“Loins of Punjab Presents” kick-starts this year’s South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival. I’ll be there. Freer Auditorium, National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. November 3, 10.30 AM. Admission free.

Later in the afternoon, readings by Madhur Jaffrey, Rishi Reddi, Thrity Umrigar, and yours truly. To be followed by a screening of Vic Sarin’s film “Partition.”

This afternoon, I joined Dev Benegal, Ram Rahman, Marina Budhos, and Aseem Chhabra in a discussion about Indian photography at the Newark Museum. “India: Public Places/Private Spaces” is the name of the splendid exhibition on display there. I read out brief pieces I had written about the work of Raghubir Singh, Pablo Bartholomew, Subodh Gupta, Shantanu Lodh, and Sunil Gupta. My dear friends Sangeeta Rao, Satish Kolluri, and Ali Mir were in the audience. The above image is from Sunil Gupta’s hugely impressive and diverse body of work; the piece I spoke about at the forum today is a different one, “Washing/Disabled,” and can be seen at the Newark exhibit. Here’s what I had to say about it:

“Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places”—Auden wrote that in a poem in 1931. The private-public divide is a Berlin Wall that we as artists love to tear down. We take pictures of the wily politician who, faced with the death of her young son, wears dark glasses that can’t quite hide the tear rolling down her cheek. Or the sunny picture of an ordinary woman tying a pink ribbon in her young daughter’s hair while the Republic Day parade passes in its full military glory behind her. But these are clichés. The real tension in my opinion is between the private vision of the artist and the public image in front of the viewer.

This remarkable composition by Sunil Gupta imposes a unique and vivid reading on a condition that we can only call “Washing/Disabled” because there is no existing name already in place in our language for what we are witnessing. We see clothes, women’s clothes and a girl’s clothes, hung out to dry. The colors are bright against the mud wall and the thatched roof of the hut. Alongside is the picture of a disabled man, he is armless, perhaps an amputee. He is also in a rural setting, although the house is of brick, and there is an alley behind him. The picture of the male is divided from the picture of the absent females. The drama comes from the questions that the pictures raise about participation in life despite disability. Is the disabled man removed from the sphere of the family? Or is the family there despite his disability? The images are from a series called “Country—Portrait of an Indian Family.” Are the pictures even related, except in the artist’s imagination? Or in my imagination as I play with the fear of impotence? The ambiguity here should not be reduced to a sentiment. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that if a gentle breeze were blowing, his empty sleeves would fill up with air and wave like limbs—across the picture’s divide, at the colorful bits of clothing that would no doubt suffer the same agitation or yearning.

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M U T I N Y
10 Year Anniversary
Saturday Nov. 3

Visuals by VJ FULL STEALTH

27 West 24th Street (btwn 5th & 6th Ave.)
Subway: F, V, N, R, W, 1, 6 to 23rd St.

Doors: 10pm $20 / $15 advance
Info: http://www.mutinysounds.com
http://www.sangament.com 212-242-8300

From the publicity material:

Founded in November 1997, MUTINY became the first club-night in the nation dedicated to the cutting edge of South Asian electronica. Once a month for six years, Mutiny’s groundbreaking crew and all-star guests brought New York City a hard-driving mix of South Asian classical, folk, and film music with drum ‘n bass, jungle, hip-hop and dub. This Nov. 3rd, on the 10th anniversary of Mutiny’s founding, the full Mutiny crew will return to the decks for one more night of musical insurgency, featuring long-time co-conspirator and electronica pioneer Talvin Singh and showcasing the rising talent of Shaa’ir + Func. Whether you missed it the first time around or have been waiting for its return, this is your chance to become part of the Mutiny!

