Quote-Unquote: The Primal Land [Adibhumi] by Pratibha Ray

"Life in the city had taught Somra Sisa a great deal. He had seen leaders arriving to address crowds, their motorcars raising clouds of dust; he had seen the strings of red and blue electric lights, heard the croaking of loudspeakers reciting litanies of false praise, caught the whiff of meat being cooked for celebratory feasts.

"Dhangras and dhangris [young men and women] of the Lower Bonda, Kandha and Paraja tribes were conscripted to dance and sing for the entertainment of the babus [government officials]. Endless discourses on the glories of tribal culture were staged and the ranting of speakers was drowned in the thunder of applause.

"When the meetings ended the adivasi [aboriginal] youths were sent back to their villages with empty bellies. The adivasi was only an item in the list of the disadvantaged: a slogan that could be screeched to bring political glory to the leader."

--From Adibhumi [The Primal Land*], by Oriya novelist, poet, literary critic and social activist, Pratibha Ray. Ms. Ray is an unshakable voice for the rights of Adivasi ('indigenous') peoples of Orissa.

The Primal Land is a novelized ethnography of the Bonda people, a primitive tribe living deep in the forested plateau of remote Malkangiri district on Orissa's southwestern tip, where Ms. Ray did research as an anthropology student in the 1970s.

The story of the Bonda in The Primal Land is told parallel to the sundry government attempts at development and "civilizing" the tribals, which has had both comic and very tragic results. Today, the Bonda number fewer than 5000 and face possible extinction.

[Buy The Primal Land at Amazon]

* The Primal Land, by Pratibha Ray
Translated by Bikram K. Das
Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd, 2001
Excerpt from pp. 254-255

Oriya Literature in Translation

I was introduced to Oriya literature by chance and by suffering. In a Khan Market bookshop in Delhi, I decided to spend a whopping 800 rupees on the Orissa edition of The Beautiful India reference book series.

There is a different edition for each Indian state, approximately 350 pages, written in imperfect Indian English (albeit scholarly Indian English) in the style of a mid-twentieth century social science Ph.D. dissertation. In other words, it is the kind of book that would cure insomnia in a sloth; a very, very dry reading on the history, economy, language, culture, politics, demographics, industry, art and architecture of the state. But one of the few gems was the section on Oriya literature—specifically the names and themes and significance of prominent writers, novelists and poets—that set me off on the path of local literary adventure.

Within the otherwise drab pages of that textbook I discovered the name of Umesh Chandra Sarakar, whose 1888 story Padmamali is considered the first-ever novel written in Oriya. Fakir Mohan Senapti (1843-1918) is called the father of modern Oriya prose. In the late 19th century a literary movement called Satyabadi came along, known for its Oriyan nationalistic spirit. There were satirists and romantic poets and fiercely politicized short story writers. The famous brothers Mohanty, Gopinath and Kanhu Charan, wrote now-classic stories on themes of social consciousness and cultural battles with modernity during the post-partition era of early Indian nationhood.

I desperately wanted to read these works to understand the place where I’d be spending a year or more of my life.

By further chance, I stumbled upon a glorious website called Grassroots Books India, billed as the largest website of Oriya literature in translation (though it could equally call itself the only website of Oriya literature in translation). Here to my delight I found Padmamali and many of the works of Senapti and the Mohantys and other important Oriya writers, available in English translation, for download in PDF format—absolutely FREE!

Grassroots Books, a non-profit, aims to “open doors to India’s best writing — selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers and translators — by publishing and promoting these works on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of Oriya writers and connecting these writers to the world at large.”

NB: Fellow Orissa-based VSO volunteer Sheila Ash has written a very informative introduction to and review of some Indian and Oriya lit on her blog, Ashramblings.

India Book Review: Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga

Duly celebrated young Indian author Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize and shot the young man to stardom. I've still not read that book. It is sitting on my virtual bookshelf, which is to say that it is stored on my partner's Kindle that I haven't yet deigned to use, which means it stands a tiny chance of achieving the paradigmatic distinction of being the first electronic book I ever read.

