Shelf Life: Out of Vaidehi's Closet

My Shelf Life column for October 2020:

The link between clothes, sexual attractiveness and power is incestuous and can be unnerving. Kannada writer Vaidehi’s stories literally disrobe it.

Vaidehi's stories shocked me when I first read them. I don't mean in the manner that the 1945-born writer has apparently “sometimes shocked Kannada intellectuals”, by publicly declaring such things as 'The kitchen is my guru, that's where I have learnt many lessons'. The incongruity there, as a critic cited by editor-translator Tejaswini Niranjana in her introduction to Vaidehi's Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006) points out, lay in one of modern Kannada's most successful writers speaking like a 'full-time grihini or housewife'. And yet, what Vaidehi was doing by adopting such a public stance was precisely why her fiction jumped out at me: she was forcing the (male-dominated, genteel, largely upper caste) world of Kannada letters to engage with the world of women as she knew it. She refused to be co-opted into literariness as they knew it. 

Since the late 19th century, women have been writing fiction about women's lives, not just in Kannada, but in Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Hindi and more. So Vaidehi, also Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, born 1945, married to KL Srinivasa Murthy at 23, and mother of two daughters, wasn't the first. But her words lift the ceaseless labour of women's lives out of the domestic space and onto the page with a ringing clarity. Somehow, the closer she sticks to the materiality of these circumscribed, cyclical lives – food and rituals, weddings and babies, illness and mortality – the more starkly we see their political, even philosophical ramifications. As she puts it: “What is important to us [women] is not whether the world is truth or lie. But work, work and more work.”

A still from the film Gulabi Talkies (2008), adapted from Vaidehi's short story by the director Girish Kasaravalli.

Among the material objects that recur in Vaidehi's stories are clothes. At one end of the spectrum is what is ritually and socially prescribed for women: the red saris encumbent on shaven-headed Brahmin widows; the gold jewels to measure a bride’s status. At the other are clothes as markers of individuality, the body as a canvas on which fashion can paint new identities.

But what was fashion in this India of sleepy villages and one-street towns, where the age-old injunctions of caste and age and community controlled so much of what people wore? In the title story Gulabi Talkies the opening of a local cinema triggers new dreams: “Day by day the bangle shop began to stock various kinds of face powder and other cosmetics...the seamstress struggled to tune her skills to the new fashions and her creations were passed off as fashionable, causing a commotion in the world of clothing which crossed over into the speech and gait of women...”.

The fashions of Vaidehi's tales may seem basic to us – but oh, how women wanted them. And how willing they were to suffer the consequences, because fashion felt like freedom. In ‘Remembering Ammachi’, for instance, the child narrator helps the grown-up Ammachi pleat her sari pallu “so that both its borders could be seen”. They set out for a neighbour's puja, but are barred by Venkappaya, who has arrogated to himself a status somewhere between adoptive brother and future husband. “How coquettishly you're going to town,” he rages. “That pallu has been pleated in such a way as to show both the breasts.”

Kannada writer Janaki Srinavasa Murthy, also known as Vaidehi. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The poorer the women are, the more meagre their aspirations – and the more excruciating their non-fulfilment. In Tale of a Theft, the hungry Bachchamma thinks of the prohibitive price of glass bangles while sitting next to women covered in gold. In Vanimai, the titular central character is a woman with mottled, flat feet whose “biggest dream was to own a pair of slippers”. This is nothing short of radical in a milieu where a man called Narasimha can tell Vanimai’s elders never to buy her slippers, declaring with perfect assurance: “Those who use footwear are either the prostitutes of Bombay or the mistresses of the town. Not decent people...” 

The spectre of the whore, in fact, is ever-present in these tales. Whether it's Narasimha taunting Vanimai or Venkapayya deliberately ruining Ammachi's secretly-tailored back-button sari blouse, being fashionable makes women attractive – too attractive. 

The late Nirad C. Chaudhuri, one of our most politically incorrect writers, once speculated that Indian women have historically had so little free contact with men that they dress only to compete with each other, that is they are acquisitive and overdressed. “It follows from this tradition,” wrote Chaudhuri in 1976, that “a woman in “very smart or piquant dress”... “must be fair prey”. To prove his point he recounted two anecdotes, in both of which “lower-class” men associate being well-dressed with sluttiness. 