Michael Ondaatje spoke this afternoon to a small group of students in a Vassar classroom; he said he missed teaching, and that though he had been a good teacher, he was a bad marker. He hated marking. “A for teaching, C for marking.” The students had come prepared with questions. In response to one, Ondaatje said, “What I love about English is that it is revived every fifty years by someone who is not English.” He mentioned G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr as an example. Another student asked about Ondaatje’s characteristic “non-linear” writing style, what it enabled him to do, and he said that it wasn’t a part of a plan. Rather, he got irritated when he found himself “hand-cuffed to the sky” and prefered “another version of things.” In other words, non-linearity is useful in ensuring the condition described by one of his heroes, John Berger: never again will a single story be told as if it was the only one. Another part of this non-linear schema, of course, is Ondaatje’s use of the collage. The first time he did it, his then publisher said, “Three poems mixed with the prose? You are going to lose half the audience.” The book wasn’t going to be published, and then the film “Gandhi” was released, and that somehow justified the book’s release. A student had a question about the film “The English Patient.” Let’s remember, this was the book that made Ondaatje famous; it was also responsible for taking him out of the classroom. He didn’t mind what had happened to his novel in the film version. It was impossible to be faithful to the book when making the film. He said, “The book is about a badly burnt man and about a depressed nurse taking care of him for three hundred pages. It wasn’t a sell-out.” The changes that Minghella had introduced, Ondaatje said, freed him from his own story.

In the evening, Ondaatje delivered the annual William Gifford lecture–reading from The Cinnamon Peeler, Running in the Family, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost, and Divisadero. After the lecture, I counted the books being held by those who were standing in line for the book-signing–a small smattering of folk with just-purchased copies of Divisadero, one Cinnamon Peeler, one The Man with the Seven Toes, and almost ninety percent of the others holding their copies of The English Patient.

For the record, Ondaatje didn’t have a copy of The English Patient to read from and had to borrow it from the bookseller present at the event. He was carrying copies of the other books.

Recommended link

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My review of Naipaul’s latest appeared in the Sunday Indian (Oct 15-21). An excerpt:

In [A Writer’s People], Naipaul is reading and writing only in the way a novelist can. In two brief but beautiful paragraphs, he presents a portrait of contrasting ambitions. First, Balzac’s Rastignac on a hill at evening above the cemetery of Paris. Rastignac stands overlooking the ‘hive’ of the famous city, and vows to taste its honey on his lips. Then, Gandhi in South Africa. The Indian leader, Naipaul writes, “has no idea of the unbearable beauty of the hostile city.” He only has “small, manageable political aims.” As he matures, his vision widens, and the nature of his rebellion grows. Writes Naipaul, “His politics becomes indistinguishable from his spirituality. There has never been any taste of honey on his lips.”

But the more indelible images come from Naipaul’s own past. At his grandmother’s house in Trinidad, back in 1944 or 1945, there was a Hindi-speaking mattress-maker who had come from India, perhaps one of the last recruits under the system of indentureship. A young Naipaul (twelve- or thirteen-year-old) wanted to know the man’s story and hear from him about India.

He writes, “I tried to make my questions as small as possible. I asked what he remembered most about India. He thought about it for some time and said, ‘There was a railway station.’ That was all I could get out of him.”

Several pages later Naipaul returns to the mattress-maker: “He would not have had the means to tell me about India. He could think only about the biggest and most modern thing he remembered: the railway station. He would have been separate, culturally far away, from his children. He was as solitary as he appeared.”

This is a part of the book’s argument. Experience is not enough; you also need words. Words by themselves aren’t sufficient either, of course. You need ways of seeing and feeling.

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I just finished reading James Wood’s review of Philip Roth’s latest. At first the quick attention to sentences, in that alert and intelligent way that Wood always has, and then the more magisterial moves toward the end, assuming a larger form in order to seemingly cover the world in three strides. (Like in the novel he praises, Wood’s criticism also builds or fabricates real fiction. In his own writings on other writers, he eschews both plodding mimesis and free-floating deconstructive play.) A sampling of both moves:

The fantasy of endlessness has found its form in late Roth—in a spare, pragmatic prose, apparently unconcerned with literary effects, focussed only on its subject. It is striking, by contrast, how proper and “literary” the earlier work now seems, with its tidy sentences and plush images sewn into the right places, its formal approach to verisimilitude.

