The review that caused a tehelka in Tehelka: Babu Fictions by Tabish Khair
In a career as a journalist, first amateur, then part-time, and for a brief period, full-time, spanning around 25 years, my byline appeared around 1820 times in print. Most of them were for hoity toity publications like Times of India, Hindustan Times, Telegraph, Outlook, India Today, The Week, Rediff.com, etc.
About one-third of that total were news stories or features, including front page ‘breaking news’ stories for TOI, Outlook, The Week, Rediff.com, and a cover feature for Society Magazine which was distinguished by the fact that it happened to be the first non-film-magazine cover feature on a certain upcoming young actor named Shah Rukh Khan.
(“Are you sure this guy’s worth covering, Ashok?” asked Suma Varghese, the then-editor of Society. “If you ask me, Suma, in ten years this guy’s going to be the biggest film star in the country.” That was in early 1994. Ironically, less than six months later, I was featured on the cover of Society too, wearing the exact same black poloneck tee shirt that SRK had worn on his cover shoot a few months earlier – the poloneck was mine, lent to SRK for his cover shoot and returned, duly laundered, with thanks. So I can honestly say, I gave Shah Rukh Khan the shirt off my back once! :~) )
Anyway, to get back to the point: In all those years and all those bylines, rarely did an editor choose to turn down a piece by me. Not because I’m such a brilliant, gifted writer (hah!), but simply because I always did my job well, turned in my copy on time, and stuck to the brief.
But there were a couple of rare exceptions. Three actually, if memory serves me well. Curiously enough, two of the three I recall happened to be book reviews. One was a review of a sponsored collection of stories published by Gentleman magazine, and the reason the editor, a very good journalist and friend at the time, Sambit Bal, turned it down was because I had savaged the anthology with particular ferocity. He respected my opinion and was gentleman enough to pay me for the review, but left it unpublished, hiring another reviewer to write a ‘more balanced’ review. Fair enough.
In another case, more recently, the online magazine Tehelka.com commissioned me to write a book review. In this case too, I didn’t like the book much and said so in the review. But unlike Gentleman, Tehelka.com not only chose to leave the review unpublished, they never paid me for my time either. The reason, if I recall it correctly, was because they knew the author of the book personally. An interesting contradiction in a journal that later shot to fame because of its emphasis on integrity and honesty.
(This wasn’t the only time Tehelka.com showed its true colours: They also commissioned me to write a non-fiction biography of a well-known personality. But when they got into trouble over their notorious ‘sting’ operation over corruption in military defense contracts, they asked me if I could please return the book advance as they were desperately in need of money.
(Notwithstanding the work and time spent on research and writing already, I paid back the entire advance – but I did wonder whether they wanted the money back because they were that desperate financially, or whether they felt the book I was working on would turn out to be too controversial. You see, the book was to be a biography of Shri Bal Thackeray, and my approach, which they knew about, was not the outright full-frontal assault on the Shiv Sena supremo’s character that they had hoped for; if anything, I was actually taking a sympathetic, even insightful look into his life and mind. Maybe that didn’t fit in with their ‘search and destroy’ philosophy of journalism.)
Anyway, I’m posting the ‘banned’ review here now. It doesn’t seem very controversial to me, but maybe that’s because I don’t know the author personally, and even if I did, I’d still review the book on its own merits.
Which reminds me of the time I reviewed one of my own books, and trashed it mercilessly. So much so, that the editor who had commissioned the review (thinking it would be an “interesting experiment” actually called me, horrified, and asked if I was sure I wanted him to publish such a “vicious self-attack”. I said, sure, because I had done my best as an author, and as a reviewer too. And both the book as well as my review of it had an equal right to co-exist in the world).
But that’s a story for another blogpost.
Now, on with the review that made such a tehelka in Tehelka…
BABU FICTIONS: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels
By Tabish Khair
Oxford University Press
Literary Criticism
407 pages, Hardcover, Rs 575
Clearly, Tabish Khair hadn’t read Sagarika Ghose’s The Gin Drinkers at the time of writing this book but he should have. Reporter Ghose’s debut novel paints a pointillist portrait of Delhi literary intellectuals standing around at cocktail parties discussing Proust and Punjabi in the same gin-laden breath.