But of course it isn't only poorer men, or even only men, who tar women for wearing certain clothes. In Vaidehi's Chandale, watching Beena “climbing up the compound in her short skirt” makes the older Rami “want to scream”. In a stunning image, the nervous housewife suddenly imagines the carefree teenager “winking at [her son Satisha] in the style of a Mumbai prostitute”. So obvious is the link between clothes and sexual attractiveness, and between sexual attractiveness and power, that it is all we can do to suppress it in those we believe don’t deserve power. Mostly, that’s other people. Sometimes, it includes ourselves.

Banner: A book cover of Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories (2006)' a still from the film Gulabi Talkies. (2008)

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 23 Oct 2020.

From English to Kannada to Kannada to English: Tejaswini Niranjana’s mirrored path to translation

My interview with a polyglot cultural theorist on the practice of translation. Published in Scroll.

Tejaswini Niranjana is a well-known academic and cultural theorist who occasionally doubles up as a translator. Her deeply attentive translations from Kannada to English include the works of two eminent Kannada writers: Vaidehi and Jayant Kaikini. Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories, a collection of Vaidehi’s short stories which Niranjana edited and translated in collaboration with three other translators, came out in 2006, while No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories – a collection of stories by Jayant Kaikini – was published in 2017. Niranjana spoke to me about her relationship with Kannada, bilingualism in India, and how she got into translation. Excerpts from the interview:

As an academic and as a translator, too, your work is in English. But I’d like to hear more about your relationship with Kannada. With your parents (Niranjana and Anupama Niranjana) both being writers in Kannada, I imagine that it was not just a language of domesticity, but a literary language that you grew up around. Did you ever yourself write in Kannada?

My mother was not so fluent in English, she went to medical college and later in life she was able to manage in English, but she always spoke to us in Kannada. My father was a journalist in both English and Kannada. He was a tenth standard dropout – because of the freedom struggle he walked out. So he was completely self-taught, prided himself on his English and so on. So he often ended up speaking to me and my younger sister (who is no more) in English. But it was something that was common in the world around us: people just kept switching back and forth between these languages.

This is while you were growing up, in Bangalore?
Yes, I was born in Dharwar but when I was two, we moved to Bangalore. Being nationalists and communists, my parents had some idea that children should know English. There was no huge politics around English, because independence was political, not about culture: that only came to me much later. At the same time they didn’t want us to forget Kannada. From the very beginning, they put me and my sister in an English medium school: a very quaint school called The Home School in Basavangudi. It had a Kannada language option which my parents forced me to take (everyone else was taking Sanskrit, because you could score 95 even without knowing the language as opposed to 60-65, if you were lucky, in Kannada).

[While I was] in primary school, there was no great engagement with Kannada, except that a lot of writers used to come home all the time. I didn’t really read a lot of Kannada literature. To this day I haven’t even read all of my father’s and mother’s works...I’ve read some.

They were very prolific, weren’t they?

Very prolific: [they wrote] dozens and dozens of books. But I knew all the writers, by name and by face. Then, when I was twelve or so, I started to write poetry in English. My parents were uncertain about the quality of this, and when I was 14 or so they decided they needed to figure out whether it was good enough. Actually I was helped by very well-known Kannada poets, like Nisar Ahmad. I remember him very fondly; he gave me my first modernist poetry – Eliot, Auden, stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise because my parents were not poets and not in English.

Anyway, my father decided to send off some of my poems to some of the well-known names in the Indo-Anglian world, without saying how old I was. Professor P Lal, of Writers’ Workshop in Calcutta, and Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who used to run a translation journal, both published some of my work. My parents felt reassured, so they offered to finance my first book.

That first collection of poetry in English, when I was sixteen, got sent to the Commonwealth Poetry Competition. A little afterwards, I started translating my own poetry into Kannada. Because I couldn’t produce it in Kannada...But at the same time, in translation, it became a different poem.

So at this point, would you say you were quite bilingual?

