It's great to be Punjabi!

It's a complaint I've seen frequently made in the context of African music or literature: simply, that to ascribe a single cultural identity to an entire continent that is the size of Africa is cultural blinkered at best, and outright racist at it's worst.

My ongoing education in and enjoyment of Hindi cinema (or Bollywood, as it is now popularly known) is teaching me something very similar about India. India at least, is a single nation, unless you want to include Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of the 'single nation' which was broken at the original moment of Independence/Partition in 1947 (but that is to be far more politically contentious than I either wish, or even feel qualified to be here). Yet, it's also a collection of federal states, all with their particular individual cultures and languages, a palimpsest of the many different cultures and rulers that have existed in the subcontinent. It's sobering to think that the only language which is spoken across the entire subcontinent is English. Indeed - and enough people have told me this, so I take it to be true - despite efforts on behalf of Hindi, it's still not really spoken in the South of the Subcontinent, seen as a cultural imposition in a way that English is not (and English is after all the international language of the world - business, academia, etc.).

It may only be an inadvertent consequence of the particular writers I've read, but I realised a while ago that, aside from R.K. Narayan, all of the Indian writing I've read comes either from the North, or else from Bombay. Is this just a consequence of the particular books which are available to me, especially in Britain? I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but one of the unfortunate consequences of the rise of Indian writing in English over the last few decades is that it has also flattened our view of the subcontinent. Arguably Rushdie's real lasting influence after his Booker win with Midnight's Children was not his style of magic realism, but rather his concern with Indian history and politics, and the sense that the Indian nation could be encapsulated entire in Very Big Books.

Bollywood of course, is only one particular film industry in India. As an arthouse film enthusiast, the first Indian filmmaker I encountered was naturally Satyajit Ray. When I first saw The Chess Players and Pather Panchali as an undergraduate, as far as I was concerned I was watching 'Indian' cinema. I knew that his work was different from Indian popular cinema (if I even had much of an idea of what that is at that point), but that was only because all arthouse cinema is culturally positioned adjacent to more popular work. And from what I understand, Ray was also a filmmaker who was concerned to position himself as very different from the majority of cinema produced in India (whether this was because he knew that he had a substantial audience abroad, or for reasons of cultural snobbery, I don't rightly know; likely it was some combination of the two). Now of course, I would contextualise his work as part of Bengali cinema, even though I've still seen very few Bengali films.

Right, this is a much longer preamble that what I intended to write, when all I really wanted to do was post a couple of videos! Like humour, cultural and regional stereotypes are one of the hardest things to translate. So I'm very lucky to have the Punjabi girl I'm married to sitting next to me when I watch some of these films, as she can explain cultural nuances and stereotypes when Bollywood uses them. And the more I see, the more I'm starting to recognise. Something I have noticed is the presence of Punjab. Part of this is probably down to the presence of so many Punjabis in the industry both in front of and behind the camera. Or so I am told this is the case. The presence of song and dance numbers in Bollywood films - one of the main things which signals 'Bollywood' to foreigners like me - may even be down to the use of musical numbers in traditional Punjabi theatre. When sound arrived in Hindi cinema, they were the natural people to employ in the industry, since they already had a strong tradition of acting, and so the theatrical traditions were also imported into the new sound cinema (no doubt the actual history is a lot more complicated than this). Of course, we used to have musicals in English language cinema too, and that was probably a similar theatrical influence from Broadway to Hollywood. It just wasn't part of the whole of the English language theatrical tradition (which means we have some missed opportunities; just imagine Jimmy Cagney's gangster films with added musical numbers - White Heat with songs! - you can't tell me it wouldn't have been awesome!).

One of the commentators on the second video below complains about all the Punjabi references in contemporary Hindi cinema, which potentially fails or slights audiences from other backgrounds that Hindi cinema should(?) also be serving. It doesn't strike me as an entirely unreasonable complaint, although it feeds into the idea that Hindi cinema is the Indian 'national' cinema, responsible for representing the entire nation in a way that other Indian regional cinemas are not expected to do. But on the other hand, I'm married to a Punjabi girl, so for me personally, I'm happy to go along with songs which celebrate Punjabi wedding songs:

Or which appears to amount to little more than 'Being Punjabi is awesome!':

Shot in a single take!

"...all that had been simple, unquestioned and changeless changed."

Attia Hosain, Phoenix Fled

A few more points:

- Firstly, it seems that I was right. There's an interview with Attia Hosain from 1991, where she says that she 'did not read much about Urdu literature except when I had to', and was 'totally influenced by the West'. So in her introduction to Virago's 1988 reissue, Anita Desai is constructing a rather facile opposition between India and 'the West' in emphasising the supposed influence of Urdu literature on her work.

- In my previous post I suggested that these stories were 'works of memory'. It is interesting that Attia Hosain produced so little fiction. Her other published work consists of a single novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and a cookery book, Cooking the Indian Way (in collaboration with Sita Pasricha), which I imagine must have seemed terribly exotic when it appeared in 1967! There are lots of reasons why an author only publishes one or two works, and Attia Hosain did leave behind more stories, and an unfinished second novel. She was also a broadcaster and journalist, but her son Waris does suggest there may be more to her literary silence following the publication of her novel.

According to her biography she was producing stories as early as the late 30s. It's not clear if that includes all of the stories that were published in Phoenix Fled. Several of them were clearly written after 1947, since they reference the violence of Partition. It's the appearance of the collection in 1953, 5 or 6 years after she made the decision to remain in England rather than move to Pakistan, that I'm trying to construct this narrative around. Ultimately, it's a question of biography, which I don't have quite enough information to answer. Still, whenever they were actually written, they were at least published in 1953. For any reader then or since, these are stories of a world which was and is located in the past. The act of publication works as the means of recuperation.

- As I've alluded to above, the historical moment which separates the past that these stories depict from the present of the 50s in which they first appeared as part of a book is not just Independence in 1947, but more significantly, the violence of Partition which accompanied it. Since reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns a while back, I've become interested in this notion that in the north of India in particular, despite the huge differences between the two faiths, there was actually a comfortable mixing and sharing between the cultures of Hindus and Muslims, a shared culture that was to a large extent ripped apart and destroyed in the aftermath of Partition. And that there were Muslims who believed in this shared culture and were consequently opposed to the creation of Pakistan. Especially nowadays, I don't imagine that it's a voice which is often heard in either India or Pakistan.

