Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 3, No. 14
Issue Coordinator: Manjushree Thapa
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Reviews
- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Kiran Desai)
- Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban)
- The Call of Nepal (JP Cross)
- Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (Pico Iyer)
- The Role of Civil Society and Democratization in Nepal (Ananda Shrestha, ed.)
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Viking, New Delhi, 1998
Price: IRs. 295
Much Hullabaloo
Manjushree Thapa
Kiran Desai's first novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard has met with steady applause from the literary world; excerpts have been printed in the New Yorker, and in Salman Rushdie's cannon-forming new anthology of Indian fiction Mirrorwork (to be reviewed in the next issue of the KPBR). Indeed, Desai's novel contains the most fashionable must-have ingredients of contemporary Indian English fiction: lush landscapes, muddleheaded natives, quaint language and a whimsical plot. What it strikingly lacks is difficult, challenging insight into human nature or Indian society.
Hullabaloo's basic premise is lighthearted, but not lacking in promise: frustrated with the dullness of his life, the dimwitted but goodhearted postal worker Sampath Chawla climbs a guava tree and finds treetop conditions so much more pleasant than those at home, he decides to live there. At first mortified, his father soon finds a way to market his son as a local baba. Sampath's coddling mother is avenged by her son's deification, and uses the occasion to unleash her suppressed talent for cooking unlikely dishes - "quail eggs, snail eggs, liver of a wild boar, tail of a wild cat" - from ingredients found in the guava orchard. Sampath's sister, meanwhile, is distressed about the effects of her brother's new lifestyle upon her marriage prospects. What ensues is a slightly overlong romp involving a band of drunken monkeys, the Superintendent of Police, the Chief Medical Officer, the Brigadier, a spy from the Atheist Society, the waiter at the Hungry Hop restaurant, the local post office staff, and Sampath's devotees.
Hullabaloo's intention is to entertain, and considerable sections of the novel succeed in doing so. The opening, comprised of snippets of newspaper reports about an ongoing drought, shows off Desai's talent for observing local absurdities - reasons for the drought include volcanic activity in Tierra del Fuego and a plot by Iraq to steal the monsoon. The book also contains passages of great beauty, and Desai has a deft, evocative way with words. And yet the novel creates a facile effect that is ultimately disappointing.
Much of this problem stems from the flatness of Desai's characters, who tend to be caricatures incapable of psychological complexity. Sampath's mother, who is perhaps the most carefully portrayed character, spends most of her life possessed by a near-mystical passion for cooking. Because she is written so imaginatively, the reader feels her passion. But the other characters lack depth. Sampath himself remains obscure in motivation after inhabiting the guava tree, and his father and sister seem to be written with the primary intention of providing comic relief.
In societies where individuality is greatly obscured by rigid roles (determined by caste or ethnicity, for example), it is common for people to view each other as socially prescribed types like the stiff bureaucrat, the corrupt cop, the greedy Bahun. These stereotypes are the beginning point for character development in much South Asian English fiction; while some authors (like Kiran's mother Anita Desai) expose the prickly individual lurking behind crude social masks, others (like Salman Rushdie) exaggerate stereotypes in order to explore flaws in their construction. Desai's typified characters do not make the reader question the mismatch between the individual and the social types they exemplify; instead her characters conform to these types and allow readers to remain unchallenged in their views about people and society.
This said, Hullabaloo can be a good introductory book to contemporary Indian English fiction for teenage readers, who might appreciate the novel's quirkiness. Desai's language, marked as it is by familiar South Asian grammars, constructions and accents, will undoubtedly provide the Nepali teenager moments of linguistic self-recognition that can make her/him feel more at home in the English language. Young readers may thus be turned on to other works of fiction emerging from this part of the world.
(M. Thapa is a writer based in Kathmandu)
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Riddley Walker
Author: Russell Hoban
Publisher: First published by Jonathan Cape, 1980, reissued by Indiana University Press in paperback 1998.