I would read my Kannada poems in competitions and win prizes for them, so I became known as a bilingual poet. That was also the time that I first met Jayant [Kaikini], he was in college, around three years older than me. I really liked his poetry, and said that I would translate it, and I sent it to him. Then we didn’t meet for some twenty years. But my introduction to him is also part of the bilingualism story.

Until my BA, I was still trying to write in both languages. That was also the time when I first got into translating fiction. My father’s novel Chirasmarane, about the Kayur peasant struggle in Kerala, which he had covered as a young journalist, had not been one of his more popular novels in Kannada. Twenty years later, for the anniversary of the struggle, someone translated it into Malayalam and then it suddenly found a huge audience. EMS Namboodiripad reviewed it...So then my father and I did many tours.

You had translated your father’s novel into English?

Yes. But I had also translated Pablo Neruda into Kannada. And Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I still hear of my translation of Julius Caesar being performed, but after the fact, because no one asks for permissions in Kannada [laughs]. But it means it’s still in circulation, which is nice.

Today, I think I’d be a little more uncertain about translating into Kannada. At the time I was living there and Kannada was part of my daily life, which it hasn’t been for a long time. Because when I was 23-24, I went off to the US to study at UCLA. I continued writing in English. I think when I wound up my US life and got a job in Hyderabad in the English department, I was still sort of writing poetry.

But I also wrote an academic book on translation, about the politics of colonialism. And somehow after all the years of thinking through that, I felt I couldn’t write in English any more. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I just stopped writing poetry in English. Even to this day, people ask me, why did you stop writing? And I say, I still write lots of books. But I stopped writing poetry.

I used to have arguments with people like the great UR Ananthamurthy, who was a friend of my father’s. He said, the kinds of things that you say should be in Kannada, why don’t you write in Kannada? I said, I engage with Kannada all the time; people have different modes of engagement with a language. But he was an indigenist of a particular kind, I am not an indigenist. I think that I am constantly in and out of languages.

You also continue to learn other languages, don’t you? You mentioned learning Spanish...

Oh, I just learnt it a little bit, when I was studying in California. I did two courses in French and two in Spanish. I did five years of German, that stuck a little more. When I was in Hyderabad, I learnt Telugu – more [a case of] speaking [it], but I can read because it’s similar to Kannada. Tamil you absorb living in Bangalore, though not very well. And I can follow the movies. And Hindi one is compelled to learn. About twelve years ago, I started learning Hindustani classical music, and I think that’s made me more open to Hindi.

I’ve kept in touch with Kannada through all my travels – living five and a half years in the US, then ten years in Hyderabad. I did come back to Bangalore in 1998, and stayed there until 2016, when I moved to Hong Kong with a full-time position at Lingnan University. More recently, I’ve been working on learning Cantonese and Mandarin for a project studying digital intimacy.

Starting out by translating poetry, some might say, is to begin with the impossible. There is a 2002 Paris Review interview in which William Weaver says that he started translating poetry from Italian as part of the process of learning the language. But that when he had actually learned Italian, he “stopped translating poetry immediately because I realised what I was doing to it.” Was translating poetry for you also imbued with a kind of beginner’s confidence, since you seem to have shifted to translating prose? Is poetry harder?

It is harder, but I still translate poetry. More on commission, or when someone asks me – so I did some of the Kannada works for the anthology of Dalit literature that Susie Tharu and K Satyanarayana edited recently.

Do you think translation alters the original more in poetry than in prose. That thing you said earlier, about it becoming a different poem...

I don’t know the answer to that. It takes me too deep into something that I am probably not paying attention to.

I guess I’m pushing here at the question of untranslatability. In your translation of Vaidehi’s work (Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories) I remember your introduction mentioned that you and the other translators had discussions about which stories would “work” in English and which wouldn’t. What for you are the reasons some texts might be harder to translate?

I think it’s about disparate experiences. Vaidehi’s work deals with a kind of village life that I am not familiar with, even though I am ancestrally from there. The west coast of Karnataka, particular forms of upper caste family life, which I have no experience of, because my father was an illegitimate and an only child with no contact with any families whatsoever. While Jayant [Kaikini]’s characters are deeply singular, right? I think I imagined that something from an urban setting would be easier to translate for me, because it’s my life as well. But at the same time, I felt deeply connected to Vaidehi’s style, which is very oblique, almost like poetry.

