Amitava Kumar | The Nation

The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad collects the work of one of our finest postcolonialist critics.

In the largest exodus in recorded history, millions of refugees migrated across the brand new border after India was partitioned in 1947.

In March 2001 a small Internet website in Delhi, tehelka.com, revealed
that two of its reporters had used a secret camera to tape senior
defense officials and political leaders accepting bribes

A young man of 16, visiting his cousins in Calcutta in a house in a
"middle-middle-class area," has just published his first poem. This
not-yet-poet from Bombay is the narrator of Amit Chaudhuri's short story
"Portrait of an Artist." The artist in the story is not the visiting
youth, however, but an older man, the English tutor who comes each week to instruct the cousins. This
man is respectfully called mastermoshai.

Mastermoshai has already been shown the narrator's poem. (One of the
cousins reports that the teacher was "very impressed.") On a Saturday
morning, the budding poet meets mastermoshai. He has a "very Bengali
face" with "spectacles that belonged to his face as much as his eyes
did" and "teeth that jutted out from under his lip, making his face
belong to the preorthodontal days." The cousins, and also the narrator,
wait for mastermoshai to say something about the poem. When two literary
men meet in Bengal, they do not indulge in small talk but instead
"straightaway enter realms of the abstract and articulate," we are
advised. Fittingly, mastermoshai's first question to the poet, in a
Bengali-inflected English, is, "Are you profoundly influenced by
Eliot?"

"It was mastermoshai who first spoke to me of Baudelaire," the narrator
says, and there are other discoveries in this induction into the
literary life. When the older man takes the poet to an editor's house in
another part of Calcutta, Chaudhuri's portrait of the artist shades into
a portrait of private homes and of the city as a whole. In Calcutta, our
poet discovers, clerks and accountants nurture an intellectual or
literary life, not only in English but also Bengali. The city appears
provincial, but it also reveals, like Joyce's Dublin, its particularity.

The literary passions that this city with a colonial past breeds are
already obsolete elsewhere. Yet they inspire a romance that is real and
productive. That is what the young poet feels after the years have
passed. By then, mastermoshai has faded into the oblivion of insanity.
His interest in Eliot and Baudelaire is seen by the narrator as a
"transitional" time during which, after the early losses of his life,
mastermoshai had returned to his "youthful enthusiasms." You realize
that the story is not so much about the space of literature, which like
the city itself offers surprises that serve as a refuge from the general
claustrophobia and madness. Instead, it is about the patient and
sometimes crazy, and mostly anonymous, striving in the former
colonies--and also about the tribute we need to pay to mentors in a
literary culture that functions without the trappings of creative
writing programs and, in the case of the poor, even ordinary colleges
and schools.

Chaudhuri's other stories in this debut collection, Real Time,
also concern themselves with the conditions under which art is born or
the circumstances in which artists live. The book's closing story is
about Mohanji, a gentle and gifted singer trained in classical
Hindustani music. He makes a living by teaching affluent housewives in
Bombay how to sing devotional bhajans and ghazals.
Mohanji's life now is "a round of middle-aged women" in Bombay's
affluent districts like Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill. At night, he
takes the fast train back to his home in a ghetto in distant Dadar.

Lately, Mohanji has been feeling ill. He believes he has an ulcer. He
also suffers from tension. This tension comes "from constantly having to
lie to the ladies he taught--white lies, flattery--and from not having a
choice in the matter."

Mohanji's student Mrs. Chatterjee does not always have the time to
practice. But, she would like to sing. She tells her teacher that she
wishes she could sing like him. Mohanji is "always surprised" that the
rich had desires for "what couldn't be theirs." He is also amused that
"it wasn't enough for Mrs. Chatterjee that she, in one sense, possessed
him; she must possess his gift as well."

This sudden sharpness on Mohanji's part, like his illness, reveals a
malaise. The gentleness in the guru, a quality to which Mrs. Chatterjee
had grown so accustomed, is now shown to be the result of great
restraint and even artistic discipline. The story's presentation of
Mohanji's speech and his silence ushers us into the domain of criticism.

We get a clue here to Chaudhuri's own art. He belongs to a very small
group of Indian writers in English who are as good critics as they are
storytellers. This skill at criticism is not a result of close
reading--though that ability is in fine evidence in The Picador Book
of Indian Literature, which Chaudhuri has edited--but of a serious
search for a reading public. Chaudhuri's writing, both critical and
fictional, subtly demonstrates for this public (which is yet unborn) its
most responsible function.

There is a great need for such acts in India. Recently, at a literary
festival in Delhi, I heard a well-known writer telling her audience that
there were only two literary critics in Punjabi in the whole country.
But this wasn't the worst. She said that one of the two critics was a
university professor who was interested only in promoting the female
students who were doing their doctorates under him. The other was a man
in Chandigarh who wrote exclusively about other writers from his own Jat
caste. The writer said, "Since I am neither a pretty face nor a Jat, I
am ignored."

I thought about the Punjabi writer, and about Chaudhuri, who was also
there at the festival, when I was awakened past midnight in my hotel
room in Delhi by a call from London. It was someone from the BBC.
Earlier that day, V.S. Naipaul had been rude to another writer. Now the
BBC wanted to know if I believed that "Naipaul had lost it."

I wasn't able to provide gossip. But, as I lay awake in bed after the
call, I remember wondering whether I hadn't made a mistake thinking that
the problem of building a critical culture was India's alone. Did
Britain, for example, have a vibrant literary public sphere? Why then
was the BBC not rousing people from sleep to ask about the solitude of a
writer working in Punjabi, a language that is used by millions, and
endowed with a rich literary past, but now possessing no critics?

Fifteen short stories and a reminiscence-in-verse make up Real
Time. Not all the pieces are as strong as the ones mentioned above.
A few of the short stories, like the one in the voice of a humiliated
demon from the Ramayana, are clever sketches but call for a more
extended treatment in order to be satisfying. There is a first-person
account of a housewife who is writing a memoir--a story meant to mock
the Indian writing scene, where, it seems, a new writer is born every
day. But Chaudhuri's wit is suited to a more muted, or perhaps just more
nuanced, register, and here the mockery falls flat.