However, my actual non-virtual bookshelf is blessedly still full of actual non-virtual books, one of which is Adiga's second book published (but first written), Between the Assassinations, a collection of short tales ("a novel of stories") set in a fictional town of Kittur on the southwest Indian coast during the seemingly arbitrary but nevertheless poetically named era in India's history between the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Arbitrary, because the stories follow no discernible chronological order, nor are they pegged to any specific date during that seven-year span, nor do they at any point reference either of the two assassinations as events significant to the narrative. Should any of these facts put you off reading the book, you'll be the sorer for it.

What Adiga writes in these character-driven stories of daily life in all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society tucked just beneath the innocent surface of fictional Kittur, is a tale of a transcendant, modern India, where the barriers, both physical and culturally imagined, between all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society are being torn down by the thrust of modernity, which as a character itself takes the thematic forms of, for example, a globalized economy, linguistic convergence and domination, identity politics of sub-national groups, and the better-informed but ceaselessly futile revolt of the have-nots against the haves--all of which characterize India's coming of new age in the late 1980s.

And, as the prose comprises the earliest, rawest writings of a young, talented author, Adiga's style is wonderfully sardonic, purposeful, and not at all off-key when it hits the occasional epiphanous note.

You should read this book.

Between the Assassinations
By Aravind Adiga
Free Press, 2009
339 pages

India Book Review: Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

If my memory is to be trusted I don't recall ever in my near-thirty-four years of life in the fortunate company of some of the best people in the world any one them uttering hinting gesturing that Salman Rushdie is his-or-her favourite most-loved best writer.

Having reread what is unswervingly credited as his best novel, Midnight's Children, here in India after first pre-dieting on other, mostly non-fiction books of subcontinental history, I can without hesitation or surprise express an reborn affinity for the book and its (after considering all possible adjectives, I'll go with 'infectious') prose.

Even in spite (or because?) of Rushdie's grotesque disfigurement of international conventions on the use of the semi-colon; I willingly endured what I had previously admonished discarded vomited as knickknack illusionist storytelling combined with an ineluctable rhapsodical unquenchable urge to build my vocabulary. (I'm looking at you, The Moor's Last Sigh; Shame, you're forgiven because your imagery of Pakistani coup culture was enticingly tabloid-esque.)

What can I tell you? This time round his alluring chutnification of fictionalized autobiography with the history and wars and rulers of India really snorted me up and away into the nasal passages of the life times adventures of Saleem Sinai. No, next time you see me I won't be telling you that Rushdieji is my new bestest prose-wallah; only that the experience of reading his masterpiece while ensconced in India is unlike any other encounter with the author.

Deservingly the novel is one of the most celebrated of the 20th century; if you're spending a bunch of time (especially down-time) in India, add it to your reading list.

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Vintage Paperback, 1995
463 pages

India Book Review: Inhaling the Mahatma, by Christopher Kremmer

Nearly fifty years after the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi, a copper urn containing part of his ashes--which were supposed to have been emptied into the Bay of Bengal in 1948--was found in a bank vault in the Oriyan city of Cuttack. Gandhi's great-grandson Tushar Gandhi won a custody battle for his ancestor's remains, and brought the urn to Allahabad--the city built at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers--for a scattering ceremony.

Aussie journo Christopher Kremmer, a foreign correspondent from Sydney, attended the ceremony and found himself a prime vantage point for photography as Tushar, standing in the Ganges River, opened the urn to release the cloud of ashes. Wrote Kremmer:

"Clicking away with my camera, I didn't realise that the amorphous cloud was creeping close to me, pushed along by wayward zephyrs. The first thing I noticed was a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. Then, a peppery sensation infiltrated my nose, like that preceding a sneeze. Suddenly, shockingly, I realised that I was inhaling the Mahatma."

Kremmer covered Indian news for international media for much of the period between 1991-2004, and collected his professional memoirs in this excellent travelogue.

India's slow emergence, after the Cold War, as a burgeoning global power buoyed by a shift toward free-market capitalism and privatization parallels the latent development of contemporary identity politics in a country whose people and regions are almost as diverse as they are numerous. And Kremmer saw and wrote about much of it, from the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 to the Gujurat riots of 2002.

In addition to inhaling the Mahatma, Kremmer was also caught smack in the middle of the Ayodhya affair--the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu fundamentalists--perhaps the single most illustrative event of the new Indian era.

Along the way, Kremmer explored the softer sides of Hindu political, historical and cultural identity, in ashrams and ancient temples; he also married an Indian woman and established a life for himself as an expat wallah.