What about language, specifically dialect? Did you approach the Kundapur dialect in Vaidehi’s work very differently from the speech in Kaikini’s work? You’ve written of how his deliberate “plain Kannada” is sometimes interrupted by the hybrid Hindi-Urdu-Dakhani that is Bombay’s urban vernacular. As a translator, would you ever choose to use English slang to represent a dialect of Kannada?

I think the parallels don’t hold in our context, because a place like Bombay is a multilingual space. And I don’t think Jayant, in his Kannada, is trying to establish dialectical difference. You can see that characters are Gujarati or Maharashtrian or Bengali. But I wouldn’t pick out some slang that you associate with Gujaratis who speaks English and stick it in there for a Gujarati character!

Is there anything in Kaikini’s Kannada that identifies these characters in terms of their communities or language?

No. He just does it by naming them. It’s usually through other details, experiences, that he builds the profile. I don’t think he dwells too much on it; it’s in brushstrokes, passing that you figure where they’re from. Vaidehi’s stories, on the other hand, are so completely provincial that you don’t have the outside seeping in...

So there is no need to distinguish her characters by their language.

Exactly. Though she does also have some autobiographical stories which are in standard Kannada.

To return to poetry, from a different angle: do you think a translator needs to be a writer? Do you think writers would have trusted you less with their work if they didn’t think of you as a poet?

I don’t think so. People are just so happy that you’re translating their work. I don’t write fiction but I translate it. I was translating Dalit poetry, Siddalingaiah and so on, and the stories of Devanuru Mahadeva when I was very young. I enjoy different kinds of translation. One of my most fun experiences was doing subtitles for Girish Kasaravalli’s second film, Akramana (1980). That was a different kind of discipline, almost like writing metered verse: you couldn’t just write what you wanted, so many characters in celluloid, and you had to fit the dialogue on screen. He approached me, knowing about my bilingual facility – there weren’t too many people then who were literary and bilingual, then. Or if they were, they did it in very old-fashioned language...

You don’t feel like bilinguality is decreasing? That there is a growing number of monolingual English-speakers in India who’re oblivious to other languages?

If you read social media, and the amount of journalism that’s being produced, you’d think everyone is only writing in English. But I don’t think that’s everyday reality for most people. Obviously, there are thousands more Indians writing in English than there were say, thirty or forty years ago. But using the example of my own niece, I kept worrying about this. But she consciously cultivates other languages: Telugu and Hindi, and she can speak in Kannada quite easily after moving to Bangalore. She texts friends in Hindi. I think Hindi often becomes the default language for young people even when it isn’t the default language for either person. I don’t think there’s an only-English setting for kids in their twenties who’re not seriously upper class...this is the sense I get, I could be wrong.

You’ve also thought a lot about the politics of translation in your academic work. In 1992, you authored a volume titled Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. I know this is an impossible request, but could you tell us what the argument of that book was?

Very very broadly, the book was among the first to point out that though it is often seen as a transparent medium by which you transport one culture into another, translation is mobilised as a way of enforcing colonial domination. I look in detail at some major texts and at the ideas of translation that were circulating in colonial times, how it worked through the missionary activity and through administrators like William Jones. In the 1780s, in the early colonial period, there was a great curiosity and romanticism about the East – and the whole understanding of translation was informed by that, by a desire not to interfere in the lives of the natives. But by the 1820s, under the East India Company, with the Utilitarian influence, the whole understanding of India changed – from seeing it as an advanced civilisation to a barbaric place. What kind of conceptual and political labour did translation do, to help colonial domination? In a literal way, too: even someone like John Mill’s understanding of India is informed by translations.

I end the book by looking at an 18th century translation of a 12th century vachana, a very Orientalist translation, and at AK Ramanujan’s translation of the same text, which is a very modernist translation. My point was not that they were good or bad, but that the discursive space they came from informed the actual translations that they did. And I offered my own translation of the vachana.

The book is 25 years old, and I don’t talk about it any more. But without my having been a translator, I would not have written that book.

Do you think in any way, that the converse is true? Did your critical focus on the politics of translation ever cripple you as a practitioner? A feeling that “I can’t be that person who translates into English in India...”

