“Why do Asian writers have to be ‘authentic’ to succeed?” asks Sarfraz Manzoor in the Observer. (Thanks, Harpreet.)

The immediate context for Manzoor’s article is the publication of Londonstani by Gautam Malkani. Manzoor writes that “the media hungers for a ‘noble savage’ who will reveal the hidden worlds that shine in the darkness” and “this assumption leads some to conclude, when they discover that Malkani was educated at Cambridge and works for the Financial Times, that he is not sufficiently immersed in British-Asian culture for his book to be truly authentic.”

A part of Manzoor’s criticism is that white writers aren’t expected to be “raw, true, authentic.” This is more the brown or the black writer’s burden. But the more interesting aspect of the argument emerges in the following words:

It is astonishing how many of the writers credited with telling typically Asian stories are in fact atypical - either Oxbridge-educated, mixed race, in mixed-race relationships or all of the above. Whether it is Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi and Hari Kunzru, or Gautam Malkani, Nirpal Dhaliwal and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, these are writers sufficiently of the culture to be able to exploit and extract from their heritage, and for their publishers to claim they are authentic, but also, in a strictly literal sense, exceptional. I have nothing against any of these writers, just the suggestion that theirs is the authentic British-Asian perspective. It is not. It is, in the main, the particular perspective of the alcohol-drinking Muslim, or the mixed-race middle class, or the writer with the Asian name and white partner who is more interested in exploring the life of their Asian fathers than their white mother. All legitimate perspectives, but all particular and personal.

I will confess that as a writer and as a critic I want authenticity. But by that I mean a writing that is not formulaic and sufficiently complex, a writing fully responsive to the amazing mixed-up world from which our stories emerge. Exactly the way in which Manzoor describes above.

A few years ago, this debate had flared in the world of Indian writing in English. Vikram Chandra had engaged in an extended sword-play with the purists, again and again asserting, with new thrusts and feints of metal, that simple-minded divisions of the world, say into Hindi-speaking (authentic) and English-speaking (inauthentic), were often unhelpful:

I was born into a household that on a census form would undoubtedly be tagged as “Mother Tongue: Hindi.” But I called my mother “Mummy” and my father “Daddy.” They spoke to me in Hindi sprinkled with English. Sitting on my mother’s lap, I read newspapers in English. English was everywhere in the world I grew up in, and continues to be an inextricable thread in the texture of every day I live in Bombay and in India. English is spoken on the playgrounds, and we tell folk tales in it, we riddle each other and joke with each other in it, and we make up nonsense verse and nursery rhymes and films in it. Along with many other languages, it is spoken in the slums, on the busses and in the post offices and the police stations and the court rooms. English has been spoken and written in on the Indian subcontinent for a few hundred years now, certainly longer than the official and literary Hindi that is our incompletely national language today. I for one hear registers aplenty ringing away in it, and as it is spoken and written more widely, these registers will expand. A language is a living thing. A patois born in soldiers’ camps not so long ago became Urdu, whose beauty ravishes our hearts. To love Urdu for her low origins and her high refinements, for her generous heart and her reckless love, is not to give up Punjabi. What a mean economy of love and belonging it must be, in which one love is always traded in for another, in which a heart is so small that it can only contain one jannat, one heaven. How fearsome must be this empty land where each new connection must inevitably mean the loss of all roots, all family, each song you may have ever sung in the past. Any ghazal-maker, any Mareez, I think, would flee from such a hellish wasteland. But my region, where Kalidas Gupta Raza continues to sing his passion for Urdu, is different. If Hindi is my mother-tongue, then English has been my father-tongue. I write in English, and I have forgotten nothing, and I have given up nothing.

