On Hinduism. By Wendy Doniger

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Biggles in France. By Captain W.E. Johns

Biggles in France

Captain W.E. Johns

Red Fox. First published 1935.

These are juvenile stories about air warfare on the 'Western Front' in World War I. The whole atmosphere is described like an extension of school life. The book is mostly a series of anecdotes describing Biggles outwitting his fellow RAF pilots from another squadron in boyish rivalry. Any kind of reference to reality is missing, except when talking about some technical stuff about the aircraft. The stories were meant for school boys, true, but so are, for example, the Harry Potter books, which are much more serious. This book is very, very light reading. A few of the air battles are excitingly described, but not as many and as well as I would have liked.

The Ancient Ship. By Zhang Wei (Translated by Howard Goldblatt)

The Ancient Ship

Zhang Wei

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

First published 1987. Translation 2008.

The year of first publication of this book in Chinese was about a decade along the Deng Xiaoping capitalist road taken by China after the demise of Mao and Maoism. The narrative spans about four or five decades, with references to  the 'glorious' past of Zheng He. Zheng was a great 15th century admiral of the Chinese navy, who explored and established trade links in many countries, as far afield as Africa and America, and including, of course, much of South Asia. In this book he is used to invoke some visions of a stable, comfortable, reasonably prosperous past in the small town of Wali on the banks of the river Luqing. Wali is famous for its production of 'White Dragon' glass noodles (made of starch extracted from mung beans), made traditionally since, perhaps, the time of Zheng He, and sold all over the country. The factory, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is communal property, though mainly controlled by the Sui family. Two other prominent families, the Zhao and the Li, wrestle intermittently for control. With the advent of Mao and Maoism, the equations change. The traditionally more powerful family finds itself jockeyed out and the upstart Zhao family takes hold of the levers of political power, i.e. of the local branches and twigs of the Communist Party of China. But, despite the change in the equations of power, initally at least, some of the centuries-old feudal structures remain, and the populace does not deviate from its ancient traditions of inter-personal relationships. Slowly, however there is corruption, and the erstwhile landlords and their families start being treated cruelly. There is brief period in which the landlords return to power and visit unspeakable horrors on their recent masters and their minions. But the tables turn once more, and more permanently. Now it is the turn of the landlord families, including the Sui, to suffer torture and cruelty. Soon the communist party cadre from the urban centres descend on Wali, shaking up and remaking the hierarchies entirely. Everyone goes through the famine and the drought brought about by the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and the other idiocies of Mao. Large swathes of the population of Wali join the millions of Chinese who die during this period. After a few decades of this, the capitalist road beckons. Wali is not itself much affected or changed directly by this new economic philiosphy, but young men from the town go to one of the large urban centres to set up some small business and make a living, coming back occasionally to thier home town to lord it over the local populace.

This tale of recent Chinese history is not told linearly. The timeline goes back and forth with no clear indication of the transitions, so we will be reading about the 1980s and in the next few pages the story will shift back to the cultural revolution, and a few page later shift to the pre-Mao times, before leaping back to modern times, and so on. This, taken together with the fact that I needed some time to get used to Chinese names, meant that often I had to reread portions ofthe novel to keep track of what was going on. The novel cannot be called gripping – at least it is not so without considerable concentration and effort. For all that, it is a good read, and worth all that work. The history I have described above is not explicitly narrated as such, but takes place in the background. The focus is on three generations of individual people in the town of Wali, and the way in which their inter-relationships are affected by the larger happenings in the country.

This is an honest book, somewhat anti-communist, but not tendentiously so. The sincereity of the author is palpable, and as I said before, it is a good and satisfying read.

Heavy Weather. By P.G. Wodehouse

Heavy Weather

P.G. Wodehouse

Penguin Books. First published 1933.

