Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (24 page)

The critic Harish Trivedi has asserted that Stephanian writers are “cut off from the experiential mainstream, and from [India's] common cultural matrix.” India is too diverse for any single “experiential mainstream” to be easily identified, but the charge of being outside the culture is a more serious one. R. K. Narayan once wrote of an English-medium school called St. Stephen's whose students are obliged to first rub off the sandal-paste caste-marks from the forehead before they enter its portals; Trivedi approvingly sees this as a metaphor of Stephanian deracination, with “St. Stephen's” a synonym “for those who have erased their antecedents.” I see no particular shame in the erasure of casteism from the classroom. But the more important point is that Stephanian writers do share a “common cultural matrix” with other Indians, though not one smeared with sandal-paste caste-marks. It is a “cultural matrix” that consists of an urban upbringing and a pan-national outlook on the Indian reality, expressed in English but drawing sustenance from nonanglophone Indian sources — languages, films,
music, food, clothing — that Stephanians share with other Indians.

Of course the attention being paid to Stephanians should not be at the expense of the very worthwhile writing being done by non-Stephanians of every stripe, particularly in other Indian languages, which deserve to be better translated in order to command the national audience that English gives the Indo-Anglians. But India is a big country: it has room for many schools of literature, and for many colleges — and cottages, and garrets — to produce them.

I
T WAS MY MOTHER
, her keen eye diligently scanning the press for items of interest, who spotted the ad in the newspaper. “Now,” it said, “you can quote Kalidasa and not just Shakespeare; Amartya Sen and not just Adam Smith… Tagore and Tharoor.” That, of course, was the clincher. (Show me a writer without an ego, and I'll show you a very good actor.) When she sent me the clipping, my first reaction was to give thanks that someone had finally done it — produced, to cite the ad again, “for the very first time, a fully cross-indexed Indian source for Indian quotations.” My second reaction was to fear that, in the face of so gigantic (and unprecedented) a task, it might not have been done well. And my third was to immediately ask a friend traveling to Delhi to pick me up a copy of the book, the
Enquire Dictionary of Quotations.

It wasn't, my friend tells me, widely available; she tried half a dozen bookshops, some rather prestigious, before finding one that stocked it. (They all had the
Penguin Dictionary
of Quotations
instead, which features no Indian author.) But it came at last, a handsomely bound volume of 244 pages with a striking yellow-and-black cover. In an introductory note the editor, T. J. S. George, observes that “the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
has thirty-eight pages of quotations from the Bible, not one from the Bhagavad Gita.” Referring to the dominance of Western source material in India, he asks, “Is it any wonder that Shakespeare is a household name in Sholapur and Thirunelveli while Kalidasa is not?”

The challenge the compiler has set for himself is undoubtedly a laudable one — to bring within the reach of the Indian reader in English quotations from Indian classics as well as contemporary writers that deserve the familiarity that well-worn Western words enjoy. Every reader and writer has indulged in the habit of looking up a familiar quotation; indeed, many of us have jotted down memorable quotes over the years ourselves, seeking inspiration or even just reminders of mind-opening thoughts or startling words. To read lines from the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, and the surviving works of Kalidasa, neatly arranged and sourced, is to rejoice in the thrill of discovery. To reread the words and the wisdom of a Nehru or a Tagore is to marvel again at the intellectual giants who brought us that freedom of mind and spirit that is just as important as the political freedom for which they strived. There is no question that the
Enquire Dictionary of Quotations
will offer any questing Indian many hours of rewarding browsing.

