ANT014 - India & its Diaspora
On a part of the world Mark Twain referred to as 'the cradle of the human race', and a rare foray into non-fiction that reads like fiction
I’ve become fascinated with India over recent years. My mother was raised in what was then Bombay (now Mumbai). Her father, who I never had the chance to meet, was a Parsi - an ethno-religous group descended from Persians who migrated to India from what is now Iran to escape religious persecution. Their faith, Zoroastrianism, is one of the oldest in the world.
These are roots I never used to pay much heed too, with my family not one to dwell on the past, but age, deaths and births have a way of pulling you closer to concepts of history and lineage that seemed irrelevant as a younger man. I’ve found myself drawn to this story, although largely through food it has to be said. The Parsi and Irani influence on food in India, particularly Mumbai where they cluster, is immense and something I dream of experiencing.
UK based restaurant group Dishoom’s From Bombay with Love is much more than a cook-book in this sense, taking you through a day in the city and it’s traditional nine(!) meals with beautiful travel writing on the famous Irani cafe’s, markets and chaiwallas weaving between delicious recipes and exquisite photography.
You may not find Bombay an easy sort of place. At least, not to begin with. […] However, as you begin to spend more time in Bombay you might begin to see past your initial impressions, past the crowds, past the extremes and into the layers: Portuguese then British colonial rule, massive inward migration from both land and sea, development of enterprise and wealth, myriad and unexpected ethnicities, religions, cultures and languages. It’s certainly the biggest, fastest, densest and richest city of India. But it is also the most cosmopolitan; it is startlingly full of accumulated difference. In a way, it seems that this accumulated difference, and it’s complete internalisation, has become the nature of the city itself. So many different voices from so many different places telling so many different stories joined together to become Bombay. […] Once you have found your places of refuge, Bombay first becomes human and then - without you noticing exactly when - it completes the seduction and becomes delightful.
It is this India - full of stories, sensory extremes, busy-ness and difference - that is so enticing. Combined with an unprecedented history of original thought and invention (it was from India that our concept of numbers originated) and a long admired culture of philosophy and humanities, it is little wonder that the country has birthed so many excellent authors and been the subject of countless classics.
These are tales of a world overflowing with love and humanity, but not without their struggles. India’s history is troubled at times, fraught with political tension and segregation, with its caste system and extreme social inequality as apparent as ever to this day. It is to this backdrop of extreme everything that the novels featured this week could only have been born from.
“India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition!”
Mark Twain
Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel, The Hungry Tide (2004), has its critics, but I found that it’s tale of adventure drew me in and its characters and relationships - between humans but to also animals, landscape and history - led to something more thought provoking than I expected. It is the story of an Indian-American cetologist who travels to the Sundarbans (a sprawling mangrove forest on the bay of Bengal) to study Irrawaddy dolphins amongst the Ganges “hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.” There, she collides with a middle-aged translator and an illiterate local to form unlikely bonds that lead to them exploring the area together. Amongst the tensions of of India’s colonial history and the Morichjhanpi massacre in particular, it explores the impossible to avoid social inequality through a tale of love and nature.
Because words are just air, Kanai-babu,' Moyna said. When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard. You can't blow on the water's surface from below, Kanai-babu. Only someone who’s outside can do that, someone like you.
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide
It is impossible to talk of modern Indian literature without mentioning Salman Rushdie’s surreal, meandering epic Midnight’s Children (1981). If the three Booker honours under its belt aren’t enough, its premise is irresistible. Saleem Sinai is one of 1,001 children born on the stroke of midnight August 15, 1947 - the moment of India’s independence. As a result of this, he, and the other 1,000, have telepathic gifts and find that the fate of their country is inexplicably linked to their own lives. Rushdie has mentioned that western readers think of it as fantasy while Indian readers consider it “pretty realistic, almost a history book” - it is this blending of lines to explore not just history and culture but the psyche of a country that sets it apart.
I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.
Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children
Despite being set in a nameless mountain dystopia in the Himalayas, Tarun J. Tejpal’s The Valley of Masks (2011) uses Indian lineage and cultural context to walk a less well trodden path into dystopian fiction for a novel hard to compare or categorise. With his lens focused on the inhumanity of any goal of human perfection, the disturbing tale and message is a universal one as the narrator, holed up under siege, recounts how his pursuit of peace and self-liberation ended up going disastrously wrong.
Not all the wood in the world became a chair unless you knew how to craft it. From all the gallons of information being poured into us, we had to distil wisdom.
Tarun J. Tejpal - The Valley of Masks
Split between India and Sheffield, England, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015) is an ever timely reminder of everything that is lost in the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’. Following three migrant workers, we see their paths to the English steel town and the range of situations that compel people to go to such great lengths and sacrifice. Shining a light on one of the most urgent political issues of our time, Sahota’s subtlety and depth of story avoids the frustratingly narrow points of many political novels for a beautiful, compelling read with a fierce spirit.
