That prickly presence in the thick of the thicket
Many of the well-known essays in this anthology still look and feel new
The essays often speak to each other. Menen’s grandmother, a few pages down, is contrasted with Sheila Dhar’s Baua, on her selfless and emotionally-abused mother who, at the end of a long chapter of sustained condemnation of her husband by Dhar, silences her daughter with her short explanation of why she put up with him until his death: “The truth is that I loved him.” In contrapuntal play, Anita Desai in her essay A Secret Connivance argues with the certainty of the urban sophisticate that “a woman will state in her dying words that her man is not guilty…” But there is a possibility, surely, that selfless suffering, historically untenable in terms of a group, is still a suspect source of an individual sense of fulfillment? Think of Robert Hayden’s lines on his (the narrator’s) father: …Speaking indifferently to him,/who had driven out the cold/ and polished my good shoes as well./ What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices? (Those Winter Sundays).
Quite a few of the essays here are well known and worth reading again. Salim Ali’s Indian House Crow, a far cry from the sad and epic monster Ted Hughes thought up, builds a nest entirely of gold and silver spectacle frames pilfered from an optician’s shop. Other remarkable essays include GV Desani’s on the squalid occult mystique of The Benares that Was, Gautam Bhatia’s Art as Politics on giant monuments and idols that small leaders build, and Ruskin Bond’s minimalist, dry-eyed last meeting with his mother in the cancer ward, and of her desertion of him when very young.
A central theme, unintended possibly, emerging in this book, is the despair of being an Indian. Starting with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (The Confessions of Young Bengal) the nature of the agon that a man or a woman born and made in India entails, surfaces in essay after essay. But the man who addresses it heroically and almost without hope is Nissim Ezekiel, whom, this writer last saw from the window of an incoming morning train from Borivili, sitting on a bench at the far end of cavernous
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Churchgate station, looking out, chin in hand, the sunlight falling on him like muslin.
Naipaul is not a contributor to this collection. Yet, his prickly presence can be sensed in the thick of the thicket. He is a contributor in absentia. The fact is you would find it hard to imagine or define an India without Naipaul’s disgust of this country: the great “Indian shoddiness.” To use a fashionable term, he “othered” India for Indians. Ezekiel’s polite but blistering critique of Naipaul’s vision (Naipaul’s India and Mine) still reads well. Somewhere in the vast The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Auden says that “redemption” from the “irreversibility of events” is possible only through forgiveness. This is essentially a Christian view. Naipaul was a fatalist (The World is What it is) who could not forgive what India was doing to Indians and vice versa. So he did the only thing he could to let us know damnation was near: he fulminated like a priest. As a man is, so he sees, as Blake puts it.
RK Narayan’s short and spare essay (Elephant in the Pit) describes villagers trapping an elephant in a pit in a festive spirit and ending up killing (strangled, spine broken) it in the process of hauling it up is essentially about that pointless cruelty (the villagers don’t even know they are being cruel) and the idiocy of the degradation of man and animal, all translating into a great sense of featureless waste; the massive anomie that follows most Indians, whether they are aware or not, like a dark cloud. Generally, you will be wasted, other things being equal. That is so Indian. It is in this context that the hard state, or Hindu India (on which burning topic, there is no smoke in this collection), on the make can be seen as a salvaging effort from chaos to order. In one of the first essays, Bankim Chandra aspires for the perfect, all-conquering Hindu who had already disappeared in the mists of the past. It is just the Indian’s peculiar luck that the Hinduism now gaining popularity is the repressed, regimented Victorian variety.
A fastidious critic may complain that the Book of Indian Essays has too many Bengali writers. True. Another might say the underprivileged are not sufficiently represented. True again. But there will be other books, less elitist. Besides, beauty in all aspects of the imagination must surely revolt against the idea of the tyranny of the masses.