Category Archives: Literature

Poetry Friday: Shilling Love

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In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d feature South Asian women poets on Poetry Fridays for the remainder of March. Today’s selection is “Shilling Love,” by Kenyan-Indian-American shailja.jpgspoken word artist Shailja Patel. Her work “Migritude” premiered last fall in the San Francisco Bay area to packed audiences–it uses her collection of saris, passed down by her mother (another take on Mama’s Saris!), to unfold hidden histories of women’s lives “in the bootprint of Empire, from India to East Africa.”

“Shilling Love” is the first poem from “Migritude” that I came across a couple of years ago, and it has stayed with me since.

Shilling Love
By Shailja Patel

They never said / they loved us

Those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents I love you honey was the dribbled caramel / of Hollywood movies / Dallas / Dynasty / where hot water gushed / at the touch of gleaming taps / electricity surged / 24 hours a day / through skyscrapers banquets obscene as the Pentagon / were mere backdrops / where emotions had no consequences words / cost nothing meant nothing would never / have to be redeemed

My parents / didn’t speak / that / language

1975 / 15 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my mother speaks battle

Storms the bastions of Nairobi’s / most exclusive prep schools / shoots our cowering / six-year old bodies like cannonballs / into the all-white classrooms / scales the ramparts of class distinction / around Loreto Convent / where the president / sends his daughter / the foreign diplomats send / their daughters / because my mother’s daughters / will / have world-class educations

She falls / regroups / falls and re-groups / in endless assaults on visa officials / who sneer behind their bulletproof windows / at US and British consulates / my mother the general / arms her daughters / to take on every citadel

1977 / 20 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my father speaks / stoic endurance / he began at 16 the brutal apprenticeship / of a man who takes care of his own / relinquished dreams of / fighter pilot rally driver for the daily crucifixion / of wringing profit from business / my father the foot soldier, bound to an honour / deeper than any currency / you must / finish what you start you must / march until you drop you must / give your life for those / you bring into the world

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Q&A with Indra Sinha, author of the Booker shortlisted “Animal’s People”

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The following interview with Indra Sinha, author of “Animal’s People,” was conducted over e-mail while he was in India on his recent book tour. He lives in a wine-making region of France, and was kind enough to indulge my questions about “Animal’s People,” his writing childhood, and the art of making wine, amongst other things. He also told me that Animal, the main character of his novel, would be happy to answer a few questions, so that interview is also included. sinha.jpg [read Sepia/Sandhya’s review of the Booker-shortlisted novel.]

What is the one thing that Animal’s People was never supposed to be? A polemic.

How long did you take to write the book? Were its origins a short story? It grew out of notes I was making for a screenplay. But did not come to life as prose fiction until the character of Animal appeared. He immediately began haranguing me and I learned eventually that the best course was just to write down everything he said. The actual writing took about three years, over a five year period.

Obviously your work with the Bhopal Medical Appeal and their newsletter was your research basis. In the first place, how did you get involved with the cause? A man from Bhopal approached me on the basis of the work I had done with Amnesty International and asked if I would help raise funds to start a clinic in Bhopal. You can’t just start something then walk away, so I then became involved in fundraising to keep it going. The clinic is now in its thirteenth year and we have given free medical care to more than 30,000 people.

In 1994, you “published an appeal in The Guardian asking for funds to start a free clinic for the still-suffering survivors of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. This led to the founding of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. The clinic opened in 1996 and has so far helped nearly 30,000 people.” Is a little bit of Elli in you? Nothing at all.

Why did you choose to set this book in a fictional town, rather than in Bhopal itself? Because I wanted to free my imagination and to concentrate on the characters. This book is about people, not about issues. The disaster that overtook the city of Khaufpur is always kept sketchy, the Kampani is never explicitly named, it is just the Kampani, and as such is not simply Union Carbide or Dow Chemical, but stands for all those ruthless, greedy corporations which are wreaking havoc all over the world. In Jaipur at the literary festival Vickie and I met Alexis Wright, who has written of the aboriginal peoples’ struggle against Rio Tinto Zinc, in Bombay we spent time with Sudeep Chakravarti who has written a powerful book called Red Sun, about the Naxali and Maoist movement in India – again tribal peoples forced off their land by mining corporations and steel companies, including Tata, which is trying to get Dow off the Bhopal hook. Continue reading →

Review: “Animal’s People,” by Indra Sinha

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The US edition of Indra Sinha’s Booker-shortlisted novel Animal’s People was just published this week by HarperCollins. Last fall, when I first heard about the book which focuses on the effects of a chemical company explosion in a contemporary Indian city, I didn’t animalspeople.jpgwant to wait … so, I immediately ordered my copy from Amazon UK. (I’m glad I did because now I have a paperback copy with a cover that I much prefer over the American edition. See for yourself below.)