"Words, silences," a story about two male friends who are meeting each
other after a long time, contains a hint of a half-understood homosexual
exchange between them in their boyhood. But the story, in its reticence,
offers too little, the author's silence acting like a silencing of its
own. A couple of other stories in the autobiographical mode work better,
recalling the lyricism and humor of Chaudhuri's earlier fiction. His
first three novels, published in a single volume in the United States
under the title Freedom Song, won a Los Angeles Times book
award in 2000. That year Chaudhuri also published a novel, A New
World, about an expatriate Indian's return to Calcutta after his
divorce.

A real gem in the present collection is the title story "Real Time,"
which along with the account of Mohanji was first published in the
British magazine Granta. This elegantly crafted story recounts an
executive's visit to a house in Calcutta where a shraddha, or
memorial ceremony, is being held. The ceremony is for a young married
woman who has committed suicide by jumping from the third-floor balcony
of her parents' house.

The visitor and his wife--the latter is related to the family--have been
able to find the house only with some difficulty. They have bought
tuberoses on the way, having bargained the price down from sixteen to
fourteen rupees. The rituals of mourning are not clear in the case of a
suicide. The narrative supplies very little conventional pathos, and yet
pathos is present in the story, always in tension with other quotidian
details that intrude upon the consciousness of the narrator. The visitor
spots an acquaintance and they fall into a conversation about "the
recent changes in their companies," their own children and even "a brief
disagreement about whether civil engineering had a future as a career
today."

Death produces a great absence, but here, in the story, the absence has
more to do with the fact that the visiting couple know very little about
the suicide. They had learned of the death from an item in the
newspaper. Grief remains remote. More than death, it is this distance
that produces a blankness, which, however, slowly gets filled with
ordinariness, and even trivia. The narrative is so precise that it is
with a tiny jolt that the reader realizes that this inconsequential
ordinariness is what we usually call life.

Jacques Derrida has written that the Moroccan Abdelkebir Khatibi does
not speak of his mother tongue "without a trembling that can be heard,"
a "discreet tremor of language that undersigns the poetic resonance of
his entire work." The same can be said of Chaudhuri. In his prose,
history always happens elsewhere. It is like an earthquake in the heart
of the earth. What the writing registers is only the shock and the
falling buildings.

In early 1993, a short while after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in
Ayodhya and the riots that had followed, Chaudhuri wrote a travel essay
about this return to India from Oxford. In that essay, he described how
the metal nameplates in the house where his father had lived in Bombay
were now all blank. This had been done to protect the Muslims living in
the building. "Small, accidental sensations, too small to be called
incidents," he wrote, "told me I was now living in a slightly altered
world."

The trip on which Chaudhuri discovered the small detail of blank metal
nameplates sowed the seed for his novel Freedom Song. While
reading his earlier novels, I had been struck by the way in which
Chaudhuri's evocative, Proustian sentences accumulated visual details. I
thought of Bengali cinema, the moment of its modernity and the movement
of the camera recording the texture of middle-class life. But there was
also an aural element to this writing. It was punctuated with delicate
pauses that made the prose musical. The sentences were marked by spaces
of silence and filled with near-poetry.

It was only when reading Freedom Song, however, that I got a more
vivid sense of Chaudhuri's unique and flawed aesthetic. The rise of
Hindu fundamentalism and the changes ushered in by market liberalization
provide the immediate occasion for the novelist to examine the changes
that affect a small group of relatives and friends. These changes are
not overwhelming; they are subtle variations on a more settled routine.
The technique works because it saves history from the banality of a
slogan. At the same time, it also carries the danger of slipping into a
mannerism. Both the strength and, on occasion, the weakness are present
in the stories of Real Time.

In recent weeks, hundreds have died in India in religious riots
orchestrated by the Hindu right in retaliation for the burning alive of
fifty-eight Hindus in a train. These events have challenged the
democratic credentials of the Indian nation-state. But they also pose a
question for intellectuals and artists, and this is the question of
seeking a powerful and imaginative response to the carnage.

What is our response in "real time"? And how does this time find breath
in our writing? Chaudhuri, in his attention to the imaginative use of
language, makes the search for the answers a process of magical
discovery. Let me end with a passage from Freedom Song that
captures the inertness but also the dynamism of the life that Chaudhuri
sees unfolding around him:

It was afternoon. And in a small lane, in front of a pavement, with the
movement of a wrist, something like a curve began to appear, it was not
clear what pattern was forming, then the letter D appeared upon a wall
of a two-storey house, in black paint, and then U, and N, until DUNKEL
had been formed, in the English language, which seemed to blazon itself
for its curious purpose; then it began again, and I and M and F began to
appear in another corner. Afternoon; no one saw them; it was too hot; on
the main road cars went past, up and down; a few people rested; they had
eaten; beggars dozed, blind to the heat and shadows, their heads bent to
the stomach.

Covered with ash and dust, the survivors of the attacks on the twin towers would barely have made it to their homes that evening of September 11 when the first reports started coming in of assaults, in various parts of the United States, on Arab-Americans, Pakistanis and Indians. It was not only the South Asians with Muslim names who were the victims of attacks but, in a bizarre twist, even the Sikhs, who, because of their beards and turbans, were assumed to be followers of the Saudi Osama bin Laden. When asked about the harassment of Sikh cabbies, a spokesman for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance told a reporter, "Americans saw Lawrence of Arabia and think all Muslims wear turbans."

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition. History is often a detour into fiction in this literature, an attempt to create a narrative of the self in a fantasy zone of displacement, mirroring in some ways the history of the immigrant (which is, of course, what many of the prominent postcolonial writers are). Witness a recent letter in the New York Times by a Sikh man in Kansas who feared being attacked. The letter proposed a plan that perhaps one could be forgiven for reading as part mimicry, part mockery: "Tomorrow morning when I go out, I will be wearing a nice red turban, white shirt and blue pants, our national colors, walking proud as a peacock, smiling at people I love and live with in our great country." (The peacock, incidentally, is the national bird of India. The principal colors of its plumage are, improbably enough, different from the colors of the US flag.)

