Tabish Khair

The Death of the Reader

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is a novel that a young writer can only admire, a double decker of a narrative powered by real talent. It is also a novel that appears to make careful use of ‘history’. And yet, if one reads it from outside the celebratory space of multicultural Britain, one notices intriguing gaps and silences. The one that I still remember relates to Samad Miah Iqbal who claims to be and is portrayed by the text as the great-grandson of Mangal Pande, the Indian sepoy who fired the first shot of the 1857 revolt. Samad is a firebrand / if not fundamentalist / Muslim much of the time and the sceptical reader in me could not reconcile this fact with the name of his historically authentic great-grandfather. For Mangal Pande is not just a Hindu name, it is a twice-born, pure-as-snow Brahmin one. It is difficult to imagine the descendants of the Mangal Pandes of India converting to Islam, let alone a firebrand version of it, and that too after the snuffing of the last symbols of Muslim glory in 1857. Of course this is not life; this is a novel. But because this is a novel, there ought to have been a spectacular story around this spectacular conversion. A similar problem confronts the sceptical reader in another celebrated novel, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which / in spite of its solid adherence to certain textual and mainstream definitions of religions (particularly ‘Hinduism’) / is rather shaky in the field of names. Take, for instance, this extract: ‘He was a Sufi, a Muslim mystic . . . His name was Satish Kumar. These are common names in Tamil Nadu . . .’ (61). It could be that, in the years I have been way from India, Tamil Nadu (in South India) has been invaded and colonised by people from North India so that names from North and West India like Satish Kumar have become common there. I am willing to allow for that possibility. But I still find it difficult to imagine a pious Muslim, even a Sufi, with a Hindu name */ for Satish and Kumar are both Hindu names. One wonders what such omissions signify? Of course, one can choose not to notice them. One can also answer, as Salman Rushdie did when some historical errors were noted in his excellent Midnight’s Children, that we are talking of an art form and an unreliable narrator. In Rushdie’s case, the errors / intentional or not / did consolidate the general discourse of the novel. It was, after all, a novel about history versus ‘his’ stories. I am not sure the same can be said of Smith’s or Martel’s novels, and a host of other, less celebrated or less accomplished novels. One can of course ‘explain away’ these ‘errors’, but only by detracting considerably from the art of the novelist. This bothers me not because of what it says about the novelist, but because of what it does to the reader. It marks the death of the reader. The reader, not as a blank receptor of the intentions of the author or the text, but as someone who actually reads. The reader as the critic. Here the etymology of the word ‘read’ has to be kept in mind: to read is to ‘think, suppose, guess; discern the meaning of (chiefly in read a riddle, a dream); inspect and interpret . . .’ (Oxford Concise Dictionary 390). Related, as the word is, to the Sanskrit rãdh and the Old Slavonic raditi, it also includes the active sense of ‘accomplish’ and ‘attend to’ respectively. Moreover, one of the original senses of the Germanic root is that of ‘taking charge’, and the act of interpreting written symbols is suggested by its Old English root. All of this reminds me of the way in which, for example, Seamus Heaney sees the act of writing. In one of his early poems, ‘Digging’, he depicts his father digging outside while he, the poet and scholar, sits at a table writing. The poem notes the separate nature of the two acts, but also suggests that writing is a sort of digging: ‘Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it’ (Heaney 1). Reading is also an act of digging. A reader is not only someone who stays on the surface of the text, but an active thinker and interpreter. She attends to the text, but she also accomplishes and takes charge. Is it then that we have moved from the death of the author to the death of the reader? In 1968, Roland Barthes published the definitive obituary of the author. Writing begins, he noted, when the author enters his death. It is language that speaks, not the author, he claimed, which was not incorrect if rather hyperbolic. In proclaiming the death of the author, Barthes also proclaimed the death of the critic and celebrated the birth of the reader. The reader, he claimed, is ‘the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed’ (Barthes 118). The reader, he added, is ‘without history, biography, psychology’; she is simply that space in which the traces by which the written text is constituted come together. Tabish Khair

