***REGION 15: Asia V

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***15. Asia V: India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan

There are many books about India I could recommend here, but I'll start with one which is neither physically nor mentally as heavy as some of the others. Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda:

A wonderful book. Told through multiple views, it has so many themes (love, adoption, marriage, parenting, etc.), though the major one is "nature versus nurture." Two children born in India of the same parents one year apart, one raised by birth parents, primarily in Mumbai, and the other raised by two physicians in San Francisco.

I grew to love or sympathize with every character. The author draws the reader into each of their lives and we understand their challenges, suffering, and choices. Each family nurtures their child in whatever way they can, but the outside situations and influences make all the difference. I would even welcome a sequel to see what challenges they face in the future.

INDIA

Train to Pakistan by Kushwant Singh

In 1947, with the end of the British Raj, the Indian sub-continent was split into two countries, Pakistan and India. By the summer of 1947, ten million people, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, were in flight. Almost one million were killed.

Train to Pakistan is a fictional account of a small town on the border of the newly declared country of Pakistan. Muslim, Hindu and Sikh have co-existed in the town in harmony for years. When the Partition occurred, and the massive transfers of people got underway, trains bringing Muslims to Pakistan from India, and trains bringing Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan to India began to pass through the town's railway station.

One day a train arrives filled with mutilated bodies. Then, a train going the other way is similarly attacked and pulls into the station. Within a period of weeks, the Muslims in the town are forced from their homes, forced to leave all their belongings behind. The village Muslims too will be put on a train to Pakistan, and the remaining villagers are being recruited to commit violent acts against Muslims.

This was a disturbing book, narrated in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. The edition I read was an anniversary edition published in 2007, and included Margaret Bourke-White's Time-Life photographs of the mass exodus. Violence was rampant, and both sides killed,stabbed, tortured, clubbed and speared. Many people died of starvation or disease as they were forced to march from their old homes to a new country. The photographs are haunting and not for the weak of heart.

My first book of the year.

Bait: Four Stories by Mahasweta Devi 2010 Not clear when stories were written, but English translation from Bengali in 2005. India

This is a collection of strange, terse, angry stories about ordinary people caught in the criminal underworld of Calcutta and its surroundings in the '60s - '80s, an underworld that is very much in league with politicians and businessmen. Devi, who is a well known and respected writer and political activist in India (her work involves so-called "tribal" communities), writes in an almost telegraphic style, with little description, focusing on the actions and the thoughts of the characters. Because of their work -- as killers, "fishers" of bodies from water tanks, prostitutes, etc. -- the characters are not sympathetic, but the reader sees them as partly unwilling cogs in a larger system, people dehumanized by their work. While most of the stories deal with men, the women in them are particularly oppressed.

The stories are not easy to follow because of the terse style, and I found the lengthy introduction by journalist and translator Sumanta Banerjee helpful in explaining their political and historical context. The book is part of its Indian publisher's "What Was Communism?" series, but the only connection I see to communism is that, according to Banerjee's introduction, some of the victims of killing in the stories were Naxalites (and he himself was jailed for being one); according to Wikipedia, the Naxalites were/are a Maoist group.

Staying On by Paul Scott

Booker Prize, 1977

Staying On, Paul Scott's last novel, was published in 1977 after the novels that made up The Raj Quartet and just before he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which would claim his life the following year. It is set in the small Indian hill town of Pangkot in 1972, where Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley, the town's only remaining British residents, live in an annex of a colonial hotel managed by Francis Bhoolabhoy, a thin and meek practicing Christian who shares drinks and stories with the Colonel, and owned by his wife Lila, whose greed and ambition is exceeded only by her girth. The Smalleys are retired, childless, and attempt to preserve the old order, although their meager income and old age limit their influence and relevance. The Colonel is tormented by poor health, a wife who no longer respects him after he decided to spend his remaining years in India without considering her, and the inhospitable Mrs Bhoolabhoy, who wants the Smalleys to leave her property, by any means necessary.

I enjoyed the first 50 or so pages of Staying On, with its descriptions of the different elements of postcolonial Indian society, but I began to lose interest after that, as the characters became less likable and their accounts and lives became more tiresome and less amusing. The denouement of the novel was disclosed in the book's first paragraph, which also limited its effectiveness and interest to this reader. This novel would be of interest to those who have read The Raj Quartet, but it is not recommended as a first book to read by Paul Scott.

India (Punjab)

I recently finished Witness the Night, by Kishwar Desai. It won the Costa First Novel award last year. The story is about an unconventional social worker in India who is called in to help a 14 year old girl who has been accused of murdering 13 members of her family. The book is part murder mystery and part social commentary on gendercide in current Indian culture. I found it to be a good read and recommend it.

KASHMIR

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

This novel is narrated by an unnamed young man, the son of a headman in a small predominantly Muslim village in the Indian-administered area of Kashmir in the early 1990s, whose four closest childhood friends have crossed the border into Pakistan to become freedom fighters after brutal government reprisals against the separatist movement. After a particularly violent crackdown by the Indian Army, the young man is "encouraged" by the local army captain and his humiliated and defeated father to work as a special assistant to the captain, in opposition to the militants and his own desire to join them.