Set in the fictional city of Khaufpur—home to a catastrophic gas explosion caused by an unnamed Kampani (if you’re thinking Union Carbide and Bhopal already, you’re not alone)—Animal’s People is the first-person account of Animal, a 19 year old, who walks on all fours, his back twisted by a disaster he is barely old enough to remember. Animal was born just a few days before “That Night” (his Apocalypse) when a chemical factory owned by Americans exploded, killing his parents, totalling his slum, and virtually destroying the health of many of the city’s poorer inhabitants. The Kampani changed his life before he really even knew what his life could be:

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being … Ask people they’ll tell you I’m the same as ever, anyone in Khaufpur will point me out, ‘There he is! Look! It’s Animal. Goes on four feet, that one. See, that’s him, bent double by his own bitterness …”

This is the powerful first line of a novel that I ripped through it at breath neck speed, simultaneously refreshed by Sinha’s raw voice and haunted by the events and images that were unfolding in the novel itself. Continue reading →

Poetry Friday: Mad About Elephants

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A little pre-post note from Sandhya Nankani, your new guest blogger: At least once a day, I come across a link or a piece of literature or an article and I think, “That would be great for sepia!” So it goes without saying that I’m thrilled about coming aboard as a guest blogger for the next month. You’ll read ennis’s little ditty about me later today, so besides inviting you to check out my family ruminations, I’m ready to fly…

For the next month, I thought it would be fun to import a regular feature—Poetry Friday–from my personal blog Literary Safari. I’ll be putting a subcontinental twist on this. Every Friday I’ll be posting a poem by a desi writer that speaks to me. mohan.jpg

I’ve always had a thing for elephants. My first (and favorite) stuffed animal was a gray elephant. In those days, stuffed animals were not very soft or fuzzy. Mine is rough and tough, but he has survived three decades, and continues to thrive (despite his half-fallen off trunk) alongside my collection of elephant kurtis; shell, glass, and metal elephants (including Ganeshas); elephant paintings and silkscreens, elephant magazine holder … yeah, OK, you get the point!

So, today’s poem—which I recently discovered in Billy Collins’ anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day—is (brace yourselves for the long title) “Aanabhrandhanmar Means ‘Mad About Elephants’” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Nez for short).

I like to pair literary and artistic selections the way people pair wine and cheese, so when I read this poem, it seemed to me a perfect accompaniment to Australia-based photojournalist Palani Mohan’s images in his new book, Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia. [click the above image to view a slideshow of his photos.]

Aanabhrandhanmar Means ‘Mad About Elephants’

Forget trying to pronounce it. What matters
is that in southern India, thousands are afflicted.
And who wouldn’t be? Children play with them
in courtyards, slap their gray skin with cupfuls
of water, shoo flies with paper pompoms.
When the head of the household leaves

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Indian Literature: Translation Stories

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There have been quite a few stories in the past couple of weeks about the issue of translation in Indian literature, most of them stemming, I think, from the annual Jaipur Literary Festival which took place last month. (Incidentally, I’ve been keeping up with these stories through The Literary Saloon, by far the best blog for world literature out there right now. All the links below come from that blog.)

Some of the stories read kind of like pep talks for translators — come on guys, get translating! This story, in The Hindu, might be one such example. Mini Krishnan focuses on the idea of a translator as a creative figure in his or her own right — a “conjurer.” One of the translated passages she quotes, from a Tamil writer, seemed particularly evocative to me:

The translator throws her voice so skilfully that the truth of a text originally written in an Indian language is “heard” in English. Here is Vasantha Surya translating the Tamil writer Ki Rajanarayanan: “Taking out the betel leaves one by one as if he were taking things out of a pooja box, he would lay them out with the devotion due to objects of worship. . . Next he would sniff the broken areca nut. Then he would blow on it. This sniffing and blowing procedure was repeated several times, his hand transporting the areca nut from nose to mouth, nose to mouth, more and more rapidly until ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, ooomm-oosh, dabak! Into his mouth the areca nut would go, having been noisily purified.” Which Indian — educated in English, unable to read his mother tongue or born of a mother other than Tamil — will not thrill to such a retelling? (link)

What I liked about this is the fact that the translator doesn’t feel the need to translate every word. Even though I don’t know Tamil, I have a pretty good idea of what a word like “dabak” must mean, just from context. I think even writing originally written in English can often get away with the inclusion of many more words from Indian languages than people might think. (I’ve seen my students pick up words on their own as they read books by Indian authors. They often have no idea how to pronounce them, but the foreignness of the words usually doesn’t stop a dedicated reader; if anything, it presents them with an interesting puzzle to solve while reading.)

