The Heart of India, by Mark Tully

When I alighted on this wonderful book in the little bookshop which is only a few steps away from the flat in Bombay in which my wife grew up, she promptly informed me of just how respected and much beloved a figure Mark Tully is in India. I already knew about him though, because he's pretty well respected here too. I'm sure that I have a memory of my Mum giving my Dad a copy of Ram Chander's Story as part of a Christmas present, one of those old Penguin 60s (a concept which now seems faintly embarrassing, a bite size book for those who no longer have the time to read a full book; Mum gave me a few as presents too). Mark Tully was a writer worthy of respect because of his sympathetic insight into a foreign culture. A great journalist. And according to Wikipedia, he resigned his post with the BBC after an argument with John Birt. Truly, he must be one of the angels!

And you're not going to see much argument with such a view from me in this post. I thought these nine stories of rural life in eastern Uttar Pradesh were fantastic. As he makes clear in his introduction to the book, Tully's one work of fiction has its roots in the same journalistic practise as all his other work. They grew out of this journalistic (self-) assignment when he realised that he needed to change more than names in order to protect some of the people he interviewed during his research. In this case, his specific interest was a desire to examine the impact of the changes India has been undergoing over the past few decades on the country's rural villagers, his choice of material partly inspired by the experience of a friend of his, Madhukar Upadhaya, who celebrated the 125th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth by repeating one of his great symbolic protests against the British, the Dandi salt march. According to Tully, about the villages he passed through (the same villages as did his illustrious predecessor), his friend informed him that 'The old village ways are dying out and nothing is replacing them.' On that basis, you might assume that these stories would contain a lament for the past, perhaps even a subsumed Western liberal guilt that it is Westernisation which is bringing about such changes, but that would be to misread the point I think both Tully and Madhukar are making. The problem is not that the old ways are dying out, but rather that there is 'nothing' to replace them.

In setting out his various reasons for choosing to set his stories in the eastern half of Uttar Pradesh, Tully makes it clear that it is because too many changes have already taken place in the western half, and that 'Not enough...' change has taken place further to the East in Bihar. So he's not harking back to any imagined golden age in the past, because some change is undoubtedly for the better, although of course some of his characters do so. Which is surely a very ordinary reaction to coping with changes in the society within which one finds oneself, when those changes have a direct effect on the life you are trying to live. It's a nostalgia which occurs to characters who are either sympathetic or unsympathetic, whilst other characters never experience such a feeling. The past is never privileged as better. Tully responds to the material of his stories then, not as a moralist, but as a journalist. As a writer, one might say. He's interested in the experience of change in itself and how it's effecting people at all levels of Indian rural communities for both good and ill.

If Tully has any ideological point to make with his stories then, it's a purely literary one. His complaint in the introduction is that much of the best known Indian writing of recent decades has concentrated on the urban middle-class and ignored the plight of villagers. He mentions no names here, but I assume that the target of his complaint is the mass of Indian writing in English that has become so prominent since the success of Rushdie.

Which is interesting in itself, since Tully a writer who, for all that by this point must have spent the majority of his life in India, and was even born in Calcutta, apparently still regards himself as a British writer. It's clear from his writing that his intended audience is a British one who may be unfamiliar with some of the details of the culture about which he writes. So on the very first page of the opening story, we have an exchange such as this:

One young man, whose hair had been stained even blacker than usual, said, 'Now we've got to sing the faag of Krishna. After all, that's what Holi is about: Braj, the home of Lord Krishna.'

Another, wearing a cotton cap with 'Happy Holi' embroidered on it, laughed and said, 'Yes! Let's celebrate Krishna. He stole the clothes of the milkmaids while they were bathing at Vrindavan. Let's celebrate that.'

