[For people who don’t know The Ramayana at all, here is a short version of the story you can look at to gain some familiarity.]

I’ve been following the discussion of an episode of The Ramayana at Locana. The discussion concerns an event near the end of the saga, after Sita has already undergone the trial by fire (Agni Pariksha), proving her fidelity to Rama during the time she was abducted by Ravana. In some versions of The Ramayana, the trial by fire is essentially the end of the story for Sita. A couple of more things happen, but then Rama rules for 10,000 years.

But in the Malayalam version Anand’s father grew up with (the post is actually the text of an article by Anand’s father, N.V.P. Unithiri), the Agni Pariksha isn’t enough to clear Sita’s honor, and persistent rumors force Rama to abandon Sita once again. Here is the passage quoted:

“What the society thinks is important. The Gods too look down upon ill fame, and fame brings respect everywhere. Does not every noble man yearn for it? I fear dishonour, oh, learned men, I’ll even renounce your company and my own life, if needed, for the sake of honour. Sita has to be deserted. Understand my state of mind, I wasn’t sadder on anyday before. Lakshmana, tomorrow you take Sita in Sumantra’s chariot and leave her at our border. Abandon her near the holy Ashram of Sage Valmiki on the banks of the Tamasa river, and get back here soon.”

This episode is known as Sita Parityaga. I’ll be referring to it in this post simply as the abandonment of Sita. Continue reading →

William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals, predicts that second-gen authors will eventually supersede authors like Rushdie and dominate prizes like the Booker (via Verbal Privilege). The Chosen One will Arise. It’s music to my ears:

It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog…

As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction… I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west…

In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call “chutnified” authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith’s famous formulation, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks”…

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one… “What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else.”

It’s the mirror image of how I feel left out of the pop culture scene in India: movies, songs, premieres, the gossip when Parveen Babi died. The desi population here is like angels on the head of a pin relative to the heft of the subcontinent. And yet we’re natives in American and UK English. Our books will not be mangotarian:

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors’ injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn’t explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience – they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic…

… the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets…

Continue reading →

Abhi posted earlier about The Bollywood Beauty. If you’re in the mood for a light, pulpy read, here’s what’s currently on the chick lit shelves at my local bookstore. While we’re at it, let’s play Orientalist buzzword bingo!

Bollywood Confidential by Sonia Singh

Raveena isn’t having much luck in Hollywood as an Indian beauty, so when her agent nabs her a starring role in a Bollywood film, she jumps at the chance and relocates to Bombay.

The Village Bride of Beverly Hills by Kavita Daswani. Exotic!

… Priya… finds herself the one chosen for matrimony and life across the seas in Beverly Hills… Luck lands her a position as a receptionist at the tabloid Hollywood Insider, and her exotic politeness wins over the red carpet community.

Singh previously wrote Goddess for Hire. Curry-scented!

A hip chick from Newport Beach… discovered she’s the incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali… Saving the world, though, may prove to be a curry-scented breeze compared to dealing with her extended Indian family.

Daswani also wrote For Matrimonial Purposes. Cardamom-flavored!

… the Prada-loving fashion publicist still finds herself “oddly drawn to the age-old system of arranged marriage…” The only flaw in this heady, cardamom-flavored confection is the rushed happy ending…

Continue reading →

We just don’t show enough love to our peeps down-under.  SM reader Sibyl sends us an excited tip about first time author Shalini Akhil, a Fijian-Indian living in Austrailia who’s just had her first book published. It’s titled Bollywood Beauty.

Kesh: born and bred in Australia: drinks at the pub; studies feminist theory; a fun-loving gal of Fijian-Indian background.
Rupa: born and bred in Fiji; scared to leave the house; makes own roti; the full-on ‘Bollywood Beauty’.

When Rupa comes to stay with her cousin Kesh, it’s a complete culture clash. And, the chai hits the fan when Rupa has to decide between new-found passion and the ways of the past.

In this delicious and highly spiced novel, Shalini Akhil dishes up tears, laughter, music and food, with a truly scary dinner dance thrown in . . . and a final scene to make you laugh and cry.

What got Sibyl especially excited was that not only did a draft of Akhil’s novel win a state literary award, but Shalini has two blogs.  In addition to the one on her website she has this more personal one on blogger, much of which catalogs her experiences as a newly published author. 

…last week thursday, mid mid-afternoon-browse i spied a copy [of my book] in mary martins southbank’s australian fiction section. i yelped audibly (the sales person near me turned around suddenly, presumably to see if i’d stepped on a chihuahua, or turned into one) and ran out the store bellowing ‘mark! maaark! come here!’. then i pointed at the shelf from across the store. he went over, knight in shining armour that he is, and fetched it off the shelf. my knees were seriously jelly… i blushed and ran to hide behind the greeting card shelf in a move i later recognised as cheap imitation of a classic bollywood over-reaction. then the bubbles subsided, and in a moment of classic mood-swingery, a voice in my head said:

hang on! one copy, spine-out? does that really warrant a bollywood duck-and-cover?

then the knight came through again, gathered me up in his muscular arms and whispered, i found the other four. face-out, new release section. and that was it, i had to leave.

Ahhh yes.  I think someday many of us working class bloggers would want to see the above scene play out in our lives (without the Bollywood ducking of course).  The story doesn’t end there.  Shalini is also a stand-up comedian:

In 2003 she entered ‘Raw Comedy’, run by radio station Triple J, and went on to become a national finalist.

Author Sujata Massey writes hapa mysteries set in Japan (thanks, tilo). Her Bengali father once lived in Cambridge — alert Jhumpa Lahiri!