No. I don’t think any of us is so coherent as an individual. I feel like I can do both!

...

This interview continues. Read the whole thing on Scroll, here.

Book review - No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s evocative stories are infused with the body and soul of Mumbai.

Set in Mumbai, and translated into English, this is an insightful, illuminating, and powerful collection.

In a freewheeling conversation at the end of this superb book, the translator Tejaswini Niranjana tells us that while this book was being envisaged, the writer Jayant Kaikini said to her on WhatsApp: “Do not hang all these stories on the Bombay peg.” She told him to trust her. The result is Kaikini’s No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, a volume whose wondrous evocation of city life is only aided by the cheeky inclusion of this meta-data.

Kaikini is an extremely well-known figure in the Kannada world, as a writer of short stories, a poet and last but not least, a lyricist for Kannada films (he has won the Filmfare award for Kannada lyrics four times). Now based in Bangalore, Kaikini has previously lived in Mumbai for two decades, working with pharmaceutical companies.

There are other famous Kannada litterateurs who have made Mumbai their home and fictional focus, among them Shantinath Desai and Yashwant Chittal (whose famous 1978 Bombay novel Shikari was also recently translated into English). But Kaikini’s stories seem to breathe the city’s air. Reading them, in Tejaswini Niranjana’s magnificent translation, one feels they simply could not have been written without Mumbai.

Sub-local identities

Part of the reason for this is Kaikini’s obvious spatial immersion in the city, his unerring sense of characters’ lives unfolding not in some generic “Bombay”/”Mumbai”, but in very particular sub-locales. There are several stories here in which Mumbai’s powerful neighbourhood identities are placed upfront. So, for example, in “Opera House”, a cinema sweeper’s sense of local geography illuminates the charms of an increasingly sidelined urban history. “Indranil wove his small world around the Opera House theatre. The night streets, the local trains, the colourful curtains of the rooms of the naachwalis that one could see from Kennedy Bridge, the Anantashram rice-and-fish plate, the round aluminium boxes containing the film reels – these were the small strands of his web.”

Or in “Mogri’s World”, Kaikini delineates with stunning evocativeness what it might be like to grow up in the Shivaji Nagar chawl, or to watch the world go by from inside the Light of India restaurant. Sometimes everything is contained in a one line reference to a place: “The past three days he had got caught in some lafda of a Sindhi fellow in Dombivli.”

Even when a story moves us across the city, Kaikini’s gaze remains located and we always know what speed we’re travelling at. So in “Partner”, Roopak Rathod has his epiphany while gripping the poles of the Murphy Baby hoarding “glistening blue, pink and purple in the weak sunlight near Nana Chowk”. In “Toofan Mail”, we attach ourselves to Toofan and his mother as they walk to the end of Teli Gali, run till Andheri Station, jump into a local train to Dahisar to meet the Toofan Mail. In “Water”, we sit in the back seat as Kunjbihari the driver starts “throwing the taxi into little lanes and alleys” only to get stuck in the torrential rain near Mahim Creek with his two passengers, strangers off a plane.

“Water” is a masterful evocation of how the city reflects itself back – whether it is the view of traffic on the Mahim-Bandra flyover, or the radio song requests that seem to allow communication across the enforced isolation of a crippling breakdown: “For Pankaj, Shweta and Nobin who are stuck at Dadar TT, this special song... Kajra Re”.

Signs and Secrets

Kaikini is powerful and valuable as a documenter, a mapper of the city. But he is much more than that. He is able to make the city resonate with the dreams, hopes and fears of those who live in it. Mumbai’s neighbourhoods and landmarks come to serve as metaphorical markers, animated signs that become keys to the surreal landscape. To Sudhanshu in “Gateway”, the thirty-storied Communication Tower in the distance seems like a giant tomb, with the two big antenna dishes on top like gigantic begging bowls held out.