The book is an able companion to the traveller's discovery of modern India; an informed and compassionate catch-up on the last twenty years of Indian current events.

Inhaling the Mahatma
By Christopher Kremmer
HarperCollins, 2006
419 pages

India Book Review: A New History of India, by Stanley Wolpert

Reading UCLA historian Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India (8th ed.) is your (and my) just punishment for not taking an Intro to India course at university.

And reading the dense volume passim in 35-minute intervals on the TTC* during a typically bleak Canadian February (as I did) might be the best way to approach the book (and might actually make winter look not too difficult by comparison).

To be fair, Wolpert’s history of India, now in its eighth edition (the academic equivalent of the best-seller list and the Oprah book club, combined), offers you infinitely more insight and considerably more depth than those forgettable history passages in Lonely Planet.

From the Vedic civilization’s economic development to agricultural innovation on the Deccan plateau; from Hindu philosophy to the Dutch East India Company; from Mughal ascendancy to English utilitarianism to the political context of the assassination of Gandhi—actually of several Gandhis—Wolpert has you covered with agonizingly precise historical minutiae of the sort that usually attracts only lonely history buffs and comatose hospital patients (the latter in book-on-tape form, obviously).

Still, it is patently irresponsible to attempt to travel India without some concept of its history, and although there are more enjoyable ways to devour it, there is no more complete way (possibly short of enrolling in Wolpert’s class). Read it before you travel but carry it along at your own risk; while it is a sure-footed reference guide, it is not a light book!

A New History of India (8th ed.)
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press, 2009
548 pages

* TTC equals Toronto Transit Commission, or more specifically the Dundas and Spadina streetcars for this blogger.

India Book Review: The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple

This past week I went to hear the famed Scottish historian and travel writer William Dalrymple deliver a live reading from a couple of his works, including The Last Mughal, at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, on the occasion of Penguin’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

I imagined a charismatic, perhaps forgivably pompous man at a lectern, a master of the subtle arts of storytelling: pitch, tone, pace, gesture, and expression. I was hardly disappointed; even his slight rotundity emerging from his long, white kurta and the beads of sweat on his large forehead fit the prescribed image of a craftsman raconteur.

The flamboyance of Dalrymple’s live performance is exceeded only by the fine tune of his prose. And The Last Mughal, so I am told by those who’ve read him more widely than I, is probably his driest book. It is a deeply practical, well-researched and well-imagined history of the Indian uprising of 1857 (the word ‘uprising’ is often substituted in the history books by ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ or ‘first war for independence’).

Dalrymple covers the full lay of the land of Delhi in the mid-nineteenth century, from the political court and palace intrigue of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (the title character) to the martial strategies of the British high command.

But it is the depiction of the men and women in between these two poles that really grants the reader a sense of the vitality of historical Delhi: the merchants and tradesmen of Shahjahanabad; the rebellious Brahmin Hindu sepoys; the newspaper editors of the city; the Mughal court poets; the English civilian administrators and their families; the fiery Protestant missionaries.

The full breadth of life of the city is overturned by Dalrymple’s lengthy inquisition into how and why this massive and popular rebellion of the native forces under British command occurred, how the dying embers of the once-great Mughal royal lineage came to reconcile with its almost inescapable fate, and how the vengeful British besieged and finally took down the mighty walls of the great city of Delhi and in doing so altered the course of India’s history forever.

And to credit Dalrymple’s robust sense of place where it is due, his (and as importantly, his many Indian grad-student researchers’) assiduous efforts in the Indian National Archives—poring over the famed Mutiny Papers, which consist of the municipal records of Delhi during the summer of 1857 as compiled by Mughal royal officials and preserved by the British after their victory in the bloody siege—provide, to use an apt phrase, the most fodder for his storytelling cannon.

It is impressive, vivid and exhaustive; maybe not a must-read for all travellers to India (not every traveller is wedded to historical enquiry, especially one so specific), but canonical for anyone who plans to tramp around the historical sites of Delhi, and for any visitor who can’t hope to know this place without understanding one of the most significant events in the history of the Indian people.

Dalrymple is the author of seven books about India, although before I got a hold of The Last Mughal, he was known to me only for his non-India work, a wonderful account of the journey of two sixth-century monks on foot across the Byzantine Empire, From the Holy Mountain (1998).

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006
578 pages