Where else can we find such crazy hybridity? A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie. He applies the same formula, with the uneven effect that has also by now become another Rushdie hallmark, in Fury, his latest novel. The story is set in New York, and with what might appear to be something akin to prescience, at least to those who religiously read astrology columns each week, Rushdie has chosen as his theme the idea of violence in the big, mad city.

While remaining glued to the television set like the rest of America recently, I have often thought of Rushdie's new book. In particular, I have thought of an Urdu-speaking Muslim taxi driver in Manhattan, Ali Majnu, whom Rushdie makes use of on two occasions for a couple of pages. Majnu is introduced to the readers as a bigoted prophet on wheels, screaming deliverance as he skids on Tenth Avenue: "Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers.... Islam will purify this whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of a Jew wife too." The cabbie appears again, 110 pages later. This time he says, "Islam will cleanse your soul of dirty anger and reveal to you the holy wrath that moves mountains." Then, switching to English, Majnu addresses another driver, "Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your grandmother's pet goat."

Lucky Ali Majnu. Unlike the other sullen, equally rude working-class immigrants in Fury, each from a benighted corner of the globe, Majnu at least gets a few colorful lines. Majnu stands alone in the novel for the whole of Islam and also for the "wealth-free" from South Asia. This is the brown man's burden, the burden of having to symbolize or answer for more than one is. Shall we regard it as a consolation that Rushdie doesn't force this character to carry the additional load of interiority or even a minimum of complexity? One is reminded of literary critic Michael Gorra's comment about Rushdie's first, great success, Midnight's Children: "Yet I remain troubled that a book about the nightmare of history, a book meant to disturb, cannot make me care about the individual characters to whom that history happens."

We know next to nothing about Ali Majnu. And yet, because Rushdie doesn't shirk big themes, he feels obliged to peremptorily link Majnu's road rage to the failure of the talks between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat at Camp David. Thus, we are simply told that our cabbie, whose first name means "beloved," was "Indian or Pakistani, but, no doubt out of some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users for the tribulations of the Muslim world." No doubt.

Rushdie's presumptuous protagonist, his voice indistinguishable from the author's, is Malik Solanka. Solanka was born in Bombay and educated in England. Now this 55-year-old former professor and doll-maker has arrived in America. In an $8,000 a month rented apartment in New York City, his sleep is interrupted by calls from the wife and child he has left behind. Solanka seems to have an unfailing ability to attract beautiful women half his age. When he is not having sex or walking around the city suspecting himself of having killed rich young heiresses with kinky tastes, Solanka continues to drop observations on nationalism, religion, Elián González and Monica, as if he were enrolled in cultural studies classes at Columbia.

The spheres of academia, sex and worldly passion have recently been explored with some subtlety by Philip Roth in The Human Stain and The Dying Animal. Saul Bellow's last novel, Ravelstein, also comes to mind. Like Roth and Bellow, even if with greater volubility than either, Rushdie can deliver lucid lines on the state of our complex world; again like them, he explores in this novel, although with an embarrassing sentimentality, sexual ecstasy and human finitude. However, there the similarities end. Unlike for the American writers, Rushdie's real theme is success. Sex is only a substitute for, or perhaps only proof of, what Rushdie really cares about, which is stardom.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie's previous outing, was a nearly 600-page anthem to the love of Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, two world-famous rock stars. Fury, at half the size, remains fully as starry-eyed about global popularity. Solanka metamorphoses from a dull academic to a television personality: He hosts history-of-philosophy programs using dolls that he has created himself. Solanka's protagonist is called Little Brain. Soon, to the surprise of other dull academics, Solanka's show becomes a cult classic and then blossoms into "a full-blooded prime-time hit." It is this, rather than the mythical story of the furies--the three women in Solanka's life--that provides the novel with its underlying theme. And what is likely to drive the reader to fury is the narrator's relentless discourse on success and wealth and chic consumer products even while appearing to denounce them.

Early in the book, we are told that Solanka has decided on "using the material of his own life and immediate surroundings and, by the alchemy of art, making it strange." The Russian Formalists and other proponents like Brecht called this aesthetic principle "the alienation effect," or estrangement. You do not need a degree in psychoanalysis to see that the estrangement that really propels Fury is of another sort. We usually call it divorce.

The failure in love gives fury to Malik Solanka's life and the lives of the others around him. Solanka's best friend, Jack Rhinehart, is a journalist. After we have been told that his refrigerator is stocked with "larks' tongues, emus' testicles, dinosaurs' eggs," we are also told that he has stopped writing meaningful journalism. Instead of visiting the war zones, Jack has begun writing "lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich." He has turned to writing novels that chronicle the loves, the misdeeds, the sexual practices, the cars, of the rich. These novels are about "the lives of today's Caesars in their Palaces." The reason that Jack has started writing this trash is that his exotically beautiful, estranged wife has been squeezing him for money. The "long, languid, pale" Mrs. Rhinehart has "the sticking power of a leech."

It took me a while to see that the book I was holding in my hand pretty much matched the description of Jack's writing. But even after I had finished reading the novel, I could not decide whether Rushdie was publicly venting his fury about what he thought had led to a degradation in art or, in a way that was equally disturbing, was simply seeking to justify the book he had now written about the subject. Fury aims at providing, it would be polite to assume, social satire. But it suffers from what Solanka in another context calls "tragedy of insulation." The story remains bound up in the persona of the protagonist, who appears utterly complicit in what he wants to lampoon. And, in our hero's view, the rulers are brutal, and the ruled, brutish. That leaves us with the garrulous Solanka and his dream girl, Neela, whose sole specialty seems to be to induce whiplash in passing males. This is not enough even to salt the satire.