And

Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction is a rival life, a “counterlife,” to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real. In “The Ghost Writer,” Nathan Zuckerman, the young writer, laments, “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” So he sets out to answer his own challenge, and conjures an outrageous invented life for Amy Bellette, in which she becomes the survivor Anne Frank. In “Exit Ghost,” Zuckerman bewails his sexual impotence: “Why must strength’s abatement be so quick and cruel? Oh, to wish what is into what is not, other than on the page!” In the earlier novel, fiction yearns to keep pace with the scandal and presumptuousness and fictionality of life; in the later novel, life yearns for the scandalous freedom and fantasy of fiction. But for Roth there is no contradiction between the two positions. In both cases, the urge to create fiction—the urge to wish what is into what is not—is really just the urge to live more, to extend life, to bring back life, as Zuckerman yearns for the rejuvenation of his body. And both the urge to create fiction and the urge to extend life belong to the magical fantasy of endlessness.

james-wood-philip-roth-exit-ghost

Here is a quick interview I gave to my friends at Tehelka:

A book that means a lot to you?
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. A pure assessment of power.

How many books do you own?
Five thousand, limited by the size of the bookshelves that, at great risk to my health, I put together myself.

Your favourite character from a book and, briefly, why?
Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. His desire to write, and his failure. Mr Biswas is me.

An author or genre you hate?
I’m torn between my dislike for the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and the dull realism of Rohinton Mistry.

Last book bought?
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.

Last book read?
VS Naipaul’s A Writer’s People.

A very overrated book?
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s — do you remember the name of the book?

A book you wish you’d written?
When I think of the books that my friends have written, I often wish I had written them because I like those books, of course, but also because a part of me believes that if my friends can do it, I can too. Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread; Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World; Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return and Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut.

Your favorite genre?
A realist novel that reinvents the world.

A book you’ve always wanted to read but haven’t?
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

After I had sent the answers back to Tehelka’s Lakshmi Indrasimhan, I was thinking about the questions again. I have further thoughts only about two of them. The first question that Lakshmi posed is a difficult one, and I can easily think of more than one book. Biswas would be one example. When I was writing the first draft of my novel I’d read a few pages from Biswas nearly each day and was struck again and again by its comedy. (Something that I, of course, failed to achieve in my own writing.) I also have a comment about the question regarding a book I wish I had written. The books by my friends are great influences–just the other day, I was teaching Butter Chicken and realized, with a slight sense of dismay, that I had unconsciously borrowed a phrase from it in what I had recently written. Also, I have another answer for that question, and that is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Not because of its prodigious success but its extraordinary architecture. I have read no other book written by an Indian writer that has come close to achieving the narrative structure and flow of Roy’s novel. (I have claimed in this space before that Kiran Desai’s Inheritance seems inspired by The God of Small Things, but the resemblance is merely thematic and related to character types.) Others have also nursed narrative ambitions, but they aren’t like Roy–they’ve only produced either Chinese puzzles or detective fiction.

By Monica Narula

Also see Raqs Media Collective

A photo from our holiday–Ila enjoying her tea. It tasted a lot like apple juice. However, for the real tea-drinkers here are George Orwell’s eleven golden rules.

Luc Tuymans
Maypole
2000, Oil on Canvas
224 x 116cm

I owe this discovery to Okwui Enwezor via this excellent review of the Istanbul Biennial.

If media images inadequately depict the horrors of reality, then Tuymans’ paintings are even more disturbingly detached. Often taking his imagery from published photos (of war, violence, subjugation), the paintings are the antithesis of this historic iconography: dull tones, vague, nondescript scenes, stripped of emotional propaganda.

Maypole suggests only the mistiest remnants of a memory: men in lederhosen raising a mast (Cross?), flags waving in the distance ? they could be scouts, pioneers, morris dancers or Hitler Youth. Though it’s painted with the faded language of nostalgia, Maypole is strangely empty: void of sympathy or moral, Tuymans renders a scene twice-removed, making it impulsively human.

Without context of history or source, the viewer is left to engage with the painting on a purely instinctive level; being drawn into the evils of history, he adopts his own role as a silent and willing observer.

[P.S. Ila and her father are going to be away on vacation till the middle of next week. No blogging!]