A biography creates a record of a life, but it must also attempt to assemble many divergent strands and seemingly 
incoherent fragments of that life into a semblance of a story for a reader. It’s hard to do even half-comprehensively with any one life — it requires, for one thing, intimate access to the person him or herself, as well as a pretty good paper trail. Vikram Seth, in Two Lives, had such access to not one but two people, who were extraordinary individually but even more so as a couple. It’s the story of Shanti Behari Seth, the author’s great uncle, and Hennerle Caro (Henny), a German Jewish refugee from the Nazis. The two of them met during the early 1930s, when Shanti was in Germany to do a doctorate in dentistry, and he rented a room in the Caros’ house. In 1937 and 1939, respectively, they left Germany and settled in London.
When the war broke out, Shanti enlisted (on the British side, of course), and served as a dentist for the troops in the African campaign, and later in Italy (where he lost an arm at Monte Cassino). Henny, for her part, lost her nuclear family at Auschwitz: unlike them, she was able to get out in time. Henny and Shanti became a couple, and eventually married. When Vikram Seth went to England initially in 1969, he didn’t know much about his uncle or his foreign wife. But as he stayed with them and then continued to visit over the course of more than twenty years, he became quite close to them. They even helped him learn German, a skill which turned out to be indispensible for this project. Two Lives is more a book of details than of ideas, though because the sense of the story is so strong it always avoids the trap of familial self-indulgence or nostalgia. Seth did a series of long interviews with Shanti in the mid-1990s, after Henny died. He also had access to hundreds of letters, including letters exchanged between Shanti and Henny, Shanti and the Seth family back in India, as well as between Henny and her family and friends in Germany. There are, of course, some exceptional synthetic passages, as well as some interesting comments by Seth on his method, both in this book and in earlier books like A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music. One such passage gives a sort of blueprint for Seth’s earlier books, but also in a sense the current one. While taking a year off from his graduate studies in California to work on his Big Indian Novel (written in Delhi), Vikram Seth realized he was opening a very big can of worms:
However I soon realized that the novel — which had opened with a grand wedding — now had so many characters whom I was interested in that I needed to take off at least a year simply to understand the varied worlds of law, politics, administration, medicine, farming, manufacture, commerce, education, music, religion, and so on, that these characters came from or worked in. What exactly did one do if one visited a courtesan in 1951, and how would I find someone to tell me? How did the credit market for small shoemakers in Agra work, and what might be the effect of a credit squeeze on people who had little to fall back on? What was it like to be a brown sahib in a white managing agency in Calcutta in the fifties? Were there girls at St Stephen’s College in the late forties?
Instead of being constrained by this research, I found that it inspired me with new ideas. It also gave me the confidence to imagine myself into the insubstantial beings I had begun with, to give them shape and personality and vividness — at least enough to make me wish to follow their lives. I wanted, of course, to tell a good story, but I also wanted to get things right. No matter how well a novel is received by readers or critics in general, if it does not ring true with those people who know from the inside the world it describes, it is in the final analysis an artistic failure.
This is a self-reflective comment on the writing of A Suitable Boy, but I think it is also a persuasive statement on the value of embracing complexity and detail over fixed ideology or given narrative formulas. Seth’s openness to explore all these different paths and channels in his fictional (and nonfictional) characters’ lives allows him to be true to the subject — as true as it is possible to be in a novel. It also enables the writer to break out of predictable postcolonial narrative conventions. The novel becomes a space for research, discovery, and documentation (indeed, rather like a biography), rather than simply a collection of commonplace observations and fancy verbal effects.
I wish we had better archives and more non-ideological archival research. For many South Asians involved in the tumult of the twentieth century, such paper trails are hard to come by. Of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who served in the Second World War, how many left behind letters documenting their experiences, their everyday thoughts, or their thoughts about their loved ones? Not many, unfortunately. From the Partition of 1947, too, the best non-official documentary evidence has tended to come from personal interviews conducted by people like Urvashi Butalia (The Other Side of Silence). Compared to the amount of documentation associated with individual experiences of the Holocaust in Europe, the Partition archive, as far as I know, is quite small.