By the time the novel comes to an end, we find that Solanka's dolls have begun to strut on the global stage. His Puppet Kings, stories about a mad cyberneticist, a drowning planet, cyborgs and lotus eaters, have been put on the web. Suddenly they are all the rage in the hyperlinked universe, perhaps only because everyone who plays the game can become a little Malik Solanka. A little brain. We learn that the dolls have inspired a rebellion on the Fiji-like island of Lilliput-Blefuscu, a rebellion that goes horribly wrong. But by then the reader is weary of art's (read Rushdie's) ambition to inspire world revolutions or, at least, global commercial success. You begin to wish that Rushdie would be content with U2 singing his songs, enjoying the rush of stepping up at Wembley Stadium to have "80,000 fans cheering you on." Here, in these pages [July 9], Rushdie wrote of a photo from that evening: "There I am looking godlike in Bono's wraparound Fly shades, while he peers benignly over my uncool literary specs. There could be no more graphic expression of the difference between our two worlds."

Yes, the difference... But, who am I to now remind Rushdie of that?

The difference between a tabloid celebrity and a serious writer is not so much worth addressing. It is more useful, I think, to ponder the ironies of a self-professed leftist author writing novels that, despite the invocation of deeply democratic themes, are fundamentally undemocratic. I am being harsh. Yet I cannot find better terms to describe writing that is so possessed of a zeal for self-glorification. Equally bothersome, Rushdie's attention to small, ordinary lives is in a pronounced way abstract, uncaring and even hostile. On June 8 last year, he wrote a sympathetic Op-Ed column in the New York Times in which he pleaded for the acceptance of Fiji's Indians as Fijians. In Fury, an analogous group is inexplicably, far too easily, turned into a murderous military force led by a psychotic, megalomaniacal swine.

There might be a moral here for the academic Marxism of classrooms and fashionable literary salons; the less doubtful lesson is about postcolonial literature itself. That literature cannot be strengthened by gestures--Rushdie has been exemplary in this regard, standing up for progressive causes and writers' rights--but by the evidence of the writing itself. In this regard, it is not the leftist writer Rushdie but the rightist V.S. Naipaul, recently awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, whose work returns us to an engagement with the roots of writing and, through that process, the narrative of individual struggles and the geography of marginalization.

Despite his railings against "half-formed societies," you discover in Naipaul repeated tributes to small beginnings and small triumphs. And, instead of the Las Vegas feel that mars Rushdie's fiction, in Naipaul you get a record of the hurt of human failure. For the reader, there is no escape from being reminded of Naipaul's origins--in a family that had barely climbed out of indentureship in a plantation economy in far-off Trinidad. As in A House for Mr. Biswas, what we are offered is a classic account about heartbreaking achievement and the daily, tragicomic routine of unacknowledged lives.

This difference--between Naipaul and Rushdie, rather than between Rushdie and Bono--is worth fighting over. In contrast to Rushdie, the older, conservative Naipaul can be relied upon to make appalling public statements. Most recently, he has fulminated against delinquent youth in England: "I see that several generations of free milk and orange juice have led to an army of thugs." In some of his writings, particularly on Islam, Naipaul can also be awfully misleading. Indeed, many have conjectured that the Nobel for the Islamophobic Naipaul is a fallout of the events of September 11. If the eminences in Stockholm were searching for anything to condemn Osama bin Laden in Naipaul's fiction, they would have found little to console them. This is because, as Pankaj Mishra wrote in The New Statesman, Naipaul, unlike Rushdie, has "alchemized the trauma of early poverty and unbelonging into a bristly but always accessible humanism." With the younger writer, you get a politically correct but often hollow, and fleshless, postmodernism.

The opposition between Rushdie and Naipaul presents us with a lesson in great, unexpected irony. But the irony goes beyond just telling us something about the two writers. The paradox actually becomes a parable about mistaken identity, that wonderful, abiding theme of postcolonial writing. We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.

Clear lines of opposition blur, for instance, when there is mimicry. Naipaul's new novel, Half a Life, begins with the words, "Willie Chandran asked his father one day, 'Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.'" In response, the father, a small man in a small town in southern India, begins to tell the story of how the son was named after a famous writer who had been on a visit to India in the years before independence. We see the outlines of a story about Somerset Maugham and The Razor's Edge. But the story is also about the father's desire to mimic another man. That man is Gandhi. And the narrative, with the distant, pedagogical economy of a fable, draws us into a tale, touched with farce, about how love and writing and politics are born through imitation. The son rebels against the knowledge his father gives him. And, in what is also a mimicry of his father, but laced with his own difference, he begins to write stories that mock his father and their shared, pitiable condition.

In doing all this, the writer Naipaul is also mimicking himself. The story he is telling here echoes what we have read in his earlier books. His account of the agitations of people belonging to the untouchable caste borrows its energy from what Naipaul wrote in the opening chapter of his travel book India: A Million Mutinies Now. The pattern is repeated in what follows in Half a Life. The second part of the book follows young Willie Chandran's arrival in England on a scholarship. Willie's fumbling attempts at sex, the lack of money compounded by the poverty of his experience, are subjects that Naipaul also wrote about with some feeling in The Mimic Men. ("Intimacy: it was violation and self-violation. These scenes in the book-shaped room didn't always end well; they could end in tears, sometimes in anger, a breast grown useless being buttoned up, a door closed on a room that seemed to require instant purification.")

In Half a Life, we also accompany Willie on his path to self-discovery as a writer in London. This is Naipaul's turf. Again, as in his fragmentary memoir Finding the Center, Naipaul prepares us not only for the excitement of writing or its difficulties but for the discovery, touched with belittlement, of the colonial life as a subject of metropolitan consumption. Willie is told by a friend, "India isn't really a subject. The only people who are going to read about India are people who have lived or worked there, and they are not going to be interested in the India you write about." Today, when postcolonial fiction is all the rage, Naipaul's restaging of this account of his past--the men wanting Bhowani Junction and the women, Black Narcissus--allows us to place his own writing, and the shape that immigrant fiction has taken in the West, into a historical context of Western desires and demands.

