Truly, you can't please all

Rushdie by Khakhar

The London Guardian has given a bad review of Bhupen Khakhar’s (1935-2003) exhibition (You can’t please all at Tate Modern), and it has expectedly given heartburns to the art fraternity in India.

A stray bad review by an art critic will not make or destroy the monumental reputation that Bhupen Khakhar justifiably enjoys.  

I’m reading Anton Joseph, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his harrowing days in the hiding from the Iranian fatwa following the publication of the Satanic Verses.

Rushdie and Khakhar shared close bonds, and Khakhar also features as a character in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Although they were friends, and even if we agree that the author’s opinion about the painter’s greatness would be biased, the memoir gives a keen insight into Khakhar’s significance to Indian art.

Rushdie says, “Finding an Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had not been easy, and Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the street art of India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the figurative and narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of that visual environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.”

Read the passage from the book for a better understanding of Khakhar, and Rushdie’s endearing narrative skills.

The BBC made a documentary about The Moor’s Last Sigh and commissioned his friend the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar to paint his portrait for the film. It was a novel about his painters and painting and his friendships with a generation of gifted Indian artists – with Bhupen himself above all – had allowed him to think of writing it. They had first met in the early 1980s and each of them had at once seen himself in the other and they had quickly become friends. Soon after their first meeting he went to Bhupen’s show at the Kasmin Knoedler gallery in London. In his pocket was a check (cheque) for a story he had just sold to The Atlantic Monthly. At the show he fell in love with Bhupen’s Second Class Railway Compartment and when he discovered that the price tag was exactly the same as the figure on the check in his pocket (Indian art was cheaper then) he had happily turned his story into his friend’s painting, and it had remained one of his most prized possessions ever since. It was hard for contemporary Indian artists to escape the influence of the West (in an earlier generation M. F. Husain’s famous horses had leaped straight out of Picasso’s Guernica, and the work of many of the other big names – Souza, Raza, Gaitonde – was too deeply indebted for his liking to modernism and Western developments in the abstraction). Finding an Indian idiom that was neither folkloric nor derivative had not been easy, and Bhupen had been one of the first to succeed, looking at the street art of India, the movie posters, the painted shop fronts, and at the figurative and narrative traditions of Indian painting, and creating out of that visual environment an oeuvre of idiosyncrasy, originality and wit.

At the heart of The Moor’s Last Sigh was the idea of the palimpsest, a picture concealed beneath another picture, a world hidden beneath another world. Before he was born his parents had hired a young Bombay painter to decorate his future nursery with fairy-tale and cartoon animals and the impoverished artist Krishen Khanna had accepted the commission. He had also painted a portrait of the unborn Salman’s beautiful young mother, Negin, but her husband, Anis, hadn’t like it and refused to buy it. Khanna stored his rejected canvas at his friend Husain’s studio and one day Husain painted a picture on his own over it, and sold it. So somewhere in Bombay there was a portrait of Negin Rushdie by Krishen, who of course, grew up to be one of the leading artists of his generation, concealed beneath a picture by Husain. Krishen said, “Husain knows where every picture of his has ended up, but won’t say.” The BBC tried to get him to say, ut the old man angrily tapped his cane on the floor and denied that the story was true. “Of course it’s true,” Krishen said. “He’s just worried that you want to destroy his painting to find your mother’s portrait, and he’s offended that you’re looking for my picture and you don’t care about his.” In the end he had come to think that the portrait was more evocative lost than found – lost, it was a beautiful mystery; found, it might have proved that Anis Rushdie’s artistic judgement had been correct, and that then apprentice Khanna hadn’t done a very good job – and he called off the search.

He sat for Bhupen in a studio in Edwardes Square, Kensington, and told him the story of the lost picture. Bhupen giggled delightedly and worked away. His portrait was being painted hi profile in the tradition of Indian court portraits, and like a good nawab he wore a see-through shirt, only his, painted by Bhupen, looked more like nylon than sheer cotton. Bhupen began drawing in a single movement, a charcoal profile that caught an exact likeness with effortless skill. The painting that covered this single charcoal line looked in some ways less like its subject and more like the character of Moor Zogoiby in the novel. “It’s a painting of you both,” Bhupen said. “You as the Moor and the Moor as you.” So there was a lost portrait beneath this portrait too.