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Indian Men Dig Mills & Boon Too

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Via the Literary Saloon, an article in the Economic Times on the upcoming formal distribution of Harlequin Mills & Boon romance novels in India. These novels have of course been available in South Asia for many years — but mostly via redistribution and consignment. It’s only now that Harlequin is planning to start distributing its books in India directly:

For most Indian readers, it will come as a surprise that M&B was never actually distributed in India. The novels have been so much a part of our lives, stacked in the hundreds in circulating libraries, borrowed dozens at a time by women (especially in hostels, where the trick was for one girl to borrow them and ten to read them the same night), laid out for sale second hand on pavements.

We’ve seen the special sections in large bookshops, shelves aching with romantic desperation, anguish and fulfillment. We’ve fantasised about the busty heroines and tall dark handsome heroes on the covers. We knew about all the different varieties of novels: nurses, Regency, exotic settings and so on. And exactly how we knew all this we would never say since like most people we would never admit to reading M&B.

But all of this was achieved with Harlequin ever selling directly. “We had some idea about this market, but we never really followed it up,” admits Go. “At the Frankfurt Book Fair, we would meet Indian distributors who would offer to take on consignments and we never bothered beyond that.” (link)

Interestingly, Harlequin is finding that Indian men are just about as likely to be Mills and Boon fans as women:

What he wasn’t expecting were the men, “A substantial percentage of Mills & Boon readership in India is male! You don’t see that in other markets.” Go has speculations on why this is the case. Perhaps it’s just the sheer ubiquity of M&B novels, “Their sisters and mothers are reading them and since they are lying around the men read them too.” (link)

(Come on, desi guys — I know you’ve read a few of these. MoorNam? Floridian? Now is the time to come clean.)

Finally, the author of the piece asks an obvious question on my mind from the start — what about the desi version:

But the interesting question is whether, as with FMCG products, M&B will see the need to Indianise their offering. When even a Kentucky Fried Chicken has to offer a chicken curry thali to survive in India, will M&B be able to continue with its offering of Western-oriented romance fiction? Or is this sort of escapist fiction exactly its appeal? (link)

(“Tall, dark, and handsome” might have to become “fair and handsome” in the Indian context. And maybe they could still use Fabio on the cover, only with Shah Rukh Khan’s hair style?)

Incidentally, I have long wanted to write my own pulpy romance novel to make some quick cash, but I’ve been starved for a good (desi-oriented) plot. Can anyone suggest a good scenario for me to use, as I attempt to enter the world of trash fiction popular romantic fare? (The best I can think of right now is an Indian version of this plot. Hopefully I can come up with a better title than “The Rancher’s Doorstep Baby,” however) Continue reading →

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta’

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On my now-defunct personal blog I used to give some of my blog entries their own soundtrack. You know, music one should play in the background to make reading the post more enjoyable. Before continuing on to read the rest of this post, please hit play on the Geto Boys:

Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book, Gang Leader for a Day, has finally hit the bookstore shelves (see WSJ review here). We’ve blogged about Sudhir several times before on SM (see 1 and 2). His previous book was titled, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Gang Leader for a Day chronicles Venkatesh’s time spent hanging in the projects while pretending to be the chief biographer of a Chicago-land crack dealer named JT:

“Gang Leader for a Day” provides an often compelling, if amateurishly written, account of his quest. Under the protection of J.T., a middle manager in a citywide crack-dealing operation, Venkatesh sets himself up at the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the nation’s largest and poorest housing projects. Over seven years of study, he hangs out with gangsters, witnesses drive-bys and – remarkably – even participates in the beating of a man accused of abusing his girlfriend. Venkatesh’s research provides groundbreaking insights into the corporate-like hierarchy of drug dealers. It reveals the intricate shadow economy of the high-rise hustlers and the ways legitimate neighborhood businesses support it. And, most effectively, it offers a heartbreaking glimpse of how residents struggle just to survive in a place where even emergency vehicles fear to venture. [Link]

Sounds like Venkatesh really got into character. If he was a cop and not a sociologist I might have titled this post “Dhiren Brasco.” In fact, some of the reviewers openly wonder if Venkatesh may have gotten too close to his “subjects:”

I found this a difficult review to write. The book is very interesting and Venkatesh is one of the world’s best and leading social scientists (and I don’t say that lightly). Still, I thought his book was…how can I put it….somewhat evil, if I may call upon that old-fashioned concept. The book required him to work with, and often encourage, a vicious gang leader for up to six years. [via Marginal Revolution]
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Subcontinental Scripts: Urdu vs. Hindi

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As part of a scholarly project I’m working on (on Saadat Hasan Manto), I recently taught myself how to read the Urdu script. I had briefly learned it as part of a Hindi class in college many years ago, but then immediately forgot it.