The narrator then travels back to his idyllic and carefree childhood with his friends and family, before the appointment of the virulently anti-Muslim head of Kashmir and the electoral fraud that served as triggers to the uprisings that led to the bloody conflict throughout the region. The villagers suffer great hardship, as the Indian Army brutally punishes the families whose sons have joined the separatist movement, aided by local collaborators (not including the narrator). As the conflict becomes more intense and more villagers are tortured or killed, each family and each person must decide to stay in the village, or flee to an unknown destination, and an uncertain destiny. The narrator is also torn between loyalty to his father, who begs with his son to stay in the village and work for the Indian Army captain who regularly insults and tortures his people, and his desire for revenge and justice for his friends and neighbors.

The Collaborator is a superb and gripping debut novel, which is also an insightful and instructive book about the recent crisis in Kashmir, which I found difficult to put down after the first 20 pages.

KASHMIR

Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland by Basharat Peer

This book served as an excellent counterpart to The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed's novel about the crisis in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the narrator of that novel and the author of this book are of similar ages and backgrounds. Peer, a studious young man whose father is a respected government official in Srinagar, the summertime capital of Kashmir, shares his personal experiences as his village, like others throughout the region, experience great hardship and tragedy during the Indian Army crackdown against separatist militants and those who support them. In contrast to the narrator of Waheed's novel, who seeks to travel to Pakistan to join his childhood friends and become a freedom fighter, Peer, with the help of his family, moves to Delhi to finish secondary school and attend law school. While working as a newspaper journalist there, he is assigned to write stories about the growing crisis in Kashmir. He travels back to his home village, and encounters former friends and neighbors, Hindu and Muslim, there and in Srinagar and Jammu. Deeply disturbed by what he sees there, and facing discrimination as a Muslim Kashmiri in Delhi, he decides to abandon his career as a journalist and write a book about the people he knew, those Kashmiris of different backgrounds he encounters, and the troubled past and recent history of the region.

Curfewed Night succeeds as a personal and an 'on the scene' account of life in Kashmir during the crisis, and in its hopeful aftermath following the peace resolution between India and Pakistan in 2004. However, a more detailed history of the region and the origins of the recent crisis would have made this a much better book, in my opinion, although I would strongly recommend this book for anyone who is unfamiliar with Kashmir or its people.

BENGAL/INDIA

My Kind of Girl
by Buddhadeva Bose
translated by Arunava Sinha

Four men, complete strangers to each other, were stranded on a night train. They met a young couple ("clearly newlyweds") who appeared very much in love. This sight of the couple triggered memories for each of them. They began reflecting about love. They decided to pass the time sharing stories with each other. Each of the four stories that followed was rendered in very simple yet beautiful prose. They were all simple tales but together they form a subtle whole.

Romantic love is the subject of My Kind of Girl (1951, English 2010) by Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974), a prolific Bengali writer. Though primarily known as a poet, Bose wrote in various genres, including novel, short fiction, drama, and essay. He is often considered in the same breath as the Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.

The novel is a slim one, 138 pages, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, who is said to be presently at work on Bose's magnum opus Tithidore (1949), a family saga. Bose himself was an accomplished translator of European poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and Charles Baudelaire.

If being in love is a natural subject for poets, then Bose was one of its purest practitioners. He explored the theme in a very likeable way, even if the stories did not have fairy tale-like endings. There are no special pyrotechnics in his writing, but sometimes the sentences will stop one in his tracks –

In the ashen first light of dawn we saw his lips move. We were so still as we watched, and it was so silent all around, that we seemed to see his words, not hear them.

There's something oddly fantastic about that seeming ability to see words in complete silence. There it was. Utterly compelling.

The descriptions of characters can be cartoonish but the unusual circumstances they found themselves in allowed them to easily surpass their cartoonish-ness. There's a sense of humor, hesitant, poker-faced. Here is a striking passage, a handsome parody of Austen's "truth universally acknowledged":

   ... Theirs was an affluent household, and a bride would only make their cup of joy brim over. And the boy wasn't one of those typical, bespectacled midgets – just see how handsome he was.
   Yes, he was indeed handsome – there was no denying this. I know – knew – Makhanlal very well; at twenty-one he was a burly, powerful giant who looked thirty-two. Large and ungainly, he had prominent teeth, a manly, hair-covered chest, enormous shoes that caused great consternation when they were sighted lying around. Seeing as he could easily pass for a father of three, it didn't seem suitable for him not to be married.

The stories may be sharing the same topic and setting, yet their diverse viewpoints formed individual portraits of the social and cultural contexts of India in the early period of 20th century. The stories formed a whole because they seemed to spring from the same source of feeling. Being in love was mixed in different states of being: disillusion, loss of idealism, pride, kindness, compassion. The simple telling was an assurance that the novel was devoid of mawkish chick-litry.

The stories build on each other. They enlarge. Like love, they can be beautiful and in that sense, inspiring and life-affirming. Also, they can be cruel and heartbreaking and yet still enlarge the heart, by a few millimeters at least.

"The more I heard about love, the more I wanted it," a dejected character cried out at one point in the story he was telling. For love can be addictive. The four voices in My Kind of Girl, spun in a kind of addictive prose, somehow tells of it.

The novel reminded me of another book set in the region. Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra is also structured as a book of independent love stories, seemingly linked by the writer's fine sensibility and poetry. It also reminded me of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. The characters were also in search of a suitable boy or girl to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage and matchmaking were the book's provinces.

The two wonderful books by the two Vikrams can be traced to the same (romantic) tradition as Bose's. It was a tradition that was not blind to historical and cultural shifts in Indian society – to a time when attitude by, and toward, women was starting to change. These attitudes are increasing liberality and independence. The passing references to them in Bose's stories are constructing a map and milieu of this new understanding.