This is a tale of Blandings Castle from PGW's golden period, involving Ronnie Fish, Sue Brown, Monty Bodkin, 'Stinker' Pyke a.k.a. Lord Tilbury, Sir Gregory Parsloe, Lady Julia Fish, Lady Constance Keeble, Percy Pilbeam the detective, Pirbright the pig-man, Beach the butler, Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, and of course the Empress of Blandings. There are no impostors, though. I give the cast almost in its entirety, since, from this list, the complicated and superbly etched plot can be imagined in outline by any PGW fan. Lady Fish, who does not appear elsewhere in the canon, is a delightful antagonist, unlike her sister Lady Constance, who is always painted as a stuffy bore. But Galahad, and later Ronnie, get the better of them both, and Ronnie gets Sue. I must have read this book at least half-a-dozen times earlier, but it retains its freshness and delightfulness. PGW's descriptions of summer nights in the castle gardens, of one or two oppressive summer afternoons (the Heavy Weather of the title, along with Ronnie's jealousy, his making 'heavy weather' of trifles), of the sentimental feelings of Galahad when he has occasion to recall the love affair in his youth, of the perfect English town of Market Blandings, and so on, are marvellously lyrical. Here's a description which conveys its meaning perfectly, but at same time does so with great humour.

'...of all the admirable hosteleries in the town, [the Emsworth Arms] possesses the largest and shadiest garden. Green and inviting, and dotted about with rustic tables and snug summerhouses, it stretches all the way down to the banks of the river; so that the happy drinker, already pleasantly in need of beer, may acquire a new and deeper thirst from watching family parties toil past in row-boats. On a really sultry day, a single father, labouring at the oars of a craft loaded down below the Plimsoll mark by a wife, a wife's sister, a cousin by marriage, four children, a dog and a picnic basket, has sometimes led to such a rush of business at the Emsworth Arms that seasoned barmaids have staggered beneath the strain.'

Serious Men. By Manu Joseph

Serious Men

Manu Joseph

First Published 2010. Harper Collins Publishers, India.

I do not see why the book won 'The Hindu Best Fiction Award, 2010' or the 'American PEN Open Book Award, 2011', maybe because its competitors were worse. It is a pretentious, fairly inauthentic, and mostly pointless story about the goings-on in and around a scientific research institute, called the Institute of Theory and Research (modelled after TIFR, obviously). There are two story strands in the novel.

One is about a Tamil dalit clerk at the Institute, called Ayyan Mani, who is PA to the Director. When the novel begins, he is in the process of setting up an elaborate fraud, projecting his 10 year old son as a prodigy, a child genius, able at that age to talk about the Fibonacci series and Supernovae. The boy Adi is actually only parroting words and sentences as tutored by his father. This is however sufficent to astonish and delight his school teachers. The effect is then enhanced by a fake 'paid news' item Ayyan places in a local Marathi newspaper, and by other such tricks. The fraud culminates in Adi being allowed to write the entrance exam to the Institute, at which, again by the fraudulent machinations of his father, he scores quite well, in the top five, much to the disbelief of the brahmin professors at the Institute. This storyline in the novel is based, as Manu Joseph himself admits (http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-hilarious-case-of-avatar-tulsi), on the story of Tathagat Avatar Tulsi. It is also cast as a tale of Brahmin-Dalit conflict in academia, and, more generally, in the power structures of Indian society. But, though intense caste conflicts are perhaps the defining reality in most such organisations, there are several problems with the narration here. Some of these problems are mere irritations: Ayyan Mani, Oja and Aditya are more Malayalee names, than Tamil; his boss is described as a Tamil Brahmin, named Arvind Acharya – this is more a Kannidiga/UP name, a TamBrahm would be called Gopalakrishnan or Subramanian or...; Malayalee (Nair, not Dalit), and Tamil Brahmin (or at least upper caste) clerks are commonly seen in Mumbai offices – Tamil Dalits almost never; a clerk in Mumbai, especially one senior enough to be PA to the Director of TIFR, would not have to live in a chawl designed for mill-workers – the Institute would have assigned him quarters, or would pay him enough to buy/rent a small self-contained apartment in the suburbs; etc. But there are other more serious problems with this storyline, which indicate that the author has bestowed only superficially sympathetic attention to the caste conflict. To state this crudely, he seems to imply that a Dalit could get into the academic programme of the Institute only by fraud. Not only because the organisation is structured against them (this made clear in the novel), but also because Dalits lack the werewithal, the intelligence and (perhaps) the integrity to get in on academic merits alone. This latter point is not made explicitly, but Ayyan Mani clearly justifies his elaborate fraud to himself (and motivates himself to go through with it) on the grounds that he is a Dalit, pulling the legs (but, he thinks, only pulling the legs) of an oppressive system run by and for the Brahmins. His son, he appears to think, is too stupid to actually learn the necessary Physics and Maths, ever, and by his prank, Mani sets out to show that his Brahmin bosses are actually stupid too. They got in simply because they are Brahmins. Maybe the author want to show, through Ayyan Mani, that there is no such thing as actually 'knowing Physics and Maths', thus displaying a streak of anti-intellectualism, or at least imputing it to the Dalit clerk. This however may be stretching my interpretation of the novel too far.