I must admit, I’ve been finding Urdu quite difficult. Reading from right to left isn’t so hard to get used to, but there are some letters that seem to be interchangeable (i.e., two different ways of writing ‘k’/’q’), and other letters that look painfully similar to one another on the page (‘d’, ‘r’, ‘v’, etc). Also, some of the vowel markers one sees in Hindi/Devanagari, though they do exist in Urdu as diacritic marks, are frequently omitted, so you often have to guess which vowel should be used based on context. Oh, and did I mention that there often aren’t clear word breaks (depending on how the typography is done in a given book or newspaper)?

But once I got the script down (roughly), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Manto’s Urdu vocabulary isn’t that far off from standard Hindustani — but then, he’s a prose writer known for his accessible style. By contrast, the vocabulary of much Urdu poetry (i.e., Ghalib) is so full of Persian words as to be unintelligible — at least to a barbarian ABD like myself.

Via the News Tab (thanks, ViParavane), I came across a great post at the Language Log blog with a historical linguistics explanation for how the script (and language) divide came to be. I don’t have much knowledge to offer on top of what Mark Liberman says, so the following are the just the quotes in Liberman’s post I found to be most interesting. Continue reading →

A Brief and Wondrous Book

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Its not often that a book blows my insides out. They were able to quite frequently when I was younger, and my mind became irreprably twisted on a diet of science fiction and fantasy. At some point I got “old” and realized that the highs I got off those books couldn’t be matched by a real life. Now I read mostly non-fiction and stay away from any strong stuff that could push me off the wagon and require literary methadone treatments. I started doing what I could to seek out the rush, the lust, the magic in the real world. I’m still doing what I can in the real world.

And then I relapsed last week. Hard. My past is why I so connected with the title character in Junot Diaz’s brilliant first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Or rather, I connected at some middle ground between this dateless, hopeless nerd and the consummate ladies man who tells us the story. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the desi connections. From the back of the book:

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that speaks in tongues. This long-awaited novel by Junot Diaz is a masterpiece about our New World, its myths, curses, and bewitching women. Set in America’s navel, New Jersey, and haunted by the vision of Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is radiant with the hard lives of those who leave and also those who stay behind — it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.” Walter Mosley

This book is a “diaspora novel” that transcends both time and reality (its filled with quotes from Lord of the Rings and other books that any real sci-fi nerd would know). As another reviewer stated, to paraphrase, “this is a diaspora novel for people who hate diaspora novels.” Set in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic it is the tale of a several generations of a strong Dominican American family that has been cursed (like all Dominicans) by the Fuku, brought by the “Admiral” who should never be named (but arrived in 1492). It is a curse so powerful that it is pointless to fight it. Diaz uses the life of an overweight science-fiction nerd to propel the story, a roughneck ladies man to narrate it, and a group of strong and beautiful latin women to beat the nerd and the roughneck out of each man and make the sadness of this book worth enduring. It is also a detailed and illuminating account of the brutal 20th century dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (a.k.a Sauron or The Eye).

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An Afro-Pakistani Poet

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Via 3 Quarks Daily, I read a profile of Noon Meem Danish, an Urdu-speaking poet from Karachi who is of African descent. The author of the piece, Asif Farrukhi, makes reference initially to some places I hadn’t heard of:

Whether you think of Lyari as Karachi’s Harlem or Harlem as a Lyari in New York, for Noon Meem Danish places provide a context but not a definition. ‘I am what I am’; he explains his signature with a characteristic mixture of pride and humility. Off-beat and defiant, he was a familiar figure in the literary landscape of the ’70s and ’80s. His poems expressing solidarity with the Negritude and the plight of blacks all over the world were referred to in Dr Firoze Ahmed’s social topography of the African-descent inhabitants of Pakistan. Karachi’s poet Noon Meem Danish now makes his home in the New York state of mind, and feels that he is very much in his element there. (link)

Lyari, one learns, is a town in/near Karachi where many of Karachi’s Africans (an estimated 500,000 of them) live. Their ancestors came to Balochistan as slaves via Arab traders (Noon Meem Danish defines himself ethnically as “Baloch,” which was confusing to me until I made the connection).

The Afro-Pakistani community, perhaps not surprisingly, hasn’t been treated particularly well, according to this essay in SAMAR magazine (skip down towards the end for some disturbing references to the extra-judicial killing of African youths). It’s not surprising that Noon Meem Danish, given his penchant for poetry, would consider leaving.

Danish is pretty forthright about the difference in how he is perceived in Karachi vs. New York:

More than home, Karachi was for him the city of the torment of recognition. ‘I was black and in Karachi it was always a shocking experience when people would ask me where I came from. They would ask how come you are speaking saaf Urdu. I had to explain myself each time.’

Karachi University wouldn’t hire him, but NYU did, and now he teaches at the University of Maryland (in the foreign language department — teaching Urdu, I presume). It’s interesting to think of someone of African descent emigrating to the U.S. because it’s less racist than the place where he grew up, but there you have it.

You can see Noon Meem Danish reciting at a Mushaira on YouTube (he’s at about 2:30 2:10). Continue reading →