But as with most first attempts, the editor has, alas, made curious choices of both commission and omission that
detract from the value of his effort. The book's arrangement is a complete shambles. It idiosyncratically sets out to be chronological rather than alphabetical: I have seen books of quotations arranged by name and others arranged by subject, but why on earth privilege the date of birth of the author over any other attribute of his material? This is complicated enough for a reader wanting to quickly look up a particular writer, but then, three-quarters of the way through the book, the chronology collapses, so that V. B. Karnik, born 1916, appears after Uma Maheshwari, born 1974 (and in some cases no date of birth is listed at all). Worse, this is a book of Indian quotations: what on earth is that wonderful Palestinian, Edward Said, doing in it? Or Bertrand Russell, with an unmemorable line about Nehru? If the (unannounced) intention is also to include great quotations about India, the list is woefully sparse; Churchill appears with a tossed-off comment about Indians being a “beastly people with a beastly religion,” but none of his more considered utterances on the country is included. Worse, his well-known crack about Mahatma Gandhi being a “half-naked fakir” appears under the “Gandhi” entry, not under “Churchill.” Only British quotations on Gandhi feature, so Einstein and Romain Rolland are absent. There is only one quote about Tagore (Yeats's famous comment that “no Indian knows English”), whereas one might have included a dozen others, or left them all out. The editor clearly could not make up his mind about how far he should go to include foreigners saying pithy things about India; by including just a handful of comments, he denies himself the excuse that he only
wished to include Indian sources, while laying himself open to the charge that his omissions are so extensive that they undermine his choices.

That is also a charge that applies to many of the selections of Indian quotations. Tagore devotees will miss several of their favorites; his immortal “When I go from hence, let this be my parting word,” the poem found written out in Wilfred Owen's diary the day before the great British poet was killed in World War I, is one example of an unforgivable omission. Nehru is superbly represented, Ram Manohar Lohia impressively so, Gandhiji poorly (no examples of his puckish wit, for instance, are included) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, after a lifetime in politics, parliament, and poetry, gets just one line. Modern Indian poets in general receive a good airing, none better than the great late A. K. Ramanaujan, but Gieve Patel's classic “On Being Neither Hindu nor Muslim in India” is absent. (And as for Shashi Tharoor, the compiler has found just four quotes, all from
The Great Indian Novel,
whereas had he only asked, I might have directed him to a dozen more that have been widely cited!) This is not to belittle the awesome task before the compiler and his helpers; but while for those who have passed away, the editor must rely on his own extensive reading, he might have done well to solicit material from living authors to give himself a better range to choose from.

Finally, the indexing is sometimes a mystery. Having organized the book neither by subject nor author, the editor has sensibly included both a subject index and an author index. Alas, the latter is whimsical (Charan Singh appears under
C,
for instance, Romila Thapar under
R,
and O. V.
Vijayan under
O
!), and the former is erratic. Kalidasa's lovely lines about the monsoon — “a source of fascination to amorous women, the constant friend to trees, shrubs and creepers, the very life and breath of all living beings, this season of rains” — can be found neither under “season,” nor “rains”: how will a student be able to quote Kalidasa on the subject of rainy weather by recourse to this index?

“Readers may agree,” Mr. George forewarns us, “that an imperfect collection is better than no collection.” Absolutely; but after offering congratulations for this imperfect job, may this reader urge Mr. George to lose no time preparing an improved second edition of what could be, but is not yet, an indispensable reference source for all thinking Indians?

C
ALCUTTA, NO STRANGER TO CULTURAL CONTROVERSY
— its citizens once rioted and burned trams to protest a Paris writer's expulsion from the Cinémathèque Française — again hit the literary headlines in 1990. This time, it was the filming of
City of Joy,
based on Dominique Lapierre's 1986 bestseller about poverty and piety in this Bengali city, that pitted outraged Calcuttans against the movie's bewildered, and largely American, crew.

Director Roland Joffe was quoted as saying he had an easier time making
The Killing Fields
on the Cambodian border and
The Mission
in the jungles of Colombia. His film has been the subject of a variety of forms of vocal protest, ranging from editorials and lawsuits to demonstrations and (in one episode) bombs being thrown on the set. A Bengali reporter covering the picketing died after allegedly being beaten up by two of Joffe's assistants. The courts kept the crew's cameras idle for weeks, before allowing restricted public filming on holidays.