The completed painting was eventually acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and Bhupen became the first Indian artist to have a work hanging there. Bhupen died on August 6, 2003, on the same day as Negin Rushdie. There was no escape from coincidence, though the meaning of such synchronicity remained elusive. He lost a friend and a mother on the same day. That was meaning enough.

Read the Jonathan Jones’s review in The Guardian here: Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook

Read Amit Chaudhuri’s essay on Bhupen Khakhar also in The Guardian here: Bombay dreams: how painter Bhupen Khakhar captured the city spirit

Read Indian art fraternity’s reaction to Jones’s negative review here: Indian Artists Respond to Review Mocking Bhupen Khakhar Show at Tate

Image: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw09598/Salman-Rushdie-The-Moor 

Faith & Fiction at The FOLD

In his memoir Joseph Anton that describes his nine years of living underground, Salman Rushdie, writes about his fascination with faith. “It was curious,” he says about himself, “that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. Belief had left him but the subject remained, nagging at his imagination. The structure and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind, and the concerns of these religions with the great questions of existence – Where do we come from? And now that we are here, how shall we live? – were also his, even if he came to conclusion that required no divine arbiter to underwrite and certainly no earthly priest class to sanction and interpret.”

A few pages earlier, he describes his father Anis thus: “Anis was a godless man – still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of not believing is hard even to formulate. But that is what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God.”

I remembered these lines from Rushdie’s memoirs when I attended a panel discussion on Faith and Fiction at the first Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) at the grand Peel Art Museum and Archives (PAMA). Canadian authors Vivek Shraya, Zarqa Nawaz, Ayelet Tsabari and Cherie Dimaline held a lively discussion on the subject. Eufemia Fantetti moderated the discussion that delved deep into questions about faith.

“How does faith influence the creation and the shape of our stories? Do traditions and beliefs inspire or inhibit the worlds that arrive on the page?” The four authors with diverse religious backgrounds (although none counted themselves as deeply religious) “discussed the development of plot, character and stories and the inspiration behind them.”

The panelists reflected on how they were deeply influenced by the manner in which they had been raised, and how, in small yet significant ways, they had begun to question at a young age the received wisdom of their respective faiths to develop their own understanding of rituals and religion. They shared their journey of reflection which awakened in them a quest to find their identity that while not quite uprooting their faith, certainly made them question the fundamentals, and redefine their faith into something that was substantially more accepting and tolerant.

For Zarqa Nawaz, the egalitarianism of Islam was obvious in the community in which she was raised. But she also found several aspects of this culture such as the segregation of women in mosques fundamentally unfair. In a telling comment, she said, “You can be secular or religious, but by being fundamentalist in your belief, you can deprive women their basic human rights.” Ayelet Tsabari, articulating what many writers feel, said in order to write you need tremendous amount of faith. She said fiction has the ability to make “tiny little changes” and “make someone feel something deeply.” Ojibway and Métis writer Cherie Dimaline described her structured upbringing where nobody talked about things that could disturb the status quo. “Stories are my faith,” she said; stories of seven generations back and forward assume importance to the First Nations culture especially when they are rapidly losing geography. Vivek Shraya spoke about her fascination with Hindu male gods who wore jewelry and had women friends – something she could relate to when she was young and trying to understand herself and her orientation. Raised in an orthodox atmosphere, she began to question the portrayal of the “other” in narratives deployed to define faith-based identity.

Faith and Fiction panel discussion was held on May 7, on the second day of the three-day Festival of Literary Diversity. The FOLD brought together writers in a celebration of Canadian diversity. I had interviewed Jael Richardson, the artistic director of FOLD for my show Living Multiculturalism on TAG TV. Here’s the video clip of the interview:

(2014) Salman Rusdie: India and Questions of Religious Freedom

Salman Rushdie spoke on India: Religious Freedom and Personal Safety on April 28, 2014 at the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival.

Let me talk a bit about my country of origin, about India.  

There is a general election under way in India right now.  