The two stories which reference the violence do so obliquely. It's so subtle in fact, that I even had to reread the final few pages of the title story just to work out what was happening: it ends with the beginning of an act of violence, which is clearly the horrors of Partition. More effecting still is the bleak narrative of a young girl in the pertinently titled 'After the Storm'. Her account of what she has experienced emerges in fragments as she struggles to describe her experience. Experience which, mercifully perhaps, she appears unable to fully comprehend. The narrator who is encouraging her to talk similarly looks away from what is being described: the central moment of historical and personal trauma can't be faced directly.

- One final point, one I'm not sure that I know how to fully articulate: it's been strange to read this collection in the same week that also saw the transmission of the harrowing documentary 'India's Daughter' about Jyoti Singh, a film which I've not been able to get out of my mind since I saw it on Wednesday night. I suppose there's little which directly links them, other than my encountering both in the same week. Both are stories which have come out of India, separated by decades, the one fiction, the other tragically, horrifically real. Many of Attia Hosain's stories are concerned with women's experience of a deeply patriarchal culture, and it's difficult not to find the concerns of these very different works resonating together in my mind.

Currently reading...

...and here's a wonderful connection between things I'm interested in: her son, Waris Hussein, was director for the first four episodes of Doctor Who, as well as a later serial 'Marco Polo'. He seems to be an interesting person in his own right, but of course, it's being the very first director of Doctor Who for which he'll always be most remembered. I love his own memories of it:

"[I was] a graduate from Cambridge with honours, and you're directing this piece about cavemen in skins...I thought, 'Where have I landed up in my life?'"

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On the face of it, it seems such a delightfully odd juxtaposition. Stories of pre-partition feudal North India, and the first story of what now seems to be an almost quintessentially English science fiction show for the BBC. The Sceenonline profile argues for a consistent interest in 'female psychology' throughout Waris Hussain's work. Certainly what I've read of his mother's work suggests a concern with the roles available to women within a feudal patriarchal society.

In her introduction to my edition, Anita Desai tries to make a connection with the Mughal school of miniature painting and the influence of Urdu. This feels rather a stretch to me - a touch of exoticism for a Western audience that is being reintroduced to an Indian author - but even allowing for that, there's surely equally a modernist influence. A concern with the confrontation between an older feudal India and modernity. These are also works of memory, describing a world which by that point no longer existed - written after Attia Hosain decided to remain in England following Partition in 1947. So the bridge between tradition and modernity, which I'm rather artificially setting up here with my somewhat comical juxtaposition, was present in her life.

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Other family connections: her niece is the Pakistani author and journalist Muneeza Shamsie, and her great niece the novelist Kamila Shamsie. Quite a family!

I'm reminded of something I once read in an interview with Martin Amis, when he was promoting his autobiography. Part of the the inspiration for writing Experience was that he wanted to record his relationship with his father. This fact, two successful writers in the family, one the parent to the other, was a 'special case'. Even at the time, I thought this was off. Just of the top of my head I could think of Dumas pere et fils. Now I can see how his claim is part of the romanticising of the writing life. As though plenty of people don't follow their parents into similar or related careers.

And what about siblings? The Brontes? A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Vidia and Shiva Naipaul? Or is it only parents and children that count. The literal act of generation paralleling the metaphorical one of literary production.

It's also about opportunity. How many writers had parents who nursed ambitions, but never made it into print? Or who might have done once or twice? Or worked in journalism? How many mothers or grandmothers had gifts for storytelling, but never even dreamed of making it into print? So yes, I think it's a rather gendered claim which sees only certain kinds of writing, of literary art, as worthy of importance.

As so often with Amis, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd been a bit less impressed with himself, he'd have been a better writer.

Isobel Colegate, The Summer of the Royal Visit

Allow me to begin with a digression about Gosford Park. Whilst it’s certainly a great film, it has one major flaw. No, I’m not referring to Stephen Fry’s inspector, although his performance does feel feel like a major tonal misjudgement with the rest of the narrative. An intrusion into this naturalistic and closely observed world of a character who surely properly belongs in a parody of Agatha Christie. In fact, I’d argue that it almost manages to unbalance the rest of the film. No, the film’s real major flaw is retrospective: the boost that it appears it gave to the career of Julian Fellowes. I’ve read somewhere that little of his actual script survives, that it was used primarily as a basis for the improvisations of the cast. If that is the case, then we should be grateful that the producers engaged the services of Robert Altman, giving the ageing American filmmaker the opportunity to produce a final late (almost) masterpiece.

Nevertheless, Fellows’s script shared in the adulation - didn’t it win awards? - and now we have Downton Abbey. Personally I’d thought that Downton Abbey was nothing more than recycled story lines stolen from Upstairs, Downstairs, only this time from the point of view of the masters. A waste of my time, so I’ve not bothered to watch it. Only a lot of people appear to have latched onto Isobel Colegate’s 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, as a source, taking it as a guide to work out what might happen in future episodes (although surely the end is easy to predict; the aristocracy declines and the house is now administered by the National Trust, assuming it wasn’t demolished after the Second World War. In other words, History happens, despite whatever the nostalgic longings of the creators and audience might wish for). The Shooting Party has recently been republished as a Penguin Classics, with an admiring introduction from Fellowes (Fellowes seems to have a sideline in providing introductions to books which can be made to fit into his idealised reactionary view of an idealised British past), although I think I’m correct in saying that he hadn't actually had read the book when he created Downton Abbey.

*

The Shooting Party was itself made into a film in 1985 - in outline it sounds very like that ur-text of the country house narrative, Le Regle de Jue - and won awards. It’s clearly the work of hers which is going to be remembered before the rest of her work. My paperback of her later 1991 novel already advertises itself on the cover as being by the ‘Author of…’. No doubt because of the film.

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“I can do all sorts of voices. I’m virtually a ventriloquist.”