Another issue that comes out of Two Lives is a fresh and surprising view of an early bicultural/biracial relationship. A few points of tension between Shanti Seth and Henny Caro on cultural matters are recorded in Two Lives (she didn’t have much interest in visiting India, for instance), but they actually weren’t especially significant in the relationship. Henny and Shanti were bound by stronger forces than ethnicity — their shared memory of a pre-war social milieu in Germany that was utterly and irreparably destroyed, as well as a deep need for support and understanding that helped them cope with the damage the war did to them both: Henny, with the loss of her family under unthinkable circumstances, and Shanti, with the loss of his right arm, which might have been catastrophic for a right-handed practicing dentist (he managed, almost miraculously, to overcome it). The clichés about white women and English-educated Indian men simply don’t apply in any way whatsoever to the life these two individuals shared.
I wanted to share one more memorable quote before closing. Here, Seth is defining the relationship between Henny and Shanti as an attempt at reconstituting “home”:
Shaken about the globe, we live out our fractured lives. Enticed or fleeing we re-form ourselves, taking on partially the coloration of our new backgrounds. Even our tongues are alienated and rejoined — a multiplicity that creates richness and confusion. Both Shanti and Henny were in the broader sense exiled; each found in their fellow exile a home.
In Shanti’s case, the exile was of his making; not so with Henny, though it could in some strict sense be said that she chose not to return when, once again, it became safe to do so. Increasingly from adolescence onwards she would have sensed that she was set apart from her Christian friends — that her position was precarious, even in the city in which she had been born, in the only streets she had known.
The idea of exile and the struggle to define a sense of home will be familiar to readers of Salman Rushdie and others. It applies remarkably well to Shanti Seth and Henny Caro — and perhaps in some sense to Vikram Seth as well, whose personal experience closely lines the tight margins of this book.
Two Lives may disappoint some fans of A Suitable Boy who were hoping for another page-turner from Vikram Seth. My suggestion might be to give over an hour or so to the book in a bookstore or library. Read the first section (fifty pages). If you’re drawn in — and I think most readers will be — take the book home.
Incidentally, an earlier Sepia Mutiny post by Manish relating to Two Lives is here.
This has been on my “must get around to reading” list for quite a while. Thanks for the great post – it’s now been bumped to the top 🙂
good idea, and a fantastic review, Amardeep. I read “Two Lives” a few months ago and it was beautiful, unexpectedly moving, and a page-turner in its own way.
I agree that there is a dearth of partition narratives. Another valuable book, however, is Borders and Boundaries, edited by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. This book documents the experiences of women.
It was a remarkable biography and as DD put it so well, “unexpectedly moving”. I went to a reading he gave here and I’d reccommend the experience to everyone – he’s a great reader, very interactive with the audience during Q&A and is chock-full of hilarious anecdotes about his family.
Amardeep,
Really good review. I started reading it at Crosswords in Bandra and ended up buying it! Its especially significant because it demonstrates how our grandparent’s generation are the essential keepers of our history (in lieu of good archival data). My family is from Punjab, where talking about partition has gone from reticence to disturbing comparisons with today’s tragedies. Its a good book and I liked how he interlaced it with different experiences in his life.
I agree with DesiDancer–“It was beautiful, unexpectedly moving, and a page-turner in its own way.” I also loved the way in which Seth was so honest with his reader about the issues of craft associated with this project. I enjoyed getting into his head in that way.
‘A Suitable Boy’ made me choose sides between the Mehras and Kapoors etc and ‘An Equal Music’ made me cry and lament for the lovers. With this one, I felt as if I finally understood Seth and why he wrote the way he did. Excellent book.
(Don’t mean to thread jack here but weren’t some Seth lovers supposed to read ‘A Suitable Boy’ and have a mass discussion on SM? ANNA…where art thou?? :-))
I must confess I started the book immediately after buying it at a reading he did, but haven’t moved on after the first section. (Then again I do most reading on the commute to/from work, and am loathe to lug hardcovers.)
But I have to echo badmash and say how totally charming he was, during reading and the Q & A (which he made feel as intimate as a chat between two friends over tea at home), and for the final phase, the signing, even after I plunked down a stack consisting of every book I owned by him (at that time: everything but the dolphin libretto) and he smiled and chatted and signed.
I understand he was not quite so cuddly in Bombay last year, but we all have our off days, don’t we?
Fascinating…
when 2 Lives came out, Seth did a fantastic web-cast with SAJA. The except he read was very compelling, as was his intimate presentation of much of his personal experience in researching and interviewing for this work. Much of the book is peppered with similar intimate moments, as he gives readers a personal insight into his struggles and thoughts on the project. The beauty with which Seth reveals Shanti and Henny’s love is wonderful– it’s not the dance-around-trees, sweeping love of supermarket novels, but a more quiet love, complete with insecurities and acceptance of imperfections– which may equal something perfect.