There's an attempt to mask the fact that this dialogue is just information for a foreign audience, that it's something no rural Indian would actually say on Holi, by the use of the words 'After all...,' indicating to his supposed audience that he's just telling them something they all know, but with the second speaker replying with just more information, it just feels clunky. There's a similar moment in a later story where an experienced, urban undergraduate discusses the concept of 'Eve teasing' with her roommate who is a sheltered, rural girl. Again, it's 'clunky'. It just doesn't quite feel right, breaking the air of vermisilitude the stories achieve so effectively in other respects, because occasional missteps such as this aside, these are otherwise excellent stories. I particularly liked the way a number of the stories would begin with one character who would then be forgotten as the story followed the consequences set in turn by their actions, almost like a daisy chain structure. It's a wonderful fictional take on the links connecting people within any complex society, giving a real sense of the size of India's society within quite a small space.

So it's interesting then that he identifies his literary rivals as a group of writers from his adopted country (many of whom actually seem to live abroad, writing about an India which is 'back home'). It's also absolutely right though, since apart from the known facts about the author's biography, these are Indian stories, about Indian characters and situations, with an Indian writer (Prenchand) as their author's acknowledged model. Part of Tully's fictional response to the welcome he feels he has received from the country is to write about India without any British presence in his narratives. It's a growing interest of mine: by this point I've got a growing shelf of unread Indian fiction and non fiction, by both Indian and non-Indian writers. And as I read more Anglo-Indian fiction, I may find other examples of English writers who achieve a similar feat, but I suspect that most are in some way or other concerned with writing about British people in India, even if India was home for them. It's understandable, and a perfectly valid subject of course, one which many Indian writers have also engaged with, but it's great to see a writer who identifies himself as British deciding to do something else.

In contrast then, whatever his intended audience might be, Mark Tully is interested not in the relationship between India and somewhere else, but in India as it is, the rural India he has researched and experienced. He's apparently proud of the fact that friends have told him that all of them have the feel of authenticity, that they all depict situations which could have happened, precisely as he depicts them. Personally, I think he should be equally proud of the fact that they also have the imagination of great fiction, going beyond reality in the way in which all good fiction does.

"India always changes people"

"Edward Said was right!"

Or so a friend responded when I joked on Facebook that visiting India had inspired a greater appreciation of Cricket, and a liking for tea, so clearly by visiting the country, I am becoming more English. Obviously, I'm defining 'English' here in terms of a rather dated cliche, but that's the joke. It's one we all recognise. We define our national identities and stereotypes in opposition to others, which strikes me as a fairly obvious observation, but perhaps it was new when Edward Said first made it (clearly, I really need to finally get around to reading Orientalism). My wife reminded me of my joke when we were discussing the line 'India always changes people', and Prawer Jhabvala's presentation of India in her 'Passage to India'-type narrative. In a few trivial ways, India clearly has changed me! And of course, marriage has changed me too.

I think the line jumped out at me, even when it appears on only the second page, because it seems so at odds with what is the largely disillusioned, 'matter of fact' tone of voice in which the novel is narrated. It's that tone of disillusionment which makes me find the novel's depiction of India so potentially iniquitous. And besides her pregnancy, something which after all can just as easily take place anywhere else, it's hard to see how the narrator's experiences in India have changed her. Possibly it's a fault of the retrospective tone in which her experiences are inevitably cast by the first person narration, but there's no sense that she is looking back on an earlier self from a now changed vantage point. She seems just as spoilt and self enclosed a person at either end of the book.

But the 'India always changes people' line did resonate with what I think is now a somewhat dated Western ideal of India. The idea that it's all 'like, really, really spiritual, yeah?'. The ideal which drove young people in the 60s and 70s to follow the hippy trail, an ideal which was still current when I was growing up (my wife tells me that the ridiculous 90s Britpop band Kula Shaker were really popular in India, which just makes me cringe). I'm being unfair here perhaps, since it could be a genuine attempt to come to terms with another culture or spiritual tradition, but there is obviously a side to this which is just incredibly patronising. Westerners vacationing in a foreign culture which supposedly has access to something more 'spiritual' than we have here.