What I wasn’t expecting to find when I started reading The Summer of the Royal Visit was such a visionary novel. A novel which is much closer in feel to the writing of Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt than the kind of historical fiction with which I was mentally associating her work. It makes me eager to actually read The Shooting Party, and wonder what kind of novel I’m going to find.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t provide plenty of the pleasures of historical fiction. There’s plenty of finely judged detail of the past. We’re in a period which is towards the end of Victoria’s reign, in a provincial city which is now a faded reflection of its former glory. I take it to be Bath, with the references to the healing waters, but it’s only ever referred to as ‘the City’, or else more intimately as ‘our City’. Two larger entwined public events overshadow the narrative: the royal visit of the title in which Victoria blesses the opening of a new library and presides over a royal procession through the City, and an architectural competition over the design for a new hotel which is at least partly intended to revive the fortunes and reverse the decline of the City.

In the foreground we have a varied cast which includes the dignitaries and provincial nobility of the City, retired soldiery, a deceitful scholar engaged in a study of the Druids, a theosophist, a priest struggling with his faith, and a youthful poet who is suffering from consumption.

Described like that, it might easily sound as though many of the characters are all late Victorian cliches. There’s something in that I suppose, although Colegate is careful not to simply give in to cliche. Her consumptive poet, Peter Tilsley, dies before producing any work of significance. Yet far from being an undiscovered genius, a Keats at the other end of the century, we're explicitly told that his work is mostly sentimental and without a great deal of merit. He’s actually the type who longs to produce work of real visionary quality, but who simply lacks the talent. We can say that all great writers start with the longing to be a writer, but there must be as many (if not more) who have the same longing but are never able to achieve their ambitions. Sometimes this will be because they are unable or unwilling to put in the work required, but as often it must be because they simply lacked the necessary talent.

But in many ways, these are as much our ‘cliches’ of the Victorian past, an attempt to rediscover the doubt and sexuality that we imagine must have lurked behind the stiff facade of Victorian culture as it's come down to us. The pieces that novelists of the time were unable (or unwilling) to include. The central character in the novel (if it can be said to have one) is one Stephen Collingwood, a priest who has buried himself in his vocation following the death of his wife in childbirth, but finds himself unable to properly connect with the impoverished parishioners among whom he lives, and finds himself doubting his faith.

There’s also a modern narrator providing us with the story the story. A retired historian, he’s a familiar figure from works such as Graham Swift’s Waterland and Maureen Duffy’s Capital, equally visionary novels with ambiguous claims on history. Remaining nameless throughout, he intrudes at various points to discourse on both the past and his late twentieth-century present. His motives for researching this tale of his city stem from his reaction against the contemporary political situation of the world; he is “…simply looking for someone who went this way before me and left a sign on the wall beside the road.”

Ever so quietly then, this is a profoundly anti-Thatcher novel (it was published in 1991, after all). It speaks for the value of community, a value which is extended to all. It's not at all the kind of reactionary nostalgia which produces a work like Downton Abbey, but a novel that digs into the late Victorian past, exposing its nerve endings and moral failings. In fact, much of the material feels like it could  easily belong in an up to date novel about the contemporary early nineties, only displaced back a century or more. One of the secrets lurking behind the Victorian facade is the abuse of children, an issue that became incredibly prevalent in various parts of 90s culture. Arguably we still have a culture which is obsessed with childhood, for better or worse.

The other aspect of 90s culture, which we seem to have moved past in some ways as it's simultaneously become a part of the cultural air, is the popular desemination of post modernism. The winning hotel design for instance, first seen in a vision from the novel’s fake psychic, Madame Sofia, consists of, "Portals and porticos, arches, window on window, an immense thing, and then we have turrets and lookout posts and what can seem to be an little houses from Simla on the roof.” No doubt this is a parody of late Victorian eclecticism, but in it’s profusion of details and borrowed influences, it also feels inescapably postmodern. Elsewhere the city is repeatedly likened to a stage set.

The are no grand narratives. Nothing is certain here. We might even define it as a kind of ‘radical’ nostalgia.

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In theory (and goodness, hasn't post modernism generated a lot of theory!), post modernism elides any stable difference between the present and the past. I don't feel that that has ever been my experience though. The proliferation of pastiches and knowingly fake histories that postmodernism has produced seems rather to serve to reinforce a huge distance between the present and the past. It's a very discomforting sensibility.

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I’ll leave you with our narrator’s lovely, melancholy consideration of history's losses:

You can’t teach history for thirty years and be against change; equally you can’t help noticing that it nearly always brings loss as well as gain. The ratio is hard to determine afterwards and almost impossible at the time. 

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Actually, no, one more thing which I haven’t managed to fit into the main body of my review. Partly because I find it so confusing.

This is also a novel which is concerned to reclaim and acknowledge the visionary aspects of Victorian culture (hence the theosophist, Madame Sofia, and the research into Druids).

But this also creates a problem, in the character of Petchumah, the South Indian wife of Wilf, the retired soldier with whom Stephen Colegate lodges. The novel is clearly acknowledging the reality of Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that I think is often overlooked: the relationships which occurred between soldiers and women from the cultures they were ostensibly oppressing. It's not a meeting of equals between the two cultures, rather it's an acknowledgement of the messiness of humans, the fact that people can't be fitted straightforwardly into a convenient cliche. Consequently, Petchumah has been brought back to our cold island. We hear little of her own voice; mostly, she's talked about by other characters, including her husband. Neither of them are principal characters in the text. But I still feel that her presence in the text is one of its strengths, because it jars nicely with our  typical stereotype of what late Victorian reality and culture was like.

Like everyone else in the town she is viewing the royal procession, accompanied by her husband, Peter Tilsley and Stephen Colgate. As the monarch passes, Peter’s enthusiasm gets the better of him, and the writing rises to a genuinely visionary pitch:

Petchumah, so pushed forward, put her hands together in her traditional greeting and bowed her head in homage. The black-clad figure turned, leant forward, seemed to speak; the royal hands - both royal hands - were half outstretched. In this small northern city the might and mystery of India, the gardens, the temples, palaces, the tiger-haunted forests, the snow-covered hills, the stone-carved elephants four thousand years old, the sacred rivers, the merciless deserts, the ancient cruel gods, bowed in homage in the person of Petchumah in her cerise and blue and silver sari before the plump elderly widow of German extraction into whose slightly protuberant eyes an extraordinary tenderness had come. Again and again Petchumah made her obeisance. Again and again the palms, the plains, the crowded bazaars, the ancient suffering, the distant wisdom based themselves, and the outstretched hands seemed to wish to bless, and the royal lips when they moved to say - or at least Peter said that was what they had said - ‘Beloved India.’

