Portraits of artists
Everything about poet Jeet Thayil’s latest novel is of monstrous proportions: Its scope and ambition, its canvas, and its subjects. A sort of followup on his previous, Booker-nominated Narcopolis, this one, deriving its name from the Bible, takes you back to Mr Thayil’s beloved Bombay (now Mumbai) and the seedy, soggy world of its poets, hustler, peddlers, artists, crazies, raconteurs, and provocateurs; the cacophony of their voices is accommodated between the beautifully designed covers of this thick volume. Some of the portraits in the book are real, including of the author himself; others are fictional; but all of them cohabit these pages, happily, cheekby-jowl, as they would in the city by the sea.
Like the trinity of the New Testament, the book has three main characters: Newton Francis Xavier, Goody Lol, and Dismas Bambai. Xavier is a sort of stand-in for Francis Newton Souza; but he is also like Mr Thayil’s mentor, the poet and journalist Dom Moraes. Like Xavier, Moraes had won the Hawthornden Prize with his first book, A Beginning. Lol’s surname is similar to that of Srimati Lal, Souza’s companion for years and who has written extensively on him. And, the heroin-dependant Bambai is like Mr Thayil himself, working for a newspaper called India Angle. (Mr Thayil was a journalist with the India Abroad.) But trying to find out who’s who is not the real attraction of this book
In his essay, Epic and Novel, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin compares the novel with other literary forms, especially the epic, and describes it to be flexible and mouldable, like clay. Mr Thayil’s novel is a vivid example of this theory, coexisting in a number of genres. It is neither cultural history, nor autobiography, nor pure invention, but a mind-boggling mix of all and more, providing it with the sort of power few contemporary Indian works of fiction have. Incidentally, the way the text is arranged — sections comprising a third-person narrative of Bambai meeting Xavier and Lol in New York, interspersed with interviews of people who have known Xavier at different times of his life — remind one of Roberto Bolano’s groundbreaking The Savage Detectives.
Mr Thayil’s Bombay is not dissimilar to Bolano’s Mexico City. Early in the book, one of the characters rants: “Why has no one written about the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two, and vanished without a trace? It had never happened before, poets writing Marathi, Hindi, English, and combinations thereof, writing to and against each other, such ferment and not a word of documentation. Why not?” This critical obscurity is fading slowly, with such books as Anjali Nerlekar’s Bombay Modern. Mr Thayil’s novel captures this world vividly.
Describing the ethics of this world, Mr Thayil’s contemporary C P Surendran wrote in an obituary for another peer, Vijay Nambisan: “In... Bombay, poetry... was a defiant and dangerous personal vocation. Something like the helpless inner voice that urges a prospective Christ to climb his cross as a matter of course, and drive the first nail with his free hand.” Though Bombay of the seventies and eighties, and in fact, the nineties, was not Paris of the twenties or New York of the sixties, it was the moment in the history of Indian literature when English poetry in the country discarded British tropes and found a voice of its own. The novel extends the Biblical reference with by including original poems dedicated to poets Arun (Kolatkar), Nissim (Ezekiel), and others, where they are referred to as saints. But, the idea of martyrdom — and in the Christian context, sainthood is never far from it — is not without problems.
Mr Thayil’s novel glorifies a sort of “bohemian” artistic life, complete with promiscuity, use of mind-altering substance, travel, and an existence outside the middle-class society and its values. Such a pose is not uncommon for artists and has been adopted by poets at least since Byron. But like Byron, all poets striking such a pose are inevitably beneficiaries of certain economic privileges. To write poetry in English, indeed to use the language itself, is mark of class in this country. Many of us might aspire to such a life, to taste the poisoned chalice, which like the Latin sacer is both sacred and cursed; but we have to go to work, and worry about rent and medical insurance.
Having said this, one must acknowledge Mr Thayil’s novel as a worthy addition to the growing list of narratives that the Maximum City has and continues to inspire. One is reminded of Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram. One looks forward to another one on his favourite metropolis, sooner than later, because the world he conjures is startling and magical.