“Correct(ing) Images from the Inside”: Reading the Limits of Erna Brodber’s Myal

This paper does not set out to read Erna Brodber’s Myal on lines already explored by other critics – either as being simply ‘‘beyond colonizing dialectics’’ or as the product of ‘‘an unusual myth-making talent’’ seeking to intuitively restore lost arts of memory. Instead, I detect in Myal a deep tension that highlights some of the most important and overlooked aspects of ‘‘postcolonial’’ criticism and studies. These aspects I will define in terms of Michael de Certeau’s distinction between ‘‘resistance’’ (contestation of a given system from outside that system) and ‘‘opposition’’ (contestation of a given system from inside that system). I shall primarily explore the tensions between these two emblematic modes of contesting power in the narrative of Myal. In the process, however, I will also seek to problematize a term used widely and, at times, superficially in the fields of postcolonialism and cultural studies – ‘‘creolization’’. Brodber’s Myal presents three broad areas of creolization. These can be dubbed generic, linguistic and religious creolization. Of these, the first – ‘‘generic creolization’’ – is the simplest and the least crucial to the argument that follows. However, it is best to begin with it as this enables the presentation of a short synopsis of this difficult novel.

Abdus Samad in Conversation

Tabish Khair Abdus Samad was born into a traditional zamindar [landlord] family of Nalanda, in the north Indian state of Bihar in 1952. The site of a major university about 2,000 years ago, Nalanda is now a small district town with few educational and vocational opportunities. However, Samad studied Political Science and finished a PhD, with university distinctions along the way. He is currently a professor of Political Science and lives in Patna, the capital of Bihar. Samad has six collections of short stories and seven novels to his credit. Though conversant in English, Hindi and other languages, he writes almost entirely in Urdu. His first and widely acclaimed novel Do Gaz Zameen was published in 1988 and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990, the most prestigious literary recognition in India. According to the Sahitya Akademi, his novel is significant for its characterisation, its lucidity of style and its portrayal of problems, as well as for its perception of cultural identity as shaped by emotional, intellectual and historical compulsions. This novel is regarded as an outstanding contribution to Indian literature in Urdu; it has been translated into several languages. Samad’s other awards include the prestigious Mirza Ghalib Prize, which he received in 2014. Samad is also known as an educationalist. He has been the principal of two colleges and a member of syndicates and senates at various universities in India. He is widely regarded as the most distinctive voice in contemporary Urdu fiction. This conversation was conducted largely during the Patna Literature Festival in February 2014, both in Urdu and English, though some matters were later clarified by email.