It’s really hard to know quite how to take this passage, to understand what’s going on here. India is reduced to a series of familiar cliches (and it all sounds like rather a lot to place on the shoulders a poor single individual too). At the same time, Victoria’s mystique is punctured. Throughout her appearance in the novel the Queen's magnificence simply dazzles all of the residents of the City with whom she comes into contact. Here, we see her as she was, the elderly woman who would have much preferred to stay hidden away in mourning and had to be forced to engage with her subjects. At the same time, any safe notion of Englishness is complicated by the noting of the Queen’s ethnicity. So, seriously, what the hell is going on here? There’s undoubtedly something deeply offensive about it. But it also feels like an extraordinary balancing act? The writing is genuinely stirring, if also somewhat mystifying.

If anything, it feels as though the writing has got out of control of the author here. The novel contains several other genuinely visionary moments which are much more successfully achieved.

But it also alerts us to a potential pitfall of the visionary mode: it all depends on just whose vision you’re in.

Notes on 'All-Consuming Fire'

Andy Lane, Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire (1994)

I was going to read this eventually.

- All-Consuming Fire is the 27th in a series of novels known as the 'Virgin New Adventures'. Between June 1991 and May 1997, a total of 61 novels were published, which continue the adventures of Sylvester McCoy's Doctor from the end of the classic series. It was cancelled in the wake of the TV movie co-produced with a number of American companies and starring Paul McGann. The BBC then took the fiction in house for a line of 'Eighth Doctor Adventures' lasting until June 2005, when that was also cancelled in the wake of the revised series. Between 1997 and 2005, they managed a total of 70 volumes. From what I've been able to gather from the various blogs and sites I hang around, although they featured some of the same writers, for a number of reasons, the 'Virgin New Adventures' were generally superior to the succeeding line. A high watermark for fiction spun off from a science fiction franchise (a low bar to clear, admittedly).

- There were also lines of 'Missing' and 'Past Doctor' adventures, short story collections, and other fiction lines. With the new series, we have a new line of fiction in a different trade dress again. It's all archived on Wikipedia, but still, faced with what must be well over two hundred books by this point, one has to wonder where to start.

- This wasn't a problem when I was a child, devouring 'Target' novelisations, most of which were written by Terrence Dicks, a man whose debt to child literacy in this country is for most part completely overlooked. Despite the fact that it was obviously exactly the sort of thing I would love, I adamantly refused to watch Doctor Who when I was a child, in the belief that it was too frightening for me. It was only because I switched on the TV after the credits had finished that I found myself watching what I now know was the final episode of Sylvester McCoy's serial 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. As it was the last episode, I missed the first sight of a Dalek flying. In addition, since it was the last episode, I can't have had any real idea about what was going on. Still, I was caught up in it, in the movement of events, and the sense that this was important. I loved it.

- Sylvester McCoy is 'my' Doctor as we say, and the aesthetic which was applied to the classic show in it's final years by then script editor Andrew Cartmell and the writers he brought on board became my default for how the Doctor Who should be. More than that actually, it was hugely formative in the development of my own taste. It was something I'd discovered for myself, and helped create a fascination with work that was difficult, strange, political, or surreal. I'm not sure how much of that influence has shown in what I've chosen to write about on this blog. There have been other formative influences, both before and since.

- The series ended the following year, so the 'Target' novelisations quickly became my source for a Doctor Who fix. Both my local and school libraries were well stocked - this was back in the days when such things still existed - and I read as many as I could find. As they no doubt were for many others, they were a means of discovering all that had happened in the past. It's only as an adult that I've finally seen as television programs some of the stories I read as a child. For me, initially at least, Doctor Who was something primarily textual, discovered through books, rather than something televisual. In prose, I found I preferred Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton's Doctors over John Pertwee or Peter Davison. Goodness knows what was surviving of their performances to cause that feeling. Perhaps it was the stories.

- The only one of the 'Virgin New Adventures' I read when it came out was Mark Gatiss' Nightshade, from early on in the range. I became interested in other things after that and largely forgot about Doctor Who. It became something to be embarrassed about ever having liked. I wanted to be serious and read things that were realistic. Not realising then the problems inherent in applying realism to fantastical material.

- The crucial difference between the novels produced to tie in to the new series, is that, like that old 'Target' books, they appear to be consciously marketed towards and written for a young audience. The fiction that appeared between 1991 and 2005 was marketed at an 'adult' audience. We need scare quotes there because 'adult' can also encompass things which, whilst they might be unsuitable for children, are also rather adolescent, so not exactly 'adult'. From what I understand, and on the basis of the few I've now read, some very fine science-fiction/fantasy novels were produced in all of the various lines.

- It's not just books, there are also audio adventures and comic strips, and spin off series from the spin offs, and goodness knows what else. If you're coming back to Doctor Who at a later date, and want to explore beyond the television show, where do you start? At the beginning? I noted above that the 'Virgin New Adventures' are seen by many people as a high watermark of this type of fiction. That's their reputation at least. Individual books though, are going to be of variable quality. Owing to a combination of Virgin's admirable policy of looking for new writers (because they're cheap), low rates of pay, and the need to produce a considerable amount of material against what I presume would be fairly tight deadlines, some of these 61 works of fiction will turn inevitably out to be crap.

- Good or bad, most writers on Virgin's series appear to have started out as fans, with little prior writing experience (at least as professional authors). That so many turned out to be capable writers, that several of them have have managed to sustain substantial writing careers beyond their start with Virgin, should perhaps be considered something of a minor miracle. But it's also a testament to the talent that was present in that generation of fans. Most of it seems to be formula fiction of one type or another - Paul Cornell has written for Marvel and DC comics, Andy Lane has produced a series of 'Young Sherlock Holmes' stories - but whatever. Formula fiction is capable of greatness, given a talented author. And in any case: I'm reading fiction which was spun off from a children's science fiction show here. There's no need to be sniffy.