Humanity Three Thousand Years After The Bomb
Joel Isaacson
Little is spelled out in Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, but a great deal is allowed to emerge through the broken-down tongue spoken by the population of "Inland" (England in a dark future). This language, invented by Hoban, is difficult to read even for a native English speaker. In the early pages, a gang of workmen are shown working to the rhythm of this chant:
Gone ter morrer here to day Pick it up and walk a way Dont you know greaf and woe Pick it up its time to go Greaf and woe dont you know Pick it up its time to go
London Town is drownt this day Hear me say walk a way Sling your bundel tern and go Parments in the mud you know Greaf and woe dont you know Pick it up its time to go
Heard it and the news of 10 Sling your bundel haul agen Haul agen and hump your load Ever bodys on the road
This tongue is reminiscent of a southern English rural dialect, but its idioms, words, and usages are like scars on the psyche of the speakers. It is a language of refugees, of foraging bands that wander for generations half starved, through a poisoned environment. It is a twisted brutal English shaped by a mutilated world.
Riddley Walker begins in the year 2347 O.C. (Our Count). As the tale unfolds we begin to recognize what can only be the aftermath of a nuclear war. The "Bad Time" is over, but the shredded memories of the holocaust that took place thousands of years before haunt humanity like a nightmare. Ancient legends tell of generations of bent and twisted human mutants who were hunted down and killed by untainted survivors. They tell of mass starvation and cannibalism, of the nearly total obliteration of civilization and knowledge.
Humanity has crawled its way out of the nightmare and emerged in a semi-literate Iron-Age. As in all oral traditions, history is couched in rhymes, rituals, and chants. The Bad Time has become humanity's central myth. No records or writing survive from before the Bad Time, and the pre-holocaust world is shrouded in mystery, remembered in legends that try to make sense of ruined machines, and of the buildings whose functions have been forgotten along with the technology that created them. No one even knows what caused the Bad Time.
Now, more than three millennia after the Bad Time, the earth is starting to heal. New soil is forming as the scant woodlands start to encroach on "sour ground." Agriculture has been taken up again, and the semi-nomadic foraging bands that were humanity's most successful social unit since the Bad Time now fight against the pressure to settle permanently on the land.
The countryside between the new farms and the old nomad stockades is dominated by packs of ferocious, highly intelligent wild dogs. To travel between settlements in a crowd of less than five, without spears and bows, is to risk being "dog-killt." This is a brutal time. Sudden death is commonplace.
A travelling puppet show is Inland's principle religious act. The show is performed by the two heads of government, the "Pry Mincer" (Prime Minister) and the "Wes Mincer" (Westminster), who travel with their army of "hevvies" from farm to stockade, spreading their party line, collecting information, and plotting against each other. Their obsession with rediscovering two lost secrets from before the Bad Time-"The-One-Big-One" (nuclear fission) and "The-One-Little-One" (gunpowder)-entangles twelve-year old Riddley Walker in a bizarre ritual quest.
A mysticism to rival that of medieval Europe pervades Inland. Every settlement, every tribe has its own oracles, its "Tell Woman" and its "Connexion Man." Riddley Walker is himself a Connexion Man. His role and his skill is to see the meaning hidden in things and events, and to reveal them to his tribe. When he finds himself the focus of inexplicable events (the wild dogs begin signaling to him), the meanings he reveals become prophetic. Like all prophets, he is despised in his own land. His escape from his own stockade, to save his life, starts him on a messianic quest through power places and altered states of consciousness.
Beyond the magic of the language, the haunting vision of the future, and the bizarre twists of the story, what makes Riddley Walker remarkable is Hoban's ability to imitate and reveal the universal processes of the mind. We see leaps of intuition that are dead-on correct, although they are based on incomplete, corrupted data. It is as though in its hunger for truth, the human mind creates it from whatever is at hand.
This book demands a lot from the reader. It makes you work. Without a high level of competence in English and some background in European civilization you don't stand a chance of understanding it. Even if you come to it well equipped, you may find yourself wondering what is going on until about page forty. Why bother with it then? Because the book pays you for your efforts with interest. It stretches you. You will not be able to shake its images from your mind. You may never see your world in the same way again.
(J. Isaacson is a writer and an architect living in Nepal)
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The Call of Nepal
Author: J.P. Cross
Publisher: Bibliotheca Himalayica, Kathmandu, 1998 (Series II Volume 17)
Blowing One's Own Trumpet
C K Lal
It is pointless to pretend that this review is unprejudiced. Colonel Cross does not hold Madhesis, or Indians, as he chooses to call them in Nepal, in very high esteem. The antagonism is mutual. This reviewer is a Madhesi and harbors a rather ambivalent attitude towards Gurkhas in general and their English officers in particular.
The Call of Nepal has been placed by its editor and publishers in Series II of Bibliotheca Himalayica, the category that deals with linguistics, biography and literature. In its attempt to be all three, it ends up being just a crude effort at self-glorification. Confusion is evident in its every page.