Her mother is from Bonne, Switzerland. Her father is a Calcutta-born Bengali. They met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she grew up in Philadelphia and Berkeley… she spends each day writing about a half-Japanese, half-American antiques dealer cum detective living in the seedier streets of Tokyo. [Link]

Her books’ titles (‘pearl,’ ‘kimono,’ ‘samurai’) pitch Asian exoticism, which, to be fair, is common in mass-market mysteries. One booster disagrees, but the name of his bookstore undercuts his argument

“Sujata really evokes a modern, quirky Japan that most Americans aren’t familiar with,” said Joe Guglielmelli, co-owner of The Black Orchid mystery bookstore in New York City. “She’s the only mystery writer out there who’s doing modern-day Japan…” [Link]

Massey chose a Japanese father and an American mother for Shimura to go against the grain. So often, Massey explains, it’s the other way around: The wife is Asian and the husband is American. “Asian women are exoticized,” she sighs… [Link]

She writes about the baffling and often funny Engrish popular in Japan (Hinglish ain’t no slouch either):

She prefers collecting the details of Japanese life… a “Milk Pie Club” sweat shirt; a brand of chocolate pretzels called “Pickle”; the “That’s Donald!” slogan on another passenger’s clothes. [Link]

Continue reading →

Looking at all the comments following Amardeep and Manish’s book reviews yesterday made me realize that we have an awful lot of avid book readers.  This article in the Hindu from a few days ago is therefore particularly relevant, especially to those who, like me, search for the hidden gems:

The British Council, along with editors Mini Krishnan and Rakshanda Jalil, has launched a website for women’s writing from South Asia: www.womenswriting.com. The site intends to promote internationally, voices that are less frequently heard and, therefore, focuses only on writing from women who live and work in the region.

The site features a unique, searchable database containing up-to-date profiles and work from some of South Asia’s most talented women writers — short excerpts, biographies, bibliographies, prizes and photographs. The site developed from a conference organised by the British Council India in 2003, UKSAWWC, which brought together women writers from the U.K. and South Asia, many for the first time. The database can be searched by author, genre and nationality.

There is an entire list of authors and their stories on the site that one can browse through.  Rest assured that there are book critiques as well. 

Continue reading →

There are a few authors (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje) who rock so hard, I devour their entire canon in weeks and wait impatiently for the latest installment. Fortunately, I’m not alone. The manly Booker committee just long listed both Rushdie and Smith, author of the Bangla-friendly White Teeth, for their upcoming books.

Amardeep previously pointed us to Amitava Kumar’s review of Shalimar the Clown, whose launch has been moved up to Sep. 6. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens reads the novel as political science tract, comparing Kashmir to Palestine. It’s reportedly a glowing review (only the intro is online) penned by Hitch for his longtime buddy:

Take the room-temperature op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir…”

If anything calamitous in the thermonuclear line does occur in the next few years, it is most probable that Kashmir will be the trigger. Moreover, it was the lakes and valleys and mountains of Kashmir that made the crucible in which the Pakistan–Taliban–al-Qaeda “faith-based” alliance was originally formed. The bitterest and longest battle between Islamic jihad and its foes is a struggle not between jihad and the West, or jihad and the Jews, but between jihad and Hindu/secular India. It is a matter not of East versus West but of East versus East. [Link]

I know this from a little study and also from a visit to the Pakistani-held side of Kashmir, where I was reminded that although human beings will always fight over even the most arid and desolate prizes, there are some places so humblingly beautiful that it is possible to imagine dying for them oneself. Salman Rushdie knows it in his core: he is Kashmiri by family… [Link]

The Village Voice is turned off by the degree to which Shalimar plumbs the senseless grief of militant violence:

The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels–Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh–percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered…

Some might question whether Afghanistan counts as South Asia. Geopolitically, it makes sense to see the country more as a hinge between western Asia (i.e., Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), and South Asia, than as decisively belonging to either region. There are certainly strong cultural ties between especially the northwestern (Pashtun-dominated) part of Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. And they listen to Hindi film songs and ghazals, and through Persian, use words like Zindagi, naan, pakora, mard, etc. On the other hand, while there are some good historical connections to the Indian subcontinent (i.e., through the the British Raj), geographically Afghanistan is cut off from it by mountains so… take your pick. There is a discussion of the question here.

Whether or not it’s certifiably ‘Sepia’, The Kite Runner does feel desi — or Watani — and it’s likely to be a book many of the readers of this blog will enjoy. Besides the (primary) story about a pair of friends growing up in idyllic, pre-1973 Afghanistan, there is an interesting consideration of life in the Afghan neighborhood in the Bay Area, “Little Kabul” in Fremont (a town which also has a large Indian population, incidentally).

Fremont is where author Khaled Hosseini grew up after his folks left Afghanistan in 1980. It’s interesting to me that in real life Hosseini is a practicing physician (age 38), while he makes the protagonist in his somewhat autobiographical book a professional writer. That Amir’s father in the novel accepts his son’s unconventional choice of profession without a fight — which no South Asian parent would ever do! — might be the only thing that really doesn’t ring true for me in terms of the immigrant experience reflected in The Kite Runner. Continue reading →

New stuff:

• Mukul Kesavan on the rise of Jinnah and the Muslim league
• Kamila Shamsie on Tariq Ali’s A Sultan in Palermo
• Amitava Kumar’s critique of Salman Rushdie in Tehelka; my disagreements with Kumar
• Cranky comments from V.S. Naipaul in the New York Times; my bewilderment

Continue reading →