The third and final part of Half a Life is set in Africa, where Willie goes after he meets Ana in London, a woman who is from a country that resembles Mozambique. This happens after Willie has married Ana, who was attracted to him because she finds in his book a story of her own past. It is Willie, insecure and without money, who asks Ana to return with him to her home in Africa. This travel to Africa, which for Naipaul has always been beset by Conradian tropes, returns us to a landscape of ruins and grim omens. At the same time, the tale is enlivened by a writer's sense of inquiry: "But I felt that the overseer had a larger appreciation of the life of the place; his surrender was more than the simple sexual thing it seemed. And when I next saw the mildewed white staff bungalows I looked at them with a new respect. So bit by bit I learned. Not only about cotton and sisal and cashew, but also about the people."

Rob Nixon, in London Calling, described Naipaul's first book of travel, The Middle Passage, as "a journey of rage into the terra incognita of the self." Naipaul's latest novel, in its final section, journeys into the darkness of the sexual self. It is a journey into a form of awakening and even grace--a new theme within the pattern of repetition I am tracing here--but it is also touched with a tender recoil from cruelty. Adulterous lovers copulate, literally, among snakes. Love is poisoned by the landscape of failure. Africa, then, no less than India in this story, plays a part in a fable, even if the fable is made up expertly from details of a well-recorded life.

This Africa, it would not be a stretch to say, is not very different from Rushdie's New York: Both are imagined by outsiders; both are places animated by fury. The difference lies in how the two novelists imagine the figure of the writer traversing the alien landscape that is so caught up in their fantasy and fear. And that is where, while absorbing all the stories in the news after the events of September 11, I came to an understanding that what Rushdie's Fury relentlessly offered was a species of the writer as exceptional, while what Naipaul's Half a Life returned us to was a sense of the writer as the opposite. In the circumstances of our times, I found resonant Willie Chandran's apperception of life on the streets of London after that social disaster called a race riot:

The newspapers and the radio were full of the riots.... It seemed to him that everyone was reading the newspapers. They were black with photographs and headlines. He heard a small old working man, years of deprivation on his face, say casually, as he might have done at home, "Those blacks are going to be a menace." It was a casual remark, not at all reflecting what was in the papers, and Willie felt at once threatened and ashamed. He felt people were looking at him. He felt the newspapers were about him.

This is a literature about us. Here and There. Willie Chandran, fearful that the papers are about him, teaches us that there is getting attention, and then there is getting attention.

The
conflict in Kargil took place in the summer of 1999. It was the
fourth war between India and Pakistan since their emergence as
independent nations in 1947, but this was the first that the two had
fought as nuclear powers. A few months after the cease-fire, Bill
Clinton made a trip, the last official visit of his
presidency to the Indian subcontinent. Before leaving the United
States, he described the region he was about to visit as "the most
dangerous place in the world today."

Around the time of
Clinton's visit to India, a small incident took place in a town
called Marcel, near Goa. An Indian schoolteacher named Dharmanand
Kholkar was assaulted because of a question he had posed on a test.
Kholkar had asked his students to imagine a fictional scenario. An
Indian soldier, injured during the Kargil war, finds himself in a
Pakistani hospital. The soldier is surprised to be alive and asks why
he has been shown such consideration. A Pakistani soldier replies
that they are both soldiers and human beings. Kholkar asked his
students to state the moral of the story.

Angered by this
presentation of the Pakistani soldier in a good light, a mob attacked
Kholkar and blackened his face. The attackers were members of the
Sangh Parivar, the fundamentalist Hindu group close to India's ruling
right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. This brand of
ultranationalism and sectarian politics has taken root in both India
and Pakistan, a phenomenon explained thusly by the late Eqbal Ahmad
in a book of collected interviews, Confronting Empire: "We are
so-and-so because we are not the Other. We are what we are because we
are different from the West, or from the Muslims, or from the Hindus,
or from the Jews, or from the Christians. It necessarily leads to
extreme distortions."

The distortions that Ahmad is
speaking of are actually part of the official, sanctioned histories.
They claim as casualties not only truth but also the education of
youth in the rival nations when they are taught in schools to hate--a
theme implicit not just in Ahmad's final work but in books by Indian
journalists Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, and the academic Urvashi
Butalia as well, albeit from very different approaches.

A
Pakistani newspaper reported last year that the objectives enshrined
in the federal curriculum for the education of a 12-year-old child
include the "ability to: 1. understand the Hinduand Muslim
differences and the resultant need for Pakistan; 2. know all about
India's evil designs against Pakistan; 3. acknowledge and identify
forces that may be working against Pakistan; 4. demonstrate by
actions a belief in the fear of Allah; 5. demonstrate the desire to
preserve the ideology, integrity and security of Pakistan; 6. make
speeches on jihad and shahadat; 7. guard against rumor mongers who
spread false news and to stage dramas signifying the evils of rumors;
8. understand the Kashmir problem; 9. collect pictures of policemen,
soldiers and National Guards."

Conversely, in Delhi, a BJP
minister responsible for education declared that history textbooks in
India should be "enthused with national spirit." The minister would
no doubt approve of a text on conversation given to students in
Rajasthan. Its example: "Student: 'Master, what has India achieved by
doing the nuclear tests? Was it a right step?' Teacher: 'Undoubtedly
it was correct, India has achieved a huge success.' Student: 'What
success? Economic sanctions have been slapped on.' Teacher: 'Economic
sanctions do not matter. The country should first become powerful.
Only the powerful are listened to. Now we can talk about world peace
aggressively.'"

The case of Dharmanand Kholkar and his
crowd-blackened face was on my mind when I went to talk to Indian and
Pakistani schoolchildren recently. I first went to a school in Bihar,
in India, where I had been a student many years ago; then I traveled
to Karachi, where my wife, a Pakistani citizen, had gone to school. I
asked the students in the schools I visited to write letters to those
that they were being taught to think of as enemies.

In
Patna, a student wrote, "Please be peaceful and love us." Another
student asked, "Why don't you all change the attitude of your mind?
Why don't you all think in a positive way?" In this letter, the
demand for peace was actually an accusation. It found the Pakistanis
solely responsible for war--and for peace. A similar impulse, in
reverse, was at work in a letter written some days later by a student
in Pakistan. That letter began: "Dear Indians, First of all hello!! I
am a Pakistani Muslim and I want to inform you that you are
liars."