Sri Lanka

Bone China, Roma Tearne

2009

Rating: 4 stars

Comments: Tearne's second novel, Bone China, is a family saga that follows three generations of the de Silvas through their slide from a position of prominence in pre-WWII Ceylon, then through the Sri Lankan civil war, and ending in current day London.

Ever since reading Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje a few years ago, Sri Lanka has been my favourite arm chair travel destination. Roma Tearne has become my favourite Sri Lankan author because she captures the exotic beauty of the island in exquisite detail. Her writing is absolutely lovely. This is the third novel by her that I've read, and once again she had me scurrying to the internet to plan my dream vacation to Sri Lanka.

When I started the book I recognized some familiar elements from her novels Mosquito and Brixton Beach, and I was afraid that she was just rehashing the same material. But once I got into the novel I was swept up in the story and found it wasn't repetitious at all. It does follow the family saga formula to some extent, but her characters are well-rounded and feel real.

Recommended for: readers who want to dive into a book with a straightforward storyline, interesting characters, and tons of atmosphere. I still think Mosquito is her best book, but this one is worth reading. It would make a good vacation read.

Bengal area of India, current day Bangladesh

Sultana's Dream and Selections from the Secluded Ones, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

1905, 1988

Comments: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was an activist for women's education and against injustices against women in early 20th century India, particularly the area that is now Bangladesh. She was a Muslim woman who spoke out against purdah, the form of gender apartheid that separates women from society. The practice of purdah can range anywhere from wearing the veil all the way to complete seclusion in the inner parts of a house.

The story "The Sultana's Dream" is very short--only twelve pages. It shows a utopian society with women in the public space and men in purdah. The culture is very advanced because the women are highly educated and make all sorts of miraculous inventions to make their life comfortable.

In "Selections from the Secluded Ones," the author tells some individual cases of women suffering under purdah. The most horrific is probably the burqa-clad woman who fell on some train tracks. Her maid wouldn't allow any men to touch her, and was unable to help the woman herself. After waiting for a whole half-hour, the train left, smashing the woman who died 11 hours later.

Purdah is not just about separating women from men--it is also about separating the woman from non-family members. A woman living under extreme purdah is not supposed to be seen by anyone. Obviously it is not possible for everyone to do this--some people just have to provide for their families, so this extreme version was only practiced by the wealthy and it was a sign of social status to keep a family's women in purdah.

Another illustration of how extreme this practice could be is the author's experience with trying to bus girls to school. The bus was almost sealed, and the girls inside vomited and fainted in the dark heat. So some louvers were opened and curtains hung over the windows. Some of the parents pulled their daughters out of school rather than have them ride in the coffin on wheels. But her hands were tied because some "brothers-in-Islam" threatened the school--because the curtains moved in the breeze, the bus was deemed purdahless. Yikes!

The rest of the short book is made up of essays written in the 1980s about the life and work of Hossain, which was also fascinating. I'd like to see a film version of her life. There are also more case studies of women living under purdah.

Rating: 4.5 stars -- it would have been a five star book for me if there was one more essay updating on the developments of purdah since the essays were written. I suspect things may have become worse, but I don't know.

Recommended for: a broad audience--it's a very short book and packs in a lot of valuable information and insight for anyone who is interested in the world.

I read this for Early Reviewers:

India/Pakistan:



52. Partitions by Amit Majmudar

On August 15, 1947, British India became partitioned into two states: the Dominion of Pakistan (which then included modern day Bangladesh) and the Union of India. The birth pangs of these two nation states were violent and sectarian, displacing 12-14 million people, and killing hundreds of thousands. As Muslims headed one way across the new border into Pakistani territory, Hindus and Sikhs fled in the opposite direction. Atrocities were committed on all sides, and even neighbors and friends grew suspicious, if not outright hostile. The effects of this volatile partition are still felt today in the hostility between the two countries.

In this, his first novel, Amit Majmudar seeks to personalize this enormous tragedy by focusing on the fates of a few: Shankar and Keshav, two Hindu twins, who become separated from their mother while trying to cross the border; a young Sikh girl named Simran, whose father would rather see her dead than dishonored; and a Muslim pediatrician, Ibrahim Masud, who quietly continues to treat the needy without reference to their religion. It is a novel of great beauty and power. Majmudar is a poet, and the images he creates with his words are at once sad and hopeful, sweet and brutal. Although a difficult book to read, it is an important one for giving insight into the mindset that creates revenge and generational conflict.

…for all his personal loyalty to Dr. Masud, there is a part of Gul Singh, too, that believes what is happening is necessary. Some killing must be done. It is a form of communication, the only kind that can cross the partitions between this country and its neighbor, between this world and the next. Their enemies must hear the deaths and know fear; their dead must hear the deaths and know rest.

Highly recommended.

Bhutan: The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden - 3 stars

This is the fictional story about the Bhutanese woman Tsomo from early childhood, growing up, getting married, migrating to India, etc. until she finally finds her destination and becomes a bhuddist nun. It's a rather straightforward story, told by Tsomo herself (though in third person). I wasn't particularly taken by the story and found it at times a bit long-winded. I also was a bit disappointed because I expected to learn more about Bhutan but as the story only evolves around Tsomo from her limited point-of-view, the reader doesn't really get an insight into life in Bhutan and what is unique about that country. And it was such a s l o w read. It felt it took me forever to finish it.

