Biting the book-end: Shashi Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad
Mar 10th, 2005 by Ashok
Well, this is my fourth attempt to post to the blog this past week. The previous three attempts seem to have got lost in transition.
What were they about? Well, one was about the music I’ve been listening to lately - a lot of Radiohead, The Who, soft rock, classical, my regular mixed bag.
Another post was about the bunch of history books I’ve been reading lately. The third was about a single book that remains one of my greatest inspirations, especially while writing my work-in-progress Mahabharata retelling.
I’ll try and recap the main gist of those lost posts, but first, I’m going to test the waters by posting this review here. Fingers crossed…
(PS: This review appeared earlier in The Hindustan Times, New Delhi.)
Living in Mumbai, that overpriced piece of real estate that exists as a loose extension of Bollywood, you soon become familiar with the phenomenon of star rub-offs. A neighbour claims to know someone who is a cousin of a cousin of a cousin of…Shah Rukh Khan. Or Aamir Khan. Or, pick your star. Everybody knows somebody who is somebody. Six degrees of intimacy.
Arguably, a collection of essays on books and authors is something like that claim. By writing about literary greats, you can hope to capture some of their stardusty magic as well. Which can only enhance your own tawny sheen. Of course, by that measure, writing a book review of a book by a literary star does much the same thing. Rubbing shoulders with a star may only leave you with sore deltoids, but the human mind is a wonderful thing.
Shashi Tharoor probably doesn’t need to elevate his own star status, such as it is, by collecting his own book reviews of other book reviewers, some of whom are actually authors. He’s already regarded with warm admiration by a fair number, mostly for his modern-day Mahabharata-revisionist retelling, The Great Indian Novel, and to a lesser extent, for the novels Riot and Show Business, and, most recently, for the non-fiction book India: From Midnight to the Millennium. He hardly needs to rub shoulders with the likes of Rushdie, Naipaul, Kipling, and Wodehouse, to name just a few of the authors covered in this collection, in order to further his own literary reputation.
But what else is one to do with all those files full of yellowing clippings? Or, when one is a career diplomat - an Under-Secretary-General of The United Nations, no less, and unable to write more than a book every half-decade or so, how does one keep one’s byline alive in the bookstores? So, Tharoor brings together a mixed bag of his own book reviews and columns on writers, books and literary musings from the past decade or so in this collection.
Like the neighbour with starry aspirations, there are some jewels of truth here: The essays on Mining the Mahabharata, Bharatiya Sanskriti in the Big Apple, The Cultural Geography of Criticism, and various freewheeling essays on the unique geopolitical complexity of being an Indian English author adrift in a sea of western culture are enlightening, insightful and very rewarding. While the critics - like this one - may wax critical about how genuinely Indian writers like Tharoor really are, or are not, the fact is that he is a practising author pursuing the most difficult of paths: that of the insider who chooses to live as an outsider, yet continues to report from within. In these essays, he strikes hardest and most passionately, raising sparks of valuable illumination into the inner mind of the literary exile. Perhaps this is why his comments on Rushdie, the epitome of literary exile, ring so heartfelt and true. In these pieces, you see the Tharoor of India: From Midnight to Millennium, and wish he would write more non-fiction like this, more essay-length insightful personalized self-commentary on the condition of being Indian abroad, and of being a quintessential babu-educated (a Stephanian no less) bhadralok in the international sharkpool.
In other, more general essays, Tharoor is readable at best, and completely vapid at worst. This is a slim book with only a few dozen pages really worth the price, but those pages are a glimpse into the larger, more ambitious book that Tharoor could write someday, something neither autobiography nor literary essay, a sustained literary rumination on the life and times of a career diplomat and author. Then perhaps at last, he will no longer need to spend his space rubbing shoulders with literary stars and become one himself.