- Granted, some of the TV show was also pretty ropey. There seem to be few stories which are outright hated by everyone, but that's less of a concern in any case. I'm happy to devote a few hours of my life to a film or television serial which is a bit rubbish, but I have less patience with novels. They take a little longer to get through, especially if they're not very well written. This isn't just a question of taste. I've read Sax Rohmer and Ian Flemming, for instance. But I find it almost physically difficult to read something which is too badly written. And faced with 61 books? Or with over 200 if I try and take it all in? I'll just focus on the highlights, thanks. Thankfully there are more than enough fan sites and reviews to help me guide my choices.

- By this point in the 'New Adventures', the Doctor is accompanied by Ace and Bernice Summers. Bernice was introduced in Paul Cornell's Love and War. She was a sufficiently successful character that following the loss of the Doctor Who licence in 1997, Virgin continued the 'New Adventures' with Bernice as the lead character for a further 23 novels. She continues to feature in audios and novels to this day. In All-Consuming Fire she shares the role of narrator with Watson.

- The Doctor is a character who unquestionably has his roots in the kind of imperialist adventure fiction of which Sherlock Holmes is a part.

- A quote:

"The [Doctor] is represented as a restoration of the traditional colonial hero. Even his costumes - Edwardian frock-coats or cricket whites, smoking jackets or Bohemian garb - recall the period of the height of British imperial power. He's presented as the ideal of colonial liberalism: an objective, asexual saviour-explorer - a scientist whose only greed is for knowledge - a man who's out neither for himself nor for a bit of the Other - a post-gendered gunless wonder - an upper-middle-class eccentric licensed by the establishment - a revolutionary who can't change history..." 

Alec Charles, 'The Ideology of Anachronism: Television, History and the Nature of Time', Time and Relative Dimensions on Space, ed. David Butler

- All-Consuming Fire isn't even the first time that the characters of the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes have been juxtaposed.

And just in case we've forgotten this famous television story, on ethat's beloved by a certain generation of fans, All-Consuming Fire includes several references to characters and situations from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Watson encounters Tom Baker's doctor in his Victorian garb in a dream. The 7th Doctor is currently staying with Professor Litefoot. A previous, untold adventure for Holmes and Watson saw them encounter the 'Walking Ventriloquist's Dummy'.

- It's an obvious idea. Only a couple of months later, John Peel's 'Missing Adventure' Evolution would team up with Arthur Conan Doyle and apparently inspire the creation of Holmes. I understand that it's not a very good book, but I love the idea of a self contradictory fictional universe in which Sherlock Holmes both is and isn't real. Holmes and Watson appear in a later 'New Adventure' and several other spin offs. The 2008 audio adventure The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel is apparently something of a sequel to All-Consuming Fire, but I've not listened to it myself.

- In it's first half the novel is essentially an effective Conan Doyle pastiche into which the destabilising worlds of Doctor Who and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos are intruding. Employed by the Pope (!), Holmes and Watson are investigating the theft of several forbidden books which have been stolen from the secret library of St John the Beheaded. These books tell of mythical beasts and gateways to other worlds. The trail leads them to India and the villainous Baron Maupertius, whose plan is explicitly linked with imperial conquest. For the last third of the novel, the novel shifts to the alien planet of Ry'leh. The alien landscape is fairly well imagined, but it's a far less compelling place compared to the Victorian London of the novel's first half.

- Andy Lane is clearly proud of his research. Right at the end, in an epilogue, Ace and Bernice question the Doctor about some of the aspects of Victorian London that Watson mentions in his narrative such as, for example, the presence of strychnine in beer. Yes, the Doctor assures them, it was all true. It has the distinct feeling of an author patting himself on the back. But, to be fair, these details taken from research into the period also gives the sections of the novel set on earth a texture which is lacking in sections set on what is, after all, a made up place.

- It's a version of Barthes' 'reality effect' that's probably common to a lot of historical fiction. Details create the world. One of the eternal problem for any writer of fiction set in the past must surely be the issue of research. How to introduce enough detail into the narrative to convince that the fiction is set in the past without overwhelming that reader with excessive detail, or without it appearing too obviously as research, not fully enclosed in the narrative. Having a native of the period narrate is certainly one way of solving the problem, although of course they're not necessarily going to notice the kind of details that we would. Vithal Rajan can have Watson notice all sort of historical details about India because he's a visitor to the country where much is new to him. In All-Consuming Fire Watson appears to be discovering a social conscience in order that Holmes may lecture him on the condition of the lower classes. It doesn't quite work, but it's a good effort. Later in the novel, once he's encountered Ace and Bernice, Watson compares them to the women of his own time. Unfortunately he seems to be thinking more of the women of modern Victorian cliche rather than what they may have actually been like. Is seems that Andy Lane's research only goes so far.

- It's also a very textual world. Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is fictional, but otherwise this is a world in which fictional characters mingle with reality. The references to Doctor Who's past includes Redvers Fenn-Cooper from the 7th Doctor story Ghost Light. From Holmes' adventures we have Inspector Lestrade (alongside Inspector Aberline and Walter Dew) and the giant rat of Sumatra. There is also Fu Manchu; the lost dictionary of the Khazars (alongside a reference to Fermat's last theorem; it was published in 1994 after all); a smart missile from Iain Banks' culture series; Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger is out of the country but John Roxton puts in an appearance in India; Charles Beauregard is present at the Diogenes Club (and Mack "the Knife' Yeovil feels like it could be a reference to Kim Newman's pseudonym, as well as The Threepenny Opera). It's not as densely referenced as Newman's work, but resides in the same ballpark. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was still a few years in the future.

- There's a wonderful sense of plenitude present in all of these works. Narrative plenitude. That's something I need to think some more about.

- The pastiche even extends to the inclusion of illustrations. This calls back to the way in which Sherlock Holmes was first published, in the Strand magazine, with illustrations. It also alludes to the 'Target' novels, which similarly came with illustrations. Unfortunately, they're not actually very good.

- Placing Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor together in a narrative which also takes them to imperial India is a fairly explicit attempt to confront the unpleasant aspects of that narrative tradition. Unfortunately, as Philip Sandifer has already pointed out on his blog, Andy Lane's attempts to do so really amount to little more than excessive liberal hand ringing and piety. For Sandifer it "feels like [the novel]’s trying to pay lip service to the fact that Victorian England was a deeply and horrifyingly flawed culture mostly so that it can enjoy the trappings of the culture in peace."