Bengal (India and Bangladesh):

The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

First published in Bengali 1916.
English translation by Surendranath Tagore 1919.

 

The setting for this landmark novel is Bengal in 1908. A movement for India's independence from Britain has gathered momentum using a form of protest known as swadeshi, a boycott of European goods to further India's economic self-sufficiency. However, in the household of Nikhil, a wealthy landowner, deep philosophical divisions have arisen over swadeshi.

The novel is narrated in rotation by its three principal characters. Nikhil is a sensitive and compassionate man. As much as he want's India's freedom, he would not purchase it at the cost of innocent lives. Nikhil makes sacrifices himself in support of swadeshi, buying poor quality locally-made goods even though they are more expensive, but he will force nothing on others. Nikhil's philosophy of self-denial is put into words by his old tutor:

We think ... that we are our own masters when we get in our hands the object of our desire -- but we are really our own masters only when we are able to cast out our desires from our minds.

Opposing Nikhil is his old friend and houseguest, Sandip, a man with unlimited ambitions who sees himself as India's liberator and does not hesitate to sacrifice the welfare of others to achieve his ends.

And yet get it I must; how, I do not care; for sin there cannot be. Sin taints only the weak. I ... am beyond its reach. Only a commoner can be a thief, the king conquers and takes his rightful spoil.

Between Nikhil and Sandip is Nikhil's wife, Bimala. Her life is that of a normal, retiring Hindu wife until she overhears Sandip. His words ignite in her the fires of patriotism and ambition.

The very next day I saw Sandip and madness, naked and rampant, danced upon my heart.

It doesn't take Sandip long to realize that Bimala is the key to his gaining access to Nikhil's resources.

We are men, we are kings, we must have our tribute. Ever since we have come upon the Earth we have been plundering her; and the more we claimed, the more she submitted.... Likewise, by sheer force of our claims, we men have opened up all the latent possibilities of women. In the process of surrendering themselves to us, they have ever gained their true greatness.

In beautiful, poetic prose the subtle but forceful battle for the heart and mind of Bimala, as for all of India, is carried out between the two men and their opposing philosophies.

(cross posted from Club Read 2011)

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai



The newest work by Anita Desai is a collection of three novellas set in modern India, which share the themes of art and isolation. In the first novella, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', a lonely young government official is serving a post in an isolated and decrepit town, when an elderly man implores him to help save a museum of various objects collected from a young man's journeys across the world. The family's mansion is in decay, with only a hint as to its former grandeur, but the museum itself, kept locked and guarded, is filled with an overwhelming display of finery that titillates and exhausts the government man. 'Translator, Translated' is about an unhappy and unfulfilled middle age college literature teacher who meets a fellow classmate at a school reunion whose career and fame she has followed for years. The teacher, Prema, is thrilled that her classmate, Tara, has recognized her, and Tara invites her to translate the book that Prema is reading into English for the publishing company that she has started. The last novella, 'The Artist of Disappearance', is easily the best of the three. It concerns a man who lives as a hermit in his late parents' partially destroyed home deep in the Himalayas, who constructs a secret garden as a peaceful escape from his already isolated existence. A film crew from Delhi that is creating a documentary about the destruction of the area by miners and others accidentally stumbles upon the garden, and wish to find its creator, to the chagrin of the hermit, who withdraws to a place where he cannot be found by anyone.

All of the stories are filled with rich descriptions of rural and city life in modern India, as Desai's mastery of language and the art of writing are on full display. However, the first two short stories ended abruptly and in an unsatisfying manner to this reader, and were less enjoyable that the last novella, which was one of the best ones I've read. This is the first book I've read by Anita Desai, who is widely recognized as one of the best modern Indian writers, and I will certainly read more of her work in the near future.

Bangladesh: A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

Every now and then I come across a book that seems to have everything I want from a book: a well-written, well-plotted story with interesting characters, but in the end leaves me with a feeling of disappointment. A Golden Age is that kind of book. The book is set in Bangladesh and tells a gripping story of a country and a people, seen through the eyes of a mother. However, it took me weeks to finish it. I actually had to start again twice because the book could not hold my attention. In the end I finished it with a sigh of relief. I'm still trying to figure out why as others seem to have liked it a lot better than I did.

India



1. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Whatever the case, he saw now that it was a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other.

Sea of Poppies is a novel about relationships that cross boundaries, such as those of race, caste, class, religion, or crossing the line and "going native". The figurative and literary vehicle that facilitates many of these crossings is the Ibis. People of all persuasions are drawn to journey on the Ibis, and at first they seem as unlikely shipmates as could be. But through the course of the book, the first in a trilogy, relationships develop that transcend the social boundaries, conventions, and even laws that separate them. Individuals themselves also change in ways that cross boundaries: a man thought to be Black in America, becomes a white sahib in India; another person undergoes a spiritual transformation that alters his physical body to resemble that of a woman.

To read my full review

India:

I finished Jungle Jest by Talbot Mundy, a compilation of three interconnected adventure stories that take place in the 1920, during the final years of the Raj. More detail for anyone interested on my 50-Book Challenge thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/130053

India 2012
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
(crossposted from my Club Read and 75 Books thread)

In this poetic novel, which I bought after I heard the author interviewed on NPR, Jeet Thayil tries to do two things: immerse the reader in the feeling of Bombay opium den, and in opium intoxication itself, and at the same time depict the changes in Bombay from the 1970s to the present. He has achieved the first goal admirably, conveying the attraction, the culture, the people, the hallucinatory dreams, the seediness, the atmosphere, all in hypnotically beautiful prose (Thayil is a published poet who was, in fact, an opium smoker in Bombay in the 70s and later). He introduces compelling characters, from the lovely and smart prostitute Dimple who prepares the opium pipes, works in a brothel, and is emphatically not what she appears to be, to a Chinese refugee from the travails of Maoism in the 50s, to the complex Rashid who runs the opium den, to a customer of Rashid's who also works for a gangster, to artists and writers,and many more. Thayil paints a picture of a world that could have existed in much the same way for centuries.

