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.
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