Kerala Harvest

Sunil Poolani of Frog Books has an interesting tale to tell.

He reviewed C P Surendran's An Iron Harvest for DNA. He didn't trash the book, but then he didn't exactly gush either.

Mr Surendran, he says, didn't take kindly to the review, and said so in no uncertain terms in a mail to the newspaper.

And now Poolani's readers chip in.

Read all about it here.

How Kaavya Viswanathan Got [Insert Witticism Here]

Since I'm designated cat-sitter for The Babu and Partner, and since they're off putting their feet up and eating prawn curry in undisclosed locations, I thought I might as well do a spot of blog-sitting too.

The New York Times, which wrote about the book earlier this month, now tells us that Ms Viswanathan has been accused of plagiarising parts of the book and that she will change those passages in the future editions.

Heh. So she's expecting future editions.

Maud Newton links to a metafilter comment:

Kaavya was my student last spring (in a section where I was a TA). I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful-- I had given her low grades on her papers.

I feel bad for her, even though she was always falling asleep in section (as if you don't notice a snoozing person sitting at a conference table for ten). Plagiarizing from chick lit has to be some kind of double whammy against artistic integrity.

Via Grumpy Old Bookman, here's the Harvard Crimson page that I hear broke the story (and an updated version here.) Ms V has subsequently apologised.

And yes, the litblogosphere has lots to say.

Enjoy.

Helen and Jerry, 7 pm at the India Habitat Centre

From Jerry Pinto's Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb:

In Kedar Kapoor's Tarzan Comes to Delhi, there is a scene worth recording, if only for the multiplicity and diversity of its elements. Tarzan (Dara Singh) has come to the city in pursuit of a thief who has stolen a necklace from a tribal deity. The tribe is on the warpath. If Tarzan and Rekha (Mumtaz) cannot retrieve the necklace within a lunar month, Rekha's father will be put to the death in front of the totem pole...
In pursuit of the necklace, the couple go to a bar where Mumbai's renowned jazzman Chick Chocolate of the fifties is playing a trumpet while Helen is singing: Jhoom re jhoom albele/ Sab se ham hain akele. She is wearing a flamenco outfit.
So we have on the dance floor a Franco-Burmese woman (who was known as an Anglo-Indian for the better part of her career) playing a Spanish senorita; a famous Catholic musician from Goa who was popularly known as India's Louis Armstrong (because of his jazz background and dark skin) playing an anonymous bandwala; and a Punjabi wrestler playing Greystoke, Lord of the Jungle. It might have added extra spice if the Muslim Mumtaz (playing the Hindu girl Rekha Suri) and the almost-Olympian cyclist Jankidas, a Hindu (playing a presumptive Goan Catholic and fixer, Mr Pinto) were also present, but one cannot have everything.
The scene is instructive: in this exaggerated tableau of the Other, almost everyone plays a role to which she or he is not suited. Except Helen. She plays herself, which means that she plays a foreign woman who sings in Hindi while remaining an outsider.

If you're in Delhi, drop by the Stein Auditorium at the Habitat Centre today (Wednesday, April 19), where Jerry will discuss his book at 7 pm. He won't be sharing the stage with Helen, unfortunately, and he does not do cabarets himself--but there will be a screening of Teesri Manzil after the discussion. Jeenewaale jhoomke mastaana ho ke jee, Aanewaali subah she begaana ho ke pee.

Literary festival, Delhi, 2006

The Babu meant to blog about Kitab, the literary festival that took place over the weekend in Delhi, but it's been written about here, and here, and here, and, oh, here. It's also been blogged, by Jabberwock in what the Babu hopes is the first of many Notes-from-the-Fest posts (I'm too lazy to do this, but it would be so nice if someone else did the hard work!) and by Hirak.
The panel discussions were better than I'd expected, but I have to confess that the best conversations happened outside the auditorium.
What was going on inside wasn't bad, but I suspect most authors doing the talking heads thing secretly share Asokamitran's bemusement at the things writers must do:

From Asokamitran’s Mole!:

I found out what the function was about only after we got there. Two hundred eminent citizens of Des Moines had arranged for a poetry reading by our international group of writers; they had been waiting for us for the past hour.
One by one, writers from our group went up to the podium and read poems in their own languages. It is true that I am no poet. However, had I known earlier about the programme, I might have saved the situation somewhat. At that moment, I felt helpless. I told one of the organizers that I carried no poems with me. He gave me a shocked look, but offered no other response….
…Wracking my brain, I recalled as much of a Gnanakoothan poem (“Anru Veru Kizhamai”) as I could, and adapted it in English as best as I could. [The reading goes well; the guests praise the poem, line by line.]
It was then that disaster struck. A good citizen of Des Moines announced that their poet-guests would now sing songs in their own languages. A deafening roar of applause went up—even from our own group. I trembled and shrank back in fright. But the guests went up on stage with more eagerness and gusto than the hosts themselves. They sang in different octaves and voices, and even in plain screeches, till everyone cried, “Enough!” When my turn came, I sang for a whole minute and got down.
We had to stay at a hotel that night, two to a room. I wanted to share a secret with the [Korean] writer who was my roommate. “Did you know that I didn’t sing any song? I only sang the thirty letters of the Tamil alphabet to a tune of my own.”
He did not seem surprised. “Is that right? I thought I was the only one who had used that idea.”

But there are some literary events--festivals, gatherings, mushairas--that the Babu is genuinely sorry to have missed. Here's a partial list, and please can we have some of this in Delhi? I'm not picky, I'm willing to pass up on Segovia and Zauq... but just a little Lorca, a dash of Ghalib?

Literary festival, Granada, 1922

From Ian Gibson’s biography, Federico Garcia Lorca:

* And then it was June. The Cante Jondo Festival was just around the corner and the excitement in Granada mounted day by day. At the beginning of the month Lorca took part in the concert that concluded the events leading up to the great event. It was given in the little pseudo-Moorish theatre of the famous Alhambra Palace Hotel, just up the steep street from Falla’s carmen, and comprised the reading, by Antonio Gallego Burin, of the maestro’s anonymous pamphlet on cante jondo; a recital by the Granada flamenco guitarist Manuel Jofre; Lorca’s recitation of several compositions from his Poem of Cante Jondo; and, to round of the evening, Andres Segovia doing something unheard of—showing that, when he felt in the mood, he was capable of playing flamenco, a genre for which he had little real affection. The following day the newspapers agreed that Lorca had been the star turn of the evening…

The competition was held on 13 and 14 June, in the Alhambra’s Plaza de los Aljibes, which had been decorated by the Basque painter Ignacio Zuloaga. Here on both nights a massive and gaily dressed audience filled the precinct to bursting point. [John B.] Trend published an account of those two unforgettable evenings (on the second of which there was a downpour) when he returned to England. He had been deeply impressed by the scene. “Wherever one looked there were exquisite figures in gay, flowered shawls and high combs,” he wrote…, “while many had put on the silks and satins of bygone days, and appeared in the fashion of the thirties and forties—the Spain of Prosper Merimee and Theophile Gautier, of Borrow and of Ford.”

The great surprise of the competition was the performance of Diego Bermudez Canete, ‘el Tenazas’ (‘Pincers’), an old cantaor, almost forgotten, who, so it was said, had walked to Granada all the way from Puente Genil, in the province of Cordova, a cross-country hike of some 80 miles. Bermudez sang the first night with powerful duende and carried all before him. The second evening, however, after a day’s tippling (sponsored, some averred, by his rivals), ‘el Tenazas’ was not in such inspired form….”