The Literatures of Metropolitan Capital

For its colonial masters in the early twentieth century and for nationalists of all ilk (inspired partly by M K Gandhi’s conception of India as a land of ‘700,000 villages’), it was the ‘village’ that was the primary space of India, at least in writing, fiction and not. However, following lopsided urbanisation in the second half of the twentieth century, the ‘opening up’ of India and the necessary reaction to this concept of ‘village India’ by postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, it is the ‘metropolis’ that constitutes the primary literary space of India now. Big cities in India (and abroad) are not just the location of almost all visible Indian English writers, they also seem to be the subject of their creativity; the Raja Rao of Kanthapura and the R K Narayan of Malgudi and Mysore are difficult to imagine today, and not likely to achieve cosmopolitan visibility. This is also evident in the national and international visibility of ‘Bollywood’. Even in the context of ‘Bombay cinema’, Bollywood denotes a different and a far more metropolitan space. This can be most simply highlighted by comparing any two commercial remakes, one from before the concept of ‘Bollywood’ took over ‘Bombay cinema’ (in the 1970s 1980s) and one from later * say, Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955) to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002). Both films were important commercial successes, featuring the leading male star and major actresses of their generations, and both achieved success in mainstream critical terms: Roy’s Devdas won four Filmfare awards in India and Bhansali’s won ten. Devdas I inserts Sarat Chandra’s foundational Bangali novel into the film footage; it begins with a page of the story, in Hindi translation, and moves on to scenes from the childhood of Devdas and Paro. Devdas II cuts directly from glossy-golden credits to a palatial house and the narrative starts with the return of Devdas II as an adult. Noticeably, in the context of Bollywood and post-Hindutva (an ideology that emphasises ‘parivaar’ or ‘family’ in its political self-description) cinema, Devdas II presents a large, happy, united family, including well-clad and contented servants. This contrasts starkly to Devdas I, where the family is rife with internal tensions, where lines of affection crisscross lines of disaffection, and where the servants are not dressed like middle-class businessmen at a Hindu festival or wedding in Delhi or London. Matter unpalatable to Hindutva ideology and difficult for metropolitan understanding such as the intricacies of caste are carefully excised in Devdas II. Again, in Devdas I, after scenes from Paro’s and Devdas’s childhood, the latter is sent to Calcutta, partly for his education and partly because he is a charming boy capable of sudden acts of anger, petulance and disobedience. Calcutta is a few hours away by train from his village, and Devdas I returns to his village at least once every year in Devdas I. In Devdas II and this reveals much about the Bollywood of India’s chattering classes today Devdas II returns ‘after ten years’ from ‘abroad’ and ‘London’. If Devdas I wears the dress partly Indian and partly Western of the Bengali semi-urban middle class in Devdas I, Devdas II enters clad in designer metropolitan period regalia, replete with hat and bow-tie, and coolly lights up a cigarette a rather implausible act in an age when young people seldom smoked cigarettes within smelling distance of elders in his beloved’s family house! One can keep adding to the evidence * not least the physiognomy of the main actresses, which changes from the buxom, round-hipped, not tall, faintly plump traditional Indian ideal of Devdas I to the slender, tall, international super-model and Ms Universe ideal of Devdas II. In any case, viewed one after another, the two films depict how different ‘Bollywood’ is as a discourse from even the big city of pre-Bollywood Bombay. An international metropolitan network is essential to any understanding of ‘Bollywood’, while ‘Bombay cinema’ though highly urban and ‘hybrid’ too still allowed more elbow room for the narration of ‘in-between’ spaces. It has been a long journey from Bombay cinema to Bollywood, and one that is not being documented very well. And in the world of literature, the route from Raja Rao’s village of Kanthapura (in the 1938 novel of that title) to Salman Rushdie’s hybrid/cosmopolitan narratives is a good indication of this journey. As I noted before and this is one of the reasons why Rushdie’s early oeuvre represents a historic landmark Tabish Khair

Raja Rao and Alien Universality

&dquo;I don’t know how village life gets expressed in our regional languages but I do know I can’t cite another authentic account of village life among novels written in the English language,&dquo; wrote C.D. Narasimhaiah’ of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura way back in the 1960’s. Decades later the situation remains more or less the same. There is no other major Indian English novel set in a completely rural backdrop with the partial exception of a few books like Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle (1942) and Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954). This paucity might be the reason (along with Rao’s concern with the philosophical aspects of life) why so many critics have described Rao as the most Indian of all Indian English authors: &dquo;a distinctive Indian sensibility&dquo;,2 &dquo;the greatest interpreter of Indian thought and culture, the revelation of the very essence of Indian life and character being his chief object as a novelist&dquo;.3 Of course, there is no reason why writing about villages and being philosophical should automatically make a writer more Indian than someone who writes about cities and the many financial scandals that afflict the Indian body politic. Still, if we let that hasty pronouncement stand for the time being, we ought to expect Rao to present &dquo;truly Indian characters&dquo;. In this context, it is interesting to begin this study of the type of alienation inherent in Rao’s (and his critics’) uses of universality and &dquo;philosophy&dquo; with an analysis of some of Rao’s characters.