The second narrative thread deals with gender discrimination – again a very distinct reality in Indian organisations, in Indian research institutions. And again, it's superficially dealt with here. The protagonist in this case is a Bengali woman, named Oparna Goshmaulik. I do not know enough about Bengali social interactions to understand the full ramifications of this name. However Oparna is described as an attractive, even sexy, young woman, and the only female member of the faculty. It is therefore not surprising that she attracts all the male faculty members, young and old. She falls in love with Arvind Acharya, who, considering their different positions in the organisation, must be about 20 years older than her, and who returns her love only tepidly. This love affair rather undermines the 'gender discrimination' angle, especially since it is she who goes after him aggressively, with the subtle implication that she does so in order to unfairly advance her career.

Manu Joseph thus comes down on the conservative (actually right-wing) side on both political issues that he deals with in the book – inverse caste and gender discrimination are actually the problem now, he appears to say.

When considered shorn of all pretences to depth and meaning, the novel is reasonably well-written and readable, but only just so. The cynical tone Manu Joseph adopts throughout, dissing almost everyone and everything, is probably meant to make him look 'cool', but ends up being boring. He has a way with words, and some of his observations on modern Indian life are neat – 'The country has become a video game', says one of the characters while driving through Mumbai traffic. But most of his 'nifties', though nice, are meaningless. They do not take the story forward, but contribute only to the air of superciliousness the author maintains throughout. Apart from the two main storylines I describe above, the novel also talks about intra-institute politics and the jockeying for power and grants. It does this however in a disappointingly shallow way, and in these situations the writing is far cry from the likes of John Le Carre who describes such meetings so well.

I could not like or identify with any of the characters. From my own experience of these places, I could however see that Manu Joseph has first hand knowledge of TIFR and the Mumbai chawls. There are no dissonances here, except perhaps an exaggeration, following 'Slumdog Millionaire', of the squalor of the chawls. My experience of these latter however dates from the sixties when I visited the homes of friends and relatives in chawls in Matunga (the Shankaralingam Pillai family) and in Chembur (the home of my classmate Moses). Things are almost certainly worse now.

The hundred-foot journey. By Richard C. Morais

The hundred-foot journey

Richard C. Morais

First published 2008. Harper Collins Publishers, India

Hassan Haji, the protagonist of the story, makes the titular 100-foot journey in the French village of Lumiere on the Alpine foothills, from his position as the chef in his father's loud and garish Indian restaurant 'Maison Mumbai', across the road to 'The Weeping Willow', a 'haute cuisine' French restaurant, where he is appointed sous-chef by the owner, a curmudgeonly old Frenchwomen named Mallory. This is the crucial journey in the book, and is framed by longer journeys before and after. His father has moved with family from Mumbai, where he had expanded the family's small time food business into a successful gourmet restaurant, unlike one day his wife, Hassan's mother, is murdered in Hindu-Muslim riots. Unable to stand this 'betrayal' by his countrymen, Abbas, the father, moves first to London, and then, after a kind of grand European tour, to Lumiere. This whole series of moves is rather improbable, and it ignores all the practical difficulties that would come in the way of any such undertaking - visas, immigration papers, money, etc. In Lumiere, Abbas, again improbably, establishes immediate rapport with the village folks, though he is looked at suspiciously, and with disgust, by Madam Mallory. The disgust turns first into jealousy, and then into a depressing admiration when she realizes that Hassan has cooking skills far above anything she can aspire to. She undertakes a hunger strike, that the author terms 'Gandhian', in order to persuade Abbas to let Hassan make the 100-foot journey. [The hunger strike is actually not at all Gandhian - it is simply blackmail. Gandhi's hunger strikes were much more profoundly thought out, and never for anything selfish or trivial, never just blackmail.] After a few years at 'The Weeping Willow', Hassan makes the longer journey to Paris, where he sets up a restaurant, that eventually, towards the end of the book, attains great success.