Take the linguistics part first. A mercenary, according to Oxford Dictionary, is a soldier hired to fight in a foreign army. Colonel Cross does not accept such 'a strained interpretation' of the term. Instead, he chooses the terms laid down by an 'Ad Hoc Committee of the United Nations' that was 'considering a possible draft convention!' Some straining, that. With this kind of language, it is no wonder that the author failed almost every examination he took in his life. The fault never lay with him, of course. As he makes one of his characters say, "You did not fail. They did not pass you."
The book is only slightly better as an autobiography. As it is, it's extremely challenging to examine oneself. Thoreau once said, "It is as hard to see oneself as to look backwards without turning around." An additional difficulty arises in this case because officers aren't the best of people to either look back or turn around. In a flash of candor remarkable for an English and even more so for a colonial soldier, the author admits, "None of us are as good as we think we are or would like to be and I was no exception." Correct the tense and replace 'was' with 'am' and you realize what a difficult read this book is.
"The two names taught in the village school were the King of Nepal's and mine," says the exalted colonel, who mentions without a twinge of embarrassment: "Men would come to me with bowed head for my blessings." The author is enlisted into the Indian Army as a BOR--British Other Ranks--and remains its phonetic equivalent all his life.
The literature part of the book is a little less insulting to the intelligence. Despite, or maybe because of the author's extraordinary lack of formal education, the prose sparkles with occasional wit and passages of noteworthy narration. Whenever he puts his argumentative style to rest and lets his observations do the listening and his emotions do the talking, the result is a pleasure to read. He is in his element telling the story of Buddhiman Gurung.
Yet the book abounds with many instances of intended slight. The author claims, without even making an attempt to hide his nastiness, "The living legend that is the military mark of Gurkhas' greatness is, to an extent, the reflection of the high caliber of British officers who have served selflessly with them for so many years." Elsewhere he observes that poverty is paraded almost proudly and then pontificates, "Before Nepal could be saved from Indian or Chinese hegemony, it had to be saved from itself."
Then there is Colonel Cross's rank ignorance to reckon with. For him, tika is a caste-mark, though even an occasional tourist to Nepal knows it to be a religion-mark used by all castes. Such a man was a historian to our army and a researcher at the supposedly prestigious Center of Nepal and Asian Studies at the Tribhuvan University. Remember the moving stanza from Bhupi Sherchan's famous poem: we are brave, because we are stupid? Colonel Cross knows this only too well, hence has the gall to quote with glee, "To be tasty, radishes have to be buried; to be good, a Nepali has to be pressed."
This book should be made required reading for all those who favor the continuation of Gurkha recruitment; they would realize what a shame it is. Just as our grinding poverty cannot justify the selling of our sisters in Sonagachhi, selling our brothers in the name of obscure treaties and lack of opportunity in our own country is indefensible.
"In comfortless camps, in sweltering offices, in gloomy dark bungalows smelling of dust and earth-oil, they earn, perhaps, the right to be a little disagreeable," wrote George Orwell in Burmese Days, way back in 1935. Colonel Cross asserts this right only too forcefully with his ramblings in the form of a book. "Nepalis have a touching faith in the sanctity and infallibility of written words," he observes, and hints darkly that he may be reborn as a Christian in the royal palace of Kathmandu and become the leader of the country.
In a nutshell, this book is a load of crap, all two hundred and forty-one pages of it bristling with racial overtones and colonial snootiness. Read it to test your patience in taking insults and soldiering the brown man's burden of putting up with the white ones' ignorance coupled with impertinence.
(CK Lal likes to believe he is a multidisciplinary student)
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Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions
Author: Pico Iyer
Publisher: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997
A Movable Sensibility
Samrat Upadhyay
How do you go about reviewing a book in which the essays range from the black and white texture of New York City, to a portrait of a "merrily smiling" Dalai Lama in Dharmasala, to a condemnation of the pathetic and apathetic characters of minimalist American writer Ann Beattie, to a witty treatise on how the comma gets no respect? Subtitled Essays from Several Directions, Pico Iyer's Tropical Classical comes at you from, um, several directions, mocking, prodding, challenging, lamenting, making a poignant observation here and ridiculing it elsewhere, and, most of all, laughing. The overall effect is that Tropical Classical delights the readers, engaging them with the sights and sounds of as far flung places as Bhaktapur and Ethiopia, and whirling them in verbal pyrotechnics that leaves them, toward the end of the book, craving for Silence, which aptly forms the title of the final chapter with these words as homage to its power: "In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us."