But there's also that other side which probably goes right back to the 19th century if not further, which is bound up with the ways in which many British discovered that they loved the people and places they found (it was William Dalrymple's White Mughals which first made me aware that the relationships between the British and the subject people they eventually colonised were a lot more complicated that a simple view of the British rise at it's imperial height would lead one to suspect). It's an ideal which relies on the very size of the country, against which the individual self becomes swallowed up. It's partly the very size of the country and the presence of so many people which defeats Rumer Godden's community of nuns. Yet it doesn't have to be threatening. For the hero of Ruskin Bond's A Room on the Roof, it's exactly that sense of size which is so appealing. The vastness of the land and its culture into which he is escaping allows him a partial freedom from his prior identity and role in the oppressive British community.

I would think it's an ideal which still has some currency, although these days it's one which has at the very least been partially replaced, by the ideal of the country as an economic powerhouse, one of those 'Asian' economies from which the Tory right think in this country now seem to think we can learn from so much (even as they simultaneously overlook the fact that all of these Asian economies also have much more powerful states than we do in Britain). It's just as reductive stereotype of course, as any image of a nation inevitably is, but it's interesting that it's one which equally relies on a sense of size, whether that's the number of people, of resources, of economic growth. It's always larger than our small island.

Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

I've still only read two novels by R.K. Narayan. My first encounter with him is described here, and whilest I certainly enjoyed it and liked many things about it, I don't think I was quite as taken with it as I thought I might be when I sat down to read the opening pages. My second encounter, The Man-eater of Malgudi, was read in India, at my in-laws' flat in Bombay, last Easter. I don't really imagine that it was the experience of reading him in India that made the difference. After all, the suburbs of modern bombay are a world away from the sleepy small town in Southern India where most of Narayan's fiction takes place. And it's basically the same plot, with a 'weaker', gentler character been taken advantage of by a more aggresive character before the status quo is restored. Of course, I don't mean to underplay the subtlety and depth of both books.

Something that struck me in the appreciate introduction from Pico Iyer (wonderfully, and cheekily titled 'Midnight's Uncle'), and which will explain why I've started this post by refering to a different writer from the post's title, was his joky aside that Narayan was writing 'Long before the Booker prize seemed to be an Indian colony...', an assumption about the Booker which I'm sure I've seen elsewhere. Only, if you look at the actual list of Booker prize winners, after the epocal victory of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, we had to wait over 15 years until 1997 for the next Indian winner, since when, we've had two more. It's certainly an impressive number if compared to the literatures from the rest of the Commonwealth, and in fairness to Iyer, he appears to have written his piece in 2009, when there had been two Indian winners in three years, but four winners out of 30 years still sounds a little like hypobole.

Interestingly, if we look at the list of winners before Rushdie, from 1969 to 1980, there are three winners which are works by 'British' authors set in India, and concerned with the legacy and the realities of British colonialism in India. No wonder the prize aquired something of a reputation for indulging in post-colonial guilt and self-flagellation.

Heat and Dust. It's a marvelously evocative title, isn't it? The coupling of those two elements conjours up a hazy image of India's past under the British Raj, an image which is assisted by my edition through the choice of period photograph for it's cover illustration. Of course, this is an historical fiction which has now itself been historicised, the mid-70s vantage point from which it is told now as much a part of history as the 1920s it looks back upon. In it's confrontation of the clash between India and Britain in the context of the Empire and it's aftermath, it's twin narratives clearly intended as a microcosm of wider relationships, it's perhaps a little unfair to say that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gets around the difficulty of avoiding privilaging one culture over another by making nearly all of her characters equally unlikeable. So, most of the Indians appear to be fraudulant and coniving, the English characters either arrogant or gullible.