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Vinay Lal, historian at UCLA, has written a fine obituary for the 255 year-old tortoise Adwaitya that died last month in Calcutta. Adwaitya was reputed to have been the pet of Lord Clive, the man often credited for having won India for the British. In commenting on how Adwaitya outlasted Clive, my dear friend Vinay finds a delightful end to the clash of civilizations:

Many will read in the story of Adwaitya, “Clive’s pet”, the tale of the tortoise and the hare writ large. Eternal tales will surely continue to come down to us in new incarnations. What other point is there to Vishnu’s avatars? We might even be tempted into seeing in Adwaitya’s story a parable for our times as the lumbering giants of Asia, the Aldabra and Galapagos tortoises of our times, India and China, make their way past the hares that had all but won the race.

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“Big Family”

In my study this morning I found, folded in a copy of Granta 89, a New York Times article from last year about the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. Here are a few lines from the article by way of introduction: “Mr Zhang, 47, is one of China’s best-known artists. For years, his works–like those of other avant-garde artists of his generation–could not be exhibited in China, often because they were deemed too modern or politically questionable… Much of Mr Zhang’s acclaim over the last decade stems from a series, called ‘Bloodline: Big Family,’ of largely largely black-and-white paintings inspired by formal family photographs of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Mr Zhang’s rendering of these portraits–the figures often devoid of emotion, seemingly trapped in a time that still defies explanation–has become his trademark. Few other Chinese artists’ works are so easily identifiable here, or so popular.”

zhang-xiaogang

End the war in Iraq — Bring all our troops home now!
No war on Iran!
Stand up for immigrant and women’s rights!

New York City.
Assemble: 22nd Street and Broadway, 10:30AM onward
March: At noon down Broadway to Foley Square
Grassroots action festival: 1:00-6:00PM, Foley Square

For a brief film “Peace Takes Courage,” go here. (Hat-tip, Professor Judith Nichols.) For more.
For a related website on intelligent dissent. (Thanks, Liz Blum.)
And, it seems the cat is getting ready to march in the city on May 1. (Thanks, Naeem Mohaiemen.)

A couple of years ago, Seth Stevenson from Slate.com took a five-step approach to liking India. Like every good therapeutic self-help text, Stevenson’s piece begins with the soothing declaration: “It’s OK to hate a place.” That is followed by this little bit of exposition:

Travel writers can be so afraid to make judgments. You end up with these gauzy tributes to the “magic” of some far-off spot. But honestly, not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, “Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.” And that’s OK.

Stevenson’s five-part essay was selected by Jamaica Kincaid for the 2005 volume of The Best American Travel Writing. I have often used Kincaid’s marvelous and polemical A Small Place in my classes; there is nothing else that so quickly, and so effectively, calls into question the prejudices of the first world traveler in the third world. Why did she choose Stevenson? Because, I think, he’s so honest about so many things, including the ways in which he uses money to keep at bay the anxiety and the poverty, and of course the diseases, that seem to assault him during his visit to India.

By the way, the last part of Stevenson’s travelogue begins with the following words:

In the mid-1970s, famed author V.S. Naipaul (of Indian descent but raised in Trinidad) came to India to survey the land and record his impressions. The result is a hilariously grouchy book titled India: A Wounded Civilization. Really, he should have just titled it India: Allow Me To Bitch at You for 161 Pages.

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A recent review of Amartya Sen’s new book Identity and Violence has sparked some heated debate on Amardeep Singh’s website. The review has been written by Tunku Varadarajan who, if some reports are to be believed, has roamed the forests of journalism like a fierce bandit. At one point, with his long mustache, he even looked like Veerappan in a tie.