Because of the immense size of the country, it takes six weeks for everyone to vote.
The election is largely fair, largely free. Voting is peaceful, incidents are few, and the results will be a trustworthy expression of this gigantic electorate.

On this electoral process rests India's claim to be the world's largest democracy. A proud claim, for it is harder for a poor country to be a free country.

And the long civil uncertainties and frequent unfreedoms of the citizens of all India's neighbours—the north, east, west and south—make the Indian boast all the prouder.
This, we can all agree, is good. 

But a democratic society is not simply one in which such a ballot takes place every four or five years.

Democracy is more than mere majoritarianism. 

In a truly free democratic society, all citizens must feel free all the time, whether they end up on the winning or losing side in an election—free to express themselves as they choose, free to worship or not worship as they please, free from danger and fear. 

If freedom of expression is under attack, if religious freedom is threatened, and if substantial parts of society live in physical fear for their safety, then such a society cannot be said to be a true democracy.  

In contemporary India all these problems exist and they are getting worse.
The attack on literary, scholarly and artistic freedom has gathered force ever since the banning of my novel, The Satanic Verses in 1988. 

Rohinton Mistry's acclaimed novel Such a Long Journey was attacked recently by members of the Hindu extremist party the Shiv Sena in Bombay and Bombay University caved in and removed the book from the syllabus.

A.K. Ramanujan's classic essay, The 300 Ramayanas, for decades, the foundational text of Ramayan studies in Delhi University, was similarly attacked and similarly the authorities cravenly succumbed and removed it from the syllabus. 

Not only was James Laine's study of the Maratha warrior king Shivaji, an icon of the Shiv Sena Party, attacked and banned, but the great library of ancient texts in Poona, where Laine had done some of his research was attacked and many ancient manuscripts destroyed. 

And most recently, the same fanatical Hindu—a person called Batra— who attacked Ramanujan's essay, brought an action against Wendy Doniger's important scholarly work, The Hindus, accusing her ludicrously and ungrammatically, of being a "woman hungry of sex" and instead of being laughed out of court, he succeeded in scaring the mighty Penguin Books of withdrawing the work. 

A gay artist, Balbir Krishan, was first threatened and then physically attacked in India's capital New Delhi, accused of spreading homosexuality. 

The grand old man of Indian painting, Maqbool Fida Husain, was driven out of India because of threats from Hindu goon squads who disliked his nude portraits of Hindu goddess Saraswati in spite the long sculptural and artistic tradition from the most ancient times of depicting Indian goddesses heavily adorned in jewellery but very scantily clad. The wardrobe of the goddess Saraswati wouldn't take up much room. 

Episodes of this sort are multiplying it seems by the month, by the week, by the day almost, and the authorities have failed lamentably in their duty to protect free speech rights.
In fact, politicians and police officials alike have repeatedly blamed the victims for being the trouble makers. 

The climate of fear that has consequently been created is such that, as some of the examples I have given show, hooligans and censors' work is now done for them by the collapse of those who ought to be free speech's defenders. 

Penguin Books, whose merger with Random House, has created the world's largest and most powerful publisher, and who were prepared to defend my work back in 1988, this time gave in to Doniger's critics without so much as a fight. 

This already lamentable state of affairs looks likely to become worse if, as seems likely, as seems probable, the election results bring to power the Hindu nationalist BJP so that the highly divisive figure of Mr Narendra Modi, accused of being responsible for an ant-Muslim pogrom in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, whose chief minister he was then and still is, a hardliner's hardliner, becomes India's next Prime Minister. 

Films dealing with the pogrom have been banned in Gujarat ever since the attacks. Already, the threats to free expression have begun to spread beyond the state of Gujarat.
Siddharth Varadarajan, the editor of the distinguished English language daily, the Hindu, was forced to resign recently because the paper's owner's felt he wasn't pro-Modi enough. Soon afterwards, the caretaker of his apartment was beaten up in a Delhi street, by thugs who told him, 'Tell your boss to watch what he says on Television.' 

Sagarika Ghose, a leading anchor of CNN's Indian affiliate, IBN, was ordered by her bosses to stop posting tweets critical of Mr Modi. In response, she tweeted what many journalists are thinking: 'There is an evil out there, an evil which is stamping out all free speech and silencing independent journalists: journalists unite!'