So how does one review essays which aim to, according to the author, "romance the possibility by looking at the everyday," when the everyday zigzags from Bombay to a monastery in California? One, too, has to come at it from several directions.
A good place to start is with "In Praise of the Humble Comma," for here Iyer demonstrates his love of the English language, the minute details of its make-up that can make or break a sentence. Punctuation marks, declares Iyer, are traffic signs of the literary road: a period is a red light; a semi-colon is a stop sign requiring the writer motorist to halt, then proceed slowly; and a comma is a flashing yellow that warns us to slow down (What about the colon? Although Iyer doesn't say, we can surmise that it's the traffic cop with a shrill whistle, making us jerk our heads). Iyer's love of language permeates the entire book; for example, the way he catches the odd, endearing ways English adapts to foreign soils. "I am very suffering," moans an overworked driver in Ethiopia. A street palmist in Bombay promises to answer such questions as, "Do I fall in love too easily?" A sign in a Bhaktapur guest house advises customers: "Hot Shower (Only in Winter) from Morning to 10:30 a.m. Please Deposit your Precious Goods to the Manager for Safety (Otherwise no Responsibility). Cloth Washing is Strictly Prohibited."
Self-described as "a global village on two legs," Iyer is keen on dissolving, or witnessing the disintegration of, the boundaries between the East and the West, between The Third World and the First, between high and low culture, and between the tropical countries with palm-lined streets and the European "classical" countries with cobble-stones and pillared houses. The hybrid global village has preoccupied Iyer for quite some time, from the early Video Night in Kathmandu, which contains a chapter devoted to his adventures on Freak Street with its famous pies and drug peddlers, to Cuba and the Night, in which he depicts the troublesome romance between an American photojournalist and a beautiful Cuban. "I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility," he has said elsewhere, "living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up a phone or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag."
Iyer's reviews of contemporary writers in Tropical Classical also exemplify the cross-cultural hybrid of the world. His review of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy is titled "Jane Austin in Calcutta." Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Iyer says, is written in a Japanese form about six ordinary days in the life of an English butler--"a perfectly English novel that could have been written only by a Japanese." Rushdie is a great postcolonial writer because he infuses into an old, stuffy England the sights and sounds of the Indian streets, thereby confusing our notions of what is Indian and what is not: "His is a world in which Indian boys in Kensington sing Neil Sedaka songs to baby girls called Scheherazade; and where diplomats from Asia play out the Captain Kirk fantasies they hatched in Dehra Dun."
In one of the longer essays called "Nepal: Movie Days in Kathmandu," Iyer chronicles the shooting of the film "The Little Buddha" in Bhaktapur. He is concerned about how the attempt to represent a place in a film drastically changes that place, so that the "real Nepal" exists only in the camera. While aware of the controversy generated by the shooting of the film, and the film itself (Westerners making a film about the founder of Buddhism), Iyer warns against seeing the affluent moviemakers/tourists as exploiters and the natives as the exploited. If it were not for the tourists, one local travel agent tells Iyer, we would all be like the beggars. Despite his concerns for the cultural erosion the filming brings, Iyer is optimistic for economic reasons: "Nepal will probably end up $4 million richer ... and [w]e can get a taste of Himalayan magic ... for a mere $7.50."
In the least, Tropical Classical is a fun, fun read, a book that can be, by virtue of its upbeat tone even for "serious" issues, read anywhere--in airports, in the bathroom, in the stark landscape of Ethiopia, in the glow of the setting sun in Dattatraya Square--attesting to the odd juxtapositions of the postmodern world.
(S. Upadhyay is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Hawaii)
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The Role of Civil Society and Democratization in Nepal
Editor: Ananda Shrestha
Publisher: Nepal Foundation for Advanced Studies (NEAFAS) and Fredrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), 1998
Conceptualizing More Bookshelf Space
Seira Tamang
Much has already been said about the manner in which concepts and trendy jargon enter Nepal, only to later dissipate meekly behind the latest new entrant. No less remarked upon and questioned is the utility of these words in the Nepali context. Sporadic voices have also been raised as to whether the imported words and concepts have really been understood by those using/advocating them. But far be it for such pesky and annoying questions to stand in the way of the bikas publishing mill. For here we have yet another publication in which a concept is used in a most confusing manner, thrust into narratives so as to confirm its necessity but appearing most clearly as an tacked-on appendage. And of course, not in any way shedding further light onto key issues within Nepal.