On the face of it,
City of Joy
’s troubles seemed to confirm India's reputation for thin-skinned hypocrisy. The protestors were angry about the film's focus on the city's despair and degradation; the filmmakers pointed out, not unreasonably, that these do exist. Calcuttans dreaded yet another depiction of poverty, prostitution, and urban squalor un-leavened by any acknowledgment that their city has for over two centuries been India's cultural capital, a metropolis of art galleries, avant-garde theaters, and overflowing bookshops, whose coffeehouse waiters speak knowledgeably of Godard and Truffaut. The filmmakers responded that that may well be true, but that's not what their film is about: it's about poverty and suffering and death — all of which can be found in good measure in Calcutta's slums — and about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of tragedy. They saw their work as a tribute to Calcutta, a city of misery that is nonetheless a city of joy. Those who want them to turn their cameras on the other Calcutta, Joffe says, are only trying to camouflage the painful reality.

Perhaps — but whose reality? Lapierre's book was burned by those he wrote about, the residents of the slum of Pilkhana. Even those who did not condone the violence and extremism of some of the protestors sympathized with their objections. The way they told it, the book was bad enough; with the film, Calcutta would become the favorite pinup of the pornographers of poverty. Westerners were going to munch popcorn in air-conditioned theaters as they stared at flickering images of dying Indian babies. This is a new kind of voyeurism, which has no interest in the totality of the Calcuttan reality, only in that part of it that titillates the
Western conscience. And don't forget the racism: in the book and in the film, the Indians are poor wretches who need cinegenic whites to give them succor. Calcutta doesn't matter for itself; it is merely the backdrop for the beatification of a Polish priest and the self-realization of an American doctor (played by
Dirty Dancing
’s Patrick Swayze).

The more thoughtful of the protestors say they would have no problem with a different film on the same subject. They are proud of Indian directors, like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, who have made vivid and convincing films on Bengali poverty. Neither Lapierre nor Joffe, they argue, feel the same empathy. Worse, by focusing on Western protagonists, they implicitly deny the dedication and sacrifice of thousands of Calcuttans — rich, poor, and middle-class — who have devoted their time and their resources to helping their fellow citizens. Even Mother Teresa couldn't have achieved a fraction of what she did without her overwhelmingly Indian legions of volunteers and nuns, none of whom happen to look like Patrick Swayze. Indians are struggling with dignity and selflessness to overcome their own problems. The book, and the film, does them a disservice.

It is a persuasive case, passionately argued by Calcuttan intellectuals. And yet I found myself deeply ambivalent about it. As an Indian, I don't particularly relish what Lapierre did in his book; I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi, sixty years earlier, calling the American traveler Katharine Mayo's
Mother India
“a drain-inspector's report.” As a writer, though, I was troubled by my Calcuttan friends’ implicit
condonation of censorship; they seemed to be saying to Lapierre and Joffe, This is our poverty, you can't depict it. I cannot accept that, any more than I can accept the suggestion that Peter Brook had no right to make his version of our epic, the Mahabharata.

I cannot accept the notion that the suffering of the Third World's underclass is not a fit subject for First World filmmakers. On the contrary, I spent more than a decade as a UN refugee official trying to get the media of the haves interested in the problems of the have-nots. I am aware that, in aiming at a Western audience, Joffe had to frame his story from the perspective of the outsiders, just as Candice Bergen as the photographer Margaret Bourke-White got more footage in the film
Gandhi
than a dozen Indian figures with a greater claim to a share in the Mahatma's life. Before seeing the film, I feared that the Indian poor would be the objects of Mr. Joffe's lens, rather than its subjects;
City of Joy
would be less their story than Patrick Swayze's. Like the Calcutta protestors, I resented that, but unlike them, it is a price I was willing to pay. (As it happens, the finished film ennobled and empowered its main Indian character, powerfully portrayed by the great Indian actor Om Puri.)