Nor are the threats limited to free expression. Modi's campaign manager Amit Shah delivered a speech in early April in the northern town of Muzaffarnagar, the site of sectarian strife last year. He described the elections as an opportunity to seek revenge against the Muslim minorities.  

Giriraj Singh, a senior leader of the BJP, said in an election rally in the northern state of Bihar, that those opposing Mr Modi would have no place in India—they will only find a place in Pakistan, he shouted. 

Praveen Togadia, one of the most senior of what I have come to think of as Modi's Toadies, told his supporters to prevent Muslims from buying property in Hindu majority neighbourhoods in Gujarat. 

The writing is on the wall.  

A couple of weeks ago, the sculptor Anish Kapoor and I, along with several other Indian artists, academics and intellectuals, signed an open letter, worrying about Mr Modi's rise to power. 

Since then, the attack on us in Indian social media has been relentless and, paradoxically, has validated our fears. 

We worried about the arrival of a bullying, intolerant new regime and here are its early outriders: menacing, nasty, bile-spewing, vengeful, substituting ad-hominem attacks for any real debate. There will not be less of this after a Modi victory. 

Mr Modi's supporters hark back to the ballot box. He will win, they say, because he is popular. And they are right.  

A disturbingly high percentage of the Indian electorate wants a strong man leader, is willing to turn a blind eye to his past misdeeds, even if those include genocide, believes that dissenting intellectuals should be put in their place, critical journalists should be muzzled, and artists should behave themselves. 

This willingness to bet the house on Modi's alleged economic genius, on which many commentators have doubts, and to risk everything that's beautiful about a free society, may indeed provide the wave which sweeps Mr Modi to victory. 

It would be easy to say: then India will get the government it deserves. For all those who value what is being lost, all those who want a country free of fear, an open society not a stifled one, all those Indians will get an India they don't deserve.  

Those who value the India for which Rabindranath Tagore yearned in his great poem, 'My country awake!' will get an India that would have horrified the poet.

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high,
where knowledge is free, 

Tagore wrote, in part:

Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

India is in danger of betraying the legacy of its founding fathers and greatest artists like Rabindranath Tagore. 

Thank you.

Taken from: http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=3262&eid=31 

The Moor's Last Sigh

I’ve been re-reading Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. Many agree that this novel is a sort of sequel to Midnight's Children.

Probably because Rushdie wrote the novel when he was hiding from the world under a fatwa from the Iranian clergy, the novel is sombre, less hopeful and realistic. 

Also, in many ways, it’s a truer picture of India as compared to the one Rushdie portrays in Midnight’s Children, which is an alarmingly hopeful novel. 

The Moor’s Last Sigh accurately captures the rootlessness of the post-Nehru generation that grew up in an India where hope was receding quickly and was being rapidly replaced by despondency.

I enjoyed The Moor’s Last Sigh more than Midnight’s Children also because it is focussed on the Bombay of 1970s and 1980s – a time and a place that I relate to. It’s easier to relate to Moraes (Moor) Zogoiby than Saleem Saini because Moraes is my generation. Saleem is my mother’s generation.

The novel – as with most of Rushdie’s novels – is replete with innumerable fanciful characters, including historical figures such as Nehru and Indira, cricketer Abbas Ali Baig, and other thinly-disguised then contemporary figures, who have now passed into history. Two that immediately come to mind are right-wing politician Bal Thackeray, and artist and one of the pioneers of the Baroda school, Bhupen Khakkar. Then, there are others whose names have been slightly altered – Crocodile Nandy – and the personalities transposed. It’s great fun reading the novel and trying to decipher who the real life person is.  A page reproduces the face of RK Laxman’s Common Man.

I know that is an insufficient and a subjective way to assess the greatness (or the lack thereof) of a book. 