He is less successful, in my opinion, in developing a plot that takes Bombay into the modern hurried, international, business-focused era (he rejects the transformation into Mumbai), as first young foreign travelers descend on Rashid's and them political unrest and most importantly heroin disrupt and ultimately destroy the opium culture, sending some of the characters into a caricature of rehab. He clearly means the culture of opium use to symbolize the old Bombay, slow and based on personal relationships and cooperation, and heroin to symbolize the transition to harshness and individualism. It doesn't quite work, at least for me.

The strength of the novel is in its portrayal of the opium world, starting with a one-sentence, six-page, prologue; its portraits of people who have, each in their own way, lost a great deal; its meditations on death and reincarnation, responsibilities to parents and children, religion, sex, and loss; and its poetic language. I found the book difficult to put down, even as I became dissatisfied as it moved on to its conclusion.

The novel frequently uses Hindi words/slang. Most can be figured out from the context, but some remain obscure.

SRI LANKA

1. I recently reviewed a book by a new ex-pat Sri Lankan writer, Roshi Fernando, for Belletrista. This was not an easy book, but it was highly rewarding and I think she's a promising new voice. Definitely worth reading. You can find my review here: http://www.belletrista.com/2012/Issue17/reviews_11.php

2. Another ex-pat Sri Lankan writer, Roma Tearne, has a new book coming out in 10 days in the UK. It is called the Road to Urbano, and there is also a short film that compliments the book. It was screened at the British Museum earlier this month.

I say "ex-pat" because it seems that all the Sri Lankan writers no longer live there. Not just Roma Tearne and Roshi Fernando, but also Booker prize nominees & winners Romesh Gunesekera & Michael Ondaatje; Lamda award winner and Giller nominee Shyam Selvadurai, Orange prize nominee V.V. Ganeshanathan, and Orange & Booker nominee Michelle de Kretser. Look at all that fabulous talent-- and all of them live away from Sri Lanka. I don't actually know of any novelists who currently live within the country. Hmmmm.

You can also add Shehan Karunatilaka, the author of this year's Commonwealth Book Prize winning novel Chinaman, to your list, Joyce. He currently resides in Singapore.

I have a bunch of authors I love in this category:

Pakistan:
Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke is so much better than A Reluctant Fundamentalist in my opinon.

India:
The writing in A Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai just jumps off the page. A second best is The Inheritance of Loss by the same author. I prefer Kiran Desai's writing to her mother Anita's.

>17 labfs39:. Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace is one of my favorites.

>12 labfs39: Amit Majmudar is an excellent poet; I'm a huge fan. I have never read his prose, and I think I will have to now.

>9 Rise:. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy was an enjoyable read, and I hear he is following that up this year with A Suitable Girl. I'm not sure if I like the premise, though. Seth writes about a tremendous range of subjects; this seems like an attempt to recapture the hit he achieved with A Suitable Boy.

INDIA

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum



You ought to know the truth: there are only two reasons lives like ours are stamped out. One: our lives are left over as proof of past and present sins and crimes against castes, races, cultures; they always want to keep this as hidden as they can. Two: our lives get in the way of the enterprising city, or act as a road bump in the master plan of a country that thinks of itself as a big player on the world stage. Our very humanity threatens to reveal the wicked culture of money and means as something suspect and unlovely. That's why whenever civilizations once developing, now on the brink of prosperity, decide to embark on a program of 'beautification', they try to root out such lives, the same way the mess on the floor is swept outside.

Uday Prakash is one of India's most highly respected writers, due to his rich stories of modern life and his willingness to describe the corruption and caste prejudice that exists there. However, his career has been marked by harassment by government officials, which has caused him to be fired from numerous jobs and to become a jack of many trades in order to feed his family. He was born in the state of Madhya Pradesh in 1951, to a family of village landlords. After the premature deaths of his parents he obtained a university degree in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, and taught comparative literature and Hindi at Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, where he has resided since 1975.

In the words of Jason Grunebaum, the narrator of this book, "In many of his stories, Uday Prakash shows how those who dare to dissent against a suffocating system are punished. But with his biting satire and delightful narrative detours he also demonstrates how humor and compassion ultimately provide the best means to fight back and escape."

The Walls of Delhi consists of three short stories, all set in Delhi at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, about a person struggling against poverty and corruption, each one told through the eyes of a narrator that knows him well. In "The Walls of Delhi", Ramnivas Pasiya is a lower caste emigrant to Delhi who is barely able to support his young family as a part-time sanitation worker, in a neighborhood filled with street vendors, prostitutes and smackheads. One of his jobs is to clean a fitness club where wealthy Hindis go to lose weight, while the poor that surround them are engaged in a daily struggle to find sufficient food for the day. "Mohandas" describes the life of Mohandas Viswakarma, who becomes the first person from his village to obtain a university degree and graduates second in his class, yet finds that the expected pathways to success are closed to him, as less educated and talented men with personal connections or the ability to bribe officials obtain employment ahead of him. Finally, "Mangosil" is about a young boy from a poor family cursed with seven prior miscarriages, whose is born healthy but experiences massive and painful enlargement of his head in proportion to his body, while simultaneously developing unusual wisdom and intelligence. Doctors are willing to diagnose and treat him, but their fees are beyond the means of his parents.

