Bihar by Day
Will someone suggest a caption for the above photograph? I saw this billboard near a highway in Bombay and understood that it was an ad for a newspaper called DNA. I would describe it as the pavement-level version of a Rushdie novel—self-satisfied metropolitan fiction for consumption by the metropolitans. It is not the buffalo who has decided to carry a reminder on its body that it must work for Bihar; instead, it is some clueless cosmopolitan who is announcing his never-to-be-really-actualized intentions about–what exactly?–social activism. If this individual has recovered from his new year’s hangover by now I’d like him to consider why the geography of a land and its peoples is reducible to the flat banality of a buffalo’s hide. No complexity here. No refinement of style. Just something as bare as a blackboard and chalk, elements in a dreamscape of juvenilia. Perhaps I am over-reacting but this is because the rag in question has dung in its DNA. I refer you, dear reader, to the non-review whose display of ignorance is exceeded only by its viciousness. Blind to the achievements of Siddharth Chowdhury’s striking debut novel Patna, Roughcut, in particular the presentation of a character who engages, with rare elan, world literature and cinema while rooted in his provincial locale, our fearless writer from DNA plants his hooves everywhere, flattening everything said in its 186 pages about artistic ambition, even enlisting poor Pankaj Mishra as a Bihari, and making a pointless comparison to The God of Small Things which makes you suspect that Arundhati Roy’s novel is the only other book the reviewer has read in the past five years. Didn’t someone suggest a while back that reviewers should have to pass some basic tests of literacy before they can be allowed to judge a book?
Click here to read “Bihay By Night”
“Early in 2006, goody-goody socially conscious cosmopolites are hard at work–displaying their ignorance.”
Cheers
Comment by toni — January 21, 2006 @ 1:39 am
Great to see you blogging.
The reviewer there, Sunil Poolani, is actually a small-time publisher, runs something called Frog Books in Mumbai and is a former journalist. That explains some of it.
Comment by Shivam Vij — January 21, 2006 @ 10:26 am
Brilliant!
Speaking of Rushdie-type “self-satisfied metropolitan fiction for consumption by the metropolitans,” wouldn’t you say that the majority of English fiction produced by Indian (or Pakistani or Bangladeshi) authors, regardless of birth country and current dwelling, is produced for a metropolitan audience. Furthermore, one can even argue that these English works are usually meant for a foreign audience grazing the local bookshop for something exotic. It seems to me that books in English written by South Asian writers are somehow removed from the characters they wish to develop.
This, I must clarify, is not because of the chosen language of story-telling - English. Rather it has to do with literary style or film-style writing. The latter of which is a term I coined for having very dry characters in fiction. Such characters are hard to get attached to or understand. I’m at a loss of words for further explaining such characters; however, some examples can be found in Jhumpa Laihiri’s books, Death of Vishnu, Vikram Seth to some extent, Rushdie in numerous of his characters.
I could totally be wrong here, but that is my opinion. Your thoughts?
Comment by Vikash Singh — January 21, 2006 @ 4:56 pm
I daresay you guys are missing the point here.
Consider, for a moment, that the buffalo in question isn’t the Great Indian Water Buffalo; its hide is brown, not black, and its horns are short. Instead, it is our buffalo’s South East Asian cousin; clearly, this is some sort of a clever metaphor on the post-colonial condition and the economic migrants it spews.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Comment by Akshay — January 22, 2006 @ 12:02 pm
Interesting !!
Mr. Phoolani is advised to update his knowledge about authors and places before writing in Papers.
PANKAJ Mishra is UPian.
RajKamal Jha is KOLKATTAN.
And Sidharth Choudhary is of course Bihari , Bangla speaking BIHARI and so is Amitava Kumar .And So am I.
ABDULLAH KHAN
Comment by Abdullah Khan — January 29, 2006 @ 5:24 am
Thanks for all the nice words about me, I just found them. Please also see my blog where I have posted the ‘review’ in question.
Comment by Sunil K Poolani — March 31, 2006 @ 9:29 am
Mr ABDULLAH KHAN. I liked your efforts to give yourself a public standing. First you write your name in full capital letters and then you compare with the ‘greats’ like Raj Kamal Jha, Pankaj Mishra, and Amitava Kumar. Keep it up.
Now, Mr Shivam Vij. You say these famous words:
“The reviewer there, Sunil Poolani, is actually a small-time publisher, runs something called Frog Books in Mumbai and is a former journalist. That explains some of it.” “Something”?!
How can you make a statement like that when you yourself had contributed to one of my books, The Rape of News? “Small-time publisher”?
Well, we publish a book a week and if that is “small-time” so be it. And your final statement, “That explains some of it”, well, you don’t explain anything.
Comment by Sunil K Poolani — March 31, 2006 @ 9:35 am