In The Role of Civil Society and Democratization in Nepal we have a compilation of seminar papers written by people prominent in their various fields. The chapter titles, "The Role of Civil Society in Democratization: Gender Perspective;" "The Role of Civil Society in Democratization: Human Rights Perspective;" "The Role of Civil Society in Democratization: trade Union Perspective;" etc. are quite telling. Neatly categorized with their particular "take" on civil society, these essays are remarkable only in the way they could have been much more lucid had they not tried to incorporate "civil society" into the text. Indeed, the concept appears forced into already existing arguments and perspectives - which themselves are not new.
Much of the problem stems from the basic lack of conceptual clarity. Not only do definitions of "civil society" differ throughout the book, but independent authors' usage of term does more to confuse than clarify. The foreword is exemplary in its conceptually confused use of the term "civil." For to talk about "the civilian character of the state" is to introduce totally different conceptural variables (more aligned to non-military state spheres) than those involved in discussions of "civil society" or indeed the notions then introduced in such equally inappropriate statements as "civil society can only exist in a civil state."
At the very outset, it must be made clear that the word "civil" used as part and parcel of the concept "civil society" is not the same "civil" as used in other contexts. The Rana state was civil in the sense that it had regulated rules and norms which related to the citizens as individuals, and thus prevented anarchy. Whether that was conducive to the emergence of civil society and what form that civil society then took are the key questions that need to be asked. Furthermore, the manner in which the concept "civil society" has been used in the book and in Nepal as a whole for that matter, is such that it is indistinguishable from the term "society."
In contradistinction to the definition of civil society broadly used in Nepal and encapsulated in the foreword (a sphere which is "neither dependent on nor reduced to corporate and state power"), a more theoretically and historically informed notion of civil society involves an associational sphere that bridges the realm of family, economy and the state, and which has as its minimal basis a form of effective, representative state rule which guarantees a system of rights. This sphere furthermore has not always existed in some timeless fashion as Diwakar Chand seems to imply in his NGO perspective chapter. Nor is it static. For civil society is also a process by which the system of rights and participatory structures are forever being extended - a result of the dynamic between the demands for the democratic norms and their insufficient realization and institutionalization.
It is at this level of analysis that trade unions, womens' rights organizations etc can be understood in relation to the civil society. Formed on the basis of interests, these associational groups constitute part of civil society. In the process of engaging with the state to further their own aims, these groups strengthen the mechanisms (including the system of rights) by which claims can be made as a whole. While an understanding of global economic and historically specific socio-political dynamics of the country also needs to be grasped for a more informed view, the relationship between civil society and democracy is clear at this level.
What underlies the problems of ahistoricity, theoretical weakness, and a certain lack of awareness of appropriate levels of analysis in the use of the concept "civil society" in Nepal, is the drive to use trendy words. As revealed by this book, this only hampers a better understanding of social dynamics. For example, in the introductory overview of the papers presented, Ananda Shrestha says of the seminar in Janakpur with trade unions, "[t]hough the concept of civil society was explained at the very onset of the seminar, discussions however hinged on the sad state of Trade Unions in Nepal." Furthermore, of the seminar on the "gender perspective," he writes that as with the trade union discussion in Janakpur, "inspite of explaining to the participants the concept of civil society in relation to democratization and the importance of the gender perspective in achieving that aim, the discussion, more often than not, strayed from the major theme and concentrated heavily on the sad plight of women in a male dominated society like Nepal."
Leaving aside the blatant cotravention of the current development mantra that development is not to be top-down and one should listen to what the "people" have to say, here we have a case of people being told that the use of a certain concept will enable them to better understand their own situation, experiences and needs!!!
To end, the publication of materials of questionable value needs to be put into the context of the bikas publishing mill, and its particular penchant for reproducing seminar papers. Keeping in mind that aside from the conceptual mayhem, this book says nothing new and manages to number 119 pages only by tacking on a non-seminar, 28 page paper on "Democracy and Social Development in Nepal" by Harka Gurung (thereby distinguishing itself from a hard cover pamphlet), certain questions need to be asked. Aside from being the result of publishing for the sake of publishing, or publishing to keep one's institution's name in the the public, or publishing because of the lack of effort involved (seminar papers are easy enough to compile), why are such publications taking up bookshelf room?
(S Tamang is a student of political science)
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