Rushdie understood this, and wrote about it on the 25th anniversary of Midnight’s Children in the Outlook magazine. “One day, I knew, the subject of Mrs. Gandhi and the Emergency would cease to be current, would no longer exercise anyone overmuch, and at that point, I told myself, my novel would either get worse—because it would lose the power of topicality—or else it would get better—because once the topical had faded, the novel's literary architecture would stand alone, and even, perhaps, be better appreciated. Clearly, I hoped for the latter, but there was no way to be sure. The fact that Midnight's Children is still of interest twenty-five years after it first appeared is, therefore, reassuring.”

For me, Midnight’s Children is history. The Moor’s Last Sigh is nostalgia. There’s a big difference between history and nostalgia. Nostalgia is personal. History can be, but is more formal. 

For an academic evaluation of the novel, read John Clement Ball's paper: Acid in the Nation’s Bloodstream: Satire, Violence, and theIndian Body Politic in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

An excerpt from the novel on Bombay

BOMBAY was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.

What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut--in Delhi, in Calcutta--from time to time they slit their neighbours' throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood. They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language you could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things never happened.--Never, you say? – OK: never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere, the language business for example, also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood were usually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so that by the time they reached the city's streets the disfigurations were relatively slight. – Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind, have I, among

my many losses, also lost clear sight?--It may be said I have; but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all? Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded streets?

Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealth of the country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay: that was one explanation for what happened. Well, well, that may have been so. And it may have been that what was unleashed in the north (in, to name it, because I must name it, Ayodhya) – that corrosive acid of the spirit, that adversarial intensity which poured into the nation's bloodstream when the Babri Masjid fell and plans for a mighty Ram temple on the god's alleged birthplace were, as they used to say in the Bombay cinema-houses, filling up fast – was on this occasion too concentrated, and even the great city's powers of dilution could not weaken it enough.

And a clip of the author reading the above passage

Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Last_sigh.jpg

A city & its festival

Bombay will turn into a bride for the next 10 days as it celebrates the Ganapati festival.

It’s a celebration that has come to define the city both negatively – crass, commercial, loud and gaudy, and positively – bringing about community camaraderie, remembering the values of freedom, independence, self-reliance, and rising above casteism.  

These days, Ganapati celebrations are held across India, most notably in Hyderabad, but it’s Bombay that really takes the festival to a different level.

Bombay’s identification with the festival is a bit surprising considering when it was started in 1893 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, it was held in three venues in Poona and only one in Bombay.

But students of history will agree that Bombay was known to frequently steal Poona’s thunder in the late 19th century. For instance, the first session of the Indian National Congress launched by Allan Octavio Hume was to be held in Poona in 1885, but had to be moved to Bombay because of the sudden outbreak of the plague in Poona.

Tilak started the public celebration of the festival in 1893 largely to resuscitate his dwindling political fortunes.  As the leader of orthodox Hindus, he had met a series of political reversals – the biggest being the passage of the age of consent bill by the English governor Sir Andrew Scoble, raising the marriageable age for girls from 10 to 12.

Historian B. R. Nanda, tracing the uneasy relationship between the moderates and the extremist elements of the Indian national movement in the 19th century has observed, “Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, and indeed the entire Bombay group of moderates had a lively distrust of Tilak. Its origins lay partly in ideological and partly in temperamental differences. For at least fifteen years there had been a sort of cold war, which hindered not only mutual understanding, but even mutual comprehension between the Congress establishment in India – of which Pherozeshah Mehta was the virtual chief – and Tilak.”

In the first year, the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav was held at three centres in Pune and at the Keshavji Naik chawl, Girgaum in Bombay. It was widely perceived as directed against the Muslims of Bombay. However, A year later, In October 1894, the English acting commissioner of the central division of Mumbai, commenting on the festival wrote to his seniors: "I must confess that my convictions lead to me to support the view widely entertained in Poona by the more respectable natives that the agitation fomented by the Deccan Brahmins is directed in reality not against the Muslims but against the government."

To read about the history of that tumultuous era, click here.
 

Many writers have described this festival and Bombay’s unique relationship with it. And none has done it better than Salman Rushdie. Here are two passages from his two best novels: Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh.

“Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets-right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools of Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club…

As for Mumbadevi – she’s not so popular these days, having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people's affections. The calendar of festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh – ‘Ganpati Baba’ – has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi, when huge processions are 'taken out' and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of the god, which they hurl into the sea. Ganesh's day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown – but where is Mumbadevi's day? It is not on the calendar.”

