Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (18 page)

There followed a somewhat lengthy disquisition on my attire — “a gold-bordered off-white Kerala style mundu… with a long blue striped cotton kurta” — in terms that would have had any self-respecting feminist howling in rage if it had been applied to the attire of a female novelist. (Women are understandably furious at their outfits being described as if they were integral to people's perception of their work, and it's no prettier when it's a woman doing it to a man.) The lady then speculated on my kurta's provenance: “Fabindia?” For the record, it was from a modest pavement stall on Gariahat Road in Calcutta that has since been demolished by that city's urban-renewal zealots. Also, its stripes were green and gold, not blue, but then color blindness is not apparently a disqualification for sartorial commentary in our more expensive papers.

The lady didn't stop there. “Even the folds of his mundu-veshti hang in unnaturally straight lines,” she opines. “He would be laughed off the streets of Calicut if he were to appear in such a garb. As everyone knows, the Keralite has innumerable ways of twitching up and hitching his mundu around his waist and furling it down as he walks and talks. Tharoor wears his like a ball-gown.” Now I have no idea how ball gowns are worn, never having needed to sport one, but this attack would have been below the belt, had I needed to wear a belt. I have no idea of the social circles in which the lady waddles, but we Keralites hitch our
mundus
or
lungis
up in casual settings, when fording a paddy field or chatting with friends, never at a formal occasion, where it would be considered disrespectful and improper. I have spoken at many a Kerala function at which
mundus
were worn by the participants, and they always hung in straight lines. As one who has donned nothing but
mundus
and
lungis
during innumerable stays at my ancestral village, I doubt I have anything to learn from a Chennai socialite about how to dress comfortably in rural India; but one look at her ample proportions was enough to explain to me why she might indeed consider straight lines unnatural.

And yet that wasn't the end of the ad hominem dissection of this beleaguered novelist. “His haircut is a dead giveaway,” she declares. “It's fashionably shaggy and American preppy, falling in strands over his noble brow, with not a drop of coconut oil.” Now that's hilarious. Anyone who has known me since I was old enough to give my own instructions to a barber knows that I've always worn my hair that way — in high school in Calcutta, college in Delhi, and on
visits to Kerala. The haircut in question, which the optically gifted lady imagined to be American, had actually been done at a dusty saloon in the Coimbatore suburb of Kovaipudur, as far removed as possible from the fashionable origins it was supposedly a “dead giveaway” for.

But enough of all this: what exactly is the lady's point? It is, of course, that dreaded nemesis of every Indo-Anglian writer: the denizen of Desi-dom challenging the authenticity of the NRI. It little matters that friends from thirty years back remember me debating on my school team in a flaming cotton kurta with my unruly hair flopping over my face: for me to stand up and do so today, as I have always done, is not acceptable to the lady and her ilk because it does not pass her acid test of what is really, truly Indian. For her, my sin is not that I have traveled too far from my roots, but that I haven't traveled far enough to please her. Had I come to the Madras Book Club in jeans and a sweatshirt, or in a pin-striped suit, no doubt she would have drawn the same conclusions from the opposite evidence. But it is time we all averred that literary mavens have no more right than Hindutva chauvinists to declare who or what is authentically Indian. There are many voices and accents engaged in our national conversation. The pun-spouting Stephanian is much an Indian as the dhoti-clad
dehati,
and the Stephanian does not become less — or more — of an Indian if he dons the
dehati's
dhoti. No more than the
dehati
ceases to be Indian if he pulls on a pair of Levi's.

These are, the lady will tell us, platitudes. It's a pity she made it necessary to repeat them.

I
T TOOK AN EDITORIAL IN A PUBLICATION I READ
, respected, and wrote for — the late lamented
Indian Review of Books
— to prompt me to break a long-standing, if self-imposed, rule.