Diplomats, socialites, industrialists with cultural pretensions, nouveau riche seeking social respectability by patronizing artists, desi Soho-type dilettantes in their straggly beards and khadi kurtas and jeans. They’re the perfect readership for this book at hand. In fact, I’d bet an US dollar that if there’s a book launch for Babu Fictions, it’s this exact crowd you’d meet.
Which is not to say that they read this book. Not on their lives! Oh, they would buy it all right. And put it up there on the elegantly designed shelves, besides the leatherbound editions and fashionable new literary novels by mega-advance-earning and award-winning Indian English novelists. Most of whom are the subject of discussion in this book.
But they’d never read it. Ploughing through the 407 closely leaded pages of Macaulayesque prose, poring through arguments about the “existential concept of self-estrangement” and the Kierkegaardian preoccupation with alienation of R K Narayan’s protagonists, wading through the thick swamps of Khair’s thesis as he works his way towards epiphany as methodically as a dying elephant in search of the fabled graveyard, these are not pleasures sought out by the peculiar breed of literary afficionados who spend the rupees at the turnstile in Indian bookstores.
On the other hand, there are certainly professors of English Lit at universities across the country who’ll wet their knickers with glee at the sight of this tome. It’s the perfect convoluted pseudo-literary doublespeak that passes for literary criticism in this country. The attitude of ‘let us now praise critically acclaimed writers’ and ‘hail, hail, the literary gang’s all here’ pervades every page.
Khair even has a decent argument or two to offer. Such as his excellent championship of the novels of Amitav Ghosh and his relative “lack of discovery” by Western critics coloured by colonial perceptions of literary heritage. Ghosh is arguably the finest living Indian English writer, both in fiction as well as nonfiction, and the very fact that he remains largely unsold and unlauded while the current Ken and Barbie dolls of the month continue to be handed out staggering advances and paraded through the media is a disturbing and important issue that deserves exploration.
Khair could have simply taken the chapters on Ghosh and published them as a separate if smaller treatise in its own right. As such, it would have been perhaps the most insightful analysis of Ghosh’s relative obscurity (as compared to his more glamour-laden colleagues like Rushdie, Roy and Seth) and literary importance ever attempted.
But Khair’s bitten by the ‘think big’ bug. It’s not enough to look at the colourful landscape of contemporary Indian English fiction and examine it in its own right, discovering the pleasures and pains of this mela-like display. Khair has to succumb to literary ass-writis, wringing his convoluted arguments in his best Harold Bloom imitation, squeezing the most organic narratives into wooden, synthetic meta-theories of literary colonialism, Raj hangovers, and similarly imposed strictures and structures.
Still, there’s meat for the mind and food for thought aplenty here. If you’re a student or a
teacher of Eng. Lit., you’ll probably find much to chew on between these Oxfordian pages. If you’ve read your way through Indian English shelves in the last decade or so (as well as the notable works of the previous five) you’ll be able to weave steadily through the labyrynthine meanderings of Khair’s mind.
But here’s the main problem: I just don’t buy it. After those 407 closely printed pages and reams of philosophical, philological, and meta-critical arguments and dozens of examples cited, I just don’t agree with the central frame of reference. Why judge Indian English novelists and their work in the context of West-East references at all? Why examine the byways and highways of colonial and post-colonial literary criticism in search of influences and inferences?
It’s true that Indian English fiction occupies a bastard child status in contemporary world literature. It’s also true that most of its authors were weaned on a steady diet of classical, hence colonial, texts. And that even the language used by these upstart renegades is that of their former rulers rather than an indigenous tongue.
But does that mean we continue to measure and analyze every new work and author only in the light of that outdated colonial tradition? Or that we expect every new novel to measure upto the standards and precepts of those towering pillars of world literature? Wasn’t it Vikram Seth who said in Time magazine at the time of the launch of A Suitable Boy that “the English language has been taken over”? And wasn’t he right?
Professors of dwindling English classes and scholars who write books like these for other scholars to read will probably find a dozen cocktail parties worth of pleasurable argument in the pages of Babu Fictions. But to anybody interested in the living river of the genre, there’s no jewel of insight or illumination to be found here. Just the tired academic labourings of yet another colonial-hungover babu critic.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 3:34 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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