  
Midnight’s Children

“Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mâché effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mâché rats – for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some of these tusk'n'tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a year, the skies were full of Colour-by-De Luxe clouds: pink and purple, magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from reused insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities 'like aurora-not borealis-but-bombayalis', as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say.”

The Moor’s Last Sigh

I’ve been fascinated with the festival since I was a child, and vividly remember standing on the balcony of my mother’s home at Prathna Samaj watching the processions of Ganapati idols vending their way to the Chowpatty beach for the immersion of the idols into the Arabian Sea at the end of the ten-day festival.

Over the years, even as religion has lost its relevance to my life, I continue to enjoy the festival, and especially the way it transforms to the mammon-worshiping metropolis into a city that comes together to be good.

Ganapati is worshipped as the god of knowledge, and is the first scribe who recorded the Mahabharata as Ved Vyas narrated the epic.

Incidentally, 1893 is also the year when Mohandas Gandhi left Gujarat for South Africa and returned two decades later to become the Mahatma.

That year, Swami Vivekananda also addressed the World Congress of Religion in Chicago, addressing the congregation with the now famous salutation of ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’, leaving the largely Caucasian audience bemused presumably because it had never been addressed thus. 

They gave him a resounding standing ovation.
 

Celebrating India

Bharat Mata by MF Husain

I suppose remembering India is in inverse proportion to the time and distance.

I've been out of India for a very long time. And Canada is far, too far. So remembering India is easy and effortless. Of course, with Facebook, time and distance have ceased to matter. The best way to remember India is to read books on India. I recently re-read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. I don’t think any writer can equal Rushide’s love for India.

Here are two short paragraphs from these books that reveal his passionate love for India.

“August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna's birthday and Coconut Day; and this year-fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve-there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will-except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

Midnight’s Children

“…the dawning of a new world, Belle, a true country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because multi-coloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon, soon we will stand upon the platform and cheer the coming of the train…”

The Moor’s Last Sigh

And then there are special occasions to remember India, especially when you’re outside India. In Toronto, the Panorama India and the Consulate General of India Toronto organize the India Day parade. It’s a feel-good event when Indians come together and have a few hours of fun at Toronto’s Dundas Square (which celebrated its decade this week). Indians from different provinces group together and take a walk around the block.

This year, the floats were missing and had been replaced by Kolkata-style hand-pulled rickshaws. Even tiny Manipur was represented. And the most vibrant groups were – expectedly – from the southern states, although the Gujaratis with their garba didn't do too badly either. A couple of years ago it was the Rajasthani group which played Lata Mangeshkar’s Meerabai bhajans (read about it here).

The human rights groups, along with groups opposed to the Indian state, including Sikh separatists, stand on the other side of the square, raising slogans.

Despite ‘voting with my feet’, so to speak, in favour of Canada, I've participated in the parade for the last five years that I've been here in Toronto because, that cliche about taking an Indian out of India but never India out of an Indian is very true. I'm the first to point out an 'incorrect' map of India (which excludes part of PoK / Azad Kashmir from India), despite being generally in favour of the Kashmiri right to self-determination. I know this at variance with my conviction that nationalism and patriotism have little relevance in a post-colonial, globalizing world.

These concepts had a special significance in the colonial era. Nelson Mandela succinctly explains it in his autobiography. In his Long March to Freedom, Mandela quotes Anton Lembede (1914-1947):  “The history of modern times is the history of nationalism. Nationalism has been tested in the people’s struggles and the fires of battle and found to be the only antidote against foreign rule and modern imperialism. It is for that reason that the great imperialistic powers feverishly endeavour with all their might to discourage and eradicate all nationalistic tendencies among their alien subjects; for that purpose huge and enormous sums of money are lavishly expended on propaganda against nationalism which is dismissed as “narrow,” “barbarous,” “uncultured,” “devilish,” etc. Some alien subjects become dupes of this sinister propaganda and consequently become tools or instruments of imperialism for which great service they are highly praised by the imperialistic power and showered with such epithets as “cultured,” “liberal,” “progressive,” “broadminded,” etc.”