- Sandifer of course, appears unable to see Empire as anything other than it's accumulated imperialist horror and oppression and "scarred over wounds". Which isn't a terribly inaccurate judgement, if perhaps a little simplistic.

- Andy Lane's fiction revels in the trappings of a culture of whose worst parts he purports to disdain. He achieves this latter by having the Doctor, Ace and Bernice make thumpingly unsubtle comments about the evils of empire and colonialist expansion. As another commentator to Philip Sandifer's post points out, however reasonable some of the comments they make might be, it's done so awkwardly that they end up coming across as insufferably smug and self righteous individuals. When for example, Watson makes a point about how impressive the Suez canal is, the Doctor responds with an unpleasant rant about the small minded nature of 19th century imperialism. It's not just that this is a needlessly unpleasant response to an innocent remark that the journey to India has been made shorter by the canal (which is just a fact, whatever your feelings about 19th century imperialism). It's also problematic because the Doctor's method of putting Watson in his place by arguing that other cultures made the same achievement only ends up praising the acts of older empires of antiquity. Imperialism is fine it appears, when it's ancient and not perpetrated by the English.

- It's also not helped by the fact that Bernice is just a little bit racist. In her parts of the narrative, she first complains about the heat of India, and the smell, which is apparently worse than that experienced on any alien planet that she's ever visited. Which isn't wrong exactly. The heat was certainly the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane for my first visit (but then it was also the beginning of summer). But it's all so unsubtle: that's what everyone first notices! She also compares lower caste Indians to unfortunate accident victims, and the crowds about their trains in rail stations to cockroaches. Lovely.

- In Bernice's potted history of the country (unsurprisingly, she thinks it's a huge place - an oft encountered cliche), she mixes up Hindu and Muslim strictures about food. As Philip Sandifer rightly points out, an error such as this takes on a greater significance in the context of a novel which is also obsessed with pointing out the evils of imperialism. It undermines the point you're trying to make when you can't be bothered to get a simple thing right such as the fact that Hindus don't eat beef and Muslims don't eat pork.

- It could be an innocent error. These things do happen. Yet it appears in a book where Watson also casually claims that "Most Indian rulers are either Hindu or Muslim," as though the two faiths are interchangeable. The ruler they meet, Tir Ram, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, which is both a nice point about how the elite of the country were implicated with the colonial oppressor, and an attempt at undermining any stereotypes about colonial subjects. It's problematic though, because he's supposed to be the Nizam of a Muslim province (Jabalhabad), so why then does he have a Hindu name? I've read somewhere that it may be a reference to the villain of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - more intertextuality - which is not exactly unproblematic either.

- Really the depiction of Hinduism in this novel is pretty appalling. Apparently some fans were put out by the way in which a number of the Doctor's old foes are equated with particular old ones from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It is a fairly pointless retcon, adding little to the narrative. Personally though, I can't get very worked up about it when a religion that has over a billion adherents, which includes my in-laws, is also being insulted. The chanting of Cthulhu cultists is explicitly compared to Indian "tribesmen" by Watson at one point. Thuggees were actually worshipping Lovecraft's old ones. They mistook the alien planet of Ry'leh for the realm of Shiva because, you know, Indians are just ignorant savages who wouldn't know any better.

- On reflection, perhaps 'pretty appalling' is rather shrill? Any insult is clearly the result of carelessness rather than any active malice. Nothing here is especially offensive unless one is particularly earnest about these things. It only appears more offensive than it might actually be because the author is intent on both foregrounding his research and attempting to make a point about nineteenth century British imperialism. Which is perhaps only to restate what Philip Sandifer has already said on his blog. He is, after all, the Doctor Who expert.

- So yes, this is a novel that is an awful lot of fun in places if you like the kind of material/tropes with which it is playing. And I admit that I do. You can have a great time with at least the first half, as the insanity of Lovecraft and the mischief of the Doctor intrudes into the utterly rational world of Sherlock Holmes. There's a proper appreciation of how both of those worlds just don't fit into the rational scheme of Sherlock Holmes (consequently Holmes goes to pieces once the characters follow the villains to Ry'leh). But it's also a novel that, in attempting to confront something important, has swallowed some really unpleasant material. Whilst elsewhere it's good intentions are just clumsily handled. Perhaps Andy Lane just wasn't up to all of the challenges he set himself with his novel. Or it may just be that some of these problems are inherent in the material itself.

- It could just be that this kind of popular fiction isn't the best place to explore the legacy of British imperialism in India. Only, of course, we have the example of Vithal Rajan.

Amit Chaudhuri quotes

It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always pre-natal, pre-nascent....It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the 'cabins' of North Calcuttam who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of those moments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. 

Afternoon Raag (1993)

History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history.

Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013) 

Sherlock Holmes vs. the Evil Empire!

Holmes of the Raj, by Vithal Rajan

Now, this is a fantastic idea. In fact it's such a good one, that Vithal Rajan wasn't even the first to have it. Take the popular character of late nineteenth-century fiction with whom we're all familiar and confront him with the realities of the British Empire. The Empire which hovers somewhere in the background of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. Of course you can say that many of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories feature no reference to the Empire, but enough of them do, and in any case, they were adventure stories written at the height of Empire in this country. The attitudes of imperialism, in the self confidence the characters exude, is a part of the narrative of Sherlock Holmes.

*



And a quick look at Wikipedia reminds me that, in an episode which Julian Barnes fictionalised a few years back, Conan Doyle, if not his character, had a very real encounter with a half-Indian lawyer George Edalji, whom he defended against the prejudices of the British police and helped to exonerate.