The weakest are those who stay put and call it sacrifice, call it not having a choice. Because, really, there was always a choice and she—one of the cowards, she realised—was making hers now. She turned back to the window, to the identical roofs. She closed her hands over the chunni and twisted it tight. “Please. Go away.”
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways
Bonus: I’ve been itching to find a place for Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (2023) and Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great (2013). Both are set in or have ties Pakistan rather than India so don’t belong here, but are incredible books for a wider look at South Asia and the many commonalities and differences between these bordering nations.
I’m making a rare exception for a non-fiction book to focus on Katherine Boo’s incredible Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012). I’m happy to, for it reads like the best fiction you’ve experienced - full of conflict, character arcs and thought-provoking insight. So much so that a few people I’ve recommended it to haven’t realised it’s non-fiction until the afterword, and can barely accept the fact even then.
In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick on the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.
A study of Annawadi, a Mumbai airport slum, Boo takes on the novel form to focus primarily on three families who call its dusty shacks home. There is Abdul, a hard working garbage collector who is amassing a modest fortune for his family. His jealous neighbour Fatima, or One-Leg, a cripple who’s husband can’t satisfy her oversized sexual appetite. Finally Asha, an ambitious and hard nosed woman with some local political success and dreams of becoming a slumlord, juxtaposed by her idealistic daughter, a teacher. Their intertwining fates spool backwards from the crisis of the book, told at its opening - a spiteful act of vengeance from a maddened Fatima that leads to Abdul’s arrest.
What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.
The title, borrowed from one of the giant advertising hoardings that hide the slum from the airport road, hints at Boo’s poetic touch, employed modestly. More-so at her true talent - a quality of attention and empathy that brings the surroundings and characters into stark clarity. By virtue of its fact, and Boo’s refusal to add comment, colour or try to use this tiny snapshot of India as a representation of anything more, it achieves what fiction aspires to - work that embodies the doctrine of ‘show, don’t tell’ and truly lets its story and subjects lead the way.
“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when to you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?" Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. "Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that," Abdul went on. "I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once when my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, 'If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.' And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, "Don't confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.'" Sunil though that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly-the kind that could be ended as Kalu's had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he'd come to realise on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned to far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself.”
What astounds me is not just that it is non-fiction, but that it is written with the journalistic rigour and integrity of a Pulitzer prize winning New Yorker staff writer - something that requires not a single embellishment or twist of truth. To achieve it, Boo and her team spent four years immersed in the slum. There they interviewed and observed, gathering "written notes, video recordings, audiotapes and photographs" and working tirelessly with translators to understand not just the slum-dwellers conversations, insults and throwaway comments but also their ambitions and desires. To truly appreciate the craft that has gone into it, I believe its fascinating afterword is worth reading up front. But craft is nothing without story, and here Boo has landed on the gem that writers of both fact and fiction dream of.
“Tell me, bastard. Shall I strip naked and dance for you now?"
Asha - Behind the Beautiful Forevers
All That Breathes is a soulful, meditative film about an Indian bird sanctuary that I’ve barely stopped thinking about. Documentary film maker Shaunak Sen puts so much care and patience behind his camera that it becomes profound. Rent online through BFI Player.
Life itself is kinship. We're all a community of air… One shouldn't differentiate between all that breathes.
Paper Menagerie, a much acclaimed fantasy short story by Ken Liu, is available free on Gizmodo. Delightful and nostalgic, it’s worth putting up with reading on a screen for a while.
I reached out to Mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers. I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with an index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring.
"Zhe jiao zhezhi," Mom said. This is called origami.
I’ve come back to Sindhu Shivaprasad’s meditation on Minimum Viable Action a few times in the past few months. An instinctual, forward moving, course correcting concept I understand well from software development, I am generally wary of tech concepts and language being applied to wider life. But far from coming from a tech-bro with one tool for every problem, this came as a thoughtful nudge to just do and be.
[The consistency is…] in the little dots you put down on paper when trying to draw a square or a circle or a rose. The minimum viable actions towards an outcome that makes sense to you until there’s a good enough reason to redirect or stop.
Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson on simple writing. An often repeated message, it is still worth dwelling on every time around.
High school taught me big words. College rewarded me for using big words. Then I graduated and realized that intelligent readers outside the classroom don’t want big words. They want complex ideas made simple.
Here in London, the sun has well and truly arrived to turn the city gold and make the streets louder. It is a time for soulful music, bumped from portable speakers on passing bikes or drifting from windows. Perfect for Common and Pete Rock to drop a slice of golden-era Hip Hop from their upcoming project - Wise Up.
If you’re new to A Novel Tribe, I always welcome guest contributors as in ANT001 and ANT004. If you’d like to contribute, just reply to this email. Alternatively the best thing you could do to help right now is to share it with someone you know. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
See you in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s hoping you can find a few moments and a sunny bench, shady tree or cosy nook to read in.
MQ.