Mandela affirms: “Lembede’s views struck a chord in me. I, too, had been susceptible to paternalistic British colonialism and the appeal of being perceived by whites as “cultured” and “progressive” and “civilized.” I was already on my way to being drawn into the black elite that Britain sought to create in Africa. That is what everyone from the regent to Mr. Sidelsky had wanted for me. But it was an illusion. Like Lembede, I came to see the antidote as militant African nationalism.”

In my very humble opinion, in the present context, and with specific reference to India, unbridled nationalism is harming India because it’s being used as a means to segregate Indians on the basis of religion, and exclude the minorities from the mainstream (see photograph).

BJP poster welcoming Modi to Hyderabad (August 2013)

Ramchandra Guha concludes his classic India After Gandhi thus: “Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and – lest I forget – so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.”

And in India’s survival and prosperity, I don’t think nationalism and patriotism are of any particular significance. 

Image: Barefoot across the nation Maqbool Fida Husain & the Idea of India Ed: Sumathi Ramaswamy

Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee - 1

Gladstone Hotel

Colonial mindsets and in postcolonial times

Recently, I was with a group of writers at Gladstone’s Melody Bar, waiting for a book launch event to commence. Although all of us now live in Toronto (or in the GTA) none of us at the table had been born here. All but I had vivid memories of the city – during their visits as children, as adolescents, as young adults – of its architecture and the people.

Then one of them said something that struck a chord: these were memories of a colonial city. I could relate to that instantly. My memories of Bombay – of its architecture and its people – are largely memories of a colonial city.

That evening, I brought home a business card of Gladstone’s sale person. I was planning to hold a small get together for friends later this month, but have since abandoned that plan. The business card is beautifully designed and has a two-tone image of the hotel’s edifice; the blue backdrop gives its an old-world, ammonia-print look and feel to it.

Gladstone’s architecture in many ways reminds me of so many buildings in Bombay’s Fort along the Hornby Road between Flora Fountain and Victoria Terminus (Dadabhai Noroji Road from Hutatma Chowk to Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus).

My son who has been forced to accompany his parents on their meaningless meanderings both in Bombay and in Toronto, picked up the card and exclaimed, “This looks like some place in India;” when I asked him why, he said, “India has such buildings, too.”

Despite valiant efforts of heritage conservationists, the turn-of-the century (19th -20th) architecture in Bombay is crumbling into oblivion, as I’d imagine it is in Toronto, too. But even as colonial architecture gives way to freer forms of design, I often wonder whether colonial way of thinking has changed, or indeed, can change.

The eager and unabashed celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years of ascension to the throne, with full participation of the state, clearly shows that in Canada, where the British monarch has a constitutional presence, there is little evidence – or even a perceived need – to move away from the elaborate and antediluvian constructs of colonialism.

Despite centuries of struggle against the British rule, has Indian thinking succeeded in casting away the colonial constructs, especially in fiction. There are many examples of the residual colonialism in Indian writing in English.

In India, there has always been a general consensus (even if it isn’t articulated often nowadays) that this is because an alien language forces an alien idiom that doesn’t – cannot – describe the Indian sensibility in all its nuances, even if it succeeds in depicting the quintessence.

But how true is that?

V.S. Naipaul wryly notes in An Area of Darkness, “The feeling is widespread that, whatever English might have done for Tolstoy, it can never do justice to the Indian “language” writers. This is possible; what I read of them in translation did not encourage me to read more.” (quote taken from Salman Rushdie’s “Damme, This is the Oriental scene for you!” 1997).

The two novels that are the two sides of this discussion of the colonial and the postcolonial narratives are Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children succeeded in pulling Indian writing in English out of the miasma of colonial thinking by twisting, turning, bending and maiming the English language to an Indian idiom, an Indian way of thinking. Equally, it also substantially altered Indian sensibilities.

I’m reproducing passages from two critical studies of Rushdie and Kipling that give a deeper insight and a different perspective to our understanding of these concepts.

(continued in the post below)

In support of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was invited to the Jaipur literature festival, but the rector of India’s leading Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom of Deoband objected to his presence. Many Muslims have found Rushdie’s Satanic Verses offensive. 