I laughed when I read some of the letters--in the
absence of any opportunities for dialogue, it would seem that Indians
and Pakistanis haven't even had a chance to abuse each other
properly. There is some official trade between the two countries, as
well as illicit trafficking in music and videocassettes. But the
common people on both sides have been starved of contact. The result
has been ignorance and suspicion as much as hostility. A boy in
Karachi Grammar School raised his hand and asked me, "How did you
convince your wife that you were not the enemy?" And yet, there is a
shared desire for peace. One of the students in Pakistan wrote in her
letter: "Once I went to the Lahore border, where I saw so many Sikhs
on the other side. I waved to them and they also waved back. They
were so friendly."

The border at Wagah, near Lahore, is the
only entry point by road for the whole of approximately 1,250 miles
that make up the length of the India-Pakistan frontier. What the name
Wagah conjures in the minds of many people in the subcontinent is the
memory of the partition, arguably the largest migration in human
history and certainly the bloodiest. The trains, laden with corpses,
crossed the border at Wagah in 1947. It was also past places like
Wagah that the sinuous human columns had passed on foot: The longest
of these bedraggled columns is said to have consisted of 400,000
people. That procession of the displaced took as many as eight days
to cross a given spot.

The partition is the bloody
underside of independence. It is the name for the division of British
India into two independent nations, one Muslim and the other secular
but predominantly Hindu. It is also the name of the riots and rape
and slaughter that accompanied that division. It is the story of the
people who, just as they were told they were free, also learned that
they had lost their homes. They were now living in a country where,
on account of their religion, they did not belong. The partition was
marked by many tragic ironies. One of them was that the new borders
were lines drawn by a hastily summoned British official, Cyril
Radcliffe, who, writes one contemporary writer, "knew nothing about
India other than the five perspiring weeks he spent
there."

The horror of the partition and even its dark
ironies have long been the concern of writers in the subcontinent,
beginning with names like Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai,
Qurratulain Hyder, Khushwant Singh and others. Despite the currency
of contemporary Indian writing in the West--fueled by a migration of
Indians to cities like London and New York--it is the earlier
migration of writers, from India to Pakistan and vice versa, that
gave birth to independent India's first wave of vital writing. At
their best, the writers of the partition threw into crisis the claims
of the nation-state; they raised questions about the relation to the
broader world of the men and women living inside the new nations'
boundaries. Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence seeks
a place in that older, somewhat forgotten, canon.

About
50,000 Muslim women and an estimated 35,000 Hindu and Sikh women are
believed to have been abducted during the partition. Where are their
voices in the annals of nationalist historiography? Butalia is a
pioneer in feminist publishing in India. She is especially alert to
the presence--and absence--of marginal voices. Her book, a collection
of oral narratives of the survivors of partition, is supplemented by
meditations on the limits of conventional history. Although its more
academic sections lack the raw power of many of the oral narratives,
and sometimes seem a bit repetitive, the study of popular
interpretations of violence as well as the persistence of memory
makes this book a critical, self-reflective work. It may seem
paradoxical, but the book's freshness comes also from the fact that
it examines wounds that have festered for more than fifty
years.

"To understand what happened in Kargil you have to
go back half a century, to the colossal and premature sundering of
the subcontinent known as Partition," writes Suketu Mehta in his
essay "A Fatal Love." He adds: "The men who killed each other over
Tiger Hill and Drass and Batalik were dealing with the unfinished
business of Partition."

The unresolved issues of the past
in India are locked in the pain of the partition. In Pakistan,
however, the division doesn't loom quite so large. There, despite the
upheaval, there was also the creation of a new identity and a new
nation. Nevertheless, the past as "unfinished business" in Pakistan
can be swiftly conjured with another name. That name is
Kashmir.

In one of the letters I brought back with me from
Karachi, a student wrote: "Kashmir is a Muslim majority province and
India promised that they will occupy Kashmir for some period...but
they betrayed. Can't they see the Kashmiri mothers bitterly crying
before their children's dead bodies?" There were similar passages in
other letters, written in a language borrowed from Pakistani news
reports. One letter, although it didn't take into account the wishes
of the Kashmiri people themselves, took a creative step toward peace:
"I wrote a poem sometime before in which I put forth the idea that
just as our parents and teachers have told us that sharing is a very
good habit, why can't India and Pakistan share Kashmir and make it a
place to visit for everyone?"

One is never far away from
the possibility of sharing, and more important, from the struggle for
peace, when reading the words of Eqbal Ahmad in Confronting
Empire. Like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Ahmad was a great
teacher and a luminary of the academic left in the United States. The
collected interviews range over all the passions that filled his
politics--his voice moves effortlessly from the demands of peace in
the Middle East to revolutionary poetry, and from the politics of
Islam to offering career advice to V.S. Naipaul.

As a
child, Ahmad met Gandhi. In the 1960s, he joined the National
Liberation Front and worked with Frantz Fanon in Algeria; later, in
America, he opposed the Vietnam War and was indicted with the
Berrigan brothers on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger.
(The charges were dismissed.) Ahmad was also engaged in conversations
with Yasir Arafat and other members of the PLO; Edward Said, who was
responsible for this alliance, describes Ahmad as a "genius at
sympathy." When he died in Islamabad in 1999, just days before the
Kargil war broke out, he was working to establish an independent,
alternative university in Pakistan.

Ahmad was still a boy
during the partition in 1947. His family had been living in their
ancestral village in Bihar, India, and Ahmad was witness to his
father's murder as he lay beside him in bed. In the company of his
elder brothers, Ahmad then migrated to Pakistan. Their mother,
however, stayed behind in India; Ahmad would not see her again until
1972, when she was on her deathbed, too ill to speak.

I
often thought of Ahmad while reading the letters of the Indian and
Pakistani schoolchildren. In Confronting Empire, Ahmad, in
conversation with well-known radio activist David Barsamian, returns
again and again to the divisions erected by nationalism. His critique
is against the embrace of Western-style nationalism--often by those
who fought so hard against Western imperialism. It is his readiness
to distance himself from the nationalist desire for possessing
disputed territories that allows him to recommend that Kashmir serve
"as the starting point of normalizing relations between India and
Pakistan."