I had made it a point not to discuss reviews of my own books in any of my own writing. This is not because I am excessively modest, or unduly burdened by a sense of authorial propriety; it is simply that I believe that a book, once published, has to make its own way in the world. Authors do not like bad reviews any more than parents like to hear criticisms of their children, and the temptation to lash out at the most unfair of them is great. But as a reader I am aware that reactions to fiction are inevitably subjective. A reviewer's dislike of a particular book says at least as much about the reviewer as it does about the book.

I have therefore been content to let reviews of my books stand unchallenged, even when — as sadly happens too often in India — the reviewer bases his or her judgments
on a partial reading, or a willful misreading, of the book. This policy has, I must admit, been made easier by the fact that I have been lucky enough to have had far more positive, indeed enthusiastic, reviews around the world for my books than unfavorable ones.

But an
IRB
editorial obliged me to break my silence. Entitled “Some Thoughts on Reviewing,” it discussed two reviews of my 1992 novel
Show Business
— an assault on the book as “irritatingly superficial” by Shobha Dé in the
IRB,
and a front-page accolade by William Boyd in the
New York Times Book Review,
which I am told was the first such tribute accorded by the
Times
to an Indian writer. After quoting a paragraph from each review, the anonymous editorialist commented that “such widely disparate views about the same book, and in fact about its essential thrust, cannot but fail to raise several questions in the average reader's mind.” Praising the credentials and the integrity of both reviewers, the editorialist wonders whether the difference is that one is an Indian and the other American (Boyd is in fact British, but let us let that pass). Can “a critic from one culture,” the
IRB
asks, “wholly appreciate the nuances in the writings from another culture?”

That is a fair question — I concede that no foreigner can get as much out of my
Great Indian Novel
as an Anglo-phone Indian can — and yet a misleading one. If the attitude implicit in that query were carried to its logical extreme, Gabriel García Márquez could not be given the Nobel Prize by a bunch of Swedes, Salman Rushdie could not be banned by an Iranian Ayatollah, and the Sahitya Akademi might as well wind up, since no Indian would be able to appreciate
its translations of novels from other Indian languages. The entire point about literature is that, while it may emerge from a specific culture, it must speak to readers of other linguistic and cultural traditions, for what endures in good writing is not culture-specific. We read literature from other cultures all the time; and we do so because literature, whether or not from a society we know, serves to illuminate and deepen our appreciation of the human condition.

But as a writer — an Indian writer — I object equally to the notion that a reviewer's individual judgment can be vindicated by his or her passport. The idea that Ms. Dé’s attack on
Show Business
can be justified by the fact that, in the
IRB
editorialist's words, she “is an Indian, with a more than adequate knowledge of the Indian background, who finds the book wanting in substance and depth” is to me a dangerous one. (Let us leave aside the temptingly obvious riposte that though Ms. Dé has been accused of many sins, an excess of “substance and depth” has never been one of them.) India has never been a country where nationality has been a determinant of opinion. In literature as in politics, there are as many opinions as there are Indians. There are Indians who don't like
Show Business,
and there are Indians who do: I have had excellent reviews from several of them, as well as letters and conversations with innumerable readers whose Indianness didn't appear to obstruct their appreciation of the novel.

Equally pernicious is the suggestion that William Boyd's praise — and by implication that of the many other reviewers in the West who admired the book, including the
Washington Post
’s eminent Jonathan Yardley, who picked it as one
of the four best books of the year — is somehow diluted by the fact they are foreigners. Boyd (
An Ice-Cream War, Brazzaville Beach,
and three Booker Prize nominations behind him) features on every critic's list of the top three Englishmen writing fiction today; he doesn't know me, has no ax to grind, and indeed has a formidable reputation to protect, one that could only be damaged by careless praise for an unworthy novel. Much as some of us might like it, Western writers have better things to do than to spend their time casting ignorant kudos on Indian books.