Literary festival, Delhi, around 1845

From Louis Werner’s Gift of Ghazals:

"The Last Candle of Delhi," by Farhatullah Beg, is a semi-historical account of a royal musha'arah attended by 59 poets, including the masters Ustad Zauq, Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan, and their student followers. Zauq was court poet of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, who himself wrote fine ghazals and under whose auspices the musha`arah convened. Farhatullah’s account was based on an actual 1845 musha'arah recorded by Karim-ud-Din Maghfoor, who collected the ghazals recited that night in a volume called a guldastah ("bouquet")
Early in Bahadur's reign, musha'arahs were held twice monthly at the Red Fort in the Diwan-e-'Am, or Public Hall. They lasted from 9:00 in the evening until dawn— a time known as "the aristocratic hour." Invitations specified the tarah, or meter-and-rhyme pattern, for each evening's ghazals.
"At the word of the heralds," the account begins, "all present settled down on folded knees and lowered their heads. The Emperor's page took out Bahadur's ghazal from a silk cloth, kissed it, touched it to his eyes and began reciting in a resonant melodious voice. The audience was too entranced to applaud. They swayed in rapture of delight at every couplet. Occasionally phrases like Subhan Allah! Subhan Allah! ["Glory to God!"] escaped underbreath from their lips. Otherwise the room remained silent, spellbound and completely lost in itself."
More worldly moments occurred as well: Although one recitation was gem-like, it was considered out of place, for it was recited in Persian, and this musha'arah was a celebration of Urdu. A ghazal by Indian Army Captain Alexander Heatherly, born of an English father and Indian mother and attending that night's performance in uniform, was roundly applauded. A failure by an otherwise senior poet is doubly mocked, first by the thunderous silence of masters, and then by the inane cheering of sycophants.
The account goes on to follow the highs and lows of both magisterial and pedestrian versifying in ghazals, and all of it—from grudge matches and artistic slights to the flare-ups of past feuds, tactical alliances between rivals and catty asides—speak to the passionate vitality of the form. It is the master Ustad Zauq who ends the musha'arah as dawn breaks: His recitation of a wistful elegy—pointedly not a ghazal—serves to bring the evening to a close and with it, unbeknownst to him, an era.

Literary festival, Patna, 1937

From Nirad C Chaudhuri's Thy Hand Great Anarch:

“… I had a joyous feeling at the prospect of going to the conference at Patna. Such gatherings were a typical cultural recreation of the Bengalis working and settled outside Bengal, the expatriate Bengalis as they were called: the Bengali Diaspora, who never forgot their Zion in Calcutta. Thus in every important city or town in northern India there was a cultural club to keep alive the traditions of Calcutta life. Patna was a big city, the capital of Bihar and Orissa, and it also had a large Bengali population…

The sessions of the conference were very well attended, actually in hundreds. In India lectures always attract very large audiences, however abstruse the subjects. To our surprise, the audience in Patna consisted as much of women as men. I thought that all the fashionable Bengali young women of Patna came to hear us. Bibhuti Babu persisted in saying that a very pretty girl in the front row was making eyes at him, which was, of course, the very last thing they would think of doing.

The guest writers read either from their works or spoke on literary questions, as Bibhuti Babu [Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay] did. On the first day he read one of his stories, and on the second discussed literary creation. But the real sensation in the way of lectures was provided by Brajen Banerji, although as a ponderous research worker he wrote in the most ponderous style. But this time his thorough research produced the opposite effect, and that was partly due to me. In order to relieve the awful solemnity of my address, I asked him to write on a light topic on which I too had done some research along with him. The subject was a revolution in the costume of Bengali women in the nineteenth century. I helped him to write his paper with great gusto.

It was indeed a revolution, but the men who preached it did that in the name of morality not of beauty. Traditionally, Bengali women wore only one sari, and nothing else with it. Besides, the higher the position of the woman the thinner was the sari. Thus, a charming Englishwoman who came to India in search of the picturesque in the thirties of the last century and was invited to the best homes of Calcutta, wrote in her journal when she saw Bengali women of the highest class: she now understood why none but their husbands or brothers were allowed to go into the zenana. To the reformers, who were all puritans of the most fanatical English type, this was abomination of desolation sitting where it ought not. From 1830 they began to denounce the scanty dress of the Bengali women, strengthening their argument by giving lurid descriptions of their semi-nudity. Brajen Babu, who had done as thorough a research on this subject as on all his other specialities, quoted these descriptions in his paper, which he read in the most monotonous style.