Ahmad's proposal is that the part of Kashmir
under Pakistani control should be left as it is; Jammu and Ladakh,
which do not share the premises of Kashmiri nationalism, should
remain a part of India; the valley of Kashmir, where a ten-year-old
uprising continues today, should be given independence. More
radically, Ahmad envisioned a unified Kashmir with divided
sovereignty. There would be no more lines of control and border
patrols, and the ruling entities would be jointly responsible for
defense. Ahmad concludes by saying, "In fact, the longer we delay
normalization of relations between India and Pakistan and the
resolution of the Kashmir conflict, the more we are creating an
environment for the spread of Islamic and Hindu
militancy."

The nuclearization of the subcontinent earns
Ahmad's denunciation as well: "We are living in modern times
throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds," as he
put it. At the same time, he was also able to see very clearly that
this is not happening without protest. He pointed out, "In Calcutta,
250,000 people came out against nuclear weapons. In Delhi, 30,000."
It is precisely this critical stance--what Gramsci called "the
pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will"--that animates
the pages of Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik's New Nukes, a
public account of the real costs of nuclearization. In their powerful
book, the authors note that the Kargil conflict cost India $2.5
billion in direct economic expenses. Hundreds of soldiers on both
sides came back in body bags. If patrolling is now increased around
Kargil, that region will become another Siachen--the Himalayan
glacier where India and Pakistan have lost more than 10,000 troops
since 1984 and spend more than $10 million on patrolling each day.
(All of this, as Bidwai and Vanaik rightly point out, in two of the
world's poorest societies.)

Both Bidwai and Vanaik are
respected Indian journalists and veteran peace activists; they
perceive very clearly the systemic implications of nuclearism,
including the growth of religious fundamentalism in both countries.
Other heavy social costs include revivified militarism and male
supremacy; the growth of media manipulation and intolerance; the
suppression of debate and dissent. But while charting in historical
detail India's and Pakistan's descent into the nuclear club, Bidwai
and Vanaik also note the growth of movements for peace since the
mid-1990s. These have been in the main people's movements, with
particular contribution by South Asian feminists who have "a strong
awareness of the connections between nuclearism and patriarchy, and
between militarism and suppression of women's rights." According to
Bidwai and Vanaik, only two months after the May 1998 nuclear tests
in India, 72.8 percent of the people polled there opposed the
manufacture and use of nuclear weapons.

New Nukes is
a comprehensive handbook on nuclear deterrence. Using India and
Pakistan as its immediate context, it maps a global history of
nuclearization. The book is very distinctively a view from the South,
with a stringent critique of the cold war era as well as of the role
of the United States and Western imperialism. It should also be added
that Bidwai and Vanaik represent a departure from the Indian,
specifically Gandhian, strains of pacificism. That earlier form of
appeal for nonviolence was content to call for peace in the abstract;
the programmatic, interconnected plans that are at the heart of the
analyses in New Nukes make peace a part of a process that is
less spiritual and more political. After all, the authors stress,
"Indian and Pakistani leaders exchanged direct or indirect nuclear
threats no less than thirteen times in just five weeks during the
Kargil crisis." In fact--and this is their crucial assertion--Kargil
"dramatically highlighted South Asia as the most likely place in the
world for a nuclear exchange to take place."

Once again I
return to the students, from across all classes, whom I met in India
and Pakistan. How many of them can remain in school in a nuclearized
subcontinent? What is the future into which they will grow? According
to Bidwai and Vanaik, after the nuclear tests, "India's education
ministry quietly decided to slow down the program to universalize
primary education, even as the government raised the military
spending allocation by fourteen percent." Which make the voices of
Ahmad and the writers of the partition collected by Butalia all the
more important--and, sadly, plaintive.

As Arundhati Roy
writes in her introduction to New Nukes (an essay that
appeared in The Nation on September 28, 1998): "Making bombs
will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or
not.... India's nuclear bomb is the final act of betrayal by a ruling
class that has failed its people. However many garlands we heap on
our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth
is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate 400 million
people."

You may find reading Akhil Sharma's debut novel akin to having your head held underwater. Attendant with feelings of a relentless, choking panic, though, will be an almost preternatural awareness of the details suffusing the experience.

In Sharma's An Obedient Father, a stunning work that is both personal and political, you hear a man say, "Misery often makes me want to look away from the present and leads me to nostalgia." The misery of the present is born out of the political trials of India in the early eighties. The escape that the narrator wishes for is driven by yearning for a rural past: "As I swallowed my heart medicine in the blue dark of the common room, I imagined walking through Beri's sugarcane fields and sitting beneath a mango tree. I wanted to be a child again, with the future a wide, still river in the afternoon." What makes this nostalgia for an unsullied past both poignant and problematic is that it is the desire of a man who cannot escape the memory of the newspapers soaking up the blood beneath his daughter's thighs each night after he has raped her.

The protagonist, Ram Karan, is a corrupt official in the Education Department in Delhi. He is a widower living with his newly widowed daughter, Anita, and his young granddaughter. Anita is the child he raped repeatedly twenty years earlier. Most of the book is in Karan's voice.

The experience of an intimacy so often violent, of being a witness to what is routinely hidden but is here plainly visible, is a result of the quality of the narrator's voice. Lucid and perverse, like the solipsistic narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, the confessions of Sharma's antihero are sharp, even empathetic, and loathsome. (Recall Nabokov's H.H.: "I had possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.")

The social backdrop of the novel is also enriched by the tussle for the Delhi seat between a dying Congress Party and an emergent, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Karan is the money man, the bribe-collector, for one of the candidates in the parliamentary election. The petty political intrigues and their murderous fallouts provide a distraction from the less public drama that is played out inside the three-member Karan home.

It is to Sharma's great credit as a novelist that I was as often horrified by Karan's abuses and compulsive degradations as I was held captive by his pellucid dissection of shame that exposes a geography of self-delusion and national wrongdoing. There can be no doubt that Ram Karan is evil, but because he almost always is given voice, he also remains in some measure human.

