Post Facto: Hierarchies of Intelligence and Other Schoolboy Fictions

Today's Sunday Guardian column:

"I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them," begins Julian Barnes' narrator Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending. "But school is where it all began."

But a narrator in his 60s who describes certain events from his schooldays over 54 pages, while managing to sum up his working life, his marriage, his daughter's birth and childhood, his divorce, his daughter's marriage and his post-retirement life in two and a half, can scarcely be believed when he says he's "not very interested" in his schooldays. The years of his adolescence seem, in fact, to be the part of his life that Tony Webster is most interested in. It's as if nothing that has happened since can ever match up to the excitement of those years: the newness, the sense of discovery, of impending doom or greatness.

Of course, Barnes' – Tony Webster's – version of adolescence is a very particular one: smartalecky boys in a London public school in the '60s, where young teachers came down from Cambridge. "[W]e were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic," says Webster of his clique of four, before going on to list the philosophers they had each read, and closing with the almost-charming disclamer: "Yes, of course we were pretentious—what else is youth for?"

But what really struck me about Webster's narrative is the degree to which he remains in thrall to the idea of intelligence he developed at the time. Four and a half decades later, he is convinced that if psychologists were to make "a graph of pure intelligence" measured against age, ""it would show that most of us peak between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five".

It seems a strange way to measure the value of our lives, or our selves: a scale in which "wisdom, pragmatism, organisational skill, tactical nous" can be dismissed as "things which, over time, blur our understanding of the matter." And yet, as a middle class Indian reader, there is something utterly and disturbingly familiar about this idea of a hierarchy of competing intelligences. For what else is the competitive exam but a graded map of the world in which the place you assign yourself as a teenager feels like one you must occupy for ever?

I have grown up listening to my father discuss school and college mates (and be discussed by them, if they happen to gather) in terms of how they fared in examinations—recounting with precision the marks each of them got, or the paper someone topped, more than four decades after the fact. I have gently and affectionately made fun of this form of reminiscence, and wondered whether this obsession with bhalo chhatros was a particularly Bengali mode of being: do Bengalis, for some reason, place a greater premium on academic success than other communities in India? And if they do, is the reason contained in Bengal's longer history of colonial education, in which success in examinations was established swiftly as the only way in which the middle class could guarantee its economic security?

This is speculation. But reading the sociologist Andre Beteille's marvelous, precise memoir of childhood and youth, Sunlight on the Garden, I was struck by the ways in which his descriptions of a Calcutta adolescence resonate with my father's. Professor Beteille is about 15 years my father's senior, and their family backgrounds are very different. But the Calcutta world they both inhabited in school and college does not seem to have changed a great deal between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, at least not in its preoccupation with examinations and star pupils. Beteille is forthright about being shaped by this. "Truth to tell," he writes, "I had at that phase in my life a fascination, not to say an obsession, with star pupils, and deep down inside me I wanted to be one myself." Within the University, there was also the hierarchy of subjects, with physics at the top. Beteille attributes this glamour to Raman, Bose and Saha, who had all worked at the University College of Science, and describes with disarming frankness his own tryst with undergraduate physics.

Beteille, of course, left physics for sociology, and in his thoughtful account of that transition we hear something of his slow unlearning of childhood hierarchies. But we live in a world in which hierarchies of intelligence still reign, and even those of us who ought to know better, seem unwilling – or unable – to quite abandon the unilateral measures of it that we've been brainwashed into believing are true.

In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, set in Madras in the 1980s, Manu Joseph describes an intensely anxious world of teenaged middle class boys, solving sample problems on colony evening walks and waiting for their fates to be decided by the boards, followed by "the toughest exam in the world". (Clue: it's not physics.) Joseph speaks of this world of conformists with barely disguised scorn, and yet, as a writer friend said sadly to me the other day, his novel's smartest, most forthright characters are either boys who've 'cracked' the system, or those who've decided to have no stake in it. In Barnes' novel, the boy who'd cracked the system commits suicide. In Joseph's novel, the boy who thinks he's smarter than the system commits suicide. The system is still winning.