The book is amusing, lighthearted and easy to read, being less than 200 pages long. The inter-racial interactions are sensitively dealt with throughout. Descriptions of Bombay of the 60's and 70's are familiar, if somewhat exaggerated. There is a great deal of descriptions of food, sometime just verging on the tedious, but never actually falling into that mode. Descriptions of the butcher's and the fish-monger's shops, and Crawford Market in Mumbai are sometimes almost scatological. Food, as an art form, is implied as being practiced only in the West, especially in France. Other cuisines, even when they are very good could never rate a Michelin 3-star. Though there is a lot about India and Indian food, the book would, I think, would have worked equally well if the immigrants had been from, say, Algeria, or Vietnam, instead of India. France, however, could not have been substituted. 

Morais has a job with the Forbes group of publications that allows him to write on whatever topic he wishes and go anywhere in the world he pleases. Lucky guy! He's used that freedom to write this nice book.

Wuthering Heights. By Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte

PDF e-book on Kindle. First published 1847.

This is a psychological study of how one man, 'to whom evil is done, does evil in return' (to quote W.H. Auden). The elderly Earnshaw lives in 'Wuthering Heights' with his son Hindley and daughter Catherine. Returning from a business trip, he brings home the orphan Heathcliff, who is badly treated by Hindley, though befriended by Catherine, when their father/guardian dies. In an earnest, though misguided attempt to attain a position where she could free Heathcliff from Hindley's authority, Catherine marries her neighbour Edward Linton of Thrushcross Grange. Outraged by his love becoming someone else's wife, Heathcliff disappears. He reappears after some years a rich man, marries Isabella, sister of Edward Linton, takes her to Wuthering Heights, where he first takes residency as a guest. He slowly gains ascendancy over Hindley, whose gambling habits drive him to yielding all his wealth to his hated, adopted brother. He has in the meanwhile married and has had a son, called Hareton Earnshaw after his father. He looses his wife to tuberculosis. Catherine, meanwhile has grown tired of Edward, though she has a daughter by him, also called Catherine. She supports Heathcliff when her husband and her friend confront each other. In the meantime Heathcliff has a son by Isabella, who runs away from him and raises her son, Linton, as a physically and psychologically weak boy. Now come a series of deaths, first Hindley, then Isabella, thus giving Heathcliff complete control of his son and the estate at Wuthering Heights. Unable to stand separation from her childhood friend and lover, Catherine dies. Heathcliff uses his great physically strength, his harsh temper and the financial powers he has acquired to make life miserable for the widower Edward, as well for Hareton, and to some extent for Linton his son. To further gratify his thirst for revenge, and his desire to gain control of the estate of the Grange as well, he maneuvers and gets the young Catherine to fall in love with, and marry his son Linton. He makes the two lead a miserable life at the Heights. Edward dies, and then Linton. Though he has now completely attained his crooked ambitions, Heathcliff dies a miserable death, tortured by the memory of his love Catherine, and the consciousness of his failure to attain her. The young widow Catherine now marries Hareton, who, despite the best efforts of Heathcliff to make him a brute, turns out well under her influence.

The entire action takes place in the two estates, which are about 5 miles apart. The setting of Wuthering Heights, especially as described in winter time, is a kind of 'House of Usher' (as described by Edgar Allen Poe), a gloomy complement to the personality of Heathcliff. There is very little description of any place outside these, bare references to a nearby village of Gimmerton, and some mention of the far-off town, which is where Heathcliff was found, and where he later made his fortune. There is however no description at all of the circumstances under which he was found. Why did the elderly Earnshaw adopt him? Was he his illegitimate son? There is not a even a hint to explain this background. Heathcliff, though, is always the 'other', a tough, unhappy, ill-tempered, physically powerful, uncultured man. He is presented however as essentially honest, and the others around him are presented as cultured, but dishonest, and weak, psychologically and physically. 

The book has powerful characterizations, but is somewhat limited in its scope and imagination. It is essentially a study of the ruin of two landed families for a quarter of a century due to the thoughtlessness, it is implied, of a sentimental old man who brought home a devil.