*

Confronting his famous character with the Empire seems like a telling of a story that Conan Doyle didn't, probably couldn't, get around to telling himself. Like I said, it's so good that someone already got their first. Andy Lane's Doctor Who novel, All-Consuming Fire, which not only mashes up the those two great British characters, but also Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos as well just for good measure, appeared in 1994 as part of Virgin's line of New Adventures published after the original series of the show ended. Now, I've not read All-Consuming Fire, but I did read a review just a few weeks ago on Philip Sandifer's magnificent TARDIS Editorum blog. Philip Sandifer, one of those bloggers who puts my meagre efforts to shame, has an often political take on the show and it's many spin offs. In this instance it sounds as though a political take would be pretty hard to avoid. From his account, it appears that the book is thoroughly aware of the problematic nature of some of the material it's mashing up. All too aware of the many abuses carried out by the British in our Empire, Andy Lane goes out of his way in his book to point out that he, through the mouthpiece of the Doctor, really doesn't approve of the British Empire. Which is problematic for several reasons, mainly because the book is apparently incredibly bad at representing the culture of the people the Empire is oppressing in India, mixing up the principles of Hinduism and Islam for instance, and often rather trite.

Again, like I say, I've not read Lane's book, although for all it's faults, it does sound like it might be worth tracking down. But I have had Vithal Rajan's book sitting on my shelves for a few months and this long preamble serves to give the reason why I chose to pull it off the shelves and read it next, because I thought that an Indian author's take on the same idea might well be more interesting. Written in a good approximation of Conan Doyle's style, the six stories, with five set in 1888 and the last under the shadow of a future war in 1913, send Watson and Holmes helter-skelter across the subcontinent, along the way encountering just about everyone who will have a future role in the independence movement. Or if not them, then their parents. As well, there are plenty of historical British characters, famous and otherwise, and not only Kipling, but analogues (the supposed originals on whom the author based his stories) of two of his most famous characters. If you don't know who everyone is, then there are helpful end notes, a device which reminds me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of novels.

Like Flashman, part of the joke comes from the reader knowing more than the characters who, leaving aside the implausibility that anyone travelling through India in 1888 would encounter such a disperate group of famous people from history like that, obviously have little idea of just how important some of these people are going to turn out to be. So for example, when the Prince of Wales is saved from a tiger by an Indian, the end note helpfully informs us that this man is the father of the man who will eventually write the Indian constitution. It's an at times affectionate ribbing of History. Not always so affectionate of course, when in the last story when Holmes and Watson foil a plot within the British military to discredit and murder a good number of the independence movement. But essentially, this is a very lighthearted set of stories. Holmes' detection often goes on in the background while Watson idles, giving us a frequently delightful travelogue, conveniently giving us a very full picture of all walks of life in British India. Again, it's not all that different from what MacDonald Fraser does in Flashman, his character's retrospective perspective allowing him to give us an incredibly detailed and well researched picture of the people and places amongst whom he travels.

Whilst there are jokes at the expense of the British - one of my favourites comes early on when they're told their driver will understand them if they just speak slowly and loudly - it's difficult to say that it's anti-British. Certainly not in the way that it sounds as though Lane's book is, the author indulging in a kind of overcompensation, apologising to the point of obsequiousness about something which our ancestors did. Funnily enough, that's not disimilar to something which actually happened to my wife not long after she arrived in Britain. Her British, white, liberal housemate felt the need to apologise to her for everything the British empire did in India. At some length.

And whilst in his review, Philip Sandifier criticises All-Consuming Fire for awkwardly grafting on it's social conscience about the horrors of British imperialism, he clearly wholly agrees with the sentiment:

But there’s a problem underlying all of this, and the book is aware of it. It’s 1994 now, and we’re all pretty much awake to the fact that the Victorian era consisted primarily of horrifying colonial impulses. It’s difficult to justify an unambiguous embrace of the Victorian in the mid-90s. And when you add Lovecraft, infamously racist dick that he was, you end up deeper in the weeds. And so the book, quite rightly, displays a social conscience. But there’s something… difficult about it. For instance, the scene where the Doctor yells at the villain, proclaiming, “you will be spreading death and destruction across the cosmos! The British Empire is based upon oppression and slavery. You offer not the hand of friendship but the jackboot of tyranny! I shall prevent your plans!” This is not wrong as such, but there’s something painfully awkward about it. And it’s far from the only moment like that - Benny refusing to help a beggar in India because, as she muses, “there were tens of thousands of people in Bombay. I couldn’t help all of them. That was the true evil. Not Daleks, not Hoothi. Poverty and powerlessness.” Again, true, but with a sort of painful facileness. I could cite more, but the point is, I think, made. 

And there's a problem here with this review too. It's all in that 'primarily'. As someone in the comments section pointed out, it all depends on how you look at it. For that commentator, the Victorian era was a time of great social progress. But if we narrow our focus just to the British in India, was the experience of the Indian people 'primarily' oppression and slavery? Before anyone reading this now tries to accuse of me of claiming that the British empire was a 'good' empire, the way I know some people do (just look at some of the scorn which has been heaped on those Kenyan men who have recently been granted permission to bring their case for compensation over the torture they suffered at the hands of British soldiers during the Mau-Mau uprising), that's not what I'm about to claim. I just think it's...more complicated than that. More nuanced. I'm as white and liberal as I suspect are Andy Lane and Phillip Sandifer and my wife's somewhat foolish former housemate, but I can't really accept such a simplified view anymore. Yes, it's my wife's fault, the influence of a trained historian. Undoubtedly, the British in India, throughout the empire, did some truly reprehensible things. In one story in Holmes of the Raj our heroes encounter a famine which has been if not manufactured, then certainly exacerbated by the British government's insistence on the doctrine of free trade. It's only through the actions of a British governor who goes against the order of his government and persuades a native merchant to help him who is able to get some famine relief to the local people. Really, aside from imperialism, the real evil in these stories appears to be free trade and those who unthinkingly espouse such an ideology. Plus ca change.

It's complicated though. The British government is the clear villain of this particular tale: British policies clearly lead to the deaths of many people. Yet the 'hero', if I can call him that, the character who at any rate does the most to help the people under his rule, is a British man. And then there's Holmes, who explicitly identifies himself as an agent of the British government, whose orders are the only reason he and Watson are actually in the country at all, but who otherwise does everything he can to help the native people whom he comes into contact with, and with whom he clearly has real sympathy. In both cases, you can argue that these are an idealisation by an Indian author, Holmes was never quite so sympathetic in Conan Doyle's original stories. Then again, you might ask why he goes to the trouble to include so many sympathetic British characters in his fiction. Why he might trouble not to depict British India as a hell of 'oppression and slavery'.