I liked the review for its rebarbative edge but have been taken aback by some of the arguments made in its favor by a reader taking issue with the original post on the above-mentioned website. Does Tunku really want to be considered a defender of right-wing Hindu ideologues? I don’t think so. More important, I feel his questions to Sen are pretty good (I’m thinking in particular of the following section: “So when Mr. Sen asks–Is a ‘religion-centered analysis of the people of the world a helpful way of understanding humanity?’–I ask back: Is ignoring religion, or diminishing its importance, a helpful way of understanding humanity? The view from Cambridge (Mass. and England) is clearly not the same as the view from my office in New York, which overlooks Ground Zero.”) and find them capable of disturbing a complacent idealism. The irate exchanges on Amardeep’s site aren’t exactly lacking in some of that complacency. For the record, while I take seriously Tunku’s questions and, even more, appreciate his mocking of the “seriously good,” I do feel that he hasn’t been entirely generous to the admirable Mr. Sen, an important voice for reason and inclusion in our divided societies. Let’s return to Tunku’s opening scenario. I thought Sen was quite un-serious and effective–witty but at the same time gentle–at puncturing other people’s assumptions. The story of the encounter with the immigration official was a pretty good one; I would have only felt rage and nervousness–and I applaud Sen’s ability to turn the unpleasantness into a funny and instructive tale. Of course, Varadarajan is untroubled by his parsimony because he provides several humorous turns in his own review. My particular favorite is the one that appears at the end, embedded in an argument about how universalism, too easily claimed, is also a form of parochialism:

Mr. Sen, inescapably, is a member of Bengal’s bhadralok, or gentleman class. (As the joke goes: One Bengali is a poet; two Bengalis are a film society; three are a political party; and four are two political parties–both leftist.) What Mr. Sen really wants is for all of us to be “fair” to each other. Fair enough. But his idealistic thesis twists and turns to remake the world in its own image. Ultimately, his picture–though pretty–bears little relation to reality. It makes me so sad.

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Today in class we’re reading Ian Frazier’s essay “Route 3″ which first appeared in the New Yorker. One of the most absorbing parts of the essay is Frazier’s description of the experience of walking on Route 3, on the stretch of the highway that extends from Montclair, New Jersey, to New York City.

The earth beside this kind of highway is like no earth that ever was. Neither cultivated nor natural, it’s beside-the point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly–ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accomodate themselves to us. In the swampy parts, the common reed would take over the roadway in a blink if the traffic stopped.

I’m still to recover from the permanent skid induced by those words describing only fixed soil–”slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast”–and the realization that, in this automobile nation, even the plain detailing of small life by the wayside is a triumph over an existence or a lifestyle that is legislated for you from on high. But in the paragraph that follows, the pleasure lies not in confronting the tenacity of lower life forms but the sense one has of a writer using his memory to recycle trash into material for celebration.

The tangled brush and the reeds collect an omnium-gatherum of trash. I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with MACY’S STUDIO on the back… Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins. Oddly, I knew where they had come from. Once, while on the bus, I saw a parade float–probably from the Puerto Rican Day Parade, held in the city–pull up alongside and then speed by. A car must have been towing it, though I don’t remember the car. The float was going at least seventy, shimmying and wobbling, banners flapping and these sequins were blowing off it in handfuls and billowing behind.

(A memory: Early in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, the following lines: “A figure, a walking man, trudging along the margin of a wide California highway… Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging.”)

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My main man Hanif Kureishi reflects on the twenty-five years that have passed since his play “Borderline” was staged. HK is on the money in his comments on the trap of radical Islam and the continuing relevance of radical rehearsals:

By the 1990s, political theatre was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theatre can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.

(Hat-tip, Naeem Mohaiemen.) (Also check out Pickled Politics for links to discussions on British Asian politics.) (Through Project Muse you can read an interview that I did with HK for Transition Magazine.)

hanif-kureishi

“Can you buy me gum?”
“Why?”
“I want to eat it.”
“Have you had gum before?”
“No.”
“It’s for big girls.”
“I am a big girl.” (When she says this, she raises her arms.)
“Okay… But do you know that you’re not supposed to swallow it?”
“Why?”
“You’re only supposed to chew it—like this.” (I imitate a cow moving its jaws.)
“Can you buy it for me?”
“Yes, but you must never eat it. You chew it and then take it out.”
“And put it on the plate?”

Zhang Fan, “Resting,” 1998, Oil on Canvas

For more.

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