These three stories are all suffused with both tragedy and humor, which prevents this book from being an overly depressing one, though it isn't a light or frivolous read. The narrator or characters make frequent and poignant comments about Indian society and its caste prejudice and rampant corruption that flow smoothly within each story. I could not put this book down once I started it, and I finished it in one sitting. The Walls of Delhi is a masterful book about modern India, which is a far better book than The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning novel, and it deserves to be widely read and appreciated.

SRI LANKA

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje



"There are so many bodies in the ground now, that's what you said...murdered, anonymous. I mean, people don't even know if they are two hundred years old or two weeks old, they've all been through fire. Some people let their ghosts die, some don't. Sarath, we can do something..."

Anil Tissera was born in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to a prosperous family, where she achieved a small degree of fame by winning a notable swimming race as a school girl. She left at 18 to attend medical school in England, and she later trained to become a forensic pathologist there and in the United States. After a brief failed marriage and the early deaths of her parents she is rootless and restless, despite her successful career. She applies and, to her surprise, is accepted as a forensic specialist for an international human rights organization that plans to send a team to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, during the height of the country's civil war. The government is engaged in fierce and bloody battles with the Tamil Tigers to the north and with separatist insurgent forces to the south simultaneously, and the bodies of thousands of soldiers on all sides and innocent civilians caught in the middle have been turning up with alarming frequency throughout the country. Intense international pressure is put upon the Sri Lankan president to investigate the claims of atrocities by the government and the rebels, and he reluctantly agrees to an investigation, while he and other officials vehemently deny that the Sri Lankan Army is involved in the torture and slaughter of insurgents and civilians.

It has been 15 years since Anil left her homeland, and Sri Lanka is both familiar and distant to her. She is paired with Sarath, a local archeologist who acts as both an older guide and as a temporizing influence on her inpatient tendencies. Later she meets Sarath's younger brother Gamini, an emergency medicine physician who is haunted by his experiences caring for hundreds of patients with traumatic injuries and seeing nearly as many corpses in the hospital's morgue.

Anil and Sarath come upon an ancient burial ground, and they discover a body that doesn't seem to fit with the others. Anil suspects that it has been placed there recently, and since soldiers guard the site she and Sarath conclude that the man, a local resident who has been brutally tortured before his death, was killed by government forces. Sarath senses the extreme danger of this discovery, and urges Anil to act cautiously, but she is outraged and insists that the government, the Sri Lankan people, and the international community must know what is happening there.

Anil's Ghost begins slowly, as Ondaatje carefully creates a rich tapestry of the lives of the main characters and teaches the reader about the essential techniques of archeology and forensic pathology, which was occasionally of little interest to me. However, the tension and drama progressively build throughout the second half of the book up to its momentous ending. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, but I was left with several unanswered questions, particularly about the motivations and fates of the three main characters that cannot be discussed in this review.

INDIA

My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose
Originally published 1951, English translation 2008, my edition 2010



This charming novella, written by a Bengali poet, can be read on several different levels. Most straightforwardly, it is the story of four men who find themselves stranded in a remote railway station late on a cold night: a contractor, a government official, a doctor, and a writer. Seeing a loving couple, each of their thoughts turn to a long-ago love of their own, and the writer proposes that they spend the night telling each other the stories of these loves. And so they do. On another level, each of the men has a different perspective on life, and a different style, and these characterizations are reflected in their stories. And on still another level, their stories provide insight into the life of middle class, educated Indians near the end of British colonial rule. Interestingly, that rule is never mentioned, except in an aside when one of the story tellers chastises a friend who is interested in an Anglo-Indian girl rather than one of their own. This book has been on my TBR since I received it several years ago when I had an Archipelago Books subscription and I'm glad this quarter's Reading Globally theme read on the Indian subcontinent made me take it off the shelves.

INDIA

Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai
Originally published 1980



This beautifully written, perceptive, and compassionate novel has been on my shelves for nearly 35 years, and I am very happy that the Reading Globally theme read on the Indian subcontinent led me to take it off the shelf and read it. It is the story of a middle class family in Old Delhi and their interrelationships, focusing on three points in time. It starts when the younger daughter, Tara, who is married to Bakul, a diplomat, returns to her family home, then switches to the children's adolescence at the time of Indian independence and the partition with Pakistan, then goes back to their earlier childhood, and finally returns to the time of Tara's visit, presumably in the 70s.

In addition to Tara, the family consists of older son Raja, who is attracted to the Urdu literary world of their neighbor and landlord, a Muslim; older daughter Bim, who is interested in history, becomes a school teacher, and ends up taking care of the house and the younger son, Baba, who is what would have been called mentally retarded at the time this book was written. Various other characters enliven the book, including their parents, who are largely absent, spending most of their time at the club; an elderly aunt, Mira, who comes to live with the family; the neighbor/landlord family, the Hyder Alis, including their daughter Benazir who Raja ends up marrying after they flee to Hyderabad during the partition troubles; and their other neighbors, the big Misra family.