As he quoted one example after another, I thought at least these would bring some smiles, especially on the faces of the ladies. Instead, I was dismayed to watch a progressive hardening of the features, and realized that modern girls in the audience retained all the Puritanism of the reformers, although they no longer needed that. Sajani and others also noticed that. I gently pulled the tail of Brajen Babu’s tunic and looked at him. He did not pay any heed to that. Sajani from the other side gave a violent pull. Brajen Babu seemed to wake up to the realization that something was wrong. He looked at me, and then at Sajani, and after that, instead of skipping the examples and bringing his address to a natural close, he stopped at the end of this quotation: “Thanks to the muslin dhotis and saris from Dacca and Santipur, the males and females of Bengal are becoming lechers and lecheresses. When they put on these abominable things what remains to be unseen?” Then he sat down with a thud on his chair. He was a very bulky man. There had to be some formal applause, but it was very faint. The audience, and more especially the feminine part of it, looked as if they said: “We are not amused.”

Back to Bom: Vikram Doctor on Rushdie's city

The Babu usually abjures the Economic Times' irritating web format--it takes four clicks to read a smallish article, and there's no single-page format--but we had to make an exception for Vikram Doctor's interesting take on Rushdie's Bombay, circa Midnight's Children and now.

Bombay is there from the posh bungalows of Methwold’s Estate where Saleem lived, to the shops it overlooked (“Chimalkar’s Toyshop; Reader’s Paradise; the Chimanbhoy Fatbhoy jewellery store; and, above all, Bombelli’s the Confectioners, with their Marquis cake, their One Yard of Chocolates”) and the Breach Candy Swimming Club with its pool in the shape of an undivided India, but out of bounds for actual Indians, to Chowpatty beach and the tetrapods on Marine Drive (the obsession of Saleem’s doctor) and the Cathedral School that Saleem attends. Much of this was undeniably autobiographical for Rushdie, which added to the power of its feeling. ...
Yet compelling as the Bombay of Midnight’s Children is, it’s also as absent as the missing Midnight’s Child from the archives. It must have existed, yet it only seems like fiction today. It was a singular moment, “a particularly beautiful and sort of memorable phase,” as Rushdie described it, when the city was uniquely cosmopolitan. ... Rushdie knew this though and that’s why the book ends in a Bombay/Mumbai recognisable today, in the vast shapeless suburbs in the north of the city where Saleem ends up managing a pickle factory. Like many South Bombayites he’s ended up a North Mumbaikar, only occasionally buying a train ticket on the “yellow-and-brown local trains [that] clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road.”

Cities of the Plain: Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta on the new-found glamour of the Third World City:

These are the early symptoms of a huge shift in the west's perception of the world: the third-world metropolis is becoming the symbol of the "new". This is all the more thrilling for its improbability: surely, those suffocating slums are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth futures? Yet it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient, planned city has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement; its homogenising obsession has induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess and life forms in chaotic variety. Such desires find in the third-world metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology.

...and what lies beneath the fascination:

This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the third-world city is more than the source of the things that will define the future, but actually is the future of the western city. Perhaps some of those tourists who look to the third world for an image of their own past are reflecting uneasily on how all the basic realities of the third-world city are already becoming more pronounced in their own cities: vast gulfs between sectors of the population across which almost no sympathetic intelligence can flow; gleaming gated communities; parallel economies and legal systems; growing numbers of people who have almost no desire or ability to participate in official systems; innovations in residential housing involving corrugated iron and tarpaulin. But perhaps we are not yet ready to contemplate the possibility that our sudden desire to map the universe in books and films is because it will orient us better for survival in London, New York or Paris.

Fair is foul: Ruchir Joshi

Ruchir Joshi explores the dark side of the Indian fair and lovely obsession in The Hindustan Times. It's a satisfying rant, but the arguments could have been a lot more complex:

It’s shameful but true that we are institutionally and individually racist towards people with dark brown skin, especially if they come from Africa rather than from America or Europe. Equally, anyone possessing what our upper-middle-class poetically calls ‘chinky features’ — whether they be Tibetan, Nepali, or from parts further south and east — will have experienced at least unspoken racism. Some from the North-eastern states will even have faced it from the muzzle of a paramilitary semi-automatic rifle.
Now, it’s bad enough that a majority of us think of other people of colour as strange and inferior. What is worse — the flip-side of our projected racism — is that we have swallowed and made part of our psyche the skin-hierarchy of our erstwhile masters. So deep is that training of over two centuries that, even 60 years after Independence, generations of Indians who have never known the Raj still tend to go into ji-huzoor mode before a White-skinned person.