Loved it, loved it, loved it. This is one of those magical books– on turning the last page, you feel like you’ve made friends.
Amardeep, do you not get a little wary when Indian writers from comfortable middle class backgrounds living in the West declare themselves to be ‘exiles’. They are not exiles, they are immigrants. I always think it is the wrong word they put on themselves, almost as if they are trying too hard to appear like romantic outcasts, to give their ‘condition’ a kind of existential glamour. They are free individuals who decided to leave their homeland freely and usually they enjoy a comfortable life.
So how do plain middle class immigrants re-invent themselves as ‘exiles’? Is there not a hint of self-aggrandisement and pomposity in it? Maybe I’m reading too much into the way they designate themselves as such, but it does irritate me a little for some reason (OK maybe Rushdie has some right to say that after the fatwa, but even before that he was casting himself in the role of suffering ‘exile’)
excerpt not except.
Amardeep
I mean, when I think of exiles, I think of writers who escape active persecution, or leave their homelands because life is no longer tenable for them….writers like Milan Kundera for example.
Two Lives is politically astute too, and throws light on current events.
I am currently reading “Two Lives” and i think it is a very good book.
Red Snapper, Talking of exiles of the middle class kind, imagine waiting in a job and situation while INS gets thru your GC paperwork. It is exile….
DD, you stated perfectly one of the main reasons for my (reluctantly) buying the book the night of the reading.
I told myself before going “I will not buy this book tonight. Hardcovers are at least double the cost of softcovers plus they weigh a ton to schlep around and read on the train. I’ll wait til it’s out in paperback later.”
Then I listened to him read, and talk about his aunt and uncle and this type of love you describe between the two of them, and it was quite touching, and I got so wrapped up in it all, that I went against my own dictat and plunked down almost $30 for the book.
They say it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind….
Red Snapper — yes, it’s true Seth and Rushdie aren’t politcal exiles. In some cases, Seth’s not an exile at all: he wrote much of “A Suitable Boy” in Delhi after having lived abroad for 15-20 years.
But I think the sense of loss many voluntary migrants feel is a legitimate subject for study, and can be called “exile.” In that one often loses access to others who speak one’s mother tongue, and also potentially one’s family (which can be especially sharp given the role of family in Indian culture), the challenges in deciding how to live one’s life can be no less difficult.
It is true that one shouldn’t wear voluntary migration as some kind of special badge of honor, but note that Seth is pretty careful in how he uses the word ‘exile’: “Shaken about the globe, we live out our fractured lives. Enticed or fleeing we re-form ourselves, taking on partially the coloration of our new backgrounds. Even our tongues are alienated and rejoined — a multiplicity that creates richness and confusion. Both Shanti and Henny were in the broader sense exiled; each found in their fellow exile a home. In ShantiÂ’s case, the exile was of his making; not so with Henny…”
His emphasis is more on the idea of the fashioning of the self out of “fragmented lives” than on “exile” per se.
Amardeep,
As always a great review. Your gentle coaxing manner makes me want to read every book you review.
Did Jhabvala ever write about her India years, other than her fiction? (I think it would be very interesting to read a review of Two Lives by Jhabvala.)
Red Snapper,
Spot on.
Amardeep, your reviewing skills are tiptop only.
The more I read (or hear about) these fractured, diasporic lives in exile, with all sorts of loss and problems relating to identity, immigration, etc. the more I envy (in some respects) people living in villages in India…I don’t want to idealise their (the villagers’) lives, they face economic hardships beyond what most of us could endure, but their sense of rootedness and the utter lack of psychological angst is beautiful. One time I was visiting my friend’s parents’ village in Punjab…my friend is a cardiologist, raised in California, very bright guy, with all sorts of complicated issues in his life…we hung out with his cousin in the village, simple Jatt farmer, with no ‘issues’ whatsoever…on paper, most of the world would rather be a successful cardiologist living in the US, but I think my friend’s cousin was a much more contented man.
Amitabh,
let me add that the issues of ‘rootedness’ are not just a diasporic issue. many ‘native’ born americans have the same issues. they may not return to their ancestral village in india, but they may retreat to a rural part of the USA where life is more as their grandparents’ described.