I've compared this book to Flashman a few times already, and I think one last comparison will draw out the point I'm trying to make here. MacDonald Fraser was, by his own admission, an imperialist. In his view the British Empire was predominantly a force for good which did much to spread ideals of democracy, science, education, etc. around the globe. It's not such an uncommon view, although not perhaps a very common one in my social circle. Yet as a writer and historian (his end notes show just how meticulous his research was for all his Flashman books), he had a basic honesty and clear sighted view of humanity that consequently his novels give a pretty damning view of 19th century British imperialism, almost in spite of themselves. In effect, Vithal Rajan comes at it from the other side. It's pretty clear where his sympathies lie, but at the same time he allows that India wasn't perfect before the British arrived. The Hindu caste system is shown to be hidebound and in need of reform. And some British individuals did good for the communities in which they found themselves. We see this in one story when Watson almost diagnoses the source of malaria, which nicely stands as an image for the material improvements of the country for which the British were responsible.

It's not that I think any good that the British did in India somehow excuses all the wrong we did. I don't believe that that kind of moral equivalence can ever exist. Which is why I dislike the use of the word 'balanced' in this context, one we see so often used by apologists for imperialism. Another term that irritates is 'realism', because that suggests we can somehow find a moral point which lets imperial aggressors off the moral hook. The victims of imperialism still exist, and the perpetrators of such crimes should be held to account, even if that can only be achieved via the history books. On the other hand, we also shouldn't ignore the existence of positive things which may have occurred, if only accidentally, because of the encounter between coloniser and colonised. The British presence in India was a history which occurred over centuries, and the British Empire was different things in different times and places. If people are complicated, then so I think are the empires they create. And if the Victorian era was a time of progressive movements as well as cruel oppression, then I strongly suspect that many such movements and beliefs were inspired or provoked by the experience of being in or ruling an empire. In which case, without the empire, would they have ever existed? The term I would prefer in this context is the one I applied to MacDonald Fraser above: 'clear-eyed', because it suggests an awareness of all the ways in which reality, however uncomfortably, doesn't fit into our neat ideological boxes.

*

A cursory look at Wikepedia also shows me that Conan Doyle also wrote a pamphlet in support of the Boer war. And a few years later wrote another denouncing abuse in the Belgian Congo. Clearly an early example of 'their empire was worse than ours'. So he wasn't perfect. For all the ways in which Doyle was progressive, he was clearly also capable of possessing unthinking imperialist assumptions. Which is one reason why it's so pleasing when a writer like Vithal Rajan comes along and corrects him in such a playful fashion.

Gilbert Adair quote

And there is, present in this film, as in the shot I have selected from it, the trope, the behaviourable motif, or whatever one cares to call it, that has above all others remained with me from a lifetime of viewing Satyajit Ray's work: I mean the amazing absense in his films of meaningful ambulation. Ray's characters, his male characters mostly but by no means exclusively, are so very horizontal! Horizontal from the heat, to be sure, as from the tetchy, fly-ridden ennervation that it enduces, but horizontal, too, as if in their very souls. They seldom walk. They never run. Ray almost always portrays them limp and languorous on a couch, fanning themselves if no servant can be mustered to fan them.

Gilbert Adair, writing about Jalsaghar [The Music Room], Flickers

'A cliched view of India...'

Another amazon review, from about two years ago:

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Failures...

Geoff Dyer's fiction has never been much concerned with plot. The opening of the second part of his latest attempt pokes fun at this tendency, observing that the phone call which sets in motion the chain of events could have been much more dramatic, could have in fact lent "narrative causality...albeit of a not very novel kind", but is instead only a call from an editor at a perfectly respectable time in the afternoon. Nor has he ever been much interested in character, although previous novels such as The Colour of Memory and Paris, Trance at least made an effort at creating individual characters with at least some semblance of independence from the author. Here there is less of a gap. Jeff is almost Geoff, clearly an extrapolation of parts of his author, although "Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently so at any rate," as he puts it in an afterword. So too is the unnamed narrator from the second half, whose narrative voice is so close to his author's that I'm sure I spotted lines reused from Geoff Dyer's own journalism. 

No, the element of fiction Dyer is most interested in lies in the variations, the cultural observations which arise from interacting with both the many writers and artists with which the text is littered, and from a confrontation with a finely observed sense of place. He is most concerned with developing and defining his own particular sensibility, and I suspect a reader's enjoyment of his work will largely depend on their response to that sensibility, one which glories in having taken a life off, and enjoys both the consequent happiness and unhappinesses, the resultant contradictions. There can't be a modern English writer who is quite so in love with the idea of failure. Out of Sheer Rage concludes with the salutary reminder that all such works, studies of the life and work of D H Lawrence and the like, are really nothing more than a means of avoiding confronting the depression he claims to have experienced during the writing of the book. And his earlier fiction, particularly Paris, Trance, similarly celebrates the personal failures of their characters, although in a more lyrical manner. Pleasure is only a means of avoiding the emptiness which underlies everything, and sometimes the pleasure can even reside in giving up and letting go, or at least in the desire to do so. 

He is also, it has to be said, an extremely funny writer.

A fairly short review. If I remember correctly, it was a book for which amazon already had a good number of reviews. I've got a much longer review of Working the Room, which goes into more depth about what I like and dislike about his writing. Hopefully get around to finishing it one of these days.

I notice that my review, such as it is, doesn't mention anything about his depiction of India. The title of this post comes from a piece about looking at all of his work which I think was published around the publication of his most recent collection in the States. I'm unable to find it now, and frankly, can't really be bothered. So I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the general criticism, which I think at least one or two of amazon's reviewers also made, is that the depiction of India is rather stereotyped, full of cliches.

Well, maybe, it's nearly two years ago since I read the book myself, so it's difficult for me to comment. I do though have a memory of reading out a few particularly funny bits to my wife where he describes Varanasi (which she has visited herself) and the part where he compares Hindu mythology to Marvel comics, and she found them all really funny. I think sometimes we can be a bit over sensitive to criticism of a foreign country which someone who actually grew up there just won't see. Or perhaps his depiction of Varanasi really is insulting. Certainly I don't think 'Death in Varanasi' contains anything nearly so insulting as the claim made by one amazon reviewer that the narator of the story is 'going native'. Now that is insulting.

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.