side of India that he hasn’t been able to accept. “These divisions get forced upon you. If a Gujarati who practices Hinduism thinks he’s more Indian than me, I say no, the Vedas and Upanishads belong equally to me. We come from the same place.”

A Place Within is one of his two India books – the other is the novel The Assassin’s Song, about a Gujarati man turning his back on his legacy as the keeper of a Sufi shrine and moving to the US. Both helped him come to terms with an identity that had lain dormant for decades. “The discovery of India completely altered me – it awoke things that I thought would be numb after a couple of generations.”

“Rebirth” might be an apt word. Right from the moving first chapter where – partly due to an Indian Airlines strike – he travels from Delhi to Bhubaneshwar by the Puri Express, the writing in A Place Within has a distinct quality: it’s as if the middle-aged Vassanji is viewing India through the eyes of a fascinated child, on a train for the first time, but when he gets around to recording his impressions the wise adult in him – mindful of his own susceptibility to simplifications – takes over, supplying a measured perspective on events and experiences, constantly checking himself when he might be about to make a sweeping statement. And yet, the wide-eyed sense of wonder is never lost: “There is so much of India, I tell myself. How does one get to it? I would like to reach out and touch it, it feels so close and familiar, yet there seems a glass cage around me.” This searching tentativeness makes A Place Within one of the most singular India books of recent years, very different in timbre from confident narratives about this or that aspect of the country.

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Though the discovery of India is an ongoing project for him (A Place Within ends elliptically, with the line “But for now I must stop here, conclude this token of pilgrimage”), there is no lack of other things that he can engage with and write about; he is currently working on a similar travel book about Tanzania. “The texture of that country is often lost in snapshot reportage and I want to depict it as a real, human place – not an AIDS, war and hunger place.” And of course, he will be a part of the narrative.

Writer and physicist; Kenyan, Tanzanian and Gujarati; Indian, African and Canadian; Hindu and Muslim; agnostic and interested in mysticism. With all these identities informing each other, it is easy to see why Vassanji prefers to use his initials rather than the names Moyez Gulamhussein, which might mark him as belonging to a specific community or region. It is no surprise too that a recurring theme of his work is the difficulty of knowing where we are from and what forces have combined to make us what we are. (Perhaps this makes it piquantly fitting that he keeps gravitating back towards Africa, which – in the long view of history – is where all humans originated.) His best writing builds on the knowledge that people and communities – along with their allegiances – shift continuously over time; for all the Indians in his novels whose families moved to Africa, there are equally reminders that the Sidis of Singpur are the descendants of Africans who made a journey in the opposite direction centuries earlier.

There is a throwaway observation in The Magic of Saida, one that might have come from any of Vassanji’s books: under the Idi Amin regime, we are reminded, people like Kamal would be viewed as foreigners, not “real” Africans – and yet, Kamal’s great-grandfather Punja had called himself “Sawahil” and fought the Germans for his adopted country, while Idi Amin himself had once fought for the British against the Kenyans. “Nothing was straightforward.” In a world that appears to be shrinking but where distinctions between “original” dwellers and “outsiders” continue to be made, Vassanji’s body of work is a gentle reminder of the fluidity of history – and of the ability of an individual to belong to many places and be many things at the same time.

Speech therapy and love in The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

[Did a version of this review for Biblio]

In a typically candid piece for Vanity Fair magazine recently, Christopher Hitchens reflected on one of the most painful aspects of his bout with cancer: the deterioration of his vocal chords. “Deprivation of the ability to speak is like the amputation of part of the personality,” wrote the man who has been among the smoothest, most eloquent public speakers of his generation:

To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.

Ruiyan Xu’s novel The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai centres on a similar loss. The victim, Li Jing, isn’t a public figure like Hitchens, but he’s a smooth-talking businessman whose professional success depends on his ability to influence clients. Understandably, then, his world turns on its head when a freak accident – caused by a gas-pipe explosion in a hotel – leaves him with a peculiar form of aphasia where he can no longer speak in Chinese. Li Jing can still talk with near-fluency in English (which was his first language because he had lived in America until the age of 10), but that’s small comfort – the continuation of a meaningful relationship with his wife Meiling depends on his being able to converse in his native tongue.

Without this ability the two of them are, for all practical purposes, strangers, stealing glances at each other from across a room, wondering if they ever knew each other at all. (Not being able to say her name right feels like the worst betrayal, as if his stupid brain is determined to elide her from his syntax, from his memory. As if she isn’t his to hold on to anymore.)

Enter Rosalyn Neal, an American neurologist brought to Shanghai on an eight-week fellowship to help Li Jing get back to normal. Rosalyn has demons of her own – she recently underwent a painful separation from her husband – and travelling to a new country is an escape from the haze that her life has become. However, she finds the going less than easy in Shanghai. (The foreign city and the exotic patient had only been abstractions before, but now they are real and waiting, with their own thorny demands.) With much at stake in her patient’s professional and personal life, she is expected to be a miracle worker, but the depressed Li Jing has retreated into a world of silence. Nor do Rosalyn’s expressions of frustration and short bursts of temper go down well with people from a less emotionally demonstrative culture. Soon she comes to resent both Shanghai and Li Jing for shutting her out.