Amardeep
Thanks. I agree with you here:
Maybe I just get the sense that too many writers or academics do exactly that, sometimes. The losses and adjustments of voluntary immigration are melancholy and ironic and full of a sense of loss and disorientation, but they are voluntary conditions. The true exile I see as being in a tragic situation – not just the noble writer persecuted by his society or state, a writer like Wole Soyinka in the past, for example – but the poor and struggling refugee from Zimbabwe or Bosnia – and it does imply to me a certain lack of perspective, a kind of reflective glamour, when the term is bandied about casually by tenured professors and prize winning authors.
Anuway, I don’t want to misdirect your thread, it’s probably just a minor irritant I have on the theme.
dear red snapper, amardeep beet (sic) me to the draw. a relevant excerpt. From rushdie’s “East West”
I first caught a whiff of this notion in The jaguar smile, and it was pretty loud in “imaginary homelands”. the thing is, i do not particularly like rushdie;s writing – but after every few chapters – there is this yearning that resonates so loudly i cant but help feel he is speaking for me and giving voice to my emoition.
so it is with that i take on the garb of the exilee noted by amardeep and speak in my voice for rushdie – just to return the favor.
to me, as i grow older, i realize the cracks between me and the society around me seem to be getting deeper and wider. i have a yearning to fit in, but the need to not compromise my essence is perpetual and taxing. it is i believe typical of many of us who straddle the old world and the new. parts of each world are attached to our selves and we can not shake these loose when we travel to the other side – in speech, in thought, in spirit. the “where are you from” follows me around whether in india or in north america. you can imagine this leaves me feeling like there is a place i belong to, that i am yet to find. this is the notion of ‘exile’ that i believe ‘deep was referring to in reference to rushdie.
there is this quest for the homeland in many of us. these homelands may just be in our imagination and we know that. but we need them so that we have the hope that some day we will arrive and the torment will be over.
for me i think it ended in toronto 🙂 and i am at peace now but i can see why the quest does not end for many including rushdie.
thanks for listening.
back to your regular programming.
I will definitely put this book on my reading list after reading Amardeep’s review. Just the sense of history contained in the lives. Plus they seem to have lived such ordinary suburban existences in London, yet they had such immense tragedies – losing an entire family in the holocaust, fighting in a war and losing an arm. That’s most fascinating to me, how history can impact and be reflected in ordinary, outwardly plain lives.
for those so inclined, here are some snippets from seth reading ‘two lives’ on the radio (thx to CBC Vancouver). (please scroll down to get to Seth’s pieces)
while you are there, do listen to kogawa’s revisiting obasan – of peripheral relevance to the topic at hand.
Amardeep,
Someone who has somewhat similar history is Amartya Sen. His second wife, Eva was Jewish emigre who father was in Italian resistance.
Do read his Nobel acceptance lecture.
This book sounds interesting. I’ve never picked up anything by Vikram Seth(yes, call me a bad Desi reader, all right?), though I really should check out some of his work probably.
Anyway, this tale sounds similar to what my family has been through, around the same time period. My great-grandfather was in government service and was posted several countries in Asia. In 1940 he and his family left for Kobe, Japan. My grandmother still has clear memories of that period in her life and I believe it had a strong impact on her, so much so that she and her brother are still able to recite a Japanese school song, and various phrases in Japanese. According to my grand-uncle, racism was already well ingrained into the Japanese psyche; a popular saying was “Indians are black; we are white”. I have several beautiful photos of the family with their Japanese servants and in kimono costume. My grandmother still recalls seeing the geisha in theatre productions as well out and about on an average day. Of course, that was a time when kimonos were everyday dresses for the people. Simultaneously the war was running it’s course and finally my great-grandfather, who was of course working for the enemy, was placed under house arrest and starved. The rest of the family fled Japan and landed in India again via a very turbulent journey, during which the boat almost capsized. Later my grandmother was to once again spend a part of her life in a foreign country; in 1947 the family shifted to Shanghai. My grandmother recalls a maidservant who suffered the agonizing foot-binding, a relic from a previous era. My great-grandfather was placed in a more prominent position this time, and the family even on an occaision met Chiang K’ai-Shek. My grandmother never took to China as much as she did to Japan though; she did not like the Chinese people very much and she still does not speak as much about China as she does on the subject of Japan.
I would love to write a book on this subject myself actually, but my great-grandmother’s time is limited now and I have but few occasions to make visits to India.
ironically, i just finished reading two lives on the train this morning on my way to work. it was a great read, and summed up nicely here. i’m not to well-informed about the details of us and european history, as much as high school and college tried to cram it down my throat… so the descriptions of shanti uncle’s experiences in the war were fascinating, and henny’s family experiences kept my heart at the bottom of my stomach for some time… check out my take on the book here: http://www.nikhiltrivedi.com/diary-uh/two-lives
[shivers and thrills] Hairy-D, a dear friend of mine calls this the “inside-outsider”. While both worlds fit, and may be comfortable, neither addresses all the things we are. I wish you might consider writing a book, yaar.
