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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Those Bloody Indians in a Major Key
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| Some excellent writing as well as some serious
editorial grandstanding |
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Published : 1 February 2010 |
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| I |
T APPARENTLY STARTED “one day in 1992” when the historian Ramachandra Guha was summoned by his “formidable professorial Tambram aunt,” the economic historian Dharma Kumar. Guha “declined her offer” to edit a new literary journal on the lines of the New Yorker or Granta “devoted to ferreting out ... new literary writing ... by paying its writers well” and |
suggested the novelist Mukul Kesavan and the scholar-publisher Rukun Advani instead. Scotch was consumed – “an old Chivas Regal” – and erudite banter exchanged. Cut to 1994 and the first issue of Civil Lines. Seven years, five issues, and some “vaguely better than modest” sales later, the whole thing starts to disintegrate and the “sixth issue of Civil Lines is about seven years overdue.”
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Written For Ever The Best of Civil Lines ed. rukun advani penguin books india and ravi dayal publisher, 2009 Rs 499, Pp 420 |
This rise-and-fall story we know because Rukun Advani narrates it at length in his editor’s introduction to this recently published ‘Best of’ anthology (whence the quotations above). It is an uneven collection that emerges, but there are more highs than lows. It can in good faith be recommended.
There is much charm in the vivid details of a childhood among the sand dunes of undivided Punjab in the extract from Khushwant Singh’s memoirs. Inevitably, with its accounts of the “taut, shapely, black-nippled bosoms” of the women of his boyhood, they are fated to be memorable chiefly as a portrait of the artist as a dirty young boy. Tenzing Sonam brings a refreshing personal angle to the ever-expanding corpus of Tibet travelogues in his A Stranger in My Native Land: A Journey Through Tibet. The familiar elements are all there – the stark landscape of the Tibetan plateau and the depressing facts of the Chinese occupation – but there are many new ones:
...Mr Chen and the interpreter admit that they cannot speak the Xining Chinese dialect very well and that this part of China is completely different from their native province... . They talk about the difficulty of adjusting to the altitude ... and of getting used to the different food habits and customs. A certain wistfulness creeps into their conversation. The absurdity of their situation becomes clear; here they are, playing out the fiction that we – Tibetan and Chinese of Qinghai Province – are brothers when the reality is that they are themselves strangers to this region ... the bureaucratic elite of a colonial power, serving time in a distant corner of the empire.
The similarly bleak landscape of Ladakh is the backdrop for Kai Friese’s virtuoso account of his pursuit of a story about the curious efforts of a Kashmiri tourism secretary hoping to revive an old attraction: a ‘lost tribe’ of ‘Dardic Aryans’ known as the Brokpas. “They are so pure,” [the tourism secretary] was quoted as saying, “that neo-Nazi women come from Germany to get impregnated with Aryan seed.”
The stage is set for a long comic romp, a ‘Carry On Up the Rohtang,’ but what follows is unpredictable and breathtaking. It takes Friese a breezy twenty pages to weave together a story that marries the absurd conceit about neo-Nazi sperm tourists with oddities from nineteenthcentury race theory, the ancient history of Ladakh, parallels between Brokpa and Biblical genealogies, and detached yet moving reportage of the Kargil conflict as it unfolds. Friese is possessed of an enviably sharp set of senses and a quick grasp of context. Consider this passage of description:
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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TG
9 February 2012
12:27 AM
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Totally brilliant. Also, a wonderful piecing apart of that embarrassing, self-gratified introduction.
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Scooter Conrad
17 February 2010
08:59 PM
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Well written, but a bit too wordy for a book review.
What I want to know is:
1. Did the reviewer like the book.
2. What was the perceived style of writing:
For adults only? Teens? Women? Men? etc.
History?, Scifi?, Romance?, Mystery? etc.
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