Book Review: Women, Men and a Chronicle of the Spaces Between

THE ILLICIT HAPPINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE
BY
MANU JOSEPH
FOURTH ESTATE | PAGES: 352 | RS. 499

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man," wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. "One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." Manu Joseph's fiction, like the Great Tradition of Western art, is full of men looking at women—and perhaps inevitably, women watching themselves being looked at. In his first book, Serious Men, the X-ray gaze of Ayyan Mani reduces pretty much every woman to her bra straps and panty lines— the girls with "tired high-caste faces" who jog past him on Marine Drive, the "modern young mothers" he "feasted on" at his son Adi's school gates, the cruelly drawn "Feature Writer" about whom Ayyan is certain "that her double chin would feel cold if he touched it". But when Ayyan looks at Oparna Goshmaulik, he doesn't only see her; he sees her as she is seen by the scientists of the otherwise all-male Institute of Theory and Research. When he zeroes in on the ponytailed girl on Marine Drive whose "haughty face it would be a pleasure to tame", he is almost immediately brought to a stop by a man who is standing still to look at her. If Ayyan is a discomfiting protagonist through whose eyes to see the world, he is wholly intended as such. Joseph has made an addition to Berger's already devastating schema: men who watch other men looking at women. The theme appears early on in Joseph's new book, The Illicit Happiness of Other People: the protagonist Ousep Chacko is at a bus stop when he sees a man pat a woman's buttocks. She thinks it is her little daughter (whose game has put the idea in the man's head). She does nothing. The man continues to pat her. "Ousep stares at the scene without opinion, without outrage. A man's hand on a woman's arse and the woman, yawning now, watching the world go by." But the primal absurdity that Ousep attributes to that scene is replaced, as the book progresses, by a sharper, sadder, much more self-conscious look at ideas about sex, via a gaze that is sometimes Ousep's but more often his son Unni's. In fact, given the recurring nature of the theme in this book, Illicit might almost be read as a secret – or perhaps a public secret – history of our deeply dysfunctional relationship with sex. The particular forms of misogyny and harassment that Joseph seeks out for his biting satire are those of Madras in the 1980s: a world in which a 12-year-old boy knows he can only fall in love with respectable girls, though he is not sure why, while his 17-year-old brother is convinced—seemingly not entirely without basis—that every schoolboy he knows has committed a sexual crime. It is a world Joseph clearly knows well, and one he captures with dry-eyed wit and yet often affecting clarity. The important women in Illicit—the marvelously memorable Mariamma, Unni's mother who either talks to Unni or to herself, and the more opaque beautiful teenager Mythili—are a great deal more sympathetic than any of the unidimensional women in Serious Men—the arrogant, hysterical Oparna, the grave, distant Lavanya, even the gullible, too-trusting Oja. The only complaint I have is that Joseph cannot resist putting his own thoughts into the minds of his characters—hearing the 16-year-old Mythili hold forth bitingly on an imagined future husband who "will crack at least one entrance exam and one day have a nice house in a suburb of San Francisco" is fun, but scarcely believable. Like Serious Men, Illicit is superbly plotted. It unfolds as a father's investigation into his 17-year-old son's inexplicable suicide, "such a terrifying word in any language". Having discovered the last cartoons the boy left behind, and denied the comfort of having known him well when he was alive, the alcoholic Ousep becomes obsessed with the mystery of Unni's death, getting gradually sucked deeper and deeper into the dark world of a precocious 17-year-old. But though this is a book that is filled with precocious, supercilious, misanthropic young men ("It is the misanthrope alone who has clarity."), it also recognises, however dimly, the inevitable human need for other people. And although it is often difficult to separate the cynical voices of these men—Ayyan in Serious Men, Unni and Ousep and so many of Unni's friends in Illicit—from the voice of the author, at least sometimes that unstinting cynicism is turned upon himself. "It is a misfortune to be in the presence of a writer, even a failed writer, to be seen by him, be his passing study and remain in his corrupt memory," goes a line in Illicit. It would indeed be a scary fate to be stowed away in Manu Joseph's "corrupt memory". Still, one cannot but hope that this is not the last book to have emerged from it.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.