But at the same time, the introduction of Rosalyn energises the novel and brings its themes into clearer relief. When she does make her breakthrough with Li Jing, there’s a ring of deus ex machina about the situation – it’s a little too neat and contrived – but it leads to personal liberation for both of them. For Rosalyn, the breakthrough coincides with her discovery of the expat community in Shanghai and the formation of a new circle of friends. One senses that, like Li Jing, she had become withdrawn – that she needed to open up and reach out to others instead of feeling sorry for herself. And soon we see the parallels between their situations: here are two people who are – in different ways – trapped in a strange world, with little means of communicating with others. This prepares us for the turn that their relationship will eventually take.

Meanwhile, circumstances have forced Meiling – a books editor – to enter the corporate world in an attempt to salvage her husband’s now-headless company. She handles this responsibility with composure, but soon she must also deal with the unusual intimacy that seems to be forming between Li Jing and the American woman – an intimacy that she herself is partly responsible for, since she insisted on Rosalyn extending her stay in Shanghai and moving into their house.

The narrative now starts to move between these three people, so that we come to understand their separate fears and insecurities, and the hold that memory has on each of them. Their dilemmas are all moving in their own ways: particularly compelling are Li Jing’s recollections of coming to China for the first time as a child with the American name James, struggling to adjust to the new setting and the new language – and his shifting relationship with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which he had loved as a boy and could barely recognise as an adult. But near the end of the book, a subtle change also occurs in our perceptions of the two women. Rosalyn, who in some ways was our entry point into the story as well as its putative hero, becomes less sympathetic – perhaps a little too hedonistic and self-absorbed – while Meiling, who has been a distant figure, slowly grows in stature. Her recollections of the early stages of her relationship with Li Jing are revealing and help make her a more accessible, sympathetic figure.

He was the gregarious one at the centre of their social group ... How he seduced her was with words ... Conversations accumulated between the two of them until one day she discovered that his words had built an entirely private universe between their two bodies.

****

Stylistically, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai doesn’t begin on a promising note. Xu’s writing is initially strained and over-descriptive, with jerky sentences and awkward phrasing (all he wants is just to find a way out). I thought her account of the hotel’s collapse was exasperatingly florid.

The ground shifting like a pre-historic animal. Fire in the kitchen stretching out its wings, flapping, frantic. Fissures mutate in the walls, mapping out an eventual collapse [...] On the facade the metallic swans glare through the smoke, their bodies adrift, desperate to hold on. One of them loosens its hold on the other, breaking the heart in between their necks, swinging its body downward with reckless velocity and swinging back the other way, its upside-down head like the pendulum of a clock, swerving through a wide arc just above the doorway.

This sort of detail might be understandable in a disaster novel like The Towering Inferno, but it’s out of place here, given how incidental the explosion is to the actual meat of the story. Even if the swans are intended as an elaborate metaphor for the fissures in Li Jing’s world, the writing at this point is overblown.

There are other small irritants. When Li Jing is lying in bed, struggling to deal with his condition, we are privy to his tortured thoughts about being unable to say “Meiling” despite understanding the syllables and hearing the tones in his own head. But then we get a sentence – “A synaptic collapse between the frontal lobe and the operculum” – which strikes a false note in a passage meant to be describing Li Jing’s internal perspective; it’s an if an omniscient narrator has suddenly intruded with medical terminology for our edification. There is also an unconvincing episode where a visitor to Li Jing’s hospital room – ignorant of his condition – goes on talking for a few minutes without realising that he is getting no response.

These are weaknesses, but as Xu slips into the natural flow of the story and focuses on the interconnected lives of her characters, her writing become smoother. Some of the book’s best passages are the ones that make little observations – without underlining the point too thickly – about the centrality of language in our everyday lives. Thus, when Rosalyn chances to meet another southerner, we are told in a throwaway sentence that she is so happy that she (perhaps subconsciously) lengthens her drawl. At another crucial point, she addresses her new friend (and potential lover) Danny as “Ben”, which is her ex-husband’s name.

I also liked the perceptive use of a translator named Alan, whose detachment becomes a counterpoint to the fraught lives of the central figures; his placid and emotionless renderings of tense conversations are amusing, but they are also pointers to the importance of tone, pitch and enunciation, and how complicated the business of talking really is. With all its little flaws, Xu’s book is a graceful reminder of the countless ways in which we are defined by our ability to speak: the stressing of syllables, the injection of feeling into an abstract or innocuous sound like “um”, even the slips of tongue that reveal hidden places in the mind. This is a story about language and speech, but it’s also about other things we take for granted, and the delicate threads that hold some of our strongest relationships together.

Sunday Guardian snippets: on euphemisms, R K Narayan and a wordless comic book

[From my weekly books column; some earlier snippets here, here and here]

The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.

Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)

Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.

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It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.

One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.

Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:

The bathroom was a shack, roofed with corrugated sheets; the wooden frame was warped and the door never shut flush, but always left a gap through which one obtained a partial glimpse of anyone bathing. But it had been a house practice, for generations, for its members not to look through [...] A very tall coconut tree loomed over the bath, shedding enormous withered fronds and other horticultural odds and ends on the corrugated roof with a resounding thud. Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible. Jagan’s father, as everyone knew, had lived at first in a thatched hut at the very back of this ground. Jagan remembered playing in a sand heap outside the hut; the floor of the hut was paved with cool clay and one could put one’s cheek to it on a warm day and feel heavenly.

The prose here is functional, but it’s also assured and humorous, and commands the reader’s full attention (the passage is randomly selected, by the way; you can open the book almost anywhere and find another like it). One also senses a pioneering Indian writer in English trying to create a visual picture of his world for the foreign readership that he knows his books will reach - it’s ironical that many people take jingoistic pride in the idea that Narayan was a provincial man who never wrote for the West.

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“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.

Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.