The beauty of this novel lies mostly in Desai's ability, similar to Chekhov's, to portray each character and his or her interests, strengths, flaws, gripes and grudges about others, and more so the reader can understand and sympathize with them and feel for their problems with the others even while feeling for the others as well. Among the issue they face are feelings of responsibility or irresponsibility, including caring for others, staying put versus moving, what one does with an education, escape and the inability to escape, and old feelings that harden with time. The issues of colonialism, independence, and post-colonialism are in the background, felt but only rarely directly expressed.

Some examples of Desai's writing.

"Oh, Bim," Tara said helplessly. Whenever she saw a tangle, an emotional tangle of this kind, rise up before her, she wanted only to turn and flee into that neat, sanitary, disinfected land in which she lived with Bakul, with its set of rules and regulations, its neatness and orderliness. And seemliness too --seemliness." p.28

"No one," said Bim, slowly and precisely, "comprehends better than children do. No one feels the atmosphere more keenly -- or catches all the nuances, all the insinuations in the air -- or notes those details that escape elders because their senses have atrophied, or calcified. . . .

"Or we lay on our backs at night, and stared up at the stars," Bim went on, more easily now. "Thinking. Wondering. Oh, we thought and we felt all right. Yes, Bakul, in our family at least we had the time. We felt everything in the air -- Mira-masi's insignificance and her need to apologize for it, mother's illness and father's preoccupation -- only we did nothing about it. Nothing." p. 149

The end of the novel reaches the sort of inconclusive resolution that it is so typical of real life.

INDIA

I enjoyed The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. While over half of the book actually takes place in Rhode Island, enough of it is set in Calcutta to make it an appropriate listing here. Plus, the influences of Indian culture remain pervasive throughout. At any rate, I found this to be a very well written novel about family and human nature, a series of interconnected personal stories about how people deal with loss, love, duty and regret. Kind of a general description, I know, but it's hard to pin this one down with providing a major spoiler. I recommend the book, for whatever that may be worth to you.

INDIA

Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry



This novel about family relationships, friendship, and the benefits and dangers of loyalty is set in 1971 Bombay, during the brutal Bangladeshi Liberation War and President Indira Gandhi's increasingly corrupt and repressive rule. The central character is Gustad Noble, a proud and respected middle aged bank clerk, who lives with his wife and three children in an apartment complex in a crumbling middle class neighborhood. Despite an outward appearance of stability, the Noble's domestic calm has been disrupted by the decision of Sohrab, the eldest child, to forego a scholarship to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, which would likely ensure his and the family's financial stability, and a serious illness that has afflicted Roshan, the youngest child and only daughter of the family. Gustad also remains hurt by the decision of his best friend and beloved neighbor, Major Jimmy Bilimoria, to leave the Khodadad Building where they lived suddenly and without warning one year earlier. Jimmy's absence has left a large void in Gustad's life, particularly at a time when he faces trouble within and outside of home.

One day Gustad receives a mysterious letter from Jimmy. The Major has joined the Indian Secret Service, and he asks Gustad to grant him a very important favor. After he deliberates on it and consults his family, Gustad agrees to help Jimmy. However, once he realizes what Jimmy has asked him to do he soon realizes that his friend has put him, his family and his career in danger. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, as Jimmy's colleagues make it clear that he may suffer repercussions from them if he doesn't fulfill Jimmy's request, which adds more stress and uncertainty to his already troubled life.

Although I found Such a Long Journey to be a well written novel, filled with interesting characters, I didn't enjoy it nearly as well as I did his two other novels, A Fine Balance and Family Matters. Several key characters, particularly Sohrab and Dilnavaz, Gustad's wife, were thinly portrayed, Sohrab's decision to forgo his scholarship to IIT remained a mysterious one, given the lack of opportunities for young men with BA degrees in India, and the story ended in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner. I'm still glad that I read it, and I would recommend it, but mainly to those who have already read his previous books.

>28 kidzdoc: kidzdoc: I've read Mistry's A Fine Balance and Tales from Firozsha Baag but not Such a Long Journey. Your synopsis is very interesting -- thanks.

I intend to return to this thread with a recommendation fairly soon as I've just discovered it and haven't had a chance to read through all the wonderful posts yet. Thanks, all.

India

A House Called Askival by Merryn Glover.

An elegant, moving and heartfelt love letter to the sights, sounds and tastes of northern India told through the enthralling story of the troubled relationship between a father and daughter stretching from Partition to the present day. James Connor is a man who, burdened with guilt following a tragic event in his youth, has dedicated his life to serving India. Ruth Connor is his estranged daughter who, as a teenager, always knew she came second to her parents’ missionary vocation and rebelled, with equally tragic consequences. After 24 years away, Ruth finally returns to Askival, the family home in Mussoorie, a remote hill station in the Northern State of Uttarakhand, to tend to her dying father. There she must face the past and confront her own burden of guilt if she is to cross the chasm that has grown between them. In this extraordinary and assured debut, Merryn Glover draws on her own upbringing as a child of missionary parents in Uttarakhand to create this sensitive, complex, moving and epic journey through the sights, sounds and often violent history of India from Partition to the present day.

INDIA

Fireproof by Raj Kamal Jha



Fireproof is a novel about horrific ethnic violence in Amedabad, based on a real event. Jha makes consistent use magical realism to tell his story, and sections of the book are very powerful, indeed. I would say all in all this is a good but flawed novel. As I said in my review, I'm at an odd place with this book. I want other people to read it, but I don't feel comfortable recommending it to them. You can that review on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

India:

Just started Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay Dance Bars. Non-fiction. I like her narrative voice so far. And, while she's empathetic towards her subjects, she's also sharp and clear-eyed in her observations.