This is the book's most disturbing feature but also its most powerful triumph. As a result, An Obedient Father poses a serious challenge to a reviewer who is tempted to take refuge in the easiest, moralizing dismissal of this unusual novel. There is reason to be dismayed by its brutality, and not everyone can savor its black humor; but it cannot be denied that the maddening narrative voice is as darkly hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky.

Sharma also pulls off the trick of showing that a collective political degradation is intertwined seamlessly with personal turpitude. Indira Gandhi's dictatorial "emergency," imposed twenty-five years ago, suspended civil rights and gave a free hand to an inner circle of politicos in Delhi. The emergency didn't tamper only with democratic institutions; its depredations made more base our responses to those weaker than we are. Sharma's novel bears the scars of that trauma and its aftermath on Karan, but also on his daughter: "Money would make everything negotiable.... The more years Indira Gandhi spent in office, the more my income grew, for more and more things fell under the government's aegis and we civil servants were the gatekeepers. I bought a toaster, a blender, a refrigerator, and a television. Anita went through higher secondary and into college. She grew up shy and easily panicked, but there was nothing that marked her as damaged."

If Kafka's K. located power in the distant castle, Sharma shows us mercilessly that such castles are our homes, so to speak, in our bedrooms. In fact, when you overhear Ram Karan's confessions about his political sins to his daughter each evening after the English news, you also realize that the political is a deflection from the interrogation of the personal. Karan understands this well: "I thought that providing her with something to rage about openly would be a way to keep us from the topic of what I had done to her."

Incest has enjoyed a popular run in Indian fiction recently. An Obedient Father is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote The God of Small Things. It is certainly the novel that Raj Kamal Jha came close to writing when in The Blue Bedspread he plumbed the dark ambiguities of abuse and incest. Sharma's novel is part of a brilliant coming of age in Indian fiction.

The dust jacket of the book informs us that its author is an investment banker who lives in Manhattan. He was born in India but grew up in Edison, New Jersey, studied at Princeton and later Stanford. He has won two O. Henry awards for his short fiction and worked as a scriptwriter for Steven Spielberg.What is most remarkable about this profile is not the youth (he's 29) or even the impressive array of accomplishments; rather, it is the fact that a writer who has lived most of his life outside India is able to write about life in Delhi with such sensitivity and flair. The brothels of Delhi's GB Road, the roads and shops of Kamla Nagar, the alleys of Old Delhi, in the changing light and temperature of the seasons, all come alive in this book's pages. Even the evocation of Karan's childhood in a village before India's independence is exact and intriguing:

I remembered that when my mother and I waited by the side of the road for a bus, I would tell my mother to move back, not because I was worried about her safety, but because this was one of the few ways I had to show my love.... Violence was common. Grown men used to rub kerosene on a bitch's nipples and watch it bite itself to death.

Does this sharpness of outline in the book, its confidence in its own voice and descriptions, put an end to the debate about the authenticity of Indian expatriate writers? An Obedient Father demonstrates that magical realism à la Salman Rushdie is not the indispensable tool of the Indian writer living abroad and, second, that unmagical realism à la Rohinton Mistry is insignificant if it does not scratch away at wounds that are covered over by the scabs of silence.

Unlike Rushdie and Mistry, both of whom have written about Indira Gandhi's emergency, Sharma produces nothing that could have been culled from the pages of a newspaper. Neither magical nor dull, his writing transgresses the borders of earlier, celebrated fictions, and he makes connections that are both vivid and dislocating: "Every night I had dreams of humiliation, of people catching me with Anita. When I saw a rooster picking at a pile of dung, I wondered what he was eating. Around this time I also began imagining sucking the penises of powerful men."

We learn early about Karan's death, but there is little consolation in this. The ironies of the victimizer becoming a victim, at the novel's end, are plainly discernible. Yet such ironies are overshadowed by the more gloomy evidence of damaged lives and their unsettled grief. And after Karan's death, I missed his eye for detail. I could not let go of the thought that of all the people in the room when Anita informs her extended family of what happened in her past, Karan is the only one who notices that everyone, in their desire to help, had ignored Anita's own desires. (Nabokov's H.H. was similarly cognizant of deeper absences: "I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.")

I tried to think again about one of Karan's earlier statements: "All the things that might mark me as unusual and explain what I did to Anita were present in other people." Did I not see the signs in my own life?

I was returning to college one summer from my hometown in Bihar, India. The train stopped at Aligarh. We were running late and it was hot outside. I looked up from my reading when an old man appeared and began to claim in a loud voice that he was Jawaharlal Nehru. The train began to move. There were many new passengers, daily commuters with their bags and their loads of merchandise. Some of them began joking with the old man. The Aligarh passengers, all men, settled down to a game of cards. They asked the old man a question or two and then teased him. Like many others in the compartment, I was amused by this teasing.

The old man, sensing that he was being mocked, shouted louder; one of the men slapped him from the upper berth and told him to be quiet. The old man was wearing a white cotton cap, as Nehru did in photographs. The cap had been knocked down. The old man picked it up and turned on the others with filthy abuses.

This was all the provocation the men needed. All down the narrow pathway between the berths, violent blows rained on the old man, who swore and spat viciously. His head began to bleed. One man gave his rubber slipper to the old man and asked him to use it to sweep the floor. "Do that, Jawaharlal," he said. When the old man tried to use the slipper to hit back, the man pulled his dhoti, leaving the old man naked from the waist down.

My fellow passengers, many of whom had been sitting till then, crowded around the old man and tore off his shirt. They kicked his genitals. Someone on a nearby berth asked that this be stopped, but this appeal had no effect.

There was a stink coming from the corner in which the old man had been pushed. As I said, it was very hot outside, and it was hot in the compartment too. I did not want to move. I thought of the old man when I got to my hostel and was preparing to sleep, but I don't think I've thought of him for any length of time ever again till I was reading An Obedient Father. That memory of derangement and violence was evoked by the book, no doubt, but also evoked was the claustrophobia of our closed lives, our bitterness and the collective nakedness ringing with abuse.

In the early 1920s, E.M.

I am an artless serf of Cupid. So are you and your mama--but not Vikram Seth.