Exhibits from I Allan Sealy's Museum

I love this painting--Matisse's The Red Room--and sent up a silent hallelujah when I read I Allan Sealy's Red, which begins in the Hermitage, with two characters bumping into each other in front of the painting. Sealy's in classic form, check out this passage:





The Red Room by Henri Matisse


What it shows:

a room perfectly red, with a maid in black and white laying a table already set with a vase of flowers, decanters of red and white wine, assorted fruit. Two rush-plaited chairs up against the table, and a window to the left. Giant blue arabesques that swarm like serpents over tablecloth and wallpaper.

What it does not show:

The Fall of Icarus, Apollo and Daphne, The Beheading of St John and the Baptist, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, The Count and Countess of Pujois, The Painter Himself, Etc.

What only I can show you:

the civet cat rustling this minute in the bamboo, here in our valley in the Himalayan foothills. when I looked up I saw its silhouette walk along the top of our brick folly, black against the neighbour's white tubelight. Here it is:

-------------------------------- imagine it ------------------------------

How exactly the silent flow of black hyphens across my screen as I hold down the key replicates the progress of the cat!
Shoo!

The other Matisse painting that's central to Red is The Painter's Family.




From Red:

In the centre, a fireplace--this is the domestic hearth in a family gathering. But the key member in this family is missing. On the mantelshelf is his stand-in, a sculpture by Matisse himself called (its name is significant in a picture of domestic leisure) The Serf. Matisse worked hard at painting, and could go on about it...
The boys wear blazing red suits even as they doze over the game. In later life Pierre will recall the tedium of these sittings; the painting shows Matisse knows how they felt. With a few crisp brush strokes this colourist with line catches the moods of his sitters: boredom in the boys, abstraction in his wife, and in his fifteen-year-old daughter, on the edge of womanhood, a molten mix of emotions as she, and only she, gazes out of the painting.

This is the first book Sealy's written on the computer, abandoning longhand for the keyboard, and it shows; he's had fun with typography and fonts, he includes a few of his own poems (Appendix, Marguerite, Red, Ribbon...), and the writing seems crisper and tauter. Don't take my word for it, go browse Red yourself.

Judge it already

And this is where the pros go when they want to judge a book by its cover: The Museum of Book Covers. Which introduced the Babu to useful terms like "coverwhoring". Plan to drop that into my next conversation: "He used to be a blurb whore, but now that he's famous, he's upgraded to fullblown coverwhoring." Excellent.

Poster Girls We Like

Spent some time this morning browsing Zubaan's Poster Women exhibition online. Here's what they're trying to do:

The Poster Women project began with the idea of locating and archiving as many posters of the movement as possible.
The idea was to look at how the women's movement and its concerns could be mapped visually, to ask what the history of the movement would look like through its posters and the visual images it had used. When we initiated this project we were convinced that it was important to collect and document posters from the movement also because while the women's movement has been - and remains - an extremely rich, complex and multi-layered movement, it has never been very good at documenting itself. Many of the pamphlets the movement has generated have been lost, much material has been destroyed, and much is gathering dust in musty cupboards and drawers in different places.
When the project began, we had no idea it would catch on so fast, or that individuals and groups from all over the country would respond so enthusiastically. Posters began to pour in, in all kinds of shapes and sizes, some in very fragile condition, others wonderfully preserved. Many groups had no idea where their posters had gone, several said they had no time to locate posters as there were more pressing issues to deal with. Many knew they had this or that poster, but did not have the time to sift through endless piles of paper to locate them. Nonetheless, we managed to garner some 1500 posters and it is these that provided the base for this exhibition, and its accompanying catalogue.

There's an online gallery; or drop in at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi. Exhibition's on till April 6.