The title story, “No Presents Please”, effortlessly establishes the mood with its opening reference to the half-finished Ghatkopar Flyover, whose iron spikes Kaikini describes as having trapped bits of the sky. “Below, the vehicles crawled their way through the construction rubble and slowly disappeared. This was the fate of all roads. A man could stop wherever he wanted, but a road?” This is, of course, also the sort of sentence that almost doesn’t need a story attached to it. Kaikini is a poet, and he does aphorism with ease. But as you read on, you are primed to be sensitive to Popat’s sense of being trapped in an identity, by a name that seems to him to leave him nameless.

Sometimes it is a person who becomes a sign, coming to stand in for something in the eyes of the beholder. Seen through Sudhanshu’s tired, questioning eyes, the keychain seller at Kala Ghoda seems like a seer who will answer his life questions. Even this “nameless man with his greying eyebrows” who stands “in two feet of space” is someone for whom Kaikini can conjure up a detailed tender backstory: “when he was a child in the cradle, when he used to be rubbed with oil and then bathed, who competed in school sports, lived different roles”.

In the dream-like world of “Interval”, both Nandu (the battery-torch boy of Malhar Theatre) and Manjari (film-viewer from Mahindrakar Chawl) wordlessly become for each other the beacons of an imagined alternative future. Even when Kaikini enables his two naive protagonists to gently disengage – having made them see, equally wordlessly, that they know nothing about each other – their symbolic importance to each other remains.

There is no dearth here of sociological detail – class, age, gender and caste are sharply observed and sensitively understood. Yet in the end, Kaikini’s Mumbai is a majestic microcosm of humanity, and his stories are concerned with quivering, beautiful examples of how stranger sociality can be meaningful. The locations for these loving exchanges between strangers can range from hospital wards and picture framers’ shops (in the superb “Unframed”) to the tea shop in “A Spare Pair of Legs” at which the village’s naughty boy Chandu encounters the urban working child Popat, one of the “army of brave boys” who “leap from running trains so that not a single peanut fell”, holding the city up on their thin hands like some Govardhan Hill.

Kaikini is often tuned to the saddest, most secret frequencies – the quiz contestant squirming as her father grovels before an oblivious TV show host; the film extra covering her face with her hands as her husband berates her in public for pretending to be shy; the two halves of a couple who’re actually relieved when the other doesn’t come home, because sleep will be undisturbed. He is an antenna, gathering up the city’s dreams and hurt, bewilderment and rage, and transmitting them ever so gently back into the zeitgeist. The result is a gift worth receiving.

Published in Scroll, 25 Mar 2018.

Book Review: The Best of Quest

This selection of articles from Quest, a socio-political and literary Indian magazine from the 1950s and 60s, offers perspectives that are still relevant today

The Best Of Quest
Edited by Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala, Arshia Sattar
Tranquebar Press
pp 694, Rs. 695

"To organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination – in all our cultural purview there is no work more necessary," wrote the American critic Lionel Trilling in 1946, in an essay called 'The Function of the Little Magazine'. Trilling's words were originally written in praise of the Partisan Review, a political and literary journal which began life as an organ of the American Communist Party but broke away after Stalin's rise to power, going on to complete a long and influential innings (1934-2003), with contributors ranging from Hannah Arendt and George Orwell to Susan Sontag and Philip Roth. But they seem oddly and equally suited to a journal that emerged from the other side of the political spectrum, at the other end of the world.

Titled Quest ("a quarterly of inquiry, criticism and ideas"), it was a journal started in Bombay in 1954. Laeeq Futehally, its Literary Editor, describes it as the outcome of a post-World War II resolution by a bunch of intellectuals that "never again should the minds of men be enslaved by evil ideologies and rigid "isms"." The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in Berlin in 1950, was devoted, in Futehally's words, to "the task of creating a worldwide ambience of respect for free thought and speech". Chapters soon emerged in other countries, many with magazines. Poet Stephen Spender agreed to edit Encounter in the UK. The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) emerged in 1950, and in 1954, Minoo Masani (one of India's first advocates of liberalism) founded Quest, with poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel as editor.

The Best of Quest is a selection of essays, poetry and fiction from Quest's remarkable life of 20-odd years: a life brought to a close by a refusal to bow to Mrs. Gandhi's Emergency diktat that it be submitted for review before publication. Edited by Futehally, Arshia Sattar and Achal Prabhala, the volume gives us a sampling of what was clearly a superbly eclectic body of writing, united only by Ezekiel's injunction that it must be "by Indians for Indians" – a difficult condition, as Futehally points out, in "those days [when] we still glamourised anything foreign, including writers".

