"The old stones were quiet here..."

The old stones were quiet here, polished by the footfalls of the years. Gandhi and Jinnah must have walked up this stretch, founding fathers of two nations; the same basalt flagstones offered a place to rest to beggars and itinerant vendors of fresh lemonade, second-hand textbooks, and handled-looking postcards that showed ten famous views of the city. Walking here, he felt that he walked among the great and insignificant of the past; all, alike, hurried as he did, for in this city even idlers liked to look as though they had somewhere to go smartly. All the clerks and petty officers; in their stream, he imagined his father, hurrying along with a set of proofs in a large envelope; he'd been proud, at one time, to do some printing for the university. It hadn't been a lucrative job, but had seemed to confer a diffuse glow of learning over all his work. A hundred and fifty years earlier this had been the beach, before the land reclamations; perhaps it was the murmur of waves one heard on the busiest days, through the endless talking of peons and passers-by, and the tumble of the red busses, the taxi-horns, the metallic steps of each person hurrying through the Fort.

Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park 

A long quote, from a novel I read some time early last year. One of many I wanted to write something about, but never got around to. It's far to late now.

If I remember correctly, what I wanted to write about this quote specifically, was how it seems to work as an allusion not to any specific novel or writer, but to that tendency in much Indian fiction in English to focus on the history and politics of post-colonial India in big, maximalist novels. Rushdie, Seth, Mistry, etc. Writing a novel of modern middle-class Mumbai, this is the only time Joseph alludes to India's history, and she is as concerned with noting the presence of 'insignificant' ordinary folk of Mumbai, going about their everyday business, which is explicitly contrasted with the great men of history, who appear only against the mass of present day reality. Where politics enters the narrative elsewhere, it's only as the irritating right wing opinions of an older relative, or else the idealistic environmentalism of a young neighbour. It appears early on in the novel, almost seeming to stand as a sign of what she's not going to do. Instead, her work is concerned with the interpersonal relationships of several characters connected by family and friendship, and with their individual experiences of living in modern Mumbai.

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Now, admittedly, my earlier post on Satyajit Ray was already long enough. Still, it's interesting to me to see that, in arguing against David Thomson's condescension to Ray, and having noted that an artist should not be expected to focus on the history and politics of their country, I then go on to argue for some of the ways in which Ray's films do actually open up to history, both colonial and post-colonial. I don't think that anything I wrote is wrong exactly - all art has a political dimension of course (the consequences of which is something which I was recently trying to grapple with in my most recent post) - but there is surely much which is easily left out of what the experience of an art work can actually mean when one is producing an explicitly political reading of a work. But if I'd wanted to try and address that there, it would have made an already very long piece even longer!

Now, I have no particular issue with reading art works for their latent political meaning - it can be a very productive way of examining a work and can produce valuable insights, and I find thinking about the social and historical contexts of a novel can be very invigorating, and certainly does;t have to exclude pleasure or enthusiasm - but I'm questioning here my own ingrained leap here to such a way of reading an art work. Is that really the reason why I fell in love with literature in the first place? Is it anyone's?

(In another context, it's also one of the ways in which, in Britain and America, and presumably elsewhere too, writers and filmmakers who come from elsewhere - specifically Asia or Africa - or else emerge from immigrant communities, can be condescended to. The unspoken expectation is that they must comment in some way on the historical and political experience of the countries or communities from which they come - they're expected to explore this for an audience which is implicitly white and British. Certainly I've seen writers expressing dismay at this 'othering' and pursuit of bogus authenticity. Aminatta Forma, in The Guardian, just last year, complaining about the labelling that both fuels and results from this unspoken assumption. Inevitably, the only book of hers I've read is her first book, her memoir of her father and Sierra Leone.)

Anjali Joseph doesn't venture far outside of her own experience in Saraswati Park, writing about the middle class Bombay in which she grew up and presumably knows as an adult from trips back. But her main characters are both men. Actually, the stories of both are hardly particularly novel - a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality, an older man coming to the realisation that he's been taking his wife for granted for years - but it's beautifully written. And as I've tried to articulate above, what's most refreshing is her refusal to overtly tie her story to explicitly political or national concerns. Nothing wrong with that, surely. Equally, it can be just as enthralling to observe the lives and intimate characters of several middle class individuals and their movement through both public and private spaces and the city. It's a novel which contains a lot of travel, of people getting about by foot or by train. Inevitable in a modern city like Mumbai, perhaps, but it's lovely to see it depicted so lovingly here.