India was among the first countries to ban the novel – the ban hasn’t been lifted till now. 

William Dalrymple, writer and one of the festival organiser, said in a statement, "Salman is a writer of enormous breadth. His … passionate engagement with Indian Islamic history shows he is far removed from the Islamophobe of myth. This is a great tragedy, and we hope he will be able to come back again in the future."

The Guardian (London, England) reported: 

Salman Rushdie pulls out of Jaipur literary festival overassassination fears

“On Friday, the British Indian writer Hari Kunzru caused further upset by reading a section from The Satanic Verses, which remains banned in India. Further attempts by writers to read from the book were stopped by organisers.

"Willy, Sanjoy: why did this happen?", Rushdie later asked Dalrymple and the festival's producer, Sanjoy Roy, protesting against their decision to prevent further readings from the banned work...

Indian officials told the Guardian they feared action by groups run by Dawood Ibrahim, a well-known crime boss living in exile, who they believe is closely linked to the Pakistani security establishment. Security experts, however, described the idea of killers being dispatched by organised criminals to kill the author as "extremely far-fetched. 

The struggling Indian government, led by the centre-left Congress party, has made no public statement on the row. There are major state elections in the coming weeks in which the votes of Muslim communities will play a critical role. The festival's organiser, (Sanjoy) Roy, said there was a need in India "to question … why we continue as a nation to succumb to one pressure or another." "This is a huge problem for Indian democracy," Roy said.

As a mark of solidarity with Rushdie, Generally About Books is reproducing an extract from Satanic Verses. 

The extract is taken from About.com (http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/a/me080930.htm)

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God’s will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. It is right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills à la god. Flattered them: you will be the instrument of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the halos, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they’ll play you a happy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behind-their-own-eyes. Of whyatm as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers… angels, they don’t have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit, to dissent.

I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.

Me?

[…] His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won’t answer to that here; nor, though he’s well aware of what they call him, to his nickname in Jahilia down below—he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney. [Coney Mountain in Rushdie’s rendering is a pun on many levels, and a reference to Mount Hira, where Muhammad is supposed to have had his first Koranic “revelation.”] Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym: Mhound.

That’s him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his hot mountain in the Hijaz. The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.”

Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s out with a new book The Lost Symbol and the publishing world can’t stop talking about it.

I intend to read it because it’s set in Washington DC. Many years ago, I had a wonderful time there being a tourist in the city of monuments.

I read the Da Vinci Code almost a year after it was published.

And became a phenomenon.

And I was the only one in this whole vast world who hadn’t read the book.

And what a book that turned out to be.

You just can’t stop reading it as Brown takes you on a spellbinding journey

Whatever else critics may say about the book and Brown’s (lack of) style, it’s a page-turner with few parallels.

Expectedly, a Hollywood blockbuster followed; but was a disappointment. Not merely because Tom Hanks didn’t make for a good Robert Langdon (Sean Penn would’ve been better).

Clearly, it was a difficult to film a book that relies so much on history, heresy, hagiography and at times hieroglyphics of the non-Egyptian kind.

A brief digression: I keenly await Deepa Mehta's attempt at turning Midnight's Children into a movie. Looking at Mehta's oeuvre, and especially Heaven on Earth (which is symbols, images and magic realism), her effort will be worth waiting for.

Salman Rushdie will be aghast that I'm taking about his masterpiece in the same breath as Brown's blockbuster.

So, back to Brown.

On the strength of the Da Vinci Code, Brown can deservedly be included in the company of the suspense masters Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett and Jack Higgins.

In my opinion, these three are the true torchbearers of a genre that creates superstar writers every month and then destroys them the next.

Longevity in this genre is impossible. Ludlum, Follett and Higgins belong to an exclusive club of writers who have churned out page-turners with envious consistency, and in Ludlum case, incredibly even after his death.

Ludlum’s Bourne Identity, Follett’s Eye of the Needle and Higgins’s Eagle has Landed remain my favourites.

Although, I must admit my reading in this genre is limited. I read these three books when I read most of my books from this genre - in the late 1970s.

Image: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01481/langdon_1481412c.jpg