The poetry section offers delights both expected ("To force the pace and never to be still/ Is not the way of those observing birds/ Or women. The best poets wait for words," writes Ezekiel) and unexpected (a 1975 poem called 'Dasara' by the well-known academic Tejaswini Niranjana, who only finished her BA in 1979). The fiction section features Keki Daruwalla and Kiran Nagarkar, as well as translations of Kamleshwar and Premendra Mitra (the latter a Bengali classic called 'Telenapota Abishkar' which – the editors should really be telling us this – was made into a haunting Hindi film called Khandhar by Mrinal Sen). My personal favourite here is Arun Joshi's story 'The Gherao': deceptively straightforward and terribly moving.

But the form that really characterises Quest is the long, opinionated essay, with writers of all stripes taking on socio-cultural, political or literary subjects with idiosyncratic ease. Some of these would never get commissioned today – they are not 'topical'. But Claude Alvarez's scathing account of the "fabrication of a new religion" by Aurobindo and his companion Mira (the Mother) and the murky politics of the Ashram's takeover of Pondicherry's White Town, or Roderick Neill's sustained, almost scholarly comparison between sadhus and hippies ("In as much as they all represent channels for social deviants and adventurous individualists...the sadhu sects of India are bodies of 'drop outs'"), for example, deal with things that are very much a presence in contemporary India, and offer a perspective that can still surprise us.

On the other hand, an exchange like the one between Jyotirmoy Datta ('On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots') and P. Lal ('Indian Writing in English: A Reply to Jyotirmoy Datta') makes one simultaneously laugh and sigh at how the same debate can carry on for half a century: is it "natural" for Indian writers to write in English, or are their reasons for doing so merely "expedient, even artistically dishonest"? Khushwant Singh provides a different sort of glimmer of recognition, despite the fact that the Delhi he describes has been almost entirely transformed in the 44 years since he wrote: "If you move in the right circles in the Capital, you need not cook any food in your house. It can be one continuous round of lunch, cocktail and dinner parties."

These occasional chuckleworthy moments apart, however, Quest comes across as largely focused on important and high-minded subjects: 'Persistence of the Caste System', 'Reflections on the Chinese invasion', 'The Concept of Justice and Personal Law in India'. "Quest was so far above popular culture and so disdainful in its indifference to the strange and bizarre events of everyday India that it needed at least one regular column that did some lampooning," the poet Dilip Chitre writes in a postscript, explaining why he felt the need to complement his 'serious pieces' on Indira Gandhi or Nirad C. Chaudhuri (written under his own name) with the irreverent pieces he wrote under the pseudonym 'D.'. D.'s columns ranged from a self-described "barbaric comparison" of Raj Kapoor's "chocolate-box love story" Bobby with Satyajit Ray's "saccharinous famine" in Ashani Sanket – where Ashani Sanket is found wanting because it does not even entertain the masses – to the argument that the sexiness of Hindi film heroines depended on their plumpness, "which goes to strengthen one's suspicion that more than one kind of starvation accounts for the female star's appeal in the Hindi cinema".

Some advertisements from the pages of Quest magazine

The editors must be thanked for bringing us a volume of scintillating – if sometimes verbose – writing from an era that seems enormously distant in some ways and not quite over in others. They have provided for those who want the dope on Quest being indirectly funded by the CIA (apparently it was, but the editors didn't know that) and offered much joy by reproducing advertisements from the pages of the original Quest. (Sample: 'When Sol has done his worst/ And really got you down/ Turn on a RALLIFAN and be/ The coolest man in town") But I have one complaint, which is that they have provided no introductions to the essays. There is not even a list of contributors, so that one will forever have to keep guessing about the identity of the wonderful Hamdi Bey who tells us that George Orwell thought of himself as "civilised" as opposed to Kipling who was "coarse", and wondering whether the author of 'The Gherao' is the same Arun Joshi who wrote the marvellous The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Such a brilliant act of excavation, and an uncurated display?

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 20 Nov 2011.