Yes, it's a little unfair, but not entirely inaccurate. In a nice note, our unnamed narrator, visiting India to trace the history of her step-grandmother who absconded with an Indian Nawab back in the 1920s, acknowledges that there wasn't actually anything particularly special about Olivia. Superficially, she might appear more sympathetic than the other British inhabitiants of 1920s Satipur, able to see through the lies the British characters use to justify their pressence in the country, but ultimately she is little more than a rather spoilt, bored young woman. Only I'm not sure that our nameless narrator is really much more appealing. Mirroring her grandmother's story, she also falls pregnant, following an affair with Inder Lal, an Indian clerk whose house she rents a room from, and who struggles with his mother's choice of a wife who is somewhat less deucated than him. Despite his betrayal of his wife in their affair, he actually remains one of the more appealing characters in the book. At least he has some life to him, with his worries about his work and his marriage, in contrast to the books rootless cosmopolitan narator, who lacks not only a name but also any visible means of economic support, and who views everyone she meets with the same kind of mildly patronising superiority. It's also not entirely clear why it's so important for her to be in India, since it appears that she learns all of her Olivia's story from her grandmother's letters and ends by acknowledging that there's no way she can learn of what happened to Olivia after she left her husband for the Nawab's court and family.

As evocative as it is, is the title entirely fair? Googling for information about Amit Chaudhuri a while back, I came across an interview in which he complains about this very title as representative of a totalising, even patronising view of India in historical fiction about the Raj, whereby this huge country, containing a vast range of different landscapes and cultures within it's borders, is reduced to a few comfortable cliches. He has a point. India in this novel is a land of widow burning and fraudulant gurus. Satipur may be a real place, but the choice to set the narrative their (literally, the town's name is 'place of Sati', the custom of widow burning which wasn't very widespread until the british decided they needed to suppress such a barbaric custom). It only seems to emphasise Prawer Jhabvala's attempts to produce a story which is emblamatic of both India as a whole and of the colonial relationship between Indians and the British.

In which case, I can't help feeling the story is perhaps to slight, too glib, to support such a metaphorical weight. True, she has no time for cliches. There's nothing romantic or enobling about the cross-cultural relationship. For the Nawab, it's just the actions of a bored, spoilt young man who is used to always getting what he wants. A point which is underlined by the pressence of another Westerner, the homosexual Harry, who is unable to adjust to the climate, also present at the Nawab's court. He's also a prolifigate bankrupt, whose small kingdom is ultimately taken under British control. The young man following the hippy trail in the 1970s whom the narrator also becomes involved with in India ends up hating the country and everything he feels it represents. Beneath the elegantly written surface, there's something really quite savage here, close to misanthropy even. Which is bracing, and does perhaps capture something of the Raj and its legacy quite effectively.

I certainly don't regret reading it, even if the writing does contain such inanities as 'India always changes people', a cliche about India which I think has been held by many British over the years (see Black Narcissus for another example), one which was at the heart of the hippy dream about India in the 60s and 70s and which is skewered mercilessly along with everything else. It's difficult to know how to take this, since it occurs within the main text. Does Prawer Jhabvala intend her readers to find her nameless narrator contemptible? I don't think all readers would find her so unsympathetic as I do, and there's little to indicate this narrator should be taken as unreliable. It's not that kind of book. But not only does she lack a name, we actually learn very little about her. She tells us about the people she meets and places she visits, but little about herself beyond the bare fact of her family relationships. Consequently, she comes to feel as though she's a partial stand in for her creator, her opinions on India derived from her, an author who can presumably tell us about the country with authority, married to an Indian and living in Delhi for so many years. Like I say, ultimately, I found I wasn't entirely convinced. It's picture of the country feels a little too pat in it's unrelenting negativity, as bad in some ways as the colonial mindset Prawer Jhabvala is trying to critique. It's not that she describes anything which couldn't, or hasn't occured, just that it seems to leave a little too much out.

Unpacking my Library...

...yes, I am!