I loved A suitable boy by Vikram Seth. After reading some book reviews and storyline, I wasn’t planning on reading this book. However, after reading so many good reviews by so many people. I might have to add this book on my list of books to read.
Dear Renu,
thank you.
and thanks to the forum,
for facilitating yet another
imaginary homeland.
Thanks for another great review Amardeep 🙂
I love reading the comments on these posts too as there’s always good writers suggested.
[shivers and thrills] Hairy-D, a dear friend of mine calls this the “inside-outsider”. While both worlds fit, and may be comfortable, neither addresses all the things we are. I wish you might consider writing a book, yaar
Yeah, go for it hairy d! Who said that story’s just for Jhumpa? I saw a recent photo of her with blue contacts and blonde highlights striking an Aishwarya-esqye pose… so my idolised image of her has become a li’l tarnished.
Can’t wait to get my hands on Two Lives. I love the way Seth’s work is so meticulously crafted. If people want a different take on Indian lit which breaks those postcolonial conventions of fancy verbal effects then Amit Chaudhary’s Picador Collection of Modern Indian Literature is excellent. There’s more to Indian lit than mirrorwork and Midnight’s Children (although I love the Rushdie too).
Nice one, Amardeep. However, I doff my hat to him for something entirely different. Apparently, his dad and mom took care of him – he stayed at their home – while he was slogging away for a long time upon The Suitable Boy. Once it became a success he decided: “Dad gets Whiskey for life and mom gets books for life!” If I were Nobel, my prize would be his:)
Regarding the comments on exile being used inappropriately I sometimes wonder if this isn’t just a semantics issue because all of these words, regardless of who is using them do describe scenarios and emotions that a lot of us experience. Of course there is a class/race distinction that shapes immigration, and writers like Seth and Rushdie have the luxury of thinking through these issues and giving them a really elegant voice. But, the bottom line is the type of alienation that is at the core of exile can be experienced through a lot of different social prisms, and I’m just glad that there are public forums for these discussions, and an acknowledgment of how many of us experience rootlessness.
In the light of the above statement, I wonder in what way would a biography go beyond a mere ‘creation or recreation of a record of life’. Also, in what way may attempt to write an impersonal biography differ from a biography of someone I have known intimately and have spent a decisive part of my life with. Furthermore, to what extent is my present going to intervene in my reconstruction of a past I either cherish or wish to forget. The question raised by Foucault in his Technologies of Power, namely,
comes poignantly alive when an author approaches time through not the objective veneer of history but a lived discursivity of the self. I leave it at that for fear of being accused of having borrowed my language from a randomizer – the dismissive unease with which the west (my deepest apologies for such neat homogeneity) looks at anything slightly theoretic from the east
Please read Technologies of the Self instead of Technologies of Power. Apologies for the mistake!
The idea of exile as summed in a teasing metonymic formula by Hamid Naficy is:
Having said that one needs to diffentiate across the variants of exiles – e.g. Salman Rushdie’s being not in any way comparable to say Vikram Seth’s or, for that matter, Amitav Ghosh’s unlike that of Agha Shahid Ali (ASA’s case being rather unique and defined by both an intangible imaginary – nationality as a difficult birth – and a tangible violence of the day-to-day lived).
The idea of exile entails not only a break – which may be spatial in the sense of being separated from a given (cultural) topography and a near impossible desire to belong – but more importantly a durative gap – a sense of (cultural) separation and once again a near impossible desire to belong that deepens with the passage of time. It is in this context that I place the frequent visits by the US based NRI scholars – Amitav Ghoshs, Suvir Kauls and Ania Loombas – back home. It is not as if they do not have access to information about India. It is the linguistic fissure – the fact that language keeps developing in such unexpected ways that even Bollywood cannot hope to comprehensively deal with it – that results in the more traumatic, often unnerving and unresolved sense of exile which they wish to avoid at any cost. A writer like Salman Rushdie or Vijay Patnaik will never have to suffer this sense of loss. Their sense of exile, as such, is rooted more in recollection than in a tangible sense of cultural production with which they may feel no need whatsoever to identify.
(from my notes on the workshop I attended on Narratives and Narrations in 2005)
So how does one mark the
? In celebration or dismay?