So — to return to the entirely legitimate concerns of the
IRB
editorial — how are we to evaluate such widely disparate reviews? The answer is of more than passing interest, since the need for a serious reviewing tradition in India is one that concerns every Indian writer. It seems to me that the answer lies in the reviews themselves. On what does the reviewer base his or her judgment? Is the reviewer's “knowledge” an asset or a handicap — in other words, does the reviewer bring too many preconceptions and prejudices to the book? Are the criticisms couched in intemperate, wholly subjective terms, or do they cite evidence from the book that could convince an uncommitted reader?

Ms. Dé’s review speaks eloquently for itself, even in the passage quoted in the editorial. “Yes, Hindi films are full of cardboard characters, but do we need to
read
about them…?” she asks (emphasis added). No one needs to read about anything, but does the reviewer ask what the novelist has tried to do with these characters? Adjectives like “tedious” and “prudish” may reflect Ms. Dé’s standards rather than the culture's; some Indian reviewers went the other way, criticizing
the book as airy and salacious, and the
London Sunday Times
reviewer, the novelist Jonathan Coe, declared that it was “an enormously funny and enjoyable novel which has never for a moment been frivolous.” What critics like Boyd, Yardley, and others found worth praising were the “architecture” of the novel, its narrative structure, its attempt to weave larger themes (reality and illusion, dharma and accountability, the place of films in our society and of our society in our films) into an entertaining story. None of these factors even found a mention in the negative Indian reviews of
Show Business.
Had the Indian critics acknowledged the author's endeavor and then found that the book fell short in the attempt, their criticisms could have been taken seriously; but when the reviewer's reading of the book is so superficial that it fails even to notice what the author has tried to do, it undermines the worth of the review.

Writers need bad reviews almost as much as they welcome good ones. It keeps us honest to be told when we've gone wrong. But reviewers must learn to tackle books on their own terms, not the reviewers’. Rise to a book and find it wanting, by all means; but do the author the courtesy of reading it first and thinking about it before reacting. That is the only way we will attain the high critical standards that remain the best guarantee of a lively — and ever-improving — literary tradition.

I
HAVE RECENTLY BEEN INVOLVED
in a minor literary controversy in the pages of the
New York Times,
whose editors felt compelled to acknowledge to their readers that the author of what is politely called a “mixed” review of my recent book
Nehru: The Invention of India
had himself received a mixed review from me some years earlier for one of his books. Turnabout, to upend a cliché, was not considered fair play.

The episode was trivial, but it reminded me of a far more entertaining incident in the same pages a decade earlier, involving Norman Mailer. Short, strong, and beer-bellied, with a pugnacious thrust of jaw and wiry gray hair, the eminent novelist (
The Naked and the Dead
), biographer (
Marilyn
), reporter (
The Armies of the Night
), and polemicist (
The Prisoner of Sex
) is a considerable presence on the American literary scene. Boozy, brawling, and bold, reviled by feminists for his attitude to women, excoriated by the Right for his opposition to the Vietnam War, Mailer is one author who is as much read about as read. The former enfant terrible
of American letters has, in a turbulent career, married and divorced a succession of women, drunk himself silly in public, marched in raucous protest demonstrations, run (unsuccessfully) for mayor of New York, and bibulously engaged in public fisticuffs.

Criticizing the work of such a combative figure is hardly a low-risk occupation. Other authors might react to an unjust review with the attitude of the old Persian proverb, “When the caravan passes, the dogs bark” (for why should a caravan be distracted by every barking dog?). But not Norman Mailer. In the early 1990s reviewers trashed Mailer's long-awaited magnum opus,
Harlot's Ghost,
a 1,334-page novel about the CIA and the American psyche that ended, ominously enough, with the words
To be continued.
The London
Sunday Times
’s Peter Kemp, a notoriously trenchant demolition expert, called the novel “the appalling manifestation of a defunct talent.” But the review that really got Mailer's goat, perhaps because it appeared in the one publication that matters most to American writers, was that of John Simon in the
New York Times Book Review.