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Some Questions about the Indian Art Market discusses some issues pertaining to India's booming art market today and reflects on its reliability to the investor in art.
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A sharply critical response to the review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss in the first issue of Phalanx and also a reply to this criticism from the reviewer.
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Reclaiming the Present for Colonialism
Since the lecture finds itself exhibited on the Reserve Bank of India's web page, this piece reflects on Meghnad Desai's First P. R. Brahmananda Memorial Lecture delivered on September 20, 2004 at Mumbai, in which the economist attempts to draw similarities between the economic growth of India during the last 40 years of the 19th century and the neo-liberal era following 1991.
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Development and Accounting Malpractice
This is a reaction to a key argument offered those (especially industrialists) favoring large scale development of 'backward states' who appear to be riding on an accounting malpractice.
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| Home > MK Raghavendra |
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Review: |
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Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva
The Ingredients of Expatriate Fiction
 Expatriate Indian writers (and writers from the diaspora) have a position of privilege in the literary life of India's metropolitan cities, if their lecture tours here are any indication. What causes the enthusiasm for these lectures and readings is not apparent but the writers are often associated with international prizes and large advances, and (to those constituting the urban literati) that places them in the ranks of the 'professional author' while the small financial rewards that writing begets in India reduces the local novelist to an amateur. Still, judging from the books that expatriates produce, the vocation of the Indian novelist abroad may not be an entirely happy one and Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva suggests this acutely.
The question that readers could ask after reading Suri's second offering pertains to the readership addressed. Indian novelists who have spent the better part of their lives in the West don't write about their adopted country - except as permanent aliens. They may be more prone to writing about the Subcontinent because it is an exotic space about which any account will seem authentic and the general aim is to construct stories with large historical resonances. While Western novelists are not obliged to locate their fiction in history (because of the deemed universality of their experience) this demand is inevitable in the case of the immigrant writer who, it is perhaps felt, can only mean something within a circumscribing context.
The Age of Shiva, like many other novels (by Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry etc.) accommodates huge chunks of history after 1947. Chronologically, the events begin with Partition and conclude at around the time of Sanjay Gandhi's death in 1980. The 'epic' nature of expatriate novels may have to do with Western readers being unable to respond to individual events. The Chinese War and the Emergency would, for instance, mean little to an American or a British reader. The reader's dissociation from the Subcontinent means that he/she might favor panoramic rather than intimate views and if large chunks of history are necessary for readers to get their teeth into, the 'epic' will be the most suitable form.
The next issue that is pertinent here is the manner in which characters and the action in a historical novel set in India are devised. The method favored by expatriate novelists seems to be this:
| a) |
Since there is a large chunk of history to be dealt with, it is preferable to cut it up into key episodes (Partition, the wars with China and Pakistan, the Emergency etc.). To be identified are the political conflicts at the heart of each episode and the forces in conflict. |
| b) |
The characters should be constructed so that they are aligned with the forces in conflict, i.e. if an episode deals with Partition, the characters will necessarily be uprooted. Each major character should then stand unequivocally for one side/ viewpoint. In The Age of Shiva Paji and Arya's families are uprooted from Pakistan and while Paji becomes an avowed secularist, the bigoted Arya joins Hindu extremists. |
| c) |
Since the novel should accommodate a huge mount of history, it is useful to provide for all conflicts through a bountiful supply of characters, some of them playing more than one role. To illustrate this, Arya in The Age of Shiva who joins a right-wing Hindu organization after Partition, eventually resists Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. |
| d) |
To make sure that the novel is not identified as a dull retelling of history 'personal' stories (that may or may not have any bearing on the history parts) should be introduced. The characters participating in history should also perform some perfunctory tasks at lesser times so that they take on the appearances of actual people. |
| e) |
A handful of mythical allusions or references to popular culture would also embellish the tale considerably. |
This appears to have become accepted procedure for the expatriate novelist but it raises questions, primarily about the distinction between history and historical fiction. The purpose of historical fiction is essentially redemptive, i.e. to retrieve lives/ experiences from history's dustbin. History, as the cliché goes, is told from the victor's viewpoint but it also has teleology. Events, for instance, that contributed to the emergence of the Nation get more attention in Indian history than those that did not. Fiction, on the other hand, avoids this bias and even a romance like Dumas' The Three Musketeers is about the victims of an internecine political conflict in a golden age, an aspect that does not engage history.
When fiction works against the dominant discourse in works of history it also has a subversive purpose. Since expatriate fiction set in India is produced by people with little or no local experience in India, they rely on the same events privileged by mainstream history. When there should be, ideally, an oppositional relationship between history and the people in historical fiction, the action of characters in Indian fiction produced abroad tends to illustrate mainstream history and that appears its value. It is, in fact, likely that international readers respond to these novels less as fiction than as sources of information about India.
The Age of Shiva appears conscious of this and contains evidence that it is even embarrassed by it. Instead of foregrounding its historical aspect, therefore, the novel positions itself through a central a mother-son relationship, which represents the mandatory 'personal' story although it is evident from the start that this is a trick because the two sides of the novel are not integrated. Manil Suri lives in America and (as Nabokov suggests in Pnin) Americans appear to construct themselves in accordance with psychoanalytical theory. Consequently, the narrator Meera appears even anxious that her relationship with her son should not be anything but oedipal. But if Suri is content not integrating the Freudian side of the novel with historical side, there are logistical issues still to be resolved.
Firstly, the novel needs to accommodate at least thirty years of history after commencing in 1947, a suitably dramatic year. Secondly, oedipal conflicts are most intense in a boy's adolescence and it would be advantageous for the novel to conclude when the boy is in his late teens and the conflict has not abated. This implies that the boy may only be born about fifteen years into the novel's chronology or, in other words, Suri needs to kill at least fifteen years before he gets to his 'theme'. He resolves this by beginning with an intensely oedipal paragraph that has nothing to do with the chapters that follow (about how people negotiate the years after Partition):
"Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body. Ashvin. Do you know how tightly you shut your eyes as with your lips you search my skin? Do you know how you thrust your feet towards me, how you reach out your arms, how the sides of your chest strain against my palms? Are you aware of your fingers brushing against my breast, their tips trying to curl around something to hold on to, but slipping instead against my smooth flesh?"
This kind of relentless beginning also has an advantage since it might draw impatient literary agents who allow only thirty pages for any novel to 'grab' them. Still, the striking beginning is not enough of a logistical solution because Ashvin is born only in page 203. Suri therefore hits upon another stratagem which is to insert, intermittently, similar paragraphs into The Age of Shiva serving as reminders of the 'theme' until the reader actually gets to Ashvin's birth.
The Age of Shiva is far too contrived for it to have any value as literature, which is not to deny that parts of it are engaging. The best sections (for this reviewer) have the appearance of family lore and deal with the fifties - the Nehru era for which Suri has genuinely warm feelings. The sections about the film industry in Bombay are also very readable. An aspect that has received praise is that almost every person in the novel transforms in some way, none of them fixed in his/her significance. This has been taken to mean that The Age of Shiva is complex but my own understanding of this aspect is different.
Real people are often extremely inconsistent in their behavior but 'complexity' in fiction has to do with reconciling these inconsistencies. The Age of Shiva is almost as loosely constructed as life is, and this means that it acknowledges the inconsistencies that people exhibit without seeing the need to reconcile them. The events in Suri's novel - and the behavior of the people caught up in them - are always plausible. Still, since plausibility cannot be the sole criterion by which fiction is judged, The Age of Shiva is not a major work of literature.
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