>31 rocketjk:: Fireproof sounds very interesting. I'll check out your review. Thanks.

>33 jennybhatt: I would love to have you read Fireproof and learn what you thought of it.

>34 rocketjk:: I have family in Ahmedabad and am very familiar with those troubled times. So, I'm definitely going to get the book. Will keep you posted. :) Thanks.

Bangladesh

I'm the second this thread to list A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam. I, too, found the book absorbing and well-written, but in the end not quite there. This is a novel about a widow and her two children, both coming of age into adulthood, during the days of Pakistani Civil War that would lead to the creation of the country of Bangladesh. For me the problem is that the narrative is so closely in the mother's head that events seem to swirl around her rather than drawing her in. Anyway, this is an interesting and cleanly written book, all in all, and I feel like I learned a lot about the events depicted.

India

I just finished The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, which I've also listed in the Burma/Myanmar thread, as the narrative describes the complicated relationships between both cultures (and the British Empire) and moves back and forth between the two countries. I thought it was a good book but it dragged for me in stretches. My review on the book's work page goes into more depth.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

I read Unmarriageable, by Soniah Kamal, which is a novel retelling Pride and Prejudice but set in contemporary Pakistan. 4.5*

And then I posted this comment on the wrong thread. So the above Jane Austen quote became even more relevant. :D

Sri Lanka

Romesh Gunesekera, Reef

Brilliant. A first novel (he's written about 8 or 9 now) and a Booker finalist. Writing that captivates. Gunesekera is, to my mind, an absolute master of those moments in life that are fleeting and indescribable; of a moment between two people. Of the evanescent. I cannot think of anyone I have ever read who does it better. There is an exquisiteness, a tenderness, a stunning beauty to his images. Ostensibly the story of a houseboy in Sri Lanka, it becomes the story of two lives inextricably woven into the tragedy of the civil war in that country. A deep, unforgettable reflection on the passage of time, chances taken and chances lost, on identity, and of exile.

Sundarbans, Bay of Bengal



The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Published 2005, 333 p.

Piya is a young American woman of Indian descent who is in the Sundarbans to study the the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella). Kanai is an Indian translator and playboy visiting his aunt. The two meet on the train, and Kanai extends an invitation to Piya to visit Lusibari, the island where his aunt lives. He is visiting there under duress, having only been there once before as a boy, but his aunt says he's been left a packet of papers by his deceased uncle, and she wants him to retrieve them in person. He thinks Piya would be a welcome distraction. Piya, however, is eager to get started with her survey and sets off on a hired boat with a government keeper. Before long, she realizes she is in trouble, and ends up with a fisherman and his son instead. Despite the language barrier, she feels instant empathy with Fokir, and they make significant progress in her project. After several days they head for Lusibari, where Kanai and Fokir's wife wait.

The chapters alternate between Piya's and Kanai's stories, and then with the diary of Kanai's uncle as well. Piya's research with the dolphins is discussed in some detail, as is the ecology and history of the Sundarbans. The diary of Kanai's uncle is concerned mainly with the Marichjhapi massacre, the forced removal of refugees from a government protected forest reserve in 1979. But it's not dry reading, for all of this is the backdrop for an adventure story complete with man-eating tigers and a cyclone.

The first half of the book is a bit slow with a lot of background on the islands, but I found it interesting as I knew nothing about the area. The second half of the book speeds up for a page-turning climax. It was the perfect book for the Indian Ocean theme read in Reading Globally.

Oxford University Press has (or had) a wonderful backlist of fiction by important (but virtually unknown in the USA) writers in various Indian languages. A month ago, for example, I read Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja, a novel in Oriya about tribal lands in Orissa. This book is a Malayalam novel by an author said to be Kerala’s first “tribal novelist.” For anyone interested in such books, I’d urge you to look into this imprint. That said, Kocharethi by Narayan is an important work for many reasons but it’s not a great work of literature. It is a fascinating window into the culture, customs, and life of a particular tribe in the mountains of Kerala (in south India); the story line follows the decline and dissolution of a family after the death of the mother and the increasing dependence (and ultimate stranglehold) on the local moneylender. Unfortunately, the translation is not entirely fluent and the translator relies very heavily on retaining many local terms. Although words describing family relationships are quite important and help present the “feeling” of being there, some are footnoted, some are defined in a glossary, and some are never defined. It makes for very heavy going at times. The fascination of the community’s interpersonal ties and the substantial presence of local customs and the depiction of local life make for absorbing reading but pick this book up for those reasons, not because it’s a great literary achievement.

Gopinath Mohanty (died 1991) won both the Jnanpith and was the first-ever winner of the National Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a celebrated author writing in Oriya (aka Odia), the official language of the state of Orissa (aka Odisha)—along India’s north eastern coast. Paraja is one of a few of his many books translated into English and it deals with the life and customs of an indigenous tribe and the farmer’s attachment to the land. In many ways, the story (written in 1945) is about the clash between modern and traditional practices and the narrative follows the change—indeed, the disintegration—of one family. And yet, for all the author’s dissatisfaction with the price paid for change, it is clear-eyed and condemns much about tradition-bound society as well. It’s well-translated, powerful and moving, and well worth the time, if you can find it. I know I’ll be on the lookout for more of his work.